Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrocardiographic Differences between COPD Patients Evaluated for Lung Transplantation With and without Pulmonary Hypertension

Abstract Introduction: Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is an indicator of poor prognosis in COPD patients; particularly in those with mean pulmonary artery pressure ≥ 40 mm Hg. Electrocardiography (ECG) might be useful for screening of this condition. Methods: Retrospective study of COPD patients evaluated for lung transplantation in whom we analyzed the 12-lead ECG performed closest to the time of right heart catheterization. Results: We included 142 patients. PH was present in 90 patients (63%) and 16 (11%) had a mean PAP ≥ 40 mmHg. The PR interval was longer in PH patients (151 (29) versus 139 (22) ms, p = 0.01) and T wave axis had a left shift (56.9 (32) versus 68.7 (19) degrees, p = 0.006). PR interval was longer (178.5 (35) versus 142.2 (23) ms, p = 0.001), T wave axis had a leftward deflection (63.6 (24) versus 42.8 (46) degrees, p = 0.005) and S wave in lead I was larger (0.19 (0.13) versus 0.12 (0.12) mV, p = 0.03) in patients with mean PAP ≥ 40 mmHg. A PR interval > 137 ms and S wave in DI > 0.02 mV had a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 59.5% to identify COPD patients with a mean PAP ≥ 40 mmHg. Conclusion: There are significant ECG differences between advanced COPD patients with and without PH; however the ECG is an inadequate tool to differentiate between the groups. A prolonged PR interval suggests the presence of severe PH.
Distinctive and pervasive alterations in aqueous humor protein composition following different types of glaucoma surgery

Purpose To investigate whether specific glaucoma surgeries are associated with differences in aqueous humor protein concentrations compared to eyes without filters. Methods In this cross-sectional study, aqueous humor samples were prospectively collected from control subjects who underwent routine cataract surgery (n=14) and from patients who had different glaucoma filters: Baerveldt aqueous shunt (n=6), Ahmed aqueous shunt (n=6), trabeculectomy (n=5), and Ex-Press trabeculectomy (n=3). Total protein concentrations were determined with Bradford assay. Tryptic digests were analyzed with liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Proteins were identified with high confidence using stringent criteria and were quantitatively compared with a label-free platform. Relative protein quantities were compared across groups with ANOVA. Post hoc pair-wise comparisons were adjusted for multiple comparisons. Results Compared to the control eyes, the aqueous humor protein concentration was increased approximately tenfold in the Ahmed and Baerveldt eyes and fivefold in the trabeculectomy and Ex-Press eyes. Overall, 718 unique proteins, splice variants, or isoforms were identified. No differences in the protein concentrations were detected between the Baerveldt and Ahmed groups. Likewise, the trabeculectomy and Ex-Press groups were remarkably similar. Therefore, the aqueous shunt groups were pooled, and the trabeculectomy groups were pooled for a three-way comparison with the controls. More than 500 proteins differed significantly in relative abundance (ANOVA p<0.01) among the control, aqueous shunt, and trabeculectomy groups. Functional analyses suggested these alterations in relative protein abundance affected dozens of signaling pathways. Conclusions Different glaucoma surgical procedures were associated with marked increases in the aqueous humor protein concentration and distinctive changes in the relative abundance of numerous proteins involved in multiple signaling pathways.
Tutorial on cross-domain recommender systems

Cross-domain recommender systems aim to generate or enhance personalized recommendations in a target domain by exploiting knowledge (mainly user preferences) from other source domains. This may beneficial for generating better recommendations, e.g. mitigating the cold-start and sparsity problems in a target domain, and enabling personalized cross-selling for items from multiple domains. In this tutorial, we formalize the cross-domain recommendation problem, categorize and survey state of the art cross-domain recommender systems, discuss related evaluation issues, and outline future research directions on the topic.
Optimal dimensioning of dynamic WDM networks

In this paper we formulate an integer programming model to solve the problem of dimensioning a dynamic WDM optical network taking into account the link capacity as well as the number of transmitters and receivers required in each node. Previous work has only considered the dimensioning of links. The objective function is minimizing the network cost as a function of the link capacity and the number of transmitters/receivers in each node. The constraint is given by the target blocking probability that all connections must meet. Results show that, compared to the classical approach of dimensioning just the link capacity, the proposed dimensioning method achieves a significantly lower network cost by decreasing the capacity required in the network links as well as the number of transmitters and receivers in the network nodes. In the cases studied, at low traffic loads the number of transmitters/receivers required in the network was as low as the half of the number obtained by a dimensioning that only takes the number of wavelengths into account.
The Evolution and Social Dynamics of Compassion

The inner processes that make compassion possible arose from the evolutionary advantage of caring for others, especially offspring, kin and in-group allies. This paper explores issues in defining compassion and its link to similar concepts such as altruism. It also explores compassion as a social motive and social mentality that choreographs social interactions and how the successful enactment of compassion is dependent on certain competencies such as sympathy, empathy, perspective taking, and distress tolerance (among others), as well as social contexts. As a motivational system, compassion has to compete with other socially choreographed motives, such as tribalism and individualistic competitiveness – much darker sides of the human psyche that have been harmful in human history. One of the challenges for compassion is to explore not only how it can promote personal well-being but also how it can counteract the destructive sides of our other motives and social mentalities.
A Time Based Analysis of Data Processing on Hadoop Cluster

Data when it becomes in that much amount that it cannot be managed by the traditional database management system then it is Big data. It is difficult to manage this much amount of the data. Hadoop is a technological answer to the Big Data. Data storage and retrieval of information from the data is done by the Hadoop Distributed File System and the Map Reduce Programming model. MapReduce provides effective bench marks for retrieving the information from the Big Data. In this paper we present our experimental work done on the Hadoop Cluster. We have analyzed the time required by the cluster for processing the data with increasing number of nodes into the cluster. We started with a single node and then increase the node by one each time. We have analyzed three types of time. The real time, user time, system time is analyzed.
Efficiently supporting multiple similarity queries for mining in metric databases

Metric databases are databases where a metric distance function is defined for pairs of database objects. In such databases, similarity queries in the form of range queries or k-nearest neighbor queries are the most important queries. In traditional query processing, single queries are issued independently by different users. In many data mining applications, however, the database is typically explored by iteratively asking similarity queries for answers of previous similarity queries. In this paper, we introduce a generic scheme for such data mining algorithms and we investigate two orthogonal approaches, reducing I/O cost as well as CPU cost, to speed-up the processing of multiple similarity queries. The proposed techniques apply to any type of similarity query and to an implementation based on an index or using a sequential scan. Parallelization yields an additional impressive speed-up. An extensive performance evaluation confirms the efficiency of our approach.
Crustal and uppermost mantle shear velocity structure adjacent to the Juan de Fuca Ridge from ambient seismic noise

Based on 6 months of OBS data from the Cascadia Initiative experiment near the Juan de Fuca Ridge, we obtain Rayleigh wave group and phase speed curves from 6 s to about 20 s period from ambient noise cross correlations among all station pairs. We confirm the hypothesis that the dispersion data can be fit by a simple age‐dependent formula, which we invert using a Bayesian Monte Carlo formalism for an age‐dependent shear wave speed model of the crust and uppermost mantle between crustal ages of 0.5 and 3.5 Ma. Igneous crustal structure is age invariant with a thickness of 7 km, water depth varies in a prescribed way, and sedimentary thickness and mantle shear wave speeds are found to increase systematically with crustal age. The mantle model possesses a shallow low shear velocity zone (LVZ) with a velocity minimum at about 20 km depth at 0.5 Ma with lithosphere thickening monotonically with age. Minimum mantle shear velocities at young ages are lower than predicted from a half‐space conductively cooling model (HSCM) and the lithosphere thickens with age faster than the HSCM, providing evidence for nonconductive cooling in the young lithosphere. The shallow LVZ is consistent with expectations for a largely dehydrated depleted (harzburgite) mantle with a small, retained near‐ridge partial melt fraction probably less than 1% with melt extending to a lithospheric age of approximately 1 Ma (i.e., ∼30 km from the ridge).
Exploiting path diversity to enhance aggregating throughput for multihomed wireless devices

Multi-homed wireless devices equipped with multiple network interfaces can transmit data over multiple access paths simultaneously for high-speed services. It is essential for data transmission to select suitable number of paths to use from all available paths. At real multihomed network, multiple paths are likely to overlap each other and share the same bottleneck, which will weaken path diversity drastically. Spurred by this observation, selection of multiple paths should consider path correlation to select multiple independent paths as much as possible. In this paper, we propose a multi-path selection scheme to avoid underlying shared bottleneck between topologically joint paths. The results demonstrate that our approach under different network conditions is more accurate than other selection schemes, even with burst background traffic.
Coupled human and natural system dynamics as key to the sustainability of Lake Victoria's ecosystem services

East Africa's Lake Victoria provides resources and services to millions of people on the lake's shores and abroad. In particular, the lake's fisheries are an important source of protein, employment, and international economic connections for the whole region. Nonetheless, stock dynamics are poorly understood and currently unpredictable. Furthermore, fishery dynamics are intricately connected to other supporting services of the lake as well as to lakeshore societies and economies. Much research has been carried out piecemeal on different aspects of Lake Victoria's system; e.g., societies, biodiversity, fisheries, and eutrophication. However, to disentangle drivers and dynamics of change in this complex system, we need to put these pieces together and analyze the system as a whole. We did so by first building a qualitative model of the lake's social-ecological system. We then investigated the model system through a qualitative loop analysis, and finally examined effects of changes on the system state and structure. The model and its contextual analysis allowed us to investigate system-wide chain reactions resulting from disturbances. Importantly, we built a tool that can be used to analyze the cascading effects of management options and establish the requirements for their success. We found that high connectedness of the system at the exploitation level, through fisheries having multiple target stocks, can increase the stocks' vulnerability to exploitation but reduce society's vulnerability to variability in individual stocks. We describe how there are multiple pathways to any change in the system, which makes it difficult to identify the root cause of changes but also broadens the management toolkit. Also, we illustrate how nutrient enrichment is not a self-regulating process, and that explicit management is necessary to halt or reverse eutrophication. This model is simple and usable to assess system-wide effects of management policies, and can serve as a paving stone for future quantitative analyses of system dynamics at local scales.
Denatured State Structural Property Determines Protein Stabilization by Macromolecular Crowding: A Thermodynamic and Structural Approach

Understanding of protein structure and stability gained to date has been acquired through investigations made under dilute conditions where total macromolecular concentration never surpasses 10 g l−1. However, biological macromolecules are known to evolve and function under crowded intracellular environments that comprises of proteins, nucleic acids, ribosomes and carbohydrates etc. Crowded environment is known to result in altered biological properties including thermodynamic, structural and functional aspect of macromolecules as compared to the macromolecules present in our commonly used experimental dilute buffers (for example, Tris HCl or phosphate buffer). In this study, we have investigated the thermodynamic and structural consequences of synthetic crowding agent (Ficoll 70) on three different proteins (Ribonuclease-A, lysozyme and holo α-lactalbumin) at different pH values. We report here that the effect of crowding is protein dependent in terms of protein thermal stability and structure. We also observed that the structural characteristics of the denatured state determines if crowding will have an effect or not on the protein stability.
Investigating the Best Practice of Teachers in Conflict Management, MARA Education Institutions, Malaysia

This study attempts to investigate the views, processes, and, best practice of conflict management among the MARA - Majlis Amanah Rakyat or Board of People Trust – teachers in the MARA education institutions. The sample of the study was 306 teachers conveniently selected from MARA education institutions in Malaysia. The data was processed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 17.0 for Windows. The finding shows that the highest perception of MARA teachers was ‘conflict can be thought as problem, we need to find the source and take the appropriate steps to solve it’ mean 4.40 and SD 0.585. In relation to the process of managing conflict, the perception was highest on ‘solution finding process is needed in conflict management’ mean 4.29 and SD 0.698. Finally, the finding indicates that the best practice of conflict management among MARA teachers was ‘conflict can be solved if there is understanding between parties and find the solution together’ mean 4.40 and SD 0.618. It is believed that if the teachers regardless of background can manage effectively the conflict in schools or colleges and foster healthy teacher-administrator relationship, teaching and learning can be improved towards facing the challenges in the era of globalization and realization of vision 2020, Malaysia, and beyond.
Saving Energy through Collaborative Eco-aware Everyday Things

The reduction of energy waste in any of its forms and everywhere is a major challenge of our society. An important proportion of such waste is due to the misuse of consumer appliances of shared use in public areas (computers, printers, coffee makers, etc.). To face this issue, we have transformed everyday consumer devices into collaborative Eco-aware everyday things. The presented work contributes with a first approach to reduce the learning time of Eco-aware objects to perform accurate predictions. The general idea is to enable a platform where Eco-aware appliances interchange their collected usage pattern in a cooperative manner to reduce energy wasting in order to alleviate the cold-start problem for new coming Eco-aware appliances. To this end, we have simulated a collaboration between two of these appliances, leading to an energy reduction regarding non-collaborative objects.
Large-deflection statics analysis of active cardiac catheters through co-rotational modelling

This paper presents a co-rotational concept for large-deflection formulation of cardiac catheters. Using this approach, the catheter is first discretized with a number of equal length beam elements and nodes, and the rigid body motions of an individual beam element are separated from its deformations. Therefore, it is adequate for modelling arbitrarily large deflections of a catheter with linear elastic analysis at the local element level. A novel design of active cardiac catheter of 9 Fr in diameter at the beginning of the paper is proposed, which is based on the contra-rotating double helix patterns and is improved from the previous prototypes. The modelling section is followed by MATLAB simulations of various deflections when the catheter is exerted different types of loads. This proves the feasibility of the presented modelling approach. To the best knowledge of the authors, it is the first to utilize this methodology for large-deflection static analysis of the catheter, which will enable more accurate control of robot-assisted cardiac catheterization procedures. Future work would include further experimental validations.
Sumoylation of the budding yeast kinetochore protein Ndc10 is required for Ndc10 spindle localization and regulation of anaphase spindle elongation

Posttranslational modification by the ubiquitin-like protein SUMO (small ubiquitin-like modifier) is emerging as an important regulator in many cellular processes, including genome integrity. In this study, we show that the kinetochore proteins Ndc10, Bir1, Ndc80, and Cep3, which mediate the attachment of chromosomes to spindle microtubules, are sumoylated substrates in budding yeast. Furthermore, we show that Ndc10, Bir1, and Cep3 but not Ndc80 are desumoylated upon exposure to nocodazole, highlighting the possibility of distinct roles for sumoylation in modulating kinetochore protein function and of a potential link between the sumoylation of kinetochore proteins and mitotic checkpoint function. We find that lysine to arginine mutations that eliminate the sumoylation of Ndc10 cause chromosome instability, mislocalization of Ndc10 from the mitotic spindle, abnormal anaphase spindles, and a loss of Bir1 sumoylation. These data suggest that sumoylation of Ndc10 and other kinetochore proteins play a critical role during the mitotic process.
New Development in Sham Acupuncture Needle

Due to the lack of an appropriate placebo, the general scientific society has questioned studies on the effects of acupuncture. The double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial is said to be the gold standard for showing that a treatment has a specific effect over placebo. But acu‐ puncture treatments undoubtedly involve placebo effects. In order to support the study of acupuncture’s effects and to give more credibility to acupuncture studies in the era of the EBM(Evidence Based Medicine), a thoroughly tested double-blind placebo for acupuncture needs to be developed.
Comparative studies of intracellular transport of secretory proteins

The physiology of protein intracellular transport and secretion by cell types thought to be free from short-term control has been compared with that of the pancreatic acinar cell, using pulse-chase protocols to follow biosynthetically-labeled secretory products. Data previously obtained (Tartakoff, A.M., and P. Vassalli. J. Exp. Med. 146:1332-1345) has shown that plasma-cell immunoglobulin (Ig) secretion is inhibited by respiratory inhibitors, by partial Na/K equilibration effected by the carboxylic ionophore monensin, and by calcium withdrawal effected by the carboxylic ionophore A 23187 in the presence of ethylene glycol bis (beta-aminoethylether)-N,N,N',N'-tetraacetic acid (EGTA) and absence of calcium. We report here that both inhibition of respiration and treatment with monensin slow secretion by fibroblasts, and also macrophages and slow intracellular transport (though not discharge per se) by the exocrine pancreatic cells. Attempted calcium withdrawal is inhibitory for fibroblasts but not for macrophages. The elimination of extracellular calcium or addition of 50 mM KCl has no major effect on secretory rate of either fibroblasts or macrophages. Electron microscopic examination of all cell types shows that monensin causes a rapid and impressive dilation of Golgi elements. Combined cell fractionation and autoradiographic studies of the pancreas show that the effect of monensin is exerted at the point of the exit of secretory protein from the Golgi apparatus. Other steps in intracellular transport proceed at normal rates. These observations suggest a common effect of the cytoplasmic Na/K balance at the Golgi level and lead to a model of intracellular transport in which secretory product obligatorily passes through Golgi elements (cisternae? ) that are sensitive to monensin. Thus, intracellular transport follows a similar course in both regulated and nonregulated secretory cells up to the level of distal Golgi elements.
Les déterminants organisationnels d’une GRH ‘anti-bienveillante’ : le cas du harcèlement moral

Le concept de harcelement moral fait l’objet d’un debat. Certains comme Hirigoyen (1998, 2001), initiatrice du debat sur le harcelement moral, ont une approche plus individuelle du harcelement moral centree autour d’un « jeu » pathologique entre un « bourreau » et une victime. D’autres comme Le Goff (2008) ont une approche plus organisationnelle. Le Goff note ainsi que le theme du harcelement moral opere un changement dans l’abord des problemes en entreprise qui tend a occulter les analyses en termes de « facteurs objectifs » et de processus (technologiques, economiques, sociaux,…) dont on s’efforce d’analyser la logique et les effets pour ceux qui travaillent. Cette recherche privilegiera cette derniere approche. Nous realiserons une analyse quantitative sur les antecedents organisationnels (organisation du travail, conditions de travail, relations sociales, ressources de l’emploi) du harcelement moral a partir des donnees de l’enquete nationale Sumer 2002-2003 portant sur 24 486 salaries.
On the Capacity of Multiplicative Finite-Field Matrix Channels

This paper deals with the multiplicative finite-field matrix channel, a discrete memoryless channel whose input and output are matrices (over a finite field) related by a multiplicative transfer matrix. The model considered here assumes that all transfer matrices with the same rank are equiprobable, so that the channel is completely characterized by the rank distribution of the transfer matrix. This model is seen to be more flexible than previously proposed ones in describing random linear network coding systems subject to link erasures, while still being sufficiently simple to allow tractability. The model is also conservative in the sense that its capacity provides a lower bound on the capacity of any channel with the same rank distribution. A main contribution is to express the channel capacity as the solution of a convex optimization problem which can be easily solved by numerical computation. For the special case of constant-rank input, a closed-form expression for the capacity is obtained. The behavior of the channel for asymptotically large field size or packet length is studied, and it is shown that constant-rank input suffices in this case. Finally, it is proved that the well-known approach of treating inputs and outputs as subspaces is information-lossless even in this more general model.