Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spin-half fermions with mass dimension one: theory, phenomenology, and dark matter

We provide the first details on the unexpected theoretical discovery of a spin-one-half matter field with mass dimension one. It is based upon a complete set of dual-helicity eigenspinors of the charge conjugation operator. Due to its unusual properties with respect to charge conjugation and parity, it belongs to a non-standard Wigner class. Consequently, the theory exhibits non-locality with . We briefly discuss its relevance to the cosmological ‘horizon problem’. Because the introduced fermionic field is endowed with mass dimension one, it can carry a quartic self-interaction. Its dominant interaction with known forms of matter is via Higgs, and with gravity. This aspect leads us to contemplate the new fermion as a prime dark matter candidate. Taking this suggestion seriously we study a supernova-like explosion of a galactic-mass dark matter cloud to set limits on the mass of the new particle and present a calculation on relic abundance to constrain the relevant cross-section. The analysis favours light mass (roughly 20 MeV) and relevant cross-section of about 2 pb. Similarities and differences with the WIMP and mirror matter proposals for dark matter are enumerated. In a critique of the theory we reveal a hint on non-commutative aspects of spacetime, and energy–momentum space.
Clinical and Biological Evaluations of Biodegradable Collagen Matrices for Glaucoma Drainage Device Implantation.

Purpose To characterize the clinical and biological properties of biodegradable collagen matrices (BCMs) for possible glaucoma drainage device implantation. Methods A total of 68 refractory glaucoma eyes, followed up postoperatively for at least 6 months, were consecutively enrolled after retrospective chart review. The BCM-augmented Ahmed valve implantations (BAAVI) using our Ologen-6 and Ologen-7 valves were performed and compared with a conventional method. Complete surgical success was defined as an IOP of ≤21 mm Hg (IOP 1) or ≤17 mm Hg (IOP 2) without antiglaucoma medications. Qualified success was defined as an IOP ≤21 mm Hg with or without antiglaucoma medications. The biological properties of each BCM were assessed by enzymatic degradation rates via collagenase under ocular physiological conditions. Results The mean ages and preoperative IOPs were similar for the groups. In the conventional, BAAVI with Ologen-6, and BAAVI with Ologen-7 groups, complete success rates with target IOP 1 were 29.2%, 40.0%, and 66.7%; those with target IOP 2 were 12.5%, 30.0%, and 45.8%; qualified success rates were 45.8%, 55.0%, and 75.0%, respectively. The enzymatic degradation rate of Ologen-7 was significantly slower than that of Ologen-6 (12.5 × 10-3 vs. 28.8 × 10-3). Conclusions The surgical success rate was highest in the Ologen-7 BAAVI group, with the lowest dependency on postoperative antiglaucoma medication use compared with the conventional and Ologen-6 BAAVI groups. The clinical results correlated with the different biological and physicochemical properties based on the degree of enzymatic degradation and on the structural morphology.
A second enzyme protecting mineralocorticoid receptors from glucocorticoid occupancy.

We have confirmed that A6 cells (derived from kidney of Xenopus laevis), which contain both mineralocorticoid and glucocorticoid receptors, do not normally possess 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydroxgenase (11β-HSD1 or 11β-HSD2) enzymatic activity and so are without apparent "protective" enzymes. A6 cells do not convert the glucocorticoid corticosterone to 11-dehydrocorticosterone but do, however, possess steroid 6β-hydroxylase that transforms corticosterone to 6β-hydroxycorticosterone. This hydroxylase is cytochrome P-450 3A (CYP3A). We have now determined the effects of 3α,5β-tetrahydroprogesterone and chenodeoxycholic acid (both inhibitors of 11β-HSD1) and 11-dehydrocorticosterone and 11β-hydroxy-3α,5β-tetrahydroprogesterone (inhibitors of 11β-HSD2) and carbenoxalone, which inhibits both 11β-HSD1 and 11β-HSD2, on the actions and metabolism of corticosterone and active Na+ transport [short-circuit current ( I sc)] in A6 cells. All of these 11β-HSD inhibitory substances induced a significant increment in corticosterone-induced I sc, which was detectable within 2 h. However, none of these agents caused an increase in I sc when incubated by themselves with A6 cells. In all cases, the additional I sc was inhibited by the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) antagonist, RU-28318, whereas the original I scelicited by corticosterone alone was inhibited by the glucocorticoid receptor antagonist, RU-38486. In separate experiments, each agent was shown to significantly inhibit metabolism of corticosterone to 6β-hydroxycorticosterone in A6 cells, and a linear relationship existed between 6β-hydroxylase inhibition and the MR-mediated increase in I scin the one inhibitor tested. Troleandomycin, a selective inhibitor of CYP3A, inhibited 6β-hydroxylase and also significantly enhanced corticosterone-induced I sc at 2 h. These experiments indicate that the enhanced MR-mediated I sc in A6 cells may be related to inhibition of 6β-hydroxylase activity in these cells and that this 6β-hydroxylase (CYP3A) may be protecting the expression of corticosterone-induced active Na+ transport in A6 cells by MR-mediated mechanism(s).
Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis is a network disorder with altered cortical hubs

Electrophysiologic hubs within the large‐scale functional networks in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) with hippocampal sclerosis (HS) have not been investigated. We hypothesized that mTLE with HS has different resting‐state network hubs in their large‐scale functional networks compared to the hubs in healthy controls (HC). We also hypothesized that the hippocampus would be a functional hub in mTLE patients with HS.
Sleep‐dependent memory consolidation is related to perceived value of learned material

Although many types of newly encoded information can be consolidated during sleep, an enhanced effect has been found for memories tagged as relevant to the future, such as through knowledge of future testing or payment for successful recall. In the current study, participants (n = 80) learned Welsh and Breton translations of English words, and intrinsic relevance of learned material was operationalized as perceived value of the Welsh and Breton languages. Participants were non‐Welsh native English speakers who had recently arrived in Wales. Memory for the words was tested immediately and 12 h later, after either a period of wake or a period of sleep. An increase in recall for both languages was found after sleep, but not after wake. Importantly, for the sleep condition, overnight improvement in Welsh word recall was associated with participants’ level of valuing the Welsh language. This association was not found for the wake period condition. These findings support previous indications of an active role of sleep in the consolidation of memories relevant for the future, and demonstrate that this effect may be modulated by individual differences in perceived value of the learned material. It remains to be established whether this association is mediated by an emotional attachment to the language or a cognitive facility with it, or both.
Zero-Cost, Fine-Grained Power Monitoring of Datacenters Using Non-Intrusive Power Disaggregation

Fine-grained power monitoring, which refers to power monitoring at the server level, is critical to the efficient operation and energy saving of datacenters. Fined-grained power monitoring, however, is extremely challenging in legacy datacenters that host server systems not equipped with power monitoring sensors. Installing power monitoring hardware at the server level not only incurs high costs but also complicates the maintenance of high-density server clusters and enclosures. In this paper, we present a zero-cost, purely software-based solution to this challenging problem. We use a novel technique of non-intrusive power disaggregation (NIPD) that establishes power mapping functions (PMFs) between the states of servers and their power consumption, and infer the power consumption of each server with the aggregated power of the entire datacenter. We implement and evaluate NIPD over a real-world datacenter with 326 nodes. The results show that our solution can provide high precision power estimation at the rack level, with mean relative error of 2.63%, and the server level, with mean relative error of 10.27% and 8.17% for the estimation of idle power and peak power, respectively.
Readactor: Practical Code Randomization Resilient to Memory Disclosure

Code-reuse attacks such as return-oriented programming (ROP) pose a severe threat to modern software. Designing practical and effective defenses against code-reuse attacks is highly challenging. One line of defense builds upon fine-grained code diversification to prevent the adversary from constructing a reliable code-reuse attack. However, all solutions proposed so far are either vulnerable to memory disclosure or are impractical for deployment on commodity systems. In this paper, we address the deficiencies of existing solutions and present the first practical, fine-grained code randomization defense, called Read actor, resilient to both static and dynamic ROP attacks. We distinguish between direct memory disclosure, where the attacker reads code pages, and indirect memory disclosure, where attackers use code pointers on data pages to infer the code layout without reading code pages. Unlike previous work, Read actor resists both types of memory disclosure. Moreover, our technique protects both statically and dynamically generated code. We use a new compiler-based code generation paradigm that uses hardware features provided by modern CPUs to enable execute-only memory and hide code pointers from leakage to the adversary. Finally, our extensive evaluation shows that our approach is practical -- we protect the entire Google Chromium browser and its V8 JIT compiler -- and efficient with an average SPEC CPU2006 performance overhead of only 6.4%.
Context-Aware Service Composition and Component Change-over using Semantic Web Techniques

This paper shows the effectiveness of dynamic over of service components for ubiquitous service composition. Although context-aware services are expected in the forthcoming ubiquitous computing era, conventional service coordination techniques are insufficient because of rigid interface designing. To cope with this problem, we have established a flexible service composition framework, where a semantic-level service scenario is translated and its components are dynamically found, selected, and bound. User situations change with time, so service components should be changed in accordance with context change. We propose a new method that reselects and rebinds service components based on context change. Through a performance measurement, we show the effectiveness and practicality of the new method.
Temporal random walk as a lightweight communication infrastructure for opportunistic networks

This paper explores the idea of sharing a common storage unit (token) as a lightweight communication infrastructure for opportunistic networks. Instead of using contacts as opportunities to transfer messages, we use them to pass the token over time. We implement a Temporal Random Walk (TRW) process to support such evolution. Sending a message is equivalent to copying it in the token and passing the token to a connected node. Eventually the recipient node will get the token and all its addressed messages. We study our approach using both synthetic and real traces. We show that it can be equivalent to common routing strategies in terms of delivery ratio and delay.
How Does Adolescent Fertility Affect the Human Capital and Wages of Young Women

We estimate the relationship between teenage childbearing, human capital investment, and wages in early adulthood, using a sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a large set of potential instruments for fertility-principally state and county-level indicators of the costs of fertility and fertility control. Adolescent fertility substantially reduces years of formal education and teenage work experience and, for white women only, early adult work experience. Through reductions in human capital, teenage childbearing has a significant effect on market wages at age 25. Our results suggest that public policies which reduce teenage childbearing are likely to have positive effects on the economic well-being of many young mothers.
Question Answering on Knowledge Bases and Text using Universal Schema and Memory Networks

Existing question answering methods infer answers either from a knowledge base or from raw text. While knowledge base (KB) methods are good at answering compositional questions, their performance is often affected by the incompleteness of the KB. Au contraire, web text contains millions of facts that are absent in the KB, however in an unstructured form. Universal schema can support reasoning on the union of both structured KBs and unstructured text by aligning them in a common embedded space. In this paper we extend universal schema to natural language question answering, employing Memory networks to attend to the large body of facts in the combination of text and KB. Our models can be trained in an end-to-end fashion on question-answer pairs. Evaluation results on Spades fill-in-the-blank question answering dataset show that exploiting universal schema for question answering is better than using either a KB or text alone. This model also outperforms the current state-of-the-art by 8.5 F1 points.
Deep Learning for Unsupervised Insider Threat Detection in Structured Cybersecurity Data Streams

Analysis of an organization's computer network activity is a key component of early detection and mitigation of insider threat, a growing concern for many organizations. Raw system logs are a prototypical example of streaming data that can quickly scale beyond the cognitive power of a human analyst. As a prospective filter for the human analyst, we present an online unsupervised deep learning approach to detect anomalous network activity from system logs in real time. Our models decompose anomaly scores into the contributions of individual user behavior features for increased interpretability to aid analysts reviewing potential cases of insider threat. Using the CERT Insider Threat Dataset v6.2 and threat detection recall as our performance metric, our novel deep and recurrent neural network models outperform Principal Component Analysis, Support Vector Machine and Isolation Forest based anomaly detection baselines. For our best model, the events labeled as insider threat activity in our dataset had an average anomaly score in the 95.53 percentile, demonstrating our approach's potential to greatly reduce analyst workloads.
Perspectives on Balanced Sequences

We examine and compare several different classes of "balanced" block codes over q-ary alphabets, namely symbol- balanced (SB) codes, charge-balanced (CB) codes, and polarity- balanced (PB) codes. Known results on the maximum size and asymptotic minimal redundancy of SB and CB codes are reviewed. We then determine the maximum size and asymptotic minimal redundancy of PB codes and of codes which are both CB and PB. We also propose efficient Knuth-like encoders and decoders for all these types of balanced codes.
Listeria monocytogenes Infection Causes Metabolic Shifts in Drosophila melanogaster

Immunity and metabolism are intimately linked; manipulating metabolism, either through diet or genetics, has the power to alter survival during infection. However, despite metabolism's powerful ability to alter the course of infections, little is known about what being “sick” means metabolically. Here we describe the metabolic changes occurring in a model system when Listeria monocytogenes causes a lethal infection in Drosophila melanogaster. L. monocytogenes infection alters energy metabolism; the flies gradually lose both of their energy stores, triglycerides and glycogen, and show decreases in both intermediate metabolites and enzyme message for the two main energy pathways, beta-oxidation and glycolysis. L. monocytogenes infection also causes enzymatic reduction in the anti-oxidant uric acid, and knocking out the enzyme uric oxidase has a complicated effect on immunity. Free amino acid levels also change during infection, including a drop in tyrosine levels which may be due to robust L. monocytogenes induced melanization.
A Semantic Wiki Alerting Environment Incorporating Credibility and Reliability Evaluation

In this paper, we describe a system that semantically annotates streams of reports about transnational criminal gangs in order to automatically produce models of the gangs' membership and activities in the form of a semantic wiki. A gang ontology and semantic inferencing are used to annotate the reports and supplement entity and relationship annotations based on the local document context. Reports in the datastream are annotated for reliability and credibility in the proof-of-concept system.
Evolutionary Analyses of Entire Genomes Do Not Support the Association of mtDNA Mutations with Ras/MAPK Pathway Syndromes

Background There are several known autosomal genes responsible for Ras/MAPK pathway syndromes, including Noonan syndrome (NS) and related disorders (such as LEOPARD, neurofibromatosis type 1), although mutations of these genes do not explain all cases. Due to the important role played by the mitochondrion in the energetic metabolism of cardiac muscle, it was recently proposed that variation in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome could be a risk factor in the Noonan phenotype and in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which is a common clinical feature in Ras/MAPK pathway syndromes. In order to test these hypotheses, we sequenced entire mtDNA genomes in the largest series of patients suffering from Ras/MAPK pathway syndromes analyzed to date (n = 45), most of them classified as NS patients (n = 42). Methods/Principal Findings The results indicate that the observed mtDNA lineages were mostly of European ancestry, reproducing in a nutshell the expected haplogroup (hg) patterns of a typical Iberian dataset (including hgs H, T, J, and U). Three new branches of the mtDNA phylogeny (H1j1, U5b1e, and L2a5) are described for the first time, but none of these are likely to be related to NS or Ras/MAPK pathway syndromes when observed under an evolutionary perspective. Patterns of variation in tRNA and protein genes, as well as redundant, private and heteroplasmic variants, in the mtDNA genomes of patients were as expected when compared with the patterns inferred from a worldwide mtDNA phylogeny based on more than 8700 entire genomes. Moreover, most of the mtDNA variants found in patients had already been reported in healthy individuals and constitute common polymorphisms in human population groups. Conclusions/Significance As a whole, the observed mtDNA genome variation in the NS patients was difficult to reconcile with previous findings that indicated a pathogenic role of mtDNA variants in NS.
Arterial blood gas and pulse oximetry in initial management of patients with community-acquired pneumonia

AbstractOBJECTIVE: To identify the factors associated with the use of arterial blood gas (ABG) and pulse oximetry (PO) in the initial management of patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and arterial hypoxemia at presentation. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 944 outpatients and 1,332 inpatients with clinical and radiographic evidence of CAP prospectively enrolled from 5 study sites in the United States and Canada. ANALYSES: Separate multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to 1) compare measurement of ABG and PO within 48 hours of presentation across sites while controlling for patient differences, and 2) identify factors associated with arterial hypoxemia (PaO2 <60 mm Hg or SaO2 <90% for non-African Americans and <92% for African Americans) while breathing room air. RESULTS: Range of ABG use by site was from 0% to 6.4% (P=.06) for outpatients and from 49.2% to 77.3% for inpatients (P<.001), while PO use ranged from 9.4% to 57.8% for outpatients (P<.001) and from 47.9% to 85.1% for inpatients (P<.001). Differences among sites remained after controlling for patient demographic characteristics, comorbidity, and illness severity. In patients with 1 or more measurements of oxygenation at presentation, hypoxemia was independently associated with 6 risk factors: age >30 years (odds ratio [OR], 3.2; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.7 to 5.9), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (OR, 1.9; 95% CI, 1.4 to 2.6), congestive heart failure (OR, 1.5; 95% CI, 1.0 to 2.1), respiratory rate >24 per minute (OR, 2.3; 95% CI, 1.8 to 3.0), altered mental status (OR, 1.6; 95% CI, 1.1 to 2.3), and chest radiographic infiltrate involving >1 lobe (OR, 2.2; 95% CI, 1.7 to 2.9). The prevalence of hypoxemia among those tested ranged from 13% for inpatients with no risk factors to 54.6% for inpatients with ≥3 risk factors. Of the 210 outpatients who had ≥2 of these risk factors, only 64 (30.5%) had either an ABG or PO performed. In the 48 outpatients tested without supplemental O2 with ≥2 risk factors 8.3% were hypoxemic. CONCLUSIONS: In the initial management of CAP, use of ABG and PO varied widely across sites. Increasing the assessment of arterial oxygenation among patients with CAP is likely to increase the detection of arterial hypoxemia, particularly among outpatients.
Estimating the prevalence of heterozygous familial hypercholesterolaemia: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Objectives Heterozygous familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) confers a significant risk for premature cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, the estimated prevalence of FH varies substantially among studies. We aimed to provide a summary estimate of FH prevalence in the general population and assess variations in frequency across different sociodemographic characteristics. Setting, participants and outcome measures We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, PsycINFO and PubMed for peer-reviewed literature using validated strategies. Results were limited to studies published in English between January 1990 and January 2017. Studies were eligible if they determined FH prevalence using clinical criteria or DNA-based analyses. We determined a pooled point prevalence of FH in adults and children and assessed the variation of the pooled frequency by age, sex, geographical location, diagnostic method, study quality and year of publication. Estimates were pooled using random-effects meta-analysis. Differences by study-level characteristics were investigated through subgroups, meta-regression and sensitivity analyses. Results The pooled prevalence of FH from 19 studies including 2 458 456 unique individuals was 0.40% (95% CI 0.29% to 0.52%) which corresponds to a frequency of 1 in 250 individuals. FH prevalence was found to vary by age and geographical location but not by any other covariates. Results were consistent in sensitivity analyses. Conclusions Our systematic review suggests that FH is a common disorder, affecting 1 in 250 individuals. These findings underscore the need for early detection and management to decrease CVD risk.