Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Near-Infrared Diffuse Optical Tomography

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is emerging as a viable new biomedical imaging modality. Using near-infrared (NIR) light, this technique probes absorption as well as scattering properties of biological tissues. First commercial instruments are now available that allow users to obtain cross-sectional and volumetric views of various body parts. Currently, the main applications are brain, breast, limb, joint, and fluorescence/bioluminescence imaging. Although the spatial resolution is limited when compared with other imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or X-ray computerized tomography (CT), DOT provides access to a variety of physiological parameters that otherwise are not accessible, including sub-second imaging of hemodynamics and other fast-changing processes. Furthermore, DOT can be realized in compact, portable instrumentation that allows for bedside monitoring at relatively low cost. In this paper, we present an overview of current state-of-the -art technology, including hardware and image-reconstruction algorithms, and focus on applications in brain and joint imaging. In addition, we present recent results of work on optical tomographic imaging in small animals.
Parental perceptions of weight status of their children

BACKGROUND Understanding the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of parents is important for planning appropriately to control their children's weight. We aimed to study these variables in parents of normal, underweight, overweight, and obese children. METHODS This cross-sectional study targeted the parents of normal, underweight, overweight, and obese children, who were selected using multistage random sampling method. The parents' knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors about the weight status of their children, weight management, obesity, diet, lifestyle, and related psychosocial factors were evaluated using a validated questionnaire. The questionnaire, which had been validated, consisted of 12 demographic, 8 knowledge, 19 attitude and beliefs, and 25 behavior questions. Mean knowledge, attitude and beliefs, and behavior scores were compared across three subgroups of parents. Student's independent t-test, ANOVA, and Kruskal-Wallis test were used to study the correlation between different demographic and socioeconomic factors, and the studied variables. RESULTS 90% of parents were aware that obesity is a disease, and 92% knew that eating too much fast food would lead to obesity in children. Only 5% assumed that obese children are healthier than non-obese children. The mean scores of the three subgroups showed no significant difference in knowledge, attitude and beliefs, and behavior. Families with fathers, whose education level was higher than high school diploma, rated their children's weight status as overweight or obese significantly less than families with fathers, whose education level was high school diploma or lower (8.5% vs. 16.5%, respectively, P = 0.014). Only 12% of parents tried to help their children lose weight at least once, and only 6% arranged sport activities for the family members. In 57% and 41% of families, the child, respectively, decided how much time was enough to watch TV, and how much chocolates and sweets to eat. 46% of children watched TV for more than 2 hours/day, and 49% of children watched TV while eating meals. The mean total score of boys' parents was significantly lower than that of girls' parents (P < 0.05). Families with low income, with no medical insurance, or not owning a house thought that the cost of registration in sport activities for children was too high (P < 0.03). CONCLUSION Some parents unreasonably rated the weight status of their children as overweight/obese. It is suggested that further studies be carried out to evaluate and improve parents' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding their children's weight.
Upgrading fortran source code using automatic refactoring

Many of the computer models used in scientific research have been developed in Fortran over many years. This evolutionary process means these models often use deprecated language features and idioms that impede software maintenance, understandability, extension, and verification. To mitigate this, we built CamFort, an open-source automatic refactoring tool for upgrading Fortran source code. We describe functionality in CamFort for removing equivalence statements and common blocks, and for introducing structured data types, and give examples of how these transformations can benefit codebase robustness.
Hodge number polynomials for nearby and vanishing cohomology

AbstractWe recall the construction of the Hodge character and we show, us-ing a result due to F. Bittner, that these can be constructed usingclassical pure Hodge theory only, sideskipping Deligne’s constructionof functorial mixed Hodge structures on the cohomology of algberaicvarieties. We then give a proof, based on the weak factorization theo-rem, that the nearby ﬁbre is well-deﬁned in the Grothendieck group ofvarieties. Finally, various formulas for numerical invariants of Hodge-theoretic origin are presented which are associated to one-parameterdegenerations of projective manifolds.Keywords: Hodge structure, Hodge Euler polynomial, Hodge number polynomial,nearby and vanishing cohomologyMSC2000 classiﬁcation: 14D07, 32G20 1 Introduction The behaviour of the cohomology of a degenerating family of complex pro-jective manifolds has been intensively studied in the nineteen-seventies byClemens, Griﬃths, Schmid and others. See [Gr] for a nice overview. Re-cently, the theory of motivic integration, initiated by Kontsevich and de-veloped by Denef and Loeser, has given a new impetus to this topic. Inparticular, in the case of a one-parameter degeneration it has produced anobject ψ
A Survey on Network Coordinates Systems, Design, and Security

During the last decade, a new class of large-scale globally-distributed network services and applications have emerged. Those systems are flexible in the sense that they can select their communication path among a set of available ones. However, ceaselessly gathering network information such as latency to select a path is infeasible due to the large amount of measurement traffic it would generate. To overcome this issue, Network Coordinates Systems (NCS) have been proposed. An NCS allows hosts to predict latencies without performing direct measurements and, consequently, reduce the network resources consumption. During these last years, NCS opened new research fields in which the networking community has produced an impressive amount of work. We believe it is now time to stop and take stock of what has been achieved so far. In this paper, we survey the various NCS proposed as well as their intrinsic limits. In particular, we focus on security issues and solutions proposed to fix them. We also discuss potential future NCS developments, in particular how to use NCS for predicting bandwidth.
Mapping calcium transients in the dendrites of Purkinje cells from the guinea‐pig cerebellum in vitro.

1. A 10 X 10 photodiode array was used to detect stimulation‐dependent absorbance changes simultaneously from many positions in the dendrite field of guinea‐pig Purkinje cells which had been injected with the calcium indicator Arsenazo III in thin cerebellar slices. Signals from each element of the array were matched to positions on the cells by mapping them onto fluorescence photographs of Lucifer Yellow which had been co‐injected into the cells with the Arsenazo III. 2. In response to intrasomatic stimulation the rising phase of the absorbance signals corresponded in time with the calcium spikes recorded with an intracellular electrode. There was no increase in absorbance during bursts of fast sodium spikes. Absorbance signals persisted after the sodium spikes were blocked by tetrodotoxin (TTX). In addition, the signals were largest at 660 nm and small signals of opposite polarity were found at 540 nm. These results indicate that the absorbance signals came from calcium entry into the cell resulting from the turning on of voltage‐dependent calcium conductances. 3. In these experiments signals were usually seen all over the dendritic field and were weak or totally absent over the soma. In some cases signals were seen over a more restricted area. With a spatial resolution of 25 microns we were not able to see any evidence for highly localized sites of calcium entry. 4. Sometimes the rising phase of the calcium signals was separated by almost 13 ms in different parts of the dendritic field, too long to be explained by active propagation delay. This suggests that calcium spikes causing these signals can be evoked separately in different regions of the Purkinje cell dendritic field by long‐lasting potentials which may reach local threshold at different times. 5. Calcium signals resulting from slow plateau after‐potentials and the calcium spikes produced by them were also detected in all locations in the dendritic field. The relative distribution of amplitudes from these plateau signals was different from the distribution of evoked signals during current injection. 6. Climbing fibre synaptic activation produced calcium signals which were distributed over the dendritic arborization, but larger at the main dendritic tree where most of the synaptic contacts are located. 7. Calcium signals were also detected from the dendrites of other neurone types in the in vitro slice preparation. Thus, it is likely that these kind of measurements can be used to analyse the electroresponsiveness of many kinds of neurones in the mammalian brain.
Kernelization of packing problems

Kernelization algorithms are polynomial-time reductions from a problem to itself that guarantee their output to have a size not exceeding some bound. For example, d-Set Matching for integers d ≥ 3 is the problem of finding a matching of size at least k in a given d-uniform hypergraph and has kernels with O(kd) edges. Recently, Bodlaender et al. [ICALP 2008], Fortnow and Santhanam [STOC 2008], Dell and Van Melkebeek [STOC 2010] developed a framework for proving lower bounds on the kernel size for certain problems, under the complexity-theoretic hypothesis that coNP is not contained in NP/poly. Under the same hypothesis, we show lower bounds for the kernelization of d-Set Matching and other packing problems. Our bounds are tight for d-Set Matching: It does not have kernels with O(kd−e) edges for any e > 0 unless the hypothesis fails. By reduction, this transfers to a bound of O(kd−1−e) for the problem of finding k vertex-disjoint cliques of size d in standard graphs. It is natural to ask for tight bounds on the kernel sizes of such graph packing problems. We make first progress in that direction by showing non-trivial kernels with O(k2.5) edges for the problem of finding k vertex-disjoint paths of three edges each. This does not quite match the best lower bound of O(k2−e) that we can prove. Most of our lower bound proofs follow a general scheme that we discover: To exclude kernels of size O(kd−e) for a problem in d-uniform hypergraphs, one should reduce from a carefully chosen d-partite problem that is still NP-hard. As an illustration, we apply this scheme to the vertex cover problem, which allows us to replace the number-theoretical construction by Dell and Van Melkebeek [STOC 2010] with shorter elementary arguments.
Concomitants of Atherosclerotic Carotid Artery Stenosis

To identify metabolic and other concomitants of a single important type of atherosclerotic cerebrovascular disease, 75 patients with angiographically and surgically proven internal carotid stenosis were compared with age and sex matched control subjects with respect to plasma cholesterol, triglycerides and glucose. They were also compared for blood pressure, cigarette smoking, evidence of ischemic heart disease, peripheral vascular disease and for a family history of these diseases. Patients with carotid stenosis had higher systolic and diastolic blood pressures and higher plasma cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations than the control groups. They had, as well, a far greater likelihood of being cigarette smokers and a greater likelihood of having diabetes mellitus and previous evidence of coronary and peripheral vascular disease. Patients with carotid stenosis were far more likely to have 2 or more of these common concomitants of atherosclerosis than were the control subjects. The data suggest that the precursors of carotid stenosis are similar to those of coronary atherosclerosis and raise the hope that modification of these factors may decrease the incidence of this highly prevalent form of cerebrovascular disease.
Decision support for automated screening of diabetic retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the leading cause of blindness. DR results in retinal disorders that include: microaneurysms, drusens, hard exudates and intra-retinal micro-vascular abnormalities (IRMA). The early signs of DR are depicted by microaneurysms among other signs. A prompt diagnosis when the disease is at the early stage can help prevent irreversible damages to the diabetic eye. This paper presents a decision support framework for automated screening of early signs of DR and classification schemes for deducing the presence or absence of microaneurysms are developed and tested under a univariate environment. The detection rule is based on binary hypothesis testing problem which simplifies the problem to yes/no decisions. An analysis of the performance of the Bayes optimality criteria is also presented in the paper.
Strategic Voting in the California Recall Election

Given people’s interest in all things California, the novelty of the recall mechanism, and the presence of a bona fide action hero in the race, it is not surprising that the 2003 California recall election attracted an inordinate amount of national attention. The circus-like atmosphere should not, however, obscure the interesting implications of the recall election for our understanding of the broader phenomenon of strategic voting. We argue that partisans faced two different strategic voting scenarios in California, with Democrats confronting a slightly more subtle set of criteria and circumstances than Republicans. Drawing on individual-level survey data designed to gauge candidate affect and second-choice preferences, we find that strategic voting was common (although by no means unanimous) among those whose preferences placed them in a position to cast such a strategic vote.
Economic Underdevelopment and Total Factor Growth in Small Scale Industries: Some Evidences from India

Globalization of Indian economy and fast and large industrialization questioned the sustainability and endurance of small scale industries (SSIs) from 1991. In this regard productivity and performance is remaining an issue that needs analysis for their development. However economic underdevelopment is remain a problem for the development of small scale industries. In this paper an attempt has been made to examine the productive performance of in small scale industries in India in underdeveloped areas with special reference to Assam. The findings of the study suggest the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of SSIs in underdeveloped areas seemed to be growing steadily over the time. The overall linear trend line of TFPG of SSIs of India indicates a declining trend over the periods from 1973- 74 to 2001-2002.
NF-κB Activation, Dependent on Acetylation/Deacetylation, Contributes to HIF-1 Activity and Migration of Bone Metastatic Breast Carcinoma Cells

Here, we show that NF-κB-HIF-1 interaction contributed to breast cancer metastatic capacity by means of an incomplete epithelial/mesenchymal transition and influencing migration, as shown in 1833 (human) and 4T1 (mouse) metastatic cells after different stimuli. The 1833 and the transforming growth factor-β1–exposed 4T1 cells showed both epithelial (E-cadherins) and mesenchymal (N-cadherins and vimentin) markers, and common mechanisms contributed to the retention of certain epithelial characteristics and the control of migration. The complex NF-κB-HIF-1 reciprocal regulation and the enhanced c-Jun expression played a functional role in exacerbating the invasiveness of 1833 cells after p50/p65 transfection and of 4T1 cells exposed to transforming growth factor-β1. Twist expression seemed to exert a permissive role also regulating epithelial/mesenchymal transition markers. After c-Src wild-type (Srcwt) transfection, c-Src-signal transducer overexpression in 1833 cells increased HIF-1 transactivating activity and invasiveness, and changed E-cadherin/N-cadherin ratio versus mesenchymal phenotype. The transcription factor pattern and the motile phenotype of metastatic 1833 cells were influenced by p65-lysine acetylation and HDAC-dependent epigenetic mechanisms, which positively regulated basal NF-κB and HIF-1 activities. However, HDAC3 acted as a corepressor of NF-κB activity in parental MDA-MB231 cells, thus explaining many differences from the derived 1833 clone, including reduced HIF-1α and c-Jun expression. Invasiveness was differently affected by HDAC knockdown in 1833 and MDA-MB231 cells. We suggest that acetylation/deacetylation are critical in establishing the bone-metastatic gene signature of 1833 cells by regulating the activity of NF-κB and HIF-1, and further clarify the epigenetic control of transcription factor network in the motile phenotype of 1833 cells. (Mol Cancer Res 2009;7(8):1328–41)
Heightening Security of P2P Networks by Neighborhood Key Method

Most of the current trust models in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are identity based, which means that in order for one peer to trust another, it needs to know the other peer's identity. In addition, the conventional access control mechanism is not suitable because the P2P networks is decentralize and dynamic one. We propose a neighborhood key method, authentication scheme base on zero-knowledge proof without leaking any sensitive information, each peer shares secrets only with authenticated neighbors, which generate verifiable pseudonym instead of their real identity from using a one-way Hash function. Security analysis proves that this method makes authentication can't be impersonated, while achieving better anonymity for peers, malicious peers cannot deduce a real identity. And also shows well defending man-in-middle attacks.
A Novel Distance Cost Approach for Multi-Robot Integrated Exploration

The ability to build reliable maps of unknown environments is important for improving autonomy in robotic systems. Moreover, when multiple robots are able to coordinate themselves to explore different areas of the environment, the exploration efficiency can be greatly improved. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-robot Integrated Exploration technique based on distance cost and frontier exploration. We use a utility function that considers both distance cost and coordination of each robot. Our distance cost technique is based on a function that can be adapted for each environment size and the coordination is integrated with the utility function. Experiments performed with simulated robots show that our approach can significantly reduce the exploration time when compared with other distance cost approaches.
Trust and School Reform Implementation

This article presents an analysis of data collected during an evaluation of a Carnegie initiative, Schools for a New Society, implemented in a large urban district in the South. Findings suggest that the initiative’s four strategic assumptions have been addressed at least partially: First, school and community representatives have jointly redesigned high schools; second, factory model high schools are transforming into small learning communities; third, changes are being systemically addressed across the district; and, fourth, public–private partnerships are helping raise dollars for public schools. As such, this article analyzes the transformation of a school into a small learning community and the importance of trust in creating a school climate conducive to school change.
Classification of Hash Functions Suitable for Real-Life Systems

Cryptographic hash functions have been widely studied and are used in many current systems. Though much research has been done on the security of hash functions, system designers cannot determine which hash function is most suitable for a particular system. The main reason for this is that the current security classification does not correspond very well to the security requirements of practical systems. This paper describes a new classification which is more suitable for designing real-life systems. This classification is the result of a new qualitative classification and a new quantitative classification. We show a mapping between each class and standard protocols. In addition, we show new requirements for four types of hash function for a future standard.
Effects of α‐Pyrrolidinopentiophenone and 4-Methyl-N-Ethylcathinone, Two Synthetic Cathinones Commonly Found in Second-Generation “Bath Salts,” on Intracranial Self-Stimulation Thresholds in Rats

Background: Use of synthetic cathinones, which are designer stimulants found in “bath salts,” has increased dramatically in recent years. Following governmental bans of methylenedioxypyrovalerone, mephedrone, and methylone, a second generation of synthetic cathinones with unknown abuse liability has emerged as replacements. Methods: Using a discrete trials current intensity threshold intracranial self-stimulation procedure, the present study assessed the effects of 2 common second-generation synthetic cathinones, α‐pyrrolidinopentiophenone (0.1–5mg/kg) and 4-methyl-N-ethcathinone (1–100mg/kg) on brain reward function. Methamphetamine (0.1–3mg/kg) was also tested for comparison purposes. Results: Results revealed both α‐pyrrolidinopentiophenone and 4-methyl-N-ethcathinone produced significant intracranial self-stimulation threshold reductions similar to that of methamphetamine. α‐Pyrrolidinopentiophenone (1mg/kg) produced a significant maximal reduction in intracranial self-stimulation thresholds (~19%) most similar to maximal reductions produced by methamphetamine (1mg/kg, ~20%). Maximal reductions in intracranial self-stimulation thresholds produced by 4-methyl-N-ethcathinone were observed at 30mg/kg (~15%) and were comparable with those observed with methamphetamine and α‐pyrrolidinopentiophenone tested at the 0.3-mg/kg dose (~14%). Additional analysis of the ED50 values from log-transformed data revealed the rank order potency of these drugs as methamphetamine ≈ α‐pyrrolidinopentiophenone>4-methyl-N-ethcathinone. Conclusions: These data suggest that the newer second-generation synthetic cathinones activate the brain reward circuitry and thus may possess a similar degree of abuse potential as prototypical illicit psychostimulants such as methamphetamine as well as the first generation synthetic cathinone methylenedioxypyrovalerone, as previously reported.
Modeling and synthesis of multi-rail multi-protocol QDI circuits

Quasi-Delay-Insensitive (QDI) circuits behave correctly independently of arbitrary delays in gates or wires, which gives them many advantages. However, there are a lot of restrictions for the design of this type of circuits, making them difficult to synthesize automatically. This paper presents a new methodology to model and synthesize QDI asynchronous circuits. The targeted circuits use the multi-rail data encoding, and use different handshaking protocols for channel-based communications. The proposed synthesis algorithms are based on Multi-valued Decision Diagrams. This article proves formally that the circuits generated with this technique are QDI. An example is given to illustrate the circuit modeling and the synthesis.