Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Look and lean: accurate head-assisted eye pointing

Compared to the mouse, eye pointing is inaccurate. As a consequence, small objects are difficult to point by gaze alone. We suggest using a combination of eye pointing and subtle head movements to achieve accurate hands-free pointing in a conventional desktop computing environment. For tracking the head movements, we exploited information of the eye position in the eye tracker's camera view. We conducted a series of three experiments to study the potential caveats and benefits of using head movements to adjust gaze cursor position. Results showed that head-assisted eye pointing significantly improves the pointing accuracy without a negative impact on the pointing time. In some cases participants were able to point almost 3 times closer to the target's center, compared to the eye pointing alone (7 vs. 19 pixels). We conclude that head assisted eye pointing is a comfortable and potentially very efficient alternative for other assisting methods in the eye pointing, such as zooming.
Tissue Plasminogen Activator Promotes Matrix Metalloproteinase-9 Upregulation After Focal Cerebral Ischemia

Background and Purpose— Thrombolytic therapy with tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) in ischemic stroke is limited by increased risks of cerebral hemorrhage and brain injury. In part, these phenomena may be related to neurovascular proteolysis mediated by matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs). Here, we used a combination of pharmacological and genetic approaches to show that tPA promotes MMP-9 levels in stroke in vivo. Methods— In the first experiment, spontaneously hypertensive rats were subjected to 3 hours of transient focal cerebral ischemia. The effects of tPA (10 mg/kg IV) on ischemic brain MMP-9 levels were assessed by zymography. In the second experiment, wild-type (WT) and tPA knockout mice were subjected to 2 hours of transient focal cerebral ischemia, and MMP-9 levels and brain edema during reperfusion were assessed. Phenotype rescue was performed by administering tPA to the tPA knockout mice. Results— In the first experiment, exogenous tPA did not change infarct size but amplified MMP-9 levels in ischemic rat brain at 24 hours. Coinfusion of the plasmin inhibitor tranexamic acid (300 mg/kg) did not ameliorate this effect, suggesting that it was independent of plasmin. In the second experiment, ischemic MMP-9 levels, infarct size, and brain edema in tPA knockouts were significantly lower than WT mice. Administration of exogenous tPA (10 mg/kg IV) did not alter infarction but reinstated the ischemic MMP-9 response back up to WT levels and correspondingly worsened edema. Conclusions— These data demonstrate that tPA upregulates brain MMP-9 levels in stroke in vivo, and suggest that combination therapies targeting MMPs may improve tPA therapy.
Speak the same language with your friends: augmenting tag recommenders with social relations

Many existing tag recommendation approaches ignore the social relations between users. In this paper, we investigate the role of such additional information for the task of personalized tag recommendation. We inject the social relations between users and the content similarities between resources, along with the social annotations made by collaborative users, into a graph representation. To fully explore the structure of this graph, we exploit the methodology of random-walk computation of similarities between all the objects. We develop a personalized collaborative filtering algorithm that combines both the collaborative information and the personalized tag preferences. Experiments on Delicious data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Low-degree-preferential random walk for information search

A random-walk-based (RW-based) information search makes a single query or multiple queries walk around a network to search for the target information. Local navigation rules, based on which a query chooses an adjacent node to move from the current location, are important for increasing the search speed of the RW-based information search. In the present paper, we focus on degree-dependent navigation rules that use information on the degrees of nodes adjacent to the query's location. We find that a low-degree-preferential RW, where the query preferentially moves a step to lower-degree nodes, exhibits better search performance than a high-degree-preferential or an unbiased RW. In the present paper, we present several theoretical and numerical results in order to support this rather surprising finding.
Stability criteria for linear discrete-time systems with interval-like time-varying delay

This paper is concerned with the stability problem for a class of uncertain linear discrete-time systems with time-varying delay. The delay is of an interval-like type, which means that both lower and upper bounds for the time-varying delay are available. The uncertainty under consideration is norm-bounded uncertainty. Based on Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional approach, delay-dependent stability criteria are obtained using a sum inequality which is first introduced and plays an important role in deriving stability conditions. The criteria are formulated in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). A numerical example is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed criteria.
Consensus Statement for Standard of Care in Spinal Muscular Atrophy

Spinal muscular atrophy is a neurodegenerative disease that requires multidisciplinary medical care. Recent progress in the understanding of molecular pathogenesis of spinal muscular atrophy and advances in medical technology have not been matched by similar developments in the care for spinal muscular atrophy patients. Variations in medical practice coupled with differences in family resources and values have resulted in variable clinical outcomes that are likely to compromise valid measure of treatment effects during clinical trials. The International Standard of Care Committee for Spinal Muscular Atrophy was formed in 2005, with a goal of establishing practice guidelines for clinical care of these patients. The 12 core committee members worked with more than 60 spinal muscular atrophy experts in the field through conference calls, e-mail communications, a Delphi survey, and 2 in-person meetings to achieve consensus on 5 care areas: diagnostic/new interventions, pulmonary, gastrointestinal/nutrition, orthopedics/rehabilitation, and palliative care. Consensus was achieved on several topics related to common medical problems in spinal muscular atrophy, diagnostic strategies, recommendations for assessment and monitoring, and therapeutic interventions in each care area. A consensus statement was drafted to address the 5 care areas according to 3 functional levels of the patients: nonsitter, sitter, and walker. The committee also identified several medical practices lacking consensus and warranting further investigation. It is the authors' intention that this document be used as a guideline, not as a practice standard for their care. A practice standard for spinal muscular atrophy is urgently needed to help with the multidisciplinary care of these patients.
Faces with Light Makeup Are Better Recognized than Faces with Heavy Makeup

Many women wear facial makeup to accentuate their appeal and attractiveness. Makeup may vary from natural (light) to glamorous (heavy), depending of the context of interpersonal situations, an emphasis on femininity, and current societal makeup trends. This study examined how light makeup and heavy makeup influenced attractiveness ratings and facial recognition. In a rating task, 38 Japanese women assigned attractiveness ratings to 36 Japanese female faces with no makeup, light makeup, and heavy makeup (12 each). In a subsequent recognition task, the participants were presented with 36 old and 36 new faces. Results indicated that attractiveness was rated highest for the light makeup faces and lowest for the no makeup faces. In contrast, recognition performance was higher for the no makeup and light make up faces than for the heavy makeup faces. Faces with heavy makeup produced a higher rate of false recognition than did other faces, possibly because heavy makeup creates an impression of the style of makeup itself, rather than the individual wearing the makeup. The present study suggests that light makeup is preferable to heavy makeup in that light makeup does not interfere with individual recognition and gives beholders positive impressions.
Hmm-based method to overcome spatiotemporal sign language recognition issues

Sign languages (SL) are the most accomplished forms of gestural communication. Therefore, their automatic analysis is a real challenge which is interestingly implied to their lexical and syntactic organization levels. Statements dealing with sign language occupy a significant interest in the Automatic Natural Language Processing (ANLP) domain. In this work, we are dealing with sign language recognition, in particular of French Sign Language (FSL). FSL has its own specificities, such as the simultaneity of several parameters, the important role of the facial expression or movement and the use of space for the proper utterance organization. Our object is to develop a new method based in HMM in order to overcome spatiotemporal sign language recognition issues.
Consensus of Multiagent Systems With Switching Jointly Reachable Interconnection and Time Delays

This paper addresses a leader-following consensus problem of a multiagent system with switching jointly reachable interconnection and noncoupling time delays. This problem arises naturally in real multiagent systems such as distributed sensing and collective motion. Neighbor-based rules are designed to realize controlling strategies for these agents described by double integrators. Although the interagent connection structures vary over time and the leader of related graphs may not be globally reachable, a sufficient condition to make all the agents follow the leader is given under a state-feedback switching signal, which is based on an appropriate partition of the state space. The consensus error is estimated in an even noisy environment. Finally, a simulation example is presented to verify the analytical results.
Análisis de enlaces en el espacio web de las universidades argentinas

This article presents the first results of a work on the characterization and analysis of samples of Argentina’s educative space web. Particularly, it corresponds to national universities, in which a three level study was carried, finding similar parameters wiht other samples from the space web. We consider that this tasks, together with the information about its use will allow to propose optimizations about the administration of the existant digital ressources and plann its development.
Diapycnal advection by double diffusion and turbulence in the ocean

Abstract : The role of double-diffusive mixing in the North Atlantic thermocline is considered. Mixing observations are analyzed in terms of the stability parameters for shear and double-diffusive convection, and a nondimensional ratio of dissipation rates. While the model for turbulence describes most dissipation occurring in high shear, dissipation in low shear is better described by the salt-finger model, and a method for estimating the salt-finger enhancement of the diapycnal haline diffusivity over the thermal diffusivity is proposed. These calculations suggest that salt-finger driven haline flux drives diapycnal downwelling in the upper thermocline. The role of turbulence occurring above rough bathymetry in the abyssal Brazil Basin is also considered. The mixing levels along sloping bathymetry exceed the levels observed on ridge crests and canyon floors. Additionally, mixing levels modulated in phase with the spring-neap tidal cycle. A model of the dissipation rate is derived and used to specify the turbulent mixing rate and constrain the diapycnal advection in an inverse model for the steady circulation. The inverse model solution reveals the presence of a secondary circulation with zonal character. These results suggest that mixing in abyssal canyons plays an important role in the mass budget of Antarctic Bottom Water.
Low Hopes, High Expectations

This article revisits two classical issues in experimental methodology: experimenter bias and demand characteristics. We report a content analysis of the method section of experiments reported in two psychology journals (Psychological Science and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), focusing on aspects of the procedure associated with these two phenomena, such as mention of the presence of the experimenter, suspicion probing, and handling of deception. We note that such information is very often absent, which prevents observers from gauging the extent to which such factors influence the results. We consider the reasons that may explain this omission, including the automatization of psychology experiments, the evolution of research topics, and, most important, a view of research participants as passive receptacles of stimuli. Using a situated social cognition perspective, we emphasize the importance of integrating the social context of experiments in the explanation of psychological phenomena. We illustrate this argument via a controversy on stereotype-based behavioral priming effects.
Whiteboard Icons to Support the Blood-Test Process in an Emergency Department: An Observational Study of Temporal Patterns

The competent treatment of emergency department (ED) patients requires an effective and efficient process for handling laboratory tests such as blood tests. This study investigates how ED clinicians go about the process, from ordering blood tests to acknowledging their results and, specifically, assesses the use of whiteboard icons to support this process. On the basis of observation and interviews we find that the blood-test process is intertwined with multiple other temporal patterns in ED work. The whiteboard icons, which indicate four temporally distinct steps in the blood-test process, support the nurses in maintaining the flow of patients through the ED and the physicians in assessing test results at timeouts. The main results of this study are, however, that the blood-test process is temporally and collaboratively complex, that the whiteboard icons pass by most of this complexity, that attending to the icons is yet another temporally sensitive activity to remember, and that whereas the assessment of test results is integral to patient treatment, the acknowledgement of having seen the results is a formal add-on, the responsibility for which is sometimes unclear.
Efficient Detection of Distributed Constraint Violations

In many distributed environments, the primary function of monitoring software is to detect anomalies, i.e., instances when system behavior deviates substantially from the norm. In this paper, we propose communication-efficient schemes for the anomaly detection problem, which we model as one of detecting the violation of global constraints defined over distributed system variables. Our approach eliminates the need to continuously track the global system state by decomposing global constraints into local constraints that can be checked efficiently at each site. Only in the occasional event that a local constraint is violated, do we resort to more expensive global constraint checking. We show that the problem of selecting the local constraints, based on frequency distribution of individual system variables, so as to minimize the communication cost is NP-hard. We propose approximation algorithms for computing provably near-optimal (in terms of the number of messages) local constraints. Experimental results with real-life network traffic data sets demonstrate that our technique can reduce message communication overhead by as much as 70% compared to existing data distribution-agnostic approaches.
A Re-Evaluation of the Nature of Speech Errors in Normal and Disordered Speakers

Abstract It is well known that speech errors in normal and aphasic speakers share cer-tain key characteristics. Traditionally, many of these errors are regarded as serial misorderings of abstract phonological segments, which maintain the phonetic well-formedness of the utterance. The current paper brings together the results of several articulatory studies undertaken independently for both subject popula-tions. These show that, in an error, instead of one segment substituting for another, two segments are often produced simultaneously even though only one segment may be heard. Such data pose problems for current models of speech production by suggesting that the commonly assumed dichotomous distinction between phonological and phonetic errors may not be tenable in the current form or may even be altogether redundant.
4×25 Gb/s Transceiver With Optical Front-end for 100 GbE System in 65 nm CMOS Technology

This paper presents a fully-integrated chipset for 4×25 Gb/s transceiver gearbox along with laser driver and photo detector front-ends. The transceiver provides 10:4 multiplexing and 4:10 demultiplexing conversion, with built-in clock generation, equalization, and amplification. The optical front-ends are realized as 4-element arrays, presenting remarkable performance with commercial vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers and photodiodes. Feedforward equalizers and continuous-time linear equalizers are employed to compensate for loss and distortion in both electrical and optical domains. Fabricated in 65 nm CMOS technology, these chips can be lumped together as a compact module with performance exceeding typical 100 GbE standards.
New Approximation to the One-sided Radial Crossing Minimization

In this paper, we study a crossing minimization problem in a radial drawing of a graph. Radial drawings have strong application in social network visualization, for example, displaying centrality indices of actors [20]. The main problem of this paper is called the one-sided radial crossing minimization between two concentric circles, named orbits, where the positions of vertices in the outer orbit are xed. The main task of the problem is to
Paclitaxel-resistant Human Ovarian Cancer Cells Undergo c-Jun NH2-terminal Kinase-mediated Apoptosis in Response to Noscapine*

We have previously discovered the opium alkaloid noscapine as a microtubule interacting agent that binds to tubulin, alters the dynamics of microtubule assembly, and arrests mammalian cells at mitosis (Ye, K., Ke, Y., Keshava, N., Shanks, J., Kapp, J. A., Tekmal, R. R., Petros, J., and Joshi, H. C. (1998) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 95, 1601–1606; Ye, K. , Zhou, J., Landen, J. W. , Bradbury, E. M. , and Joshi, H. C. (2001) J. Biol. Chem. 276, 46697–46700; Zhou, J., Panda, D. , Landen, J. W. , Wilson, L. , and Joshi, H. C. (2002) J. Biol. Chem. 277, 17200–17208). Here we show that noscapine does not compete with paclitaxel for tubulin binding and can efficiently inhibit the proliferation of both paclitaxel-sensitive and paclitaxel-resistant human ovarian carcinoma cells (i.e. the parental cell line 1A9 and two derivative cell lines, 1A9PTX10 and 1A9PTX22, which harbor β-tubulin mutations that impair paclitaxel-tubulin interaction (Giannakakou, P., Sackett, D. L., Kang, Y. K., Zhan, Z., Buters, J. T., Fojo, T., and Poruchynsky, M. S. (1997) J. Biol. Chem. 272, 17118–17125). Strikingly, these cells undergo apoptotic death upon noscapine treatment, accompanied by activation of the c-Jun NH2-terminal kinases (JNK). Furthermore, inhibition of JNK activity by treatment with antisense oligonucleotide or transfection with dominant-negative JNK blocks noscapine-induced apoptosis. These findings thus indicate a great potential for noscapine in the treatment of paclitaxel-resistant human cancers. In addition, our results suggest that the JNK pathway plays an essential role in microtubule inhibitor-induced apoptosis.
Computer-aided breast cancer detection and diagnosis of masses using difference of Gaussians and derivative-based feature saliency

A new model-based vision (MBV) algorithm is developed to find regions of interest (ROI's) corresponding to masses in digitized mammograms and to classify the masses as malignant/benign. The MBV algorithm is comprised of 5 modules to structurally identify suspicious ROI's, eliminate false positives, and classify the remaining as malignant or benign. The focus of attention module uses a difference of Gaussians (DoG) filter to highlight suspicious regions in the mammogram. The index module uses tests to reduce the number of nonmalignant regions from 8.39 to 2.36 per full breast image. Size, shape, contrast, and Laws texture features are used to develop the prediction module's mass models. Derivative-based feature saliency techniques are used to determine the best features for classification. Nine features are chosen to define the malignant/benign models. The feature extraction module obtains these features from all suspicious ROI's. The matching module classifies the regions using a multilayer perceptron neural network architecture to obtain an overall classification accuracy of 100% for the segmented malignant masses with a false-positive rate of 1.8 per full breast image. This system has a sensitivity of 92% for locating malignant ROI's. The database contains 272 images (12 b, 100 /spl mu/m) with 36 malignant and 53 benign mass images. The results demonstrate that the MBV approach provides a structured order of integrating complex stages into a system for radiologists.
Soil Conservation Through Sediment Trapping: A Review

Preventing the off‐site effects of soil erosion is an essential part of good catchment management. Most efforts are in the form of on‐site soil and water conservation measures. However, sediment trapping can be an alternative (additional) measure to prevent the negative off‐site effects of soil erosion. Therefore, not all efforts should focus solely on on‐site soil conservation but also on the safe routing of sediment‐laden flows and on creating sites and conditions where sediment can be trapped. Sediment trapping can be applied on‐site and off‐site and involves both vegetative and structural measures. This paper provides an extensive review of scientific journal articles, case studies and other reports that have assessed soil conservation efforts and the sediment trapping efficacy (STE) of vegetative and structural measures. The review is further illustrated through participatory field observation and stakeholders' interview. Vegetation type and integration of two or more measures are important factors influencing STE. In this review, the STE of most measures was evaluated either individually or in such combinations. In real landscape situations, it is not only important to select the most efficient erosion control measures but also to determine their optimum location in the catchment. Hence, there is a need for research that shows a more integrated determination of STE at catchment scale. If integrated measures are implemented at the most appropriate spatial locations within a catchment where they can disconnect landscape units from each other, they will decrease runoff velocity and sediment transport and, subsequently, reduce downstream flooding and sedimentation problems. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.