Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Laocoön: Scalable and Portable Receipt-free E-voting Protocol without Untappable Channels

Vote-buying and voter-coercion are the impending threats when deploying remote online voting into large scale elections. With a policy of carrot and stick, it will encourage voters to deviate from honest voting strategy and spoil the democratic election. To deal with this problem, many voting protocols proposed their solutions with the notion of receipt-freeness. However, existing receipt-free voting protocols either rely on some impractical assumptions as untappable communication channel, or are burden with heavy voter-side computation and quadratic tallying complexity. In this paper, we present $Laoco\ddot{o}n$, a brand new cryptographic voting protocol which is practical and light-weight to be deployed in large scale online elections. By taking advantage of proxy re-encryption, our protocol can defend vote-buying attacks. Furthermore, we introduce a new property, candidate-adaptiveness, in electronic voting which refers to as every candidate knows the real-time vote number towards himself, while he knows nothing about others, nor he buys votes. We prove the correctness of our protocol and evaluate the performance with experimental results. Finally we advance some open problems which will be coped in our future work.
Impact of cardiac resynchronisation therapy on burden of hospitalisations and survival: a retrospective observational study in the Northern Region of New Zealand

Objective Cardiac resynchronisation therapy (CRT) devices have been shown to improve heart failure (HF) symptoms, survival and improve quality of life (QoL). We evaluated the overall impact of CRT on recurrent hospitalisations and survival in real-world patients with HF. Design Retrospective observational study. Setting Northern region of New Zealand. Participants Patients with HF who underwent CRT device implantation in between 2008 and 2014 were followed up for 1 year. Interventions CRT. Primary and secondary outcomes measured Survival, all-cause hospitalisations, length of stay, from which days alive and out of hospital (DAOH) were calculated. Results 177patients were included, of whom eight died (4.5%) within 1 year of follow-up. Pre-CRT implantation, 83% of all patients had been hospitalised for a total 248 hospitalisation events. Following CRT, 47 patients (27%) were readmitted to hospital within 1 year (total of 98 admissions; p<0.01 compared with pre-device implant). Length of hospital stay was significantly shorter than in the year prior to CRT implantation at a median of 4 (IQR 2–6) vs 7 (IQR 3.5–10.5) days (p=0.03). An increase in the median number of DAOH was observed from 362 (IQR 355–364) to 365 (IQR 364–365) (p<0.01) after CRT implant. The improvement in DAOH was seen regardless of gender and type of CRT devices. Greater DAOH was also seen in those with non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy and Caucasians. Conclusion After CRT implant, patients with HF have greater DAOH with reduction of total hospitalisation and fewer hospital days. These results support CRT devices use as a treatment option for appropriate HF patients. DAOH represents an easily measured, patient-centred endpoint that may reflect effectiveness of interventions in future CRT studies.
Pilot evaluation of the Sleep Ninja: a smartphone application for adolescent insomnia symptoms

Objectives The aim of this study was to test the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary effects of a recently developed smartphone application, Sleep Ninja, for adolescent sleep difficulties. Setting The study was conducted online with Australian individuals recruited through the community. Participants Participants were 50 young people aged 12–16 years with sleep difficulties. Design A single-arm pre–post design was used to evaluate feasibility, acceptability and sleep and mental health variables at baseline and postintervention. Intervention Cognitive–behavioural therapy for insomnia informed the development of the Sleep Ninja. The core strategies covered by the app are psychoeducation, stimulus control, sleep hygiene and sleep-related cognitive therapy. It includes six training sessions (lessons), a sleep tracking function, recommended bedtimes based on sleep guidelines, reminders to start a wind-down routine each night, a series of sleep tips and general information about sleep. Users progress through each training session and conclude the 6-week programme with a black belt in sleep. Outcome measures Feasibility was evaluated based on consent rates, adherence and attrition, acceptability was assessed using questionnaires and a poststudy interview, and sleep, depression and anxiety variables were assessed at baseline and postintervention. Results Data indicated that the Sleep Ninja is a feasible intervention and is acceptable to young people. Findings showed that there were significant improvements on sleep variables including insomnia (within-group effect size d=−0.90), sleep quality (d=−0.46), depression (d=−0.36) and anxiety (d=−0.41). Conclusions The Sleep Ninja is a promising intervention that could assist adolescents who experience sleep difficulties. A follow-up randomised controlled trial is now warranted. Trial registration number ACTRN12617000141347
Backstepping-based attitude control for a quadrotor UAV using nonlinear disturbance observer

In this article, a backstepping-based control strategy is developed for the attitude control of a quadrotor Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle (UAV). Considering that the quadrotor UAV usually suffers external disturbances to complete practical missions, a nonlinear disturbance observer is introduced to improve the accuracy and robustness of the attitude controller. The disturbances of the system are estimated efficiently by using developed nonlinear disturbance observer. The simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy for the quadrotor UAV during the quasi-static flight.
Estimating hazard ratios from published Kaplan‐Meier survival curves: A methods validation study

Various statistical methods have been developed to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) from published Kaplan‐Meier (KM) curves for the purpose of performing meta‐analyses. The objective of this study was to determine the reliability, accuracy, and precision of four commonly used methods by Guyot, Williamson, Parmar, and Hoyle and Henley.
The essential tyrosine‐containing loop conformation and the role of the C‐terminal multi‐helix region in eukaryotic phenylalanine ammonia‐lyases

Besides the post‐translationally cyclizing catalytic Ala‐Ser‐Gly triad, Tyr110 and its equivalents are of the most conserved residues in the active site of phenylalanine ammonia‐lyase (PAL, EC 4.3.1.5), histidine ammonia‐lyase (HAL, EC 4.3.1.3) and other related enzymes. The Tyr110Phe mutation results in the most pronounced inactivation of PAL indicating the importance of this residue. The recently published X‐ray structures of PAL revealed that the Tyr110‐loop was either missing (for Rhodospridium toruloides) or far from the active site (for Petroselinum crispum). In bacterial HAL (∼500 amino acids) and plant and fungal PALs (∼710 amino acids), a core PAL/HAL domain (∼480 amino acids) with ≥ 30% sequence identity along the different species is common. In plant and fungal PAL a ∼100‐residue long C‐terminal multi‐helix domain is present. The ancestor bacterial HAL is thermostable and, in all of its known X‐ray structures, a Tyr83‐loop‐in arrangement has been found. Based on the HAL structures, a Tyr110‐loop‐in conformation of the P. crispum PAL structure was constructed by partial homology modeling, and the static and dynamic behavior of the loop‐in/loop‐out structures were compared. To study the role of the C‐terminal multi‐helix domain, Tyr‐loop‐in/loop‐out model structures of two bacterial PALs (Streptomyces maritimus, 523 amino acids and Photorhabdus luminescens, 532 amino acids) lacking this C‐terminal domain were also built. Molecular dynamics studies indicated that the Tyr‐loop‐in conformation was more rigid without the C‐terminal multi‐helix domain. On this basis it is hypothesized that a role of this C‐terminal extension is to decrease the lifetime of eukaryotic PAL by destabilization, which might be important for the rapid responses in the regulation of phenylpropanoid biosynthesis.
A Systematic Review and Standardized Comparison of Available Evidence for Outcome Measures Used to Evaluate Proximal Humerus Fracture Patients.

OBJECTIVES To summarize and appraise any patient-reported or clinician-measured outcome measures based on their measurement properties in proximal humerus fracture patients. DATA SOURCES AND STUDY SELECTION MEDLINE, EMBASE, and CINAHL were searched from January 2000 to August 2018 to identify all studies of proximal humerus fracture patients that reported a measurement property evaluation of an outcome measure. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS Quality appraisal of each measure was completed using the Evaluating the Measurement of Patient-Reported Outcomes (EMPRO) tool. The EMPRO takes into account all studies of each measure, and the overall score is transformed linearly to a range of 0 (lowest) to 100 (best). RESULTS Eleven instruments were identified. Intended concepts of the instruments included clinician-measured shoulder function, patient-reported function or disability, and patient-reported general health state. Only the Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand (DASH), Oxford Shoulder Score, Constant Score, University of California, Los Angeles Shoulder Score, and EuroQol 5 Dimension (EQ5D) were evaluated in more than 1 study. The Shoulder Function Index (SFINX), DASH, and EQ5D had the highest EMPRO scores (80, 66, and 58, respectively). The SFINX and DASH consistently scored among the top 3 instruments for each attribute. CONCLUSIONS Evidence on the measurement properties of outcome measures for proximal humerus fracture patients is limited. With the available evidence, the SFINX is recommended as a clinician-measured functional outcome measure, the DASH as a patient-reported functional outcome measure, and the EQ5D as a general health status measure.
Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Mindfulness as a Useful Treatment Modality.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of a structured mindfulness group intervention program targeting deficient emotional self-regulation (DESR) in a sample of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). METHOD Seventy-two children aged 7 to 12 years with ADHD were randomized into 2 groups (mindfulness and control). The dysregulation profile was measured using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) Attention/Anxiety-Depression/Aggression scales. RESULTS Children with ADHD who received mindfulness-based group therapy showed lower levels of DESR after treatment, with a reduction in CBCL dysregulation profile (F (1,63) = 4.81; p = 0.032). All ADHD symptoms showed a moderately significant positive correlation with DESR (p < 0.01). Children with combined-type showed higher levels of DESR than children with inattentive-type (p = 0.018); however, no statistically significant changes were observed in the combined-type after mindfulness treatment. CONCLUSION This study suggests that mindfulness in the form of structured group therapy might be clinically relevant in treating children with ADHD and thus make an impact on the overall clinical outcome, regardless of the ADHD subtype.
REMAP: Multi-Layer Entropy-Guided Pooling of Dense CNN Features for Image Retrieval

This paper addresses the problem of very large-scale image retrieval, focusing on improving its accuracy and robustness. We target enhanced robustness of search to factors, such as variations in illumination, object appearance and scale, partial occlusions, and cluttered backgrounds—particularly important when a search is performed across very large datasets with significant variability. We propose a novel CNN-based global descriptor, called REMAP, which learns and aggregates a hierarchy of deep features from multiple CNN layers, and is trained end-to-end with a triplet loss. REMAP explicitly learns discriminative features which are mutually supportive and complementary at various semantic levels of visual abstraction. These dense local features are max-pooled spatially at each layer, within multi-scale overlapping regions, before aggregation into a single image-level descriptor. To identify the semantically useful regions and layers for retrieval, we propose to measure the information gain of each region and layer using KL-divergence. Our system effectively learns during training how useful various regions and layers are and weights them accordingly. We show that such relative entropy-guided aggregation outperforms classical CNN-based aggregation controlled by SGD. The entire framework is trained in an end-to-end fashion, outperforming the latest state-of-the-art results. On image retrieval datasets Holidays, Oxford, and MPEG, the REMAP descriptor achieves mAP of 95.5%, 91.5%, and 80.1%, respectively, outperforming any results published to date. REMAP also formed the core of the winning submission to the Google Landmark Retrieval Challenge on Kaggle.
Reduced Clostridioides difficile Tests Among Solid Organ Transplant Recipients Through a Diagnostic Stewardship Bundled Intervention

Background Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) is a frequent complication of solid organ transplantation, especially in the early post-transplantation period. Overdiagnosis of CDI is likely common in hospitals using nucleic acid amplification testing (NAAT), potentially leading to unnecessary iatrogenesis and cost. Recently, multiple studies have shown that computerized clinical decision support (CCDS)-based interventions can significantly reduce inappropriate C. difficile testing and healthcare facility-onset CDI events across hospitals and health systems. We aimed to determine if a CCDS-based intervention could reduce C. difficile testing and surveillance infection events among recent solid organ transplant recipients, a population at high risk for CDI. We also sought to determine the safety of the CCDS intervention. Material/Methods Quasi-experimental census-adjusted interrupted time-series analyses were performed retrospectively to examine testing and CDI events pre- and post-intervention. Mortality and readmissions rates were also examined. Results A significant 33% relative reduction in tests and a nonsignificant trend towards fewer CDI events were observed following the intervention, without significant differences in mortality or 30-day readmission. A review of patients with positive C. difficile NAATs after prevented tests revealed no specific adverse events attributable to a possible delay in CDI diagnosis. Conclusions CCDS may be a helpful and safe adjunctive strategy to reduce unnecessary testing in accordance with guideline recommendations among solid organ transplant recipients.
A large series of hyalinizing trabecular tumors: Cytomorphology and ancillary techniques on fine needle aspiration

Hyalinizing trabecular tumors (HTTs) are rare, essentially benign, follicular cell–derived thyroid neoplasms characterized by a trabecular growth pattern and nuclear pseudoinclusions. Their cytological findings are misleading, because these tumors are often misinterpreted on fine needle aspirate cytology as malignant lesions, such as papillary thyroid cancer and/or medullary thyroid cancer, leading to unnecessary total thyroidectomy. The aim of this study was to analyze the cytomorphological features and application of ancillary techniques in a series of HTTs.
An Internet Traffic Identification Approach Based on GA and PSO-SVM

Internet traffic identification is currently an important challenge for network management. Many approaches have been proposed to classify different categories of Internet traffic. However, traditional approaches only focus on identifying TCP flows and have ignored the selection of best feature subset for classification. In this paper, we propose an approach to classify both TCP and UDP traffic flows using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. In this approach, we select the best feature subset using Genetic Algorithm, and then we calculate the correspondence weight of each feature selected by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In addition, the traditional SVM algorithm is optimized by PSO algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that this approach can effectively select the feature subset from multiple attributes that can best reflect the differences among different network applications. Moreover, the identification rate is improved by the method of feature weighting and PSO optimized SVM algorithm.
Novel miniaturized Wilkinson power divider for 3G mobile receivers

This paper reports the miniaturization of a microstrip Wilkinson power divider by substituting the quarter wave transmission lines employed in conventional Wilkinson power dividers with its equal circuit consisting of two stubs and an inductor. Reduction of the device length to 53% its size are reported here. This Wilkinson power divider is designed at 2140 MHz for using in 3G-UMTS receivers. Furthermore, the second harmonic suppression is realized in this configuration and its frequency response is similar to low pass filters because of inductor. Also, the dividing procedure, the reflection coefficient and the isolation is as good as conventional Wilkinsons.
Addictive behaviors and personality traits in adolescents

Introduction Behavioral addictions refer to repeated dysfunctional behaviors that do not involve the ingestion of addictive substances. Studies on the association between behavioral addictions and personality traits have noted in individuals with problematic behaviors a high proclivity toward impulsivity and sensation-seeking and a low predisposition to harm avoidance. The majority of these studies have focused on adults, while far fewer have involved adolescents. Methods The study population was 109 high school students (age range 15–18 years) in Turin, Italy. Participants completed an assessment that comprised a demographic questionnaire and 3 self-report questionnaires: the Shorter PROMIS Questionnaire (SPQ), the Internet Addiction Test (IAT), and the Multidimensional Questionnaire for Adolescents (QMA). Results A gender-related difference in the risk of developing an addictive behavior was observed, with a significantly higher percentage of risk seen for several addiction tendencies among the males. Statistically significant correlations emerged between some personality determinants and certain addictive behaviors. Discussion The study pinpoints epidemiological indicators for the extent of this growing problem among adolescents. Conclusions The findings have implications for identifying protection factors and risk factors for addictive behaviors and related psychiatric disorders, and the development of primary prevention strategies derived from such factors.
Increased hygroscopicity of Arizona Test Dust seeds by secondary organic aerosol coating from α-pinene ozonolysis

1) Department of Applied Physics, University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 1627, FI-70211 Kuopio, Finland 2) Department of Environmental Science, University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 1627, FI-70211 Kuopio, Finland 3) Finnish Meteorological Institute, P.O. Box 503, FI-00101 Helsinki, Finland 4) Aerodyne Research, 45 Manning Road, Billerica, MA 01821, USA 5) National Center for Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307-3000, USA 6) Finnish Meteorological Institute, P.O. Box 1627, FI-70211 Kuopio, Finland
Subjective Sleep Quality in Women With Divorce Histories

A marital status of divorced or separated, as opposed to married, predicts increased risk of health problems, but not for all persons. Focusing on one established health risk that has been linked with divorce—poor subjective sleep quality—the present cross-sectional study examined whether a history of physical intimate partner victimization (IPV) helps identify divorced women at potentially greater risk of health problems. Community midlife women with divorce histories, all of whom were free of current IPV, reported on their past month sleep quality and lifetime IPV. The predicted odds of poor sleep quality were significantly greater for women with, versus without, IPV histories. This held after adjusting for socioemotional, medical, or sociodemographic risks. A dose–response relationship between IPV chronicity and poor quality sleep was observed. IPV history may help identify divorced women at increased risk of poor quality sleep and, more broadly, poor health.
Seq2Feature: a comprehensive web-based feature extraction tool

MOTIVATION Machine learning techniques require various descriptors from protein and nucleic acid sequences to understand/predict their structure and function as well as distinguishing between disease and neutral mutations. Hence, availability of a feature extraction tool is necessary to bridge the gap. RESULTS We developed a comprehensive web-based tool, Seq2Feature, which computes 252 protein and 41 DNA sequence-based descriptors. These features include physicochemical, energetic and conformational properties of proteins, mutation matrices and contact potentials as well as nucleotide composition, physicochemical and conformational properties of DNA. We propose that Seq2Feature could serve as an effective tool for extracting protein and DNA sequence based features as applicable inputs to machine learning algorithms. AVAILABILITY https://www.iitm. ac.in/bioinfo/SBFE/index.html. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Contradiction between amide‐CEST signal and pH in breast cancer explained with metabolic MRI

Metabolic MRI is a noninvasive technique that can give new insights into understanding cancer metabolism and finding biomarkers to evaluate or monitor treatment plans. Using this technique, a previous study has shown an increase in pH during neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) treatment, while recent observation in a different study showed a reduced amide proton transfer (APT) signal during NAC treatment (negative relation). These findings are counterintuitive, given the known intrinsic positive relation of APT signal to pH.