Approaches For Preparing Agricultural Advisory Services Feasibility Study

According to present literature on agricultural extension organizations reforms, moving towards agricultural advisory services have become a paramount choice to perform these changes by policy makers and planners throughout the world especially in developing countries. The mainpurpose of this study was to propose some methods for doing agricultural advisory services feasibility studies. For doing so, three methods, which include project objectives-based approaches, force field analysis -based approaches, fitness between frame conditions and choice variables-based approaches have been introduced in this paper based on this criticalassumption that there is no best practice or method for designing these services and it necessary to choose best fit agricultural advisory services

Classification of awake, REM, and NREM from EEG via singular spectrum analysis

© 2015 IEEE. In this study, a single-channel electroencephalography (EEG) analysis method has been proposed for automated 3-state-sleep classification to discriminate Awake, NREM (non-rapid eye movement) and REM (rapid eye movement). For this purpose, singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is applied to automatically extract four brain rhythms: delta, theta, alpha, and beta. These subbands are then used to generate the appropriate features for sleep classification using a multi class support vector machine (M-SVM). The proposed method provided 0.79 agreement between the manual and automatic scores

High-levelexpression of functional recombinant human coagulation factor VII in insect cells

Abstract: Recombinant coagulation factor VII (FVII) is used as a potential therapeutic intervention in hemophilia patients who produce antibodies against the coagulation factors. Mammalian cell lines provide low levels of expression, however, the Spodoptera frugiperda Sf9 cell line and baculovirus expression system are powerful systems for high-level expression of recombinant proteins, but due to the lack of endogenous vitamin K-dependent carboxylase, expression of functional FVII using this system is impossible. In the present study, we report a simple but versatile method to overcome the defect for high-level expression of the functional recombinant coagulation FVII in Sf9 cells. This method involves simultaneous expression of both human γ-carboxylase (hGC) and human FVII genes in the host. It may be possible to express other vitamin K-dependent coagulation factors using this method in the future. Keywords: Baculovirus; γ-carboxylase; Coagulation FVII; Factor VII; Insect cel

Locomotor adaptability in persons with unilateral transtibial amputation

Background Locomotor adaptation enables walkers to modify strategies when faced with challenging walking conditions. While a variety of neurological injuries can impair locomotor adaptability, the effect of a lower extremity amputation on adaptability is poorly understood. Objective Determine if locomotor adaptability is impaired in persons with unilateral transtibial amputation (TTA). Methods The locomotor adaptability of 10 persons with a TTA and 8 persons without an amputation was tested while walking on a split-belt treadmill with the parallel belts running at the same (tied) or different (split) speeds. In the split condition, participants walked for 15 minutes with the respective belts moving at 0.5 m/s and 1.5 m/s. Temporal spatial symmetry measures were used to evaluate reactive accommodations to the perturbation, and the adaptive/de-adaptive response. Results Persons with TTA and the reference group of persons without amputation both demonstrated highly symmetric walking at baseline. During the split adaptation and tied post-adaptation walking both groups responded with the expected reactive accommodations. Likewise, adaptive and de-adaptive responses were observed. The magnitude and rate of change in the adaptive and de-adaptive responses were similar for persons with TTA and those without an amputation. Furthermore, adaptability was no different based on belt assignment for the prosthetic limb during split adaptation walking. Conclusions Reactive changes and locomotor adaptation in response to a challenging and novel walking condition were similar in persons with TTA to those without an amputation. Results suggest persons with TTA have the capacity to modify locomotor strategies to meet the demands of most walking conditions despite challenges imposed by an amputation and use of a prosthetic limb

Neutrino-electron scattering in noncommutative space

Neutral particles can couple with the $U(1)$ gauge field in the adjoint representation at the tree level if the space-time coordinates are noncommutative (NC). Considering neutrino-photon coupling in the NC QED framework, we obtain the differential cross section of neutrino-electron scattering. Similar to the magnetic moment effect, one of the NC terms is proportional to $\frac 1 T$, where $T$ is the electron recoil energy. Therefore, this scattering provides a chance to achieve a stringent bound on the NC scale in low energy by improving the sensitivity to the smaller electron recoil energy.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

The Influence of Spatial Registration on Detection of Cerebral Asymmetries Using Voxel-Based Statistics of Fractional Anisotropy Images and TBSS

The sensitivity of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) for detecting microstructural white matter alterations has motivated the application of voxel-based statistics (VBS) to fractional anisotropy (FA) images (FA-VBS). However, detected group differences may depend on the spatial registration method used. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of spatial registration on detecting cerebral asymmetries in FA-VBS analyses with reference to data obtained using Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS). In the first part of this study we performed FA-VBS analyses using three single-contrast and one multi-contrast registration: (i) whole-brain registration based on T2 contrast, (ii) whole-brain registration based on FA contrast, (iii) individual-hemisphere registration based on FA contrast, and (iv) a combination of (i) and (iii). We then compared the FA-VBS results with those obtained from TBSS. We found that the FA-VBS results depended strongly on the employed registration approach, with the best correspondence between FA-VBS and TBSS results when approach (iv), the “multi-contrast individual-hemisphere” method was employed. In the second part of the study, we investigated the spatial distribution of residual misregistration for each registration approach and the effect on FA-VBS results. For the FA-VBS analyses using the three single-contrast registration methods, we identified FA asymmetries that were (a) located in regions prone to misregistrations, (b) not detected by TBSS, and (c) specific to the applied registration approach. These asymmetries were considered candidates for apparent FA asymmetries due to systematic misregistrations associated with the FA-VBS approach. Finally, we demonstrated that the “multi-contrast individual-hemisphere” approach showed the least residual spatial misregistrations and thus might be most appropriate for cerebral FA-VBS analyses

Overview of the PAN/CLEF 2015 Evaluation Lab

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24027-5_49This paper presents an overview of the PAN/CLEF evaluation lab. During the last decade, PAN has been established as the main forum of text mining research focusing on the identification of personal traits of authors left behind in texts unintentionally. PAN 2015 comprises three tasks: plagiarism detection, author identification and author profiling studying important variations of these problems. In plagiarism detection, community-driven corpus construction is introduced as a new way of developing evaluation resources with diversity. In author identification, cross-topic and cross-genre author verification (where the texts of known and unknown authorship do not match in topic and/or genre) is introduced. A new corpus was built for this challenging, yet realistic, task covering four languages. In author profiling, in addition to usual author demographics, such as gender and age, five personality traits are introduced (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and a new corpus of Twitter messages covering four languages was developed. In total, 53 teams participated in all three tasks of PAN 2015 and, following the practice of previous editions, software submissions were required and evaluated within the TIRA experimentation framework.Stamatatos, E.; Potthast, M.; Rangel, F.; Rosso, P.; Stein, B. (2015). Overview of the PAN/CLEF 2015 Evaluation Lab. En Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction: 6th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF'15, Toulouse, France, September 8-11, 2015, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing. 518-538. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24027-5_49S518538Álvarez-Carmona, M.A., López-Monroy, A.P., Montes-Y-Gómez, M., Villaseñor-Pineda, L., Jair-Escalante, H.: INAOE’s participation at PAN 2015: author profiling task–notebook for PAN at CLEF 2015. In: CLEF 2013 Working Notes. CEUR (2015)Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Fine, J., Shimoni, A.R.: Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts. TEXT 23, 321–346 (2003)Bagnall, D.: Author identification using multi-headed recurrent neural networks. In: CLEF 2015 Working Notes. CEUR (2015)Burger, J.D., Henderson, J., Kim, G., Zarrella, G.: Discriminating gender on twitter. In: Proceedings of EMNLP 2011. ACL (2011)Burrows, S., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Paraphrase Acquisition via Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning. ACM TIST 4(3), 43:1–43:21 (2013)Castillo, E., Cervantes, O., Vilariño, D., Pinto, D., León, S.: Unsupervised method for the authorship identification task. In: CLEF 2014 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR (2014)Celli, F., Lepri, B., Biel, J.I., Gatica-Perez, D., Riccardi, G., Pianesi, F.: The workshop on computational personality recognition 2014. In: Proceedings of ACM MM 2014 (2014)Celli, F., Pianesi, F., Stillwell, D., Kosinski, M.: Workshop on computational personality recognition: shared task. In: Proceedings of WCPR at ICWSM 2013 (2013)Celli, F., Polonio, L.: Relationships between personality and interactions in facebook. In: Social Networking: Recent Trends, Emerging Issues and Future Outlook. Nova Science Publishers, Inc. (2013)Chaski, C.E.: Who’s at the Keyboard: Authorship Attribution in Digital Evidence Invesigations. International Journal of Digital Evidence 4 (2005)Chittaranjan, G., Blom, J., Gatica-Perez, D.: Mining Large-scale Smartphone Data for Personality Studies. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 17(3), 433–450 (2013)Fréry, J., Largeron, C., Juganaru-Mathieu, M.: UJM at clef in author identification. In: CLEF 2014 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR (2014)Gollub, T., Potthast, M., Beyer, A., Busse, M., Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Stein, B.: Recent trends in digital text forensics and its evaluation. In: Forner, P., Müller, H., Paredes, R., Rosso, P., Stein, B. (eds.) CLEF 2013. LNCS, vol. 8138, pp. 282–302. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)Gollub, T., Stein, B., Burrows, S.: Ousting ivory tower research: towards a web framework for providing experiments as a service. In: Proceedings of SIGIR 2012. ACM (2012)Hagen, M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Source retrieval for plagiarism detection from large web corpora: recent approaches. In: CLEF 2015 Working Notes. CEUR (2015)van Halteren, H.: Linguistic profiling for author recognition and verification. In: Proceedings of ACL 2004. ACL (2004)Holmes, J., Meyerhoff, M.: The Handbook of Language and Gender. Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics. Wiley (2003)Jankowska, M., Keselj, V., Milios, E.: CNG text classification for authorship profiling task–notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: CLEF 2013 Working Notes. CEUR (2013)Juola, P.: Authorship Attribution. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 1, 234–334 (2008)Juola, P.: How a Computer Program Helped Reveal J.K. Rowling as Author of A Cuckoo’s Calling. Scientific American (2013)Juola, P., Stamatatos, E.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN-2013. In: CLEF 2013 Working Notes. CEUR (2013)Kalimeri, K., Lepri, B., Pianesi, F.: Going beyond traits: multimodal classification of personality states in the wild. In: Proceedings of ICMI 2013. ACM (2013)Koppel, M., Argamon, S., Shimoni, A.R.: Automatically Categorizing Written Texts by Author Gender. Literary and Linguistic Computing 17(4) (2002)Koppel, M., Schler, J., Bonchek-Dokow, E.: Measuring Differentiability: Unmasking Pseudonymous Authors. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 8, 1261–1276 (2007)Koppel, M., Winter, Y.: Determining if Two Documents are Written by the same Author. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 65(1), 178–187 (2014)Kosinski, M., Bachrach, Y., Kohli, P., Stillwell, D., Graepel, T.: Manifestations of User Personality in Website Choice and Behaviour on Online Social Networks. Machine Learning (2013)López-Monroy, A.P., y Gómez, M.M., Jair-Escalante, H., Villaseñor-Pineda, L.: Using intra-profile information for author profiling–notebook for PAN at CLEF 2014. In: CLEF 2014 Working Notes. CEUR (2014)Lopez-Monroy, A.P., Montes-Y-Gomez, M., Escalante, H.J., Villasenor-Pineda, L., Villatoro-Tello, E.: INAOE’s participation at PAN 2013: author profiling task-notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: CLEF 2013 Working Notes. CEUR (2013)Luyckx, K., Daelemans, W.: Authorship attribution and verification with many authors and limited data. In: Proceedings of COLING 2008 (2008)Maharjan, S., Shrestha, P., Solorio, T., Hasan, R.: A straightforward author profiling approach in mapreduce. In: Bazzan, A.L.C., Pichara, K. (eds.) IBERAMIA 2014. LNCS, vol. 8864, pp. 95–107. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)Mairesse, F., Walker, M.A., Mehl, M.R., Moore, R.K.: Using Linguistic Cues for the Automatic Recognition of Personality in Conversation and Text. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 30(1), 457–500 (2007)Eissen, S.M., Stein, B.: Intrinsic plagiarism detection. In: Lalmas, M., MacFarlane, A., Rüger, S.M., Tombros, A., Tsikrika, T., Yavlinsky, A. (eds.) ECIR 2006. LNCS, vol. 3936, pp. 565–569. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)Mohammadi, G., Vinciarelli, A.: Automatic personality perception: Prediction of Trait Attribution Based on Prosodic Features. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 3(3), 273–284 (2012)Moreau, E., Jayapal, A., Lynch, G., Vogel, C.: Author verification: basic stacked generalization applied to predictions from a set of heterogeneous learners. In: CLEF 2015 Working Notes. CEUR (2015)Nguyen, D., Gravel, R., Trieschnigg, D., Meder, T.: “How old do you think I am?”; a study of language and age in twitter. In: Proceedings of ICWSM 2013. AAAI (2013)Oberlander, J., Nowson, S.: Whose thumb is it anyway?: classifying author personality from weblog text. In: Proceedings of COLING 2006. ACL (2006)Peñas, A., Rodrigo, A.: A simple measure to assess non-response. In: Proceedings of HLT 2011. ACL (2011)Pennebaker, J.W., Mehl, M.R., Niederhoffer, K.G.: Psychological Aspects of Natural Language Use: Our Words. Our Selves. Annual Review of Psychology 54(1), 547–577 (2003)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Eiselt, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 2nd international competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF 2010 Working Notes. CEUR (2010)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection. Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE) 45, 45–62 (2011)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd international competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF 2011 Working Notes (2011)Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Hagen, M., Graßegger, J., Kiesel, J., Michel, M., Oberländer, A., Tippmann, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Gupta, P., Rosso, P., Stein, B.: Overview of the 4th international competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF 2012 Working Notes. CEUR (2012)Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Hagen, M., Tippmann, M., Kiesel, J., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Stein, B.: Overview of the 5th international competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF 2013 Working Notes. CEUR (2013)Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Stein, B.: Improving the reproducibility of PAN’s shared tasks: plagiarism detection, author identification, and author profiling. In: Kanoulas, E., Lupu, M., Clough, P., Sanderson, M., Hall, M., Hanbury, A., Toms, E. (eds.) CLEF 2014. LNCS, vol. 8685, pp. 268–299. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Beyer, A., Busse, M., Tippmann, M., Rosso, P., Stein, B.: Overview of the 6th international competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF 2014 Working Notes. CEUR (2014)Potthast, M., Göring, S., Rosso, P., Stein, B.: Towards data submissions for shared tasks: first experiences for the task of text alignment. In: CLEF 2015 Working Notes. CEUR (2015)Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Stein, B., Graßegger, J., Michel, M., Tippmann, M., Welsch, C.: ChatNoir: a search engine for the clueweb09 corpus. In: Proceedings of SIGIR 2012. ACM (2012)Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Völske, M., Stein, B.: Crowdsourcing interaction logs to understand text reuse from the web. In: Proceedings of ACL 2013. ACL (2013)Potthast, M., Stein, B., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P.: An evaluation framework for plagiarism detection. In: Proceedings of COLING 2010. ACL (2010)Potthast, M., Stein, B., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 1st international competition on plagiarism detection. In: Proceedings of PAN at SEPLN 2009. CEUR (2009)Quercia, D., Lambiotte, R., Stillwell, D., Kosinski, M., Crowcroft, J.: The personality of popular facebook users. In: Proceedings of CSCW 2012. ACM (2012)Rammstedt, B., John, O.: Measuring Personality in One Minute or Less: A 10 Item Short Version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German. Journal of Research in Personality (2007)Rangel, F., Rosso, P.: On the impact of emotions on author profiling. In: Information Processing & Management, Special Issue on Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media (2014) (in press)Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Celli, F., Potthast, M., Stein, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 3rd author profiling task at PAN 2015. In: CLEF 2015 Working Notes. CEUR (2015)Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Chugur, I., Potthast, M., Trenkmann, M., Stein, B., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 2nd author profiling task at PAN 2014. In: CLEF 2014 Working Notes. CEUR (2014)Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Koppel, M., Stamatatos, E., Inches, G.: Overview of the author profiling task at PAN 2013–notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: CLEF 2013 Working Notes. CEUR (2013)Sapkota, U., Bethard, S., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Solorio, T.: Not all character N-grams are created equal: a study in authorship attribution. In: Proceedings of NAACL 2015. ACL (2015)Sapkota, U., Solorio, T., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Bethard, S., Rosso, P.: Cross-topic authorship attribution: will out-of-topic data help? In: Proceedings of COLING 2014 (2014)Schler, J., Koppel, M., Argamon, S., Pennebaker, J.W.: Effects of age and gender on blogging. In: AAAI Spring Symposium: Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs. AAAI (2006)Schwartz, H.A., Eichstaedt, J.C., Kern, M.L., Dziurzynski, L., Ramones, S.M., Agrawal, M., Shah, A., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., Seligman, M.E., et al.: Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach. PloS one 8(9), 773–791 (2013)Stamatatos, E.: A Survey of Modern Authorship Attribution Methods. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60, 538–556 (2009)Stamatatos, E.: On the Robustness of Authorship Attribution Based on Character N-gram Features. Journal of Law and Policy 21, 421–439 (2013)Stamatatos, E., Daelemans, W., Verhoeven, B., Juola, P., López-López, A., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN 2015. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2015 Evaluation Labs. CEUR (2015)Stamatatos, E., Daelemans, W., Verhoeven, B., Stein, B., Potthast, M., Juola, P., Sánchez-Pérez, M.A., Barrón-Cedeño, A.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN 2014. In: CLEF 2014 Working Notes. CEUR (2014)Stamatatos, E., Fakotakis, N., Kokkinakis, G.: Automatic Text Categorization in Terms of Genre and Author. Comput. Linguist. 26(4), 471–495 (2000)Stein, B., Lipka, N., Prettenhofer, P.: Intrinsic Plagiarism Analysis. Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE) 45, 63–82 (2011)Stein, B., Meyer zu Eißen, S.: Near similarity search and plagiarism analysis. In: Proceedings of GFKL 2005. Springer (2006)Sushant, S.A., Argamon, S., Dhawle, S., Pennebaker, J.W.: Lexical predictors of personality type. In: Proceedings of Joint Interface/CSNA 2005Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W.: Clips stylometry investigation (CSI) corpus: a dutch corpus for the detection of age, gender, personality, sentiment and deception in text. In: Proceedings of LREC 2014. ACL (2014)Weren, E., Kauer, A., Mizusaki, L., Moreira, V., de Oliveira, P., Wives, L.: Examining Multiple Features for Author Profiling. Journal of Information and Data Management (2014)Zhang, C., Zhang, P.: Predicting gender from blog posts. Tech. rep., Technical Report. University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA (2010

G-CSF Prevents the Progression of Structural Disintegration of White Matter Tracts in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: A Pilot Trial

Background: The hematopoietic protein Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) has neuroprotective and regenerative properties. The G-CSF receptor is expressed by motoneurons, and G-CSF protects cultured motoneuronal cells from apoptosis. It therefore appears as an attractive and feasible drug candidate for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The current pilot study was performed to determine whether treatment with G-CSF in ALS patients is feasible.Methods: Ten patients with definite ALS were entered into a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial. Patients received either 10 mu g/kg BW G-CSF or placebo subcutaneously for the first 10 days and from day 20 to 25 of the study. Clinical outcome was assessed by changes in the ALS functional rating scale (ALSFRS), a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery, and by examining hand activities of daily living over the course of the study (100 days). The total number of adverse events (AE) and treatment-related AEs, discontinuation due to treatment-related AEs, laboratory parameters including leukocyte, erythrocyte, and platelet count, as well as vital signs were examined as safety endpoints. Furthermore, we explored potential effects of G-CSF on structural cerebral abnormalities on the basis of voxel-wise statistics of Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), brain volumetry, and voxel-based morphometry.Results: Treatment was well-tolerated. No significant differences were found between groups in clinical tests and brain volumetry from baseline to day 100. However, DTI analysis revealed significant reductions of fractional anisotropy (FA) encompassing diffuse areas of the brain when patients were compared to controls. On longitudinal analysis, the placebo group showed significant greater and more widespread decline in FA than the ALS patients treated with G-CSF.Conclusions: Subcutaneous G-CSF treatment in ALS patients appears as feasible approach. Although exploratory analysis of clinical data showed no significant effect, DTI measurements suggest that the widespread and progressive microstructural neural damage in ALS can be modulated by G-CSF treatment. These findings may carry significant implications for further clinical trials on ALS using growth factors

Uncertainty quantification for kinetic models in socio-economic and life sciences

Kinetic equations play a major rule in modeling large systems of interacting particles. Recently the legacy of classical kinetic theory found novel applications in socio-economic and life sciences, where processes characterized by large groups of agents exhibit spontaneous emergence of social structures. Well-known examples are the formation of clusters in opinion dynamics, the appearance of inequalities in wealth distributions, flocking and milling behaviors in swarming models, synchronization phenomena in biological systems and lane formation in pedestrian traffic. The construction of kinetic models describing the above processes, however, has to face the difficulty of the lack of fundamental principles since physical forces are replaced by empirical social forces. These empirical forces are typically constructed with the aim to reproduce qualitatively the observed system behaviors, like the emergence of social structures, and are at best known in terms of statistical information of the modeling parameters. For this reason the presence of random inputs characterizing the parameters uncertainty should be considered as an essential feature in the modeling process. In this survey we introduce several examples of such kinetic models, that are mathematically described by nonlinear Vlasov and Fokker--Planck equations, and present different numerical approaches for uncertainty quantification which preserve the main features of the kinetic solution.Comment: To appear in "Uncertainty Quantification for Hyperbolic and Kinetic Equations