Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Higher Prevalence Rate of Campylobacter in Retail Beef Livers Compared to Other Beef and Pork Meat Cuts

The objectives of this study were to determine the prevalence of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli in retail beef, beef livers, and pork meats purchased from the Tulsa (OK, USA) area and to further characterize the isolates obtained through antimicrobial susceptibility testing. A total of 97 chilled retail beef (50 beef livers and 47 other cuts), and 100 pork samples were collected. The prevalence of Campylobacter in beef livers was 39/50 (78%), while no Campylobacter was isolated from the other beef cuts. The prevalence in pork samples was 2/100 (2%). A total of 108 Campylobacter isolates (102 beef livers isolates and six pork isolates) were subjected to antimicrobial resistance profiling against sixteen different antimicrobials that belong to eight different antibiotic classes. Of the six pork Campylobacter coli isolates, four showed resistance to all antimicrobials tested. Among the beef liver isolates, the highest antibiotic resistances were to tetracyclines and β-lactams, while the lowest resistances were to macrolides, aminoglycosides, lincosamides, and phenicols. Resistances to the fluoroquinolone, macrolide, aminoglycoside, tetracycline, β-lactam, lincosamide, and phenicol antibiotic classes were significantly higher in Campylobacter coli than Campylobacter jejuni isolates. Multidrug Resistance (MDR) among the 102 Campylobacter (33 Campylobacter jejuni and 69 Campylobacter coli) beef liver isolates was significantly higher in Campylobacter coli (62%) than Campylobacter jejuni (39%). The high prevalence of Campylobacter in retail beef livers and their antimicrobial resistance raise concern about the safety of these retail products.
Helicobacter Pylori Infection in Children

Helicobacter pylori infection is a common problem in pediatric practice, and its acquisition is related with poor socioeconomic conditions. Although the organism is thought to be responsible for many diseases, only a handful of them have a direct causal relationship. At present, only a small number of children with well-defined clinical syndromes are benefited from testing and treatment. The treatment should include at least two antibiotics with a proton pump inhibitor.
Annotating and Learning Event Durations in Text

This article presents our work on constructing a corpus of news articles in which events are annotated for estimated bounds on their duration, and automatically learning from this corpus. We describe the annotation guidelines, the event classes we categorized to reduce gross discrepancies in inter-annotator judgments, and our use of normal distributions to model vague and implicit temporal information and to measure inter-annotator agreement for these event duration distributions. We then show that machine learning techniques applied to this data can produce coarse-grained event duration information automatically, considerably outperforming a baseline and approaching human performance. The methods described here should be applicable to other kinds of vague but substantive information in texts.
Memory Management Techniques for Large-Scale Persistent-Main-Memory Systems

Storage Class Memory (SCM) is a novel class of memory technologies that promise to revolutionize database architectures. SCM is byte-addressable and exhibits latencies similar to those of DRAM, while being non-volatile. Hence, SCM could replace both main memory and storage, enabling a novel single-level database architecture without the traditional I/O bottleneck. Fail-safe persistent SCM allocation can be considered conditio sine qua non for enabling this novel architecture paradigm for database management systems. In this paper we present PAllocator, a fail-safe persistent SCM allocator whose design emphasizes high concurrency and capacity scalability. Contrary to previous works, PAllocator thoroughly addresses the important challenge of persistent memory fragmentation by implementing an efficient defragmentation algorithm. We show that PAllocator outperforms state-of-the-art persistent allocators by up to one order of magnitude, both in operation throughput and recovery time, and enables up to 2.39x higher operation throughput on a persistent B-Tree.
ASCA and ROSAT observations of nearby cluster cooling flows

ABSTRA C T We present a detailed analysis of the X-ray properties of the cooling flows in a sample of nearby, X-ray-bright clusters of galaxies using high-quality ASCA spectra and ROSAT X-ray images. We demonstrate the need for multiphase models to consistently explain the spectral and imaging X-ray data for the clusters. The mass deposition rates of the cooling flows, independently determined from the ASCA spectra and ROSAT images, exhibit reasonable agreement. We confirm the presence of intrinsic X-ray absorption in the clusters using a variety of spectral models. We also report detections of 100-mm infrared emission, spatially coincident with the cooling flows, in several of the systems studied. The observed infrared fluxes and flux limits are in good agreement with the predicted values owing to reprocessed X-ray emission from the cooling flows. We present precise measurements of the abundances of iron, magnesium, silicon and sulphur in the central regions of the Virgo and Centaurus clusters. Our results firmly favour models in which a high mass fraction (70‐80 per cent) of the iron in the X-ray gas in these regions originates from Type Ia supernovae. Finally, we present a series of methods which may be used to estimate the ages of cooling flows from Xray data. The results for the present sample of clusters indicate ages of between 2.5 and 7 Gyr. If the ages of cooling flows are primarily set by subcluster merger events, then our results suggest that in the largest clusters, mergers with subclusters with masses of ,30 per cent of the final cluster mass are likely to disrupt cooling flows.
Tissue expression of PD-L1 mediates peripheral T cell tolerance

Programmed death 1 (PD-1), an inhibitory receptor expressed on activated lymphocytes, regulates tolerance and autoimmunity. PD-1 has two ligands: PD-1 ligand 1 (PD-L1), which is expressed broadly on hematopoietic and parenchymal cells, including pancreatic islet cells; and PD-L2, which is restricted to macrophages and dendritic cells. To investigate whether PD-L1 and PD-L2 have synergistic or unique roles in regulating T cell activation and tolerance, we generated mice lacking PD-L1 and PD-L2 (PD-L1/PD-L2−/− mice) and compared them to mice lacking either PD-L. PD-L1 and PD-L2 have overlapping functions in inhibiting interleukin-2 and interferon-γ production during T cell activation. However, PD-L1 has a unique and critical role in controlling self-reactive T cells in the pancreas. Our studies with bone marrow chimeras demonstrate that PD-L1/PD-L2 expression only on antigen-presenting cells is insufficient to prevent the early onset diabetes that develops in PD-L1/PD-L2−/− non-obese diabetic mice. PD-L1 expression in islets protects against immunopathology after transplantation of syngeneic islets into diabetic recipients. PD-L1 inhibits pathogenic self-reactive CD4+ T cell–mediated tissue destruction and effector cytokine production. These data provide evidence that PD-L1 expression on parenchymal cells rather than hematopoietic cells protects against autoimmune diabetes and point to a novel role for PD-1–PD-L1 interactions in mediating tissue tolerance.
Why 'Good' Firms Do Bad Things: The Effects of High Aspirations, High Expectations and Prominence on the Incidence of Corporate Illegality

Recent high-profile corporate scandals involving prominent, high-performing firms cast doubt on assertions that the costs of getting caught decrease the likelihood such high performers will act illegally. We explain this paradox by using theories of loss aversion and hubris to examine a sample of S&P 500 manufacturers. Results demonstrate that both performance above internal aspirations and performance above external expectations increase the likelihood of illegal activities. The sample firms’ prominence enhanced the effects of performance above expectations on the likelihood of illegal actions. Prominent and less prominent firms displayed different patterns of behavior when their performance failed to meet aspirations.
Numeracy as a precursor to pro-social behavior: The impact of numeracy and presentation format on the cognitive mechanisms underlying donation decisions

Donation requests often convey numerical information about the people in need. In two studies we investigated the effects of numeracy and presentation format on the underlying affective and cognitive mechanisms of donation decisions. In Study 1, participants were presented with information about a victim in need, either in a frequency format or in a percentage format. In Study 2, we manipulated the identifiability and number of target victims. Our results demonstrate that donations of individuals lower in numeracy were more susceptible to changes in numeric presentation format than those higher in numeracy. Importantly, the underlying mechanisms for donations differed by numeracy. Whereas the mental image of the victim influenced donation decisions of less numerate people only, the estimated impact of a donation was positively correlated with donation amounts for both more and less numerate individuals.
The potential of domestic electric vehicles to contribute to Power System Operation through vehicle to grid technology

The domestic use of electric vehicles (EVs) is expected to grow significantly over the next two decades. Wide scale use of EVs will have a significant impact on electricity loads and could risk of overstretching the power system if steps are not taken to prevent this. On the positive side, the charging of vehicle batteries could be regarded as an excellent opportunity to create responsive load as part of a demand side management (DSM) approach to network operation. DSM has been regarded as one of the most effective and efficient ways to solve problems associated with renewable energy integration. For the purposes of quantifying the potential impact of widespread electric vehicles use on the power system it is essential to understand how and when conventional vehicles are used at the present time. The Time of Use UK Survey 2000 contains valuable information relating to privately owned car use. Analysis of data shows that privately owned vehicles are utilised for only 5.2% of the time, in principal making them available for the remaining 94.8% of time for load control purposes. EV batteries could even be discharged briefly at times of peak system demand through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. This article quantifies the potential for responsive load from EVs and outlines an appropriate control system to maximize the value of this. Overall, there were 28 million licensed cars registered in Great Britain at the end of 2008 with 89% of them being privately owned [1], indicating the considerable scope for responsive load and V2G.
Eavesdropping-Resilient OFDM System Using Sorted Subcarrier Interleaving

In this paper, we present a novel eavesdropping-resilient OFDM system through sorted subcarrier interleaving. The transmitter interleaves subcarriers in each OFDM signal according to its dynamic channel state information (CSI) to the legitimate receiver. More specifically, subcarriers are interleaved according to the sorted order of their instantaneous channel gains that are observed at the transmitter. Based on channel reciprocity, the legitimate receiver can derive the interleaving pattern initiated by the transmitter through its local channel estimate, and then de-interleave the received signals. In contrast, since spatially separated wireless channels in rich multipath environments are independent of each other, an eavesdropper at a third location cannot follow the dynamic subcarrier interleaving permutation, and thus fails to eavesdrop this transmission. Considering the imperfect reciprocity of noisy channel estimates at the legitimate terminals, only a subset of subcarriers in each OFDM signal is involved in the interleaving. A subcarrier selection algorithm is investigated to realize a trade-off between the eavesdropping resilience and transmission reliability. Theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulations have been provided to validate the proposed system. Compared with prior security enhancement schemes, the proposed approach requires only minor modifications to off-the-shelf systems and avoids additional resource consumption.
Analysis of Vitamin D Status in Major Depression

Objective. The goals of this study were to determine the serum level of 25 hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D), a vitamin D metabolite, in patients with recurrent depression, to assess risk factors for vitamin D deficiency, and to evaluate whether the severity of symptoms of depression and response to treatment were associated with serum vitamin 25(OH)D level. Method. Ninety-one patients 18 to 65 years of age meeting the ICD-10 criteria for recurrent depression were evaluated for depressive symptoms using the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. The control group consisted of 89 healthy subjects matched according to sex and age. Serum levels of 25(OH)D, parathyroid hormone (PTH), and calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (Ca2+) were determined in all group members. Results. A significantly decreased serum level of 25(OH)D was observed in the group of patients with recurrent depression compared with healthy subjects. PTH and Ca2+ levels were within the reference values in a substantial majority of patients. No correlation was found between 25(OH)D serum level and age, sex, height, body mass index, disease duration, number of depressive episodes, type of pharmacotherapy, or effectiveness of treatment. Conclusions. Low serum levels of 25(OH)D in patients with recurrent depression suggest that these patients are an important risk group for vitamin D deficiency. However, no relationship was found between these low levels of 25(OH)D and response to treatment for depression. Nevertheless, the results indicate the need to monitor the concentration and supplementation of products containing calciferol in such patients. (Journal of Psychiatric Practice2014;20:329–337)
Quality of Life in Patients with Focal Hyperhidrosis before and after Treatment with Botulinum Toxin A

The aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness of treatment with BTX-A in quality of life of patients suffering from primary focal hyperhidrosis. Materials and Methods. A total of 119 patients (62 females and 57 males) between 18 and 65 years suffering from moderate to severe focal hyperhidrosis were treated with BTX-A. Thirty-nine patients suffered from axillary hyperhidrosis, 47 patients from palmar hyperhidrosis, 12 patients from plantar hyperhidrosis, and 21 patients from palmar and plantar hyperhidrosis. A baseline and posttreated examination of patients 6 months after BTX-A is included. The Hyperhidrosis Disease Severity Scale (HDSS) was chosen to assess the disease severity and the modified Dermatology Life Quality Index was used (DLQI) to assess the quality of life. Results. Quality of life showed a significant improvement after treatment with BTX-A. The total DLQI score resulted significantly lower than the basal value (P < 0.0001). The seriousness of hyperhidrosis significantly decreased after the treatment (P < 0.0001). In addition, there was notable difference between the posttreatment DLQI scores and pretreatment severity of hyperhidrosis by sex. Conclusions. Treatment with BTX-A led to the reduction of disease severity and improvement of quality of life, while it is a safe, easy to use method with minimal side effects.
Model Driven Segmentation of Articulating Humans in Laplacian Eigenspace

We propose a general approach using Laplacian Eigenmaps and a graphical model of the human body to segment 3D voxel data of humans into different articulated chains. In the bottom-up stage, the voxels are transformed into a high-dimensional (6D or less) Laplacian Eigenspace (LE) of the voxel neighborhood graph. We show that LE is effective at mapping voxels on long articulated chains to nodes on smooth 1D curves that can be easily discriminated, and prove these properties using representative graphs. We fit 1D splines to voxels belonging to different articulated chains such as the limbs, head and trunk, and determine the boundary between splines using the spline fitting error. A top-down probabilistic approach is then used to register the segmented chains, utilizing their mutual connectivity and individual properties. Our approach enables us to deal with complex poses such as those where the limbs form loops. We use the segmentation results to automatically estimate the human body models. While we use human subjects in our experiments, the method is fairly general and can be applied to voxel-based segmentation of any articulated object composed of long chains. We present results on real and synthetic data that illustrate the usefulness of this approach.
An Extended Compression Format for the Optimization of Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpM × V) has been characterized as one of the most significant computational scientific kernels. The key algorithmic characteristic of the SpM × V kernel, that inhibits it from achieving high performance, is its very low flop:byte ratio. In this paper, we present a compressed storage format, called Compressed Sparse eXtended (CSX), that is able to detect and encode simultaneously multiple commonly encountered substructures inside a sparse matrix. Relying on aggressive compression techniques of the sparse matrix's indexing structure, CSX is able to considerably reduce the memory footprint of a sparse matrix, alleviating the pressure to the memory subsystem. In a diverse set of sparse matrices, CSX was able to provide a more than 40 percent average performance improvement over the standard CSR format in SMP architectures and surpassed 20 percent improvement in NUMA systems, significantly outperforming other CSR alternatives. Additionally, it was able to adapt successfully to the nonzero element structure of the considered matrices, exhibiting very stable performance. Finally, in the context of a “real-life” multiphysics simulation software, CSX accelerated the SpM × V component nearly 40 percent and the total solver time approximately 15 percent.
Binary Black Hole Mergers from Planet-like Migrations

If supermassive black holes (BHs) are generically present in galaxy centers, and if galaxies are built up through hierarchical merging, BH binaries are at least temporary features of most galactic bulges. Observations suggest, however, that binary BHs are rare, pointing toward a binary lifetime far shorter than the Hubble time. We show that, almost regardless of the detailed mechanism, all stellar dynamical processes are too slow in reducing the orbital separation once orbital velocities in the binary exceed the virial velocity of the system. We propose that a massive gas disk surrounding a BH binary can effect its merger rapidly, in a scenario analogous to the orbital decay of super-Jovian planets due to a proto-planetary disk. As in the case of planets, gas accretion onto the secondary (here a supermassive BH) is integrally connected with its inward migration. Such accretion would give rise to quasar activity. BH binary mergers could therefore be responsible for many or most quasars.
Storm water retention and actual evapotranspiration performances of experimental green roofs in French oceanic climate

Green roofs are promising urban management tools from the standpoint of both rainwater management and microclimatology. They are considered as a storm water mitigation technique and may also favour evapotranspiration fluxes, which can be beneficial for urban comfort during summer periods. In France, however, water retention performance of green roofs remains unknown, and published values are often unsuitable. Six experimental roofs, including two thicknesses of growing media, three types of vegetation cover and bare surfaces, were monitored for two years in Nantes and compared to an experimental gravel flat roof. The thickest media combined with the most densely vegetated cover yields the best results in terms of storm water mitigation and actual evapotranspiration. In winter, the rainwater retention performance is clearly dependent on the type of experimental roof vegetation. This kind of experimental set-up is well suited to assisting urban planners design tools for storm water mitigation in buildings.
Percutaneous fixation with Kirschner wires versus volar locking plate fixation in adults with dorsally displaced fracture of distal radius: randomised controlled trial

Objectives To compare the clinical effectiveness of Kirschner wire fixation with locking plate fixation for patients with a dorsally displaced fracture of the distal radius. Design A multicentre two arm parallel group assessor blind randomised controlled trial with 1:1 treatment allocation. Setting 18 trauma centres in the United Kingdom. Participants 461 adults with a dorsally displaced fracture of the distal radius within 3 cm of the radiocarpal joint that required surgical fixation. Patients were excluded if the surgeon thought that the surface of the wrist joint was so badly displaced it required open reduction. Interventions Kirschner wire fixation: wires are passed through the skin over the dorsal aspect of the distal radius and into the bone to hold the fracture in the correct anatomical position. Locking plate fixation: a locking plate is applied through an incision over the volar (palm) aspect of the wrist and secured to the bone with fixed angle locking screws. Main outcome measures Primary outcome measure: validated patient rated wrist evaluation (PRWE). This rates wrist function in two (equally weighted) sections concerning the patient’s experience of pain and disability to give a score out of 100. Secondary outcomes: disabilities of arm, shoulder, and hand (DASH) score, the EuroQol (EQ-5D), and complications related to the surgery. Results The baseline characteristics of the two groups were well balanced, and over 90% of patients completed follow-up. The wrist function of both groups of patients improved by 12 months. There was no clinically relevant difference in the patient rated wrist score at three, six, or 12 months (difference in favour of the plate group was −1.3, 95% confidence interval −4.5 to 1.8; P=0.40). Nor was there a clinically relevant difference in health related quality of life or the number of complications in each group. Conclusions Contrary to the existing literature, and against the rapidly increasing use of locking plate fixation, this trial found no difference in functional outcome in patients with dorsally displaced fractures of the distal radius treated with Kirschner wires or volar locking plates. Kirschner wire fixation, however, is cheaper and quicker to perform. Trial registration Current Controlled Trials ISCRTN 31379280. UKCRN 8956.
Negative Bias Temperature Instability: Estimation and Design for Improved Reliability of Nanoscale Circuits

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has become one of the major causes for temporal reliability degradation of nanoscale circuits. In this paper, we analyze the temporal delay degradation of logic circuits due to NBTI. We show that knowing the threshold-voltage degradation of a single transistor due to NBTI, one can predict the performance degradation of a circuit with a reasonable degree of accuracy. We also propose a sizing algorithm, taking the NBTI-affected performance degradation into account to ensure the reliability of nanoscale circuits for a given period of time. Experimental results on several benchmark circuits show that with an average of 8.7% increase in area, one can ensure a reliable performance of circuits for ten years