Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evidence for climatic and hillslope‐aspect controls on vadose zone hydrology and implications for saprolite weathering

Through the delivery of water in snowmelt, climate should govern the rate and extent of saprolite formation in snow‐dominated mountain watersheds, yet the mechanisms by which water flows deeply into regolith are largely unexplored. In this study we link rainfall, snow depth, and water content data from both soil and shallow saprolite to document vadose zone dynamics in two montane catchments over 2 years. Measurements of snow pack thickness and soil moisture reveal strong contrasts between north‐ and south‐facing slopes in both the timing of meltwater delivery and the duration of significant soil wetting in the shallow vadose zone. Despite similar magnitudes of snowmelt recharge, north‐facing slopes have higher sustained soil moisture compared to south‐facing slopes. To help interpret these observations, we use a 2D numerical model of vadose zone dynamics to calculate the expected space–time moisture patterns on an idealized hillslope under two wetting scenarios: a single sustained recharge pulse versus a set of short pulses. The model predicts that the duration of the recharge event exerts a stronger control on the depth and residence time of water in the upper unsaturated zone than the magnitude of the recharge event. Model calculations also imply that water should move more slowly through the subsurface and downward water flux should be substantially reduced when water is applied in several pulses rather than in one sustained event. The results suggest that thicker soil and more deeply weathered rock on north‐facing slopes may reflect greater water supply to the deep subsurface. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
AN EMPIRICALLY DERIVED KINETIC MODEL FOR ALBITIZATION OF DETRITAL PLAGIOCLASE

We propose an empirically derived model that estimates the extent of reaction for albitization of plagioclase as a function of time, grain surface area, and temperature from 0 to 200°C. We use a kinetic formulation independent of pressure, and consistent with the Rate Law, which quantifies the dependence of the reaction rate on the initial concentration of the reacting material, and the Arrhenius equation. The formulation is described by the function: - d[An]/dt = S m k[An 0 ] 2 (1 - Ω) where d[An]/dt is the rate change of the anorthite mole fraction with time, S m the mineral surface area (cm 2 ), k the rate constant 1/cm 2 s, [An o ] is a constant representing the initial anorthite mole fraction, and Ω a constant weighed average saturation index. We derive the apparent activation energy (E a ) and frequency factor (A), both present in the rate constant k, by fitting them to the extent of albitization measured in 11 samples from the Sanjoaquin Basin. Subsequently, we test the model against two independent albitization trends, one from the Texas Gulf Coast basin and one from the Denver Basin of Colorado. Our results indicate that albitization in all three basins can be fit by an E a of 68 ′ 4 kJ/mole and A of (6.5 ′ 0.5) x 10 3 1/cm 2 Ma. The rate dependence on temperature is consistent with experimental values for albite crystal growth and with empirically derived precipitation rates of other diagenetic silicates such as illite and quartz. The parameters and fit suggest that albitization can be modeled as a surface controlled reaction, primarily dependent on temperature.
MOVING BOTTLENECKS: A THEORY GROUNDED ON EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATION

This paper presents the most complete picture yet of moving bottlenecks on freeways, including experimental observations and a theory. The experimental observations include the “fingerprint” of a moving bottleneck on a series of loop detectors, and a set of controlled experiments in which moving bottlenecks were artificially introduced in the traffic stream. The paper also contrasts this evidence with current theories and describes a new one that is consistent with the data. High-resolution oblique plots of loop detector data from freeway I-880 in Oakland (California) are used to analyze the aforementioned fingerprint. They clearly display the presence of the bottleneck and its evolution in time and space, including the precise location in space-time where it appeared. The data also reveal a fleeting but real change in the drivers’ car-following attitude shortly after the bottleneck’s appearance. The controlled experiments reveal that the flow downstream of the bottleneck increases with the speed of the bottleneck when the bottleneck holds back a queue—in contradiction with two previous theories (Gazis and Herman, 1992, and Newell, 1993). The new theory includes these as special cases. It treats the moving bottleneck as a boundary condition that can be integrated with kinematic wave (KW) theory and also with variants of this theory that account for multiple vehicle types and changes in driver psychology. The empirical evidence suggests that the lengths of queues upstream of moving bottlenecks and the ensuing vehicle delays can now be predicted with good accuracy.
Partial Superficial Parotidectomy via Retroauricular Hairline Incision

Objectives The purpose of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of retroauricular hair line incision (RAHI) in partial superficial parotidectomy by comparison with modified Blair incision or facelift incision. Methods Medical records of 73 patients with benign parotid tumor who underwent partial superficial parotidectomy were retrospectively reviewed. Size and location of tumors, operative time, occurrence of facial nerve paralysis and Frey's syndrome, and cosmetic outcomes were compared among RAHI, facelift incision (FLI), modified Blair incision (MBI) groups. Results RAHI group showed better cosmetic results than FLI group or MBI group compared with other type of incisions (P<0.001, P<0.001, respectively). Among the 3 groups, there were no significant differences of operative time and location of tumor (P=0.377), size of tumor (P>0.999), occurrence of temporary or permanent facial nerve paralysis (P=0.745) and Frey's syndrome (P=0.940). Conclusion Partial superficial parotidectomy can be done safely by RAHI in most cases of benign parotid tumor. Compared with MBI or FLI, RAHI has better cosmetic outcome with no increase of operative time or postoperative complications.
Cost-effectiveness of natalizumab versus fingolimod for the treatment of relapsing multiple sclerosis

Abstract Background: With the addition of new agents for the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) (e.g., fingolimod), there is a need to evaluate the relative value of newer therapies in terms of cost and effectiveness, given healthcare resource constraints in the United States. Objective: To assess the cost-effectiveness of natalizumab vs fingolimod in patients with relapsing MS. Methods: A decision analytic model was developed to estimate the incremental cost per relapse avoided of natalizumab and fingolimod from a US managed care payer perspective. Two-year costs of treating patients with MS included drug acquisition costs, administration and monitoring costs, and costs of treating MS relapses. Effectiveness was measured in terms of MS relapses avoided (data from AFFIRM and FREEDOMS trials). One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were conducted to assess uncertainty. Results: Mean 2-year estimated treatment costs were $86,461 (natalizumab) and $98,748 (fingolimod). Patients receiving natalizumab had a mean of 0.74 relapses avoided per 2 years vs 0.59 for fingolimod. Natalizumab dominated fingolimod in the incremental cost-effectiveness analysis, as it was less costly and more effective in reducing relapses. One-way sensitivity analysis showed the results of the model were robust to changes in drug acquisition costs, administration costs, and costs of treating MS relapses. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis showed natalizumab was cost-effective 95.1% of the time, at a willingness-to-pay (WTP) threshold of $0 per relapse avoided, increasing to 96.3% of the time at a WTP threshold of $50,000 per relapse avoided. Limitations: Absence of data from direct head-to-head studies comparing natalizumab and fingolimod, use of relapse rate reduction rather than sustained disability progression as primary model outcome, assumption of 100% adherence to MS treatment, and not capturing adverse event costs in the model. Conclusions: Natalizumab dominates fingolimod in terms of incremental cost per relapse avoided, as it is less costly and more effective.
Retrospective evaluation of outcomes in patients with overactive bladder receiving tolterodine versus oxybutynin.

PURPOSE The frequency, relative risk, resource utilization, and costs related to comorbidities associated with overactive bladder (OAB) were studied. METHODS A retrospective analysis of patients with OAB who initiated treatment with tolterodine extended release (ER), oxybutynin ER, or oxybutynin immediate release (IR) between January 2001 and December 2002 was conducted to evaluate the frequency, relative risk, resource utilization, and costs related to three specific comorbidities associated with OAB: urinary tract infections (UTIs), depression, and fracture. Two patient cohorts (tolterodine ER versus oxybutynin ER and tolterodine ER versus oxybutynin IR) were matched on a 1:1 basis according to their propensity to receive a prescription for tolterodine ER. RESULTS The frequency and relative risk of UTIs were significantly lower in the tolterodine ER group than in the oxybutynin ER and oxybutynin IR groups. The relative risk of depression was also lower in the tolterodine ER group than the oxybutynin ER and oxybutynin IR groups; however, the differences were only significant in the tolterodine ER versus oxybutynin IR comparison. The utilization of UTI- and depression-related services and the number of antiinfective and antidepressant prescriptions were significantly lower in the tolterodine ER group than in the oxybutynin ER group. UTI- and depression-related costs were generally lower in the tolterodine ER group than in the oxybutynin ER or oxybutynin IR group. CONCLUSION Treatment of OAB patients with tolterodine ER was associated with reduced frequency, relative risk, medical and pharmacy resource utilization, and incurred costs related to selected OAB-associated comorbidities compared with treatment with oxybutynin ER or oxybutynin IR.
Learned graphical models for probabilistic planning provide a new class of movement primitives

Biological movement generation combines three interesting aspects: its modular organization in movement primitives (MPs), its characteristics of stochastic optimality under perturbations, and its efficiency in terms of learning. A common approach to motor skill learning is to endow the primitives with dynamical systems. Here, the parameters of the primitive indirectly define the shape of a reference trajectory. We propose an alternative MP representation based on probabilistic inference in learned graphical models with new and interesting properties that complies with salient features of biological movement control. Instead of endowing the primitives with dynamical systems, we propose to endow MPs with an intrinsic probabilistic planning system, integrating the power of stochastic optimal control (SOC) methods within a MP. The parameterization of the primitive is a graphical model that represents the dynamics and intrinsic cost function such that inference in this graphical model yields the control policy. We parameterize the intrinsic cost function using task-relevant features, such as the importance of passing through certain via-points. The system dynamics as well as intrinsic cost function parameters are learned in a reinforcement learning (RL) setting. We evaluate our approach on a complex 4-link balancing task. Our experiments show that our movement representation facilitates learning significantly and leads to better generalization to new task settings without re-learning.
Dual personality of Mad1

Nuclear transport is a dynamic process that can be modulated in response to changes in cellular physiology. We recently reported that the transport activity of yeast nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) is altered in response to kinetochore-microtubule (KT-MT) interaction defects. Specifically, KT detachment from MTs activates a signaling pathway that prevents the nuclear import of cargos by the nuclear transport factor Kap121p. This loss of Kap121p-mediated import is thought to influence the nuclear environment, including the phosphorylation state of nuclear proteins. A key regulator of this process is the spindle assembly checkpoint protein Mad1p. In response to unattached KTs, Mad1p dynamically cycles between NPCs and KTs. This cycling appears to induce NPC molecular rearrangements that prevent the nuclear import of Kap121p-cargo complexes. Here, we discuss the underlying mechanisms and the physiological relevance of Mad1p cycling and the inhibition of Kap121p-mediated nuclear import, focusing on outstanding questions within the pathway.
A New Scoring System to Determine Thromboembolic Risk After Heart Valve Replacement

Objective—To determine the most important inflammatory and hematologic predictors of thromboembolism (TE) in patients undergoing valve replacement (VR) to be used in conjunction with clinical risk factors for preoperative risk profiling. Methods and Results—Preoperative and immediately postoperative clinical, echocardiographic, hematologic, biochemical and microbiological parameters were examined prospectively in 370 patients undergoing VR (249 AVR, 93 MVR, 28 DVR). Mean follow-up was 4.4 years (max 6.6 years; total 1566 pt/yrs), and 96 TE events were documented (28 major and 68 minor). INR data were collected on all patients. Laboratory values were considered elevated if they exceeded the 80th percentile of those of 70 controls with the same distribution of age and gender. IgA antibody to Chlamydia pneumoniae (CP)≥1:64 was considered indicative of significant infection. Predictors of TE on multivariate analysis following AVR were (hazard ratios): CP infection (2.6), previous TE (2.5), raised eosinophils (2.4), cancer history (2.1), postoperative infection (2.0), hypertension (2.0), CABG × 3/4 (2.0), and diabetes (1.9). Predictors of TE following MVR/DVR were raised mean platelet volume (4.0), raised factor VII (3.1), CP infection (2.7), previous mitral valvotomy (2.5), raised fibrinogen (2.2), and raised reticulocytes (2.0). These risk factors were additive when present in the same patient, enabling a scoring system to be developed that accurately predicted risk of TE based on number of risk factors. Conclusions—Selected blood tests and clinical risk factors provide a scoring system that accurately predicts TE risk and may guide prosthesis choice and antithrombotic management.
Nitric oxide, a double edged sword in cancer biology: Searching for therapeutic opportunities

Nitric oxide (NO) is a pleiotropic molecule critical to a number of physiological and pathological processes. The last decade has witnessed major advances in dissecting NO biology and its role in cancer pathogenesis. However, the complexity of the interactions between different levels of NO and several aspects of tumor development/progression has led to apparently conflicting findings. Furthermore, both anti‐NO and NO‐based anticancer strategies appear effective in several preclinical models. This paradoxical dichotomy is leaving investigators with a double challenge: to determine the net impact of NO on cancer behavior and to define the therapeutic role of NO‐centered anticancer strategies. Only a comprehensive and dynamic view of the cascade of molecular and cellular events underlying tumor biology and affected by NO will allow investigators to exploit the potential antitumor properties of drugs interfering with NO metabolism. Available data suggest that NO should be considered neither a universal target nor a magic bullet, but rather a signal transducer to be modulated according to the molecular makeup of each individual cancer and the interplay with conventional antineoplastic agents. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Med Res Rev, 27, No. 3, 317–352, 2007
Human gesture recognition using Kinect camera

In this paper, we propose a comparison of human gesture recognition using data mining classification methods in video streaming. In particular, we are interested in a specific stream of vector of twenty body-joint positions which are representative of the human body captured by Kinect camera. The recognized gesture patterns of the study are stand, sit down, and lie down. Classification methods chosen for comparison study are backpropagation neural network, support vector machine, decision tree, and naive Bayes. Experimental results have shown that the backpropagation neural network method outperforms other classification methods and can achieve recognition with 100% accuracy. Moreover, the average accuracy of all classification methods used in this study is 93.72%, which confirms the high potential of using the Kinect camera in human body recognition applications. Our future work will use the knowledge obtained from these classifiers in time series analysis of gesture sequence for detecting fall motion in a smart home system.
My Facebook Profile : Copy, Resemblance, or Simulacrum?

This paper offers a theoretical reading of the phenomenon and experience of the social networking site, Facebook, through an exploration of how loyally a Facebook profile can represent the essence of an individual, and whether such Platonic notions of essence and loyalty of copy are disturbed by the nature of a social networking site profile, in ways described by Deleuze’s notions of the reversal of Platonism. In bringing a post-structuralist critique to a hugely successful and popular information system, the paper attempts to open up the black box of the ‘user’ and explore how notions of the Self might be reflected through engagement with IS.
Human Glutathione Transferase A3-3, a Highly Efficient Catalyst of Double-bond Isomerization in the Biosynthetic Pathway of Steroid Hormones*

The cDNA of a novel human glutathione transferase (GST) of the Alpha class was cloned, and the corresponding protein, denoted GST A3-3, was heterologously expressed and characterized. GST A3-3 was found to efficiently catalyze obligatory double-bond isomerizations of Δ5-androstene-3,17-dione and Δ5-pregnene-3,20-dione, precursors to testosterone and progesterone, respectively, in steroid hormone biosynthesis. The catalytic efficiency (k cat/K m ) with Δ5-androstene-3,17-dione was determined as 5 × 106 m −1 s−1, which is considerably higher than with any other GST substrate tested. The rate of acceleration afforded by GST A3-3 is 6 × 108 based on the ratio between k cat and the rate constant for the nonenzymatic isomerization of Δ5-androstene-3,17-dione. Besides being high in absolute numbers, the k cat/K m value of GST A3-3 exceeds by a factor of ∼230 that of 3β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase/isomerase, the enzyme generally considered to catalyze the Δ5-Δ4 double-bond isomerization. Furthermore, GSTA3-specific polymerase chain reaction analysis of cDNA libraries from various tissues showed a message only in those characterized by active steroid hormone biosynthesis, indicating a selective expression of GST A3-3 in these tissues. Based on this finding and the high activity with steroid substrates, we propose that GST A3-3 has evolved to catalyze isomerization reactions that contribute to the biosynthesis of steroid hormones.
Using Multithreaded Techniques to Mask Memory Latency on FPGA Accelerators

The performance gap between CPUs, and memory memory has diverged significantly since the 1980's making efficiency memory utilization a key concern for any application developer. Modern CPUs will process orders of magnitude more data than their memory architectures can sustain. Multiple levels of caches are used by the major CPU architects to cope with this issue. Frequently used data is stored as close as possible to the core, which allows it to be retrieved in a few cycles. Compared to the thousands of cycles it would take to be retrieved from main memory. However, data locality is important for caches to be effective, and as applications become more and more irregular the CPU's performance drops. This causes many important applications (e.g. sparse matrices, graphs, hash tables) to suffer from poor performance. This thesis explores how custom hardware accelerators using memory masking multithreaded techniques can be used to improve performance. In hardware multithreaded designs thread states are managed directly in hardware, and with enough application parallelism they can fully mask memory latency without storing data in caches. Designs scale well to match the memory architectures bandwidth. The emergence of heterogeneous FPGA platforms has made it easier to build and test the design on real world hardware.This thesis starts with the issue of programmability. Hardware development is notoriously difficult and time consuming. The CHAT tool, a C-to-VHDL compiler, is presented that assists developers by generating custom multithreaded kernels from high level software descriptions. The thesis proceeds by using CHAT to generate a custom Sparse Matrix Vector (SpMV) kernel. Results show how multithreading can provide data independent performance. Compared to the software and GPU performance which drops significantly as the benchmark's irregularity increases. Cache miss rates increase on the CPU, and memory cannot be coalesced as efficiently on the GPUs. Finally we use multithreading to accelerate two common database operations: Hash join, and aggregation. They are the first in-memory implementations on FPGA hardware. The hash join design shows an improvement of 2x over the best multicore software designs available, and does so with 33% less memory bandwidth. Aggregation shows comparable performance when generating hash tables. However, it generates multiple tables that need to be merged, and this step reduces performance on high cardinality datasets.