Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Counting Dirac braids and hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations

We define a new invariant $w$ for hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations over closed oriented surfaces, which counts the number of Dirac braids included intrinsically in the monodromy, by using chart description introduced by the second author. As an application, we prove that two hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations of genus $g$ over a given base space are stably isomorphic if and only if they have the same numbers of singular fibers of each type and they have the same value of $w$ if $g$ is odd. We also give examples of pair of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations with the same numbers of singular fibers of each type which are not stably isomorphic.
Rock Physical Properties of Longmaxi Shale Gas Formation in South Sichuan Province, China

Deep shale gas (burial depth > 3500 m) in the Longmaxi Formation of southern Sichuan Province will be the primary target for exploration and development in China for a relatively long period. However, the lack of a physical basis for the “sweet-spots” seismic and well-logging prediction is caused by uncertainty in the rock physical properties of deep shale gas in the research area. Acoustic and hardness measurements were performed on shale samples from a deep layer of the Longmaxi Formation in southern Sichuan. Microtextural characteristics of the shale samples were also analyzed by conventional optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. Based on these measurements, the rock physical properties of the shale samples and control factors are discussed. It is shown that the deep shale samples have similar properties to the shallow shale in mineral composition, microtexture, and pore type. However, the organic pore in deep shale samples is relatively undeveloped, while the dissolved pores are more developed. For high-quality shale samples (total organic content > 2%), crystal quartz of biological origin forms the framework of rock samples, resulting in effective dynamic and static properties, reflecting the elastic behavior of rigid quartz aggregates. For organic-lean samples (total organic content < 2%), orientated detrital clay particles take the role of load-bearing grains. Therefore, these shale samples’ overall rock physical properties are mainly controlled by the elastic properties of “soft” clay. The load-bearing grain variation from organic-rich shale samples to organic-lean samples results in an overturned “V”-type change in terms of velocity versus content. Organic-rich shale samples also show an apparent low Poisson’s ratio. Organic-rich shale has a slight velocity–porosity trend, while organic-lean shale shows a significant velocity–porosity trend. In addition, due to the difference in rock microtexture between organic-rich and organic-lean shale, these two kinds of reservoir rocks can be discriminated in cross plots of P-wave impedance versus Poisson’s ratio and Young’s modulus versus Poisson’s ratio. Change in hardness also reflects the control of microtexture, and shale samples with biological-origin quartz as load-bearing grains show higher hardness and brittleness. However, the variation in quartz content has less of an impact on hardness and brittleness in shale samples with clay as the load-bearing grain. Our results provide an experimental basis for the geophysical identification and prediction of deep shale gas layers.
Platelet Activation by Antisense Oligonucleotides (ASOs) in the Göttingen Minipig, including an Evaluation of Glycoprotein VI (GPVI) and Platelet Factor 4 (PF4) Ontogeny

Antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) is a therapeutic modality that enables selective modulation of undruggable protein targets. However, dose- and sequence-dependent platelet count reductions have been reported in nonclinical studies and clinical trials. The adult Göttingen minipig is an acknowledged nonclinical model for ASO safety testing, and the juvenile Göttingen minipig has been recently proposed for the safety testing of pediatric medicines. This study assessed the effects of various ASO sequences and modifications on Göttingen minipig platelets using in vitro platelet activation and aggregometry assays. The underlying mechanism was investigated further to characterize this animal model for ASO safety testing. In addition, the protein abundance of glycoprotein VI (GPVI) and platelet factor 4 (PF4) was investigated in the adult and juvenile minipigs. Our data on direct platelet activation and aggregation by ASOs in adult minipigs are remarkably comparable to human data. Additionally, PS ASOs bind to platelet collagen receptor GPVI and directly activate minipig platelets in vitro, mirroring the findings in human blood samples. This further corroborates the use of the Göttingen minipig for ASO safety testing. Moreover, the differential abundance of GPVI and PF4 in minipigs provides insight into the influence of ontogeny in potential ASO-induced thrombocytopenia in pediatric patients.
Anticancer Properties of 3-Dietoxyphosphorylfuroquinoline-4,9-dione

Herein, the antitumor activity of a novel synthetic analog with 5,8-quinolinedione scaffold, diethyl (2-(2-chlorophenyl)-4,9-dioxo-4,9-dihydrofuro [3,2-g]quinolin-3-yl)phosphonate (AJ-418) was investigated on two breast cancer cell lines. This analog was selected from a small library of synthetic quinolinediones on the basis of its strong antiproliferative activity against MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cells and 4-5-fold lower cytotoxicity towards healthy MCF-10A cells. The morphology of MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cancer cells treated with AJ-418 changed drastically, while non-tumorigenic MCF-10A cells remained unaffected. In MCF-7 cells, after 24 h incubation, the increased number of apoptotic cells coincided with a decrease in proliferation and cell viability. The 24 h treatment of MDA-MB-231 cells with the tested compound reduced their cell viability and proliferation rate; however, a significant pro-apoptotic effect was visible only after longer incubation times (48 h and 72 h). Then, the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) of compound AJ-418 in C3H mice after subcutaneous administration was determined to be 160 mg/kg, showing that this analog was well tolerated and can be further evaluated to assess its potential therapeutic effect in tumor-bearing mice.
Bulk flows of hot plasma in the Jovian magnetosphere: A model of anisotropic fluxes of energetic ions

Since the Ulysses flyby of Jupiter in February 1992, a consistent picture of the bulk flows of hot plasma has yet to be formed. The present study reports a comprehensive analysis of energetic particle anisotropies from the Ulysses mission. We present an empirical model which separates flow from gradient anisotropies. The model employs a multidimensional minimization routine to fit simultaneously 13 free parameters using 98 measurements. The large number of independent measurements is possible because the Ulysses Heliosphere Instrument for Spectra, Composition, and Anisotropy at Low Energy (HI-SCALE) has nearly full angular coverage at high time resolution and moderately high angular resolution. The model uses the full energy range (∼50-3000 keV) of the low-energy magnetic spectrometers and also the pure proton channels of the composition aperture on the instrument. We present flow results during the inbound pass of Ulysses in which the radial velocity component shows a persistent radial outflow. The azimuthal component is in the sense of planetary rotation but generally below rigid corotation, and the azimuthal velocity is greater near the plasma current sheet than at higher magnetic latitudes. Outbound, the flows in the high-latitude duskside magnetosphere inferred from the particle anisotropies indicate, surprisingly, sunward flows opposite to planetary rotation. We find evidence of gradient anisotropies especially near the magnetospheric current sheet on the dayside. We present a picture of the global magnetic field configuration and flows of hot plasma, consistent with our model results, dominated by subcorotation at low latitudes but by sunward flow at high latitudes.
Optimized Privacy-Preserving CNN Inference With Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Inference of machine learning models with data privacy guarantees has been widely studied as privacy concerns are getting growing attention from the community. Among others, secure inference based on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has proven its utility by providing stringent data privacy at sometimes affordable cost. Still, previous work was restricted to shallow and narrow neural networks and simple tasks due to the high computational cost incurred from FHE. In this paper, we propose a more efficient way of evaluating convolutions with FHE, where the cost remains constant regardless of the kernel size, resulting in 12–<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$46\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> timing improvement on various kernel sizes. Combining our methods with FHE bootstrapping, we achieve at least 18.9% (and 48.1%) timing reduction in homomorphic evaluation of 20-layer CNN classifiers (and a part of it) on CIFAR10/100 (and ImageNet, respectively) datasets. Furthermore, in consideration of our methods being effective for evaluating CNNs with intensive convolutional operations and exploring such CNNs, we achieve at least <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> faster inference on CIFAR10/100 with FHE than the prior works having the same or less accuracy.
Numerical simulation of generalized newtonian blood flow past a couple of irregular arterial stenoses

This paper looked at the numerical investigations of the generalized Newtonian blood flow through a couple of irregular arterial stenoses. The flow is treated to be axisymmetric, with an outline of the stenoses obtained from a three dimensional casting of a mild stenosed artery, so that the flow effectively becomes two‐dimensional. The Marker and Cell (MAC) method is developed for the governing unsteady generalized Newtonian equations in staggered grid for viscous incompressible flow in the cylindrical polar co‐ordinates system. The derived pressure‐Poisson equation was solved using Successive‐Over‐Relaxation (S.O.R.) method and the pressure‐velocity correction formulae have been derived. Computations are performed for the pressure drop, the wall shear stress distribution and the separation region. The presented computations show that in comparison to the corresponding Newtonian model the generalized Newtonian fluid experiences higher pressure drop, lower peak wall shear stress and smaller separation region. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 27: 960–981, 2011
Mechanical Properties of Hybrid (Steel-Kenaf) Fiber Reinforced Concrete

Fiber reinforced concrete is a commonly used material to cater for the shortcomings of concrete, such as low tensile strength, brittleness, and rapid crack propagation. This paper presents an experimental study on the mechanical properties of the hybrid (steel-kenaf) fiber added into concrete mixture. Two types of fibers, namely hooked-end steel fiber and kenaf fiber were considered. A control specimen without fibers was used to compare with fiber reinforced concrete mixture considering 1% and 2% volume fraction. Mechanical properties, i.e., workability, compressive strength and flexural strength, were investigated. In this study, the kenaf fibers were treated by 6% concentration of Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) through immersion in the laboratory for 24 hours. The results showed that the addition of hybrid fiber improves the performance of compressive strength and flexural strength of the concrete. Specimens with 2% hybrid fibers show the best flexural performance. Moreover, an increase in volume fractions of steel fibers leads to an increase in the compressive and flexural strengths of concrete. In addition, specimens with steel-kenaf hybrid fibers exhibit a better failure behavior than specimens without fibers.
Formation of Jets through Mixing and Forcing of Potential Vorticity: Analysis and Parameterization of Beta-Plane Turbulence

Abstract Formation of multiple jets in forced beta-plane turbulence is studied from the perspective of nonuniform nonconservative arrangement of potential vorticity (PV). Numerical simulations are analyzed to show that mixing and forcing reinforce jets by concentrating PV gradients at the axes of prograde jets. Based on the formalism developed in the companion paper, the nonconservative driving of jets is diagnosed and parameterized through the diffusive flux of PV and the source of wave activity. It is found that the two terms nearly balance on a long time scale, and they are both strongly anticorrelated with the PV gradient, which suggests that PV controls the nonconservative processes and that these processes could be parameterized as functions of the PV gradient. The flux is modeled using the effective diffusivity formula recently obtained by Ferrari and Nikurashin. Consistent with the PV barrier concept, the nonlinear diffusivity is a decreasing function of the squared PV gradient and agrees well wit.
RLCA: Reinforcement Learning Model Integrating Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation

Empathy is a crucial field of social science research. The current research on the dialog systems with empathy has two main limitations: 1) less adequate integration of the cognition and affection aspects of empathy for enhancing the perceptual and emotional expression abilities and 2) lack of the evaluation of the generated response at the sentence level in the training process for reducing the problem of exposure bias. Therefore, we proposed the reinforcement learning model integrating cognition and affection (RLCA) model that utilizes the RL framework integrating cognition and affection to evoke greater empathetic expression in the model. In particular, the cognitive response generator can reason commonsense information based on the user’s situation to improve the perceptual capabilities of the proposed model. Moreover, the emotional regulator can mitigate the exposure bias problem by distilling multiple emotion signals from predicted responses and imparting higher emotional intelligence to the proposed model. Furthermore, the interaction between the cognition and affection aspects helps the model to learn the features of empathic expressions in human conversation. Extensive experimental findings on a benchmark dataset indicate that the RLCA outperforms the popular baseline models of automatic metrics and human evaluations while generating more interpretable empathetic responses.
Economic burden of illness among patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) associated with connective tissue disorders (CTD)

Abstract Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is commonly associated with connective tissue disorders (CTDs). This study provides a contemporary assessment of the economic burden of CTD + PAH and PAH in the United States. Eligible adult patients identified from Optum's deidentified Clinformatics® Data Mart Database (10/01/2015‐09/30/2021) were classified into mutually exclusive cohorts based on recorded diagnoses: (1) CTD + PAH, (2) PAH, (3) CTD, (4) control without CTD/PAH. The index date was a randomly selected diagnosis date for PAH (CTD + PAH, PAH cohorts) or CTD (CTD cohort), or a random date (control cohort). Entropy balancing was used to balance characteristics across cohorts. Healthcare costs and healthcare resource utilization (HRU) per patient per month (PPPM) were assessed for ≤12 months postindex and compared among balanced cohorts. A total of 552,900 patients were included (CTD + PAH: n = 1876; PAH: n = 8177; CTD: n = 209,156; control: n = 333,691). Average total all‐cause costs were higher for CTD + PAH than PAH cohort ($16,854 vs. $15,686 PPPM; p = 0.02); both cohorts incurred higher costs than CTD and control cohorts ($4476 and $2170 PPPM; all p < 0.001). Average HRU PPPM was similar between CTD + PAH and PAH cohorts (inpatient stay: 0.15 vs. 0.15, outpatient visits: 4.23 vs. 4.11; all p > 0.05), while CTD and control cohorts incurred less HRU (inpatient stay: 0.07 and 0.03, outpatient visits: 2.67 and 1.69; all p < 0.001). CTD + PAH and PAH are associated with a substantial economic burden. The incremental burden attributable to PAH versus the general population and patients with CTD without PAH highlights significant unmet needs among PAH patients.
Pointwise slant submanifolds in almost Hermitian manifolds

An interesting class of submanifolds of almost Hermitian manifolds ( ˜ M, ˜ J )i s the class of slant submanifolds. Slant submanifolds were introduced by the first author in [6] as submanifolds M of ( ˜ M, ˜ J) such that, for any nonzero vector X ∈ TpM, p ∈ M , the angle θ(X) between JX and the tangent space TpM is independent of the choice of p ∈ M and X ∈ TpM . The first results on slant submanifolds were summarized in the book [7]. Since then slant submanifolds have been studied by many geometers. Many nice results on slant submanifolds have been obtained during the last two decades. The main purpose of this paper is to study pointwise slant submanifolds in almost Hermitian manifolds which extends slant submanifolds in a very natural way. Several basic results in this respect are proved in this paper.
Discovery of a Kilohertz Quasi-periodic Oscillation in 2S 0918–549

We report the discovery of a kilohertz quasi-periodic oscillation (kHz QPO) in the low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) 2S 0918-549. The kHz QPO has a frequency of 1156 ± 9 Hz, an FWHM of 70 ± 20 Hz, and a fractional rms amplitude of 18% ± 2%. We also detected for the first time a type I X-ray burst in this source. The compact object must therefore be a neutron star. Finally, we were able to classify the source as an atoll source exhibiting the full complement of spectral/timing states of this class (island and banana). From the peak burst flux, an upper limit on the persistent luminosity can be derived of 0.5% of the Eddington luminosity, making 2S 0918-549 one of the least luminous LMXBs showing a kHz QPO. We compare the fractional rms amplitudes of the upper kHz QPO across the ensemble of LMXBs. We find a strong anticorrelation with luminosity. In LMXBs with luminosities ~100 times lower than those of Z sources, the fractional rms amplitude is a factor ~10 larger.
Positive Unlabeled Fake News Detection via Multi-Modal Masked Transformer Network

Fake news detection has gotten continuous attention during these years with more and more people have been posting and reading news online. To enable fake news detection, existing researchers usually assume labeled posts are provided for two classes (true or false) so that the model can learn a discriminative classifier from the labeled data. However, this supposition may not hold true in reality, as most users may only label a small number of posts in a single category that they are interested in. Furthermore, most existing methods fail to mask the noise or irrelevant context (i.e., regions or words) between different modalities to assist in strengthening the correlations between relevant contexts. To tackle these issues, we present a curriculum-based multi-modal masked transformer network (CMMTN) for positive unlabeled multi-modal fake news detection by jointly modeling the inter-modality and intra-modality relationships of multi-modal information and masking the irrelevant context between modalities. In particular, we adopt BERT and ResNet to obtain better representations for texts and images, separately. Then, the extracted features of images and texts are fed into a multi-modal masked transformer network to fuse the multi-modal content and mask the irrelevant context between modalities by calculating the similarity between inter-modal contexts. Finally, we design a curriculum-based PU learning method to handle the positive and unlabeled data. Massive experiments on three public real datasets prove the effectiveness of the CMMTN.
Chemoprevention of neuroblastoma: progress and promise beyond uncertainties

Neuroblastoma is the most common extracranial solid tumor in children and comprises one-tenth of all childhood cancer deaths. The current clinical therapy for this deadly disease is multimodal, involving an induction phase with alternating regimens of high-dose chemotherapeutic drugs and load reduction surgery; a consolidation phase with more intensive chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and stem cell transplant; and a maintenance phase with immunotherapy and immune-activating cytokine treatment. Despite such intensive treatment, children with neuroblastoma have unacceptable life quality and survival, warranting preventive measures to regulate the cellular functions that orchestrate tumor progression, therapy resistance, metastasis, and tumor relapse/recurrence. Globally, active efforts are underway to identify novel chemopreventive agents, define their mechanism(s) of action, and assess their clinical benefit. Some chemoprevention strategies (e.g., retinoids, difluoromethylornithine) have already been adopted clinically as part of maintenance phase therapy. Several agents are in the pipeline, while many others are in preclinical characterization. Here we review the classes of chemopreventive agents investigated for neuroblastoma, including cellular events targeted, mode(s) of action, and the level of development. Our review: (i) highlights the pressing need for new and improved chemopreventive strategies for progressive neuroblastoma; (ii) lists the emerging classes of chemopreventive agents for neuroblastoma; and (iii) recognizes the relevance of targeting dynamically evolving hallmark functions of tumor evolution (e.g., survival, differentiation, lineage transformation). With recent gains in the understanding of tumor evolution processes and preclinical and clinical efforts, it is our strong opinion that effective chemopreventive strategies for aggressive neuroblastoma are a near reality.
Breast Density Evaluation According to BI-RADS 5th Edition on Digital Breast Tomosynthesis: AI Automated Assessment Versus Human Visual Assessment

Background: The assessment of breast density is one of the main goals of radiologists because the masking effect of dense fibroglandular tissue may affect the mammographic identification of lesions. The BI-RADS 5th Edition has revised the mammographic breast density categories, focusing on a qualitative evaluation rather than a quantitative one. Our purpose is to compare the concordance of the automatic classification of breast density with the visual assessment according to the latest available classification. Methods: A sample of 1075 digital breast tomosynthesis images from women aged between 40 and 86 years (58 ± 7.1) was retrospectively analyzed by three independent readers according to the BI-RADS 5th Edition. Automated breast density assessment was performed on digital breast tomosynthesis images with the Quantra software version 2.2. 3. Interobserver agreement was assessed with kappa statistics. The distributions of breast density categories were compared and correlated with age. Results: The agreement on breast density categories was substantial to almost perfect between radiologists (κ = 0.63–0.83), moderate to substantial between radiologists and the Quantra software (κ = 0.44–0.78), and the consensus of radiologists and the Quantra software (κ = 0.60–0.77). Comparing the assessment for dense and non-dense breasts, the agreement was almost perfect in the screening age range without a statistically significant difference between concordant and discordant cases when compared by age. Conclusions: The categorization proposed by the Quantra software has shown a good agreement with the radiological evaluations, even though it did not completely reflect the visual assessment. Thus, clinical decisions regarding supplemental screening should be based on the radiologist’s perceived masking effect rather than the data produced exclusively by the Quantra software.