Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Centralized and Distributed Power Allocation in Multi-User Wireless Relay Networks

Optimal power allocation for multi-user amplify-and-forward wireless relay networks in which multiple source-destination pairs are assisted by a set of relays is investigated. Two relay power allocation strategies based on maximization of either i) the minimum rate among all users or ii) the weighted sum of rates are developed. A distributed implementation of the maximum weighted-sum-rate power allocation strategy is also studied. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed strategies and reveal their interesting throughput-fairness tradeoff in resource allocation.
The effects of income and education on ethnic differences in oral health: a study in US adults

Background: Ethnic differences exist in oral health. However, the causes of the differences have not been adequately addressed. The objective of this study is to examine the effect of socioeconomic position on ethnic differences in oral health. Methods: Data were from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted in the USA (1988–94). The effects of income and education on ethnic differences in perceived oral health, gingival bleeding, periodontitis and tooth loss were analysed using a series of regression models. Results: The probabilities of poorer oral health were higher among African–American, Mexican–Americans and other ethnic groups than in White Americans. Adjusting for income and education resulted in a reduction in the ORs for having poorer perceived oral health (44%), tooth loss (29%), gingival bleeding (61%) and periodontitis (30%) among African–Americans than White Americans. Similar reductions in risk were observed among Mexican–Americans and other ethnic groups. Conclusion: The results indicate that education and income play an important role in ethnic differences in oral health. Despite the major impact of socioeconomic position, the results imply that there are causes additional to socioeconomic position for ethnic differences in oral health.
Substrate network house cleaning via live virtual network migration

Network virtualization techniques aim at efficiently allocating the underlying substrate network (SN) resources to the hosted virtual networks (VNs). Unfortunately, over time, and due to the frequent initiation and termination of VNs, the available and utilized SN resources become fragmented. This in turn, gradually degrades the performance of these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel proactive SN resource re-optimization technique that efficiently overcomes the fragmentation problem by performing appropriate re-arrangement, or house cleaning, for the available and utilized SN resources. To minimize the incurred computational overhead, the invocation of this technique is only triggered by certain events such as the departure of an expired VN. The contributions of the proposed work are two fold; first, we develop an efficient technique for the selection and re-allocation of VN portions that are contributing to the fragmentation problem. The technique takes into consideration the trade-off between the benefit from increasing the SN utilization and the cost incurred by the VN migration. The second contribution is novel VN live migration techniques that significantly reduce the service interruption time during migration. Simulation experiments demonstrate the achieved gain in the SN resource utilization as well as in the VN acceptance ratio and the net revenue.
Implications of High-Frequency Cochlear Dead Regions for Fitting Hearing Aids to Adults With Mild to Moderately Severe Hearing Loss

Objectives: A cochlear dead region (DR) occurs at a given frequency when there is a loss of normal functioning of inner hair cells tuned to that frequency. It has been suggested that existence of high-frequency DRs has implications for hearing aid fitting, and that the optimal amount of high-frequency gain is reduced for these patients. However, the data supporting this suggestion has been obtained using listeners with severe or profound hearing loss. It is uncertain whether these results would apply for listeners with the mild to moderately severe hearing loss that is more typical of hearing aid users. This investigation used laboratory and field measurements to examine the effects of reduced high-frequency gain in typical hearing aid users with high-frequency DRs compared with matched users without DRs. Design: The study was a double-blinded, nonrandomized intervention design with18 matched pairs of adult subjects. In each pair, one subject had high-frequency DRs (usually at one or two test frequencies) and the other subject had no DR. Each subject was fitted unilaterally with a hearing aid having two active programs. One program used a National Acoustics Laboratories (NAL) prescription target for average speech (NAL condition). The other program was identical to NAL except for reduced gain in the high frequencies (low-pass [LP] condition). Outcomes included aided speech recognition in quiet and noise measured in the laboratory, ratings of speech understanding in daily life, and final preference for the NAL or LP program. Results: In laboratory testing, speech recognition in quiet was significantly better when using the NAL program. This result was seen for subjects with DRs and without DRs. When listening in noise, speech recognition was significantly better when using the NAL program for subjects without DRs. For subjects with DRs, results were equivalent for the NAL and LP programs. In daily life, the NAL program received significantly higher ratings for speech understanding, and this result was seen for subjects with and without DRs. When asked about their preference for using the NAL or LP program in daily life, subjects did not always choose the program they had rated as giving better speech understanding, but their preference was not associated with having DRs. About one-third of subjects preferred the LP program. The reason most frequently given for preferring the LP program was that the NAL was too loud. Conclusions: Overall, adult hearing aid wearers with mild to moderately severe hearing loss benefitted from high-frequency gain whether or not they had DRs. In laboratory testing, but not in daily life, subjects with DRs tended to obtain less benefit than those without DRs. However, provision of NAL high-frequency gain never resulted in poorer performance in either group. These results suggest that identification of high-frequency DRs at one or two frequencies does not call for any a priori modification of the target hearing aid prescription for listeners with mild to moderately severe hearing loss.
ENERGY COUPLING IN DESULFOVIBRIO DESULFURICANS

Chemoautotrophism, as exemplified by Nitrosomonas, Thiobacillus, and other bacteria, represents a unique mode of existence. Eowever, as more intimate knowledge of both autotrophic and heterotrophic metabolism is attained, the problem of defining what is unique about a chemoautotroph appears to become more difficult. Koffier and Wilson (1951) suggested that the uniqueness may lie not in the ability to oxidize inorganic molecules, but rather in the ability to couple the energy obtained from these oxidations to the energy requiring reactions of the cell. It was perhaps with some similar thought in mind that Woods and Lascelles (1954) pointed -out, in their introduction to a symposium on autotrophic microorganisms, that "There appears to be no case so far discovered of an organism using the oxidation of a higher carbon compound solely as reducing and energy source for chemoautotrophic growth, that is, with no liberation of carbon dioxide from substrate oxidation and no incorporation of carbon other than exogenous carbon dioxide. " However, current concepts of high energy bond formation and utilization provide no reason for assuming that the nature of the substrate oxidized should restrict the subsequent utility of the high energy compounds generated. Consequently the hypothetical organism described above might exist or be made to exist under the proper nutritional conditions. It was to check this possibility that the experiments reported here were initiated. Desulfovibrio desulfuricans was chosen as the experimental organism because (a) it is supposedly a facultative autotroph capable of oxidizing hydrogen and deriving all cell carbon from carbon dioxide (Butlin and Adams, 1947; Butlin, Adams, and Thomas, 1949; Sisler and ZoBell, 1951; Senez and Volcani, 1951; Sorokin, 1954), and (b) it carries out incomplete oxidations of alcohols which support cell growth but which liberate
Efficacy of Combined Therapy of Periosteum and Bone Allograft in a Critical-Sized Defect Model in New Zealand White Rabbits

Background Large segmental bone defects caused by trauma, infection, or bone tumor resection are difficult to cure and have been a problem in the field of bone repair for decades. The objective of this study was to discuss the efficacy of combined therapy of free periosteum and bone allograft in treating bone defects and to provide a theoretical basis for clinical application of this therapy. Material/Methods A unilateral tibia cortical defect model in New Zealand white rabbits was established according to Girolamo method. Total 48 rabbits were randomized into 3 groups: a simple bone defect group (n=16), an autogenous bone graft group (n=16), and a periosteum and bone allograft combined therapy group (n=16). The efficacy was evaluated by imaging inspections and scoring, HE staining, and RT-PCR in postoperative weeks 2, 4, 8, and 12. Results The results of imaging and histopathological inspections in the study indicated that in postoperative weeks 4, 8, and 12 the experimental and control groups had statistically significant differences in Lane-Sandhu radiographic scoring and relative bone density when compared with the simple bone defect group (P<0.05). The RT-PCR results suggested that the expression of SPP-1, BMP-2, and VEGF in the experimental group was higher than in the control group (P<0.05) and the expression of Col Iα1 in the control group was higher than in the experimental group (P<0.05). Conclusions Efficacies of the combined therapy (periosteum combined with bone allografting) and the criterion standard therapy (autogenous bone grafting) are equivalent in treating bone defects in New Zealand white rabbits.
A continuous 4000-year lake-level record of Owens Lake, south-central Sierra Nevada, California, USA

Abstract Reconstruction of lake-level fluctuations from landform and outcrop evidence typically involves characterizing periods with relative high stands. We developed a new approach to provide water-level estimates in the absence of shoreline evidence for Owens Lake in eastern California by integrating landform, outcrop, and existing lake-core data with wind-wave and sediment entrainment modeling of lake-core sedimentology. We also refined the late Holocene lake-level history of Owens Lake by dating four previously undated shoreline features above the water level (1096.4 m) in AD 1872. The new ages coincide with wetter and cooler climate during the Neopluvial (~3.6 ka), Medieval Pluvial (~0.8 ka), and Little Ice Age (~0.35 ka). Dates from stumps below 1096 m also indicate two periods of low stands at ~0.89 and 0.67 ka during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. The timing of modeled water levels associated with 22 mud and sand units in lake cores agree well with shoreline records of Owens Lake and nearby Mono Lake, as well as with proxy evidence for relatively wet and dry periods from tree-ring and glacial records within the watershed. Our integrated analysis provides a continuous 4000-yr lake-level record showing the timing, duration, and magnitude of hydroclimate variability along the south-central Sierra Nevada.
Going out on a limb: Joint Extraction of Entity Mentions and Relations without Dependency Trees

We present a novel attention-based recurrent neural network for joint extraction of entity mentions and relations. We show that attention along with long short term memory (LSTM) network can extract semantic relations between entity mentions without having access to dependency trees. Experiments on Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) corpora show that our model significantly outperforms feature-based joint model by Li and Ji (2014). We also compare our model with an end-to-end tree-based LSTM model (SPTree) by Miwa and Bansal (2016) and show that our model performs within 1% on entity mentions and 2% on relations. Our fine-grained analysis also shows that our model performs significantly better on Agent-Artifact relations, while SPTree performs better on Physical and Part-Whole relations.
Diclofenac and its effect on corneal sensation.

Pain after excimer laser surgery has been a major problem. Recently, there have been reports that topical diclofenac sodium can decrease postoperative discomfort. 1,2 We investigated whether this effect was due to any anesthetic properties of the diclofenac eyedrops. For several years we have used the corneal microanesthesiometer to measure corneal sensation. This is a noncontact device that uses air puffs to convey force to the cornea. Sensitivity threshold determination is based on stimulation of the cornea by air puffs of varying intensity. Its accuracy and reliability has been tested on over 400 eyes. 3 Ten volunteers were recruited for the study. All had normal eye examination results. There was no history of any systemic or ocular disease that might affect corneal sensation. The 10 subjects ranged in age from 22 to 52 years. Corneal sensation was tested in each eye using the corneal microanesthesiometer. One drop of balanced salt
Optimality of Belief Propagation for Crowdsourced Classification

Crowdsourcing systems are popular for solving large-scale labelling tasks with low-paid (or even non-paid) workers. We study the problem of recovering the true labels from noisy crowdsourced labels under the popular Dawid-Skene model. To address this inference problem, several algorithms have recently been proposed, but the best known guarantee is still significantly larger than the fundamental limit. We close this gap under a simple but canonical scenario where each worker is assigned at most two tasks. In particular, we introduce a tighter lower bound on the fundamental limit and prove that Belief Propagation (BP) exactly matches this lower bound. The guaranteed optimality of BP is the strongest in the sense that it is information-theoretically impossible for any other algorithm to correctly label a larger fraction of the tasks. In the general setting, when more than two tasks are assigned to each worker, we establish the dominance result on BP that it outperforms other existing algorithms with known provable guarantees. Experimental results suggest that BP is close to optimal for all regimes considered, while existing state-of-the-art algorithms exhibit suboptimal performances.
Body mass affects seasonal variation in sickness intensity in a seasonally breeding rodent

ABSTRACT Species that display seasonal variation in sickness intensity show the most intense response in the season during which they have the highest body mass, suggesting that sickness intensity may be limited by an animal's energy stores. Siberian hamsters (Phodopus sungorus) display lower body masses and less intense sickness when housed in short, winter-like days as opposed to long, summer-like days. To determine whether reduced sickness intensity displayed by short-day hamsters is a product of seasonal changes in body mass, we food restricted long-day hamsters so that they exhibited body mass loss that mimicked the natural photoperiod-induced loss of body mass in short-day hamsters. We then experimentally induced sickness with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and compared sickness responses among long-day food-restricted and long- and short-day ad libitum fed groups, predicting that long-day food-restricted hamsters would show sickness responses comparable to those of short-day ad libitum fed hamsters and attenuated in comparison to long-day ad libitum fed hamsters. We found that long-day food-restricted hamsters showed attenuated LPS-induced anorexia, loss of body mass and hypothermia compared with long-day ad libitum fed animals; however, anorexia remained elevated in long-day food-restricted animals compared with short-day ad libitum fed animals. Additionally, LPS-induced anhedonia and decreases in nest building were not influenced by body mass. Results of hormone assays suggest that cortisol levels could play a role in the attenuation of sickness in long-day food-restricted hamsters, indicating that future research should target the roles of glucocorticoids and natural variation in energy stores in seasonal sickness variation. Summary: Inducing short-day-like seasonal body mass loss in hamsters housed in a long-day photoperiod attenuates energetically expensive sickness symptoms, such that they correspond with natural seasonal variation in sickness intensity.
East Asian Economic Integration and its Impact on Future Growth

Two propositions appear to be gaining wide currency, given the revealed preference for preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the East Asian region and elsewhere. The first is that economic integration is a good way to promote economic growth. The second is that PTAs, particularly ones that go beyond goods trade, are an effective way to promote economic integration. Yet both propositions are empirical questions. In this paper, a partial evaluation of the evidence suggests caution is called for. Current PTAs appear to be doing little to remove the important impediments to growth in the region. Far greater income gains would come from comprehensive reform of nondiscriminatory impediments to competition, as part of a thorough-going program of unilateral domestic regulatory reform. It may be time to rethink East Asian economic integration as a policy priority, or at least review the way in which it might be pursued.
A Predictive Ligand-Based Bayesian Model for Human Drug-Induced Liver Injury

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is one of the most important reasons for drug development failure at both preapproval and postapproval stages. There has been increased interest in developing predictive in vivo, in vitro, and in silico models to identify compounds that cause idiosyncratic hepatotoxicity. In the current study, we applied machine learning, a Bayesian modeling method with extended connectivity fingerprints and other interpretable descriptors. The model that was developed and internally validated (using a training set of 295 compounds) was then applied to a large test set relative to the training set (237 compounds) for external validation. The resulting concordance of 60%, sensitivity of 56%, and specificity of 67% were comparable to results for internal validation. The Bayesian model with extended connectivity functional class fingerprints of maximum diameter 6 (ECFC_6) and interpretable descriptors suggested several substructures that are chemically reactive and may also be important for DILI-causing compounds, e.g., ketones, diols, and α-methyl styrene type structures. Using Smiles Arbitrary Target Specification (SMARTS) filters published by several pharmaceutical companies, we evaluated whether such reactive substructures could be readily detected by any of the published filters. It was apparent that the most stringent filters used in this study, such as the Abbott alerts, which captures thiol traps and other compounds, may be of use in identifying DILI-causing compounds (sensitivity 67%). A significant outcome of the present study is that we provide predictions for many compounds that cause DILI by using the knowledge we have available from previous studies. These computational models may represent cost-effective selection criteria before in vitro or in vivo experimental studies.
Active Listening for Spatial Orientation in a Complex Auditory Scene

To successfully negotiate a complex environment, an animal must control the timing of motor behaviors in coordination with dynamic sensory information. Here, we report on adaptive temporal control of vocal–motor behavior in an echolocating bat, Eptesicus fuscus, as it captured tethered insects close to background vegetation. Recordings of the bat's sonar vocalizations were synchronized with high-speed video images that were used to reconstruct the bat's three-dimensional flight path and the positions of target and vegetation. When the bat encountered the difficult task of taking insects as close as 10–20 cm from the vegetation, its behavior changed significantly from that under open room conditions. Its success rate decreased by about 50%, its time to initiate interception increased by a factor of ten, and its high repetition rate “terminal buzz” decreased in duration by a factor of three. Under all conditions, the bat produced prominent sonar “strobe groups,” clusters of echolocation pulses with stable intervals. In the final stages of insect capture, the bat produced strobe groups at a higher incidence when the insect was positioned near clutter. Strobe groups occurred at all phases of the wingbeat (and inferred respiration) cycle, challenging the hypothesis of strict synchronization between respiration and sound production in echolocating bats. The results of this study provide a clear demonstration of temporal vocal–motor control that directly impacts the signals used for perception.
Raman spectroscopic characterization of multiwall carbon nanotubes and of composites

In this work Raman spectroscopy was used for extensive characterization of multiwall carbon nanotube (MWNTs) and of MWCNTs/rubber composites. We have measured the Raman spectra of bundled and dispersed multiwall carbon nanotubes. All the Raman bands of the carbon nanotubes are seen to shift to higher wavenumbers upon debundling on account of less intertube interactions. Effects of laser irradiation were also investigated. Strong effects are observed by changing the wavelength of the laser excitation. On the other hand, at a given excitation wavelength, changes on the Raman bands are observed by changing the laser power density due to sample heating during the measurement procedure.
Genome-Wide Identification and Testing of Superior Reference Genes for Transcript Normalization in Arabidopsis1[w]

Gene transcripts with invariant abundance during development and in the face of environmental stimuli are essential reference points for accurate gene expression analyses, such as RNA gel-blot analysis or quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (PCR). An exceptionally large set of data from Affymetrix ATH1 whole-genome GeneChip studies provided the means to identify a new generation of reference genes with very stable expression levels in the model plant species Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Hundreds of Arabidopsis genes were found that outperform traditional reference genes in terms of expression stability throughout development and under a range of environmental conditions. Most of these were expressed at much lower levels than traditional reference genes, making them very suitable for normalization of gene expression over a wide range of transcript levels. Specific and efficient primers were developed for 22 genes and tested on a diverse set of 20 cDNA samples. Quantitative reverse transcription-PCR confirmed superior expression stability and lower absolute expression levels for many of these genes, including genes encoding a protein phosphatase 2A subunit, a coatomer subunit, and an ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme. The developed PCR primers or hybridization probes for the novel reference genes will enable better normalization and quantification of transcript levels in Arabidopsis in the future.