Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neighbourhood food store availability in relation to 24 h urinary sodium and potassium excretion in young Japanese women

Previous studies on the relationship of local food environment with residents' diets have relied exclusively on self-reported information on diet, producing inconsistent results. Evaluation of dietary intake using biomarkers may obviate the biases inherent to the use of self-reported dietary information. This cross-sectional study examined the association between neighbourhood food store availability and 24 h urinary Na and K excretion. The subjects were 904 female Japanese dietetic students aged 18–22 years. Neighbourhood food store availability was defined as the number of food stores within a 0·5-mile (0·8-km) radius of residence. Urinary Na and K excretion and the ratio of urinary Na to K were estimated from a single 24 h urine sample. After adjustment for potential confounding factors, neighbourhood availability of confectionery stores/bakeries was inversely associated with urinary K, and was positively associated with the ratio of Na to K (P for trend = 0·008 and 0·03, respectively). Neighbourhood availability of rice stores showed an independent inverse association with urinary K (P for trend = 0·03), whereas neighbourhood availability of supermarkets/grocery stores conversely showed an independent positive association with this variable (P for trend = 0·03). Furthermore, neighbourhood availability of fruit/vegetable stores showed an independent inverse association with the ratio of Na to K (P for trend = 0·049). In a group of young Japanese women, increasing neighbourhood availability of supermarkets/grocery stores and fruit/vegetable stores and decreasing availability of confectionery stores/bakeries and rice stores were associated with favourable profiles of 24 h urinary K (and Na) excretion.
Initial Conditions and Moment Restrictions in Dynamic Panel Data Models

In this paper we consider estimation of the autoregressive error components model. When the autoregressive parameter is moderately large and the number of time series observations is moderately small, the usual Generalised Methods of Moments (GMM) estimator obtained after first differencing has been found to be poorly behaved. Here we consider alternative linear estimators that are designed to improve the properties of the standard first-differenced GMM estimator. We consider two approaches to estimation. The first approach extends the model by adding the observed initial values as an extra regressor. This allows consistent estimates to be obtained by error-components GLS. This estimator is shown to be equivalent to the optimal GMM estimator for the normal homoskedastic error components model. The second approach considers a mild restriction on the initial condition process under which lagged differences in the dependent variable can be used to construct linear moment conditions in the levels equations. The complete set of moment conditions can then be exploited by a linear GMM estimator in a system of first-differenced and levels equations, rendering the non-linear moment conditions redundant for estimation. This estimator is strictly more efficient than non-linear GMM when the additional restriction is valid. Monte Carlo simulations are reported which demonstrate the dramatic improvement in performance of the proposed estimators compared to the usual first-differenced GMM estimator, especially for high values of the autoregressive parameter. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abst (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Temporal interactions in the cat visual system. II. Suppressive and facilitatory effects in the lateral geniculate nucleus

Extracellular responses were recorded from single neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the cat during presentation of pairs of brief visual stimuli identical to those that produce orientation-selective paired-pulsed suppression in the visual cortex. LGN neurons also show paired-pulse suppression, but the suppression is not orientation selective, and it occurs only for short interstimulus intervals (ISIs; usually less than 200 msec). At longer ISIs, most LGN neurons show a period of facilitation. Thus, the paired-pulse suppression in the LGN cannot account for that seen in the visual cortex. Paired-pulse suppression in the LGN was found to be enhanced by stimulation of the receptive field surround. LGN neurons also showed a second type of suppression, termed “offset suppression,” which consisted of a more long-lasting suppression of spontaneous activity following the offset of an excitatory visual stimulus. The suppression of spontaneous activity was accompanied by a reduction of the antidromic excitability, assessed by stimulating LGN axons within the cortex or optic radiation. Unlike paired-pulsed suppression, offset suppression was not enhanced by increased stimulation of the receptive field surround. Paired-pulse suppression and offset suppression are most likely due to different mechanisms because they have different time courses and depend differently on the spatial properties of the stimuli. Functionally, paired-pulse suppression may be related to the reduced visual sensitivity that accompanies eye movements, while offset suppression may serve to enhance temporal contrast.
A new forced convergence decoding scheme for LDPC codes

In this paper, we present a new forced convergence decoding scheme for LDPC codes. We remove the early detected variable nodes from the Tanner graph and thus the parity matrix shrinks iteration by iteration and the decoding complexity can be reduced. When the parity check matrix shrinks to zero before the maximum iteration, we get a chance to detect the wrong deletion and, for the decodable codewords, most of such failure can be recovered by restoring the original Tanner graph and resuming the decoding in the remaining iterations. Simulations results indicate that the proposed method can reduce the decoding complexity significantly while keep the error rate performance unchanged or even better.
A Trace-Driven Analysis of Wireless Group Communication Mechanisms

Wireless access is increasingly ubiquitous while mobile devices that use them are resource rich. These trends allow wireless users to collaborate with each other. We investigate various group communication paradigms that underly collaboration applications. We synthesize durations when members collaborate using wireless device availability traces. Wireless users operate from a variety of locations. Hence, we analyzed the behavior of wireless users in universities, corporations, conference venues, and city-wide hotspots. We show that the availability durations are longer in corporations followed by university and then in hotspots. The number of simultaneously available wireless users is small in all the scenarios. The session lengths are becoming smaller while the durations between sessions are becoming larger. We observed user churn in all the scenarios. We show that synchronous mechanisms require less e ﬀ ort to maintain update synchronicity among the group members. However, distributed mechanisms require a large number of replicas in order to propagate updates among the users. For asynchronous mechanisms, we show that pull-based mechanisms naturally randomize the times when updates are propagated and thus achieve better performance than push based mechanisms. We develop an adaptive approach that customizes the update frequency using the last session duration and show that this mechanism exhibits good performance when the required update frequency intervals are large. We also show that for a given number of gossips, it is preferable to propagate updates to all available nodes rather than increasing the frequency while correspondingly reducing the number of nodes to propagate updates. We develop a middleware to illustrate the practicality of our approach.
Tropgene : Quick Implementation of New Web Interfaces for ACEDB Databases

ACEDB (http://www.acedb.org/) is an object-oriented system capable of storing and retrieving complex biological information. ACEDB is currently used by many databases: WormBase [1], thirty one plant-related databases available from the UK Crop Plant Bioinformatics Network WWW site [2], MagnaportheDB [3], ESTHER [4], ParaDB [5], etc. ACEDB provides an intuitive object-oriented view of biological data, and a graphical user interface with many specialized data visualization tools, such as genetic map viewer and a sequence annotation display. A set of Perl CGI scripts (AceBrowser, WebAce) have been yet implemented to allow to any ACEDB databases to be browsed via World Wide Web pages, using different database search interfaces [6]. One of the most useful interface is the object-browsing mode which allows the user to retrieve objects by class, with possibility to restrict the search to names that matches a pattern. However, these different ACEDB web interfaces have many drawbacks. Indeed, to realize complex queries (combining requests, use of arithmetic and comparison operators, etc.), users have to learn the AQL (Ace Query Language) syntax, which is not user-friendly for biologists. Moreover, results are always displayed according to the raw ACEDB hierarchical tree view which isn't particularly attractive and doesn't allow to easily extract information concerning only some specific tags. The development of new web interfaces, containing sophisticated request forms and results displays reformatted into nice HTML pages is a time consuming task. The new Perl object package we created allows to quickly generate this type of web interfaces for all the ACEDB databases.
Mining Web Data for Chinese Segmentation

within documents as indexing terms for search of relevant documents. As Chinese is an ideographic character-based language, the words in the texts are not delimited by white spaces. Indexing of Chinese documents is impossible without a proper segmentation algorithm. Many Chinese segmentation algorithms have been proposed in the past. Traditional segmentation algorithms cannot operate without a large dictionary or a large corpus of training data. Nowadays, the Web has become the largest corpus that is ideal for Chinese segmentation. Although most search engines have problems in segmenting texts into proper words, they maintain huge databases of documents and frequencies of character sequences in the documents. Their databases are important potential resources for segmentation. In this paper, we propose a segmentation algorithm by mining Web data with the help of search engines. On the other hand, the Romanized pinyin of Chinese language indicates boundaries of words in the text. Our algorithm is the first to utilize the Roman-ized pinyin to segmentation. It is the first unified segmen-tation algorithm for the Chinese language from different geographical areas, and it is also domain independent because of the nature of the Web. Experiments have been conducted on the datasets of a recent Chinese segmenta-tion competition. The results show that our algorithm out-performs the traditional algorithms in terms of precision and recall. Moreover, our algorithm can effectively deal with the problems of segmentation ambiguity, new word (unknown word) detection, and stop words.
Spectrum hole identification in multiple TV bands by adaptive threshold multi-taper spectrum estimator for cognitive radio

Cognitive radio (CR) is a wireless technology that facilitates unlicensed users to access the sensed spectrum without creating any interference to the primary user. Sensing the licensed spectrum to seek for spatiotemporal information of any possible spectrum hole is the first step needed to be performed by the CR devices. In this paper we propose an adaptive threshold technique to extract spectrum hole information from Multi-taper Spectrum Estimator (MSE) estimated spectrum. It has been found that when threshold is adapted depending on the change in noise level and presence of primary or secondary signals in a TV band, the detection performance improves compared to fixed threshold. A 400 kHz band was split into 20kHz sub bands to verify the possibility of splitting the TV bands into 200kHz bands from CR usage perspective. From analytical calculations and MATLAB simulations it has been shown that if TV band is viewed as 200 kHz sub-band channels from CR perspective; blocking probability for CR operation can be reduced. In addition it has also been shown that sensing multiple TV bands simultaneously can help CRs to find more opportunities with minor impact on system complexity.
Nonlinear Response of the Mass-Spring Model with nonsmooth Stiffness

In this paper, we study the nonlinear response of the nonlinear mass-spring model with nonsmooth stiffness. For this purpose, we take as prototype model, a system that consists of the double-well smooth potential with an additional spring component acting on the system only for large enough displacement. We focus our study on the analysis of the homoclinic orbits for such nonlinear potential for which we observe the appearance of chaotic motion in the presence of damping effects and an external harmonic force, analyzing the crucial role of the linear spring in the dynamics of our system. The results are shown by using both the Melnikov analysis and numerical simulations. We expect our work to have implications on problems concerning the suspension of vehicles, among others.
Acceleration-based safety decision procedure for programs with arrays

Reachability analysis of programs with arrays is a well-known challenging problem and many existing approaches are bound to incomplete solutions. In this paper we identify a class of programs with arrays for which safety is fully decidable. The completeness result we provide is built up from acceleration techniques for arrays and the decision procedure for the Array Property Fragment class.
Web-based Ontology Learning with ISOLDE

The last few years saw a continuing increase in the availability of open source web-based information resources such as Wikipedia and similar initiatives. As this kind of information is freely available, has some pre-defined format, covers many topic areas and is of an acceptable quality it is an ideal resource for bootstrapping or extending domain ontologies. In this paper we show how web resources such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary and a German online dictionary (DWDS) can be used in combination with a domain corpus and a general purpose named-entity tagger to derive a domain ontology. The ISOLDE (Information System for Ontology Learning and Domain Exploration) system we describe generates a domain ontology by extracting class candidates from the linguistic context of a given set of ontology instances and by deriving further knowledge on these class candidates from available web resources.
Parallel Algorithms for Counting Triangles in Networks with Large Degrees

Finding the number of triangles in a network is an important problem in the analysis of complex networks. The number of triangles also has important applications in data mining. Existing distributed memory parallel algorithms for counting triangles are either Map-Reduce based or message passing interface (MPI) based and work with overlapping partitions of the given network. These algorithms are designed for very sparse networks and do not work well when the degrees of the nodes are relatively larger. For networks with larger degrees, Map-Reduce based algorithm generates prohibitively large intermediate data, and in MPI based algorithms with overlapping partitions, each partition can grow as large as the original network, wiping out the benefit of partitioning the network. In this paper, we present two efficient MPI-based parallel algorithms for counting triangles in massive networks with large degrees. The first algorithm is a space-efficient algorithm for networks that do not fit in the main memory of a single compute node. This algorithm divides the network into non-overlapping partitions. The second algorithm is for the case where the main memory of each node is large enough to contain the entire network. We observe that for such a case, computation load can be balanced dynamically and present a dynamic load balancing scheme which improves the performance significantly. Both of our algorithms scale well to large networks and to a large number of processors.
Strategic help in user interfaces for information retrieval

Brajnik et alia describe their view of an effective retrieval interface, one which coaches the searcher using stored knowledge not only of database structure, but of strategic situations which are likely to occur, such as repeating failed tactics in a low return search, or failing to try relevance feedback techniques. The emphasis is on the system suggesting search strategy improvements by relating them to an analysis of work entered so far and selecting and ranking those found relevant. FIRE is an interface utilizing these techniques. It allows the user to assign documents to useful, topical and trash folders, maintains thesauri files automatically searchable on query terms, and it builds, using user entries and a rule system, a picture of the retrieval situation from which it generates suggestions.
Enhanced Apoptosis of B and T Lymphocytes in TAFII105 Dominant-negative Transgenic Mice Is Linked to Nuclear Factor-κB*

The general transcription factor TFIID is composed of the TATA-binding protein (TBP) and 12–14 TBP-associated factors (TAFIIs). Some TAFIIs act as bridges between transcription activators and the general transcription machinery through direct interaction with activation domains. Although TAF-mediated transcription activation has been established, there is little genetic evidence connecting it to binding of an activator. TAFII105 is a substoichiometric subunit of transcription factor IID highly expressed in B lymphocytes. In this study, we examined the physiological role of TAFII105 and its mechanism of action in vivo by expressing two forms of dominant-negative mutant TAFII105 in mice. We show that TAFII105 has a pro-survival role in B and T lymphocytes, where the native protein is expressed. In addition, TAFII105 is important for T cell maturation and for production of certain antibody isotypes. These phenotypic alterations were absent in mice expressing a dominant-negative mutant that lacks one of the domains mediating p65/RelA binding in vitro. These findings provide support to the notion that interaction between the activator and TAF is important for their function in vivo.
Efficient construction of machine-checked symbolic protocol security proofs

We embed an untyped security protocol model in the interactive theorem prover Isabelle/HOL and derive a theory for constructing proofs of secrecy and authentication properties. Our theory is based on two key ingredients. The first is an inference rule for enumerating the possible origins of messages known to the intruder. The second is a class of protocol-specific invariants that formalize type assertions about variables in protocol specifications. The resulting theory is well suited for interactively constructing human-readable, protocol security proofs. We additionally give an algorithm that automatically generates Isabelle/HOL proof scripts based on this theory. We provide case studies showing that both interactive and automatic proof construction are efficient. The resulting proofs provide strong correctness guarantees since all proofs, including those deriving our theory from the security protocol model, are machine-checked.
A P2P Collaborative RFID Data Cleaning Model

RFID emerges to be one of the key technologies to modernize Logistics and supply chain management. In a typical RFID enabled logistics and supply chain application, there exist RFID readers to detect and identify the goods with RFID tags attached. Considering the huge amount of goods, the successful reading of RFID data becomes a crucial issue. Many algorithms and models to improve the RFID reading have been proposed, yet most of them focus on addressing the problem in a single reading node. In this paper, we introduce a P2P model to identify and remove inaccurate reading of RFID data by utilizing the information exchanged among related nodes along the business processing route of each RFID tagged item. The successful deployment of this model will ease the demand for high accurate reading of each RFID reading node while reducing the total cost of the RFID network. Our simulation shows the RFID network correct function against the business requirements will be ensured while the overall performance of the RFID network can be guaranteed.
Modelling Implicit Communication in Multi-Agent Systems with Hybrid Input/Output Automata

We propose an extension of Hybrid I/O Automata (HIOAs) to model agent systems and their implicit communication through perturbation of the environment, like localization of objects or radio signals diffusion and detection. To this end we decided to specialize some variables of the HIOAs whose values are functions both of time and space. We call them world variables. Basically they are treated similarly to the other variables of HIOAs, but they have the function of representing the interaction of each automaton with the surrounding environment, hence they can be output, input or internal variables. Since these special variables have the role of simulating implicit communication, their dynamics are specified both in time and space, because they model the perturbations induced by the agent to the environment, and the perturbations of the environment as perceived by the agent. Parallel composition of world variables is slightly different from parallel composition of the other variables, since their signals are summed. The theory is illustrated through a simple example of agents systems.
Real-Time Geometric Detailing Using Programmable Hardware

Striving for photorealism, texture mapping and its more advanced variations, bump and displacement mapping, have all become fundamental tools in computer graphics. Recently, the introduction of programmable graphics hardware has enabled the employment of displacement mapping in real-time applications. While displacement mapping facilitates the actual modification of the underlying geometry, it is constrained by being an injective mapping. Further, it is also limited because it usually maps the geometry of the (low-resolution) smooth base surfaces, typically by displacing their vertices. Drawing from a recent work on DeformationDisplacement Mapping (DDM) [4], in this work we offer real-time solutions to both these limitations. Our solutions make it possible to employ the DDM paradigm on programmable graphics hardware. By reversing the roles of the base surfaces and their geometric details, both the one-to-one constraint and the base surface resolution limitation are resolved. Furthermore, this role-reversal also paves the way for other benefits such as a tremendous decrease in the memory consumption of geometric detail information in the DDM and the ability to animate the details over the base surface. We show that the presented scheme can be used effectively to generate highly complex renderings and animations, in real-time, on modern graphics hardware. The capabilities of the proposed method are demonstrated for both rational parametric base surfaces and polygonal base surfaces.