Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mobile Web service platform for robust, responsive distributed application

In mobile computing environments, distributed applications are provided over the wireless network that is unstable. The goal of our research is to offer service stability by rapid failure detection and recovery by switching to service management required by each client application through the cooperation of client middleware and the overlay network. This paper describes adaptive monitoring (AM), which detects failure rapidly with only a slight addition in network load, and Monitoring Information Notification Protocol (MINP), which transfer failure information efficiently. Experiments on a testbed hosting real Web Services confirm that our system can detect failure and switch to a service alternative within the recovery time demanded by most applications. We also confirm that the proposed method is effective in reducing network load as well as satisfying application requirements.
Immunosuppressive effect of 6-mercaptopurine-riboside. IV. Studies on antibody biosynthesis.

The effect of 6.MPR on the antibody formation of rabbits challenged with bovine serum albumin has been studied in comparison with that of 6.MP. Observation revealed that the antibody formation is profoundly suppressed when the animal is treated with 6.MPR in an appropriate dose and period in relation with the introduction of antigen. Discussion was made of the possibility of 6.MPR as a superior therapeutic agent for autoimmune diseases.
Association of serum lipid profiles with depressive and anxiety disorders in menopausal women.

BACKGROUND Several studies have investigated the relationships of lipid levels with depressive and anxiety disorders, and their results revealed an association between low cholesterol and higher levels of depressive symptoms in young, middle-aged, and postpartum women. However, few studies have explored this relationship in menopausal women. Hence, in this study of menopausal Taiwanese women, we attempted to determine the correlation of depressive and anxiety disorders with serum lipid profiles. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study covering a 2-year period. Sixty-nine menopausal women who visited the gynecologic outpatient department of our hospital were enrolled. Psychiatric diagnoses were made using the semi-structured clinical interview for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) criteria. Blood samples for serum lipid profiles were simultaneously collected. Data were analyzed using analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA) adjusted for age and body mass index (BMI). RESULTS Total cholesterol (TC) and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) were higher in postmenopausal women than in perimenopausal women, but this was not true for triglyceride (TG), high-density lipoprotein (HDL), very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL), the TC/HDL ratio, or the LDL/HDL ratio. However, when peri- and postmenopausal women were categorized into normal controls and those having anxiety disorders and depressive disorders, no significant differences were found in lipid concentrations of TG, TC, HDL, VLDL, LDL, TC/HDL, or LDL/HDL among the 3 groups. CONCLUSIONS Although these results do not suggest that serum lipid profiles can be used as biological markers to distinguish depressive or anxiety disorders in menopausal women, larger samples are required to prove such results in the future.
Las competencias del deportista para el rendimiento

En este articulo abordamos con ilusion, conviccion y humildad una propuesta de modelo explicativo que contribuya en la conceptualiza- cion y desarrollo de la Psicologia del Deporte en su aplicacion al entrena- miento de rendimiento. En un primer apartado exponemos algunas con- clusiones de la revision de recientes publicaciones especializadas, donde predominan investigaciones con una metodologia de alta validez interna pero con una moderada validez externa y que sugieren la necesidad de am- pliar los modelos teoricos-conceptuales. Posteriormente, analizamos las habilidades del deportista propias del deporte, agrupadas a partir de las relaciones del deportista con el medio especi co de la actividad, los objetos, los deportistas, las normas y del conocimiento que adquiere de su actividad. Finalmente, desarrollamos las competencias del deportista consigo mismo: control de la activacion, atencion, pensamientos, imagenes mentales, obje- tivos, conductas y emociones. Estas competencias del deportista se mejoran con el trabajo de las habilidades de: reconocer lo mas adecuado, detectar los factores de descompensacion, reconvertir lo inadecuado en adecuado , y por la aplicacion e caz a la competicion de lo aprendido en los entrenamientos
Immigrant Workers in the United States : Recent Trends, Vulnerable Populations, and Challenges for Occupational Health

Immigrant workers are a rapidly growing segment of the U.S. work force, and these increasing numbers have resulted in a different ethnic mix in the work force than in previous decades. Immigrant workers are not a homogenous group, but are over-represented in low-paying occupations. Their diversity and vulnerability present distinct challenges for occupational health nurses. High-risk occupations in which a large proportion of immigrant workers are hired include agriculture, sweatshops, day laborers, and construction. Initiatives needed to improve the working conditions of this vulnerable population include improved surveillance and research, culturally competent care providers, improved health care access, advocacy, and changes in immigration and health policy.
Healing the social wounds of war

The healing of those hurt by war can take different forms, ranging from violence and vengeance to psychotherapy and humanitarian aid imposed from outside. This healing has been widely and critically discussed in the literature. Instead, the focus here is more on the way communities try to heal themselves long after the outside world has lost interest. In this context, resisting the oppressor becomes less important than recovery, and the past can matter less than the future.
Structural similarity of a membrane protein in micelles and membranes.

The anisotropic spin interactions measured for membrane proteins in weakly oriented micelles and in oriented lipid bilayers provide independent and potentially complementary high-resolution restraints for structure determination. Here we show that the membrane protein CHIF adopts a similar structure in lipid micelles and bilayers, allowing the restraints from micelle and bilayer samples to be combined in a complementary fashion to enhance the structural information. Back-calculation and assignment of the NMR spectrum of CHIF in oriented lipid bilayers, from the structure determined in micelles, provides additional restraints for structure determination as well as the global orientation of the protein in the membrane. The combined use of solution and solid-state NMR restraints also affords cross-validation for the structural analysis.
Evaluation of protocol before transplantation and after reperfusion biopsies from human orthotopic liver allografts: Considerations of preservation and early immunological injury

Light microscopic, immunohistochemical and ultrastructural analysis of protocol before transplantation and after reperfusion biopsy specimens from 87 randomly selected patients was performed to assess the contribution of preservation and immunological injury to early graft failure. Most biopsy specimens were essentially normal by light microscopy before transplantatio, and no particular feature could be relied on to predict function after transplantation. Ultrastructural examination of biopsy specimens before transplantation demonstrated preferential degeneration of sinusoidal lining cells, but no strict correlation was seen between ultrastructural sinusoidal integrity before transplantation and function after transplantation. The presence of zonal or severe focal necrosis and a severe neutrophilic exudate in biopsy specimens after reperfusion presaged a poor early postoperative course in most, but not all, patients. The presence of preformed lymphocytotoxic antibodies had no effect on the early clinical course, but was associated with Kupffer cell hypertrophy in needle biopsy specimens taken after transplantation. No definite evidence was seen of hyperacute rejection as a result of preformed lymphocytotoxic antibodies as detected in conventional assays. These findings suggest that preservation injury accounts for only a subset of grafts that fail to function after transplantation. Other perioperative or “recipient” factors may be of equal or greater importance in early graft dysfunction or failure. (HEPATOLOGY 1990;11:932‐941.).
Speech-Driven Automatic Facial Expression Synthesis

This paper focuses on the problem of automatically generating speech synchronous facial expressions for 3D talking heads. The proposed system is speaker and language independent. We parameterize speech data with prosody related features and spectral features together with their first and second order derivatives. Then, we classify the seven emotions in the dataset with two different classifiers: Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Probability density function of the spectral feature space is modeled with a GMM for each emotion. Temporal patterns of the emotion dependent prosody contours are modeled with an HMM based classifier. We use the Berlin Emotional Speech dataset (EMO-DB) [ 1 ] during the experiments. GMM classifier has the best overall recognition rate 82.85% when cepstral features with delta and acceleration coefficients are used. HMM based classifier has lower recognition rates than the GMM based classifier. However, fusion of the two classifiers has 83.80% recognition rate on the average. Experimental results on automatic facial expression synthesis are encouraging.
Cranberry in children: prevention of recurrent urinary tract infections and review of the literature

Urinary tract infections (UTI) are common in childhood. In 30-50% of children with UTI the infections occur recurrently, especially in those with vesicoureteral reflux (VUR), neurogenic bladder (NB), previous cystitis or pyelonephritis and malformative uropathies. To reduce the likelihood of UTI, antibiotic prophylaxis has been regarded as the therapeutic standard for many years. However, the disadvantage of long-term antibiotic therapy is the potential for development of collateral effects and resistant organisms in the host. Such reasons have induced scientists to search for alternative modalities of UTI prevention and have contributed to determining the increasing desire for "naturalness" of the population and preventing excessive medication. The use of cranberry fulfils these needs by potentially replacing or enhancing traditional procedures. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of cranberry in preventing UTI in pediatric populations. We searched Pubmed, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials and Internet. Cranberry in patients with previous UTI was evaluated in three studies, cranberry in patients with VUR in three studies and four studies analyzed the efficacy of cranberry in children with NB. In seven of nine studies cranberry had a significant effect in preventing UTI.
CNOP for Diffuse Aggressive Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma: The Nebraska Lymphoma Study Group Experience

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the CNOP regimen (cyclophosphamide, mitoxantrone, vincristine, and prednisone) throughout a community based oncology network with a large number of elderly non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) patients. Three hundred and seventy-three previously untreated patients with diffuse aggressive NHL received the CNOP regimen administered through a community oncology network, the Nebraska Lymphoma Study Group (NLSG). The complete response rate was 60% with an overall response rate of 73%. The estimated 4-year event-free survival for patients <60 years was 44%, compared to 38% for those >age 60 (p =0.18). However, the 4-year estimated overall survival for patients <60 years was 62% compared to 44% for those >60 years (p <0.001). Prognostic factors predictive for a poor event-free survival were male gender, stage III/IV disease, Karnofsky score <80, and elevated lactic dehydrogenase (LDH). The lymphoma specific cumulative death rate was 29% for patients <60 years compared with 33% for patients >60 years (p =0.07). After failing CNOP the 4-year overall survival (OS) was 19%. The estimated 4-year OS for patients who failed CNOP and went on to receive high-dose chemotherapy (HDC) and autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant (ASCT) was 64% for patients < age 60 and 48% for those >60 years (p =0.23). In conclusion, CNOP chemotherapy administered to patients with diffuse aggressive NHL in a community oncology network produces similar result to that reported for other anthracycline based regimens reported in the literature. Patients >age 60 had a higher rate of failure due to causes other than lymphoma which accounted for a worse survival long-term. However, patients of all ages who failed CNOP and who were able to receive HDC and ASCT demonstrated long-term disease survival after the transplant.
Heat inactivation and reactivation of broccoli peroxidase.

Heat inactivation characteristics differed for acidic (A), neutral (N), and basic (B) broccoli peroxidase. At 65 degrees C, A was the most heat stable followed by N and B. The activation energies for denaturation were 388, 189, and 269 kJ/mol for A, N, and B, respectively. Reactivation of N occurred rapidly, within 10 min after the heated enzyme was cooled and incubated at room temperature. The extent of reactivation varied from 0 to 50% depending on the isoenzyme and heating conditions (temperature and time). The denaturation temperature allowing the maximum reactivation was 90 degrees C for A and horseradish peroxidase (HRP) and 70 and 80 degrees C for B and N, respectively. In all cases, heat treatment at low temperatures for long times prevented reactivation of the heated enzymes. Calcium (5 mM) increased the thermal stability of N and B but had no effect on reactivation. The presence of 0.05% bovine serum albumin decreased thermal stability but increased the extent of reactivation of A.
ScienceDirect The 4 th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Information Technology ( SEIT-2014 ) Integrated analysis of commuters ’ energy consumption

There are strong interactions between energy consumption at home, in the office, and in the traffic system. For example, workers can telecommute, saving the energy at the office and in the transport system, but on the other hand increasing energy consumption at home. As an alternative measure, making working hours less flexible and thus forcing everybody to be at the workplace at the same time reduces the energy consumption of the office building. Both measures in addition have traffic congestion consequences. This paper discusses these policies based on a simple analytical model as well as based on a simulation model which includes a sophisticated simulation of the transport system. c © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Elhadi M. Shakshuki.
Advanced location-tracking systems in home, automotive and public transportation environments

In this paper, a novel distance based source-localization algorithm is proposed for location-tracking applications in home, automotive and public transportation environments. Based on the least squares (LS) formulation of the source-localization problem, we develop an optimization algorithm that proves mostly unaffected by the number of local minima of the LS-objective function. The algorithm, referred to as range global distance continuation (R-GDC), consists of an iterative procedure in which, at each k-th iteration, the original objective is smoothed by a Gaussian kernel (smoothing function) and minimized by a steepest-descent (SD) method. The results reveal that the R-GDC algorithm, not only outperforms the alternative methods, but also achieves a localization error that is close to theoretical position error bound (PEB).
Speech perception with F0mod, a cochlear implant pitch coding strategy

Abstract Objective: The fundamental frequency modulation (F0mod) sound processing strategy was developed to improve pitch perception with cochlear implants. In previous work it has been shown to improve performance in a number of pitch-related tasks such as pitch ranking, familiar melody identification, and Mandarin Chinese tone identification. The objective of the current study was to compare speech perception with F0mod and the standard clinical advanced combination encoder (ACE) strategy. Study sample: Seven cochlear-implant listeners were recruited from the clinical population of the University Hospital Leuven. Design: F0mod was implemented on a real-time system. Speech recognition in quiet and noise was measured for seven cochlear-implant listeners, comparing F0mod with ACE, using three different Dutch-language speech materials. Additionally the F0 estimator used was evaluated physically, and pitch ranking performance was compared between F0mod and ACE. Results: Immediately after switch-on of the F0mod strategy, speech recognition in quiet and noise were similar for ACE and F0mod, for four out of seven listeners. The remaining three listeners were subjected to a short training protocol with F0mod, after which their performance was reassessed, and a significant improvement was found. Conclusions: As F0mod improves pitch perception, for the seven subjects tested it did not interfere with speech recognition in quiet and noise, and has a low computational complexity, it seems promising for implementation in a clinical sound processor.
Turbo Equalization Effect for Nonbinary LDPC Code in BPM R/W Channel

It is expected for the nonbinary low-density parity-check (LDPC) coding and iterative decoding system to introduce the turbo equalization in order to enhance the error correction ability in the bit-patterned medium (BPM) R/W channel. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the turbo equalization on the bit-error rate (BER) performance of nonbinary LDPC coding and iterative decoding system over Galois filed GF(28) in BPM R/W channel with write-error at an areal recording density of 2 Tbit/inch2 considering the coding rate loss. The performance of turbo equalization using the nonbinary LDPC coding and iterative decoding system is evaluated by computer simulation, and it is compared to that without turbo equalization. The results show that the nonbinary LDPC and iterative decoding system with the turbo equalization has the larger write-margin compared to that without turbo equalization.
Efficient Approximation of P‐value of the Maximum of Correlated Tests, with Applications to Genome‐Wide Association Studies

Genome‐wide association study (GWAS), typically involving 100,000 to 500,000 single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), is a powerful approach to identify disease susceptibility loci. In a GWAS, single‐marker analysis, which tests one SNP at a time, is usually used as the first stage to screen SNPs across the genome in order to identify a small fraction of promising SNPs with relatively low p‐values for further and more focused studies. For single‐marker analysis, the trend test derived for an additive genetic model is often used. This may not be robust when the additive assumption is not appropriate for the true underlying disease model. A robust test, MAX, based on the maximum of three trend test statistics derived for recessive, additive, and dominant models, has been proposed recently for GWAS. But its p‐value has to be evaluated through a resampling‐based procedure, which is computationally challenging for the analysis of GWAS. Obtaining the p‐value for MAX with adjustment for the covariates can be even more time‐consuming. In this article, we provide a simple approximation for the p‐value of the MAX test with or without adjusting for the covariates. The new method avoids resampling steps and thus makes the MAX test readily applicable to GWAS. We use simulation studies as well as real datasets on 17 confirmed disease‐associated SNPs to assess the accuracy of the proposed method. We also apply the method to the GWAS of coronary artery disease.
Times to exhaustion at 100% of velocity at VO2max and modelling of the time-limit/velocity relationship in elite long-distance runners.

The aim of this study was to measure running times to exhaustion (Tlim) on a treadmill at 100% of the minimum velocity which elicits VO2max (vVO2max in 38 elite male long-distance runners (VO2max = 71.4 +/- 5.5 ml.kg-1.min-1 and vVO2max = 21.8 +/- 1.2 km.h-1). The lactate threshold (LT) was defined as a starting point of accelerated lactate accumulation around 4 mM and was expressed in %VO2max. Tlim value was negatively correlated with vVO2max (r = -0.362, p < 0.05) and VO2max (r = -0.347, p < 0.05) but positively with LT (% vVO2max) (r = 0.378, p < 0.05). These data demonstrate that running time to exhaustion at vVO2max in a homogeneous group of elite male long-distance runners was inversely related to vVO2max and experimentally illustrates the model of Monod and Scherrer regarding the time limit-velocity relationship adapted from local exercise for running by Hughson et al. (1984).
Leukocytapheresis as an Adjunct to Conventional Medication for Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Inflammatory bowel disease is characterized by clinical remission and relapse caused by severe intestinal inflammation. Drug therapy for inflammatory bowel disease is associated with unpleasant side effects. Furthermore, efficacy of conventional drugs decreases with chronic use, which can be a major difficulty in the long-term management of this disease. In active inflammatory bowel disease, leukocytes are elevated with activation behavior and increased survival time, and mucosal neutrophil level parallels the severity of intestinal inflammation and predicts relapse. Leukocyte-derived inflammatory cytokines are suspected to be major factors in the initiation and perpetuation of inflammatory bowel disease. Accordingly, leukocytes should be appropriate targets for therapy. To reduce peripheral blood level of leukocytes, centrifugation has been used to deplete peripheral blood leukocytes; this provided the initial evidence that reducing the level of peripheral blood leukocytes can benefit patients with inflammatory disease. To overcome the limitations of centrifugation, membrane filters, such as the Cellsorba™ column and leukocyte-adsorbing beads containing column like Adacolumn®, have been developed that are direct blood perfusion systems for removing any desired level of leukocytes. In initial independent clinical studies, these two new models have produced striking clinical efficacy, safety, and a marked reduction in the dose of corticosteroids used to induce remission of active inflammatory bowel disease. Leukocytapheresis has been associated with a significant decrease in the amount of several proinflammatory cytokines produced by peripheral blood leukocytes. Accordingly, the Japan Ministry of Health has now approved both methods for the treatment of active ulcerative colitis. Clinical data suggest that leukocytapheresis might be an effective adjunct to therapy for inflammatory bowel disease to promote remission, taper conventional drug dosage, and potentially reduce the number of patients who require colectomy. The results should further understanding of the pathophysiology of inflammatory bowel disease.