Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk factors for cardiovascular disease and future osteoarthritis-related arthroplasty: a population-based cohort study in men and women from Malmö, Sweden

Objective: To investigate the hypothesis that cardiovascular risk factors increase the likelihood of future osteoarthritis (OA)-related arthroplasty in adult men and women. Methods: Baseline cohort data on cardiovascular risk factors [age, socio-economic class, family history, obesity, smoking, glucose, cholesterol, blood pressure, and early cardiovascular disease (CVD) history] were linked to clinical registers of OA-related arthroplasty data. The study included 8749 women and 14 821 men with up to a 30-year follow-up. Results: In women, higher cardiovascular risk groups were more likely to have an OA outcome compared to the lowest risk quartile group (trend p < 0.001). The estimates were as follows: second quartile risk: rate ratio (RR) 2.15, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.6–2.9, third quartile risk: 3.32 (2.5–4.5); and highest risk quartile: 3.47 (2.6–4.7). In men, higher cardiovascular risk groups were also more likely to have an OA outcome compared to the lowest risk quartile group (trend p = 0.001). The estimates were as follows: second quartile risk: RR 1.44, 95% CI 1.1–1.9; third quartile risk: 1.38 (1.1–1.8); and highest risk quartile: 1.67 (1.3–2.2). Conclusions: Our large cohort study with up to a 30-year follow-up period provides evidence to support the hypothesis of shared risk factors in CVD and OA, and the findings suggest an alternative aetiological process in the pathogenesis of OA.
Effects of atrazine on dna damage and antioxidative enzymes in Vicia faba

To evaluate atrazine (2‐chloro‐4‐ethylamino‐6‐isopropylamino‐1,3,5‐triazine) ecotoxicology in soil, the effect of atrazine on the activity of antioxidative enzymes (superoxide dismutase [SOD], catalase [CAT], and guaiacol peroxidase [POD]) was investigated in Vicia faba roots. Tissues from each treatment were collected on the days 7, 14, 21, and 28. Compared with the controls, SOD activity in V. faba roots was stimulated by the 2.5 mg/kg treatment and inhibited by the 5 and 10 mg/kg treatments, and CAT and POD activities in the 10 mg/kg treatment were inhibited on the whole. The Olive tail moments of single‐cell gel electrophoresis of root cells were enhanced after treatment with different doses of atrazine on days 7, 14, 21, and 28, and significant differences were found compared to the controls. In conclusion, atrazine induces oxidative stress and DNA damage on V. faba.
Comparison of Hybrid III Child Test Dummies to Pediatric PMHS in Blunt Thoracic Impact Response

The limited availability of pediatric biomechanical impact response data presents a significant challenge to the development of child dummies. In the absence of these data, the development of the current generation of child dummies has been driven by scaling of the biomechanical response requirements of the existing adult test dummies. Recently published pediatric blunt thoracic impact response data provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of these scaling methodologies. However, the published data include several processing anomalies and nonphysical features. These features are corrected by minimizing instrumentation and processing error to improve the fidelity of the individual force-deflection responses. Using these data, biomechanical impact response corridors are calculated for a 3-year-old child and a 6-year-old child. These calculated corridors differ from both the originally published postmortem human subject (PMHS) corridors and the impact response requirements of the current child dummies. Furthermore, the response of the Hybrid III 3-year-old test dummy in the same impact condition shows a similar deflection but a significantly higher force than the 3-year-old corridor. The response of the Hybrid III 6-year-old dummy, on the other hand, correlates well with the calculated 6-year-old corridor. The newly developed 3-year-old and 6-year-old blunt thoracic impact response corridors can be used to define data-driven impact response requirements as an alternative to scaling-driven requirements.
Potential application of population models in the European ecological risk assessment of chemicals II: Review of models and their potential to address environmental protection aims

Whereas current chemical risk assessment (RA) schemes within the European Union (EU) focus mainly on toxicity and bioaccumulation of chemicals in individual organisms, most protection goals aim at preserving populations of nontarget organisms rather than individuals. Ecological models are tools rarely recommended in official technical documents on RA of chemicals, but are widely used by researchers to assess risks to populations, communities and ecosystems. Their great advantage is the relatively straightforward integration of the sensitivity of species to chemicals, the mode of action and fate in the environment of toxicants, life‐history traits of the species of concern, and landscape features. To promote the usage of ecological models in regulatory risk assessment, this study tries to establish whether existing, published ecological modeling studies have addressed or have the potential to address the protection aims and requirements of the chemical directives of the EU. We reviewed 148 publications, and evaluated and analyzed them in a database according to defined criteria. Published models were also classified in terms of 5 areas where their application would be most useful for chemical RA. All potential application areas are well represented in the published literature. Most models were developed to estimate population‐level responses on the basis of individual effects, followed by recovery process assessment, both in individuals and at the level of metapopulations. We provide case studies for each of the proposed areas of ecological model application. The lack of clarity about protection goals in legislative documents made it impossible to establish a direct link between modeling studies and protection goals. Because most of the models reviewed here were not developed for regulatory risk assessment, there is great potential and a variety of ecological models in the published literature. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2010;6:338–360. © 2010 SETAC
Paper Electronics

Paper is ubiquitous in everyday life and a truly low‐cost substrate. The use of paper substrates could be extended even further, if electronic applications would be applied next to or below the printed graphics. However, applying electronics on paper is challenging. The paper surface is not only very rough compared to plastics, but is also porous. While this is detrimental for most electronic devices manufactured directly onto paper substrates, there are also approaches that are compatible with the rough and absorptive paper surface. In this review, recent advances and possibilities of these approaches are evaluated and the limitations of paper electronics are discussed.
Match Planar Curve Based on Affine Invariant

In order to recognize the curve with the same feature points but the curvature between the two adjacent feature points is different; a novel method for matching curve is proposed under the affine transformation. First feature points are matched both on model contour and object contour, then the affine region is divided for obtaining a series of sub-region's centroids by using feature points and the whole contour's centroid. Because area ratio of triangles, which constituted by centroid of the whole contour region and sub-region’s centroids, is invariant under affine transformation. We introduce area ratio of triangles to construct affine invariant, and normalized it too. And then a new recognition vector matrix is defined, and a different measure function is defined by us too. Finally the different measure value between model curve and object curve is calculated, which can be employed to judge whether the model and object are matched. Theory analysis and experiment results show the method is feasible, which can not only match the different curve but also distinguish the object with the similar shape according to the different measure value.
Suicidal thoughts and associated factors in an elderly population

This study examined the prevalence of suicidal thoughts and associated factors in an elderly population. Data for 969 elderly subjects from a population‐based study were used, and examinations by physicians, including psychiatric examination and informants' interview, were assessed. In total, 13.3% of the subjects had had suicidal thoughts during the last 2 weeks (10.8% fleetingly and 2.5% frequently). Of those who had had fleeting suicidal thoughts, 26.7% also had major depression, while 50% of those who had frequent suicidal thoughts were depressed. In addition, suicidal thoughts were associated with increased disability in daily living, institutionalization, visual problems and the use of psychotropic drugs. It is concluded that a careful psychiatric assessment is necessary when suicidal thoughts are expressed by an elderly person.
Phase-II Clinical Validation of a Powered Exoskeleton for the Treatment of Elbow Spasticity

Introduction: Spasticity is a typical motor disorder in patients affected by stroke. Typically post-stroke rehabilitation consists of repetition of mobilization exercises on impaired limbs, aimed to reduce muscle hypertonia and mitigate spastic reflexes. It is currently strongly debated if the treatment's effectiveness improves with the timeliness of its adoption; in particular, starting intensive rehabilitation as close as possible to the stroke event may counteract the growth and postpone the onset of spasticity. In this paper we present a phase-II clinical validation of a robotic exoskeleton in treating subacute post-stroke patients. Methods: Seventeen post-stroke patients participated in 10 daily rehabilitation sessions using the NEUROExos Elbow Module exoskeleton, each one lasting 45 min: the exercises consisted of isokinetic passive mobilization of the elbow, with torque threshold to detect excessive user's resistance to the movement. We investigated the safety by reporting possible adverse events, such as mechanical, electrical or software failures of the device or injuries or pain experienced by the patient. As regards the efficacy, the Modified Ashworth Scale, was identified as primary outcome measure and the NEEM metrics describing elbow joint resistance to passive extension (i.e., maximum extension torque and zero-torque angle) as secondary outcomes. Results: During the entire duration of the treatments no failures or adverse events for the patients were reported. No statistically significant differences were found in the Modified Ashworth Scale scores, between pre-treatment and post-treatment and between post-treatment and follow-up sessions, indicating the absence of spasticity increase throughout (14 days) and after (3–4 months follow-up) the treatment. Exoskeleton metrics confirmed the absence of significant difference in between pre- and post-treatment data, whereas intra-session data highlighted significant differences in the secondary outcomes, toward a decrease of the subject's joint resistance. Conclusions: The results show that our robotic exoskeleton can be safely used for prolonged sessions in post-stroke and suggest that intensive early rehabilitation treatment may prevent the occurrence of spasticity at a later stage. Moreover, the NEEM metrics were found to be reliable compared to the Modified Ashworth Scale and sensitive to revealing intra-session changes of elbow resistance to passive extension, in agreement with clinical evidences.
PaperSketch: a paper-digital collaborative remote sketching tool

Pen and paper support the rapid production of sketches. However, the paper interface is not always optimal for collaborative sketching as seen in brainstorming sessions where multiple parties would often like to communicate and participate in the sketching synchronously. Novel interactive paper solutions may provide the answer by bridging the paper-digital divide and allowing users to sketch on paper simultaneously while capturing the actions digitally. We present an analysis of collaborative sketching activities in working environments with remote participation. After highlighting the importance of paper for natural interaction in these settings, we introduce PaperSketch, an interactive paper-digital tool for collaborative remote sketching. We discuss the collaborative development of ideas based on the prototype and outline how important feedback issues have been addressed by utilising spatial constraints and multimodal features.
Using event-driven lightweight DSC-based agents for MAS modelling

To date several agent models and related programming frameworks have been introduced for developing distributed applications in terms of multi-agent systems in open and dynamic environments. Among them, those based on lightweight architectures, asynchronous messages/events and state-based programming such as JADE, Bond and Actors have demonstrated great effectiveness for modelling open and distributed software systems. In this paper, we propose the event-driven lightweight distilled statecharts-based agent (ELDA) model which is based on the same fundamentals of the aforementioned agent models and frameworks, and provides a more effective design enabled by: a Statecharts-based specification of the agent behaviour, multiple coordination spaces for local/remote inter-agent and agent/non-agent-component interactions, and a coarse-grained strong agent mobility. A MAS based on the ELDA model can be easily designed through the ELDA meta-model and programmed through a Java-based implementation of the meta-model (ELDAFramework). Visual programming and automatic code generation of the MAS under-development is supported by an Eclipse-based visual tool (ELDATool). The produced MAS code can be executed by a discrete-event simulator framework (ELDASim) which allows for the validation of the MAS under-development. A simple yet effective case study is provided to exemplify the proposed model and its related tools.
Advanced Build-up Materials for High Speed Transmission Application

Build-up process is a highly effective method for miniaturization and high density integration of printed circuit boards. Along with increasing demands for high transmission speed of electronic devices with high functionality, packaging substrates installed with semiconductors in such devices are strongly required to reduce the transmission loss. Our insulation materials are used in a semi-additive process (SAP) with low dielectric loss tangent, smooth resin surface after desmear, and good insulation reliability. Actually, the transmission loss of strip line substrates and Cu surface roughness impact on transmission loss were measured using our materials. Furthermore, low dielectric molding film with low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) and low Young's modulus are introduced.
Discriminative Hash Tracking With Group Sparsity

In this paper, we propose a novel tracking framework based on discriminative supervised hashing algorithm. Different from previous methods, we treat tracking as a problem of object matching in a binary space. Using the hash functions, all target templates and candidates are mapped into compact binary codes, with which the target matching is conducted effectively. To be specific, we make full use of the label information to assign a compact and discriminative binary code for each sample. And to deal with out-of-sample case, multiple hash functions are trained to describe the learned binary codes, and group sparsity is introduced to the hash projection matrix to select the representative and discriminative features dynamically, which is crucial for the tracker to adapt to target appearance variations. The whole training problem is formulated as an optimization function where the hash codes and hash function are learned jointly. Extensive experiments on various challenging image sequences demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed tracker.
Chemopreventive effect of diclofenac on mammary carcinogenesis in Sprague-Dawley rats

Chemopreventive effect of non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in mammary carcinogenesis was reported in several studies. In this study, the effect of a nonselective cyclooxygenase inhibitor diclofenac (DICLO) in the prevention of N-methyl-N-nitrosourea (NMU)-induced mammary carcinogenesis in Sprague-Dawley female rats was evaluated. NMU was administered to animals intraperitoneally in two doses of 50 mg kg−1 b.w. within postnatal days 42-48. In experiment A (short-term administration), DICLO was administrated intramuscularly (5 mg kg−1 b.w.) every other day, starting 3 days before and for subsequent 25 days after first NMU injection. In experiment B (long-term administration), DICLO was administered in tap water (0.01 mg ml−1) continually, starting 7 days before and for subsequent 22 weeks after first NMU dose. The study was terminated 22 weeks after the first dose of NMU in both experiments. After DICLO treatment, tumor frequency per group was reduced in both variants of drug administration: in experiment A by 38% and in experiment B by 39.5%. Moreover, DICLO decreased tumor incidence by 11.5% and delayed tumor latency by 14 days in experiment B. In our preventive-curative experiments DICLO decreased some parameters of NMU-induced rat mammary carcinogenesis, mainly the tumor frequency.
Covariance based modeling of underwater scenes for fish detection

In this paper we present an algorithm for visual object detection in a underwater real-life context which explicitly models both the background and the foreground for each frame - thus helping to avoid foreground absorption into similar background -, and integrates both colour and texture features (which have proved effective in overcoming the limitations of colour-only appearance descriptors) into a covariance-based model, which provides an elegant way to merge multiple features together and enforce structural relationships. A joint domain-range model combined to a post-processing approach based on Markov Random Field takes into account the spatial dependency between pixels in the classification process, unlike the classical pixel-oriented modeling techniques. Our results show the effectiveness of this approach in the underwater environment, which presents a lot of variety in scene conditions, objects' motion patterns, shapes and colouring, and background activity.
Optimal detumbling of defunct spacecraft using space robots

Unmanned spacecraft equipped with manipulators could be used for on-orbit servicing or for capture and removal from orbit of large space debris. After grasping of tumbling target satellite with the manipulator both satellites connected by the manipulator begin to rotate around the common mass center. Changes of manipulator configuration would results in changes of combined moment of inertia and changes in rotational motion of such system. Two satellites connected by the manipulator can be considered as a one rigid body with variable inertia. In this paper we present application of Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) algorithm for planning changes of inertia tensor of such rotating body in order to minimize rotational kinetic energy and stabilize motion around one axis. Minimization of rotational energy is crucial for the detumbling phase of orbital capture maneuver. Results of numerical simulation is presented and possible directions of future work are indicated.
BFTCloud: A Byzantine Fault Tolerance Framework for Voluntary-Resource Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is becoming a popular and important solution for building highly reliable applications on distributed resources. However, it is a critical challenge to guarantee the system reliability of applications especially in voluntary-resource cloud due to the highly dynamic environment. In this paper, we present BFT Cloud (Byzantine Fault Tolerant Cloud), a Byzantine fault tolerance framework for building robust systems involuntary-resource cloud environments. BFT Cloud guarantees robustness of systems when up to f of totally 3f+1 resource providers are faulty, including crash faults, arbitrary behaviors faults, etc. BFT Cloud is evaluated in a large-scale real-world experiment which consists of 257 voluntary-resource providers located in 26 countries. The experimental results shows that BFT Cloud guarantees high reliability of systems built on the top of voluntary-resource cloud infrastructure and ensures good performance of these systems.
An Analysis Framework for Security in Web Applications

Software systems interact with outside environments (e.g., by taking inputs from a user) and usually have particular assumptions about these environments. Unchecked or improperly checked assumptions can affect security and reliability of the systems. A major class of such problems is the improper validation of user inputs. In this paper, we present the design of a static analysis framework to address these input related problems in the context of web applications. In particular, we study how to prevent the class of SQL command injection attacks. In our framework, we use an abstract model of a source program that takes user inputs and dynamically constructs SQL queries. In particular, we conservatively approximate the set of SQL queries that a program may generate as a finite state automaton. Our framework then applies some novel checking algorithms on this automaton to indicate or verify the absence of security violations in the original application program. Work is in progress to build a prototype of our analysis.