Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
32 Numerical methods for nuclear fuel burnup calculations

The material composition of nuclear fuel changes constantly due to nuclides transforming to other nuclides via neutron-induced transmutation reactions and spontaneous radioactive decay. The objective of burnup calculations is to simulate these changes over time. This thesis considers two essential topics of burnup calculations: the numerical solution of burnup equations based on computing the burnup matrix exponential, and the uncertainty analysis of neutron transport criticality equation based on perturbation theory. The burnup equations govern the changes in nuclide concentrations over time. They form a system of first order differential equations that can be formally solved by computing the matrix exponential of the burnup matrix. Due to the dramatic variation in the half-lives of different nuclides, the system is extremely stiff and the problem is complicated by vast variations in the time steps used in burnup calculations. In this thesis, the mathematical properties of burnup matrices are studied. It is deduced that their eigenvalues are generally confined to a region near the negative real axis. Rational approximations that are accurate near the negative real axis, and the Chebyshev rational approximation method (CRAM) in particular, are proposed as a novel method for solving the burnup equations. The results suggest that the proposed approach is capable of providing a robust and accurate solution to the burnup equations with a very short computation time. When a mathematical model contains uncertain parameters, this uncertainty is propagated to responses dependent on the model. This thesis studies the propagation of neutron interaction data uncertainty through the criticality equation on a fuel assembly level. The considered approach is based on perturbation theory, which allows computing the sensitivity profiles of a response with respect to any number of parameters in an efficient manner by solving an adjoint system in addition to the original forward problem. The uncertainty related to these parameters can then be propagated deterministically to the response by linearizing the response.
Closed World Reasoning in the Semantic Web through Epistemic Operators

The open world assumption makes OWL principally suitable to handle incomplete knowledge in Semantic Web scenarios, however, some scenarios desire closed world reasoning. Autoepistemic description logics allow to realise closed world reasoning in open world settings through epistemic operators. An extension of OWL by epistemic operators therefore allows for non-monotonic features known from closed world systems, such as default rules, integrity constraints or epistemic querying. These features can be beneficially applied in Semantic Web scenarios, where OWL lacks expressiveness.
Epigenetic Activity of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor Gamma Agonists Increases the Anticancer Effect of Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors on Multiple Myeloma Cells

Epigenetic modifications play a major role in the development of multiple myeloma. We have previously reported that the PPARγ agonist pioglitazone (PIO) enhances, in-vitro, the cytotoxic effect of the Histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi), valproic acid (VPA), on multiple myeloma cells. Here, we described the development of a new multiple myeloma mouse model using MOLP8 cells, in order to evaluate the effect of VPA/PIO combination on the progression of myeloma cells, by analyzing the proliferation of bone marrow plasma cells. We showed that VPA/PIO delays the progression of the disease and the invasion of myeloma cells in the bone marrow. Mechanistically, we demonstrated that VPA/PIO increases the cleavage of caspase 3 and PARP, and induces the acetylation of Histone 3 (H3). Furthermore, we provided evidence that PPARγ agonist is able to enhance the action of other HDACi such as Vorinostat or Mocetinostat. Using PPARγ antagonist or siPPARγ, we strongly suggest that, as described during adipogenesis, PIO behaves as an epigenetic regulator by improving the activity of HDACi. This study highlights the therapeutic benefit of PIO/VPA combination, compared to VPA treatment as a single-arm therapy on multiple myeloma and further highlights that such combination may constitute a new promising treatment strategy which should be supported by clinical trials.
The impact of child problem behaviors of children with ASD on parent mental health: The mediating role of acceptance and empowerment

Raising a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has often been associated with higher levels of parenting stress and psychological distress, and a number of studies have examined the role of psychological processes as mediators of the impact of child problem behavior on parent mental health. The current study examined the relations among child problem behavior, parent mental health, psychological acceptance, and parent empowerment. Participants included 228 parents of children diagnosed with ASD, 6–21 years of age. As expected, psychological acceptance and empowerment were negatively related to the severity of parent mental health problems. When acceptance and empowerment were compared with each other through a test of multiple mediation, only psychological acceptance emerged as a significant partial mediator of the path between child problem behavior and parent mental health problems. As child problem behavior increased, parent psychological acceptance decreased, resulting in an increase in parent mental health problems. These findings suggest that for problems that are chronic and difficult to address, psychological acceptance may be an important factor in coping for parents of young people with ASD, in line with the growing literature on positive coping as compared with problem-focused coping.
Paperclickers: Affordable solution for classroom response systems

We propose paperclickers, a low‐cost classroom response system requiring a single mobile device for the teacher and cards with printed codes for the students, which results in a low‐cost, easy‐to‐deploy solution that aims at broadening the adoption of active learning techniques in developing countries. We implemented paperclickers as a smartphone application, whose development history, with pitfalls and lessons learned, we describe in this paper. We also describe the results of the first round of usability tests we performed on the first prototype, indicating the feasibility of paperclickers, the opportunities for design improvement, and how they affected the current version of the software. A beta release of paperclickers is available for the public.
Leveraging Value Locality in Optimizing NAND Flash-based SSDs

NAND flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are increasingly being deployed in storage systems at different levels such as buffer-caches and even secondary storage. However, the poor reliability and performance offered by these SSDs for write-intensive workloads continues to be their key shortcoming. Several solutions based on traditionally popular notions of temporal and spatial locality help reduce write traffic for SSDs. However, another form of locality - value locality - has remained completely unexplored. Value locality implies that certain data items (i.e., "values," not just logical addresses) are likely to be accessed preferentially. Given evidence for the presence of significant value locality in real-world workloads, we design CA-SSD which employs content-addressable storage (CAS) to exploit such locality. Our CA-SSD design employs enhancements primarily in the flash translation layer (FTL) with minimal additional hardware, suggesting its feasibility. Using three real-world workloads with content information, we devise statistical characterizations of two aspects of value locality - value popularity and temporal value locality - that form the foundation of CA-SSD. We observe that CA-SSD is able to reduce average response times by about 59-84% compared to traditional SSDs. Even for workloads with little or no value locality, CA-SSD continues to offer comparable performance to a traditional SSD. Our findings advocate adoption of CAS in SSDs, paving the way for a new generation of these devices.
Repetitive locomotor training and physiotherapy improve walking and basic activities of daily living after stroke: a single-blind, randomized multicentre trial (DEutsche GAngtrainerStudie, DEGAS)

Objective: To evaluate the effect of repetitive locomotor training on an electromechanical gait trainer plus physiotherapy in subacute stroke patients. Design: Randomized controlled trial. Setting: Four German neurological rehabilitation centres. Subjects: One hundred and fifty-five non-ambulatory patients (first-time stroke <60 days). Intervention: Group A received 20 min locomotor training and 25 min physiotherapy; group B had 45 min physiotherapy every week day for four weeks. Main outcome measures: Primary variables were gait ability (Functional Ambulation Category, 0-5) and the Barthel Index (0-100), blindly assessed at study onset, end, and six months later for follow-up. Responders to the therapy had to become ambulatory (Functional Ambulation Category 4 or 5) or reach a Barthel Index of ≥ 75. Secondary variables were walking velocity, endurance, mobility and leg power. Results: The intention-to-treat analysis revealed that significantly greater number of patients in group A could walk independently: 41 of 77 versus 17 of 78 in group B (P B < 0.0001) at treatment end. Also, significantly more group A patients had reached a Barthel Index ≥ 75: 44 of 77 versus 21 of 78 (P B < 0.0001). At six-month follow-up, the superior gait ability in group A persisted (54 of 77 versus 28 of 78, P B < 0.0001), while the Barthel Index responder rate did not differ. For all secondary variables, group A patients had improved significantly more (P B < 0.0001) during the treatment period, but not during follow-up. Conclusions: Intensive locomotor training plus physiotherapy resulted in a significantly better gait ability and daily living competence in subacute stroke patients compared with physiotherapy alone.
Proliferation of vesicular stomatitis virus in leucocytes from rheumatoid patients.

In the course of the manifold and persistent searches for an aetiological agent in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) it has been reported that cultured synovial cells from patients suffering from RA fail to be infected by a strain of rubella virus or by Newcastle disease virus (Smith and Hamerman, 1969; Grayzel and Beck, 1970); this was taken as evidence for a pre-existent occult virus infection of the cells. Although this finding has failed to receive confirmation by other investigators (Phillips, 1971; Runge and Allison, 1972) we considered it to be ofsufficient significance to examine leucocytes both from the peripheral blood and from joint effusions in RA for their ability to support the growth of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV); this virus was selected since it is known to replicate in leucocytes (Edelman and Wheelock, 1966). In blood mononuclear leucocytes, we have confirmed replication of VSV when stimulated with either phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) or with pokeweed mitogen (PWM); the leucocytes ofRA subjects supported viral replication as well as those of normal donors. VSV also multiplied in association with joint effusion mononuclear cells, although titres were lower than those obtained with stimulated blood leucocytes.
Complications of epilepsy surgery: a systematic review of focal surgical resections and invasive EEG monitoring.

PURPOSE Underutilization of epilepsy surgery remains a major problem and is in part due to physicians' misconceptions about the risks associated with epilepsy surgery. The purpose of this study was to systematically review the literature on complications of focal epilepsy surgery. METHODS A literature search was conducted using PubMed and Embase to identify studies examining epilepsy surgery complications. Abstract and full text review, along with data extraction, was done in duplicate. Minor medical and neurologic complications were defined as those that resolved completely within 3 months of surgery, whereas major complications persisted beyond that time frame. Descriptive statistics were used to report complication proportions. KEY FINDINGS Invasive monitoring: Minor complications were reported in 7.7% of patients, whereas major complications were reported in only 0.6% of patients undergoing invasive monitoring. Resective surgery: Minor and major medical complications were reported in 5.1% and 1.5% of patients respectively, most common being cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leak. Minor neurologic complications occurred in 10.9% of patients and were twice as frequent in children (11.2% vs. 5.5%). Minor visual field defects were most common (12.9%). Major neurologic complications were noted in 4.7% of patients, with the most common being major visual field defects (2.1% overall). Perioperative mortality was uncommon after epilepsy surgery, occurring in only 0.4% of temporal lobe patients (1.2%extratemporal). SIGNIFICANCE The majority of complications after epilepsy surgery are minor or temporary as they tend to resolve completely. Major permanent neurologic complications remain uncommon. Mortality as a result of epilepsy surgery in the modern era is rare.
Sleep complaints in middle‐aged women and men: the contribution of working conditions and work–family conflicts

This study aimed to examine how physical working conditions, psychosocial working conditions and work–family conflicts are associated with sleep complaints, and whether health behaviours explain these associations. We used pooled postal questionnaire surveys collected in 2001–2002 among 40–60‐year‐old employees of the City of Helsinki (n = 5819, response rate 66%). Participants were classified as having sleep complaints if they reported sleep complaints at least once a week on average (24% of women and 20% of men). Independent variables included environmental work exposures, physical workload, computer work, Karasek’s job strain and work–family conflicts. Age, marital status, occupational class, work arrangements, health behaviours and obesity were adjusted for. Most working conditions were associated strongly with sleep complaints after adjustment for age only. After adjustment for work–family conflicts, the associations somewhat attenuated. Work–family conflicts were also associated strongly with women’s [odds ratio (OR) 5.90; confidence interval (CI) 4.16–8.38] and men’s sleep (OR 2.56; CI 1.34–4.87). The associations remained robust even after controlling for unhealthy behaviours, obesity, health status, depression and medications. Physically strenuous working conditions, psychosocial job strain and work–family conflicts may increase sleep complaints. Efforts to support employees to cope with psychosocial stress and reach a better balance between paid work and family life might reduce sleep complaints. Sleep complaints need to be taken into account in worksite health promotion and occupational health care in order to reduce the burden of poor sleep.
Listen to Your Heart : Stress Prediction Using Consumer Heart Rate Sensors

Galvanic skin response (GSR) is commonly used to measure short-term emotional and cognitive stress, but measuring GSR requires obtrusive equipment. We present a model to predict stress levels solely from electrocardiogram (ECG) data, which can be measured with wearable consumer-grade heart monitors. Our model incorporates time and frequency domain features of heart rate variability, and the spectral power components of the ECG. We make predictions on a sliding window of ECG signal. We apply a linear model to predict stress as a continuous quantity, and our prediction is correlated with the actual GSR with R2 = 0.873 ± 0.035. We also present a model for classifying each window as a binary “stress” or “rest” periods. The best performance was achieved with a linear SVM, with an F1 score of 0.98 on the most distinct samples (highest and lowest 20 percentile GSR levels), and F1 = 0.85 over all samples.
High accuracy depth filtering for Kinect using edge guided inpainting

Kinect is an easy and convenient means to calculate the depth of a scene in real time. It is used widely in several applications for its ease of installation and handling. Many of these applications need a high accuracy depth map of the scene for rendering. Unfortunately, the depth map provided by Kinect suffers from various degradations due to occlusion, shadowing, scattering etc. The major two degradations are the edge distortion and shadowing. Edge distortion appears due to the intrinsic properties of Kinect and makes any depth based operation perceptually degraded. The problem of edge distortion removal has not received as much attention as the hole filling problem, though it is considerably important at the post processing stage of a RGB scene. We propose a novel method to remove line distortion in order to construct high accuracy depth map of the scene by exploiting the edge information already present in the RGB image.
Prototype System for Retrieval of Remote Sensing Images based on Color Moment and Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix

The remote sensing image archive is increasing day by day. The storage, organization and retrieval of these images poses a challenge to the scienitific community. In this paper we have developed a system for retrieval of remote sensing images on the basis of color moment and gray level co-occurrence matrix feature extractor. The results obtained through prototype system is encouraging.
Rous sarcoma virus nucleic acid-binding protein p12 is necessary for viral 70S RNA dimer formation and packaging

To study the function(s) of the Rous sarcoma virus nucleic acid-binding protein p12, we constructed mutants by using two restriction sites in the p12 proviral coding sequence of the Prague C strain to insert KpnI synthetic linkers. The two restriction sites are in the same reading frame, which allowed us to construct a deletion mutant lacking the two conserved Cys-His regions and a duplication mutant containing three intact Cys-His boxes. These mutant DNAs were transfected into chicken embryo fibroblasts, and the viral particles produced in a transient assay were characterized biochemically and for infectivity. Our results indicate that the Rous sarcoma virus nucleic acid-binding protein p12 is necessary for genomic RNA packaging but not for particle assembly and is implicated in the formation of a stable 70S dimeric RNA. Moreover, the fact that one mutant was apparently able to package normal 70S RNA but was not infectious suggests a role for p12 during the infection process.
Involvement of N‐methyl‐D‐aspartate receptors in epileptiform bursting in the rat hippocampal slice.

The effects of the N‐methyl‐D‐aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, D‐2‐amino‐5‐phosphonovaleric acid (D‐APV), and other excitatory amino acid antagonists, were studied on CA1 pyramidal neurones treated with picrotoxin or bicuculline to reduce synaptic inhibition mediated by gamma‐aminobutyric acid (GABA). Under these conditions epileptiform burst firing is readily produced by orthodromic stimulation of the pyramidal cell population. D‐APV reduced the plateau amplitude and duration of the depolarization underlying evoked and spontaneous bursts without affecting membrane potential, input resistance or the ability of the cell to fire a Ca2+ spike or a short train of Na+ spikes. A late component of the subthreshold excitatory post‐synaptic potential (e.p.s.p.) was voltage dependent, being reduced in amplitude on membrane hyperpolarization. D‐APV selectively removed this component of the e.p.s.p. in disinhibited slices. In contrast, in the absence of GABA antagonists, D‐APV had no noticeable effect on the e.p.s.p. as studied with field potential recordings. The concentration‐response relationship of the inhibitory effect of D‐APV and L‐APV on population spike bursts was studied. The action of APV was highly stereoselective; the EC50 of D‐APV was approximately 700 nM, whereas a similar inhibition required 540 microM‐L‐APV. A number of other excitatory amino acid antagonists were tested at a fixed concentration (100 microM). Among them, the quisqualate antagonist gamma‐D‐glutamylaminomethyl sulphonic acid was ineffective against epileptiform bursts. In the low nanomolar concentration range both D‐ and L‐APV potentiated bursting. These results suggest that in the absence of GABAergic inhibition, a significant component of the slow depolarization underlying burst firing is voltage dependent, synaptic in origin and mediated by NMDA receptors. We propose that, under normal (non‐epileptic) physiological conditions, the balance between synaptic inhibition mediated by GABA receptors and synaptic excitation mediated by NMDA receptors may modulate the excitability of pyramidal cell dendrites.
Incremental Discriminant Learning for Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation

This paper proposes a new incremental learning method for heterogeneous domain adaptation, in which the training data from both source domain and target domains are acquired sequentially, represented by heterogeneous features. Two different projection matrices are learned to map the data from two domains into a discriminative common subspace, where the intra-class samples are closely-related to each other, the inter-class samples are well-separated from each other, and the data distribution mismatch between the source and target domains is reduced. Different from previous work, our method is capable of incrementally optimizing the projection matrices when the training data becomes available as a data stream instead of being given completely in advance. With the gradually coming training data, the new projection matrices are computed by updating the existing ones using an eigenspace merging algorithm, rather than repeating the learning from the begin by keeping the whole training data set. Therefore, our incremental learning solution for the projection matrices can significantly reduce the computational complexity and memory space, which makes it applicable to a wider set of heterogeneous domain adaptation scenarios with a large training dataset. Furthermore, our method is neither restricted to the corresponding training instances in the source and target domains nor restricted to the same type of feature, which meaningfully relaxes the requirement of training data. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.