Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alcoholism Biomarkers for the Assessment of DUI Recidivism

Introduction: Assessment for alcohol use disorders (AUD) is a major objective of the evaluation process following a driving under the influence (DUI) conviction. The risk of under-reporting of alcohol use in the DUI evaluation context has led to interest in the potential of biomarkers of AUD. The prevalence of AUD in this population has been found to be higher based upon biomarkers compared to self-reported diagnostic procedures. Studies using carbohydratedeficient transferase (CDT) alone or in combination with other markers have indicated AUD rates of 30% and 48% in samples of DUI offenders. While rates of alcohol abuse or dependence have been observed to be higher in recidivists compared to first-time offenders when using selfreport based diagnostic interviews, to our knowledge studies using biomarkers have not corroborated this relationship. Main Hypotheses: 1) A positive relationship exists between alcohol use biomarkers and recidivism status; 2) this relationship is strengthened when using multiple biomarkers; 3) DUI recidivists possess biomarkers indicative of greater prevalence of AUD than first-time offenders. Method: 71 male DUI offenders (mean age = 44.2 years, mean education = 12.3 years) were included in the main analyses. The number of past convictions of DUI offenders was distributed as follow: 1 = 42.3%, 2 = 26.8%, and 3-8 = 30.9%. In addition to sociodemographic variables, blood samples were collected from participants to measure alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotranferase (AST), gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), mean corpuscular volume (MCV), carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT), and thiamine. Logarithmic transformations were used to correct the distribution of some biomarkers. Results: ALT significantly differentiated between first-time offenders and recidivists (t(69) = -2.2, p = 0.029). Number of DUI convictions was correlated to ALT (r(69) = 0.25, p = 0.018); AST (r(69) = 0.21, p = 0.039); MCV (r(69) = 0.25, p = 0.019); and thiamine (r(69) = 0.22, p = 0.036). Forward stepwise regression modeling of frequency of DUI convictions was significant (R 2 = 0.14, F(2,68) = 5.35, p = 0.007) with ALT (p = 0.010) and thiamine (p = 0.018) making significant contributions. When using established cut-offs indicative of AUD, however, biomarkers studied individually or in combination failed to reliably categorize recidivists from first-time offenders. Conclusion: The study indicates a positive relationship between biomarkers of AUD and recidivism status. Furthermore, use of multiple markers improves the strength of this relationship. Traditional biomarker cut-offs for AUD detection may have limited use in estimating recidivism status, and may require recalibration in future prospective studies.
Rapid and Efficient Vascular Transport of Arginine Polymers Inhibits Myointimal Hyperplasia

BackgroundWe recently discovered that short polymers of arginine efficiently translocate across the cytoplasmic membrane independent of the basic amino acid transporter. We evaluated the kinetics and biological effects of heptamers of l-arginine and d-arginine (L-R7 and D-R7, respectively) in vascular cells. We assessed the effects of these peptides on the NO synthesis pathway and vascular cell proliferation. Methods and ResultsHuman umbilical vein endothelial cell and rabbit vascular segments were incubated in medium containing biotin-labeled L-R7 or D-R7. Both polymers rapidly translocated through the vessel wall and into the vascular cells in a dose- and time-dependent fashion. At a dose of 10 &mgr;mol/L for 30 minutes, 100% of the endothelial cells showed evidence of cytoplasmic and nuclear localization of the peptides. To evaluate the biological effects of the polymer translocation on myointimal formation, rabbit jugular vein segments were incubated with polymers (10 &mgr;mol/L, 30 minutes) or vehicle before arterial interposition grafting. Planimetric measurement 28 days after surgery revealed that L-R7 and D-R7 substantially reduced myointimal formation compared with the control condition (intima/media ratio: control 1.50.5, L-R7 0.40.2, and D-R7 0.80.2;P <0.05). Furthermore, basal nitrate and nitrite production from L-R7–treated grafts was significantly higher than that from both control and D-R7–treated veins. Studies in vitro of cultured vascular smooth muscle cells revealed that both polymers also exhibit an NO-independent inhibition of vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation. ConclusionsShort polymers of arginine have the unique ability of vascular cell translocation, and they also have direct biological effects. These attributes are potentially useful in treating myointimal hyperplasia.
Aiding face recognition with social context association rule based re-ranking

Humans are very efficient at recognizing familiar face images even in challenging conditions. One reason for such capabilities is the ability to understand social context between individuals. Sometimes the identity of the person in a photo can be inferred based on the identity of other persons in the same photo, when some social context between them is known. This research presents an algorithm to utilize co-occurrence of individuals as the social context to improve face recognition. Association rule mining is utilized to infer multi-level social context among subjects from a large repository of social transactions. The results are demonstrated on the G-album and on the SN-collection pertaining to 4675 identities prepared by the authors from a social networking Web site. The results show that association rules extracted from social context can be used to augment face recognition and improve the identification performance.
Quantitative Analysis of the Pulmonary Wedge Angiogram in Congenital Heart Defects: Correlation with Hemodynamic Data and Morphometric Findings in Lung Biopsy Tissue

SUMMARY At cardiac catheterization, 93 pulmonary wedge angiograms were performed in 85 patients with congenital heart defects. The pulmonary wedge angiogram was quantitatively analyzed and the findings were compared with hemodynamic features and morphometric assessment of lung biopsy tissue when available (27 patients). A pulmonary wedge catheter was directed into the right or left lower lobe to the origin of the posterobasal segment artery. The balloon was inflated and 0.3 mI/kg Renovist injected; then, the balloon was deflated and the venophase was followed. From the cine, the following were assessed: (1) abruptness of tapering of the pulmonary arteries (mean length of the artery segment between luminal diameters of 2.5 mm and 1.5mm was calculated), (2) intensity of background haze with reference to standard films and (3) pulmonary circulation time, i.e., the time from balloon deflation to entrance of Renovist into the left atrium. Progressively more abrupt tapering of the pulmonary arteries was observed in patients with increasingly abnormal hemodynamics (p < 0.001). Four patient groups were significantly different from each other (p < 0.05): group I, normal mean pulmonary artery pressure (Ppa), group II, increased Ppa pulmonary vascular resistance (Rp) ⩽ 3 U/m2, group IIIa, Rp > 3 < 5 U/m2 and group IIIb, Rp ⩾ 5 U/m2. Tapering was also more abrupt with increasingly severe structural changes in lung biopsy tissue (p < 0.001). Those with grade A(abnormal extension of muscle into peripheral arteries), grade B (A + increased medial wall thickness) and grade C (B + reduced artery concentration) were significantly different from each other (p < 0.02). Patients with grade IIIb hemodynamics and grade C lung biopsy changes also differed from all other groups in that they had significantly more reduction in background haze (p < 0.05) and tended to have a more prolonged pulmonary circulation time. After repair, the rate of tapering reflected both the current hemodynamic state as well as preoperative Ppa and lung biopsy findings. Thus, the pulmonary wedge angiogram assessed quantitatively correlates with the hemodynamic findings and is also informative of the structural state of the peripheral pulmonary vascular bed.
Collective Operations in an Application-level Fault Tolerant MPI System

The running times of many computational science programs are now significantly greater than the mean-time-betweenfailures (MTBF) of the hardware they run on. Therefore, fault-tolerance is becoming a critical issue on highperformance platforms. Checkpointing is a technique for making programs fault tolerant by periodically saving their state and restoring this state after failure. In system-level checkpointing, the state of the entire machine is saved periodically on stable storage. This has too much overhead to be practical on highperformance platforms with thousands of processors. In practice, programmers do manual checkpointing by writing code to (i) save the values of key program variables at critical points in the program, and (ii) restore the entire computational state from these values during recovery. However, this can be difficult to do in general MPI programs. In an earlier paper, we presented a distributed checkpoint coordination protocol which handles MPI’s point-topoint constructs, and deals with the unique challenges of application-level checkpointing. This protocol is implemented by a thin software layer that sits between the application program and the MPI library, so it does not require any modifications to the MPI library. However, it did not handle collective communication, which is a very important part of MPI. In this paper we extend the protocol to handle MPI’s collective communication constructs.
Energy-efficient management of virtual machines in data centers for cloud computing

Cloud computing has revolutionized the information technology industry by enabling elastic on-demand provisioning of computing resources. The proliferation of Cloud computing has resulted in the establishment of large-scale data centers around the world containing thousands of compute nodes. However, Cloud data centers consume enormous amounts of electrical energy resulting in high operating costs and carbon dioxide emissions. In 2010, energy consumption by data centers worldwide was estimated to be between 1.1% and 1.5% of the global electricity use and is expected to grow further. This thesis presents novel techniques, models, algorithms, and software for distributed dynamic consolidation of Virtual Machines (VMs) in Cloud data centers. The goal is to improve the utilization of computing resources and reduce energy consumption under workload independent quality of service constraints. Dynamic VM consolidation leverages fine-grained fluctuations in the application workloads and continuously reallocates VMs using live migration to minimize the number of active physical nodes. Energy consumption is reduced by dynamically deactivating and reactivating physical nodes to meet the current resource demand. The proposed approach is distributed, scalable, and efficient in managing the energy-performance trade-off. The key contributions are: 1. Competitive analysis of dynamic VM consolidation algorithms and proofs of the competitive ratios of optimal online deterministic algorithms for the formulated single VM migration and dynamic VM consolidation problems. 2. A distributed approach to energy-efficient dynamic VM consolidation and several novel heuristics following the proposed approach, which lead to a significant reduction in energy consumption with a limited performance impact, as evaluated by a simulation study using real workload traces. 3. An optimal offline algorithm for the host overload detection problem, as well as a novel Markov chain model that allows a derivation of an optimal randomized control policy under an explicitly specified QoS goal for any known stationary workload and a given state configuration in the online setting. 4. A heuristically adapted host overload detection algorithm for handling unknown non-stationary workloads. The algorithm leads to approximately 88% of the mean inter-migration time produced by the optimal offline algorithm. 5. An open source implementation of a software framework for distributed dynamic VM consolidation called OpenStack Neat. The framework can be applied in both further research on dynamic VM consolidation, and real OpenStack Cloud deployments to improve the utilization of resources and reduce energy consumption.
A transgene carrying an A2G missense mutation in the SMN gene modulates phenotypic severity in mice with severe (type I) spinal muscular atrophy

5q spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a common autosomal recessive disorder in humans and the leading genetic cause of infantile death. Patients lack a functional survival of motor neurons (SMN1) gene, but carry one or more copies of the highly homologous SMN2 gene. A homozygous knockout of the single murine Smn gene is embryonic lethal. Here we report that in the absence of the SMN2 gene, a mutant SMN A2G transgene is unable to rescue the embryonic lethality. In its presence, the A2G transgene delays the onset of motor neuron loss, resulting in mice with mild SMA. We suggest that only in the presence of low levels of full-length SMN is the A2G transgene able to form partially functional higher order SMN complexes essential for its functions. Mild SMA mice exhibit motor neuron degeneration, muscle atrophy, and abnormal EMGs. Animals homozygous for the mutant transgene are less severely affected than heterozygotes. This demonstrates the importance of SMN levels in SMA even if the protein is expressed from a mutant allele. Our mild SMA mice will be useful in (a) determining the effect of missense mutations in vivo and in motor neurons and (b) testing potential therapies in SMA.
Analysis of cache tuner architectural layouts for multicore embedded systems

Due to the memory hierarchy's large contribution to a microprocessor's total power, cache tuning is an ideal method for optimizing overall power consumption in embedded systems. Since most embedded systems are power and area constrained, the hardware and/or software that orchestrate cache tuning - the cache tuner - must not impose significant power and area overhead. Furthermore, as embedded systems increasingly trend towards multicore, inter-core data sharing, communication, and synchronization impose additional cache tuner design complexity, necessitating cross-core cache tuning coordination. In order to minimize cache tuner overhead, cache tuner design must consider these overheads and scalability. Whereas prior work proposes low-overhead cache tuners, scalability to multicore systems requires additional considerations. In this work, we present a low-overhead, scalable cache tuner and extensively evaluate various cache tuner design tradeoffs with respect to power and area for constrained multicore embedded systems. Based on our analysis, we formulate valuable insights and designer-assisted guidelines for modeling scalable and efficient cache tuners that best achieve optimization goals while maintaining power and area constraints.
Genetic rescue of cell number in a mouse model of microphthalmia: interactions between Chx10 and G1-phase cell cycle regulators

Insufficient cell number is a primary cause of failed retinal development in the Chx10 mutant mouse. To determine if Chx10 regulates cell number by antagonizing p27Kip1 activity, we generated Chx10, p27Kip1 double null mice. The severe hypocellular defect in Chx10 single null mice is alleviated in the double null, and while Chx10-null retinas lack lamination, double null retinas have near normal lamination. Bipolar cells are absent in the double null retina, a defect that is attributable to a requirement for Chx10 that is independent of p27Kip1. We find that p27Kip1 is abnormally present in progenitors of Chx10-null retinas, and that its ectopic localization is responsible for a significant amount of the proliferation defect in this microphthalmia model system. mRNA and protein expression patterns in these mice and in cyclin D1-null mice suggest that Chx10 influences p27Kip1 at a post-transcriptional level, through a mechanism that is largely dependent on cyclin D1. This is the first report of rescue of retinal proliferation in a microphthalmia model by deletion of a cell cycle regulatory gene.
When cycles collapse: A general approximation technique for constrained two-connectivity problems

We present a general approximation technique for a class of network design problems where we seek a network of minimum cost that satisfies certain communication requirements and is resilient to worst-case single-link failures. Our algorithm runs in $O(n^2 \log n)$ time on a graph ith $n$ nodes and outputs a solution of cost at most thrice the optimum. We extend our technique to obtain approximation algorithms for augmenting a given network so as to satisfy certain communication requirements and achieve resilience to single-link failures. Our technique allows one to find nearly minimum-cost two-connected networks for a variety of connectivity requirements. For example, our result generalizes earlier results on finding a minimum-cost two-connected subgraph of a given edge-weighted graph and an earlier result on finding a minimum-cost subgraph two-connecting a specified subset of the nodes. Using our technique, we can also approximately solve for the first time a two-connected version of the generalized Steiner network problem and a two-connected version of the non-fixed point-to-point connection problem.
Structure and stability of non-symmetric Burgers vortices

We investigate, numerically and analytically, the structure and stability of steady and quasi-steady solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations corresponding to stretched vortices embedded in a uniform non-symmetric straining field, (αx, βy, γz), α+β+γ=0, one principal axis of extensional strain of which is aligned with the vorticity. These are known as non-symmetric Burgers vortices (Robinson & Saffman 1984). We consider vortex Reynolds numbers R=Γ/(2πv) where Γ is the vortex circulation and v the kinematic viscosity, in the range R=1−104, and a broad range of strain ratios λ=(β−α)/(β+α) including λ>1, and in some cases λ[Gt ]1. A pseudo-spectral method is used to obtain numerical solutions corresponding to steady and quasi-steady vortex states over our whole (R, λ) parameter space including λ where arguments proposed by Moffatt, Kida & Ohkitani (1994) demonstrate the non-existence of strictly steady solutions. When λ[Gt ]1, R[Gt ]1 and ε≡λ/R[Lt ]1, we find an accurate asymptotic form for the vorticity in a region 1<r/(2v/γ)1/2[les ]ε1/2, giving very good agreement with our numerical solutions. This suggests the existence of an extended region where the exponentially small vorticity is confined to a nearly cat's-eye-shaped region of the almost two-dimensional flow, and takes a constant value nearly equal to Γγ/(4πv)exp[−1/(2eε)] on bounding streamlines. This allows an estimate of the leakage rate of circulation to infinity as ∂Γ/∂t =(0.48475/4π)γε−1Γ exp (−1/2eε) with corresponding exponentially slow decay of the vortex when λ>1. An iterative technique based on the power method is used to estimate the largest eigenvalues for the non-symmetric case λ>0. Stability is found for 0[les ]λ[les ]1, and a neutrally convective mode of instability is found and analysed for λ>1. Our general conclusion is that the generalized non-symmetric Burgers vortex is unconditionally stable to two-dimensional disturbances for all R, 0[les ]λ[les ]1, and that when λ>1, the vortex will decay only through exponentially slow leakage of vorticity, indicating extreme robustness in this case.
School Counselor Development Program (SCDP) for the Treatment of Adolescent Depression and Suicidality: A Pilot Study.

The School Counselor Development Program (SCDP) was developed as a continuing education intervention for middle school counselors in the New York City Department of Education, focusing on six mental health issues relevant to their work with students. A pilot study was run with 21 New York City Public School counselors. This paper focuses on one of the six modules, dealing with the depression and suicidality of students. The training consisted of a short didactic portion focusing on skills training, extensive roleplay practice, and a concluding discussion. A repeated measures design was used with counselors self-assessing confidence before and after the training. It showed a moderately significant increase in counselors’ confidence in dealing with suicidal students and a significant increase in their confidence in dealing with depressed students. Implications for counselors, limitations of the study, and future research are discussed.
Punctured polygons and polyominoes on the square lattice

We use the finite lattice method to count the number of punctured staircase and self-avoiding polygons with up to three holes on the square lattice. New or radically extended series have been derived for both the perimeter and area generating functions. We show that the critical point is unchanged by a finite number of punctures, and that the critical exponent increases by a fixed amount for each puncture. The increase is 1.5 per puncture when enumerating by perimeter and 1.0 when enumerating by area. A refined estimate of the connective constant for polygons by area is given. A similar set of results is obtained for finitely punctured polyominoes. The exponent increase is proved to be 1.0 per puncture for polyominoes.
Exploring the Effect of Lactium™ and Zizyphus Complex on Sleep Quality: A Double-Blind, Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trial

Acute, non-clinical insomnia is not uncommon. Sufferers commonly turn to short-term use of herbal supplements to alleviate the symptoms. This placebo-controlled, double-blind study investigated the efficacy of LZComplex3 (lactium™, Zizyphus, Humulus lupulus, magnesium and vitamin B6), in otherwise healthy adults with mild insomnia. After a 7-day single-blind placebo run-in, eligible volunteers (n = 171) were randomized (1:1) to receive daily treatment for 2 weeks with LZComplex3 or placebo. Results revealed that sleep quality measured by change in Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) score improved in both the LZComplex3 and placebo groups. There were no significant between group differences between baseline and endpoint on the primary outcome. The majority of secondary outcomes, which included daytime functioning and physical fatigue, mood and anxiety, cognitive performance, and stress reactivity, showed similar improvements in the LZComplex3 and placebo groups. A similar proportion of participants reported adverse events (AEs) in both groups, with two of four treatment-related AEs in the LZComplex3 group resulting in permanent discontinuation. It currently cannot be concluded that administration of LZComplex3 for 2 weeks improves sleep quality, however, a marked placebo response (despite placebo run-in) and/or short duration of treatment may have masked a potential beneficial effect on sleep quality.