Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A taxonomic revision of Australian Conopidae (Insecta: Diptera)

A taxonomic revision of the Australian Conopidae is presented. Nineteen genera in four subfamilies are recognised. The Stylogasterinae are represented by the cosmopolitan genus Stylogaster Macquart and the Myopinae by Myopa Fabricius and Thecophora Rondani. A monotypic genus, Notoconops gen. nov., is described and placed in a new subfamily, Notoconopinae. The remaining fifteen Australian genera are assigned to the Conopinae. Australoconops Camras, Chrysidiomyia Krober, Conops Linnaeus, Delkeskampomyia Krober, Heteroconops Krober, Microconops Krober, Neoconops Krober, Pleurocerina Macquart, Physocephala Schiner, Smartiomyia Krober and Stenoconops Krober are redescribed. Four new conopine genera are described: Atrichoparia; Camrasiconops; Setosiconops; and Tanyconops, with the following resultant new combinations: Atrichoparia curticornis (Krober) (from Heteroconops); Camrasiconops ater (Camras) and Ca. rufofemoris (Camras) (from Microconops); and Setosiconops robustus (Krober) (from Neoconops). Callosiconops Krober and Paraconops Krober are regarded as junior synonyms of Chrysidiomyia and Pleurocerina respectively with the following resultant new combinations: Chrysidiomyia hirsuta (Krober), Pleurocerina aristalis (Camras), P. longicornis (Krober), P. nigrifacies (Krober), P. similis (Krober), P. turneri (Camras). A total of 100 species of Australian Conopidae are now recognised. No new species of Myopinae or Stylogasterinae are described. Representative species only of Atrichoparia, Camrasiconops, Heteroconops and Microconops are described. All species of the other 12 genera are described or redescribed. These include the following 45 new species,: Australoconops aglaos, A. aurantius, A. balteus, A. breviplatus, A. brunneus, A. camrasi, A. cantrelli, A. elegans, A. fulvitarsus, A. furvus, A. nebrias, A. neuter, A. pallorivittus, A. phaeomeros, A. ruficrus, A. vespoides; Chrysidiomyia rugifrons, C. setosa; Conops aureolus, C. badius, C. chvalai, C. sparsus; Heteroconops carnarvonensis; Neoconops brevistylus, N. glaber; Notoconops alexanderi, Pleurocerina aquila, P. brevis, P. chrysopyga, P. lamellata, P. lutea, P. luteiceps, P. occidua, P. saxatilis, P. scutellata, P. vespiformis; Setosiconops epixanthus, Se. similis, Smartiomyia arena, Sm. cerina, Sm. danielsi, Sm. macalpinei; Tanyconops longicaudus, T. luteus, T. ocellatus. Australoconops ocellatus (de Meijere) comb. nov. is resurrected from synonymy with A. aurosus (Newman). Conops demeijerei Krober is considered a junior synonym of C. seminiger de Meijere. A lectotype and paralectotypes are designated for Microconops fasciatus Krober. Anatomical features used in descriptions are discussed and illustrated. Special attention has been given to the ultrastructure of spicules on female genital structures. These spicules show differences between genera and species. The high degree of endemism of the Australian fauna is discussed in relation to the world fauna and some preliminary thoughts on phylogenetic relationships are presented. A catalogue of the Australian Conopidae is included as an Appendix.
Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression as Risk Factors for Development of Asthma. Longitudinal Evidence from the First National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Epidemiologic Followup Study

To test the hypothesis that symptoms of anxiety and depression are associated with increased risk of developing asthma, a population-based cohort of 5,23! baseline and non-asthmatic persons aged 25 to 74 was followed for 13 years. The association between asthma incidence and anxiety and depression was analyzed using Cox proportional hazards regression. For nonsmokers and persons without respiratory symptoms or predicted-to-observed FEVI ratio less than 65% (FEV1 < 65%), high levels of anxiety and depression remained independent predictors of asthma. The effects of anxiety and depression were particularly strong among nonsmokers without baseline respiratory symptoms or FEVI < 65%. We hypothesize that the baseline presence of strong risk factors such as smoking, respiratory symptoms, or FEV1 < 65% may obscure the effects of anxiety and depression symptomatology on the subsequent development of asthma. These analyses point out the need to move toward more sophisticated stratified models in the study of psychological factors and asthma.
Influence of Diet on Element Incorporation in the Shells of Two Bivalve Molluscs: Argopecten irradians concentricus and Mercenaria mercenaria

Recently, biogenic carbonates have received much attention as potential proxies of environmental change; however, a major pathway of elemental incorporation is often overlooked when making interpretations or designing experiments. This research experimentally examines the influence of diet on elemental composition in juvenile shells of the bay scallop, Argopecten irradians concentricus, and the northern quahog, Mercenaria mercenaria. Exploratory trials were conducted using Argopecten irradians concentricus juveniles fed different algal diets: Isochrysis, Chaetoceros, Pavlova, Tetraselmis, or a mix of all four in a 2:1:2:2 ratio. No differences between the left and right valves were revealed, thus, subsequent analysis of the dietary influence on shell chemistry utilized both valves. Only Mg/Ca and K/Ca were significantly different between the diet groups, though different influences were determined. Experiments with juvenile Mercenaria mercenaria compared shell chemistries among clams fed unicellular diets of Isochrysis sp. (CCMP1324), Pavlova pinguis (CCMP609), Chaetoceros mulleri (CCMP1316), Isochrysis sp. (CCMP1611) culture, Pavlova sp. (CCMP1209), or Chaetoceros galvestonensis (CCMP186), a mixed diet of all species in equal ratios (Mixed), or no food (starvation control). The results indicate
Latent Linear Critiquing for Conversational Recommender Systems

Critiquing is a method for conversational recommendation that iteratively adapts recommendations in response to user preference feedback. In this setting, a user is iteratively provided with an item recommendation and attribute description for that item; a user may either accept the recommendation, or critique the attributes in the item description to generate a new recommendation. Historical critiquing methods were largely based on explicit constraint- and utility-based methods for modifying recommendations w.r. t. critiqued item attributes. In this paper, we revisit the critiquing approach in the era of recommendation methods based on latent embeddings with subjective item descriptions (i.e., keyphrases from user reviews). Two critical research problems arise: (1) how to co-embed keyphrase critiques with user preference embeddings to update recommendations, and (2) how to modulate the strength of multi-step critiquing feedback, where critiques are not necessarily independent, nor of equal importance. To address (1), we build on an existing state-of-the-art linear embedding recommendation algorithm to align review-based keyphrase attributes with user preference embeddings. To address (2), we exploit the linear structure of the embeddings and recommendation prediction to formulate a linear program (LP) based optimization problem to determine optimal weights for incorporating critique feedback. We evaluate the proposed framework on two recommendation datasets containing user reviews with simulated users. Empirical results compared to a standard approach of averaging critique feedback show that our approach reduces the number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item and increases the overall success rate.
Assessment of Remotely Sensed Image Processing Techniques for Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Applications

Name: Christopher M. Zarzar Date of Degree: August 11, 2017 Institution: Mississippi State University Major Field: Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Major Professor: Jamie L. Dyer Title of Study: Assessment of remotely sensed image processing techniques for Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) applications Pages in Study 78 Candidate for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) offer a new era of local-scale environmental monitoring where access to invaluable aerial data no longer comes at a substantial cost. This provides the opportunity to vastly expand the ability to detect natural hazards impacts, observe environmental conditions, quantify restoration efforts, track species propagation, monitor land surface changes, cross-validate existing platforms, and identify hazardous situations. While UASs have the potential to accelerate understanding of natural processes, much of the research using UASs has applied current remote sensing image processing techniques without questioning the validity of these in UAS applications. With new scientific tools comes a need to affirm that previous techniques are still valid for the new systems. To this end, the objective of the current study is to provide an assessment regarding the use of current remote sensing image processing techniques in UAS applications. The research reported herein finds that atmospheric effects have a statistically significant impact on low altitude UAS imagery. Correcting for these external factors affecting the imagery was successful using an empirical line calibration (ELC) image correction technique and required little modification for use in a complex UAS application. Finally, it was found that classification performance of UAS imagery was reliant on training sample size more than classification technique, and that training sample size requirements are larger than previous remote sensing studies suggest.
Efficient Belief Propagation Polar Decoder With Loop Simplification Based Factor Graphs

The performance of belief propagation list (BPL) decoding of polar codes is related to the selection of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L$</tex-math></inline-formula> factor graphs (FGs), which have the least number of girths. However, the straightforward search of such FGs is of high complexity. To achieve good performance with reasonable complexity, we propose an efficient method to find FGs with the least number of length-12 loops in all permuted FGs. Since some length-12 loops have been destroyed by redundant decoding operations, the corresponding FGs can be simplified to different numbers of length-12 loops. Thanks to the proposed loop simplification (LS), BPL decoding is now based on more efficient FGs, resulting in better performance and lower average decoding latency than the state-of-the-art. Numerical results have shown that the performance improvement is 0.15 dB when frame error ratio (FER) is <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10^{-4}$</tex-math></inline-formula>, for <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(1024, 512)$</tex-math></inline-formula> codes with <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L=64$</tex-math></inline-formula>.
Radiation Exposure during Percutaneous Endoscopic Lumbar Discectomy: Interlaminar versus Transforaminal

Abstract Objective Percutaneous endoscopic lumbar discectomy (PELD) relies heavily on fluoroscopy guidance; therefore, medical staff exposure to radiation has become an important issue. The purpose of this study was to determine the radiation dose and the amount of time to which the surgeons are exposed during PELD and to compare both parameters in the transforaminal (TF) and interlaminar (IL) approaches. Although they are considerably different, they may be wrongly considered together. Methods A retrospective evaluation of the last 20 PELD performed by the authors is presented. Patients were distributed in 2 groups. Six (1F, 5M) patients were submitted to IL-PELD and 14 (6F, 8M) to TF-PELD. Fluoroscopy reports were obtained from patients' records, all performed with the same C-Arm device and software mode. Groups were compared using unpaired t-test. Results The IL group showed an average radiation exposure of 8.37 ± 4.21 mGy and duration of 11.1 ± 5.45 seconds, while the TF group showed an average radiation exposure of 28.92 ± 7.56 mGy and duration of 42 ± 16.64 seconds. The p-value for radiation was 0.0000036, and for time it was 0.00027. Conclusions Interlaminar PELD requires a lower radiation dose and a shorter amount of exposure than TF-PELD. Studies that concern radiation required for minimally-invasive spine surgeries should consider the PELD approaches separately.
Genetic programming applied to morphological image processing

This thesis presents three approaches to the automatic design of algorithms for the processing of binary images based on the Genetic Programming (GP) paradigm. In the first approach the algorithms are designed using the basic Mathematical Morphology (MM) operators, i.e. erosion and dilation, with a variety of Structuring Elements (SEs). GP is used to design algorithms to convert a binary image into another containing just a particular characteristic of interest. In the study we have tested two similarity fitness functions, training sets with different numbers of elements and different sizes of the training images over three different objectives. The results of the first approach showed some success in the evolution of MM algorithms but also identifed problems with the amount of computational resources the method required. The second approach uses Sub-Machine-Code GP (SMCGP) and bitwise operators as an attempt to speed-up the evolution of the algorithms and to make them both feasible and effective. The SMCGP approach was successful in the speeding up of the computation but it was not successful in improving the quality of the obtained algorithms. The third approach presents the combination of logical and morphological operators in an attempt to improve the quality of the automatically designed algorithms. The results obtained provide empirical evidence showing that the evolution of high quality MM algorithms using GP is possible and that this technique has a broad potential that should be explored further. This thesis includes an analysis of the potential of GP and other Machine Learning techniques for solving the general problem of Signal Understanding by means of exploring Mathematical Morphology.
Medication Adherence and its Association with Glycaemic Control, Blood Pressure Control, Glycosuria and Proteinuria Among People Living With Diabetes (PLWD) in the Ho Municipality, Ghana

Adherence is the active, voluntary, and collaborative involvement of the patient in a mutually acceptable course of behaviour to produce a therapeutic result. The study is aimed at assessing adherence to medication and its relation to therapeutic outcomes among people living with diabetes in the Ho Municipality.A cross-sectional study was conducted involving 150 diabetic patients attending the diabetic clinic at the Ho Municipal Hospital. Urine glucose and urine protein were measured using a two-parameter dipstick. The current fasting blood glucose and blood pressure, as well as the measurements of two previous visits, were documented. A semi-structured questionnaire including the Diabetes Complication Checklist and the Morisky, Green and Levine Adherence Scale were used to capture biodata, clinical information and medication adherence.Optimal medication adherence was 60.67%. Glycaemic control and controlled blood pressure were 33.33% and 58.67%, respectively. The prevalence of glycosuria and proteinuria was 10.67% and 3.3%, respectively. Percentage glycaemic control and controlled blood pressure were found to be higher among the medication adherent group, while glycosuria and proteinuria were the highest among participants presenting with low medication adherence.In this group of patients living with diabetes in the Ho Municipality, high level of uncontrolled glycaemia and blood pressure exist.However, these two treatment outcomes may be modulated by optimal medication adherence.
Is Prefilled Contrast Agent Effective in Timesaving and Patient Safety

Background: In CT imaging, when preparing contrast agent, the prefilled type is simpler to use than is the vial type. In this study, the benefits from using prefilled contrast agent were examined. Methods: The benefits of the prefilled type were defined as time saving and prevention of infection. We measured the preparation time in 3 general hospitals, and then estimated the time saving benefit by multiplying the result by the cost of the CT scan. To gauge infection prevention, we conducted a decision analytic model and estimated the benefits using the probability of infection from the decision model and treatment costs. Results: The cost of both drugs was equal; however, the additional material cost associated with vial type agent was $18.18, which is higher than that of the prefilled type. The reduction in time from using the prefilled type was on average 51.9 seconds, and the time savings was estimated as $7.22 per case. The benefit of preventing infection was estimated at $0.24 per case when using the prefilled type. Therefore, the total benefit was estimated at $25.64. Conclusions: The prefilled type was superior to the vial type in that it was associated with lower costs and higher benefits.
Measuring and Modelling the Dispersal of Pollen and Spores by Wind

Our present understanding of pollen dispersal by wind (anemophily) is quite limited. Due to the stochastic and complex nature of anemophily, modelling the dispersal patterns of the pollen and seeds of wind pollinated plants is not an easy task. The majority of the existing dispersal models are varied and have many conflicting predictions of pollen dispersal distances and concentrations from a source. These discrepancies between models reflect the lack of both short and long distance dispersal data, limiting the ability to seriously test the validity of these models. The main objective of this study was to measure ambient pollen concentrations of various tree and shrub species at both short and long distances from the source. A secondary objective was to measure the parameters involved in the dispersal process of anemophilous pollen and subsequently use these parameters and the empirical data collected to test the accuracy of three analytical mechanistic models of pollen and seed dispersal. The applications of such models are extensive; besides being of use to the allergy-suffering population, present-day issues such as climate change, pollen contamination in GMO crops, and landscape fragmentation raise concerns about whether plants will be able to adapt, disperse, and reproduce effectively in such rapidly changing environments.
Studies of Spontaneous Oxidative and Frameshift Mutagenesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Studies of Spontaneous Oxidative and Frameshift Mutagenesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by Sarah Victoria Mudrak University Program in Genetics and Genomics Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Dr. Sue Jinks-Robertson, Supervisor ___________________________ Dr. Kenneth Kreuzer ___________________________ Dr. Daniel Lew ___________________________ Dr. John McCusker ___________________________ Dr. Thomas Petes An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University Program in Genetics and Genomics in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 Copyright by Sarah Victoria Mudrak 2010
Clinical and Radiographic Oral Manifestations in Pediatric Patients with Chronic Renal Failure on Dialysis Therapy

Objective: To describe clinical and radiological oral manifestations in children with chronic renal failure on dialysis therapy and the relationship with disease, period of dialysis, and history of secondary hyperparathyroidism. Methods: A comparative study of 2 independent groups, including thirty- three children with chronic renal failure on dialysis (between 7-16 years old) and 33 children without chronic renal failure and with similar characteristics was conducted. Intraoral examinations, including a smear of oral mucosa and digital panoramic maxillary radiographs, were performed. Results: Among children with chronic renal failure, 16 (48.5%) had xerostomia, 18 (54.5%) had uremic breath, 16 (48.5%) showed changes in oral mucosa, 24 (72.7%) had regular oral hygiene with a low rate of dental caries, 20 (60.6%) had enamel hypoplasia, 25 (75.8%) tested positive for Candida hyphae, 5 (15.2%) had changes in the shape of the mandibular cortex, and 14 (42.4%) had signs of osteopenia in the jaws. Conclusion: We found significant differences between the groups with and without chronic renal failure for xerostomia, uremic breath, changes in oral mucosa, enamel hypoplasia, dental caries, mandibular cortical shape, and signs of osteopenia. Moreover, we observed significant relationships between several aforementioned findings and the period of kidney disease, duration of dialysis, and presence of osteodystrophy.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Omega-3 Fatty Acid Supplementation: A Systematic Review

Date of accept: 02 October 2018 ABSTRACT Objective: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a chronic multifactorial disorder mainly affecting school-aged children and resulting in inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity symptoms. While exact underlying cause remains unknown, observations regarding the low plasma levels of omega-3 fatty acids in ADHD patients leads to a new treatment approach, omega-3 fatty acid supplementation. Method: Literature search is performed about the relation between omega-3 fatty acid supplementation and ADHD treatment by using 3 databases. Nineteen studies met the inclusion criteria and further analyzed. Results: Studies performed with higher number of participants and for longer trial period demonstrate beneficial effects of omega-3 fatty acids in ADHD treatment while no significant additional adverse effects are recorded compared to regular treatment options. Discussion: Omega-3 fatty acid supplementation approach in ADHD treatment is one of the highly investigated issues while there is a lack of comprehensive literature review regarding that issue. In this literature review, we conclude beneficial effects of omega-3 fatty acids in ADHD treatment while it is important to emphasize the need for additional and more comprehensive clinical trials about this issue.
Accelerating Performance Inference over Closed Systems by Asymptotic Methods

Recent years have seen a rapid growth of interest in exploiting monitoring data collected from enterprise applications for automated management and performance analysis. In spite of this trend, even simple performance inference problems involving queueing theoretic formulas often incur computational bottlenecks, for example upon computing likelihoods in models of batch systems. Motivated by this issue, we revisit the solution of multiclass closed queueing networks, which are popular models used to describe batch and distributed applications with parallelism constraints. We first prove that the normalizing constant of the equilibrium state probabilities of a closed model can be reformulated exactly as a multidimensional integral over the unit simplex. This gives as a by-product novel explicit expressions for the multiclass normalizing constant. We then derive a method based on cubature rules to efficiently evaluate the proposed integral form in small and medium-sized models. For large models, we propose novel asymptotic expansions and Monte Carlo sampling methods to efficiently and accurately approximate normalizing constants and likelihoods. We illustrate the resulting accuracy gains in problems involving optimization-based inference.