Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dealing with Generic Contrariness in Structured Argumentation

The adoption of a generic contrariness notion in ASPIC+ substantially enhances its expressiveness with respect to other formalisms for structured argumentation. In particular, it opens the way to novel investigation directions, like the use of multivalued logics in the construction of arguments. This paper points out however that in the current version of ASPIC+ a serious technical difficulty related with generic contrariness is present. With the aim of preserving the same level of generality, the paper provides a solution based on a novel notion of closure of the contrariness relation at the level of sets of formulas and an abstract representation of conflicts between sets of arguments. The proposed solution is shown to satisfy the same rationality postulates as ASPIC+ and represents a starting point for further technical and conceptual developments in structured argumentation.
Seismic Behaviour and Seismic Design of Single-Layer Reticulated Shells with Semi-Rigid Joint System

An investigation of the seismic behaviour and a design method for single-layer reticulated shells with semi-rigid joints is described in this paper. A semi-rigid joint system has some bending and rotational rigidity that lying between that of a rigid-joint and a pin-joint. The seismic capacity of Kiewit reticulated shells with bolt-ball joints is analyzed in detail on the basis of the bending rigidity of the bolt-ball joint reported by others. The change rules of natural frequency and seismic internal force coefficient are reviewed by analyzing of large-scale shells with different span, depth-to-span ratio, bending rigidity, roof load, section size of members and seismic wave parameters. The seismic internal force coefficient (under the influence of bending moment) for shells with a semi-rigid joint system is summarized statistically to provide the maximal seismic response envelop.
Effectiveness of physician-based assessment and counseling for exercise in a staff model HMO.

BACKGROUND Few primary care physicians routinely counsel for exercise, despite the benefits of physical activity and the high prevalence of inactivity. The objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of Physician-Based Assessment and Counseling for Exercise (PACE), a brief, behavior-based tool for primary care providers counseling healthy adults. METHODS This study is a randomized controlled trial of 812 patients age 30 years or older registered for well visits at 32 primary care physician offices at a staff model health maintenance organization. Intervention physicians were trained to deliver PACE exercise counseling protocols at the index visit, and one reminder telephone call occurred at 1 month. An enhanced intervention group received additional activity reminders. RESULTS At the 6-month follow-up, the control group did not differ significantly from the intervention group for energy expended (2,048 kcal/week versus 2,108 kcal/ week, P = 0.77), time spent in walking or other moderate to vigorous activities (202 min/week versus 187 min/ week, P = 0.99), mental health, physical function, or behaviors previously shown to predict activity change. Among the intervention patients, the stages-of-change score for Contemplators increased significantly compared with controls (P = 0.03), but without a significant change in energy expended. Baseline levels of physical activity counseling were high (50%), as were baseline patient physical activity levels (61% exercised at least three times a week). CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that a one-time PACE counseling session with minimal reinforcement, in a setting with high baseline levels of activity, does not further increase activity. The finding that Contemplators advanced in stage of behavior change suggests that further studies are needed to examine long-term, repeated counseling interventions.
Vision-based Web Data Records Extraction

This paper studies the problem of extracting data records on the response pages returned from web databases or search engines. Existing solutions to this problem are based primarily on analyzing the HTML DOM trees and tags of the response pages. While these solutions can achieve good results, they are too heavily dependent on the speciflcs of HTML and they may have to be changed should the response pages are written in a totally difierent markup language. In this paper, we propose a novel and language independent technique to solve the data extraction problem. Our proposed solution performs the extraction using only the visual information of the response pages when they are rendered on web browsers. We analyze several types of visual features in this paper. We also propose a new measure revision to evaluate the extraction performance. This measure re∞ects perfect extraction ratio among all response pages. Our experimental results indicate that this visionbased approach can achieve very high extraction accuracy.
Whole exome sequencing analysis pipeline for the discovery of mutations causative of human rare diseases

Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies have made exome sequencing to be an outstanding tool for finding disease associated mutations at a relatively low cost. However, it is a non-trivial task to transform the vast amount of sequence data into meaningful variants to improve disease understanding. Several challenges arise when dealing with this approach, being critical checkpoints the raw read preprocessing, mapping procedure, variant calling and posterior variant selection. A number of computational algorithms and pipelines have been reported for variant analysis, none of them providing a complete strategy from raw data to mendelian analysis results. Here, we present a methodology that spans from SOLiD raw reads processing to mendelian analysis and variant selection, and its application over a set of samples from The Medical Genome Project, which proves the good performance of the applied methodology. As stated above, the input of the pipeline is an xsq file generated by Applied Biosystem SOLiD 5500 XL sequencers, while the output is the result of variant annotation and mendelian analysis, assuming samples to be derived from a group or a family. A brief description of the steps is provided below:
Evolution of long term narrowband-IoT

Wireless technology is one of the enabler for Internet of Things (IoT) with a tremendous expected growth in the next years. The variety of wireless technologies to support different requirements like coverage or network architecture transform the wireless industry in a very competitive segment. There are many solutions for short and middle range IoT communication however, there is not still a long range solution that is broader adopted by the industry, which is generally know as Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWAN) technology. There LPWAN has not been designed for mobile network but the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), that is responsible for 3G and 4G standardization, created the new technology that is named Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT) which intends to be widely adopted by the Operators. This article presents a summary of the NB-IoT specifications and some comparisons with others LPWAN technologies.
What you see is what you snap: snapping to geometry deformed on the GPU

We present a simple yet effective snapping technique for constraining the motion of the cursor of an input device to the surface of 3D models whose geometry is arbitrarily deformed by a programmable hardware fragment and vertex processor. The technique works in image space and thus snaps the cursor to the geometry actually rendered instead of the geometry originally submitted to the rendering pipeline. We also present a method to establish a correspondence between snapped geometry in image space and object space, and an efficiency improvement based on the control of frequency of frame buffer accesses. Performance tests are conducted and compared against the standard picking and snapping algorithm used by the D3DX library of the Microsoft Direct3D API. We conclude by emphasizing the feasibility of our algorithm when facing the new advances of the graphics hardware for deforming geometry on the GPU.
Lack of Nocturnal Blood Pressure Fall in Elderly Bedridden Hypertensive Patients With Cerebrovascular Disease

To prevent recurrence of cerebrovascular disease (CVD), adequate control of blood pressure (BP) is extremely important for the treatment of hypertensive CVD patients. As absence of the nocturnal fall of BP by the expected 10–20% from daytime levels is reported to exaggerate target organ injury, 24-h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) was conducted, especially to obtain data during nighttime sleep. Forty-eight elderly bedridden chronic phase CVD hypertensive patients (assessed 1–3 mo after CVD accident) participated. As a group, nocturnal BP was higher than diurnal BP, whereas nocturnal pulse rate was lower than diurnal pulse rate. The nocturnal BP fall was blunted in most (∼90%) of the patients. These results suggest that to perform a rational drug treatment, it is essential to do 24-h ABPM before initiation of antihypertensive therapy in elderly bedridden hypertensive CVD patients. (Author correspondence: akiofuji@jichi.ac.jp)
Improving Local Per Level Hierarchical Classification

In the domain of many relevant classification problems, classes are organized in hierarchies, representing specialization relationships between them. These are the so-called hierarchical classification problems. Methods based on different approaches have been used to solve them, trying to achieve better predictive performance. In this work, we propose two local per level hierarchical classifiers, which contain distinct strategies to solve inconsistent predictions, common to the local per level approach. We have compared the proposed methods with traditional strategies from different paradigms. The computational experiments, conducted over 18 hierarchical classification data sets, showed that the proposed ideas were able to reach competitive and robust results in terms of prediction accuracy.
Characterization study of electric arc furnace dust phases

Electric arc furnace dust (EAFD) is a solid waste generated in the collection of particulate material during steelmaking process in electric arc furnace. The aim of this work is to carry out a chemical and structural characterization of two EAFD samples with different Zn contents. Optical emission spectroscopy via inductively coupled plasma (ICP), X ray diffractometry (XRD) and Mossbauer spectroscopy analysis were carried out in such EAFD samples. From XRD measurements, the samples exhibits the following phases: ZnFe2O4, Fe3O4, MgFe2O4, FeCr2O4, Ca0.15Fe2. 85O4, MgO, Mn3O4, SiO2 and ZnO. The phases detected by Mossbauer spectroscopy were: ZnFe2O4, Fe3O4, Ca0.15Fe2. 85O4 and FeCr2O4. Magnesium ferrite (MgFe2O4), observed in the XRD patterns as overlapped peaks, was not identified in the Mossbauer spectroscopy analysis.
Adjustment of systematic microarray data biases

MOTIVATION Systematic differences due to experimental features of microarray experiments are present in most large microarray data sets. Many different experimental features can cause biases including different sources of RNA, different production lots of microarrays or different microarray platforms. These systematic effects present a substantial hurdle to the analysis of microarray data. RESULTS We present here a new method for the identification and adjustment of systematic biases that are present within microarray data sets. Our approach is based on modern statistical discrimination methods and is shown to be very effective in removing systematic biases present in a previously published breast tumor cDNA microarray data set. The new method of 'Distance Weighted Discrimination (DWD)' is shown to be better than Support Vector Machines and Singular Value Decomposition for the adjustment of systematic microarray effects. In addition, it is shown to be of general use as a tool for the discrimination of systematic problems present in microarray data sets, including the merging of two breast tumor data sets completed on different microarray platforms. AVAILABILITY Matlab software to perform DWD can be retrieved from https://genome.unc. edu/pubsup/dwd/
Multiscale Entropy of Electroencephalogram as a Potential Predictor for the Prognosis of Neonatal Seizures

Objective Increasing animal studies supported the harmful effects of prolonged or frequent neonatal seizures in developing brain, including increased risk of later epilepsy. Various nonlinear analytic measures had been applied to investigate the change of brain complexity with age. This study focuses on clarifying the relationship between later epilepsy and the changes of electroencephalogram (EEG) complexity in neonatal seizures. Methods EEG signals from 19 channels of the whole brain from 32 neonates below 2 months old were acquired. The neonates were classified into 3 groups: 9 were normal controls, 9 were neonatal seizures without later epilepsy, and 14 were neonatal seizures with later epilepsy. Sample entropy (SamEn), multiscale entropy (MSE) and complexity index (CI) were analyzed. Results Although there was no significant change in SamEn, the CI values showed significantly decreased over Channels C3, C4, and Cz in patients with neonatal seizures and later epilepsy compared with control group. More multifocal epileptiform discharges in EEG, more abnormal neuroimaging findings, and higher incidence of future developmental delay were noted in the group with later epilepsy. Conclusions Decreased MSE and CI values in patients with neonatal seizures and later epilepsy may reflect the mixed effects of acute insults, underlying brain immaturity, and prolonged seizures-related injuries. The analysis of MSE and CI can therefore provide a quantifiable and accurate way to decrypt the mystery of neonatal seizures, and could be a promising predictor.
CoLesIR at CLEF 2006: Rapid Prototyping of an N-gram-Based CLIR System

In this our rst joint participation as the CoLesIR group, our team has participated in the Portuguese monolingual ad-hoc task and in all robust ad-hoc tasks |all monolingual tasks, the English-to-German bilingual task, and the multilingual task. We have developed an n-gram model inspired by the previous work of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Our approach makes generalized use of freely available resources |such as the Europarl parallel corpus, the GIZA++ wordalignment toolkit, and the Terrier retrieval platform|, and employs a new n-gram direct translation technique. This new technique takes as input previously existing aligned word lists and obtains as output aligned n-gram lists. It can also handle word translation probabilities, as in the case of statistical word alignments. This new n-gram-based approach shares the main advantages of the original proposal. This solution avoids the need for word normalization during indexing or translation, and it can also deal with out-of-vocabulary words. Since it does not rely on language-specic processing, it can be applied to very dieren t languages, even when linguistic information and resources are scarce or unavailable. Our proposal adds to these characteristics a higher speed during the n-gram alignment process. Unfortunately, lack of time did not allow us to get our n-gram direct translation system ready on time. This way, we could submit only those initial results to be used as baselines in the future evaluation of our approach.
Prospective randomized comparison of cefodizime versus cefuroxime for perioperative prophylaxis in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting

The effects of cefodizime and cefuroxime on neutrophil phagocytosis and reactive oxygen production in 54 patients undergoing elective coronary artery bypass grafting were studied. Both drugs were administered twice at a dosage of 40 mg/kg of body weight (pre- and intraoperative). Phagocytic capacity was assessed by measuring the uptake of fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus by flow cytometry. Reactive oxygen generation after phagocytosis was estimated by determining the amount of dihydrorhodamine 123 converted to rhodamine 123 intracellularly. In both groups the mean phagocytic ability for E. coli and S. aureus decreased during surgery (-21 and -8%, respectively, for the cefodizime group and -39 and -38%, respectively, for the cefuroxime group; P < 0.05 for all). In the cefodizime group a normalization of mean E. coli and S. aureus neutrophil phagocytosis was seen on day 5 (+9 and -4% compared to preoperative values; P > 0.35 for both), whereas in cefuroxime-treated patients phagocytic ability remained depressed (-37 and -31%; P < 0.04 for both). In both groups mean neutrophil reactive oxygen intermediate (ROI) production after E. coli and S. aureus phagocytosis increased during cardiopulmonary bypass (+44 and +83%, respectively, in the cefodizime group and +58 and +73%, respectively, in the cefuroxime group; P < 0.05 for all). One day after surgery E. coli- and S. aureus-driven neutrophil ROI production was not different from the preoperative values (-2 and +12%, respectively, for the cefodizime group and +7 and +15%, respectively, for the cefuroxime group; P > 0.15 for all). Postoperative serum levels of the C-reactive protein on days 2 and 7 were lower in cefodizime-treated patients (19 +/- 6 and 4 +/- 2 mg/liter versus 23 +/- 6 and 11 +/- 5 mg/liter; P < 0.05 for both). In addition to cefodizime's antimicrobial activity during perioperative prophylaxis, its use in coronary artery bypass grafting can prevent procedure-related prolonged postoperative neutrophil phagocytosis impairment.
A Large-Scale Exploration of Effective Global Features for a Joint Entity Detection and Tracking Model

Entity detection and tracking (EDT) is the task of identifying textual mentions of real-world entities in documents, extending the named entity detection and coreference resolution task by considering mentions other than names (pronouns, definite descriptions, etc.). Like NE tagging and coreference resolution, most solutions to the EDT task separate out the mention detection aspect from the coreference aspect. By doing so, these solutions are limited to using only local features for learning. In contrast, by modeling both aspects of the EDT task simultaneously, we are able to learn using highly complex, non-local features. We develop a new joint EDT model and explore the utility of many features, demonstrating their effectiveness on this task.
Role of the constant region domain in the structural diversity of human antibody light chains

Issues regarding the structural diversity (heterogeneity) of an antibody molecule have been the subject of discussion along with the development of antibody drugs. Research on heterogeneity has been extensive in recent years, but no clear solution has been reached. Heterogeneity is also observed in catalytic antibody k light chains (CLs). In this study, we investigated how the constant region domain of CLs concerns structural diversity because it is a simple and good example for elucidating heterogeneity. By means of cation‐exchange chromatography, SDS‐PAGE, and 2‐dimensional electrophoresis for the CL, multimolecular forms consisting of different electrical charges and molecular sizes coexisted in the solution, resulting in the similar heterogeneity of the full length of CLs. The addition of copper ion could cause the multimolecular forms to change to monomolecular forms. Copper ion contributed greatly to the enrichment of the dimer form of CL and the homogenization of the differently charged CLs. Two molecules of the CL protein bound one copper ion. The binding affinity of the ion was 48.0 μM21. Several divalent metal ions were examined, but only zinc showed a similar effect. —Hifumi, E. , Taguchi, H. , Kato, R. , Uda, T. Role of the constant region domain in the structural diversity of human antibody light chains. FASEB J. 31, 1668–1677 (2017) www.fasebj. org
The Migration of Purified Osteoclasts Through Collagen Is Inhibited by Matrix Metalloproteinase Inhibitors

The most obvious proteolytic event controlled by the osteoclast is bone matrix removal in the resorption compartment. Here, however, we investigated whether matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activity of the osteoclast might be involved in its migration to its future bone resorption site. We seeded either nonpurified or purified osteoclasts onto either uncoated or collagen‐coated dentine slices and cultured them in the presence or absence of specific MMP inhibitors. When nonpurified osteoclasts were cultured on uncoated dentine, MMP inhibitors did not prevent pit formation, as previously reported. However, when collagen‐coated dentine was used, pit formation was strongly inhibited by MMP inhibitors. The same results were obtained when performing these experiments with purified osteoclasts, thus demonstrating the ability of osteoclasts by themselves to migrate through collagen via an MMP‐dependent pathway. This demonstration was confirmed by using collagen‐coated invasion chambers. In addition, the invasions were not, or only slightly, inhibited by inhibitors of serine proteinases, cysteine proteinases, and carbonic anhydrase, though the latter two are well established bone resorption inhibitors that strongly inhibited pit formation. It is concluded that osteoclasts can migrate through collagen in the absence of other cells and that this migration relies on MMP activity, whereas other enzymes typically required for bone removal in the resorption compartment are not essential for migration. Some of the osteoclast MMPs might thus be relevant to the migratory/invasive activity of the osteoclast, rather than to its bone resorptive activity itself.
Probabilistic Proactive Routing with Active Route Trace-Back for Highly Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs) is composed of mobile wireless nodes that are self-organized. The infrastructureless and dynamic nature of these networks demand very efficient routing strategies to be implemented in order to provide reliable end-to-end communication. Different routing protocols have been proposed in literature, but all of them are restricted to certain topology and scale assumptions or applicable only in presence of low mobility. However, as in Ad Hoc networks the network is set up on the fly, and as it might be applied to high mobility scenarios such as vehicular communication the need of a topology and mobility independent routing scheme is crucial. In this paper, we introduce a new routing scheme for MANETs, which has the ability to work efficiently under different network topology: nodes-density and coverage area size under a high nodes-mobility unlike all the available routing schemes that assume a limited setting of those factors. Instead of broadcasting extensive control packets for network topology discovery, the proposed scheme reuses the already allocated feedback information carried in unicast packets for the routing process without introducing any extra overhead. The conducted simulations-based analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly enhance the routing process.