Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical comparison of pulsatile and nonpulsatile perfusion during cardiopulmonary bypass.

Controversy exists concerning the utilization of pulsatile flow during cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) with regard to improved patient outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate pulsatile perfusion in patients undergoing CPB in a clinical setting. Seventy patients undergoing open heart surgery for repair of valvular or congenital heart disease were prospectively entered into the study and were randomly assigned to either pulsatile perfusion (PP, n = 35) or nonpulsatile perfusion (NP, n = 35) groups. All patients received identical surgical, perfusion, and postoperative care. Study parameters included: rate of spontaneous cardiac conversion, inotropic drug use, urine output, skin temperature, platelet count, fibrinogen concentration, and plasma free hemoglobin level. There were no statistically significant differences seen in either preoperative or operative parameters between groups. The PP group had a significantly higher rate of spontaneous cardiac conversion, less inotropic drug use, earlier recovery of skin temperature, and higher urine output during CPB (908.8 +/- 87.2 ml/hr vs. 606.1 +/- 57.5 ml/hr, p < .01). There were no significant differences in either platelet count or fibrinogen concentration between groups. There was a steady increase in plasma free hemoglobin during PP, which was not seen in the NP group (p < .01). We conclude that the use of pulsatile flow resulted in improved patient outcomes in maintaining better renal function and preserving cardiac function in the early post-bypass period.
Ground deformation induced by geothermal utilization at Reykjanes, SW-Iceland, inferred from interferometric analysis of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar images (InSAR)

The Reykjanes geothermal system is a high-temperature seawater system situated at the southwestern tip of the Reykjanes Peninsula, SW-Iceland. Data from Sentinel-1A and 1B satellites have been used to evaluate ground deformation induced by geothermal utilization between April 2015 and October 2017, using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) methods. Cumulative near-vertical and near-east displacements were inferred by stacking and combining two-year interval interferograms formed from SAR images acquired from ascending and descending orbits. Velocity maps were generated for each track from time series analysis of the displacement of coherent pixels, revealing a steady subsidence within a subcircular bowl centered on the well field, together with horizontal contraction towards the deformation center. The average rate of change is about 16 mm/yr in the satellite line-of-sight, in the area of maximum deformation. The characteristics of the deforming source were inverted using analytical models assuming the geothermal reservoir behaves as a pressure source embedded in an elastic half space. The best fit was obtained for penny shaped and sill-like sources at about 1 km depth contracting at a rate of -0.9 × 10 5 m 3 /yr. This inferred volume change was compared to estimations of the expected amount of contraction of rock under pressure and temperature decline measured at 900 m depth in boreholes in the geothermal field. Considering the geological structure of the reservoir, it is suggested that the observed deformation results from a combination of compaction and thermal contraction caused by lack of steam recharge within a steam zone in the upper-most part of the geothermal reservoir.
Saffold Virus, a Human Theiler's-Like Cardiovirus, Is Ubiquitous and Causes Infection Early in Life

The family Picornaviridae contains well-known human pathogens (e.g., poliovirus, coxsackievirus, rhinovirus, and parechovirus). In addition, this family contains a number of viruses that infect animals, including members of the genus Cardiovirus such as Encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV) and Theiler's murine encephalomyelits virus (TMEV). The latter are important murine pathogens that cause myocarditis, type 1 diabetes and chronic inflammation in the brains, mimicking multiple sclerosis. Recently, a new picornavirus was isolated from humans, named Saffold virus (SAFV). The virus is genetically related to Theiler's virus and classified as a new species in the genus Cardiovirus, which until the discovery of SAFV did not contain human viruses. By analogy with the rodent cardioviruses, SAFV may be a relevant new human pathogen. Thus far, SAFVs have sporadically been detected by molecular techniques in respiratory and fecal specimens, but the epidemiology and clinical significance remained unclear. Here we describe the first cultivated SAFV type 3 (SAFV-3) isolate, its growth characteristics, full-length sequence, and epidemiology. Unlike the previously isolated SAFV-1 and -2 viruses, SAFV-3 showed efficient growth in several cell lines with a clear cytopathic effect. The latter allowed us to conduct a large-scale serological survey by a virus-neutralization assay. This survey showed that infection by SAFV-3 occurs early in life (>75% positive at 24 months) and that the seroprevalence reaches >90% in older children and adults. Neutralizing antibodies were found in serum samples collected in several countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia. In conclusion, this study describes the first cultivated SAFV-3 isolate, its full-length sequence, and epidemiology. SAFV-3 is a highly common and widespread human virus causing infection in early childhood. This finding has important implications for understanding the impact of these ubiquitous viruses and their possible role in acute and/or chronic disease.
Learning Probabilistic Relational Models

A large portion of real-world data is stored in commercial relational database systems. In contrast, most statistical learning methods work only with "flat" data representations. Thus, to apply these methods, we are forced to convert our data into a flat form, thereby losing much of the relational structure present in our database. This paper builds on the recent work on probabilistic relational models (PRMs), and describes how to learn them from databases. PRMs allow the properties of an object to depend probabilistically both on other properties of that object and on properties of related objects. Although PRMs are significantly more expressive than standard models, such as Bayesian networks, we show how to extend well-known statistical methods for learning Bayesian networks to learn these models. We describe both parameter estimation and structure learning -- the automatic induction of the dependency structure in a model. Moreover, we show how the learning procedure can exploit standard database retrieval techniques for efficient learning from large datasets. We present experimental results on both real and synthetic relational databases.
11 Recent Advances in Yeast Biomass Production

Yeasts have been used by humans to produce foods for thousands of years. Bread, wine, sake and beer are made with the essential contribution of yeasts, especially from the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The first references to humans using yeasts were found in Caucasian and Mesopotamian regions and date back to approximately 7000 BC. However, it was not until 1845 when Louis Pasteur discovered that yeasts were microorganisms capable of fermenting sugar to produce CO2 and ethanol. Ancient practices were based on the natural presence of this unicellular eukaryote, which spontaneously starts the fermentation of sugars. As industrialisation increased the manufacture of fermented products, the demand of yeast grew exponentially. At the end of the 19th century, addition of exogenous yeast biomass to produce bread and beer started to become a common practice. Wineries were more reluctant to alter traditional practices, and started using exogenous yeast inocula in the 1950’s, especially in countries with less wine tradition (USA, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). In the 1960’s, yeast biomass-producing plants contributed to the technology of producing large amounts of active dry yeast (ADY), and its use rapidly spread to European countries (Reed and Nagodawithana, 1988). Nowadays, modern industries require very large amounts of selected yeasts to obtain high quality reproducible products and to ensure fast, complete fermentations. Around 0.4 million metric tonnes of yeast biomass, including 0.2 million tonnes baker's yeast alone, are produced each year worldwide. Efficient and profitable factory-scale processes have been developed to produce yeast biomass. The standard process was empirically optimised to obtain the highest yield by increasing biomass production and decreasing costs. However in recent years, several molecular and physiological studies have revealed that yeast undergoes diverse stressful situations along the biomass production process which can seriously affect its fermentative capacity and technological performance. In this chapter, we review the yeast biomass production process, including substrates, growth configuration, yield optimisation and the particularities of brewing, bakeror wineyeasts production. We summarise the new studies that describe the process from a molecular viewpoint to reveal yeast responses to different stressful situations. Finally, we
A Proposed Genus Boundary for the Prokaryotes Based on Genomic Insights

ABSTRACT Genomic information has already been applied to prokaryotic species definition and classification. However, the contribution of the genome sequence to prokaryotic genus delimitation has been less studied. To gain insights into genus definition for the prokaryotes, we attempted to reveal the genus-level genomic differences in the current prokaryotic classification system and to delineate the boundary of a genus on the basis of genomic information. The average nucleotide sequence identity between two genomes can be used for prokaryotic species delineation, but it is not suitable for genus demarcation. We used the percentage of conserved proteins (POCP) between two strains to estimate their evolutionary and phenotypic distance. A comprehensive genomic survey indicated that the POCP can serve as a robust genomic index for establishing the genus boundary for prokaryotic groups. Basically, two species belonging to the same genus would share at least half of their proteins. In a specific lineage, the genus and family/order ranks showed slight or no overlap in terms of POCP values. A prokaryotic genus can be defined as a group of species with all pairwise POCP values higher than 50%. Integration of whole-genome data into the current taxonomy system can provide comprehensive information for prokaryotic genus definition and delimitation.
Constant factor Approximation Algorithms for Uniform Hard Capacitated Facility Location Problems: Natural LP is not too bad

In this paper, we give first constant factor approximation for capacitated knapsack median problem (CKM) for hard uniform capacities, violating the budget only by an additive factor of $f_{max}$ where $f_{max}$ is the maximum cost of a facility opened by the optimal and violating capacities by $(2+\epsilon)$ factor. Natural LP for the problem is known to have an unbounded integrality gap when any one of the two constraints is allowed to be violated by a factor less than $2$. Thus, we present a result which is very close to the best achievable from the natural LP. To the best of our knowledge, the problem has not been studied earlier. For capacitated facility location problem with uniform capacities, a constant factor approximation algorithm is presented violating the capacities a little ($1 + \epsilon$). Though constant factor results are known for the problem without violating the capacities, the result is interesting as it is obtained by rounding the solution to the natural LP, which is known to have an unbounded integrality gap without violating the capacities. Thus, we achieve the best possible from the natural LP for the problem. The result shows that natural LP is not too bad. Finally, we raise some issues with the proofs of the results presented in~\cite{capkmByrkaFRS2013} for capacitated $k$-facility location problem (C$k$FLP). ~\cite{capkmByrkaFRS2013} presents $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ approximation violating the capacities by a factor of $(2 + \epsilon)$ using dependent rounding. We first fix these issues using our techniques. Also, it can be argued that (deterministic) pipage rounding cannot be used to open the facilities instead of dependent rounding. Our techniques for CKM provide a constant factor approximation for CkFLP violating the capacities by $(2 + \epsilon)$.
TB dots strategy in District Rawalpindi: results and lessons.

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most ancient diseases of mankind. Despite newer modalities for diagnosis and treatment, unfortunately, people are still suffering, and TB is among the top 10 killer infectious diseases in the world. TB is a devastating disease due to its rapid transmission and high rate of mortality causing around 1.8 million deaths annually. This study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the Directly Observed Therapy Short-course (DOTS) in the target population. METHODS Two Tehsils of District Rawalpindi were selected for the study. All patients under TB treatment attending Basic Health Units (BHUs) and Rural Health Centres (RHCs) were included in the study. The patients with extra pulmonary TB and children under five years of age were excluded from the study. All patients were contacted individually and asked about the DOTS program activity using a preformed questionnaire that mainly contained questions regarding knowledge of the patients about their disease and the role of health facility in treating and following the disease. RESULTS Out of the 224 patients who were included in the study, 87 (38.8%) were male, and 137 (61.2%) were female. Majority (48.8%) of the patients was in age group of 21-40 years and 62.5% patients had positive family history of TB. Among the patients, 51.8% were illiterate, 31.7% had studied till primary level, and only 16.5% had the educational qualification of Matric or above. In our study 69.2% of patients themselves or through their relatives reported to the health facilities to get treatment, while the rest were picked by community health workers, 62.9% were diagnosed by the public hospitals, 23.2% were diagnosed by general practitioners and 12.9% by the federal public hospitals. In our study 69.6% of the patients were not observed at all or were observed by the family members. CONCLUSION TB is mainly a disease of the poor and illiterate people. Despite many achievements a bulk of patients are not picked by the community health providers nor are they properly observed. We need to improve the current working of the DOTS personnel. General practitioners are playing a big role in diagnosing the disease, so they need to be integrated in the DOTS to effectively diagnose and control TB.
Overlap properties of geometric expanders

Abstract The overlap number of a finite (d + 1)-uniform hypergraph H is the largest constant c(H) ∈ (0, 1] such that no matter how we map the vertices of H into ℝd, there is a point covered by at least a c(H)-fraction of the simplices induced by the images of its hyperedges. Motivated by the search for an analogue of the notion of graph expansion for higher dimensional simplicial complexes, we address the question whether or not there exists a sequence of arbitrarily large (d + 1)-uniform hypergraphs with bounded degree for which . Using both random methods and explicit constructions, we answer this question positively by constructing infinite families of (d + 1)-uniform hypergraphs with bounded degree such that their overlap numbers are bounded from below by a positive constant c = c(d). We also show that, for every d, the best value of the constant c = c(d) that can be achieved by such a construction is asymptotically equal to the limit of the overlap numbers of the complete (d + 1)-uniform hypergraphs with n vertices, as n → ∞. For the proof of the latter statement, we establish the following geometric partitioning result of independent interest. For any h, s and any ɛ > 0, there exists K = K(ɛ, h, s) satisfying the following condition. For any k ≧ K and for any semi-algebraic relation R on h-tuples of points in a Euclidean space ℝd with description complexity at most s, every finite set P ⫅ ℝd has a partition P = P1 ∪ ⋯ ∪ Pk into k parts of sizes as equal as possible such that all but at most an ɛ-fraction of the h-tuples (Pi1, … , Pih) have the property that either all h-tuples of points with one element in each Pij are related with respect to R or none of them are.
Combination of phone N-grams for a MPEG-7-based spoken document retrieval system

In this paper, we present a phone-based approach of spoken document retrieval (SDR), developed in the framework of the emerging MPEG-7 standard. The audio part of MPEG-7 aims at standardizing the indexing of audio documents. It encloses a SpokenContent tool that provides a description framework of the semantic content of speech signals. In the context of MPEG-7, we propose an indexing and retrieval method that uses phonetic information only and a vector space IR model. Different strategies based on the use of phone N-gram indexing terms are experimented.
Customer Familiarity and its Effects on Expectations, Performance Perceptions, and Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Study

This paper examines the effects of customer familiarity (i.e. the number of previous consumption-related experiences) on a) expectations prior to the consumption of a service, b) performance perceptions after the consumption, and c) satisfaction after the consumption. Data collected in a longitudinal study of a tour operator's customers who took part in a trip to the same destination shows that familiarity is unrelated to expectations, but negatively and significantly associated with performance perceptions and satisfaction.
Support Vector Regression Machines

A new regression technique based on Vapnik's concept of support vectors is introduced. We compare support vector regression (SVR) with a committee regression technique (bagging) based on regression trees and ridge regression done in feature space. On the basis of these experiments, it is expected that SVR will have advantages in high dimensionality space because SVR optimization does not depend on the dimensionality of the input space.
Interactions between demography and environmental effects are important determinants of population dynamics

Warmer winters alter the dynamics of a local bird population and reduce immigration rate due to density-dependent feedback. Climate change will affect the population dynamics of many species, yet the consequences for the long-term persistence of populations are poorly understood. A major reason for this is that density-dependent feedback effects caused by fluctuations in population size are considered independent of stochastic variation in the environment. We show that an interplay between winter temperature and population density can influence the persistence of a small passerine population under global warming. Although warmer winters favor an increased mean population size, density-dependent feedback can cause the local population to be less buffered against occasional poor environmental conditions (cold winters). This shows that it is essential to go beyond the population size and explore climate effects on the full dynamics to elaborate targeted management actions.
Childhood-onset schizophrenia: insights from neuroimaging studies.

Advances in neuroimaging allow prospective study of human brain development. Studies on pediatric populations are particularly informative because they explore the pathophysiological processes that are tied to important periods of brain development. Furthermore, childhood-onset counterparts of typical adult-onset illnesses usually show a more severe phenotype, one that is less likely to be influenced by environmental factors and more likely to show genetic influences. Such samples thus provide an opportunity to study the illness in its relatively pure form and that may also increase the likelihood of identifying causal genetic events. A study of childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) has been ongoing at the NIMH since 1990. The diagnosis is made using unmodified DSM-III-R/IV criteria and, in most cases, after a drug-free inpatient observation. The COS cases (N = 102 to date) clinically resemble poor outcome adult-onset schizophrenia (AOS) cases, in that all phenomenological, family, and neurobiological studies in COS show similar findings as in AOS, suggesting continuity between these two forms of the illness. Structuralbrainabnormalitiesareanestablishedfeature of AOS, characterized by reduced gray matter (GM) volumes in the cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala, which is subtly progressive over time. The majority of neuroimaging studies in COS have come from the NIMH sample. Earlier COS studies, consistent with findings from AOS studies, showed increased lateral ventricular volume, decreased total and regional GM volumes, and increased basal ganglia volumes that progressed during adolescence.
Molecular diversity of tannic acid degrading bacteria isolated from tannery soil

Aims: The aim of this study was to enrich and isolate bacteria from a tannery soil that were capable of utilizing tannic acid and gallic acid as sole source of carbon aerobically, and to characterize their diversity in order to identify efficient strains that can be used for tannin bioremediation.
Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement with Optimal Resilience and Linear Complexity

Given a system with $n > 3t + 1$ processes, where $t$ is the tolerated number of faulty ones, we present a fast asynchronous Byzantine agreement protocol that can reach agreement in $O(t)$ expected running time. This improves the $O(n^2)$ expected running time of Abraham, Dolev, and Halpern [PODC 2008]. Furthermore, if $n = (3 + \varepsilon) t$ for any $\varepsilon > 0$, our protocol can reach agreement in $O (1 / \varepsilon)$ expected running time. This improves the result of Feldman and Micali [STOC 1988] (with constant expected running time when $n > 4 t$).