Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Statistical and computational trade-offs in estimation of sparse principal components

In recent years, sparse principal component analysis has emerged as an extremely popular dimension reduction technique for high-dimensional data. The theoretical challenge, in the simplest case, is to estimate the leading eigenvector of a population covariance matrix under the assumption that this eigenvector is sparse. An impressive range of estimators have been proposed; some of these are fast to compute, while others are known to achieve the minimax optimal rate over certain Gaussian or sub-Gaussian classes. In this paper, we show that, under a widely-believed assumption from computational complexity theory, there is a fundamental trade-off between statistical and computational performance in this problem. More precisely, working with new, larger classes satisfying a restricted covariance concentration condition, we show that there is an effective sample size regime in which no randomised polynomial time algorithm can achieve the minimax optimal rate. We also study the theoretical performance of a (polynomial time) variant of the well-known semidefinite relaxation estimator, revealing a subtle interplay between statistical and computational efficiency.
Poor positive predictive value of serum immunoglobulin G4 concentrations in the diagnosis of immunoglobulin G4-related sclerosing disease

Background Immunoglobulin G4 (IgG4)-related sclerosing disease is a recently described clinicopathological entity with diverse manifestations including, amongst others, autoimmune pancreatitis, sclerosing cholangitis, sclerosing sialadenitis and retroperitoneal fibrosis. Elevated serum IgG4 concentration has been described as the hallmark of this condition with reported good sensitivity and specificity. Objective We sought to establish the utility of serum IgG4 concentrations in the diagnosis of IgG4-related sclerosing disease by determining how many serum samples with elevated IgG4 from an unselected population would originate from patients who fulfilled criteria for this diagnosis. Methods The clinical features and laboratory characteristics of patients whose serum IgG4 concentration was greater than 1.30 g/L were analysed retrospectively from a total of 1,258 IgG subclass measurements performed in a tertiary hospital diagnostic laboratory. Results Eighty patients (6.4%) had elevated IgG4 concentrations greater than 1.30 g/L. Nine of 61 patients had the diagnosis of IgG4-related sclerosing disease, giving a poor positive predictive value of 15%. The median serum IgG4 concentrations of those with and without IgG4-related sclerosing disease were 2.16 g/L and 1.86 g/L, respectively (p = 0.22). Conclusion Serum IgG4 concentration has poor positive predictive value in the diagnosis of IgG4-related sclerosing disease and, therefore, the clinical significance of elevated serum IgG4 concentration alone must be interpreted with caution.
The Institutionalization of Alternative Economies

This paper explores the institutionalization process of complementary currencies; understanding the institutionalization of alternative economies is key in order to assess their sustainability. Drawing from neo-institutional theory, the paper examines the objectification processes in a sample of Spanish and Greek recently formed time banks. The paper focuses on the rationalization stage, i.e. when rules, practices and symbols are embedded in the organization, and studies how symbols and norms establish the framework for social interaction and make the common space of action visible. The main finding of this paper is that timebanking is subject to multiple logics, both inter and intra time banks. These logics lead to adopt different organizational forms, promote disparate forms of actorhood, and adopt different pricing and accounting systems. Yet, these objects are not aligned with one another, and tensions between the symbolic and the functional are found. Institutionalization is not yet complete as there are still missing blended models that bridge multiple logics.
PEDESTRIAN DETECTION WITH RADAR AND COMPUTER VISION

This paper presents a method for detecting people on-board a moving vehicle. The perception of the environment is performed through the fusion of an automotive radar sensor and a monocular vision system. The fusion uses a two-step approach for efficient object detection. In the first step, a target-list is generated from the radar sensor. The items in the list are hypotheses for the presence of people. In a second step, hypotheses are proved by the vision system. This method is considerably faster than a sole image processing solution. For the covering abstract see ITRD E123380.
Dextromethorphan Mediated Bitter Taste Receptor Activation in the Pulmonary Circuit Causes Vasoconstriction

Activation of bitter taste receptors (T2Rs) in human airway smooth muscle cells leads to muscle relaxation and bronchodilation. This finding led to our hypothesis that T2Rs are expressed in human pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells and might be involved in regulating the vascular tone. RT-PCR was performed to reveal the expression of T2Rs in human pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells. Of the 25 T2Rs, 21 were expressed in these cells. Functional characterization was done by calcium imaging after stimulating the cells with different bitter agonists. Increased calcium responses were observed with most of the agonists, the largest increase seen for dextromethorphan. Previously in site-directed mutational studies, we have characterized the response of T2R1 to dextromethorphan, therefore, T2R1 was selected for further analysis in this study. Knockdown with T2R1 specific shRNA decreased mRNA levels, protein levels and dextromethorphan-induced calcium responses in pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells by up to 50%. To analyze if T2Rs are involved in regulating the pulmonary vascular tone, ex vivo studies using pulmonary arterial and airway rings were pursued. Myographic studies using porcine pulmonary arterial and airway rings showed that stimulation with dextromethorphan led to contraction of the pulmonary arterial and relaxation of the airway rings. This study shows that dextromethorphan, acting through T2R1, causes vasoconstrictor responses in the pulmonary circuit and relaxation in the airways.
A review of the status of satellite remote sensing and image processing techniques for mapping natural hazards and disasters

In the event of a natural disaster, remote sensing is a valuable source of spatial information and its utility has been proven on many occasions around the world. However, there are many different types of hazards experienced worldwide on an annual basis and their remote sensing solutions are equally varied. This paper addresses a number of data types and image processing techniques used to map and monitor earthquakes, faulting, volcanic activity, landslides, flooding, and wildfire, and the damages associated with each. Remote sensing is currently used operationally for some monitoring programs, though there are also difficulties associated with the rapid acquisition of data and provision of a robust product to emergency services as an end-user. The current status of remote sensing as a rapid-response data source is discussed, and some perspectives given on emerging airborne and satellite technologies.
Determining the preference threshold for a multicriteria decision support system through evolutionary modelling

This article uses the concepts of Genetic Algorithms and Transgenetic Algorithms associated to a Multicriteria Decision Support System for discrete alternatives, with the aim of better defining an important parameter of ranking, in this case, the preference threshold, p. This is one of the crucial parameters for the application of multicriteria methods of the French School of Multicriteria Decision Support that are embedded in that system. The use of Genetic Algorithms was shown to be an extremely useful source for helping decision analysts in the choice of values for the thresholds of transitivity. For future studies, an investigation of the possibility of using Genetic Algorithms to study variations in criteria weights in detail and/or the value of discordances is recommended. In addition, studies could be carried out on the pertinences of criteria weights in the context of the use of this fuzzy parameter used by Decision Support Systems. Key-words: Multicriteria decision support System. Genetic algorithms. Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm
Primary Thyroid Teratomas in Children: A Report of 11 Cases With a Proposal of Criteria for Their Diagnosis

Cervical teratomas are uncommon neoplasms, although the commonest neck tumors in newborns and infants. Presence of associated thyroid tissue often causes speculation as to the site of origin, ie, arising from within thyroid, adjacent soft tissue with secondary involvement of thyroid, or as innate part of a cervical teratoma. Twenty-eight cases of cervical teratomas were identified over 75 years, including 11 cases containing associated thyroid tissue. Clinical history, treatment, and follow-up were reviewed and the neoplasms analyzed regarding location, size, degree of maturity, and relative arrangement of thyroid and other tissues. All thyroid teratomas were congenital, measured 3.5 to 13.5 cm in diameter (median size, 6.9 cm), and were resected. Follow-up ranged from 1 to 45 years (median, 17 years) without recurrent disease in any patient. Neuroglial tissue predominated in 10 of 11 tumors. Intimate admixture of thyroid and other tissues with or without surrounding fibrous pseudocapsule was present in 8 cases, suggesting thyroid as origin. Histologic immaturity in congenital thyroid teratomas is not the harbinger of adverse behavior as seen in adolescents and adults. Intimate intermingling of thyroid tissue with teratoma and presence of a pseudocapsule seem to be the most significant criteria for establishing thyroid as origin.
University of Lugano at TREC 2015: Contextual Suggestion and Temporal Summarization Tracks

This technical report presents the work of the University of Lugano at TREC 2015 Contextual Suggestion and Temporal Summarization tracks. The first track that we report on, is the Contextual Suggestion. The goal of the Contextual Suggestion track is to develop systems that could generate user-specific suggestions that a user might potentially like. Our proposed method attempts to model the users’ behavior and interest using a classifier, and enrich the basic model using additional data sources. Our results illustrate that our proposed method performed very well in terms of all used evaluation metrics. The second track that we report on, is the Temporal Summarization that aims to develop systems that can detect useful, new, and timely updates about a certain event. Our proposed method selects sentences that are relevant and novel to a specific event with the aim to create a summary for this event. The results showed that the proposed method is very e↵ective in terms of Latency Comprehensiveness (LC). However, the approach did not manage to obtain a good performance in terms of Expected Latency Gain (ELG).
Cytotoxic Activity of Crude Extracts as well as of Pure Components from Jatropha Species, Plants Used Extensively in African Traditional Medicine

Extracts from Jatropha curcas, a plant used in African traditional medicine for various diseases, were tested for cytotoxic activity. The root extracts strongly reduced cell growth of tumor cells in vitro, a result consistent with the knowledge of the application of these plant extracts in traditional medicine, especially to cure/ameliorate cancer. A selection of pure diterpenoids existing in extracts from Jatropha species and isolated from J. curcas, for example, curcusone C, curcusone D, multidione, 15-epi-4Z-jatrogrossidentadion, 4Z-jatrogrossidentadion, 4E-jatrogrossidentadion, 2-hydroxyisojatrogrossidion, and 2-epi-hydroxyisojatrogrossidion, were likewise tested, and they also showed strong cytotoxic activity. It turned out that these extracts are highly active against L5178y mouse lymphoma cells and HeLa human cervix carcinoma cells, while they cause none or only very low activity against neuronal cell, for example, PC12. These data underscore that extracts from J. curcas or pure secondary metabolites from the plant are promising candidates to be anticancer drug, combined with low neuroactive effects.
Within tree variation of lignin, extractives, and microfibril angle coupled with the theoretical and near infrared modeling of microfibril angle

A theoretical model was built predicting the relationship between microfibril angle and lignin content at the Angstrom (A) level. Both theoretical and statistical examination of experimental data supports a square root transformation of lignin to predict microfibril angle. The experimental material used came from 10 longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) trees. Klason lignin (n=70), microfibril angle (n=70), and extractives (n=100) were measured and reported at different ring numbers and heights. All three traits were strongly influenced by ring age from pith while microfibril angle and extractives exhibited more of a height effect than lignin. As such, the multivariate response of the three traits were different in the axial direction than the radial direction supporting that care needs to be taken when defining juvenile wood within the tree. The root mean square error of calibration (RMSEC) for microfibril angle of the theoretical model (RMSEC = 9.8) was almost as low as the least squares regression model (RMSEC = 9.35). Microfibril angle calibrations were also built from NIR absorbance and showed a strong likeness to theoretical and experimental models (RMSEC = 9.0). As a result, theoretical and experimental work provided evidence that lignin content played a significant role in how NIR absorbance relates to microfibril angle. Additionally, the large variation in extractives content coupled with sampling procedure proved important when developing NIR based calibration equations for lignin and microfibril angle.
ERROR ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH WRITTEN ESSAY OF HIGHER EFL LEARNERS: A CASE STUDY

The aim of the research is to identify grammatical error and to investigate the most and the least of grammatical error occurred on the students’ English written essay. The approach of research is qualitative descriptive with descriptive analysis. The samples were taken from the essays made by 34 students in writing class. The findings resulted in: the most common error occurred was subject-verb agreement error and the score was 28, 25%. The second place of frequent error was on verb tense and form with 24, 66% as the score. The third was on spellings errors and the value is 17, 94%. The fourth was error on using auxiliaries and the score 9, 87%. The fifth was error on word order with the score was 8.07%. The rest error was applying passive voice with the score is 4.93%, articles (3.59%), prepositions (1.79%), and pronoun and run-on sentence with the same scores, 0. 45%. This may indicate that most students still made errors even for the usage of basic grammar rules in their writing. Keywords : developing essay ; grammatical error; writing
Making Trillion Correlations Feasible in Feature Grouping and Selection

Today, modern databases with “Big Dimensionality” are experiencing a growing trend. Existing approaches that require the calculations of pairwise feature correlations in their algorithmic designs have scored miserably on such databases, since computing the full correlation matrix (i.e., square of dimensionality in size) is computationally very intensive (i.e., million features would translate to trillion correlations). This poses a notable challenge that has received much lesser attention in the field of machine learning and data mining research. Thus, this paper presents a study to fill in this gap. Our findings on several established databases with big dimensionality across a wide spectrum of domains have indicated that an extremely small portion of the feature pairs contributes significantly to the underlying interactions and there exists feature groups that are highly correlated. Inspired by the intriguing observations, we introduce a novel learning approach that exploits the presence of sparse correlations for the efficient identifications of informative and correlated feature groups from big dimensional data that translates to a reduction in complexity from O(m2n) to O(mlogm + Kamn), where Ka ≪ min(m; n) generally holds. In particular, our proposed approach considers an explicit incorporation of linear and nonlinear correlation measures as constraints in the learning model. An efficient embedded feature selection strategy, designed to filter out the large number of non-contributing correlations that could otherwise confuse the classifier while identifying the correlated and informative feature groups, forms one of the highlights of our approach. We also demonstrated the proposed method on one-class learning, where notable speedup can be observed when solving one-class problem on big dimensional data. Further, to identify robust informative features with minimal sampling bias, our feature selection strategy embeds the V-fold cross validation in the learning model, so as to seek for features that exhibit stable or consistent performance accuracy on multiple data folds. Extensive empirical studies on both synthetic and several real-world datasets comprising up to 30 million dimensions are subsequently conducted to assess and showcase the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Conceptions of Culture and Person for Psychology

This article argues that the current popularity of culture in psychology is likely to continue in the future if the conception of the person that psychologists adopt includes culture as an integral part of human nature. This thesis is illustrated in a brief historical account. Although the current discourse in psychology is marked by a metatheoretical tension between natural and cultural science approaches to mind, a consensus is emerging that assumes a materialist (or physicalist) ontology, a Darwinian evolutionism, and cultural-historical embeddedness of psychological processes and their development in social context. In this emerging consensus, culture is conceptualized as a species-specific property of Homo sapiens, which transmits information not only genetically across generations, but also symbolically between and within generations. Culture is thus integral to the ongoing process of tool use and symbol manipulation. Contemporary issues in the culture-mind relation are discussed against this common background.
Association of Internet Supported Physical Activity with Academic Performance of Medical Students

Physical activity is known to decrease stress and improve academic performance (cognitive skills, attitudes and academic scores) in students as it increases the blood flow to the brain thereby increasing oxygenation of the neuronal tissues. This is specially applied in the students of medical universities where higher stress levels are recorded. Objective: To determine the role of internet supported physical activity in academic performance of medical students. The study design is Quasi Experimental Study conducted in a Medical University, Lahore for 6 months. Methods: A total of 100 students (age 18 – 25) were enrolled. Data were collected through pretested questionnaires and analyzed by frequency tables, cross tabulations and paired sample t-tests through SPSS version 16. Results: After the intervention was carried out, 91% of the students had noticed significant increases in their physical energy levels and stress levels were reduced in 79% of the students. A total of 52% of students lost their weight after the intervention out of which 44% had also claimed a decrease in their stress levels. Academic Performance of students was determined by the following factors; Cognitive skills and attitudes, which further included attention span(an increase of 62% was seen), memory (improvement was seen in 62% of the students) and grasp on concepts (which was increased in 77%), Class room behaviors such as class attendance (increase was seen in 59% of the students) and Academic scores (improvement was not significant (p = .612) and increase was seen only in 43% of students of which 23 were female and 20 were male students). However, the physical activity and academic performance was statistically in significant (p = 0.612). Conclusion: The physical activity and academic performance was not found to be significant. In addition, physical activity was found to decrease stress levels and this decrease in stress was positively related to weight loss in these students.
Association of the variants in the PPARG gene and serum lipid levels: a meta-analysis of 74 studies

Considerable studies have been carried out to investigate the relationship between the polymorphisms of PPARG (Pro12Ala, C161T and C1431T) and serum lipid levels, but the results were inconclusive. Hence, we conducted a meta‐analysis to clarify the association. MEDLINE, EMBASE and the Cochrane Library databases were searched systematically. The subgroup analysis was performed based on ethnicity. Seventy‐four studies with 54,953 subjects were included in this meta‐analysis. In Pro12Ala, the group with the ‘PP’ (C/C genotype) genotype group had lower levels of total cholesterol (TC) (mean difference, MD: −0.02, P < 0.00001; I2 = 28%), low‐density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL‐C) (MD: −0.02, P < 0.00001; I2 = 30%) and higher levels of triglyceride (TG) (MD: 0.06, P < 0.00001; I2 = 30%) than the combined ‘PA+AA’ (PA = C/G genotype, AA = G/G genotype) genotype group in Asian population, and the group with the ‘PP’ genotype had higher levels of TG (MD: 0.07, P < 0.02; I2 = 67%) than the combined ‘PA+AA’ genotype group in non‐Asian population. No statistically significant differences in the levels of TC, TG, high‐density lipoprotein cholesterol, LDL‐C were detected between different genotypes in C161T(Asian or non‐Asian) and C1431T(Asian) polymorphisms. This meta‐analysis was a renewed and confirmed study to assess the association between PPARG polymorphisms and serum lipid levels in Asian and non‐Asian populations. There is a prominent association between Pro12Ala polymorphism and the levels of TC, LDL‐C and TG in Asian population. No statistically significant differences in serum lipid levels were detected between different genotypes in C161T and C1431T polymorphisms.
Overlap of copper and iron uptake systems in mitochondria in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the mitochondrial carrier family protein Pic2 imports copper into the matrix. Deletion of PIC2 causes defects in mitochondrial copper uptake and copper-dependent growth phenotypes owing to decreased cytochrome c oxidase activity. However, copper import is not completely eliminated in this mutant, so alternative transport systems must exist. Deletion of MRS3, a component of the iron import machinery, also causes a copper-dependent growth defect on non-fermentable carbon. Deletion of both PIC2 and MRS3 led to a more severe respiratory growth defect than either individual mutant. In addition, MRS3 expressed from a high copy number vector was able to suppress the oxygen consumption and copper uptake defects of a strain lacking PIC2. When expressed in Lactococcus lactis, Mrs3 mediated copper and iron import. Finally, a PIC2 and MRS3 double mutant prevented the copper-dependent activation of a heterologously expressed copper sensor in the mitochondrial intermembrane space. Taken together, these data support a role for the iron transporter Mrs3 in copper import into the mitochondrial matrix.