Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A nanoelectronics-blood-based diagnostic biomarker for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)

Significance Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a disease which afflicts approximately 2 million people in the United States and many more around the globe. A combination of factors might trigger ME/CFS, and there is currently no well-established blood-based biomarker to diagnose it. Taking advantage of advancements in micro/nanofabrication, direct electrical detection of cellular and molecular properties, microfluidics, and artificial intelligence techniques, we developed a nanoelectronics blood-based assay that can potentially establish a diagnostic biomarker and a drug-screening platform for ME/CFS. Given the significance of this assay, we envision it has the potential to be widely employed in research laboratories and clinics in the future as an aid to physicians as well as to our colleagues in the ME/CFS research community. There is not currently a well-established, if any, biological test to diagnose myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The molecular aberrations observed in numerous studies of ME/CFS blood cells offer the opportunity to develop a diagnostic assay from blood samples. Here we developed a nanoelectronics assay designed as an ultrasensitive assay capable of directly measuring biomolecular interactions in real time, at low cost, and in a multiplex format. To pursue the goal of developing a reliable biomarker for ME/CFS and to demonstrate the utility of our platform for point-of-care diagnostics, we validated the array by testing patients with moderate to severe ME/CFS patients and healthy controls. The ME/CFS samples’ response to the hyperosmotic stressor observed as a unique characteristic of the impedance pattern and dramatically different from the response observed among the control samples. We believe the observed robust impedance modulation difference of the samples in response to hyperosmotic stress can potentially provide us with a unique indicator of ME/CFS. Moreover, using supervised machine learning algorithms, we developed a classifier for ME/CFS patients capable of identifying new patients, required for a robust diagnostic tool.
Fabrication and mobility characteristics of SiGe surface channel pMOSFETs with a HfO/sub 2//TiN gate stack

This paper describes an extensive experimental study of TiN/HfO/sub 2//SiGe and TiN/HfO/sub 2//Si cap/SiGe gate stacked-transistors. Through a careful analysis of the interface quality (interface states and roughness), we demonstrate that an ultrathin silicon cap is mandatory to obtain high hole mobility enhancement. Based on quantum mechanical simulations and capacitance-voltage characterization, we show that this silicon cap is not contributing any silicon parasitic channel conduction and degrades by only 1 /spl Aring/ the electrical oxide thickness in inversion. Due to this interface optimization, Si/sub 0.72/Ge/sub 0.28/ pMOSFETs exhibit a 58% higher mobility at high effective field (1 MV/cm) than the universal SiO/sub 2//Si reference and a 90% higher mobility than the HfO/sub 2//Si reference. This represents one of the best hole mobility results at 1 MV/cm ever reported with a high-/spl kappa//metal gate stack. We thus validate a possible solution to drastically improve the hole mobility in Si MOSFETs with high-/spl kappa/ gate dielectrics.
Simple, lexicalized choice of translation timing for simultaneous speech translation

Conventional speech translation systems wait until the end of the input sentence before starting translation, causing a large delay in the translation process. Methods have been proposed to reduce this delay by dividing the input utterance on pause boundaries, but while these methods have proven useful on speech translation of language pairs with similar word order, they are insensitive to linguistic information and less effective for languages that require more word reordering. In this work, we propose a method that uses lexicalized information to perform translation unit segmentation considering the relationship between the source and target languages. In particular, we use the phrase table and reordering probabilities used in phrase-based translation systems to decide points in the sentence where we can begin translation with less delay. Through an experimental evaluation, we conﬁrmed that the proposed method signiﬁcantly reduces delay for Japanese-English and French-English translation. We also show that a parameter introduced in our model can adjust the trade-off between simultaneity and accuracy, and that in situations that require a large degree of simultaneity, our system can achieve a delay reduction of 20% compared to pause segmentation with identical accuracy.
Curiosity and Compassion: Curiosity and Attachment Security's Relationship with Empathic Responding to Hardship

CURIOSITY AND COMPASSION: CURIOSITY AND ATTACHMENT SECURITY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH EMPATHIC RESPONDING TO HARDSHIP By: Athena H. Cairo, B.A. A thesis prospectus submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015 Director: Dr. Jeffrey D. Green Associate Professor of Psychology Department of Psychology Compassion requires both attention and motivation to engage with another person’s experience. Two studies examined whether curiosity—the interest and motivation to explore new or complex information—promotes empathic concern and suppresses personal distress. These studies also examined whether attachment insecurity moderates curiosity’s effect on empathy. Study 1 identified correlations among curiosity, attachment security, empathic concern, and personal distress traits. In Study 2, participants were primed with high or low curiosity before watching a video of a peer experiencing hardship, then reported state curiosity, empathic concern, personal distress, and prosocial motivation. Trait and state curiosity predicted greater empathic concern and prosocial motivation. In Study 1, greater attachment anxiety was shown to weaken trait curiosity’s relationship with empathic concern. In Study 2, greater attachment anxiety also weakened the relationship between state curiosity and personal distress. These results suggest curiosity may be a way to promote compassion and willingness to help.
Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS Observations of T Dwarfs: Brown Dwarf Multiplicity and New Probes of the L/T Transition

We present the results of a Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS imaging survey of 22 T-type field brown dwarfs. Five are resolved as binary systems with angular separations of 0. ″05-0. ″35, and companionship is established on the basis of component F110W - F170M colors (indicative of CH4 absorption) and low probabilities of background contamination. Prior ground-based observations show 2MASS 1553+1532AB to be a common proper-motion binary. The properties of these systems—low multiplicity fraction (12% resolved, as corrected for sample selection biases), close projected separations (ρ = 1.8-5.0 AU) and near-unity mass ratios—are consistent with previous results for field brown dwarf binaries. Three of the binaries have components that span the poorly understood transition between L dwarfs and T dwarfs. Spectral decomposition analysis of one of these, SDSS 1021-0304AB, reveals a peculiar flux reversal between its components, as its cooler T5 secondary is ~30% brighter at 1.05 and 1.27 μm than its T1 primary. This system, 2MASS 0518-2828AB, and SDSS 1534+1615AB all demonstrate that the J-band brightening observed between late-type L to mid-type T dwarfs is an intrinsic feature of this spectral transition, albeit less pronounced than previously surmised. We also find that the resolved binary fraction of L7 to T3.5 dwarfs is twice that of other L and T dwarfs, an anomaly that can be explained by a relatively rapid evolution of brown dwarfs through the L/T transition, perhaps driven by dynamic (nonequilibrium) depletion of photospheric condensates.
Diversity Performance Analysis on Multiple HAP Networks

One of the main design challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is achieving a high-data-rate transmission for individual sensor devices. The high altitude platform (HAP) is an important communication relay platform for WSNs and next-generation wireless networks. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques provide the diversity and multiplexing gain, which can improve the network performance effectively. In this paper, a virtual MIMO (V-MIMO) model is proposed by networking multiple HAPs with the concept of multiple assets in view (MAV). In a shadowed Rician fading channel, the diversity performance is investigated. The probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are derived. In addition, the average symbol error rate (ASER) with BPSK and QPSK is given for the V-MIMO model. The system capacity is studied for both perfect channel state information (CSI) and unknown CSI individually. The ergodic capacity with various SNR and Rician factors for different network configurations is also analyzed. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the performance analysis. It is shown that the performance of the HAPs network in WSNs can be significantly improved by utilizing the MAV to achieve overlapping coverage, with the help of the V-MIMO techniques.
Comparative Analysis of Different Tube Models for Linear Rheology of Monodisperse Linear Entangled Polymers

The aim of the present paper is to analyse the differences between tube-based models which are widely used for predicting the linear viscoelasticity of monodisperse linear polymers, in comparison to a large set of experimental data. The following models are examined: Milner–McLeish, Likhtman–McLeish, the Hierarchical model proposed by the group of Larson, the BoB model of Das and Read, and the TMA model proposed by the group of van Ruymbeke. This comparison allows us to highlight and discuss important questions related to the relaxation of entangled polymers, such as the importance of the contour-length fluctuations (CLF) process and how it affects the reptation mechanism, or the contribution of the constraint release (CR) process on the motion of the chains. In particular, it allows us to point out important approximations, inherent in some models, which result in an overestimation of the effect of CLF on the reptation time. On the contrary, by validating the TMA model against experimental data, we show that this effect is underestimated in TMA. Therefore, in order to obtain accurate predictions, a novel modification to the TMA model is proposed. Our current work is a continuation of earlier research (Shchetnikava et al., 2014), where a similar analysis is performed on well-defined star polymers.
Social Consequences of Insulin‐dependent Diabetes Mellitus are Limited: A Population‐based Comparison of Young Adult Patients vs Healthy Controls

In a population‐based study, the social situation of 91 young adult patients with Type 1 diabetes mellitus (IDDM) since childhood was compared to that of an age‐ and sex‐matched group of 189 healthy persons. Their mean age was 37.2 years, duration of diabetes 28.7 years and severe complications were present in 13 of the 91 patients. A nearly 10‐fold increased mortality rate was found in diabetic patients, mainly due to diabetic nephropathy and trauma, including suicide. The employment rate was lower in diabetic patients (71 % vs 85 %, p < 0.05); the need for welfare benefits was greater (15 % vs 3 %, p < 0.01). These differences were mainly the consequence of diabetic late complications. Education, housing conditions, life style, civil state, alcohol and smoking habits were similar in both groups. Confidence in the future was slightly less in diabetic patients (p < 0.05). In conclusion, besides an increased mortality rate, the present study has shown no serious social consequences in adult Type 1 diabetic patients without severe late complications, as compared to matched controls. Our results indicate that IDDM affects social life only to a limited extent, in the absence of severe vascular complications.
Disrupted Topological Organization in Whole-Brain Functional Networks of Heroin-Dependent Individuals: A Resting-State fMRI Study

Neuroimaging studies have shown that heroin addiction is related to abnormalities in widespread local regions and in the functional connectivity of the brain. However, little is known about whether heroin addiction changes the topological organization of whole-brain functional networks. Seventeen heroin-dependent individuals (HDIs) and 15 age-, gender-matched normal controls (NCs) were enrolled, and the resting-state functional magnetic resonance images (RS-fMRI) were acquired from these subjects. We constructed the brain functional networks of HDIs and NCs, and compared the between-group differences in network topological properties using graph theory method. We found that the HDIs showed decreases in the normalized clustering coefficient and in small-worldness compared to the NCs. Furthermore, the HDIs exhibited significantly decreased nodal centralities primarily in regions of cognitive control network, including the bilateral middle cingulate gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, and right precuneus, but significantly increased nodal centralities primarily in the left hippocampus. The between-group differences in nodal centralities were not corrected by multiple comparisons suggesting these should be considered as an exploratory analysis. Moreover, nodal centralities in the left hippocampus were positively correlated with the duration of heroin addiction. Overall, our results indicated that disruptions occur in the whole-brain functional networks of HDIs, findings which may be helpful in further understanding the mechanisms underlying heroin addiction.
Quality of Life assessments in the evaluation of gastroesophageal reflux and peptic ulcer disease before, during and after treatment.

BACKGROUND It has recently been suggested that Quality of Life (QOL) be used in the evaluation of new medical treatment regimens together with cost-benefit, efficacy and safety. In this overview we point out some aspects of use of the Psychological General Well-Being Index (PGWB) in patients with peptic ulcer and reflux disease gained from our own investigations in later years. METHODS QOL was assessed using questionnaires before diagnosis, during medical healing treatment and at a 1-year follow-up in peptic ulcer disease or before and after surgery in reflux disease. RESULTS Untreated patients with unknown diagnosis had low QOL scores. With treatment, scores increased rapidly to supernormal values and fell off to normal values during the follow-up year. CONCLUSION QOL evaluations seem sensitive and reflect the patient's subjective feeling of disease. They add another new aspect of treatment effect not earlier included in treatment evaluations.
Hybrid System Combination for Machine Translation: An Integration of Phrase-level and Sentences-level Combination Approaches

Hybrid System Combination for Machine Translation: An Integration of Phrase-level and Sentence-level Combination Approaches Wei-Yun Ma Given the wide range of successful statistical MT approaches that have emerged recently, it would be beneficial to take advantage of their individual strengths and avoid their individual weaknesses. Multi-Engine Machine Translation (MEMT) attempts to do so by either fusing the output of multiple translation engines or selecting the best translation among them, aiming to improve the overall translation quality. In this thesis, we propose to use the phrase or the sentence as our combination unit instead of the word; three new phrase-level models and one sentence-level model with novel features are proposed. This contrasts with the most popular system combination technique to date which relies on word-level confusion network decoding. Among the three new phrase-level models, the first one utilizes source sentences and target translation hypotheses to learn hierarchical phrases — phrases that contain subphrases (Chiang 2007). It then re-decodes the source sentences using the hierarchical phrases to combine the results of multiple MT systems. The other two models we propose view combination as a paraphrasing process and use paraphrasing rules. The paraphrasing rules are composed of either string-to-string paraphrases or hierarchical paraphrases, learned from monolingual word alignments between a selected best translation hypothesis and other hypotheses. Our experimental results show that all of the three phrase-level models give superior performance in BLEU compared with the best single translation engine. The two paraphrasing models outperform the re-decoding model and the confusion network baseline model. The sentence-level model exploits more complex syntactic and semantic information than the phrase-level models. It uses consensus, argument alignment, a supertag-based structural language model and a syntactic error detector. We use our sentence-level model in two ways: the first selects a translated sentence from multiple MT systems as the best translation to serve as a backbone for paraphrasing process; the second makes the final decision among all fused translations generated by the phrase-level models and all translated sentences of multiple MT systems. We proposed two novel hybrid combination structures for the integration of phrase-level and sentence-level combination frameworks in order to utilize the advantages of both frameworks and provide a more diverse set of plausible fused translations to consider.
Evaluation of antifungal activity of Calotropis gigantea latex extract: an in vitro study.

Medicinal plants are important source of potentially useful structures for the development of novel chemotherapeutic agents. The present study was aimed to evaluate the antifungal effect of partially purified C. gigantea latex extract on some human pathogenic fungi. Ethanolic extract of the latex were tested in vitro against fungi strains. The inhibitory effect was assessed by disc diffusion method. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum fungicidal concentration (MFC) were also determined by serial dilution method. The ethanolic extract was subjected to qualitative phytochemical screening for the presence of bioactive ingredients. The ethanolic extract shows the presence of many biologically active molecules such as flavonoids, alkaloids, triterpenoids, steroids, saponins, phenols and glycosides. The latex extract shows significant zone of inhibition in dose dependent manner. The MIC and MFC values of latex extract against fungal strains varies from 1 mg to 8 mg and the results are comparable with Amphotericin B. From this study, we conclude that the latex extract possesses potent fungicidal activity which may be due to the presence of biologically active ingredients with antimicrobial activity in the ethanolic extract of C. gigantea
Video clip assessment of a salivary gland ultrasound scoring system in Sjögren’s syndrome using consensual definitions: an OMERACT ultrasound working group reliability exercise

Objective To develop ultrasound (US) definitions and a US novel scoring system for major salivary gland (SG) lesions in patients with primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS) and to test their intrareader and inter-reader reliability using US video clips. Methods Twenty-five rheumatologists were subjected to a three-round, web-based Delphi process in order to agree on (1) definitions and scanning procedure of salivary gland ultrasonography (SGUS): parotid, submandibular and sublingual glands (PG, SMG and SLG); (2) definitions for the elementary SGUS lesions in patients with Sjögren’s syndrome; (3) scoring system for grading changes. The experts rated the statements on a 1–5 Likert scale. In the second step, SGUS video clips of patients with pSS and non-pSS sicca cases were collected containing various spectrums of disease severity followed by an intrareader and inter-reader reliability exercise. Each video clip was evaluated according to the agreed definitions. Results Consensual definitions were developed after three Delphi rounds. Among the three selected SGs, US assessment of PGs and SMGs was agreed on. Agreement was reached to score only greyscale lesions and to focus on anechoic/hypoechoic foci in a semiquantitative matter or, if not possible on a qualitatively (present/absent) evaluation of fatty or fibrous lesions. Intrareader reliability for detecting and scoring these lesions was excellent (Cohen’s kappa 0.81) and inter-reader reliability was good (Light’s kappa 0.66). Conclusion New definitions for developing a novel semiquantitative US score in patients with pSS were developed and tested on video clips. Inter-reader and intrareader reliabilities were good and excellent, respectively.
Gene Disruption through Homologous Recombination inSpiroplasma citri: an scm1-Disrupted Motility Mutant Is Pathogenic

ABSTRACT To determine whether homologous recombination could be used to inactivate selected genes in Spiroplasma citri, plasmid constructs were designed to disrupt the motility gene scm1. An internal scm1 gene fragment was inserted into plasmid pKT1, which replicates in Escherichia coli but not inS. citri, and into the S. citri oriC plasmid pBOT1, which replicates in spiroplasma cells as well as in E. coli. Electrotransformation of S. citri with the nonreplicative, recombinant plasmid pKTM1 yielded no transformants. In contrast, spiroplasmal transformants were obtained with the replicative, pBOT1-derived plasmid pCJ32. During passaging of the transformants, the plasmid was found to integrate into the chromosome by homologous recombination either at the oriC region or at the scm1 gene. In the latter case, plasmid integration by a single crossover between the scm1 gene fragment carried by the plasmid and the full-length scm1 gene carried by the chromosome led to a nonmotile phenotype. Transmission of thescm1-disrupted mutant to periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) plants through injection into the leafhopper vector (Circulifer haematoceps) showed that the motility mutant multiplied in the insects and was efficiently transmitted to plants, in which it induced symptoms similarly to the wild-type S. citri strain. These results suggest that the spiroplasmal motility may not be essential for pathogenicity and that, more broadly, the S. citri oriC plasmids can be considered promising tools for specific gene disruption by promoting homologous recombination in S. citri, a mollicute which probably lacks a functional RecA protein.
A Numerical Algorithm for Solving the Absolute Stability Problem in R3

The problem of absolute stability is one of the oldest open problems in the theory of control. For low-order systems, the most general results were obtained by Pyatnitskiy and Rapoport. They derived an implicit characterization of the "most destabilizing" nonlinearity using the maximum principle. In this paper, we show that their approach yields a simple and efficient numerical scheme for solving the problem in the case of third-order systems. This allows the determination of the critical value where stability is lost in a tractable and accurate fashion. This value is important in many practical applications and we believe that it can also be used to develop a deeper theoretical understanding of this interesting problem.