Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A protocol for systematic reviews of Ayurveda treatments

This protocol is intended primarily for Ayurveda doctors who wish to take up systematic reviews along with an expert who has experience in doing such reviews. We have structured this protocol by incorporating the principles of patient treatment in Ayurveda, within the Cochrane framework, using Vitiligo as a model. The treatment section provides a comprehensive list of classical medicines used in the treatment of the disease. This will help in increasing the search terms. Such a list also helps to determine the needs of individualized treatment principles used in the trial and to assess the confounding factors. The search strategy includes an extensive listing of eastern data bases and hand searching. In Ayurveda, the titles of articles are not in the Population, Intervention, Control, and Outcome (PICO) pattern and sometimes the title and methodology do not tally. Therefore, a search of all types of studies is necessary to pool all the relevant publications. A data extraction form is proposed for use in assessing the quality of Ayurvedic studies. The form provides a template for performing evidence reviews of Ayurvedic interventions.
Visual-to-speech conversion based on maximum likelihood estimation

This paper proposes a visual-to-speech conversion method that converts voiceless lip movements into voiced utterances without recognizing text information. Inspired by a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based voice conversion method, GMM is estimated from jointed visual and audio features and input visual features are converted to audio features using maximum likelihood estimation. In order to capture lip movements whose frame rate data is smaller than the audio data, we construct long-term image features. The proposed method has been evaluated using large-vocabulary continuous speech and experimental results show that our proposed method effectively estimates spectral envelopes and fundamental frequencies of audio speech from voiceless lip movements.
Sintering integrated control model management framework based on distributed observer pattern

Control model management is an important part of the sintering integrated control system. It can serve as the bridge between real-time database and process monitoring and control model monitoring screens. The life cycle model (LCM), as well as control model management framework (CMMF) with LCM as its core based on distributed observer design pattern is presented. The CMMF can effectively manage the asynchronously monitoring multiple control models for a large number of clients and synchronously showing data under a distributed environment. The on site operation and simulation results of the system prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework.
Unappreciated Role of LDHA and LDHB to Control Apoptosis and Autophagy in Tumor Cells

Tumor cells possess a high metabolic plasticity, which drives them to switch on the anaerobic glycolysis and lactate production when challenged by hypoxia. Among the enzymes mediating this plasticity through bidirectional conversion of pyruvate and lactate, the lactate dehydrogenase A (LDHA) and lactate dehydrogenase B (LDHB), are indicated. LDHA has a higher affinity for pyruvate, preferentially converting pyruvate to lactate, and NADH to NAD+ in anaerobic conditions, whereas LDHB possess a higher affinity for lactate, preferentially converting lactate to pyruvate, and NAD+ to NADH, when oxygen is abundant. Apart from the undisputed role of LDHA and LDHB in tumor cell metabolism and adaptation to unfavorable environmental or cellular conditions, these enzymes participate in the regulation of cell death. This review presents the latest progress made in this area on the roles of LDHA and LDHB in apoptosis and autophagy of tumor cells. Several examples of how LDHA and LDHB impact on these processes, as well as possible molecular mechanisms, will be discussed in this article. The information included in this review points to the legitimacy of modulating LDHA and/or LDHB to target tumor cells in the context of human and veterinary medicine.
Novel microsatellite loci for Sebaea aurea (Gentianaceae) and cross-amplification in related species1

Premise of the study: Microsatellite loci were developed in Sebaea aurea (Gentianaceae) to investigate the functional role of diplostigmaty (i.e., the presence of additional stigmas along the style). Methods and Results: One hundred seventy-four and 180 microsatellite loci were isolated through 454 shotgun sequencing of genomic and microsatellite-enriched DNA libraries, respectively. Sixteen polymorphic microsatellite loci were characterized, and 12 of them were selected to genotype individuals from two populations. Microsatellite amplification was conducted in two multiplex groups, each containing six microsatellite loci. Cross-species amplification was tested in seven other species of Sebaea. The 12 novel microsatellite loci amplified only in the two most closely related species to S. aurea (i.e., S. ambigua and S. minutiflora) and were also polymorphic in these two species. Conclusions: These results demonstrate the usefulness of this set of newly developed microsatellite loci to investigate the mating system and population genetic structure in S. aurea and related species.
An adaptive fuzzy logic based handoff algorithm for interworking between WLANs and mobile networks

Our goal is to propose an optimal handoff algorithm for hybrid networks (HNs), which are constructed by interworking between wireless LANs (WLANs) and mobile networks. The proposed algorithm is an adaptive fuzzy logic based algorithm that can adapt itself with the dynamic conditions in HNs. It uses mobile terminal speed estimation and traffic in the WLAN as additional input parameters. This algorithm is designed to the meet special requirements of HNs. Simulation results show that it has much better performance than conventional algorithms.
A track-to-track association method for automotive perception systems

Recent and future driver assistance systems use more and more sensors, that have individual tracking modules. For target tracking, it becomes necessary to find techniques to manage as simply as possible the use of a great number of independent and heterogeneous sensors, at the different stages of the process. This paper presents a modular highlevel track-fusion architecture for a multisensor environment. This architecture allows the variation of the number and the types of the used sensors with no major change in the tracking algorithm. The paper also tackles the multisensor track-to-track association issue with a new algorithm based on a particular track-to-track distance computation. An example of target tracking method is shown to make use of the proposed architecture and the track-to-track association algorithm.
The Influence of Supershells and Galactic Outflows on the Escape of Ionizing Radiation from Dwarf Starburst Galaxies

We study the escape of Lyman continuum radiation from the disks of dwarf starburst galaxies, with and without supershells, by solving the radiation transfer problem of stellar radiation through them. We model disks with Md = 108-1010 M☉, with exponential surface density profiles as a function of redshift, and model the effects of repeated supernova explosions driving supershells out of the disks, using the hydrodynamic simulation code ZEUS-3D. The amount of star formation is assumed proportional to mass above some density threshold. We vary the threshold to explore the range of star formation efficiencies, f* = 0.006, 0.06, and 0.6. We find that the interstellar gas swept up in dense supershells can effectively trap the ionizing photons before the supershells blow out of the disks. The blowouts then create galactic outflows, chimneys that allow the photons to escape directly to the intergalactic medium. Our results are consistent with escape fractions of less than 0.1 measured in local dwarf starburst galaxies, because they are likely observed while the starbursts are young, before blowout. We suggest that high-redshift dwarf starburst galaxies may make a substantial contribution to the UV background radiation with total escape fractions ≳0.2, as expected if star formation efficiencies are ≳ 0.06.
Anemia among Primary School Children in Eastern Ethiopia

Background Anemia during childhood impairs physical growth, cognitive development and school performance. Identifying the causes of anemia in specific contexts can help efforts to prevent negative consequences of anemia among children. The objective of this study was to assess prevalence and identify correlates of anemia among school children in Eastern Ethiopia. Methods A cross sectional study was conducted from January 2012 to February 2012 in Kersa, Eastern Ethiopia. The study included randomly selected primary school students. Hemoglobin concentration was measured using a Hemocue haemoglobinometer. A child was identified as anemic if the hemoglobin concentration was <11.5 g/dl for children (5–11 yrs) and < 12 g/dl for child older than 12 years age. Poisson regression model with robust variance was used to calculate prevalence ratios. Result The overall prevalence of anemia was 27.1% (95% CI: 24.98, 29.14): 13.8% had mild, 10.8% moderate, and 2.3% severe anemia. Children with in the age group of 5-9 years (APR, 1.083; 95% CI, 1.044- 1.124) were at higher risk for anemia. Paternal education (Illiterate, 1.109; 1.044 - 1.178) was positively associated with anemia. Children who had irregular legume consumption (APR, 1.069; 95% CI, 1.022 -1.118) were at higher risk for anemia. Conclusion About a quarter of school children suffer from anemia and their educational potential is likely to be affected especially for those with moderate and severe anemia. Child age, irregular legume consumption, and low paternal schooling were associated with anemia. Intervention programmes aimed to reduce anemia among school children are crucial to ensure proper growth and development of children.
ACMS: the Akamai configuration management system

An important trend in information technology is the use of increasingly large distributed systems to deploy increasingly complex and mission-critical applications. In order for these systems to achieve the ultimate goal of having similar ease-of-use properties as centralized systems they must allow fast, reliable, and lightweight management and synchronization of their configuration state. This goal poses numerous technical challenges in a truly Internet-scale system, including varying degrees of network connectivity, inevitable machine failures, and the need to distribute information globally in a fast and reliable fashion. In this paper we discuss the design and implementation of a configuration management system for the Akamai Network. It allows reliable yet highly asynchronous delivery of configuration information, is significantly fault-tolerant, and can scale if necessary to hundreds of thousands of servers. The system is fully functional today providing configuration management to over 15,000 servers deployed in 1200+ different networks in 60+ countries.
Studying the pseudo random number generator of a low-cost RFID tag

Due to severe limitations in their computational and storage capabilities, many low-cost RFID tags have been shown to implement quite weak authentication protocols, largely due to weakness in their pseudorandom number generators (PRNG). This aim of this is to examine the PRNG in use within the authentication protocol of the new NXP MIFARE Ultralight C RFID low-cost card. The article investigates the nonces generated by the card during the authentication protocol to assess their randomness, and to test any possible attacks down this path. We confirm the validity of the methodology by applying similar techniques to the Mifare 1K Classic, confirming previously discovered weaknesses. We conclude that in the light of our analysis, the PRNG of the Ultralight C is a major improvement over that of the Mifare 1K, and that the nonces generated by the former can't be easily distinguished from truly random ones.
Etherfuse: an ethernet watchdog

Ethernet is pervasive. This is due in part to its ease of use. Equipment can be added to an Ethernet network with little or no manual configuration. Furthermore, Ethernet is self-healing in the event of equipment failure or removal. However, there are scenarios where a local event can lead to network-wide packet loss and duplication due to slow or faulty reconfiguration of the spanning tree. Moreover, in some cases the packet loss and duplication may persist indefinitely. To address these problems, we introduce the EtherFuse, a new device that can be inserted into an existing Ethernet to speed the reconfiguration of the spanning tree and suppress packet duplication. EtherFuse is backward compatible and requires no change to the existing hardware, software, or protocols. We describe a prototype EtherFuse implementation and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness. Specifically, we characterize how quickly it responds to network failures, its ability to reduce packet loss and duplication, and its benefits on the end-to-end performance of common applications.
Screening of metal borohydrides by mechanochemistry and diffraction.

Ay, there's the rub: The formation of cadmium-based borohydrides is screened by mechanochemical synthesis using various reactants in different ratios. Sequential in situ variable-temperature diffraction studies provide simultaneous information about composition, structure, decomposition pathways, and properties of the compounds. © 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.
Transactional Exactly-once

A three-tier application is organized as three layers. Front end clients (e.g., browsers) with which human user interact; middle-tier servers (e.g., web servers) that contain the core business logic of the application; and back-end database servers against which application servers perform transactions. Although three-tier applications are nowadays mainstream, they usually fail to provide su cient reliability guarantees to the end users. Usually, ad-hoc replication and transactional techniques are developed for speci c parts of the application, but these techniques are not combined to provide some global notion of reliability. The aim of this paper is precisely to de ne a desirable, yet realistic, speci cation of end-toend reliability in three-tier applications. We present the speci cation in the form of a problem called Transactional Exactly-Once which encompasses both safety and liveness properties in such environments. We also describe a practical protocol that solves the problem and we discuss its implementation and performances in a practical setting.
HQ Replication: Properties and Optimizations

There are currently two approaches to providing Byzantine-fault-tolerant state machine replication: a replica-based approach, e.g., BFT, that uses communication between replicas to agree on a proposed ordering of requests, and a quorum-based approach, such as Q/U, in which clients contact replicas directly to optimistically execute operations. Both approaches have shortcomings: the quadratic cost of inter-replica communication is unnecessary when there is no contention, and Q/U requires a large number of replicas and performs poorly under contention. We present HQ, a hybrid Byzantine-fault-tolerant state machine replication protocol that overcomes these problems. HQ employs a lightweight quorum-based protocol when there is no contention, but uses BFT to resolve contention when it arises. Furthermore, HQ uses only 3f +1 replicas to tolerate f faults, providing optimal resilience to node failures. We implemented a prototype of HQ, and we compare its performance to BFT and Q/U analytically and experimentally. Additionally, in this work we use a new implementation of BFT designed to scale as the number of faults increases. Our results show that both HQ and our new implementation of BFT scale as f increases; additionally our hybrid approach of using BFT to handle contention works well.
Design of a Multilayer Transducer for Acoustic Bladder Volume Assessment

Catheterization remains the "gold standard" for bladder volume assessment, but it is invasive and introduces the risk of infections and traumas. Therefore, noninvasive bladder volume measurement methods have gained interest. In a preceding study a new technique to measure the bladder volume on the basis of nonlinear ultrasound wave propagation was validated. This paper describes a first prototype of a dedicated multilayer transducer to implement this approach. It is composed of a PZT transducer for transmission and a PVDF layer for reception. Acoustical measurements in a water tank and phantom measurements showed that there is a relation between bladder volume and the harmonic contents of the echo obtained from a region of interest behind the bladder. Simulations with an equivalent transducer model on the basis of KLM-circuit modeling closely matched with the results from the acoustical measurements. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the multilayer transducer design for bladder volume assessment on the basis of nonlinear wave propagation
What does an aberrated photo tell us about the lens and the scene?

We investigate the feasibility of recovering lens properties, scene appearance and depth from a single photo containing optical aberrations and defocus blur. Starting from the ray intersection function of a rotationally-symmetric compound lens and the theory of Seidel aberrations, we obtain three basic results. First, we derive a model for the lens PSF that (1) accounts for defocus and primary Seidel aberrations and (2) describes how light rays are bent by the lens. Second, we show that the problem of inferring depth and aberration coefficients from the blur kernel of just one pixel has three degrees of freedom in general. As such it cannot be solved unambiguously. Third, we show that these degrees of freedom can be eliminated by inferring scaled aberration coefficients and depth from the blur kernel at multiple pixels in a single photo (at least three). These theoretical results suggest that single-photo aberration estimation and depth recovery may indeed be possible, given the recent progress on blur kernel estimation and blind deconvolution.
Optimizing Main-Memory Join on Modern Hardware

textabstractIn the past decade, the exponential growth in commodity CPUs speed has far outpaced advances in memory latency. A second trend is that CPU performance advances are not only brought by increased clock rate, but also by increasing parallelism inside the CPU. Current database systems have not yet adapted to these trends, and show poor utilization of both CPU and memory resources on current hardware. In this article, we show how these resources can be optimized for large joins and translate these insights into guidelines for future database architectures, encompassing data structures, algorithms, cost modeling, and implementation. In particular, we discuss how vertically fragmented data structures optimize cache performance on sequential data access. On the algorithmic side, we refine the partitioned hash-join with a new partitioning algorithm called radix-cluster, which is specifically designed to optimize memory access. The performance of this algorithm is quantified using a detailed analytical model that incorporates memory access costs in terms of a limited number of parameters, such as cache sizes and miss penalties. We also present a calibration tool that extracts such parameters automatically from any computer hardware. The accuracy of our models is proven by exhaustive experiments conducted with the Monet database system on three different hardware platforms. Finally, we investigate the effect of implementation techniques that optimize CPU resource usage. Our experiments show that large joins can be accelerated almost an order of magnitude on modern RISC hardware when both memory and CPU resources are optimized.
Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting Characterization: An Experimental Study

This paper presents the outcomes of experiments performed to acquire data and to evaluate various parameters to: (1) assess the feasibility of harvesting the energy from the ambient RF power to energize wireless sensor nodes, and, (2) characterize commercially available PowerCastTM energy harvester. The parameters of interest are: (1) Ambient RF power along several bands, (2) Time, Tc, taken by PowerCastTM energy harvester for charging, and (3), The received signal strength indicator (RSSI) captured by PowerCast™ energy harvester. The former measurements are taken at different locations inside King Fahd University campus. The latter two quantities were computed from data acquired at various coordinates of the harvester relative to the transmitter and the source of energy. The data is acquired in indoor and outdoor scenarios. The acquired data was processed in MATLAB and it was concluded that: (1) The ambient RF power in not sufficient to energize the commercially available PowerCast™ RF power harvester which has a specified requirement of at least -10dBm power to successfully harvest RF energy. (2) The outdoor experiments suggested that Tc is directly, while RSSI is inversely proportional to the radial distance from the power transmitter. The two quantities are also significantly affected by the variation of azimuth and elevation of harvester w.r. t. the transmitter. (3) It is observed in the indoor experiments that trends of Tc and RSSI are not as regular as those in the case of outdoor experiments. Experimental procedure and all of the analyses are documented in detail so that it can be a useful reference for researchers working in this area.
Ability of IncP‐9 plasmid pM3 to replicate in Escherichia coli is dependent on both rep and par functions

IncP‐9 plasmids are common in Pseudomonas species and can be transferred to other Gram‐negative eubacteria but tend not to be stably maintained outside their natural host genus. A 1.3 kb ori V‐rep fragment from IncP‐9 plasmid pM3 was sufficient for autonomous replication in Pseudomonas putida but not in Escherichia coli. Replication of ori V‐rep in E. coli was restored when additional rep was provided in trans, suggesting that the replication defect resulted from insufficient rep expression from its natural promoter. A promoter deficiency in E. coli was confirmed by reporter gene assays, transcriptional start point mapping and mutation of the promoter recognition elements. Dissection of the pM3 mini‐replicon, pMT2, showed that this replication deficiency in E. coli is suppressed by additional determinants from its par operon: ParB, which can be supplied in trans, and its target, the par operon promoter, required in cis to ori V‐rep. We propose that ParB binding to its target either changes plasmid DNA and thus promoter conformation or by spreading or looping contacts RNAP at the rep promoter so that rep expression is sufficient to activate ori V.