Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Key Steps in Developing a Cognitive Vaccine against Traumatic Flashbacks: Visuospatial Tetris versus Verbal Pub Quiz

Background Flashbacks (intrusive memories of a traumatic event) are the hallmark feature of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, however preventative interventions are lacking. Tetris may offer a ‘cognitive vaccine’ [1] against flashback development after trauma exposure. We previously reported that playing the computer game Tetris soon after viewing traumatic material reduced flashbacks compared to no-task [1]. However, two criticisms need to be addressed for clinical translation: (1) Would all games have this effect via distraction/enjoyment, or might some games even be harmful? (2) Would effects be found if administered several hours post-trauma? Accordingly, we tested Tetris versus an alternative computer game – Pub Quiz – which we hypothesized not to be helpful (Experiments 1 and 2), and extended the intervention interval to 4 hours (Experiment 2). Methodology/Principal Findings The trauma film paradigm was used as an experimental analog for flashback development in healthy volunteers. In both experiments, participants viewed traumatic film footage of death and injury before completing one of the following: (1) no-task control condition (2) Tetris or (3) Pub Quiz. Flashbacks were monitored for 1 week. Experiment 1: 30 min after the traumatic film, playing Tetris led to a significant reduction in flashbacks compared to no-task control, whereas Pub Quiz led to a significant increase in flashbacks. Experiment 2: 4 hours post-film, playing Tetris led to a significant reduction in flashbacks compared to no-task control, whereas Pub Quiz did not. Conclusions/Significance First, computer games can have differential effects post-trauma, as predicted by a cognitive science formulation of trauma memory. In both Experiments, playing Tetris post-trauma film reduced flashbacks. Pub Quiz did not have this effect, even increasing flashbacks in Experiment 1. Thus not all computer games are beneficial or merely distracting post-trauma - some may be harmful. Second, the beneficial effects of Tetris are retained at 4 hours post-trauma. Clinically, this delivers a feasible time-window to administer a post-trauma “cognitive vaccine”.
Cotton—A Versatile Textile Fiber

Certain recent researches on cotton are reviewed, together with further data on natural variations of it as found on the cottonseed and modifications of the fiber by chemical and physical treatments. No attempt has been made to present a general review. A more extensive over-all treatment of cotton quality may be found in a report by the Bureau of Plant Industry [11]. Cotton fibers grow first in length, then in thickness. The physical properties of the fiber and, therefore, its use value are determined by its length, fineness, and cell-wall construc tion, all of which are genetically controlled but are also sub ject to modifications by weather conditions during growth. Since fiber length is established before the cell walls thicken, length and cell-wall structure may be influenced independ ently. As growth proceeds there is a general trend toward compensation of loss of fiber length by added strength and vice versa; however, the failure of weather conditions to remain the same throughout the growing period of the fiber may result, for example, in short, weak fiber or long, strong fiber. Cotton fibers may be modified by swelling treatments while tension is applied. Such treatments may increase the fiber strength at the expense of other properties. The spinning quality of cotton is dependent upon a com bination of fiber properties and upon the spinning technique used. In general, however, the size of yarn or thread made from cotton is dependent upon its fiber length. For a given length, fiber fineness, and even strength, may influence the maximum count to be expected. Strong yarns require relatively strong fiber for any given fiber length and fineness. Uniformity of fiber length undoubtedly influences the ease of manufacture and the percentage of waste to be expected from a given cotton, but it is indicated that well-bred mod ern varieties have sufficient length uniformity to give good results. Within a variety, however, growth conditions, gin ning, and baling may affect the fiber-length uniformity enough to influence fiber property-yarn strength relationships. Since variety characteristics may be influenced by growth conditions, causing positive varietal relationships to reverse and become negative for environment, the analyses of data consisting of fiber properties and yarn strengths, except for very general treatments, will give more information if variety and environmental effects can be segregated. It is indicated that if good certified seed of suitable varie ties for each type of environment are planted, cotton of ac ceptable quality can be produced throughout the Cotton Belt. In selecting a cotton for specialized uses, variety and growth conditions as well as grade and staple should be considered for best results.
Modelling and control of a quad-rotor robot

To date, most quad-rotor aerial robots have been based on flying toys. Although such systems can be used as prototypes, they are not sufficiently robust to serve as experimental robotics platforms. We have developed the X-4 Flyer, a quad-rotor robot using custom-built chassis and avionics with off-the-shelf motors and batteries, to be a highly reliable experimental platform. The vehicle uses tuned plant dynamics with an onboard embedded attitude controller to stabilise flight. A linear SISO controller was designed to regulate flyer attitude.
Fair Work-Conserving Bandwidth Guarantees in Datacenters Using MPTCP

Datacenters should provide bandwidth guarantees to tenants for performance predictability. Ideally, this process should attain three important characteristics: work conservation, fairness, and simplicity. The first one indicates that tenants can utilize unused bandwidths effectively without harming the bandwidth guarantee. The second one means that tenants share the unused bandwidth following a certain fairness policy. The last one requires that the developed scheme can be easily deployed with commodity software and hardware. However, achieving all requirements at the same time is challenging considering the distributed nature of bandwidth usage in datacenters. In this paper, we present our practical approach that can solve the aforementioned challenges using multipath TCP (MPTCP). With MPTCP, we split each TCP flow into one bandwidth guarantee (BG) subflow and one work conservation (WC) subflow. We treat all BG subflows and UDP flows as BG traffic and WC subflows as WC traffic. We let BG traffic go through a high priority queue on switches to guarantee allocated bandwidth. WC traffic goes through a low priority queue to grab unused bandwidths without harming bandwidth guarantee. We tune the aggressiveness of WC subflows to achieve the fairness policy. The overall scheme can be easily deployed on commodity servers and switches. We implement our approach along with the Linux kernel MPTCP implementation. Extensive testbed experiments show that our scheme achieves all the three goals with design simplicity compared to prior work.
An enhanced personal photo recommendation system by fusing contextual and textual features on mobile device

As a main means to record scene in personal daily life, personal photos convey high-level semantic information (e.g., who, what, when, where) of an activity user engaged in. Different from other information retrieval tasks, personal photo recommendation depends on the measure of activity relevancy which is implicitly embedded in photos. Spurred by this observation, an enhanced recommendation approach by fusing both contextual and textual features is proposed. First, contextual relevancy is incrementally refined with an enhanced temporal and spatial clustering method respectively. Second, textual similarity of photo annotations is calculated using WordNet to augment the activity relevancy. Third, a fuzzy decision based multi-criteria ranking algorithm i.e., Preference Ranking Organization Method of Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) is adopted to make recommendations when giving an entry photo. A prototype has been developed on mobile device to illustrate this concept. Experiment results on a real dataset which contains 10,827 photos collected from 50 volunteers during 12 months demonstrate that our approach is more accurate than traditional schemes.
Comparative Genomic and Functional Analysis of 100 Lactobacillus rhamnosus Strains and Their Comparison with Strain GG

Lactobacillus rhamnosus is a lactic acid bacterium that is found in a large variety of ecological habitats, including artisanal and industrial dairy products, the oral cavity, intestinal tract or vagina. To gain insights into the genetic complexity and ecological versatility of the species L. rhamnosus, we examined the genomes and phenotypes of 100 L. rhamnosus strains isolated from diverse sources. The genomes of 100 L. rhamnosus strains were mapped onto the L. rhamnosus GG reference genome. These strains were phenotypically characterized for a wide range of metabolic, antagonistic, signalling and functional properties. Phylogenomic analysis showed multiple groupings of the species that could partly be associated with their ecological niches. We identified 17 highly variable regions that encode functions related to lifestyle, i.e. carbohydrate transport and metabolism, production of mucus-binding pili, bile salt resistance, prophages and CRISPR adaptive immunity. Integration of the phenotypic and genomic data revealed that some L. rhamnosus strains possibly resided in multiple niches, illustrating the dynamics of bacterial habitats. The present study showed two distinctive geno-phenotypes in the L. rhamnosus species. The geno-phenotype A suggests an adaptation to stable nutrient-rich niches, i.e. milk-derivative products, reflected by the alteration or loss of biological functions associated with antimicrobial activity spectrum, stress resistance, adaptability and fitness to a distinctive range of habitats. In contrast, the geno-phenotype B displays adequate traits to a variable environment, such as the intestinal tract, in terms of nutrient resources, bacterial population density and host effects.
Polyphyly of the extinct family Oviparosiphidae and its implications for inferring aphid evolution (Hemiptera, Sternorrhyncha)

Aphidoidea, the so-called "true aphids" are one of the most challenging groups in terms of solving the phylogenetic relationships. Morphology-based analyses were strongly affected by widespread homoplasy, while the molecular-based attempts struggled with the lack of sufficient phylogenetic signal. Despite significant improvements, the higher classification still remains unresolved and rather controversial. However, the use of the fossil record, one of the most valuable sources of information, was mainly limited to calibration of a phylogenetic tree, without a direct inclusion into the analysis. The extinct family Oviparosiphidae has long been considered as the common ancestor of all recent Aphidoidea and it was used as a calibration point in several analyses, but it has been never analyzed in a phylogenetic context. The family has been treated as a monophyletic group purely based on the simultaneous presence of two abdominal structures, ovipositor and siphunculi. However, it has been shown recently that at least one more extinct lineage, present at the same time, was characterized by the same features. For these reasons, we performed a maximum parsimony analysis using morphological data for extinct aphid taxa to prove the monophyly of Oviparosiphidae. Our analysis shows that the presumed ancestor lineage of recent aphids is a polyphyletic group. Our results support the hypothesis of an early Mesozoic rapid radiation of aphids, which led to several different lineages characterized by both ovipositor and siphunculi. The results indicate the necessity of examining the other extinct families, and shows that the diversity of aphids before the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution (KTR) was higher than expected. Even though there is not enough data to perform a formal analysis, fossils seem to suggest a significant impact of the KTR on aphid diversification. Additionally, we have made a redescription of two genera and description of a new species, Vitimaphis subridens sp. nov.
Evaluation of analytical methods for the determination of the physicochemical properties of fermented, granulated, and roasted cassava pulp ‐ gari

Abstract Simple but reliable methods for the determination of the physicochemical properties of gari were evaluated for the parameters, such as grain size, bulk density, swelling index, moisture content, gross calorific value, cyanide content, and acidity content. The grain sizes were between 525 and 928 μm (weighted means), the bulk densities between 0.541 and 0.699 g/cm³, and the swelling indices between 3.21 and 4.33. The moisture contents ranged from 4.30 to 9.19%. The gross calorific values were found between 15.45 and 15.82 kJ/g. The cyanide contents were between 0 and 4.8 ppm. The acidity contents varied among 0.55 and 1.62%. Correlation tests verified the influences of the grain size and the moisture content on the acidity content with a probability of 99.9%. The methods were regarded as suitable and adaptable for the application in small and medium cassava‐processing industries with special regard to the respect of the consumer`s health safety.
Multi-port converter integrating two PWM converters for multi-power-source systems

Multi-power-source systems containing multiple power sources and batteries have been attracting significant attentions since the advent of renewable energy systems and electric vehicles. Multiple converters in proportion to the number of power sources are necessary in such systems, resulting in increased complexity and cost. Multi-port converters (MPCs) combining multiple converters into a single unit have been reported to achieve simplified systems at lower costs. However, the necessity of a transformer, low effective duty cycle operation, and no common ground issues are of great concern in the conventional MPCs. This paper proposes the MPC integrating two PWM converters for multi-power-source systems. The two converters can be integrated into a single unit by sharing switches without employing a transformer, hence simplifying the circuit. Depending on the power balance among each port, the MPC operates either in three operation modes. Detailed operation analyses were performed separately for these three operation modes. A 240-W prototype was built, and the experimental results agreed well with those of the analysis.
National study of physical and sexual assault among women with disabilities

Objective: To examine the association between the level of disability impairment and physical and sexual assault in a sample of US women at least 18 years of age. Design, setting and participants: Retrospective longitudinal study of 6273 non-institutionalized US women from 8000 women participating in the 1995–1996 National Violence Against Women (NVAW) Survey. Main outcome measure: Women’s experiences of physical and sexual assault in the 12 months before the NVAW interview. Results: Most women reported having no disability (n = 5008, 79.8%) and/or not experiencing an assault in the year before their interview (n = 6018, 95.9%). Less than 5% (n = 280) reported having a disability that severely limited daily activities, and 15.7% (n = 985) reported having a disability that moderately limited activities. Less than 4% (n = 218) of the women reported a physical-only assault, and less than 1% (n = 37) reported being sexually assaulted. Women with severe disability impairments were four times more likely to be sexually assaulted than women with no reported disabilities (RR = 4.0, 95% CI 1.5 to 10.6). Little difference in the risk of sexual assault was found between women with moderate disability impairments and those reporting no disabilities (RR = 1.0, 95% CI 0.3 to 2.8). Women with severe (RR = 1.6, 95% CI 0.9 to 3.0) and moderate (RR = 1.2, 95% CI 0.8 to 1.9) disability impairments were at greater risk, although not quite significantly so, of physical-only assault than were women without a disability. Conclusion: The findings suggest that women with disabilities that severely limit activities of daily living are at increased risk of sexual assault.
6-MP metabolite profiles provide a biochemical explanation for 6-MP resistance in patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Approximately 40% of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients fail to benefit from 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP)/azathioprine (AZA). Recent reports suggest 6-thioguanine nucleotide (6-TGN) levels (>235) independently correlate with remission. An inverse correlation between 6-TGN and thiopurine methyltransferase (TPMT) has been described. The objectives of this study were to determine whether dose escalation optimizes both 6-TGN levels and efficacy in patients failing therapy because of subtherapeutic 6-TGN levels and its effect on TPMT. METHODS Therapeutic efficacy and adverse events were recorded at baseline and upon reevaluation after dose escalation in 51 IBD patients. 6-MP metabolite levels and TPMT activity were recorded blinded to clinical information. RESULTS Fourteen of 51 failing 6-MP/AZA at baseline achieved remission upon dose escalation, which coincided with significant rises in 6-TGN levels. Despite increased 6-MP/AZA doses, 37 continued to fail therapy at follow-up. Dose escalation resulted in minor changes in 6-TGN, yet a significant increase in 6-methylmercaptopurine ribonucleotides (6-MMPR) (P < or = 0.01) and 6-MMPR:6-TGN ratio (P < 0.001). 6-MMPR rises were associated with dose-dependent hepatotoxicity in 12 patients (24%). TPMT was not influenced by dose escalation. CONCLUSIONS Serial metabolite monitoring identifies a novel phenotype of IBD patients resistant to 6-MP/AZA therapy biochemically characterized by suboptimal 6-TGN and preferential 6-MMPR production upon dose escalation.
How to Avoid Herd Behavior: A Stochastic Multi-Choice Scheduling Algorithm and Parameters Analysis in Grid Scheduling

Large distributed systems, such as grid computing and cloud computing, promise to supply users with high performance. Consequently, scheduling is currently becoming a crucial problem. Herd behavior is a common phenomenon which causes severe performance decrease in the systems caused by bad scheduling behaviors. In this paper, based on the theoretical results of the homogeneous balls and bins model, it is proposed that a new and unique stochastic algorithm is used to avoid herd behavior. Experiments address that the multi-choice strategy can decrease herd behavior in large-scale sharing environment, at the same time providing increased scheduling performance and causing less scheduling burden than greedy algorithms. Distributed Hash Table (DHT) is used to organize grid computing resources. In the case of 1000 resources, the simulations show that for the heavy load (i.e., system utilization rate 0.5), the multi-choice algorithm reduces the number of incurred herds by a factor of 36, the average job waiting time by a factor of 8, and the average job turn-around time by 12% compared to the greedy algorithm. Moreover, in the cases of 2000 and 4000 nodes, two parameters (replica and d-group) are analyzed based on how they affect the performance of the algorithm. It is observed that there is an inflexion in the performance curve. Finally, a theoretic analysis of the algorithm performance is presented.
Coupling quadrature and continuous Runge–Kutta methods for optimal control problems

This article deals with the numerical solution of optimal control problems for ordinary differential equations. The approach is based on the coupling between quadrature rules and continuous Runge–Kutta solvers, and it lies in the framework of direct optimization methods and recursive discretization techniques. The analysis of discrete solution accuracy has been carried out and coupling criteria are established to have global methods featured by a given accuracy order. Consequently, numerical schemes are built up to high orders. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes has been validated on several test problems arising in the field of economic applications. Results have been compared with the ones by classical Runge–Kutta methods, in terms of single function evaluations and average CPU time of the optimization process. The search for optimal solutions has been performed by standard algorithms in Matlab environment.
A Faster Quick Search Algorithm

We present the FQS (faster quick search) algorithm, an improved variation of the quick search algorithm. The quick search (QS) exact pattern matching algorithm and its variants are among the fastest practical matching algorithms today. The FQS algorithm computes a statistically expected shift value, which allows maximal shifts and a smaller number of comparisons between the pattern and the text. Compared to the state-of-the-art QS variants of exact pattern matching algorithms, the proposed FQS algorithm is the fastest when lΣl ≤ 128, where lΣl is the alphabet size. FQS also has a competitive running time when lΣl > 128. Running on three practical text files, E. coli (lΣl = 4), Bible (lΣl = 63) and World192 (lΣl = 94), FQS resulted in the best performance in practice. Our FQS algorithm will have important applications in the domain of genomic database searching, involving DNA or RNA sequence databases with four symbols Σ = {A, C, G, T(/U)} or protein databases with lΣl = 20.