Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Surgical Management of Jugular Foramen Meningiomas: A Series of 13 Cases and Review of the Literature

Objective: Primary meningiomas occurring within the jugular foramen are exceedingly rare lesions presumed to originate from arachnoid‐lining cells situated within the jugular foramen. The objective of this study is to analyze the management and outcome in a series of 13 primary jugular foramen meningiomas collected at a single center.
Unsupervised Compensation of Intra-Session Intra-Speaker Variability for Speaker Diarization

This paper presents a novel framework for unsupervi s d compensation of intra-session intra-speaker variabi lity in the context of speaker diarization. Audio files are par ameterized by sequences of GMM-supervectors representing overl apping short segments of speech. Session-dependent intra-s ession intra-speaker variability is estimated in an unsupe rvis d manner, and is compensated using the nuisance attri bute projection (NAP) method. The proposed compensation method is evaluated in the context of speaker diari zation in two-speaker conversations. A simple and effective t wospeaker diarization algorithm is introduced in whic h speaker diarization is performed in the compensated superve ctorspace. The proposed diarization algorithm was evalu ated on summed telephone conversations and achieved a speak er rror rate of 2.8% which is a 54% relative error reductio n c mpared to a baseline BIC-based system. Finally, we evaluate the proposed system on a speaker recognition task in th e summedspeech condition where improvement in speaker recog niti n accuracy is observed using the proposed diarization system.
Skeptical and Optimistic Robust Priors for Clinical Trials

A useful technique from the subjective Bayesian viewpoint, is to ask the subject matter researchers and other parties involved, such as pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies, for reasonable optimistic and pessimistic priors regarding the effectiveness of a new treatment. Up to now, the proposed skeptical and optimistic priors have been limited to conjugate priors, though there is no need for this limitation. The same reasonably adversarial points of view can take with robust priors. Robust priors permit a much faster and efficient resolution of the disagreement between the conclusions based on skeptical and optimistic priors. As a consequence, robust Bayesian clinical trials tend to be shorter. Our proposal in this paper is to use Cauchy and intrinsic robust priors for both skeptical and optimistic priors leading to results more closely related with the sampling data when prior and data are in conflict. In other words, the use of robust priors removes the dogmatism implicit in conjugate priors. Dogmatism here has very precise meaning: Conjugate priors affect the posterior conclusions by a fixed rate, regardless if there is a conflict between prior and data. Robust priors are automatically discounted by Bayes Theorem in the presence of conflict.
Virtual Machine Memory Access Tracing with Hypervisor Exclusive Cache

Virtual machine (VM) memory allocation and VM consolidation can benefit from the prediction of VM page miss rate at each candidate memory size. Such prediction is challenging for the hypervisor (or VM monitor) due to a lack of knowledge on VM memory access pattern. This paper explores the approach that the hypervisor takes over the management for part of the VM memory and thus all accesses that miss the remaining VM memory can be transparently traced by the hypervisor. For online memory access tracing, its overhead should be small compared to the case that all allocated memory is directly managed by the VM. To save memory space, the hypervisor manages its memory portion as an exclusive cache (i.e., containing only data that is not in the remaining VM memory). To minimize I/O overhead, evicted data from a VM enters its cache directly from VM memory (as opposed to entering from the secondary storage). We guarantee the cache correctness by only caching memory pages whose current contents provably match those of corresponding storage locations. Based on our design, we show that when the VM evicts pages in the LRU order, the employment of the hypervisor cache does not introduce any additional I/O overhead in the system. We implemented the proposed scheme on the Xen para-virtualization platform. Our experiments with microbenchmarks and four real data-intensive services (SPECweb99, index searching, TPC-C, and TPC-H) illustrate the overhead of our hypervisor cache and the accuracy of cache-driven VM page miss rate prediction. We also present the results on adaptive VM memory allocation with performance assurance.
Direct and indirect influence of physical education-based interventions on physical activity: a review.

BACKGROUND Physical education (PE) has the potential of stimulating physical activity (PA) in children and adolescents in a direct and an indirect manner. By providing in-class activity, PE could directly contribute to the accumulation of physical activity. In addition, it is often claimed that PE could have an effect on physical activity by stimulating out-of-class activity, or even physical activity in adult life. METHODS We reviewed intervention studies using a PE component that directly or indirectly aimed to increase physical activity in primary and secondary school students. An electronic literature search was conducted and articles' reference lists were scanned for additional papers. RESULTS Fourteen studies matched our criteria. A review of these studies showed that interventions are able to directly increase activity in PE classes with relatively simple modifications, whereas the evidence for increasing out-of-class PA through interventions utilizing PE as a component is less convincing. CONCLUSIONS We propose that evidence-based interventions aimed at increasing PA in children and adolescents through PE should at this moment be aimed at the direct effect of PE. There is a need for high quality PE-based interventions directed at out-of-class activity and long-term active life style.
Endothelial Cell Seeding onto Various Biomaterials Causes Superoxide-induced Cell Death

The seeding and/or in-growth of endothelial cells on a number of blood-contacting implants are a concern for both biomaterials and tissue engineering. While endothelialization has been viewed positively, owing to their ability to regulate both smooth muscle and blood, there is evidence which suggests that endothelial cells on a nonoptimized surface may be counterproductive. The present study describes the experimentation designed to elucidate the effect of culture substrate on intracellular superoxide (SO) levels, a marker for endothelial cell dysfunction. The adaptation of the use of dihydroethidium under physiologically relevant shearing conditions is also reported. The present study describes a standardized method for the use of dihydroethidium as a marker for intracellular oxidative stress under physiologic shear. Levels of hydrogen peroxide (oxidative stress producing agent) are optimized to a minimum of 60 μM (under static conditions) to allow for the detection of SO within the free radical scavenging environment. A flow rate of 24.4 mL/min is applied and found to produce physiologically relevant shear stress (8.2 dynes/cm2) within the system under study. Dihydroethidium is a useful marker for assessing intracellular oxidative stress in studies that require shear.
Infectious disease and the worldwide distribution of IQ

We show that infectious disease is a major contributor of the worldwide distribution of human cognitive ability, as measured by psychometric IQ. In areas where infectious disease is high, average human intelligence tends to be lower, and in areas where infectious disease is low, average human intelligence tends to be higher. In separate studies, we tested this across both world nations (chapter 2) and across states of the USA (chapter 3). In efforts to disseminate our research to wider audience, I reviewed the findings contained chapters 2 and 3 using language that is accessible non-biologists (chapter 4). Although it contains no original research, this chapter makes our research more readily available to people in non-biological fields, such as economics and political science, who may be interested in our findings. vi An early prediction we made, based on our first analysis, was that infectious disease could account for the apparent link between IQ and rates of asthma, that other research has discovered (chapter 5). Additionally, this chapter attempts to reconcile the predictions made by several related hypotheses. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES.viii LIST OF TABLES.ix CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION.1 CHAPTER 2 – PARASITE PREVALENCE AND THE WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION OF COGNITIVE ABILITY.7 CHAPTER 3 – PARASITE PREVALENCE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF INTELLIGENCE AMONG THE STATES OF THE USA.39 CHAPTER 4 – INFECTIOUS DISEASE PREVALENCE PREDICTS IQ ACROSS WORLD NATIONS AND STATES OF THE USA.65 CHAPTER 5 – INFECTIOUS DISEASE AND THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE HYGIENE HYPOTHESIS TO IQ.81 viii LIST OF FIGURES 2-1.35 3-1.60 3-2.61 5-1.98
Comparative inactivation of isepamicin, amikacin, and gentamicin by nine beta-lactams and two beta-lactamase inhibitors, cilastatin and heparin

This study was undertaken to compare the susceptibility to inactivation of isepamicin with amikacin and gentamicin when exposed to different beta-lactams, beta-lactamase inhibitors, and heparin. The aminoglycosides (5, 10, 20, and 50 micrograms/ml) were incubated in human serum with ampicillin, azlocillin, aztreonam, carbenicillin, ceftazidime, piperacillin, and ticarcillin (100 and 600 micrograms/ml) and with clavulanate, cilastatin, 1:1 imipenemcilastatin, oxacillin, and sulbactam (20 and 120 micrograms/ml) for 48 h at 37 degrees C. Aminoglycoside concentrations were measured by fluorescence polarization immunoassay (FPI) after 0, 8, and 48 h of incubation and by radial diffusion bioassay after 48 h of incubation. Each of the three aminoglycosides was also added to whole blood containing either heparin (100 U/ml) or 0.5% EDTA as a control and assayed after 6 h by FPI. The degree of inactivation of isepamicin by the beta-lactams was significantly less than that by amikacin (P less than 0.003) and gentamicin (P less than 0.0002) when determined by bioassay. Piperacillin, carbenicillin, and azlocillin produced the greatest amount of inactivation, and cilastatin and oxacillin produced the least. A similar pattern was observed when the degree of inactivation was measured by FPI. A significant difference in the degree of inactivation was noted between isepamicin and gentamicin (P less than 0.003 at 8 h and P less than 0.006 at 48 h) but not between isepamicin and amikacin (P greater than 0.7 at 8 h and P greater than 0.08 at 48 h). Aminoglycoside determinations by FPI were not influenced by the presence of heparin. In summary, isepamicin was found to be at least as stable as amikacin against inactivation by beta-lactam compounds and beta-lactamase inhibitors. Heparin (100 U/ml) did not influence aminoglycoside determinations by FPI.
Ontologies improve text document clustering

Text document clustering plays an important role in providing intuitive navigation and browsing mechanisms by organizing large sets of documents into a small number of meaningful clusters. The bag of words representation used for these clustering methods is often unsatisfactory as it ignores relationships between important terms that do not cooccur literally. In order to deal with the problem, we integrate core ontologies as background knowledge into the process of clustering text documents. Our experimental evaluations compare clustering techniques based on pre-categorizations of texts from Reuters newsfeeds and on a smaller domain of an eLearning course about Java. In the experiments, improvements of results by background knowledge compared to a baseline without background knowledge can be shown in many interesting combinations.
Endothelial Cell Heparanase Taken Up by Cardiomyocytes Regulates Lipoprotein Lipase Transfer to the Coronary Lumen After Diabetes

After diabetes, the heart has a singular reliance on fatty acid (FA) for energy production, which is achieved by increased coronary lipoprotein lipase (LPL) that breaks down circulating triglycerides. Coronary LPL originates from cardiomyocytes, and to translocate to the vascular lumen, the enzyme requires liberation from myocyte surface heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPGs), an activity that needs to be sustained after chronic hyperglycemia. We investigated the mechanism by which endothelial cells (EC) and cardiomyocytes operate together to enable continuous translocation of LPL after diabetes. EC were cocultured with myocytes, exposed to high glucose, and uptake of endothelial heparanase into myocytes was determined. Upon uptake, the effect of nuclear entry of heparanase was also investigated. A streptozotocin model of diabetes was used to expand our in vitro observations. In high glucose, EC-derived latent heparanase was taken up by cardiomyocytes by a caveolae-dependent pathway using HSPGs. This latent heparanase was converted into an active form in myocyte lysosomes, entered the nucleus, and upregulated gene expression of matrix metalloproteinase-9. The net effect was increased shedding of HSPGs from the myocyte surface, releasing LPL for its onwards translocation to the coronary lumen. EC-derived heparanase regulates the ability of the cardiomyocyte to send LPL to the coronary lumen. This adaptation, although acutely beneficial, could be catastrophic chronically because excess FA causes lipotoxicity. Inhibiting heparanase function could offer a new strategy for managing cardiomyopathy observed after diabetes.
Probabilistic source-level optimisation of embedded programs

Efficient implementation of DSP applications is critical for many embedded systems. Optimising C compilers for embedded processors largely focus on code generation and instruction scheduling which, with their growing maturity, are providing diminishing returns. This paper empirically evaluates another approach, namely source-level transformations and the probabilistic feedback-driven search for "good" transformation sequences within a large optimisation space. This novel approach combines two selection methods: one based on exploring the optimisation space, the other focused on localised search of good areas. This technique was applied to the UTDSP benchmark suite on two digital signal and multimedia processors (Analog Devices TigerSHARC TS-101, Philips TriMedia TM-1100) and an embedded processor derived from a popular general-purpose processor architecture (Intel Celeron 400). On average, our approach gave a factor of 1.71 times improvement across all platforms equivalent to an average 41% reduction in execution time, outperforming existing approaches. In certain cases a speedup of up to ͠ 7 was found for individual benchmarks.
Associations Between Blood Pressure and Outcomes Among Blacks in the Jackson Heart Study

Background In 2014, new hypertension guidelines liberalized blood pressure goals for persons 60 years and older. Little is known about the implications for blacks. Methods and Results Using data from 2000 through 2011 for 5280 participants in the Jackson Heart Study, a community‐based black cohort in Jackson, Mississippi, we examined whether higher blood pressure was associated with greater risk of mortality and heart failure hospitalization, and whether the risk was the same across age groups. We investigated associations between baseline blood pressure and both mortality and heart failure hospitalization. We also tested for interactions between age and blood pressure in the mortality model. Median systolic and diastolic blood pressures at baseline were 125 mm Hg (25th–75th percentile, 114–137 mm Hg) and 79 mm Hg (72–86 mm Hg), respectively. Median follow‐up was 9 years for mortality and 7 years for heart failure hospitalization. After multivariable adjustment, every 10 mm Hg increase in systolic blood pressure was associated with greater risks of mortality (hazard ratio, 1.12; 95% CI, 1.06–1.17) and heart failure hospitalization (1.07; 95% CI, 1.00–1.14). The mortality risk per 10 mm Hg increase in systolic blood pressure was greater in participants younger than 60 years (1.26; 95% CI, 1.13–1.42) than among participants 60 years and older (1.09; 95% CI, 1.03–1.15). Conclusions Adults in all age groups were at greater risk of mortality as systolic blood pressure increased. In the context of the 2014 hypertension guidelines, these findings should be considered when determining treatment goals in black patients.
New center a stroke of gene-ius.

Background: Phylogenetic analyses based on datasets rich in both genes and species (phylogenomics) are becoming a standard approach to resolve evolutionary questions. However, several difficulties are associated with the assembly of large datasets, such as multiple copies of a gene per species (paralogous or xenologous genes), lack of some genes for a given species, or partial sequences. The use of undetected paralogous or xenologous genes in phylogenetic inference can lead to inaccurate results, and the use of partial sequences to a lack of resolution. A tool that selects sequences, species, and genes, while dealing with these issues, is needed in a phylogenomics context. Results: Here, we present SCaFoS, a tool that quickly assembles phylogenomic datasets containing maximal phylogenetic information while adjusting the amount of missing data in the selection of species, sequences and genes. Starting from individual sequence alignments, and using monophyletic groups defined by the user, SCaFoS creates chimeras with partial sequences, or selects, among multiple sequences, the orthologous and/or slowest evolving sequences. Once sequences representing each predefined monophyletic group have been selected, SCaFos retains genes according to the user's allowed level of missing data and generates files for super-matrix and supertree analyses in several formats compatible with standard phylogenetic inference software. Because no clear-cut criteria exist for the sequence selection, a semi-automatic mode is available to accommodate user's expertise. Conclusion: SCaFos is able to deal with datasets of hundreds of species and genes, both at the amino acid or nucleotide level. It has a graphical interface and can be integrated in an automatic workflow. Moreover, SCaFoS is the first tool that integrates user's knowledge to select orthologous sequences, creates chimerical sequences to reduce missing data and selects genes according to their level of missing data. Finally, applying SCaFoS to different datasets, we show that the judicious selection of genes, species and sequences reduces tree reconstruction artefacts, especially if the dataset includes fast evolving species. from First International Conference on Phylogenomics Sainte-Adèle, Québec, Canada. 15–19 March, 2006 Published: 8 February 2007 BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007, 7(Suppl 1):S2 doi:10.1186/1471-2148-7-S1-S2 <supplement> <title> <p>First International Conference on Phylogenomics</p> </title> <editor>Hervé Philippe, Mathieu Blanchette</editor> <note>Proceedings</note> </supplement> © 2007 Roure et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Effect of a single treatment (imprinting) with genistein or combined treatment with genistein+benzpyrene on the binding capacity of glucocorticoid and estrogen receptors of adult rats

Hormonal imprinting takes place perinatally at the first encounter between the hormone and its target receptor. This is needed for the normal finishment of the maturation of the receptor–signal transduction system. In excess of foreign molecules, which can also bind to the receptor, faulty imprinting develops with life-long consequences. Genistein, a soybean phytosteroid (isoflavone), has estrogen-like effects and can be bound by steroid receptors. In the present experiments, single neonatal treatment (imprinting) with 20 m g of genistein, or combined treatment with 20 m g of genistein+20 m g of benzpyrene was done and liver and thymus glucocorticoid receptors of adult male and female rats and uterine estrogen receptors were studied. There was no difference in the binding capacity of uterine estrogen receptors. Genistein treatment alone caused a significant reduction of liver glucocorticoid receptor density in males; however, there were no other significant alterations. After combined genistein+benzpyrene treatment, more than half of the thymus and liver glucocorticoid receptor values significantly changed. The results call attention to the imprinting-modifying effect of a second (environmental) imprinter.
Toward a theory of sustainable grouth of the firm

This paper presents ‘needs evolution model’ in terms of ‘needs-determined innovation’ on the premises that how innovative a technology may be, unless it prompts a customer to pay willingly by triggering new appealing needs attribute(s) that brings about customer satisfaction, it is of no use at all, and that no customer will pay until he/she expects to get satisfaction without being dissatisfied, and that while a customer expects his/her needs 100% satisfied, he/she always becomes excited and has the maximum level of willingness to pay (WTP). This notion provides a firm with a clear-cut logic of strategy formulation & implementation, ‘Seek Norm as Ideal & Get-to-Norm’ for value creation. This paper finally proposes a framework for theorizing sustainable growth of the firm by showing how to meet customer needs ideally at each stage of needs evolution from holism, synthesis and dynamism points of view with a stronger rationale borrowed from physics, bio-ecology & complexity theory.
New representations of the Hecke algebra and algebraic Bethe Ansatz for an integrable generalized spin ladder

A new class of representations of the Hecke algebra is presented, from which one can get a novel class of solutions to the quantum Yang-Baxter equations. It turns out that such a solution can be used to describe the quantum integrability of a generalized spin ladder. The Bethe Ansatz equations are derived using the algebraic Bethe Ansatz method.
Creating Engaging Online Learning Material with the JSAV JavaScript Algorithm Visualization Library

Data Structures and Algorithms are a central part of Computer Science. Due to their abstract and dynamic nature, they are a difficult topic to learn for many students. To alleviate these learning difficulties, instructors have turned to algorithm visualizations (AV) and AV systems. Research has shown that especially engaging AVs can have an impact on student learning of DSA topics. Until recently, most AV systems were Java-based systems. But, the popularity of Java has declined and is being supplanted by HTML5 and JavaScript content online. In this paper, we present JSAV: the JavaScript AV development library. JSAV goes beyond traditional AV library support for displaying standard data structures components, to provide functionality to simplify creation of AVs on many engagement levels including interactive exercises. We describe the growing body of content created with JSAV and summarize our three years of experience and research results from using JSAV to build content that supports CS education.