Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fault Diagnosis of Metro Traction Power Systems Using A Modified Fuzzy Reasoning Spiking Neural P System

This paper presents the application of a modified fuzzy reasoning spiking neural P systems (MFRSN P system, for short) to fault diagnosis of metro traction power supply systems. In MFRSN P systems, three types of neurons are used to represent operation information of protection devices including protective relays and circuit breakers; a reasoning algorithm associated with MFRSN P systems is introduced to fulfill fault reasoning; fault diagnosis rules for metro traction power supply systems and their MFRSN P systems are described. Case studies show the feasibility and effectiveness of the presented method. Key-words: Membrane computing, probabilistic fuzzy reasoning spiking neural P system, metro traction power supply system, fault diagnosis.
Audio Replay Attack Detection Using High-Frequency Features

This paper presents our contribution to the ASVspoof 2017 Challenge. It addresses a replay spoofing attack against a speaker recognition system by detecting that the analysed signal has passed through multiple analogue-to-digital (AD) conversions. Specifically, we show that most of the cues that enable to detect the replay attacks can be found in the high-frequency band of the replayed recordings. The described anti-spoofing countermeasures are based on (1) modelling the subband spectrum and (2) using the proposed features derived from the linear prediction (LP) analysis. The results of the investigated methods show a significant improvement in comparison to the baseline system of the ASVspoof 2017 Challenge. A relative equal error rate (EER) reduction by 70% was achieved for the development set and a reduction by 30% was obtained for the evaluation set.
Chapter 5 Management of Bilateral Wilms Tumours

Synchronous bilateral Wilms tumours (BWTs) represent 4% to 7% of all Wilms tumours (WTs) and present at a younger age than unilateral WTs do. At least 10% of synchronous BWTs have unfavourable histology, and up to 22% are associated with genitourinary abnormalities, aniridia, WAGR (WT, aniridia, genitourinary anomalies, and retardation) syndrome, Denys–Drash syndrome, hemihypertrophy or one of the other overgrowth syndromes. The long-term disease-free survival rate of patients with unilateral WT is now approaching 90% and is around 70% for those with metastatic disease. For both synchronous and metachronous WTs, the prognosis is less favourable, with reported cure rates In: Wilms Tumor. Marry M. van den Heuvel-Eibrink (Editor) ISBN: 978-0-9944381-1-9; Doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.15586/codon.wt. 2016 Codon Publications, Brisbane, Australia
Outcome of omentopexy as primary repair in perforated duodenal ulcer.

OBJECTIVE This study was conducted to determine the short-term complications and duration of hospital stay in patients treated with omentopexy as primary repair in perforated duodenal ulcer that were more than 12 hours old and more than 0.5 cm in size. STUDY DESIGN Case-series study. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY Department of General Surgery, Bolan Medical College, Quetta from January 2006 to January 2007. PATIENTS AND METHODS Thirty consecutive patients of perforated duodenal ulcer in whom the duration of perforation was greater than 12 hours and size of perforation was greater than 0.5 cm were included in this study. After adequate resuscitation, emergency laparotomy was performed and primary repair with pedicled omental patch performed without primary suturing of the perforation. A thorough peritoneal lavage was done with normal saline. Postoperatively, all the patients were given intravenous fluids, antibiotics and H2-receptor blockers. All the patients were closely monitored for the development of any postoperative complication. All the findings were recorded on a pre-designed proforma. Duration of hospital stay was noted at the time of discharge. All the patients were discharged on proton pump inhibitors, prescribed for 6 weeks. RESULTS Perforation was present on the anterior surface of the first part of duodenum in all cases. Size of perforation varied from 0.6 cm to 1.5 cm. Median size was 0.8 cm. Wound infection was seen in 10 (33.3%) patients and pneumonia in 7 (23.3%) patients. Two (6.7%) patients developed burst abdomen and residual pelvic collection that required re-operation. Overall, 15 (50%) patients did not develop any complication. Mortality was 1 (3.3%). Median hospital stay was 9 days. CONCLUSION Omentopexy with thorough peritoneal lavage is simple and safe procedure with low mortality and fewer post-operative complications. It does not require great expertise and can be performed in a very short time in seriously ill patient. It should be chosen instead of an acid reducing operation in an emergency setting.
Genetic manipulation of centromere function

A conditional centromere was constructed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by placing the centromere of chromosome III immediately downstream from the inducible GAL1 promoter from S. cerevisiae. By utilizing growth conditions that favor either transcriptional induction (galactose-carbon source) or repression (glucose-carbon source) from the GAL1 promoter, centromere function can be switched off or on, respectively. With the conditional centromere we were able to radically alter the mitotic transmission pattern of both monocentric and dicentric plasmids. Moreover, it was possible to selectively induce the loss of a single chromosome from a mitotically dividing population of cells. We observed that the induction of chromosome III aneuploidy resulted in a dramatic change in cell morphology. The construction of a conditional centromere represents a novel way to create conditional mutations of cis-acting DNA elements and will be useful for further analysis of this important stabilizing element.
Cholesteryl Esters Are Elevated in the Lipid Fraction of Bronchoalveolar Lavage Fluid Collected from Pediatric Cystic Fibrosis Patients

Background Host-derived lipids including cholesteryl esters (CEs) such as cholesteryl linoleate have emerged as important antibacterial effectors of innate immunity in the airways and cholesteryl linoleate has been found elevated in the context of inflammation. Cystic fibrosis (CF) patients suffer from chronic infection and severe inflammation in the airways. Here, we identified and quantified CEs in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) from CF patients and non-CF disease controls, and tested whether CE concentrations are linked to the disease. Materials and Methods CEs in BALF from 6 pediatric subjects with CF and 7 pediatric subjects with non-CF chronic lung disease were quantified by mass spectral analysis using liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry and multiple reaction monitoring. BALFs were also examined for total lipid, total protein, albumin, and, as a marker for inflammation, human neutrophil peptide (HNP) 1–3 concentrations. Statistical analysis was conducted after log 10 transformation of the data. Results Total lipid/protein ratio was reduced in CF BALF (p = 0.018) but the concentrations of CEs, including cholesteryl linoleate, were elevated in the total lipid fraction in CF BALF compared to non-CF disease controls (p < 0.050). In addition, the concentrations of CEs and HNP1-3 correlated with one another (p < 0.050). Conclusions The data suggests that the lipid composition of BALF is altered in CF with less total lipid relative to protein but with increased CE concentrations in the lipid fraction, likely contributed by inflammation. Future longitudinal studies may reveal the suitability of CEs as a novel biomarker for CF disease activity which may provide new information on the lipid mediated pathophysiology of the disease.
Cocaine Noodles: Exploiting the Gap between Human and Machine Speech Recognition

Hands-free, voice-driven user input is gaining popularity, in part due to the increasing functionalities provided by intelligent digital assistances such as Siri, Cortana, and Google Now, and in part due to the proliferation of small devices that do not support more traditional, keyboard-based input. In this paper, we examine the gap in the mechanisms of speech recognition between human and machine. In particular, we ask the question, do the differences in how humans and machines understand spoken speech lead to exploitable vulnerabilities? We find, perhaps surprisingly, that these differences can be easily exploited by an adversary to produce sound which is intelligible as a command to a computer speech recognition system but is not easily understandable by humans. We discuss how a wide range of devices are vulnerable to such manipulation and describe how an attacker might use them to defraud victims or install malware, among other attacks.
Market Freedom and the Global Recession

This study finds that the set of policies that favor liberalization in credit markets (regulatory quality) are negatively correlated with countries’ resilience to the recent recession as measured by output growth in 2008 and 2009. The Global nature of the recession and the cross-country heterogeneity of its depth provide a unique opportunity to examine the link between the structural characteristics of economic and social systems before and after the crisis.
A survey of nurses' wound care knowledge.

PURPOSE To provide information about nurses' knowledge and practices in the prevention and care of wounds, based on responses to a 2004 survey in Advances in Skin & Wound Care and its sister publication, Nursing2004. TARGET AUDIENCE This continuing education activity is intended for physicians and nurses with an interest in understanding best practices for preventing and treating wounds. LEARNING OBJECTIVES After reading the preceding article and taking this test, the participant should be able to: 1. Discuss the Advances in Skin & Wound Care and Nursing2004 wound care survey results. 2. Relate the survey responses to best practice standards for for preventing and treating wounds. 3. Identify implications for improvements in wound care education and practice based on survey results.
Lensless Compressive Imaging

We develop a lensless compressive imaging architecture, which consists of an aperture assembly and a single sensor, without using any lens. An anytime algorithm is proposed to reconstruct images from the compressive measurements; the algorithm produces a sequence of solutions that monotonically converge to the true signal (thus, anytime). The algorithm is developed based on the sparsity of local overlapping patches (in the transformation domain) and state-of-the-art results have been obtained. Experiments on real data demonstrate that encouraging results are obtained by measuring about 10% (of the image pixels) compressive measurements. The reconstruction results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the JPEG compression (based on file sizes) and the reconstructed image quality is close to the JPEG compression, in particular at a high compression rate.
Linear Hinge Loss and Average Margin

We describe a unifying method for proving relative loss bounds for online linear threshold classification algorithms, such as the Perceptron and the Winnow algorithms. For classification problems the discrete loss is used, i.e., the total number of prediction mistakes. We introduce a continuous loss function, called the "linear hinge loss", that can be employed to derive the updates of the algorithms. We first prove bounds w.r. t. the linear hinge loss and then convert them to the discrete loss. We introduce a notion of "average margin" of a set of examples. We show how relative loss bounds based on the linear hinge loss can be converted to relative loss bounds i.t. o. the discrete loss using the average margin.
Efficiently monitoring bandwidth and latency in IP networks

Effective monitoring of network utilization and performance indicators is a key enabling technology for proactive and reactive resource management, flexible accounting, and intelligent planning in next-generation IP networks. In this paper, we address the challenging problem of efficiently monitoring bandwidth utilization and path latencies in an IP data network. Unlike earlier approaches, our measurement architecture assumes a single point-of-control in the network (corresponding to the network operations center) that is responsible for gathering bandwidth and latency information using widely-deployed management tools, like SNMP, RMON/NetFlow, and explicitly-routed IP probe packets. Our goal is to identify effective techniques for monitoring (a) bandwidth usage for a given set of links or packet flows, and (b) path latencies for a given set of paths, while minimizing the overhead imposed by the management tools on the underlying production network. We demonstrate that minimizing overheads under our measurement model gives rise to new combinatorial optimization problems, most of which prove to be NP-hard. We also propose novel approximation algorithms for these optimization problems and prove guaranteed upper bounds on their worst-case performance. Our simulation results validate our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of our novel monitoring algorithms over a wide range of network topologies.
Effects of propofol on damage of rat intestinal epithelial cells induced by heat stress and lipopolysaccharides

Gut-derived endotoxin and pathogenic bacteria have been proposed as important causative factors of morbidity and death during heat stroke. However, it is still unclear what kind of damage is induced by heat stress. In this study, the rat intestinal epithelial cell line (IEC-6) was treated with heat stress or a combination of heat stress and lipopolysaccharide (LPS). In addition, propofol, which plays an important role in anti-inflammation and organ protection, was applied to study its effects on cellular viability and apoptosis. Heat stress, LPS, or heat stress combined with LPS stimulation can all cause intestinal epithelial cell damage, including early apoptosis and subsequent necrosis. However, propofol can alleviate injuries caused by heat stress, LPS, or the combination of heat stress and LPS. Interestingly, propofol can only mitigate LPS-induced intestinal epithelial cell apoptosis, and has no protective role in heat-stress-induced apoptosis. This study developed a model that can mimic the intestinal heat stress environment. It demonstrates the effects on intestinal epithelial cell damage, and indicated that propofol could be used as a therapeutic drug for the treatment of heat-stress-induced intestinal injuries.
Provably Private Data Anonymization: Or, k-Anonymity Meets Differential Privacy

Privacy-preserving microdata publishing currently lacks a solid theoretical foundation. Most existing techniques are deve loped to satisfy syntactic privacy notions such as k-anonymity, which fails to provide strong privacy guarantees. The recently propose d notion of differential privacy has been widely accepted as a sound p rivacy foundation for statistical query answering. However, no ge neral practical microdata publishing techniques are known to sat isfy differential privacy. In this paper, we start to bridge this gap . We first analyze k-anonymization methods and show how they fail to provide sufficient protection against re-identification, w hich it was designed to protect. We then prove that, k-anonymization methods, when done “safely”, and when preceded with a random sampling step, can satisfy (ǫ, δ)-differential privacy with reasonable parameters. This result is, to our knowledge, the first to link k-anonymity with differential privacy and illustrates that “hiding in a crowd ofk” indeed offers privacy guarantees. This naturally leads to f uture research in designing “safe” and practical k-anonymization methods. We observe that our result gives an alternative approach to o utput perturbation for satisfying differential privacy: namely , adding a random sampling step in the beginning and pruning results th at are too sensitive to changing a single tuple. This approach may b e applicable to settings other than microdata publishing. We al so show that adding a random-sampling step can greatly amplify the l ev l of privacy guarantee provided by a differentially-private lgorithm. This result makes it much easier to provide strong privacy gu arantees when one wishes to publish a portion of the raw data. Fi nally, we show that current definitions of (ǫ, δ)-differential privacy requireδ to be very small to provide sufficient privacy protection when publishing microdata, making the notion impractical i n some scenarios. To address this problem, we introduce a notion ca lled f -smooth(ǫ, δ)-differential privacy.
Do the Young Live in a "Smaller World" Than the Old? Age-Specific Degrees of Separation in a Large-Scale Mobile Communication Network

That any two persons are separated by a relatively small number of intermediary contacts -- the "small-world" phenomenon -- is a surprising but well established regularity in human social networks. To date, network science has ignored the question of whether the small world phenomenon manifests itself in similar ways across dyadic classes defined by individual traits, such as age or sex. To address this gap in the literature, we explore the phenomenon of "age-specific small worlds" by employing a mobile phone network built from billions of communication events approximating interaction patterns at a societal scale. We observe the average distance between any pair of users is 9.52, corresponding to nine-and-a-half degrees of separation. More importantly, we show that there is a systematic relationship between age and the average distance connecting that person to others, with some age groups falling below this average quantity while others falling above. Young people live in the "smallest world," being separated from other young people and their parent's generation via a comparatively small number of intermediaries. Older people live in the "least small world," being separated from their same age peers and their younger counterparts by a relatively large number of intermediaries. Middle age-people fall in between, being sociometrically close to both younger and older generations. However, there exists no significant difference of this age-effect on small world size between men and women. In all these results demonstrate that age-group heterogeneity of the small world can be traced to well-known social mechanisms affecting the way that age interacts with overall volume of connectivity and the relative prevalence of kin ties and non-kin ties, and may have important implications for our understanding of information cascades, diffusion phenomena, and the localized spread of fads and fashions.
Twisted-torus configurations with large toroidal magnetic fields in relativistic stars

Understanding the properties of the internal magnetic field of neutron stars remains a theoretical challenge. Over the last years, twisted-torus geometries have been considered both in Newtonian and general-relativistic equilibrium models, as they represent a potentially good description of neutron star interiors. All of these works have found an apparent intrinsic limitation to geometries that are poloidal-field-dominated, with a toroidal-to-poloidal energy ratio inside the star that are <10%, unless surface currents are included and magnetic fields are allowed to be discontinuous. This limitation is in stark contrast with the general expectation that much higher toroidal fields should be present in the stellar interior and casts doubt about the stability and hence realism of these configurations. We here discuss how to overcome this limitation by adopting a new prescription for the azimuthal currents that leads to magnetized equilibria where the toroidal-to-total magnetic-field energy ratio can be as high as 90%, thus including geometries that are toroidal-field-dominated. Moreover, our results show that for a fixed exterior magnetic-field strength, a higher toroidal-field energy implies a much higher total magnetic energy stored in the star, with a potentially strong impact on the expected electromagnetic and gravitational-wave emission from highly magnetized neutron stars.
Embryonic expression of the cysteine rich protein 61 (CYR61) gene: A candidate for the development of human epispadias.

BACKGROUND Isolated epispadias is the mildest phenotype of the exstrophy-epispadias complex, a urogenital birth defect of variable severity. The androgen receptor antagonist flutamide (FLU) is known to cause malformations in the rat genital and reproductive tract, and single-dose prenatal FLU exposure can induce epispadias in rat offspring. The Cyr61 gene exhibited the highest response to FLU in rat fetal testis, and we suggested it a promising candidate gene for epispadias in humans, because its protein product promotes proliferation, migration, and adhesion of endothelial cells and fibroblasts. METHODS We used whole mount in situ analysis in mice to investigate ventrocaudal expression of the Cyr61 transcript at gestational days 9.5 to 11.5, which is the equivalent of human gestational weeks 4 to 6 (postulated time of epispadias organogenesis in humans). We also performed mutational analysis of the CYR61 gene in 11 patients with isolated epispadias and in additional eight patients with the related classic bladder exstrophy phenotype. RESULTS Expression of Cyr61 was detected in endothelial cells of vessels surrounding the cloaca and the umbilical cord on gestational days 10 and 11.5. The mutation screening, however, revealed no alterations in the coding region of human CYR61. CONCLUSIONS The spatiotemporal expression pattern observed suggests a role for Cyr61 in the development of the external genitalia. Our mutation screening study, however, could not confirm that mutations affecting the CYR61 gene are a frequent cause of epispadias or classic bladder exstrophy, although rare mutations might be detectable in larger patient samples.
PTSD in Long Term Care.

Symptoms of PTSD may persist (Rosen, Fields, Hand, Falsettie, & Van Karnmen, 1989) or be exacerbated (Pary, Turns & Tobias, 1986) during the challenges of illness and institutionalization in late life. Having survived life threatening events may provide a basis for enhanced resilience or vulnerability in the face of these challenges (Elder & Clipp, 1989). This case study is described to illustrate the potential for therapeutic reconciliation in late life PTSD and the role of therapeutic aids in facilitating that process.
ON BILINEAR FORMS BASED ON THE RESOLVENT OF LARGE RANDOM MATRICES

Consider a matrix $\Sigma_n$ with random independent entries, each non-centered with a separable variance profile. In this article, we study the limiting behavior of the random bilinear form $u_n^* Q_n(z) v_n$, where $u_n$ and $v_n$ are deterministic vectors, and Q_n(z) is the resolvent associated to $\Sigma_n \Sigma_n^*$ as the dimensions of matrix $\Sigma_n$ go to infinity at the same pace. Such quantities arise in the study of functionals of $\Sigma_n \Sigma_n^*$ which do not only depend on the eigenvalues of $\Sigma_n \Sigma_n^*$, and are pivotal in the study of problems related to non-centered Gram matrices such as central limit theorems, individual entries of the resolvent, and eigenvalue separation.