Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of salmeterol on seasonal changes in airway responsiveness and exhaled nitric oxide in pollen-sensitive asthmatic subjects.

OBJECTIVE Using a model of natural allergen exposure, we examined the effect of regular treatment with salmeterol on allergen-induced changes in airway responsiveness and exhaled nitric oxide (ENO). DESIGN Double-blind, randomized, parallel-group study. SETTING Specialist allergy unit in a university hospital. PATIENTS Asthmatic patients sensitized to pollen allergens were randomly allocated to monotherapy with salmeterol (n = 14) or placebo (n = 13). INTERVENTIONS Salmeterol, 25 micro g, and placebo inhalers, two puffs bid, for 6 weeks. MEASUREMENTS Spirometry, the level of a provocative concentration of a substance (methacholine) causing a 20% fall in FEV(1) (PC(20)), the PC(20) level for adenosine 5'-monophosphate (AMP), and ENO were measured before the pollen season and were repeated at the height of the pollen season after 6 weeks of treatment with salmeterol or placebo. RESULTS The decrease in FEV(1) during the pollen season was significantly larger in the placebo group than in the salmeterol group, the mean difference in the change between the groups being 0.20 L (95% confidence interval, 0.03 to 0.35; p = 0.047). Changes in PC(20) for methacholine, PC(20) for AMP, and ENO levels were not significantly different between treatment groups. However, a mean (+/- SEM) decrease in the PC(20) for methacholine of -1.0 +/- 0.4 doubling concentrations was observed within the placebo group (p = 0.03), whereas no significant changes were observed within the salmeterol group. A significant decrease in PC(20) for AMP (doubling concentrations) was observed within the placebo group (-2.1 +/- 0.6; p = 0.003) and the salmeterol group (-1.5 +/- 0.4; p = 0.003). ENO concentrations increased significantly among the placebo and the salmeterol groups during natural pollen exposure. CONCLUSION These observations indicate that natural allergen exposure and the regular use of salmeterol are not associated with a greater increase in ENO and airway responsiveness than allergen exposure alone.
Over-Zealous Security Administrators Are Breaking the Internet

As the security threats on the Internet are becoming more prevalent, firewalls and other forms of protection are becoming more commonplace. Unfortunately, improperly configured firewalls can cause a variety of problems. One particularly nasty problem is when a firewall administrator chooses to use - or continue using - Path MTU Discovery (a good choice in most situations), but blocks packets required for the protocol to work: ICMP type 3 code 4 packets. This problem, the Path MTU Discovery Black Hole, has been discussed many times before. However with under- 1500 MTU protocols such as PPPoE becoming common for both home and business high-speed connections, this problem is affecting more people than ever before.
Psychometric Properties of the Attitudes toward Self-Revised in Italian Young Adults

Objectives and Methods. Several researchers have provided support for the critical role of cognitive vulnerabilities in the development of depression. The Attitudes toward Self-Revised (ATS-R) was designed to assess three potential self-regulatory vulnerabilities to depression: High Standards (HS), Self-Criticism (SC), and Negative Generalization (NG). The aim of the study was to assess the psychometric properties of the ATS-R in the Italian young adult population. The ATS-R, the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), and the Teate Depression Inventory (TDI) were administered to 857 (320 men and 537 women) young adults. Results. The best-fitting solution for the ATS-R was a 2-factor model, which obtained satisfactory homogeneity of content (HS/SC: Cronbach α = 0.81; mean interitem correlation = 0.46. NG: Cronbach α = 0.75; mean interitem correlation = 0.43) and significant correlation with the BDI-II (NG: Pearson r = 0.29, P < 0.01), the TDI (HS/SC: Pearson r = −0.26, P < 0.01), and the BHS (HS/SC: Pearson r = −0.29, P < 0.01; NG: Pearson r = 0.22, P < 0.01). Conclusions. The Italian version of the ATS-R seems to be a valid instrument for the study of the role of cognitive tendencies as potential vulnerability for depression.
Query Optimisation using Natural Language Processing

Interesting change has come in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen in both research direction and methodology in the past several years. Increased work in computational linguistics tended to focus on purely symbolic methods. Now various work is shifting toward hybrid methods that combine new empirical corpusbased methods, including the use of probabilistic and information theoretic techniques, with traditional symbolic methods. Need of Natural Language Query Processing is for an English sentence to be interpreted by the computer and appropriate action taken. Question answering to any databases in natural language is a very convenient and easy method of data access, especially for casual users who do not understand complicated database query languages such as SQL So this paper proposes the architecture for translating English Query into SQL using Semantic Grammar
Heart rate estimation using wrist-acquired photoplethysmography under different types of daily life motion artifact

Reflective wrist photoplethysmograph (PPG), obtained by a watch or wristband, can provide a natural and unconstrained way for daily life heart rate monitoring. However, reflective wrist PPG often suffers from poor signal quality and various distortions due to daily life motion artifact. In this paper, we analyze the influence of motion artifact on reflective wrist PPG signals, and propose a method to extract reliable heart rate from such distorted PPG signals. The proposed method consists of adaptive filtering, heart rate selection, and motion identification. Experimental results show that our proposed method can generate reliable heart rate values from wrist PPG signals with different types of motion artifact.
Spatial Pattern of Attacks of the Invasive Woodwasp Sirex noctilio, at Landscape and Stand Scales

Invasive insect pests are responsible for important damage to native and plantation forests, when population outbreaks occur. Understanding the spatial pattern of attacks by forest pest populations is essential to improve our understanding of insect population dynamics and for predicting attack risk by invasives or planning pest management strategies. The woodwasp Sirex noctilio is an invasive woodwasp that has become probably the most important pest of pine plantations in the Southern Hemisphere. Our aim was to study the spatial dynamics of S. noctilio populations in Southern Argentina. Specifically we describe: (1) the spatial patterns of S. noctilio outbreaks and their relation with environmental factors at a landscape scale; and (2) characterize the spatial pattern of attacked trees at the stand scale. We surveyed the spatial distribution of S. noctilio outbreaks in three pine plantation landscapes, and we assessed potential associations with topographic variables, habitat characteristics, and distance to other outbreaks. We also looked at the spatial distribution of attacked trees in 20 stands with different levels of infestation, and assessed the relationship of attacks with stand composition and management. We found that the spatial pattern of pine stands with S. noctilio outbreaks at the landscape scale is influenced mainly by the host species present, slope aspect, and distance to other outbreaks. At a stand scale, there is strong aggregation of attacked trees in stands with intermediate infestation levels, and the degree of attacks is influenced by host species and plantation management. We conclude that the pattern of S. noctilio damage at different spatial scales is influenced by a combination of both inherent population dynamics and the underlying patterns of environmental factors. Our results have important implications for the understanding and management of invasive insect outbreaks in forest systems.
Thompson Sampling Based Monte-Carlo Planning in POMDPs

Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) has been drawing great interest in recent years for planning under uncertainty. One of the key challenges is the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. To address this, we introduce a novel online planning algorithm for large POMDPs using Thompson sampling based MCTS that balances between cumulative and simple regrets. The proposed algorithm Dirichlet-Dirichlet-NormalGamma based Partially Observable Monte-Carlo Planning (D2NG-POMCP) treats the accumulated reward of performing an action from a belief state in the MCTS search tree as a random variable following an unknown distribution with hidden parameters. Bayesian method is used to model and infer the posterior distribution of these parameters by choosing the conjugate prior in the form of a combination of two Dirichlet and one NormalGamma distributions. Thompson sampling is exploited to guide the action selection in the search tree. Experimental results confirmed that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on several common benchmark problems.
A Bayesian approach to income inference in a communication network

The explosion of mobile phone communications in the last years occurs at a moment where data processing power increases exponentially. Thanks to those two changes in a global scale, the road has been opened to use mobile phone communications to generate inferences and characterizations of mobile phone users. In this work, we use the communications network, enriched by a set of users' attributes, to gain a better understanding of the demographic features of a population. Namely, we use call detail records and banking information to infer the income of each person in the graph.
Triangulation and CSG representation of polyhedra with arbitrary genus

The main purpose behind decomposing an object into simpler components is to simplify a problem for complex objects into a number of subproblerns dealing with simple objects. In particular, the problem of partitioning a three dimensional polyhedron into simpler parts arises in mesh generation for finite element methods, CAD/CAM applications, computer graphics, motion planning and solid modeling. Though several decomposition problems have been widely researched in two dimensions, very few results exist for their three dimensional counterparts. Two such problems, triangulation and CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) tree partition of polyhedra are addressed in this paper. In triangulation we seek for a sirrtplicial decomp~ sition of the given polyhedron. This is a non trivial step in finite element mesh generation for polyhedral domains. In three dimensions, there are polyhedra that are not triangulable without additional points called Steiner points. Moreover, as shown by Rupert and Seidel [13], the general problem of determining whether a polyhedron is triangulable without Steiner points or not, is NP-hard. Due to these constraints we consider the problem of triangulation with Steiner points. On a related problem of convex de composition of polyhedra Chazelle gave an 0(nr3) time and 0(nr2) space algorithm for a polyhedron with n edges and r reflex edges called notches 1 [3].
JaldiMAC – Beyond Simulation

WiFi has been promoted as an affordable technology that can provide broadband Internet connectivity to poor and sparsely populated regions. A growing number of deployments, some of substantial scale, are making use of WiFi to extend connectivity into rural areas. However, the vast majority of the 3.5 billion people living in rural villages [1] are still unserved. To reach these people, new technology must be developed to make small rural wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) profitable. In previous study [2], we have identified radio towers as the largest expense for WISPs; to reduce or eliminate this barrier to entry, we proposed a novel point-to-multipoint deployment topology that takes advantage of “natural towers” such as hills and mountains to provide connectivity even over great distances. In this work we make this design practical with two components that together make up JaldiMAC: Jaldi9K, an open source driver for commodity wireless hardware that offers comprehensive control over physical layer parameters and makes few assumptions about the overlying MAC layer; and JaldiTDMA, a TDMA scheduler that (i) enables and is optimized for point-to-multipoint deployments, (ii) adapts to the asymmetry of Internet traffic, and (iii) provides loose quality of service guarantees for latency sensitive traffic without compromising fairness. To our knowledge, JaldiMAC is the first integrated solution that combines all of these elements, and Jaldi9K is the first Linux wireless driver with the flexibility to effectively implement JaldiMAC on commodity hardware.
The Potluck Problem with consumers' choice behavior

This paper extends the current Potluck Problem to include multiple goods in the relevant problem scenario, thereby bringing in the question of estimation of consumers' choice behaviors in the system. Given a variety of dishes to choose from at any dinner instance, an agent chooses a set of dishes in a particular proportion such that his utility from the total consumption is maximized. Such choice behaviors of agents determine the demand structure of the dishes offered in a potluck dinner. In this paper, we use mathematically specified models of consumer choice to represent these behaviors. These models are used to build a set of predictors that are capable of computing certain functional forms and variables (including seasonal and trend variables) of the demand system. Such predictors existing in the system are then used by agents in estimating the demand at future potluck dinner instances.
Contract Over Target Baseline (OTB) Effect on Earned Value Management's Cost Performance Index (CPI)

Abstract : Cost growth is a problem in U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) acquisitions. A particular component of cost growth is a cost overrun or Over Target Baseline (OTB). In 2009, Trahan found that the Gompertz growth curve better predicted program Estimates at Completion (EAC) for OTB contracts. In 2010, Thickstun studied "the relationships between overruns and a variety of factors," but found OTB occurrences "random" and questioned the benefit of the OTB process (Thickstun, 2010). In this research, we study OTB's ability to effect improved program cost performance; we examine OTB's effect on the cumulative Cost Performance Index (CPI) slope after an OTB intervention. We find there is no statistically significant change in cumulative CPI slope after OTB. For the data studied, an OTB investment does not significantly improve management's ability to earn cost value as reflected in the cumulative CPI slope.
Visually-based audio texture segmentation for audio scene analysis

In an analogy with image texture segmentation in visual scene analysis, this paper describes a method for segmenting sound textures in a stream of audio. In particular, we propose a visual scheme to partition an audio stream signal into pieces of audio textures. This visual representation is based on the inter-similarity matrix of the MFCC feature in the signal frames. Classical image enhancement such as binarization and median filtering are applied to the inter-similarity matrix in-order to partition the matrix into homogenous regions. A novelty test operator is then used to localize the boundaries of the image regions, which correspond to audio textures boundaries, signalling thereby a change of audio scene. The perceptual and computational advantages of this visually-based audio texture segmentation are illustrated using a wide range of sound textures of varying degree of complexity.
Metaheuristic Approaches to Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Computing: A Review

Virtual machine placement (VMP) is mapping virtual machines (VMs) to appropriate physical machines (PMs) to achieve satisfactory objectives such as minimised energy consumption or maximised performance. VMP is considered as a non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) problem. Metaheuristic techniques are able to find near-optimal solutions to NP-hard problems. This paper presents a review upon metaheuristic approaches to VMP in cloud computing.
A Comparative Study of Medical Data Classification Methods Based on Decision Tree and Bagging Algorithms

Medical data mining has been a popular data mining topic of late. Especially, diagnosing of the heart disease is one of the important issue and many researchers investigated to develop intelligent medical decision support systems to help the physicians. In this paper, we propose the use of decision tree C4.5 algorithm, bagging with decision tree C4.5 algorithm and bagging with Naïve Bayes algorithm to identify the heart disease of a patient and compare the effectiveness, correction rate among them. The data we study is collected from patients with coronary artery disease.
Serum albumin disrupts Cryptococcus neoformans and Bacillus anthracis extracellular vesicles

For both pathogenic fungi and bacteria, extracellular vesicles have been shown to contain many microbial components associated with virulence, suggesting a role in pathogenesis. However, there are many unresolved issues regarding vesicle synthesis and stability, including the fact that vesicular packaging for extracellular factors involved in virulence must also have a mechanism for vesicle unloading. Consequently, we studied the kinetics of vesicle production and stability using [1‐14C] palmitic acid metabolic labelling and dynamic light scattering techniques. Cryptococcus neoformans vesicles were produced throughout all stages of fungal culture growth and they were stable once isolated. Density gradient analysis revealed that only a portion of the vesicle population carried cryptococcal polysaccharide, implying heterogeneity in vesicular cargo. Vesicle incubation with macrophages resulted in rapid vesicle instability, a phenomenon that was ultimately associated with serum albumin. Additionally, albumin, along with mouse serum and murine immunoglobulin destabilized Bacillus anthracis vesicles, but the effect was not observed with ovalbumin or keyhole limpet haemocyanin, demonstrating that this phenomenon is neither host‐, microbe‐ nor protein‐specific. Our findings strongly suggest that cryptococcal vesicles are short‐lived in vivo and vesicle destabilization is mediated by albumin. The ability of albumin to promote vesicular offload through destabilization indicates a new activity for this abundant serum protein.
Belief-propagation reconstruction for compressed sensing: Quantization vs. Gaussian approximation

This work considers the compressed sensing (CS) of i.i. d. signals with sparse measurement matrices and belief-propagation (BP) reconstruction. In general, BP reconstruction for CS requires the passing of messages that are distributions over the real numbers. To implement this in practice, one typically uses either quantized distributions or a Gaussian approximation. In this work, we use density evolution to compare the reconstruction performance of these two methods. Since the reconstruction performance depends on the signal realization, this analysis makes use of a novel change of variables to analyze the performance for a typical signal. Simulation results are provided to support the results.
Novel Approach to Classify Plants Based on Metabolite-Content Similarity

Secondary metabolites are bioactive substances with diverse chemical structures. Depending on the ecological environment within which they are living, higher plants use different combinations of secondary metabolites for adaptation (e.g., defense against attacks by herbivores or pathogenic microbes). This suggests that the similarity in metabolite content is applicable to assess phylogenic similarity of higher plants. However, such a chemical taxonomic approach has limitations of incomplete metabolomics data. We propose an approach for successfully classifying 216 plants based on their known incomplete metabolite content. Structurally similar metabolites have been clustered using the network clustering algorithm DPClus. Plants have been represented as binary vectors, implying relations with structurally similar metabolite groups, and classified using Ward's method of hierarchical clustering. Despite incomplete data, the resulting plant clusters are consistent with the known evolutional relations of plants. This finding reveals the significance of metabolite content as a taxonomic marker. We also discuss the predictive power of metabolite content in exploring nutritional and medicinal properties in plants. As a byproduct of our analysis, we could predict some currently unknown species-metabolite relations.
Geographical range of amenity benefits: Hedonic price analysis for railway stations

People want to live nearby consumption amenities as this saves time on commuting. This paper develops a residential location model in which the geographical range and the magnitude of amenity benefits as reflected in residential prices can ex post be assessed. First we extend a standard residential location model with a non-essential consumption amenity. We show that the geographical range of amenity benefits can be determined as the minimal distance to the amenity beyond which residential rents are independent of the distance to the amenity. We next apply this insight in a hedonic analysis of the effect of proximity to a railway station on local housing prices in the wider metropolitan area of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The geographical range of the railway stations is estimated to be 1.1 kilometer and the house price premium paid for station proximity is estimated to be 3 to 5 percent. We show furthermore that failing to account for the localized character of the amenity benefits can lead to a considerable under- or overestimation of the benefits.
Political Decision Making, Deliberation and Participation

Introduction - political decision making, deliberation and participation, M.X. Delli Carpini et al. Political decision making: elite cues and political decision making, M. Gilens, N. Murakawa understanding the role of race in candidate evaluation, K. Callaghan, N. Terkildsen liberal-conservative thinking in the American electorate, W.G. Jacoby. Political deliberation: the deliberative citizen: theory and evidence, T. Mendelberg opinion quality and policy preferences in deliberative research, M. Lindeman. Political engagement: citizenship and civic engagement in public problem-solving, B. Haney et al paradigms of minority and immigrant political participation in the United States, D.K. Park, C. Vargas-Ramos.
Estimating the determinants, dynamics and structural breaks in the real exchange rate of Libya

This paper examines the determinants of real exchange rate (RER) of Libya utilising annual data for the period 1970-2007 by applying the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration method. Our empirical evidence shows that there is a long-run equilibrium relation between the RER and its fundamental determinants. The results indicate that the RER strongly appreciates with respect to terms of trade but strongly depreciates with government expenditure which is not consistent with the traditional Mundell-Fleming effect of fiscal policy. In addition, RER depreciates with interest rate differential, appreciates with foreign assets, and appreciates with openness of the economy. However, the impact of technology and productivity improvement on the RER is not significant. The speed of adjustment towards equilibrium was found to be high with short-run disequilibrium correcting by nearly 76 per cent per annum. Both the structural break variables are found to be positive, but one of them ( 2 D ) is statistically insignificant indicating the non-linearity in the RER function. The results add new insights to the literature on the determinants of the RER in Libya.