Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
US long-haul truck driver work organization and the association with cardiometabolic disease risk

ABSTRACT Work organization, including long working hours, irregular work schedules, and job stress, has been associated with increased cardiometabolic disease (CMD) risk for numerous working populations. The purpose of this study was to examine the associations between work hours, work schedules, job stress, and CMD risk for a sample of US long-haul truck drivers (LHTDs). A nonexperimental, descriptive, cross-sectional design was employed to collect survey and anthropometric data from 260 US LHTDs at a major truck stop. The mean BMI was 33.40 kg/m2 and mean waist circumference was 114.77 cm. Using logistic regression, researchers found longer work hours, especially greater than 11 hours daily, were associated with increased odds for an extremely high risk of CMD. Results support comprehensive and integrated approaches that address work organization, and in particular long working hours, to reduce drivers' CMD risk.
The Big Bang Theory of IDEs

Remember the halcyon days when development required only a text editor, a compiler, and some sort of debugger (in cases where the odd printf() or two alone didn’t serve)? During the early days of computing, these were independent tools used iteratively in development’s golden circle. Somewhere along the way we realized that a closer integration of these tools could expedite the development process. Thus was born the integrated development environment (IDE), a framework and user environment for software development that’s actually a toolkit of instruments essential to software creation. At first, IDEs simply connected the big three (editor, compiler, and debugger), but nowadays most go well beyond those minimum requirements. In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed an explosion in the constituent functionality of IDEs.
Regulation of intracellular pH by glycosaminoglycans

The intracellular pH is regulated by a delicate balance of ion distribution across the plasma membrane and the physico‐chemical properties of intra‐ and extracellular components. We analyzed the effects of glycosaminoglycans on the intracellular pH of fibroblasts by using the fluorescent pH indicator BCECF‐AM. Addition of hyaluronan, hyaluronan oligosaccharides, chondroitin sulfate, or heparin to the culture medium of fibroblasts caused intracellular acidification from pH 7.2 to 6.7 in a concentration dependent manner. High molecular weight hyaluronan acidified more than hyaluronan oligosaccharides at the same concentrations. Hyaluronidase treatment or inhibition of hyaluronan export with xanthohumol led to intracellular alkalization. These observations indicated that extracellular glycosaminoglycans participate in intracellular pH regulation. The mechanism was explained by Donnan effects and molecular crowding. J. Cell. Physiol. 228: 2071–2075, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm with Differential Evolution

Differential evolution (DE) is a simple evolutionary algorithm that has shown superior performance in the global continuous optimization. It mainly utilizes the differential information to guide its further search. But the differential information also results in instability of performance. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been developing rapidly and has been applied widely since it is introduced, as it can converge quickly. But PSO easily got stuck in local optima because it easily loses the diversity of swarm. This paper proposes a combination of DE and PSO (termed DEPSO) that makes up their disadvantages. DEPSO combines the differential information obtained by DE with the memory information extracted by PSO to create the promising solutions. Finally, DEPSO is tested to solve several benchmark optimization problems. The experimental results show the effectiveness of DEPSO algorithm for the multimodal function, and also verify that DEPSO can perform better than other algorithms (DE, CPSO) in solving the benchmark problems.
Steady-state analysis of the buck converter for renewable energy systems

This paper investigates an input-output voltage gain and efficiency analysis of input-controlled step-down buck converter for renewable energy systems. The system investigates operation in two modes, continuous conduction mode and discontinuous conduction mode. In the research, the parasitic resistance of the inductor is considered, and also DC-link-output voltage is fixed by energy storage or by the post stage power conditioner. The input voltage should be controlled for tracking the maximum power point. In the system, the CCM-DCM boundary condition is totally different from that of an output-controlled converter for conventional. Finally, extensive simulation results are also presented to compare in voltage gain and power efficiency to buck converter.
Direct numerical simulation of turbulent non-premixed combustion with realistic chemistry

Combustion is an important phenomenon in many engineering applications; combustion of hydrocarbons is still by far the most common source of energy in the world. In virtually every application of combustion processes, the flow in which the chemical reactions are taking place is turbulent. Furthermore, the combustion process itself is usually described by a very large system of elementary chemical reactions. These chemical kinetic mechanisms are usually extremely stiff and involve, for long-chain hydrocarbon species, perhaps hundreds of chemical species (which, if the combustion process is to be completely simulated, implies a need to solve hundreds of partial differential equations simultaneously). The governing equations describing the chemical composition are closely coupled to those describing the turbulent transport. Also, the chemical reaction rates are non-linear and strongly depend on the instantaneous composition and temperature. For these reasons, a full understanding of the many processes at work in devices such as furnaces, diesel engines, and gas turbines has been lacking. In many devices of interest such as those mentioned above, the combustion takes place in what is known as the “non-premixed” regime. The fuel and oxidizer are initially unmixed, and in order for chemical reaction to take place, they must first mix together. In this regime, the rate at which fuel and oxidizer are consumed and at which heat and product species are produced is, therefore, to a large extent controlled by mixing. The nature of such flows lends itself to a particular variety of models which attempt to take advantage of this. These models describe mixing based on what is called the “mixture fraction”, or the fraction of fluid which originated in the fuel stream; they attempt to either describe a steady state flame by a simple mapping operation—as in fast chemistry models (Bilger, 1980) and laminar flamelet models (Peters, 1984)—or incorporate reaction rates by expressing them as functions of the mixture fraction—as in the unsteady laminar flamelet model of Pitch and Peters (1998), the Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) model proposed independently by Klimenko (1990) and Bilger (1993a,b), and the Conditional Source-term Estimation (CSE) model of Bushe and Steiner (1998). Work attempting to improve and validate models for turbulent combustion has been hampered by a lack of adequate experimental results. Experimental methods which might provide the necessary insight are also extremely expensive, difficult to perform, and still quite limited in the information they provide. Direct Numerical
Electron–electron and electron–hole pairing in graphene structures

The superconducting pairing of electrons in doped graphene owing to in-plane and out-of-plane phonons is considered. It is shown that the structure of the order parameter in the valley space substantially affects conditions of the pairing. Electron–hole pairing in a graphene bilayer in the strong coupling regime is also considered. Taking into account retardation of the screened Coulomb pairing potential shows a significant competition between the electron–hole direct attraction and their repulsion owing to virtual plasmons and single-particle excitations.
IFN-λ determines the intestinal epithelial antiviral host defense

Type I and type III IFNs bind to different cell-surface receptors but induce identical signal transduction pathways, leading to the expression of antiviral host effector molecules. Despite the fact that type III IFN (IFN-λ) has been shown to predominantly act on mucosal organs, in vivo infection studies have failed to attribute a specific, nonredundant function. Instead, a predominant role of type I IFN was observed, which was explained by the ubiquitous expression of the type I IFN receptor. Here we comparatively analyzed the role of functional IFN-λ and type I IFN receptor signaling in the innate immune response to intestinal rotavirus infection in vivo, and determined viral replication and antiviral gene expression on the cellular level. We observed that both suckling and adult mice lacking functional receptors for IFN-λ were impaired in the control of oral rotavirus infection, whereas animals lacking functional receptors for type I IFN were similar to wild-type mice. Using Mx1 protein accumulation as marker for IFN responsiveness of individual cells, we demonstrate that intestinal epithelial cells, which are the prime target cells of rotavirus, strongly responded to IFN-λ but only marginally to type I IFN in vivo. Systemic treatment of suckling mice with IFN-λ repressed rotavirus replication in the gut, whereas treatment with type I IFN was not effective. These results are unique in identifying a critical role of IFN-λ in the epithelial antiviral host defense.
Sidescan sonar segmentation using active contours and level set methods

This paper is concerned with the application of active contour methods to unsupervised binary segmentation of high resolution sonar images. First texture features are extracted from a side scan image containing two distinct regions. A region based active contour model of Chan and Vese [2000] is then applied to the vector valued images extracted from the original data. The set of features considered is the Haralick feature set based on the cooccurrence matrix. To improve computational efficiency the extraction of the Haralick feature set is implemented by using sum and difference histograms as proposed by Unser [1989]. Our implementation includes an automatic feature selection step used to readjust the weights attached to each feature in the curve evolution equation that drives the segmentation. Results are shown on simulated and real data. The influence of the algorithm parameters and contour initialisation are analysed.
Electrooculographic and electromyographic artifacts removal from EEG

Completely automated methods for removing electroocular (EOG) and muscle (EMG) artifacts in the electroencephalogram (EEG) are presented in this paper which are implemented as an Automatic Artifact Removal (AAR) toolbox in EEGLAB. The method of removing EOG artifacts is based on second order blind identification (SOBI) as a blind source separation (BSS) technique and procedure of muscle artifact removal is based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) as a blind source separation (BSS) technique. These techniques successfully deals with the removal of the most EOG and EMG artifacts in EEG recordings containing epilectic seizures without distorting the recorded ictal activity.
Study of a thyristor driven pump as a flow indicator

In the present paper, the load current of a thyristor driven pump has been utilized as a mass flow sensing parameter of a fluid being lifted by the pump. The motor load current has been sensed by an opto-isolator based circuit and the output of this circuit has been displayed in a PC monitor using Labtech Notebook Pro software. A theoretical equation relating the output of opto-isolator circuit with mass flow rate has been derived and experimental study has been carried out to verify this theoretical equation, assuming the volume flow rate of water at constant room temperature to be proportional to mass flow rate. The experimental results are presented in the paper. It has been observed that the opto-isolator output and the on-line display in PC monitor both vary almost linearly with mass flow rate. Percentage deviation of the experimental results from ideal linearity and repeatability in terms of standard deviation are found to be within tolerable limit.
Left atrial volume is an independent predictor of all-cause mortality in chronic hemodialysis patients.

OBJECTIVE An enlarged left atrium (LA) has recently been identified as a risk factor for adverse cardiovascular outcomes in various pathologic conditions. However, few studies have evaluated its prognostic value in hemodialysis (HD) patients. METHODS We conducted an observational study to investigate whether an enlarged LA predicted all-cause mortality in 174 HD patients. Patients were stratified into two groups based on the LA volume index (LAVI) value of 32 mL/m2. RESULTS An increased left atrial volume index (LAVI >32 mL/m(2)) was present in 28 (16.1%) of the HD patients. During the follow-up period (50.1 ± 22.4 months), 77 patients (44.3%) died. A Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed that the 7-year survival rate was significantly lower in the group whose LAVI was >32 mL/m(2) than in the group whose LAVI was ≤ 32 mL/m(2) (p=0.0033). Multivariate analyses adjusted for echocardiographic parameters and clinical and laboratory data showed that increased LAVI was an independent predictor of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio 1.030, 95% confidence interval 1.004-1.056, p=0.0260). Moreover, increased LAVI had a higher predictive value for all-cause mortality (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve=0.612, p=0.0059) among the measured echocardiographic parameters. CONCLUSION The results of the present study suggested that measurement of LAVI may be helpful in the risk stratification of HD patients and in providing therapeutic direction for their management.
Reproducing and Prototyping Recommender Systems in R

In this paper we describe rrecsys, an open source extension package in R for rapid prototyping and intuitive assessment of recommender system algorithms. Due to its wide variety of implemented packages and functionalities, R language represents a popular choice for many tasks in Data Analysis. This package replicates the most popular collaborative ﬁltering algorithms for rating and binary data and we compare results with the Java-based LensKit implementation for the purpose of benchmarking the implementation. Therefore this work can also be seen as a contribution in the context of replication of algorithm implementations and reproduction of evaluation results. Users can easily tune available implementations or develop their own algorithms and assess them according to the standard methodology for oﬄine evaluation. Thus this package should represent an easily accessible environment for research and teaching purposes in the ﬁeld of recommender systems.
BandPass Sigma-Delta Modulator for Capacitive Pressure Sensor

The paper deals with bandpass sigma-delta modulator (BP SDM), which is used for conversion of signal from capacitive pressure sensor. This approach is absolutely new and unique, because this kind of modulators is utilized only for wireless and video applications. The main advantage of BP SDM is due to its defined band. That is why it is resistant against offsets of its subcuircits. Another important advantage is low power consumption, since the BP SDM digitizes only narrow band instead of whole Nyquist band with similar dynamic range. The paper shows basic ideas of this approach and simulation results with ideal and real modulator. The main stages are implemented in switched-capacitor (SC) technique. The modulator layout is presented as well.
Mitogen-activated Protein Kinase Is Involved in the Degradation of p53 Protein in the Bryostatin-1-induced Differentiation of the Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia NB4 Cell Line*

Overexpression of mutant p53 has been reported to promote tumorigenicity in several cancers. However, despite its potential importance, the signals regulating mutant p53 protein expression are not known. Here we show that a form of p53 that is incapable of binding DNA is overexpressed in the acute promyelocytic leukemia NB4 cell line. Our results demonstrate that treatment of NB4 cells with bryostatin-1, which induces differentiation in this cell line, leads to hyperphosphorylation of this DNA binding-impaired form of p53 via mitogen-activated protein kinase. After this phosphorylation, the p53 protein is degraded by the ubiquitin/proteasome pathway. Furthermore, we show that inhibition of p53 hyperphosphorylation blocks p53 protein degradation and cell differentiation. In addition, inhibition of the ubiquitin/proteasome pathway also blocks p53 protein degradation and cell differentiation. These findings suggest a role for mitogen-activated protein kinase in the degradation of the DNA binding-impaired form of p53 protein and in the bryostatin-induced differentiation observed in this cell line. The implications of these results with respect to the functional significance of p53 phosphorylation and degradation in cell differentiation are discussed.
A Dual-Fed, Self-Diplexing PIFA and RF Front-End

A dual-fed, self-diplexing planar inverted F antenna and an associated RF front-end are described. It is shown that co-design of the antenna and front-end can be used to double the operational bandwidth, without significant size or performance penalties. Indeed, the use of two feeds allows the antenna to be self-diplexing, which results in improved overall efficiency
Effects of design, structure and material on thermal-mechanical reliability of large array wafer level packages

In this paper, thermo-mechanical reliability of a variety of state-of-art wafer level packaging (WLP) technologies is studied from a structural design point of view. Various WLP technologies, such as Ball on I/O with and without redistribution layer (RDL), Ball on Polymer with and without under bump metallurgy (UBM) process, and encapsulated Copper Post WLPs, are investigated for their structural characteristics and reliability performance. Ball on I/O WLP, in which solder balls are attached directly to the metal pads on silicon wafer, is used as a benchmark for the analysis. 3-D finite element modeling is performed to investigate the effects of WLP structures, UBM process, polymer film material properties (in Ball on Polymer), and encapsulated epoxy material properties (in Copper Post WLP). Fundamentals underlying thermomechanical reliability mechanisms are uncovered through detailed parametric studies. Experimental tests with various parameters were conducted to validate simulation results. Both Ball on Polymer and Copper Post WLPs have shown great reliability improvement in thermal cycling. Encapsulated copper post WLP showed the best performance.
Penicillin‐binding proteins in β‐lactam‐resistant laboratory mutants of Streptococcus pneumoniae

The increasing number of penicillin‐resistant clinical strains of Strepfococcus pneumoniae has raised questions about the mechanism involved. We have isolated a large number of independent, spontaneous laboratory mutants with increasing resistance against either piperacillin or cefotaxime. Both classes of mutants showed a different pathway of penicillin‐binding protein (PBP) alterations, and within each group of mutants the individual PBPs appeared to have changed at different resistance levels and in different sequences. The mutations led to decreased β‐lactam affinity and possibly to a reduction in the amount of protein present in the cell, but differences in apparent molecular weight, like those reported in low‐ and high‐level resistant pathogenic strains, were not found. Some mutants showed a high degree of cross‐resistance to a variety of pencillins and cephaiosporins independently of the acquired PBP alterations, indicating that different genotypes can be responsible for the same phenotypic expression of resistance.
Nondestructive optical determination of fiber organization in intact myocardial wall

Mapping the myocardial fiber organization is important for assessing the electrical and mechanical properties of normal and diseased hearts. Current methods to determine the fiber organization have several limitations: histological sectioning mechanically distorts the tissue and is labor‐intensive, while diffusion tensor imaging has low spatial resolution and requires expensive MRI scanners. Here, we utilized optical clearing, a fluorescent dye, and confocal microscopy to create three‐dimensional reconstructions of the myocardial fiber organization of guinea pig and mouse hearts. We have optimized the staining and clearing procedure to allow for the nondestructive imaging of whole hearts with a thickness up to 3.5 mm. Myocardial fibers could clearly be identified at all depths in all preparations. We determined the change of fiber orientation across strips of guinea pig left ventricular wall. Our study confirms the qualitative result that there is a steady counterclockwise fiber rotation across the ventricular wall. Quantitatively, we found a total fiber rotation of 105.7 ± 14.9° (mean ± standard error of the mean); this value lies within the range reported by previous studies. These results show that optical clearing, in combination with a fluorescent dye and confocal microscopy, is a practical and accurate method for determining myocardial fiber organization. Microsc. Res. Tech., 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Détection de ruptures pour les signaux multidimensionnels. Application à la détection d'anomalies dans les réseaux.

L'objectif de cette these est de proposer des methodes non-parametriques de detection retrospective de ruptures. L'application principale de cette etude est la detection d'attaques dans les reseaux informatiques a partir de donnees recueillies par plusieurs sondes disseminees dans le reseau. Nous proposons dans un premier temps une methode en trois etapes de detection decentralisee d'anomalies faisant cooperer des sondes n'ayant acces qu'a une partie du trafic reseau. Un des avantages de cette approche est la possibilite de traiter un flux massif de donnees, ce qui est permis par une etape de filtrage par records. Un traitement local est effectue dans chaque sonde, et une synthese est realisee dans un centre de fusion. La detection est effectuee a l'aide d'un test de rang qui est inspire par le test de rang de Wilcoxon et etendu aux donnees censurees. Dans une seconde partie, nous proposons d'exploiter les relations de dependance entre les donnees recueillies par les differents capteurs afin d'ameliorer les performances de detection. Nous proposons ainsi une methode non-parametrique de detection d'une ou plusieurs ruptures dans un signal multidimensionnel. Cette methode s'appuie sur un test d'homogeneite utilisant un test de rang multivarie. Nous decrivons les proprietes asymptotiques de ce test ainsi que ses performances sur divers jeux de donnees (bio-informatiques, econometriques ou reseau). La methode proposee obtient de tres bons resultats, en particulier lorsque la distribution des donnees est atypique (par exemple en presence de valeurs aberrantes).