Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Laboratory Evaluation of the Alere q Point-of-Care System for Early Infant HIV Diagnosis

Introduction Early infant diagnosis (EID) and prompt linkage to care are critical to minimise the high morbidity and mortality associated with infant HIV infection. Attrition in the “EID cascade” is common; however, point-of-care (POC) EID assays with same-day result could facilitate prompt linkage of HIV-infected infant to treatment. Despite a number of POC EID assays in development, few have been independently evaluated and data on new technologies are urgently needed to inform policy. Methods We compared Alere q 1/2 Detect POC system laboratory test characteristics with the local standard of care (SOC), Roche CAP/CTM HIV-1 qualitative PCR in an independent laboratory-based evaluation in Cape Town, South Africa. Routinely EID samples collected between November 2013 and September 2014 were each tested by both SOC and POC systems. Repeat testing was done to troubleshoot any discrepancy between POC and SOC results. Results Overall, 1098 children with a median age of 47 days (IQR, 42–117) were included. Birth PCR (age <7 days) comprised of 8% (n = 92) tests while 56% (n = 620) of children tested as part of routine EID (ages 6–14 weeks). In the overall direct comparison, Alere q Detect achieved sensitivity of 95.5% (95% CI, 91.7–97.9%) and a specificity of 99.8% (95% CI, 99.1–100%). Following repeat testing of discordant samples and exclusion of any inconclusive results, the POC assay sensitivity and specificity were 96.9% (95% CI 93.4–98.9%) and 100% (lower 95% CI 98%) respectively. Among birth PCR tests the POC assay had slightly lower sensitivity (93.3% vs 96.5% in routine EID) and higher assay error rate (10% vs 5% in samples of older children, p = 0.04). Conclusion Our results indicate this POC assay performs well for EID in the laboratory. The high specificity and thus high positive predictive value would suggest a positive POC result may be adequate for immediate infant ART initiation. While POC testing for EID may have particular utility for birth testing at delivery facilities, the lower sensitivity and error rate requires further attention, as does field implementation of POC EID technologies in other clinical care settings.
Mining opinions in Arabic text using an improved “Semantic Orientation using Pointwise Mutual Information” Algorithm

This paper presents an optimized approach for mining opinions in Arabic Religious Decrees using an improved “Semantic Orientation using Pointwise Mutual Information” Algorithm. The original approach executed a number of steps to classify a religious decree into either Halal (Allowed) or Haraam (Prohibited). Those steps included Data Collection, Simple Text Preprocessing, Manual Data labeling, Advanced Text Preprocessing, Weight Calculation and experimentation using Supervised and Unsupervised Learning Algorithms. Weight Calculation process utilized SO-PMI Algorithm proposed by Wang and Araki in 2008. Results obtained by original approach gave an accuracy rate of 73.08%. The new approach utilizes an improved SO-PMI Algorithm that executes a series of advanced steps to improve the calculation of the weights. The improved algorithm increased the accuracy rate of the Unsupervised Learning Algorithm up to 20% but produced poor results for the Supervised Learning Algorithm.
Analysis on the Spatial Difference of Economic Compactness in Dongting Lake Ecological Economic Zone Based on the Entropy Value Method

In dongting lake ecological economic zone (hunan) within the territory of 26 counties as the research object, using the method of entropy value, according to 2013 statistical yearbook in hunan province, investigation of dongting lake ecological economic zone of the compact degree of city economy in set up multiple indexes composite measurement model. Through assignment of 13 indicators weight, and compact degree of 26 counties and cities economy score analysis thinks, dongting lake ecological economic zone city economy overall not high compactness, internal significant difference, and regional differentiation characteristics obviously, wangcheng high compactness and yueyang area economy, changde and yiyang need to speed up the development, improve the economic compactness. Through analysis, dongting lake ecological economic zone economic compact degree of motivation mechanism mainly includes the system regulation, economy and population drive three elements, three factors work together, promote synergy economic compact degree.
Interactive comment on “ Remotely sensed land-surface energy fluxes at sub-field scale in heterogeneous agricultural landscape and coniferous plantation ” by R .

It is noted (p. 4860, lines 3-5) that the ALEXI and DTD models are based on TSEB. Similarly, on p. 4867 (lines 8-9) it is stated that ALEXI and DTD have been developed from the TSEB. The TSEB model has been presented in Appendix A1. Where is the TSEB version referred to in Sect. 3.1 and Appendix A1 different from the versions described in Norman et al. (1995), Norman et al. (2000), Anderson et al. (1995), and Anderson et al. (1997)? Similarly: where does the DTD model described in Appendix
Numerical Solution for the Falkner-Skan Boundary Layer Viscous Flow over a Wedge

We explore the problem of the Falkner-Skan boundary layer flow past a wedge considering the velocity slip condition and nanofluid. The governing partial differential equation is transformed into an ordinary differential equation. The numerical results of the resulting ordinary system are obtained using Matlab software. The effect of the slip parameter on the flow and the presence of the nanofluids are discussed.
A Novel Cellular Defect in Diabetes

OBJECTIVE Skeletal muscle myopathy is a common diabetes complication. One possible cause of myopathy is myocyte failure to repair contraction-generated plasma membrane injuries. Here, we test the hypothesis that diabetes induces a repair defect in skeletal muscle myocytes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Myocytes in intact muscle from type 1 (INS2Akita+/−) and type 2 (db/db) diabetic mice were injured with a laser and dye uptake imaged confocally to test repair efficiency. Membrane repair defects were also assessed in diabetic mice after downhill running, which induces myocyte plasma membrane disruption injuries in vivo. A cell culture model was used to investigate the role of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and the receptor for AGE (RAGE) in development of this repair defect. RESULTS Diabetic myocytes displayed significantly more dye influx after laser injury than controls, indicating a repair deficiency. Downhill running also resulted in a higher level of repair failure in diabetic mice. This repair defect was mimicked in cultured cells by prolonged exposure to high glucose. Inhibition of the formation of AGE eliminated this glucose-induced repair defect. However, a repair defect could be induced, in the absence of high glucose, by enhancing AGE binding to RAGE, or simply by increasing cell exposure to AGE. CONCLUSIONS Because one consequence of repair failure is rapid cell death (via necrosis), our demonstration that repair fails in diabetes suggests a new mechanism by which myopathy develops in diabetes.
Automatic design of application-specific reconfigurable processor extensions with UPaK synthesis kernel

This article presents a new tool for automatic design of application-specific reconfigurable processor extensions based on UPaK (Abstract Unified Patterns Based Synthesis Kernel for Hardware and Software Systems). We introduce a complete design flow that identifies new instructions, selects specific instructions and schedules a considered application on the newly created reconfigurable architecture. The identified extensions are implemented as specialized sequential or parallel instructions. These instructions are executed on a reconfigurable unit implementing all merged patterns. Our method uses specially developed algorithms for subgraph isomorphism that are implemented as graph matching constraints. These constraints together with separate algorithms are able to efficiently identify computational patterns and carry out application mapping and scheduling. Our methods can handle both time-constrained and resource-constrained scheduling. Experimental results show that the presented method provides high coverage of application graphs with small number of patterns and ensures high application execution speedup both for sequential and parallel application execution with reconfigurable processor extensions implementing selected patterns.
Salient object detection by multi-level features learning determined sparse reconstruction

We propose a salient object detection algorithm via multilevel features learning determined sparse reconstruction. There are three stages in our method. First, the test image are successively processed by a segmentation and semantic information generation procedures. Second, three kinds of features are extracted from semantic, global, and local levels for each superpixel to train a random forest regressor, the learned regression model is then used to generate an initial saliency map. Third, the ultimate detection result is produced using sparse reconstruction determined by the initial saliency map. Compared with most approaches, the proposed method has two obvious advantages. First, the heterogeneous regions inside salient object are often allocated similar saliency values in saliency map. Second, there are much fewer false positives in our detection results. The superior performance of our method were evaluated on four datasets with 12 state-of-the-art approaches.
MicroRNA-mediated down-regulation of NKG2D ligands contributes to glioma immune escape

Malignant gliomas are intrinsic brain tumors with a dismal prognosis. They are well-adapted to hypoxic conditions and poorly immunogenic. NKG2D is one of the major activating receptors of natural killer (NK) cells and binds to several ligands (NKG2DL). Here we evaluated the impact of miRNA on the expression of NKG2DL in glioma cells including stem-like glioma cells. Three of the candidate miRNA predicted to target NKG2DL were expressed in various glioma cell lines as well as in glioblastomas in vivo: miR-20a, miR-93 and miR-106b. LNA inhibitor-mediated miRNA silencing up-regulated cell surface NKG2DL expression, which translated into increased susceptibility to NK cell-mediated lysis. This effect was reversed by neutralizing NKG2D antibodies, confirming that enhanced lysis upon miRNA silencing was mediated through the NKG2D system. Hypoxia, a hallmark of glioblastomas in vivo, down-regulated the expression of NKG2DL on glioma cells, associated with reduced susceptibility to NK cell-mediated lysis. This process, however, was not mediated through any of the examined miRNA. Accordingly, both hypoxia and the expression of miRNA targeting NKG2DL may contribute to the immune evasion of glioma cells at the level of the NKG2D recognition pathway. Targeting miRNA may therefore represent a novel approach to increase the immunogenicity of glioblastoma.
Fault indulgent in embedded memory using WCET real-time embedded system

The growing density of integration and the increasing percentage of system-on-chip memory occupied by embedded programs have led to an increase in the expected amount of power consumption. In order to reduce the integrity and iterations of the embedded programs the WCET has been implemented. By monitoring the Worst Case Execution time we can reduce the clock cycles required by each instruction of the program, which analogously increases the memory consumption based on both RAM and ROM memory in the embedded system and also power consumption criteria. In this paper, a compiler level optimization, namely WCET-aware rescheduling register allocation, is proposed to achieve WCET minimization for realtime embedded systems. The novelty of the proposed approach is that the effects of register allocation, instruction scheduling, and cluster assignment on the quality of generated code are taken into account for WCET minimization. Three compilation processes are integrated into a single phase balanced result obtained with 6kbytes of ROM reduction from 8kbytes.
Tradeoffs in the Complexity of Backdoor Detection for Combinatorial Problems

There has been considerable interest in the identification of structural properties of combinatorial problems that lead to efficient algorithms for solving them. Some of these properties are “easily” identifiable, while others such as backdoor sets are of interest because they capture key aspects of state-of-the-art constraint solvers as well as of many real-world problem instances. In particular, it was recently shown that the problem of identifying a strong Hornor 2CNF-backdoor can be solved by exploiting equivalence with deletion backdoors, and is NP-complete. We prove that strong backdoor identification becomes harder than NP (unless NP=coNP) as soon as the inconsequential sounding feature of empty clause detection (present in all modern SAT solvers) is added. More interestingly, in practice such a feature as well as polynomial time constraint propagation mechanisms often lead to much smaller backdoor sets. We show experimentally that instances from real-world domains that have thousands of variables often have backdoors of only a few variables. Our results suggest that structural notions explored for designing efficient algorithms for combinatorial problems should capture both statically and dynamically identifiable properties. We also evaluate the effect of different preprocessors on the structure of the instances and hence on the backdoor size. Finally, we also look into strong backdoors for satisfiable instances and their relationship to solution counting.
ECQ: An Efficient Conjunctive Query scheme over encrypted multidimensional data in smart grid

With the deployment of smart meters at individual households, smart grid can collect metering data of users' power consumption. However, users' power usage patterns would also be revealed. To preserve the users' privacy, metering data is mostly encrypted by cryptographic algorithms. When data mining is needed to support decision making or ensure reliability, to find useful information from the encrypted data is very important for smart grid. Most of the traditional keyword searching schemes rarely consider both users' data privacy and requesters' query privacy. In particular, the power system data in smart grid has multidimensional attributes; thus, how to query over the encrypted multidimensional data on all dimensions is a challenging issue in smart grid. To achieve finer grained conjunctive query, this paper proposes an Efficient Conjunctive Query (ECQ) scheme. Specificly, the ECQ incorporates the idea of public key encryption and conjunctive keywords search to achieve conjunctive query without data and query privacy leakage. Security analysis demonstrates that the ECQ can achieve the security requirements, namely, data confidentiality, integrity and privacy, as well as query privacy. In addition, simulation results show that the ECQ can reduce users' computation cost and total communication cost.
Secure Smartcard-Based Fingerprint Authentication ∗

In this paper, the fundamental insecurities hampering a scalable, wide-spread deployment of biometric authentication are examined, and a cryptosystem capable of using fingerprint data as its key is presented. For our application, we focus on situations where a private key stored on a smartcard is used for authentication in a networked environment, and we assume an attacker can launch off-line attacks against a stolen card. Juels and Sudan’s fuzzy vault is used as a starting point for building and analyzing a secure authentication scheme using fingerprints and smartcards called a fingerprint vault. Fingerprint minutiae coordinates mi are encoded as elements in a finite field F and the secret key is encoded in a polynomial f(x) over F [x]. The polynomial is evaluated at the minutiae locations, and the pairs (mi, f(mi)) are stored along with random (ci, di) chaff points such that di 6= f(ci). Given a matching fingerprint, a valid user can seperate out enough true points from the chaff points to reconstruct f(x), and hence the original secret key. The parameters of the vault are selected such that the attacker’s vault unlocking complexity is maximized, subject to zero unlocking complexity with a matching fingerprint and a reasonable amount of error. For a feature location measurement variance of 9 pixels, the optimal vault is 2 times more difficult to unlock for an attacker compared to a user posessing a matching fingerprint, along with approximately a 30% chance of unlocking failure. ∗Supported by The Boeing Company under Illinois Technology Challenge Grant 03-115. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Boeing Company or the State of Illinois. †This work was completed while T. Clancy was with the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior speci£c permission and/or a fee. WBMA’03, November 8, 2003, Berkeley, California, USA. Copyright 2003 ACM 1-58113-779-6/03/00011 . $5.00.
Breastfeeding Practices among Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders

Background. Breastfeeding is associated with a decreased risk of obesity in the early and adult years. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI) experience high rates of obesity which is often obfuscated with aggregated data. Using disaggregated data, we examined breastfeeding practices among NHPI. Methods. Seven databases and reference lists were searched. Two independent researchers extracted relevant studies based on predetermined criteria. Nine studies met our inclusion criteria and a meta-analysis was conducted using random-effects, inverse-various weighted models. Results. Few studies disaggregated NHPI populations when examining breastfeeding practices. Most studies were cross-sectional and our search yielded no randomized or quasirandomized control trials. The results of the meta-analysis indicated that 46.5% NHPI women initiated breastfeeding with 40.8% breastfeeding exclusively. These pooled analyses show that NHPI breastfeeding practices are below the recommended national and international goals and guidelines. Conclusion. Breastfeeding practices among NHPI are heterogeneous and critical disparities exist among certain NHPI subgroups and additional research needs to be conducted to determine the reasons for the disparity. Future studies should work to disaggregate data for NHPI and the various subpopulations. Multicomponent, multilevel strategies are needed to support breastfeeding practices among NHPI.
Factors affecting the demand for labour in large-scale sugarcane farming in three regions of KwaZulu-Natal, 1984-2008.

Many authors have cited the relatively high unemployment rate as the most severe economic problem facing South Africa today. At the same time, government institutions claim that the agricultural sector can help solve the high unemployment rate, as this sector has the potential to create employment for a large number of unemployed South Africans. These institutions do not elaborate on how the sector will provide so many jobs. Published empirical studies on the South African (SA) agricultural sector have recommended ways in which policy-makers may achieve their goals of creating employment. However, most studies on labour considered the entire agricultural sector, whereas this study focuses on a subsector, namely the SA sugarcane sector. The study aims to analyse the potential of the sugarcane SA sector to create employment by estimating longand short-run price (wage) elasticities of labour demand for large-scale sugarcane farms on the South Coast, in the Midlands and in Tugela/Zululand during 1984/1985-2008/2009. Using panel data, two models are estimated by Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Model 1 capturing labour use intensity and using “labour units employed per 1000 tonnes of cane cut” as the dependent variable, while Model 2 captures the total labour units demanded by large-scale sugarcane farmers. Only Model 2 is estimated using simultaneous equations as past studies indicate that labour use intensity may be analysed using single-equation models. For Model 1, the estimates of the long-run wage elasticities compared to the short-run wage elasticities are similar and around -0.5, -0.17 and -0.33 for the South Coast, Midlands and Tugela/Zululand regions, respectively. The wage elasticity estimates for Model 2 in the shortrun were -0.34, -0.24 and -0.17 and in the long run -0.61, -0.42 and -0.30 for the South Coast, Midlands and Tugela/Zululand, respectively. The two econometric techniques (OLS and 3SLS) yielded similar wage elasticities. Results suggest that all labour demand estimates were wage inelastic, with the South Coast having a relatively greater response of labour demand to wage rate changes than the other two regions. Inelastic demand estimates for labour in all three regions may be due to the perennial, long-term nature of sugarcane and farmers taking time to decide how to respond to changes (hikes) in the price of labour. The decline in the demand for labour by large-scale sugarcane farmers due to an increase in real wage rates raises questions about the appropriateness of labour laws and minimum wage
Mathematical Models of Within-Host and Transmission Dynamics to Determine Effects of Malaria Interventions in a Variety of Transmission Settings

A model for Anopheles population dynamics and malaria transmission is combined with a within-host dynamics microsolver to study baseline transmission, the effects of seasonality, and the impact of interventions. The Garki Project is recreated in simulation of the pre-intervention baseline and the different combinations of interventions deployed. Modifications are introduced, and longer project duration, extension of dry-season spraying, and transmission-blocking vaccines together achieve local elimination in some conditions. A variety of interventions are simulated in transmission settings that vary in transmission intensity and underlying seasonality. Adding vaccines to existing vector control efforts extends the ability to achieve elimination to higher baseline transmission and less favorable vector behavior. If one species of the Anopheles gambiae species complex feeds disproportionately outdoors for a given complex average behavior, vector control impacts are less than for a single species. Non-zero dry-season transmission limits seasonal oscillation in parasite dynamics and impact of wet-season interventions.
Adding more fuel to the fire: An eye-tracking study of idiom processing by native and non-native speakers

Using eye-tracking, we investigate on-line processing of idioms in a biasing story context by native and non-native speakers of English. The stimuli are idioms used figuratively (at the end of the day — ‘eventually’), literally (at the end of the day — ‘in the evening’), and novel phrases (at the end of the war). Native speaker results indicate a processing advantage for idioms over novel phrases, as evidenced by fewer and shorter fixations. Further, no processing advantage is found for figurative idiom uses over literal ones in a full idiom analysis or in a recognition point analysis. Contrary to native speaker results, non-native findings suggest that L2 speakers process idioms at a similar speed to novel phrases. Further, figurative uses are processed more slowly than literal ones. Importantly, the recognition point analysis allows us to establish where non-natives slow down when processing the figurative meaning.