Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Challenges and Opportunities of Finnish Defence Equipment Projects: Changes over a Decade

The objective of this study is to examine success factors of defence equipment projects in the Finnish Defence Forces. The out-line of established success factors for projects and performance measurement is based on the literature review. The strength of this study is that it incorporates a longitudinal design of success factor changes from 2006 to 2018. The main research question is ‘How challenges and opportunities of Finnish defence equipment projects have changed from 2006 to 2018? ’ The results of the empirical data offer a unique opportunity to explore changes over a decade in the Finnish defence equipment projects. The challenges and opportunities of defence equipment projects are determined by theory, swot analysis and the ﬁndings of the research process. In conclusion, the critical success factors have remained unchanged, despite the environmental and organizational changes in the Finnish Defence Forces.
Author Clustering based on Compression-based Dissimilarity Scores

The PAN 2017 Author Clustering task examines the two application scenarios complete author clustering and authorship-link ranking. In the first scenario, one must identify the number (k) of different authors within a document collection and assign each document to exactly one of the k clusters, where each cluster corresponds to a different author. In the second scenario, one must establish authorship links between documents in a cluster and provide a list of document pairs, ranked according to a confidence score. We present a simple scheme to handle both scenarios. In order to group the documents by their authors, we use k-Medoids, where the optimal k is determined through the computation of silhouettes. To determine links between the documents in each cluster, we apply a predefined compressor as well as a dissimilarity measure. The resulting compression-based dissimilarity scores are then used to rank all document pairs. The proposed scheme does not require (text-)preprocessing, feature engineering or hyperparameter optimization, which are often necessary in author clustering and/or other related fields. However, the achieved results indicate that there is room for improvement.
Are Institutions a crucial Determinant of Cross Country Economic Efficiency? A Two-Stage Double Bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper analyses the role of institutions in enhancing the economic efficiencies across countries in a two stage Double Bootstrap DEA framework based on nonparametric frontier analysis as proposed by Simar and Wilson (2007). In the first stage, cross country workers’ efficiency is estimated using a bootstrapped DEA approach over the period of 1990-2000 for 78 countries. In the second stage, the impact of institutions on these efficiency estimates is analyzed in a truncated bootstrapped regression. Twenty-nine institutional indicators from the same period have been utilized to extract three orthogonal factors based on principal component analysis. These factors namely institutional and policy rents, political rents and risk reducing technologies, along with their aggregated index are used as institutional variables. Findings suggest that inefficiencies in the economy are less where institutions are stronger. This study also shows that institutions that curb corruption, bureaucratic inefficiencies, lax regulations and unfriendly business policies, tend to have a larger effect on workers efficiency than other two indices that curb political rents and those that reduce transactional risks. Furthermore, when they are aggregated, the combined impact is more than the individual impact.
Non-target photo images in oddball paradigm improve EEG-based personal identification rates

A research on biometry based on human brain activities has lately been emerging. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of personal identification using one-channel electroencephalogram during photo retrieval in oddball paradigm. The use of non-target photo images was examined to improve the identification performances. Nine photo images were randomly presented one after another to five subjects. The Principal Component Analysis and the Linear Discriminant Analysis were applied for the signal processing. With EEG activities both during target and non-target photo retrieval, the algorithm successfully improved the identification rates. The rates were 87.2, 95.0, and 97.6% using 5, 10, and 20-time averaging, respectively. The performances with EEG only during target photo retrieval were lower by 5–13%. This study reveals a future possibility of photo retrieval tasks to realize the personal identification using human brain activities, which will yield rich controls of machine for the users of brain computer-interface.
Predictors of chewing difficulty onset among dentate adults: 24-month incidence.

OBJECTIVES Chewing ability is an important measure of health-related quality of life, yet few studies have examined predictors of chewing difficulty in community-based samples. This study describes longitudinal patterns of chewing difficulty and identifies predictors of chewing difficulty onset. METHODS The Florida Dental Care Study (FDCS) was a longitudinal study of oral health and related behaviors. Interviews and a clinical exam were conducted with a sample that included persons who had at least one tooth and were aged 45 years or older (n = 873). The five-item chewing index of Leake (1990), with minor revision, was the outcome of interest. RESULTS Approximately 21 percent of baseline participants reported chewing difficulty and about 34 percent reported difficulty during the study. Having infected or sore gums, loose tooth, loose crown or bridge, toothache pain, lower numbers of opposing pairs of teeth, dry mouth, and being female were significant predictors of incident chewing difficulty. CONCLUSIONS Self-reported oral disease and tissue damage and toothache pain were strong predictors of decline in chewing ability. Additionally, women were identified as a high-risk group for incident chewing difficulty. Future research should elaborate further the pathways through which these factors affect oral function.
Optical millimeter-wave generation utilizing optical parametric loop mirror and fiber Bragg grating

A novel photonic technique of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) sub-carrier generation using optical parametric loop mirror (OPLM) and fiber Bragg grating (FBG) is proposed. Due to the four-wave mixing (FWM) effect and loop reflection characteristic in an OPLM, a carrier-suppressed modulation signal is able to generate two new harmonic components with six times frequency spacing of the modulation frequency and the initial two optical tones can be reflected back to the input port by the OPLM itself, which servers as the first order filtering. At the transmission port of the OPLM, a matching FBG will give further suppressing on the pump light. Finally, a millimeter-wave sub-carrier will be obtained after the FBG.
Vascular Dysfunction in Leukoaraiosis

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The pathogenesis of leukoaraiosis has long been debated. This work addresses a less well-studied mechanism, cerebrovascular reactivity, which could play a leading role in the pathogenesis of this disease. Our aim was to evaluate blood flow dysregulation and its relation to leukoaraiosis. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Cerebrovascular reactivity, the change in the blood oxygen level–dependent 3T MR imaging signal in response to a consistently applied step change in the arterial partial pressure of carbon dioxide, was measured in white matter hyperintensities and their contralateral spatially homologous normal-appearing white matter in 75 older subjects (age range, 50–91 years; 40 men) with leukoaraiosis. Additional quantitative evaluation of regions of leukoaraiosis was performed by using diffusion (n = 75), quantitative T2 (n = 54), and DSC perfusion MRI metrics (n = 25). RESULTS: When we compared white matter hyperintensities with contralateral normal-appearing white matter, cerebrovascular reactivity was lower by a mean of 61.2% ± 22.6%, fractional anisotropy was lower by 44.9 % ± 6.9%, and CBF was lower by 10.9% ± 11.9%. T2 was higher by 61.7% ± 13.5%, mean diffusivity was higher by 59.0% ± 11.7%, time-to-maximum was higher by 44.4% ± 30.4%, and TTP was higher by 6.8% ± 5.8% (all P < .01). Cerebral blood volume was lower in white matter hyperintensities compared with contralateral normal-appearing white matter by 10.2% ± 15.0% (P = .03). CONCLUSIONS: Not only were resting blood flow metrics abnormal in leukoaraiosis but there is also evidence of reduced cerebrovascular reactivity in these areas. Studies have shown that reduced cerebrovascular reactivity is more sensitive than resting blood flow parameters for assessing vascular insufficiency. Future work is needed to examine the sensitivity of resting-versus-dynamic blood flow measures for investigating the pathogenesis of leukoaraiosis.
HIV-1 at the placenta: immune correlates of protection and infection

Purpose of review Mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV-1 remains a significant global health concern despite implementation of maternal combination antiretroviral therapy for treatment as prevention to offset transmission. The risk of in-utero HIV-1 transmission in the absence of interventions is ∼7%. This low rate of transmission points to innate and adaptive mechanisms to restrict lentiviral infection within the placenta. Recent findings Placental macrophages (Hofbauer cells) are key mediators in in-utero transmission of HIV-1. Hofbauer cells constitutively express elevated concentrations of regulatory cytokines, which inhibit HIV-1 replication in vitro, and possess intrinsic antiviral properties. Hofbauer cells sequester HIV-1 in intracellular compartments that can be accessed by HIV-1-specific antibodies and may occur in vivo to offset MTCT. Intriguingly, studies have reported strong associations between maternal human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) viremia and MTCT of HIV-1. HCMV infection at the placenta promotes inflammation, chronic villitis, and trophoblast damage, providing potential HIV-1 access into CD4+CCR5+ target cells. The placenta exhibits a variety of mechanisms to limit HIV-1 replication, yet viral-induced activation with maternal HCMV may override this protection to facilitate in-utero transmission of HIV-1. Summary Understanding immune correlates of protection or transmission at the placenta during on-going HIV-1 exposure may contribute to understanding HIV pathogenesis and the development of effective immunotherapies.
A statistical geometry approach to distance estimation in wireless sensor networks

Algorithmic approaches to the estimation of pairwise distances between the nodes of a wireless sensor network are highly attractive to provide information for routing and localization without requiring specific hardware to be added to cost/resource-constrained nodes. This paper exploits statistical geometry to derive robust estimators of the pairwise Euclidean distances from topological information typically available in any network. Extensive Monte Carlo experiments conducted on synthetic benchmarks demonstrate the improved quality of the proposed estimators with respect to the state of the art.
Nitric oxide down‐regulates caveolin‐1 expression in rat brains during focal cerebral ischemia and reperfusion injury

As a signalling molecule of the integral membrane protein family, caveolin participates in cellular signal transduction via interaction with other signalling molecules. The nature of interaction between nitric oxide (NO) and caveolin in the brain, however, remains largely unknown. In this study we investigated the role(s) of NO in regulating caveolin‐1 expression in rat ischemic brains with middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO). Exposure to 1 h ischemia induced the increases in neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) and NO concentration with concurrent down‐regulation of caveolin‐1 expression in the ischemic core of rat brains. Subsequent 24 h or more reperfusion time led to an increase in inducible NOS (iNOS) expression and NO production, as well as a decline of caveolin‐1 protein at the core and penumbra of the ischemic brain. Afterwards, NOS inhibitors and an NO donor were utilized to clarify the link between NO production and caveolin‐1 expression in the rats with 1 h ischemia plus 24 h reperfusion. NG‐nitro‐l‐arginine methyl ester (L‐NAME, a non‐selective NOS inhibitor), N6‐(1‐iminoethyl)‐lysine (NIL, an iNOS inhibitor), and 7‐nitroindazole (7‐NI, a nNOS inhibitor) prevented the loss of caveolin‐1 in the core and penumbra of the ischemic brain, whereas l‐N5‐(1‐iminoethyl)‐ornithine (L‐NIO, an endothelial NOS inhibitor) showed less effect than the other NOS inhibitors. S‐Nitroso‐N‐acetylpenicillamine (SNAP, a NO donor) down‐regulated the expression of caveolin‐1 protein in normal and ischemic brains. These results, when taken together, suggest that NO modulates the expression of caveolin‐1 in the brain and that the loss of caveolin‐1 is associated with NO production in the ischemic brain.
Determination of 4(5)-methylimidazole in carbonated beverages by isotope-dilution liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

The purpose of this study was to develop a method to quantify 4(5)-methylimidazole (4-MEI), a suspected carcinogen, in carbonated beverages by simple sample dilution and isotope-dilution reverse-phase LC-MS/MS. Isotope dilution using hexa-deuterated methylimidazole (d6-4-MEI) was used to quantify native 4-MEI and to assess matrix effects quantitatively. The accuracy of the method was assessed by intentionally fortifying a negative control sample at three doses: low, medium and high (replicates of n = 5 each) with a known amount of 4-MEI. The respective absolute error in each case was 18.7 ± 0.7%, 14.6 ± 2.8% and 21.1 ± 9.7%. Within-day (intra-) and day-to-day (inter-) repeatability, determined as the relative standard deviation by fortifying a negative control sample (n = 5), were 9.5% and 15.4%, respectively. Average ion suppression of d6-4-MEI in beer was 63.9 ± 3.2%, while no suppression or enhancement was seen in non-alcoholic samples. The instrument and method limit of detection were calculated as 0.6 and 5.8 ng ml–1, respectively. 4(5)-Methylimidazole was quantified in a variety of store-bought consumer beverages and it was found that in many of the samples tested consuming a single can of beer would result in intake levels of 4-MEI that exceed the no significant risk guideline of 29 µg day–1. Conversely, 4-MEI in the samples was orders of magnitude smaller than the European Food Safety Authority acceptable daily intake threshold value of 100 mg kg–1 bw day–1. Graphical Abstract
Efficacy and Safety of Zoledronic Acid for Treatment of Postmenopausal Osteoporosis: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

We conducted a meta-analysis based on eligible studies to assess the efficacy and safety of zoledronic acid treatment for postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. PubMed, Web of Science, and Embase were searched for eligible studies that assessed the efficacy of zoledronic acid in the prevention of fractures among postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. The primary outcomes were new vertebral fracture, nonvertebral fracture, and hip fracture. Secondary outcomes were bone mineral density (BMD) and safety outcomes. A fixed-effect or random-effect model was used to pool the estimates according to the heterogeneity among the included studies. Eight randomized controlled trials, involving 13,335 patients, were included in this meta-analysis. Pooled results showed that treatment with zoledronic acid significantly reduced the incidences of nonvertebral fractures, vertebral fractures, and hip fractures, as compared with placebo. Zoledronic acid was also associated with significant improvement in BMD at lumbar spine, total hip, femoral neck, and trochanter. However, the incidence of any adverse events was higher in the zoledronic acid group than that in the control group, and serious adverse events were comparable between the 2 groups. This meta-analysis indicated that zoledronic acid could significantly reduce the fracture risk and increase BMD in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. Furthermore, it would not result in serious adverse events. Zoledronic acid could be used as an effective and well-tolerated treatment for postmenopausal women with osteoporosis.
Rethinking Feature Discrimination and Polymerization for Large-scale Recognition

Feature matters. How to train a deep network to acquire discriminative features across categories and polymerized features within classes has always been at the core of many computer vision tasks, specially for large-scale recognition systems where test identities are unseen during training and the number of classes could be at million scale. In this paper, we address this problem based on the simple intuition that the cosine distance of features in high-dimensional space should be close enough within one class and far away across categories. To this end, we proposed the congenerous cosine (COCO) algorithm to simultaneously optimize the cosine similarity among data. It inherits the softmax property to make inter-class features discriminative as well as shares the idea of class centroid in metric learning. Unlike previous work where the center is a temporal, statistical variable within one mini-batch during training, the formulated centroid is responsible for clustering inner-class features to enforce them polymerized around the network truncus. COCO is bundled with discriminative training and learned end-to-end with stable convergence. Experiments on five benchmarks have been extensively conducted to verify the effectiveness of our approach on both small-scale classification task and large-scale human recognition problem.
Mini‐Mental State Examination: a normative study in Italian elderly population

The Mini‐Mental State Examination (MMSE), a brief test to assess cognitive status, is heavily influenced by age and education. It was administered to 1019 elderly subjects (aged 65–89 years) living in three different Italian cities. A statistical non‐linear regression model was built up in order to obtain adjustment coefficients to reduce the influence of demographic variables on the MMSE raw scores. Age and educational level were significantly and independently associated with the MMSE score. Results of a multiple linear regression with transformation of age and education provided adjustment coefficients of the MMSE raw scores. Data from this study will ameliorate the overall reliability of MMSE as a screening test for cognitive impairment in elderly people.
Robust Least-Squares Support Vector Machine With Minimization of Mean and Variance of Modeling Error

The least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) is a popular data-driven modeling method and has been successfully applied to a wide range of applications. However, it has some disadvantages, including being ineffective at handling non-Gaussian noise as well as being sensitive to outliers. In this paper, a robust LS-SVM method is proposed and is shown to have more reliable performance when modeling a nonlinear system under conditions where Gaussian or non-Gaussian noise is present. The construction of a new objective function allows for a reduction of the mean of the modeling error as well as the minimization of its variance, and it does not constrain the mean of the modeling error to zero. This differs from the traditional LS-SVM, which uses a worst-case scenario approach in order to minimize the modeling error and constrains the mean of the modeling error to zero. In doing so, the proposed method takes the modeling error distribution information into consideration and is thus less conservative and more robust in regards to random noise. A solving method is then developed in order to determine the optimal parameters for the proposed robust LS-SVM. An additional analysis indicates that the proposed LS-SVM gives a smaller weight to a large-error training sample and a larger weight to a small-error training sample, and is thus more robust than the traditional LS-SVM. The effectiveness of the proposed robust LS-SVM is demonstrated using both artificial and real life cases.
A Comparative Ontogenic Study of Urinary Bladder: Impact of the Epithelial Differentiation in Embryonic and Newborn Rats

The present study aimed to show the cellular and subcellular distribution of glycogen content during the differentiation of urothelial cells from simple cuboidal to stratified transitional epithelium. Bladder samples were taken from rat embryos on the 15th to 19th days and newborn at 21st day. During the development of the bladder, the formation of fusiform vesicles, asymmetric unit membrane (AUM) and microridges were examined with staining with haematoxylin–eosin and periodic acid Schiff for light microscope and periodic acid–thiocharbohydrazide–silver proteinate for transmission electron microscope. The topographical changes of luminal differentiation were examined with the scanning electron microscope. The urothelium was simple cuboidal from 15th till the 17th days of gestation. Glycogen content was present in the cytoplasm till the 18th day of gestation. At the early stage (16th day) of gestation, the apical surface contains microvilli that points the undifferentiated cells. The density of microvilli decreased and ropy microridges appeared at the 17th day of gestation. The small discoid vesicles lined with AUM developed at the apical cytoplasm of the surface cells at the 17th day of gestation. After this stage, both the density of microridges and large and elongated fusiform vesicles increased. The differentiation of the urothelium begins with the formation of the round and small vesicles, continues with the formation of the AUM and at the final stage there is a decrease in both glycogen content and the appearance of the microridges at the luminal surface of the urothelial cells.
Strengthening access control in case of compromised accounts in smart home

Smart home user usually controls smart devices through smart application, which is managed by user's account. Thus, compromised account is possible and countermeasure to such attack can help protect both devices and data pertaining to them. In this paper, we propose a security countermeasure in case of compromised account in smart home system by introducing another layer of access control beyond the traditional authentication method (e.g. username and password). In our proposed approach, although user is successfully authenticated, he subjects to another control at devices or data permission level for every access attempt to them. This control takes into account the profile and behaviour of user requesting access to the system to determine whether user is legitimate or malicious and access control permission and type of access control enforcement are decided based on that factor.
Detuned loading effect and high-speed modulation of fiber grating semiconductor lasers

We have studied both theoretically and experimentally the detuned-loading effect of a fiber grating semiconductor laser. This effect is observed experimentally with a fiber grating semiconductor laser constructed with a single-angled facet diode and a conically lensed grating. Operation of such a laser is demonstrated at 2.5 Gb/s and good eye diagrams are obtained.