Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Association between Postload Plasma Glucose Levels and 38-Year Mortality Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: The Prospective NHLBI Twin Study

Background Due to the paucity of direct evidence, we aimed to evaluate whether the association between postload plasma glucose levels (ppGlucose) and long-term risk of mortality from coronary heart disease was independent of or attributable to genes and common environment. Methods and Findings From the prospective National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Twin Study, we included 903 middle-aged male twins, who were nondiabetic, free of coronary heart disease at baseline (1969–1973), and followed for up to 38 years for coronary heart, cardiovascular, and all-cause mortality. Frailty survival models were used to estimate hazard ratio (HR) for various associations: overall (equivalent to singleton population association), within-pair (controlling for genes and environment common to co-twins), and between-pair association (reflecting influences of common factors). Overall associations were statistically significant for coronary heart and cardiovascular but not all-cause deaths after controlling for known risk factors. The associations were not statistically significant in within-pair analyses. The within-pair association was not statistically different by zygosity for specific and all-cause death risk. After the full adjustment for known risk factors, HR (95% confidence interval) for within-pair association was 1.07 (0.90, 1.28), 1.06 (0.94, 1.19), and 0.99 (0.94, 1.05) for coronary heart, cardiovascular, and all-cause mortality, respectively. The fully adjusted between-pair associations were statistically significant for specific and all-cause death risk: a 50 mg/dL increase in the mean value of ppGlucose for a twin pair was associated with a raised death risk [HR (95% confidence interval) 1.15 (1.02, 1.30), 1.10 (1.02, 1.20), and 1.05 (1.01, 1.09) for coronary heart, cardiovascular, and all-cause mortality, respectively]. Between-pair association was significant in dizygotic but not in monozygotic twins. Conclusion The positive association between ppGlucose and long-term coronary heart mortality risk is largely explained by factors shared between co-twins, including familial factors; however, within-pair effects cannot be absolutely excluded.
Temporally flexible feedback signal to foveal cortex for peripheral object recognition

Significance When subjects were asked to discriminate objects in the periphery, foveal visual noise presented at precise time windows following the peripheral object onset disrupted their performance. Further, this effect of foveal noise depends on task demand and stimulus features and primarily occurs for object tasks that involve spatial details. The time window, during which the noise is effective, can be shifted based on the amount of preprocessing of the peripheral objects, revealing the operation of temporally flexible feedback processing in the foveal cortex for peripheral object recognition. Recent studies have shown that information from peripherally presented images is present in the human foveal retinotopic cortex, presumably because of feedback signals. We investigated this potential feedback signal by presenting noise in fovea at different object–noise stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), whereas subjects performed a discrimination task on peripheral objects. Results revealed a selective impairment of performance when foveal noise was presented at 250-ms SOA, but only for tasks that required comparing objects’ spatial details, suggesting a task- and stimulus-dependent foveal processing mechanism. Critically, the temporal window of foveal processing was shifted when mental rotation was required for the peripheral objects, indicating that the foveal retinotopic processing is not automatically engaged at a fixed time following peripheral stimulation; rather, it occurs at a stage when detailed information is required. Moreover, fMRI measurements using multivoxel pattern analysis showed that both image and object category-relevant information of peripheral objects was represented in the foveal cortex. Taken together, our results support the hypothesis of a temporally flexible feedback signal to the foveal retinotopic cortex when discriminating objects in the visual periphery.
What does scene text tell us?

Scene text is one of the most important information sources for our daily life because it has particular functions such as disambiguation and navigation. In contrast, ordinary document text has no such function. Consequently, it is natural to have a hypothesis that scene text and document text have different characteristics. This paper tries to prove this hypothesis by semantic analysis of texts by word2vec, which is a neural network model to give a vector representation of each word. By the vector representation, we can have the semantic distributions of scene text and document text in Euclidean space and then determine their semantic categories by simple clustering. Experimental study reveals several differences between scene text and document text. For example, it is found that scene text is a semantic subset of document text and several semantic categories are very specific to scene text.
Early detection of acute renal failure by serum cystatin C.

BACKGROUND Acute renal failure (ARF) is associated with high mortality. Presently, no specific therapy for ARF exists. Therefore, early detection of ARF is critical to prevent its progression. However, serum creatinine, the standard marker to detect ARF, demonstrates major limitations. We prospectively evaluated whether serum cystatin C detected ARF earlier than serum creatinine. METHODS In 85 patients at high risk to develop ARF, serum creatinine and cystatin C were determined daily. ARF was defined according to the Risk of renal dysfunction, Injury to the kidney, Failure of kidney function, Loss of kidney function, and ESRD (RIFLE) classification when creatinine increased by >/=50% (R-criteria), by >/=100% (I-criteria), or by >/=200% (F-criteria). In analogy, ARF was detected when cystatin C increased by >/=50%, by >/=100%, or by >/=200%. RESULTS Forty-four patients developed ARF and 41 served as controls. In ARF by R-, I-, and F-criteria, the increase of cystatin C significantly preceded that of creatinine. Specifically, serum cystatin C increased already by >/=50% 1.5 +/- 0.6 days earlier compared to creatinine. Serum cystatin C demonstrated a high diagnostic value to detect ARF as indicated by area under the curve of the ROC analysis of 0.82 and 0.97 on the two days before the R-criteria was fulfilled by creatinine. Cystatin C detected ARF according to the R-criteria with a sensitivity of 55% and 82% on these days, respectively. Cystatin C also performed excellently, detecting ARF defined by the I- and F-criteria two days prior to creatinine, and moderately well predicting renal replacement therapy in the further course of ARF. Additionally, low T(3)- or T(3)/T(4) syndrome, glucocorticoid deficiency and excess did not affect cystatin C levels, adding to its usefulness in critically ill patients with ARF. CONCLUSION Serum cystatin C is a useful detection marker of ARF, and may detect ARF one to two days earlier than creatinine.
Comparison of approaches for parameter identifiability analysis of biological systems

MOTIVATION Modeling of dynamical systems using ordinary differential equations is a popular approach in the field of Systems Biology. The amount of experimental data that are used to build and calibrate these models is often limited. In this setting, the model parameters may not be uniquely determinable. Structural or a priori identifiability is a property of the system equations that indicates whether, in principle, the unknown model parameters can be determined from the available data. RESULTS We performed a case study using three current approaches for structural identifiability analysis for an application from cell biology. The approaches are conceptually different and are developed independently. The results of the three approaches are in agreement. We discuss strength and weaknesses of each of them and illustrate how they can be applied to real world problems. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION For application of the approaches to further applications, code representations (DAISY, Mathematica and MATLAB) for benchmark model and data are provided on the authors webpage. CONTACT andreas.raue@fdm.uni-freiburg.de.
A recurrent decentralized key management architecture for wireless sensor network

Wireless sensor networks increasingly become viable solutions to many challenging problems and will successively be deployed in many areas in the future. However, deploying such an open infrastructure without security in mind has often proved to be unreasonably dangerous. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized recurrent key management architecture for wireless senor networks, covering aspects of key refreshment and en-route cryptograpy. It features a balance between security and energy consumption by minimizing communication overheads between nodes. Key refreshment uses a new recurrent update algorithm while en-route cryptography allows intermediary nodes to further encrypt or not the data based on specific rules. The keying protocols involved uses only symmetric cryptographic. The analysis of the proposed security architecture demonstrates its capability to satisfy the desired security aspects while still being a lightweight solution. Moreover, compared with a system that uses public-key data encryption, the energy consumption of the algorithm is tens of times lower.
A Topic Clustering Approach to Finding Similar Questions from Large Question and Answer Archives

With the blooming of Web 2.0, Community Question Answering (CQA) services such as Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com), WikiAnswer (http://wiki.answers.com), and Baidu Zhidao (http://zhidao.baidu.com), etc., have emerged as alternatives for knowledge and information acquisition. Over time, a large number of question and answer (Q&A) pairs with high quality devoted by human intelligence have been accumulated as a comprehensive knowledge base. Unlike the search engines, which return long lists of results, searching in the CQA services can obtain the correct answers to the question queries by automatically finding similar questions that have already been answered by other users. Hence, it greatly improves the efficiency of the online information retrieval. However, given a question query, finding the similar and well-answered questions is a non-trivial task. The main challenge is the word mismatch between question query (query) and candidate question for retrieval (question). To investigate this problem, in this study, we capture the word semantic similarity between query and question by introducing the topic modeling approach. We then propose an unsupervised machine-learning approach to finding similar questions on CQA Q&A archives. The experimental results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Pmch-Deficiency in Rats Is Associated with Normal Adipocyte Differentiation and Lower Sympathetic Adipose Drive

The orexigenic neuropeptide melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH), a product of Pmch, is an important mediator of energy homeostasis. Pmch-deficient rodents are lean and smaller, characterized by lower food intake, body-, and fat mass. Pmch is expressed in hypothalamic neurons that ultimately are components in the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) drive to white and interscapular brown adipose tissue (WAT, iBAT, respectively). MCH binds to MCH receptor 1 (MCH1R), which is present on adipocytes. Currently it is unknown if Pmch-ablation changes adipocyte differentiation or sympathetic adipose drive. Using Pmch-deficient and wild-type rats on a standard low-fat diet, we analyzed dorsal subcutaneous and perirenal WAT mass and adipocyte morphology (size and number) throughout development, and indices of sympathetic activation in WAT and iBAT during adulthood. Moreover, using an in vitro approach we investigated the ability of MCH to modulate 3T3-L1 adipocyte differentiation. Pmch-deficiency decreased dorsal subcutaneous and perirenal WAT mass by reducing adipocyte size, but not number. In line with this, in vitro 3T3-L1 adipocyte differentiation was unaffected by MCH. Finally, adult Pmch-deficient rats had lower norepinephrine turnover (an index of sympathetic adipose drive) in WAT and iBAT than wild-type rats. Collectively, our data indicate that MCH/MCH1R-pathway does not modify adipocyte differentiation, whereas Pmch-deficiency in laboratory rats lowers adiposity throughout development and sympathetic adipose drive during adulthood.
Civic duty and employee outcomes: Do high commitment human resource practices and work overload matter?

This article tests the impact of two organization-relevant factors, high commitment human resource practices (HCHRP) and work overload on a component of public service motivation, civic duty and employee outcomes (job satisfaction, affective commitment, and quit intentions). Local government employees in Wales (n=1,755) were used to test our research hypotheses. Results show that both HCHRP and work overload had direct and indirect affects (via civic duty) on employee outcomes. The positive effects of HCHRP on employee outcomes more than compensated for the negative impact of work overload. However, given the modest relations between the organization-relevant factors and civic mindedness, firm efforts should perhaps focus primarily on recruitment and retention campaigns rather than training and socialization strategies.
Fuzzy wavelet packet based feature extraction method and its application to biomedical signal classification

In this paper, we develop an efficient fuzzy wavelet packet (WP) based feature extraction method for the classification of high-dimensional biomedical data such as magnetic resonance spectra. The key design phases involve: 1) a WP transformation mapping the original signals to many WP feature spaces and finding optimal WP decomposition for signal classification; 2) feature extraction based on the optimal WP decomposition; and 3) signal classification realized by a linear classifier. In contrast to the standard method of feature extraction used in WPs, guided by the criteria of signal compression or signal energy, our method is used to extract discriminatory features from the WP coefficients of the optimal decomposition. The extraction algorithm constructs fuzzy sets of features (via fuzzy clustering) to assess their discriminatory effectiveness. This paper includes a number of numerical experiments using magnetic resonance spectra. Classification results are compared with those obtained from common feature extraction methods in the WP domain.
Using Cost Analysis to Examine Variability in Replications of an Efficacious Child Neglect Prevention Program

This article reports on a program- and case-level cost analysis of five replication sites of an efficacious child neglect prevention program. Approximately one-third of all sites' total labor hours were expended on direct family services and casework support for a specific family, with the remainder spent on indirect implementation support and program administration activities. Including non-personnel costs, the all-site mean total cost per family was $6,276, ranging across sites from $2,245 to $10,260. Costs varied greatly among individual families within sites. More research is needed to understand factors associated with differences in cost.
Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South

Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.
Restructuring legacy C code into C++

In this paper, we describe restructuring of C code into new C++ classes. Such restructuring is done to facilitate both software reuse and software evolution. The restructuring is accomplished by restructuring tools and scenarios. We discuss the transformation tool-set and the design of the individual tools. The approach is demonstrated on a case study We also discuss how this tool-set could be enhanced in the future.
Developmental Coordination Disorder: A synthesis of evidence to underpin an allied health professions' framework

Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) lack the motor coordination necessary to perform tasks considered appropriate for their age, given normal intellectual ability and the absence of other neurological disorders. DCD is a common childhood disorder that can develop into a long‐term condition that has a significant impact on society. A key method of managing DCD is through the assessment and interventions of allied health professionals (AHPs). To date, no integrated AHP framework for the assessment and treatment of DCD exists. The present article illustrates the methods used to synthesise multiple data sources (policy, scientific evidence, service user views and AHP perspectives) by a multidisciplinary group of AHP researchers and practitioners. Through this process a series of principles of good practice were identified, and then developed into a framework for AHPs working with children with DCD. In this article the methodology used to enable synthesis from different evidence sources will be presented, as will the resultant framework. The findings will then be discussed within the current literature emphasising the importance of health/education partnership in the support and management of these children.
On Local Super-Penalization of Interior Penalty Discontinuous Galerkin Methods

We prove in an abstract setting that standard (continuous) Galerkin finite element approximations are the limit of interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin approximations as the penalty parameter tends to infinity. We apply this result to equations of non-negative characteristic form and the non-linear, time dependent system of incompressible miscible displacement. Moreover, we investigate varying the penalty parameter on only a subset of a triangulation and the effects of local super-penalization on the stability of the method, resulting in a partly continuous, partly discontinuous method in the limit. An iterative automatic procedure is also proposed for the determination of the continuous region of the domain without loss of stability of the method.
HYERS-ULAM STABILITY OF THE GENERALIZED TRIGONOMETRIC FORMULAS

In this paper, we will investigate the Hyers-Ulam stability of the following functional equations∫ G ∫ K f(xtk · y)dkdμ(t) = f(x)g(y) + g(x)f(y), x, y ∈ G and ∫ G ∫ K f(xtk · y)dkdμ(t) = f(x)f(y)− g(x)g(y), x, y ∈ G, whereK is a compact subgroup of morphisms of G, dk is a normalized Haar measure of K, μ is a complexK-invariant measure with compact support, the functions f, g are continuous onG andf is assumed to satisfies the Kannappan type condition K(μ) ∫ G ∫ G f(ztxsy)dμ(t)dμ(s) = ∫ G ∫ G f(ztysx)dμ(t)dμ(s), x, y, z ∈ G. The paper of Székelyhidi [30] is the essential motivation for the present work and the methods used here are closely related to and inspired by those in [30]. The concept of the generalized Hyers-Ulam stability of mappings was introduced in the subject of functional equations by Th. M. Rassias in [20].
Cross-cultural experiences of immigrant students from Mainland China in Hong Kong secondary schools

Many schools in Hong Kong are concerned with the growing number of enrolments of students from Mainland China. This article examines the immigrant students’ constructs of their cross-cultural identities. It reveals how these students experience a journey of transformation in language, culture and identity. Qualitative data were collected from unstructured interviews with 12 immigrant students from Mainland China from six secondary schools. Two cases which are representative of the sample are reported. The study showed the transformation of the cross-cultural identities of these students, in the process of which they adopted the new culture into their lives and made it their reality while they still strongly connected part of their identity to their Mainland Chinese background. Despite some negative experiences of adaptation, they adopted a meritocratic approach to making sense of their cross-cultural experience. It was used as a form of agency to overcome, or at least ameliorate, feelings of discrimination, loss of cultural support and being immigrants in the ‘new’ society of Hong Kong. Lastly, two implications for the promotion of education for immigrant students will be discussed at school and legal levels.
Automatic Annotation of Structured Facts in Images

Motivated by the application of fact-level image understanding, we present an automatic method for data collection of structured visual facts from images with captions. Example structured facts include attributed objects (e.g., ), actions (e.g., ), interactions (e.g., ), and positional information (e.g., ). The collected annotations are in the form of fact-image pairs (e.g., and an image region containing this fact). With a language approach, the proposed method is able to collect hundreds of thousands of visual fact annotations with accuracy of 83% according to human judgment. Our method automatically collected more than 380,000 visual fact annotations and more than 110,000 unique visual facts from images with captions and localized them in images in less than one day of processing time on standard CPU platforms.