Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Building Collapse Assessment by the Use of Postearthquake Chinese VHR Airborne SAR

In this letter, a comprehensive study of the mapping of building collapse levels by the use of postearthquake synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is addressed. Although previous studies have successfully quantified the collapse level by the use of postevent SAR, the types of features that are of benefit to the final accuracy still remain unknown. This letter takes the Yushu earthquake as a case study to contribute in two key areas. First, the Chinese dual-band airborne SAR mapping system (CASMSAR), which collected very-high-resolution X-band and P-band images (0.50 and 1.1 m, respectively) by interferometric and polarimetric modes, is comprehensively evaluated for the first time. Second, to discriminate intact and fallen structures, multiconfiguration SAR data features are analyzed, including 40 polarimetric, 3 interferometric, and 138 texture features. Furthermore, a random-forest decision framework is introduced to quantify the importance score of each feature and to improve the discrimination accuracy. The CASMSAR experiment results indicate that the texture is recommended as a powerful input to quantify the extent of building collapse in Yushu.
Recreational Use of Phosphodiesterase 5 Inhibitors and Its Associated Factors among Undergraduate Male Students in an Ethiopian University: A Cross-Sectional Study

Purpose To assess the prevalence of phosphodiesterase 5 (PDE5) inhibitor use and associated factors among University of Gondar undergraduate students. Materials and Methods An institution-based, cross-sectional study, using a survey questionnaire, was conducted from October to December 2015 to assess PDE5 inhibitor use and associated factors among male students at the University of Gondar. A Self-Esteem and Relationship questionnaire (14 items), an International Index of Erectile Function questionnaire (15 items) and a questionnaire on PDE5 inhibitor use (14 items) were included in the survey. Results Across all respondents (age, 21.9±1.88 years), more than half (55.7%, n=233) had heard about PDE5 inhibitors, but only 23 men (5.5%) reported trying a PDE5 inhibitor drug at least once. Older students were more likely to use PDE5 inhibitors compared to younger students (adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 1.40; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.109~1.768). Those students who were smokers were 5.15 times more likely to use PDE5 inhibitors as compared to their non-smoking counterparts (AOR, 5.15; 95% CI, 2.096~12.687). In addition, multivariate logistic regression showed that being in a relationship, alcohol use, greater number of cigarettes smoked per day, and more sexual partners were significantly associated with PDE5 inhibitor use. Conclusions The prevalence of PDE5 inhibitor use among undergraduate students was 5.5%. Cigarette smoking and other substance use, older age, and greater number of sexual partners were significantly associated factors for PDE5 inhibitor use. These findings suggest that restricting access to PDE5 inhibitor drugs is essential to curtailing misuse among university students.
Post-Exercise Muscle Protein Synthesis in Rats after Ingestion of Acidified Bovine Milk Compared with Skim Milk

Bovine milk proteins have a low absorption rate due to gastric acid-induced coagulation. Acidified milk remains liquid under acidic conditions; therefore, the absorption rate of its protein may differ from that of untreated milk. To investigate how this would affect muscle protein synthesis (MPS), we compared MPS after ingestion of acidified versus skim milk in rats. Male Sprague-Dawley rats swam for 2 h and were immediately administered acidified or skim milk, then euthanized at 30, 60, 90, and 120 min afterwards. Triceps muscle samples were excised for assessing fractional synthetic rate (FSR), plasma components, intramuscular free amino acids and mTOR signaling. The FSR in the acidified milk group was significantly higher than in the skim milk group throughout the post-ingestive period. Plasma essential amino acids, leucine, and insulin levels were significantly increased in the acidified milk group at 30 min after administration compared to the skim milk group. In addition, acidified milk ingestion was associated with greater phosphorylation of protein kinase B (Akt) and ribosomal protein S6 kinase (S6K1), and sustained phosphorylation of 4E-binding protein 1 (4E-BP1). These results indicate that compared with untreated milk, acidified milk ingestion is associated with greater stimulation of post-exercise MPS.
Health Effects of Fine Particulate Air Pollution: Lines that Connect

Abstract Efforts to understand and mitigate the health effects of particulate matter (PM) air pollution have a rich and interesting history. This review focuses on six substantial lines of research that have been pursued since 1997 that have helped elucidate our understanding about the effects of PM on human health. There has been substantial progress in the evaluation of PM health effects at different time-scales of exposure and in the exploration of the shape of the concentration-response function. There has also been emerging evidence of PM-related cardiovascular health effects and growing knowledge regarding interconnected general pathophysiological pathways that link PM exposure with cardiopulmonary morbidity and mortality. Despite important gaps in scientific knowledge and continued reasons for some skepticism, a comprehensive evaluation of the research findings provides persuasive evidence that exposure to fine particulate air pollution has adverse effects on cardiopulmonary health. Although much of this research has been motivated by environmental public health policy, these results have important scientific, medical, and public health implications that are broader than debates over legally mandated air quality standards.
Developed Distributed Energy-Efficient Clustering (DDEEC) for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Typically, a wireless sensor network contains an important number of inexpensive power constrained sensors, which collect data from the environment and transmit them towards the base station in a cooperative way. Saving energy and therefore, extending the wireless sensor networks lifetime, imposes a great challenge. Clustering techniques are largely used for these purposes. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a clustering technique called a Developed Distributed Energy-Efficient Clustering scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. This technique is based on changing dynamically and with more efficiency the cluster head election probability. Simulation results show that our protocol performs better than the Stable Election Protocol (SEP) by about 30% and than the Distributed Energy-Efficient Clustering (DEEC) by about 15% in terms of network lifetime and first node dies.
Diagnostic value of urine erythrocyte morphology in the detection of glomerular disease in SurePath™ liquid‐based cytology compared with fresh urine sediment examination

H. Ohsaki, T. Hirouchi, N. Hayashi, E. Okanoue, M. Ohara, N. Kuroda, E. Hirakawa and Y. Norimatsu Diagnostic value of urine erythrocyte morphology in the detection of glomerular disease in SurePath™ liquid‐based cytology compared with fresh urine sediment examination
Cavernous carotid aneurysms: a new treatment paradigm in the era of flow diversion

ABSTRACT Introduction: Cavernous carotid aneurysms can cause significant symptomatology through mass effect and may rupture, resulting in carotid-cavernous fistula or epistaxis. Traditional treatment options included endovascular or surgical parent vessel occlusion, or embolization; in the last decade, the development of flow-diverting stents has changed the management paradigm for these lesions. Areas covered: In this review, we summarize the natural history, clinical presentation, and evolution of treatment options for cavernous carotid aneurysms and discuss developments likely to influence treatment strategies in the future. We performed a Medline search for relevant review articles and original reports and additional searches based on review of referenced articles, abstracts, and conference presentations. Expert commentary: Long-term data are still required to fully assess the efficacy of endoluminal reconstruction using flow diversion, but this approach appears to offer an attractive therapy for many cavernous carotid aneurysms requiring intervention.
A Data-driven Method for the Detection of Close Submitters in Online Learning Environments

Online learning has become very popular over the last decade. However, there are still many details that remain unknown about the strategies that students follow while studying online. In this study, we focus on the direction of detecting 'invisible' collaboration ties between students in online learning environments. Specifically, the paper presents a method developed to detect student ties based on temporal proximity of their assignment submissions. The paper reports on findings of a study that made use of the proposed method to investigate the presence of close submitters in two different massive open online courses. The results show that most of the students (i.e., student user accounts) were grouped as couples, though some bigger communities were also detected. The study also compared the population detected by the algorithm with the rest of user accounts and found that close submitters needed a statistically significant lower amount of activity with the platform to achieve a certificate of completion in a MOOC. These results confirm that the detected close submitters were performing some collaboration or even engaged in unethical behaviors, which facilitates their way into a certificate. However, more work is required in the future to specify various strategies adopted by close submitters and possible associations between the user accounts.
Measuring social capital: culture as an explanation of Italy's economic dualism.

The paper presents a quantitative test of the oft-repeated view that Italy's backward and poor South suffered from low "social capital", a tendency to defect from co-operative engagements. The problem with such assertions is that they run the risk of taking as evidence in favour of the hypothesis the very observations that need to be explained. The analysis carried out in this work tries to break out of this impasse by analyzing the conditions under which it was ex ante welfare-improving for farmers in early 20th century Italy to join an unlimited liability rural co-operative bank which would give them access to cheaper credit but also exposed them to the risk of their neighbours' defection.
Lattice-Based Recurrent Neural Network Encoders for Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) heavily relies on word-level modelling to learn semantic representations of input sentences.However, for languages without natural word delimiters (e.g., Chinese) where input sentences have to be tokenized first,conventional NMT is confronted with two issues:1) it is difficult to find an optimal tokenization granularity for source sentence modelling, and2) errors in 1-best tokenizations may propagate to the encoder of NMT.To handle these issues, we propose word-lattice based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoders for NMT,which generalize the standard RNN to word lattice topology.The proposed encoders take as input a word lattice that compactly encodes multiple tokenizations, and learn to generate new hidden states from arbitrarily many inputs and hidden states in preceding time steps.As such, the word-lattice based encoders not only alleviate the negative impact of tokenization errors but also are more expressive and flexible to embed input sentences.Experiment results on Chinese-English translation demonstrate the superiorities of the proposed encoders over the conventional encoder.
Tracking colistin-treated patients to monitor the incidence and outcome of carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative infections.

BACKGROUND Existing surveillance mechanisms may underestimate the incidence of carbapenem-resistant gram-negative infections (CRGNIs). Although carbapenem resistance increases the risk of death, the trend in mortality over time is unknown. METHODS A retrospective cohort study was conducted at 40 academic medical centers using a discharge database to identify adult hospital admissions without cystic fibrosis in 2006-2012 and received intravenous colistin for >3 consecutive days or died during therapy (termed colistin cases). The primary outcomes were the number of colistin cases per 100,000 admissions per year and change in the hospital mortality rate over time compared with the rate of discharges to home. Secondary outcomes included median overall and intensive care unit lengths of stay. RESULTS From 2006 to 2012, a total of 5011 unique patients were identified as colistin cases. The number per 100,000 admissions per year increased from 35.56 to 92.98 during the 7-year study (P < .001). The odds of in-hospital death among colistin cases (compared with discharge to home) decreased by a mean of 5.2%/y (P = .04), whereas discharge to an institution (P = .24) or hospice (P = .89) remained steady over time. The median overall and intensive care unit lengths of stay decreased by 7.5 and 6 days, respectively (P < .001). In a 4-hospital chart review, 81.6% of colistin cases were found to have culture-positive CRGNIs. Conversely, 53% of extensively drug-resistant bloodstream CRGNIs at 2 of these hospitals met colistin case criteria. CONCLUSIONS Colistin cases represent a severely ill population with a high probability of having culture-confirmed CRGNIs. Colistin tracking is a novel strategy for monitoring the incidence and mortality of CRGNIs, particularly those caused by extensively drug-resistant bacteria. Although the incidence of colistin cases nearly tripled within 7 years, more of these patients are surviving hospitalization and going home.
Automatic rule identification for agent-based crowd models through gene expression programming

Agent-based modelling of human crowds has now become an important and active research field, with a wide range of applications such as military training, evacuation analysis and digital game. One of the significant and challenging tasks in agent-based crowd modelling is the design of decision rules for agents, so as to reproduce desired emergent phenomena behaviors. The common approach in agent-based crowd modelling is to design decision rules empirically based on model developer's experiences and domain specific knowledge. In this paper, an evolutionary framework is proposed to automatically extract decision rules for agent-based crowd models, so as to reproduce an objective crowd behavior. To automate the rule extraction process, the problem of finding optimal decision rules from objective crowd behaviors is formulated as a symbolic regression problem. An evolutionary framework based on gene expression programming is developed to solve the problem. The proposed algorithm is tested using crowd evacuation simulations in three scenarios with differing complexity. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and shows that our algorithm is able to find decision rules for agents, which in turn can generate the prescribed macro-scale dynamics.
A scalable approach to thread-level speculation

While architects understand how to build cost-effective parallel machines across a wide spectrum of machine sizes (ranging from within a single chip to large-scale servers), the real challenge is how to easily create parallel software to effectively exploit all of this raw performance potential. One promising technique for overcoming this problem is Thread-Level Speculation (TLS), which enables the compiler to optimistically create parallel threads despite uncertainty as to whether those threads are actually independent. In this paper we propose and evaluate a design for supporting TLS that seamlessly scales to any machine size because it is a straightforward extension of writeback invalidation-based cache coherence (which itself scales both up and down). Our experimental results demonstrate that our scheme performs well on both single-chip multiprocessors and on larger-scale machines where communication latencies are twenty times larger.
Effects of perceptual and conceptual similarities on consumers' evaluations of copycat brand names

Copycats often choose brand names that mimic perceptual, conceptual, or both elements of leading brand names. Yet little is known about how perceptual and conceptual similarities of a copycat interact to affect consumers' evaluations, especially in logographic language systems (e.g., Chinese). Three laboratory experiments demonstrate that perceptual similarity alone leads to negative evaluations of copycat brand names; this negative effect, however, can be mitigated when conceptual similarity is added. The underlying mechanism for this effect can be traced to consumers' persuasion knowledge. Perceptual (vs. conceptual) similarity activates consumers' persuasion knowledge about the insincere motives of the copycat brand, which in turn shapes their brand evaluations. However, this effect can become less prominent when conceptual similarity is added because it alleviates use of persuasion knowledge, or when a consumer is in a happy mood because it neutralizes persuasion knowledge. These findings shed light on how different types of copycat strategies interact to affect copycat brand name evaluations and offer important implications for marketing practice. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Reliability Issues in Open Source Software

Source software in recent years has received great attention amongst software users. The success of the Linux Operating system, Apache web server, Mozilla web browser etc. demonstrates open source software development (OSS) as an alternative form of software development. Despite the phenomenal success of open source software the reliability of OSS is often questioned. The opponents of open source software claim that open source software is unreliable as the source code of OSS is available and the potential threats can easily be incorporated. Whereas the supporters claim OSS to be more reliable than proprietary software as the source code is open and freely available for scrutiny for all. This paper analyzes the reliability issues of open source software in contrast to the proprietary software. Various views of researchers on the reliability of OSS are studied and analyzed and a theoretical study is made to examine the reliability of OSS. Results of various surveys on reliability conducted by various researchers/agencies are also incorporated in support of reliability analysis of OSS.
Delivery of aerosolized medication to intubated babies

We studied the delivery of aerosolized cromolyn sodium to intubated babies, and evaluated the effect of changes in delivery techniques. In addition, we compared these results with an in vitro model of aerosol delivery. Cromolyn sodium was used as a marker because once the drug is absorbed, it is excreted unchanged, approximately 50% in urine and 50% in bile. We demonstrated that, in vitro, a conventional, jet‐type nebulizer aerosolized 20.5% of a test dose of cromolyn, and only 5.5% of the dose was recovered after passage through 60 cm of ventilator tubing and an endotracheal tube adapter. This increased to 44.5% nebulized and 19% recovered when the volume nebulized was increased from 2 mL to 5 mL. A submicronic nebulizer aerosolized 40% and delivered 33.5% of the test dose. A 20 mg dose of nebulized cromolyn sodium was used as a test dose in infants, after which urine was collected for 4 hours. Forty‐three urine samples were collected, after the delivery of cromolyn test doses, from nine babies (16–128 days old) intubated for bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Both the jet and submicronic nebulizers were tested in two positions: (1) in place of the ventilator humidifier, and (2) at the endotracheal tube adapter. There were no statistically significant differences in cromolyn delivery for any system configuration. In all situations, means of less than 0.1% of the test dose were recovered in the urine. We estimated that in all cases, < 1% of the test dose (approximately 50–100 μg of cromolyn) had been deposited in the lung. These results show that although the submicronic nebulizer aerosolized cromolyn more efficiently, no additional cromolyn could be detected in infants. We speculate that a significant portion of the smaller particles are exhaled. Pediatr Pulmonol 1991; 10:136–141.
Radial Scars and Subsequent Breast Cancer Risk: A Meta-Analysis

Background The relationship between radial scars and breast cancer is unclear, as the results of different studies are inconsistent. We aim to solve the controversy and assess the breast cancer risk of radial scars. Methods Case-control or cohort studies about radial scars and breast cancer risk published in PubMed, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library from 2000 to 2013 were searched. Heterogeneity for the eligible data was assessed and a pooled odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated. Results Five observational studies involving 2521 cases and 20290 controls were included in our study. From pooled analysis, radial scars were found to have a 1.33 fold increased risk of breast cancer, but which was not significant (P = 0.138). Sample size contributed to heterogeneity. In subgroup analysis, the results pooled from studies with sample size >2000 show that presence of radial scars was associated with 1.6 times breast cancer risk compared to absence of radial scars. Radial scars increased the risk of breast cancer among women with proliferative disease without atypia, but no significant association between radial scars and carcinoma was noted among women with atypical hyperplasia. Conclusions Radial scars tend to be associated with an increased breast cancer risk. Radial scars should be considered among women with proliferative disease without atypia, while atypical hyperplasia is still the primary concern among women with both radial scars and atypical hyperplasia.
The fate of low grade dysplasia in ulcerative colitis

OBJECTIVE:The optimal strategy for the management of definite low grade dysplasia (LGD) detected in surveillance in ulcerative colitis (UC) is unknown, because the natural history of LGD has not been well described.METHODS:We reviewed the Mayo Clinic records of patients with UC found to have flat LGD between 1990 and 1993 in whom a nonoperative strategy was pursued for 2 months or more.RESULTS:Eighteen patients with UC and LGD were observed for a median of 32 months. Nine of 18 patients identified with UC and LGD developed advanced neoplastic lesions during follow-up, which were defined as adenocarcinoma, raised dysplasia, or high grade dysplasia. The cumulative incidence of progression to an advanced lesion was 33% at 5 yr (95% CI = 9–56%). Only one patient developed adenocarcinoma, diagnosed 74 months after his initial finding of LGD and 20 months after his last surveillance exam. Besides this patient, adenocarcinoma was not detected in the colectomy specimens of 13 other patients who underwent surgery. Colectomies were performed for dysplasia or cancer in seven patients, active colitis in five patients, and unknown reasons in two patients. Four patients did not have colectomies.CONCLUSIONS:Neoplastic progression in patients with UC and LGD is common. Total proctocolectomy should be offered to all patients with flat LGD. Our study illustrates numerous pitfalls in the practice of surveillance.