Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Influence Propagation View of PageRank

For a long time, PageRank has been widely used for authority computation and has been adopted as a solid baseline for evaluating social influence related applications. However, when measuring the authority of network nodes, the traditional PageRank method does not take the nodes’ prior knowledge into consideration. Also, the connection between PageRank and social influence modeling methods is not clearly established. To that end, this article provides a focused study on understanding PageRank as well as the relationship between PageRank and social influence analysis. Along this line, we first propose a linear social influence model and reveal that this model generalizes the PageRank-based authority computation by introducing some constraints. Then, we show that the authority computation by PageRank can be enhanced if exploiting more reasonable constraints (e.g., from prior knowledge). Next, to deal with the computational challenge of linear model with general constraints, we provide an upper bound for identifying nodes with top authorities. Moreover, we extend the proposed linear model for better measuring the authority of the given node sets, and we also demonstrate the way to quickly identify the top authoritative node sets. Finally, extensive experimental evaluations on four real-world networks validate the effectiveness of the proposed linear model with respect to different constraint settings. The results show that the methods with more reasonable constraints can lead to better ranking and recommendation performance. Meanwhile, the upper bounds formed by PageRank values could be used to quickly locate the nodes and node sets with the highest authorities.
Determinants of Adherence to Antiretroviral Therapy among HIV-Infected Patients in Africa

Background. There are only a few comprehensive studies of adherence to ART and its challenges in Africa. This paper aims to assess the evidence on the challenges and prospects of ART adherence in sub-Saharan Africa. Methods. The authors reviewed original and review articles involving HIV-positive individuals that measured adherence to ART and its predictors in the past decade. Findings. Against expectations, sub-Saharan Africa patients have similar or higher adherence levels compared to those of developed countries. The challenges to ART adherence include factors related to patients and their families, socioeconomic factors, medication, and healthcare systems. Conclusion. Despite good adherence and program-related findings, antiretroviral treatment is challenged by a range of hierarchical and interrelated factors. There is substantial room for improvement of ART programs in sub-Sahara African countries.
Chemical abundances in the inner 5 kpc of the galactic disk

High-resolution, high signal-to-noise spectral data are presented for four young B-type stars lying towards the Galactic Centre. Determination of their atmospheric parameters from their absorption line profiles, and uvby photometric measurement of the continua indicate that they are massive objects lying slightly out of the plane, and were probably born in the disk between 2.5-5 kpc from the Centre. We have carried out a detailed absolute and differential line-by-line abundance analyses of the four stars compared to two stars with very similar atmospheric parameters in the solar neighbourhood. The stars appear to be rich in all the well sampled chemical elements (C, N, Si, Mg, S, Al), except for oxygen . Oxygen abundances derived in the atmospheres of these four stars are very similar to that in the solar neighbourhood. If the photospheric composition of these young stars is reflective of the gaseous ISM in the inner Galaxy, then the values derived for the enhanced metals are in excellent agreement with the extrapolation of the Galactic abundance gradients previously derived by Rolleston et al. (2000) and others. However, the data for oxygen suggests that the inner Galaxy may not be richer than normal in this element, and the physical reasons for such a scenario are unclear.
Derailer: interactive security analysis for web applications

Derailer is an interactive tool for finding security bugs in web applications. Using symbolic execution, it enumerates the ways in which application data might be exposed. The user is asked to examine these exposures and classify the conditions under which they occur as security-related or not; in so doing, the user effectively constructs a specification of the application's security policy. The tool then highlights exposures missing security checks, which tend to be security bugs. We have tested Derailer's scalability on several large open-source Ruby on Rails applications. We have also applied it to a large number of student projects (designed with different security policies in mind), exposing a variety of security bugs that eluded human reviewers.
Effect of Rocket (Eruca sativa) Extract on MRSA Growth and Proteome: Metabolic Adjustments in Plant-Based Media

The emergence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in food has provoked a great concern about the presence of MRSA in associated foodstuff. Although MRSA is often detected in various retailed meat products, it seems that food handlers are more strongly associated with this type of food contamination. Thus, it can be easily postulated that any food could be contaminated with this pathogen in an industrial environment or in household and cause food poisoning. To this direction, the effect of rocket (Eruca sativa) extract on MRSA growth and proteome was examined in the present study. This goal was achieved with the comparative study of the MRSA strain COL proteome, cultivated in rocket extract versus the standard Luria-Bertani growth medium. The obtained results showed that MRSA was able to grow in rocket extract. In addition, proteome analysis using 2-DE method showed that MRSA strain COL is taking advantage of the sugar-, lipid-, and vitamin-rich substrate in the liquid rocket extract, although its growth was delayed in rocket extract compared to Luria–Bertani medium. This work could initiate further research about bacterial metabolism in plant-based media and defense mechanisms against plant-derived antibacterials.
Interannual Modulation of Northern Hemisphere Winter Storm Tracks by the QBO

Storm tracks, defined as the preferred regions of extratropical synoptic‐scale disturbances, have remarkable impacts on global weather and climate systems. Causes of interannual storm track variation have been investigated mostly from a troposphere perspective. As shown in this study, Northern Hemisphere winter storm tracks are significantly modulated by the tropical stratosphere through the quasi‐biennial oscillation (QBO). The North Pacific storm track shifts poleward during the easterly QBO winters associated with a dipole change in the eddy refraction and baroclinicity. The North Atlantic storm track varies vertically with a downward shrinking (upward expansion) in easterly (westerly) QBO winters associated with the change of the tropopause height. These results not only fill the knowledge gap of QBO‐storm track relationship but also suggest a potential route to improve the seasonal prediction of extratropical storm activities owing to the high predictability of the QBO.
Ambient Temperature and Biomarkers of Heart Failure: A Repeated Measures Analysis

Background: Extreme temperatures have been associated with hospitalization and death among individuals with heart failure, but few studies have explored the underlying mechanisms. Objectives: We hypothesized that outdoor temperature in the Boston, Massachusetts, area (1- to 4-day moving averages) would be associated with higher levels of biomarkers of inflammation and myocyte injury in a repeated-measures study of individuals with stable heart failure. Methods: We analyzed data from a completed clinical trial that randomized 100 patients to 12 weeks of tai chi classes or to time-matched education control. B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP), C-reactive protein (CRP), and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) were measured at baseline, 6 weeks, and 12 weeks. Endothelin-1 was measured at baseline and 12 weeks. We used fixed effects models to evaluate associations with measures of temperature that were adjusted for time-varying covariates. Results: Higher apparent temperature was associated with higher levels of BNP beginning with 2-day moving averages and reached statistical significance for 3- and 4-day moving averages. CRP results followed a similar pattern but were delayed by 1 day. A 5°C change in 3- and 4-day moving averages of apparent temperature was associated with 11.3% [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.1, 22.5; p = 0.03) and 11.4% (95% CI: 1.2, 22.5; p = 0.03) higher BNP. A 5°C change in the 4-day moving average of apparent temperature was associated with 21.6% (95% CI: 2.5, 44.2; p = 0.03) higher CRP. No clear associations with TNF or endothelin-1 were observed. Conclusions: Among patients undergoing treatment for heart failure, we observed positive associations between temperature and both BNP and CRP—predictors of heart failure prognosis and severity.
Plant-soil interactions in a changing world

Evidence is mounting to suggest that the transfer of carbon through roots of plants to the soil plays a primary role in regulating ecosystem responses to climate change and its mitigation. Future research is needed to improve understanding of the mechanisms involved in this phenomenon, its consequences for ecosystem carbon cycling, and the potential to exploit plant root traits and soil microbial processes that favor soil carbon sequestration.
Humoral Immune Response to AAV

Adeno-associated virus (AAV) is a member of the family Parvoviridae that has been widely used as a vector for gene therapy because of its safety profile, its ability to transduce both dividing and non-dividing cells, and its low immunogenicity. AAV has been detected in many different tissues of several animal species but has not been associated with any disease. As a result of natural infections, antibodies to AAV can be found in many animals including humans. It has been shown that pre-existing AAV antibodies can modulate the safety and efficacy of AAV vector-mediated gene therapy by blocking vector transduction or by redirecting distribution of AAV vectors to tissues other than the target organ. This review will summarize antibody responses against natural AAV infections, as well as AAV gene therapy vectors and their impact in the clinical development of AAV vectors for gene therapy. We will also review and discuss the various methods used for AAV antibody detection and strategies to overcome neutralizing antibodies in AAV-mediated gene therapy.
Categorical Proportional Difference: A Feature Selection Method for Text Categorization

Supervised text categorization is a machine learning task where a predefined category label is automatically assigned to a previously unlabelled document based upon characteristics of the words contained in the document. Since the number of unique words in a learning task (i.e., the number of features) can be very large, the efficiency and accuracy of the learning task can be increased by using feature selection methods to extract from a document a subset of the features that are considered most relevant. In this paper, we introduce a new feature selection method called categorical proportional difference (CPD), a measure of the degree to which a word contributes to differentiating a particular category from other categories. The CPD for a word in a particular category in a text corpus is a ratio that considers the number of documents of a category in which the word occurs and the number of documents from other categories in which the word also occurs. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate CPD when used in conjunction with SVM and Naive Bayes text classifiers on the OHSUMED, 20 Newsgroups, and Reuters-21578 text corpora. Recall, precision, and the F-measure were used as the measures of performance. The results obtained using CPD were compared to those obtained using six common feature selection methods found in the literature: χ2, information gain, document frequency, mutual information, odds ratio, and simplified χ2. Empirical results showed that, in general, according to the F-measure, CPD outperforms the other feature selection methods in four out of six text categorization tasks.
Coordinated Satellite Observations of the Very Low Frequency Transmission Through the Ionospheric D Layer at Low Latitudes, Using Broadband Radio Emissions From Lightning

Both ray theory and full‐wave models of very low frequency transmission through the ionospheric D layer predict that the transmission is greatly suppressed near the geomagnetic equator. We use data from the low‐inclination Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System satellite to test this semiquantitatively, for broadband very low frequency emissions from lightning. Approximate ground‐truthing of the incident wavefields in the Earth‐ionosphere waveguide is provided by the World Wide Lightning Location Network. Observations of the wavefields at the satellite are provided by the Vector Electric Field Instrument aboard the satellite. The data set comprises whistler observations with the satellite at magnetic latitudes <26°. Thus, our conclusions, too, must be limited to the near‐equatorial region and are not necessarily predictive of midlatitude whistler properties. We find that in most broadband recordings of radio waves at the satellite, very few of the lightning strokes result in a detectable radio pulse at the satellite. However, in a minority of the recordings, there is enhanced transmission of very low frequency lightning emissions through the D layer, at a level exceeding model predictions by at least an order of magnitude. We show that kilometric‐scale D‐layer irregularities may be implicated in the enhanced transmission. This observation of sporadic enhancements at low magnetic latitude, made with broadband lightning emissions, is consistent with an earlier review of D‐layer transmission for transmission from powerful man‐made radio beacons.
A Closer Look at the Closest String and Closest Substring Problem

Let S be a set of k strings over an alphabet Σ each string has a length between e and n. The Closest Substring Problem (CSSP) is to find a minimal integer d (and a corresponding string t of length e) such that each string s ∈ S has a substring of length e with Hamming distance at most d to t. We say t is the closest substring to S. For e = n, this problem is known as the Closest String Problem (CSP). Particularly in computational biology, the CSP and CSSP have found numerous practical applications such as identifying regulatory motifs and approximate gene clusters, and in degenerate primer design. We study ILP formulations for both problems. Our experiments show that a position-based formulation for the CSP performs very well on real-world instances emerging from biology. Even on randomly generated instances that are hard to solve to optimality, solving the root relaxation leads to solutions very close to the optimum. For the CSSP we give a new formulation that is polytope-wise stronger than a straightforward extension of the CSP formulation. Furthermore we propose a strengthening constraint class that speeds up the running time.
Construction of a soft error (SEU) hardened Latch with high critical charge

The recent development of semiconductor technology has achieved downsized, large-scaled and low-power VLSI systems. However, it makes the soft error issue more serious. The soft error is a transient-induced event on memory and logic circuits caused by striking of a-rays emitted from the package and high energy neutron radiation from cosmic rays. This paper presents a soft error hardened latch with high critical charge with short delay time. At 45 nm technology, the critical charge of the proposed latch is at least 142 times larger than the Cosmic-Ray Immune Latch. The CK-Q delay time of the proposed latch is 39% and 63% shorter than existing latches; the delay time is only 1% longer than the Cosmic-Ray Immune Latch. The average dynamic power consumption of the proposed latch is 76% and 28% higher than existing latches.
Jupiter – friend or foe? III: the Oort cloud comets

Abstract It has long been assumed that the planet Jupiter acts as a giant shield, significantly lowering the impact rate of minor bodies on Earth. However, until recently, very little work had been carried out examining the role played by Jupiter in determining the frequency of such collisions. In this work, the third of a series of papers, we examine the degree to which the impact rate on Earth resulting from the Oort cloud comets is enhanced or lessened by the presence of a giant planet in a Jupiter-like orbit, in an attempt to more fully understand the impact regime under which life on Earth has developed. Our results show that the presence of a giant planet in a Jupiter-like orbit significantly alters the impact rate of Oort cloud comets on Earth, decreasing the rate as the mass of the giant planet increases. The greatest bombardment flux is observed when no giant planet is present.
Effect of in vivo somatotropin treatment of growing pigs on adipose tissue lipogenesis.

The present study was undertaken to determine the effects of porcine somatotropin (pST) on glucose flux rates, lipogenic enzyme activities, and the abundance of fatty acid synthase mRNA in pig adipose tissue. Barrows were injected daily with 120 micrograms of pST/kg BW (n = 6) or excipient (n = 6). On d 11 of treatment, pigs were slaughtered (empty BW = 77 +/- 2 kg) and subcutaneous adipose tissue was collected. Basal incorporation of [14C]glucose into total lipid decreased by 86% with pST treatment, whereas glucose oxidation to CO2 decreased by 79%. Insulin (10 ng/mL) stimulated both glucose oxidation and incorporation into lipid by a small increment of similar magnitude for both treatment groups. Rates of lipogenesis determined in vitro were highly correlated with similar measurements made in vivo on the same set of animals (r = .76). The reduction in basal rates of lipogenesis corresponded to a 79% decrease in total (activated) acetyl-coenzyme A carboxylase activity and a 67% decrease in fatty acid synthase activity. Reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate-generating enzymes were decreased to a lesser extent. Northern blot analysis of RNA from the same animals reveal a 90% decrease in mRNA for fatty acid synthase in the pST-treated group. The correlation between mRNA abundance and enzyme activity for fatty acid synthase was . 90. These data indicate that the pST-induced reduction in adipose tissue lipid accretion in growing barrows is largely a result of diminished rates of lipogenesis that are manifestations of the decreased activities of the fatty acid-synthesizing enzymes. These changes seem to result from suppression of genes that encode for the lipogenic enzymes.
Real-time full body motion imitation on the COMAN humanoid robot

SUMMARY On-line full body imitation with a humanoid robot standing on its own two feet requires simultaneously maintaining the balance and imitating the motion of the demonstrator. In this paper we present a method that allows real-time motion imitation while maintaining stability, based on prioritized task control. We also describe a method of modified prioritized kinematic control that constrains the imitated motion to preserve stability only when the robot would tip over, but does not alter the motions otherwise. To cope with the passive compliance of the robot, we show how to model the estimation of the center of mass of the robot using support vector machines. In the paper we give detailed description of all steps of the algorithm, essentially providing a tutorial on the implementation of kinematic stability control. We present the results on a child-sized humanoid robot called Compliant Humanoid Platform or COMAN. Our implementation shows reactive and stable on-line motion imitation of the humanoid robot.
Evaluating well-mixed room and near-field–far-field model performance under highly controlled conditions

ABSTRACT Exposure judgments made without personal exposure data and based instead on subjective inputs tend to underestimate exposure, with exposure judgment accuracy not significantly more accurate than random chance. Therefore, objective inputs that contribute to more accurate decision making are needed. Models have been shown anecdotally to be useful in accurately predicting exposure but their use in occupational hygiene has been limited. This may be attributable to a general lack of guidance on model selection and use and scant model input data. The lack of systematic evaluation of the models is also an important factor. This research addresses the need to systematically evaluate two widely applicable models, the Well-Mixed Room (WMR) and Near-Field–Far-Field (NF-FF) models. The evaluation, conducted under highly controlled conditions in an exposure chamber, allowed for model inputs to be accurately measured and controlled, generating over 800 pairs of high quality measured and modeled exposure estimates. By varying conditions in the chamber one at a time, model performance across a range of conditions was evaluated using two sets of criteria: the ASTM Standard 5157 and the AIHA Exposure Assessment categorical criteria. Model performance for the WMR model was excellent, with ASTM performance criteria met for 88–97% of the pairs across the three chemicals used in the study, and 96% categorical agreement observed. Model performance for the NF-FF model, impacted somewhat by the size of the chamber was nevertheless good to excellent. NF modeled estimates met modified ASTM criteria for 67–84% of the pairs while 69–91% of FF modeled estimates met these criteria. Categorical agreement was observed for 72% and 96% of NF and FF pairs, respectively. These results support the use of the WMR and NF–FF models in guiding decision making towards improving exposure judgment accuracy.
Consumer Preferences for Verbal and Written Medication Information

The extent of medication use and drug information preferences was surveyed randomly from patients at six different pharmacy health care systems. Following verbal consultation, each patient was given one or more modified United States Pharmacopeia drug information leaflets corresponding to the verbal information and a self-addressed, stamped questionnaire to complete. Chi-square analysis was performed on 317 responses with overwhelming acceptance (96 percent) of the medication information provided. Although a majority of respondents (62 percent) preferred a combination of both written and oral information, specific information preferences (oral, written, or both) were significantly related to educational level, pharmacy attended, and prescription status. Nearly 45 percent of the respondents indicated the information was responsible for changing their medication use. Subjects who were elderly, taking cardiovascular medications, or getting refill prescriptions were significantly less likely to change as a result of the information provided. Although 65 percent of the respondents were unwilling to pay an additional fee for the service, females and those who were 45–54 years and over 65 years old were significantly more willing to pay for the information. In addition, the willingness to pay tended to increase as the number of daily medications taken increased. Consideration of socioeconomic and prescription variables may help define subgroups with specific information preferences and counseling activities that may be directly reimbursable.