Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Indexing the medical open access literature for textual and content-based visual retrieval

Over the past few years an increasing amount of scientific journals have been created in an open access format. Particularly in the medical field the number of openly accessible journals is enormous making a wide body of knowledge available for analysis and retrieval. Part of the trend towards open access publications can be linked to funding bodies such as the NIH1 (National Institutes of Health) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF2) requiring funded projects to make all articles of funded research available publicly. This article describes an approach to make part of the knowledge of open access journals available for retrieval including the textual information but also the images contained in the articles. For this goal all articles of 24 journals related to medical informatics and medical imaging were crawled from the web pages of BioMed Central. Text and images of the PDF (Portable Document Format) files were indexed separately and a web-based retrieval interface allows for searching via keyword queries or by visual similarity queries. Starting point for a visual similarity query can be an image on the local hard disk that is uploaded or any image found via the textual search. Search for similar documents is also possible.
Robust and interpretable statistical models for predicting the intensification of tropical cyclones

Based on the tropical cyclone (TC) forecasting literature, hurricane intensity prediction is one of the most challenging tasks. To date, the problem has been addressed through statistical models (SHIFOPR, ST5D), statistical-dynamical models (SHIPS) and primitive equation numerical models (GFDL), predicting the intensity changes for up to five days. For the first two kinds of models, both multiple linear regression (MLR) and non-linear regression in the form of neural networks (NNs), have been applied with promising results (DeMaria et al. 2005, Castro 2004, Knaff et al. 2004, Baik and Hwang 2000, Baik and Hwang 1998). On the other hand, the procedures for feature selection and for reporting the predictive performance of the derived models have not been investigated to a great extent, in the sense that (1) they widely vary, so comparisons between models are made in an ad-hoc basis; (2) the derived models have an inherent selection bias, i.e. allowance to peek in the test set during feature selection, prohibiting good generalization behavior (Ambroise and McLachlan 2002); and (3) they are unstable in terms of performance and understanding (Guyon and Elisseeff 2003). For example, it is often the case that at certain seasons the models perform extremely well and in others quite unsatisfactory, while there is a constant update in the set of features used, lowering the interpretability of the models. Having the above in mind, the goal of this paper is twofold: (a) to build robust models; and (b) build models that are explicitly or implicitly interpretable, delivering additional knowledge about the problem. Robustness in this context can be defined as a property of a model that is performing efficiently, is able to generalize well and is parsimonious – a characteristic of models that generalize well – based on what Ockham's razor principle implies: complexity (in our case extra features) must pay for itself by giving a significant improvement in the error rate during the training procedure (Cristianini and Shawe-Taylor 2000). This principle is quantified in section 3. Recently developed rule based regression schemes are also a focus of the work presented here. They are applied to the dataset in order to identify more elaborate structure behind the intensity predictions. MLR and NNs fail to provide the human expert with
Lower‐crustal earthquakes in the West Kunlun range

Reviewing data from regional permanent seismic stations and a 2001–2002 deployment of portable broadband seismic stations along the Tibet‐Tarim border, we identified five unusually deep earthquakes located beneath the West Kunlun range. Application of regional centroid moment tensor analysis puts these events at depths of 40–60 km, with overall uncertainty ranging between 5–8 km. Previous investigations of the region indicate a Moho depth of ∼62 km, implying that these earthquakes occurred near the bottom of the crust. Hence we infer that the lowermost crust beneath the range is brittle and seismically active. Two of these earthquakes are located directly beneath the trace of the Altyn‐Tagh fault, with a nodal plane nearly parallel to the local strike of the fault, and a left‐lateral sense of slip consistent with the long‐term displacement across the fault. The two events suggest that the Altyn‐Tagh fault extends through the entire crust in the West Kunlun.
Opposite effects of interleukin-4 and interleukin-10 on nitric oxide production in murine macrophages

Interleukin-4 (IL-4) and interleukin-10 (IL-10) were evaluated for their ability to inhibit the production of nitric oxide (NO) by interferon-γ (IFN-γ)- or lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-activated murine macrophages (RAW 264.7 and J774.2). Macrophages pre-treated with IL-4 and then stimulated with IFN-γ or LPS showed significant inhibition in their ability to produce NO as measured by nitrite production. Simultaneous treatment of IL-4 pre-incubated cells with IFN-γ and LPS together augmented nitrite accumulation. On the other hand, similar exposures of the macrophages to IL-10 followed by IFN-γ or LPS treatments resulted in significantly increased NO production. Thus IL-10 failed to suppress IFN-γ or LPS-induced NO production and showed opposite effects in these experiments to IL-4. We conclude that the two lymphokines have differing roles in the control of production of NO and might act to control the secretion of nitric oxide in vivo.
Culturing marine bacteria – an essential prerequisite for biodiscovery

The potential for using marine microbes for biodiscovery is severely limited by the lack of laboratory cultures. It is a long‐standing observation that standard microbiological techniques only isolate a very small proportion of the wide diversity of microbes that are known in natural environments from DNA sequences. A number of explanations are reviewed. The process of establishing laboratory cultures may destroy any cell‐to‐cell communication that occurs between organisms in the natural environment and that are vital for growth. Bacteria probably grow as consortia in the sea and reliance on other bacteria for essential nutrients and substrates is not possible with standard microbiological approaches. Such interactions should be considered when designing programmes for the isolation of marine microbes. The benefits of novel technologies for manipulating cells are reviewed, including single cell encapsulation in gel micro‐droplets. Although novel technologies offer benefits for bringing previously uncultured microbes into laboratory culture, many useful bacteria can still be isolated using variations of plating techniques. Results are summarized for a study to culture bacteria from a long‐term observatory station in the English Channel. Bacterial biodiversity in this assemblage has recently been characterized using high‐throughput sequencing techniques. Although Alphaproteobacteria dominated the natural bacterial assemblage throughout the year, Gammaproteobacteria were the most frequent group isolated by plating techniques. The use of different gelling agents and the addition of ammonium to seawater‐based agar did lead to the isolation of a higher proportion of Alphaproteobacteria. Variation in medium composition was also able to increase the recovery of other groups of particular interest for biodiscovery, such as Actinobacteria.
EAC-CPF Ontology and Linked Archival Data

The EAC-CPF standard is an XML schema maintained by the Society of American Archivists in partnership with the Berlin State Library used for encoding contextual information about persons, corporate bodies, and families related to archival materials. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of the application of Semantic Web technology for creating Linked Open Data of descriptions of entities associated with the creation and maintenance of archives. In this paper we present two EAC-CPF ontologies and we provide an in-depth description of all phases of the work, from the study of the standard to the definition of the classes and properties of the two OWL ontologies and a case study of application in authority records of IBC Archivi (information system of historical archives in the Emilia-Romagna region).
School Resources and Academic Standards in California: Lessons from the Schoolhouse

Research publications reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Directors of the Public Policy Institute of California. Short sections of text, not to exceed three paragraphs, may be quoted without written permission provided that full attribution is given to the source and the above copyright notice is included. PPIC does not take or support positions on any ballot measure or on any local, state, or federal legislation, nor does it endorse, support, or oppose any political parties or candidates for public office. iii Foreword Policy discussion of the state of K–12 education in California used to devolve into a discourse on the challenges of financing education, the effects of Propositions 13 and 98, and the power of teachers' unions. But beginning in 1995, a new element was introduced into the often-contentious debate—high academic standards, by which not only students but also teachers and the education system itself could be judged. It can be argued that the introduction of these high standards both reinvigorated the debate and increased the intensity of criticism by parents and the media. The authors of School Resources and Academic Standards in California: Lessons from the Schoolhouse point out that these standards are among the highest in the nation—with test score goals equivalent to requiring that 70 percent of every California school's students achieve above the national median. To hold such high standards is indeed laudable. But how are they viewed at the local level, by those who teach students in individual districts and schools on a daily basis? The authors of this report—supported with funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation—set out to answer that question at a select group of schools, interviewing district superintendents, conducting on-site school visits, surveying teachers, and conducting financial analyses. They found that the superintendents they interviewed were strongly supportive of the new standards regimen, chiefly because standards give them more direct authority over what actually goes on in their classrooms. However, the 2,000-plus teachers they surveyed were more ambivalent—supportive of standards but also concerned about the gap between the ideal of high state standards and the reality of low, present-day achievement levels at many schools. Not surprisingly, neither superintendents nor teachers thought that the resources provided to school districts and classrooms were sufficient to achieve the high standards set by Sacramento. Teachers pointed specifically to staffing …
Classification Rule Mining for Object Oriented Databases: A Brief Review

Data mining is the discovery of knowledge and useful information from the data stored in large databases. The classification of large data sets is an important problem in data mining. Most data mining algorithms cannot be applied to complex object databases unless it is converted into a single flat table. Much valuable information especially the linkages between objects could be lost by conversion of such databases into a single table. As object-oriented data models embody rich data structures and semantics in the construction of complex databases, such as complex data objects, class hierarchies, property inheritance and methods, etc. So it is important to extend the area of study from relational database systems to object-oriented database systems and investigate the mechanisms for knowledge discovery in object-oriented databases. This paper presents a brief review of some of the significant researches available in the literature for object-oriented data mining.
The conditions for tool use in primates: implications for the evolution of material culture.

In order to identify the conditions that favored the flourishing of primate tool use into hominid technology, we examine inter- and intraspecific variation in manufacture and use of tools in extant nonhuman primates, and develop a model to account for their distribution. We focus on tools used in acquiring food, usually by extraction. Any model for the evolution of the use of feeding tools must explain why tool use is found in only a small subset of primate species, why many of these species use tools much more readily in captivity, why routine reliance on feeding tools is found in only two species of ape, and why there is strong geographic variation within these two species. Because ecological factors alone cannot explain the distribution of tool use in the wild, we develop a model that focuses on social and cognitive factors affecting the invention and transmission of tool-using skills. The model posits that tool use in the wild depends on suitable ecological niches (especially extractive foraging) and the manipulative skills that go with them, a measure of intelligence that enables rapid acquisition of complex skills (through both invention and, more importantly, observational learning), and social tolerance in a gregarious setting (which facilitates both invention and transmission). The manipulative skills component explains the distribution across species of the use of feeding tools, intelligence explains why in the wild only apes are known to make and use feeding tools routinely, and social tolerance explains variation across populations of chimpanzees and orangutans. We conclude that strong mutual tolerance was a key factor in the explosive increase in technology among hominids, probably intricately tied to a lifestyle involving food sharing and tool-based processing or the acquisition of large, shareable food packages.
Making Programs Forget: Enforcing Lifetime for Sensitive Data

This paper introduces guaranteed data lifetime, a novel system property ensuring that sensitive data cannot be retrieved from a system beyond a specified time. The trivial way to achieve this is to "reboot"; however, this is disruptive from the user's perspective, and may not even eliminate disk copies. We discuss an alternate approach based on state re-incarnation where data expiry is completely transparent to the user, and can be used even if the system is not designed a priori to provide the property.
DCT based ring oscillator Physical Unclonable Functions

A new post-processing scheme is proposed for Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) based on Ring Oscillators (ROs). The scheme uses the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to decorrelate the RO outputs and improves on existing RO PUFs in terms of uniqueness and the number of extracted bits.
Calmodulin Is Essential for Cardiac IKS Channel Gating and Assembly: Impaired Function in Long-QT Mutations

The slow IKS K+ channel plays a major role in repolarizing the cardiac action potential and consists of the assembly of KCNQ1 and KCNE1 subunits. Mutations in either KCNQ1 or KCNE1 genes produce the long-QT syndrome, a life-threatening ventricular arrhythmia. Here, we show that long-QT mutations located in the KCNQ1 C terminus impair calmodulin (CaM) binding, which affects both channel gating and assembly. The mutations produce a voltage-dependent macroscopic inactivation and dramatically alter channel assembly. KCNE1 forms a ternary complex with wild-type KCNQ1 and Ca2+-CaM that prevents inactivation, facilitates channel assembly, and mediates a Ca2+-sensitive increase of IKS-current, with a considerable Ca2+-dependent left-shift of the voltage-dependence of activation. Coexpression of KCNQ1 or IKS channels with a Ca2+-insensitive CaM mutant markedly suppresses the currents and produces a right shift in the voltage-dependence of channel activation. KCNE1 association to KCNQ1 long-QT mutants significantly improves mutant channel expression and prevents macroscopic inactivation. However, the marked right shift in channel activation and the subsequent decrease in current amplitude cannot restore normal levels of IKS channel activity. Our data indicate that in healthy individuals, CaM binding to KCNQ1 is essential for correct channel folding and assembly and for conferring Ca2+-sensitive IKS-current stimulation, which increases the cardiac repolarization reserve and hence prevents the risk of ventricular arrhythmias.
Factors that Influence the Memory of Entertainment Experiences

When generating an entertainment experience, such as that of a movie, a novel, or a computer game, not only the experience itself, but also the memory of the experience plays an important role. Pleasurable memories can generate additional pleasure during recall, be instrumental to generate secondary social pleasure when communicating the experience, and be important for word-of-mouth advertising of the entertainment product. In order to optimize entertainment experiences, especially for an online dynamic generation of experiences within computer games, we need to build formal models of these processes. This paper is a summary of a research study we conducted with 50 university students in order to identify factors that influence the memory of entertainment experiences. Our findings show that when watching a short film, a range of factors, including the level of attention of the person, the predictability of the storyline, and the valence of the content, all have substantial impact on the amount of information the test subject can recollect at a later stage. Psychophysiological measurements like skin conductance are also found to be indicators of the memory performance. In terms of the application of the results, some of the factors suggest the use of profiling techniques to best match the target audience's background, e.g., when used for automated story generation within a game.
Dictyostelium discoideum as a Novel Host System to Study the Interaction between Phagocytes and Yeasts

The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum is a well-established model organism to study the interaction between bacteria and phagocytes. In contrast, research using D. discoideum as a host model for fungi is rare. We describe a comprehensive study, which uses D. discoideum as a host model system to investigate the interaction with apathogenic (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and pathogenic (Candida sp.) yeast. We show that Dictyostelium can be co-cultivated with yeasts on solid media, offering a convenient test to study the interaction between fungi and phagocytes. We demonstrate that a number of D. discoideum mutants increase (atg1−, kil1−, kil2−) or decrease (atg6−) the ability of the amoebae to predate yeast cells. On the yeast side, growth characteristics, reduced phagocytosis rate, as well as known virulence factors of C. albicans (EFG1, CPH1, HGC1, ICL1) contribute to the resistance of yeast cells against predation by the amoebae. Investigating haploid C. albicans strains, we suggest using the amoebae plate test for screening purposes after random mutagenesis. Finally, we discuss the potential of our adapted amoebae plate test to use D. discoideum for risk assessment of yeast strains.
Physiological concentrations of bile acids down‐regulate agonist induced secretion in colonic epithelial cells

In patients with bile acid malabsorption, high concentrations of bile acids enter the colon and stimulate Cl− and fluid secretion, thereby causing diarrhoea. However, deoxycholic acid (DCA), the predominant colonic bile acid, is normally present at lower concentrations where its role in regulating transport is unclear. Thus, the current study set out to investigate the effects of physiologically relevant DCA concentrations on colonic epithelial secretory function. Cl− secretion was measured as changes in short‐circuit current across voltage‐clamped T84 cell monolayers. At high concentrations (0.5–1 mM), DCA acutely stimulated Cl− secretion but this effect was associated with cell injury, as evidenced by decreased transepithelial resistance (TER) and increased lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release. In contrast, chronic (24 hrs) exposure to lower DCA concentrations (10–200 μM) inhibited responses to Ca2+ and cAMP‐dependent secretagogues without altering TER, LDH release, or secretagogue‐induced increases in intracellular second messengers. Other bile acids – taurodeoxycholic acid, chenodeoxycholic acid and cholic acid – had similar antisecretory effects. DCA (50 μM) rapidly stimulated phosphorylation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFr) and both ERK and p38 MAPKs (mitogen‐activated protein kinases). The EGFr inhibitor, AG1478, and the protein synthesis inhibitor, cycloheximide, reversed the antisecretory effects of DCA, while the MAPK inhibitors, PD98059 and SB203580, did not. In summary, our studies suggest that, in contrast to its acute prosecretory effects at pathophysiological concentrations, lower, physiologically relevant, levels of DCA chronically down‐regulate colonic epithelial secretory function. On the basis of these data, we propose a novel role for bile acids as physiological regulators of colonic secretory capacity.
Subject-Driven Community Mining in Online Social Networks

Discovering communities in online social networks (OSNs) has attracted much attention in recent years. Most of existing research in this area focuses on the “friend” relationship among members in OSNs, but ignores the fact that a community is subject-centric: people interested in a subject form a community by interacting with each other. In this paper we introduce the concept of subject-driven communities and propose to discover such communities by 1) modeling a community using a posting/commenting interaction graph instead of a friendship network, 2) applying text classification on the content of blogs when constructing the interaction graph to keep it subject-relevant, and 3) applying link analysis on the interaction graph to locate the core members of a community. Our initial experimental results on LiveJournal demonstrate the effectiveness of our
Delta-Modulated AC–AC Converter for PM WECS

An ac-to-ac converter has been developed to convert the variable input frequency in wind energy conversion system (WECS) to a constant output frequency of 50 Hz for a distributed generation unit. The switching strategy and control mechanism for the converter is presented using time domain simulations in MATLAB environment. A specific triggering pattern has been generated for the switching devices in the converter to achieve desired polarity of the output voltage across the distributed load. The harmonics in the input supply side of the converter are mitigated by using delta modulation technique, whereas in the output of the converter, passive filtering has been used along with delta modulation technique. The design and implementation issues of the modulation technique and the switching scheme are discussed in detail with suitable simulation and experimental results. The analysis and properties of the proposed solution is compared with the known solutions. It has been concluded that an ac-ac converter is technically a viable option to interface a wind turbine to a utility grid.