Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Topographic Normalization in Rugged Terrain

Remote sensing of rugged terrain is hampered by topographic effects on spectral signatures. The purpose of this study was to attempt normalization of the topographic effect encountered when analyzing Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery in the Rocky Mountains. Two normalization techniques were performed on a subscene of a TM image of Rocky Mountain National Park. The first technique was a band ratio and the second was a backwards radiance correction transformation (BRCT) employing a Minnaert constant based on a non-Lambertian assumption. The results of this study indicated that application of the BRCT approach was the more successful technique for reducing topographic effects. Further, after conducting a homogeneity of variance test, the reduction of variances in spectral values between original and non-Lambertian normalized images was found to be statistically significant. PRESENTRESEARCH To address this problem, two normalization techniques were compared; a band ratio, and a backwards radiance correction transformation (BRCT) utilizing a Minnaert constant based on a non-Lambertian assumption. The Minnaert constant was com- puted for the entire scene and for a local sample area. An al- gorithm developed for generating slope and aspect from digital elevation data and for use in a raster based geographic infor- mation system (GIs) was used in the BRCT normalization tech- nique. A one-way analysis of variance was conducted to quantify the relationship of brightness values (BV) from selected similar sites, consisting of Lodgepole Pine forests, before and after nor- malization. Another one-way analysis of variance was per- formed on data that consisted of Bvs from two forest sample sites and values from different cover types, rock outcroppings, or barren soil. The latter analysis provided a comparison be- tween F statistics obtained from similar cover type information with that obtained from mixed cover types.
Tubercular Sinus of Labia Majora: Rare Case Report

Tuberculosis of the female external genitalia is unusual and primary infection is rare. We report a 50-year-old female patient admitted to Department to Surgery with swelling over left inguinal area with discharging sinus from labia majora to left inguinal crease which was found to be tubercular sinus on histopathology.
Load-balanced pipeline parallelism

Accelerating a single thread in current parallel systems remains a challenging problem, because sequential threads do not naturally take advantage of the additional cores. Recent work shows that automatic extraction of pipeline parallelism is an effective way to speed up single thread execution. However, two problems remain challenging - load balancing and inter-thread communication. This work shows new mechanism to exploit pipeline parallelism that naturally solves the load balancing and communication problems. This compiler-based technique automatically extracts the pipeline stages and executes them in a data parallel fashion, using token-based chunked synchronization to handle sequential stages. This technique provides linear speedup for several applications, and outperforms prior techniques to exploit pipeline parallelism by as much as 50%.
Mechanism of Extracellular K+-Induced Local and Conducted Responses in Cerebral Penetrating Arterioles

Background and Purpose— Extracellular concentration of potassium ion ([K+]o) may have a significant influence on the cerebral circulation in health and disease. Mechanisms of [K+]o-induced conducted vasomotor responses in cerebral arterioles, possibly linking microvascular regulation to neuronal activity, have not been examined. Methods— We analyzed vascular responses to small increases of [K+]o (up to 5 mmol/L) in isolated, cannulated, and pressurized rat cerebral arterioles (36.5±1.4 &mgr;m). [K+]o was elevated globally through extraluminal application or locally through micropipette, while arteriolar diameter was measured online. Results— Elevation of [K+]o (5 mmol/L) produced dilation that was inhibited by ouabain but not BaCl2. Locally applied [K+]o (3 to 5 mmol/L) produced a biphasic response (initial constriction followed by dilation), both of which were conducted to the remote site (distance 1142±68 &mgr;m). Endothelial impairment inhibited conducted but not local biphasic responses. Extraluminal ouabain attenuated local and conducted secondary dilation but not initial constriction. The local biphasic response was unaffected by extraluminal or intraluminal BaCl2. Extraluminal but not intraluminal BaCl2 impaired both conducted constriction and dilation. Conclusions— In rat penetrating arteriole, (1) [K+]o (3 to 5 mmol/L) strongly regulates arteriolar tone and causes conducted vasomotor responses; (2) local responses to elevated [K+]o are endothelium independent but conducted responses are dependent on an intact endothelium; (3) smooth muscle Na+-K+-ATPase activation is the generator of conducted dilation; and (4) smooth muscle inward rectifier potassium channels sustain conduction. Our findings suggest that potassium-induced conducted vasomotor responses may link local neuronal activity to microvascular regulation, which may be attenuated in pathological conditions.
Enteric coating of granules containing the probiotic Lactobacillus acidophilus

Abstract In the present study, a capsule formulation composed of enteric coated granules of Lactobacillus acidophilus ATCC 4962 was developed using Eudragit L30D-55 as enteric polymer. Optimization of the capsule formulation was achieved with a maximum viable cell count after 2 h of incubation in acid medium and disintegration time of 1 h in buffer pH 6.8. The amount of Eudragit L30D-55 in the capsules correlated with gastric juice resistance. The best protective qualities against artificial gastric juice were observed when capsules were prepared from granules composed of L. acidophilus, corn starch, lactose monohydrate, polyvinylpyrrolidone and coated with 12.5 % (m/V) of Eudragit L30D-55. Capsule formulation of L. acidophilus in edible broth medium suspension serves as a cheap alternative to the expensive freeze-drying procedure for preparing L. acidophilus. In addition, the enteric coating using Eudragit L30D-55 could protect probiotics from the acidic gastric environment and enhance the bioactivity of probiotics along with replacement of pathogenic microbes in human intestine
A P ] 4 M ay 2 00 4 A compactness theorem of n-harmonic maps

For n ≥ 3, let Ω ⊂ R be a bounded smooth domain and N ⊂ R be a compact smooth Riemannian submanifold without boundary. Suppose that {un} ⊂ W (Ω, N) are weak solutions to the perturbed n-harmonic map equation (1.2), satisfying (1.3), and uk → u weakly in W (Ω, N). Then u is an n-harmonic map. In particular, the space of n-harmonic maps is sequentially compact for the weak-W 1,n topology. §
Developmental Robustness by Obligate Interaction of Class B Floral Homeotic Genes and Proteins

DEF-like and GLO-like class B floral homeotic genes encode closely related MADS-domain transcription factors that act as developmental switches involved in specifying the identity of petals and stamens during flower development. Class B gene function requires transcriptional upregulation by an autoregulatory loop that depends on obligate heterodimerization of DEF-like and GLO-like proteins. Because switch-like behavior of gene expression can be displayed by single genes already, the functional relevance of this complex circuitry has remained enigmatic. On the basis of a stochastic in silico model of class B gene and protein interactions, we suggest that obligate heterodimerization of class B floral homeotic proteins is not simply the result of neutral drift but enhanced the robustness of cell-fate organ identity decisions in the presence of stochastic noise. This finding strongly corroborates the view that the appearance of this regulatory mechanism during angiosperm phylogeny led to a canalization of flower development and evolution.
Enhancing RF energy harvesting performance with cooperative beam selection for wireless sensors

RF energy harvesting is a promising potential solution to provide convenient and perpetual energy supplies to low-power wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we investigate the energy harvesting performance of a wireless sensor node powered by harvesting RF energy from an existing multiple-antenna transmitter. Specifically, we propose a random unitary beamforming (RUB) based cooperative beam selection scheme to enhance the energy harvesting performance at the sensor. Under a constant total transmission power constraint, the multiple-antenna transmitter selects the best active beams for data transmission, while satisfying the energy harvesting requirement at the sensor. We derive an exact closed-form expression for the distribution function of harvested energy in a coherence time at the sensor, as well as the throughput of the existing system over Rayleigh fading channels. We further investigate the performance tradeoff of the average harvested energy at the sensor versus the throughput of the existing system.
Anticipatory Innovation

We are living in an age of radical innovations. Science, technology and industry have given communities across the world unprecedented instrumental capabilities, and the miracles of technology and industry are trumpeted daily in the popular media. These instrumental capabilities have a shadow side, however, and the shadow side of this process is often ignored or obscured. The tremendous innovative capacities that have emerged in late industrial society, which have led to ever increasing instrumental power, have also contributed to the undermining of social and ecological systems. The development of the atomic bomb, most obviously, exemplifies the proliferation of a kind of innovation not uncommon in late industrial modernity. As the sociologist Ulrick Beck argues, along with the innovative capacities which empower us, we have also seen the emergence of a "world risk society"; a globalizing world of "manufactured uncertainties". While the direct consequences of our innovations often seem positive, much innovation research has systematically marginalised consideration of the "consequences of consequences" the diffusion effects of innovation. An illustration of this principle can be perceived most succinctly through a reading of Everett Rogers' well known work The Diffusion of Innovations. The Diffusion of Innovations brings together various strands of innovation research, exploring the diffusion of innovation through a generalist perspective on the definition, process and nature of innovation. Included are examples of social innovation (new types of social organization, such as the modern democracy), technical innovations (computers and pesticides) and innovations of technique or method (for example, the boiling of water). It is a text for those who want to know how to
Discovery of a High Proper Motion L Dwarf Binary: 2MASS J15200224–4422419AB

We report the discovery of the wide L1.5+L4.5 binary 2MASS J15200224-4422419AB, identified during spectroscopic follow-up of high proper motion sources selected from the Two Micron All Sky Survey. This source was independently identified by Kendall et al. in the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey. Resolved JHK photometry and low-resolution near-infrared spectroscopy demonstrate that this system is composed of two well-separated (1.174′′ ± 0.016′′) L dwarfs. Component classifications are derived using both spectral ratios and comparison to the near-infrared spectra of previously classified field L dwarfs. Physical association for the pair is deduced from the large common proper motion of the components (μ = 0.73′′ ± 0.03′′ yr-1) and their similar spectrophotometric distances (19 ± 2 pc). The projected separation of the binary, 22 ± 2 AU, is consistent with maximum separation/total system-mass trends for very low mass binaries. The 2MASS J1520-4422 system exhibits both large tangential (66 ± 7 km s-1) and radial velocities (-70 ± 18 km s-1), and its motion in the local standard of rest suggests that it is an old member of the Galactic disk population. This system joins a growing list of well-separated (>0.5''), very low mass binaries, and is an excellent target for resolved optical spectroscopy to constrain its age, as well as trace activity/rotation trends near the hydrogen-burning limit.
LRU2-MRU collaborative cache replacement algorithm on multi-core system

The access conflict from different threads or processes for parallel applications, can lead the system performance to degrade for multi-core system with shared cache. Cache replacement algorithm for L2 shared cache can be used to solve the problem efficiently and reasonably. Although LRU cache replacement algorithm can better reflect the locality of program and is widely used, it is not optimal for reducing the shared cache miss ratio and MPKI (misses per thousand instructions), and can not predict whether the data is be used frequently. In this paper, based on the consideration of time prediction, the disadvantage of LRU and the conflict between parallel application and shared cache, we propose the LRU2-MRU collaborative cache replacement algorithm to solve these problems. We use 10 benchmark programs to show that the LRU2-MRU collaborative cache algorithm may reduce the miss ratio of L2 shared cache by 4.61%, and the MPKI is average 4.54% lower than LRU.
Edlin: an Easy to Read Linear Learning Framework

The Edlin toolkit provides a machine learning framework for linear models, designed to be easy to read and understand. The main goal is to provide easy to edit working examples of implementations for popular learning algorithms. The toolkit consists of 27 Java classes with a total of about 1400 lines of code, of which about 25% are I/O and driver classes for examples. A version of Edlin has been integrated as a processing resource for the GATE architecture, and has been used for gene tagging, gene name normalization, named entity recognition in Bulgarian and biomedical relation extraction.
RDF-based schema mediation for database grid

In presence of grid where a huge amount of databases can be involved in sharing cycle, database tools and middlewares should be well suited for schema mediation and query processing in a semantically meaningful way. Dart is an implemented prototype system whose goal is to provide a semantic solution for database resource sharing capable of deployment in grid settings. This paper particularly concerns the problems of schema mediation in DartGrid. Our approach mainly involves the following notions: a) we use RDF/OWL to define the mediated ontologies for integration, b) we devise a set of rules for automatically converting the relational schema to RDF/OWL description called source data semantic, c) we define the source data semantic (source schema) as the view of shared ontologies (mediated schema), d) query is formulated and posed on the shared ontologies. A set of grid services is developed for the implementation of above functionalities.
Kosmix: Exploring the Deep Web using Taxonomies and Categorization

We introduce topic exploration, a new approach to information discovery on the web that differs significantly from conventional web search. We then explain why the Deep Web, an inhospitable region for web crawlers, is emerging as a significant information resource. Finally, we describe the anatomy of Kosmix, the first general-purpose topic exploration engine to harness the Deep Web. The Kosmix approach to the Deep Web leverages a huge taxonomy of millions of topics and their relationships, and differs significantly from that adopted by web search engines such as Google.
Differentially private feature selection

The privacy-preserving data analysis has been gained significant interest across several research communities. The current researches mainly focus on privacy-preserving classification and regression. However, feature selection is also an essential component for data analysis, which can be used to reduce the data dimensionality and can be utilized to discover knowledge, such as inherent variables in data. In this paper, in order to efficiently mine sensitive data, a privacy preserving feature selection algorithm is proposed and analyzed in theory based on local learning and differential privacy. We also conduct some experiments on benchmark data sets. The Experimental results show that our algorithm can preserve the data privacy to some extent.
Diabetic foot care: self reported knowledge and practice among patients attending three tertiary hospital in Nigeria.

BACKGROUND Diabetes Mellitus (DM) foot complications are a leading cause of mortality in developing countries and the prevalence of diabetes is expected to increase in the next decades in these countries. The aim of this study was to determine the knowledge and practice of foot care among diabetes patients attending three tertiary hospitals in Nigeria. METHODS This is a cross-sectional study carried out from November 2009 to April 2010. Pre-tested structured questionnaires were administered by medical officers to diabetes patients. The outcome variables were knowledge and practice regarding foot care. The knowledge and practice scores were classified as good if score ≥70%, satisfactory if score was 50-69% and poor if score was < 50%. RESULTS Of 352 diabetes patients, 30.1% had good knowledge and 10.2 % had good practice of DM foot care. Majority (78.4%) of patients with poor practice had poor knowledge of foot care. With regard to knowledge, 68.8% were unaware of the first thing to do when they found redness/bleeding between their toes and 61.4% were unaware of the importance of inspecting the inside of the footwear for objects. Poor foot practices include; 89.2% not receiving advice when they bought footwear and 88.6% failing to get appropriate size footwear. Illiteracy and low socioeconomic status were significantly associated with poor knowledge and practice of foot care. CONCLUSION This study has highlighted the gaps in the knowledge and practice of foot care in DM patients and underscores the need for an educational programme to reduce of diabetic foot complication.
Why Do Countries Matter so Much for Corporate Governance?

This paper develops and tests a model of how country characteristics, such as legal protections for minority investors, and the level of economic and financial development, influence firms' costs and benefits in implementing measures to improve their own governance and transparency. The model focuses on an entrepreneur who needs to raise funds to finance the firm's investment opportunities and who decides whether or not to invest in better firm-level governance mechanisms to reduce agency costs. We show that, for a given level of country investor protection, the incentives to adopt better governance mechanisms at the firm level increase with a country's financial and economic development. When economic and financial development is poor, the incentives to improve firm-level governance are low because outside finance is expensive and the adoption of better governance mechanisms is expensive. Using firm-level data on international corporate governance and transparency ratings for a large sample of firms from around the world, we find evidence consistent with this prediction. Specifically, we show that (1) almost all of the variation in governance ratings across firms in less developed countries is attributable to country characteristics rather than firm characteristics typically used to explain governance choices, (2) firm characteristics explain more of the variation in governance ratings in more developed countries, and (3) access to global capital markets sharpens firm incentives for better governance, but decreases the importance of home-country legal protections of minority investors.
Talker localization in a real acoustic environment based on DOA estimation and statistical sound source identification

For a hands-free speech interface, it is very important to capture distant talking speech with high quality. A microphone array is an ideal candidate for this purpose. However, this approach requires localizing the target talker. Conventional talker localization algorithms in multiple sound source environments not only have difficulty localizing the multiple sound sources accurately, but also have difficulty localizing the target talker among known multiple sound source positions. To cope with these problems, we propose a new talker localization algorithm consisting of two algorithms. One is DOA (Direction Of Arrival) estimation algorithm for multiple sound source localization based on CSP (Cross-power Spectrum Phase) coefficient addition method. The other is statistical sound source identification algorithm based on GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) for localizing the target talker position among localized multiple sound sources. In this paper, we particularly focus on the talker localization performance based on the combination of these two algorithms with a microphone array.
Content-Based Filtering Enhanced by Human Visual Attention Applied to Clothing Recommendation

Recommendation systems (RS) are important applications to help consumers to find interesting products in large databases available on line. A wide range of RS can be easily found such as Netflix and Amazon. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based approach for clothing recommendation, termed CRESA, which combines textual attributes, visual features and human visual attention to compose the clothes profile. Traditionally, the RS uses textual and/or visual features to derive the similarity measure between two products. However some parts of the image may call much more attention of users than others. We believe that the characterization of this phenomenon can improve the quality of the recommendation systems, especially when applied to the clothing recommendation problem. With this purpose, in this work we propose weighting the similarity of visual attention between corresponding parts of products with the measures conventionally used in content-based image recommendation systems. The experimental results showed that our approach reached the best accuracy rates when compared to the baseline approaches.
An High-Throughput In Vivo Screening System to Select H3K4-Specific Histone Demethylase Inhibitors

Background Histone demethylases (HDMs) have a prominent role in epigenetic regulation and are emerging as potential therapeutic cancer targets. The search for small molecules able to inhibit HDMs in vivo is very active but at the present few compounds were found to be specific for defined classes of these enzymes. Methodology/Principal Findings In order to discover inhibitors specific for H3K4 histone demethylation we set up a screening system which tests the effects of candidate small molecule inhibitors on a S.cerevisiae strain which requires Jhd2 demethylase activity to efficiently grow in the presence of rapamycin. In order to validate the system we screened a library of 45 structurally different compounds designed as competitive inhibitors of α -ketoglutarate (α-KG) cofactor of the enzyme, and found that one of them inhibited Jhd2 activity in vitro and in vivo. The same compound effectively inhibits human Jumonji AT-Rich Interactive Domain (JARID) 1B and 1D in vitro and increases H3K4 tri-methylation in HeLa cell nuclear extracts (NEs). When added in vivo to HeLa cells, the compound leads to an increase of tri-methyl-H3K4 (H3K4me3) but does not affect H3K9 tri-methylation. We describe the cytostatic and toxic effects of the compound on HeLa cells at concentrations compatible with its inhibitory activity. Conclusions/Significance Our screening system is proved to be very useful in testing putative H3K4-specific HDM inhibitors for the capacity of acting in vivo without significantly altering the activity of other important 2-oxoglutarate oxygenases.