Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carbon Nanomaterials Interfacing with Neurons: An In vivo Perspective

Developing new tools that outperform current state of the art technologies for imaging, drug delivery or electrical sensing in neuronal tissues is one of the great challenges in neurosciences. Investigations into the potential use of carbon nanomaterials for such applications started about two decades ago. Since then, numerous in vitro studies have examined interactions between these nanomaterials and neurons, either by evaluating their compatibility, as vectors for drug delivery, or for their potential use in electric activity sensing and manipulation. The results obtained indicate that carbon nanomaterials may be suitable for medical therapies. However, a relatively small number of in vivo studies have been carried out to date. In order to facilitate the transformation of carbon nanomaterial into practical neurobiomedical applications, it is essential to identify and highlight in the existing literature the strengths and weakness that different carbon nanomaterials have displayed when probed in vivo. Unfortunately the current literature is sometimes sparse and confusing. To offer a clearer picture of the in vivo studies on carbon nanomaterials in the central nervous system, we provide a systematic and critical review. Hereby we identify properties and behavior of carbon nanomaterials in vivo inside the neural tissues, and we examine key achievements and potentially problematic toxicological issues.
Multiplanar knee laxity increases during a 90-min intermittent exercise protocol.

PURPOSE This study aimed to examine changes in sagittal (AP LAX), frontal (VV LAX), and transverse (IER LAX) plane knee laxity in men and women during an intermittent exercise protocol (IEP) simulating the intensity and duration of a soccer match. METHODS Intercollegiate/club athletes (29 females and 30 males) were measured on AP LAX (-90 to 130 N) before and after warm-up and every 15 min during and for 1 h after the IEP. VV LAX (± 10 N · m) and IER LAX (± 5 N · m) were measured before and after warm-up, at the end of each 45-min half, and at 30 min after exercise. Values were compared to a control (no exercise) condition. RESULTS Compared to control condition, females increased AP LAX and VV LAX during the IEP, whereas males did not (P < 0.037). AP LAX increased within 15 min of exercise (9.5 ± 2.1 mm), and peak values obtained at the end of the first (10.1 ± 2.0 mm) and second half (10.1 ± 2.1 mm) were 12% greater than before warm-up values (9.0 ± 1.8 mm). VV LAX increased before warm-up (9.5° ± 3.4°) to the end of each half (both 10.4° ± 3.2°; 10% increase) and remained elevated 30 min after exercise (10.5° ± 2.9°). Both sexes increased IER LAX from before warm-up (25.5° ± 6.1°) to all time points (after warm-up = 26.6° ± 6.0°, first half = 27.0° ± 6.6°, second half = 27.3° ± 6.5°, 30 min after exercise = 26.95° ± 5.7°; P = 0.007). Changes in AP LAX (-0.10 to 5.9 mm), VV LAX (-1.7° to 5.7°), and IER LAX (-4.1° to 13.3°) during exercise varied considerably among individuals in both sexes, with a larger proportion of females experiencing substantial changes in AP LAX and VV LAX. CONCLUSIONS Although exercise-related knee laxity changes were more pronounced in females, there was a subset of both males and females who experienced substantial knee laxity increases during exercise. Whether these individuals are more susceptible to higher-risk lower extremity biomechanics and injury risk later in a game or practice is currently under investigation.
Temporal Information a Permanent Solution for Continuous Monitoring System

Today there is no way that can ensure that person who logged in as authenticated user is the same user accessing the system. To resolve this problem continuous monitoring system can serve the purpose on the basis of extracted biometric features. But providing biometric features continuously cannot be feasible for the user. In the proposed method a continuous user monitoring system is developed which observe user’s presence in front of console using a webcam and face detection technique on captured frame. This is implemented using both hard biometric and soft biometric features extraction. A final comparative analysis is drawn from the extracted results to prove the upper hand of soft biometric features over hard biometric features when it comes to continuous monitoring system. General Terms Image processing
A Provably Correct Learning Algorithm for Latent-Variable PCFGs

We introduce a provably correct learning algorithm for latent-variable PCFGs. The algorithm relies on two steps: first, the use of a matrix-decomposition algorithm applied to a co-occurrence matrix estimated from the parse trees in a training sample; second, the use of EM applied to a convex objective derived from the training samples in combination with the output from the matrix decomposition. Experiments on parsing and a language modeling problem show that the algorithm is efficient and effective in practice.
A Survey on Workflow Satisfiability, Resiliency, and Related Problems

Workflows specify collections of tasks that must be executed under the responsibility or supervision of human users. Workflow management systems and workflow-driven applications need to enforce security policies in the form of access control, specifying which users can execute which tasks, and authorization constraints, such as Separation of Duty, further restricting the execution of tasks at run-time. Enforcing these policies is crucial to avoid frauds and malicious use, but it may lead to situations where a workflow instance cannot be completed without the violation of the policy. The Workflow Satisfiability Problem (WSP) asks whether there exists an assignment of users to tasks in a workflow such that every task is executed and the policy is not violated. The WSP is inherently hard, but solutions to this problem have a practical application in reconciling business compliance and business continuity. Solutions to related problems, such as workflow resiliency (i.e., whether a workflow instance is still satisfiable even in the absence of users), are important to help in policy design. Several variations of the WSP and similar problems have been defined in the literature and there are many solution methods available. In this paper, we survey the work done on these problems in the past 20 years.
Research and implementation of database high performance sorting algorithm with big data

According to the demand of large data sorting algorithm, a new efficient algorithm for large data sorting is proposed. The algorithm by constructing the equivalent sort keys, optimized quicksort algorithm; through the technology of task driven, AIO and double buffer mechanism to make full use of system resources; in algorithm implementation, using multi thread processing tasks, by controlling the number of threads of control parallelism. Comprehensive utilization of these technologies, the algorithm will achieve the separation of database connections and threads, and improve the concurrency of database support, so that the ranking of big data performance close to the theoretical limit value.
Supply Chain Alliances: Rhetoric and Reality

Supply chain management implies an increased reliance on closer buyer/supplier relationships. This study used a multi-method (survey and interview) approach to determine the nature of alliance management in modern supply chains. One point regarding the present status of alliance management in today's supply chain world is clear--truly synergistic relationships are very rare. When asked to indicate the percent of their supply chain relationships that are true alliances, two responses were commonly heard. First, several managers quickly asked, "What do you mean by alliance? " This response revealed the fact that the word alliance is used to signify a wide range of relationship types. Second, many managers indicated a rather large percentage of relationships operate on an alliance basis. The interviewer then followed-up by defining an alliance as a collaborative or synergistic relationship that adds value above and beyond what is achievable through simple long-term contracts. When the definition of alliance was clarified and the emphasis was on "cooperatively working together" or "symbiotic relationships," the managers inevitably adjusted their percentage dramatically downward. The end result was that the vast majority of the participants suggest that "synergistic working relationships" represent only a very small fraction of all supply chain relationships--typically 5 percent or less. Managers generally concurred that the distance between "preferred" supplier and "synergistic" alliance is quite large. A dozen alliance management tools and techniques emerged as somewhat important to absolutely essential to the development of synergistic alliance relationships.
Optimal Design of Rotating Actuators Made by Magnetically Controlled Shape Memory Alloy

In order to solve the problem dealing with the shape recovering by using spring and large excitation power of magnetically controlled shape memory alloy (MSMA) actuator, a new rotating MSMA actuator in the differential control way of the two MSMA elements is proposed in this paper. On the basis of permanent magnet bias magnetic field, the rotating speed can be controlled by changing the amplitude and frequency of the excitation current of the controllable magnetic field. The control properties of MSMA material is introduced, the operation principle of rotating MSMA actuator is analyzed, the expressions of displacement and rotating speed are derived. Based on the magnetic field analysis, a differential rotating MSMA actuator prototype is designed and built. The proposed differential MSMA actuator can reduce effectively the volume and control power, improve control accuracy and dynamic response speed because of adopting the optimal design of exciting mode and control method of recovering the deformation of MSMA element.
A preliminary study for automatic accurate detection of adenomatous polyps in the small intestine

In this paper we present a novel preliminary study based on state of the art computation techniques applied on WCE video images for extracting features and patterns from different views of the same polyp. The extracted pattern and features are synthesized by using LG registration technique to create better views for each polyp by removing artifacts and noise. The outcome images (views) from each polyp will be used for the training and testing of a machine learning system that will separate the two types of diminutive polyps.
Early renal function recovery and long‐term graft survival in kidney transplantation

Following kidney transplantation (KTx), renal function improves gradually until a baseline eGFR is achieved. Whether or not a recipient achieves the best‐predicted eGFR after KTx may have important implications for immediate patient management, as well as for long‐term graft survival. The aim of this cohort study was to calculate the renal function recovery (RFR) based on recipient and donor eGFR and to evaluate the association between RFR and long‐term death‐censored graft failure (DCGF). We studied 790 KTx recipients between January 1990 and August 2014. The last donor SCr prior to organ procurement was used to estimate donor GFR. Recipient eGFR was calculated using the average of the best three SCr values observed during the first 3 months post‐KTx. RFR was defined as the ratio of recipient eGFR to half the donor eGFR. 53% of recipients had an RFR ≥1. There were 127 death‐censored graft failures (16%). Recipients with an RFR ≥1 had less DCGF compared with those with an RFR <1 (HR 0.56; 95% CI 0.37–0.85; P = 0.006). Transplant era, acute rejection, ECD and DGF were also significant determinants of graft failure. Early recovery of predicted eGFR based on donor eGFR is associated with less DCGF after KTx.
A tractable probabilistic model for Affymetrix probe-level analysis across multiple chips

MOTIVATION Affymetrix GeneChip arrays are currently the most widely used microarray technology. Many summarization methods have been developed to provide gene expression levels from Affymetrix probe-level data. Most of the currently popular methods do not provide a measure of uncertainty for the expression level of each gene. The use of probabilistic models can overcome this limitation. A full hierarchical Bayesian approach requires the use of computationally intensive MCMC methods that are impractical for large datasets. An alternative computationally efficient probabilistic model, mgMOS, uses Gamma distributions to model specific and non-specific binding with a latent variable to capture variations in probe affinity. Although promising, the main limitations of this model are that it does not use information from multiple chips and does not account for specific binding to the mismatch (MM) probes. RESULTS We extend mgMOS to model the binding affinity of probe-pairs across multiple chips and to capture the effect of specific binding to MM probes. The new model, multi-mgMOS, provides improved accuracy, as demonstrated on some bench-mark datasets and a real time-course dataset, and is much more computationally efficient than a competing hierarchical Bayesian approach that requires MCMC sampling. We demonstrate how the probabilistic model can be used to estimate credibility intervals for expression levels and their log-ratios between conditions. AVAILABILITY Both mgMOS and the new model multi-mgMOS have been implemented in an R package, which is available at http://www.bioinf. man.ac. uk/resources/puma.
Impact of Procedural Characteristics on Justice Perceptions of Chinese Civil Service Candidates

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of eight procedural characteristics on the justice perception of candidates taking Chinese civil servant recruitment exam. The effects of justice perception on candidate’s confidence in government and their recommendation intention were also tested. Four hundred twenty-one graduating students from 10 universities in Shandong province participated in this study. Among the eight procedural characteristics, predictive validity, interpersonal treatment, consistency, and feedback were supported to be predictor of the overall process justice perception. Whereas, content validity, opportunity to perform, property of questions, and information known did not show significant impact on the process justice perception. Results demonstrated the significant effect of candidates’ justice perception on their confidences in government and recommendation intentions. The practical implications and limitations of the present study are also discussed.
Heart Rate–Corrected QT and JT Intervals in Electrocardiograms in Physically Fit Students and Student Athletes

In literature, data on the prevalence of prolonged and shortened corrected QT (QTc) have shown considerable variability. The aim of the study was to compare QTc and JTc intervals of competitive student athletes and noncompetitive sport participants to QTc cutoff points used in athletes. A group of 485 physically fit candidates for the study of kinesiology (139 female and 346 male candidates) aged 18–20 participated in the study. Basic anthropometry, field fitness test, cardiovascular, electrocardiograms measurements, and blood sampling for lipid profile were conducted. The prolonged QTc according to European Society of Cardiology criteria was found in 2.9% of female and 4.3% of male students. When the “Seattle criteria” were used, the proportion of prolonged QTc was 1.44% in female and 0.29% in male students. The shortened QTc according to the Seattle cutoff points was presented in 0.7% of female and 2.0% of male students. The JTc over 400 ms was found in 0.72% of female and 0.29% of male students. The JTc shorter than 320 ms was presented in 0.7% of female and 1.1% of male students. No significant differences were found between students involved in competitive sport and those involved in recreational sporting activities. Female students had lower body mass index and blood pressure values, better blood lipid profile, and lower uric acid concentrations. In conclusion, the Seattle criteria markedly decreased the proportion of prolonged QTc in student athletes, particularly in male students. It seems that the JTc interval could be a better parameter than the QTc interval for the estimation of specific repolarization time in physically fit university students.
Prevalence and Prognostic Significance of Hyponatremia in Patients with Acute Exacerbation of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Data from the Akershus Cardiac Examination (ACE) 2 Study

Background Hyponatremia is prevalent and associated with mortality in patients with heart failure (HF). The prevalence and prognostic implications of hyponatremia in acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary (AECOPD) have not been established. Method We included 313 unselected patients with acute dyspnea who were categorized by etiology of dyspnea according to established guidelines (derivation cohort). Serum Na+ was determined on hospital admission and corrected for hyperglycemia, and hyponatremia was defined as [Na+]<137 mmol/L. Survival was ascertained after a median follow-up of 816 days and outcome was analyzed in acute HF (n = 143) and AECOPD (n = 83) separately. Results were confirmed in an independent AECOPD validation cohort (n = 99). Results In the derivation cohort, median serum Na+ was lower in AECOPD vs. acute HF (138.5 [135.9–140.5] vs. 139.2 [136.7–141.3] mmol/L, p = 0.02), while prevalence of hyponatremia (27% [22/83] vs. 20% [29/143], p = 0.28) and mortality rate (42% [35/83] vs. 46% [66/143], p = 0.56) were similar. By univariate Cox regression analysis, hyponatremia was associated with increased mortality in acute HF (HR 1.85 [95% CI 1.08, 3.16], p = 0.02), but not in AECOPD (HR 1.00 [0.47, 2.15], p = 1.00). Analogous to the results of the derivation cohort, hyponatremia was prevalent also in the AECOPD validation cohort (25% [25/99]), but not associated with mortality. The diverging effect of hyponatremia on outcome between AECOPD and acute HF was statistically significant (p = 0.04). Conclusion Hyponatremia is prevalent in patients with acute HF and AECOPD, but is associated with mortality in patients with acute HF only.
Exploring the Existence of Lipid Rafts in Bacteria

SUMMARY An interesting concept in the organization of cellular membranes is the proposed existence of lipid rafts. Membranes of eukaryotic cells organize signal transduction proteins into membrane rafts or lipid rafts that are enriched in particular lipids such as cholesterol and are important for the correct functionality of diverse cellular processes. The assembly of lipid rafts in eukaryotes has been considered a fundamental step during the evolution of cellular complexity, suggesting that bacteria and archaea were organisms too simple to require such a sophisticated organization of their cellular membranes. However, it was recently discovered that bacteria organize many signal transduction, protein secretion, and transport processes in functional membrane microdomains, which are equivalent to the lipid rafts of eukaryotic cells. This review contains the most significant advances during the last 4 years in understanding the structural and biological role of lipid rafts in bacteria. Furthermore, this review shows a detailed description of a number of molecular and genetic approaches related to the discovery of bacterial lipid rafts as well as an overview of the group of tentative lipid-protein and protein-protein interactions that give consistency to these sophisticated signaling platforms. Additional data suggesting that lipid rafts are widely distributed in bacteria are presented in this review. Therefore, we discuss the available techniques and optimized protocols for the purification and analysis of raft-associated proteins in various bacterial species to aid in the study of bacterial lipid rafts in other laboratories that could be interested in this topic. Overall, the discovery of lipid rafts in bacteria reveals a new level of sophistication in signal transduction and membrane organization that was unexpected for bacteria and shows that bacteria are more complex than previously appreciated.
A Tale of Tails: An Empirical Analysis of Loss Distribution Models for Estimating Operational Risk Capital

Operational risk is being considered as an important risk component for financial institutions as evinced by the large sums of capital that are allocated to mitigate this risk. Therefore, risk measurement is of paramount concern for the purposes of capital allocation, hedging, and new product development for risk mitigation. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of commonly used methods and introduce new techniques to measure this risk with respect to various criteria. We find that our newly introduced techniques perform consistently better than the other models we tested.
CAB-Fuzz: Practical Concolic Testing Techniques for COTS Operating Systems

Discovering the security vulnerabilities of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) operating systems (OSes) is challenging because they not only are huge and complex, but also lack detailed debug information. Concolic testing, which generates all feasible inputs of a program by using symbolic execution and tests the program with the generated inputs, is one of the most promising approaches to solve this problem. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art concolic testing tools do not scale well for testing COTS OSes because of state explosion. Indeed, they often fail to find a single bug (or crash) in COTS OSes despite their long execution time. In this paper, we propose CAB-FUZZ (Context-Aware and Boundary-focused), a practical concolic testing tool to quickly explore interesting paths that are highly likely triggering real bugs without debug information. First, CAB-FUZZ prioritizes the boundary states of arrays and loops, inspired by the fact that many vulnerabilities originate from a lack of proper boundary checks. Second, CAB-FUZZ exploits real programs interacting with COTS OSes to construct proper contexts to explore deep and complex kernel states without debug information. We applied CAB-FUZZ to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 and found 21 undisclosed unique crashes, including two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities (CVE- 2015-6098 and CVE-2016-0040) and one information disclosure vulnerability in a cryptography driver (CVE- 2016-7219). CAB-FUZZ found vulnerabilities that are non-trivial to discover; five vulnerabilities have existed for 14 years, and we could trigger them even in the initial version of Windows XP (August 2001).
Co-Evolution of Selection and Influence in Social Networks

Many networks are complex dynamical systems, where both attributes of nodes and topology of the network (link structure) can change with time. We propose a model of co-evolving networks where both node attributes and network structure evolve under mutual influence. Specifically, we consider a mixed membership stochastic blockmodel, where the probability of observing a link between two nodes depends on their current membership vectors, while those membership vectors themselves evolve in the presence of a link between the nodes. Thus, the network is shaped by the interaction of stochastic processes describing the nodes, while the processes themselves are influenced by the changing network structure. We derive an efficient variational inference procedure for our model, and validate the model on both synthetic and real-world data.