Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Maximizing the Impact of Tobacco 21 Laws Across the United States.

Tobacco 21, the prohibition of retailers from selling cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, powdered tobacco, electronic cigarettes, and other tobacco products to customers younger than 21 years, has become an increasingly popular tobacco-control strategy. As of early 2018, Tobacco 21 laws exist in almost 300 separate locations across 19 different states and cover more than 25% of the US population. In this issue of AJPH, Macinko et al. (p. 669) found that adolescent tobacco use declined slightly inNewYorkCity after the city raised the minimum legal sales age to 21 years. Although New York City already had relatively low rates of tobacco use for adolescents, rates continued to decline during the 18 months after implementation of the new law. Macinko et al. also found that across New York State and in four comparator cities in Florida, rates of adolescent tobacco use fell at a steeper rate than that seen in New York City. Put another way, those comparator locations tended to catch up to New York City in terms of adolescent tobacco use during the short study period. Denormalization of tobacco use in society, higher taxes on tobacco products, smoke-free laws, local point-of-sale restrictions, tobacco-control campaigns, and tobacco-cessation programs with coverage for tobaccodependence treatment medications all play a part in the continued downward trend of adolescent and adult tobacco use in the United States. MODELS AND REAL-WORLD TIMING According to the National Academies of Science, Tobacco 21 laws can be a significant contributor to an effective tobacco-control landscape, with an estimated 25% reduction in tobacco use by those aged 15 to 17 years and a 12% reduction in population tobacco use over time. Although those estimates were determined by mathematical models, more recent data from Needham, Massachusetts demonstrated a 47% reduction in high school smoking five years after implementation of the Tobacco 21 law. From the mathematical models and from the real-world data, time remains the first necessary component for realizing the full benefits of Tobacco 21 laws. Social norms and culture change in high schools may take time because of the behavioral-modeling tendency of 9th and 10th graders to imitate what they see in their 11th and 12th grade schoolmates.
Cardiac-gated slit lamp videography as a novel approach to assessing a microcirculatory network

In this article we describe the development of a system that is designed to image and in turn, allow characterization of the microcirculation in conjunctiva. To characterise the blood flow the system simultaneously captures high quality imagery alongside information on the cardiac cycle, using a multimodal image and biosignal acquisition approach. Images are captured using a smartphone camera attached, via a bespoke adapter, to a 40× magnification slit lamp. Images are recorded as videos at a resolution of up to approximately 1920 × 1080 pixels per frame (i.e. 1080k) and sampled at 60 frames per second. Information on the cardiac cycle is captured using a phonocardiogram device. In order to allow time synchronisation of the video with the phonocardiogram, the phonocardiogram output signal is fed via a custom adapter to the audio input of the smartphone video recording device. This allows for the phonocardiogram to be time synchronised in the audio layer of the video file. This software system provides the opportunity for cardiac gated assessment of a readily obtainable microvascular network, namely the conjunctival vasculature.
Relationship between paravertebral muscle twitching and long-term effects of radiofrequency medial branch neurotomy

Background To achieve a prolonged therapeutic effect in patients with lumbar facet joint syndrome, radiofrequency medial branch neurotomy (RF-MB) is commonly performed. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the prognostic value of paravertebral muscle twitching when performing RF-MB in patients with lumbar facet joint syndrome. Methods We collected and analyzed data from 68 patients with confirmed facet joint syndrome. Sensory stimulation was performed at 50 Hz with a 0.5 V cut-off value. Patients were divided into 3 groups according to the twitching of the paravertebral muscle during 2 Hz motor stimulation: ‘Complete’, when twitching was observed at all needles; ‘Partial’, when twitching was present at 1 or 2 needles; and ‘None’, when no twitching was observed. The relationship between the long-term effects of RF-MB and paravertebral muscle twitching was analyzed. Results The mean effect duration of RF-MB was 4.6, 5.8, and 7.0 months in the None, Partial, and Complete groups, respectively (P = 0.47). Although the mean effect duration of RF-MB did not increase significantly in proportion to the paravertebral muscle twitching, the Complete group had prolonged effect duration (> 6 months) than the None group in subgroup analysis. (P = 0.03). Conclusions Paravertebral muscle twitching while performing lumbar RF-MB may be a reliable predictor of long-term efficacy when sensory provocation under 0.5 V is achieved. However, further investigation may be necessary for clarifying its clinical significance.
Privately releasing conjunctions and the statistical query barrier

Suppose we would like to know all answers to a set of statistical queries C on a data set up to small error, but we can only access the data itself using statistical queries. A trivial solution is to exhaustively ask all queries in C. Can we do any better? We show that the number of statistical queries necessary and sufficient for this task is---up to polynomial factors---equal to the agnostic learning complexity of C in Kearns' statistical query (SQ)model. This gives a complete answer to the question when running time is not a concern. We then show that the problem can be solved efficiently (allowing arbitrary error on a small fraction of queries) whenever the answers to C can be described by a submodular function. This includes many natural concept classes, such as graph cuts and Boolean disjunctions and conjunctions. While interesting from a learning theoretic point of view, our main applications are in privacy-preserving data analysis: Here, our second result leads to an algorithm that efficiently releases differentially private answers to all Boolean conjunctions with 1% average error. This presents progress on a key open problem in privacy-preserving data analysis. Our first result on the other hand gives unconditional lower bounds on any differentially private algorithm that admits a (potentially non-privacy-preserving) implementation using only statistical queries. Not only our algorithms, but also most known private algorithms can be implemented using only statistical queries, and hence are constrained by these lower bounds. Our result therefore isolates the complexity of agnostic learning in the SQ-model as a new barrier in the design of differentially private algorithms.
Co-clustering on manifolds

Co-clustering is based on the duality between data points (e.g. documents) and features (e.g. words), i.e. data points can be grouped based on their distribution on features, while features can be grouped based on their distribution on the data points. In the past decade, several co-clustering algorithms have been proposed and shown to be superior to traditional one-side clustering. However, existing co-clustering algorithms fail to consider the geometric structure in the data, which is essential for clustering data on manifold. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a Dual Regularized Co-Clustering (DRCC) method based on semi-nonnegative matrix tri-factorization. We deem that not only the data points, but also the features are sampled from some manifolds, namely data manifold and feature manifold respectively. As a result, we construct two graphs, i.e. data graph and feature graph, to explore the geometric structure of data manifold and feature manifold. Then our co-clustering method is formulated as semi-nonnegative matrix tri-factorization with two graph regularizers, requiring that the cluster labels of data points are smooth with respect to the data manifold, while the cluster labels of features are smooth with respect to the feature manifold. We will show that DRCC can be solved via alternating minimization, and its convergence is theoretically guaranteed. Experiments of clustering on many benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms many state of the art clustering methods.
Putting Hybrid Cultural Data on the Semantic Web

A prerequisite for joining the rapidly growing Semantic Web is to expose data as RDF triples. In the cultural heritage world the data in question is very often a mixture of structured database fields and associated textual documents. Transforming relational database (RDB) content to RDF is not altogether straightforward and the issues are examined as a preliminary to the much more difficult step of augmenting the RDB content by extracting structured RDF triples directly from natural language text, using a specially designed txt2rdf process. This opens the way to a true integration of the hybrid data so common in heritage management. Finally we lead up to experimental results showing structured queries (using SPARQL) that cannot be answered from the RDB material alone, but which are satisfied against the augmented graph. In this domain there are potentially vast amounts of textual material available for linking to structured records, so the future possibilities of the techniques described are exciting.
Weak constraint leaf image recognition based on convolutional neural network

Recently the computer vision and machine learning research communities pay a great attention to the leaf image recognition problem. Our literature survey focusing on the user interaction aspect reveals that two schemes of image acquisition have been used, one with strong constraint and the other with no constraint. The strong constraint interaction asks users to capture images by placing a leaf on a uniform background such as white paper while the unconstrained interaction allows any form of image capturing. The former one gets a high performance sacrificing the user convenience while the latter one provides a great convenience sacrificing the recognition performance. Our scheme is weakly constrained in the middle of two extremes. The proposed interaction scheme only asks users to center the leaf on smartphone camera screen. The leaf may be on the tree or off the tree. When the leaf is picked off the tree, it is recommended to place it against rather uniform background such as sky, soil, or tree bark. By fine-tuning the pre-trained CNNs (Convolutional Neural Network), we obtained a practical performance, 96.08% top-1 and 99.81% top-5 accuracies. The dataset is publicly open and the recognition system is released as an Android App.
Implementation of dynamic node management in Hadoop cluster

Hadoop Distributed Filesystem provides great scalability of storing big data. However, it lacks dynamicity of node management because all nodes in a Hadoop cluster are tightly-coupled from each other. This feature interferes with reusing other computing resources to the Hadoop cluster when then are available. This paper presents a dynamic node management mechanism of Hadoop cluster with concrete implementations. The implementation result shows that any data node can be casually removed from the cluster whenever necessary, and be joined again when available.
A Machine Learning Approach to the Detection of Fetal Hypoxia during Labor and Delivery

Labor monitoring is crucial in modern health care, as it can be used to detect (and help avoid) significant problems with the fetus. In this article we focus on detecting hypoxia (or oxygen deprivation), a very serious condition that can arise from different pathologies and can lead to life-long disability and death. We present a novel approach to hypoxia detection based on recordings of the uterine pressure and fetal heart rate, which are obtained using standard labor monitoring devices. The key idea is to learn models of the fetal response to signals from its environment. Then, we use the parameters of these models as attributes in a binary classification problem. A running count of pathological classifications over several time periods is taken to provide the current label for the fetus. We use a unique database of real clinical recordings, both from normal and pathological cases. Our approach classifies correctly more than half the pathological cases, 1.5 hours before delivery. These are cases that were missed by clinicians; early detection of this type would have allowed the physician to perform a Caesarean section, possibly avoiding the negative outcome.
Identification of Isn1 and Sdt1 as Glucose- and Vitamin-regulated Nicotinamide Mononucleotide and Nicotinic Acid Mononucleotide 5′-Nucleotidases Responsible for Production of Nicotinamide Riboside and Nicotinic Acid Riboside*

Recently, we discovered that nicotinamide riboside and nicotinic acid riboside are biosynthetic precursors of NAD+, which are utilized through two pathways consisting of distinct enzymes. In addition, we have shown that exogenously supplied nicotinamide riboside is imported into yeast cells by a dedicated transporter, and it extends replicative lifespan on high glucose medium. Here, we show that nicotinamide riboside and nicotinic acid riboside are authentic intracellular metabolites in yeast. Secreted nicotinamide riboside was detected with a biological assay, and intracellular levels of nicotinamide riboside, nicotinic acid riboside, and other NAD+ metabolites were determined by a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry method. A biochemical genomic screen indicated that three yeast enzymes possess nicotinamide mononucleotide 5′-nucleotidase activity in vitro. Metabolic profiling of knock-out mutants established that Isn1 and Sdt1 are responsible for production of nicotinamide riboside and nicotinic acid riboside in cells. Isn1, initially classified as an IMP-specific 5′-nucleotidase, and Sdt1, initially classified as a pyrimidine 5′-nucleotidase, are additionally responsible for dephosphorylation of pyridine mononucleotides. Sdt1 overexpression is growth-inhibitory to cells in a manner that depends on its active site and correlates with reduced cellular NAD+. Expression of Isn1 protein is positively regulated by the availability of nicotinic acid and glucose. These results reveal unanticipated and highly regulated steps in NAD+ metabolism.
An Anisotropic Elastoplastic Model for Geomaterials and Numerical Implementation

An anisotropic constitutive model is proposed in this paper accounting for both structural anisotropy and induced anisotropic plasticity. It is assumed that the rock is composed of a matrix and of potential planes of weakness. The matrix is assumed to be linear, transversely isotropic and the plasticity is described by a non linear yield function where the parameters are deduced from the nonlinear Hoek-Brown envelopes in pre- and post-peak, and derived from the laboratory characterization. A non-associated flow rule is used with a distinction between compression and extensional stress paths, as well as the absence of volumetric strain beyond large plastic distortion. The planes of weakness are considered as known a priori or assumed to be oriented perpendicular to the direction of the current minor principal stress. An elastic-perfectly plastic behavior according to the Mohr-Coulomb criterion is assumed in the planes of weakness; while the elastic part is considered as linear and transversely isotropic. Finally, the proposed model was implemented in FLAC 3D and used to simulate triaxial compressions to provide a verification of the implementation. The applicability of the implemented model to reproduce damage (pre-peak) and/or failure developments around a circular opening is checked. The GCS drift, one of the mine-by experiments set up at the main level of the Meuse/Haute-Marne Underground Research Laboratory, is selected for this first application.
Serum leptin and bone metabolism parameters in obese children

Aim: Complex correlations exist between leptin, obesity and bone formation. Leptin is thought to affect growth and bone formation as well as osteoblastic and osteoclastic activities. Additionally, leptin increases bone mineral content. The aim of this study was to evaluate the correlation between serum leptin levels and osteoblastic and osteoclastic parameters and Bone Mineral Density (BMD) in children with exogenous obesity. Patients and method: Forty-five children with exogenous obesity, aged 6-17 years (27 girls and 18 boys) who were followed up at the Eskisehir Osmangazi University Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, were enrolled. Thirty-nine healthy children, aged 6-17 years (17 girls and 22 boys), were assigned to the control group. In addition to serum leptin, serum osteocalcin was measured as an indicator of osteoblastic activity, and urine Deoxypyridinoline/Creatinine ratio (DPD/Cr) was measured as an indicator of osteoclastic activity. BMD was assessed in all children by DEXA screening. Results: Serum leptin levels and osteocalcin levels were significantly higher in obese children than in the controls (both p 0.05); however, BMD in obese girls was higher than that in obese boys (p<0.05). Positive correlations were found between serum leptin concentrations, serum osteocalcin concentrations and BMD values in obese children (p<0.05). Discussion: In the present study, we identified an increase in BMD and serum osteocalcin levels in obese children. Accordingly, such an increase in osteoblastic activity is considered to be associated with an increase in serum leptin levels. More comprehensive studies are required to assess the central and peripheral effects of leptin on bone metabolism.
A Biologically-Motivated Developmental System Towards Perceptual Awareness in Vehicle-Based Robots

Existing learning networks and architectures are not suited to handle autonomous driving or driver assistance in complex, human-designed environments such as city driving. Developmental learning techniques for such “vehicle-based” robots will be necessary. Motivated by neuroscience, we propose a system with a design based on the criteria of autonomous, open-ended development. The eventual goal is perceptual awareness – a conceptual and symbolic understanding of the sensed environment, that can be communicated, developed and refined using a teacher defined language. In the system proposed here, radars and a camera are integrated to localize nearby objects for further analysis. The attended areas are each transformed into sparse representation by a layer of developed natural filters analogous to V1. Taking that layer’s response, MILN (Multilayer In-place Learning Network) integrates unsupervised and supervised learning to selforganize efficient representations for recognition of the types of the objects. We trained our system with data from 10 different city and highway road environments and compare with other learning algorithms favorably. Results of the comparison show that this system is the only one tested that can fit all the specified criteria of development for a generalpurpose learning architecture. ∗Both authors contributed equally to this paper. This work is supported in part by General Motors Research and Development.
T-ZrS nanoribbons: structure and electronic properties

Recently, monolayer and few layers of trigonal phases of zirconium disulfide (T-ZrS) sheets were obtained experimentally on hexagonal boron nitride using an evaporation technique. On the basis of these previous results, we report the structural and electronic properties of armchair nanoribbons (ANRs) and zigzag nanoribbons (ZNRs) of T-ZrS by means of density functional theory. According to our results, both ANRs and ZNRs are nonmagnetic semiconductors similar to a two-dimensional T-ZrS monolayer. The semiconducting character is not altered by termination of the edge atoms with hydrogen. The band gaps are associated with the ribbon widths and edge structures. The band gaps of bare and H-terminated ANR-ZrS decrease exponentially, whereas the band gaps of ultra-narrow zigzag nanoribbons oscillate slightly with increasing ribbon width. Although the band gaps of bare ANRs approach that of 2D T-ZrS, other structures have larger band gaps than the monolayer with increasing ribbon width. The cohesive and formation energies of bare ANRs and ZNRs converge rapidly to that of the 2D T-ZrS structure with increasing ribbon width.
Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the Vocational Fit Assessment (VFA).

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to determine the psychometric properties of the Vocational Fit Assessment (VFA) by examining its factor structure and subscale reliability. METHOD This prospective cross-sectional study used two surveys (one for worker abilities and one for job demands) to collect the data needed for the psychometric evaluation of the VFA. Latent parallel analysis and ordinal exploratory factor analysis were used to iteratively refine VFA subscales. RESULTS Ten unidimensional subscales emerged from factor analysis of VFA items: (1) Cognitive Abilities, (2) Communication Skills, (3) Computer Skills, (4) Higher Task-Related Abilities, (5) Interpersonal Skills, (6) Lower Task-Related Abilities, (7) Physical Abilities, (8) Safety, (9) Self-Determination, and (10) Work Structure. Subscale internal consistency (ordinal α) was ≥. 86 for VFA for worker abilities and ≥. 77 for VFA for job demands. CONCLUSION The unidimensional structure of VFA subscales and estimates of internal consistency lend initial evidence in support of their reliability and validity.
Crocin prevents platelet-derived growth factor BB-induced vascular smooth muscle cells proliferation and phenotypic switch

The phenotypic switch of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) is a major initiating factor for atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases. Platelet-derived growth factor-BB (PDGF-BB) initiates a number of biological processes that contribute to VSMC proliferation and phenotypic switch. Crocin, a component of saffron, has been reported to inhibit atheromatous plaque formation. However, the effects of crocin on PDGF-BB-induced VSMC proliferation and phenotypic switch remain unclear. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of crocin on PDGF-BB-induced VSMCs proliferation and phenotypic switch and its underlying mechanisms. Cell proliferation and markers of VSMCs phenotypic switch were measured using a Cell Counting Kit-8 assay and western blot analysis, respectively. The signaling pathways involved in the effects of crocin on VSMCs were validated by western blot analysis with or without the use of specific pathway inhibitors. Crocin significantly inhibited PDGF-BB-induced VSMCs proliferation compared with the PDGF-BB only group (P<0.05). In addition, crocin significantly abrogated the PDGF-BB-induced increase in contractile protein α-smooth muscle actin, calponin and decrease in synthetic proteins osteopontin (OPN) in a concentration dependent manner (P<0.05). In addition, crocin slowed PDGF-BB-induced Janus kinase (JAK)-signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) and extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK)/Kruppel-like factor 4 (KLF4) signaling activation in VSMCs. By applying the JAK inhibitor (AG490) and ERK1/2 inhibitor (U0126), the results suggested that the crocin inhibited PDGF-BB-induced VSMCs phenotypic switch through the JAK/STAT3 and ERK/KLF4 signaling pathways. These results suggested that crocin may effectively prevent PDGF-BB-induced VSMCs proliferation and phenotypic switch and may be a promising candidate for the therapy of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases.