Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Training Deep Networks without Learning Rates Through Coin Betting

Deep learning methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in many application scenarios. Yet, these methods require a significant amount of hyperparameters tuning in order to achieve the best results. In particular, tuning the learning rates in the stochastic optimization process is still one of the main bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a new stochastic gradient descent procedure for deep networks that does not require any learning rate setting. Contrary to previous methods, we do not adapt the learning rates nor we make use of the assumed curvature of the objective function. Instead, we reduce the optimization process to a game of betting on a coin and propose a learning-rate-free optimal algorithm for this scenario. Theoretical convergence is proven for convex and quasi-convex functions and empirical evidence shows the advantage of our algorithm over popular stochastic gradient algorithms.
Effects of alkaline treatment for fibroblastic adhesion on titanium

Background: The surface energy of titanium (Ti) implants is very important when determining hydrophilicity or hydrophobicity, which is vital in osseointegration. The purpose of this study was to determine how Ti plates with an alkaline treatment (NaOH) affect the adhesion and proliferation of human periodontal ligament fibroblasts (HPLF). Materials and Methods: In vitro experimental study was carried out. Type 1 commercially pure Ti plates were analyzed with atomic force microscopy to evaluate surface roughness. The plates were treated ultrasonically with NaOH at 5 M (pH 13.7) for 45 s. HPLF previously established from periodontal tissue was inoculated on the treated Ti plates. The adhered and proliferated viable cell numbers were determined using the 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide method for 60 min and 24 h, respectively. The data were analyzed using Kruskal–Wallis tests and multiple comparisons of the Mann–Whitney U-test,P value was fixed at 0.05. Results: The mean roughness values equaled 0.04 μm with an almost flat surface and some grooves. The alkaline treatment of Ti plates caused significantly (P < 0.05) more pronounced HPLF adhesion and proliferation compared to untreated Ti plates. Conclusion: The treatment of Ti plates with NaOH enhances cell adhesion and the proliferation of HPLF cells. Clinically, the alkaline treatment of Ti-based implants could be an option to improve and accelerate osseointegration.
The role of accident theory in injury prevention – time for the pendulum to swing back

Injury prevention is a branch of safety sciences. While comprehensive theoretical developments occurred in the wider field in the last decades, little of these developments reached and influenced the injury prevention community. Instead, a clear retro trend ‘back to basics’ is seen among injury prevention scholars, especially to Dr William Haddon's pioneering work some 50 years ago. This paper intends to draw attention to this polarisation and discuss possible explanations. It is argued that the strong campaign against the accident concept among leading injury prevention groupings became a serious hindrance for theoretical exchange. The underlying process is interpreted in terms of a struggle for ownership over this truly interdisciplinary field of research, unfortunately at the expense of theoretical stagnation in injury prevention circles and lessened interest in collaboration from other scientific areas. This paper is written as a tribute to Professor Leif Svanström and his scientific contributions, with special regard to his genuine interest in interdisciplinary research.
Exclusive Memory Scheduling for Multimedia MPSoC

Multimedia MPSoC (Multi-Processor System-on-Chip) has been widely used in today's consumer electronics. As many memory intensive IP (Intellectual Property) cores are integrated into a single chip, the performance of shared memory has been a critical issue. Conventional memory scheduling policies just schedule the existing requests in the queue and waste the potential scheduling space because they don't use the features of memory access modules. Existing policies often have to take a tradeoff between performance and QoS (Quality-of-Service). In this paper, we propose an exclusive memory scheduling policy by the observation of memory locality and latency tolerance of multimedia modules. We build a window mechanism and make IP cores monopolize the memory bus round-robin to get both performance and fairness. The experiment results show that the proposed scheduling policy improves the system bandwidth by 36.5% and reduces CPU latency by 29% under heaviest workload compared to a QoS-based control policy. In addition, our policy has low hardware cost and can cooperate with other schedulers.
Micro‐angiographical studies of the medullary venous system of the cerebral hemisphere

In order to identify the zones of convergence of the medullary veins of the cerebral white matter, gelatin‐mixed barium sulfate was injected into normal brains at autopsy. A catheter was inserted into the internal jugular veins or the carotid and vertebral arteries. Serial soft tissue roentgenograms of whole brains and brain slices were used to determine the zones of convergence. The deep med‐ullary veins had four zones of covergence before draining into the subependymal veins: the first (superficial), second (candelabra), third (palmate) and fourth (subependymal). The zones of various convergence within the white matter were due to the crossing of nerve fiber tracts (e.g. the pes of the corona radiata, the radiation of the corpus callosum, the superior occipitofrontal fasciculus, the tapetum and the sagittal strata). Similar but less conspicuous information about the parenchymal arteries was observed in the arterial injection studies. These results suggest that micro‐angiographical studies of the medullary veins of the cerebral white matter provide detailed information on veno‐architecture and convergence zones. This information may help in understanding the pathogenesis of medullary venous malformations.
“Decisions from experience” = sampling error + prospect theory: Reconsidering Hertwig, Barron, Weber & Erev (2004)

According to prospect theory, people overweight low probability events and underweight high probability events. Several recent papers (notably, Hertwig, Barron, Weber & Erev, 2004) have argued that although this pattern holds for “description-based” decisions, in which people are explicitly provided with probability distributions over potential outcomes, it is actually reversed in “experience-based” decisions, in which people must learn these distributions through sampling. We reanalyze the data of Hertwig et al. (2004) and present a replication to determine the extent to which their phenomenon can be attributed to sampling error (a statistical rather than psychological phenomenon) versus underestimation of rare events (i.e., judgmental bias) versus actual underweighting of judged probabilities. We find that the apparent reversal of prospect theory in decisions from experience can be attributed almost entirely to sampling error, and are consistent with prospect theory and the two-stage model of decision under uncertainty (Fox & Tversky, 1998).
Sub–10 nm polyamide nanofilms with ultrafast solvent transport for molecular separation

Composite membranes for filtering solvents Much research has focused on finding membranes that can purify water or extract waste carbon dioxide. However, there is also a need for the removal of small molecules from organic liquids. Many existing processes are energy-intensive and can require large quantities of solvents. Karan et al. grew confined polymer layers on a patterned sacrificial support to give rippled thin films that were then placed on ceramic membranes (see the Perspective by Freger). The composite membrane showed high flux for organic solvents and good stability and was able to separate out small molecules with high efficiency. Science, this issue p. 1347; see also p. 1317 Thin, crumpled polymer films on ceramic supports are high-flux membranes for removing small molecules from organic fluids. [Also see Perspective by Freger] Membranes with unprecedented solvent permeance and high retention of dissolved solutes are needed to reduce the energy consumed by separations in organic liquids. We used controlled interfacial polymerization to form free-standing polyamide nanofilms less than 10 nanometers in thickness, and incorporated them as separating layers in composite membranes. Manipulation of nanofilm morphology by control of interfacial reaction conditions enabled the creation of smooth or crumpled textures; the nanofilms were sufficiently rigid that the crumpled textures could withstand pressurized filtration, resulting in increased permeable area. Composite membranes comprising crumpled nanofilms on alumina supports provided high retention of solutes, with acetonitrile permeances up to 112 liters per square meter per hour per bar. This is more than two orders of magnitude higher than permeances of commercially available membranes with equivalent solute retention.
Comparisons of Body Image Perceptions of a Sample of Black and White Women with Rheumatoid Arthritis and Fibromyalgia in the US

Objective : To explore the disease-related, body image (BI) perceptions of women diagnosed with, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and fibromyalgia (FM). Methods : A purposive sample of twenty-seven females participated in individual semi-structured phone interviews to elicit BI perceptions relative to pain, activity limitations and coping measures. Sessions were digitally recorded, transcribed verbatim, and content analyzed. Results : Body image perceptions relative to 5 major themes emerged in the analysis. They focused on Pain, Disease Impact on Physical and Mental Function, Weight, Diseased-Induced Fears and, Coping measures. Pain was a common experience of all participants. Other troubling factors verbalized by participants included dislike and shame of visibly affected body parts, and disease-induced social, psychological and physical limitations. RA participants thought that manifested joint changes, such as swelling and redness, undergirded their prompt diagnosis and receipt of health care. Contrarily, women with fibromyalgia perceived that the lack of visible, disease-related, physical signs led to a discounting of their disease, which led to delayed health care and subsequent frustrations and anger. All but one participant used prayer and meditation as a coping measure. Conclusion : The body image perceptions evidenced by the majority of participants were generally negative and included specific focus on their disease-affected body parts (e.g. joints), mental function, self-identity, health care experiences, activity limitations and overall quality of life. Given the global effect of RA and FM, assessment and integration of findings about the BI perceptions of individuals with FM and RA may help define suitable interdisciplinary strategies for managing these conditions and improving participants’ quality of life.
Boosting nearest neighbor classifiers for multiclass recognition

Nearest neighbor classifiers are a popular method for multiclass recognition in a wide range of computer vision and pattern recognition domains. At the same time, the accuracy of nearest neighbor classi? ers is sensitive to the choice of distance measure. This paper introduces an algorithm that uses boosting to learn a distance measure for multiclass k-nearest neighbor classification. Given a family of distance measures as input, AdaBoost is used to learn a weighted distance measure, that is a linear combination of the input measures. The proposed method can be seen both as a novel way to learn a distance measure from data, and as a novel way to apply boosting to multiclass recognition problems that does not require output codes. In our approach, multiclass recognition of objects is reduced to a single binary recognition task, defined on triples of objects. Preliminary experiments with eight UCI datasets yield no clear winner among our method, boosting using output codes, and k-nn classification using an unoptimized distance measure. Our algorithm did achieve lower error rates in some of the datasets, which indicates that it is a method worth considering for nearest neighbor recognition in various pattern recognition domains.
Nonconserved Tryptophan 38 of the Cell Surface Receptor for Subgroup J Avian Leukosis Virus Discriminates Sensitive from Resistant Avian Species

ABSTRACT Subgroup J avian leukosis virus (ALV-J) is unique among the avian sarcoma and leukosis viruses in using the multimembrane-spanning cell surface protein Na+/H+ exchanger type 1 (NHE1) as a receptor. The precise localization of amino acids critical for NHE1 receptor activity is key in understanding the virus-receptor interaction and potential interference with virus entry. Because no resistant chicken lines have been described until now, we compared the NHE1 amino acid sequences from permissive and resistant galliform species. In all resistant species, the deletion or substitution of W38 within the first extracellular loop was observed either alone or in the presence of other incidental amino acid changes. Using the ectopic expression of wild-type or mutated chicken NHE1 in resistant cells and infection with a reporter recombinant retrovirus of subgroup J specificity, we studied the effect of individual mutations on the NHE1 receptor capacity. We suggest that the absence of W38 abrogates binding of the subgroup J envelope glycoprotein to ALV-J-resistant cells. Altogether, we describe the functional importance of W38 for virus entry and conclude that natural polymorphisms in NHE1 can be a source of host resistance to ALV-J.
PEDIATRIC AND CONGENITAL HEART DISEASE Original Studies Pulmonary Perfusion Scans Following Transcatheter Patent Ductus Arteriosus Closure Using the Amplatzer Devices

Introduction: Obstruction to flow in the left pulmonary artery (LPA) is a well-known complication after transcatheter device closure of patent ductus arteriosus (PDA). This complication has been studied for different devices using lung perfusion radionuclide scintigraphy (LPRS), but not for Amplatzer devices. This study was performed to evaluate the effect of such devices on lung perfusion using LPRS. Methods: This is a retrospective study that looked at all patients who had PDA closure using different Amplatzer devices at our center between July 1999 and January 2007. All patients underwent LPRS within 24 hr of the procedure. We compared LPRS with other hemodynamic data obtained by cardiac catheterization and echocardiography. Results are presented as mean 6 SD or median and ranges. Results: A total of 70 patients had PDA closure using an Amplatzer device; median age was 1.8 years (4 months to 75 years) and median weight was 12 kg (5–112 Kg). Nine patients had associated cardiac anomalies. Sixty eight patients had available LPRS. The mean percent of left lung perfusion (LLP) was 42.7% (66.7%). Excluding patients with pre-existing LPA stenosis, 17% had abnormally decreased LLP. On hemodynamic measurements, 62 patients had available direct pressure measurements following PDA closure. None had significant increase. No correlation was found with echocardiographic data. Conclusion: PDA closure with Amplatzer family of devices is associated with a relatively significant risk of decreased perfusion to the left lung, mostly mild abnormalities. Comparison with catheterization and echocardiographic measurements showed lack of correlation with LPRS findings. VC 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
NNexus: An Automatic Linker for Collaborative Web-Based Corpora

In this paper, we introduce Noosphere Networked Entry eXtension and Unification System (NNexus), a generalization of the automatic linking engine of Noosphere (at PlanetMath.org) and the first system that automates the process of linking disparate "encyclopediardquo entries into a fully connected conceptual network. The main challenges of this problem space include: 1) linking quality (correctly identifying which terms to link and which entry to link to with minimal effort on the part of users), 2) efficiency and scalability, and 3) generalization to multiple knowledge bases and web-based information environment. We present the NNexus approach that utilizes subject classification and other metadata to address these challenges. We also present evaluation results demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of the approach and discuss ongoing and future directions of research.
Editorial: Self-reflective practice and first-person action research

For this special issue we invited people working with self-reflective, first-person action research approaches to submit articles which would explore the range, richness, delights, challenges and dilemmas of these aspects of action research. We are using the term first-person action research (and first-person inquiry interchangeably) to differentiate aspects of action research theory and practice that focus on:
Occipital nerve stimulation for intractable occipital neuralgia: an open surgical technique.

Occipital neuralgia (ON) is defined as a paroxysmal jabbing pain in the cutaneous distribution of the greater or lesser occipital or third occipital nerve.10 The pain is frequently described as sharp, shooting, stabbing or electrical, preferentially unilateral and remitting, radiating to the occipital and frontal areas, with associated symptoms suggesting a pain origin from the neck.2,3 ON tends to become chronic and must be distinguished from referred pain to the occiput. Etiologies of occipital neuralgia include traumatic (72% of this series), degenerative (14% of this series), and oncological or idiopathic (14% of this series). Most cases arise from a flexion-extension injury to the neck (i.e., whiplash), which commonly results from a rear-end motor vehicle collision.8 Treatment modalities for ON vary from conservative measures, which are usually the frontline treatments, to injections and surgical interventions. Injections such as regional anesthetic nerve block are initially effective in the majority of cases and are also helpful as a diagnostic tool.5,19,28 More recently, botulinum toxin A injection has been used with varied results,4,14 and a recent systematic review was equivocal because of the small number of patients.24 Surgical approaches are indicated for medically intractable ON and are often considered as the last resort. Surgical modalities include decompressive, ablative, and stimulating procedures. The clinical efficacy of these procedures varies, and each has complications of its own. Electrical stimulation of the occipital nerve has been previously reported as a nonablative modality to treat ON.6,9,12,20–22,27 The techniques described for stimulation of the occipital nerve use a fluoroscopic percutaneous approach to insert the stimulating electrode. However, this blind approach does not ensure that the electrode is directly in contact with the nerve trunk. The reported efficacy varies between 60% and 90% of pain relief21 and can diminish substantially with malpositioning or migration of the electrode lead. It is known that percutaneous occipital electrodes are prone to migration with subsequent loss of stimulation and often need surgical revision,13 even after meticulous anchorage techniques.7 Migration rates are study dependent, ranging from zero to 100%, with an average of approximately 15%; the readers are referred to a systematic review on implanted occipital nerve stimulators by Jasper et al.11 for more details. We postulate that suboptimal positioning of the electrode in relation to the nerve trunk and migration of the percutaneously placed electrode in the highly mobile cervical region are the reasons for loss of stimulation. In an attempt to solve the problem of electrode positioning and migration, we developed an open surgical approach that allows visualizing the occipital nerve and ensures meticulous anchoring of the electrode onto the main trunk of the nerve.
The Impact of Diagnosed and Undiagnosed Current Asthma in the General Adult Population

Background: Restrictive definitions of current asthma are used in epidemiological studies to achieve a highly specific classification of subjects. However, undiagnosed asthmatics should be taken into account to correctly evaluate the impact of the disease in the general population. Methods: In an Italian multi-centre cross-sectional survey carried out in 1998–2000, 18,647 responders (20–44 years old) to a screening questionnaire were classified as having physician-diagnosed current asthma or current respiratory symptoms. Similarities in the risk factor profile and in the socioeconomic burden were considered suggestive of undiagnosed current asthma. Results: In Italy, the prevalence of physician-diagnosed current asthma was 4.9% (95% CI 4.4–5.4), while that of ‘asthma attacks and/or use of anti-asthmatic drugs in the past 12 months without a diagnosis of asthma’ (ADWD) was 1.5% (95% CI 1.3–1.7). Allergic rhinitis was highly associated with diagnosed current asthma [relative risk ratio (RRR) 12.48; 95% CI 9.12–17.07; reference category: neither asthma during lifetime nor current respiratory symptoms] and with ADWD (RRR 8.42; 95% CI 6.33–11.19). Chronic cough/phlegm was homogeneously associated with all the respiratory conditions, and the strongest relationship was with ADWD (RRR 7.79; 95% CI 4.95–12.25). Subjects with ADWD and diagnosed current asthmatics were characterised by high and homogeneous percentages of individuals who reported productivity losses (19.0 and 15.1%) and hospitalisations (9.2 and 6.2%) because of respiratory problems in the past year. Conclusions: The impact of current asthma seems to be largely underestimated among Italian adults, since the individuals with ADWD may be undiagnosed current asthmatics.
Linear decision rule as aspiration for simple decision heuristics

Several attempts to understand the success of simple decision heuristics have examined heuristics as an approximation to a linear decision rule. This research has identified three environmental structures that aid heuristics: dominance, cumulative dominance, and noncompensatoriness. This paper develops these ideas further and examines their empirical relevance in 51 natural environments. The results show that all three structures are prevalent, making it possible for simple rules to reach, and occasionally exceed, the accuracy of the linear decision rule, using less information and less computation.
Dynamic packet scheduling performance in UTRA Long Term Evolution downlink

In this paper we evaluate the performance of dynamic Packet Scheduling (PS) of 3GPP UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) Downlink. Packet scheduling is of utmost importance in 3G LTE, because all traffic types with different Quality of Service requirements are competing of the resources. We present a decoupled time and frequency domain packet scheduling framework for LTE downlink. Simulation results with three basic packet scheduler combinations with different amount of fairness are presented in four different 3GPP macro simulation cases to show the both extremes in tradeoff between fairness and spectral efficiency. In addition, the effect of multiuser diversity on packet scheduling performance is studied. It is shown that by dividing the packet scheduler into a time domain and a frequency domain and utilizing different algorithms in both domains, the throughput fairness between users can be effectively controlled.