Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comprehensive approach to understand somatic symptoms and their impact on emotional and psychosocial functioning in children

Introduction Somatic symptoms are frequently reported by children with significant impairment in functioning. Despite studies on adult populations that suggest somatic symptoms often co-occur with difficulties in identifying and describing feelings, little research has been done in childhood. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and frequency of somatic symptoms as well as to investigate the functional impairment in children with high number of self reported somatic symptoms versus those with fewer somatic symptoms. Additionally the parental perception of their children's somatic symptoms and functioning was explored. Finally, we explored the direct and indirect effects of difficulties in identifying feelings in predicting somatic symptoms and functional disability among school-aged children. Methods 356 Italian school-aged children and their mothers participated in this study. Children (mean age = 11.43; SD = 2.41) completed the Children’s Somatization Inventory (CSI-24) to assess somatic symptoms, the Functional Disability Inventory (FDI) to assess physical and psychosocial functioning and the Alexithymia Questionnaire for Children (AQC) to evaluate alexithymic features. Mothers completed the parental forms of the CSI and the FDI. Results Among children, 66.3% did not declare somatic symptoms and 33.7% reported one or more somatic symptoms in the last two weeks. A significant positive correlation emerged between children’s and mothers’ CSI total scores. Both children’s and mothers’ FDI total scores were significantly correlated with CSI scores. A significant correlation was observed between somatic symptoms and alexithymic features. Furthermore, the data showed that somatic symptoms mediated the relationship between difficulties in identifying feelings and functional impairment. Finally, it was showed that alexithymia facet of difficulty in identifying feelings contributed in large part to the prediction of the somatic symptomatology (b = 0.978, p < 0.001; R2 = 0.164, F(5, 350) = 10.32, p < 0.001). Conclusions Findings from this study provide evidence that a higher frequency of somatic symptoms is associated with functional disabilities and alexithymic facets in school-aged children.
VHL tumor suppressor regulates Cl 2 / HCO 3 2 exchange and Na 1 / H 1 exchange activities in renal carcinoma cells

Karumanchi, S. Ananth, Lianwei Jiang, Bertrand Knebelmann, Alan K. Stuart-Tilley, Seth L. Alper, and Vikas P. Sukhatme. VHL tumor suppressor regulates Cl/ HCO3 exchange and Na/H exchange activities in renal carcinoma cells. Physiol Genomics 5: 119–128, 2001. — Mutations in the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) tumor suppressor gene are thought to play a critical role in the pathogenesis of both sporadic and VHL disease-associated clear-cell renal carcinomas (RCC). Differential display-PCR identified the AE2 anion exchanger as a candidate VHL target gene. AE2 mRNA and polypeptide levels were approximately threefold higher in 786-O VHL cells than in 786-O Neo cells. In contrast, Cl/HCO3 exchange activity in 786-O VHL cells was 50% lower than in 786-O Neo cells. Since resting intracellular pH (pHi) values were indistinguishable, we postulated that Na/H exchange activity (NHE) might be similarly reduced in 786-O VHL cells. NHE-mediated pHi recovery from acid load was less than 50% that in 786-O Neo cells, whereas hypertonicity-stimulated, amiloride-sensitive NHE was indistinguishable in the two cell lines. The NHE3 mRNA level was higher in 786-O VHL than 786-O Neo cells, but NHE1 mRNA levels did not differ. AE2 and NHE3 are the first transcripts reported to be upregulated by pVHL. Elucidation of mechanisms responsible for downregulation of both ion exchange activities will require further investigation.
Compliant Bi-bellows actuator with PVDF force-shape sensing

Soft actuators are a key-stone for safe humanrobots interaction, but deformation of compliant manipulators complicates their control. We propose using feedback from a deflection sensor consisting of a thin piezoelectric polymer. A Bi-bellows actuator was used as test-bed for demonstrating shape-tracking during free actuation, and also detection of contact with an obstacle. This sensor will enable accurate kinematic control of compliant manipulators and introduce in conjunction force sensing capabilities.
A cost-effective load balanced adaptive routing scheme for mesh-connected networks

A highly cost-effective adaptive routing algorithm for n-D meshes is designed. It employs only two virtual channels. The planar routing and the 2D VBMAR are used as constructs for it. Routing freedom is greatly enhanced to improve performance. As a result, the algorithm features load balance and high adaptivity. Deadlock freedom of the algorithm is proved. Extensive simulations show that it not only outperforms an algorithm with equal virtual channels, but also excels the fully routing algorithm with much more virtual channels.
The Value of Long-Term Accrual Management *

Extant literature suggests that income smoothing can be measured either by the correlation between cash flows and accruals or by the volatility of accruals. We find that high levels of future returns associated with the correlation measure are completely offset by the negative future returns associated with accrual volatility over one-month to five-year horizons; that is, long-term accrual management leads to lower future firm values. This evidence holds for both discretionary and operating accruals, for firms that exhibit varying combinations of cash flowaccrual correlations and accrual volatilities, and after controlling for commonly used returninformative variables. Our analyses suggest that the net negative effect of income smoothing is attributable to information uncertainty due to accrual volatility.
A 0.7e−rms-temporal-readout-noise CMOS image sensor for low-light-level imaging

For low-light-level imaging, the performance of a CMOS image sensor (CIS) is usually limited by the temporal readout noise (TRN) generated from its analog readout circuit chain. Although a sub-electron TRN level can be achieved with a high-gain pixel-level amplifier, the pixel uniformity is highly impaired up to a few percent by its open-loop amplifier structure [1]. The TRN can be suppressed without this penalty by employing either a high-gain column-level amplifier [2] or a correlated multiple sampling (CMS) technique [3-5]. However, only 1-to-2 electron TRN level has been reported with the individual use of these approaches [2-5], and the low-frequency noise of the in-pixel source follower i.e. 1/f and RTS noise is a further limitation. Therefore, by implementing a high-gain column-level amplifier and CMS technique together with an in-pixel buried-channel source follower (BSF) [6], the TRN level can be reduced even further.
Edge Detecting for Range Data Using Laplacian Operators

Feature extraction in image data has been investigated for many years, and more recently the problem of processing images containing irregularly distributed data has become prominent. Range data are now commonly used in the areas of image processing and computer vision. However, due to the data irregularity found in range images that occurs with a variety of image sensors, direct image processing, in particular edge detection, is a nontrivial problem. Typically, irregular range data would require to be interpolated to a regular grid prior to processing. One example of an edge detection technique that can be directly applied to range images is the scan-line approximation, but this does not employ exact data locations. Therefore, we present novel Laplacian operators that can be applied directly to irregularly distributed data, and in particular we focus on application to irregularly distributed 3-D range data for the purpose of edge detection. Within the data distribution framework commonly occurring in range data acquisition devices, our results illustrate that the approach works well over a range of levels of irregularity of data distribution. The use of Laplacian operators on range data is also found to be much less susceptible to noise than the traditional use of Laplacian operators on intensity images.
ROP: Alleviating Refresh Overheads via Reviving the Memory System in Frozen Cycles

DRAM memory performs periodic refreshes to prevent data loss due to charge leakage, while memory refreshes cause performance degradation and energy consumption, referred to as refresh overheads. In this paper, we propose Refresh-Oriented Prefetching (ROP) to alleviate memory refresh overheads. Before a refresh starts, ROP prefetches cache lines from the tobe-refreshed rank into an added SRAM buffer. In doing so, when a rank is undergoing refresh, memory requests can still be serviced rather than being blocked. At the core of ROP is a probabilistic prefetch model determining which cache lines are prefetched for a refresh based on the access patterns appearing in an observational window ahead of the refresh. A Pattern Profiler collects statistics about memory traffic occurring before and after the starting time of each refresh operation in a period of training time and it outputs two conditional probabilities which are used to control subsequent prefetch decisions. A Prefetcher maintains a prediction table which helps to ascertain access patterns appearing around refresh operations. The prediction table is updated every time an access occurs to the to-be-nextrefreshed ran during the observational window and is consulted to decide which cache lines are prefetched. Extensive evaluation results with benchmarks from SPEC CPU2006 on a DDR4 memory have demonstrated that with ROP memory performance can be improved by up to 9.2% (3.3% on average) for singlecore simulations, while reducing the overall memory energy by up to 6.7% (3.6% on average), relative to an auto-refresh baseline memory. Moreover, it increases the Weighted Speedup by up to 2.22X (1.32X on average) for 4-core multiprogram simulations, while reducing energy by up to 48.8% (24.4% on average).
Novel composition test functions for numerical global optimization

In the evolutionary optimization field, there exist some algorithms taking advantage of the known property of the benchmark functions, such as local optima lying along the coordinate axes, global optimum having the same values for many variables and so on. Multiagent genetic algorithm (MAGA) is an example for this class of algorithms. In this paper, we identify shortcomings associated with the existing test functions. Novel hybrid benchmark functions, whose complexity and properties can be controlled easily, are introduced and several evolutionary algorithms are evaluated with the novel test functions.
Lack of Association between NADPH Quinone Oxidoreductase 1 (NQO1) Gene C609T Polymorphism and Lung Cancer: A Case-Control Study and a Meta-Analysis

Background The association between NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase 1 (NQO1) gene C609T polymorphism (rs1800566) and lung cancer has been widely evaluated, and a definitive answer so far is lacking. We first conducted a case-control study to assess this association in northeastern Han Chinese, and then performed a meta-analysis to further address this issue. Methodology/Principal Findings This case-control study involved 684 patients clinically diagnosed as lung cancer and 602 age-matched cancer-free controls from Harbin city, Heilongjiang province, China. Genotyping was conducted using the PCR-LDR (ligase detection reactions) method. Meta-analysis was managed by STATA software. Data and study quality were assessed in duplicate. Our case-control association study indicated no significant difference in the genotype and allele distributions of C609T polymorphism between lung cancer patients and controls, consistent with the results of the further meta-analysis involving 7286 patients and 9167 controls under both allelic (odds ratio (OR) = 0.99; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.92–1.06; P = 0.692) and dominant (OR = 0.98; 95% CI: 0.89–1.08; P = 0.637) models. However, there was moderate evidence of between-study heterogeneity and low probability of publication bias. Further subgroup analyses by ethnicity, source of controls and sample size detected no positive associations in this meta-analysis. Conclusions Our study in northeastern Han Chinese, along with the meta-analysis, failed to confirm the association of NQO1 gene C609T polymorphism with lung cancer risk, even across different ethnic populations.
Runaway collisions in young star clusters – I. Methods and tests

We present the methods and preparatory work for our study of the collisional runaway scenario to form a very massive star (VMS, M∗ > 400 M� ) at the centre of a young, compact stellar cluster. In the first phase of the process, a very dense central core of massive stars (M∗ � 30‐120 M � ) forms through mass segregation and gravothermal collapse. This leads to a collisional stage, likely to result in the formation of a VMS (itself a possible progenitor for an intermediate-mass black hole) through a runaway sequence of mergers between the massive stars. In this paper, we present the runaway scenario in a general astrophysical context. We then explain the numerical method used to investigate it. Our approach is based on a Monte Carlo code to simulate the stellar dynamics of spherical star clusters, using a very large number of particles (a few 10 5 to several 10 6 ). Finally, we report on test computations carried out to ensure that our implementation of the important physics is sound. In a second paper, we present results from more than 100 cluster simulations realized to determine the conditions leading to the collisional formation of a VMS and the characteristics of the runaway sequences.
Odors in olfactory bulb are defined by a short discrete temporal sequence: recognition by brute-force conversion to a spatial pattern (chunking)

Mitral cells, the principal neurons in the olfactory bulb, respond to odorants by firing bursts of action potentials called sharp events. A given cell produces a sharp event at a fixed phase during the sniff cycle in response to a given odor; different cells have different phases. The olfactory bulb response to an odor is thus a sequence of sharp events. Here, we show that sharp event onset is biased toward certain phases of the ongoing gamma frequency oscillation. Thus, the signature of an odor is a discrete sequence. The fact that this sequence is relatively short suggests a new class of "brute force" solutions to the problem of odor recognition: cortex may contain a small number of modules, each forming a persistent snapshot of what occurs in a certain gamma cycle. Towards the end of the sniff, the collection of these snapshots forms a spatial pattern that could be recognized by standard attractor-based network mechanisms. We demonstrate the feasibility of this solution with simulations of simple network architectures having modules that represent gamma-cycle specific information. Thus "brute force" solutions for converting a discrete temporal sequence into a spatial pattern (chunking) are neurally plausible.
Classification of comment helpfulness to improve knowledge sharing among medical practitioners.

Clinical research article summaries called infoPOEMs (Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters) are emailed by the Canadian Medical Association to family physicians who read them and answer the online Information Assessment Method (IAM) questionnaire which a free form textual opinion fields to comment on the value or content of the infoPOEM. This article presents results of a relevance evaluation study applied on these comments to automatically determine their helpfulness and consequently the interest of sharing them among the medical community. A dataset of 3,470 manually annotated comments provides a gold standard, containing structural, syntactic, and semantic features taken from the Unified Medical Language System and IAM questionnaire. Applied machine learning algorithms show a global f-measure improvement of 9.1% when compared to a binary occurrence bag-of-word baseline.
Topic-based defect prediction: NIER track

Defects are unavoidable in software development and fixing them is costly and resource-intensive. To build defect prediction models, researchers have investigated a number of factors related to the defect-proneness of source code, such as code complexity, change complexity, or socio-technical factors. In this paper, we propose a new approach that emphasizes on technical concerns/functionality of a system. In our approach, a software system is viewed as a collection of software artifacts that describe different technical concerns/-aspects. Those concerns are assumed to have different levels of defect-proneness, thus, cause different levels of defectproneness to the relevant software artifacts. We use topic modeling to measure the concerns in source code, and use them as the input for machine learning-based defect prediction models. Preliminary result on Eclipse JDT shows that the topic-based metrics have high correlation to the number of bugs (defect-proneness), and our topic-based defect prediction has better predictive performance than existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Nonblocking memory management support for dynamic-sized data structures

Conventional dynamic memory management methods interact poorly with lock-free synchronization. In this article, we introduce novel techniques that allow lock-free data structures to allocate and free memory dynamically using any thread-safe memory management library. Our mechanisms are lock-free in the sense that they do not allow a thread to be prevented from allocating or freeing memory by the failure or delay of other threads. We demonstrate the utility of these techniques by showing how to modify the lock-free FIFO queue implementation of Michael and Scott to free unneeded memory. We give experimental results that show that the overhead introduced by such modifications is moderate, and is negligible under low contention.
Globally convergent range image registration by graph kernel algorithm

Automatic range image registration without any knowledge of the viewpoint requires identification of common regions across different range images and then establishing point correspondences in these regions. We formulate this as a graph-based optimization problem. More specifically, we define a graph in which each vertex represents a putative match of two points, each edge represents binary consistency decision between two matches, and each edge orientation represents match quality from worse to better putative match. Then strict sub-kernel defined in the graph is maximized. The maximum strict sub-kernel algorithm enables us to uniquely determine the largest consistent matching of points. To evaluate the quality of a single match, we employ the histogram of triple products that are generated by all surface normals in a point neighborhood. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our method for rough range image registration.
A denoising and drift-control approach for UAV trajectory tracking

As part of dead reckoning, inertial navigation has been developed for many years in locating the vehicle without GPS. We employ the technology on a quadrotor platform to track the trajectory of the vehicle. In this paper, a new method was designed to make the tracking result more precisely. To achieve this, we firstly smooth the sensor data by minus offset dynamically and adopt Kalman Filtering algorithm. Then we detect velocity and correct the wrong value in time to decrease drift in displacement. This is an important step in locating the vehicle simply by odometry.
Affective symptoms as predictors of Alzheimer's disease in subjects with mild cognitive impairment: a 10-year follow-up study

Background Affective symptoms are common in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), but there is disagreement whether these symptoms are predictive for Alzheimer's disease (AD). We investigated the predictive accuracy of affective symptoms for AD during a follow-up study in subjects with MCI, and whether the predictive accuracy was modified by age, the presence of amnestic MCI or the length of follow-up. Method Newly referred subjects (n=263) with MCI older than 55 years were selected from a memory clinic and followed up after 2, 5 and 10 years. Predictors investigated were: symptoms of depression, anxiety, apathy and sleeping problems. Results Affective symptoms were present in 50–70% of the subjects. The average follow-up period was 5.4 years and 79 subjects (29%) developed AD. Sleeping problems were associated with a decreased risk for AD [odds ratio (OR) 0.35, p<0.001]. Symptoms of depression (OR 0.61, p=0.059) and anxiety (OR 0.58, p=0.051) showed a trend in the same direction. The OR of apathy for AD was 0.67 (p=0.14). Depression was associated with a decreased risk for AD only in subjects without amnestic MCI, but not in subjects with amnestic MCI. Moreover, anxiety was related to the risk for AD differently between subjects diagnosed with AD at the 5-year follow-up (OR 0.23) and subjects diagnosed with AD at the 10-year follow-up (OR 1.7). Conclusions Affective symptoms are associated with a decreased risk for AD. The risk may be dependent on MCI subtype or length of follow-up, but it does not depend on age.
MODELLING AND SIMULATION TECHNIQUES FOR BUSINESS PROCESS ANALYSIS AND RE-ENGINEERING VLATKA

Recent business developments in the light of globalization and increased competition have caused many organisations to rethink their business processes. In this evolving context, business process analysis and reengineering are key to the successful implementation of the necessary adaptive changes. This paper investigates the benefits of business process modeling and simulation as means to address the challenges of such changes. While alternative implementation scenarios can be tested and quantitatively assessed by means of simulation, suitable design of experiments techniques are needed to guide the specification of the implementation details. Following this discussion, an application case is presented to illustrate the role and the benefits of simulation in business process analysis and re-engineering. The concept of combining AI techniques based on Genetic Algorithms with simulation to iteratively guide the design of simulation experiments and progressively improve the performance of the solution is presented and discussed. A summary of the observed benefits and an overview of the remaining challenges are proposed in the conclusions.
Effects of a Bovine Alpha S1-Casein Tryptic Hydrolysate (CTH) on Sleep Disorder in Japanese General Population

This study describes the effect of bovine alpha-S1 casein tryptic hydrolysate (CTH) in a representative sample of day-time workers from the general population of Japan with the occurrence of insomnia during the preceding six months. To investigate this issue, 32 subjects, aged between 25 and 40 years, were examined for the sub- jective sleep quality using the Japanese Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI-J). CTH significantly improves the PSQI total score of the treated subjects. It particularly improves the sleep quality after two weeks of treatment, decreases the sleep latency and the daytime dysfunction after four weeks of treatment. Given the antistress properties of CTH, it seems possible to relate the detected improvement of sleep aspects to a reduc- tion of stress following its' chronic administration. In conclusion, being given its beneficial effects and its absence of negative side effects, it would be advantageous to use the CTH to improve chronic insomnia in the Japanese general population. However, further studies will be necessary in order to clarify the essential aspect of CTH properties in the sleep problems.