Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparing the routing energy overheads of ad-hoc routing protocols

We use simulations to study the comparative routing overheads of three ad-hoc routing protocols, namely AODV, DSDV and DSR. In contrast to earlier studies, we focus exclusively on the energy consumption and not on other metrics such as the number of routing packets. In particular, we study the 'range effects' of the three protocols, i.e., how changes to the transmission power and transmission radius affect the overall energy consumed by routing-related packets. Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, the energy spent in packet receptions is almost as important as the transmission power; using the number of transmissions as an indicator of the routing overhead can thus be fairly misleading. Our studies show that the energy overhead of the three protocols varies with the transmission power in distinct and non-obvious ways.
Risk Factors for Group B Streptococcus Colonization Among Pregnant Women in Korea

OBJECTIVES To identify obstetric and maternal factors related to Group B Streptococcus (GBS) colonization in pregnant women in Korea. METHODS The study was conducted between the years 2006-2008 in four hospitals, Cheil and Eulji hospital in Seoul, and Motae and Eulji hospital in Daejeon. We recruited 2,644 pregnant women between 35 to 37 weeks of gestation who had visited for antenatal care. Participants completed a questionnaire, and urine, vaginal and rectal specimens were obtained and cultured using selective broth media. After delivery, medical records were reviewed. RESULTS GBS colonization was significantly associated with hospital, age group, education, frequency of pregnancy, and premature rupture of membranes (PROM, more than 18 hours). After adjustment for other variables, Cheil hospital (odds ratio [OR], 2.05; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.20-3.52), and the first pregnancy (OR, 2.32; 95% CI, 1.12-4.81) remained significant. History of vaginitis showed marginal significance (OR, 1.50; 95% CI, 0.98-2.29). CONCLUSION To prevent GBS infection of neonates, clinicians should be alert to the potentially higher risk of GBS colonization in pregnant women in their first pregnancy, and women with premature rupture of membranes (PROM) (18 hours+) or who have a history of vaginitis.
Management of primary ciliary dyskinesia in European children: recommendations and clinical practice

The European Respiratory Society Task Force on primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) in children recently published recommendations for diagnosis and management. This paper compares these recommendations with current clinical practice in Europe. Questionnaires were returned by 194 paediatric respiratory centres caring for PCD patients in 26 countries. In most countries, PCD care was not centralised, with a median (interquartile range) of 4 (2–9) patients treated per centre. Overall, 90% of centres had access to nasal or bronchial mucosal biopsy. Samples were analysed by electron microscopy (77%) and ciliary function tests (57%). Nasal nitric oxide was used for screening in 46% of centres and saccharine tests in 36%. Treatment approaches varied widely, both within and between countries. European region, size of centre and the country’s general government expenditure on health partly defined availability of advanced diagnostic tests and choice of treatments. In conclusion, we found substantial heterogeneity in management of PCD within and between countries, and poor concordance with current recommendations. This demonstrates how essential it is to standardise management and decrease inequality between countries. Our results also demonstrate the urgent need for research: to simplify PCD diagnosis, to understand the natural history and to test the effectiveness of interventions.
An Experimental Comparison of Constraint Logic Programming and Answer Set Programming

Answer Set Programming (ASP) and Constraint Logic Programming over finite domains (CLP(FD)) are two declarative progmmming paradigms that have been extensively used to encode applications involving search, optimization, and reasoning (e.g., commonsense reasoning and planning). This paper presents experimental comparisons between the declarative encodings of various computationally hard problems in both frameworks. The objective is to investigate how the solvers in the two domains respond to different problems, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of their implementations, and suggesting criteria for choosing one approach over the other. Ultimately, the work in this paper is expected to lay the foundations for transfer of technology between the two domains, e.g., suggesting ways to use CLP(FD) in the execution of ASP.
Is cloned code older than non-cloned code?

It is still a debated question whether cloned code causes increased maintenance efforts. If cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code, i.e. it is changed less often, it will require less maintenance efforts. The more stable cloned code is, the longer it will not have been changed, so the stability can be estimated through the code's age. This paper presents a study on the average age of cloned code. For three large open source systems, the age of every line of source code is computed as the date of the last change in that line. In addition, every line is categorized whether it belongs to cloned code as detected by a clone detector. The study shows that on average, cloned code is older than non-cloned code. Moreover, if a file has cloned code, the average age of the cloned code of the file is lower than the average age of the non-cloned code in the same file. The results support the previous findings that cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code.
Radiation oncology.

Radiation Oncology focuses on the use of radiation for cancer therapy and research. The department does not offer degrees; however, its faculty teach courses open to medical students, graduate students, and undergraduates. The department also accepts students in other curricula as advisees for study and research. Graduate students in Biophysics and Cancer Biology may perform their thesis research in the department. Undergraduates may arrange individual research projects under supervision of faculty.
A point set whose space of triangulations is disconnected

In this paper we explicitly construct a triangulation of a 6-dimensional point configuration of 324 points which admits no geometric bistellar operations (or flips, for short). This triangulation is an isolated element in the graph of triangulations of the point configuration. It has been a central open question in polytope combinatorics in the last decade whether point configurations exist for which this graph is not connected (see, e.g., [37, Question 1.2] and [48, Challenge 3]). We also construct a 234-dimensional polytope with 552 vertices whose graph of triangulations has an isolated element. Our construction is likely to have an impact in algebraic geometry too, via the connections between lattice polytopes and toric varieties [21, 23, 31, 43]. For example, in [2, Section 2] and [24, Section 4] the different authors study algebraic schemes based on the poset of subdivisions of an integer point configuration. The connectivity of these schemes and of the graph of triangulations are equivalent. See Section 4.3, in particular Corollary 4.9. The graph of triangulations is also related to the Baues poset, which appears in oriented matroid theory, zonotopal tilings and hyperplane arrangements, so our result has implications in these areas. ∗ Let A be a finite point set in the real affine space R. A polyhedral subdivision of A is a geometric polyhedral complex with vertices in A which covers the convex hull of A. If all the cells are simplices, then it is a triangulation. More combinatorial definitions are convenient if A is not in convex position, i.e. if some element of A is not a vertex of the convex hull. See Definitions 4.1 and 1.1 for details, and also [6], [21, Chapter 7], [36], [47, Chapter 9], or the monograph in preparation [14]. There are at least the following three ways to give a structure to the collection of all triangulations of a point configuration A: (A) Flips. Geometric bistellar operations, or flips, are the minimal changes which can be made in a triangulation of A to produce a new one (see Definition 1.3). A particular case is the familiar diagonal edge flip in two-dimensional triangulations, of frequent use in computational geometry and geometric combinatorics.
Formant transition-specific adaptation by lipreading of left auditory cortex N1m

To test for the feature specificity of adaptation of auditory-cortex magnetoencephalographic N1m responses to phonemes during lipreading, we presented eight healthy volunteers with a simplified sine-wave first-formant (F1) transition shared by /ba/, /ga/, and /da/, and a continuum of second-formant (F2) transitions contained in /ba/ (ascending), /da/ (level), and /ga/ (descending), during lipreading of /ba/ vs. /ga/ vs. a still-face baseline. N1m responses to the F1 transition were suppressed during lipreading, further, visual /ga/ (vs. /ba/) significantly suppressed left-hemisphere N1m responses to the F2 transition contained in /ga/. This suggests that visual speech activates and adapts auditory cortex neural populations tuned to formant transitions, the basic sound-sweep constituents of phonemes, potentially explaining enhanced speech perception during lipreading.
The remarkable effectiveness of ergodic theory in number theory

The main goal of this survey is the description of the fruitful interaction between Ergodic Theory and Number Theory via the study of two beautiful results: the first one by Ben Green and Terence Tao (about long arithmetic progressions of primes) and the second one by Noam Elkies and Curtis McMullen (about the distribution of the sequence { √ n} mod 1). More precisely, during the first part, we will see how the ergodic-theoretical ideas of Furstenberg about the famous Szemeredi theorem were greatly generalized by Green and Tao in order to solve the classical problem of finding arbitrarily long arithmetical progression of prime numbers, while the second part will focus on how Elkies and McMullen used the ideas of Ratner's theory (about the classification of ergodic measures related to unipotent dynamics) to compute explicitly the distribution of the sequence { √ n} on the unit circle.
Immunoendocrine Interactions during HIV-TB Coinfection: Implications for the Design of New Adjuvant Therapies

Worldwide, around 14 million individuals are coinfected with both tuberculosis (TB) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In coinfected individuals, both pathogens weaken immunological system synergistically through mechanisms that are not fully understood. During both HIV and TB infections, there is a chronic state of inflammation associated to dramatic changes in immune cytokine and endocrine hormone levels. Despite this, the relevance of immunoendocrine interaction on both the orchestration of an effective immune response against both pathogens and the control of the chronic inflammation induced during HIV, TB, or both infections is still controversial. The present study reviews immunoendocrine interactions occurring during HIV and TB infections. We also expose our own findings on immunoendocrine cross talk in HIV-TB coinfection. Finally, we evaluate the use of adrenal hormones and their derivatives in immune-therapy and discuss the use of some of these compounds like the adjuvant for the prevention and treatment of TB in HIV patients.
LT-OLSR: Attack-tolerant OLSR against link spoofing

Optimized Link State Routing is a routing protocol that has been extensively studied for mobile ad-hoc networks. Link spoofing, which disturbs the routing service, is one of the critical security problems related to the OLSR protocol. Existing approaches against link spoofing attack have several drawbacks. In this paper, we propose an LT-OLSR protocol that broadcasts Hello messages to neighbors within two-hops to defend networks against link spoofing attacks. Simulation and analysis results show that the LT-OLSR protocol tolerates link spoofing attacks extensively. The contributions presented in this paper are as follows: (1) We design a mechanism to ensure the integrity of a routing table. (2) In addition, our approach against link spoofing attack is not only extensive but also compact. (3) Finally, it can be practically implemented under various types of MANET environments.
The effect of vitrification on mouse oocyte apoptosis by cryotop method.

BACKGROUND Oocyte cryopreservation is one of the most important topics in the field of assisted reproductive technology to preserve women fertility, but relationship between cryopreservation and apoptosis is still a matter of debate. The present study was aimed to investigate the effects of vitrification on apoptosis in mouse oocytes by Cryotop method. METHOD A total of 200 germinal vesicle (GV) and 200 metaphase II (MII) oocytes were obtained from ovaries and fallopian tubes of NMRI mice, respectively and divided into control and experimental groups. Oocytes in experimental group were vitrified by Cryotop using vitrification medium and were kept in liquid nitrogen for one month. The survival rate of oocytes was evaluated after 2 hour incubation time. Then, the oocyte apoptosis was evaluated by TUNEL technique and compared with those in control group. The data was compared statistically using SPSS software and chi-square test. RESULTS The survival rates of vitrified GV (93%) and MII oocytes (88%) showed a significant decrease compared with the control group (P<0.05), but there was no significant difference in survival rate of both vitrified oocyte groups. The incidence of apoptosis in vitrified and control GV oocytes showed no significant difference (13% vs. 7%), but the rate of apoptosis in vitrified MII oocytes increased significantly not only in comparison with MII control group (25% vs. 5%) but also with vitrified GV oocytes (P<0.05). CONCLUSION The results indicate that vitrification increases apoptosis in mouse MII oocytes and apoptosis may play a role in MII oocyte injury after vitrification.
Accuracy Analysis of DSMC Chemistry Models Applied to a Normal Shock Wave

A preliminary validation study of three DSMC chemistry models, two recent and one standard, is presented. First the 2D geometry and numerical approach used to simulate the shock experiments is verified. Next, 2 different vibrational relaxation models are validated by comparison with data for the M=9.3 case where dissociation is small in the nonequilibrium region of the shock. Finally, the 3 DSMC chemistry model results are compared for the M=13.4 case where nonequilbrium dissociation (in the region where the vibrational temperature is greatly different from the rotational and translational temperature) is important. It is shown that the peak vibrational temperature is very sensitive to vibrational favoring in the chemistry model and that the vibrationally-favored KSS model predicts the measured peak quite well.
Diversity of ganglion cells in the mouse retina: Unsupervised morphological classification and its limits

The dendritic structures of retinal ganglion cells in the mouse retina were visualized by particle‐mediated transfer of DiI, microinjection of Lucifer yellow, or visualization of green fluorescent protein expressed in a transgenic strain. The cells were imaged in three dimensions and the morphologies of a series of 219 cells were analyzed quantitatively. A total of 26 parameters were studied and automated cluster analysis was carried out using the k‐means methods. An effective clustering, judged by silhouette analysis, was achieved using three parameters: level of stratification, extent of the dendritic field, and density of branching. An 11‐cluster solution is illustrated. The cells within each cluster are visibly similar along morphological dimensions other than those used statistically to form the clusters. They could often be matched to ganglion cell types defined by previous studies. For reasons that are discussed, however, this classification must remain provisional. Some steps toward more definitive methods of unsupervised classification are pointed out. J. Comp. Neurol. 489:293–310, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
N-Substituted 5-Amino-6-methylpyrazine-2,3-dicarbonitriles: Microwave-Assisted Synthesis and Biological Properties

In this work a series of 15 N-benzylamine substituted 5-amino-6-methyl-pyrazine-2,3-dicarbonitriles was prepared by the aminodehalogenation reactions using microwave assisted synthesis with experimentally set and proven conditions. This approach for the aminodehalogenation reaction was chosen due to its higher yields and shorter reaction times. The products of this reaction were characterized by IR, NMR and other analytical data. The compounds were evaluated for their antibacterial, antifungal and herbicidal activity. Compounds 3 (R = 3,4-Cl), 9 (R = 2-Cl) and 11 (R = 4-CF3) showed good antimycobacterial activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MIC = 6.25 µg/mL). It was found that the lipophilicity is important for antimycobacterial activity and the best substitution on the benzyl moiety of the compounds is a halogen or trifluoromethyl group according to Craig’s plot. The activities against bacteria or fungi were insignificant. The presented compounds also inhibited photosynthetic electron transport in spinach chloroplasts and the IC50 values of the active compounds varied in the range from 16.4 to 487.0 µmol/L. The most active substances were 2 (R = 3-CF3), 3 (R = 3,4-Cl) and 11 (R = 4-CF3). A linear dependence between lipophilicity and herbicidal activity was observed.
The Presenilin Proteins Are Components of Multiple Membrane-bound Complexes That Have Different Biological Activities*

Several lines of evidence have indicated that the presenilin proteins function within macromolecular complexes and are necessary for the regulated intramembranous proteolysis of certain type 1 transmembrane proteins, including the amyloid precursor protein, Notch, and p75. Data from multiple complementary experiments now suggest that there may be several distinct presenilin complexes. We show here that presenilin mutations and certain detergents affect the abundance and componentry of the presenilin complexes, and these structural effects correlate with their effects on γ-secretase activity. Our data suggest that there are at least three complexes, including a ∼150-kDa nicastrin-aph-1 complex (which is likely to be a precursor complex). There is a stable and abundant intermediate complex of ∼440 kDa, which contains aph-1, pen-2, nicastrin, and PS1. However, it is the very low abundance, high mass (≥670 kDa) heteromeric complexes that are associated with the highest γ-secretase-specific activity.
General anesthesia and contrast-enhanced computed tomography to optimize renal percutaneous radiofrequency ablation: multi-institutional intermediate-term results.

INTRODUCTION Percutaneous renal ablation is often performed under conscious sedation and without contrast-enhanced imaging. We evaluated intermediate-term outcomes of patients undergoing percutaneous contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT)-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) under general anesthesia (GA) at two high-volume centers. MATERIALS AND METHODS Prospectively maintained Institutional Regulatory Board-approved databases were searched to identify patients treated with percutaneous RFA using contrast-enhanced CT under GA. A total of 163 masses in 151 patients were treated. Enhancement on imaging or a positive biopsy at 4 to 6 weeks was considered incomplete ablation. Positive findings beyond this interval were defined as local recurrence. RESULTS The median follow-up was 18 months (range, 1.5-70). Median tumor size was 2.3 cm (range, 1-5.4). Of the 130 (80%) masses with definitive pathology, 70% were renal cell cancer. Five masses had evidence of viable tumor at 4 to 6 weeks posttreatment for a complete initial ablation rate of 97%. Three of these five lesions were endophytic. Five masses (3.3%) showed evidence of local recurrence, and metastases developed in two patients (1.3%). Overall 1- and 3-year recurrence-free survival was 97% and 92%, respectively. Masses that were in the central region and were endophytic had the highest risk for recurrence (hazard ratio, 6.3; p = 0.016). CONCLUSIONS Intermediate-term outcomes of percutaneous RFA are excellent. GA-assisted, contrast-enhanced CT-guided percutaneous RFA demonstrates a high initial ablation success rate. However, endophytic and interpolar lesions are at higher risk for recurrence.
Association between the serum level of vitamin D and systemic sclerosis in a Chinese population: a case control study

Several autoimmune diseases have been associated with reduced vitamin D levels. However, the serum level of vitamin D in Chinese systemic sclerosis (SSc) patients have not been reported. The aim of this study was to evaluate the serum levels of vitamin D in Chinese SSc patients and analyze the association between vitamin D and SSc.
Image Quality of the Human Eye

The eye is an optical instrument that projects scenes of the visual world onto the retina. It has been known for many years that the eye is far from being a perfect optical system, in particular for large pupil diameters. Refractive anomalies (defocus or astigmatism) occur frequently in the eye. In Western countries, myopia affects approximately 30% of the population, although its prevalence is much higher (> 80%) in certain Asian societies. However, the eye suffers also from other optical imperfections (called high-order aberrations), which are not typically measured in the clinic and cannot be corrected by conventional means. Like defocus, optical aberrations blur the retinal image, reducing image contrast and limiting the range of spatial frequencies available to further stages of the visual processing. The contribution of aberrations to optical degradation is typically smaller than is that of defocus or astigmatism. The blurring effect of aberrations becomes more noticeable for large pupils. For small pupil sizes, diffraction effects, associated with limited aperture size, predominate over the aberrations. Along with diffraction and aberrations, scattering also contributes to degradation of retinal image quality. Scattering occurs at the cornea and particularly in the lens. Although typically scattering is small in normal, young eyes, it is well known that it increases with age (due to changes in the crystalline lens) and after PRK refractive surgery.
Bent and Hyper-Bent Functions in Polynomial Form and Their Link With Some Exponential Sums and Dickson Polynomials

Bent functions are maximally nonlinear Boolean functions with an even number of variables. They were introduced by Rothaus in 1976. For their own sake as interesting combinatorial objects, but also because of their relations to coding theory (Reed-Muller codes) and applications in cryptography (design of stream ciphers), they have attracted a lot of research, specially in the last 15 years. The class of bent functions contains a subclass of functions, introduced by Youssef and Gong in 2001, the so-called hyper-bent functions, whose properties are still stronger and whose elements are still rarer than bent functions. Bent and hyper-bent functions are not classified. A complete classification of these functions is elusive and looks hopeless. So, it is important to design constructions in order to know as many of (hyper)-bent functions as possible. This paper is devoted to the constructions of bent and hyper-bent Boolean functions in polynomial forms. We survey and present an overview of the constructions discovered recently. We extensively investigate the link between the bentness property of such functions and some exponential sums (involving Dickson polynomials) and give some conjectures that lead to constructions of new hyper-bent functions.