Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Relationship between Cocaine Use and Human Papillomavirus Infections in HIV-Seropositive and HIV-Seronegative Women

Objective. Animal data suggest that cocaine has an immunosuppressive effect, but no human studies have been conducted to assess the relation of cocaine use with human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, the viral cause of cervical cancer. Since both cocaine use and HPV infection are common among HIV-positive women, we sought to determine whether use of cocaine and/or crack influences the natural history of HPV among women with or at high risk of HIV. Methods. Women enrolled in the Women's Interagency HIV Study (2278 HIV-seropositive and 826 high-risk seronegative women) were examined every six months for up to 9.5 years with Pap smear, collection of cervicovaginal lavage (CVL) samples, and detailed questionnaires regarding health and behavior, including use of crack and cocaine (crack/cocaine). CVLs were tested for HPV DNA by PCR, with genotyping for over forty HPV types. Results. In multivariate logistic regression models, censoring women treated for cervical neoplasia, crack/cocaine use within the last six months was associated with prevalent detection of oncogenic HPV DNA (odds ratio [OR] = 1.30 (1.09–1.55)), and with oncogenic HPV-positive squamous intraepithelial lesions (SIL) (OR = 1.70 (1.27–2.27)), following adjustment for age, race, HIV-serostatus, and CD4+ T-cell count, the number of sexual partners in the past six months, and smoking. In multivariate Cox models crack/cocaine use was also associated with a trend that approached significance in regard to incident detection of oncogenic HPV-positive SIL (HR = 1.51, 95% CI 0.99–2.30), and while the rate of oncogenic HPV clearance was not related to cocaine use, the clearance of any SIL was significantly lower in those with versus those without recent crack/cocaine use (HR = 0.57, 95% CI 0.34–0.97). Conclusions. Cocaine use is associated with an increased risk of detection of both prevalent and incident oncogenic HPV infection, as well as an increased risk of HPV-positive SIL over time.
Approach to the Metabolic Implications of Peritoneal Dialysis in Acute Kidney Injury

During the 1970s and 1980s, peritoneal dialysis (PD) was widely accepted as the standard treatment for acute kidney injury (AKI). However, advances in the techniques of extracorporeal blood purification gradually reduced its use, making PD an underused modality in this context. Although PD for AKI is an underutilized modality worldwide, it is frequently used in developing countries because of its lower cost and minimal infrastructure requirements. Recent studies have shown that PD administered continuously through a flexible catheter and cycler is an effective treatment in AKI because it ensures adequate fluid status and metabolic control. However, the use of PD in AKI has several limitations, such as the need for an intact peritoneal cavity and, in emergency situations such as severe fluid overload and severe hyperkalemia, an efficacy that is lower than that with extracorporeal blood purification techniques. Metabolic, infectious, and mechanical disorders related to PD are also limitations. Among the metabolic complications of PD are hyperglycemia, hypernatremia, protein loss into the dialysate, and hypercatabolism. Hyperglycemia is caused by the use of dialysate containing high concentrations of glucose. Hypernatremia is a result of short dialysate dwell times during the rapid exchanges of high-volume PD. Protein loss into the dialysate can reach 48 g daily, worsening the nutrition status of patients already depleted by AKI. Severe hypercatabolism caused by PD remains controversial and occurs because PD methods cannot provide an adequate dialysis dose for AKI patients. Few studies have assessed the metabolic implications of PD in AKI patients. Evaluation of these implications is relatively simple, imposes no additional costs, and can provide information about the severity of the disease. Evaluation could also guide the selection of therapeutic, dialytic, and nutrition measures, preventing metabolic complications. The present manuscript describes the metabolic implications of PD and reviews the literature on how to prevent metabolic complications.
Gene Therapy: A Promising Approach for Neuroprotection in Parkinson’s Disease?

With the development of effective systems for gene delivery to the central nervous system (CNS), gene therapy has become a therapeutic option for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Gene therapies that are the most advanced in the clinic have been designed to more effectively compensate for the lack of dopamine signaling in the basal ganglia and rescue the cardinal motor symptoms of PD. However, it remains essential to devise novel therapies to prevent neurodegeneration and disease progression. Since gene therapy has been initially proposed for the delivery of neurotrophins to support the survival and function of dopaminergic neurons, our understanding of PD etiology has changed dramatically. Genes implicated in familial forms of the disease and genetic risk factors associated with sporadic PD have been identified. The spreading of the α-synuclein pathology, as well as perturbations of the lysosomal and mitochondrial activities, appear to play critical roles in the pathogenesis. These findings provide novel targets for gene therapy against PD, but at the same time underline the complexity of this chronic disease. Here we review and discuss the successes and limitations of gene therapy approaches, which have been proposed to provide neuroprotection in PD.
Effective medium theory of hopping transport.

An effective medium theory for the calculation of the conductivity in the presence of inelastic scattering has been developed. Our approach turns out to be quite universal and applicable to arbitrary types of disorder. In contrast to other effective medium theories, our method does not rely on the introduction of an ordered lattice but focuses on the diffusion processes in the disordered media. We obtain a quantum diffusion equation in the presence of inelastic scattering which takes into account the Fermi correlation. The form of this equation shows the inapplicability of the concept of a spectral density for the conductivity used in earlier effective medium treatments. Furthermore, we apply our formalism to the calculation of the conductivity in the variable range hopping regime. For the dc conductivity we obtain Mott's law. In addition, we derive a simple formula for the frequency dependence of the ac conductivity. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
MicroTrails: comparing hypotheses about task selection on a crowdsourcing platform

To optimize the workflow on commercial crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Microworkers, it is important to understand how users choose their tasks. Current work usually explores the underlying processes by employing user studies based on surveys with a limited set of participants. In contrast, we formulate hypotheses based on the different findings in these studies and, instead of verifying them based on user feedback, we compare them directly on data from a commercial crowdsourcing platform. For evaluation, we use a Bayesian approach called HypTrails which allows us to give a relative ranking of the corresponding hypotheses. The hypotheses considered, are for example based on task categories, monetary incentives or semantic similarity of task descriptions. We find that, in our scenario, hypotheses based on employers as well the the task descriptions work best. Overall, we objectively compare different factors influencing users when choosing their tasks. Our approach enables crowdsourcing companies to better understand their users in order to optimize their platforms, e.g., by incorparting the gained knowledge about these factors into task recommentation systems.
Development and Psychometric Properties of the Problematic Internet use Questionnaire

Since the inception of the Internet, research has suggested that a small group of people have a tendency to abuse the Internet and thereby cause damage to their health, their personal life and/or their professional life. Numerous terms, including Internet Addiction Disorder and pathological Internet use, have been used to describe this behaviour and its consequences. More recently, the term, problematic Internet use, has been favoured to describe people who cannot resist engaging with the Internet. This article describes the development and psychometric properties of the Problematic Internet Use Questionnaire (PIUQ). The development of the PIUQ was a two-stage process involving a pilot study on a smaller sample (N = 279) and a validation study on a much larger sample (N = 1795). The results of the validation study provided good evidence for the reliability and construct validity of the PIUQ. The exploratory factor analysis suggests that the PIUQ may consist of three sub-scales (i.e., Online preoccupation, Adverse effects and Social interactions), each with good internal reliability. The discussion provides recommendations for future studies using and validating the PIUQ.
FoldCons: A Simple Way To Improve Tag Recommendation

Tag recommendation is a major aspect of collaborative tagging systems. It aims to recommend tags to a user for tagging an item. In this paper we present a part of our work in progress which is a novel improvement of recommendations by re-ranking the output of a tag recommender. We mine association rules between candidates tags in order to determine a more consistent list of tags to recommend. Our method is an add-on one which leads to better recommendations as we show in this paper. It is easily parallelizable and morever it may be applied to a lot of tag recommenders. The experiments we did on five datasets with two kinds of tag recommender demonstrated the efficiency of our method.
Efficient data streaming with on-chip accelerators: Opportunities and challenges

The transistor density of microprocessors continues to increase as technology scales. Microprocessors designers have taken advantage of the increased transistors by integrating a significant number of cores onto a single die. However, a large number of cores are met with diminishing returns due to software and hardware scalability issues and hence designers have started integrating on-chip special-purpose logic units (i.e., accelerators) that were previously available as PCI-attached units. It is anticipated that more accelerators will be integrated on-chip due to the increasing abundance of transistors and the fact that not all logic can be powered at all times due to power budget limits. Thus, on-chip accelerator architectures deserve more attention from the research community. There is a wide spectrum of research opportunities for design and optimization of accelerators. This paper attempts to bring out some insights by studying the data access streams of on-chip accelerators that hopefully foster some future research in this area. Specifically, this paper uses a few simple case studies to show some of the common characteristics of the data streams introduced by on-chip accelerators, discusses challenges and opportunities in exploiting these characteristics to optimize the power and performance of accelerators, and then analyzes the effectiveness of some simple optimizing extensions proposed.
Analysis of Single-Trap-Induced Random Telegraph Noise on FinFET Devices, 6T SRAM Cell, and Logic Circuits

This paper analyzes the impacts of single-charged-trap-induced random telegraph noise (RTN) on FinFET devices in tied- and independent-gate modes, 6T static random access memory (SRAM) cell stability, and several basic logic circuits. The dependence of RTN on trap location, EOT, and temperature is evaluated through 3-D atomistic TCAD simulation. It is observed that the charged trap located near the bottom of sidewall (gate) interface and in the middle region between the source and drain will result in the most significant impact. EOT scaling and higher operating temperature improve the immunity to RTN. RTN degradation in independent-gate mode and the dependence on the location of the trap and bias-dependent current-conduction path are analyzed. We show that the planar BULK device, with larger subthreshold swing (<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$S.S.$</tex></formula>) and comparable trap-induced <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$V_{T}$</tex></formula> shift, exhibits less nominal RTN degradation than FinFET for traps placed in the worst position. However, the larger variability and surface conduction characteristic of the planar BULK device lead to broader dispersion and larger worst case RTN degradation than the FinFET device with smaller variability and volume conduction. For traps randomly placed across the interface, similar RTN amplitude dispersions are observed for FinFET and planar BULK devices except in the vicinity of distribution tail due to the strong interaction between the charged trap and discrete random dopants in planar BULK devices. For 6T FinFET SRAM cell, the READ static noise margin of 64 possible combinations from trapping/detrapping in each cell transistor is examined. Because of reduced carriers with decreasing supply voltage <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$(V_{\rm dd})$</tex></formula>, the importance of RTN on subthreshold cell stability increases. Moreover, the leakage and delay of FinFET inverters, two-way nand, and two-to-one multiplexer are investigated using 3-D TCAD mixed-mode simulations. The RTN is found to cause <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$\sim$</tex></formula>24%–27% and <formula formulatype="inline"> <tex Notation="TeX">$\sim$</tex></formula>13%–15% variations in leakage and delay at <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$V_{ \rm dd} = \hbox{0.4}\ \hbox{V}$</tex></formula>, respectively, for the logic circuits evaluated.
Connectivity rescues genetic diversity after a demographic bottleneck in a butterfly population network

Significance With climate change and associated climatic instability, populations are expected to experience more frequent and severe fluctuations in size. These population size fluctuations erode genetic diversity, which is a central concern for conservation. Connectivity among habitats should, in theory, protect against the erosion of genetic diversity because immigration of individuals into populations can counteract genetic diversity loss. Our study provides the first evidence in a natural system for a direct effect of connectivity in recovery of genetic diversity following a demographic bottleneck, highlighting the importance of maintaining connectivity in the face of climate change. Our results suggest an important potential interaction between the two global change factors of habitat fragmentation and climate change on genetic diversity of natural populations. Demographic bottlenecks that occur when populations fluctuate in size erode genetic diversity, but that diversity can be recovered through immigration. Connectivity among populations and habitat patches in the landscape enhances immigration and should in turn facilitate recovery of genetic diversity after a sudden reduction in population size. For the conservation of genetic diversity, it may therefore be particularly important to maintain connectivity in the face of factors that increase demographic instability, such as climate change. However, a direct link between connectivity and recovery of genetic diversity after a demographic bottleneck has not been clearly demonstrated in an empirical system. Here, we show that connectivity of habitat patches in the landscape contributes to the maintenance of genetic diversity after a demographic bottleneck. We were able to monitor genetic diversity in a network of populations of the alpine butterfly, Parnassius smintheus, before, during, and after a severe reduction in population size that lasted two generations. We found that allelic diversity in the network declined after the demographic bottleneck but that less allelic diversity was lost from populations occupying habitat patches with higher connectivity. Furthermore, the effect of connectivity on allelic diversity was important during the demographic recovery phase. Our results demonstrate directly the ability of connectivity to mediate the rescue of genetic diversity in a natural system.
Work in progress - assessment of the development of personal and social competencies by students

Universities are becoming increasingly aware of how important it is to equip their students with personal and social competencies such as client orientation or teamwork and cooperation. This paper presents a research project whose aim is to create a comprehensive system of assessment and development of competencies to support the competency-based educational model implemented at the School of Chemical Engineering (ETSEQ) at the University Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain
Challenging tensions: critical, theoretical and empirical perspectives on social enterprise

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue, which explores the concept and significance of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship internationally.Design/methodology/approach – This introductory article examines the literature that exists to date and presents an outline of some of the fundamental issues and the challenging tensions within the conceptualisation of social enterprise. The article concludes with a discussion of critical future research needs.Findings – The findings suggest that a critical perspective is required in order to add originality and value to this developing area of research.Originality/value – The papers presented raise some interesting issues about current conceptualisations of social enterprise and entrepreneurship, challenging tensions from critical, theoretical and empirical perspectives. The Special Issue seeks to expand the debate in social enterprise and bring to the fore some critical perspective in order to highlight alternative views which.
Techniques for the interactive visualization of volumetric data

Some ideas and techniques for visualizing volumetric data are introduced. The methods presented are different from both the volume rendering techniques and surface contour methods. Volumetric data is data with a domain of three independent variables. The independent variables do not have to indicate a position in space and can be abstract in the sense that they can represent any quantity. The authors cover only the case where the dependent data is a single scalar. The authors describe a collection of techniques and ideas for graphing cuberille grid data. All of these techniques are quite simple and rather easy to implement. During the development of these techniques, the authors were particularly concerned with allowing the user to interact with the system in order to interrogate and analyze the relationships indicated by the volumetric data. <<ETX>>
Power-efficient access-point selection for indoor location estimation

An important goal of indoor location estimation systems is to increase the estimation accuracy while reducing the power consumption. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm known as CaDet for power-efficient location estimation by intelligently selecting the number of access points (APs) used for location estimation. We show that by employing machine learning techniques, CaDet is able to use a small subset of the APs in the environment to detect a client's location with high accuracy. CaDet uses a combination of information theory, clustering analysis, and a decision tree algorithm. By collecting data and testing our algorithms in a realistic WLAN environment in the computer science department area of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, we show that CaDet (clustering and decision tree-based method) can be much higher in accuracy as compared to other methods. We also show through experiments that, by intelligently selecting APs, we are able to save the power on the client device while achieving the same level of accuracy.
A fast iterative features selection for the K-nearest neighbor

Recently, multi-source remote sensing data and their derived features such as vegetation indices, texture metrics have been frequently applied to quantitatively estimate forest above-ground biomass (AGB). However, it is still challenging to efficiently select the optimal features for modeling the forest AGB. In this study, a fast, efficient and automatic method has been proposed, called as k-nearest neighbor with fast iterative features selection (KNN-FIFS). This method iteratively pre-select the optimal features which determined by the minimum root mean square error (RMSE) between the forest field data and the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) estimates based on the leave-one-out (LOO) cross-validation. By use of KNN-FIFS and multisource data, including Landsat-8 OLI (operational land imager) and its vegetation indices, texture metrics, HV polarization of P-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data (PHV), and forest inventory data, were applied to estimate forest AGB over Genhe forest reserve located in Inner Mongolia, China. Afterwards, the model behaviors between KNN-FIFS and stepwise multiple linear regression (SMLR) methods were compared, which showed that the KNN-FIFS method (R2 = 0.77 and RMSE = 22.74 t·ha−1) was superior to the SMLR method (R2 = 0.53 and RMSE = 32.37 t·ha−1).
Improvements in Throughput Maximization for Real-Time Scheduling

We consider the problem of off-line throughput maximization for job scheduling on one or more machines, where each job has a release time, a deadline and a profit. Most of the versions of the problem discussed here were already treated by Bar-Noy et al. [3]. Our main contribution is to provide algorithms that do not use linear programming, are simple and much faster than the corresponding ones proposed in [3], while either having the same quality of approximation or improving it. More precisely, compared to the results of in BarNoy et al. [3], our pseudo-polynomial algorithm for multiple unrelated machines and all of our strongly-polynomial algorithms have better performance ratios, all of our algorithms run much faster, are combinatorial in nature and avoid linear programming. Finally, we show that algorithms with better performance ratios than 2 are possible if the stretch factors of the jobs are bounded; a straightforward consequence of this result is an improvement of the ratio of an optimal solution to the integer programming formulation of the JISP2 problem (see [13]) to that of its linear programming relaxation.