Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exponential Stability and Stabilization of Delayed Memristive Neural Networks Based on Quadratic Convex Combination Method

This paper is concerned with the exponential stability and stabilization of memristive neural networks (MNNs) with delays. First, we present some generalized double-integral inequalities, which include some existing inequalities as their special cases. Second, combining with quadratic convex combination method, these double-integral inequalities are employed to formulate a delay-dependent stability condition for MNNs with delays. Third, a state-dependent switching control law is obtained for MNNs with delays based on the proposed stability conditions. The desired feedback gain matrices are accomplished by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed results are tested by two numerical examples.
The Effect of Perceived Characteristics of Innovation on E-Commerce Adoption by SMEs in Thailand

The study investigates factors that effect E-commerce adoption rate by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Thailand. Based on Rogers’ Innovation Diffusion theoretical framework, five perceived characteristics of innovation are considered as factors affect E-commerce adoption rate. Security and Confidentiality is additional variable investigated this research. A multiple regression was conducted and the result shows that four characteristics of innovation – relative advantage, compatibility, security/confidentiality and observability – were positively related to the rate of E-commerce adoption by Thai SMEs.
Urinary Tract Infection among Antiretroviral Therapy Users and Nonusers in Jimma University Specialized Hospital, Jimma, Ethiopia

Background. The introduction of antiretroviral therapy (ART) has dramatically reduced morbidity related with bacterial infection including urinary tract infection (UTI) among patients with HIV/AIDS. This study was carried out to determine the prevalence of UTI and identify common bacterial etiologies among HIV/AIDS patients of ART users and nonusers in Jimma University Specialized Hospital. Methods. A comparative cross sectional study was conducted from September to December 2012 on 367 ART users and 114 nonuser patients attending ART clinic. Sociodemographic characteristics, associated factors, and urine samples were collected; culture, biochemical tests, Gram stain, and drug sensitivity tests were done. Results. Of 467 examined urine samples, 56 (12%) had significant bacterial growth. Forty-six (12.5%) of the cases were ART users and 10 (10%) were nonusers. E. coli was the predominant isolate in both ART users (25 (54.3%)) and nonusers (6 (6%)). Majority of the bacterial isolates were from females. Most (>75%) of the isolates from both groups were resistant to ampicillin and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole but sensitive to norfloxacine, ceftriaxone, and chloramphenicol. Conclusion. There was no statistically significant difference regarding the prevalence of significant bacterial growth between ART users and nonusers. Therefore, it is recommended that UTI in both groups should be managed with drugs that show sensitivity.
Thai word segmentation for visualization of Thai Web sites

Information overload is a problem in the Information Age and Information visualization is an approach to provide an overview of the content of a web site. Tag cloud is one of the ways to represent information as an image of a group of words. However, there are limitations on tag cloud generation, and one of them is due to the characteristics for the language. In order to extract tags or words for tag cloud, word segmentation is required. This paper proposes a Thai word segmentation approach for the visualization of Thai Web sites. The proposed Thai word segmentation technique is based on the longest matching technique together with a refined corpus. The results of Thai word segmentation are compatible with the results from previous BEST's contests in Thailand.
Validity and Reliability of Three Self-Report Instruments for Assessing Attainment of Physical Activity Guidelines in University Students

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to compare the validity and reliability of three short physical activity self-report instruments to determine their potential for use with university student populations. The participants (N = 155; 44.5% male; 22.9 ± 5.13 years) wore an accelerometer for 9 consecutive days and completed a single-item measure, the a brief two item measure and the International Physical Activity Questionnaire—Short Form questionnaires on day 1 and 9. Correlations between self-reported and accelerometer derived moderate-to-vigorous physical activity levels were moderate for the International Physical Activity Questionnaire—Short Form, while poor for the single-item measure and the a brief two item measure. The agreement level was high with the International Physical Activity Questionnaire—Short Form (77.4%) and moderate for both the single-item measure (45.2 %) and a brief two item measure (44.5 %). The intraclass correlations between the two administrations were moderate to strong across all measures (0.52–0.70) in 133 participants. The International Physical Activity Questionnaire—Short Form is the most suitable of these three self-report instruments for use with this population due to higher correlations and levels of agreement with accelerometry.
Krylov subspace techniques for low frequency structural acoustic analysis and optimization

A reduced order model is developed for low frequency, fully coupled, undamped and constantly damped structural acoustic analysis of interior cavities, backed by flexible structural systems. The reduced order model is obtained by applying a Galerkin projection of the coupled system matrices, from a higher dimensional subspace to a lower dimensional subspace, whilst preserving some essential properties of the coupled system. The basis vectors for projection are computed efficiently using the Arnoldi algorithm, which generates an orthogonal basis for the Krylov subspace containing moments of the original system. The key idea of constructing a reduced order model via Krylov subspaces is to remove the uncontrollable, unobservable and weakly controllable, observable parts without affecting the transfer function of the coupled system. The reduced order modelling technique is applied to a frame-panel two-way coupled vibro-acoustic optimization problem, with stacking sequences of the composite structure as design variables. The optimization is performed via a hybrid search strategy combining outputs from Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) and Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) algorithm. It is shown that reduced order modelling technique results in a very significant reduction in simulation time, while maintaining the desired accuracy of the optimization variables under investigation.
Digital Games, Design, and Learning

In this meta-analysis, we systematically reviewed research on digital games and learning for K–16 students. We synthesized comparisons of game versus nongame conditions (i.e., media comparisons) and comparisons of augmented games versus standard game designs (i.e., value-added comparisons). We used random-effects meta-regression models with robust variance estimates to summarize overall effects and explore potential moderator effects. Results from media comparisons indicated that digital games significantly enhanced student learning relative to nongame conditions ( g ¯ = 0.33, 95% confidence interval [0.19, 0.48], k = 57, n = 209). Results from value-added comparisons indicated significant learning benefits associated with augmented game designs ( g ¯ = 0.34, 95% confidence interval [0.17, 0.51], k = 20, n = 40). Moderator analyses demonstrated that effects varied across various game mechanics characteristics, visual and narrative characteristics, and research quality characteristics. Taken together, the results highlight the affordances of games for learning as well as the key role of design beyond medium.
Global Coronary Artery Plaque Area is Associated with Myocardial Hypoperfusion in Women with Non-ST Elevation Myocardial Infarction

Abstract Background: Women with non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) have similar extent of myocardial ischemia but less obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD) than their male counterparts. We tested the impact of global coronary artery plaque area and artery tortuosity on myocardial perfusion in NSTEMI patients. Methods: Coronary artery plaque area was determined by quantitative angiography in 108 patients (32% women) with NSTEMI. Myocardial perfusion was assessed by contrast echocardiography in the 17 individual left ventricular segments. Artery tortuosity was defined as ≥3 curves >45° in a main coronary artery. Results: Age, prevalence of hypertension, and diabetes did not differ between sexes (all nonsignificant). Women had lower prevalence of ≥50% coronary artery stenosis (74% vs. 91%, p<0.05), while global coronary plaque area (35±22 vs. 43±21mm2) and the number of segments with hypoperfusion (6.9±3.7 vs. 7.2±3.4) did not differ between sexes (both p>0.07). In multivariate analysis, larger coronary artery plaque area was associated with a 35% higher risk for having severe myocardial hypoperfusion (odds ratio 1.35 [95% confidence interval 1.01–1.80], p<0.05) in the total study population, while no association between artery tortuosity and myocardial ischemia was found. Similar results were obtained in separate analysis among women and men. Conclusion: In women and men with NSTEMI, the global coronary artery plaque area was an important determinant of the severity of myocardial hypoperfusion at rest independent of presence of significant coronary stenoses. These findings may expand current understanding of NSTEMI in patients with nonobstructive CAD.
Distributed Creation and Adaptation of Random Scale-Free Overlay Networks

Random scale-free overlay topologies provide a number of properties like for example high resilience against failures of random nodes, small (average) diameter as well as good expansion and congestion characteristics that make them interesting for the use in large-scale distributed systems. A number of these properties have been shown to be influenced by the exponent of their power law degree distribution. In this article, we present a distributed rewiring scheme that is suitable to effectuate random scale-free overlay topologies with an adjustable degree distribution exponent. The scheme uses a biased random walk strategy to sample new endpoints of edges being rewired and relies on an equilibrium model for scale-free networks. The bias of the random walk strategy can be tuned to produce random scale-free networks with arbitrary degree distribution exponents greater than two. We argue that the rewiring strategy can be implemented in a distributed fashion based on a node’s information about its immediate neighbors. We present both analytical arguments as well as results that have been obtained in simulations of the proposed protocol.
Curriculum Vitae Accounting for the Changing Role of Family Income in Determining College Entry College Education Matter? " . I Would like to Thank Morten Ravn and Salvador Ortigueira for Their Advice. I Also Benefited from Comments Of

Assessing the importance of borrowing constraints for college entry is key for education policy analysis in the U.S. economy. I present a computable dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations and incomplete markets that allows me to measure the fraction of households constrained in their college entry decision. College education is financed by family transfers and public subsidies, where transfers are generated through altruism on part of the parents. Parents face a trade-off between making transfers to their children and own savings. Ceteris paribus, parents who expect lower future earnings transfer less and save more. Data from the 1986 Survey of Consumer Finances give support to this mechanism. I show that this trade-off leads to substantially higher estimates of the fraction of constrained households compared to the results in the empirical literature (18 instead of 8 percent). The model also predicts that an increment in parents’ earnings uncertainty decreases their willingness to provide transfers. In combination with rising returns to education, which makes college going more attractive, this boosts the number of constrained youths and explains why family income has become more important for college access over the last decades in the U.S. economy.
Emergence of long timescales and stereotyped behaviors in Caenorhabditis elegans

Animal behaviors often are decomposable into discrete, stereotyped elements, well separated in time. In one model, such behaviors are triggered by specific commands; in the extreme case, the discreteness of behavior is traced to the discreteness of action potentials in the individual command neurons. Here, we use the crawling behavior of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to demonstrate the opposite view, in which discreteness, stereotypy, and long timescales emerge from the collective dynamics of the behavior itself. In previous work, we found that as C. elegans crawls, its body moves through a “shape space” in which four dimensions capture approximately 95% of the variance in body shape. Here we show that stochastic dynamics within this shape space predicts transitions between attractors corresponding to abrupt reversals in crawling direction. With no free parameters, our inferred stochastic dynamical system generates reversal timescales and stereotyped trajectories in close agreement with experimental observations. We use the stochastic dynamics to show that the noise amplitude decreases systematically with increasing time away from food, resulting in longer bouts of forward crawling and suggesting that worms can use noise to modify their locomotory behavior.
Online Goal Babbling for rapid bootstrapping of inverse models in high dimensions

We present a model of online Goal Babbling for the bootstrapping of sensorimotor coordination. By modeling infants' early goal-directed movements we show that inverse models can be bootstrapped within a few hundred movements even in very high-dimensional sensorimotor spaces. Our model thereby explains how infants might initially acquire reaching skills without the need for exhaustive exploration, and how robots can do so in a feasible way. We show that online learning in a closed loop with exploration allows substantial speed-ups and, in high-dimensional systems, outperforms previously published methods by orders of magnitude.
Interleukin (IL)-1 gene polymorphisms: relevance of disease severity associated alleles with IL-1beta and IL-1ra production in multiple sclerosis.

BACKGROUND: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disorder, with a considerable genetic influence on susceptibility and disease course. Cytokines play an important role in MS pathophysiology, and genes encoding various cytokines are logical candidates to assess possible associations with MS susceptibility and disease course. We previously reported an association of a combination of polymorphisms in the interleukin (IL)-1B and IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1RN) genes (i.e. IL-1RN allele 2+/IL-1B(+3959)allele 2-) with disease severity in MS. Extending this observation, we investigated whether IL-1beta and IL-1ra production differed depending on carriership of this gene combination. METHODS: Twenty MS patients and 20 controls were selected based upon carriership of the specific combination. In whole blood, in vitro IL-1beta and IL-1ra production was determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent-assay after 6 and 24 h of stimulation with lipopolysaccharide. RESULTS: Carriers of the specific combination produced more IL-1ra, especially in MS patients, although not significantly. IL-1ra production was significantly higher in individuals homozygous for IL-1RN allele 2. In patients, Il-1ra production was higher and IL-1beta production lower compared with controls. In primary progressive patients, the IL-1beta /IL-1ra ratio was significantly lower than in relapsing-remitting patients. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest higher in vitro IL-1ra production in carriers of IL-1RN allele 2, with an indication of an allelic dose-effect relationship.
McDonaldizing Spirituality

The exponential growth of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in recent years has resulted in a marketisation and commodification of practice—popularly labeled “McMindfulness”—which divorces mindfulness from its spiritual and ethical origins in Buddhist traditions. Such commodification is criticized by utilising ideas and insights drawn from work in educational philosophy and policy analysis. The “McDonaldization” process is applied to the emerging populist versions of mindfulness and analysed in some detail, alongside the capitalization and marketisation of MBIs on the McMindfulness model. The central argument is that the crucial educational function of MBIs needs to be informed by the moral virtues which are at the heart of Buddhist mindfulness. Without such an ethical and educational foundation—actively connected with engaged Buddhist foundations aimed at individual and social transformation—mindfulness becomes just another fashionable self-help gimmick that is unlikely to be of any lasting individual or social benefit.
An algorithm for computing nucleic acid base‐pairing probabilities including pseudoknots

Given a nucleic acid sequence, a recent algorithm allows the calculation of the partition function over secondary structure space including a class of physically relevant pseudoknots. Here, we present a method for computing base‐pairing probabilities starting from the output of this partition function algorithm. The approach relies on the calculation of recursion probabilities that are computed by backtracking through the partition function algorithm, applying a particular transformation at each step. This transformation is applicable to any partition function algorithm that follows the same basic dynamic programming paradigm. Base‐pairing probabilities are useful for analyzing the equilibrium ensemble properties of natural and engineered nucleic acids, as demonstrated for a human telomerase RNA and a synthetic DNA nanostructure. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem 25: 1295–1304, 2004
Long-Term Effects of Intermittent IL-2 in HIV Infection: Extended Follow-Up of the INSIGHT STALWART Study

Background The Study of Aldesleukin with and without Antiretroviral Therapy (STALWART) was designed to evaluate whether intermittent IL-2 alone or with peri-cycle ART increased CD4+ cell counts (and so delayed initiation of ART) in HIV infected individuals having ≥300 CD4+ cells/mm3 compared to untreated controls. When the results of two large clinical trials, ESPRIT and SILCAAT, showed no clinical benefit from IL-2 therapy, IL-2 administration was halted in STALWART. Because IL-2 recipients in STALWART experienced a greater number of opportunistic disease (OD) or death and adverse events (AEs), participants were asked to consent to an extended follow-up phase in order to assess persistence of IL-2 effects. Methodology Participants in this study were followed for clinical events and AEs every 4 months for 24 months. Unadjusted Cox proportional hazards models were used to summarize death, death or first OD event, and first grade 3 or 4 AE. Principal Findings A total of 267 persons were enrolled in STALWART (176 randomized to the IL-2 arms and 91 to the no therapy arm); 142 individuals in the IL-2 group and 80 controls agreed to enter the extended follow-up study. Initiation of continuous ART was delayed in the IL-2 groups, but once started, resulted in similar CD4+ cell and viral load responses compared to controls. The hazard ratios (95% CI) for IL-2 versus control during the extension phase for death or OD, grade 3 or 4 AE, and grade 4 AE were 1.45 (0.38, 5.45), 0.43 (0.24, 1.63) and 0.20 (0.04, 1.03), respectively. The hazard ratios for the AE outcomes were significantly lower during the extension than during the main study. Conclusions Adverse events associated with IL-2 cycling did not persist upon discontinuation of IL-2. The use of IL-2 did not impact the subsequent response to initiation of cART.
Effect of follicle-stimulating hormone receptor N680S polymorphism on the efficacy of follicle-stimulating hormone stimulation on donor ovarian response

Objective The aim of this study was to investigate whether N680S FSHR polymorphism has a predictive value for the ovarian response to stimulation with gonadotropins and cycle outcome in our egg donor program. Methods The oocyte donor candidates were selected according to the Instituto Bernabeu egg donation program requirements and ASRM and ESHRE guidelines for oocyte donation. The FSHR polymorphism N680S was studied in 145 oocyte donors. All donors underwent controlled ovarian hyperstimulation (COH) (n=355) using urinary follicle-stimulating hormone in a GnRH antagonist protocol and receiving a GnRH agonist triggering. The main outcome measures were oocyte yield, days of stimulation, gonadotropin doses, biochemical pregnancy, ongoing pregnancy, and miscarriage rates. Results Significant differences were reported in the antral follicle count (16.5±5.0 for NN, 14.5±4.7 for NS, and 14.1±3.8 for SS), number of eggs retrieved (21.5±9.2 for NN, 18.5±8.2 for NS, and 19.8±8.9 for SS), and gonadotropin doses (2098.5±639.4 IU for NN, 2023 ±490.1 IU for NS, and 2149.5±552.3 IU for SS) between the genotypes. The clinical outcome was not affected by the N680S polymorphism of the FSHR gene in the egg donors. Conclusion In a population of fertile egg donors, the FSHR gene polymorphism at position 680 is associated with different ovarian responses to COH. The genotype of the FSHR gene is an important factor for determining the prognosis of the COH cycles in normo-ovulatory fertile women.
Line matching leveraged by point correspondences

A novel method for line matching is proposed. The basic idea is to use tentative point correspondences, which can be easily obtained by keypoint matching methods, to significantly improve line matching performance, even when the point correspondences are severely contaminated by outliers. When matching a pair of image lines, a group of corresponding points that may be coplanar with these lines in 3D space is firstly obtained from all corresponding image points in the local neighborhoods of these lines. Then given such a group of corresponding points, the similarity between this pair of lines is calculated based on an affine invariant from one line and two points. The similarity is defined on the basis of median statistic in order to handle the problem of inevitable incorrect correspondences in the group of point correspondences. Furthermore, the relationship of rotation between the reference and query images is estimated from all corresponding points to filter out those pairs of lines which are obviously impossible to be matches, hence speeding up the matching process as well as further improving its robustness. Extensive experiments on real images demonstrate the good performance of the proposed method as well as its superiority to the state-of-the-art methods.
Comparing isogenic strains of Beijing genotype Mycobacterium tuberculosis after acquisition of Isoniazid resistance: A proteomics approach

We determined differences in the protein abundance among two isogenic strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) with different Isoniazid (INH) susceptibility profiles. The strains were isolated from a pulmonary tuberculosis patient before and after drug treatment. LC‐MS/MS analysis identified 46 Mtb proteins with altered abundance after INH resistance acquisition. Protein abundance comparisons were done evaluating the different bacterial cellular fractions (membrane, cytosol, cell wall and secreted proteins). MS data have been deposited to the ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD002986.