Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating Structural Change Approaches to Health Promotion: An Exploratory Scoping Review of a Decade of U.S. Progress

Structural change approaches—also known as policy and environmental changes—are becoming increasingly common in health promotion, yet our understanding of how to evaluate them is still limited. An exploratory scoping review of the literature was conducted to understand approaches and methods used to evaluate structural change interventions in health promotion and public health literature. Two analysts—along with health sciences librarian consultation—searched PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE for peer-reviewed U.S.-based, English language studies published between 2005 and 2016. Data were extracted on the use of evaluation frameworks, study designs, duration of evaluations, measurement levels, and measurement types. Forty-five articles were included for the review. Notably, the majority (73%) of studies did not report application of a specific evaluation framework. Studies used a wide range of designs, including process evaluations, quasi- or nonexperimental designs, and purely descriptive approaches. In addition, 15.6% of studies only measured outcomes at the individual level. Last, 60% of studies combined more than one measurement type (e.g., site observation + focus groups) to evaluate interventions. Future directions for evaluating structural change approaches to health promotion include more widespread use and reporting of evaluation frameworks, developing validated tools that measure structural change, and shifting the focus to health-directed approaches, including an expanded consideration for evaluation designs that address health inequities.
Study of the Navigation Method for a Snake Robot Based on the Kinematics Model with MEMS IMU

A snake robot is a type of highly redundant mobile robot that significantly differs from a tracked robot, wheeled robot and legged robot. To address the issue of a snake robot performing self-localization in the application environment without assistant orientation, an autonomous navigation method is proposed based on the snake robot’s motion characteristic constraints. The method realized the autonomous navigation of the snake robot with non-nodes and an external assistant using its own Micro-Electromechanical-Systems (MEMS) Inertial-Measurement-Unit (IMU). First, it studies the snake robot’s motion characteristics, builds the kinematics model, and then analyses the motion constraint characteristics and motion error propagation properties. Second, it explores the snake robot’s navigation layout, proposes a constraint criterion and the fixed relationship, and makes zero-state constraints based on the motion features and control modes of a snake robot. Finally, it realizes autonomous navigation positioning based on the Extended-Kalman-Filter (EKF) position estimation method under the constraints of its motion characteristics. With the self-developed snake robot, the test verifies the proposed method, and the position error is less than 5% of Total-Traveled-Distance (TDD). In a short-distance environment, this method is able to meet the requirements of a snake robot in order to perform autonomous navigation and positioning in traditional applications and can be extended to other familiar multi-link robots.
Adiabatic reactive viscometry for polyurethane reaction injection molding

Adiabatic reactive rheometry involves the simultaneous measurement of viscosity and temperature changes during adiabatic polymerization. Using the adiabatic reactor method to relate temperature to fractional conversion results in a useful rheokinetic tool ideally suited for fastreacting reaction injection molding (RIM) systems for which the mold-filling step is nearly adiabatic. In this work, a small laboratory RIM machine is used to mix the reactants and deliver them to a constant stress rheometer retrofitted with a wide-gap Couette geometry and two thermocouples. Measurements on two polyurethane systems are reported. A simple cross-linking system is used to verify the adiabatic rheokinetic method through comparison to a known gel conversion. Subsequent measurements on a phase-separating RIM system show that increases in catalyst level, hard segment content, and initial reactant temperature result in a decreased gel time and an increased gel conversion. The viscosity rise profiles aid our understanding of the onset and development of phase separation. They are also essential for mold-filling models and establishing moldability criteria for these RIM systems.
Understanding the covariation of tics, attention‐deficit/hyperactivity, and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms: A population‐based adult twin study

Chronic tic disorders (TD), attention‐deficit/hyperactivity‐disorder (ADHD), and obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD) frequently co‐occur in clinical and epidemiological samples. Family studies have found evidence of shared familial transmission between TD and OCD, whereas the familial association between these disorders and ADHD is less clear. This study aimed to investigate to what extent liability of tics, attention‐deficit/hyperactivity, and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms is caused by shared or distinct genetic or environmental influences, in a large population‐representative sample of Swedish adult twins (n = 21,911). Tics, attention‐deficit/hyperactivity, and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms showed modest, but significant covariation. Model fitting suggested a latent liability factor underlying the three phenotypes. This common factor was relatively heritable, and explained significantly less of the variance of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity symptom liability. The majority of genetic variance was specific rather than shared. The greatest proportion of total variance in liability of tics, attention‐deficit/hyperactivity, and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms was attributed to specific non‐shared environmental influences. Our findings suggest that the co‐occurrence of tics and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms, and to a lesser extent attention‐deficit/hyperactivity symptoms, can be partly explained by shared etiological influences. However, these phenotypes do not appear to be alternative expressions of the same underlying genetic liability. Further research examining sub‐dimensions of these phenotypes may serve to further clarify the association between these disorders and identify more genetically homogenous symptom subtypes. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Galectin-3: One Molecule for an Alphabet of Diseases, from A to Z

Galectin-3 (Gal-3) regulates basic cellular functions such as cell–cell and cell–matrix interactions, growth, proliferation, differentiation, and inflammation. It is not surprising, therefore, that this protein is involved in the pathogenesis of many relevant human diseases, including cancer, fibrosis, chronic inflammation and scarring affecting many different tissues. The papers published in the literature have progressively increased in number during the last decades, testifying the great interest given to this protein by numerous researchers involved in many different clinical contexts. Considering the crucial role exerted by Gal-3 in many different clinical conditions, Gal-3 is emerging as a new diagnostic, prognostic biomarker and as a new promising therapeutic target. The current review aims to extensively examine the studies published so far on the role of Gal-3 in all the clinical conditions and diseases, listed in alphabetical order, where it was analyzed.
EyePACT

The parallax effect describes the displacement between the perceived and detected touch locations on a touch-enabled surface. Parallax is a key usability challenge for interactive displays, particularly for those that require thick layers of glass between the screen and the touch surface to protect them from vandalism. To address this challenge, we present EyePACT, a method that compensates for input error caused by parallax on public displays. Our method uses a display-mounted depth camera to detect the user's 3D eye position in front of the display and the detected touch location to predict the perceived touch location on the surface. We evaluate our method in two user studies in terms of parallax correction performance as well as multi-user support. Our evaluations demonstrate that EyePACT (1) significantly improves accuracy even with varying gap distances between the touch surface and the display, (2) adapts to different levels of parallax by resulting in significantly larger corrections with larger gap distances, and (3) maintains a significantly large distance between two users' fingers when interacting with the same object. These findings are promising for the development of future parallax-free interactive displays.
Stability conditions for a discrete-time decentralised medium access algorithm

We consider a stochastic queueing system modelling the behaviour of a wireless network with nodes employing a discrete-time version of the standard decentralised medium access algorithm. The system is {\em unsaturated} -- each node receives an exogenous flow of packets at the rate $\lambda$ packets per time slot. Each packet takes one slot to transmit, but neighboring nodes cannot transmit simultaneously. The algorithm we study is {\em standard} in that: a node with empty queue does {\em not} compete for medium access; the access procedure by a node does {\em not} depend on its queue length, as long as it is non-zero. Two system topologies are considered, with nodes arranged in a circle and in a line. We prove that, for either topology, the system is stochastically stable under condition $\lambda < 2/5$. This result is intuitive for the circle topology as the throughput each node receives in a saturated system (with infinite queues) is equal to the so called {\em parking constant}, which is larger than $2/5$. (The latter fact, however, does not help to prove our result.) The result is not intuitive at all for the line topology as in a saturated system some nodes receive a throughput lower than $2/5$.
Energy-Efficient Data Mining Techniques for Emergency Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Event detection is an important part in many Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications such as forest fire, environmental pollution. In this kind of applications, the event must be detected early in order to reduce the threats, damages. In this paper, we propose a new approach for early forest fire detection, which is based on the integration of Data Mining techniques into sensor nodes. The idea is to partition the node set into clusters so that each node can individually detect fires using classification techniques. Once a fire is detected, the corresponding node will send an alert to its cluster-head. This alert will then be routed via gateways, other cluster-heads to the sink in order to inform the firefighters. The approach is validated using the CupCarbon simulator. The results show that our approach can provide a fast reaction to forest fires with efficient energy consumption.
Authenticated Garbling and Efficient Maliciously Secure Two-Party Computation

We propose a simple and efficient framework for obtaining efficient constant-round protocols for maliciously secure two-party computation. Our framework uses a function-independent preprocessing phase to generate authenticated information for the two parties; this information is then used to construct a single "authenticated" garbled circuit which is transmitted and evaluated. We also show how to efficiently instantiate the preprocessing phase with a new, highly optimized version of the TinyOT protocol by Nielsen et al. Our protocol outperforms existing work in both the single-execution and amortized settings, with or without preprocessing: In the single-execution setting, our protocol evaluates an AES circuit with malicious security in 37 ms with an online time of 1 ms. Previous work with the best overall time requires 62 ms (with 14 ms online time); previous work with the best online time (also 1 ms) requires 124 ms overall. If we amortize over 1024 executions, each AES computation requires just 6.7 ms with roughly the same online time as above. The best previous work in the amortized setting has roughly the same total time but does not support function-independent preprocessing. Our work shows that the performance penalty for maliciously secure two-party computation (as compared to semi-honest security) is much smaller than previously believed.
Two‐stage test of means of unordered pairs

The problem of testing equality of means of a bivariate normal distribution on the basis of a sample of size n has been considered when the labels of the observations are either missing or not known. The problem may arise in many applied settings, especially in genetics. Classical likelihood ratio test fails here because of identifiability problems. We propose a two‐stage testing procedure using a recently developed test in the context of penalized splines. The proposed testing procedure is found to outperform the tests proposed in the literature. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The role of Purkinje cell-derived VEGF in cerebellar astrogliosis in Niemann-Pick type C mice

Niemann-Pick type C disease (NP-C) is a fatal neuro-degenerative disorder caused by a deficiency of NPC1 gene function, which leads to severe neuroinflammation such as astrogliosis. While reports demonstrating neuroinflammation are prevalent in NP-C, information about the onset and progression of cerebellar astrogliosis in this disorder is lacking. Using gene targeting, we generated vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) conditional null mutant mice. Deletion of VEGF in cerebellar Purkinje neurons (PNs) led to a significant increase of astrogliosis in the brain of NP-C mice in addition to the loss of PNs, suggesting PN-derived VEGF as an important factor in NP-C pathology. Moreover, replenishment of VEGF in neurons improved brain pathology in NP-C mice. Overall, our data provide a new pathological perspective on cerebellar astrogliosis in NP-C and suggest the importance of VEGF as a therapeutic target for this disease.
Fine-Tuning Decentralized Anonymous Payment Systems based on Arguments for Arithmetic Circuit Satisfiability

Digital currencies like Bitcoin and other blockchain based systems provide means to record monetary transfers between accounts. In Bitcoin like systems transactions are published on a decentralized ledger and reveal the sender, receiver and amount of a transfer, hence such systems give only moderate anonymity guarantees. Payment systems like ZCash attempt to offer much stronger anonymity by hiding the origin, destination and value of a payment. The ZCash system is able to offer strong anonymity, mainly due to use of Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (ZK-SNARK) of arithmetic circuit satisfiability. One drawback of ZCash is that the arithmetic circuit is rather large, thus requires a large common reference string and complex prover for the ZK-SNARK. In fact, the memory and prover complexity is dominated by the ZK-SNARK in use and is mainly determined by the complexity of the circuit. In this paper we design a Decentralized Anonymous Payment system (DAP), functionally similar to ZCash, however with significantly smaller arithmetic circuits, thus greatly reducing the memory and prover complexity of the system. Our construction is based on algebraic primitives, from the realm of elliptic curve and lattice based cryptography, which satisfiability might be efficiently verified by an arithmetic circuit.
Tractable Parameterizations for the Minimum Linear Arrangement Problem

The M<scp>inimum</scp> L<scp>inear</scp> A<scp>rrangement</scp> (MLA) problem involves embedding a given graph on the integer line so that the sum of the edge lengths of the embedded graph is minimized. Most layout problems are either intractable or not known to be tractable, parameterized by the <i>treewidth</i> of the input graph. We investigate MLA with respect to three parameters that provide more structure than treewidth. In particular, we give a factor (1 + ϵ)-approximation algorithm for MLA parameterized by (ϵ, <i>k</i>), where <i>k</i> is the <i>vertex cover number</i> of the input graph. By a similar approach, we obtain two FPT algorithms that exactly solve MLA parameterized by, respectively, the <i>max leaf</i> and <i>edge clique cover</i> numbers of the input graph.
First-in-human phase 1 study of the BTK inhibitor GDC-0853 in relapsed or refractory B-cell NHL and CLL

GDC-0853 is a selective, reversible, and non-covalent inhibitor of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) that does not require interaction with the Cys481 residue for activity. In this first-in-human phase 1 study we evaluated safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and activity of GDC-0853 in patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) or chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Twenty-four patients, enrolled into 3 cohorts, including 6 patients who were positive for the C481S mutation, received GDC-0853 at 100, 200, or 400 mg once daily, orally. There were no dose limiting toxicities. GDC-0853 was well tolerated and the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) was not reached due to premature study closure. Common adverse events (AEs) in ≥ 15% of patients regardless of causality included fatigue (37%), nausea (33%), diarrhea (29%), thrombocytopenia (25%), headache (20%), and abdominal pain, cough, and dizziness (16%, each). Nine serious AEs were reported in 5 patients of whom 2 had fatal outcomes (confirmed H1N1 influenza and influenza pneumonia). A third death was due to progressive disease. Eight of 24 patients responded to GDC-0853: 1 complete response, 4 partial responses, and 3 partial responses with lymphocytosis, including 1 patient with the C481S mutation. Two additional C481S mutation patients had a decrease in size of target tumors (–23% and –44%). These data demonstrate GDC-0853 was generally well-tolerated with antitumor activity.
Associations of rare nicotinic cholinergic receptor gene variants to nicotine and alcohol dependence

Nicotine's rewarding effects are mediated through distinct subunits of nAChRs, encoded by different nicotinic cholinergic receptor (CHRN) genes and expressed in discrete regions in the brain. In the present study, we aimed to test the associations between rare variants at CHRN genes and nicotine dependence (ND), and alcohol dependence (AD). A total of 26,498 subjects with nine different neuropsychiatric disorders in 15 independent cohorts, which were genotyped on Illumina, Affymetrix, or PERLEGEN microarray platforms, were analyzed. Associations between rare variants (minor allele frequency (MAF) <0.05) at CHRN genes and nicotine dependence, and alcohol dependence were tested. The mRNA expression of all Chrn genes in whole mouse brain and 10 specific brain areas was investigated. All CHRN genes except the muscle‐type CHRNB1, including eight genomic regions containing 11 neuronal CHRN genes and three genomic regions containing four muscle‐type CHRN genes, were significantly associated with ND, and/or AD. All of these genes were expressed in the mouse brain. We conclude that CHRNs are associated with ND (mainly) and AD, supporting the hypothesis that the full catalog of ND/AD risk genes may contain most neuronal nAChRs‐encoding genes. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Exploration of joint redundancy but not task space variability facilitates supervised motor learning

Significance Theories of reinforcement learning claim that motor variability helps in motor learning and are supported by recent experimental work. In contrast, theories of motor control propose that variability is noise that needs to be suppressed. We attempt to reconcile these apparent contradictory positions. Using the formulation of the unconstrained manifold hypothesis, we show that motor variability has two components—a part arising out of the redundancy that does not affect task-space and another component related to task-space variability. We show that the motor variability component resulting from the redundancy determines both dynamic and kinematic learning ability across subjects without affecting task-space variability. The number of joints and muscles in a human arm is more than what is required for reaching to a desired point in 3D space. Although previous studies have emphasized how such redundancy and the associated flexibility may play an important role in path planning, control of noise, and optimization of motion, whether and how redundancy might promote motor learning has not been investigated. In this work, we quantify redundancy space and investigate its significance and effect on motor learning. We propose that a larger redundancy space leads to faster learning across subjects. We observed this pattern in subjects learning novel kinematics (visuomotor adaptation) and dynamics (force-field adaptation). Interestingly, we also observed differences in the redundancy space between the dominant hand and nondominant hand that explained differences in the learning of dynamics. Taken together, these results provide support for the hypothesis that redundancy aids in motor learning and that the redundant component of motor variability is not noise.
Are Introduced Species Better Dispersers Than Native Species? A Global Comparative Study of Seed Dispersal Distance

We provide the first global test of the idea that introduced species have greater seed dispersal distances than do native species, using data for 51 introduced and 360 native species from the global literature. Counter to our expectations, there was no significant difference in mean or maximum dispersal distance between introduced and native species. Next, we asked whether differences in dispersal distance might have been obscured by differences in seed mass, plant height and dispersal syndrome, all traits that affect dispersal distance and which can differ between native and introduced species. When we included all three variables in the model, there was no clear difference in dispersal distance between introduced and native species. These results remained consistent when we performed analyses including a random effect for site. Analyses also showed that the lack of a significant difference in dispersal distance was not due to differences in biome, taxonomic composition, growth form, nitrogen fixation, our inclusion of non-invasive introduced species, or our exclusion of species with human-assisted dispersal. Thus, if introduced species do have higher spread rates, it seems likely that these are driven by differences in post-dispersal processes such as germination, seedling survival, and survival to reproduction.
Behaviour of reinforced concrete beams with multiwall carbon nanotubes under monotonic loading

The main goal of this paper is to study the effect of multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) on the behaviour of reinforced concrete beams under monotonic loading. In this study seven beams were loaded up to failure under the effect of two concentrated load using a hydraulic testing machine where the failure mode observed and the load–deflection relationships have been reported. Reference beam was reinforced with steel bars only. While the other six beams were reinforced with short and long MWCNTs at different concentrations (0.03, 0.045 and 0.06%) by weight of dry cement in addition to steel bars. The mechanical properties of concrete (compressive strength, splitting tensile strength, flexural strength and static modulus of elasticity) with MWCNTs were also studied. Ultrasonic pulse velocity test was used to evaluate the porosity of concrete nanocomposite. Dispersion of MWCNTs was achieved using Ultrasonic Liquid Processors with surfactant. Scanning electron microscopy images for micro-crack bridging was conducted to examine the bonding between MWCNTs and the cement paste. Test results showed that addition of very low concentrations of MWCNTs led to the reduction of porosity of concrete composite. Reinforcing concrete with MWCNTs led to an improvement in the load-carrying capacity and deflections of the composite beams, compared to the reference beam. The seven beams have also been analysed by the non-linear three-dimensional finite element analysis employing ANSYS package (14.5 release) to determine the load–deflection relations.