Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Smoking and Risk of Kidney Failure in the Singapore Chinese Health Study

Background The relationship between smoking and risk of kidney failure, especially in people of Chinese origin, is not clear. We analyzed data from the Singapore Chinese Health Study to investigate whether smoking increases the risk of kidney failure. Methods The Singapore Chinese Health Study is a population-based cohort of 63,257 Chinese adults enrolled between 1993 and 1998. Information on smoking status was collected at baseline. Incidence of kidney failure was identified via record linkage with the nationwide Singapore Renal Registry until 2008. Kidney failure was defined by one of the following: 1) serum creatinine level of more than or equal to 500 µmol/l (5.7 mg/dl), 2) estimated glomerular filtration rate of less than 15 ml/min/1.73 m2, 3) undergoing hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis, 4) undergone kidney transplantation. Cox proportional hazard regression analysis was performed for the outcome of kidney failure after adjusting for age, education, dialect, herbal medications, body mass index, sex, physician-diagnosed hypertension and diabetes mellitus. Results The mean age of subjects was 55.6 years at baseline, and 44% were men. Overall 30.6% were ever smokers (current or former) at baseline. A total of 674 incident cases of kidney failure occurred during a median follow-up of 13.3 years. Among men, smokers had a significant increase in the adjusted risk of kidney failure [hazard ratio (HR): 1.29; 95% CI: 1.02–1.64] compared to never smokers. There was a strong dose-dependent association between number of years of smoking and kidney failure, (p for trend = 0.011). The risk decreased with prolonged cessation (quitting ≥10 years since baseline). The number of women smokers was too few for conclusive relationship. Limitation Information on baseline kidney function was not available. Conclusions Cigarette smoking is associated with increased risk of kidney failure among Chinese men. The risk appears to be dose- and duration-dependent and modifiable after long duration of cessation.
Workflow composition through design suggestions using design-time provenance information

With the increasing complexity of the Grid based application workflows, the workflow design process is also getting more and more complex. Many workflow design tools provide mechanism to ease the workflow design process and to make the life easier for a workflow designer. In this paper, we present a provenance based workflow design suggestion system for quick and easy creation of the error-free workflows. In our approach, the provenance system intercepts the users' actions, processes, stores these actions in the provenance store and provides suggestions about possible subsequent actions for the workflow design. These suggested actions are based on the current user actions and are calculated using the provenance information available in the provenance store. These design suggestions partially automate the design process providing ease of use, reliability and correctness during the workflow design process. Creating error-free workflows is of pivotal importance in distributed execution environments. Increasing complexity in the designing of these complex workflows is making the design process more error prone and tedious. Taking into account the significance of correctness of the Grid based workflow and realizing the importance of the design-time in the life of a workflow based application, we present a novel approach of using recorded provenance information.
Efficient transgenic rat production by a lentiviral vector

Lentiviral vectors based transgenesis is emerging as a new method which may substantially increase the transgenic success rates in the rat. We generated Dahl S transgenic rats using a lentiviral vector expressing eGFP driven by the CAG promoter, consisting of a hCMV immediate‐early enhancer, a chicken â‐actin transcription start site, and a composite intron including sequences from rabbit â‐Globin. Subsequently, we comprehensively evaluated the transgenic rates, transgene inheritance, and expression patterns in terms of the potential usefulness of this tool for gene function studies in the rat. Transgenic and mosaicism rates were 21.7% (n=60) and 12.5%, respectively. In the founders, the copy number of the transgene ranged from 1–4. The transgene inheritance was 48.9%. Small numbers of insertion sites allowed deriving transgenic inbred lines with a single copy of the transgene within one generation of offspring. eGFP fluorescence of the transgenic organs (carrying a single copy of the transgene) was at a similar level across the evaluated five lines of the F1 generation (using Metamorph), indicating no significant chromosomal position effect on expression level. The CAG appears to be a very potent promoter in the rat as it drove the eGFP expression in all examined 21 organs. Lentiviral transgenesis provides a novel powerful tool for efficient transgenic rat generation allowing this most comprehensively studied species to be more broadly used in physiological genomics research.
A Speech-First Model for Repair Detection and Correction

Interpreting fully natural speech is an important goal for spoken language understanding systems. However, while corpus studies have shown that about 10% of spontaneous utterances contain self-corrections, or REPAIRS, little is known about the extent to which cues in the speech signal may facilitate repair processing. We identify several cues based on acoustic and prosodic analysis of repairs in the DARPA Air Travel Information System database, and propose methods for exploiting these cues to detect and correct repairs.
A Conceptual Model of VA Implementation with a Focus on Heart Failure and the Role of QUERI Revised 12 / 1 / 2009

Purpose A primary goal of the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) of the Veteran's Administration is to implement best practices leading to improved care for veterans. The VA has made significant advances in systematically implementing evidence into practice (1). QUERI have begun to understand the process of implementation – breaking open the "black box" to understand the contextual factors, barriers, facilitators, and moderators and to describe these with models of the improvement process (2).
A Light Weight Multi-Copy Geocache Maintenance in Mobile Disconnected networks

-------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT--------------------------------------------------We present a light weight Geocache maintenance algorithm to maintain the information at a particular location in mobile disconnected networks. In mobile disconnected networks the mobile nodes within the coverage of particular location can carry the data for little while and pass to some other node when it moves away from the location. The selection of nodes to carry the data by means of movement of the node and returning the data to the location when it moves away from location doesn’t make sense. Because it increases the traffic in the network and the traffic introduced in sending the data back to the location will increase the network overhead. To challenge this issue we introduce a multi-copy Geocache maintenance algorithm, where the cache or data will be maintained in few nodes around the location. In the proposed methodology the data will not be returned to the origin but will be handover to some other node which is closer in origins perimeter. This reduces the unnecessary routing of packets and data towards the origin and removes the failure introduced by the node failure.
A General Model for Authentic Data Publication

Query answers from on-line databases can easily be corrupted by hackers or malicious intent by the database publisher. Thus it is important to provide mechanisms which allow clients to trust the results from on-line queries. Authentic publication is a novel scheme which allows untrusted publishers to securely answer queries from clients on behalf of trusted off-line data owners. Publishers validate answers using compact, unforgeable verification objects (VOs), which clients can check efficiently. To make authentic publication attractive it is important for the VOs to be small, efficiently computable and verifiable. This has led to the development of a number of data representations for efficient VO computation. In this paper, we prove the security of VOs for a new general data model called Search DAGs. Our security theorem for Search DAGS gives simple security proofs and efficient VOs for a broad range of known structures including binary trees, multi-dimensional range trees, and skip lists. Our approach also helps to provide a clean separation between the proof of security and efficiency. We also use search DAGs to prove the security of two new and much more complex data models for efficient multi-dimensional range searches. This allows compact VOs to be computed (size O(logN +T )) for typical 1D and 2D range queries, where the query answer is of size T and the database is of size N . We also show I/O efficient schemes to construct the VOs. For a system with disk blocks of size B, we answer 1D and 3-sided range queries and compute the VOs with O(logBN + T/B) I/O operations using linear size data structures.
Effect of Forward Error Correction Codes on the Performance of LDS-OFDM

In this paper, selection criteria of Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes, in particular, the convolutional codes are evaluated for a novel air interface scheme, called Low Density Signature Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (LDS-OFDM). In this regard, the mutual information transfer characteristics of turbo Multiuser Detector (MUD) are investigated using Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts. LDS-OFDM uses Low Density Signature structure for spreading the data symbols in frequency domain. This technique benefits from frequency diversity in addition to its ability of supporting parallel data streams more than the number of subcarriers (overloaded condition). The turbo MUD couples the data symbols' detector of LDS scheme with users' FEC decoders through the message passing principle.
Numerical solution of the nonlinear Poisson–Boltzmann equation: Developing more robust and efficient methods

We present a robust and efficient numerical method for solution of the nonlinear Poisson‐Boltzmann equation arising in molecular biophysics. The equation is discretized with the box method, and solution of the discrete equations is accomplished with a global inexact‐Newton method, combined with linear multilevel techniques we have described in an article appearing previously in this journal. A detailed analysis of the resulting method is presented, with comparisons to other methods that have been proposed in the literature, including the classical nonlinear multigrid method, the nonlinear conjugate gradient method, and nonlinear relaxation methods such as successive overrelaxation. Both theoretical and numerical evidence suggests that this method will converge in the case of molecules for which many of the existing methods will not. In addition, for problems which the other methods are able to solve, numerical experiments show that the new method is substantially more efficient, and the superiority of this method grows with the problem size. The method is easy to implement once a linear multilevel solver is available and can also easily be used in conjunction with linear methods other than multigrid. © 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Prevention Mechanism of Information Deceit

Data security and extracting intelligence from data in the form of information is the area where every organization is concerned about it. Network security is concerned with who connects to and what goes across a network. Net users have to provide personal credentials like passwords or wireless keys, and the network must protect with firewalls and intrusion detection system. Information security on the other hand, is a somewhat more general concept of being sure information systems have confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This can include network security as well as cryptography, access control, physical security, and more. It covers everything from the earliest security mechanism to latest DMZ zones. Social engineering is the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information, rather than by breaking in or using technical cracking techniques . This paper described various techniques related to social engineering attack; the countermeasures for a social engineering attack.
Olecranon Bone Graft: Revisited

Autogenous bone grafts are frequently in use in the field of reconstructive upper extremity surgery. Cancellous bone grafts are applied to traumatic osseous defects, nonunions, defects after the resection of benign bone tumors, arthrodesis, and osteotomy procedures. Cancellous bone grafts do not only have benefits such as rapid revascularization, but they also have mechanical advantages. Despite the proximity to the primary surgical field, cancellous olecranon grafts have not gained the popularity they deserve in the field of reconstructive hand surgery. In this study, the properties, advantages, and technical details of harvesting cancellous olecranon grafts are discussed.
Efficient Content Authentication over Distributed Hash Tables

We study a new model for data authentication over peer-to-peer storage networks, where data is stored, queried and authenticated in a totally distributed fashion. The model captures the security requirements of emerging distributed computing applications. We present an efficient implementation of a distributed Merkle tree, which realizes a Merkle tree over a peer-to-peer network, thus extending a fundamental cryptographic authentication technique to a peer-topeer distributed environment. We show how our distributed Merkle tree can be used to design an efficient authenticated distributed hash table. Our scheme is built on top of a broad class of existing distributed hash table implementations, is efficient, and achieves generality by only using the basic functionality of object location. We use this scheme to implement the first distributed authenticated dictionary.
Fast reconstruction of phylogenetic trees using locally-sensitive hashing

We present the first sub-quadratic time algorithm that with high probability correctly reconstructs phylogenetic trees for short sequences generated by a Markov model of evolution. Due to rapid expansion in sequence databases, such very fast algorithms are becoming necessary. Other fast heuristics have been developed for building trees from very large alignments (Price et al, and Brown et al), but they lack theoretical performance guarantees. Our new algorithm runs in $O(n^{1+\gamma(g)}\log^2n)$ time, where $\gamma$ is an increasing function of an upper bound on the branch lengths in the phylogeny, the upper bound $g$ must be below$1/2-\sqrt{1/8} \approx 0.15$, and $\gamma(g)<1$ for all $g$. For phylogenies with very short branches, the running time of our algorithm is close to linear. For example, if all branch lengths correspond to a mutation probability of less than 0.02, the running time of our algorithm is roughly $O(n^{1.2}\log^2n)$. Via a prototype and a sequence of large-scale experiments, we show that many large phylogenies can be reconstructed fast, without compromising reconstruction accuracy.
Post-Traumatic Stress and Self-Disclosure

Post-traumatic stress (PTS) is a significant clinical problem in the general population. However, only a portion of those exposed to trauma develop PTS. Patterns of emotional self-disclosure have the potential to explain some of the individual differences in the development and continuation of symptoms. In this study, the authors investigated the links between emotional self-disclosure, as measured by the Emotional Self-Disclosure Scale (ESDS; W. E. Snell, R. S. Miller, & S. S. Belk, 1988), and a post-trauma psychological state, as measured by the Trauma Symptom Inventory (TSI; J. Briere, 1995). Their results showed that, in general, men engaged in less emotional self-disclosure than did women, and as TSI scores increased, the men were significantly less willing to disclose emotions of happiness. For women, as TSI scores increased they were significantly more willing to engage in talk about emotions related to anxiety but less willing to talk about emotions related to fear. The authors considered these data within current understandings of the role of emotional self-disclosure in the processing of traumatic experiences.
Topic indexing with Wikipedia

Wikipedia article names can be utilized as a controlled vocabulary for identifying the main topics in a document. Wikipedia’s 2M articles cover the terminology of nearly any document collection, which permits controlled indexing in the absence of manually created vocabularies. We combine state-of-the-art strategies for automatic controlled indexing with Wikipedia’s unique property—a richly hyperlinked encyclopedia. We evaluate the scheme by comparing automatically assigned topics with those chosen manually by human indexers. Analysis of indexing consistency shows that our algorithm outperforms some human subjects.
Quantum capacitance in scaled down III–V FETs

We have built a physical gate capacitance model for III-V FETs that incorporates quantum capacitance and centroid capacitance in the channel. We verified its validity with simulations (Nextnano) and experimental measurements on High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) with InAs and InGaAs channels down to 30 nm in gate length. Our model confirms that in the operational range of these devices, the quantum capacitance significantly lowers the overall gate capacitance. In addition, the channel centroid capacitance is also found to have a significant impact on gate capacitance. Our model provides a number of suggestions for capacitance scaling in future III-V FETs.
Perfect simulation and stationarity of a class of mobility models

We define "random trip", a generic mobility model for independent mobiles that contains as special cases: the random waypoint on convex or non convex domains, random walk with reflection or wrapping, city section, space graph and other models. We use Palm calculus to study the model and give a necessary and sufficient condition for a stationary regime to exist. When this condition is satisfied, we compute the stationary regime and give an algorithm to start a simulation in steady state (perfect simulation). The algorithm does not require the knowledge of geometric constants. For the special case of random waypoint, we provide for the first time a proof and a sufficient and necessary condition of the existence of a stationary regime. Further, we extend its applicability to a broad class of non convex and multi-site examples, and provide a ready-to-use algorithm for perfect simulation. For the special case of random walks with reflection or wrapping, we show that, in the stationary regime, the mobile location is uniformly distributed and is independent of the speed vector, and that there is no speed decay. Our framework provides a rich set of well understood models that can be used to simulate mobile networks with independent node movements. Our perfect sampling is implemented to use with ns-2, and it is freely available to download from http://ica1www.epfl. ch/RandomTrip.
Investigation of Fieldbus Control System in Marine Engine Room Process Control Systems

Aimed at the "Information Detached Island" phenomenon of the traditional process control system in ship marine engine room, a brand new thought, integrating the former entirely independent control systems in ship engine room by the method of Fieldbus technology, is introduced in this paper. The modeling of typical systems (e.g. fuel oil viscosity control system and cooling water control system) in automatic engine room was set and construction of semi-physical simulation systems was completed to seek an advanced control method. Technology based on Foundation Fieldbus was applied to carry out the interconnected system. Besides semi-physical simulation systems, OPC interface technology, communications of field devices and system configuration are described here as well. The system with a successfully exploited technical platform of open and total numerical control system can expediently make an expansion so its application surly has a splendid prospect in ship integrated automation system in the future.
Effects of Blood Pressure and Blood Pressure–Lowering Treatment During the First 24 Hours Among Patients in the Third International Stroke Trial of Thrombolytic Treatment for Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose— In patients with acute ischemic stroke, a high blood pressure or a highly variable blood pressure is a common reason for withholding thrombolytic treatment, but guidelines recommend a conservative approach to active blood pressure lowering in this setting. We have performed exploratory analyses to study the clinical effects of blood pressure and early blood pressure–lowering treatment in patients included in a randomized-controlled trial of thrombolytic treatment for acute ischemic stroke. Methods— The Third International Stroke Trial (IST-3) randomized 3035 patients with ischemic stroke to recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator 0.9 mg/kg or open control within 6 hours of symptom onset. Blood pressure was measured at randomization, at start of treatment, and at 30 minutes and 1 and 24 hours after start of treatment, and the use of blood pressure–lowering treatment during the first 24 hours was recorded. We have characterized blood pressure by mean systolic blood pressure at baseline, by variability of systolic blood pressure (expressed by the standard deviation and the range between the lowest and the highest pressure), and by the change in systolic blood pressure from baseline to 24 hours. We used logistic regression analysis to explore the associations of blood pressure characteristics or blood pressure–lowering treatment with early adverse events, early death, and functional outcome at 6 months, after adjustment for key prognostic variables. Results— High baseline blood pressure and high blood pressure variability during the first 24 hours were associated with higher numbers of early adverse events and early deaths, and for several analyses, the differences were statistically significant. A larger decline in blood pressure and the use of blood pressure–lowering treatment during the first 24 hours were associated with a reduced risk of poor outcome at 6 months (odds ratio, 0.93; 95% confidence interval, 0.89–0.97; P=0.001 and odds ratio, 0.78; 95% confidence interval, 0.65–0.93; P=0.007, respectively), irrespective of whether the patient was given recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator (P values for interaction >0.05). Conclusions— Among patients with ischemic stroke who are candidates for thrombolytic treatment, high baseline blood pressure and a large pressure variability during the first 24 hours may be associated with a poor prognosis, whereas a large reduction in blood pressure and the use of blood pressure–lowering treatment during the first 24 hours may be associated with a favorable prognosis. These data support the rationale for further trials of agents that lower blood pressure or reduce blood pressure variability in the acute phase of ischemic stroke. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00120003.