Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding Differences in the Body Burden–Age Relationships of Bioaccumulating Contaminants Based on Population Cross Sections versus Individuals

Background: Body burdens of persistent bioaccumulative contaminants estimated from the cross-sectional biomonitoring of human populations are often plotted against age. Such relationships have previously been assumed to reflect the role of age in bioaccumulation. Objectives: We used a mechanistic modeling approach to reproduce concentration-versus-age relationships and investigate factors that influence them. Method: CoZMoMAN is an environmental fate and human food chain bioaccumulation model that estimates time trends in human body burdens in response to time-variant environmental emissions. Trends of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) congener 153 concentrations versus age for population cross sections were estimated using simulated longitudinal data for individual women born at different times. The model was also used to probe the influence of partitioning and degradation properties, length of emissions, and model assumptions regarding lipid content and liver metabolism on concentration–age trends of bioaccumulative and persistent contaminants. Results: Body burden–age relationships for population cross sections and individuals over time are not equivalent. The time lapse between the peak in emissions and sample collection for biomonitoring is the most influential factor controlling the shape of concentration–age trends for chemicals with human metabolic half-lives longer than 1 year. Differences in observed concentration–age trends for PCBs and polybrominated diphenyl ethers are consistent with differences in emission time trends and human metabolic half-lives. Conclusions: Bioaccumulation does not monotonically increase with age. Our model suggests that the main predictors of cross-sectional body burden trends with age are the amount of time elapsed after peak emissions and the human metabolic and environmental degradation rates.
Does clofazimine prevent erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL) in leprosy? A retrospective study, comparing the experience of multibacillary patients receiving either 12 or 24 months WHO-MDT.

OBJECTIVE To compare the occurrence, duration and severity of ENL in leprosy patients treated with either 12 or 24 months of standard multi-drug therapy (MDT). MATERIALS AND METHODS STUDY POPULATION 296 patients treated with MDT for 2 years, between 1985 and 1992 and followed up as part of a relapse study; and 293 patients, treated between 1998 and 2004, with MDT for 1 year and also followed up as part of a relapse study. The Chi squared test and multiple logistic regression analysis were used to test for statistical significance. RESULTS ENL was not significantly more common, but it was longer-lasting and more severe in patients receiving only 12 months of MDT, as compared with those receiving 24 months treatment. A high BI at the start of treatment significantly increased the risk of severe ENL by a factor of between 6 and 12, while treatment with 12 instead of 24 months of MDT significantly increased the risk by a factor of between 3 and 10. CONCLUSIONS This study provides further evidence that a high initial BI is the key risk factor for ENL. It also suggests that the difference between these two cohorts in their experience of ENL as demonstrated in this study, may be related to the different amounts of clofazimine which the two cohorts were given in the early years of their treatment. Further studies are needed to determine whether clofazimine could be used more specifically to reduce the severity of ENL in the small group of patients at high risk for the condition.
Exploiting Multi-User Diversity and Multi-Hop Diversity in Dual-Hop Broadcast Channels

We propose joint user-and-hop scheduling over dual-hop block-fading broadcast channels in order to exploit multi-user diversity gains and multi-hop diversity gains all together. To achieve this objective, the first and second hops are scheduled opportunistically based on the channel state information. The joint scheduling problem is formulated as maximizing the weighted sum of the long term achievable rates of the users under a stability constraint, which means that in the long term the rate received by the relay should equal the rate transmitted by it, in addition to power constraints. We show that this problem is equivalent to a single-hop broadcast channel by treating the source as a virtual user with an optimal weight that maintains the stability constraint. We show how to obtain the source weight either off-line based on channel statistics or on real-time based on channel measurements. Furthermore, we consider special cases including the maximum sum-rate scheduler and the proportional fair scheduler. We also show how to extend the scheme into one that allows multiple user scheduling via superposition coding with successive decoding. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed joint scheduling scheme enlarges the rate region as compared to scheduling schemes that exploit the diversity gains partially.
TOWARDS A BUSINESS PROCESS MANGEMENT MATURITY MODEL

Business Process Management (BPM) has been identified as the number one business priority by a recent Gartner study (Gartner, 2005). However, BPM has a plethora of facets as its origins are in Business Process Reengineering, Process Innovation, Process Modelling, and Workflow Management to name a few. Organisations increasingly recognize the requirement for an increased process orientation and require appropriate comprehensive frameworks, which help to scope and evaluate their BPM initiative. This research project aims toward the development of a holistic and widely accepted BPM maturity model, which facilitates the assessment of BPM capabilities. This paper provides an overview about the current model with a focus on the actual model development utilizing a series of Delphi studies. The development process includes separate studies that focus on further defining and expanding the six core factors within the model, i.e. strategic alignment, governance, method, Information Technology, people and culture.
Mitofusin 2 Protects Hepatocyte Mitochondrial Function from Damage Induced by GCDCA

Mitochondrial impairment is hypothesized to contribute to the pathogenesis of chronic cholestatic liver diseases. Mitofusin 2 (Mfn2) regulates mitochondrial morphology and signaling and is involved in the development of numerous mitochondrial-related diseases; however, a functional role for Mfn2 in chronic liver cholestasis which is characterized by increased levels of toxic bile acids remain unknown. Therefore, the aims of this study were to evaluate the expression levels of Mfn2 in liver samples from patients with extrahepatic cholestasis and to investigate the role Mfn2 during bile acid induced injury in vitro. Endogenous Mfn2 expression decreased in patients with extrahepatic cholestasis. Glycochenodeoxycholic acid (GCDCA) is the main toxic component of bile acid in patients with extrahepatic cholestasis. In human normal hepatocyte cells (L02), Mfn2 plays an important role in GCDCA-induced mitochondrial damage and changes in mitochondrial morphology. In line with the mitochondrial dysfunction, the expression of Mfn2 decreased significantly under GCDCA treatment conditions. Moreover, the overexpression of Mfn2 effectively attenuated mitochondrial fragmentation and reversed the mitochondrial damage observed in GCDCA-treated L02 cells. Notably, a truncated Mfn2 mutant that lacked the normal C-terminal domain lost the capacity to induce mitochondrial fusion. Increasing the expression of truncated Mfn2 also had a protective effect against the hepatotoxicity of GCDCA. Taken together, these findings indicate that the loss of Mfn2 may play a crucial role the pathogenesis of the liver damage that is observed in patients with extrahepatic cholestasis. The findings also indicate that Mfn2 may directly regulate mitochondrial metabolism independently of its primary fusion function. Therapeutic approaches that target Mfn2 may have protective effects against hepatotoxic of bile acids during cholestasis.
Surfing Behind a Boat: Quality and Reliability of Online Resources on Scaphoid Fractures.

BACKGROUND Patients seeking information and advice on treatment of scaphoid fractures unknowingly confront longstanding medical controversies surrounding the management of this condition. However, there are no studies specifically looking into the quality and reliability of online information on scaphoid fractures. METHODS We identified 44 unique websites for evaluation using the term "scaphoid fractures". The websites were categorized by type and assessed using the DISCERN score, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark criteria and the Health on the net (HON) code. RESULTS The majority of websites were commercial (n = 13) followed by academic (n = 12). Only seven of the websites were HON certified. The mean DISCERN score was 43.8. Only 4 websites scored 63 or above representing excellent quality with minimal shortcomings but 13 websites scored 38 or below representing poor or very poor quality. The mean JAMA benchmark criteria score was 2.2. The Governmental and Non-Profit Organizations category websites had the highest mean JAMA benchmark score. The websites that displayed the HON-code seal had higher mean DISCERN scores and higher mean JAMA benchmark scores compared to websites that did not display the seal. CONCLUSIONS Good quality health information is certainly available on the Internet. However, it is not possible to predict with certainty which sites are of higher quality. We suggest clinicians should have a responsibility to educate their patients regarding the unregulated nature of medical information on the internet and proactively provide patients with educational resources and thus help them make smart and informed decisions.
librosa: Audio and Music Signal Analysis in Python

This document describes version 0.4. 0 of librosa: a Python pack- age for audio and music signal processing. At a high level, librosa provides implementations of a variety of common functions used throughout the field of music information retrieval. In this document, a brief overview of the library's functionality is provided, along with explanations of the design goals, software development practices, and notational conventions.
Combining Word Reordering Methods on different Linguistic Abstraction Levels for Statistical Machine Translation

We describe a novel approach to combining lexicalized, POS-based and syntactic treebased word reordering in a phrase-based machine translation system. Our results show that each of the presented reordering methods leads to improved translation quality on its own. The strengths however can be combined to achieve further improvements. We present experiments on German-English and GermanFrench translation. We report improvements of 0.7 BLEU points by adding tree-based and lexicalized reordering. Up to 1.1 BLEU points can be gained by POS and tree-based reordering over a baseline with lexicalized reordering. A human analysis, comparing subjective translation quality as well as a detailed error analysis show the impact of our presented tree-based rules in terms of improved sentence quality and reduction of errors related to missing verbs and verb positions.
Elastic Scaling for Data Stream Processing

This article addresses the profitability problem associated with auto-parallelization of general-purpose distributed data stream processing applications. Auto-parallelization involves locating regions in the application's data flow graph that can be replicated at run-time to apply data partitioning, in order to achieve scale. In order to make auto-parallelization effective in practice, the profitability question needs to be answered: How many parallel channels provide the best throughput? The answer to this question changes depending on the workload dynamics and resource availability at run-time. In this article, we propose an elastic auto-parallelization solution that can dynamically adjust the number of channels used to achieve high throughput without unnecessarily wasting resources. Most importantly, our solution can handle partitioned stateful operators via run-time state migration, which is fully transparent to the application developers. We provide an implementation and evaluation of the system on an industrial-strength data stream processing platform to validate our solution.
A Review of Employee Turnover Influence Factor and Countermeasure

Employee turnover is a major field in the study of human resource management. The study is carried out by many Chinese and foreign scholars for a long time, but these studies are only focused on one or two aspects. This article attempts to make a summary on the employee turnover influence factors and puts forward countermeasures from personal factor, organization and work factor, social and economic factor these three aspects. Then we will summary the characteristics of existing studies and put forward the direction of future research.
Morphology and phylogenies of two hypotrichous brackish-water ciliates from China, Neourostylopsis orientalis n. sp. and Protogastrostyla sterkii (Wallengren, 1900) n. comb., with establishment of a new genus Neourostylopsis n. gen. (Protista, Ciliophora, Hypotrichia).

This paper investigates the morphology, infraciliature and small-subunit (SSU) rRNA gene sequences of two hypotrichous ciliates, Neourostylopsis orientalis n. sp. , and Protogastrostyla sterkii (Wallengren, 1900) n. comb. (basionym Gastrostyla sterkii), collected from coastal waters in southern China. Neourostylopsis orientalis n. sp. is diagnosed mainly by the arrangement of brownish cortical granules, the numbers of adoral membranelles and frontal and transverse cirri and the characteristics of its midventral cirral pairs. The SSU rRNA gene phylogeny strongly supports the establishment of the new genus Neourostylopsis n. gen., which is characterized mainly by the following features: frontal and transverse cirri clearly differentiated, buccal cirri present, two frontoterminal cirri, midventral complex composed of midventral pairs only and not exceeding the halfway point of the cell, more than one row of marginal cirri on each side which derive from individual anlagen within each parental row, caudal cirri lacking. Thus, two new combinations are required: Neourostylopsis songi (Lei et al., 2005) n. comb. , and Neourostylopsis flavicana (Wang et al., 2011) n. comb. Additionally, improved diagnoses for both Metaurostylopsis and Apourostylopsis are supplied in this study. Protogastrostyla sterkii (Wallengren, 1900) n. comb. differs from the similar congener Protogastrostyla pulchra mainly in body shape, ratio of buccal field to body length in vivo and molecular data. Based on the present studies, we conclude that the estuarine population of P. pulchra collected by J. Gong and others [Gong et al., J Eukaryot Microbiol (2007) 54, 468-478] is a population of P. sterkii.
Improving GDP Measurement: A Measurement-Error Perspective

We provide a new measure of historical U.S. GDP growth, obtained by applying optimal signal-extraction techniques to the noisy expenditure-side and income-side GDP estimates. The quarter-by-quarter values of our new measure often differ noticeably from those of the traditional measures. Its dynamic properties differ as well, indicating that the persistence of aggregate output dynamics is stronger than previously thought.
Monitoring supports performance in a dual-task paradigm involving a risky decision-making task and a working memory task

Performing two cognitively demanding tasks at the same time is known to decrease performance. The current study investigates the underlying executive functions of a dual-tasking situation involving the simultaneous performance of decision making under explicit risk and a working memory task. It is suggested that making a decision and performing a working memory task at the same time should particularly require monitoring—an executive control process supervising behavior and the state of processing on two tasks. To test the role of a supervisory/monitoring function in such a dual-tasking situation we investigated 122 participants with the Game of Dice Task plus 2-back task (GDT plus 2-back task). This dual task requires participants to make decisions under risk and to perform a 2-back working memory task at the same time. Furthermore, a task measuring a set of several executive functions gathered in the term concept formation (Modified Card Sorting Test, MCST) and the newly developed Balanced Switching Task (BST), measuring monitoring in particular, were used. The results demonstrate that concept formation and monitoring are involved in the simultaneous performance of decision making under risk and a working memory task. In particular, the mediation analysis revealed that BST performance partially mediates the influence of MCST performance on the GDT plus 2-back task. These findings suggest that monitoring is one important subfunction for superior performance in a dual-tasking situation including decision making under risk and a working memory task.
Temperature-Dependent Production of Marine Copepods: A Global Synthesis

Estimating the production of marine copepods depends on measuring two key variables: biomass and growth rate. The major difficulty in estimating production of marine copepods and other zooplankton has been the inability to obtain precise, rapid measurements. In practice the variability in measurement of biomass greatly exceeds that in growth rate. It is shown here that individual growth rates of copepods can be accurately estimated from data on generation times and the weights of eggs and adults. Analysis of 181 separately published estimates of generation time for 33 species of copepods at environmental temperatures ranging from -1.7⚬ to 30.7⚬C shows that temperature alone explains more than 90% of the variance in growth rate. Temperature dependence of growth rate transcends species differences. Weight-specific growth rate appears to be independent of body size. We hypothesize that food may not be limiting to growth in nature; the impression that food is limiting may be due to sampling at the wrong scales. Another possible cause of the apparent maximum growth rates of copepods in nature is predation mortality, which could selectively remove slower-growing individuals from the population. The temperature-dependent model developed here predicts the phenomenon of decreasing body size with increasing environmental temperature, often observed for single species of copepods. A method is suggested for making more accurate estimates of secondary production by using modern instrumentation to make quasi-synoptic measurements of biomass and temperature and using the temperature-dependent model to estimate individual growth rates.
Monitoring strategies for scalable dynamic checkpointing

Resilience is an important challenge for extreme-scale supercomputers. Failures in current supercomputers are assumed to be uniformly distributed in time. However, recent studies show that failures in high-performance computing systems are partially correlated in time, generating periods of higher failure density. The detection of those periods is important in order to adjust the system to new conditions. In this paper we present a monitoring system that listens to hardware events across computing nodes and forwards important events to the fault tolerance runtime so it can react to those regime changes. Our evaluation at scale shows several aspects of this dynamic checkpointing scheme, critical to understanding its applicability on production systems, as well as to identifying possible avenues for future improvements. In particular, we evaluate the ability of our system to monitor as many types of events as possible, measure their importance, and forward them to the resilience runtime.
Surface Brightness Profiles for a Sample of LMC, SMC, and Fornax Galaxy Globular Clusters

We use Hubble Space Telescope archival images to measure central surface brightness profiles of globular clusters around satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. We report results for 21 clusters around the LMC, five around the SMC, and four around the Fornax dwarf galaxy. The profiles were obtained using a recently developed technique based on measuring integrated light, which is tested on an extensive simulated data set. Our results show that for 70% of the sample, the central photometric points of our profiles are brighter than previous measurements using star counts with deviations as large as 2 mag arcsec-2. About 40% of the objects have central profiles deviating from a flat central core, with central logarithmic slopes continuously distributed between -0.2 and -1.2. These results are compared with those found for a sample of Galactic clusters using the same method. We confirm the known correlation in which younger clusters tend to have smaller core radii, and we find that they also have brighter central surface brightness values. This seems to indicate that globular clusters might be born relatively concentrated, and that a profile with an extended flat core might not be the ideal choice for initial profiles in theoretical models.
Impacts of oceanic re-emergence on North Atlantic winter climate

The aim of this thesis is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the role played by the North Atlantic Ocean in influencing North Atlantic and European atmospheric circulation and surface temperatures using climate models and observations. In this thesis the pattern of occurrences of re-emergence of sea surface temperature anomalies and positive and negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) events over the last 140 years (1871-2011) from historical observations are examined to understand the historical relationship between the ocean and atmosphere. The findings are compared with CMIP5 historical ensemble model output (1850-2005). The aim is to understand how these models which have been used to simulate changes in the Earth’s climate through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries perform in terms of their ability to simulate the observed links between re-emergence and the state of the NAO. Finally, in an ocean-atmosphere model simulation, the role played by North Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) on shorter (monthly) timescales is investigated in two recent European cold weather events that both coincided with similarly low NAO values: the winter of 2009/2010 and the early winter of 2010/2011. The evidence from the simulation study of the recent cold winters indicates that the NAO was influenced by the pattern of ocean surface temperatures occurring in October to December 2010 and re-emergence of SST anomalies in the North Atlantic contributed towards the development of an SST anomaly pattern, which favoured the persistence of a negative NAO resulting in the cold weather anomaly of December 2010 in Northern Europe. Observations show a link between NAO strength and re-emergence after negative NAO winters. The occurrence of a reemergence event increases the chance of predicting the atmospheric state in the second winter. The analysis of the CMIP5 model output suggests that the majority of the models do not correctly represent re-emergence processes in the North Atlantic and are limited in their ability to reproduce the variability in oceanic and atmospheric conditions seen in observations. Historical observations show a link between the NAO strength and re-emergence, but potential re-emergence events cannot be predicted from the atmospheric state alone. Whilst this thesis has identified factors which point to when these events are likely to occur there still remains considerable uncertainty in our ability to predict them.