Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accuracy and Usability of a Novel Algorithm for Detection of Irregular Pulse Using a Smartwatch Among Older Adults: Observational Study

Background Atrial fibrillation (AF) is often paroxysmal and minimally symptomatic, hindering its diagnosis. Smartwatches may enhance AF care by facilitating long-term, noninvasive monitoring. Objective This study aimed to examine the accuracy and usability of arrhythmia discrimination using a smartwatch. Methods A total of 40 adults presenting to a cardiology clinic wore a smartwatch and Holter monitor and performed scripted movements to simulate activities of daily living (ADLs). Participants’ clinical and sociodemographic characteristics were abstracted from medical records. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing different domains of the device’s usability. Pulse recordings were analyzed blindly using a real-time realizable algorithm and compared with gold-standard Holter monitoring. Results The average age of participants was 71 (SD 8) years; most participants had AF risk factors and 23% (9/39) were in AF. About half of the participants owned smartphones, but none owned smartwatches. Participants wore the smartwatch for 42 (SD 14) min while generating motion noise to simulate ADLs. The algorithm determined 53 of the 314 30-second noise-free pulse segments as consistent with AF. Compared with the gold standard, the algorithm demonstrated excellent sensitivity (98.2%), specificity (98.1%), and accuracy (98.1%) for identifying irregular pulse. Two-thirds of participants considered the smartwatch highly usable. Younger age and prior cardioversion were associated with greater overall comfort and comfort with data privacy with using a smartwatch for rhythm monitoring, respectively. Conclusions A real-time realizable algorithm analyzing smartwatch pulse recordings demonstrated high accuracy for identifying pulse irregularities among older participants. Despite advanced age, lack of smartwatch familiarity, and high burden of comorbidities, participants found the smartwatch to be highly acceptable.
The microvascular effects of insulin resistance and diabetes on cardiac structure, function, and perfusion: a cardiovascular magnetic resonance study

Aims Type 2 diabetes mellitus is an independent risk factor for the development of heart failure. To better understand the mechanism by which this occurs, we investigated cardiac structure, function, and perfusion in patients with and without diabetes. Methods and results Sixty-five patients with no stenosis >30% on invasive coronary angiography were categorized into diabetes (19) and non-diabetes (46) which was further categorized into prediabetes (30) and controls (16) according to the American Diabetes Association guidelines. Each patient underwent comprehensive cardiovascular magnetic resonance assessment. Left-ventricular (LV) mass, relative wall mass (RWM), Lagrangian circumferential strain, LV torsion, and myocardial perfusion reserve (MPR) were calculated. LV mass was higher in diabetics than non-diabetics (112.8 ± 39.7 vs. 91.5 ± 21.3 g, P = 0.01) and in diabetics than prediabetics (112.8 ± 39.7 vs. 90.3 ± 18.7 g, P = 0.02). LV torsion angle was higher in diabetics than non-diabetics (9.65 ± 1.90 vs. 8.59 ± 1.91°, P = 0.047), and MPR was lower in diabetics than non-diabetics (2.10 ± 0.76 vs. 2.84 ± 1.25 mL/g/min, P = 0.01). There was significant correlation between MPR and early diastolic strain rate (r = −0.310, P = 0.01) and LV torsion (r = −0.306, P = 0.01). In multivariable linear regression analysis, non-diabetics waist–hip ratio, but not body mass index, had a significant association with RWM (Beta = 0.34, P = 0.02). Conclusion Patients with diabetes have increased LV mass, LV torsion, and decreased MPR. There is a significant association between decreased MPR and increased LV torsion suggesting a possible mechanistic link between microvascular disease and cardiac dysfunction in diabetes.
Revenue Improvement for Wireless Service Providers in Hybrid Macrocell–Femtocell Networks

Femto base stations (FBSs) are cost-effective choices for wireless service providers (WSPs) to provide better indoor coverage and capacity in cellular networks. With the introduction of femtocells, spectrum allocation among macro base stations (MBSs) and numerous FBSs becomes challenging. WSPs will allocate resources among hierarchical infrastructures to mitigate mutual interference and maximize WSPs' revenue from service provisioning. In this paper, we propose a channel allocation and service provision framework to help WSPs allocate resources and increase revenue. The spectrum allocation and revenue maximization problem is formulated as a convex problem, and a centralized method is proposed to efficiently solve it. We also propose a distributed algorithm called LD (based on Lagrangian decomposition) to achieve a near-optimal solution with low computational and communication complexity, which can be used when the system is on a large scale. The simulation results show that our scheme can significantly improve the system's revenue.
Ground temperature measurement and emissivity determination to understand the thermal anomaly and its significance on the development of an arid environmental ecosystem in the sand dunes across the Israel – Egypt border

The Israel–Egypt border region composed of longitudinal sand dunes is a very unique arid environmental ecosystem in the world: the Israeli side with much more vegetation cover has notably higher land surface temperature (LST) during daytime than the Egyptian side where bare sand prevails. In order to understand this thermal anomaly and its scientific significance in the arid environmental ecosystem development, a series of intensive research activities have been conducted in the past several years, including remote sensing analysis and meteorological modeling. In the paper, we present part of the series studies on the issue: the ground temperature measurement and emissivity determination. The region is mainly composed of four basic surface patterns: biogenic crust, bare sand, vegetation and playa (physical crust). Our hypothesis to occurrence of the thermal anomaly is that it is the direct result of the different surface composition structures and ground emissivities on both sides. Results from our ground temperature measurements during 1997–1998 validate the hypothesis of a significant LST difference existing among the main surface patterns of the region. Biogenic crust covering 72% on the Israeli side and only about 12% on the Egyptian side has an ARTICLE IN PRESS *Corresponding author. International Institute for Earth System Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China. E-mail address: qinzh@nju.edu. cn (Z. Qin). 0140-1963/$ see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv. 2004.03. 017 average kinetic surface temperature of above 3 C higher than bare sand. Emissivity of the two most important surface patterns also presents a significant difference. Biogenic crust has an average emissivity ranging from 0.9671 at low temperature to 0.9725 at high temperature. Bare sand occupying above 80% of the surface on the Egyptian side and only about 7% on the Israeli side has an average emissivity between 0.9435 and 0.9543. On the basis of the ground temperature measurements, we use the estimated surface cover percentage to factor the emissivity for a simple simulation of average LST on both sides, which results in an outcome that strongly support the explanation of the thermal anomaly in the border region. Since biogenic crust that covers most surface of the region plays important functions in arid ecosystem development and is common in several deserts such as north Africa and central Australia, our documentation of its surface temperature change and determination of its emissivity, which have not been seen in the literature, will provide valuable scientific basis for other studies on arid environmental ecosystems. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Improving the mastery of relative clause in French L1 secondary classes: the effects of an intervention based on verbal interactions on written syntactic structures

Using the accurate relative pronoun (RP) in a formal writing task in French presents challenges for writers since they seem to be influenced by forms used in the popular oral variety of French which are far from the linguistic norm (Blanche-Benveniste, 2010). Studies describing the teaching of the relative clause (RC) in the secondary classroom have highlighted the problems encountered by students not only with han- dling this grammatical object, but also with using their grammatical knowledge in revising their text (Dolz & Schneuwly, 2009). However, to our knowledge, no study has yet been conducted to conceive and test an intervention for teaching RCs in French L1 classes. Based on theoretical and empirical work converging toward the fostering of sustained verbal interactions throughout grammatical and revision instruction, a series of lessons was implemented with 52 grade nine students enrolled in a French course (Montreal, Canada). Pretest and posttest texts were analysed in terms of RC frequency, usage and accuracy. While no difference was found in the general frequency of RCs, results show a significant increase in the use of complex RPs. Students, especially the weaker ones, also make significantly fewer mistakes overall on RPs and also on complex RPs. These results could indicate that certain structures associated with complexity and formal register are used more frequently and more accurately during written production after our intervention. Our results contribute to the ongoing discussion on the complementarity between direct grammar instruction and writing and revision instruc- tion and their positive impact on students’ syntactic constructions in texts.
Decomposition of mortality rates from cardiovascular disease in the adult population: a study for Brazilian micro-regions between 1996 and 2015

As mortes por doenças cardiovasculares constituem um dos mais sérios problemas de saúde, pois representam a primeira causa de morte em todo o planeta, inclusive no Brasil (algo em torno de 30% nos últimos anos). Entretanto, a mortalidade devido a essa causa não se apresenta de maneira uniforme no território brasileiro, uma vez que o país ainda possui importantes disparidades regionais resultantes das desigualdades socioeconômicas e de acesso aos sistemas de saúde. Diante disso, o objetivo deste artigo é verificar como efeitos de idade e taxas podem explicar o diferencial observado de mortes por doenças cardiovasculares na população adulta, por sexo, nas microrregiões brasileiras, no período de 1996 a 2015. Para tanto, e após a correção dos sub-registro de óbitos, foi utilizada a técnica de decomposição. Os resultados sugerem que há uma diminuição nas taxas de mortes por doenças cardiovasculares e que tanto o efeito da estrutura etária como o do nível podem ter influenciado na variação destas mortes registradas no Brasil ao longo do período analisado. Estes achados indicam que a transição epidemiológica brasileira não é uniforme entre e mesmo dentro dos próprios estados e, consequentemente, o Brasil ainda tem um extenso percurso para caminhar.
Combination of spectral and SVD precodings for out-of-band leakage suppression

Since the out-of-band (OOB) power suppression of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been an essential topic for various wireless communication applications such as Cognitive Radio (CR) systems, in this paper, two existing precoding techniques are investigated. Then a combined approach which properly adjusts the matched code rates of these two investigated techniques is proposed. Numerical results show that, for OFDM without guard intervals (NG-OFDM) and with zero padding (ZP-OFDM), the proposed method gives significant further improvement on OOB power suppression and almost no extra drawback than either of the two original techniques.
Is Working Memory Load Irrelevant to Inhibitory Cognitive Control in Negative Priming?

Despite extensive research on working memory and on visual selective attention, the interaction between the two has rarely been investigated. One exception is the highly influential work of de Fockert JW et al. [1] reported in Science. They reported that working memory is crucial for reducing distraction by maintaining the prioritization of relevant over irrelevant information. Their findings were derived from a task combining two unrelated tasks – one requiring visual selective attention and the other working memory – to see if increasing load in the working memory task would increase the processing of visual distractors in the selective attention task. Participants in their study were asked to remember the order of four digits presented either in a random order (high working memory load) or in a fixed order (low load), while categorizing famous names superimposed on irrelevant distractor faces. They found significantly more interference from an irrelevant famous face in the name classification (“politician” vs. “pop-star”) task in the high memory load condition, compared to the low memory load condition. As such, high load seemed to reduce the efficiency of selection and thereby increased the interfering effects of irrelevant stimuli. Accordingly, de Fockert JW et al. [1] concluded that participants were better able to block out the interfering effects of an incongruent face when concurrent memory load obligations are low, whereas when memory load is high, there is more extensive processing of the distractor face resulting in more interference.
STUDENTS’ VOICE: EFL SPEAKING PROBLEMS ON ENGLISH DAY PROGRAM AT ONE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN INDONESIA

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the problems of speaking English encountered by students on English day at one senior high school in Jambi, Indonesia. The data were collected through demographic profiles and semi-structure in-depth interviews with senior high school students. The demographic data were analyzed descriptively while the interview data were transcribed and analyzed line by line to generate and develop codes and themes. Five salient themes that emerged in this research were (1) inadequate vocabulary knowledge, (1) grammar as a stumbling block, (3) fear of negative response from others, (4) low self-esteem to speak in English, and (5) feeling anxious to speak in English. Suggestions and implications are also discussed. Key words: English day, speaking problems, Indonesian students
Generating program inputs for database application testing

Testing is essential for quality assurance of database applications. Achieving high code coverage of the database application is important in testing. In practice, there may exist a copy of live databases that can be used for database application testing. Using an existing database state is desirable since it tends to be representative of real-world objects' characteristics, helping detect faults that could cause failures in real-world settings. However, to cover a specific program code portion (e.g., block), appropriate program inputs also need to be generated for the given existing database state. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel approach that generates program inputs for achieving high code coverage of a database application, given an existing database state. Our approach uses symbolic execution to track how program inputs are transformed before appearing in the executed SQL queries and how the constraints on query results affect the application's execution. One significant challenge in our problem context is the gap between program-input constraints derived from the program and from the given existing database state; satisfying both types of constraints is needed to cover a specific program code portion. Our approach includes novel query formulation to bridge this gap. Our approach is loosely integrated into Pex, a state-of-the-art white-box testing tool for . NET from Microsoft Research. Empirical evaluations on two real database applications show that our approach assists Pex to generate program inputs that achieve higher code coverage than the program inputs generated by Pex without our approach's assistance.
Fast Multi-Stage Submodular Maximization : Extended version

Motivated by extremely large-scale machine learning problems, we introduce a new multistage algorithmic framework for submodular maximization (called MULTGREED), where at each stage we apply an approximate greedy procedure to maximize surrogate submodular functions. The surrogates serve as proxies for a target submodular function but require less memory and are easy to evaluate. We theoretically analyze the performance guarantee of the multi-stage framework and give examples on how to design instances of MULTGREED for a broad range of natural submodular functions. We show that MULTGREED performs very closely to the standard greedy algorithm given appropriate surrogate functions and argue how our framework can easily be integrated with distributive algorithms for further optimization. We complement our theory by empirically evaluating on several real-world problems, including data subset selection on millions of speech samples where MULTGREED yields at least a thousand times speedup and superior results over the state-of-the-art selection methods.
Heart Rate Spectral Analysis, Cardiac Norepinephrine Spillover, and Muscle Sympathetic Nerve Activity During Human Sympathetic Nervous Activation and Failure

Although heart rate variability (HRV) at 0.1 Hz has been proposed as a noninvasive clinical measure of cardiac sympathetic nerve firing, this premise has not been sufficiently validated by comparison with techniques such as microneurography and the measurement of norepinephrine spillover from the heart that more directly reflect presynaptic sympathetic activity. Methods and ResultsWe compared the three techniques under conditions of effective cardiac sympathetic denervation, pure autonomic failure (n=4), dopamine β-hydroxylase deficiency (n= 1), and after cardiac transplantation (n=9) as well as in the context of sympathetic nervous activation in cardiac failure (n= 15) and with aging (n= 10). Age-matched comparisons were made in each case with healthy individuals drawn from a pool of 52 volunteers. In pure autonomic failure and early after transplantation, cardiac norepinephrine spillover was negligible, and HRV was low. Late after transplantation, however, cardiac norepinephrine spillover returned to normal levels, and HRV remained low. In comparison to younger subjects (18 to 35 years old), older individuals (60 to 75 years old) had higher muscle sympathetic nerve activity (young, 22.9±1.9; old, 31.3±5.8 bursts per minute; P < .05) and cardiac norepinephrine spillover (young, 14.3±2.5; old, 20.1±3.0 ng/min; P < .05). In contrast, total HRV was reduced by 89%, and at 0.1 Hz it was reduced by 93% (P < .05). Cardiac failure was also characterized by elevated cardiac norepinephrine spillover (cardiac failure patients, 59±4; healthy volunteers, 18±3 ng/min; P < .01) but reduced 0.1 Hz HRV (cardiac failure patients, 49±17; healthy volunteers, 243±4 ms2; P < .05). ConclusionsHRV at 0.1 Hz depends on factors in addition to cardiac sympathetic nerve firing rates, including multiple neural reflexes, cardiac adrenergic receptor sensitivity, postsynaptic signal transduction, and electrochemical coupling, and is not directly related to cardiac norepinephrine spillover, which is a more direct measure of the sympathetic nerve firing rate.
Migration of Thymic Pre-T Cells Regulates Development, Proliferation, and Heterogeneous Nuclear Ribonucleoprotein L Alternative Splicing Controlled by

The regulation of posttranscriptional modiﬁcations of pre-mRNA by alternative splicing is important for cellular function, development, and immunity. The receptor tyrosine phosphatase CD45, which is expressed on all hematopoietic cells, is known for its role in the development and activation of T cells. CD45 is known to be alternatively spliced, a process that is partially regulated by heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein (hnRNP) L. To investigate the role of hnRNP L further, we have generated conditional hnRNP L knockout mice and found that LckCre-mediated deletion of hnRNP L results in a decreased thymic cellularity caused by a partial block at the transition stage between double-negative 4 and double-positive cells. In addition, hnRNP L 2 / 2 thymocytes express aberrant levels of the CD45RA splice isoforms and show high levels of phosphorylated Lck at the activator tyrosine Y394, but lack phosphorylation of the inhibitory tyrosine Y505. This indicated an increased basal Lck activity and correlated with higher proliferation rates of double-negative 4 cells in hnRNP L 2 / 2 mice. Deletion of hnRNP L also blocked the migration and egress of single-positive thymocytes to peripheral lymphoid organs in response to sphingosine-1-phosphate and the chemokines CCL21 and CXCL12 very likely as a result of aberrant splicing of genes encoding GTPase regulators and proteins affecting cytoskeletal organization. Our results indicate that hnRNP L regulates T cell differentiation and migration by regulating pre-TCR and chemokine receptor signaling. by ver-ifying presence of the neocassette (StuI digestion) as well as the third loxP site (XmnI digestion) by Southern blot. A positive clone was transiently transfected with a plasmid encoding Cre-recombinase, and partially recombined clones with the neocassette removed, leaving the endogenous locus with only two loxP sites inserted, were identiﬁed by PCR and con- ﬁrmed by Southern blot (Bcl1/Sﬁ1 digestion). One clone was used to generate hnRNP L-ﬂoxed mice using standard procedures. hnRNP L- ﬂoxed mice were backcrossed to C57BL/6 for more than eight gener-ations. All animals were housed under speciﬁc pathogen-free conditions at the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montreal animal facilities, and all experiments conformed to ethical principles and guidelines approved by the institutional animal care committee.
Enhancing Sparsity by Constraining Strategies : Constrained SIRT versus Spectral Projected Gradient Methods

We investigate a constrained version of simultaneous iterative reconstruction techniques (SIRT) from the general viewpoint of projected gradient methods. This connection enable us to assess the computational merit of this algorithm class. We borrow a leaf from numerical optimization to cope with the slow convergence of projected gradient methods and propose an acceleration procedure based on the spectral gradient choice of steplength along with a nonmonotone strategy. We compare these schemes and present numerical experiments on some algebraic image reconstruction models with sparsity constraints, with particular attention to tomographic particle image reconstruction. The performance of both constrained SIRT and nonmonotone spectral projected gradient approach is illustrated for several constraining strategies.