bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Genetic diversity of the rice bean (Vigna umbellata) genepool as assessed by SSR markers
Authors: Tian J. , Isemura T. , Kaga A. , Vaughan D.A. , Tomooka N.
Published: November 2013

The genetic diversity of 472 rice bean accessions (388 cultivated and 84 wild) from 16 Asian countries was evaluated by 13 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. In total, 168 alleles were detected, and the numbers of alleles in cultivated and wild accessions were 129 and 132, respectively. The gene diversity in cultivated populations (0.565) was about 83% of that for wild (0.678) populations. Cultivated populations from Vietnam, Myanmar, Nepal, and India had the highest gene diversity (>0.5). East Asian accessions formed a distinct genepool. Indonesian cultivated accessions showed high genetic divergence from other cultivated populations and had the most similar genetic structure to wild accessions. In Nepalese cultivated accessions, many accessions from western regions were quite distinct from others and formed a specific group. These Nepalese accessions could be considered a unique gene source for rice bean breeding. In contrast, eastern Nepalese accessions showed an SSR profile similar to that of Southeast Asian rice beans. The present study represents the first comprehensive SSR analysis in cultivated and wild rice bean germplasm and clarifies geographical distribution of genetic profile that might be used to broaden the genetic base of currently grown rice bean cultivars.
Captions and biases in diagnostic search
Authors: White Ryen W. , Horvitz Eric
Published: November 2013

People frequently turn to the Web with the goal of diagnosing medical symptoms. Studies have shown that diagnostic search can often lead to anxiety about the possibility that symptoms are explained by the presence of rare, serious medical disorders, rather than far more common benign syndromes. We study the influence of the appearance of potentially-alarming content, such as severe illnesses or serious treatment options associated with the queried for symptoms, in captions comprising titles, snippets, and URLs. We explore whether users are drawn to results with potentially-alarming caption content, and if so, the implications of such attraction for the design of search engines. We specifically study the influence of the content of search result captions shown in response to symptom searches on search-result click-through behavior. We show that users are significantly more likely to examine and click on captions containing potentially-alarming medical terminology such as “heart attack” or “medical emergency” independent of result rank position and well-known positional biases in users' search examination behaviors. The findings provide insights about the possible effects of displaying implicit correlates of searchers' goals in search-result captions, such as unexpressed concerns and fears. As an illustration of the potential utility of these results, we developed and evaluated an enhanced click prediction model that incorporates potentially-alarming caption features and show that it significantly outperforms models that ignore caption content. Beyond providing additional understanding of the effects of Web content on medical concerns, the methods and findings have implications for search engine design. As part of our discussion on the implications of this research, we propose procedures for generating more representative captions that may be less likely to cause alarm, as well as methods for learning to more appropriately rank search results from logged search behavior, for examples, by also considering the presence of potentially-alarming content in the captions that motivate observed clicks and down-weighting clicks seemingly driven by searchers' health anxieties.
Interaction design, heritage, and the self
Authors: Wallace Jayne
Published: November 2013

On Heritage aims to offer and promote a rich discussion at the intersection of art, performance, and culture that expands the boundaries of HCI while broadening our understanding of how things of the past come to matter in the present.

Elisa Giaccardi, Editor
Destination-based congestion awareness for adaptive routing in 2D mesh networks
Authors: Ramanujam Rohit Sunkam , Lin Bill
Published: November 2013

The choice of routing algorithm plays a vital role in the performance of on-chip interconnection networks. Adaptive routing is appealing because it offers better latency and throughput than oblivious routing, especially under nonuniform and bursty traffic. The performance of an adaptive routing algorithm is determined by its ability to accurately estimate congestion in the network. In this regard, maintaining global congestion state using a separate monitoring network offers better congestion visibility into distant parts of the network compared to solutions relying only on local congestion. However, the main challenge in designing such routing schemes is to keep the logic and bandwidth overhead as low as possible to fit into the tight power, area, and delay budgets of on-chip routers. In this article, we propose a minimal destination-based adaptive routing strategy (DAR), where every node estimates the delay to every other node in the network, and routing decisions are based on these per-destination delay estimates. DAR outperforms Regional Congestion Awareness (RCA), the best previously known adaptive routing algorithm that uses nonlocal congestion state. The performance improvement is brought about by maintaining fine-grained per-destination delay estimates in DAR that are more accurate than regional congestion metrics measured in RCA. The increased accuracy is a consequence of the fact that the per-destination delay estimates are not corrupted by congestion on links outside the admissible routing paths to the destination. A scalable version of DAR, referred to as SDAR, is also proposed for minimizing the overheads associated with DAR in large network topologies. We show that DAR outperforms local adaptive routing by up to 79% and RCA by up to 58% in terms of latency on SPLASH-2 benchmarks. DAR and SDAR also outperform existing adaptive and oblivious routing algorithms in latency and throughput under synthetic traffic patterns on 8×8 and 16times;16 mesh topologies, respectively.
Animating human lower limbs using contact-invariant optimization
Authors: Mordatch Igor , Wang Jack M. , Todorov Emanuel , Koltun Vladlen
Published: November 2013

We present a trajectory optimization approach to animating human activities that are driven by the lower body. Our approach is based on contact-invariant optimization. We develop a simplified and generalized formulation of contact-invariant optimization that enables continuous optimization over contact timings. This formulation is applied to a fully physical humanoid model whose lower limbs are actuated by musculotendon units. Our approach does not rely on prior motion data or on task-specific controllers. Motion is synthesized from first principles, given only a detailed physical model of the body and spacetime constraints. We demonstrate the approach on a variety of activities, such as walking, running, jumping, and kicking. Our approach produces walking motions that quantitatively match ground-truth data, and predicts aspects of human gait initiation, incline walking, and locomotion in reduced gravity.
A metric of visual comfort for stereoscopic motion
Authors: Du Song-Pei , Masia Belen , Hu Shi-Min , Gutierrez Diego
Published: November 2013

We propose a novel metric of visual comfort for stereoscopic motion, based on a series of systematic perceptual experiments. We take into account disparity, motion in depth, motion on the screen plane, and the spatial frequency of luminance contrast. We further derive a comfort metric to predict the comfort of short stereoscopic videos. We validate it on both controlled scenes and real videos available on the internet, and show how all the factors we take into account, as well as their interactions, affect viewing comfort. Last, we propose various applications that can benefit from our comfort measurements and metric.
Stereoscopizing cel animations
Authors: Liu Xueting , Mao Xiangyu , Yang Xuan , Zhang Linling , Wong Tien-Tsin
Published: November 2013

While hand-drawn cel animation is a world-wide popular form of art and entertainment, introducing stereoscopic effect into it remains difficult and costly, due to the lack of physical clues. In this paper, we propose a method to synthesize convincing stereoscopic cel animations from ordinary 2D inputs, without labor-intensive manual depth assignment nor 3D geometry reconstruction. It is mainly automatic due to the need of producing lengthy animation sequences, but with the option of allowing users to adjust or constrain all intermediate results. The system fits nicely into the existing production flow of cel animation. By utilizing the T-junction cue available in cartoons, we first infer the initial, but not reliable, ordering of regions. One of our major contributions is to resolve the temporal inconsistency of ordering by formulating it as a graph-cut problem. However, the resultant ordering remains insufficient for generating convincing stereoscopic effect, as ordering cannot be directly used for depth assignment due to its discontinuous nature. We further propose to synthesize the depth through an optimization process with the ordering formulated as constraints. This is our second major contribution. The optimized result is the spatiotemporally smooth depth for synthesizing stereoscopic effect. Our method has been evaluated on a wide range of cel animations and convincing stereoscopic effect is obtained in all cases.
Flexible muscle-based locomotion for bipedal creatures
Authors: Geijtenbeek Thomas , van de Panne Michiel , van der Stappen A. Frank
Published: November 2013

We present a muscle-based control method for simulated bipeds in which both the muscle routing and control parameters are optimized. This yields a generic locomotion control method that supports a variety of bipedal creatures. All actuation forces are the result of 3D simulated muscles, and a model of neural delay is included for all feedback paths. As a result, our controllers generate torque patterns that incorporate biomechanical constraints. The synthesized controllers find different gaits based on target speed, can cope with uneven terrain and external perturbations, and can steer to target directions.
A sparse control model for image and video editing
Authors: Xu Li , Yan Qiong , Jia Jiaya
Published: November 2013

It is common that users draw strokes, as control samples, to modify color, structure, or tone of a picture. We discover inherent limitation of existing methods for their implicit requirement on where and how the strokes are drawn, and present a new system that is principled on minimizing the amount of work put in user interaction. Our method automatically determines the influence of edit samples across the whole image jointly considering spatial distance, sample location, and appearance. It greatly reduces the number of samples that are needed, while allowing for a decent level of global and local manipulation of resulting effects and reducing propagation ambiguity. Our method is broadly beneficial to applications adjusting visual content.
Urban pattern
Authors: Yang Yong-Liang , Wang Jun , Vouga Etienne , Wonka Peter
Published: November 2013

We present a framework for generating street networks and parcel layouts. Our goal is the generation of high-quality layouts that can be used for urban planning and virtual environments. We propose a solution based on hierarchical domain splitting using two splitting types: streamline-based splitting, which splits a region along one or multiple streamlines of a cross field, and template-based splitting, which warps pre-designed templates to a region and uses the interior geometry of the template as the splitting lines. We combine these two splitting approaches into a hierarchical framework, providing automatic and interactive tools to explore the design space.
3D self-portraits
Authors: Li Hao , Vouga Etienne , Gudym Anton , Luo Linjie , Barron Jonathan T. , Gusev Gleb
Published: November 2013

We develop an automatic pipeline that allows ordinary users to capture complete and fully textured 3D models of themselves in minutes, using only a single Kinect sensor, in the uncontrolled lighting environment of their own home. Our method requires neither a turntable nor a second operator, and is robust to the small deformations and changes of pose that inevitably arise during scanning. After the users rotate themselves with the same pose for a few scans from different views, our system stitches together the captured scans using multi-view non-rigid registration, and produces watertight final models. To ensure consistent texturing, we recover the underlying albedo from each scanned texture and generate seamless global textures using Poisson blending. Despite the minimal requirements we place on the hardware and users, our method is suitable for full body capture of challenging scenes that cannot be handled well using previous methods, such as those involving loose clothing, complex poses, and props.
Interactive by-example design of artistic packing layouts
Authors: Reinert Bernhard , Ritschel Tobias , Seidel Hans-Peter
Published: November 2013

We propose an approach to "pack" a set of two-dimensional graphical primitives into a spatial layout that follows artistic goals. We formalize this process as projecting from a high-dimensional feature space into a 2D layout. Our system does not expose the control of this projection to the user in form of sliders or similar interfaces. Instead, we infer the desired layout of all primitives from interactive placement of a small subset of example primitives. To produce a pleasant distribution of primitives with spatial extend, we propose a novel generalization of Centroidal Voronoi Tesselation which equalizes the distances between boundaries of nearby primitives. Compared to previous primitive distribution approaches our GPU implementation achieves both better fidelity and asymptotically higher speed. A user study evaluates the system's usability.
Automatic noise modeling for ghost-free HDR reconstruction
Authors: Granados Miguel , Kim Kwang In , Tompkin James , Theobalt Christian
Published: November 2013

High dynamic range reconstruction of dynamic scenes requires careful handling of dynamic objects to prevent ghosting. However, in a recent review, Srikantha et al. [2012] conclude that "there is no single best method and the selection of an approach depends on the user's goal". We attempt to solve this problem with a novel approach that models the noise distribution of color values. We estimate the likelihood that a pair of colors in different images are observations of the same irradiance, and we use a Markov random field prior to reconstruct irradiance from pixels that are likely to correspond to the same static scene object. Dynamic content is handled by selecting a single low dynamic range source image and hand-held capture is supported through homography-based image alignment. Our noise-based reconstruction method achieves better ghost detection and removal than state-of-the-art methods for cluttered scenes with large object displacements. As such, our method is broadly applicable and helps move the field towards a single method for dynamic scene HDR reconstruction.
A compact random-access representation for urban modeling and rendering
Authors: Kuang Zhengzheng , Chan Bin , Yu Yizhou , Wang Wenping
Published: November 2013

We propose a highly memory-efficient representation for modeling and rendering urban buildings composed predominantly of rectangular block structures, which can be used to completely or partially represent most modern buildings. With the proposed representation, the data size required for modeling most buildings is more than two orders of magnitude less than using the conventional mesh representation. In addition, it substantially reduces the dependency on conventional texture maps, which are not space-efficient for defining visual details of building facades. The proposed representation can be stored and transmitted as images and can be rendered directly without any mesh reconstruction. A ray-casting based shader has been developed to render buildings thus represented on the GPU with a high frame rate to support interactive fly-by as well as street-level walk-through. Comparisons with standard geometric representations and recent urban modeling techniques indicate the proposed representation performs well when viewed from a short and long distance.
3D Wikipedia
Authors: Russell Bryan C. , Martin-Brualla Ricardo , Butler Daniel J. , Seitz Steven M. , Zettlemoyer Luke
Published: November 2013

We introduce an approach for analyzing Wikipedia and other text, together with online photos, to produce
annotated
3D models of famous tourist sites. The approach is completely automated, and leverages online text and photo co-occurrences via Google Image Search. It enables a number of new interactions, which we demonstrate in a new 3D visualization tool. Text can be selected to move the camera to the corresponding objects, 3D bounding boxes provide anchors back to the text describing them, and the overall narrative of the text provides a temporal guide for automatically flying through the scene to visualize the world as you read about it. We show compelling results on several major tourist sites.
Biharmonic diffusion curve images from boundary elements
Authors: Ilbery Peter , Kendall Luke , Concolato Cyril , McCosker Michael
Published: November 2013

There is currently significant interest in freeform, curve-based authoring of graphic images. In particular, "diffusion curves" facilitate graphic image creation by allowing an image designer to specify naturalistic images by drawing curves and setting colour values along either side of those curves. Recently, extensions to diffusion curves based on the biharmonic equation have been proposed which provide smooth interpolation through specified colour values and allow image designers to specify colour gradient constraints at curves. We present a Boundary Element Method (BEM) for rendering diffusion curve images with smooth interpolation and gradient constraints, which generates a solved boundary element image representation. The diffusion curve image can be evaluated from the solved representation using a novel and efficient line-by-line approach. We also describe "curve-aware" upsampling, in which a full resolution diffusion curve image can be upsampled from a lower resolution image using formula evaluated orrections near curves. The BEM solved image representation is compact. It therefore offers advantages in scenarios where solved image representations are transmitted to devices for rendering and where PDE solving at the device is undesirable due to time or processing constraints.
Simulation and control of skeleton-driven soft body characters
Authors: Liu Libin , Yin KangKang , Wang Bin , Guo Baining
Published: November 2013

In this paper we present a physics-based framework for simulation and control of human-like skeleton-driven soft body characters. We couple the skeleton dynamics and the soft body dynamics to enable two-way interactions between the skeleton, the skin geometry, and the environment. We propose a novel pose-based plasticity model that extends the corotated linear elasticity model to achieve large skin deformation around joints. We further reconstruct controls from reference trajectories captured from human subjects by augmenting a sampling-based algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by results not attainable with a simple combination of previous methods.
Public policy and the global public inclusive infrastructure project
Authors: Lewis Clayton , Treviranus Jutta
Published: November 2013

Public policy increasingly plays a role in influencing the work that we do as HCI researchers, interaction designers, and practitioners. "Public policy" is a broad term that includes both government policy and policy within non-governmental organizations, such as standards bodies. The Interacting with Public Policy forum focuses on topics at the intersection of human-computer interaction and public policy.

Jonathan Lazar, Editor
Distributed scheduling schemes for wireless mesh networks
Authors: Vijayalayan Kanthaiah Sivapragasam , Harwood Aaron , Karunasekera Shanika
Published: November 2013

An efficient scheduling scheme is a crucial part of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs)—an emerging communication infrastructure solution for autonomy, scalability, higher throughput, lower delay metrics, energy efficiency, and other service-level guarantees. Distributed schedulers are preferred due to better scalability, smaller setup delays, smaller management overheads, no single point of failure, and for avoiding bottlenecks. Based on the sequence in which nodes access the shared medium, repetitiveness, and determinism, distributed schedulers that are supported by wireless mesh standards can be classified as either random, pseudo-random, or cyclic schemes. We performed qualitative and quantitative studies that show the strengths and weaknesses of each category, and how the schemes complement each other. We discuss how wireless standards with mesh definitions have evolved by incorporating and enhancing one or more of these schemes. Emerging trends and research problems remaining for future research also have been identified.
LinguaBytes
Authors: Hengeveld Bart
Published: November 2013

The boundaries between 'the digital' and our everyday physical world are dissolving as we develop more physical ways of interacting with computing. This forum presents some of the topics discussed in the colorful multidisciplinary field of tangible and embodied interaction.

Eva Hornecker, Editor
Reflections on HCI for development
Authors: Toyama Kentaro
Published: November 2013

This forum looks at how the fields of interaction design and HCI can extend to cover "developing" communities around the world, ones that are gaining access to digital technology for the first time.

Gary Marsden, Editor
Clothing the naked emperor
Authors: Bias Randolph G. , Kortum Philip , Sauro Jeff , Gillan Doug
Published: November 2013

Evaluation and usability as a practice area has diversified its approaches, broadened the spectrum of UX issues it addresses, and extended its contribution into deeper levels of product-development decision making. This forum addresses conceptual, methodological, and professional issues that arise in the field's continuing effort to contribute robust information about users to product planning and design.

David Siegel and Susan Dray, Editors
Two women who pioneered user-centered design
Authors: Grudin Jonathan , Williams Gayna
Published: November 2013

Timelines provides perspectives on HCI history, glancing back at a road that sometimes took unexpected branches and turns. History is not a dry list of events; it is about points of view and differing interpretations.

Jonathan Grudin, Editor
In Memoriam
Authors: Jameson Anthony
Published: November 2013

This recollection of John Riedl, founding coeditor-in-chief of the
ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
, presents a picture by editors of the journal of what it was like to collaborate and interact with him.
Temporal locality in today's content caching
Authors: Traverso Stefano , Ahmed Mohamed , Garetto Michele , Giaccone Paolo , Leonardi Emilio , Niccolini Saverio
Published: November 2013

The dimensioning of caching systems represents a difficult task in the design of infrastructures for content distribution in the current Internet. This paper addresses the problem of defining a realistic arrival process for the content requests generated by users, due its critical importance for both analytical and simulative evaluations of the performance of caching systems. First, with the aid of \youtube traces collected inside operational residential networks, we identify the characteristics of real traffic that need to be considered or can be safely neglected in order to accurately predict the performance of a cache. Second, we propose a new parsimonious traffic model, named the Shot Noise Model (SNM), that enables users to natively capture the dynamics of content popularity, whilst still being sufficiently simple to be employed effectively for both analytical and scalable simulative studies of caching systems. Finally, our results show that the SNM presents a much better solution to account for the temporal locality observed in real traffic compared to existing approaches.
Is SDN the de-constraining constraint of the future internet?
Authors: Crowcroft Jon , Fidler Markus , Nahrstedt Klara , Steinmetz Ralf
Published: November 2013

Dagstuhl hosted a three-day seminar on the Future Internet on March 25-27, 2013. At the seminar, about 40 invited researchers from academia and industry discussed the promises, approaches, and open challenges of the Future Internet. This report gives a general overview of the presentations and outcomes of discussions of the seminar.
Introduction to Volume 5 of theAnnual Review of Financial Economics
Authors: Lo Andrew W.
Published: November 2013

In Volume 5 of the Annual Review of Financial Economics, we continue focusing on the role of banks and credit in the recent financial crisis with articles on too big to fail, credit-rating agencies, corporate governance for banks, bank leverage and real interest rates, and financial contagion in the banking sector. More traditional topics such as dynamic capital-structure models, cross-sectional asset pricing tests, trends in firm-specific volatility, short selling, and conglomerates and the theory of the firm are also included. In addition, we have two contributions that fall outside the mainstream of financial economics, one involving capital allocation in the insurance industry and the other involving tax issues at the intersection of law and finance. But we begin this volume with a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the publications of Black & Scholes (1973) and Merton (1973b) on pricing options and other derivative securities, two articles that forever changed the theory and practice of financial economics.
Short Selling
Authors: Reed Adam V.
Published: November 2013

Short selling plays a unique role in financial markets. Short selling’s institutional structure is distinct from other types of trades, and short sellers have been shown to be more informed than other types of traders. This review discusses short sellers’ motivation, the institutional mechanics of short selling, the empirical findings on short selling, the regulation of short selling, the connection between corporate events and short selling, and the equity lending market. The review assesses the current direction of research as well as summarizes the current state of knowledge about the subject.
Nephroprotective effects of TVP1022, a non-MAO inhibitor S-isomer of rasagiline, in an experimental model of diabetic renal ischemic injury
Authors: Abu-Saleh Niroz , Awad Hoda , Khamaisi Mogher , Armaly Zaher , Karram Tony , Heyman Samuel N. , Kaballa Aviva , Ichimura Takaharu , Holman James , Abassi Zaid
Published: November 2013

Ischemic acute kidney injury (iAKI) in diabetes mellitus is associated with a rapid deterioration of kidney function, more than in nondiabetic subjects. TVP1022, a non-MAO inhibitor S-isomer of rasagiline, possesses antioxidative and antiapoptotic activities. The current study examines the effects of TVP1022 and tempol on iAKI in diabetic rats. Diabetes was induced by streptozotocin. iAKI was induced by clamping the left renal artery for 30 min in both diabetic and nondiabetic rats. The right intact kidney served as a control. Forty-eight hours following ischemia, urinary flow (V), sodium excretion (UNaV), and glomerular filtration rate (GFR) in both ischemic and nonischemic kidneys were determined. The nephroprotective effects of tempol and TVP1022 were examined in these rats. Hematoxylin and eosin staining, 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE) immunofluorescence, and nitrotyrosine immunohistochemistry were performed on renal tissues of the various experimental groups. Compared with normoglycemic rats, iAKI in diabetic animals caused more profound reductions in V, UNaV, and GFR. Tempol and TVP1022 treatment increased GFR two- and four-fold in diabetic ischemic kidney, respectively. Besides hemodynamic perturbations, iAKI markedly increased renal immunoreactive 4-HNE and nitrotyrosine staining in both diabetic and nondiabetic rats. Moreover, iAKI increased medullary necrosis, congestion, and casts. Noteworthy, these increases were to a larger extent in ischemic diabetic kidneys. TVP1022, and to a lesser extent tempol, decreased nitrotyrosine and 4-HNE immunoreactivities and necrosis and cast formation in the renal medulla. TVP1022 treatment improves renal dysfunction and histological changes in an iAKI diabetic model and suggests a role for TVP1022 therapy in kidney injury.
Interplay between microRNAs and the STAT3 signaling pathway in human cancers
Authors: Cao Qing , Li Yun-Yun , He Wen-Feng , Zhang Zhong-Zu , Zhou Qin , Liu Xin , Shen Yang , Huang Ting-Ting
Published: November 2013

MicroRNAs (miRNAs, also miR) are a class of noncoding endogenous RNAs that regulate gene expression through binding to protein-coding messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules, predominantly within the 3′-untranslated region (3′-UTR). Signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 ( STAT3) is a transcription factor that regulates a battery of genes involved in regulating a variety of biological processes. There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating that miRNAs are closely associated with the STAT3 signaling pathway. In this review, we focus on interactions between miRNAs and the STAT3 signaling pathway, focusing on their reciprocal regulation and roles in cancer. For instance, several papers independently support the existence of regulatory feedback loops between miRNAs and the STAT3 pathway in different cancer contexts including IL-6-STAT3-miR-24/miR-629-HNF4α-miR-124 and IL-6R-STAT3-NF-κB-Lin-28-let-7a. Furthermore, several miRNA components are reported to be involved in STAT3-mediated tumorigenesis, for example miR-21, miR-155, and miR-181b. Through binding to STAT3-binding sites within the promoters of these oncomiRs, STAT3 activates their transcription and mediates tumorigenesis. Some miRNAs directly modulate STAT3 activity through targeting the STAT3 3′-UTR; other miRNAs target SOCS, PIAS3, and EGFR genes, which encode proteins that regulate the STAT3 signaling pathway. Given that miRNAs represent a newly discovered class of regulatory molecules, investigating their biological functions and contribution to pathologies caused by STAT3 dysregulation is essential to improve our understanding of tumorigenesis and to develop novel anticancer therapeutics. The more we can learn about miRNAs- STAT3 interactions, the better able we will be to manipulate them for developing cancer therapeutics.
A Review of Piecewise Linearization Methods
Authors: Lin Ming-Hua , Carlsson John Gunnar , Ge Dongdong , Shi Jianming , Tsai Jung-Fa
Published: November 2013

Various optimization problems in engineering and management are formulated as nonlinear programming problems. Because of the nonconvexity nature of this kind of problems, no efficient approach is available to derive the global optimum of the problems. How to locate a global optimal solution of a nonlinear programming problem is an important issue in optimization theory. In the last few decades, piecewise linearization methods have been widely applied to convert a nonlinear programming problem into a linear programming problem or a mixed-integer convex programming problem for obtaining an approximated global optimal solution. In the transformation process, extra binary variables, continuous variables, and constraints are introduced to reformulate the original problem. These extra variables and constraints mainly determine the solution efficiency of the converted problem. This study therefore provides a review of piecewise linearization methods and analyzes the computational efficiency of various piecewise linearization methods.
A Novel Case of Functional Gastric Neuroendocrine Carcinoma Occurred after Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection
Authors: Shibata Yoshiaki , Ito Yuji , Fujita Hiroko , Okada Yume , Nagai Toshihiko , Sano Hirohito , Ito Kumiko
Published: November 2013

In Japan, endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) is becoming a standard treatment for intramucosal differentiated gastric cancer. Although ESD is associated with a high cure rate for patients with early gastric cancer, tumors may recur, albeit rarely. We performed ESD on an 80-year-old man with a small depressed type of gastric cancer of the posterior wall of the cardia, found to be locally invasive on histology. Thirty months later, local recurrence and multiple liver metastases were detected, accompanied by frequent severe hypoglycemia. Despite chemotherapy, the patient died 6 months after relapse. On autopsy, the recurrent gastric lesion and liver metastases were examined immunohistochemically. Several characteristic tumor cells were positive for chromogranin A, cluster of differentiation (CD) 56, Ki-67, and insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-II. Western blot analysis of the patient’s serum obtained during a hypoglycemic attack showed the high molecular weight form of IGF-II or “big” IGF-II. The patient was diagnosed with non-islet cell tumor hypoglycemia (NICTH), with “big” IGF-II being produced by the gastric neuroendocrine carcinoma. This is the novel case of a functional gastric neuroendocrine carcinoma that occurred after ESD and induced a hypoglycemic attack associated with NICTH.
Effects of Essential Oils and Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids on Canine Skin Equivalents: Skin Lipid Assessment and Morphological Evaluation
Authors: Cerrato S. , Ramió-Lluch L. , Fondevila D. , Rodes D. , Brazis P. , Puigdemont A.
Published: November 2013

A canine skin equivalent model has been validated for the assessment of a topical formulation effects. Skin equivalents were developed from freshly isolated cutaneous canine fibroblasts and keratinocytes, after enzymatic digestion of skin samples (n=8) from different breeds. Fibroblasts were embedded into a collagen type I matrix, and keratinocytes were seeded onto its surface at air-liquid interface. Skin equivalents were supplemented with essential oils and polyunsaturated fatty acid formulation or with vehicle. Skin equivalents were histopathologically and ultrastructurally studied, and the three main lipid groups (free fatty acids, cholesterol, and ceramides) were analyzed. Results showed that the culture method developed resulted in significant improvements in cell retrieval and confluence. Treated samples presented a thicker epidermis with increased number of viable cell layers, a denser and compact stratum corneum, and a more continuous basal membrane. Regarding lipid profile, treated skin equivalents showed a significant increase in ceramide content (51.7±1.3) when compared to untreated (41.6 ± 1.4) samples. Ultrastructural study evidenced a compact and well-organized stratum corneum in both treated and control skin equivalents. In conclusion, cell viability and ceramides increase, after lipid supplementation, are especially relevant for the treatment of skin barrier disruptions occurring in canine atopic dermatitis.
Algebraic Properties of Quasihomogeneous and Separately Quasihomogeneous Toeplitz Operators on the Pluriharmonic Bergman Space
Authors: Guan Hongyan , Liu Liu , Lu Yufeng
Published: November 2013

We study some algebraic properties of Toeplitz operator with quasihomogeneous or separately quasihomogeneous symbol on the pluriharmonic Bergman space of the unit ball inℂn. We determine when the product of two Toeplitz operators with certain separately quasi-homogeneous symbols is a Toeplitz operator. Next, we discuss the zero-product problem for several Toeplitz operators, one of whose symbols is separately quasihomogeneous and the others are quasi-homogeneous functions, and show that the zero-product problem for two Toeplitz operators has only a trivial solution if one of the symbols is separately quasihomogeneous and the other is arbitrary. Finally, we also characterize the commutativity of certain quasihomogeneous or separately quasihomogeneous Toeplitz operators.
An Update on Diabetic Women Obstetrical Outcomes Linked to Preconception and Pregnancy Glycemic Profile: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Gizzo Salvatore , Patrelli Tito Silvio , Rossanese Marta , Noventa Marco , Berretta Roberto , Di Gangi Stefania , Bertin Martina , Gangemi Michele , Nardelli Giovanni Battista
Published: November 2013

Women with type 2 diabetes were less likely to have diabetes related complications than women with type 1. Women with type 1 diabetes had a high prepregnancy care and showed a worse glycemic control than women with type 2 both in the preconception period and during pregnancy. Obstetrical outcomes showed that preeclampsia and stillbirth rate is almost doubled in type 1 patients while perinatal deaths and SGA importantly increased in type 2 diabetes. In modern obstetrical care it is mandatory to maintain glucose levels as close to normal as possible particularly in diabetic population. HbA1C no higher than 6% before pregnancy and during the first trimester seems to decrease the risk of adverse obstetrical outcomes. Both the preconceptional counseling and glycemic profile optimization represent a fundamental step to improve pregnancy outcomes in women with preexisting diabetes. A systematic approach to family planning and the availability of preconception care for all diabetic women who desire pregnancy could be an essential step for diabetic management program.
Basic Unit Layer Rate Control Algorithm for H.264 Based on Human Visual System
Authors: Chen Xiao , Liu Haiying
Published: November 2013

In the process of the video coding, special attention should be paid to the subjective quality of the image. In the JVT-G012 algorithm for H.264, the influence of the human visual characteristic in basic unit layer rate control was not taken into account. This paper takes the influence of the human visual characteristic into the full consideration and offers ways to improve the subjective quality of the image. The visual characteristic factor, which is constituted by the motion feature and edge feature, is used to reasonably allocate the target bits, and then its quantization parameter is adjusted by encoded frame information. The experimental results show that, in comparison to the original algorithm, the proposed algorithm can not only control the bit rate more accurately but also make the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) stable, so as to improve the stationarity of the video image. The subjective quality of the reconstructed video is more satisfying.
Compost and Crude Humic Substances Produced from Selected Wastes and Their Effects on Zea mays L. Nutrient Uptake and Growth
Authors: Palanivell Perumal , Susilawati Kasim , Ahmed Osumanu Haruna , Majid Nik Muhamad
Published: November 2013

Production of agriculture and timber commodities leads generation of enormous quantity of wastes.
Improper disposal of these agroindustrial wastes pollutes the environment. This problem could be
reduced by adding value to them. Therefore, a study was carried out to analyse and compare the
nutrients content of RS, RH, SD, and EFB of composts and crude humic substances;
furthermore, their effect on growth, dry matter production, and nutrient uptake for
Zea mays L., and selected soil chemical properties were evaluated.
Standard procedures were used to analyze humic acids (HA), crude fulvic acids (CFA),
crude humin (CH), soil, dry matter production and nutrient uptake. Sawdust and RS compost
matured at 42 and 47 days, respectively, while RH and EFB composts were less matured
at 49th day of composting. Rice straw compost had higher ash, N, P, CEC, HA, K, and Fe
contents with lower organic matter, total organic carbon, and C/N and C/P ratios. The HA
of sawdust compost showed higher carbon, carboxylic, K, and Ca contents compared to
those of RS, RH, and EFB. Crude FA of RS compost showed highest pH, total K, Ca, Mg,
and Na contents. Crude humin from RS compost had higher contents of ash, N, P, and CEC.
Rice straw was superior in compost, CFA, and CH, while sawdust compost was superior in HA.
Application of sawdust compost significantly increased maize plants’ diameter, height,
dry matter production, N, P, and cations uptake. It also reduced N, P, and K based chemical
fertilizer use by 90%. Application of CH and the composts evaluated in this study could
be used as an alternative for chemical fertilizers in maize cultivation.
Time Series Analysis: A New Methodology for Comparing the Temporal Variability of Air Temperature
Authors: Post Piia , Kärner Olavi
Published: November 2013

Temporal variability of three different temperature time series was compared by the use of statistical modeling of time series. The three temperature time series represent the same physical process, but are at different levels of spatial averaging: temperatures from point measurements, from regional Baltan65+, and from global ERA-40 reanalyses. The first order integrated average model IMA(0, 1, 1) is used to compare the temporal variability of the time series. The applied IMA(0, 1, 1) model is divisible into a sum of random walk and white noise component, where the variances for both white noises (one of them serving as a generator of the random walk) are computable from the parameters of the fitted model. This approach enables us to compare the models fitted independently to the original and restored series using two new parameters. This operation adds a certain new method to the analysis of nonstationary series.
Phenolic Contents and Antioxidant Potential of Crataegus Fruits Grown in Tunisia as Determined by DPPH, FRAP, and β‐Carotene/Linoleic Acid Assay
Authors: Mraihi Farouk , Journi Mohamed , Chérif Jamila Kalthoum , Sokmen Munevver , Sokmen Atalay , Trabelsi-Ayadi Malika
Published: November 2013

Crataegus fruit is one of most important fruits in Tunisian flora. Some fruits of this genus are edible. This study was undertaken in order to examine the benefits of these fruits in human health and their composition of antioxidants including total polyphenol, flavonoids, proanthocyanidins content, and total anthocyanins. The antioxidative properties of the ultrasonic methanolic extract were assessed by different in vitro methods such as the FRAP, DPPH, and β‐carotene/linoleic acid assay. We concluded that peel fraction of red fruits possessed relatively high antioxidant activity and might be a rich source of natural antioxidants in comparison with the pulp and seed fruit extract. The results also showed that hawthorn yellow fruit presents lower amounts of phenolic content, absence of anthocyanins, and less antioxidant capacity. Most of peel and seed fractions were stronger than the pulp fractions in antioxidant activity based on their DPPH IC50, FRAP values, and results of β‐carotene/linoleic acid. The total phenolic compounds contents were also highly correlated with the DPPH method and the FRAP assay.
Bifurcation of Limit Cycles and Center Conditions for Two Families of Kukles-Like Systems with Nilpotent Singularities
Authors: Li Peiluan , Wu Yusen , Ding Xiaoquan
Published: November 2013

We solve theoretically the center problem and the cyclicity of the Hopf bifurcation for two families of Kukles-like systems with their origins being nilpotent and monodromic isolated singular points.
Effect of Annealing Temperature on the Morphology and Piezoresponse Characterisation of Poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) Films via Scanning Probe Microscopy
Authors: Lau K. , Liu Y. , Chen H. , Withers R. L.
Published: November 2013

Poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) (PVDF-TrFE (70/30)) films were synthesized on a gold/glass substrate via spin coating. The films were annealed at a temperature between125∘Cand180∘C. Nanoscale characterisation of the morphology, polarization switching, and local piezoresponse hysteresis loops of PVDF-TrFE film was studied using a scanning probe microscope (SPM). Ferroelectric switchable domains were identified by piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) for all films. Small grains, with weak piezoresponse character, were observed for films annealed just above the Curie temperature. Acicular grains were obtained when the annealing temperature approached the melting point and the piezoresponse increased. Annealing above the melting point decreased the piezoresponse and the morphology changed dramatically into plate-like structures.
Optical Measurement of Blood Oxygen Saturation of Dental Pulp
Authors: Kakino Satoko , Kushibiki Shinya , Yamada Azusa , Miwa Zenzo , Takagi Yuzo , Matsuura Yuji
Published: November 2013

The applicability of arterial pulse oximetry to dental pulp was demonstrated using in vitro and in vivo measurements. First, porcine blood of known oxygen saturation (SO2) was circulated through extracted human upper incisors, while transmitted-light plethysmography was performed using three different visible wavelengths. From the light intensity waveforms measured in vitro, a parameter that is statistically correlated to SO2 was calculated using the pulsatile/nonpulsatile component ratios of two wavelengths for different SO2. Then, values were measured in vivo for living incisors, and the corresponding SO2 values were calculated using the results of in vitro measurements. The estimated SO2 values of the upper central incisors measured in vivo were from 71.0 to 92.7%. This study showed the potential to measure the oxygen saturation changes to identify the sign of pulpal inflammation.
Axially Symmetric Bulk Viscous String Cosmological Models in GR and Brans-Dicke Theory of Gravitation
Authors: Rao V. U. M. , Neelima D.
Published: November 2013

Axially symmetric string cosmological models with bulk viscosity in Brans-Dicke (1961) and general relativity (GR) have been studied. The field equations have been solved by using the anisotropy feature of the universe in the axially symmetric space-time. Some important features of the models, thus obtained, have been discussed. We noticed that the presence of scalar field does not affect the geometry of the space-time but changes the matter distribution, and as a special case, it is always possible to obtain axially symmetric string cosmological model with bulk viscosity in general relativity.
Molecular Dynamic Simulation to Explore the Molecular Basis of Btk‐PH Domain Interaction with Ins(1,3,4,5)P4
Authors: Lu Dan , Jiang Junfeng , Liang Zhongjie , Sun Maomin , Luo Cheng , Shen Bairong , Hu Guang
Published: November 2013

Bruton’s tyrosine kinase contains a pleckstrin homology domain, and it specifically binds inositol 1,3,4,5‐tetrakisphosphate (Ins(1,3,4,5)P4), which is involved in the maturation of B cells. In this paper, we studied 12 systems including the wild type and 11 mutants, K12R, S14F, K19E, R28C/H, E41K, L11P, F25S, Y40N, and K12R‐R28C/H, to investigate any change in the ligand binding site of each mutant. Molecular dynamics simulations combined with the method of molecular mechanics/Poisson‐Boltzmann solvent‐accessible surface area have been applied to the twelve systems, and reasonable mutant structures and their binding free energies have been obtained as criteria in the final classification. As a result, five structures, K12R, K19E, R28C/H, and E41K mutants, were classified as “functional mutations,” whereas L11P, S14F, F25S, and Y40N were grouped into “folding mutations.” This rigorous study of the binding affinity of each of the mutants and their classification provides some new insights into the biological function of the Btk‐PH domain and related mutation‐causing diseases.