Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Reciprocal Relationship between Suicidality and Stigma

Introduction Although suicidality is frequently the cause of stigma, it is conversely true that stigma may be the cause of suicidality. The present paper focuses on the complex relationships that exist between suicidal behavior and stigmatizing attitudes. Methods A narrative review of the topic will be presented on the basis of the relevant literature collected from an electronic search of PubMed, ISI Web of Knowledge, and Scopus databases, using stigma, public stigma, structural stigma, perceived stigma, self-stigma, suicide, attempted suicide, and suicidality as key words. Results A negative perception is frequently held of suicidal people, labeling them as weak and unable to cope with their problems, or selfish. Individuals who have attempted suicide are subject to similar processes of stigmatization and “social distancing”; insurance policies include an exclusion clause against death by suicide. Subjects with a direct personal experience of depression or suicide strongly endorse a feeling of self-stigma; those who have attempted suicide are often ashamed and embarrassed by their behavior and tend to hide the occurrence as much as possible. Similar processes are observed among family members of subjects who have committed suicide or made a suicide attempt, with a higher perceived stigma present in those bereaved by suicide. Perceived or internalized stigma produced by mental or physical disorders, or through belonging to a minority group, may represent a significant risk factor for suicide, being severely distressing, reducing self-esteem and acting as a barrier in help-seeking behaviors. Conclusion With the aim of preventing suicide, greater efforts should be made to combat the persisting stigmatizing attitudes displayed toward mental disorders and suicide itself. Indeed, the role of stigma as a risk factor for suicide should further motivate and spur more concerted efforts to combat public stigma and support those suffering from perceived or internalized stigma. Experts and scientific societies should form an alliance with the media in an effort to promote a marked change in the societal perception of mental health issues and suicide. As stigma may result in severe consequences, specialist care and psychological interventions should be provided to populations submitted to stigma.
A Comparison of Fuzzy ARTMAP and Multilayer Perceptron for Handwritten Digit Recognition

This paper explores the features of the Fuzzy ARTMAP neural network classi er in the context of on-line handwritten recognition. A Fuzzy ARTMAP classi er is compared with a multilayer Perceptron trained using the standard backpropagation algorithm. Results show that although the recognition performance of both networks is similar, the convergence of the Fuzzy ARTMAP is both much faster and incrementaly stable than that of the Perceptron. In fact, it is shown experimentally that a Fuzzy ARTMAP can be trained in a single pass with almost no performance penalty when using the fast learning mode. The recognition experiments were conducted on handwritten digits extracted from the Unipen training dataset.
Ribosomal Protein S6 Kinase 1 Signaling Regulates Mammalian Life Span

Mimicking Caloric Restriction The extended life span and resistance to age-related diseases in animals exposed to caloric restriction has focused attention on the biochemical mechanisms that produce these effects. Selman et al. (p. 140; see the Perspective by Kaeberlein and Kapahi) explored the role of the mammalian ribosomal protein S6 kinase 1 (S6K1), which regulates protein translation and cellular energy metabolism. Female knockout mice lacking expression of S6K1 showed characteristics of animals exposed to caloric restriction, including improved health and increased longevity. The beneficial effects included reduced fat mass in spite of increased food intake. Thus, inhibition of signaling pathways activated by S6K1 might prove beneficial in protecting against age-related disease. A signaling pathway in mice mediates the effects of caloric restriction that protect against age-related diseases. Caloric restriction (CR) protects against aging and disease, but the mechanisms by which this affects mammalian life span are unclear. We show in mice that deletion of ribosomal S6 protein kinase 1 (S6K1), a component of the nutrient-responsive mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) signaling pathway, led to increased life span and resistance to age-related pathologies, such as bone, immune, and motor dysfunction and loss of insulin sensitivity. Deletion of S6K1 induced gene expression patterns similar to those seen in CR or with pharmacological activation of adenosine monophosphate (AMP)–activated protein kinase (AMPK), a conserved regulator of the metabolic response to CR. Our results demonstrate that S6K1 influences healthy mammalian life-span and suggest that therapeutic manipulation of S6K1 and AMPK might mimic CR and could provide broad protection against diseases of aging.
Automated Digital Conversion of Hand-Drawn Plots

An algorithm has been developed using Matlab that takes an image of a sketch of one or more functions, plotted on the xand yaxes, and converts it into an electronic plot, along with the set of equations and parameters that recreate the same plot. This is accomplished by extraction of the plot data, followed by data grouping based on three different heuristic methods (colour, slope and process of elimination), followed by leastsquares fitting. Keywords-graph; plot; sketch; digitization; conversion
Autoconfiguration of enterprise-class application deployment in virtualized infrastructure using OVF activation mechanisms

IT-based services existing today, such as the ones supporting e-commerce systems or corporate applications, demand complex architectures to address enterprise-class requirements (high availability, vast user demand, etc.). In particular, most enterprise-class applications are multi-tiered and multi-node, i.e. composed of many independent systems with complex relationships among them. In recent years, virtualization technologies have brought many advantages to enterprise-class application implementation, such as cost consolidation and ease of management. However, even when using virtualization, the configuration operations associated to the deployment of enterprise-class applications are still a challenging task since they constitute a mostly manual, time-consuming and error prone process. In this paper we propose a solution to that problem based on the automation of that procedure by means of the OVF activation mechanism. Our work focuses on a practical case, which has been used to assess the feasibility of our solution and to extract valuable lessons that we expose as part of the article.
Single-Channel Properties of Synaptic and Extrasynaptic GABAA Receptors Suggest Differential Targeting of Receptor Subtypes

Many neurons express a multiplicity of GABAA receptor subunit isoforms. Despite having only a single source of inhibitory input, the cerebellar granule cell displays, at various stages of development, more than 10 different GABAA subunit types. This subunit diversity would be expected to result in significant receptor heterogeneity, yet the functional consequences of such heterogeneity remain poorly understood. Here we have used single-channel properties to characterize GABAA receptor types in the synaptic and extrasynaptic membrane of granule cells. In the presence of high concentrations of GABA, which induced receptor desensitization, extrasynaptic receptors in outside-out patches from the soma entered long-lived closed states interrupted by infrequent clusters of openings. Each cluster of openings, which is assumed to result from the repeated activation of a single channel, was to one of three main conductance states (28, 17, or 12 pS), the relative frequency of which differed between patches. Such behavior indicates the presence of at least three different receptor types. This heterogeneity was not replicated by individual recombinant receptors (α1β2γ2S or α1β3γ2S), which gave rise to clusters of a single type only. By contrast, the conductance of synaptic receptors, determined by fluctuation analysis of the synaptic current or direct resolution of channel events, was remarkably uniform and similar to the highest conductance value seen in extrasynaptic patches. These results suggest that granule cells express multiple GABAA receptor types, but only those with a high conductance, most likely containing a γ subunit, are activated at the synapse.
Gain measurement of antennas using RFID

This paper presents a method for contactless gain measurements of 50 Ohm antennas. The method is based on connecting a special passive RFID chip assembly, matched to 50 Ohm in the wide band, to the antenna and measuring the read sensitivity of the resulting tag in the tag characterization system. The gain of the antenna is then calculated from previous calibrated measurement done with reference antenna of known gain, such as dipole. We illustrate the method with experimental measurements on several antennas. The main advantage of this method is that it does not require any external cables and can be used for characterization of small antennas inside modern mobile wireless devices.
Effect of Muscle Energy Technique on Anterior Pelvic Tilt in Lumbar Spondylosis Patients

Background: Muscle Energy Techniques (MET) have been widely used by manual therapists over the past years, but still limited research validated its use and there was limited evidence to substantiate the theories used to explain its effects. Objective: To investigate the effect of Muscle Energy Technique (MET) on anterior pelvic tilt in patients with lumbar spondylosis. Design: Randomized controlled trial. Subjects: Thirty patients with anterior pelvic tilt from both sexes were involved, aged between 35 to 50 years old and they were divided into MET and control groups with 15 patients in each. Methods: All patients received 3sessions/week for 4 weeks where the study group received MET, Ultrasound and Infrared, and the control group received U.S and I.R only. Pelvic angle was measured by palpation meter, pain severity by the visual analogue scale and functional disabilities by the Oswestry disability index. Results: Both groups showed significant improvement in all measured variables. The MET group was significantly better than the control group in pelvic angle, pain severity, and functional disability as p-value were (0.001, 0.0001, 0.0001) respectively. Conclusion and implication: the study group fulfilled greater improvement in all measured variables than the control group which implies that application of MET in combination with U.S and I.R were more effective in improving pelvic tilting angle, pain severity and functional disabilities than using electrotherapy only. Keywords—Anterior pelvic tilt, lumbar spondylosis, muscle energy technique exercise, palpation meter.
Approximately Efficient Two-Sided Combinatorial Auctions

We develop and extend a line of recent work on the design of mechanisms for two-sided markets. The markets we consider consist of buyers and sellers of a number of items, and the aim of a mechanism is to improve the social welfare by arranging purchases and sales of the items. A mechanism is given prior distributions on the agents' valuations of the items, but not the actual valuations; thus the aim is to maximise the expected social welfare over these distributions. As in previous work, we are interested in the worst-case ratio between the social welfare achieved by a truthful mechanism, and the best social welfare possible. Our main result is an incentive compatible and budget balanced constant-factor approximation mechanism in a setting where buyers have XOS valuations and sellers' valuations are additive. This is the first such approximation mechanism for a two-sided market setting where the agents have combinatorial valuation functions. To achieve this result, we introduce a more general kind of demand query that seems to be needed in this situation. In the simpler case that sellers have unit supply (each having just one item to sell), we give a new mechanism whose welfare guarantee improves on a recent one in the literature. We also introduce a more demanding version of the strong budget balance (SBB) criterion, aimed at ruling out certain "unnatural" transactions satisfied by SBB. We show that the stronger version is satisfied by our mechanisms.
Quality of experience of VoIP for social network services: Facebook vs LINE over 3G networks in North Bangkok

This paper presents a preliminary study of quality of experience (QoE) of VoIP that are provided as social network services using Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) with Thai and Chinese speech samples. This study focuses on VoIP quality of the free call feature from Facebook and LINE, which are the popular social network site and the popular social network application for Thai users respectively. From this study, it has been found no significant difference between VoIP quality from Facebook and LINE when connected Internet via WLAN. However, it has been found that LINE tends to provide better VoIP quality than Facebook with significant difference (p-value <; 0.05) when connected 3G networks in three forth test conditions, including two test conditions with Thai speech.
On Using i* for Modeling Autonomy, Reasoning, and Planning in Adaptive Systems

Many systems are being developed where components have some form of autonomy and can adapt to change. However, it is not clear how these aspects of autonomous systems can be modeled by existing software development frameworks. How can we model how much autonomy an agent/component has? How can we specify when autonomous behavior, reconfiguration, or reasoning/planning is triggered? How can we model the constraints that control autonomy? We need a framework and process for developing such systems. In this paper, these questions are discussed and some possible approaches are outlined.
A Cure for HIV Infection: “Not in My Lifetime” or “Just Around the Corner”?

With the advent and stunning success of combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) to prolong and improve quality of life for persons with HIV infection, HIV research has been afforded the opportunity to pivot towards studies aimed at finding "a cure. " The mere idea that cure of HIV might be possible has energized researchers and the community towards achieving this goal. Funding agencies, both governmental and private, have targeted HIV cure as a high priority; many in the field have responded to these initiatives and the cure research agenda is robust. In this "salon" two editors of Pathogens and Immunity, Michael Lederman and Daniel Douek ask whether curing HIV is a realistic, scalable objective. We start with an overview perspective and have asked a number of prominent HIV researchers to add to the discussion.
Do We Have e-Collaboration Genes ?

Long before Darwin (1859) proposed his theory of evolution by natural selection there has been debate about how much of our behavior is influenced by our “nature” (or our genes) and what types of behavior are particularly affected by our genetic makeup. Behaviors that are strongly influenced by our genes, and that are thus assumed to be more closely related to our biological structure than our cultural backgrounds, are often referred to as “instinctive” behaviors. Thus, from this perspective it makes sense to say that the compulsion that many of us feel to eat more candy than we need is in fact an instinct, most likely motivated by the scarcity of food containing highcalorie sugars in the ancestral environments in which we evolved, from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens. On one extreme of the debate of how much of our behavior is influenced by our genes are those who are often referred to as biological determinists. They believe that nearly all of our behavior is determined by our genes and they often ignore evidence to the contrary. On the other extreme are those who subscribe to the notion that our genetic makeup influences virtually none of our beABSTRACT
Forecasting Violent Extremist Cyber Recruitment

The Internet's increasing use as a means of communication has led to the formation of cyber communities, which have become appealing to violent extremist (VE) groups. This paper presents research on forecasting the daily level of cyber-recruitment activity of VE groups. We used a previously developed support vector machine model to identify recruitment posts within a Western jihadist discussion forum. We analyzed the textual content of this data set with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and we fed these analyses into a variety of time series models to forecast cyber-recruitment activity within the forum. Quantitative evaluations showed that employing LDA-based topics as predictors within time series models reduces forecast error compared with naive (random-walk), autoregressive integrated moving average, and exponential smoothing baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result reported on this forecasting task. This research could ultimately help assist with efficient allocation of intelligence analysts in response to predicted levels of cyber-recruitment activity.
Carbon Black: Production, Properties, and Uses

Preface Carbon Blacks in Electrochemical Energy Conversion Devices: Uses & Applications in Fuel Cells Study & Application of Carbon Black Vulcan XC-72R in Polymeric Electrolyte Fuel Cells Intermolecular & Intramolecular Interaction at Adsorption on the Surface of Graphitized Thermal Carbon Black Heat Transfer & Growth of Primary Black Carbon Particles in Gas Mixture What Does Carbon Nanomaterial Cause in Human Health? Carbon Black Low Pressure Plasma Processing of Carbon Black: A New Class of Granular Adsorbers of Acid and/or Basic Compounds Production, Properties & Applications of Carbon Blacks in Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Batteries A Review of Current Analytical Applications Employing Graphitized Carbon Black Effect of Carbon Black Fillers on the Tribological Properties of PTFE The Application of Carbon Black in Energy Storage Index.
Decomposition and evaluation of activity in multiple event-related trials

It is generally accepted that evoked and induced activations represent different aspects of cerebral functions during an Event Related Potentials (ERP) experiment. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has been successfully applied to event related electroencephalography (EEG) to decompose it into a sum of spatially fixed and temporally independent components that can be attributed to underlying cortical activity. A major problem in the application of ICA is the stability of estimated independent components. In this paper we exploited the split-half approach to assess component stability. We used different measures quantifying both phase and energy aspects of the ERP, in order to distinguish evoked from induced oscillations. We applied these measures to the stable independent components derived from a dataset of progressive Mild Cognitive Impairment (PMCI) and elderly controls. We found reduced energy in the induced theta activity in PMCI subjects, in accordance with previous studies. In addition, PMCI subjects presented lower phase-locking values and diminished late alpha band energy in contrast to controls.
Human Emotion Recognition from MotionUsing a Radial Basis FunctionNetwork ArchitectureMark

In this paper a radial basis function network architecture is developed that learns the correlation of facial feature motion patterns and human emotions. We describe a hierarchical approach which at the highest level identiies emotions, at the mid level determines motion of facial features, and at the low level recovers motion directions. Individual emotion networks were trained to recognize thèsmile' and`surprise' emotions. Each emotion network was trained by viewing a set of sequences of one emotion for many subjects. The trained neural network was then tested for retention , extrapolation and rejection ability. Success rates were about 88% for retention, 73% for extrapolation, and 79% for rejection.
Identification of Amino Acid Residues in the Capsid Proteins of Adeno-Associated Virus Type 2 That Contribute to Heparan Sulfate Proteoglycan Binding

ABSTRACT The adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2) uses heparan sulfate proteoglycan (HSPG) as its primary cellular receptor. In order to identify amino acids within the capsid of AAV2 that contribute to HSPG association, we used biochemical information about heparin and heparin sulfate, AAV serotype protein sequence alignments, and data from previous capsid studies to select residues for mutagenesis. Charged-to-alanine substitution mutagenesis was performed on individual residues and combinations of basic residues for the production and purification of recombinant viruses that contained a green fluorescent protein (GFP) reporter gene cassette. Intact capsids were assayed for their ability to bind to heparin-agarose in vitro, and virions that packaged DNA were assayed for their ability to transduce normally permissive cell lines. We found that mutation of arginine residues at position 585 or 588 eliminated binding to heparin-agarose. Mutation of residues R484, R487, and K532 showed partial binding to heparin-agarose. We observed a general correlation between heparin-agarose binding and infectivity as measured by GFP transduction; however, a subset of mutants that partially bound heparin-agarose (R484A and K532A) were completely noninfectious, suggesting that they had additional blocks to infectivity that were unrelated to heparin binding. Conservative mutation of positions R585 and R588 to lysine slightly reduced heparin-agarose binding and had comparable effects on infectivity. Substitution of AAV2 residues 585 through 590 into a location predicted to be structurally equivalent in AAV5 generated a hybrid virus that bound to heparin-agarose efficiently and was able to package DNA but was noninfectious. Taken together, our results suggest that residues R585 and R588 are primarily responsible for heparin sulfate binding and that mutation of these residues has little effect on other aspects of the viral life cycle. Interactive computer graphics examination of the AAV2 VP3 atomic coordinates revealed that residues which contribute to heparin binding formed a cluster of five basic amino acids that presented toward the icosahedral threefold axis from the surrounding spike protrusion. Three other kinds of mutants were identified. Mutants R459A, H509A, and H526A/K527A bound heparin at levels comparable to that of wild-type virus but were defective for transduction. Another mutant, H358A, was defective for capsid assembly. Finally, an R459A mutant produced significantly lower levels of full capsids, suggesting a packaging defect.
A multiresolution framework for variational subdivision

Subdivision is a powerful paradigm for the generaton of curves and surfaces. It is easy to implement, computationally efficient, and useful in a variety of applications because of its intimate connection with multiresolution analysis. An important task in computer graphics and geometric modeling is the construction of curves that interpolate a griven set of points and minimize a fairness functional (variational design). In the context of subdivision, fairing leads to special schemes requiring the solution of a banded linear system at every subdivision step. We present several examples of such schemes including one that reproduces nonuniform interpolating cubic splines. Expressing the construction in terms of certain elementary operations we are able to embed variational subdivision in the lifting framework, a powerful technique to construct wavelet filter banks given a subdivision scheme. This allows us to extend the traditional lifting scheme for FIR filters to a certain class of IIR filters. Consquently, we how how to build variationally optimal curves and associated, stable wavelets in a straightforward fashion. The algorithms to perform the corresponding decomposition and reconstruction transformations are easy to implement and efficient enough for interactive applications.