Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the generation of object databases using booster

This paper shows how ideas from a combination of formal techniques can be used to enable the automatic generation of databases from precise object models. It explores how the specification of an object database design can be formalized in terms of method preconditions, method postconditions, and invariant properties - many of which will correspond to integrity constraints for the data representation. Individual method specifications can be completed to reflect constraints expressed elsewhere in the model, composed to specify transactions, and then translated into executable code, to produce a reliable data store with a programming interface. The process of completion, composition, and translation may be automated to produce a model-driven approach to the development of object databases
SADA: A Freeware Decision Support Tool Integrating GIS, Sample design, Spatial Modeling, and Risk Assessment

Spatial Analysis and Decision Assistance (SADA) is a Windows freeware program that incorporates tools from environmental assessment into an effective problem-solving environment. SADA was developed by the Institute for Environmental Modeling at the University of Tennessee and includes integrated modules for GIS, visualization, geospatial analysis, statistical analysis, human health and ecological risk assessment, cost/benefit analysis, sampling design, and decision support. SADA began in the middle 1990s as a simple tool for integrating human health risk with spatial modeling tools. Since then, SADA has continued as an evolving freeware product targeted to individuals needing the integration or expansion of existing models into a spatial context. Because of the varied user base, SADA was engineered with an open and highly scaleable environment that in most cases allows additional functionality without an apparent increase in complexity. As a result, applications of SADA have extended into other disciplines that place strong emphasis on the spatial distribution of data. This paper provides an overview of the central functions of SADA and discusses how we addressed the problem of presenting complex and integrated models in a tractable manner. Information on SADA and a free download of the program can be found at http://www.tiem. utk.edu/~sada/.
Estimating animal population density using passive acoustics

Reliable estimation of the size or density of wild animal populations is very important for effective wildlife management, conservation and ecology. Currently, the most widely used methods for obtaining such estimates involve either sighting animals from transect lines or some form of capture‐recapture on marked or uniquely identifiable individuals. However, many species are difficult to sight, and cannot be easily marked or recaptured. Some of these species produce readily identifiable sounds, providing an opportunity to use passive acoustic data to estimate animal density. In addition, even for species for which other visually based methods are feasible, passive acoustic methods offer the potential for greater detection ranges in some environments (e.g. underwater or in dense forest), and hence potentially better precision. Automated data collection means that surveys can take place at times and in places where it would be too expensive or dangerous to send human observers.
Recent Advances in Axial-Flux Permanent-Magnet Machine Technology

This paper reviews the progress that has been made in the analysis and design of axial-flux permanent-magnet machines over the past decade, with particular attention to aspects such as electromagnetic and thermal modeling, materials, manufacturing, pulsating torque, and extended speed range. Comparisons with other machine types and applications are also reviewed.
Slowly rotating homogeneous stars and the Heun equation

The scheme developed by Hartle in 1967 for describing slowly rotating bodies was applied to the simple model of constant density by Chandrasekhar and Miller in 1974. The pivotal equation one has to solve turns out to be one of Heun's equations. After a brief discussion of this equation and the chances of finding a closed-form solution, a quickly converging series solution of it is presented. A comparison with numerical solutions of the full Einstein equations allows one to truncate the series at an order appropriate to the slow rotation approximation. The truncated solution is then used to provide explicit expressions for the metric.
Receptor sensitivity in bacterial chemotaxis

Chemoreceptors in Escherichia coli are coupled to the flagella by a labile phosphorylated intermediate, CheY∼P. Its activity can be inferred from the rotational bias of flagellar motors, but motor response is stochastic and limited to a narrow physiological range. Here we use fluorescence resonance energy transfer to monitor interactions of CheY∼P with its phosphatase, CheZ, that reveal changes in the activity of the receptor kinase, CheA, resulting from the addition of attractants or repellents. Analyses of cheR and/or cheB mutants, defective in receptor methylation/demethylation, show that response sensitivity depends on the activity of CheB and the level of receptor modification. In cheRcheB mutants, the concentration of attractant that generates a half-maximal response is equal to the dissociation constant of the receptor. In wild-type cells, it is 35 times smaller. This amplification, together with the ultrasensitivity of the flagellar motor, explains previous observations of high chemotactic gain.
Indicators of Family Care for Development for Use in Multicountry Surveys

Indicators of family care for development are essential for ascertaining whether families are providing their children with an environment that leads to positive developmental outcomes. This project aimed to develop indicators from a set of items, measuring family care practices and resources important for caregiving, for use in epidemiologic surveys in developing countries. A mixed method (quantitative and qualitative) design was used for item selection and evaluation. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted to examine the validity of candidate items in several country samples. Qualitative methods included the use of global expert panels to identify and evaluate the performance of each candidate item as well as in-country focus groups to test the content validity of the items. The quantitative methods included analyses of item-response distributions, using bivariate techniques. The selected items measured two family care practices (support for learning/stimulating environment and limit-setting techniques) and caregiving resources (adequacy of the alternate caregiver when the mother worked). Six play-activity items, indicative of support for learning/stimulating environment, were included in the core module of UNICEF's Multiple Cluster Indictor Survey 3. The other items were included in optional modules. This project provided, for the first time, a globally-relevant set of items for assessing family care practices and resources in epidemiological surveys. These items have multiple uses, including national monitoring and cross-country comparisons of the status of family care for development used globally. The obtained information will reinforce attention to efforts to improve the support for development of children.
Natural Course of Adult Ebstein Anomaly When Treated according to Current Recommendation

The objectives of this study were to assess the clinical outcomes of adults with Ebstein Anomaly (EA) according to their treatment modalities. All adult EA patients diagnosed between October 1994 and October 2014 were retrospectively evaluated by medical record review. Total 60 patients were categorized into 3 groups according to their treatment strategy, i.e. non-operative treatment (Group I, n = 23), immediate operative treatment (Group II, n = 27), and delayed operative treatment (Group III, n = 10). A composite of major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events (MACCE) and factors associated with MACCE were assessed in each treatment group. MACCE occurred in 13.0% patients in Group I, 55.6% patients in Group II and 50% in Group III (P = 0.006). Event free survivals at 5 years were 90% in Group I, 52.7% in Group II, 50.0% in Group III (P = 0.036). Post-operatively, most patients showed improvement on clinical symptoms. However, event free survival rate was lower in patients with operation compared to those with non-operative treatment (58.7% vs. 90.9%; P = 0.007). Major arrhythmic event occurred more frequently even after surgical ablation (50.0% vs. 20.0%; P = 0.034). Re-operation was more frequent in patients underwent delayed surgery compared to those with immediate surgery (50.0% vs. 18.5%; P = 0.001). Current guideline to decide patient’s treatment strategy appeared to be appropriate in adult patients with EA. However, surgical ablation for arrhythmia was not enough so that concomitant medical treatment should be considered. Therefore, attentive risk stratification and cautious decision of treatment strategy by experienced cardiac surgeon are believed to improve clinical outcome.
Theoretical and empirical evaluation of diversity-preserving mechanisms in evolutionary algorithms: on the rigorous runtime analysis of diversity-preserving mechanisms in evolutionary algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) simulate the natural evolution of species by iteratively applying evolutionary operators such as mutation, recombination, and selection to a set of solutions for a given problem. One of the major advantages of these algorithms is that they can be easily implemented when the optimisation problem is not well understood, and the design of problem-specific algorithms cannot be performed due to lack of time, knowledge, or expertise to design problem-specific algorithms. Also, EAs can be used as a first step to get insights when the problem is just a black box to the developer/programmer. In these cases, by evaluating candidate solutions it is possible to gain knowledge on the problem at hand. EAs are well suited to dealing with multimodal problems due to their use of a population. A diverse population can explore several hills in the fitness landscape simultaneously and offer several good solutions to the user, a feature desirable for decision making, multi-objective optimisation and dynamic optimisation. However, a major difficulty when applying EAs is that the population may converge to a sub-optimal individual before the fitness landscape is explored properly. Many diversity-preserving mechanisms have been developed to reduce the risk of such premature convergence and given such a variety of mechanisms to choose from, it is often not clear which mechanism is the best choice for a particular problem. We study the (expected/average) time for such algorithms to find satisfactory solutions for multimodal and multi-objective problems and to extract guidelines for the informed design of efficient and effective EAs. The resulting runtime bounds are used to predict and to judge the performance of algorithms for arbitrary problem sizes, further used to clarify important design issues from a theoretical perspective. We combine theoretical research with empirical applications to test the theoretical recommendations for their practicality, and to engage in rapid knowledge transfer from theory to practice. With this approach, we provide a better understanding of the working principles of EAs with diversity-preserving mechanisms. We provide theoretical foundations and we explain when and why certain diversity mechanisms are effective, and when they are not. It thus contributes to the informed design of better EAs.
Differentiated Prostate Cells onto a Defective Cell Cycle Hormone-regulated Apoptosis Results from Reentry of Updated Version

Castration initiates extensive apoptosis of the secretory epithelial cells lining the ducts of the rat ventral prostate, resulting in the striking regression of this male sexual accessory tissue. We had previously described the paradox of finding similar cascades of gene activity (c-fos > c-myc > hsp-70) induced during the early period of ventral prostate regression and during the regrovrth of the ventral prostate gland initi ated by testosterone replenishment. This common pattern of protoon cogene expression during periods of predominant cellular apoptosis or proliferation caused us to examine further the possibility that the two cellular events occur through identical early molecular pathways. In the present study we demonstrate that apoptotic prostate epithelial cells incorporate bromodeoxyuridine into nuclear high-molecular-weight DNA prior to nuclear DNA fragmentation. The DNA synthetic activityoccurs in coordination with a massive induction of proliferai ivo cell nuclear antigen, a proliferation marker, in the nuclei of androgen-deprived prostatic epithelial cells. Moreover, this activity is also associ ated with the increased expression of mRNA encoding p53, a suppressor gene well known as a cell cycle-blocking agent. Our data indicate that quiescent (G0) prostate epithelial cells undergo apoptosis due to two sequential events initiated by testosterone depletion. The first event is the active reentry of these cells into the cell cycle. The second event is the apoptotic destruction resulting from the inability of the differenti ated cells to successfully complete this cycle.
Striking the balance between content diversity and content importance in swarm-based P2P streaming

During recent years, the success of live swarm-based P2P streaming system has been witnessed. Nevertheless, how to design an effective mechanism for mitigating video quality degradation in a lossy network environment is still not thoroughly resolved yet. Unlike conventional client-server paradigm, there is data availability problem in swarm-based P2P streaming system. If we directly conduct the importance-first scheduling strategy in swarm-based P2P streaming system, the serious content bottleneck for low priority chunks occurs, particularly when the population size is large. In this work, we propose a dynamic strategy-switching approach that combines the advantages of random scheduling and importance first scheduling to deal with the problem. Simulation results indicate that our approach not only provides better scheduling efficiency, but also is scalable even if population size is large.
Maximum Diastolic Potential of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Cardiomyocytes Depends Critically on IKr

Human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM) hold promise for therapeutic applications. To serve these functions, the hiPSC-CM must recapitulate the electrophysiologic properties of native adult cardiomyocytes. This study examines the electrophysiologic characteristics of hiPSC-CM between 11 and 121 days of maturity. Embryoid bodies (EBs) were generated from hiPS cell line reprogrammed with Oct4, Nanog, Lin28 and Sox2. Sharp microelectrodes were used to record action potentials (AP) from spontaneously beating clusters (BC) micro-dissected from the EBs (n = 103; 37°C) and to examine the response to 5 µM E-4031 (n = 21) or BaCl2 (n = 22). Patch-clamp techniques were used to record IKr and IK1 from cells enzymatically dissociated from BC (n = 49; 36°C). Spontaneous cycle length (CL) and AP characteristics varied widely among the 103 preparations. E-4031 (5 µM; n = 21) increased Bazett-corrected AP duration from 291.8±81.2 to 426.4±120.2 msec (p<0.001) and generated early afterdepolarizations in 8/21 preparations. In 13/21 BC, E-4031 rapidly depolarized the clusters leading to inexcitability. BaCl2, at concentrations that selectively block IK1 (50–100 µM), failed to depolarize the majority of clusters (13/22). Patch-clamp experiments revealed very low or negligible IK1 in 53% (20/38) of the cells studied, but presence of IKr in all (11/11). Consistent with the electrophysiological data, RT-PCR and immunohistochemistry studies showed relatively poor mRNA and protein expression of IK1 in the majority of cells, but robust expression of IKr. In contrast to recently reported studies, our data point to major deficiencies of hiPSC-CM, with remarkable diversity of electrophysiologic phenotypes as well as pharmacologic responsiveness among beating clusters and cells up to 121 days post-differentiation (dpd). The vast majority have a maximum diastolic potential that depends critically on IKr due to the absence of IK1. Thus, efforts should be directed at producing more specialized and mature hiPSC-CM for future therapeutic applications.
Detecting Mars Surface Change Using Landmark Comparison

Current pixel-based methods of automatic image change detection are too computationally expensive and prone to spurious detection to discover meaningful changes in Mars surface features in NASA’s large, continuously expanding database of satellite imagery. Automatically finding these changes is important to planetary geologists as the changes often represent the appearance of new dust devil tracks, dark slope streaks, and meteor impacts. We developed a more efficient method of change detection that compares information about landforms appearing in subsequent images of the same region. By avoiding the direct comparison of pixels, this method reduces computational complexity and is more robust against variations in lighting and camera orientation. We investigated improvements to our methods of selecting regions that stand out from their surroundings and developed a graph representation of these landforms. We then applied graph matching algorithms to detect emerging and disappearing landforms. Finally, we experimented with a RANSAC algorithm to refine this matching under the assumption that the coordinate systems of the compared images are related by an affine transform.
The Selective Impairment of Resting-State Functional Connectivity of the Lateral Subregion of the Frontal Pole in Schizophrenia

Objective Although extensive resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) changes have been reported in schizophrenia, rsFC changes of the frontal pole (FP) remain unclear. The FP contains several subregions with different connection patterns; however, it is unknown whether the FP subregions are differentially affected in schizophrenia. To explore this possibility, we compared rsFC differences of the FP subregions between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. Method One hundred healthy controls and 91 patients with schizophrenia underwent resting-state functional MRI with a sensitivity-encoded spiral-in (SENSE-SPIRAL) imaging sequence to reduced susceptibility-induced signal loss and distortion. The FP was subdivided into the orbital (FPo), medial (FPm), and lateral (FPl) subregions. Mean fMRI time series were extracted for each FP subregion and entered into a seed-based rsFC analysis. Results The FP subregions exhibited differential rsFC patterns in both healthy controls and schizophrenia patients. Direct comparison between groups revealed reduced rsFCs between the bilateral FPl and several cognitive-related regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, temporal cortex and inferior parietal lobule in schizophrenia. Although the FPl exhibited obvious atrophy, rsFC changes were unrelated to volumetric atrophy in the FPl, to duration of illness, and to antipsychotic medication dosage. No significant differences were observed in the rsFCs of other FP subregions. Conclusion These findings suggest a selective (the lateral subregion) functional disconnection of the FP subregions in schizophrenia.
MODELING LONG-RUN ECONOMIC GROWTH

This paper reviews the recent empirical literature on long-run growth to determine what factors influence growth in total factor productivity (TFP) and whether there are any channels of influence that should be added to standard models of long-run growth. Factors affecting productivity fall into three general categories: physical capital, human capital, and innovation (including other factors that might influence TFP growth). Recent empirical evidence provides little support for the idea that there are extra-normal returns to physical capital accumulation, nor is there solid justification for adding a separate channel of influence from capital to TFP growth. The paper finds evidence that human capital—as distinct from labor hours worked—is an important factor for growth but also that there is not yet a consensus about exactly how it should enter the model. Some argue that human capital should enter as a factor of production, while others argue that it merely spurs innovation. The forces governing TFP growth are not well understood, but there is evidence that R&D spending is a significant contributor and that its benefit to society may exceed its benefit to the company doing the spending—that is, it is a source of spillovers. The paper concludes with some examples of how standard models of growth could be modified to reflect some of the channels of influence identified in the empirical review. The author gratefully acknowledges helpful comments from Doug Hamilton, Bob Dennis, Ben Page, and John Peterson. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author. 1 Total factor productivity is average real output per unit of combined labor and capital input. The growth of TFP is defined as the growth of real output that is not explained by the growth of labor and capital.
Analyzing visual technical patterns - a neural network based saliency analysis

We propose a neural network based saliency analysis to identify important information related to investment decisions. We apply our approach to 753 US stocks and 1960 head-and-shoulders patterns. The results show that among all variables that are related to technical patterns, membership value and pattern length as well as firm size have the highest saliency coefficients and are the most relevant to future returns. The results are consistent with previous studies and the practice of technical analysis. Our study suggests that saliency analysis offers much greater advantage when compared with correlation coefficients in revealing the relationships in the stock market. Average investors can use saliency analysis to sort through information and find the more important information to focus on, therefore shortening their learning curve of becoming expert investors.
Exploring Fine-Grained Emotion Detection in Tweets

We examine if common machine learning techniques known to perform well in coarse-grained emotion and sentiment classification can also be applied successfully on a set of fine-grained emotion categories. We first describe the grounded theory approach used to develop a corpus of 5,553 tweets manually annotated with 28 emotion categories. From our preliminary experiments, we have identified two machine learning algorithms that perform well in this emotion classification task and demonstrated that it is feasible to train classifiers to detect 28 emotion categories without a huge drop in performance compared to coarser-grained classification schemes.
A Natural Variant of the Heme-Binding Signature (R441C) Resulting in Complete Loss of Function of CYP2D6

A new variant allele CYP2D6*62 (g.4044C>T; R441C) of the drug-metabolizing cytochrome P450 (P450) CYP2D6 was identified in a person with reduced sparteine oxidation phenotype, which was unexpected based on a genetic CYP2D6*1A/*41 background. The recombinantly expressed variant protein had no activity toward propafenone as a result of missing heme incorporation. Sequence alignment revealed that the positively charged R441 residue is part of the heme-binding signature but not strictly conserved among all the P450s. A compilation of described P450 monooxygenase variants revealed that other enzymes can functionally tolerate even nonconservative amino acid changes at the corresponding position (i.e., the invariant cysteine 2). This suggests that heme binding in mammalian P450s depends not only on the integrity of the heme-binding signature but also on other family- and subfamily-specific sequence determinants.