Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence of obesity and trends in the distribution of body mass index among US adults, 1999-2010.

CONTEXT Between 1980 and 1999, the prevalence of adult obesity (body mass index [BMI] ≥30) increased in the United States and the distribution of BMI changed. More recent data suggested a slowing or leveling off of these trends. OBJECTIVE To estimate the prevalence of adult obesity from the 2009-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and compare adult obesity and the distribution of BMI with data from 1999-2008. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS NHANES includes measured heights and weights for 5926 adult men and women from a nationally representative sample of the civilian noninstitutionalized US population in 2009-2010 and for 22,847 men and women in 1999-2008. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The prevalence of obesity and mean BMI. RESULTS In 2009-2010 the age-adjusted mean BMI was 28.7 (95% CI, 28.3-29.1) for men and also 28.7 (95% CI, 28.4-29.0) for women. Median BMI was 27.8 (interquartile range [IQR], 24.7-31.7) for men and 27.3 (IQR, 23.3-32.7) for women. The age-adjusted prevalence of obesity was 35.5% (95% CI, 31.9%-39.2%) among adult men and 35.8% (95% CI, 34.0%-37.7%) among adult women. Over the 12-year period from 1999 through 2010, obesity showed no significant increase among women overall (age- and race-adjusted annual change in odds ratio [AOR], 1.01; 95% CI, 1.00-1.03; P = .07), but increases were statistically significant for non-Hispanic black women (P = .04) and Mexican American women (P = .046). For men, there was a significant linear trend (AOR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02-1.06; P < .001) over the 12-year period. For both men and women, the most recent 2 years (2009-2010) did not differ significantly (P = .08 for men and P = .24 for women) from the previous 6 years (2003-2008). Trends in BMI were similar to obesity trends. CONCLUSION In 2009-2010, the prevalence of obesity was 35.5% among adult men and 35.8% among adult women, with no significant change compared with 2003-2008.
Solving Strategies for Highly Symmetric CSPs

Symmetry often appears in real-world constraint satisfaction problems, but strategies for exploiting it are only beginning to be developed. Here, a rationale for exploiting symmetry within depth-first search is proposed, leading to an heuristic for variable selection and a domain pruning procedure. These strategies are then applied to a highly symmetric combinatorial problem, namely the generation of balanced incomplete block designs. Experimental results show that these strategies achieve a reduction of up to two orders of magnitude in computational effort. Interestingly, two previously developed strategies are shown to be particular instances of this approach.
Managing scientific data with named data networking

Many scientific domains, such as climate science and High Energy Physics (HEP), have data management requirements that are not well supported by the IP network architecture. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new network architecture whose service model is better aligned with the needs of data-oriented applications. NDN provides features such as best-location retrieval, caching, load sharing, and transparent failover that would otherwise be painstakingly (re-)implemented by each application using point-to-point semantics in an IP network. We present the first scientific data management application designed and implemented on top of NDN. We use this application to manage climate and HEP data over a dedicated, high-performance, testbed. Our application has two main components: a UI for dataset discovery queries and a federation of synchronized name catalogs. We show how NDN primitives can be used to implement common data management operations such as publishing, search, efficient retrieval, and publication access control.
An Unexpected Diversity of Photoreceptor Classes in the Longfin Squid, Doryteuthis pealeii

Cephalopods are famous for their ability to change color and pattern rapidly for signaling and camouflage. They have keen eyes and remarkable vision, made possible by photoreceptors in their retinas. External to the eyes, photoreceptors also exist in parolfactory vesicles and some light organs, where they function using a rhodopsin protein that is identical to that expressed in the retina. Furthermore, dermal chromatophore organs contain rhodopsin and other components of phototransduction (including retinochrome, a photoisomerase first found in the retina), suggesting that they are photoreceptive. In this study, we used a modified whole-mount immunohistochemical technique to explore rhodopsin and retinochrome expression in a number of tissues and organs in the longfin squid, Doryteuthis pealeii. We found that fin central muscles, hair cells (epithelial primary sensory neurons), arm axial ganglia, and sucker peduncle nerves all express rhodopsin and retinochrome proteins. Our findings indicate that these animals possess an unexpected diversity of extraocular photoreceptors and suggest that extraocular photoreception using visual opsins and visual phototransduction machinery is far more widespread throughout cephalopod tissues than previously recognized.
Event and world

The world into which we are born as the horizon of all our behavior is a world both of things and of events. But what are events? Though familiar to all of us, they are philosophically obscure. However central they may be to the question of being in Western thought, from Aristotle to Heidegger, events have always been assigned a derivative status, indeterminate, at the margins of philosophy.Claude Romano seeks to change all that, to describe precisely what sort of phenomenon an event is and to establish how it can be grasped via a phenomenology. He seeks, above all, to understand a humanbeing as one to whom events can occur, who is able to face them and to appropriate them through experience. Evential hermeneuticsis the name he gives this approach, which conceives human being as an undergoing of events for which there can be no substitution and as thereby becoming himself.Romano at once forces us to think human existence-or rather, human adventure-in the light of events and helps us understand how and why the event has been neglected in the ontological tradition.
Clustering Categorical and Numerical Data: A New Procedure Using Multidimensional Scaling

In this paper, we present a concept based on the similarity of categorical attribute values considering implicit relationships and propose a new and effective clustering procedure for mixed data. Our procedure obtains similarities between categorical values from careful analysis and maps the values in each categorical attribute into points in two-dimensional coordinate space using multidimensional scaling. These mapped values make it possible to interpret the relationships between attribute values and to directly apply categorical attributes to clustering algorithms using a Euclidean distance. After trivial modifications, our procedure for clustering mixed data uses the k-means algorithm, well known for its efficiency in clustering large data sets. We use the familiar soybean disease and adult data sets to demonstrate the performance of our clustering procedure. The satisfactory results that we have obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in discovering structure in data.
A Blind-Mixing Scheme for Bitcoin based on an Elliptic Curve Cryptography Blind Digital Signature Algorithm

To strengthen the anonymity of Bitcoin, several centralized coin-mixing providers (mixers) such as BitcoinFog.com, BitLaundry.com, and Blockchain.info assist users to mix Bitcoins through CoinJoin transactions with multiple inputs and multiple outputs to uncover the relationship between them. However, these mixers know the output address of each user, such that they cannot provide true anonymity. This paper proposes a centralized coin-mixing algorithm based on an elliptic curve blind signature scheme (denoted as Blind-Mixing) that obstructs mixers from linking an input address with an output address. Comparisons among three blind signature based algorithms, Blind-Mixing, BlindCoin, and RSA Coin-Mixing, are conducted. It is determined that BlindCoin may be deanonymized because of its use of a public log. In RSA Coin-Mixing, a user's Bitcoins may be falsely claimed by another. In addition, the blind signature scheme of Blind-Mixing executes 10.5 times faster than that of RSA Coin-Mixing.
Measurement and Analysis of Test Suite Volume Metrics for Regression Testing

Regression testing intends to ensure that a software applications works as specified after changes made to it during maintenance. It is an important phase in software development lifecycle. Regression testing is the re-execution of some subset of test cases that has already been executed. It is an expensive process used to detect defects due to regressions. Regression testing has been used to support software-testing activities and assure acquiring an appropriate quality through several versions of a software product during its development and maintenance. Regression testing assures the quality of modified applications. In this proposed work, a study and analysis of metrics related to test suite volume was undertaken. It was shown that the software under test needs more test cases after changes were made to it. A comparative analysis was performed for finding the change in test suite size before and after the regression test.
Dualities, distributed communities of practice and knowledge management

Abstract: Purpose – This main aim of this article is to explore the relationship between knowledge management (KM) and communities of practice (CoPs) in general and virtual CoPs in particular. A subsidiary aim is to provide some practical guidelines about how virtual CoPs can be facilitated and maintained. Design/methodology/approach – The relationship between KM and CoPs is explored using theoretical constructs, the notion of a duality, and data from a case study. The article reports on a case study of a “virtual” CoP and highlights two key aspects of virtual working. The article demonstrates how these key aspects map on to Wenger's participation-reification duality and, in turn, on to the soft-hard duality described by Hildreth and Kimble. Findings – The case study of a “virtual” CoP was based in three geographically separate locations (the UK, the USA, and Japan). The case study reports on the activities of the UK part of the CoP both at their UK base and during one of their regular trips to the USA. It highlights the importance of two particular aspects or virtual working: social relationships and the use of shared artefacts. Practical implications – Some general conclusions are drawn from the analysis concerning the facilitation of virtual CoPs and the broader implications of dualities for KM. Originality/value – The main contribution of the article is in making an explicit link between KM and CoPs through the use of the notion of the duality of knowledge.
Design from Zeroth Principles

A successful design accounts for the structure of the problem it is aimed at solving. When it is a human-directed design, this includes the expectations of its users. How do we arrive at such a design? One approach starts from first principles (e.g., simplicity, unity, symmetry, balance) to evaluate the quality of proposed designs. Here, we introduce design from zeroth principles, a form of human-in-the-loop computation that synthesizes a design that conforms to its users’ expectations. The technique begins by constructing a transmission chain seeded with a random design. Each user in the chain is exposed to the design and then recreates it, passing along their recreation to the next user, who does the same. Through this iterative process, the users’ perceptual, inductive, and reconstructive biases directly transform the initial design into one that is better fit to human cognition. Such designs are easier to learn and harder to forget. We evaluated the approach in three domains — stimulus–response mappings, vanity phone numbers, and letter placement in typeset words — and show that it produces a good design in each.
Psychopathic traits, affect, and cocaine use-related outcomes

Title of thesis: PSYCHOPATHIC TRAITS, AFFECT, AND COCAINE USE-RELATED OUTCOMES Katherine Elena Long, Masters of Science, 2015 Thesis directed by: Professor Carl W. Lejuez, Department of Psychology Substance abuse and associated public health and economic consequences represent a pervasive and costly problem. Among inner-city substance users, crack/cocaine is the most common drug of choice and is associated with health compromising behaviors. Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) are more prevalent, severe, and difficult to treat among individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). Psychopathy is a construct which is related to but distinct from ASPD, and the relation between primary psychopathic traits and substance use is not well understood. The present laboratory experimental study of cocaine use-related outcomes in the context of mood inductions among cocaine users found that primary psychopathic traits were negatively associated with attentional bias for cocaine-related cues but not associated with self-reported craving. Assignment to the negative affect manipulation was related to greater attentional bias but not to craving. The interaction between mood condition and primary psychopathic traits was not a significant predictor of either outcome. PSYCHOPATHIC TRAITS, AFFECT, AND COCAINE USE-RELATED OUTCOMES
Tolerization of Tumor-Specific T Cells Despite Efficient Initial Priming in a Primary Murine Model of Prostate Cancer1

In this report, we studied T cell responses to a prostate cancer Ag by adoptively transferring tumor Ag-specific T cells into prostate tumor-bearing mice. Our findings demonstrate that CD8+ T cells initially encountered tumor Ag in the lymph node and underwent an abortive proliferative response. Upon isolation from the tumor, the residual tumor-specific T cells were functionally tolerant of tumor Ag as measured by their inability to degranulate and secrete IFN-γ and granzyme B. We next sought to determine whether providing an ex vivo-matured, peptide-pulsed dendritic cell (DC) vaccine could overcome the tolerizing mechanisms of tumor-bearing transgenic adenocarcinoma of the mouse prostate model mice. We demonstrate that tumor Ag-specific T cells were protected from tolerance following provision of the DC vaccine. Concurrently, there was a reduction in prostate tumor size. However, even when activated DCs initially present tumor Ag, T cells persisting within the tolerogenic tumor environment gradually lost Ag reactivity. These results suggest that even though a productive antitumor response can be initiated by a DC vaccine, the tolerizing environment created by the tumor still exerts suppressive effects on the T cells. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that when trying to elicit an effective antitumor immune response, two obstacles must be considered: to maintain tumor Ag responsiveness, T cells must be efficiently primed to overcome tumor Ag presented in a tolerizing manner and protected from the suppressive mechanisms of the tumor microenvironment.
Na+-Ca2+ Exchange Activity Is Localized in the T-Tubules of Rat Ventricular Myocytes

Abstract— Detubulation of rat ventricular myocytes has been used to investigate the role of the t-tubules in Ca2+ cycling during excitation-contraction coupling in rat ventricular myocytes. Ca2+ was monitored using fluo-3 and confocal microscopy. In control myocytes, electrical stimulation caused a spatially uniform increase in intracellular [Ca2+] across the cell width. After detubulation, [Ca2+] rose initially at the cell periphery and then propagated into the center of the cell. Application of caffeine to control myocytes resulted in a rapid and uniform increase of intracellular [Ca2+]; the distribution and amplitude of this increase was the same in detubulated myocytes, although its decline was slower. On application of caffeine to control cells, there was a large, rapid, and transient rise in extracellular [Ca2+] as Ca2+ was extruded from the cell; this rise was significantly smaller in detubulated cells, and the remaining increase was blocked by the sarcolemmal Ca2+ ATPase inhibitor carboxyeosin. The treatment used to produce detubulation had no significant effect on Ca2+ efflux in atrial cells, which lack t-tubules. Detubulation of ventricular myocytes also resulted in loss of Na+-Ca2+ exchange current, although the density of the fast Na+ current was unaltered. It is concluded that Na+-Ca2+ exchange function, and hence Ca2+ efflux by this mechanism, is concentrated in the t-tubules, and that the concentration of Ca2+ flux pathways in the t-tubules is important in producing a uniform increase in intracellular Ca2+ on stimulation.
The Pareto set as decision support information in multimodal passenger transportation network design

Given a range of traffic related sustainability problems, policy makers need to know which measures should be taken to reach their objectives as much as possible. Multi-objective optimisation is useful to support these decisions, because it results in an overview of possibly optimal solutions. This Pareto set can be very large, especially if more than two (mainly opposed) objectives are involved. This is also the case when optimising infrastructure planning in a multimodal passenger transportation network, with accessibility, use of urban space by parking, operating deficit and climate impact as objectives. Methods are presented to derive problem knowledge from the Pareto set. This includes the best values per objective, average trade-off values between pairs of objectives and identification of the min-max solution. These methods make the Pareto set more useful as decision support information: they demonstrate the next step in multi-objective option prioritisation. An insight provided for a case study in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area in The Netherlands is that it is possible to improve all aspects of sustainability simultaneously in comparison to the current transportation network: the current design is not part of the Pareto set. Next, improving travel time further can be done cost-efficiently, but reducing CO2 emissions is expensive when using measures related to multimodal trip making. Finally, increasing frequencies appears to be more effective to improve sustainability than introducing P&R facilities and train stations.
Modeling idiosyncratic preferences: How generative knowledge and expression frequency jointly determine language structure

Most models of choice in language focus on broadly applicable generative knowledge, treating item-specific variation as noise. Focusing on word order preferences in binomial expressions (e.g. bread and butter), we find meaning in the item-specific variation: more frequent expressions have more polarized (i.e. frozen) preferences. Of many models considered, only one that takes expression frequency into account can predict the language-wide distribution of preference strengths seen in corpus data. Our results support a gradient trade-off in language processing between generative knowledge and itemspecific knowledge as a function of frequency.
A formal method to improve SystemVerilog functional coverage

Improving functional coverage efficiently in a verification environment based on constrained random simulation could be a difficult task, since some design states are hard to be reached by random input patterns. On the other hand, manually crafting direct test patterns may be time consuming. In this paper, a functional test pattern generation (FTPG) framework is proposed to automatically produce deterministic test patterns for complete coverage. The framework is based on the functional coverage model (covergroup) provided by SystemVerilog, and it could be easily integrated to modern digital design flow. We synthesize a practical subset of covergroup language constructs to enable FTPG by a SAT-solver. An algorithm called MRRS is proposed to minimize the potential large complexity of the synthesized circuits. Preliminary experimental results demonstrate that MRRS could facilitate FTPG to achieve 43X speed-up in average while the maximum speed-up can reach 67X. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper which proposes an FTPG method that utilizes covergroups.
Problem Severity and Motivation for Treatment in Incarcerated Substance Abusers

Studies of community-based treatment programs for substance users document that motivation for treatment is a consistent predictor of clients remaining under treatment for a longer period of time. Recent research has replicated this in prison-based treatment programs, implying that motivation is clinically important regardless of setting. The current study examines predictors of treatment motivation using data collected from 661 male drug-involved inmates during in-depth interviews that include components of the Addiction Severity Index, TCU Motivation Scale, and the Heath Services Research Instrument. Findings showed treatment motivation can be measured effectively in prison-based settings. Motivation scores were not significantly different between individuals in a prison-based treatment program and those in the general prison population. Furthermore, higher motivation for treatment scores were associated with greater levels of problem severity, suggesting that individuals with more drug-use related life problems may recognize this need and desire help for beginning long-term recovery.
C-reactive protein correlates with tissue oxygen availability in patients with stable COPD

Background Arterial oxygen tension, oxygen delivery to tissue, and systemic inflammation are recognized as pivotal factors in the progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, interconnections between systemic inflammation and tissue oxygen availability are scantly investigated. Tissue oxygen availability depends on arterial PaO2, oxygen concentration, hemoglobin oxygen affinity (P50), and hemoglobin oxygen binding capacity (ceHb). As the integrated changes of those indices are summarized by oxygen extraction tension (PaO2x), the objective of this study was to explore the association between C-reactive protein (CRP) blood levels and either PaO2x or each of its determinants, in stable COPD. Materials and methods Blood CRP and oxygen status of arterial blood were measured at rest while breathing room air in 44 moderate to severe stable COPD patients. PaO2x was calculated along the shape of oxygen binding curve as the oxygen tension resulting from removal of 2.3 mmol of oxygen per liter of blood. Multiple linear regression analysis was performed with PaO2, ceHb, and P50 as independent variables, and CRP as the dependent variable, adjusting for age and sex. The analysis was repeated using PaO2x as a sole independent variable. Results Multiple linear regression analysis indicated that ceHb, PaO2, and P50, were significant and independent predictors of CRP (R2 = 0.52, p < 0.0001). PaO2x alone was an even stronger predictor of CRP (R2 = 0.62, p < 0.0001). Conclusions These findings indicate that physiological determinants of tissue oxygen availability are independently associated with CRP blood levels. Thus, improvement of tissue oxygen availability is a central therapeutic option to modulate the severity of systemic inflammatory processes in patients with COPD.