Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FRACTURE PROCESS ZONE IN DYNAMICALLY LOADED CRACK-LINE WEDGE-LOADED, DOUBLE-CANTILEVER BEAM CONCRETE SPECIMENS

This reports results of tests on crack-line wedge-loaded, double cantiliver beam concrete specimens loaded to failure at increasing strain rates using a displacement controlled MTS dynamic-loading system. Linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM), together with a trailing fracture-process zone (FPZ) was used to evaluate the dynamic fracture response of those specimens. While the constitutive relations governing the FPZ was found to be strain-rate independent, the dynamic stress intensity factor was found to be strain-rate dependent. The energy release rate closely approximated the energy-dissipation rate in the FPZ, demonstrating that the FPZ is the dominant energy-dissipation mechanism in concrete.
Hypertension in Egypt: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND With 29% of the world’s adult population projected to have hypertension by the year 2025, prevention and management of hypertension have become a public health priority. Hypertension also referred to as high blood pressure, in which the arteries have persistent high blood pressure. This results in a condition where the heart has to work harder than normal to flow blood through the vessels. A few years ago, there was no sufficient information about the epidemiology of hypertension, treatment protocols and its consequences in Egypt. Lately, there has been a major change in health system in Egypt, including research development. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the existing data on prevalence, levels of awareness, treatment and control of hypertension in Egypt with a view of suggestive actions that could enhance control of hypertension and improve quality of life of the patients. METHODS Six databases (Pub Med, Cochrane, MEDLINE, Sciencedirect, MedEase, Embase) were searched in November 2013, applying the following criteria: published from January 1995 to November 2013 written in English and carried out on human subjects. RESULTS 21 studies were included in the systematic review of the prevalence, awareness, and control of hypertension in Egypt. The sample size ranged from 27 subjects to 12008 subjects, and the age range from 6-95 years. Every study had both male and female representatives. In most of the studies, the women were more than the men. CONCLUSION There are declines in the levels of awareness of hypertension and even lower levels of control. Research is required to reveal reasons behind these near to the ground levels of control and treatment, and especially awareness, in order to put in the picture policy for the improvement of quality of life of hypertensive patients in Egypt.
The Role of Tec Family Kinases in the Regulation of T-helper-cell Differentiation

ABSTRACT Members of the Tec kinase family (Tec, Btk, Itk, Rlk, and Bmx) play an important role during innate and adaptive immune responses, and mutations in Tec family kinases are linked with immunodeficiencies in humans and mice. Three members of the Tec kinase family are expressed in T cells (Tec, Itk, and Rlk), and biochemical and genetic studies have revealed important roles for Tec family kinases during T-cell development and in the control of T-cell function. Here the authors review the role of Tec family kinases in the regulation of T-helper-cell differentiation.
International Journal of Women's Health Dovepress Role of Multidetector Computed Tomography (mdct) in Patients with Ovarian Masses

Objective: To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of multidetector 64-slice computed tomography (MDCT) in the diagnosis and differentiation of benign and malignant ovarian masses using histopathology and surgical findings as the gold standard. One hundred patients found to have ovarian masses on CT scan were included in the study. CT scan was performed in all these patients after administration of oral and IV contrast. Ovarian masses were classified as benign and malignant on scan findings. Imaging findings were compared with histopathologic results and surgical findings. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), and diagnostic accuracy of MDCT were calculated. Results: MDCT was found to have 97% sensitivity, 91% specificity, and an accuracy of 96% in the differentiation of benign and malignant ovarian masses, while PPV and NPV were 97% and 91%, respectively. Conclusion: MDCT imaging offers a safe, accurate and noninvasive modality to differentiate between benign and malignant ovarian masses.
Assessment of Uncertainty in High Frequency Data: The Observed Asymptotic Variance

The availability of high frequency financial data has generated a series of estimators based on intra‐day data, improving the quality of large areas of financial econometrics. However, estimating the standard error of these estimators is often challenging. The root of the problem is that traditionally, standard errors rely on estimating a theoretically derived asymptotic variance, and often this asymptotic variance involves substantially more complex quantities than the original parameter to be estimated. Standard errors are important: they are used to assess the precision of estimators in the form of confidence intervals, to create “feasible statistics” for testing, to build forecasting models based on, say, daily estimates, and also to optimize the tuning parameters. The contribution of this paper is to provide an alternative and general solution to this problem, which we call Observed Asymptotic Variance. It is a general nonparametric method for assessing asymptotic variance (AVAR). It provides consistent estimators of AVAR for a broad class of integrated parameters Θ = ∫ θ t dt, where the spot parameter process θ can be a general semimartingale, with continuous and jump components. The observed AVAR is implemented with the help of a two‐scales method. Its construction works well in the presence of microstructure noise, and when the observation times are irregular or asynchronous in the multivariate case. The methodology is valid for a wide variety of estimators, including the standard ones for variance and covariance, and also for more complex estimators, such as, of leverage effects, high frequency betas, and semivariance.
Information in the zero crossings of bandpass signals

An interesting subclass of bandpass signals {h} is described wherein the zero crossings of h determine h within a multiplicative constant. The members may have complex zeros, but it is necessary that h should have no zeros in common with its Hilbert transform h other than real simple zeros. It is then sufficient that the band be less than an octave in width. The subclass is shown to include full-carrier upper-sideband signals (of less than an octave bandwidth). Also it is shown that full-carrier lower-sideband signals have only real simple zeros (for any ratio of upper and tower frequencies) and, hence, are readily identified by their zero crossings. However, under the most general conditions for uniqueness, the problem of actually recovering h from its sign changes appears to be very difficult and impractical.
Desmoplastic neurotropic melanoma of the head and neck: The role of radiation therapy

Desmoplastic neurotropic melanoma (DNM) is an uncommon cutaneous melanoma variant with pronounced neurotropism. In contrast to ordinary melanomas, locoregional recurrences are common and distant metastasis are uncommon in patients with DNM. Local control with surgery and radiation therapy may assume a more important role in this variant of melanoma. We present a case of an unresectable skull base recurrence of DNM that was controlled using radiation therapy alone and review the literature.
Generalized reliability-based syndrome decoding for LDPC codes

Aiming at bridging the gap between the maximum likelihood decoding (MLD) and the suboptimal iterative decodings for short or medium length LDPC codes, we present a generalized ordered statistic decoding (OSD) in the form of syndrome decoding, to cascade with the belief propagation (BP) or enhanced min-sum decoding. The OSD is invoked only when the decoding failures are obtained for the preceded iterative decoding method. With respect to the existing OSD which is based on the accumulated log-likelihood ratio (LLR) metric, we extend the accumulative metric to the situation where the BP decoding is in the probability domain. Moreover, after generalizing the accumulative metric to the context of the normalized or offset min-sum decoding, the OSD shows appealing tradeoff between performance and complexity. In the OSD implementation, when deciding the true error pattern among many candidates, an alternative proposed proves to be effective to reduce the number of real additions without performance loss. Simulation results demonstrate that the cascade connection of enhanced min-sum and OSD decodings outperforms the BP alone significantly, in terms of either performance or complexity.
Calcium and ER stress mediate hepatic apoptosis after burn injury

A hallmark of the disease state following severe burn injury is decreased liver function, which results in gross metabolic derangements that compromise patient survival. The underlying mechanisms leading to hepatocyte dysfunction after burn are essentially unknown. The aim of the present study was to determine the underlying mechanisms leading to hepatocyte dysfunction and apoptosis after burn. Rats were randomized to either control (no burn) or burn (60% total body surface area burn) and sacrificed at various time‐points. Liver was either perfused to isolate primary rat hepatocytes, which were used for in vitro calcium imaging, or liver was harvested and processed for immunohistology, transmission electron microscopy, mitochondrial isolation, mass spectroscopy or Western blotting to determine the hepatic response to burn injury in vivo. We found that thermal injury leads to severely depleted endoplasmic reticulum (ER) calcium stores and consequent elevated cytosolic calcium concentrations in primary hepatocytes in vitro. Burn‐induced ER calcium depletion caused depressed hepatocyte responsiveness to signalling molecules that regulate hepatic homeostasis, such as vasopressin and the purinergic agonist ATP. In vivo, thermal injury resulted in activation of the ER stress response and major alterations in mitochondrial structure and function – effects which may be mediated by increased calcium release by inositol 1,4,5‐trisphosphate receptors. Our results reveal that thermal injury leads to dramatic hepatic disturbances in calcium homeostasis and resultant ER stress leading to mitochondrial abnormalities contributing to hepatic dysfunction and apoptosis after burn injury.
Financial Fraud Detection: a New Ensemble Learning Approach for Imbalanced Data

With the rapid development of online and offline transactions, various financial fraud crimes happen every day. Financial fraud has seriously affected the health of economics and damaged the welfare of consumers, investors, as well as financial institutions. Prior studies apply several classification technologies, including decision trees, Bayesian networks, and support vector machines (SVM), to detect fraud detection. However, they ignore one important characteristic of fraud data, which is the number of valid records is largely smaller than the number of illegal fraud records. It implies the data is imbalanced. To resolve this issue, some researchers combine different sampling techniques to improve the detection accuracy of imbalanced fraud data. Among these techniques, ensemble learning is regarded as a perfect tool to handle the classification in imbalance data set. In this study, we propose a new ensemble method for financial fraud detection. This approach combines the bagging and boosting techniques together, in which the bagging technique can reduce the variance for the classification model through resampling the original data set, while boosting technique can reduce the bias of the model. In the future, we would conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approaches with the other state-of-the-art methods on real datasets.
Utilization of Granite Powder as Filler in PC-Toughened Epoxy Resins: Studies on Physico-Mechanical Properties

The present study reports the possibility of using granite powder, an industrial waste with no end use, as potential filler in polycarbonate (PC)-toughened epoxy resin. Testing data for the physico-mechanical properties such as tensile, flexural, density and void content of the composites, according to the filler loading were catalogued. Incorporation of waste granite powder in toughened resin enhances the mechanical properties when compared to neat epoxy, but reduces significantly with respect to toughened resin matrix.
A Survey of Health Care Models that Encompass Multiple Departments

In this survey we review quantitative health care models to illustrate the extent to which they encompass multiple hospital departments. The paper provides general overviews of the relationships that exists between major hospital departments and describes how these relationships are accounted for by researchers. We find the atomistic view of hospitals often taken by researchers is partially due to the ambiguity of patient care trajectories. To this end clinical pathways literature is reviewed to illustrate its potential for clarifying patient flows and for providing a holistic hospital perspective.
Focusing on a probability element: Parameter selection of message importance measure in big data

Message importance measure (MIM) is applicable to characterize the importance of information in the scenario of big data, similar to entropy in information theory. In fact, MIM with a variable parameter can make an effect on the characterization of distribution. Furthermore, by choosing an appropriate parameter of MIM, it is possible to emphasize the message importance of a certain probability element in a distribution. Therefore, parametric MIM can play a vital role in anomaly detection of big data by focusing on probability of an anomalous event. In this paper, we propose a parameter selection method of MIM focusing on a probability element and then present its major properties. In addition, we discuss the parameter selection with prior probability, and investigate the availability in a statistical processing model of big data for anomaly detection problem.
Proteomics as a route to identification of toxicity targets in environmental toxicology

Ecotoxicology describes a three‐way relationship between ecosystems, chemical pollutants and living organisms. It is predicated on the fact that chemical pollution can exert toxic effects on organisms at the individual and population levels. These toxic effects may provide important information to supplement chemical analysis of environmental samples and aid in assessing the environmental quality of specific ecosystems. Traditionally, effects have been detected by means of biomarkers which, of necessity, were often molecules or processes known to be affected by pollutants. Proteomics provides a means of achieving high‐throughput analysis of effects on protein populations and sub‐populations with the potential to identify novel biomarkers. This review summarises the main approaches currently used in this area and assesses the potential of proteomics for identification of novel toxicity targets.
The importance of loading the periphery of the vertebral endplate.

BACKGROUND Commercial fusion cages typically provide support in the central region of the endplate, failing to utilize the increased compressive strength around the periphery. This study demonstrates the increase in compressive strength that can be achieved if the bony periphery of the endplate is loaded. METHODS Sixteen cadaveric lumbar vertebrae (L1-L5) were randomly divided into two even groups. A different commercial mass produced implant (MPI) was allocated to each group: (I) a Polyether-ether-ketone (PEEK) anterior lumber inter-body fusion (ALIF) MPI; and (II) a titanium ALIF MPI. Uniaxial compression at a displacement rate of 0.5 mm/sec was applied to all vertebrae during two phases: (I) with the allocated MPI situated in the central region of the endplate; (II) with an aluminum plate, designed to load the bony periphery of the endplate. The failure load and mode of failure was recorded. RESULTS From phase 1 to phase 2, the failure load increased from 1.1±0.4 to 2.9±1.4 kN for group 1; and from 1.3±1.0 to 3.0±1.9 kN for group 2. The increase in strength from phase 1 to phase 2 was statistically significant for each group (group 1: P<0.01, group 2: P<0.05, paired t-test). There was no significant difference between the groups in either phase (P>0.05, t-test). The mode of failure in phase 1 was the implant being forced through the endplate for both groups. In phase 2, the mode of failure was either a fracture of the epiphyseal rim or buckling of the side wall of the vertebral body. CONCLUSIONS Loading the periphery of the vertebral endplate achieved significant increase in compressive load capacity compared to loading the central region of the endplate. Clinically, this implies that patient-specific implants which load the periphery of the vertebral endplate could decrease the incidence of subsidence and improve surgical outcomes.
Location enhancement to IEEE 802.11 DCF

In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the existing IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) MAC to improve channel spatial reuse efficiency, and thus improve overall network data throughput. Our modification, named the location enhanced DCF (LED) for IEEE 802.11, incorporates location information in DCF frame exchange sequences so that stations sharing the communication channel are able to make better interference predictions and blocking assessments. Utilizing an underlying physical layer design that supports frame capture, the LED enhanced interference estimation can increase overall network data throughput by permitting more concurrent transmissions. In this paper we also analytically study the potential performance enhancement of the LED over the original IEEE 802.11 DCF. The results are verified using the ns-2 simulator, which shows that up to 35% of DCF blocking decisions are unnecessary and our LED method can achieve up to 22% more throughput than the original DCF.
The stability of symmetric solutions to polygenic models.

Analysis of multilocus evolution is usually intractable for more than n approximately 10 genes, because the frequencies of very large numbers of genotypes must be followed. An exact analysis of up to n approximately 100 loci is feasible for a symmetrical model, in which a set of unlinked loci segregate for two alleles (labeled "0" and "1") with interchangeable effects on fitness. All haploid genotypes with the same number of 1 alleles can then remain equally frequent. However, such a symmetrical solution may be unstable: for example, under stabilizing selection, populations tend to fix any one genotype which approaches the optimum. Here, we show how the 2(n)x2(n) stability matrix can be decomposed into a set of matrices, each no larger than nxn. This allows the stability of symmetrical solutions to be determined. We apply the method to stabilizing and disruptive selection in a single deme and to selection against heterozygotes in a linear cline.
Bayesian Information Extraction Network

Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) offer an elegant way to integrate various aspects of language in one model. Many existing algorithms developed for learning and inference in DBNs are applicable to probabilistic language modeling. To demonstrate the potential of DBNs for natural language processing, we employ a DBN in an information extraction task. We show how to assemble wealth of emerging linguistic instruments for shallow parsing, syntactic and semantic tagging, morphological decomposition, named entity recognition etc. in order to incrementally build a robust information extraction system. Our method outperforms previously published results on an established benchmark domain.
Alternating electric fields arrest cell proliferation in animal tumor models and human brain tumors

We have recently shown that low intensity, intermediate frequency, electric fields inhibit by an anti-microtubule mechanism of action, cancerous cell growth in vitro. Using implanted electrodes, these fields were also shown to inhibit the growth of dermal tumors in mice. The present study extends these findings to additional cell lines [human breast carcinoma; MDA-MB-231, and human non-small-cell lung carcinoma (H1299)] and to animal tumor models (intradermal B16F1 melanoma and intracranial F-98 glioma) using external insulated electrodes. These findings led to the initiation of a pilot clinical trial of the effects of TTFields in 10 patients with recurrent glioblastoma (GBM). Median time to disease progression in these patients was 26.1 weeks and median overall survival was 62.2 weeks. These time to disease progression and OS values are more than double the reported medians of historical control patients. No device-related serious adverse events were seen after >70 months of cumulative treatment in all of the patients. The only device-related side effect seen was a mild to moderate contact dermatitis beneath the field delivering electrodes. We conclude that TTFields are a safe and effective new treatment modality which effectively slows down tumor growth in vitro, in vivo and, as demonstrated here, in human cancer patients.
The analysis of creep data for solder alloys

With the continued miniaturisation of electronics equipment, a more detailed examination of the mechanical behaviour of solders is required to ensure reliability in performance. The paper reviews various aspects of the interpretation of the creep response of lead‐containing and lead‐free alloys. It demonstrates the necessity of acquiring stress‐rupture data over as long a period as possible to avoid non‐conservative extrapolation. For example, at 75°C, the transition in slope of the applied stress vs time to rupture plot occurs after about 1,000 h for Sn‐37Pb, although for the lead‐free alloys examined no such transition is observed within this timescale. Sometimes, deformation may be a more appropriate failure criterion than rupture, and it is shown that for Sn‐37Pb this may result in substantially shorter failure times than utilising a rupture criterion. The quality of life estimation methods then depends upon the extent of this stage when the creep rate is a minimum. The Y factor (tm : tr) where tm is .
A Review of Web Based Interventions Focusing on Alcohol Use

Alcohol continues to be a major contributor to morbidity and mortality globally. Despite the scientific advances, alcohol use related problems continue to pose a major challenge to medicine and public health. Internet offers a new mode to provide health care interventions. Web based interventions (WBIs) provide the health care services at the door steps of the end users. WBIs have been developed for alcohol use related problems over the past few years. WBIs offer a potentially relevant and viable mode of service delivery to problem alcohol users. Hence, it is important to assess these interventions for their effectiveness. Some of the existing WBIs for alcohol use assessed systematically in controlled trials. The current review evaluates the available evidence for the effectiveness of WBIs for reducing alcohol use. The literature search was performed using MedLine, PubMed, PsycINFO and EMBASE for relevant English language articles published up to and including April 2013. Only publications focused on reducing alcohol use through WBIs were included.