Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of a demographic base map for the presentation of areal data in epidemiology.

The purpose of this article is to offer a develop ment of the demographic map as an alternative to the geographical base-map for the presentation of areal data in epidemiology. The results of geographical investigations into disease morbidity or mortality are often presented cartographically and invariably the base-map used is the normal geographical one, showing the relevant administrative areas. The relating of disease rates to area is useful, in that the recognition of areas characterized by high or low rates may lead to clues of aetiological significance. When considering areal patterns of disease, however, the epidemiologist requires information about the size of the population at risk in the areas concerned. Sutherland (1962) drew attention to the principal deficiency of the geographical base-map in this respect. Referring to Scotland, he showed that on the normal map correct weighting could not be given to the large urban populations which occupy small areas, whilst small rural populations, often sparsely distributed over large areas, could appear to be over-represented. Thus, base-maps which would relate disease rates to the local populations at risk as well as to geographical position might prove useful epidemiological tools. Development of the demographic map, in which the area of each administrative unit is made proportional to its population whilst contiguity of geographical boun daries and the relative geographical positions of the units are maintained as far as is possible (Hollings worth, 1966) offers interesting possibilities in this direction. The use of such maps in epidemiology is not new, Levison and Haddon (1965), for example, having used the technique for plotting cases of Wilm's tumour in New York State. To date, however, these maps have not been used to present data at the national level. Sutherland (1962) developed a form of demo graphic diagram, using the same principle of area proportional to population, called an isodemic representation. As a basis he split Scotland into its five hospital regions and showed them separated. He thus lost geographical contiguity between the administrative units, a condition it would seem desirable to preserve. An attempt has been made in developing the age sex specific cartograms illustrated below (Figs 1, 3, and 4) to relate disease rates to both the popula tion at risk and to geographical position in the 57 public health districts of Scotland. * A basic aim was also to try to produce cartograms similar to each other in local outline as well as in overall shape to make them readily comparable and hence of greater potential utility. Efforts to simplify their construc tion and final shape have also been made. To date demographic maps have presented complicated construction problems and their final appearance has often been of considerable complexity. These factors may well have obscured their advantages and contributed to their limited application so far.
Goals in Enterprise Architecture Management -- Findings from Literature and Future Research Directions

The Management of Enterprise Architectures (EAM) is an evolving discipline within the information systems community. By taking a holistic point of view on an enterprise, considering its business and Information Technology (IT) elements, EAM aims at a better alignment of business and IT, cost savings and faster response times. In order to achieve those benefits academics as well as industry representatives already provide methods, models and tools. Nevertheless, researchers and practitioners call for means to demonstrate the payoff of EAM initiatives. A common management approach for explicitly tracking an individual's or team's performance and success relies on the definition of goals. To the authors' knowledge such an approach is not yet established within the EAM discipline. To improve this shortfall, this paper gives an overview on the current body of knowledge in the field of goals in EAM by means of an extensive literature study. Based on the analysis' results we present reoccurring properties of goals in EAM, possible interrelations and an initial classification. The paper concludes by providing topics for future research directions.
Adopting GQM-Based Measurement in an Industrial Environment

Schlumberger RPS (Retail Petroleum Systems) integrated the Goal/Question/Metric approach into their existing measurement programs to improve their program performance. Key to their success was the use of feedback sessions as a forum to analyze and interpret measurement data. The paper discusses the elements of the GQM approach and fitting GQM to a measurement program.
Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships: Findings From Two National Samples of Single Americans

Although academic and popular interest in consensual nonmonogamy (CNM) is increasing, little is known about the prevalence of CNM. Using two separate U.S. Census based quota samples of single adults in the United States (Study 1: n = 3,905; Study 2: n = 4,813), the present studies show that more than one in five (21.9% in Study 1; 21.2% in Study 2) participants report engaging in CNM at some point in their lifetime. This proportion remained constant across age, education level, income, religion, region, political affiliation, and race, but varied with gender and sexual orientation. Specifically, men (compared to women) and people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual (compared to those who identify as heterosexual) were more likely to report previous engagement in CNM. These findings suggest that a sizable and diverse proportion of U.S. adults have experienced CNM, highlighting the need to incorporate CNM into theoretical and empirical therapy and family science work.
Novel Accurate and Fast Optic Disc Detection in Retinal Images With Vessel Distribution and Directional Characteristics

A novel accurate and fast optic disc (OD) detection method is proposed by using vessel distribution and directional characteristics. A feature combining three vessel distribution characteristics, i.e., local vessel density, compactness, and uniformity, is designed to find possible horizontal coordinate of OD. Then, according to the global vessel direction characteristic, a General Hough Transformation is introduced to identify the vertical coordinate of OD. By confining the possible OD vertical range and by simplifying vessel structure with blocks, we greatly decrease the computational cost of the algorithm. Four public datasets have been tested. The OD localization accuracy lies from 93.8% to 99.7%, when 8-20% vessel detection results are adopted to achieve OD detection. Average computation times for STARE images are about 3.4-11.5 s, which relate to image size. The proposed method shows satisfactory robustness on both normal and diseased images. It is better than many previous methods with respect to accuracy and efficiency.
Optimizing Data Mining Workloads using Hardware Accelerators

Data mining is the process of finding useful and actionable patterns in large data sets. Data mining algorithms have become vital to researchers in science, engineering, medicine, business, search and security domains. In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the size of the data being collected and analyzed. Data mining algorithms have been unable to scale up to these vast amounts of data, leading to significant performance degradation. Also, the enhancements in processor and system designs do not necessarily aid data mining workloads. In our previous work, we demonstrated that computational characteristics as well as data access requirements for data mining workloads are quite different than those of other common workloads. Therefore, there is a need to specifically address the limitations of accelerating data mining workloads. In this paper, we present a brief overview of the major challenges faced in data mining systems design. We first highlight important characteristics of these workloads. Then, we describe some initial designs and results for accelerating data mining algorithms using programmable hardware. Our results show that tremendous performance gains can be obtained by accelerating these workloads when compared to using traditional systems.
CFTL: A Convertible Flash Translation Layer with Consideration of Data Access Patterns

NAND ﬂash memory-based storage devices are increasingly adopted as one of the main alternatives for magnetic disk drives. The ﬂash translation layer (FTL) is a software/hardware interface inside NAND ﬂash memory, which allows existing disk-based applications to use it without any signiﬁcant modiﬁcations. Since FTL has a critical impact on the performance of NAND ﬂash-based devices, a variety of FTL schemes have been proposed to improve their performance. However, existing FTLs perform well for either a read intensive workload or a write intensive work-load, not for both of them due to their ﬁxed and static address mapping schemes. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel FTL addressing scheme named as Convertible Flash Translation Layer (CFTL, for short). CFTL is adaptive to data access patterns so that it can dynamically switch the mapping of a data block to either read-optimized or write-optimized mapping scheme in order to fully exploit the beneﬁts of both schemes. By judiciously taking advantage of both schemes, CFTL resolves the intrinsic problems of the existing FTLs. In addition to this convertible scheme, we propose an eﬃcient caching strategy so as to considerably improve the CFTL performance further with only a simple hint. Consequently, both of the convertible feature and caching strategy empower CFTL to achieve good read performance as well as good write performance. Our experimental evaluation with a variety of realistic workloads demonstrates that the proposed CFTL scheme outperforms other FTL schemes.
Maternal Diabetes Leads to Adaptation in Embryonic Amino Acid Metabolism during Early Pregnancy

During pregnancy an adequate amino acid supply is essential for embryo development and fetal growth. We have studied amino acid composition and branched chain amino acid (BCAA) metabolism at day 6 p.c. in diabetic rabbits and blastocysts. In the plasma of diabetic rabbits the concentrations of 12 amino acids were altered in comparison to the controls. Notably, the concentrations of the BCAA leucine, isoleucine and valine were approximately three-fold higher in diabetic rabbits than in the control. In the cavity fluid of blastocysts from diabetic rabbits BCAA concentrations were twice as high as those from controls, indicating a close link between maternal diabetes and embryonic BCAA metabolism. The expression of BCAA oxidizing enzymes and BCAA transporter was analysed in maternal tissues and in blastocysts. The RNA amounts of three oxidizing enzymes, i.e. branched chain aminotransferase 2 (Bcat2), branched chain ketoacid dehydrogenase (Bckdha) and dehydrolipoyl dehydrogenase (Dld), were markedly increased in maternal adipose tissue and decreased in liver and skeletal muscle of diabetic rabbits than in those of controls. Blastocysts of diabetic rabbits revealed a higher Bcat2 mRNA and protein abundance in comparison to control blastocysts. The expression of BCAA transporter LAT1 and LAT2 were unaltered in endometrium of diabetic and healthy rabbits, whereas LAT2 transcripts were increased in blastocysts of diabetic rabbits. In correlation to high embryonic BCAA levels the phosphorylation amount of the nutrient sensor mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) was enhanced in blastocysts caused by maternal diabetes. These results demonstrate a direct impact of maternal diabetes on BCAA concentrations and degradation in mammalian blastocysts with influence on embryonic mTOR signalling.
Frequency Guided Generalized Adaptive Notch Filtering—Tracking Analysis and Optimization

Generalized adaptive notch filters (GANFs) are estimators of coefficients of quasi-periodically time-varying systems, encountered e.g., in RF applications when Doppler effect takes place. Current state of the art GANFs can deliver highly accurate estimates of system variations' frequency, but underperform in terms of accuracy of system coefficient estimates. The paper proposes a novel multistage GANF with improved coefficient tracking properties and smaller sensitivity to choice of estimation gains. The processing pipeline consists of three stages. First, a pilot filter computes preliminary frequency estimates. Second, a special linear filter reshapes the pilot frequency estimates. Third, a frequency guided GANF works out final estimates of system coefficients. A nontrivial design of the second stage filter assures that the proposed solution has a considerably better performance than current stage of the art solutions or a simpler two-stage approach consisting of the pilot and the frequency guided filter only.
RAPD Analysis for Determination of Components in Herbal Medicine

In this study, the RAPD (Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA) technique was employed for determination of the components in an Ayurvedic herbal prescription, Rasayana Churna. One-hundred-and-twenty decamer oligonucleotide primers were screened in the RAPD analysis to identify three Ayurvedic medicines, dried stem of Tinospora cordifolia, dried fruit of Emblica officinalis and dried fruit of Tribulus terestris, the Ayurvedic prescription. Primer OPC-6 simultaneously generated three distinct amplicons, each specific to one component. The marker with 600 bp is specific to Tinospora cordifolia; the marker 500 bp is specific to Emblica officinalis and the remaining marker >1000 bp was present in Tribulus terestris. Presence of three herbal medicines was determined when RAPD reaction with OPC-6 was performed. The technique was proved to contribute to the identification of components in Ayurvedic herbal preparation and thus helping to serve as a complementary tool for quality control.
Elucidation of Xenobiotic Metabolism Pathways in Human Skin and Human Skin Models by Proteomic Profiling

Background Human skin has the capacity to metabolise foreign chemicals (xenobiotics), but knowledge of the various enzymes involved is incomplete. A broad-based unbiased proteomics approach was used to describe the profile of xenobiotic metabolising enzymes present in human skin and hence indicate principal routes of metabolism of xenobiotic compounds. Several in vitro models of human skin have been developed for the purpose of safety assessment of chemicals. The suitability of these epidermal models for studies involving biotransformation was assessed by comparing their profiles of xenobiotic metabolising enzymes with those of human skin. Methodology/Principal Findings Label-free proteomic analysis of whole human skin (10 donors) was applied and analysed using custom-built PROTSIFT software. The results showed the presence of enzymes with a capacity for the metabolism of alcohols through dehydrogenation, aldehydes through dehydrogenation and oxidation, amines through oxidation, carbonyls through reduction, epoxides and carboxylesters through hydrolysis and, of many compounds, by conjugation to glutathione. Whereas protein levels of these enzymes in skin were mostly just 4–10 fold lower than those in liver and sufficient to support metabolism, the levels of cytochrome P450 enzymes were at least 300-fold lower indicating they play no significant role. Four epidermal models of human skin had profiles very similar to one another and these overlapped substantially with that of whole skin. Conclusions/Significance The proteomics profiling approach was successful in producing a comprehensive analysis of the biotransformation characteristics of whole human skin and various in vitro skin models. The results show that skin contains a range of defined enzymes capable of metabolising different classes of chemicals. The degree of similarity of the profiles of the in vitro models indicates their suitability for epidermal toxicity testing. Overall, these results provide a rational basis for explaining the fate of xenobiotics in skin and will aid chemical safety testing programmes.
In Vivo Substrates of the Lens Molecular Chaperones αA-Crystallin and αB-Crystallin

αA-crystallin and αB-crystallin are members of the small heat shock protein family and function as molecular chaperones and major lens structural proteins. Although numerous studies have examined their chaperone-like activities in vitro, little is known about the proteins they protect in vivo. To elucidate the relationships between chaperone function, substrate binding, and human cataract formation, we used proteomic and mass spectrometric methods to analyze the effect of mutations associated with hereditary human cataract formation on protein abundance in αA-R49C and αB-R120G knock-in mutant lenses. Compared with age-matched wild type lenses, 2-day-old αA-R49C heterozygous lenses demonstrated the following: increased crosslinking (15-fold) and degradation (2.6-fold) of αA-crystallin; increased association between αA-crystallin and filensin, actin, or creatine kinase B; increased acidification of βB1-crystallin; increased levels of grifin; and an association between βA3/A1-crystallin and αA-crystallin. Homozygous αA-R49C mutant lenses exhibited increased associations between αA-crystallin and βB3-, βA4-, βA2-crystallins, and grifin, whereas levels of βB1-crystallin, gelsolin, and calpain 3 decreased. The amount of degraded glutamate dehydrogenase, α-enolase, and cytochrome c increased more than 50-fold in homozygous αA-R49C mutant lenses. In αB-R120G mouse lenses, our analyses identified decreased abundance of phosphoglycerate mutase, several β- and γ-crystallins, and degradation of αA- and αB-crystallin early in cataract development. Changes in the abundance of hemoglobin and histones with the loss of normal α-crystallin chaperone function suggest that these proteins also play important roles in the biochemical mechanisms of hereditary cataracts. Together, these studies offer a novel insight into the putative in vivo substrates of αA- and αB-crystallin.
Towards adaptation in e-learning 2.0

This paper presents several essential steps from an overall study on shaping new ways of learning and teaching, by using the synergetic merger of three different fields: Web 2.0, e-learning and adaptation (in particular, personalisation to the learner). These novel teaching and learning ways—the latter focus of this paper—are reflected in and finally adding to various versions of the My Online Teacher 2.0 adaptive system. In particular, this paper focuses on a study of how to more effectively use and combine the recommendation of peers and content adaptation to enhance the learning outcome in e-learning systems based on Web 2.0. In order to better isolate and examine the effects of peer recommendation and adaptive content presentation, we designed experiments inspecting collaboration between individuals based on recommendation of peers who have greater knowledge, and compare this to adaptive content recommendation, as well as to “simple” learning in a system with a minimum of Web 2.0 support. Overall, the results of adding peer recommendation and adaptive content presentation were encouraging, and are further discussed in detail in this paper.
Using Blog Properties to Improve Retrieval

This paper describes three simple heuristics which improve opinion retrieval eectiveness by using blog-specific properties. Blog timestamps are used to increase the retrieval scores of blog posts published near the time of a significant event related to a query; an inexpensive approach to comment amount estimation is used to identify the level of opinion expressed in a post; and query-specific weights are used to change the importance of spam filtering for dierent types of queries. Overall, these methods, combined with non-blogspecific retrieval approaches, result in substantial improvements over state-of-the-art.
A MONTE CARLO COMPARISON OF POLYTOMOUS ITEM ESTIMATION BASED ON HIGHER-ORDER ITEM RESPONSE THEORY MODELS VERSUS HIGHER-ORDER CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS MODELS

Item response theory (IRT) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are two statistical techniques that were originally developed from different disciplines, but they are closely related to each other. Both can analyze the relationship between item responses and underlying constructs. This research investigated the performance of the two statistical methods with a higher-order structure in estimating polytomous response data. The higher-order IRT or second-order CFA model formulates correlational structure of multiple domains through a higher-order latent trait. This study compared Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation under a higher-order IRT model to mean-and-variance adjusted weighted least square (WLSMV) estimation under a second-order CFA model. The accuracy of the two estimation methods in recovering item parameters, overall and domain-specific abilities, and their correlations was examined under varied conditions. The results showed MCMC and WLSMV methods were comparable on the accuracy of item discrimination and threshold parameter estimations. Although both estimation methods were found to yield more accurate item discrimination estimates as the number of items in each domain increased, WLSMV method was more sensitive to the number of items. The study also showed both estimation methods performed equally well in estimating overall and domain abilities. The accuracy of ability estimation increased as the number of items, number of dimensions, and correlations between domains increased. Beck Depression Inventory was analyzed using both estimation methods. Consistent with the findings in the simulation study, the results indicated the two estimation methods yielded quite comparable estimates for both item parameters and abilities at general and specific levels. The results also showed some variations in the item parameter estimates across different prior distributions used in MCMC, indicating the effect of priors on MCMC for the item parameter estimation. Furthermore, both estimation methods exhibited a convergence problem when the correlations between the general and specific factors were very high (i.e., r > .90).
Back to direct style II: first-class continuations

We continue to investigate the direct-style transformation by extending it to programs requiring call-with-current-continuation (a.k.a. call/cc). The direct style (DS) and the continuation-passing style (CPS) transformations form a Galois connection. This pair of functions has a place in the programmer's toolbox—yet we are not aware of the existence of any other DS transformer. Starting from our DS transformer towards pure, call-by-value functional terms (Scheme), we extend it with a counting analysis to detect non-canonical occurrences of a continuation. The declaration of such a continuation is translated into a call/cc and its application into the application of the corresponding first-class continuation We also present staged versions of the DS and of the CPS transformations, where administrative reductions are separated from the actual translation, and where the actual translations are carried out by local, structure-preserving rewriting rules. These staged transformations are used to prove the Galois continuation. Together, the CPS and the DS transformations enlarge the class of programs that can be manipulated on a semantic basis. We illustrate this point with partial evaluation, by specializing a Scheme program with respect to a static part of its input. The program uses coroutines. This illustration achieves a first: a static coroutine is executed statically and its computational content is inlined in the residual program.