Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names

Bitcoin is a purely online virtual currency, unbacked by either physical commodities or sovereign obligation; instead, it relies on a combination of cryptographic protection and a peer-to-peer protocol for witnessing settlements. Consequently, Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique characteristic further, using heuristic clustering to group Bitcoin wallets based on evidence of shared authority, and then using re-identification attacks (i.e., empirical purchasing of goods and services) to classify the operators of those clusters. From this analysis, we characterize longitudinal changes in the Bitcoin market, the stresses these changes are placing on the system, and the challenges for those seeking to use Bitcoin for criminal or fraudulent purposes at scale.
High‐dose methylprednisolone is effective in treating radiation‐induced refractory haemorrhagic cystitis

CORB, CURB-65 and SMART-COP respectively. In conclusion, our GIM treats CAP in a population that is extremely elderly and has multiple comorbidities, with a high proportion coming from residential care. Of those meeting a case definition of CAP, scoring criteria defined 98 (62%) and 108 (69%) with ‘severe’ CAP using the CORB and CURB-65 criteria respectively, contrasting with only 23 (15%) by SMART-COP criteria. Notably, as predictors of mortality, ‘severe’ CORB, CURB-65 and SMART-COP scores had diagnostic sensitivities of 78%, 78% and 44%, specificities of 40%, 33% and 90% and NPV of approximately 90% (92%, 90% and 90% respectively). Although limited to a single-unit, single-centre study with retrospective ascertainment and data collection, this study illustrates that the three PSSS performed similarly well in safely classifying patients at lowest risk of death in this GIM population. SMART-COP, although more specific, was much less sensitive. CORB and CURB-65 performed similarly. In addition to the diagnostic performance of PSSS evaluated in this study, practical considerations may also be important in choosing the best test to use in this setting. As well as being less sensitive, SMART-COP is also the most difficult to perform (requiring arterial blood gases). Similarly, although CORB and CURB65 have similar diagnostic performance, CORB is simpler to use (CURB65 requires the results of a blood urea) and therefore has added advantages of practicality. Clinicians should also recognise that residential care, dementia and malignancy may predict poor prognosis in this group.
Growth and corruption: a complex relationship

This paper investigates the growth-corruption relationship in a sample of 146 countries for the period 1984-2009 using panel generalized method of moments. While negative effects of corruption on growth have drawn economists’ interest in recent years, our main contribution is to examine the effects by employing the hierarchical polynomial regression to evaluate the relationship after controlling economic and institutional factors. The result challenges some of the findings that negative growth-corruption association in the literature, but also provide new inferences. The findings reflect that corruption is not always growth-inhibitory, for some countries it is growth-enhancing which supports the “grease the wheels” hypothesis. However, our results suggest that a cubic function best fitted the data.
Blocking effect removal using robust statistics and line process

The Gibbs distribution with spatially adaptive clique potential functions is used as the image prior distribution in the coding artifact reduction problem. Unlike previous approaches, the image is divided in regions based on the local statistics and a clique potential function is assigned for each region. A non-differentiable potential function that preserves edge in detailed image regions is introduced. Images recovered by the proposed approach contain reduced coding artifact and improved preservation of details.
Optimizing image-based patterned defect inspection through FDTD simulations at multiple ultraviolet wavelengths

The sizes of non-negligible defects in the patterning of a semiconductor device continue to decrease as the dimensions for these devices are reduced. These “killer defects” disrupt the performance of the device and must be adequately controlled during manufacturing, and new solutions are required to improve optics-based defect inspection. To this end, our group has reported [Barnes et al., Proc. SPIE 1014516 (2017)] our initial five-wavelength simulation study, evaluating the extensibility of defect inspection by reducing the inspection wavelength from a deep-ultraviolet wavelength to wavelengths in the vacuum ultraviolet and the extreme ultraviolet. In that study, a 47 nm wavelength yielded enhancements in the signal to noise (SNR) by a factor of five compared to longer wavelengths and in the differential intensities by as much as three orders-of-magnitude compared to 13 nm. This paper briefly reviews these recent findings and investigates the possible sources for these disparities between results at 13 nm and 47 nm wavelengths. Our in-house finite-difference time-domain code (FDTD) is tested in both two and three dimensions to determine how computational conditions contributed to the results. A modified geometry and materials stack is presented that offers a second viewpoint of defect detectability as functions of wavelength, polarization, and defect type. Reapplication of the initial SNR-based defect metric again yields no detection of a defect at λ = 13 nm, but additional image preprocessing now enables the computation of the SNR for λ = 13 nm simulated images and has led to a revised defect metric that allows comparisons at all five wavelengths.
Deletion-Robust Submodular Maximization: Data Summarization with "the Right to be Forgotten"

How can we summarize a dynamic data stream when elements selected for the summary can be deleted at any time? This is an important challenge in online services, where the users generating the data may decide to exercise their right to restrict the service provider from using (part of) their data due to privacy concerns. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce the dynamic deletion-robust submodular maximization problem. We develop the first resilient streaming algorithm, called ROBUST-STREAMING, with a constant factor approximation guarantee to the optimum solution. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on several real-world applications, including summarizing (1) streams of geo-coordinates (2); streams of images; and (3) click-stream log data, consisting of 45 million feature vectors from a news recommendation task.
Identification and characterization of [6]-shogaol from ginger as inhibitor of vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation

Scope Vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) proliferation is involved in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease, making the identification of new counteracting agents and their mechanisms of action relevant. Ginger and its constituents have been reported to improve cardiovascular health, but no studies exist addressing a potential interference with VSMC proliferation. Methods and results The dichloromethane extract of ginger inhibited VSMC proliferation when monitored by resazurin metabolic conversion (IC50 = 2.5 μg/mL). The examination of major constituents from ginger yielded [6]-shogaol as the most active compound (IC50 = 2.7 μM). In the tested concentration range [6]-shogaol did not exhibit cytotoxicity toward VSMC and did not interfere with endothelial cell proliferation. [6]-shogaol inhibited DNA synthesis and induced accumulation of the VSMC in the G0/G1 cell-cycle phase accompanied with activation of the nuclear factor-erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2)/HO-1 pathway. Since [6]-shogaol lost its antiproliferative activity in the presence of the heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) inhibitor tin protoporphyrin IX, HO-1 induction appears to contribute to the antiproliferative effect. Conclusion This study demonstrates for the first time inhibitory potential of ginger constituents on VSMC proliferation. The presented data suggest that [6]-shogaol exerts its antiproliferative effect through accumulation of cells in the G0/G1 cell-cycle phase associated with activation of the Nrf2/HO-1 pathway.
New findings and old controversies in the research of multiple sclerosis and its model experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory demyelinating disease of the CNS that is heterogeneous in its clinical manifestation and progression, as well as in its pathological mechanisms. Animal models, in particular the various forms of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, have been highly valuable for studying both disease pathology and drug development. Novel technologies, such as advanced imaging systems, as well as systematic research of CNS biopsies and postmortem samples from MS patients, have brought major progress in disease understanding. Consequently, in addition to the sclerotic demyelinated plaques in the white matter, changes in normal-appearing white matter tissue (‘pre-plaque’) and gray matter pathology are currently regarded as central disease components. This review aims to provide current insights on several central aspects in MS research. In particular, the interplay between inflammation and neurodegeneration mediating the disease, and therapeutic strategies attempting to induce immunomodulation and neuroprotective repair processes, are discussed.
An analytical method for evaluating Network-on-Chip performance

Today, due to the increasing demand for more and more complex applications in the consumer electronic market segment, Systems-on-Chip consist of many processing elements and become larger and larger. While on-chip system designers must be able to get fast and accurate communication performance analysis for such huge systems, the simulation-based approaches are not adequate anymore. Addressing the increasing need for early performance evaluation in NoC-based system design flow, this paper presents a generic analytical method to estimate communication latencies and link-buffer utilizations for a given NoC architecture with a given application mapped on it. The accuracy of our method is experimentally compared with the results obtained from Cycle-Accurate SystemC simulations.
Evoked Electromyographically Controlled Electrical Stimulation

Time-variant muscle responses under electrical stimulation (ES) are often problematic for all the applications of neuroprosthetic muscle control. This situation limits the range of ES usage in relevant areas, mainly due to muscle fatigue and also to changes in stimulation electrode contact conditions, especially in transcutaneous ES. Surface electrodes are still the most widely used in noninvasive applications. Electrical field variations caused by changes in the stimulation contact condition markedly affect the resulting total muscle activation levels. Fatigue phenomena under functional electrical stimulation (FES) are also well known source of time-varying characteristics coming from muscle response under ES. Therefore, it is essential to monitor the actual muscle state and assess the expected muscle response by ES so as to improve the current ES system in favor of adaptive muscle-response-aware FES control. To deal with this issue, we have been studying a novel control technique using evoked electromyography (eEMG) signals to compensate for these muscle time-variances under ES for stable neuroprosthetic muscle control. In this perspective article, I overview the background of this topic and highlight important points to be aware of when using ES to induce the desired muscle activation regardless of the time-variance. I also demonstrate how to deal with the common critical problem of ES to move toward robust neuroprosthetic muscle control with the Evoked Electromyographically Controlled Electrical Stimulation paradigm.
Shasta: a low overhead, software-only approach for supporting fine-grain shared memory

This paper describes Shasta, a system that supports a shared address space in software on clusters of computers with physically distributed memory. A unique aspect of Shasta compared to most other software distributed shared memory systems is that shared data can be kept coherent at a fine granularity. In addition, the system allows the coherence granularity to vary across different shared data structures in a single application. Shasta implements the shared address space by transparently rewriting the application executable to intercept loads and stores. For each shared load or store, the inserted code checks to see if the data is available locally and communicates with other processors if necessary. The system uses numerous techniques to reduce the run-time overhead of these checks. Since Shasta is implemented entirely in software, it also provides tremendous flexibility in supporting different types of cache coherence protocols. We have implemented an efficient cache coherence protocol that incorporates a number of optimizations, including support for multiple communication granularities and use of relaxed memory models. This system is fully functional and runs on a cluster of Alpha workstations.The primary focus of this paper is to describe the techniques used in Shasta to reduce the checking overhead for supporting fine granularity sharing in software. These techniques include careful layout of the shared address space, scheduling the checking code for efficient execution on modern processors, using a simple method that checks loads using only the value loaded, reducing the extra cache misses caused by the checking code, and combining the checks for multiple loads and stores. To characterize the effect of these techniques, we present detailed performance results for the SPLASH-2 applications running on an Alpha processor. Without our optimizations, the checking overheads are excessively high, exceeding 100% for several applications. However, our techniques are effective in reducing these overheads to a range of 5% to 35% for almost all of the applications. We also describe our coherence protocol and present some preliminary results on the parallel performance of several applications running on our workstation cluster. Our experience so far indicates that once the cost of checking memory accesses is reduced using our techniques, the Shasta approach is an attractive software solution for supporting a shared address space with fine-grain access to data.
The Usefulness of Intraoperative Circumferential Frozen-Section Analysis of Lumpectomy Margins in Breast-Conserving Surgery

Purpose Intraoperative frozen-section analysis of the lumpect-omy margin during breast-conserving surgery (BCS) is an excellent method in obtaining a clear resection margin. This study aimed to investigate the usefulness of intraoperative circumferential frozen-section analysis (IOCFS) of lumpectomy margin during BCS for breast cancer, and to find factors that increase the conversion into mastectomy. Methods From 2007 to 2011, 509 patients with breast cancer underwent IOCFS during BCS. The outer surfaces of the shaved lumpectomy margins were evaluated. A negative margin was defined as no ink on the tumor. All margins were evaluated using the permanent section analysis. Results Among the 509 patients, 437 (85.9%) underwent BCS and 72 (14.1%) finally underwent mastectomy. Of the 483 pathologically confirmed patients, 338 (70.0%) were true-negative, 24 (5.0%) false-negative, 120 (24.8%) true-positive, and 1 (0.2%) false-positive. Twenty-four patients (4.7%) among total 509 patients had undetermined margins as either atypical ductal hyperplasia or ductal carcinoma in situ in the first IOCFS. The IOCFS has an accuracy of 94.8% with 83% sensitivity, 99.7% specificity, 93.4% negative predictive value, and 99.2% positive predictive value. Sixty-three cases (12.4%) were converted to mastectomy, the first intraoperatively. Of the 446 (87.6%) patients who successfully underwent BCS, 64 patients received additional excisions and 32 were reoperated to achieve clear margin (reoperation rate, 6.3%). Twenty-three of the reoperated patients underwent re-excisions using the second intraoperative frozen section analysis, and achieved BCS. Nine cases were additionally converted to mastectomy. No significant differences in age, stage, and biological factors were found between the BCS and mastectomy cases. Factors such as invasive lobular carcinoma, multiple tumors, large tumor, and multiple excisions increased the conversion to mastectomy. Conclusion The IOCFS analysis during BCS is useful in evaluating lumpectomy margins and preventing reoperation.
Rendering of Vector Data on 3D Virtual Landscapes

In geographical information systems (GIS), vector data has important applications in the analysis and management of virtual landscapes. Therefore, methods that allow combined visualization of terrain and geo-spatial vector data are required. Such methods have to adapt the vector data to the terrain surface and to ensure a precise and efficient mapping. In this paper, we took the idea of the fast display, researched the vector data organization based on XML/KML standards and pre-processing, and achieved high-quality real-time seamless overlay of vector data on virtual landscapes. In addition, we mainly talked about the geometry-based and texture-based vector data overlay technology, made a performance analysis and gave a valuable conclusion, at last accomplished an efficient and accurate rendering of vector data on the three-dimensional scene.
Sandblasted and acid-etched dental implants: a histologic study in rats.

PURPOSE Current literature has revealed that surface etching of endosseous implants can improve bone-implant contact. The aim of this study was to evaluate the differences in bone-implant contact (BIC) between sandblasted/acid-etched and machined-surface implants. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty-two Sprague-Dawley rats were used in this study. Two implant surfaces, Ecotek (sandblasted/ acid-etched) and machined, were used with 1 implant placed in each tibia of the animals. A total of 64 implants were placed. BIC was evaluated at 5, 15, 30, and 60 days. Histomorphometry of the BIC was evaluated statistically. RESULTS The sandblasted/acid-etched surface demonstrated a greater BIC percentage than the machined surface. This difference was statistically significant only at 30 and 60 days after healing. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION The sandblasted/acid-etched surface demonstrated a stronger bone response than the machined one at a later period of healing.
Vision-based Control for Car Platooning using Homography Decomposition

In this paper, we present a complete system for car platooning using visual tracking. The visual tracking is achieved by directly estimating the projective transformation (in our case a homography) between a selected reference template attached to the leading vehicle and the corresponding area in the current image. The relative position and orientation of the servoed car with regard to the leading one is computed by decomposing the homography. The control objective is stated in terms of path following task in order to cope with the non-holonomic constraints of the vehicles.
Internet traffic classification using energy time-frequency distributions

We present a fundamentally new approach to classify application flows based on the mapping of aggregate transport-layer volume information onto the Time-Frequency (TF) plane. We initially show that the volume persona (i.e. counts of packets and bytes) of traffic flows at the transport layer exhibits highly non-stationary characteristics, hence rendering many typical classification methods inapplicable. By virtue of this constraint, we present a novel application classification method based on the Cohen energy TF distributions for such highly non-stationary signals. We have used the Rényi information to measure the distinct complexity of any given application signal, and to subsequently construct a robust training model for every application protocol within our scheme. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated using real backbone and edge link network traces captured in US and Japan. Our results show that for the majority of applications, aggregate volume-based classification can reach up to 96% accuracy, while considering significantly less features in comparison with existing approaches.
Novel Random-Switching PWM Technique With Constant Sampling Frequency and Constant Inductor Average Current for Digitally Controlled Converter

A new 2-D random-switching pulsewidth modulation (PWM) technique is proposed to reduce the dominant harmonic clusters while retaining constant average inductor current and constant sampling frequency. The special feature of constant average inductor current can reduce the output voltage ripple. Moreover, the controller parameters of a digitally controlled power converter are not required to change, which is quite essential to digitally controlled systems. Current random PWM methods are discussed and compared with the proposed method in this paper. It will be shown that the merits of the presented method include random-switching frequency, constant sampling frequency, and constant average inductor current. An field-programmable-gate-array-based digitally controlled buck converter experimental system has been set up. The specifications of the converter include input voltage = 5 V, output voltage = 1.5 V, and switching frequency = 200 kHz. The proposed random-switching pattern is implemented by software. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed random-switching pattern.
An ISOCAM survey through gravitationally lensing galaxy clusters. III. New results from mid-infrared observations of the cluster Abell 2219

The massive cluster of galaxies Abell 2219 (z = 0.228) with two spectacular gravitational lensing arcs was observed at 14.3 µm (hereafter 15 µm) with the Infrared Space Observatory and results were published by Barvainis et al. (1999). These observations have been reanalyzed using a method specifically designed for the detection of faint sources that had been applied to other clusters. Five new sources were detected and the resulting cumulative total of ten sources all have optical counterparts. The mid-infrared sources are identified with three cluster members, three foreground galaxies, an Extremely Red Object, a star and two galaxies of unknown redshift. The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of the galaxies are fit with models from a selection, using the program GRASIL. Best-fits are obtained, in general, with models of galaxies with ongoing star formation. Infrared luminosities and star formation rates are obtained for six sources: the cluster members and the foreground galaxies. For the three cluster members the infrared luminosities derived from the model SEDs are between ∼5.7 × 10 10 Land 1.4 × 10 11 L� , corresponding to infrared star formation rates between 10 and 24 Myr −1 . The two cluster galaxies that have optical classifications are in the Butcher-Oemler region of the color-magnitude diagramme. The three foreground galaxies have infrared luminosities between 1.5 × 10 10 Land 9.4 × 10 10 Lyielding infrared star formation rates between 3 and 16 Myr −1 . T wo of the foreground galaxies are located in two foreground galaxy enhancements (Boschin et al. 2004). Including Abell 2219, six distant clusters of galaxies have been mapped with ISOCAM and luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs) have been found in three of them. The presence of LIRGs in Abell 2219 strengthens the association between luminous infrared galaxies in clusters and recent or ongoing cluster merger activity.