Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Skeletal Cell Differentiation Is Enhanced by Atmospheric Dielectric Barrier Discharge Plasma Treatment

Enhancing chondrogenic and osteogenic differentiation is of paramount importance in providing effective regenerative therapies and improving the rate of fracture healing. This study investigated the potential of non-thermal atmospheric dielectric barrier discharge plasma (NT-plasma) to enhance chondrocyte and osteoblast proliferation and differentiation. Although the exact mechanism by which NT-plasma interacts with cells is undefined, it is known that during treatment the atmosphere is ionized generating extracellular reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS and RNS) and an electric field. Appropriate NT-plasma conditions were determined using lactate-dehydrogenase release, flow cytometric live/dead assay, flow cytometric cell cycle analysis, and Western blots to evaluate DNA damage and mitochondrial integrity. We observed that specific NT-plasma conditions were required to prevent cell death, and that loss of pre-osteoblastic cell viability was dependent on intracellular ROS and RNS production. To further investigate the involvement of intracellular ROS, fluorescent intracellular dyes Mitosox (superoxide) and dihydrorhodamine (peroxide) were used to assess onset and duration after NT-plasma treatment. Both intracellular superoxide and peroxide were found to increase immediately post NT-plasma treatment. These increases were sustained for one hour but returned to control levels by 24 hr. Using the same treatment conditions, osteogenic differentiation by NT-plasma was assessed and compared to peroxide or osteogenic media containing β-glycerolphosphate. Although both NT-plasma and peroxide induced differentiation-specific gene expression, neither was as effective as the osteogenic media. However, treatment of cells with NT-plasma after 24 hr in osteogenic or chondrogenic media significantly enhanced differentiation as compared to differentiation media alone. The results of this study show that NT-plasma can selectively initiate and amplify ROS signaling to enhance differentiation, and suggest this technology could be used to enhance bone fusion and improve healing after skeletal injury.
The Effects of Anxiety and Sadness on Travelers' Decisions and Perceived Risk: Mood Management As an Active Process of Affect-Adjustment

INTRODUCTION Recent studies have shown that anxiety motivates individuals to prefer low risk tasks and to be risk aversive, whereas sadness motivates individuals to prefer high reward tasks and to be risk seeking. The first experiment demonstrated that anxiety and sadness impact travelers’ decisions and perceived risk in a significantly different way. A further experiment revealed that the effects of anxiety and sadness on travel preferences and perceived risk were only pronounced when travelers made decisions for themselves and expected they would be affected by the outcomes. The results indicated that travelers’ mood management is like an active affect-adjustment process. Extant studies on the influence of affective states on decision processes have found that different affects or moods (even for the same negative moods) are likely to exert sharply different impacts on individuals’ decision making (e.g., Pham 1998; Pham, Cohen, Pracejus, and Hughes 2001; Raghunathan and Pham 1999). In spite of common wisdom, many important decisions are made under emotionally taxing conditions. As for travels or leisure, vacations are a popular means of people adapting themselves or relaxing their moods. Travel or leisure have been shown to play an important role for psychophysiological health and adjustment, and has been shown to be one of the frequent strategies for people to cope with stress (Orsega-Smith, Mowen, Payne, and Godbey 2004; Payne 2002). Therefore, it is important to explore how affective states affect travelers’ decision making, particularly for the negative affects. According to the affect-as-information perspective (Schwarz 1990; Schwarz and Clore 1996), people often rely on emotional information while making decisions because affects are likely to be considered as valuable information for their judgment. Two negative affects— anxiety and sadness—are focused as target affects because they are among the most widespread forms of emotional distress (Bryant and Zillman 1984; Levi 1967). In this research, the hypotheses about travelers’ mood management were derived from recent developments on the informative value of affective states (e.g., Pham 1998; Yi and Baumgartner 2004) combined with an analysis of the cognitive determinants of affect (Lazarus 1991; Roseman, Spindel and Jose 1990). These hypotheses were examined by contrasting travelers’ decisions and perceived risk under anxiety versus under sadness.
A Gatekeeper among Gatekeepers

This paper investigates the influence of news agency Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANP) on the coverage and diversity of political news in Dutch national newspapers. Using computational text analysis, we analyzed the influence on print newspapers across three years (1996, 2008, and 2013) and compared influence on print and online newspapers in 2013. Results indicate that the influence of ANP on print newspapers only increased slightly. Online newspapers, however, depend heavily on ANP and are highly similar as a result of such dependence. We draw conclusions relating to the gatekeeping role of news agencies in the digital age in general, and in the context of the Netherlands in particular. Additionally, we demonstrate that techniques from the field of information retrieval can be used to perform these analyses on a large scale. Our scripts and instructions are published open-source to stimulate the use of these techniques in communication studies.
An Iterative Two-Party Protocol for Scalable Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage

Record linkage is the process of identifying which records in different databases refer to the same real-world entities. When personal details of individuals, such as names and addresses, are used to link databases across different organisations, then privacy becomes a major concern. Often it is not permissible to exchange identifying data among organisations. Linking databases in situations where no private or confidential information can be revealed is known as 'privacy-preserving record linkage' (PPRL). We propose a novel protocol for scalable and approximate PPRL based on Bloom filters in a scenario where no third party is available to conduct a linkage. While two-party protocols are more secure because there is no possibility of collusion between one of the database owners and the third party, these protocols generally require more complex and expensive techniques to ensure that a database owner cannot infer any sensitive information about the other party's data during the linkage process. Our two-party protocol uses an efficient privacy technique called Bloom filters, and conducts an iterative classification of record pairs into matches and non-matches, as selected bits of the Bloom filters are revealed. Experiments conducted on real-world databases that contain nearly two million records, show that our protocol is scalable to large databases while providing sufficient privacy characteristics and achieving high linkage quality.
The VIVIDE programming environment: connecting run-time information with programmers' system knowledge

Programmers benefit from concrete program run-time information during code-centric comprehension activities. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art programming environments distract programmers from their task-oriented thinking by forcing them to cope with (1) tool-driven run-time information access and with (2) tool-driven changing information views. However, current research projects address these problems with new concepts for capturing run-time behavior as needed and for organizing all information on-screen according to the programmers' mental model. Unfortunately, there has been no attempt that tries to combine available solutions into one single approach. We propose a new concept for programming environments, which allow programmers to work in a task-oriented way: Run-time information is collected automatically using tests; Information is displayed consistently in self-contained editors arranged on a horizontal boundless tape. We illustrate practicability with an implementation in Squeak/Smalltalk. We believe that such environments will allow programmers to explore program-related information without noticeable tool switches and hence context switches. Having this, the cognitive effort will be reduced and thus programmers will make fewer false conclusions and eventually save time.
Fracture of Carbon Nanotube—Amorphous Carbon Composites: Molecular Modeling

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are promising candidates for use as reinforcements in next generation structural composite materials because of their extremely high specific stiffness and strength. They cannot, however, be viewed as simple replacements for carbon fibers because there are key differences between these materials in areas such as handling, processing, and matrix design. It is impossible to know for certain that CNT composites will represent a significant advance over carbon fiber composites before these various factors have been optimized, which is an extremely costly and time intensive process. This work attempts to place an upper bound on CNT composite mechanical properties by performing molecular dynamics simulations on idealized model systems with a reactive forcefield that permits modeling of both elastic deformations and fracture. Amorphous carbon (AC) was chosen for the matrix material in this work because of its structural simplicity and physical compatibility with the CNT fillers. It is also much stiffer and stronger than typical engineering polymer matrices. Three different arrangements of CNTs in the simulation cell have been investigated: a single-wall nanotube (SWNT) array, a multi-wall nanotube (MWNT) array, and a SWNT bundle system. The SWNT and MWNT array systems are clearly idealizations, but the SWNT bundle system is a step closer to real systems in which individual tubes aggregate into large assemblies. The effect of chemical crosslinking on composite properties is modeled by adding bonds between the CNTs and AC. The balance between weakening the CNTs and improving fiber-matrix load transfer is explored by systematically varying the extent of crosslinking. It is, of course, impossible to capture the full range of deformation and fracture processes that occur in real materials with even the largest atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. With this limitation in mind, the simulation results reported here provide a plausible upper limit on achievable CNT composite properties and yield some insight on the influence of processing conditions on the mechanical properties of CNT composites.
Plausible combinations: An improved method to evaluate the covariate structure of Cormack-Jolly-Seber mark-recapture models

Mark-recapture models are extensively used in quantitative population ecology, providing estimates of population vital rates, such as survival, that are difficult to obtain using other methods. Vital rates are commonly modeled as functions of explanatory covariates, adding considerable flexibility to mark-recapture models, but also increasing the subjectivity and complexity of the modeling process. Consequently, model selection and the evaluation of covariate structure remain critical aspects of mark-recapture modeling. The difficulties involved in model selection are compounded in Cormack-Jolly-Seber models because they are composed of separate sub-models for survival and recapture probabilities, which are conceptualized independently even though their parameters are not statistically independent. The construction of models as combinations of sub-models, together with multiple potential covariates, can lead to a large model set. Although desirable, estimation of the parameters of all models may not be feasible. Strategies to search a model space and base inference on a subset of all models exist and enjoy widespread use. However, even though the methods used to search a model space can be expected to influence parameter estimation, the assessment of covariate importance, and therefore the ecological interpretation of the modeling results, the performance of these strategies has received limited investigation. We present a new strategy for searching the space of a candidate set of Cormack-Jolly-Seber models and explore its performance relative to existing strategies using computer simulation. The new strategy provides an improved assessment of the importance of covariates and covariate combinations used to model survival and recapture probabilities, while requiring only a modest increase in the number of models on which inference is based in comparison to existing techniques.
Lifestyle Interventions for People with, and at Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in Polynesian Communities: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

There is evidence that lifestyle intervention among Polynesian people can reduce diabetes incidence and complications, but this evidence has not been systematically reviewed. The aim of this study was to systematically review the efficacy of lifestyle interventions, targeting the prevention and management of type 2 diabetes among Polynesian people. MEDLINE, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and Embase were searched to find randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and pre-post studies. Eight studies (four RCTs and four pre-post studies) with 1590 participants met the inclusion criteria. The data on health outcomes that was reported in these studies included blood pressure, body mass index, waist circumference, weight, and glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c). The meta-analyses showed that the interventions had resulted in statistically significant reductions in systolic blood pressure (SBP) across four of the studies (WMD, −9.93 mmHg; 95% Cl, −10.77 to −9.09; and p < 0.00001). However, the effects on weight across five of the studies (WMD, −1.15 kg; 95% Cl, −2.80 to 0.51; p = 0.18) and the HbA1c levels across two of the studies (WMD, −0.38%; 95% Cl, −1.15 to 0.39; and p = 0.33) were not statistically significant. This review provides evidence that lifestyle interventions may be effective in achieving modest reductions in SBP in Polynesian people. Further research is needed to fully assess the effectiveness of these interventions in this population long-term.
Automatic LQR tuning based on Gaussian process global optimization

This paper proposes an automatic controller tuning framework based on linear optimal control combined with Bayesian optimization. With this framework, an initial set of controller gains is automatically improved according to a pre-defined performance objective evaluated from experimental data. The underlying Bayesian optimization algorithm is Entropy Search, which represents the latent objective as a Gaussian process and constructs an explicit belief over the location of the objective minimum. This is used to maximize the information gain from each experimental evaluation. Thus, this framework shall yield improved controllers with fewer evaluations compared to alternative approaches. A seven-degree-of-freedom robot arm balancing an inverted pole is used as the experimental demonstrator. Results of two- and four-dimensional tuning problems highlight the method's potential for automatic controller tuning on robotic platforms.
Automatic Annotation of Co-Occurrence Relations

We introduce a method for automatically labelling edges of word co-occurrence graphs with semantic relations. Therefore we only make use of training data already contained within the graph. Starting point of this work is a graph based on word co-occurrence of the German language, which is created by applying iterated co-occurrence analysis. The edges of the graph have been partially annotated by hand with semantic relationships. In our approach we make use of the commonly appearing network motif of three words forming a triangular pattern. We assume that the fully annotated occurrences of these structures contain information useful for our purpose. Based on these patterns rules for reasoning are learned. The obtained rules are then combined using Dempster-Shafer theory to infer new semantic relations between words. Iteration of the annotation process is possible to increase the number of obtained relations. By applying the described process the graph can be enriched with semantic information at a high precision.
Computational Approaches for the High-Throughput Analysis of Porous Materials for Energy-related Applications

Crystalline porous materials are an important class of materials that can be used for oil refinement, hydrogen or methane storage, as well as carbon dioxide capture. Selecting optimal materials for these important applications requires analysis and screening of millions of potential candidates. Recently, we proposed an automatic approach based on the fast marching method for analyzing void space inside materials, a critical step preceding expensive molecular simulations. This article summarizes our progress in the development of parallel multicore CPU and GPU versions of our tool that enables high-throughput material screening on modern high-performance computing platforms.
Sagittal and Frontal Plane Evaluation of the Whole Spine and Clinical Outcomes after Vertebral Fractures

Although it is known that a change in any level of the spine alters biomechanics, there are not many studies to evaluate the spine as a whole in both sagittal and frontal planes. This prospective cohort study evaluates the morphology and mobility of the entire spine in patients with vertebral fractures. The Treatment Group consisted of 43 patients who underwent percutaneous balloon kyphoplasty or percutaneous balloon kyphoplasty plus fixation. The Control Group consisted of 39 healthy subjects. Spinal Mouse was used for the assessment of the curvatures and the mobility of the spine. Clinical outcomes were evaluated by Visual Analogue Scale and Oswestry Disability Index. The measurements were recorded at 15 days and 3, 6, and 12 months postoperatively. Regarding the curvatures and mobility in sagittal plane, a statistically significant increase appeared early at 3 months, for lumbar curve, spinopelvic angulation, and overall trunk inclination. In the frontal plane, most of the improvements were recorded after 6 months. Patients with osteoporotic fracture showed statistically significant lower mean value than patients with traumatic fracture. Pain and disability index showed early improvements. This study provides a comprehensive and complete picture of the functionality of the spine in patients treated with percutaneous balloon kyphoplasty.
Energy and Accuracy Trade-Offs in Accelerometry-Based Activity Recognition

Driven by real-world applications such as fitness, wellbeing and healthcare, accelerometry-based activity recognition has been widely studied to provide context-awareness to future pervasive technologies. Accurate recognition and energy efficiency are key issues in enabling long-term and unobtrusive monitoring. While the majority of accelerometry-based activity recognition systems stream data to a central point for processing, some solutions process data locally on the sensor node to save energy. In this paper, we investigate the trade-offs between classification accuracy and energy efficiency by comparing on- and off-node schemes. An empirical energy model is presented and used to evaluate the energy efficiency of both systems, and a practical case study (monitoring the physical activities of office workers) is developed to evaluate the effect on classification accuracy. The results show a 40% energy saving can be obtained with a 13% reduction in classification accuracy, but this performance depends heavily on the wearer's activity.
Internationalization of SMEs : Towards an integrative approach of resources and competences

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) constitut e an important part of economic growth and dynamics not only for advanced industrialized c ountries but also for developing economies. Three approaches explaining the behavior s of SMEs’ internationalization are proposed in the literature: the stage approach, the network approach and the international entrepreneurship approach. The purpose of this article is to review and assess each approach with the aim to better understand the international ization process of SMEs. We will try to figure out the interrelationships among these appro aches by looking into their points of view in common. Then we will make an effort to combine t h important dimensions proposed by each approach towards an integrative approach based on the concept of resources and competences.
Automatic image annotation by image fragment matching

Automatic image annotation problem is one of the most important sub-problems of computer vision. It is strongly related to and goes beyond image recognition. The key goal of annotation is to assign a set of words from a given dictionary to a previously unseen image. In this paper, we address two key problems related to image annotation. The first one is low precision of generated answers, the second one is automatic localization of image fragments related to annotations. The proposed method utilizes image fragment matching to precisely localize near-duplicate visual content of images.
Optimization-Theoretic Analysis of Stability-Optimal Transmission Policy for Multiple-Antenna Multiple-Access Channel

The philosophy of scheduler design in modern wireless data networks exposes the tendency towards layer-spanning optimization (cross-layer design). An important particular goal of joint design of the physical and (data) link layer appears to be the achievement of the entire stability region of the network. In this work, we provide the optimization-theoretic analysis of the corresponding policy, referred to as stability-optimal policy, in the multiple-antenna multiple-access channel. We characterize some useful features of the policy. In particular, we state the conditions for optimality of link subset transmission and expose essential differences to the established scheduling approaches, such as sum-rate maximization. This further allows for the statement of necessary and sufficient conditions for the overall stability optimality of successive interference cancellation order. Finally, we present the approach of splitting of the multilink stability problem into the set of single-link optimization problems. We propose a corresponding iterative optimization method, which is an extension of the known concept of iterative waterfilling from
Charm: A Language for Closed-Form High-Level Architecture Modeling

As computer architecture continues to expand beyond software-agnostic microarchitecture to data center organization, reconfigurable logic, heterogeneous systems, application-specific logic, and even radically different technologies such as quantum computing, detailed cycle-level simulation is no longer presupposed. Exploring designs under such complex interacting relationships (e.g., performance, energy, thermal, cost, voltage, frequency, cooling energy, leakage, etc.) calls for a more integrative but higher-level approach. We propose Charm, a domain specific language supporting Closed-form High-level ARchitecture Modeling. Charm enables mathematical representations of mutually dependent architectural relationships to be specified, composed, checked, evaluated and reused. The language is interpreted through a combination of symbolic evaluation (e.g., restructuring) and compiler techniques (e.g., memoization and invariant hoisting), generating executable evaluation functions and optimized analysis procedures. Further supporting reuse, a type system constrains architectural quantities and ensures models operate only in a validated domain. Through two case studies, we demonstrate that Charm allows one to define high-level architecture models concisely, maximize reusability, capture unreasonable assumptions and inputs, and significantly speedup design space exploration.