Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces

This paper constructs a new data set of repeated sales of artworks and estimates an annual index of art prices for the period 1875-2000. Contrary to earlier studies, we find art outperforms fixed income securities as an investment, though it significantly under-performs stocks in the US. Art is also found to have lower volatility and lower correlation with other assets, making it more attractive for portfolio diversification than discovered in earlier research. There is strong evidence of underperformance of masterpieces, meaning expensive paintings tend to underperform the art market index. The evidence is mixed on whether the "law of one price" holds in the New York auction market.
The Effect of Cement Augmentation on the Load Transfer in an Osteoporotic Functional Spinal Unit: Finite-Element Analysis

Study Design. The effect of cement augmentation on an osteoporotic lumbar functional spinal unit was investigated using finite-element analysis. Objective. To evaluate the influence of cement augmentation on load transfer, stresses, and strains. Summary of Background Data. Osteoporosis is the most frequent skeletal disease of the elderly, leading to weakness of the bony structures. Cement injection into vertebral bodies has been used to treat osteoporotic compression fractures of the spine. The clinical results are encouraging. Experimental biomechanical studies showed significant increases in stiffness and strength of treated bodies. However, little is known about the consequences for the adjacent, nontreated levels. Methods. Three-dimensional finite-element models of L2–L3 were developed and the material properties adapted to simulate osteoporosis. The influence of augmentation level as well as uni- and bipedicular filling with polymethylmethacrylate were investigated. Compression, flexion, and lateral bending were simulated. Results. Augmentation increased the pressure in the nucleus pulposus and the deflection of the adjacent endplate. The stresses and strains in the vertebrae next to an augmentation were increased, and their distribution was changed. Larger areas were subjected to higher stresses and strains. The treatment clearly altered the load transfer. Changes to the overall stress and strain distribution were less pronounced for unipedicular augmentation. Conclusions. Cement augmentation restores the strength of treated vertebrae, but leads to increased endplate bulge and an altered load transfer in adjacent vertebrae. This supports the hypothesis that rigid cement augmentation may facilitate the subsequent collapse of adjacent vertebrae. Further study is required to determine the optimal reinforcement material and filling volume to minimize this effect.
Top-K Influential Nodes in Social Networks: A Game Perspective

Influence maximization, the fundamental of viral marketing, aims to find top-$K$ seed nodes maximizing influence spread under certain spreading models. In this paper, we study influence maximization from a game perspective. We propose a Coordination Game model, in which every individuals make their decisions based on the benefit of coordination with their network neighbors, to study information propagation. Our model serves as the generalization of some existing models, such as Majority Vote model and Linear Threshold model. Under the generalized model, we study the hardness of influence maximization and the approximation guarantee of the greedy algorithm. We also combine several strategies to accelerate the algorithm. Experimental results show that after the acceleration, our algorithm significantly outperforms other heuristics, and it is three orders of magnitude faster than the original greedy method.
Bioaccessible Antioxidants in Milk Fermented by Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum Strains

Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum is among the dominant species of the human gastrointestinal microbiota and could thus have potential as probiotics. New targets such as antioxidant properties have interest for beneficial effects on health. The objective of this study was to evaluate the bioaccessibility of antioxidants in milk fermented by selected B. longum subsp. longum strains during in vitro dynamic digestion. The antioxidant capacity of cell extracts from 38 strains, of which 32 belong to B. longum subsp. longum, was evaluated with the ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) method. On the basis of screening and gene sequence typing by multilocus locus sequence analysis (MLSA), five strains were chosen for fermenting reconstituted skim milk. Antioxidant capacity varied among the strains tested (P = 0.0009). Two strains of B. longum subsp. longum (CUETM 172 and 171) showed significantly higher ORAC values than the other bifidobacteria strains. However, there does not appear to be a relationship between gene sequence types and antioxidant capacity. The milk fermented by each of the five strains selected (CUETM 268, 172, 245, 247, or PRO 16-10) did not have higher initial ORAC values compared to the nonfermented milk samples. However, higher bioaccessibility of antioxidants in fermented milk (175–358%) was observed during digestion.
Recognition memory for tactile sequences

In three experiments participants were required to compare the similarity in item order for two temporally separated sequences of tactile stimuli presented to the fingers of the hand. Between-sequence articulatory suppression but not tactile interference impaired recognition accuracy (Experiment 1), and the null effect of tactile interference was not due to the second tactile sequence overwriting the sensory record of the first sequence (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 showed that compared to a condition where the second sequence was presented in the tactile modality only, recognition was enhanced when the second sequence was seen presented either to the hand or on a diagrammatic representation of a hand. A final experiment showed that the effects of Experiment 1 were replicated when the underside of the forearm was used for stimulus presentation, suggesting that the data are not idiosyncratic to the first method of presentation. The pattern of results suggests memory for a sequence of tactile stimuli involves the deployment of strategies utilising a combination of verbal rehearsal and visuo-spatial recoding rather than relying solely on the retention of sensory traces. This is taken to reflect limitations in both the capacity and duration of tactile sensory memory.
Obesity and Risk of Adverse Outcomes Associated With Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery

Background—Obesity is frequently cited as a risk factor for adverse outcomes of major surgery. The results of prior studies of the relationship between obesity and risk of adverse outcomes of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) have been contradictory because of insufficient power to assess relatively infrequent outcomes or data to adjust for confounding factors. Methods and Results—Data on patient age, sex, height, weight, medical history, current clinical status, and treatment factors were assessed prospectively among 11 101 consecutive patients undergoing CABG. Body mass index (BMI) was used as the measure of obesity and was categorized as nonobese (1st to 74th percentiles), obese (75th to 94th percentiles), or severely obese (95th to 100th percentiles). Adverse outcomes occurring in-hospital, including mortality, intraoperative/postoperative cerebrovascular accident (CVA), postoperative bleeding, and sternal wound infection, were defined prospectively. Associations between obesity and postoperative.
Inferring Fine-grained Control Flow Inside SGX Enclaves with Branch Shadowing

Intel has introduced a hardware-based trusted execution environment, Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), that provides a secure, isolated execution environment, or enclave, for a user program without trusting any underlying software (e.g., an operating system) or firmware. Researchers have demonstrated that SGX is vulnerable to a page-fault-based attack. However, the attack only reveals page-level memory accesses within an enclave. In this paper, we explore a new, yet critical, side-channel attack, branch shadowing, that reveals fine-grained control flows (branch granularity) in an enclave. The root cause of this attack is that SGX does not clear branch history when switching from enclave to nonenclave mode, leaving fine-grained traces for the outside world to observe, which gives rise to a branch-prediction side channel. However, exploiting this channel in practice is challenging because 1) measuring branch execution time is too noisy for distinguishing fine-grained controlflow changes and 2) pausing an enclave right after it has executed the code block we target requires sophisticated control. To overcome these challenges, we develop two novel exploitation techniques: 1) a last branch record (LBR)-based history-inferring technique and 2) an advanced programmable interrupt controller (APIC)-based technique to control the execution of an enclave in a finegrained manner. An evaluation against RSA shows that our attack infers each private key bit with 99.8% accuracy. Finally, we thoroughly study the feasibility of hardware-based solutions (i.e., branch history flushing) and propose a software-based approach that mitigates the attack.
Point Sources of GeV Gamma Rays

A catalog of γ-ray sources based on photons with energies greater than 1 GeV has been developed from observations taken by the EGRET instrument of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The data are taken from the 4.5 yr of observation available in the public data archives. We emphasize sources that are detected using the entire database, without regard to any possible transient or variable behavior. Ten of the 57 sources reported here have not previously been reported in the catalogs developed using photons above 100 MeV in energy. Twenty-seven sources have identifications with objects seen at other wavelengths: the Large Magellanic Cloud, five pulsars, and 21 blazars. The remaining 30 sources are classified as unidentified; however, seven may be associated with Galactic supernova remnants and one source may be a Galactic X-ray binary (LSI 61 303). The 30 unidentified sources are distributed nearly uniformly along the Galactic plane and are symmetric about it. Only one of the unidentified sources has a Galactic latitude in excess of 30°, whereas, if the sources were distributed uniformly, ~12 would be expected on the basis of the combined EGRET exposure. A scatter plot of the flux from the unidentified sources versus Galactic latitude reveals two rather distinct categories of source: “bright” sources with fluxes greater than or equal to 4.0 × 10-8 photons cm-2 s-1 and “dim” sources with fluxes of less than 4.0 × 10-8 photons cm-2 s-1. The absence of high-latitude bright sources is striking. The bright unidentified sources have an average Galactic latitude of 2. °7, which is consistent with a Population I distribution at distances of 1-5 kpc. The dim unidentified sources have a broader latitude distribution with an average |b| = 13. °8, indicating that if they are at the same average distance from the Galactic plane as the bright sources, they are paradoxically approximately 5 times closer than the bright objects on average and therefore roughly 2 orders of magnitude less luminous.
Differential gene expression in pristane-induced arthritis susceptible DA versus resistant E 3 rats

Arthritis susceptibility genes were sought by analysis of differential gene expression between pristane-induced arthritis (PIA)-susceptible DA rats and PIA-resistant E3 rats. Inguinal lymph nodes of naïve animals and animals 8 days after pristane injection were analyzed for differential gene expression. mRNA expression was investigated by microarray and real-time PCR, and protein expression was analyzed by flow cytometry or ELISA. Twelve genes were significantly differentially expressed when analyzed by at least two independent methods, and an additional five genes showed a strong a tendency toward differential expression. In naïve DA rats IgE, the bone marrow stromal cell antigen 1 (Bst1) and the MHC class II β-chain (MhcII) were expressed at a higher level, and the immunoglobulin kappa chain (Igκ) was expressed at a lower level. In pristane-treated DA rats the MHC class II β-chain, gelatinase B (Mmp9) and the protein tyrosine phosphatase CL100 (Ptpn16) were expressed at a higher level, whereas immunoglobulins, the CD28 molecule (Cd28), the mast cell specific protease 1 (Mcpt1), the carboxylesterase precursor (Ces2), K-cadherin (Cdh6), cyclin G1 (Ccng1), DNA polymerase IV (Primase) and the tumour associated glycoprotein E4 (Tage) were expressed at a lower level. Finally, the differentially expressed mRNA was confirmed with protein expression for some of the genes. In conclusion, the results show that animal models are well suited for reproducible microarray analysis of candidate genes for arthritis. All genes have functions that are potentially important for arthritis, and nine of the genes are located within genomic regions previously associated with autoimmune disease.
The Asymmetric Business Cycle

Abstract The business cycle is a fundamental yet elusive concept in macroeconomics. In this paper, we consider the problem of measuring the business cycle. First, we argue for the output-gap view that the business cycle corresponds to transitory deviations in economic activity away from a permanent, or trend, level. Then we investigate the extent to which a general model-based approach to estimating trend and cycle for the U.S. economy leads to measures of the business cycle that reflect models versus the data. We find empirical support for a nonlinear time series model that produces a business cycle measure with an asymmetric shape across NBER expansion and recession phases. Specifically, this business cycle measure suggests that recessions are periods of relatively large and negative transitory fluctuations in output. However, several close competitors to the nonlinear model produce business cycle measures of widely differing shapes and magnitudes. Given this model-based uncertainty, we construct a model-averaged measure of the business cycle. This measure also displays an asymmetric shape and is closely related to other measures of economic slack such as the unemployment rate and capacity utilization.
Cytokines Associated With Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia or Death in Extremely Low Birth Weight Infants

OBJECTIVE. The goal was to develop multivariate logistic regression models for the outcome of bronchopulmonary dysplasia and/or death at postmenstrual age of 36 weeks by using clinical and cytokine data from the first 28 days. METHODS. For 1067 extremely low birth weight infants in the Neonatal Research Network of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, levels of 25 cytokines were measured in blood collected within 4 hours after birth and on days 3, 7, 14, and 21. Stepwise regression analyses using peak levels of the 25 cytokines and 15 clinical variables identified variables associated with bronchopulmonary dysplasia/death. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed for bronchopulmonary dysplasia/death by using variables selected through stepwise regression. Similar analyses were performed by using average cytokine values from days 0 to 21, days 0 to 3, and days 14 to 21. RESULTS. Of 1062 infants with available data, 606 infants developed bronchopulmonary dysplasia or died. On the basis of results from all models combined, bronchopulmonary dysplasia/death was associated with higher concentrations of interleukin 1β, 6, 8, and 10 and interferon γ and lower concentrations of interleukin 17, regulated on activation, normal T cell expressed and secreted, and tumor necrosis factor β. Compared with models with only clinical variables, the addition of cytokine data improved predictive ability by a statistically significant but clinically modest magnitude. CONCLUSIONS. The overall cytokine pattern suggests that bronchopulmonary dysplasia/death may be associated with impairment in the transition from the innate immune response mediated by neutrophils to the adaptive immune response mediated by T lymphocytes.
The Influence of Episode Severity on Caregiver Recall, Care-seeking, and Treatment of Diarrhea among Children 2–59 Months of Age in Bihar, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh, India

Increased diarrheal episode severity has been linked to better 2-week recall and improved care-seeking and treatment among caregivers of children under five. Using cross-sectional data from three Indian states, we sought to assess the relationship between episode severity and the recall, care-seeking, and treatment of childhood diarrhea. Recall error was higher for episodes with onset 8–14 days (31.2%) versus 1–7 days (4.8%) before the survey, and logistic regression analysis showed a trend toward increased severity of less recent compared with more recent episodes. This finding indicates that data collection with 2-week recall underestimates diarrhea prevalence while overestimating the proportion of severe episodes. There was a strong correlation between care-seeking and dehydration, fever, vomiting, and increased stool frequency and duration. Treatment with oral rehydration salts was associated with dehydration, vomiting, and higher stool frequency, and trends were established between therapeutic zinc supplementation and increased duration and stool frequency. However, state and care-seeking sector were stronger determinants of treatment than episode severity, illustrating the need to address disparities in treatment quality across regions and delivery channels. Our findings are of importance to researchers and diarrhea management program evaluators aiming to produce accurate estimates of diarrheal outcomes and program impact in low- and middle-income countries.
Interaction with a mixed-initiative system for exploratory data analysis

Abstract Exploratory data analysis (EDA) plays an increasingly important role in statistical analysis. EDA is difficult, however, even with the help of modern statistical software. We have developed an assistant for data exploration, based on Al planning techniques, that addresses some of the strategic shortcomings of conventional software. This paper describes the design and behavior of the system and discusses an experimental evaluation that demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.
A Benchmark Dataset for Audio Classification and Clustering

We present a freely available benchmark dataset for audio classification and clustering. This dataset consists of 10 seconds samples of 1886 songs obtained from the Garageband site. Beside the audio clips themselves, textual meta data is provided for the individual songs. The songs are classified into 9 genres. In addition to the genre information, our dataset also consists of 24 hierarchical cluste r models created manually by a group of users. This enables a user centric evaluation of audio classification and clustering algorithms and gives researchers the opportunity to test the performance of their methods on heterogeneous data. We first give a motivation for assembling our benchmark dataset. Then we describe the dataset and its elements in more detail. Finally, we present some initial results using a set of audio features generated by a feature construction approach.
On the Asymptotic Number of Plane Curves and Alternating Knots

We present a conjecture for the power-law exponent in the asymptotic number of types of plane curves as the number of self-intersections goes to infinity. In view of the description of prime alternating links as flype equivalence classes of plane curves, a similar conjecture is made for the asymptotic number of prime alternating knots. The rationale leading to these conjectures is given by quantum field theory. Plane curves are viewed as configurations of loops on random planar lattices, that are in turn interpreted as a model of two-dimensional quantum gravity with matter. The identification of the universality class of this model yields the conjecture. Since approximate counting or sampling planar curves with more than a few dozens of intersections is an open problem, direct confrontation with numerical data yields no convincing indication on the correctness of our conjectures. However, our physical approach yields a more general conjecture about connected systems of curves. We take advantage of this to design an original and feasible numerical test, based on recent perfect samplers for large planar maps. The numerical data strongly support our identification with a conformal field theory recently described by Readand Saleur.
The Effects of Combining Elastic and Free Weight Resistance on Strength and Power in Athletes

This study was undertaken to determine whether combined elastic and free weight resistance (CR) provides different strength and power adaptations than free weight resistance (FWR) training alone. Forty-four young (age 20 ± 1 years), resistance-trained (4 ± 2 years' experience) subjects were recruited from men's basketball and wrestling teams and women's basketball and hockey teams at Cornell University. Subjects were stratified according to team, then randomly assigned to the control (C; n = 21) or experimental group (E; n = 23). Before and after 7 weeks of resistance training, subjects were tested for lean body mass, 1 repetition maximum back squat and bench press, and peak and average power. Both C and E groups performed identical workouts except that E used CR (i.e., elastic resistance) for the back squat and bench press, whereas the C group used FWR alone. CR was performed using an elastic bungee cord attached to a standard barbell loaded with plates. Elastic tension was accounted for in an attempt to equalize the total work done by each group. Statistical analyses revealed significant (P < 0.05) between-group differences after training. Compared with C, improvement for E was nearly three times greater for back squat (16.47 ± 5.67 vs. 6.84 ± 4.42 kg increase), two times greater for bench press (6.68 ± 3.41 vs. 3.34 ± 2.67 kg increase), and nearly three times greater for average power (68.55 ± 84.35 vs. 23.66 ± 40.56 watt increase). Training with CR may be better than FWR alone for developing lower and upper body strength, and lower body power in resistance-trained individuals. Long-term effects are unclear, but CR training makes a meaningful contribution in the short term to performance adaptations of experienced athletes.
Microwave Weed and Soil Treatment in Agricultural Systems

Weeds are the major hindrance in crop production, costing approximately AU$4 billion annually in Australian gain production systems, in 2006. Herbicide resistance is also becoming a global issue; therefore, there is a growing need for alternative weed control methods. Several thermal and non-thermal methods are possible. The thermal method of microwave weed management has been explored for some time. This paper provides a brief summary of the research associated with this technique.
Robust Observer Design for Unknown Inputs Takagi–Sugeno Models

This paper deals with the observer design for Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy models subject to unknown inputs and disturbance affecting both states and outputs of the system. Sufficient conditions to design an unknown input T-S observer are given in linear matrix inequality (LMI) terms. Both continuous-time and discrete-time cases are studied. Relaxations are introduced by using intermediate variables. Extension to the case of unmeasured decision variables is also given. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the given results.