Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On-Demand Real-Time Information Dissemination: A General Approach with Fairness, Productivity and Urgency

Modern real-time information dissemination services generate data dynamically and process data requests on demand. Such data or requests are usually valid or useful subject to temporal conditions. This paper devises an efficient on-demand time-critical data broadcast scheme by considering request urgency, service productivity and access fairness, to maintain quality of service and performance. The experimental studies show the proposed scheduling approach is able to achieve low request deadline miss rate and mean access time simultaneously. Its performance is superior to classical EDF and MRF and further better than SIN-k and RxW methods by simply tuning parameters.
Fuzzy c-Means Clustering Based Polarization Assessment in Intelligent Argumentation System for Collaborative Decision Support

Intelligent argumentation system facilitates stakeholders to exchange dialogue over issues and provides decision support by capturing rationale of the stakeholders through arguments. In argumentation process, stakeholders tend to polarize on their opinions and form polarization groups. A method [1] was developed earlier to identify polarization groups, however, polarization groups tend to overlap to a certain degree and each stakeholder may be a member of multiple polarization groups to varied degrees. Quantifying stakeholders' membership in multiple polarization groups in argumentation for collaborative decision making is not addressed earlier. We present an approach using fuzzy clustering algorithm to address this issue and evaluate the approach using an argumentation tree built by twenty four stakeholders.
A computational study of whole-brain connectivity in resting state and task fMRI

Background We compared the functional brain connectivity produced during resting-state in which subjects were not actively engaged in a task with that produced while they actively performed a visual motion task (task-state). Material/Methods In this paper we employed graph-theoretical measures and network statistics in novel ways to compare, in the same group of human subjects, functional brain connectivity during resting-state fMRI with brain connectivity during performance of a high level visual task. We performed a whole-brain connectivity analysis to compare network statistics in resting and task states among anatomically defined Brodmann areas to investigate how brain networks spanning the cortex changed when subjects were engaged in task performance. Results In the resting state, we found strong connectivity among the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), precuneus, medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), lateral parietal cortex, and hippocampal formation, consistent with previous reports of the default mode network (DMN). The connections among these areas were strengthened while subjects actively performed an event-related visual motion task, indicating a continued and strong engagement of the DMN during task processing. Regional measures such as degree (number of connections) and betweenness centrality (number of shortest paths), showed that task performance induces stronger inter-regional connections, leading to a denser processing network, but that this does not imply a more efficient system as shown by the integration measures such as path length and global efficiency, and from global measures such as small-worldness. Conclusions In spite of the maintenance of connectivity and the “hub-like” behavior of areas, our results suggest that the network paths may be rerouted when performing the task condition.
Beta1-Adrenoceptor Polymorphism Predicts Flecainide Action in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation

Background Antiarrhythmic action of flecainide is based on sodium channel blockade. Beta1-adrenoceptor (β1AR) activation induces sodium channel inhibition, too. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the impact of different β1AR genotypes on antiarrhythmic action of flecainide in patients with structural heart disease and atrial fibrillation. Methodology/Principal Findings In 145 subjects, 87 with atrial fibrillation, genotyping was performed to identify the individual β1AR Arg389Gly and Ser49Gly polymorphism. Resting heart rate during atrial fibrillation and success of flecainide-induced cardioversion were correlated with β1AR genotype. The overall cardioversion rate with flecainide was 39%. The Arg389Arg genotype was associated with the highest cardioversion rate (55.5%; OR 3.30; 95% CI; 1.34–8.13; p = 0.003) compared to patients with Arg389Gly (29.5%; OR 0.44; 95% CI; 0.18–1.06; p = 0.066) and Gly389Gly (14%; OR 0.24; 95% CI 0.03–2.07; p = 0.17) variants. The single Ser49Gly polymorphism did not influence the conversion rate. In combination, patients with Arg389Gly-Ser49Gly genotype displayed the lowest conversion rate with 20.8% (OR 0.31; 95% CI; 0.10–0.93; p = 0.03). In patients with Arg389Arg variants the heart rate during atrial fibrillation was significantly higher (110±2.7 bpm; p = 0.03 vs. other variants) compared to Arg389Gly (104.8±2.4 bpm) and Gly389Gly (96.9±5.8 bpm) carriers. The Arg389Gly-Ser49Gly genotype was more common in patients with atrial fibrillation compared to patients without atrial fibrillation (27.6% vs. 5.2%; HR 6.98; 95% CI; 1.99–24.46; p<0.001). Conclusions The β1AR Arg389Arg genotype is associated with increased flecainide potency and higher heart rate during atrial fibrillation. The Arg389Gly-Ser49Gly genotype might be of predictive value for atrial fibrillation.
Enforcement of Civil Rights Law in Private Workplaces: The Effects of Compliance Reviews and Lawsuits Over Time

Has federal antidiscrimination law been effective in moving women and minorities into management? Early studies show that government affirmative action reviews improved the numbers, and rank, of blacks, but evidence of what has happened since 1980 is sparse. There is little evidence that civil rights lawsuits improved the employment status of women or African Americans. We examine establishment-level effects of compliance reviews and lawsuits on the percentage of women and blacks in management. We find that compliance reviews, which alter organizational routines, had stronger and more lasting effects than lawsuits, which create disincentives to discriminate. We also find that deregulation was more consequential for compliance reviews than for lawsuits: Compliance reviews initiated in the 1980s were less effective than those initiated in the 1970s. Not so for lawsuits. Compared to lawsuits, compliance reviews appear to have a greater capacity to elicit lasting organizational change, but their effects are mediated by the regulatory environment.
Different Issues in the Design and Implementation of a Rule Based Grammar for the Surface Syntactic Disambiguation of Basque

This paper presents the results of a set of preliminary experiments reusing some of the modules for the surface syntactic processing of Basque in order to improve the surface syntactic disambiguation. The general idea is to reuse the existing modules at different stages of processing and to find the better order of application of those modules. It aims at introducing a strategy for surface syntactic disambiguation in Basque via rule-based grammars. The results from an evaluation of this disambiguation strategy on a sample corpus are described.
A Sensorimotor Network for the Bodily Self

Neuroscientists and philosophers, among others, have long questioned the contribution of bodily experience to the constitution of self-consciousness. Contemporary research answers this question by focusing on the notions of sense of agency and/or sense of ownership. Recently, however, it has been proposed that the bodily self might also be rooted in bodily motor experience, that is, in the experience of oneself as instantiating a bodily structure that enables a specific range of actions. In the current fMRI study, we tested this hypothesis by making participants undergo a hand laterality judgment task, which is known to be solved by simulating a motor rotation of one's own hand. The stimulus to be judged was either the participant's own hand or the hand of a stranger. We used this task to investigate whether mental rotation of pictures depicting one's own hands leads to a different activation of the sensorimotor areas as compared with the mental rotation of pictures depicting another's hand. We revealed a neural network for the general representation of the bodily self encompassing the SMA and pre-SMA, the anterior insula, and the occipital cortex, bilaterally. Crucially, the representation of one's own dominant hand turned out to be primarily confined to the left premotor cortex. Our data seem to support the existence of a sense of bodily self encased within the sensorimotor system. We propose that such a sensorimotor representation of the bodily self might help us to differentiate our own body from that of others.
Cold induced changes of adenosine levels in common eelpout (Zoarces viviparus): a role in modulating cytochrome c oxidase expression

SUMMARY Exposure of ectothermic organisms to variations in temperatures causes a transient mismatch between energy supply and demand, which needs to be compensated for during acclimation. Adenosine accumulation from ATP breakdown indicates such an imbalance and its reversal reflects a restoration of energy status. We monitored adenosine levels in blood serum and liver of common eelpout (Zoarces viviparus) during cold exposure in vivo. Furthermore, we tested its effect on the pattern of thermal acclimation in hepatocytes isolated from cold- (4°C) versus warm- (11°C) exposed fish. Adenosine levels increased during cold exposure in vivo and reached a transient maximum after 24 h in serum, but remained permanently elevated in liver. Whole animal cold acclimation induced a rise of liver citrate synthase activity by 44±15%, but left cytochrome c oxidase activity (COX) and RNA expression of the respective genes unchanged. Cold incubation of hepatocytes from warm-acclimated fish failed to cause an increase of mitochondrial enzyme activities despite increased COX4 mRNA levels. Conversely, warm acclimation of hepatocytes from cold-acclimated fish reduced both enzyme activities and COX2 and COX4 mRNA levels by 26–37%. Adenosine treatment of both warm- and cold-acclimated hepatocytes suppressed COX activities but activated COX mRNA expression. These effects were not receptor mediated. The present findings indicate that adenosine has the potential to regulate mitochondrial functioning in vivo, albeit the pathways resulting in the contrasting effects on expression and activity need to be identified.
Performance Measure Properties and Incentive System Design

We analyze effects of performance measure properties (controllable and uncontrollable risk, distortion, and manipulation) on incentive plan design, using data from auto dealership manager incentive systems. Dealerships put the most weight on measures that are “better” with respect to these properties. Additional measures are more likely to be used for a second or third bonus if they can mitigate distortion or manipulation in the first performance measure. Implicit incentives are used to provide ex post evaluation, to motivate the employee to use controllable risk on behalf of the firm, and to deter manipulation of performance measures. Overall, our results indicate that firms use incentive systems of multiple performance measures, incentive instruments, and implicit evaluation and rewards as a response to weaknesses in available performance measures.
Towards a Private Fall Injury Warning Service for Smartphone-Distracted Pedestrian

Fast evolving smart phone technology greatly promoted consumption of service and content on the move, meanwhile raised new privacy, security and health issues, e.g., Increasing Pedestrians Multitasking with Smart phones (PMS) fall injury. Existing camera or vehicular-based safety technologies mostly aims to warn PMS based on camera observations which are limited to the coverage of camera view. To enable warning without camera, we look to study PMS injury issue by understand the internal causes of the increased injury, say the distractive multitasking phone usage activities (MPUA). In this paper, we present Safe MT: a smart phone-based PMS safety application to case study the suspicious typical MPUA that increase fall risk in daily life. Safe MT provides accurate private monitoring of phone usage activity (PUA) as well as accompanying gait style (GS). For PUA monitoring, Safe MT employees a novel out-of-band approach to infer typical PUA, e.g., Calling, messaging, without causing privacy harshness at low overhead. For efficient GS monitoring, Safe MT employed a novel gait-style classification (GSC) algorithm that overcome the challenges of subjective gait style signature, using later-binding initialization with subjective user data. We implemented the system on Android phones and validated its availability in supervised lab experiments, results show that our system can effectively identify the two parameters of MPUA. Although fall injury case are hardly recorded in 4-week real trace data, understanding of MPUA are still gained by mining the collected dataset.
Risk of upper aerodigestive tract cancers in a case-cohort study of autoworkers exposed to metalworking fluids

Aims: To re-examine aerodigestive cancer risk in a cohort of autoworkers exposed to metal working fluids (MWF), using improved case definition and more recently diagnosed cases. Methods: The autoworker cohort included 31 100 hourly workers alive on 1 January 1985 who worked at three automobile plants in Michigan. A case-cohort design was carried out that included incident cases of cancers of the larynx, oesophagus, and stomach, and a 10% sample of the cohort. A Cox proportional hazards model was used to estimate MWF exposure effects. The smoothing method of penalised splines was used to explore the shape of the underlying exposure-response curves. Results: The most important finding was the association between larynx cancer incidence and cumulative straight MWF exposure. The results for oesophageal cancer were less consistent. For stomach cancer there was no evidence of excess risk. Conclusion: This association between larynx cancer and straight MWF exposures was consistent with a previous finding in this cohort, providing further support for a causal relation.
North Atlantic circulation indices: links with summer and winter UK temperature and precipitation and implications for seasonal forecasting

UK seasonal mean temperature and precipitation conditions are extremely variable from one year to the next but in the last decade have featured several cool, wet summers and mild, wet winters interspersed with some notable cold winter episodes. Jet stream variability is a major determinant of these fluctuations and is often represented by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index. Recent work has shown some evidence of promising predictability in the winter NAO from 1 to 2 months ahead, while summer predictability remains very limited. Although the phase and magnitude of the NAO influences total UK rainfall, there are regional variations which it does not explain. Here we examine the relationship between UK regional summer and winter precipitation and temperature and a range of North Atlantic atmospheric circulation indices. While the NAO shows a significant relationship with temperature in both seasons and summer rainfall over most of the UK, the picture in winter is more complicated, with other circulation indices such as the East Atlantic pattern explaining rainfall anomalies in southern England. Other indices also show significant relationships with precipitation in regions where the NAO does not. Because UK weather is determined by the interplay between different circulation indices, attention should be given to developing seasonal forecasts of other circulation indices to complement the NAO forecasts. We also find that some potential drivers of jet stream variability are significantly associated with UK temperature and rainfall variability, particularly in summer. This provides further scope for producing seasonal forecasts based directly on these drivers. Improved seasonal forecasts will be useful to a range of end users in agriculture, energy supply, transport and insurance industries and can be extended to other UK weather variables such as extreme rainfall events and storm frequency, and related metrics such as wind power capacity and solar energy.
Myocardial sympathetic degeneration correlates with clinical phenotype of Parkinson's disease

In idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD), different clinical subtypes are distinguished due to predominant motor symptoms: a tremor‐dominant type (TDT), an akinetic rigid type (ART), and a mixed type (MT). We compared myocardial sympathetic innervation, measured by MIBG scintigraphy, in different subtypes of PD at early and advanced stages of PD. We applied MIBG scintigraphy in 102 patients with PD. About 57 patients were at Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) stage 1, 22 at H&Y stage 2, and 23 at H&Y stages 3 and 4. For quantification of myocardial MIBG uptake, the heart‐to‐mediastinum (H/M) count‐ratio was calculated. At all H&Y stages, myocardial MIBG uptake was significantly higher in TDT patients than in ART or MT patients (P < 0.05; ANOVA). Furthermore, at each H&Y stage, myocardial MIBG uptake correlated significantly with severity of hypokinesia (P < 0.05; Spearman's correlation) and rigidity (P < 0.05), but not with severity of resting or postural tremor. The significant correlation between myocardial sympathetic degeneration and severity of hypokinesia and rigidity suggests that myocardial sympathetic degeneration and hypokinetic‐rigid symptoms develop in a closely coupled manner in early as well as advanced PD. No such correlation can be found between myocardial sympathetic degeneration and parkinsonian tremor. © 2007 Movement Disorder Society
Ripley: Automatically Securing Distributed Web Applications Through Replicated Execution

Rich Internet applications are becoming increasingly distributed, as demonstrated by the popularity of AJAX/Web 2.0 applications such as Hotmail, Google Maps, Facebook, and many others. A typical multi-tier AJAX application consists of a server component implemented in Java J2EE, PHP or ASP.NET and a client-side component executing in JavaScript. The resulting application is more performant and responsive because computation is moved closer to the client, and thus avoids unnecessary network round trips for frequent user actions. However, once a portion of the code is moved to the client, a malicious user can easily subvert the client side of the computation and potentially jeopardize sensitive server state. In this paper we propose RIPLEY, a system that uses replicated execution to automatically preserve the integrity of a distributed computation. RIPLEY replicates a copy of the client-side computation on the trusted server tier. Every client-side event is transferred to the replica of the client for execution. RIPLEY observes results of the computation, both as computed on the client-side and on the server side using the replica of the client-side code. Any discrepancy is flagged as a potential violation of computational integrity. Our evaluation of RIPLEY on five complex and representative AJAX applications suggests that RIPLEY is a promising method for building secure distributed web applications.
Pancreatic Islets in Mice with the Obese-hyperglycemic Syndrome: Lack of Effect of Carbutamide

The hereditary obese-hyperglycemic syndrome is a Mendelian recessive condition which has been intensively studied in the last few years. In particular, mice with this syndrome are grossly obese (weights up to 115 gm. have been recorded), hypercholesterolemic, show high blood glucose levels generally further increased by the administration of growth hormone, an increased lipogenesis even when fasted, increased glycogen turnover, increased liver phosphorylase,* and a number of other nutritional, endocrine and behavioral idiosyncrasies. Of particular interest from the etiological point of view is the fact that the islets of Langerhans are grossly hypertrophied," that the insulin content of the pancreas is increased, that the insulin-like activity of their serum is greater than that of the nonobese animals, that diethyldithiocarbamate, which Kadota and Midorikawa found to be alphacytotoxic, decreases blood sugar and eliminates the hyperglycemic reaction to growth hormone and that the pancreatic glucagon content appears increased after growth hormone administration. It has also been found that carbutamide did not correct the defects in carbohydrate metabolism and in fat metabolism found in these animals.
IPF: In-Place X-Filling Algorithm for the Reliability of Modern FPGAs

Modern SRAM-based field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are prone to single event upsets compared to application-specific integrated circuits. We propose a synthesis-based in-place x-filling algorithm by utilizing don't cares to augment the reliability of FPGA-based designs. Compared to circuit- and architecture-based solutions, our algorithm is in place, and does not incur area, power, performance, and design time overheads. Compared to other synthesis-based algorithms, we take into account widely accepted interconnect architecture. For the 10 largest combinational MCNC benchmark circuits mapped to 6-LUT architecture, our approach achieves up to 37% greater failure rate reduction, and up to 7 × runtime speedup, compared to the best known synthesis-based in-place algorithm, namely the in-place decomposition algorithm.
Changes in metabolic syndrome and its components with lifestyle modification in Japanese men.

OBJECTIVE Changes in metabolic syndrome and its components with lifestyle modification were evaluated in Japanese men. METHODS We used data for 160 Japanese men (45.6+/-8.8 years) with a 1-year follow up. Anthropometric, blood examination and blood pressure measurements were evaluated. Metabolic syndrome was defined by using a criterion in Japan. All subjects were given instructions by well-trained medical staff on how to change their lifestyle. RESULTS With a 1-year follow-up, anthropometric parameters, blood pressure (BP), triglyceride and HDL cholesterol were significantly improved and the prevalence of metabolic syndrome was significantly reduced. The number of subjects with abdominal obesity at baseline and at follow-up was higher (81 men) than that of subjects with other components at baseline and at follow-up. Parameters at baseline were significantly correlated with changes in parameters for one year. With lifestyle modification, the level of 163 mmHg in systolic BP (SBP), 115 mmHg in diastolic BP (DBP), 226 mg/dL in triglyceride and 33 mg/dL in HDL cholesterol at baseline was estimated to improve to the level without medications with a 1-year follow up. CONCLUSION Lifestyle modification is useful for improving metabolic syndrome and its components. However, items of metabolic syndrome were improved, even when the abdominal circumference was greater than the normal value for Japanese men.
A Phase Field Variational Model with Arctangent Regularization for Saliency Detection

In this paper, we propose a phase field variational model with arctangent regularization for saliency detection. The classical Cahn-Hilliard model is used to extract features in complex image domain with highly anisotropic interfacial energy. Various visual attention features can be detected by minimizing the energy functional. The processing of saliency detection can be seen as a dynamical competition between saliency and background. Our method is task-dependent and easy to implement. Experimental results on various images show that our model successfully suppresses the background, while preserves the fine feature, like point, silhouette and texture very well, which is important in terms of human visual perception.