Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
[A retrospective follow-up study of prolonged nucleos(t)ide analogue and interferon combination therapy in HBeAg-positive chronic hepatitis B patients].

OBJECTIVE To investigate the efficacy of a 96-week course of nucleos(t)ide analogue and interferon (IFN) combination therapy for achieving seroconversion at 24 weeks after completion in patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB). METHODS One-hundred-and-thirty-five CHB patients with positivity for hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) were recruited for study between January 2005 and December 2008. All patients were given a 96-week course of nucleos(t)ide analogue (lamivudine or adefovir dipivoxil) alone (monotherapy controls, n = 45) or in combination with IFN or Pegylated-IFN-alpha-2a (Peg-IFNa-2a) (n = 90). At treatment weeks 12, 24, 48, 72, and 96, and at 24 weeks after treatment completion, serum samples were collected from all patients for assessment of biochemical, virological and serological responses to treatment. The biochemical response was indicated by normalization of the alanine aminotransferase (ALT) level. The virologic response was indicated by a reduction in the hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA level to less than 1000 copies/ml. The serological response was indicated by seroconversion of either HBeAg or hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg). Statistical analysis was performed with the Chi-squared test. RESULTS Among the patients treated with nucleos(t)ide analogue and IFN combination therapy, 41.1% (37/90) achieved HBeAg seroconversion and 18.9% (17/90) achieved HBsAg seroconversion at the end of treatment. However, significantly less of the patients treated with nucleos(t)ide analogue monotherapy achieved HBeAg seroconversion and none achieved HBsAg seroconversion by end of treatment (33.3% and 0%, respectively; x2= 8.08, P less than 0.01 vs. the combination therapy group). Age stratification of the 17 HBsAg-seroconverted patients treated with combination therapy indicated that the HBsAg seroconversion rate was significantly higher in patients less than 30-years-old than those 30 and older (x2= 12.62 and 4.24, respectively, P less than 0.05). At post-treatment week 24, the 17 HBsAg-seroconverted patients treated with combination therapy showed HBsAg titers of less than 250 IU/ml; moreover, 11.8% (2/17) of these patients remained HBeAg-positive and 17.6% (3/17) showed abnormal ALT levels and elevated HBV DNA. CONCLUSION Prolonged nucleos(t)ide analogue plus IFN combination therapy can significantly improve the rate of HBsAg seroconversion in HBeAg-positive CHB patients, and this treatment regimen is especially efficacious in patients under the age of 30.
Associations Between Physical Activity and Depressive Symptoms by Weight Status Among Adults With Type 2 Diabetes: Results From Diabetes MILES-Australia.

BACKGROUND To examine associations between physical activity (PA) and depressive symptoms among adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus (Type 2 DM), and whether associations varied according to weight status. METHODS Diabetes MILES-Australia is a national survey of adults with diabetes, focused on behavioral and psychosocial issues. Data from 705 respondents with Type 2 DM were analyzed, including: demographic and clinical characteristics, PA (IPAQ-SF), depressive symptoms (PHQ-9), and BMI (self-reported height and weight). Data analysis was performed using ANCOVA. RESULTS Respondents were aged 59 ± 8 years; 50% women. PA was negatively associated with depressive symptoms for the overall sample (ηp2= 0.04,P < .001) and all weight categories separately: healthy (ηp2 0.11 P = .041,), overweight (ηp2= 0.04, P = .025) and obese (ηp2 = 0.03, P = .007). For people who were healthy (BMI 18.5 to 24.9) or overweight (BMI 25 to 29.9), high amounts of PA were significantly associated with fewer depressive symptoms; for adults who were obese (BMI ≥ 30) however, both moderate and high amounts were associated with fewer depressive symptoms. CONCLUSIONS PA is associated with fewer depressive symptoms among adults with Type 2DM, however the amount of PA associated with fewer depressive symptoms varies according to weight status. Lower amounts of PA might be required for people who are obese to achieve meaningful reductions in depressive symptoms compared with those who are healthy weight or overweight. Further research is needed to establish the direction of the relationship between PA and depressive symptoms.
Robot navigation using stereo-vision

-- This article aims to present a stereo vision based algorithm developed for robot navigation. This algorithm has to analyze the minimum information to find obstacles and goals. The algorithm works in an indoor environment with walls, doors and obstacles. It first calculates the displacement of the relevant pixels of the pictures, calculate the distances of those points and then applies a filter to find the doors of the room in which the robot is. Another algorithm permits the robot to navigate with that information. In a robotic context the algorithm has to be fast but efficient. The algorithm steps are: get pictures from 2 cameras; calculate contrasts of those pictures; find relevant points where to calculate displacements and 3-dimensional information; calculate displacement for those points; convert displacements into a top view of the environment; find angles where there probably is a door; determine the angle of the goal and goe toward.
The Role of Cloudlets in Hostile Environments

The convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing is predicated on a reliable, high-bandwidth end-to-end network. This basic requirement is hard to guarantee in hostile environments such as military operations and disaster recovery. In this article, the authors examine how VM-based cloudlets that are located in close proximity to associated mobile devices can overcome this challenge. This article is part of a special issue on the edge of the cloud.
OMG overview: CORBA and the OMA in enterprise computing

37 When this interoperability goal was realized in 1996 with the issuance of the CORBA 2.0 (Common Object Request Broker Architecture 2.0) specification [2, 6], two notable things happened: First, the infrastructure oriented OMG members who had been concentrating on CORBA and the basic services were suddenly free to expand their horizons to include extended features; as a result, the basic CORBA object model is being extended to include multiple interfaces per object, objects passable by value, a beans-like component model, and support for real-time, fault-tolerant, and embedded CORBA [3]. A second result was that companies and organizations working in vertical markets (or, as OMG refers to them, Domains) started to use the OMG Interface Definition Language (IDL) to specify standard objects that all could share. This led OMG to expand its scope through a major reorganization in early 1996, creating its Domain Technology Committee that has grown to include subgroups in Finance/Insurance, with this expansion was the formation of OMG's Analysis and Design Task Force, which adopts specifications supporting software analysis and design. The result, shown in Figure 1, is an extensive suite of OMG specifications with enormous appeal to the enterprise that is now able to field the large-scale applications they need within a single coherent architecture that extends from design to run time. Even though the upper layers of this architecture are only starting to emerge, the basic infrastructure is well-tested and has already produced many stories of CORBA success in mission-critical enterprise applications [4]. An general overview of the OMG architecture is provided in the sidebar " Architectural Overview, " which gives an idea of its scope. We survey and introduce each of the areas listed in the sidebar here and provide references to additional information. Other articles in this section will build on this material in many of the areas. All OMG specifications are W hen the Object Management Group (OMG) was formed in 1989, interoperability was its founders' primary, and almost their sole, objective: A vision of software components working smoothly together, without regard to details of any component's location, platform, operating system, programming language, or network hardware and software.
Periodic 1.5 ka climate variations during MIS 2 in the belt of Southern Hemispheric westerlies

Abstract Lacustrine sediments retrieved from Laguna Potrok Aike in the framework of the Potrok Aike Maar Lake Sediment Archive Drilling Project (PASADO) offer the possibility to investigate climate variations of the past ~51 cal ka BP in Southern Hemispheric midlatitudes, Argentinean Patagonia. This study focuses on short-term cyclicities in the Ca and magnetic susceptibility data sets between 51 and 15 cal ka BP. The record yields a climate pattern with a periodicity of 1.5 ka during Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage 2 (MIS 2) detected in the Southern Hemisphere from 31 to 17 cal ka BP for the first time. MIS 2 is known for constantly cold temperatures, whereas prominent climate variations paced by a 1.5 ka periodicity occurred during MIS 3. Our study documents that minor latitudinal oscillations of the Southern Hemispheric westerlies and the polar easterlies with a 1.5 ka periodicity also took place during MIS 2. However, we assume that because of a major northward displacement of the Southern Hemispheric westerlies, these oscillations did not sufficiently affect the zone of Circumpolar Deep Waters and an increased greenhouse effect by upwelling of CO2-rich deep waters did not occur. This mechanism illustrates why prominent climate events fail to appear during MIS 2.
Adaptive Cache Replacement Policy

Adaptive cache is mimicking best replacement policy through observing more than one cache replacement algorithms, such as Least Recently Used, LRU and First In First Out, FIFO. This is accomplished by tracking the policy that would lead to a better performance than using each policy individually. One way to determine the performance of a processor is using CPI. According to Iron Laws of Memory Hierarchy, latency introduced by the caches is one of the factors, which have negative impact on CPI. In order to overcome this bottleneck, intelligent caching mechanisms is a must. In the referenced paper, an adaptive replacement policy is applied to decrease latency hence to increase CPI. In this research, as proposed in the referred paper, we defined new data caches in SimpleScalar in addition to data level 1 and data level 2 caches, each of which with different replacement policies. We refined the adaptively selection policy to cover all local and global metrics. Furthermore, we applied adaptivity to both level 1 and level 2 caches, and also just level 2 caches to observe impact of adaptivity more clearly.
HAL-Based Cascaded Model for Variable-Length Semantic Pattern Induction from Psychiatry Web Resources

Negative life events play an important role in triggering depressive episodes. Developing psychiatric services that can automatically identify such events is beneficial for mental health care and prevention. Before these services can be provided, some meaningful semantic patterns, such as , have to be extracted. In this work, we present a text mining framework capable of inducing variable-length semantic patterns from unannotated psychiatry web resources. This framework integrates a cognitive motivated model, Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL), to represent words as well as combinations of words. Then, a cascaded induction process (CIP) bootstraps with a small set of seed patterns and incorporates relevance feedback to iteratively induce more relevant patterns. The experimental results show that by combining the HAL model and relevance feedback, the CIP can induce semantic patterns from the unannotated web corpora so as to reduce the reliance on annotated corpora.
Isolated Execution on Many-core Architectures

We explore how many-core platforms can be used to enhance the security of future systems and to support important security properties such as runtime isolation using a small Trusted Computing Base (TCB). We focus on the Intel Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) to show that such properties can be implemented in current systems. We design a system called SEMA which offers strong security properties while maintaining high performance and flexibility enabled by a small centralized security kernel. We further implement and evaluate the feasibility of our design. Currently, our prototype security kernel is able to execute applications in isolation and accommodate dynamic resource requests from them. We show that, with minor modifications, many-core architectures can offer some unique security properties, not supported by existing singleand multi-core architectures, such as application context awareness. Context awareness, a new security property that we define and explore in this work, allows each application to discover, without any interaction with the security kernel, which other parts of the system are allowed to interact with it and access its resources. We also discuss how an application can use context awareness to defend itself from an unlikely, yet potentially compromised security kernel.
Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells from osteoporotic patients do not show altered mitochondrial energetics or ultrastructure

As a consequence of the ongoing demographic change, osteoporosis is considered as one of the mayor challenges for the health care system of the 21st century. However, the exact etiology of osteoporosis is far from being understood. Some evidence suggests that changes in stem cell metabolism might contribute to development of the disease. Therefore we evaluated whether differences of the morphology and/or the energy metabolism of mitochondria can be observed between human bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells obtained from osteoporotic patients as compared to non-osteoporotic controls. Mesenchymal stem cells were isolated from the bone marrow of senile osteoporotic and non osteoporotic patients, osteoporosis being assessed by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry. We then confirmed the stemness of the cells by FACS analysis of the expression of surface markers and by conducting multi-lineage differentiation experiments. And we finally investigated mitochondrial morphology and function with electron microscopy of cryo-fixed samples and by high-resolution respirometry, respectively. In addition we compared the energy metabolism of the stem cells to those of the osteosarcoma cell line MG-63. The data show, for the first time, the applicability on stem cells of the methods used here. Furthermore, our results indicated that there are no obvious differences detectable in mitochondrial morphology between cells from osteoporotic and non osteoporotic donors and that these cells also seem to be energetically indistinguishable with unchanged rates of routine respiration and respiratory capacity as well as unaltered oxygen consumption rates linked to different respiratory complexes. In summary, we could not detect any evidence indicating major changes of mitochondrial features in cells from osteoporotic patients.
Retrieval evaluation with incomplete information

This paper examines whether the Cranfield evaluation methodology is robust to gross violations of the completeness assumption (i.e., the assumption that all relevant documents within a test collection have been identified and are present in the collection). We show that current evaluation measures are not robust to substantially incomplete relevance judgments. A new measure is introduced that is both highly correlated with existing measures when complete judgments are available and more robust to incomplete judgment sets. This finding suggests that substantially larger or dynamic test collections built using current pooling practices should be viable laboratory tools, despite the fact that the relevance information will be incomplete and imperfect.
CSP and determinism in security modelling

We show how a variety of confidentiality properties can be expressed in terms of the abstraction mechanisms that CSP provides. We argue that determinism of the abstracted low-security viewpoint provides the best type of property. By changing the form of abstraction mechanism we are able to model different assumptions about how systems behave, including handling the distinction between input and output actions. A detailed analysis of the nature of nondeterminism shows why certain security properties have had the paradoxical property of not being preserved by refinement-a disadvantage not shared by the determinism-based conditions. Finally we give an efficient algorithm for testing the determinism properties on a model-checker. <<ETX>>
Unleashing the shrew: a stealth greedy targeted attack on TCP traffic in wireless LANs

This paper presents a new jamming attack in wireless LANs that deliberately targets uplink TCP acknowledgements (TCP-ACKs) of downlink TCP flows. To ensure immunity to detection with existing schemes, in this attack, the attacker does not jam the target constantly; instead, it relies on our probabilistic estimation model to forecast the time when its transmission has the highest likelihood of colliding with the target's generated TCP-ACKs. Repeating this process results in a decrease of the average congestion window of the targeted due to an increased round-trip time (RTT). The rogue node and/or its colluding attackers can grab this freed bandwidth and increase their throughput. We demonstrate via ns-2 simulation the effectiveness of such attack and show how easy it is to deploy without hardware modification. We also discuss its immunity to detection by existing detection schemes and investigate some parameters that may be used in building future detection mechanisms.
A novel ERAP2 haplotype structure in a Chilean population: implications for ERAP2 protein expression and preeclampsia risk

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the endoplasmic reticulum aminopeptidase 2 (ERAP2) gene are associated with preeclampsia (PE) in different populations. rs2549782, a coding variant (N392K) that significantly affects substrate specificity, is in linkage disequilibrium (LD) with rs2248374, a marker SNP associated with ERAP2 protein expression in previously studied populations. As a result of nonsense‐mediated RNA decay, ERAP2 protein is not expressed from the rs2248374 G allele. We previously reported that the fetal rs2549782 minor G allele is associated with PE in African‐Americans, but not in Chileans. In this study, we found that rs2549782 was in LD with rs2248374 in African‐Americans, but not in Chileans. The unexpected lack of strong LD in Chileans raised the possibility that rs2248374 could be associated with PE in the absence of an association with rs2549782. However, we found no significant association for this allele with PE in Chileans. Chileans homozygous for the rs2248374 G allele did not express 110 kDa ERAP2 protein, consistent with nonsense‐mediated RNA decay, and carriers of the rs2248374 A allele did. We conclude that the Chilean ERAP2 haplotype structure allows for the expression of the major T allele of rs2549782 encoding 392N, which could impact peptide trimming and antigen presentation. Our discovery of racial differences in genetic structure and association with PE reveal heretofore unrecognized complexity of the ERAP2 locus.
LBS Privacy Preserving Model and Security Analysis Based on Expanded Anonymous Server

Considering the existence of privacy security threats in LBS, we designed a Expanded Anonymous Server based on traditional LBS system structure to protect privacy information. It use the fully homomorphic encryption method to ensure the safety of Anonymous Server; At the same time, the onion algorithm and asymmetric encryption methods are used to design an improved LBS privacy preserving model based on expanded anonymous server. The model ensures the user’s information is guaranteed to be not tampered or leaked. Using attack algorithm to detect the LBS preserving model and traditional LBS model, the security analysis shows that LBS preserving model can protect the user’s anonymous identity, location information and service content effectively in LBS.
Computing n-Finger Form-Closure Grasps on Polygonal Objects

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for computing all n-finger form-closure grasps on a polygonal object based on a new sufficient and necessary condition for form-closure. With this new condition, it is possible to transfer the problem of computing the form-closure grasp in R3 to one in R1. We demonstrate that the non-form-closure grasps consist of two convex polytopes in the space of n parameters representing grasp points on sides of the polygon. The proposed algorithm works efficiently for n ≤ 3 and takes O(n3n/2) time for n > 3, where n denotes the number of the fingers. The algorithm has been implemented and its efficiency has been confirmed with two examples.
Adaptive radiation in miniature: the minute salamanders of the Mexican highlands (Amphibia: Plethodontidae: Thorius)

The small size and apparent external morphological similarity of the minute salamanders of the genus Thorius have long hindered evolutionary studies of the group. We estimate gene and species trees within the genus using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from nearly all named and many candidate species and find three main clades. We use this phylogenetic hypothesis to examine patterns of morphological evolution and species coexistence across central and southern Mexico and to test alternative hypotheses of lineage divergence with and without ecomor- phological divergence. Sympatric species differ in body size more than expected after accounting for phylogenetic relationship, and morphological traits show no significant phylogenetic signal. Sympatric species tend to differ in a combination of body size, presence or absence of maxillary teeth, and relative limb or tail length, even when they are close relatives. Sister species of Thorius tend to occupy climatically similar environments, which suggests that divergence across climatic gradients does not drive species formation in the genus. Rather than being an example of cryptic species formation, Thorius more closely resembles an adaptive radiation, with ecomorphological divergence that is bounded by organism-level constraints. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2013, 109, 622-643. ADDITIONAL KEYWORDS: biogeography - diversification - morphology - phylogeny - species formation - systematics.
Lumped-Element Coplanar-Waveguide Diplexer

Novel reduced-size lumped-element coplanar-waveguide (CPW) diplexer is proposed, using planar lumped-elements to realize the 3rd order low-pass and band-pass filters in the diplexer structure. Simple equivalent-circuit model is also established, from which the passband behavior of the lumped-element diplexer structure may be characterized. Specifically, a CPW diplexer that is target for mixer applications to separate the IF/LO signals is established and carefully examined.
Theory of electronic ferroelectricity.

We present a theory of the linear and nonlinear optical characteristics of the insulating phase of the Falicov-Kimball model within the self-consistent mean-field approximation. The Coulomb attraction between the itinerant $d$ electrons and the localized $f$ holes gives rise to a built-in coherence between the $d$ and $f$ states, which breaks the inversion symmetry of the underlying crystal, leading to (1) electronic ferroelectricity, (2) ferroelectric resonance, and (3) a nonvanishing susceptibility for second-harmonic generation. As experimental tests of such a built-in coherence in mixed-valent compounds, we propose measurements of the static dielectric constant, the microwave absorption spectrum, and the dynamic second-order susceptibility.