Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biocontrol and Osmoprotection for Plants under Salinated Conditions

Today, world agriculture faces an increasing threat by plant pathogens. This can hardly be overcome by conventional methods of pest management. Not only do synthetic pesticides show limited efficiency because of the development of resistance by the pathogen, consumers are also concerned more and more about their effects on environmental sustainability, food safety, and food quality. On the other hand, insufficient food supply and deficiencies of vitamins and micronutrients are widely spread problems in many developing countries and extensive and expensive agricultural efforts are required to address these problems. In many of these areas, soil salinization—originally caused by humidification because of the clearing of trees for agriculture and amplified by salt brought in by ground water and strong irrigation—is an enormous additional problem. In 1999, 42% of arable land in Asia and 31% in the Middle East and North Africa were irrigated; irrigated land in developing countries is estimated to increase by
Real‐Time Individual Predictions of Prostate Cancer Recurrence Using Joint Models

Patients who were previously treated for prostate cancer with radiation therapy are monitored at regular intervals using a laboratory test called Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA). If the value of the PSA test starts to rise, this is an indication that the prostate cancer is more likely to recur, and the patient may wish to initiate new treatments. Such patients could be helped in making medical decisions by an accurate estimate of the probability of recurrence of the cancer in the next few years. In this article, we describe the methodology for giving the probability of recurrence for a new patient, as implemented on a web‐based calculator. The methods use a joint longitudinal survival model. The model is developed on a training dataset of 2386 patients and tested on a dataset of 846 patients. Bayesian estimation methods are used with one Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm developed for estimation of the parameters from the training dataset and a second quick MCMC developed for prediction of the risk of recurrence that uses the longitudinal PSA measures from a new patient.
Osteoprotegerin/RANKL axis and progression of coronary artery calcification in hemodialysis patients.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Vascular calcification is associated with increased cardiovascular mortality in chronic hemodialysis patients. This prospective study investigated the relationship between serum osteoprotegerin, receptor activator of NF-κB ligand, inflammatory markers, and progression of coronary artery calcification score. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS Seventy-eight hemodialysis patients were enrolled. Serum IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, osteoprotegerin, receptor activator of NF-κB, fetuin A, and bone alkaline phosphatase were measured by ELISA. Coronary artery calcification score was measured two times with 1-year intervals, and patients were classified as progressive or nonprogressive. RESULTS Baseline and first-year serum osteoprotegerin levels were significantly higher in the progressive than nonprogressive group (17.39±9.67 versus 12.90±6.59 pmol/L, P=0.02; 35.17±18.35 versus 24±11.65 pmol/L, P=0.002, respectively). The ratio of serum osteoprotegerin to receptor activator of NF-κB ligand at 1 year was significantly higher in the progressive group (0.26 [0.15-0.46] versus 0.18 [0.12-0.28], P=0.004). Serum osteoprotegerin levels were significantly correlated with coronary artery calcification score at both baseline (r=0.36, P=0.001) and 1 year (r=0.36, P=0.001). Importantly, progression in coronary artery calcification score significantly correlated with change in serum osteoprotegerin levels (r=0.39, P=0.001). In addition, serum receptor activator of NF-κB ligand levels were significantly inversely correlated with coronary artery calcification scores at both baseline (r=-0.29, P=0.01) and 1 year (r=-0.29, P=0.001). In linear regression analysis for predicting coronary artery calcification score progression, only baseline coronary artery calcification score and change in osteoprotegerin were retained as significant factors in the model. CONCLUSIONS Baseline coronary artery calcification score and serum osteoprotegerin levels were significantly associated with progression of coronary artery calcification score in hemodialysis patients.
Tackling Biomedical Text Summarization: OAQA at BioASQ 5B

In this paper, we describe our participation in phase B of task 5b of the fifth edition of the annual BioASQ challenge, which includes answering factoid, list, yes-no and summary questions from biomedical data. We describe our techniques with an emphasis on ideal answer generation, where the goal is to produce a relevant, precise, non-redundant, query-oriented summary from multiple relevant documents. We make use of extractive summarization techniques to address this task and experiment with different biomedical ontologies and various algorithms including agglomerative clustering, Maximum Marginal Relevance (MMR) and sentence compression. We propose a novel word embedding based tf-idf similarity metric and a soft positional constraint which improve our system performance. We evaluate our techniques on test batch 4 from the fourth edition of the challenge. Our best system achieves a ROUGE-2 score of 0.6534 and ROUGE-SU4 score of 0.6536.
A high performance network virtualization architecture with bandwidth guarantees

Virtualization technologies in cloud computing have been developing rapidly nowadays. One of their fundamental technologies is network virtualization. In order to increase bandwidth, link aggregation can be applied with network virtualization. It can balance the bandwidth of multiple virtual machines. In this paper, we purpose a high performance network virtualization model for multiple network adapters on KVM full virtualization with two types of link aggregation: network bonding and network teaming. Both types can increase throughput up to the number of network adapters in scenario 1 and 2. In Our work also integrates SLA, which is able to guarantee bandwidth of each virtual machine. In scenario 3, SLA bandwidth with both of link aggregation types provides throughput ratios for each network adapter of the two iPerf virtual machine servers at 80% and 20%. In conclusion, bandwidth guarantee is possible on KVM with network bounding and network teaming.
Replication association analysis of S100B and cognitive ageing.

Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, Department of Psychology, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, Geriatric Medicine Unit, The University of Edinburgh, Royal Victoria, Edinburgh, UK Correspondence to John M. Starr, Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, Geriatric Medicine Unit, The University of Edinburgh, Royal Victoria, Craigleith Road, Edinburgh, EH4 2DN, UK Tel: + 44 131 537 5023; fax: + 44 131 537 5140; e-mail: jstarr@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
The Impact of Relationship Functioning on Cortisol in Married Couples: A Dyadic Exploration of Sleep as a Potential Mediator

The Impact of Relationship Functioning on Cortisol in Married Couples: A Dyadic Exploration of Sleep as a Potential Mediator Benjamin David Clark Department of Psychology, BYU Doctor of Philosophy Relationship functioning in couples has been linked to numerous health outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between 1) marital functioning and sleep dimensions, 2) marital functioning and cortisol, and 3) sleep dimensions and cortisol. The sample consisted of 108 heterosexual, married couples and was part of a larger marital intervention study. As predicted, poor marital functioning was related to negative sleep outcomes. However, these effects were only significant for wives. There was also evidence to suggest that poor marital functioning was associated with increased cortisol levels in husbands. These effects were independent of age and BMI. Contrary to our hypotheses, cortisol was not linked to sleep outcomes and, therefore, not a mediator of effect between marital functioning and cortisol. However, we did find evidence to suggest that stress and depressive symptomology could mediate the association between dyadic adjustment and sleep. Together, these findings provide evidence for how marital functioning can affect both physical and psychological health.
Make or Buy: A Systematic Approach to Department of Defense Sourcing Decisions for Services (An Interim Report)

Abstract : Over the last decade, Department of Defense (DoD) spending on service contracts more than doubled in constant terms, from $90 billion in 2000 to $183 billion in 2012. Policy makers have recently attempted to reduce or even reverse this trend, in part by emphasizing instead the in-sourcing of work performed under services contracts. Over the last three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has worked to develop a more systematic framework for guiding sourcing decisions for services contracts within the DoD which would have broader implications for the whole universe of budget-based decisions within the DoD. Towards that purpose, this paper analyzes the stated motivations, implementation strategies, and guiding analytical underpinnings for previous outsourcing efforts and for the currently ongoing in-sourcing initiative. It then assesses current and previous DoD methodologies for guiding sourcing decisions, highlighting the individual strengths and shortcomings of these methodologies. The third section of this paper analyzes public sector sourcing decisions in the wider context of economics and business management, to provide broader conceptual insights for more informed determinations on these sourcing decisions. All of this research is being used to develop a repeatable, verifiable, data-driven methodology to guide sourcing decisions, which will be presented in the final report of this project.
Branding a Store: How to Build Successful Retail Brands in a Changing Marketplace

"Branding a Store" shows how to build a strong, independent retail brand identity to remain competitive in today's global marketplace. First this book explains the distinction between retail brands and manufacturer brands, and assesses the increasing conflict between the two. The author explains in detail the potential benefits of a strong retail brand for both the retailer and the consumer. It discusses the factors to consider when positioning the brand: assortment; price; convenience; and, customer experience. The author considers the three competitive strategies to follow to build a strong, distinct brand identity: increasing sales; cutting costs; and, increasing differentiation from the competition. Then he explains the most effective ways to communicate with the consumer. Finally he offers insights into the future development of successful retail brands.
Central Memory CD4+ T Cell Responses in Chronic HIV Infection Are Not Restored by Antiretroviral Therapy1

A strong CD4+ T cell response has been correlated with better control of HIV infection. However, the effect of HIV on the maintenance of Ag-specific memory CD4+ T cells is not fully understood. We characterized the function and phenotype of memory CD4+ T cells generated by mumps and influenza A or B viruses in HIV-infected individuals receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy (n = 21), HIV-infected long-term nonprogressors (n = 10), and HIV-seronegative volunteers (n = 10). We observed significantly decreased proliferation of the Ag-specific central memory CD4+ T cell population (CD28+/CCR7+/CD45RA−) in the antiretroviral treated HIV-infected individuals compared with the seronegative controls. Restored CD4+ T cell count and decreased HIV viral load while on highly active antiretroviral therapy did not result in increased proliferation, whereas nadir CD4+ T cell count predicted the presence of Ag-specific proliferation. Our results indicate that HIV infection leads to impaired maintenance of virus-induced or vaccine-generated central memory CD4+ T cells that is not restored by HAART.
Interactive Brain Tumor Segmentation with Inclusion Constraints

This thesis proposes an improved interactive brain tumor segmentation method based on graph cuts, which is an efficient global optimization framework for image segmentation, and star shape, which is a general segmentation shape prior with minimal user assistance. Our improvements lie in volume ballooning, compactness measure and inclusion constraints. Volume ballooning is incorporated to help to ”balloon” segmentation for situations where the foreground and background have similar appearance models and changing relative weight between appearance model and smoothness term cannot help to achieve an accurate segmentation. We search different ballooning parameters for different slices since an appropriate ballooning force may vary between slices. As the evaluation for ”goodness of segmentation” in parameter searching, two new compactness measures are introduced, ellipse fitting and convexity deviation. Ellipse fitting is a measure of compactness based on the deviation from an ellipse of best fit, which prefers segmentation with an ellipse shape. And convexity deviation is a more strict measure for preferring convex segmentation. It uses the number of convexity violation pixels as the measure for compactness. Inclusion constraints is added between slices to avoid side slice segmentation larger than the middle slice problem. The inclusion constraints consist of mask inclusion, which is implemented by an unary term in graph cuts, and pairwise inclusion, which is implemented by a pairwise term. Margin is allowed in inclusion so that the inclusion region is enlarged. With all these improvements, the final result is promising. The best performance for our dataset is 88% compared to the previous system in [25] that achieved 87%.
Determination of wall shear stress in the aorta with the use of MR phase velocity mapping

MR phase velocity mapping was used to calculate wall shear stress (WSS) in the suprarenal and infrarenal abdominal aorta, two sites with very different proclivities for development of atherosclerosis. For the eight subjects studied, the average value of the mean (tune averaged over the cardiac cycle) WSS in the suprarenal aorta was 10.4 dynes/cm2 at the posterior wall and 8.6 at the anterior wall. In the infrarenal aorta, WSS values were 4.7 at the posterior wall and 6.1 at the anterior wall. Peak WSS over the cardiac cycle was 48 and 54 at the anterior and posterior walls of the suprarenal aorta, respectively, and 33 and 30 at the anterior and posterior walls of the infrarenal aorta, respectively. Wide variation was found in both mean and peak WSS values among subjects. However, for 28 of 32 locations examined, mean and peak WSS were ingher in the suprarenal aorta than in the infrarenal aorta. Because atherosclerosis is more likely to form in the infrarenal aorta than in the suprarenal aorta, tins study supports the hypothesis that low WSS is a localizing factor for atherosclerosis, and ingh WSS may act as a deterrent against formation of atherosclerosis.
Transport Survey Methods: Best Practice for Decision Making

This book provides an international perspective on improving information to support transportation decision making. It comprises a selection of papers plus workshop syntheses from the 9th International Conference on Transport Survey Methods in Chile in November 2011. The conference was organized into 14 workshops with both paper presentations and discussions in the workshops forming the majority of the conference activity. The papers reported primarily on research pertaining to continuous improvement in transport survey methods — the backbone of the transportation data pipeline in most countries. But some papers also addressed the new ways in which innovation — notably technological innovation — is being applied to the capture and analysis of data to produce necessary information faster, better, and less expensively. The conference program built on a rich legacy of intellectual pursuits spanning the past two decades, and it is anticipated that the conference will continue into the future. Thus, the contents of this book represent a 5–10 year view through a moving window on the international state of the practice and concerns in transport survey methods.
A novel compact soft-start circuit with internal circuitry for DC-DC converters

A novel internal soft-start circuit with simple topology for DC-DC buck converters is presented. It is implemented by controlling the output of error amplifier to make switch current limit increases in steps without using external capacitor, which reduces the component cost, saves board space and benefits for portable applications. This circuit is designed on the basis of Hynix 0.5 mum CMOS process, and its performance has been verified by Hspice simulation and measurement results. Avoiding the inrush current and overshoot vloltage, the IC starts up in 4 steps in 1.6 ms with input voltage of 3.6 V, output voltage of 1.8 V, output capacitor of 22 muF and load current of 1.1 A.
Are British Muslims alienated from mainstream politics by Islamophobia and British foreign policy?

This paper uses the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study to look at the political attitudes of Muslims in Britain. It tests the relationship between political alienation and political participation on the one hand, and Islamophobia and disapproval of British military involvement in Afghanistan on the other. The principal findings are that perceptions of Islamophobia are linked to greater political alienation, to a greater likelihood of non-electoral participation and to a lower likelihood of voting among Muslims. Likewise, disapproval of the war in Afghanistan is associated with greater political alienation and a greater likelihood of some types of non-electoral participation. There is strong evidence that British Muslims are more likely to interpret discrimination they experience as motivated by their religion and that they perceive more prejudice at the group level. These findings have two theoretical implications. First, they support the theory that non-electoral participation is motivated by dissatisfaction with the party political system. Second, they suggest that perceptions of sociotropic discrimination (for minorities) and a rare salient political issue in which all parties are in opposition to most voters can lead to negative affect towards the political system and stimulate non-electoral participation at the expense of voting.
Music Synchronization, Audio Matching, Pattern Detection, and User Interfaces for a Digital Music Library System

Over the last two decades, growing efforts to digitize our cultural heritage could be observed. Most of these digitization initiatives pursuit either one or both of the following goals: to conserve the documents – especially those threatened by decay – and to provide remote access on a grand scale. For music documents these trends are observable as well, and by now several digital music libraries are in existence. An important characteristic of these music libraries is an inherent multimodality resulting from the large variety of available digital music representations, such as scanned score, symbolic score, audio recordings, and videos. In addition, for each piece of music there exists not only one document of each type, but many. Considering and exploiting this multimodality and multiplicity, the DFG-funded digital library initiative Probado Music aimed at developing a novel userfriendly interface for content-based retrieval, document access, navigation, and browsing in large music collections. The implementation of such a front end requires the multimodal linking and indexing of the music documents during preprocessing. As the considered music collections can be very large, the automated or at least semi-automated calculation of these structures would be recommendable. The field of music information retrieval (MIR) is particularly concerned with the development of suitable procedures, and it was the goal of Probado Music to include existing and newly developed MIR techniques to realize the envisioned digital music library system. In this context, the present thesis discusses the following three MIR tasks: music synchronization, audio matching, and pattern detection. We are going to identify particular issues in these fields and provide algorithmic solutions as well as prototypical implementations. In Music synchronization, for each position in one representation of a piece of music the corresponding position in another representation is calculated. This thesis focuses on the task of aligning scanned score pages of orchestral music with audio recordings. Here, a previously unconsidered piece of information is the textual specification of transposing instruments provided in the score. Our evaluations show that the neglect of such information can result in a measurable loss of synchronization accuracy. Therefore, we propose an OCR1-based approach for detecting and interpreting the transposition information in orchestral scores. For a given audio snippet, audio matching methods automatically calculate all musically similar excerpts within a collection of audio recordings. In this context, subsequence dynamic time warping (SSDTW) is a well-established approach as it allows for local and global tempo variations between the query and the retrieved matches. Moving to real-life digital music libraries with larger audio collections, however, the quadratic runtime of SSDTW results in untenable response times. To improve on the response time, this thesis 1 Optical character recognition
Smooth Beamforming and Efficient Beamforming Weight Computation

This paper investigates an efficient way of computing the beamforming weights for a MIMO OFDM system. It is shown that computing the weights incrementally across correlated channels can significantly reduce the complexity. An additional benefit of this technique is that it provides a "smooth" beamformer, i.e., it does not significantly change the correlation of the beamformed channel, which makes it suitable for advanced channel estimation techniques. We evaluate its performance in the OFDM-based IEEE802.11n system, where the computations are done across the subcarriers, and show that significant gains from channel smoothing at the receiver are possible due to the smooth beamformer. We also show that linear interpolation of beamforming matrices between subcarriers can be used, which only has a small degradation compared to optimal interpolation but a much simple implementation.
Cultural constructions of the concept of household in sample surveys

We analyse the use of the concept of household in sample surveys, with evidence drawn from a review of survey definitions, a series of in-depth interviews with data producers and users, and a systematic study of recent literature. We consider the place of the concept within the discipline of demography, and demonstrate how its definition and use interact with cultural values and core concepts integral to the discipline. Focusing on Tanzania as a case study, we examine the diversity of factors that influence the construction of household-level data from cross-sectional household surveys. Throughout the survey process, contrasting interpretations of the meaning of household and different motivations for using specific definitions of the term interact. This generates data and outputs with potential for undercounting, bias, and misrepresentations, with adverse effects on the quality of data used for monitoring development indicators. Some ways of improving data collection on households are proposed.