Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antarctica, 1979–2016 sea ice extent: total versus regional trends, anomalies, and correlation with climatological variables

ABSTRACT Antarctica satellite-derived sea ice extents (SIEs) showed a slight increase over the 1979–2010 period, generally attributed to a number of theories, including a combination of changes in atmosphere- and ocean–sea ice interactions. However, almost all authors agreed on the need of further studies based on a longer period of analysis. In this study, a 6 years longer time series (1979-2016) was analysed to calculate total and regional sea ice trends. Those trends were then correlated with three main climatological variables (air temperature, pressure, and wind components). The results showed an increased positive trend of total 1979–2016 SIE (1.6 ± 0.4% decade−1) compared to the 1979–2010 period, mostly due to the thermodynamic effect of winds. Remote factors (El Niño–Southern Oscillation and variations in equatorial Pacific and Indian oceans) also contributed to the sea ice increase by causing disturbances in the wind fields. The regional analysis confirmed the great impact of the increased westerly, katabatic and circumpolar winds, but with some differences with respect to the total trend. The increase of wind speed was stronger in the Weddell Sea and Western Pacific Ocean sectors, which corresponded to an increasing of their decadal SIE (from 1.2 ± 1.1% decade−1 to 1.7 ± 0.8% decade−1 and from 0.5 ± 1.5% decade−1 to 1.8 ± 1.2% decade−1, respectively). The Bellingshausen–Amundsen seas sector showed a decrease of its sea ice loss from −5.1 ± 1.6% decade−1 to −2.9 ± 1.4% decade−1, due to the cooling of the air temperature in the Peninsula and the increase of winds. Contrarily, two sectors – Indian Ocean and Ross Sea – showed a reduction in their increasing trends with respect to the 1979–2010 period.
Ultra-High Cycle Fatigue Behavior of DZ125 Superalloy Used in Turbine Blades

The high temperature ultra-high cycle fatigue (UHCF) behaviors of DZ125 superalloy used in aero-engine turbine blades were systematically studied. The results show that the fatigue fracture still occurs above 108 at the frequency of 20kHz, R=-1 and 700°C. There is a negligible frequency effect for the DZ125 superalloy, therefore, it is proposed that the ultrasonic fatigue testing could be expected as an accelerated fatigue testing method. Fatigue cracks originate from the subsurface of the specimens, where have no metallurgy defects or “fish eye” character. The crystal orientation change of the alloy is very little after fatigue.The maximum value changed for the elastic modulus of the alloy is about 30GPa after fatigue compared with that before fatigue.
Performance evaluation of a newly developed high‐resolution, dual‐head animal SPECT system based on the NEMA NU1–2007 standard

Small‐animal single‐photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) system plays an important role in the field of drug development and investigation of potential drugs in the preclinical phase. The small‐animal High‐Resolution SPECT (HiReSPECT) scanner has been recently designed and developed based on compact and high‐resolution detectors. The detectors are based on a high‐resolution parallel hole collimator, a cesium iodide (sodium‐activated) pixelated crystal array and two H8500 position‐sensitive photomultiplier tubes. In this system, a full set of data corrections such as energy, linearity, and uniformity, together with resolution recovery option in reconstruction algorithms, are available. In this study, we assessed the performance of the system based on NEMA‐NU1–2007 standards for pixelated detector cameras. Characterization of the HiReSPECT was performed by measurement of the physical parameters including planar and tomographic performance. The planar performance of the system was characterized with flood‐field phantom for energy resolution and uniformity. Spatial resolution and sensitivity were evaluated as functions of distance with capillary tube and cylindrical source, respectively. Tomographic spatial resolution was characterized as a function of radius of rotation (ROR). A dedicated hot rod phantom and image quality phantom was used for the evaluation of overall tomographic quality of the HiReSPECT. The results showed that the planar spatial resolution was ~1.6mm and ~2.3mm in terms of full‐width at half‐maximum (FWHM) along short‐ and long‐axis dimensions, respectively, when the source was placed on the detector surface. The integral uniformity of the system after uniformity correction was 1.7% and 1.2% in useful field of view (UFOV) and central field of view (CFOV), respectively. System sensitivity on the collimator surface was 1.31cps/μCi and didn't vary significantly with distance. Mean tomographic spatial resolution was measured ∼1.7 mm FWHM at the radius of rotation of 25 mm with dual‐head configuration. The measured performance demonstrated that the HiReSPECT scanner has acceptable image quality and, hence, is well suited for preclinical molecular imaging research. PACS number: 87.57. U
Restoration of Decreased T Helper 1 and CD8+ T Cell Subsets Is Associated With Regression of Lymphoproliferative Disorders Developed During Methotrexate Treatment

Background Lymphoproliferative disorder (LPD), including malignant lymphoma, is a relatively rare but life-threatening complication in RA patients under methotrexate (MTX) therapy. Spontaneous regression of LPD after MTX withdrawal is regarded as a distinct characteristic in part of such LPDs. Objective The present study aimed to investigate the immunological difference in regressive LPD and persistent LPD. Methods We studied RA patients who developed LPD during MTX administration (n = 35) and clinically matched controls (n = 35). The time of MTX cessation was defined as week 0, and LPD patients were divided into two groups according to LPD status at week 12: regressive group (n = 22) and persistent group (n = 13). Flow cytometric analysis of whole blood samples and serum cytokine assays were conducted for LPD (n = 10) and control patients (n = 10) at weeks 0, 4, and 12. Results There was a significant decrease in peripheral lymphocytes and the proportion of T helper 1 cells (Th1 cells), effector memory CD8+ T cells (EMCD8+ T) and Epstein–Barr virus (EBV)-specific CD8+ T cells at the time of LPD diagnosis, and a significant increase after MTX cessation was observed in the regressive group but not in the persistent group. The expansion of Th1 cells and EMCD8+ T cells significantly correlated with an increase in serum interferon (IFN)-γ concentration. Conclusion Changes in Th1 cells, EMCD8+ T cells and EBV-specific CD8+ T cells, which coincided with an increase in IFN-γ, were significantly different between regressive LPD and persistent LPD after MTX cessation.
A 0.21 μJ patient-specific REM/Non-REM sleep classifier for Alzheimer patients

An electroencephalograph (EEG) based classification processor for Random Eye-movement (REM) and Non-REM (NREM) sleep detection for Alzheimer patients is presented. To enable a home-based wearable polysomnography, a single-channel-EEG, with the novel feature extraction (FE) approach and the machine-learning classifier is utilized. The 4-dimenional Feature Vector (FV) is based on the spectral edge frequency (SEF), low-to-high spectral content, and rapid-eye-movement detection. To utilize SEF efficiently on hardware, a 16-point FFT is proposed that achieves an area reduction of 43% compared to the conventional with minimal overhead in the precision loss. A Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM) is utilized to decide between REM and NREM based on the FV. The system is synthesized using 0. 18μm process and experimental verification is done using FPGA based on the subset of patients from the PhysioNet Sleep database. The proposed classification processor achieves energy-efficiency of 0.21J/classification with a sensitivity and specificity of 89.8% and 93.6% respectively.
Visual Representations of Disaster

Nepal was struck by two major earthquakes in April and May 2015 which gave rise to much media attention. Because of photographs' power to influence how people perceive significant events, we investigate how these disasters are represented visually through Twitter-shared images in three ways. First, we compare how geotagged image tweets are distributed vis-à-vis the reported damage, to see if a seemingly "objective" method of representation stands up. Second, with an iteratively developed coding scheme, we examine how images are differently produced and shared within global versus local populations and after each earthquake, with the idea that amplification "collectively instructs" what features of the event are most important. Third, we analyze how images from other locations, disasters, and time periods are appropriated as part of the "story" of the disaster event. We found differences in image popularity, with global twitterers emphasizing recovery and relief efforts in their diffusion of images, and locals emphasizing people suffering and major damage in their sourcing and re-sharing. We also found that globals were more likely to appropriate images, evoking lessons from Sontag about "the pain of others" [39].
Nitrogen metabolism and urinary excretion of purines in goat kids

1. In Expt 1 three male goat kids of the Swedish Landrace breed were bottle-fed on isoenergetic liquid diets composed of goat's milk alone or substituted with 200, 400, 600 and 800 ml of a nitrogen-free liquid diet/1. The goat kids were 3 weeks old at the start of the experiment and weighed on average 5.3 (sd 0.22) kg. The experiment lasted for 45 d divided into nine 5 d periods. The goat kids were kept individually in metabolism cages, and faeces and urine were collected daily. 2. In Expt 1 there was a significant (P < 0.001) relation between N intake and N retention, with an estimated (extrapolation) basal N excretion of 211 mg N/kg metabolic live weight (W0.75). While the creatinine excretion remained fairly constant (19.9 mg/W0.75), there was a tendency for both the allantoin and uric acid excretions to change with N intakes. Hypoxanthine showed no consistent excretion pattern, and xanthine could not be detected. 3. In Expt 2 three male goat kids of the Swedish Landrace breed were used to study the effect of level of intake on N and purine metabolism. The first experimental period (period 1) started at 2 weeks of age (5.5 kg live weight) and the second experimental period (period 2) at 9 weeks of age (9.8 kg live weight). The goat kids were bottle-fed on goat milk at intended intakes of 400, 600, 800 and 1000 kJ gross energy/kg W0.75. Each treatment was given for 7 d with adaptation for 3 d and collections for 4 d. 4. In Expt 2 there were significant (P < 0.001) increases in both live weight and N retention when level of intake was increased. With increasing N intakes both total N and urea-N excretions increased significantly (P < 0.05). The proportions of urea-N and ammonia-N were fairly constant within periods, and were on average respectively 0.81 and 0.059 in period I and 0.84 and 0.068 in period 2. There was no significant effect of treatment on the urinary excretion of allantoin, hypoxanthine, xanthine and creatinine. In period 2 uric acid excretion was significantly (P < 0.01) affected by the treatments. 5. From the presented findings it is concluded that the endogenous urinary excretion of purine derivatives in a young growing ruminant was only marginally affected by large variations in protein supply, and also by the level of intake of milk.
Crash Consistency in Encrypted Non-volatile Main Memory Systems

Non-Volatile Main Memory (NVMM) systems provide high performance by directly manipulating persistent data in-memory, but require crash consistency support to recover data in a consistent state in case of a power failure or system crash. In this work, we focus on the interplay between the crash consistency mechanisms and memory encryption. Memory encryption is necessary for these systems to protect data against the attackers with physical access to the persistent main memory. As decrypting data at every memory read access can significantly degrade the performance, prior works propose to use a memory encryption technique, counter-mode encryption, that reduces the decryption overhead by performing a memory read access in parallel with the decryption process using a counter associated with each cache line. Therefore, a pair of data and counter value is needed to correctly decrypt data after a system crash. We demonstrate that counter-mode encryption does not readily extend to crash consistent NVMM systems as the system will fail to recover data in a consistent state if the encrypted data and associated counter are not written back to memory atomically, a requirement we refer to as counter-atomicity. We show that na¨ıvely enforcing counter-atomicity for all NVMM writes can serialize memory accesses and results in a significant performance degradation. In order to improve the performance, we make an observation that not all writes to NVMM need to be counter-atomic. The crash consistency mechanisms rely on versioning to keep one consistent copy of data intact while manipulating another version directly in-memory. As the recovery process only relies on the unmodified consistent version, it is not necessary to strictly enforce counter-atomicity for the writes that do not affect data recovery. Based on this insight, we propose selective counter-atomicity that allows reordering of writes to data and associated counters when the writes to persistent memory do not alter the recoverable consistent state. We propose efficient software and hardware support to enforce selective counter-atomicity. Our evaluation demonstrates that in a 1/2/4/8- core system, selective counter-atomicity improves performance by 6/11/22/40% compared to a system that enforces counter-atomicity for all NVMM writes. The performance of our selective counter-atomicity design comes within 5% of an ideal NVMM system that provides crash consistency of encrypted data at no cost.
Hallucinating Face Image by Regularization Models in High-Resolution Feature Space

In this paper, we propose two novel regularization models in patch-wise and pixel-wise, respectively, which are efficient to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) face image from low-resolution (LR) input. Unlike the conventional patch-based models which depend on the assumption of local geometry consistency in LR and HR spaces, the proposed method directly regularizes the relationship between the target patch and corresponding training set in the HR space. It avoids dealing with the tough problem of preserving local geometry in various resolutions. Taking advantage of kernel function in efficiently describing intrinsic features, we further conduct the patch-based reconstruction model in the high-dimensional kernel space for capturing nonlinear characteristics. Meanwhile, a pixel-based model is proposed to regularize the relationship of pixels in the local neighborhood, which can be employed to enhance the fuzzy details in the target HR face image. It privileges the reconstruction of pixels along the dominant orientation of structure, which is useful for preserving high-frequency information on complex edges. Finally, we combine the two reconstruction models into a unified framework. The output HR face image can be finally optimized by performing an iterative procedure. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed face hallucination method produces superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods.
Quality and Diversity Optimization: A Unifying Modular Framework

The optimization of functions to find the best solution according to one or several objectives has a central role in many engineering and research fields. Recently, a new family of optimization algorithms, named quality-diversity (QD) optimization, has been introduced, and contrasts with classic algorithms. Instead of searching for a single solution, QD algorithms are searching for a large collection of both diverse and high-performing solutions. The role of this collection is to cover the range of possible solution types as much as possible, and to contain the best solution for each type. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we present a unifying framework of QD optimization algorithms that covers the two main algorithms of this family (multidimensional archive of phenotypic elites and the novelty search with local competition), and that highlights the large variety of variants that can be investigated within this family. Second, we propose algorithms with a new selection mechanism for QD algorithms that outperforms all the algorithms tested in this paper. Lastly, we present a new collection management that overcomes the erosion issues observed when using unstructured collections. These three contributions are supported by extensive experimental comparisons of QD algorithms on three different experimental scenarios.
The quality of demographic data on older Africans

BACKGROUND Developing appropriate and equitable policies for older people in Africa requires accurate and reliable data. It is unclear whether existing data can accurately assess older African population structures, let alone provide the detailed information needed to inform policy decision making. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the quality of nationally representative data on older Africans through examining the accuracy of age data collected from different sources. METHODS To measure the accuracy of age reporting overall we calculate Whipple’s Index, and a modified Whipple’s Index for older adults, using the single year age-sex distributions from (a) the household roster of 17 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) (b) the censuses of 12 of these countries and (c) the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) for Ethiopia and Niger. We compare reported sex ratios by age. RESULTS The quality of age data is very poor for most countries outside Southern Africa, especially for older adults. In some Sahelian countries DHS surveys appear to omit a considerable proportion of older women. Data on population structure of older people by age and sex produced by the DHS and the census are inconsistent and contradictory. CONCLUSIONS Different field methodological approaches generate contradictory data on older Africans. With the exception of Southern Africa, it is impossible to assess accurately the basic demographic structure of the older population. The data available are so problematic that any conclusions about age-related health and welfare and their evolution over time and space are potentially compromised. This has ramifications for policy makers and practitioners who demand, fund and depend on large scale demographic data sources.
Counting Steps in Activities of Daily Living in People With a Chronic Disease Using Nine Commercially Available Fitness Trackers: Cross-Sectional Validity Study

Background Measuring physical activity with commercially available activity trackers is gaining popularity. People with a chronic disease can especially benefit from knowledge about their physical activity pattern in everyday life since sufficient physical activity can contribute to wellbeing and quality of life. However, no validity data are available for this population during activities of daily living. Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the validity of 9 commercially available activity trackers for measuring step count during activities of daily living in people with a chronic disease receiving physiotherapy. Methods The selected activity trackers were Accupedo (Corusen LLC), Activ8 (Remedy Distribution Ltd), Digi-Walker CW-700 (Yamax), Fitbit Flex (Fitbit inc), Lumoback (Lumo Bodytech), Moves (ProtoGeo Oy), Fitbit One (Fitbit inc), UP24 (Jawbone), and Walking Style X (Omron Healthcare Europe BV). In total, 130 persons with chronic diseases performed standardized activity protocols based on activities of daily living that were recorded on video camera and analyzed for step count (gold standard). The validity of the trackers’ step count was assessed by correlation coefficients, t tests, scatterplots, and Bland-Altman plots. Results The correlations between the number of steps counted by the activity trackers and the gold standard were low (range: –.02 to .33). For all activity trackers except for Fitbit One, a significant systematic difference with the gold standard was found for step count. Plots showed a wide range in scores for all activity trackers; Activ8 showed an average overestimation and the other 8 trackers showed underestimations. Conclusions This study showed that the validity of 9 commercially available activity trackers is low measuring steps while individuals with chronic diseases receiving physiotherapy engage in activities of daily living.
Analysis and Design of Dual-Band Rectifier Using Novel Matching Network

In this brief, a compact dual-band impedance matching network is introduced and applied to the design of rectifying circuits. The matching network can work at two arbitrary frequencies with arbitrary complex impedance simultaneously. Theoretical analysis is carried out and the closed-form design formulas are derived. For validation, a dual-band rectifier working at 0.915 and 2.45 GHz is implemented. The measured maximum RF-to-dc efficiencies are 77.2% and 73.5% at 0.915 and 2.45 GHz, respectively.
Nosocomial Outbreak of Upper Respiratory Tract Infection With β-Lactamase-Negative Ampicillin-Resistant Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae

OBJECTIVE To describe the epidemiologic features of an outbreak of an acute respiratory tract infection (ARI) caused by β-lactamase-negative ampicillin-resistant (BLNAR) nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) in an acute-care ward. DESIGN Cross-sectional case-control study. SETTING An acute-care ward (ward A) in a general hospital of Kochi in western Japan. METHODS Patients who shared a room with an index patient and all staff in ward A were screened and followed from July 1 to August 31, 2015. Sputum or throat swab samples were collected from participants and tested by culture and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The association between detected pathogens and ARI development among all participants was examined. A case-control study was conducted to identify risk factors for disease. RESULTS In total, 78 participants, including the index patient, were enrolled. Of all participants, 27 (34.6%) developed mild respiratory symptoms during a 3-week period: 24 were diagnosed as upper respiratory tract infections, and 3 were diagnosed as lower respiratory tract infections. The presence of BLNAR NTHi was confirmed in 13 participants, and multilocus sequence typing demonstrated that these isolates belonged to sequence type 159. All isolates showed identical pulsed-field gel electrophoresis patterns. The presence of BLNAR NTHi was strongly associated with ARI development, whereas viruses were not associated with the disease. Multivariate analyses demonstrated that a history of contact with the index patient was independently associated with ARI caused by BLNAR NTHi. CONCLUSIONS BLNAR NTHi has the potential to cause upper respiratory tract infections among adults and to spread rapidly in hospital settings. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2018;39:652–659