Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A NEW GIBBS SAMPLING BASED BAYESIAN MODEL UPDATING APPROACH USING MODAL DATA FROM MULTIPLE SETUPS

This paper presents a new Gibbs sampling based approach for Bayesian model updating of a linear dynamic system based on modal data (natural frequencies and partial mode shapes of some of the dominant modes) obtained from a structure using multiple setups. Modal data from multiple setups pose a problem as mode shapes identified from multiple setups are normalized individually and the scaling factors to form the overall mode shape are not known a priori. For comprehensive quantification of the uncertainties, the proposed approach allows for an efficient update of the probability distribution of the model parameters, overall mode shapes, scaling factors, and prediction error variances. The proposed approach does not require solving the eigenvalue problem of any structural model or matching of model and experimental modes, and is robust to the dimension of the problem. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method are illustrated by simulated numerical examples.
Homozygous deletions inactivate DCC, but not MADH4/DPC4/SMAD4, in a subset of pancreatic and biliary cancers

Loss of heterozygosity (LOH) of chromosome arm 18q is frequent in gastrointestinal cancers. Over 90% of pancreatic carcinomas have 18q LOH. Bi‐allelic inactivation of the MADH4/DPC4/SMAD4 gene at 18q21.1 is seen in about half of pancreatic carcinomas with 18q LOH. In the remaining tumors with 18q LOH, MADH4 is not mutated and its expression is unaffected, and no alterations in MADH2/SMAD2, a MADH4‐related gene at 18q12.3, have been found. A controversial candidate tumor‐suppressor gene at 18q21.2 is DCC (deleted in colorectal carcinoma), which encodes a netrin‐1 receptor component with functions in cell migration and apoptosis. Reduced or absent DCC expression has been observed in many cancers, but few somatic mutations that would clearly inactivate DCC function have been reported. We studied a panel of 115 pancreatic and 14 biliary cancers for homozygous deletions of DCC exons and flanking 18q regions. Seven homozygous deletions were seen in the region that includes the DCC gene. In two tumors, the deletions inactivate DCC but not MADH4. A physical and transcript map of the deleted regions was constructed, and DCC was the only known gene affected by all seven deletions. These data are the strongest mutational evidence presented yet in support of the hypothesis that DCC or another gene in the region distal to MADH4 is inactivated, playing a causal role in cancer development. Genes Chromosomes Cancer 27:353–357, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Nitric oxide‐mediated corpus cavernosal smooth muscle relaxation is impaired in ageing and diabetes

Objective To examine nitric‐oxide (NO)‐mediated relaxation in cavernosal smooth muscle in a rat model of diabetes, as previous experiments showed that HbA1c (an isoform of glycosylated haemoglobin and a marker of long‐term diabetic control) impaired NO‐mediated relaxation of normal corpus cavernosal tissue through the generation of superoxide anions.
A New Technique for Capacity Enhancement in WCDMA Uplink with Synchronization

Cellular phones have experienced an exponential growth worldwide over the last decade with more than one billion cell phone users projected in the near future. On the other hand, service providers must support new technology and infrastructure in order to fulfill their customers' requirements. These requirements include the capacity of network. The large expectances created for Wide Band Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) are based on its flexibility for multimedia capabilities and the high capacity it will provide. However, the demanded traffic grows rapidly, and new capacity enhancements are required in order to satisfy the future needs. Uplink synchronization can be a method to reduce the multiple access interference (MAI) by exploiting the uplink orthogonality and thereby increase the capacity of WCDMA systems. In this paper, the performance of uplink synchronous WCDMA has been assessed in terms of the capacity gain relative to an equivalent asynchronous system. The capacity gain has been evaluated theoretically and by means of MATLAB simulations for scenarios with different orthogonality factors. Orthogonality of codes is directly dependent on synchronization which in turn increases the capacity gain. In this study, it is proposed that synchronization plays an important role in enhancing the capacity gain of uplink WCDMA system. Also, an alternative solution is proposed to increase the capacity in the uplink of a synchronized WCDMA system by introducing variable modulation.
Sizing analog integrated circuits by combining gm/ID technique and evolutionary algorithms

Automatic sizing of analog integrated circuits (ICs) remains an open challenge. This work shows an hybrid approach for finding optimal sizes of analog IC's elements, by combining the gm/ID technique for determining the parameter ranges for a given biasing levels, and using those to limit the search space through performing multi-objective optimization with evolutionary algorithms. That way, the NSGA-II optimization algorithm is employed to optimize the width (W) and length (L) of MOSFETs of an operational transconductance amplifier, which (W/L) search spaces are found by applying equations and biasing conditions to the gm/ID technique. From simulation results, we conclude on the appropriateness of gm/ID to accelerate the computational time of evolutionary algorithms for optimizing analog ICs.
Response Set in the Measurement of Stimulation-Seeking

The effect of social desirability response set on a measure of individual differences in stimulation—seeking—the Sensation-Seeking Scale—was studied in a 2 × 3 × 5 design consisting of factors of sex, instructions (fake good, fake bad, and control) and five subscales, with 15 undergraduate Ss per cell, making a total of 90 Ss. No significant effect of instructions was found, nor were any interactions of any variables significant. However, a significant (p < .01) main effect associated with sex was obtained, with males scoring significantly higher than females. In addition, a significant (p < .01) main effect of subscales was found, indicating significant variation among subscale means. It was concluded that response set, as aroused, was not a significant factor in this measure.
The role of desire in understanding intentions to drink responsibly: an application of the Model of Goal-Directed Behaviour

Abstract This study models young people’s moderate drinking decision-making using the Model of Goal-Directed Behaviour (MGB), thus presenting insights into young people’s desires and intentions to drink responsibly. Testing the applicability of the MGB to quantitatively analyse responsible drinking, the explanatory sphere of the MGB is extended. An online survey resulted in 1522 completed questionnaires from respondents aged between 18 and 25 years. Collected data were analysed with structural equation modelling (SEM) using SPSS AMOS21 (IBM, New York, NY, USA) software. The key finding of this study is that an individual’s desire to drink moderately is the most important predictor of young people’s responsible drinking intentions. Our use of MGB provides further evidence that there is a strong distinction between consumer desires and intentions.
TOWARD CLARIFICATION OF THE CONCEPT OF ‘MINORITY’ STATUS AND DECISION-MAKING IN JUVENILE COURT PROCEEDINGS

ABSTRACT Although researchers have studied the influence of being a minority on juvenile court processing and case outcomes, few have adequately conceptualized and tested for the different effects being Latino may have relative to being African American or being white. There has also been a failure to consider all available case outcomes at the stage of intake and decision making across the juvenile justice system. In either situation, race/ethnic differences may be obscured or enhanced The objective of the present research was to study decision-making within juvenile court proceedings in the state of Iowa to fill these voids. Utilizing an interpretation of conflict theory that emphasizes stereotyping upon decisionmaking, the results suggest that differences exist in the case processing and outcomes of Latinos, African Americans, and whites. Separating the outcome of release from diversion and a recommendation for further intervention at intake also provide evidence of race/ethnic differences that may hav.
High Throughput Total Order Broadcast for Cluster Environments

Total order broadcast is a fundamental communication primitive that plays a central role in bringing cheap software-based high availability to a wide array of services. This paper studies the practical performance of such a primitive on a cluster of homogeneous machines. We present FSR, a (uniform) total order broadcast protocol that provides high throughput, regardless of message broadcast patterns. FSR is based on a ring topology, only relies on point-to-point inter-process communication, and has a linear latency with respect to the total number of processes in the system. Moreover, it is fair in the sense that each process has an equal opportunity of having its messages delivered by all processes. On a cluster of Itanium based machines, FSR achieves a throughput of 79 Mbit/s on a 100 Mbit/s switched Ethernet network
Methylome analysis reveals dysregulated developmental and viral pathways in breast cancer

Background Breast cancer (BC) ranks among the most common cancers in Sudan and worldwide with hefty toll on female health and human resources. Recent studies have uncovered a common BC signature characterized by low frequency of oncogenic mutations and high frequency of epigenetic silencing of major BC tumor suppressor genes. Therefore, we conducted a genome-wide methylome study to characterize aberrant DNA methylation in breast cancer. Results Differential methylation analysis between primary tumor samples and normal samples from healthy adjacent tissues yielded 20188 differentially methylated positions (DMPs), which is further divided into 13633 hypermethylated sites corresponding to 5339 genes and 6555 hypomethylated sites corresponding to 2811 genes. Moreover, bioinformatics analysis revealed epigenetic dysregulation of major developmental pathways including hippo signaling pathway. We also uncovered many clues to a possible role for EBV infection in BC Conclusion Our results clearly show the utility of epigenetic assays in interrogating breast cancer tumorigenesis, and pinpointing specific developmental and viral pathways dysregulation that might serve as potential biomarkers or targets for therapeutic interventions.
Acute postpartumuterine inversion with haemorrhagic shock: laparoscopic reduction: a new method of management

Sir, While this case report is interesting and there are very nice laparoscopic images to illustrate the inverted uterus, I was disturbed by several features of the report. Nobody can have much experience in this rare complication, however, with 35 years of obstetric practice, 25 years as a consultant, I have never found hydrostatic reduction of an inverted uterus to fail. Yet, this well-established technique was never even attempted, but only referred to in the discussion. There is no explanation why an attempt at hydrostatic reduction was not made. As described by Calder,1 as a youngster I scoffed at the concept when I first heard of the method. However, in practice I soon found that with uterine relaxation and patience, the uterine inversion is silently reduced under the hydrostatic pressure. WHO2 recommends that if manual reduction fails, then the hydrostatic method should be used. In hospital practice, we would favour the use of the hydrostatic method as the primary method. Any attempt at reduction of a complete inversion needs to be combined with some form of uterine relaxation and adequate analgesia. I was also puzzled by the details of the case report regarding haemorrhage. At the time of uterine inversion, there was a massive haemorrhage. This is not the time to attempt reduction. There is no description of continued bleeding, and this conforms to my experience that once the uterus is inverted and well contracted there is relatively little bleeding. Her collapse may well have been partly due to a vasovagal response associated with the attempt at reduction and the presence of the inversion itself. This is supported by the fact that she appears to have been given colloids only as there is no mention of a blood transfusion. It appears that there was rather quick resort to a completely unconventional although innovative management. We cannot accept that laparoscopic reduction can be any more likely to be successful than manual reduction, and much less effective than hydrostatic reduction. j References
Neurospheres modified to produce glial cell line‐derived neurotrophic factor increase the survival of transplanted dopamine neurons

Glial cell line‐derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) has been shown to increase the survival of dopamine neurons in a variety of in vitro and in vivo model systems. Therefore, it constitutes an important therapeutic protein with the potential to ameliorate dopamine neuronal degeneration in Parkinson's disease or to support dopamine neuronal replacement strategies. However, biophysical and practical considerations present obstacles for the direct delivery of the GDNF protein to CNS neurons. Here we show that rodent neural precursor cells isolated and expanded in culture as neurospheres (NS) can be genetically modified to express green fluorescent protein (GFP) or to release GDNF using lentiviral constructs. GDNF‐NS increased the fibre outgrowth of primary embryonic dopamine neurons in cocultures, showing that the protein was released in biologically significant quantities. Furthermore, after transplantation into the 6‐hydroxydopamine‐lesioned rat striatum, GDNF‐NS significantly increased the survival of cografted primary dopamine neurons. However, this was not reflected in behavioural recovery in these animals. We found that, by 6 weeks, few cells expressed GDNF or GFP, suggesting either that transgene expression was down‐regulated over time or that the cells died. This may explain the initial effects on dopamine neuronal survival within the graft but the lack of long‐term effect on subsequent fibre outgrowth and behaviour. Providing sustained levels of neural precursor‐mediated transgene expression can be achieved following transplantation in the future; this approach may prove beneficial as an alternative therapeutic strategy in the cell‐based management of Parkinson's disease. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Consumers' Beliefs about Product Benefits: The Effect of Obviously Irrelevant Product Information

When consumers try to assess the performance of a product on a key benefit, their information search often reveals both diagnostic information and irrelevant information. Although one would expect irrelevant information to have little impact on predictions of product performance, we present evidence that the irrelevant information systematically weakens consumers' beliefs that the product will provide the benefit. We show that this dilution effect persists after subjects have acknowledged the irrelevance of the additional information but that it does depend on whether the product information is processed with the desired benefit in mind. We conclude that consumers are selectively looking for information that suggests the product will deliver the desired benefit and that they categorize any additional evidence, be it irrelevant or disconfirming, as not confirming. As a consequence, irrelevant information weakens consumers' beliefs in the product's ability to deliver the benefit.
Classification of gait types based on the duty-factor

This paper deals with classification of human gait types based on the notion that different gait types are in fact different types of locomotion, i.e., running is not simply walking done faster. We present the duty-factor, which is a descriptor based on this notion. The duty-factor is independent on the speed of the human, the cameras setup etc. and hence a robust descriptor for gait classification. The duty-factor is basically a matter of measuring the ground support of the feet with respect to the stride. We estimate this by comparing the incoming silhouettes to a database of silhouettes with known ground support. Silhouettes are extracted using the codebook method and represented using shape contexts. The matching with database silhouettes is done using the Hungarian method. While manually estimated duty-factors show a clear classification the presented system contains misclassifications due to silhouette noise and ambiguities in the database silhouettes.
Heuristics for Provisioning Services to Workflows in XaaS Clouds

In XaaS clouds, resources as services (e.g., infrastructure, platform and software as a service) are sold to applications such as scientific and big data analysis workflows. Candidate services with various configurations (CPU type, memory size, number of machines and so on) for the same task may have different execution time and cost. Further, some services are priced rented by intervals that be shared among tasks of the same workflow to save service rental cost. Establishing a task-mode (service) mapping (to get a balance between time and cost) and tabling tasks on rented service instances are crucial for minimizing the client-oriented cost to rent services for the whole workflow. In this paper, a multiple complete critical-path based heuristic (CPIS) is developed for the task-mode mapping problem. A list based heuristic (LHCM) concerning the task processing cost and task-slot matching is developed for tabling tasks on service instances based on the result of task-mode mapping. Then, the effectiveness of the proposed CPIS is compared with that of the previously proposed CPIL, the existing state-of-the-art heuristics including PCP, SC-PCP ( an extension to PCP), DET, and CPLEX. The effectiveness of the proposed LHCM is evaluated with its use with different task-mode mapping algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed heuristics can reduce 24 percent of the service renting cost than the compared algorithms on the test benchmarks at most for non-shareable services. In addition, half of the service renting cost could be saved when LHCM is applied to consolidate tasks on rented service instances.
In Vivo Evidence for TonB Dimerization

ABSTRACT TonB, in complex with ExbB and ExbD, is required for the energy-dependent transport of ferric siderophores across the outer membrane of Escherichia coli, the killing of cells by group B colicins, and infection by phages T1 and φ80. To gain insights into the protein complex, TonB dimerization was studied by constructing hybrid proteins from complete TonB (containing amino acids 1 to 239) [TonB(1-239)] and the cytoplasmic fragment of ToxR which, when dimerized, activates the transcription of the cholera toxin gene ctx. ToxR(1-182)-TonB(1-239) activated the transcription of lacZ under the control of the ctx promoter (Pctx::lacZ). Replacement of the TonB transmembrane region by the ToxR transmembrane region resulted in the hybrid proteins ToxR(1-210)-TonB(33-239) and ToxR(1-210)-TonB(164-239), of which only the latter activated Pctx::lacZ transcription. Dimer formation was reduced but not abolished in a mutant lacking ExbB and ExbD, suggesting that these complex components may influence dimerization but are not strictly required and that the N-terminal cytoplasmic membrane anchor and the C-terminal region are important for dimer formation. The periplasmic TonB fragment, TonB(33-239), inhibits ferrichrome and ferric citrate transport and induction of the ferric citrate transport system. This competition provided a means to positively screen for TonB(33-239) mutants which displayed no inhibition. Single point mutations of inactive fragments selected in this manner were introduced into complete TonB, and the phenotypes of the TonB mutant strains were determined. The mutations located in the C-terminal half of TonB, three of which (Y163C, V188E, and R204C) were obtained separately by site-directed mutagenesis, as was the isolated F230V mutation, were studied in more detail. They displayed different activity levels for various TonB-dependent functions, suggesting function-related specificities which reflect differences in the interactions of TonB with various transporters and receptors.
Accuracy of brief and full forms of the Child Mania Rating Scale.

This study assesses the sensitivity of full and brief forms of a parent-rated mania scale to variations in diagnoses. Parents of a sample of 150 subjects either diagnosed with bipolar disorder (BD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or healthy controls (HC), completed the full Child Mania Rating Scale and other measures. We used single-parameter item-response theory models to produce a brief parent mania rating scale from the full version. The 10-item, brief Child Mania Rating Scale -- Parent (CMRS-P) version correlated . 93 with 11 items from the full CMRS-P that were not used in constructing the brief version, and showed accuracy comparable to the full scale in differentiating BD from ADHD, and in discriminating among bipolar subtypes.
Threshold Effects in Parameter Estimation as Phase Transitions in Statistical Mechanics

Threshold effects in the estimation of parameters of nonlinearly modulated, continuous-time, wide-band waveforms, are examined from a statistical physics perspective. These threshold effects are shown to be analogous to phase transitions of certain disordered physical systems in thermal equilibrium. The main message, in this work, is in demonstrating that this physical point of view may be insightful for understanding the interactions between two or more parameters to be estimated, from the aspects of the threshold effect.
The coding ecology: image coding via competition among experts

We consider the image-coding problem as a competitive ecology of specialists, each vying for the task of coding a portion of an image. Each specialist, or expert, derives its competitive advantage from its ability to concisely describe an underlying visual event (e.g., shadows, motion, occluding objects). In this paper, the metaphor of an auction informs the design of a predictive coder. Experts locate candidate regions of support, characterize the activity within, and submit their proposals in the form of bids passed along to an auctioneer. We describe the designs for six such experts, and examine candidate strategies for the decision unit (the auctioneer). We define protocols for comparing the bids, and compare overall coding performance using several examples.
Self-Perceived Competencies and Depression among Middle School Students in Japan and the United States

Predictors of self-reported depressive symptoms were investigated within groups of 125 middle school students from the United States and 99 middle school students from Japan. Multiple regression analyses indicated that self-perceptions of physical attractiveness, social acceptance, and behavioral conduct independently contributed to self-reported depression among United States students. Self-perceptions of interpersonal connectedness, peer social acceptance, behavioral conduct, and physical attractiveness independently contributed to self-reported depression among Japanese students. Self-perceptions of academic competence were not an independent predictor of depression in either group. In addition to revealing critical relations between specific domains of perceived competence and depression during early adolescence within each group of students, results indicated that common beliefs regarding associations between Japanese students' perceived academic competence and level of emotional distress may reflect an exception rather than a rule. Implications for preventive interventions and further research are discussed.