Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software cache support and API design for embedded DSP processor

In embedded SoC design, memory hierarchies are playing increasingly important roles for system performances. There is a significant latency gap between internal and external memory accesses. The external memory access might downgrade the performance of embedded systems. Application developers must explicitly handle data transfer between external and internal memories. That is a burden for programmers. In this paper, we propose a software cache API to help programmers to ease this problem. The proposed API includes pointwise element access and block version of access to software cache. We also give a detailed description for design and implementation of software cache API. As a case study, the software cache API is implemented on PAC DSP, a high performance DSP aiming for multi-media applications. We evaluate the implementation with UTDSP benchmark suite. The experiment results show that the proposed software cache can efficiently reduce the external memory access times.
Cognitive Asymmetrical Neural Substrates of Tactile Discrimination in Humans : A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Tokiko Harada,1,2 Daisuke N. Saito,2 Ken-Ichi Kashikura,3 Tetsuhiro Sato,3 Yoshiharu Yonekura,3 Manabu Honda,1 and Norihiro Sadato1,2,4 1Department of Physiological Sciences, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Kanagawa 240-0193, Japan, 2National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan, 3Biomedical Imaging Research Center, Fukui Medical University, Fukui 910-1193, Japan, and 4Japan Science and Technology Corporation/Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society, Kawaguchi 332-0012, Japan
Data analysis using circular causality in networks

Complex systems in causal relationships are known to be circular rather than linear; this means that a particular result is not produced by a single cause, but rather that both positive and negative feedback processes are involved. However, although interpreting systemic interrelationships requires a language formed by circles, this has only been developed at the diagram level, and not from an axiomatic point of view. The first difficulty encountered when analysing any complex system is that usually the only data available relate to the various variables, so the first objective was to transform these data into cause-and-effect relationships. Once this initial step was taken, our discrete chaos theory could be applied by finding the causal circles that will form part of the system attractor and allow their behavior to be interpreted. As an application of the technique presented, we analyzed the system associated with the transcription factors of inflammatory diseases. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 19: 15-19, 2014
Oscillometric estimation of aortic pulse wave velocity: comparison with intra-aortic catheter measurements

ObjectivesRecently, a novel method to estimate aortic pulse wave velocity (aPWV) noninvasively from an oscillometric single brachial cuff waveform reading has been introduced. We investigated whether this new approach provides acceptable estimates of aPWV compared with intra-aortic catheter measurements. MethodsEstimated values of aPWV obtained from brachial cuff readings were compared with those obtained using an intra-aortic catheter in 120 patients (mean age 61.8±10.8 years) suspected for coronary artery disease undergoing cardiac catheterization. Differences between aPWV values obtained from the test device and those obtained from catheter measurements were estimated using Bland–Altman analysis. ResultsThe mean difference±SD between brachial cuff-derived values and intra-aortic values was 0.43±1.24 m/s. Comparison of aPWV measured by the two methods showed a significant linear correlation (Pearson’s R=0.81, P<0.0001). The mean difference for repeated oscillometric measurements of aPWV was 0.05 m/s, with 95% confidence interval limits from −0.47 to 0.57 m/s. ConclusionaPWV can be obtained using an oscillometric device with brachial cuffs with acceptable accuracy compared with intra-aortic readings.
Auditory negative priming in speeded reactions and temporal order judgements

Two experiments are reported that demonstrate negative priming for auditory stimuli. Reaction times and temporal order judgements were used as the dependent measures in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. In Experiment 1, participants classified tones presented to one ear as wind or string instruments while ignoring tones presented to the other ear. The task was identical for both the prime and the subsequent probe presentations. Probe reactions were slower for previously ignored tones than for tones that had not occurred during the prime presentation. Probe reactions to previously attended tones were faster than reactions to nonrepeated tones. In Experiment 2, the probe reactions were replaced by temporal order judgements. The probability of accepting a tone as antecedent was lower for previously ignored primes than for new tones. No difference was observed between previously attended and new tones. The results are compatible with the conclusion that distractor inhibition is a necessary component of the processes that bring about observable negative priming phenomena.
Global stabilization of cart-pendulum system with sliding mode controller: Experimental results

The objective of the present work is the global stabilization of a cart-pendulum system. First, an energy shaping algorithm is developed to bring up the pendulum to the close vicinity of its upright equilibrium point. The energy control technique employed here also takes care of the practical constraint of limited cart track length. Next, a sliding mode controller (SMC) does the task of keeping the pendulum at its upright position. The real-time implementation of the control scheme is carried out for the cart-inverted pendulum system. The robustness under uncertainty caused by dry friction, plant parameter variations; disturbance rejection and noise attenuation of the SMC have been investigated thoroughly in real-time.
Psychological distress in couples dealing with colorectal cancer: gender and role differences and intracouple correspondence.

OBJECTIVES This longitudinal study examined patterns of psychological distress in couples facing colorectal cancer within 6 months after surgery. In addition, correspondence in psychological distress was investigated between patients and their spouses, taking into account the gender of the patient. METHOD The study had a longitudinal design, involving three assessment points; (T1) within 2 weeks after surgery, (T2) 3 months after baseline and (T3) 6 months after baseline. At T1, respondents were asked to indicate how they felt during the week prior to surgery. At T2 and T3, respondents reported their feelings during the preceding week. Psychological distress was measured using the 20-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) in 137 couples. RESULTS Concerning the week prior to surgery, females reported more distress being a patient, whereas males reported more distress being a spouse. In comparison with a reference group, females as well as males, regardless of their role, showed increased levels of psychological distress prior to surgery. At 3 and 6 months following surgery, increased levels of distress continued to exist in females, whereas males' distress returned to normal levels. Neither within female-patient couples, nor within male-patient couples, were associations between patients' and spouses' distress found. CONCLUSION We demonstrated a considerable impact of the cancer diagnosis on both female and male patients and their spouses before and 3 months after surgery. Six months after surgery, females, in particular, appear to be vulnerable to distress.
L'élevage et les productions animales dans l'économie de la fin du second âge du fer à Levroux (Indre)

Cette these est une etude archeozoologique qui porte sur un important site de gaule centrale, Levroux dans l'Indre, site exceptionnel pour sa richesse avec environ 200 000 restes osseux. Nous avons cherche a comprendre a quel degre les productions et les services lies aux animaux domestiques participent aux bouleversements economiques et sociaux des IIeme et Ier s. Av. J. -C. Dans ce village dont la fonction n'etait plus uniquement agricole et qui remplissait un important role economique, politique et commercial sur le territoire des bituriges. La longue occupation du site et des alentours, de la Tene c2 a la periode gallo-romaine, a permis de suivre l'evolution de l'ensemble des operations qui assurent la production, l'entretien et l'utilisation des animaux domestiques et de travailler a la fois au niveau synchronique et diachronique. Nous avons ainsi pu mettre en evidence une importante restructuration economique qui se manifeste en particulier par une specialisation et par une intensification des productions vivrieres et qui est liee au developpement d'echanges sur courtes et sur longues distances. Parallelement, nous avons constate l'apparition de methodes de selection des animaux domestiques et l'amelioration progressive des conditions d'elevage qui temoignent d'une recherche de rentabilite et d'une specialisation. Tous ces resultats ont revele que des sa fondation, le site de Levroux presentait un certain nombre de caracteristiques originales, et que le village jouait un role eminent au niveau regional tout en etant integre a des reseaux de distribution sur longue distance. D'autre part, ce travail a montre a quel point la connaissance des modalites de l'elevage et des productions liees aux animaux domestiques est essentielle pour comprendre les bouleversements economiques et sociaux que connait la societe gauloise a la fin de l'âge du fer.
Prognosis and management after a first myocardial infarction.

PATIENTS who have a first myocardial infarction deserve consideration as a special group. For the most part, the early mortality rate from a first infarction is roughly half the rate found in patients with a second or third infarction,1 , 2 and the long-term survival is considerably better than in patients who have had previous infarctions.3 , 4 The published studies on risk stratification4 5 6 and treatment7 8 9 after an infarction have paid remarkably little attention to patients having their first myocardial infarction. Such patients constitute a majority (60 to 80 percent) of those with acute infarction, yet they are rarely viewed as a special group.
PASTEURELLA MULTOCIDA IN PERITONEAL DIALYSIS: A RARE CAUSE OF PERITONITIS ASSOCIATED WITH EXPOSURE TO DOMESTIC CATS

Abstract Pasteurella multocida is a rare cause of peritonitis in peritoneal dialysis patients with only 10 cases reported in the literature so far. All cases were observed in patients with close contact with cats, usually with a direct puncture of the dialysis tubing. We report a case of Pasteurella multocida peritonitis in a patient maintained under continuous cycling peritoneal dialysis (CCPD), who had frequent and close contact with cats. Patients should be made aware of this potential complication and advised to keep domestic animals away from the location of their peritoneal exchanges.
Neuropilin-1-Expressing Microglia Are Associated With Nascent Retinal Vasculature Yet Dispensable for Developmental Angiogenesis.

PURPOSE Neuropilin-1 (NRP-1) is a transmembrane receptor that is critical for vascular development within the central nervous system (CNS). It binds and influences signaling of several key angiogenic factors, such as VEGF-165, semaphorin 3A, platelet derived growth factor, and more. Neuropilin-1 is expressed by neurons and endothelial cells as well as a subpopulation of proangiogenic macrophages/microglia that are thought to interact with endothelial tip cells to promote vascular anastomosis during brain vascularization. We previously demonstrated a significant role for NRP-1 in macrophage chemotaxis and showed that NRP-1-expressing microglia are major contributors to pathologic retinal angiogenesis. Given this influence on CNS angiogenesis, we now investigated the involvement of microglia-resident NRP-1 in developmental retinal vascularization. METHODS We followed NRP-1 expressing microglia during retinal development. We used LysM-cre myeloid lineage-driver cre mice to reduce expression of NRP-1 in retinal myeloid-derived cells and performed a comprehensive morphometric analysis of retinal vasculature during development. RESULTS We provide evidence that NRP-1+ microglia are present throughout the retina during vascular development with a preference for the non-vascularized retina. Using LysM-Cre/Nrp1(fl/fl) mice, we reduced NRP-1 expression by ~65% in retinal microglia and demonstrate that deficiency in NRP-1 in these microglia does not impair retinal angiogenesis. CONCLUSIONS Our data draw a dichotomous role for NRP-1 in cells of myeloid lineage where it is dispensable for adequate retinal developmental vascularization yet obligate for pathologic retinal angiogenesis.
Multivariate Spearman ’ s rho for rank aggregation

We study the problem of rank aggregation: given a set of ranked lists, we want to form a consensus ranking. Our main contribution is the derivation of a nonparametric estimator for rank aggregation based on multivariate extensions of Spearman’s ρ, which measures correlation between a set of ranked lists. Multivariate Spearman’s ρ is defined using copulas, and we show that the geometric mean of normalised ranks maximises multivariate correlation. Motivated by this, we propose a weighted geometric mean approach for learning to rank which has a closed form least squares solution. When only the best or worst elements of a ranked list are known, we impute the missing ranks by the average value, allowing us to apply Spearman’s ρ. Finally, we demonstrate good performance on the rank aggregation benchmarks MQ2007 and MQ2008.
Mining Time Series Data: Moving from Toy Problems to Realistic Deployments

Data mining and knowledge discovery has attracted a lot of research interest in the last decade. Although there is extensive research in this area, we argue that most of the work is not as useful, since the datasets that they are dealing with and the methods that they proposed to solve the problems are more like `toy examples' compared to the much more complicate real-world scenario. We have observed the following two problems that widely exist in most of data mining research. First, parameters will hurt the potential of spreading the ideas in the research community. In a lot of works, there are usually several parameters to tune in the proposed method. We claim that the parameter turning can kill the usefulness of an algorithm and reduce the number of citations. Second, the prevalently existed assumptions about the data further limit their application to solve the real-world problem. We strive to mitigate the above two problems. The contribution of this dissertation is as follows:First, we demonstrate a parameter free framework using MDL to discover the intrinsic features of the data. With the intrinsic cardinality and dimensionality of the time series, we can further understand the underlying meaning of the data, before consulting the domain experts. In addition, the intrinsic features can be used as dimensionality reduction and have huge applications in the various lower bounding techniques. Second, we show a time series classification framework that has none of the prevalent assumptions. We propose to use the data editing technique to automatically build a data dictionary. In addition, our classification framework has the capability to say `I do not know' at a certain point when classifying the incoming queries that does not belong to any concept in the training data. Our results show that a small fraction of all the data can achieve even better classification results than using all the data. In the last, we propose a dynamically weighted multi-dimensional classification framework, which can smartly choose the weight of each data dimension. The results over extensive datasets from various domains show that our framework is more accurate and robust to the occluded data.
A Specific Role for AKT 3 in the Genesis of Ovarian Cancer through Modulation of G 2M Phase Transition

Ovarian cancer is the major cause of death from gynecological malignancy, and there is an urgent need for new therapeutic targets. The phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/AKT pathway has been strongly implicated in the genesis of ovarian cancer. However, to identify and evaluate potential targets for therapeutic intervention, it is critical to understand the mechanism by which the PI3K/AKT pathway facilitates ovarian carcinogenesis. Here, we show that AKT3 is highly expressed in 19 of 92 primary ovarian tumors. Strikingly, purified AKT3 exhibited up to 10-fold higher specific activity than AKT1, potentially amplifying the effects of AKT3 overexpression. Consistent with this finding, AKT3 levels in a range of ovarian cancer cell lines correlated with total AKT activity and proliferation rates, implicating AKT3 as a key mediator of ovarian oncogenesis. Specific silencing of AKT3 using short hairpin RNA markedly inhibited proliferation of the two cell lines with highest AKT3 expression and total AKT activity, OVCA429 and DOV13, by slowing G2-M phase transition. These findings are consistent with AKT3 playing a key role in the genesis of at least one subset of ovarian cancers. (Cancer Res 2006; 66(24): 11718-25)
Pharmacodynamic study of DDT in cockerels.

White Leghorn cockerels were fed commercial DDT at levels of 250, 500, and 1000 μg/day in the diet. The absorption, distribution, and metabolism of DDT in plasma, brain, liver, kidney, heart, breast muscle, intestinal tract, skin, and fat were investigated, using gas–liquid chromatography in the quantitation of the residues. To aid in assessing chlorinated hydrocarbon toxicity in wild birds, correlations between observed symptoms and the residue levels in possible target tissues were studied in conjunction with the mechanism of action of DDT. The results indicate that the sum of the residues of p,p′-DDD, o,p′-DDT, and p,p′-DDT (toxic residues) in the brain was the best parameter for diagnosing DDT poisoning in birds. Signs of DDT toxicity were observed in all birds with brain levels in excess of 35 p.p.m. The lowest level of toxic residues in the brains of dead birds was 27.7 p.p.m. The mean brain level of toxic residues in tremoring and dead birds was 54.2 p.p.m. Metabolism and the significance of the le.
Including Anatomical and Functional Information in MC Simulation of PET and SPECT Brain Studies. Brain-VISET: A Voxel-Based Iterative Method

Monte Carlo (MC) simulation provides a flexible and robust framework to efficiently evaluate and optimize image processing methods in emission tomography. In this work we present Brain-VISET (Voxel-based Iterative Simulation for Emission Tomography), a method that aims to simulate realistic [ 99mTc]-SPECT and [ 18F]-PET brain databases by including anatomical and functional information. To this end, activity and attenuation maps generated using high-resolution anatomical images from patients were used as input maps in a MC projector to simulate SPECT or PET sinograms. The reconstructed images were compared with the corresponding real SPECT or PET studies in an iterative process where the activity inputs maps were being modified at each iteration. Datasets of 30 refractory epileptic patients were used to assess the new method. Each set consisted of structural images (MRI and CT) and functional studies (SPECT and PET), thereby allowing the inclusion of anatomical and functional variability in the simulation input models. SPECT and PET sinograms were obtained using the SimSET package and were reconstructed with the same protocols as those employed for the clinical studies. The convergence of Brain-VISET was evaluated by studying the behavior throughout iterations of the correlation coefficient, the quotient image histogram and a ROI analysis comparing simulated with real studies. The realism of generated maps was also evaluated. Our findings show that Brain-VISET is able to generate realistic SPECT and PET studies and that four iterations is a suitable number of iterations to guarantee a good agreement between simulated and real studies.
Predicting risk of delivering low birthweight babies: which indicator is better?

The purpose of this paper was to examine potential advantages and disadvantages of anthropometric indicators of high risk of delivering low birth weight babies (LBW) (babies under 2.5kg.). Indicators and high risk limits selected for this analysis were: weight gain during pregnancy =or< 16th percentile for gestational age equivalent to 8kg. at term); armircumference (=or< 23.5cm at any point in pregnancy); uterine height (=or< 10 percentile for gestational age); and weight gain expressed as % of standard weight for height (equal or less than 90% at the beginning of pregnancy). The results suggest that: 1) arm circumference independently of gestational age has similar sensitivity and specificity as weight gain during pregnancy for gestational age. Uterine height and weight gain for standard height may perform a little better. 2) At the community level combinations of arm circumference either with uterine height or with weight for height (at health services level) would produce better results. Such a combination of measures would help to avoid 4 to 5 times more LBW babies for a given input of resources as compared with no use of risk indicators. Therefore the hypothesis is proposed that this last combination of risk indicators is the best feasible option to use in poor malnourished population with high prevalence of LBW babies. (authors modified)
The Relationship between Stress Coping Strategies and Mental Health in Patients with Cardiovascular Disorders

Introduction: Cardiovascular diseases are one of the most common causes of death and health problems in the world. Identifying and modifying the risk factors for these diseases play an important role in reducing the effects and mortality caused by them. Considering the role of psychological stress on the health and well-being of this group of patients, this study examined the relationship between stress coping styles and mental health in patients with cardiovascular disorders. Methodology: The sample consisted of 85 patients (46 women and 39 men) with an average age of 40/72 years (SD =29/11) which were selected from among the patients referred to cardiologists in the city of Semnan. Tools used in this study were two questionnaires, i.e. stress coping questionnaire and general health questionnaire GHQ-28. Results: Data analysis was performed using Pearson correlation coefficient and multi-variant regression analysis. In general, the results showed that there is a significant negative correlation between emotion-focused coping style and mental health in patients with cardiovascular disorders (r= -0/473, p < 0/01). Also, there is a significant positive correlation between problem--focused coping style and mental health (r=0/380, p < 0/01). Therefore, these styles can be predictors of mental health in these patients. Conclusion: Using appropriate stress coping strategies can moderate unwanted effects of stressful situations on the physical, psychological and emotional health of the people. Patients with cardiovascular disorders mostly react to