Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Expediting precomputation for reduced deformable simulation

Model reduction has popularized itself for simulating elastic deformation for graphics applications. While these techniques enjoy orders-of-magnitude speedups at runtime simulation, the efficiency of precomputing reduced subspaces remains largely over-looked. We present a complete system of precomputation pipeline as a faster alternative to the classic linear and nonlinear modal analysis. We identify three bottlenecks in the traditional model reduction precomputation, namely modal matrix construction, cubature training, and training dataset generation, and accelerate each of them. Even with complex deformable models, our method has achieved orders-of-magnitude speedups over the traditional precomputation steps, while retaining comparable runtime simulation quality.
Internet Based Obesity Prevention Program for Thai School Children- A Randomized Control Trial.

INTRODUCTION Internet based obesity prevention program is one approach in learning strategies to improve healthy behaviour. It has been advocated as one strategy to address the rising prevalence of childhood obesity; however, their efficacy is not seen consistently. AIM The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of internet based obesity prevention program in Thai school children. MATERIALS AND METHODS Healthy children studying in public schools in one township of central Thailand were randomly assigned to either the intervention (internet based) program or the control group. Anthropometric characteristics were recorded at baseline and for the next four following months at monthly intervals. Changes in the percentage of overweight/obese children and changes in BMI at the end of study were considered as the primary and secondary outcome, respectively. RESULTS A total of 217 children, mean age of 10.7 years, were included into the final analysis. Baseline anthropometric parameters and percentages of overweight/obesity were not significantly different between groups. At the end of the study, the control group had a higher percentage of overweight/obesity than the intervention group (56.6% vs. 39.6%, respectively; p-value=0.009). Children in the control group had a significantly higher increase in net BMI gains than those in the intervention group (1.24kg/m2 vs. 0.40kg/m2, p-value=0.027). The intervention group had no changes in BMI z-score (-0.001, 95%CI -0.19 to 0.18, p-value=0.988), contrary to those in the control group, which had significant gain of BMI z-score at the end of study (0.45, 95%CI 0.27 to 0.63, p-value<0.001). CONCLUSION Internet the based obesity prevention program was effective in modifying anthropometric outcome and helped to address the rising prevalence of overweight and obese status in Thai children.
Sepsis in Patients With Cirrhosis

ABSTRACT Patients with cirrhosis are at high risk for sepsis and sepsis‐related mortality. Aggressive treatment aimed at avoidance of hypoperfusion and prompt identification and treatment of the causative organism can improve patients' survival. Fluid administration is the first‐line treatment to improve perfusion to vital organs; however, care should be taken to assess true intravascular volume status. In patients with adequate intravascular volume, vasopressors are then added to support blood pressure. Complications of cirrhosis often worsen in the setting of sepsis. Portosystemic encephalopathy, pulmonary complications, renal complications, adrenal insufficiency, malnutrition, and insufficient glucose control all must be considered and treated to support a patient with cirrhosis through sepsis. The quality of care that these patients receive ultimately influences their survival.
Beyond method : philosophical conversations in healthcare research and scholarship

Beyond Method provides a forum for scholars across health and human sciences disciplines to explore issues surrounding philosophy, methodology, and epistemology in the context of interpretive scholarship. The essays comprising this volume move beyond the practical descriptions or the "how to" of interpretive methods commonly found in textbooks to explore the contributions, underlying assumptions, limitations, and possibilities embedded within and across particular philosophical, methodological, and epistemological perspectives. They reveal the richness of understanding that emerges when philosophical issues are explicated within contemporary contexts, illuminating new possibilities for healthcare and human science scholarship.
Neutrophil elastase and cathepsin G protein and messenger RNA expression in bone marrow from a patient with Chediak-Higashi syndrome

Aims—To determine whether neutrophil elastase and cathepsin G are expressed, at transcriptional or translational levels, in the bone marrow from a patient with Chediak-Higashi syndrome. Methods—Blood neutrophils were isolated from three patients with Chediak-Higashi disease and bone marrow was collected from one. Cell lysates were analysed for neutrophil elastase and cathepsin G activity by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay and western immunoblotting. Northern blotting was used to detect messenger RNA (mRNA) for cathepsin G, elastase and β-actin in bone marrow extracts, and immunohistochemistry was used to localise the enzymes in marrow myeloid cells. Results—Elastase and cathepsin G were not detected in blood neutrophils from the patients with Chediak-Higashi disease, but were present in bone marrow cells, although immunohistochemistry showed they were not within cytoplasmic granules. The concentrations of elastase and cathepsin G in Chediak-Higashi bone marrow were about 25 and 15%, respectively, of those in normal marrow. Quantitative scanning of northern blots showed that elastase and cathepsin G mRNA, corrected for β-actin mRNA, were expressed equally in normal marrow. Conclusions—Transcription of elastase and cathepsin G mRNA in promyelocytes of patients with Chediak-Higashi disease is normal, but the protein products are deficient in these cells and absent in mature neutrophils. This suggests that the translated proteins are not packaged into azurophil granules but are degaded or secreted from the cells.
Vitamin D Receptor Alleles, Bone Mineral Density and Turnover in Postmenopausal Osteoporotic and Healthy Women

Objective: Vitamin D receptor (VDR) gene polymorphisms and bone metabolic markers were investigated as potential genetic markers for osteoporosis in postmenopausal Turkish women. The relationship between their VDR gene polymorphisms and bone states was determined. Materials and Methods: Restriction fragment length polymorphisms at the VDR gene locus (i.e., for BsmI, ApaI, and TaqI) was investigated in 75 postmenopausal osteoporotic (53.16 ± 1.31 years) and 66 healthy (52.62 ± 1.69 years) Turkish women and the genotypes were related to bone mineral density (BMD) at femoral neck (FN), lumbar spine (L1–4), trochanter, Ward’s triangle (Ward’s) and metabolic parameters of bone turnover. Results: In osteoporotic women, TaqI genotype-related differences of the VDR gene were found to be significant at all BMD sites; TT genotype had higher L1–4 BMD values than Tt and tt (p < 0.05); tt genotype had significantly lower BMD at FN (p < 0.05), trochanter (p < 0.01), and Ward’s (p < 0.05) compared to TT genotype. The tt genotype was found to be associated with higher (p < 0.05) serum osteocalcin levels compared to Tt and TT genotypes in the osteoporotic women, whereas no such association was found for the healthy women. Conclusion: Our data showed an association between VDR TaqI genotype and BMD at the FN, L1–4, trochanter and Ward’s triangle in nonobese postmenopausal osteoporotic women. Thus the VDR gene Taql polymorphism modulates differences in BMD in the postmenopausal osteoporotic women.
Look Who's Talking: Discovering Dependencies between Virtual Machines Using CPU Utilization

A common problem experienced in datacenters and utility clouds is the lack of knowledge about the mappings of the services being offered to or run by external users to the sets of virtual machines (VMs) realizing them. This makes it difficult to manage VM ensembles to attain provider goals like minimizing the resources consumed by certain services or reducing the power drawn by datacenter machines. This paper presents the 'Look Who's Talking' (LWT) set of methods and framework for identifying inter-VM dependencies. LWT does not require services to be modified, or middleware or operating systems to be instrumented, but instead, operates in management VMs with privileged access to hypervisor-level information about current machine use. The current implementation of LWT has been integrated into the Xen hypervisor running across a small-scale prototype datacenter, for which experimental measurements show that it can effectively identify dependencies between VMs with an average of 97.15% overall accuracy rate, with zero knowledge of or modifications to applications or workloads and with minimal effect on system performance.
Linear bandits in high dimension and recommendation systems

A large number of online services provide automated recommendations to help users to navigate through a large collection of items. New items (products, videos, songs, advertisements) are suggested on the basis of the user's past history and - when available - her demographic profile. Recommendations have to satisfy the dual goal of helping the user to explore the space of available items, while allowing the system to probe the user's preferences. We model this trade-off using linearly parametrized multi-armed bandits and prove upper and lower bounds that coincide up to constants in the data poor (high-dimensional) regime. We test (a variation of) the scheme used for estabilishing achievability on the Netflix dataset, and obtain results in agreement with the theory.
Single Administration of Thrombopoietin Prevents Progression of Liver Fibrosis and Promotes Liver Regeneration After Partial Hepatectomy in Cirrhotic Rats

Objective:To evaluate the effect of thrombopoietin on liver regeneration after hepatectomy and antifibrosis under conditions of liver cirrhosis in rats. Summary Background Data:We revealed that platelets induced by thrombopoietin administration promote liver regeneration after hepatectomy in the normal liver. Methods:Seventy percent hepatectomy was carried out in rats, which were subsequently divided into 4 groups: (1) normal group without any treatment, (2) liver cirrhosis (LC) group, (3) combined thrombopoietin and liver cirrhosis (LC+TPO) group, and (4) combined thrombopoietin, antiplatelet serum and liver cirrhosis (LC+TPO+APS) group. Growth kinetics in the liver regeneration and growth factors were analyzed. Liver fibrotic area and activation of hepatic stellate cells were also investigated. Results:In LC group, liver regeneration was significantly delayed compared with normal group 24 hours after hepatectomy. On the other hand, liver regeneration of LC+TPO group increased significantly compared with LC group, to a level that was the same as that recorded in normal group. In LC group, liver fibrotic area before hepatectomy was significantly higher compared with the normal group. Liver fibrosis of LC+TPO group was significantly reduced compared with LC group. The antifibrotic and liver regeneration promoting effects of LC+TPO group were inhibited by antiplatelet serum in LC+TPO+APS group. Conclusion:The administration of thrombopoietin reduces liver fibrosis and stimulates regeneration after hepatectomy through increment and accumulation of platelets in the cirrhotic liver. This could be a potentially useful treatment for liver cirrhosis.
Application of Statistical Relational Learning to Hybrid Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems usually involve exploiting the relations among known features and content that describe items (content-based filtering) or the overlap of similar users who interacted with or rated the target item (collaborative filtering). To combine these two filtering approaches, current model-based hybrid recommendation systems typically require extensive feature engineering to construct a user profile. Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) provides a straightforward way to combine the two approaches. However, due to the large scale of the data used in real world recommendation systems, little research exists on applying SRL models to hybrid recommendation systems, and essentially none of that research has been applied on real big-data-scale systems. In this paper, we proposed a way to adapt the state-of-the-art in SRL learning approaches to construct a real hybrid recommendation system. Furthermore, in order to satisfy a common requirement in recommendation systems (i.e. that false positives are more undesirable and therefore penalized more harshly than false negatives), our approach can also allow tuning the trade-off between the precision and recall of the system in a principled way. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed approach as well as its improved performance on recommendation precision.
Analytical Intrachannel Nonlinear Models to Predict the Nonlinear Noise Waveform

Intrachannel nonlinearity is considered as a major distortion in high capacity transmission systems. To better understand the nonlinear distortion, the nonlinearity modeling is an essential technology. Most of current nonlinear models focus on the statistical characteristics of nonlinear noise. In this paper, we investigate the analytical models that predict the time-varying nonlinear noise waveform. For the return-to-zero (RZ) pulse-shaped system, the “power weighted, additive-multiplicative model” is investigated under various system conditions for quadrature phase shift keying and 16 quadrature amplitude modulation formats, with dispersion managed and unmanaged link composed of standard single mode fiber or nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber. For the non-RZ and Nyquist pulses, the Nyquist nonlinear model is investigated. Both two models achieved 95% accuracy which is defined as the absolute value of the cross correlation between the noise waveform obtained by split step Fourier simulation and the waveform calculated by the model. Simulation also shows that the model functions well for the most optical power range of commercial communication systems.
Blind Enhancement of the Rhythmic and Harmonic Sections by NMF: Does it help?

Non-Negative Matrix Factorization is well known to lead to considerable successes in the blind separation of drums and melodic parts of music recordings. Such splitting may well serve as enhancement when it comes to typical Music Information Retrieval tasks as automatic key labelling or tempo detection. In this respect we introduce the combination of an NMF based blind music separation into several isolated audio tracks in combination with Support Vector classification to assign each obtained track to be either rhythmic or melodic. Thereby optimal parametrization and performances are discussed. Next, stereophonic information is further used to eliminate the key melody and bass usually panned in the centre for tempo detection or e. g. for chord labelling. We then analyse the potential for the named tasks by a number of experiments carried out on the MTV Europe Most Wanted of the 1980 ies and 90 ies in MP3 format.
Selective attention affects conceptual object priming and recognition: a study with young and older adults

In the present study, we investigated the effects of selective attention at encoding on conceptual object priming (Experiment 1) and old–new recognition memory (Experiment 2) tasks in young and older adults. The procedures of both experiments included encoding and memory test phases separated by a short delay. At encoding, the picture outlines of two familiar objects, one in blue and the other in green, were presented to the left and to the right of fixation. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to attend to the picture outline of a certain color and to classify the object as natural or artificial. After a short delay, participants performed a natural/artificial speeded conceptual classification task with repeated attended, repeated unattended, and new pictures. In Experiment 2, participants at encoding memorized the attended pictures and classify them as natural or artificial. After the encoding phase, they performed an old–new recognition memory task. Consistent with previous findings with perceptual priming tasks, we found that conceptual object priming, like explicit memory, required attention at encoding. Significant priming was obtained in both age groups, but only for those pictures that were attended at encoding. Although older adults were slower than young adults, both groups showed facilitation for attended pictures. In line with previous studies, young adults had better recognition memory than older adults.
Unexpected DNA Loss Mediated by the DNA Binding Activity of Ribonuclease A

Ribonuclease A (RNase A) is widely used in molecular biology research both for analytical assays and for nucleic acid preparation. The catalytic mechanism of RNase A is well understood and absolutely precludes activity on DNA; however anecdotal reports of DNA degradation by RNase A are not uncommon. Here we describe a mechanism by which RNase A treatment can lead to apparent DNA degradation. This results from the surprising finding that RNase A remains functional in a phenol:chloroform mixture, to our knowledge the only enzyme that survives this highly denaturing solvent environment. Although RNase A does not cleave the DNA backbone it is capable of binding to DNA, forming stable RNase A-DNA complexes that partition to the interphase or organic phase during phenol:chloroform purification. The unexpected survival of the RNase A DNA-binding activity in phenol means that these complexes are not dissolved and a substantial amount of RNase A-bound DNA is permanently removed from the aqueous phase and lost on phase separation. This effect will impact DNA recovery from multiple procedures and is likely to represent a source of sequence bias in genome-wide studies. Our results also indicate that the results of analytical studies performed using RNase A must be considered with care.
A review of metal mesh filters

The Astronomical Instrumentation Group at Cardiff University has been developing metal mesh optical filters for more than 30 years, which are currently in use in many ground-, balloon- and space-based instruments. Here we review the current state of the art with respect to these quasi-optical components (low-pass, high-pass and band-pass filters, dichroics and beam-dividers) as developed for the FIR and sub-millimetre wavelength region. We compare performance data with various modelling tools (HFSS, transmission line theory or Floquet mode analysis). These models assist with our understanding of the behaviour of these filters when used at non-normal incidence or in the diffraction region of the grid structures. Interesting artefacts, such as the Wood anomalies and behaviour with S and P polarisations, which dictate the usage of these components in polarisation sensitive instruments, will be discussed.
Therapy With Mud Compresses for Knee Osteoarthritis: Comparison of Natural Mud Preparations With Mineral-Depleted Mud

Mud pack therapy is an alternative mode of treatment for rheumatic diseases. It is based on the application of heated mud packs to the entire body or to specific areas, such as over joints. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the efficacy of treatment with mud compresses at patients’ homes for osteoarthritis of the knee.Fifty-eight patients with osteoarthritis of the knee were enrolled in a prospective, double-blinded, controlled study. Forty patients were treated with natural mineral-rich mud compresses and 18 patients were treated with mineral-depleted mud compresses. Mud compresses were applied 5 times each week during 3 weeks for a total of 15 treatments. Patients were assessed at baseline, at completion of the 3-week treatment period, and twice after the conclusion of the treatment period—after 1 month and after 3 months.The main outcome measures were the Lequesne Index of severity of knee osteoarthritis, patient self-assessment of pain, and severity of knee pain on a visual analog scale. A reduction of 20% or more in the pain scores was considered clinically significant.In the group treated with natural mud compresses, a significant reduction in knee pain was observed at all assessments. Similarly, improvement in the Lequesne Index was seen at the end of therapy and a month after treatment. In the control group, given mineral-depleted mud compresses, no significant change in knee pain was seen at any assessment. Improvement in the Lequesne Index was seen 1 and 3 months after completion of the therapy, but not at the end of therapy. Seventy-two percent of the patients in the treatment group had an improvement of >20% in self-assessment of knee pain, compared with 33% in the control group (p = 0.005). The data suggest that treatment with mud compresses, but only in their natural form, temporarily relieves pain in patients with osteoarthritis of the knees. We believe that treatment with mud compresses might augment conventional medical therapy in these patients.
Toxicity of cadmium and zinc mixtures to the decaudized cercarial life span of Diplostomum spathaceum

Abstract The effects of cadmium and zinc mixtures at concentrations ranging from 0.1 to 10,000 μg l−1 on the life-span of decaudized cercarial bodies (cercariae that have shed their tails) of Diplostomum spathaceum (Trematoda: Diplostomatidae) was investigated. Cercariae were exposed to metal mixtures of equal and unequal concentrations, and a low-dose pre-treatment followed by a high-dose exposure mixtures. Metal mixtures demonstrated variable effects on decaudized cercariae either by increasing or reducing their life-span compared to single metal exposures dependent on concentration and the type of mixed metal treatment. Prolonged exposure to equal metal mixtures at low concentrations (0.1–100 μg l−1) resulted in a reduction in the life-span of decaudized cercariae at 0.1 and 100 μg l−1 in those individuals decaudized during the initial 24 h exposure period compared with those decaudized during the final 24 h period of cercarial survival, whilst in controls there was no significant life-span change between the two time periods. Decaudized cercariae which were exposed to low concentrations (0.1–100 μg l−1) of equal metal mixtures were also evaluated for their role as an indicator of larval ‘fitness’ for migrating through the tissues of their target fish host for those individuals decaudized during the initial 24 h exposure period, and demonstrated only a limited change in their life-span compared to control and single metal exposures. The importance of metal mixtures in parasite establishment in the fish host is discussed.