Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experience-based planning with sparse roadmap spanners

We present an experience-based planning framework called Thunder that learns to reduce computation time required to solve high-dimensional planning problems in varying environments. The approach is especially suited for large configuration spaces that include many invariant constraints, such as those found with whole body humanoid motion planning. Experiences are generated using probabilistic sampling and stored in a sparse roadmap spanner (SPARS), which provides asymptotically near-optimal coverage of the configuration space, making storing, retrieving, and repairing past experiences very efficient with respect to memory and time. The Thunder framework improves upon past experience-based planners by storing experiences in a graph rather than in individual paths, eliminating redundant information, providing more opportunities for path reuse, and providing a theoretical limit to the size of the experience graph. These properties also lead to improved handling of dynamically changing environments, reasoning about optimal paths, and reducing query resolution time. The approach is demonstrated on a 30 degrees of freedom humanoid robot and compared with the Lightning framework, an experience-based planner that uses individual paths to store past experiences. In environments with variable obstacles and stability constraints, experiments show that Thunder is on average an order of magnitude faster than Lightning and planning from scratch. Thunder also uses 98.8% less memory to store its experiences after 10,000 trials when compared to Lightning. Our framework is implemented and freely available in the Open Motion Planning Library.
Effects of moderate-intensity exercise on polysomnographic and subjective sleep quality in older adults with mild to moderate sleep complaints.

BACKGROUND This study sought to determine the 12-month effects of exercise increases on objective and subjective sleep quality in initially inactive older persons with mild to moderate sleep complaints. METHODS A nonclinical sample of underactive adults 55 years old or older (n=66) with mild to moderate chronic sleep complaints were randomly assigned to a 12-month program of primarily moderate-intensity endurance exercise (n=36) or a health education control program (n=30). The main outcome measure was polysomnographic sleep recordings, with additional measures of subjective sleep quality, physical activity, and physical fitness. Directional hypotheses were tested. RESULTS Using intent-to-treat methods, at 12 months exercisers, relative to controls, spent significantly less time in polysomnographically measured Stage 1 sleep (between-arm difference=2.3, 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.7-4.0; p=003), spent more time in Stage 2 sleep (between-arm difference=3.2, 95% CI, 0.6-5.7; p=.04), and had fewer awakenings during the first third of the sleep period (between-arm difference=1.0, 95% CI, 0.39-1.55; p=.03). Exercisers also reported greater 12-month improvements relative to controls in Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) sleep disturbance subscale score (p=.009), sleep diary-based minutes to fall asleep (p=.01), and feeling more rested in the morning (p=.02). CONCLUSIONS Compared with general health education, a 12-month moderate-intensity exercise program that met current physical activity recommendations for older adults improved some objective and subjective dimensions of sleep to a modest degree. The results suggest additional areas for investigation in this understudied area.
Identification of Novel Thyroid Cancer-Related Genes and Chemicals Using Shortest Path Algorithm

Thyroid cancer is a typical endocrine malignancy. In the past three decades, the continued growth of its incidence has made it urgent to design effective treatments to treat this disease. To this end, it is necessary to uncover the mechanism underlying this disease. Identification of thyroid cancer-related genes and chemicals is helpful to understand the mechanism of thyroid cancer. In this study, we generalized some previous methods to discover both disease genes and chemicals. The method was based on shortest path algorithm and applied to discover novel thyroid cancer-related genes and chemicals. The analysis of the final obtained genes and chemicals suggests that some of them are crucial to the formation and development of thyroid cancer. It is indicated that the proposed method is effective for the discovery of novel disease genes and chemicals.
U-shaped relationship of left ventricular ejection time index and all-cause mortality.

BACKGROUND Previous studies have suggested that systolic and diastolic heart failure is associated with alterations of left ventricular ejection time index (LVETI). We sought to examine the relation of LVETI to mortality in an elderly population. METHODS We prospectively enrolled 852 patients undergoing cardiac catheterization for suspected coronary artery disease (CAD) in 2001 and 2002. LVETI was measured noninvasively using radial applantation tonometry and pulse waveform analysis. Mortality data were assessed by telephone interviews with general practitioners, hospital records, and the national mortality register. RESULTS The mean age was 64.8 years, 60.7% of subjects were men, 70.1% of subjects had significant CAD, and 28.6% of subjects had impaired systolic function. After a mean follow-up of 8.2 ± 2.3 years, 183 deaths occurred. At baseline, LVETI was significantly associated with age, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, pulse pressure, and N-terminal probrain natriuretic peptide. A shorter LVETI was significantly and independently associated with impaired systolic function. Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed that both prolonged and shortened ejection time index (1st and 3rd tertile LVETI) were associated with a decreased survival probability (P <0.05, log-rank-test) compared with normal LVETI (2nd tertile). In multivariable Cox regression analysis, the hazard ratios for all-cause mortality were 1.66 for 1st tertile LVETI (P = 0.01) and 1.75 for 3rd tertile LVETI (P = 0.006). The effect of a shortened LVETI on mortality was partly due to the effect of impaired systolic function on ejection duration. CONCLUSIONS We observed a U-shaped relation between ejection duration and all-cause mortality.
Choosy But Not Chaste : Multiple Mating in Human Females

When Charles Darwin set out to relate his theory of evolution by natural selection to humans he discovered that a complementary explanation was needed to properly understand the great variation seen in human behavior. The resulting work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, laid out the defining principles and evidence of sexual selection. In brief, this work is best known for illuminating the typically male strategy of intrasexual competition and the typically female response of intersexual choice. While these sexual stereotypes were first laid out by Darwin, they grew in importance when, years later, A. J. Bateman, in a careful study of Drosophila mating strategies, noted that multiple mating appeared to provide great benefit to male reproductive success, but to have no such effect on females. As a result, female choice soon became synonymous with being coy, and only males were thought to gain from promiscuous behavior. However, the last thirty years of research have served to question much of the traditional
Maternal autoimmune diseases, asthma and allergies, and childhood autism spectrum disorders: a case-control study.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between physician-documented diagnoses of maternal autoimmune diseases, allergies, and asthma around the time of pregnancy and subsequent diagnoses of autism in children. DESIGN A case-control study nested within a cohort of infants born between January 1995 and June 1999. SETTING Northern California Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program. PARTICIPANTS Cases (n = 420) were children with at least 1 diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) recorded in Kaiser Permanente outpatient clinical databases. Controls (n = 2100) were children without an ASD diagnosis who were frequency matched to cases on sex, birth year, and hospital of birth. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Frequencies of maternal immunologic disorders were compared between cases and controls with a chi2 statistic, and relative risks were estimated by crude and adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals using logistic regression. RESULTS The final study population included 407 cases and 2095 controls. A similar proportion of case and control mothers had a diagnosis of any autoimmune disease in the 4-year period surrounding pregnancy (10.3% vs 8.2%, P = .15). After adjustment for maternal factors, only 1 autoimmune condition, psoriasis, was significantly associated with ASDs (adjusted odds ratio, 2.7; 95% confidence interval, 1.3-5.8). A greater than 2-fold elevated risk of ASD was observed for maternal asthma and allergy diagnoses recorded during the second trimester of pregnancy. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that maternal autoimmune disorders present in women around the time of pregnancy are unlikely to contribute significantly to autism risk. Further etiologic investigations are needed to confirm these results and should include objective documentation of diagnoses and consider a larger set of maternal immune-related conditions, including asthma and allergies.
SoftBound: highly compatible and complete spatial memory safety for c

The serious bugs and security vulnerabilities facilitated by C/C++'s lack of bounds checking are well known, yet C and C++ remain in widespread use. Unfortunately, C's arbitrary pointer arithmetic, conflation of pointers and arrays, and programmer-visible memory layout make retrofitting C/C++ with spatial safety guarantees extremely challenging. Existing approaches suffer from incompleteness, have high runtime overhead, or require non-trivial changes to the C source code. Thus far, these deficiencies have prevented widespread adoption of such techniques. This paper proposes SoftBound, a compile-time transformation for enforcing spatial safety of C. Inspired by HardBound, a previously proposed hardware-assisted approach, SoftBound similarly records base and bound information for every pointer as disjoint metadata. This decoupling enables SoftBound to provide spatial safety without requiring changes to C source code. Unlike HardBound, SoftBound is a software-only approach and performs metadata manipulation only when loading or storing pointer values. A formal proof shows that this is sufficient to provide spatial safety even in the presence of arbitrary casts. SoftBound's full checking mode provides complete spatial violation detection with 67% runtime overhead on average. To further reduce overheads, SoftBound has a store-only checking mode that successfully detects all the security vulnerabilities in a test suite at the cost of only 22% runtime overhead on average.
Organic carbon production, mineralisation and preservation on the Peruvian margin

Abstract. Carbon cycling in Peruvian margin sediments (11 and 12° S) was examined at 16 stations, from 74 m water depth on the middle shelf down to 1024 m, using a combination of in situ flux measurements, sedimentary geochemistry and modelling. Bottom water oxygen was below detection limit down to ca. 400 m and increased to 53 μM at the deepest station. Sediment accumulation rates decreased sharply seaward of the middle shelf and subsequently increased at the deep stations. The organic carbon burial efficiency (CBE) was unusually low on the middle shelf ( 60%) at the deep oxygenated sites. In line with other studies, CBE was elevated under oxygen-deficient waters in the mid-water oxygen minimum zone. Organic carbon rain rates calculated from the benthic fluxes alluded to efficient mineralisation of organic matter in the water column compared to other oxygen-deficient environments. The observations at the Peruvian margin suggest that a lack of oxygen does not greatly affect the degradation of organic matter in the water column but promotes the preservation of organic matter in sediments.
Proactive techniques for correct and predictable Internet routing

The Internet is composed of thousands of autonomous, competing networks that exchange reachability information using an interdomain routing protocol. Network operators must continually reconfigure the routing protocols to realize various economic and performance goals. Unfortunately, there is no systematic way to predict how the configuration will affect the behavior of the routing protocol or to determine whether the routing protocol will operate correctly at all. This dissertation develops techniques to reason about the dynamic behavior of Internet routing, based on static analysis of the router configurations, before the protocol ever runs on a live network. Interdomain routing offers each independent network tremendous flexibility in configuring the routing protocols to accomplish various economic and performance tasks. Routing configurations are complex, and writing them is similar to writing a distributed program; the (unavoidable) consequence of configuration complexity is the potential for incorrect and unpredictable behavior. These mistakes and unintended interactions lead to routing faults, which disrupt end-to-end connectivity. Network operators writing configurations make mistakes; they may also specify policies that interact in unexpected ways with policies in other networks. To avoid disrupting network connectivity and degrading performance, operators would benefit from being able to determine the effects of configuration changes before deploying them on a live network; unfortunately, the status quo provides them no opportunity to do so. This dissertation develops the techniques to achieve this goal of proactively ensuring correct and predictable Internet routing. The first challenge in guaranteeing correct and predictable behavior from a routing protocol is defining a specification for correct behavior. We identify three important aspects of correctness---path visibility, route validity, and safety---and develop proactive techniques for guaranteeing that these properties hold. Path visibility states that the protocol disseminates information about paths in the topology; route validity says that this information actually corresponds to those paths; safety says that the protocol ultimately converges to a stable outcome, implying that routing updates actually correspond to topological changes. Armed with this correctness specification, we tackle the second challenge: analyzing routing protocol configurations that may be distributed across hundreds of routers. We develop techniques to check whether a routing protocol satisfies the correctness specification within a single independently operated network. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.) (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Herschel : the first science highlights Special feature L E From filamentary clouds to prestellar cores to the stellar IMF : Initial highlights from the Herschel ⋆ Gould Belt Survey ⋆ ⋆

We summarize the first results from the Gould Belt Survey, obtained toward the Aquila rift and Polaris Flare regions during the science demonstration phase of Herschel. Our 70–500 μm images taken in parallel mode with the SPIRE and PACS cameras reveal a wealth of filamentary structure, as well as numerous dense cores embedded in the filaments. Between ∼350 and 500 prestellar cores and ∼45–60 Class 0 protostars can be identified in the Aquila field, while ∼300 unbound starless cores and no protostars are observed in the Polaris field. The prestellar core mass function (CMF) derived for the Aquila region bears a strong resemblance to the stellar initial mass function (IMF), already confirming the close connection between the CMF and the IMF with much better statistics than earlier studies. Comparing and contrasting our Herschel results in Aquila and Polaris, we propose an observationally-driven scenario for core formation according to which complex networks of long, thin filaments form first within molecular clouds, and then the densest filaments fragment into a number of prestellar cores via gravitational instability.
Graph-based Classification on Heterogeneous Information Networks

A heterogeneous information network is a network composed of multiple types of objects and links. Recently, it has been recognized that strongly-typed heterogeneous information networks are prevalent in the real world. Sometimes, label information is available for part of the objects. Learning from such labeled and unlabeled data via transductive classification can lead to good knowledge extraction of the hidden network structure. However, although classification on homogeneous networks has been studied over decades, classification on heterogeneous networks has not been explored until recently. In this paper, we consider the transductive classification problem on heterogeneous networked data which share a common topic. Only part of the objects in the given network are labeled, and we aim to predict labels for all types of the remaining objects. A novel graph-based regularization framework, GNetClass, is proposed to model the link structure in information networks with arbitrary network schema and number of object/link types. Specifically, we explicitly respect the type differences by preserving consistency over each relation graph corresponding to each type of links separately. Efficient computational schemes are then introduced to solve the corresponding optimization problem. Experiments on the DBLP data set show that our algorithm significantly improves the classification accuracy over existing state-of-the-art methods. Index Terms—Heterogeneous Information Networks, Classification, Semi-supervised Learning, Regularization. F
Reprogramming of Neural Progenitor Cells into Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells in the Absence of Exogenous Sox2 Expression

Expression of the transcription factors Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c‐Myc in mesodermal and endodermal derivatives, including fibroblasts, lymphocytes, liver, stomach, and β cells, generates induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. It remains unknown, however, whether cell types of the ectodermal lineage are equally amenable to reprogramming into iPS cells by the same combination of factors. To test this, we have isolated genetically marked neural progenitor cells (NPCs) from neonatal mouse brains and infected them with viral vectors expressing Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c‐Myc. Infected NPCs gave rise to iPS cells that expressed markers of embryonic stem cells, showed demethylation of pluripotency genes, formed teratomas, and contributed to viable chimeras. In contrast to other somatic cell types, NPCs expressed high levels of endogenous Sox2 and thus did not require viral Sox2 expression for reprogramming into iPS cells. Our data show that in addition to mesoderm‐ and endoderm‐derived cell types, neural progenitor cells of the ectodermal lineage can be reprogrammed into iPS cells, suggesting that in vitro reprogramming is a universal process. These results also imply that the combination of factors necessary for reprogramming is dependent on cellular context.
Aetiology of Schizophrenia and Implications for Nursing Practice: A Literature Review

Schizophrenia is recognised as a major mental illness and is prevalent in approximately 1% of the global population. This paper reviewed literature published between 2001 and 2013 to explore the aetiology of schizophrenia and discuss implications for mental health nursing practice. Although the causes of schizophrenia are largely unknown, there is a strong correlation between identified physiological and environmental markers and the development of the disease. With this knowledge, mental health nurses can potentially contribute to the development of strategies and approaches to complement current treatments, and therefore ensure improved outcomes for mental health clients.
Sources of multiple Resistances to foliar diseases of mango

Twenty five cultivars were evaluated against various foliar diseases of mango under natural field conditions during 2013- 2014 and 2014- 2015. None of cultivars showed complete resistance to all the diseases. Most of the cultivars showed resistant to malformation and sooty mould except Arka Nilkiran, Pusa Surya, Pusa Arunima,, Sensation, Dushehari and Pant Sinduri were found to be succeptible to malformation and Pantchandra, Arunika, Langra, Dudhehari, Neelgoa to sooty mould. All the cultivas were found to be succeptible to anthracnose except Sindhu+P+S which was found to be moderately resistant. Langra, Sensation, amarpali and Neeleshan were moderately resistant to red rust. Late Maturity, Langra, Amarpali and Neeleshan to Red rust, Tommy Atkins+ Zill, Arka Nilkiran, Swarna Jahagir and Neeleshan to Phoma blight and Arunika, Pusa Surya, Sindhu+P+S, swarna Jahagir and Neeludin to bacterial spot.
Heavy Metals and Hydrocarbon Contamination of Surface water in Azuabie Creek within Bonny Estuary, Nigeria

The aim of this study was to assess some heavy metals (Cr, Ni, Cd, Pb, Zn and Cu) and hydrocarbon concentrations of Azuabie creek using the Okujagu creek as a control location. Seventy two samples were collected from four stations (AZ1, AZ2, AZ3 and OK) in six months (July – December 2016). Samples were analyzed using AAS and GC spectrophotometry while ANOVA and PCA were used for data analysis.The hydrocarbons (THC, 0.3 ± 0.07 – 84.6 ± 28.85 mg/l, TPH,0.07 ± 0.03 - 45.20 ± 13.88 mg/l & PAH, 0.001 ± 0.0003 – 0.384 ± 0.104 mg/l) were generally higher in Azuabie creek and showed increased concentration over time with significant difference (p<0.001) between locations and also between months. The increase in hydrocarbon level is due to oil bunkering and other anthropogenic activities in the study area. The concentration of Cr, Ni, Cd, and Pb generally exceeded WHO and USEPA limits in water while those of Zn and Cu fell below such regulatory limits. Site discrimination by PCA showed AZ1 & AZ2 as most dissimilar stations traceable to higher contaminant levels associated with such sites. In conclusion, the variables within Azuabie creek showed higher contaminant level compared to the control creek. Complete isolation of each site examined indicates dissimilarity in the water quality with respect to contaminant level within the creek hence regular monitoring is needed to detect water quality changes. Keyword : Heavy metals, hydrocarbon, surface water, contamination
Polymorphism, subtyping, and type inference in MLsub

We present a type system combining subtyping and ML-style parametric polymorphism. Unlike previous work, our system supports type inference and has compact principal types. We demonstrate this system in the minimal language MLsub, which types a strict superset of core ML programs. This is made possible by keeping a strict separation between the types used to describe inputs and those used to describe outputs, and extending the classical unification algorithm to handle subtyping constraints between these input and output types. Principal types are kept compact by type simplification, which exploits deep connections between subtyping and the algebra of regular languages. An implementation is available online.