Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genome Sequences of Four Divergent Multidrug-Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii Strains Isolated from Patients with Sepsis or Osteomyelitis

ABSTRACT Acinetobacter baumannii is a Gram-negative bacterium that causes nosocomial infections worldwide, with recent prevalence and higher frequency in wounded military personnel. Four A. baumannii strains from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) isolated between 2008 and 2009 were sequenced, representing diverse, multidrug-resistant isolates from osteomyelitis or septic patients.
A 0.18μm CMOS Receiver with Decision-feedback Equalization for Backplane Applications

Decision-feedback equalization (DFE) is explored to reduce inter-symbol interference (ISI) and crosstalks in highspeed backplane applications. In the design of clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit, embedding DFE within phase and frequency detector (PFD) enhances to recover data inherently from distorted input signals and facilitates to provide DFE with recovered clock. With PRBS15 data signaling at 5-Gb/s over 34" FR4 backplane, SPECTRE simulation in 0.18-μm CMOS process has shown the design feasibility
Optical Mapping of Repolarization and Refractoriness From Intact Hearts

BackgroundHeterogeneities of repolarization (R) across the myocardium have been invoked to explain most reentrant arrhythmias. The measurement of refractory periods (RPs) has been widely used to assess R, but conventional electrode and extrastimulus mapping techniques have not provided reliable maps of RPs. Methods and ResultsGuinea pig hearts were stained with a voltage-sensitive dye to measure fluorescence (F) action potentials (APs) from 124 sites with a photodiode array. AP duration (APD) was defined as the time between depolarization (dF/dt)max and R time points (ie, the time when AP returns to baseline or some percent thereof). However, R time points are difficult to determine because AP downstrokes are often encumbered by drifting baselines and motion artifacts, which make this definition ambiguous. In optical and microelectrode recordings, the second derivative of AP downstrokes is shown to contain an easily detected, unique local maximum. The correlation between the position of this maximum (d2F/dt2)max, and R has been tested during altered AP characteristics induced by changes in cycle length, ischemia, and hypoxia. Under these various modifications of the AP, the time points of (d2F/dt2) max fell at 97.0±2.1% of recovery to baseline. Extrastimulus techniques applied to (1) isolated myocytes, (2) intact hearts, and (3) mathematical simulations indicated that (d2V/dt2)max coincided with the effective RPs of APs. The coincidence of RPs and (d2V/dt2)max was valid within 5 milliseconds, for resting potentials of −75 to −90 mV and extrastimuli three times threshold voltage. ConclusionsThus, optical APs and (d2F/dt2)max can be used to map activation, R, and RPs with AP recordings from a single heartbeat.
Evaluation of hypoglycemic and antioxidant activities of ‘Koubru Yai’ (Stephania rotunda Engl.): An important medicinal plant used in traditional medicine of Manipur

The traditional practices documented during plant survey conducted in the state of Manipur region revealed the use of tuber of Stephania rotunda (SR) for treatment of diabetes by the local communities. The present study was aimed to evaluate hypoglycemic and antioxidant activity of ethanol and water extracts of SR tuber. Water and alcoholic extract of SR tuber were compared for total phenolic, flavonoids, antioxidant and α-amylase inhibition activity. The alcoholic extract of Stephania rotunda having high concentration of total Phenols and Flavonoid showed significant α-amylase inhibition activity (IC50 = 78.06μg/mL) and also antioxidant activities (DPPH) as compared to water extract. The present study provides the evidence that the use of Stephania rotunda tubers help in maintaining blood sugar level by the local communities of Manipur. Further, this study will also provide leads for future drug development programme for amelioration of diabetes.
Factors Affecting Uptake of Cervical Cancer Early Detection Measures Among Women in Thika, Kenya

In this study, 50 in-depth interviews were carried out with women from the general population in Thika, Kenya. We explored awareness, attitudes, and behavior toward cervical cancer and screening measures among the women. The concept of the health belief model (HBM) was used to develop the topics for the in-depth interviews. Our findings highlight the lack of awareness of cervical cancer and the benefits of early detection measures as critical barriers that affect women's participation in screening programs. We provide a basis for designing programs that will be acceptable and accessible to a larger population, resulting in a reduced cervical cancer burden.
High performance spatial-temporal de-interlacing technique using interfield information

This paper presents a hybrid method for video de-interlacing. The basic idea is to segment the field dynamically into background area or foreground area. The proposed method interpolates pixels using temporal information in the background area, and then interpolates remaining pixels using spatial and temporal algorithms in the foreground area. Extensive simulations conducted for video sequences show the performance of the proposed method over the previous line averaging methods and the schemes based on the ELA in terms of the objective and subjective image qualities.
Multi-feature based visual saliency detection in surveillance video

The perception of video is different from that of image because of the motion information in video. Motion objects lead to the difference between two neighboring frames which is usually focused on. By far, most papers have contributed to image saliency but seldom to video saliency. Based on scene understanding, a new video saliency detection model with multi-features is proposed in this paper. First, background is extracted based on binary tree searching, then main features in the foreground is analyzed using a multi-scale perception model. The perception model integrates faces as a high level feature, as a supplement to other low-level features such as color, intensity and orientation. Motion saliency map is calculated using the statistic of the motion vector field. Finally, multi-feature conspicuities are merged with different weights. Compared with the gaze map from subjective experiments, the output of the multi-feature based video saliency detection model is close to gaze map.
Convex programming-based resource management for uncertain execution platforms

An approach to constrained resource allocation for real time software components executing on nondeterministic hardware is considered. A model for resource consumption based on execution rate is investigated together with an event-based measurement and parameter estimation scheme. Finally, an algorithm for real time constrained optimization of resources is presented together with results from a case study with synthetic software components.
Pathologic Features of Prognostic Significance in Adrenocortical Carcinoma

There are currently no well-established pathologic prognostic factors helpful in distinguishing low versus high grade adrenocortical carcinomas. The effect of 11 pathologic parameters on survival was investigated in 42 cases of adrenocortical carcinoma. Only one variable, mitotic rate, had a strong statistical association with patient outcome. The 21 patients with carcinomas with > 20 mitoses per 50 high power fields (hpf) had a median survival of 14 months, whereas the 21 patients with carcinomas with ≤ 20 mitoses had a median survival of 58 months (p < 0.02). The presence of atypical mitoses, capsular invasion, tumor weight > 250 g, and size > 10 cm each showed a marginal statistical association with poor survival (p < 0.06), whereas other features assessed, such as nuclear grade, presence of necrosis or of venous or sinusoidal invasion, character of the tumor cell cytoplasm, or architectural pattern, showed no statistical significance in predicting survival. It is proposed that adrenal cortical carcinomas with >20 mitoses be designated high grade, whereas tumors with ≤20 mitoses be designated low grade.
Evidence of coarticulation in a phonological feature detection system

In this study, we investigate the capability of phonological features (PFs) in capturing the fine variational structure in speech which arise due to natural phenomenon such as coarticulation. The PF theory provides a framework in which a far more richer description of speech is possible when compared to traditional phonetic representations. However, current approaches toward training PF detectors do not explicitly expose the statistical system to patterns of coarticulation. The analysis presented here shows that despite this handicap, our PF system still learns to capture these variants in speech. In fact, it is noted that the use of phone-based transcriptions to judge the performance of PF systems erroneously labels such variants as errors. Our result show that a large proportion of speech frames that are deemed errors by phone-transcriptions are actually coarticulated as is evidenced by their phonetic context. These findings offer important knowledge in analyzing and improving the utility of PFs in ASR (automatic speech recognition) for spontaneous conversational speech.
The Great Moderation in Economic Volatility: A View from the States

Since the middle of the 1980s, economic growth in the U.S. has become much more stable than it was in the preceding three decades, and the magnitude of the decline is substantial. What accounts for the decline in volatility, and why is the decline important for policymakers? In “The Great Moderation in Economic Volatility: A View from the States,” Jerry Carlino discusses these questions and makes the case that using state-level rather than just national data offers a much larger testing ground for analyzing the decline in economic volatility.
Improved Tolerance to Various Abiotic Stresses in Transgenic Sweet Potato (Ipomoea batatas) Expressing Spinach Betaine Aldehyde Dehydrogenase

Abiotic stresses are critical delimiters for the increased productivity and cultivation expansion of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), a root crop with worldwide importance. The increased production of glycine betaine (GB) improves plant tolerance to various abiotic stresses without strong phenotypic changes, providing a feasible approach to improve stable yield production under unfavorable conditions. The gene encoding betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) is involved in the biosynthesis of GB in plants, and the accumulation of GB by the heterologous overexpression of BADH improves abiotic stress tolerance in plants. This study is to improve sweet potato, a GB accumulator, resistant to multiple abiotic stresses by promoted GB biosynthesis. A chloroplastic BADH gene from Spinacia oleracea (SoBADH) was introduced into the sweet potato cultivar Sushu-2 via Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. The overexpression of SoBADH in the transgenic sweet potato improved tolerance to various abiotic stresses, including salt, oxidative stress, and low temperature. The increased BADH activity and GB accumulation in the transgenic plant lines under normal and multiple environmental stresses resulted in increased protection against cell damage through the maintenance of cell membrane integrity, stronger photosynthetic activity, reduced reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, and induction or activation of ROS scavenging by the increased activity of free radical-scavenging enzymes. The increased proline accumulation and systemic upregulation of many ROS-scavenging genes in stress-treated transgenic plants also indicated that GB accumulation might stimulate the ROS-scavenging system and proline biosynthesis via an integrative mechanism. This study demonstrates that the enhancement of GB biosynthesis in sweet potato is an effective and feasible approach to improve its tolerance to multiple abiotic stresses without causing phenotypic defects. This strategy for trait improvement in sweet potato not only stabilizes yield production in normal soils in unpredictable climates but also provides a novel germplasm for sweet potato production on marginal lands.
On an efficient implementation of the multistage Wiener filter through Householder reflections for DS-CDMA interference suppression

The paper describes the implementation of the multistage Wiener filter (MWF) through a series of nested Householder transformations applied to the input signal as a means to form the analysis filter-bank part of the structure. The input signal is successively projected onto an appropriate subspace whereby the mutual information is maximized at each step, as required by the MWF structure. The method presented is described-as a constrained optimization problem, where the constraints are imposed on the input signal, and not on the coefficients of the filter. The method is applicable to reduced-rank as well as to full-rank implementations of the MWF. The Householder transformation assures that the equivalent blocking matrices for all the stages are efficiently implemented via single reflections and that only unitary reflections are employed; robustness against deleterious finite-precision effects is, therefore, improved. Simulations of a DS-CDMA interference suppression receiver illustrate the robust behavior of the proposed scheme when implemented in finite precision as compared to the conventional MWF using non-orthogonal blocking matrices.
Linear precoding and finite rate feedback design for V-BLAST architecture

Linear precoding is a simple method to improve the performance of V-BLAST architecture. However, it requires perfect channel state information at the transmitter, which necessitates a great amount of feedback. In this paper, we propose a linear precoding scheme for the V-BLAST architecture with an MMSE-SIC receiver. The whole scheme includes the design of an unquantized precoder and its finite rate feedback. The unquantized precoder, consisting of a beamforming matrix and a power allocation matrix, is designed by maximizing the minimum post-detection SINR of the MMSE-SIC receiver. In addition to the optimal precoder, we give a suboptimal solution which is shown to be asymptotically optimal at low SNR. The advantage of this suboptimal solution is that its extension to finite rate feedback is straightforward. Specifically, beamforming vectors are selected sequentially from a predetermined codebook and the indices are fed back. Besides, elements of the power allocation matrix are scalar quantized and fed back. Theoretical analysis reveals that the unquantized beamforming vectors are uniformly distributed on the unit sphere, leading to a very natural codebook design criterion - the Grassmannian criterion. Moreover, the proposed scheme is flexible enough to allow for a change in the number of data streams without redesigning the codebook. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Information Leakage through Online Social Networking: Opening the Doorway for Advanced Persistence Threats

The explosion of online social networking (OSN) in recent years has caused damages to organisations due to leakage of information by their employees. Employees’ social networking behaviour, whether accidental or intentional, provides an opportunity for advanced persistent threats (APT) attackers to realise their social engineering techniques and undetectable zero-day exploits. APT attackers use a spear-phishing method that targeted on key employees of victim organisations through social media in order to conduct reconnaissance and theft of confidential proprietary information. This conceptual paper posits OSN as the most challenging channel of information leakage and provides an explanation about the underlying factors of employees leaking information via this channel through a theoretical lens from information systems. It also describes how OSN becomes an attack vector of APT owing to employees’ social networking behaviour, and finally, recommends security education, training and awareness (SETA) for organisations to combat these threats.
A program which solves arithmetic problems in Turkish

This paper describes AL‹, the first computer program which can solve primary-school-level arithmetic problems stated in Turkish. This task involves several subtasks: morphological analysis of every word in the input, syntactic analysis of each sentence, semantic analysis of words, providing a description of the commonsense world that is large enough to enable the correct answering of the problems, and generating the answer in human-readable form.
Measuring Semantic Textual Similarity of Sentences Using Modified Information Content and Lexical Taxonomy

In this paper, we present a survey and comparative studies on semantic textual similarity methods, those are based on WordNet taxonomy. We also proposed a new method for measuring semantic similarity between sentences. This proposed method, uses the advantages of taxonomy methods and merge these information to a language model. It considers the WordNet synsets for lexical relationships between nodes/words and uni-gram language model is implemented over a large corpus to assign the information content value between the two nodes of different classes. Finally, a similarity score is generated by considering the maximum weight and shortest distance of the graph. To evaluate and compare the method, SemEval 2015 English STS task 2 training dataset is considered.
MyPeerReview: an online peer-reviewing system for programming courses

In Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), there has been an interest in employing the peer-review process in context of teaching programming but previous attempts to find an appropriate platform have been unfruitful. In this paper we describe the considerations with regard to the design and implementation of a web-based peer-review system that enables the use cases involved with the process. We tested the system in a programming course to assess its suitability and usability from the students' point of view. The test confirmed the design to be working and laid out the groundwork for future development of the system.
Colchicine for Primary Biliary Cirrhosis: A Cochrane Hepato-biliary Group Systematic Review of Randomized Clinical Trials

OBJECTIVES:Colchicine is used for patients with primary biliary cirrhosis due to its immunomodulatory and antifibrotic potential. The results from randomized clinical trials have, however, been inconsistent. We conducted a systematical review to evaluate the effect of colchicine for primary biliary cirrhosis.METHODS:We identified randomized clinical trials comparing colchicine with placebo/no intervention. We analyzed effects by fixed and random effects model. We investigated heterogeneity by subgroup and sensitivity analyses.RESULTS:We included 10 trials involving 631 patients, four of which were high-quality trials. No significant differences were detected between colchicine and placebo/no intervention regarding mortality (relative risk (RR), 1.21; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.71–2.06), mortality or liver transplantation (RR = 1.00; 95% CI, 0.67–1.49), liver complications, liver biochemical variables, liver histology, or adverse events. Regarding mortality, an extreme case analysis favoring colchicine did not demonstrate beneficial effects of colchicine, whereas an extreme case analysis favoring placebo/no intervention demonstrated a detrimental effect of colchicine (RR = 2.28; 95% CI, 1.17–4.44). The number of patients without improvement of pruritus significantly decreased in the colchicine group (RR = 0.75; 95% CI, 0.65–0.87). However, this estimate was based on only 156 patients from three trials.CONCLUSIONS:There is insufficient evidence to support the use of colchicine for patients with primary biliary cirrhosis. As we are unable to exclude a risk of increased mortality, we recommend to use colchicine only in randomized clinical trials.
Hepatic Tissue Engineering Using Scaffolds: State of the Art

Severe hepatic failure accounts for many deaths and raises medical costs each year worldwide. Currently, liver transplantation is the most common therapeutic option for patients with end-stage chronic liver disease. Due to decrease in the number of organ donors, many in need of transplantation continue to remain on the waiting list. Hepatic Tissue Engineering is a step toward alleviating the need for organ donors. Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering require two complementary key ingredients as follows: 1) biologically compatible scaffolds that can be readily adopted by the body system without harm, and 2) suitable cells including various stem cells or primary cells that effectively replace the damaged tissues without adverse consequences. Yet many challenges must be overcome such as scaffold choice, cell source and immunological barriers. Today, hepatogenic differentiation of stem cells has created trust and promise for use of these cells in hepatic tissue engineering and liver replacement. However, using suitable scaffolds is an important key to achieving the necessary functions required for hepatic replacement. In recent years, different scaffolds have been used for liver tissue engineering. In this review, we have presented different concepts in using cell /scaffold constructs to guide hepatic tissue engineering.
Novel Roles for Osteopontin and Clusterin in Peripheral Motor and Sensory Axon Regeneration

Previous studies demonstrated that Schwann cells (SCs) express distinct motor and sensory phenotypes, which impact the ability of these pathways to selectively support regenerating neurons. In the present study, unbiased microarray analysis was used to examine differential gene expression in denervated motor and sensory pathways in rats. Several genes that were significantly upregulated in either denervated sensory or motor pathways were identified and two secreted factors were selected for further analysis: osteopontin (OPN) and clusterin (CLU) which were upregulated in denervated motor and sensory pathways, respectively. Sciatic nerve transection induced upregulation of OPN and CLU and expression of both returned to baseline levels with ensuing regeneration. In vitro analysis using exogenously applied OPN induced outgrowth of motor but not sensory neurons. CLU, however, induced outgrowth of sensory neurons, but not motor neurons. To assess the functional importance of OPN and CLU, peripheral nerve regeneration was examined in OPN and CLU−/− mice. When compared with OPN+/+ mice, motor neuron regeneration was reduced in OPN−/− mice. Impaired regeneration through OPN−/− peripheral nerves grafted into OPN+/+ mice indicated that loss of OPN in SCs was responsible for reduced motor regeneration. Sensory neuron regeneration was impaired in CLU−/− mice following sciatic nerve crush and impaired regeneration nerve fibers through CLU−/− nerve grafts transplanted into CLU+/+ mice indicated that reduced sensory regeneration is likely due to SC-derived CLU. Together, these studies suggest unique roles for SC-derived OPN and CLU in regeneration of peripheral motor and sensory axons.