Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling SCTP throughput in integrated WLAN/cellular networks

Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is a new transport layer protocol accepted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). A SCTP-based wireless local area network (WLAN)/cellular vertical handover scheme provides a network-independent solution to the integration of these two wireless access technologies. In this paper, to study the SCTP data transmission performance in a WLAN/cellular overlay environment, we develop a new analytical model that takes into account the congestion window, the round trip time, the slow start and congestion avoidance processes. By comparing numerical results from the analytical model with simulation results, we demonstrate that our model is able to predict SCTP throughput accurately. The analytical model provides a useful tool to study the performance of SCTP.
Oncologic outcomes of transoral laser microsurgery for T 3 laryngeal carcinoma : a meta-analysis

Laryngeal carcinomas are the second most common type of head and neck tumors, most of which are squamous cell carcinomas. The specific choice of treatment of T3 laryngeal (glottic or supraglottic) squamous cell carcinoma has been rather controversial. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and oncologic outcomes of transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) for untreated T3 laryngeal carcinoma. This study searched and screened all publications about TLM for untreated T3 laryngeal carcinoma in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, and clinical trials. Retrieval cut-off date was May 31, 2017. Quality of studies was assessed and relevant data were extracted through inclusion and exclusion criteria. Seven studies were included in this meta-analysis. Pooled oncologic outcomes of patients with T3 glottic carcinoma, including 5-year overall survival (OS), 5-year disease-specific survival (DSS), and 5-year laryngectomy-free survival (LFS) rates, were 63% (95% confidence internal [CI], 57-69), 80% (95% CI, 65-92), and 77% (95% CI, 63-88), respectively. Pooled oncologic outcomes of patients with T3 supraglottic carcinoma, including 5-year OS, DSS, and LFS rates, were 68% (95% CI, 52-82), 80% (95% CI, 65-92), and 90% (95% CI, 79-97), respectively. Pooled ORs for 5-year OS, DSS, and LFS between glottic carcinoma and supraglottic carcinoma were 0.84 (95% CI, 0.35-2.01), 0.88 (95% CI, 0.27-2.85), and 0.33 (95% CI, 0.20-0.56), respectively. In conclusion, TLM offers patients with T3 glottic or supraglottic carcinomas better oncologic outcomes. TLM may be a valid option for organ-preserving surgery. However, its efficacy should be confirmed by more prospective clinical trials.
Non-genetic Cell-to-cell Variability and the Consequences for Pharmacology This Review Comes from a Themed Issue on Omics Edited the Distribution of Protein Abundance and Resulting Variability in Phenotype Measuring Cell-to-cell Variation

Recent advances in single-cell assays have focused attention on the fact that even members of a genetically identical group of cells or organisms in identical environments can exhibit variability in drug sensitivity, cellular response, and phenotype. Underlying much of this variability is stochasticity in gene expression, which can produce unique proteomes even in genetically identical cells. Here we discuss the consequences of non-genetic cell-to-cell variability in the cellular response to drugs and its potential impact for the treatment of human disease. Introduction It has long been recognized that differences from one cell to the next can arise through variation in the extra-cellular environment (e.g. morphogen gradients during embryogenesis) or from genomic alteration (e.g. genetic heterogeneity within a tumor). Only recently has it become clear that intracellular biochemical fluctuations can also have profound effects on phenotype. These fluctuations cause genetically identical cells to vary significantly in their responsiveness to stimuli and drugs even in a uniform environment [1,2 ,3 ,4,5 ,6,7 ,8 ]. Such cell-to-cell differences arise from stochasticity in the biochemical reactions. Gene expression is one of the best understood of these stochastic processes (see Box 1), but cytoskeletal rearrangement, protein localiz-ation, post-translational modification, and formation of protein complexes are almost certainly also involved in generating variability. The net result is the creation of cell populations with the same genome but unique proteomes. Transient heritability is an interesting property of phe-notypic variability arising from cell-to-cell differences at the proteome level [5 ,9 ,10 ]. While genetic differences are stably passed on to progeny and epigenetic modifications are heritable for 10–10 5 cell divisions [11], the state of the proteome is heritable on a much shorter timescale (one to a few divisions) [5 ,9 ,10 ]. The pro-teomes of recently born sister cells are similar, owing to binomial partitioning of abundant cellular components during cell division [12,13]. The phenotypes of sister cells are therefore more similar than those of two cells chosen at random, although stochastic fluctuations cause sister cells to decorrelate rapidly [5 ,8 ,10 ]. The timescales and mechanisms underlying stochastic, epigenetic, and genetic variation are distinct, but the three types of variation interact (Figure 1a). Most obviously, genetic and epigenetic factors determine the mean levels or activities of proteins, and stochastic processes determine dispersion around the mean. However, the proteome also influences epigenetic regulation of gene expression [14,15] and it has been suggested that the expression levels of …
Coping with Ambiguity and Unknown Words through Probabilistic Models

From spring 1990 through fall 1991, we performed a battery of small experiments to test the effectiveness of supplementing knowledge-based techniques with probabilistic models. This paper reports our experiments in predicting parts of speech of highly ambiguous words, predicting the intended interpretation of an utterance when more than one interpretation satisfies all known syntactic and semantic constraints, and learning caseframe informationfor verbsfrom example uses.From these experiments, we are convinced that probabilistic models based on annotated corpora can effectively reduce the ambiguity in processing text and can be used to acquire lexical informationfrom a corpus, by supplementing knowledge-based techniques.Based on the results of those experiments, we have constructed a new natural language system (PLUM) for extracting data from text, e.g., newswire text.
Is “Universal Syntax” Universally Useful for Learning Distributed Word Representations?

Recent comparative studies have demonstrated the usefulness of dependency-based contexts (DEPS) for learning distributed word representations for similarity tasks. In English, DEPS tend to perform better than the more common, less informed bag-of-words contexts (BOW). In this paper, we present the ﬁrst cross-linguistic comparison of different context types for three different languages. DEPS are extracted from “universal parses” without any language-speciﬁc optimization. Our results suggest that the universal DEPS (UDEPS) are useful for detecting functional similarity (e.g., verb similarity, solving syntactic analogies) among languages, but their advantage over BOW is not as prominent as previously reported on English. We also show that simple “post-parsing” ﬁltering of useful UDEPS contexts leads to consistent improvements across languages.
Using Syntactic and Semantic based Relations for Dialogue Act Recognition

This paper presents a novel approach to dialogue act recognition employing multilevel information features. In addition to features such as context information and words in the utterances, the recognition task utilizes syntactic and semantic relations acquired by information extraction methods. These features are utilized by a Bayesian network classifier for our dialogue act recognition. The evaluation results show a clear improvement from the accuracy of the baseline (only with word features) with 61.9% to an accuracy of 67.4% achieved by the extended feature set.
Quantitative analysis of the regulation scheme of invertase expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the expression of invertase, which is the hydrolyzing enzyme of sucrose, is controlled by the presence of monosaccharides, such as glucose and fructose, and referred to as carbon catabolite repression. To date, efforts have been made to identify the mechanism by which cells sense extracellular monosaccharide concentrations and trigger the genes involved in the repression pathway. The aim of the present work was to quantitatively investigate the cellular regulation of invertase expression in the wild-type strain S. cerevisiae CEN.PK113-7D during batch growth containing mixed sugar substrates under different initial conditions. Because of the high frequency and accurate online analysis of multiple components, a tight control of invertase expression could be observed, and threshold concentrations of the monosaccharides for derepression could be determined to 0.5 gl(-1) for glucose and 2 gl(-1) for fructose. Also, the existence of a hitherto undescribed regulatory state, in which cells regulate invertase expression very precisely and operate over long periods at monosaccharide concentrations lower than the above thresholds, could be demonstrated. All experimental observations could be summarized in a formulation of the cellular regulation scheme of invertase expression. A simple kinetic model could show that the regulation scheme explains the observed behavior very well. Additionally, the model was able to explain consequences of the regulation on the global metabolism.
Asymmetry of the PLANCK antenna beam shape and its manifestation in the CMB data

We present a new method to extract the beam shape incorporated in the pixelized map of CMB experiments. This method is based on the interplay of the amplitudes and phases of the signal and instrumental noise. By adding controlled white noise onto the map, the phases are perturbed in such a way that the beam shape manifests itself through the mean-squared value of the difference between original and perturbed phases. This method is useful in extracting preliminary antenna beam shape without time-consuming spherical harmonic computations.
Advanced Exception Handling Mechanisms

It is no longer possible to consider exception handling as a secondary issue in language design, or even worse, a mechanism added after the fact via a library approach. Exception handling is a primary feature in language design and must be integrated with other major features, including advanced control flow, objects, coroutines, concurrency, real-time, and polymorphism. Integration is crucial as there are both obvious and subtle interactions between exception handling and other language features. Unfortunately, many exception handling mechanisms work only with a subset of the features and in the sequential domain. A framework for a comprehensive, easy to use, and extensible exception handling mechanism is presented for a concurrent, object-oriented environment. The environment includes language constructs with separate execution stacks, e.g. coroutines and tasks, so the exception environment is significantly more complex than the normal single-stack situation. The pros and cons of various exception features are examined, along with feature interaction with other language mechanisms. Both exception termination and resumption models are examined in this environment, and previous criticisms of the resumption model, a feature commonly missing in modern languages, are addressed.
Purchasing Designer Label Apparels: The Role of Reference Groups

Luxury brands have a growing market in Asia, and with the enormous contribution of Asian market to the growing global luxury brands market, it is imperative to understand the roles of key reference groups (peers, siblings, parents, and celebrities) in the purchase of designer label apparels. The increased consumption of luxury products can be attributed to the rapid economic growth in China and other Asian countries. Prior studies indicate that Asian consumers maintain conspicuous appreciation for designer products. In this paper, the roles of reference groups in a purchase decision for designer label apparels, were explored. The data analysis was based on 248 valid responses generated through personal administration. The findings reveal that the four hypotheses were supported. The findings would enable marketing and business strategists in building grounds in focusing on important variables in the context examined. Several implications for research and practice including suggestions for future studies were highlighted.
DaDianNao: A Machine-Learning Supercomputer

Many companies are deploying services, either for consumers or industry, which are largely based on machine-learning algorithms for sophisticated processing of large amounts of data. The state-of-the-art and most popular such machine-learning algorithms are Convolutional and Deep Neural Networks (CNNs and DNNs), which are known to be both computationally and memory intensive. A number of neural network accelerators have been recently proposed which can offer high computational capacity/area ratio, but which remain hampered by memory accesses. However, unlike the memory wall faced by processors on general-purpose workloads, the CNNs and DNNs memory footprint, while large, is not beyond the capability of the on chip storage of a multi-chip system. This property, combined with the CNN/DNN algorithmic characteristics, can lead to high internal bandwidth and low external communications, which can in turn enable high-degree parallelism at a reasonable area cost. In this article, we introduce a custom multi-chip machine-learning architecture along those lines. We show that, on a subset of the largest known neural network layers, it is possible to achieve a speedup of 450.65x over a GPU, and reduce the energy by 150.31x on average for a 64-chip system. We implement the node down to the place and route at 28nm, containing a combination of custom storage and computational units, with industry-grade interconnects.
Numerical study of axonal outgrowth in grooved nerve conduits

Nerve conduits with grooved inner texture, working as a topographical guidance cue, have been experimentally proved to play a significant role in axonal alignment. How grooved conduits guide axonal outgrowth is of particular interest for studying nerve regeneration. A viscoelastic model of axonal outgrowth in a conduit with a defined grooved geometry characterized by its width in the circumferential direction and its height in the radial direction is developed in this work. In this model, the axon is considered as an elastic beam and the axonal deformation and motion, including stretching, bending and torsion, are described using a Cosserat rod theory. The friction between axon and substrate is also considered in this model as well as the tip outgrowth. It is found that the directional outgrowth of the axon can be significantly improved by the grooved texture: when the groove width decreases or the groove height increases, the axonal elongation in the longitudinal direction of the conduit can be increased, which is in good agreement with experimental observations. This work is the first numerical model to study the effect of the substrate geometry on axonal outgrowth.
There’s no shortcut: Building understanding from information in ultrarunning

Now that information proliferates, information science should turn its attention towards higher order epistemic aims, such as understanding. Before systems to support the building of understanding can be designed, the process of building understanding must be explored. This article discusses the findings from an interpretative phenomenological analysis study on the information experience of participants in a 100-mile footrace which reveal how these participants have built understanding in their athletic pursuits. Three ways in which ultrarunners build understanding – by taking time, by undergoing struggle and by incorporating multiple perspectives – are described. The ensuing discussion leads to three questions that can guide the future development of information systems that support understanding: First, how can information science slow people down? Second, how can information science encourage people to willingly struggle? And, third, how can information science stimulate analogical thinking?
Promoting Cooperative Learning in an Expository Writing Course.

English for Academic Purposes is a compulsory one-semester course offered to first-year students at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad. Its primary objective is to assist students in developing competency in the targeted expository strategies that are deemed necessary to meet the writing requirements of the tertiary level. During Semester 2 in 2009-2010, cooperative learning was introduced in both the lecture and tutorial sessions of the evening programme in an attempt to improve the learning outcomes among the registered adult students. This paper examines the impact of cooperative learning on these students in the context of the lecture and tutorial sessions as students worked toward the production of a credited expository assignment. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to assess student feedback through questionnaires, peer feedback, and group performance on the credited assignment. The study confirmed that clear guidelines, practical-based content, and multiple opportunities to practice are significant in maximizing cooperative learning opportunities. However, cooperative learning cannot completely militate against the individual or collective disadvantages of weak language skills.
Increased Risk of Psychiatric Disorders in Women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome in Southwest China

Background: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and its characteristic symptoms have been associated with physical and psychological issues in women of reproductive age. The current study was conducted in response to the dearth of systematic research related to psychological functioning and quality of life in patients with PCOS in Southwest China, and to determine whether patients with PCOS exhibit poorer mental health (MH) compared to healthy women of the same age and living in the same region, without a PCOS diagnosis. Methods: We enrolled 120 outpatients with PCOS and 100 healthy controls in this study. Standardized questionnaires were administered to assess general MH conditions (General Health Questionnaire-12-item version), anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), depression (Beck Depression Inventory), as well as health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measured using the 36-item short-form health survey. The independent samples t-test was conducted for continuous study variables. For categorical variables, the Pearson Chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, and logistic regression were performed. Results: The prevalence of anxiety (13.3% vs. 2.0%) and depression (27.5% vs. 3.0%) was higher in patients with PCOS compared to the controls (both P < 0.05). Patients with PCOS had decreased HRQoL. Patients with PCOS who had fertility requirements were more likely to be anxious and depressed than those without fertility requirements (anxiety: 22.6% [12/53] vs. 5.9% [4/67], &khgr;2 = 7.117, P = 0.008; depression: 37.7% (20/53) vs.19. 4% (13/67), &khgr;2 = 4.988, P = 0.026). Conclusions: PCOS and related symptoms may be risk factors for depression and anxiety. Professionals should be concerned with the MH of women with PCOS, and psychological therapy should be considered.
The Biological andMetabolic Fates of Endogenous DNADamage Products

DNA and other biomolecules are subjected to damaging chemical reactions during normal physiological processes and in states of pathophysiology caused by endogenous and exogenous mechanisms. In DNA, this damage affects both the nucleobases and 2-deoxyribose, with a host of damage products that reflect the local chemical pathology such as oxidative stress and inflammation. These damaged molecules represent a potential source of biomarkers for defining mechanisms of pathology, quantifying the risk of human disease and studying interindividual variations in cellular repair pathways. Toward the goal of developing biomarkers, significant effort has been made to detect and quantify damage biomolecules in clinically accessible compartments such as blood and and urine. However, there has been little effort to define the biotransformational fate of damaged biomolecules as they move from the site of formation to excretion in clinically accessible compartments. This paper highlights examples of this important problem with DNA damage products.
Basel II implementation in developing countries and effects on SME development.

This Issue Paper examines the implementation of Basel II in low-income countries (LICs). The aims are to assess the low-income countries’ views and concerns on Basel II, whether and how they intend to implement the new Basel Capital Accord, and the challenges they may face in doing so. The paper discusses in particular the possible implications of Basel II implementation for competitiveness of LIC banking sectors and financial inclusion. Drawing on a survey covering low-income countries especially from Africa, the paper finds that in addition to technical challenges that include the need to build long and reliable data base to run sophisticated risk assessment models, and to build supervisors’ capacity to assess, validate and monitor the use of such models, LICs face broader issues related to Basel II implementation, such as competitiveness of national and foreign banks, access to credit by SMEs, potential increased pro-cyclicality of bank lending and their macroeconomic impacts. The paper concludes that LIC regulators may not need just technical assistance but also more ‘political’ support for their negotiations on regulations with international banks to ensure that their regulatory regimes are consistent with national aims for both financial stability and sufficient credit, especially to SMEs.
Biodistribution and radiation dosimetry estimates of 1-(2'-deoxy-2'-(18)F-Fluoro-1-beta-D-arabinofuranosyl)-5-bromouracil: PET imaging studies in dogs.

UNLABELLED This study reports on the biodistribution and radiation estimates of 1-(2'-deoxy-2'-(18)F-fluoro-1-beta-d-arabinofuranosyl)-5-bromouracil ((18)F-FBAU), a potential tracer for imaging DNA synthesis. METHODS Three normal dogs were intravenously administered (18)F-FBAU and a dynamic PET scan was performed for 60 min over the upper abdomen followed by a whole-body scan for a total of 150 min. Blood samples were collected at stipulated time intervals to evaluate tracer clearance and metabolism. Tissue samples of various organs were analyzed for tracer uptake and DNA incorporation. Dynamic accumulation of the tracer in different organs was derived from reconstructed PET images. The radiation dosimetry of (18)F-FBAU was evaluated using the MIRD method. RESULTS At 60 min after injection, blood analysis found >90% of the activity in unmetabolized form. At 2 h after injection, (18)F-FBAU uptake was highest in proliferating tissues (mean SUVs: marrow, 2.6; small intestine, 4.0), whereas nonproliferative tissues showed little uptake (mean SUVs: muscle, 0.75; lung, 0.70; heart, 0.85; liver, 1.28). Dynamic image analysis over 60 min showed progressive uptake of the tracer in marrow. Extraction studies demonstrated that most of the activity in proliferative tissues was in the acid-insoluble fraction (marrow, 83%; small intestine, 73%), consistent with incorporation into DNA. In nonproliferative tissue, most of the activity was not found in the acid-insoluble fraction (>84% for heart, muscle, and liver). CONCLUSION These results demonstrate that (18)F-FBAU was resistant to metabolism, readily incorporated into DNA in proliferating tissues, and showed good contrast between organs of variable DNA synthesis. These findings indicate that (18)F-FBAU may find use in measuring DNA synthesis with PET.