Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Polymorphisms in Toll-like receptor genes are associated with vitiligo

Background: The members of Toll-like receptor (TLR) family are responsible for recognizing various molecular patterns associated with pathogens. Their expression is not confined to immune cells and have been detected in skin cells such as keratinocytes and melanocytes. As part of a generated response to pathogens, TLRs are involved in inducing inflammatory mediators to combat these threats. It is therefore not surprising that TLRs have been implicated in inflammatory skin diseases, including atopic dermatitis and psoriasis. Likewise, as key players in autoimmunity, they have been associated with a number of autoimmune diseases. Based on this, the role of TLRs in vitiligo could be suspected, but is yet to be clearly established. Methods: In order to conduct a genetic association analysis, 30 SNPs were selected from TLR1-TLR8 and TLR10 regions to be genotyped in Estonian case-control cohort consisting of 139 vitiligo patients and 307 healthy control individuals. The patients were further analyzed in subgroups based on sex, age of onset, occurrence of vitiligo among relatives, extent of depigmented areas, vitiligo progression activity, appearance of Köbner's phenomenon, existence of halo naevi, and incidence of spontaneous repigmentation. Results: The most notable finding came with SNP rs179020 situated in TLR7 gene, that was associated in entire vitiligo (Padj = 0.0065) and also several subgroup analyses. Other single marker and haplotype analyses pointed to TLR3, TLR4, and TLR10 genes. Conclusions: This study investigated the genetic regions of nine TLR genes in relation to vitiligo susceptibility. The main results were the associations of TLR7 SNPs with vitiligo, while several other associations were obtained from the remaining TLR gene regions. This suggests that in addition to other inflammatory skin diseases, TLRs affect the development of vitiligo, thus making them interesting targets for future research.
On real-time delay monitoring in software-defined networks

The paper introduces a new loop-based method to measure end-to-end packet delay in software-defined network infrastructures. Although the method generates auxiliary service packets, it does not require any complementary support from the switching hardware. The prototype implementation shows the method is able to provide one-way delay values with microsecond precision on a steady load. Direct application of the method to each data flow in the network is straightforward, but can cause excessive hardware utilization. Thus, the paper proposes an algorithm to improve it by decomposing global end-to-end estimations into the set local ones whereas removing their redundancy. The algorithm makes it practically possible to monitor delay of each data flow in real-time.
Applying a Contamination Model to Testing an Embedded System

Sets of test procedures are employ ed to verify an error free output of a development or a production process. A deg ree of coverag e is associated with each test, and the set of tests aims at achieving an agregated coverag e of the properties of the sy tem under test. The performance of a set of tests may , therefore, be considered as an application of an input sequence to the sy tem under test, with the aim of obtaining a particular coverage of verification of the sy stem's properties [ 6,7]. A speci al case i s that of a veri fied computer embedded system, in which a change procedure has been performed in a set of its software elements. The order of input sequences i n the tests following a defi ned chang e in a system significantly dominates the average speed of detection of the ex istence of an error. This paper p esents a method, based on a model of the system under test, which allows defining the order of tests after a change is performed in one of the sy stem's software elements. The method uses a “contamination model,” in which the contamination source is the chang e performed on the system. A simulation tool is used to define an efficient order of tests to obtain a faster detection of an error in the chang e. The method has been applied to a practical computer embedded sy stem, in the telecommunications field, and the results are d escribed.
Rib fracture: Different radiographic projections

Summary Background: Rib fracture is the most common thoracic injury. It is thought to be present in 10% of all traumatic injuries and in almost 40% of patients who sustained severe non-penetrating trauma. There are 12 pairs of ribs. This study reviews various methods of acquisition and reconstruction of radiographic images of traumatic rib fractures in order to determine the optimal views and to simplify rib fracture diagnostics. Material/Methods: Eight different plain radiography pictures of ribs were performed with the patient in an erect position. The following projections were obtained in sequence: oblique at 45° or 30° angle on inspiration, oblique at 45° or 30° angle on expiration as well as 45° and 39° projections during slow and fast breathing. All radiographic examinations were performed using a Philips three-phase scanner installed at the Al- Razi Hospital in Jenin, Palestine. Results: The results demonstrate that the 45° antero-posterior oblique projection performed on expiration is recommended for diagnostics and interpretation of traumatic rib fractures. Conclusions: Conclusion emerging from this study are such that for a 45° oblique view on expiration is recommended for radiographic imaging of patients with clinical signs of fracture, e.g. evaluation of lower rib fractures, while 45° oblique view during fast breathing is recommended for suspected upper rib fractures.
Towards Automated Restructuring of Object Oriented Systems

Software aging is an important cost contributor to the maintenance of aging software systems. Recent years have brought significant progress in the area of automatic detection of "code smells" as well as tool support for refactoring and implementing design patterns in the code. Nonetheless, there is hardly any tool support to help the maintainer decide how to refactor in a given situation, such that the recommended refactorings are also meaningful in that particular situation. Most of the existing techniques are either merely supporting the process, such as visualizations, or cannot guarantee meaningful refactorings, such as optimization based techniques. This paper introduces and experimentally evaluates a novel, tool supported approach to determine meaningful refactorings to structural flaws in object oriented systems. The refactorings recommended by our approach are guaranteed to lead to a meaningful and more maintainable structure in each analyzed situation. The approach contributes to a dramatic reduction of costs, by reducing the need and scope of detailed, manual code analysis
Securing the Scalable Source Routing Protocol

The Scalable Source Routing (SSR) protocol combines overlay-like routing in a virtual network structure with source routing in the physical network to a single cross-layer architecture. Thereby, it can provide indirect routing in networks that lack a well-crafted structure. SSR is well suited for mobile ad hoc networks, sensor-actuator networks, and especially for mesh networks. Moreover, SSR directly provides the routing semantics of a structured routing overlay, making it an efficient basis for the scalable implementation of fully decentralized applications. In this paper we analyze SSR with regard to security: We show where SSR is prone to attacks, and we describe protocol modifications that make SSR robust in the presence of malicious nodes. The core idea is to introduce cryptographic certificates that allow nodes to discover forged protocol messages. We evaluate our proposed modifications by means of simulations, and thus demonstrate that they are both effective and efficient.
Analysis of number size distributions of tropical free tropospheric aerosol particles observed at Pico Espejo (4765 m a.s.l.), Venezuela

Abstract. The first long-term measurements of aerosol number and size distributions in South-American tropical free troposphere (FT) were performed from March 2007 until March 2009. The measurements took place at the high altitude Atmospheric Research Station Alexander von Humboldt. The station is located on top of the Sierra Nevada mountain ridge at 4765 m a.s. l. nearby the city of Merida, Venezuela. Aerosol size distribution and number concentration data was obtained with a custom-built Differential Mobility Particle Sizer (DMPS) system and a Condensational Particle Counter (CPC). The analysis of the annual and diurnal variability of the tropical FT aerosol focused mainly on possible links to the atmospheric general circulation in the tropics. Considerable annual and diurnal cycles of the particle number concentration were observed. Highest total particle number concentrations were measured during the dry season (January–March, 519 ± 613 cm−3), lowest during the wet season (July–September, 318 ± 194 cm−3). The more humid FT (relative humidity (RH) range 50–95 %) contained generally higher aerosol particle number concentrations (573 ± 768 cm−3 during dry season, 320 ± 195 cm−3 during wet season) than the dry FT (RH
American Thoracic Society Documents An Official American Thoracic Society Statement : Update on the Mechanisms , Assessment , and Management of Dyspnea

Background: Dyspnea is a common, distressing symptom of cardiopulmonary and neuromuscular diseases. Since the ATS published aconsensus statementondyspnea in1999, therehasbeenenormous growth in knowledge about the neurophysiology of dyspnea and increasing interest in dyspnea as a patient-reported outcome. Purpose: The purpose of this document is to update the 1999 ATS Consensus Statement on dyspnea. Methods: An interdisciplinary committee of experts representing ATS assemblies onNursing, Clinical Problems, Sleep andRespiratory Neurobiology,PulmonaryRehabilitation,andBehavioralSciencedetermined the overall scope of this update through group consensus. Focused literature reviews in key topic areas were conducted by committee members with relevant expertise. The final content of this statement was agreed upon by all members. Results: Progresshasbeenmade in clarifyingmechanismsunderlying several qualitatively and mechanistically distinct breathing sensations.Brain imagingstudieshaveconsistently showndyspneastimuli to be correlatedwith activation of cortico-limbic areas involvedwith interoception and nociception. Endogenous and exogenous opioids may modulate perception of dyspnea. Instruments for measuring dyspnea are often poorly characterized; a framework is proposed for more consistent identification of measurement domains. Conclusions: Progress in treatmentofdyspneahasnotmatchedprogress inelucidatingunderlyingmechanisms.There isacriticalneedfor interdisciplinary translational research to connect dyspnea mechanisms with clinical treatment and to validate dyspnea measures as patient-reported outcomes for clinical trials.
LASSO based building thermal model for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning control

Sophisticated controllers using building models and effects of disturbances are required for saving energy in buildings. Occupancy and climate are the disturbances acting on the building thermal model. This investigation presents a procedure for constructing building thermal model using experiments, simple sensor and least-absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). The thermal model so obtained is simple and can be used to construct model based controllers. Further, the methods leads to a linear model as against the non-linear thermal building models making it easier to design model based controllers. The building model is illustrated on a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) test-bed in a laboratory. Our results show that the LASSO based captures the non-linear disturbances and improves the model accuracy. The obtained results are compared with the actual measurements and least-squares to illustrate the accuracy.
Automatic Word Categorization : An Information-theoretic

This paper presents a novel approach to the automatic categorization of words from raw data. We count occurrences of word pairs in text and use a hierarchical clustering technique on this frequency data to obtain a classiication of words into linguistic categories. As a distance criterion in the clustering process, we use the loss of mutual information caused by combining two clusters into a single new cluster. The main advantage of such a method is the ability to construct linguistic categories that combine both syntactic and semantic/pragmatic factors, which may help in reducing the number of nonsensical analyses that a language processing system will produce. Results of the application of this method on letter data and on a word corpus are shown, which clearly demonstrate this blending of syntactic and semantic aspects. Words are not only classiied on the basis of their syntactic categories, but also with respect to aspects that are related to their meanings. The method can form the basis of a system that uses a much ner categorization of words than is feasible using traditional grammar-based approaches. We plan to use it in a layered system of artiicial neural networks that are trained to recognize higher-level constituents.
The effect of accurate speech production experience on the development of auditory-visual speech perception in children

This study investigated the development of auditory-visual speech perception (AVSP) in a group of children with and without inconsistent phonological disorder, a speech production disorder. Children were given tests of AVSP, language specific speech perception (LSSP), and executive functions. Results provide evidence of a link between speech production and auditory-visual speech perception, indicating that failure in speech perception as a result of phonological misrepresentation might partly be due to in efficient speechreading and auditory-visual speech integration abilities.
A new opportunistic interference alignment scheme and performance comparison of MIMO interference alignment with limited feedback

We investigate the performance of several interference alignment (IA) schemes for a three-user MIMO channel with limited feedback. In our study, we consider traditional IA with quantized channel state information at each transmitter, and opportunistic IA (OIA) that exploits the idea of opportunistic selection to select users whose interfering channels are most aligned. The performance of the former is determined by the quantization resolution, whereas the performance of the later depends on the number of users available for selection. We show that OIA only requires a small number of users to achieve a comparable performance to traditional IA schemes with quantized feedback. Motivated by this fact, we propose a new user selection criterion that outperforms the existing state of the art. Simulations show the superior performance of our OIA scheme under different strong/mild interference conditions.
High Fidelity Denial of Service ( DoS ) Experimentation

Experimentation with security attacks introduces additional requirements compared to traditional networking and distributed system experiments. High capacity attack flows can push systems beyond their expected operational regions, and expose unexpected behaviors. Many popular simulation and emulation environments fail to account for such behaviors, and incorrect results have been reported based on experiments conducted in these environments. In addition, simulation and emulation environments sometimes introduce artifacts, altering the experimental outcome and its interpretation. Finally, identification of systems settings that significantly impact experimental results is crucial for creating repeatable experiments. In this paper, we present the results of a careful sensitivity analysis we have conducted, which exposes difficulties in obtaining meaningful measurements from three emulation testbeds: DETER at http://www.isi. deterlab.net/, Emulab at http://www.emulab. net/, and Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory (WAIL) at http://www.schooner. wail.wisc. edu with default system settings. We compare these results to ns-2 simulation results, and find dramatic differences between simulation and emulation results for Denial of Service (DoS) attack experiments. We select low-rate TCP-targeted DoS attacks as a case study, since these attacks have generated significant interest in the research community in the past few years. To validate our comparisons, we use a simple analytical model of TCP performance degradation, in the presence of a special case of TCP-targeted DoS attacks (those not causing timeouts), as a lower bound. Our results reveal that software routers such as Click provide a flexible experimental platform, but require understanding and manipulation of the underlying network device drivers. We also discuss our future work plans for creating higher fidelity network simulation and emulation models that are not computationally prohibitive. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II summarizes related work. Section III describes the simple analytical model we have developed. Section IV explains the experimental setup that we use. Section V summarizes our results and the problems in achieving high fidelity DoS simulation and emulation. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper.
Modeling of Waveguide Structures Using DG-FETD Method With Higher Order Tetrahedral Elements

In this paper, the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite-element time-domain (FETD) method is developed to model electromagnetic (EM) structures with waveguide excitations. Several specific issues about the DG-FETD modeling are addressed. First, the higher order tetrahedral elements are employed to accurately model the geometry of EM structures and effectively reduce the dispersion error so that the efficiency of the FETD method is increased. To further increase the efficiency of the DG-FETD method, the local time-stepping scheme is applied. Secondly, the conformal perfect matching layer (PML) is applied to terminate the waveguide. The formulation of the conformal PML is presented in this paper. Thirdly, a novel approach is proposed to extract the S-parameters of waveguide structures. This approach applies the surface magnetic current to excite the EM fields in the waveguide structures. Taking advantage of the relationship between the excitation current and excited fields in the uniform waveguide, one can readily obtain the incident electric fields that are required for calculating the S-parameters. This approach avoids the pre-simulation of the uniform waveguide. Finally, the numerical results are given to validate the DG-FETD modeling.
Using Web Services for Distributed Medical Visualisation

Collaboration on the storage, processing and visualisation of medical data via the Internet is a considerable challenge and one that is growing in importance due to the escalating interest in the Virtual Physiological Human. Investigations into possible approaches for distributed, realtime visualisation are important in this context. This paper presents a Web Services approach to distributed visualisation that has been developed within the LHDL project. The processing and visualisation Web Services that have been created are based on existing MAF applications; this has formed a useful testbed for transforming legacy software into Web Services. On the client side, a Rich Internet Application concept was adopted, while a web-based, user friendly Flex client has been implemented.
Cyclic Digital Nets, Hyperplane Nets, and Multivariate Integration in Sobolev Spaces

Cyclic nets are a special case of digital nets and were recently introduced by Niederreiter. Here we present a construction algorithm for such nets, where we use the root mean square worst-case error of a randomly digitally shifted point set in a weighted Sobolev space as a selection criterion. This yields a feasible construction algorithm since for a cyclic net with qm points (with fixed bijections and fixed ground field) there are qm possible choices. Our results here match the convergence rate and strong tractability results for polynomial lattice rules, hence providing us with an alternative construction algorithm. Further, we improve upon previous results by including constructions over arbitrary finite fields and an arbitrary choice of bijections.
Prospector : a protocol-specific detector of polymorphic buffer overflows

While future attacks are likely to be increasingly polymorphic, current intrusion detection methods tend to be either powerless in the face of attack mutation, or too inaccurate to be used as intrusion prevention filters. Our system, known as Prospector consists of three components. First, an emulatorbased honey-pot uses taint analysis to detect zeroday intrusion attempts with great accuracy. Second, a signature generator uses protocol knowledge to generate signatures for use in filters. Third, a filter engine functions as an intrusion prevention system, scanning incoming traffic for many different signatures simultaneously in an efficient manner and dropping streams containing attacks. No false positives are incurred on either the detection or the filtering phase. The Prospector IPS is implemented both on a general purpose CPU and on a network processor embedded on a network card.
Segmentation of lecture videos based on text: a method combining multiple linguistic features

In multimedia-based e-learning systems, there are strong needs for segmenting lecture videos into topic units in order to organize the videos for browsing and to provide search capability. Automatic segmentation is highly desired because of the high cost of manual segmentation. While a lot of research has been conducted on topic segmentation of transcribed spoken text, most attempts rely on domain-specific cues and formal presentation format, and require extensive training; none of these features exist in lecture videos with unscripted and spontaneous speech. In addition, lecture videos usually have few scene changes, which imply that the visual information that most video segmentation methods rely on is not available. Furthermore, even when there are scene changes, they do not match with the topic transitions. In this paper, we make use of the transcribed speech text extracted from the audio track of video to segment lecture videos into topics. We review related research and propose a segmentation approach. Our approach utilizes features such as noun phrases and combines multiple content-based and discourse-based features. Our preliminary results show that the noun phrases are salient features and the combination of multiple features is promising to improve segmentation accuracy.
Transition Planning Processes for Young People Serving Custodial Sentences in New South Wales, Australia

The aim of the study was to identify transition planning processes as reported by participants for school-aged youth serving custodial sentences in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, and to establish the extent to which these reflect current evidence or research-based transition practices reported in the literature. The authors used inductive content analysis methodology to analyse interviews with 44 staff members from the education and juvenile justice systems in NSW. The findings of the study indicate that although a number of evidence/research-based practices are being used, there are some that still need to be implemented. Specifically, there is a need for more involvement of the families of incarcerated youth and support for the self-determination of the young people in custody.