Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive intemally turbo-coded ultra wideband-impulse radio (AITC-UWB-IR) system

As a new spread spectrum system, an ultra wideband-impulse radio (UWB-IR) has attracted much attention in high speed indoor multiple access radio communications. Since the UWB-IR system repeats and transmits pulses for each bit, the UWB-IR system is considered as a coded scheme with a simple repetition block code. As an error correcting code, turbo-codes proposed by C. Berrou et al. in 1993 have attracted much attention beyond the field of coding theory, because the performance is very close to the Shannon limit with practical decoding complexity. In this paper, we propose an adaptive internally turbo-coded UWB-IR (AITC-UWB-IR) system. The proposed system employs a turbo code in addition to a repetition block code and shares the transmission bandwidth adaptively between them. We evaluate the performance of the AITC-UWB-IR by theoretical analysis and computer simulation. From our numerical and simulation results, we show that the BER of the AITC-UWB-IR is superior to that of the SOC-UWB-IR on an AWGN channel when the bit rate is high. We also showed that the AITC-UWB-IR system using low rate turbo codes improves the BER on an AWGN channel and a real Gaussian fading channel. Consequently, we confirm that for the same bit rate, we had better make the code rate of turbo codes lower and make the number of repetitions of the repetition codes smaller to achieve the better BER.
Understanding Young People's Use of Danmaku Websites: the effect of Perceived Coolness and subcultural Identi

“Wow! This is cool! ” response is frequently used by young people to express their approval and fond of objects, including digital products and se rvices. Moreover, with the evolution of Internet and information technology, various media have promoted the emergence and development of diverse subcultures among the young generation who have their own lifestyles. ACG (Animation, Comic, and Game) is such an adolescent subculture which is fascinating to a group of young people, named Otaku. Danmaku video sharing website is an important social media for them to communicate, and reflects an obvious hedonic characteristic of usage. As young people are the main adopters of innovative products, when studying young people’s use of technologies, it is essentially important to involve the effect of coolness and subculture. In this paper, we posit that perceived coolness has a positive effect on young people’s use behaviour of Danmaku video sharing website, and ACG cultural identity moderates the effect. We also try to identify the potential quality related factors which can predict perceived coolness. A quasi-experiment is designed to test the research model and hypotheses.
Deep Convolutional Networks for Modeling Image Virality

Study of virality and information diffusion is a topic gaining traction rapidly in the computational social sciences. Computer vision and social network analysis research has also focused on understanding the impact of content and information diffusion in making content viral. We present a novel algorithm to model image virality on online networks using the increasingly popular deep convolutional neural network architectures. Our proposed model provides significant insights into the features that are responsible for promoting virality and surpass the existing state-of-the-art by a 10% relative improvement in prediction.
Sensitivity Analysis for Variational Inequalities

In this paper we study the behavior of the local solutions of perturbed variational inequalities, governed by perturbations to both the variational inequality function and the feasible region. Assuming appropriate second-order and regularity conditions, we show that the perturbed local solution set is Lipschitz continuous and directionally differentiable. Even when the directional differentiability is not guaranteed, we are still able to describe and characterize first-order information concerning the perturbed local solution set. We also discuss relations to nonlinear programming sensitivity analysis.
Loop-synthesizing transformation for maintaining parallelism and enhancing locality

On parallel computers, parallelism and locality are critical points for the performance of programs. It is known that locality and parallelism of loop nests can be improved by loop transformations. However, many useful loop transformations are restricted to perfectly nested loop nests. We present a loop-synthesizing transformation for maintaining parallelism and improving locality, with respect to a sequence of parallel loop nests. Since the result of our synthesizing transformation is a perfectly nested loop nest, we can directly perform the loop transformations which are restricted to perfectly nested loop nests, to further parallelize and to further enhance locality after the transformation.
Persistent Empiric COPD Diagnosis and Treatment After Pulmonary Function Test Showed No Obstruction

BACKGROUND: Health-care providers often diagnose and empirically treat COPD without a confirmative pulmonary function test (PFT) or even despite a PFT that is not diagnostic of obstructive lung disease. We hypothesized that a portion of patients continue to carry a persistent empiric COPD diagnosis and receive treatment with bronchodilators and inhaled steroids after a PFT shows no obstruction. METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed single PFT sessions with both spirometry and plethysmography in 1,805 subjects. We included subjects who had a normal PFT or a restrictive ventilatory defect. Persistent empiric COPD diagnosis and treatment were defined when subjects with normal PFTs or a restrictive ventilatory defect continued to carry a health-care provider COPD diagnosis or receive treatment with bronchodilators and/or inhaled glucocorticoids, respectively, after a PFT showed no obstruction. RESULTS: One quarter of subjects with FEV1/FVC ≥ lower limit of the normal range had nonspecific PFT abnormalities. We included 473 subjects with normal PFTs and 382 with a restrictive ventilatory defect (n = 855). Persistent empiric COPD diagnosis (60 of 855, 7% prevalence) was associated with current (odds ratio [OR] = 44.7, P < .001) and former smoking (OR = 17.3, P < .001) and older age (OR = 1.03/y, P = .005). Persistent empiric treatment (208 of 855, 24%) was associated with empiric COPD diagnosis (OR = 24.6, P < .001), female sex (OR = 1.75, P = .002), current (OR = 2.04, P = 0.040) and former smoking (OR = 1.53, P = 0.029), interstitial lung disease (OR = 2.09, P = .001), other respiratory diagnosis (OR = 3.17, P < .001), and obstructive sleep apnea (OR = 1.79, P = .006). CONCLUSIONS: Persistent empiric COPD diagnosis was 7%, but persistent empiric treatment was common.
On Multivalued Nonexpansive Mappings in ℝ-Trees

The relationships between nonexpansive, weakly nonexpansive, *-nonexpansive, proximally nonexpansive, proximally continuous, almost lower semicontinuous, and ɛ-semicontinuous mappings in ℝ-trees are studied. Convergence theorems for the Ishikawa iteration processes are also discussed.
The parallel-BCI speller based on the P300 and SSVEP features

This paper developed a parallel-BCI speller system, consisting of four simultaneously presented sub-spellers, where the sub-speller switching and character selection were simultaneously identified through decoding the dominant frequency of steady-state visual-evoked potential (SSVEP) and the time of P300 occurrence in a parallel mode. Five subjects took part in the offline and online experiments. The canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and stepwise linear discriminant analysis (SWLDA) were jointly used to recognize the target character. Online tests showed that the parallel-BCI speller reached the peak information transfer rate (ITR) of 67.4 bit/min with an average of 48.0 bit/min. The results indicate that the proposed parallel-BCI system can be effectively controlled by users with attention shifting fluently among the sub-spellers, and highly improve the BCI spelling performance.
Automatic generation of goal regions for assembly tasks in the presence of uncertainty

A systematic procedure for generating the goal region of a mating action from a CAD model of assemblies using the mating features and the constraint types residing in the model, is presented. Assuming convexity and similarity of mating features, an analytical solution for C-space interior is developed and used to construct the goal region from 2-D features. This method provides a well-defined goal region which allows the computation of the corresponding success probability. Due to the uncertainties in object representation, goal regions are also subject to uncertainties. An approach that shrinks the nominal boundary of a goal region is proposed for computing the expectation of success probabilities. The effects of interference and fine-motion planning on success probabilities are also taken into consideration in order to define theoretical goal regions. <<ETX>>
Outcomes in severe sepsis and patients with septic shock do not matter! PIRO is a score to treat severe septic and septic shock patients not to measure outcomes.

present, whereas 50% of the wholebody selenium is stored in the skeletal muscle (4), i.e., a pool characterized by slow turnover and hence probably requiring a prolonged period of selenium substitution to allow refilling. However, little is known about the distribution, and probably also redistribution, of selenium during systemic inflammation. Furthermore, no data are available about the metabolism and distribution of exogenously administered selenium in critically ill patients. Last, selenium toxicity is linked to the cumulative dose of ingested selenium (5). Therefore, before the widespread adoption of prolonged selenium supplementation in critically ill patients can be advocated, further clinical trials are required that specifically address the safety of high-dose and prolonged selenium supplementation. Dr. Rex received speaking and consulting fees from biosyn Arzneimittel. The Department of Anesthesiology, University Hospital of the RWTH Aachen, has received funding from Biosyn, Germany, as financial support for conducting the clinical trial that is presented in the manuscript. The remaining authors have not disclosed any potential conflicts of interest.
Thienopyridine Use After Coronary Stenting in Low Income Patients Enrolled in Medicare Part D Receiving Maintenance Dialysis

Background Coronary stenting in patients on dialysis has increased by nearly 50% over the past decade, despite heightened risks of associated stent thrombosis and bleeding relative to the general population. We examined clopidogrel, prasugrel or ticlopidine use after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with stenting in patients on dialysis. We conducted 3‐, 6‐, and 12‐month landmark analyses to test the hypothesis that thienopyridine discontinuation prior to those time points would be associated with higher risks of death, myocardial infarction, or repeat revascularization, and a lower risk of major bleeding episodes compared with continued thienopyridine use. Methods and Results Using the US Renal Data System, we identified 8458 patients on dialysis with Medicare Parts A+B+D undergoing PCI with stenting between July 2007 and December 2010. Ninety‐nine percent of all thienopyridine prescriptions were for clopidogrel. At 3 months, 82% of patients who received drug‐eluting stents (DES) had evidence of thienopyridine use. These proportions fell to 62% and 40% at 6 and 12 months, respectively. In patients who received a bare‐metal stent (BMS), 70%, 34%, and 26% of patients had evidence of thienopyridine use at 3, 6, and 12 months, respectively. In patients who received a DES, there was a suggestion of higher risks of death or myocardial infarction associated with thienopyridine discontinuation in the 3‐, 6‐, and 12‐months landmark analyses, but no higher risk of major bleeding episodes. In patients who received a BMS, there were no differences in death or cardiovascular events, and possibly lower risk of major bleeding with thienopyridine discontinuation in the 3‐ and 6‐month landmark analyses. Conclusions The majority of patients on dialysis who undergo PCI discontinue thienopyridines before 1 year regardless of stent type. While not definitive, these data suggest that longer‐term thienopyridine use may be of benefit to patients on dialysis who undergo PCI with DES.
An Elliptic Curve Cryptography-Based RFID Authentication Securing E-Health System

Mobile healthcare (M-health) systems can monitor the patients’ conditions remotely and provide the patients and doctors with access to electronic medical records, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology plays an important role in M-health services. It is important to securely access RFID data in M-health systems: here, authentication, privacy, anonymity, and tracking resistance are desirable security properties. In 2014, He et al. proposed an elliptic curve cryptography- (ECC-) based RFID authentication protocol which is quite attractive to M-health applications, owing to its claimed performance of security, scalability, and efficiency. Unfortunately, we find their scheme fails to achieve the privacy protection if an adversary launches active tracking attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate our active attack on He et al.'s scheme and propose a new scheme to improve the security. Performance evaluation shows the improved scheme could meet the challenges of M-health applications.
Mining topical influencers based on the multi-relational network in micro-blogging sites

In micro-blogging contexts such as Twitter, the number of content producers can easily reach tens of thousands, and many users can participate in discussion of any given topic. While many users can introduce diversity, as not all users are equally influential, it makes it challenging to identify the true influencers, who are generally rated as being interesting and authoritative on a given topic. In this study, the influence of users is measured by performing random walks of the multi-relational data in micro-blogging: ret-weet, reply, reintroduce, and read. Due to the uncertainty of the reintroduce and read operations, a new method is proposed to determine the transition probabilities of uncertain relational networks. Moreover, we propose a method for performing the combined random walks for the multi-relational influence network, considering both the transition probabilities for intra- and inter-networking. Experiments were conducted on a real Twitter dataset containing about 260 000 users and 2.7 million tweets, and the results show that our method is more effective than TwitterRank and other methods used to discover influencers.
Error-related brain potentials elicited by vocal errors

Error-related negativity (ERN) is observed immediately after an error in choice reaction time tasks performed by hand response. We examined whether the ERN occurs in relation to slips of vocalization in the Stroop color word task. In one condition, the subject's vocal responses were masked by continuous pink noise in order to prevent vocalization-related cortical potentials from contaminating the ERN time window. This masking procedure was successful in inhibiting the vocalization-related cortical potential. More importantly, vocalization errors elicited a frontocentral negative-going deflection followed by a positive component immediately after the error response regardless of the masking condition. The present results suggest that the error detection mechanism may also elicit an ERN-like component in response to vocal slips.
The Role of ISO 14001 in China ’ s Environmental Crisis

Adoption of the ISO 14001 environmental management standard is analyzed using data drawn from a survey of manufacturing firms in China. The analysis proceeds by first identifying predictors of ISO 14001 adoption and then estimating the relationship between ISO 14001 adoption and compliance with environmental regulations. Potential endogeneity between ISO 14001 and environmental performance is addressed by estimating ISO 14001 adoption and regulatory compliance models simultaneously using the SURBP estimator. Results indicate that ISO 14001 adoption increases compliance with environmental regulations, and this effect persists after implementing the appropriate controls for endogeneity.
Recovering Dense Tissue Multispectral Signal from in vivo RGB Images

Hyperspectral/multispectral imaging (HSI/MSI) contains rich information clinical applications, such as 1) narrow band imaging for vascular visualisation; 2) oxygen saturation for intraoperative perfusion monitoring and clinical decision making [1]; 3) tissue classification and identification of pathology [2]. The current systems which provide pixel-level HSI/MSI signal can be generally divided into two types: spatial scanning and spectral scanning. However, the trade-off between spatial/spectral resolution, the acquisition time, and the hardware complexity hampers implementation in real-world applications, especially intra-operatively. Acquiring high resolution images in real-time is important for HSI/MSI in intra-operative imaging, to alleviate the side effect caused by breathing, heartbeat, and other sources of motion. Therefore, we developed an algorithm to recover a pixel-level MSI stack using only the captured snapshot RGB images from a normal camera. We refer to this technique as "super-spectral-resolution". The proposed method enables recovery of pixel-level-dense MSI signals with 24 spectral bands at ~11 frames per second (FPS) on a GPU. Multispectral data captured from porcine bowel and sheep/rabbit uteri in vivo has been used for training, and the algorithm has been validated using unseen in vivo animal experiments.
Improved DC flashover performance of epoxy insulators in SF6 gas by direct fluorination

In order to prove the effectiveness of direct fluorination in improving dc flashover performance of epoxy insulators in SF6 gas and also to provide evidence for the importance of surface conductivity of solid insulators, sheet-shaped and truncated cone epoxy samples were prepared and were fluorinated in a laboratory stainless vessel using a F2/N2 mixture with 12.5% F2 by volume at 0.1 MPa and 85 °C for 30 min. Physicochemical characteristics of the fluorinated surface layer were evaluated by ATR-FTIR and SEM techniques, and the results showed substantial chemical modification of the surface layer, which has a thickness of 0.89 μm and a roughened surface. Further, as expected on the basis of previous studies, measurements of surface electrical properties of the surface fluorinated sample, compared to the unfluorinated one, revealed a four orders of magnitude higher surface conductivity and a much more rapid decay of surface potential after corona charging. Dc flashover tests were performed on the truncated cone samples in SF6 gas at 0.1 MPa with a stepwise increasing voltage before and after the fluorination. The flashover test results showed a definite improvement in dc flashover voltage. For example, the flashover voltage at 63.2% probability or the mean flashover voltage for 2 min duration of the voltage step increased by 13.8% or 13.6% after the fluorination. The performance improvement is mainly attributed to easy leakage and dispersion of the charge deposited on the surface fluorinated sample from the gas phase, due to high conductivity of the fluorinated layer. The flashover test results also showed the influences of the duration of the voltage step on the flashover voltage and on the increase rate of flashover voltage. This means that even the time constant of the fast gas phase charging should be larger than 2 min, and that there should be different influences of the inhomogeneous surface conduction between the virgin sample and the fluorinated sample.
Swiss 3T3 mouse embryo fibroblasts transfected with a human prepro‐GRP gene synthesize and secrete pro‐GRP rather than GRP

A prepro‐gastrin‐releasing peptide (GRP) gene was introduced into Swiss 3T3 mouse embryo fibroblasts by DNA transfection in an attempt to establish autocrine growth stimulation. Clonal transfectants expressed varying amounts of GRP encoding mRNA. They synthesized and secreted a ∼ 15‐kd pro‐GRP hormone but not fully processed 2.8‐kd GRP. Accordingly, no changes in growth properties were associated with GRP gene expression. We postulate that Swiss 3T3 fibroblasts lack the enzymes necessary to process significantly pro‐GRP into biologically active peptides and that this deficiency may be responsible for the failure to establish autocrine growth stimulation in the transfected cells.
How thematic maps can assist collection management: A qualitative assessment of Journals' thematic focus

Abstract We present a method for mapping the content of a text collection. This method uses linguistic analysis to relate terms extracted from the texts and clusters them into thematic topics mapped onto a 2D space. While the graphic display of domain topics is useful for several information-driven tasks, the focus of the paper is more on the comparison of journal ranking by productivity (number of published papers in the collection) and by content representativity (ranking by number of terms and clusters). The results show that the two rankings are not identical, thus pointing to possible discrepancies between pure productivity and terminological density.
CORTICOTROPHIN RELEASING FACTOR: RESPONSES IN NORMAL SUBJECTS AND PATIENTS WITH DISORDERS OF THE HYPOTHALAMUS AND PITUITARY

Synthetic CRF‐41 has been given to 43 patients with hypothalamic, pituitary or adrenal diseases and contrasted with the responses in 20 normal subjects. In the normal subjects the mean increment in serum cortisol (± SE) was 276 ± 38 nmol/l; the increments showed a significant negative correlation with the basal serum cortisol levels (r= ‐0·56; P<0·02). The mean peak serum cortisol was 662 ± 34 nmol/1 and the mean peak corticosterone was 28·6 ± 3·8 nmol/1. There was a significant positive correlation between the peak serum corticosterone and cortisol concentrations (r= 0·84; P<0·0001). Dexamethasone pretreatment abolished the rise in cortisol in response to CRF‐41. The peak serum cortisol following CRF‐41 was not significantly different between the normal subjects and those patients with pituitary disease who had normal cortisol responses to insulin‐induced hypoglycaemia. However, in individual patients the peak cortisol levels induced by hypoglycaemia were greater than, but significantly correlated with, those induced by 100 μg of CRF‐41. Seven patients were ACTH deficient in response to hypoglycaemia, and of these six responded normally to CRF‐41. Only one of these patients had a lesion clearly originating in the hypothalamus; four had pituitary tumours with suprasellar extensions and the remaining patient had idiopathic GH and ACTH deficiency. Our data suggest that these patients have a functional defect of ACTH secretion due to the failure of CRF to reach the corticotroph. Of the four patients with pituitary‐dependent Cushing's disease who were on no treatment at the time of testing, three showed an exaggerated and one a normal response to CRF‐41. These normal or enhanced responses of hypercortisolaemic patients with Cushing's syndrome contrast with the complete inhibition of the responses to CRF‐41 in normal subjects given dexamethasone. In the treated patients with Cushing's syndrome