Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiple Kernel Sparse Representation-Based Orthogonal Discriminative Projection and Its Cost-Sensitive Extension

Sparse representation-based classification (SRC) has been developed and shown great potential for real-world application. Based on SRC, Yang et al. devised an SRC steered discriminative projection (SRC-DP) method. However, as a linear algorithm, SRC-DP cannot handle the data with highly nonlinear distribution. Kernel sparse representation-based classifier (KSRC) is a non-linear extension of SRC and can remedy the drawback of SRC. KSRC requires the use of a predetermined kernel function and selection of the kernel function and its parameters is difficult. Recently, multiple kernel learning for SRC (MKL-SRC) has been proposed to learn a kernel from a set of base kernels. However, MKL-SRC only considers the within-class reconstruction residual while ignoring the between-class relationship, when learning the kernel weights. In this paper, we propose a novel multiple kernel sparse representation-based classifier, and then we use it as a criterion to design a multiple kernel sparse representation-based orthogonal discriminative projection method. The proposed algorithm aims at learning a projection matrix and a corresponding kernel from the given base kernels such that in the low dimension subspace the between-class reconstruction residual is maximized and the within-class reconstruction residual is minimized. Furthermore, to achieve a minimum overall loss by performing recognition in the learned low-dimensional subspace, we introduce cost information into the dimensionality reduction method. The solutions for the proposed method can be efficiently found based on trace ratio optimization method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Meta-Analysis of Candidate Gene Effects Using Bayesian Parametric and Non-Parametric Approaches

Candidate gene (CG) approaches provide a strategy for identification and characterization of major genes underlying complex phenotypes such as production traits and susceptibility to diseases, but the conclusions tend to be inconsistent across individual studies. Meta-analysis approaches can deal with these situations, e.g., by pooling effect-size estimates or combining P values from multiple studies. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of two types of statistical models, parametric and non-parametric, for meta-analysis of CG effects using simulated data. Both models estimated a “central” effect size while taking into account heterogeneity over individual studies. The empirical distribution of study-specific CG effects was multi-modal. The parametric model assumed a normal distribution for the study-specific CG effects whereas the non-parametric model relaxed this assumption by posing a more general distribution with a Dirichlet process prior (DPP). Results indicated that the meta-analysis approaches could reduce false positive or false negative rates by pooling strengths from multiple studies, as compared to individual studies. In addition, the non-parametric, DPP model captured the variation of the “data” better than its parametric counterpart.
Current primary care management of children aged 1–36 months with urinary tract infections in Europe: large scale survey of paediatric practice

Objective To describe current practice among European paediatricians regarding diagnosis and management of urinary tract infections in children aged 1–36 months and to compare these practices with recently published guidelines. Design Web-based large scale survey evaluating knowledge of, attitudes towards and the methods for diagnosing, treating and managing urinary tract infections in children. Setting Primary and secondary care practices in Europe. Sample 1129 paediatricians. Results A diagnosis of urinary tract infection is considered by 62% of the respondents in children aged 1–36 months with unexplained fever. The preferred method of urine collection is use of a bag (53% for infants <3 months and 59% for children 4–36 months of age). 60% of paediatricians agree that oral and parenteral antibiotics have equal efficacy. Co-amoxiclav is the antibiotic of choice for 41% of participants, while 9% prescribe amoxicillin. 80% of respondents prescribe ultrasound in all children with a confirmed urinary tract infection. 63% of respondents prescribe a cystography when abnormalities are revealed during ultrasound evaluation. A quarter of respondents recommend antibiotic prophylaxis for all children with any vesicoureteral reflux. The data among European countries are very heterogeneous. The three most recent urinary tract infection guidelines (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the American Academy of Paediatrics and the Italian Society of Paediatric Nephrology) are not followed properly. Conclusions Management of febrile urinary tract infections remains controversial and heterogeneous in Europe. Simple, short, practical and easy-to-remember guidelines and educational strategies to ensure their implementation should be developed.
Transmission Scheduling for Optimizing Sensor Network Lifetime: A Stochastic Shortest Path Approach

We present transmission scheduling algorithms for maximizing the lifetime of a sensor network. In each data collection, only one group of sensors are scheduled to transmit their measurements directly to an access point (AP) through a fading channel, causing a reduction in battery energy levels of these sensors. We formulate the problem of dynamically choosing which group of sensors should communicate with the AP to maximize network lifetime as a stochastic shortest path Markov decision process. We consider three types of channel information structure: global channel state information (CSI), channel statistics, and local CSI. For optimal scheduling using global CSI (i.e., the scheduler has the information of all sensors' instantaneous channel realizations), we propose an algorithm that obtains the optimal stationary scheduling policy with computational complexity reduced from exponential to polynomial in network size when the network is dense. Due to the large implementation overhead in acquiring global CSI, we consider scheduling algorithms that use channel statistics (i.e., each sensor only knows its own channel distribution) or local CSI (i.e., each sensor knows its own instantaneous channel realization). The optimal scheduling using channel statistics is formulated as a shortest path multiarmed bandit problem, which has an indexable optimal policy. We derive a closed-form expression for the Gittins index. We further show that the Gittins index is simply the residual energy when the channel fading is identically (but not necessarily independently) distributed across sensors, i.e., the optimal scheduling policy in this case is to choose the sensor with the most residual energy. Finally, we study an asymptotically optimal scheduling protocol using local CSI. This protocol has a distributed implementation yet achieves a comparable performance as the optimal scheduling using global CSI
Anti-obese and anti-diabetic effects of a mixture of daidzin and glycitin on C57BL/6J mice fed with a high-fat diet

We investigated the effects of a mixture of daidzin and glycitin, which are the glycoside-form isoflavones of daidzein and glycitein, respectively, on body weight, lipid levels, diabetic markers, and metabolism in a high-fat diet (HF) fed C57BL/6J mice for 92 days. The mice were divided into basic diet group (CON), HF group, and HF companied with the isoflavone mixture group (HFISO). Results showed that mice in HFISO had a significantly lower body weight and adipose tissue compared to HF group. Blood glucose, serum HbA1c, and serum insulin also showed lower levels in HFISO group. In addition, higher hepatic GSH level and lower serum 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) level were found in HFISO group mice. This suggests that the regulation of oxidative stress by daidzin and glycitin was closely related to the suppression of adipose tissue and the progression of diabetes. Graphical Abstract Adipose cells enlargement occurs on high-fat diet feeding mice. The supplementary of isoflavones may regulate the oxidative stress, and suppress the adipose tissue and the progression of diabetes.
Intrusive memories, post-traumatic stress disorder and myocardial infarction.

OBJECTIVES To identify the associations between two personality variables (alexithymia, negative affect), social support, awareness of myocardial infarction, and the severity of post-traumatic stress symptoms. DESIGN A cross sectional design was adopted with simultaneous measures of both dependent and independent variables. METHOD A random sample of 69 patients who had an MI between 6 and 12 months previously were sent postal questionnaires measuring alexithymia, negative affect, social support, awareness of myocardial infarction, the severity of post-traumatic stress symptoms and a number of demographic details. RESULTS Forty-four individuals completed and returned all the questionnaires. A 10% prevalence of post-traumatic stress symptoms was found. Regression analyses were conducted to identify independent associates of the dependent variables with and without the inclusion of the measure of negative affect. Alexithymia, age, social support and awareness at the time of having a myocardial infarction, were each strongly predictive of one or all measures of symptoms. CONCLUSIONS Evidence supporting the impact of each of the variables on the course of post-traumatic stress disorder was supported in a population of myocardial infarction patients. If these variables were found predictive in a longitudinal study, they would indicate possible risk factors for post-traumatic stress disorder in this population.
The effect of author set size and data size in authorship attribution

Applications of authorship attribution 'in the wild' (Koppel, M., Schler, J., and Argamon, S. (2010). Authorship attribution in the wild. Language Resources and Evaluation. Advanced Access published January 12, 2010:10.1007/ s10579-009-9111-2), for instance in social networks, will likely involve large sets of candidate authors and only limited data per author. In this article, we present the results of a systematic study of two important parameters in super- vised machine learning that significantly affect performance in computational authorship attribution: (1) the number of candidate authors (i.e. the number of classes to be learned), and (2) the amount of training data available per can- didate author (i.e. the size of the training data). We also investigate the robust- ness of different types of lexical and linguistic features to the effects of author set size and data size. The approach we take is an operationalization of the standard text categorization model, using memory-based learning for discriminating be- tween the candidate authors. We performed authorship attribution experiments on a set of three benchmark corpora in which the influence of topic could be controlled. The short text fragments of e-mail length present the approach with a true challenge. Results show that, as expected, authorship attribution accuracy deteriorates as the number of candidate authors increases and size of training data decreases, although the machine learning approach continues performing significantly above chance. Some feature types (most notably character n-grams) are robust to changes in author set size and data size, but no robust individual features emerge.
Down‐modulation of keratin 8 phosphorylation levels by PRL‐3 contributes to colorectal carcinoma progression

Phosphatase of regenerating liver‐3 (PRL‐3) is a member of the PRL protein tyrosine phosphatase family and has been proposed to promote the invasiveness and metastastic capability of colorectal cancers (CRCs); however, the underlying mechanisms and target molecules of PRL‐3 protein remain unknown. On the basis of the biological significance of PRL‐3 phosphatase activity confirmed by the catalytically inactive PRL‐3 mutant (C104S) and a PRL‐3 inhibitor in CRC‐derived SW480 cells, we performed protein expression profiling to search for PRL‐3‐mediated effector proteins. By a comparative study of phosphorylated proteins that differentially expressed in wild type and C104S mutant PRL‐3‐transfected SW480 cells; the cytoskeletal intermediate filament keratin 8 (KRT8) was identified as a physiological PRL‐3‐interacting protein. Indeed, treatment with the PRL‐3 inhibitor effectively suppressed the phosphorylation of KRT8 at S73 and S431. Moreover, we detected the physiological interaction between PRL‐3 and KRT8 and their colocalization at cellular lamellipodias and ruffles in vivo. In CRC tissue samples, tumor cells with high PRL‐3 expression showed reduction or loss of phosphorylated KRT8 expression, particularly at the invasive front and in the liver metastases. In conclusion, our results indicate that PRL‐3 may play an important role for the promotion of CRC cell migration and metastatic potential through direct KRT8 dephosphorylation. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Serial Default and Debt Renegotiation [ Job Market Paper ]

Emerging countries that have defaulted on their debt repayment obligations in the past are more likely to default again in the future than are non-defaulters even with the same debt-toGDP ratio. This paper explains this stylized fact within a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework by explicitly modeling renegotiations between a defaulting country and its creditors. The quantitative analysis of the model reveals that the equilibrium probability of default for a given debt-to-GDP level is weakly increasing with the number of past defaults, consistent with empirical observations. The equilibrium of the model also accords with an additional observed fact: a country for which default terms require less than a 100 percent recovery rate tends to pay a higher rate of return (relative to a risk-free rate) on subsequently issued debt than do defaulting countries that agree to a full recovery rate. JEL Classi cation Codes: E43; F32; F34; G12
Proteasomal non‐catalytic subunit PSMD2 as a potential therapeutic target in association with various clinicopathologic features in lung adenocarcinomas

We previously identified PSMD2, a subunit of the 19S regulatory complex of proteasomes, as a constituent of a signature associated with the acquisition of metastatic phenotype and poor prognosis in lung cancers. In the present study, we found that knockdown of PSMD2 decreased proteasome activity, and induced growth inhibition and apoptosis in lung cancer cell lines. These effects of siRNA‐mediated PSMD2 inhibition were associated with changes in the balance between phosphorylated AKT and p38, as well as with induction of p21. In addition, patients with higher PSMD2 expression had poorer prognosis and a small fraction of lung cancer specimens carried increased copies of PSMD2. Notably, our findings clearly illustrate that lung adenocarcinomas can be divided into two groups; those with and without general upregulation of proteasome pathway genes including PSMD2. This general upregulation was significantly more prevalent in the non‐terminal respiratory unit (non‐TRU)‐type, a recently proposed genetically and clinicopathologically relevant expression profile‐defined classification of adenocarcinomas (P < 0.001 by Fisher's exact test). Patients with adenocarcinomas with general upregulation had significantly shorter survival after potentially curative resection (P = 0.0001 by log‐rank test) independent of disease stage, as shown by multivariate Cox regression analysis. Our results suggest that PSMD2 may be a good molecular target candidate and that other co‐regulated proteasome pathway genes and/or their common regulator(s) might also be potential targets, warranting future study including elucidation of the underlying common regulatory mechanism. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Combining online and offline knowledge in UCT

The UCT algorithm learns a value function online using sample-based search. The TD(λ) algorithm can learn a value function offline for the on-policy distribution. We consider three approaches for combining offline and online value functions in the UCT algorithm. First, the offline value function is used as a default policy during Monte-Carlo simulation. Second, the UCT value function is combined with a rapid online estimate of action values. Third, the offline value function is used as prior knowledge in the UCT search tree. We evaluate these algorithms in 9 x 9 Go against GnuGo 3.7. 10. The first algorithm performs better than UCT with a random simulation policy, but surprisingly, worse than UCT with a weaker, handcrafted simulation policy. The second algorithm outperforms UCT altogether. The third algorithm outperforms UCT with handcrafted prior knowledge. We combine these algorithms in MoGo, the world's strongest 9 x 9 Go program. Each technique significantly improves MoGo's playing strength.
Evaluation of cytospin precision in low cellularity canine cerebrospinal fluid

The cell count and differential of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) cytologic examination classify CSF as inflammatory or not. The cytospin cell yield is related to cell count, but to our knowledge a relationship has not been characterized and cytospin precision is undocumented in any species. The objective of our study was to calculate intra-assay precision of cellular yield and differential on cytocentrifuged canine CSF, determine the factors that may affect precision, and predict the number of cytospins necessary to confirm mild neutrophilic pleocytosis. Ten concurrent replicate cytospins were created from nonhemorrhagic CSF, obtained from 60 dogs in other terminal studies, with either a manual or calibrated pipetting technique. Up to 500 cells per cytospin were counted and classified on each slide. Coefficient of variation (CV), multiple regression, and probabilities were calculated for relationships between cell yield and independent factors including technique, total nucleated cell count, cell differential, and total protein. Manual and calibrated pipetting had similar CVs (average 31%) for total cell yield, but the calibrated technique had fewer foamy macrophages. CV for neutrophil percentage among low cellularity samples with any neutrophils was 146%. Probability based on linear regression showed that 1 cytospin is sufficient to identify samples with >3% neutrophils. Occasional neutrophils, eosinophils, mitotic figures, phagocytic cells, and ependymal cells were seen in many low cellularity canine CSF samples. Canine CSF cytospin cell yield and differential evaluations are imprecise. Calibrated rather than manual pipetting is recommended.
Rapid detection and strain identification of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) by real‐time RT‐PCR

Aims: To develop and validate assays based on real‐time reverse transcriptase‐polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) for rapid detection and strain identification (European and North American strains) of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) by using SYBR Green I and TaqMan probe chemistries.
Interaction of Nitric Oxide with Catalase: Structural and Kinetic Analysis

We present the structures of bovine catalase in its native form and complexed with ammonia and nitric oxide, obtained by X-ray crystallography. Using the NO generator 1-(N,N-diethylamino)diazen-1-ium-1,2-diolate, we were able to generate sufficiently high NO concentrations within the catalase crystals that substantial occupation was observed despite a high dissociation rate. Nitric oxide seems to be slightly bent from the heme normal that may indicate some iron(II) character in the formally ferric catalase. Microspectrophotometric investigations inline with the synchrotron X-ray beam reveal photoreduction of the central heme iron. In the cases of the native and ammonia-complexed catalase, reduction is accompanied by a relaxation phase. This is likely not the case for the catalase NO complex. The kinetics of binding of NO to catalase were investigated using NO photolyzed from N,N′-bis(carboxymethyl)-N,N′-dinitroso-p-phenylenediamine using an assay that combines catalase with myoglobin binding kinetics. The off rate is 1.5 s–1. Implications for catalase function are discussed.
The Effectiveness of Laceback Ligatures: A Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial

Objective To evaluate the effects of laceback ligatures on the anteroposterior and vertical position of lower incisors and the mesial position of the lower first molars. Design Randomized controlled trial. Settings Patients under treatment in the Department of Orthodontics, Royal Bournemouth Hospital, Dorset, during a 6 month period from November 1999 to March 2000. Subjects Sixty-two adolescents (mean 13.7 years, range 11.2–16.8 years) with similar malocclusions, requiring extraction of all first premolars, were randomly assigned to experimental (laceback: 30; 12 male, 18 female) and control (non-laceback: 32; 14 male, 18 female) groups. Interventions Treatment using upper and lower fixed appliances following extraction of four premolars. One group had lacebacks placed, whilst the control group had no lacebacks. Main outcome measures The participants were examined clinically and radiographically, and lateral cephalograms with radio-opaque tooth markers and lower study casts records were taken when lower fixed appliances were placed (T1) and following sufficient leveling with a 0.018 inch stainless steel round wire (T2). Linear measurements were recorded following digitization of the lateral cephalograms and using a vernier caliper on the study casts. A Student t-test was used to examine differences between the two groups following assessment for normality. Results In both groups the lower incisors retroclined during T1–T2; (Mean±SD: Experimental −0.53±1.9 mm, Control −0.44±1.29 mm). There was no statistical significance between the two groups (p = 0.84). The lower incisors extruded in both groups; 0.47±0.98 mm in the experimental group and 0.44±0.87 mm in the control group. There was no statistical difference between the groups (p = 0.9). The lower first molars showed 0.83 mm greater mesial movement in the experimental group, which was statistically significant (p < 0.05). Labial segment crowding decreased in both groups (experimental −3±1.6 mm, control −2.67±2.28 mm), the difference between the groups being non-significant (p = 0.51). Arch length decreased in both groups (experimental −2.08±2.82 mm, control −2.9±3.06 mm), but the difference between them was not significant (p = 0.28) Conclusions In first premolar extraction cases, the lower labial segment does not procline during the leveling stage with the pre-adjusted edgewise appliance and the use of laceback ligatures conveys no difference in the anteroposterior or vertical position of the lower labial segment. Furthermore, the use of laceback ligatures creates a statistically and clinically significant increase in the loss of posterior anchorage.