Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Paper pencil versus pc administered querying of a study on health behaviour in school-aged children

Purpose: To investigate the reliability, the concordance, the feasibility and the appreciation of the computer format (pc format) of the Flemish version of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children-questionnaire (HBSC-questionnaire) versus the original paper pencil format (pp format). Procedure: Five hundred sixty first grade pupils of four secondary schools in Ghent completed the HBSC-questionnaire twice, with a test-retest interval of 6-10 days under one of the following conditions: - twice the pc format (N = 177), - twice the paper pencil format (N = 224), - or both formats in counterbalanced order (N = 159). Results: Test-retest reliabilities of both formats were at best moderate but comparable. For the majority of items mode of administration had no significant effect on adolescents' responses, but the pc format showed fewer item incompletions. Most of the pupils who completed both formats preferred the pc format. Conclusion: The computer assisted version of the hbsc-questionnaire can be used as a valid alternative for the original paper and pencil version.
IPO ETFs: An Alternative Way to Enter the Initial Public Offering Business

This chapter focuses on the initial public offerings (IPO) ETFs, which constitute an alternative way to enter the IPO business. Short- and long-term performance of ETFs is examined vis-a-vis the performance of major market indices. Three types of returns are computed; the absolute, benchmark-adjusted, and abnormal return. Returns are computed for the initial trading day and for the first 2, 3, 4, 5, 21, and 63 trading days. Long-run returns are also calculated for the first 6, 12, 18, and 24 months of trading and for the entire history of ETFs up to October 31, 2016 from a cumulative and a buy-and-hold perspective. Risk-adjusted returns are estimated with a six-factor model. The results indicate that the average first-day return is positive but below 1%. In the long run, the cumulative absolute returns are positive during the several intervals examined, whereas the cumulative benchmark-adjusted and abnormal returns are positive only for the first 6 months of trading. These returns become negative after the first 6 months. Going further, ETFs deliver significant buy-and-hold returns over the several periods examined. Finally, the results reveal that just one out of the four IPO ETFs examined can produce a robust and statistically significant alpha.
PDK4‐Deficiency Reprograms Intrahepatic Glucose and Lipid Metabolism to Facilitate Liver Regeneration in Mice

Liver regeneration requires intrahepatic and extrahepatic metabolic reprogramming to meet the high hepatic bioenergy demand for liver cell repopulation. This study aims to elucidate how pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase 4 (PDK4), a critical regulator of glucose and lipid metabolism, coordinates metabolic regulation with efficient liver growth. We found that hepatic Pdk4 expression was elevated after two‐thirds partial hepatectomy (PHx). In Pdk4−/− PHx mice, the liver/body weight ratio was more rapidly restored, accompanied by more aggressive hepatic DNA replication; however, Pdk4−/− mice developed more severe hypoglycemia. In Pdk4−/− PHx livers, the pro‐regenerative insulin signaling was potentiated, as demonstrated by early peaking of the phosphorylation of insulin receptor, more remarkable induction of the insulin receptor substrate proteins, IRS1 and IRS2, and more striking activation of Akt. The hepatic up‐regulation of CD36 contributed to the enhanced transient regeneration‐associated steatosis in Pdk4−/− PHx mice. Notably, CD36 overexpression in mice promoted the recovery of liver/body weight ratio and elevated intrahepatic adenosine triphosphate after PHx. CD36 expression was transcriptionally suppressed by FOXO1 (forkhead box protein O1), which was stabilized and translocated to the nucleus following AMPK (adenosine monophosphate–activated protein kinase) activation. PHx remarkably induced AMPK activation, which became incompetent to respond in Pdk4−/− livers. Moreover, we defined that PDK4‐regulated AMPK activation directly depended on intracellular adenosine monophosphate in vitro and in regenerative livers. Conclusion: PDK4 inhibition reprograms glucose and lipid metabolism to promote liver regeneration by enhancing hepatic insulin/Akt signaling and activating an AMPK/FOXO1/CD36 regulatory axis of lipid. These findings may lead to potential therapeutic strategies to prevent hepatic insufficiency and liver failure.
Peripheral and Central Auditory Findings in Individuals with Williams Syndrome

Introduction: Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopment genetic condition. The syndrome may present manifestations associated with the central nervous system, hearing, and language. It is possible, as well, to observe an alteration in the central auditory system, which can be diagnosed through long-latency auditory evoked potential (LLAEP). Objective: The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the results obtained by peripheral and central auditory evaluation on individuals with WS, verifying if there is a relationship between audiological findings and gender, age and ear side. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study in which 14 individuals with WS were evaluated. The exams performed consisted of pure tone audiometry, vocal audiometry, acoustic immittance measures, LLAEP, and cognitive potential. Results: The sample was composed of patients from 4 to 18 years old, with a mean age of 11.6 years old (±5.3), being 9 males (64.3%) and 5 females (35.7%). We mainly verified mild to moderate degree (40-44%) of sensorineural auditory loss (35.7-42.9%), type A tympanometric curve (57.1-64.3%), and absent acoustic reflexes (57.1%). As for central auditory evaluation, the subjects showed latency delay in all of the LLAEP components. Moreover, it was evidenced a statistically significant difference when comparing ears for amplitude on cognitive potential evaluation (p = 0.032), observing higher values at the left ear. It was also observed an inverse association between age and P1 wave latency both on the right (p = 0.006) and on the left ear (p = 0.022), and this result can be related to the nervous system maturational process of the WS individuals. Conclusion: There are few studies investigating the central auditory pathway on WS in literature. The present study contributes to the extension of the knowledge about the central involvement of the auditory phenotype in the syndrome. However, considering the sample size, more studies are suggested to confirm these findings.
Hyper-Parameter Optimization: A Review of Algorithms and Applications

Since deep neural networks were developed, they have made huge contributions to everyday lives. Machine learning provides more rational advice than humans are capable of in almost every aspect of daily life. However, despite this achievement, the design and training of neural networks are still challenging and unpredictable procedures. To lower the technical thresholds for common users, automated hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) has become a popular topic in both academic and industrial areas. This paper provides a review of the most essential topics on HPO. The first section introduces the key hyper-parameters related to model training and structure, and discusses their importance and methods to define the value range. Then, the research focuses on major optimization algorithms and their applicability, covering their efficiency and accuracy especially for deep learning networks. This study next reviews major services and toolkits for HPO, comparing their support for state-of-the-art searching algorithms, feasibility with major deep learning frameworks, and extensibility for new modules designed by users. The paper concludes with problems that exist when HPO is applied to deep learning, a comparison between optimization algorithms, and prominent approaches for model evaluation with limited computational resources.
Brownian Motions and Heat Kernel Lower Bounds on Kähler and Quaternion Kähler Manifolds

We study the radial parts of the Brownian motions on K\"ahler and quaternion K\"ahler manifolds. Thanks to sharp Laplacian comparison theorems, we deduce as a consequence a sharp Cheeger-Yau type lower bound for the heat kernels of such manifolds and also sharp Cheng's type estimates for the Dirichlet eigenvalues of metric balls.
Encoder-Decoder Based Convolutional Neural Networks with Multi-Scale-Aware Modules for Crowd Counting

In this paper, we propose two modified neural networks based on dual path multi-scale fusion networks (SFANet) and SegNet for accurate and efficient crowd counting. Inspired by SFANet, the first model, which is named M-SFANet, is attached with atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and context-aware module (CAN). The encoder of M-SFANet is enhanced with ASPP containing parallel atrous convolutional layers with different sampling rates and hence able to extract multi-scale features of the target object and incorporate larger context. To further deal with scale variation throughout an input image, we leverage the CAN module which adaptively encodes the scales of the contextual information. The combination yields an effective model for counting in both dense and sparse crowd scenes. Based on the SFANet decoder structure, M-SFANet‘s decoder has dual paths, for density map and attention map generation. The second model is called M-SegNet, which is produced by replacing the bilinear upsampling in SFANet with max unpooling that is used in SegNet. This change provides a faster model while providing competitive counting performance. Designed for high-speed surveillance applications, M-SegNet has no additional multi-scale-aware module in order to not increase the complexity. Both models are encoder-decoder based architectures and are end-to-end trainable. We conduct extensive experiments on five crowd counting datasets and one vehicle counting dataset to show that these modifications yield algorithms that could improve state-of-the-art crowd counting methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/Pongpisit-Thanasutives/Variations-of-SFANet-for-Crowd-Counting.
A Survey of Adversarial Learning on Graphs

Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, a line of studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r. t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give appropriate definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can provide a comprehensive overview and offer insights for the relevant researchers. More details of our works are available at this https URL.
Chromatin Dynamics upon DNA Damage

The dynamics organization of the nuclear genome is essential for many biological processes and is often altered in cells from diseased tissue. In the presence of double-strand break (DSBs) in S. cerevisiae and some mammalian cell lines, DNA mobility is dramatically altered. These changes in DNA mobility act as a double-edged sword since they promote homologous pairing in diploid yeast for example, but in some cases, they lead to potentially mutagenic DNA repair event and are the source of chromosomal translocations. In this chapter, we will present the state of the art in the field of chromosomes mobility in response to DNA damage. After introducing the importance of genome organization and dynamics, we will present in a clear and accessible manner several methods used in the literature to measure and quantify chromatin mobility inside living cells. We will then give an overview of the important findings in the field, both in yeast and in mammalian cells.
The Effect of Depression and Perceived Social Support Systems on Quality of Life in Dialysis Patients

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to find the effect of depression and perceived social support systems on quality of life in hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis patients. MATERIAL and METHODS: This study was a cross-sectional study that was conducted between June and September 2016 on 122 hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis patients at the Erciyes University Health Application and Research Center and a private dialysis center. The patient information form, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) and WHOQOL-BREF were used as data collection tools. RESULTS: Patients got the highest scores in the environmental field in WHOQOL-BREF, and the family support sub-dimension was the highest in MSPSS. Patients who were illiterate and literate had statistically significantly lower mean scores in the mental field and environmental field when compared with the other education levels. There was a negative correlation between the age and physical and mental fields, peritoneal dialysis duration and social field, peritoneal dialysis treatment time per day and mental field. MSPSS total score and mental, social, and environmental fields had a statistically significant positive correlation (p<0.05). BDI and WHOQOL-BREF life quality sub-scale scores had a statistically significant negative correlation. CONCLUSION: Depression has a negative effect on the quality of life of dialysis patients, whereas social support systems have positive effect. KEy wORDS: Dialysis, Depression, Social support, Quality of life
Abrupt degenerately-doped silicon nanowire tunnel junctions

We have confirmed the presence of narrow, degenerately-doped axial silicon nanowire (SiNW) p-n junctions via off-axis electron holography (EH). SiNWs were grown via the vapor-solid-liquid (VLS) mechanism using gold (Au) as the catalyst, silane (SiH4), diborane (B2H6) and phosphine (PH3) as the precursors, and hydrochloric acid (HCl) to stabilize the growth. Two types of growth were carried out, and in each case we explored growth with both n/p and p/n sequences. In the first type, we abruptly switched the dopant precursors at the desired junction location, and in the second type we slowed the growth rate at the junction to allow the dopants to readily leave the Au catalyst. We demonstrate degenerately-doped p/n and n/p nanowire segments with abrupt potential profiles of 1.02 ± 0.02 and 0.86 ± 0.3 V, and depletion region widths as narrow as 10 ± 1 nm via EH. Low temperature current-voltage measurements show an asymmetric curvature in the forward direction that resemble planar gold-doped tunnel junctions, where the tunneling current is hidden by a large excess current. The results presented herein show that the direct VLS growth of degenerately-doped axial SiNW p-n junctions is feasible, an essential step in the fabrication of more complex SiNW-based devices for electronics and solar energy.
Robustness to Incorrect Models in Average-Cost Optimal Stochastic Control

We study continuity properties of infinite-horizon average expected cost problems with respect to transition probabilities, as well as applications of these results to the problem of robustness of control policies designed for incorrect models applied to systems with incomplete models. We show that sufficient conditions presented in the literature for discounted-cost problems are not sufficient to ensure robustness for averagecost problems. However, we show that the average optimal cost is continuous under the convergence in total variation and in weak convergence in addition to uniform ergodicity and regularity conditions. Using such continuity results, we establish that the mismatch error due to the application of a control policy designed for an incorrectly estimated model is continuous in terms of total variation distance or any weak convergence inducing metric between the true model and an incorrect one, thus leading to robustness.
Fractional Gravity and Modified Newtonian Dynamics

This paper introduces a possible alternative model of gravity based on fractional calculus and its applications to Newtonian gravity. In particular, Gauss's law for gravity as well as Laplace's equation and other fundamental classical laws are extended to a $D$-dimensional metric space, where $D$ can be a non-integer dimension. We show a possible connection between this Newtonian Fractional Gravity (NFG) and Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), the leading alternative gravity model, which accounts for the observed properties of galaxies and other astrophysical structures without requiring the dark matter hypothesis. The MOND acceleration constant $a_{0} \simeq 1.2 \times 10^{ -10}\mbox{m}\thinspace \mbox{s}^{ -2}$ can be related to a natural scale length $l_{0}$ in NFG, i.e., $a_{0} \approx GM/l_{0}^{2}$, for astrophysical structures of mass $M$, and the deep-MOND regime is present in regions of space where the dimension is reduced to $D \approx 2$. For several fundamental spherically-symmetric structures, we compare MOND results such as the empirical Radial Acceleration Relation (RAR), circular speed plots, and logarithmic plots of the observed radial acceleration $g_{obs}$ vs. the baryonic radial acceleration $g_{bar}$, showing that NFG is capable of reproducing these results using a variable local dimension $D\left (w\right )$, where $w =r/l_{0}$ is a dimensionless radial coordinate. At the moment, we are unable to derive explicitly this dimension function $D\left (w\right )$ from first principles, but it can be obtained empirically in each case from the general RAR. Additional work on the subject, including studies of axially-symmetric structures, detailed galactic rotation curves fitting, and a possible relativistic extension, will be needed to establish NFG as a viable alternative model of gravity.
Numerical smoothing and hierarchical approximations for efficient option pricing and density estimation

When approximating the expectation of a functional of a certain stochastic process, the efficiency and performance of deterministic quadrature methods, and hierarchical variance reduction methods such as multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC), is highly deteriorated in different ways by the low regularity of the integrand with respect to the input parameters. To overcome this issue, a smoothing procedure is needed to uncover the available regularity and improve the performance of the aforementioned methods. In this work, we consider cases where we cannot perform an analytic smoothing. Thus, we introduce a novel numerical smoothing technique based on root-finding combined with a one dimensional integration with respect to a single well-chosen variable. We prove that under appropriate conditions, the resulting function of the remaining variables is highly smooth, potentially allowing a higher efficiency of adaptive sparse grids quadrature (ASGQ), in particular when combined with hierarchical representations to treat the high dimensionality effectively. Our study is motivated by option pricing problems and our main focus is on dynamics where a discretization of the asset price is needed. Our analysis and numerical experiments illustrate the advantage of combining numerical smoothing with ASGQ compared to the Monte Carlo method. Furthermore, we demonstrate how numerical smoothing significantly reduces the kurtosis at the deep levels of MLMC, and also improves the strong convergence rate. Given a pre-selected tolerance, $\text{TOL}$, this results in an improvement of the complexity from $\mathcal{O}\left(\text{TOL}^{-2.5}\right)$ in the standard case to $\mathcal{O}\left(\text{TOL}^{-2} \log(\text{TOL})^2\right)$. Finally, we show how our numerical smoothing enables MLMC to estimate density functions, which standard MLMC (without smoothing) fails to achieve.
The Tidal Disruption Event AT 2018hyz II: Light-curve modelling of a partially disrupted star

AT 2018hyz (=ASASSN-18zj) is a tidal disruption event (TDE) located in the nucleus of a quiescent E+A galaxy at a redshift of $z = 0.04573$, first detected by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN). We present optical+UV photometry of the transient, as well as an X-ray spectrum and radio upper limits. The bolometric light curve of AT 2018hyz is comparable to other known TDEs and declines at a rate consistent with a $t^{-5/3}$ at early times, emitting a total radiated energy of $E = 9\times10^{50}$ erg. An excess bump appears in the UV light curve about 50 days after bolometric peak, followed by a flattening beyond 250 days. The light curve shows an excess bump in the UV about 50 days after bolometric peak lasting for at least 100 days, which may be related to an outflow. We detect a constant X-ray source present for at least 86 days. The X-ray spectrum shows a total unabsorbed flux of $\sim 4\times10^{-14}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ and is best fit by a blackbody plus power-law model with a photon index of $\Gamma = 0.8$. A thermal X-ray model is unable to account for photons $> 1$ keV, while the radio non-detection favors inverse-Compton scattering rather than a jet for the non-thermal component. We model the optical and UV light curves using the Modular Open-Source Fitter for Transients (MOSFiT) and find a best fit for a black hole of $5.2\times10^6$ M$_\odot$ partially disrupting a $0.1$ M$_\odot$ star (stripping a mass of $\sim 0.01$ M$_\odot$ for the inferred impact parameter, $\beta=0.6$). The low optical depth implied by the small debris mass may explain how we are able to see hydrogen emission with disk-like line profiles in the spectra of AT 2018hyz (see our companion paper, Short et al.~2020).
Collective excitations of a one-dimensional quantum droplet

We calculate the excitation spectrum of a one-dimensional self-bound quantum droplet in a two-component bosonic mixture described by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) with cubic and quadratic nonlinearities. The cubic term originates from the mean-field energy of the mixture proportional to the effective coupling constant $\delta g$, whereas the quadratic nonlinearity corresponds to the attractive beyond-mean-field contribution. The droplet properties are governed by a control parameter $\gamma\propto \delta g N^{2/3}$, where $N$ is the particle number. For large $\gamma>0$ the droplet features the flat-top shape with the discrete part of its spectrum consisting of plane-wave Bogoliubov phonons propagating through the flat-density bulk and reflected by edges of the droplet. With decreasing $\gamma$ these modes cross into the continuum, sequentially crossing the particle-emission threshold at specific critical values. A notable exception is the breathing mode which we find to be always bound. The balance point $\gamma = 0$ provides implementation of a system governed by the GPE with an unusual quadratic nonlinearity. This case is characterized by the ratio of the breathing-mode frequency to the particle-emission threshold equal to 0.8904. As $\gamma$ tends to $-\infty$ this ratio tends to 1 and the droplet transforms into the soliton solution of the integrable cubic GPE.