Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination when the Delta Variant is Prevalent - Wisconsin, July 2021

The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant and its sublineages (B.1.617.2, AY.1, AY.2, AY.3; [1]) can cause high viral loads, are highly transmissible, and contain mutations that confer partial immune escape [2,3]. Using PCR threshold cycle (Ct) data from a single large contract laboratory, we show that individuals in Wisconsin, USA had similar viral loads in nasal swabs, irrespective of vaccine status, during a time of high and increasing prevalence of the Delta variant. Infectious SARS-CoV-2 was isolated from 51 of 55 specimens (93%) with Ct <25 from both vaccinated and unvaccinated persons, indicating that most individuals with Ct values in this range (Wilson 95% CI 83%-97%) shed infectious virus regardless of vaccine status. Notably, 68% of individuals infected despite vaccination tested positive with Ct <25, including at of Our data the individuals should while also being tested for if COVID-like symptoms.
New developments in the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia: role of obinutuzumab

: Obinutuzumab is a novel glycoengineered type II anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody with a higher affinity for CD20 epitope, enhanced antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity and direct cell death, leading to superior cytotoxicity compared with rituximab. The approval of obinutuzumab by US Food and Drug Administration was based on a pivotal, phase III, randomized trial of chlorambucil monotherapy (n = 118), chlorambucil plus obinutuzumab (n = 333), or chlorambucil plus rituximab (n = 330) in previously untreated patients with CLL. Obinutuzumab was administered intravenously as 1,000 mg on days 1, 8, and 15 of cycle 1 and day 1 of subsequent cycles. Obinutuzumab plus chlorambucil was associated with an overall response rate of 78% and a median progression-free survival of 26.7 months. Overall, obinutuzumab was fairly well tolerated in this pivotal study. The incidence of grade 3 or higher adverse events was infusion-related reactions (20%), neutropenia (33%), thrombocytopenia (10%), and infections (7%). Obinutuzumab in combination with chlorambucil is a safe and effective new treatment option for previously untreated elderly patients with CLL. It should become the new standard of care for these patients with significant co-morbidities who are not candidates for fludarabine-based therapy. Obinutuzumab combination therapy with several agents that inhibit kinases involved in the B-cell receptor signaling pathway, as well as many other agents utilized in the frontline and relapsed/refractory setting, is currently under investigation. As the results from these studies become available, the role of obinutuzumab is expected to expand to other settings.
A comparison of geostatistical methodologies used to estimate snow water equivalent

: The need to monitor and forecast water resources accurately, particularly in the western United States, is becoming increasingly critical as the demand for water continues to escalate. Consequently, the National Weather Service (NWS) has developed a geostatistical model that is used to obtain areal estimates of snow water equivalent (the thtal water content in all phases of the snowpack), a major source of water in the West. The areal snow water equivalent estimates are used to update the hydrologic simulation models maintained by the NWS and designed to produce extended streamflow forecasts for river systems throughout the United States. An alternative geostatistical technique has been proposed to estimate snow water equivalent. In this research, we describe the two methodologies and compare the accuracy of the estimates produced by each technique. We illustrate their application and compare their estimation accuracy using snow data collected in the North Fork Clearwater River basin in Idaho.
Sparse Learning of Dynamical Systems in RKHS: An Operator-Theoretic Approach

Transfer operators provide a rich framework for representing the dynamics of very general, non-linear dynamical systems. When interacting with reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS), descriptions of dynamics often incur prohibitive data storage requirements, motivating dataset sparsifi-cation as a precursory step to computation. Further, in practice, data is available in the form of trajectories, introducing correlation between samples. In this work, we present a method for sparse learning of transfer operators from β - mixing stochastic processes, in both discrete and continuous time, and provide sample complexity analysis extending existing theoretical guarantees for learning from non-sparse, i.i. d. data. In addressing continuous-time settings, we develop precise descriptions using covariance-type operators for the infinitesimal generator that aids in the sample complexity analysis. We empirically illustrate the efficacy of our sparse embedding approach through deterministic and stochastic non-linear system examples.
La inscripción electoral de los jóvenes en Chile: Factores de incidencia y aproximaciones al debate

Independiente de las caracteristicas sociales, economicas y politicas de cada pais, la desafeccion juvenil hacia las elecciones se ha transformado en uno de los temas de mayor trascendencia en el debate internacional (vease, por ejemplo, Skelton y Valentine, 2003; Carlin, 2006; O’Toole y otros, 2003; Wiseman, 2006). El hecho de que la participacion electoral sea la base de un buen gobierno (Payne y otros, 2003), ha determinado que la marginacion de ciertos grupos —jovenes en especial— paulatinamente se este convirtiendo en una de las mayores trabas para la consecucion de una democracia fuerte, estable y de calidad. Chile no ha estado al margen de estos acontecimientos. Aunque metodologicamente es dificil vincular un elemento administrativo como la inscripcion en los registros con la verdadera tendencia de la ciudadania en participar en las elecciones,2 lo cierto es que el peso
Paired-Point Lifting for Enhanced Privacy-Preserving Visual Localization

Visual localization refers to the process of recovering camera pose from input image relative to a known scene, forming a cornerstone of numerous vision and robotics systems. While many algorithms utilize sparse 3D point cloud of the scene obtained via structure-from-motion (SfM) for localization, recent studies have raised privacy concerns by successfully revealing high-fidelity appearance of the scene from such sparse 3D representation. One prominent approach for bypassing this attack was to lift 3D points to randomly oriented 3D lines thereby hiding scene geometry, but latest work have shown such random line cloud has a critical statistical flaw that can be exploited to break through protection. In this work, we present an alternative lightweight strategy called Paired-Point Lifting (PPL) for constructing 3D line clouds. Instead of drawing one randomly oriented line per 3D point, PPL splits 3D points into pairs and joins each pair to form 3D lines. This seemingly simple strategy yields 3 benefits, i) new ambiguity in feature selection, ii) increased line cloud sparsity and iii) nontrivial distribution of 3D lines, all of which contributes to enhanced protection against privacy attacks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the strength of PPL in concealing scene details without compromising localization accuracy, unlocking the true potential of 3D line clouds.
Amplatzer Amulet Left Atrial Appendage Occluder Versus Watchman Device for Stroke Prophylaxis (Amulet IDE) A Randomized, Controlled Trial

death (5.6% versus 7.7%, difference=–2.12 [95% CI, –4.45 to 0.21]; P <0.001 for noninferiority). The rate of major bleeding was similar between groups (11.6% versus 12.3%; difference=–0.71 [95% CI, –3.72 to 2.31]; P =0.32 for superiority). LAA occlusion was higher for the Amulet occluder than for the Watchman device (98.9% versus 96.8%; difference=2.03 [95% CI, 0.41–3.66]; P <0.001 for noninferiority; P =0.003 for superiority). CONCLUSIONS: The Amulet occluder was noninferior for safety and effectiveness of stroke prevention for nonvalvular atrial fibrillation compared with the Watchman device and superior for LAA occlusion. Procedure-related complications were higher with the Amulet occluder and decreased with operator experience.
Contrastive learning for supervised graph matching

Deep graph matching techniques have shown promising results in recent years. In this work, we cast deep graph matching as a contrastive learning task and introduce a new objective function for contrastive mapping to exploit the relationships between matches and non-matches. To this end, we develop a hardness attention mechanism to select negative samples which captures the relatedness and informativeness of positive and negative samples. Further, we propose a novel deep graph matching framework, Stable Graph Matching (Sta-bleGM), which incorporates Sinkhorn ranking into a stable marriage algorithm to efﬁciently compute one-to-one node correspondences between graphs. We prove that the proposed objective function for contrastive matching is both positive and negative informative, offering theoretical guarantees to achieve dual-optimality in graph matching. We empirically verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by conducting experiments on standard graph matching benchmarks.
Alien and native plants of urban river corridors: a study of riparian plant propagule dynamics along the river Brent, Greater London

iii ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the dynamics of alien and native plant propagules in relation to the standing vegetation of the urban riparian corridor of the River Brent, London and also experimental results regarding the effectiveness of physical management of Impatiens glandulifera, one of the most common riparian alien invasive species in the United Kingdom. The study has shown that viable plant propagules are well-distributed within the top 10 cm of urban riparian soils, with no significant difference in propagule abundance or species richness between 0-5 and 5-10 cm layers or with distance (0-1, 1-2, 2-3 m) from the low flow channel. Urban riparian propagule banks are as species rich as those in more rural situations, but they contain a greater proportion of alien species (>20%). Soil propagule abundance was greater in the autumn than in the spring but species richness varied little. The propagule bank species composition varied seasonally, more unique alien species being recorded in the spring than in the autumn. Using artificial turf traps placed within the riparian zone, the deposition of fluvial sediment and viable propagules was investigated. Significant correlations between sediment weight and propagule abundance and richness indicated the important role of hydrochory in delivering viable propagules to the riparian zone, particularly during winter. Lower sediment weight and propagule species richness of summer samples and weaker correlation between sediment weight and propagule abundance and richness indicated the importance of local seedrain in summer. Comparison of species composition of the propagule bank and standing vegetation demonstrated little relationship between the two, with far greater abundance of alien species in the propagule bank, the majority of which were not found in the local vegetation. The propagule bank also contained more species with long-lived persistent seeds, than was observed in the standing vegetation. Impatiens glandulifera was the most frequently occurring species in the standing vegetation, while Buddleja davidii was the most frequently occurring species in the propagule bank.
Interacting Higher-Spin Gauge Models in BRST-antifield Formalism

Interacting higher-spin gauge models including fermions are derived in the BRST-antifield formalism. We introduce massless totally-symmetric rank-n tensor-spinors, which is Dirac spinors in D-dimensional spacetime, as well as massless bosonic totally-symmetric tensors. By applying the BRST deformation scheme, the free higher-spin gauge theory is deformed such that the deformed action S would satisfy the master equation (S, S) = 0. We obtain interactions of two fermions and one boson, and those of a fermion and a boson in turn. They contain all orders in the deformation parameter and satisfy the master equation exactly. Employing the BRST deformation scheme built on AdS spaces, we derive interacting higher-spin gauge models including fermions on AdS spaces as well. We also consider the case that infinite series contained in our models are convergent. 1 makoto.sakaguchi. phys@vc.ibaraki. ac.jp
Who Squats IPv4 Addresses?

To mitigate IPv4 exhaustion, IPv6 provides expanded address space, and NAT allows a single public IPv4 address to suffice for many devices assigned private IPv4 address space. Even though NAT has greatly extended the shelf-life of IPv4, some networks need more private IPv4 space than what is officially allocated by IANA due to their size and/or network management practices. Some of these networks resort to using squat space, a term the network operations community uses for large public IPv4 address blocks allocated to organizations but historically never announced to the Internet. While squatting of IP addresses is an open secret, it introduces ethical, legal, and technical problems. In this work we examine billions of traceroutes to identify thousands of organizations squatting. We examine how they are using it and what happened when the US Department of Defense suddenly started announcing what had traditionally been squat space. In addition to shining light on a dirty secret of operational practices, our paper shows that squatting distorts common Internet measurement methodologies, which we argue have to be re-examined to account for squat space.
An Improved Recursive Least Square Algorithm For Adapting Fuzzy Channel Equalizer

Adaptive filters have been thoroughly investigated in digital communication. They are especially exploited as equalizers, to compensate for channel distortions, although equalizers based on linear filters perform poorly in nonlinear distortion. In this paper, a nonlinear equalizer based on a fuzzy filter is proposed and a new algorithm for the adaptation parameters is presented. The followed approach is based on a regularization of the Recursive Least Square (RLS) algorithm and an incorporation of fuzzy rules in the adaptation process. The proposed approach, named Improved Fuzzy Recursive Least Square (IFRLS), enhances significantly the fuzzy equalizer performance through the acquisition of more convergence properties and lower steady-state Mean Square Error (MSE). The efficiency of the IFRLS algorithm is confirmed through extensive simulations in a nonlinear environment, besides the conventional RLS, in terms of convergence abilities, through MSE, and the equalized signal behavior. The IFRLS algorithm recovers the transmitted signal efficiently and leads to lower steady-state MSE. An improvement in convergence abilities is noticed, besides the RLS.
The Day Destroys the Night, Night Extends the Day: A Clientele Perspective on Equity Premium Variation

We decompose market returns into their overnight and intraday components, which dramatically improves equity premium forecasts. Past smoothed overnight market returns strongly negatively forecast subsequent close-to-close returns (quarterly R of over 14%), primarily through intraday mean reversion. In contrast, past smoothed intraday market returns strongly positively forecast subsequent overnight returns; this partially-offsetting effect explains PE’s relatively poor forecasting ability (R only 3%). Our decomposition also resurrects the conditional CAPM: If we allow market betas to vary with past smoothed overnight returns, the four Fama-French factors’ alphas decrease on average by 84%. We interpret these return patterns through a clientele perspective. First, individual investor expectations and consumption growth strongly positively forecast overnight market returns, while intermediary risk tolerance strongly negatively forecasts intraday market returns. Second, aggregate cash-flow news occurs primarily intraday and is positively (negatively) correlated with revisions in expected future overnight (intraday) returns. Finally, while the Tech boom, Covid crash/rebound, and patterns in meme stocks were primarily driven by overnight returns, the Global Financial Crisis was mostly an intraday phenomenon. JEL classification: G02, G12, G23, N22
BIS Working Papers No 1043 The scarring effects of deep contractions

We find that deep contractions have highly persistent scarring effects, depressing the level of GDP at least a decade hence. Drawing on a panel of 24 advanced and emerging economies from 1970 to the present, we show that these effects are nonlinear and asymmetric: there is no such persistence following less severe contractions or large expansions. While scarring after financial crises is well known, it also occurred after the deep contractions of the 1970 s and 1980 s that followed energy price shocks and restrictive monetary policy to combat high inflation. These results are very robust and have important implications for policy making and macro modelling.
Clinical, acne treatment patterns, expectations, and satisfaction among adult females of different races/ethnicities

Background: Limited data are available on acne treatment patterns, expectations, and satisfaction in the adult female subpopulation, particularly among different racial and ethnic groups. Objective: Describe acne treatment SA, 31.1%). No statistically significant differences were observed among racial/ethnic groups in their level of satisfaction with OTC or prescription acne treatments. Conclusion: Racial/ethnic differences were observed in acne treatment patterns in adult females, while treatment expectations were similar. Results indicate that treatment patterns and expectations may impact treatment satisfaction and medication compliance.
Morally Driven and Emotionally Fueled: The Interactive Effects of Values and Emotions in the Social Transmission of Information Endorsing E-cigarettes

Drawing upon the literature on moral foundations theory and the social transmission of information, our study investigated the effects of values and emotions on the sharing of pro-vaping messages on Twitter. Tweets ( N = 9,542) containing top pro-vaping hashtags during the time of e-cigarette or vaping use–associated lung injury (EVALI) and the federal vape bans were analyzed. A lexicon-based machine classifier customized to vaping discourse and the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon were used to produce the frequencies of moral and emotional words in the corpus. Mixed-effects hurdle negative binomial models were performed to predict the likelihood of a post receiving one and more retweets. Results showed that moral foundations, particularly Authority/subversion and Care/harm, and emotions of anger and sadness predicted the sharing of pro-vaping tweets. Interaction effects indicated that both emotions had a stronger effect on eliciting shares when a post contained lower levels of moral foundations. This study provides insights into the mechanism of how pro-vaping messages are amplified on Twitter, emphasizing the roles of moral values and emotions in enabling the process.
Populists’ Use of Nostalgia: A Supervised Machine Learning Approach

An emotion that has recently gained traction in the context of populism is nostalgia, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past. Nostalgia can refer to the past of one’s group or nation, as reflected in populists’ narratives of the heartland—the vision of a utopian future based on an idealized past in which their country belonged to the “pure people. ” However, research on nostalgia in political communication across the political aisle is scarce. The current study aimed to fill this gap via supervised machine learning. First, we used an experimental approach established in psychology to create a ground-truth data set and trained and evaluated a classifier for detecting nostalgic sentiment in the German language. We then applied this classifier to a large database ( N = 4,022) of German political parties’ Facebook posts. We demonstrate that (a) populist (vs. non-populist)—especially right-wing—parties employ nostalgia more frequently; (b) nostalgic narratives differ between parties, and (c) nostalgic (vs. non-nostalgic) posts are associated with more user engagement.
The relationship between entrepreneurial intent, gender and personality.

Purpose We examine gender differences in personality traits of people with and without entrepreneurial intent to assess whether women who intend to become entrepreneurs exhibit particular tendencies that can be fostered. Design/Methodology/Approach Participants completed an online battery of well-established questionnaires to cover a range of personality traits relevant to entrepreneurship and gender. Participants also answered items concerning intent to become an entrepreneur. A factor analysis of personality traits produced four factors (Esteem and Power, Ambition, Risk Propensity, and Communal Tendency, the latter reflecting Openness and Cooperation, without Hubris). We constructed four parallel regression models to examine how gender, entrepreneurial intent, and the interaction of gender with intent related to these four personality factor scores. Findings Participants who endorsed a desire to become an entrepreneur reported higher Ambition. Women with entrepreneurial intentions endorsed higher levels of Communal Tendency than men with entrepreneurial intent. Those without entrepreneurial intent did not show gender differences in Communal Tendency. Implications Current findings suggest that men and women who intend to become entrepreneurs share many traits, but women with entrepreneurial intent show unique elevations in communal tendencies. Thus, a worthwhile locus for intervention into the gender disparity in self-employment may be providing space for and acknowledgement of prosocial motivation and goals as one successful route to entrepreneurship. Originality/value Given the underutilized economic potential of women entrepreneurs, there is a fundamental need for a rich array of research on factors that limit and promote women's entry into entrepreneurship. Current findings indicate that personality may be one piece of this puzzle.
News Podcast Use, Press Freedom, and Political Participation: A Cross-National Study of 38 Countries

This study investigates the use and effects of news podcasts on online and offline political participation, based on a global survey of news consumers from 38 countries. The results demonstrate that political participation, both online and offline, is directly affected by news podcast use. Online discussion around news mediated the relationship between the use of news podcasts and both online and offline political participation. Furthermore, the study found that people living in countries with lower levels of press freedom tended to use news podcasts more, and that the level of press freedom had a direct influence on both online and offline participation across nations. This article advances the literature on news podcasts and their role in facilitating discussions around news and political participation by contextualizing news podcast use in a global context