Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Good hand, bad hand: correlations between gesturing hand and speech valence

There is general agreement that the body expresses emotion, and while there is research on the expression of emotion in so-called “body language” (e.g. facial expression, posture), only little research exists on the expression of emotion in hand gestures. Two previous studies (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2010; Kipp & Martin, 2009) found opposing patterns of correlation between the gesturing hand and the valence of the co-occurring speech, and this thesis aims to help fill the research gap with the help of two empirical studies, the first on gesture production and the second on gesture perception, both in relation to valence. The first study analyses the handedness of gestures and valence of speech produced by three guests on the Tavis Smiley Show. For two of the three speakers it was found that gestures produced with the dominant hand tended to co-occur with positive speech, while gestures produced with the non-dominant hand tended to co-occur with negative speech, a pattern similar to that found by Casasanto and Jasmin (2010). No pattern of correlation was found for the third speaker. The second study used an experiment to explore whether the handedness of gesture affect the valence ratings of co-occurring speech, using systematically varied video data of one-word utterances and pragmatic gestures. This study found some evidence that words co-occurring with gestures performed with the right hand receive higher valence ratings, while words co-occurring with gestures performed with the left hand receive lower valence ratings, with a larger effect for negative words than positive words. In sum, this thesis supports previous findings of correlations between the handedness of gestures and the valence of speech in production, but also shows inter-individual variation and points out the need to consider demographic factors in future research. It found some evidence of the effect of handedness of gesture on the perceived valence of speech, but more research is needed, and should include left-handed participants and speakers to determine the pattern of correlation between handedness of gesture and speech valence.
A novel intracellular compartment with unusual secretory properties in human neutrophils

Human neutrophils contain a novel intracellular compartment that is distinct from the previously characterized azurophil and specific granules. This compartment is distinguished by the presence of cytochemically detectable alkaline phosphatase activity. The alkaline phosphatase-containing compartments are short rod-shaped organelles that rapidly undergo a dramatic reorganization upon cell stimulation with either a chemoattractant or an active phorbol ester. Biochemical analysis shows that in unstimulated neutrophils the majority of the alkaline phosphatase activity is intracellular, but after stimulation essentially all of this activity becomes associated with the cell surface. The exocytotic pathway is unusual in that these small organelles fuse to form elongated tubular structures before their association with the plasmalemma.
Role of wild birds as carriers of multi-drug resistant Escherichia coli and Escherichia vulneris

Emergence and distribution of multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria in environments pose a risk to human and animal health. A total of 82 isolates of Escherichia spp. were recovered from cloacal swabs of migrating and non-migrating wild birds. All bacterial isolates were identified and characterized morphologically and biochemically. 72% and 50% of isolates recovered from non-migrating and migrating birds, respectively, showed positive congo red dye binding (a virulence factor). Also, hemolysin production (a virulence factor) was showed in 8% of isolates recovered from non-migrating birds and 75% of isolates recovered from migrating birds. All isolates recovered from non-migrating birds were found resistant to Oxacillin while all isolates recovered from migrating birds demonstrated resistance to Oxacillin, Chloramphenicol, Oxytetracycline and Lincomycin. Some bacterial isolates recovered from non-migrating birds and migrating birds exhibited MDR phenotype. The MDR isolates were further characterized by API 20E and 16S rRNA as E. coli and E. vulneris. MDR Escherichia isolates contain ~1–5 plasmids of high-molecular weights. Accordingly, wild birds could create a potential threat to human and animal health by transmitting MDR bacteria to water streams and other environmental sources through their faecal residues, and to remote regions by migration.
Overexpression of 15-lipoxygenase-1 in oxygen-induced ischemic retinopathy inhibits retinal neovascularization via downregulation of vascular endothelial growth factor-A expression

Purpose 15-Lipoxygenase-1 (15-LOX-1) plays an important role in regulating angiogenesis, but the mechanism to date is controversial, even contradictory. The goal of our study was to investigate whether 15-LOX-1 plays a role in inhibiting retinal neovascularization (RNV) in a mouse model of oxygen-induced retinopathy (OIR) and the underlying mechanism. Methods Experiments were performed using retinas from a mouse model of OIR that was treated with and without intravitreous injection of adenoviral-15-lipoxygenase-1 (Ad-15-LOX-1) or adenoviral-green fluorescence protein (Ad-GFP) at postnatal day 12 (P12). At P17, the efficacy of the gene transfer was assessed with immunofluorescence staining. RNV was evaluated with fluorescein angiography on flatmounted retinas and quantified by counting the preretinal neovascular cells. Expression of 15-LOX-1 and vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A) were determined with real-time PCR and western blot. Results RNV during OIR was associated with decreased 15-LOX-1 expression, and retinal 15-LOX-1 levels were negatively correlated with the progression of RNV. In the intravitreous injected Ad-15-LOX-1 mice with OIR, retinal 15-LOX-1 expression was significantly increased at the protein and mRNA levels at P17. 15-LOX-1 expression was clearly demonstrated, primarily in the outer plexiform layer, inner nuclear layer, and ganglion cell layer retinas, five days after gene delivery. Fluorescein retinal angiography and quantification of the preretinal neovascular cells demonstrated that RNV was significantly inhibited. Meanwhile, the expression levels of VEGF-A were significantly decreased at the transcriptional and translational levels. Conclusions Our results suggest that overexpression of 15-LOX-1 inhibits RNV in a mouse model of OIR via downregulation of VEGF-A expression, and 15-LOX-1 may be a novel therapeutic target for ocular neovascularization diseases.
Evolutionary dynamics and fixation probabilities in directed networks

In this paper, we investigate the evolutionary dynamics in directed and/or weighted networks. We study the fixation probability of a mutant in finite populations in stochastic voter-type dynamics for several update rules. The fixation probability is defined as the probability of a newly introduced mutant in a wild-type population taking over the entire population. In contrast to the case of undirected and unweighted networks, the fixation probability of a mutant in directed networks is characterized not only by the degree of the node that the mutant initially invades but also by the global structure of networks. Consequently, the gross connectivity of networks such as small-world property or modularity has a major impact on the fixation probability.
A locally adaptive boundary evolution algorithm for novelty detection using level set methods

This paper proposes a new locally adaptive boundary evolution algorithm for level set methods (LSM)-based novelty detection. The proposed approach consists of level set function construction, boundary evolution, and evolution termination. It utilises the exterior data points lying outside the decision boundary to effect the segments of the boundary that need to be locally evolved in order to make the boundary better fit the data distribution, so it can evolve boundary locally without requiring knowing explicitly the decision boundary. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively detect novel events as compared to the reported LSM-based novelty detection method with global boundary evolution scheme and four representative novelty detection methods when there is an exacting error requirement on normal events.
Relation between job strain, alcohol, and ambulatory blood pressure.

"Job strain" (defined as high psychological demands and low decision latitude on the job) has been previously reported to be associated with increased risk of hypertension and increased left ventricular mass index (LVMI) in a case-control study of healthy employed men, aged 30-60 years, without evidence of coronary heart disease. We hypothesized that job strain would be associated with increased ambulatory blood pressure (AmBP). A total of 264 men at eight work sites wore an AmBP monitor for 24 hours on a working day. In an analysis of covariance model, job strain was associated with an increase in systolic AmBP of 6.8 mm Hg (p = 0.002) and diastolic AmBP of 2.8 mm Hg at work (p = 0.03) after adjusting for age, race, body mass index, Type A behavior, alcohol behavior, smoking, work site, 24-hour urine sodium, education, and physical demand level of the job. Alcohol use also had a significant effect on AmBP. However, among subjects not in high-strain jobs, alcohol had no apparent effect on AmBP at work. Instead, alcohol use and job strain interacted such that workers in high-strain jobs who drank regularly had significantly higher systolic AmBP at work (p = 0.007). Among the other risk factors, only age, body mass index, and smoking had significant effects on AmBP. Job strain also had significant effects on AmBP at home and during sleep as well as on LVMI. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Acoustic noise radiated by PWM-controllel induction machine drives

This paper investigates the acoustic noise radiated from two nominally identical induction motors when fed from sinusoidal, and asymmetric regular sampling subharmonic and space-vector pulsewidth modulation (PWM) converters. The theory for analyzing the noise spectrum is developed further to account for the interaction between the motor and the drive. It is shown that manufacturing tolerances can result in significant differences in the noise level emitted from nominally identical motors, and that mechanical resonances can result in extremely high noise emissions. Such resonances can be induced by stator and rotor slot air-gap field harmonics due to the fundamental component of current, and by the interaction between the airgap field harmonics produced by the fundamental and the PWM harmonic currents. The significance of the effect of PWM strategy on the noise is closely related to the mechanical resonance with vibration mode order zero, while the PWM strategy will be critical only if the dominant cause of the emitted noise is the interaction of the fundamental air-gap field and PWM harmonics.
A Scan-Based Delay Test Method for Reduction of Overtesting

This paper presents a scan-based delay test method, called sequential-broad-side (SeBoS), to minimize overtesting of delay test. We consider two critical reasons for overtesting which are the existence of illegal states in sequential circuits and the high IR drop caused by power dissipation during structural test. The proposed SeBoS method inserts several slow clock cycles before applying the fast clock for detecting delay faults, thus considerable illegal states can be avoided and IR drop can be reduced. Illegal states are not necessarily computed before test generation. They can be accumulated and expanded during the automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) process. The derived illegal states are then used to guide test generation for the remaining faults. Compared with previous methods, the SeBoS method can avoid more illegal states when considering the same number of time frames. Experimental results on ISCAS-89 benchmark circuits show the effectiveness of the method.
A geometrical placement planner for unknown sensor-modelled objects and placement areas

A Personal Robot should be able to handle possible unknown objects in unknown environments. For a manipulation task the question what to do with an object once it had been grasped is one of the most essential ones beside the grasping task itself. We propose a placement planner for sensor-modelled objects in complex environments. The planner computes a stable position and orientation for the object in the environment. The algorithm uses only geometric information, most notably no force or torque sensor is required. In particular, we introduce a novel approach regarding the configuration computation. By means of experiments with various household objects the robustness and performance are validated. Further on, we compare our approach to a configuration computation using a physics simulation framework.
Defects in specific associations between astroglia and neurons occur in microcultures of weaver mouse cerebellar cells

The neurological mutation weaver is characterized by defects in granule cell migration along Bergmann glial processes and by subsequent death and disposition of granule cells. Immunocytochemical localization of antisera raised against purified glial filament protein (AbGF) and transmission electron microscopy were used to visualize specific associations between granule neurons and astroglia in microcultures of cerebellar cells dissociated from normal (+/+), heterozygous (+/wv), and homozygous (wv/wv) B6CBA-w mouse cerebella. In microcultures of cells dissociated from normal B6CBA-Aw-J-wv (+/+) cerebella, staining with AbGF closely resembled results previously reported for cells taken from C57BL/6J (+/+) tissue. Two forms of stained astroglia were seen, one with a larger perikaryon and shorter processes, among which 12 to 20 unstained cells nestled; and another with a smaller cell soma and longer processes, along which a few unstained cells were seen. The first resembled astrocytes of the internal granular layer and white matter, the second Bergmann astroglia. In microcultures of heterozygous animals (+/wv), the number of granule cells was reduced slightly. Many stained astroglia resembled those from +/+ cerebella, but others had thickened processes and enlarged terminal “endfeet. ” Granule cells associated with both forms of stained astroglia. Cultures from homozygous weaver (wv/wv) cerebella contained very few, if any, granule cells and did not exhibit specific neuronal/glial interactions characteristic of +/+ cells. Both forms of stained wv/wv glial cells had enlarged cell somata giving rise to stunted processes, suggesting that both Bergmann glia and astrocytes are affected by the weaver gene. By both immunocytochemical staining and electron microscopy, accumulation and tangling of glial filaments were seen. Immunocytochemical staining of weaver cerebellar tissue with AbGF also revealed abnormalities in astrocytes of the internal granular layer and white matter in addition to previously reported defects in Bergmann glia. Agglutination with five plant lectins, each with a different carbohydrate-binding specificity, revealed that postnatal weaver cerebellar cells agglutinate with the lectins concanavalin A and the wheat germ agglutinin, suggesting the persistence postnatally of embryonic cell surface elements on postnatal weaver cells.
A new keyword spotting approach

Keyword spotting is the task of identifying the occurrences of certain desired keywords in an arbitrary speech signal. Keyword spotting has many applications one of them is telephone routing. In particular, we consider a big company which receives thousands of telephone calls daily. We are interested with the classification of these calls to route them to the appropriate department. State-of-the-art approaches in keyword spotting considered the speech signal as continuous speech, where keywords and non-keywords are modeled using hidden Markov models. In this paper, we suggest a perceptual approach, which exploit acoustic particularities of the predefined keywords to detect their frontiers, without modeling the Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words.
Not Just a Mothers’ Problem: The Consequences of Perceived Workplace Flexibility Bias for All Workers

Flexibility bias and the “ideal worker” norm pose serious disadvantages for working mothers. But, are mothers the only ones harmed by these norms? We argue that these norms can be harmful for all workers, even “ideal” ones—men without caregiving responsibilities who have never used flexible work arrangements. We investigate how working in an environment where workers perceive flexibility bias affects their job attitudes and work-life spillover. Using representative survey data of U.S. workers, we find that perceived flexibility bias reduces job satisfaction and engagement and increases turnover intentions and work-life spillover for all types of workers, even ideal workers. The effects of perceived bias on satisfaction, turnover, and spillover operate beyond experiences with family responsibilities discrimination and having colleagues who are unsupportive of work-life balance. We show that workplace cultures that harbor flexibility bias—and, by extension, that valorize ideal work—may affect the entire workforce in costly ways.
IRIS: A Protégé Plug-in to Extract and Serialize Product Attribute Name-Value Pairs

This article introduces IRIS wrapper, which is developed as a Protege plug-in, to solve an increasingly important problem: extracting information from the product descriptions provided by online sources and structuring this information so that is sharable among business entities, software agents and search engines. Extracted product information is presented in a GoodRelations-compliant ontology. IRIS also automatically marks up your products using RDFa or Microdata. Creating GoodRelations snippets in RDFa or Microdata using the product information extracted from Web is a business value, especially when you consider most of the popular search engines recommend the use of these standards to provide rich site data for their index.
Creating and maintaining tutorials with DEFT

Good documentation is crucial for frameworks to be used correctly. One important kind of framework documentation are tutorials. They tell how to use the framework and provide additional code examples. However, tutorials are rare compared to other kinds of documentation such as API documentation due to high creation and maintenance costs. In this paper we highlight the problems of writing and maintaining tutorials. Then we present the Development Environment For Tutorials (DEFT), which provides support to address the identified problems.
An analytical approach to placement legalization

We present a method to achieve nearly legal placement while optimizing the traditional metrics in an analytical placement framework. A legalization penalty function term is added to the cost function of the placer. The purpose of this term is to remove overlaps and place cells into rows. The new term kicks in when global spreading cannot resolve overlaps any further. We study how this legalization term in placement helps to achieve better final placements when it is used in combination with wire-length driven analytical placement. Experimental results show that using this additional legalization cost term results in reduction of degradation of wire-length from 7.6% to 0.7% after discrete detailed placement. Optimization of wire-length along with the legalization term in placement shows 6% improvement in total wire-length on average, which if translated into timing is 48% of total negative slack. A further feature to control cell density helps reduce congestion by 33%.
Deterministic CUR for Improved Large-Scale Data Analysis: An Empirical Study

Low-rank approximations which are computed from selected rows and columns of a given data matrix have attracted considerable attention lately. They have been proposed as an alternative to the SVD because they naturally lead to interpretable decompositions which was shown to be successful in application such as fraud detection, fMRI segmentation, and collaborative filtering. The CUR decomposition of large matrices, for example, samples rows and columns according to a probability distribution that depends on the Euclidean norm of rows or columns or on other measures of statistical leverage. At the same time, there are various deterministic approaches that do not resort to sampling and were found to often yield factorization of superior quality with respect to reconstruction accuracy. However, these are hardly applicable to large matrices as they typically suffer from high computational costs. Consequently, many practitioners in the field of data mining have abandon deterministic approaches in favor of randomized ones when dealing with today’s large-scale data sets. In this paper, we empirically disprove this prejudice. We do so by introducing a novel, linear-time, deterministic CUR approach that adopts the recently introduced Simplex Volume Maximization approach for column selection. The latter has already been proven to be successful for NMF-like decompositions of matrices of billions of entries. Our exhaustive empirical study on more than 30 synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrates that it is also beneficial for CUR-like decompositions. Compared to other deterministic CUR-like methods, it provides comparable reconstruction quality but operates much faster so that it easily scales to matrices of billions of elements. Compared to sampling-based methods, it provides competitive reconstruction quality while staying in the same run-time complexity class.
Numerical study on the along-track interferometric radar imaging mechanism of oceanic surface currents

The phase information in along-track interferometric synthetic aperture radar (along-track INSAR, ATI) images is a measure of the Doppler shift of the backscattered signal and thus of the line-of-sight velocity of the scatterers. It can be exploited for oceanic surface current measurements from aircraft or spacecraft. However, as already discussed in previous publications, the mean Doppler frequency of the radar backscatter from the ocean is not exclusively determined by the mean surface current, but it includes contributions associated with surface wave motion. The authors present an efficient new model for the simulation of Doppler spectra and ATI signatures. The model is based on Bragg scattering theory in a composite surface model approach. They show that resulting Doppler spectra are consistent with predictions of an established model based on fundamental electrodynamic expressions, while computation times are reduced by more than one order of magnitude. This can be a key advantage with regard to operational applications of ATI. Based on model calculations for two simple current fields and various wind conditions and radar configurations, they study theoretical possibilities and limitations of oceanic current measurements by ATI. They find that best results can be expected from ATI systems operated at high microwave frequencies like 10 GHz (X band), high incidence angles like 60/spl deg/, low platform altitude/speed ratios, and vertical (VV) polarization. The ATI time lag should be chosen long enough to obtain measurable phase differences, but much shorter than the decorrelation time of the backscattered field.