Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Chronic Calorie Restriction or Dietary Resveratrol Supplementation on Insulin Sensitivity Markers in a Primate, Microcebus murinus

The prevalence of diabetes and hyperinsulinemia increases with age, inducing metabolic failure and limiting lifespan. Calorie restriction (CR) without malnutrition delays the aging process, but its long-term application to humans seems difficult. Resveratrol (RSV), a dietary polyphenol, appears to be a promising CR mimetic that can be easily administered in humans. In this work, we hypothesized that both CR and RSV impact insulin sensitivity in a non-human primate compared to standard-fed control (CTL) animals. Four- to five-year-old male grey mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) were assigned to three dietary groups: a CTL group, a CR group receiving 30% fewer calories than the CTL and a RSV group receiving the CTL diet supplemented with RSV (200 mg·day−1·kg−1). Insulin sensitivity and glycemia were assessed using an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) and the homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR index) evaluation after 21 or 33 months of chronic treatment. Resting metabolic rate was also measured to assess the potential relationships between this energy expenditure parameter and insulin sensitivity markers. No differences were found after a 21-month period of treatment, except for lower glucose levels 30 min after glucose loading in CR animals. After 33 months, CR and RSV decreased glycemia after the oral glucose loading without decreasing fasting blood insulin. A general effect of treatment was observed on the HOMA-IR index, with an 81% reduction in CR animals and 53% in RSV animals after 33 months of treatment compared to CTL. Chronic CR and dietary supplementation with RSV affected insulin sensitivity by improving the glucose tolerance of animals without disturbing their baseline insulin secretion. These results suggest that both CR and RSV have beneficial effects on metabolic alterations, although these effects are different in amplitude between the two anti-aging treatments and potentially rely on different metabolic changes.
Delays in Referral and Enrolment Are Associated With Mitigated Benefits of Cardiac Rehabilitation After Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery

Background—Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is recommended after coronary artery bypass graft surgery; however, the consequences of longer wait times to start CR have not been elucidated. Method and Results—Cardiopulmonary, demographic, and anthropometric assessments were conducted before and after 6 months of CR in consecutively enrolled patients from January 1995 to October 2012. Wait times were ascertained from referral forms and charts. Neighborhood characteristics were ascertained using census data and cross-referencing with patients’ home geographic location. Among 6497 post- coronary artery bypass graft participants, mean and median total wait time (time from surgery to first exercise session) was 101.1±47.9 and 80 days, respectively. In multiple linear regression, correlates of longer total wait time and the 2 wait-time phases, time from surgery to CR referral and time from CR referral to first exercise session, were determined. Factors influencing longer wait times included female sex, greater age, being employed, less social support, longer drive time to CR, lower neighborhood socioeconomic status, higher systolic blood pressure, abdominal obesity, and a complex medical history. After adjusting for correlates of delayed entry, longer wait time for each of the total and 2 wait-time phases was significantly associated with less improvement in cardiopulmonary fitness (VO2peak; &bgr;=−0.165, P<0.001), body fat percentage (&bgr;=0.032, P<0.02), resting heart rate (&bgr;=0.066, P<0.001), and poorer attendance to CR classes (&bgr;=−0.081, P<0.001) and completion rate (&bgr;=2.741, P<0.001). Conclusions—Strategies for timely access to CR at each phase of the process are important given the negative impact that wait time has on key clinical outcomes. This is relevant because optimizing VO2peak and attendance to CR has been shown to confer a mortality advantage.
with Shading via Three-Dimensional Textures

A new and easy-to-implement method for direct volume rendering that uses 3D texture maps for acceleration, and incorporates directional lighting, is described. The implementation, called Voltx, produces high-quality images at nearly interactive speeds on workstations with hardware support for three-dimensional texture maps. Previously reported methods did not incorporate a light model, and did not address issues of multiple texture maps for large volumes. Our research shows that these extensions impact performance by about a factor of ten. Voltx supports orthographic, perspective, and stereo views. This paper describes the theory and implementation of this technique, and compares it to the shear-warp factorization approach. A rectilinear data set is converted into a three-dimensional texture map containing color and opacity information. Quantized normal vectors and a lookup table provide efficiency. A new tesselation of the sphere is described, which serves as the basis for normal-vector quantization. A new gradient-based shading criterion is described, in which the gradient magnitude is interpreted in the context of the field-data value and the material classification parameters, and not in isolation. In the rendering phase, the texture map is applied to a stack of parallel planes, which effectively cut the texture into many slabs. The slabs are composited to form an image.
An adaptive descriptor for uncalibrated omnidirectional images - towards scene reconstruction by trifocal tensor

Omnidirectional cameras are widely used for robotic applications in structured environments. However, because of the distorted field of view (FOV), it is hard to describe the primitive features extracted from them robustly. In this paper, we tackle the problem by using Histogram of Gradient (HoG) statistics for the regions of interest (ROI) in the neighborhood of major vertical lines extracted from the panoramic image. As a validation, we compare the proposed algorithm with state-of-the-art based on two widely used data-sets, leading to evidently better performance. We also introduce a scene reconstruction scenario using the proposed descriptor based on 1D Trifocal Tensor framework. The comparative results show the competence of the descriptor.
Inducing Multilingual POS Taggers and NP Bracketers via Robust Projection Across Aligned Corpora

This paper investigates the potential for projecting linguistic annotations including part-of-speech tags and base noun phrase bracketings from one language to another via automatically word-aligned parallel corpora. First, experiments assess the accuracy of unmodified direct transfer of tags and brackets from the source language English to the target languages French and Chinese, both for noisy machine-aligned sentences and for clean hand-aligned sentences. Performance is then substantially boosted over both of these baselines by using training techniques optimized for very noisy data, yielding 94-96% core French part-of-speech tag accuracy and 90% French bracketing F-measure for stand-alone monolingual tools trained without the need for any human-annotated data in the given language.
Randomised clinical trial of lensectomy versus lens aspiration and primary capsulotomy for children with bilateral cataract in south India

AIMS The primary objective was to determine which surgical technique gave the best long term visual outcome for infants and young children with bilateral symmetrical cataract in south India. Secondary objectives were to assess complications and the need for further surgical intervention. METHODS A randomised controlled clinical trial was undertaken. 65 children under 10 years old with bilateral cataract had one eye treated by lensectomy and the other by aspiration with primary capsulotomy. RESULTS 56 children (86%) with a mean age at surgery of 53 months were reviewed 3 years after surgery. The overall binocular acuity was 6/18 or better in 57.1% and 6/60 or better in 94.6%. There was no difference in visual acuity between the matched pairs of eyes undergoing aspiration or lensectomy at the third year of follow up (p=0.57). Aspiration eyes were more likely to require a secondary procedure to restore vision than lensectomy eyes (66.1% v 1.8%). CONCLUSION Aspiration with primary capsulotomy gives an acceptable visual outcome in this part of India providing that there is good follow up to manage capsule opacification. If secondary intervention is not possible owing to poor compliance with follow up, then lensectomy is likely to give better long term visual rehabilitation providing there is good maintenance and technical support for the lensectomy equipment.
A Tissue P Systems Based Uniform Solution to Tripartite Matching Problem

A tissue P system with cell division is a computing model which has two basic features: intercellular communication and the ability of cell division. The ability of cell division allows us to obtain an exponential amount of cells in linear time and to design cellular solutions to computationally hard problems in polynomial time. In this work we present an efficient solution to the tripartite matching problem by a family of such devices. This solution leads to an interesting open problem whether tissue P systems with cell division and communication rules of length 2 can solve NP-complete problems. An answer to this open problem will provide a borderline between efficiency and non-efficiency in terms of the lengths of communication rules.
Long-term impact of pregnancy-related venous thrombosis on quality-of-life, general health and functioning: results of a cross-sectional, case–control study

Objectives To evaluate the long-term consequences of pregnancy-related venous thrombosis (VT) by the assessment of generic quality-of-life (QOL), well-being, general health and daily-life functioning. We also wanted to evaluate the impact of the frequently occurring complication post-thrombotic syndrome (PTS) after that of deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Design Population-based cross-sectional, case–control study. Setting 18 Norwegian hospitals during 1990–2003. Participants The study population comprised 559 cases with a validated first-ever, pregnancy-related VT and 1229 controls naïve for VT at the time of index pregnancy. Cases were identified using the Norwegian Patient Register and the Medical Birth Registry of Norway and the latter was used to select as controls women who gave birth at the same time as a case. After exclusion of two cases with missing location of VT, the final study population comprised 311 cases and 353 controls. Methods Self-completion of a comprehensive questionnaire in 2006. Main outcome measures Generic QOL and well-being assessed by the Ferrans and Powers QOL Index (QLI) and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-20). Results QOL assessed by QLI did not differ between cases and controls; mean score 23.1 (95% CI 22.7 to 23.5) vs 23.7 (23.3 to 24.0), neither did well being assessed by GHQ-20; 18.7 (18.0 to 19.4) vs 17.9 (17.3 to 18.4). However, cases reported pain other than in the lower limbs and muscle–skeletal problems more often and were more often physically worn out after work compared with controls. Cases which developed PTS reported poorer health, had pain more often, developed skin and psychiatric problems, used analgesic drugs more frequently and were more often on sick leave as compared to those without PTS. Conclusions Long-term generic QOL and subjective well-being 3–16 years after a pregnancy-related VT were not different from a reference population, but women with PTS after DVT seemed to have poorer QOL and an impaired general health.
for Literary Text with Neural Networks

We propose a method for using neural networks to attribute quotes in literary texts. Since previous work has been unable to successfully solve this problem based on bag-of-words features, we study the issue of whether this is due to the limited expressiveness of such features. By re-framing the modeling of quotes and characters as based off of word vectors, we hope to demonstrate that individual characters do, in fact, have recognizable vocabulary-based characteristics. The limited performance of our resulting models demonstrate that there are more complicated forces at play than simply the words in the quote when determining its speaker.
Effective and Efficient Malware Detection at the End Host

Malware is one of the most serious security threats on the Internet today. In fact, most Internet problems such as spam e-mails and denial of service attacks have malware as their underlying cause. That is, computers that are compromised with malware are often networked together to form botnets, and many attacks are launched using these malicious, attacker-controlled networks. With the increasing significance of malware in Internet attacks, much research has concentrated on developing techniques to collect, study, and mitigate malicious code. Without doubt, it is important to collect and study malware found on the Internet. However, it is even more important to develop mitigation and detection techniques based on the insights gained from the analysis work. Unfortunately, current host-based detection approaches (i.e., anti-virus software) suffer from ineffective detection models. These models concentrate on the features of a specific malware instance, and are often easily evadable by obfuscation or polymorphism. Also, detectors that check for the presence of a sequence of system calls exhibited by a malware instance are often evadable by system call reordering. In order to address the shortcomings of ineffectivemodels, several dynamic detection approaches have been proposed that aim to identify the behavior exhibited by a malware family. Although promising, these approaches are unfortunately too slow to be used as real-time detectors on the end host, and they often require cumbersome virtual machine technology. In this paper, we propose a novel malware detection approach that is both effective and efficient, and thus, can be used to replace or complement traditional antivirus software at the end host. Our approach first analyzes a malware program in a controlled environment to build a model that characterizes its behavior. Such models describe the information flows between the system calls essential to the malware's mission, and therefore, cannot be easily evaded by simple obfuscation or polymorphic techniques. Then, we extract the program slices responsible for such information flows. For detection, we execute these slices to match our models against the runtime behavior of an unknown program. Our experiments show that our approach can effectively detect running malicious code on an end user's host with a small overhead.
Modeling and Simulation for Grid Fault Impacts on a DC Microgrid

A micro grid consists of several distributed generation resources and local loads, which provide the solution to supply premium power to remote or specific areas. To the design of a micro grid, it is necessary to perform computer simulation for the planning and study. Before the actual system is built, all potential responses of the system should be known and then the design can be modified to avoid negative impacts to the system. This paper presents experiences of modeling and simulations for observing the impacts of connected ac grid faults on a dc micro grid. Results for the study system are also reported.
Evaluation studies of three intrusion detection systems under various attacks and rule sets

This paper investigates the performance and the detection accuracy of three popular open-source intrusion detection systems: Snort, Suricata and Bro. We evaluate all systems using various attack types including DoS attack, DNS attack, FTP attack, Scan port attack, and SNMP attack. The experiments were run under different traffic rates and different sets of active rules. The performance metrics used are the CPU utilization, the number of packets lost, and the number of alerts. The results illustrated that each attack type had significant effects on the IDS performance. But, Bro showed better performance than other IDS systems when evaluated under different attack types and using a specific set of rules. The results also indicated the drop of the accuracy when the three IDS tools activate the full rule set.
Supply Chain Management in the Petroleum Industry : Challenges and Opportunities

Supply chain management in the petroleum industry contains various challenges, specifically in the logistics area, that are not present in most other industries. These logistical challenges are a major influence on the cost of oil and its derivatives. However, opportunities for cost savings in logistics still do exist. Giant oil and petrochemical companies are undertaking a “swap” practice that saves companies millions of dollars. The objective of this paper is to shed some light on the supply chain challenges and opportunities in the petroleum industry and on swap practices that have long been employed by petroleum industry’s giants around the world, such as BP, BASF, Honeywell, Nova, and much more, yet have long been ignored in the operations management literature.
The BLUE active queue management algorithms

In order to stem the increasing packet loss rates caused by an exponential increase in network traffic, the ietf has been considering the deployment of active queue management techniques such as Red [14]. While active queue management can potentially reduce packet loss rates in the Internet, we show that current techniques are ineffective in preventing high loss rates. The inherent problem with these queue management algorithms is that they use queue lengths as the indicator of the severity of congestion. In light of this observation, a fundamentally different active queue management algorithm, called Blue, is proposed, implemented, and evaluated. Blue uses packet loss and link idle events to manage congestion. Using both simulation and controlled experiments, Blue is shown to perform significantly better than Red, both in terms of packet loss rates and buffer size requirements in the network. As an extension to Blue, a novel technique based on Bloom filters [2] is described for enforcing fairness among a large number of flows. In particular, we propose and evaluate Stochastic Fair Blue (SFB), a queue management algorithm which can identify and rate-limit nonresponsive flows using a very small amount of state information.
The acceptability of assistive technology to older people

Assistive technology (AT) is defined in this paper as ‘any device or system that allows an individual to perform a task that they would otherwise be unable to do, or increases the ease and safety with which the task can be performed’ (Cowan and Turner-Smith 1999). Its importance in contributing to older people's independence and autonomy is increasingly recognised, but there has been little research into the viability of extensive installations of AT. This paper focuses on the acceptability of AT to older people, and reports one component of a multi-disciplinary research project that examined the feasibility, acceptability, costs and outcomes of introducing AT into their homes. Sixty-seven people aged 70 or more years were interviewed in-depth during 2001 to find out about their use and experience of a wide range of assistive technologies. The findings suggest a complex model of acceptability, in which a ‘felt need’ for assistance combines with ‘product quality’. The paper concludes by considering the tensions that may arise in the delivery of acceptable assistive technology.
Discharge β-Blocker Use and Race after Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting

Introduction: The use of discharge β-blockers after cardiac surgery is associated with a long-term mortality benefit. β-Blockers have been suggested to be less effective in black cardiovascular patients compared with whites. To date, racial differences in the long-term survival of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) patients who receive β-blockers at discharge have not been examined. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted on patients undergoing CABG between 2002 and 2011. Long-term survival was compared in patients who were and who were not discharged with β-blockers. Hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were computed using a Cox regression model. P-for-interaction between race and discharge β-blocker use was computed using a likelihood ratio test. Results: A total of 853 (88%) black (n = 970) and 3,038 (88%) white (n = 3,460) patients had a history of β-blocker use at discharge (N = 4,430). Black patients who received β-blockers survived longer than those not receiving β-blockers and the survival advantage was comparable with white patients (black, adjusted HR = 0.33, 95% CI = 0.23–0.46; white, adjusted HR = 0.48, 95% CI = 0.39–0.58; p-for-interaction = 0.74). Among patients discharged on β-blockers, we did not observe a long-term survival advantage for white compared with black patients (HR = 1.2, 95% CI = 0.95–1.5). Conclusion: β-Blocker use at discharge was associated with a survival advantage among black patients after CABG and a similar association was observed in white patients.
An Implementation of a Log-Structured File System for UNIX

Research results [ROSE91] suggest that a log-structured file system (LFS) offers the potential for dramatically improved write performance, faster recovery time, and faster file creation and deletion than traditional UNIX file systems. This paper presents a redesign and implementation of the Sprite [ROSE91] log-structured file system that is more robust and integrated into the vnode interface [KLEI86]. Measurements show its performance to be superior to the 4BSD Fast File System (FFS) in a variety of benchmarks and not significantly less than FFS in any test. Unfortunately, an enhanced version of FFS (with read and write clustering) [MCVO91] provides comparable and sometimes superior performance to our LFS. However, LFS can be extended to provide additional functionality such as embedded transactions and versioning, not easily implemented in traditional file systems.