Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
"High normal" thyroid stimulating hormone: does it matter?

Metabolic syndrome characterized by central obesity, glucose intolerance, hypertension, and atherogenic dyslipidemia is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). It is estimated that approximately 20% to 25% of the world’s adult population have the metabolic syndrome and they are two times as likely to die from and three times as likely to have CVD compared with those without the syndrome. Insulin resistance and central obesity are considered to be the underlying causes of the metabolic syndrome [1].
Between law and politics: Explaining international dispute settlement behavior

Over recent decades a judicialization process of international dispute settlement procedures has taken place. Yet, the judicialization of procedures remains meaningless if the procedures are not used and accepted by disputing states in practice. Prominent theoretical approaches point to different conditions under which this is to be expected. Realism emphasizes the international distribution of power, institutionalism stresses the importance of the institutional design of international dispute settlement procedures, and liberalism points to the domestic institutional setting of the participating states. The article confronts these theoretical expectations with states’ actual dispute settlement behavior in the international trade regime, the United Nations Security Council, the European human rights regime and the regime on the protection of endangered species in the 1970s/80s and 1990s/2000s, respectively. Its main finding is that, compared to realism and liberalism, institutionalism fares better in explaining the judicialization of states’ dispute settlement behavior.
Cooperative data muling from ground sensors to base stations using UAVs

Data muling using UAVs/drones is currently emerging as an alternative to the traditional traffic engineering techniques used in wireless sensor networks, when wireless communication is not an option or the least cost-efficient solution. This paper revisits the issue of traffic engineering in Internet-of-Things (IoT) settings, to assess the relevance of using UAVs for the persistent collection of sensor readings from the sensor nodes located into an environment and their delivery to base stations where further processing is performed. We consider a persistent path planning and UAV allocation model, where a team of UAVs coming from various base stations are used to collect data from ground sensors and deliver the collected information to their closest base stations. This problem is mathematically formalised and proven to be NP-hard. We propose a heuristic solution for the problem and evaluate its relative efficiency through simulation.
Fathers’ contribution towards toddlers’ aggressiveness

In this thesis I investigated the relationship between fathers’ antisocial and physically aggressive behaviour and toddlers’ behaviour. Previous work has largely ignored fathers or seen fathers only as an influence on mothers and little is known about fathers’ aggressiveness. Families were recruited for the Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS), which is a prospective longitudinal study of parents and their children. Parents were interviewed about their own behaviours during pregnancy and the children were assessed at intervals until 33 months of age (Chapter 2 describes the study design). Chapter 3 examined associations between the antisocial behaviour of the couple. Although men committed more antisocial behaviours than women, there were associations between partners’ rates of both violent and non-violent antisocial behaviours. The relationship between fathers’ antisocial behaviours and young children’s behaviour was explored in Chapter 4. Fathers’ non-violnt antisocial symptoms were associated with mothers’ reports of toddlers’ aggressiveness. Fathers’ physical aggressiveness was associated with infants’ contentious behaviours, toddlers’ aggressiveness and observations of toddlers’ use of force against a peer. When physical aggressiveness was considered more closely a component relating specifically to toddlers’ physical aggressiveness was identified. Fathers’ physical aggressiveness was associated with toddlers’ physical aggressiveness, which suggests a homotypic continuity in physical aggressiveness between fathers and toddlers. All of the associations between fathers’ and toddlers’ behaviours remained significant after controlling for the mothers’ behaviours. Thus, fathers’ behaviours provide unique contributions towards toddlers’ behaviours independently of the mothers’ behaviours. Since antisocial fathers are more likely to be absent fathers Chapter 5 examined the relationship between fathers’ physical aggressiveness and father absence. Although father absence was associated with fathers’ physical aggressiveness, it did not explain the association between fathers’ and toddlers’ physical aggressiveness. Together these findings show that fathers are important to study in their own right, rather than as an influence on mothers.
Foreign Language Acquisition and Audio‐Visual Aids*

ABSTRACT This study examines the ability of audiovisual aids to facilitate second language acquisition. One hundred seven high school students enrolled in Spanish Two participated in this study. Two groups were formed which covered the identical material except that one group was taught with substantially more and varied audio-visual aids than prescribed by the standard curriculum. At the end of seven weeks both groups were tested on the material covered. The audiovisual aids group performed significantly better in vocabulary and listening comprehension but no difference was found in structure. Discussion in relation to extant literature is provided as well as recommendations for future study.
Cecil: A Sequencing Constraint Language for Automatic Static Analysis Generation

A flexible and general mechanism for specifying problems relating to the sequencing of events and mechanically translating them into dataflow analysis algorithms capable of solving those problems is presented. Dataflow analysis has been used for quite some time in compiler code optimization. Most static analyzers have been custom-built to search for fixed and often quite limited classes of dataflow conditions. It is shown that the range of sequences for which it is interesting and worthwhile to search in actually quite broad and diverse. A formalism for specifying this diversity of conditions is created. It is shown that these conditions can be modeled essentially as dataflow analysis problems for which effective solutions are known. It is also shown how these solutions can be exploited to serve as the basis for mechanical creation of analyzers for these conditions. >
An Online Multipath Routing Algorithm for Maximizing Lifetime in Wireless Sensor Networks

We address the maximum lifetime routing problem in wireless sensor networks, and present an online multipath routing algorithm. The proposed algorithm strives to maximize the network lifetime metric by distributing the source-to-sink traffic for a given routing request along a set of paths. Fuzzy membership function is used for designing the edge weight function. Simulation results obtained under a variety of network scenarios show that the proposed multipath scheme is able to achieve better lifetime results than those obtained by its predecessor single-path fuzzy routing scheme as well as by another well-known online routing scheme, namely the Online Maximum Lifetime heuristic.
Electronic Health Record Mid-Parental Height Auto-Calculator for Growth Assessment in Primary Care

Primary care providers are charged with distinguishing children with an underlying growth problem from those with healthy variant short stature. Knowing the heights of the biological parents aids in making that decision. This study sought to determine the feasibility and functionality of an electronic mid-parental height (MPH) auto-calculator in the clinical assessment of child growth in a pediatric primary care setting. Clinicians completed surveys for 62% of 6803 children (mean height 13 ± 7 percentile) with recorded parent heights. Collecting parent height data required <30 seconds in 91% of encounters. The MPH tool confirmed clinicians’ initial growth assessment in 79% of cases and changed it in 4%; the remainder did not use the tool. Clinicians who changed assessment were more likely (P < .0001) to pursue more comprehensive evaluation. The MPH tool was a quick, functional resource as a component of an electronic health record system in actual, busy, pediatric primary care practices.
An architecture for amplify‐and‐forward cooperative systems with real modulations

This paper proposes a simple architecture for half‐duplex cooperative systems which use amplify‐and‐forward (AF) as a relay strategy and one‐dimensional modulations for source messages. The proposed solution uses the two orthogonal channels of quadrature modulation in order to allow a node to behave simultaneously as a source and a relay. We demonstrate that the new scheme has a similar performance to the conventional orthogonal amplify‐and‐forward protocol without suffering from bandwidth loss, and avoids error propagation problems of previously reported AF superposition schemes. The proposed technique is suitable for applications with low spectral efficiencies and practical adaptive systems where real modulations are implemented based on a quadrature modulation core. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Evaluator Characteristics and Methodological Choice

This study addresses the central question “How do evaluators' background characteristics relate to their evaluation design choices? ” Evaluators were provided with a fictitious description of a school-based program and asked to design an evaluation of that program. Relevant background characteristics such as level of experience, methodological preferences, evaluation utilization preferences, and level of education were collected from each respondent. Major findings indicate that evaluators' methodological and use preferences were significantly related to specific design choices for the fictitious evaluation.
Power Quality Analysis Using S-Transform

This paper presents a new approach for power quality analysis using a modified wavelet transform known as S-transform. The local spectral information of the wavelet transform can, with slight modification, be used to perform local cross spectral analysis with very good time resolution. The 'phase correction' absolutely references the phase of the wavelet transform to the zero time point, thus assuring that the amplitude peaks are regions of stationary phase. The excellent time-frequency resolution characteristic of the S-transform makes it an attractive candidate for analysis of power system disturbance signals. Several power quality problems are analysed using both the S-transform and discrete wavelet transform, showing clearly the advantage of the S-transform in detecting, localizing and classifying the power quality problems.
Globalization, Urbanization & Sporting Spectacle in Pacific Asia: Places, Peoples & Pastness

Within this paper we “hold together” an amalgam of intensive and extensive glocalization and the simultaneous reinscription of the importance of the global growth rationalities to aid understandings of contemporary Pacific Asian sporting spectacles. Through a series of four vignettes, we point to the place of sport within intense transformations within urban conglomerations in Pacific Asia. In so doing, we point to three central, and interrelated, problematics that appear endemic to Pacific Asian mega-events; raising questions over whose histories, whose representations and which peoples matter to, and for, the Pacific Asian sporting spectacle. Conclusions are centered on attuning our scholarly directions toward the structural inequalities embedded within these processes and transformations.
Automatic, Self-adaptive Control of Unfold-fold Transformations

I describe an automated approach to partial evaluation based transformations for elementary simpliications and unfolding and folding. The approach emphasizes program algebra and relies on canonical forms and distributive laws to expose instances to which the elementary simpliications apply. This approach to partial evaluation has been applied to a number of practical examples of moderate complexity, including eliminating a data structure from a partial-diierential-equation solver. 1. WHY SELF-ADAPTIVE UNFOLDING? Program transformations for unfolding and folding were introduced in the classic paper of Burstall and Darlington 7]. These transformations are very powerful; they are capable of proving theorems about function deenitions by mathematical induction. Use of unfold-fold in automatic program transformation is diicult, however. The unfold transformation, in particular, is challenging, because it replaces the application of a named function by an application of the deenition of that function. Obviously, if the named function is recursive, such replacement could go on forever. After to the appearance of the Burstall and Darlington paper, some work was done on control of unfold-fold transformations. Feather 8] implemented a strategy in which unfolding took place until a user-speciied pattern was found. The user of Feather's system prevented innnite unfolding by providing an explicit limit on the number of times unfolding took place. Feather's approach has not been widely used, however, in part because it is diicult to predict the required target pattern and the limit on unfolding; in practice, their determination required extensive experimentation. A somewhat similar approach is to use \metaprogramming" to control unfolding. This approach also suuers
Early Conflict Detection Based BCP for SAT Solving

This paper describes a new BCP algorithm that improves the performance of Chaff class solvers by reducing the total number of clauses the BCP procedure must evaluate. This is done by: detecting conflicts earlier; evaluating clauses better; and by increasing the controllability of the conflicts which the BCP procedure finds. Solvers like Limmat [10] include a simple Early Conflict Detection BCP (ECDB), however we introduce a new aggressive ECDB procedure and the MIRA solver that efficiently incorporates it while easily facilitating comparisons between ECDB modes. With the full ECDB procedure enabled, MIRA was able to reduce the number of evaluated clauses by 59% on average compared to the disabled ECDB version. This new procedure and other speedup techniques discussed here allow MIRA to solve problems 3.7 times faster on average than zChaff. Lastly, this paper shows how significant speedup can be attained relatively easily by incorporating a certain level of ECDB into other solvers.
The β-Prism Lectin Domain of Vibrio cholerae Hemolysin Promotes Self-assembly of the β-Pore-forming Toxin by a Carbohydrate-independent Mechanism*

Background: Vibrio cholerae hemolysin is a pore-forming toxin with a β-prism lectin domain. Results: Although amphipathicity-driven interactions with lipids dominate membrane targeting, relocation of the lectin domain during toxin assembly generates entropy to push oligomerization and thereby promote pore formation. Conclusion: The lectin domain promotes toxin assembly by a carbohydrate-independent mechanism. Significance: A novel role for the lectin domain in protein oligomerization is revealed. Vibrio cholerae cytolysin/hemolysin (VCC) is an amphipathic 65-kDa β-pore-forming toxin with a C-terminal β-prism lectin domain. Because deletion or point mutation of the lectin domain seriously compromises hemolytic activity, it is thought that carbohydrate-dependent interactions play a critical role in membrane targeting of VCC. To delineate the contributions of the cytolysin and lectin domains in pore formation, we used wild-type VCC, 50-kDa VCC (VCC50) without the lectin domain, and mutant VCCD617A with no carbohydrate-binding activity. VCC and its two variants with no carbohydrate-binding activity moved to the erythrocyte stroma with apparent association constants on the order of 107 m−1. However, loss of the lectin domain severely reduced the efficiency of self-association of the VCC monomer with the β-barrel heptamer in the synthetic lipid bilayer from ∼83 to 27%. Notably, inactivation of the carbohydrate-binding activity by the D617A mutation marginally reduced oligomerization to ∼77%. Oligomerization of VCC50 was temperature-insensitive; by contrast, VCC self-assembly increased with increasing temperature, suggesting that the process is driven by entropy and opposed by enthalpy. Asialofetuin, the β1-galactosyl-terminated glycoprotein inhibitor of VCC-induced hemolysis, promoted oligomerization of 65-kDa VCC to a species that resembled the membrane-inserted heptamer in stoichiometry and morphology but had reduced global amphipathicity. In conclusion, we propose (i) that the β-prism lectin domain facilitated toxin assembly by producing entropy during relocation in the heptamer and (ii) that glycoconjugates inhibited VCC by promoting its assembly to a water-soluble, less amphipathic oligomer variant with reduced ability to penetrate the bilayer.
Facial freckles recognition using convolutional neural network

Freckles is a facial feature of human, it has many significant applications in many video surveillance area. This paper proposes to use deep learning method to perform freckles detection and recognition in face images. To be more specific, a freckle recognition model is proposed in this paper based on convolution neural network. Experimental results are presented to show that the proposed approach is able to achieve 98% accuracy freckle recognition rate.
Feature selection using binary particle swarm optimization and support vector machines for medical diagnosis

Abstract In this article, we propose a feature selection strategy using a binary particle swarm optimization algorithm for the diagnosis of different medical diseases. The support vector machines were used for the fitness function of the binary particle swarm optimization. We evaluated our proposed method on four databases from the machine learning repository, including the single proton emission computed tomography heart database, the Wisconsin breast cancer data set, the Pima Indians diabetes database, and the Dermatology data set. The results indicate that, with selected less number of features, we obtained a higher accuracy in diagnosing heart, cancer, diabetes, and erythematosquamous diseases. The results were compared with the traditional feature selection methods, namely, the F-score and the information gain, and a superior accuracy was obtained with our method. Compared to the genetic algorithm for feature selection, the results of the proposed method show a higher accuracy in all of the data, except in one. In addition, in comparison with other methods that used the same data, our approach has a higher performance using less number of features.
CoConut: Co-Classification with Output Space Regularization

In this work we introduce a new approach to co-classification, i.e. the task of jointly classifying multiple, otherwise independent, data samples. The method we present, named CoConut, is based on the idea of adding a regularizer in the label space to encode certain priors on the resulting labelings. A regularizer that encourages labelings that are smooth across the test set, for instance, can be seen as a test-time variant of the cluster assumption, which has been proven useful at training time in semi-supervised learning. A regularizer that introduces a preference for certain class proportions can be regarded as a prior distribution on the class labels. CoConut can build on existing classifiers without making any assumptions on how they were obtained and without the need to re-train them. The use of a regularizer adds a new level of flexibility. It allows the integration of potentially new information at test time, even in other modalities than what the classifiers were trained on. We evaluate our framework on six datasets, reporting a clear performance gain in classification accuracy compared to the standard classification setup that predicts labels for each test sample separately.
Maelstrom: Churn as shelter

Structured overlays are an important and powerful class of overlay networks that has emerged in recent years. They are typically targeted at peer-to-peer deployments involving millions of user-managed machines on the Internet. In this paper we address routing-table poisoning attacks against structured overlays, in which adversaries attempt to intercept traffic and control the system by convincing other nodes to use compromised nodes as their overlay network neighbors. In keeping with the fully-decentralized goals of structured overlay design, we propose a defense mechanism that makes minimal use of centralized infrastructure. Our approach, induced churn, utilizes periodic routing-table resets, unpredictable identifier changes, and a rate limit on routing-table updates. Induced churn leaves adversaries at the mercy of chance: they have little opportunity to strategize their positions in the overlay, and cannot entrench themselves in any position that they do acquire. We implement induced churn in Maelstrom, an extension to the broadly used Bamboo distributed hash table. Our Maelstrom experiments over a simulated network demonstrate robust routing with very modest costs in bandwidth and latency, at levels of adversarial activity where unprotected overlays are rendered almost completely useless.
Manitoba Superintendents

The role of the school superintendent is complex and challenging. The type of leadership exemplified by school superintendents is crucial to their ability to respond appropriately and adequately to growing diversity issues and economic, social and community influences. Because individuals learn from the styles and/or characteristics of others whom they would like to emulate, this localized qualitative study asked superintendents to elaborate on the nature and characteristics of the people who have most influenced their leadership style. Who were these mentors? What specific characteristics were identified in the mentors? In what ways are these characteristics evident in superintendents' own leadership styles? A critical lens of servant-leadership was used to analyze the information gathered from Manitoba superintendents.