Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-Attribute Profit-Maximizing Pricing Extended

In the unlimited-supply profit-maximizing pricing problem, we are given the consumers’ consideration sets and know their purchase strategy (e.g. buy the cheapest items). The goal is to price the items to maximize the revenue. Previous studies suggest that this problem is too general to obtain even a sublinear approximation ratio (in terms of the number of items) even when the consumers are restricted to have very simple purchase strategies. In this paper we initiate the study of the multi-attribute pricing problem as a direction to break this barrier. Specifically, we consider the case where each item has a constant number of attributes, and each consumer would like to buy the items that satisfy her criteria in all attributes. This notion intuitively captures typical real-world settings and has been widelystudied in marketing research, healthcare economics, etc. It also helps categorizing previously studied cases, such as highway pricing problem and graph vertex pricing problem on planar and bipartite graphs, from the general case. We show that this notion of attributes leads to improved approximation ratios on a large class of problems. This is obtained by utilizing the fact that the consideration sets have low VC-dimension and applying Dilworth’s theorem on a certain partial order defined on the set of items. As a consequence, we present sublinear-approximation algorithms, thus breaking the previous barrier, for two well-known variants of the problem: unit-demand uniform-budget min-buying and single-minded pricing problems. Moreover, we generalize these techniques to the unit-demand utility-maximizing pricing problem and (non-uniform) unit-demand min-buying pricing problem when valuations or budgets depend on attributes, as well as the pricing problem with symmetric valuations and subadditive revenues. These results suggest that considering attributes is a promising research direction in obtaining improved approximation algorithms for such pricing problems. ∗This extended abstract focuses on explaining the main technical idea by showing a sub-linear approximation algorithm for the problem called UUDP-MIN. For the result in its full generality, we refer to the full version [17]. †Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. Email: parinya@cs.uchicago. edu. Work partially done at Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany. Supported by NSF grant CCF0844872. ‡Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany. Email: {elbassio,hsun}@mpi-inf.mpg. de §Theory and Applications of Algorithms Research Group, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. Email: danupon@gmail.com. Work partially done while at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA and MaxPlanck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany. ar X iv :1 20 2. 28 40 v1 [ cs . G T ] 1 3 Fe b 20 12
Clinical Correlation between Retinal Sensitivity and Foveal Thickness in Retinitis Pigmentosa Patients

Purpose To investigate the relationship between retinal structure and retinal sensitivity comparing data obtained using spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) and microperimetry in retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and healthy patients. Methods A total of 49 patients (98 eyes) with RP were divided into 4 groups according to the OCT findings: group A, patients with no macular changes; group B, patients with cystoid macular edema (CME); group C, patients with vitreomacular traction (VMT); group D, patients with retinal thinning. As a control group, we enrolled 27 healthy subjects. All subjects underwent a complete ophthalmologic examination, including SD-OCT and microperimetry. For the statistical analysis, Pearson correlation test and linear regression analysis were used. A p value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results We did not find any significant difference in best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), foveal thickness, or retinal sensitivity between group A and the healthy subjects (p>0.05). In group B, linear regression of logMAR versus foveal thickness and retinal sensitivity versus foveal thickness gave r values of 0.931 and 0.786, respectively. In group C, r values were 0.786 and 0.842, respectively, while in group D they were 0.816 and 0.795. Conclusions This article shows the first application of the new microperimeter MP3 in patients with RP, which has proven to be very sensitive in detecting functional abnormalities in all the patients. Future studies should investigate the relationships among photoreceptor cell loss, retinal sensitivity, and fixation in patients with RP.
Duplicate Removal for Candidate Answer Sentences

In this paper, we describe the duplicate removal component of Infolab’s1 question answering system that contributed to CSAIL’s entry of TREC-152 Question Answering track. The goal of the Question Answering Track is to provide short, succinct answers to English sentences posed by users. In answering definition questions, we are asked to retrieve new and relevant information, in the form of short sentences or fragments from newswire text. Because many news articles overlap in content, we need to employ a duplicate removal method before presenting the results to the users. Here we present two different approaches to duplicate removal. Our first approach uses the BLEU score, a commonly used metric for machine translation evaluation, as the similarity metric between sentences. Our second approach takes a list of candidate answers, and clusters answers using word-level edit-distance as the similarity metric; the best answer from each cluster is chosen as the representative. In this paper we compare these two approaches and determine their relative performances in the duplicate detection task.
Aberrant Synthesis, Metabolism, and Plasma Accumulation of Circulating Estrogens and Estrogen Metabolites in Preeclampsia Implications for Vascular Dysfunction

Estrogens and estrogen metabolites have important functions in cardiovascular and other physiology, yet the patterns of estrogen synthesis, metabolism, and the individual plasma profile of estrogens and estrogen metabolites during human pregnancy as well as in preeclampsia remain undetermined. We performed liquid chromatography mass spectrometry on plasma samples from normotensive pregnant women (normP; n=8), women with mild (mPE; n=8), and severe (sPE; n = 8) preeclampsia at labor. Compared with normP, estrone was lower in sPE, whereas plasma level of estradiol-17&bgr; was significantly lower in women with mPE and sPE. Estriol was lower in sPE, but not in mPE. Although 2-hydroxyestrone was lower in mPE and sPE, 4-hydroxyestrone was high in sPE. 16-&agr;-hydroxyestrone was higher in mPE, but not in sPE. 2-hydroxyestradiol in women with mPE and sPE were lower compared with normP. Compared with 2-methoxyestrone in normP, levels were lower in sPE. 3-methoxyestrone and 4-methoxyestrone were unchanged. 2-methoxyestradiol was lower in mPE and sPE; however, 4-methoxyestradiol was low only in sPE. Compared with normP, 16-keto-estradiol-17&bgr; levels were significantly higher in sPE, whereas 16-epi-estriol and 17-epi-estriol were lower in women with sPE. Our findings show that preeclampsia is characterized by aberrant synthesis, metabolism, and accumulation of estrogens and estrogen metabolites that are likely to be associated with alterations in vascular function. These results underscore the need to investigate the functional vascular and other physiology of estrogens and estrogen metabolites in the pathophysiology of preeclampsia.
Neurophysiological constraints on the eye-mind link

Several current computational models of eye-movement control in reading posit a tight link between the eye and mind, with lexical processing directly triggering most “decisions” about when to start programming a saccade to move the eyes from one word to the next. One potential problem with this theoretical assumption, however, is that it may violate neurophysiological constraints imposed by the time required to encode visual information, complete some amount of lexical processing, and then program a saccade. In this article, we review what has been learned about these timing constraints from studies using ERP and MEG. On the basis of this review, it would appear that the temporal constraints are too severe to permit direct lexical control of eye movements without a significant amount of parafoveal processing (i.e., pre-processing of word n+1 from word n). This conclusion underscores the degree to which the perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes involved in reading must be highly coordinated to support skilled reading, a par excellence example of a task requiring visual-cognitive expertise.
Biochars Improve Nutrient Retention Capacity of Highly Weathered Tropical Soils

Highly weathered soils in the tropics are low in fertility, negatively affecting plant growth. The potential of biochar for improving soil nutrient retention is reportedly promising, triggering this study to assess the nutrient retention capacities of two biochars when applied at 2% in combination with two composts also applied at 2% to an Ultisol (Ustic Kanhaplohumult, Leilehua series) and an Oxisol (Rhodic haplustox, Wahiawa series) of Hawai’i. Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa cv. Bonsai) was used as the test plant in two greenhouse plantings, which had a factorial completely randomized design with three replicates per treatment. The results indicated that the combined additions of biochar and compost significantly increased the pH, EC, P and K of the soils; improved Ca, Mg and Fe uptake; and increased shoot and total cabbage fresh and dry matter. Exchangeable aluminum in the Ultisol was decreased from 2.5 cmol+/kg to virtually zero. Extractable Mn and Fe in the high Mn-Oxisol were decreased by 55 and 42%, respectively. Chinese cabbage growth in the Ultisol amended with the lac tree (Schleichera oleosa) wood biochar and vermicompost was almost twice over lime at 2 cmol+/kg. Essential nutrients in the plant tissues, with the exception of N and K, were sufficient for the cabbage growth, suggesting increases in nutrients and reduced soil acidity by the additions of biochar combined with compost were the probable cause.
Survival time after surgery is inversely related to the amounts of prostaglandins extracted from human breast cancers [proceedings].

Homogenates of malignant human breast tumours contained more prostaglandin-like material (PG-lm) than those of benign tumours or apparently normal breast tissue (Bennett, Charlier, McDonald, Simpson, Stamford & Zebro, 1977). Patients whose malignant tumours produced highest amounts of PG-lm most frequently had scintigraphic evidence of bone metastases at the time of surgery, and 'basal' amounts of PGs tended to be higher in tumours with histological evidence of invasiveness (Bennett et al., 1977). We now show that patients whose tumours produced most PG-lm often die soonest after mastectomy. Tumours were removed at operation and samples were homogenised in acid-ethanol to indicate 'basal' amounts of PG, or in Krebs solution which allows synthesis from released endogenous precursors ('newly synthesised' + 'basal' = 'total' PG). The PGs were extracted and bioassayed against authentic PGE2 on the rat stomach strip preparation (Bennett
Fragmentation and the value-added structure of exports in Polish industry

The accession to the European Union contributed to an increase in Poland’s foreign trade, and the growing export market is coupled with an increasing importance of intermediate imports, which is necessary to produce goods of appropriate quality and price. This phenomenon is a part of the process of fragmentation in global value chains. Fragmentation of the value chains should manifest themselves, in particular, in a multi-phase manufacturing process that requires many components of different types. In this paper, the recently available OECD database of the Trade in Value Added (TiVA) has been used to assess changes in the composition of gross exports of Poland and other Central Europe countries. In Poland, practically all sectors show a growing share of the imported value added. The cases analyzed confirm the thesis that the high technology sectors foster fragmentation. In the case of technologically less advanced sectors and short-value chains, benefits of fragmentation are limited. The progressing fragmentation and, as a consequence, a growing share of the imported value added made the gross export value (which is commonly used in statistics) of little use for the analysis of the economic role and competitive position of sectors. However, thanks to new projects based on I-O matrices of the global economy, it is possible to decompose gross exports into respective domestic and foreign value-added streams.
Differential biosynthesis and posttranslational processing of vasopressin and oxytocin in rat brain during embryonic and postnatal development

The biosynthesis and posttranslational processing of arginine vasopressin (AVP) and oxytocin (OT) peptides in the developing rat brain and pituitary were studied using antibodies and complementary separation methods that permitted a quantitative radioimmunoassay (RIA) analysis of precursor, intermediate, and completely processed forms of the peptides. Precursor forms of the peptides were first detected in rat brain as early as embryonic day (E) 15 for AVP and E17 for OT. Proteolytic cleavage products of the precursors were detected 1 d later for both peptides. AVP was present in a fully processed (amidated) from immediately (E16) and throughout fetal development. OT was cleaved from its precursor starting on E18 but remained in an intermediate (C- terminal extended) form until E21, when amidated OT was first detected in the pituitary. Hence, Pro-AVP processing in the fetus was immediate and complete, whereas Pro-OT processing in the fetus was much slower and incomplete, resulting in the generation of partially processed, nonamidated stable forms of the peptide (OT-Gly10, OT-Gly10-Lys11, and OT-Gly10-Lys11-Arg12). The presence of OT-Gly10-Lys11-Arg12 as a major, stable intermediate form, indicated that the in vivo pattern of endoproteolytic cleavage occurred principally at the C-terminus of the pair of basic amino acids at the tripeptide spacer sequence (Gly-Lys- Arg) in the precursor. Although both precursors were first expressed nearly simultaneously in the brain, the steady-state levels of the precursors were very different throughout fetal life. From E16-E21, the quantities of AVP precursors and peptides were 5- to 10-fold greater than those of OT, suggesting a much higher level of precursor biosynthesis in the AVP neurons. In addition to these differences in the regulation of biosynthesis and processing, AVP peptides were axonally transported to the pituitary 3 d earlier than OT peptides, and in far greater (20-fold) abundance. The early presence and abundance of amidated AVP in the brain and pituitary suggests a trophic function for this peptide during development.
A SIMULATION BASED ESTIMATION OF CROWD ABILITY AND ITS INFLUENCE ON CROWDSOURCED EVALUATION OF DESIGN CONCEPTS

Crowdsourced evaluation is a promising method for evaluating attributes of design concepts that require human input. One factor in obtaining good evaluations is the ratio of high-ability to low-ability participants within the crowd. In this paper we introduce a Bayesian network model capable of finding participants with high design evaluation ability, so that their evaluations may be weighted more than those of the rest of the crowd. The Bayesian network model also estimates a score of how well each design concept performs with respect to a design attribute without knowledge of the true scores. Monte Carlo simulation studies tested the quality of the estimations on a variety of crowds consisting of participants with different evaluation ability. Results suggest that the Bayesian network model estimates design attribute performance scores much closer to their true values than simply weighting the evaluations from all participants in the crowd equally. This finding holds true even when the group of high ability participants is a small percentage of the entire crowd.Copyright © 2013 by ASME
A simple LC-MS/MS method for determination of kynurenine and tryptophan concentrations in human plasma from HIV-infected patients.

BACKGROUND Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase, catalyzing tryptophan (Trp) metabolism through the kynurenine (Kyn) metabolic pathway, plays important roles in immune suppression and the CNS. In this article, we report a simple, rapid and specific LC-MS/MS method for accurate determination of Kyn and Trp concentrations in human plasma from HIV-infected patients. RESULTS The human plasma sample (100 µl) was mixed with Kyn-d4 and Trp-d5 internal standards and then precipitated with trifluoroacetic acid. The supernatant was directly analyzed by LC-MS/MS. The assay using surrogate matrix calibrators was validated for precision, accuracy, matrix effect, extraction efficiency and stability. Some assay validation issues for endogenous substance bioanalysis using an LC-MS/MS method are discussed. CONCLUSION A simple, specific and reproducible LC-MS/MS method has been developed and validated for measuring Kyn and Trp in human plasma samples.
Diagnosis and management of ophthalmological features in patients with mucopolysaccharidosis

Ocular pathology is common in patients with mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS), a hereditary lysosomal storage disorder, where the eye as well as other tissues accumulate excessive amounts of glycosaminoglycans. Despite genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity within and between different types of MPS, the disease symptoms and clinical signs often manifest during the first 6 months of life with increasing head size, recurrent infections, umbilical hernia, growth retardation and skeletal problems. Typical ocular features include corneal clouding, ocular hypertension/glaucoma, retinal degeneration and optic nerve atrophy. Visual deterioration and sensitivity to light may substantially reduce the quality of life in MPS patients, particularly when left untreated. As an early intervention, haematopoietic stem cell transplantation and/or enzyme replacement therapy are likely to improve patients' symptoms and survival, as well as visual outcome. Thus, it is of utmost importance to ensure proper detection and accurate diagnosis of MPS at an early age. It is of fundamental value to increase awareness and knowledge among ophthalmologists of the ocular problems affecting MPS patients and to highlight potential diagnostic pitfalls and difficulties in patient care. This review provides insight into the prevalence and severity of ocular features in patients with MPS and gives guidance for early diagnosis and follow-up of MPS patients. MPS poses therapeutic challenges in ocular management, which places ophthalmologists next to paediatricians at the forefront of interventions to prevent long-term sequelae of this rare but serious disease.
Radiographic Contrast-Media-Induced Acute Kidney Injury: Pathophysiology and Prophylactic Strategies

Contrast-induced acute kidney injury (CI-AKI) is one of the most widely discussed and debated topics in cardiovascular medicine. With increasing number of contrast-media- (CM-) enhanced imaging studies being performed and growing octogenarian population with significant comorbidities, incidence of CI-AKI remains high. In this review, pathophysiology of CI-AKI, its relationship with different types of CM, role of serum and urinary biomarkers for diagnosing CI-AKI, and various prophylactic strategies used for nephroprotection against CI-AKI are discussed in detail.
Collaborative marketplaces for eScience: A medical imaging use case

The development of digital imaging technology is creating extraordinary levels of accuracy that provide support for improved reliability in different aspects of the image analysis such as content-based image retrieval, image segmentation and classification. This has dramatically increased the volume and generation rates of data, which make querying and sharing non-trivial, and render centralized solutions infeasible. Moreover, in many cases this data is naturally distributed or has to be shared across multiple institutions requiring decentralized solutions. In this paper, we present a federation approach that can take advantage of advanced cyber-infrastructure (ACI) by seamlessly and securely interacting with information/data located across geographically distributed resources. We describe and evaluate the establishment of a federated marketplace across resources from UK and US in the context of collaborative research in medical imaging. We show how users from different sites can transparently access to remote data by placing computational requests in the marketplace. Moreover, we evaluate different pricing policies to demonstrate how site providers and users can benefit from such federation.
Physical properties of nanoparticle silica gel doped with CdS prepared by sol-gel technique

CdS/silica xerogel glasses were prepared via silica gels containing mixture solution of 0.2 M (CdCl2 and thiourea) with molar ratio 1:1. Doping the gels with this mixture solution and its heat treatment gave transparent yellow silica-gel glasses doped with CdS crystals. X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscope make it possible to evaluate the nanoparticle size of the prepared samples. The nanoparticle size was dependent on the concentration of the dopant materials and the heating temperature. In the optical transmission spectra, the absorption edge exhibited a blue shift compared to that of the bulk CdS, and its energy shift was reciprocally proportional to the square of the radius. Thus the quantum-size effect could be found for the silica gel containing CdS prepared by the sol-gel process. The energy band gap shifted to higher energy for smaller nanoparticle size.
Gaussian Beam Processes: A Nonparametric Bayesian Measurement Model for Range Finders

In probabilistic mobile robotics, the development of measurement models plays a crucial role as it directly influences the efficiency and the robustness of the robot’s performance in a great variety of tasks including localization, tracking, and map building. In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic measurement model for range finders, called Gaussian beam processes, which treats the measurement modeling task as a nonparametric Bayesian regression problem and solves it using Gaussian processes. The major benefit of our approach is its ability to generalize over entire range scans directly. This way, we can learn the distributions of range measurements for whole regions of the robot’s configuration space from only few recorded or simulated range scans. Especially in approximative approaches to state estimation like particle filtering or histogram filtering, this leads to a better approximation of the true likelihood function. Experiments on real world and synthetic data show that Gaussian beam processes combine the advantages of two popular measurement models.
Emerging MS-based platforms for the characterization of tumor-derived exosomes isolated from human biofluids: challenges and promises of MudPIT

ABSTRACT Introduction: Exosomes are small extracellular vesicles of endosomal origin that are produced and released by several type of cells. These vesicles contain different macromolecules: proteins, mRNA, miRNA, mitochondrial DNA, and lipids. Exosomes play an important role in cell-to-cell communication, also promoting cancer progression. Areas covered: Various proteomic approaches have been applied to study exosomes isolated from different human biofluids in search of possible cancer biomarkers. The results of these studies are reported, and pros and cons of each employed technique are described. Gel-free and gel-based mass spectrometry systems are discussed, giving particular emphasis on the innovative multidimensional protein identification technology (MudPIT). Expert commentary: Proteomic studies on exosomes as candidate cancer biomarkers from urine and other body fluids in cancer have shown the potential of MS-based techniques. In particular, MudPIT is a promising tool to be applied in clinical proteomics of cancer.