Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sequencing, De Novo Assembly, and Annotation of the Transcriptome of the Endangered Freshwater Pearl Bivalve, Cristaria plicata, Provides Novel Insights into Functional Genes and Marker Discovery

Background The freshwater mussel Cristaria plicata (Bivalvia: Eulamellibranchia: Unionidae), is an economically important species in molluscan aquaculture due to its use in pearl farming. The species have been listed as endangered in South Korea due to the loss of natural habitats caused by anthropogenic activities. The decreasing population and a lack of genomic information on the species is concerning for environmentalists and conservationists. In this study, we conducted a de novo transcriptome sequencing and annotation analysis of C. plicata using Illumina HiSeq 2500 next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, the Trinity assembler, and bioinformatics databases to prepare a sustainable resource for the identification of candidate genes involved in immunity, defense, and reproduction. Results The C. plicata transcriptome analysis included a total of 286,152,584 raw reads and 281,322,837 clean reads. The de novo assembly identified a total of 453,931 contigs and 374,794 non-redundant unigenes with average lengths of 731.2 and 737.1 bp, respectively. Furthermore, 100% coverage of C. plicata mitochondrial genes within two unigenes supported the quality of the assembler. In total, 84,274 unigenes showed homology to entries in at least one database, and 23,246 unigenes were allocated to one or more Gene Ontology (GO) terms. The most prominent GO biological process, cellular component, and molecular function categories (level 2) were cellular process, membrane, and binding, respectively. A total of 4,776 unigenes were mapped to 123 biological pathways in the KEGG database. Based on the GO terms and KEGG annotation, the unigenes were suggested to be involved in immunity, stress responses, sex-determination, and reproduction. A total of 17,251 cDNA simple sequence repeats (cSSRs) were identified from 61,141 unigenes (size of >1 kb) with the most abundant being dinucleotide repeats. Conclusions This dataset represents the first transcriptome analysis of the endangered mollusc, C. plicata. The transcriptome provides a comprehensive sequence resource for the conservation of genetic information in this species and enrichment of the genetic database. The development of molecular markers will assist in the genetic improvement of C. plicata.
On the Use of Discriminative Cohort Score Normalization for Unconstrained Face Recognition

Facial imaging has been largely addressed for automatic personal identification, in a variety of different environments. However, automatic face recognition becomes very challenging whenever the acquisition conditions are unconstrained. In this paper, a picture-specific cohort normalization approach, based on polynomial regression, is proposed to enhance the robustness of face matching under challenging conditions. A careful analysis is presented to better understand the actual discriminative power of a given cohort set. In particular, it is shown that the cohort polynomial regression alone conveys some discriminative information on the matching face pair, which is just marginally worse than the raw matching score. The influence of the cohort set size in the matching accuracy is also investigated. Further, tests performed on the Face Recognition Grand Challenge ver 2 database and the labeled faces in the wild database allowed to determine the relation between the quality of the cohort samples and cohort normalization performance. Experimental results obtained from the LFW data set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to improve the recognition accuracy in unconstrained face acquisition scenarios.
Impact of Integrated Amrita Meditation Technique on Adrenaline and Cortisol Levels in Healthy Volunteers

The objective was to find out the effect of Integrated Amrita Meditation Technique (IAM) on the stress hormones: adrenaline and cortisol. One hundred and fifty healthy subjects were randomized into three groups. Blood was collected at 0 hour, 48 hours, 2 months, and 8 months after the first visit. Adrenaline was analyzed by ELISA and cortisol by Chemiluminescent method. In the IAM, PMR and control groups 44, 44, and 36 came, respectively, for the baseline visit. Within group, cortisol and adrenaline levels reduced in the IAM 48 hours onwards and the fall sustained until 8 months (P < .05). ANCOVA (Repeated measures) on adrenaline taking the four levels of observation showed a highly significant (P = .001) drop in the IAM group. The mean cortisol values between groups were not statistically significant (P = .138). IAM Technique was effective in reducing adrenaline and cortisol levels within group comparisons.
Creating robust roadmaps for motion planning in changing environments

In this paper we introduce a method based on the probabilistic roadmap (PRM) planner to construct robust roadmaps for motion planning in changing environments. PRM's are usually aimed at static environments. In reality though, many environments are not static, but contain moving obstacles as well. Often the motion of these obstacles is not unconstrained, but is restricted to some confined area, e.g. a door that can be open or closed or a chair which is bounded to a room. We exploit this observation by assuming that a moving obstacle has a predefined set of potential placements. We present a variant of PRM that is robust against placement changes of obstacles. Our method creates a roadmap that is guaranteed to contain a path for any feasible query when time goes to infinity, i.e. the method is probabilistically complete. Our implementation shows that after a roadmap is created in the preprocessing phase, queries can be solved instantaneously, thus allowing for on-the-fly replanning to anticipate changes in the environment.
Exploring the Measurement Profiles of Socioeconomic Background and their differences in Reading Achievement : A Two-level Latent Class Analysis

A large body of SES-Attainment studies has established the relationship between student’s socioeconomic background and academic achievement, making SES a single powerful predictor of student’s performance. Typically SES is measured as a composition of parental education, occupation and income. However, a variety of alternative measurement of SES has also been developed (White, 1982; Sirin, 2005). The general trend of SES measurement is moving from SES being seen as a single index to regarding it as a multi-dimensional concept that imposes its effects at different levels of observation. The measures of SES also have extended from the aforementioned aspects to a set of rather broad indicators of home possessions and activities. Due to the variability in the measures and measurement methods of SES, the estimated effects of SES on academic achievement vary and become difficult to compare and evaluate. It is thus necessary to reexamine the measurement of SES by exploring the psychometric properties of SES.
Comparative analysis of open source content management systems

In the past decade, the effect of internet usage on businesses, has increased rapidly, and new technlogies have increased business productivity by many folds. By using a content management systems (CMSs), small scale businesses with restrained budgets need not to be concerned about hiring professional programmers to put their businesses online through a website. A CMS is a software that keeps track of every piece of content on a website, without requiring any technical skills or knowledge of management. This paper compares seven CMSs, namely Alfresco, Typo3, Dotnetnuke, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and Plone on the dimensions namely, system requirements, performance, security, built-in features, support and management. We have chosen these seven CMSs based on their e-commerce market share, google page rank, brand strength and rate of adoption.
Research on relationship between memory scale and lifetime of WSNs with cluster mechanism

As the reason that WSNs are critical limited by energy supplication, it becomes the first to all problems that how to prolong the lifetime of WSNs. Cluster mechanism is an efficient method to prolong the lifetime of WSNs by separating WSNs into many clusters. In every turn, each cluster has a head to allocate the data transmitting work. In this paper, we present a research on the affection of memory scale of nodes deployed in WSNs. We use different values of memory scale to test the cluster mechanism deployed in WSNs. Results show that with the increase of memory scale value the lifetime of WSNs has the tendency of more longer existing period. Well, when the memory scale is the integral multiple of 10, such as 10, 20, 30, etc., the lifetime will be the minimal value. This paper gives a quantitative analysis of the relation between length of memory scale and lifetime in WSNs with cluster mechanism.
XG DSA Radio System

This paper describes the dynamic spectrum access radio system that was built as part of the DARPA XG program. The DSA system's architecture four principal components (the DSA engine; the environmental sensing (i.e., detection) subsystem; the communications (i.e., radio) subsystem; and a policy module/enforcer) are described. The DSA system's 802.16-based radio hardware is described. One of the field tests related to group sensing is described. A companion paper describes the XG DSA policy software design and field test.
Question Answering Against Very-Large Text Collections

Question answering involves developing methods to extract useful information from large collections of documents. This is done with specialised search engines such as Answer Finder. The aim of Answer Finder is to provide an answer to a question rather than a page listing related documents that may contain the correct answer. So, a question such as "How tall is the Eiffel Tower" would simply return "325m" or "1,063ft". Our task was to build on the current version of Answer Finder by improving information retrieval, and also improving the pre-processing involved in question series analysis.
Brainy hand: an ear-worn hand gesture interaction device

Existing wearable hand gesture interaction devices are very bulky and cannot be worn in everyday life, because of the presence of a large visual feedback device. In particular, an eyeglass-type head-mounted display is very large for constant usage. To solve this problem, we propose Brainy Hand, which is a simple wearable device that adopts laser line, or more specifically, a mini-projector as a visual feedback device. Brainy Hand consists of a color camera, an earphone, and a laser line or mini-projector. This device uses a camera to detect 3D hand gestures. The earphone is used for receiving audio feedback. In this study, we introduce several user interfaces using Brainy Hand. (e.g., music player, phone)
Texture self-similarity measure method and its application

According to the definition of texture and the self-similar characteristics of texture, we introduce the quantify method which computes the texture self-similarity from the structure and appearance details. This method can effectively distinguish the obvious structural textures, and the results of this method and the subjective evaluation results are consistent. In addition, we give two applications: the texture category and the evaluation of texture synthesis results.
Fuzzy Logic in Sports: A Review and an Illustrative Case Study in the Field of Strength Training

ABSTRACT As a special form of probabilistic reasoning, the fuzzy logic concept allows the effective realization of approximate, vague, uncertain, dynamic, continuous and, at the same time, more realistic conditions, which are closer to the actual physical world and human thinking. This many-valued idea involves the definition of fuzzy sets and rules as well membership functions. These techniques allow the mapping of classes of objects not only – according to the binary logic – to false (0) and true (1) but also to intermediate values in between. Based on this theorem, the particular purpose of this paper was to propose a fuzzy logic approach for the evaluation of strength training exercises. The motivation for the present study arose from previous research done in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) in sports, the effective number of multidisciplinary solutions integrating fuzzy logic methodologies and the lack of applications in the fields of sport and especially strength training. The conception takes into account gathered data from sensor-equipped machines as well as recommended suggestions and criteria regarding a proper execution. The final aim is to integrate the designed procedures into a computer-based coaching framework, returning automated feedback on the performed technique.
Waterfilling Gains O ( 1 / SNR ) at High SNR

We show that the gain for using a waterfilling power allocation instead of a flat allocation over non-singular channel components is negligible at high signal-to-noise ratios. Consider the standard additive noise communication channel with a quadratic power constraint. Although waterfilling provides the optimal input distribution for Gaussian noise channels, sub-optimal distributions are often not too bad. For example, [1] shows that transmitting at only 2 levels (either on or off) in each sub-channel loses very little. Similarly, [2], [3] show that the mutual information for an optimal waterfilling power allocation on any additive noise channel is at most 0.5 bits per real channel use higher than the mutual information for an independent, identically distributed, Gaussian input. Here we use elementary arguments to show that the gain in mutual information for the optimal waterfilling power allocation versus a flat power allocation over non-singular channel modes is at most O(SNR−1) where SNR denotes the signal-to-noise ratio parameter. When power is allocated across all n modes instead of only the k non-singular modes, the mutual information penalty (in bits per complex channel mode) is (k/n) log2(n/k) + O(SNR−1) (which is at most e−1 log2 e +O(SNR−1) ≈ . 53 +O(SNR−1)). In [3] this bound is tightened to show that the mutual information loss for a flat Gaussian input is at most e−1 log2 e ≈ . 53 bits per complex channel mode for any SNR. A. Problem Model and Notation We denote vectors and sequences in bold (e.g., x) with the ith element denoted as xi. Matrices are capitalized bold letters. Random variables are denoted using the sans serif font (e.g., x) while random vectors and sequences are denoted with bold sans serif (e.g., x). A variety of scenarios involve transmitting over a channel with different gains or noise powers which can be ergodic, non-ergodic, time-selective or frequency-selective. Since the role of waterfilling is essentially the same in all these cases, we focus on the following model and briefly mention how to translate the main results to other scenarios. The transmitter selects an n-vector, x, as input to the channel which produces the output y according to
Generating sketch based adaptive meshes

This work presents a new technique for generating the base mesh for an adaptive mesh generated by a sketch based modeling system. The method uses topology information of the region inside a closed curve to create a good quality base mesh, with controlled vertex valence, and few irregular vertices. The base mesh is refined using an inflation of the region inside the curve to form the final mesh. The user can control how to do the refinement operation including more details where it is necessary. Keywords-Base mesh generation; Adaptive meshes; Sketch based modeling
Dynamics of the radio galaxy 3C 449

We present ROSAT PSPC observations of the twin-jet radio galaxy 3C 449. The soft X-ray emission from this object is dominated by an extended halo with a scale comparable to that of the radio source. The asymmetry of the X-ray emission is reflected in that of the radio lobes, providing evidence that the behaviour of the jets is strongly influenced by the external medium. A region of reduced X-ray surface brightness coincident with the southern radio lobe of 3C 449 suggests that the radio source has displaced thermal plasma from the X-ray-emitting halo. However, the minimum pressure in the radio lobe is considerably lower than our estimates of the pressure in the external medium. We discuss the implications for the dynamics of the radio source.
60-GHz System-on-Package Transmitter Integrating Sub-Harmonic Frequency Amplitude Shift-Keying Modulator

This paper proposes a simple low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) integrated transmitter using sub-harmonic amplitude shift-keying modulation for 60-GHz wireless communications applications. The transmitter system-on-package (SoP) has been monolithically implemented with a six-layer LTCC block embedding a resonator, modulator, and antenna and two active circuits, including a negative resistance generator and frequency doubler on the block. The transmitter SoP integrating whole millimeter-wave circuitry is as small as 26 times 18 times 0.6 mm3, which needs external interfaces only for supplying dc power and digital input signal. The fabricated transmitter SoP reveals a bit error rate of 10-11 and good eye pattern through a 2.5-m transmission of 800-Mb/s data.
Prevalence, laterality, and comorbidity of hippocampal sclerosis in an autopsy sample

Hippocampal sclerosis (HS) is a common and often asymmetric neuropathological finding among elderly persons who experience progressive memory loss, but its cause is unknown and it is rarely diagnosed during life. In order to improve both understanding and diagnosis of late‐life HS, bilateral hippocampi and cerebral hemispheres were reviewed in 130 consecutive autopsy cases drawn from a longitudinal study of subjects with subcortical ischemic vascular dementia (IVD), Alzheimer disease (AD) and normal aging. HS was found in 31 of 130 cases (24.5%). Of these, 45% were bilateral, 32% left‐sided, and 23% right‐sided. The majority of HS cases involved the entire rostral‐caudal extent of the hippocampus. However, in 7 cases HS was focal in nature and was only found at or anterior to the lateral geniculate nucleus. In 77% of cases, HS was accompanied by other types of pathology (‘mixed’ HS), but in 23% of cases it was the sole neuropathologic finding (‘pure’ HS). TDP‐43‐positive cytoplasmic inclusions were found in dentate granule cells in 93% of all HS cases, 55% of AD cases with no HS, but 0% of IVD cases with no HS. MRI hippocampal volumes were significantly lower in bilateral HS compared to AD (p < 0.001) and in unilateral HS cases compared to cases with intact hippocampi (p < 0.001).
Error sensitivity of JPEG2000 codestream for efficient data protection on unreliable networks

Lossy compressed data, and multimedia content by extension can afford some further losses or degradation in lossy networks without removing its meaning. Still images coded by JPEG2000 exhibit a codestream hierarchically built with codeblock contributions organized in packets across quality layers and resolutions. In this paper we show how the image suffers from missing contributions in accordance with information available in packet header, with the layer inclusion tag especially. Our goal is to determine the level of importance of JPEG2000 packets with the only knowledge of the headers for efficient data protection on unreliable network.
A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR UTILIZING DATA WAREHOUSING TO PREDICT INFORMATION SECURITY THREATS

Many organizations have implemented information security countermeasures to detect, minimize, and defend against information security threats, or breaches. Most of these countermeasures have traditionally adopted a passive approach to securing corporate data. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for utilizing an information security data warehouse to identify security breach patterns, in order to predict when potential breaches are most likely to occur, thus taking a more proactive approach to securing information assets.
Instrumentation of standard libraries in object-oriented languages: the twin class hierarchy approach

Code instrumentation is widely used for a range of purposes that include profiling, debugging, visualization, logging, and distributed computing. Due to their special status within the language infrastructure, the standard class libraries, also known as system classes provided by most contemporary object-oriented languages are difficult and sometimes impossible to instrument. If instrumented, the use of their rewritten versions within the instrumentation code is usually unavoidable. However, this is equivalent to `instrumenting the instrumentation', and thus may lead to erroneous results. Consequently, most systems avoid rewriting system classes. We present a novel instrumentation strategy that alleviates the above problems by renaming the instrumented classes. The proposed approach does not require any modifications to the language, compiler or runtime. It allows system classes to be instrumented both statically and dynamically. In fact, this is the first technique that enables dynamic instrumentation of Java system classes without modification of any runtime components. We demonstrate our approach by implementing two instrumentation-based systems: a memory profiler and a distributed runtime for Java.
MP48-12 ACTIVE SURVEILLANCE OF VERY LOW AND LOW RISK PROSTATE CANCER: LONG-TERM OUTCOMES FROM A LARGE PROSPECTIVE COHORT

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: Active surveillance (AS) is a first-line management option for men with very low risk (VLR) and low risk (LR) prostate cancer. We sought to assess and describe long-term clinical outcomes and the optimal approach to AS. METHODS: Prospectively-defined cohort study initiated in January 1995 and followed clinically through July 2018, comprised of men diagnosed with VLR (n=1293) or LR (n=525) prostate cancer who elected initial management with AS in favor of immediate definitive therapy. The 10- and 15-year cumulative incidence were evaluated using a competing risk analysis for primary outcomes: all-cause mortality, prostate cancer-specific mortality or metastatic disease; and secondary outcomes: biopsy grade reclassification (BGR) to Grade Group (GG) ≥ 2, BGR to GG ≥ 3, and curative intervention. Additionally, the use of targeted biopsy was assessed. RESULTS: 1818 men (median age 66, IQR 61 -69) were enrolled in AS during the study period with a median follow-up of 5.0 years (range 0.01-20.0); 920 men ≥5 years and 305 ≥10 years. The median interval between surveillance biopsies was 13 months (IQR 12 -15). There were 88 deaths due to causes other than prostate cancer, 4 deaths due to prostate cancer, and a total of 10 patients who experienced prostate cancer death or metastatic disease (6 VLR and 4 LR). The cumulative incidence of prostate cancer death or metastasis was 0.6% at 10 years and 1.4% at 15 years. The cumulative hazard ratio of non-prostate-cancer death to prostate cancer death or metastasis was 26:1 (Figure). The 10- and 15-year cumulative incidence of BGR to GG ≥ 2, BGR to GG ≥ 3, and curative intervention was 30% and 32%; 10% and 11%; and 48% and 52%, respectively. The median treatment free survival was 11 years. Since it was introduced, the use of targeted biopsy significantly increased from 21% in 2014 to 36% in 2017 (p= <0.001), while misclassification rates, i.e., BGR within first 2 surveillance biopsies, significantly decreased from 21% in 2014 to 7% in 2017 (p = 0.002). CONCLUSIONS: In a large, single-institution, prospective AS cohort under careful monitoring, the risk of cancer death or metastasis was low over long-term follow-up. These data continue to support the use of AS in the management of most patients with favorable-risk prostate cancer. Figure. No caption available. Source of Funding: none