Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acceptability and Willingness-to-Pay for a Hypothetical Ebola Virus Vaccine in Nigeria

Background Ebola virus disease is a highly virulent and transmissible disease. The largest recorded fatality from Ebola virus disease epidemic is ongoing in a few countries in West Africa, and this poses a health risk to the entire population of the world because arresting the transmission has been challenging. Vaccination is considered a key intervention that is capable of arresting further spread of the disease and preventing future outbreak. However, no vaccine has yet been approved for public use, although various recombinant vaccines are undergoing trials and approval for public use is imminent. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the acceptability of and willingness-to-pay for Ebola virus vaccine by the public. Methods The study was a community-based cross-sectional qualitative and quantitative interventional study conducted in two communities, each in two states in Nigeria. An interviewer-administered questionnaire was used to collect information on respondents’ knowledge of the Ebola virus, the ways to prevent the disease, and their preventive practices, as well as their acceptability of and willingness-to-pay for a hypothetical vaccine against Ebola virus disease. The association between acceptability of the vaccine and other independent variables were evaluated using multivariate regression analysis. Results Ebola virus disease was considered to be a very serious disease by 38.5% of the 582 respondents (224/582), prior to receiving health education on Ebola virus and its vaccine. Eighty percent (80%) accepted to be vaccinated with Ebola vaccine. However, among those that accepted to be vaccinated, most would only accept after observing the outcome on others who have received the vaccine. More than 87.5% was willing to pay for the vaccine, although 55.2% was of the opinion that the vaccine should be provided free of charge. Conclusion The level of acceptability of Ebola virus vaccine among respondents was impressive (though conditional), as well as their willingness to pay for it if the vaccine is not publicly funded. In order to achieve a high uptake of the vaccine, information and education on the vaccine should be extensively shared with the public prior to the introduction of the vaccine, and the vaccine should be provided free of charge by government.
Robustness Indicators for Cloud-Based Systems Topologies

Various services are now available in the Cloud, ranging from turnkey databases and application servers to high-level services such as continuous integration or source version control. To stand out of this diversity, robustness of service compositions is an important selling argument, but which remains difficult to understand and estimate as it does not only depend on services but also on the underlying platform and infrastructure. Yet, choosing a specific service composition may fail to deliver the expected robustness, but reverting early choices may jeopardise the success of any Cloud project. Inspired by existing models used in Biology to quantify the robustness of ecosystems, we show how to tailor them to obtain early indicators of robustness for cloud-based deployments. This technique helps identify weakest services in the overall architecture and in turn mitigates the risk of having to revert key architectural choices. We illustrate our approach by comparing the robustness of four alternative deployments of the Sens App application, which includes a Mongo DB database, four REST services and a graphical web-front end.
Enhancing Healthcare Provider Feedback and Personal Health Literacy: Dual Use of a Decision Quality Measure

In this protocol for a pilot study we seek to establish the feasibility of using a web-based survey to simultaneously supply healthcare organisations and agencies with feedback on a key aspect of the care experience they provide and increase the generic health decision literacy of the individuals responding. The focus is on the person's involvement in decision making, an aspect of care which is seriously under-represented in current surveys if one adopts the perspective of person-centred care. By engaging with an instrument to assess decision quality the person can, in the one action, provide a retrospective evaluation of a past decision making experience in a specific provider context and enhance their competency in future decision making in any setting. We see this as an exercise in context-sensitive educational health informatics.
A Quantitative Climate Study of Dynamically Downscaled Simulations of the 1997/98 Mega-El Niño Wet Season in Hawai'i

The 1997/98 El Niño, one of the largest planetary-scale climate phenomena on record, was chosen as a preliminary case study in which to test the feasibility of using WRF3.7 (Weather Research and Forecasting Model, Version 3.7) for climate studies. The 1997/98 El Niño wet season (November to April) was compared with the 2005/06 ENSOneutral wet season by dynamically downscaling two different reanalysis products, NCEP R2 and ERA-Interim, via WRF3.7. The performance capabilities of the WRF model were assessed by employing different forcing fields, landsurface models, domain configurations, and horizontal resolutions, with and without reanalysis grid nudging, for the two largest Hawaiian Islands, Maui and the Big Island. Model performance was validated in a series of comparative rainfall tests to determine the accuracy of simulated rainfall by directly comparing model output with observed rain gauge measurements during the two specified time periods. Sensitivity studies were also performed to assess model response to changes in input (e.g., forcing fields, horizontal grid resolution, etc.). Once total resolvable precipitation compared favorably with observed NCDC rain gauge data in terms of accumulated 6-month simulated rainfall totals, the simulations were determined to be rainfall validated. Following these validation procedures, the dynamically downscaled simulations were then examined in terms of physical variables which seemed to best characterize the atmospheric changes in the Hawaiian climate system and most likely contributed to the reduced precipitation during the 1997/98 El Niño wet season. More generally, this thesis investigated the applicability of using WRF as a regional climate model for conducting long-term climate studies. A Quantitative Climate Study of Dynamically Downscaled Simulations of the 1997/98 El Niño Wet Season in Hawai`i
Chimera states: coexistence of coherence and incoherence in networks of coupled oscillators

A chimera state is a spatio-temporal pattern in a network of identical coupled oscillators in which synchronous and asynchronous oscillation coexist. This state of broken symmetry, which usually coexists with a stable spatially symmetric state, has intrigued the nonlinear dynamics community since its discovery in the early 2000s. Recent experiments have led to increasing interest in the origin and dynamics of these states. Here we review the history of research on chimera states and highlight major advances in understanding their behaviour.
Occurrence of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) among clinical samples in tehran-iran and its correlation with polymorphism of specific accessory gene regulator (AGR) groups

Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is responsible for an increasing number of serious hospital and community acquired infections. Virulence gene expression in Staphylococcus aureus is orchestrated by regulators such as the accessory gene regulator (agr). Staphylococcal strains are divided into four major agr groups (agrI-IV) on the basis of agrD and agrC polymorphisms. The purpose of this study was to define the prevalence of MRSA strains in appointed Tehran's hospitals and then to define and compare the proportion of agr I, II, III, IV polymorphisms between MRSA and Methicillin Sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) strains. A total of 235 isolates were evaluated by conventional antibiotic susceptibility tests and PCR for agr and mecA genes. 112 strains were MRSA (47.5%) and the most prevalent agr specific group was agr I followed by agr III, agr II and agr IV, respectively. The prevalence of agr groups amongst MRSA and MSSA strains was not statistically significant (P≥0.05). This study suggests that agr I is not only the most prevalent agr type in MRSAs but also the most common one in Methicillin Sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) strains in Iran.
New Findings on Using Queue Occupancy to Integrate Runtime Power-Saving Techniques Across the Pipeline

This paper provides new insights on how to integrate power-saving techniques by using queue occupancies to dynamically match the power-saving modes of various pipeline stages with the current instruction throughput. (This paper focuses on fetch, decode, integer execution, and data cache.) Architects have proposed many runtime power-saving techniques, most of which reduce power dissipation in a single microarchitectural unit. But very little work has been done to integrate these disparate techniques to ensure that they cooperate rather than interfering with each other. We use both queuing theory and experimental results to justify the use of superscalar decoupling queues to guide dynamic control of power settings. This permits integrated power control for multiple units across the pipeline, with minimal negative interaction, by matching the throughput of each stage and the application’s current instruction-level parallelism. Our findings verify but also improve upon those in previous work by Semerraro et al. In particular, our approach is robust in jumping out of the bad power modes configuration incurring radical performance degradation, and our approach allows the fetch stage (a significant source of power dissipation) to realize power savings, something that prior integrated, queue-based techniques have not been able to accomplish.
Fiber‐Level On‐the‐Fly Procedural Textiles

Procedural textile models are compact, easy to edit, and can achieve state‐of‐the‐art realism with fiber‐level details. However, these complex models generally need to be fully instantiated (aka. realized) into 3D volumes or fiber meshes and stored in memory, We introduce a novel realization‐minimizing technique that enables physically based rendering of procedural textiles, without the need of full model realizations. The key ingredients of our technique are new data structures and search algorithms that look up regular and flyaway fibers on the fly, efficiently and consistently. Our technique works with compact fiber‐level procedural yarn models in their exact form with no approximation imposed. In practice, our method can render very large models that are practically unrenderable using existing methods, while using considerably less memory (60–200× less) and achieving good performance.
Quantitative Evaluation of Standing Stabilization Using Stiff and Compliant Actuators

In this paper we evaluate the benefits of series elastic actuation in performing a balancing task on a humanoid robot. By having the possibility to replace the type of transmission at the ankles level, it was possible to repeat the very same experiment in two different conditions: (1) Using series elastic actuators (SEA); (2) Replacing the elastic elements with rigid transmissions. The experiments consisted in perturbing a balanced posture with an impulsive force. Perturbations were applied in two different scenarios: hitting the robot on the upper body and at the support platform, thus acting above and under the actuated joint. The applied perturbations were controlled to be repeatable and the static stiffness of the rigid and elastic actuators were tuned to match. With these assumptions, static responses were the same in the two conditions; differences appeared only during the dynamic response and are motivated by different proportions between active and passive stiffness. In both scenarios, results show that series elasticity simplifies the role of the balancing controller by low pass filtering the dynamics of the zero moment point, consistently observing a more stable balance recovery with SEA through all the experiments.
M-theory on the Stiefel manifold and 3d conformal field theories

We compute the mass and multiplet spectrum of M-theory compactified on the product of AdS4 spacetime by the Stiefel manifold V(5,2) = SO(5)/SO(3), and we use this information to deduce via the AdS/CFT map the primary operator content of the boundary = 2 conformal field theory. We make an attempt for a candidate supersymmetric gauge theory that, at strong coupling, should be related to parallel M2-branes on the singular point of the non-compact Calabi-Yau four-fold ∑a = 15za2 = 0, describing the cone on V(5,2).
Design of Wideband Fractional Delay Filters Using Derivative Sampling Method

In this paper, the design of wideband fractional delay filter is investigated. First, the reconstruction formula of derivative sampling method is applied to design wideband fractional delay filter by using index substitution and window method. The filter coefficients are easily computed because closed-form design is obtained. Then, the weighted least squares method is used to design fixed and variable wideband fractional delay filters. Finally, numerical examples are demonstrated to show that the proposed method has smaller design error than the conventional fractional delay filter without sampling the derivative of signal.
GIS for source water assessment and nonpoint source modeling in the Las Vegas Valley

GIS for Source Water Assessment and Nonpoint Source Modeling in the Las Vegas Valley by Marcelo Reginato Dr. Thomas C. Plechota, Examination Committee Chair Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Nevada, Las Vegas This thesis develops a better understanding of issues related to surface water contamination and protection of drinking water sources in the Las Vegas Valley. A Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to identify source water protection zones and to estimate nonpoint source loads for the entire watershed. The extent of the source water protection zones is represented by the valley's dry weather flows. After source water protection zones were defined, field work and GIS defined the potential contaminant sources and land uses within the protection zones. The GIS nonpoint source model shows that roads account for approximately 25% of the Total Nitrogen and 18% of the Total Phosphorus from nonpoint sources. Analysis suggest that a disproportionately high amount of nutrient loads have their origin within the source water protection zones. Approximately 10 to 7 percent of nutrient loads originate in the 5% of the total watershed area represented by protection zones. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Thyroid Hormone Analog, DITPA, Improves Endothelial Nitric Oxide and Beta-Adrenergic Mediated Vasorelaxation after Myocardial Infarction

This study was designed to determine if the thyroid hormone analog 3,5 diiodothyropropionic acid (DITPA), now in clinical trials for heart failure, alters endothelial function after myocardial infarction (MI). Three weeks after MI, adult Sprague–Dawley rats were randomly assigned to DITPA (375 μg/100 g subcutaneous) or no treatment of 3 weeks. In MI rats, left ventricular (LV) end-diastolic pressure and LV dP/dt decreased (P < 0.05). DITPA did not change MAP (87 ± 10 versus 90 ± 7 mm Hg) or LV end-diastolic pressure (23 ± 3 versus 19 ± 9 mm Hg) but did lower (P < 0.05) LV dP/dt (4633 ± 797 versus 3650 ± 1236 mm Hg/s). In aortic segments from MI rats, DITPA enhanced the acetylcholine dependent vasorelaxation (59 ± 11% at 10−4 M, P < 0.05) and isoproterenol induced vasorelaxation (57 ± 13% at 10−4 M, P < 0.05). The increases in vasorelaxation were blocked with l-NAME and restored with l-arginine. Treatment with DITPA increased (P < 0.05) eNOS protein content in aortic tissue from sham rats (3.8 ± 2.8 to 44.5 ± 7.1 integrated intensity units (II)/μg) and in MI rats (5.3 ± 3.4 to 28.3 ± 8.9 II/μg). In endothelial cells, 24 hours’ treatment with DITPA (10 μM) increased (P < 0.01) eNOS protein expression from 22.1 ± 4.8 to 52.7 ± 16.8 II/μg protein and DITPA (20 μM) increased eNOS to 49.1± 15.2 II/μg protein. The thyroid analog DITPA enhances endothelial nitric oxide and beta-adrenergic-mediated vasorelaxation by increasing nitric oxide in the vasculature.
To interpolate or not to interpolate: Subjective assessment of interpolation performance on a light field display

Interpolating virtual views from sparse visual content increases the angular resolution of the visualization. However, such techniques may degrade the image quality through inaccurate view estimation. The smooth motion parallax through increased angular resolution, and image quality are essential components of the overall user experience. The choice of interpolation initiates an unclear trade-off between them. In this paper, we introduce our research on interpolation techniques for 3D light field visualization. We examined the performance and perceived quality of selected algorithms, in a series of subjective quality assessment experiments. Our results show an obvious interpolation technique preference on visual contents with low angular resolutions.
LMethyR-SVM: Predict Human Enhancers Using Low Methylated Regions based on Weighted Support Vector Machines

Background The identification of enhancer is a challenging task. Various types of epigenetic information including histone modification have been utilized in the construction of enhancer prediction models based on a diverse panel of machine learning models. However, DNA methylation profiles generated from the whole genome bisulfate sequencing (WGBS) have not been fully explored for their potential in enhancer prediction despite the fact that low methylated regions (LMRs) have been implied to be distal active regulatory regions. Method In this work we propose a prediction framework, LMethyR-SVM, using LMRs identified from cell-type-specific WGBS DNA methylation profiles based on an unlabeled-negative learning framework. In LMethyR-SVM, the set of cell-type-specific LMRs is further divided into three sets: reliable positive, like positive, and likely negative, according to their resemblance to a small set of experimentally validated enhancers in the VISTA database based on an estimated non-parametric density distribution. Then, the prediction model is trained by solving a weighted support vector machine. Results We demonstrate the performance of LMethyR-SVM by using the WGBS DNA methylation profiles derived from the H1 human embryonic stem cell type (H1) and the fetal lung fibroblast cell type (IMR90). The predicted enhancers are highly conserved with a reasonable validation rate based on a set of commonly used positive markers including transcription factors, p300 binding and DNase-I hypersensitive sites. In addition, we show evidence that the large fraction of LMethyR-SVM predicted enhancers are not predicted by ChromHMM in H1 cell type and they are more enriched for the FANTOM5 enhancers. Conclusion Our work suggests that low methylated regions detected from the WGBS data are useful as complementary resources to histone modification marks in developing models for the prediction of cell type-specific enhancers.
LA419, a Novel Nitric Oxide Donor, Prevents Pathological Cardiac Remodeling in Pressure-Overloaded Rats Via Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase Pathway Regulation

Reduced endogenous NO production has been described in cardiovascular disorders as cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure. The therapy with conventional nitrates is limited by their adverse hemodynamic effects and drug tolerance. The novel NO donor LA419 has demonstrated important antithrombotic and anti-ischemic properties without those adverse effects. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of LA419 chronic treatment on cardiac hypertrophy development in a progressive model of left ventricular hypertrophy. Rats were randomly divided into 6 groups: sham and clip (euthanized 7 weeks after aortic stenosis), sham+vehicle, sham+LA419, clip+vehicle, and clip+LA419 (euthanized 14 weeks after the surgery and treated with vehicle or 30 mg/kg of LA419 once left ventricular hypertrophy was established). LA419 treatment for 7 weeks induced a marked reduction in the heart:body weight ratio (4.10±0.28 and 3.38±0.06 mg/g in clip+vehicle versus clip+LA419; P<0.001) and left ventricular diameter (11.96±0.25 and 9.90±0.20 mm in clip+vehicle versus clip+LA419; P<0.001) without modifying the high blood pressure observed in stenosed rats. Histological analysis revealed that LA419 attenuated myocardial and perivascular fibrosis observed in rats with pressure overload for 14 weeks. In addition, LA419 treatment restored endothelial NO synthase and caveolin-3 expression levels, enhanced the interaction between endothelial NO synthase and its positive regulator the heat shock protein 90, and re-established the normal cardiac content of cGMP in stenosed rats. Thus, LA419 prevented the progression to maladaptative cardiac hypertrophy in response to prolonged pressure overload through a mechanism that involved the re-establishment of the endothelial NO synthase signaling pathway.
Intrinsic Image Decomposition for Feature Extraction of Hyperspectral Images

In this paper, a novel feature extraction method based on intrinsic image decomposition (IID) is proposed for hyperspectral image classification. The proposed method consists of the following steps. First, the spectral dimension of the hyperspectral image is reduced with averaging-based image fusion. Then, the dimension reduced image is partitioned into several subsets of adjacent bands. Next, the reflectance and shading components of each subset are estimated with an optimization-based IID technique. Finally, pixel-wise classification is performed only on the reflectance components, which reflect the material-dependent properties of different objects. Experimental results show that, with the proposed feature extraction method, the support vector machine classifier is able to obtain much higher classification accuracy even when the number of training samples is quite small. This demonstrates that IID is indeed an effective way for feature extraction of hyperspectral images.
A novel technique for rapidly separating willow roots from clay soil

Numerous studies have examined the root dynamics of willow biomass energy crops growing on medium to coarse-textured soils, using either soil coring, minirhizotron techniques, or a combination thereof. However, neither approach is well suited for studying roots in soil of high clay content. Our objective was to test the efficacy of using a simple baking soda (NaHCO3) pre-treatment for facilitating the separation of willow roots from a Vertisol (70% clay). Soil cores were collected from within a willow variety trial plot of Tully Champion (Salix viminalis x S. miyabeana) and were either conventionally washed (i.e., no pre-treatment) or washed following a pre-treatment consisting of shaking the sample for 15 min with either deionized water or 1.2M NaHCO3. Measurement variables included washing duration, water usage, and recovery of fine (< 2 mm) and coarse roots. The ranking of washing duration and water usage was 1.2M NaHCO3 pre-treatment < deionized water pre-treatment < conventional washing. Compared to conventional washing, the 1.2M NaHCO3 pre-treatment reduced the washing duration and water usage by 45 and 61%, respectively, while increasing the fine-root recovery by 29%. There was no significant difference (P > 0.05) in coarse root recovery among the three washing methods. Developing a quicker technique of separating willow roots from high clay content soilshould promote further investigations of root growth dynamics within this traditionally difficult soil type.