Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Early Initiation of Amphetamine-Type Stimulants (ATS) Use Associated with Lowered Cognitive Performance among Individuals with Co-Occurring Opioid and ATS Use Disorders in Malaysia

ABSTRACT Amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) use is increasingly prevalent in Malaysia, including among individuals who also use opioids. We evaluated cognitive functioning profiles among individuals with co-occurring opioid and ATS dependence and their lifetime patterns of drug use. Participants (N = 50) enrolling in a clinical trial of buprenorphine/naloxone treatment with or without atomoxetine completed the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices, Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test, Digit Span, Trail Making and Symbol Digit Substitution tasks. Multidimensional scaling and a K-means cluster analyses were conducted to classify participants into lower versus higher cognitive performance groups. Subsequently, analyses of variance procedures were conducted to evaluate between group differences on drug use history and demographics. Two clusters of individuals with distinct profiles of cognitive performance were identified. The age of ATS use initiation, controlling for the overall duration of drug use, was significantly earlier in the lower than in the higher cognitive performance cluster: 20.9 (95% CI: 18.0–23.8) versus 25.2 (95% CI: 22.4–28.0, p = 0.038). While adverse effects of ATS use on cognitive functioning can be particularly pronounced with younger age, potentially related to greater vulnerability of the developing brain to stimulant and/or neurotoxic effects of these drugs, the current study findings cannot preclude lowered cognitive performance before initiation of ATS use.
Air cleaning efficiency of deodorant materials under dynamic conditions: effect of air flow rate

rate DTU Orbit (10/03/2019) Air cleaning efficiency of deodorant materials under dynamic conditions: effect of air flow rate Unpleasant odor is a serious problem in hospitals and elderly facilities. One of the unpleasant odors is ammonia originating from human urine and sweat. The air cleaning efficiency of porous activated carbon fiber fabric which has been treated with acid, and porous activated carbon fiber fabric was evaluated as deodorant materials neutralising ammonia in air. The deodorant material efficiency was tested in a special experimental set-up consisting of a straight pipe section, an ammonia gas generator, a fan and a textile frame. The deodorant materials, placed in the pipe, were exposed to a flow of air mixed with ammonia gas at a concentration of 20 ppm and velocities of 0.05, 0.15, 0.3 and 1.2 m/s. The activated carbon fibers treated with acid had a high deodorizing effect for ammonia (0.8) at a velocity of 0.05 m/s. The deodorizing effect of this material decreased with the increase in the velocity. The porous activated carbon fiber fabric did not have a deodorant effect.
Parallel Copying Garbage Collection Using Delayed Allocation

We present a new approach to parallel copying garbage collection on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machines appropriate for Java and other object-oriented languages. Parallel, in this setting, means that the collector runs in several parallel threads. Our collector is based on a new idea called delayed allocation, which completely eliminates the fragmentation problem of previous parallel copying collectors while still keeping low synchronization, high efficiency, and simplicity of collection. In addition to this main idea, we also discuss several other ideas such as termination detection, balancing the distribution of work, and dealing with contention during work distribution.
Aortic Stiffness in Lone Atrial Fibrillation: A Novel Risk Factor for Arrhythmia Recurrence

Background Recent community-based research has linked aortic stiffness to the development of atrial fibrillation. We posit that aortic stiffness contributes to adverse atrial remodeling leading to the persistence of atrial fibrillation following catheter ablation in lone atrial fibrillation patients, despite the absence of apparent structural heart disease. Here, we aim to evaluate aortic stiffness in lone atrial fibrillation patients and determine its association with arrhythmia recurrence following radio-frequency catheter ablation. Methods We studied 68 consecutive lone atrial fibrillation patients who underwent catheter ablation procedure for atrial fibrillation and 50 healthy age- and sex-matched community controls. We performed radial artery applanation tonometry to obtain central measures of aortic stiffness: pulse pressure, augmentation pressure and augmentation index. Following ablation, arrhythmia recurrence was monitored at months 3, 6, 9, 12 and 6 monthly thereafter. Results Compared to healthy controls, lone atrial fibrillation patients had significantly elevated peripheral pulse pressure, central pulse pressure, augmentation pressure and larger left atrial dimensions (all P<0.05). During a mean follow-up of 2.9±1.4 years, 38 of the 68 lone atrial fibrillation patients had atrial fibrillation recurrence after initial catheter ablation procedure. Neither blood pressure nor aortic stiffness indices differed between patients with and without atrial fibrillation recurrence. However, patients with highest levels (≥75th percentile) of peripheral pulse pressure, central pulse pressure and augmentation pressure had higher atrial fibrillation recurrence rates (all P<0.05). Only central aortic stiffness indices were associated with lower survival free from atrial fibrillation using Kaplan-Meier analysis. Conclusion Aortic stiffness is an important risk factor in patients with lone atrial fibrillation and contributes to higher atrial fibrillation recurrence following catheter ablation procedure.
The Relationship of Objectively Measured Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour with Gestational Weight Gain and Birth Weight

Objective. To evaluate the relationship of physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour with gestational weight gain (GWG) and birth weight. Design. Combined data from two prospective studies: (1) nulliparous pregnant women without BMI restrictions and (2) overweight and obese pregnant women at risk for gestational diabetes. Methods. Daily PA and sedentary behaviour were measured with an accelerometer around 15 and at 32–35 weeks of gestation. The association between time spent in moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) and in sedentary activities with GWG and birth weight was determined. Main outcome measures were GWG between 15 and 32 weeks of gestation, average GWG per week, and birth weight. Results. We studied 111 women. Early in pregnancy, 32% of women spent ≥30 minutes/day in at least moderate PA versus 12% in late pregnancy. No significant associations were found between time spent in MVPA or sedentary behaviour with GWG or birth weight. Conclusions. We found no relation between MVPA and sedentary behaviour with GWG or birth weight. The small percentage of women meeting the recommended levels of PA indicates the need to inform and support pregnant women to maintain regular PA, as there seems to be no adverse effect on birth weight and maintaining PA increases overall health.
Hardware Software Partitioning Problem in Embedded System Design Using Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Hardware/software partitioning is a crucial problem in embedded system design. In this paper, we provide an alternative approach to solve this problem using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme with integer linear programming, genetic algorithm and ant colony optimization technique has been compared using standard benchmark datasets, and the computer simulations reveal that the proposed approach outperforms all the meta-heuristic based existing techniques with respect to cumulative runtimes for several runs of the same program. The integer linear programming has been found to yield the optimal solutions, and the proposed swarm scheme yields sub-optimal solution, sufficiently close to the reported results obtained for integer programming.
Is epileptogenic cortex truly hypometabolic on interictal positron emission tomography?

Positron emission tomography (PET) of glucose metabolism is often applied for the localization of epileptogenic brain regions, but hypometabolic areas are often larger than or can miss epileptogenic cortex in nonlesional neocortical epilepsy. The present study is a three‐dimensional brain surface analysis designed to demonstrate the functional relation between glucose PET abnormalities and epileptogenic cortical regions. Twelve young patients (mean age, 10.8 years) with intractable epilepsy of neocortical origin underwent chronic intracranial electroencephalographic monitoring. The exact location of the subdural electrodes was determined on high‐resolution three‐dimensional reconstructed magnetic resonance imaging scan volumes. The electrodes were classified according to their locations over cortical areas, which were defined as hypometabolic, normometabolic, or at the border between hypometabolic and normal cortex (metabolic “border zones”) based on interictal glucose PET. Electrodes with seizure onset were located over metabolic border zones significantly more frequently than over hypometabolic or normometabolic regions. Seizure spread electrodes also more frequently overlay metabolic border zones than hypometabolic regions. These findings suggest that cortical areas with hypometabolism should be interpreted as regions mostly not involved in seizure activity, although epileptic activity commonly occurs in the surrounding cortex. This feature of hypometabolic cortex is remarkably similar to that of structural brain lesions surrounded by epileptogenic cortex. Cortical areas bordering hypometabolic regions can be highly epileptogenic and should be carefully assessed in presurgical evaluations. Ann Neurol 2000;48:88–96
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Ontology and Use Case

* Abstract—Ontologies play an increasingly important role in annotation, integration, and analysis of biomedical data. In this paper, we describe the design and development of a Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Ontology and how we can use this ontology as a controlled vocabulary for supporting automatic annotation of clinical text. The automated annotation is performed using a natural language processing (NLP) tool called YTEX. In addition, we demonstrate how we can use the concepts and relationships defined in the PTSD Ontology to perform data summarization and categorization.
Fold recognition using sequence fingerprints of protein local substructures

A protein local substructure (descriptor) is a set of several short nonoverlapping fragments of the polypeptide chain. Each substructure describes local environment of a particular residue and includes only those segments of the main chain that are located in the proximity of that residue. Similar descriptors from the representative set of proteins were analyzed to reveal links between the substructures and the sequences of their segments. Using the detected sequence-based fingerprints, specific geometrical conformations are assigned to new sequences. The ability of the approach to recognize correct SCOP folds was tested on 273 sequences from the 49 most popular folds. Good predictions were obtained in 85% of cases. No performance drop was observed with decreasing sequence similarity between target sequences and sequences from the training set of proteins.
Ligand-independent growth hormone receptor dimerization occurs in the endoplasmic reticulum and is required for ubiquitin system-dependent endocytosis

The regulatory effect of growth hormone (GH) on its target cells is mediated via the GH receptor (GHR). GH binding to the GHR results in the formation of a GH-(GHR)2 complex and the initiation of signal transduction cascades via the activation of the tyrosine kinase JAK2. Subsequent endocytosis and transport to the lysosome of the ligand-receptor complex is regulated via the ubiquitin system and requires the presence of an intact ubiquitin-dependent endocytosis (UbE) motif in the cytosolic tail of the GHR. Recently, the model of ligand-induced receptor dimerization has been challenged. In this study, ligand-independent GHR dimerization is demonstrated in the endoplasmic reticulum and at the cell surface by coimmunoprecipitation of an epitope-tagged truncated GHR with wild-type GHR. In addition, evidence is provided that the extracellular domain of the GHR is not required to maintain this interaction. Internalization of a chimeric receptor, which fails to dimerize, is independent of an intact UbE-motif. Therefore, we postulate that dimerization of GHR molecules is required for ubiquitin system-dependent endocytosis.
Simultaneous reduction of dynamic and static power in scan structures

Power dissipation during test is a major challenge in testing integrated circuits. Dynamic power has been the dominant part of power dissipation in CMOS circuits, however, in future technologies the static portion of power dissipation will outreach the dynamic portion. This paper proposes an efficient technique to reduce both dynamic and static power dissipation in scan structures. Scan cell outputs which are not on the critical path(s) are multiplexed to fixed values during scan mode. These constant values and primary inputs are selected such that the transitions occurring on nonmultiplexed scan cells are suppressed and the leakage current during scan mode is decreased. A method for finding these vectors is also proposed. The effectiveness of this technique is proved by experiments performed on ISCAS89 benchmark circuits.
Translating Between PEGs and CFGs

We transform a CFG into a PEG in two steps. First, we transform the CFG into an Abstract PEG (A-PEG). Conceptually, an A-PEG is a PEG that operates over programs stores rather than individual variables, and whose nodes represent the basic blocks of the CFG. Figure 1(b) shows a sample A-PEG, derived from the CFG in Figure 1(a). The A-PEG captures the structure of the original CFG using θ, pass and eval nodes, but does not capture the flow of individual variables, nor the details of how each basic block operates. For each basic block n in the CFG, there is a node SEn in the corresponding A-PEG that represents the execution of the basic block (SE stands for Symbolic Evaluator): given a store at the input of the basic block, SEn returns the store at the output. For basic blocks that have multiple CFG successors, meaning that the last instruction in the block is a branch, we assume that the store returned by SE contains a specially named boolean variable whose value indicates which way the branch will go. The function cond takes a program store, and selects this specially named variable from it. As a result, for a basic block n that ends in a branch, cond(SEn) is a boolean stating which way the branch should go. Once we have an A-PEG, the translation from A-PEG to PEG is simple – all that is left to do is expand the A-PEG to the level of individual variables by replacing each SE n node with a dataflow representation of the instructions in block n. For example, in Figure 1, if there were two variables being assigned in all the basic blocks, then the PEG would essentially contain two structural copies of the A-PEG, one copy for each variable. Our algorithm for converting a CFG into an A-PEG starts with a reducible CFG (all CFGs produced from valid Java code are reducible, and furthermore, if a CFG is not reducible, it can be transformed
POM: Power efficient multi-view video streaming over multi-antenna wireless systems

Multi-view video streaming is essential for various mobile 3D and immersive applications that can capture the same scene from multiple angles. However, the large traffic volume of multi-view streaming will drain the battery power quickly. This paper studies the power efficient delivery of 3D content with multi-view video coding (MVC) in the emerging 802.11-like MIMO wireless systems, and the purpose is to minimize the power consumption with the video quality guarantee. We propose an efficient algorithm to perform antenna assignment and transmission power allocation, by exploiting both the source coding characteristics of MVC and channel diversity of multiple antennas. A proof-of-concept system, namely PoM, is designed on the software radio platform and is evaluated in realistic indoor environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical system for energy efficient multi-view video streaming. Experimental results show that PoM can significantly save energy in the transmission by 12% ~ 65% on average when the required PSNR decreases from 45dB to 35dB.
Harmonic Order Parameters for Characterizing Complex Particle Morphologies

Order parameters based on spherical harmonics and Fourier coefficients already play a significant role in condensed matter research in the context of systems of spherical or point particles. Here, we extend these types of order parameter to more complex shapes, such as those encountered in nanoscale self-assembly applications. To do so, we build on a powerful set of techniques that originate in the computer science field of "shape matching. " We demonstrate how shape matching techniques can be applied to identify unknown structures and create highly-specialized \textit{ad hoc} order parameters. Additionally, we investigate the special symmetry properties of harmonic descriptors, and demonstrate how they can be exploited to provide optimal solutions to certain classes of problems. Our techniques can be applied to particle systems in general, both simulated and experimental, provided the particle positions are known.
Co-evolving demes of non-uniform cellular automata for synchronisation

Emergent computation refers to systems in which global information processing appears as a result of the interactions among many components, each of which may be a system that exhibits an ability for emergent computation at a different level of self-organisation. In this paper we employ a modification of cellular programming to evolve cellular machines for synchronisation. This allows global computation to occur by many local interactions among computational demes of interacting cells. The computational machine, derived from the non-uniform cellular automata model, consists of a grid of cells which are co-evolved in isolated demes. We describe experiments which show that demes can be co-evolved to perform non-trivial computation. We also analyse the mechanisms of computation within the different synchronising demes. Our results not only show that the co-evolution of demes is possible, but that they can attain high computational performance through co-operative action.
Super-resolution Imaging of the Kidney Glomerulus in Health and Disease Conditions

Introduction & Aim: The kidney glomerulus is a capillary tuft where urine begins to form by ultrafiltration. This glomerular filter allows water and small solutes to pass freely, while restricting cells and proteins larger than 65 kD from entering the urinary space. The glomerular filtration barrier (GFB) is composed of three layers: the fenestrated endothelial cell layer, the glomerular basement membrane (GBM) layer and the podocytes with interdigitating foot processes. Slit diaphragms, small rod-like structures bridging the space between adjacent foot processes, are important for podocyte function[1]. Glomerular diseases lead to filtration barrier failure, causing protein leakage into the urine (proteinuria) that is often followed by eventual kidney failure. Proteinuria is usually accompanied by podocyte foot process effacement (FPE), a major change in podocyte shape characterized by simplification of the foot processes and direct adherence of the podocyte cell body to the capillary wall. This is a major shift in the podocyte actin cytoskeleton, and it occurs in almost all glomerular diseases regardless of the etiology. However, the exact causes of podocyte FPE and its relationship with proteinuria are unclear [2, 3].
Forgive and forget: return to obscurity

Traditionally, if someone did some act that required forgiveness, there were social norms in place for such forgiveness to happen. Over time, the act is also typically forgotten. And, should the person not be forgiven and the social pressure become too great, he had the option of moving to a new location for a fresh start. Yet with the Internet, these options are no longer available. Worse, activities which traditionally did not even require forgiveness are now impacting lives in unexpected ways, and are never forgotten. There are, however, technical approaches that could be applied to the problem, such as (1) controlling dissemination through new access control models or cryptographic approaches, (2) flooding the web with contrary information, (3) leading users to believe the information applies to someone else, (4) changing the semantics of what was written, and (5) finding a way to take advantage of the inconvenient information. In this paper we discuss the social act of forgiveness, and go into detail on the possible technical approaches to "forgetting" without deleting.
A proximal retinal component in the primate photopic ERG a-wave.

PURPOSE The monkey photopic ERG was studied during administration of glutamate analogs to determine whether the photopic a-wave derives exclusively from photoreceptors. METHODS Monkey photopic ERGs were elicited using 200-msec flashes or 30-microseconds xenon photostrobe flashes on a steady light-adapting background of 40 cd/m2 (3.3 log scotopic troland). Intravitreal injections of APB, PDA, or both were given to block transmission to depolarizing and hyperpolarizing second-order retinal neurons, respectively. RESULTS After injecting PDA to block light responses of horizontal cells and hyperpolarizing bipolar cells, part of the photopic a-wave was eliminated. The PDA-sensitive component, presumed to be due to activity postsynaptic to cones, was responsible for the photopic a-wave threshold and dominated the response over the initial 1 to 1.5 log units of intensity. For brighter stimuli, this component made a constant contribution to the photopic a-wave. A non-PDA-sensitive contribution to the a-wave, presumed to originate directly from cones, was first evident 1 to 1.5 log units above photopic a-wave threshold. It progressively dominated the a-wave at higher intensities, particularly at early time points after the flash. Injecting PDA almost eliminated the photopic a-wave elicited with bright xenon photostrobe flashes that are commonly used for human clinical ERG diagnostic testing, indicating that this a-wave may contain significant postreceptoral activity. CONCLUSION The primate photopic ERG a-wave derives, in part, from retinal activity postsynaptic to cone photoreceptors, particularly for stimuli near the photopic ERG threshold that are typically used for human clinical studies.