Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High Prevalence of Insecure Attachment in Patients with Primary Hypertension

Hypertension is a major cardiovascular (CV) risk factor and is predicted by heightened CV reactivity to stress in healthy individuals. Patients with hypertension also show an altered stress response, while insecure attachment is linked to a heightened stress reactivity as well. This is the first study aiming to assess attachment representations in patients with primary hypertension and to investigate their CV responses when their attachment system is activated. We studied 50 patients (38 men, 12 women) with primary hypertension. The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP), a widely used and validated interview, was performed to measure the patients' attachment representations, and to activate their attachment system. Blood pressure and heart rate were measured after 10 min at rest prior to and directly after the AAP interview. Mood and state anxiety were assessed using the Multidimensional Mood State Questionnaire (MDBF) and the State Trait Anxiety Inventory-State (STAI-S) before and after the experiment. The prevalence of insecure attachment (dismissing, preoccupied, unresolved) in hypertensive patients was predominant (88%), while in non-clinical populations, only about 50% of individuals had insecure attachment patterns. Blood pressure (p < 0.001), heart rate (p = 0.016), and rate pressure product (p < 0.001) significantly increased in response to the attachment interview. Secure attached patients showed the highest rise in systolic blood pressure (p = 0.020) and the lowest heart rate compared to the other attachment groups (p = 0.043). However, attachment representation showed no significant group or interaction effects on diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and rate pressure product. Insecure attachment was highly over-represented in our sample of patients with primary hypertension. Additionally, a robust CV response to the attachment-activating stimulus was observed. Our data suggest that insecure attachment is significantly linked to primary hypertension, which implies the need for further investigations to evaluate attachment insecurity as a possible risk factor for hypertension.
Assigning cells to switches in cellular mobile networks using taboo search

The design of wireless telecommunications networks is a complex process, which requires solving simultaneously many difficult combinatorial optimization problems. We propose a taboo-search approach dedicated to one of the aforementioned design optimization problems, namely the cell assignment problem. Our approach defines a series of moves applicable to an initial solution in order to improve the cost and establish the feasibility of the solution. For this purpose, we identify a gain structure with update procedures to efficiently choose the best solution in the current neighborhood. The results are generally good in comparison with those obtained through other heuristic methods.
GPU-based acceleration for Monte Carlo ray-tracing of complex 3D scene

This paper introduces two acceleration methods for the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation of photons on Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). The GPU-based methods for performing MC method enable the use of the model in more complex vegetation canopy. We describe the computation and how it is mapped onto the many parallel computational units on one NVIDIA GT240M graphic card. For a vegetation canopy consisting of 13020 polygons, the speedup is 16.45× over the code on an Intel T6400 dual-core processor. And this method can be accelerated tremendously by employing better GPU processor, or using more GPUs for simulation.
A Word Vector and Matrix Factorization Based Method for Opinion Lexicon Extraction

Automatic opinion lexicon extraction has attracted lots of attention and many methods have thus been proposed. However, most existing methods depend on dictionaries (e.g., WordNet), which confines their applicability. For instance, the dictionary based methods are unable to find domain dependent opinion words, because the entries in a dictionary are usually domain-independent. There also exist corpus-based methods that directly extract opinion lexicons from reviews. However, they heavily rely on sentiment seed words that have limited sentiment information and the context information has not been fully considered. To overcome these problems, this paper presents a word vector and matrix factorization based method for automatically extracting opinion lexicons from reviews of different domains and further identifying the sentiment polarities of the words. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and performs better than the state-of-the-art methods.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 1-1-2010 Operational and Work Systems-Related Success Factors for Customer Relationship Management in " Product Sales " and " Solution Sales "-a Descriptive Case Study

Despite much IS research on customer relationship management (CRM) and respective (critical) success factors (SFs), CRM initiatives are still subject to high failure rates. One reason may be that many studies rather exclusively deal with a technological and project perspective and thus focus on CRM-related IT systems and their introduction. As a consequence, no holistic perspective on CRM in the sense of an integrated and IT-reliant work system is taken on. In addition, existing SFs are rather abstract and barely useful for practitioners. Thus, there is a research need for SFs that are concrete – which will be referred to as operational – and beyond IT. In order to attain preliminary knowledge, we conducted a descriptive single-case study within the German sales department of a global company from the electronics and electrical engineering industry. In the course of a two-stage data collection and analysis process, 56 sales managers of the two sales types “product sales” and “solution sales” were interviewed as regards organizational setting, sales process, and information requirements. As contribution, we propose rankings of operational and work system-related SFs, additional qualitative information, and differences between “product sales” and “solution sales”.
Increased functional connectivity within medial temporal lobe in mild cognitive impairment

Pathology at preclinical and prodromal stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) may manifest itself as measurable functional change in neuronal networks earlier than detectable structural change. Functional connectivity as measured using resting‐state functional magnetic resonance imaging has emerged as a useful tool for studying disease effects on baseline states of neuronal networks. In this study, we use high resolution MRI to label subregions within the medial temporal lobe (MTL), a site of early pathology in AD, and report an increase in functional connectivity in amnestic mild cognitive impairment between entorhinal cortex and subregions of the MTL, with the strongest effect in the anterior hippocampus. However, our data also replicated the effects of decreased connectivity of the MTL to other nodes of the default mode network reported by other researchers. This dissociation of changes in functional connectivity within the MTL versus the MTL's connection with other neocortical structures can help enrich the characterization of early stages of disease progression in AD. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Selection of critical segmentation-a prerequisite for object based image classification

Object based image analysis is suitable for medium and high resolution remote sensing images. The crucial step in object based classification is image segmentation. Problem of over-and-under segmentation occurs due to improper selection of segmentation parameters. Classification is applied over the segmented image, thus selection of properly segmented image for an application is the basic prerequisite for a quality classified image.
Applying System Execution Modeling Tools to Evaluate Enterprise Distributed Real-time and Embedded System QoS

Component middleware is popular for enterprise distributed systems because it provides effective reuse of the core intellectual property (i.e., the "business logic"). Component-based enterprise distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems, however, incur new integration problems associated with component configuration and deployment. New research is therefore needed to minimize the gap between the development and deployment/configuration of components, so that deployment and configuration strategies can be evaluated well before system integration. This paper uses an industrial case study from the domain of shipboard computing to show how system execution modeling tools can provide software and system engineers with quantitative estimates of system bottlenecks and performance characteristics to help evaluate the performance of component-based enterprise DRE systems and reduce time/effort in the integration phase. The results from our case study show the benefits of system execution modeling tools and pinpoint where more work is needed
Association of biocompatible peritoneal dialysis solutions with peritonitis risk, treatment, and outcomes.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The effect of biocompatible peritoneal dialysis (PD) solutions on PD-related peritonitis is unclear. This study sought to evaluate the relationship between use of biocompatible solutions and the probability of occurrence or clinical outcomes of peritonitis. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS The study included all incident Australian patients receiving PD between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2010, using Australia and New Zealand Dialysis and Transplant Registry data. All multicompartment PD solutions of neutral pH were categorized as biocompatible solutions. The independent predictors of peritonitis and the use of biocompatible solutions were determined by multivariable, multilevel mixed-effects Poisson and logistic regression analysis, respectively. Sensitivity analyses, including propensity score matching, were performed. RESULTS Use of biocompatible solutions gradually declined (from 7.5% in 2007 to 4.2% in 2010), with preferential use among smaller units and among younger patients without diabetes mellitus. Treatment with biocompatible solution was associated with significantly greater overall rate of peritonitis (0.67 versus 0.47 episode per patient-year; incidence rate ratio, 1.49; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.19 to 1.89) and with shorter time to first peritonitis (hazard ratio [HR], 1.48; 95% CI, 1.17 to 1.87), a finding replicated in propensity score-matched cohorts (HR, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.09 to 1.71). CONCLUSIONS In an observational registry study, use of biocompatible PD solutions was associated with higher overall peritonitis rates and shorter time to first peritonitis. Further randomized studies adequately powered for a primary peritonitis outcome are warranted.
Multimodal Personality Recognition in Collaborative Goal-Oriented Tasks

Incorporating research on personality recognition into computers, both from a cognitive as well as an engineering perspective, would facilitate the interactions between humans and machines. Previous attempts on personality recognition have focused on a variety of different corpora (ranging from text to audiovisual data), scenarios (interviews, meetings), channels of communication (audio, video, text), and different subsets of personality traits (out of the five ones from the Big Five Model). Our study uses simple acoustic and visual nonverbal features extracted from multimodal data, which have been recorded in previously uninvestigated scenarios, and consider all five personality traits and not just a subset. First, we look at the human-machine interaction scenario, where we introduce the display of different “collaboration levels. ” Second, we look at the contribution of the human-human interaction (HHI) scenario on the emergence of personality traits. Investigating the HHI scenario creates a stronger basis for future human-agents interactions. Our goal is to study, from a computational approach, the emergence degree of the five personality traits in these two scenarios. The results demonstrate the relevance of each of the two scenarios when it comes to the degree of emergence of certain traits and the feasibility to automatically recognize personality under different conditions.
Supporting Reuse of Knowledge of Failures through Ontology-based Semantic Search

In order to increase the effectiveness of sharing and reusing knowledge about failures, we have applied the expert knowledge ontology-based semantic search system, EKOSS, to the “failure knowledge database”. An ontology based on description logics is used as a formalized knowledge representation language for creating semantic statements describing 212 of the JST failure cases. Using the EKOSS reasoner, the similarity between a search statement giving the conditions of a new project or project design and the semantic statements describing failure cases can be quantified by inferring specific semantic relationships between entities involved in the case. The corpus of semantic statements is described, and results of applying the EKOSS semantic search to the semantic statements are analyzed. Finally, the effectiveness of the SCINTENG ontology for expressing the underlying failure mechanisms of the cases is discussed.
A Dynamic Instrumentation Approach to Software Transactional Memory

A Dynamic Instrumentation Approach to Software Transactional Memory Marek Olszewski Master of Applied Science Graduate Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Toronto 2007 With the advent of chip-multiprocessors, we are faced with the challenge of parallelizing performance-critical software. Transactional memory has been proposed as a promising programming model, with software transactional memory (STM) being especially compelling for today’s use. However, in addition to high overheads, existing STMs are limited to either managed languages or intrusive APIs. Furthermore, transactions in STMs cannot normally contain calls to unobservable code such as shared libraries or system calls. In this dissertation we present JudoSTM, a novel dynamic binary-rewriting approach to implementing STM that supports C and C++ code. By using value-based conflict detection, JudoSTM additionally supports the transactional execution of both (i) irreversible system calls and (ii) code that contains locks. We lower overhead through several novel optimizations that improve invisible-reader and validate/commit performance. We show that our approach performs comparably to RSTM—demonstrating that a dynamic binary-rewriting approach to implementing STM is an interesting alternative.
Presence of Angiotensinogen Messenger RNA in Various Cultured Cell Lines

The presence of angiotensinogen messenger RNA (mRNA) was assessed in total RNA extracted from hepatoma, glioma, neuroblastoma, and glioma-neuroblastoma hybrid cell lines. Total RNA from 1 × 107 cells was extracted, transferred to a membrane, and hybridized with a 32P-labeled, full-length (1650-base pair) rat angiotensinogen complementary DNA (cDNA). Angiotensinogen RNA sequences could be definitively detected only in hepatoma cells. Steroids were used in an attempt to increase the angiotensinogen mRNA level. Dexamethasone (2 × 1(H M) or 17 β-estradiol (1 × 1(H M) was added to the cultures 18 to 24 hours prior to harvest. Dexamethasone treatment of the hepatoma cells resulted in a large increase in angiotensinogen mRNA, whereas estradiol had no effect. Steroids failed to induce detectable levels of angiotensinogen mRNA in total RNA from the other cell lines. That the RNA was intact was ensured by hybridizing duplicate Northern blots to a 32P-Iabeled actin cDNA. Actin mRNA sequences were detected in all cell lines. Blot hybridization of poly (A)+ RNA resulted in the visualization of a weak angiotensinogen mRNA signal for a glioma cell line and a glioma-neuroblastoma hybrid line. However, the ability to detect angiotensinogen mRNA in a cell may depend on the phenotype expressed, which can be governed by culture conditions.
Education and politics

Education is the key to people’s minds. This inquiry is associated with this spectrum as it investigated the relationship between education and politics. It identified the double role of education as a politicising and a politicised factor in the two consecutive eras of the Fatimids and the Ayyūbids in medieval Egypt. The inquiry concluded that despite the existing political and religious affiliations in each epoch, formal and informal institutions of education were arenas in which power and politics received fundamental expression. This does not necessarily mean that the politicization of education during those two phases restricted the thought and prevented it from flourishing. On the contrary, learning was accessible for all and absolutely free. Students received stipends provided by abundant income from a chain of a deeply embedded institution in the thoughts and practices of medieval Islamic societies called waqf. The religious motive was fundamental in the functioning of Islamic medieval educational process and the ultimate role of education in both, Fatimid and Ayyūbid epochs was the preservation of the Islamic faith and the sharī’ah.
Stable dynamic backpropagation learning in recurrent neural networks

The conventional dynamic backpropagation (DBP) algorithm proposed by Pineda does not necessarily imply the stability of the dynamic neural model in the sense of Lyapunov during a dynamic weight learning process. A difficulty with the DBP learning process is thus associated with the stability of the equilibrium points which have to be checked by simulating the set of dynamic equations, or else by verifying the stability conditions, after the learning has been completed. To avoid unstable phenomenon during the learning process, two new learning schemes, called the multiplier and constrained learning rate algorithms, are proposed in this paper to provide stable adaptive updating processes for both the synaptic and somatic parameters of the network. Based on the explicit stability conditions, in the multiplier method these conditions are introduced into the iterative error index, and the new updating formulations contain a set of inequality constraints. In the constrained learning rate algorithm, the learning rate is updated at each iterative instant by an equation derived using the stability conditions. With these stable DBP algorithms, any analog target pattern may be implemented by a steady output vector which is a nonlinear vector function of the stable equilibrium point. The applicability of the approaches presented is illustrated through both analog and binary pattern storage examples.
A Functional Assessment of Executive Functioning: The Hamburger Turning Task

The number of neuropsychological tests and functional assessments that claim to have a relationship between the patient's testing performance and behavior in real-world settings is limited. Additionally, there is a growing concern among testing professionals that most, if not all, psychological tests and standardized assessments introduce environments and stimuli that people never encounter and tasks that often do not emulate life situations or vocational requirements. In order to address the current issues surrounding the ecological validity of psychometric tests, this pilot study introduced a hands-on assessment using a simulated real-world vocational task. Twenty-three subjects between the ages of 18-26, with varying cognitive disabilities, completed a vocational simulation task, the Hamburger Turning Task (HTT), and the results were compared to their scores on a battery of commonly used neuropsychological tests (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Finger Tapping test, Controlled Oral Word Association Test, Trailmaking Test, Stroop Color-Word test) that purport to measure aspects of executive functioning analogous to those measured by the HTT. A Pearson-product correlation was run to compare the relationship between the scores from the HTT and the psychometric tests, as well as the relationship between both psychometric tests and HTT scores and daily behavioral observations of executive functioning related performance over a 7 week period. The results of the study found a significant correlation between the HTT and behavioral data, leading us to believe that the HTT can be used to evaluate real-world aspects of executive functioning. It was also found that there was a high level of interrater reliability on the scoring of the HTT, allowing future researchers to use this as a standardized tool.
Coupled Functional Maps

Classical formulations of the shape matching problem involve the definition of a matching cost that directly depends on the action of the desired map when applied to some input data. Such formulations are typically one-sided - they seek for a mapping from one shape to the other, but not vice versa. In this paper we consider an unbiased formulation of this problem, in which we solve simultaneously for a low-distortion map relating the two given shapes and its inverse. We phrase the problem in the spectral domain using the language of functional maps, resulting in an especially compact and efficient optimization problem. The benefits of our proposed regularization are especially evident in the scarce data setting, where we demonstrate highly competitive results with respect to the state of the art.
Unusual Chemokine Receptor Antagonism Involving a Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Pathway1

Antagonism of chemokines on chemokine receptors constitutes a new regulatory principle in inflammation. Eotaxin (CCL11), an agonist for CCR3 and an attractant of eosinophils, basophils, and Th2 lymphocytes, was shown to act as an antagonist for CCR2, which is widely expressed on leukocytes and is essential for inflammatory responses. In this report we provide direct evidence for a novel mechanism how chemokine receptor function can be arrested by endogenous ligands. We show that binding of eotaxin to CCR2 stimulates the mitogen-activated protein kinases extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2). Activation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 1/2-ERK pathway is indispensable for eotaxin-mediated attenuation of CCR2 function, as inhibition of ERK phosphorylation abolishes the arresting effect. ERK is also activated by CCR2 agonists, e.g., monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (CCL2). However, the involved pathways are different, although in either case coupling of CCR2 to pertussis toxin-sensitive heterotrimeric G proteins is necessary. The results are in agreement with the view that CCR2 could assume different activation states depending on the ligand it encounters. With respect to actin polymerization and calcium mobilization, the different activation states lead to agonistic and antagonistic responses. It is conceivable that the intracellular signal transduction pathway that is activated by eotaxin could cause an attenuation of proinflammatory responses mediated by CCR2.