Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association Between Streptococcal Infection and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Tourette's Syndrome, and Tic Disorder

Objective. Reports have suggested that streptococcal infection may be etiologically related to pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders (PANDAS), but there are few good epidemiologic studies to support this theory. Using population-based data from a large West-Coast health maintenance organization, we assessed whether streptococcal infection was associated with increased risk for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette's syndrome (TS), or tic disorder. Methods. This is a case-control study of children 4 to 13 years old receiving their first diagnosis of OCD, TS, or tic disorder between January 1992 and December 1999 at Group Health Cooperative outpatient facilities. Cases were matched to controls by birth date, gender, primary physician, and propensity to seek health care. Results. Patients with OCD, TS, or tic disorder were more likely than controls to have had prior streptococcal infection (OR: 2.22; 95% CI: 1.05, 4.69) in the 3 months before onset date. The risk was higher among children with multiple streptococcal infections within 12 months (OR: 3.10; 95% CI: 1.77, 8.96). Having multiple infections with group A β-hemolytic streptococcus within a 12-month period was associated with an increased risk for TS (OR: 13.6; 95% CI: 1.93, 51.0). These associations did not change appreciably when limited to cases with a clear date of onset of symptoms or with tighter matching on health care behavior. Conclusion. These findings lend epidemiologic evidence that PANDAS may arise as a result of a postinfectious autoimmune phenomenon induced by childhood streptococcal infection.
Risk Aversion and Schooling Decisions

Using unique Italian panel data in which individual differences in attitudes toward risk are measurable (from a lottery pricing question), we investigate the effect of the individual specific time invariant risk aversion factor on the probability of entering higher education. Apart from the risk aversion factor, absolute risk aversion depends on various state variables (wealth, liquidity constraints, back- ground risk) and is assumed to be measured with nonclassical error. We also take into account the endogeneity of the response to the risk aversion question, as well as potential non-classical measurement error in wealth. All model specifications point out to the fact that individual specific risk aversion acts as a deterrent to higher education investment.
Baire and Volterra spaces

In this paper we describe broad classes of spaces for which the Baire space property is equivalent to the assertion that any two dense G (cid:14) - sets have dense intersection. We also provide examples of spaces where the equivalence does not hold. Finally, our techniques provide an easy proof of a new internal characterization of perfectly meager subspaces of [0 ; 1] and characterize metric spaces that are always of (cid:12)rst category.
Polysulfone based Membranes with Desired Pores Characteristics

Polysulfone based membranes with controlled porosity pore density, size and orientation were synthesized. The predicted pore characteristics are obtained by adding magnetite (nano or micro) particles into the polysulfone gel and the pores obtained by applying different magnetic fields. The pore density, size and orientation can be designed based on the magnetite particle concentration, on the magnetite particles size and respectively based on the angle between membrane surface and magnetite field. The pore density, size and orientation of the membranes were analyzed by SEM. FTIR was used to investigate the membrane composition and to prove the possibility of removing the magnetite particles by acidic dissolution or by extended membrane exposure to the magnetic field. The complex thermal analysis was used to characterize the thermal behaviour of the synthesized membranes.
Effects of Tension on the Swelling of Cotton Fibers

Changes in the cross-sectional area and circularity of cotton fibers tensioned in water and other media have been measured microscopically. It was found that the area increased significantly over that brought about by water-swelling alone. Fibers tensioned in bundle form at 0.45 g. /grex for 1 hr. in water showed an average increase of 98% in area compared to dry untensioned fibers, and an increase in circularity (axis ratio) of 57%. These increases were not retained on drying, even when tension on the fibers was maintained. Immersion without tension in urea solution, ethylamine, or sodium hydroxide of mercerizing strength, followed by removal of the reagent and drying, in each case produced increases in area and circularity over those of the untreated fibers. Tensioning at 0.45 g. /grex during im mersion in these reagents increased the circularity, but decreased the area with respect to the untensioned fibers. The elongation of fiber bundles tensioned in the various media was measured. The sodium hydroxide solution produced the greatest elongation.
A new genus of the Actinomycetales: Microtetraspora gen. nov.

SUMMARY: Two aerobic mesophilic microbial species of a new genus belonging to the family Streptomycetaceae of the order Actinomycetales are described under the name Microtetraspora (Microtetraspora glauca, type species). The microorganisms produced a filamentous growth which is differentiated into a vegetative and an aerial mycelium. The new genus is characterized by the formation of a short and sparsely branched aerial mycelium bearing at the end of short sporophores chains of four spores. Sporulation is not observed to take place on the vegetative mycelium. The genus Microtetraspora is widely distributed in the soil and has been isolated from many samples.
The use of tetracyclines for the treatment of sarcoidosis.

BACKGROUND To evaluate the safety and efficacy of minocycline in the treatment of sarcoidosis, a nonrandomized, open study was performed in patients with cutaneous sarcoidosis. OBSERVATIONS Twelve patients with cutaneous sarcoidosis were treated with minocycline, 200 mg/d, for a median duration of 12 months. Three patients had extracutaneous lesions at the time of the study. The median follow-up was 26 months. A clinical response was observed in 10 patients, consisting of complete responses in 8 patients and partial responses in 2 patients. A progression of skin lesions was observed in 1 patient, and lesions remained stable in another patient. Adverse effects were minimal, except in 1 patient, who developed hypersensitivity syndrome. A slight hyperpigmentation occurred in 2 patients at the site of previous lesions, which completely disappeared after minocycline use was discontinued. A relapse of skin symptoms occurred after minocycline withdrawal in 3 patients, who further received doxycycline, 200 mg/d, allowing a complete remission of lesions. CONCLUSIONS These results support that minocycline and doxycycline may be beneficial for the treatment of cutaneous sarcoidosis. Randomized controlled studies are warranted for the evaluation of the true efficacy of tetracyclines in these patients.
Facial reactions to facial expressions.

Previous research has demonstrated that different patterns of facial muscle activity are correlated with different emotional states. In the present study subjects were exposed to pictures of happy and angry facial expressions, in response to which their facial electromyographic (EMG) activities, heart rate (HR), and palmar skin conductance responses (SCRs) were recorded. It was found that happy and angry faces evoked different facial EMG response patterns, with increased zygomatic region activity to happy stimuli and increased corrugator region activity to angry stimuli. Furthermore, both happy and angry faces evoked HR decelerations and similar SCR magnitudes. The results are interpreted as suggesting that facial EMG recordings provide a method for distinguishing between response patterns to “positive” and “negative” emotional visual stimuli.
2 J ul 2 00 2 Optimally Cutting a Surface into a Disk ∗

We consider the problem of cutting a set of edges on a polyhedral manifold surface, possibly with boundary, to obtain a single topological disk, minimizing either the total number of cut edges or their total length. We show that this problem is NP-hard, even for manifolds without boundary and for punctured spheres. We also describe an algorithm with running time nO(g+k), where n is the combinatorial complexity, g is the genus, and k is the number of boundary components of the input surface. Finally, we describe a greedy algorithm that outputs a O(log g)-approximation of the minimum cut graph in O(g2n log n) time. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 18th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry [19]. See http://www.cs. uiuc.edu/∼jeffe/pubs/schema.html for the most recent version of this paper. Partially supported by a Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER award CCR-0093348, and NSF ITR grant DMR-0121695. Partially supported by NSF CAREER award CCR-0132901. Optimally Cutting a Surface into a Disk 1
Bayesian Poker

Poker is ideal for testing automated reasoning under uncertainty. It introduces uncertainty both by physical randomization and by incomplete information about opponents' hands. Another source of uncertainty is the limited information available to construct psychological models of opponents, their tendencies to bluff, play conservatively, reveal weakness, etc. and the relation between their hand strengths and betting behaviour. All of these uncertainties must be assessed accurately and combined effectively for any reasonable level of skill in the game to be achieved, since good decision making is highly sensitive to those tasks. We describe our Bayesian Poker Program (BPP), which uses a Bayesian network to model the program's poker hand, the opponent's hand and the opponent's playing behaviour conditioned upon the hand, and betting curves which govern play given a probability of winning. The history of play with opponents is used to improve BPP's understanding of their behaviour. We compare BPP experimentally with: a simple rule-based system; a program which depends exclusively on hand probabilities (i.e., without opponent modeling); and with human players. BPP has shown itself to be an effective player against all these opponents, barring the better humans. We also sketch out some likely ways of improving play.
On undetected error probability of binary matrix ensembles

In this paper, an analysis of the undetected error probability of ensembles of mtimesn binary matrices is presented. The ensemble called the Bernoulli ensemble whose members are considered as matrices generated from i.i. d. Bernoulli source is mainly considered here. The main contributions of this work are (i) derivation of the error exponent of the average undetected error probability and (ii) closed form expressions for the variance of the undetected error probability. It is shown that the behavior of the exponent for a sparse ensemble is somewhat different from that for a dense ensemble. Furthermore, as a byproduct of the proof of the variance formula, simple covariance formula of the weight distribution is derived.
Capacity of Underspread Noncoherent WSSUS Fading Channels under Peak Signal Constraints

We characterize the capacity of the general class of noncoherent underspread wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) time-frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels, under peak constraints in time and frequency and in time only. Capacity upper and lower bounds are found which are explicit in the channel's scattering function and allow to identify the capacity-maximizing bandwidth for a given scattering function and a given peak-to-average power ratio.
Interfacial Microstructure of Magnetic Pressure Seam Welded Al-Fe, Al-Ni and Al-Cu Lap Joints

A new welding method, magnetic pressure seam welding, was used to lap join dissimilar metals (Al-Fe, Al-Ni and Al-Cu). The circuit for magnetic pressure seam welding consists of a capacitor, an electric discharge gap switch, and a plate-type coil. The overlapped metal plates are placed over the coil. When an impulse current from an energy-storage capacitor bank passes through the coil, a high-density magnetic flux is suddenly generated around the coil. The generated high-density magnetic flux lines cross the end of the overlapped plates. Eddy currents are induced mainly inside the Al plate because it has a high electrical conductivity. Both the Joule heat generated in the plates and the magnetic pressure applied from the Al side promote the joining of the lapped plates. The welding is normally achieved within 10 μs. This results in very little microstructural change in the parent plates aside from the area around the weld interface. Strong lap joints were obtained for every metal combination and no tensile fracture took place in the weld region. A characteristic wavy morphology was observed at the weld interface. An intermediate phase layer was also observed at the weld interface. TEM observation revealed that the intermediate layer consisted of fine Al grains and intermetallic compound particles dispersed among the Al grains. The growth direction of the wave, the welding condition dependency of the wavelength and the amplitude of the interfacial wave were intensively investigated in order to clarify the welding mechanism of this method.
Electromagnetic Sheet Bulging: Analysis of Process Parameters by FE Simulations

Electromagnetic forming is a non-conventional forming process and is classified as a high-speed forming process. It provides certain advantages as compared to conventional forming processes: improved formability, high repeatability and productivity, reduction in tooling cost and reduction of springback and of wrinkling. However, various process parameters affect the performance of the electromagnetic forming system. Finite element simulations are very useful to optimize a process because they can reduce time and costs. With the aim of investigating the effects of the process parameters on the deformed blank geometry, finite element simulations of an electromagnetic sheet bulging test have been performed in this work. Furthermore the role of first impulse of discharged current is also investigated.
Using first-order logic to reason about policies

A policy describes the conditions under which an action is permitted or forbidden. We show that a fragment of (multi-sorted) first-order logic can be used to represent and reason about policies. Because we use first-order logic, policies have a clear syntax and semantics. We show that further restricting the fragment results in a language that is still quite expressive yet is also tractable. More precisely, questions about entailment, such as 'May Alice access the file? ', can be answered in time that is a low-order polynomial (indeed, almost linear in some cases), as can questions about the consistency of policy sets. We also give a brief overview of a prototype that we have built whose reasoning engine is based on the logic and whose interface is designed for nonlogicians, allowing them to enter both policies and background information, such as 'Alice is a student', and to ask questions about the policies.
Characterization of the vertices and extreme directions of the negative cycle polyhedron and harness of generating vertices of $0/1$-polyhedra

Given a graph $G=(V,E)$ and a weight function on the edges $w:E\mapsto\RR$, we consider the polyhedron $P(G,w)$ of negative-weight flows on $G$, and get a complete characterization of the vertices and extreme directions of $P(G,w)$. As a corollary, we show that, unless $P=NP$, there is no output polynomial-time algorithm to generate all the vertices of a 0/1-polyhedron. This strengthens the NP-hardness result of Khachiyan et al. (2006) for non 0/1-polyhedra, and comes in contrast with the polynomiality of vertex enumeration for 0/1-polytopes \cite{BL98} [Bussieck and L\"ubbecke (1998)].
Continuous Deployment at Facebook and OANDA

Continuous deployment is the software engineering practice of deploying many small incremental software updates into production, leading to a continuous stream of 10s, 100s, or even 1,000s of deployments per day. High-profile Internet firms such as Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, Flickr, Google, and Netflix have embraced continuous deployment. However, the practice has not been covered in textbooks and no scientific publication has presented an analysis of continuous deployment. In this paper, we describe the continuous deployment practices at two very different firms: Facebook and OANDA. We show that continuous deployment does not inhibit productivity or quality even in the face of substantial engineering team and code size growth. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show it is possible to scale the size of an engineering team by 20X and the size of the code base by 50X without negatively impacting developer productivity or software quality. Our experience suggests that top-level management support of continuous deployment is necessary, and that given a choice, developers prefer faster deployment. We identify elements we feel make continuous deployment viable and present observations from operating in a continuous deployment environment.
Marine regime shifts in ocean biogeochemical models: a case study in the Gulf of Alaska

Regime shifts have been reported in many marine ecosystems, and are often expressed as an abrupt change occurring in multiple physical and biological components of the system. In the Gulf of Alaska, a regime shift in the late 1970s was observed, indicated by an abrupt increase in sea surface temperature and major shifts in the catch of many fish species. A thorough understanding of the extent and mechanisms leading to such regime shifts is challenged by data paucity in time and space. We investigate the ability of a suite of ocean biogeochemistry models of varying complexity to simulate regime shifts in the Gulf of Alaska by examining the presence of abrupt changes in time series of physical variables (sea surface temperature and mixed-layer depth), nutrients and biological variables (chlorophyll, primary productivity and plankton biomass) using change-point analysis. Our results show that some ocean biogeochemical models are capable of simulating the late 1970s shift, manifested as an abrupt increase in sea surface temperature followed by an abrupt decrease in nutrients and biological productivity. Models from low to intermediate complexity simulate an abrupt transition in the late 1970s (i.e. a significant shift from one year to the next) while the transition is smoother in higher complexity models. Our study demonstrates that ocean biogeochemical models can successfully simulate regime shifts in the Gulf of Alaska region. These models can therefore be considered useful tools to enhance our understanding of how changes in physical conditions are propagated from lower to upper trophic levels.
Encoding Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars with a Nonmonotonic Inheritance Hierarchy

This paper shows how DATR, a widely used formal language for lexical knowledge representation, can be used to define an LTAG lexicon as an inheritance hierarchy with internal lexical rules. A bottom-up featural encoding is used for LTAG trees and this allows lexical rules to be implemented as covariation constraints within feature structures. Such an approach eliminates the considerable redundancy otherwise associated with an LTAG lexicon.
On the Secrecy Capacity of Fading Channels

We consider the secure transmission of information over an ergodic fading channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. Our eavesdropper can be viewed as the wireless counterpart of Wyner's wiretapper. The secrecy capacity of such a system is characterized under the assumption of asymptotically long coherence intervals. We analyze the full channel state information (CSI) case, where the transmitter has access to the channel gains of the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper, and the main channel CSI scenario, where only the legitimate receiver channel gain is known at the transmitter. In each scenario, the secrecy capacity is obtained along with the optimal power and rate allocation strategies. We then propose a low-complexity on/off power allocation strategy that achieves near-optimal performance with only the main channel CSI. More specifically, this scheme is shown to be asymptotically optimal as the average SNR goes to infinity, and interestingly, is shown to attain the secrecy capacity under the full CSI assumption. Remarkably, our results reveal the positive impact of fading on the secrecy capacity and establish the critical role of rate adaptation, based on the main channel CSI, in facilitating secure communications over slow fading channels.
Immunologic and Therapeutic Synergy of IL-27 and IL-2: Enhancement of T Cell Sensitization, Tumor-Specific CTL Reactivity and Complete Regression of Disseminated Neuroblastoma Metastases in the Liver and Bone Marrow1

IL-27 exerts antitumor activity in murine orthotopic neuroblastoma, but only partial antitumor effect in disseminated disease. This study demonstrates that combined treatment with IL-2 and IL-27 induces potent antitumor activity in disseminated neuroblastoma metastasis. Complete durable tumor regression was achieved in 90% of mice bearing metastatic TBJ-IL-27 tumors treated with IL-2 compared with only 40% of mice bearing TBJ-IL-27 tumors alone and 0% of mice bearing TBJ-FLAG tumors with or without IL-2 treatment. Comparable antitumor effects were achieved by IL-27 protein produced upon hydrodynamic IL-27 plasmid DNA delivery when combined with IL-2. Although delivery of IL-27 alone, or in combination with IL-2, mediated pronounced regression of neuroblastoma metastases in the liver, combined delivery of IL-27 and IL-2 was far more effective than IL-27 alone against bone marrow metastases. Combined exposure to IL-27 produced by tumor and IL-2 synergistically enhances the generation of tumor-specific CTL reactivity. Potentiation of CTL reactivity by IL-27 occurs via mechanisms that appear to be engaged during both the initial sensitization and effector phase. Potent immunologic memory responses are generated in mice cured of their disseminated disease by combined delivery of IL-27 and IL-2, and depletion of CD8+ ablates the antitumor efficacy of this combination. Moreover, IL-27 delivery can inhibit the expansion of CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ regulatory and IL-17-expressing CD4+ cells that are otherwise observed among tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes from mice treated with IL-2. These studies demonstrate that IL-27 and IL-2 synergistically induce complete tumor regression and long-term survival in mice bearing widely metastatic neuroblastoma tumors.
Specimen size effect on tensile strength of surface-micromachined polycrystalline silicon thin films

A new tensile tester using an electrostatic-force grip was developed to evaluate the tensile strength and the reliability of thin-film materials. The tester was constructed in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) chamber for in situ observation and was applied for tensile testing of polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) thin films with dimensions of 30-300 /spl mu/m long, 2-5 /spl mu/m wide, and 2 /spl mu/m thick. It was found that the mean tensile strengths of nondoped and P-doped poly-Si are 2.0-2.8 and 2.0-2.7 GPa, respectively, depending on the length of the specimens, irrespective of the specimen width. Statistical analysis of these size effects on the tensile strength predicted that the location of the fracture origin was on the edge of the specimen, which was Identified by the SEM observation of the fracture surface of the thin films.