Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parallelization of ant colony optimization algorithm using Kaira

Parallel computing can be very useful for meta-heuristic algorithms, because it can reduce time to find a solution with given properties. On the other hand parallel programming is generally more difficult than the sequential one and we need more development time to get a working parallel solution. We are developing a tool named Kaira which is intended for modelling, debugging, and automated generation of parallel applications. The modelling is based on our own variant of Coloured Petri Nets. In this paper we present how to create parallel programs from an existing sequential implementation of Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm using Kaira. This approach simplifies the development process and thus saves the development time and costs.
Keypress-Based Musical Preference Is Both Individual and Lawful

Musical preference is highly individualized and is an area of active study to develop methods for its quantification. Recently, preference-based behavior, associated with activity in brain reward circuitry, has been shown to follow lawful, quantifiable patterns, despite broad variation across individuals. These patterns, observed using a keypress paradigm with visual stimuli, form the basis for relative preference theory (RPT). Here, we sought to determine if such patterns extend to non-visual domains (i.e., audition) and dynamic stimuli, potentially providing a method to supplement psychometric, physiological, and neuroimaging approaches to preference quantification. For this study, we adapted our keypress paradigm to two sets of stimuli consisting of seventeenth to twenty-first century western art music (Classical) and twentieth to twenty-first century jazz and popular music (Popular). We studied a pilot sample and then a separate primary experimental sample with this paradigm, and used iterative mathematical modeling to determine if RPT relationships were observed with high R2 fits. We further assessed the extent of heterogeneity in the rank ordering of keypress-based responses across subjects. As expected, individual rank orderings of preferences were quite heterogeneous, yet we observed mathematical patterns fitting these data similar to those observed previously with visual stimuli. These patterns in music preference were recurrent across two cohorts and two stimulus sets, and scaled between individual and group data, adhering to the requirements for lawfulness. Our findings suggest a general neuroscience framework that predicts human approach/avoidance behavior, while also allowing for individual differences and the broad diversity of human choices; the resulting framework may offer novel approaches to advancing music neuroscience, or its applications to medicine and recommendation systems.
Urban air pollution and effects on biomarkers of systemic inflammation and coagulation: a panel study in healthy adults

Abstract Context: Urban particulate air pollution is associated with cardiovascular diseases and mortality, possibly mediated through systemic inflammation and increased blood viscosity. Objectives: To examine short-term effects of exposure to urban air pollution on blood biomarkers for systemic inflammation and coagulation in a panel of healthy adults living in Gothenburg, Sweden. Materials and methods: The 16 volunteers, all non-smokers, median age 35 years, were called for blood sampling the morning after a day with high levels of urban particulate matter (PM10 > 30 µg/m3) or a day with low levels (PM10 < 15 µg/m3 and NO2 < 35 µg/m3). Associations between exposure to air pollution and each biomarker (C-reactive protein, fibrinogen, serum amyloid A, coagulation factor VIII, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1, p-selectin, soluble intercellular adhesion molecule-1, soluble vascular adhesion molecule-1, Clara cell protein 16 and surfactant protein D) were examined using a linear mixed-effects model. Results: In total, 12 sampling sessions were performed, six after high-pollution and six after low-pollution days, over 21 months. The ratio of air pollution levels between high- and low-pollution days was five for PM10 (median: 49 and 10 µg/m3) and two for NO2 (median: 47 and 24 µg/m3). No significant increase in blood levels of any of the biomarkers were seen after days with high air pollution levels compared with low levels. Conclusion: Biomarkers of inflammation and coagulation were not found to be significantly increased in the mornings after days with elevated levels of urban air pollution compared with low levels when performing repeated blood samplings in healthy volunteers.
Evolution of invasive traits in nonindigenous species: increased survival and faster growth in invasive populations of rusty crayfish (Orconectes rusticus)

The importance of evolution in enhancing the invasiveness of species is not well understood, especially in animals. To evaluate evolution in crayfish invasions, we tested for differences in growth rate, survival, and response to predators between native and invaded range populations of rusty crayfish (Orconectes rusticus). We hypothesized that low conspecific densities during introductions into lakes would select for increased investment in growth and reproduction in invasive populations. We reared crayfish from both ranges in common garden experiments in lakes and mesocosms, the latter in which we also included treatments of predatory fish presence and food quality. In both lake and mesocosm experiments, O. rusticus from invasive populations had significantly faster growth rates and higher survival than individuals from the native range, especially in mesocosms where fish were present. There was no influence of within‐range collection location on growth rate. Egg size was similar between ranges and did not affect crayfish growth. Our results, therefore, suggest that growth rate, which previous work has shown contributes to strong community‐level impacts of this invasive species, has diverged since O. rusticus was introduced to the invaded range. This result highlights the need to consider evolutionary dynamics in invasive species mitigation strategies.
A Novel Ring Oxidation of 4- or 5-Substituted 2H-Oxazole to Corresponding 2-Oxazolone Catalyzed by Cytosolic Aldehyde Oxidase

The ring oxidation of 2H-oxazole, or C2-unsubstituted oxazole, to 2-oxazolone, a cyclic carbamate, was observed on various 4- or 5-substituted oxazoles. Using 5-(3-bromophenyl)oxazole as a model compound, its 2-oxazolone metabolite M1 was fully characterized by liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance. The reaction mainly occurred in the liver cytosolic fraction without the requirement of cytochrome P450 enzymes and cofactor NADPH. Investigations into the mechanism of formation of 2-oxazolone using various chemical inhibitors indicated that the reaction was primarily catalyzed by aldehyde oxidase and not by xanthine oxidase. In addition, cytosol incubation of 5-(3-bromophenyl)oxazole in the medium containing H218O led to the 18O incorporation into M1, substantiating the reaction mechanism of a typical molybdenum hydroxylase. The rank order of liver cytosols for the 2-oxazolone formation was mouse > monkey ≫ rat and human liver cytosol, whereas M1 was not formed in dog liver cytosol. Because the reaction was observed with a number of 4- or 5-substituted 2H-oxazoles in mouse liver cytosols, 2H-oxazoles represent a new substrate chemotype for ring oxidation catalyzed by aldehyde oxidase.
Is mortality after childhood cancer dependent on social or economic resources of parents? A population‐based study

Diagnostic and treatment protocols for childhood cancer are generally standardized, and therefore, survival ought to be fairly equal across social strata in societies with free public health care readily available. Nevertheless, our study explores whether there are disparities in mortality after childhood cancer in Norway depending on socioeconomic status of parents. Limited knowledge on differentials exists from earlier analyses. Discrete‐time hazard regression models for all‐cause mortality for the first 10 years after diagnosis were estimated for all Norwegian children (younger than 20 years), who were diagnosed with cancer during 1974–2007 (N = 6,280), using data from five national registers. Mortality was reduced by about 15% for children with highly educated mothers and children without siblings. These effects were most pronounced for cancers predicted to encompass intense, long‐lasting treatments resulting in chronic health problems. Neither earnings nor the marital status of parents affected children's survival. This large, registry‐based study suggests that time constraints and various noneconomic rewards of parents from their education appears to have an impact on childhood cancer survival. It may be that children with resourceful parents are healthier at the outset and/or are more likely to avoid later health problems. It may also be that children of well‐informed and strongly involved parents are offered better treatment or are able to make better use of what is offered, for instance, by adhering more closely to recommendations for follow‐up treatment. The possibility of such differentials in offered and actual treatment should be addressed in future research.
Luring houseflies (Musca domestica) to traps: do cuticular hydrocarbons and visual cues increase catch?

Abstract Houseflies (Musca domestica L.) are a major pest species of livestock units and landfill sites. Insecticide resistance has resulted in an increased emphasis on lure‐and‐kill control methods, but the success of this approach relies on the effective attraction of houseflies with olfactory or visual stimuli. This study examined the efficacy of olfactory (cuticular hydrocarbons) or visual (colours and groups of flies) attractants in a commercial poultry unit. Despite simulating the cuticular hydrocarbon profiles of male and female houseflies, we found no significant increase in the number of individuals lured to traps and no sex‐specific responses were evident. The use of target colours selected to match the three peaks in housefly visual spectral sensitivity yielded no significant increase in the catch rate of traps to which they were applied. This study also demonstrated that male and female flies possess significantly different spectral reflectance (males are brighter at 320–470 nm; females are brighter at 470–670 nm). An experiment incorporating groups of recently killed flies from which cuticular hydrocarbons were either removed by solvent or left intact also failed to show any evidence of olfactory or visual attraction for houseflies of either sex. This study concluded that variations of the most commonly applied methods of luring houseflies to traps in commercial livestock units fail to significantly increase capture rates. These results support commonly observed inconsistencies associated with using olfactory or visual stimuli in lure‐and‐kill systems, possibly because field conditions lessen the attractant properties observed in laboratory experiments.
Coil Embolization of Intracranial Aneurysms: A Six-Month Follow-Up Study

Background: Rupture of the intracranial aneurysms is associated with a high risk of bleeding and a high incidence of mortality if left untreated. Objectives: The aim of this study is to report our experience in managing intracranial aneurysms using coil embolization and to report the 6-month follow-up outcome of the patients. Patients and Methods: From January 2010 to December 2012, a series of 90 nonrandomized consecutive patients (mean age: 44.6 ± 14.9 years) with intracranial aneurysms underwent endovascular coil embolization in our center. We excluded patients with dissecting, blood blister-like, or false aneurysms. All patients were evaluated by four-vessel angiography to determine the shape, size, number and location of the aneurysms. We recommended a six-month follow-up control angiography. However, only 38 of them participated in this follow-up imaging. The data were analyzed by chi-square, fisher exact and t-tests and alpha was considered lower than 5%. Results: Immediately after the procedure, the total occlusion was seen in 76 (86.4%), subtotal occlusion in six (6.8%), and partial occlusion in six patients (6.8%). There was no significant relationship between the aneurysm size, aneurysm neck size, and location of the aneurysm with total or subtotal occlusions. Eleven patients (12.5%) experienced some complication during the procedure including two tears, three focal neurological signs, three vision disturbances, and three bleedings in the aneurysm. Major complications were significantly higher in the posterior aneurysm compared to the anterior ones (55.6% versus 44.4% of the major complications; P value = 0.015). Among patients who underwent control angiography, 34 patients (89.4%) had no change, two (5.3%) had new growth and two (5.3%) had widening of the neck after 6 months follow-up. Although aneurysms that remained unchanged after six months follow-up angiography had total occlusion after the procedure, it was 50% for aneurysms that had any changes in 6 months follow-up angiography (P value = 0.01). Conclusion: Coil embolization showed successful outcomes in the treatment of intracranial aneurysms with a low complication rate.
Sparse-matrix wavefront reconstruction: simulations and experiments

Adaptive optics systems with Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors require reconstruction of the atmospheric phase error from subaperture slope measurements, with every sensor in the array being used in the computation of each actuator command. This fully populated reconstruction matrix can result in a significant computational burden for adaptive optics systems with large numbers of actuators. A method for generating sparse wavefront reconstruction matrices for adaptive optics is proposed. The method exploits the relevance of nearby subaperture slope measurements for control of an individual actuator, and relies upon the limited extent of the influence function for a zonal deformable mirror. Relying only on nearby sensor information can significantly reduce the calculation time for wavefront reconstruction. In addition, a hierarchic controller is proposed to recover some of the global wavefront information. The performance of these sparse wavefront reconstruction matrices was evaluated in simulation, and tested on the Palomar Adaptive Optics System. This paper presents some initial results from the simulations and experiments.
Xanthogranulomatous Pyelonephritis.

IMAGING FINDINGS Gray scale ultrasound images of the left kidney demonstrate an enlarged kidney with multiple dilated calyces containing low-level echoes, a thin renal parenchyma (Fig. 1), and a central echogenic calculus with posterior acoustic shadowing (Fig. 2). An ultrasound image with color Doppler interrogation over the bladder demonstrates a normal right and absent left ureteral jet (Fig. 3). Reformatted coronal computed tomography (CT) image of the same patient confirms the sonographic findings demonstrating the dilated calyces and central staghorn calculus (Fig. 4). The ultrasound and CT findings are diagnostic of xanthogranulomatous pyelonephritis (XGP).
Liver injury associated with ketoconazole: Review of the published evidence

The azole antifungal agent ketoconazole has been available since 1981 for the treatment of fungal infections. In 2013, the American Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency issued warnings or prohibitions against the clinical use of oral ketoconazole due to the risk of liver injury which may lead to liver transplantation or death. From the available published evidence it is difficult to determine the actual incidence or prevalence of liver injury during clinical use of ketoconazole as an antifungal. Hepatic injury, when it occurs, is generally evident as asymptomatic and reversible abnormalities of liver function tests. However, serious liver injury has been reported. Alternatives to ketoconazole (such as itraconazole, fluconazole, voriconazole, and terbinafine) are available, but improved safety with respect to liver injury risk is not clearly established. We are not aware of published reports of significant ketoconazole‐associated liver injury in volunteer study participants when ketoconazole has been used as a CYP3A inhibitor in the context of clinical research on drug metabolism. Possible alternatives to ketoconazole as prototype CYP3A inhibitors include ritonavir and potentially itraconazole, but not clarithromycin.
Illness in General Practice

We are fortunate in this country in possessing elaborate and reliable information on the causes of mortality, but with the greater emphasis now being placed on the early diagnosis and the prevention of illness more data are required on morbidity. This need is being partially met by the surveys of sickness carried out by the Social Survey for the Ministry of Health, whose first report appeared in 1946 (Slater, 1946). The information collected by the Social Survey is obtained by non-medical workers, and while it gives valuable information about the general incidence and trends of illness based on broad diagnostic groups it cannot be expected to provide the detailed information about illness in the community which only certification by doctors can yield. Detailed information on the causes of incapacity from sickness amongst the insured population of Scotland was published by the Department of Health for Scotland (1939), and provides a wealth of morbidity data about this population group in the year 1936-7. The following survey was undertaken to obtain information about the types and relative frequency of illnesses which lead people to consult their general practitioner.
Investigating the Functional Hierarchy of Bacillus megaterium PV361 Spore Germinant Receptors

ABSTRACT Spores of Bacillus megaterium QM B1551 germinate rapidly when exposed to a number of single-trigger germinant compounds, including glucose, proline, leucine, and certain inorganic salts. However, spores of strain PV361, a plasmidless QM B1551 derivative that lacks the GerU germinant receptor (GR) responsible for mediating germination in response to single-trigger compounds, can germinate efficiently when incubated in nutritionally rich media, presumably via activation of additional germinant receptors. In this work, we have identified five chromosomally encoded GRs and attempted to characterize, by mutational analysis, germinant recognition profiles associated with the respective receptors in strain PV361. Of strains engineered with single GR insertion-deletions, only GerK-null spores displayed significant defective germination phenotypes when incubated in 5% (wt/vol) beef extract or plated on rich solid medium. Cumulative decreases in viability were observed in GerK-null spores that also lacked GerA or GerA2, indicating that these GRs, which exerted little effect on spore germination when disrupted individually, have a degree of functionality. Unexpectedly, an efficient germination response to combinations of germinants was restored in GerA+ spores, which lack all other functional GRs, providing evidence for negative cooperativity between some GRs within the spore. Tetrazolium-based germinative assays conducted with purified spores indicated that these newly characterized B. megaterium GRs are cognate for a wide and chemically diverse range of germinant molecules, but unlike GerU, can only be induced to trigger germination when stimulated by at least two different germinants.
Acquiring knowledge in Soar

The strategies used in designing limited method-based tools can be applied to the much broader method that underlies Soar, called the problem space computational model (PSCM). Taql (for task acquisition language), which is the computer representation of PSCM, is discussed. Taql, together with its programming environment, comprises the Soar-based expert-system development tool. A Taql specification consists of a set of Taql constructs, each of which describes some aspect of a PSCM knowledge role. Each of Taql's 17 constructs is a list consisting of a type and a name for the Taql construct instance, followed by a list of arguments. Each argument specifies some aspect of the construct's PSCM knowledge role. Taql's effectiveness is attributed to a combination of PSCM's simplicity and flexibility and the principled way in which Taql was designed. <<ETX>>
Secure and Verifiable Policy Update Outsourcing for Big Data Access Control in the Cloud

Due to the high volume and velocity of big data, it is an effective option to store big data in the cloud, as the cloud has capabilities of storing big data and processing high volume of user access requests. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a promising technique to ensure the end-to-end security of big data in the cloud. However, the policy updating has always been a challenging issue when ABE is used to construct access control schemes. A trivial implementation is to let data owners retrieve the data and re-encrypt it under the new access policy, and then send it back to the cloud. This method, however, incurs a high communication overhead and heavy computation burden on data owners. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that enabling efficient access control with dynamic policy updating for big data in the cloud. We focus on developing an outsourced policy updating method for ABE systems. Our method can avoid the transmission of encrypted data and minimize the computation work of data owners, by making use of the previously encrypted data with old access policies. Moreover, we also propose policy updating algorithms for different types of access policies. Finally, we propose an efficient and secure method that allows data owner to check whether the cloud server has updated the ciphertexts correctly. The analysis shows that our policy updating outsourcing scheme is correct, complete, secure and efficient.
Cell adhesion and migration are regulated at distinct stages of thymic T cell development: the roles of fibronectin, VLA4, and VLA5

T cell development in the thymus requires the establishment of stable interactions with cell-selecting elements such as the cortical epithelium followed by a regulated movement of selected progenitors to the medulla. Cell adhesion and migration are mediated by integrins in a number of biological systems though little is known regarding their function in the thymus. We demonstrated previously that immature CD3loCD69lo double positive human thymocytes adhere avidly to FN via the integrin, VLA4. We now demonstrate that the interaction of mature CD3hiCD69hi thymic subsets with FN triggers migration rather than firm adhesion. Migration requires the engagement of VLA4 in cooperation with VLA5 and both receptors regulate the persistence and directionality of movement. While migration capability is linked to maturation state, ligand concentration determines the efficiency of migration. In fact, FN and the alternatively spliced CS1 site are predominant in the thymic medulla, suggesting an instructive role of this ECM protein in vivo. Our studies identify a novel VLA4 and VLA5/FN-mediated pathway likely to be involved in regulating cell traffic between the cortex and medulla of the thymus. Moreover, the data provides evidence that VLA4 exists in at least two functional states at distinct stages of T cell development. While different states of VLA4 activation have been described on cell lines, this represents the first evidence supporting a biological significance for this integrin property.