Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Diet and Simvastatin on Fatty Acid Composition in Hypercholesterolemic Men: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Objective—To explore the separate and combined effects of simvastatin and a low-saturated diet rich in &agr;-linolenic acid on serum fatty acids. Methods and Results—120 hypercholesterolemic men were randomly allocated to a habitual diet or dietary treatment group and to receive, in random order, simvastatin 20 mg/d or placebo, each for 12 weeks, in a double-blind manner. Dietary treatment decreased proportions from total fatty acids of palmitic acid (C16:0) by 3.3% (P<0.05), stearic acid (C18:0) by 3.7% (P<0.05) and increased proportions of oleic acid (C18:1n-9) by 4.2% (P<0.01), and &agr;-linolenic acid (C18:3n-3) by 29.8% (P<0.001). Simvastatin decreased proportions from total fatty acids of palmitic acid by 2.0% (P<0.01), linoleic acid (C18:2n-6) by 5.3% (P<0.001), and &agr;-linolenic acid by 6.8% (P<0.05), and increased proportions of &ggr;-linolenic acid (C18:3n-6) by 11.1% (P<0.001), dihomo-&ggr;-linolenic acid (C20:3n-6) by 4.2% (P<0.01), arachidonic acid (C20:4n-6) by 14.2% (P<0.001), and the sum of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (C20-22) by 9.0% (P<0.001). Simvastatin increased ratios of stearic to palmitic, &ggr;-linolenic to linoleic, and arachidonic to dihomo-&ggr;-linolenic acid by 7.6%, 17.0%, and 10.0% (P<0.001 for all), respectively, suggesting increased fatty acid elongase and &Dgr;6- and &Dgr;5-desaturase enzyme activities. Conclusions—Increased formation of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids and their metabolites may contribute a substantial part of the pleiotropic effects of simvastatin.
Continuous Carryover of Temporal Context Dissociates Response Bias from Perceptual Influence for Duration

Recent experimental evidence suggests that the perception of temporal intervals is influenced by the temporal context in which they are presented. A longstanding example is the time-order-error, wherein the perception of two intervals relative to one another is influenced by the order in which they are presented. Here, we test whether the perception of temporal intervals in an absolute judgment task is influenced by the preceding temporal context. Human subjects participated in a temporal bisection task with no anchor durations (partition method). Intervals were demarcated by a Gaussian blob (visual condition) or burst of white noise (auditory condition) that persisted for one of seven logarithmically spaced sub-second intervals. Crucially, the order in which stimuli were presented was first-order counterbalanced, allowing us to measure the carryover effect of every successive combination of intervals. The results demonstrated a number of distinct findings. First, the perception of each interval was biased by the prior response, such that each interval was judged similarly to the preceding trial. Second, the perception of each interval was also influenced by the prior interval, such that perceived duration shifted away from the preceding interval. Additionally, the effect of decision bias was larger for visual intervals, whereas auditory intervals engendered greater perceptual carryover. We quantified these effects by designing a biologically-inspired computational model that measures noisy representations of time against an adaptive memory prior while simultaneously accounting for uncertainty, consistent with a Bayesian heuristic. We found that our model could account for all of the effects observed in human data. Additionally, our model could only accommodate both carryover effects when uncertainty and memory were calculated separately, suggesting separate neural representations for each. These findings demonstrate that time is susceptible to similar carryover effects as other basic stimulus attributes, and that the brain rapidly adapts to temporal context.
A Survey of 56 Midlatitude EGRET Error Boxes for Radio Pulsars

We have conducted a radio pulsar survey of 56 unidentified γ-ray sources from the third EGRET catalog that are at intermediate Galactic latitudes (5° < |b| < 73°). For each source, four interleaved 35 minute pointings were made with the 13 beam, 1400 MHz multibeam receiver on the Parkes 64 m radio telescope. This covered the 95% error box of each source at a limiting sensitivity of ~0.2 mJy to pulsed radio emission for periods P ≳ 10 ms and dispersion measures ≲50 pc cm-3. Roughly half of the unidentified γ-ray sources at |b| > 5° with no proposed active galactic nucleus counterpart were covered in this survey. We detected nine isolated pulsars and four recycled binary pulsars, with three from each class being new discoveries. Timing observations suggest that only one of the pulsars has a spin-down luminosity that is even marginally consistent with the inferred luminosity of its coincident EGRET source. Our results suggest that population models, which include the Gould Belt as a component, overestimate the number of isolated pulsars among the midlatitude Galactic γ-ray sources, and that it is unlikely that Gould Belt pulsars make up the majority of these sources. However, the possibility of steep pulsar radio spectra and the confusion of terrestrial radio interference with long-period pulsars (P ≳ 200 ms) having very low dispersion measures (≲10 pc cm-3, expected for sources at a distance of less than about 1 kpc) prevent us from strongly ruling out this hypothesis. Our results also do not support the hypothesis that millisecond pulsars make up the majority of these sources. Nonpulsar source classes should therefore be further investigated as possible counterparts to the unidentified EGRET sources at intermediate Galactic latitudes.
An Empirical Analysis of Some Heuristic Features for Planning through Local Search and Action Graphs

Planning through local search and action graphs is a powerful approach to fully-automated planning which is implemented in the well-known LPG planner. The approach is based on a stochastic local search procedure exploring a space of partial plans and several heuristic features with different possible options. In this paper, we experimentally analyze the most important of them, with the goal of understanding and evaluating their impact on the performance of LPG, and of identifying default settings that work well on a large class of problems. In particular, we analyze several heuristic techniques for (a) evaluating the search neighborhood, (b) defining/restricting the search neighborhood, (c) selecting the next plan flaw to handle, (d) setting the “noise” parameter randomizing the search, and (e) computing reachability information that can be exploited by the heuristic functions used to evaluate the neighborhood elements. Some of these techniques were introduced in previous work on LPG, while others are new. Additional experimental results indicate that the current version of LPG using the identified best heuristic techniques as the default settings is competitive with the winner of the last (2008) International Planning Competition.
Diabetes in Malaysia: problems and challenges.

The socioeconomic implications of diabetes meIlitus cannot be accurately assessed but it is worthwhile to review the impact of the disease on the individual and society. Firstly, an allocation will have to be made from the limited health budget for the treatment of diabetes, its complications and associated diseases such as hyperlipidaemia and hypertension. In addition, there is the loss of personal income and productivity due to early deaths, early retirements because of stroke, heart attacks, amputation, chronic renal failure or blindness and the frequent absenteeism from work. In the United Kingdom, an estimated one billion pounds or 4-5% of health care resources was spent for the treatment of diabetics 9 while in ASEAN, the expenditure (mainly for hospitalisation) may exceed US$ 750 million per year 10. Indirect costs for rehabilitation of diabetics with complication(s) and support for dependents must also be included. The psychological impact of diabetes on the in­ dividual and the affected family cannot be costed but must also be fully appreciated.
GIS and the Random Forest Predictor: Integration in R for Tick-Borne Disease Risk Assessment

We discuss how sophisticated machine learning methods may be rapidly integrated within a GIS for the development of new approaches in landscape epidemiology. A multitemporal predictive map is obtained by modeling in R, analyzing geodata and digital maps in GRASS, and managing biodata samples and weather data in PostgreSQL. In particular, we present a risk mapping system for tick-borne diseases, applied to model the risk of exposure to Lyme borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) in Trentino, Italian Alps.
Multitask Learning with Low-Level Auxiliary Tasks for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech Recognition

End-to-end training of deep learning-based models allows for implicit learning of intermediate representations based on the final task loss. However, the end-to-end approach ignores the useful domain knowledge encoded in explicit intermediate-level supervision. We hypothesize that using intermediate representations as auxiliary supervision at lower levels of deep networks may be a good way of combining the advantages of end-to-end training and more traditional pipeline approaches. We present experiments on conversational speech recognition where we use lower-level tasks, such as phoneme recognition, in a multitask training approach with an encoder-decoder model for direct character transcription. We compare multiple types of lower-level tasks and analyze the effects of the auxiliary tasks. Our results on the Switchboard corpus show that this approach improves recognition accuracy over a standard encoder-decoder model on the Eval2000 test set.
Nonuniversality in models of epitaxial growth.

Kinetic roughening in two variants of a solid-on-solid model of epitaxial growth, a ‘‘toy’’ relaxation model and a collective diffusion model, is studied and compared, using extensive computer simulations in different spatial dimensions. We have studied the Wolf-Villain ~WV! model and its modifications, and a full diffusion ~FD! model with Arrhenius dynamics. The WV model shows nonuniversal features and its asymptotic behavior switches between the Edwards-Wilkinson type and a morphological instability, depending on the spatial dimension, a lattice coordination, or a minor modification of the model rules. The results for the FD model in 111 and 211 dimensions are not consistent with any of the continuum equations proposed to describe epitaxial growth; in particular, we observe too low values of the roughness exponent measured from the height-difference correlation function. In 1 11 dimensions, the results obtained for both models are very similar for more than 10 6 monolayers deposited with an ‘‘incorporation’’ radius in the WV model corresponding to the substrate temperature in the FD model. Such a close correspondence is not found in 211 dimensions. Asymptotic behavior of the WV and FD models is different in all spatial dimensions. Both FD and WV models show anomalous scaling in all dimensions studied. The anomalous scaling in the FD model is very weak ~logarithmic! in the physically relevant case of 211 dimensions.
Multi-microphone fusion for detection of speech and acoustic events in smart spaces

In this paper, we examine the challenging problem of detecting acoustic events and voice activity in smart indoors environments, equipped with multiple microphones. In particular, we focus on channel combination strategies, aiming to take advantage of the multiple microphones installed in the smart space, capturing the potentially noisy acoustic scene from the far-field. We propose various such approaches that can be formulated as fusion at the signal, feature, or at the decision level, as well as combinations of the above, also including multi-channel training. We apply our methods on two multi-microphone databases: (a) one recorded inside a small meeting room, containing twelve classes of isolated acoustic events; and (b) a speech corpus containing interfering noise sources, simulated inside a smart home with multiple rooms. Our multi-channel approaches demonstrate significant improvements, reaching relative error reductions over a single-channel baseline of 9.3% and 44.8% in the two datasets, respectively.
Modeling DNA-binding of Escherichia coli σ70 exhibits a characteristic energy landscape around strong promoters

We present a computational model of DNA-binding by σ70 in Escherichia coli which allows us to extract the functional characteristics of the wider promoter environment. Our model is based on a measure for the binding energy of σ70 to the DNA, which is derived from promoter strength data and used to build up a non-standard weight matrix. Opposed to conventional approaches, we apply the matrix to the environment of 3765 known promoters and consider the average matrix scores to extract the common features. In addition to the expected minimum of the average binding energy at the exact promoter site, we detect two minima shortly upstream and downstream of the promoter. These are likely to occur due to correlation between the two binding sites of σ70. Moreover, we observe a characteristic energy landscape in the 500 bp surrounding the transcription start sites, which is more pronounced in groups of strong promoters than in groups of weak promoters. Our subsequent analysis suggests that the characteristic energy landscape is more likely an influence on target search by the RNA polymerase than a result of nucleotide biases in transcription factor binding sites.
A longitudinal study of rheumatoid arthritis in South Africans.

Little is known about the functional outcome of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in Africans treated with disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs). We describe our experience with 182 RA patients seen at a tertiary hospital in South Africa. During the median follow-up period of 3.3 years, the proportion of patients with severe functional disability (American College of Rheumatology [ACR] functional classes [FCs] 3 and 4) declined significantly from 48.9% at presentation to 30.8% at last visit (P =.0006). There was a significant fall in the median Westergren erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) (46-28 mm/hour, P <.00001) and C-reactive protein (CRP) (19-15.5 mg/L, P =.006) over this period. Logistic regression analysis showed that the factors that negatively affected functional outcome at last visit were severe functional disability at presentation (odds ratio [OR] = 4.1, P =.0004), delay in referral for specialist care > 2 years (OR = 3.1, P =.02), and ESR at last visit > 28 mm/hour (OR = 3.2, P =.002). DMARDs and oral corticosteroids were prescribed in 93.1% of patients at presentation and 60.4% of patients at last visit. Life-table analysis showed that the survival time with methotrexate (MTX) use was significantly longer compared with the other DMARDs (P =.0002). A total of only 37 surgical procedures were performed on 21 patients. This retrospective study shows that despite the late presentation and severe disease, patients do improve on DMARD therapy in the medium term. The study highlights the need for prospective studies to assess the efficacy and safety of DMARDs, particularly in early disease, in the developing countries where biologics are unlikely to be affordable in the foreseeable future.
The mechanical properties of bivalve (Mollusca) shell structures

Bivalve shells are composed of a two phased composite material consisting of calcium carbonate and a largely protein matrix. The two phases are arranged into a number of distinct shell structures; these occur in discrete layers and their occurrence appears to be correlated with mode of life. Some mechanical properties of individual shell structures were tested; these included compression, bending, impact, and microhardness tests. Density and matrix content were also determined. Some structures were nearly twice as strong as bone. The relative strength is apparently related to the size of the microstructural units rather than to the matrix content, which is low. The possible functional significance of the various shell structures is discussed but it is difficult to see why any structure apart from nacre, which is both the strongest and the phylogenetically oldest, has been evolved. the on larger of
Adult Neuronal Regeneration Induced by Transgenic Integrin Expression

In a variety of adult CNS injury models, embryonic neurons exhibit superior regenerative performance when compared with adult neurons. It is unknown how young neurons extend axons in the injured adult brain, in which adult neurons fail to regenerate. This study shows that cultured adult neurons do not adapt to conditions that are characteristic of the injured adult CNS: low levels of growth-promoting molecules and the presence of inhibitory proteoglycans. In contrast, young neurons readily adapt to these same conditions, and adaptation is accompanied by an increase in the expression of receptors for growth-promoting molecules (receptors of the integrin family). Surprisingly, the regenerative performance of adult neurons can be restored to that of young neurons by gene transfer-mediated expression of a single α-integrin.
Frame synchronization for M-ary modulation with phase offsets

We study frame synchronization (FS) based on the transmission of known sequences (synchronization words) for M-PSK signals in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise and phase offset due to imperfect carrier phase estimation. In particular, we derive optimal and simple suboptimal metrics for noncoherent FS of M-PSK modulation with M ≥ 4. We show that a simple ℓ1-norm correction of the noncoherent correlation gives large improvements in terms of synchronization error probability. For example, more than 2 dB are gained with respect to usual correlation tests in terms of signal to noise ratio, assuming QPSK with a synchronization error probability 10−3. Finally, we illustrate that the proposed technique is better than correlation based metric also for M-QAM systems, as well as in the presence of small frequency offsets.
Equity Issuance, Distress, and Agency Problems: The 20% Rule for Privately Issued Equity

Stock exchanges require shareholder approval for discounted placements that make up more than 20% of existing shares. This study shows discontinuity among placement distribution around the 20% threshold, which suggests that managers tend to avoid seeking approval by keeping the placement fraction just below 20%. Empirical results show that placements below 20% have negative announcement returns while …rms that seek approval do not. Moreover, managers seem to avoid seeking shareholder approval not because the approval process is too costly, but because the placements are not in the best interests of shareholders. Overall, my …ndings suggest agency problems in private placements.
Safe From Harm: Learned, Instructed, and Symbolic Generalization Pathways of Human Threat-Avoidance

Avoidance of threatening or unpleasant events is usually an adaptive behavioural strategy. Sometimes, however, avoidance can become chronic and lead to impaired daily functioning. Excessive threat-avoidance is a central diagnostic feature of anxiety disorders, yet little is known about whether avoidance acquired in the absence of a direct history of conditioning with a fearful event differs from directly learned avoidance. In the present study, we tested whether avoidance acquired indirectly via verbal instructions and symbolic generalization result in similar levels of avoidance behaviour and threat-beliefs to avoidance acquired after direct learning. Following fear conditioning in which one conditioned stimulus was paired with shock (CS+) and another was not (CS−), participants either learned or were instructed to make a response that cancelled impending shock. Three groups were then tested with a learned CS+ and CS− (learned group), instructed CS+ (instructed group), and generalized CS+ (derived group) presentations. Results showed similar levels of avoidance behaviour and threat-belief ratings about the likelihood of shock across each of the three pathways despite the different mechanisms by which they were acquired. Findings have implications for understanding the aetiology of clinical avoidance in anxiety.
Gradient-Enhancing Conversion for Illumination-Robust Lane Detection

Lane detection is important in many advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Vision-based lane detection algorithms are widely used and generally use gradient information as a lane feature. However, gradient values between lanes and roads vary with illumination change, which degrades the performance of lane detection systems. In this paper, we propose a gradient-enhancing conversion method for illumination-robust lane detection. Our proposed gradient-enhancing conversion method produces a new gray-level image from an RGB color image based on linear discriminant analysis. The converted images have large gradients at lane boundaries. To deal with illumination changes, the gray-level conversion vector is dynamically updated. In addition, we propose a novel lane detection algorithm, which uses the proposed conversion method, adaptive Canny edge detector, Hough transform, and curve model fitting method. We performed several experiments in various illumination environments and confirmed that the gradient is maximized at lane boundaries on the road. The detection rate of the proposed lane detection algorithm averages 96% and is greater than 93% in very poor environments.
Theoretical study of the frequency shift in bimodal FM-AFM by fractional calculus

Bimodal atomic force microscopy is a force-microscopy method that requires the simultaneous excitation of two eigenmodes of the cantilever. This method enables the simultaneous recording of several material properties and, at the same time, it also increases the sensitivity of the microscope. Here we apply fractional calculus to express the frequency shift of the second eigenmode in terms of the fractional derivative of the interaction force. We show that this approximation is valid for situations in which the amplitude of the first mode is larger than the length of scale of the force, corresponding to the most common experimental case. We also show that this approximation is valid for very different types of tip–surface forces such as the Lennard-Jones and Derjaguin–Muller–Toporov forces.
Hardness Results for Consensus-Halving

We study the consensus-halving problem of dividing an object into two portions, such that each of $n$ agents has equal valuation for the two portions. The $\epsilon$-approximate consensus-halving problem allows each agent to have an $\epsilon$ discrepancy on the values of the portions. We prove that computing $\epsilon$-approximate consensus-halving solution using $n$ cuts is in PPA, and is PPAD-hard, where $\epsilon$ is some positive constant; the problem remains PPAD-hard when we allow a constant number of additional cuts. It is NP-hard to decide whether a solution with $n-1$ cuts exists for the problem. As a corollary of our results, we obtain that the approximate computational version of the Continuous Necklace Splitting Problem is PPAD-hard when the number of portions $t$ is two.