Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plasma Renin Activity–Guided Strategy for the Management of Hypertension

Despite the wide array of antihypertensive agents and the availability of national guidelines regarding treatment for hypertension, the disease remains uncontrolled in nearly 50% of affected patients. Furthermore, the number of patients with resistant hypertension continues to increase. For patients with resistant hypertension, the American Heart Association has advocated for clinical studies to determine appropriate pharmacologic treatment strategies. One proposed strategy involves ambulatory measurement of plasma renin activity (PRA) to guide the selection of antihypertensive therapy. Patients with low PRA would be prescribed natriuretic volume‐mediated therapies (e.g., diuretics and calcium channel blockers), whereas those with high PRA would receive antirenin system therapies (e.g., β‐blockers, angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitors, and angiotensin II receptor blockers). This review focuses on the principles of PRA‐guided therapy, its historical development, alternative approaches to classifying patients into categories of response to antihypertensive agents, and recent data supporting the use of plasma renin activity–guided hypertension management.
'The Empire Strikes Back' ?: HGIS de las Indias and the Postcolonial Death Star

This article serves a two-fold purpose: first, to give an overview of the project HGIS de las Indias, and second to ask for its relation with the epistemological currents in spatial humanities, thereby raising some fundamental thoughts and inquietudes about the relationship between projects designed for accommodating particular practical needs and overarching theory. In the first part, thus, we will sketch the initial impulse that made the project come to life; then, we will outline the basic structure, features, and general characteristics of the database and its web application, briefly commenting on how that database design correlates and conflicts with the ontologies of historical sources underlying the reconstruction process. In the second part, we will try to tackle the question of whether projects of such tailoring should have a place within the spatial humanities, which seem to have shifted or solidified their epistemological center in poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, and neo-geographic discourses, advocating for a reflected employment of digital spatial tools focussing on their different roles within the humanities instead of enforcing a growing divide between a theoretical navel-gazing and an atheoretical practice.
Detecting and Removing Noisy Data on Web Document using Text Density Approach

The web documents content are useful resources for many applications. However, this content could be classified into relevant content and irrelevant content with respect to the involved application. The irrelevant content, like advertisements banner, copyright information, and navigation menus assumed as noisy data. Noisy data that found among the content of the web document affects negatively the performance of most of applications that deals with the content of web pages. The process of detecting and removing noisy data is an important pre-processing step in many applications such as web page classifications, clustering of web pages and information retrieval tasks. We developed a unified algorithm able to detect automatically the noisy data and eliminate them out of the web page and produce a clear web document that could be used effectively in later steps. The suggested approach examined using a dataset composed of different classes. The results of the conducted experiments showed a significant enhancement in the problem of detecting and removing noisy.
A real time computational and statistical model (with high availability) of early warning for plant protection and pest control for crops (exp. Kutki)

Picrorhiza Kurroa (Kutki) is the crop grown in India which we are analyzing here in Himalayan region. Farmers face a great loss of production as well as economic loss due to the disease in plants or may be pest attacks on immense level. So, they use pesticides and fertilizers for better crop growth but these chemicals harm the crops in excess quantity. And also inhaling of these chemicals leads to liver disorder, asthma, cancer etc. The use of pesticides can be reduced with the help of forecasting of diseases and pest infection in limited time framework. So in this paper we are presenting the development of system using beta regression model for early warning plant protection and pest control. This system also has a mechanism to alert farmers via email/Short Message Service (SMS) technology regarding the plant disease of Picrorhiza Kurroa (kutki) plant.
Quantizing time series for efficient similarity search under timewarping

Indexing Time Series Data is an interesting problem that has attracted much interest in the research community for the last decade. Traditional indexing methods organize the data space using different metrics. For time series, however, there are some cases when a metric is not suited for properly assessing the similarity between sequences. For instance, to detect similarities between sequences that are locally out of phase Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) must be used. DTW is not a metric as it does not satisfy the triangular inequality. Therefore, traditional spatial access methods cannot be used without introducing false dismissals. In such cases, alternative methods for organizing and searching time series data must be proposed. In this paper we propose the use of quantization to generate small and homogeneous representations of time series. We compute upper- and lower-bounds on the DTW distance to a query sequence using this quantized representation to filter-out sequences that cannot be a best match for the query. In the proposed approach, efficient search is achieved by organizing the quantized representation of data in a linear array that can be efficiently read from disk. The computational cost of processing the query is shadowed by the IO cost required to scan the file containing the linear array and it does affect the total query cost.
Dictyostelium myosin heavy chain kinase A regulates myosin localization during growth and development

Phosphorylation of the Dictyostelium myosin II heavy chain (MHC) has a key role in regulating myosin localization in vivo and drives filament disassembly in vitro. Previous molecular analysis of the Dictyostelium myosin II heavy chain kinase (MHCK A) gene has demonstrated that the catalytic domain of this enzyme is extremely novel, showing no significant similarity to the known classes of protein kinases (Futey, L. M., Q. G. Medley, G. P. Cote, and T. T. Egelhoff. 1995. J. Biol. Chem. 270:523-529). To address the physiological roles of this enzyme, we have analyzed the cellular consequences of MHCK A gene disruption (mhck A- cells) and MHCK A overexpression (MHCK A++ cells). The mhck A- cells are viable and competent for tested myosin-based contractile events, but display partial defects in myosin localization. Both growth phase and developed mhck A- cells show substantially reduced MHC kinase activity in crude lysates, as well as significant overassembly of myosin into the Triton-resistant cytoskeletal fractions. MHCK A++ cells display elevated levels of MHC kinase activity in crude extracts, and show reduced assembly of myosin into Triton-resistant cytoskeletal fractions. MHCK A++ cells show reduced growth rates in suspension, becoming large and multinucleated, and arrest at the mound stage during development. These results demonstrate that MHCK A functions in vivo as a protein kinase with physiological roles in regulating myosin II localization and assembly in Dictyostelium cells during both growth and developmental stages.
Localizing Value of Pain Distribution Patterns in Cervical Spondylosis

Study Design Prospective observational study. Purpose To investigate the value of pain distribution in localizing appropriate surgical levels in patients with cervical spondylosis. Overview of Literature Previous studies have investigated the value of pain drawings in its correlation with various features in degenerative spine diseases including surgical outcome, magnetic resonance imaging findings, discographic study, and psychogenic issues. However, there is no previous study on the value of pain drawings in identifying symptomatic levels for the surgery in cervical spondylosis. Methods The study collected data from patients with cervical spondylosis who underwent surgical treatment between August 2009 and July 2012. Pain diagrams drawn separately by each patient and physician were collected. Pain distribution patterns among various levels of surgery were analyzed by the chi-square test. Agreement between different pairs of data, including pain diagrams drawn by each patient and physician, intra-examiner agreement on interpretation of pain diagrams, inter-examiner agreement on interpretation of pain diagrams, interpretation of pain diagram by examiners and actual surgery, was analyzed by Kappa statistics. Results The study group consisted of 19 men and 28 women with an average age of 55.2 years. Average duration of symptoms was 16.8 months. There was no difference in the pain distribution pattern at any level of surgery. The agreement between pain diagram drawn by each patient and physician was moderate. Intra-examiner agreement was moderate. There was slight agreement of inter-examiners, examiners versus actual surgery. Conclusions Pain distribution pattern by itself has limited value in identifying surgical levels in patients with cervical spondylosis.
Characterization of DNA methylation as a function of biological complexity via dinucleotide inter-distances

We perform a statistical study of the distances between successive occurrences of a given dinucleotide in the DNA sequence for a number of organisms of different complexity. Our analysis highlights peculiar features of the CG dinucleotide distribution in mammalian DNA, pointing towards a connection with the role of such dinucleotide in DNA methylation. While the CG distributions of mammals exhibit exponential tails with comparable parameters, the picture for the other organisms studied (e.g. fish, insects, bacteria and viruses) is more heterogeneous, possibly because in these organisms DNA methylation has different functional roles. Our analysis suggests that the distribution of the distances between CG dinucleotides provides useful insights into characterizing and classifying organisms in terms of methylation functionalities.
Inflammatory Macrophages Promotes Development of Diabetic Encephalopathy

Background/Aims: Diabetes and Alzheimer's disease are often associated with each other, whereas the relationship between two diseases is ill-defined. Although hyperglycemia during diabetes is a major cause of encephalopathy, diabetes may also cause chronic inflammatory complications including peripheral neuropathy. Hence the role and the characteristics of inflammatory macrophages in the development of diabetic encephalopathy need to be clarified. Methods: Diabetes were induced in mice by i.p. injection of streptozotocin (STZ). Two weeks after STZ injection and confirmation of development of diabetes, inflammatory macrophages were eliminated by i.p. injection of 20µg saporin-conjugated antibody against a macrophage surface marker CD11b (saporin-CD11b) twice per week, while a STZ-treated group received injection of rat IgG of same frequency as a control. The effects of macrophage depletion on brain degradation markers, brain malondialdehyde (MDA), catalase, superoxidase anion-positive cells and nitric oxide (NO) were measured. Results: Saporin-CD11b significantly reduced inflammatory macrophages in brain, without affecting mouse blood glucose, serum insulin, glucose responses and beta cell mass. However, reduced brain macrophages significantly inhibited the STZ-induced decreases in brain MDA, catalase and superoxidase anion-positive cells, and the STZ-induced decreases in brain NO. Conclusion: Inflammatory macrophages may promote development of diabetic encephalopathy.
Netshare and stochastic netshare: predictable bandwidth allocation for data centers

Application performance in cloud data centers often depends crucially on network bandwidth, not just the aggregate data transmitted as in typical SLAs. We describe a mechanism for data center networks called NetShare that requires no hardware changes to routers but allows bandwidth to be allocated predictably across services based on weights. The weights are either specified by a manager, or automatically assigned at each switch port based on a virtual machine heuristic for isolation. Bandwidth unused by a service is shared proportionately by other services, providing weighted hierarchical max-min fair sharing. On a testbed of Fulcrum switches, we demonstrate that NetShare provides bandwidth isolation in various settings, including multipath networks.
Robust Image Watermarking Scheme Based on 3D-DCT

A robust image watermarking scheme based on 3-dimensional discrete cosine transform (3D DCT) is proposed for color image copyright protection. Firstly, the color image is divided into 3-D blocks, and then they are transformed into transform domain by 3D DCT transform, finally, the generated pseudo random sequence is embedded into the selected coefficients. Applying the nice correlatives among different color channels, the watermark can be embedded with good robustness. The theoretic analysis shows that the proposed method has good robustness over 2-D based method. Experimental results support the conclusion well.
Comparison of Decoding Strategies for CTC Acoustic Models

Connectionist Temporal Classification has recently attracted a lot of interest as it offers an elegant approach to building acoustic models (AMs) for speech recognition. The CTC loss function maps an input sequence of observable feature vectors to an output sequence of symbols. Output symbols are conditionally independent of each other under CTC loss, so a language model (LM) can be incorporated conveniently during decoding, retaining the traditional separation of acoustic and linguistic components in ASR. For fixed vocabularies, Weighted Finite State Transducers provide a strong baseline for efficient integration of CTC AMs with n-gram LMs. Character-based neural LMs provide a straight forward solution for open vocabulary speech recognition and all-neural models, and can be decoded with beam search. Finally, sequence-to-sequence models can be used to translate a sequence of individual sounds into a word string. We compare the performance of these three approaches, and analyze their error patterns, which provides insightful guidance for future research and development in this important area.
FPGA implementation of an IF transceiver for OFDM-based WLAN

The paper deals with the design and implementation on FPGA of an intermediate frequency transceiver for OFDM-based WLAN. The circuit has been particularized for the HIPERLAN/2 standard, but most of the work can be generalized to IEEE 802.11a/g standards. The system is composed of three main blocks (autocorrelator, CORDIC, and FFT processor) that are used in different time intervals to perform all the required operations. The autocorrelator is used for frame detection and carrier frequency offset estimation. The CORDIC is reused to estimate frequency offset, to compensate that frequency and to calculate the division in the channel estimation stage. Finally, the FFT/IFFT processor also uses its complex-number multiplier to perform the channel compensation of the received OFDM symbols. The whole IF transceiver fits in a low cost FPGA, an XC3S400-4 Spartan III device.
Combustion Analysis and Study on Smoke and NOX Emissions of Diesel and Biodiesel Fueled CI Engines With Ethanol Blends

Diesel engines suffer from high amount of soot, particulate matter and nitrogen oxides emissions in spite of their advantages such as high thermal efficiency, low CO and HC emissions. The use of Biodiesel in conventional diesel engines results in a substantial reduction of HC, CO and PM. Its higher cetane number improves the ignition quality. However it suffers from cold starting problems and increased NOx emissions when compared with diesel fuel. Reduction of NOx emissions and particulate matter simultaneously is quite difficult due to the Soot/NOx trade off. In this investigation, tests were conducted on a single cylinder DI diesel engine fueled with neat diesel and biodiesel as baseline fuel and addition of 5 to 20% ethanol on a volume basis in steps of 5 vol.% as a bio-resource supplementary oxygenated fuel to analyze the combustion and emissions characteristics. The results have shown a simultaneous reduction of NOx and smoke emissions in comparison with baseline fuels. A global overview of the results has shown that the 15% ethanol addition to diesel and biodiesel fuel produce the lowest smoke opacity. Meanwhile the lowest amount of NOX emissions belongs to the 10% and 15% ethanol addition to diesel and biodiesel respectively.Copyright © 2011 by ASME
Does Software Design Complexity Affect Maintenance Effort

The design complexity of a software system may be characterized within a refinement level (e.g., data flow among modules), or between refinement levels (e.g., traceability between the specification and the design). We analyzed an existing set of data from NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory to test whether changing software modules with high design complexity requires more personnel effort than changing modules with low design complexity. By analyzing variables singly, we identified strong correlations between software design complexity and change effort for error corrections performed during the maintenance phase. By analyzing variables in combination, we found patterns which identify modules in which error corrections were costly to perform during the acceptance test phase.
Swallowing dysfunction following endotracheal intubation

AbstractTo evaluate postextubation swallowing dysfunction (PSD) 21 days after endotracheal extubation and to examine whether PSD is time-limited and whether age matters.For this prospective cohort study, we evaluated 151 adult critical care patients (≥20 years) who were intubated for at least 48 hours and had no pre-existing neuromuscular disease or swallowing dysfunction. Participants were assessed for time (days) to pass bedside swallow evaluations (swallow 50 mL of water without difficulty) and to resume total oral intake. Outcomes were compared between younger (20–64 years) and older participants (≥65 years). PSD, defined as inability to swallow 50 mL of water within 48 hours after extubation, affected 92 participants (61.7% of our sample). At 21 days postextubation, 17 participants (15.5%) still failed to resume total oral intake and were feeding-tube dependent. We found that older participants had higher PSD rates at 7, 14, and 21 days postextubation, and took significantly longer to pass the bedside swallow evaluations (5.0 vs 3.0 days; P = 0.006) and to resume total oral intake (5.0 vs 3.0 days; P = 0.003) than their younger counterparts. Older participants also had significantly higher rates of subsequent feeding-tube dependence than younger patients (24.1 vs 5.8%; P = 0.008). Excluding patients with pre-existing neuromuscular dysfunction, PSD is common and prolonged. Age matters in the time needed to recover. Swallowing and oral intake should be monitored and interventions made, if needed, in the first 7 to 14 days postextubation, particularly for older patients.
Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms

This paper presents our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): "Tangible Bits. " Tangible Bits allows users to "grasp & manipulate" bits in the center of users’ attention by coupling the bits with everyday physical objects and architectural surfaces. Tangible Bits also enables users to be aware of background bits at the periphery of human perception using ambient display media such as light, sound, airflow, and water movement in an augmented space. The goal of Tangible Bits is to bridge the gaps between both cyberspace and the physical environment, as well as the foreground and background of human activities. This paper describes three key concepts of Tangible Bits: interactive surfaces; the coupling of bits with graspable physical objects; and ambient media for background awareness. We illustrate these concepts with three prototype systems ‐ the metaDESK, transBOARD and ambientROOM ‐ to identify underlying research issues.
Computing exact geometric predicates using modular arithmetic with single precision

We propose an efficient method that determines the sign of a multivariate polynomial expression with integer coefficients. This is a central operation on which the robustness of many geometric algorithms depends. Our method relies on modular computations, for which comparisons are usually thought to require multiprecision. Our novel technique of {\it recursive relaxation of the moduli} enables us to carry out sign determination and comparisons by using only floating point computations in single precision. This leads us to propose a hybrid symbolic-numeric approach to exact arithmetic. The method is highly parallelizable and is the fastest of all known multiprecision methods \from a complexity point of view. As an application, we show how to compute a few geometric predicates that reduce to matrix determinants and we discuss implementation efficiency, which can be enhanced by arithmetic filters. We substantiate these claims by experimental results and comparisons to other existing approaches. Our method can be used to generate robust and efficient implementations of geometric algorithms (convex hulls, Delaunay triangulations, arrangements) and numerical computer algebra (algebraic representation of curves and points, symbolic perturbation, Sturm sequences and multivariate resultants).
Relationship Between Asthma and High Blood Pressure Among Adolescents in Aracaju, Brazil

Background. Asthma has been linked to cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and related risk factors such as hypertension in adults. It is unclear whether the relationship between asthma and hypertension found among adults is also observed in adolescents. Hence, the authors examined asthma and its association with prehypertension and hypertension among adolescents in Aracaju, Brazil. Methods. Data on asthma and blood pressure were collected among 1002 adolescents age 12 to 17 years old in 15 public schools, 5 municipal schools, and 10 private schools. Asthma data were ascertained by the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) written questionnaire. Sex-, age-, and height-specific percentile levels were used to define prehypertension (90–94th percentile) and hypertension (≥95th percentile). Results. The prevalence of asthma was 20.6% in boys and 27.7% in girls. Among boys, the prevalence rates of prehypertension and hypertension were 26.7% and 17.0%, respectively. Among girls, the rates of prehypertension and hypertension were 14.3% and 12.9%, respectively. There were no statistically significant associations between asthma and prehypertension, and hypertension, even after adjusting for age, social economic status, physical activity, and body mass index (BMI) in both boys (prehypertension: odds ratio [OR] = 1.35, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.80–2.27; hypertension: OR = 0.60, 95% CI: 0.29–1.23) and girls (prehypertension: OR = 0.71, 95% CI: 0.40–1.28; hypertension: OR = 1.07, 95% CI: 0.60–1.94). Conclusions. These results suggest no association between asthma and high blood pressure in adolescents. More prospective studies are needed to establish whether hypertension becomes more pronounced at a specific age in asthmatics, and if so, the possible factors that may contribute to this.