Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ethyl glucuronide in hair and fingernails as a long-term alcohol biomarker

Aims This study aimed to evaluate the performance of ethyl glucuronide (EtG) in hair and fingernails as a long-term alcohol biomarker. Design Cross-sectional survey with probability sampling. Setting Midwestern United States. Participants Participants were 606 undergraduate college students between the ages of 18 and 25 years at the time of selection for potential study participation. Measurements EtG concentrations in hair and fingernails were measured by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry at three thresholds [30 picograms (pg) per milligram (mg); 20 pg/mg; and 8 pg/mg]. Any weekly alcohol use, increasing-risk drinking and high-risk drinking on average during the past 12 weeks was assessed by participant interview using the time-line follow-back method. Findings In both hair and fingernails at all three EtG thresholds, sensitivity was greatest for the high-risk drinking group [hair: 0.43, confidence interval (CI) = 0.17, 0.69 at 30 pg/mg, 0.71, CI = 0.47, 0.95 at 20 pg/mg; 0.93, CI = 0.79, 1.00 at 8 pg/mg; fingernails: 1.00, CI = 1.00–1.00 at 30, 20 and 8 pg/mg] and specificity was greatest for any alcohol use (hair: 1.00, CI = 1.00, 1.00 at 30 and 20 pg/mg; 0.97, CI = 0.92–0.99 at 8 pg/mg; fingernails: 1.00, CI = 1.00–1.00 at 30, 20 and 8 pg/mg). Areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves were significantly higher for EtG concentration in fingernails than hair for any weekly alcohol use (P = 0.02, DeLong test, two-tailed) and increasing-risk drinking (P = 0.02, DeLong test, two-tailed). Conclusions Ethyl glucuronide, especially in fingernails, may have potential as a quantitative indicator of alcohol use.
Algorithm 983

The detection of heterogeneity among objects (products, treatments, medical studies) assessed on a series of blocks (consumers, patients, methods, pathologists) is critical in numerous areas such as clinical research, cosmetic studies, or survey analysis. The Cochran’s Q test is the most widely used test for identifying heterogeneity on binary data (success vs. failure, cure vs. not cure, 1 vs. 0, etc.). For a large number of blocks, the Q distribution can be approximated by a χ2 distribution. Unfortunately, this does not hold for limited sample sizes or sparse tables. In such situations, one has to either run Monte Carlo simulations or compute the exact Q distribution to obtain an accurate and reliable result. However, the latter method is often disregarded in favor of the former due to computational expense considerations. The purpose of this article is to propose an extremely fast implementation of the exact Cochran’s Q test so one can benefit from its accuracy at virtually no cost regarding computation time. It is implemented as a part of the XLSTAT statistical software (Addinsoft 2015). After a short presentation of the Cochran’s Q test and the motivation for its exact version, we detail our approach and present its actual implementation. We then demonstrate the gain of this algorithm with performance evaluations and measurements. Comparisons against a well-established implementation have shown an increase of the computational velocity by a factor ranging from 100 up to 1× 106 in the most favorable cases.
The Detection of Neuropsychological Malingering

The present study compared the responses of a group of simulating malingerers who were offered a monetary incentive to feign symptoms of a head injury, with the responses of head injured groups both with and without litigation, a forensic parole group, and an honest-responding control group. The following six neuropsychological measures were utilized: Rey 15-Item Memory Test, Controlled Oral Word Association Test, Finger Oscillation Test, WAIS-R Neuropsychological Instrument (Vocabulary, Information, and Similarities subtests), Booklet Category Test, and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. The statistical concepts of floor effect, performance curve, and magnitude of error were examined. Additionally, the statistical differences in the responses of the five groups were analyzed to determine cutting scores for use in distinguishing malingerers from nonmalingerers.
Striatopallidal Neuron NMDA Receptors Control Synaptic Connectivity, Locomotor, and Goal-Directed Behaviors

The basal ganglia (BG) control action selection, motor programs, habits, and goal-directed learning. The striatum, the principal input structure of BG, is predominantly composed of medium-sized spiny neurons (MSNs). Arising from these spatially intermixed MSNs, two inhibitory outputs form two main efferent pathways, the direct and indirect pathways. Striatonigral MSNs give rise to the activating, direct pathway MSNs and striatopallidal MSNs to the inhibitory, indirect pathway (iMSNs). BG output nuclei integrate information from both pathways to fine-tune motor procedures and to acquire complex habits and skills. Therefore, balanced activity between both pathways is crucial for harmonious functions of the BG. Despite the increase in knowledge concerning the role of glutamate NMDA receptors (NMDA-Rs) in the striatum, understanding of the specific functions of NMDA-R iMSNs is still lacking. For this purpose, we generated a conditional knock-out mouse to address the functions of the NMDA-R in the indirect pathway. At the cellular level, deletion of GluN1 in iMSNs leads to a reduction in the number and strength of the excitatory corticostriatopallidal synapses. The subsequent scaling down in input integration leads to dysfunctional changes in BG output, which is seen as reduced habituation, delay in goal-directed learning, lack of associative behavior, and impairment in action selection or skill learning. The NMDA-R deletion in iMSNs causes a decrease in the synaptic strength of striatopallidal neurons, which in turn might lead to a imbalanced integration between direct and indirect MSN pathways, making mice less sensitive to environmental change. Therefore, their ability to learn and adapt to the environment-based experience was significantly affected. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The striatum controls habits, locomotion, and goal-directed behaviors by coordinated activation of two antagonistic pathways. Insofar as NMDA receptors (NMDA-Rs) play a key role in synaptic plasticity essential for sustaining these behaviors, we generated a mouse model lacking NMDA-Rs specifically in striatopallidal neurons. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a specific deletion of inhibitory, indirect pathway medium-sized spiny neuron (iMSN) NMDA-Rs has been used to address the role of these receptors in the inhibitory pathway. Importantly, we found that this specific deletion led to a significant reduction in the number and strength of the cortico–iMSN synapses, which resulted in the significant impairments of behaviors orchestrated by the basal ganglia. Our findings indicate that the NMDA-Rs of the indirect pathway are essential for habituation, action selection, and goal-directed learning.
How secure is split manufacturing in preventing hardware trojan?

With the trend of outsourcing fabrication, split manufacturing is regarded as a promising way to both provide the high-end nodes in untrusted external foundries and protect the design from potential attackers. However, in this work, we show that split manufacturing is not inherently secure. A hardware trojan attacker can still discover necessary information with a simulated annealing based attack approach at the placement level. We further propose a defense approach by moving the insecure gates away from their easily-attacked candidate locations. Experimental results on benchmark circuits show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
The Capability Maturity Model for Software

This paper provides an overview of the latest version of the Capability Maturity Model for Software, CMM v1.1. Based on over six years of experience with software process improvement and the contributions of hundreds of reviewers, CMM v1.1 describes the software engineering and management practices that characterize organizations as they mature their processes for developing and maintaining software. This paper stresses the need for a process maturity framework to prioritize improvement actions, describes the process maturity framework of five maturity levels and the associated structural components, and discusses future directions for the CMM.
Analysis of Breast Feeding Data Using Data Mining Methods

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the benefit of using common data mining techniques on survey data where statistical analysis is routinely applied. The statistical survey is commonly used to collect quantitative information about an item in a population. Statistical analysis is usually carried out on survey data to test hypothesis. We report in this paper an application of data mining methodologies to breast feeding survey data which have been conducted and analysed by statisticians. The purpose of the research is to study the factors leading to deciding whether or not to breast feed a new born baby. Various data mining methods are applied to the data. Feature or variable selection is conducted to select the most discriminative and least redundant features using an information theory based method and a statistical approach. Decision tree and regression approaches are tested on classification tasks using features selected. Risk pattern mining method is also applied to identify groups with high risk of not breast feeding. The success of data mining in this study suggests that using data mining approaches will be applicable to other similar survey data. The data mining methods, which enable a search for hypotheses, may be used as a complementary survey data analysis tool to traditional statistical analysis.
Anxiety and comorbid measures associated with PLXNA2.

CONTEXT Reduction in adult neurogenesis has been proposed as a mechanism for onset of depression. Semaphorins and their coreceptors, plexins, have been implicated in nervous system development and in adult neurogenesis. A recent genomewide association study of schizophrenia identified a variant of the gene encoding plexin A2 (PLXNA2) to be most consistently associated across study samples. Common genetic liabilities have been reported between psychiatric and psychological measures, but few examples exist of common genetic variants. OBJECTIVE To perform a genetic association study between 6 single nucleotide polymorphisms from the PLXNA2 gene (rs3736963, rs2767565, rs752016, rs1327175, rs2478813, and rs716461) and anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and psychological distress. DESIGN Extreme discordant and concordant siblings. SETTING Australia. PARTICIPANTS Study participants were selected with respect to extreme neuroticism scores from a population cohort of 18 742 twin individuals and their siblings. The participants and their parents (if blood or buccal samples were available) were genotyped, for a total of 2854 genotyped individuals from 990 families. Of these, 624 individuals with a diagnosis of anxiety or depression from 443 families were used in the association analysis. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES All the participants completed the Composite International Diagnostic Interview, the 23-item Neuroticism scale of the revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and the 10-item Kessler Psychological Distress Scale. Diagnoses of DSM-IV depression and anxiety were determined from the Composite International Diagnostic Interview. RESULTS There was evidence of an allelic association between rs2478813 (and other single nucleotide polymorphisms correlated with it) and anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and psychological distress; the association with anxiety is significant after Bonferroni correction for multiple testing (empirical P<.001). The mouse ortholog of PLXNA2 is located in a highly significant linkage region previously reported for anxiety in mice. CONCLUSION PLXNA2 is a candidate for causal variation in anxiety and in other psychiatric disorders through its comorbidity with anxiety.
NOR-SASS (Norwegian Sonothrombolysis in Acute Stroke Study)

Background and Purpose— The NOR-SASS (Norwegian Sonothrombolysis in Acute Stroke Study) aimed to assess effect and safety of contrast-enhanced ultrasound treatment in an unselected acute ischemic stroke population. Methods— Patients treated with intravenous thrombolysis within 4.5 hours after symptom onset were randomized 1:1 to either contrast-enhanced sonothrombolysis (CEST) or sham CEST. A visible arterial occlusion on baseline computed tomography angiography was not a prerequisite for inclusion. Pulse-wave 2 MHz ultrasound was given for 1 hour and contrast (SonoVue) as an infusion for ≈30 minutes. Magnetic resonance imaging and angiography were performed after 24 to 36 hours. Primary study end points were neurological improvement at 24 hours defined as National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score 0 or reduction of ≥4 National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale points compared with baseline National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale and favorable functional outcome at 90 days defined as modified Rankin scale score 0 to 1. Results— A total of 183 patients were randomly assigned to either CEST (93 patient) or sham CEST (90 patients). The rates of symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage, asymptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage, or mortality were not increased in the CEST group. Neurological improvement at 24 hours and functional outcome at 90 days was similar in the 2 groups both in the intention-to-treat analysis and in the per-protocol analysis. Conclusions— CEST is safe among unselected ischemic stroke patients with or without a visible occlusion on computed tomography angiography and with varying grades of clinical severity. There was, however, statistically no significant clinical effect of sonothrombolysis in this prematurely stopped trial. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT01949961.
Maternally and Paternally Silenced Imprinted Genes Differ in Their Intron Content

Imprinted genes exhibit silencing of one of the parental alleles during embryonic development. In a previous study imprinted genes were found to have reduced intron content relative to a non-imprinted control set (Hurst et al., 1996). However, due to the small sample size, it was not possible to analyse the source of this effect. Here, we re-investigate this observation using larger datasets of imprinted and control (non-imprinted) genes that allow us to consider mouse and human, and maternally and paternally silenced, imprinted genes separately. We find that, in the human and mouse, there is reduced intron content in the maternally silenced imprinted genes relative to a non-imprinted control set. Among imprinted genes, a strong bias is also observed in the distribution of intronless genes, which are found exclusively in the maternally silenced dataset. The paternally silenced dataset in the human is not different to the control set; however, the mouse paternally silenced dataset has more introns than the control group. A direct comparison of mouse maternally and paternally silenced imprinted gene datasets shows that they differ significantly with respect to a variety of intron-related parameters. We discuss a variety of possible explanations for our observations.
What Have We Learned about Antiphospholipid Syndrome from Patients and Antiphospholipid Carrier Cohorts?

Abstract Venous or arterial thrombosis or pregnancy morbidity in the presence of circulating antiphospholipid antibodies (aPL) define the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). In terms of accepted APS criteria, aPL are detected by one coagulation test (lupus anticoagulant; LAC) and two immunoassays (anticardiolipin antibodies and anti-β2-glycoptrotein I antibodies). In patients with APS, a single positive test carries a much lower risk of thrombosis recurrence or new pregnancy loss than does multiple (or triple) positivity. The same holds true for aPL carriers, namely subjects with laboratory tests but without clinical criteria for APS. Thus, very different risk categories exist among patients with APS as well as in carriers of aPL. Triple positivity apparently identifies the pathogenic autoantibody (antidomain I-II of β2-glycoptrotein I); it is in this category of patients that trials on new therapeutic strategies should focus.
Fusion of spatial and visual information for object tracking on iPhone

In this work, a novel object tracking system is proposed which tracks visual objects on Apple iPhone 4 platform in real-time. The system utilizes the color space of the frames provided by iPhone camera, in parallel with the motion data provided by iPhone motion sensors, to cancel the effect of iPhone movements during matching different candidate tracks. The proposed system also adapts to changes in target appearance and size, thus leading to a robust tracking. Several experiments conducted on actual video sequences are used to illustrate the functionality of the proposed approach.
N-Type Thermoelectric Performance of Functionalized Carbon Nanotube-Filled Polymer Composites

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were functionalized with polyethyleneimine (PEI) and made into composites with polyvinyl acetate (PVAc). CNTs were dispersed with different amounts of sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate (SDBS) prior to the PEI functionalization. The resulting samples exhibit air-stable n-type characteristics with electrical conductivities as great as 1500 S/m and thermopowers as large as −100 µV/K. Electrical conductivity and thermopower were strongly affected by CNT dispersion, improving the properties with better dispersion with high concentrations of SDBS. This improvement is believed to be due to the increase in the number of tubes that are evenly coated with PEI in a better-dispersed sample. Increasing the amount of PEI relative to the other constituents positively affects thermopower but not conductivity. Air exposure reduces both thermopower and conductivity presumably due to oxygen doping (which makes CNTs p-type), but stable values were reached within seven days following sample fabrication.
Estimation, Control, and Planning for Autonomous Aerial Transportation

This paper presents estimation and control synthesis for an aerial manipulator to carry an unknown payload. Online estimation is based on parametrization of the aerial manipulator, which consists of a multirotor and a robotic arm. With the estimated physical properties, an augmented adaptive controller is proposed so that the end effector of the robotic arm can track the desired trajectory. Relying on this control structure, finally, we propose a flight motion generation method satisfying the joint angle limitation based on the analysis of the allowable flight area with respect to the joint angle variation. To validate our approach, the simulation results with comparison of conventional adaptive controller are shown. We also perform load carrying experiments using a custom-made aerial manipulator.
Dynamic contrast enhancement based on histogram specification

A novel contrast enhancement algorithm is proposed. The proposed approach enhances the contrast without losing the original histogram characteristics, which is based on the histogram specification technique. It is expected to eliminate the annoying side effects effectively by using the differential information from the input histogram. The experimental results show that the proposed dynamic histogram specification (DHS) algorithm not only keeps the original histogram shape features but also enhances the contrast effectively. Moreover, the DHS algorithm can be applied by simple hardware and processed in real-time system due to its simplicity.
Influences in Product Spaces: KKL and BKKKL Revisited

The notion of the influence of a variable on a Boolean function on a product space has attracted much attention in combinatorics, computer science and other fields. Two of the basic papers dealing with this notion are by Kahn, Kalai and Linial (KKL) and Bourgain, Kahn, Kalai, Katznelson and Linial (BKKKL). In this paper we survey the results in those papers and offer some simpler proofs, corrections, and extensions of the theorems presented there. We present several related open problems.
ATTAIN: An Attack Injection Framework for Software-Defined Networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) has recently attracted interest as a way to provide cyber resiliency because of its programmable and logically centralized nature. However, the security of the SDN architecture itself against malicious attacks is not well understood and must be ensured in order to provide cyber resiliency to systems that use SDNs. In this paper, we present ATTAIN, an attack injection framework for OpenFlow-based SDN architectures. First, we define an attack model that relates system components to an attacker's capability to influence control plane behavior. Second, we define an attack language for writing control plane attacks that can be used to evaluate SDN implementations. Third, we describe an attack injector architecture that actuates attacks in networks. Finally, we evaluate our framework with an enterprise network case study by writing and running attacks with popular SDN controllers.
Intramacrophage Survival for Extracellular Bacterial Pathogens: MgtC As a Key Adaptive Factor

Classically, pathogenic bacteria are classified as intracellular or extracellular pathogens. Intracellular bacterial pathogens, as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Salmonella enterica, Brucella suis, or Listeria monocytogenes, can replicate within host cells. After entering the target host cell (professional or non-professional phagocyte), the intracellular pathogen follows vacuolar or cytosolic pathways to replicate. In contrast, extracellular pathogens, as Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa or streptococci, avoid phagocytosis, thus promoting extracellular multiplication. However, the situation appears more complex with a dual lifestyle of intracellular/extracellular bacterial pathogens (Silva, 2012). Indeed, diverse bacterial intracellular pathogens have the ability to produce extracellular infections as a second phase after the initial intracellular stage. Conversely, several extracellular pathogens can enter host cells in vivo, resulting in a phase of intracellular residence, which can be of importance prior the typical extracellular infection. During infection, macrophage lineage cells eliminate infiltrating pathogens through a battery of antimicrobial responses that include oxidative and acid stresses, toxic metal cations, and antimicrobial peptides. Bacterial pathogens have developed strategies to escape the innate immune system and counteract the microbicidal action of macrophages (reviewed by Sarantis and Grinstein, 2012). Whereas some pathogens inhibit phagocytosis (extracellular pathogens), others use virulence factors to subvert the macrophage antimicrobial role and manipulate the host-cell to establish a replication niche. Hence, intracellular pathogens overcome macrophage defenses and use these immune cells as residence and dissemination strategies. Even if it accounts for a transitory initial event, so-called extracellular pathogens can also encounter an intramacrophage stage and have therefore to escape the killing by these immune cells. Intracellular bacteria use a broad range of molecular pathogenicity determinants to manipulate host cell processes and adapt to the intracellular environment. Recent data, described below, reveal that so-called extracellular pathogens have also acquired similar pathogenicity determinants to improve intramacrophage survival.