Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating the population distribution of usual 24-hour sodium excretion from timed urine void specimens using a statistical approach accounting for correlated measurement errors.

BACKGROUND High US sodium intake and national reduction efforts necessitate developing a feasible and valid monitoring method across the distribution of low-to-high sodium intake. OBJECTIVE We examined a statistical approach using timed urine voids to estimate the population distribution of usual 24-h sodium excretion. METHODS A sample of 407 adults, aged 18-39 y (54% female, 48% black), collected each void in a separate container for 24 h; 133 repeated the procedure 4-11 d later. Four timed voids (morning, afternoon, evening, overnight) were selected from each 24-h collection. We developed gender-specific equations to calibrate total sodium excreted in each of the one-void (e.g., morning) and combined two-void (e.g., morning + afternoon) urines to 24-h sodium excretion. The calibrated sodium excretions were used to estimate the population distribution of usual 24-h sodium excretion. Participants were then randomly assigned to modeling (n = 160) or validation (n = 247) groups to examine the bias in estimated population percentiles. RESULTS Median bias in predicting selected percentiles (5th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 95th) of usual 24-h sodium excretion with one-void urines ranged from -367 to 284 mg (-7.7 to 12.2% of the observed usual excretions) for men and -604 to 486 mg (-14.6 to 23.7%) for women, and with two-void urines from -338 to 263 mg (-6.9 to 10.4%) and -166 to 153 mg (-4.1 to 8.1%), respectively. Four of the 6 two-void urine combinations produced no significant bias in predicting selected percentiles. CONCLUSIONS Our approach to estimate the population usual 24-h sodium excretion, which uses calibrated timed-void sodium to account for day-to-day variation and covariance between measurement errors, produced percentile estimates with relatively low biases across low-to-high sodium excretions. This may provide a low-burden, low-cost alternative to 24-h collections in monitoring population sodium intake among healthy young adults and merits further investigation in other population subgroups.
Treatment with Cefotaxime Affects Expression of Conjugation Associated Proteins and Conjugation Transfer Frequency of an IncI1 Plasmid in Escherichia coli

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the major mechanism responsible for spread of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic treatment has been suggested to promote HGT, either by directly affecting the conjugation process itself or by selecting for conjugations subsequent to DNA transfer. However, recent research suggests that the effect of antibiotic treatment on plasmid conjugation frequencies, and hence the spread of resistance plasmids, may have been overestimated. We addressed the question by quantifying transfer proteins and conjugation frequencies of a blaCTX−M−1 encoding IncI1 resistance plasmid in Escherichia coli MG1655 in the presence and absence of therapeutically relevant concentrations of cefotaxime (CTX). Analysis of the proteome by iTRAQ labeling and liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry revealed that Tra proteins were significantly up-regulated in the presence of CTX. The up-regulation of the transfer machinery was confirmed at the transcriptional level for five selected genes. The CTX treatment did not cause induction of the SOS-response as revealed by absence of significantly regulated SOS associated proteins in the proteome and no significant up-regulation of recA and sfiA genes. The frequency of plasmid conjugation, measured in an antibiotic free environment, increased significantly when the donor was pre-grown in broth containing CTX compared to growth without this drug, regardless of whether blaCTX-M-1 was located on the plasmid or in trans on the chromosome. The results shows that antibiotic treatment can affect expression of a plasmid conjugation machinery and subsequent DNA transfer.
Enhancing differential evolution performance with local search for high dimensional function optimization

In this paper, we proposed Fittest Individual Refinement (FIR), a crossover based local search method for Differential Evolution (DE). The FIR scheme accelerates DE by enhancing its search capability through exploration of the neighborhood of the best solution in successive generations. The proposed memetic version of DE (augmented by FIR) is expected to obtain an acceptable solution with a lower number of evaluations particularly for higher dimensional functions. Using two different implementations DEfirDE and DEfirSPX we showed that proposed FIR increases the convergence velocity of DE for well known benchmark functions as well as improves the robustness of DE against variation of population. Experiments using multimodal landscape generator showed our proposed algorithms consistently outperformed their parent algorithms. A performance comparison with reported results of well known real coded memetic algorithms is also presented.
Greedy, Joint Syntactic-Semantic Parsing with Stack LSTMs

We present a transition-based parser that jointly produces syntactic and semantic dependencies. It learns a representation of the entire algorithm state, using stack long short-term memories. Our greedy inference algorithm has linear time, including feature extraction. On the CoNLL 2008--9 English shared tasks, we obtain the best published parsing performance among models that jointly learn syntax and semantics.
Blind Source Separation: Fundamentals and Recent Advances (A Tutorial Overview Presented at SBrT-2001)

Blind source separation (BSS), i.e., the decoupling of unknown signals that have been mixed in an unknown way, has been a topic of great interest in the signal processing community for the last decade, covering a wide range of applications in such diverse fields as digital communications, pattern recognition, biomedical engineering, and financial data analysis, among others. This course aims at an introduction to the BSS problem via an exposition of well-known and established as well as some more recent approaches to its solution. A unified way is followed in presenting the various results so as to more easily bring out their similarities/differences and emphasize their relative advantages/disadvantages. Only a representative sample of the existing knowledge on BSS will be included in this course. The interested readers are encouraged to consult the list of bibliographical references for more details on this exciting and always active research topic.
Warm-Route versus Cold-Route Interbasin Exchange in the Meridional Overturning Circulation

AbstractThe interbasin exchange of the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) is studied in an idealized domain with two basins connected by a circumpolar channel in the southernmost region. Gnanadesikan’s conceptual model for the upper branch of the MOC is extended to include two basins of different widths connected by a reentrant channel at the southern edge and separated by two continents of different meridional extents. Its analysis illustrates the basic processes of interbasin flow exchange either through the connection at the southern tip of the long continent (cold route) or through the connection at the southern tip of the short continent (warm route). A cold-route exchange occurs when the short continent is poleward of the latitude separating the subpolar and subtropical gyre in the Southern Hemisphere (the zero Ekman pumping line); otherwise, there is warm-route exchange. The predictions of the conceptual model are compared to primitive equation computations in a domain with the same idealized.
Capital structure, corporate governance, and the effect of Sarbanes-Oxley

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act represented a major legislative action designed to increase transparency and accountability in U.S. corporations. Within the context of agency theory and corporate governance, the expectation is that the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley impacted the agency relationship of firms and hence affected the corporate governance structure. With these changes, the question arises as to the capital structure decisions of corporations which have previously been shown to be related to agency measures and corporate governance. It is the objective of this research to examine the capital structure of U.S. firms as they relate to corporate governance measures and to determine the effect, if any, of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Preoperative Inhibition of Cyclooxygenase-1 in the Spinal Cord Reduces Postoperative Pain

Intrathecal administration of cyclooxygenase (COX)-1, but not COX-2, specific inhibitors given on postoperative day 1 has analgesic effects in an incisional model of postoperative pain. We investigated the effects of preoperative administration of intrathecal COX inhibitors in this model. Fifteen minutes before surgery, rats received intrathecally the COX-1 preferring inhibitor, ketorolac, the specific COX-1 inhibitor, SC-560, the COX-2 inhibitor, NS-398, or vehicle. A 1-cm longitudinal incision was then made through skin, fascia, and muscles of the plantar aspect of a left paw in male rats. Withdrawal threshold to von Frey filaments was measured at 2 h, 4 h, and at intervals up to 5 days later. Ketorolac and SC-560 increased withdrawal threshold to mechanical stimulation, but NS-398 had no significant effect. These results suggest that COX-1 plays an important role in spinal cord pain processing and sensitization after surgery and that preoperative intrathecal administration of specific COX-1 inhibitors may be useful to treat postoperative pain.
Cross-reactive antibodies against GM2 and CMV-infected fibroblasts in Guillain–Barré syndrome

Objective: To investigate whether anti-GM2 antibodies in patients with Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS) are induced by molecular mimicry with cytomegalovirus (CMV). Background: Antibodies against ganglioside GM2 are frequently present in the serum from GBS patients with an antecedent infection with CMV. Methods: The authors detected inhibition of anti-GM2 reactivity after incubation of GM2-reactive serum samples with fibroblasts infected with a GBS-associated CMV strain. Control sera consisted of GQ1b-reactive samples, and control antigens included uninfected fibroblasts and fibroblasts that were infected with other herpes viruses. Results: Serum immunoglobulin M reactivity with GM2 was decreased in a dose-dependent manner after incubation with CMV-infected fibroblasts. Incubation of anti-GM2-positive serum samples with uninfected fibroblasts and fibroblasts infected with varicella zoster virus did not inhibit anti-GM2 reactivity, whereas this reactivity was slightly decreased after incubation with herpes simplex virus type 1 in one patient. Antibodies against ganglioside GQ1b did not react with CMV-infected fibroblasts. Conclusions: CMV-infected fibroblasts express gangliosidelike epitopes that recognize specifically anti-GM2 antibodies. These results support the hypothesis that antiganglioside antibodies in CMV-infected GBS patients are induced by molecular mimicry between GM2 and antigens that are induced by a CMV infection.
Ultrastructural characterization and immunolocalization of osteopontin in rat calvarial osteoblast primary cultures

As part of ongoing studies aimed at clarifying the early events of bone matrix deposition and mineralization, we have characterized primary osteoblast cultures using ultrastructural and immunocytochemical methods. Osteogenic cells were isolated by sequential enzymatic digestion of newborn rat (2–4‐day‐old) calvariae and grown for periods of 7 to 28 days on polystyrene, Thermanox plastic, or sputtered titanium. Bone‐like nodules, showing a stratified organization of cells and collagen, were examined by scanning and transmission electron microscopy, and further characterized for mineral by backscattered electron imaging and X‐ray microanalysis. Colloidal gold immunocytochemistry was used to examine the distribution of osteopontin in these nodules. Cells at the surface of the nodules were rounded, while those within the nodules generally appeared more flattened. Both cell types, particularly at early culture intervals, exhibited well‐developed protein synthetic organelles. Collagen fibrils were present between the cell layers and some individual fibrils appeared mineralized. Aggregates of needle‐shaped crystallites were sometimes apposed to the cell surface, frequently within invaginated regions of the cell membrane, while other mineralized masses of various sizes were present within the collagenous scaffolding. The periphery of the mineralized masses was often delimited by an electron‐dense, lamina limitans‐like layer. Focal accumulations and/or a more complete layer of afibrillar, mineralized organic matrix were sometimes observed at the interface between the cells and the surface of the culture dish. Osteopontin was immunodetected over the afibrillar and collagenous mineralized matrix throughout the cultures and, in some cases, labeling was concentrated over the peripheral, electron‐dense material delimiting the mineralized masses. In conclusion, these data indicate that calvaria‐derived osteoblasts produce an extracellular matrix with structural and compositional similarities to bone. Although not a regular observation, the accumulation of osteopontin on the surface of the culture substrate and at the periphery of masses of mineralized matrix may be analogous to what takes place in vivo at naturally occurring bone interfaces. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Sinusoidal interference rejection analysis of an LMS adaptive feedforward controller with a noisy periodic reference

This paper applies a new vector subspace model to determine the non-Wiener solutions of the LMS algorithm when the reference input is an arbitrary noisy periodic signal. The LMS weights are modeled as a deterministic time-varying mean plus a zero-mean fluctuating part. For the mean weight, each harmonic component of the periodic reference is shown to excite only a two-dimensional (2-D) subspace of the N-dimensional tap weight space. The fluctuating part of the weight is due to the reference noise that excites the full N-dimensional space. The power spectrum of the error is computed using the correlation function of the weight fluctuations. The error is shown to be primarily the sum of a white noise and the canceled periodic residual for an independent noise vector model. When the effects of the tapped delay line are incorporated in the model, the noise becomes colored with a spectrum centered about the canceled sinusoidal frequency. This weight model significantly simplifies the understanding of the non-Wiener behavior and can be applied to active noise cancellation problems when filters appear in the cancellation loop.
Compressive sensing with redundant dictionaries and structured measurements

Sparse approximation methods for the recovery of signals from undersampled data when the signal is sparse in an overcomplete dictionary have received much attention recently due to their practical importance. A common assumption is the D-restricted isometry property (D-RIP), which asks that the sampling matrix approximately preserve the norm of all signals sparse in D. While many classes of random matrices satisfy this condition, those with a fast-multiply stemming from subsampled bases require an additional randomization of the column signs, which is not feasible in many practical applications. In this work, we demonstrate that one can subsample certain bases in such a way that the D-RIP will hold without the need for random column signs.
Clinical and Epidemiological Factors Associated with Methicillin Resistance in Community-Onset Invasive Staphylococcus aureus Infections: Prospective Multicenter Cross-Sectional Study in Korea

Successful empirical therapy of Staphylococcus aureus infections requires the ability to predict methicillin resistance. Our aim was to identify predictors of methicillin resistance in community-onset (CO) invasive S. aureus infections. Sixteen hospitals across Korea participated in this study from May to December 2012. We prospectively included cases of S. aureus infection in which S. aureus was isolated from sterile clinical specimens ≤72 hours after hospitalization. Clinical and epidemiological data were gathered and compared in methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) cases. Community-associated (CA) infections were defined as in previous studies. In total, there were 786 cases of community-onset S. aureus infection, 102 (13.0%) of which were CA-MRSA. In addition to known risk factors, exposure to 3rd generation cephalosporins in the past 6 months [odds ratio (OR), 1.922; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.176–3.142] and close contact with chronically ill patients in the past month (OR, 2.647; 95% CI, 1.189–5.891) were independent risk factors for MRSA infection. However, no clinical predictors of CA-MRSA were identified. Methicillin resistance, CO infection, and appropriateness of empirical antibiotics were not significantly related to 30-day mortality. MRSA infection should be suspected in patients recently exposed to 3rd generation cephalosporins or chronically-ill patients. There were no reliable predictors of CA-MRSA infection, and mortality was not affected by methicillin resistance.
Billion-Scale Similarity Search with GPUs

Similarity search finds application in database systems handling complex data such as images or videos, which are typically represented by high-dimensional features and require specific indexing structures. This paper tackles the problem of better utilizing GPUs for this task. While GPUs excel at data parallel tasks such as distance computation, prior approaches in this domain are bottlenecked by algorithms that expose less parallelism, such as <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>k</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="johnson-ieq1-2921572.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-min selection, or make poor use of the memory hierarchy. We propose a novel design for <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>k</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="johnson-ieq2-2921572.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-selection. We apply it in different similarity search scenarios, by optimizing brute-force, approximate and compressed-domain search based on product quantization. In all these setups, we outperform the state of the art by large margins. Our implementation operates at up to 55 percent of theoretical peak performance, enabling a nearest neighbor implementation that is 8.5 × faster than prior GPU state of the art. It enables the construction of a high accuracy <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>k</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="johnson-ieq3-2921572.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-NN graph on 95 million images from the <sc>Yfcc100M</sc> dataset in 35 minutes, and of a graph connecting 1 billion vectors in less than 12 hours on 4 Maxwell Titan X GPUs. We have open-sourced our approach for the sake of comparison and reproducibility.
On Acoustic Diversification Front-End for Spoken Language Identification

The parallel phone recognition followed by language model (PPRLM) architecture represents one of the state-of-the-art spoken language identification systems. A PPRLM system comprises multiple parallel subsystems, where each subsystem employs a phone recognizer with a different phone set for a particular language. The phone recognizer extracts phonotactic attributes from the speech input to characterize a language. The multiple parallel subsystems are devised to capture the phonetic diversification available in the speech input. Alternatively, this paper investigates a new approach for building a PPRLM system that aims at improving the acoustic diversification among its parallel subsystems by using multiple acoustic models. These acoustic models are trained on the same speech data with the same phone set but using different model structures and training paradigms. We examine the use of various structured precision (inverse covariance) matrix modeling techniques as well as the maximum likelihood and maximum mutual information training paradigms to produce complementary acoustic models. The results show that acoustic diversification, which requires only one set of phonetically transcribed speech data, yields similar performance improvements compared to phonetic diversification. In addition, further improvements were obtained by combining both diversification factors. The best performing system reported in this paper combined phonetic and acoustic diversifications to achieve EERs of 4.71% and 8.61% on the 2003 and 2005 NIST LRE sets, respectively, compared to 5.77% and 9.94% using phonetic diversification alone.
How Salient is Scene Text?

Computational models of visual attention use image features to identify salient locations in an image that are likely to attract human attention. Attention models have been quite effectively used for various object detection tasks. However, their use for scene text detection is under-investigated. As a general observation, scene text often conveys important information and is usually prominent or salient in the scene itself. In this paper, we evaluate four state-of-the-art attention models for their response to scene text. Initial results indicate that saliency maps produced by these attention models can be used for aiding scene text detection algorithms by suppressing non-text regions.
Harnessing the interface for domain learning

Making an interface less direct changes how the user learns about the particular domain they are acting upon. Different interfaces cause the user to interact in different ways. This affects how they build up information about the domain they are working in. The counterintuitive finding is that less easy to use interfaces can be beneficial to the domain learning process. Less direct interfaces cause the user to build a more verbalisable and transferable body of knowledge about the domain. The research outlined here is examining this learning process to draw conclusions about where the effect can be most usefully employed.
Annoyance and Worry in a Petrochemical Industrial Area—Prevalence, Time Trends and Risk Indicators

In 1992, 1998, and 2006, questionnaires were sent to stratified samples of residents aged 18–75 years living near petrochemical industries (n = 600–800 people on each occasion) and in a control area (n = 200–1,000). The aims were to estimate the long-term prevalence and change over time of annoyance caused by industrial odour, industrial noise, and worries about possible health effects, and to identify risk indicators. In 2006, 20% were annoyed by industrial odour, 27% by industrial noise (1–4% in the control area), and 40–50% were worried about health effects or industrial accidents (10–20% in the control area). Multiple logistic regression analyses revealed significantly lower prevalence of odour annoyance in 1998 and 2006 than in 1992, while industrial noise annoyance increased significantly over time. The prevalence of worry remained constant. Risk of odour annoyance increased with female sex, worry of health effects, annoyance by motor vehicle exhausts and industrial noise. Industrial noise annoyance was associated with traffic noise annoyance and worry of health effects of traffic. Health-risk worry due to industrial air pollution was associated with female sex, having children, annoyance due to dust/soot in the air, and worry of traffic air pollution.