Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Maternal Functional Hemodynamics in the Second Half of Pregnancy: A Longitudinal Study

Objective Cardiovascular response to passive leg raising (PLR) is useful in assessing preload reserve, but it has not been studied longitudinally during pregnancy. We aimed to investigate gestational age associated serial changes in maternal functional hemodynamics and establish longitudinal reference ranges for the second half of pregnancy. Materials and Methods This was a prospective longitudinal study on 98 healthy pregnant women who were examined 3–5 times during 20–40 weeks of gestation (a total of 441 observations). Maternal cardiac function and systemic hemodynamics were assessed at baseline and 90 seconds after PLR using impedance cardiography (ICG). The main outcome measures were gestational age specific changes in ICG-derived variables of maternal cardiovascular function and functional hemodynamic response to PLR. Results Hemodynamic response to PLR varied during pregnancy. PLR led to an insignificant increase in stroke volume during 20+0 to 31+6 weeks, but later in gestation the stroke volume was slightly lower at PLR compared to baseline. PLR caused no significant change in cardiac output between 20+0 and 23+6 weeks and a significant decrease after 24+0 weeks. A decrease in heart rate, mean arterial pressure, and cardiac contractility was observed during PLR throughout the second half of pregnancy. Systemic vascular resistance was reduced by PLR up to 32+0 weeks, but increased slightly thereafter. Conclusion Healthy pregnant women appear to have limited preload reserve and reduced cardiac contractility, especially in the third trimester, which makes them vulnerable to fluid overload and cardiac failure.
Effect of Dual-Task Training (Fixed Priority-Versus-Variable Priority) for Improving Balance in Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of 2 different instructional sets of dual task training conditions, fixed-priority instruction (FP) versus variable-priority instruction (VP) on dual task performance in older adults with balance impairment. Community dwelling older adults (n=30) with balance impairment who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were included for the study. The subjects were explained about the purpose and nature of the study. All participants received 45-minute training sessions, 3 times a week for 4 weeks. Dependent variables Berg Balance Scale (BBS) and Activities based Confidence Scale (ABC) were measured before and after 4 week training program. Significant interaction and main effects were further explained by paired and unpaired t-test and wilcoxon test. Within groups, analysis showed that there is improvement in BBS and ABC scores after 4 weeks training programs in both groups. Between groups, analysis showed that there is significant improvement (P 0.05) of both BBS and ABC scores in VP (variable priority) group when compared to FP (fixed priority) group. Dual task balance training under variable priority is more effective in improving balance of older adults.
The Tumor Necrosis Factor α (-308 A/G) Polymorphism Is Associated with Cystic Fibrosis in Mexican Patients

Environmental and genetic factors may modify or contribute to the phenotypic differences observed in multigenic and monogenic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis (CF). An analysis of modifier genes can be helpful for estimating patient prognosis and directing preventive care. The aim of this study is to determine the association between seven genetic variants of four modifier genes and CF by comparing their corresponding allelic and genotypic frequencies in CF patients (n = 81) and control subjects (n = 104). Genetic variants of MBL2 exon 1 (A, B, C and D), the IL-8 promoter (−251 A/T), the TNFα promoter (TNF1/TNF2), and SERPINA1 (PI*Z and PI*S) were tested in CF patients and control subjects from northeastern Mexico by PCR-RFLP. Results The TNF2 allele (P = 0.012, OR 3.43, 95% CI 1.25–9.38) was significantly associated with CF under the dominant and additive models but was not associated with CF under the recessive model. This association remained statistically significant after adjusting for multiple tests using the Bonferroni correction (P = 0.0482). The other tested variants and genotypes did not show any association with the disease. Conclusion An analysis of seven genetic variants of four modifier genes showed that one variant, the TNF2 allele, appears to be significantly associated with CF in Mexican patients.
"God will get me through": African American women coping with breast cancer and implications for support groups.

This research examines the coping processes of African American women with breast cancer and how those processes relate to low usage of cancer support groups by these women. Prior coping research has utilized predominantly White samples. The limited research on African American coping responses is conflicting and characterized by small samples and non-probability sampling techniques. In this study, 26 respondents from Central and North Texas metropolitan areas were interviewed, including 9 key informants, 9 African American breast cancer survivors, and 8 White survivors. The data suggest that African American and White women cope with breast cancer in significantly different ways. Culture appears to account for the differences. All African American breast cancer survivors identified faith as their primary coping strategy. In contrast, only half of the White survivors claimed faith as their primary coping strategy, but like the other White survivors, tended to rely on multiple coping strategies. The African American survivors conceptualized God as an active member of their support network. Most prayed for healing, and several attributed examples of healing to God's intervention. The White survivors found God's presence in the actions of other people. They prayed for strength, peace, and courage to endure the illness. The use of faith as a coping strategy was the most significant difference between the African American and White breast cancer survivors, but different social support needs were also evident. White survivors readily disclosed the details of their illness and actively sought the assistance of other people. African American women were much less likely to discuss their illness with other persons and expressed a greater inclination to rely on themselves. This study indicates that cancer support groups must be structured to consider cultural coping differences for wider African American usage. Coping research conducted on primarily African American samples is necessary to develop interventions intended to serve African Americans.
Accelerated parallel imaging by transform coding data compression with k-t SENSE

The theory and implementation of the k-t approach (k-t BLAST and k-t SENSE) are reviewed in the context of transform coding. The k-t approach exploits the information redundancy in typical time series of magnetic resonance images that depict anatomy and/or functional parameters. By utilizing this redundancy, it opens up the opportunity for significant acceleration, which in turn allows for scan time reduction, improvements in spatial or temporal resolution, or extended volume coverage for a given acquisition time
Semantic role labeling for Bengali using 5Ws

In this paper we present different methodologies to extract semantic role labels of Bengali nouns using 5W distilling. The 5W task seeks to extract the semantic information of nouns in a natural language sentence by distilling it into the answers to the 5W questions: Who, What, When, Where and Why. As Bengali is a resource constraint language, the building of annotated gold standard corpus and acquisition of linguistics tools for features extraction are described in this paper. The tag label wise reported precision values of the present system are: 79.56% (Who), 65.45% (What), 73.35% (When), 77.66% (Where) and 63.50% (Why).
An open architecture for the routing protocols design in ad hoc networks

A huge number of routing protocols have been proposed for ad hoc networks to improve the networks' performance. Because of the large number of designs, it's difficult to track all the designs and choose the optimal protocol for an ad hoc network under various scenarios. In addition, it is not clear if any of the original design ideas in the huge number of existing works can be combined to form new and better routing systems. To address this challenge, in this paper, a new open architecture is proposed, called Orchestra, which aims to bring a great change to the current design process of ad hoc routing protocols. The architecture can automatically assemble and test of a great variety of routing designs with high flexibility and compatibility by the help of routing algebra. Furthermore, it can also be combined with other algorithms like genetic algorithm to find the most suitable protocol design for a certain network scenario. The performance of the existing routing protocols implemented in Orchestra is as same as their original version in ns2, as which is shown in our simulation result.
A programming model and runtime system for significance-aware energy-efficient computing

We introduce a task-based programming model and runtime system that exploit the observation that not all parts of a program are equally significant for the accuracy of the end-result, in order to trade off the quality of program outputs for increased energy-efficiency. This is done in a structured and flexible way, allowing for easy exploitation of different points in the quality/energy space, without adversely affecting application performance. The runtime system can apply a number of different policies to decide whether it will execute less-significant tasks accurately or approximately. The experimental evaluation indicates that our system can achieve an energy reduction of up to 83% compared with a fully accurate execution and up to 35% compared with an approximate version employing loop perforation. At the same time, our approach always results in graceful quality degradation.
MOEA/D with a delaunay triangulation based weight adjustment

MOEA/D decomposes a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) into a set of scalar sub-problems with evenly spread weight vectors. Recent studies have shown that the fixed weight vectors used in MOEA/D might not be able to cover the whole Pareto front (PF) very well. Due to this, we developed an adaptive weight adjustment method in our previous work by removing subproblems from the crowded parts of the PF and adding new ones into the sparse parts. Although it performs well, we found that the sparse measurement of a subproblem which is determined by the m-nearest (m is the dimensional of the object space) neighbors of its solution can be more appropriately defined. In this work, the neighborhood relationship between subproblems is defined by using Delaunay triangulation (DT) of the points in the population.
Fast Approximation Algorithms for Graph Partitioning Using Spectral and Semidefinite-Programming Techniques

Graph partitioning problems are a central topic of research in the study of approximation algorithms. They are of interest to theoretical computer scientists for their far-reaching connections to spectral graph theory, metric embeddings and inapproximability theory. And they are also important for many practitioners, as algorithms for graph partitioning are often fundamental primitives in the solution of other problems, such as image segmentation, clustering and social-network analysis. While many theoretical approximation algorithms exist for graph partitioning, they often rely on multicommodity-flow computations that run quadratic time in the worst case and are too time-consuming for the massive graphs that are prevalent in today's applications. In this thesis, we study the design of approximation algorithms that yield strong approximation ratios, while running in subquadratic time and relying on computational procedures that are often fast in practice. Our algorithms employ spectral and s-t flow operations to explore the cuts of a graph in a very efficient way. A crucial ingredient in their design is the usage of random walks that capture the sparse cuts of a graph better than single eigenvectors. The analysis of our methods is particularly simple, as it relies on a semidefinite programming formulation of the graph partitioning problem of choice. Indeed, we can develop our algorithms as primal-dual methods for solving a semidefinite program and show that certain random walks arise naturally from this approach.
Relationship between the density distribution of intramembrane particles and electron transfer in the mitochondrial inner membrane as revealed by cholesterol incorporation

A low pH method of liposome-membrane fusion (Schneider et al., 1980, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 77:442) was used to enrich the mitochondrial inner membrane lipid bilayer 30-700% with exogenous phospholipid and cholesterol. By varying the phospholipid-to- cholesterol ratio of the liposomes it was possible to incorporate specific amounts of cholesterol (up to 44 mol %) into the inner membrane bilayer in a controlled fashion. The membrane surface area increased proportionally to the increase in total membrane bilayer lipid. Inner membrane enriched with phospholipid only, or with phospholipid plus cholesterol up to 20 mol %, showed randomly distributed intramembrane particles (integral proteins) in the membrane plane, and the average distance between intramembrane particles increased proportionally to the amount of newly incorporated lipid. Membranes containing between 20 and 27 mol % cholesterol exhibited small clusters of intramembrane particles while cholesterol contents above 27 mol % resulted in larger aggregations of intramembrane particles. In phospholipid-enriched membranes with randomly dispersed intramembrane particles, electron transfer activities from NADH- and succinate-dehydrogenase to cytochrome c decreased proportionally to the increase in distance between the particles. In contrast, these electron- transfer activities increased with decreasing distances between intramembrane particles brought about by cholesterol incorporation. These results indicate that (a) catalytically interacting redox components in the mitochondrial inner membrane such as the dehydrogenase complexes, ubiquinone, and heme proteins are independent, laterally diffusible components; (b) the average distance between these redox components is effected by the available surface area of the membrane lipid bilayer; and (c) the distance over which redox components diffuse before collision and electron transfer mediates the rate of such transfer.
A Trustworthy Service Computing Framework through a Semantic Messaging Model

In this paper, we present a framework supporting reliable and trustworthy service-oriented workspace sharing environments. To this end, we propose a communication model to facilitate a complex level of interactions among workspace participants. To implement a communication model, we adopted a frame-based approach, in which each frame has slots to be filled. Slots in a frame are analyzed and filled using the semantic information provided from serv ice participants. In addition, we provide a trust model for predicting behaviors of service providers. Our trust model ensures reliability by indicating the extent to which a service is reliable. To estimate risks and the degree of service satisfaction, we employ historical user ratings. In addition, we evaluated a case from the design and manufacturing domain. We conclude that our proposed approach will contribute to realizing trustworthy workspace sharing in a service oriented environment.
Psychological Basis of the Relationship Between the Rorschach Texture Response and Adult Attachment: The Mediational Role of the Accessibility of Tactile Knowledge

ABSTRACT This study clarifies the psychological basis for the linkage between adult attachment and the texture response on the Rorschach by examining the mediational role of the accessibility of tactile knowledge. Japanese undergraduate students (n = 35) completed the Rorschach Inkblot Method, the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale for General Objects (Nakao & Kato, 2004) and a lexical decision task designed to measure the accessibility of tactile knowledge. A mediation analysis revealed that the accessibility of tactile knowledge partially mediates the association between attachment anxiety and the texture response. These results suggest that our hypothetical model focusing on the response process provides a possible explanation of the relationship between the texture response and adult attachment.
Transgenic Analysis of the Response of the Rat Calbindin-D 9k Gene to Vitamin D.

The promoter of the calbindin-D 9k (CaBP9k) gene, previously analyzed in transgenic mice, contains all of the information necessary for expression of a transgene similar to the endogenous gene and also for an appropriate response to vitamin D. In the present study we first investigated the role of a putative vitamin D-responsive element (9k/VDRE), located at nucleotides− 489 to −445 on the rat CaBP9k promoter gene, using transgenic mice. As expected, the pattern of transgene expression in mice carrying this putative VDRE mutated in its whole promoter context was similar to that in mice bearing the wild-type sequence. These transgenic mice also responded to 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 in the same way as those bearing the wild-type transgene and as those carrying a transgene with a large deletion (from −2894 to −117) eliminating the putative 9k/VDRE. Thus, the putative 9k/VDRE is not required for the control of rat CaBP9k gene expression by vitamin D in vivo. We also found that responsiveness to 1,25-dihydroxy.
Solving Zhou chaotic system using fourth-order Runge-Kutta method

Most of scientific problems and natural phenomena can be modeled by chaotic systems of ordinary differential equations. These problems can be solved by using various methods. In this paper, we are interested to test the Runge-Kutta method of order four on the Zhou chaotic system. This system is a new three-dimensional autonomous chaotic system. Numerical comparisons are made between the Runge-Kutta of order four and the Euler’s method. Comparisons were also done between the RK4 methods but with different time steps. It has been observed that the accuracy of RK4 solutions can be increased by decreasing the time step. Our work shows that RK4 method successfully can solve the Zhou system and figures are given for different number of iterations with corresponding range of time, t.
Tests de cohérence pour le développement d'un modèle stratégique de simulation des déplacements

La vocation d'un modele strategique de transport est d'evaluer les consequences globales de politiques de deplacements (infrastructures, exploitation, reglementation, tarification) et leurs liens avec le developpement urbain. Un prototype a ete developpe en 1995 sur l'agglomeration lyonnaise. Ses principales caracteristiques sont un fonctionnement sur tableur, un decoupage geographique tres agrege (18 zones pour 1,2 millions d'habitants), une projection dans l'avenir effectuee en pas a pas. Trois tests, qui font l'objet de ce rapport, ont ete realises pour mesurer la coherence des choix specifiques a ce modele.
Using Sentiment Analysis to Monitor Electoral Campaigns

In recent years, there has been an increasing attention in the literature on the possibility of analyzing social media as a useful complement to traditional off-line polls to monitor an electoral campaign. Some scholars claim that by doing so, we can also produce a forecast of the result. Relying on a proper methodology for sentiment analysis remains a crucial issue in this respect. In this work, we apply the supervised method proposed by Hopkins and King to analyze the voting intention of Twitter users in the United States (for the 2012 Presidential election) and Italy (for the two rounds of the centre-left 2012 primaries). This methodology presents two crucial advantages compared to traditionally employed alternatives: a better interpretation of the texts and more reliable aggregate results. Our analysis shows a remarkable ability of Twitter to “nowcast” as well as to forecast electoral results.
Linguistic Issues in Language Technology – LiLT

We describe a series of experiments in which we start with English to French and English to Japanese versions of a rule-based speech translation system for a medical domain, and bootstrap corresponding statistical systems. Comparative evaluation reveals that the statistical systems are still slightly inferior to the rule-based ones, despite the fact that considerable effort has been invested in tuning both the recognition and translation components; however, a hybrid system is able to deliver a small but significant improvement in performance. In conclusion, we suggest that the hybrid architecture we describe potentially allows construction of limited-domain speech translation systems which combine substantial source-language coverage with high-precision translation. RAYNER, Emmanuel, et al. Bootstrapping a Statistical Speech Translator From a Rule-Based One. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 2012, vol. 5, no. 3
Automatic input rectification

We present a novel technique, automatic input rectification, and a prototype implementation, SOAP. SOAP learns a set of constraints characterizing typical inputs that an application is highly likely to process correctly. When given an atypical input that does not satisfy these constraints, SOAP automatically rectifies the input (i.e., changes the input so that it satisfies the learned constraints). The goal is to automatically convert potentially dangerous inputs into typical inputs that the program is highly likely to process correctly. Our experimental results show that, for a set of benchmark applications (Google Picasa, ImageMagick, VLC, Swfdec, and Dillo), this approach effectively converts malicious inputs (which successfully exploit vulnerabilities in the application) into benign inputs that the application processes correctly. Moreover, a manual code analysis shows that, if an input does satisfy the learned constraints, it is incapable of exploiting these vulnerabilities. We also present the results of a user study designed to evaluate the subjective perceptual quality of outputs from benign but atypical inputs that have been automatically rectified by SOAP to conform to the learned constraints. Specifically, we obtained benign inputs that violate learned constraints, used our input rectifier to obtain rectified inputs, then paid Amazon Mechanical Turk users to provide their subjective qualitative perception of the difference between the outputs from the original and rectified inputs. The results indicate that rectification can often preserve much, and in many cases all, of the desirable data in the original input.
Fully Integrated Graphene and Carbon Nanotube Interconnects for Gigahertz High-Speed CMOS Electronics

Carbon-based nanomaterials such as metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes, multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), and graphene have been considered as some of the most promising candidates for future interconnect technology because of their high current-carrying capacity and conductivity in the nanoscale, and immunity to electromigration, which has been a great challenge for scaling down the traditional copper interconnects. Therefore, studies on the performance and optimization of carbon-based interconnects working in a realistic operational environment are needed in order to advance the technology beyond the exploratory discovery phase. In this paper, we present the first demonstration of graphene interconnects monolithically integrated with industry-standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology, as well as the first experimental results that compare the performance of high-speed on-chip graphene and MWCNT interconnects. The graphene interconnects operate up to 1.3-GHz frequency, which is a speed that is commensurate with the fastest high-speed processor chips today. A low-swing signaling technique has been applied to improve the speed of carbon interconnects up to 30%.