Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Isoliquiritigenin Suppresses Osteosarcoma U2OS Cell Proliferation and Invasion by Regulating the PI3K/Akt Signalling Pathway

Aims: Isoliquiritigenin (ISL) is a flavonoid, that has been shown to have antioxidant, vasorelaxant, anti-inﬂammatory, and antitumor activities. This study aimed to explore the antitumor effect of ISL on human osteosarcoma U2OS cells and investigate the mechanism of this effect. Methods: The effect of ISL on osteosarcoma U2OS cell proliferation, invasion, migration, and apoptosis were determined by a CCK8 assay, a transwell invasion assay, a transwell migration assay, and fluorescence-activated cell sorting, respectively. In addition, the protein expression levels of Bcl2, Bax, active Caspase-3, Akt, mTOR, p70, and Cyclin D1 were detected by western blotting. Results: ISL suppressed cell proliferation, inhibited invasion and migration, and promoted apoptosis in U2OS cells. After treatment with ISL, the protein expression levels of Bax and active Caspase-3 increased, while the level of Bcl-2 declined significantly. Furthermore, the phosphorylation levels of Akt and mTOR declined significantly compared with that of the control. Conclusion: ISL could retard proliferation and promote apoptosis of U2OS cells possibly by suppressing the PI3K/Akt signalling pathway, indicating that it might be a potential therapeutic agent for osteosarcoma treatment.
Information security policy compliance: Investigating the role of intrinsic motivation towards policy compliance in the organisation

recent behavioral research in information security has focused on increasing employees' motivation to enhance the security performance in an organization. This empirical study investigated employees' information security policy (ISP) compliance intentions using self-determination theory (SDT). Relevant hypotheses were developed to test the proposed research model. Data obtained via a survey (N=3D407) from a Fortune 600 organization in Saudi Arabia provides empirical support for the model. The results confirmed that autonomy, competence and the concept of relatedness all positively affect employees' intentions to comply. The variable 'perceived value congruence' had a negative effect on ISP compliance intentions, and the perceived legitimacy construct did not affect employees' intentions. In general, the findings of this study suggest that SDT has value in research into employees' ISP compliance intentions.
2×VDD-tolerant ESD detection circuit in a 90-nm low-voltage CMOS process

A new 2×VDD-tolerant electrostatic discharge (ESD) detection circuit using only low-voltage device is proposed in a 90-nm 1-V CMOS process. Unlike the RC based detection circuit, the proposed circuit is a voltage triggered detection circuit, so the clamp device cannot be triggered even under very fast power up events. Also, without RC network the detection circuit generates a very small leakage current. The proposed circuit can generate 50.1 mA current to turn on the substrate triggered silicon-controlled rectifier (STSCR) under the ESD stress. Under normal operating conditions, all the devices are free from over-stress voltage threat, the leakage current is only 50 nA. The simulation result shows the circuit can be used for 2xVDD-tolerant application.
Kernel low-rank embedding dictionary learning for face recognition

A novel face recognition algorithm — Kernel Low-rank embedding Dictionary Learning (KLEDL) is presented in this short paper. In KLEDL, we jointly realized dictionary learning and data information reduction at the same time. The core content of KLEDL is to make the threshold of coefficients distance from between-class to within-class as large as possible, for the purpose to improve the classification recognition rate and gain more discriminative features. Furthermore, the integrity of the global and local feature is preserved which is very important to sample reconstruction. As we know, sample reconstruction is proved to be fundamental for dictionary learning and low-rank representation to obtain an excellent recognition rate. Experimental results fully illustrate KLEDL outperforms all compared modern algorithms with several experiments operating in the face databases of AR, CMU-PIE and Extended Yale B (EYB).
Who tweets about cancer? An analysis of cancer-related tweets in the USA

Cancer patients, family members and friends are increasingly using social media. Some oncologists and oncology centres are engaging with social media, and advocacy groups are using it to disseminate information and coordinate fundraising efforts. However, the question of whether such social media activity corresponds to areas with higher incidence of cancer or higher access to cancer centres remains understudied. To address this gap, our study compared US government data with 90,986 cancer-related tweets with the keywords ‘chemo’, ‘lymphoma’, ‘mammogram’, ‘melanoma’, and ‘cancer survivor’. We found that the frequency of cancer-related tweets is not associated with mammogram testing and cancer incidence rates, but that the concentration of doctors and cancer centres is associated with cancer-related tweet frequency. Ultimately, we found that Twitter has value to cancer patients, survivors and their families, but that cancer-related social media resources may not be targeting locations that could see the most value and benefit. Therefore, there are real opportunities to better align cancer-related engagement on Twitter and other social media.
Accelerate large-scale seismic data Kirchhoff time migration in spark

Seismic exploration are creating massive amount of data by using advanced scientific instruments and computer simulations. Pre-stack Kirchhoff Time Migration (PKTM), as one of the most commonly-used imaging method in oil and gas industry, is facing with severe performance defects due to its computationally expensive feature and huge amount of input. This requires new technologies for improving computing per­formance and processing scalability. In this paper, we propose a lightweight module to support large-scale seismic data processing and parallel implementation of PKTM algorithm atop Apache Spark framework. Some optimization methods such as an auto- chunk method and columnar storage re-arrangement are added to improve the performance of data processing and PKTM migration. Experimental results show an improvement of 2.4 times over direct RDDs-based Spark processing and 3.2 times over Hadoop implementation, and our method shows simplicity in seismic data processing and scales linearly with the input data size.
Background Odors Modulate N170 ERP Component and Perception of Emotional Facial Stimuli

Successful social interaction relies on the accurate decoding of other peoples’ emotional signals, and their contextual integration. However, little is known about how contextual odors may lead to modulation of cortical processing in response to facial expressions. We investigated how unpleasant and pleasant contextual background odors affected emotion perception and cortical event-related potential (ERP) responses to pictures of faces expressing happy, neutral and disgusted facial expressions. Faces were, regardless of expression, rated more positively in the pleasant odor condition and more negatively in the unpleasant odor condition. Faces were overall rated as more emotionally arousing in the presence of an odor, irrespective of its valence. Contextual odors also interacted with facial expressions, such that happy faces were rated as especially non-arousing in the unpleasant odor condition. The early, face-sensitive N170 ERP component also displayed an interaction effect. Here, disgusted faces were affected by the odor context such that the N170 revealed a relatively larger negativity in the context of a pleasant odor compared with an unpleasant odor. There were no odor effects on the responses to faces in other measured ERP components (P1, VPP, P2, and LPP). These results suggest that odors bias socioemotional perception early stages of the visual processing stream. However, effects may vary across emotional expressions and measurements.
Human Action Recognition via Depth Maps Body Parts of Action

Human actions can be recognized from depth sequences. In the proposed algorithm, we initially construct depth, motion maps (DMM) by projecting each depth frame onto three orthogonal Cartesian planes and add the motion energy for each view. The body part of the action (BPoA) is calculated by using bounding box with an optimal window size based on maximum spatial and temporal changes for each DMM. Furthermore, feature vector is constructed by using BPoA for each human action view. In this paper, we employed an ensemble based learning approach called Rotation Forest to recognize different actions Experimental results show that proposed method has significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on Microsoft Research (MSR) Action 3D and MSR DailyActivity3D dataset.
Plant-insect interactions patterns in three European paleoforests of the late-Neogene—early-Quaternary

Plants and insects are constantly interacting in complex ways through forest communities since hundreds of millions of years. Those interactions are often related to variations in the climate. Climate change, due to human activities, may have disturbed these relationships in modern ecosystems. Fossil leaf assemblages are thus good opportunities to survey responses of plant–insect interactions to climate variations over the time. The goal of this study is to discuss the possible causes of the differences of plant–insect interactions’ patterns in European paleoforests from the Neogene–Quaternary transition. This was accomplished through three fossil leaf assemblages: Willershausen, Berga (both from the late Neogene of Germany) and Bernasso (from the early Quaternary of France). In Willershausen it has been measured that half of the leaves presented insect interactions, 35% of the fossil leaves were impacted by insects in Bernasso and only 25% in Berga. The largest proportion of these interactions in Bernasso were categorized as specialist (mainly due to galling) while in Willershausen and Berga those ones were significantly more generalist. Contrary to previous studies, this study did not support the hypothesis that the mean annual precipitation and temperature were the main factors that impacted the different plant–insect interactions’ patterns. However, for the first time, our results tend to support that the hydric seasonality and the mean temperature of the coolest months could be potential factors influencing fossil plant–insect interactions.
NMF-based stochastic models for multi-label propagation

Multi-label propagation associates with transmitting multi-labels from tagged examples to untagged ones that are relevant in semantic. Many existing algorithms will lose their advantages if the correlations among tagged examples, untagged examples, and labels are improperly identified. To address this problem, a set of stochastic models are constructed, which describe not only the correlations among examples in the feature space, but also the correlations between examples and labels in the label space. The parameters involved in the stochastic models are then learned by a non-negative matrix factorization algorithm and a non-negative least square optimization algorithm. By setting up connections among examples, stochastic models, and labels, the advantages of smooth assumption are fully exploited, so that the labels are properly propagated. The experiments are carried out on six benchmark datasets from different real world applications. The results demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach, as compared with the performance of other state-of-the-art algorithms.
3-D Interferometric Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging of Ship Target With Complex Motion

A novel algorithm for 3-D interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar (InISAR) imaging of ship target with complex motion via orthogonal double baseline is presented. For the ship target with a certain translational velocity and 3-D rotation, the distance between any scatterers on the target and the radar is analyzed in detail, and the keystone transform is used to reduce the impact of migration through resolution cell of ship target with big size. Then, the fractional Fourier transform is adopted to achieve the 2-D ISAR image of the target, and the mismatch of the ISAR images achieved by the three radars is solved by the image coregistration method according to the 1-D range profile. Finally, the 3-D InISAR image of the ship target is achieved with the interferometric operation with the three ISAR images. The effectiveness of the proposed method is proved by some simulation results, and the influence of different motion parameters on the 3-D imaging of ship target is analyzed simultaneously in this paper.
Current understanding of photophobia, visual networks and headaches

Objective To review clinical and pre-clinical evidence supporting the role of visual pathways, from the eye to the cortex, in the development of photophobia in headache disorders. Background Photophobia is a poorly understood light-induced phenomenon that emerges in a variety of neurological and ophthalmological conditions. Over the years, multiple mechanisms have been proposed to explain its causes; however, scarce research and lack of systematic assessment of photophobia in patients has made the search for answers quite challenging. In the field of headaches, significant progress has been made recently on how specific visual networks contribute to photophobia features such as light-induced intensification of headache, increased perception of brightness and visual discomfort, which are frequently experienced by migraineurs. Such progress improved our understanding of the phenomenon and points to abnormal processing of light by both cone/rod-mediated image-forming and melanopsin-mediated non-image-forming visual pathways, and the consequential transfer of photic signals to multiple brain regions involved in sensory, autonomic and emotional regulation. Conclusion Photophobia phenotype is diverse, and the relative contribution of visual, trigeminal and autonomic systems may depend on the disease it emerges from. In migraine, photophobia could result from photic activation of retina-driven pathways involved in the regulation of homeostasis, making its association with headache more complex than previously thought.
Child online safety and parental intervention: a study of Sri Lankan internet users

Today’s world of digital and mobile media does not require actual physical contact, between the suitable target and the motivated offender, as with traditional crime. In fact, as Mesch (2009) contended that the internet is not merely an information channel but it creates a new space of activities for children, where they are exposed to motivated offenders and the actors of fourth party. Therefore, for the sake of children’s safety, the practice of parental mediation control is increasingly becoming more pertinent everyday. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine how parental mediation control in Sri Lanka is influenced by their internet self-efficacy, their experience as online victims and their trust in online users. ,This paper uses a unique data set of computer and internet users from Sir Lanka to examine parental intervention in their children’s online activities. Specifically, the data set contains 347 responses from computer and internet users. To analyze the data, the authors use a binary dependent (probit) model. ,The results show that such factors alter the baseline probability of parental intervention. However, some differences are found between younger and older parents, with the latter group responding more to trust in online users and victimization experience while the former is mainly driven from computer self-efficacy. In particular, the older group is less likely to trust online internet users in terms of never adding unknown persons in the social media. Finally, being self-employed and an older parent has a positive effect on the likelihood of adopting parental controls, possibly because of the non-pecuniary attributes of self-employment. ,This study adds to the emerging parental mediation control literature by looking at the likelihood of younger and older parents who were victims of cybercrimes, who have greater internet self-efficacy and lower online third-party trust to adopt parental mediation control behaviors. Also another contribution to the literature is the role of occupation type on parental monitoring behaviors.
Text Line Extraction Based on Integrated K-Shortest Paths Optimization

Text in images can be utilized in many image understanding applications due to the exact semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel integrated k-shortest paths optimization based text line extraction method. Firstly, the candidate text components are extracted by the Maximal Stable Extremal Region (MSER) algorithm on gray, red, green and blue channels. Secondly, one integrated directed graph on red, green, and blue channels are constructed upon the candidate text components, which can effectively incorporate different channels into one framework. Then, the integrated directed graph is transformed guided by the extracted text lines in gray channel to reduced the computational complexity. Finally, we use the k-shortest paths optimization algorithm to extract the text lines by taking advantage of the particular structure of the integrated directed graph. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.
Power Converters for Power-Ultrasonic Transducers

High-performance power-converters in the form of single-tone class-D amplifiers are required to drive power-ultrasonic transducers in industrial applications. These must produce low-distortion, variable-frequency, and variable-amplitude sinusoidal currents to efficiently drive the piezoelectric cell and horn of transducers, and thereby vibrate materialprocessing stages. A resonant-tracking control strategy is generally used to efficiently couple and regulate output power delivery at a high-Q probe-system resonant mode. This paper reviews a number of power-converter control options suitable for such probe drivers, including quasi-squarewave (QS), naturally sampling pulse width modulation (PWM) and programmed PWM (PPWM). Typical output-waveform quality and the PSPICE models of the power-converter and piezoelectric transducer developed to assess and compare methods are presented.
Patient-perceived acceptability of a virtual world-based cardiac rehabilitation program

Background Despite its benefits, cardiac rehabilitation (CR) participation rates remain subpar. Telehealth lifestyle interventions have emerged as modalities to enhance CR accessibility. Virtual-world (VW) technology may provide a means to increase CR use. Objectives This pilot study assessed the feasibility and acceptability of a VW-based CR program as an extension to medical center-based CR. Our goal is to apply the study results toward the design of a patient-centered VW platform prototype with high usability, understandability, and credibility. Methods Patients (n = 8, 25% women) recently enrolled in outpatient CR at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota participated in a 12-week, VW health education program and provided feedback on the usability, design and satisfaction of the intervention at baseline and completion. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyze the participant perceptions of the intervention. Results Overall, there were positive participant perceptions of the VW experience. There was unanimous high satisfaction with the graphical interface appearance and ease of use. Participants placed value on the convenience, accessibility, and social connectivity of the remote program as well as the novelty of the simulation platform presentations, which aided in memorability of key concepts. Greater than 80% of participants reported that the program improved their health knowledge and helped to maintain better health habits. Conclusions Our pilot study revealed the feasibility and acceptability of an innovative VW-based CR program among cardiac patients. This novel delivery method for CR has the potential to influence healthy lifestyle change and to increase accessibility to vulnerable populations with higher cardiovascular disease burdens.
Optimal Design of Encoding Profiles for ABR Streaming

We discuss the problem of optimal design of encoding profiles for adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming. We formalize this problem and show that it belongs to a class of non-linear constrained optimization problems, with several methods available for solving it numerically. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by several examples of optimal encoding ladders constructed for different sources and network models.
Gullibility may be a warning sign of Alzheimer's disease dementia

ABSTRACT Background: Theory of Mind reasoning, which plays a pivotal role in social interaction, is required to detect deception. Empirically, those with cognitive decline are vulnerable to deception. Methods: Participants were 45 healthy elderly adults with clinical dementia rating (CDR) 0, and 76 outpatients: 25 with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI, CDR 0.5), 34 with mild Alzheimer's disease dementia (ADD, CDR 1), and 17 with moderate ADD (CDR 2). The task consisted of two single-frame cartoons that depicted a character with an intention to deceive another character using social signs of gaze and pointing, and participants are provided clue questions to detect the character's intentions. Results: The percentage of participants who detected the character's intention decreased with ADD progression (CDR 0, 82.2%; CDR 0.5, 48.0%; CDR 1, 29.4%; and CDR 2, 0%). Total score (0–6) also decreased with ADD progression (CDR 0, 4.4 +/−1.1; CDR 0.5, 3.0 +/−1.3; CDR 1, 2.9 +/−1.5; and CDR 2, 1.6 +/−0.9). Discussion and Conclusions: The present study demonstrated that those with aMCI have difficulty in detecting other's deceiving intentions, when the intention was shown implicitly using social signs. In a previous study, we have reported that mild ADD showed difficulties in detecting intention, while aMCI succeeded in detection when the intention was depicted explicitly. These results together suggested that those with aMCI is vulnerable to deception when the intention was shown implicitly using non-verbal cues, while ADD may fail to detect the intention even when the intention was shown explicitly.
Relationship between alcohol and occurrence of various offenses

Article history: Received August 25, 2013 Received in revised format 19 September 2013 Accepted 23 October 2013 Available online November 12 2013 Alcohol is the most prevalent abused drug in the world and brings out a large amount of medical expenses to the society. This paper presents an empirical investigation to devise preventive measures and identify the groups at risk. In this study, a descriptive study was conducted among people who were arrested by the police because of committing illegal actions and were suspected of alcohol usage were referred to the organization of forensic medicine. The studied variables include gender, age, state of affair, marital status, type of crime, the time of drug use, tranquillizer drugs and the times of psychiatrist visit. Out of 305 subjects, 204 (66.9%) cases had a positive respiratory test result and 101 (33.1%) were negative. The results showed that committing crimes due to quarrel and wrangling (34.3%) and being drunk in the public (29.7%) were prevalent among the people who used alcohol. Driving accidents also had 18% prevalence. 32.7% of the people who had a negative respiratory test result had committed crimes because of being drunk and 29.7% of them had quarrel and wrangling. The high rate of alcohol use in people who referred from the disciplinary office to the organization of forensic medicine demonstrated that it was necessary to devise a plan in order to improve a person's awareness of harmful alcohol use and to identify the vulnerable groups in the society. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.