Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testing for efficacy in adaptive clinical trials with enrichment

Adaptive design of clinical trials has attracted considerable interest because of its potential of reducing costs and saving time in the clinical development process. In this paper, we consider the problem of assessing the effectiveness of a test treatment over a control by a two‐arm randomized clinical trial in a potentially heterogenous patient population. In particular, we study enrichment designs that use accumulating data from a clinical trial to adaptively determine patient subpopulation in which the treatment effect is eventually assessed. A hypothesis testing procedure and a lower confidence limit are presented for the treatment effect in the selected patient subgroups. The performances of the new methods are compared with existing approaches through a simulation study. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Frequency and Clinical Features of Dengue Infection in a Schoolchildren Cohort from Medellin, Colombia

To determine the incidence of dengue infection, we established active surveillance of febrile episodes in a cohort of schoolchildren from three schools in Medellin, Colombia. We followed a cohort of 2,379 schoolchildren in 2010 and followed 1,840 of these children the following year. During the follow-up time, 264 schoolchildren displayed 297 febrile episodes; of these, 23 episodes (7.7%) were caused by acute dengue infection. All four dengue serotypes were found, and all of the cases were mild. The most common symptoms in the dengue cases compared with those in other febrile illness were asthenia (96% versus 87%), anorexia (78% versus 57%), rhinorrhea (65.2% versus 58%), abdominal pain (56.5% versus 47.8%), arthralgia (43% versus 33%), and positive tourniquet test (13% versus 3%). This difference was not statistically significant. Pulse was elevated, and systolic arterial pressure was lower in dengue cases compared with other febrile illness (P < 0.05). Mosquito indexes were determined in 8 children's houses and in the schools. Aedes aegypti adults were found in both households and in schools, whereas Aedes aegypti larvae were found only in schools. These results showed an elevated dengue frequency in children, with symptoms similar to those of other febrile illness and transmission risk in households and schools.
Drifting reduction in progressive fine granularity scalable video coding

This paper investigates the drifting problem in Progressive Fine Granularity Scalable (PFGS) video coding, which arises from the fact that high quality references are used to predict the enhancement layer. Due to the unique property of the PFGS scheme, this paper first analyzes the occurrence and propagation of the drifting errors in details. As a result, an iterative model is established to simulate the drifting errors at the encoder. With the proposed drifting model, a decisionmaking mechanism can help the PFGS scheme to choose the coding mode of each macroblock in the enhancement layer. The experimental results show that the PFGS scheme incorporating the proposed technique can effectively reduce the drifting errors at low bit rates. Meanwhile, the PFGS scheme also improves the coding efficiency up to 1.8dB compared with the FGS scheme at moderate or high bit rates.
Justice without Borders: Human Rights Cases in U.S. Courts

In 1980 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals broke with years of legal tradition and ruled that human rights victims could sue their oppressors in federal court - even if the alleged violations occurred outside the country. This court based the extension of its authority on a provision of the 1789 Judiciary Act now referred to as the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). ATCA cases present a unique opportunity to study judicial behavior in the face of separation of powers interests, traditions of judicial restraint, sovereign immunity defenses, and an active internationalist movement to extend human rights guarantees worldwide. Combining legal analysis with quantitative methodology, I find that U.S. federal courts are slowly accepting an internationalist approach to human rights, and that interest groups are largely driving this transformation. Sovereignty concerns and judicial ideology are not conditioning case outcomes, but party resources and separation of powers issues are.
Bad vessels beware! Semaphorins will sort you out!

Secreted class 3 semaphorins (Sema3), which signal through plexin receptors and mostly use neuropilins (Nrps) as co‐receptors, were initially identified for their ability to steer navigating axons in the developing embryo. They were later found to control angiogenesis in physiological and pathological settings as well (Serini et al, ). Indeed, the development of a novel and aberrant vasculature is central to the pathogenesis of several human diseases, including cancer and vascular retinopathies (Goel et al, ). A large body of evidence demonstrates that in cancer, a massive regression of angiogenesis may trigger hypoxia‐driven genetic programs, which in turn can overcome drug inhibitory mechanisms and ultimately favour cancer cell invasion and dissemination. Thus, an emerging concept in molecular medicine is to devise therapeutic strategies that, rather than simply inhibiting angiogenesis, can foster the re‐establishment of a structural and functional normal network, a phenomenon often referred to as “vessel normalization” (Goel et al, ) (Fig ). Of note, and in this context, Sema3A (Maione et al, ) and Sema3F (Wong et al, ) have been reported to favour the normalization of cancer vasculature and impair metastatic dissemination.
Electron tomography of cells

Abstract The electron microscope has contributed deep insights into biological structure since its invention nearly 80 years ago. Advances in instrumentation and methodology in recent decades have now enabled electron tomography to become the highest resolution three-dimensional (3D) imaging technique available for unique objects such as cells. Cells can be imaged either plastic-embedded or frozen-hydrated. Then the series of projection images are aligned and back-projected to generate a 3D reconstruction or ‘tomogram’. Here, we review how electron tomography has begun to reveal the molecular organization of cells and how the existing and upcoming technologies promise even greater insights into structural cell biology.
Protective role of Zingiber officinale Roscoe on Aceclofenac induced oxidative stress in rat liver.

Oxidative stress due to abnormal production of reactive oxygen molecules (ROM) is believed to be involved in the etiology of toxicities of many xenobiotics. In this study protective effect of Zingiber officinale (ZO) against Aceclofenac (ACE) induced oxidative stress in rat liver was evaluated. Twenty four young wistar rats were divided into four groups as follows: control group, ACE (single dose of 10 mg/kg body wt., i.p), ACE plus ZO (250 mg/kg) and ACE plus ZO (500mg/kg). The activities of antioxidant enzymes such as superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), reduced glutathione (GSH), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and glutathione S-transferase (GST) (p<0.001) as well as the concentration of malondialdehyde, as an indicator of lipid peroxidation, were measured to evaluate oxidative stress in homogenates of the liver. ACE administration increased malondialdehyde levels (p<0.001) and decreased SOD, CAT, GSH, GPx and GST activities. Co-administration of ZO as a dose dependent manner (250 & 500 mg/kg) with ACE injections caused significantly decreased malondialdehyde levels as well as elevates SOD, CAT, GSH, GPx and GST (p<0.05 & p<0.001) activities in liver tissue when compared with ACE alone. It can be concluded that Zingiber officinale may prevent ACE-induced oxidative changes in liver by reducing reactive oxygen species.
Telearch - Integrated visual simulation environment for collaborative virtual archaeology.

Archaeologists collect vast amounts of digital data around the world; however, they lack tools for integration and collaborative interaction to support reconstruction and interpretation process. TeleArch software is aimed to integrate different data sources and provide real-time interaction tools for remote collaboration of geographically distributed scholars inside a shared virtual environment. The framework also includes audio, 2D and 3D video streaming technology to facilitate remote presence of users. In this paper, we present several experimental case studies to demonstrate the integration and interaction with 3D models and geographical information system (GIS) data in this collaborative environment. TELEARCH INTEGRATED VISUAL SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT FOR COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ARCHAEOLOGY Gregorij Kurillo1 and Maurizio Forte2 1 University of California,Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences 736 Sutardja Dai Hall, Berkeley 2 University of California, Merced, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts Corresponding author: mforte@ucmerced.edu Received: 10/02/2012 Accepted: 23/02/2012
Stressing Out: Connecting Race, Gender, and Stress with Faculty Productivity

This study uses multilevel modeling to analyze data from a national sample of full-time, undergraduate faculty at four-year institutions to examine the connections among race, gender, sources of stress, and productivity in the areas of research, teaching, and service. We find that stress due to discrimination has particular negative salience for faculty of color By contrast, stress due to family obligations significantly and positively correlated with faculty's adoption of student-centered teaching practices and participation in civic-minded activities.
Single-Photon Avalanche Diode CMOS Sensor for Time-Resolved Fluorescence Measurements

A single-photon avalanche diode-based pixel array for the analysis of fluorescence phenomena is presented. Each 180 times 150 - mum2 pixel integrates a single photon detector combined with an active quenching circuit and a 17-bit digital events counter. On-chip master logic provides the digital control phases required by the pixel array with a full programmability of the main timing synchronisms. The pixel exhibits an average dark count rate of 3 kcps and a dynamic range of over 120-dB in time uncorrelated operation. A complete characterization of the single photon avalanche diode characteristics is reported. Time-resolved fluorescence measurements have been demonstrated by detecting the fluorescence decay of quantum-dot samples without the aid of any optical filters for excitation laser light cutoff.
Debugging Multithreaded Programs Using Symbolic Analysis

Debugging multithreaded software is challenging because the basic assumption that underlies sequential software debugging, i.e. the program behavior is deterministic under fixed inputs, is no longer valid due to the nondeterminism brought by thread scheduling. To restore this basic assumption, we propose a proactive debugging method so that programmers can debug multithreaded programs as if they were sequential. Our approach is based on the synergistic integration of a set of new symbolic analysis and dynamic analysis techniques. In particular, symbolic analysis is used to investigate the program behavior under multiple thread interleavings and then drive the dynamic execution to new branches. Dynamic analysis is used to execute these new branches and in turn guide the symbolic analysis further. The net effect of applying this feedback loop is a systematic and complete coverage of the program behavior under a fixed test input.
A modular synchronizing FIFO for NoCs

Systems-on-chip designs often use functional blocks operating at different clock frequencies. This motivates the use of an asynchronous network-on-chip (NoC) with synchronizing FIFOs interfacing between the NoC and the functional blocks. To minimize design time, these FIFOs should be constructed from cells available in a standard cell library and configurable to work in a wide range of applications. We present a modular synchronizing FIFO design that can be implemented using logic gates from a typical standard-cell library. The FIFO has interchangeable input and output interfaces for edge-triggered synchronous communication and for two asynchronous handshake protocols: asP* and LEDR. The FIFO capacity, synchronizer latency and interface protocols are independent parameters, allowing the FIFO to be easily configured for different NoC requirements. We evaluate performance using post-layout simulation results and analyze the metastability induced failure rate for synchronization latencies from half a clock cycle up to three clock cycles.
Is Chip-Multiprocessing the End of Real-Time Scheduling?

Chip-multiprocessing is considered the future path for performance enhancements in computer architecture. Eight processor cores on a single chip are state-of-the art and several hundreds of cores on a single die are expected in the near future. General purpose computing is facing the challenge how to use the many cores. However, in embedded real-time systems thread-level parallelism is naturally used. In this paper we assume a system where we can dedicate a single core for each thread. In that case classic real-time scheduling disappears. However, the threads, running on their dedicated core, still compete for a shared resource, the main memory. A time-sliced memory arbiter is used to avoid timing influences between threads. The schedule of the arbiter is integrated into the worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis. The WCET results are used as a feedback to regenerate the arbiter schedule. Therefore, we schedule memory access instead of CPU time.
Nonword repetition and young children's receptive vocabulary: A longitudinal study

A longitudinal study investigated the claim that phonological memory contributes to vocabulary acquisition in young children. In the first phase, children were given tests of receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, nonword repetition, phonological sensitivity (or “awareness”), and performance IQ. In the second phase, children were given the nonword repetition and receptive vocabulary tests. In Session 1, both nonword repetition and phonological sensitivity accounted for variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar after performance IQ effects were controlled. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled, nonword repetition did not account for significant additional variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar. When performance IQ and autoregression effects were controlled, all Session 1 verbal ability measures predicted Session 2 vocabulary, but only Session 1 vocabulary predicted Session 2 nonword repetition. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled, Session 1 nonword repetition (leniently scored) predicted Session 2 vocabulary. Overall, these findings show qualified support for the claim that the capacity component of nonword repetition contributes directly to vocabulary in young children. They suggest that the association between nonword repetition and vocabulary in young children may, to a substantial extent, reflect a latent phonological processing ability that is also manifest in phonological sensitivity.
Private Convex Optimization for Empirical Risk Minimization with Applications to High-dimensional Regression

We consider differentially private algorithms for convex empirical risk minimization (ERM). Differential privacy (Dwork et al., 2006b) is a recently introduced notion of privacy which guarantees that an algorithm’s output does not depend on the data of any individual in the dataset. This is crucial in fields that handle sensitive data, such as genomics, collaborative filtering, and economics. Our motivation is the design of private algorithms for sparse learning problems, in which one aims to find solutions (e.g., regression parameters) with few non-zero coefficients. To this end: (a) We significantly extend the analysis of the “objective perturbation” algorithm of Chaudhuri et al. (2011) for convex ERM problems. We show that their method can be modified to use less noise (be more accurate), and to apply to problems with hard constraints and non-differentiable regularizers. We also give a tighter, data-dependent analysis of the additional error introduced by their method. A key tool in our analysis is a new nontrivial limit theorem for differential privacy which is of independent interest: if a sequence of differentially private algorithms converges, in a weak sense, then the limit algorithm is also differentially private. In particular, our methods give the best known algorithms for differentially private linear regression. These methods work in settings where the number of parameters p is less than the number of samples n. (b) We give the first two private algorithms for sparse regression problems in high-dimensional settings, where p is much larger than n. We analyze their performance for linear regression: under standard assumptions on the data, our algorithms have vanishing empirical risk for n = poly(s, log p) when there exists a good regression vector with s nonzero coefficients. Our algorithms demonstrate that randomized algorithms for sparse regression problems can be both stable and accurate – a combination which is impossible for deterministic algorithms.
Lyman Limit Systems in Cosmological Simulations

We used a cosmological simulation with self-consistent radiative transfer to investigate the physical nature of Lyman limit systems at z = 4. In agreement with previous studies, we find that most of the Lyman limit systems are ionized by the cosmological background, while higher column density systems seem to be illuminated by the local sources of radiation. In addition, we find that most of the Lyman limit systems in our simulations are located within the virial radii of galaxies with a wide range of masses and are physically associated with them ("bits and pieces" of galaxy formation). While the finite resolution of our simulations cannot exclude an existence of a second population of self-shielded, neutral gas clouds located in low-mass dark matter halos ("minihalos"), our simulations are not consistent with minihalos dominating the total abundance of Lyman limit systems.
Hierarchical Regression for Single Image Super Resolution via Clustering and Sparse Representation

Regression-based image super resolution (SR) methods have shown great advantage in time consumption while maintaining similar or improved quality performance compared to other learning-based methods. In this paper, we propose a novel single image SR method based on hierarchical regression to further improve the quality performance. As an improvement to other regression-based methods, we introduce a hierarchical scheme into the process of learning multiple regressors. First, training samples are grouped into different clusters according to their geometry similarity, which generates the structure layer. Then in each cluster, a compact dictionary can be learned by Sparse Coding (SC) method and the training samples can be further grouped by dictionary atoms to form the detail layer. Last, a series of projection matrixes, which anchored to dictionary atoms, can be learned by linear regression. Experiment results show that hierarchical scheme can lead to regression that is more precise. Our method achieves superior high quality results compared with several state-of-the-art methods.
A fuzzy basis function vector-based multivariable adaptive controller for nonlinear systems

In this paper, a new fuzzy basis function vector (FBFV) approach for the adaptive control of multivariable nonlinear systems is presented. With this method, the nonlinear plant is first linearized. The linearized bias and uncertainties as well as disturbances are assumed to be included in the model structure and their upper bound will be adaptively learned by the FBFV method. The output of the FBFV is used as the parameters of the robust controller in the sense that both the robustness and the asymptotic error convergence can be obtained for the multivariable nonlinear system. The effectiveness of the proposed analysis and design method is illustrated with a simulated example.
Problem-Focused Coping and Self-efficacy as Correlates of Quality of Life and Severity of Fibromyalgia in Primary Fibromyalgia Patients

ObjectivesPatients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) often experience problems such as poor quality of life (QoL), loss of self-efficacy (SE), inappropriate coping behavior, and chronic widespread pain along with other symptoms. Recent studies have indicated that sense of SE and effective coping strategies (CSs) are the crux on which the management of chronic pain and enrichment of QoL of FMS patients depend. Realizing the importance of this subject for the rehabilitation of the people with FMS, this study aimed at analyzing the correlation between severity of FMS, and QoL, SE, and CSs among the patients of FMS. MethodsOne hundred patients with fibromyalgia (FM) and 100 control subjects were studied. Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire–Revised, Quality of Life Scale, Arthritis Self-efficacy Scale, and COPE Scales for CSs were administered to both the groups. ResultsSignificantly lower SE, poor QoL, and less use of CSs were reported by FM patients (P < 0.01) vis-à-vis healthy people. Problem-focused coping (r = 0.27, P < 0.01) and SE (r = 0.20, P < 0.05) were found to be significantly and positively associated with QoL. Components of Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire–Revised, namely, pain, function, and symptoms, were found to be significantly and negatively associated with problem-focused coping (P < 0.05), SE (P < 0.01), and QoL (P < 0.01). ConclusionsThis study confirms that problem-focused CSs and SE are important correlates of QoL and severity of FM in Indian as well as other populations.
Effect of high‐dose methylprednisolone treatment on Th17 cells in patients with multiple sclerosis in relapse

Objectives – Growing evidences have suggested that Th17 cells are involved in the pathogenic mechanisms of multiple sclerosis (MS). Treatment with high‐dose intravenous methylprednisolone (IVMP) has beneficial effects on functional recovery in patients with MS during relapse. The present study was designed to analyze the influences of IVMP on Th17 cells in patients with MS after a 5‐day high‐dose IVMP treatment.
A distributed search service for peer-to-peer file sharing in mobile applications

In this paper, we present the concept of passive distributed indexing, a general-purpose distributed search service for mobile file sharing applications, which is based on peer-to-peer technology. The service enables resource-effective searching for files distributed across mobile devices based on simple queries. Building blocks of PDI constitute local broadcast transmission of query- and response messages, together with caching of query results at every device participating in PDI. Based on these building blocks, the need for flooding the entire network with query messages can be eliminated for most application. In extensive simulation studies, we demonstrate the performance of PDI. Because the requirements of a typical mobile file sharing application are not known-or even do not exist at all-we study the performance of PDI for different system environments and application requirements. We show that due to the flexible design PDI can be employed for several kinds of applications.
Human gait recognition for virtual environments exploration

This paper presents a novel use of sensor sytem for human gait recognition evolution to be employed in virtual environments exploration. The system allows free human motion inside a virtual environment employing human gait recognition. Experimental sessions have been organized in order to acquire acceleration data related to walking and running of several subjects. We present an algorithm that recognizes a person gait in real-time. The recognized motion can be used to enhance the presence of the user in the virtual environment. A simple scenario has been developed to assess the system functionality. The experiments carried out show that our system is suitable to classify human motion, count steps and, moreover, can be used both in virtual and augmented reality (VR) environments for an improved interaction.