Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MEDFLY AREAWIDE STERILE INSECT TECHNIQUE PROGRAMMES FOR PREVENTION, SUPPRESSION OR ERADICATION: THE IMPORTANCE OF MATING BEHAVIOR STUDIES

Abstract The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is amongst the most non-disruptive pest control methods. Unlike some other biologically-based methods it is species specific, does not release exotic agents into new environments and does not even introduce new genetic material into existing populations as the released organisms are not self-replicating. However, the SIT is only effective when integrated on an areawide basis, addressing the total population of the pest, irrespective of its distribution. There has been considerable progress in the development and integrated application of the SIT against the Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly), Ceratitis capitata, as reflected by operational programs for prevention, suppression and eradication of this pest. There is however, considerable scope for improving the efficiency of medfly SIT, an indispensable requirement for increased involvement of the private sector in any future application. One way to achieve this has been the development of genetic sexing strains, making it possible to release only sterile males. Another is improving sterile male performance through a better understanding of the sexual behavior of this insect. Unlike other insects for which the SIT has been successfully applied, medfly has a complex lek-based mating system in which the females exert the mate choice selecting among aggregated and displaying wild and sterile males. With the objective of developing a better understanding of medfly mating behavior, an FAO/IAEA Coordinated Research Project was carried out from 1994 to 1999. Some of the resulting work conducted during this period with the participation of research teams from ten countries is reported in this issue.
SemEval-2016 Task 6: Detecting Stance in Tweets

Here for the ﬁrst time we present a shared task on detecting stance from tweets: given a tweet and a target entity (person, organization, etc.), automatic natural language systems must determine whether the tweeter is in favor of the given target, against the given target, or whether neither inference is likely. The target of interest may or may not be referred to in the tweet, and it may or may not be the target of opinion. Two tasks are proposed. Task A is a traditional supervised classiﬁcation task where 70% of the annotated data for a target is used as training and the rest for testing. For Task B, we use as test data all of the instances for a new target (not used in task A) and no training data is provided. Our shared task received submissions from 19 teams for Task A and from 9 teams for Task B. The highest clas-siﬁcation F-score obtained was 67.82 for Task A and 56.28 for Task B. However, systems found it markedly more difﬁcult to infer stance towards the target of interest from tweets that express opinion towards another entity.
The Association between Depressive Symptoms and Physical Diseases in Switzerland: A Cross-Sectional General Population Study

Objective: To estimate the association between depressive symptoms and physical diseases in Switzerland, as respective findings might inform about future estimates of mental and physical health care costs. Methods: A population-based study, using data from the Swiss Health Survey collected by computer-assisted telephone interviews and additional written questionnaires during the year 2007 (n = 18,760) in Switzerland. The multistage stratified random sample included subjects aged 15 years and older, living in a private Swiss household with a telephone connection. Complete data were available for 14,348 subjects (51% of all subjects reached by telephone). Logistic regression analyses were used to estimate the associations between depressive symptoms and any physical disease, or a specific physical disease out of 13 non-communicable physical diseases assessed with a self-report checklist on common physical diseases. Analyses were adjusted for sex, age, education, occupation, and household income. Results: In the adjusted models, depressive symptoms were associated with arthrosis and arthritis [Odds Ratio (OR) = 1.79, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.28-2.50] and any physical disease (OR = 1.67, 95% CI = 1.33-2.10) after controlling for multiple testing. Conclusion: Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the comorbidity of depressive symptoms and arthrosis and arthritis in Switzerland and might have implications for more precise future estimates of mental and physical health care costs.
Performance comparison of layer 3 switches in cases of flow- and topology-driven connection setup

The layer 3 switch enables us to transmit IP datagrams fast using the cut-through technique. There are mainly two cases in establishing connections; one is the flow-driven case and the other is the topology-driven one. In this paper, we analyze the cut-through rate, the datagram waiting time and the mis-order rate as performance measure of both cases and compare these performances. In the analysis, by using interrupted Bernoulli process (IBP), we model the arrival process of IP flow and IP datagram from each source. Furthermore, we investigate impacts of the arrival rate and the average IP flow length on the performance.
Cellular senescence in human myoblasts is overcome by human telomerase reverse transcriptase and cyclin‐dependent kinase 4: consequences in aging muscle and therapeutic strategies for muscular dystrophies

Cultured human myoblasts fail to immortalize following the introduction of telomerase. The availability of an immortalization protocol for normal human myoblasts would allow one to isolate cellular models from various neuromuscular diseases, thus opening the possibility to develop and test novel therapeutic strategies. The parameters limiting the efficacy of myoblast transfer therapy (MTT) could be assessed in such models. Finally, the presence of an unlimited number of cell divisions, and thus the ability to clone cells after experimental manipulations, reduces the risks of insertional mutagenesis by many orders of magnitude. This opportunity for genetic modification provides an approach for creating a universal donor that has been altered to be more therapeutically useful than its normal counterpart. It can be engineered to function under conditions of chronic damage (which are very different than the massive regeneration conditions that recapitulate normal development), and to overcome the biological problems such as cell death and failure to proliferate and migrate that limit current MTT strategies. We describe here the production and characterization of a human myogenic cell line, LHCN‐M2, that has overcome replicative aging due to the expression of telomerase and cyclin‐dependent kinase 4. We demonstrate that it functions as well as young myoblasts in xenotransplant experiments in immunocompromized mice under conditions of regeneration following muscle damage.
Analytical approximations of fractional delays: Lagrange interpolators and allpass filters

We propose in this paper a new point of view which unifies two well known filter families for approximating ideal fractional delay filters: Lagrange interpolator filters (LIF) and Thiran allpass filters. We achieve this unification by approximating the ideal Fourier transform of the fractional delay according to two different Pade approximations: series expansions and continued fraction expansions, and by proving that both approximations correspond exactly either to the LIF family or to the allpass delay filters family. This leads to an efficient modular implementation of LIFs.
Comorbidity-Adjusted Survival in Early Stage Lung Cancer Patients Treated with Hypofractionated Proton Therapy

Objective. To determine the influence of comorbidity on survival in early-stage lung cancer patients treated with proton radiotherapy, using the Charlson Comorbidity Index. Study Design and Setting. Fifty-four non-small-cell lung cancer patients, treated prospectively in a phase II clinical trial with hypofractionated proton therapy, were analyzed retrospectively to assess their burden of comorbid disease as expressed by Charlson Comorbidity Index. Using the Charlson Comorbidity Index method, a predicted survival curve based on comorbidity was formulated and compared to the observed mortality from causes other than lung cancer in the study population. Results. The study population had an average age score of 2.8 and an average Charlson Comorbidity Index of 4.7. Predicted survival was calculated to be 67% and 50% at 2 and 4 years, respectively. Actual comorbidity-specific survival at 2 and 4 years was 64% and 45%, respectively. The observed survival fell within the 95% confidence intervals of the predicted survival at all time points up to 5 years. Conclusion. Predicted mortality from concurrent disease, based on Charlson Comorbidity Index, correlated well with observed comorbidity-specific mortality. This helps substantiate the accuracy of the data coding in cause of death and strengthens previously reported disease-specific survival rates.
Completions of quantum coordinate rings

Given an iterated skew polynomial ring C[y 1 ; τ 1 , δ 1 ]. [y n ;τ n ,δ n ] over a complete local ring C with maximal ideal m, we prove, under suitable assumptions, that the completion at the ideal m+(y 1 , y 2 ;., y n ) is an iterated skew power series ring. Under further conditions, the completion becomes a local, noetherian, Auslander regular domain. Applicable examples include quantum matrices, quantum symplectic spaces, and quantum Euclidean spaces.
An Analytic Hierarchy Process Contingency Analysis of Factors Affecting the Emigration Decision of Medical Doctors in Turkey

While the importance of explicitly identifying and considering contingent factors such as decision content and context is widely accepted as a way to ensure the validity of the decision analysis for the specific task at hand, few studies include this. This research uses a contingency theoretical approach to study factors affecting the emigration decision of medical doctors (MDs) for the specific case of Turkey. The motivation for conducting this study arises from the observation that the growing trend in emigration among MDs from Turkey is having a significant impact on the country’s healthcare system. Dealing with the emigration of MDs is crucial for ensuring an effective and sustainable healthcare system, especially in terms of the availability of services, satisfaction, and employment of the healthcare staff. Contextual factors were explicitly identified through consultation with experts, while the generic factors were retrieved from the specialized medical migration literature. The Analytic Hierarchy Process method was utilized to prioritize the factors. Seventy-three participants were surveyed about their intention to either study or work abroad. The findings reveal that low remuneration and anxiety about their future due to the political situation in the country constitute the two most important factors driving the decision to emigrate.
Fusion of audio and motion information on HMM-based highlight extraction for baseball games

This paper aims to extract baseball game highlights based on audio-motion integrated cues. In order to better describe different audio and motion characteristics in baseball game highlights, we propose a novel representation method based on likelihood models. The proposed likelihood models measure the "likeliness" of low-level audio features and motion features to a set of predefined audio types and motion categories, respectively. Our experiments show that using the proposed likelihood representation is more robust than using low-level audio/motion features to extract the highlight. With the proposed likelihood models, we then construct an integrated feature representation by symmetrically fusing the audio and motion likelihood models. Finally, we employ a hidden Markov model (HMM) to model and detect the transition of the integrated representation for highlight segments. A series of experiments have been conducted on a 12-h video database to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and show that the proposed framework achieves promising results over a variety of baseball game sequences.
Status of Superconducting Fault Current Limiter in Italy: Final Results From the In-Field Testing Activity and Design of the 9 kV/15.6 MVA Device

Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico-RSE S.p.A. has recently accomplished a more than two-year-long in-field activity on the first Italian superconducting fault current limiter (SFCL). In order to carry out the in-field activity, a 9-kV/3.4-MVA SFCL device was installed as single feeder protection inside the Milan MV distribution grid; further to this first success, the development of a new device to be installed in the same substation, but as a transformer protection, has been already initiated. After having briefly summarized the final result of the in-field activity on the 9-kV/3.4-MVA device, this paper is mainly focused on the new 9-kV/15.6-MVA upgraded device: in particular, the first small-scale HTS winding prototypes will be described and the power tests implemented to validate their performances will be discussed. The test results allowed to identify the best layout, consisting in two parallel-connected coaxially arranged 2G windings, each made of two layers anti-inductively wound on a fiberglass cylinder, and each featuring a total 2G tape amount of 96 m. The actual research plan foresees to install the upgraded device in the live grid in 2016.
Mechanistic Model for Cancer Growth and Response to Chemotherapy

Cancer treatment has developed over the years; however not all patients respond to this treatment, and therefore further research is needed. In this paper, we employ mathematical modeling to understand the behavior of cancer and its interaction with therapy. We study a drug delivery and drug-cell interaction model along with cell proliferation. Due to the fact that cancer cells grow when there are enough nutrients and oxygen, proliferation can be a barrier against a response to therapy. To understand the effect of this factor, we perform numerical simulations of the model for different values of the parameters with a continuous delivery of the drug. The numerical results showed that cancer dies after short apoptotic cycles if the cancer is highly vascularized or if the penetration of the drug is high. This suggests promoting angiogenesis or perfusion of the drug. This result is similar to the situation where proliferation is not considered since the constant release of drug overcomes the growth of the cells and thus the effect of proliferation can be neglected.
Warming is Driving Decreases in Snow Fractions While Runoff Efficiency Remains Mostly Unchanged in Snow-Covered Areas of the Western United States

AbstractWinter snowfall and accumulation is an important component of the surface water supply in the western United States. In these areas, increasing winter temperatures T associated with global warming can influence the amount of winter precipitation P that falls as snow S. In this study we examine long-term trends in the fraction of winter P that falls as S (Sfrac) for 175 hydrologic units (HUs) in snow-covered areas of the western United States for the period 1951–2014. Because S is a substantial contributor to runoff R across most of the western United States, we also examine long-term trends in water-year runoff efficiency [computed as water-year R/water-year P (Reff)] for the same 175 HUs. In that most S records are short in length, we use model-simulated S and R from a monthly water balance model. Results for Sfrac indicate long-term negative trends for most of the 175 HUs, with negative trends for 139 (~79%) of the HUs being statistically significant at a 95% confidence level (p = 0.05). Additio.
Aggregate path index for incremental Web view maintenance

As Web data keeps growing in an explosive way, Web queries need to be materialized to achieve fast query response time. However, developing efficient maintenance techniques for materialized views over dynamic Web data sources is more challenging than in the traditional database context. In this paper, given a Web view specified in XQL, we propose an aggregation path index structure to hold a collection of "qualified" objects with respect to the query pattern. By utilizing the pre-computed auxiliary information stored in such an index, our algorithms show that Web view maintenance can be done more efficiently. Cost analysis and experimental studies on the advantages of our incremental maintenance approach compared to state-of-art solutions illustrate the performance gains of APIX.
Does Management Matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this, the authors ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms, providing free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen set of treatment plants and compared their performance to the control plants. They find that adopting these management practices had three main effects. First, it raised average productivity by 11 percent through improved quality and efficiency and reduced inventory. Second, it increased decentralization of decision making, as better information flow enabled owners to delegate more decisions to middle managers. Third, it increased the use of computers, necessitated by the data collection and analysis involved in modern management. Since these practices were profitable this raises the question of why firms had not adopted these before. Their results suggest that informational barriers were a primary factor in explaining this lack of adoption. Modern management is a technology that diffuses slowly between firms, with many Indian firms initially unaware of its existence or impact. Since competition was limited by constraints on firm entry and growth, badly managed firms were not rapidly driven from the market.
Current and Future AAC Research Considerations for Adults with Acquired Cognitive and Communication Impairments

ABSTRACT Adults with acquired language impairments secondary to stroke, traumatic brain injury, and neurodegenerative diseases are candidates for communication supports outside of the traditional restoration-based approaches to intervention. Recent research proves repeatedly that augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) provides a means for participation, engagement, conversation, and message transfer when individuals can no longer expect full return of pre-morbid communication skills and that inclusion of communication supports should begin early. We discuss current research and future directions for integrated systems of technical supports that include low-technology, high tech, and partner-dependent strategies for adults with severe and chronic aphasia, cognitive-communication problems resulting from traumatic brain injuries, and primary progressive aphasia.
Remote ischemic preconditioning of the heart: protective responses in functional and biophysical properties of cardiac mitochondria.

UNLABELLED Remote ischemic preconditioning (RIP)-induced protection of myocardial energetics was well documented on the level of tissue, but data concerning the involvement of mitochondria were missing. We aimed at the identification of changes in membrane properties and respiratory functions induced in rat heart mitochondria by RIP. Experiments were performed on 46 male Wistar rats divided into control and RIP-treated groups of 21 animals each. Blood flow in the occluded area was recorded by MRI angiography in four animals. RIP protocol comprised of three successive 5-min occlusions each followed by 5-min reperfusions of descending branches of the right hind limb femoral artery. The efficacy of RIP was evaluated as the extent of RIP-induced protection against damage to the functions of mitochondria isolated by differential centrifugation after 30-min global ischemia followed by 40-min reperfusion of the hearts in Langendorff mode. ASSESSMENTS mitochondrial membrane fluidity with a fluorescent probe DPH, CoQ(9) and CoQ(10) with HPLC, mitochondrial respiration with the Oxygraph-2k (Oroboros). Results revealed that RIP was affecting the mitochondria. The immediate protection conferred by RIP involves beneficial and prognostically significant effects: a total elimination of ischemia/reperfusion-induced depression of mitochondrial membrane fluidity and a trend for better preservation of mitochondrial state 3 respiration.
Back to RGB: 3D Tracking of Hands and Hand-Object Interactions Based on Short-Baseline Stereo

We present a novel solution to the problem of 3D tracking of the articulated motion of human hand(s), possibly in interaction with other objects. The vast majority of contemporary relevant work capitalizes on depth information provided by RGBD cameras. In this work, we show that accurate and efficient 3D hand tracking is possible, even for the case of RGB stereo. A straightforward approach for solving the problem based on such input would be to first recover depth and then apply a state of the art depth-based 3D hand tracking method. Unfortunately, this does not work well in practice because the stereo-based, dense 3D reconstruction of hands is far less accurate than the one obtained by RGBD cameras. Our approach bypasses 3D reconstruction and follows a completely different route: 3D hand tracking is formulated as an optimization problem whose solution is the hand configuration that maximizes the color consistency between the two views of the hand. We demonstrate the applicability of our method for real time tracking of a single hand, of a hand manipulating an object and of two interacting hands. The method has been evaluated quantitatively using the same datasets as relevant, state of the art RGBD-based approaches. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed stereo-based method performs equally well to its RGBD-based competitors, and in some cases, it even outperforms them.
Myocardial perfusion and ventricular function measurements during total coronary artery occlusion in humans. A comparison with rest and exercise radionuclide studies.

BACKGROUND The purpose of this investigation was to compare the magnitude of change in myocardial perfusion and function during exercise with that obtained during total coronary artery occlusion. Radionuclide studies are widely used for the diagnosis and determination of prognosis in patients with suspected or known coronary artery disease. These studies are based on the premise that the relative deficit of coronary blood flow, which is induced by exercise and recognized as increased demand, relates to the jeopardy experienced by the decrease or sudden absolute interruption of coronary blood flow that is recognized as decreased supply and is associated with coronary stenosis or total coronary artery occlusion. The magnitude of exercise-induced perfusion and function abnormalities compared with those induced by total coronary artery occlusion in humans has not been previously reported. METHODS AND RESULTS We prospectively studied 20 patients with > or = 50% diameter stenosis documented by quantitative coronary angiography in at least one vessel. A same-day rest/exercise sestamibi myocardial function and perfusion study was performed within 24 hours before percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty. At 1 minute after balloon inflation, while the vessel was occluded, sestamibi was injected, and a myocardial perfusion and function study was performed. Perfusion defect size was greater during occlusion (28 +/- 3%) than during exercise (13 +/- 2%) (P < .01). Ejection fraction was greater during exercise (53 +/- 3%) compared with values measured during occlusion (41 +/- 2%) (P < .01). CONCLUSIONS Physiological abnormalities induced by coronary occlusion are greater than those that occur during exercise, thereby indicating that stress-induced ischemia may not reflect the total potential myocardium in jeopardy from a stenotic lesion, if sudden occlusion occurs.