Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lack of Detection of XMRV in Seminal Plasma from HIV-1 Infected Men in The Netherlands

Background Xenotropic murine leukaemia virus-related virus (XMRV) is a recently discovered human gammaretrovirus with yet unknown prevalence and transmission route(s). Its presence in prostate stromal fibroblasts and prostatic secretions suggests that XMRV might be sexually transmitted. We chose to study a compartment closely connected to the prostate, a location where XMRV was detected in independent studies. Seminal plasma samples from HIV-1 infected men were examined as they have an increased probability of acquiring sexually transmitted pathogens. Methodology/Principal Findings We studied the prevalence of XMRV in 93 seminal plasma samples of 54 HIV-1 infected men living in The Netherlands with a nested PCR amplification specifically targeting the XMRV gag gene. As a control for the presence and integrity of retrovirus particles, HIV-1 was amplified from the same samples with a PCR amplification targeting the env gene of the virus, or HIV-1 was quantified with a real-time PCR amplifying part of the pol gene. Conclusions/Significance Although HIV-1 was amplified from 25% of the seminal plasma samples, no XMRV was detected, suggesting that either the prevalence of XMRV is very low in The Netherlands, or that XMRV is not naturally present in the seminal plasma.
Application of the affective certainty model to affective decision-making in the workplace

We apply a new model of evaluative processing, known as the Affective Certainty Model (ACM) as a potential further explanation of performance and satisfaction at work. The ACM maintains that when state (mood) and trait (personality) sources of emotion knowledge are consistent, people should find it easier to make affective judgments than when sources of emotion knowledge diverge. Accordingly, the model seeks to examine the interactive effect of neuroticism and mood states on the speed with which individuals are able to make self-relevant affective decisions with reference to self-perceived task performance and task satisfaction. The proposed model is suitable to empirical research using a randomised experimental design, and has implications for productivity and job satisfaction in the workplace. (118 Words)
The evolutionary emergence of language : social function and the origins of linguistic form

Part I. The Evolution of Cooperative Communication: 1. Introduction: the evolution of cooperative communication Chris Knight 2. Comprehension, production and conventionalization in the origins of language Robbins Burling 3. Co-operation, competition and the evolution of pre-linguistic communication Jason Noble 4. Language and hominid politics Jean-Louis Dessalles 5. Secret language use at female initiation: bounding gossiping communities Camilla Power 6. Play as precursor of phonology and syntax Chris Knight Part II. The Emergence of Phonetic Structure: 7. Introduction: the emergence of phonetic structure Michael Studdert-Kennedy 8. The role of mimesis in infant language development: evidence for phylogeny? Marilyn M. Vihman and Rory A. DePaolis 9. Evolution of speech: the relation between ontogeny and phylogeny Peter J. MacNeilage and Barbara L. Davis 10. Evolutionary implications of the particulate principle: imitation and the dissociation of phonetic form from semantic function Michael Studdert-Kennedy 11. Emergence of sound systems through self-organisation Bart de Boer 12. Modelling language-physiology coevolution Daniel Livingstone and Colin Fyfe Part III. The Evolution of Syntax: 13. The emergence of syntax James R. Hurford 14. The spandrels of the linguistic genotype David Lightfoot 15. The distinction between sentences and noun phrases: an impediment to language evolution? Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy 16. How protolanguage became language Derek Bickerton 17. Holistic utterances in protolanguage: the link from primates to humans Alison Wray 18. Syntax without natural selection: how compositionality emerges from vocabulary in a population of learners Simon Kirby 19. Social transmission favours linguistic generalization James R. Hurford 20. Words, memes and language evolution Robert P. Worden 21. On the reconstruction of 'proto-world' word order Frederick J. Newmeyer Epilogue 22. The history, rate and pattern of world linguistic evolution Mark Pagel.
Brain-Gene Ontology: Integrating Bioinformatics and Neuroinformatics Data, Information and Knowledge to Enable Discoveries

The paper presents some preliminary results on the brain-gene ontology (BGO) project that is concerned with the collection, presentation and use of knowledge in the form of ontology. BGO includes various concepts, facts, data, software simulators, graphs, videos, animations, and other information forms, related to brain functions, brain diseases, their genetic basis and the relationship between all of them. The first version of the brain-gene ontology has been completed as a hierarchical structure and as an initial implementation in the Prot¿g¿ ontology building environment.
High prevalence of genetic variants previously associated with Brugada syndrome in new exome data

More than 300 variants in 12 genes have been associated with Brugada syndrome (BrS) which has a prevalence ranging between 1:2000 and 1:100,000. Until recently, there has been little knowledge regarding the distribution of genetic variations in the general population. This problem was partly solved, when exome data from the NHLI GO Exome Sequencing Project (ESP) was published. In this study, we aimed to report the prevalence of previously BrS‐associated variants in the ESP population. We performed a search in ESP for variants previously associated with BrS. In addition, four variants in ESP were genotyped in a second Danish control population (n = 536) with available electrocardiograms. In ESP, we identified 38 of 355 (10%) variants, distributed on 272 heterozygote carriers and two homozygote carriers. The genes investigated were on average screened in 6258 individuals. This corresponds to a surprisingly high genotype prevalence of 1:23 (274:6258). Genotyping the four common ESP‐derived variants CACNA2D1 S709N, SCN5A F2004L, CACNB2 S143F, and CACNB2 T450I in the Danish controls, we found a genotype prevalence comparable with that found in ESP. We suggest that exome data are used in research, as an additive tool to predict the pathogenicity of variants in patients suspected for BrS.
Augmenting the Senses: A Review on Sensor-Based Learning Support

In recent years sensor components have been extending classical computer-based support systems in a variety of applications domains (sports, health, etc.). In this article we review the use of sensors for the application domain of learning. For that we analyzed 82 sensor-based prototypes exploring their learning support. To study this learning support we classified the prototypes according to the Bloom's taxonomy of learning domains and explored how they can be used to assist on the implementation of formative assessment, paying special attention to their use as feedback tools. The analysis leads to current research foci and gaps in the development of sensor-based learning support systems and concludes with a research agenda based on the findings.
Dielectric characterization of biocompatible hydrogels for application to Epidermal RFID devices

Functionalized skin-like membranes are currently under investigation for the design of a new class of Epidermal Electronics devices for sensing and healing applications. The dynamic response of epidermal antennas in presence of absorption and release of fluids is a key-point to design RFID radio-sensors and actuators. This paper addresses the characterization of the dielectric property of PVA-based biocompatible hydrogel membranes in the UHF RFID band by means of a modified ring resonator. Samples having different compositions are measured in the dry state as well as when exposed to a progressive release of body fluids emulating perspirations or wound exudates. It was found that the permittivity increases up to 10 times demonstrating that such membranes may be also used as sensors.
A study of Mozart effect in Attentional blink

In this paper, we investigated the existence of the temporal component of Mozart effect, analyzed the influence of arousal or mood changing to attentional blink when listening to Mozart Sonata (K.448 D Major). We manipulated the tempo and the mode of Mozart Sonata to check if these two factors of music could affect participant’s temporal attention in two experiments. According to the experiment results, the temporal component of Mozart effect does not general exist. Mozart Sonata might possibly induce listener’s arousal or mood shifting, but could not induce any temporal attention improvement significantly.
Comprehensive splice-site analysis using comparative genomics

We have collected over half a million splice sites from five species—Homo sapiens, Mus musculus, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans and Arabidopsis thaliana—and classified them into four subtypes: U2-type GT–AG and GC–AG and U12-type GT–AG and AT–AC. We have also found new examples of rare splice-site categories, such as U12-type introns without canonical borders, and U2-dependent AT–AC introns. The splice-site sequences and several tools to explore them are available on a public website (SpliceRack). For the U12-type introns, we find several features conserved across species, as well as a clustering of these introns on genes. Using the information content of the splice-site motifs, and the phylogenetic distance between them, we identify: (i) a higher degree of conservation in the exonic portion of the U2-type splice sites in more complex organisms; (ii) conservation of exonic nucleotides for U12-type splice sites; (iii) divergent evolution of C.elegans 3′ splice sites (3′ss) and (iv) distinct evolutionary histories of 5′ and 3′ss. Our study proves that the identification of broad patterns in naturally-occurring splice sites, through the analysis of genomic datasets, provides mechanistic and evolutionary insights into pre-mRNA splicing.
Refinement, Decomposition, and Instantiation of Discrete Models: Application to Event-B

We argue that formal modeling should be the starting point for any serious development of computer systems. This claim poses a challenge for modeling: at first it must cope with the constraints and scale of serious developments. Only then it is a suitable starting point. We present three techniques, refinement, decomposition, and instantiation, that we consider indispensable for modeling large and complex systems. The vehicle of our presentation is Event-B, but the techniques themselves do not depend on it.
Listen to my breath: Exploring expressive function of breathing sounds in imitation and emotional attunement

Several psycho-physiological studies have provided evidences about the reciprocal influence between respiration and psychological variables but few attentions have been brought to the investigation of the expressive function of breathing sounds. Study 1 aims to build a multilayer analysis model that enable an acoustic description of breathing sounds. Audio and video recordings of breathing of two pairs of participants engaged in individual and joint performance were conducted. 1903 were video and audio analyzed and 3 sets of indexes were derived: respiratory, acoustic and interactive (aimed to relate partner’s respiratory behaviour during joint performances). Study 2 investigates what could be inferred about a person’s identity, emotional state and activity from the sound of his/her breathing. Moreover, it aims to verify whether imitation of breathing patterns improve the identification of those features. Ecological recordings of breathing sounds of people engaged in 6 activities and 4 emotions. 90 participants listen to the tracks and answer a questionnaire about such variables. Other 90 mimicked the tracks before answering. Participants were able to infer valuable information about the aspects under investigation with better results in the imitation task. Study 3 aims to describe the acoustic features of 6 emotional breathing patterns (anger, fear, sadness, disgust, tenderness and joy) and to see whether breathing together could strengthen the attunement process. 20 pairs of women participated. For each emotion, within the pair one participant read a story emotionally connoted and breathes as if she actually was in that situation. Her partner had to convey her closeness breathing in the same way. Finally they filled in a questionnaire. Different respiratory patterns were related to each emotion. Moreover the task influenced several attunement dimensions: synchronization, emotional decoding, emotional experience and perception of interpersonal similarity.
Autonomous RF Surveying Robot for Indoor Localization and Tracking

RF fingerprinting is an interesting solution for indoor localization and tracking because it uses existing devices and infrastructure and involves minimal intervention to ongoing activities. The method involves constructing a database of signal strengths at different locations in an indoor space. Real-time measurements are compared to the database to retrieve the bestmatching location. The process of constructing the signal strength maps often involves lengthy labor, which causes difficulties in practical deployment. Furthermore, the maps need to be periodically updated for potential changes. To address these challenges, we describe the design and working of a robotic platform that can construct RF signal maps with minimal human intervention. Using a new method of multi-sensor integration for Simultaneous Localization & Mapping (SLAM), our robotic platform can autonomously navigate inside a building while localizing its position and gathering RF signal strength data.
Collecting injury surveillance data in low- and middle-income countries: The Cape Town Trauma Registry pilot

Abstract Injury is a major public health issue, responsible for 5 million deaths each year, equivalent to the total mortality caused by HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. The World Health Organisation estimates that of the total worldwide deaths due to injury, more than 90% occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Despite the burden of injury sustained by LMIC, there are few continuing injury surveillance systems for collection and analysis of injury data. We describe a hospital-based trauma surveillance instrument for collection of a minimum data-set for calculating common injury scoring metrics including the Abbreviated Injury Scale and the Injury Severity Score. The Cape Town Trauma Registry (CTTR) is designed for injury surveillance in low-resource settings. A pilot at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town was conducted for one month to demonstrate the feasibility of systematic data collection and analysis, and to explore challenges of implementing a trauma registry in a LMIC. Key characteristics of the CTTR include: ability to calculate injury severity, key minimal data elements, expansion to include quality indicators and minimal drain on human resources based on few fields. The CTTR provides a strategy to describe the distribution and consequences of injury in a high trauma volume, low-resource environment.
Efficient object selection using depth and texture information

Object selection is a challenge in computer vision since it is generally a trade-off between accuracy and performance. A popular approach is the use of bounding boxes around objects that are to be selected. Other common techniques provide a set of objects from which the user can then choose. The method presented in this paper is designed around the priority of performance and granular selection of objects in the scene. Experiments performed on a non-parallel implementation of the proposed solution return results in an average time of 0.043s. The technique also returned very good results in the processing of objects that are partially occluded, hence enabling future work in improved identification and recognition of such objects.
Involvement of FoxQ1 in NSCLC through regulating EMT and increasing chemosensitivity

Forkhead box Q1 (FoxQ1) is a member of the forkhead transcription factor family. High expression of FoxQ1 has been associated with several cancers including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but its role in the development of NSCLC is not clear. In this study, we investigated the effect of FoxQ1 up-regulated and down-regulated in vitro and in vivo, and the role of FoxQ1 in regulating epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in NSCLC, providing evidence that FoxQ1 could be a potential therapeutic target in NSCLC. NSCLC cells with silenced FoxQ1 had decreased cell proliferation, migration and invasion in cell culture and delayed growth of xenograft tumors in mice compared with corresponding control cells. The NSCLC cells downregulated for FoxQ1 induced the expression of apoptosis-associated proteins and reduction of anti-apoptotic protein expression. Downregulation of FoxQ1 promoted the expression of epithelial markers and decreased several mesenchymal markers in vitro and in vivo. In addition, FoxQ1 was associated with resistance to conventional chemotherapeutic agents. In contrast, FoxQ1 overexpressed elicited converse effects on these phenotypes in vitro and in vivo. Our findings define a key role for FoxQ1 in regulating EMT and increasing chemosensitivity in NSCLC.
Mutual Bilingual Terminology Extraction

This paper describes a novel methodology to perform bilingual terminology extraction, in which automatic alignment is used to improve the performance of terminology extraction for each language. The strengths of monolingual terminology extraction for each language are exploited to improve the performance of terminology extraction in the other language, thanks to the availability of a sentence-level aligned bilingual corpus, and an automatic noun phrase alignment mechanism. The experiment indicates that weaknesses in monolingual terminology extraction due to the limitation of resources in certain languages can be overcome by using another language which has no such limitation.
On evaluating human recognition using electrocardiogram signals: From rest to exercise

Human recognition has been an active research area in the past decade. As the traditional biometrics such as face, fingerprint and iris have been widely deployed around the world, the vulnerability of such systems to falsification and spoofing attacks has been admitted. ECG is related to electrical activities of heart and is among the newer additions to biometric family. In addition to its inherent liveness detection, it is easy to collect. It can be easily captured from fingertips. However, ECG is a time-varying signal. Unlike most of previous works on ECG biometric that are limited to rest condition, we consider the effect of exercise on biometric performance of ECG. We consider the case that enrollment and testing are in different body conditions: rest and exercise. A feature selection is conducted to select features that are less affected by exercise. Selected features are then used for enrolling and testing the biometric system's users. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art methods in ECG recognition.
A Complete Axiomatization for Blocks World

Blocks World (BW) has been one of the most popular model domains in AI history. However, there has not been serious work on axiomatizing the state constraints of BW and giving justification for its soundness and completeness. In this paper, we model a state of BW by a finite collection of finite chains, and call the theory of all these structures BW theory. We present seven simple axioms and prove that their consequences are precisely BW theory, using Ehrenfeucht-Fräıssé games. We give a simple decision procedure for the theory which can be implemented in exponential space, and prove that every decision procedure (even if nondeterministic) for the theory must take at least exponential time. We also give a characterization of all nonstandard models for the theory. Finally, we present an expansion of BW theory and show that it admits elimination of quantifiers. As a result, we are able to characterize all definable predicates in BW theory, and give simple examples of undefinable predicates.
Preview-Based Discrete-Time Dynamic Formation Control Over Directed Networks via Matrix-Valued Laplacian

This paper studies the dynamic formation control problem for cooperative agents with discrete-time dynamics over directed graphs. Unlike using absolute coordinate, relative coordinate, interagent distance, or interagent bearing to specify the target formation and coordinate agents to achieve the formation, we study a coordination problem where the desired formation varies with time and only its geometric shape is predefined. Matrix-valued Laplacian approach has been adopted to address this problem in the continuous-time setting. However, the discrete-time counterpart is more challenging due to the constraint in information exchange. On the other hand, observe that in many real operations, at a given time instant, the agents will be able to plan their target formation configurations for a period of time ahead. We propose preview-based P-like and PD-like controllers for the formation control. The controllers with proper parameter setting are proved to be effective to address the dynamic formation control problem. Numerical simulations are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.
Analysis of Accuracy Factor for 3 D Reconstruction using 2 D Image Obtained from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ( UAV )

Recently UAV has been used in various fields such as construction and civil engineering, disaster, terrain analysis, transportation, etc. In addition, many companies from all over the world are focusing on developing UAV technology. The market of personal UAV has been growing and attracting people’s attention year after year due to the low cost of UAV. Especially, in construction industries where people work on large-scale fields, there are many methods to obtain space information and those methods can be done at low cost. However, the existing studies are mostly about utilization of UAV such as flight plan and acquisition 3d image methods. Therefore, it is necessary to study result values according to use of variable value. This study focuses on the variables which affect the result of 3D reconstruction using 2D image obtained by UAV. First, we fixed values of flight planning of UAV and distortion correction of picture. After that, we took pictures of building and obtained point cloud that allowed us to make 3D model of the building. Second, we analyzed results of the 3D model according to variable of illumination. Then, we found number of point cloud from the previous results. Finally, we identified optimal illumination result to build an effective 3D Modeling. We present about optimal value of illuminance variation to improve current method of developing 3d model. This study can be a more efficient and accurate method to obtain images by UAV.