Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scheduling multicast traffic in internally buffered crossbar switches

Scheduling multicast traffic has been an active research topic due to the tremendous growth of multicast traffic (audio, video, teleconferencing, etc.) on the Internet. Considerable research work has been done on input queued (IQ) switches to handle the multicast traffic. Unfortunately, all the proposed solutions were of no practical value because they either lack performance or were simply not practical. Internally buffered crossbar (IBC) switches, on the other hand, have been considered as a robust alternative to buffer-less crossbar switches to improve the switching performance. However, no work has ever been done on multicasting in IBC switches. In this paper, we fill this gap and study, for the first time, the multicasting problem in IBC switches. In particular, we propose a simple scheduling scheme named multicast cross-points round robin (MXRR) for the IBC switch architecture. Our scheme was shown to handle multicast traffic more efficiently and far better than all previous schemes. Yet, MXRR is both practical and achieves high performance.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) In vivo tumor growth inhibition and biodistribution studies of locked nucleic acid ( LNA ) antisense oligonucleotides

Locked nucleic acids (LNA) are novel high-af®nity DNA analogs that can be used as genotype-speci®c drugs. The LNA oligonucleotides (LNA PO ODNs) are very stable in vitro and in vivo without the need for a phosphorothiolated backbone. In this study we tested the biological fate and the ef®cacy in tumor growth inhibition of antisense oligonucleotides directed against the gene of the large subunit of RNA polymerase II (POLR2A) that are completely synthesized as LNA containing diester backbones. These full LNA oligonucleotides strongly reduce POLR2A protein levels. Full LNA PO ODNs appeared to be very stable compounds when injected into the circulation of mice. Full LNA PO ODNs were continuously administered for 14 days to tumor-bearing nude mice. Tumor growth was inhibited sequence specifically at dosages from 1 mg/kg/day. LNA PO ODNs appeared to be non-toxic at dosages <5 mg/kg/day. Biodistribution studies showed the kidneys to have the highest uptake of LNA PO ODNs and urinary secretion as the major route of clearance. This report shows that LNA PO ODNs are potent genotype-speci®c drugs that can inhibit tumor growth
A friendly mobile entertainment robot for disabled children

Disabled children, when compared to other children, have fewer opportunities for exploring and interacting with the world. Thus, they are exposed to the feeling that they are unable to do anything by themselves. In this sense, the use of mobile robots may help these children to overcome their limitation and provide means to develop social skills. This paper describes partial results of on-going research on control architectures for mobile robots concerning hardware and software aspects. We propose a behavior-based architecture for the interaction between humans and robots, particularly children with severe motor disabilities. The main goal is to create a modular, flexible and scalable development environment, which motivates children to interact with the robot and the world.
I'm not joking! The strategic use of humour in stories of racism

This study examines the use of humour by Black football coaches in England as a rhetorical device against racism. The paper draws on humour studies and critical race theory to illustrate signs of humour as defence. Research on humour has popularly explored the ambiguities and qualities of humour and, in particular, joke telling through its use as a foil to stem racial ills is less well understood. Where previous work has focused on explicit joke telling/banter in sport, this paper examines how techniques of humour are used in everyday racialised experiences. The use of techniques of humour enables feelings of subordination, and humiliation to be transposed into forms of resistance, while its physiological and psychological benefits can lead to inter-racial relief and catharsis. The paper concludes that techniques of humour remain underexplored as important tools of resistance to everyday racism.
Endoluminal solutions to bariatric surgery complications: A review with a focus on technical aspects and results

Obesity is a growing problem in developed countries, and surgery is the most effective treatment in terms of weight loss and improving medical comorbidity in a high proportion of obese patients. Despite the advances in surgical techniques, some patients still develop acute and late postoperative complications, and an endoscopic evaluation is often required for diagnosis. Moreover, the high morbidity related to surgical reintervention, the important enhancement of endoscopic procedures and technological innovations introduced in endoscopic equipment have made the endoscopic approach a minimally-invasive alternative to surgery, and, in many cases, a suitable first-line treatment of bariatric surgery complications. There is now evidence in the literature supporting endoscopic management for some of these complications, such as gastrointestinal bleeding, stomal and marginal ulcers, stomal stenosis, leaks and fistulas or pancreatobiliary disorders. However, endoscopic treatment in this setting is not standardized, and there is no consensus on its optimal timing. In this article, we aim to analyze the secondary complications of the most expanded techniques of bariatric surgery with special emphasis on those where more solid evidence exists in favor of the endoscopic treatment. Based on a thorough review of the literature, we evaluated the performance and safety of different endoscopic options for every type of complication, highlighting the most recent innovations and including comparative data with surgical alternatives whenever feasible.
Etiology and early pathogenesis of malignant testicular germ cell tumors: towards possibilities for preinvasive diagnosis

Malignant testicular germ cell tumors (TGCT) are the most frequent cancers in Caucasian males (20-40 years) with an 70% increasing incidence the last 20 years, probably due to combined action of (epi)genetic and (micro)environmental factors. It is expected that TGCT have carcinoma in situ(CIS) as their common precursor, originating from an embryonic germ cell blocked in its maturation process. The overall cure rate of TGCT is more than 90%, however, men surviving TGCT can present long-term side effects of systemic cancer treatment. In contrast, men diagnosed and treated for CIS only continue to live without these long-term side effects. Therefore, early detection of CIS has great health benefits, which will require an informative screening method. This review described the etiology and early pathogenesis of TGCT, as well as the possibilities of early detection and future potential of screening men at risk for TGCT. For screening, a well-defined risk profile based on both genetic and environmental risk factors is needed. Since 2009, several genome wide association studies (GWAS) have been published, reporting on single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with significant associations in or near the genes KITLG, SPRY4, BAK1, DMRT1, TERT, ATF7IP, HPGDS, MAD1L1, RFWD3, TEX14, and PPM1E, likely to be related to TGCT development. Prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal environmental factors also influence the onset of CIS. A noninvasive early detection method for CIS would be highly beneficial in a clinical setting, for which specific miRNA detection in semen seems to be very promising. Further research is needed to develop a well-defined TGCT risk profile, based on gene-environment interactions, combined with noninvasive detection method for CIS.
Latent Domain Word Alignment for Heterogeneous Corpora

This work focuses on the insensitivity of existing word alignment models to domain differences, which often yields suboptimal results on large heterogeneous data. A novel latent domain word alignment model is proposed, which induces domain-conditioned lexical and alignment statistics. We propose to train the model on a heterogeneous corpus under partial supervision, using a small number of seed samples from different domains. The seed samples allow estimating sharper, domain-conditioned word alignment statistics for sentence pairs. Our experiments show that the derived domain-conditioned statistics, once combined together, produce notable improvements both in word alignment accuracy and in translation accuracy of their resulting SMT systems.
BrainWeb: Online Interface to a 3D MRI Simulated Brain Database

Introduction: The increased importance of automated computer techniques for anatomical brain mapping from MR images and quantitative brain image analysis methods leads to an increased need for validation and evaluation of the effect of image acquisition parameters on performance of these procedures. Validation of analysis techniques of in-vivo acquired images is complicated due to the lack of reference data (“ground truth”). Also, optimal selection of the MR imaging parameters is difficult due to the large parameter space. BrainWeb makes available to the neuroimaging community, online on WWW, a set of realistic simulated brain MR image volumes (Simulated Brain Database, SBD) that allows the above issues to be examined in a controlled, systematic way.
A Framework for Individualizing Predictions of Disease Trajectories by Exploiting Multi-Resolution Structure

For many complex diseases, there is a wide variety of ways in which an individual can manifest the disease. The challenge of personalized medicine is to develop tools that can accurately predict the trajectory of an individual's disease, which can in turn enable clinicians to optimize treatments. We represent an individual's disease trajectory as a continuous-valued continuous-time function describing the severity of the disease over time. We propose a hierarchical latent variable model that individualizes predictions of disease trajectories. This model shares statistical strength across observations at different resolutions-the population, subpopulation and the individual level. We describe an algorithm for learning population and subpopulation parameters offline, and an online procedure for dynamically learning individual-specific parameters. Finally, we validate our model on the task of predicting the course of interstitial lung disease, a leading cause of death among patients with the autoimmune disease scleroderma. We compare our approach against state-of-the-art and demonstrate significant improvements in predictive accuracy.
Research frontiers on the dark side of consumer behaviour: The case of materialism and compulsive buying

ABSTRACT Materialism and compulsive consumption are viewed as dimensions of the dark side of consumer behaviour and have been the focus of consumer research for several decades. This article first shows that previous efforts to study compulsive buying and materialism have been limited in part because they have relied on single perspectives and inadequate methods. Second, it suggests that research in this area could be advanced by adopting emergent approaches and methods that have been used in social and behavioural sciences to study the onset and development of maladaptive behavioural patterns. Third, the article presents the multi-theoretical life course research paradigm that has been widely adopted in numerous disciplines as an approach to the study of various forms of maladaptive behaviour. Fourth, it illustrates how this approach could be employed to study the onset and development of materialism and compulsive buying. Finally, drawing from this paradigm, the article offers new insights in the form of propositions and conceptual directions to help researchers improve their efforts in studying materialism and compulsive buying as well as other forms of the dark side of consumer behaviour.
Changes in efferent and afferent connectivity in rats with induced cerebrocortical microgyria

Freezing injury to the cortical plate at postnatal day (P) 1 initiates a cascade of events that ultimately result in a focal neocortical malformation resembling human 4‐layered microgyria. This malformation has been associated with widespread changes in neocortical and thalamic architecture and physiology. It was hypothesized that at least some of these alterations could result from connectional reorganization following early injury. The current experiment was designed to delineate the efferent and afferent connections between the cerebral hemispheres and between the cortex and thalamus of rats with induced cerebrocortical microgyria. Microgyria were induced in the parietal cortex of rats by freezing injury on postnatal day 1. In adulthood, injections of biotinylated dextran amine were made either in the microgyric cortex, in homologous regions of the opposite hemisphere, or in ipsilateral ventrobasal complex of the thalamus. Appropriately directed connections to homotopic areas were seen in some but not all microgyric rats. In addition, heterotopic projections to frontal and secondary sensorimotor cortices were noted. Projections from homotopic regions in the hemisphere opposite to the malformation terminated most often in the medial portions of the microgyrus or avoided it entirely. There were almost no thalamocortical or corticothalamic projections between the ventrobasal complex and the microgyrus itself, although a dense plexus of thalamocortical fibers was often noted at the border between the malformed and normal cortex. These connectional changes may help explain disturbances in architecture, physiology, and behavior associated with these focal malformations. J. Comp. Neurol. 418:423–440, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Information seeking on the web: An integrated approach based on human collaboration and web 2.0

The explosion of contents on the Web poses a great challenge for users to find “right” information to meet their need. Though some tools exist that can provide help, they only meet the need from limited perspectives and as a result, users have to use multiple tools even for the same goal. This paper proposes an integrated system named Search 2.0 for information seeking on the Web. Specifically, it makes the following contributions: (1) collaboration support is introduced into traditional search engines, making information seeking a social process; (2) an automatic tag learning approach is put forward based on explicit user feedback and traditional search engines.
Epidemic progression on networks based on disease generation time

We investigate the time evolution of disease spread on a network and present an analytical framework using the concept of disease generation time. Assuming a susceptible–infected–recovered epidemic process, this network-based framework enables us to calculate in detail the number of links (edges) within the network that are capable of producing new infectious nodes (individuals), the number of links that are not transmitting the infection further (non-transmitting links), as well as the number of contacts that individuals have with their neighbours (also known as degree distribution) within each epidemiological class, for each generation period. Using several examples, we demonstrate very good agreement between our analytical calculations and the results of computer simulations.
Inter-smell relations in industrial and open source systems: A replication and comparative analysis

The presence of anti-patterns and code smells can affect adversely software evolution and quality. Recent work has shown that code smells that appear together in the same file (i.e., collocated smells) can interact with each other, leading to various types of maintenance issues and/or to the intensification of negative effects. It has also been found that code smell interactions can occur across coupled files (i.e., coupled smells), with comparable negative effects as the interaction of same-file (collocated) smells. Different inter-smell relations have been described in previous work, yet only few studies have evaluated them empirically. This study attempts to replicate the findings from previous work on inter-smell relations by analyzing larger systems, and by including both industrial and open source ones. We also include the analysis of coupled smells in addition to collocated smells, to achieve a more complete picture of inter-smell relations. Our results suggest that if coupled smells are not considered, one may risk increasing the number of false negatives when analysing inter-smells. A major finding is that patterns of inter-smell relations vary between open source and industrial systems, suggesting that contextual variables should be considered in further studies on code smells.
Occlusion-based depth ordering on monocular images with Binary Partition Tree

This paper proposes a system to relate objects in an image using occlusion cues and arrange them according to depth. The system does not rely on any a priori knowledge of the scene structure and focuses on detecting specific points, such as T-junctions, to infer the depth relationships between objects in the scene. The system makes extensive use of the Binary Partition Tree (BPT) as the segmentation tool jointly with a new approach for T-junction estimation. Following a bottomup strategy, regions (initially individual pixels) are iteratively merged until only one region is left. At each merging step, the system estimates the probability of observing a T-junction which is a cue of occlusion when three regions meet. When the BPT is constructed and the pruning is performed, this information is used for depth ordering. Although the proposed system only relies on one low-level depth cue and does not involve any learning process, it shows similar performances than the state of the art.
A Role of Serum-Based Neuronal and Glial Markers as Potential Predictors for Distinguishing Severity and Related Outcomes in Traumatic Brain Injury

Objective Optimal treatment decision and estimation of the prognosis in traumatic brain injury (TBI) is currently based on demographic and clinical predictors. But sometimes, there are limitations in these factors. In this study, we analyzed three central nervous system biomarkers in TBI patients, will discuss the roles and clinical applications of biomarkers in TBI. Methods From July on 2013 to August on 2014, a total of 45 patients were included. The serum was obtained at the time of hospital admission, and biomarkers were extracted with centrifugal process. It was analyzed for the level of S-100 beta (S100B), glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), and ubiquitin carboxy-terminal hydrolase-L1 (UCH-L1). Results This study included 33 males and 12 females with a mean age of 58.5 (19-84) years. TBI patients were classified into two groups. Group A was severe TBI with Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score 3-5 and Group B was mild TBI with GCS score 13-15. The median serum concentration of S100B, GFAP, and UCH-L1 in severe TBI were raised 5.1 fold, 5.5 fold, and 439.1 fold compared to mild injury, respectively. The serum levels of these markers correlated significantly with the injury severity and clinical outcome (p<0.001). Increased level of markers was strongly predicted poor outcomes. Conclusion S100B, GFAP, and UCH-L1 serum level of were significantly increased in TBI according to severity and associated clinical outcomes. Biomarkers have potential utility as diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic adjuncts in the setting of TBI.
Regulation of Intracellular Chloride by Cotransporters in Developing Lateral Superior Olive Neurons

The regulatory mechanisms of intracellular Cl−concentration ([Cl−]i) were investigated in the lateral superior olive (LSO) neurons of various developmental stages by taking advantage of gramicidin perforated patch recording mode, which enables neuronal [Cl−]i measurement. Responses to glycine changed from depolarization to hyperpolarization during the second week after birth, resulting from [Cl−]i decrease. Furosemide equally altered the [Cl−]i of both immature and mature LSO neurons, indicating substantial contributions of furosemide-sensitive intracellular Cl− regulators; i.e., K+–Cl− cotransporter (KCC) and Na+-K+-Cl−cotransporter (NKCC), throughout this early development. Increase of extracellular K+ concentration and replacement of intracellular K+ with Cs+resulted in [Cl−]i elevation at postnatal days 13–15 (P13–P15), but not at P0–P2, indicating that the mechanism of neuronal Cl− extrusion is sensitive to both furosemide and K+-gradient and poorly developed in immature LSO neurons. In addition, removal of extracellular Na+ decreased [Cl−]i at P0–P2, suggesting the existence of extracellular Na+-dependent and furosemide-sensitive Cl− accumulation in immature LSO neurons. These data show clearly that developmental changes of Cl− cotransporters alter [Cl−]i and are responsible for the switch from the neonatal Cl− efflux to the mature Cl− influx in LSO neurons. Such maturational changes in Cl− cotransporters might have the important functional roles for glycinergic and GABAergic synaptic transmission and the broader implications for LSO and auditory development.
Automatic Translation of Biomedical Terms by Supervised Machine Learning

In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient automatic system to translate biomedical terms. It mainly relies on a machine learning approach able to infer rewriting rules from pair of terms in two languages. Given a new term, these rules are then used to transform the initial term into its translation. Since conflicting rules may produce different translations, we also use language modeling to single out the best candidate. We report experiments on different language pairs (including Czech, English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish and even Russian); our approach yields good results (varying according to the considered languages) and outperforms existing ones for the French-English pair.
Mitochondrial Peroxiredoxin 3 Regulates Sensory Cell Survival in the Cochlea

This study delineates the role of peroxiredoxin 3 (Prx3) in hair cell death induced by several etiologies of acquired hearing loss (noise trauma, aminoglycoside treatment, age). In vivo, Prx3 transiently increased in mouse cochlear hair cells after traumatic noise exposure, kanamycin treatment, or with progressing age before any cell loss occurred; when Prx3 declined, hair cell loss began. Maintenance of high Prx3 levels via treatment with the radical scavenger 2,3-dihydroxybenzoate prevented kanamycin-induced hair cell death. Conversely, reducing Prx3 levels with Prx3 siRNA increased the severity of noise-induced trauma. In mouse organ of Corti explants, reactive oxygen species and levels of Prx3 mRNA and protein increased concomitantly at early times of drug challenge. When Prx3 levels declined after prolonged treatment, hair cells began to die. The radical scavenger p-phenylenediamine maintained Prx3 levels and attenuated gentamicin-induced hair cell death. Our results suggest that Prx3 is up-regulated in response to oxidative stress and that maintenance of Prx3 levels in hair cells is a critical factor in their susceptibility to acquired hearing loss.