Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Local field enhancement effects for nanostructuring of surfaces

We report on a method that allows the nanostructuring of surfaces with intense laser pulses. For this purpose isolated polystyrene spheres with diameters in the order of the laser wavelength were deposited on a silicon or glass surface. Illumination with short and ultrashort laser pulses produced holes underneath these particles. Calculations of the field near the particles make clear that geometrical optics, that is, focusing by a spherical lens, as well as near‐field effects, contribute to the size and shape of these holes. This technique can be utilized for the parallel structuring of large surface areas with a single laser shot.
Endovascular stent-graft placement for complications of acute type B aortic dissection

Purpose of review To review the concepts and current clinical results of endovascular stent-graft placement for acute complicated type B aortic dissection. Recent findings The optimal treatment for patients with dissections confined to the descending aorta (Stanford type B-AD) remains a matter of debate. Usually, antihypertensive medical therapy with strict blood pressure lowering below 135/80 mm Hg represents the first choice for patients with uncomplicated type B-AD. Patients with acute complicated type B-AD remain a major therapeutic challenge because surgery of the descending aorta is still associated with high morbidity and mortality. In 1999, endovascular stent-graft placement was introduced as a novel, less invasive treatment option for patients with type B aortic dissection. Current indications include acute (contained) aortic rupture, symptomatic ischemic branch vessel involvement, early aortic expansion, or unrelenting pain. So far, few studies on stent-graft placement in patients with acute complicated aortic dissection have been published reporting an early mortality between 0 and ∼20%. Summary To date, there is limited experience with endovascular stent-graft placement for acute complicated type B aortic dissection demonstrating its feasibility and life-saving potential. The endovascular approach can avoid the major trauma of open surgery and should help to get patients out of the acute life-threatening phase of the disease; however, long-term results are needed to assess the durability of this treatment.
A first look at IPv4 transfer markets

In February 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) exhausted its free pool of IPv4 addresses, and the regional registries (RIRs) have started to run out of IPv4 addresses as well. As RIRs have started rationing allocations, IPv4 transfer markets have emerged as a new mechanism to acquire IPv4 addresses. Barring a few high-profile exceptions, IPv4 transfers have largely flown under the radar. In this work, we use the lists of transfers published by three RIRs to characterise the transfer market - the types of players involved, the sizes and characteristics of transferred address blocks, and the visibility of transferred address blocks in the routing table before and after the transfer. Next, we take first steps toward detecting address transfers using BGP data from the Routeviews and RIPE repositories from 2004-2013. We identify reasons why legitimate changes in prefix origin could be mistakenly inferred to be transfers, and implement a series of 10 filters that remove 86% of candidate transfers. Our results indicate that BGP-based detection of transfers is prone to false positives due to significant noise in BGP data, while some transfers remain undetectable as they involve non-BGP speakers. We describe some additional data sources and analysis techniques that may help reveal an opaque market for IPv4 address block transfers.
Multidimensional Nano Heat Conduction in Cylindrical Transistors

A 3-D non-Fourier heat conduction in a cylindrical surrounding-gate (SG) MOSFET including phonon-wall collisions effects has been developed and presented. The obtained results are verified with the existent data. The various thermal characteristics of the device are obtained from the solution of the dual-phase-lag model coupled with a 3-D second-order temperature jump boundary condition. We find that, when the Fourier law ceases to be valid, the presented model is able to predict the nano heat transfer in cylindrical devices. After switching off the device, we show that the temperature is more thermally stable then that given in MOSFET and tri-gate silicon on insulator-MOSFET. We show also that the radius of the cylindrical SG drastically changes the temperature and heat flux distributions within the transistor devices.
On the Computability of Conditional Probability

As inductive inference and machine-learning methods in computer science see continued success, researchers are aiming to describe ever more complex probabilistic models and inference algorithms. It is natural to ask whether there is a universal computational procedure for probabilistic inference. We investigate the computability of conditional probability, a fundamental notion in probability theory, and a cornerstone of Bayesian statistics. We show that there are computable joint distributions with noncomputable conditional distributions, ruling out the prospect of general inference algorithms, even inefficient ones. Specifically, we construct a pair of computable random variables in the unit interval such that the conditional distribution of the first variable given the second encodes the halting problem. Nevertheless, probabilistic inference is possible in many common modeling settings, and we prove several results giving broadly applicable conditions under which conditional distributions are computable. In particular, conditional distributions become computable when measurements are corrupted by independent computable noise with a sufficiently smooth bounded density.
Change in prevalence and antibiotic resistance of Enterococcus species isolated from blood cultures over an 8-year period

The enterococci have emerged as a major cause of nosocomial bacteremia due in part to increasing resistance to antimicrobial therapy (1, 4, 7, 10, 11). To determine whether a shift in the prevalence of Enterococcus species was associated with an increase in antimicrobial resistance, we reviewed all enterococcal isolates from cultures of blood collected from January 1988 through December 1995. Isolates were identified by conventional biochemical assays and assessed for susceptibilities to ampicillin, vancomycin, and high levels of gentamicin and streptomycin by using an agar dilution procedure according to the recommendations of the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) (3, 5, 6). Resistance to ampicillin and to vancomycin was verified by the NCCLS broth macrodilution method. Beta-lactamase production was evaluated by the chromogenic cephalosporin (nitrocefin) disc method (BBL Microbiology, Cockeysville, Md.). (This work was presented in part at the 95th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, Washington, D.C., 21 to 25 May 1995.) A total of 419 consecutive Enterococcus isolates from individual patients were studied. As shown in Table 1, the percentage of Enterococcus faecalis isolates per total number of enterococci isolated decreased significantly from 83.9% in 1988 and 1989 to 58.1% in 1994 and 1995 (P 5 0.001). In the same time period, the percentage of E. faecium isolates increased significantly from 12.9% of total isolates to 36.3% (P 5 0.001) while the number of other Enterococcus species remained stable. The frequency of antibiotic resistance for both E. faecium and E. faecalis increased significantly during the time period studied (P # 0.001). For E. faecalis, the highest percent increase in resistance was to gentamicin (2.6 to 36.1%, P , 0.001), followed by streptomycin (7.7 to 20.8%, P 5 0.020). Ampicillin resistance in this species was rare, and no vancomycin resistance was detected. In contrast, the greatest increase in resistance for E. faecium was to ampicillin (16.7 to 75.6%, P 5 0.001), followed by gentamicin (0 to 28.9%, P 5 0.001), vancomycin (0 to 23.2%, P 5 0.011), and streptomycin
Teleseismic migration with dual bootstrap stack

S U M M A R Y A recently developed stacking scheme called dual bootstrap stack (DBS) is applied to teleseismic migration, using deep earthquakes in South America as sources and USArray as receivers. Built with statistical tests for signal significance and coherence, DBS can achieve a clean separation of signal and noise, and unlike conventional non-linear stacks such as Nth-root stack (NRS) and phase-weighted stack (PWS), it can recover signals even when the signal-to-noise ratio is lower than unity. Migration results with DBS are compared with those with linear stack, NRS and PWS, and DBS-based migration is shown to be able to detect weak, smallscale scatterers that cannot be imaged by NRS and PWS and cannot be confidently identified by linear stack. Based on migration results reproducible among multiple data sets, a number of small-scale scatterers are suggested to exist in the top 400 km and the bottom 1500 km of the mantle in the study region. Though being time-consuming, teleseismic migration with DBS is suggested to be a promising tool to map out a variety of hitherto undetected small-scale heterogeneities in the mantle.
The impact of 12 weeks walking football on health and fitness in males over 50 years of age

Aim To describe and characterise anthropometrical and fitness changes following a 12-week walking football programme in individuals over the age of 50 years. Methods Following ethical approval, 10 male participants (mean (SD): age 66 (7) years) with a range of comorbidities completed a 12-week walking football programme, consisting of a single 2 h training session each week. Body mass, fat mass, fat free mass, maximal oxygen consumption, maximal heart rate, exercise time to exhaustion and isometric hand-grip strength, were assessed at baseline and immediately following the intervention. Week-0–12 intervention differences were determined using means (95% CIs) and t tests; effect sizes were calculated using Cohen's d (0.2 small, 0.5 medium, 0.8 large). Results 12 weeks walking football significantly reduced body fat mass (week 0, 27.4 (9.0) kg versus week 12, 24.4 (8.9) kg, p=<0.05, d=1.0) and reduced percentage body fat (week 0, 30.3 (8.2) % versus week 12, 27.5 (8.5) %, p=<0.05, d=1.0). A significant increase in time to volitional exhaustion during increamental exercise (week 0, 545 (102) s versus week 12, 603 (102) s, p=<0.05, d=0.7) was observed without any change in peak blood lactate. Non-significant differences with medium effect sizes were seen for a reduction whole body mass, increase in lean body mass and a reduction in body mass index. Conclusions This investigation suggests the potential efficacy of walking football as a public health intervention, even in populations presenting a range of comorbidities, with future research investigating its move to scale.
Design and Evaluation of a Parallel Invocation Protocol for Transactional Applications over the Web

Edge computing is a powerful tool to face the challenging performance requirements of modern Internet applications. By replicating applications' data and logic across a large number of geographically distributed servers, edge computing platforms allow to achieve significant enhancements of the proximity between clients and contents, and of the system scalability. These platforms reveal highly effective when handling requests entailing read-only access to the application data, as these requests can be autonomously served by some edge server typically located closer to the client than the origin site. However, in contexts where end users can trigger transactional manipulations of the application state (e.g., e-Commerce, auctions or financial applications), the corresponding update requests typically need to be redirected to the origin transactional data sources, thus, nullifying any performance benefit arising from data replication and client proximity. To cope with this issue, in this paper, we present a parallel invocation protocol, which exploits the path-diversity along the end-to-end interaction toward the origin sites by concurrently routing transactional requests toward multiple-edge servers. Request processing is finally carried out by a single-edge server, adaptively selected as the most responsive one depending on current system conditions. The proposed edge server selection scheme does not require coordination among (geographically distributed) edge server instances, thus, being very light and scalable. The benefits from our protocol in terms of both reduced and more predictable end-to-end latency are quantified via an extended simulation study.
Insulator Pollution Performance at High Altitude: Major Trends

A survey of the data available from the literature was conducted in order to assess major trends in insulator performance with altitude. The literature comprised tests on individual insulator strings both under natural and artificial conditions along with actual live-in performance. The major trends reported here suggest a pressure dependence (p/po)0.35 for DC and (p/po)0.5 for AC, of V50 for standard polluted insulators at altitudes lower than about 4 km (p ~ 0.6 atm). These pressure dependences impose a derating of the relative performance of leakage path length or flashover voltage with altitude, namely 6%/ km for AC, 5%/ km for positive DC and 4%/ km for negative DC applied voltages. Dielectric breakdown, in contrast, imposes a 10.5%/ km degradation of insulating air gaps with altitude.
Combining gradient histograms using orientation tensors for human action recognition

We present a method for human action recognition based on the combination of Histograms of Gradients into orientation tensors. It uses only information from HOG3D: no features or points of interest are extracted. The resulting raw histograms obtained per frame are combined into an orientation tensor, making it a simple, fast to compute and effective global descriptor. The addition of new videos and/or new action cathegories does not require any recomputation or changes to the previously computed descriptors. Our method reaches 92.01% of recognition rate with KTH, comparable to the best local approaches. For the Hollywood2 dataset, our recognition rate is lower than local approaches but is fairly competitive, suitable when the dataset is frequently updated or the time response is a major application issue.
Seeing the Same Words Differently: The Time Course of Automaticity and Top–Down Intention in Reading

We investigated how linguistic intention affects the time course of visual word recognition by comparing the brain's electrophysiological response to a word's lexical frequency, a well-established psycholinguistic marker of lexical access, when participants actively retrieve the meaning of the written input (semantic categorization) versus a situation where no language processing is necessary (ink color categorization). In the semantic task, the ERPs elicited by high-frequency words started to diverge from those elicited by low-frequency words as early as 120 msec after stimulus onset. On the other hand, when categorizing the colored font of the very same words in the color task, word frequency did not modulate ERPs until some 100 msec later (220 msec poststimulus onset) and did so for a shorter period and with a smaller scalp distribution. The results demonstrate that, although written words indeed elicit automatic recognition processes in the brain, the speed and quality of lexical processing critically depends on the top–down intention to engage in a linguistic task.
No Midpregnancy Fall in Diastolic Blood Pressure in Women With a Low Educational Level: The Generation R Study

Low socioeconomic status has been associated with preeclampsia. The underlying mechanism, however, is unknown. Preeclampsia is associated with relatively high blood pressure levels in early pregnancy and with an absent midpregnancy fall in blood pressure. At present, little is known about the associations among socioeconomic status, blood pressure level in early pregnancy, blood pressure change during pregnancy, and preeclampsia. We studied these associations in 3142 pregnant women participating in a population-based cohort study. Maternal educational level (high, midhigh, midlow, and low) was used as an indicator of socioeconomic status. Systolic and diastolic blood pressure was measured in early, mid-, and late pregnancy. Relative to women with high education, those with low and midlow education had higher mean systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels in early pregnancy; this was explained largely by a higher prepregnancy body mass index. Although women with high, midhigh, and midlow education had a significant midpregnancy fall in diastolic blood pressure, those with low education did not (change from early to midpregnancy: −0.38 mm Hg; 95% CI: −1.33 to 0.58). The latter could not be explained by prepregnancy body mass index, smoking, or alcohol consumption during pregnancy. The absence of a midpregnancy fall also tended to be related to the development of preeclampsia, especially among women with a low educational level (OR: 3.8; 95% CI: 0.80 to 18.19). The absence of a midpregnancy fall in diastolic blood pressure in women with a low education level may be a sign of endothelial dysfunction that is manifested during pregnancy. This might partly explain these women’s susceptibility to preeclampsia.
Effects of E-Retailer Provided Information and Social Influence on Purchase Decisions

We investigate drivers of consumer purchase decisions when shopping experience goods online, using the context of expertise literature in business topics. Based on 60,000 books from Amazon.de, we test hypotheses on the effects of (1) “brand” characteristics (author’s background, reputation, experience, demographics), (2) product characteristics (publisher, price, page count, reading excerpts, cover), and (3) social influence in terms of observational learning (OL), word-of-mouth (WOM), and expert opinions, on sales. The results demonstrate that online demand depends on a mix of these factors; yet, sales are largely determined by brand characteristics. In fact, the market’s perception of the author alters consumers’ price sensitivity and renders observable product characteristics insignificant; social influence amplifies this effect. These issues are underexplored since studies often focus on WOM effects without considering brand and product characteristics, and the relative effects of social influence, on purchase decisions. The paper shows how to target online demand more effectively.
Empathy and universal values explicated by the empathy-altruism hypothesis

ABSTRACT Research reports that empathy is on the decline in present-day society, together with an increasing trend in self-enhancing values. Based on the empathy-altruism hypothesis, we investigated whether these constructs are interlinked by analyzing the relationships between emotional and cognitive empathy and 10 universal values. In the first study, using a middle-aged U.S. sample, the results showed that empathy was strongly and positively related to altruistic values and negatively to self-enhancing values in a pattern that aligned with the empathy-altruism hypothesis. In a second confirmation study, these findings were replicated and extended, while also controlling for the Big Five personality traits, to discount that empathy is only captured by basic personality. Only emotional empathy, not cognitive empathy, accounted for up to 18% additional variance in altruistic values, which further confirmed the emphasis on feelings, as postulated by the empathy-altruism hypothesis.
Oral habits in relation to dental caries and gingival health among children attending the dental hospital

Background: The purpose of this study was to detect "Bad oral habits" involving finger sucking, mouth breathing, tongue thrusting and lip sucking among children attending the Department of Pedodontic, College of Dentistry for the first time. These habits were studied in relation to dental caries and gingival health condition. Material and method: Out of 500 children who attended the Department of Pedodontic for first time, (35) children were found to have oral habits, 20 males and 15 females with an age range of 5-12 years. Those were having oral habit as finger sucking; mouth breathing, tongue thrust and lip sucking were examined for their dental and gingival health by using dmft / DMFT index, PLI and GI indices. Result: This study showed that children with bad oral habits constituted only (7%) of total examined subjects. The predominant type of bad oral habits was finger sucking (42.8%). A positive relation between dental caries, plaque and gingival indices and bad oral habits was found. Conclusion: Bad oral habits may act as a predisposing factor for dental caries and gingivitis
Both IL-1β and TNF-α Regulate NGAL Expression in Polymorphonuclear Granulocytes of Chronic Hemodialysis Patients

Background. NGAL is involved in modulation of the inflammatory response and is found in the sera of uremic patients. We investigated whether hemodiafiltration (HDF) could influence the ability of polymorphonuclear granulocytes (PMGs) to release NGAL. The involvement of interleukin- (IL-)1β and tumor necrosis factor- (TNF-)α on NGAL release was evaluated. Methods. We studied end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients at the start of dialysis (Pre-HDF) and at the end of treatment (Post-HDF) and 18 healthy subjects (HSs). Peripheral venous blood was taken from HDF patients at the start of dialysis and at the end of treatment. Results. PMGs obtained from ESRD patients were hyporesponsive to LPS treatment, with respect to PMG from HS. IL-1β and TNF-α produced by PMG from post-HDF patients were higher than those obtained by PMG from pre-HDF. Neutralization of IL-1β, but not of TNF-α, determined a clear-cut production of NGAL in PMG from healthy donors. On the contrary, specific induction of NGAL in PMG from uremic patients was dependent on the presence in supernatants of IL-1β and TNF-α. Conclusion. Our data demonstrate that in PMG from healthy subjects, NGAL production was supported solely by IL-1β, whereas in PMG from HDF patients, NGAL production was supported by IL-1β, TNF-α.
Quantitative Analysis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-associated Coronavirus-infected Cells Using Proteomic Approaches

We present the first proteomic analysis on the cellular response to severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) infection. The differential proteomes of Vero E6 cells with and without infection of the SARS-CoV were resolved and quantitated with two-dimensional differential gel electrophoresis followed by ESI-MS/MS identification. Moreover isotope-coded affinity tag technology coupled with two-dimensional LC-MS/MS were also applied to the differential proteins of infected cells. By combining these two complementary strategies, 355 unique proteins were identified and quantitated with 186 of them differentially expressed (at least 1.5-fold quantitative alteration) between infected and uninfected Vero E6 cells. The implication for cellular responses to virus infection was analyzed in depth according to the proteomic results. Thus, the present work provides large scale protein-related information to investigate the mechanism of SARS-CoV infection and pathogenesis.