Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simulation of Structural Features of Atmospheric Boundary Layer of Chengdu Urban Agglomeration

In the present paper, features of the atmospheric boundary layer of Chengdu urban agglomeration were identified and transfer, diffusion and conversion rules of atmospheric pollutants in the boundary layer were analyzed by using the mesoscale meteorological model, WRF(Weather Research & Forecasting)to simulate the temporal and spatial distribution and features of the flow field, temperature field, humidity field, and atmospheric mixed layer height of Chengdu urban agglomeration. As a result, basic data were provided for developing the plan for the coordinated development of the urban agglomeration economy and environment. The simulation show that, in Sichuan Basin, south wind and east wind prevail on the near-ground surface and 850 hPa isobaric surface while west wind and southwest wind prevail on the 700 hPa isobaric surface. Under the influence of the mountains around the basin, the flow field on the near-ground surface forms circulation in the south of the basin. The atmosphere strongly exchanges in the vertical direction below 1500 m and the exchange becomes weaker upwards. The ground temperature field distribution is low in northwest and high in southeast. The urban heat island effect is obvious, and especially the “big heat island” occurs in the urban agglomeration. In winter, temperature inversion frequently happens. In terms of ground humidity field, in winter and spring, it is low in northwest and high in southeast, which is opposite in summer; in autumn, humidity is low in west and high in east. Regarding the mixed layer height of the study area, it reaches the minimum value in winter and the maximum value in summer; the daily mixed layer height reaches the maximum value between 14:00 and 15:00 and reaches the minimum value in the small hours.
Performance Issues in Non-Gaussian Filtering Problems

Performance for filtering problems is usually measured using the second-order moment. For non-Gaussian applications, this measure is not always sufficient. In this paper, the Kull-back divergence is extensively used to compare estimated distributions. Several estimation techniques are compared, and methods with ability to express non-Gaussian posterior distributions are shown to give superior performance over classical second-order moment based estimators.
Resistance to Fluid Shear Stress Is a Conserved Biophysical Property of Malignant Cells

During metastasis, cancer cells enter the circulation in order to gain access to distant tissues, but how this fluid microenvironment influences cancer cell biology is poorly understood. A longstanding view is that circulating cancer cells derived from solid tissues may be susceptible to damage from hemodynamic shear forces, contributing to metastatic inefficiency. Here we report that compared to non-transformed epithelial cells, transformed cells are remarkably resistant to fluid shear stress (FSS) in a microfluidic protocol, exhibiting a biphasic decrease in viability when subjected to a series of millisecond pulses of high FSS. We show that magnitude of FSS resistance is influenced by several oncogenes, is an adaptive and transient response triggered by plasma membrane damage and requires extracellular calcium and actin cytoskeletal dynamics. This novel property of malignant cancer cells may facilitate hematogenous metastasis and indicates, contrary to expectations, that cancer cells are quite resistant to destruction by hemodynamic shear forces.
Regression of Moral Reasoning during Medical Education: Combined Design Study to Evaluate the Effect of Clinical Study Years

Background Moral reasoning is important for developing medical professionalism but current evidence for the relationship between education and moral reasoning does not clearly apply to medical students. We used a combined study design to test the effect of clinical teaching on moral reasoning. Methods We used the Defining Issues Test-2 as a measure of moral judgment, with 3 general moral schemas: Personal Interest, Maintaining Norms, and Postconventional Schema. The test was applied to 3 consecutive cohorts of second year students in 2002 (n = 207), 2003 (n = 192), and 2004 (n = 139), and to 707 students of all 6 study years in 2004 cross-sectional study. We also tested 298 age-matched controls without university education. Results In the cross-sectional study, there was significant main effect of the study year for Postconventional (F(5,679) = 3.67, P = 0.003) and Personal Interest scores (F(5,679) = 3.38, P = 0.005). There was no effect of the study year for Maintaining Norms scores. 3rd year medical students scored higher on Postconventional schema score than all other study years (p<0.001). There were no statistically significant differences among 3 cohorts of 2nd year medical students, demonstrating the absence of cohort or point-of-measurement effects. Longitudinal study of 3 cohorts demonstrated that students regressed from Postconventional to Maintaining Norms schema-based reasoning after entering the clinical part of the curriculum. Interpretation Our study demonstrated direct causative relationship between the regression in moral reasoning development and clinical teaching during medical curriculum. The reasons may include hierarchical organization of clinical practice, specific nature of moral dilemmas faced by medical students, and hidden medical curriculum.
A gene ontology-based microarray gene expression data analysis for diagnosing pseudomyxoma peritonei

This research presents a gene ontology (GO)-based microarray gene expression data analysis method for diagnosing pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP). The proposed method extracts a set of probes that are good candidates for tumor markers of PMP. It is shown that bidirectional hierarchical cluster analysis using the extracted probes is helpful for identifying the primary site of PMP. Some tumor markers for PMP are found through the proposed method.
Experimental Investigation on Deformation and Failure of Rock under Cyclic Indentation

Indentation induced cracking may have widely encountered in rock engineering, such as drilling and cutting process. It is significant to investigate the deformation and failure process for further understanding the failure mechanism of rock under cyclic indentation. In the present work, we have experimentally investigated the deformation fields on the sample surface via digital image correlation (DIC) technique. It has been found that the force-indentation displacement exhibits hysteresis during the loading-unloading cycles. The energy dissipation and the displacement field in the samples during the process has been analyzed. Furthermore, a median crack has been observed to nucleate running almost parallel to the loading axis when indentation force amounts to a critical value. Experimental analysis reveals that local tensile strain dominates the crack nucleation of rock and the shear strain has an effective influence on crack propagation. In unload-reloading process, crack behavior closure and re-opening is clearly observed by DIC technique. By the displacement distribution along the crack surface, crack opening displacement (COD) and stress intensity factor can be calculated for further fracture analysis.
Semisupervised Generalized Discriminant Analysis

Generalized discriminant analysis (GDA) is a commonly used method for dimensionality reduction. In its general form, it seeks a nonlinear projection that simultaneously maximizes the between-class dissimilarity and minimizes the within-class dissimilarity to increase class separability. In real-world applications where labeled data are scarce, GDA may not work very well. However, unlabeled data are often available in large quantities at very low cost. In this paper, we propose a novel GDA algorithm which is abbreviated as semisupervised generalized discriminant analysis (SSGDA). We utilize unlabeled data to maximize an optimality criterion of GDA and formulate the problem as an optimization problem that is solved using the constrained concave-convex procedure. The optimization procedure leads to estimation of the class labels for the unlabeled data. We propose a novel confidence measure and a method for selecting those unlabeled data points whose labels are estimated with high confidence. The selected unlabeled data can then be used to augment the original labeled dataset for performing GDA. We also propose a variant of SSGDA, called M-SSGDA, which adopts the manifold assumption to utilize the unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on many benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
2 User Profiles for Personalized Information Access

The amount of information available online is increasing exponentially. While this information is a valuable resource, its sheer volume limits its value. Many research projects and companies are exploring the use of personalized applications that manage this deluge by tailoring the information presented to individual users. These applications all need to gather, and exploit, some information about individuals in order to be effective. This area is broadly called user profiling. This chapter surveys some of the most popular techniques for collecting information about users, representing, and building user profiles. In particular, explicit information techniques are contrasted with implicitly collected user information using browser caches, proxy servers, browser agents, desktop agents, and search logs. We discuss in detail user profiles represented as weighted keywords, semantic networks, and weighted concepts. We review how each of these profiles is constructed and give examples of projects that employ each of these techniques. Finally, a brief discussion of the importance of privacy protection in profiling is presented.
Towards Automated Checking of Component-Oriented Enterprise Applications

Building enterprise applications using component-based frameworks has been suggested as a way to help companies manage their software assets. We propose tool support for managing these high-level data-centric applications with formal methods. Our method is based on extracting a system model from the models of components and from the application code which glues the components together. This model is used for generating state spaces that can be checked for desired or undesired properties. In order to manage the state space explosion problem we propose that the application developer controls some parameters of the model. Even though the insight of the application developer is still needed, we believe that creating tool support for the proposed method could contribute to the success of the component-based approach.
Differentiation of Human Adipose-Derived Stem Cells into “Brite” (Brown-in-White) Adipocytes

It is well established now that adult humans possess active brown adipose tissue (BAT) which represents a potential pharmacological target to combat obesity and associated diseases. Moreover thermogenic brown-like adipocytes (“brite adipocytes”) appear also in mouse white adipose tissue (WAT) upon β3-adrenergic stimulation. We had previously shown that human multipotent adipose-derived stem cells (hMADS) are able to differentiate into cells which exhibit the key properties of human white adipocytes, and then to convert into functional brown adipocytes upon PPARγ activation. In light of a wealth of data indicating that thermogenic adipocytes from BAT and WAT have a distinct cellular origin, we have characterized at the molecular level UCP1 positive hMADS adipocytes from both sexes as brite adipocytes. Conversion of white to brown hMADS adipocytes is dependent on PPARγ activation with rosiglitazone as the most potent agonist and is inhibited by a PPARγ antagonist. In contrast to mouse cellular models, hMADS cells conversion into brown adipocytes is weakly induced by BMP7 treatment and not modulated by activation of the Hedgehog pathway. So far no primary or clonal precursor cells of human brown adipocytes have been obtained that can be used as a tool to develop therapeutic drugs and to gain further insights into the molecular mechanisms of brown adipogenesis in humans. Thus hMADS cells represent a suitable human cell model to delineate the formation and/or the uncoupling capacity of brown/brite adipocytes that could help to dissipate caloric excess intake among individuals.
Edge-Aware Filtering with Local Polynomial Approximation and Rectangle-Based Weighting

This paper presents a novel method for performing guided image filtering using local polynomial approximation (LPA) with range guidance. In our method, the LPA is introduced into a multipoint framework for reliable model regression and better preservation on image spatial variation which usually contains the essential information in the input image. In addition, we develop a weighting scheme which has the spatial flexibility during the filtering process. All components in our method are efficiently implemented and a constant computation complexity is achieved. Compared with conventional filtering methods, our method provides clearer boundaries and performs especially better in recovering spatial variation from noisy images. We conduct a number of experiments for different applications: depth image upsampling, joint image denoising, details enhancement, and image abstraction. Both quantitative and qualitative comparisons demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Simultaneous shield insertion and net ordering under explicit RLC noise constraint

For multiple coupled RLC nets, we formulate the min-area simultaneous shield insertion and net ordering (SINO/NB-v) problem to satisfy the given noise bound. We develop an efficient and conservative model to compute the peak noise, and apply the noise model to a simulated-annealing (SA) based algorithm for the SINO/NB-v problem. Extensive and accurate experiments show that the SA-based algorithm is efficient, and always achieves solutions satisfying the given noise bound. It uses up to 71% and 30% fewer shields when compared to a greedy based shield insertion algorithm and a separated shield insertion and net ordering algorithm, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work that presents an in-depth study on the min-area SINO problem under an explicit noise constraint.
Alternative donor hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for mature lymphoid malignancies after reduced-intensity conditioning regimen: similar outcomes with umbilical cord blood and unrelated donor peripheral blood

We have reported encouraging results of unrelated cord blood transplantation for patients with lymphoid malignancies. Whether those outcomes are comparable to matched unrelated donor transplants remains to be defined. We studied 645 adult patients with mature lymphoid malignancies who received an allogeneic unrelated donor transplant using umbilical cord blood (n=104) or mobilized peripheral blood stem cells (n=541) after a reduced-intensity conditioning regimen. Unrelated cord blood recipients had more refractory disease. Median follow-up time was 30 months. Neutrophil engraftment (81% vs. 97%, respectively; P<0.0001) and chronic graft-versus-host disease (26% vs. 52%; P=0.0005) were less frequent after unrelated cord blood than after matched unrelated donor, whereas no differences were observed in grade II–IV acute graft-versus-host disease (29% vs. 32%), non-relapse mortality (29% vs. 28%), and relapse or progression (28% vs. 35%) at 36 months. There were also no significant differences in 2-year progression-free survival (43% vs. 58%, respectively) and overall survival (36% vs. 51%) at 36 months. In a multivariate analysis, no differences were observed in the outcomes between the two stem cell sources except for a higher risk of neutrophil engraftment (hazard ratio=2.12; P<0.0001) and chronic graft-versus-host disease (hazard ratio 2.10; P=0.0002) after matched unrelated donor transplant. In conclusion, there was no difference in final outcomes after transplantation between umbilical cord blood and matched unrelated donor transplant. Umbilical cord blood is a valuable alternative for patients with lymphoid malignancies lacking an HLA-matched donor, being associated with lower risk of chronic graft-versus-host disease.
One-step fabrication of superhydrophobic and superoleophilic cigarette filters for oil-water separation

To develop a simple and efficient way to recycle used cigarette filters, we report on a one-step method for preparing superhydrophobic and superoleophilic cigarette filters for oil–water separation. The robust coating layer on the surface of the cellulose acetate fiber, along with the inherent rough texture of the cigarette filter, could lead to its surface that displayed superhydrophobicity and superoleophilicity. Water droplets can retain in spherical shapes on the modified cigarette filters, while oils were immediately absorbed by the cigarette filters with high absorption capacity. As a result, free oil–water mixtures were separated with efficiency of above 98.0% by the driving force of gravity, and water-in-oil emulsion was also separated with a promising flux of about 2500 L m−2 h−1. The purity of oil for the tested emulsion was above 99.96%, indicating extremely high separation efficiency. This method for the fabrication of the superhydrophobic and superoleophilic cigarette filters would be a good candidate for recycling the solid wastes and developing an economic oil–water separation material to meet emerging needs in practical applications.
CONVERGENCE OF KAC ’ S RANDOM WALK

We study a long standing open problem on the mixing time of Kac’s random walk on SO(n,R) by random rotations. We obtain an upper bound mix = O(n log n) for the weak convergence which is close to the trivial lower bound Ω(n). This improves the upper bound O(n log n) by Diaconis and Saloff-Coste [9]. The proof is a variation on the coupling technique we develop to bound the mixing time for compact Markov chains, which is of independent interest.
Facilitating online discussions by automatic summarization

In the DISCOSUMO project, we aim to develop a computational toolkit to automatically summarize discussion forum threads. In this paper, we present the initial design of the toolkit, the data that we work with and the challenges we face. Discussion threads on a single topic can easily consist of hundreds or even thousands of individual contributions, with no obvious way to gain a quick overview of what kind of information is contained within the thread. We address the summarization of forum threads with domain-independent and language-independent methodology. We evaluate our system on data from four different web forums, covering different domains, languages and user communities. Our approach is largely unsupervised, using recurrent neural networks. Evaluation of the first version should point out where in the pipeline supervised techniques and/or heuristics are required to improve our summarization toolbox. If successful, the automatic summarization of discussion forum threads will play an important role in facilitating easy participation in online discussions.
Comparison of Left Ventricular Phase Parameters Analysis between Two Software Programs in Patients with Normal Gated Single-photon Emission Computed Tomography-Myocardial Perfusion Imaging

Background: Phase analysis can be easily performed by different software to assess the left ventricular dyssynchrony from gated single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) with high precision. However, the normal values of histogram bandwidth (HBW) and phase standard deviation (PSD) and their comparison using different programs have not been fully elucidated and actively being evaluated at present. The aim of this study was to determine the phase analysis parameters values and to compare the phase indices of two commonly used programs in a group of patients with normal gated SPECT-MPI. Methods: Phase parameters were retrospectively evaluated in 138 consecutive nondiabetic patients having a normal gated SPECT-MPI using the quantitative gated SPECT (QGS) and Emory Cardiac Toolbox (ECTb) software. HBW, PSD, and phase entropy were calculated separately using both programs. Results: The fair correlation between software programs was observed. HBW and PSD in QGS and ECTb were 26.20 ± 9.7 and 25.46 ± 8.0 (r-value. 56, SEE 6.65) and 6.64 ± 2.5 and 7.65 ± 2.5 (r = 0.54, SEE 2.14), respectively. The value of phase entropy in QGS program was 45.08 ± 6.3. A fair correlation between phase entropy and PSD in QGS was observed (r = 0.44, 95% confidence interval-0.29–0.56). Conclusion: Phase analysis parameters derived from gated SPECT-MPI in patients with normal myocardial perfusion are program dependent and may differ. The results cannot be interchangeably used in the same patients.
Pathophysiology of cardiotoxicity from target therapy and angiogenesis inhibitors

The progress in cancer therapy and the increase in number of long-term survivors reveal the issue of cardiovascular side-effects of anticancer drugs. Cardiotoxicity has become a significant problem, and the risks of adverse cardiac events induced by systemic drugs need to be seriously considered. Potential cardiovascular toxicities linked to anticancer agents include arrhythmias, myocardial ischemia and infarction, hypertension, thromboembolism, left ventricular dysfunction, and heart failure. It has been shown that several anticancer drugs seriously affect the cardiovascular system, such as ErbB2 inhibitors, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibitors, multitargeted kinase inhibitors, Abelson murine leukemia viral oncogene homolog inhibitors, and others. Each of these agents has a different mechanism through which it affects the cardiovascular system. ErbB2 inhibitors block the ErbB4/ErbB2 heterodimerization pathway triggered by Neuregulin-1, which is essential for cardiomyocyte survival. VEGF signaling is crucial for vascular growth, but it also has a major impact on myocardial function, and the VEGF pathway is also essential for maintenance of cardiovascular homeostasis. Drugs that inhibit the VEGF signaling pathway lead to a net reduction in capillary density and loss of contractile function. Here, we review the mechanisms and pathophysiology of the most significant cardiotoxic effects of ErbB2 inhibitors and antiangiogenic drugs. Moreover, we highlight the role of cardioncology in recognizing these toxicities, developing strategies to prevent or minimize cardiovascular toxicity, and reducing long-term cardiotoxic effects.
Agent-based micro-storage management for the Smart Grid

The use of energy storage devices in homes has been advocated as one of the main ways of saving energy and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels in the future Smart Grid. However, if micro-storage devices are all charged at the same time using power from the electricity grid, it means a higher demand and, hence, requires more generation capacity, results in more carbon emissions, and, in the worst case, breaks down the system due to over-demand. To alleviate such issues, in this paper, we present a novel agent-based micro-storage management technique that allows all (individually-owned) storage devices in the system to converge to profitable, efficient behaviour. Specifically, we provide a general framework within which to analyse the Nash equilibrium of an electricity grid and devise new agent-based storage learning strategies that adapt to market conditions. Taken altogether, our solution shows that, specifically, in the UK electricity market, it is possible to achieve savings of up to 13% on average for a consumer on his electricity bill with a storage device of 4 kWh. Moreover, we show that there exists an equilibrium where only 38% of UK households would own storage devices and where social welfare would be also maximised (with an overall annual savings of nearly GBP 1.5B at that equilibrium).