Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A new curvature tensor based segmentation method for optimized triangulated CAD meshes

This paper presents a new and efficient algorithm for the decomposition of 3D arbitrary triangle meshes and particularly optimized triangulated meshes coming from CAD. The algorithm is based on the curvature tensor field analysis and presents two distinct complementary steps: a region based segmentation, which is an improvement of that presented in [1] and which decomposes the object into known and near constant curvature patches, and a boundary rectification based on curvature tensor directions, which corrects boundaries by suppressing their artefacts or discontinuities. Experiments were conducted on various models including both CAD and natural objects, results are satisfactory. Resulting segmented patches, by virtue of their properties (known curvature, clean boundaries) are particularly adapted to computer graphics tasks like parametric or subdivision surface fitting in an adaptive compression objective.
Label‐free mass spectrometric analysis of the mdx‐4cv diaphragm identifies the matricellular protein periostin as a potential factor involved in dystrophinopathy‐related fibrosis

Proteomic profiling plays a decisive role in the identification of novel biomarkers of muscular dystrophy and the elucidation of new pathobiochemical mechanisms that underlie progressive muscle wasting. Building on the findings of recent comparative analyses of tissue samples and body fluids from dystrophic animals and patients afflicted with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, we have used here label‐free MS to study the severely dystrophic diaphragm from the not extensively characterized mdx‐4cv mouse. This animal model of progressive muscle wasting exhibits less dystrophin‐positive revertant fibers than the conventional mdx mouse, making it ideal for the future monitoring of experimental therapies. The pathoproteomic signature of the mdx‐4cv diaphragm included a significant increase in the fibrosis marker collagen and related extracellular matrix proteins (asporin, decorin, dermatopontin, prolargin) and cytoskeletal proteins (desmin, filamin, obscurin, plectin, spectrin, tubulin, vimentin, vinculin), as well as decreases in proteins of ion homeostasis (parvalbumin) and the contractile apparatus (myosin‐binding protein). Importantly, one of the most substantially increased proteins was identified as periostin, a matricellular component and apparent marker of fibrosis and tissue damage. Immunoblotting confirmed a considerable increase of periostin in the dystrophin‐deficient diaphragm from both mdx and mdx‐4cv mice, suggesting an involvement of this matricellular protein in dystrophinopathy‐related fibrosis.
Multidrug Resistance Protein 2 Is an Important Determinant of Paclitaxel Pharmacokinetics

Purpose: P-glycoprotein (P-gp; ABCB1) efficiently transports lipophilic amphipathic drugs, including the widely used anticancer drug paclitaxel (Taxol). We found previously that human multidrug resistance protein 2 (MRP2; ABCC2) also transports paclitaxel in vitro, and although we expected that paclitaxel pharmacokinetics would be dominated by P-gp, the effect of Mrp2 was tested in vivo. Experimental Design: We generated and characterized Mdr1a/1b/Mrp2−/− mice, allowing assessment of the distinct roles of Mrp2 and Mdr1a/1b P-gp in paclitaxel pharmacokinetics. Results: Surprisingly, the effect of Mrp2 on i.v. administration of paclitaxel was as great as that of P-gp. The area under plasma concentration-time curve (AUC)i.v. in both Mrp2−/− and Mdr1a/1b−/− mice was 1.3-fold higher than in wild-type mice, and in Mdr1a/1b/Mrp2−/− mice, a 1.7-fold increase was found. In spite of this similar effect, Mrp2 and P-gp had mostly complementary functions in paclitaxel elimination. Mrp2 dominated the hepatobiliary excretion, which was reduced by 80% in Mrp2−/− mice. In contrast, P-gp dominated the direct intestinal excretion, with a minor role for Mrp2. The AUCoral of paclitaxel was 8.5-fold increased by Mdr1a/1b deficiency but not affected by Mrp2 deficiency. However, in the absence of Mdr1a/1b P-gp, additional Mrp2 deficiency increased the AUCoral another 1.7-fold. Conclusions: Thus far, Mrp2 was thought to mainly affect organic anionic drugs in vivo. Our data show that Mrp2 can also be a major determinant of the pharmacokinetic behavior of highly lipophilic anticancer drugs, even in the presence of other efficient transporters. Variation in MRP2 activity might thus directly affect the effective exposure to paclitaxel, on i.v. administration, but also on oral administration, especially when P-gp activity is inhibited.
Controlled Release of Dexamethasone From an Intravitreal Delivery System Using Porous Silicon Dioxide

Purpose The current study aims to evaluate a porous silicon-based drug delivery system meant for sustained delivery of dexamethasone (Dex) to the vitreous and retina. Methods Dexamethasone was grafted covalently into the pore walls of fully oxidized porous silicon particles (pSiO2-COO-Dex), which then was evaluated for the pharmacological effect of the payload on cultured ARPE19 cells before intravitreal injection. The Dex release profile was investigated in a custom designed dynamic dissolution chamber to mimic the turnover of vitreous fluid in rabbit eyes. Ocular safety, in vivo release, and pharmacodynamics were evaluated in rabbit eyes, and the human VEGF-induced rabbit retinal vascular permeability model. Results Loading efficiency of Dex was 69 ± 9 μg per 1 mg of the pSiO2-COO-Dex particles. Dynamic in vitro release demonstrated a sustained mode when compared to free Dex, with the drug half-life extended by 5 times. The released Dex was unaltered and biologically active. In vivo drug release in rabbit eyes revealed a mode similar to the release seen in vitro, with a vitreous half-life of 11 days. At 2 and 4 weeks after a single intravitreal injection of pSiO2-COO-Dex particles (mean 2.71 ± 0.47 mg), intravitreal 500 ng of VEGF did not induce significant retinal vessel dilation or fluorescein leakage, while these events were observed in the eyes injected with empty pSiO2 particles or with free Dex. The retinal vessel score from fluorescein angiography for the control eyes was double the score for the eyes injected with pSiO2-COO-Dex. No adverse reaction was observed for the eyes injected with drug-loaded pSi particles during the course of the study. Conclusions The porous silicon-based Dex delivery system (pSiO2-COO-Dex) can be administered safely into vitreous without toxicity. Dex release from the porous silicon particles was sustained for 2 months and was effective against VEGF-induced retinal vessel reaction.
Research on Statistical Relational Learning at the University of Washington

This paper presents an overview of the research on learning statistical models from relational data being carried out at the University of Washington. Our work falls into five main directions: learning models of social networks; learning models of sequential relational processes; scaling up statistical relational learning to massive data sources; learning for knowledge integration; and learning programs in procedural languages. We describe some of the common themes and research issues arising from this work.
A randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of an exercise program in women with rheumatoid arthritis taking low dose prednisone.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of a 12 month, weight bearing, aerobic exercise program on disease activity, physical function, and bone mineral density (BMD) in women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) taking low dose prednisone. METHODS A group of women with RA (n = 23) not receiving steroid therapy and in American College of Rheumatology functional class I or II was compared to 30 steroid treated patients with similar demographics. The latter group was randomized to usual care (n = 16) or an aerobic, weight bearing exercise program (n = 14) 3 times a week for 12 months. All subjects were recruited from an outpatient rheumatology clinic or physical therapy department and met the study inclusion criteria. Outcome measures included disease activity (erythrocyte sedimentation rate, active joint count), physical function (Health Assessment Questionnaire disability index, activity level) and BMD of the spine and femoral neck (by dual energy projection radiology). RESULTS Subjects in the exercise group had a small but nonsignificant decrease in disease activity and statistically significant improvements in function (p = 0.05) and activity levels (p = 0.05). BMD remained unchanged in the exercise group, decreased significantly (p = 0.004) in the nonsteroid comparison group (hip), and changed nonsignificantly in the control group. However, between-group changes in spinal BMD of the steroid treated groups was not significant (p = 0.09). CONCLUSION Women with RA taking low dose steroid therapy can safely participate in a dynamic, weight bearing exercise program with positive effects on their physical function, activity and fitness levels, and BMD with no exacerbation of disease activity.
Fast, automated thermal simulation of three-dimensional integrated circuits

Three-dimensional (3D) stacked integrated circuits (ICs) can significantly improve circuit performance and offer the promise of integrating various technologies (memory, logic, RF, mixed-signal, optoelectronics) within a single block. Lack of 3D design tools and heat dissipation from vertically stacked multiple layers are the crucial problems in their development. To address these issues, CFD Research Corporation (CFDRC) is developing methodologies and tools to analyze and assess coupled electrical and thermal performance of 3D ICs, including calculation of realistic full-chip thermal distributions and determining from them signal delay/distortion. Due to the stacking technology, extensive localized heating can occur. Analysis to minimize these hot spots using thermal vias is demonstrated. Our Python-script based framework allows to drive and control all the aspects of the 3D model building (directly from layouts), thermal simulations, and results extraction/post-processing. Hence, it is a good basis for coupling with Electronic Design Automation (EDA) systems. We present results of automated, fast, but detailed thermal simulations of 3D stacked integrated circuits. In addition, procedures for automatic extraction of reduced and compact thermal-resistance-based 3D models have been implemented. These techniques greatly reduce required computational time, and allow for very fast parametric modeling analysis of 3D IC design configurations and temperature extraction. From these thermal resistance models, equivalent SPICE netlists may be generated and used for independent or coupled thermal analysis.
Course Redesign: An Evidence-Based Approach

A first year non-majors biology course, with an enrollment of around 440 students, has been redesigned from a course of traditional content and teaching style to one that emphasizes biological concepts in current global issues and incorporates active learning strategies. We were informed by the education literature incorporating many aspects of established curriculum redesign principles and extended its application to a biology course. Systematic measurement of student attitudes and collection of student feedback through a series of surveys as well as focus group interviews proved to be invaluable in the course redesign process. The information gathered over a two-year period enabled us to fine-tune the course content and teaching strategies effectively to better meet the interests of students in the non-majors course as was documented by the evidence gathered in this research. Un cours de biologie de premiere annee pour etudiants qui ne se specialisent pas dans ce domaine, dans lequel etaient inscrits 440 etudiants, a ete remanie. Ce cours, dont le contenu et le style d’enseignement etaient traditionnels, est devenu un cours ou les concepts de biologie ont ete mis en valeur dans le contexte des questions globales d’actualite, et des strategies d’apprentissage actif y ont ete incorporees. Nous avons puise nos ressources dans les publications consacrees a l’education qui incorporent les principes etablis de remaniement des programmes de cours et nous avons applique ces principes a un cours de biologie. La mesure systematique des attitudes des etudiants, les commentaires recueillis aupres des etudiants par le biais de plusieurs sondages, ainsi que les entrevues de groupes temoins, se sont averes inestimables au cours du processus de remaniement du cours. Les renseignements recueillis pendant une periode de deux ans nous ont permi d’affiner de facon efficace le contenu du cours ainsi que les strategies d’enseignement afin de mieux repondre aux interets des etudiants dans des cours qui ne s’adressent pas a des specialistes du sujet enseigne, tel que documente par l’evidence recueillie au cours de cette recherche.
Examining successful Iranian women entrepreneurs: an exploratory study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the factors impacting successful Iranian women entrepreneurs. The factors include: self‐efficacy, risk taking, negative stereotypes, and societal culture and traditions.Design/methodology/approach – The paper utilizes interviews conducted with a sample of successful Iranian women entrepreneurs and examines the challenges they had to overcome, as well as their success factors.Findings – Challenges caused by the negative stereotypes and traditions of Iranian society are barriers successful Iranian women entrepreneurs had to overcome. The possession of personal internal factors such as high levels of self‐efficacy and risk taking positively impacted these women's success.Research limitation/implications – The interviews were not conducted by the authors and were published in Farsi, so there may be interpretation and/or translation issues. However, there are few empirical studies on Iranian women entrepreneurs, and this research is one of the first that contri.
Virtual reality therapy for anxiety disorders: Advances in evaluation and treatment.

Virtual Reality Therapy for Anxiety Disorders explores how the latest virtual reality interventions can be used to treat patients with anxiety disorders. Virtual reality therapy enables the patient to experience a realistic, yet carefully controlled exposure to an anxiety-provoking scenario, in the therapist's own office. The authors provide discussion of virtual reality therapy for specific disorders including panic disorder and agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, fear of flying or driving, claustrophobia, arachnophobia, and fear of medical procedures. Tips and caveats are provided, making this book important reading for therapists interested in exploring an exciting new therapy modality.
Diffraction Effects and Compensation in Passive Acoustic Mapping

Over the last decade, a variety of noninvasive techniques have been developed to monitor therapeutic ultrasound procedures in support of safety or efficacy assessments. One class of methods employs diagnostic ultrasound arrays to sense acoustic emissions, thereby providing a means to passively detect, localize, and quantify the strength of nonlinear sources, including cavitation. Real array element diffraction patterns may differ substantially from those presumed in existing beamforming algorithms. However, diffraction compensation has received limited treatment in passive and active imaging, and measured diffraction data have yet to be used for array response correction. The objectives of this paper were to identify differences between ideal and real element diffraction patterns, and to quantify the impact of diffraction correction on cavitation mapping beamformer performance. These objectives were addressed by performing calibration measurements on a diagnostic linear array, using the results to calculate diffraction correction terms, and applying the corrections to cavitation emission data collected from soft tissue phantom experiments. Measured diffraction patterns were found to differ significantly from those of ideal element forms, particularly at higher frequencies and shorter distances from the array. Diffraction compensation of array data resulted in cavitation energy estimates elevated by as much as a factor of 5, accompanied by the elimination of a substantial bias between two established beamforming algorithms. These results illustrate the importance of using measured array responses to validate analytical field models and to minimize observation biases in imaging applications where quantitative analyses are critical for assessment of therapeutic safety and efficacy.
A Case Study and a Computational Simulation of the European Union Draft Technical Guidance Documents for Chemical Safety Assessment of Mixtures: Limitations and a Tentative Alternative

Two different methods, Key Critical Component (KCC) and Composite Reciprocal (CR), are used to derive Predicted No Effect Concentration (PNECs) and Derived No Effect Level (DNELs) that are employed in mixture risk assessment. A case study was conducted on coating products and a computational simulation of the KCC and CR methods. The KCC method considers only one key critical component as the whole mixture of equal danger, whereas the CR method indirectly considers the contribution of each component to mixture toxicity. Computational simulation is the first approach that adopts a theoretical perspective in discussing the causes of different outcomes between models and how the two methods should be applied for regulatory purposes in terms of concept, implementation, and performance. The deviation between the two models was highly dependent on the number of mixture components having similarly weighted DNELs (or PNECs). Therefore, if risk assessment using the KCC or CR method needs to be achieved, then the number of mixture components with similarly weighted DNELs (or PNECs) should be checked first. In this study, as a tentative alternative to the existing KCC and CR methods, a tiered approach combining Enhanced KCC (e-KCC) and CR methods was proposed and discussed. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene for the following free supplemental resources: Material Safety Data Sheets for coating products. ]
Codebook Reconstruction with Word Correlation Feedback Mechanism

Bag of feature model has been shown to be one of the most successful methods in generic image categorization problems. However, creating codebook by clustering local feature vectors (e.g. Kmeans) may lose holistic information of images. This paper presents a novel process called Correlation Feedback for codebook construction. It introduces semantic similarities of words by measuring correlation between distributions of them within one image. Further more, we employ label propagation process to spread the affinities among all features. An enhanced codebook is constructed based on fusion of the new similarity matrix with spectral clustering. Experimental results on Caltech101 and the 15 nature scenes datasets shows promising performance of importing the novel similarity to dictionary construction.
Deciding on Family Holidays—Role Distribution and Strategies in Use

ABSTRACT The article discusses holiday-related decision making in families by exploring the role distribution and strategies employed by family members, with particular attention given to the influence of children. Based on the theoretical discussion, a model is developed that highlights the influence of a number of contextual factors on role distribution and decision-making strategies, and which is found useful in the analysis of qualitative interviews with German and Danish families. The empirical analysis demonstrates patterns in the role distribution of family members in line with the existing literature; however, diversions from established knowledge also appear as children occupy a multitude of roles, and the role of the mother to some extent differs across the German and Danish data. Contextual factors like parental perceptions of children and societal structures are useful in explaining this complexity in role distribution. Likewise in relation to decision-making strategies, contextual factors are helpful in explaining the strategies used, in particular the convention that holidays are an extraordinary “free space” which allows for more negotiation power being bestowed on children than in everyday life.
Determining factors of sport injuries in amateur sports in Spain.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES : An epidemiological study of descriptive and analytical cases was developed. The aim was to evaluate sports injuries occurring during the practice of recreational sport in the geographical area of all regions of Spain. METHODS: Trauma medical centers and physiotherapy clinics were selected. Surveys were passed through interviewers in a total of 1616 subjects who had suffered an injury in the last 12 months while practicing sport as a leisure activity. The information collection was performed using a digital database hosted on a web server connected to a digital survey through which the subjects' responses were recorded. RESULTS: The sports where most injuries occurred was football (27.6% of all accidents), followed by running (8.6%), futsal (7.9%) and basketball (7.7 %). Attending the underlying determinant factors of injury, some relation between them were found, which may lead us to better know the injuries causation. CONCLUSIONS: The results show a general description of the influence that sports injuries and their consequences mean in Spanish society. More comparative studies of cases of injured and uninjured athletes in amateur sport would be advisable to establish preventive campaigns.
Goal Setting and Feedback in the Management of a Professional Department

This paper presents a case study of a goal setting and feedback intervention in the engineering department of a light truck manufacturing company. The intervention involved subordinate participation in setting goals for completing special engineering projects and the public display of feedback about goal attainment. The intervention also served as a catalyst for changing the way in which the entire engineering department was managed. The behavioral objectives of the intervention were to reduce project design errors and missed project completion dates for three engineers in the department. Both objectives were realized. However, due to the nature of a case study, these results are interpreted with caution. A number of suggestions are offered for future research.
Genetic feature subset selection for gender classification: a comparison study

We consider the problem of gender classification from frontal facial images using genetic feature subset selection. We argue that feature selection is an important issue in gender classification and demonstrate that Genetic Algorithms (GA) can select good subsets of features (i.e., features that encode mostly gender information), reducing the classification error. First, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to represent each image as a feature vector (i.e., eigen-features) in a low-dimensional space. Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are then employed to select a subset of features from the low-dimensional representation by disregarding certain eigenvectors that do not seem to encode important gender information. Four different classifiers were compared in this study using genetic feature subset selection: a Bayes classifier, a Neural Network (NN) classifier, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, and a classifier based on Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Our experimental results show a significant error rate reduction in all cases. The best performance was obtained using the SVM classifier. Using only 8.4% of the features in the complete set, the SVM classifier achieved an error rate of 4.7% from an average error rate of 8.9% using manually selected features.