Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Methodologic Implications of the Precautionary Principle: Causal Criteria

Abstract Applying the Precautionary Principle to public health requires a re-evaluation of the methods of inference currently used to make claims about disease causation from epidemiologic and other forms of scientific evidence. In current thinking, a well-established, near-certain causal relationship implies highly consistent statistically significant results across many different studies, large relative risk estimates, extensive understanding of biological mechanisms and dose-response relationships, positive prevention trial results, a clear temporal relationship between cause and effect, and other conditions spelled out in terms of the widely-used causal criteria. The Precautionary Principle, however, states that preventive measures are to be taken when cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. What evidentiary conditions, as reflected in the causal criteria, will be certain enough to warrant precautionary preventive action? This paper argues that minimum evidentiary requirements for causation need to be articulated if the Precautionary Principle is to be successfully incorporated into public health practice. Two precautionary changes to criteria-based methods of causal inference are examined: reducing the number of criteria and weakening the rules of inference accompanying the criteria. Such changes point in the direction of identifying minimum evidentiary conditions, but would be premature without better understanding how well current methods of causal inference work.
Experience- and Age-Related Outgrowth of Intrinsic Neurons in the Mushroom Bodies of the Adult Worker Honeybee

A worker honeybee performs tasks within the hive for approximately the first 3 weeks of adult life. After this time, it becomes a forager, flying repeatedly to collect food outside of the hive for the remainder of its 5–6 week life. Previous studies have shown that foragers have an increased volume of neuropil associated with the mushroom bodies, a brain region involved in learning, memory, and sensory integration. We report here that growth of the mushroom body neuropil in adult bees occurs throughout adult life and continues after bees begin to forage. Studies using Golgi impregnation asked whether the growth of the collar region of the mushroom body neuropil was a result of growth of the dendritic processes of the mushroom body intrinsic neurons, the Kenyon cells. Branching and length of dendrites in the collar region of the calyces were strongly correlated with worker age, but when age-matched bees were directly compared, those with foraging experience had longer, more branched dendrites than bees that had foraged less or not at all. The density of Kenyon cell dendritic spines remained constant regardless of age or behavioral state. Older and more experienced foragers therefore have a greater total number of dendritic spines in the mushroom body neuropil. Our findings indicate that, under natural conditions, the cytoarchitectural complexity of neurons in the mushroom bodies of adult honeybees increases as a function of increasing age, but that foraging experience promotes additional dendritic branching and growth.
Attenuation of Astroglial Reactivity by Interleukin-10

Prominent responses that follow brain trauma include the activation of microglia, the recruitment of blood-derived macrophages, and astroglial reactivity. Based on evidence that cytokines produced by macrophages/microglia may cause astrocytes to become reactive, the aim of this study was to determine whether astroglial reactivity could be attenuated by interleukin (IL)-10, a potent inhibitor of cytokine synthesis by macrophages/microglia. Four days after the local application of IL-10 to the site of corticectomy in adult mice, the number of reactive astrocytes and their state of hypertrophy was reduced (by 60%) when compared with vehicle controls. In the majority of IL-10-treated mice, but not in any vehicle controls, the tissue in the immediate vicinity of IL-10 application contained viable but nonreactive astrocytes. The mechanism by which IL-10 attenuates astroglial reactivity is likely via the reduction of cytokine production by macrophages/microglia because, based on Mac-1 immunohistochemistry, the macrophages/microglia of IL-10 brains had a decreased activation state compared with vehicle-treated controls. Another macrophage/microglia deactivating agent, macrophage inhibitory factor, also reduced astroglial activity in vivo. Furthermore, IL-10 had no direct effect on purified astrocytes in culture, indicating that its in vivo action on astroglial reactivity is likely via indirect mechanisms. Finally, injury resulted in the substantial rise of tumor necrosis factor-α mRNA levels, and this elevation was significantly inhibited by IL-10. The ability to manipulate the extent of astrogliosis should provide a means of addressing the neurotrophic or inhibitory role of reactive astrocytes in neurological recovery.
Appendices to "Toward a Bisimulation Theory for Linear Higher-Order -Calculus"

A Linear higher-order π-calculus In this section, we give an introduction, a revisit, to linear higher-order π-calculus (LHOPi), which is first proposed by Fu [3]. Linear higher-order π (LHOPi) processes (or simply processes) are denoted by capital letters They are defined by the following abstract grammar. f v(·) denotes free process variables.
LitLinker : A System for Searching Potential Discoveries in Biomedical Literature

The explosive growth in biomedical literature has made it difficult for researchers to keep up with advancements, even in their own narrow specializations. While researchers formulate new hypotheses to test, it is very important for them to identify connections to their work from other parts of the literature. However, the current volume of information has become a great barrier for this task, and new automated tools are needed to help researchers identify new knowledge that bridges gaps across distinct sections of literature. In this dissertation, we propose a knowledge discovery system called LitLinker that incorporates knowledge based methodologies, statistical methods and information extraction algorithms to mine the biomedical literature for new, potentially causal connections between biomedical terms. In this paper, we will discuss the main design challenges with our proposed solutions and the evaluation plan we designed to measure the overall performance of LitLinker.
Screening Enhancements: Why don't they Enhance Performance?

Data obtained utilizing image enhancements in a carry-on bag x-ray screening task were analyzed to determine whether and how image enhancements affect performance. To complement earlier studies of experienced screeners, sixty-six novices to the screening task used six different overall enhancements. Results indicated a significant worsening of performance, A', between Original images and Negative images, but no performance differences for the other enhancements, similar to effects found for experienced screeners. There was little overall performance learning taking place on the task. More detailed analysis by splitting response times into search and non-search components revealed little more enhancement effect, but a reduction in False Alarm response time as the task progressed. It appears that the locus of lack of positive effects of enhancements is not just a function of familiarity with the current screen view.
Chromatin Dynamics during Nucleotide Excision Repair: Histones on the Move

It has been a long-standing question how DNA damage repair proceeds in a nuclear environment where DNA is packaged into chromatin. Several decades of analysis combining in vitro and in vivo studies in various model organisms ranging from yeast to human have markedly increased our understanding of the mechanisms underlying chromatin disorganization upon damage detection and re-assembly after repair. Here, we review the methods that have been developed over the years to delineate chromatin alterations in response to DNA damage by focusing on the well-characterized Nucleotide Excision Repair (NER) pathway. We also highlight how these methods have provided key mechanistic insight into histone dynamics coupled to repair in mammals, raising new issues about the maintenance of chromatin integrity. In particular, we discuss how NER factors and central players in chromatin dynamics such as histone modifiers, nucleosome remodeling factors, and histone chaperones function to mobilize histones during repair.
Mergers, Innovation, and Entry-Exit Dynamics: Consolidation of the Hard Disk Drive Industry, 1996-2016

How far should an industry be allowed to consolidate when competition and innovation are endogenous? We extend Rust's (1987) framework to incorporate a stochastically alternating-move game of dynamic oligopoly, and estimate it using data from the hard disk drive industry, in which a dozen global players consolidated into only three in the last 20 years. We find plateau-shaped equilibrium relationships between competition and innovation, with systematic heterogeneity across time and productivity. Our counterfactual simulations suggest the optimal policy should stop mergers when five or fewer firms exist, highlighting a dynamic welfare tradeoff between ex-post pro-competitive effects and ex-ante value-destruction side effects.
Adults with high social anhedonia have altered neural connectivity with ventral lateral prefrontal cortex when processing positive social signals

Social anhedonia (SA) is a debilitating characteristic of schizophrenia, a common feature in individuals at psychosis-risk, and a vulnerability for developing schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Prior work (Hooker et al., 2014) revealed neural deficits in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) when processing positive social cues in a community sample of people with high SA. Lower VLPFC neural activity was related to more severe self-reported schizophrenia-spectrum symptoms as well as the exacerbation of symptoms after social stress. In the current study, psycho-physiological interaction (PPI) analysis was applied to further investigate the neural mechanisms mediated by the VLPFC during emotion processing. PPI analysis revealed that, compared to low SA controls, participants with high SA exhibited reduced connectivity between the VLPFC and the motor cortex, the inferior parietal and the posterior temporal regions when viewing socially positive (relative to neutral) emotions. Across all participants, VLPFC connectivity correlated with behavioral and self-reported measures of attentional control, emotion management, and reward processing. Our results suggest that impairments to the VLPFC mediated neural circuitry underlie the cognitive and emotional deficits associated with social anhedonia, and may serve as neural targets for prevention and treatment of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.
Adaptive Illumination Correction Considering Ordinal Characteristics

Improper illumination always causes a variety of image problems in practice. To improve image quality in an automatic manner, an adaptive Gamma correction method is proposed in this paper. Considering that the proposed Gamma correction method can also result in reducing image contrast, ordinal characteristics between pixels are exploited to improve image clarity. This makes Gamma correction method more suitable to illumination changes in real situations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a good performance in improving image quality as well as correcting image illumination condition.
Rare targets are often missed in visual search

Our society relies on accurate performance of visual screening tasks (e.g. for knives in luggage or tumors in mammograms). These are visual searches for rare targets. We report that target rarity leads to disturbingly inaccurate performance. Visual search is the subject of a voluminous laboratory literature 1. Typically, observers perform several hundred searches and targets are presented on 50% of trials. Target prevalence in baggage screening or cancer screening is much lower (~0.3% in routine mammography 2). We compared performance on high and low prevalence versions of an artificial baggage-screening task. Observers looked for "tools" among objects drawn from other categories. Semi-transparent objects were presented on noisy backgrounds and could overlap At 1% prevalence, 12 paid volunteer observers had to be tested for 2000 trials each (broken into 250 trial blocks) to obtain a mere 20 target-present trials each, Each observer was tested for 200 trials in the 10% and 50% conditions. Observers were given feedback on their performance, including a point system designed to emphasize the importance of finding the target (see supplementary methods). Low prevalence search has some similarity to vigilance tasks where observers wait for fleeting signals 3,4. However our search stimuli are continuously visible until observers choose to respond. Figure 1: Stimuli: Observers searched for tools in displays with semi-transparent objects placed randomly on a noisy background.
A Self-adaptive Likelihood Function for Tracking with Particle Filter

The particle filter is known to be efficient for visual tracking. However, its parameters are empirically fixed, depending on the target application, the video sequences and the context. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm which automatically adjusts online two majors of them: the correction and the propagation parameters. Our purpose is to determine, for each frame of a video, the optimal value of the correction parameter and to adjust the propagation one to improve the tracking performance. On one hand, our experimental results show that the common settings of particle filter are sub-optimal. On another hand, we prove that our approach achieves a lower tracking error without needing to tune these parameters. Our adaptive method allows to track objects in complex conditions (illumination changes, cluttered background, etc.) without adding any computational cost compared to the common usage with fixed parameters.
The Determinants for the Use of Wireless System in Traditional Chinese Hospital

Among various technological developments, the use of wireless systems is emerging rapidly in the developing and industrialized economies. Medical is no exception to this phenomenon, whereas individuals are trying to save lives instead of making profit in hospital. Researcher in information systems domain agreed that use of wireless portable system in hospital could improve quality of care, cost reduction, error reductions, and better information quality. Awareness and use of information communication technologies (ICT) are on the rise in China and uptake of the wireless system in hospital is relatively slow. This paper present the initial finding of the data collected from traditional Chinese medical professionals regarding their opinions and views about the use of wireless portable system in hospital. Total of 100 surveys were distributed and 86 useable surveys were returned, data was analyzed through SPSS software. Factor analysis through SPSS analysis clearly shows that Chinese hospital professionals are concerned about the usefulness and outcome offered by the system itself.
Oscillatory Dynamics for a Coupled Membrane-Bulk Diffusion Model with Fitzhugh-Nagumo Membrane Kinetics

Oscillatory dynamics associated with the coupled membrane-bulk PDE-ODE model of Gomez-Marin, Garcia-Ojalvon, and Sancho [Phys. Rev. Lett. , 98 (2007), 168303] in one spatial dimension is analyzed using a combination of asymptotic analysis, linear stability theory, and numerical bifurcation software. The mathematical model consists of two dynamically active membranes with Fitzhugh--Nagumo kinetics, separated spatially by a distance $L$, that are coupled together through a diffusion field that occupies the bulk region $0
Current status of HER2 testing: caught between a rock and a hard place.

The analysis of breast cancer specimens for alterations in the HER2/neu (c-erb-B2) gene or its protein product has become common practice in surgical pathology laboratories. Although some clinicians use the information derived from these assays for assessing patient prognosis and evaluating the likelihood of response to various chemotherapeutic agents and to tamoxifen, the major clinical role of assessment of HER2 status is to help determine patient suitability for treatment with trastuzumab (Herceptin), a monoclonal antibody targeted to the HER2 protein. 1,2
Static and dynamic virtual channel allocation for high performance, in-order communication in on-chip networks

Most routers in on-chip interconnection networks (OCINs) have multiple virtual channels (VCs) to mitigate the effects of head-of-line blocking. Multiple VCs necessitate VC allocation schemes since packets or flows must compete for channels when there are more flows than virtual channels at a link. Conventional dynamic VC allocation, however, raises two critical issues. First, it still suffers from a fair amount of head-of-line blocking since all flows can be assigned to any VC within a link. Moreover, dynamic VC allocation compromises the guarantee of in-order delivery even when used with basic variants of dimensionordered routing, requiring large reorder buffers at the destination core or, alternatively, expensive retransmission logic. In this thesis, we present two virtual channel allocation schemes to address these problems: Static Virtual Channel Allocation and Exclusive Dynamic Virtual Channel Allocation (EDVCA). Static VC allocation assigns channels to flows by precomputation when oblivious routing is used, and ensures deadlock freedom for arbitrary minimal routes when two or more VCs are available. EDVCA, on the other hand, is done at runtime, not requiring knowledge of traffic patterns or routes in advance. We demonstrate that both static VCA and EDVCA guarantee in-order packet delivery under single path routing, and furthermore, that they both outperform dynamic VC allocation (out-of-order) by effectively reducing head-of-line blocking. We also introduce a novel bandwidth-sensitive oblivious routing scheme (BSORM), which is deadlock-free through appropriate static VC allocation. Implementation for these schemes requires only minor, inexpensive changes to traditional oblivious dimension-ordered router architectures, more than offset by the removal of packet reorder buffers and logic. Thesis Supervisor: Srinivas Devadas Title: Associate Department Head, Professor
FLELex: a graded lexical resource for French foreign learners

In this paper we present FLELex, the first graded lexicon for French as a foreign language (FFL) that reports word frequencies by difficulty level (according to the CEFR scale). It has been obtained from a tagged corpus of 777,000 words from available textbooks and simplified readers intended for FFL learners. Our goal is to freely provide this resource to the community to be used for a variety of purposes going from the assessment of the lexical difficulty of a text, to the selection of simpler words within text simplification systems, and also as a dictionary in assistive tools for writing.
A study on the effect of smartphones on the digital divide

This study aims at conducting an empirical study of the digital divide hypothesis in Korea where the majority of people own smart phones. The research question is as follows: "How does the proliferation of smartphones have an impact on the digital divide by demographic factors such as gender, age, education, income? " The dependent variable is the digital skill/usage access. The independent variables are gender, age, income, education and employment. Controlled variables include the desktop computer, laptop computer, Internet connection, and cellular phone. Smartphones are used as a moderating variable. As the result, the use of the smartphone reduced the existing digital divide by age, education, occupation, income. Policies associated with the digital gaps need to be propelled in the direction to raise the utilization and increase the accessibility of the smartphone.
A Review of Constraint-Based Routing Algorithms

Constraint-based routing is an invaluable part of a full-sedged Quality of Service (QoS) architecture. Unfortunately, routing with multiple additive constraints is known to be a NP-complete problem. Hence, accurate constraint-based routing algorithms with a fast running time are scarce, perhaps even non-existent. The expected impact of such a constrained-based routing algorithm has resulted in the proposal of numerous heuristics and a few exact QoS algorithms. Although at times an overview of QoS algorithms has been published, a comparative study to the performance of QoS algorithms is still missing. With this paper we attempt to Þll this gap. This paper aims to give a thorough, concise and fair evaluation of the most important constraintbased routing algorithms known today. We will provide a descriptive overview of restricted shortest path algorithms and multi-constrained path algorithms. A performance evaluation of these two classes of algorithms is presented based on complexity analysis and simulation results.
A 2.45 GHz smart antenna for location-aware single-anchor indoor applications

This paper proposes a new switched beam array optimized for 2.45 GHz wireless indoor applications. The antenna supports directional communication to enable spatial reusability, and polarization diversity to mitigate multipath propagation. It also supports absolute 2D target localization using measurements from a single anchor node. The paper describes the antenna design, the implementation and the experimental characterization, along with its positioning applications. The localization results obtained with data collected from indoor measurements, showing an average localization error as low as 1.7 m.
Enumerating Triangulations in General Dimension by

The aim of this research is to study triangulations in general dimension through enumeration. Many results have been achieved for triangulations in dimension two. For triangulations in general dimension, regular triangulations, which form a subclass of all triangulation, have been studied recently. However nonregular triangulations are not yet well understood We rst propose an algorithm to enumerate all triangulations for arbitrary con gurations of points. Regular triangulations form a nice algebraic structure, and algorithms to enumerate them e ciently is known. However, no such thing was known for all triangulations. We accomplish this by characterizing triangulations as maximal independents sets of an intersection graph, and enumerating the maximal independent sets. The intersection graph here, is a graph with vertices the maximal dimensional simplices of the given point con guration, and edges between improperly intersecting simplices. Thus triangulations form a subset of the maximal independent sets of this graph. We next propose an algorithm to enumerate e ciently the regular triangulations of highly symmetric polytopes. Among those we are interested in triangulations of products of two simplices and hypercubes. It is not e cient to enumerate naively the triangulations of these symmetric polytopes, because we may count the \same" triangulation many times. We accomplish this by enumerating classes of triangulations in respect of symmetry. This is done by introducing reverse search for classes of objects. We also consider facets of independent set polytopes of intersection graphs of simplices. We deal with two intersection graphs. The intersection graph of d-simplices and the graph of (d 1)-simplices for point con gurations having dimension d. The independent set polytopes are the convex hulls of the incidence vectors of the independent sets of these graphs. As a special case, we deal with points spanning the plane. We give a proof that an inequality known to be powerful for the minimum weight triangulation problem is de ning a facet of the independent set polytope.