Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neighborhoods, obesity, and diabetes--a randomized social experiment.

BACKGROUND The question of whether neighborhood environment contributes directly to the development of obesity and diabetes remains unresolved. The study reported on here uses data from a social experiment to assess the association of randomly assigned variation in neighborhood conditions with obesity and diabetes. METHODS From 1994 through 1998, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) randomly assigned 4498 women with children living in public housing in high-poverty urban census tracts (in which ≥40% of residents had incomes below the federal poverty threshold) to one of three groups: 1788 were assigned to receive housing vouchers, which were redeemable only if they moved to a low-poverty census tract (where <10% of residents were poor), and counseling on moving; 1312 were assigned to receive unrestricted, traditional vouchers, with no special counseling on moving; and 1398 were assigned to a control group that was offered neither of these opportunities. From 2008 through 2010, as part of a long-term follow-up survey, we measured data indicating health outcomes, including height, weight, and level of glycated hemoglobin (HbA(1c)). RESULTS As part of our long-term survey, we obtained data on body-mass index (BMI, the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) for 84.2% of participants and data on glycated hemoglobin level for 71.3% of participants. Response rates were similar across randomized groups. The prevalences of a BMI of 35 or more, a BMI of 40 or more, and a glycated hemoglobin level of 6.5% or more were lower in the group receiving the low-poverty vouchers than in the control group, with an absolute difference of 4.61 percentage points (95% confidence interval [CI], -8.54 to -0.69), 3.38 percentage points (95% CI, -6.39 to -0.36), and 4.31 percentage points (95% CI, -7.82 to -0.80), respectively. The differences between the group receiving traditional vouchers and the control group were not significant. CONCLUSIONS The opportunity to move from a neighborhood with a high level of poverty to one with a lower level of poverty was associated with modest but potentially important reductions in the prevalence of extreme obesity and diabetes. The mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear but warrant further investigation, given their potential to guide the design of community-level interventions intended to improve health. (Funded by HUD and others.).
Electrophysiological indices of abnormal error-processing in adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

BACKGROUND Impaired cognitive control has been frequently observed in children and young people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and might underlie the excessive hyperactivity and impulsivity in this population. We investigated behavioural and electrophysiological indices relevant to one domain of cognitive control; namely error processing. METHODS Adolescents aged 14 to 17 with ADHD (n = 23) and a typically developing control group (HC; n = 19) performed a visual go/no-go task. Electro-encephalography (EEG) data were collected simultaneously and response-locked error trials were averaged to derive two event-related potentials, the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe). Evoked theta power and inter-trial phase coherence (ITC) were measured in two time windows ('early' and 'late') equivalent to those used for detection of the ERN and Pe. RESULTS Analysis revealed normal ERN amplitude and a statistical trend for smaller Pe amplitude at a fronto-central electrode site in the ADHD group. The group also showed significant reductions in late evoked theta power and early and late theta ITC. Relationships between behavioural measures and ITC were different between groups, particularly for post-error slowing, a measure of strategic response adjustment on trials immediately following an error. CONCLUSIONS The results reveal abnormalities in behavioural and electrophysiological indices of error processing in adolescents with ADHD and suggest that ITC is more sensitive than traditional ERP measures to error-processing abnormalities.
Micromagnetic Analysis of Effective Magnetic Dipole Position in Magnetic Force Microscope Tip

An accurate micromagnetic model of the magnetic force microscope (MFM) tip has been developed to calculate the effective dipole and its position in a simple point probe model, which are important in the quantitative explanation of MFM images. The pyramid-shaped MFM tips are considered in this paper; so cuboid cells in the body, as well as triangular prism and quadrangle pyramid cells at the edge are included to accurately describe the geometrical shape of the tip. The effective position of the magnetic point dipole and the MFM tip field distribution are analyzed, based on the calculated domain structures in the tips with different materials parameters. The simulated tip fields are compared carefully with that of the point probe model usually utilized in the MFM tips.
Stress transfer and strain rate variations during the seismic cycle

[1] The balance of forces implies stress transfers during the seismic cycle between the elastobrittle upper crust and the viscoelastic lower crust. This could induce observable time variations of crustal straining in the interseismic period. We simulate these variations using a one-dimensional system of springs, sliders, and dashpot loaded by a constant force. The seismogenic zone and the zone of afterslip below are modeled from rate-and-state friction. The ductile deeper fault zone is modeled from a viscous slider with Newtonian viscosity n. The force per unit length, F, must exceed a critical value Fc to overcome friction resistance of the fault system. This simple system produces periodic earthquakes. The recurrence period, Tcycle, and the duration of the postseismic relaxation phase, which is driven dominantly by afterslip, then both scale linearly with n. Between two earthquakes, interseismic strain buildup across the whole system is nonstationary with the convergence rates Vi, just after each earthquake, being systematically higher than the value Vf at the end of the interseismic period. We show
Learning to Match Aerial Images with Deep Attentive Architectures

Image matching is a fundamental problem in Computer Vision. In the context of feature-based matching, SIFT and its variants have long excelled in a wide array of applications. However, for ultra-wide baselines, as in the case of aerial images captured under large camera rotations, the appearance variation goes beyond the reach of SIFT and RANSAC. In this paper we propose a data-driven, deep learning-based approach that sidesteps local correspondence by framing the problem as a classification task. Furthermore, we demonstrate that local correspondences can still be useful. To do so we incorporate an attention mechanism to produce a set of probable matches, which allows us to further increase performance. We train our models on a dataset of urban aerial imagery consisting of 'same' and 'different' pairs, collected for this purpose, and characterize the problem via a human study with annotations from Amazon Mechanical Turk. We demonstrate that our models outperform the state-of-the-art on ultra-wide baseline matching and approach human accuracy.
Loss of lubricant from oil-lubricated near-starved spherical roller bearings

Abstract The time to lubricant film breakthrough in an oil-lubricated spherical roller bearing has been measured using SKF Lubcheck for various settings of bearing load, outer ring temperature, shaft speed and oil type and viscosity. The bearings were lubricated once and then run to film breakthrough with the aim of estimating the lubricant losses under different conditions. The result of the experiments supports the theory of lubricant replenishment, and it is shown that high speed combined with high lubricant viscosity will shorten the time to film breakthrough.
Exclusive Feature Learning on Arbitrary Structures via \ell_{1, 2}-norm

Group LASSO is widely used to enforce the structural sparsity, which achieves the sparsity at the inter-group level. In this paper, we propose a new formulation called "exclusive group LASSO", which brings out sparsity at intra-group level in the context of feature selection. The proposed exclusive group LASSO is applicable on any feature structures, regardless of their overlapping or non-overlapping structures. We provide analysis on the properties of exclusive group LASSO, and propose an effective iteratively re-weighted algorithm to solve the corresponding optimization problem with rigorous convergence analysis. We show applications of exclusive group LASSO for uncorrelated feature selection. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the proposed method.
Analysis of Projects and Volunteer Participation in Large Scale Free and Open Source Software Ecosystem

The ecology of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is dotted by projects of every kind ranging from small desktop applications to large mission critical systems. To enable maximum visibility among the developer community, these projects are often hosted in community project management portals. The current work studies one such portal, sourceforge. net by analysing the data of 200,000 projects and 2 million developers for the period Feb 2005 to Aug 2009. The scope of the present study includes the analysis of developer contribution. The slow growth rate of developer community and high number of single developer projects are the major findings of the present work.
Electrocardiographic and Echocardiographic profile of Dilated Cardiomyopathy patients attending tertiary care hospital in Vadodara

Background: Dilated cardiomyopathy is one of the important causes of congestive heart failure and attributes to 25% of all cases of CHF. Moreover, in majority of cases with DCM, no specific etiology is known. The increasing incidence of DCM is also associated with significant morbidity and mortality. So, the current study aimed at understanding the electrocardiographic and echocardiographic profile of DCM patients coming to tertiary care hospital in Vadodara.
Effect of Strenuous Arm Exercise on Oxidized-LDL-Potentiated Platelet Activation in Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury

Summary This study investigates how strenuous arm exercise affects oxidizedlow density lipoprotein (Ox-LDL) mediated-platelet activation in patients with SCI. Ten patients with SCI and ten age- and sex-matched healthy subjects exercised strenuously using an arm crank ergometer. The following measurements were taken both when the subjects were at rest, and immediately after exercise: plasma lipid profile, Ox-LDL mediated platelet aggregability and [Ca2+]i, urinary 11-dehydro-thromboxane B2 (11-dehydro-TXB2) and 8-iso-prostaglandin F2α. (8-iso-PG F2α.) contents, and plasma NO metabolite (nitrite plus nitrate) level. Based on these measurements, the major findings of this study can be summarized as follows: 1) the SCI group had higher urinary 8-iso- PGF2α. and 11-dehydro-TXB2 contents, but a lower plasma nitrite plus nitrate level than the control group; 2) at rest, the SCI group had a higher platelet aggregability and [Ca2+]i, and Ox-LDL-potentiated platelet activation than the control group; 3) Ox-LDL-potentiated platelet aggregation was enhanced by strenuous arm exercise in both groups, but the effect of exercise was more pronounced in the SCI group than in the control group; 4) treating the platelet with L-arginine inhibited Ox-LDL-potentiated platelet activation in both groups. The study concludes that individuals with SCI had more extensive resting and exercise-enhanced Ox-LDL-potentiated platelet activation and greater amounts of preformed lipid peroxides than those without SCI. Therefore, supplementation therapy with antioxidants may be needed for patients with SCI, especially in a strenuous arm exercise period.
The RNA Polymerase-Associated Factor 1 Complex Is Required for Plant Touch Responses

Thigmomorphogenesis is a stereotypical developmental alteration in the plant body plan that can be induced by repeatedly touching plant organs. To unravel how plants sense and record multiple touch stimuli we performed a novel forward genetic screen based on the development of a shorter stem in response to repetitive touch. The touch insensitive (ths1) mutant identified in this screen is defective in some aspects of shoot and root thigmomorphogenesis. The ths1 mutant is an intermediate loss-of-function allele of VERNALIZATION INDEPENDENCE 3 (VIP3), a previously characterized gene whose product is part of the RNA polymerase II-associated factor 1 (Paf1) complex. The Paf1 complex is found in yeast, plants and animals, and has been implicated in histone modification and RNA processing. Several components of the Paf1 complex are required for reduced stem height in response to touch and normal root slanting and coiling responses. Global levels of histone H3K36 trimethylation are reduced in VIP3 mutants. In addition, THS1/VIP3 is required for wild type histone H3K36 trimethylation at the TOUCH3 (TCH3) and TOUCH4 (TCH4) loci and for rapid touch-induced upregulation of TCH3 and TCH4 transcripts. Thus, an evolutionarily conserved chromatin-modifying complex is required for both short- and long-term responses to mechanical stimulation, providing insight into how plants record mechanical signals for thigmomorphogenesis.
TORSIONAL BEHAVIOR OF PRESTRESSED CONCRETE BOX-GIRDER BRIDGES WITH CORRUGATED STEEL WEBS

Prestressed concrete box-girder bridges with corrugated steel webs is a major improvement on traditional prestressed concrete box-girder bridges. Steel webs, in stead of concrete webs, are efficient in reducing self-weight. Moreover, using corrugated webs allows one to avoid using stiffeners usually needed in flat plate webs and provides a convenient solution to the problem of prestress losses. Since the first prestressed concrete box-girder bridge with corrugated steel webs was built in France in 1986, the performance of this type of bridge has been receiving deserved attention and has proved its superiority over the others. In the past, however, most of the relevant studies were primarily concerned with the response of the corrugated steel webs. The flexural behavior of the bridge as a whole was not experimentally studied until 1998. This paper describes the experimental results of four scaled prestressed concrete box-girder bridges with corrugated steel webs subjected to torsion and presents an analytical model to predict the torsional behavior of such bridges. The Shinkai bridge in Japan was selected as the reference of the prototype. It is found that the torsional performance looks quite promising and that the analytical model fits the experimental results satisfactorily.
Antenna-pattern diversity versus space diversity for use at handhelds

This paper investigates diversity for dual-antenna systems operating in indoor environments. First, an approximated equation of the diversity gain is derived for different combining techniques. These theoretical results show that the two-term approximation, as generally used in the literature , is too rough an estimate. Consequently, a new six-term approximation is derived. Next, it is demonstrated by a comparison of theoretical and experimental diversity gain values that, due to mutual coupling between the two antennas in practice, the diversity gain will not approach 0 dB if the distance between the two antennas approaches zero. Finally, it is concluded from measurements at 900 MHz that antenna-pattern diversity is a better choice than space diversity for use at handhelds.
Programming of body composition by early growth and nutrition

There is now compelling evidence that growth patterns in early life are associated with risk of the metabolic syndrome in adulthood, although the relative importance of prenatal v. postnatal growth for such associations remains controversial. Body composition may play a key role in the ‘programming’ of such diseases, through itself being programmed by early growth, and perhaps also by being a mediator of the programming process. Early studies reporting positive associations between birth weight and adult BMI suggested a tendency for large babies to become obese adults. Such findings appeared contradictory to the many studies linking low birth weight with increased risk of the metabolic syndrome. Recent studies now indicate that birth weight is strongly predictive of later lean mass, and has a much weaker association with later fatness. Studies that link low birth weight with a more central adipose distribution in later life remain controversial, and require confirmation using more sophisticated methodologies. Findings for infant growth rate appear population-specific, with infant weight gain predicting subsequent lean mass in developing countries, but predicting subsequent fat mass and obesity in industrialised populations. Further studies are required on this issue, to ensure that appropriate public health policies are recommended for countries across the range of economic development. Although the links between early growth and later disease risk implicate early-life nutrition, either in utero or during infancy, few prospective studies have explored the influence of early diet on later body composition. Many studies have associated breast-feeding with a reduced prevalence of obesity categorised by BMI; however, the few studies directly evaluating childhood fatness provide little support for this hypothesis. Recent advances in the ability to measure body composition during the infant period offer a major opportunity to improve the understanding of the nutritional programming of body composition and its contribution, or lack thereof, to subsequent disease risk.
Heuristics and Biases in Charity

A ltruistic behavior often leads to desirable social outcomes. we can thus assume that more altruism is better than less, other things being equal. But altruism tends to be already widely encouraged, so efforts to promote it even further may produce little noticeable change. Instead, it might be easier to do more good by improving efficiency of the altruistic behaviors already in place. Because altruism is a precious but scarce resource, its wise allocation should be a priority. that is, given the amount of money a person would be willing to give to charity, and the relevant information available, a donor should allocate the donated funds in as efficient a manner as possible. † there are several obstacles in the way of achieving such efficiency, however. For example, some donors make decisions that are simply not as well informed as they could be. But an even bigger threat to optimality is posed by overly simplistic decision rules, also referred to as heuristics or cognitive biases. Biases are systematic errors in thinking that are not necessarily a result of misinformation or ignorance, but rather are brought about by an overgeneralization of some decision rule that might be useful in one context but is ill-suited or even harmful when applied in another. Cognitive biases often lead to the systematic misallocations of funds and waste of resources.
NG2-Positive Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cells in Adult Human Brain and Multiple Sclerosis Lesions

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is characterized by multifocal loss of myelin, oligodendrocytes, and axons. Potential MS therapies include enhancement of remyelination by transplantation or manipulation of endogenous oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. Characteristics of endogenous oligodendrocyte progenitors in normal human brain and in MS lesions have not been studied extensively. This report describes the distribution of cells in sections from normal adult human brain and MS lesions by using antibodies directed against NG2, an integral membrane chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan expressed by oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. Stellate-shaped NG2-positive cells were detected in the white and gray matter of normal adult human brain and appeared as abundant as, but distinct from, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and microglia. Stellate-shaped or elongated NG2-positive cells also were detected in chronic MS lesions. A subpopulation of the elongated NG2-positive cells expressed the putative apoptotic signaling molecule p75NTR. TUNEL-positive cells in three active, nine chronic active, and four chronic inactive lesions, however, were p75NTR-negative. These studies identify cells with phenotypic markers of endogenous oligodendrocyte progenitors in the mature human CNS and suggest that functional subpopulations of NG2-positive cells exist in MS lesions. Endogenous oligodendrocyte progenitor cells may represent a viable target for future therapies intended to enhance remyelination in MS patients.
Mobile advertising: evaluating the effects of animation, user and content relevance

The potential for user-relevant, context-appropriate, targeted advertising on mobile devices is enormous given device improvements and advances in personal and location-based data collection. However, little is known about how users experience display advertisements ('ads') on mobile devices, or what factors drive mobile ad effectiveness. In this paper, we investigate users' experiences of display advertising on mobile devices. We consider three factors that are often studied in desktop settings the ad's level of personal relevance to the user, its relevance to the page content, and within-ad properties, with a particular focus on the level of animation in the ad. Our findings reveal a few surprises. First, personal relevance to the user has little or no impact on ad efficacy measured by recall. Instead, content relevance boosts ad recall. Second, user relevance leads to a more pleasant and interesting experience, but content relevance has no effect. Third, contrary to the popular notion that animation often leads to more effective ads by garnering more user attention, we find that a simple type of animation, such as blinking animation, negatively affects user experience and reduces ad recall. Our findings, while focused on advertising, offer insights for design of mobile content presentation in general.
Climate change in the Arctic: current and future vulnerability in two Inuit communities in Canada

Climate change is already occurring in the Arctic and the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment recently concluded that future climate change could be devastating for Inuit. This paper characterises vulnerability to climate change in two Inuit communities in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, focusing on the resource harvesting sector. In both communities, Inuit have demonstrated significant adaptability in the face of current changes in climatic conditions. This adaptability is facilitated by traditional Inuit knowledge, strong social networks, flexibility in resource use, and institutional support. Changing Inuit livelihoods, however, have undermined certain aspects of adaptive capacity and have resulted in emerging vulnerabilities. Global and regional climate projections indicate that climatic conditions which currently pose risks are expected to be negatively affected by future climate change. These projections are not without precedent and analysis of current vulnerability and identification of adaptation constraints by Inuit in the two communities indicate the continued importance of traditional coping mechanisms. The ability to draw on these coping mechanisms in light of future climate change, however, will be unequal and the research indicates that young Inuit and those without access to economic resources, in particular, are vulnerable.