Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
1 An agent-based modeling framework for simulating 2 human exposure to environmental stresses in urban 3 areas 4

The importance of predicting the exposure to environmental hazards is highlighted by 16 issues like global climate change, public health problems caused by environment stresses, and 17 property damages and depreciations. Several approaches have been used to assess potential 18 exposure and achieve optimal results under various conditions, for example, for different scales, 19 groups of people, or certain points in time. Micro-simulation tools are becoming increasingly 20 important in human exposure assessment, where each person is simulated individually and 21 continuously. This paper describes an agent-based model (ABM) framework that can dynamically 22 simulate human exposure levels, along with their daily activities, in urban areas that are 23 characterized by environmental stresses such as air pollution and heat stress. Within the framework, 24 decision making processes can be included for each individual based on rule-based behavior to 25 achieve goals under changing environmental conditions. The ideas described in this paper are 26 implemented in a free and open source NetLogo platform. A simplified modeling scenario of the 27 ABM framework in Hamburg, Germany, further demonstrates its utility in various urban 28 environments and individual activity patterns, and portability to other models, programs and 29 frameworks. The prototype model can potentially be extended to support environmental incidence 30 management by exploring the daily routines of different groups of citizens and compare the 31 effectiveness of different strategies. Further research is needed to fully develop an operational 32 version of the model. 33
Contextual Influences on Concordance Between Maternal Report and Laboratory Observation of Toddler Fear

Emotion and temperament researchers have faced an enduring issue of how to best measure children’s tendencies to express specific emotions. Inconsistencies between laboratory observation and parental report have made it challenging for researchers to determine the utility of these different forms of measurement. The current study examined the effect of laboratory episode characteristics (i.e., threat level of the episode, maternal involvement) on concordance between maternal report and laboratory observation of toddler fear. The sample included 111 mother-toddler dyads who participated in a laboratory assessment when toddlers were approximately 24 months old. Toddler fear was assessed both via maternal report and observation from a number of laboratory episodes that varied in their level of threat and whether mothers were free or constrained in their involvement in the task. Results indicated that maternal report related to the observed fear composites for low threat, but not high threat episodes. On the contrary, maternal involvement in the laboratory episodes did not moderate the relation between maternal report and laboratory observation of fear. These results suggest that the threat level of laboratory episodes designed to elicit fear, but not maternal involvement in these episodes, may be important to take into consideration when assessing their relation to maternal report of fear and fearful temperament.
Long Run Growth of Financial Data Technology

“Big data” financial technology raises concerns about market inefficiency. A common concern is that the technology might induce traders to extract others’ information, rather than to produce information themselves. We allow agents to choose how much they learn about future asset values or about others’ demands, and we explore how improvements in data processing shape these information choices, trading strategies and market outcomes. Our main insight is that unbiased technological change can explain a market-wide shift in data collection and trading strategies. However, in the long run, as data processing technology becomes increasingly advanced, both types of data continue to be processed. Two competing forces keep the data economy in balance: data resolve investment risk, but future data create risk. The efficiency results that follow from these competing forces upend two pieces of common wisdom: our results offer a new take on what makes prices informative and whether trades typically deemed liquidity-providing actually make markets more resilient. (JEL C55, D83, G12, G14, O33)
A radiomics model from joint FDG-PET and MRI texture features for the prediction of lung metastases in soft-tissue sarcomas of the extremities

This study aims at developing a joint FDG-PET and MRI texture-based model for the early evaluation of lung metastasis risk in soft-tissue sarcomas (STSs). We investigate if the creation of new composite textures from the combination of FDG-PET and MR imaging information could better identify aggressive tumours. Towards this goal, a cohort of 51 patients with histologically proven STSs of the extremities was retrospectively evaluated. All patients had pre-treatment FDG-PET and MRI scans comprised of T1-weighted and T2-weighted fat-suppression sequences (T2FS). Nine non-texture features (SUV metrics and shape features) and forty-one texture features were extracted from the tumour region of separate (FDG-PET, T1 and T2FS) and fused (FDG-PET/T1 and FDG-PET/T2FS) scans. Volume fusion of the FDG-PET and MRI scans was implemented using the wavelet transform. The influence of six different extraction parameters on the predictive value of textures was investigated. The incorporation of features into multivariable models was performed using logistic regression. The multivariable modeling strategy involved imbalance-adjusted bootstrap resampling in the following four steps leading to final prediction model construction: (1) feature set reduction; (2) feature selection; (3) prediction performance estimation; and (4) computation of model coefficients. Univariate analysis showed that the isotropic voxel size at which texture features were extracted had the most impact on predictive value. In multivariable analysis, texture features extracted from fused scans significantly outperformed those from separate scans in terms of lung metastases prediction estimates. The best performance was obtained using a M Vallières et al A radiomics model from joint FDG-PET and MRI texture features for the prediction of lung metastases in soft-tissue sarcomas of the extremities Printed in the UK 5471 PMb © 2015 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine 2015 60 Phys. Med. biol.
Tumor syndrome, hepatic and hematological features revealing undiagnosed early rheumatoid arthritis

Background: Extra-articular manifestations in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are rare and generally occur in an advanced stage of the disease. We report a case of an unusual onset of early RA. Case presentation: A 21 year old male complains of polyathritis involving small and large joints, associated with fever, asthenia, anorexia and weight loss. The temperature was up to 38.8°. There was a left cervical adenopathies, hepato-splenomegaly and there were synovitis in all joints sparing distal interphalangial joints. The erythrocyte sedimentation rate was accelerated; the C-reactive protein was up to 222 mg/l. The number of white blood cells were 9000/mm3 with monocytosis, lymphocytosis and thrombocytosis at 986000/mm3 . There was cholestasis with cytolysis. Rheumatoid factor (RF) and anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies (ACCP) were positive. The hands X-ray didn’t show any RA specific signs. The chest X-Ray showed a left pleurisy. The CT scan showed multiple axillar and mediastinal lymphadenopathies, hepato-splenomegaly with multiple coelio-mesenteric and retroperitoneal lymph nodes. The pleural biopsy as well as the biopsy of the adenopathy and the salivary glands didn’t show any specific abnormalities or signs of lymphoma. The hepatic biopsy revealed an inflammatory lymphohistiocytic infiltrate with rare foci of necrosis and a dilatation of the hepatic sinusoids. The diagnosis of RA was suspected and confirmed by the MRI of the hands. Conclusion: RA may have an unusual onset such as hematologic, hepatic, pleuropulmonary features or tumor syndrome, but it is rarely reported. The diagnosis in this case is difficult
Inkjet Geometric Design & Compensation Rules Generation and Characterization

Geometric design and compensation rules aim to guarantee that layout representations match final printed patterns within a valid tolerance for a desired process yield. The more conservative the rules are, the better is the yield. So, for a given process and after an experimental extraction of the required process parameters, it is possible to derive minimum design rules that characterize the technology process to a point where design engineers can address physical design to develop devices and systems without a deep knowledge of process and materials. A methodology to extract and characterize inkjet geometric design and compensation rules is proposed in this work as a first step to separate design from fabrication in a similar way as in silicon technology.
Increased Single-Fiber Jitter Level Is Associated With Reduction in Motor Function With Aging

Objective Age-associated skeletal muscle weakness is a major contributing factor to an increased late life mortality and morbidity, but its neurobiology is poorly understood. Previously, we provided histological evidence of dying-back axonal degeneration of motor neurons and denervation of neuromuscular junctions in age-associated muscle weakness. Given this, we aimed to evaluate the relation between impaired neuromuscular transmission and various aspects of age-associated muscle weakness. Design We compared two electrophysiological measures, single-fiber jitter and compound motor action potential in mice of different age groups, and correlated them with various physical performance measures, such as grip strength, standing and walking time, and treadmill performance. Results Consistent with our previous histological data, single-fiber jitter, a measure of neuromuscular junction transmission, was significantly increased in older animals, whereas compound motor action potential shows no difference between young and old age groups. Neither jitter nor compound motor action potential correlated with any of physical performance measures, except for jitter and standing activity. Conclusions Impaired neuromuscular transmission—represented as increase in single-fiber electromyography jitter level—reflects decline in motor function with aging.
Development of a self-scored persistent airflow obstruction screening questionnaire in a general Japanese population: the Hisayama study

Background The use of a simple screening questionnaire to detect persistent airflow obstruction (AO) in COPD may facilitate the early, accurate diagnosis of COPD in general practice settings. Objective This study developed an original persistent AO questionnaire for screening individuals with COPD in a general Japanese population. Methods A working group was established to generate initial draft questionnaire items about COPD. Eligible subjects aged 40 and older living in Japan were solicited to participate in a health checkup from 2014 to 2015. In study I, 2,338 subjects who fully completed the initial draft questionnaire and who had valid spirometry measurements were statistically analyzed to determine the final questionnaire items as a COPD screening questionnaire (COPD-Q). Persistent AO was defined as a post-bronchodilator FEV1/FVC <0.70. In study II, the working group analyzed the weighted scores for individual items and established a cutoff point for the COPD-Q based on the data of 2,066 subjects in the Hisayama study. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to examine the ability of the COPD-Q to discriminate between subjects with and without AO. Results The five-item COPD-Q was established based on 19 initial draft items in study I and the weighted scores of individual items. The overall area under the ROC curve for the COPD-Q was 0.796 (95% confidence interval, 0.707–0.788). A cutoff of 4 points resulted in a sensitivity of 71.0% and a specificity of 70.1%. The positive predictive value was 10.8%, and the negative predictive value was 97.9%. The crude odds ratio of the COPD-Q for AO was 5.8. Conclusion The five-item COPD-Q is a useful questionnaire for diagnosing persistent AO in a general Japanese population and is expected to be an effective first-stage screening tool for detecting COPD.
A Specific Model for Assessing the Financial Performance:Case study on Building Sector Enterprises of Galati County - Romania

In this paper is designed a specific model for assessing the financial performance, based on models of bankruptcy risk, for enterprises acting in the building sector from Galati County - Romania. The main purpose of the paper is designing and development a model for evaluation financial performance that important for ranking enterprises. To choose model variables was used discriminate analysis on 22 variables proposed that separate objectively performant by non-performant enterprises. The proposed model with five variables was tested using the initial sample of enterprises obtaining an average success ratio of 81.82%.
Lexical and affective models in early acquisition of semantics

Motivated by theories of early language development in children we investigate the contribution of affective features to early acquisition of lexical semantics. For the task of semantic similarity between words, semantic and affective spaces are modeled using network-based distributed semantic models. We propose a method for constructing semantic activations from a combination of lexical and affective relations and show that affective information plays a prominent role in our lexical development model.
Mechanically Reinforced Catechol-Containing Hydrogels with Improved Tissue Gluing Performance

In situ forming hydrogels with catechol groups as tissue reactive functionalities are interesting bioinspired materials for tissue adhesion. Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)–catechol tissue glues have been intensively investigated for this purpose. Different cross-linking mechanisms (oxidative or metal complexation) and cross-linking conditions (pH, oxidant concentration, etc.) have been studied in order to optimize the curing kinetics and final cross-linking degree of the system. However, reported systems still show limited mechanical stability, as expected from a PEG network, and this fact limits their potential application to load bearing tissues. Here, we describe mechanically reinforced PEG–catechol adhesives showing excellent and tunable cohesive properties and adhesive performance to tissue in the presence of blood. We used collagen/PEG mixtures, eventually filled with hydroxyapatite nanoparticles. The composite hydrogels show far better mechanical performance than the individual components. It is noteworthy that the adhesion strength measured on skin covered with blood was >40 kPa, largely surpassing (>6 fold) the performance of cyanoacrylate, fibrin, and PEG–catechol systems. Moreover, the mechanical and interfacial properties could be easily tuned by slight changes in the composition of the glue to adapt them to the particular properties of the tissue. The reported adhesive compositions can tune and improve cohesive and adhesive properties of PEG–catechol-based tissue glues for load-bearing surgery applications.
A study of digital camera colorimetric characterisation based on polynomial modelling

The digital camera is a powerful tool to capture images for use in image processing and colour communication. However, the RGB signals generated by a digital camera are device-dependent, i.e. different digital cameras produce different RGB responses for the same scene. Furthermore, they are not colorimetric, i.e. the output RGB signals do not directly correspond to the device-independent tristimulus values based on the CIE standard colorimetric observer. One approach for deriving a colorimetric mapping between camera RGB signals and CIE tristimulus values uses polynomial modelling and is described here. The least-squares fitting technique was used to derive the coefficients of 3× n polynomial transfer matrices yielding a modelling accuracy typically averaging 1 Δ E units in CMC(1:1) when a 3× 11 matrix is used. Experiments were carried out to investigate the repeatability of the digitising system, characterisation performance when different polynomials were used, modelling accuracy when 8-bit and 12-bit RGB data were used for characterisation and the number of reference samples needed to achieve a reasonable degree of modelling accuracy. Choice of characterisation target and media and their effect on metamerism have been examined. It is demonstrated that a model is dependent upon both media and colorant and applying a model to other media/colorants can lead to serious eye-camera metamerism problems.
Full Accounting for Verifiable Outsourcing

Systems for verifiable outsourcing incur costs for a prover, a verifier, and precomputation; outsourcing makes sense when the combination of these costs is cheaper than not outsourcing. Yet, when prior works impose quantitative thresholds to analyze whether outsourcing is justified, they generally ignore prover costs. Verifiable ASICs (VA)---in which the prover is a custom chip---is the other way around: its cost calculations ignore precomputation. This paper describes a new VA system, called Giraffe; charges Giraffe for all three costs; and identifies regimes where outsourcing is worthwhile. Giraffe's base is an interactive proof geared to data-parallel computation. Giraffe makes this protocol asymptotically optimal for the prover and improves the verifier's main bottleneck by almost 3x, both of which are of independent interest. Giraffe also develops a design template that produces hardware designs automatically for a wide range of parameters, introduces hardware primitives molded to the protocol's data flows, and incorporates program analyses that expand applicability. Giraffe wins even when outsourcing several tens of sub-computations, scales to 500x larger computations than prior work, and can profitably outsource parts of programs that are not worthwhile to outsource in full.
Probabilistic performance assessment of low ductility r.c. frames retrofitted by elasto-plastic dissipative braces

The paper illustrates a probabilistic methodology for assessing the vulnerability of existing r.c. buildings with limited ductility capacity and retrofitted by means of dissipative braces. The methodology is based on the development of single component and system fragility curves before and after the retrofit. The proposed approach allows to highlight the possible changes in the most significant collapse modalities before and after the retrofit and to evaluate the effectiveness of the retrofit by taking into account the probabilistic properties of the seismic behaviour of the considered systems. A benchmark 2-dimensional reinforced concrete frame with low ductility capacity is considered as case study. The frame is designed for gravity-loads only and does not comply with modern anti-seismic code requirements. It is retrofitted by introducing elasto-plastic dissipative braces designed for different levels of their target base-shear capacity, following a design method involving the pushover analysis of the system before and after retrofit. The obtained results show that the use of braces yields a significant increase in the seismic capacity, though an increased dispersion of the behaviour is observed in the retrofitted system.
Evolutionary trends in body size of parasitic flatworms

Evolutionary trends in body size have been identified within several lineages, but not all have followed Cope's rule, which states that average body size within a taxon tends to increase over time. In organisms such as parasites, space constraints may have shaped the evolution of body sizes, favouring small-bodied taxa capable of exploiting new niches. Here, the average adult body sizes of families in three groups of parasitic flatworms, the Digenea and two clades of Monogenea (Monopisthocotylea and Polyopisthocotylea), are related to their clade rank. Clade rank reflects the number of branching events, and thus the total path length, between an extant family and the root of the phylogenetic tree. Among families of Digenea, all of which are endoparasites of vertebrates, there was no trend in body size evolution. In contrast, the Monopisthocotylea and Polyopisthocotylea, which are (with the exception of Polystomatidae and Sphyranuridae) ectoparasites of fish, revealed significant negative relationships between family body size and clade rank, suggesting an evolutionary trend of decreasing size. In addition, an analysis of body size distributions in monogenean families also provides support, albeit weak, for this trend. From an ancestor parasitic on the skin of fishes, monogeneans have diversified by colonizing other microhabitats on their hosts, including such space-limited sites as the gaps between secondary gill lamellae. Using a conservative likelihood ratio test, however, a random walk, or null model of evolution could not be discarded in favour of the directional trends mentioned above. Nevertheless, these results suggest that body size has taken different evolutionary paths in endo- and ectoparasitic flatworms. © 2005 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2005, 85, 181–189.
A repeat protein‐based DNA polymerase inhibitor for an efficient and accurate gene amplification by PCR

A polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using a thermostable DNA polymerase is the most widely applied method in many areas of research, including life sciences, biotechnology, and medical sciences. However, a conventional PCR incurs an amplification of undesired genes mainly owing to non‐specifically annealed primers and the formation of a primer‐dimer complex. Herein, we present the development of a Taq DNA polymerase‐specific repebody, which is a small‐sized protein binder composed of leucine rich repeat (LRR) modules, as a thermolabile inhibitor for a precise and accurate gene amplification by PCR. We selected a repebody that specifically binds to the DNA polymerase through a phage display, and increased its affinity to up to 10 nM through a modular evolution approach. The repebody was shown to effectively inhibit DNA polymerase activity at low temperature and undergo thermal denaturation at high temperature, leading to a rapid and full recovery of the polymerase activity, during the initial denaturation step of the PCR. The performance and utility of the repebody was demonstrated through an accurate and efficient amplification of a target gene without nonspecific gene products in both conventional and real‐time PCRs. The repebody is expected to be effectively utilized as a thermolabile inhibitor in a PCR. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2016;113: 2544–2552. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
First description of the male spider Pacifiphantes magnificus (Chamberlin & Ivie) (Araneae: Linyphiidae)

The spider Pacifiphantes magnificus (Chamberlin & Ivie 1943)(Linyphiidae), originally described as a member of the ge-nus Bathyphates, is redescribed and the first description of the male is presented. DNA barcoding was used to test the conspecificity of specimens from different collection events and to help match specimens from different sexes.