Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving of LSO(Ce) Scintillator Properties by Co-Doping

The influence of the co-doping of cerium-doped lutetium oxyorthosilicate (LSO) with ytterbium on the output characteristics of this scintillator material were investigated by studying X-ray luminescence spectra, emission decay kinetics, afterglow level, Vickers indentation hardness, thermally stimulated luminescence, and radiation stability of luminescence parameters. It has been demonstrated that the optimal doping contents are ~ 0.1 mol. % and ~ 0.5 mol. % for cerium and ytterbium, respectively. A considerable increase in the radiation stability of light output, decrease in the afterglow level by more than two orders of magnitude and a 20% decrease in indentation hardness at the optimal concentration of Yb have been observed, however, at the expense of the light output.
Path planning for pushing a disk using compliance

We consider the path planning problem for a robot that pushes a disk shaped object in an environment among obstacles. Instead of only allowing the object to move through the free space, we also allow the object to slide along the boundaries of the environment using compliance, extending the possibilities for the robot to find a push path. We present an exact algorithm that, given a path for the object consisting of k sections, preprocesses the environment consisting of n non-intersecting line segments in O(n/sup 2/ log n) and reports a push path in O(kn log n) time or reports failure if no path exists. Under the weak assumption of low obstacle density, the query time is reduced to O((k + n) log n).
Self-reported Ambivalence in Schizophrenia and Associations With Negative Mood

Abstract One instrument potentially useful for schizophrenia research is the Revised Schizotypal Ambivalence Scale (rSAmb). However, previous research has not examined the construct validity of this instrument in people with schizophrenia. In the current study, people with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (n = 47) and bipolar disorder (BPD; n = 19) completed the rSAmb along with current symptom and other clinical data. As a group, the people with schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder reported significantly less ambivalence on the rSAmb than did the people with BPD. In addition, the rSAmb was not significantly related to any schizophrenia symptom (all correlations < 0.15). Instead, the rSAmb was significantly associated with negative mood symptoms in the past week, a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder rather than schizophrenia, and the number of negative terms used in speech. These results suggest that the rSAmb may be associated with negative mood and not with schizophrenia, although systematic examination of larger cohorts is warranted.
N-Gram Posterior Probabilities for Statistical Machine Translation

Word posterior probabilities are a common approach for confidence estimation in automatic speech recognition and machine translation. We will generalize this idea and introduce n-gram posterior probabilities and show how these can be used to improve translation quality. Additionally, we will introduce a sentence length model based on posterior probabilities. We will show significant improvements on the Chinese-English NIST task. The absolute improvements of the BLEU score is between 1.1% and 1.6%.
Delta Neutrophil Index as a Prognostic Marker in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit

Background: The delta neutrophil index (DNI) is a useful marker for diagnosing and predicting the prognosis of sepsis. The purpose of this study was to investigate the usefulness of DNI as a prognostic marker in patients within the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), as well as its association with other prognostic factors. Methods: A total of 516 children admitted to Severance Children’s Hospital PICU from December 2009 to February 2015 were analyzed. DNI was measured on the day of PICU admission. Mortality was defined as death within 28 days following PICU admission. Results: The median value of DNI was 1.2% (interquartile range [IQR] 0-4.3%) in the survivor group and 9.5% (IQR 2.3-20.8%) in the non-survivor group, and the difference was statistically significant (p < 0.001). DNI was significantly positively correlated with ICU scores such as Pediatric Index of Mortality 3 and Pediatric Risk of Mortality III, as well as with C-reactive protein and lactate levels. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of DNI for mortality was 0.748 (95% CI: 0.687-0.808) and the cut-off value was 4.95%. Conclusions: The initial DNI level can be considered a useful indicator for predicting prognosis in PICU patients.
Complexity of inverting the Euler function

Given an integer n, how hard is it to find the set of all integers m such that φ(m) = n, where φ is the Euler totient function? We present a certain basic algorithm which, given the prime number factorization of n, in polynomial time "on average" (that is, (log n) O(1) ), finds the set of all such solutions m. In fact, in the worst case this set of solutions is exponential in logn, and so cannot be constructed by a polynomial time algorithm. In the opposite direction, we show, under a widely accepted number theoretic conjecture, that the PARTITION PROBLEM, an NP-complete problem, can be reduced in polynomial (in the input size) time to the problem of deciding whether φ(m) = n has a solution, for polynomially (in the input size of the PARTITION PROBLEM) many values of n (where the prime factorizations of these n are given). What this means is that the problem of deciding whether there even exists a solution m to φ(m) = n, let alone finding any or all such solutions, is very likely to be intractable. Finally, we establish close links between the problem of inverting the Euler function and the integer factorization problem.
Berberine hydrochloride: anticancer activity and nanoparticulate delivery system

Background Berberine hydrochloride is a conventional component in Chinese medicine, and is characterized by a diversity of pharmacological effects. However, due to its hydrophobic properties, along with poor stability and bioavailability, the application of berberine hydrochloride was hampered for a long time. In recent years, the pharmaceutical preparation of berberine hydrochloride has improved to achieve good prospects for clinical application, especially for novel nanoparticulate delivery systems. Moreover, anticancer activity and novel mechanisms have been explored, the chance of regulating glucose and lipid metabolism in cancer cells showing more potential than ever. Therefore, it is expected that appropriate pharmaceutical procedures could be applied to the enormous potential for anticancer efficacy, to give some new insights into anticancer drug preparation in Chinese medicine. Methods and results We accessed conventional databases, such as PubMed, Scope, and Web of Science, using “berberine hydrochloride”, “anti-cancer mechanism”, and “nanoparticulate delivery system” as search words, then summarized the progress in research, illustrating the need to explore reprogramming of cancer cell metabolism using nanoparticulate drug delivery systems. Conclusion With increasing research on regulation of cancer cell metabolism by berberine hydrochloride and troubleshooting of issues concerning nanoparticulate delivery preparation, berberine hydrochloride is likely to become a natural component of the nanoparticulate delivery systems used for cancer therapy. Meanwhile, the known mechanisms of berberine hydrochloride, such as decreased multidrug resistance and enhanced sensitivity of chemotherapeutic drugs, along with improvement in patient quality of life, could also provide new insights into cancer cell metabolism and nanoparticulate delivery preparation.
Effects of Cranberry Extracts on Growth and Biofilm Production of Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus species

Biofilm producing bacteria such as Staphylococcus species and Escherichia coli are the most common cause of catheter related urinary tract infections (UTIs). The American cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) is utilized widely as a prophylaxis for UTIs due to its prevention of microbial adhesion. Cranberry contains proanthocyanidins (PACs), which have been implicated as active constituents responsible for its bacterial antiadhesive properties. Despite overwhelming data supporting cranberry's beneficial effects against human pathogenic bacteria, there is limited information regarding its effects on biofilm formation. This study evaluated the effects of three proprietary PAC‐standardized cranberry extracts on the inhibition of bacterial growth and biofilm production against a panel of clinically relevant pathogens: Staphylococcus epidermidis, Staphylococcus aureus, clinical methicillin‐resistant S. aureus (MRSA), Staphylococcus saprophyticus and Escherichia coli. The extracts inhibited the growth of the Gram‐positive bacteria (Staphylococcus spp.) but not the Gram‐negative species (E. coli) with minimum inhibitory concentrations in the range 0.02–5 mg/mL. The extracts also inhibited biofilm production by the Gram‐positive bacteria but did not eradicate their established biofilm. These results suggest that cranberry may have beneficial effects against the growth and biofilm producing capability of Gram‐positive bacteria pathogens. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Does Postoperative Mechanical Axis Alignment Have an Effect on Clinical Outcome of Primary Total Knee Arthroplasty? A Retrospective Cohort Study

Background: There is an ongoing debate whether patients with constitutional varus should be restored to neutral mechanical alignment following total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Objective: The aim of this retrospective cohort study is to determine whether mild unintentional postoperative varus alignment (3°–6°) influences TKA outcome in patients with and without preoperative varus alignment due to medial osteoarthritis of the knee. Methods: We analyzed 172 consecutive TKA cases between April 2011 and May 2014. Patients were divided into four groups based on their preoperative and postoperative hip-knee-ankle angles (HKA): preoperative varus ≤ 3° with postoperative varus position ≤ 3° (Group 1, n = 47); preoperative varus >3° with postoperative varus ≤ 3° (Group 2, n = 104); preoperative varus ≤ 3° with postoperative varus malalignment > 3° (Group 3, n = 3); and preoperative varus > 3° with postoperative varus malalignment > 3° (Group 4, n = 18). Patients were followed up until 2 years postoperatively. Results: Knee Society Score and Western Ontario and McMaster University Osteoarthritis Index scores for all study groups increased following TKA, with no postoperative differences at any time point. Group 4 performed significantly better on the Forgotten Joint Score than Group 2 (p = 0.019). Group 4 performed significantly better on the High Flexion Knee Score than Group 2 (p = 0.004) and Group 1 (p = 0.019). All other between-group differences were not statistically significant. Conclusion: Residual postoperative varus alignment of the lower limb does not appear to adversely affect clinical outcome following TKA for varus-type osteoarthritis.
A Highly Pathogenic Strain of Staphylococcus sciuri Caused Fatal Exudative Epidermitis in Piglets

Staphylococcus sciuri are important human pathogens responsible for endocarditis, peritonitis, septic shock, urinary tract infection, pelvic inflammatory disease and wound infections. However, little information is known regarding the pathogenicity of S. sciuri to animals. From the pericardial fluid of a diseased piglet with exudative epidermitis (EE), we isolated a strain of Staphylococcus in pure culture. Surprisingly, this isolate was a member of S. sciuri rather than S. hyicus as identified by its biochemical traits and also by analysis of 23S ribosomal DNA using Internal Transcribed Spacer PCR. In addition, inoculation of newborn piglets with 1×1010 CFU of the isolate by oral feeding or intra-muscular injection successfully reproduced EE in piglets, which suggested that the oral intake of the pathogen by the animals is one of the major routes of exposure. These unexpected findings prioritized S. sciuri as important zoonotic agents, which may have ramifications for human medicine.
Knowledge discovery from telecommunication network alarm databases

A telecommunication network produces daily large amounts of alarm data. The data contains hidden valuable knowledge about the behavior of the network. This knowledge can be used in filtering redundant alarms, locating problems in, the network, and possibly in predicting severe faults. We describe the TASA (Telecommunication Network Alarm Sequence Analyzer) system for discovering and browsing knowledge from large alarm databases. The system is built on the basis of viewing knowledge discovery as an interactive and iterative process, containing data collection, pattern discovery, rule postprocessing, etc. The system uses a novel framework for locating frequently occurring episodes from sequential data. The TASA system offers a variety of selection and ordering criteria for episodes, and supports iterative retrieval from the discovered knowledge. This means that a large part of the iterative nature of the KDD process can be replaced by iteration in the rule postprocessing stage. The user interface is based on dynamically generated HTML. The system is in experimental use, and the results are encouraging: some of the discovered knowledge is being integrated into the alarm handling software of telecommunication operators.
Trade-Off Between Security and Performance in Block Ciphered Systems With Erroneous Ciphertexts

It has long been held that errors in received noisy ciphertexts should be eliminated using as many as possible powerful error correcting codes in order to reduce the avalanche effect on legitimate users' performance in block ciphered systems. However, the negative effect of erroneous ciphertexts on cryptanalysis by an eavesdropper has not been well understood, nor the possible measurable trade-off between security enhancement and performance degradation under noisy ciphertexts. To address these questions, we have launched a case study in this paper using Data Encryption Standard (DES)-based block ciphers operating in cipher feedback (CFB) mode to show quantitatively the pros and cons of exploiting voluntarily or nonvoluntarily introduced binary errors in ciphertexts of block ciphered systems using our proposed comparison metrics. A serially concatenated scheme with both outer and inner encoder-encipher pairs is proposed which allows us to quantitatively reveal the sacrifice made by legitimate users in its postdecryption capacity, as well as the security improvement factor (SIF) which reflects the additionally required plaintext-ciphertext pairs for eavesdropper's known plaintext attack, in the presence of noise in ciphertexts. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of derived approximations of the postdecryption performance for the legitimate receiver.
Low frequency BOLD fluctuations during resting wakefulness and light sleep: A simultaneous EEG‐fMRI study

Recent blood oxygenation level dependent functional MRI (BOLD fMRI) studies of the human brain have shown that in the absence of external stimuli, activity persists in the form of distinct patterns of temporally correlated signal fluctuations. In this work, we investigated the spontaneous BOLD signal fluctuations during states of reduced consciousness such as drowsiness and sleep. For this purpose, we performed BOLD fMRI on normal subjects during varying levels of consciousness, from resting wakefulness to light (non‐slow wave) sleep. Depth of sleep was determined based on concurrently acquired EEG data. During light sleep, significant increases in the fluctuation level of the BOLD signal were observed in several cortical areas, among which visual cortex was the most significant. Correlations among brain regions involved with the default‐mode network persisted during light sleep. These results suggest that activity in areas such as the default‐mode network and primary sensory cortex, as measured from BOLD fMRI fluctuations, does not require a level of consciousness typical of wakefulness. Hum Brain Mapp, 2008. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Mapping of smart field device profiles to web services

A high degree of interoperability in decentralised or distributed automation systems is achieved by smart field device profiles. Profiles are very common for nearly all field bus systems for a long period of time. The basic models of these profiles are usually (1) parameter lists with the related behaviour descriptions for example state machines, (2) function block profiles or (3) object based profiles. Common for all of them is that there is a tight coupled connection between the field devices and host devices such as PLCs. Usually there is no direct connection between the field devices. Future automation systems tend to migrate to more distribution among the system components and to more loose coupled paradigm. This paradigm is used in service oriented architectures (SOA) which are mainly applied in business and IT applications. The EU IP SOCRADES intents to build a complete automation system based on SOA. In the framework of this project the mapping of existing profile models to Web services is therefore investigated. The paper presents the migration steps starting from existing model descriptions to an example of a Web service based profile.
Automatic Syllabification in English: A Comparison of Different Algorithms

Automatic syllabification of words is challenging, not least because the syllable is not easy to define precisely. Consequently, no accepted standard algorithm for automatic syllabification exists. There are two broad approaches: rule-based and data-driven. The rule-based method effectively embodies some theoretical position regarding the syllable, whereas the data-driven paradigm tries to infer “new” syllabifications from examples assumed to be correctly syllabified already. This article compares the performance of several variants of the two basic approaches. Given the problems of definition, it is difficult to determine a correct syllabification in all cases and so to establish the quality of the “gold standard” corpus used either to evaluate quantitatively the output of an automatic algorithm or as the example-set on which data-driven methods crucially depend. Thus, we look for consensus in the entries in multiple lexical databases of pre-syllabified words. In this work, we have used two independent lexicons, and extracted from them the same 18,016 words with their corresponding (possibly different) syllabifications. We have also created a third lexicon corresponding to the 13,594 words that share the same syllabifications in these two sources. As well as two rule-based approaches (Hammond's and Fisher's implementation of Kahn's), three data-driven techniques are evaluated: a look-up procedure, an exemplar-based generalization technique, and syllabification by analogy (SbA). The results on the three databases show consistent and robust patterns. First, the data-driven techniques outperform the rule-based systems in word and juncture accuracies by a very significant margin but require training data and are slower. Second, syllabification in the pronunciation domain is easier than in the spelling domain. Finally, best results are consistently obtained with SbA.
The IMGT/HLA database

It is 10 years since the IMGT/HLA database was released, providing the HLA community with a searchable repository of highly curated HLA sequences. The HLA complex is located within the 6p21.3 region of human chromosome 6 and contains more than 220 genes of diverse function. Many of the genes encode proteins of the immune system and are highly polymorphic. The naming of these HLA genes and alleles, and their quality control is the responsibility of the WHO Nomenclature Committee for Factors of the HLA System. Through the work of the HLA Informatics Group and in collaboration with the European Bioinformatics Institute, we are able to provide public access to this data through the website http://www.ebi. ac.uk/imgt/hla/. The first release contained 964 sequences, the most recent release 3300 sequences, with around 450 new sequences been added each year. The tools provided on the website have been updated to allow more complex alignments, which include genomic sequence data, as well as the development of tools for probe and primer design and the inclusion of data from the HLA Dictionary. Regular updates to the website ensure that new and confirmatory sequences are dispersed to the HLA community, and the wider research and clinical communities.
All Creatures Great and Small: Becoming Other Organisms through the EmbodySuit

The EmbodySuit augmented human system allows students to experience life from the perspectives of different organisms, by virtually and physically becoming birds, spiders, ants and even bacteria. Inspired by current advances in nanorobotics, Star Trek's holodeck and the Magic school bus, Embodysuit makes learning embodied and experiential. The student becomes a real organism, part of a real, natural ecosystem. The student's senses are adapted to those of the organism, and the student's actions map to the actions of an organism-sized robot inside a real environment. Our system is based on our projection of advances that will occur in the next 35 years in augmented reality, cybernetics and micro robotics. By about 2050 EmbodySuit type systems will be feasible to prototype, enabling us to address key research questions in classroom scientific inquiry; experiential and embodied learning; technology development; and design for 3D embodied cyber-systems.
The notion of a rational convex program, and an algorithm for the arrow-debreu Nash bargaining game

We introduce the notion of a rational convex program (RCP) and we classify the known RCPs into two classes: quadratic and logarithmic. The importance of rationality is that it opens up the possibility of computing an optimal solution to the program via an algorithm that is either combinatorial or uses an LP-oracle. Next, we define a new Nash bargaining game, called ADNB, which is derived from the linear case of the Arrow-Debreu market model. We show that the convex program for ADNB is a logarithmic RCP, but unlike other known members of this class, it is nontotal. Our main result is a combinatorial, polynomial-time algorithm for ADNB. It turns out that the reason for infeasibility of logarithmic RCPs is quite different from that for LPs and quadratic RCPs. We believe that our ideas for surmounting the new difficulties will be useful for dealing with other nontotal RCPs as well. We give an application of our combinatorial algorithm for ADNB to an important “fair” throughput allocation problem on a wireless channel. Finally, we present a number of interesting questions that the new notion of RCP raises.
Semi-Automatic Refinement and Assessment of Subgroup Patterns

This paper presents a methodological approach for the semiautomatic refinement and assessment of subgroup patterns using summarization and clustering techniques in the context of intelligent data mining systems. The method provides the suppression of irrelevant (and redundant) patterns and facilitates the intelligent refinement of groups of similar patterns. Furthermore, the presented approach features intuitive visual representations of the relations between the patterns, and appropriate techniques for their inspection and evaluation.