Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fostering Children’s Connection to Nature Through Authentic Situations: The Case of Saving Salamanders at School

The aim of this paper is to explore how children learn to form new relationships with nature. It draws on a longitudinal case study of children participating in a stewardship project involving the conservation of salamanders during the school day in Stockholm, Sweden. The qualitative method includes two waves of data collection: when a group of 10-year-old children participated in the project (2015) and 2 years after they participated (2017). We conducted 49 interviews with children as well as using participant observations and questionnaires. We found indications that children developed sympathy for salamanders and increased concern and care for nature, and that such relationships persisted 2 years after participation. Our rich qualitative data suggest that whole situations of sufficient unpredictability triggering free exploration of the area, direct sensory contact and significant experiences of interacting with a species were important for children’s development of affective relationships with the salamander species and with nature in an open-ended sense. Saving the lives of trapped animals enabled direct sensory interaction, feedback, increased understanding, and development of new skills for dynamically exploring further ways of saving species in an interactive process experienced as deeply meaningful, enjoyable and connecting. The behavioral setting instilled a sense of pride and commitment, and the high degree of responsibility given to the children while exploring the habitat during authentic situations enriched children’s enjoyment. The study has implications for the design of education programs that aim to connect children with nature and for a child-sensitive urban policy that supports authentic nature situations in close spatial proximity to preschools and schools.
Disguised plagiarism detection in Arabic text documents

Plagiarism detection is a challenging Natural Language Processing (NLP) task. Recently, many systems have been able to detect the simple verbatim reproduction (copy and paste). However, more disguised plagiarism techniques have been used in real plagiarism cases such as: rewording, synonym substitution, paraphrasing and text manipulation, which make the plagiarism detection task much more difficult. In this paper, we propose two approaches devoted to assist users in detecting plagiarism in Arabic natural language texts. The first approach is based on word-embedding, words alignment, and words weighting for the purpose of measuring the semantic similarity relationships among textual units. The second approach is based on Machine Learning (ML), where the characterisation is performed at the sentence level. We combine lexical, syntactic, and semantic features to assist the detection task. The Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Trees (DT), and Random Forests (RF) are investigated. The classifiers are trained and evaluated using the training dataset of the first Arabic Plagiarism Detection (AraPlagDet) shared task 2015. Our experimental results show that the proposed approaches achieve promising results compared to state-of-the-art Arabic plagiarism detection systems.
ANTIBACTERIAL ACTIVITY, FREE RADICAL SCAVENGING POTENTIAL, PHYTOCHEMICAL INVESTIGATION AND IN-VIVO TOXICITY STUDIES OF MEDICINAL PLANT EMBELIA BASAAL (R. & S.) A. DC.

Objective: Present extensive study on medicinal plant Embelia basaal (R. & S.) A. DC. was undertaken for evaluation and quantification of broad spectrum antibacterial activity, free radical scavenging potential, phytochemical investigation, development of high performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) fingerprint profile and in-vivo safety of the plant. Methods: Dried fruits of the plant were powdered and macerated in variety of solvents to obtain four extracts of different polarities. Antibacterial activity was evaluated using agar well diffusion assay. Most potent antibacterial extract of E. basaal was selected for further extensive studies. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values of the potent antibacterial extract were determined using broth macrodilution method as per Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute guidelines. Free radical scavenging activity was evaluated using 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl assay. Qualitative phytochemical tests, quantification of total phenolic contents and HPTLC fingerprint analysis were carried out for phytochemical investigation. The in-vivo safety of the plant was determined by conducting acute oral toxicity studies in mice as per Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development guidelines test no. 420. Results: Ethanol extract of E. basaal was found potent bactericidal against selected pathogens and chosen for further extensive studies. The extract exhibited significant free radical scavenging activity (inhibitory concentration 50 value=50 μg/mL). Phytochemical investigation revealed presence of phenolic compounds, terpenoids, tannins and alkaloids in the test extract and it was found safe in-vivo at a dose level of 2000 mg/kg body weight of an animal. Conclusion: E. basaal was found medicinally active in the present study. Its broad spectrum antibacterial activity, significant free radical scavenging potential and in-vivo safety will provide a platform for advance studies in the area. Keywords: Embelia basaal (R. & S.) A. DC. , Bactericidal activity, Free radical scavenging activity, Phytochemical investigation, High performance thin layer chromatography fingerprint, Acute oral toxicity.
An efficient retrieval algorithm for case structures using TRIE

Hierarchical classification is very comprehensive for human and a useful representation for many applications, such as selection of word translation of machine translation systems, semantic representation of natural language analysis, and so on. Especially, for the case structures, the case slot is generally restricted by hierarchical concepts. Case structures are a typical semantic representation for natural language understanding and it has semantic constraints, or roles, for noun phrases in the slot for a verb. Generally, semantic constraints are confirmed by hierarchical relationships between concepts of nouns and the input concepts. With growing hierarchical structures, the number of concepts increases and the length of numerical codes representing concepts becomes long. The frequency of determinations is very high for complex sentences. Multiple concepts correspond to one word. From these reasons, it costs a lot to determine whether a concept for a given word is a sub-concept for concepts of the case slot or not. This paper presents a fast method for determining the hierarchical relationships by introducing trie structures instead of a sequential storage of concept codes. The worst-case time complexity of the determination process by the presented method remarkably improves the one of the sequential storage, which depends on the number of concepts in the slot. The trie structures can be compressed by merging common transitions into one trie. From the simulation results, it is shown that the presented algorithm is 6 to 25 times faster than the sequential storage while keeping a smaller size of tries.
Using an Augmented Reality Device as a Distance-based Vision Aid—Promise and Limitations

SIGNIFICANCE For people with limited vision, wearable displays hold the potential to digitally enhance visual function. As these display technologies advance, it is important to understand their promise and limitations as vision aids. PURPOSE The aim of this study was to test the potential of a consumer augmented reality (AR) device for improving the functional vision of people with near-complete vision loss. METHODS An AR application that translates spatial information into high-contrast visual patterns was developed. Two experiments assessed the efficacy of the application to improve vision: an exploratory study with four visually impaired participants and a main controlled study with participants with simulated vision loss (n = 48). In both studies, performance was tested on a range of visual tasks (identifying the location, pose and gesture of a person, identifying objects, and moving around in an unfamiliar space). Participants' accuracy and confidence were compared on these tasks with and without augmented vision, as well as their subjective responses about ease of mobility. RESULTS In the main study, the AR application was associated with substantially improved accuracy and confidence in object recognition (all P < .001) and to a lesser degree in gesture recognition (P < .05). There was no significant change in performance on identifying body poses or in subjective assessments of mobility, as compared with a control group. CONCLUSIONS Consumer AR devices may soon be able to support applications that improve the functional vision of users for some tasks. In our study, both artificially impaired participants and participants with near-complete vision loss performed tasks that they could not do without the AR system. Current limitations in system performance and form factor, as well as the risk of overconfidence, will need to be overcome.
Unpackaging the genetics of mammalian fertility: strategies to Identify the “reproductive genome”†

Abstract Gene mutations, including different alleles of the same gene, are tremendously useful in deconstructing complex developmental systems, such as reproduction, into component molecular pathways. For this reason, great effort has been devoted in the past three decades to biased (reverse genetic) and unbiased (forward genetic) searches for new genes that impactmammalian reproduction and fertility. These efforts have more recently been complemented with international efforts to systematically mutate all mouse genes and to determine their phenotypes (essentially a hybrid of forward and reverse genetics). Here, we survey the available data on the relative productivity of these approaches in identifying fertility genes, estimate the number of protein-coding genes essential for fertility of males and females, and predict the next major directions in the genetics of reproduction and fertility. Summary Sentence Strategies to identify the entire repertoire of mammalian genes required for fertility are reviewed.
Open Multi-Agent Systems With Discrete States and Stochastic Interactions

We consider a multi-agent system in which agents arrive and depart from a network randomly as a Bernoulli process. Each agent that is active in the network must decide between two actions represented by 0 or 1. Each active agent then observes the action of a random neighbour and updates its preference towards a certain action. New agents that arrive into the network are activated with a random preference and action. This means that the notion of consensus in the standard sense can no longer be applied and instead, we provide conditions under which majority action preservation occurs when the number of agents is arbitrarily large. This property will imply that a large fraction of the active agent population will retain their action almost surely.
Investigation of injuries occurring within competitive waterskiing in the UK

International Journal of Exercise Science 6(1) : 29-42, 2013. To date, most waterskiing research has been on recreational waterskiers from the USA. Our aim was to determine if the tournament waterskiing population in the UK had the same injury patterns as these previously studied populations. We hypothesised that the number of injuries, body parts injured and type of injury would vary by gender, event and competitive level. An online questionnaire was distributed to all British Water Ski Federation (BWSF) tournament licence holders. There were 90 participants: 24 female and 66 male (mean age 37 ± 15). Chi- squared and Fishers Exact Test was used to analyse the data. Forty-five skiers reported 71 injuries. The most common body part injured was back/trunk (38.8%); the most common type of injury was strain/sprain (64.6%). There was no association between gender and incidence of injury, however males had significantly more strains and sprains than females. Skiers in the lower competitive levels reported significantly more falls than the higher-level skiers. Slalom skiers reported the most injuries (76.8%), with 23.2% of injures in jump and none in trick. A high percentage of strains and sprains highlight the need for more specific physical conditioning. Longitudinal studies are needed to make causal links between injury factors.
Variational Building Modeling from Urban MVS Meshes

In this paper, we introduce a method for building LOD (levels of detail) modeling from urban multi-view stereo (MVS) meshes. Using city MVS meshes as input, our algorithm proceeds in three main steps: segmentation, contour extraction and modeling. With the prior knowledge and span constraint, we first segment the scene with an adapted variational measure to discover the underlying structures. The next contour extraction step projects the vertical structures onto the ground as line segments and extract the facade contours from them with a Markov random field. In the last modeling step, the contours are used to label the roof sections out and extruded to generate models of LODs with semantics. Experiments on complex and noisy urban meshes show that our approach could generate compact and accurate building models when compared with stateof- art methods.
Parathyroid Hormone and Bone in Dialysis Patients

Bone maintains extracellular calcium levels through a system called bone remodeling. Parathyroid hormone (PTH) is the major initiator of this system, which is secreted by the information through calcium sensing receptor in parathyroid cells. PTH modifies calcified bone morphology through a process of its bone action. Therefore, extremely hyperactivated parathyroid function seen in patients with chronic kidney disease has been considered to have a negative impact on the bone mechanical properties. While skeletal deformities and fragility fractures were common among dialysis patients up to the 1970s, after which methods for the treatment of hyperparathyroidism were developed, we now seldom encounter those cases with severe secondary hyperparathyroidism in Japan. In a three‐dimensional morphometry of biopsied iliac bone samples obtained from dialysis patients, PTH level was inversely correlated with cortical bone thickness, however, this relationship disappeared among those with intact PTH < 1000 pg/mL. Higher PTH levels were associated with more complicated and irregular cancellous bone surface, but this change was not accompanied with decreased cancellous bone connectivity. These findings theoretically support the recent clinical study results that PTH levels no longer show a tight correlation with fracture risk in dialysis patients. Nevertheless, the use of calcium sensing receptor agonist is likely to be associated with reduced hip fracture risk in dialysis patients. Further study is needed to reveal its pharmacological mechanism on bone.
Automated hardware design using genetic programming, VHDL, and FPGAs

We have developed a completely automated approach to hardware design based on integrating three core technologies into one comprehensive system, namely genetic programming (GP), the VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Our system uses an automated GP engine, as opposed to a human designer, to evolve a hardware design composed of one or more FPGAs that will maximally achieve an application's software requirements. Several variants of our system exist; other variants are currently under development. The focus of this paper is to describe our original system design and its most recent revision to date.
Preoperative Assessment of Neural Elements in Lumbar Spinal Stenosis by Upright Magnetic Resonance Imaging: An Implication for Routine Practice?

Introduction Lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) is a kinetic-dependent disease typically aggravating during spinal loading. To date, assessment of LSS is usually performed with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, conventional supine MRI is associated with significant drawbacks as it does not truly reflect physiological loads, experienced by discoligamentous structures during erect posture. Consequently, supine MRI often fails to reveal the source of pain and/or disability caused by LSS. The present study sought to assess neural dimensions via MRI in supine, upright, and upright-hyperlordotic position in order to evaluate the impact of patient positioning on neural narrowing. Therefore, radiological measures such as neuroforaminal dimensions, central canal volume, sagittal listhesis, and lumbar lordosis at spinal level L4/5 were extracted and stratified according to patient posture. Materials and methods Overall, 10 subjects were enclosed in this experimental study. MRI was performed in three different positions: (1) 0° supine (SP), (2) 80° upright (UP), and (3) 80° upright + hyperlordotic (HY) posture. Upright MRI was conducted utilizing a 0.25T open-configuration scanner equipped with a rotatable examination bed allowing for true standing MRI. Radiographic outcome of upright MRI imaging was extracted and evaluated according to patient positioning. Results Upright MRI-based assessment of neural dimensions was successfully accomplished in all subjects. Overall, radiographic parameters revealed a significant decrease of neural dimensions from supine to upright position: Specifically, mean foraminal area decreased from SP to UP by 13.3% (P ≤ 0.05) as well as from SP to HY position by 21% (P ≤ 0.05). Supplementation of hyperlordosis did not result in additional narrowing of neural elements (P ≥ 0.05). Furthermore, central canal volume revealed a decrease of 7% at HY and 8% at UP compared to SP position (P ≥ 0.05). Assessment of lumbar lordosis yielded in a significant increase when assessed at HY (+22.1%) or UP (+8.7%) compared to SP (P ≤ 0.05). Conclusions Our data suggest that neuroforaminal dimensions assessed by conventional supine MRI are potentially overestimated in patients with LSS. Especially, in patients having occult disease not visualized on conventional imaging modalities, upright MRI allows for a precise, clinically relevant, and at the same time non-invasive evaluation of neural elements in LSS when neural decompression is considered.
3 D Line Segment Detection for Unorganized Point Clouds from Multiview Stereo

This paper presents a fast and reliable approach for detecting 3D line segment on the unorganized point clouds from multi-view stereo. The core idea is to discover weak matching of line segments by re-projecting 3D point to 2D image plane and infer 3D line segment by spatial constraints. On the basis of 2D line segment detector and multiview stereo, the proposed algorithm firstly re-projects the spatial point clouds into planar set on different camera matrices; then finds the best re-projection line from tentative matched points. Finally, 3D line segment is produced by back-projection after outlier removal. In order to remove the matching errors caused by re-projection, a plane clustering method is implemented. Experimental results show that the approach can obtain satisfactory 3D line detection visually as well as high computational efficiency. The proposed fast line detection can be extended in the application of 3D sketch for large-scale scenes from multiple images.
Title Quantitative characterization and analysis of the dynamic NF-kappaB response in microglia

Background: Activation of the NFB transcription factor and its associated gene expression in microglia is a key component in the response to brain injury. Its activation is dynamic and is part of a network of biochemical species with multiple feedback regulatory mechanisms. Mathematical modeling, which has been instrumental for understanding the NFB response in other cell types, offers a valuable tool to investigate the regulation of NFB activation in microglia at a systems level. Results: We quantify the dynamic response of NFB activation and activation of the upstream kinase IKK using ELISA measurements of a microglial cell line following treatment with the pro-inflammatory cytokine TNFa. A new mathematical model is developed based on these data sets using a modular procedure that exploits the feedback structure of the network. We show that the new model requires previously unmodeled dynamics involved in the stimulus-induced degradation of the inhibitor I Ba in order to properly describe microglial NFB activation in a statistically consistent manner. This suggests a more prominent role for the ubiquitin-proteasome system in regulating the activation of NFB to inflammatory stimuli. We also find that the introduction of nonlinearities in the kinetics of IKK activation and inactivation is essential for proper characterization of transient IKK activity and corresponds to known biological mechanisms. Numerical analyses of the model highlight key regulators of the microglial NFB response, as well as those governing IKK activation. Results illustrate the dynamic regulatory mechanisms and the robust yet fragile nature of the negative feedback regulated network. Conclusions: We have developed a new mathematical model that incorporates previously unmodeled dynamics to characterize the dynamic response of the NFB signaling network in microglia. This model is the first of its kind for microglia and provides a tool for the quantitative, systems level study the dynamic cellular response to inflammatory stimuli.
Ocular manifestations observed in HTLV-I seropositive patients in Rio de Janeiro

Objetivo: avaliar a freqüência de manifestações oculares observadas em pacientes soropositivos para HTLV-I no Rio de Janeiro. Métodos: O estudo abrangeu 17 pacientes portadores de TSP/HAM (paraparesia tropical espástica/ mielopatia associada ao HTLV-I) e 55 pacientes soropositivos para HTLV-I não portadores de TSP/HAM ou ATLL (leucemia/linfoma de células T do adulto). Resultados: Nos pacientes portadores de TSP/HAM foi observada a freqüência de 11,8% de uveíte anterior, 11,8% de vasculite retiniana e 5,9% de opacidade vítrea. No grupo de pacientes soropositivos para HTLV-I não portadores de TSP/HAM ou ATLL, observou-se a freqüência de 1,8% de vasculite retiniana e 1,8% de exsudato algodonoso. Conclusão: Concluiu-se que, em tais manifestações oculares, o HTLV-I deve ser considerado como um dos agentes etiológicos a serem pesquisados em áreas endêmicas como o Rio de Janeiro. Ocular manifestations observed in HTLV-I seropositive patients in Rio de Janeiro
The Demand for Insecticide-Treated Mosquito Nets: Evidence from Africa

The Handbook on Contingent Valuation is unique in that it focuses on contingent valuation as a method for evaluating environmental change. It examines econometric issues, conceptual underpinnings, implementation issues as well as alternatives to contingent valuation. Anna Alberini and James Kahn have compiled a comprehensive and original reference volume containing invaluable case studies that demonstrate the implementation of contingent valuation in a wide variety of applications. Chapters include those on the history of contingent valuation, a practical guide to its implementation, the use of experimental approaches, an ecological economics perspective on contingent valuation and approaches for developing nations.
Extended Shift-Splitting Iteration Method For Nonsymmetric Generalized Saddle Point Problems ∗

Recently, the extended shift-splitting iteration method is proposed for the nonsingular symmetric saddle point problem [J. Comput. Appl. Math., 313(2017), 70—81]. In this paper, the extended shift-splitting iteration method is applied for solving nonsymmetric generalized saddle point problems. We prove the convergence and semi-convergence of the extended shift-splitting iteration method to solve the nonsingular and singular nonsymmetric generalized saddle point problems, respectively.