Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Influence of Land Intensive Use and Urbanization to Air Pollution: Evidence from China

Urbanization has a significant impact on environmental pollution, but the relationship between urbanization and environmental pollution is complex. This paper separately discusses the population urbanization and land urbanization relationship of air pollution, and the impact of urbanization level and land intensive utilization on air pollution are used for empirical analysis. The panel data of 35 provincial capitals and sub provincial cities in China are selected from 2003 to 2015, and index system is constructed to evaluate the level of urbanization, land urbanization and land intensive use. After testing the Heteroscedasticity between panels, Autocorrelation within groups and contemporaneous correlation across panels of the panel data, an econometric model is established and a comprehensive feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) method is chosen to estimate the consistent and valid results which show the effects of urbanization, land urbanization and land intensive utilization on air pollution. This paper puts forward the related questions and policy recommendations.
Can smartphones detect stress-related changes in the behaviour of individuals?

We describe initial results from an ongoing project to use mobile phone sensors to detect stress related situations. The questions that we address in this stage of our work in progress is whether differences between stressful and non stressful periods can be detected in information readily available on a smartphone such as location traces, BlueTooth devices seen during the day and phone call patterns. We present an experiment with 7 students who were monitored during a two week exam session (stressful situation) and the two following weeks (non stressful period). The results show that a behaviour modification can clearly be seen, although the exact interpretation and generalization requires further work and larger scale experiments.
Dynamic queue length thresholds for shared-memory packet switches

In shared-memory packet switches, buffer management schemes can improve overall loss performance, as well as fairness, by regulating the sharing of memory among the different output port queues. Of the conventional schemes, static threshold (ST) is simple but does not adapt to changing traffic conditions, while pushout (PO) is highly adaptive but difficult to implement. We propose a novel scheme called dynamic threshold (DT) that combines the simplicity of ST and the adaptivity of PO. The key idea is that the maximum permissible length, for any individual queue at any instant of time, is proportional to the unused buffering in the switch. A queue whose length equals or exceeds the current threshold value may accept no more arrivals. An analysis of the DT algorithm shows that a small amount of buffer space is (intentionally) left unallocated, and that the remaining buffer space becomes equally distributed among the active output queues. We use computer simulation to compare the loss performance of DT, ST, and PO. DT control is shown to be more robust to uncertainties and changes in traffic conditions than ST control.
Intelligent agents for adaptive security market surveillance

ABSTRACT Market surveillance systems have increasingly gained in usage for monitoring trading activities in stock markets to maintain market integrity. Existing systems primarily focus on the numerical analysis of market activity data and generally ignore textual information. To fulfil the requirements of information-based surveillance, a multi-agent-based architecture that uses agent intercommunication and incremental learning mechanisms is proposed to provide a flexible and adaptive inspection process. A prototype system is implemented using the techniques of text mining and rule-based reasoning, among others. Based on experiments in the scalping surveillance scenario, the system can identify target information evidence up to 87.50% of the time and automatically identify 70.59% of cases depending on the constraints on the available information sources. The results of this study indicate that the proposed information surveillance system is effective. This study thus contributes to the market surveillance literature and has significant practical implications.
Advancing 6-DoF Instrument Pose Estimation in Variable X-Ray Imaging Geometries

Accurate 6-DoF pose estimation of surgical instruments during minimally invasive surgeries can substantially improve treatment strategies and eventual surgical outcome. Existing deep learning methods have achieved accurate results, but they require custom approaches for each object and laborious setup and training environments often stretching to extensive simulations, whilst lacking real-time computation. We propose a general-purpose approach of data acquisition for 6-DoF pose estimation tasks in X-ray systems, a novel and general purpose YOLOv5-6D pose architecture for accurate and fast object pose estimation and a complete method for surgical screw pose estimation under acquisition geometry consideration from a monocular cone-beam X-ray image. The proposed YOLOv5-6D pose model achieves competitive results on public benchmarks whilst being considerably faster at 42 FPS on GPU. In addition, the method generalizes across varying X-ray acquisition geometry and semantic image complexity to enable accurate pose estimation over different domains. Finally, the proposed approach is tested for bone-screw pose estimation for computer-aided guidance during spine surgeries. The model achieves a 92.41% by the $0.1\cdot d$ ADD-S metric, demonstrating a promising approach for enhancing surgical precision and patient outcomes. The code for YOLOv5-6D is publicly available at https://github.com/cviviers/YOLOv5-6D-Pose.
Incidence and characteristics of newly diagnosed rheumatic heart disease in urban African adults: insights from the heart of Soweto study.

AIMS Little is known on the incidence and clinical characteristics of newly diagnosed rheumatic heart disease (RHD) in adulthood from urban African communities in epidemiologic transition. METHODS AND RESULTS Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital services the black African community of 1.1 million people in Soweto, South Africa. A prospective, clinical registry captured data from all de novo cases of structural and functional valvular heart disease (VHD) presenting to the Cardiology Unit during 2006/07. We describe in detail all cases with newly diagnosed RHD. There were 4005 de novo presentations in 2006/07 and 960 (24%) had a valvular abnormality. Of these, 344 cases (36%) were diagnosed with RHD. Estimated incidence of new cases of RHD for those aged >14 years in the region was 23.5 cases/100 000 per annum. Most were black African females (n = 234-68%) with a similar age profile to males [median 41 (interquartile range 30-55) years vs. 42 (interquartile range 31-55) years]. The predominant valvular lesion (n = 204, 59%) was mitral regurgitation (MR), with 48 (14%) and 43 (13%) cases, respectively, having combination lesions of aortic plus MR and mixed mitral VHD. Impaired systolic function was found in 28/204 cases (14%) of predominant MR and in 23/126 cases (18%) with predominant aortic regurgitation. Elevated right ventricular systolic pressure >35 mmHg (62 cases), atrial fibrillation (34 cases), and anaemia (27 cases) were found in 18, 10, and 8% of 344 RHD cases, respectively. Subsequent valve replacement/repair was performed in 75 patients (22%). A total of 90 cases (26%) were admitted within 30 months of initial diagnosis for suspected bacterial endocarditis. CONCLUSION These data reveal a high incidence of newly diagnosed RHD within an adult urban African community. These data argue strongly for the first episode of RHD to be made a notifiable condition in high burden countries in order to ensure control of the disease through register-based secondary prophylaxis programmes.
Study of GPR 81 , the Lactate Receptor , from Distant Species Identifies Residues and Motifs Critical for GPR 81 Functions

Receptors from distant species may have conserved functions despite significant differences in protein sequences. Whereas the noncritical residues are often changed in distant species, the amino acids critical in receptor functions are often conserved. Studying the conserved residues between receptors from distant species offers valuable information to probe the roles of residues in receptor function. We identified two zebrafish receptors (zGPR81-1 and zGPR81-2) that show approximately 60% identity to human GPR81, GPR109a, and GPR109b but respond only to L-lactate and not to the GPR109a ligands. Protein sequence comparison among zebrafish GPR81s, mammalian GPR81s, GPR109a, and GPR109b identified a common structure (six Cys residues at the extracellular domains that potentially form three disulfide bonds) in this subfamily of receptors. In addition, a number of residues conserved in all GPR81s but not in GPR109s have been identified. Furthermore, we identified a conserved motif, C165-E166-S167-F168, at the second extracellular loop of GPR81. Using site-directed mutagenesis, we showed that Arg71 at the transmembrane domain 2 is very critical for GPR81 function. In addition, we demonstrated that the C165-E166-S167-F168 motif at the second extracellular loop is critical for GPR81 function, and the conserved six Cys residues at the extracellular regions are necessary for GPR81 function. It is important to mention that for those residues important for GPR81 function, the corresponding residues or motifs in GPR109a are also critical for GPR109a function. These findings help us better understand the interaction between lactate and GPR81 and provide useful information for GPR81 ligand design.
MaskRNN: Instance Level Video Object Segmentation

Instance level video object segmentation is an important technique for video editing and compression. To capture the temporal coherence, in this paper, we develop MaskRNN, a recurrent neural net approach which fuses in each frame the output of two deep nets for each object instance -- a binary segmentation net providing a mask and a localization net providing a bounding box. Due to the recurrent component and the localization component, our method is able to take advantage of long-term temporal structures of the video data as well as rejecting outliers. We validate the proposed algorithm on three challenging benchmark datasets, the DAVIS-2016 dataset, the DAVIS-2017 dataset, and the Segtrack v2 dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance on all of them.
A genome-wide scan for linkage to chromosomal regions in 382 sibling pairs with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.

OBJECTIVE Some genome-wide scans and association studies for schizophrenia susceptibility genes have yielded significant positive findings, but there is disagreement between studies on their locations, and no mutation has yet been found in any gene. Since schizophrenia is a complex disorder, a study with sufficient power to detect a locus with a small or moderate gene effect is necessary. METHOD In a genome-wide scan of 382 sibling pairs with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, 396 highly polymorphic markers spaced approximately 10 centimorgans apart throughout the genome were genotyped in all individuals. Multipoint nonparametric linkage analysis was performed to evaluate regions of the genome demonstrating increased allele sharing, as measured by a lod score. RESULTS Two regions with multipoint maximum lod scores suggesting linkage were found. The highest lod scores occurred on chromosome 10p15-p13 (peak lod score of 3.60 at marker D10S189) and the centromeric region of chromosome 2 (peak lod score of 2.99 at marker D2S139). In addition, a maximum lod score of 2.00 was observed with marker D22S283 on chromosome 22q12, which showed evidence of an imprinting effect, whereby an excess sharing of maternal, but not paternal, alleles was present. No evidence of linkage was obtained at several locations identified in previous studies, including chromosomes 1q, 4p, 5p-q, 6p, 8p, 13q, 15p, and 18p. CONCLUSIONS The findings of this large genome-wide scan emphasize the weakness and fragility of linkage reports on schizophrenia. No linkage appears to be consistently replicable across large studies. Thus, it has to be questioned whether the genetic contribution to this disorder is detectable by these strategies and the possibility raised that it may be epigenetic, i.e., related to gene expression rather than sequence variation. Nevertheless, the positive findings on chromosome 2, 10, and 22 should be pursued further.
Five‐year prospective study of DNA tumor ploidy and colorectal cancer survival

Background. Retrospective studies have suggested that DNA tumor content (ploidy) has a significant effect on survival. This group has reported, prospectively, that among patients who had colorectal resections for carcinoma, the 2‐year tumor recurrence rate was significantly greater for patients with aneuploid tumor than for those with diploid tumors. This paper reports the 5‐year survival rates of this cohort of patients.
PTSD and comorbid AUD: a review of pharmacological and alternative treatment options

Background: Although posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol use disorders (AUD) frequently co-occur there are no specific treatments for individuals diagnosed with these comorbid conditions. The main objectives of this paper are to review the literature on pharmacological options for PTSD and comorbid AUD, and to summarize promising behavioral and alternative interventions for those with these dual diagnoses
Parallel Newton-Krylov-Schwarz Algorithms for the Transonic Full Potential Equation

We study parallel two-level overlapping Schwarz algorithms for solving nonlinear finite element problems, in particular, for the full potential equation of aerodynamics discretized in two dimensions with bilinear elements. The overall algorithm, Newton--Krylov--Schwarz (NKS), employs an inexact finite difference Newton method and a Krylov space iterative method, with a two-level overlapping Schwarz method as a preconditioner. We demonstrate that NKS, combined with a density upwinding continuation strategy for problems with weak shocks, is robust and economical for this class of mixed elliptic-hyperbolic nonlinear partial differential equations, with proper specification of several parameters. We study upwinding parameters, inner convergence tolerance, coarse grid density, subdomain overlap, and the level of fill-in in the incomplete factorization, and report their effect on numerical convergence rate, overall execution time, and parallel efficiency on a distributed-memory parallel computer.
Texture Synthesis Using Shallow Convolutional Networks with Random Filters

Here we demonstrate that the feature space of random shallow convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can serve as a surprisingly good model of natural textures. Patches from the same texture are consistently classified as being more similar then patches from different textures. Samples synthesized from the model capture spatial correlations on scales much larger then the receptive field size, and sometimes even rival or surpass the perceptual quality of state of the art texture models (but show less variability). The current state of the art in parametric texture synthesis relies on the multi-layer feature space of deep CNNs that were trained on natural images. Our finding suggests that such optimized multi-layer feature spaces are not imperative for texture modeling. Instead, much simpler shallow and convolutional networks can serve as the basis for novel texture synthesis algorithms.
Functional Characterization of Acetylcholine Receptors Expressed in Human Neurons Differentiated from Hippocampal Neural Stem/Progenitor Cells

Neurotransmission mediated by acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) plays an important role in learning and memory functions in the hippocampus. Impairment of the cholinergic system contributes to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), indicating the importance of AChRs as drug targets for AD. To improve the success rates for AD drug development, human cell models that mimic the target brain region are important. Therefore, we characterized the functional expression of nicotinic and muscarinic AChRs (nAChRs and mAChRs, respectively) in human hippocampal neurons differentiated from hippocampal neural stem/progenitor cells (HIP-009 cells). Intracellular calcium flux in 4-week differentiated HIP-009 cells demonstrated that the cells responded to acetylcholine, nicotine, and muscarine in a concentration-dependent manner (EC50 = 13.4 ± 0.5, 6.0 ± 0.4, and 35.0 ± 2.5 µM, respectively). In addition, assays using subtype-selective compounds revealed that major AD therapeutic target AChR subtypes—α7 and α4β2 nAChRs, as well as M1 and M3 mAChRs—were expressed in the cells. Furthermore, neuronal network analysis demonstrated that potentiation of M3 mAChRs inhibits the spontaneous firing of HIP-009 neurons. These results indicate that HIP-009 cells are physiologically relevant for AD drug screening and hence are loadstars for the establishment of in vitro AD models.
Long-term retinal nerve fiber layer changes following nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy

Background In cases of nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness changes have been described during the first 12 months following the acute event. The purpose of this study was to report on the long-term RNFL changes in these eyes beyond the first year following onset of NAION. Methods Fourteen eyes of 13 patients with NAION were analyzed in this retrospective observational case series study. Uninvolved eyes served as controls. All patients underwent a complete neuro-ophthalmological examination and repeat measurements of peripapillary RNFL thickness using Stratus optical coherence tomography. Results On optical coherence tomography scan performed on average 6 months following onset of NAION, the mean global RNFL thickness (59.8 ± 11.8 μm) was significantly thinner (P < 0.001) compared with uninvolved eyes (95.1 ± 13.9 μm). In a second optical coherence tomography scan performed on average 13 (range 12–23) months later, the mean global RNFL thickness (58.9 ± 6.5 μm) was not significantly different (P = 0.702) from the first scan. Conclusion There appears to be no further RNFL loss beyond the first 6 months following an acute event of NAION.
Guideline in the Prediction of Coronary Artery Calci fi cation Progression in a Korean Population

Background-—Since the release of the 2013 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) guidelines, significant controversy has surrounded the applicability of the new cholesterol guidelines and the Pooled Cohort Equations. In this present study, we investigated whether eligibility for statin therapy determined by the 2013 ACC/AHA guidelines on the management of blood cholesterol is better aligned with the progression of coronary artery calcification (CAC) detected by coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) than the previously recommended 2004 National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) Adult Treatment Panel (ATP) III guidelines.
Iterative source-channel decoding for robust image transmission

In this paper we discuss the application of a joint source-channel decoding approach to image transmission over wireless channels. In addition to channel codes, also the implicit residual redundancy after source encoding in both horizontal and vertical direction is utilized for error protection. At the decoder we use an iterative (“turbo”) source-channel decoder which can be obtained in the same manner as for serially concatenated channel codes. As a new result we show that this iterative decoding scheme in combination with a novel simplified joint source and channel coding rate allocation at the encoder can be successfully employed for protecting the image data, especially when the channel is highly corrupted. Furthermore, when the source correlations are approximated with a large training set at the decoder, only a small loss in performance is observed.
Statistical study of the storm time radiation belt evolution during Van Allen Probes era: CME‐ versus CIR‐driven storms

Coronal mass ejection (CME)‐driven or corotating interaction region (CIR)‐driven storms can change the electron distributions in the radiation belt dramatically, which can in turn affect the spacecraft in this region or induce geomagnetic effects. The Van Allen Probes twin spacecraft, launched on 30 August 2012, orbit near the equatorial plane and across a wide range of L∗ with apogee at 5.8 RE and perigee at 620 km. Electron data from Van Allen Probes MagEIS and REPT instruments have been binned every 6 h at L∗=3 (defined as 2.5 < L∗<3.5), 4 (3.5 < L∗<4.5), 5 (4.5 < L∗<5.5). The superposed epoch analysis shows that (1) CME storms induce more electron flux enhancement at L∗=3 for energy channels below 1 MeV than CIR storms; (2) CME storms induce more electron flux enhancement at L∗=4 and 5 in the energy channels above 1 MeV than CIR storms; (3) CIR storms induce more electron flux enhancement at L∗=4 and 5 in the energy channels below 1 MeV than CME storms; (4) intense CME induce more than 50 times flux enhancement for the energy channel around 400 keV at L∗=3; (5) intense CIR induce more than 50 times flux enhancement for the energy channel around 200 keV at L∗=4. These results are consistent with a general picture of enhanced convection over a longer period for CIR storms which increased flux closer to geosynchronous orbit consistent with earlier studies, while CME storms likely produce deeper penetration of enhanced flux and local heating which is greater at higher energies at lower L∗.
Diversity and status of avifauna in man-made sacred ponds of Kurukshetra, India

Located in the Trans-Gangetic Plains of India, Kurukshetra is dotted with a number of man-made, perennial, sacred ponds of great historical and religious importance. These wetlands also serve as important wintering and stopover sites for birds coming from the Palearctic region. Surveys were conducted from April 2014 to March 2015 to recordthe diversity and status of avifauna in four sacred ponds of Kurukshetra. Point counts and direct observations were used to record the bird species. A total of 126 bird species of 98 genera belonging to 45 families and 16 orders were identified, of which 41 were winter migrants, six were summer migrants, and 79 were residents. Anatidae (n=15) was the most common family, followed by Ardeidae (n=8), and Motacillidae and Muscicapidae (n=7 each). Based on the guilds, 37 species were carnivorous, 36 omnivorous, 29 insectivorous, six herbivorous, six frugivorous, five granivorous, four insectivorous/nectarivorous, and three piscivorous. Of the species recorded, five species are classified as Near Threatened and one species as Vulnerable in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species; nine species are listed in Appendix II of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and six species are included in Schedule I of the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. We hope that this study will provide a baseline for future research on monitoring the population and seasonal changes in the bird assemblageof sacred ponds.