Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changing water temperatures: a surface water archive for England and Wales

The temperature of water in lakes, rivers and streams has a fundamental influence on aquatic organisms, ecological processes and the potency of many pollutants. We expect water temperature in the UK to increase under projected climate change, but rtes and spatial variation of change remain unclear for inland waters. It is also unclear how we might manage land and river flow regimes to modify river temperature where this may be desirable, for example, to protect fish from lethal temperatures. Although water temperature broadly correlates with air temperature, the drivers of surface water temperature involve dynamic heat (energy) exchanges at the water surface and river bed and complex hydrological fluxes. To date, published reports of water temperature change in British rivers have been based on a limited number of sites: these have provided useful monitoring data on the thermal processes of rivers but rather less about the thermal regime of rivers. Our understanding of river thermal spatio-temporal variability and processes remains incomplete. In part, this has been related to a lack of long-term data across a range of different environments. The Environment Agency has recently created a surface water temperature archive for England and Wales based on measurements at over 30 000 sites, with observations extending back to between <5 and 30 years. The archive is being used to assess post-1990 trends in water temperature across England and Wales. Here, we briefly describe the archive and its potential uses. We present preliminary observations of the variation in river water temperature across England and Wales and the changing relationship between water and air temperatures at and between sites. We also illustrate the potential for exploring ecological response to changes in water temperature.
Managing Uncertainty in Autonomic Cloud Elasticity Controllers

Elasticity allows a cloud system to maintain an optimal user experience by automatically acquiring and releasing resources. Autoscaling-adding or removing resources automatically on the fly-involves specifying threshold-based rules to implement elasticity policies. However, the elasticity rules must be specified through quantitative values, which requires cloud resource management knowledge and expertise. Furthermore, existing approaches don't explicitly deal with uncertainty in cloud-based software, where noise and unexpected events are common. The authors propose a control-theoretic approach that manages the behavior of a cloud environment as a dynamic system. They integrate a fuzzy cloud controller with an online learning mechanism, putting forward a framework that takes the human out of the dynamic adaptation loop and can cope with various sources of uncertainty in the cloud.
Evaluation Measures for Depression Prediction and Affective Computing

A variety of evaluation measures are being used to validate systems in depression prediction and affective computing. Among them, the most common measures focus on the error between the ground truth and predictions. However, when the ground truth is ordinal such as in psychiatric scores, ranking information is more important than the actual error. Therefore, this study systematically analyses the properties of classification, error-based and ranking measures particularly using classification accuracy, root mean square error (RMSE) and Spearman rank correlation coefficient, with the aim of identifying suitable measures for evaluating depression prediction and affective computing. For the purpose of analysis, we employed both synthetic data and real depression prediction systems evaluated with the AVEC2017 depression corpus. Outcomes of the experiments suggest that RMSE and classification accuracy, which are frequently used, are not sensitive to ordering and that rank correlation measures are more appropriate for depression prediction, which is an ordinal problem.
Anodal tDCS Over the Left DLPFC Did Not Affect the Encoding and Retrieval of Verbal Declarative Information

Several studies imply that anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) can modulate the formation of verbal episodic memories. The aim of this study was to test if tDCS through a multi-electrode Laplacian montage over the left DLPFC could differentially modulate declarative memory performance depending on the application phase. Two groups of healthy participants (n = 2 × 15) received 1 mA anodal or sham stimulation for 20 min during the encoding or during the recall phase on a delayed cued-recall, using a randomized, double-blinded, repeated-measures experimental design. Memory performance was assessed at two time points: 10 min and 24 h after learning. We found no significant difference between anodal and sham stimulation with regard to the memory scores between conditions (stimulation during encoding or recall) or between time points, suggesting that anodal tDCS over the left DLPFC with these stimulation parameters had no effect on the encoding and the consolidation of associative verbal content.
Managing creative people

Managing a staff of writers, artists, producers--you know, "creative types"--poses several anxieties for many managers. In analyzing why this is so, I looked at my own business experiences--as a manager who directs creative thinkers and doers, and as a creative person, myself. I will first describe certain qualities which challenge managerial skill and then I will describe management practices I have found effective in being managed (as a creative person).
Use of T cell-based diagnosis of tuberculosis infection to optimize interpretation of tuberculin skin testing for child tuberculosis contacts.

BACKGROUND Treatment of recent tuberculosis infection in children aged <2 years is essential, because of high risk of progression to disease, but diagnosis is hindered by the inaccuracy of the tuberculin skin test (TST). More-accurate T cell-based tests of infection could enhance diagnosis by optimizing interpretation of the TST results. METHODS A total of 979 child tuberculosis contacts in Istanbul underwent the TST and enzyme-linked immunospot assay. Using enzyme-linked immunospot test results as a reference standard, we assessed the effect of age and bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination on the sensitivity and specificity of the TST, and we computed the optimal TST cutoff points, using receiver operating characteristic curves. RESULTS With a TST cutoff point of >or=10 mm, the sensitivity of the TST was 66% for children aged <2 years, which was lower than that for older children (P= .006). Specificity was 75% for BCG-vaccinated children, compared with 92% for unvaccinated children (P= .001). Optimal cutoff points improved TST specificity for children with 1 BCG scar, with little loss of sensitivity. Despite the use of optimal cutoff points, TST sensitivity remained <70% for children aged <2 years, specificity remained <87% for BCG-vaccinated children aged >or=2 years, and overall accuracy was low for children with >1 BCG scar. CONCLUSIONS Negative results of the TST cannot exclude tuberculosis infection for child tuberculosis contacts aged <2 years, which supports the use of preventive therapy regardless of the TST results for this age group. In children aged >or=2 years, the accuracy of the TST can be improved by adjustment of cutoff points for BCG-vaccinated children but remains poor for children with >1 BCG scar. This methodology can define optimal TST cutoff points for diagnosis of tuberculosis infection tailored to target populations.
Reliability of Different Mark-Recapture Methods for Population Size Estimation Tested against Reference Population Sizes Constructed from Field Data

Reliable estimates of population size are fundamental in many ecological studies and biodiversity conservation. Selecting appropriate methods to estimate abundance is often very difficult, especially if data are scarce. Most studies concerning the reliability of different estimators used simulation data based on assumptions about capture variability that do not necessarily reflect conditions in natural populations. Here, we used data from an intensively studied closed population of the arboreal gecko Gehyra variegata to construct reference population sizes for assessing twelve different population size estimators in terms of bias, precision, accuracy, and their 95%-confidence intervals. Two of the reference populations reflect natural biological entities, whereas the other reference populations reflect artificial subsets of the population. Since individual heterogeneity was assumed, we tested modifications of the Lincoln-Petersen estimator, a set of models in programs MARK and CARE-2, and a truncated geometric distribution. Ranking of methods was similar across criteria. Models accounting for individual heterogeneity performed best in all assessment criteria. For populations from heterogeneous habitats without obvious covariates explaining individual heterogeneity, we recommend using the moment estimator or the interpolated jackknife estimator (both implemented in CAPTURE/MARK). If data for capture frequencies are substantial, we recommend the sample coverage or the estimating equation (both models implemented in CARE-2). Depending on the distribution of catchabilities, our proposed multiple Lincoln-Petersen and a truncated geometric distribution obtained comparably good results. The former usually resulted in a minimum population size and the latter can be recommended when there is a long tail of low capture probabilities. Models with covariates and mixture models performed poorly. Our approach identified suitable methods and extended options to evaluate the performance of mark-recapture population size estimators under field conditions, which is essential for selecting an appropriate method and obtaining reliable results in ecology and conservation biology, and thus for sound management.
NF-κB as a potential therapeutic target in myelodysplastic syndromes and acute myeloid leukemia

Importance of the field: The inactive NF-κB–inhibitor of NF-κB (IκB) complex is activated by stimuli including pro-inflammatory cytokines, mitogens, growth factors and stress-inducing agents. The release of NF-κB facilitates its translocation to the nucleus, where it promotes cell survival by initiating transcription of genes encoding stress-response enzymes, cell-adhesion molecules, pro-inflammatory cytokines and anti-apoptotic proteins. NF-κB and associated regulatory factors (IκB kinase subunits and bcl-3) are implicated in hematological and solid tumour malignancies. NF-κB appears to be involved in cell proliferation control, apoptosis control, angiogenesis promotion and possibly regulation of diffusion of metastases. There are several reports that inhibition of NF-κB as a therapeutic target may have a role in tumour cell death or growth inhibition. Area covered in this review: We review data about inhibition of NF-κB in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). We describe the molecular mechanisms underlying NF-κB deregulation in these haematological malignancies. What the reader will gain: Constitutive activation of NF-κB in the nucleus has been reported in some varieties of MDS/AML. The in vitro and in vivo results of NF-κB inhibition in myeloid malignancies are highlighted. Take home message: NF-κB selective inhibitory drugs may be useful, either as single agents or associated with conventional chemotherapy.
Wildfire Suppression Costs for Canada under a Changing Climate

Climate-influenced changes in fire regimes in northern temperate and boreal regions will have both ecological and economic ramifications. We examine possible future wildfire area burned and suppression costs using a recently compiled historical (i.e., 1980–2009) fire management cost database for Canada and several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate projections. Area burned was modelled as a function of a climate moisture index (CMI), and fire suppression costs then estimated as a function of area burned. Future estimates of area burned were generated from projections of the CMI under two emissions pathways for four General Circulation Models (GCMs); these estimates were constrained to ecologically reasonable values by incorporating a minimum fire return interval of 20 years. Total average annual national fire management costs are projected to increase to just under $1 billion (a 60% real increase from the 1980–2009 period) under the low greenhouse gas emissions pathway and $1.4 billion (119% real increase from the base period) under the high emissions pathway by the end of the century. For many provinces, annual costs that are currently considered extreme (i.e., occur once every ten years) are projected to become commonplace (i.e., occur once every two years or more often) as the century progresses. It is highly likely that evaluations of current wildland fire management paradigms will be necessary to avoid drastic and untenable cost increases as the century progresses.
Aggregated mapping of driver attention from matched optical flow

Eye tracking research about driver distraction, applied to real world driving tasks, has so far demanded a massive amount of manual intervention, for the annotation of hundreds of hours of head camera videos. We present a novel methodology that enables the automated integration of arbitrary gaze localizations onto a visual object and its local surrounding in order to draw heat maps directly onto the environment. Gaze locations are tracked in video frames of the eye tracking glasses' head camera, within the regions about the driver's environment, using optical flow methodology. The high robustness and accuracy of the optical flow based tracking - measured with a residual mean error of ≈0.3 pixels on sequences, captured and verified in 576 individual trials - enables a fully automated estimation of the driver's attention processes, for example in the context of roadside objects. We present results from a typical driver distraction study and visualize the performance of fully aggregated human attention behavior.
Mesenchymal Stem Cells Protect Nucleus Pulposus Cells from Compression-Induced Apoptosis by Inhibiting the Mitochondrial Pathway

Objective Excessive apoptosis of nucleus pulposus cells (NPCs) induced by various stresses, including compression, contributes to the development of intervertebral disc degeneration (IVDD). Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can benefit the regeneration of NPCs and delay IVDD, but the underlying molecular mechanism is poorly understood. This study aimed to evaluate the antiapoptosis effects of bone marrow-derived MSC (BMSC) on rat NPCs exposed to compression and investigate whether the mitochondrial pathway was involved. Methods BMSCs and NPCs were cocultured in the compression apparatus at 1.0 MPa for 36 h. Cell viability, apoptosis, mitochondrial function, and the expression of apoptosis-related proteins were evaluated. Results The results showed that coculturing with BMSCs increased the cell viability and reduced apoptosis of NPCs exposed to compression. Meanwhile, BMSCs could relieve the compression-induced mitochondrial damage of NPCs by decreasing reactive oxygen species level and maintaining mitochondrial membrane potential as well as mitochondrial integrity. Furthermore, coculturing with BMSCs suppressed the activated caspase-3 and activated caspase-9, decreased the expressions of cytosolic cytochrome c and Bax, and increased the expression of Bcl-2. Conclusions Our results suggest that BMSCs can protect against compression-induced apoptosis of NPCs by inhibiting the mitochondrial pathway and thus enhance our understanding on the MSC-based therapy for IVDD.
A marginal structural model to estimate the causal effect of antidepressant medication treatment on viral suppression among homeless and marginally housed persons with HIV.

CONTEXT Depression strongly predicts nonadherence to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antiretroviral therapy, and adherence is essential to maintaining viral suppression. This suggests that pharmacologic treatment of depression may improve virologic outcomes. However, previous longitudinal observational analyses have inadequately adjusted for time-varying confounding by depression severity, which could yield biased estimates of treatment effect. Application of marginal structural modeling to longitudinal observation data can, under certain assumptions, approximate the findings of a randomized controlled trial. OBJECTIVE To determine whether antidepressant medication treatment increases the probability of HIV viral suppression. DESIGN Community-based prospective cohort study with assessments conducted every 3 months. SETTING Community-based research field site in San Francisco, California. PARTICIPANTS One hundred fifty-eight homeless and marginally housed persons with HIV who met baseline immunologic (CD4+ T-lymphocyte count, <350/μL) and psychiatric (Beck Depression Inventory II score, >13) inclusion criteria, observed from April 2002 through August 2007. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Probability of achieving viral suppression to less than 50 copies/mL. Secondary outcomes of interest were probability of being on an antiretroviral therapy regimen, 7-day self-reported percentage adherence to antiretroviral therapy, and probability of reporting complete (100%) adherence. RESULTS Marginal structural models estimated a 2.03 greater odds of achieving viral suppression (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.15-3.58; P = .02) resulting from antidepressant medication treatment. In addition, antidepressant medication use increased the probability of antiretroviral uptake (weighted odds ratio, 3.87; 95% CI, 1.98-7.58; P < .001). Self-reported adherence to antiretroviral therapy increased by 25 percentage points (95% CI, 14-36; P < .001), and the odds of reporting complete adherence nearly doubled (weighted odds ratio, 1.94; 95% CI, 1.20-3.13; P = .006). CONCLUSIONS Antidepressant medication treatment increases viral suppression among persons with HIV. This effect is likely attributable to improved adherence to a continuum of HIV care, including increased uptake and adherence to antiretroviral therapy.
Building Information-rich Maps for Intuitive Human Interface Using Networked Knowledge Base

Despite significant advances in multimedia transferring technologies in various fields of robotics, it is sometimes quite difficult for the operator to fully understand the context of 3D remote environments from 2D image feedback. Particularly, in the remote control of mobile robots, the recognition of the object associated with the task is very important, because the operator has to control the robot safely in various situations not through trial and error. Therefore, it is necessary to provide the operator with 3D volumetric models of the object and object-related information as well such as locations, shape, size, material properties, and so on. Thus, in this paper, we propose a vision-based human interface system that provides an interactive, information-rich map through network-based information brokering. The system consists of an object recognition part, a 3D map building part, a networked knowledge base part, and a control part of the mobile robot.
Gefitinib ( ZD 1839 ) Monotherapy as a Salvage Regimen for Previously Treated Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Purpose: A worldwide compassionate-use program has enabled >42,000 patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) to receive gefitinib treatment. Here we report the outcome of gefitinib therapy in patients who enrolled in the “Iressa” Expanded Access Program at the Samsung Medical Center. Experimental Design: Patients with advanced or metastatic NSCLC who had progressed after prior systemic chemotherapy and for whom no other treatment option was available were eligible to receive gefitinib treatment as part of the Expanded Access Program. A post hoc assessment of potential prognostic factors for response and survival was performed by multivariate analysis. Results: All 111 evaluable patients had stage IV disease; most patients had a baseline performance status of 2 [n 52 (47%)] or 3 [n 18 (16%)] and had received >2 prior chemotherapy regimens (56%). The objective response rate was 26%, the disease control rate (measured over >8 weeks) was 40%, and the 1-year survival rate was 44%. Adenocarcinoma histology was associated with better response and disease control rates, and a performance status of 0–2 was also associated with a better disease control rate. Both of these factors, as well as female gender, were significantly associated with longer survival. Gefitinib was well tolerated; the most common adverse event was grade 1 skin rash. Conclusions: Gefitinib demonstrated significant antitumor activity and a favorable tolerability profile in this series of NSCLC patients with poor prognosis.
To build text summaries of high quality, nuclearity is not sufficient

Researchers in discourse have long hypothesized that the nuclei of a rhetorical structure tree provide a good summary of the text for which that tree was built. In this paper, I discuss a psychohnguistic experiment that validates this hypothesis, but that also shows that the distinction between nuclei and satelhtes is not sufficient if we want to build summaries of very high quality. I empirically compare various techniques for mapping discourse trees into partial orders that reflect the importance of the elementary textual units in texts and I discuss both their strengths and weaknesses.
A comparison of the globular cluster luminosity functions of the inner and outer halo of the Milky Way and M31

We show that the globular cluster luminosity function (GCLF) of the inner halo of the Milky Way is statistically different from the GCLF of the outer halo. We also find a similar difference between the inner and outer halo population of M31. We assert that this difference is evidence for some form of dynamical evolution of the cluster population and/or a dependence of GCLF shape on the environment in which the cluster population formed. We also find that the turnover luminosity of the GCLF is unaffected by these differences and further assert that this stability of the turnover luminosity affirms its usefulness as an indicator of cosmic distance.
A read-while-write-based out-of-order scheduling for high performance NAND flash-based storage devices

Recently, Phase-change RAMs (PRAMs) are considered to be as a good candidate that can substitute as DRAM cache buffers (CBs) in NAND flash-based storage devices (NFSDs). PRAM is an adequate device to mobile consumer electronics thanks to low static power consumption, high density and non-volatility. However, in spite of many advantages over DRAM, asymmetric write/read speed of PRAM causes performance degradation in NFSD. In this paper, hence, we first propose a novel scheduling method for an NFSD with PRAM CB utilizing read-while-write (RWW) of PRAM. The method schedules NFSD's requests to service read and write simultaneously using RWW. In the experiment result, the proposed method reduces read and write latency on average by 30% and 19%, respectively.
A robust ranging detection with MAI cancellation for OFDMA systems

During the initial uplink synchronization, the BS communicates with MSs to adjust timing and power offsets. The common method to achieve the objective is to use the orthogonal code in the frequency domain for OFDMA systems. Due to the timing offset, the orthogonality of codes is decayed and multiple access interference (MAI) becomes serious. In order to decrease this influence, we proposed the idea which combines the channel estimation and the multiuser detection. On the strength of cancelling the MAI step by step, ranging users can be detected one by one. The proposed idea is robust to achieve a significant improvement on the ranging detection rate over the multipath Rayleigh fading channel.