Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simulating Household Savings and Labour Supply: an Application of Dynamic Programming

This paper describes a fully behavioural microsimulation model that has recently been developed at the National Institute for considering responses to changes in pension policy of household savings and labour supply. The model generates household decisions regarding labour/leisure, and consumption/savings by solving a dynamic programming problem over the simulated lifetime. This analytical framework incorporates a degree of complexity that is usually omitted from econometric analyses that are common in the literature.
Activation of professional and personal network relations when experiencing a symptom: a population-based cross-sectional study

Objective To describe patterns of disclosure of symptoms experienced among people in the general population to persons in their personal and/or professional network. Design A population-based cross-sectional study. Data were collected from a web-based survey. Setting The general population in Denmark. Participants 100 000 individuals randomly selected, representative of the adult Danish population aged ≥20 years were invited. Approximately 5% were not eligible for inclusion. 49 706 (men=23 240; women=26 466) of 95 253 eligible individuals completed the questionnaire; yielding a response rate of 52.2%. Individuals completing all questions regarding social network relations form the study base (n=44 313). Primary and secondary outcome measures Activation of personal and/or professional relations when experiencing a symptom. Results The 44 313 individuals reported in total 260 079 symptom experiences within the last 4 weeks. No professional network relation was used in two-thirds of all reported symptoms. The general practitioner (GP) was the most frequently reported professional relation activated (22.5%). People reporting to have available personal relations were slightly less inclined to contact the GP (21.9%) when experiencing a symptom compared with people with no reported personal relations (26.8%). The most commonly activated personal relations were spouse/partner (56.4%) and friend (19.6%). More than a quarter of all reported symptom experiences was not shared with anyone, personal nor professional. The symptom experiences with the lowest frequency of network activation were symptoms such as black stool, constipation, change in stool texture and frequent urination. Conclusion This study emphasises variation in the activation of network relations when experiencing a symptom. Symptoms were shared with both personal and professional relations, but different patterns of disclosures were discovered. For symptoms derived from the urogenital or colorectal region, the use of both personal and professional relations was relatively small, which might indicate reticence to involve other people when experiencing symptoms of that nature.
Generation of periodic stochastic foam models for numerical analysis

Stochastic cellular models of rigid foam based on Voronoi spatial partitioning are generated and investigated for potential use in numerical analysis using finite element methods. Such partitions are deterministic once a distribution of cell nuclei has been defined. A drawback is that the models tend to exhibit a significant share of short edges and small faces. Such small geometrical features are not likely to occur in real foams since they are unfavorable from a surface energy point of view and they also generate problems in numerical analysis due to associated meshing challenges. Through minimization of the surface area, using the computer software Surface Evolver, the Voronoi models are brought to better resemblance with ideal dry foam and the occurrence of small geometrical features is strongly reduced. It is generally seen that different seed point distribution algorithms result in different model topologies. The presented methodology is systematic, parameterized and the results are very promising. Good grounds are provided for modeling of real rigid foam materials, that do not necessarily fully resemble ideal dry foam.
Role of Nonmetallic Inclusions in Fatigue, Pitting, and Corrosion Fatigue

Abstract A study was conducted of the effect of nonmetallic inclusions on the fatigue and corrosion fatigue resistance of a high-strength steel in 0.6 M sodium chloride (NaCl) solutions. Results indicated that angular calcium-aluminate inclusions played an important role in introducing cracks during air fatigue cycling; however, sulfide inclusions appeared to be the main contributors to sites for corrosion pits and subsequent crack initiation. Conventional consideration based on the stress intensification caused by such defects was insufficient to describe the role of nonmetallic inclusions in fatigue crack development in air and by corrosion pits during corrosion fatigue. However, it was considered that the interaction between geometric discontinuities (i.e., nonmetallic inclusions and cyclic loading) resulted in plasticity localization and, thus, facilitated crack development. Similarly, enhancement of localized dissolution resulting from plasticity localization contributed to corrosion pit development .
Communication on a segmented bus

In this study, we discuss communication aspects concerning a segmented bus platform. Placed somewhere midway between the classical system bus and the network on chip approaches, the segmented bus architecture provides certain performance improvements in comparison with the first, while employing a much simpler communication structure and algorithm than those thought for the second. Our implementation strategy targets an FPGA technology. The result comes as a parameterized communication scheme for system on chip designers.
Quality‐of‐life and surgical treatments for rectal cancer—a longitudinal analysis using the California Cancer Registry

Background: Heterogeneous results for research investigating health‐related quality of life (HRQL) in patients undergoing sphincter‐ablating procedures for rectal cancer are likely due to single institution experiences and measurement of HRQL. To address this heterogeneity, we evaluated HRQL in patients with rectal cancer by type of surgery, location of tumor, and receipt of adjuvant therapy using an HRQL instrument that has not been used to address rectal cancer patients in a population‐based sample over time.
Metabolomics in paediatric respiratory diseases and bronchiolitis

The metabolic study of an organism may make it possible to monitor, through the metabolites,the physiology and/or pathology of the organism itself. Metabolomics, in the strictest sense, “the set of metabolites, the final products of the genetic expression”. Most clinical chemistry tests available today rely on old technologies that measure only a single chemical in blood, urine or other biofluids, and these tests are neither sensitive nor specific for any particular disease. Metabolomics offers a holistic approach to systems medicine, with the promise to enhance clinical chemistry diagnostics in several pathologic conditions. The present review covers the application of clinical metabolomics in three different areas of respiratory diseases in pediatrics: asthma, pneumonia and bronchiolitis. Comparison between two 1H-NMR urine spectra by two bronchiolitis patients are also presented.
On-line end-to-end congestion control

Congestion control in the current Internet is accomplished mainly by TCP/IP. To understand the macroscopic network behavior that results from TCP/IP and similar end-to-end protocols, one main analytic technique is to show that the the protocol maximizes some global objective function of the network traffic. We analyze a particular end-to-end MIMD (multiplicative-increase, multiplicative-decrease) protocol. We show that if all users of the network use the protocol, and all connections last for at least logarithmically many rounds, then the total weighted throughput (value of all packets received) is near the maximum possible. Our analysis includes round-trip-times, and (in contrast to most previous analyses) gives explicit convergence rates, allows connections to start and stop, and allows capacities to change.
Biomarkers of Guillain-Barré Syndrome: Some Recent Progress, More Still to Be Explored

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), the axonal subtype of which is mainly triggered by C. jejuni with ganglioside-mimicking lipooligosaccharides (LOS), is an immune-mediated disorder in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) accompanied by the disruption of the blood-nerve barrier (BNB) and the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier (B-CSF-B). Biomarkers of GBS have been extensively explored and some of them are proved to assist in the clinical diagnosis and in monitoring disease progression as well as in assessing the efficacy of immunotherapy. Herein, we systemically review the literature on biomarkers of GBS, including infection-/immune-/BNB, B-CSF-B, and PNS damage-associated biomarkers, aiming at providing an overview of GBS biomarkers and guiding further investigations. Furthermore, we point out further directions for studies on GBS biomarkers.
Effect of Texture Components on the Lankford Parameters in Ferritic Stainless Steel Sheets

Two ferritic stainless steel (FSS) sheets were produced to display different recrystallization textures. The in-plane variation of the Lankford parameter R(α) was calculated from the sheet textures and compared to the R-values determined experimentally. The textures of the FSS sheets were further decomposed into a number of individual texture components to clarify the effect of the main texture constituents on R(α). The in-plane variation of R(α) is mainly governed by the main texture component, while minor texture components generally reduce the overall level of R(α). A desirable high normal anisotropy R and small in-plane variations of R(α) are obtained for texture components with an Euler angle Φ lying in the range 50° ≤ Φ ≤ 60°, which comprise the γ-fiber orientations close to {111}//ND.
The prevalence of coeliac disease in rheumatoid arthritis

Objective To determine the prevalence of coeliac disease in rheumatoid arthritis. Methods One hundred and sixty patients with seropositive rheumatoid arthritis were tested for the endomysial antibody. Those found positive were studied further with endoscopic small bowel biopsy. Results Only one patient was found to have coeliac disease, and that had already been diagnosed. Thus the prevalence of previously undiagnosed coeliac disease in rheumatoid arthritis is 0 (95% CI 0–0.24%) and the overall prevalence of coeliac disease is 0.63% (95% CI 0.1–3.5%). These prevalences are not significantly different from the reported prevalences of coeliac disease in the general population. Conclusions This study does not support an association between coeliac disease and seropositive rheumatoid arthritis or the screening of such patients for coeliac disease.
Alpha-particle SEU performance of SRAM with triple well

A triple-well scheme has been implemented on an 18-Mb fast synchronous SRAM by using a high energy implant to evaluate its impact on the alpha-particle-induced accelerated soft error rate (ASER). The device uses a single poly 0.15-/spl mu/m CMOS process. The SER FIT rates have been measured from silicon with and without the triple well. In contrast to the historical literature, the measured FIT rate of the triple-well silicon shows a significant degradation of the SER FIT rate. Detailed analysis of bitmap for the flipped cell was employed to identify the degradation mechanism. It is found that the increase of the p-well resistivity and the effective contact to the p-well is the main reason of the degradation. However, in the region of solid tap to both n-well and p-well, the FIT rate is close but slightly higher than the control wafers. In addition, a trade-off between the NMOS and PMOS region is identified using two-dimensional numerical analysis. The results prove that an optimization of the well connections are needed for the triple-well scheme and the SER improvement relies on the optimization of the tradeoff effect. For high energy particles, which can penetrate much deeper into the silicon substrate, the triple well is expected to be helpful to limit the charge collection.
Multi-objective Long-Short Term Memory Neural Networks for Speaker Diarization in Telephone Interactions

Speaker Diarization aims to solve the "who spoke when" task in human interactions. In this work we use Long-Short Term Memory neural networks with two different outputs, one for learning discriminative embeddings from interacting speakers, and another for detecting speech activity and overlap. At test time, we use non-overlapped speech frames to infer centroids using KMeans and use a speech endpoint algorithm to generate speaker segments. Our datasets are real-world hand-annotated telephone call center prompts in Brazilian Portuguese.Our results achieve the best Diarization Error Rate of 4:30% for the held-out test set, against 5:49% of our baseline. We also show that our system is fairly simpler in test time than the traditional system used in our baseline, while being able to address the overlapping speaker issue.
Prevention and treatment of peri-implant diseases

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Dispatch then stop: Optimal dissemination of security patches in mobile wireless networks

The security threat posed by malware in mobile wireless networks can be countered through immunization using security patches. The distribution of patches however consumes bandwidth which is specially scarce in wireless networks, and must therefore be judiciously controlled in order to attain desired trade-offs between security risks and resource consumption. The desired tradeoffs can be attained by activating at any given time only fractions of dispatchers and selecting their packet transmission rates. We formulate the above tradeoffs as optimal control problems that seek to minimize the aggregate network costs that depend on security risks and resource consumed by the countermeasures. We prove that the optimal control strategies have simple structures. When the resource consumption cost rate is concave, the control strategies are bang-bang with at most one jump from the maximum to the minimum value. When the resource consumption cost rate is convex, the above transition is strict but continuous.
ProSynth: an integrated prosodic approach to device-independent, natural-sounding speech synthesis

This paper outlines ProSynth, an approach to speech synthesis which takes a rich linguistic structure as central to the generation of natural-sounding speech. We start from the assumption that the acoustic richness of the speech signal reflects linguistic structural richness and underlies the percept of naturalness. Naturalness achieved by paying attention to systematic phonetic detail in the spectral, temporal and intonational domains produces a perceptually robust signal that is intelligible in adverse listening conditions. ProSynth uses syntactic and phonological parses to model the fine acoustic‐phonetic detail of real speech. We present examples of our approach to modelling systematic segmental, temporal and intonational detail and show how all are integrated in the prosodic structure. Preliminary tests to evaluate the effects of modelling systematic fine spectral detail, timing, and intonation suggest that the approach increases intelligibility and naturalness. c 2000 Academic Press
Large margin hidden Markov models for speech recognition

In this paper, motivated by large margin classifiers in machine learning, we propose a novel method to estimate continuous-density hidden Markov model (CDHMM) for speech recognition according to the principle of maximizing the minimum multiclass separation margin. The approach is named large margin HMM. First, we show this type of large margin HMM estimation problem can be formulated as a constrained minimax optimization problem. Second, we propose to solve this constrained minimax optimization problem by using a penalized gradient descent algorithm, where the original objective function, i.e., minimum margin, is approximated by a differentiable function and the constraints are cast as penalty terms in the objective function. The new training method is evaluated in the speaker-independent isolated E-set recognition and the TIDIGITS connected digit string recognition tasks. Experimental results clearly show that the large margin HMMs consistently outperform the conventional HMM training methods. It has been consistently observed that the large margin training method yields significant recognition error rate reduction even on top of some popular discriminative training methods
Comparison of short- and long-term outcomes of laparoscopic vs open resection for gastric gastrointestinal stromal tumors

AIM To compare the short- and long-term outcomes of laparoscopic (LR) vs open resection (OR) for gastric gastrointestinal stromal tumors (gGISTs). METHODS In total, 301 consecutive patients undergoing LR or OR for pathologically confirmed gGISTs from 2005 to 2014 were enrolled in this retrospective study. After exclusion of 77 patients, 224 eligible patients were enrolled (122 undergoing LR and 102 undergoing OR). The demographic, clinicopathologic, and survival data of all patients were collected. The intraoperative, postoperative, and long-term oncologic outcomes were compared between the LR and OR groups following the propensity score matching to balance the measured covariates between the two groups. RESULTS After 1:1 propensity score matching for the set of covariates including age, sex, body mass index, American Society of Anesthesiology score, tumor location, tumor size, surgical procedures, mitotic count, and risk stratification, 80 patients in each group were included in the final analysis. The baseline parameters of the two groups were comparable after matching. The LR group was significantly superior to the OR group with respect to the operative time, intraoperative blood loss, postoperative first flatus, time to oral intake, and postoperative hospital stay (P < 0.05). No differences in perioperative blood transfusion or the incidence of postoperative complications were observed between the two groups (P > 0.05). No significant difference was found in postoperative adjuvant therapy (P = 0.587). The mean follow-up time was 35.30 ± 26.02 (range, 4-102) mo in the LR group and 40.99 ± 25.07 (range, 4-122) mo in the OR group with no significant difference (P = 0.161). Survival analysis showed no significant difference in the disease-free survival time or overall survival time between the two groups (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION Laparoscopic surgery for gGISTs is superior to open surgery with respect to intraoperative parameters and postoperative outcomes without compromising long-term oncological outcomes.
Diet effects on honeybee immunocompetence

The maintenance of the immune system can be costly, and a lack of dietary protein can increase the susceptibility of organisms to disease. However, few studies have investigated the relationship between protein nutrition and immunity in insects. Here, we tested in honeybees (Apis mellifera) whether dietary protein quantity (monofloral pollen) and diet diversity (polyfloral pollen) can shape baseline immunocompetence (IC) by measuring parameters of individual immunity (haemocyte concentration, fat body content and phenoloxidase activity) and glucose oxidase (GOX) activity, which enables bees to sterilize colony and brood food, as a parameter of social immunity. Protein feeding modified both individual and social IC but increases in dietary protein quantity did not enhance IC. However, diet diversity increased IC levels. In particular, polyfloral diets induced higher GOX activity compared with monofloral diets, including protein-richer diets. These results suggest a link between protein nutrition and immunity in honeybees and underscore the critical role of resource availability on pollinator health.
Dietary Milk Sphingomyelin Prevents Disruption of Skin Barrier Function in Hairless Mice after UV-B Irradiation

Exposure to ultraviolet-B (UV-B) irradiation causes skin barrier defects. Based on earlier findings that milk phospholipids containing high amounts of sphingomyelin (SM) improved the water content of the stratum corneum (SC) in normal mice, here we investigated the effects of dietary milk SM on skin barrier defects induced by a single dose of UV-B irradiation in hairless mice. Nine week old hairless mice were orally administrated SM (146 mg/kg BW/day) for a total of ten days. After seven days of SM administration, the dorsal skin was exposed to a single dose of UV-B (20 mJ/cm2). Administration of SM significantly suppressed an increase in transepidermal water loss and a decrease in SC water content induced by UV-B irradiation. SM supplementation significantly maintained covalently-bound ω-hydroxy ceramide levels and down-regulated mRNA levels of acute inflammation-associated genes, including thymic stromal lymphopoietin, interleukin-1 beta, and interleukin-6. Furthermore, significantly higher levels of loricrin and transglutaminase-3 mRNA were observed in the SM group. Our study shows for the first time that dietary SM modulates epidermal structures, and can help prevent disruption of skin barrier function after UV-B irradiation.
Variational inference with copula augmentation

We develop a general methodology for variational inference which preserves dependency among the latent variables. This is done by augmenting the families of distributions used in mean-field and structured approximation with copulas. Copulas allow one to separately model the dependency given a factorization of the variational distribution, and can guarantee us better approximations to the posterior as measured by KL divergence. We show that inference on the augmented distribution is highly scalable using stochastic optimization. Furthermore, the addition of a copula is generic and can be applied straightforwardly to any inference procedure using the original meanfield or structured approach. This reduces bias, sensitivity to local optima, sensitivity to hyperparameters, and significantly helps characterize and interpret the dependency among the latent variables.