Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nicotine increases ventricular vulnerability to fibrillation in hearts with healed myocardial infarction.

The vulnerability of the infarcted hearts to ventricular fibrillation (VF) was tested in in situ canine hearts during nicotine infusion. The activation pattern was mapped with 477 bipolar electrodes in open-chest anesthetized dogs (n = 8) 5-6 wk after permanent occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Nicotine (129 +/- 76 ng/ml) lengthened (P < 0.01) the pacing cycle length at which VF was induced from 171 +/- 8.9 to 210 +/- 14. 7 ms. Nicotine selectively amplified the magnitude of conduction time and monophasic action potential (MAP) amplitude and duration (MAPA and MAPD, respectively) alternans in the epicardial border zone (EBZ) but not in the normal zone. With critical reduction of the MAPA and MAPD in the EBZ, conduction block occurred across the long axis of the EBZ cells. Block led immediately to reentry formation in the EBZ with a mean period of 105 +/- 10 ms, which, after one to two rotations, degenerated to VF. Nicotine widened the range of diastolic intervals over which the dynamic MAPD restitution curve had a slope >1. We conclude that nicotine facilitates conduction block, reentry, and VF in hearts with healed myocardial infarction by increasing the magnitude of depolarization and repolarization alternans consistent with the restitution hypothesis of vulnerability to VF.
Mining uncertain data

As an important data mining and knowledge discovery task, association rule mining searches for implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful pieces of information—in the form of rules revealing associative relationships—that are embedded in the data. In general, the association rule mining process comprises two key steps. The first key step, which mines frequent patterns (i.e., frequently occurring sets of items) from data, is more computationally intensive than the second key step of using the mined frequent patterns to form association rules. In the early days, many developed algorithms mined frequent patterns from traditional transaction databases of precise data such as shopping market basket data, in which the contents of databases are known. However, we are living in an uncertain world, in which uncertain data can be found almost everywhere. Hence, in recent years, researchers have paid more attention to frequent pattern mining from probabilistic databases of uncertain data. In this paper, we review recent algorithmic development on mining uncertain data in these probabilistic databases for frequent patterns. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov 2011 1 316–329 DOI: 10.1002/widm.31
Ultra-Thin Film of Chitosan and Sulfated Chitosan Coating on Titanium Oxide by Layer-by-Layer Self-Assembly Method

The ultra-thin film composed of chitosan (CS) and sulfated chitosan (SCS) was assembled on the titanium oxide surface by layer-by-layer (LBL) self-assembly methods. The titanium oxide film was treated by NaOH solution, followed by successively dipping the substrates in 5mg/ml sulfated chitosan (SCS) and 5mg/ml chitosan (CS) solutions alternatively, We hypothesized that this biologic coating may have the property of good biocompatibility, antibacteriostatic effect, anticoagulant activitves and enhancing sell biocompatibility.
The sweet spot of a biological hammer: the centre of percussion of glyptodont (Mammalia: Xenarthra) tail clubs

The importance of the centre of percussion (CP) of some hand-held sporting equipment (such as tennis rackets and baseball bats) for athletic performance is well known. In order to avoid injuries it is important that powerful blows are located close to the CP. Several species of glyptodont (giant armoured mammals) had tail clubs that can be modelled as rigid beams (like baseball bats) and it is generally assumed that these were useful for agonistic behaviour. However, the variation in tail club morphology among known genera suggests that a biomechanical and functional analysis of these structures could be useful. Here, we outline a novel method to determine the CP of the glyptodont tail clubs. We find that the largest species had the CP very close to the possible location of horny spikes. This is consistent with the inference that they were adapted to delivering powerful blows at that point. Our new analysis reinforces the case for agonistic use of tail clubs in several glyptodont species.
Does Pet Ownership in Infancy Lead to Asthma or Allergy at School Age? Pooled Analysis of Individual Participant Data from 11 European Birth Cohorts

Objective To examine the associations between pet keeping in early childhood and asthma and allergies in children aged 6–10 years. Design Pooled analysis of individual participant data of 11 prospective European birth cohorts that recruited a total of over 22,000 children in the 1990s. Exposure definition Ownership of only cats, dogs, birds, rodents, or cats/dogs combined during the first 2 years of life. Outcome definition Current asthma (primary outcome), allergic asthma, allergic rhinitis and allergic sensitization during 6–10 years of age. Data synthesis Three-step approach: (i) Common definition of outcome and exposure variables across cohorts; (ii) calculation of adjusted effect estimates for each cohort; (iii) pooling of effect estimates by using random effects meta-analysis models. Results We found no association between furry and feathered pet keeping early in life and asthma in school age. For example, the odds ratio for asthma comparing cat ownership with “no pets” (10 studies, 11489 participants) was 1.00 (95% confidence interval 0.78 to 1.28) (I2 = 9%; p = 0.36). The odds ratio for asthma comparing dog ownership with “no pets” (9 studies, 11433 participants) was 0.77 (0.58 to 1.03) (I2 = 0%, p = 0.89). Owning both cat(s) and dog(s) compared to “no pets” resulted in an odds ratio of 1.04 (0.59 to 1.84) (I2 = 33%, p = 0.18). Similarly, for allergic asthma and for allergic rhinitis we did not find associations regarding any type of pet ownership early in life. However, we found some evidence for an association between ownership of furry pets during the first 2 years of life and reduced likelihood of becoming sensitized to aero-allergens. Conclusions Pet ownership in early life did not appear to either increase or reduce the risk of asthma or allergic rhinitis symptoms in children aged 6–10. Advice from health care practitioners to avoid or to specifically acquire pets for primary prevention of asthma or allergic rhinitis in children should not be given.
Effects of PON polymorphisms and haplotypes on molecular phenotype in Mexican‐American mothers and children

Paraoxonase 1 (PON1) prevents oxidation of low‐density lipoproteins and inactivates toxic oxon derivatives of organophosphate pesticides (OPs). More than 250 SNPs have been previously identified in the PON1 gene, yet studies of PON1 genetic variation focus primarily on a few promoter SNPs (−108, −162) and coding SNPs (192, 55). We sequenced the PON1 gene in 30 subjects from a Mexican‐American birth cohort and identified 94 polymorphisms with minor allele frequencies >5%, including several novel variants (six SNPs, one insertion, and two deletions). Variants of the PON1 gene and three SNPs from PON2 and PON3 were genotyped in 700 children and mothers from the same cohort. PON1 phenotype was established using two substrate‐specific assays: arylesterase (AREase) and paraoxonase (POase). Twelve PON1 and two PON2 polymorphisms were significantly associated with AREase activity, and 37 polymorphisms with POase activity; however, only nine were not in strong linkage disequilibrium (LD) with either PON1−108 or PON1192 (r2 > 0.20), SNPs with known effects on PON1 quantity and substrate‐specific activity. Single tagSNPs PON155 and PON1192 accounted for similar ranges of AREase variation compared to haplotypes comprised of multiple SNPs within their haplotype blocks. However, PON155 explained 11–16% of POase activity, while six SNPs in the same haplotype block explained threefold more variance (36–56%). Although LD structure in the PON cluster seems similar between Mexicans and Caucasians, allele frequencies for many polymorphisms differed strikingly. Functional effects of PON genetic variation related to susceptibility to OPs and oxidative stress also differed by age and should be considered in protecting vulnerable subpopulations. Environ. Mol. Mutagen. 52:105–116, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Impact strength, microstructure, and water absorption properties of kenaf/polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fiber-reinforced polyoxymethylene (POM) hybrid composites

Natural fiber composites are becoming more attractive for applications as energy absorbers in the automotive industry despite their high moisture absorption characteristics. The main objective of this paper is to study the impact strength and moisture absorption properties of long fiber and short fiber hybrid composites using a kenaf/polyethylene terephthalate fiber reinforced in the polyoxymethylene matrix. The results obtained from the impact test gave 10.8 J/cm for the longer fiber hybrid composites, which is higher compared to 8.0 J/cm obtained for the short fiber hybrid composites due to less fiber pullout from the matrix. A moisture content of 0.92% and percentage water absorption of 6.77% were obtained for the long fiber composite due to poor interfacial adhesion between the fiber and the matrix. A high void content of 0.52% and porosity of 1.21% also accounted for high water and moisture absorption of the long fiber hybrid composite.
Utility Independent Privacy Preserving Data Mining on Vertically Partitioned Data

Problem statement: Driven by mutual benefits, or by regulations that require certain data to be published, there has been a demand for the exchange and publication of data among various parties. Data publishing has been ubiquitous in many domains such as medical, business and education. Detailed person-specific data, present in the centralized server or in the distributed environment, in its original form often contains sensitive information about individuals, and publishing such data immediately violates individual privacy. The main problem in this regard is to develop method for publishing data in a more hostile environment so that the published data remains practically useful while individual privacy is preserved. There are n parties, each having a private database, want to jointly conduct a data mining operation on the union of their databases. How could these parties accomplish this without disclosing their database to the other parties or any third party? Approach: To address this issue, we developed a simple technique of transforming the categorical and numeric sensitive data using a mapping table and graded grouping technique, respectively. The typical data mining tasks such as classification, clustering and association rule mining were performed on both the original and transformed tables. The rules/results/patterns of both the tables were compared and the utility of the transformed data was evaluated. Results: The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed approach was able to achieve cent percent utility for any type of mining task as compared to the original table. The classification accuracy of Adult data set obtained, with education as class variable was 40.08% and the same accuracy was obtained even after transformation. Similarly the number of rules generated for the given confidence 0.9, was the same for both the original and transformed table and equal to 10. Conclusion: The association rules involving categorical sensitive attributes were checked manually for privacy breach. We found that it is not possible to guess the actual sensitive values from the rules, even though there was no information loss. The results can be interpreted only with the concern of data owner or data publisher.
Association Discovery in Two-View Data

Two-view datasets are datasets whose attributes are naturally split into two sets, each providing a different view on the same set of objects. We introduce the task of finding small and non-redundant sets of associations that describe how the two views are related. To achieve this, we propose a novel approach in which sets of rules are used to translate one view to the other and vice versa. Our models, dubbed translation tables, contain both unidirectional and bidirectional rules that span both views and provide lossless translation from either of the views to the opposite view. To be able to evaluate different translation tables and perform model selection, we present a score based on the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. Next, we introduce three TRANSLATOR algorithms to find good models according to this score. The first algorithm is parameter-free and iteratively adds the rule that improves compression most. The other two algorithms use heuristics to achieve better trade-offs between runtime and compression. The empirical evaluation on real-world data demonstrates that only modest numbers of associations are needed to characterize the two-view structure present in the data, while the obtained translation rules are easily interpretable and provide insight into the data.
Ultra‐Low Energy Threshold for Cancer Photothermal Therapy Using Transferrin‐Conjugated Gold Nanorods

Gold nanoparticles have shown potential applications for cancer detection and localized photothermal therapy (PTT). Among the gold nanoparticles that have been studied, gold nanorods are of particular interest because of their tuneable near-infrared (NIR) absorption and the recent success in their size-controlled, large-scale synthesis. The strong two-photon photoluminescence (TPL) of gold nanorods render them good contrast agents for cancer cell imaging under two-photon excitation, which makes it more suitable to three-dimensional nonlinear optical imaging of biological samples. Despite the successful application of gold nanorods in PTT and in vitro cancer imaging, this technique still has a long way to go before it can be implemented clinically. For clinical applications, the energy input should be as low as possible to avoid damage to healthy tissues, which is always a concern for laser-based applications. The energy threshold can be reduced by optimizing tumor targeting of the particles, choosing a suitable laser mode, and improving the light absorption efficiency of the nanorods. It has been observed that a pulsed femtosecond laser beam in PTT was more effective than a continuous wave (CW) laser beam. However, most of the gold nanorods are randomly oriented in cells, making it impossible to achieve the maximum energy efficiency due to the limited fraction of excitation of the total nanorods under linearly polarized light. To increase the light absorption efficiency and hence the photothermal effect of the nanorods, a circularly polarized laser beam, which can emit a light beam of all polarization angles within one optical period, can be used to activate as many nanorods as possible, as illustrated by Figure 1a. To demonstrate the circular polarization effect on nanorod excitation, nanorods from a dilute solution were deposited on a cover slide and the same population of nanorods was subject to a linearly and circularly polarized light illumination in sequence. The corresponding images of the nanorods are given in Figure 1b and 1c, respectively. Both single gold nanorods and aggregated nanorods (larger and brighter spots as circled in Fig. 1b) can be identified. It shows that under illumination of circularly polarized light at
Tology-Aware Optimal Data Placement Algorithm for Network Traffic Optimization

We propose a new optimal data placement technique to improve the performance of MapReduce in cloud data centers by considering not only the data locality but also the global data access costs. We first conducted an analytical and experimental study to identify the performance issues of MapReduce in data centers and to show that MapReduce tasks that are involved in unexpected remote data access have much greater communication costs and execution time, and can significantly deteriorate the overall performance. Next, we formulated the problem of optimal data placement and proposed a generative model to minimize global data access cost in data centers and showed that the optimal data placement problem is NP-hard. To solve the optimal data placement problem, we propose a topology-aware heuristic algorithm by first constructing a replica-balanced distribution tree for the abstract tree structure, and then building a replica-similarity distribution tree for detail tree construction, to construct an optimal replica distribution tree. The experimental results demonstrated that our optimal data placement approach can improve the performance of MapReduce with lower communication and computation costs by effectively minimizing global data access costs, more specifically reducing unexpected remote data access.
GNSS‐R ground‐based and airborne campaigns for ocean, land, ice, and snow techniques: Application to the GOLD‐RTR data sets

Several ground‐based and airborne data sets taken with the Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS‐R) technique are made available to the research community. This paper reviews the potential applications of these bistatic radar observations, including a list of possible approaches and algorithms described in the literature for oceanic measurements (altimetric and scatterometric), soil moisture sensing, and sea ice and snow characterization. A list of applicable models complements the review. The paper continues with descriptions of the campaigns included in the initial data set, together with the basic information required to understand the instrumental issues of the data. Finally, some parameters and observables provided in the data are detailed.
Learning Visual Behavior for Gesture AnalysisAndrew

A state-based method for learning visual behavior from image sequences is presented. The technique is novel for its incorporation of multiple representations into the Hidden Markov Model framework. Independent representations of the instantaneous visual input at each state of the Markov model are estimated concurrently with the learning of the temporal characteristics. Measures of the degree to which each representation describes the input are combined to determine an input's overall membership to a state. We exploit two constraints allowing application of the technique to view-based gesture recognition: gestures are modal in the space of possible human motion, and gestures are viewpoint-dependent. The recovery of the visual behavior of a number of simple gestures with a small number of low resolution image sequences is shown. 1 From human motion to gesture For all the degrees of freedom available to the human body, we seem to habitually use a only small class of motions that they permit. Even athletes, which as a group use their bodies in ways that most people do not, aspire to repeat motions awlessly, spending hours upon hours practicing the same motion. In the space of motions allowed by the body's degrees of freedom, there is a subspace that most of us use. For example, if the body is modeled by a series of joints and angles between them, there would be many combinations of joint angles that we would never see. Gesture is one interesting subspace of human motion. For the purposes of this paper, we deene gesture to be motions of the body that are intended to communicate to another agent. Therefore, the gesturer and the recipient of the gesture must share a knowledge of gesture to communicate eeectively. By way of simpliication, this means the gesturer's movement must be one of a predeened set. We do not mean that a given gesture has a xed geometry; a \wave" might be a single gesture in which the hand can be at any height between the chest and the top of the head. Rather, for now we are assuming that there is a set of gestures and each gesture deenes a range of motions that are to be interpreted as being examples of that gesture. Thus gestures are modal in the space of possible human motion. Due to the variability of human movement, the behavior of the gesture must be described without regards to precise geometry or …
Fusion of multi-spectral bands and DSM from WorldView-2 stereo imagery for building extraction

This paper describes a building extraction approach by fusion panchromatic image, multispectral image and Digital Surface Model (DSM) generated from WorldView-2 stereo imagery. First, the DSM is used to indicate a rough building location, and then Hough-transform is followed to generate 2D segments from panchromatic images. Hough lines in the two main directions of each building are kept. The probability of each segment belonging to a building is calculated from random forest estimations. An automatic training data selection strategy is designed for this supervised classification. Finally, the 2D segments and classification results are combined to get the final building boundaries. This method has been tested in the city center of Munich, Germany.
RTM-DCU: Predicting Semantic Similarity with Referential Translation Machines

We use referential translation machines (RTMs) for predicting the semantic similarity of text. RTMs are a computational model effectively judging monolingual and bilingual similarity while identifying translation acts between any two data sets with respect to interpretants. RTMs pioneer a language independent approach to all similarity tasks and remove the need to access any task or domain specific information or resource. RTMs become the 2nd system out of 13 systems participating in Paraphrase and Semantic Similarity in Twitter, 6th out of 16 submissions in Semantic Textual Similarity Spanish, and 50th out of 73 submissions in Semantic Textual Similarity English.
Oral idarubicin in the treatment of acute myelogenous leukaemia and the blast phase of chronic myeloid leukaemia

Fourteen patients with poor‐risk acute myelogenous leukaemia (AML) and five patients with accelerated phase/blast crisis chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) were treated with 3 days of oral idarubicin (25 mg/m2/day). No complete remissions or return to chronic phase CML were observed. A fall in the peripheral blast count was seen in all patients with the first cycle of treatment, and with subsequent cycles in CML patients, but all responses were transient, with eventual reemergence of peripheral blasts. In some patients, there was a clear cut improvement in symptoms such as bone and splenic pain. Five of the AML patients and all of the CML patients were treated as out‐patients. In this group of patients oral idarubicin was found to be a useful drug for palliative treatment.
Wi-HTest: Compliance Test Suite for Diagnosing Devices in Real-Time WirelessHART Network

WirelessHART was released in September 2007 and is the first open wireless communication standard specifically designed for real-time process control applications. It is designed to the same standards as its wired counterpart for reliability and interoperability. To ensure the compliance with the HART Communication Protocol and the adherence to its strict timing requirements, all WirelessHART devices must be thoroughly tested and registered with the HART Communication Foundation (HCF). In this paper, we present Wi-HTest, the test suite designed to exercise WirelessHART devices, thus facilitating compliance assessment. We discuss the detailed architecture of Wi-HTest and highlight several critical features like packet handling with accurate timing control and fault data injection. We also describe a sniffer called Wi-Analys for capturing WirelessHART packets along with their timing information and a post process suite for analyzing the packets. These three tools together provide the complete compliance verification environment for WirelessHART. Based on the test specification developed by HCF, a representative test case is conducted for the purpose of demonstration. This test case in turn shows that Wi-HTest is a novel and efficient test suite for verifying the compliance of real-time WirelessHART devices.