Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two linear time algorithms for MST on minor closed graph classes

This article presents two simple deterministic algorithms for finding the Minimum Spanning Tree in O(|V |+ |E|) time for any non-trivial class of graphs closed on graph minors. This applies in particular to planar graphs and graphs of bounded genus. Both algorithms run on a pointer machine and they require no a priori knowledge of the structure of the class except for its density. Edge weights are only compared.
Winspect: a case study for wearable computing-supported inspection tasks

Introduces the Winspect project-an application of wearable computing in an industrial inspection process-with focus on its user interface. We present a case study to demonstrate the benefit of wearable input devices and the use of implicit interaction as a complementary technique. Two almost independent tasks from the application domain are addressed: the input of findings for inspected components in a harsh environment, and a technique to overcome the display resolution when browsing a hypertext-like documentation.
Transcriptional regulation of PNPLA3 and its impact on susceptibility to nonalcoholic fatty liver Disease (NAFLD) in humans

The increased expression of PNPLA3148M leads to hepatosteatosis in mice. This study aims to investigate the genetic control of hepatic PNPLA3 transcription and to explore its impact on NAFLD risk in humans. Through a locus-wide expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) mapping in two human liver sample sets, a PNPLA3 intronic SNP, rs139051 A>G was identified as a significant eQTL (p = 6.6×10−8) influencing PNPLA3 transcription, with the A allele significantly associated with increased PNPLA3 mRNA. An electrophoresis mobility shift assay further demonstrated that the A allele has enhanced affinity to nuclear proteins than the G allele. The impact of this eQTL on NAFLD risk was further tested in three independent populations. We found that rs139051 did not independently affect the NAFLD risk, whilst rs738409 did not significantly modulate PNPLA3 transcription but was associated with NAFLD risk. The A-G haplotype associated with higher transcription of the disease-risk rs738409 G allele conferred similar risk for NAFLD compared to the G-G haplotype that possesses a lower transcription level. Our study suggests that the pathogenic role of PNPLA3148M in NAFLD is independent of the gene transcription in humans, which may be attributed to the high endogenous transcription level of PNPLA3 gene in human livers.
The Asheville Project: participants' perceptions of factors contributing to the success of a patient self-management diabetes program.

OBJECTIVE To ascertain patients', providers', and managers' perceptions of the factors that contributed to the success of the Asheville Project. DESIGN One-time focus groups of patients and diabetes care providers and individual interviews with managers involved in the project. SETTING The City of Asheville and Mission-St. Joseph's Health System (MSJ), Asheville, N.C. PATIENTS AND OTHER PARTICIPANTS Twenty-one patients with diabetes who were employees of the two self-insured employers participating in the Asheville Project; four specially trained pharmacists who provided diabetes-related pharmaceutical care and one diabetes educator, all of whom received reimbursement for their services; six managers employed by the City of Asheville or MSJ who were involved in the project. INTERVENTION A trained facilitator conducted four focus groups and six manager interviews in September 2001. Each session lasted 60 to 90 minutes, and the facilitator used a standard list of open-ended questions. The focus group sessions were recorded for subsequent analysis. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Perceptions of focus group participants and managers of how the Asheville Project enabled patients with diabetes to become more responsible and successful in self-managing their condition. RESULTS Focus group participants and managers were enthusiastic about their experiences with the project. Patients valued the relationships they established with their pharmacist or diabetes educator; as a result of these providers' support, patients felt more in control of their lives and were healthier. The waived co-payments for diabetes medications and related supplies was the decisive incentive for getting many patients to enroll in the project. For the providers, the project was a source of professional growth and satisfaction. Managers felt the project helped them fulfill their health care responsibilities to their employees, reduced overall costs, enhanced their organizations' reputations in health care delivery, and resulted in less absenteeism. CONCLUSION Patients, providers, and managers in the Asheville Project believed that aligned incentives and community-based resources that provide health care services to patients with diabetes offer a practical, patient-empowering, and cost-effective solution to escalating health care costs.
Scaling of physiological processes in homeothermic animals.

b is the slope of a straight-line plot and a is the Y-intercept.1 From a century's worth of exponential growth of raw data that could give "a sense of being engulfed by a flood tide . confused by complexity" (120), allometric equations provide an orderly reduction to formal statements from which patterns and parallels emerge. Ultimately we seek to identify the physical constraints and causes that explain the empirical exponents.
Length of hospital stay after acute myocardial infarction.

A number of trials show that long stay in hospital after an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is not necessary for many patients and that stays of three-ten days may be adequate. All patients aged under 70 years with a diagnosis of AMI admitted to the seven public hospitals in the Lower Hunter Region of New South Wales are monitored as part of the WHO MONICA Study. Between August 1984 and December 1985 of 438 hospitalised patients with a 'definite' AMI according to MONICA criteria and a clinical discharge diagnosis of AMI, 386 (88%) patients were discharged alive from hospital. Four patients had lengths of stay between 46 and 77 days and have been omitted from further analysis. The mean length of hospital stay was 13.6 days (95% confidence intervals 12.9 to 14.3 days); 74% of all patients stayed in hospital for more than ten days. The mean length of stay in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) was 4.5 days (95% confidence intervals 4.2 to 4.8 days) with 60% staying longer than three days. Mean hospital stay varied from 10.5 to 17.4 days among the seven hospitals, although most of this variation was accounted for by three hospitals with few patients. Restricting analysis to the four hospitals with 90% of all the patients, multiple regression analysis showed that the CK enzyme levels, the evolution of Q waves on ECG, the presence of an anterior AMI and the use of nitrates and digoxin during hospitalisation were all associated with increased length of stay in hospital. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Photometric properties of Lyman-break galaxies at z = 3 in cosmological SPH simulations

We study the photometric properties of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) formed by redshift z = 3 in a set of large cosmological smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of the A cold dark matter (ACDM) model. Our numerical simulations include radiative cooling and heating with a uniform UV background, star formation, supernova feedback and a phenomenological model for galactic winds. Analysing a series of simulations of varying box size and particle number allows us to isolate the impact of numerical resolution on our results. We compute spectra of simulated galaxies using a population synthesis model, and derive colours and luminosity functions of galaxies at z = 3 after applying local dust extinction and absorption by the intergalactic medium (IGM). We find that the simulated galaxies have U n - G and G - R colours consistent with observations, provided that intervening absorption by the IGM is applied. The observed properties of LBGs, including their number density, colours and luminosity functions, can be explained if LBGs are identified with the most massive galaxies at z = 3, having typical stellar mass of M* ∼ 10 10 h -1 M ○. , a conclusion broadly consistent with earlier studies based on hydrodynamic simulations of the ACDM model. We also find that most simulated LBGs were continuously forming stars at a high rate for more than 1 Gyr up until z = 3, but with numerous starbursts lying on top of the continuous component. Interestingly, our simulations suggest that more than 50 per cent of the total stellar mass and star formation rate in the Universe are accounted for by galaxies that are not detected in the current generation of LBG surveys.
Handwritten Signature Verification using Neural Network

A number of biometric techniques have been proposed for personal identification in the past. Among the vision-based ones are face recognition, fingerprint recognition, iris scanning and retina scanning. Voice recognition or signature verification are the most widely known among the non-vision based ones. As signatures continue to play an important role in financial, commercial and legal transactions, truly secured authentication becomes more and more crucial. A signature by an authorized person is considered to be the “seal of approval” and remains the most preferred means of authentication. The method presented in this paper consists of image prepossessing, geometric feature extraction, neural network training with extracted features and verification. A verification stage includes applying the extracted features of test signature to a trained neural network which will classify it as a genuine or forged.
Nyström approximation of Wishart matrices

Spectral methods requiring the computation of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a positive definite matrix are an essential part of signal processing. However, for sufficiently high-dimensional data sets, the eigenvalue problem cannot be solved without approximate methods. We examine a technique for approximate spectral analysis and low-rank matrix reconstruction known as the Nyström method, which recasts the eigendecomposition of large matrices as a subset selection problem. In particular, we focus on the performance of the Nyström method when used to approximate random matrices from the Wishart ensemble. We provide statistical results for the approximation error, as well as an experimental analysis of various subset sampling techniques.
QLUT at SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity Based on Word Embeddings

This paper reports the details of our submissions in the task 1 of SemEval 2017. This task aims at assessing the semantic textual similarity of two sentences or texts. We submit three unsupervised systems based on word embeddings. The differences between these runs are the various preprocessing on evaluation data. The best performance of these systems on the evaluation of Pearson correlation is 0.6887. Unsurprisingly, results of our runs demonstrate that data preprocessing, such as tokenization, lemmatization, extraction of content words and removing stop words, is helpful and plays a significant role in improving the performance of models.
Assessment of MRI Contrast Agent Kinetics via Retro-Orbital Injection in Mice: Comparison with Tail Vein Injection

It is not known whether administration of contrast agent via retro-orbital injection or the tail vein route affects the efficiency of dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Therefore, we compared the effects of retro-orbital and tail vein injection on the kinetics of the contrast agent used for MRI in mice. The same group of nine healthy female mice received contrast agent via either route. An extracellular contrast agent was infused via the tail vein and retro-orbital vein, in random order. Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI was performed before and after administering the contrast agent. The contrast effects in the liver, kidney, lung, and myocardium were assessed. The average total times of venous puncture and mounting of the injection system were about 10 and 4 min for the tail vein and retro-orbital route, respectively. For all organs assessed, the maximum contrast ratio occurred 30 s after administration and the time course of the contrast ratio was similar with either routes. For each organ, the contrast ratios correlated strongly; the contrast ratios were similar. The retro-orbital and tail vein routes afforded similar results in terms of the kinetics of the contrast agent. The retro-orbital route can be used as a simple efficient alternative to tail vein injection for dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI of mice.
Genetic Vaccines and Therapy

Background: Electroporation is an established technique for enhancing plasmid delivery to many tissues in vivo, including the skin. We have previously demonstrated efficient delivery of plasmid DNA to the skin utilizing a custom-built four-plate electrode. The experiments described here further evaluate cutaneous plasmid delivery using in vivo electroporation. Plasmid expression levels are compared to those after liposome mediated delivery. Methods: Enhanced electrically-mediated delivery, and less extensively, liposome complexed delivery, of a plasmid encoding the reporter luciferase was tested in rodent skin. Expression kinetics and tissue damage were explored as well as testing in a second rodent model. Results: Experiments confirm that electroporation alone is more effective in enhancing reporter gene expression than plasmid injection alone, plasmid conjugation with liposomes followed by injection, or than the combination of liposomes and electroporation. However, with two time courses of multiple electrically-mediated plasmid deliveries, neither the levels nor duration of transgene expression are significantly increased. Tissue damage may increase following a second treatment, no further damage is observed after a third treatment. When electroporation conditions utilized in a mouse model are tested in thicker rat skin, only higher field strengths or longer pulses were as effective in plasmid delivery. Conclusion: Electroporation enhances reporter plasmid delivery to the skin to a greater extent than the liposome conjugation method tested. Multiple deliveries do not necessarily result in higher or longer term expression. In addition, some impact on tissue integrity with respect to surface damage is observed. Pulsing conditions should be optimized for the model and for the expression profile desired. Published: 4 December 2008 Genetic Vaccines and Therapy 2008, 6:16 doi:10.1186/1479-0556-6-16 Received: 14 July 2008 Accepted: 4 December 2008 This article is available from: http://www.gvt-journal.com/content/6/1/16 © 2008 Heller 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.
Mutagenicity of ZnO nanoparticles in mammalian cells: Role of physicochemical transformations under the aging process

Abstract Zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) potentially undergo physicochemical transformation in the environment, which may lead to unexpected environmental and health risks. The “aging” process is essential for better understanding the toxicity and fate of NPs in the environment. However, the mutagenic effects of aged ZnO NPs are still unexplored. The present study focused on investigating the physicochemical transformation during aging process and clarifying the mutagenicity of naturally aged ZnO NPs in human–hamster hybrid (AL) cells. It was found that ZnO NPs underwent sophisticated physicochemical transformations with aging regardless of original morphology or size, such as the microstructural changes, the formation of hydrozincite (Zn5(CO3)2(OH)6) and the release of free zinc ions. Interestingly, the aged ZnO NPs were investigated to be able to result in much lower cytotoxicity while relatively high degree mutation than fresh ZnO NPs. With characterization of the soluble and insoluble fractions of aged ZnO NPs suspension, together with the control measurements using metal chelator (TPEN) and endocytosis inhibitor (Nystatin), it was revealed that the release of zinc ions and nanoparticle uptake made significantly different contributions to the mutagenicity of fresh and aged ZnO NPs. This study clearly demonstrated that the physicochemical transformation of ZnO NPs with aging plays important and comprehensive roles in the ZnO NPs-induced mutagenicity in mammalian cells.
Mindfulness and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors : Recognizing When to Help Others in the Workplace

Until recently the construct of mindfulness has been studied primarily within religious and philosophical disciplines. Little attention has been given to mindfulness as it relates to organizational settings and work related outcomes. Filling this gap within the literature the present study provides the theoretical rationale and method for testing the relationship between mindfulness and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) as moderated by empathy. Using self-regulation theory and social exchange theory the study makes a case for why mindfulness should be considered an antecedent of OCBs. The results of the study showed that mindfulness is positively correlated with both empathy and OCBs and that empathy is positively correlated with OCBs. The findings did not support empathy as a moderating variable in the mindfulness-OCB relationship. Suggestions for future research and limitations are addressed.
Second Language Motivation: Its Relationship to Noticing, Affect, and Production in Task-Based Interaction

Second language (L2) motivation has been characterized as a complex construct comprised of cognitive, affective, and behavioral components (Gardner, 1985, 2001, 2006). This research explored whether components of L2 motivation significantly related to cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of task-based interaction – specifically, the cognitive dimension of noticing of recasts; the affective dimensions of task satisfaction, task relevance, and task difficulty; and the behavioral dimensions of accuracy, complexity, and fluency of L2 production. Second language motivation was operationalized in accordance with measures adapted from three qualitatively distinct theoretical conceptualizations: the traditionally investigated socio-educational model of second language acquisition (Gardner, 1985, 2001, 2006), the situated perspective of state motivation (Gardner & Tremblay, 1998; Julkunen, 1989, 2001; Tennant & Gardner, 2004; Tremblay, Goldberg, & Gardner, 1995), and the more recently proposed L2 motivational self-system (Dörnyei, 2005, 2009a). Forty-four intermediate learners of Arabic completed a motivation questionnaire, took part in a video-taped task-based interaction with a native speaker interlocutor, and then returned one day later for a stimulated-recall session addressing clipped episodes from their task-based interaction. Ratings of task satisfaction, task relevance, and task difficulty were obtained from participants after each of the six tasks used during interaction. Results indicated that attitudes towards the L2 community, a component of integrativeness in the socio-educational model, significantly predicted reported noticing of recasts. Also, state motivation significantly correlated with task satisfaction and task relevance. As for L2 production, the aggregate construct of motivation, as defined by the socio-educational model, significantly predicted accuracy, complexity, and fluency in four participants, the two most-motivated and the two least-
Envy in Othello. Can effort explain such a tragic issue

We aim at disentangling the impact of effort on social emotions and more particularly on envy. Thus we observe the impact of effort on individual well-being and behaviour. In our experiment subjects are paired and receive endowments whether according to their performance in a real-effort task or randomly. We focus on subjects placed in situations of inferiority and ask them to report their satisfaction level before and after being exposed to unflattering social comparison. Finally, subjects can choose to reduce their opponent’s endowment by incurring a personal cost. We convey that the introduction of effort does not affect individual well-being and partially subjects’ decisions to reduce others’ income. Subjects do not reduce more often their opponent’s endowment but they cut a greater portion of their opponent’s endowment when endowments are attributed according to individual performance. Besides we observe that poor performing subjects are more prone to reduce others’ income than high performing ones. We also find evidences suggesting that envy is ought to explain reduction decisions engaged by high performing subjects and disappointment explicates reduction decisions engaged by low performing ones.
Pathway Enrichment Analysis with Networks

Detecting associations between an input gene set and annotated gene sets (e.g., pathways) is an important problem in modern molecular biology. In this paper, we propose two algorithms, termed NetPEA and NetPEA’, for conducting network-based pathway enrichment analysis. Our algorithms consider not only shared genes but also gene–gene interactions. Both algorithms utilize a protein–protein interaction network and a random walk with a restart procedure to identify hidden relationships between an input gene set and pathways, but both use different randomization strategies to evaluate statistical significance and as a result emphasize different pathway properties. Compared to an over representation-based method, our algorithms can identify more statistically significant pathways. Compared to an existing network-based algorithm, EnrichNet, our algorithms have a higher sensitivity in revealing the true causal pathways while at the same time achieving a higher specificity. A literature review of selected results indicates that some of the novel pathways reported by our algorithms are biologically relevant and important. While the evaluations are performed only with KEGG pathways, we believe the algorithms can be valuable for general functional discovery from high-throughput experiments.
Action-Dependent Adaptive Critic Design Based Neurocontroller for Cement Precalciner Kiln

There are many factors that can affect the calciner process of cement production, such as highly nonlinearity and time-lag, making it very difficult to establish an accurate model of the cement precalciner kiln (PCK) system. In order to reduce transport energy consumption and to ensure the quality of cement clinker burning, one needs to explore different control methods from the traditional way. Adaptive Critic Design (ACD) integrated neural network, reinforcement learning and dynamic programming techniques, is a new optimal method. As the PCK system parameters change frequently with high real-time property, ADACD (Action-Dependant ACD) algorithm is used in PCK system to control the temperature of furnace export and oxygen content of exhaust. ADACD does not depend on the system model, it may use historical data to train a controller offline, and then adapt online. Also the BP network of artificial neural network is used to accomplish the network modeling, and action and critic modules of the algorithm. The results of simulation show that, after the fluctuations in the early control period, the controlled parameters tend to be stabilized guaranteeing the quality of cement clinker calcining.