Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The relationship between Self-Rating of the Effects of alcohol and alcohol challenge results in ninety-eight young men.

OBJECTIVE The level of intensity of response to a drug is likely to influence the future pattern of intake of the substance. This article evaluates a simple Self-Rating of the Effects (SRE) of alcohol form, and reports the relationship between a person's estimate of the amounts of alcohol usually required for four possible effects during three different time frames and his subjective feelings reported during an alcohol challenge. METHOD SRE forms and results of a challenge with 0.9 ml/kg (0.72 g/kg) of ethanol were available for 18 to 29 year old drinking, but not alcohol dependent, men (N = 98). A subset of 40 subjects completed a second SRE form approximately 1 year later. RESULTS The correlation between the two SRE administration was . 82 (p < .0001), and the results on the SRE were internally consistent, with a higher number of drinks associated with more intense alcohol effects. Focusing on the subjective feelings reported at the 60-minute timepoint during the alcohol challenge, 11 of the 12 alcohol effect categories on the SRE correlated in the predicted direction, including eight that were statistically significant. Evaluating all seven timepoints during the drinking experiment, the average number of drinks on the SRE correlated significantly with the Subjective High Assessment Scale (SHAS) total score at all but the final timepoint. Sons of alcoholics and controls demonstrated similar levels of correlation between SRE and alcohol challenge results. Finally, the SRE correctly identified 79% of the individuals whose levels of response to alcohol fell into the lowest third of intensity during the alcohol challenge, and it correctly classified 60% to 67% of the alcohol challenge subjects who did not fall into that low response category. CONCLUSIONS The SRE is a simple and reliable measure of a person's estimate of the number of drinks required to achieve a response. The form might be helpful in educating people about the intensity of their response to alcohol and might be useful as a point of discussion in curricula focusing on genetic aspects of alcoholism. When alcohol challenges are not possible in a research protocol, the SRE might help identify a less heterogeneous subgroup of individuals at high risk for alcoholism who have a common mechanism increasing their vulnerability.
Application of laser scanning cytometry followed by epifluorescent and differential interference contrast microscopy for the detection and enumeration of Cryptosporidium and Giardia in raw and potable waters

Aims: The main goal of this study was to validate a new laser scanning cytometry method (ChemScanRDI) that couples immunofluorescence detection with differential interference contrast (DIC) confirmation, against manual microscopic enumeration of Giardia and Cryptosporidium (oo)cysts. This study also assessed the basic performance of the new Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) NF T 90‐455 method for Giardia and Cryptosporidium (oo)cyst enumeration with respect to (oo)cyst yield, linearity, repeatability, influence of turbidity and detection limit in raw and potable waters. Methods and Results: The new standard method relies on cartridge (Envirocheck) filtration, immunomagnetic separation purification, immunofluorescence staining and detection followed by DIC confirmation. The recovery was 30–50% for both parasites at seeding levels from 30 to 230 (oo)cysts. The method is linear from 0 to around 400 seeded (oo)cysts and the yield does not significantly vary for turbidity levels from 10 to 40 Formazin Nephelometric Units (FNU). The results were obtained using manual microscopic enumeration of the (oo)cysts. The ChemScanRDI yielded counts that were at least equivalent to those obtained using manual microscopy for both parasites in raw and potable water concentrates, for seeding levels of 10–300 or 10–100, respectively. The purification and labelling method proposed by the supplier of theChemScanRDI (Chemunex) reached very similar recoveries to the AFNOR protocol (70–86% in both cases). Conclusions: Laser scanning cytometry can be used as a more standardized alternative to manual enumeration as part of the new AFNOR standard method. Significance and Impact of the Study: By using laser scanning cytometry instead of manual microscopy, laboratories could circumvent the limitations of manual microscopy, namely: low sample throughput, operator subjectivity and operator fatigue. The study further supports the drive to incorporate laser scanning cytometry in the standard methods for Giardia and Cryptosporidium enumeration.
The Evolution of Collective Strategy Frames in High- and Low-Velocity Industries

We argue that the collective assumptions of firms drive their actions and practices, and create the conditions of industry velocity. In our view, cognitive construction by firms is the primary driver of industry velocity. This is in contrast to the contingency views common in the literature, which hold that industry velocity plays a role by constraining and shaping firm strategies. Specifically, we suggest that firms develop unique assumptions, social networks, and feedback mechanisms; that these mechanisms perpetuate patterns of changes in collective beliefs and aggregate actions; and that these patterns in turn shape high-and low-velocity conditions. We examine these assertions by tracing the collective beliefs of three aircraft (low-velocity) and semiconductor (high-velocity) firms over a 20-year period (1977--1997). Our results suggest that the cognitive construction view of industry velocity is reasonable.
Investigational therapies for acromegaly

Introduction: The treatment of acromegaly aims at normalizing growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-I) levels and controlling tumor growth. The approaches to therapy are essentially three: surgery and pharmacotherapy, alone or in combination, and radiotherapy, generally used in more aggressive tumors. Areas covered: This review focuses on the novel drug formulations being developed for medical therapy of acromegaly. Even though many efficient treatments have been made available to manage acromegaly in the last two decades, a significant number of patients remain still uncontrolled. Medical therapy represents an important therapeutic option and can be used as the first-line treatment in many patients. However, roughly 25% of patients might be considered as poor responsive or resistant to conventional long-acting somatostatin analogs (SSA) treatment. Therefore, new longer-acting SSA, oral SSA formulations, new combined therapies with weekly doses of pegvisomant, combination therapy with pegvisomant (PEG) and cabergoline (CAB) or SSA and new approaches have been proposed. New molecules are currently under investigation in clinical trials, such as the SSA multi-receptor ligand, pasireotide, which represents a promising option therapy, especially in patients not adequately controlled with currently available SSA. Further, temozolomide has been suggested as an efficient drug for treating GH-aggressive pituitary tumors resistant to conventional therapy. Expert opinion: All these novel SSA formulations and new molecules implement the available options in therapies of acromegaly to improve disease control. However, further studies are needed to define the exact role of these newer agents. The predicting factors for response to these new therapies should also be determined.
Novel, Effective and Cost-Efficient Method of Introducing Fluorine into Metal/Hf-based Gate Stack in MuGFET and Planar SOI Devices with Significant BTI Improvement

In this work, we propose a new, effective, and cost-efficient method of introducing fluorine into metal/Hf-based gate stack of planar and multi-gate devices (MuGFET), resulting in significant improvements in both NBTI and PBTI characteristics. The key advantage of this method is that it uses the SF6-based metal gate etch for F introduction, requiring no extra implantation steps. In addition to the significant BTI improvement with the novel method, we also demonstrate, for the first time, better Vth control and increased drive current on MuGFET devices.
A Resilient, Non-neuronal Source of the Spatiotemporal Lag Structure Detected by BOLD Signal-Based Blood Flow Tracking

Recent evidence has suggested that blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals convey information about brain circulation via low frequency oscillation of systemic origin (sLFO) that travels through the vascular structure (“lag mapping”). Prompted by its promising application in both physiology and pathology, we examined this signal component using multiple approaches. A total of 30 healthy volunteers were recruited to perform two reproducibility experiments at 3 Tesla using multiband echo planar imaging. The first experiment investigated the effect of denoising and the second was designed to study the effect of subject behavior on lag mapping. The lag map's intersession test-retest reproducibility and image contrast were both diminished by removal of either the neuronal or the non-neuronal (e.g., cardiac, respiratory) components by independent component analysis-based denoising, suggesting that the neurovascular coupling also comprises a part of the BOLD lag structure. The lag maps were, at the same time, robust against local perfusion increases due to visuomotor task and global changes in perfusion induced by breath-holding at the same level as the intrasession reliability. The lag structure was preserved after time-locked averaging to the visuomotor task and breath-holding events, while any preceding signal changes were canceled out for the visuomotor task, consistent with the passive effect of neurovascular coupling in the venous side of the vasculature. These findings support the current assumption that lag mapping primarily reflects vascular structure despite the presence of sLFO perturbation of neuronal or non-neuronal origin and, thus, emphasize the vascular origin of the lag map, encouraging application of BOLD-based blood flow tracking.
Stereo Error Detection, Correction, and Evaluation

An algorithm is presented for error detection and correction of disparity, as a process separate from stereo matching, with the contention that matching is not necessarily the best way to utilize all the physical constraints characteristic to stereopsis. As a result of the bias in stereo research towards matching, vision tasks like surface interpolation and object modeling have to accept erroneous data from the stereo matchers without the benefits of any intervening stage of error correction. An algorithm which identifies all errors in disparity data that can be detected on the basis of figural continuity and corrects them is presented. The algorithm can be used as a postprocessor to any edged-based stereo matching algorithm, and can additionally be used to automatically provide quantitative evaluations on the performance of matching algorithms of this class. >
Polar codes : A pipelined implementation

Polar codes are a class of codes that can achieve the capacity of binary-input memoryless channels with certain symmetries. These codes have a recursive structure tha t make it possible to encode and decode them within complexity O(N log N) for a code of block length N . This paper presents pipelined architectures with identical modules that are useful for low-complexity implementation of polar codes both in hardware and software. The uniform structure of the modules in the design make it possible to trade complexity for time in hardware implementations.
Continuous Probabilistic Reverse Skyline Monitoring over Uncertain Data Streams

Reverse skyline is useful for supporting many applications, such as marketing decision,environmental monitoring. Since the uncertainty of data is inherent in many scenarios, there is a needfor processing probabilistic reverse skyline queries. In this paper, we study the problem of efficientlyprocessing these queries on uncertain data streams. We first show the formal definitions of reverseskyline probability and probabilistic reverse skyline. Then we propose a new algorithm called CPRSto maintain the most recent N uncertain data elements and to process continuous queries on them.CPRS is based on R-tree, and efficient pruning techniques, one of which is based on a new structurenamed Characteristic Rectangle, are incorporated into it to handling the extra computing complexityarising from the uncertainty of data. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our techniquesare very efficient in handling uncertain data streams.
Access to Primary Care Services Among the Homeless

Objective: To identify barriers and facilitators to primary care access among the homeless using the Equity of Access to Medical Care Framework and to provide recommendations for medical and public health practitioners to improve health among this underserved population. Methods: A quasi-systematic review of the literature was conducted using the PubMed, CINAHL, and PsycINFO databases. Study elements from articles in the final analysis were extracted and categorized into dimensions of access from the Framework. Results: The review identified multiple barriers to primary care access for the homeless. This included lack of insurance coverage and competing priorities. Facilitators to access included tailored health care delivery systems and having a regular source of care. Conclusion: This review provides evidence that health policy initiatives, patient-centered care, and targeted interventions can assist with improving primary care access among the homeless.
On Metro-Line Crossing Minimization

We consider the problem of drawing a set of simple paths along the edges of an embedded underlying graph G = (V;E) so that the total number of crossings among pairs of paths is minimized. This problem arises when drawing metro maps, where the embedding of G depicts the structure of the underlying network, the nodes of G correspond to train stations, an edge connecting two nodes implies that there exists a railway track connecting them, whereas the paths illustrate the metro lines connecting terminal stations. We call this the metro-line crossing minimization problem (MLCM). We examine several variations of the problem for which we develop algorithms that yield optimal solutions.
A distributed software project management tool

The DSPMtool is a distributed client/server software project management information system that consists of the tools and techniques used to gather; analyse, integrate, and disseminate the outputs of various software project management processes. The DSPMtool borrows a few ideas from an emerging group of client/server technology called "groupware", which is essentially a collection of technologies that brings people in different parts of the organization, or even from remote sites across the globe, to work together by collecting and sharing information. Multimedia document management is an example of groupware technology that plays an important role in the design of the DSPMtool. Other groupware technologies such as workflow, e-mail, conferencing, and scheduling invoke a great number of ideas and possibilities for ways of conducting and managing a software project, and some of these have found its way into the DSPMtool.
The Detection of Fault-Prone Programs

The use of the statistical technique of discriminant analysis as a tool for the detection of fault-prone programs is explored. A principal-components procedure was employed to reduce simple multicollinear complexity metrics to uncorrelated measures on orthogonal complexity domains. These uncorrelated measures were then used to classify programs into alternate groups, depending on the metric values of the program. The criterion variable for group determination was a quality measure of faults or changes made to the programs. The discriminant analysis was conducted on two distinct data sets from large commercial systems. The basic discriminant model was constructed from deliberately biased data to magnify differences in metric values between the discriminant groups. The technique was successful in classifying programs with a relatively low error rate. While the use of linear regression models has produced models of limited value, this procedure shows great promise for use in the detection of program modules with potential for faults. >
CMOL Technology Development Roadmap

We present a preliminary analysis of various options and strategies for the development of hybrid CMOS/nanodevice integrated circuits, in particular those of “CMOL” type and its later varieties, and an assessment of the possible impact of this technology for several key areas of microelectronics. We believe that CMOL technology and/or its cousins is the most natural (and possibly the only practicable) way to extend the exponential (Moore’s-Law) development of integrated semiconductor circuits to the next 10 to 15 years, i.e. well beyond the 10-nm frontier.
A 0.8V 10b 8OMS/s 6.5mW Pipelined ADC with Regulated Overdrive Voltage Biasing

A low-voltage design is developed for amplifiers in the pipelined ADC, regulating overdrive voltage to be constant over PVT variations. A prototype 10b 80MS/S pipelined ADC is fabricated in a 90nm CMOS process. The ADC consumes 6.5mW from a 0.8V supply and occupies 1.18 times 0.54mm2
Transforms for prediction residuals in video coding

Typically the same transform, the 2-D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), is used to compress both image intensities in image coding and prediction residuals in video coding. Major prediction residuals include the motion compensated prediction residual, the resolution enhancement residual in scalable video coding, and the intra prediction residual in intra-frame coding. The 2-D DCT is efficient at decorrelating images, but the spatial characteristics of prediction residuals can be significantly different from the spatial characteristics of images, and developing transforms that are adapted to the characteristics of prediction residuals can improve their compression efficiency. In this thesis, we explore the differences between the characteristics of images and prediction residuals by analyzing their local anisotropic characteristics and develop transforms adapted to the local anisotropic characteristics of some types of prediction residuals. The analysis shows that local regions in images have 2-D anisotropic characteristics and many regions in several types of prediction residuals have 1-D anisotropic characteristics. Based on this insight, we develop 1-D transforms for these residuals. We perform experiments to evaluate the potential gains achievable from using these transforms within the H.264 codec, and the experimental results indicate that these transforms can increase the compression efficiency of these residuals.
Caspase-8 Serves Both Apoptotic and Nonapoptotic Roles1

Knockout of caspase-8, a cysteine protease that participates in the signaling for cell death by receptors of the TNF/nerve growth factor family, is lethal to mice in utero. To explore tissue-specific roles of this enzyme, we established its conditional knockout using the Cre/loxP recombination system. Consistent with its role in cell death induction, deletion of caspase-8 in hepatocytes protected them from Fas-induced caspase activation and death. However, application of the conditional knockout approach to investigate the cause of death of caspase-8 knockout embryos revealed that this enzyme also serves cellular functions that are nonapoptotic. Its deletion in endothelial cells resulted in degeneration of the yolk sac vasculature and embryonal death due to circulatory failure. Caspase-8 deletion in bone-marrow cells resulted in arrest of hemopoietic progenitor functioning, and in cells of the myelomonocytic lineage, its deletion led to arrest of differentiation into macrophages and to cell death. Thus, besides participating in cell death induction by receptors of the TNF/nerve growth factor family, caspase-8, apparently independently of these receptors, also mediates nonapoptotic and perhaps even antiapoptotic activities.
HpdR Is a Transcriptional Activator of Sinorhizobium meliloti hpdA, Which Encodes a Herbicide-Targeted 4-Hydroxyphenylpyruvate Dioxygenase

ABSTRACT Sinorhizobium meliloti hpdA, which encodes the herbicide target 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase, is positively regulated by HpdR. Gel mobility shift and DNase I footprinting analyses revealed that HpdR binds to a region that spans two conserved direct-repeat sequences within the hpdR-hpdA intergenic space. HpdR-dependent hpdA transcription occurs in the presence of 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, as well as during starvation.
Acoustic-Prosodic Characteristics of Sleepy Speech - Between Performance and Interpretation

When we address speaker states like sleepiness, two partly competing interests can be observed: both within applications and engineering approaches, we aim at utmost performance in terms of classiﬁcation or regression accuracy – which normally means using a very large feature vector and a brute force approach. The other interest is interpretation: we want to know what tells apart atypical (here: sleepy) speech from typical (here: non-sleepy) speech, i.e., their respective feature characteristics. Both interests cannot be served at the same time. In this paper, we pre-select a small number of easily interpretable acoustic-prosodic features modelling spectrum and prosody, based on the literature and on the general idea of sleepiness being characterised by relaxation. Performance obtained with these single features and this small feature vector is compared with the performance obtained with a very large feature vector; moreover, we discuss to which extent the features chosen model relaxation as sleepiness characteristic.
Relaxed hover solutions for multicopters: Application to algorithmic redundancy and novel vehicles

This paper presents a relaxed definition of hover for multicopters with propellers pointing in a common direction. These solutions are found by requiring that the multicopter remain substantially in one position, and that the solutions be constant when expressed in a coordinate system attached to the vehicle. The vehicle’s angular velocity is then shown to be either zero or parallel to gravity. The controllability of a vehicle’s attitude about these solutions is then investigated. These relaxed hover solutions may be applied as an algorithmic failsafe, allowing, for example, a quadrocopter to fly despite the complete loss of one, two, or three of its propellers. Experimental results validate the quadrocopter failsafe for two types of failure (a single propeller and two opposing propellers failing), and a nonlinear simulation validates the remaining two types of failure (two adjacent and three propellers failing). The relaxed hover solutions are also shown to allow a multicopter to maintain flight in spite of extreme center of mass offsets. Finally, the design and experimental validation of three novel vehicles is presented.