Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating the use of Reservoir Computing for forecasting the hourly wind speed in short -term

This paper presents the results of the models created for forecasting the hourly wind speed in 24-step-forward using Reservoir Computing (RC). RC is a new paradigm that offers an intuitive methodology for using the temporal processing power of recurrent neural networks (RNN) without the inconvenience of training them. Originally, introduced independently as Liquid State Machine [5] or Echo State Network [6], whose basic concept is randomly construct a RNN and leave the weights unchanged. In this work we used Echo State Network (ESN) to create the models and Multi-Layer Networks (MLP) to compare the results. The results showed that the ESN performed significantly better than MLP networks, even though it presents a significantly simpler, and faster, training algorithm.
Seeing Is Believing: The Transitory Influence of Reputation Information on E-Commerce Trust and Decision Making

This research examines the transitory influence of reputation information on consumer decision making regarding an e-vendor. Using social judgment theory to explain how reputation information's effect on perceptions may be fleeting, we specifically examined how user trusting beliefs related to an e-vendor change after a simple exposure to the Web site. A total of 369 college students participated in an experiment that found that reputation information was initially strongly related to trusting beliefs regarding the e-vendor, but a brief nonpurchase-related exposure to the e-vendor's Web site—that is, direct experience—reduced reputation's effects significantly. This research provides insights into why reputation information may be more important in certain circumstances than in others and enhances our understanding of how consumer decision making is affected by different purchasing contexts. This research also has implications on the design and use of trust-building technologies.
Visual Outcomes After Descemet Membrane Endothelial Keratoplasty Versus Descemet Stripping Automated Endothelial Keratoplasty—Comparison of Specific Matched Pairs

Purpose: To compare visual rehabilitation after Descemet membrane endothelial keratoplasty (DMEK) and Descemet stripping automated endothelial keratoplasty (DSAEK) for Fuchs endothelial dystrophy. Methods: The medical records of patients undergoing endothelial keratoplasty were retrospectively evaluated. A DMEK (n = 25 eyes) and a DSAEK (n = 25 eyes) group were formed. Specific matched pairs consisting of 1 DMEK and 1 DSAEK eye with the same preoperative best spectacle-corrected visual acuity (BSCVA) were built and compared with regard to visual rehabilitation, subjective refraction, central corneal thickness, and endothelial cell density. Results: Preoperative median BSCVA (logarithm of the minimal angle of resolution) was for both groups 0.7 (range, 0.2–1.70). At 12 months, median BSCVA was 0.0 (range, −0.08 to 0.7) after DMEK and 0.3 (range, 0.1–0.52) after DSAEK (P < 0.001). The spherical equivalent changed after DMEK from 0.0 D (range, −2.75 to 4.63 D) to 0.5 D (range, −1 to 2.5 D) and after DSAEK from −0.32 D (range, −2.50 to 1 D) to 0.63 D (range, −2.38 to 2 D). Central corneal thickness decreased from 718 &mgr;m (range, 566–1041 &mgr;m) to 533 &mgr;m (range, 460–605 &mgr;m) after DMEK and from 650 &mgr;m (range, 527–749 &mgr;m) to 605 &mgr;m (range, 486–650 &mgr;m) after DSAEK. Endothelial cell density decreased from 2448 cells/mm2 (range, 2106–3000 cells/mm2) to 1263 cells/mm2 (range, 589–2282 cells/mm2) after DMEK and from 2348 cells/mm2 (range, 2156–2781 cells/mm2) to 1327 cells/mm2 (range, 664–1972 cells/mm2) after DSAEK. Conclusions: DMEK patients showed faster rehabilitation and higher BSCVA at all postoperative visits; however, the decline in graft's endothelial cell count and change in the spherical equivalent were similar for both procedures.
Polyinosinic-Polycytidylic Acid Limits Tumor Outgrowth in a Mouse Model of Metastatic Lung Cancer

Polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid (poly I:C), a TLR3 ligand, is currently being tested in human clinical trials as an adjuvant to anti-cancer vaccines and in combination with other therapies. However, little is known about its activity in established pulmonary metastasis. The aim of our study was to elucidate the effect of poly I:C (1, 10, or 100 μg/mouse) in a mouse model of B16-F10–induced metastatic lung cancer. Lung tumor growth was arrested after a single administration of poly I:C. This was associated with higher influx of mature dendritic cells (DCs), which drove toward a Th1-like, Th17-like, and cytotoxic immune environment. The interference with IFN type I receptor signaling by means of a specific mAb reversed poly I:C-mediated tumor regression due to lower presence of myeloid DCs, cytotoxic DCs (CD11c+CD8+), NKT cells, CD8+ T cells, and Th1-like cytokines. Moreover, the adoptive transfer of poly I:C-activated bone marrow-derived DCs into tumor-bearing mice resulted in activities similar to those of the systemic administration of poly I:C on lung tumor burden. In conclusion, our data prove that poly I:C has potential anti-tumor activity in a mouse model of established pulmonary metastasis. The activation of DCs and the production of IFN type I are responsible for an effective T cytotoxic immune response against metastatic lung cancer progression after poly I:C treatment.
Prevalence, awareness, and control of hypertension in elderly and very elderly in Poland: results of a cross-sectional representative survey

Objective: The aim of the study was to examine prevalence, awareness, and control of hypertension in elderly and very elderly in Poland. Methods: The random sample of 4950 study participants aged 65 or more (age range 65–104 years), equally distributed in six age subgroups, and participated in cross-sectional, nationally representative survey PolSenior. During two separate visits, standardized interviews on awareness of hypertension as well as anthropometric measurements, blood pressure (BP) and heart rate readings were obtained. Hypertension was defined according to 2013 European Society of Hypertension/European Society of Cardiology Guidelines. Results: Mean SBP was highest in men aged 75–79 years (148.3 mmHg) and in women aged 80–84 years (149.9 mmHg), and then steadily decreased, whereas DBP decreased steadily from age 65. Hypertension affected about 80% of septuagenarians. Its prevalence decreased with age to 67% in women and 60% in men aged 90 years or older. In nonagenarians, awareness of hypertension (72% in women and 61% in men) and percentage of treated study participants (64% of women and 54% of men) was the lowest. In contrast, among treated study participants proportion of well controlled (BP < 140/90 mmHg) was the highest in people older than 85 reaching 34% among nonagenarian women and 38% in men. Conclusions: The results show a reversed trend in prevalence and control of hypertension in people aged 80 years and older when compared with the younger elderly. As awareness and treatment of hypertension decreases with advanced age, it seems reasonable to extend screening programs and antihypertensive initiatives for the elderly and very elderly.
Care for depression in a changing environment.

The U.S. health care system is quickly changing, but is it moving in the right direction? Focusing on care for clinical depression as a test case, this paper summarizes our previously published findings on the effects of various payment strategies, managed care, and primary care gatekeepers on the outcomes and costs for the treatment of mental health conditions. We then synthesize the policy implications of these findings for achieving value of care, lower costs, and good health outcomes.
Optimal tuning of PI/PID controllers for integrating processes with inverse response

Processes showing an initial response that is opposite to the final steady-state are present in industrial applications. Control of such processes involves difficulties and recently researchers have started paying great attention to the control of such processes. This paper reports on deriving optimal tuning rules for controlling integrating processes with inverse response. Simple and optimal analytical formulae for PI controllers have been derived based on Integral performance criteria. Simulation examples have been given to demonstrate the usefulness of the suggested approach.
vRAM: Faster Verifiable RAM with Program-Independent Preprocessing

We study the problem of verifiable computation (VC) for RAM programs, where a computationally weak verifier outsources the execution of a program to a powerful (but untrusted) prover. Existing efficient implementations of VC protocols require an expensive preprocessing phase that binds the parties to a single circuit. (While there are schemes that avoid preprocessing entirely, their performance remains significantly worse than constructions with preprocessing.) Thus, a prover and verifier are forced to choose between two approaches: (1) Allow verification of arbitrary RAM programs, at the expense of efficiency, by preprocessing a universal circuit which can handle all possible instructions during each CPU cycle; or (2) Sacrifice expressiveness by preprocessing an efficient circuit which is tailored to the verification of a single specific RAM program. We present vRAM, a VC system for RAM programs that avoids both the above drawbacks by having a preprocessing phase that is entirely circuit-independent (other than an upper bound on the circuit size). During the proving phase, once the program to be verified and its inputs are chosen, the circuit-independence of our construction allows the parties to use a smaller circuit tailored to verifying the specific program on the chosen inputs, i.e., without needing to encode all possible instructions in each cycle. Moreover, our construction is the first with asymptotically optimal prover overhead; i.e., the work of the prover is a constant multiplicative factor of the time to execute the program. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that vRAM reduces the prover's memory consumption by 55-110x and its running time by 9-30x compared to existing schemes with universal preprocessing. This allows us to scale to RAM computations with more than 2 million CPU cycles, a 65x improvement compared to the state of the art. Finally, vRAM has performance comparable to (and sometimes better than) the best existing scheme with program-specific preprocessing despite the fact that the latter can deploy program-specific optimizations (and has to pay a separate preprocessing cost for every new program).
The Dynamic Range of Neonatal Heart Rate Variability

Neonatal Heart Rate Variability. Introduction: Although it is generally appreciated that heart rate variability is low during severe illness, the extent, time course, and mathematical characteristics of heart rate variability during transitions between health and illness have not been systematically examined. The purpose of this study was to analyze heart rate variability in newborn infants during a rapid recovery from severe respiratory and circulatory failure.
Design of tool for the optimization of deck area assignments with integration into existing naval ship design programs

Many tasks in the early stages of ship design are manual and repetitive processes. One such task is in the realm of deck area arrangements. The allocation and assignment of areas in early stage ship design involves tracking the difference of total ship area envelope and all required areas to be placed for habitability, mission support, and propulsion capability among many. The problem becomes more complex with the addition of constraints involving required separation zones between other areas, affinities for certain areas or deck levels, and compartment subdivision. The Leading Edge Architecture for Prototyping Systems (LEAPS) database structure output from the Advanced Ship and Submarine Evaluation Tool (ASSET) provides a ship envelope and a list of areas requiring assignment. However, with over a hundred different area categories to place in a subdivided ship hull of a large number of compartments each with their own preferences and constraints, this problem is categorized as Nondeterministic Polynomial-time hard (NP-hard). A complete solution to an NP-hard problem cannot be found in polynomial time, meaning that finding the optimal solution in the design space is not realistically feasible as the problem scales upwards in size. Fortunately this type of problem, known as Bin Packing, is well understood in computer science. Metaheuristic methods of obtaining near-optimal solutions in a finite timeframe exist that are reasonable enough for use. This thesis presents a ship design tool that pairs two of these meta-heuristic methods with naval ship architecture and LEAPS based projects. The approach is divided into three major steps: a ship volume balance, a ship area balance, and an area layout of the ship footprint. The output of the tool is the general arrangements drawings in a universal CAD format that would be the starting point for more detailed arrangements. Thesis Supervisor: Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis Title: Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering Thesis Supervisor: Fredo Durand Title: Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Update on Rhinovirus and Coronavirus Infections

Rhinoviruses and coronaviruses cause significant morbidity in immunocompetent people of all ages and in patients with underlying chronic medical or immunosuppressed conditions. Newer diagnostic tests, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), have expanded our understanding of these respiratory viruses in clinical infections. These sensitive diagnostic tests have been used to describe new members of these virus families, such as human rhinovirus C (HRVC) and human coronavirus NL-63 (HCoV-NL63). The epidemiology of these newly described viruses will help us develop better intervention strategies.
Estimating the “Effective Number of Codons”: The Wright Way of Determining Codon Homozygosity Leads to Superior Estimates

In 1990, Frank Wright introduced a method for measuring synonymous codon usage bias in a gene by estimation of the “effective number of codons,” Nc. Several attempts have been made recently to improve Wright's estimate of Nc, but the methods that work in cases where a gene encodes a protein not containing all amino acids with degenerate codons have not been tested against each other. In this article I derive five new estimators of Nc and test them together with the two published estimators, using resampling under rigorous testing conditions. Estimation of codon homozygosity, F, turns out to be a key to the estimation of Nc. F can be estimated in two closely related ways, corresponding to sampling with or without replacement, the latter being what Wright used. The Nc methods that are based on sampling without replacement showed much better accuracy at short gene lengths than those based on sampling with replacement, indicating that Wright's homozygosity method is superior. Surprisingly, the methods based on sampling with replacement displayed a superior correlation with mRNA levels in Escherichia coli.
Intravitreal triamcinolone with photodynamic therapy for subfoveal choroidal neovascularisation in age related macular degeneration

Aims: To report the effects of intravitreal triamcinolone acetonide (iTAAC) injections as an adjunctive treatment to photodynamic therapy (PDT) with verteporfin for new subfoveal choroidal neovascularisation (CNV) in age related macular degeneration (AMD). Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the records of all AMD patients who had iTAAC within 6 weeks of their first PDT and had a follow up of one year or longer. The proportion of eyes after one year follow up that lost or gained ⩾15 and ⩾30 ETDRS letters, baseline and one year lesion greatest linear dimension (GLD), number of PDTs, and side effects were assessed. Results: Fourteen patients were evaluated. Eleven received one initial combined treatment and three received an additional combined treatment after 6 months. Median follow up was 18 months (range 12 to 25 months). Overall, 7% gained ⩾30 letters, 50% maintained stable vision, 14% lost 15–29 letters, and 29% lost ⩾30 letters. Overall, mean GLD increased from 2580 (SD 1088) µm to 3946 (SD 1503) µm (p = 0.01). The mean number of PDTs during the first year was 2.57. Side effects were mild intraocular pressure elevation in 28.5% and cataract progression in 50% of phakic eyes. Conclusions: iTAAC with PDT in AMD was found to be relatively safe and had reasonable results for lesions with some classic component.
Batch ethanol fermentation: the correlation between the fermentation efficiency and the biomass initial concentration depends on what is considered as produced ethanol

Embora muitos estudos tenham avaliado muitos dos fatores que afetam a eficiencia da fermentacao etanolica, a influencia da concentracao da biomassa na eficiencia do processo tem recebido pouca atencao. Esse trabalho mostra que a influencia da concentracao inicial de biomassa depende do que se considera "etanol produzido". Se, terminada a fermentacao, considera-se como etanol produzido apenas aquele existente na fase aquosa do meio, o rendimento da fermentacao decresce linearmente quando a concentracao inicial de biomassa aumenta. Entretanto, se o etanol intracelular tambem e considerado, a concentracao da biomassa nao afeta o rendimento da fermentacao.
Sequence-to-Dependency Neural Machine Translation

Nowadays a typical Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model generates translations from left to right as a linear sequence, during which latent syntactic structures of the target sentences are not explicitly concerned. Inspired by the success of using syntactic knowledge of target language for improving statistical machine translation, in this paper we propose a novel Sequence-to-Dependency Neural Machine Translation (SD-NMT) method, in which the target word sequence and its corresponding dependency structure are jointly constructed and modeled, and this structure is used as context to facilitate word generations. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on Chinese-English and Japanese-English translation tasks.
Topotecan vitreous levels after periocular or intravenous delivery in rabbits: an alternative for retinoblastoma chemotherapy.

PURPOSE To determine the extent and the mechanism by which topotecan, a candidate agent for the treatment of retinoblastoma, gains access to the vitreous when administered by periocular injection or intravenous infusion. METHODS In vivo experiments were conducted in which albino rabbits received 1 mg topotecan by periocular injection (POI group; n = 30) or as a 30-minute intravenous infusion (IV group; n = 16). Plasma and vitreal topotecan concentrations were analyzed during the 10 hours after administration. A population pharmacokinetic model was fit to the data. Additionally, periocular injections were performed postmortem to study the effect of removing the blood vasculature barrier. RESULTS Potentially active lactone topotecan levels were detected in the vitreous in the POI and IV groups. Both administration schedules induced high total topotecan plasma exposures because of absorption from the periocular depot, though plasma lactone area under the curve (AUC) was significantly higher in the IV group. Similar vitreal concentrations were found in treated and control eyes in the POI group. The transfer from the periocular compartment to the vitreous was negligible. The absence of drug levels in the control eye of the postmortem-injected rabbits confirmed the systemic delivery of topotecan. Local toxicity was not observed. CONCLUSIONS As a consequence of a favored passage across the blood-retinal barrier, considerable topotecan vitreous levels were detected in a rabbit model after systemic or periocular administration. Transscleral entry in vivo was constrained by rapid clearance from the administration site.
SUCCESSFUL INTRAMUSCULAR GROWTH OF HUMAN TUMOR IN CONDITIONED MICE *

The classic experiment of heterologous transplantation of human tumor, which was an attempt to transfer cancer from man to dog, was recorded by Peyrilhe in 1775. ' In 1840 Langenbeck injected the vein of a dog with the juice from a human medullary carcinoma of the humerus. Two months later several round nodules were found in the lung. However, Rudolf Virchow, the pathologist, found the structure more similar to a spontaneous cancer in the dog than to that in the human. ' In 1884 Zahn2 transplanted a human enchondroma to the anterior chamber of the eye of a rabbit, but failed to find evidence of its growth. Klebs' in 1890 examined fragments of human carcinoma removed from the peritoneal cavities of white rats at varying intervals after introduction. He found that epithelial constituents of the graft had vanished by the third day. reported that the Jensen rat sarcoma grew serially in the chick embryo; however, he did not succeed in propagating the tumor in chickens. In 1938 Greenej-' reported that human uterine adenoma and adenocarcinoma could be maintained in the rabbit. This tumor was serially transferred for several generations. In 1951 a new approach to the problem of heterologous transplantation of human cancer was described by Toolan, who later reported the survival and proliferation of 90 per cent of 101 human tumors in rats and hamsters treated with cortisone and/or X irradiation.8-'0 Recently many experiments dealing with heterologous transplantation of human tumor have been reported by Sommers et aZ. ,I' Hoch-Ligeti and Hsue,12 and Patterson et all3 The experiments reported in the first part of this paper were set up in the hope of developing human tumors transplantable to mice. In this work the mice were treated with cortisone, X irradiation, and ThorotrastJ either singly or in various combinations. The second part of the paper follows histologically the development of a human tumor from one day to one week after transplantation. * The research for this paper was supported in part by Grant CY-3784 from the National Cancer Institute, Public Health Service, Bethesda, Md. , and in part by Grant T-47 from the American Cancer Society, Inc., New York, N. Y. t Visiting Research Fellow, Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, and SloanKettering Division, Cornell University Medical College, New York, N. Y. $ A proprietary colloidal suspension of thorium dioxide In 1912 Murphy3,
Crossing Community Sectors: Challenges Faced by Families of Children With Special Health Care Needs

This article identifies unmet needs and challenges of 37 families caring for children with special health care needs (CSHCN). Data were collected in focus groups. Data saturation occurred in the third group. Another group was conducted to ensure adequate inclusion of rural participants. Mean age of participants was 36 years. Most participants were women (92%), Caucasian (65%), high school graduates (89%), and employed, with 38% from rural communities. All families had health care insurance, primarily Medicaid (87%). An interdisciplinary team used NVIVO software to facilitate content analysis. Seven areas emerged: family support systems, early intervention/school systems, coordination of care, lack of knowledge, provider/family relationships, parent roles, and insurance systems. Caregivers noted the critical role of nurses but a lack of nurse presence in community care systems. This study adds to the multidimensional nature of caring for CSHCN and highlights the importance of considering how families interface with multiple community sectors.