Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Merit of Raman Pumping in Uniform and Uncompensated Links Supporting NyWDM Transmission

We propose a method to quantitatively evaluate the improvement of the optical signal-to-nose ratio (OSNR) enabled by Raman pumping in hybrid Raman/erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (HFA) for Nyquist-wavelength-division multiplexing (NyWDM) transmission of multilevel modulation formats on the C-band, over uniform, uncompensated and periodically amplified links. It is based on the well accepted thesis that in the considered system scenario propagation effects can be approximately and conservatively modeled as an additive Gaussian disturbance called nonlinear interference (NLI), and it exploits the GN-model for analytical calculations. As an example, we apply the developed method to three typical fiber types with fiber-span loss Af from 20 to 30 dB, and show that the pure counter-propagating pumping scheme is always close to be optimal. Using this pumping scheme, the merit of Raman pumping is very similar for all the considered fibers and its maximum is enabled by full-Raman amplification with an OSNR improvement that increases with Af, and goes from 4 to 5 dB in the explored range. We show that adding some copropagating pump, we obtain a further OSNR improvement of only up to 0.9 dB, so, for the considered scenarios, it does not emerge any indications for the use of some copropagating pump in HFA. Moreover, for counter-propagating pumping schemes, we can obtain about 80% of the maximum Raman merit setting the Raman gain in the HFA only to 60% of the overall gain. We define as moderate pumping regime this HFA operating-mode, that, besides being convenient from an energy-efficiency point of view, it is also irrelevantly affected by pump depletion and so it is very stable in case some input channels are added/dropped, as required by reconfigurable optical networks.
Health in Elite Sports from a Salutogenetic Perspective: Athletes' Sense of Coherence

Objective Considering the high number of stressors encountered in the context of elite sports, a high sense of coherence (SOC) is crucial to allow athletes to maintain their health from both short- and long-term perspectives. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate SOC in a population of elite athletes, focusing on identification of subsets of athletes with particularly high and low SOC scores, and any related predictors. The elite athletes' SOC scores were also evaluated for differences with those of the general population of Germany; whether a correlation between SOC and subjective health existed was additionally examined. Method In total, 698 male and female elite athletes, drawn from Germany's highest-level national track and field squads, and first and second division handball teams, completed a survey that included the SOC-L9 Scale and measures of subjective health, sociodemographic information, and the number of injury lay-offs experienced during the athletes' careers to date. Results Classification tree analysis reveals six contrast groups with varying SOC scores. Several interacting factors determine the group to which an athlete belongs. Together with overuse injuries, additional factors are age, gender, and completed/not completed apprenticeship/degree. Female athletes aged between 19 and 25, who had already been subject to lay-offs due to overuse injuries, comprise the group with the lowest SOC scores. Overall, the SOC of elite athletes is slightly lower than in the general population. In accordance with other studies, a stronger SOC is also correlated significantly with better global subjective health. Conclusion The identification of contrast groups with varying SOC scores contributes to the development of more targeted salutogenetic health promotion programs. Such programs would ideally include learning modules pertaining to coping with overuse injuries, as well as social support systems aiming to effectively combine education and elite sport.
Robust Multivariate Regression with Grossly Corrupted Observations and Its Application to Personality Prediction

We consider the problem of multivariate linear regression with a small fraction of the responses being missing and grossly corrupted, where the magnitudes and locations of such occurrences are not known in priori. This is addressed in our approach by explicitly taking into account the error source and its sparseness nature. Moreover, our approach allows each regression task to possess its distinct noise level. We also propose a new algorithm that is theoretically shown to always converge to the optimal solution of its induced non-smooth optimization problem. Experiments on controlled simulations suggest the competitiveness of our algorithm comparing to existing multivariate regression models. In particular, we apply our model to predict the Big-Five personality from user behaviors at Social Network Sites (SNSs) and microblogs, an important yet dicult problem in psychology, where empirical results demonstrate its superior performance with respect to related learning methods.
Knowledge, attitude and practice about breast cancer and breast self-examination among women seeking out-patient care in a teaching hospital in central India.

BACKGROUND Breast cancer (BC) continues to be a major cause of morbidity and mortality throughout the world. Early detection of BC and early treatment increases the chance of survival. According to Breast Health Global Initiative guidelines for low and middle income countries, diagnosing BCs early by promoting breast self-awareness; clinical breast examination (CBE) and resource adapted mammographic screening will reduce BC mortality. There is a paucity of data on the knowledge and awareness of BC and self-breast examination in India. We designed this hospital based cross sectional descriptive study to evaluate the current status of knowledge, awareness and practices related to BC and breast self-examination in the female rural population attending a teaching hospital. MATERIALS AND METHODS We did a random sampling to identify and enroll 360 women and their female relatives. We excluded a participant from the study if she had already undergone a screening mammography or had had a BC. The data was collected by a self-administered questionnaire in vernacular language. RESULTS Our study population included 360 women with a mean age of 45.81 (±10.9) years. Only 5 (1.38%) females had a family history of BC. A whopping 81% of women did not have any knowledge about BC. All the women thought that CBE by doctors was the only way for screening BC. CONCLUSIONS We concluded that with the results of this study, it is imperative to increase awareness about BC and its detection methods in the community through health education campaigns. We should have major policy changes to increase future screening programs and health education programs which would have an overall positive impact on reducing the disease burden.
State maintenance and its impact on the performability of multi-tiered Internet services

In this paper, we evaluate the performance, availability, and combined performability of four soft state maintenance strategies in two multitier Internet services, an online book store and an auction service. To take soft state and service latency into account, we propose an extension of our previous quantification methodology, and novel availability and performability metrics. Our results demonstrate that storing the soft state in a database can achieve better performability than storing it in main memory, even when the state is efficiently replicated. Strategies that offload the handling of soft state from the database increase the load on other tiers and, consequently, increase the impact of faults in these tiers on service availability. Based on these results, we conclude that service designers need to provision the cluster and balance the load with availability and cost, as well as performance, in mind.
Privacy-preserving P2P data sharing with OneSwarm

Privacy -- the protection of information from unauthorized disclosure -- is increasingly scarce on the Internet. The lack of privacy is particularly true for popular peer-to-peer data sharing applications such as BitTorrent where user behavior is easily monitored by third parties. Anonymizing overlays such as Tor and Freenet can improve user privacy, but only at a cost of substantially reduced performance. Most users are caught in the middle, unwilling to sacrifice either privacy or performance. In this paper, we explore a new design point in this tradeoff between privacy and performance. We describe the design and implementation of a new P2P data sharing protocol, called OneSwarm, that provides users much better privacy than BitTorrent and much better performance than Tor or Freenet. A key aspect of the OneSwarm design is that users have explicit configurable control over the amount of trust they place in peers and in the sharing model for their data: the same data can be shared publicly, anonymously, or with access control, with both trusted and untrusted peers. OneSwarm's novel lookup and transfer techniques yield a median factor of 3.4 improvement in download times relative to Tor and a factor of 6.9 improvement relative to Freenet. OneSwarm is publicly available and has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users since its release.
Real-time monocular visual odometry for on-road vehicles with 1-point RANSAC

This paper presents a system capable of recovering the trajectory of a vehicle from the video input of a single camera at a very high frame-rate. The overall frame-rate is limited only by the feature extraction process, as the outlier removal and the motion estimation steps take less than 1 millisecond with a normal laptop computer. The algorithm relies on a novel way of removing the outliers of the feature matching process.We show that by exploiting the nonholonomic constraints of wheeled vehicles it is possible to use a restrictive motion model which allows us to parameterize the motion with only 1 feature correspondence. Using a single feature correspondence for motion estimation is the lowest model parameterization possible and results in the most efficient algorithms for removing outliers. Here we present two methods for outlier removal. One based on RANSAC and the other one based on histogram voting. We demonstrate the approach using an omnidirectional camera placed on a vehicle during a peak time tour in the city of Zurich. We show that the proposed algorithm is able to cope with the large amount of clutter of the city (other moving cars, buses, trams, pedestrians, sudden stops of the vehicle, etc.). Using the proposed approach, we cover one of the longest trajectories ever reported in real-time from a single omnidirectional camera and in cluttered urban scenes, up to 3 kilometers.
Surface-micromachined free-space fiber optic switches with integrated microactuators for optical fiber communication systems

We report on a novel surface-micromachined free-space fiber optic switch with integrated microactuators for optical fiber communication systems. The switch consists of an out-of-plane micromirror driven by integrated scratch drive actuators, and balanced by a spring. A fall time and a rise time of 15 ms and 6 ms have been achieved, respectively. The switch is equipped with the fail-safe feature as required by the FDDI optical bypass switch. In addition, a vibration g-test has been conducted while the switch is transmitting data. Error free operation up to 89 g's has been achieved for vibration frequencies from 200 Hz to 10 kHz.
Ignorance is Almost Bliss: Near-Optimal Stochastic Matching With Few Queries

The stochastic matching problem deals with finding a maximum matching in a graph whose edges are unknown but can be accessed via queries. This is a special case of stochastic k-set packing, where the problem is to find a maximum packing of sets, each of which exists with some probability. In this paper, we provide edge and set query algorithms for these two problems, respectively, that provably achieve some fraction of the omniscient optimal solution. Our main theoretical result for the stochastic matching (i.e., 2-set packing) problem is the design of an adaptive algorithm that queries only a constant number of edges per vertex and achieves a (1-ε) fraction of the omniscient optimal solution, for an arbitrarily small ε > 0. Moreover, this adaptive algorithm performs the queries in only a constant number of rounds. We complement this result with a non-adaptive (i.e., one round of queries) algorithm that achieves a (0.5 - ε) fraction of the omniscient optimum. We also extend both our results to stochastic k-set packing by designing an adaptive algorithm that achieves a (2/k - ε) fraction of the omniscient optimal solution, again with only O(1) queries per element. This guarantee is close to the best known polynomial-time approximation ratio of 3/k+1 -ε for the deterministic k-set packing problem [Furer 2013]. We empirically explore the application of (adaptations of) these algorithms to the kidney exchange problem, where patients with end-stage renal failure swap willing but incompatible donors. We show on both generated data and on real data from the first 169 match runs of the UNOS nationwide kidney exchange that even a very small number of non-adaptive edge queries per vertex results in large gains in expected successful matches.
Academic resilience in education: the role of achievement goal orientations

Introduction: In the past 2 decades, research findings established achievement goal theory as a powerful framework for conceptualizing difference in the quality of student's engagement, persistence on task, and academic resilience. So the present study examined the relationship between achievement goal orientations and academic resilience. Method: Participants were 606 students (307 girls and 297 boys) selected from Shiraz high schools. They completed the Achievement Goals Questionnaire and Youth development Module Scale (RYDM). To analyze the data, the relationships between variables were examined, using Pearson product–moment correlations. Also simulanteous multiple regression was performed to investigate the prediction of academic resilience by achievement goal orientations. To examine the reliability and the validity of measures Cronbach alpha coefficient and factor analysis method were applied, respectively. Results: Simultaneous multiple regression of achievement goal orientations on academic resilience showed that "mastery-approach" was a significant positive predictor of the "home care/high" and "peer care" subscales. Also, "performance-approach" was a significant, positive predictor of "home care/high", and "school/community meaningful" was predicted by "performance-avoidance" positively. Conclusion: According to the findings, it seems that achievement goal orientation has a critical role in students’ academic achievement. Implications of the results are discussed in more details.
Alloimmunization as a strategy for vaccine design against HIV/AIDS.

AO NE-D AY W O RK SH OP organized by Thomas Lehner and Gene Shearer and cosponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), NIH, and the NIH Office of AIDS Research (OAR) was held at the NIH (Bethesda, MD) on May 6, 1999. With the current worldwide rate of HIV infection estimated to be 16,000 per day, new approaches for the prevention of HIV infection and disease need to be considered. The primary objective of this workshop was to review the published data from HIV-1 exposure and infection, as well as from the SIV–macaque model, to assess whether further consideration should be given to the possibility of immunization against HLA alloantigens as an alternative strategy for an AIDS vaccine. Furthermore, because more than 33 million persons are now infected worldwide, and the incidence of failure of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) is increasing, a secondary objective was to consider alloimmunization as a strategy for immune-based therapy in HIV-infected patients. The rationale of using alloimmunizati on for protection against HIV/AIDS was presented more than 6 years ago,1 and has been reconsidered on the basis of additional new findings. 2 This brief review of the workshop considers alloim munization first as a prophylactic AIDS vaccine, and second as an approach for immune-based therapy. It should be noted that the data suggesting the use of alloimmunizat ion for prophylactic and therapeutic immunization are distinct, and that the strategies for using alloimmunizat ion to achieve vaccine and therapeutic end points may not necessarily be the same.
Tree pattern matching and subset matching in randomized O(nlog3m) time

lle main goal of this paper is to give an efficient algorithm for the Tree Pattern Matching problem. We also introduce and give an efficient algorithm for the Subset Matching problem. The Subset Matching problem is to find all occurrences of a pattern string p of length m in a text string t of length n, where each pattern and text location is a set of characters drawn from some alphabet. The pattern is said to occur at text position i if the set p~] is a subset of the set t[i + j – 1], for allj, 1< j < m. Wegivean O((s+ n)log2 mlog(s + n)) randomized algorithm for this problem, wheres denotes the sum of the sizes of all the sets. Then we reduce the Tree Pattern Matching problem to a number of instances of the Subset Matching problem. This reduction takes linear time and the sum of the sizes of the Subset Matching problems obtained is also linear. Coupled with our first result, this implies an O(n logz m log n) time randomized algorithm for the Tree Pattern Matching problem.
Epidemiology and sociodemographics of systemic lupus erythematosus and lupus nephritis among US adults with Medicaid coverage, 2000-2004.

OBJECTIVE Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and lupus nephritis (LN) disproportionately affect individuals who are members of racial/ethnic minority groups and individuals of lower socioeconomic status (SES). This study was undertaken to investigate the epidemiology and sociodemographics of SLE and LN in the low-income US Medicaid population. METHODS We utilized Medicaid Analytic eXtract data, with billing claims from 47 states and Washington, DC, for 23.9 million individuals ages 18-65 years who were enrolled in Medicaid for >3 months in 2000-2004. Individuals with SLE (≥3 visits >30 days apart with an International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision [ICD-9] code of 710.0) and with LN (≥2 visits with an ICD-9 code for glomerulonephritis, proteinuria, or renal failure) were identified. We calculated SLE and LN prevalence and incidence, stratified by sociodemographic category, and adjusted for number of American College of Rheumatology (ACR) member rheumatologists in the state and SES using a validated composite of US Census variables. RESULTS We identified 34,339 individuals with SLE (prevalence 143.7 per 100,000) and 7,388 (21.5%) with LN (prevalence 30.9 per 100,000). SLE prevalence was 6 times higher among women, nearly double in African American compared to white women, and highest in the US South. LN prevalence was higher among all racial/ethnic minority groups compared to whites. The areas with lowest SES had the highest prevalence; areas with the fewest ACR rheumatologists had the lowest prevalence. SLE incidence was 23.2 per 100,000 person-years and LN incidence was 6.9 per 100,000 person-years, with similar sociodemographic trends. CONCLUSION In this nationwide Medicaid population, there was sociodemographic variation in SLE and LN prevalence and incidence. Understanding the increased burden of SLE and its complications in this low-income population has implications for resource allocation and access to subspecialty care.
Two‐chain high molecular weight kininogen induces endothelial cell apoptosis and inhibits angiogenesis: partial activity within domain 5

We previously reported that the binding of two‐chain high molecular weight kininogen (HKa) to endothelial cells may occur through interactions with endothelial urokinase receptors. Since the binding of urokinase to urokinase receptors activates signaling responses and may stimulate mitogenesis, we assessed the effect of HKa binding on endothelial cell proliferation. Unexpectedly, HKa inhibited proliferation in response to several growth factors, with 50% inhibition caused by ~10 nM HKa. This activity was Zn2+ dependent and not shared by either single‐chain high molecular weight kininogen (HK) or low molecular weight kininogen. HKa selectively inhibited the proliferation of human umbilical vein and dermal microvascular endothelial cells, but did not affect that of umbilical vein or human aortic smooth muscle cells, trophoblasts, fibroblasts, or carcinoma cells. Inhibition of endothelial proliferation by HKa was associated with endothelial cell apoptosis and unaffected by antibodies that block the binding of HK or HKa to any of their known endothelial receptors. Recombinant HK domain 5 displayed activity similar to that of HKa. In vivo, HKainhibited neovascularization of subcutaneously implanted Matrigel plugs, as well as rat corneal angiogenesis. These results demonstrate that HKa is a novel inhibitor of angiogenesis, whose activity is dependent on the unique conformation of the two‐chain molecule. —Zhang, J.‐C. , Claffey, K. , Sakthivel, R. , Darzynkiewicz, Z. , Shaw, D. E. , Leal, J., Wang, Y. ‐C. , Lu, F. M. , McCrae, K. R. Two‐chain high molecular weight kininogen induces endothelial cell apoptosis and inhibits angiogenesis: partial activity within domain 5. The FASEB J. 14, 2589–2600 (2000)
Atrioventricular Nodal Reentrant Tachycardia in Patients Referred for Atrial Fibrillation Ablation: Response to Ablation That Incorporates Slow-Pathway Modification

Background— Although the most common sites of atrial ectopy that trigger atrial fibrillation (AF) are in or around the pulmonary veins (PVs), atrioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia (AVNRT) can also cause or coexist with AF. We sought to characterize patients with AF and AVNRT and assess clinical outcomes after ablation. Methods and Results— To determine the prevalence of concomitant AVNRT and AF, 629 consecutive patients referred for catheter ablation between November 1998 and March 2005 were studied. Electrophysiological studies with programmed stimulation during isoproterenol infusion identified atrial ectopy that initiated AF and the presence of inducible AVNRT. AF ablation consisted of proximal isolation of PVs and elimination of any non-PV trigger of AF, including AVNRT. There were 27 patients (4.3%) who had inducible AVNRT at the time of AF ablation. Of these, 13 underwent AVNRT ablation without PV isolation. Compared with the rest of the cohort, patients with AVNRT and AF were younger at the time of symptom onset (age 36.8±13.8 versus 48.2±11.7 years; P<0.01). Freedom from AF with or without previously ineffective antiarrhythmic medication was similar in both groups (96.3% versus 90.7%; mean follow-up 21.4±9.4 months); however, patients with AVNRT targeted for ablation were more likely to be AF free while not taking any antiarrhythmic medication after a single procedure during the follow-up period (87.5% versus 54.7%; P<0.01) and had fewer complications (0% versus 2.5%; P=0.30). Twelve of the 13 patients who underwent slow-pathway ablation without left atrial ablation remained AF free without the need for antiarrhythmic medication after a single procedure. Conclusions— AVNRT is an uncommon AF trigger seen more frequently in younger patients. Ablation of AVNRT in patients with AF was associated with improved outcomes compared with those with other triggers of AF.