Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ExpressMatch: A System for Creating Ground-Truthed Datasets of Online Mathematical Expressions

In recognition domains, publicly available ground-truthed datasets are essential to perform effective performance evaluation and comparison of existing methods and systems. However, in the field of online handwritten mathematical expression recognition, datasets are quite scarce and their creation is one of the current challenging issues. In this paper, we present Express Match, a system designed to help creation and management of online mathematical expression datasets with ground-truth data. In this system, handwritten model expressions can be input and manually annotated with ground-truth data, transcriptions of these expressions can be automatically annotated by matching them to the respective models. Additional metadata can also be attached to each sample expression. To test the system, a dataset consisting of 56 model expressions and 910 sample expressions with a total of 20,010 symbols, written by 25 different writers, has been created. This dataset, as well as Express Match, will be made publicly available.
Clinical practice pattern of gastroenterologists, primary care physicians, and otolaryngologists for the management of GERD in the Asia–Pacific region: The FAST survey

Background and Aim: The clinical practice patterns of gastroenterologists, primary care physicians, and otolaryngologists for the management of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) in the Asia–Pacific region are unknown. Respective medical professionals from seven countries of the Asia–Pacific region were invited to participate in a questionnaire survey.
The Great Recession and the retirement decisions of older workers

To determine how asset values of older workers affect their future retirement decisions, it is important to take into account how asset values change over asset cycles. This study uses Health and Retirement Study data from waves 1992 through 2010 together with restricted SSA data on geographic location to estimate a model of the age at first self-reported retirement for the subsample of married males. The model covariates include demographic variables, workplace variables, non-housing financial wealth, and housing equity. The proportional hazard estimates are, for the most part, significant and of the correct sign. The estimated models suggest that declines in housing wealth during the Great Recession lowered retirement probabilities of married males by as much as 15 to 19 percent. This delay was offset in cases where the household had defined benefit or defined contribution pensions.
Risk factors for language impairment in Swedish bilingual and monolingual children relative to severity

Aim: To explore potential risk factors for language impairment (LI) relative to degree of severity in bilingual and monolingual children. Methods: Two groups of clinically assessed children were compared, 252 bilinguals whose parents were both non‐Swedish and 446 monolinguals, who were referred over a period of 24 mo to the University Hospital in Malmo for suspected LI. Results: A multivariate linear regression for both groups showed that two risk factors were the same: parental distress (p > 0.0001 in both groups) and short attention span (p > 0.0001 in both groups). Male gender (p > 0.0001) was an additional predictor for LI relative to degree of severity in the monolingual group. Specific risk factors for LI relative to degree of severity in the bilingual children were maternal arrival within 1 y in relation to birth (p > 0.002) and parental need for an interpreter after >5 y in Sweden (p > 0.040).
Growth of Large Banks, 1930-1960

T HE secular decline in the number of banks and the associated increase in the size of the average bank have raised serious questions about the viability of a banking structure which contains the vast extremes of bank size which are found in the United States. In spite of the widespread interest in this matter, very little statistical evidence has been available to gauge the success with which different size banks have met the challenge of their environments. We have attempted to fill part of this gap in the literature by investigating the performance of large banks during the years 1930 to 1960. In this study, we measured a bank's success in meeting the challenge of its environment by the growth of its assets. This is not the only measure of success but, unlike some other measures (e.g., profits), asset figures are available in published sources and are comparable for all banks. Although we recognize that all banks neither operated in an identical environment nor faced an equal challenge from their environments, we did not attempt in this paper to assess the nature or sources of the comparative growth record of large banks. Our more limited goal was to determine, as a matter of historical fact, whether large banks grew more or less than the banking system as a whole during those years. This analysis of the growth of large banks is based on the performance of the 200 largest banks in the system on particular dates. The 200 largest banks were only . 84 per cent of the bank population in 1930 and 1.48 per cent in 1960, but they accounted for more than half of all the commercial banking resources in the country on both dates. ' We identified by name each of the 200 largest banks in the country on three different dates, 1930, 1940, and 1950,2 and traced the growth of each bank in each of these top groups (i.e., the 1930 top group, the 1940 top group, and the 1950 top group) for different periods of time up to 1960. A word about some limitations of these basic bank figures is in order.3 First, only three groups of large banks were included in this study. Second, the periods covered for these groups, ranging from ten years for the 1950 top group to thirty years for the 1930 top group, provided three observations on the effects of a ten-year period, two observations on the effects of a twenty-year period, and one observation on the effects of a thirty-year period. Third, the composition of these bank groups overlaps because some of the leading banks on one date were also the leading banks on another date.
Effect of Oil Regeneration on Improving Paper Conditions in a Distribution Transformer

Managing a large fleet of ageing assets has become a technical challenge faced by many electricity utilities in developed countries. Asset managers are increasingly interested in techniques that can help extend the useful lifetime of a transformer. Oil regeneration is one of such techniques. In this paper, oil regeneration experiments were performed on a 6.4/0.4 kV retired distribution transformer to investigate the effect of oil regeneration on improving paper conditions. Oil regeneration was conducted in two stages, with the first stage aimed at ‘cleaning the oil’ and the second stage targeted at ‘cleaning the paper’. Oil samples were collected at regular intervals throughout the process and paper samples were obtained from the transformer before and after each oil regeneration stage. It was found that oil regeneration restores oil parameters, including moisture and acidity, similar to those of new oils at the end of stage 1. Analysis of paper samples indicated a reduction in paper moisture at the end of stage 2 by nearly 40%, while low molecular weight acids (LMA) in paper exhibited a reduction by around 30% on average. It is found that the extended oil regeneration period, i.e., stage 2, is necessary to improve the paper condition and hence to reduce the paper ageing rate.
Treponema phagedenis encodes and expresses homologs of the Treponema pallidum TmpA and TmpB proteins

We cloned and sequenced the genes from Treponema phagedenis Kazan 5 encoding proteins homologous to the TmpA and TmpB proteins of Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum Nichols (hereafter referred to as T. pallidum). Although previous reports suggested that the TmpA and TmpB proteins were specific for T. pallidum, we found that homologs for both were expressed in T. phagedenis Kazan 5 and Reiter. The TmpA protein from T. phagedenis contained the consensus sequence that bacterial lipoproteins require for posttranslational modification and subsequent proteolytic cleavage by signal peptidase II and showed 42% amino acid sequence identity with the TmpA protein from T. pallidum. The TmpB proteins of T. phagedenis and T. pallidum had similar amino acid sequences at their amino- and carboxy-terminal ends. The central portions of both of these proteins contained four repeats of the amino acid sequence EAARKAAE. The TmpB protein from T. phagedenis had an additional amino acid sequence repeat (consensus sequence KAAKE/D) that was not found in the TmpB protein from T. pallidum; this repeat was most remarkable, as it occurred 17 times in succession. These repeated amino acid sequences probably created an extensive alpha-helix region within the TmpB proteins. As with T. pallidum, the stop codon of the T. phagedenis tmpA gene overlapped the start codon of its tmpB gene. Northern blot analysis showed that the T. phagedenis tmpA and tmpB genes were probably transcribed into a single 2.5-kb mRNA molecule. Western blot (immunoblot) analysis demonstrated that both proteins were expressed by T. phagedenis. The high degree of amino acid sequence conservation seen with the TmpA and TmpB proteins from two different Treponema species suggests that they may play crucial roles in the biology of these organisms.
An N‐terminal nuclear export signal is required for the nucleocytoplasmic shuttling of IκBα

The potent transcriptional activities of Rel/NF‐κB proteins are regulated in the cytoplasm and nucleus by the inhibitor, IκBα. The mechanism, by which IκBα can either sequester NF‐κB in the cytoplasm or act as a nuclear post‐induction repressor of NF‐κB, is uncertain. We find that IκBα shuttles continuously between the nucleus and cytoplasm. This shuttling requires a previously unidentified CRM1‐dependent nuclear export signal (NES) located within the N‐terminal domain of IκBα at amino acids 45–55. Deletion or mutation of the N‐terminal NES results in nuclear localization of IκBα. NF‐κB (p65) association with IκBα affects steady‐state localization but does not inhibit its shuttling. Endogenous complexes of IκBα–NF‐κB shuttle and will accumulate in the nucleus when CRM1 export is blocked. We find TNFα can activate the nuclear IκBα–NF‐κB complexes by the classical mechanism of proteasome‐mediated degradation of IκBα. These studies reveal a more dynamic nucleocytoplasmic distribution for IκBα and NF‐κB suggesting previously unknown strategies for regulating this ubiquitous family of transcription activators.
Parents as Educators at Playcentre: Understanding the Constraints and Enablers of Teaching Practice

This paper reports on a study which investigated four parents as educators' use of their life experiences, skills and knowledge in their teaching practice in an urban Playcentre. This paper focuses on two themes that arose from the analysis. Firstly, the influence that the parents as educators' changing sense of belonging to the group had on their teaching practice is discussed and how this suggests the need to build a temporal dimension into understanding teaching practice within a team. Secondly, findings are examined that suggest that a sociocultural approach to the discourse surrounding adults' teaching practices could open up the possibilities of more culturally valued mature activities being undertaken within the centre setting, enabling educators to draw more fully on their own funds of knowledge.
Curbing Financial Crimes with Anti-Graft Bureaus in Nigeria: The Accountants’ Perception

Corruption, be it financial or non-financial is a global cankerworm that has eaten deep into the fabrics of many nations and war against it has been a recurring decimal in every economy. In Nigeria, recent attempts at nipping corruption in the bud gave rise to some anti-graft agencies such as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Against this background, opinion of 140 accountants in various capacities was sought on the efficacy of the anti-graft agencies in curbing financial crimes through a survey questionnaire. The study found that respondents group perceived the anti-graft agencies as highly effective but could not establish that accountants in various walks of life differ significantly in their perception of the efficacy of the Nigerian Anti-graft bureaus (Overall Mean= 2.98, F= 2.263 and P>0.05) using ANOVA as statistical analysis tool. It was recommended that Nigerian government should strengthen the Anti-financial crimes agencies given that the influence of highly placed offenders, the dignity, societal bondage and shame inherent in financial crimes may affect the potency of anti-financial crimes measures put in place.
Patterns of energy intake in patients with cirrhosis and healthy volunteers

Fuel utilization and N economy are optimized in patients with cirrhosis by provision of several small meals throughout the day and a late-night snack of complex carbohydrate. Currently, however, only limited information is available on the patterns of energy intake in patients with chronic liver disease. The aims of the present study were to determine the number of days required to undertake such an investigation and to observe the daily distribution of energy intake in this patient population. Eight patients with cirrhosis and eight matched healthy volunteers kept weighed dietary intake records for fifteen separate days over a 6-month period. The records were analysed for energy intake per hour and the number and size of energy intake episodes per 24 h calculated. Intake was verified against resting energy expenditure. Fourteen separate observational days were required to investigate the pattern of energy intake in the cirrhotic patients while 20 d were required for healthy volunteers. Considerable inter- and intrasubject variations in the number and size of energy intake episodes were observed in both the patients and healthy volunteers. However, no significant differences were observed between the mean total number of daily energy intake episodes (6·3 (sd 1·6) v. 7·0 (sd 1·4)) or in the distribution of daily energy intake between the two groups. Most patients and volunteers tended to eat frequent small meals, often including a late-night snack, rather than two or three large meals daily. It should, therefore, be possible to establish optimum patterns of energy intake in these patients in line with recent guidelines.
Improved endocervical sampling and HPV viral load detection by Cervex‐Brush® Combi

Objective: Liquid‐based cytology (LBC) for cervical screening is becoming increasingly used. Together with SurePath® LBC, various collecting devices can be utilized, among which the Cervex‐Brush® is the most widely used. The new Rovers® Cervex‐Brush® Combi combines the advantages of the Cervex‐Brush® with the EndoCervex‐Brush® increasing sampling of the endocervical canal. The objective of this study was to analyse and to compare the Cervex‐Brush® Combi with the Cervex‐Brush® for the collection of squamous and endocervical cells, human papillomavirus (HPV) typing/quantification and disease detection in SurePath® LBC.
Multiscale model predicts increasing focal adhesion size with decreasing stiffness in fibrous matrices

Significance Focal adhesions play crucial roles in mechanotransduction and regulate processes such as spreading, proliferation, differentiation, and motility. It is well known that cells develop larger adhesions when cultured on stiffer elastic hydrogels, but the native extracellular matrix (ECM) is fibrous, nonlinear, and dissipative. We developed a multiscale model showing that adhesion size decreases with increasing stiffness in fibrous matrices, in excellent agreement with our experiments on engineered fibrous matrices. Our model shows that this is due to the feedback between cell contractility and the physical remodeling of ECM, which does not exist in elastic substrates. The basic stiffness–adhesion size principle uncovered can be applied to understand tumor progression fundamentally or to better design biomaterial scaffolds to control cell behavior. We describe a multiscale model that incorporates force-dependent mechanical plasticity induced by interfiber cross-link breakage and stiffness-dependent cellular contractility to predict focal adhesion (FA) growth and mechanosensing in fibrous extracellular matrices (ECMs). The model predicts that FA size depends on both the stiffness of ECM and the density of ligands available to form adhesions. Although these two quantities are independent in commonly used hydrogels, contractile cells break cross-links in soft fibrous matrices leading to recruitment of fibers, which increases the ligand density in the vicinity of cells. Consequently, although the size of focal adhesions increases with ECM stiffness in nonfibrous and elastic hydrogels, plasticity of fibrous networks leads to a departure from the well-described positive correlation between stiffness and FA size. We predict a phase diagram that describes nonmonotonic behavior of FA in the space spanned by ECM stiffness and recruitment index, which describes the ability of cells to break cross-links and recruit fibers. The predicted decrease in FA size with increasing ECM stiffness is in excellent agreement with recent observations of cell spreading on electrospun fiber networks with tunable cross-link strengths and mechanics. Our model provides a framework to analyze cell mechanosensing in nonlinear and inelastic ECMs.
Epileptic Seizure Detection Using Genetically Programmed Artificial Features

Patient-specific epilepsy seizure detectors were designed based on the genetic programming artificial features algorithm, a general-purpose, methodic algorithm comprised by a genetic programming module and a k-nearest neighbor classifier to create synthetic features. Artificial features are an extension to conventional features, characterized by being computer-coded and may not have a known physical meaning. In this paper, artificial features are constructed from the reconstructed state-space trajectories of the intracranial EEG signals intended to reveal patterns indicative of epileptic seizure onset. The algorithm was evaluated in seven patients and validation experiments were carried out using 730.6 hr of EEG recordings. The results with the artificial features compare favorably with previous benchmark work that used a handcrafted feature. Among other results, 88 out of 92 seizures were detected yielding a low false negative rate of 4.35%
How to talk to strangers: Generating medical reports for first-time users

We propose a novel approach for handling first-time users in the context of automatic report generation from time-series data in the health domain. Handling first-time users is a common problem for Natural Language Generation (NLG) and interactive systems in general - the system cannot adapt to users without prior interaction or user knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for generating medical reports for first-time users, using multi-objective optimisation (MOO) to account for the preferences of multiple possible user types, where the content preferences of potential users are modelled as objective functions. Our proposed approach outperforms two meaningful baselines in an evaluation with prospective users, yielding large (= .79) and medium (= .46) effect sizes respectively.
A Dynamic Network Bandwidth Allocation Mechanism under Network QoS Constraints

A virtualized cloud platform may host several cloud services/applications simultaneously. Each hosted cloud service usually runs on a virtual cluster, consisting of several virtual machines (VMs) with a virtual network. In many cases, the virtual clusters share the overall physical network bandwidth. Thus, the quality of the cloud services sharing the same physical networks can be seriously affected when one of the cloud services produces a high traffic load. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to solve the mentioned issue. The proposed mechanism utilizes a logically centralized QoS controller to allocate network bandwidth to virtual clusters dynamically. The QoS controller uses a monitor to continuously gather network usage of each VM, and calculates the bandwidth consumption in the granule of virtual clusters. A Rate Limiter is bundled to each physical machine for triggering bandwidth re-distribution. The proposed mechanism is implemented on the OpenStack-based cloud platform, SAMEVED, which is developed to support on-line network security experiments. We implemented several network bandwidth re-distribution strategies on the proposed mechanism. We emulate the real network flows in the platform, and the experiment results show that, the proposed approach can effectively reduce nearly one third of packet loss rate when running a video streaming service in a high network traffic scenario.
Humidity Sensor Based on Fabry–Perot Interferometer and Intracavity Sensing of Fiber Laser

A humidity sensor based on Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI) and intracavity sensing of a fiber ring laser is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. A compact humidity-sensitive fiber-optic FPI is developed and inserted in a fiber ring laser. Because the output power of the fiber laser is modulated by the reflection loss of the FPI at different ambient humidity, intracavity humidity sensing is induced. The experiment shows that the relative output power of the fiber laser has a good linear response to ambient humidity from 25%RH to 95%RH and the humidity sensitivity of 0.202 dB/%RH is obtained with a narrow 3-dB bandwidth and high signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore, the excellent performance of the sensor for remote humidity detection is demonstrated. The sensor also shows a low temperature cross-sensitivity, fast time response, and good stability. The proposed sensor has a great potential in high-capacity sensor network and remote detections.
Glucose variability indices in type 1 diabetes: parsimonious set of indices revealed by sparse principal component analysis.

BACKGROUND Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) time-series are often analyzed, retrospectively, to investigate glucose variability (GV), a risk factor for the development of complications in type 1 diabetes (T1D). In the literature, several tens of different indices for GV quantification have been proposed, but many of them carry very similar information. The aim of this article is to select a relatively small subset of GV indices from a wider pool of metrics, to obtain a parsimonious but still comprehensive description of GV in T1D datasets. MATERIALS AND METHODS A pool of 25 GV indices was evaluated on two CGM time-series datasets of 17 and 16 T1D subjects, respectively, collected during the European Union Seventh Framework Programme project "Diadvisor" (2008-2012) in two different clinical research centers using the Dexcom(®) (San Diego, CA) SEVEN(®) Plus. After the indices were centered and scaled, the Sparse Principal Component Analysis (SPCA) technique was used to determine a reduced set of metrics that allows preserving a high percentage of the variance of the whole original set. In order to assess whether or not the selected subset of GV indices is dataset-dependent, the analysis was applied to both datasets, as well as to the one obtained by merging them. RESULTS SPCA revealed that a subset of up to 10 different GV indices can be sufficient to preserve more than the 60% of the variance originally explained by all the 25 variables. It is remarkable that four of these GV indices (i.e., Index of Glycemic Control, percentage of Glycemic Risk Assessment Diabetes Equation score due to euglycemia, percentage Coefficient of Variation, and Low Blood Glucose Index) were selected for all the considered T1D datasets. CONCLUSIONS The SPCA methodology appears a suitable candidate to identify, among the large number of literature GV indices, subsets that allow obtaining a parsimonious, but still comprehensive, description of GV.