Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Serum Cystatin C, Markers of Chronic Kidney Disease, and Retinopathy in Persons with Diabetes

Purpose. We examined the association of CKD defined by serum creatinine, serum cystatin C, and albuminuria with moderate diabetic retinopathy (DR). Methods. We examined 1,119 Indian adults with diabetes, aged 40–80 years, who participated in the Singapore Indian Eye Study (2007–2009), a population-based cross-sectional study. The associations of CKD defined by each of the three markers alone and in combination with moderate DR were examined using logistic regression models adjusted for potential confounding factors including duration of diabetes, smoking, body mass index, systolic blood pressure, and HbA1c. Results. The prevalence of moderate DR was significantly higher among those with CKD defined by triple markers (41.1%) compared to CKD defined separately by creatinine (26.6%), cystatin C (20.9%), and albuminuria (23.4%). People with CKD defined by triple markers had a fourteenfold higher odds of moderate DR (OR (95% CI) = 13.63 (6.08–30.54)) compared to those without CKD by any marker. Nearly half (48.7%) of participants with cystatin C ≥ 1.12 mg/L have moderate DR. Conclusions. CKD defined by a triple marker panel was strongly associated with moderate DR in this Asian population with diabetes.
Pendidikan Berbasis Budaya Cirebon

Sebagai proses transformasi nilai-nilai dalam rangka pembentukan pribadi individu yang mampu memaknai dirinya, masyarakat, dan bangsanya, pendidikan hendaknya ditanamkan kepada pribadi anak didik dari jati diri dan identitas luhur bangsanya. Nilai-nilai kebudayaan bangsa ini dapat dijadikan sebagai sumber daya intelektual, emosional, dan spiritual. Dalam budaya Cirebon, nilai-nilai luhur kebudayaannya sangat potensial untuk dijadikan ‘spirit’ yang melandasi setiap aktifitas pendidikan sekaligus menjadi objek nilai yang akan ditransformasikan. Sintesis dan perpaduan antara nilai-nilai tradisional (agama) dan nilai-nilai modernitas tercermin dalam produk dan sejarah kebudayaan Cirebon. Perpaduan dua nilai inilah yang merupakan karakter khas yang ditemukan dalam batang tubuh kebudayaan Cirebon. Karena itu, pendidikan berbasis budaya Cirebon selalu mengupayakan lahirnya peserta-didik yang mampu memahami dan mempertahankan jati dirinya sebagai anak suku bangsa namun ternyata tidak kaku dalam mengarungi arus modernisasi dan globalisasi. As the process of transformation values for the creation of private individuals who are able to make sense of themselves, society, and nation, education should be imparted to student’s personal identity and the identity of the noble nation. The values of this nation's culture can be used as a power source of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. In the culture of Cirebon, noble values culture very potential to be 'spirit' that underlies any educational activities at the same time become the object of value to be transformed. Synthesis and a blend of traditional values (religion) and the values of modernity is reflected in the products and the cultural history of Cirebon. The combination of the two values is what is the distinctive character found in the body of Cirebon culture. Therefore, culture-based education Cirebon is always seeking the birth of participant-learners who are able to understand and maintain their identity as a child of tribes but it is not rigid as it navigates the currents of modernization and globalization.
A Beam Search Algorithm for ITG Word Alignment

Inversion transduction grammar (ITG) provides a syntactically motivated solution to modeling the distortion of words between two languages. Although the Viterbi ITG alignments can be found in polynomial time using a bilingual parsing algorithm, the computational complexity is still too high to handle real-world data, especially for long sentences. Alternatively, we propose a simple and effective beam search algorithm. The algorithm starts with an empty alignment and keeps adding single promising links as early as possible until the model probability does not increase. Experiments on Chinese-English data show that our algorithm is one order of magnitude faster than the bilingual parsing algorithm with bitext cell pruning without loss in alignment and translation quality.
Association between GRN rs5848 Polymorphism and Parkinson′s Disease in Taiwanese Population

A single nucleotide polymorphism GRN rs5848 (3′UTR+78 C>T) was reported to alter the risk for frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Herein, we investigated the effect of GRN rs5848 on the risk of Parkinson’s disease (PD) by genotyping 573 Taiwanese patients with PD and 490 age-matched control subjects. Compared to subjects with CC genotype, those with TT genotype had a 1.58-fold increased risk of PD (95% CI: 1.77∼2.34, P = 0.021). PD patients demonstrate a higher frequency of T allele (37.2%) than controls (32.2%; odds ratio [OR] = 1.24, 95% CI: 1.04∼1.49, P = 0.017). This susceptibility was particularly observed in female subjects, in which TT genotype had a 2.16-fold increased risk of PD as compared with controls(95% CI: 1.24∼3.78, P = 0.006). The frequency of T allele (39.3%) in female PD patients was higher than in female control subjects (31.1%; OR = 1.43, CI: 1.11∼1.87, P = 0.007). No association was observed between GRN rs5848 and susceptibility in male subjects. These findings show that the GRN rs5848 TT genotype and T allele are risk factors for female Taiwanese patients with PD.
A Low-Cost Approximate Minimal Hitting Set Algorithm and its Application to Model-Based Diagnosis

Generating minimal hitting sets of a collection of sets is known to be NP-hard, necessitating heuristic approaches to handle large problems. In this paper a low-cost, approximate minimal hitting set (MHS) algorithm, coined Staccato, is presented. Staccato uses a heuristic function, borrowed from a lightweight, statistics-based software fault localization approach, to guide the MHS search. Given the nature of the heuristic function, Staccato is specially tailored to model-based diagnosis problems (where each MHS solution is a diagnosis to the problem), although well-suited for other application domains as well. We apply Staccato in the context of model-based diagnosis and show that even for small problems our approach is orders of magnitude faster than the brute-force approach, while still capturing all important solutions. Furthermore, due to its low cost complexity, we also show that Staccato is amenable to large problems including millions of variables.
Measuring Enterprise Architecture success: a tentative model for measuring success

Interest towards Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been increasing during the last few years. EA has been found to be a crucial aspect of business survival, and thus the importance of EA implementation success is also crucial. Current literature does not have a tool to be used to measure the success of EA implementation. In this paper, a tentative model for measuring success is presented and empirically validated in EA context. Results show that the success of EA implementation can be measured indirectly by measuring the achievement of the objectives set for the implementation. Results also imply that achieving individual's objectives do not necessarily mean that organisation's objectives are achieved. The presented Success Measurement Model can be used as basis for developing measurement metrics.
mCrave: continuous estimation of craving during smoking cessation

Craving usually precedes a lapse for impulsive behaviors such as overeating, drinking, smoking, and drug use. Passive estimation of craving from sensor data in the natural environment can be used to assist users in coping with craving. In this paper, we take the first steps towards developing a computational model to estimate cigarette craving (during smoking abstinence) at the minute-level using mobile sensor data. We use 2,012 hours of sensor data and 1,812 craving self-reports from 61 participants in a smoking cessation study. To estimate craving, we first obtain a continuous measure of stress from sensor data. We find that during hours of day when craving is high, stress associated with self-reported high craving is greater than stress associated with low craving. We use this and other insights to develop feature functions, and encode them as pattern detectors in a Conditional Random Field (CRF) based model to infer craving probabilities.
Bernoulli Random Forests: Closing the Gap between Theoretical Consistency and Empirical Soundness

Random forests are one type of the most effective ensemble learning methods. In spite of their sound empirical performance, the study on their theoretical properties has been left far behind. Recently, several random forests variants with nice theoretical basis have been proposed, but they all suffer from poor empirical performance. In this paper, we propose a Bernoulli random forests model (BRF), which intends to close the gap between the theoretical consistency and the empirical soundness of random forests classification. Compared to Breiman's original random forests, BRF makes two simplifications in tree construction by using two independent Bernoulli distributions. The first Bernoulli distribution is used to control the selection of candidate attributes for each node of the tree, and the second one controls the splitting point used by each node. As a result, BRF enjoys proved theoretical consistency, so its accuracy will converge to optimum (i.e., the Bayes risk) as the training data grow infinitely large. Empirically, BRF demonstrates the best performance among all theoretical random forests, and is very comparable to Breiman's original random forests (which do not have the proved consistency yet). The theoretical and experimental studies advance the research one step further towards closing the gap between the theory and the practical performance of random forests classification.
Adoption of Short Messaging Service (SMS) in Malaysia

Short Messaging Service SMS being an almost instantaneous communication medium that connects people is now a phenomenon that has grown and spread around the globe at an amazing speed. Given the current trend of SMS usage and its potential growth, this paper provides an insight into SMS adoption. The study attempts to delineate the demographics and usage profile of SMS users in Malaysia, as well as explaining the factors influencing SMS adoption in Malaysia by using a modified version of the Technology Acceptance Model TAM, which was originally introduced by Davis 1989. The study presents the demographic and usage profile in terms of gender, age, occupation, monthly personal income, extent of SMS usage and so forth of 489 SMS users from four institutions of education in the Klang Valley and Selangor. The present research uses and validates the scales for variables developed by earlier studies, namely perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, and perceived fees, which are hypothesized to be fundamental determinants of behavioural intention. The scale items for the said variables were tested for reliability, correlation and regression. The application of correlation analysis reveals a significant relationship among the independent variables, namely, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, and perceived ease of use with the dependent variable that is behavioural intention. With regards to the level of importance derived from regression analysis, usefulness ranks the highest, followed by ease of use and enjoyment in explaining SMS adoption in Malaysia. Perceived fees do not seem to have a significant relationship with behavioural intention. Some implications, limitations and recommendations for future research are also discussed.
Custom multi-threaded Dynamic Memory Management for Multiprocessor System-on-Chip platforms

We address the problem of custom Dynamic Memory Management (DMM) in Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures. Customization is enabled through the definition of a design space that captures in a global, modular and parameterized manner the primitive building blocks of multi-threaded DMM. A systematic exploration methodology is proposed to efficiently traverse the design space. Customized Pareto DMM configurations are automatically generated through the development of software tools implementing the proposed methodology. Experimental evaluation based on a real-life multithreaded dynamic network application show that the proposed methodology delivers higher quality (application-specific) solutions in comparison with state-of-the-art dynamic memory managers together with 62% exploration runtime reductions.
A Load Balancing Scheme for Distributed Simulation Based on Multi-agent System

Nowadays, multi-agent techniques are widely used in developing scalable and flexible software applications. Distributed simulation based on multi-agent system is very useful due to the inherent property of scalability and autonomy of agent system. Load balancing is an important issue in distributed simulation which distributes the jobs among the PCs so as to balance the load. This paper proposes a scheme minimizing the simulation time of distributed simulation implemented on multi-agent platform. In order to achieve the goal, the time management agent is employed along with other agents checking the hardware resources and making the best use of them for minimizing the simulation time by dynamic load balancing with the PCs. The results of an experiment indicate that the proposed scheme substantially reduces the simulation time compared to the existing scheme.
Neural networks for control

Provides a quick overview of neural networks and explains how they can be used in control systems. We introduce the multilayer perceptron neural network and describe how it can be used for function approximation. The backpropagation algorithm (including its variations) is the principal procedure for training multilayer perceptrons; it is briefly described here. Care must be taken, when training perceptron networks, to ensure that they do not overfit the training data and then fail to generalize well in new situations. Several techniques for improving generalization are discussed. The article also presents several control architectures, such as model reference adaptive control, model predictive control, and internal model control, in which multilayer perceptron neural networks can be used as basic building blocks.
Detecting weak public transport connections from cellphone and public transport data

Many modern and growing cities are facing declines in public transport usage, with few efficient methods to explain why. In this article, we show that urban mobility patterns and transport mode choices can be derived from cellphone call detail records coupled with public transport data recorded from smart cards. Specifically, we present new data mining approaches to determine the spatial and temporal variability of public and private transportation usage and transport mode preferences across Singapore. Our results, which were validated by Singapore's quadriennial Household Interview Travel Survey (HITS), revealed that there are 3.5 million public and 4.3 million private inter-district trips (HITS: 3.5 million and 4.4 million, respectively). Along with classifying which transportation connections are weak, the analysis shows that the mode share of public transport use increases from 38% in the morning to 44% around mid-day and 52% in the evening.
Validación de la Escala Abreviada de Afrontamiento Religioso Brief-RCOPE en el Contexto Argentino en estudiantes de confesión católica

En la actualidad, el estudio del afrontamiento religioso constituye una de las principales lineas de investigacion en psicologia de la religion. Debido a la escasez de instrumentos que posibiliten su indagacion en el contexto argentino, el presente estudio se propone adaptar y validar la Escala Abreviada de Afrontamiento Religioso (B-RCOPE), una de las tecnicas mas empleadas para su evaluacion empirica. Participaron en el presente estudio 200 estudiantes de ambos sexos de colegios secundarios de confesion catolica de la Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires (CABA). De acuerdo con los resultados, el analisis factorial confirmatorio presenta un ajuste adecuado a los datos recabados de la poblacion en estudio, de manera similar a lo reportado en otros trabajos. Por su parte, la consistencia interna resulto aceptable tanto para el afrontamiento positivo como para el afrontamiento negativo. De esta manera, los resultados obtenidos indican que la B-RCOPE cuenta con caracteristicas psicometricas adecuadas, ofreciendo un aporte a la adaptacion y la validacion de este instrumento para el contexto argentino.
Smartphone based fall prevention exercises

Falling is a very serious problem for our society, as it affects one out of three older adults. Currently, this is a well-known problem and therefore multiple ICT-based solutions for falls management exist. In addition, a small part of them are said to help preventing falls, but most of the reviewed solutions doesn't seem to have their focus in reducing specific fall risk factors like loss of muscle mass or a poor balance. The proposed ICT-based fall prevention solution is based on an existing fall prevention exercise programme specifically designed for the Portuguese population. It takes advantage of the smartphone processing capabilities as well as its built-in inertial sensors to evaluate the movements performed during the execution of specific exercises. Using only a simple smartphone it is possible to provide a friendly and inexpensive solution capable of increasing seniors' adherence to fall prevention exercises as well as raise their motivation to properly execute the exercises in their home environment.
Diet, phylogeny, and basal metabolic rate in phyllostomid bats.

Aside from the pervasive effects of body mass, much controversy exists as to what factors account for interspecific variation in basal metabolic rates (BMR) of mammals; however, both diet and phylogeny have been strongly implicated. We examined variation in BMR within the New World bat family Phyllostomidae, which shows the largest diversity of food habits among mammalian families, including frugivorous, nectarivorous, insectivorous, carnivorous and blood-eating species. For 27 species, diet was taken from the literature and BMR was either measured on animals captured in Brazil or extracted from the literature. Conventional (nonphylogenetic) analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), with body mass as the covariate, was first used to test the effects of diet on BMR. In this analysis, which assumes that all species evolved simultaneously from a single ancestor (i.e., a "star" phylogeny), diet exerted a strong effect on mass-independent BMR: nectarivorous bats showed higher mass-independent BMR than other bats feeding on fruits, insects or blood. In phylogenetic ANCOVAs via Monte Carlo computer simulation, which assume that species are part of a branching hierarchical phylogeny, no statistically significant effect of diet on BMR was observed. Hence, results of the nonphylogenetic analysis were misleading because the critical values for testing the effect of diet were underestimated. However, in this sample of bats, diet is perfectly confounded with phylogeny, because the four dietary categories represent four separate subclades, which greatly reduces statistical power to detect a diet (= subclade) effect. But even if diet did appear to exert an influence on BMR in this sample of bats, it would not be logically possible to separate this effect from the possibility that the dietary categories differ for some other reason (i.e., another synapomorphy of one or more of the subclades). Examples such as this highlight the importance of considering phylogenetic relationships when designing new comparative studies, as well as when analyzing existing data sets. We also discuss some possible reasons why BMR may not coadapt with diet.
Genetic Diversity of Blastocystis Isolated From Cattle in Khorramabad, Iran

Background: Blastocystis is a zoonotic protozoan parasite living in the digestive system of some vertebrates. This parasite has some subtypes, pathogenicity status of which has still remained controversial. Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the subtype of Blastocystis in infected cattle. Materials and Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed on 196 isolates from cattle stool samples collected from slaughterhouse in Khorramabad city, Iran, in 2012. Genomic DNA was extracted and to determine the Blastocystis subtype, seven pairs of sequence-tagged sites (STS) primers were used. Results: Of 196 specimens, 19 (9.6%) were infected with Blastocystis. Among the 19 positive samples, the most common subtype was ST5 (47.36 %), followed by ST3 (10.53%) and ST6 (10.53%). Two (10.53%) samples had mixed infections by ST3 and ST5. The four isolates not ampliﬁed by any STS primers were probably unknown genotypes. Conclusions: In the present study, the highest prevalence was for ST5, which is so important for epidemiology and risk of human infection. The report related to ST3 in cattle as a subtype of human showed mutual infection between human and cattle. Another important point in this study was the ST6 report. Finally, it seems that gathering epidemiological data is needed for a better understanding of the potential animal reservoirs for human infection.
Identifying Good Condition in Native Vegetation: A Bayesian Regression and Decision Theoretic Approach

Vegetation condition assessment tools have been developed throughout Australia in response to vegetation management legislation and policy requirements for a metric that can be used to demonstrate duty of care. Queensland’s tool BioCondition is based on the pioneering Habitat Hectares framework developed in Victoria and the Biometrics approach used in NSW. It comprises three components: (A) a standardized field methodology; (B) a set of easily measured attributes that act as surrogates or indicators of biodiversity values; and (C) a set of preliminary benchmarks that discriminate sites with undisturbed remnant vegetation from more disturbed sites, for each attribute and for each ecosystem type.
Abc3-Mediated Efflux of an Endogenous Digoxin-like Steroidal Glycoside by Magnaporthe oryzae Is Necessary for Host Invasion during Blast Disease

Magnaporthe oryzae, which causes the devastating rice-blast disease, invades its host plants via a specialized infection structure called the appressorium. Previously, we showed that the ATP-Binding Cassette 3 transporter is necessary for appressorial function (host penetration) in M. oryzae. However, thus far, the molecular basis underlying impaired appressorial function in the abc3Δ remains elusive. We hypothesized that the abc3Δ appressoria accumulate excessive amounts of specific efflux substrate(s) of the Abc3 transporter in M. oryzae. We devised an innovative yeast-based strategy and identified Abc3 Transporter efflux Substrate (ATS) to be a digoxin-like endogenous steroidal glycoside that accumulates to inhibitory levels in M. oryzae abc3Δ appressoria. Exogenous ATS altered cell wall biogenesis and viability in wild-type Schizosaccharomyces pombe, but not in S. pombe expressing M. oryzae Abc3. We show that ATS associates with the Translation Elongation factor Tef2 in M. oryzae, and propose that ATS regulates ion homeostasis during pathogenesis. Excessive ATS accumulation, either intracellularly due to impaired efflux in the abc3Δ or when added exogenously to the wild type, renders M. oryzae nonpathogenic. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the host penetration defects in the abc3Δ are due to aberrant F-actin dynamics as a result of altered Tef2 function and/or ion homeostasis defects caused by excess accumulation of ATS therein. Rather surprisingly, excessive exogenous ATS or digoxin elicited the hypersensitive response in rice, even in the absence of the blast fungus. Lastly, reduced disease symptoms in the inoculated host plants in the presence of excessive digoxin suggest a potential use for such related steroidal glycosides in controlling rice-blast disease.