Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Review of Canid Management in Australia for the protection of livestock and wildlife -- potential application to Coyote Management

Australia has two introduced canid species — European red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and wild dogs (which include dingoes, Canis lupus dingo, feral domestic dogs C. l. familiaris and their hybrids). Foxes were introduced into mainland Australia in the 1860s and quickly spread (Rolls, 1984; Jarman 1986). This dispersal and establishment is believed linked with the introduction and spread of European wild rabbits (Oryctolagus cunniculus) (Saunders et al., 1995). Except in Tasmania, where previous introductions appear to have been unsuccessful, and in northern Australia, where the climate is unsuitable and rabbits are essentially absent, foxes have become established throughout in virtually all habitats including urban and residential environments (Saunders et al., 1995). Within decades of their introduction, legislation was enacted proclaiming them as pests to agriculture, and more recently, as a key threatening process to endangered small mammals (NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service, 2001). This status has been enshrined in subsequent legislation and strengthened by virtue of foxes being an introduced pest species rather than a native animal. Dingoes are thought to have arrived in Australia from Southeast Asia about 5000 years before present (Corbett, 1995a). A number of reports have reviewed the origins, ecological significance of dingos, and their morphological and genetic relationship to domestic dogs. Interested readers are referred to Newsome et al. (1980) as one example. Like foxes they are also found in virtually every habitat across the Australian continent and are absent from Tasmania (Fleming et al., 2001). However, because of their longer association with Australia, they are often regarded as a “native” species (Davis, 2001). Wild domestic dogs have been present since the first European settlement in 1788 (Fleming et al., 2001) and hybridization with dingoes has been occurring ever since (Corbett, 1995a, 2001). Despite the native status of dingoes, all wild dogs and foxes are regarded and managed as pests on agricultural lands, i.e. outside of conservation areas. Pure dingoes alone are afforded legislative protection in areas set aside for conservation (Fleming et al., 2001; Davis and Leys, 2001) yet feral dogs and hybrids effectively enjoy the same legislative protection in conservation areas as dingoes, because they cannot be managed separately.
Understanding Persistence to Avoid Underestimation of Collective Flood Risk

The assessment of collective risk for flood risk management requires a better understanding of the space-time characteristics of flood magnitude and occurrence. In particular, classic formulation of collective risk implies hypotheses concerning the independence of intensity and number of events over fixed time windows that are unlikely to be tenable in real-world hydroclimatic processes exhibiting persistence. In this study, we investigate the links between the serial correlation properties of 473 daily stream flow time series across the major river basins in Europe, and the characteristics of over-threshold events which are used as proxies for the estimation of collective risk. The aim is to understand if some key features of the daily stream flow data can be used to infer properties of extreme events making a more efficient and effective use of the available data. Using benchmark theoretical processes such as Hurst-Kolmogorov (HK), generalized HK (gHK), autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) models, and Fourier surrogate data preserving second order linear moments, our findings confirm and expand some results previously reported in the literature, namely: (1) the interplay between short range dependence (SRD) and long range dependence (LRD) can explain the majority of the serial dependence structure of deseasonalized data, but losing information on nonlinear dynamics; (2) the standardized return intervals between over-threshold values exhibit a sub-exponential Weibull-like distribution, implying a higher frequency of return intervals longer than expected under independence, and expected return intervals depending on the previous return intervals; this results in a tendency to observe short (long) inter-arrival times after short (long) inter-arrival times; (3) as the average intensity and the number of events over one-year time windows are not independent, years with larger events are also the more active in terms of number of events; and (4) persistence influences the distribution of the collective risk producing a spike of probability at zero, which describes the probability of years with no events, and a heavier upper tail, suggesting a probability of more extreme annual losses higher than expected under independence. These results provide new insights into the clustering of stream flow extremes, paving the way for more reliable simulation procedures of flood event sets to be used in flood risk management strategies.
Safety, Effectiveness and Acceptability of the PrePex Device for Adult Male Circumcision in Kenya

Objective To assess the safety, effectiveness and acceptability of the PrePex device for adult medical male circumcision (MMC) in routine service delivery in Kenya. Methods We enrolled 427 men ages 18–49 at one fixed and two outreach clinics. Procedures were performed by trained clinical officers and nurses. The first 50 enrollees were scheduled for six follow-up visits, and remaining men were followed at Days 7 and 42. We recorded adverse events (AEs) and time to complete healing, and interviewed men about acceptability and pain. Results Placement and removal procedures each averaged between 3 and 4 minutes. Self-reported pain was minimal during placement but was fleetingly intense during removal. The rate of moderate/severe AEs was 5.9% overall (95% confidence interval [CI] 3.8%–8.5%), all of which resolved without sequelae. AEs included 5 device displacements, 2 spontaneous foreskin detachments, and 9 cases of insufficient foreskin removal. Surgical completion of MMC was required for 9 men (2.1%). Among the closely monitored first 50 participants, the probability of complete healing by Day 42 was 0.44 (95% CI 0.30–0.58), and 0.90 by Day 56. A large majority of men was favorable about their MMC procedure and would recommend PrePex to friends and family. Conclusions The PrePex device was effective for MMC in Kenya, and well-accepted. The AE rate was higher than reported for surgical procedures there, or in previous PrePex studies. Healing time is longer than following surgical circumcision. Provider experience and clearer counseling on post-placement and post-removal care should lead to lower AE rates. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01711411
A Teacher-Student Framework for Zero-Resource Neural Machine Translation

While end-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) has made remarkable progress recently, it still suffers from the data scarcity problem for low-resource language pairs and domains. In this paper, we propose a method for zero-resource NMT by assuming that parallel sentences have close probabilities of generating a sentence in a third language. Based on the assumption, our method is able to train a source-to-target NMT model (“student”) without parallel corpora available guided by an existing pivot-to-target NMT model (“teacher”) on a source-pivot parallel corpus. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves over a baseline pivot-based model by +3.0 BLEU points across various language pairs.
Sorafenib for the treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma with extrahepatic metastasis: a prospective multicenter cohort study

Sorafenib, an oral multikinase inhibitor, is approved for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) treatment. However, its therapeutic effect in advanced HCC patients with extrahepatic metastasis remains uncertain. This study aimed to prospectively assess the efficacy, safety, and survival risk factors and evaluate the prognostic impact of sorafenib treatment in advanced HCC patients with or without extrahepatic metastasis. Between May 2009 and March 2014, 312 consecutive advanced HCC patients who received sorafenib were enrolled in this study. We evaluated their characteristics and compared the clinical outcomes of those with and without extrahepatic metastasis. Of the enrolled patients, 245 (81%) received sorafenib treatment for more than 1 month, with a median duration of 3.6 months. Eighteen patients demonstrated partial response to sorafenib therapy, 127 had stable disease, and 134 had progressive disease at the first radiologic assessment. The median survival time (MST) and progression‐free survival (PFS) were 10.3 and 3.6 months, respectively. Multivariate analysis identified gender, Child‐Pugh class, baseline serum des‐gamma‐carboxy prothrombin level, and treatment duration as independent risk factors for survival. Extrahepatic metastasis was detected in 178 patients. However, the MST, PFS, and therapeutic effect were comparable between patients with and without extrahepatic metastasis. The independent risk factors for decreased overall survival in patients with extrahepatic metastasis were similar to those affecting all patients. Our results indicated that sorafenib could be administered for hepatic reserve and as long‐term treatment for advanced HCC patients regardless of their extrahepatic metastasis status.
Using Two-Dimensional Markov Models and the Effective-Capacity Approach for Cross-Layer Design in AMC/ARQ-Based Wireless Networks

This paper proposes a novel framework for the cross-layer analysis and design of wireless networks combining adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) at the physical layer with an automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol at the data-link layer. Most previous works rely on first-order amplitude-based finite-state Markov chains (AFSMCs) to model the physical layer. It is shown that these models present several deficiencies that could compromise the design of higher layer protocols. Thus, a physical-layer first-order 2-D Markov model using both the amplitude and the rate of change of the fading envelope is presented. Based on this multidimensional physical-layer Markov model, the quality-of-service (QoS) performance at the data-link layer is investigated through the use of two different approaches. The first one relies on an analytical framework based on a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) that jointly describes the statistical behavior of the arrival process, the queueing system, and the physical layer. The second one is based on the effective-bandwidth and effective-capacity theories. Both the DTMC-based and the effective-bandwidth/capacity-based approaches are analyzed and compared in combination with our proposed physical-layer first-order 2-D Markov model in a cross-layer design aiming to satisfy the required average packet loss probability constraint by maximizing the average throughput of the system. Numerical results show that our proposed framework represents a significant improvement over previous models.
[A study on the role of granulocytes in carcinoma-bearing hosts--G/L ratio as a new host indicator].

It has frequently been observed that the proportion of granulocytes in peripheral blood of cancer patients increases as their cancer progresses, leading some to conjecture that this phenomenon is correlated with the patient's clinical condition. To investigate this possible relationship, the authors conducted the investigations into the number of granulocytes present in cancer patients. First, in experiments on peripheral blood granulocytes in healthy subjects, we examined surface carbohydrate antigens using monoclonal antibodies, and the effect exerted on the self's NK activity by the addition of granulocytes. As a result, it became clear that granulocytes, unlike lymphocytes, have many antigens in common with cancer cells, and that the self's NK activity is suppressed as more and more granulocytes are added. We next investigated whether the patient's clinical condition can be ascertained by analyzing the change over time of the G/L ratio, i.e. the ratio between the numbers of granulocytes and of lymphocytes present in peripheral blood. In the control group the G/L ratio was 1.4 +/- 0.1. For patients with advanced cases of stomach cancer scheduled to undergo surgery, G/L ratios were measured before the operation, in the stable period for two months after the operation, and at the time of readmission to the hospital because of relapse. The pre-surgery patients in stage I to III shared the same value as the healthy control group, but those in stage IV had a significantly higher ratio. As for the relationship between G/L ratio and clinical condition, stage III and IV patients, whose progress we were able to follow for only a short time, showed a decline in the ratio after surgery. When the patients relapsed, however, their G/L ratio rose again. Since this fluctuation in the ratio reflects well the host's clinical status, the G/L ratio can be used as an indicator during treatment. It also proved useful in cases in which no tumor marker exists.
Modeling NERFs for speaker recognition

We introduce a new type of feature to capture long-range patterns associated with individual speakers or with speaking styles. NERFs, or Nonuniform Extraction Region Features, are defined based on regions of speech that are delimited by various automatically extractable events of interest. There is a wide unexplored space of potentially useful NERFs, but to use them successfully, at least two important challenges must be addressed: (1) methods for coping with inherently missing features, and (2) methods for feature selection from large sets of potentially correlated NERFs. We address the issue of missing features in this paper. We propose three methods for modeling NERFs that cope with missing features. We show that on the 2003 NIST extended-data speaker recognition evaluation task, a NERF system yields an EER of 11.6% alone, and improves the MFCC baseline performance by roughly 15% relative.
The Quantum Schur Transform: I. Efficient Qudit Circuits

We present an efficient family of quantum circuits for a fundamental primitive in quantum information theory, the Schur transform. The Schur transform on n d-dimensional quantum systems is a transform between a standard computational basis to a labelling related to the representation theory of the symmetric and unitary groups. If we desire to implement the Schur transform to an accuracy of epsilon, then our circuit construction uses a number of gates which is polynomial in n, d and log(1/epsilon). The important insights we use to perform this construction are the selection of the appropriate subgroup adapted basis and the Wigner-Eckart theorem. Our efficient circuit construction renders numerous protocols in quantum information theory computationally tractable and is an important new efficient quantum circuit family which goes significantly beyond the standard paradigm of the quantum Fourier transform.
Afferent nerve sensitivity is decreased by an iNOS‐dependent mechanism during indomethacin‐induced inflammation in the murine jejunum in vitro

Abstract Evidence exists that visceral afferent sensitivity is subject to regulatory mechanisms. We hypothesized that afferent sensitivity is decreased in the small intestine during intestinal inflammation by an inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS)‐dependent mechanism. C57BL/6 mice were injected twice with vehicle or 60 mg kg−1 indomethacin subcutaneously to induce intestinal inflammation. Afferent sensitivity was recorded on day 3 from a 2‐cm segment of jejunum in vitro by extracellular multi‐unit afferent recordings from the mesenteric nerve bundle. In subgroups (n = 6), iNOS was inhibited selectively by L‐N6‐(1‐iminoethyl)‐lysine (L‐NIL) given either chronically from day 1–3 (3 mg kg−1 twice daily i.p.) or acutely into the organ bath (30 μmol L−1). The indomethacin‐induced increase of macroscopic and microscopic scores of intestinal inflammation (both P < 0.05) were unchanged after pretreatment with L‐NIL. Peak afferent firing following bradykinin (0.5 μmol L−1) was 55 ± 8 impulse s−1 during inflammation vs 97 ± 7 impulse s−1 in controls (P < 0.05). Normal firing rate was preserved following L‐NIL pretreatment (112 ± 16 impulse s−1) or acute administration of L‐NIL (108 ± 14 impulse s−1). A similar L‐NIL dependent reduction was observed for 5‐HT (250 μmol L−1) and mechanical ramp distension from 20 to 60 cmH2O (both P < 0.05). Intraluminal pressure peaks were decreased to 0.66 ± 0.1 cmH2O during inflammation compared to 2.51 ± 0.3 in controls (P < 0.01). Afferent sensitivity is decreased by an iNOS‐dependent mechanism during intestinal inflammation which appears to be independent of the inflammatory response. This suggests that iNOS‐dependent nitric oxide production alters afferent sensitivity during inflammation by interfering with signal transduction to afferent nerves rather than by attenuating intestinal inflammation.
International Conference on Competitive Manufacturing Cooperation of Industrial Robots with Indoor-GPS

In recent years, the interest in cooperating robots has grown substantially as possible applications for these manipulators are explored. Research in this field tends to focus on the development of specialised controllers. In this paper, however, the problem of achieving absolute accuracy in the positioning and movement of cooperating robots is addressed. The proposed solution to achieve absolute positioning is to use the Indoor-GPS technology as an external position measurement system allowing external control of the robot motions. With the project in its preliminary stages, this paper introduces the technologies involved and presents the current system. The introductory work that has been done and future outlook are given.
Scribe Impacts on Provider Experience, Operations, and Teaching in an Academic Emergency Medicine Practice

Introduction Physicians dedicate substantial time to documentation. Scribes are sometimes used to improve efficiency by performing documentation tasks, although their impacts have not been prospectively evaluated. Our objective was to assess a scribe program’s impact on emergency department (ED) throughput, physician time utilization, and job satisfaction in a large academic emergency medicine practice. Methods We evaluated the intervention using pre- and post-intervention surveys and administrative data. All site physicians were included. Pre- and post-intervention data were collected in four-month periods one year apart. Primary outcomes included changes in monthly average ED length of stay (LOS), provider-specific average relative value units (RVUs) per hour (raw and normalized to volume), self-reported estimates of time spent teaching, self-reported estimates of time spent documenting, and job satisfaction. We analyzed data using descriptive statistics and appropriate tests for paired pre-post differences in continuous, categorical, and ranked variables. Results Pre- and post-survey response rates were 76.1% and 69.0%, respectively. Most responded positively to the intervention, although 9.5% reported negative impressions. There was a 36% reduction (25%–50%; p<0.01) in time spent documenting and a 30% increase (11%–46%, p<0.01) in time spent in direct patient contact. No statistically significant changes were seen in job satisfaction or perception of time spent teaching. ED volume increased by 88 patients per day (32–146, p=0.04) pre- to post- and LOS was unchanged; rates of patients leaving against medical advice dropped, and rates of patients leaving without being seen increased. RVUs per hour increased 5.5% and per patient 5.3%; both were statistically significant. No statistically significant changes were seen in patients seen per hour. There was moderate correlation between changes in ED volume and changes in productivity metrics. Conclusion Scribes were well received in our practice. Documentation time was substantially reduced and redirected primarily to patient care. Despite an ED volume increase, LOS was maintained, with fewer patients leaving against medical advice but more leaving without being seen. RVUs per hour and per patient both increased.
Expression of aberrantly spliced oncogenic ikaros isoforms in childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

PURPOSE We sought to determine if molecular abnormalities involving the Ikaros gene could contribute to the development of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in children. PATIENTS AND METHODS We studied Ikaros gene expression in normal human bone marrow, normal thymocytes, normal fetal liver-derived immature lymphocyte precursor cell lines, eight different ALL cell lines, and leukemic cells from 69 children with ALL (T-lineage ALL, n = 18; B-lineage ALL, n = 51). Expression of Ikaros protein and its subcellular localization were examined by immunoblotting and confocal laser-scanning microscopy, respectively. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and nucleotide sequencing were used to identify the specific Ikaros isoforms expressed in these cells. Genomic sequencing of splice junction regions of the Ikaros gene was performed in search for mutations. RESULTS In each of the ALL cases, we found high-level expression of a non-DNA-binding or aberrant DNA-binding isoform of Ikaros with abnormal subcellular compartmentalization patterns. In contrast, only wild-type Ik-1 and Ik-2 isoforms with normal subcellular localization were found in normal bone marrow cells and thymus-derived or fetal liver-derived normal lymphocyte precursors. In leukemic cells expressing the aberrant Ikaros coding sequences with the 30-base-pair deletion, genomic sequence analysis of the intron-exon junctions between exons 6 and 7 yielded the wild-type sequence. We identified a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) affecting the third base of the triplet codon for a proline (CCC or CCA) in the highly conserved bipartite activation region (viz, A or C at position 1002 numbering from the translation start site of Ik-1) within our Ikaros clones. Bi-allelic expression of truncated and/or non-DNA-binding isoforms along with wild-type isoforms was observed in leukemic cells, which implicates trans-acting factor(s) affecting splice site recognition. CONCLUSION Our findings link specific molecular defects involving the Ikaros gene to childhood ALL. Posttranscriptional regulation of alternative splicing of Ikaros RNA seems to be defective in leukemic lymphocyte precursors from most children with ALL. Consequently, leukemic cells from ALL patients, in contrast to normal lymphocyte precursors, express high levels of non-DNA-binding Ikaros isoforms that are reminiscent of the non-DNA-binding Ikaros isoforms that lead to lymphoblastic leukemia in mice.
Secure wireless powered relaying networks: Energy harvesting policies and performance analysis

In this paper, we investigate the problem of secure communication for a scenario, which consists of one pair of source‐destination nodes and one untrusted relay. The source communicates with the destination via the help of energy harvesting–aware untrusted relay, which acts as the helper to forward the source information to the destination; however, the relay also acts as the unintended user to eavesdrop the source information. To keep the source information confidential from untrusted relay, the destination‐assisted jamming technique is deployed. We evaluate the impact of energy harvesting protocols on such a secure communication scenario through the proposed energy transfer protocols, namely, source‐based energy harvesting protocol and maximum energy harvesting protocol. To evaluate the secrecy performance of these proposed schemes, we derive analytical expressions for two important performance metrics including intercept probability and strictly positive secrecy capacity. The numerical analysis reveals the different trade‐off between secure performance and relevant system parameters (i.e., power splitting ratio, time switching ratio, energy conversion efficiency, transmit signal‐to‐noise ratio, and relay location). Simulation results are also provided to demonstrate the accuracy of the developed analytical expression.