Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Life-course pathways to psychological distress: a cohort study

Objectives Early life factors, like intelligence and socioeconomic status (SES), are associated with health outcomes in adulthood. Fitting comprehensive life-course models, we tested (1) the effect of childhood intelligence and SES, education and adulthood SES on psychological distress at midlife, and (2) compared alternative measurement specifications (reflective and formative) of SES. Design Prospective cohort study (the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s). Setting Aberdeen, Scotland. Participants 12 500 live-births (6282 boys) between 1950 and 1956, who were followed up in the years 2001–2003 at age 46–51 with a postal questionnaire achieving a response rate of 64% (7183). Outcome measures Psychological distress at age 46–51 (questionnaire). Results Childhood intelligence and SES and education had indirect effects on psychological distress at midlife, mediated by adult SES. Adult SES was the only variable to have a significant direct effect on psychological distress at midlife; the effect was stronger in men than in women. Alternative measurement specifications of SES (reflective and formative) resulted in greatly different model parameters and fits. Conclusions Even though formative operationalisations of SES are theoretically appropriate, SES is better specified as reflective than as a formative latent variable in the context of life-course modelling.
Designing for Personalized Article Content

While personalized feeds and collaborative filtering have become extremely popular on media websites, content personalization has received much less attention. Automatically modifying the textual and multimedia features of an article offers significant opportunities. Doing so has potential benefit for journalists, media sites, and readers. However, personalizing content in a news context poses numerous challenges that are not encountered in other applications like education and targeted advertising. In this paper we articulate a design space and guidelines that we have defined in the process of developing a content personalization toolset.
The Generalized Distributive Law and Free Energy Minimization

In an important recent paper, Yedidia, Freeman, and Weiss [7] showed that there is a close connection between the belief propagation algorithm for probabilistic inference and the Bethe-Kikuchi approximation to the variational free energy in statistical physics. In this paper, we will recast the YFW results in the context of the “generalized distributive law” [1] formulation of belief propagation. Our main result is that if the GDL is applied to junction graph, the fixed points of the algorithm are in one-to-one correspondence with the stationary points of a certain Bethe-Kikuchi free energy. If the junction graph has no cycles, the BK free energy is convex and has a unique stationary point, which is a global minimum. On the other hand, if the junction graph has cycles, the main result at least shows that the GDL is trying to do something sensible.
Serial concatenation of LDPC codes and differential modulations

In this paper, we consider serially concatenated schemes with outer novel and efficient low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and inner modulations effective against channel impairments. With a pragmatic approach, we show how to design LDPC codes tailored for simple and robust modulation formats, such as differentially encoded (DE) modulations. The LDPC codes are optimized through the use of a recently proposed analysis technique based on extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts. In particular, we optimize, through a "clever" random walk in the parametric space, the degree distributions of the outer LDPC codes, obtaining significant insights on the impact of such distributions on the performance of the proposed concatenated schemes. The optimization is carried out for transmission over both the additive white Gaussian noise channel and a noncoherent channel. The performance predicted by the EXIT chart-based optimization is confirmed by results obtained via computer simulations, considering phase-shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation at the transmitter side, and iterative demodulation/decoding at the receiver side. The significance of the proposed optimized design of LDPC-coded schemes with DE modulations is validated by the fact that standard nonoptimized LDPC codes perform poorly when used together with inner DE modulations.
Security breaches as PMU deviation: detecting and identifying security attacks using performance counters

This paper considers and validates the applicability of leveraging pervasively-available performance counters for detecting and reasoning about security breaches. Our key observation is that many security breaches, which typically cause abnormal control flow, usually incur precisely identifiable deviation in performance samples captured by processors. Based on this observation, we implement a prototype system called Eunomia, which is the first non-intrusive system that can detect emerging attacks based on return-oriented programming without any changes to applications (either source or binary code) or special-purpose hardware. Our security evaluation shows that Eunomia can detect some realistic attacks including code-injection attacks, return-to-libc attacks and return-oriented programming attacks on unmodified binaries with relatively low overhead.
Effect of scanner in longitudinal diffusion tensor imaging studies

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of longitudinal drift in scanner hardware, inter‐scanner variability (bias), and scanner upgrade on longitudinal changes in global and regional diffusion properties using longitudinal data obtained on two scanners of the exact same model at one institution. A total of 224 normal subjects were scanned twice, at an interval of about 1 year, using two 3.0‐T scanners of the exact same model. Both scanners were simultaneously upgraded during the study period. The subjects were divided into four groups according to the combination of scanners used. With use of tract‐based spatial statistics, we evaluated the effects of scanner drift and inter‐scanner variability (bias) on global and regional fractional anisotropy (FA), axial diffusivity (AD), and radial diffusivity (RD) changes of the white matter. Even with scanners of the exact same model, inter‐scanner variability (bias) significantly affected longitudinal results. FA, AD, and RD of the white matter were relatively stable within the same scanner. We also investigated the effect of scanner upgrade on longitudinal FA, AD, and RD changes. The scanner upgrade included only software upgrade, not hardware upgrade; however, there was a significant effect of scanner upgrade on longitudinal results. These results indicate that inter‐scanner variability and scanner upgrade can significantly affect the results of longitudinal diffusion tensor imaging studies. Hum Brain Mapp, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Learning to recognize brain specific proteins based on low-level features from on-line prediction servers

During the last decade, the area of bioinformatics has produced an overwhelming amount of data, with the recently published draft of the human genome being the most prominent example. This has enabled researchers to use data driven, rather than hypothesis driven, methods to address a wide variety of specific problems related to the analysis of biological sequences (e.g., protein, DNA and RNA sequences). Today a number of low-level properties of biological sequences, like the presence or absence of signal peptides, can be obtained from publicly available online prediction servers. Such a server typically implements a classifier which is trained to determine a single property of a sequence on the basis of various kinds of biochemical laboratory results. In this paper we investigate how the low-level data from these distributed on-line sources can be combined to construct a classifier that recognizes a high-level property, namely the brain specificity, of a protein. This is a task for which no satisfactory method has yet been reported. Features gathered from eight different on-line prediction servers are used in experiments to yield a representation of protein sequences obtained from the Swiss-Prot database. The experiments show that using these low-level features, classifiers can be trained to predict the brain specificity with a surprisingly high accuracy (around 70%).
Negative correlation between phospholipase and esterase activity produced by Fusarium isolates

Fusarium species have emerged as one of the more outstanding groups of clinically important filamentous fungi, causing localized and life-threatening invasive infections with high morbidity and mortality. The ability to produce different types of hydrolytic enzymes is thought to be an important virulence mechanism of fungal pathogens and could be associated with the environment of the microorganism. Here, we have measured the production of two distinct lipolytic enzymes, phospholipase and esterase, by sixteen Fusarium isolates recovered from the hospital environment, immunocompromised patients' blood cultures, foot interdigital space scrapings from immunocompromised patients, and foot interdigital space scrapings from immunocompetent patients (4 isolates each). Fourteen of these 16 isolates were identified as Fusarium solani species complex (FSSC) and two were identified as F. oxysporum species complex (FOSC). Some relevant genus characteristics were visualized by light and electron microscopy such as curved and multicelled macroconidia with 3 or 4 septa, microconidia, phialides, and abundant chlamydospores. All Fusarium isolates were able to produce esterase and phospholipase under the experimental conditions. However, a negative correlation was observed between these two enzymes, indicating that a Fusarium isolate with high phospholipase activity has low esterase activity and vice versa. In addition, Fusarium isolated from clinical material produced more phospholipases, while environmental strains produced more esterases. These observations may be correlated with the different types of substrates that these fungi need to degrade during their nutrition processes.
Relationship of Wives''Employment Status to Husband, Wife and Pair Satisfaction

The present invention relates to detonation joining of high tension lines and the like in which the line ends and their steel cores respectively are joined together by a single shot or detonation. According to the invention each of the line ends to be joined is provided with an exposed core end on which is firmly wedged a separate steel sleeve having an outer diameter approximately equal to that of the line, a main connecting tube of aluminium enclosing the adjacent steel sleeves and parts of the line ends is provided with an exterior layer of explosive charge which during detonation compresses said main connecting tube around the line ends and simultaneously around the steel sleeves which thereby are compressed around the core ends so that an effective mutual anchorage of the components of the joint is obtained.
Usability of requirements techniques: a systematic literature review

The usability of requirements engineering (RE) techniques has been recognised as a key factor for their successful adoption by industry. RE techniques must be accessible to stakeholders with different backgrounds, so they can be empowered to effectively and efficiently contribute to building successful systems. When selecting an appropriate requirements engineering technique for a given context, one should consider the usability supported by each of the candidate techniques. The first step towards achieving this goal is to gather the best evidence available on the usability of RE approaches by performing a systematic literature review, to answer one research question: How is the usability of requirements engineering techniques and tools addressed? We systematically review articles published in the Requirements Engineering Journal, one of the main sources for mature work in RE, to motivate a research roadmap to make RE approaches more accessible to stakeholders with different backgrounds.
Decoherence in the chemical compass: the role of decoherence for avian magnetoreception

Contrary to the usual picture that decoherence destroys quantum properties and causes the quantum-to-classical transition, we argue that decoherence can also play a constructive role in driving quantum dynamics and amplifying its results to macroscopic scales. We support this perspective by presenting an example system from spin chemistry, which is also of importance for biological systems, e.g. in avian magnetoreception.
An applicaton of the extented Kalman filter in servo motors of medical equipments

Servo motors have been widely used in medical equipment, but servo motors have the large torque and flux linkage ripple in the conventional direct torque control (DTC). The stator flux linkage estimation in the conventional DTC also needs the integration of the back electromotive force (back-emf), and is largely affected by the value of the stator resistance. The application of the extended Kalman filter (EKF) in the aspect of estimating stator flux linkage is studied in this paper, reducing the torque and flux linkage ripple and eliminating the integration of the back-emf. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method not only does well in the speed, the rotor position and the stator flux linkage estimation, but also is robust to the stator resistance.
Energy-Efficient Nodes-Cooperation Transmission in Unreliable Wireless Sensor Networks

How to provide reliable transmission over unreliable wireless sensor links meanwhile keep energy efficiency is an interest challenge. In this paper, a novel nodes cooperation strategy in network layer for energy-efficient reliable transmission over unreliable-links is studied. The energy efficiency of sensor networks and its optimization with new transmission strategy are analyzed theoretically. The key idea of the proposed strategy is using multi nodes to receive packets simultaneously and relay packets competitively. Further theoretical and experimental analysis gives us some insights on the improvements in reliable transmission and energy efficiency that cooperation can bring to networks.
Fast and accurate grid representations for atom‐based docking with partner flexibility

Macromolecular docking methods can broadly be divided into geometric and atom‐based methods. Geometric methods use fast algorithms that operate on simplified, grid‐like molecular representations, while atom‐based methods are more realistic and flexible, but far less efficient. Here, a hybrid approach of grid‐based and atom‐based docking is presented, combining precalculated grid potentials with neighbor lists for fast and accurate calculation of atom‐based intermolecular energies and forces. The grid representation is compatible with simultaneous multibody docking and can tolerate considerable protein flexibility. When implemented in our docking method ATTRACT, grid‐based docking was found to be ∼35x faster. With the OPLSX forcefield instead of the ATTRACT coarse‐grained forcefield, the average speed improvement was >100x. Grid‐based representations may allow atom‐based docking methods to explore large conformational spaces with many degrees of freedom, such as multiple macromolecules including flexibility. This increases the domain of biological problems to which docking methods can be applied. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Lack of Association between Receptor Protein Tyrosine Phosphatase RPTPtx and Cadherins

RPTPlx is a receptor-like protein tyrosine phosphatase that mediates homophilic cell-cell interactions. Surface expression of RPTPIx is restricted to cellcell contacts and is upregulated with increasing cell density, suggesting a role for RPTP~ in contact-mediated signaling. It was recently reported (Brady-Kalnay, S.M., D.L. Rimm, and N.K. Tonks. 1995. J. Cell Biol. 130:977-986) that RPTP~ binds directly to cadherin/ catenin complexes, and thus may regulate the tyrosine phosphorylation of such complexes. Here we report that this concept needs revision. Through reciprocal precipitations using a variety of antibodies against RPTPIx, cadherins, and catenins, we show that RPTP~ does not interact with cadherin/catenin complexes, even when assayed under very mild lysis conditions. We find that the anti-RPTP~ antiserum used by others precipitates cadherins in a nonspecific manner independent of RPTPI~. We conclude that, contrary to previous claims, RPTPIx does not interact with cadherin complexes and thus is unlikely to directly regulate cadherin/
Word Segmentation on Chinese Mirco-Blog Data with a Linear-Time Incremental Model

This paper describes the model we designed for the word segmentation bakeoff on Chinese micro-blog data in the 2nd CIPS-SIGHAN joint conference on Chinese language processing. We presented a linear-time incremental model for word segmentation where rich features including character-based features, word-based features as well as other possible features can be easily employed. We report the performances of our model on four datasets in the SIGHAN bake-off 2005. After adding more features designed for the micro-blog data, the performance of our model is further improved. The F-score of our model for this bake-off is 0.9478 and 44.88% of the sentences are segmented correctly.
Hypertension and atrial fibrillation: diagnostic approach, prevention and treatment. Position paper of the Working Group ‘Hypertension Arrhythmias and Thrombosis’ of the European Society of Hypertension

Hypertension is the most common cardiovascular disorder and atrial fibrillation is the most common clinically significant arrhythmia. Both these conditions frequently coexist and their prevalence increases rapidly with aging. There are different risk factors and clinical conditions predisposing to the development of atrial fibrillation, but due its high prevalence, hypertension is still the main risk factor for the development of atrial fibrillation. Several pathophysiologic mechanisms (such as structural changes, neurohormonal activation, fibrosis, atherosclerosis, etc.) have been advocated to explain the onset of atrial fibrillation. The presence of atrial fibrillation per se increases the risk of stroke but its coexistence with high blood pressure leads to an abrupt increase of cardiovascular complications. Different risk models are available for the risk stratification and the prevention of thromboembolism in patients with atrial fibrillation. In all of them hypertension is present and is an important risk factor. Antihypertensive treatment may contribute to reduce this risk, and it seems some classes are superior to others in the prevention of new-onset atrial fibrillation and prevention of stroke. Antithrombotic treatment with warfarin is effective in the prevention of thromboembolic events, although quite recently, new classes of anticoagulants that do not require international normalized ratio monitoring have been introduced with promising results.
Volume regulation in astrocytes: A role for taurine as an osmoeffector

Astrocytes in culture regulate their volume under anisosmotic conditions by as yet unclear mechanisms. In a number of other cells this process involves a loss of intracellular osmotically active solutes, including taurine. The possibility that taurine participates as an osmoeffector in astrocytes was examined in cultured astrocytes exposed to hyposmolar conditions.
Algebraic Quantum Error Correction Codes

A systematic and exhaustive method based on the group structure of a unitary Lie algebra is proposed to generate an enormous number of quantum codes. With respect to the algebraic structure, the orthogonality condition, which is the central rule of generating quantum codes, is proved to be fully equivalent to the distinguishability of the elements in this structure. In addition, four types of quantum codes are classified according to the relation of the codeword operators and some initial quantum state. By linking the unitary Lie algebra with the additive group, the classical correspondences of some of these quantum codes can be rendered. Keywords—Quotient-Algebra Partition, Codeword Spinors, Basis Codewords, Syndrome Spinors
A case for a joint strategy of diversified bet hedging and plasticity in the pea aphid wing polyphenism

Phenotypic plasticity and diversified bet hedging are strategies for coping with variable environments. Plasticity is favoured when an organism can predict future conditions using environmental cues, while bet hedging is favoured when predictive cues are not available. Theoretical analyses suggest that many organisms should use a mixture of both strategies, because environments often present both scenarios. Here, we examine if the pea aphid wing polyphenism, a well-known case of plasticity, is potentially a mixture of plasticity and bet hedging. In this polyphenism, asexual females produce more winged offspring in crowded conditions, and wingless offspring in uncrowded conditions. We find that pea aphids use plasticity to respond to crowding and we find considerable genetic variation for this response. We further show that individual aphids produce both winged and wingless offspring, consistent with the variability expected in a bet hedging trait. We conclude that the pea aphid wing polyphenism system is probably a mixture of plasticity and bet hedging. Our study adds to a limited list of empirical studies examining mixed strategy usage, and suggests that mixed strategies may be common in dispersal traits.
Research and implement of PMSM regenerative braking strategy based on controllable rectification

Based on the topology of back-to-back convertor, a regenerative braking strategy used for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) is presented in this paper. According to this strategy, without dc link braking resistor, PMSM can operate in four-quadrants stably, and switch in different quadrants continuously. Based on Model Reference Adaptive System (MRAS) theory, a rotational inertia online-observer is designed, and an energy manager strategy is obtained using the observed inertia value. The strategy is verified in Matlab/Simulink. Then in a 4kW PMSM experiment platform, the regenerative braking strategy is implemented. The results of experiment show that the regenerative braking strategy can be used in PMSM forward and reverse operation effectively, which is the foundation of the further industrial application.
How to identify potential fallers in a stroke unit: validity indexes of 4 test methods.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to describe general characteristics of patients with stroke who have a tendency to fall and to determine whether certain test instruments can identify fallers. METHODS Patients treated in a stroke unit during a 12-month period were included. At inclusion assessments were made with Berg Balance Scale Berg Balance Scale, Stops Walking When Talking, Timed Up & Go (TUG) and diffTUG. At follow-up 6 or 12 months later, patients who had fallen were identified. RESULTS During the time from discharge to follow-up on 159 patients, 68 patients fell and 91 did not. Fallers fell more often during their initial hospital stay, used sedatives more often and were more visually impaired, compared with non-fallers. The Berg Balance Scale, Stops Walking When Talking and TUG results differed between fallers and non-fallers. The combined results of Berg Balance Scale and Stops Walking When Talking increased the possibility of identifying fallers. CONCLUSION Berg Balance Scale, Stops Walking When Talking and TUG can be used to evaluate which patients have a tendency to fall in order to carry out preventive measures. Berg Balance Scale can be used in all patients. Stops Walking When Talking can give additional information if the patient is able to walk. TUG is a possible choice, but fewer patients can perform it.