Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Call and Execution Semantics in AspectJ

The Aspect-Oriented Programming methodology provides a means of encapsulation of crosscuting concerns in software. AspectJ is a general-purpose aspect-oriented programming language that extends Java. This paper investigates the semantics of call and execution pointcuts in AspectJ, and their interaction with inheritance. We present a semantic model manifested by the current (1.1.1) release of AspectJ, point out its shortcomings, and present alternative models.
Self-avoiding random walk approach to image enhancement

The paper presents a new technique of image enhancement. The described algorithm enables the suppression of noise and contrast enhancement. The interesting feature of this new algorithm is that its iterative use leads to the image segmentation. The algorithm is based on a concept of a virtual particle, which performs a special kind of a random walk — the so called self-avoiding random walk. The transition probabilities of the random walk are determined by the median distribution. The segmentation effect obtained using this method, together with the ability of the algorithm to eliminate impulse and Gaussian noise makes it an interesting preprocessing tool for image analysis.
Towards a new convolution-based approach to the specification of STPU-solutions

This paper is aimed at proposing a new convolution-based approach to the specification of solutions of the so-called Simple Temporal Problem under Uncertainty. We intend to show that this approach type allows us to extend some intuitive and common-sense solutions -that can be obtain in a rudimentary way - to the whole class definable by the appropriate functions. We show how their features can be found be means formal tools of the mathematical analysis. In addition, we introduce a formal and complete system of fuzzy logic capable of representing the “before”-relation between intervals in some convolution-based depiction.
Enzymatic assays for creatinine: Time for action

Estimation of glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) on the basis of serum creatinine concentration measurements using equations is critical to ongoing global public health efforts to improve the diagnosis and treatment of chronic kidney disease. There is now ongoing activity to promote world‐wide standardization of methods to measure creatinine concentrations, together with the introduction of a revised eGFR equation appropriate for use with standardized creatinine methods. Standardization of calibration, i.e. implementation of calibration traceable to higher‐order reference measurement procedures and reference materials, does not, however, correct for analytical interferences of field methods (non‐specificity bias). To account for the sensitivity of alkaline picrate‐based methods to non‐creatinine chromogens, some manufacturers have adjusted the calibration to minimize the pseudo‐creatinine contribution of plasma proteins, thereby producing results more closely aligned with the reference method (isotope dilution‐mass spectrometry), but this strategy makes the assumption that the non‐creatinine chromogen interference is constant among samples, which is an oversimplification. Thus, analytical non‐specificity for substances found in individual patient samples affects the accuracy of eGFR computed from serum creatinine concentrations for any alkaline picrate method, including the so‐called “compensated” Jaffe methods. Using assays that are more specific for serum creatinine, such as those based on enzymatic reactions, may provide more reliable eGFR values. Supporting the choice of more specific assays by clinical laboratories is one of the main tasks of our profession in achieving the ultimate clinical goal, which is to routinely report an accurate eGFR in all pertinent clinical situations.
Hospital Variation in Survival Trends for In‐hospital Cardiac Arrest

Background During the past decade, survival after in‐hospital cardiac arrest has improved markedly. It remains unknown whether the improvement in survival has occurred uniformly at all hospitals or was driven by large improvements at only a few hospitals. Methods and Results We identified 93 342 adults with an in‐hospital cardiac arrest at 231 hospitals in the Get With The Guidelines®‐Resuscitation registry during 2000–2010. Using hierarchical regression models, we evaluated hospital‐level trends in survival to discharge. Mean age was 66 years, 59% were men, and 21% were black. Between 2000 and 2010, there was a significant decrease in age, prevalence of heart failure and myocardial infarction, and cardiac arrests due to shockable rhythms (P<0.001 for all) and an increase in prevalence of sepsis, respiratory insufficiency, renal insufficiency, intensive care unit location, and mechanical ventilation before arrest (P<0.001 for all). After adjustment for temporal trends in baseline characteristics, hospital rates of in‐hospital cardiac arrest survival improved by 7% per year (odds ratio [OR] 1.07, 95% CI 1.06 to 1.08, P<0.001). Improvement in survival varied markedly and ranged from 3% in the bottom hospital quartile to 11% in the top hospital quartile. Compared with minor teaching hospitals (OR 1.04, 95% CI 1.02 to 1.06), hospital rate of survival improvement was greater at major teaching (OR 1.08, 95% CI 1.06 to 1.10) and nonteaching hospitals (OR 1.07, 95% CI 1.05 to 1.09, P value for interaction=0.03). Conclusion Although in‐hospital cardiac arrest survival has improved during the past decade, the magnitude of improvement varied across hospitals. Future studies are needed to identify hospital processes that have led to the largest improvement in survival.
Comparison of primers and optimization of PCR conditions for detection of Cryptosporidium parvum and Giardia lamblia in water

Eight pairs of published PCR primers were evaluated for the specific detection of Cryptosporidium parvum and Giardia lamblia in water. Detection sensitivities ranged from 1 to 10 oocysts or cysts for purified preparations and 5 to 50 oocysts or cysts for seeded environmental water samples. Maximum sensitivity was achieved with two successive rounds of amplification and hybridization, with oligonucleotide probes detected by chemiluminescence. Primer annealing temperatures and MgCl2 concentrations were optimized, and the specificities of the primer pairs were determined with closely related species. Some of the primers were species specific, while others were only genus specific. Multiplex PCR for the simultaneous detection of Cryptosporidium and Giardia was demonstrated with primers amplifying 256- and 163-bp products from the 18S rRNA gene of Cryptosporidium and the heat shock protein gene of Giardia, respectively. The results demonstrate the potential utility of PCR for the detection of pathogenic protozoa in water but emphasize the necessity of continued development.
Reconsidering Intrusion Monitoring Requirements in Shared Cloud Platforms

Multi-tenancy is the core feature that enables efficiency and cost effectiveness of cloud computing. However, it brings several new security concerns. Ensuring 'strong isolation' between co-localized tenants remains the most critical issue. This work aims at highlighting new attack strategies brought by the resource sharing paradigm in multi-tenant elastic IaaS Clouds in order to understand impacts of these attacks on the design of Intrusion Detection Systems in Cloud. The first part of this paper surveys the literature related to accepted vulnerabilities. Several Proofs of Concept are described and classified according to the results of the exploitation of these vulnerabilities. In the second part, we argue the existence of new attack strategies able to take advantage of the mechanisms which enable autonomic elasticity. These mechanisms are by nature sensitive to VMs resource consumption which can be easily manipulated by attacks. Finally, we give a representation of the presented vulnerabilities to engage a discussion on the limitations of pure user-centric security monitoring approaches for guaranteeing VM security.
Task-specific Word-Clustering for Part-of-Speech Tagging

While the use of cluster features became ubiquitous in core NLP tasks, most cluster features in NLP are based on distributional similarity. We propose a new type of clustering criteria, specific to the task of part-of-speech tagging. Instead of distributional similarity, these clusters are based on the beha vior of a baseline tagger when applied to a large corpus. These cluster features provide similar gains in accuracy to those achieved by distributional-similarity derived clusters. Using both types of cluster features together further improve tagging accuracies. We show that the method is effective for both the in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios for English, and for French, German and Italian. The effect is larger for out-of-domain text.
A fault tolerant closed-loop anesthesia system based on internal model control and extended state observer

This paper proposes a fault tolerant strategy for a closed-loop anesthesia system. To the authors best knowledge, it is the first time that the concept of fault tolerance applied to intravenous anesthesia. Internal model control (IMC) is used to construct the basic closed-loop system, and bispectral index (BIS) is selected as a measurement of patients depth of anesthesia (DoA) as well as a feedback signal. In this study, a sensor fault, BIS artifact, is considered. An extended state observer (ESO) and a switching strategy are selected for fault detection and control reconfiguration. All of the above mentioned works are established on a closed-loop aesthesia simulation platform. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can deal with the considered kind of fault effectively.
Improved Consistent Weighted Sampling Revisited

Min-Hash is a popular technique for efficiently estimating the Jaccard similarity of binary sets. Consistent Weighted Sampling (CWS) generalizes the Min-Hash scheme to sketch weighted sets and has drawn increasing interest from the community. Due to its constant-time complexity independent of the values of the weights, Improved CWS (ICWS) is considered as the state-of-the-art CWS algorithm. In this paper, we revisit ICWS and analyze its underlying mechanism to show that there actually exists dependence between the two components of the hash-code produced by ICWS, which violates the condition of independence. To remedy the problem, we propose an Improved ICWS (I<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^2$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:msup><mml:mrow/><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:msup></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="wu-ieq1-2876250.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>CWS) algorithm which not only shares the same theoretical computational complexity as ICWS but also abides by the required conditions of the CWS scheme. The experimental results on a number of synthetic data sets and real-world text data sets demonstrate that our I<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^2$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:msup><mml:mrow/><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:msup></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="wu-ieq2-2876250.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>CWS algorithm can estimate the Jaccard similarity more accurately, and also competes with or outperforms the compared methods, including ICWS, in classification and top-<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>K</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="wu-ieq3-2876250.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> retrieval, after relieving the underlying dependence.
Optimal Transmit Strategies in Multi-Antenna Bidirectional Relaying

We study the transmit strategies in a MIMO bidirectional relaying scenario with individual power constraints. In two phases a half-duplex relay node decodes-and-forwards the signals of two nodes. Each node has multiple antennas. We deduce the transmit strategy in the first phase from the general Gaussian MIMO-MAC. Since each node knows a priori the interference of its own message in the second phase interference-free reception is achieved. Therefore, the optimal relay transmit strategy is given by two point-to-point water-filling solutions which are coupled by the relay power distribution. In the large SNR, the sum of any bidirectional rate tuple on the boundary of the rate region is asymptotically proportional with the minimum spatial degree of both MIMO channels.
Hospitalization and other risk factors for depressive and anxious symptoms in oncological and non‐oncological patients

Depression and anxiety are common in hospitalized patients. In particular, oncological patients might be vulnerable to depression and anxiety. The aim of this study is to assess and compare different variables and the prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms between oncological and medically ill inpatients and to identify variables that can influence depressive and anxious symptoms during hospitalization of patients.
Career Indecision and Self-Efficacy among Adolescents

Three hundred and forty-one high school students completed measures of how confident they were in their ability to perform a variety of specific occupational tasks (task career self-efficacy), how decided they were on a career (career decidedness) and how easy it was for them to make independent decisions (indecisiveness). There were no significant differences between the gender groups on the measure of career decidedness, although females reported more difficulty in making decisions. There were significant correlations between some of the task career self-efficacy subscales and both career decidedness and indecisiveness. In particular females and males who were confident in their verbal interpersonal skills tended to be relatively decisive and relatively career-decided. A series of regression analyses indicated that the relationship between task career self-efficacy, indecisiveness and career decidedness was similar for females and males.
The effects of coping on the psychological well-being of individuals who are late-deafened

Recent research supports the application of the theory of adaptation to various groups of individuals with disabilities. The premise of the theory is that individuals with certain disabilities may have greater difficulty adapting to their newly acquired level of functioning (Diener, Lucas, & Scollon, 2006). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between disability factors and psychosocial outcomes, specifically psychological well-being, in a sample of individuals who lost their hearing after age 12. Coping was examined to determine if it was a mediator of the relationships between the disability factors (age of onset, severity of disability, and adaptation) and the psychological well-being of individuals who are late-deafened. Participants (N = 202) completed a survey, including a demographic questionnaire, the Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults, the Reaction to Impairment and Disability Inventory, the Ways of Coping Questionnaire, and the Psychological Well-Being scale. SPSS and LISREL were used to test the four main hypotheses. Final analyses showed that emotion focused coping did not mediate the relationship between age of onset of hearing loss or adaptation and psychological wellbeing. However, the structural equation model showed that emotion focused coping mediated the relationships between perceived severity of hearing loss and psychological well-being, and problem focused coping mediated the relationship between adaptation to disability and psychological well-being. In addition, the fully mediated model proved to be a more parsimonious fit than the model that included direct relationships. Finally, comparison of this sample to other research samples revealed significantly lower levels of
Cytomegalovirus, and possibly Epstein–Barr virus, shedding in breast milk is associated with HIV-1 transmission by breastfeeding

Objective:Postnatal HIV-1 mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) occurs in spite of antiretroviral therapy. Co-infections in breast milk with cytomegalovirus (CMV) and Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) are associated with increased HIV-1 shedding in this compartment. We investigated CMV levels and EBV detection in breast milk as potential risk factors for MTCT of HIV-1 via breastfeeding. Methods:Cell-free HIV-1 RNA, cell-associated HIV-1 DNA, CMV and EBV DNA were quantified in breast milk from 62 HIV-infected mothers and proven postnatal MTCT of HIV-1 via breastfeeding. Controls were 62 HIV-positive mothers with HIV-uninfected infants. Results:Median (interquartile range) CMV DNA viral load was significantly higher in cases [88 044 (18 586–233 904)] than in controls [11 167 (3221–31 152)] copies/106 breast milk cells (P < 0.001). Breast milk CMV DNA level correlated positively with breast milk HIV-1 RNA level in cases and controls. EBV DNA was detectable in a higher proportion of breast milk samples of cases (37.1%) than controls (16.1%; P = 0.009). HIV-1 MTCT was strongly associated with HIV-1 RNA shedding in breast milk and plasma. In multivariable analysis, every 1 log10 increase in breast milk CMV DNA was associated with a significant 2.5-fold greater odds of MTCT of HIV-1, independent of breast milk and plasma HIV-1 levels; the nearly three-fold increased risk of HIV-1 MTCT with breast milk EBV DNA detection did not reach significance. Conclusion:We provide the first evidence of an independent association between CMV in breast milk, and postnatal MTCT of HIV-1. This association could fuel persistent shedding of HIV-1 in breast milk in women receiving antiretroviral therapy. EBV DNA detection in breast milk may also be associated with MTCT of HIV-1, but only marginally so.
Aging test strategy and adaptive test scheduling for SoC failure prediction

This paper presents a novel failure prediction testing technique that is applicable for system-on-chips (SoCs). Highly reliable systems such as automobiles, aircraft or medical equipments would not allow any interruptive erroneous responses during a system operation, which might result in catastrophe. Therefore, we propose a failure prediction delay testing technique that is applied during the time when the system is not working, such as power-on/-off times. To achieve high reliability in the field, the proposed technique should take into consideration various types of aging mechanisms. Since the testing environment of voltage and temperature is uncontrollable in the field, an accurate delay measurement considering the variation due to voltage and temperature should be developed. Moreover, we propose an adaptive test scheduling that gives more test chances to more possible degrading parts for improving detecting efficiency.
Differences in the Mechanical Properties of the Developing Cerebral Cortical Proliferative Zone between Mice and Ferrets at both the Tissue and Single-Cell Levels

Cell-producing events in developing tissues are mechanically dynamic throughout the cell cycle. In many epithelial systems, cells are apicobasally tall, with nuclei and somata that adopt different apicobasal positions because nuclei and somata move in a cell cycle–dependent manner. This movement is apical during G2 phase and basal during G1 phase, whereas mitosis occurs at the apical surface. These movements are collectively referred to as interkinetic nuclear migration, and such epithelia are called “pseudostratified. ” The embryonic mammalian cerebral cortical neuroepithelium is a good model for highly pseudostratified epithelia, and we previously found differences between mice and ferrets in both horizontal cellular density (greater in ferrets) and nuclear/somal movements (slower during G2 and faster during G1 in ferrets). These differences suggest that neuroepithelial cells alter their nucleokinetic behavior in response to physical factors that they encounter, which may form the basis for evolutionary transitions toward more abundant brain-cell production from mice to ferrets and primates. To address how mouse and ferret neuroepithelia may differ physically in a quantitative manner, we used atomic force microscopy to determine that the vertical stiffness of their apical surface is greater in ferrets (Young's modulus = 1700 Pa) than in mice (1400 Pa). We systematically analyzed factors underlying the apical-surface stiffness through experiments to pharmacologically inhibit actomyosin or microtubules and to examine recoiling behaviors of the apical surface upon laser ablation and also through electron microscopy to observe adherens junction. We found that although both actomyosin and microtubules are partly responsible for the apical-surface stiffness, the mouse<ferret relationship in the apical-surface stiffness was maintained even in the presence of inhibitors. We also found that the stiffness of single, dissociated neuroepithelial cells is actually greater in mice (720 Pa) than in ferrets (450 Pa). Adherens junction was ultrastructurally comparable between mice and ferrets. These results show that the horizontally denser packing of neuroepithelial cell processes is a major contributor to the increased tissue-level apical stiffness in ferrets, and suggest that tissue-level mechanical properties may be achieved by balancing cellular densification and the physical properties of single cells.
Managing Behaviour with Attachment in Mind

Ben Holmes and Miriam Silver report on a group intervention that combined aspects of established parenting groups with attachment theory, developed to help adoptive parents and foster carers understand and manage their child's behaviour. Participants were provided with an understanding of the principles of attachment theory, how this related to their child's development and behaviour, and how they could improve the relationship with their child through greater empathy and the provision of a safe, structured home environment. Analysis of pre- and post-questionnaire measures indicated significant improvements in the parent–child relationship. Additionally, parent/carer observations indicated a reduction in the perceived severity and impact of the problems or concerns about their child's behaviour.
Secure smart phones fitted to mobile Ad hoc networks and devices for security control

The presence of wireless links makes mobile ad hoc networks more vulnerable than wire-line networks to various forms of attack. Multimedia session communication applications over such ad hoc networks need a session key to encrypt session call traffic. This security requirement for session communications can be fulfilled by applying dynamic session key management architecture. In this paper, we propose a key agreement scheme that can be realized by encrypting mobile traffic with the agreed secret session key. We also propose a key control device (KCD) that can legally listen to any session call. We solve these contradictory sounding goals: encrypting call traffic and monitoring call traffic. The key agreement process forces a pair of call participants to calculate the Diffie-Hellman session key just before a call session begins. It starts by sending an SMS message for announcing its temporary IP address (TIP) and ‘nonce’ from the caller to the callee, so that the callee may learn the caller's TIP immediately at the beginning of each call and send a ‘GET/nonce’ command in an HTTP request line to perform the Diffie-Hellman public key exchanges with the caller. The nonce value will be used to prevent replay attacks and to thwart clogging attacks. In the proposed security control, one of the call pair is designated to report call information so that the KCD may compute the same secret session key as the call pair agree on.