Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phosphorus-induced nephrocalcinosis in female rats: a study on regression and clinical abnormalities

The question addressed was whether pre-established phosphorus (P)-induced nephrocalcinosis would regress after dietary P restriction. Female rats were fed purified diets containing either 0·2% (w/w) P(low P) or 0·6% P (high P). After 29 days, the high-P diet had caused massive nephrocalcinosis as demonstrated chemically (by the analysis of calcium in kidney) and histologically Jby inspection of kidney sections stained for calcium phosphate deposits). Switching rats from the high P to the low P diet did not result in a decrease in the degree of nephrocalcinosis within 91 days. Thus, P-induced nephrocalcinosis may not regress upon subsequent P restriction. Rats that had been fed either the 0·2 or 0·6% P diet for 56 days were examined clinically with respect to 14 selected variables. None of the variables discriminated between rats with or without nephrocalcinosis. This might imply that P-induced nephrocalcinosis in female rats does not cause significant discomfort.
Tracking using explanation-based modeling

We study the tracking problem, namely, estimating the hidden state of an object over time, from unreliable and noisy measurements. The standard framework for the tracking problem is the generative framework, which is the basis of solutions such as the Bayesian algorithm and its approximation, the particle filters. However, the problem with these solutions is that they are very sensitive to model mismatches. In this paper, motivated by online learning, we introduce a new framework -- an {\em explanatory} framework -- for tracking. We provide an efficient tracking algorithm for this framework. We provide experimental results comparing our algorithm to the Bayesian algorithm on simulated data. Our experiments show that when there are slight model mismatches, our algorithm vastly outperforms the Bayesian algorithm.
Bayesian Methods for Phylogeny Independent Detection of Positively Selected Amino Acid Sites

A positively selected amino acid site is one for which natural selection encourages diversification. The identification of such sites is of biomedical importance, as diversifying sites cannot act as reliable binding sites for location-specific drugs. We introduce a new method for detecting positive selection based on a class of Bayesian generalized linear models (GLMs). This method does not require explicit assumptions about phylogeny and offers relatively reduced time to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) convergence. We compare our Bayesian GLM approach with three current methods for detecting positive selection: Nei and Gojobori’s ADAPTSITE, Yang’s PAML, and Huelsenbeck and Ronquist’s MrBayes.
Runtime and Architecture Support for Efficient Data Exchange in Multi-Accelerator Applications

Heterogeneous parallel computing applications often process large data sets that require multiple GPUs to jointly meet their needs for physical memory capacity and compute throughput. However, the lack of high-level abstractions in previous heterogeneous parallel programming models force programmers to resort to multiple code versions, complex data copy steps and synchronization schemes when exchanging data between multiple GPU devices, which results in high software development cost, poor maintainability, and even poor performance. This paper describes the HPE runtime system, and the associated architecture support, which enables a simple, efficient programming interface for exchanging data between multiple GPUs through either interconnects or cross-node network interfaces. The runtime and architecture support presented in this paper can also be used to support other types of accelerators. We show that the simplified programming interface reduces programming complexity. The research presented in this paper started in 2009. It has been implemented and tested extensively in several generations of HPE runtime systems as well as adopted into the NVIDIA GPU hardware and drivers for CUDA 4.0 and beyond since 2011. The availability of real hardware that support key HPE features gives rise to a rare opportunity for studying the effectiveness of the hardware support by running important benchmarks on real runtime and hardware. Experimental results show that in a exemplar heterogeneous system, peer DMA and double-buffering, pinned buffers, and software techniques can improve the inter-accelerator data communication bandwidth by 2×. They can also improve the execution speed by 1.6× for a 3D finite difference, 2.5× for 1D FFT, and 1.6× for merge sort, all measured on real hardware. The proposed architecture support enables the HPE runtime to transparently deploy these optimizations under simple portable user code, allowing system designers to freely employ devices of different capabilities. We further argue that simple interfaces such as HPE are needed for most applications to benefit from advanced hardware features in practice.
Adaptive tracking of representative cycles in regular and zigzag persistent homology

Persistent homology and zigzag persistent homology are techniques which track the homology over a sequence of spaces, outputting a set of intervals corresponding to birth and death times of homological features in the sequence. This paper presents a method for choosing a homology class to correspond to each of the intervals at each time point. For each homology class a specific representative cycle is stored, with the choice of homology class and representative cycle being both geometrically relevant and compatible with the birth-death interval decomposition. After describing the method in detail and proving its correctness, we illustrate the utility of the method by applying it to the study of coverage holes in time-varying sensor networks.
Microbial diversity in The Cedars, an ultrabasic, ultrareducing, and low salinity serpentinizing ecosystem

Significance The Cedars, in coastal northern California, is an active serpentinization site. The spring waters emerging from this system feature very high pH (≈11.5), low redox potential (≈−550 mV), and low ionic concentrations, making it an exceptionally challenging environment for life. The microbial communities are different in different springs, strongly correlated with the source of the serpentinizing groundwater feeding the springs (shallow or deep). The shallow groundwater community was similar to those described in other terrestrial serpentinizing sites, while the deep community was distinctly different from any other previously described terrestrial serpentinizing community. These communities have the potential to yield important insights into survival mechanisms in these challenging, early-earth analog environments. The Cedars, in coastal northern California, is an active site of peridotite serpentinization. The spring waters that emerge from this system feature very high pH, low redox potential, and low ionic concentrations, making it an exceptionally challenging environment for life. We report a multiyear, culture-independent geomicrobiological study of three springs at The Cedars that differ with respect to the nature of the groundwater feeding them. Within each spring, both geochemical properties and microbial diversity in all three domains of life remained stable over a 3-y period, with multiple samples each year. Between the three springs, however, the microbial communities showed considerable differences that were strongly correlated with the source of the serpentinizing groundwater. In the spring fed solely by deep groundwater, phylum Chloroflexi, class Clostridia, and candidate division OD1 were the major taxa with one phylotype in Euryarchaeota. Less-abundant phylotypes include several minor members from other candidate divisions and one phylotype that was an outlier of candidate division OP3. In the springs fed by the mixture of deep and shallow groundwater, organisms close to the Hydrogenophaga within Betaproteobacteria dominated and coexisted with the deep groundwater community members. The shallow groundwater community thus appears to be similar to those described in other terrestrial serpentinizing sites, whereas the deep community is distinctly different from any other previously described terrestrial serpentinizing community. These unique communities have the potential to yield important insights into the development and survival of life in these early-earth analog environments.
1 Power optimization in routing protocols for wireless and mobile networks

This chapter presents a survey of energy efficient (a.k.a. po wer-aware) routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks. For such networks, r outing of packets is a significant power-consuming activity since it involves pac ket forwarding by many intermediate nodes in a multi-hop manner. The general conse nsu is that protocols should optimize for energy consumption for routing activit y given the limited battery power available in wireless nodes. The chapter presents a su mmary of recent research done on this topic – evaluation of energy consumption in ad ho c routing protocols, localized routing algorithms that optimize based on power a nd other metrics, network topology generation designed to optimize power consumptio n,routing algorithms that balance power consumption among all network nodes, and algo rithms that maximize nodes’ lifetimes. D R A F T Mar h 19, 2001, 2:39pm D R A F T ii POWER OPTIMIZATION IN ROUTING PROTOCOLS
Does culture count? Comparative performances of top family and non-family firms

Sixty-five of the world’s largest family firms were compared against with those of a matched sample of 65 non-family firms. Contrary to previous studies, family firms here displayed higher profitability and a broadly positive (if slightly inconsistent) relationship between increasing family ownership levels and performance. Sales growth was also consistently higher over 20 years when averaged worldwide. Since other studies have mainly been restricted to single countries or regions, we further analysed differences across continents and country cultures. Within both North America and Europe family and non-family firms were equally profitable (though family firms grew relatively faster in North America). The same was true for ‘high-trust’ countries and also for Anglo-Saxon regions. However, in low-trust countries and also in more long-termist Asian countries, family firms performed better than non-family firms both in terms of profitability and sales growth. La culture compte-t-elle ? Performances comparées des plus grandes entreprises familiales et non-familiales Chris Carr et Suzanne Bateman Soixante-cinq des plus grandes entreprises familiales sont ici comparées à un échantillon similaire de 65 entreprises non-familiales. Contrairement à des études précédentes, les entreprises familiales font état d’une meilleure profitabilité et d’une relation plutôt positive (même si elle n’est pas consistante) entre les niveaux de propriété familiale et la performance. Sur une période de vingt ans, la croissance des ventes est en outre constamment plus élevée lorsque l’on fait la moyenne à l’échelle mondiale. Etant donné que les autres études se sont surtout attachées à des pays ou des régions spécifiques, nous avons en sus analysé les différences entre les différentes cultures continentales et nationales. En Amérique du Nord et en Europe, les entreprises familiales sont tout aussi profitables que les entreprises non familiales (notons cependant qu’en Amérique du nord, les entreprises familiales croissent plus vite). Ceci est aussi le cas pour les pays à « confiance élevée » et les régions anglo-saxonnes. Cependant, dans les pays à « faible confiance » et dans les pays asiatiques dont l’approche est sur le long terme, la performance des entreprises familiales est meilleure que celle des entreprises non-familiales, à la fois en termes de profitabilité et de croissance des ventes.
Validation of the kinect for gait analysis using the GAITRite walkway

Accurate, non-intrusive and straightforward techniques for gait quality analysis can provide important information concerning the fall risk of a person. For this purpose an algorithm was developed which can measure step length and step time using the Kinect depth image. The validity of the measured step length and time is determined using the GAITRite walkway as a ground truth. The results of this validation confirm that the Kinect is well-suited for determining general parameters of a walking sequence (a Spearmans Correlation Coefficient (SCC) of 0.94 for average step length and 0.75 for average step time per walk), but we furthermore show that determining accurate results for single steps is more difficult (SCC of 0.74 for step length and 0.43 for step time for each step), making it harder to measure more complex gait parameters such as e.g. gait symmetry.
OpenWNS - open Wireless Network Simulator

This paper presents the open Wireless Network Simulator (openWNS). This simulation tool was developed in the last 5 years at the department of Communication Networks (ComNets) at RWTH Aachen University and has been released as open source software recently. openWNS is a dynamic event driven system level simulation platform that allows for investigation of dynamic protocol behaviour in multi-cellular scenarios with detailed interference modeling. The simulation platform follows a modular design down to protocol building blocks, which makes it possible to rapidly modify the implemented protocol stacks. openWNS currently includes models from physical to application layer. The protocol modules for IEEE 802.16m and IEEE 802.11n-draft are probably the most interesting for the wireless research community.
There is no fork

We describe a new programming idiom for concurrency, based on Applicative Functors, where concurrency is implicit in the Applicative <*> operator. The result is that concurrent programs can be written in a natural applicative style, and they retain a high degree of clarity and modularity while executing with maximal concurrency. This idiom is particularly useful for programming against external data sources, where the application code is written without the use of explicit concurrency constructs, while the implementation is able to batch together multiple requests for data from the same source, and fetch data from multiple sources concurrently. Our abstraction uses a cache to ensure that multiple requests for the same data return the same result, which frees the programmer from having to arrange to fetch data only once, which in turn leads to greater modularity. While it is generally applicable, our technique was designed with a particular application in mind: an internal service at Facebook that identifies particular types of content and takes actions based on it. Our application has a large body of business logic that fetches data from several different external sources. The framework described in this paper enables the business logic to execute efficiently by automatically fetching data concurrently; we present some preliminary results.
Author Profiling, instance-based Similarity Classification

In digital documents analysis for forensic applications, when anonymous documents are presented and it is not possible with the available tools to determine the true author of the document, there are of vital importance methods that identify the characteristics of the Author Profile (Gender, Age, Personality, etc.). We propose to use a simple method of classification based on the similarity between objects, considering different features for documents representation: (a document corresponds to a set of tweets of a user), the terms used in the tweets, as well as characteristics of opinion and subjectivity presented in them. Our goal will be to classify, based on the content of the tweets, the Gender and language variety of an author from an unknown set of tweets corresponding to him. In the experiments we observed good results in Gender classification, but low values in language variety classification. We processed only the English dataset.
Particle Swarm Optimization of network migration planning

Traffic demand of backbone networks will increase rapidly in the next years, while equipment costs per bit are shrinking. To cope with this development the migration of those backbones towards Carrier Ethernet is investigated. In this paper we discuss a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) heuristic that can be used to enhance the overall migration process. We will introduce the basic migration problem, as well as system models for a possible migration case. Improved heuristics for basic PSO and their application to network migration will be presented. Results regarding algorithm performance and optimized migration cost will be delivered in the paper.
Communication-Efficient Distributed Variance Monitoring and Outlier Detection for Multivariate Time Series

Modern scale-out services are comprised of thousands of individual machines, which must be continuously monitored for unexpected failures. One recent approach to monitoring is latent fault detection, an adaptive statistical framework for scale-out, load-balanced systems. By periodically measuring hundreds of performance metrics and looking for outlier machines, it attempts to detect subtle problems such as misconfigurations, bugs, and malfunctioning hardware, before they manifest as machine failures. Previous work on a large, real-world Web service has shown that many failures are indeed preceded by such latent faults. Latent fault detection is an offline framework with large bandwidth and processing requirements. Each machine must send all its measurements to a centralized location, which is prohibitive in some settings and requires data-parallel processing infrastructure. In this work we adapt the latent fault detector to provide an online, communication- and computation-reduced version. We utilize stream processing techniques to trade accuracy for communication and computation. We first describe a novel communication-efficient online distributed variance monitoring algorithm that provides a continuous estimate of the global variance within guaranteed approximation bounds. Using the variance monitor, we provide an online distributed outlier detection framework for non-stationary multivariate time series common in scale-out systems. The adapted framework reduces data size and central processing cost by processing the data in situ, making it usable in wider settings. Like the original framework, our adaptation admits different comparison functions, supports non-stationary data, and provides statistical guarantees on the rate of false positives. Simulations on logs from a production system show that we are able to reduce bandwidth by an order of magnitude, with below 1% error compared to the original algorithm.
Noun Phrase Chunking for Marathi using Distant Supervision

Information Extraction from Indian languages requires effective shallow parsing, especially identification of “meaningful” noun phrases. Particularly, for an agglutinative and free word order language like Marathi, this problem is quite challenging. We model this task of extracting noun phrases as a sequence labelling problem. A Distant Supervision framework is used to automatically create a large labelled data for training the sequence labelling model. The framework exploits a set of heuristic rules based on corpus statistics for the automatic labelling. Our approach puts together the benefits of heuristic rules, a large unlabelled corpus as well as supervised learning to model complex underlying characteristics of noun phrase occurrences. In comparison to a simple English-like chunking baseline and a publicly available Marathi Shallow Parser, our method demonstrates a better performance.
On The Dynamic Relationship Of Perceptual And Learning And Memory Systems: Mechanisms For Adaptive Perceptual Change

statistical information. A link between higher variability and more abstract learning suggests another way to elucidate how learning can proceed from naturalistic sensory experience. For example, for sensory experiences supported by more abstract statistical information, greater variability of experience may be necessary for the appropriate learning to take place. The opposite may also hold that the more variability inherent in sensory input, the more abstract any patterns of learning. However, not all variability is likely to affect statistical learning. As illustrated in J. J. Gibson and Gibson (1955), participants are able increase their ability to pick out a specific novel drawing despite being presented with perceptual variability. Relevant perceptual variability was presented along three dimen-
Characteristics of Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation in Patients With Continuous Flow Left Ventricular Assist Devices

Background—Left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) are increasingly used as a bridge to cardiac transplantation or as destination therapy. Patients with LVADs are at high risk for ventricular arrhythmias. This study describes ventricular arrhythmia characteristics and ablation in patients implanted with a Heart Mate II device. Methods and Results—All patients with a Heart Mate II device who underwent ventricular arrhythmia catheter ablation at 9 tertiary centers were included. Thirty-four patients (30 male, age 58±10 years) underwent 39 ablation procedures. The underlying cardiomyopathy pathogenesis was ischemic in 21 and nonischemic in 13 patients with a mean left ventricular ejection fraction of 17%±5% before LVAD implantation. One hundred and ten ventricular tachycardias (VTs; cycle lengths, 230–740 ms, arrhythmic storm n=28) and 2 ventricular fibrillation triggers were targeted (25 transseptal, 14 retrograde aortic approaches). Nine patients required VT ablation <1 month after LVAD implantation because of intractable VT. Only 10/110 (9%) of the targeted VTs were related to the Heart Mate II cannula. During follow-up, 7 patients were transplanted and 10 died. Of the remaining 17 patients, 13 were arrhythmia-free at 25±15 months. In 1 patient with VT recurrence, change of turbine speed from 9400 to 9000 rpm extinguished VT. Conclusions—Catheter ablation of VT among LVAD recipients is feasible and reasonably safe even soon after LVAD implantation. Intrinsic myocardial scar, rather than the apical cannula, seems to be the dominant substrate.
Differences in Load Dependence of Relaxation Between the Left and Right Ventricular Myocardium as a Function of Age in Rats

To determine whether the variation in the magnitude of work load sustained by the left and right ventricles during adulthood and senescence affects the load-dependent aspect of relaxation, posterior papillary muscles from the left and right ventricles of rats at 4, 10, and 20 months of age were studied under variably loaded conditions in vitro. Because of differences between the life spans of Fischer and Sprague-Dawicy rats, the functional characteristics of relaxation were investigated to evaluate the possibility of a differential age-associated response in these two strains of animals. The kinetic performance of the diastolic phase of myocardial contraction was measured by assessing the relative time during which load bearing occurred in a series of afterloaded isotonic twitches. This measurement was expressed as the ratio of the duration of afteiioaded isotonic shortening and relengthening to the time required for isometric force to decline to the same level daring isometric relaxation. A ratio of less than unity identified a load-dependent state whereas a value greater than one reflected a load-independent condition. Results snowed that the right myocardium was completely load independent whereas the left myocardium was fully load dependent at all physiological afterloads. Aging reduced the load independence of the right ventricle and the load dependence of the left ventricle in Fischer rats. In contrast, no aging effect on the properties of afteiioaded isotonic relaxation was seen in Sprague-Dawiey rats. In conclusion, distinct differences exist in the mechanical dynamics of inactivation between the left and right ventricular myocardium. Aging reduced these variations in Fischer rats but had no apparent influence in Sprague-Dawiey animals up to 20 months after birth.