Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ViBE video database system: an update and further studies

In this paper we extend the shot transition detection component of the ViBE video database system to include gradual scene changes. ViBE, a browsable/searchable paradigm for organizing video data containing a large number of sequences, is being developed at Purdue as a testbed to explore ideas and concepts in video databases. We also present result on the performance of our cut detection algorithm using a large test set. The performance of two other techniques are compared against our method.
A labeling algorithm for just-in-time scheduling in TDMA networks

This paper describes a scheduling algorithm for high speed, TDMA communication networks. The problem is to find a route and determine switch schedules so that a burst of information can traverse the network from source to destination. We show that this problem is difficult, i.e., that several simple variations are NP-complete. We present an algorithm that finds schedules, and within a simplifying assumption, is guaranteed to find a route if one exists. Simulations indicate that this algorithm runs quickly in practice and overall scheduling efficiencies of 80-90% can be achieved. We also describe a variation in which the problem is to find a repeating schedule and we show how to adapt the basic algorithm for this variation.
Low Insulin‐Like Growth Factor (IGF‐1) in the Cerebrospinal Fluid of Children with Progressive Encephalopathy, Hypsarrhythmia, and Optic Atrophy (PEHO) Syndrome and Cerebellar Degeneration

Summary: Purpose: In patients with progressive encephalopathy, hypsarrhythmia, and optic atrophy (PEHO) syndrome, the pathophysiology underlying early progressive cerebellar and brainstem degeneration and severe epilepsy is unknown. Because insulin‐like growth factor (IGF)‐1 has been shown significantly to promote survival of cerebellar neurons, we wanted to see if the IGF system played a role in the pathogenesis of cerebellar atrophy.
Rates of major depressive disorder and clinical outcomes following traumatic brain injury.

CONTEXT Uncertainties exist about the rates, predictors, and outcomes of major depressive disorder (MDD) among individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). OBJECTIVE To describe MDD-related rates, predictors, outcomes, and treatment during the first year after TBI. DESIGN Cohort from June 2001 through March 2005 followed up by structured telephone interviews at months 1 through 6, 8, 10, and 12 (data collection ending February 2006). SETTING Harborview Medical Center, a level I trauma center in Seattle, Washington. PARTICIPANTS Five hundred fifty-nine consecutively hospitalized adults with complicated mild to severe TBI. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) depression and anxiety modules were administered at each assessment and the European Quality of Life measure was given at 12 months. RESULTS Two hundred ninety-seven of 559 patients (53.1%) met criteria for MDD at least once in the follow-up period. Point prevalences ranged between 31% at 1 month and 21% at 6 months. In a multivariate model, risk of MDD after TBI was associated with MDD at the time of injury (risk ratio [RR], 1.62; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.37-1.91), history of MDD prior to injury (but not at the time of injury) (RR, 1.54; 95% CI, 1.31-1.82), age (RR, 0.61; 95% CI, 0.44-0.83 for > or = 60 years vs 18-29 years), and lifetime alcohol dependence (RR, 1.34; 95% CI, 1.14-1.57). Those with MDD were more likely to report comorbid anxiety disorders after TBI than those without MDD (60% vs 7%; RR, 8.77; 95% CI, 5.56-13.83). Only 44% of those with MDD received antidepressants or counseling. After adjusting for predictors of MDD, persons with MDD reported lower quality of life at 1 year compared with the nondepressed group. CONCLUSIONS Among a cohort of patients hospitalized for TBI, 53.1% met criteria for MDD during the first year after TBI. Major depressive disorder was associated with history of MDD and was an independent predictor of poorer health-related quality of life.
Neurotoxicity of immunosuppressive drugs

The clinical profile of neurotoxicity caused by immunosuppression has changed. When toxic levels are reached, both cyclosporine and tacrolimus may produce a clinical spectrum that varies from tremor and acute confusional state to status epilepticus and major speech or language abnormalities. Coma has become an unusual manifestation. Magnetic resonance imaging has been better defined, and abnormalities may be more widespread than those in the posterior lobes. These white matter lesions are caused by vasogenic edema, but may lead to apoptosis and cytotoxic edema if exposure is prolonged. Recent evidence suggests inhibition of a drug‐efflux pump and dysfunction of the blood‐brain barrier by enhanced nitric oxide production.
Metabolic Profiling as Well as Stable Isotope Assisted Metabolic and Proteomic Analysis of RAW 264.7 Macrophages Exposed to Ship Engine Aerosol Emissions: Different Effects of Heavy Fuel Oil and Refined Diesel Fuel

Exposure to air pollution resulting from fossil fuel combustion has been linked to multiple short-term and long term health effects. In a previous study, exposure of lung epithelial cells to engine exhaust from heavy fuel oil (HFO) and diesel fuel (DF), two of the main fuels used in marine engines, led to an increased regulation of several pathways associated with adverse cellular effects, including pro-inflammatory pathways. In addition, DF exhaust exposure was shown to have a wider response on multiple cellular regulatory levels compared to HFO emissions, suggesting a potentially higher toxicity of DF emissions over HFO. In order to further understand these effects, as well as to validate these findings in another cell line, we investigated macrophages under the same conditions as a more inflammation-relevant model. An air-liquid interface aerosol exposure system was used to provide a more biologically relevant exposure system compared to submerged experiments, with cells exposed to either the complete aerosol (particle and gas phase), or the gas phase only (with particles filtered out). Data from cytotoxicity assays were integrated with metabolomics and proteomics analyses, including stable isotope-assisted metabolomics, in order to uncover pathways affected by combustion aerosol exposure in macrophages. Through this approach, we determined differing phenotypic effects associated with the different components of aerosol. The particle phase of diluted combustion aerosols was found to induce increased cell death in macrophages, while the gas phase was found more to affect the metabolic profile. In particular, a higher cytotoxicity of DF aerosol emission was observed in relation to the HFO aerosol. Furthermore, macrophage exposure to the gas phase of HFO leads to an induction of a pro-inflammatory metabolic and proteomic phenotype. These results validate the effects found in lung epithelial cells, confirming the role of inflammation and cellular stress in the response to combustion aerosols.
A bulged stem-loop structure in the 3' untranslated region of the genome of the coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus is essential for replication

The 3' untranslated region (UTR) of the positive-sense RNA genome of the coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) contains sequences that are necessary for the synthesis of negative-strand viral RNA as well as sequences that may be crucial for both genomic and subgenomic positive-strand RNA synthesis. We have found that the entire 3' UTR of MHV could be replaced by the 3' UTR of bovine coronavirus (BCV), which diverges overall by 31% in nucleotide sequence. This exchange between two viruses that are separated by a species barrier was carried out by targeted RNA recombination. Our results define regions of the two 3' UTRs that are functionally equivalent despite having substantial sequence substitutions, deletions, or insertions with respect to each other. More significantly, our attempts to generate an unallowed substitution of a particular portion of the BCV 3' UTR for the corresponding region of the MHV 3' UTR led to the discovery of a bulged stem-loop RNA secondary structure, adjacent to the stop codon of the nucleocapsid gene, that is essential for MHV viral RNA replication.
A simulation analysis of the impact of forest fire suppression policies on rekindles

Rekindles have a significant presence in the Portuguese forest fire management system and an important impact on fire suppression resources in particular (Pacheco, Claro, and Oliveira 2014). In most of the cases, mop-up is made exclusively with water, without suitable tools to carry out the work effectively, allowing the fire to rekindle. Thus, it's pretended to develop a discrete event simulation (DES) of rekindles as a rework problem and, after this, assay the impact of different suppression policies on rekindles.
Automatic speaker recognition using dynamic Bayesian network

This paper presents a novel approach to automatic speaker recognition using dynamic Bayesian network (DBN). DBNs have a precise and well-understood probabilistic semantics, and the ability to incorporate prior knowledge, to represent arbitrary non-linearities, and to handle hidden variables and missing data in a principled way with high extensibility. Experimental evaluation over YOHO corpus shows promising results compared to other classical methods.
SVitchboard II and fiSVer i: high-quality limited-complexity corpora of conversational English speech

In this paper, we introduce a set of benchmark corpora of conversational English speech derived from the Switchboard-I and Fisher datasets. Traditional ASR research requires considerable computational resources and has slow experimental turnaround times. Our goal is to introduce these new datasets to researchers in the ASR and machine learning communities (especially in academia), in order to facilitate the development of novel acoustic modeling techniques on smaller but acoustically rich corpora. We select these corpora to maximize an acoustic quality criterion while limiting the vocabulary size (from 10 words up to 10,000 words) with different state-of-the-art submodular function optimization algorithms. We provide baseline word recognition results for both GMM and DNN-based systems and release the corpora definitions and Kaldi training recipes to the public.
Factors which predict violence victimization in Uganda

Introduction Violence is a major public health issue, globally and on the African continent. This paper looks at Uganda and begins the process of identifying the factors that predict violence in that country. The purpose is to interpret the implications of the study results for violence prevention programs. Methods The study includes the responses of 2 399 Ugandans collected in 2011 by the Fifth Round of the Afrobarometer surveys. The study concentrates on 259 respondents who reported either they or someone else in their family had been the victim of violence, defined as being physically attacked, in the last year. Results Logistical regression analysis identified six factors that predict physical violence in Uganda. In order, these included being the victim of a property crime, age, gender, fear of crime in the home, poverty, and residential crowding. The surprising findings relate to what may be called target hardening, especially for those likely to be re-victimized. Respondents did tend to be re-victimized, with about 61 percent of violence victims also property crime victims. Fear of crime in home was another predictor of violence victimization, and many of these respondents had been crime victims. Conclusion These findings imply that target hardening should be the basis to begin to implement violence prevention programs in Uganda. The suggestion is crime prevention personnel/ law enforcement need to respond to reported incidents of property and/or violence victimization and attempt to prepare victims to protect both their premises and their persons in the future.
Minimizing overhead in parallel algorithms through overlapping communication/computation

One of the major goals in the design of parallel processing machines and algorithms is to reduce the effects of the overhead introduced when a given problem is parallelized. A key contributor to overhead is communication time. Many architectures try to reduce this overhead by minimizing the actual time for communication, including latency and bandwidth. Another approach is to hide communication by overlapping it with computation. This paper presents the Proteus parallel computer and its effective use of communication hiding through overlapping communication/computation techniques. These techniques are easily extended for use in compiler support of parallel programming. We also address the complexity or rather simplicity, in achieving complete exchange on the Proteus Machine.
Thermo electric properties of nanocomposite materials

This dissertation presents a theoretical study of heat transport in nanoporous composites andin nanowire and also theoretical study of thermoelectric properties of the Si0:8Ge0:2 alloywith some experimental new and old measurements.The first study on the porous alloys show that its can display thermal conductivity reductionsat considerably larger pore sizes than nonalloyed porous materials of the same nominalporosity. The thermal conductivity of Si0:5Ge0:5 alloy with 0.1 porosity becomes half thenonporous value at 1000 nm pore sizes, whereas pores smaller than 100 nm are required toachieve the same relative reduction in pure Si or Ge. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we alsoshow that previous models had overestimated the thermal conductivity in the small pore limit.Our results imply that nanoporous alloys should be advantageous with respect to nanoporousnonalloys, for applications requiring a low thermal conductivity, such as novel thermoelectrics.The second theoretical study on the nanowire thermal conductance reveals the structureeffect on the phonon transport. With a theoretical model that considers the frequency dependenceof phonon transport, we are able to quantitatively account for the experimental resultsof straight and bent nanowires in the whole temperature range which shows that due to andouble bend on the straight thermal conductance reduced by 40% at temperature 5K.Finally, we theoretically investigate the thermoelectric properties of sintered SiGe alloys,compare them with new and previous experimental measurements, and determine their potentialfor further improvement. The theoretical approach is validated by extensive comparisonof predicted bulk mobility, thermopower, and thermal conductivity, for varying Ge and dopingconcentrations, in the 300 �� 1000K temperature range. The effect of grain boundariesis then included for Si0:8Ge0:2 sintered nanopowders , and used to predict optimized valuesof the thermoelectric figure of merit at different grain sizes. Our calculations suggest thatfurther optimization of current state of the art n-type (p-type) material would be possible,possibly leading to 6% (5%) ZT enhancement at 1000K and 25% (4%) at room temperature.Even larger enhancements should be possible if the phonon scattering probability of the grainboundaries could be increased beyond its present value of 10%.
Tracking down software changes responsible for performance loss

Continuous software change may inadvertently introduce a drop in performance at runtime. The longer the performance loss remains undiscovered, the harder it is to address. Current profilers do not efficiently support performance comparison across multiple software versions. As a consequence, identifying the cause of a slow execution caused by a software change is often carried out in an ad-hoc fashion. We propose multidimensional profiling as a way to repeatedly profile a software execution by varying some variables of the execution context. Having explicit execution variation points is key to understanding precisely how a performance aspect evolves along with the version history of the software. We present the key ingredients to make multidimensional profiling effective, and sketch the design of Rizel, an implementation in the Pharo programming language.
Contexts Matter: A Hydropolitical Analysis of Blue Nile and Yarmouk River Basins

Transboundary surface water is of strategic importance in the Arab world as it accounts for over two thirds of the renewable water in the region. Despite most shared waters have their source outside the Arab countries, no basin-wide agreements exist over the use, allocation and management of the main transboundary rivers in the region: the Nile, the Jordan, and the Tigris and Euphrates. This paper investigates the intra-basin hydro-political relations in the dynamic contexts of Yarmouk and Blue Nile rivers. In both cases, the lack of a shared vision on the management of transboundary waters has resulted in unilateral initiatives rather than comprehensive and agreed legal frameworks. Adopting a broader problemshed approach rather than a narrow watershed one, this paper captures the interests and reasons of such dynamic contexts, and analyses how recent changes impact on the transboundary water management of shared basins. In particular, the relevance of including power analysis into the assessment of water-related negotiations will shed light over competing interests and political asymmetries, which ultimately affect the processes of water allocation and use. The insights provided by evidence-based assumptions over the dynamic and often conflictive process of water governance formation in the two cases considered will disclose alternative perspectives to the (mainstream) analyses of water management, in the attempt to situate specific hydro-political dynamics in the regional evolving contexts of the cases selected. The intra-basin interactions that emerge from the analysis will uncover some of the neglected issues in the literature over transboundary water management, while contributing at the same time to the search for solutions to the current water disputes in the two case studies.
Validation of Intratumoral T-bet+ Lymphoid Cells as Predictors of Disease-Free Survival in Breast Cancer

T-bet+ lymphoid cells are associated with adverse clinicopathologic features like the basal subgroup, yet confer a favorable outcome in invasive breast cancer. Thus, T-bet may prove to be an important prognostic and/or predictive marker for use in immunotherapy trials. We previously observed T-bet+ lymphocytes to be associated with a good prognosis in a cohort of women with familial breast cancer. To validate this finding, we evaluated lymphocyte T-bet expression in an independent unselected prospectively accrued series of women with lymph node–negative breast carcinoma. T-bet and clinicopathologic data were available for 614 women. Hormone receptors, HER2, Ki-67, CK5, EGFR, p53, and T-bet status were determined using IHC and/or biochemical methods. Tumors were assigned to luminal A, luminal B, HER2, and basal subtypes based on the expression of IHC markers. Multiple cutpoints were examined in a univariate penalized Cox model to stratify tumors into T-bet+/high and T-bet−/low. Fisher exact test was used to analyze T-bet associations with clinicopathologic variables, IHC markers, and molecular subtype. Survival analyses were by the Cox proportional hazards model. All tests were two sided. A test with a P value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. T-bet+/high tumor status was significantly associated with large tumor size, high grade, hormone receptor negativity, CK5, EGFR and p53 positivity, high Ki-67, and basal subtype. With a median follow-up of 96.5 months, T-bet−/low tumor status was associated with a reduced disease-free survival compared with T-bet+/high tumor status in multivariate analysis (P = 0.0027; relative risk = 5.62; 95% confidence intervals, 1.48–50.19). Despite being associated with adverse clinicopathologic characteristics, T-bet+ tumor-infiltrating lymphoid cells are associated with a favorable outcome. This supports their role in Th1-mediated antitumor activity and may provide insight for the development of new therapeutic strategies. Cancer Immunol Res; 4(1); 41–48. ©2015 AACR.
Sex factors in growth of malignant melanoma in hamsters: in vivo and in vitro correlation.

Summary Transplanted amelanotic and melanotic strains of hamster malignant melanoma grew faster and were more rapidly lethal in females than in males. In vitro growth of the amelanotic strain was inhibited markedly by testosterone and weakly by estradiol. These findings and a review of earlier animal work suggest that sex steroids may influence growth of malignant melanoma in several species.
Cdk5 and the mystery of synaptic vesicle endocytosis

Regulation of endocytosis by protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation is critical to synaptic vesicle recycling. Two groups have now identified the neuronal kinase Cdk5 (cyclin-dependent kinase 5) as an important regulator of this process. Robinson and coworkers recently demonstrated that Cdk5 is necessary for synaptic vesicle endocytosis (SVE) (Tan et al., 2003), whereas a new report in this issue claims that Cdk5 negatively regulates SVE (Tomizawa et al., 2003). Careful examination of the data reveals a model that helps resolve the apparently contradictory nature of these reports.
Application of plantography examination to the assessment of foot deformity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Introduction Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, inflammatory and multiple-system disorder of connective tissue. It frequently affects joints and periarticular structures of feet that constitute a significant supporting element underlying normal gait and motion of the body centre of gravity. The aim of the study was to evaluate foot deformities on the basis of plantography examination in RA patients according to the severity of the disease. Material and methods The study was performed on 54 RA patients. The control group consisted of 34 volunteers free of any disorders. Plantography examination was carried out by means of a CQ ST2K podoscope. The following parameters were applied to the assessment of the disturbances of foot statics: hallux valgus angle (α), Sztriter-Godunow index (KY), Wejsflog's index (Wwp) and Clarke's angle (CL). Results Markedly higher values of the α angle were noted in RA patients, reflecting the presence of hallux valgus. Moreover, values of the α angle were higher in patients in the third stage of radiological changes than those in the second one. On the other hand, values of Clarke's angle for the right foot were significantly higher in men in the second and third stage of RA compared to the control group. The most common deformities in RA patients include HV and transverse flat foot, more explicit in women in the third stage of RA. Conclusions Plantography examination has been shown to constitute a useful diagnostic tool for assessment and monitoring of foot deformities in RA patients.