Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heart disease and breast cancer perceptions: Ethnic differences and relationship to attentional bias

Differences in perceptions of susceptibility, seriousness, and fear of heart disease and breast cancer were examined and related to attentional bias for disease-related words among Canadian women of various ethnic ancestry. Women (n = 831) completed an online survey, and 503, among them, also completed an attentional bias task. Perceived seriousness of breast cancer predicted attentional bias for breast cancer in women of South Asian ancestry. Lifestyle behaviors were related to breast cancer attentional bias in women with British ancestry. Understanding relationships between modifiable risk factors, disease risk perceptions, and attentional biases among different ethnic groups can help create targeted promotional campaigns.
Performance Improvement of Space Shift Keying MIMO Systems with Orthogonal Codebook-Based Phase-Rotation Precoding

This paper considers codebook-based precoding for Space Shift Keying (SSK) modulation MIMO system. Codebook-based precoding avoids the necessity for full knowledge of Channel State Information (CSI) at the transmitter and alleviates the complexity of generating a CSI-optimized precoder. The receiver selects the codeword that maximizes the Minimum Euclidean Distance (MED) of the received constellation and feeds back its index to the transmitter. In this paper, we first develop a new accurate closed-form Bit Error Rate (BER) for SSK without precoding. Then, we investigate several phase-rotation codebooks with quantized set of phases and systematic structure. Namely, we investigate the Full-Combination, Walsh-Hadamard, Quasi-Orthogonal Sequences, and Orthogonal Array Testing codebooks. In addition, since the size of the Full-Combination codebook may be large, we develop an iterative search method for fast selection of its best codeword. The proposed codebooks significantly improve the BER performance in Rayleigh and Nakagami fading channels, even at high spatial correlation among transmit antennas and CSI estimation error. Moreover, we show that only four phases are sufficient and further phase granularity does yield significant gain. This avoids hardware multiplication during searching the codebook and applying the codeword.
Review spam detection using machine learning

Prior to buying a product, people usually inform themselves by reading online reviews. To make more profit sellers often try to fake user experience. As customers are being deceived this way, recognizing and removing fake reviews is of great importance. This paper analyzes spam detection methods, based on machine learning, and presents their overview and results.
The Toll-Like Receptor 4 D299G and T399I Polymorphisms Are Associated with Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis: A Meta-Analysis

Background: Some studies have reported that Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) D299G and T399I polymorphisms are associated with increased Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) risk in the Caucasian population. However, the results have been inconsistent. Methods: A systemic review of the published data (16 studies with 8,387 cases and 7,013 controls for D299G; 8 studies with 3,881 cases and 1,861 controls for T399I) was undertaken and a meta-analysis was performed to test whether TLR4 D299G and T399I polymorphisms were associated with CD or UC susceptibility and whether 299Gly carriage was associated with phenotypes of CD patients. Results: The TLR4 299Gly allele showed a significant association with CD and UC in the Caucasian population (OR 1.29, 95% CI 1.08–1.54, and OR 1.28, 95% CI 1.08–1.51, respectively). Similar association was detected between the T399I polymorphism and susceptibility to CD and UC (OR 1.37, 95% CI 1.12–1.68, and OR 1.46, 95% CI 1.13–1.88, respectively). However, no significant association was identified between CD phenotypes and 299Gly carriage. Conclusion: The meta-analysis showed that TLR4 D299G and T399I confer a significant risk for developing CD and UC in Caucasians. Additional well-powered studies of the association between TLR4 variants and UC are needed.
Understanding the determinants and dynamic process of user exodus in social networking sites: Evidence from Kaixin001

Understanding the factors and mechanism that affect the users’ abandon behaviors is necessary for the sustained use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs). This study focuses on a special SNS discontinuance phenomenon—user exodus. Compared to individual discontinuance behavior studied in prior research, the SNS user exodus possesses its own characteristics: a huge magnitude of users abandon a given SNS product in a very short time. Given the fatal blow of exodus to SNS providers, this exploratory research seeks to unravel why and how the SNS user exodus occurs. Specifically, we conducted a mixed‐method research combining laddering interview and network analysis. Drawing on the means‐end chain theory, laddering interviews were first used to collect data from discontinuers of a Chinese SNS, Kaixin001, which has experienced a severe user dropout. Then we identified various factors triggering user exodus by content analysis. Last, network analysis was employed to establish the connections between various attributes, consequences, and values. The results showed that user exodus in SNS is strongly related to three types of value: functional, affective, and social value. More important, we also emphasized the dynamics process of exodus by highlighting the role of lurking. Possible contributions and implications of our findings are discussed.
Tumor cell death after electrotransfer of plasmid DNA is associated with cytosolic DNA sensor upregulation

Cytosolic DNA sensors are a subgroup of pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) and are activated by the abnormal presence of the DNA in the cytosol. Their activation leads to the upregulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines and can also induce cell death. The presence of cytosolic DNA sensors and inflammatory cytokines in TS/A murine mammary adenocarcinoma and WEHI 164 fibrosarcoma cells was demonstrated using real time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), western blotting and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). After electrotransfer of plasmid DNA (pDNA) using two pulse protocols, the upregulation of DNA-depended activator of interferon regulatory factor or Z-DNA binding protein 1 (DAI/ZBP1), DEAD (Asp-Glu-Ala-Asp) box polypeptide 60 (DDX60) and interferon-inducible protein 204 (p204) mRNAs was observed in both tumor cell lines, but their expression was pulse protocol dependent. A decrease in cell survival was also observed; it was cell type, DNA concentration and pulse protocol dependent. Furthermore, the different protocols of electrotransfer led to different cell death outcomes, necrosis and apoptosis, as indicated by an annexin V and 7AAD assays. The obtained data provide new insights on the presence of cytosolic DNA sensors in tumor cells and the activation of different types of cells death after electrotransfer of pDNA. These observations have important implications on the planning of gene therapy or DNA vaccination protocols.
Use of Serum Zinc Concentration as an Indicator of Population Zinc Status

Assessing the prevalence and severity of zinc deficiency in populations is critical to determine the need for and appropriate targeting of zinc intervention programs and to assess their effectiveness for improving the health and well-being of high-risk populations. However, there is very little information on the zinc status of populations worldwide due to the lack of consensus on appropriate biochemical indicators of zinc status. The objective of this review was to evaluate the use of serum zinc concentration as an indicator of population zinc status. We have reviewed the response of serum zinc concentration to dietary zinc restriction and zinc supplementation. In addition, we completed pooled analyses of nine zinc intervention trials in young children to assess the relations between serum zinc concentration of individuals before treatment and their responses to zinc supplementation. Also, in updated combined analyses of previously published data, we investigated the relation between the mean initial serum zinc concentration of a study population and their mean growth responses to zinc supplementation in randomized intervention trials among children. The results from depletion/repletion studies indicate that serum zinc concentrations respond appreciably to severe dietary zinc restriction, although there is considerable interindividual variation in these responses. There is also clear evidence that both individual and population mean serum zinc concentrations increase consistently during zinc supplementation, regardless of the initial level of serum zinc concentration. By contrast, an individual's serum zinc concentration does not reliably predict that person's response to zinc supplementation. Serum zinc concentration can be considered a useful biomarker of a population's risk of zinc deficiency and response to zinc interventions, although it may not be a reliable indicator of individual zinc status.
Resource Allocation and HARQ Optimization for URLLC Traffic in 5G Wireless Networks

5G wireless networks are expected to support ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) traffic which requires very low packet delays (< 1 ms) and extremely high reliability (~99.999%). In this paper, we focus on the design of a wireless system supporting downlink URLLC traffic. Using a queuing network-based model for the wireless system, we characterize the effect of various design choices on the maximum URLLC load it can support, including: 1) system parameters such as the bandwidth, link SINR, and QoS requirements; 2) resource allocation schemes in orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based systems; and 3) hybrid automatic repeat request schemes. Key contributions of this paper which are of practical interest are: 1) study of how the minimum required system bandwidth to support a given URLLC load scales with associated QoS constraints; 2) characterization of optimal OFDMA resource allocation schemes which maximize the admissible URLLC load; and 3) optimization of a repetition code-based packet re-transmission scheme.
Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Weight Sharing

Unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) is a recently proposed approach for machine translation which aims to train the model without using any labeled data. The models proposed for unsupervised NMT often use only one shared encoder to map the pairs of sentences from different languages to a shared-latent space, which is weak in keeping the unique and internal characteristics of each language, such as the style, terminology, and sentence structure. To address this issue, we introduce an extension by utilizing two independent encoders but sharing some partial weights which are responsible for extracting high-level representations of the input sentences. Besides, two different generative adversarial networks (GANs), namely the local GAN and global GAN, are proposed to enhance the cross-language translation. With this new approach, we achieve significant improvements on English-German, English-French and Chinese-to-English translation tasks.
Understanding the social acceptability of natural resource decisionmaking processes by using a knowledge base modeling approach.

Kakoyannis, Christina; Shindler, Bruce; Stankey, George 2001. Understanding the social acceptability of natural resource decisionmaking processes by using a knowledge base modeling approach. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-518. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 40 p. Natural resource managers are being confronted with increasing conflict and litigation with those who find their management plans unacceptable. Compatible and sustainable management decisions necessitate that natural resource agencies generate plans that are not only biologically possible and economically feasible but also socially acceptable. Currently, however, we lack a framework to integrate socially acceptable judgments with the biological and economic factors that help define successful forest management plans. This research examines the ability of a knowledge base approach to assess the social acceptability of natural resource decisionmaking processes and to determine its suitability for use in forest management planning. We note four main caveats with using knowledge bases for evaluating social acceptability: (1) the importance of asking and answering the right question, (2) the ability of the knowledge base to become a “black box,” (3) problems associated with using a numerical value to estimate a concept as complex as social acceptability, (4) and our incomplete understanding of the factors that influence social acceptability judgments. Acknowledging the caveats, however, can make the knowledge base model a useful tool in forest management planning. We determined that knowledge bases can account for various factors affecting social acceptability and can facilitate discussions about the compatibility and links among social, biological, and economic decision factors.
Bank Capital Pressures, Loan Substitutability, and Nonfinancial Employment

We exploit the cross-state, cross-time variation in bank tangible capital ratios—brought about by bank branch deregulation on a state-by-state basis—to identify the effects of bank capital pressures on employment and firm dynamics during two waves of changes in bank capital regulation. We show that stronger capital pressures temporarily slowed down growth in employment in industries that depend on external finance, retarding growth in the average size of firms rather than in the number of firms. Such effects were particularly strong for smaller firms that may not have had access to national capital and bank loan markets. Our findings indicate that a tightening of capital requirements may have significant real effects, in part because of the lack of substitutes for bank loans.
TypeSQL: Knowledge-Based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generation

Interacting with relational databases through natural language helps users with any background easily query and analyze a vast amount of data. This requires a system that understands users’ questions and converts them to SQL queries automatically. In this paper, we present a novel approach TypeSQL which formats the problem as a slot filling task in a more reasonable way. In addition, TypeSQL utilizes type information to better understand rare entities and numbers in the questions. We experiment this idea on the WikiSQL dataset and outperform the prior art by 6% in much shorter time. We also show that accessing the content of databases can significantly improve the performance when users’ queries are not well-formed. TypeSQL can reach 82.6% accuracy, a 17.5% absolute improvement compared to the previous content-sensitive model.
[Prevalence of erectile dysfunction in men with pre-diabetes: An investigation in Lanzhou].

Objective To investigate the prevalence of erectile dysfunction (ED) in men with pre-diabetes. METHODS This study included 500 men with impaired fasting glycaemia (IFG), 500 with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT), and another 500 with normal blood glucose (NBG), all from Lanzhou. We conducted a questionnaire investigation among the subjects using the International Index of Erectile Dysfunction 5 (IIEF-5). RESULTS The prevalence rates of ED in the IFG, IGT, and NBG groups were 14.8%, 29.2%, and 33.2%, respectively. After controlling for age, nationality, occupation, education, income, obesity, and blood pressure, the incidence rate was markedly higher in the IFG and IGT than in the NBG group (29.2% and 33.2% vs 14.8%, P <0.05), but showed no statistically significant difference between the IFG and IGT groups (P >0.05). CONCLUSIONS The prevalence of ED is higher in men with pre-diabetes than in those with normal blood glucose in Lanzhou.
A Model of Happiness in the Workplace

Based on the existing literature, this paper proposes a model of happiness in the workplace. Following a brief introduction of the relevant definitions of happiness, both the antecedents and consequences of happiness in the organization are discussed and listed with reference to the various existing concepts related to subjective well-being/happiness. The former comprises three dimensions: money and unemployment as necessary conditions; community and its attributes (trust, individualism, democracy, and democratic process) as context; and individual behavior and experiences based on positive psychology. The latter includes individual-group interaction and its properties, enhanced individual capabilities, and the individual’s eventual health and longevity, which is influenced positively by these two elements. The proposed model is followed by an evaluation of the three routes to happiness, which are based on positive psychology, as well as a discussion on happiness and constructs such as locus of control and the process of pursuing
BER Performance of Stratified ACO-OFDM for Optical Wireless Communications over Multipath Channel

In intensity modulation/direct detection- (IM/DD-) based optical OFDM systems, the requirement of the input signal to be real and positive unipolar imposes a reduction of system performances. Among previously proposed unipolar optical OFDM schemes for optical wireless communications (OWC), asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and direct current biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) are the most accepted ones. But those proposed schemes experience either spectral efficiency loss or energy efficiency loss which is a big challenge to realize high speed OWC. To improve the spectral and energy efficiencies, we previously proposed a multistratum-based stratified asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (STACO-OFDM), and its performance was analyzed for AWGN channel. STACO-OFDM utilizes even subcarriers on the first stratum and odd subcarriers on the rest of strata to transmit multiple ACO-OFDM frames simultaneously. STACO-OFDM provides equal spectral efficiency as DCO-OFDM and better spectral efficiency compared to ACO-OFDM. In this paper, we analyze the BER performance of STACO-OFDM under the effect of multipath fading. The theoretical bit error rate (BER) bound is derived and compared with the simulation results, and good agreement is achieved. Moreover, STACO-OFDM shows better BER performance compared to ACO-OFDM and DCO-OFDM.
Morphometric measurements of systemic atherosclerosis and visceral fat: Evidence from an autopsy study

Background Morphometric measurements of systemic atherosclerosis and direct quantification of visceral fat are only possible using materials from autopsy studies. However, the few autopsy studies that have investigated the association of visceral fat with atherosclerosis had small sample sizes and focused on coronary arteries of young or middle-aged White subjects. We aimed to investigate the association of pericardial fat (PF) and abdominal visceral fat (AVF) with atherosclerosis in the aorta, coronary, carotid, and cerebral arteries in a large autopsy study. Materials and methods We evaluated deceased subjects aged 30 years or above. We dissected and weighted the PF and the AVF and evaluated the atherosclerotic burden in the aorta, as well as the carotid, coronary, and cerebral arteries using morphometric measurements. We also investigated the interaction of PF and AVF with age regarding the atherosclerotic burden. Results The mean age of the 240 included subjects was 64.8±15.3 years, and 63% was male. Greater PF was associated with a higher degree of aortic atherosclerosis after adjusting for confounding variables (coefficient = 4.39, 95% CI = 0.83; 7.94, p = 0.02). Greater AVF was associated with a higher coronary stenosis index (coefficient = 1.49, 95% CI = 0.15; 2.83, p = 0.03) and a greater number of coronary plaques (coefficient = 0.71, 95% CI = 0.24; 1.19, p = 0.003). We did not find an association of PF or AVF with carotid or cerebral atherosclerotic burden. We found a significant interaction of AVF (coefficient = -0.08; 95% CI = -0.14; -0.02, p = 0.009) and PF (coefficient = -0.87, 95% CI = -1.70; -0.04, p = 0.04) with age regarding carotid artery atherosclerotic burden. Conclusions Greater AVF was associated with greater atherosclerotic burden and extent in coronary arteries, while greater PF correlated with a higher degree of atherosclerosis in the aorta.
Semi-Parametric Image Synthesis

We present a semi-parametric approach to photographic image synthesis from semantic layouts. The approach combines the complementary strengths of parametric and nonparametric techniques. The nonparametric component is a memory bank of image segments constructed from a training set of images. Given a novel semantic layout at test time, the memory bank is used to retrieve photographic references that are provided as source material to a deep network. The synthesis is performed by a deep network that draws on the provided photographic material. Experiments on multiple semantic segmentation datasets show that the presented approach yields considerably more realistic images than recent purely parametric techniques.
Recovery domains: an organizing principle for recoverable operating systems

We describe a strategy for enabling existing commodity operating systems to recover from unexpected run-time errors in nearly any part of the kernel, including core kernel components. Our approach is dynamic and request-oriented; it isolates the effects of a fault to the requests that caused the fault rather than to static kernel components. This approach is based on a notion of "recovery domains," an organizing principle to enable rollback of state affected by a request in a multithreaded system with minimal impact on other requests or threads. We have applied this approach on v2.4. 22 and v2.6. 27 of the Linux kernel and it required 132 lines of changed or new code: the other changes are all performed by a simple instrumentation pass of a compiler. Our experiments show that the approach is able to recover from otherwise fatal faults with minimal collateral impact during a recovery event.
Virtual reality classroom applied to science education

The goal of the present study was to develop a virtual reality classroom, to improve student's Learning performance and outcomes. A serious virtual reality learning environment was developed, integrating virtual reality technology, virtual reality device, as well as 3D interactive virtual reality digital information content. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed design, students' performance in terms of their learning achievement and learning motivation was examined. 105 high-school students from Taiwan were divided into three individual groups of 35 students each, with one control group and experimental groups. The results of this virtual reality classroom showed significantly better learning motivation, learning outcomes and positive impacts on learning students' achievement scores.