Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of Self-Reported Speed of Eating with an Objective Measure of Eating Rate

Slow eating may be beneficial in reducing energy intake although there is limited research quantifying eating rate. Perceived speed of eating was self-reported by 78 adults using a standard question “On a scale of 1–5 (very slow–very fast), how fast do you believe you eat? ” Timing the completion of meals on three occasions was used to assess objective eating rate. The mean (SD) speeds of eating by self-reported categories were 49 (13.7), 42 (12.2), and 35 (10.5) g/min for fast, medium, and slow eaters, respectively. Within each self-reported category, the range of timed speed of eating resulted in considerable overlap between self-identified ‘fast’, ‘medium’ and ‘slow’ eaters. There was 47.4% agreement (fair) between self-reported speed of eating and the objective measure of eating rate (κ = 0.219). Self-reported speed of eating was sufficient at a group level to detect a significant difference (10.9 g/min (95% CI: 2.7, 19.2 g/min, p = 0.009)) between fast and slow; and fast and medium eaters (6.0 g/min (0.5, 11.6 g/min p = 0.033)). The mean difference (95% CI) between slow and medium eaters was 4.9 (−3.4, 12.2) g/min (p = 0.250). At an individual level, self-report had poor sensitivity. Compared to objectively measured speed of eating, self-reported speed of eating was found to be an unreliable means of assessing an individual’s eating rate. There are no standard protocols for assessing speed of eating or eating rate. Establishing such protocols would enable the development of population reference ranges across various demographic groups that may be applicable for public health messages and in clinical management.
Estimating Attention in Exhibitions Using Wearable Cameras

This paper demonstrates a system for automatic detection of visual attention and identification of salient items at exhibitions (e.g. museum or an auction). The method is offline and is done on a video captured by a head mounted camera. Towards the estimation of attention, we define the notions of "saliency" and "interestingness" for an exhibition items. Our method is a combination of multiple state of the art techniques from different vision tasks such as tracking, image matching and retrieval. Many experiments are conducted to evaluate multiple aspects of our method. The method has proven to be robust to image blur, occlusion, truncation, and dimness. The experiments shows strong performance for the tasks of matching items, estimating focus frames and detecting salient and interesting items. This can be useful to the commercial vendors and museum curators and help them to understand which items are appealing more to the visitors.
Cellular and Molecular Mediators of Neuroinflammation in the Pathogenesis of Parkinson's Disease

Neuroinflammation is a host-defense mechanism associated with restoration of normal structure and function of the brain and neutralization of an insult. Increasing neuropathological and biochemical evidence from the brains of individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) provides strong evidence for activation of neuroinflammatory pathways. Microglia, the resident innate immune cells, may play a major role in the inflammatory process of the diseased brain of patients with PD. Although microglia forms the first line of defense for the neural parenchyma, uncontrolled activation of microglia may directly affect neurons by releasing various molecular mediators such as inflammatory cytokines (tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin [IL]-6, and IL-1β), nitric oxide, prostaglandin E2, and reactive oxygen and nitrogen species. Moreover, recent studies have reported that activated microglia phagocytose not only damaged cell debris but also intact neighboring cells. This phenomenon further supports their active participation in self-enduring neuronal damage cycles. As the relationship between PD and neuroinflammation is being studied, there is a realization that both cellular and molecular mediators are most likely assisting pathological processes leading to disease progression. Here, we discuss mediators of neuroinflammation, which are known activators released from damaged parenchyma of the brain and result in neuronal degeneration in patients with PD.
FROM UNCERTAINTY TO RISK ? PROBLEMS WITH USING PRICES IN PREDICTION MARKETS TO IMPROVE DECISION-MAKING

With four days to go, there is only a 2% chance that Osama bin Laden will be captured in January 2005. And there is a 13% probability that a Palestinian state will be established by year’s end. Whether the Republicans or the Democrats will win the White House in 2008 is basically a toss-up (the Republicans have a slight lead at 50.9% to 48.4%). Or at least so says the prediction market at TradeSports. The price of the last trade on TradeSports for a contract that will pay $10 on Feb. 1 if Osama is captured during the month of January 2005 (and nothing otherwise) was $0.20. Proponents of prediction markets argue that this market price can be interpreted as a meaningful forecast of the likelihood that Osama will indeed be captured in the next several days. A probability of 2% makes this exchange at 20 cents a fair bet. The intuition that the market prices of these contingent claims represent meaningful predictions about future events is based on the theory of efficient capital markets. Markets provide incentives for a large group of individuals to collect information about the event of interest and to reveal their information by placing bets. The price formation process aggregates traders’ information, and, if the market is efficient, the resulting price fully reflects all of the information available to traders in the market.
A Synergic Neuro-Fuzzy Evaluation System in Cultural Intelligence

In today’s age of globalization, cultural awareness has become a challenge for designers of tutoring systems to include the cultural dimension in the tutoring strategy and in the learning environment. Nevertheless, cultural awareness is also a domain to be learned by a student, and a competency that can be assessed. Research on cultural intelligence has provided a new perspective and presented a new way to alleviate issues arising from cross-cultural education. To date, no research on cultural intelligence has been empirically computerized with soft-computing technology. This research aims to invent a cultural intelligence computational model and to implement the model in an expert system through the use of artificial intelligence technology. The purpose of this study is to provide intercultural training for individuals to solve the intercultural adaptation problems they may be faced with in a variety of authentic crosscultural situations.
Perception of the visual environment

The eyes are the front end to the vast majority of the human behavioural repertoire. The manner in which our eyes sample the environment places fundamental constraints upon the information that is available for subsequent processing in the brain: the small window of clear vision at the centre of gaze can only be directed at an average of about three locations in the environment in every second. We are largely unaware of these continual movements, making eye movements a valuable objective measure that can provide a window into the cognitive processes underlying many of our behaviours. The valuable resource of high quality vision must be allocated with care in order to provide the right information at the right time for the behaviours we engage in. However, the mechanisms that underlie the decisions about where and when to move the eyes remain to be fully understood. In this chapter I consider what has been learnt about targeting the eyes in a range of diﬀerent experimental paradigms, from simple stimuli arrays of only a few isolated targets, to complex arrays and photographs of real environments, and finally to natural task settings. Much has been learnt about how we view photographs, and current models incorporate low-level image salience, motor biases to favour certain ways of moving the eyes, higher-level expectations of what objects look like and expectations about where we will find objects in a scene. Finally in this chapter I will consider the fate of information that has received overt visual attention. While much of the detailed information from what we look at is lost, some remains, yet our understanding of what we retain and the factors that govern what is remembered and what is forgotten are not well understood. It appears that our expectations about what we will need to know later in the task are important in determining what we represent and retain in visual memory, and that our representations are shaped by the interactions that we engage in with objects.
A Vlsi-chip-set for a Hardware-accelerator for the Simplex-method

We present a hardware realization of the Simplex Method, the central method of linear programming. We customized the algorithm regarding numerical stability (arithmetics) as well as hardware proximity. The resulting hardware is based on a parallel architecture with up to eight processing units, employing standard FPUs, RAMs and custom VLSI-chips. It has been designed for use in an IBM PC/AT environment .
Performance Comparison of Two Retransmission Control Schemes for Slow-Frequency-Hopped Communication Systems

An optically transmittant body of a ternary sulfide material such as calcium lanthanum sulfide is provided by concurrently precipitating from a nitrate solution of calcium and lanthanum, calcium carbonate and lanthanum carbonate. The precipitation reaction forms a homogeneous fine particle size starting powder of calcium carbonate and lanthanum carbonate powders. The starting powder is reacted with a sulfurizing agent such as hydrogen sulfide to convert such starting powder into a calcium lanthanum sulfide powder. The particle size of the homogeneous starting powder is sufficiently small to permit substantially complete and uniform conversion of such starting powder into the calcium lanthanum sulfide powder. The calcium lanthanum sulfide powder is then compacted into the desired form of the optically transmittant body and is subsequently sintered at an elevated temperature in an atmosphere of excess sulfur to increase the density of the material. An excess sulfur atmosphere is provided to prevent decomposition of the calcium lanthanum sulfide and to aid in the conversion of any residual calcium carbonate, lanthanum carbonate material present in the calcium lanthanum sulfide. The sintered calcium lanthanum sulfide material is then compressed at an elevated pressure and temperature providing the material of the optically transmittant body.
Inhibition of Myeloid Dendritic Cell Accessory Cell Function and Induction of T Cell Anergy by Alcohol Correlates with Decreased IL-12 Production12

Alcohol consumption inhibits accessory cell function and Ag-specific T cell responses. Myeloid dendritic cells (DCs) coordinate innate immune responses and T cell activation. In this report, we found that in vivo moderate alcohol intake (0.8 g/kg of body weight) in normal volunteers inhibited DC allostimulatory capacity. Furthermore, in vitro alcohol treatment during DC differentiation significantly reduced allostimulatory activity in a MLR using naive CD4+ T cells, and inhibited tetanus toxoid Ag presentation by DCs. Alcohol-treated DCs showed reduced IL-12, increased IL-10 production, and a decrease in expression of the costimulatory molecules CD80 and CD86. Addition of exogenous IL-12 and IL-2, but not neutralization of IL-10, during MLR ameliorated the reduced allostimulatory capacity of alcohol-treated DCs. Naive CD4+ T cells primed with alcohol-treated DCs showed decreased IFN-γ production that was restored by exogenous IL-12, indicating inhibition of Th1 responses. Furthermore, CD4+ T cells primed with alcohol-treated DCs were hyporesponsive to subsequent stimulation with the same donor-derived normal DCs, suggesting the ability of alcohol-treated DCs to induce T cell anergy. LPS-induced maturation of alcohol-treated immature DCs partially restored the reduced allostimulatory activity, whereas alcohol given only during DC maturation failed to inhibit DC functions, suggesting that alcohol primarily impairs DC differentiation rather than maturation. NFκB activation, a marker of DC maturation was not affected by alcohol. Taken together, alcohol both in vitro and in vivo can impair generation of Th1 immune responses via inhibition of DC differentiation and accessory cell function through mechanisms that involve decreased IL-12 induction.
Pareto optimal sensing strategies for an active vision system

We present a multiobjective methodology, based on evolutionary computation, for solving the sensor planning problem for an active vision system. The application of different representation schemes, that allow to consider either fixed or variable size camera networks in a single evolutionary process, is studied. Furthermore, a novel representation of the recombination and mutation operators is brought forth. The developed methodology is incorporated into a 3D simulation environment and experimental results shown. Results validate the flexibility and effectiveness of our approach and offer new research alternatives in the field of sensor planning.
Delis Dynamically Evolving, Large-scale Information Systems

An evaluation of the currently known " evolutionary game theory " approaches Preface This report comprises the complete D4.3. 1 deliverable as specified for work-package WP4.3 in Subject SP4 of the DELIS (Dynamically Evolving Large-scale Information Systems) Integrated Project. The essential goal of the DELIS project is to understand, predict, engineer and control large evolving information systems. These are often arranged in the form of dynamic networks (for example: the Internet or Peer-2-Peer applications running on-top of such physical infrastructure). WP4.3 brings together a team of specialists in Game Theory, Evolutionary Economics and Organisational Science and Agent-Based Modelling. The purpose of this report is to outline the relevant work and state-of-the-art in each field (including limitations) with application to DELIS-like systems and then to outline integrative ongoing problems, ideas and projects that bring these techniques together to advance the state-of-the-art. In the following chapters we overview techniques and ideas from classical game theory, evolutionary game theory, individual and agent-based computational modelling, and organisation science. We indicate their limitations and propose ongoing work to integrate techniques to overcome some of those limitations. In this context we identify some ambitious (yet realistic) long-term goals. In this early (6 month) deliverable the participants in WP4.3 report on planned and ongoing collaborative and supportive projects and work. The next scheduled deliverable for WP4.3 is at the 18 month stage. This report can therefor be viewed as an outline of the ongoing work that will take place within WP4.3 over the next 12 months (though it should not read as exhaustive or strict).
From Embedded Knowledge to Embodied Knowledge: New Product Development as Knowledge Management

Because new product development (NPD) teams are engaged in knowledge creation, NPD management should emphasize cognitive team processes rather than purely social processes. Using the notions of tacit knowledge and distributed cognition as a basis, the authors propose that the T-shaped skills, shared mental models, and NPD routines of team members, as well as the A-shaped skills of the team leader, are key design variables when creating NPD teams. The authors propose that trust in team orientation, trust in technical competence, information redundancy, and rich personal interaction are important process variables for the effective and efficient creation of new knowledge.
MODELING AND PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION FOR MULTISTAGE SIMULATION OF MICROBIAL BIOCONVERSION IN BATCH CULTURE

The bioconversion of glycerol to 1,3-propanediol is a complex bioprocess. The item of product inhibition in the equation of Specific rate of cell growth is overlapped in [L. Wang, J. X. Ye, E. M. Feng and Z. L. Xiu, An improved model for multistage simulation of glycerol fermentation in batch culture and its parameter identification, Nonlinear Anal. Hybrid Syst.3(4) (2009) 455–462]. Therefore, in this work, the specific rate of cell growth is modified by the mechanism of multistage simulation of microbial bioconversion and the previous time-dependent model is converted to the autonomous standard form. The properties of the solutions for the nonlinear dynamic system are discussed and the identifiability of the parameters is proved. Finally the feasible optimization algorithm is constructed to find the optimal parameters for the system. Numerical result shows that the improved model with identified parameters can describe the batch culture better, compared with the previous results.
Mutual Properties: An Empirical Assessment

Conceptual models are a medium used by model creators as a medium to communicate aspects of the real world. The real world is composed of things and relationships. While conceptual models are capable of capturing and communicating information about a thing, it is unsatisfactory at capturing relationships. One common relationship is the associations relationship a single line drawn between two or more things. What does this line mean? How well is it understood? We argue that mutual properties, a construct based ontology – a categorisation method of how we perceived things – will increase the understanding of model observed as such constructs integrate well with human cognition. Our result shows that, when these two models are compared with each other, the mutual properties group had a higher average of problem-solving score thus indicating a deeper understanding of the problem domain. However statistical tests on the result shows that the difference of score between the two groups on account of the model was insignificant, thus indicating the presence of a foreign influencing factors.
The Resistance to Freeze-Drying and to Storage Was Determined as the Cellular Ability to Recover Its Survival Rate and Acidification Activity

The protective effects of the fatty acid composition and membrane action of the acidification activity of two strains of Lactobacillus kept at 20°C were studied. The addition of sorbitol, monosodium glutamate and glycerol during storage is causing the decline of acidification and increased concentrations of unsaturated fatty acids observed in both strains. The addition of sorbitol and monosodium glutamate does not alter the fatty acid composition, whatever the strain, but increases the resistance to freeze-drying of L. plantarum CWBI-B1419 and improves survival during storage. The addition of these preservatives and decreased activity of acidification improves the ratio unsaturated. These results indicate that the survival during storage and freeze-drying resistance are closely related to the composition of membrane fatty acids. This behaviour can be interpreted as an adaptation of L. plantarum B1419-CWBI supplemented by cryoprotectant additives such as sorbitol or monosodium glutamate sorbitol and monosodium glutamate as an additive. L. plantarum CWBI-B1419 presents a greater adaptation to culture conditions than L. paracasei ssp. paracasei LMG9192T.
Hydroxyproline, a Serum Biomarker Candidate for Gastric Ulcer in Rats: A Comparison Study of Metabolic Analysis of Gastric Ulcer Models Induced by Ethanol, Stress, and Aspirin

Gastrointestinal symptoms are a common manifestation of adverse drug effects. Non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are widely prescribed drugs that induce the serious side effect of gastric mucosal ulceration. Biomarkers for these side effects have not been identified and ulcers are now only detectable by endoscopy. We previously identified five metabolites as biomarker candidates for NSAID-induced gastric ulcer using capillary electrophoresis–mass spectrometry (CE–MS)-based metabolomic analysis of serum and stomach from rats. Here, to clarify mechanism of changes and limitations of indications of biomarker candidates, we performed CE–MS-based metabolomic profiling in stomach and serum from rats with gastric ulcers induced by ethanol, stress, and aspirin. The results suggest that a decrease in hydroxyproline reflects the induction of gastric injury and may be useful in identifying gastric ulcer induced by multiple causes. While extrapolation to humans requires further study, hydroxyproline can be a new serum biomarker of gastric injury regardless of cause.
Acquisition, Extinction, and Reacquisition of a Cerebellar Cortical Memory Trace

Associative learning in the cerebellum underlies motor memories and probably also cognitive associations. Pavlovian eyeblink conditioning, a widely used experimental model of such learning, depends on the cerebellum, but the memory locus within the cerebellum as well as the underlying mechanisms have remained controversial. To date, crucial information on how cerebellar Purkinje cells change their activity during learning has been ambiguous and contradictory, and there is no information at all about how they behave during extinction and reacquisition. We have now tracked the activity of single Purkinje cells with microelectrodes for up to 16 h in decerebrate ferrets during learning, extinction, and relearning. We demonstrate that paired peripheral forelimb and periocular stimulation, as well as paired direct stimulation of cerebellar afferent pathways (mossy and climbing fibers) consistently causes a gradual acquisition of an inhibitory response in Purkinje cell simple spike firing. This conditioned cell response has several properties that matches known features of the behavioral conditioned response. The response latency varies with the interstimulus interval, and the response maximum is adaptively timed to precede the unconditioned stimulus. Across training trials, it matches behavioral extinction to unpaired stimulation and also the substantial savings that occur when paired stimulation is reinstated. These data suggest that many of the basic behavioral phenomena in eyeblink conditioning can be explained at the level of the single Purkinje cell.
PSYCHOBIOLOGICAL FRONTIERS OF ELECTROCONVULSIVE THERAPY IN DEPRESSION : EVALUATION OF STRATEGIES FOR RATIONAL PRESCRIPTION AND REDUCTION IN MORBIDITY1

Respected members of the chair and distinguished colleagues, I a m proud to address you at this august forum. Before I commence with my text, I have a few pleasant duties to perform. I acknowledge with gratitude Professors Venkoba Rao and Parvathi Devi for having instituted this award, and pay my humble respects to the memory of their son, the late Tilak Venkoba Rao, whose promising career was tragically aborted by an unfortunate road accident. I thank my mentor and colleague, Dr. B. N . Gangadhar, who has guided me in much of my EGT research. Finally, I wish to pay a special tribute to all my teachers, down the decades, some of whom I am privileged to have in my audience today; few amongst us can claim to be entirely selfmade, and I unreservedly acknowledge my personal and professional indebtedness to the teaching profession.
Analysis of thermal noise and noise reduction in CMOS device

Advanced CMOS technology assures CMOS device as a good choice for physical realization of RF applications. But as scaling progresses, noise and short channel effect start to deteriorate the device performance, thus increasing the power dissipation. This work focuses on the analysis of thermal noise by varying the gate resistance and frequency. Equivalent noise voltage is calculated for various extracted gate resistance and the effect of distributed gate resistance due to wider channel MOS is analyzed. Thermal noise is reduced using multifinger gate structure when compared to conventional nMOS. A complete small signal equivalent of nMOS along with augmented equivalent noise models is discussed.