Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of Fitness With Vascular Intima-Media Thickness and Elasticity in Adolescence

OBJECTIVES: Vascular intima-media thickness (IMT) and elasticity are surrogate markers of atherosclerosis. Data on the effect of cardiorespiratory fitness on these measures of vascular health in adolescence are scarce. The aim was to examine the association of fitness with aortic and carotid artery IMT and elasticity in adolescents. METHODS: Aortic (n = 449) and carotid (n = 467) IMT and elasticity were measured ultrasonographically in 17-year-old adolescents participating in a prospective, longitudinal atherosclerosis prevention study (Special Turku Coronary Risk Factor Intervention Project). Distensibility and Young's elastic modulus (YEM) were used as measures of arterial elasticity. Cardiorespiratory fitness (maximum oxygen uptake, mL/kg/min) was measured with a maximal cycle ergometer test. Data on fitness were available for 341 of adolescents with aortic and 355 with carotid ultrasound measures. RESULTS: Fitness was inversely associated with aortic IMT (β[SE] = –0.0029[0.0013]; P = .031) and YEM (β[SE] = –0.012[0.0053]; P = .025) after adjusting for gender, physical activity, high-density lipoprotein/total cholesterol, triglycerides, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, homeostasis model of assessment–insulin resistance, BMI, systolic blood pressure, and smoking. Risk of having low aortic distensibility (≤10th percentile) decreased with increasing fitness (odds ratio = 0.89, 95% confidence interval 0.82–0.98); P = . 014). The increase in aortic IMT and YEM between ages 11 and 17 years was smaller in adolescents who were fit at age 17 compared with adolescents who had the lowest fitness level (P for IMT = .015, P for YEM = .0072). Fitness was not associated with carotid IMT or elasticity. Lifestyle counseling given in the Special Turku Coronary Risk Factor Intervention Project was not associated with fitness. CONCLUSIONS: Fitness was favorably associated with aortic IMT and elasticity in adolescents. No association of fitness with the respective carotid indices was found. These data suggest that fitness in part enhances vascular health in healthy adolescents.
A Synchronous IPC Protocol for Predictable Access to Shared Resources in Mixed-Criticality Systems

In mixed-criticality systems, highly critical tasks must be temporally and logically isolated from faults in lower-criticality tasks. Such strict isolation, however, is difficult to ensure even for independent tasks, and has not yet been attained if low- and high-criticality tasks share resources subject to mutual exclusion constraints (e.g., Shared data structures, peripheral I/O devices, or OS services), as it is often the case in practical systems. Taking a pragmatic, systems-oriented point of view, this paper argues that traditional real-time locking approaches are unsuitable in a mixed-criticality context: locking is a cooperative activity and requires trust, which is inherently in conflict with the paramount isolation requirements. Instead, a solution based on resource servers (in the microkernel sense) is proposed, and MC-IPC, a novel synchronous multiprocessor IPC protocol for invoking such servers, is presented. The MC-IPC protocol enables strict temporal and logical isolation among mutually untrusted tasks and thus can be used to share resources among tasks of different criticalities. It is shown to be practically viable with a prototype implementation in LITMUSRT and validated with a case study involving several antagonistic failure modes. Finally, MC-IPC is shown to offer analytical benefits in the context of Vestal's mixed-criticality task model.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for List-wise Recommendations

Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Practice and Theory of Blendshape Facial Models

“Blendshapes”, a simple linear model of facial expression, is the prevalent approach to realistic facial animation. It has driven animated characters in Hollywood ﬁlms, and is a standard feature of commercial animation packages. The blendshape approach originated in industry, and became a subject of academic research relatively recently. This report describes the published state of the art in this area, covering both literature from the graphics research community, and developments published in industry forums. We show that, despite the simplicity of the blendshape approach, there remain open problems associated with this fundamental technique.
Expressed sequence tag-linked microsatellites as a source of gene-associated polymorphisms for detecting signatures of divergent selection in atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.).

The prediction that selection affects the genome in a locus-specific way also affecting flanking neutral variation, known as genetic hitchhiking, enables the use of polymorphic markers in noncoding regions to detect the footprints of selection. However, as the strength of the selective footprint on a locus depends on the distance from the selected site and will decay with time due to recombination, the utilization of polymorphic markers closely linked to coding regions of the genome should increase the probability of detecting the footprints of selection as more gene-containing regions are covered. The occurrence of highly polymorphic microsatellites in the untranslated regions of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) is a potentially useful source of gene-associated polymorphisms which has thus far not been utilized for genome screens in natural populations. In this study, we searched for the genetic signatures of divergent selection by screening 95 genomic and EST-derived mini- and microsatellites in eight natural Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L. , populations from different spatial scales inhabiting contrasting natural environments (salt-, brackish, and freshwater habitat). Altogether, we identified nine EST-associated microsatellites, which exhibited highly significant deviations from the neutral expectations using different statistical methods at various spatial scales and showed similar trends in separate population samples from different environments (salt-, brackish, and freshwater habitats) and sea areas (Barents vs. White Sea). We consider these ESTs as the best candidate loci affected by divergent selection, and hence, they serve as promising genes associated with adaptive divergence in Atlantic salmon. Our results demonstrate that EST-linked microsatellite genome scans provide an efficient strategy for discovering functional polymorphisms, especially in nonmodel organisms.
Scale and Concurrency of GIGA+: File System Directories with Millions of Files

We examine the problem of scalable file system directories, motivated by data-intensive applications requiring millions to billions of small files to be ingested in a single directory at rates of hundreds of thousands of file creates every second. We introduce a POSIX-compliant scalable directory design, GIGA+, that distributes directory entries over a cluster of server nodes. For scalability, each server makes only local, independent decisions about migration for load balancing. GIGA+ uses two internal implementation tenets, asynchrony and eventual consistency, to: (1) partition an index among all servers without synchronization or serialization, and (2) gracefully tolerate stale index state at the clients. Applications, however, are provided traditional strong synchronous consistency semantics. We have built and demonstrated that the GIGA+ approach scales better than existing distributed directory implementations, delivers a sustained throughput of more than 98,000 file creates per second on a 32-server cluster, and balances load more efficiently than consistent hashing.
Cultural and Socio-Economic Factors on Changes in Aging among Iranian Women

The aim of the study is to determine the cultural and socio-economic factors that influence changes in aging among Iranian women. This qualitative study was part of a more extensive study designed according to grounded theory method. A purposeful, snowball and theoretical sampling technique was used. Data collection instruments were interviews and field notes. Duration of interviews differed and ranged from 38 to 110 minutes. Data collection process, coding and analysis were performed simultaneously. Collected data were analyzed using the recommended method by Corbin and Straus (1998 and 2008). The factors were formed from 6 subcategories: cultural and socio-economic status in the past, urban/rural life, companionship status, beliefs and attitudes, higher responsibilities of women and women’s financial capability. This study explained the various aspects of cultural and socio-economic changes in the elderly participants based on their real experiences.
Bandits with Budgets

We investigate multi-armed bandits with budgets, a natural model for ad-display optimization encountered in search engines. We provide asymptotic regret lower bounds satisfied by any algorithm, and propose algorithms which match those lower bounds. We consider different types of budgets: scenarios where the advertiser has a fixed budget over a time horizon, and scenarios where the amount of money that is available to spend is incremented in each time slot. Further, we consider two different pricing models, one in which an advertiser is charged for each time her ad is shown (i.e., for each impression) and one in which the advertiser is charged only if a user clicks on the ad. For all of these cases, we show that it is possible to achieve O(log(T)) regret. For both the cost-per-impression and cost-per-click models, with a fixed budget, we provide regret lower bounds that apply to any uniformly good algorithm. Further, we show that B-KL-UCB, a natural variant of KL-UCB, is asymptotically optimal for these cases. Numerical experiments (based on a real-world data set) further suggest that B-KL-UCB also has the same or better finite-time performance when compared to various previously proposed (UCB-like) algorithms, which is important when applying such algorithms to a real-world problem.
Current-Based Testing of Optical Feedback Pixel Driver

A testing scheme of an optical feedback pixel driver is proposed, discussed and simulated by HSPICE. A basic characteristic of the specific circuit is that the gray scales of the pixel are created by pulse width modulation. So, the integral of the output I pixel current (which is proportional to I oled) has to be measured or calculated and used for testing. The testing procedure that is proposed enables the detection and identification of common processing defects up to 96%, as verified from simulation results. Although I pixel current is tend to be very low, the measuring system used, using special instrumentation ICs, is successfully simulated and verified by HSPICE.
Preventive aerobic training exerts a cardioprotective effect on rats treated with monocrotaline

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a chronic disease which causes overload to the right ventricle. The effect of preventive training on cardiac remodelling in this condition is still unknown. This study aimed to evaluate the influence of preventive training on hypertrophy, heart function and gene expression of calcium transport proteins in rats with monocrotaline‐induced PAH. Thirty‐two male Wistar rats were randomly divided into four groups: S, sedentary control; T, trained control; SM, sedentary monocrotaline; and TM, trained monocrotaline. The preventive training protocol was performed on a treadmill for 13 weeks, five times/week. The first two weeks were adopted for adaptation to training with gradual increases in speed/time. The speed of the physical training from the third to tenth weeks was gradually increased from 0.9 to 1.1 km/h for 60 min. Next, monocrotaline was applied (60 mg/kg) to induce PAH and lactate threshold analysis performed to determine the training speeds. The training speed of the TM group in the following two weeks was 0.8 km/h for 60 min and the T = 0.9 km/h for 60 min; in the final two weeks, both groups trained at the same speed and duration 0.9 km/h, 60 min. Cardiac function was assessed through echocardiography, ventricular hypertrophy through histomorphometric analysis and gene expression through RT‐qPCR. Right cardiac function assessed through the peak flow velocity was SM = 75.5 cm/s vs. TM = 92.0 cm/s (P = 0.001), and ventricular hypertrophy was SM = 106.4 μm² vs. TM = 77.7 μm² (P = 0.004). There was a decrease in the gene expression of ryanodine S = 1.12 au vs. SM = 0.60 au (P = 0.02) without alterations due to training. Thus, we conclude that prior physical training exerts a cardioprotective effect on the right ventricle in the monocrotaline rat model.
Could the Deep Squat Jump Predict Weightlifting Performance?

Vizcaya, FJ, Viana, O, Fernandez del Olmo, M, and Martin Acero, R. Could the deep squat jump predict weightlifting performance? J Strength Cond Res 23(3): 729-734, 2009-This research was carried out with the aim of describing the deep squat jump (DSJ) and comparing it with the squat (SJ) and countermovement (CMJ) jumps, to introduce it as a strength testing tool in the monitoring and control of training in strength and power sports. Forty-eight male subjects (21 weightlifters, 12 triathletes, and 15 physical education students) performed 3 trials of DSJ, SJ, and CMJ with a 1-minute rest among them. For the weightlifters, snatch and clean and jerk results during the Spanish Championship 2004 and the 35th EU Championships 2007 were collected to study the relationship among vertical jumps and weightlifters' performance. A 1-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed significant differences between groups in the vertical jumps, with the highest jumps for the weightlifters and the lowest for the triathletes. An ANOVA for repeated measures (type of jump) showed better results for DSJ and CMJ than SJ in all groups. A linear regression analysis was performed to determine the association between weightlifting and vertical jump performances. Correlations among the weightlifting performance and the vertical jumps were also calculated and determined using Pearson r. Results have shown that both CMJ and DSJ are strongly correlated with weightlifting ability. Therefore, both measures can be useful for coaches as a strength testing tool in the monitoring and control of training in weightlifting.
Multi-task Sequence to Sequence Learning

Sequence to sequence learning has recently emerged as a new paradigm in supervised learning. To date, most of its applications focused on only one task and not much work explored this framework for multiple tasks. This paper examines three multi-task learning (MTL) settings for sequence to sequence models: (a) the oneto-many setting - where the encoder is shared between several tasks such as machine translation and syntactic parsing, (b) the many-to-one setting - useful when only the decoder can be shared, as in the case of translation and image caption generation, and (c) the many-to-many setting - where multiple encoders and decoders are shared, which is the case with unsupervised objectives and translation. Our results show that training on a small amount of parsing and image caption data can improve the translation quality between English and German by up to 1.5 BLEU points over strong single-task baselines on the WMT benchmarks. Furthermore, we have established a new state-of-the-art result in constituent parsing with 93.0 F1. Lastly, we reveal interesting properties of the two unsupervised learning objectives, autoencoder and skip-thought, in the MTL context: autoencoder helps less in terms of perplexities but more on BLEU scores compared to skip-thought.
Phylogeny, Floral Evolution, and Inter-Island Dispersal in Hawaiian Clermontia (Campanulaceae) Based on ISSR Variation and Plastid Spacer Sequences

Previous studies based on DNA restriction-site and sequence variation have shown that the Hawaiian lobeliads are monophyletic and that the two largest genera, Cyanea and Clermontia, diverged from each other ca. 9.7 Mya. Sequence divergence among species of Clermontia is quite limited, however, and extensive hybridization is suspected, which has interfered with production of a well-resolved molecular phylogeny for the genus. Clermontia is of considerable interest because several species posses petal-like sepals, raising the question of whether such a homeotic mutation has arisen once or several times. In addition, morphological and molecular studies have implied different patterns of inter-island dispersal within the genus. Here we use nuclear ISSRs (inter-simple sequence repeat polymorphisms) and five plastid non-coding sequences to derive biparental and maternal phylogenies for Clermontia. Our findings imply that (1) Clermontia is not monophyletic, with Cl. pyrularia nested within Cyanea and apparently an intergeneric hybrid; (2) the earliest divergent clades within Clermontia are native to Kauài, then Òahu, then Maui, supporting the progression rule of dispersal down the chain toward progressively younger islands, although that rule is violated in later-evolving taxa in the ISSR tree; (3) almost no sequence divergence among several Clermontia species in 4.5 kb of rapidly evolving plastid DNA; (4) several apparent cases of hybridization/introgression or incomplete lineage sorting (i.e., Cl. oblongifolia, peleana, persicifolia, pyrularia, samuelii, tuberculata), based on extensive conflict between the ISSR and plastid phylogenies; and (5) two origins and two losses of petaloid sepals, or—perhaps more plausibly—a single origin and two losses of this homeotic mutation, with its introgression into Cl. persicifolia. Our phylogenies are better resolved and geographically more informative than others based on ITS and 5S-NTS sequences and nuclear SNPs, but agree with them in supporting Clermontia's origin on Kauài or some older island and dispersal down the chain subsequently.
Auditory brainstem, middle and late latency responses to short gaps in noise at different presentation rates

Abstract Objective: The effects of rate on auditory-evoked potentials (AEP) to short noise gaps (12 ms) recorded at high sampling rates using wide-band filters were investigated. Design: Auditory brainstem (ABR), middle latency (MLR), late latency (LLR) and steady-state (ASSR) responses were simultaneously recorded in adult subjects at four gap rates (0.5, 1, 5 and 40 Hz). Major components (V, Na, Pa, Nb, Pb, N1 and P2) were identified at each rate and analysed for latency/amplitude characteristics. Gap responses at 40 Hz were recovered from Quasi-ASSRs (QASSR) using the CLAD deconvolution method. Study Sample: Fourteen right ears of young normal hearing subjects were tested. Results: All major components were present in all subjects at 1 Hz. P1 (P50) appeared as a low-pass filtered component of Pa and Pb waves. At higher rates, N1 and P2 disappeared completely while major ABR-MLR components were identified. Peak latencies were mostly determined by noise onsets slightly delayed by offset responses. Conclusions: Major AEP components can be recorded to short gaps at 1 Hz using high sampling rates and wide-band filters. At higher rates, only ABR and MLRs can be recorded. Such simultaneous recordings may provide a complete assessment of temporal resolution and processing at different levels of auditory pathways.
Using the geneRecommender Package

geneRecommender is a package used to identify coexpressed genes in microarray data. In particular, the package ranks genes according to how strongly they correlate with a set of query genes over the experiments for which the query genes behave in a similar fashion. The query genes, which are chosen by the user, are intended to be genes known to be involved in a process of interest. Since genes which are coexpressed are more likely to be functionally related, the ranked list produced by geneRecommender will suggest other genes which are involved in or related to the process of interest. The package is an implementation of the Gene Recommender algorithm developed by Owen et al [1]. geneRecommender is designed to work even with a significant amount of missing data.
Progesterone Receptor (PR) Isoforms PRA and PRB Differentially Regulate Expression of the Breast Cancer Resistance Protein in Human Placental Choriocarcinoma BeWo Cells

Breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP) plays a significant role in drug disposition and in conferring multidrug resistance in cancer cells. Previous studies have shown that steroid hormones such as 17β-estradiol and progesterone can affect BCRP expression in cancer cells. In this study, we investigated the molecular mechanism by which BCRP expression in human placental choriocarcinoma BeWo cells is regulated by progesterone. Transfection of the progesterone receptor (PR) isoforms PRA and PRB resulted in a similarly increased expression of PRA and PRB, respectively. However, progesterone significantly increased BCRP expression and activity only in PRB-transfected cells. This stimulatory effect of progesterone was abrogated by the PR antagonist mifepristone (RU-486). Consistently, transcriptional activity of the BCRP promoter was induced 2- to 6-fold by 10-8 to 10-5 M progesterone in PRB-transfected cells. Progesterone had little effect on BCRP expression and activity and transcriptional activity of the BCRP promoter in PRA-transfected cells; however, cotransfection of PRA and PRB significantly decreased the progesterone-response compared with that in cells transfected with only PRB. Mutations in a novel progesterone response element (PRE) identified between -243 to -115 bp of the BCRP promoter region significantly attenuated the progesterone-response in PRB-transfected cells, and deletion of the PRE nearly completely abrogated the progesterone effect. Specific binding of both PRA and PRB to the BCRP promoter through the identified PRE was confirmed using the electrophoretic mobility shift assay. Collectively, progesterone induces BCRP expression in BeWo cells via PRB but not PRA. PRA represses the PRB activity. Thus, PRA and PRB differentially regulate BCRP expression in BeWo cells.