Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Statins Therapy Can Reduce the Risk of Atrial Fibrillation in Patients with Acute Coronary Syndrome: A Meta-Analysis

Background: It is a controversy whether statins therapy could be beneficial for the occurrence of atrial fibrillation (AF) in acute coronary syndrome (ACS). To clarify this problem, we performed a meta-analysis with the currently published literatures. Methods: The electronic databases were searched to obtain relevant trials which met the inclusion criteria through October 2011. Two authors independently read the trials and extracted the related information from the included studies. Either fixed-effects models or random-effects models were assumed to calculate the overall combined risk estimates according to I2 statistic. Sensitivity analysis was conducted by omitting one study in each turn, and publication bias was evaluated using Begg's and Egger's test. Results: Six studies were eligible to inclusion criteria, of the six studies, 161305 patients were included in this meta-analysis, 77920 (48.31%) patients had taken the statins therapy, 83385 (51.69%) patients had taken non-statins therapy. Four studies had investigated the effect of statins therapy on occurrence of new-onset AF in ACS patients, another two had described the association between statins therapy and occurrence of AF in ACS patients with AF in baseline. The occurrence of AF was reduced 35% in statins therapy group compared to that in non-statins group (95% confident interval: 0.55-0.77, P<0.0001), and the effect of statins therapy seemed more beneficial for new-onset AF (RR=0.59, 95%CI: 0.48-0.73, p=0.096) than secondary prevention of AF (RR=0.70, 95%CI: 0.43-1.14, p=0.085). There was no publication bias according to the Begg's and Egger's test (Begg, p=0.71; Egger, p=0.73). Conclusion: Statins therapy could reduce the risk of atrial fibrillation in patients with ACS.
Arabidopsis Serine Decarboxylase Mutants Implicate the Roles of Ethanolamine in Plant Growth and Development

Ethanolamine is important for synthesis of choline, phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) and phosphatidylcholine (PC) in plants. The latter two phospholipids are the major phospholipids in eukaryotic membranes. In plants, ethanolamine is mainly synthesized directly from serine by serine decarboxylase. Serine decarboxylase is unique to plants and was previously shown to have highly specific activity to l-serine. While serine decarboxylase was biochemically characterized, its functions and importance in plants were not biologically elucidated due to the lack of serine decarboxylase mutants. Here we characterized an Arabidopsis mutant defective in serine decarboxylase, named atsdc-1 (Arabidopsis thaliana serine decarboxylase-1). The atsdc-1 mutants showed necrotic lesions in leaves, multiple inflorescences, sterility in flower, and early flowering in short day conditions. These defects were rescued by ethanolamine application to atsdc-1, suggesting the roles of ethanolamine as well as serine decarboxylase in plant development. In addition, molecular analysis of serine decarboxylase suggests that Arabidopsis serine decarboxylase is cytosol-localized and expressed in all tissue.
Kernel approximate Bayesian computation in population genetic inferences

Abstract Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a likelihood-free approach for Bayesian inferences based on a rejection algorithm method that applies a tolerance of dissimilarity between summary statistics from observed and simulated data. Although several improvements to the algorithm have been proposed, none of these improvements avoid the following two sources of approximation: 1) lack of sufficient statistics: sampling is not from the true posterior density given data but from an approximate posterior density given summary statistics; and 2) non-zero tolerance: sampling from the posterior density given summary statistics is achieved only in the limit of zero tolerance. The first source of approximation can be improved by adding a summary statistic, but an increase in the number of summary statistics could introduce additional variance caused by the low acceptance rate. Consequently, many researchers have attempted to develop techniques to choose informative summary statistics. The present study evaluated the utility of a kernel-based ABC method [Fukumizu, K. , L. Song and A. Gretton (2010): “Kernel Bayes’ rule: Bayesian inference with positive definite kernels,” arXiv, 1009.5736 and Fukumizu, K. , L. Song and A. Gretton (2011): “Kernel Bayes’ rule. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24. ” In: J. Shawe-Taylor and R. S. Zemel and P. Bartlett and F. Pereira and K. Q. Weinberger, (Eds.), pp. 1549–1557. , NIPS 24: 1549–1557] for complex problems that demand many summary statistics. Specifically, kernel ABC was applied to population genetic inference. We demonstrate that, in contrast to conventional ABCs, kernel ABC can incorporate a large number of summary statistics while maintaining high performance of the inference.
Using reinforcement learning for city site selection in the turn-based strategy game Civilization IV

This paper describes the design and implementation of a reinforcement learner based on Q-Learning. This adaptive agent is applied to the city placement selection task in the commercial computer game Civilization IV. The city placement selection determines the founding sites for the cities in this turn-based empire building game from the Civilization series. Our aim is the creation of an adaptive machine learning approach for a task which is originally performed by a complex deterministic script. This machine learning approach results in a more challenging and dynamic computer AI. We present the preliminary findings on the performance of our reinforcement learning approach and we make a comparison between the performance of the adaptive agent and the original static game AI. Both the comparison and the performance measurements show encouraging results. Furthermore the behaviour and performance of the learning algorithm are elaborated and ways of extending our work are discussed.
Precipitating Condensation Clouds in Substellar Atmospheres

We present a method to calculate vertical profiles of particle size distributions in condensation clouds of giant planets and brown dwarfs. The method assumes a balance between turbulent diffusion and sedimentation in horizontally uniform cloud decks. Calculations for the Jovian ammonia cloud are compared with results from previous methods. An adjustable parameter describing the efficiency of sedimentation allows the new model to span the range of predictions made by previous models. Calculations for the Jovian ammonia cloud are consistent with observations. Example calculations are provided for water, silicate, and iron clouds on brown dwarfs and on a cool extrasolar giant planet. We find that precipitating cloud decks naturally account for the characteristic trends seen in the spectra of L- and T-type ultracool dwarfs.
Parallel algorithm for maximum empty L-shaped polygon

For a given rectangle containing N points, an important problem is to nd the largest L-shaped polygon with sides parallel to those of the original rectangle, which contains none of the points. An L-shaped polygon is an orthogonal polygon with exactly one reeex angle. This paper presents a O(log n) time algorithm using O(n 3 = log n) processors on an EREW PRAM, using the idea of parallel preex. Herewith we achieve optimal speed-up over the best known sequential algorithm. We also present a O(logn) time algorithm on a mesh of trees architecture with O(n 3) processors.
Confirmation of Errors in Hipparcos Parallaxes from Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensor Astrometry of the Pleiades

We present absolute trigonometric parallaxes and relative proper motions for three members of the Pleiades, obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope's Fine Guidance Sensor 1r, a white-light interferometer. We estimate spectral types and luminosity classes of the stars comprising the astrometric reference frame from R ≈ 2000 spectra, VJHK photometry, and reduced proper motions. From these we derive estimates of absolute parallaxes and introduce them into our model as observations with error. We constrain the three cluster members to have a 1 σ dispersion in distance less than 6.4 pc and find an average πabs = 7.43 ± 0.17 ± 0.20 mas, where the second error is systematic due to member placement within the cluster. This parallax corresponds to a distance of 134.6 ± 3.1 pc or a distance modulus of m - M = 5.65 ± 0.05 for these three Pleiades stars, presuming a central location. This result agrees with three other independent determinations of the Pleiades distance. Presuming that the cluster depth systematic error can be significantly reduced because of the random placement of these many members within the cluster, these four independent measures yield a best-estimate Pleiades distance of πabs = 7.49 ± 0.07 mas, corresponding to a distance of 133.5 ± 1.2 pc or a distance modulus of m - M = 5.63 ± 0.02. This resolves the dispute between the main-sequence fitting and the Hipparcos distance moduli in favor of main-sequence fitting.
A Sensor Distribution Algorithm for FPGAs with Minimal Dynamic Reconfiguration Overhead

Thermal monitoring of a design plays a vital role to ensure safe and reliable thermal operating conditions. Thermal monitoring by employing thermal sensors is a popular technique for assessing thermal behavior and providing directives for run-time preventive measures. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer a wide range of functionalities and therefore static placement of thermal sensors during fabrication process is inefficient and inappropriate for such resource constrained devices. In such cases, dynamic reconfiguration is shown to be effective for thermal monitoring because the resources required to instantiate sensors and their exact placement might conflict with the placed and routed circuit. However, instantiating a large number of sensors will incur significant reconfiguration overhead. Our goal is to assist the dynamic reconfiguration based sensor placement approach such that it becomes more efficient. In this paper we present our Longest Edge Rectangular Bisection algorithm, that minimizes the number of required sensors and controls their distribution on the reconfigurable fabric. Our algorithm effectively monitors the design and maintains a given accuracy level in temperature sensing. For a set of hotspots distributed across different logic array sizes, our algorithm reduces the number of required sensors by 69.5% and 17.5% on an average, when compared to a uniform grid-based placement and a more efficient circular intersection based placement respectively.
AN INDIVIDUAL TRAIT-BASED INVESTIGATION OF EMPLOYEE CYBERLOAFING

Limited attention in IS research has been paid to the phenomenon of cyberloafing, i.e., employee nonwork-related Internet use during work time. This study takes an individual trait approach and investigates the impact of personality traits, including both general and domain-specific ones, on cyberloafing. More specifically, it was hypothesized that while general traits, like the “Big Five,” will be significant predictors of cyberloafing, domain-specific traits, such as computer playfulness, will have more superior explanatory power and explain incremental variance beyond the Big Five. Also explored was the conceptual foundation of computer playfulness in the Big Five trait framework, particularly its relationship with openness to experience. Survey data from a sample of working adults were used to explore these relationships. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.
Integration of family planning services into HIV care and treatment in Kenya: a cluster-randomized trial

Objective:To determine whether integrating family planning services into HIV care is associated with increased use of more effective contraceptive methods (sterilization, intrauterine device, implant, injectable or oral contraceptives). Design:Cluster-randomized trial. Setting:Eighteen public HIV clinics in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Participants:Women aged 18–45 years receiving care at participating HIV clinics; 5682 clinical encounters from baseline period (December 2009–February 2010) and 12 531 encounters from end-line period (July 2011–September 2011, 1 year after site training). Intervention:Twelve sites were randomized to integrate family planning services into the HIV clinic, whereas six clinics were controls where clients desiring contraception were referred to family planning clinics at the same facility. Main outcome measures:Increase in use of more effective contraceptive methods between baseline and end-line periods. Pregnancy rates during the follow-up year (October 2010–September 2011) were also compared. Results:Women seen at integrated sites were significantly more likely to use more effective contraceptive methods at the end of the study [increased from 16.7 to 36.6% at integrated sites, compared to increase from 21.1 to 29.8% at controls; odds ratio (OR) 1.81, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.24–2.63]. Condom use decreased non-significantly at intervention sites compared to controls (OR 0.64, 95% CI 0.35–1.19). No difference was observed in incident pregnancy in the first year after integration comparing intervention to control sites (incidence rate ratio 0.90; 95% CI 0.68–1.20). Conclusions:Integration of family planning services into HIV care clinics increased use of more effective contraceptive methods with a non-significant reduction in condom use. Although no significant reduction in pregnancy incidence was observed during the study, 1 year may be too short a period of observation for this outcome.
A needle in the stack: eﬃcient clone detection for huge collections of source code

—One of the important uses of source code clone detection analysis is plagiarism detection, where a ﬁle is compared against a known corpus of source code to try to ﬁnd potential matches. As the availability of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) continues to increase it has become important to know if speciﬁc source code has been created from copies of FOSS software. Version 5.0. 2 of Debian GNU/Linux contains approximately 323 millions SLOCs, distributed in approximately 1.45 million ﬁles. Current clone detection tools are incapable of dealing with a corpus of this size, and might either take literally months to complete a detection run, or might simply crash due to lack of resources. In this paper we propose a time and space efﬁcient token-based method to detect clones of a source code ﬁle against a known corpus of source code. With an empirical study, we demonstrate that our method is capable of ﬁnding clones of a ﬁle in a corpus of 100,000 ﬁles source code ﬁles in a few seconds.
Coalition Formation for Bearings-Only Localization in Sensor Networks—A Cooperative Game Approach

In this paper, formation of optimal coalitions of nodes is investigated for data acquisition in bearings-only target localization such that the average sleep time allocated to the nodes is maximized. Targets are required to be localized with a prespecified accuracy where the localization accuracy metric is defined to be the determinant of the Bayesian Fisher information matrix (B-FIM). We utilize cooperative game theory as a tool to devise a distributed dynamic coalition formation algorithm in which nodes autonomously decide which coalition to join while maximizing their feasible sleep times. Nodes in the sleep mode do not record any measurements, hence, save energy in both sensing and transmitting the sensed data. It is proved that if each node operates according to this algorithm, the average sleep time for the entire network converges to its maximum feasible value. In numerical examples, we illustrate the tradeoff between localization accuracy and the average sleep time allocated to the nodes and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme via Monte Carlo simulations.
Multisensorial experiences and embodied knowledge of professional dancers in ballet practices

Synopsis The daily ballet technique class is one of the central aspects of the professional dancer’s practice and has a special place in their lives. This everyday practice has multiple functions: it helps the dancer prepare for rehearsals and performances and it also improves the physical and artistic proficiency of the body. Dancers engage in ballet class and rehearsal through their senses, for example: hearing the teacher’s tasks and the music, seeing themselves in the mirror, sweating, feeling the body temperature, heartbeat, feeling the pressure of body weight against gravity and sensing the presence of other dancers in the studio. The professional ballet class transforms and reshapes the dancers’ body through experience and affects their sensorial apparatus and the way knowledge is incorporated. This paper aims to understand how the dancer’s senses are connected to the acquisition of embodied knowledge in the daily practices in a professional ballet institution (company/private studio). The professional ballet class and rehearsal were thus investigated as a complex practice where embodied learning is socially, politically and culturally framed. The methodology included ethnographic descriptions, my active participation in ballet class and rehearsals, interviews with dancers, archives (video and photos) and performance analysis. I argue that a person’s learning processes result from a dynamic interplay of interwoven bodily senses of each dancer depending on the social context.
The Economy Plane : Igniting Innovation in the Internet

Recent trends in technology and network use have pushed the capabilities required of the Internet beyond what the current infrastructure can provide. To address these limitations, the network community has developed a variety of technologies that can be used to support new and enhanced network services. A critical question that remains unanswered is how to get users and service providers to adopt and embrace these new technologies and resulting services. Since market forces have a drastic effect on the shape of services and applications deployed and used in the network, our work proposes an economy plane for the Internet. Our economy plane is based on two main concepts: (1) services that can be offered and sold in a marketplace and that can be used to compose more complex service offerings, and (2) contracts that reflect the economic relationships between entities participating in the Internet. By automating the instantiation of services and the setup of contracts, these operations can take place at short time scales and thus allow users to take advantage of market forces. Due to increased competition among providers, we expect reduced vertical integration and the quick deployment of novel networking technology throughout the network. We describe the architectural design of our economy plane, and provide examples of how to implement various aspects of the economy plane in practice.
Test case prioritization

Test case prioritization techniques schedule test cases for execution in an order that attempts to increase their eeectiveness in meeting some performance goal. Various goals are possible; one involves rate of fault detection | a measure of how quickly faults are detected within the testing process. An improved rate of fault detection during testing can provide faster feedback on the system under test, and let software engineers begin correcting faults earlier than might otherwise be possible. In this paper, we describe several techniques for prioritizing test cases, and report the results of empirical studies investigating the eeectiveness of these techniques for improving rate of fault detection. Our results suggest that several techniques can signiicantly improve rate of fault detection, and illustrate several tradeoos between the techniques.
Construction and characterization of protein libraries composed of secondary structure modules

Only a minute fraction of all possible protein sequences can exist in the genomes of all life forms. To explore whether physicochemical constraints or a lack of need causes the paucity of different protein folds, we set out to construct protein libraries without any restriction of topology. We generated different libraries (all α‐helix, all β‐strand, and α‐helix plus β‐strand) with an average length of 100 amino acid residues, composed of designed secondary structure modules (α‐helix, β‐strand, and β‐turn) in various proportions, based primarily on the patterning of polar and nonpolar residues. We wished to explore that part of sequence space that is rich in secondary structure. The analysis of randomly chosen clones from each of the libraries showed that, despite the low sequence homology to known protein sequences, a substantial proportion of the library members containing α‐helix modules were indeed helical, possess a defined oligomerization state, and showed cooperative chemical unfolding behavior. On the other hand, proteins composed of mainly β‐strand modules tended to form amyloid‐like fibrils and were among the least soluble proteins ever reported. We found that a large fraction of members in non‐β‐strand–containing protein libraries that are distant from natural proteins in sequence space possess unexpectedly favorable properties. These results reinforce the efficacy of applying binary patterning to design proteins with native‐like properties despite lack of restriction in topology. Because of the intrinsic tendency of β‐strand modules to aggregate, their presence requires precise topologic arrangement to prevent fibril formation.
Optimizing direct threaded code by selective inlining

Achieving good performance in bytecoded language interpreters is difficult without sacrificing both simplicity and portability. This is due to the complexity of dynamic translation ("just-in-time compilation") of bytecodes into native code, which is the mechanism employed universally by high-performance interpreters.We demonstrate that a few simple techniques make it possible to create highly-portable dynamic translators that can attain as much as 70% the performance of optimized C for certain numerical computations. Translators based on such techniques can offer respectable performance without sacrificing either the simplicity or portability of much slower "pure" bytecode interpreters.
On the Requirements for Concurrent Software Architectures to Support Advanced Separation of Concerns

Some of the open issues regarding the design and implementation of a concurrent software architecture that should support advanced separation of concerns lie at the level at which components and aspects integrate. Should the integration be at the source code or maybe at the object code? How do we better express the aspectual properties of systems? To what degree should an aspect oriented architecture support an open system? Should it enable dynamic adaptability? Should it support reusability? Should it further enable formal verification of systems properties? In this paper we address these issues in the context of a set of desired requirements for concurrent software architectures in order to be able to improve software quality.
Non-negative matrix factorizations performing object detection and localization

We study the problem of detecting and localizing objects in still, gray-scale images making use of the part-based representation provided by non-negative matrix factorizations. Non-negative matrix factorization represents an emerging example of subspace methods which is able to extract interpretable parts from a set of template image objects and then to additively use them for describing individual objects. In this paper, we present a prototype system based on some non-negative factorization algorithms, which differ in the additional properties added to the non-negative representation of data, in order to investigate if any additional constraint produces better results in general object detection via non-negative matrix factorizations.