Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pediatric rheumatic disease in the intensive care unit: Lessons learned from 15 years of experience in a tertiary care pediatric hospital

Objective: This study describes the 15-yr experience of a large urban tertiary care children’s hospital in treating critically ill patients with pediatric rheumatic diseases. Design: Retrospective case series. Setting: Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, a large urban tertiary care children’s hospital. Patients: All patients with pediatric rheumatic diseases admitted to the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles pediatric intensive care unit from January 1995 to July 2009. Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: An internal database and medical records were reviewed for demographics, diagnoses, treatments, organ dysfunction, interventions, infections, and outcomes. Standardized mortality ratio was calculated based on Pediatric Risk of Mortality III estimated mortality. Factors associated with mortality were identified by univariate analyses. Ninety patients with 122 total admissions were identified. The majority of patients were Hispanic (63%), female (73%), and had systemic lupus erythematosus (62%). Pediatric rheumatic disease-related complications (50%) were the most common reason for admission; 32% of admissions involved multiorgan dysfunction. Eighteen admissions (15%) resulted in mortality. Deaths were most commonly attributed to combined infection and active rheumatic disease (50%), infection only (22%), rheumatic disease only (11%), or other causes (17%). In 30 (25%) admissions, a new rheumatologic diagnosis was established. Standardized mortality ratio was 0.72 (95% confidence interval 0.38-1.25) for pediatric rheumatic disease patients compared to 0.87 (95% confidence interval 0.79-0.96) for all pediatric intensive care unit patients. Factors associated with mortality included use of mechanical ventilation, vasopressors, and renal replacement (continuous venovenous hemodialysis) (all p < .05). Conclusions: Pediatric rheumatic disease-related complications were the principal cause of pediatric intensive care unit admission. Deaths occurred most often from severe infections in patients with active rheumatic disease. Pediatric rheumatology patients admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit had outcomes similar to the global pediatric intensive care unit population when adjusted for severity of illness.
Probabilistic relational reasoning for differential privacy

Differential privacy is a notion of confidentiality that protects the privacy of individuals while allowing useful computations on their private data. Deriving differential privacy guarantees for real programs is a difficult and error-prone task that calls for principled approaches and tool support. Approaches based on linear types and static analysis have recently emerged; however, an increasing number of programs achieve privacy using techniques that cannot be analyzed by these approaches. Examples include programs that aim for weaker, approximate differential privacy guarantees, programs that use the Exponential mechanism, and randomized programs that achieve differential privacy without using any standard mechanism. Providing support for reasoning about the privacy of such programs has been an open problem. We report on CertiPriv, a machine-checked framework for reasoning about differential privacy built on top of the Coq proof assistant. The central component of CertiPriv is a quantitative extension of a probabilistic relational Hoare logic that enables one to derive differential privacy guarantees for programs from first principles. We demonstrate the expressiveness of CertiPriv using a number of examples whose formal analysis is out of the reach of previous techniques. In particular, we provide the first machine-checked proofs of correctness of the Laplacian and Exponential mechanisms and of the privacy of randomized and streaming algorithms from the recent literature.
Effect on Adherence to Nicotine Replacement Therapy of Informing Smokers Their Dose Is Determined by Their Genotype: A Randomised Controlled Trial

Background The behavioural impact of pharmacogenomics is untested. We tested two hypotheses concerning the behavioural impact of informing smokers their oral dose of NRT is tailored to analysis of DNA. Methods and Findings We conducted an RCT with smokers in smoking cessation clinics (N = 633). In combination with NRT patch, participants were informed that their doses of oral NRT were based either on their mu-opioid receptor (OPRM1) genotype, or their nicotine dependence questionnaire score (phenotype). The proportion of prescribed NRT consumed in the first 28 days following quitting was not significantly different between groups: (68.5% of prescribed NRT consumed in genotype vs 63.6%, phenotype group, difference = 5.0%, 95% CI −0.9,10.8, p = 0.098). Motivation to make another quit attempt among those (n = 331) not abstinent at six months was not significantly different between groups (p = 0.23). Abstinence at 28 days was not different between groups (p = 0.67); at six months was greater in genotype than phenotype group (13.7% vs 7.9%, difference = 5.8%, 95% CI 1.0,10.7, p = 0.018). Conclusions Informing smokers their oral dose of NRT was tailored to genotype not phenotype had a small, statistically non-significant effect on 28-day adherence to NRT. Among those still smoking at six months, there was no evidence that saying NRT was tailored to genotype adversely affected motivation to make another quit attempt. Higher abstinence rate at six months in the genotype arm requires investigation. Trial registration Controlled-Trials.com ISRCTN14352545.
Clinical benefits and cost‐effectiveness of allogeneic red‐blood‐cell transfusion in severe symptomatic anaemia

Background It is well known that blood transfusion is life‐saving, but also that it carries a serious risk of transmitting viral infections. Introduction of new methods of testing for transmissible diseases, blood banking and dispatch regulations has considerably increased the cost of blood products. However, the clinical benefits and cost‐effectiveness of allogeneic red‐blood‐cell (ARBC) transfusion remain assumed yet undetermined. We assessed the clinical benefits and cost‐effectiveness of ARBC transfusion in severe anaemia.
Slowness and Sparseness Lead to Place, Head-Direction, and Spatial-View Cells

We present a model for the self-organized formation of place cells, head-direction cells, and spatial-view cells in the hippocampal formation based on unsupervised learning on quasi-natural visual stimuli. The model comprises a hierarchy of Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) nodes, which were recently shown to reproduce many properties of complex cells in the early visual system [1]. The system extracts a distributed grid-like representation of position and orientation, which is transcoded into a localized place-field, head-direction, or view representation, by sparse coding. The type of cells that develops depends solely on the relevant input statistics, i.e., the movement pattern of the simulated animal. The numerical simulations are complemented by a mathematical analysis that allows us to accurately predict the output of the top SFA layer.
PROPERTIES OF THE CAUSATIVE AGENT OF A CHICKEN TUMOR

1. The tumor-producing fraction, isolated from Chicken Tumor I by means of differential centrifugation at high speed, has been investigated as regards its power to absorb ultraviolet light. A characteristic absorption spectrum was found, with a maximum at λ2575. The absorbing power of the material in that region was largely due to the presence of nucleic acid, or of a closely related compound. 2. Inactivation of the purified tumor fraction with ultraviolet light depressed the absorbing power of the material, especially in the region of 2600–2500Å. These changes were those which nucleic acid would present under the same conditions. 3. Inactivation of the tumor agent with acid or alkali was accompanied by decomposition of the tumor nucleoprotein and passage of free nucleic acid into solution. 4. Partial or complete inactivation of the tumor agent by heat, at 50° or 65deg;C. , was attended by liberation of nucleic acid of low molecular weight. 5. The parallelism between tumor-producing activity and the integrity of the tumor ribonucleoprotein suggests that the nucleoprotein may be an essential part of the active principle.
An Equivalence Between Relational Database Dependencies and a Fragment of Propositional Logic

It is known that there is an eqmvalence between functional dependencies m a relatmonal database and a certain fragment of proposmonal logic Thins eqmvalence is extended to include both functional and multivalued dependencmes. Thus, for each dependency there is a corresponding statement m proposmonal logic. It ms then shown that a dependency (funcuonal or multivalued) is a consequence of a set of dependencies ff and only ff the corresponding proposiuonal statement ~s a consequence of the corresponding set of proposmonal statements. Examples are given to show that these techniques are valuable mn provmdmg much shorter proofs of theorems about dependencies than have been obtained by more tradmonal means It is shown that this eqmvalence cannot be extended to include either join dependencies or embedded multmvalued dependencies.
Pathophysiology of Cardiogenic Shock: Quantification of Myocardial Necrosis, Clinical, Pathologic and Electrocardiographic Correlations

Clinical and pathologic data were correlated in 22 patients with cardiogenic shock and 10 “control’ patients who died suddenly after infarction without shock. A pathologic technique of ventricular mapping allowed quantification of recent as well as old infarction. Total left ventricular (LV) damage averaged 51% (range 35-68%) in the shock patients and 23% (range 14-31%) in the control group. Shock was associated with recent infarction (all 22 patients), old infarction (21 patients) and extension of infarction (18 patients). Extension, often in a subepicardial manner, averaged 6% of LV mass (range 3-10%) in 18 patients with shock; it preceded shock in four, coincided with the onset of shock in six, and followed shock in seven patients with shock. In contrast, small extensions averaging 2% of LV mass were found in three, and multiple recent infarctions in two control patients. Although progressive myocardial damage was a common pathologic finding, it was infrequently recognized clinically. The electrocardiogram reflected evidence of recent infarction in 56%, old infarction in 31%, and extension in only 30% of patients. These data suggest that appropriate early therapeutic intervention might limit myocardial damage by preventing extension or reinfarction. Since shock was best correlated with total LV damage, such limitation of infarction might reduce the incidence and mortality of cardiogenic shock.
EuroSCORE II and the importance of a local model, InsCor and the future SP-SCORE

Introduction The most widely used model for predicting mortality in cardiac surgery was recently remodeled, but the doubts regarding its methodology and development have been reported. Objective The aim of this study was to assess the performance of the EuroSCORE II to predict mortality in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafts or valve surgery at our institution. Methods One thousand consecutive patients operated on coronary artery bypass grafts or valve surgery, between October 2008 and July 2009, were analyzed. The outcome of interest was in-hospital mortality. Calibration was performed by correlation between observed and expected mortality by Hosmer Lemeshow. Discrimination was calculated by the area under the ROC curve. The performance of the EuroSCORE II was compared with the EuroSCORE and InsCor (local model). Results In calibration, the Hosmer Lemeshow test was inappropriate for the EuroSCORE II (P=0.0003) and good for the EuroSCORE (P=0.593) and InsCor (P=0.184). However, the discrimination, the area under the ROC curve for EuroSCORE II was 0.81 [95% CI (0.76 to 0.85), P<0.001], for the EuroSCORE was 0.81 [95% CI (0.77 to 0.86), P<0.001] and for InsCor was 0.79 [95% CI (0.74-0.83), P<0.001] showing up properly for all. Conclusion The EuroSCORE II became more complex and resemblance to the international literature poorly calibrated to predict mortality in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafts or valve surgery at our institution. These data emphasize the importance of the local model.
Total oil w ter content cco nts for augmented ABA leaf concentration and stomatal regulation of split-rooted apple trees during heterogeneous soil drying

In mammals, cadmium is widely considered as a non-genotoxic carcinogen acting through a methylation-dependent epigenetic mechanism. Here, the effects of Cd treatment on the DNA methylation patten are examined together with its effect on chromatin reconfiguration in Posidonia oceanica. DNA methylation level and pattern were analysed in actively growing organs, under short(6 h) and long(2 d or 4 d) term and low (10 mM) and high (50 mM) doses of Cd, through a Methylation-Sensitive Amplification Polymorphism technique and an immunocytological approach, respectively. The expression of one member of the CHROMOMETHYLASE (CMT) family, a DNA methyltransferase, was also assessed by qRT-PCR. Nuclear chromatin ultrastructure was investigated by transmission electron microscopy. Cd treatment induced a DNA hypermethylation, as well as an up-regulation of CMT, indicating that de novo methylation did indeed occur. Moreover, a high dose of Cd led to a progressive heterochromatinization of interphase nuclei and apoptotic figures were also observed after long-term treatment. The data demonstrate that Cd perturbs the DNA methylation status through the involvement of a specific methyltransferase. Such changes are linked to nuclear chromatin reconfiguration likely to establish a new balance of expressed/repressed chromatin. Overall, the data show an epigenetic basis to the mechanism underlying Cd toxicity in plants.
Path ORAM: an extremely simple oblivious RAM protocol

We present Path ORAM, an extremely simple Oblivious RAM protocol with a small amount of client storage. Partly due to its simplicity, Path ORAM is the most practical ORAM scheme for small client storage known to date. We formally prove that Path ORAM requires log^2 N / log X bandwidth overhead for block size B = X log N. For block sizes bigger than Omega(log^2 N), Path ORAM is asymptotically better than the best known ORAM scheme with small client storage. Due to its practicality, Path ORAM has been adopted in the design of secure processors since its proposal.
Patterns of Selection in Anti-Malarial Immune Genes in Malaria Vectors: Evidence for Adaptive Evolution in LRIM1 in Anopheles arabiensis

Background Co-evolution between Plasmodium species and its vectors may result in adaptive changes in genes that are crucial components of the vector's defense against the pathogen. By analyzing which genes show evidence of positive selection in malaria vectors, but not in closely related non-vectors, we can identify genes that are crucial for the mosquito's resistance against Plasmodium. Methodology/Principle Findings We investigated genetic variation of three anti-malarial genes; CEC1, GNBP-B1 and LRIM1, in both vector and non-vector species of the Anopheles gambiae complex. Whereas little protein differentiation was observed between species in CEC1 and GNBP-B1, McDonald-Kreitman and maximum likelihood tests of positive selection show that LRIM1 underwent adaptive evolution in a primary malaria vector; An. arabiensis. In particular, two adjacent codons show clear signs of adaptation by having accumulated three out of four replacement substitutions. Furthermore, our data indicate that this LRIM1 allele has introgressed from An. arabiensis into the other main malaria vector An. gambiae. Conclusions/Significance Although no evidence exists to link the adaptation of LRIM1 to P. falciparum infection, an adaptive response of a known anti-malarial gene in a primary malaria vector is intriguing, and may suggest that this gene could play a role in Plasmodium resistance in An. arabiensis. If so, our data also predicts that LRIM1 alleles in An. gambiae vary in their level of resistance against P. falciparum.
Inter-Business Trading Structure Model with Agent-Based Simulation and Its Application to Real Data

: This paper proposes an inter-business trading structure model with agent-based simulation. The proposed model can deal with the two kinds of dynamic changes: (1) supply and demand volumes and the resulting production lead time, and (2) the combination of both decentralized and centralized inter-business structure. The model is applied to analyzing recent rapid market changes of Japanese ﬁrm data. The data is taken from the TDB (Teikoku Databank) business trading database, which contains ﬁrm information with four million trading items, business volumes and relations over many years. Using this information, we focused on changes in the trading of ﬁrms involved in the Japanese software industry. The experimental results applied to real data suggest that the dynamic structural changes determined by the model have a critical role in various cases of performance of Japanese software industry ﬁrms in the TDB database.
gprof: a call graph execution profiler

We extended the UNIX® system's profiler by gathering arcs in the call graph of a program. Here is it 20 years later and this profiler is still in daily use. Why is that? It's not because there aren't well-known areas for improvement.Large complex programs are composed of many small routines that implement abstractions for the routines that call them. To be useful, an execution profiler must attribute execution time in a way that is significant for the logical structure of a program as well as for its textual decomposition. This data must then be displayed to the user in a convenient and informative way. The gprof profiler accounts for the running time of called routines in the running time of the routines that call them. The design and use of this profiler is described.
DNA barcoding uncovers cryptic diversity in 50% of deep-sea Antarctic polychaetes

The Antarctic marine environment is a diverse ecosystem currently experiencing some of the fastest rates of climatic change. The documentation and management of these changes requires accurate estimates of species diversity. Recently, there has been an increased recognition of the abundance and importance of cryptic species, i.e. those that are morphologically identical but genetically distinct. This article presents the largest genetic investigation into the prevalence of cryptic polychaete species within the deep Antarctic benthos to date. We uncover cryptic diversity in 50% of the 15 morphospecies targeted through the comparison of mitochondrial DNA sequences, as well as 10 previously overlooked morphospecies, increasing the total species richness in the sample by 233%. Our ability to describe universal rules for the detection of cryptic species within polychaetes, or normalization to expected number of species based on genetic data is prevented by taxon-specific differences in phylogenetic outputs and genetic variation between and within potential cryptic species. These data provide the foundation for biogeographic and functional analysis that will provide insight into the drivers of species diversity and its role in ecosystem function.
CVM-Net: Cross-View Matching Network for Image-Based Ground-to-Aerial Geo-Localization

The problem of localization on a geo-referenced aerial/satellite map given a query ground view image remains challenging due to the drastic change in viewpoint that causes traditional image descriptors based matching to fail. We leverage on the recent success of deep learning to propose the CVM-Net for the cross-view image-based ground-to-aerial geo-localization task. Specifically, our network is based on the Siamese architecture to do metric learning for the matching task. We first use the fully convolutional layers to extract local image features, which are then encoded into global image descriptors using the powerful NetVLAD. As part of the training procedure, we also introduce a simple yet effective weighted soft margin ranking loss function that not only speeds up the training convergence but also improves the final matching accuracy. Experimental results show that our proposed network significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on two existing benchmarking datasets. Our code and models are publicly available on the project website1.
Shoreline Extraction from RADARSAT-2 Intensity Imagery Using a Narrow Band Level Set Segmentation Approach

This paper presents a semi-automated method for shoreline extraction from RADARSAT-2 intensity imagery. First, a preprocessing is applied to enhance the contrast of the SAR image. Second, thresholding combined with morphological filtering is employed to segment the SAR image into the land and the sea. Third, narrow band level set segmentation is implemented to refine the segmentation result. In the last step, morphological filters are utilized to eliminate any remaining spurious segments. Boundaries between the land and the sea are delineated into shorelines based on the segmentation result. Experiment on RADARSAT-2 intensity images demonstrates that the proposed method is promising.
The effect of Pseudo-nitzschia seriata on grazing and fecundity of Calanus finmarchicus and Calanus glacialis

This study investigates whether feeding on the domoic acid (DA)-producing diatom Pseudo-nitzschia seriata affects the faecal pellet (FP) production (proxy for grazing) and fecundity of Calanus finmarchicus and Calanus glacialis. Female copepods were fed a saturating concentration of food (400 µg C L−1) in two combinations (i) natural phytoplankton spiked with 50% P. seriata and (ii) only the non-toxic phytoplankton community. The copepods ingested DA, as illustrated by DA accumulation in their FPs, and transferred a share of DA to their eggs and body tissue. DA was mainly excreted through FPs in both species. Compared with C. finmarchicus, C. glacialis accumulated substantially more DA in its body tissue. For both species, egg production and hatching success were unaffected by grazing on the toxic diatom. This suggests that feeding on DA-containing P. seriata does not affect copepod fecundity, despite increasing DA concentrations of P. seriata during the experiment.
Synthesis of nanocrystals and morphology control of hydrothermally prepared LiFePO4

Lithium transition metal phosphate olivines such as LiFePO4 have been recognized as very promising electrodes for lithium-ion batteries because of their energy storage capacity combined with electrochemical and thermal stability. A key issue in these materials is to determine the synthetic conditions for optimum control of particle size and morphology, and ideally to find those that result in nanocrystalline products. Here, we report a full study that examines the synthesis of the material via hydrothermal methods to give single phase nanocrystalline materials for LiFePO4 and LiMnPO4, and their solid solutions with Mg2+. A reaction mechanism is proposed. Variation of the synthesis parameters showed that increasing reactant concentration strongly favours the formation of nanocrystalline products, but as less defect-free materials are formed at temperatures above 180 °C, and ideally above 200 °C, control of nucleation and growth can (and should) also be effected using polymeric or surfactant additives. The nature of the precursor and carbon-containing additives in the autoclave also have profound effects on morphology and the electrochemical properties.