Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing urban growth dynamics of major Southeast Asian cities using night-time light data

ABSTRACT This study analysed urban growth patterns for 15 Southeast Asian cities using remotely sensed night-time light data from 1992 to 2012. We extracted three urban categories (countryside, peri-urban, and core-urban) for each city using objectively derived thresholds from the brightness gradient (BG) approach. The peri-urban and core-urban combined categories were generally found to increase over time for all cities whereas countryside urban category decreased implying strong spatial and temporal trends in urbanization. These trends were also found to be sensitive to geographic characteristics of cities. The study showed that the BG approach can be successfully applied to extract and study growth dynamics of different urban categories for Southeast Asian cities having range of demographic and socioeconomic conditions. The BG derived urban categories compared favourably with Landsat derived impervious areas, where the former was found to envelope the high percentage impervious region derived from the latter. The BG-derived urban areas are lastly compared against the population data to explore linkages with population growth.
Hope for the Best or Prepare for the Worst? Towards a Spatial Cognitive Bias Test for Mice

Cognitive bias, the altered information processing resulting from the background emotional state of an individual, has been suggested as a promising new indicator of animal emotion. Comparable to anxious or depressed humans, animals in a putatively negative emotional state are more likely to judge an ambiguous stimulus as if it predicts a negative event, than those in positive states. The present study aimed to establish a cognitive bias test for mice based on a spatial judgment task and to apply it in a pilot study to serotonin transporter (5-HTT) knockout mice, a well-established mouse model for the study of anxiety- and depression-related behavior. In a first step, we validated that our setup can assess different expectations about the outcome of an ambiguous stimulus: mice having learned to expect something positive within a maze differed significantly in their behavior towards an unfamiliar location than animals having learned to expect something negative. In a second step, the use of spatial location as a discriminatory stimulus was confirmed by showing that mice interpret an ambiguous stimulus depending on its spatial location, with a position exactly midway between a positive and a negative reference point provoking the highest level of ambiguity. Finally, the anxiety- and depression-like phenotype of the 5-HTT knockout mouse model manifested - comparable to human conditions - in a trend for a negatively distorted interpretation of ambiguous information, albeit this effect was not statistically significant. The results suggest that the present cognitive bias test provides a useful basis to study the emotional state in mice, which may not only increase the translational value of animal models in the study of human affective disorders, but which is also a central objective of animal welfare research.
A patient perspective on the barriers to home dialysis.

INTRODUCTION People with End Stage Renal Disease rarely choose home dialysis therapies even though they can offer a range of Quality-of-Life (QOL) benefits such as improved convenience, mental health well-being, employment, reduced mortality and cost effectiveness. Attempts to increase usage of such self-caring modalities, have met with limited success, in part due to a lack of understanding of patient decision making and patient perceived barriers to such therapies. OBJECTIVE To explore the patient perspective on the main barriers to a range of self-care or home dialysis therapies, including Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis, Home Haemodialysis and Extended Home Haemodialysis. MATERIALS AND METHODS A longitudinal patient narrative approach is adopted. RESULTS There are significant barriers to all aspects of informed decision making around home therapies, but many are based on perception. Creating decision aids and education programmes to tackle these perceived barriers, actively encouraging home therapy take up, focusing on QOL in clinical decision making, offering peer support and expanded in-centre self-care treatment options may increase awareness and uptake of self-care therapies.
A Reliable Tool to Determine Cell Viability in Complex 3-D Culture: The Acid Phosphatase Assay

Cell-based assays are more complex than cell-free test systems but still reflect a highly artificial cellular environment. Incorporation of organotypic 3-dimensional (3-D) culture systems into mainstream drug development processes is increasingly discussed but severely limited by complex methodological requirements. The objective of this study was to explore a panel of standard assays to provide an easy-handling, standardized protocol for rapid routine analysis of cell survival in multicellular tumor spheroid-based antitumor drug testing. Spheroids of 2 colon carcinoma cell lines were characterized for evaluation. One of the assay systems tested could reliably be used to determine cell viability in spheroids. The authors verified that the acid phosphatase assay (APH) is applicable for single spheroids in 96-well plates, does not require spheroid dissociation, and is linear and highly sensitive for HT29 and HCT-116 spheroids up to diameters of 650 µm and 900 µm, consisting of 40,000 and 80,000 cells, respectively. Treatment of HT29 and HCT-116 cells with 5-fluorouracil, Irinotecan, and C-1311 revealed critically reduced drug efficacies in 3-D versus monolayer culture, which is discussed in light of literature data. The experimental protocol presented herein is a small but substantial contribution to the establishment of sophisticated 3-D in vitro systems in the antitumor drug screening scenario. (Journal of Biomolecular Screening 2007:925-937)
Evals is Not Enough: Why We Should Report Wall-clock Time

Have you ever noticed that your car never achieves the fuel economy claimed by the manufacturer? Does this seem unfair? Unscientic? Would you like the same situation to occur in Genetic Improvement? Comparison will always be difficult [9], however, guidelines have been discussed [3, 5, 4]. With two GP [8] approaches, comparing the number of evaluations of the fitness function is reasonably fair. This means you are comparing the GP systems, and not how well they are implemented, how fast the language is. However, the situation with GI [6, 1] is unique. With GI we will typically compare systems which are applied to the same application written in the same language (i.e. a GI systems targeted at Java, may not even be applied to C). Thus, wall-clock time becomes more relevant. Thus, this paper asks if reporting number of evaluations is enough, or if wall-clock time is also important, particularly in the context of GI. It argues that reporting time is even more important when doing GI when compared to traditional GP
Thaptomys Thomas 1915 (Rodentia, Sigmodontinae, Akodontini) with karyotypes 2n = 50, FN = 48, and 2n = 52, FN = 52: Two monophyletic lineages recovered by molecular phylogeny

A novel karyotype with 2n = 50, FN = 48, was described for specimens of Thaptomys collected at Una, State of Bahia, Brazil, which are morphologically indistinguishable from Thaptomys nigrita, 2n = 52, FN = 52, found in other localities. It was hence proposed that the 2n = 50 karyotype could belong to a distinct species, cryptic of Thaptomys nigrita, once chromosomal rearrangements observed, along with the geographic distance, might represent a reproductive barrier between both forms. Phylogenetic analyses using maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood based on partial cytochrome b sequences with 1077 bp were performed, attempting to establish the relationships among the individuals with distinct karyotypes along the geographic distribution of the genus; the sample comprised 18 karyotyped specimens of Thaptomys, encompassing 15 haplotypes, from eight different localities of the Atlantic Rainforest. The intra-generic relationships corroborated the distinct diploid numbers, once both phylogenetic reconstructions recovered two monophyletic lineages, a northeastern clade grouping the 2n = 50 and a southeastern clade with three subclades, grouping the 2n = 52 karyotype. The sequence divergence observed between their individuals ranged from 1.9% to 3.5%.
Recent Development of Dual-Dictionary Learning Approach in Medical Image Analysis and Reconstruction

As an implementation of compressive sensing (CS), dual-dictionary learning (DDL) method provides an ideal access to restore signals of two related dictionaries and sparse representation. It has been proven that this method performs well in medical image reconstruction with highly undersampled data, especially for multimodality imaging like CT-MRI hybrid reconstruction. Because of its outstanding strength, short signal acquisition time, and low radiation dose, DDL has allured a broad interest in both academic and industrial fields. Here in this review article, we summarize DDL's development history, conclude the latest advance, and also discuss its role in the future directions and potential applications in medical imaging. Meanwhile, this paper points out that DDL is still in the initial stage, and it is necessary to make further studies to improve this method, especially in dictionary training.
Growth and Body Composition of Human Milk–fed Premature Infants Provided With Extra Energy and Nutrients Early After Hospital Discharge: 1-year Follow-up

Objectives: Human milk (HM) is the optimal source of nutrition for premature infants; however, it is unclear whether HM alone is sufficient to meet their elevated nutritional requirements early after hospital discharge. We previously reported that premature infants (750–1800 g birth weight) fed HM containing extra nutrients for 12 weeks after discharge had dietary intakes closer to recommended levels and grew more rapidly than those fed HM alone. The objectives of the present article are to examine the impact of this intervention on bone mineralization, body composition, and HM use up to 1 year. Data are also presented on general developmental level at 18-month corrected age (CA). Patients and Methods: At discharge, predominantly HM-fed infants were randomized to receive for 12 weeks either approximately half of their feedings containing a multinutrient fortifier (intervention, n = 19) or all of their feedings as HM alone (control, n = 20). Results: Intervention infants remained longer (P < 0.001) and had greater whole-body bone mineral content (P = 0.02) until 12-month CA compared with controls. Intervention infants born less than or equal to 1250 g continued to have a larger mean head circumference throughout the first year of life (P < 0.0001). Human milk feeding (mL · kg−1 · day−1) differed between groups at 6- (P = 0.035), but not 12-month CA. No statistically significant differences were found between groups in the mental, motor, or behavior rating scale scores of the Bayley II at 18-month CA. Conclusions: Adding a multinutrient fortifier to HM provided to predominantly HM-fed premature infants early after discharge results in sustained differences in weight, length, and whole-body bone mineral content, and in smaller babies, head circumference for the first year of life.
A Statistical Learning Based System for Fake Website Detection

Existing fake website detection systems are unable to effectively detect fake websites. In this study, we advocate the development of fake website detection systems that employ classification methods grounded in statistical learning theory (SLT). Experimental results reveal that a prototype system developed using SLT-based methods outperforms seven existing fake website detection systems on a test bed encompassing 900 real and fake websites.
Can venous thromboembolism navigate the prevention of cardiovascular complications?

Traditionally venous and arterial thrombosis has been viewed as two separate pathophysiological and clinical entities. It is widely accepted that venous thrombi are “red thrombi” being predominantly formed from red blood cells and fibrin. “Red thrombi” usually develop in areas with slow blood flow, such as veins or left atrial appendage of patients with atrial fibrillation. Consequently anticoagulant agents are highly effective for prevention of embolism secondary to venous thrombosis or atrial fibrillation. Although anticoagulants could exert some beneficial effect in arterial thrombosis (e.g., in patients with ischemic heart disease) they have not become a routine part of management of such patients.
A novel signed higher-radix full-adder algorithm and implementation with current-mode multi-valued logic circuits

A higher-radix algebra for full-addition of two numbers is described and realised by combining multivalued logic min, max, literal and cyclic operators in terms disjoint terms. The latter operator is designed by using a current-mode threshold circuit while the other operator is realised by only voltage-mode switching circuits. The threshold circuit employed allows for much higher radices compared to architectures employing voltage-mode binary logic switching circuits as well as better mismatch properties compared to previous threshold circuits. Due to disjoint terms involved, multi-valued logic min and max operators can be replaced with ordinary transmission operation and addition, respectively. Resultant a single-digit, radix-8 full-adder and its 3-bit counterpart voltage-mode circuits are realised and compared. The algorithm is also exploited for a multi-digit case and its HSPICE simulation results are presented.
Probabilistic Multileave for Online Retrieval Evaluation

Online evaluation methods for information retrieval use implicit signals such as clicks from users to infer preferences between rankers. A highly sensitive way of inferring these preferences is through interleaved comparisons. Recently, interleaved comparisons methods that allow for simultaneous evaluation of more than two rankers have been introduced. These so-called multileaving methods are even more sensitive than their interleaving counterparts. Probabilistic interleaving--whose main selling point is the potential for reuse of historical data--has no multileaving counterpart yet. We propose probabilistic multileave and empirically show that it is highly sensitive and unbiased. An important implication of this result is that historical interactions with multileaved comparisons can be reused, allowing for ranker comparisons that need much less user interaction data. Furthermore, we show that our method, as opposed to earlier sensitive multileaving methods, scales well when the number of rankers increases.
Continuous Ambient Lighting and Lens Compensation in Infant Monkeys

Purpose. Protracted daily lighting cycles do not promote abnormal ocular enlargement in infant monkeys as they do in a variety of avian species. However, observations in humans suggest that ambient lighting at night may reduce the efficiency of the emmetropization process in primates. To test this idea, we investigated the ability of infant monkeys reared with continuous light to compensate for optically imposed changes in refractive error. Methods. Beginning at about 3 weeks of age, a hyperopic or myopic anisometropia was imposed on 12 infant rhesus monkeys by securing either a −3 D or +3 D lenses in front of one eye and a zero-powered lens in front of the fellow eye. Six of these monkeys were reared with the normal vivarium lights on continuously, whereas the other six lens-reared monkeys were maintained on a 12-h-light/12-h-dark lighting cycle. The ocular effects of the lens-rearing procedures were assessed periodically during the treatment period by cycloplegic retinoscopy, keratometry, and A-scan ultrasonography. Results. Five of six animals in each of the lighting groups demonstrated clear evidence for compensating anisometropic growth. In both lighting groups, eyes that experienced optically imposed hyperopic defocus (−3 D lenses) exhibited faster axial growth rates and became more myopic than their fellow eyes. In contrast, eyes treated with +3 D lenses showed relatively slower axial growth rates and developed more hyperopic refractive errors. The average amount of compensating anisometropia (continuous light, 1.6 ± 0.5 D vs. control, 2.3 ± 0.5 D), the structural basis for the refractive errors, and the ability to recover from the induced refractive errors were also not altered by continuous light exposure. Conclusion. Ambient lighting at night does not appear to overtly compromise the functional integrity of the vision-dependent mechanisms that regulate emmetropization in higher primates.
Reduction of Common-Mode Voltage in Five-Phase Induction Motor Drives Using Predictive Control Techniques

The common-mode voltage (CMV) is known to be a source of electromagnetic interference, and it is potentially dangerous for the machine windings' insulation and bearings. CMV has been analyzed for three-phase machines supplied by voltage-source inverters, showing that modified pulsewidth modulation and model predictive control (MPC) techniques can significantly reduce the CMV at the expense of increased current distortion. This paper analyzes the CMV for five-phase drives and proposes a modified MPC strategy that accounts for the CMV reduction. The MPC can adjust the weights of the cost function to find a good balance between CMV reduction and low current distortion. The MPC strategy is experimentally tested showing how the CMV can be effectively reduced, thus improving the multiphase drive performance.
Regulation of the epithelial to mesenchymal transition and metastasis by Raf kinase inhibitory protein-dependent Notch1 activity

Raf kinase inhibitory protein (RKIP), an endogenous inhibitor of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) pathway, has been implicated as a suppressor of metastasis and a prognostic marker in cancers. However, how RKIP acts as a suppressor during metastasis is not fully understood. Here, we show that RKIP activity in cervical and stomach cancer is inversely correlated with endogenous levels of the Notch1 intracellular domain (NICD), which stimulates the epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) and metastasis. The levels of RKIP were significantly decreased in tumor tissues compared to normal tissues, whereas NICD levels were increased. Overexpression of RKIP in several cell lines resulted in a dramatic decrease of NICD and subsequent inhibition of several mesenchymal markers, such as vimentin, N-cadherin, and Snail. In contrast, knockdown of RKIP exhibited opposite results both in vitro and in vivo using mouse models. Nevertheless, knockdown of Notch1 in cancer cells had no effect on the expression of RKIP, suggesting that RKIP is likely an upstream regulator of the Notch1 pathway. We also found that RKIP directly interacts with Notch1 but has no influence on the intracellular level of the γ-secretase complex that is necessary for Notch1 activation. These data suggest that RKIP plays a distinct role in activation of Notch1 during EMT and metastasis, providing a new target for cancer treatment.
BoTGen: A new approach for in-lab generation of botnet datasets

Although datasets represent a critical part of research and development activities, botnet research suffers from a serious shortage of reliable and representative datasets. In this paper, we explain a new approach to build a botnet experimentation platform completely from off-the-shelf open sources. This work aims to fill the gap in botnet research due to the lack of representative datasets. The proposed approach provides a flexible way to experiment with botnets freely in a controlled environment. Moreover, various botnet scenarios can be generated and carried out automatically, which allows producing rich datasets with diverse botnet scenarios.
Localization of Human Resources in the State of Qatar: Perspectives of Expatriate Managers

Purpose – This paper seeks to provide an overview of the concept of “localization” of human resources in Qatar. Relative to the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCCCs), economic development began late in Qatar due to political and economic factors such as the influx of an immigrant labour force and changes in the education system. Now, with one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and the highest per capita income, Qatar has vigorously embraced rapid economic expansion. However, in a small country awash with natural resources, and with a population engulfed by expatriates, the issue of “localization” is a pressing economic and social issue.Design/methodology/approach – This paper reviews the national human resource situation in this atypical context, and seeks to determine the factors that impact on “localization” in this small, yet important Gulf nation.Findings – There are some common barriers to “localization” throughout the GCCCs. These can be summarized as: an inefficient quo.
Fura‐2 calcium transients in frog skeletal muscle fibres.

1. Intact single twitch fibres from frog muscle were mounted at long sarcomere spacing (3.5‐4.2 microns) on an optical bench apparatus for the measurement of absorbance and fluorescence signals following the myoplasmic injection of either or both of the Ca2+ indicator dyes Fura‐2 and Antipyrylazo III. Dye‐related signals were measured at 16‐17 degrees C in fibres at rest and stimulated electrically to give a single action potential or brief train of action potentials. 2. The apparent diffusion constant of Fura‐2 in myoplasm, Dapp, was estimated from Fura‐2 fluorescence measured as a function of time and distance from the site of dye injection. On average (N = 7), Dapp was 0.36 x 10(‐6) cm2 s‐1, a value nearly 3‐fold smaller than expected if all the Fura‐2 was freely dissolved in the myoplasmic solution. The small value of Dapp is explained if approximately 60‐65% of the Fura‐2 molecules were bound to relatively immobile sites in myoplasm. 3. In resting fibres the fraction of Fura‐2 in the Ca2+‐bound form was estimated to be small, on average (N = 11) 0.06 of total dye. However, because of the large fraction of Fura‐2 not freely dissolved in myoplasm, and the indirect method employed for estimating Ca2+‐bound dye, calibration of the resting level of myoplasmic free Ca2+ ([Ca2+]) from the fraction of Ca2+‐bound dye was not considered reliable. 4. In response to a single action potential, large changes in Fura‐2 fluorescence (delta F) and absorbance (delta A) were detected, which had identical time courses. As expected, the directions of these transients corresponded to an increase in Ca2+‐dye complex. For wavelengths, lambda, between 380 and 460 nm, peak delta A(lambda) was closely similar to the Ca2+‐dye difference spectrum for Fura‐2 determined in in vitro calibrations. Beer's law was used to calibrate the concentration of Ca2+‐dye complex formed during activity (delta[CaFura‐2]) from the delta A(lambda) signal. Peak delta[CaFura‐2] was found to vary between 0.01 and 0.4 mM, depending on the total concentration of injected Fura‐2 ([Fura‐2T]), which ranged as high as 0.9 mM. 5. In fibres in which peak delta[CaFura‐2] was less than 0.06 mM, delta[CaFura‐2] had a limiting minimal half‐width of 50‐60 ms. However, as peak delta[CaFura‐2] increased (up to 0.3‐0.4 mM), delta[CaFura‐2] half‐width became markedly prolonged (up to 150‐200 ms), indicative of a strong buffering action of large concentrations of Fura‐2 on the underlying [Ca2+] transient (delta[Ca2+]). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)