Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the capabilities of satellite imagery for monitoring regional air pollution episodes

A comparative analysis of satellite visible-channel imagery and ground-based aerosol measurements is carried out for three cases (20-23 July 1978; 3-5 August 1977; and 8-10 July 1974), each of which represents a significant pollution episode based on low surface visibility and high sulfate levels. The satellite data analyzed include NOAA/VHRR, GOES, and Landsat; the sulfate measurements are from the Sulfate Regional Experiment (SURE) network. In addition to the analysis of the satellite imagery, the feasibility of detecting pollution episodes from space is investigated using a simulation model. The model results are compared to quantitative information derived from digitized satellite data. The results show that when a regional air pollution episode has built up over a period of three to five days to a point where sulfate levels of _ 30 _g/m3 are being measured, a haze pattern that correlates closely with the area of reported low surface visibilities and high sulfate levels can be detected in satellite visible-channel imagery. The extent and transport of the haze pattern can be monitored from the satellite data over the period of the maximum intensity of the episode. The model simulation demonstrates the potential of the satellite to monitor both the magnitude and areal extent of pollution episodes. Quantitative information on total aerosol amount derived from the satellite digitized data using the atmospheric radiative transfer model agrees well with the results obtained from the ground based measurements.
Seismic Data Preconditioning for Improved Reservoir Characterization (Inversion and Fracture Analysis)

Advanced seismic techniques such as pre-stack inversion or azimuthal analysis are now routinely adopted for quantitative reservoir characterization of rock properties and fracture indicators, however the quality of the input seismic data is critical to such advanced analyses. Frequency content, random and coherent noise, amplitude-preserving processing and gather flatness must be addressed at the preconditioning stage. Improved results and increased confidence follow from careful well-driven modeling and QCs.
A Very Very Large Corpus Doesn’t Always Yield Reliable Estimates

Banko and Brill (2001) suggested that the development of very large training corpora may be more effective for progress in empirical Natural Language Processing than improving methods that use existing smaller training corpora.This work tests their claim by exploring whether a very large corpus can eliminate the sparseness problems associated with estimating unigram probabilities. We do this by empirically investigating the convergence behaviour of unigram probability estimates on a one billion word corpus. When using one billion words, as expected, we do find that many of our estimates do converge to their eventual value. However, we also find that for some words, no such convergence occurs. This leads us to conclude that simply relying upon large corpora is not in itself sufficient: we must pay attention to the statistical modelling as well.
Asian weaver ants, Oecophylla smaragdina, and their repelling of pollinators

The Asian weaver ant, Oecophylla smaragdina, is known to have outstanding predatory power. This ant can protect the host plants from attacks of phytophagous insects and therefore has been used for biological control in the tropics. We present evidence for a possible negative effect of Oecophylla on the performance of host plants. Our observation in a fruit orchard of rambutan in Sumatra suggested that the presence of Oecohylla nests on the trees statistically significantly lowered the flower-visiting rate of flying insects, involving the major pollinator Trigona minangkabau. The visiting rate of Oecophylla workers to each flower shoot of rambutan significantly negatively correlated with the visiting rate of flying insects. Empirical evidence of such an inhibitory effect on flower-visiting of pollinators cased by aggressive ants has been scarce so far.
Analysis of Link Structures on the World Wide Web and Classified Improvements

Finding relevant results for web searches has been a problem that has plagued search engine designers since their inception. This is because it is difficult to understand what a searcher desires in their results. In this paper, we will propose a trained classification method using features based on the the results of link analysis of the world wide web in order to better produce web search results.
Factors Predicting and Reducing Mortality in Patients with Invasive Staphylococcus aureus Disease in a Developing Country

Background Invasive Staphylococcus aureus infection is increasingly recognised as an important cause of serious sepsis across the developing world, with mortality rates higher than those in the developed world. The factors determining mortality in developing countries have not been identified. Methods A prospective, observational study of invasive S. aureus disease was conducted at a provincial hospital in northeast Thailand over a 1-year period. All-cause and S. aureus-attributable mortality rates were determined, and the relationship was assessed between death and patient characteristics, clinical presentations, antibiotic therapy and resistance, drainage of pus and carriage of genes encoding Panton-Valentine Leukocidin (PVL). Principal Findings A total of 270 patients with invasive S. aureus infection were recruited. The range of clinical manifestations was broad and comparable to that described in developed countries. All-cause and S. aureus-attributable mortality rates were 26% and 20%, respectively. Early antibiotic therapy and drainage of pus were associated with a survival advantage (both p<0.001) on univariate analysis. Patients infected by a PVL gene-positive isolate (122/248 tested, 49%) had a strong survival advantage compared with patients infected by a PVL gene-negative isolate (all-cause mortality 11% versus 39% respectively, p<0.001). Multiple logistic regression analysis using all variables significant on univariate analysis revealed that age, underlying cardiac disease and respiratory infection were risk factors for all-cause and S. aureus-attributable mortality, while one or more abscesses as the presenting clinical feature and procedures for infectious source control were associated with survival. Conclusions Drainage of pus and timely antibiotic therapy are key to the successful management of S. aureus infection in the developing world. Defining the presence of genes encoding PVL provides no practical bedside information and draws attention away from identifying verified clinical risk factors and those interventions that save lives.
Analysis of Asymmetric Piezoelectric Composite Beam

This paper deals with the vibration analysis of an asymmetric composite beam composed of glass a piezoelectric material. The Bernoulli’s beam theory is adopted for mechanical deformations, and the electric potential field of the piezoelectric material is assumed such that the divergence-free requirement of the electrical displacements is satisfied. The accuracy of the analytic model is assessed by comparing the resonance frequencies obtained by the analytic model with those obtained by the finite element method. The model developed can be used as a tool for designing piezoelectric actuators such as micro-pumps.
Cardiometabolic Implications of Postpartum Weight Changes in the First Year After Delivery

OBJECTIVE The cumulative effect of postpartum weight retention from each pregnancy in a woman’s life may contribute to her ultimate risk of diabetes and vascular disease. However, there is little direct evidence supporting this hypothesis. In this context, we sought to evaluate the cardiometabolic implications of patterns of postpartum weight change and the time course thereof in the first year after pregnancy. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Three hundred five women underwent cardiometabolic characterization at recruitment in pregnancy and at 3 and 12 months postpartum. Based on their respective weight changes between prepregnancy and 3 months postpartum (loss or gain) and between 3 and 12 months postpartum (loss or gain), participants were stratified into four groups: loss/loss, gain/loss, loss/gain, and gain/gain. RESULTS Most women (81.0%) had higher weight at 3 months postpartum compared with prepregnancy. Between 3 and 12 months, most women (74.4%) lost weight. At 3 months, there were modest differences between the four groups in mean adjusted LDL cholesterol (P = 0.01) and apolipoprotein-B (apoB; P = 0.02) but no significant differences in adjusted blood pressure, fasting and 2-h glucose, HDL, triglycerides, homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), adiponectin, and C-reactive protein. By 12 months postpartum, however, clear gradients emerged, with mean adjusted diastolic blood pressure (P = 0.02), HOMA-IR (P = 0.0003), LDL (P = 0.001), and apoB (P < 0.0001) all progressively increasing from the loss/loss group to gain/loss to loss/gain to gain/gain. Similarly, at 12 months, mean adjusted adiponectin showed a stepwise decrease from loss/loss to gain/loss to loss/gain to gain/gain (P = 0.003). CONCLUSIONS An adverse cardiometabolic profile emerges as early as 1 year postpartum in women who do not lose weight between 3 and 12 months after delivery.
Quantitative Protein Profile Comparisons Using the Isotope‐Coded Affinity Tag Method

Current methods for measuring pairwise changes in protein expression involve differential stable isotopic labeling of proteins or peptides either in vivo or in vitro followed by identification and quantification using a mass spectrometer. In these methods, the mass spectrometer detects two different masses, which correspond to a single protein from two different samples that have been labeled with either a heavy or normal isotope. Changes in protein expression are observed when the identical peptide from each of two biological conditions is identified and a difference is detected in the measurements comparing the peptide labeled with the heavy isotope to the one with a normal isotopic distribution. This approach allows the simultaneous comparison of the expression of many proteins between two different biological states (e.g., yeast grown on galactose versus glucose, or normal versus cancer cells). This unit describes one of these popular methods for quantitative protein profiling using the isotope‐coded affinity tag (ICAT) technique.
Serum 25(OH)D and Type 2 Diabetes Association in a General Population

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to examine vitamin D status as a determinant for development of type 2 diabetes and deterioration of glucose homeostasis. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A random sample of the general population of Copenhagen, Denmark, was taken as part of the Inter99 study. Included were 6,405 men and women aged 30–65 years at baseline (1999–2001), with 4,296 participating in the follow-up examination 5 years later (2004–2006). Vitamin D was determined at baseline as serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D]. Diabetes was defined based on an oral glucose tolerance test and a glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) test. Secondary outcomes included continuous markers of glucose homeostasis. RESULTS The risk of incident diabetes associated with a 10 nmol/L increase in 25(OH)D was odds ratio (OR) 0.91 (95% CI 0.84–0.97) in crude analyses. The association became statistically nonsignificant after adjustment for confounders, with an OR per 10 nmol/L of 0.94 (0.86–1.03). Low 25(OH)D status was significantly associated with unfavorable longitudinal changes in continuous markers of glucose homeostasis after adjustment for confounders. Fasting and 2-h glucose and insulin as well as the degree of insulin resistance increased significantly more during follow-up among those with low 25(OH)D levels compared with those with higher levels. CONCLUSIONS Low 25(OH)D status was not significantly associated with incident diabetes after adjustment for confounders. However, it was significantly associated with unfavorable longitudinal changes in continuous markers of glucose homeostasis, indicating that low vitamin D status could be related to deterioration of glucose homeostasis.
KP4 fungal toxin inhibits growth in Ustilago maydis by blocking calcium uptake

KP4 is a virally encoded fungal toxin secreted by the P4 killer strain of Ustilago maydis. From our previous structural studies , it seemed unlikely that KP4 acts by forming channels in the target cell membrane. Instead, KP4 was proposed to act by blocking fungal calcium channels, as KP4 was shown to inhibit voltage‐gated calcium channels in rat neuronal cells, and its effects on fungal cells were abrogated by exogenously added calcium. Here, we extend these studies and demonstrate that KP4 acts in a reversible manner on the cell membrane and does not kill the cells, but rather inhibits cell division. This action is mimicked by EGTA and is abrogated specifically by low concentrations of calcium or non‐specifically by high ionic strength buffers. We also demonstrate that KP4 affects 45Ca uptake in U. maydis. Finally, we show that cAMP and a cAMP analogue, N 6,2′‐O‐dibutyryladenosine 3′:5′‐cyclic monophosphate, both abrogate KP4 effects. These results suggest that KP4 may inhibit cell growth and division by blocking calcium‐regulated signal transduction pathways.
Adaptively secure broadcast encryption under standard assumptions with better efficiency

In this study, the authors present an efficient public-key broadcast encryption (PKBE) scheme with sub-linear size of public keys, private keys and ciphertexts and prove its adaptive security under standard assumptions. Compared with the currently best scheme of Garg et al. (CCS 2010) that provides adaptive security under standard assumptions and sub-linear size of various parameters, the ciphertext size of the author's scheme is 94% shorter and the encryption algorithm of their scheme is also 2.8 times faster than the scheme of Garg et al. To achieve their scheme, they adapt the dual system encryption technique of Waters. However, there is a challenging problem to use this technique for the construction of PKBE with sub-linear size of ciphertexts such as a tag compression problem. To overcome this problem, they first devise a novel tag update technique for broadcast encryption. Using this technique, they build an efficient PKBE scheme in symmetric bilinear groups, and prove its adaptive security under standard assumptions.
MYBL2 is a sub-haploinsufficient tumor suppressor gene in myeloid malignancy

A common deleted region (CDR) in both myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) affects the long arm of chromosome 20 and has been predicted to harbor a tumor suppressor gene. Here we show that MYBL2, a gene within the 20q CDR, is expressed at sharply reduced levels in CD34+ cells from most MDS cases (65%; n = 26), whether or not they harbor 20q abnormalities. In a murine competitive reconstitution model, Mybl2 knockdown by RNAi to 20–30% of normal levels in multipotent hematopoietic progenitors resulted in clonal dominance of these ‘sub-haploinsufficient’ cells, which was reflected in all blood cell lineages. By 6 months post-transplantation, the reconstituted mice had developed a clonal myeloproliferative/myelodysplastic disorder originating from the cells with aberrantly reduced Mybl2 expression. We conclude that downregulation of MYBL2 activity below levels predicted by classical haploinsufficiency underlies the clonal expansion of hematopoietic progenitors in a large fraction of human myeloid malignancies. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.00825. 001
Learning from Learning Objects and Their Repositories to Create Sustainable Educational App Environments

The last years have seen an increased usage of apps, applications that are downloaded from a centralized repository and run in a particular environment. However, smaller app environments face the major challenge of attracting sufficient awareness and usage by third-party developers and users to become sustainable. This is a typical chicken-and-egg problem. Without apps, few people will be using the environment. Few users lead to limited incentive for app developers. We analyze work done in a very similar domain, namely learning object repositories (LORs), to learn about factors that inhibit participation in app environments. We also present an approach to overcome these problems, which aims at lowering the barriers of participation for app production as much as possible. The framework was partly implemented and is being applied at a higher education institution, where teachers and teaching assistants created over a hundred of apps.
Automatic Extraction of semantic relations between medical entities: Application to the treatment relation

Information extraction is a complex task which is necessary to develop highprecision information retrieval tools. In this paper, we present MeTAE, a platform to extract medical entities and the medical relations linking them. The proposed approach relies on linguistic patterns and domain knowledge and consists in two steps: (i) recognition of medical entities and (ii) identification of the correct semantic relation between each pair of entities. The first step is achieved by an enhanced use of MetaMap which improves the precision obtained by MetaMap by 19.59% in our evaluation. The second step relies on linguistic patterns which are built semiautomatically from a corpus selected according to semantic criteria. We evaluate our system’s ability to identify medical entities of 16 types. We also evaluate the extraction of treatment relations between a treatment (e.g., medication) and a problem (e.g., disease): we obtain 75.72% of precision and 60.46% of recall. We achieve encouraging results w.r. t similar research works in the literature.
Autonomous vehicle navigation and mapping with local minima avoidance paradigm in unknown environments

A commonly used local navigation algorithm, the Vector Field Histogram (VFH), is relatively fast and thus suitable when computational capabilities on a robot are limited. One of the attendant disadvantages of this algorithm is that a robot can get trapped when attempting to get past a concave obstacle structure. The Navigation Challenge course now has several such structures, including some that partially surround waypoints. Elaborate heuristics are needed to make VFH viable in such a situation and their tuning is arduous. An alternate approach that avoids the use of heuristics is to combine a dynamic path planning algorithm with VFH. In this paper, the D*Lite path planning algorithm is used to provide VFH with intermediate goals, which the latter then uses as stepping stones to its final destination. Results from simulation studies as well as field deployment are used to illustrate the benefits of using the local navigator in conjunction with a path planner.
Influenza A (H1N1) in Victoria, Australia: A Community Case Series and Analysis of Household Transmission

Background We characterise the clinical features and household transmission of pandemic influenza A (pH1N1) in community cases from Victoria, Australia in 2009. Methods Questionnaires were used to collect information on epidemiological characteristics, illness features and co-morbidities of cases identified in the 2009 Victorian Influenza Sentinel Surveillance program. Results The median age of 132 index cases was 21 years, of whom 54 (41%) were under 18 years old and 28 (21%) had medical co-morbidities. The median symptom duration was significantly shorter for children who received antivirals than in those who did not (p = 0.03). Assumed influenza transmission was observed in 63 (51%) households. Influenza-like illness (ILI) developed in 115 of 351 household contacts, a crude secondary attack rate of 33%. Increased ILI rates were seen in households with larger numbers of children but not larger numbers of adults. Multivariate analysis indicated contacts of cases with cough and diarrhoea, and contacts in quarantined households were significantly more likely to develop influenza-like symptoms. Conclusion Most cases of pH1N1 in our study were mild with similar clinical characteristics to seasonal influenza. Illness and case features relating to virus excretion, age and household quarantine may have influenced secondary ILI rates within households.
Discourse Level Explanatory Relation Extraction from Product Reviews Using First-Order Logic

Explanatory sentences are employed to clarify reasons, details, facts, and so on. High quality online product reviews usually include not only positive or negative opinions, but also a variety of explanations of why these opinions were given. These explanations can help readers get easily comprehensible information of the discussed products and aspects. Moreover, explanatory relations can also benefit sentiment analysis applications. In this work, we focus on the task of identifying subjective text segments and extracting their corresponding explanations from product reviews in discourse level. We propose a novel joint extraction method using firstorder logic to model rich linguistic features and long distance constraints. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
How large is Aroostook County? Exploring the historical mutability of US county area measurements

ABSTRACT Area measurements play a prominent role in many types of geographical and historical analyses. The accuracy and precision of such measurements, however, are dependent on a host of input factors, including the type of instrumentation used as well as the scale and projection of the source map and its level of cartographic generalization. As a consequence of variability in these inputs, published area measures change over time. This paper reviews the record of land area measurements for counties published by the US Census Bureau between 1880 and 2000, documents the major changes in measurement instrumentation and procedures employed, and analyzes patterns of the greatest variability in reported values. Two states are used as case studies (Iowa and Maine). The results suggest that the greatest variability occurs in those areas with irregular borders, thus reflecting the interaction of the source maps with human measurement error and the encoding capabilities of the area measurement instruments. The observations also indicate that variability in area measurements for counties has decreased over time.
Risk Assessment of Heavy Metal Pollution in Soils of Gejiu Tin Ore and Other Metal Deposits of Yunnan Province

This paper aims to study three main metal mining areas in Yunnan Province, to summarize and analyze the heavy metal pollution situation in each mining area, and to assess the ecological risk of the mining areas. The results showed that heavy metal pollution existed in different regions of the three mining areas with pollution elements of Cd, As, Cu, Pb, Zn. Risk level, besides Zhen Yuan mining area (class C), for the other two areas was class D, with Beichang mining area in Lanping as the most serious polluted mining area.