Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hydrogeological study of the Malenščica karst spring (SW Slovenia) by means of a time series analysis

Time series analyses are often used for the investigation of karst aquifers, but are only rarely employed in a way of using a large number of spatially distributed time series. Furthermore, only a small number of applications employ other types of hydrologi­cal data apart from rainfall, water level and discharge. The pre­sented study of the Malenscica karst spring aquifer underlines the usefulness of the simultaneous auto- and cross-correlation analysis of daily and hourly hydrological data sets, including discharge, water level, temperature, electrical conductivity and rainfall on a regional scale. The results of the autocorre­lation analysis show that the storage capacity of the spring is moderate, but this does not indicate that the system, whichis characterized by prevailing conduit porosity, is less intensively karstified. This suggests that well-karstified systems of a more complex structure can have higher memory effects than less complex systems. The results of the cross-correlation analysis show that karst springs and watercourses in the investigated area react instantly and simultaneously to rather homogeneous precipitation, yet withdifferent intensity. In suchcases a cross-correlation analysis between rainfall or ponors as inputs and springs as outputs does not provide sufficient information on the hydrogeological functioning of the system, whereas the results of a cross-correlation analysis of electrical conductivity data sets provide valuable information on its functioning and can be easily compared to those obtained by tracer tests. On the other hand, the applicability of a temperature time series in suchcomplex karst systems is limited. A comparative analysis of the results of the time series analyses performed in succes­sive hydrological years has proven that the selection of the hy­drological year can have strong effects on the results of a time series analysis.
Effect of Wrapping Materials and Cold Storage Durations on Water Content of Nectarine

Three wrapping materials (news paper + straw, kraft paper and kraft paper + straw) and five cold storage durations (0, 8, 16, 24 and 32-day) were investigated for water content of nectarine (cv. Moghan) during cold storage at -1°C temperature and 98% relative humidity. The experiment was laid out in Factorial Completely Randomized Design (FCRD) with four replications for each one of factors. The data collected were subjected to Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Duncan's Multiple Range Test (DMRT) at 1% probability was performed to compare the means of different treatments. The statistical results of the study indicated that wrapping material and cold storage duration significantly (P = 0.01) affected water content. Results of the study also indicated that water content decreased by increasing cold storage duration. In addition, kraft paper + straw was the best wrapping materials for conserving water content.
Preliminary Case Studies of a New Processed Cellular Allograft Derived from Umbilical Cord Blood (UCB) in Challenging Spinal Fusion Patients

Case histories in unique patient populations can be a useful bridge before larger more comprehensive studies can be undertaken. A new fluid allograft product (BioBurst, Burst Biologics, Boise, ID) has performed beyond expectations in the cases presented here, with rapid consolidation of the bone graft and greater than expected bone volume. These early highly encouraging results in challenging patients show the potential of BioBurst Fluid as a valuable adjunct for spinal fusion and justify further research and clinical studies.
False News On Social Media: A Data-Driven Survey

In the past few years, the research community has dedicated growing interest to the issue of false news circulating on social networks. The widespread attention on detecting and characterizing deceptive information has been motivated by considerable political and social backlashes in the real world. As a matter of fact, social media platforms exhibit peculiar characteristics, with respect to traditional news outlets, which have been particularly favorable to the proliferation of false news. They also present unique challenges for all kind of potential interventions on the subject. As this issue becomes of global concern, it is also gaining more attention in academia. The aim of this survey is to offer a comprehensive study on the recent advances in terms of detection, characterization and mitigation of false news that propagate on social media, as well as the challenges and the open questions that await future research on the field. We use a data-driven approach, focusing on a classification of the features that are used in each study to characterize false information and on the datasets used for instructing classification methods. At the end of the survey, we highlight emerging approaches that look most promising for addressing false news.
Novel Approaches to PET Imaging Neuroinflammation

ion step was not rate limiting. A possible explanation lies in the observation that our studies actually detect the final metabolites, the radioactive N-[C]-methylpyridinone (in vivo PET) or the fluorescent coumarin (in vitro assays; figure 3.5) that form after a second step of hydrolysis of the intermediate 1-methyl-4-phenoxy-2,3-dihydropyridinium species (in contrast, the in vitro kinetic studies of deuterated MPTP measured the dihydropyridinium species). Thus, it is possible that the hydrolysis step was partially rate limiting and obscuring any effect from the deuterium substitution, an example of a masked kinetic isotope effect. The enzymatic mechanism of MAO has been investigated thoroughly; however, the mode of C-H bond breakage is not entirely agreed upon. The two main mechanistic theories involve either hydrogen abstraction or hydride transfer, which differ in their respective intermediates, but both claim that this step is rate limiting. Silverman and coworkers spent the better part of two decades gathering evidence against a possible radical mechanism and for the hydrogen abstraction mechanism. Investigating inhibitors of the enzyme supported the presence of a covalently bound intermediate to the FAD cofactor, indicating a hydrogen atom transfer. This mechanism was further strengthened by crystallographic evidence of the covalently bound inhibitor, deprenyl, in 2002. The Edmondson, Castagnoli, 42-45 and Heikkila 46-48 groups also greatly contributed to the investigation into the MAO mechanism. Similar to Silverman’s kinetic experiments, all of these groups were able to demonstrate primary kinetic isotope effects upon deuterium substitution at the carbon alpha to the monoamine (figure 3.4, red circle). Regardless of the identity of the C-H bond breakage, hydride or hydrogen atom, there is evidence for this to be 1) rate limiting and 2) highly sensitive to isotopic exchange. 32, 40-41, 43 Our results at face value would indicate that with our substrate, it is not rate limiting. However,
Push the Student to Learn Right: Progressive Gradient Correcting by Meta-learner on Corrupted Labels

While deep networks have strong fitting capability to complex input patterns, they can easily overfit to biased training data with corrupted labels. Sample reweighting strategy is commonly used to alleviate this robust learning issue, through imposing zero or possibly smaller weights to corrupted samples to suppress their negative influence to learning. Current reweighting algorithms, however, need elaborate tuning of additional hyper-parameters or careful designing of complex meta-learner for learning to assign weights on samples. To address these issues, we propose a new meta-learning method with few tuned hyper-parameters and simple structure of a meta-learner (one hidden layer MLP network). Guided by a small amount of unbiased meta-data, the parameters of the proposed meta-learner can be gradually evolved for finely tugging the classifier gradient approaching to the right direction. This learning manner complies with a real teaching progress: A good teacher should more respect the student's own learning manner and help progressively correct his learning bias based on his/her current learning status. Experimental results substantiate the robustness of the new algorithm on corrupted label cases, as well as its stability and efficiency in learning.
Patch-Based Output Space Adversarial Learning for Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation

Glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness. Accurate segmentation of the optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) from fundus images is beneficial to glaucoma screening and diagnosis. Recently, convolutional neural networks demonstrate promising progress in the joint OD and OC segmentation. However, affected by the domain shift among different datasets, deep networks are severely hindered in generalizing across different scanners and institutions. In this paper, we present a novel patch-based output space adversarial learning framework (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>OSAL) to jointly and robustly segment the OD and OC from different fundus image datasets. We first devise a lightweight and efficient segmentation network as a backbone. Considering the specific morphology of OD and OC, a novel morphology-aware segmentation loss is proposed to guide the network to generate accurate and smooth segmentation. Our <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>OSAL framework then exploits unsupervised domain adaptation to address the domain shift challenge by encouraging the segmentation in the target domain to be similar to the source ones. Since the whole-segmentation-based adversarial loss is insufficient to drive the network to capture segmentation details, we further design the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>OSAL in a patch-based fashion to enable fine-grained discrimination on local segmentation details. We extensively evaluate our <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>OSAL framework and demonstrate its effectiveness in improving the segmentation performance on three public retinal fundus image datasets, i.e., Drishti-GS, RIM-ONE-r3, and REFUGE. Furthermore, our <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>OSAL framework achieved the first place in the OD and OC segmentation tasks in the <italic>MICCAI 2018 Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge</italic>.
Fourier and circulant matrices are not rigid

The concept of matrix rigidity was first introduced by Valiant in [12]. Roughly speaking, a matrix is rigid if its rank cannot be reduced significantly by changing a small number of entries. There has been extensive interest in rigid matrices as Valiant showed in [12] that rigidity can be used to prove arithmetic circuit lower bounds. In a surprising result, Alman and Williams showed that the (real valued) Hadamard matrix, which was conjectured to be rigid, is actually not very rigid. This line of work was extended by [3] to a family of matrices related to the Hadamard matrix, but over finite fields. In our work, we take another step in this direction and show that for any abelian group G and function f : G → C, the matrix given by Mxy = f(x --- y) for x, y ∈ G is not rigid. In particular, we get that complex valued Fourier matrices, circulant matrices, and Toeplitz matrices are all not rigid and cannot be used to carry out Valiant's approach to proving circuit lower bounds. This complements a recent result of Goldreich and Tal [5] who showed that Toeplitz matrices are nontrivially rigid (but not enough for Valiant's method). Our work differs from previous non-rigidity results in that those works considered matrices whose underlying group of symmetries was of the form Fnp with p fixed and n tending to infinity, while in the families of matrices we study, the underlying group of symmetries can be any abelian group and, in particular, the cyclic group ZN, which has very different structure. Our results also suggest natural new candidates for rigidity in the form of matrices whose symmetry groups are highly non-abelian. Our proof has four parts. The first extends the results of [1,3] to generalized Hadamard matrices over the complex numbers via a new proof technique. The second part handles the N X N Fourier matrix when N has a particularly nice factorization that allows us to embed smaller copies of (generalized) Hadamard matrices inside of it. The third part uses results from number theory to bootstrap the non-rigidity for these special values of N and extend to all sufficiently large N. The fourth and final part involves using the non-rigidity of the Fourier matrix to show that the group algebra matrix, given by Mxy = f(x --- y) for x, y ∈ G, is not rigid for any function f and abelian group G.
Reflect- and Transmit-Array Antennas for Scalable and Energy-Efficient mmWave Massive MIMO

Hybrid analog-digital architectures are promising candidates for implementing millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems since they enable a considerable reduction of the required number of costly radio frequency (RF) chains by moving some of the signal processing operations into the analog domain. Nevertheless, the analog feed network, comprising RF dividers, combiners, phase shifters, and line connections, of hybrid MIMO architectures is not scalable due to its prohibitively high power consumption for large numbers of transmit antennas. In this paper, we study novel massive MIMO architectures, namely reflect-array (RA) and transmit-array (TA) antennas, which consist of few active antennas (i.e., RF chains) and large numbers of passive antennas. We show that the constraints that the precoders for RA and TA antennas have to meet, differ from those of conventional MIMO architectures. Taking these constraints into account and exploiting the sparsity of mmWave channels, we design two efficient precoders for RA and TA antennas; one based on maximizing the mutual information and one based on approximating the optimal unconstrained digital precoder via the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. Furthermore, in order to fairly compare the performance of RA and TA antennas against conventional fully-digital and hybrid MIMO architectures, we develop a unified power consumption model. Our simulation results show that unlike conventional MIMO architectures, RA and TA antennas are highly energy efficient and fully scalable in terms of the number of transmit antennas. Therefore, RA and TA antennas are candidates for realizing the potential of \textit{massive} MIMO in practice.
Shallow Learning for Fluid Flow Reconstruction with Limited Sensors and Limited Data

In many applications, it is important to reconstruct a fluid flow field, or some other high-dimensional state, from limited measurements and limited data. In this work, we propose a shallow neural network-based learning methodology for such fluid flow reconstruction. Our approach learns an end-to-end mapping between the sensor measurements and the high-dimensional fluid flow field, without any heavy preprocessing on the raw data. No prior knowledge is assumed to be available, and the estimation method is purely data-driven. We demonstrate the performance on three examples in fluid mechanics and oceanography, showing that this modern data-driven approach outperforms traditional modal approximation techniques which are commonly used for flow reconstruction. Not only does the proposed method show superior performance characteristics, it can also produce a comparable level of performance with traditional methods in the area, using significantly fewer sensors. Thus, the mathematical architecture is ideal for emerging global monitoring technologies where measurement data are often limited.
Effect of Erbium Laser on Microtensile Bond Strength of Fissure Sealant in Primary Teeth: An in vitro Study

Background: Laser etching has several advantages as compared with conventional acid etching. However, results of earlier studies on conditioning surfaces with erbium, chromium:yttrium–scandium–gallium–garnet (Er, Cr:YSGG) before application of the fissure sealant have been inconclusive. Aim: The study aimed to evaluate the microtensile strength of resin-based fissure sealant bonded to primary enamel conditioned by Er, Cr:YSGG laser with varying power outputs. Materials and Methods: Fifty sound primary first molars were randomized into the following five groups based on pretreatment choice: Group 1: 3.5 W laser etching + acid etching; Group 2: 2.5 W laser etching + acid etching; Group 3: 3.5 W laser etching with no acid; Group 4: 2.5 W laser etching with no acid and Group 5: acid etching with no laser. Acid etch was performed with 35% orthophosphoric acid for 30 s. Laser etching was performed with Er, Cr:YSGG (2780 nm) laser using G6 tips and 600 μm diameter, 2.5 W or 3.5 W power outputs, pulse duration of 140 μs and a repetition rate of 20 Hz. Sealant was applied on the buccal surface followed by an incremental buildup with composite resin. Microtensile bond strength was assessed and compared among the five groups using one- and two-way ANOVA. Results: There was no statistical difference in the mean bond strength between groups except in Group 4 (9.66 MPa) (Group 1: 15.57 MPa; Group 2: 14.18 MPa; Group 3: 14.78 MPa; Group 5: 14.63 MPa). Conclusion: Pretreatment with 3.5 W Er, Cr:YSGG laser alone results in microtensile bond strengths similar to that produced by acid etching, indicating that enamel etching using 3.5 W Er, Cr:YSGG laser would result in the long-term success of pit and fissure sealants in primary teeth.
NtMYB4 and NtCHS1 Are Critical Factors in the Regulation of Flavonoid Biosynthesis and Are Involved in Salinity Responsiveness

High levels of salinity induce serious oxidative damage in plants. Flavonoids, as antioxidants, have important roles in reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenging. In the present study, the tobacco R2R3 MYB type repressor, NtMYB4, was isolated and characterized. The expression of NtMYB4 was suppressed by salinity. Overexpression of NtMYB4 reduced the salt tolerance in transgenic tobacco plants. NtMYB4 repressed the promoter activity of NtCHS1 and negatively regulated its expression. Rutin accumulation was significantly decreased in NtMYB4 overexpressing transgenic plants and NtCHS1 RNAi silenced transgenic plants. Moreover, high H2O2 and O2− contents were detected in both types of rutin-reduced transgenic plants under high salt stress. In addition, exogenous rutin supplementation effectively scavenged ROS (H2O2 and O2−) and improved the salt tolerance of the rutin-reduced transgenic plants. In contrast, NtCHS1 overexpressing plants had increased rutin accumulation, lower H2O2 and O2− contents, and higher tolerance to salinity. These results suggested that tobacco NtMYB4 acts as a salinity response repressor and negatively regulates NtCHS1 expression, which results in the reduced flavonoid accumulation and weakened ROS-scavenging ability under salt stress.
Clinicopathologic Patterns of Adult Renal Tumors

Background and Aim: Adult renal tumors (ARTs) are rare as compared with tumors of other organs and systems; however, it is important to have demographic and pathology data of rare tumors, including ART. No such data are available from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Therefore, we aimed to study the demographic and pathological data of ART from King Fahad Hospital, Al-Madinah, KSA. Materials and Methods: This is a retrospective study of computerized data from the histopathology laboratory of King Fahad Hospital during a 10-year period (January 2006–September 2015). Results: There were 42 cases of ART, comprising 28 males and 14 females (male:female ratio of 2:1). The study group ranged in age from 17 to 83 years, with a mean of 54.5 years. In the study cohort, 93% of the patients had malignant tumors and 7% had benign lesions. Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) accounted for 85.8% of cases, followed by squamous cell carcinoma and sarcoma. The benign tumors recorded in our series were oncocytoma (4.7%) and angiomyolipoma (2.4%). The tumor size of RCC ranged from 4 to 17 cm, with a mean of 7.4 cm. The majority of patients (68%) had Fuhrman Grade II tumor. Gross capsular invasion, renal vein invasion and lymph node metastases were present in one case each. Conclusion: We conclude that the pathological findings of ART from the Madinah region are in concordance with studies in national and international literature.
Drivers of Regional Bacterial Community Structure and Diversity in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean

The fundamental role of bacteria in global biogeochemical cycles warrants a thorough understanding of the factors controlling bacterial community structure. In this study, the integrated effect of seasonal differences and spatial distribution on bacterial community structure and diversity were investigated at the regional scale. We conducted a comprehensive bacterial survey, with 451 samples of the Scotian Shelf sector of the Northwest Atlantic Ocean during spring and fall of 2014 and 2016, to analyze the effects of physicochemical gradients on bacterial community structure. Throughout the region, Pelagibacteraceae and Rhodobacteraceae were the most common in the free-living fraction, while Flavobacteriia and Deltaproteobacteria were more abundant in the particle-associated fraction. Overall, there was strong covariation of the microbial community diversity from the two size fractions. This relationship existed despite the statistically significant difference in community structure between the free-living and particle-associated size fractions. In both size fractions, distribution patterns of bacterial taxa, and species within taxa, displayed temporal and spatial preferences. Distinct bacterial assemblages specific to season and depth in the water column were identified. These distinct assemblages, consistent for both 2014 and 2016, suggested replicable patterns in microbial communities for spring and fall in this region. Over all sites, temperature and oxygen values were highly correlated with community similarity, and salinity and oxygen values were the most strongly positively- and negatively correlated with alpha diversity, respectively. However, the strengths of these correlations depended on the depth and season sampled. The bathymetry of the Scotian Shelf, the abrupt shelf break to the Scotian Slope and the major ocean currents dominating in the region led to the formation of distinct on-shelf and off-shelf bacterial communities both in spring and fall. The highest species richness was observed at the shelf break, where water masses from the two major currents meet. Our study establishes the baseline for assessing future changes in the bacterial community of the Scotian Shelf waters, a rapidly changing sector of the Atlantic Ocean.