Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimizing the Diffusion System Based on Continuous-Time Consensus Algorithm

Due to beneficial insights on PDEs, recently, the reverse of this approach is implemented where a spatially discrete system is approximated by a spatially continuous one, governed by linear PDEs forming diffusion equations. In the case of distributed consensus algorithms, this approach is adapted to enhance its convergence rate to the equilibrium. In previous studies within this context, constant diffusion coefficient is considered for obtaining the diffusion equations. This is equivalent to assigning a constant weight to all edges of the underlying graph in the consensus algorithm. Here, by relaxing this restricting assumption, a spatially variable diffusion coefficient is considered and by optimizing the obtained system, it is shown that significant improvements are achievable in terms of the convergence rate of the obtained spatially continuous system. As a result of approximation, the system is divided into two sections, namely, the spatially continuous path branches and the lattice core which connect.
Defined Contribution Pension Plans: Determinants of Participation and Contributions Rates

Records of 793,794 employees eligible to participate in 647 defined contribution pension plans are studied. About 71% of them choose to participate in the plans, and of the participants, 12% choose to contribute the maximum allowed, $10,500. The main findings are (other things equal) (1) participation rates, contributions and (most remarkably) savings rates increase with compensation; on average, a $10,000 increase in compensation is associated with a 3.7% higher participation probability and $900 higher contribution; (2) women’s participation probability is 6.5% higher than men’s and they contribute almost $500 more than men; (3) participation probabilities are similar for employees covered and not covered by DB plans, but those covered by DB plans contribute more to the DC plans; (4) the availability of a match by the employer increases employees’ participation and contributions; the effect is strongest for low-income employees; (v) participation rates, especially among low-income employees, are higher when company stock is an investable fund.
Analysis of Facial Deformities in Korean Leprosy

Objectives The clinical features of various facial deformities in Korean leprosy patients were evaluated according to the type of leprosy. Methods One hundred ninety six patients with leprosy were examined for various facial deformities using a nasal speculum, endoscope, and digital camera. The frequency and severity of external nasal deformities and septal perforations were evaluated according to the type of leprosy. Eye deformities, ear deformities, and facial palsy were also assessed. Results Seventy-one patients (36.2%) displayed external nasal deformities: 28 minimal contractures, three cartilage contractures, two bony-cartilage contractures, and 38 skin defects. The external nasal deformity and severe form deformity in lepromatous types were more frequent compared to other types (P<0.05 for each variable). Twenty-three patients (9%) displayed septal perforations, among whom 11 had cartilaginous perforations and 12 had bony-cartilaginous perforations. The frequency of septal and bony-cartilaginous perforations did not differ significantly between the types of leprosy (P>0.05 for each variable). Sixty-one patients (31.1%) had eye deformities and 19 patients (9.7%) had facial nerve palsy, common in the borderline type. No cases of ear deformities were observed. Conclusion Korean patients had characteristic deformities according to the type of leprosy. They were different from those seen in the prior analyses of Caucasian populations.
A Comparison of Lesions in Small Intracerebral Arteries Among Japanese Men in Hawaii and Japan

Background and Purpose This report examines the hypothesis that the higher risk of stroke among Japanese men in Japan compared with those in Hawaii is related to pathology in small intracerebral arteries by comparing the prevalence of such lesions in autopsied participants from two cohorts of Japanese men in Japan and Hawaii. Methods Existing histological sections from the left basal ganglia from 232 men from Japan and 175 men of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii were examined for selected abnormalities in arteries between 100 and 300 μm in diameter by three pathologists. The presence of lacunar infarcts was also noted, and information about cerebral infarcts, cerebral hemorrhages, and atherosclerosis in the circle of Willis was available for the Hawaii group. Results Lacunar infarcts and all small intracerebral artery lesions except medial fibrosis were more common at every age in Japan than in Hawaii. By cause of death, all lesions were three or more times more prevalent among men who died of stroke than of noncardiovascular causes in both areas. In the Hawaii group, the small intracerebral artery lesions were significantly associated with autopsy evidence of cerebral and lacunar infarcts, and with atherosclerosis in the large arteries of the circle of Willis. Among a large number of risk factors measured at the baseline examination in Hawaii, only high blood pressure and reported usual Asian diet were significantly associated with one or more measures of small intracerebral artery lesions. Conclusions An overview of the accumulated data indicated that small intracerebral artery pathology plays an important role in the high risk of stroke in Japanese men in Japan compared with those in Hawaii. These studies support the idea that hypertension is a necessary factor in the causal pathway, but also indicate that some other factors are involved. Some aspect of an Asian diet continues to be of importance for future research.
A statistical model for radio propagation in office buildings

This paper proposes a statistical model for radio propagation in indoor office buildings, where the orientations of the reflecting surfaces are not random. The important channel parameters including PAS and PDS have been derived. Multiple angular clusters were clearly observed in the PAS profiles, which have been previously presented for similar building types. The PDS profiles exhibit an exponential distribution, which agrees well the empirical observations reported in the existing literature. It is concluded that a reasonably accurate description of propagation in buildings of this type can be obtained with the proposed model
Tunable Bandpass Filter Design Based on External Quality Factor Tuning and Multiple Mode Resonators for Wideband Applications

In this paper, a tunable bandpass filter using cross-shaped multiple mode resonators (MMRs) and N:1 transformer based external quality factor tuning structures is proposed. The use of a cross-shaped MMR simplifies inter-resonators control while two Qe tuning structures are investigated and incorporated with the MMR to implement simultaneous center frequency agility and narrow and wide bandwidth tuning. Compared with traditional tunable filters, the proposed architecture requires less tuning elements and is easier to realize wideband and high-order tunable filters. Two examples (Filter I and II) are presented to validate the design. Both filters use a single MMR and six tuning elements to achieve a third-order wideband tunable filter. Filter I reports 58% center frequency tuning with constant bandwidth and 14%-64.4% fractional bandwidth (FBW) tuning when center frequency locates at 1 GHz. Filter II achieves larger frequency agility and wider FBW tuning of 82.9% and 95%, respectively, for the same bandwidth and center frequency of Filter I.
Brief Versus Full Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test in National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome Network Clinical Trials

Objectives:Alcohol use disorders are common among patients admitted to an ICU, yet systematic screening is rarely performed. We sought to confirm the construct validity of the full Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test and to evaluate the performance of the brief three-item Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test-C using the full Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test as a proxy gold standard in a population of patients with a medical critical illness. Design:Secondary analysis. Setting:The acute respiratory distress syndrome network, a consortium of 12 university centers (44 hospitals) dedicated to conducting multicenter clinical trials in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. Subjects:Patients meeting consensus criteria for acute respiratory distress syndrome. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:Of 1,133 patients enrolled in one of three acute respiratory distress syndrome network studies, 1,037 (92%) had full Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test data available. Of the included patients, 236 (23%) scored above the screening threshold for an alcohol use disorder on the full Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. Construct validity analysis of the full Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test supported a three-factor model. Compared with the full Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test -C had an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.99 for men and 0.98 for women. The optimal cutoff was 4 for both genders. At this cutoff, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test -C had a sensitivity of 95% (95% CI, 92–98%) and specificity of 94% (95% CI, 92–96%) for men and sensitivity of 89% (95% CI, 82–96%) and specificity of 99% (95% CI, 98–100%) for women. Conclusions:Although a three-factor structure for the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test was confirmed in ICU patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome, the first three questions focusing on alcohol consumption provide information that is comparable with the full 10-item Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test screening questionnaire. This study is limited by the lack of a true gold standard, and the performance of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test -C is likely overestimated due to this limitation.
Investigation of MgO and CaO/Al2O3 polyphosphate cements

Calcined magnesia and two high-alumina cements, i. e. Secar 51 and Secar 71, were combined with solutions of Na polyphosphate with chain lengths between n = 4 and n = 30. The resulting pastes exhibited setting time and strength development that depended on the poly phosphate chain length and curing conditions. A distinct chemical shrinkage accompanied the hardening process.
Role of human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 X region proteins in immortalization of primary human lymphocytes in culture

Human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1) immortalizes human CD4+ T lymphocytes in culture. Previous studies show that in the context of a herpesvirus saimiri vector, the sequence of the X region at the 3' end of the HTLV-1 genome is also capable of immortalizing CD4+ lymphocytes in the absence of HTLV-1 structural proteins. The X region of HTLV-1 encodes two trans-acting viral proteins, the 42-kDa Tax protein and the 27-kDa Rex protein. Infection of human cord blood cells with herpesvirus saimiri recombinants which contain HTLV-1 X region sequences defective for expression of tax, rex, or both tax and rex demonstrates that tax function is necessary and sufficient for immortalization of primary human CD4+ cord blood lymphocytes in culture in the context of the herpesvirus saimiri vector.
Throughput and Latency in Finite-Buffer Line Networks

This work investigates the effect of finite buffer sizes on the throughput capacity and packet delay of line networks with packet erasure links that have perfect feedback. These performance measures are shown to be linked to the stationary distribution of an underlying irreducible Markov chain that models the system exactly. Using simple strategies, bounds on the throughput capacity are derived. The work then presents two iterative schemes to approximate the steady-state distribution of node occupancies by decoupling the chain to smaller queueing blocks. These approximate solutions are used to understand the effect of buffer sizes on throughput capacity and the distribution of packet delay. Using the exact modeling for line networks, it is shown that the throughput capacity is unaltered in the absence of hop-by-hop feedback provided packet-level network coding is allowed. Finally, using simulations, it is confirmed that the proposed framework yields accurate estimates of the throughput capacity and delay distribution and captures the vital trends and tradeoffs in these networks.
A test of Darwin's naturalization hypothesis in the thistle tribe shows that close relatives make bad neighbors

Significance Invasive species negatively impact both natural ecosystems and human society and are notoriously difficult to control once established. Thus, identifying potentially invasive taxa and preventing their dislocation is the most efficient management method. Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis, which predicts that the less closely related to native flora species are, the more likely they are to succeed as invaders, is tested here with an unprecedentedly thorough molecular phylogenetic approach, examining >100,000 phylogenies of the weed-rich thistle tribe Cardueae. Branch lengths between taxa were used as measures of evolutionary relatedness. Results show that invasive thistles are more closely related to natives than noninvasive introduced thistles, suggesting they share preadaptive traits with the natives that make them more likely to succeed as invaders. Invasive species have great ecological and economic impacts and are difficult to control once established, making the ability to understand and predict invasive behavior highly desirable. Preemptive measures to prevent potential invasive species from reaching new habitats are the most economically and environmentally efficient form of management. Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis predicts that invaders less related to native flora are more likely to be successful than those that are closely related to natives. Here we test this hypothesis, using the weed-rich thistle tribe, Cardueae, in the California Floristic Province, a biodiversity hotspot, as our study system. An exhaustive molecular phylogenetic approach was used, generating and examining more than 100,000 likely phylogenies of the tribe based on nuclear and chloroplast DNA markers, representing the most in-depth reconstruction of the clade to date. Branch lengths separating invasive and noninvasive introduced taxa from native California taxa were used to represent phylogenetic distances between these groups and were compared at multiple biogeographical scales to ascertain whether invasive thistles are more or less closely related to natives than noninvasive introduced thistles are. Patterns within this highly supported clade show that not only are introduced thistles more closely related to natives more likely to be invasive, but these invasive species are also evolutionarily closer to native flora than by chance. This suggests that preadaptive traits are important in determining an invader’s success. Such rigorous molecular phylogenetic analyses may prove a fruitful means for furthering our understanding of biological invasions and developing predictive frameworks for screening potential invasive taxa.
Clustering Based on Conditional Distributions in an Auxiliary Space

We study the problem of learning groups or categories that are local in the continuous primary space but homogeneous by the distributions of an associated auxiliary random variable over a discrete auxiliary space. Assuming that variation in the auxiliary space is meaningful, categories will emphasize similarly meaningful aspects of the primary space. From a data set consisting of pairs of primary and auxiliary items, the categories are learned by minimizing a Kullback-Leibler divergence-based distortion between (implicitly estimated) distributions of the auxiliary data, conditioned on the primary data. Still, the categories are defined in terms of the primary space. An online algorithm resembling the traditional Hebb-type competitive learning is introduced for learning the categories. Minimizing the distortion criterion turns out to be equivalent to maximizing the mutual information between the categories and the auxiliary data. In addition, connections to density estimation and to the distributional clustering paradigm are outlined. The method is demonstrated by clustering yeast gene expression data from DNA chips, with biological knowledge about the functional classes of the genes as the auxiliary data.
Usefulness of ST segment depression limited to the recovery phase of exercise stress test.

OBJECTIVE To determine the diagnostic value of ST segment depression limited to recovery phase of Exercise Tolerance Test (ETT). STUDY DESIGN An observational cross-sectional study. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY The study was carried out at Punjab Institute of Cardiology, Lahore, from March to August 2007 for a period of 6 months. METHODOLOGY In this study, 100 patients were selected with purposive non-probability sampling technique and were divided into two groups, group A having ST segment depression during exercise phase of ETT, and group B having ST segment depression only in recovery phase after undergoing ETT according to Bruce protocol. The patients were subjected to coronary angiography later on. The chi-square or Fischer's exact test of significance was applied at 0.05 level of significance to compare the coronary angiographic finding between two groups. Diagnostic value of ST segment depression was computed keeping angiographic finding as Gold standard. RESULTS There were no major differences between the two groups regarding angiographic finding. Significant coronary artery stenosis (> 50% narrowing) was found in 68 (93%) patients of group A and 23 (85%) patients of group B (p=0.18). Three vessel disease was found in 30 (41%) patients in group A and 7 (26%) patients in group B (p=0.08). Left main stem disease was found in 5 (6.8%) patients of group A and 1 (3.7%) patient of group B. Normal coronaries were found in 6% of patients among group A and 14% of patients among group B (p=0.12). Specificity, sensitivity, Positive Predictive Value (PPV) and Negative Predictive Value (NPV) of ST segment depression in recovery phase was 55, 25, 85 and 6 percent respectively (95% CI; 1.16 - 2.25). CONCLUSION In patients undergoing exercise stress test, ST segment depression occurring only in recovery phase of ETT has a diagnostic value largely comparable with that of ST segment depression induced during exercise phase of ETT. Thus careful evaluation of ST segment depression occurring only in recovery phase may add significantly to the clinical information derived from the results of ETT.
Using uncleanliness to predict future botnet addresses

The increased use of botnets as an attack tool and the awareness attackers have of blocking lists leads to the question of whether we can effectively predict future bot locations. To that end, we introduce a network quality that we term uncleanliness: an indicator of the propensity for hosts in a network to be compromised by outside parties. We hypothesize that unclean networks will demonstrate two properties: spatial and temporal uncleanliness. Spatial uncleanliness is the tendency for compromised hosts to cluster within unclean networks. Temporal uncleanliness is the tendency for unclean networks to contain compromised hosts for extended periods. We test for these properties by collating data from multiple indicators (spamming, phishing, scanning and botnet IRC log monitoring). We demonstrate evidence for both spatial and temporal uncleanliness. We further show evidence for cross-relationship between the various datasets, showing that botnet activity predicts spamming and scanning, while phishing activity appears to be unrelated to the other indicators.
1-D Multipoint Auxiliary Source Propagator for the Total-Field/Scattered-Field FDTD Formulation

A multipoint auxiliary time-domain 1-D propagator is proposed for initiation of plane wave sources in the total-field/ scattered-field formulation (TFSF) of finite-difference time-domain (FDTD). The propagator is developed by making the 1-D and 2-D/3-D dispersion equations identical, leading to a multipoint 1-D stencil. A perfect match can be achieved for a plane wave propagating at an angle forming an integer gridcell ratio, which can in theory represent almost any angle. Numerical examples in 2-D show that leakage errors into the scattered field domain are on the order of finite precision (-300 dB for double precision)
FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND VERTICAL INTEGRATION: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

Existing evidence is mostly inconclusive on the relevance of financial development as a determinant of vertical integration. This paper presents evidence that, once industry heterogeneity in firm size distribution is taken into account, financial development is an important determinant of cross-country differences in vertical integration. Financial development fosters entry of firms and increases competition in the industry. This reduces vertical integration of larger firms, but also leads smaller, non-integrated, firms to exit the industry. As a result, higher financial development reduces vertical integration in industries where a high share of output is produced by small firms. The positive effect of financial development on entry also reduces vertical integration by fostering the development of input markets.
Molecular Cloning and Nucleotide Sequence of the Superoxide Dismutase Gene and Characterization of Its Product fromBacillus subtilis

ABSTRACT Bacillus subtilis was found to possess one detectable superoxide dismutase (Sod) in both vegetative cells and spores. The Sod activity in vegetative cells was maximal at stationary phase. Manganese was necessary to sustain Sod activity at stationary phase, but paraquat, a superoxide generator, did not induce the expression of Sod. The specific activity of purified Sod was approximately 2,600 U/mg of protein, and the enzyme was a homodimer protein with a molecular mass of approximately 25,000 per monomer. The gene encoding Sod, designatedsodA, was cloned by the combination of several PCR methods and the Southern hybridization method. DNA sequence analysis revealed the presence of one open reading frame consisting of 606 bp. Several putative promoter sites were located in the upstream region ofsodA. The deduced amino acid sequence showed high homology with other bacterial manganese Sods. Conserved regions in bacterial manganese Sod could also be seen. The phenotype of double mutantEscherichia coli sodA sodB, which could not grow in minimal medium without supplemental amino acids, was complemented by the expression of B. subtilis sodA.