Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An optimized set of temperature coefficients for LGS

LGS is a promising material for SAW applications at high temperature. However, the temperature coefficients of LGS material constants are not accurate enough to perform reliable simulations above 300°C. In the first part of the paper, we describe a new possible way to derive these coefficients in a wider temperature range. The calculated coefficients allow for accurate predictions up to at least 800°C. In the second part, a deeper analysis of the algorithm outputs demonstrates some of its main limitations. Possible solutions are described to predict then improve the accuracy of the optimized coefficients values.
Abstraction of Object-Oriented Data Models

ion of Object-Oriented Data Models Karl J. Lieberherr, Paul Bergstein, Ignacio Silva-Lepe Northeastern University, College of Computer Science Cullinane Hall, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston MA 02115 lieber@corwin.CCS. northeastern.EDU phone: (617) 437 20 77 Abstract The contributions of this paper are two-fold: First we introduce a novel, axiomatically de ned object-oriented data model, called the Demeter kernel model, and second we outline several computational problems underlying the bottom-up design process in the kernel model. Speci cally, we sketch a fast algorithm, called SMCDL-A, for abstracting a single inheritance class hierarchy from object examples. SMCDL-A \invents" abstract classes to minimize the total size of the classes which generalize the object examples. SMCDL-A provides a formal solution to the bottom-up design problem which so far only has been addressed informally. SMCDL-A has applications to object-oriented design, conceptual scheme design for object-oriented databases and knowledge acquisition from examples.
Fluctuating Inhibitory Inputs Promote Reliable Spiking at Theta Frequencies in Hippocampal Interneurons

Theta-frequency (4–12 Hz) rhythms in the hippocampus play important roles in learning and memory. CA1 interneurons located at the stratum lacunosum-moleculare and radiatum junction (LM/RAD) are thought to contribute to hippocampal theta population activities by rhythmically pacing pyramidal cells with inhibitory postsynaptic potentials. This implies that LM/RAD cells need to fire reliably at theta frequencies in vivo. To determine whether this could occur, we use biophysically based LM/RAD model cells and apply different cholinergic and synaptic inputs to simulate in vivo-like network environments. We assess spike reliabilities and spiking frequencies, identifying biophysical properties and network conditions that best promote reliable theta spiking. We find that synaptic background activities that feature large inhibitory, but not excitatory, fluctuations are essential. This suggests that strong inhibitory input to these cells is vital for them to be able to contribute to population theta activities. Furthermore, we find that Type I-like oscillator models produced by augmented persistent sodium currents (INaP) or diminished A-type potassium currents (IA) enhance reliable spiking at lower theta frequencies. These Type I-like models are also the most responsive to large inhibitory fluctuations and can fire more reliably under such conditions. In previous work, we showed that INaP and IA are largely responsible for establishing LM/RAD cells’ subthreshold activities. Taken together with this study, we see that while both these currents are important for subthreshold theta fluctuations and reliable theta spiking, they contribute in different ways – INaP to reliable theta spiking and subthreshold activity generation, and IA to subthreshold activities at theta frequencies. This suggests that linking subthreshold and suprathreshold activities should be done with consideration of both in vivo contexts and biophysical specifics.
Recent developments on immunotherapy for brain cancer

Introduction: Brain tumors are a unique class of cancers since they are anatomically shielded from normal immunosurveillance by the blood–brain barrier, lack a normal lymphatic drainage system and reside in a potently immunosuppressive environment. Of the primary brain cancers, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common and aggressive in adults. Although treatment options include surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, the average lifespan of GBM patients remains at only 14.6 months post-diagnosis. Areas covered: A review of key cellular and molecular immune system mediators in the context of brain tumors including TGF-β, cytotoxic T cells, Tregs, CTLA-4, PD-1 and IDO is discussed. In addition, prognostic factors, currently utilized immunotherapeutic strategies, ongoing clinical trials and a discussion of new or potential immunotherapies for brain tumor patients are considered. Expert opinion: Current drugs that improve the quality of life and overall survival in patients with brain tumors, especially for GBM, are poorly effective. This disease requires a reanalysis of currently accepted treatment strategies, as well as newly designed approaches. Here, we review the fundamental aspects of immunosuppression in brain tumors, new and promising immunotherapeutic drugs as well as combinatorial strategies that focus on the simultaneous inhibition of immunosuppressive hubs, both in immune and brain tumor cells, which is critical to consider for achieving future success for the treatment of this devastating disease.
Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors of Neurofibromatosis Type I (von Recklinghausen's Disease)

Gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST), as well as the hyperplastic lesions of intestinal neural tissue and its supporting structures, is a gastrointestinal complication of type 1 neurofibromatosis (NF1) (von Recklinghausen's disease). In the present study, we analyzed the histologic and immunohistochemical features, and the c-kit and PDGFRA gene mutations of 36 GISTs derived from 9 NF1 patients. Distinctively, multiple GISTs arose preferentially in the small intestine. The histologic features of NF1-associated GISTs are almost similar to those of non-NF1 GISTs, but characteristically most of the NF1-associated GISTs contained skeinoid fibers. Thirty-three GISTs (92%) showed immunoreactivity for KIT, and 23 tumors (64%) showed diffuse or mosaic-like immunoreactivity for S-100 protein. Hyperplasic lesions, which may be the hyperplasia of interstitial cells of Cajal, were observed around some GISTs. Exons 9, 11, 13, and 17 of the c-kit gene and exons 12 and 18 of the PDGFRA gene were amplified and directly sequenced. Point mutations of c-kit gene or PDGFRA gene were identified only in three (8%) and two (6%) tumors, respectively. NF1-associated GISTs, showing the dual differentiation of interstitial cells of Cajal and Schwann cells, develop in close association with the myenteric nerve structure of gastrointestinal tract of NF1 patients. The point mutations of c-kit and PDGFRA gene may play a limited role in the tumorigenesis of NF1-associated GISTs.
Profile of disability in elderly people: estimates from a longitudinal population study

Abstract Objectives: To provide estimates of the numbers of cognitively impaired and physically disabled elderly people in England and Wales, subdivided by a range of sociodemographic, dependency, care receipt, and survival variables, to support debates on the form and funding of health and welfare programmes. Design: Interviews at baseline and 2 year follow up plus data on resource use extracted from records for those with disability. Subjects: 10 377 people aged 65 years and over in Cambridgeshire, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Oxford. All estimates weighted to population of England and Wales in 1996. Results: 11% of men and 19% of women aged 65 and over were disabled, totalling 1.3 million people; 38% of these were aged 85 or over and a similar percentage were cognitively impaired. Overall, more than 80% of elderly disabled people needed help on at least a daily basis. Over a third of people with limitations to daily activity living in private households were wholly or partly dependent on formal services for help. 63% of disabled elderly people used acute hospitals during the 2 year follow up, 43% as inpatients. 53% of those with cognitive impairment and limitations to daily activity were living in institutions. Conclusions: Very elderly people and those with cognitive impairment make up a large proportion of those in need of long term care. A large proportion of even the most disabled elderly people currently live outside institutions and depend on formal services as well as informal care givers. Disabled elderly people use acute hospitals extensively, underlining the interrelations between acute and long term care.
Parent and Self-Report Health-Related Quality of Life Measures in Young Patients With Tourette Syndrome

Tourette syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by tics and comorbid behavioral problems. This study compared child- and parent-reported quality of life and everyday functioning. We assessed 75 children with Tourette syndrome, of which 42 (56%) had comorbid conditions (obsessive-compulsive disorder = 25; attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder = 6; both comorbidities = 4). All patients completed psychometric instruments, including the Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome–Quality of Life Scale for Children and Adolescents (child report) and the Child Tourette’s Syndrome Impairment Scale (parent report). Data were compared for patients with pure Tourette syndrome, Tourette syndrome + obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome + attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Tourette syndrome + both comorbidities. There were no group differences in quality of life. However, there were differences for total, school, and home activities impairment scores. Children and parents may not share similar views about the impact of Tourette syndrome on functioning. The measurement of health-related quality of life in Tourette syndrome is more complex in children than adults.
Comparison of Neoadjuvant vs Concurrent/Adjuvant Androgen Deprivation in Men with High-risk Prostate Cancer Receiving Definitive Radiation Therapy

Purpose It is unknown whether there is a benefit to starting androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) prior to rather than concurrently with definitive radiation therapy in men with high-risk prostate cancer. We studied the National Cancer Data Base to determine whether the timing of ADT impacts survival. Methods Men diagnosed with high-risk prostate adenocarcinoma who received external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) to a dose of 70-81 Gy along with ADT from 2004-2011 were included. Those who started ADT 42-90 days before EBRT were identified as having received neoadjuvant hormonal therapy (N-HT) and those who received ADT from 14 days before their radiation until 84 days after the start of EBRT were categorized as receiving concurrent/adjuvant treatment (C-HT). We used the log-rank test to compare Kaplan-Meier survival curves and multivariable Cox regression to assess the impact of covariables on overall survival (OS). Results Among 11,491 included patients, those receiving N-HT were 1 year older (p<0.001) and more likely to have Gleason 8-10 disease (p = 0.01) and cT3-4 disease (p = 0.002). Men receiving N-HT had a 5-year and median OS of 80.6% and 111.4 months, respectively, compared to 78.3% and 108.9 months, respectively, in those receiving C-HT (p = 0.03). This benefit remained significant on multivariable analysis (hazard ratio 0.86, 95% confidence interval 0.77-0.96, p = 0.008). Duration of ADT was not available to report. Conclusions External beam radiation therapy with N-HT was associated with improved overall survival compared to C-HT. This study is hypothesis-generating and further studies are needed to best qualify the sequencing of hormone therapy with the duration of treatment.
A Structured Grid Finite-Element Method Using Computed Basis Functions

Structured (e.g., rectangular) meshes in finite-element (FE) analysis offer several advantages, but are not often used because of the error introduced in fitting material interfaces. The nonconforming voxel FE method (NVFEM) is a hierarchical structured method that systematically reduces the geometric error in an adaptive way, but it requires large numbers of elements and therefore is expensive. By computing basis functions that take into account the interface cutting through an element, the number of elements needed is greatly reduced. The resulting method, CBF-NVFEM, is applied to the computation of the radar cross section of free-space scatterers. Results indicate that CBF-NVFEM is much more efficient than NVFEM and is competitive with FEM using unstructured meshes of tetrahedra.
Dynamic Cluster Resource Allocations for Jobs with Known and Unknown Memory Demands

The cluster system we consider for load sharing is a compute farm which is a pool of networked server nodes providing high-performance computing for CPU-intensive, memory-intensive, and I/O active jobs in a batch mode. Existing resource management systems mainly target at balancing the usage of CPU loads among server nodes. With the rapid advancement of CPU chips, memory and disk access speed improvements significantly lag behind advancement of CPU speed, increasing the penalty for data movement, such as page faults and I/O operations, relative to normal CPU operations. Aiming at reducing the memory resource contention caused by page faults and I/O activities, we have developed and examined load sharing policies by considering effective usage of global memory in addition to CPU load balancing in clusters. We study two types of application workloads: 1) Memory demands are known in advance or are predictable and 2) memory demands are unknown and dynamically changed during execution. Besides using workload traces with known memory demands, we have also made kernel instrumentation to collect different types of workload execution traces to capture dynamic memory access patterns. Conducting different groups of trace-driven simulations, we show that our proposed policies can effectively improve overall job execution performance by well utilizing both CPU and memory resources with known and unknown memory demands.
ASH AND SUGARS IN CANE JUICE AT NCHALO SUGAR ESTATE, MALAWI: RELATIONSHIP WITH INORGANIC CONSTITUENTS IN SOIL

Nchalo Sugar Estate in Malawi has consistently higher molasses purities and usually higher ash in final molasses than other mills in southern Africa. An investigation was conducted over two seasons to determine the main constituents of the ash and what relationship existed between the ions in juice, juice quality and the soil cations and salinity parameters. The influence of time of harvest was also considered. Juice potassium, sulphate and chloride ions were the main components of ash. Soil potassium in the upper 60 cm of the soil profile correlated with the ash and potassium content of the juice extracts. Calcium and magnesium in the soil were positively associated with sucrose. Calcium and sodium in the soil were significantly and positively correlated with their respective cations in juice. The influence of time of harvest on soil constituents sampled within the 0-30 cm soil layer was non-significant except for electrical conductivity.
Unbiased adaptive feedback cancellation in hearing aids by closed-loop identification

Hearing aid users often suffer from feedback which causes "howling" and limits the maximum stable gain. The direct method of adaptive feedback cancellation is widely used to mitigate feedback, however it is less effective for high forward path gains due to the inherent bias in the feedback path estimate. This bias can be reduced at the expense of artificial delays which can potentially introduce pre-echo and "comb filter" effects. The direct method also tends to cancel tonal audio signals such as alarms and music. We propose using a system identification method in closed-loop for unbiased feedback cancellation which does not possess the negative characteristics manifested by the direct method, but uses an identification signal. The two-stage method which employs two adaptive filters, one to identify the entire closed-loop, and another to extract the feedback path response was the preferred unbiased method due to its low computation and good feedback identification particularly during "howling. " This paper presents the theory of the proposed new method, and computer simulations which demonstrate its advantages over the widely used direct method.
Normal Sequence and Activity but Reduced Levels of DNA-Pkcs in Human Lymphoblastic Cells Implicate Impaired Protein Stability with Radiosensitive Phenotype

Background: Non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) is the main repair pathway for DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) induced by ionizing radiation in mammalian cells. Subsets of cancer patients are hypersensitive to radiotherapy after standard doses. We sought to determine the radiosensitivity of human lymphoblastic cells (LB0005) for the abnormality in NHEJ components. Methods: Lymphoblastic (LB0005) cells are derived from an adult cancer patient with late radionecrosis. A low magnesium in vitro DNA-end joining assay was performed to examine for any defect in NHEJ activity. Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and sequence analysis were performed to examine for abnormality if any, in the genetic sequence of known NHEJ components. Results: LB0005 cells showed a gain of functional abnormality in the NHEJ pathway. While genetic sequence analysis showed no apparent mutational variations in the known classical NHEJ components, DNA-PKcs (DNA-dependent protein kinase catalytic subunit) protein is reduced in quantity compared to normal control, in spite of higher transcript levels. Conclusions: Taken together cells derived from a radiosensitive patient showed an abnormality in NHEJ activity. Proteins other than the classical NHEJ factors may regulate the NHEJ activity. Furthermore, the defect in theses regulatory proteins may have an impact on the stability of DNA-PKcs.
Automatic labeling of Japanese prosody using j-toBI style description

Speech corpora with prosodic labels are getting more and more important not only for speech synthesis but also for discourse modeling. A widely used labeling system for Japanese prosody, J-ToBI, however, is insufficient for applications like discourse modeling and it even lacks an accurate method for automatic labeling. In this paper, we propose an automatic labeling method for J-ToBI style description of tonal events in Japanese speech, aiming at applying it to a general-purpose labeling of Japanese prosody. The proposed method takes into account the linguistic constraints on the tone structure, which improves the accuracy of automatic labeling. We achieve a fairly good performance in a preliminary experiment using a read speech corpus.
International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics Job shop scheduling optimization through multiple independent particle swarms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop an effective and efficient approach to exploit meta-heuristic in particle swarm optimization (PSO) for the job shop scheduling problem (JSP), a class of NP-hard optimization problems. The approach is to be built on a PSO with multiple independent swarms. PSO was inspired by bird flocking and animal social behaviors. The particles operate collectively like a swarm that flies through the hyperdimensional space to search for possible optimal solutions. The behavior of the particles is influenced by their tendency to learn from their personal past experience and from the success of their peers to adjust their flying speed and direction. Research in fusing the multiple-swarm concept into PSO is well-established in solving single objective optimization problems and multimodal problems. Design/methodology/approach – This study examines the optimization of the JSP via a search space division scheme and use of the meta-heuristic method of PSO by assigning each machine in a JSP an independent swarm of particles. The use of multiple swarms in PSO is motivated by the idea of “divide and conquer” to reduce the computational complexity incurred through solving a NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. The resulted design, JSP/PSO algorithm, fully exploits the computing power presented by the multiple-swarm PSO. Findings – Simulation experiments show that the proposed JSP/PSO algorithm can effectively solve the JSP problems from small to median size. If certain mechanism of information sharing between swarms can be incorporated, it is believed that the new design could offer even more computing power to tackle the large-sized problems. Originality/value – The proposed JSP/PSO algorithm is effective in solving JSPs. The proposed algorithm shows considerable promise when searching the space of non-delay schedules. It demands relatively lower number of function evaluations compared to other state-of-the-art. The drawback to the JSP/PSO is that the GT scheduling adopted is too computationally expensive. Future works will address this concern.
Patterns of Cognitive Performance in Healthy Ageing in Northern Portugal: A Cross-Sectional Analysis

Background The Minho Integrative Neuroscience Database (MIND)-Ageing project aims to identify predictors of healthy cognitive ageing, including socio-demographic factors. In this exploratory analysis we sought to establish baseline cohorts for longitudinal assessment of age-related changes in cognition. Methods The population sample (472 individuals) was strictly a convenient one, but similar to the Portuguese population in the age profile. Participants older than 55 years of age were included if they did not present defined disabling pathologies or dementia. A standardized clinical interview was conducted to assess medical history and a battery of neuropsychological tests was administered to characterize global cognition (Mini Mental State Examination), memory and executive functions (Selective Reminding Test; Stroop Color and Word Test; and Block Design subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale). Cross-sectional analysis of the neuropsychological performance with individual characteristics such as age, gender, educational level and setting (retirement home, senior university, day care center or community), allowed the establishment of baseline clusters for subsequent longitudinal studies. Results Based on different socio-demographic characteristics, four main clusters that group distinctive patterns of cognitive performance were identified. The type of institution where the elders were sampled from, together with the level of formal education, were the major hierarchal factors for individual distribution in the four clusters. Of notice, education seems to delay the cognitive decline that is associated with age in all clusters. Conclusions Social-inclusion/engagement and education seem to have a protective effect on mental ageing, although this effect may not be effective in the eldest elders.