Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A General Framework for Efficient Continuous Multidimensional Top-k Query Processing in Sensor Networks

Top-k query has long been a crucial problem in multiple fields of computer science, such as data processing and information retrieval. In emerging cyber-physical systems, where there can be a large number of users searching information directly into the physical world, many new challenges arise for top-k query processing. From the client's perspective, users may request different sets of information, with different priorities and at different times. Thus, top-k search should not only be multidimensional, but also be across time domain. From the system's perspective, data collection is usually carried out by small sensing devices. Unlike the data centers used for searching in the cyber-space, these devices are often extremely resource constrained and system efficiency is of paramount importance. In this paper, we develop a framework that can effectively satisfy demands from the two aspects. The sensor network maintains an efficient dominant graph data structure for data readings. A simple top-k extraction algorithm is used for user query processing and two schemes are proposed to further reduce communication cost. Our methods can be used for top-k query with any linear convex query function. The framework is adaptive enough to incorporate some advanced features; for example, we show how approximate queries and data aging can be applied. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work for continuous multidimensional top-k query processing in sensor networks. Simulation results show that our schemes can reduce the total communication cost by up to 90 percent, compared with a centralized scheme or a straightforward extension from previous top-k algorithm on 1D sensor data.
Inhibiting the HSP90 chaperone destabilizes macrophage migration inhibitory factor and thereby inhibits breast tumor progression

The Rockefeller University Press $30.00 J. Exp. Med. Vol. 209 No. 2 275-289 www.jem. org/cgi/doi/10.1084/jem.20111117 275 In normal cells, heat shock chaperones guide proper folding of nascent polypeptide clients into mature proteins, assist in multimeric complex assembly, and regulate cellular levels of clients by promoting their degradation. Importantly, during oncogenesis the normal chaperone function becomes subverted to allow malignant transformation and enable cancer cell survival. Cancer cells are in a constant state of proteotoxic stress, both from an adverse microenvironment (hypoxia and acidosis) and from within (conformationally aberrant oncoproteins, high levels of ROS, high levels of DNA damage, and genomic instability). Thus, their proteins, and in particular their oncoproteins, require constant massive chaperone support to prevent protein aggregation and promote tumor cell survival (Whitesell and Lindquist, 2005; Taipale et al., 2010; Trepel et al., 2010). Hence, in addition to their oncogene addiction, cancer cells also require activated heat shock proteins. Among these chaperones, heat shock protein 90 (HSP90) is unique because many of its clients are conformationally labile signal transducers with crucial roles in growth control and cell survival. HSP90 plays a key role in the conformational stabilization and maturation of mutant oncogenic signaling proteins, encompassing, for example, receptor tyrosine kinases (ErbB1 and ErbB2/HER2; Mimnaugh et al., 1996), signaling kinases (Bcr-Abl and Akt; Basso et al., 2002), NFB (Chen et al., 2002), c-Raf, FLT3, and steroid CORRESPONDENCE Ute M. Moll: umoll@uni-goettingen.de
A framework for linking population model development with ecological risk assessment objectives

The value of models that link organism‐level impacts to the responses of a population in ecological risk assessments (ERAs) has been demonstrated extensively over the past few decades. There is little debate about the utility of these models to translate multiple organism‐level endpoints into a holistic interpretation of effect to the population; however, there continues to be a struggle for actual application of these models as a common practice in ERA. Although general frameworks for developing models for ERA have been proposed, there is limited guidance on when models should be used, in what form, and how to interpret model output to inform the risk manager's decision. We propose a framework for developing and applying population models in regulatory decision making that focuses on trade‐offs of generality, realism, and precision for both ERAs and models. We approach the framework development from the perspective of regulators aimed at defining the needs of specific models commensurate with the assessment objective. We explore why models are not widely used by comparing their requirements and limitations with the needs of regulators. Using a series of case studies under specific regulatory frameworks, we classify ERA objectives by trade‐offs of generality, realism, and precision and demonstrate how the output of population models developed with these same trade‐offs informs the ERA objective. We examine attributes for both assessments and models that aid in the discussion of these trade‐offs. The proposed framework will assist risk assessors and managers to identify models of appropriate complexity and to understand the utility and limitations of a model's output and associated uncertainty in the context of their assessment goals. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:369–380. Published 2017. This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.
Excellent Tribological Properties of Lower Reduced Graphene Oxide Content Copper Composite by Using a One-Step Reduction Molecular-Level Mixing Process

Reduced graphene oxide (RGO) composite copper matrix powders were fabricated successfully by using a modified molecular-level mixing (MLM) method. Divalent copper ions (Cu2+) were adsorbed in oxygen functional groups of graphene oxide (GO) as a precursor, then were reduced simultaneously by one step chemical reduction. RGO showed a distribution converting from a random to a three-dimensional network in the copper matrix when its content increased to above 1.0 wt. % The tribological tests indicated that the friction coefficient of the composite with 1.0 wt. % RGO decreased markedly from 0.6 to 0.07 at an applied load of 10 N, and the wear rate was about one-third of pure copper. The excellent tribological properties were attributed to a three-dimensional and uniform distribution, which contributes to improving toughness and adhesion strength.
Multivitamin use and breast cancer incidence in a prospective cohort of Swedish women.

BACKGROUND Many women use multivitamins in the belief that these supplements will prevent chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. However, whether the use of multivitamins affects the risk of breast cancer is unclear. OBJECTIVE We prospectively examined the association between multivitamin use and the incidence of invasive breast cancer in the Swedish Mammography Cohort. DESIGN In 1997, 35,329 cancer-free women completed a self-administered questionnaire that solicited information on multivitamin use as well as other breast cancer risk factors. Relative risks (RRs) and 95% CIs were calculated by using Cox proportional hazard models and adjusted for breast cancer risk factors. RESULTS During a mean follow-up of 9.5 y, 974 women were diagnosed with incident breast cancer. Multivitamin use was associated with a statistically significant increased risk of breast cancer. The multivariable RR of women who reported the use of multivitamins was 1.19 (95% CI: 1.04, 1.37). The association did not differ significantly by hormone receptor status of the breast tumor. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that multivitamin use is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. This observed association is of concern and merits further investigation.
A two-level hierarchical EDA using conjugate priori

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) are stochastic optimization methods that guide the search by building and sampling probabilistic models. Inspired by Bayesian inference, we proposed a two-level hierarchical model based on beta distribution. Beta distribution is the conjugate priori for binomial distribution. Besides, we introduced a learning rate function into the framework to control the model update. To demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our proposed algorithm, experiments are carried out on the 01-knapsack problems. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms cGA, PBIL and QEA.
Crystallization of agility back to basics

~en: are a nwn~r of agile and traditional methodologies for software development. Agilists provide agile principles and agile values to characterize the agile methods but there is no clear and inclusive defmition of agile methods; subsequently it is not feasible to draw a clear distinction between traditional and agile sofu:vare development methods in. ~ractice. ~e purpose of this paper is to explain th~~of.agility. jn ~~l;. an~_tll:e~}os.ugges. t a definition of agge methods that would help in the ranking or differentiation of agile methods from other available methods. Abstract:
Cross-Domain Visual Recognition via Domain Adaptive Dictionary Learning

In real-world visual recognition problems, the assumption that the training data (source domain) and test data (target domain) are sampled from the same distribution is often violated. This is known as the domain adaptation problem. In this work, we propose a novel domain-adaptive dictionary learning framework for cross-domain visual recognition. Our method generates a set of intermediate domains. These intermediate domains form a smooth path and bridge the gap between the source and target domains. Specifically, we not only learn a common dictionary to encode the domain-shared features, but also learn a set of domain-specific dictionaries to model the domain shift. The separation of the common and domain-specific dictionaries enables us to learn more compact and reconstructive dictionaries for domain adaptation. These dictionaries are learned by alternating between domain-adaptive sparse coding and dictionary updating steps. Meanwhile, our approach gradually recovers the feature representations of both source and target data along the domain path. By aligning all the recovered domain data, we derive the final domain-adaptive features for cross-domain visual recognition. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrates that our approach outperforms most state-of-the-art methods.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies evaluating the performance and operational characteristics of dual point-of-care tests for HIV and syphilis

Background Mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of syphilis and HIV continue to be important yet preventable causes of perinatal and infant morbidity and mortality. Objectives To systematically review, critically appraise and perform a meta-analysis to evaluate the operational characteristics of dual rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for HIV/syphilis and evaluate whether they are cost effective, acceptable and easy to use. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources We searched seven electronic bibliographic databases from 2012 to December 2016 with no language restrictions. Search keywords included HIV, syphilis and diagnosis. Review methods We included studies that evaluated the operational characteristics of dual HIV/syphilis RDTs. Outcomes included diagnostic test accuracy, cost effectiveness, ease of use and interpretation and acceptability. All studies were assessed against quality criteria and assessed for risk of bias. Results Of 1914 identified papers, 18 were included for the meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy for HIV and syphilis. All diagnostic accuracy evaluation studies showed a very high sensitivity and specificity for HIV and a lower, yet adequate, sensitivity and specificity for syphilis, with some variation among types of test. Dual screening for HIV and syphilis was more cost effective than single rapid tests for HIV and syphilis and prevented more adverse pregnancy outcomes. Qualitative data suggested dual RDTs were highly acceptable to clients, who cited time to result, cost and the requirement of a single finger prick as important characteristics of dual RDTs. Conclusion The results of this systematic review and meta-analysis can be used by policy-makers and national programme managers who are considering implementing dual RDTs for HIV and syphilis. Trial registration number PROSPERO 2016:CRD42016049168.
SAWS: Selective Asymmetry-Aware Work-Stealing for Asymmetric Multi-core Architectures

Asymmetric Multi-Core (AMC) architectures, where cores in different CPUs have different performance and power consumption, have been widely used from large-scale datacenters to mobile smart-phones for their high performance as well as energy efficiency. However, existing task scheduling policies often result in the poor performance of parallel programs on emerging AMC architectures due to the unbalanced workload, the severe shared cache misses and remote memory accesses. To solve this problem, we propose a Selective Asymmetry-aware Work-Stealing (SAWS) runtime system, which can reduce remote memory accesses while balancing workload across asymmetric cores. SAWS consists of an asymmetric-aware task allocator and a selective work-stealing scheduler. The asymmetric-aware task allocator properly distributes the tasks to asymmetric CPUs so that most tasks can access data from local memory node and the workload is balanced according to the computational ability of different CPUs. After that, the selective work-stealing scheduler is used to further balance the workload at runtime and adjust the frequencies of asymmetric cores. Our real-system experimental results show that SAWS improves the performance of memory-bound programs up to 59.3% compared with traditional work-stealing schedulers in AMC architectures.
In Vitro Activities of MCB3681 and Eight Comparators against Clostridium difficile Isolates with Known Ribotypes and Diverse Geographical Spread

ABSTRACT Treatments for Clostridium difficile infection remain limited, despite the introduction of fidaxomicin, and development of new agents is necessary. We determined the in vitro susceptibilities of 199 prevalent or emerging Clostridium difficile PCR ribotypes to MCB3681, a novel investigational quinolonyl-oxazolidinone, and 8 comparators (metronidazole, vancomycin, fidaxomicin, moxifloxacin, ciprofloxacin, clindamycin, tigecycline, and linezolid). MCB3681 showed good activity against C. difficile with no evidence of MCB3681 resistance in isolates showing either moxifloxacin or linezolid resistance or both moxifloxacin and linezolid resistance.
Dialog act classification from prosodic features using support vector machines

A leakage current between the inverting input terminal and the output terminal of an operational amplifier having a switch between the two terminals is prevented from flowing by equalizing the potentials at the two terminals of the switch when it is open. This is accomplished by dividing the switch into two and inserting an additional switch between the intermediate node of the divided two switches and a reference potential point.
Hardware-Assisted Dependable Systems

Unpredictable hardware faults and software bugs lead to application crashes, incorrect computations, unavailability of internet services, data losses, malfunctioning components, and consequently financial losses or even death of people. In particular, faults in microprocessors (CPUs) and memory corruption bugs are among the major unresolved issues of today. CPU faults may result in benign crashes and, more problematically, in silent data corruptions that can lead to catastrophic consequences, silently propagating from component to component and finally shutting down the whole system. Similarly, memory corruption bugs (memory-safety vulnerabilities) may result in a benign application crash but may also be exploited by a malicious hacker to gain control over the system or leak confidential data. Both these classes of errors are notoriously hard to detect and tolerate. Usual mitigation strategy is to apply ad-hoc local patches: checksums to protect specific computations against hardware faults and bug fixes to protect programs against known vulnerabilities. This strategy is unsatisfactory since it is prone to errors, requires significant manual effort, and protects only against anticipated faults. On the other extreme, Byzantine Fault Tolerance solutions defend against all kinds of hardware and software errors, but are inadequately expensive in terms of resources and performance overhead. In this thesis, we examine and propose five techniques to protect against hardware CPU faults and software memory-corruption bugs. All these techniques are hardware-assisted: they use recent advancements in CPU designs and modern CPU extensions. Three of these techniques target hardware CPU faults and rely on specific CPU features: ∆-encoding efficiently utilizes instruction-level parallelism of modern CPUs, Elzar re-purposes Intel AVX extensions, and HAFT builds on Intel TSX instructions. The rest two target software bugs: SGXBounds detects vulnerabilities inside Intel SGX enclaves, and “MPX Explained” analyzes the recent Intel MPX extension to protect against buffer overflow bugs. Our techniques achieve three goals: transparency, practicality, and efficiency. All our systems are implemented as compiler passes which transparently harden unmodified applications against hardware faults and software bugs. They are practical since they rely on commodity CPUs and require no specialized hardware or operating system support. Finally, they are efficient because they use hardware assistance in the form of CPU extensions to lower performance overhead.
An open label, single-armed, exploratory study of apatinib (a novel VEGFR-2 tyrosine kinase inhibitor) in patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma

Background Apatinib, a novel small molecule vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 (VEGFR-2) tyrosine kinase inhibitor, have shown remarkable efficacy in many solid cancers. But evidence of antitumor activity in patients with lymphoma is still limited. We conducted an open-label, single-armed, exploratory study in relapse or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients for the efficacy and safety of apatinib. Experimental design Patients with relapse or refractory non-Hodgkin patients meet the criteria were eligible for enrollment. Treatment comprised of oral apatinib 500 mg once daily with 21 days as a treatment cycle. The primary end point was response rate. Secondary end points included progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Results Between February 2016 and December 2016, 21 patients were enrolled. The ORR (CR plus PR) was 47.6% (10 of 21 patients) included 9.5% CRs and 38.1% PRs. 23.8% patients achieved stable disease made the DCR 71.4% (15/21). The median OS was 7.3 months (95% CI, 7.1 to 7.9) and the median PFS was 7.1 months (95% CI, 4.2 to 7.3). Most patients suffered from grade 1 to grade 2 treatment-related adverse events and the most common nonhematologic adverse events were proteinuria (47.6%), hypertension (42.9%) and hand-foot syndrome (33.3%), respectively. Conclusions In our study, the results we presented showed apatinib might have a rapid, safe and high efficacy on relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients. Based on the data more clinic trials are expected to be taken to identification the efficacy of apatinib on lymphoma further.
Basolateral amygdala projections to ventral hippocampus modulate the consolidation of footshock, but not contextual, learning in rats

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) modulates memory consolidation for a variety of types of learning, whereas other brain regions play more selective roles in specific kinds of learning suggesting a role for differential consolidation via distinct BLA pathways. The ventral hippocampus (VH), an efferent target of the BLA, has been suggested to selectively process emotion-related learning, yet whether the BLA → VH pathway modulates memory consolidation, and does so in a learning-specific manner, is unknown. To address this issue, the BLA of male Sprague-Dawley rats was bilaterally transduced to express either ChR2(E123A) or eArchT3.0. Fiber optic probes were implanted in the VH to provide illumination of BLA axons. Rats then underwent a modified contextual fear conditioning task permitting separation of context and footshock learning. On day 1, rats received 3 min of pre-exposure to the apparatus. On day 2, rats were placed into the apparatus, received an immediate footshock, and quickly removed. Retention was tested on day 4. Optical stimulation of the BLA → VH pathway following footshock, but not context, training using trains of 40-Hz light pulses enhanced retention. Continuous optical inhibition of this pathway for 15 min starting 25 min after footshock training impaired retention. These findings indicate that BLA → VH projections influence the consolidation for footshock, but not context, learning of a modified CFC task and provide direct evidence that BLA projections to other brain regions modulate memory consolidation selectively depending on the kind of learning involved.
Review of new information on the use of wet and dry milling feed by-products in feedlot diets

The processing of grains to produce human foods, beverages, or fuel ethanol has resulted in a wide variety of associated feed by-products. Hominy feed and distillers by-products are feed by-products associated with two distinctly different drymilling industries. Hominy feed contains approximately 57% starch, 11% CP, and 5% fat (DM basis). When fed to finishing cattle, hominy feed has approximately 87% the net energy value of corn. Distillers by-products contain 25 to 32% CP and 13 to 16% fat (DM basis). Wet distillers by-products have approximately 97 to 147% the net energy value of corn. The energy value of wet distillers by-products may be affected by the type of grain used in the fermentation process (corn vs grain sorghum) and the amount of solubles added to the distillers grains. Drying distillers by-products reduces their net energy value but does not seem to affect their protein value. Corn gluten feed (CGF) and corn gluten meal (CGM) are feed by-products of the wet milling industry. Corn gluten feed is composed primarily of bran and steep. Corn gluten feed is lower in both CP (14 to 24%, DM basis) and escape protein (20 to 30%, % of CP) than CGM, but it is high in net energy for gain (90 to 114% of corn; DM basis). As the proportion of steep increases and bran decreases in CGF, the CP and net energy for gain content increases. When fed to finishing cattle, dried CGF has a lower net energy value than wet CGF. Wet distillers by-products and wet CGF seem to reduce the incidence of subacute acidosis. Because feed by-products have a high nutritional content and are often economically priced, they are excellent sources of energy and protein for feedlot cattle.