Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bezafibrate in men with lower extremity arterial disease: randomised controlled trial

Objective: To assess the effect of bezafibrate on the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke in men with lower extremity arterial disease. Design: Double blind placebo controlled randomised trial. Setting: 85 general practices and nine hospital vascular clinics. Participants: 1568 men, mean age 68.2 years (range 35 to 92) at recruitment. Interventions: Bezafibrate 400 mg daily (783 men) or placebo (785 men). Main outcome measures: Combination of coronary heart disease and of stroke. All coronary events, fatal and non-fatal coronary events separately, and strokes alone (secondary end points). Results: Bezafibrate did not reduce the incidence of coronary heart disease and stroke. There were 150 and 160 events in the active and placebo groups respectively (relative risk 0.96, 95% confidence interval 0.76 to 1.21). There were 90 and 111 major coronary events in the active and placebo groups respectively (0.81, 0.60 to 1.08), of which 64 and 65 were fatal (0.95, 0.66 to 1.37) and 26 and 46 non-fatal (0.60, 0.36 to 0.99). Beneficial effects on non-fatal events were greatest in men aged <65 years at entry, in whom benefit was also seen for all coronary events (0.38, 0.20 to 0.72). There were no significant effects in older men. There were 60 strokes in those on active treatment and 49 in those on placebo (1.34, 0.80 to 2.01). There were 204 and 195 deaths from all causes in the two groups respectively (1.03, 0.83 to 1.26). Bezafibrate reduced the severity of intermittent claudication for up to three years. Conclusions: Bezafibrate has no effect on the incidence of coronary heart disease and of stroke combined but may reduce the incidence of non-fatal coronary events, particularly in those aged <65 years at entry, in whom all coronary events may also be reduced.
The Influences of Physical Science Problem-Solving Activities in Teacher Education Programs.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of problem-solving activities in physical science classes designed for elementary education majors. A post-test only control group design was used, with 50 students participating during a 5-week treatment period. The experimental group performed problem-solving activities, while the control group did not perform any problem-solving activities. Data collection occurred at the end of the treatment period. Instrumentation consisted of the Test of Integrated Process Skills II and the Problem Solving Inventory. Multiple linear regression analysis indicated that there were significant differences between the experimental group and the control group. The process skill ability mean score was significantly higher for the experimental group than for the control group. There was also a significant relationship between the independent variable of logical reasoning ability and process skill ability. The experimental group had a better perception of their ability to approach their problems and had more confidence in their problem-solving ability, however, the control group had a better perception in the area of personal control. (Contains 10 references.) (SM) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ********************************************************************************
On the influence of ram-pressure stripping on the star formation of simulated spiral galaxies

Aims. We investigate the influence of ram-pressure stripping on the star formation and the mass distribution in simulated spiral galaxies. Special emphasis is put on the question of where the newly formed stars are located. The stripping radius from the simulation is compared to analytical estimates. Methods. Disc galaxies are modelled in combined N-body/hydrodynamic simulations (GADGET-2) with prescriptions for cooling, star formation, stellar feedback, and galactic winds. These model galaxies move through a constant density and temperature gas, which has parameters comparable to the intra-cluster medium (ICM) in the outskirts of a galaxy cluster (T = 3k eV≈ 3.6 × 10 7 K and ρ = 10 −28 g/cm 3 ). With this numerical setup we analyse the influence of ram-pressure stripping on the star formation rate of the model galaxy. Results. We find that the star formation rate is significantly enhanced by the ram-pressure effect (up to a factor of 3). Stars form in the compressed central region of the galaxy, as well as in the stripped gas behind the galaxy. Newly formed stars can be found up to hundred kpc behind the disc, forming structures with sizes of roughly 1 kpc in diameter and with masses of up to 10 7 M� . A s they do not possess a dark matter halo due to their formation history, we name them “stripped baryonic dwarf” galaxies. We also find that the analytical estimate for the stripping radius from a Gunn & Gott (1972) criterion agrees well with the numerical value from the simulation. Like in former investigations, edge-on systems lose less gas than face-on systems, and the resulting spatial distribution of the gas and the newly formed stars is different.
UCFS-A Novel User-Space, High Performance, Customized File System for Web Proxy Servers

Web proxy caching servers play a key role in today's Web infrastructure. Previous studies have shown that disk I/O is one of the major performance bottlenecks of proxy servers. Most conventional file systems do not work well for proxy server workloads and have high overheads. This paper presents a novel, User-space, Customized File System, called UCFS, that can drastically improve the I/O performance of proxy servers. UCFS is a user-level software component of a proxy server which manages data on a raw disk or disk partition. Since the entire system runs in the user space, it is easy and inexpensive to implement. It also has good portability and maintainability. UCFS uses efficient in-memory meta-data tables to eliminate almost all I/O overhead of meta-data searches and updates. It also includes a novel file system called Cluster-structured File System (CFS). Similarly to the Log-structured File Systems (LFS), CFS uses large disk transfers to significantly improve disk write performance. However, CFS can also markedly improve file read operations and it does not generate garbage. Comprehensive simulation experiments using five representative real-world traces show that UCFS can significantly improve proxy server performance. For example, UCFS achieves 8-19 times better I/O performance than the state-of-the-art SQUID server running on a Unix Fast File System (FFS), 4-7.5 times better than SQUID on asynchronous FFS, and 3-9 times better than the improved SQUIDML.
Temporal Generative Adversarial Nets with Singular Value Clipping

In this paper, we propose a generative model, Temporal Generative Adversarial Nets (TGAN), which can learn a semantic representation of unlabeled videos, and is capable of generating videos. Unlike existing Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN)-based methods that generate videos with a single generator consisting of 3D deconvolutional layers, our model exploits two different types of generators: a temporal generator and an image generator. The temporal generator takes a single latent variable as input and outputs a set of latent variables, each of which corresponds to an image frame in a video. The image generator transforms a set of such latent variables into a video. To deal with instability in training of GAN with such advanced networks, we adopt a recently proposed model, Wasserstein GAN, and propose a novel method to train it stably in an end-to-end manner. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.
Variation in Electrophoretic Karyotype and Antifungal Susceptibility of Clinical Isolates of Cryptococcus neoformans at a University-Affiliated Teaching Hospital from 1987 to 1994

ABSTRACT Ninety-eight isolates of Cryptococcus neoformans were collected from 30 patients at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics from December 1987 through December 1994. The susceptibility of each isolate was determined against fluconazole, itraconazole, amphotericin B, and flucytosine. Of the 98 isolates, 53 were recovered from blood, 19 were recovered from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and 26 were recovered from other sources. Although the strains were isolated from the same institution, DNA typing by electrophoretic karyotype (EK) revealed wide genetic variation. Overall, 23 different EK profiles were identified by computer-aided analysis. An isolate exhibiting a single EK was isolated from 24 of 30 patients (80%), whereas multiple strains with unique EKs were isolated from 6 of 30 (20%) patients. Of the six patients who had multiple strains recovered, only one individual had two strains isolated from unique body sites, one strain from the blood and the other from the CSF. Six strains were isolated from multiple patients. Nine patients had multiple sequential isolates recovered over periods of time ranging from 3 days to 4 months. EK analysis revealed persistence of the same genotype in six of the cases. Three patients, however, appeared to have an isolate with a second distinct EK emerge during therapy. Of the patients with sequential positive cultures, an increase in the MICs for test agents was observed in only one case. C. neoformans isolates were collected over a period of 7 years, during which time MICs at our institution remained stable.
Characteristics of an Outpatient Treatment Sample by Primary Substance of Abuse

Objective:This study examines sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, as a function of primary substance of abuse, among clients approached, screened, and assessed for eligibility in a 10-site effectiveness trial of a Web-based psychosocial intervention for substance use disorders. Consistent with the design of effectiveness trials, eligibility criteria were broad and exclusion criteria minimal; thus, the recruited sample may be viewed as relatively representative of patients seeking treatment throughout the United States. Methods:&khgr;2 tests for categorical variables and F tests for continuous variables were used to analyze demographic, substance use, physical and mental health, and sexual risk data collected at screening and baseline; pairwise comparisons between primary substance subgroups for baseline data were conducted if the test statistic P value was 0.01 or less. Results:Few participants expressed disinterest in the study at screening because of the computer-assisted intervention. A diverse sample of substance users completed baseline and were enrolled: 22.9% marijuana; 21.7% opiates; 20.9% alcohol; 20.5% cocaine; and 13.9% stimulants users. Marijuana users demonstrated the greatest differences across primary substances: they were younger, less likely to be married or attend 12-step meetings, and more likely to be in treatment as a result of criminal justice involvement. All patients, even marijuana users, reported comparable rates of co-occurring mental health disorders and sexual risk and substantial rates of polysubstance use disorders. Conclusions:Primary substance of abuse may be a less important indicator of overall severity compared with co-occurring disorders and other factors common across treatment seekers, further demonstrating the need for integrated treatment services and care and comprehensive pretreatment assessment.
Second-line therapy of squamous non-small cell lung cancer: an evolving landscape

ABSTRACT Introduction: The treatment of lung cancer has radically changed over the last few years. The discovery of druggable oncogenic alterations and the introduction of immunotherapy have provided lung cancer patients with the possibility of more efficient and less toxic therapeutic alternatives than chemotherapy. In the case of lung squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC), the treatment progress is slower than adenocarcinoma, for which several targeted agents have been already approved. The standard first-line therapy for LSCC, in most sites of the world, is platinum-based chemotherapy. After disease progression, these patients now have novel treatment options, including antiangiogenic agents and immune checkpoint blockade. Areas covered: We provide a summary of the recent novelties for the second-line therapy of LSCC, emphasizing on the results of the most important clinical trials that have led to regulatory approvals. Expert commentary: Immune checkpoint inhibitors have changed the therapeutic algorithm for LSCC patients. Other treatment options in the second-line setting include ramucirumab in combination with docetaxel and afatinib. However, we still lack biomarkers to predict which patients could respond better to each treatment. Despite the identification of several actionable molecular alterations, there are no approved targeted agents specific for advanced LSCC. Results from ongoing biomarker-driven studies are eagerly awaited to establish effective treatments for molecularly selected subgroups of patients.
Silicon Nanowire-Based Devices for Gas-Phase Sensing

Since their introduction in 2001, SiNW-based sensor devices have attracted considerable interest as a general platform for ultra-sensitive, electrical detection of biological and chemical species. Most studies focus on detecting, sensing and monitoring analytes in aqueous solution, but the number of studies on sensing gases and vapors using SiNW-based devices is increasing. This review gives an overview of selected research papers related to the application of electrical SiNW-based devices in the gas phase that have been reported over the past 10 years. Special attention is given to surface modification strategies and the sensing principles involved. In addition, future steps and technological challenges in this field are addressed.
Detection of IUPAC and IUPAC-like chemical names

Motivation: Chemical compounds like small signal molecules or other biological active chemical substances are an important entity class in life science publications and patents. Several representations and nomenclatures for chemicals like SMILES, InChI, IUPAC or trivial names exist. Only SMILES and InChI names allow a direct structure search, but in biomedical texts trivial names and Iupac like names are used more frequent. While trivial names can be found with a dictionary-based approach and in such a way mapped to their corresponding structures, it is not possible to enumerate all IUPAC names. In this work, we present a new machine learning approach based on conditional random fields (CRF) to find mentions of IUPAC and IUPAC-like names in scientific text as well as its evaluation and the conversion rate with available name-to-structure tools. Results: We present an IUPAC name recognizer with an F1 measure of 85.6% on a MEDLINE corpus. The evaluation of different CRF orders and offset conjunction orders demonstrates the importance of these parameters. An evaluation of hand-selected patent sections containing large enumerations and terms with mixed nomenclature shows a good performance on these cases (F1 measure 81.5%). Remaining recognition problems are to detect correct borders of the typically long terms, especially when occurring in parentheses or enumerations. We demonstrate the scalability of our implementation by providing results from a full MEDLINE run. Availability: We plan to publish the corpora, annotation guideline as well as the conditional random field model as a UIMA component. Contact:roman.klinger@scai.fraunhofer. de
Ssrp1a controls organogenesis by promoting cell cycle progression and RNA synthesis

Tightly controlled DNA replication and RNA transcription are essential for differentiation and tissue growth in multicellular organisms. Histone chaperones, including the FACT (facilitates chromatin transcription) complex, are central for these processes and act by mediating DNA access through nucleosome reorganisation. However, their roles in vertebrate organogenesis are poorly understood. Here, we report the identification of zebrafish mutants for the gene encoding Structure specific recognition protein 1a (Ssrp1a), which, together with Spt16, forms the FACT heterodimer. Focussing on the liver and eye, we show that zygotic Ssrp1a is essential for proliferation and differentiation during organogenesis. Specifically, gene expression indicative of progressive organ differentiation is disrupted and RNA transcription is globally reduced. Ssrp1a-deficient embryos exhibit DNA synthesis defects and prolonged S phase, uncovering a role distinct from that of Spt16, which promotes G1 phase progression. Gene deletion/replacement experiments in Drosophila show that Ssrp1b, Ssrp1a and N-terminal Ssrp1a, equivalent to the yeast homologue Pob3, can substitute Drosophila Ssrp function. These data suggest that (1) Ssrp1b does not compensate for Ssrp1a loss in the zebrafish embryo, probably owing to insufficient expression levels, and (2) despite fundamental structural differences, the mechanisms mediating DNA accessibility by FACT are conserved between yeast and metazoans. We propose that the essential functions of Ssrp1a in DNA replication and gene transcription, together with its dynamic spatiotemporal expression, ensure organ-specific differentiation and proportional growth, which are crucial for the forming embryo.
Attraction Radii in Binary Hopfield Nets are Hard to Compute

We prove that it is an NP-hard problem to determine the attraction radius of a stable vector in a binary Hopfield memory network, and even that the attraction radius is hard to approximate. Under synchronous updating, the problems are already NP-hard for two-step attraction radii; direct (one-step) attraction radii can be computed in polynomial time.
Voxel-based morphometry reveals reduced grey matter volume in the temporal cortex of developmental prosopagnosics

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia exhibit severe and lasting difficulties in recognizing faces despite the absence of apparent brain abnormalities. We used voxel-based morphometry to investigate whether developmental prosopagnosics show subtle neuroanatomical differences from controls. An analysis based on segmentation of T1-weighted images from 17 developmental prosopagnosics and 18 matched controls revealed that they had reduced grey matter volume in the right anterior inferior temporal lobe and in the superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus bilaterally. In addition, a voxel-based morphometry analysis based on the segmentation of magnetization transfer parameter maps showed that developmental prosopagnosics also had reduced grey matter volume in the right middle fusiform gyrus and the inferior temporal gyrus. Multiple regression analyses relating three distinct behavioural component scores, derived from a principal component analysis, to grey matter volume revealed an association between a component related to facial identity and grey matter volume in the left superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus plus the right middle fusiform gyrus/inferior temporal gyrus. Grey matter volume in the lateral occipital cortex was associated with component scores related to object recognition tasks. Our results demonstrate that developmental prosopagnosics have reduced grey matter volume in several regions known to respond selectively to faces and provide new evidence that integrity of these areas relates to face recognition ability.
Coset-based lattice detection for MIMO systems

This paper presents a new sub-optimal lattice decoder based on decomposition of the detection lattice into cosets and iterative application of LLL reduction to its primal and dual representations. From each coset, a candidate solution is chosen using linear equalization followed by integer quantization. These candidates are then compared and the best amongst them is returned. Because the cosets are identical save for distinct translation vectors, their sub-lattice decoders share common preprocessing and can operate very efficiently in parallel. Exclusive of pre-processing, the computational complexity of the proposed decoder is quadratic in the problem dimension and linear in the number of cosets. Simulation results demonstrate the near-ML bit error rate performance offered by the new decoder in the context of existing QAM-modulated MIMO detection schemes.
Detecting Fraud Using Transaction Frequency Data

Despite all attempts to prevent fraud, it continues to be a major threat to industry and government. In this paper, we present a fraud detection method which detects irregular frequency of transaction usage in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. We discuss the design, development and empirical evaluation of outlier detection and distance measuring techniques to detect frequency-based anomalies within an individual user’s profile, relative to other similar users. Primarily, we propose three automated techniques: a univariate method, called Boxplot which is based on the sample’s median; and two multivariate methods which use Euclidean distance, for detecting transaction frequency anomalies within each transaction profile. The two multivariate approaches detect potentially fraudulent activities by identifying: (1) users where the Euclidean distance between their transaction-type set is above a certain threshold and (2) users/data points that lie far apart from other users/clusters or represent a small cluster size, using k-means clustering. The proposed methodology allows an auditor to investigate the transaction frequency anomalies and adjust the different parameters, such as the outlier threshold and the Euclidean distance threshold values to tune the number of alerts. The novelty of the proposed technique lies in its ability to automatically trigger alerts from transaction profiles, based on transaction usage performed over a period of time. Experiments were conducted using a real dataset obtained from the production client of a large organization using SAP R/3 (presently the most predominant ERP system), to run its business. The results of this empirical research demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Molecular Defects of the CYP21A2 Gene in Greek-Cypriot Patients with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia

Background/Aim: To determine the mutations in the CYP21A2 gene in Greek-Cypriots with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and attempt a genotype-phenotype correlation. Subjects and Methods: Molecular analysis was performed by multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification and direct sequencing of PCR products of the CYP21A2 gene in 32 CAH patients. Results: The most frequent genetic defect in the classic salt-wasting and simple virilizing forms was the IVS2-13A/C>G (55%) mutation, followed by Large lesion (20%) and in the non-classical form, the p.V281L (79.5%). Genotypes were categorized in 4 mutation groups (null, A, B and C). All 3 patients in the null group manifested the salt-wasting form and all 6 patients in mutation group A presented with the classical form. One patient in group B had the simple virilizing form and 22 patients in group C exhibited the non-classical form. Conclusion: The spectrum of mutations of the CYP21A2 gene in our population is comparable to the most common reported in similar ethnic groups. The knowledge of the ethnic specificity of the CYP21A2 mutations represents a valuable diagnostic tool for all forms of CAH.
Optimal binary measurement matrices for compressed sensing

We explicitly construct binary measurement matrices with good sparse approximation guarantees. Specifically, our measurement matrices have an order optimal number of measurements and have ℓ1/ℓ1 approximation guarantee. Our construction uses the progressive edge growth technique. We apply coding theoretic results and rely on a recent connection of compressed sensing to LP relaxation for channel decoding.