Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of apolipoprotein B with incident type 2 diabetes in an aboriginal Canadian population.

BACKGROUND Expanding evidence indicates that apolipoprotein B (apo B) is superior to LDL cholesterol as a marker of vascular disease. Although traditional lipid measures are known to predict type 2 diabetes, limited data are available regarding apo B. We assessed the association of apo B with incident type 2 diabetes and compared it with traditional lipid variables as a risk predictor in aboriginal Canadians. METHODS Of an initial cohort of 606 individuals without diabetes in 1993-1995, 540 were contacted for the 10-year follow-up evaluation in 2003-2005. Fasting and 2-h postload glucose concentrations were obtained at baseline and follow-up to determine incident type 2 diabetes. Baseline fasting serum lipids were measured with standard laboratory procedures. RESULTS The cumulative 10-year incidence of type 2 diabetes was 17.5%. High concentrations of apo B, triglycerides, and LDL cholesterol, and low concentrations of HDL cholesterol were individually associated with incident type 2 diabetes in univariate analyses. Comparing C statistics of univariate models showed apo B to be a superior determinant of incident diabetes compared with LDL (P = 0.026) or HDL (P = 0.004) cholesterol. With multivariate adjustment including waist circumference, apo B (odds ratio, 1.50; 95% CI, 1.11-2.02) and triglycerides (odds ratio, 1.49; 95% CI, 1.12-1.98) remained associated with incident diabetes, whereas LDL and HDL cholesterol became nonsignificant. CONCLUSIONS The association of plasma apo B with incident type 2 diabetes and its better prediction of risk compared with LDL or HDL cholesterol suggest the potential for the use of apo B in type 2 diabetes risk communication and prevention.
Can It Be Predicted Which Patients With Chronic Low Back Pain Should Be Offered Tertiary Rehabilitation in a Functional Restoration Program?: A Search for Demographic, Socioeconomic, and Physical Predictors

Study Design. A prospective clinical trial was conducted that involved six groups of patients with chronic low back pain selected from a large cohort (N = 816). Objectives. To correlate pretreatment baseline variables with outcome parameters after treatment in a functional restoration program or in control programs, to identify possible factors predictive of the need for functional restoration. Summary of Background Data. Since the functional restoration program was first described, research has focused on identifying patients who will or will not benefit from such a program. The value of previous studies is limited, however, because predictive factors from a control group were not "subtracted. " Methods. Eight hundred sixteen patients with chronic low back disability were included. All had a structured medical examination, including various physical tests before participation in either a functional restoration program (n = 621) or shorter "control" outpatient programs (n = 144). A smaller group of the cohort (n = 51) had no treatment and served as a pure control group. Six groups were selected from the cohort: Three underwent an identical functional restoration program and three underwent different outpatient control programs. Several baseline demographic, physical, and socioeconomic variables were correlated to 1‐year outcome parameters. Results. Age, days of sick leave, connection to the work force, and back pain intensity, were significantly correlated to success 1 year after entry into the study in all groups, no matter what kind of treatment was administered. Back muscle endurance, sports activity, activity of daily living scores, and vibrations were of importance in some outcome parameters for success after functional restoration. Smoking was positively correlated to disability pension. Days of sick leave and, in functional restoration, ability to work were the only factors that were correlative with statistics for people who withdrew. Conclusions. Different factors can be identified as predictive of outcome in a functional restoration program, but most of these factors were also shown to predict success for shorter control outpatient programs or of no treatment.
THE NATURE OF SURFACE MW DISCHARGES

In MRTI are received and investigated the microwave discharges of average and high gas pressure, developing in the field of radiation with amplitude, significantly smaller critical value, exclusively along a surface of dielectric. The discharges initiated by means of passive electromagnetic vibrators, located on a surface of dielectric, look like a net of thin channels pressed to a surface of dielectric. Experiments with dielectric plates from quartz, textolite, glass-reinforced textolite, usual and quartz glass, ceramics and polyethylene have specified in independence of discharge properties on a kind of dielectric material. Special interest was presented by experiments with thin dielectric films. At a thickness of films even 100мкм discharges have the same properties, as discharges on a surface of unlimitedly thick plates. Experiments were spent on installations with wavelength of MW radiation 8.9 cm and 2.5 cm. As the reasons, causing primary propagation of streamer discharge over a surface of dielectric, the electrostatic effects and physical-chemical surface processes in presence of the discharge were considered. But the second factor was classified as a factor, which is not defining the reason of indifference of phenomena to a material of dielectric testifies. However, attraction to the phenomena theory of first factor, the processes of electrostatic effect, changing distribution of MW field in a vicinity of the head of the growing streamer, has appeared uneasy because the calculations have shown, that the increase in amplitude of a field at a head of a streamer near surface of dielectric with dielectric permeability e ~ 2-4 (typical values for used materials) does not exceed 10-15 % for thick dielectric layers and very small for thin films, that is obviously not enough for maintenance of primary propagation along a surface. But more detailed calculations at both electrostatic and electrodynamic approach have shown, that presence of a dielectric layer with e ~ 2-4 displaces a maximum of amplitude of a field in a streamer head towards a surface (not changing essentially its amplitudes) if the thickness of a dielectric layer is more than distance from the streamer head to a surface. By earlier numerical modeling it has been shown, that the streamer develops towards a maximum of amplitude of a field defined by the sum of a primary field and field generated by currents induced in discharge channels and forgoing to a head of streamer. At presence of dielectric the charges, induced in dielectric, displaces a field maximum nearer to surface so a streamer, keeping the tendency to extend in direction of field maximum, continuously slides over a surface. It is possible to assert, that the electrostatic factor is the defining factor for the surface streamer MW discharges.
Favorable cardiovascular risk profile in middle age and health-related quality of life in older age.

BACKGROUND Life expectancy is greater for people with favorable midlife cardiovascular risk profiles (ie, low risk). However, some speculate that increased longevity may lead to large numbers of ill, disabled, older persons with lower quality of life. Few data exist on this important issue. This study evaluates the relationship of midlife low-risk status to quality of life and illness in older age. METHODS Cohort of middle-aged adults from the Chicago Heart Association Detection Project in Industry (2692 women and 3650 men; baseline ages, 36-64 years [average age, 73.2 years in 1996]) without baseline (1967-1973) major electrocardiographic abnormalities or history of diabetes or myocardial infarction. Quality of life (12-item Health Status Questionnaire [HSQ-12] on physical, mental, and social well-being) and self-reported diseases were assessed after 26 years of follow-up. Baseline risk strata included low risk (favorable blood pressure and serum cholesterol levels, no smoking, and no minor electrocardiographic abnormalities); 0 risk factors (ie, no high risk factors but >or=1 risk factors not at favorable levels); or any 1, any 2, or 3 or more of the following 4 risk factors: high blood pressure, high serum cholesterol level, smoking, and minor electrocardiographic abnormalities. The HSQ-12 scores and disease outcomes for low risk were compared with other strata. RESULTS Adjusted scores for physical, mental, social functioning, and disease-free outcomes were highest for low-risk individuals and decreased significantly with number of risk factors (eg, 58% of low-risk women had excellent/very good health compared with 28% of women with >or=3 risk factors). CONCLUSIONS Favorable cardiovascular risk profile in middle age is associated with better quality of life and lower risk of diseases in older age. Moreover, the fewer the risk factors, the higher the quality of life.
Alpha reactivity to first names differs in subjects with high and low dream recall frequency

Studies in cognitive psychology showed that personality (openness to experience, thin boundaries, absorption), creativity, nocturnal awakenings, and attitude toward dreams are significantly related to dream recall frequency (DRF). These results suggest the possibility of neurophysiological trait differences between subjects with high and low DRF. To test this hypothesis we compared sleep characteristics and alpha reactivity to sounds in subjects with high and low DRF using polysomnographic recordings and electroencephalography (EEG). We acquired EEG from 21 channels in 36 healthy subjects while they were presented with a passive auditory oddball paradigm (frequent standard tones, rare deviant tones and very rare first names) during wakefulness and sleep (intensity, 50 dB above the subject's hearing level). Subjects were selected as High-recallers (HR, DRF = 4.42 ± 0.25 SEM, dream recalls per week) and Low-recallers (LR, DRF = 0.25 ± 0.02) using a questionnaire and an interview on sleep and dream habits. Despite the disturbing setup, the subjects' quality of sleep was generally preserved. First names induced a more sustained decrease in alpha activity in HR than in LR at Pz (1000–1200 ms) during wakefulness, but no group difference was found in REM sleep. The current dominant hypothesis proposes that alpha rhythms would be involved in the active inhibition of the brain regions not involved in the ongoing brain operation. According to this hypothesis, a more sustained alpha decrease in HR would reflect a longer release of inhibition, suggesting a deeper processing of complex sounds than in LR during wakefulness. A possibility to explain the absence of group difference during sleep is that increase in alpha power in HR may have resulted in awakenings. Our results support this hypothesis since HR experienced more intra sleep wakefulness than LR (30 ± 4 vs. 14 ± 4 min). As a whole our results support the hypothesis of neurophysiological trait differences in high and low-recallers.
CheckDep: A Tool for Tracking Software Dependencies

Many software developers use a syntactical `diff' in order to performa quick review before committing changes to the repository. Others are notified of the change by e-mail (containing diffs or change logs), and they review the received information to determine if their work is affected. We lift this simple process from the code level to the more abstract level of dependencies: a software developer can use CheckDep to inspect introduced and removed dependencies before committing new versions, and other developers receive summaries of the changed dependencies via e-mail. We find the tool useful in our software-development activities and now make the tool publicly available.
Training a Statistical Machine Translation System without GIZA++

The IBM Models (Brown et al., 1993) enjoy great popularity in the machine translation community because they offer high quality word alignments and a free implementation is available with the GIZA++ Toolkit (Och and Ney, 2003). Several methods have been developed to overcome the asymmetry of the alignment generated by the IBM Models. A remaining disadvantage, however, is the high model complexity. This paper describes a word alignment training procedure for statistical machine translation that uses a simple and clear statistical model, different from the IBM models. The main idea of the algorithm is to generate a symmetric and monotonic alignment between the target sentence and a permutation graph representing different reorderings of the words in the source sentence. The quality of the generated alignment is shown to be comparable to the standard GIZA++ training in an SMT setup.
Current issues and new techniques in visual quality assessment

This paper deals with two current issues in visual quality assessment, namely, contextual effects in quality judgments and the evaluation of time-varying image quality. A scaling experiment is described showing that contextual effects due to stimulus spacing are negligible when a method based on difference judgments is used. It is also shown that subjects can record their impressions of time-varying image quality by means of moving a slider along a graphical scale. The research on contextual effects as well as on the continuous assessment of time-varying image quality illustrate the important role psychological factors play in image quality evaluation.
Incremental Parameter Estimation of Stochastic Context-Free Grammars without Retention of the Sentence Corpus

Stochastic context free grammars (SCFGs) are often used to represent the syntax of natural languages. Most algorithms for learning these grammars from data require a corpus of sentences to be stored and repearedly processed. We are interested in how embedded agents might learn the syntax of natural languages from exposure to utterances over long periods of time. In this context, the memory and computational requirements of existing algorithms for learning SCFGs from data are prohibitive. We present an online algorithm for learning the parameters of SCFGs that computes summary statistics from sentences as they are observed. The algorithm thus requires a xed amount of space regardless of the number of sentences it processes. Despite the fact that it uses much less information than the Inside-Outside algorithm, our algorithm performs almost as well.
The Mo-Se active site of nicotinate dehydrogenase

Nicotinate dehydrogenase (NDH) from Eubacterium barkeri is a molybdoenzyme catalyzing the hydroxylation of nicotinate to 6-hydroxynicotinate. Reactivity of NDH critically depends on the presence of labile (nonselenocysteine) selenium with an as-yet-unidentified form and function. We have determined the crystal structure of NDH and analyzed its active site by multiple wavelengths anomalous dispersion methods. We show that selenium is bound as a terminal MoSe ligand to molybdenum and that it occupies the position of the terminal sulfido ligand in other molybdenum hydroxylases. The role of selenium in catalysis has been assessed by model calculations, which indicate an acceleration of the critical hydride transfer from the substrate to the selenido ligand in the course of substrate hydroxylation when compared with an active site containing a sulfido ligand. The MoO(OH)Se active site of NDH shows a novel type of utilization and reactivity of selenium in nature.
Hollow CU-coated plastic waveguides for the delivery of THz radiation

Terahertz (THz) radiation has important applications in spectroscopy, imaging, and space science. For some of these applications, in particular spectroscopy, a flexible fiber optic could potentially simplify the THz system and enable the user to transmit radiation to remote locations without excessive absorption by atmospheric moisture. To date THz fiber optics and waveguides have been limited to rigid hollow metallic waveguides, solid wires, or short lengths of solid-core transparent dielectrics such as sapphire and plastic. In this paper we report on flexible, hollow polycarbonate waveguides with interior Cu coatings for broadband THz transmission fabricated using simple liquid-phase chemistry techniques. The losses for these hollow-core guides were measured using a tunable, cw single-mode far IR laser. The losses for the best guides were found to be less than four dB/m and the single mode of the laser was preserved for the smaller bore waveguides. Loss calculations of the loss for the HE11 mode reveal that the metal-coated hollow waveguides have much higher loss than for waveguides coated with both metallic and dielectric thin films.
Materials Science Research for the Conservation of Sculpture and Monuments

Mountains give the illusion of durability because their grand scale hides the continual weathering of their surfaces. When the same stone is used to create a sculpture, the loss of a few millimeters suffices to spoil, or even eliminate, the features of a face; the rate of loss may be surprising, but it is not necessarily unnatural.
Dilong: Role in Peripheral Nerve Regeneration

Dilong, also known as earthworm, has been widely used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for thousands of years. Schwann cell migration and proliferation are critical for the regeneration of injured nerves and Schwann cells provide an essentially supportive role for neuron regeneration. However, the molecular mechanisms of migration and proliferation induced by dilongs in Schwann cells remain unclear. Here, we discuss the molecular mechanisms that includes (i) migration signaling, MAPKs (mitogen-activated protein kinases), mediated PAs and MMP2/9 pathway; (ii) survival and proliferative signaling, IGF-I (insulin-like growth factor-I)-mediated PI3K/Akt pathways and (iii) cell cycle regulation. Dilong stimulate RSC96 cell proliferation and migration. It can induce phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and p38, but not JNK, and activate the downstream signaling expression of PAs (plasminogen activators) and MMPs (matrix metalloproteinases) in a time-dependent manner. In addition, Dilong stimulated ERK1/2 and p38 phosphorylation was attenuated by pretreatment with chemical inhibitors (U0126 and SB203580), and small interfering ERK1/2 and p38 RNA, resulting in migration and uPA-related signal pathway inhibition. Dilong also induces the phosphorylation of IGF-I-mediated PI3K/Akt pathway, activates protein expression of PCNA (proliferating cell nuclear antigen) and cell cycle regulatory proteins (cyclin D1, cyclin E and cyclin A) in a time-dependent manner. In addition, it accelerates G1-phase progression with earlier S-phase entry and significant numbers of cells entered the S-phase. The siRNA-mediated knockdown of PI3K that significantly reduces PI3K protein expression levels, resulting in Bcl2 survival factor reduction, revealing a marked blockage of G1 to S transition in proliferating cells. These results reveal the unknown RSC96 cell migration and proliferation mechanism induced by dilong, which find use as a new medicine for nerve regeneration.
Molecular analysis of the promoter operator region of the Escherichia coli K-12 tyrP gene

The nucleotide sequence of the tyrP promoter region from Escherichia coli has been determined. Two TYR R boxes have been identified, and one of these was shown to overlap the -35 region of a major tyrP promoter (p1). S1 nuclease mapping of in vivo transcripts revealed that transcription from p1 is stimulated by phenylalanine and to a lesser extent by leucine. The demonstration that mutants in which TyrR-tyrosine-mediated repression of tyrP has been abolished have single base changes in the TYR R box which overlaps p1 suggests that TyrR-tyrosine-mediated repression of tyrP also involves p1. TyrR-independent stimulation of tyrP expression by Casamino Acids involves a second promoter 140 bases upstream of p1. There are no TYR R boxes in this region. The sequences of 10 TYR R boxes preceding the genes tyrP, tyrR, and aroG and the operons aroF tyrA and aroL aroM are compared and discussed.
Design , implementation , and performance of an automatic configuration service for distributed component systems

Component technology promotes code reuse by enabling the construction of complex applications by assembling off-the-shelf components. However, components depend on certain characteristics of the environment in which they execute. They depend on other software components and on hardware resources. In existing component architectures, the application developer is left with the task of resolving those dependencies, i.e., making sure that each component has access to all the resources it needs and that all the required components are loaded. Nevertheless, according to encapsulation principles, developers should not be aware of the component internals. Thus, it may be difficult to find out what a component really needs. In complex systems, such as the ones found in modern distributed environments, this manual approach to dependency management can lead to disastrous results. Current systems rely heavily on manual configuration by users and system administrators. This is tolerable now, when users have to manage a few computers. But, in the near future, people will have to deal with thousands of computing devices and it will no longer be acceptable to require the user to configure each of them. This article presents the results of our six-year research (from 1998 to 2003) in the area of automatic configuration, describing an integrated architecture for managing dependencies in distributed componentbased systems. The architecture supports automatic configuration and dynamic resource management in distributed heterogeneous environments. We describe a concrete implementation of this architecture, present experimental results, and compare our approach to other works in the area.
Stress test model of cascading failures in power grids

Cascading failures in electric power systems are one of the major causes of large power blackouts. The operators in control centers of electric power systems need an online tool to monitor the risk of cascading failures when transferring large quantities of power over long distances. In this paper, we propose a two-stage stress test model of cascading failures. The stress test model is intended to emulate the effect of security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED) in support of the required power transfer level, and at the same time, to account for relay actions in response to a given set of severe disturbances, called maximum credible disturbances. The model includes an inner stage, which simulates cascading outages due to relay actions in the system at a given state under disturbances, and an outer stage, which moves the operating point of the system as the power transfer increases as a result of SCED. We use the stress test model to simulate cascading failures in a real 3000-bus power system when increasing its power transfer level in different directions.