Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of Annealing and Degradation Effects on a-Si PV Modules in Real Operating Conditions

This article summarizes the main results obtained by the investigation of annealing and degradation mechanisms observed for amorphous silicon (a-Si) modules. This interest comes from the encouraging results obtained by thermally insulated a-Si PV plant. Findings showed that the better thermal behaviour and annealing processes of a-Si compared to c-Si technologies compensated a significant part of losses due to the nearly horizontal roof integration. The study focuses on the characterization of the annealing process, in terms of temperature and heating duration. Other aspects investigated are the stability of annealing and stability of degradation, the degradation dependence on the module load and the contrasting effects occurring to a-Si module power due to a temperature increase.
Determining prognosis in acute exacerbation of COPD

Background Acute exacerbations are the leading causes of hospitalization and mortality in patients with COPD. Prognostic tools for patients with chronic COPD exist, but there are scarce data regarding acute exacerbations. We aimed to identify the prognostic factors of death and readmission after exacerbation of COPD. Methods This was a retrospective study conducted in the Department of Internal Medicine of Geneva University Hospitals. All patients admitted to the hospital with a diagnosis of exacerbation of COPD between 2008 and 2011 were included. The studied variables included comorbidities, Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) severity classification, and biological and clinical parameters. The main outcome was death or readmission during a 5-year follow-up. The secondary outcome was death. Survival analysis was performed (log-rank and Cox). Results We identified a total of 359 patients (195 men and 164 women, average age 72 years). During 5-year follow-up, 242 patients died or were hospitalized for the exacerbation of COPD. In multivariate analysis, age (hazard ratio [HR] 1.03, 95% CI 1.02–1.05; P<0.0001), severity of airflow obstruction (forced expiratory volume in 1 s <30%; HR 4.65, 95% CI 1.42–15.1; P=0.01), diabetes (HR 1.47, 95% CI 1.003–2.16; P=0.048), cancer (HR 2.79, 95% CI 1.68–4.64; P<0.0001), creatinine (HR 1.003, 95% CI 1.0004–1.006; P=0.02), and respiratory rate (HR 1.03, 95% CI 1.003–1.05; P=0.028) on admission were significantly associated with the primary outcome. Age, cancer, and procalcitonin were significantly associated with the secondary outcome. Conclusion COPD remains of ominous prognosis, especially after exacerbation requiring hospitalization. Baseline pulmonary function remains the strongest predictor of mortality and new admission. Demographic factors, such as age and comorbidities and notably diabetes and cancer, are closely associated with the outcome of the patient. Respiratory rate at admission appears to be the most prognostic clinical parameter. A prospective validation is, however, still required to enable the identification of patients at higher risk of death or readmission.
Zinc and Other Metals Deficiencies and Risk of Type 1 Diabetes: An Ecological Study in the High Risk Sardinia Island

BACKGROUND Type 1 diabetes incidence presents a decreasing gradient in Europe from the Nordic countries to the Mediterranean ones. Exception to this gradient is represented by Sardinia, the second largest Mediterranean island whose population shows the highest incidence in Europe, after Finland. The genetic features of this population have created a fertile ground for the epidemic of the disease, however, as well as being strikingly high, the incidence rate has suddenly presented a continuous increase from the '50s, not explainable by accumulation of new genetic variants. Several environmental factors have been taken into account, possibly interacting with the genetic/epigenetic scenario, but there are no strong evidences to date. METHODS The present study investigated the hypothesis that geochemical elements could create permissive environmental conditions for autoimmune diabetes. An ecological analysis was performed to test possible correlations between the values of eight elements in stream sediments and type 1 diabetes incidence rate in Sardinia. RESULTS Analyses revealed negative associations between elements, such as Co, Cr, Cu, Mn, Ni, Zn, and type 1 diabetes incidence. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest a possible protective role of some elements against the onset of the disease.
Multiple Common Susceptibility Variants near BMP Pathway Loci GREM1, BMP4, and BMP2 Explain Part of the Missing Heritability of Colorectal Cancer

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified 14 tagging single nucleotide polymorphisms (tagSNPs) that are associated with the risk of colorectal cancer (CRC), and several of these tagSNPs are near bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) pathway loci. The penalty of multiple testing implicit in GWAS increases the attraction of complementary approaches for disease gene discovery, including candidate gene- or pathway-based analyses. The strongest candidate loci for additional predisposition SNPs are arguably those already known both to have functional relevance and to be involved in disease risk. To investigate this proposition, we searched for novel CRC susceptibility variants close to the BMP pathway genes GREM1 (15q13.3), BMP4 (14q22.2), and BMP2 (20p12.3) using sample sets totalling 24,910 CRC cases and 26,275 controls. We identified new, independent CRC predisposition SNPs close to BMP4 (rs1957636, P = 3.93×10−10) and BMP2 (rs4813802, P = 4.65×10−11). Near GREM1, we found using fine-mapping that the previously-identified association between tagSNP rs4779584 and CRC actually resulted from two independent signals represented by rs16969681 (P = 5.33×10−8) and rs11632715 (P = 2.30×10−10). As low-penetrance predisposition variants become harder to identify—owing to small effect sizes and/or low risk allele frequencies—approaches based on informed candidate gene selection may become increasingly attractive. Our data emphasise that genetic fine-mapping studies can deconvolute associations that have arisen owing to independent correlation of a tagSNP with more than one functional SNP, thus explaining some of the apparently missing heritability of common diseases.
History of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus and Risk of Incident Invasive Breast Cancer among Parous Women in the Nurses' Health Study II Prospective Cohort

Background: Type II diabetes is associated with breast cancer in epidemiologic studies. Pregnancy also modifies breast cancer risk. We hypothesized that women with a history of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), which shares pathogenesis and risk factors with type II diabetes, would have greater invasive breast cancer risk than parous women without a history of GDM. Methods: We conducted a prospective analysis among parous women in the Nurses' Health Study II, with mean age 35 years in 1989. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards models were used to compare risks of incident invasive breast cancer in women with and without a history of GDM. Results: Among 86,972 women studied, 5,188 women reported a history of GDM and 2,377 developed invasive breast cancer (100 with history of GDM, 2,277 without GDM) over 22 years of prospective follow-up. History of GDM was inversely associated with incident invasive breast cancer [HR, 0.68; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.55–0.84; P = 0.0004], compared with no history of GDM, after adjustment for body mass index, reproductive history, and other breast cancer risk factors. Findings were similar by menopausal status, although observed person-time was predominantly premenopausal (premenopausal: HR, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.56–0.96; P = 0.03; postmenopausal: HR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.43–0.92; P = 0.02). Restricting to women undergoing mammography screening modestly attenuated the relationship (HR, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.57–0.96; P = 0.02). Conclusions: Among a large cohort of U.S. women, history of GDM was not associated with an elevated risk of subsequent invasive breast cancer. Impact: Our findings highlight the need to further investigate GDM's role in breast cancer development. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 26(3); 321–7. ©2016 AACR.
Coalescence of the Fullerenes in SWNT with Bend Junction

The coalescence of the fullerenes encapsulated in the host single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) with bend junction is explored theoretically by energy driven kinetic Monte Carlo (EDKMC) method. Despite the lower productivity of successful coalescence (with clear identified chiralitys), there is still a possibility to form the inner tube with bend junction which can copy the separated pentagon and heptagon from the host tube exactly with the chiralitys at the two sides clearly identified. The statistic to ~20 successfully coalesced inner tubes with bend junctions shows that the chiral angle differences (CAD) between the two sides > 20 o, which is determined by the minimization of the formation energies of the junctions. Therefore, the chirality distribution of the inner tube may be effectively narrowed by tuning the CAD of the bend host tube, which may provide an alternative way to the application of specific control to the chiralitys.
Clinicopathological features of colorectal polyps in 2002 and 2012

Background/Aims There are few comparative studies on the historical changes in the clinicopathologic characteristics of colorectal polyps in Korea. This retrospective study compared the clinicopathologic characteristics of colorectal polyps treated at our institution in 2002 and 2012. Methods The medical records of 1,816 patients who underwent colonoscopy and were found to have colorectal polyps in 2002 (n = 597) or 2012 (n = 1,219) were reviewed retrospectively. Patient characteristics and polyp sizes, gross morphologies, locations, and pathologic results were analyzed and compared. Results Mean age was older in the 2002 group than in the 2012 group (67.3 ± 11.1 years vs. 55.4 ± 10.8 years, p < 0.001). The 1,816 study subjects had a total of 3,723 colorectal polyps, with a mean of 2.05 polyps per patient. Mean polyp size was larger in the 2002 group than in the 2012 group (0.6 ± 0.4 cm vs. 0.4 ± 0.3 cm, p < 0.001). The most common histology was tubular adenoma and they were more common in the right colon in both study groups. Although the distribution of total adenoma was not significantly different between groups, the location of advanced adenoma differed significantly and was more common in the right colon in the 2012 group (30.4% vs. 63.2%, p = 0.01). Conclusions No significant change in total polyps and adenoma distribution was found between 2002 and 2012. However, advanced adenoma was more common in the right colon in 2012, which cautiously suggests a locational shift from the left to right colon. These findings indicate that right colon polyps require more attention.
Cyclic bond behaviour of FRP-to-steel bonded joints

Cyclic behaviour of the FRP-to-steel bonded interfaces is a key issue to be addressed in modelling the long-term performance of FRP-to-steel bonded joints. However, compared to extensive experimental and theoretical study on the bond-slip behaviour between two adherents, either FRP-to-steel or FRP-to-concrete under monotonic loading, so far only few research have been carried out on the cyclic behaviour of such bonded joints. This paper presents a new bond-slip model to model the behaviour of FRP-to-steel bonded joints under quasi-static cyclic loading. In addition, an analytical model to model the load-displacement behaviour and interfacial shear stress distributions is also presented. The results from the proposed model and the results from another existing model are compared with the experimental results from two FRP-to-steel bonded joints tests under cyclic loading. Results from the proposed model show a better agreement with the experimental load-displacement behaviour, shear stress distribution and the bond-slip behaviour.
Eating Disorders and Breast Cancer

Background: Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa affect overall and reproductive health and may also affect breast cancer risk. We studied the association between self-reported eating disorders and breast cancer risk in a prospective cohort study. Methods: In 2003–2009, the Sister Study enrolled women ages 35–74 years who had a sister with breast cancer but had never had it themselves. Using data from 47,813 women, we estimated adjusted HRs and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the association between eating disorders and invasive breast cancer over a median of 5.4 years of follow-up. Results: Three percent (n = 1,569) of participants reported a history of an eating disorder. Compared with women who never had an eating disorder, women who reported eating disorders in the past had reduced breast cancer risk (HR = 0.62; 95% CI, 0.42–0.92). Conclusions: In this large prospective, observational cohort study, we observed an inverse association between having a history of an eating disorder and invasive breast cancer. Impact: Historical eating disorders may be associated with a long-term reduction in breast cancer risk. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 26(2); 206–11. ©2016 AACR.
Central blood pressure assessment using 24-hour brachial pulse wave analysis

: This review describes the use of central blood pressure (BP) measurements during ambulatory monitoring, using noninvasive devices. The principles of measuring central BP by applanation tonometry and by oscillometry are reported, and information on device validation studies is described. The pathophysiological basis for the differences between brachial and aortic pressure is discussed. The currently available methods for central aortic pressure measurement are relatively accurate, and their use has important clinical implications, such as improving diagnostic and prognostic stratification of hypertension and providing a more accurate assessment of the effect of treatment on BP.
Constitutive model for shear yield stress of magnetorheological fluid based on the concept of state transition

Magnetorheological fluid (MRF) is a smart material whose rheological properties can be varied by a magnetic field; it has been applied in the development of semiactive dampers for a variety of applications. The material essentially consists of a suspension of magnetic particles in a nonmagnetic carrier fluid. It is important to understand the magnetic response of MRF and its dependence on several parameters for improving and designing MRF devices. The purpose of this work is to develop a constitutive model that describes the behavior of the shear yield stress of the material as function of the magnetic field and composition. Taking into account that the material changes its rheology and apparent viscosity according to magnetic field, a magnetically induced state transition is proposed; by the use of a state transition equation, a constitutive model for shear yield stress is defined, consisting of an expression that relates composition of the material and the stimulus applied, it also associates the volume fraction of particles, magnetic field and the material that composes the particles.
Discovering geographical topics in the twitter stream

Micro-blogging services have become indispensable communication tools for online users for disseminating breaking news, eyewitness accounts, individual expression, and protest groups. Recently, Twitter, along with other online social networking services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook and Yelp, have started supporting location services in their messages, either explicitly, by letting users choose their places, or implicitly, by enabling geo-tagging, which is to associate messages with latitudes and longitudes. This functionality allows researchers to address an exciting set of questions: 1) How is information created and shared across geographical locations, 2) How do spatial and linguistic characteristics of people vary across regions, and 3) How to model human mobility. Although many attempts have been made for tackling these problems, previous methods are either complicated to be implemented or oversimplified that cannot yield reasonable performance. It is a challenge task to discover topics and identify users' interests from these geo-tagged messages due to the sheer amount of data and diversity of language variations used on these location sharing services. In this paper we focus on Twitter and present an algorithm by modeling diversity in tweets based on topical diversity, geographical diversity, and an interest distribution of the user. Furthermore, we take the Markovian nature of a user's location into account. Our model exploits sparse factorial coding of the attributes, thus allowing us to deal with a large and diverse set of covariates efficiently. Our approach is vital for applications such as user profiling, content recommendation and topic tracking. We show high accuracy in location estimation based on our model. Moreover, the algorithm identifies interesting topics based on location and language.
In Their Own Words : Explaining Obedience to Authority Through an Examination of Participants '

The authors examined data generated during a replication of Milgram’s obedience studies to address some lingering questions about those studies. In Study 1, judges coded comments participants made during experimental and debriefing sessions. Participants who refused to follow the experimenter’s instructions were significantly more likely to express a sense of personal responsibility than those who followed the instructions. Participants who expressed concern for the well-being of the learner exhibited a greater reluctance to continue the procedure than did those not expressing this concern. However, whether participants expressed concern for the learner was not related to whether they ultimately continued the procedure. Study 2 looked at participants’ reactions to each of the experimenter’s four prods. The further along the prod sequence the experimenter went, the less likely participants were to continue the procedure. This pattern challenges interpretations of the obedience studies based on the notion that participants were following orders.
Automatic Drum Transcription Using the Student-Teacher Learning Paradigm with Unlabeled Music Data

Automatic drum transcription is a sub-task of automatic music transcription that converts drum-related audio events into musical notation. While noticeable progress has been made in the past by combining pattern recognition methods with audio signal processing techniques, the major limitation of many state-of-the-art systems still originates from the difﬁculty of obtaining a meaningful amount of annotated data to support the data-driven algorithms. In this work, we address the challenge of insufﬁciently labeled data by exploring the possibility of utilizing unlabeled music data from online resources. Speciﬁcally, a student neural network is trained using the labels generated from multiple teacher systems. The performance of the model is evaluated on a publicly available dataset. The results show the general viability of using unlabeled music data to improve the performance of drum transcription systems.
Impact of sustained virological response to chronic hepatitic C antiviral therapy on new onset diabetes mellitus type 2 after controlling for metabolic syndrome

The high cost associated with antiviral treatment for chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection mandates further investigation in the context of preventing complications such as type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2). We determined the cumulative incidence of DM2 in subjects with chronic HCV infection who received concomitant pegylated interferon (Peg-IFN) and ribavirin. We conducted a retrospective analysis of data obtained from Veterans Administrations Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI) to identify an adult cohort of patients without diabetes with chronic HCV infection who received Peg-IFN-based therapy between October 2001 and December 2011. Patients with history of HIV, hepatitis B infection, hepatocellular cancer (HCC), non-HCC cancers, and history of transplantation were excluded. Sustained virological response (SVR) was defined as negative HCV RNA 3 months after completion of therapy. Using Cox proportional hazards regression for multivariable analysis, we determined that patients who achieved SVR were at a significantly less risk of developing DM2. Adjusted survival rates showed that the responders' group was significantly less likely to develop DM2 over time (HR 0.60, CI 0.48 to 0.74, p<0.001). Peg-IFN-based therapy in chronic HCV patients that resulted in SVR significantly decreased the risk of developing DM2 and independently predicts the development of new onset disease after controlling for correlates of metabolic syndrome.
Remembering my friends: Medial prefrontal and hippocampal contributions to the self‐reference effect on face memories in a social context

Memories associated with the self are remembered more accurately than those associated with others. The memory enhancement related to the self is known as the self‐reference effect (SRE). However, little is known regarding the neural mechanisms underlying the SRE in a social context modulated by social relationships. In the present fMRI study, we investigated encoding‐related activation of face memories encoded with the self‐referential process in a social context that was manipulated by imagining a person‐to‐person relationship. Healthy young adults participated in the present study. During encoding, participants encoded unfamiliar target faces by imagining a future friendship with themselves (Self), their friends (Friend), or strangers (Other). During retrieval, participants were presented with target and distracter faces one by one, and they judged whether each face had been previously learned. In the behavioral results, target faces encoded in the Self condition were remembered more accurately than those encoded in the Other condition. fMRI results demonstrated that encoding‐related activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was significantly greater in the Self condition than in the Friend or Other conditions. In addition, the generalized psycho‐physiological interaction (gPPI) analysis showed that functional connectivity between activation in the hippocampus and the cortical midline structures (CMSs), including the mPFC and precuneus, was significant in the Self but not in the Other condition. These findings suggest that the SRE in a social context could be involved in the interaction between the CMS regions, which are related to the self‐referential process, and the hippocampus related to the memory process. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4256–4269, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.