Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The rate of leukocyte telomere shortening predicts mortality from cardiovascular disease in elderly men

Telomere length (TL) has been proposed as a marker of mitotic cell age and as a general index of human organismic aging. Short absolute leukocyte telomere length has been linked to cardiovascular-related morbidity and mortality. Our aim was to test whether the rate of change in leukocyte TL is related to mortality in a healthy elderly cohort. We examined a subsample of 236 randomly selected Caucasian participants from the MacArthur Health Aging Study (aged 70 to 79 years). DNA samples from baseline and 2.5 years later were assayed for mean TL of leukocytes. Percent change in TL was calculated as a measure of TL change (TLC). Associations between TL and TLC with 12-year overall and cardiovascular mortality were assessed. Over the 2.5 year period, 46% of the study participants showed maintenance of mean bulk TL, whereas 30% showed telomere shortening, and, unexpectedly, 24% showed telomere lengthening. For women, short baseline TL was related to greater mortality from cardiovascular disease (OR = 2.3; 95% CI: 1.0 - 5.3). For men, TLC (specifically shortening), but not baseline TL, was related to greater cardiovascular mortality, OR = 3.0 (95% CI: 1.1 - 8.2). This is the first demonstration that rate of telomere length change (TLC) predicts mortality and thus may be a useful prognostic factor for longevity.
R-R variability detects increases in vagal modulation with phenylephrine infusion.

High-frequency power, measured from power spectral analysis of R-R variability, reflects vagal modulation of the sinus node. Unexpectedly, a recent study reported a decrease in high-frequency power during the infusion of phenylephrine despite a prolongation of R-R intervals, indicating an increase in vagal activity. To better define the limitations of high-frequency power to quantify vagal modulation, we measured high-frequency power during the infusion of phenylephrine (0.4, 0.8, and 1.2 μg ⋅ kg-1 ⋅ min-1) into 10 normal subjects. We found increasing doses of phenylephrine produced progressive increases in systolic blood pressure from 118 ± 4 to 129 ± 5 mmHg ( P < 0.005), R-R intervals from 881 ± 44 to 1,274 ± 69 ms ( P < 0.0001), and the logarithm of high-frequency power from 5.83 ± 0.22 to 7.73 ± 0.24 ln(ms2) ( P < 0.0001). The conclusion was high-frequency power increases with increasing doses of phenylephrine. These data strongly support the ability of high-frequency power to detect an increase in vagal modulation during baroreceptor activation from an increase in systolic blood pressure with the infusion of phenylephrine.
Cardiac surgery related cardio-renal syndrome assessed by conventional and novel biomarkers – under or overestimated diagnosis?

Introduction Serum creatinine is a ‘gold standard’ criterion of recognizing and staging of acute kidney injury (AKI) despite it being a suboptimal, delayed indicator. The interpretation of increased values of biomarkers imposes great difficulty regarding cardiac surgery procedures performed with cardiopulmonary bypass and may lead to under- or overestimated diagnosis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical utility of the sole serum creatinine or urine neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) concentration used for identification of patients with AKI after cardiac surgery. Material and methods A prospective observational study was conducted on a group of 88 adult patients undergoing a coronary artery bypass grafting procedure. Serum creatinine was evaluated on the day of the operation, and 24 and 48 h post-operatively. Urinary NGAL concentration was measured: immediately after and one hour after cardiopulmonary bypass, and 24 h from the beginning of the operation. We assessed features of kidney injury and 30-day and 5-year mortality. Results Patients in the AKI group diagnosed with creatinine level and urine output criteria presented more advanced age (p = 0.01), higher body mass index (p = 0.01) and preoperative myocardial infarction (p = 0.02). Elevation of NGAL level was observed in 5 of 13 cases with AKI, based on creatinine criteria and 4 of 75 cases without AKI. Within 5 years after the surgical procedure the recurrence of renal failure was 36% in the AKI group (with perioperative NGAL elevation in 2 cases only). Conclusions In the cardiac surgery patients the diagnosis of AKI based on sole serum creatinine or urine NGAL concentration confirmed transient kidney injury. However, the clinical implications of these findings are insufficient for prediction of clinical outcome.
BCG Data Discrimination Using Daubechies Compactly Supported Wavelet Transform and Neural Networks for Heart Disease Diagnosis

Heart diseases are among the one of the most usual causes of death of the mankind. To assist clinicians in monitoring and diagnosing heart diseases, several electronic devices have been developed. One of the methods, ballistocardiography (BCG) was popular before the 1970s but after that other methods have replaced it, partly because the devices were difficult to construct. Recently developed sensors offer new unobtrusive possibilities to evaluate the condition of the patient's heart even at home without attaching electrodes to the patient. In this study we applied Daubechies compactly supported wavelet transform to extract essential features of the BCG signal and neural networks to classify the BCG. Initial tests with BCG from six subjects indicate that the method can classify the subjects to three classes with a high accuracy. The method is almost insensitive to latency and non-linear disturbance. Moreover, the wavelet transform requires no prior knowledge of the statistical distribution of data samples and the computational complexity and training time are reduced
Brownian motion on time scales, basic hypergeometric functions, and some continued fractions of Ramanujan

Motivated by Levy’s characterization of Brownian motion on the line, we propose an analogue of Brownian motion that has as its state space an arbitrary unbounded closed subset of the line: such a process will a martingale, has the identity function as its quadratic variation process, and is “continuous” in the sense that its sample paths don’t skip over points. We show that there is a unique such process, which turns out to be automatically a Feller-Dynkin Markov process. We find its generator, which is a natural generalization of the operator f 7→ 1 2 f ′′. We then consider the special case where the state space is the self-similar set {±qk : k ∈ Z} ∪ {0} for some q > 1. Using the scaling properties of the process, we represent the Laplace transforms of various hitting times as certain continued fractions that appear in Ramanujan’s “lost” notebook and evaluate these continued fractions in terms of basic hypergeometric functions (that is, q-analogues of classical hypergeometric functions). The process has 0 as a regular instantaneous point, and hence its sample paths can be decomposed into a Poisson process of excursions from 0 using the associated continuous local time. Using the reversibility of the process with respect to the natural measure on the state space, we find the entrance laws of the corresponding Ito excursion measure and the Laplace exponent of the inverse local time – both again in terms of basic hypergeometric functions. By combining these ingredients, we obtain explicit formulae for the resolvent of the process. We also compute the moments of the process in closed form. Some of our results involve q-analogues of classical distributions such as the Poisson distribution that have appeared elsewhere in the literature.
Absolute Pitch: Evidence for Early Cognitive Facilitation during Passive Listening as Revealed by Reduced P3a Amplitudes

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to identify or produce different pitches without using reference tones. At least two sequential processing stages are assumed to contribute to this phenomenon. The first recruits a pitch memory mechanism at an early stage of auditory processing, whereas the second is driven by a later cognitive mechanism (pitch labeling). Several investigations have used active tasks, but it is unclear how these two mechanisms contribute to AP during passive listening. The present work investigated the temporal dynamics of tone processing in AP and non-AP (NAP) participants by using EEG. We applied a passive oddball paradigm with between- and within-tone category manipulations and analyzed the MMN reflecting the early stage of auditory processing and the P3a response reflecting the later cognitive mechanism during the second processing stage. Results did not reveal between-group differences in MMN waveforms. By contrast, the P3a response was specifically associated with AP and sensitive to the processing of different pitch types. Specifically, AP participants exhibited smaller P3a amplitudes, especially in between-tone category conditions, and P3a responses correlated significantly with the age of commencement of musical training, suggesting an influence of early musical exposure on AP. Our results reinforce the current opinion that the representation of pitches at the processing level of the auditory-related cortex is comparable among AP and NAP participants, whereas the later processing stage is critical for AP. Results are interpreted as reflecting cognitive facilitation in AP participants, possibly driven by the availability of multiple codes for tones.
Semi-supervised Max-margin Topic Model with Manifold Posterior Regularization

Supervised topic models leverage label information to learn discriminative latent topic representations. As collecting a fully labeled dataset is often time-consuming, semi-supervised learning is of high interest. In this paper, we present an effective semi-supervised max-margin topic model by naturally introducing manifold posterior regularization to a regularized Bayesian topic model, named LapMedLDA. The model jointly learns latent topics and a related classifier with only a small fraction of labeled documents. To perform the approximate inference, we derive an efficient stochastic gradient MCMC method. Unlike the previous semi-supervised topic models, our model adopts a tight coupling between the generative topic model and the discriminative classifier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that such tight coupling brings significant benefits in quantitative and qualitative performance.
New non-oral drug delivery systems for Parkinson's disease treatment

Introduction: Parkinson's disease (PD) remains the only neurodegenerative disorder for which there are highly effective symptomatic therapies, but still unmet needs regarding its long-term management. Levodopa (LD) remains the most effective treatment; however, chronic use is associated with potentially disabling motor complications. Areas covered: This review highlights a variety of new non-oral drug delivery strategies for non-invasive and invasive routes of drug administration for the treatment of PD. It also includes current and future trends of liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles and biocompatible microparticles as new non-oral drug delivery systems. Expert opinion: The long-term complications and limitations of LD treatment might be improved by changing therapy from the present pulsatile stimulation to a more constant stimulation of central dopamine receptors. Stimulation of these receptors may be possible with a new non-oral drug delivery system, with the aim of achieving long-lasting and less fluctuating drug levels, minimization of peak levels and thereby reduction of side effects.
Identification of Arcanobacterium pyogenes isolated by post mortem examinations of a bearded dragon and a gecko by phenotypic and genotypic properties

The present study was designed to identify phenotypically and genotypically two Arcanobacterium (A.) pyogenes strains isolated by post mortem examinations of a bearded dragon and a gecko. The A. pyogenes strains showed the typical biochemical properties and displayed CAMP-like synergistic hemolytic activities with various indicator strains. The species identity could be confirmed genotypically by amplification and sequencing of the 16S rDNA gene and, as novel target gene, by sequencing of the beta subunit of RNA polymerase encoding gene rpoB, of both strains and of reference strains representing nine species of the genus Arcanobacterium. The species identity of the two A. pyogenes strains could additionally be confirmed by PCR mediated amplification of species specific parts of the 16S-23S rDNA intergenic spacer region, the pyolysin encoding gene plo and by amplification of the collagen-binding protein encoding gene cbpA. All these molecular targets might help to improve the future identification and further characterization of A. pyogenes which, as demonstrated in the present study, could also be isolated from reptile specimens.
What is the limit of energy saving by dynamic voltage scaling?

Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is a technique that varies the supply voltage and clock frequency based on the computation load to provide desired performance with the minimal amount of energy consumption. It has been demonstrated as one of the most effective low power system design techniques, in particular for real time systems. Previously, there are works on both ends of the DVS systems: the ideal variable voltage system which can change its voltage with no physical constraints, and the multiple voltage system which has a number of discrete voltages available simultaneously. In this paper, we study the DVS systems between these two extreme cases. We consider systems that can vary the operating voltage dynamically under various real-life physical constraints. Based on the system's different behavior during voltage transition, we define the feasible DVS system and the practical DVS system. We build mathematical model to analyze the potential of DVS on energy saving for these different systems. Finally, we simulate the behavior of a secure wireless communication networks with DVS systems. The results show that DVS results in energy reduction from 36% to 79%, and the real life DVS systems can be very close to the ideal system in energy saving.
Citation Classification for Behavioral Analysis of a Scientific Field

Citations are an important indicator of the state of a scientific field, reflecting how authors frame their work, and influencing uptake by future scholars. However, our understanding of citation behavior has been limited to small-scale manual citation analysis. We perform the largest behavioral study of citations to date, analyzing how citations are both framed and taken up by scholars in one entire field: natural language processing. We introduce a new dataset of nearly 2,000 citations annotated for function and centrality, and use it to develop a state-of-the-art classifier and label the entire ACL Reference Corpus. We then study how citations are framed by authors and use both papers and online traces to track how citations are followed by readers. We demonstrate that authors are sensitive to discourse structure and publication venue when citing, that online readers follow temporal links to previous and future work rather than methodological links, and that how a paper cites related work is predictive of its citation count. Finally, we use changes in citation roles to show that the field of NLP is undergoing a significant increase in consensus.
Influence of continuous negative pressure in the rat middle ear

High negative pressure in the middle ear was thought to be closely related to the etiology of retraction‐type cholesteatoma. Recently, it has been detected that mechanical forces are important factors in epithelial turnover and affect cytoskeletal remodeling. Continuous negative pressure in the middle ear may possibly accelerate the proliferation and differentiation of epithelial cells of the tympanic membrane.
Causation

We, and scientific practice, tend to conceive of causation as an objective relation characterizing the external world. Philosophy has been more ambiguous. This chapter intends to renew the doubts. If causation is only a model-relative notion and if causation is tightly entangled with notions that are best understood in a subject-relative way, then the objectivity of causation is at least undermined. The paper discusses these doubts and concludes that the objectivity of causation must not be presupposed, but must be constructively earned.
Childhood abuse, the BDNF-Val66Met polymorphism and adult psychotic-like experiences.

BACKGROUND The well-established relationship between childhood adversity and psychosis is likely to involve other factors such as genetic variants that can help us to understand why not everyone exposed to adverse events develops psychotic symptoms later in life. AIMS We investigated the influence of childhood abuse and neglect on positive and negative psychotic-like experiences in adulthood and the potential moderating effect of the BDNF-Val66Met polymorphism. METHOD Psychotic-like experiences and childhood adversity were assessed in 533 individuals from the general population. RESULTS Childhood abuse showed a strong independent effect on the positive dimension of psychotic-like experiences (β = 0.16, s.e. = 0.05, P = 0.002). Furthermore, this association was moderated by the BDNF-Val66Met polymorphism (β = 0.27, s.e. = 0.10, P = 0.004). CONCLUSIONS Individuals exposed to childhood abuse are more likely to report positive psychotic-like experiences. Met carriers reported more positive psychotic-like experiences when exposed to childhood abuse than did individuals carrying the Val/Val genotype. Therefore, the observed gene-environment interaction effect may be partially responsible for individual variation in response to childhood abuse.
OFDM/OQAM: A Solution to Efficiently Increase the Capacity of Future PLC Networks

The popularity of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), or more precisely cyclic prefix-OFDM (CP-OFDM), which is indeed totally justified by its intrinsic properties, makes the breakthrough of other modulation techniques difficult. In the case of power-line communication (PLC) networks, windowed OFDM was the retained modulation in the HPAV specification, the current standard implemented in most of the recent in-home PLC systems. But another modulation, called OFDM/OQAM, has been recently presented as a viable alternative to the classical OFDM. Now, the results of our comparisons between the two modulations schemes, done in terms of capacity and throughput, aim at showing that the baseband version of OFDM/OQAM, named in short Hermitian symmetric-OQAM (HS-OQAM), is a serious candidate to efficiently improve data rates in PLC networks.
Contagion as a Wealth Effect

Financial contagion is described as a wealth effect in a continuous-time model with two risky assets and three types of traders. Noise traders trade randomly in one market. Long-term investors provide liquidity using a linear rule based on fundamentals. Convergence traders with logarithmic utility trade optimally in both markets. Asset price dynamics are endogenously determined (numerically) as functions of endogenous wealth and exogenous noise. When convergence traders lose money, they liquidate positions in both markets. This creates contagion, in that returns become more volatile and more correlated. Contagion reduces benefits from portfolio diversification and raises issues for risk management. Copyright The American Finance Association 2001.
Social-Aware Video Multicast Based on Device-to-Device Communications

To meet the explosive demand on delivering high-definition video steams over cellular networks, we design a Social-aware video multiCast (SoCast) system leveraging device-to-device (D2D) communications. One salient feature of SoCast is to stimulate effective cooperation among mobile users (clients), by making use of two types of important social ties, i.e., social trust and social reciprocity. By using SoCast, clients form groups to obtain missing packets from other clients and restore incomplete video frames, according to the unique video encoding structure. In return, the user perception of the mobile video quality can be substantially improved. Specifically, we first cast the problem of social ties based group formation among clients for cooperative video multicast as a coalitional game, and then devise a distributed algorithm to obtain the core solution (group formation) for the formulated coalitional game. Further, a resource allocation scheme is proposed for the base station to handle D2D radio resource requests from client groups. Extensive numerical studies using real video traces corroborate the significant gain using SoCast.
Gray Level Corner Detection

In this paper the analysis of gray level corner detections has been carried out. The performances of cornerness measures for some corner detection algorithms are discussed. This paper presents a new approach for corner detection called the GradientDirection corner detector which is developed from the popular Plessey corner detector. The GradientDirection corner detector is based on the measure of the gradient module of the image gradient direction and the constraints of false corner response suppression.
Energy Efficient Node Caching and Load Balancing Enhancement of Reactive Ad Hoc Routing Protocols

Enhancing route request broadcasting protocols constitutes a substantial part of recent research in mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) routing. We suggest a novel approach to modify route request broadcast based on node caching. The intuition behind node caching is that the nodes involved in recent data packet forwarding have more reliable information about its neighbors and have better locations (e.g., on the intersection of several data routes) than other nodes. We cache nodes which are recently involved in data packet forwarding, and use only them to forward route requests. Stopping forwarding route requests from the other nodes considerably reduces routing overhead at the expense of possible destination missing. The suggested node caching techniques can be also viewed as a dynamic implementation of a connected dominating set (CDS). We overcome the known drawback of CDS - overuse of dominating (cached) nodes - by a new load-balancing scheme. Our contributions include: (i) a new energy-efficient node caching enhancement of route request broadcast for reactive ad hoc routing protocols; (ii) an extensive simulation study in NS2 of the novel node caching enhancement of AODV (AODV-NC) showing drastic reduction in overhead, significant improvement of the packet delivery ratio and the end-to-end delay and overhead; (iii) an analysis of the forwarding load distribu- tion and energy consumption, and (iv) an extensive simulation study in NS2 of the novel AODV-NC based routing protocol with adaptive workload balancing (AODV- NC-WLB) showing considerable improvement in throughput, overhead, delivery ratio and delay over the standard AODV for stressed MANETs.
BOOTSTRAPPING REGRESSION MODELS WITH MANY PARAMETERS

The regression model is considered, where the number of data points n and parameters p are both large. It is shown that the bootstrap approximation to the distribution of contrasts is valid, provided p/n is small. It is also shown that if p/n does not tend to zero, the bootstrap approximation is invalid. Similar results are obtained for the full p-dimensional distribution of the least squares estirates. Here, the relevant growth condition is that p /n -> 0, and regularity conditions are needed on the tails of the error distribution.