Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Joint Effects of C-Reactive Protein and Glycated Hemoglobin in Predicting Future Cardiovascular Events of Patients With Advanced Atherosclerosis

Background—C-reactive protein (CRP) and glycohemoglobin (HbA1c) are established risk factors for the development of cardiovascular disease. We investigated the joint effects of these parameters on cardiovascular outcome of patients with advanced atherosclerosis. Methods and Results—We studied 454 patients with advanced atherosclerosis (median age, 69 years; 264 male). Cardiovascular risk profile, high-sensitivity CRP (hs-CRP), and HbA1c were obtained at baseline, and patients were followed for a median of 21 months (interquartile range, 13 to 26) for the occurrence of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) (myocardial infarction, percutaneous coronary interventions, coronary artery bypass graft, carotid revascularization, stroke, and death). We observed 166 MACE in 128 patients (28%). Cumulative event-free survival rates at 6, 12, and 24 months were 91%, 85%, and 73%, respectively. Adjusted hazard ratios for the occurrence of MACE according to increasing quartiles of hs-CRP and HbA1c were 1.35 (P =0.31), 1.90 (P =0.026) and 2.13 (P =0.007), and 1.40 (P =0.26), 1.81 (P =0.059), and 2.36 (P =0.023), respectively, compared with the lowest quartiles. Considering both parameters jointly, we found that patients with hs-CRP >0.44 mg/dL and HbA1c >6.2% (upper quartiles) were at highest risk for MACE, with each parameter adding to the prognostic information of the other. Conclusions—Inflammation, indicated by hs-CRP, and hyperglycemia, indicated by HbA1c, jointly contribute to the cardiovascular risk of patients with advanced atherosclerosis. Patients with both hs-CRP and HbA1c in the upper quartiles (>0.44 mg/dL and >6.2%, respectively) are at particularly high risk for poor cardiovascular outcome.
Collision Avoidance for a Visuo-motor System Using Multiple Self-organizing Maps

Collision avoidance for a visuo-motor system in unstructured and cluttered environment is described. The achievement of collision avoidance is based on a simplified path planning system and motion control performed by self-organizing maps. The self-organizing maps are learned to determine joint angles of a redundant manipulator. Since the learning algorithm promises to make the manipulator reach targets precisely with obstacle-free poses, the path planning system only needs to plan a collision-free path for the end effector of the manipulator in the image spaces. By means of the cooperation of two self-organizing maps, the system solves occlusion problems successfully. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Understanding DIY punk as activism : realising DIY ethics through cultural production, community and everyday negotiations

This thesis explores the production of DIY punk alternative cultures, communities and identities as activism. Based on an ethnographic study of DIY punk in North East England, it combines and integrates the disciplinary approaches of sociology, cultural studies and geography. Using an interpretivist epistemology, the research focuses on DIY punk participants’ subjective realities and experiences, through participant observation, of punk events and shows, and interviews. Carried out by a researcher who was both embedded in the scene, as a punk participant, and outside it, as an academic PhD student, it enhances methodological and epistemological debates about the ‘insider/outsider’ research stance and subjectivities. This thesis promotes DIY punk as a relevant and rich area for scholarship. It theorises DIY punk participation as cultural production (Moore, 2007), existing within a framework of activism, as participants attempt to bring into being ‘hoped-for futures’ (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010) using a multitude of tactics. Identifying multi-layered and multi-scalar acts of resistance, the narrowness of the concept of activism in the literature is critiqued. A more inclusive conceptualisation of activism, as more than oppositional, is proposed. A DIY ethic is theorised as anti-capitalist and interconnected with other complexly interwoven ideologies and politics. The everyday challenges that participants face, in negotiating a DIY punk ethic, and the interface between DIY punk culture and ‘mainstream’ society, are examined. Participants narratively construct DIY punk through ongoing negotiations, which affect how participants produce and interact with and in DIY punk spaces. The research contributes to scholarship on punk and community by arguing that DIY punk cultural production is strengthened by notions of community. It has wider relevance by exploring the meaning of community in a unique cultural context. It offers a definition of community that recognises DIY punk communities as imagined (Anderson, 1991) but sensitive to the significance of place.
An Analysis of the Community Land Trust Model

Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ concept involves collective ownership of the means of production, rights to information, right to difference, right to self-management, and what he refers to as ‘autogestion. ’ Lefebvre’s ideas have captured the imagination of many grassroots and transnational organizations, such as the Right to the City Alliance and have been applied to various issues in the city dealing with human rights, including access to affordable housing, use of public space, and threats of displacement from gentrification. Within and across these organizations, it becomes critical to examine the contours of ‘the right to the city’ and what rights Lefebvre and activists who use this framework mean as they pursue their social justice agendas. In this study, I examine the community land trust model in the context of the ‘right to the city’ framework that Lefebvre (1996) developed and as interpreted by Purcell (2014). My analysis reveals that the grassroots CLT model more closely embodies the ideals of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ through collective governance and the appropriation of urban space in contrast to other traditional CLT models that focus more narrowly on affordable housing. This study suggests the importance of the community’s voice in realizing the right to the city. INDEX WORDS: Lefebvre, Westside Atlanta, Affordable housing, Community Land Trust, Social justice, Urban geography, Right to the city AN ANALYSIS OF THE COMMUNITY LAND TRUST MODEL
Spatial patterns of bacterial and archaeal communities along the Romanche Fracture Zone (tropical Atlantic)

The composition of prokaryotic communities was determined in the meso- and bathypelagic waters funneled through the Romanche Fracture Zone (RFZ, 2°7′S, 31°79′W to 0°6′N, 14°33′W) in the tropical Atlantic. Distinct water masses were identified based on their physical and chemical characteristics. The bacterial and archaeal communities were depth-stratified with a total of 116 and 25 operational taxonomic units (OTUs), respectively, distributed among the distinct water masses as revealed by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism, and cloning and sequencing. The relative abundance of Thaumarchaeota, determined by catalyzed reporter deposition-fluorescence in situ hybridization, was significantly higher in deeper layers (Antarctic Bottom Water, AABW, > 4000 m depth), contributing up to 31% to the total prokaryotic community, than in the mesopelagic and lower euphotic layer. Although the contribution of SAR11 to bacterial abundance did not increase with depth, SAR202, SAR324, SAR406 and Alteromonas did increase with depth. Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis revealed successional changes in the bacterial and archaeal community composition of the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) with a passage time through the RFZ of c. 4 months but not in the under- and overlying water masses. Our results indicate that specific water masses harbor distinct bacterial and archaeal communities and that the prokaryotic community of the NADW undergoes successional changes in this conduit between the western and eastern Atlantic basin. Apparently, in the absence of major input of organic matter to specific deep-water masses, the indigenous prokaryotic community adapts to subtle physical and biogeochemical changes in the water mass within a time frame of weeks, similar to the reported seasonal changes in surface water prokaryotic communities.
Faint Agn and the Ionizing Background

We determine the evolution of the faint, high-redshift, optical luminosity function of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) implied by several observationally-motivated models of the ionizing background from 3 < z < 5. Our results depend crucially on whether we use the total ionizing rate measured by the proximity effect technique or the lower determination favored by the flux decrement distribution of Lyα forest lines. Assuming a faint-end luminosity function slope of 1.58 and the SDSS estimates of the bright-end slope and normalization, we find that the luminosity function must break at M B = −24.2,−22.3,−20.8 at z = 3, 4, 5 if we adopt the lower ionization rate and assume no stellar contribution to the background. The breaks must occur at M B = −20.6,−18.7,−18.7 for the proximity effect estimate. Since stars may also contribute to the background, these values are lower limits on the break luminosity, and they brighten by as much as ∼ 2 mag if the escape fraction of ionizing photons from high-z galaxies is consistent with recent estimates: fesc = 0.16. By comparing our expectations to faint AGN searches in the HDF and high-z galaxy fields, we conclude that in order for the proximity effect background to be correct, most of the background must be derived from stars: fesc ≫ 0.16. Conversely, the lower flux-decrement-derived background requires a smaller number of ionizing sources, and faint AGN counts are consistent with this estimate only if there is a limited stellar contribution, fesc <∼0.16. Our derived luminosity functions together with the locally-estimated black hole density suggest that the efficiency of converting mass to light in optically-unobscured AGN is somewhat lower than expected, ǫ <∼0.05 (all models). Comparison with similar estimates based on X-ray counts suggests that more than half of all AGN are obscured in the UV/optical. We also derive lower limits on typical AGN lifetimes and obtain >∼10yr for favored cases. Finally, we make predictions for future faint AGN surveys, and discuss how our results can help constrain models of AGN and galaxy formation.
Smart: Single-Cycle Multihop Traversals over a Shared Network on Chip

As the number of on-chip cores increases, scalable on-chip topologies such as meshes inevitably add multiple hops to each network traversal. The best practice today is to design one-cycle routers, such that the low-load network latency between a source and destination is equal to the number of routers and links (that is, twice the hops) between them. Designers of operating systems, compilers, and cache coherence protocols often try to limit communication to within a few hops because on-chip latency is critical for their scalability. In this article, the authors propose an on-chip network called Smart (Single-cycle Multihop Asynchronous Repeated Traversal) that aims to present a single-cycle datapath all the way from the source to the destination. They do not add any additional fast physical express links in the datapath; instead, they drive the shared crossbars and links asynchronously up to multiple hops within a single cycle. They designed a router and link microarchitecture to achieve such a traversal, and a flow-control technique to arbitrate and set up multihop paths within a cycle. A place-and-route design at 45 nm achieves 11 hops within a 1-GHz cycle for paths without turns (9 hops for paths with turns). The authors observe 5 to 8 times reduction in low-load latencies across synthetic traffic patterns on an 8×8 chip multiprocessor, compared to a baseline one-cycle router network. Full-system simulations with Splash-2 and Parsec benchmarks demonstrate 27 and 52 percent reduction in runtime for private and shared level-2 designs, respectively.
Ideological Polarization and Organizational Form Evolution: A Study of Islamic–Secular Rivalry and High Schools in Turkey, 1971–1998

Abstract:How do rival organizational forms that are associated with different ideological values affect each other's growth? And how do ideological polarization and state regulation impact the growth of these rival organizational forms? We adopt a community ecology framework as the stepping-stone to answer these questions in the context of a study of the dynamics of the Turkish high school educational system from 1971 to 1998—a period characterized by important regulatory changes amid growing ideological polarization between religious Islamic and secular factions. We explore how micro-level ideological Islamic–secular polarization and macro-level state regulation as to female participation may impact the meso-level interaction among high school forms. We demonstrate that rival organizational forms affect each other's growth positively, on average, but that this mutualism is reduced by ideological polarization and reinforced by the increase in female participation in Islamic high school education.
Empathy and theory of mind abilities of children with specific learning disorder (SLD)

ABSTRACT OBJECTIVES: Specific learning disorder (SLD) is a very common disorder in childhood, and it is discussed under neurodevelopmental disorders in the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). SLD affects children's academic achievement, as well as bringing challenges in their social relationships. The purpose of our study is to compare the empathy and theory of mind (ToM) abilities of children with SLD with those of healthy peers. METHODS: A total of 83 children were included in our study, comprising 40 cases diagnosed with SLD and without comorbidity and 43 healthy controls. The case group's mean age was 9.3 ± 1.5 years and the control group's mean age was 9.3 ± 1.3 years. All children were evaluated using the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-age Children – Present and Lifetime Version (K-SADS-PL), ToM tasks, and emotion recognition scales. RESULTS: Children diagnosed with SLD demonstrated statistically significantly worse performance on the Comprehension Test (CT), Unexpected Outcomes Test (UOT), and False-belief Tasks, which evaluated the ToM and empathy abilities. No difference was obtained in intelligence level between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: It was determined that children with SLD had challenges in the ToM and empathy abilities compared to children with healthy development. In conclusion, developing special education programmes by considering such possible shortcomings in the field of social cognition will positively contribute to the elimination of challenges faced by children in their academic and social lives.
Stereo Mapping for A Prototype Lunar Rover

A stereo mapping system developed for a prototype lunar rover is presented in the paper. All the components, including camera calibration, image rectification, stereo matching and reconstruction, are implemented to build a model of the natural terrain. For camera calibration, an iterative calibration algorithm that accounts for both radial and tangential distortion is presented. In each step a closed- form solution is arrived at and the reconstruction results validate its property in improving calibration precision. After image rectification, we utilized a geometry constraint in a multi-stage stereo matching algorithm, which enables the system to process stereo image pairs of various types of natural terrain successfully. Finally we are able to construct the quantitative models of the terrain around the rover, which will be used to detect obstacles and plan path. We have tested the system in laboratory and the preliminary experimental results indicate that the precision and robustness of the system is acceptable to date.
Categorization of Galactic Images Using a Distributed Architecture

Efficient processing of vast amounts of image data has become critical in many areas of astronomy. GalaxyZoo is an online project that uses input from the general public to classify images of over 60 million galaxies. However, as it does not make use of computer assistance in classification, image identification and categorization is exceedingly slow. Although computer vision can be used to automate image identification, it is not always accurate and able to classify images appropriately. Processing large data sets require the ability to store and recall information quickly. In short, rapid identification of astronomical images is hindered by the immense sizes of the image data sets and the inadequacy of current computer vision techniques. In this project, we designed and developed a software system to address both of these issues. First, our system permits rapid image identification and categorization using computer vision whenever possible, and supplements it with a user interface that allows users both to classify images that were not categorized by the automated process and to gauge computer error. Second, to handle vast amounts of image data efficiently, our system is built using the Apache Hadoop distributed file system architecture on commodity computing hardware. In particular, we use the map-reduce framework that supports efficient distributed processing of large data sets on clusters of computers. We are currently analyzing the effectiveness of our approach and system.
Real-time illumination-invariant speed-limit sign recognition based on a modified census transform and support vector machines

In this paper, we propose a robust illumination system for speed-limit sign recognition in real-time. Real-time traffic sign detection with various illuminations is one of the challenges in a vision-based intelligent vehicle system, as illumination varies greatly in real-world road images based on factors such as driving time, weather, lighting conditions, and driving directions. Our method uses a MCT (Modified Census Transform) as an illumination-invariant method for the real-time detection of traffic signs and uses a SVM (Support Vector Machine) as a classifier for detection and validation. With the proposed method, we have obtained a very high detection rate of 99.8% and recognition rates of 98.4% on various real-world driving images.
The Metaphysics of Economic Exchanges

Abstract What are economic exchanges? The received view has it that exchanges are mutual transfers of goods motivated by inverse valuations thereof. As a corollary, the standard approach treats exchanges of services as a subspecies of exchanges of goods. We raise two objections against this standard approach. First, it is incomplete, as it fails to take into account, among other things, the offers and acceptances that lie at the core of even the simplest cases of exchanges. Second, it ultimately fails to generalize to exchanges of services, in which neither inverse preferences nor mutual transfers hold true. We propose an alternative definition of exchanges, which treats exchanges of goods as a special case of exchanges of services and which builds in offers and acceptances. According to this theory: (i) The valuations motivating exchanges are propositional and convergent rather than objectual and inverse; (ii) All exchanges of goods involve exchanges of services/actions, but not the reverse; (iii) Offers and acceptances, together with the contractual obligations and claims they bring about, lie at the heart of all cases of exchange.
Moduli spaces of D-branes in CFT backgrounds

D-branes in curved backgrounds can be treated with techniques of boundary conformal field theory. We discuss the influence of scalar condensates on such branes, i.e. perturbations of boundary conditions by marginal boundary operators. A general criterion is presented that guarantees a boundary perturbation to be truly marginal in all orders of perturbation theory. Our results on boundary deformations have several interesting applications which are sketched at the end of this note.
SoundRiver: Semantically‐Rich Sound Illustration

Sound is an integral part of most movies and videos. In many situations, viewers of a video are unable to hear the sound track, for example, when watching it in a fast forward mode, viewing it by hearing‐impaired viewers or when the plot is given as a storyboard. In this paper, we present an automated visualization solution to such problems. The system first detects the common components (such as music, speech, rain, explosions, and so on) from a sound track, then maps them to a collection of programmable visual metaphors, and generates a composite visualization. This form of sound visualization, which is referred to as SoundRiver, can be also used to augment various forms of video abstraction and annotated key frames and to enhance graphical user interfaces for video handling software. The SoundRiver conveys more semantic information to the viewer than traditional graphical representations of sound illustration, such as phonoautographs, spectrograms or artistic audiovisual animations.
Control of a biped walking with dynamic balance

Human can walk agilely because of their dynamic balance. In this article, we develop a simple algorithm to control bipedal walking with active balance. The robot can reach its expected velocity by controlling stance leg length and can maintain dynamic balance by selecting suitable swing direction. We test our control algorithm in a simulation environment. The tests show that the robot can follow the given velocity, endure external disturbance from front and rear direction, and walk on the uneven or ramp ground. This control algorithm can be used to develop bipedal robot or humanoid robot.
Protein 600 Is a Microtubule/Endoplasmic Reticulum-Associated Protein in CNS Neurons

There is an increasing body of literature pointing to cytoskeletal proteins as spatial organizers and interactors of organelles. In this study, we identified protein 600 (p600) as a novel microtubule-associated protein (MAP) developmentally regulated in neurons. p600 exhibits the unique feature to interact with the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Silencing of p600 by RNA interference (RNAi) destabilizes neuronal processes in young primary neurons undergoing neurite extension and containing scarce staining of the ER marker Bip. Furthermore, in utero electroporation of p600 RNAi alters neuronal migration, a process that depends on synergistic actions of microtubule dynamics and ER functions. p600-depleted migrating neurons display thin, crooked, and “zigzag” leading process with very few ER membranes. Thus, p600 constitutes the only known MAP to associate with the ER in neurons, and this interaction may impact on multiple cellular processes ranging from neuronal development to neuronal maturation and plasticity.