Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An integrated NTP-RTCP solution to audio skew detection and compensation for VoIP applications

The circuit switched POTS (plain old telephone system) preserves the timing relationship between media samples from sender to receiver through use of a common clock. For PC-based Internet multimedia, the existence of separate audio and system clocks on either end-host can introduce significant complications. Much work has taken place in recent years that addresses the issue of system clock skew and its effect on precise delay measurement. In a voice over IP (VoIP) environment, where adaptive buffering techniques are employed, system and audio clock skew can distort both delay measurement and playout control as well as lead to poor buffer performance. This paper presents a high level mechanism to measure and compensate for the skew relationships between system and audio clocks at each end of a multimedia session. The mechanism utilises both the network time protocol (NTP) and the RTP (realtime transport protocol) control protocol or RTCP. Preliminary and positive results are presented from a testbed system and plans for further work are outlined.
Allophonic and Phonemic Contrasts in Infants' Learning of Sound Patterns

French-learning 11-month-old and English-learning 11- and 4-month-old infants were familiarized with consonant–vowel–consonant syllables in which the final consonants were dependent on whether the preceding vowel was oral or nasal. Oral and nasal vowels are present in the ambient language of all participants, but vowel nasality is phonemic (contrastive) in French and allophonic (noncontrastive) in English. After familiarization, infants heard novel syllables that either followed or violated the familiarized patterns. French-learning 11-month-olds and English-learning 4-month-olds displayed a reliable pattern of preference demonstrating learning and generalization of the patterns, while English-learning 11-month-olds oriented equally to syllables following and violating the familiarized patterns. The results are consistent with an experience-driven reduction of attention to allophonic contrasts by as early as 11 months, which influences phonotactic learning.
Emerging molecular targets in the treatment of bacterial meningitis

The mortality and morbidity associated with bacterial meningitis have remained significant despite advances in antimicrobial chemotherapy and supportive care. A major contributing factor to this high mortality and morbidity is our incomplete understanding of the pathogenesis of this disease and its associated neurological sequelae. Most cases of bacterial meningitis develop as a result of haematogenous spread, but it is unclear how circulating bacteria cross the blood–brain barrier. Experimental animal studies indicate that two forms of neuronal injury, such as necrotic cortical injury and apoptotic hippocampal injury, are predominant in bacterial meningitis, but the mechanisms by which these two forms of injury occur are unclear. Recent studies have identified several bacteria–host determinants for bacterial translocation of the blood–brain barrier, and several host inflammatory markers that are associated with neuronal injury in animal models of experimental bacterial meningitis. These determinants/markers may provide important targets for the prevention and treatment of bacterial meningitis. This review focuses on representative steps in the pathogenesis of bacterial meningitis that are likely to be key targets in coming years, and summarises the status of current knowledge for each target.
Executive Pay, Earnings Manipulation and Shareholder Litigation

The paper examines the impact of executive compensation on private securities litigation. We find that incentive pay in the form of options increases the probability of securities class action litigation, holding constant a wide range of firm characteristics. We further document that there is abnormal upward earnings manipulation during litigation class periods and that insiders exercise more options and sell more shares during class periods, but that this activity is largely driven by pre-existing option holdings of the managers. Our results suggest that option-based compensation may have the unintended side effect of giving executives an incentive to focus excessively on the short term share price.
Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications Algorithms and Bounds for Overloaded Orthogonal Drawings

Orthogonal drawings are widely used for graph visualization due to their high clarity and ease of representation. But when it comes to high-degree and massive graphs, even orthogonal drawings have difficulties producing a clean and simple visualization. In this paper we present a technique called Overloaded Orthogonal Drawing that greatly improves the readability by proposing a new vertex placement and reframing the orthogonal edge routing approach. We first place the vertices on grid points following a relaxed version of dominance drawing, called weak dominance condition. Edge routing is implied automatically by the vertex coordinates. In order to simplify these drawings we use an overloading technique of the edges. All algorithms are simple and easy to implement and can be applied to directed acyclic graphs, planar, non-planar and undi-rected graphs. We also present bounds on the number of bends and the area. Overloaded orthogonal drawings present several interesting properties such as efficient visual edge confirmation as well as clarity of the drawing.
Posttreatment Assessment of Women at Risk of Developing High-Grade Cervical Disease: Proposal for New Guidelines Based on Data From The Netherlands

Objective Women treated for high-grade cervical disease (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 2 or grade 3 [CIN2/3]) face a significant risk of developing post-treatment disease. Therefore, in most European countries, they are monitored by cytologic testing at 6, 12, and 24 months after treatment. Although testing for high-risk types of the human papillomavirus (hrHPV) in the follow-up seems to be a valuable supplementary method, its use is not yet fully explored. Methods Besides reviewing the literature, we completed a long-term follow-up study describing the cumulative risk for CIN2/3 or cancer (CIN2+) of different hrHPV and cytology test results after treatment. Conclusions High-risk HPV testing improves the sensitivity to detect posttreatment CIN2/3 (relative sensitivity = 1.15, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.06–1.25), but the highest sensitivity (95%, 95% CI = 91%–98%) is reached by performing cotesting (both cytology and hrHPV). The CIN2+ risk after a single negative cotesting result taken 6 months after treatments was similar to the risk after 3 consecutive negative cytologic test results (5-y CIN2+ risk being 3.0% [95% CI = 1.5%–6.1%] and 2.9% [95% CI = 1.2%–7.1%], respectively). Women who test negative for cotesting at both 6 and 24 months after treatment have a minimal risk of developing CIN3+ in the next 5 years (0.0%, 95% CI = 0.0%–3.0%). Recommendations We propose a new posttreatment surveillance protocol, consisting of combined testing with both cytology and hrHPV at 6 and 24 months after treatment. After 2 negative cotesting results, women should be retested after 5 years.
Fast Inter-MAP Handover in HMIPv6

A scheme that supports a fast handover effectively in hierarchical mobile IPv6 networks (HMIPv6) is presented. In HMIPv6 when a mobile node (MN) moves from a MAP domain to another, it can experience disruption of connection as well as packet loss due to a long handover latency. To cope with these problems, the fast handover scheme from FMIPv6 is adopted to optimize the performance of the inter-MAP handover. The handover latency for various protocols is compared to the proposed scheme with analytical model. The results show that the proposed scheme is better approach to handle the mobile node’s movement than the other protocols.
Socioeconomic disparities in health: the impact of pharmacotherapy

Along with age and gender, socioeconomic status is a fundamental driver of health. This review discusses the meaning of socioeconomic status and how it influences health across a person’s life. Particular attention is paid to the role of psychosocial stress and self-determination. Through various pathways, socioeconomic status may affect biologic aging. This review also discusses the implications of the socioeconomic status–health relationship for understanding international differences in population health such as differences in life expectancy. The review concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for national policies and the potential impact of pharmacotherapy.
Effect of Sipjeondaebo-Tang on Cancer-Induced Anorexia and Cachexia in CT-26 Tumor-Bearing Mice

Cancer-associated anorexia and cachexia are a multifactorial condition described by a loss of body weight and muscle with anorexia, asthenia, and anemia. Moreover, they correlate with a high mortality rate, poor response to chemotherapy, poor performance status, and poor quality of life. Cancer cachexia is regulated by proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-6 (IL-6), monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α). In addition, glucagon like peptide-1 (GIP-1), peptide YY (PYY), ghrelin, and leptin plays a crucial role in food intake. In this study, we investigated the therapeutic effects of one of the traditional herbal medicines, Sipjeondaebo-tang (Juzen-taiho-to in Japanese; SJDBT), on cancer anorexia and cachexia in a fundamental mouse cancer anorexia/cachexia model, CT-26 tumor-bearing mice. SJDBT was more significantly effective in a treatment model where it was treated after anorexia and cachexia than in a prevention model where it was treated before anorexia and cachexia on the basis of parameters such as weights of muscles and whole body and food intakes. Moreover, SJDBT inhibited a production of IL-6, MCP-1, PYY, and GLP-1 and ameliorated cancer-induced anemia. Therefore, our in vivo studies provide evidence on the role of SJDBT in cancer-associated anorexia and cachexia, thereby suggesting that SJDBT may be useful for treating cancer-associated anorexia and cachexia.
Kaposi's Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus (Human Herpesvirus 8) Contains Two Functional Lytic Origins of DNA Replication

ABSTRACT We used a transient-transfection replication assay to identify two functional copies of the human herpesvirus 8 (HHV8) lytic origin of DNA replication (oriLyt). BCLB-1 cells were transfected with HHV8 subgenomic fragments containing the putative lytic origin along with a plasmid expressing viral transactivator open reading frame (ORF) 50. The HHV8 left-end oriLyt (oriLyt-L) lies between ORFs K4.2 and K5 and is composed of a region encoding various transcription factor binding sites and an A+T-rich region and a G+C repeat region. The right-end oriLyt (oriLyt-R) maps between ORF 69 and vFLIP, a region similar to the RRV oriLyt, and is an inverted duplication of oriLyt-L.
Development of a new miniaturized 300-MHZ frequency band antenna for wireless microsensor nodes

This paper describes the development of a miniaturized 300-MHz band antenna that is effective for small wireless sensor nodes for human and animal health monitoring. We have proposed a new concept of antenna miniaturization using magnetic materials and optimized the design of the new antenna taking the advantage of 3 dimensional full-wave electromagnetic field simulations. Also, its fabrication process including the machining of ferrite substrates and mask-less printing has been developed.
High fluence low‐power laser irradiation induces apoptosis via inactivation of Akt/GSK3β signaling pathway

High fluence low‐power laser irradiation (HF‐LPLI) is a newly discovered stimulus through generating reactive oxygen species (ROS) to trigger cell apoptosis. Activation of glycogen synthase kinase 3β (GSK3β) is proved to be involved in intrinsic apoptotic pathways under various stimuli. However, whether the proapoptotic factor GSK3β participates in HF‐LPLI‐induced apoptosis has not been elucidated. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated the involvement of GSK3β in apoptosis under HF‐LPLI treatment (120 J/cm2, 633 nm). We found that GSK3β activation could promote HF‐LPLI‐induced apoptosis, which could be prevented by lithium chloride (a selective inhibitor of GSK3β) exposure or by GSK3β‐KD (a dominant‐negative GSK3β) overexpression. We also found that the activation of GSK3β by HF‐LPLI was due to the inactivation of protein kinase B (Akt), a widely reported and important upstream negative regulator of GSK3β, indicating the existence and inactivation of Akt/GSK3β signaling pathway. Moreover, the inactivation of Akt/GSK3β pathway depended on the fluence of HF‐LPLI treatment. Furthermore, vitamin c, a ROS scavenger, completely prevented the inactivation of Akt/GSK3β pathway, indicating ROS generation was crucial for the inactivation. In addition, GSK3β promoted Bax activation by down‐regulating Mcl‐1 upon HF‐LPLI treatment. Taken together, we have identified a new and important proapoptotic signaling pathway that is consisted of Akt/GSK3β inactivation for HF‐LPLI stimulation. Our research will extend the knowledge into the biological mechanisms induced by LPLI. J. Cell. Physiol. 226: 588–601, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Personicle: Personal Chronicle of Life Events

This paper presents an overview and early results of our project to build a framework for integrating, aggregating, and analyzing heterogeneous personal data streams to build persona and use it to recognize evolving personal situation. Using increasing volumes of heterogeneous personal data streams, we recognize first movements and personal situations for providing individuals actionable information and insights. We demonstrate recognition of high-level life events through simultaneous use of asynchronous observations consisting of continuous GPS and accelerometer measurements. The main contributions of our framework will be to develop an architecture to integrate, store, and analyze data from heterogeneous data streams; detect low level physical activities using various unobtrusive sensors embedded in a mobile phone; and design a hierarchical classifier that identifies high-level life events using location context and physical activity and create a chronicle of life events called Personicle. We plan to collect test data sets and make them available publicly as a resource to other researchers.
Modeling Suspicious Email Detection using Enhanced Feature Selection

The paper presents a suspicious email detection model which incorporates enhanced feature selection. In the paper we proposed the use of feature selection strategies along with classification technique for terrorists email detection. The presented model focuses on the evaluation of machine learning algorithms such as decision tree (ID3), logistic regression, Na\"ive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for detecting emails containing suspicious content. In the literature, various algorithms achieved good accuracy for the desired task. However, the results achieved by those algorithms can be further improved by using appropriate feature selection mechanisms. We have identified the use of a specific feature selection scheme that improves the performance of the existing algorithms.
Identification and Characterization of the HicAB Toxin-Antitoxin System in the Opportunistic Pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are small genetic modules that are widely distributed in the genomes of bacteria and archaea and have been proposed to fulfill numerous functions. Here, we describe the identification and characterization of a type II TA system, comprising the hicAB locus in the human opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The hicAB locus consists of genes hicA and hicB encoding a toxin and its cognate antitoxin, respectively. BLAST analysis revealed that hicAB is prevalent in approximately 36% of P. aeruginosa strains and locates in the same genomic region. RT-PCR demonstrated that hicAB forms a bicistronic operon that is cotranscribed under normal growth conditions. Overproduction of HicA inhibited the growth of Escherichia coli, and this effect could be counteracted by co-expression of HicB. The Escherichia coli kill/rescue assay showed that the effect of HicA is bacteriostatic, rather than bactericidal. Deletion of hicAB had no effect on the biofilm formation and virulence of P. aeruginosa in a mice infection model. Collectively, this study presents the first characterization of the HicAB system in the opportunistic pathogen P. aeruginosa.
Endoscopic nasopharyngectomy for salvage in nasopharyngeal carcinoma: A novel anatomic orientation

Nasopharyngectomy for residual/recurrent nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) using an endoscopic technique is less invasive than traditional methods. Our objective was to identify the important anatomic landmarks so that the endoscopic surgeon can avoid injury to the internal carotid artery and perform a nasopharyngectomy safely.
Edge‐Effect Interactions in Fragmented and Patchy Landscapes

Ecological edges are increasingly recognized as drivers of landscape patterns and ecosystem processes. In fragmented and patchy landscapes (e.g., a fragmented forest or a savanna with scattered termite mounds), edges can become so numerous that their effects pervade the entire landscape. Results of recent studies in such landscapes show that edge effects can be altered by the presence or proximity of other nearby edges. We considered the theoretical significance of edge‐effect interactions, illustrated various landscape configurations that support them and reviewed existing research on this topic. Results of studies from a variety of locations and ecosystem types show that edge‐effect interactions can have significant consequences for ecosystems and conservation, including higher tree mortality rates in tropical rainforest fragments, reduced bird densities in grassland fragments, and bush encroachment and reduced wildlife densities in a tropical savanna. To clarify this underappreciated concept and synthesize existing work, we devised a conceptual framework for edge‐effect interactions. We first worked to reduce terminological confusion by clarifying differences among terms such as edge intersection and edge interaction. For cases in which nearby edge effects interact, we proposed three possible forms of interaction: strengthening (presence of a second edge causes stronger edge effects), weakening (presence of a second edge causes weaker edge effects), and emergent (edge effects change completely in the presence of a second edge). By clarifying terms and concepts, this framework enables more precise descriptions of edge‐effect interactions and facilitates comparisons of results among disparate study systems and response variables. A better understanding of edge‐effect interactions will pave the way for more appropriate modeling, conservation, and management in complex landscapes.
Multispectral Image Acquisition and Simulation of Illuminant Changes

In this chapter we describe a system for the acquisition of multispectral images using a CCD camera with carefully selected optical filters. We further present an application where the acquired multispectral images are used to simulate the image of a scene as it would have appeared under a given illuminant. For this application, the use of multispectral images is found to yield a much higher accuracy compared to traditional methods using only three-channel colour images.
Learning juntas

We consider a fundamental problem in computational learning theory: learning an arbitrary Boolean function which depends on an unknown set of <i>k</i> out of <i>n</i> Boolean variables. We give an algorithm for learning such functions from uniform random examples which runs in time roughly <i>(n<sup>k</sup>)<sup>ω/(ω + 1)</sup>,</i> where <i>ω < 2.376</i> is the matrix multiplication exponent. We thus obtain the first polynomial factor improvement on the naive <i>n<sup>k</sup></i> time bound which can be achieved via exhaustive search. Our algorithm and analysis exploit new structural properties of Boolean functions.
Deletion of Specific Immune-Modulatory Genes from Modified Vaccinia Virus Ankara-Based HIV Vaccines Engenders Improved Immunogenicity in Rhesus Macaques

ABSTRACT Modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) is a safe, attenuated orthopoxvirus that is being developed as a vaccine vector but has demonstrated limited immunogenicity in several early-phase clinical trials. Our objective was to rationally improve the immunogenicity of MVA-based HIV/AIDS vaccines via the targeted deletion of specific poxvirus immune-modulatory genes. Vaccines expressing codon-optimized HIV subtype C consensus Env and Gag antigens were generated from MVA vector backbones that (i) harbor simultaneous deletions of four viral immune-modulatory genes, encoding an interleukin-18 (IL-18) binding protein, an IL-1β receptor, a dominant negative Toll/IL-1 signaling adapter, and CC-chemokine binding protein (MVAΔ4-HIV); (ii) harbor a deletion of an additional (fifth) viral gene, encoding uracil-DNA glycosylase (MVAΔ5-HIV); or (iii) represent the parental MVA backbone as a control (MVA-HIV). We performed head-to-head comparisons of the cellular and humoral immune responses that were elicited by these vectors during homologous prime-boost immunization regimens utilizing either high-dose (2 × 108 PFU) or low-dose (1 × 107 PFU) intramuscular immunization of rhesus macaques. At all time points, a majority of the HIV-specific T cell responses, elicited by all vectors, were directed against Env, rather than Gag, determinants, as previously observed with other vector systems. Both modified vectors elicited up to 6-fold-higher frequencies of HIV-specific CD8 and CD4 T cell responses and up to 25-fold-higher titers of Env (gp120)-specific binding (nonneutralizing) antibody responses that were relatively transient in nature. While the correlates of protection against HIV infection remain incompletely defined, our results indicate that the rational deletion of specific genes from MVA vectors can positively alter their cellular and humoral immunogenicity profiles in nonhuman primates.
Service level routing on the Internet

There is an increasing need for Internet services that can be provided with a high degree of availability and quality of service guarantees. This work presents a backbone architecture for the Internet that supports the notion of a virtual host. Connections to such hosts are directed to a service level router at the border of an autonomous system and routed to an appropriate server host using multiple levels of tunneling. The mechanism routes individual service requests and as a result provides load balancing at finer granularity and shorter response times than existing domain name service (DNS) based load distribution schemes. Once a flow has been identified the service level router may be short-cut by tunneling directly from a (high performance) ingress router. The policy for routing connections to virtual hosts is based on a state update protocol that distributes aggregated resource availability information between the different levels of routing. User-defined routing policies for each virtual host can be incorporated in this mechanism. We give examples of applications that would benefit from our mechanisms, most importantly World Wide Web and multimedia streaming and make a comparison with other current approaches.