Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deep-water plays in the western Black Sea: insights into sediment supply within the Maykop depositional system

Abstract The Oligocene–Early Miocene Maykop depositional system of the Western Black Sea Basin is investigated in terms of sediment supply and provenance. Potential sediment source regions and conduits for sediment supply into the deep-water portion of the basin are evaluated based on the tectonic history and framework of the region, and are supported by observations from published well, reflection seismic and isopach data. The outcrop geology of the present-day land areas adjacent to the basin is used as a guide to the likely provenance and, hence, quality of potential siliciclastic reservoirs. Reservoir presence and reservoir quality are key subsurface risks for exploration in deep-water plays involving Maykop turbidite sandstones and charge from the well-known Maykop organic carbon-rich mudstones that are widespread across the basin. Sediments sourced from the NE Moesian Platform and Dobrogea, channelled into the offshore Black Sea via the Histria Trough, are considered moderate risk in terms of primary reservoir quality, as evidenced by thick packages of fine-grained sediment. In contrast, sediments derived from the southern Strandja Massif fed into the Burgas Basin, and potentially into the deeper-water Turkish Black Sea, are relatively low risk in terms of reservoir quality, given the abundance of acidic intrusions within the massif. Sediment derived from parts of the northern Strandja Massif, especially the volcaniclastics of the Srednogornie region, are likely to have poorer reservoir quality characteristics. Sediments derived from the granitic Bolu Massif within the Pontides might be of good reservoir quality but are likely to be ponded behind the offshore Kozlu Ridge. An important sediment source-to-sink system was derived from the Balkanides and entered the deeper-water western Black Sea via the Kamchia Trough. The present-day Kamchia river is a relatively minor sediment supplier to the Black Sea, but the palaeo-Kamchia river of the Oligocene–Early Miocene would have exploited a much greater drainage area consisting of an axial trunk stream, occupying the newly formed Kamchia Foredeep to the north of the Balkanides, and transverse rivers sourcing sediment from the granitic and gneissic bodies of the Balkan Mountains and from Early Cretaceous and Palaeogene sandstones. These would provide reasonable reservoir quality, and it is estimated from reference source-to-sink relationships that offshore sediment flux via this system was probably at least eight times greater than at present. Known shelf-edge canyons in offshore Bulgaria facilitated this sediment reaching the deep water offshore, where a sedimentary fan with a length in excess of 150 km is likely to have developed. This suggests that the potential is good for encountering good-quality reservoir sands in the Maykop succession deep water of the western Black Sea, and this aspect of regional play risk could be of less concern than was previously considered.
A low number of invasive marine species in the tropics: a case study from Pilbara (Western Australia)

Invasive marine species (IMS) are thought to be one of the most serious anthropogenic threats to global marine biodiversity. There are numerous reports of IMS being introduced into new areas throughout the world, but relatively few are in tropical locations. It has been suggested that this is an artefact of our lack of knowledge species present in the megadiverse tropics and a lack of IMS surveys. The Pilbara in northern Western Australia (WA) is used as a case study to examine these questions. The area is at high risk of IMS because of extensive international shipping. A detailed literature search of marine biodiversity studies developed a database of 5,532 species recorded in the Pilbara. There have been numerous surveys for species on the Australian national and WA IMS lists but only one, the ascidian Didemnum perlucidum Monniot, 1983, has been found.
Acute respiratory illness in an American community. The Tecumseh study.

Approximately 14,600 cases of respiratory illness in 4,905 residents of Tecumseh, Mich, were studied during a six-year period. The annual incidence of respiratory illness for each individual was calculated. Rates decreased with age except during the 20- to 29-year decade. In children less than 3 years of age, males experienced more illnesses than females; in those older than that, the reverse was true. Frequency of physician consultation varied with illness type. Rhinoviruses were the most frequently isolated pathogen from all illnesses. From those associated with physician consultation, group A hemolytic streptococci were nearly as frequently isolated. More illnesses started on Monday than on any other day of the week. Illness frequency increased with education of head of household, but decreased with family income. Therefore, highest rates were observed in more educated families with low income.
Effects of chronic caffeine administration on respiration and schedule-controlled behavior in rhesus monkeys.

The effects of chronic caffeine administration on ventilation and schedule-controlled behavior were studied in 12 adult rhesus monkeys. In seated subjects prepared with a head plethysmograph, ventilation was measured during exposure to air (normocapnia) and to elevated levels of CO2 (3%, 4% and 5%) mixed in air (hypercapnia). Acute administration of caffeine (10.0-30.0 mg/kg i.m.) produced marked, dose-dependent increases in ventilation during conditions of normocapnia and hypercapnia. However, daily administration of caffeine (10.0 mg/kg i.m.) for 8 consecutive days resulted in tolerance to its respiratory-stimulant effects that was surmountable with higher doses. Caffeine-tolerant subjects also were cross-tolerant to theophylline, an active metabolite of caffeine, and to rolipram and Ro 20-1724, selective phosphodiesterase inhibitors. When chronic administration was terminated and the acute effects of caffeine were redetermined, sensitivity returned to levels obtained before chronic administration within 9 days. Drug effects on behavior were studied in monkeys trained to respond under a fixed-interval schedule of stimulus termination. Acute administration of caffeine (1.0-30.0 mg/kg i.m.) produced significant rate-increasing effects on fixed-interval responding, but chronic administration resulted in tolerance that was insurmountable, such that no dose increased responding above control rates. Although the time course for development and loss of tolerance to the behavioral effects of caffeine corresponded closely with respiration, cross-tolerance did not extend to the behavioral effects of rolipram. Chronic caffeine administration had little effect on caffeine metabolism or clearance, which indicated that caffeine tolerance was pharmacodynamic. The results suggest that different neurochemical mechanisms mediate the effects of caffeine on respiration and behavior, and that inhibition of type IV phosphodiesterase plays a prominent role in caffeine-induced respiratory stimulation.
Towards a Hybrid Model for Chinese Word Segmentation

This paper describes a hybrid Chinese word segmenter that is being developed as part of a larger Chinese unknown word resolution system. The segmenter consists of two components: a tagging component that uses the transformation-based learning algorithm to tag each character with its position in a word, and a merging component that transforms a tagged character sequence into a word-segmented sentence. In addition to the position-of-character tags assigned to the characters, the merging component makes use of a number of heuristics to handle non-Chinese characters, numeric type compounds, and long words. The segmenter achieved a 92.8% F-score and a 72.8% recall for OOV words in the closed track of the Peking University Corpus in the Second International Chinese Word Segmentation Bakeoff.
Cytoskeletal forces during signaling activation in Jurkat T-cells

Cytoskeletal forces are implicated in T-cell–receptor activation, but their determinants are not known. Traction force microscopy was used to measure forces generated during T-cell activation. Whereas actin dynamics were essential for force generation, myosin contractility played a limited role. T-cells were also found to be mechanosensitive.
Very old drivers: findings from a population cohort of people aged 84 and over.

BACKGROUND Increases in longevity will involve a significant increase among the number of drivers in the very old, who are at greater risk of being involved in road accidents. Data are thus needed from studies of older populations to characterize those still driving, the reasons for giving up and to help formulate appropriate policies for dealing with the problems faced and created by an increase in older drivers. METHODS A driving questionnaire was administered to surviving members of a cohort comprising a representative sample of individuals aged >/=84, the Cambridge City over 75 Cohort. Out of 546 survivors 404 completed the driving questionnaire at the 9-year follow-up. In addition, subjects were assessed, at baseline and at each follow-up, for cognitive performance using the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and for physical impairment using the Instrumental of Activities in Daily Living (IADL) scale. RESULTS Of the sample, 37% had driven in the past, and 8.4% were still driving, the majority regularly. The drivers tended to be younger (mean age 86.6 years), men (71%) and to be married (67.7%). Although physical disability and cognitive impairment are common in this age group, current drivers had few physical limitations on their daily activities and were not impaired on MMSE. None of the current drivers had visual impairment and 22.6% had hearing loss. Of those who had given up driving, 48.5% had given up at the age of >/=80. The commonest reasons for giving up driving were health problems (28.6%), and loss of confidence (17.9%). One-third reported giving up driving on advice. CONCLUSION A process of self-selection takes place among older drivers. People over the age of 84 who are still driving have generally high levels of physical fitness and mental functioning, although some have some sensory loss. Given the likely increase in the number of older drivers over the next decades, safety will be improved most by strategies aimed at the entire driving population with older drivers in mind, rather than relying on costly screening programmes to identify the relatively small numbers of impaired older people who continue to drive.
Inducing Semantic Micro-Clusters from Deep Multi-View Representations of Novels

Automatically understanding the plot of novels is important both for informing literary scholarship and applications such as summarization or recommendation. Various models have addressed this task, but their evaluation has remained largely intrinsic and qualitative. Here, we propose a principled and scalable framework leveraging expert-provided semantic tags (e.g., mystery, pirates) to evaluate plot representations in an extrinsic fashion, assessing their ability to produce locally coherent groupings of novels (micro-clusters) in model space. We present a deep recurrent autoencoder model that learns richly structured multi-view plot representations, and show that they i) yield better micro-clusters than less structured representations; and ii) are interpretable, and thus useful for further literary analysis or labeling of the emerging micro-clusters.
Free, soluble interleukin-17 protein during severe inflammation in human airways

Studies in rodents indicate that the cytokine, interleukin (IL)-17, links the activation of T-lymphocytes to neutrophilic inflammation. The aim of the current study was to determine whether free, soluble IL-17 protein can be released during severe inflammation in human airways. Fifteen healthy subjects were exposed to a swine confinement in order to induce severe inflammation characterized by high neutrophil numbers in the airways. Bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid was harvested 2 weeks prior to and 24 h after this exposure and the concentration of IL-17 protein was measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Total and cell differential counts were also performed in BAL fluid. Prior to exposure to the swine confinement, the concentration of IL-17 in BAL fluid was low (<7.8 pg·mL−1) in 14 out of 15 subjects. However, exposure to the swine confinement caused an increase in IL-17 in 13 out of 15 subjects (median IL-17 concentration of 26.9 pg·mL−1). This exposure also caused a 51-fold increase in the concentration of neutrophils in BAL fluid. To conclude, free, soluble interleukin-17 protein can be released during severe inflammation characterized by high neutrophil numbers in human airways. The significance of interleukin-17 in inflammatory airway diseases therefore deserves further evaluation.
Can Pseudonymity Really Guarantee Privacy?

One of the core challenges facing the Internet today is the problem of ensuring privacy for its users. It is believed that mechanisms such as anonymity and pseudonymity are essential building blocks in formulating solutions to address these challenges and considerable effort has been devoted towards realizing these primitives in practice. The focus of this effort, however, has mostly been on hiding explicit identify information (such as source addresses) by employing a combination of anonymizing proxies, cryptographic techniques to distribute trust among them and traffic shaping techniques to defeat traffic analysis. We claim that such approaches ignore a significant amount of identifying information about the source that leaks from the contents of web traffic itself. In this paper, we demonstrate the significance and value of such information by showing how techniques from linguistics and stylometry can use this information to compromise pseudonymity in several important settings. We discuss the severity of this problem and suggest possible countermeasures.
Long-lived pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma slice cultures enable precise study of the immune microenvironment

ABSTRACT Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) remains a deadly disease that is rarely cured, despite many recent successes with immunotherapy for other malignancies. As the human disease is heavily infiltrated by effector T cells, we postulated that accurately modeling the PDA immune microenvironment would allow us to study mechanisms of immunosuppression that could be overcome for therapeutic benefit. Using viable precision-cut slices from fresh PDA, we developed an organotypic culture system for this purpose. We confirmed that cultured slices maintain their baseline morphology, surface area, and microenvironment after at least 6 d in culture, and demonstrated slice survival by MTT assay and by immunohistochemistry staining with Ki-67 and cleaved-Caspase-3 antibodies. Immune cells, including T cells (CD3+, CD8+, and FOXP3+) and macrophages (CD68+, CD163+ and HLA-DR+), as well as stromal myofibroblasts (αSMA+) were present throughout the culture period. Global profiling of the PDA proteome before and after 6 d slice culture indicated that the majority of the immunological proteins identified remain stable during the culture process. Cytotoxic effects of drug treatment (staurosporine, STS and cycloheximide, CHX) on PDA slices culture confirmed that this system can be used to assess functional response and cell survival following drug treatment in both a treatment time- and dose-dependent manner. Using multicolor immunofluorescence, we stained live slices for both cancer cells (EpCAM+) and immune cells (CD11b+ and CD8+). Finally, we confirmed that autologous CFSE-labeled splenocytes readily migrate into co-cultured tumor slices. Thus, our present study demonstrates the potential to use tumor slice cultures to study the immune microenvironment of PDA.
PCA-based feature transformation for classification: issues in medical diagnostics

The goal of this paper is to propose, evaluate, and compare several data mining strategies that apply feature transformation for subsequent classification, and to consider their application to medical diagnostics. We (1) briefly consider the necessity of dimensionality reduction and discuss why feature transformation may work better than feature selection for some problems; (2) analyze experimentally whether extraction of new components and replacement of original features by them is better than storing the original features as well; (3) consider how important the use of class information is in the feature extraction process; and (4) discuss some interpretability issues regarding the extracted features.
Food practices, dietary patterns, and leisure among Mexican Americans in the Midwestern U.S.

ABSTRACT Changes in diet that have occurred in the last several decades in many developed countries have contributed to high obesity rates and an increasing prevalence of chronic diseases among immigrant populations. This study, conducted in the Midwestern U.S., examined changes in food practices and dietary patterns among Mexican immigrants and investigated how leisure was related to their food practices and dietary patterns. The study was based on in-depth interviews with 23 Mexican immigrants. The findings showed that immigrants prepared foods of their culture using both traditional and new techniques, excluded other foods of their culture unavailable in their local environment, and consumed foods that were new to them and which they became familiar with in the new country. Following immigration, most interviewees stopped growing food as part of their leisure, and cooking became less fun and was no longer a leisurely activity as a result of time constraints and conflicting family and work schedules.
8-pole superconducting quasi-elliptic function filter for mobile communications application

This paper presents recent developments of an 8-pole planar high temperature superconductor bandpass filter with a quasi-elliptic function response. A novel planar filter configuration that allows a pair of transmission zeros to be placed at the band edges is described. The miniature filter has a bandwidth of 15 MHz at a centre frequency of 1777.5 MHz it is designed for mobile communication base station applications. The filter is fabricated using double sided YBCO thin film on an MgO substrate of size 0.3/spl times/22.5/spl times/39 mm. The preliminary results are presented.
Antimicrobial Usage and Antimicrobial Resistance in Animal Production in Southeast Asia: A Review

Southeast Asia is an area of great economic dynamism. In recent years, it has experienced a rapid rise in the levels of animal product production and consumption. The region is considered to be a hotspot for infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We reviewed English-language peer-reviewed publications related to antimicrobial usage (AMU) and AMR in animal production, as well as antimicrobial residues in meat and fish from 2000 to 2016, in the region. There is a paucity of data from most countries and for most bacterial pathogens. Most of the published work relates to non-typhoidal Salmonella (NTS), Escherichia coli (E. coli), and Campylobacter spp. (mainly from Vietnam and Thailand), Enterococcus spp. (Malaysia), and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (Thailand). However, most studies used the disk diffusion method for antimicrobial susceptibility testing; breakpoints were interpreted using Clinical Standard Laboratory Institute (CSLI) guidelines. Statistical models integrating data from publications on AMR in NTS and E. coli studies show a higher overall prevalence of AMR in pig isolates, and an increase in levels of AMR over the years. AMU studies (mostly from Vietnam) indicate very high usage levels of most types of antimicrobials, including beta-lactams, aminoglycosides, macrolides, and quinolones. This review summarizes information about genetic determinants of resistance, most of which are transferrable (mostly plasmids and integrons). The data in this review provide a benchmark to help focus research and policies on AMU and AMR in the region.
Comparison of channel normalisation techniques for automatic speech recognition over the phone

We compared three different channel normalisation (CN) methods in the context of a connected digit recognition task over the phone: cepstrum mean substraction (CMS), RASTA filtering and the Gaussian dynamic cepstrum representation (GDCR). Using a small set of context independent (CI) continuous Gaussian mixture hidden Markov models (HMMs), we found that CMS and RASTA outperformed the GDCR technique. We show that the main cause for the superiority of CMS compared to RASTA is the phase distortion introduced by the RASTA filter. Recognition results for a phase corrected RASTA technique are identical to those of CMS. Our results indicate that an ideal cepstrum based CN method should: (1) effectively remove the DC component; (2) at least preserve modulation frequencies in the range 2-16 Hz; and (3) introduce no phase distortion in case CI HMMs are used for recognition.
Exploiting as hierarchy for scalable route selection in multi-homed stub networks

Multi-homing is a common practice among many (especially large) customer (or stub) networks. Although the purpose of multi-homing is primarily for enhanced reliability, it has also increasingly been used for load balancing and latency reduction. In this paper, we address the problem of how to perform <i>scalable</i> route selection in a multi-homed <i>stub</i> network to optimize network latency to various destinations as measured by round-trip-time (RTT). A straight forward method is to simply perform RTT measurements (e.g., using ping) to each destination via each provider and select the one with the minimum RTT as the "best" next-hop to the destination. Is there a more. To answer this question, we carry out a measurement-based study to analyze the differences of RTTs in using two different providers in a multi-homed stub network to reach a large number of randomly selected destinations. Our study reveals that because of the AS hierarchy, for a large fraction of the network prefixes, the two AS paths through two providers merge in the core of the Internet. Furthermore, the router at which the two router level paths merge is actually in the AS at which the AS level paths merge. This phenomenon causes the RTT difference between the two paths through the two providers to be determined by the <i>non shared</i> portion of the paths. Our study reveals that most of the two router level paths through the two upstream providers merge at the AS at which the two AS level paths merge. Based on this finding, we devise a scalable route (next-hop provider) selection algorithm using BGP information in a multi-homed stub network. We also present a preliminary evaluation.