Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prospective evidence of a circulating microRNA signature as a non-invasive marker of hepatocellular carcinoma in HBV patients.

The predictive value of circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) in hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has been demonstrated in retrospective studies, but it has rarely been tested in prospective studies. In a cohort of 373 cancer-free HBV patients with a median follow-up of 4.5 years, we measured the expression of 24 retrospectively identified HCC-related miRNAs in baseline serum samples. When we analyzed the prospective associations of miRNA expression with HCC risk using the Cox proportional hazards model, we found that 15 of the 24 miRNAs exhibited a significant association with HCC risk. In particular, 7 miRNAs (miR-122, miR-99a, miR-331, miR-125b, miR-23b, miR-92a, and miR-26a) were associated with an increased risk, and 8 miRNAs (miR-652, miR-23a, miR-27a, miR-34a, miR-145, miR-10a, miR-150, and let-7f) were associated with a decreased risk. Compared to HBV patients with a low miRNA-based risk score, those with a high miRNA-based risk score exhibited a significantly elevated HCC risk in both univariate (hazard ratio [HR] 6.56, 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.74-15.70) and multivariate (HR 3.57, 95% CI 1.34-9.48) analyses. The risk score significantly increased the HCC prediction performance of alpha-fetoprotein (concordance index increased from 0.68 to 0.82, P < 0.0001). In silico analyses indicated that the genes targeted by the 15 miRNAs are mainly enriched in the transforming growth factor-beta signaling pathway. Collectively, these results provide prospective evidence that circulating miRNAs serve as non-invasive markers for risk prediction of HCC in HBV patients.
Modelling methodology of atrial fibrosis affects rotor dynamics and electrograms.

AIMS Catheter ablation is an effective technique for terminating atrial arrhythmia. However, given a high atrial fibrillation (AF) recurrence rate, optimal ablation strategies have yet to be defined. Computer modelling can be a powerful aid but modelling of fibrosis, a major factor associated with AF, is an open question. Several groups have proposed methodologies based on imaging data, but no comparison to determine which methodology best corroborates clinically observed reentrant behaviour has been performed. We examined several methodologies to determine the best method for capturing fibrillation dynamics. METHODS AND RESULTS Patient late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging data were transferred onto a bilayer atrial computer model and used to assign fibrosis distributions. Fibrosis was modelled as conduction disturbances (lower conductivity, edge splitting, or percolation), transforming growth factor-β1 ionic channel effects, myocyte-fibroblast coupling, and combinations of the preceding. Reentry was induced through pulmonary vein ectopy and the ensuing rotor dynamics characterized. Non-invasive electrocardiographic imaging data of the patients in AF was used for comparison. Electrograms were computed and the fractionation durations measured over the surface. Edge splitting produced more phase singularities from wavebreaks than the other representations. The number of phase singularities seen with percolation was closer to the clinical values. Addition of fibroblast coupling had an organizing effect on rotor dynamics. Simple tissue conductivity changes with ionic changes localized rotors over fibrosis which was not observed with clinical data. CONCLUSION The specific representation of fibrosis has a large effect on rotor dynamics and needs to be carefully considered for patient specific modelling.
Temporary employment, job satisfaction and subjective well-being

This article is concerned with whether employees on temporary contracts in Britain report lower well-being than those on permanent contracts, and whether this relationship is mediated by differences in dimensions of job satisfaction. Previous research has identified a well-being gap between permanent and temporary employees but has not addressed what individual and contract specific characteristics contribute to this observed difference. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, the article finds that a large proportion of the difference in self-reported well-being between permanent and temporary employees appears to be explained by differences in satisfaction with job security. Other dimensions of job satisfaction are found to be less important. In fact, after controlling for differences in satisfaction with security, the results suggest that temporary employees report higher psychological well-being and life satisfaction. This indicates that an employment contract characterized by a definite duration lowers individual well-being principally through heightened job insecurity.
Modeling Career Path Trajectories

Understanding the structure and dynamics of the job market is important both from the local perspective of individual job hunters and from the global perspective of economists and policy makers. In this paper, we explore such questions by analyzing the text of a corpus of resumes and their job transitions. We first demonstrate the use of a statistical topic model to discover the latent skills that make up each job description and to map the cooccurrence patters of various skills. Although these topical features alone are good at discovering the structure of the job market, they are relatively poor at predicting job transitions. We next present a topical sequence model trained on topic features that has improved ability to predict subsequent job titles.
Nitric oxide mediates neurodegeneration and breakdown of the blood-brain barrier in tPA-dependent excitotoxic injury in mice

Stroke and many neurodegenerative diseases culminate in neuronal death through a mechanism known as excitotoxicity. Excitotoxicity proceeds through a complex signaling pathway that includes the participation of the serine protease tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). tPA mediates neurotoxic effects on resident central nervous system cells as well alters blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability, which further promotes neurodegeneration. Another signaling molecule that promotes neurodegeneration and BBB dysfunction is nitric oxide (NO), although its precise role in pathological progression remains unclear. We examine here the potentially interrelated roles of tPA, NO and peroxynitrite (ONOO–), which is the toxic metabolite of NO, in BBB breakdown and neurodegeneration following intrahippocampal injection of the glutamate analog kainite (KA). We find that NO and ONOO– production are linked to tPA-mediated excitotoxic injury, and demonstrate that NO provision suffices to restore the toxic effects of KA in tPA-deficient mice that are normally resistant to excitotoxicity. NO also promotes BBB breakdown and excitotoxicity. Interestingly, BBB breakdown in itself does not suffice to elicit neurodegeneration; a subsequent ONOO–-mediated event is required. In conclusion, NO and ONOO– function as downstream effectors of tPA-mediated excitotoxicity.
A security mechanism of Smart Grid AMI network through smart device mutual authentication

AMI (Advanced Meter Infrastructure), vital component to build next generation electricity grid, is an informatization service infrastructure for electricity between consumers and electricity companies. To manage the quantity of electricity consumed, AMI is composed with bidirectional communication Smart Devices. Authentication mechanism is necessary to have the access control of Smart Devices in Smart Grid communication environment. However, current ID-based authentication mechanism does not offer mutual authentication between User Device and Smart Meter. PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) in Smart Grid gives a guarantee for security, but the number of exchanged data to generate certificate for all Smart Devices is concerned. This paper proposes to couple ID-based authentication and PKI mechanism, which offers mutual authentication between Smart Devices. This proposed mechanism reduces the number of message exchanges and ultimately provides secure communication environments to Smart Devices.
Analog Electronic Implementation of a Class of Hybrid Dissipative Dynamical System

An analog electronic implementation by means of operational amplifiers of a class of hybrid dissipative systems in R3 is presented. The switching systems have two unstable hyperbolic focus-saddle equilibria with the same stability index, a positive real eigenvalue and a pair of complex conjugated eigenvalues with negative real part. The analog circuit generates signals that oscillate in an attractor located between the two unstable equilibria, and may present saturation states at the moment of energizing it, i.e. if the initial voltage on the capacitors do not belong to the basin of attraction the circuit will end on a saturation state.
Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal Will You Still Be Teaching in the Twenty-first Century? Redirecting the Discussion and Transforming Higher Education Will You Still Be Teaching in the Twenty-first Century?

INTRODUCTION " Computers are coming! Computers are coming! " is the cry heard around the world as the technology revolution slowly and insidiously works its way into the classroom from kindergarten through higher education. Administrators dream about the economies of inexpensive computer systems handling hundreds of students relatively independently of faculty, with the additional benefit that computers do not debate issues at staff meetings. Lost in the current rush to extol the value of having computers in every classroom, internet courses available to any student anywhere in the world, and complete degrees offered in cyberspace, is a discussion about the real nature of education, the human side. Teaching/learning paradigms at all institutions of higher education must change from lectures to interactive, student-centered inquiry approaches, in order to focus on the human aspects of learning, or else computers will do the teaching for us. This article is not intended to criticize all uses of technology but instead to promote learning through human interactions. The author believes that appropriate uses of technology lie in supplemental instruction intended to complement classroom activities, not replace them. Computers are useful for building skills, repetition exercises, the search for information via the world wide web, and some communications via e-mail or chat rooms. But technology can never replace the affective nature of education created by face to face interaction between students, and between students and teachers. Unfortunately, the real value of computers as teaching tools has been lost on administrators who only see the apparent economics of scale when they consider the internet as a mechanism to recruit additional students beyond their immediate geographical region. College professors are at a crossroads. We are under increasing pressure to incorporate technology into our courses and to offer extraterrestrial learning environments commonly referred to as cyberspace or internet courses. Simultaneously, we are expected to teach students how to think critically, solve problems and interact socially in preparation for the workplace. Something is missing from the discussion on how higher education should accomplish these goals. The question which should be driving this debate is not how much technology can we include in our teaching, but instead, " What is the underlying philosophy of education and the learning experience? " Several questions spring to mind and should form the basis for discussions about the future of higher education. They are: 1. Should we facilitate learning through interactive, student-centered courses or focus …
Super-wideband bandwidth extension for speech in the 3GPP EVS codec

This paper describes the time-domain bandwidth extension (TBE) framework employed to code wideband and super-wideband speech in the newly standardized 3GPP EVS codec. The TBE algorithm uses a nonlinear harmonic modeling technique that incorporates principles of time-domain envelope-modulated noise mixing. At 13.2 kbps, the super-wideband coding of speech uses as low as 1.55 kbps for encoding the spectral content from 6.4-14.4 kHz. Subjective evaluation results from ITU-T P.800 Mean Opinion Score (MOS) tests are provided, showing significantly improved quality compared to the other standardized SWB codecs under both clean speech and speech with background noise.
High-order sequence modeling using speaker-dependent recurrent temporal restricted boltzmann machines for voice conversion

This paper presents a voice conversion (VC) method that utilizes recently proposed recurrent temporal restricted Boltzmann machines (RTRBMs) for each speaker, with the goal of capturing high-order temporal dependencies in an acoustic sequence. Our algorithm starts from the separate training of two RTRBMs for a source and target speaker using speaker-dependent training data. Since each RTRBM attempts to discover abstractions at each time step, as well as the temporal dependencies in the training data, we expect that the models represent the speaker-specific latent features in the high-order spaces. In our approach, we run conversion from such speaker-specificemphasized features of the source speaker to those of the target speaker using a neural network (NN), so that the entire network (the two RTRBMs ant the NN) forms a deep recurrent neural network and can be fine-tuned. Through VC experiments, we confirmed the high performance of our method especially in terms of objective criteria in comparison to conventional VC methods such as Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based approaches.
A Parallel Hardware Architecture for Scale and Rotation Invariant Feature Detection

This paper proposes a parallel hardware architecture for image feature detection based on the scale invariant feature transform algorithm and applied to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem. The work also proposes specific hardware optimizations considered fundamental to embed such a robotic control system on-a-chip. The proposed architecture is completely stand-alone; it reads the input data directly from a CMOS image sensor and provides the results via a field-programmable gate array coupled to an embedded processor. The results may either be used directly in an on-chip application or accessed through an Ethernet connection. The system is able to detect features up to 30 frames per second (320times240 pixels) and has accuracy similar to a PC-based implementation. The achieved system performance is at least one order of magnitude better than a PC-based solution, a result achieved by investigating the impact of several hardware-orientated optimizations on performance, area and accuracy.
Coronary heart disease in the elderly.

In 1984, 435,759 deaths were attributed to CHD among persons greater than or equal to 65 years of age. CHD was the leading cause of death in this group. Death rates rose steeply with age among the elderly. Men had higher death rates than women, but the male-to-female ratio declined with increasing age. Considerable geographic variation in CHD mortality in the elderly was noted. Since 1968, CHD death rates have declined in persons greater than or equal to 65 years of age in each age, sex, and race group. However, prevalence of self-reported CHD in the elderly population has increased. Prevalence rates increased with age except for a slight decrease above age 75 in men. In 1985, 436,000 persons aged greater than or equal to 65 years were discharged with a principal diagnosis of acute MI. The hospital case fatality rate was 21.8%. Since 1970, hospitalization rates for acute MI have generally increased, while hospital fatality rates have decreased for persons greater than or equal to 65 years of age. Since 1979, utilization of coronary artery bypass surgery and coronary arteriography have dramatically increased among the elderly. In 1980 and 1981, elderly persons made six million visits to physicians' offices for chronic CHD. CHD contributed importantly to the 1980 expenditures of 3.3 billion dollars in men and 4.8 billion dollars in women greater than or equal to 65 years of age for heart disease care. Although mortality rates from CHD in the elderly have decreased since 1968, increasing hospitalization rates and utilization of other health care services emphasize the need for more vigorous efforts at prevention. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
DGHPSIM:: Generic simulation of hospital performance

The British National Health Service (NHS) has a performance management framework that aims to guarantee short waiting times for patients by including mandatory targets for hospitals. DGHPSim is a suite of four components that simulates the activities of an NHS general hospital to show the effect of different policies on waiting times in these hospitals. DGHPSim has a generic structure that is used to simulate a particular hospital by employing data appropriate to that hospital from available data sets. Two of the components of DGHPSim, the accident and emergency simulator and the outpatient simulator, may be used independently as stand-alone simulators of these hospital functions. The DGHPSim suite incorporates a novel way of simulating the multitasking behavior of clinicians and uses transition matrices, extracted from standard datasets, to represent the states through which patients pass and the wards in which they may be treated. As a whole, the DGHPSim suite may be used to investigate improvement options before their implementation or to investigate how a hospital has improved its performance. We show how DGHPSim is used to investigate reported performance improvements in an English general hospital.
The SYSU system for the interspeech 2015 automatic speaker verification spoofing and countermeasures challenge

Many existing speaker verification systems are reported to be vulnerable against different spoofing attacks, for example speech synthesis, voice conversion, play back, etc. In order to detect these spoofed speech signals as a countermeasure, we propose a score level fusion approach with several different i-vector subsystems. We show that the acoustic level Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features, the phase level modified group delay cepstral coefficients (MGDCC) and the phonetic level phoneme posterior probability (PPP) tandem features are effective for the countermeasure. Furthermore, feature level fusion of these features before i-vector modeling also enhance the performance. A polynomial kernel support vector machine is adopted as the supervised classifier. In order to enhance the generalizability of the countermeasure, we also adopted the cosine similarity and PLDA scoring as one-class classifications methods. By combining the proposed i-vector subsystems with the OpenSMILE baseline which covers the acoustic and prosodic information further improves the final performance. The proposed fusion system achieves 0.29% and 3.26% EER on the development and test set of the database provided by the INTERSPEECH 2015 automatic speaker verification spoofing and countermeasures challenge.
An Improved System For Real-Time Scene Text Recognition

In this paper we showcase a system for real-time text detection and recognition. We apply deep features created by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for both text detection and word recognition task. For text detection we follow the common localization-verification scheme which already shown its excellent ability in numerous previous work. In text localization stage, textual regions are roughly detected by using a MSERs (Maximally Stable Extremal Regions) detector with high recall rate. False alarms are then eliminated by using a CNNs classifier, and remaining text regions are further grouped into words. In the word recognition stage, we developed an skeleton-based text binarization method for segmenting text from its background. A CNNs based recognizer is then applied for recognizing character. The initial experiments show the powerful ability of deep features for text classification comparing with commonly used visual features. Our current implementation demonstrates real-time performance for recognizing scene text by using a standard PC with webcam.
Is CORI Effective for Collection Selection? An Exploration of Parameters, Queries, and Data

In distributed information retrieval, a wide range of techniques have been proposed for choosing collections to interrogate. Many of these collection-selection techniques are based on ranking the lexicons; of these, arguably the best known is the CORI collection ranking metric, which includes several parameters that, in principle, should be tuned for different data sets. However, parameters chosen in early work on CORI have been used without alteration in almost all subsequent work, despite drastic differences in the data collections. We have explored the behaviour of CORI for a range of data sets and parameter values. It appears that parameters cannot reliably be chosen for CORI: not only do the optimal choices vary between data sets, but they also vary between query types and, indeed, vary wildly within query sets. Coupled with the observation that even CORI with optimal parameters is usually less effective than other methods, we conclude that the use of CORI as a benchmark collection selection method is inappropriate.
Kernel-based supervised hashing for cross-view similarity search

Spectral-based hashing (SpH) is the most used method for cross-view hash function learning (CVHFL). However, the following three problems are shared by many existing SpH methods. Firstly, preserving intra- and inter-similarity simultaneously increases models' complexity significantly. Secondly, linear model applied in many SpH methods is hard to handle multimodal data in cross-view scenarios. Thirdly, to learn irrelevant multiple bits, SpH imposes orthogonality constraints which decreases the mapping quality substantially with the increase of bit number. To address these challenges, we propose a novel SpH method for CVHFL in this paper, referred to as Kernel-based Supervised Hashing for Cross-view Similarity Search (KSH-CV). We prove that the intra-adjacency matrix is redundant given inter-adjacency matrix. Then we define our objective function in a supervised and k-ernelized way which just needs to preserve inter-similarity. Furthermore a novel Adaboost algorithm, which minimizes exponential mapping loss function for cross-view similarity search, is derived to solve the objective function efficiently while avoiding orthogonality constraints. Extensive experiments verifies that KSH-CV can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art methods on three cross-view datasets.
Is Short-Term Mating the Maladaptive Result of Insecure Attachment? A Test of Competing Evolutionary Perspectives

Different evolutionary perspectives offer competing views on short-term mating and attachment. Some theories argue that short-term mating results from insecure attachment, particularly the maladaptive attachment features of low self-esteem, interpersonal distrust, social avoidance, and emotional instability. Other theories posit that short-term mating is adaptive, having evolved as an ecologically contingent reproductive strategy. In this view, short-term mating has multiple origins—developmental, heritable, and situational—and may not be associated with the maladaptive traits of insecure attachment. Across several different cultures, short-term mating was moderately associated with insecure attachment, and insecure attachment was strongly related to maladaptive personality. However, short-term mating was largely independent of maladaptive personality. In some cases, especially among young men, short-term mating was associated with adaptive personality traits, especially higher self-esteem. It is argued that although insecure romantic attachment is somewhat associated with short-term mating, the causal links between early parent-child attachment and short-term mating are rather limited.