Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Etanercept treatment in juvenile idiopathic arthritis: The Polish registry

Summary Background To evaluate the long-term safety and efficacy of etanercept treatment in Polish patients with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). Material/Methods The study involved patients, fulfilling the JIA criteria of the International League of Associations of Rheumatology (ILAR), who were started on etanercept therapy after methotrexate and other synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) had proven ineffective. Patient data were collected in an electronic registry. Disease improvement was assessed based on Giannini’s criteria. Results The statistical analysis involved 188 patients. Significant improvement was observed in all clinical and laboratory parameters after the first month of therapy and was maintained in the following months. ACR Pediatric 30, 50, 70, 90, and 100 improvement was observed in 81.4%, 65.9%, 27.5%, 16.2%, and 15%, respectively, of patients after 3 months and in 94.7%, 88.4%, 62.1%, 34.7%, and 26.3%, respectively, after 24 months of treatment. Throughout the 72-month safety observation period, 1162 adverse events were reported; the exposure-adjusted AE rate was 2.96 per patient per year. Conclusions In patients with various subtypes of JIA resistant to conventional DMARD treatment, etanercept resulted in significant and long-lasting improvements in disease activity. Combination treatment with etanercept and a DMARD was well tolerated.
Practical Relay Attack on Contactless Transactions by Using NFC Mobile Phones

Contactless technology is widely used in security sensitive applications, including identiﬁcation, payment and access-control systems. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range contactless technology allowing mobile devices to act primarily as either a reader or a to-ken. Relay attacks exploit the assumption that a contact-less token within communication range is in close proximity, by placing a proxy-token in range of a contactless reader and relaying communication over a greater distance to a proxy-reader communicating with the authentic token. It has been theorised that NFC-enabled mobile phones could be used as a generic relay attack platform without any additional hardware, but this has not been successfully demonstrated in practice. We present a practical implementation of an NFC-enabled relay attack, requiring only suitable mobile software applications. This implementation reduces the complexity of relay attacks and therefore has potential security implications for current contactless systems. We also discuss countermeasures to mitigate the attack.
The role of slabs and oceanic plate geometry in the net rotation of the lithosphere, trench motions, and slab return flow

Absolute plate motion models with respect to a deep mantle reference frame (e.g., hot spots) typically contain some net rotation (NR) of the lithosphere. Global mantle flow models for the present‐day plate setting reproduce similarly oriented NRs but with amplitudes significantly smaller than those found in some high NR Pacific hot spot reference frames. It is therefore important to understand the mechanisms of NR excitation, which we attempt here with two‐dimensional cylindrical models of an idealized Pacific domain. We study the influence of slab properties, oceanic ridge position, continental keels, and a weak asthenospheric layer on NR and trench migration. Fast slab return flow develops in models with stiff slabs and moderate slab dips. Rapid NRs, comparable to the high NR Pacific hot spot reference frames, are primarily induced by asymmetric slab dips, in particular a shallow slab beneath South America and a steep slab in the western Pacific. A scaling relationship links the amplitude of NR to plate size, slab dip angle, and slab viscosity. Asymmetric ridge positions also promote NR through asymmetric plate sizes. Continental keels have less impact, in contrast to what has been found in earlier global studies. Several models yield unidirectional Pacific trench motions, such as slab advance in the western Pacific and, simultaneously, slab retreat in the eastern Pacific. Our model provides a physical explanation for NR generation in the present‐day Pacific setting and hints at mechanisms for the temporal evolution of the basin.
How can the loggerhead sea-turtle survive? Exploring the journeys of the Caretta caretta using ANT and critical realism

The endangered loggerhead sea-turtle (Caretta caretta) nests on the shores of the Mediterranean, but faces threats to its existence from a variety of sources. Answering the question of how this species can survive is complex as it involves examining the relationships between the turtle, its natural environment, local tourists, property developers, conservation organisations, governments and law-makers. We argue that actor-network theory provides a powerful methodology for tracing these relations and identifying crucial actors which enable the survival of this animal. Using a rich ethnography and drawing on insights from 116 interviews, we trace three actor-networks that highlight factors important to the survival of the species. Yet, we also highlight the conceptual difficulties that result from using an actor-network theory ontology for understanding socio-ecological interactions and argue that these may be ameliorated by embedding the actor-network theory methodology within a critical realist ontology. We argue that this engagement between critical realism and actor-network theory offers researchers a powerful method for understanding relations between socio-ecological actors while overcoming some of the theoretical difficulties of actor-network theory.
Evolution of Gene Regulatory Networks by Fluctuating Selection and Intrinsic Constraints

Various characteristics of complex gene regulatory networks (GRNs) have been discovered during the last decade, e.g., redundancy, exponential indegree distributions, scale-free outdegree distributions, mutational robustness, and evolvability. Although progress has been made in this field, it is not well understood whether these characteristics are the direct products of selection or those of other evolutionary forces such as mutational biases and biophysical constraints. To elucidate the causal factors that promoted the evolution of complex GRNs, we examined the effect of fluctuating environmental selection and some intrinsic constraining factors on GRN evolution by using an individual-based model. We found that the evolution of complex GRNs is remarkably promoted by fixation of beneficial gene duplications under unpredictably fluctuating environmental conditions and that some internal factors inherent in organisms, such as mutational bias, gene expression costs, and constraints on expression dynamics, are also important for the evolution of GRNs. The results indicate that various biological properties observed in GRNs could evolve as a result of not only adaptation to unpredictable environmental changes but also non-adaptive processes owing to the properties of the organisms themselves. Our study emphasizes that evolutionary models considering such intrinsic constraining factors should be used as null models to analyze the effect of selection on GRN evolution.
Joint repairs for web wrappers

Automated web scraping is a popular means for acquiring data from the web. Scrapers (or wrappers) are derived from either manually or automatically annotated examples, often resulting in under/over segmented data, together with missing or spurious content. Automatic repair and maintenance of the extracted data is thus a necessary complement to automatic wrapper generation. Moreover, the extracted data is often the result of a long-term data acquisition effort and thus jointly repairing wrappers together with the generated data reduces future needs for data cleaning. We study the problem of computing joint repairs for XPath-based wrappers and their extracted data. We show that the problem is NP-complete in general but becomes tractable under a few natural assumptions. Even tractable solutions to the problem are still impractical on very large datasets, but we propose an optimal approximation that proves effective across a wide variety of domains and sources. Our approach relies on encoded domain knowledge, but require no per-source supervision. An evaluation spanning more than 100k web pages from 100 different sites of a wide variety of application domains, shows that joint repairs are able to increase the quality of wrappers between 15% and 60% independently of the wrapper generation system, eliminating all errors in more than 50% of the cases.
Can emotional valence in stories be determined from words

In spite of the growing interest witnessed in the study of the relationship between emotion and language, the determination of the emotional valence of sentences, paragraphs or texts has so far attracted little attention. To bridge this gap, a technique based on the emotional aspect of words is presented. In this preliminary study, we have compared the affective tones of the sentences of four texts as perceived by readers, to the values generated by the words that compose the texts. The results support the psychological reality of the affective tones of linguistic units larger than a word, and the possibility of their evaluation through the lexical information. Such information should be useful for studying the role of emotional interest on text processing and for the analysis of the natural stories produced by people in reaction to stressful events.
Service reconfiguration using super distributed objects (SDO) in context-aware service systems

We propose a technique for combining devices to create a more flexible context-aware service system. This system integrates devices that are embedded or distributed in the user's environment and are networked with each other. The system for providing context-aware services locates and selects devices appropriate to the user's context. When the context changes while the service is being provided, devices for that service can be partially reconfigured without resetting all the parameters. We have verified the effectiveness of our technique in a prototype implementation.
GRAPH PRODUCTS OF RIGHT CANCELLATIVE MONOIDS

Abstract Our first main result shows that a graph product of right cancellative monoids is itself right cancellative. If each of the component monoids satisfies the condition that the intersection of two principal left ideals is either principal or empty, then so does the graph product. Our second main result gives a presentation for the inverse hull of such a graph product. We then specialize to the case of the inverse hulls of graph monoids, obtaining what we call ‘polygraph monoids’. Among other properties, we observe that polygraph monoids are F*-inverse. This follows from a general characterization of those right cancellative monoids with inverse hulls that are F*-inverse.
The Global Impact of the Internet: Widening the Economic Gap Between Wealthy and Poor Nations?

Does the Internet have the potential to accelerate development in poor nations? Or is it an innovation that will widen the gap between wealthy and poor countries? This paper places the Internet in a framework of major innovations in modern economic history that have contributed to increased global economic inequality. To study whether the Internet has the potential to do the same, we investigate the determinants of Internet diffusion and explore differences between developed and developing nations. Our findings indicate that developing countries are being left behind as the transformation to the 'new economy' takes place in wealthier countries. If this trend continues, it may have dire consequences for world economic inequality and political stability, as did great innovations of earlier eras. We consider policies that might accelerate the development of information technology in poorer countries so these nations can benefit from the technological revolution occurring in wealthier countries. We also discuss why it might be in the interest of the developed countries to pursue such policies.
Video Volume Segmentation for Event Detection

Video processing for surveillance and security applications has become a research hotspot in the last decade. This paper reports a research into volume-based segmentation techniques for video event detection. It starts with an introduction of the structure in 3D video volumes denoted by spatio-temporal features extracted from video footages. The focus of the work is on devising an effective and efficient 3D segmentation technique suitable to the volumetric nature of video events through deploying innovative 3D clustering methods. It is supported by the design and experiment on the 3D data compression techniques for accelerating the pre-processing of the original video data. An evaluation on the performance of the developed methods is presented at the end.
Fall Detection and Activity Recognition with Machine Learning

Due to the rapid aging of the European population, an effort needs to be made to ensure that the elderly can live longer independently with minimal support of the working-age population. The Confidence project aims to do this by unobtrusively monitoring their activity to recognize falls and other health problems. This is achieved by equipping the user with radio tags, from which the locations of body parts are determined, thus enabling posture and movement reconstruction. In the paper we first give a general overview of the research on fall detection and activity recognition. We proceed to describe the machine learning approach to activity recognition to be used in the Confidence project. In this approach, the attributes characterizing the user’s behavior and a machine learning algorithm must be selected. The attributes we consider are the locations of body parts in the reference coordinate system (fixed with respect to the environment), the locations of body parts in a body coordinate system (affixed to the user’s body) and the angles between adjacent body parts. Eight machine learning algorithms are compared. The highest classification accuracy of over 95 % is achieved by Support Vector Machine used on the reference attributes and angles.
Free Vibration Analysis of a Rotating Non-Uniform Blade with Multiple Open Cracks Using DQEM

In this paper, differential quadrature element method (DQEM) is used to analyze the free transverse vibration of a multiple cracked non-uniform Timoshenko blade rotating with a constant angular velocity. The blade's deflection is assumed to be small so that the nonlinear terms can be neglected. Governing equations, compatibility conditions at the damaged cross-sections and boundary conditions are derived and formulated by the differential quadrature rules. First, the precision of the proposed method is confirmed by the exact solutions available in the literature. Then, the effect of angular velocity value as well as the location, depth and numbers of the cracks are investigated on the natural frequencies of the blade. The advantages of the proposed method are applicable for blades with any arbitrary variable section and less time-consuming for cases with several cracks.
SHAPE MATCHING WITH OCCLUSION IN IMA GE DATABASES

We proposean approachfor matchingdeformed,occludedandunoccludedshapes usingDynamicProgramming(DP). Wedistinguishamongvariouscasesof matchingincluding caseswheretheshapesarescaledwith respecto eachotheror caseswhereoneshapematches thewholeor only apartof theothershape.Ourapproachhandlesnoiseandshapedistortionsby allowing matchingof mergedsequences of consecuti ve smallsegment s in a shape,with larger segment s of anothershape,while beinginvariantto translation, scaleorientationandstarting point selection.We demonstratethesuperiorityof our approachover traditionalapproachesto shapematchingandretrieval basedonFourierdescriptorsandmoment s.
Programming of One- and Two-Step Stress Recovery in a Poly(ester urethane)

This work demonstrates that phase-segregated poly(ester urethane) (PEU) with switching segments of crystallizable poly(1,4-butylene adipate) (PBA) can be programmed to generate two separate stress recovery events upon heating under constant strain conditions. For programming, two elongations are applied at different temperatures, followed by unloading and cooling. During the adjacent heating, two-step stress recovery is triggered. The results indicate that the magnitude of the stress recovery signals corresponds to the recovery of the two deformation stresses in reverse order. As demonstrated by further experiments, twofold stress recovery can be detected as long as the elongation at higher temperature exceeds the strain level of the deformation at lower temperature. Another finding includes that varying the lower deformation temperature enables a control over the stress recovery temperature and thus the implementation of so-called “temperature-memory effects”. Moreover, exerting only one elongation during programming enables a heating-initiated one-step stress recovery close to the deformation temperature. Based on these findings, such polymers may offer new technological opportunities in the fields of active assembly when used as fastening elements and in functional clothing when utilized for compression stockings.
The Hughes Award: Who is they? Inquiries into how individuals construe social context

When people are asked about their career decisions, they often invoke the influence of they. They may include family or teachers, but it repeatedly includes some amorphous group of generalized others. This article describes my inquiries into the question: Who is they? Initial studies examined individuals’ perceptions of career timetables within organizations. The results suggested that individuals experience their social context as an intricate territory informed by self-perceptions, shared perceptions, and actual distributions. However, these studies assumed they equalled the employee population. Later work showed that in large organizations this assumption is unwarranted. Each individual acquires his or her own non-random version of social context: an organizational reference group. These individual-level reference groups and the neighborhoods in which they cluster are distinctive because they include distant associations defined only by awareness. Both concepts offer opportunities for exploring the social structure that emerges between individuals’ informal social networks and the organization.
Negative autoregulation of BCL-6 is bypassed by genetic alterations in diffuse large B cell lymphomas

Thirty to forty percent of diffuse large B cell lymphomas (DLBCL) carry BCL-6 translocations that disrupt its 5′ regulatory region. This same region is also subject to somatic hypermutations, although only a small fraction of these mutations have a detectable effect on transcription. Here, we show that transcription of the BCL-6 gene is negatively self-regulated in multiple cell types. This mechanism operates by means of the interaction of two BCL-6-binding sites within exon 1 of the gene and the BCL-6 protein itself, which is a potent transcription repressor. Because the DLBCL-associated “activating mutations” specifically target these exon 1 binding sites, and because the entire exon 1 is usually removed in the BCL-6-translocated tumors, this autoregulation is bypassed in 30–40% of all DLBCL cases. Our results not only demonstrate an important mechanism governing the expression of BCL-6, but also explain how BCL-6 is deregulated in a large number of DLBCL patients, providing a better understanding of BCL-6-related lymphomagenesis.
Constraints on the Clustering, Biasing and Redshift Distribution of Radio Sources

We discuss how different theoretical predictions for the variance sigma(2) of the counts-in-cells distribution of radio sources can be matched to measurements from the FIRST survey at different flux limits. The predictions are given by the integration of models for the angular correlation function w(theta) for three different functional forms of the redshift distribution N(z), different spatial correlation functions that match the observed present-day shape and by different evolutions of the bias b(z) with redshift. We also consider the two cases of open and flat universes. Although the predicted w(theta) show substantial differences because of differences in the values of N(z), these differences are not significant compared to the uncertainties in the current observations. It turns out that, independent of the geometry of the universe and the flux limit, the best fit is provided by models with constant biasing at all times, although the difference between models with epoch-independent bias and models with bias that evolves linearly with redshift is not very large. All models with strong evolution of bias with epoch are ruled out, as they grossly overestimate the amplitude of the variance over the whole range of angular scales sampled by the counts-in-cells analysis. As a further step we directly calculated w(obs)(theta) at 3 mJy from the catalogue and matched it with our models for the angular correlation function, in the hypothesis that the clustering signal comes from two different populations, namely AGN-powered sources and starbursting galaxies. The results are consistent with a scenario for hierarchical clustering where the fainter starbursting galaxies trace the mass at all epochs, while the brighter AGNs are strongly biased, with b(z) evolving linearly with redshift, as suggested by some theories of galaxy formation and evolution.
Eğitim Fakültelerindeki Öğretim Elemanlarının Hayat Boyu Öğrenme Yeterlikleri İle Hayat Çapında Öğrenme Alışkanlıklarının İncelenmesi

Oz: Bilgide meydana gelen hizli degisimler ve buna bagli olarak yasanan toplumsal gelismeler, bireylerin bilgiye ulasmalarinda ve yeni ogrenmelere duyulan gereksinmelerinde yenilikleri de beraberinde getirmektedir. Bu surec ile icinde bulundugumuz bilgi caginda bireylerin her yasta, her yerde ve her konuda ogrenmelerini destekleyen hayat boyu ogrenme kavraminin onemi vurgulanmaktadir. Hayat capinda ogrenme kavrami ise zamana ve fiziksel ortamlara sigdirilamayan sinirsiz bir ogrenme anlayisini ifade etmektedir. Yapilan bu arastirmanin amaci, egitim fakultelerindeki ogretim elemanlarinin hayat boyu ogrenme yeterlikleri ile hayat capinda ogrenme aliskanliklarini incelemektir. Arastirmada betimsel yontem kullanilmistir ve veriler ‘Hayat Boyu Ogrenme Yeterlik Algisi Olcegi’ ve ‘Hayat Capinda Ogrenme Aliskanliklari Olcegi’ yoluyla elde edilmistir. Arastirma, 2015-2016 akademik yilinin birinci doneminde yedi farkli bolgede bulunan universitelerde gorev yapan 276 ogretim elemaniyla gerceklestirilmistir. Elde edilen bulgulara gore, egitim fakultelerindeki ogretim elemanlarinin hayat boyu ogrenme yeterlikleri ile hayat capinda ogrenme aliskanliklari yuksek duzeydedir. Hayat boyu ogrenme yeterlik algisi olcegi alt boyutlari ile hayat capinda ogrenme aliskanliklari olcegi alt boyutlari arasinda anlamli duzeyde iliskiler tespit edilmistir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Hayat boyu ogrenme, hayat capinda ogrenme, ogretim elemani.
Highly Efficient Transforms Module Solution for a H.264/SVC Encoder

The computational-intensive demands of H.264 video encoder normally imply to the use of high performance hardware solutions like dedicated multimedia DSP or programmable logic devices. These demands can be even more critical when it is necessary to implement a H.264/SVC (Scalable Video Coding) solution, an emergent encoder standard that provides the generation of flexible and adaptive multi-layer streams. The complexity of a SVC encoder increases proportionally with number of configured layers, introducing new challenges to multimedia market. In this work we propose an efficient hardware module, responsible for the transform algorithms (Hadamard and DCT) of a SVC encoder, processing up eight samples per clock. The proposed module take into account specific memory demands in order to produce an optimized solution with respect to encoder performance and complexity, aiming to reach a realizable SVC encoder.