Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lysosomal Acid Lipase Deﬁciency in the Etiological Investigation of Cryptogenic Liver Disease in Adults: A Multicenter Brazilian Study

: Background: Lysosomal acid lipase deﬁciency (LAL-D) is a rare genetic disease associated with the deregulation of lipid metabolism, leading to atherosclerosis, dyslipidemia, and hepatic steatosis, with potential progression to cirrhosis. Our study aims to assess the role of LAL-D in the setting of cryptogenic liver disease. Methods: A large multicenter cross-sectional study was conducted, which included 135 patients with cryptogenic liver disease from four liver centers in Brazil. All patients were submitted to the investigation of LAL enzyme activity on dried blood spots. Results: Three patients (two female) presented levels of LAL below the reference limit, compatible with LAL-D (2.2%). They had a mean age of 43.9 ± 10.1 years and a mean body-mass index (BMI) of 23.1 ± 1.7 kg/m 2 . The mean serum levels of glucose, HDL-cholesterol, and triglycerides were 89.7 ± 3.2, 21.7 ± 3.2, and 206.7 ± 25.5 mg/dL, respectively. All patients had duodenal polyposis with xanthomatous macrophages. LAL-D investigation should be considered for individuals with chronic liver disease of an unknown etiology, especially with a normal BMI, high triglycerides, and low-HDL-cholesterol levels. The identiﬁcation of LAL-D patients is extremely important since enzyme replacement therapy with Sebelipase Alfa signiﬁcantly increases their survival.
Desynchronizing Synchronous Programs by Modes

The synchronous programming paradigm simplifies the specification and verification of reactive systems. However, synchronous programs must be often implemented on architectures that do not follow this model of computation (like distributed systems or systems-on-a-chip). This gives rise to desynchronization techniques, which map the synchronous program to a platform without global time while preserving the original synchronous semantics.In this paper, we present a new approach to desynchronize synchronous programs. Our approach is based on partitioning the system and deriving suited computation modes for that partitioning. These computation modes dynamically decouple the components of a system by eliminating temporarily unnecessary and undesired computations and communications. We present several variations of the general concept and discuss their pros and cons. Finally, we illustrate our approach with the help of several small examples.
Multiscale Adaptive Inference on Conditional Moment Inequalities

This paper considers inference for conditional moment inequality models using a multiscale statistic. We derive the asymptotic distribution of this test statistic and use the result to propose feasible critical values that have a simple analytic formula. We also propose critical values based on a modified bootstrap procedure and prove their asymptotic validity. The asymptotic distribution is extreme value, and the proof uses new techniques to overcome several technical obstacles. We provide power results that show that our test detects local alternatives that approach the identified set at the best possible rate under a set of conditions that hold generically in the set identified case in a broad class of models, and that our test is adaptive to the smoothness properties of the data generating process. Our results also have implications for the use of moment selection procedures in this setting. We provide a monte carlo study and an empirical illustration to inference in a regression model with endogenously censored and missing data.
Tri-linear interpolation-based cerebral white matter fiber imaging

Diffusion tensor imaging is a unique method to visualize white matter fibers three-dimensionally, non-invasively and in vivo, and therefore it is an important tool for observing and researching neural regeneration. Different diffusion tensor imaging-based fiber tracking methods have been already investigated, but making the computing faster, fiber tracking longer and smoother and the details shown clearer are needed to be improved for clinical applications. This study proposed a new fiber tracking strategy based on tri-linear interpolation. We selected a patient with acute infarction of the right basal ganglia and designed experiments based on either the tri-linear interpolation algorithm or tensorline algorithm. Fiber tracking in the same regions of interest (genu of the corpus callosum) was performed separately. The validity of the tri-linear interpolation algorithm was verified by quantitative analysis, and its feasibility in clinical diagnosis was confirmed by the contrast between tracking results and the disease condition of the patient as well as the actual brain anatomy. Statistical results showed that the maximum length and average length of the white matter fibers tracked by the tri-linear interpolation algorithm were significantly longer. The tracking images of the fibers indicated that this method can obtain smoother tracked fibers, more obvious orientation and clearer details. Tracking fiber abnormalities are in good agreement with the actual condition of patients, and tracking displayed fibers that passed though the corpus callosum, which was consistent with the anatomical structures of the brain. Therefore, the tri-linear interpolation algorithm can achieve a clear, anatomically correct and reliable tracking result.
Design of a near-minimal dynamic perfect hash function on embedded device

There has been a general opinion that it is difficult to construct perfect hash tables with high load factor for large datasets having a million records. The problem is even more challenging if new records can be added to the hash table incrementally. In this article, we shall demonstrate the design of a dynamic perfect hash function on embedded device based on simple bit-shuffle and bit-extraction operations. The achievable load factor can be up to 100%, and the amortized memory cost of the hash function is about 7 to 15 bits per key for 32-bit keys. Incremental updates to the hash table are allowed. The perfect hash function for a dataset with 1 million keys can be constructed in a few seconds of CPU time.
SPECIAL COLLECTION: TECHNOLOGY IN A TIME OF SOCIAL DISTANCING Media Use and Avoidance Experiences During Social Distancing

Media use signi ﬁ cantly increased in many countries as shelter-in-place and social distancing measures were enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, little is known about what speci ﬁ c media were used; the emotional experiences users associated with media during the pandemic; or how media use may have varied as social distancing protocols changed over time. A mixed-methods study analyzed media use reports from students at two U.S. universities, gathered at the immediate onset of social distancing and again 7 months later. We quantitatively coded and analyzed the media channels and content types users reported seeking out and avoiding at each time point, and thematically analyzed the motives and affective experiences reported. Generally, users increased television viewing and computer-mediated interpersonal communication early in the pandemic, and overwhelmingly avoided the news at the onset of social distancing. In terms of affective responses, participants reported mixed experiences with social media, with some platforms associated with positive affect (TikTok, YouTube) while others were generally a source of stress (Facebook, Twitter, news content). Overall, results suggest unique platforms and content types may ful ﬁ ll different functions based on the emotional needs of users during times of societal stress.
Language comprehension is both embodied and symbolic

Over the last decades a divide seems to have emerged in the cognitive sciences between embodied and symbolic approaches to language understanding. Embodied approaches argue that language comprehension requires activation of our experiences with the world, whereas symbolic approaches argue that language comprehension relies on interdependencies of words. The current paper argues that language comprehension is both embodied and symbolic. According to the symbol interdependency hypothesis comprehenders can ultimately ground symbols, but they also can rely on interdependencies across symbols as a shortcut to the meaning of words. An overview is given of the evidence supporting this hypothesis suggesting that embodied representations are activated under certain conditions and ultimately tend to be encoded in language structures. Attempts to answer the question to what extent language comprehension is embodied or symbolic are not new. For instance, around 360 BC, Plato describes a discussion between Cratylus, Hermogenes, and Socrates, with Socrates asking:
Inactivation of RNA Viruses by Gamma Irradiation: A Study on Mitigating Factors

Effective inactivation of biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) pathogens is vital in order to study these agents safely. Gamma irradiation is a commonly used method for the inactivation of BSL-4 viruses, which among other advantages, facilitates the study of inactivated yet morphologically intact virions. The reported values for susceptibility of viruses to inactivation by gamma irradiation are sometimes inconsistent, likely due to differences in experimental protocols. We analyzed the effects of common sample attributes on the inactivation of a recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus expressing the Zaire ebolavirus glycoprotein and green fluorescent protein. Using this surrogate virus, we found that sample volume and protein content of the sample modulated viral inactivation by gamma irradiation but that air volume within the sample container and the addition of external disinfectant surrounding the sample did not. These data identify several factors which alter viral susceptibility to inactivation and highlight the usefulness of lower biosafety level surrogate viruses for such studies. Our results underscore the need to validate inactivation protocols of BSL-4 pathogens using “worst-case scenario” procedures to ensure complete sample inactivation.
Detecting co-residency with active traffic analysis techniques

Virtualization is the cornerstone of the developing third party compute industry, allowing cloud providers to instantiate multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single set of physical resources. Customers utilize cloud resources alongside unknown and untrusted parties, creating the co-resident threat -- unless perfect isolation is provided by the virtual hypervisor, there exists the possibility for unauthorized access to sensitive customer information through the exploitation of covert side channels. This paper presents co-resident watermarking, a traffic analysis attack that allows a malicious co-resident VM to inject a watermark signature into the network flow of a target instance. This watermark can be used to exfiltrate and broadcast co-residency data from the physical machine, compromising isolation without reliance on internal side channels. As a result, our approach is difficult to defend without costly underutilization of the physical machine. We evaluate co-resident watermarking under a large variety of conditions, system loads and hardware configurations, from a local lab environment to production cloud environments (Futuregrid and the University of Oregon's ACISS). We demonstrate the ability to initiate a covert channel of 4 bits per second, and we can confirm co-residency with a target VM instance in less than 10 seconds. We also show that passive load measurement of the target and subsequent behavior profiling is possible with this attack. Our investigation demonstrates the need for the careful design of hardware to be used in the cloud.
An assessment of the environmental impacts of catchment management on the status of Pong Wetland in district Kangra of Himachal Pradesh

The study on the environmental impacts of catchment management on the status of Pong wetland was conducted during the year 2011-12 in the immediate catchment of Pong reservoir. Four main tributaries viz., Buhal, Dehar, Gaj and Banerwere selected to determine spatial trends in nutrient concentrations and to relate these trends to different land use systems in the catchment. Each tributary was divided into four sites of 5 km each. Site which does not form the catchment of Pong reservoir was excluded. Nutrient concentrations at most of the sites within the catchment were found within the permissible limits. However, no spatial trend was observed along a longitudinal gradient in the nutrient concentrations of tributaries taken under study. Spatial distribution of land use system in the catchment of wetland corroborated that catchment under study covered maximum area under forest land use followed by cultivated land and barren land. Three representative samples of silt at different locations were collected from the lake at the point of their entry into the lake and were used to analyze for certain heavy metals like Cd, Fe, Cu, Zn. Silt characteristics of lake were showed that lake sediments contain heavy metals but ranged within the permissible limits. However, increase in their concentration in near future may cause changes in the physico-chemical composition of the lake water. Improved management and maintenance of catchment land use systems are crucial and there is a need to conserve and preserve these existing wetlands to maintain and improve the ecological balance.
Identification of Nonlipophilic Corynebacteria Isolated from Dairy Cows with Mastitis

ABSTRACT Nonlipophilic corynebacteria associated with clinical and subclinical mastitis in dairy cows were found to belong to four species: Corynebacterium amycolatum, Corynebacterium ulcerans, Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis, andCorynebacterium minutissimum. These species may easily be confused. However, clear-cut differences between C. ulcerans and C. pseudotuberculosis were found in their acid production from maltotriose and ethylene glycol, susceptibility to vibriostatic agent O129, and alkaline phosphatase. Absence of growth at 20°C and lack of α-glucosidase and 4MU-α-d-glycoside hydrolysis activity differentiatedC. amycolatum from C. pseudotuberculosis andC. ulcerans. The mastitis C. pseudotuberculosisstrains differed from the biovar equi and ovis reference strains and from caprine field strains in their colony morphologies and in their reduced inhibitory activity on staphylococcal β-hemolysin.C. amycolatum was the most frequently isolated nonlipophilic corynebacterium.
L2 English Learners Automatic Classification Methods

Summary. This study analyses different features that would enable classifiers to detect language levels in adult second language (L2) English Learners. 46 different speech samples from users speaking 15 different L1 native languages were selected from the Learning Prosody in a Foreign Language (LeaP) corpus, Gut (2004). Using different groupings of features from the spoken L2 secondary language (English), a Support Vector Machine (SVM), was trained and the speakers were classified into three different categories: c1, c2, and s1. The categories used correspond to beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of the target secondary language, English. These are the same categories used by the human annotators, and were also used for ease of comparison and consistency. The features are grouped into four different sub‐categories: sentence, syllable, duration, and pitch. Surprisingly, most of the pitch features had no effect on the accuracy. A small common word list was also used, please see Table 13. The edit distance measure of the sentences with the common words removed had a positive effect; measurable differences could be found with and without the common words included in the sentences. Due to the small size of the training and testing sets, it was found that the different groupings of the L1 languages of the speakers had a significant effect on the accuracy of the classification
Fitness and Adiposity Are Independently Associated with Cardiometabolic Risk in Youth

Purpose. The purpose of the study was to examine the independent associations of adiposity and cardiorespiratory fitness with clustered cardiometabolic risk. Methods. A cross-sectional sample of 192 adolescents (118 boys), aged 14–16 years, was recruited from a South Lanarkshire school in the West of Scotland. Anthropometry and blood pressure were measured, and blood samples were taken. The 20 m multistage fitness test was the indicator of cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF). A clustered cardiometabolic risk score was constructed from HDL-C (inverted), LDL-C, HOMA, systolic blood pressure, and triglycerides. Interleukin-6, C-reactive protein, and adiponectin were also measured and examined relative to the clustered cardiometabolic risk score, CRF, and adiposity. Results. Although significant, partial correlations between BMI and waist circumference (WC) and both CRF and adiponectin were negative and weak to moderate, while correlations between the BMI and WC and CRP were positive but weak to moderate. Weak to moderate negative associations were also evident for adiponectin with CRP, IL-6, and clustered cardiometabolic risk. WC was positively associated while CRF was negatively associated with clustered cardiometabolic risk. With the additional adjustment for either WC or CRF, the independent associations with cardiometabolic risk persisted. Conclusion. WC and CRF are independently associated with clustered cardiometabolic risk in Scottish adolescents.
Using Transputer Computing Systems at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics

By the beginning of 1990-ies, parallel architectures started to apply in microprocessor systems. At that time, the transputer architecture was considered to be the most prospective one, i.e., an architecture of specialized microprocessors to be used in parallel computations with the capability to create a computational environment with a multitude of processors. At the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences a number of projects were developed with using such computational systems for a variety of objectives: controllers of CAMAC systems in various control and management systems for physical plants, systems for data acquisition and processing in the VME standard, accelerating boards for IBM PCs to perform data processing and modeling.
Mesoscale modeling of smoke transport from equatorial Southeast Asian Maritime Continent to the Philippines: First comparison of ensemble analysis with in situ observations

Atmospheric transport of smoke from equatorial Southeast Asian Maritime Continent (Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia) to the Philippines was recently verified by the first‐ever measurement of aerosol composition in the region of the Sulu Sea from a research vessel named Vasco. However, numerical modeling of such transport can have large uncertainties due to the lack of observations for parameterization schemes and for describing fire emission and meteorology in this region. These uncertainties are analyzed here, for the first time, with an ensemble of 24 Weather Research and Forecasting model with Chemistry (WRF‐Chem) simulations. The ensemble reproduces the time series of observed surface nonsea‐salt PM2.5 concentrations observed from the Vasco vessel during 17–30 September 2011 and overall agrees with satellite (Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)) and Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) data. The difference of meteorology between National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP's) Final (FNL) and European Center for Medium range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF's) ERA renders the biggest spread in the ensemble (up to 20 μg m−3 or 200% in surface PM2.5), with FNL showing systematically superior results. The second biggest uncertainty is from fire emissions; the 2 day maximum Fire Locating and Modelling of Burning Emissions (FLAMBE) emission is superior than the instantaneous one. While Grell‐Devenyi (G3) and Betts‐Miller‐Janjić cumulus schemes only produce a difference of 3 μg m−3 of surface PM2.5 over the Sulu Sea, the ensemble mean agrees best with Climate Prediction Center (CPC) MORPHing (CMORPH)'s spatial distribution of precipitation. Simulation with FNL‐G3, 2 day maximum FLAMBE, and 800 m injection height outperforms other ensemble members. Finally, the global transport model (Navy Aerosol Analysis and Prediction System (NAAPS)) outperforms all WRF‐Chem simulations in describing smoke transport on 20 September 2011, suggesting the challenges to model tropical meteorology at mesoscale and finer scale.
Characteristics and outcomes of prehospital and emergency department surgical airways

Abstract Objectives The surgical airway is a high acuity, low occurrence procedure. Data on the complications and outcomes of surgical airways are limited. Our primary objective was to describe immediate complications, late complications, and clinical outcomes of patients who underwent a surgical airway procedure in the prehospital or emergency department (ED) setting. Methods We conducted a retrospective chart review of patients ≥14 years at an academic medical center who underwent a surgical airway procedure in the ED, the prehospital setting, or at a referring ED prior to interfacility transfer. We identified cases from keyword searches of prehospital text pages and hospital electronic medical records from June 1, 2008 to July 1, 2022. Manual chart review was used to confirm inclusion and determine patient and procedure characteristics. Outcomes included immediate complications, delayed in‐hospital complications, and neurologic disability as defined by Modified Rankin Score (mRS) at discharge. Results We identified 63 patients (34 prehospital, 11 ED, and 18 referring ED). Immediate complications included mainstem intubation (46.0%) and bleeding that required direct pressure (23.4%). Overall, 29 patients (46%) died after arrival to the hospital. Of the patients surviving to hospital admission, 25 (48%) had an airway‐related complication. Nine complications were deemed directly related to technical components of the procedure. Of the patients who survived to discharge, 18 (52.9%) had poor neurologic function (mRS 4–5). Conclusion Procedural complications, mortality, and poor neurologic function were common following a surgical airway procedure in the prehospital or ED setting. Most patients surviving to discharge had a moderate to severe neurologic disability.
Impact of persistent barrier to gene flow and catastrophic events on red algae evolutionary history along the Chilean coast

Historical vicariance events, linked to the existence of stable physical barriers to gene flow, generate concordant genetic breaks in co-distributed species while stochastic processes (e.g., costal uplift) could cause species-specific genetic breaks as a result of local strong demographic bottlenecks or extinction. In Chile, previous studies show that the area of the 30°S-33°S could correspond to a stable barrier to gene flow that have affected the genetic structure of various algae and marine invertebrates. Here we sequenced two organellar genes (COI and rbcL) in four taxonomically accepted co-distributed red seaweeds species characterized by a low dispersal potential: Mazzaella laminarioides, M. membranacea, Asterfilopsis disciplinalis, and Ahnfeltiopsis vermicularis. Our results revealed the existence of ten strongly differentiated linages in the taxa studied. Strong genetic breaks, concordant in both space and time (divergence estimated to have occurred some 2.9–12.4 million years ago), were observed between taxa distributed across the 33°S. Conversely, in the Central/South part of the Chilean coast, the localization of the genetic breaks/sub-structure observed varied widely (36°S, 38°S, 39°S, and 40°S). These results suggest that a major historical vicariance event has modeled the genetic structure of several Chilean marine organisms in the north of the Chilean coast during the mid-Miocene, while more recent stochastic events and genetic drift could be the driving forces of genetic divergence/structuration in the central-southern part of the coast.