Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measurement and Prediction of Speech Intelligibility in a Virtual Chat Room

Intelligibility in a telecommunication-based conference application can largely be improved, when the speech signals of the different interlocutors are presented spatially, and when the sources are spatially distributed. For the controlled exploitation of the underlying Cocktail Party Effect in speech chat applications, a prediction of the intelligibility related to a given spatial configuration is sought. To this aim, a number of intelligibility tests have been conducted on different configurations of a virtual speech chat room based on binaural rendering technology and headphone presentation. The measurement object of the intelligibility tests was the Speech Reception Threshold, i.e. the signal-to-interferer ratio threshold for 50% intelligibility. Based on the test results, the paper presents a parametric model developed for intelligibility predictions in virtual chat-room applications, and briefly discuss its prediction performance.
Selection of Multipotent Stem Cells during Morphogenesis of Small Intestinal Crypts of Lieberkühn Is Perturbed by Stimulation of Lef-1/β-Catenin Signaling*

Studies of chimeric mice have disclosed that the stem cell hierarchy in the small intestinal epithelium is established during formation of its proliferative units (crypts of Lieberkühn). This process involves a selection among several multipotential progenitors so that ultimately only one survives to supply descendants to the fully formed crypt. In this report, we examine the hypothesis that the level of β-catenin (β-cat)-mediated signaling is an important factor regulating this stem cell selection. In the canonical Wnt signaling pathway, β-catenin can partner with Lef-1/Tcf high mobility group (HMG) box transcription factors to control gene expression. Both Lef-1 and Tcf-4 mRNAs are produced in the fetal mouse small intestine. Tcf-4 expression is sustained, whereas Lef-1 levels fall as crypt formation is completed during the first two postnatal weeks. A Tcf-4 gene knockout is known to block intestinal epithelial proliferation in late fetal life. Therefore, to test the hypothesis, we enhanced β-catenin signaling in a chimeric mouse model in which the stem cell selection could be monitored. A fusion protein containing the HMG box domain of Lef-1 linked to the trans-activation domain of β-catenin (Lef-1/β-cat) was constructed to promote direct stimulation of signaling without being retained in the cytoplasm through interactions with E-cadherin and Apc/Axin. Lef-1/β-cat was expressed in 129/Sv embryonic stem cell-derived small intestinal epithelial progenitors present in developing B6-ROSA26↔129/Sv chimeras. Lef-1/β-cat stimulated expression of a known β-catenin target (E-cadherin), suppressed expression of Apc and Axin, and induced apoptosis in 129/Sv but not in neighboring B6-ROSA26 epithelial cells. This apoptotic response was not associated with any detectable changes in cell division within the Lef-1/β-cat-expressing epithelium. By the time crypt development was completed, all 129/Sv epithelial cells were lost. These results indicate that developmental changes in β-catenin-mediated signaling can play an important role in establishing a stem cell hierarchy during crypt morphogenesis.
Norm-Making in Social Exchange: A Contract Law Model

In recent years sociologists have become increasingly aware of and interested in legal environments and the characteristics of legal systems. This burgeoning interest in the law as a subject of sociological inquiry has not, however, brought with it an appreciation of the possibility that legal skills or knowledge may elucidate questions of interest to students of social systems generally. Law is arguably relevant to many sociological issues which make normative arrangements problematic. This is because a legal code represents a formalized (and often idealized) statement of those norms which are considerd basic in a particular society. It was the genius of Emile Durkheim (1964) to recognize that the quality of legal remedies in a system could provide a good operational indicator of the way in which that society sought to answer the Hobbesean question of maintaining order. The Division of Labor in Society (1964) draws heavily on this insight.
Rapid Responses to Steroid Hormones in the Kidney

Rapid signalling responses stimulated by steroid hormones have been detected in various tissues including the nephron. The significance of these responses in modulating the physiological effects elicited by mineralocorticoids, glucocorticoids and the reproductive hormones in the kidney is now becoming more evident. This review outlines how rapid signalling responses stimulated by these hormones are coupled to the regulation of membrane transport targets that impact upon the reabsorptive and excretory functions of the kidney.
CURRENT INDIAN EYE RESEARCH 3 Pathogenesis and Management of Diabetic Macular Edema

1. Dr. Rajendra Prasad Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi-110029; 2. Susrut Eye Foundation and Research Centre, Sector-III, Salt Lake City, Kolkata 700106. Corresponding Author : Dr. Subijay Sinha, E-mail: subijay.sinha@gmail.com Received on : 04/05/2014, Accepted on : 30/05/2014 Conflict of Interest : None, Financial Disclosure : None Diabetic macular edema (DME) is one of the major causes of vision loss in patients with diabetic retinopathy. It is defined as retinal thickening in the posterior pole essentially resulting from increased permeability of retinal vasculature leading to the disruption of the blood retinal barrier and other alterations in the retinal micro-environments1.
Tetraploid development in the mouse

Spontaneous duplication of the mammalian genome occurs in approximately 1% of fertilizations. Although one or more whole genome duplications are believed to have influenced vertebrate evolution, polyploidy of contemporary mammals is generally incompatible with normal development and function of all but a few tissues. The production of tetraploid (4n) embryos has become a common experimental manipulation in the mouse. Although development of tetraploid mice has generally not been observed beyond midgestation, tetraploid:diploid (4n:2n) chimeras are widely used as a method for rescuing extraembryonic defects. The tolerance of tissues to polyploidy appears to be dependent on genetic background. Indeed, the recent discovery of a naturally tetraploid rodent species suggests that, in rare genetic backgrounds, mammalian genome duplications may be compatible with the development of viable and fertile adults. Thus, the range of developmental potentials of tetraploid embryos remains in large part unexplored. Here, we review the biological consequences and experimental utility of tetraploid mammals, in particular the mouse. Developmental Dynamics 228:751–766, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Des animaux pour humaniser les soins : Éthique des soins et récits de zoothérapie canine auprès de résidents de centres d'hébergement de soins de longue durée

En zootherapie, les gens peuvent a la fois beneficier d’interactions et de relations avec un humain et un animal. Ce texte presente quelques anecdotes vecues illustrant comment la zootherapie peut contribuer au bien-etre socioaffectif des patients. Ce texte souligne que notre nature sociale rend l’ethique des soins possible pour les soignants et necessaire pour les patients, tout en faisant un parallele entre les aptitudes de mes chiens et les miennes. Je plaide aussi pour qu’on ne neglige pas les besoins socioaffectifs des patients.
Boundaries on Spacetimes: An Outline

The causal boundary construction of Geroch, Kronheimer, and Penrose has some universal properties of importance for general studies of spacetimes, particularly when equipped with a topology derived from the causal structure. Properties of the causal boundary are detailed for spacetimes with spacelike boundaries, for multi-warped spacetimes, for static spacetimes, and for spacetimes with group actions.
Tumor Antigen Expression in Melanoma Varies According to Antigen and Stage

Purpose: Melanoma cells express antigens that can induce T-cell and antibody responses. Obtaining a detailed understanding of antigen expression in primary and metastatic melanoma is essential if these molecules are to be useful targets for immunotherapy of melanoma. Experimental Design: Malignant melanomas (n = 586) from 426 patients were typed for antigen expression. Multiple samples were available from 86 individuals, enabling analysis of antigen expression patterns over time. Paraffin-embedded samples were tested by immunohistochemistry for the presence of the differentiation antigens: gp100, Melan-A, tyrosinase, and the “cancer/testis” antigens MAGE-A1, MAGE-A4, and NY-ESO-1. Results: Samples were primary tumors (n = 251), lymph node metastases (n = 174), s.c. metastases (n = 71), and distant metastases (n = 90). The differentiation antigens were strongly expressed in 93% to 95% of tumors regardless of stage. In contrast, the frequency of cancer/testis antigen expression in primary tumors for MAGE-A1, MAGE-A4, and NY-ESO-1 was lower (20%, 9%, and 45%, respectively). MAGE-A1 and MAGE-A4 were acquired with advancing disease (to 51% and 44% in distant metastases, respectively) but not NY-ESO-1, which remained positive in 45%. MAGE-A1 expression was twice as prevalent in ulcerated primaries as in nonulcerated primaries (30% versus 15%; P = 0.006) and in thicker as opposed to thin melanomas (26% versus 10%; P = 0.1). Conclusions: This large series describes patterns of antigen expression in melanoma and their evolution over time. This will help inform decisions about selection of patients and target antigens for melanoma immunotherapy clinical trials.
Genotoxicity of Corrosion Eluates Obtained From Endosseous Implants

Purpose:Commercially pure titanium alloys are currently used as metallic biomaterials in implantology. Corrosion phenomena appear to play a decisive role in metallic implant long-term behavior. Thus, the goal of this study was to examine the genotoxic potential of corrosion eluates obtained from dental implants using Chinese ovary hamster cells in vitro by the single-cell gel (comet) assay. This technique detects deoxyribonucleic acid strand breaks in individual cells in alkaline conditions. Materials and Methods:The materials tested included 3 dental implants commercially available. Each of the tested materials was corroded in a solution consisting of equal amounts of acetic acid and sodium chloride (0.1 M) for 1, 3, 7, 14, and 21 days. The Chinese ovary hamster cultures were then exposed to all corrosion eluates obtained from endosseous dental implants for 30 minutes at 37°C. Results:None of the eluates was found to exhibit genotoxicity, regardless of the type of dental implant used. Conclusion:The results suggest that all dental implants tested in this study did not induce deoxyribonucleic acid breakage as depicted by the single-cell gel (comet) assay.
A middleware for reflective web service choreographies on the cloud

Web service composition is a commonly used solution to build distributed systems on the cloud. Choreographies are one specific kind of service composition in which the responsibilities for the execution of the system are shared by its service components without a central point of coordination. Due to the distributed nature of these systems, a manual approach to resource usage monitoring and allocation to maintain the expected Quality of Service (QoS) is not only inefficient but also does not scale. In this paper, we present an open source choreography enactment middleware that is capable of automatically deploying and executing a composition. Additionally, it also monitors the composition execution to perform automatic resource provisioning and dynamic service reconfiguration based on pre-defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) constraints. To achieve that, it keeps a meta-level representation of the compositions, which contains their specifications, deployment statuses, and QoS attributes. Application developers can write specific rules that take into account these meta-data to reason about the performance of the composition and change its behavior. Our middleware was evaluated on Amazon EC2 and our results demonstrate that, with little effort from the choreography developer or deployer, the middleware is able to maintain the established SLA using both horizontal and vertical scaling when faced with varying levels of load. Additionally, it also reduces operational costs by using as little computational resources as possible.
Institutionen För Datavetenskap Application Whitelisting Smartphones in High Security Environments Application Whitelisting Smartphones in High Security Environments

Today, smartphones are in widespread use by consumers, commercial companies and government authorities. Unfortunately, there are many examples of applications carrying out malicious activities, such as stealing information or subscribing to premium-rate services. In this thesis work, a novel application whitelisting process (AWP) is proposed. It defines processes for application security audits and whitelisting i.e. methods on how to classify, evaluate and test a given application to make sure that it with a level of assurance does not have malicious intentions. In a risk analysis of users in high security environments, the results showed that confidentiality and availability is the top most important security aspects to protect in this environment. The applications in the whitelisting process should therefore be tested for known malware and adware as well as permissions that can be used to send private information to remote servers. Additionally, testing should also be carried out for information leakage through intents and content resolvers. Because whitelisting is locking down the freedom and usability that comes with a smartphone, three different leveled whitelists are proposed to satisfy users and organizations with different security needs. A prototype was developed to prove the overall usability of the design. The result of scanning 200 applications from Google Play showed that 12% of all applications can be placed in the highest leveled whitelist. The results also suggest that 17.5 % of all applications on Google Play are malware or potentially unwanted applications. The results points to that using this novel whitelisting process, about 30% of all applications can be automated into whitelists and will not need manual analysis.
Directed Altruism and Enforced Reciprocity in Social Networks: How Much is a Friend Worth?

We conduct field experiments in a large real-world social network to examine why decision makers treat friends more generously than strangers. Subjects are asked to divide surplus between themselves and named partners at various social distances, where only one of the decisions is implemented. In order to separate altruistic and future interaction motives, we implement an anonymous treatment where neither player is told at the end of the experiment which decision was selected for payment and a non-anonymous treatment where both players are told. Moreover, we include both games where transfers increase and decrease social surplus to distinguish between different future interaction channels including signaling one's generosity and enforced reciprocity, where the decision maker treats the partner to a favor because she can expect it to be repaid in the future. We can decompose altruistic preferences into baseline altruism towards any partner and directed altruism towards friends. Decision makers vary widely in their baseline altruism, but pass at least 50 percent more surplus to friends compared to strangers when decision making is anonymous. Under non-anonymity, transfers to friends increase by an extra 24 percent relative to strangers, but only in games where transfers increase social surplus. This effect increases with density of the network structure between both players, but does not depend on the average amount of time spent together each week. Our findings are well explained by enforced reciprocity, but not by signaling or preference-based reciprocity. We also find that partners' expectations are well calibrated to directed altruism, but that they ignore decision makers' baseline altruism. Partners with high baseline altruism have friends with higher baseline altruism and are therefore treated better.
Advances in applied anatomy of the eyelid and orbit

Purpose of review The oculofacial surgeon seeking to achieve ideal outcomes and avoid complications in aesthetic, functional and reconstructive surgery must have an understanding of the three-dimensional anatomic features, as well as the dynamic aspects, of the eyelid and orbital region. Knowledge of the orbital and periorbital region may be the last frontier of human anatomy, as new information is still being uncovered every year and each clarification of anatomy leads to a new level of sophistication in the understanding and treatment of orbital and eyelid disease both medically and surgically. Recent findings Recently, a great deal of attention has been focused on better understanding of the vasculature, fatty tissue, fascial attachments, and lymphatic drainage of the orbital and periorbital region. This in turn has provided improved clinical understanding of orbital disease and surgical applications of these findings have been described. Summary Anatomic knowledge in ophthalmology is not yet complete but constantly evolving. Exciting new insights into treatment of ophthalmologic disease have resulted from the application of an ever greater anatomic understanding of the orbital and periorbital region.
Effect of emphysema on CT scan measures of airway dimensions in smokers.

BACKGROUND In CT scans of smokers with COPD, the subsegmental airway wall area percent (WA%) is greater and more strongly correlated with FEV1 % predicted than WA% obtained in the segmental airways. Because emphysema is linked to loss of airway tethering and may limit airway expansion, increases in WA% may be related to emphysema and not solely to remodeling. We aimed to first determine whether the stronger association of subsegmental vs segmental WA% with FEV1 % predicted is mitigated by emphysema and, second, to assess the relationships among emphysema, WA%, and total bronchial area (TBA). METHODS We analyzed CT scan segmental and subsegmental WA% (WA% = 100 × wall area/TBA) of six bronchial paths and corresponding lobar emphysema, lung function, and clinical data in 983 smokers with COPD. RESULTS Compared with segmental WA%, the subsegmental WA% had a greater effect on FEV1% predicted (-0.8% to -1.7% vs -1.9% to -2.6% per 1-unit increase in WA%, respectively; P < .05 for most bronchial paths). After adjusting for emphysema, the association between subsegmental WA% and FEV1 % predicted was weakened in two bronchial paths. Increases in WA% between bronchial segments correlated directly with emphysema in all bronchial paths (P < .05). In multivariate regression models, emphysema was directly related to subsegmental WA% in most bronchial paths and inversely related to subsegmental TBA in all bronchial paths. CONCLUSION The greater effect of subsegmental WA% on airflow obstruction is mitigated by emphysema. Part of the emphysema effect might be due to loss of airway tethering, leading to a reduction in TBA and an increase in WA%.
Ascorbic Acid ameliorates nicotine exposure induced impaired spatial memory performances in rats.

INTRODUCTION The long lasting behavioural and cognitive impairments in offspring prenatally exposed to nicotine have been confirmed in animal models. In the present study, we investigated the effect of ascorbic acid on prenatal nicotine exposure induced behavioral deficits in male offspring of rats. METHODS The pregnant Wistar dams were divided into four groups of six rats: control, vehicle control, nicotine and nicotine+ascorbic acid groups. The nicotine group received daily dose of subcutaneous injections of 0.96 mg/kg body weight (bw) nicotine free base throughout gestation. Pregnant dams in nicotine+ascorbic acid group were first given nicotine free base (0.96 mg/kg bw/day; subcutaneous route) followed by ascorbic acid (50 mg/kg bw/day, orally) daily throughout gestation. The cognitive function of male offspring of all the experimental groups was studied using Morris water maze test at postnatal day 40. RESULTS Prenatal nicotine exposure altered spatial learning and memory in male offspring. However, treatment with ascorbic acid ameliorated these changes in rats. CONCLUSION Ascorbic acid supplementation was found to be effective in preventing the prenatal nicotine exposure induced cognitive deficits in rat offspring to some extent.
Pre-IPO Operational and Financial Decisions

Many owners of growing privately held firms make operational and financial decisions in an effort to maximize the expected present value of the proceeds from an initial public offering (IPO). We ask: "What is the right time to make an IPO? " and "How should operational and financial decisions be coordinated to increase the likelihood of a successful IPO? " Financial and operational decisions in this problem are linked because adequate financial capital is crucial for operational decisions to be feasible and operational decisions affect the firm's access to financial resources. The IPO event is treated as a stopping time in an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process. Unlike traditional stopping-time models, at every stage the model includes other decisions such as production, sales, and loan size. The results include (1) characterization of an optimal capacity-expansion policy, (2) sufficient conditions for a monotone threshold rule to yield an optimal IPO decision, and (3) algorithmic implications of results in (1) and (2).
Stochastic Stabilization of Partially Observed and Multi-Sensor Systems Driven by Unbounded Noise Under Fixed-Rate Information Constraints

We investigate the stabilization of unstable multidimensional partially observed single-sensor and multi-sensor (single-controller) discrete-time linear systems driven by unbounded noise and controlled over discrete noiseless channels. Stability is achieved under fixed-rate communication requirements that are asymptotically tight in the limit of large sampling periods. Through the use of similarity transforms, sampling and random-time drift conditions we obtain a coding and control policy leading to the existence of a unique invariant distribution and finite second moment for the sampled state. We obtain tight necessary and sufficient conditions for the general multi-sensor case under an assumption related to the Jordan form structure of such systems. In the absence of this assumption, we give sufficient conditions for stabilization.
Performance utility-analysis of multi-state systems

This paper defines a new utility importance of a state of a component in multi-state systems. This utility importance overcomes some drawbacks of a well-known importance measure suggested by William S. Griffith (J. Applied Probability, 1980). The relationship between this new utility importance and the Griffith importance is studied and their difference is illustrated with examples. The contribution of an individual component to the performance utility of a multi-state system is discussed. Examples show that a meaningful index for measuring the performance of individual components in a multi-state system can hardly be defined in general, without considering the actual values of the utility levels and the distributions of the component-states in the system. An example illustrates how genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, and tabu search can be used in selecting components and defining the position order of components so that the performance utility of a multi-state system is optimized.