Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circulating Epstein-Barr virus DNA in the serum of patients with gastric carcinoma.

PURPOSE We investigated the detectability of EBV DNA in the serum of gastric carcinoma patients in Hong Kong. Previous data have shown that approximately 10% of gastric carcinomas in Hong Kong are associated with EBV. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN We recruited 51 patients with gastric carcinoma, 30 patients with gastritis, and 197 apparently healthy controls. For gastric carcinoma patients, blood samples were obtained before surgery. After surgery, the resected tumor samples from the cancer cases were subjected to in situ hybridization for small EBV-encoded RNA (EBER). Serum EBV DNA in all cases was measured by real-time quantitative PCR. RESULTS Serum EBV DNA was detectable in 5 of 5 (100%) EBER-positive gastric carcinoma cases (median concentration, 1063 copies/ml), in 13 of 14 (93%) EBER-negative gastric carcinoma cases with EBER-positive infiltrating lymphocytes (median concentration, 50 copies/ml), and in 0 of 32 (0%) EBER-negative cases. In the nontumor controls, serum EBV DNA was detectable in 7 of 30 (23%) gastritis cases (median concentration, 0 copies/ml) and in 7 of 197 (3.6%) apparently healthy individuals (median concentration, 0 copy/ml). CONCLUSIONS Our data indicate that serum EBV DNA reflects tumoral EBER status and opens up the possibility that circulating EBV DNA may be used as a tumor marker for the EBER-positive gastric carcinomas. The biological and clinical significance of the presence of low levels of circulating EBV DNA in the minority of gastritis patients and healthy individuals remains to be elucidated.
Cohort comparisons: emotional well-being among adolescents and older adults

Background There are several negative stereotypes about older adults that have negatively influenced people’s attitude about aging. The present study compared emotional well-being between older adults and adolescents. Methods Data for this study came from 1,403 community-dwelling elderly persons and 1,190 secondary school students and were obtained from two national cross-sectional surveys. Emotional well-being was measured using the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index. Data analysis was conducted using a multivariate analysis of covariance with SPSS software version 20 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY, USA). Results Elderly people significantly scored higher levels of emotional well-being (mean, 62.3; standard deviation, 22.55) than younger people (mean, 57.9; standard deviation, 18.46; t, 5.32; P≤0.001). The findings from the multivariate analysis of covariance revealed a significant difference between older adults and younger people in emotional well-being [F(3, 2587)=120.21; P≤0.001; η2=0.122] after controlling for sex. Conclusion Contrary to negative stereotypes about aging, our findings show a higher level of emotional well-being among older adults compared with younger people.
SGR2, a Phospholipase-Like Protein, and ZIG/SGR4, a SNARE, Are Involved in the Shoot Gravitropism of Arabidopsis Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at www.plantcell.org/cgi/doi/10.1105/tpc.010215.

In higher plants, the shoot and the root generally show negative and positive gravitropism, respectively. To elucidate the molecular mechanisms involved in gravitropism, we have isolated many shoot gravitropism mutants in Arabidopsis. The sgr2 and zig/sgr4 mutants exhibited abnormal gravitropism in both inflorescence stems and hypocotyls. These genes probably are involved in the early step(s) of the gravitropic response. The sgr2 mutants also had misshapen seed and seedlings, whereas the stem of the zig/sgr4 mutants elongated in a zigzag fashion. The SGR2 gene encodes a novel protein that may be part of a gene family represented by bovine phosphatidic acid–preferring phospholipase A1 containing a putative transmembrane domain. This gene family has been reported only in eukaryotes. The ZIG gene was found to encode AtVTI11, a protein that is homologous with yeast VTI1 and is involved in vesicle transport. Our observations suggest that the two genes may be involved in a vacuolar membrane system that affects shoot gravitropism.
The Contest for Olympic Succes as a Public Good

This study considers the performance of countries at the Olympic Games as a public good. Firstly, it is argued that, at the national level, Olympic success meets the two key conditions of a public good: non-rivalry and non-excludability. Secondly, it is demonstrated that standard income inequality measures, such as the Lorenz curve and the Gini index, can be successfully applied to the distribution of Olympic success. The actual distribution of Olympic success is compared with alternative hypothetical distributions, among which according to population shares, the distribution favoured by a social planner and the noncooperating Nash- Cournot distribution. By way of conclusion, a device is proposed to make the distribution of Olympic success more equitable.
Conditional Marginalization for Exponential Random Graph Models

For exponential random graph models, under quite general conditions, it is proved that induced subgraphs on node sets disconnected from the other nodes still have distributions from an exponential random graph model. This can help in the theoretical interpretation of such models. An application is that for saturated snowball samples from a potentially larger graph which is a realization of an exponential random graph model, it is possible to do the analysis of the observed snowball sample within the framework of exponential random graph models without any knowledge of the larger graph.
Development of a soft PZT based tactile sensor array for force localization

The need of designing tactile sensors for machines and robotic systems has become crucial with the increase of the tasks related to human. This work proposes a silicone embedded, low profile piezoelectric sensor array that is suitable for applications where tactile sensing and force localization is needed. The developed sensor has 3 piezoelectric ceramics (PZT) placed in 1×3 array and consists of 5 layers including flexible electrodes and silicone layers. The fabricated tactile sensor has 5 mm spatial resolution and has 0.578–0.821 V/N sensitivity range with a linear characteristic under 0–1 N impulse forces. Also the repeatability of the sensor is approximately 95.65 percent. In this work, the design of the sensor is presented. Each PZT element subjected to impulse force input has been calibrate and a force localization experiment has been performed on the sensor. The results show that our proposed sensor can be used as a force localization sensor.
Portable performance on Asymmetric Multicore Processors

Static and dynamic power constraints are steering chip manufacturers to build single-ISA Asymmetric Multicore Processors (AMPs) with big and small cores. To deliver on their energy efficiency potential, schedulers must consider core sensitivity, load balance, and the critical path. Applying these criteria effectively is challenging especially for complex and non-scalable multithreaded applications. We demonstrate that runtimes for managed languages, which are now ubiquitous, provide a unique opportunity to abstract over AMP complexity and inform scheduling with rich semantics such as thread priorities, locks, and parallelism - information not directly available to the hardware, OS, or application. We present the WASH AMP scheduler, which (1) automatically identifies and accelerates critical threads in concurrent, but non-scalable applications; (2) respects thread priorities; (3) considers core availability and thread sensitivity; and (4) proportionally schedules threads on big and small cores to optimize performance and energy. We introduce new dynamic analyses that identify critical threads and classify applications as sequential, scalable, or non-scalable. Compared to prior work, WASH improves performance by 20% and energy by 9% or more on frequency-scaled AMP hardware (not simulation). Performance advantages grow to 27% when asymmetry increases. Performance advantages are robust to a complex multithreaded adversary independently scheduled by the OS. WASH effectively identifies and optimizes a wider class of workloads than prior work.
Nonlinearity in photonic crystal fibres

This thesis introduces the linear and nonlinear properties of photonic crystal fibre (PCF), describes the fabrication and characterisation of different PCFs, and demonstrates their applications to supercontinuum (SC) generation and single-photon sources. The linear properties of PCF include endlessly single-mode transmission, highly controllable dispersion and birefringence. These unique properties have made PCFs the best media to demonstrate all kinds of nonlinear effects such as self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPM), Raman effects, four-wave mixing and modulation instability (FWM and MI), and soliton effects. The combination of these nonlinear effects has led to impressive spectral broadening known as SC generation in PCFs. The intrinsic correlation of signal and idler photons from FWM has brought PCF to the application of single-photon generation. Four projects about SC generation were demonstrated. The first was visible continuum generation in a monolithic PCF device, which gave a compact, bright (-20 dBm/nm), flat and single-mode visible continuum source extending to short wavelength at 400 nm. The second was polarised SC generation in a highly bire-fringent PCF. A well linearly polarised continuum source spanning 450-1750 nm was achieved with >99% power kept in a single linear polarisation. This polarised continuum source was then applied to tuneable visible/UV generation in a BIBO crystal. The third was residual pump peak removal for SC generation in PCFs. The fourth was to design an all-fibre dual-wavelength pumping for spectrally localised continuum generation. Two projects about photon pair generation using FWM were then demonstrated. One was an all-fibre photon pair source designed in the telecom band for quantum communication. This source achieved >50% heralding efficiency which is the highest in fibre photon pair sources reported so far. Another one was to design birefringent PCFs for naturally narrow band photon pair generation in the Si SPAD high detection efficiency range. 0.122 nm bandwidth signal photons at 596.8 nm were generated through cross polarisation phase matched FWM in a weakly birefringent PCF pumped by a picosecond Ti:Sapphire laser at 705 nm in the normal dispersion regime.
A probabilistic solution to the MEG inverse problem via MCMC methods: the reversible jump and parallel tempering algorithms

We investigated the usefulness of probabilistic Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for solving the magnetoencephalography (MEG) inverse problem, by using an algorithm composed of the combination of two MCMC samplers: Reversible Jump (RJ) and Parallel Tempering (PT). The MEG inverse problem was formulated in a probabilistic Bayesian approach, and we describe how the RJ and PT algorithms are fitted to our application. This approach offers better resolution of the MEG inverse problem even when the number of source dipoles is unknown (RJ), and significant reduction of the probability of erroneous convergence to local modes (PT). First estimates of the accuracy and resolution of our composite algorithm are given from results of simulation studies obtained with an unknown number of sources, and with white and neuromagnetic noise. In contrast to other approaches, MCMC methods do not just give an estimation of a "single best" solution, but they provide confidence interval for the source localization, probability distribution for the number of fitted dipoles, and estimation of other almost equally likely solutions.
Omnidirectional composite right/left-handed leaky-wave antenna with downtilted beam

In this study, we propose a novel leaky-wave omnidirectional antenna using a coplanar-strip-type composite right/left-handed (CRLH) line for application to a base station antenna used for a mobile communication system. Further, we realize an extremely slender omnidirectional antenna by adopting a polarization composite method. We also design a prototype antenna in the 3.5 GHz band and show the results of measurement obtained using this prototype antenna.
You snooze, you win

Since the 1990s, the death rate from falling has increased greatly among older adults, say officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This could reflect the fact that people are living longer with chronic medical conditions. But the CDC also reports this good news: Injury rates from hip fractures have decreased sharply among women after 1996. One possible explanation is that Medicare began reimbursing care providers for bone density screenings on elderly people in 1998, researchers say. In 1993, the death rate from falling was about 24 per 100,000. In 2003, this figure rose to 37 deaths per 100,000. Falling is the 14th leading cause of death among people age 65 and older. Looking at nonfatal injuries from falling between 2001 and 2005, researchers Nursing2007 Volume 37, Number 2
We Can Track You if You Take the Metro: Tracking Metro Riders Using Accelerometers on Smartphones

Motion sensors, especially accelerometers, on smartphones have been discovered to be a powerful side channel for spying on users' privacy. In this paper, we reveal a new accelerometer-based side-channel attack which is particularly serious: malware on smartphones can easily exploit the accelerometers to trace metro riders stealthily. We first address the challenge to automatically filter out metro-related data from a mass of miscellaneous accelerometer readings, and then propose a basic attack which leverages an ensemble interval classifier built from supervised learning to infer the riding trajectory of the user. As the supervised learning requires the attacker to collect labeled training data for each station interval, this attack confronts the scalability problem in big cities with a huge metro network. We thus further present an improved attack using semi-supervised learning, which only requires the attacker to collect labeled data for a very small number of distinctive station intervals. We conduct real experiments on a large self-built dataset, which contains more than 120 h of data collected from six metro lines of three major cities. The results show that the inferring accuracy could reach 89% and 94% if the user takes the metro for four and six stations, respectively. We finally discuss possible countermeasures against the proposed attack.
The Implementation of Beyond Centers and Circle Time (BCCT) in Early Childhood Programs in Indonesia

Playing has an important role in young childrens development, especially in developing self-regulation, language, cognition, and social competence. Through play, children develop self-regulation, language, cognition, and social competence, which increases their motivation and affects their learning. Therefore, play-based curriculum is currently widely used in early childhood programs. In such curriculum, play is seen as an integral part of children's lives, and that each child has their own unique interests and needs.The Directorate of Early Childhood Education Development introduced the Beyond Centers and Circle Time (BCCT) curriculum in 2004. It is a play-based curriculum which employs some learning centers and four kinds of scaffolding in order to support children's holistic development. It is also child-centered and aligned with the basic principles of Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP). The Indonesian government realizes that early childhood programs have a pivotal role in preparing children for their future and academic lives. Consequently, strategies are needed to improve the quality of early childhood education in Indonesia and support learning process of young children. The implementation of BCCT is in fact an effort to achieve these goals. This study aims to provide a short review of the implementation of BCCT in early childhood programs in Indonesia, as well as its advantages and challenges.
Non-local means denoising based on SVD basis images

With the assumption that natural images contain considerable amount of self-similarity, non-local means image de-noising uses patches similarity in order to filter noisy images. Although the output of the Non local means algorithm is very desirable in removing the low level of noise, when the noise increases, the performance deteriorates. This is because the similarity cannot be evaluated perfectly through noisy patches. To solve this problem, in the proposed approach, the similarity evaluation for each patch is performed based on the structural information. This is due to the fact that the HVS (Human Visual System) is highly adopted to extract structural information from a viewing scene. In this paper, a modified non-local means filter is introduced in order to find better similar patches especially in the case of high level of noise. The experimental results show appropriate performance of the presented algorithm both visually and quantitatively.
Reduced Cluster Search ML Decoding for QO-STBC Systems

Since the maximum likelihood (ML) decoding results too complex when the modulation order and the number of receive antennas increase, an efficient reduced complexity ML-based decoding scheme applied to a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems with quasi-orthogonal space-time block code (QO-STBC) is proposed, and named reduced cluster search ML decoding (RCS-ML). Its performance and complexity aspects are compared to the conventional ML decoding approach. High-order modulation indexes and short low density parity check codes (LDPC) are considered. Numerical results have indicated no degradation in the performance and an increasing reduction in the complexity of RCS-ML decoding with respect to the conventional ML when the modulation order increases.
The Efficiency of Multimodal Interaction for a Map-based Task

This paper compares the efficiency of using a standard direct-manipulation graphical user interface (GUI) with that of using the QuickSet pen/voice multimodal interface for supporting a military task. In this task, a user places military units and control measures (e.g., various types of lines, obstacles, objectives) on a map. Four military personnel designed and entered their own simulation scenarios via both interfaces. Analyses revealed that the multimodal interface led to a 3 to 4-fold speed improvement in the average entity creation time, including all error handling. Time to repair errors also was significantly faster when interacting multimodally. These results indicate a substantial efficiency advantage for multimodal over GUI-based interaction during map-based tasks.
Streamflow Depletion Modeling: Methods for an Adaptable and Conjunctive Water Management Decision Support Tool

Groundwater pumping depletes streamflow, which can have significant ecological impacts depending on the magnitude of depletion relative to environmental flow needs. Streamflow depletion estimates from groundwater pumping have been quantified using both analytical and numerical methods, but are not routinely compared to environmental flow needs or used in practical water management tools. Decision support tools that incorporate groundwater dynamics are becoming increasingly necessary for water managers as groundwater regulations become more important in environmental policy, particularly concerning the preservation of environmental flow needs. We develop and apply methods for a web‐based decision support tool for conjunctive groundwater and surface water management, demonstrated using a case study watershed in British Columbia, Canada. Open‐source data are analyzed with a combination of spatial algorithms and previously developed analytical models, such that the tool can be applied to other regions. Streamflow depletion estimates are calculated in four regions in the largely undeveloped Bulkley Valley, British Columbia. Our transparent methodology has geographic and data input flexibility which is a significant improvement on currently existing water management tool methods.
Effective Vibrotactile Cueing in a Visual Search Task

This paper presents results from work we have done into the combination of visual and vibrotactile cues for improving user interaction in virtual environments. Using a custom-designed control system, the intensity of a large number of low-cost vibrational devices can be independently controlled. Our current task is to determine the parameters and design-space for providing this type of cueing to support effective HCI. In a visual search task, user performance was compared over three levels of visual cues and four levels of vibrotactile cue types, in an attempt to narrow the visual search field for locating a letter from a random display of letters. Our results confirm the work of others, showing that users perform significantly faster when given visual cues, and that in the absence of visual cues, vibrotactile cues significantly improve performance. We also found that the waveform of the vibrotactile cue does not seem to make a difference in performance.
Assessment of space environment induced microdamage in toughened composite materials

The effects of simulated space environments on the microdamage in a series of commercially available toughened matrix composite systems was determined. Low-earth orbit (LEO) exposures were simulated by thermal cycling; geosynchronous orbit (GEO) exposures were simulated by electron irradiation plus thermal cycling. Material response was characterized by assessing the induced microcracking and its influence on chemical and mechanical property changes. All materials, including several advanced, tough thermoplastics microcracked when exposed to the simulated LEO environment except a 177 C cured single phase toughened epoxy composite. The GEO simulated environment produced microdamage in all materials. The results suggest that increased matrix toughness may not be the overriding factor leading to improved durability in the space environment.
A Model-Theoretic Coreference Scoring Scheme

This note describes a scoring scheme for the coreference task in MUC6. It improves on the original approach by: (1) grounding the scoring scheme in terms of a model; (2) producing more intuitive recall and precision scores; and (3) not requiring explicit computation of the transitive closure of coreference. The principal conceptual difference is that we have moved from a syntactic scoring model based on following coreference links to an approach defined by the model theory of those links.
Multicycle Dynamics of the Aksay Bend Along the Altyn Tagh Fault in Northwest China: 1. A Simplified Double Bend

I perform multicycle dynamic simulations of a restraining double bend that is simplified from the Aksay bend along the Altyn Tagh Fault in northwest China. The earthquake cycle includes a coseismic dynamic rupture phase and an interseismic stress loading and relaxation phase. The double bend fault system has two fault strands and each strand comprises a stem segment that strikes parallel to the maximum shear loading direction and a bend segment that deviates from the loading direction. I find that the restraining double bend is an effective barrier to dynamically propagating ruptures over multiple earthquake cycles, with a probability of rupture jumping from one strand to the other varying from 0% to 10%, depending on parameter values of the rate dependence of friction during the dynamic phase and the viscosity for stress relaxation during the interseismic phase. The critical condition for the primary rupture on the first strand to jump onto the second strand is that the preshear stress is close enough to the shear strength over a certain size of the fault patch on the second strand. These results on the simplified double bend provide important insights into rupture behavior of geometrically complex faults over multiple earthquake cycles in general and a reference to explore rupture behavior of the Aksay bend in particular.