Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dementia, Comorbidity, and Physical Function in the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly

Background: Participants in the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) are a unique clinical population of medically complex and highly disabled older adults who qualify for nursing home level care but receive services in the community. A main goal of PACE programs is to prevent further declines in physical function that may necessitate costly institutionalization. This study evaluates how multimorbidity and dementia impact both self-selected gait speed and Timed Up and Go (TUG) in this population. Methods: This study was a cross-sectional design. Sociodemographic information, physical function, comorbidity data, and dementia status on 525 PACE participants were extracted from a quality improvement database. Separate univariable and multivariable linear regression models were used to evaluate the impact of comorbidity status and dementia on gait speed and TUG time. Results: PACE participants overall have a high degree of functional disability, with an average gait speed of 0.66 m/s, an average Short Physical Performance Battery score of 6.0/12, and an average TUG time of nearly 20 s. In the univariable analysis, a higher number of comorbidities and a diagnosis of dementia were associated with greater limitation for gait speed and TUG time. After adjusting for age, sex, strength, and balance, each additional comorbidity was independently associated with 0.015 m/s slower gait speed, as well as a 3.5% increase in TUG time for PACE participants with dementia. Conclusions: Ambulatory PACE participants have average levels of physical function that are dangerously close to thresholds thought to indicate vulnerability for further disability development, hospitalization, and nursing home admission. Both dementia and comorbidity burden are associated with declines in physical function, and the interaction between these risk factors is a telling indicator to functional decline in higher-level ambulatory tasks. PACE program clinicians can use this information to better identify participants at risk for limited physical function. Further research should investigate consequences of functional decline and determine optimal intervention strategies for PACE participants with functional impairments.
Miniaturized millimeter-wave narrow bandpass filter in 0.18 μm CMOS technology using spiral inductors and inter digital capacitors

In this paper, first, we demonstrate that millimeter wave bandpass filters at 60 GHz can be realized using miniaturized lumped capacitors and spiral inductors instead of traditional microstrip transmission line structures. Second, at these frequencies, inter digital capacitors are shown to have a much higher quality factor (Q) than high density metal- insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors. All the circuit elements are layout optimized using electro-magnetic tools which resulted in Qs ≥ 15 over the frequency band of operation. The filter is fabricated in 0.18 μm high resistivity RF silicon on insulator CMOS technology with a top thick metal built especially for the design of low loss inductors. The filter has a center frequency of 51 GHz and 3dB bandwidth of 9 GHz, with a fractional bandwidth of 17.6% and a loaded Q of 5.6. The chip area of the filter is 160 μm × 135 μm excluding the pads. Since the proposed filter implementation does not require MIM processing, significant process cost savings can be achieved when compared to existing lumped filter implementations.
A Spatially Enhanced Error Concealment Technique and its Potential Alternative Application to Reduce H.264 Stream Sizes

With more and more video content being transmitted digitally and with user expectations continually rising, error concealment is becoming an increasingly important part of streaming media. Often overlooked in the past, even now manufacturers are often only doing the bare minimum necessary in order to avoid complexity. This paper first presents a combination of simple techniques that when combined produce an extremely effective concealment method that maintains spatially correlated edges throughout any lost data; this in turn gives an increase in both mathematical and visual performance when compared against the commonly used bilinear concealment technique. Secondly this paper looks at an alternative use of the bilinear passive error concealment algorithm that is often used by H.264 decoders. Occasionally a concealed macroblock is mathematically closer to the original than an encoded and decoded one, by removing these from the stream at the encoder and thus forcing the decoder to conceal the missing data, a significant reduction in the bit stream size (up to 5%) can be achieved with almost no loss in quality.
ADAM17-Mediated Shedding of Inflammatory Cytokines in Hypertension

The increase of Angiontesin-II (Ang-II), one of the key peptides of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS), and its binding to the Ang-II type 1 receptor (AT1R) during hypertension is a crucial mechanism leading to AD\AM17 activation. Among the reported membrane anchored proteins cleaved by ADAM17, immunological cytokines (TNF-α, IFN-γ, TGF-β, IL-4, IL-10, IL-13, IL-6, FKN) are the major class of substrates, modulation of which triggers inflammation. The rise in ADAM17 levels has both central and peripheral implications in inflammation-mediated hypertension. This narrative review provides an overview of the role of ADAM17, with a special focus on its cellular regulation on neuronal and peripheral inflammation-mediated hypertension. Finally, it highlights the importance of ADAM17 with regards to the biology of inflammatory cytokines and their roles in hypertension.
Factors associated with quality of life in a cohort of postmenopausal women

Objective. To evaluate quality of life (QOL) and identify its associated factors in a cohort of postmenopausal women who had not received hormone therapy. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 81 postmenopausal women who had not used hormone therapy in the last six months. Sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, in addition to the prevalence of menopausal symptoms, were evaluated. QOL was assessed by the Medical Outcomes Study 36-item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) questionnaire, which may be condensed into two summaries: Physical Component Summary and Mental Component Summary. Generalized linear models were used to analyze the data, allowing the identification of factors affecting QOL, adjusting for confounding variables. Results. The mean (±standard deviation) age of the participants was 58.1 ± 4.7 years. The most prevalent symptoms were nervousness (67%) and hot flushes and sweating (51%). Factors associated with poorer QOL were sweating, palpitations, nervousness (physical component), and dizziness, nervousness, depression, insomnia and dyspareunia (mental component). Conclusion. We observed that menopausal symptoms negatively affected the physical and mental components of QOL in postmenopausal women.
Passivity as a design tool for group coordination

We pursue a group coordination problem where the objective is to steer the differences between output variables of the group members to a prescribed compact set via distributed feedback rules. When the information flow between neighboring members is bidirectional, we show that the closed-loop system exhibits a special interconnection structure which inherits the passivity properties of its components. By exploiting this structure we develop a passivity-based design framework, which results in a broad class of feedback rules that encompass as special cases some of the existing formation stabilization and group agreement designs in the literature. The passivity approach offers additional design flexibility compared to these special cases, and systematically constructs a Lurie-type Lyapunov function for the closed-loop system. We further study the robustness of the feedback laws in the presence of a time-varying communication topology
Real-time Scale-invariant Object Recognition from Light Field Imaging

We present a novel light field dataset along with a real-time and scale-invariant object recognition system. Our method is based on bag-of-visual-words and codebook approaches. Its evaluation was carried out on a subset of our dataset of unconventional images. We show that the low variance in scale inferred from the specificities of a plenoptic camera allows high recognition performance. With one training image per object to recognise, recognition rates greater than 90 % are demonstrated despite a scale variation of up to 178 %. Our versatile light-field image dataset, CSEM-25, is composed of five classes of five instances captured with the recent industrial Raytrix R5 camera at different distances with several poses and backgrounds. We make it available for research purposes.
Monitoring Training Load, Recovery-Stress State, Immune-Endocrine Responses, and Physical Performance in Elite Female Basketball Players During a Periodized Training Program

Abstract Nunes, JA, Moreira, A, Crewther, BT, Nosaka, K, Viveiros, L, and Aoki, MS. Monitoring training load, recovery-stress state, immune-endocrine responses, and physical performance in elite female basketball players during a periodized training program. J Strength Cond Res 28(10): 2973–2980, 2014—This study investigated the effect of a periodized training program on internal training load (ITL), recovery-stress state, immune-endocrine responses, and physical performance in 19 elite female basketball players. The participants were monitored across a 12-week period before an international championship, which included 2 overloading and tapering phases. The first overloading phase (fourth to sixth week) was followed by a 1-week tapering, and the second overloading phase (eighth to 10th week) was followed by a 2-week tapering. ITL (session rating of perceived exertion method) and recovery-stress state (RESTQ-76 Sport questionnaire) were assessed weekly and bi-weekly, respectively. Pretraining and posttraining assessments included measures of salivary IgA, testosterone and cortisol concentrations, strength, jumping power, running endurance, and agility. Internal training load increased across all weeks from 2 to 11 (p ⩽ 0.05). After the first tapering period (week 7), a further increase in ITL was observed during the second overloading phase (p ⩽ 0.05). After the second tapering period, a decrease in ITL was detected (p ⩽ 0.05). A disturbance in athlete stress-recovery state was noted during the second overloading period (p ⩽ 0.05), before returning to baseline level in end of the second tapering period. The training program led to significant improvements in the physical performance parameters evaluated. The salivary measures did not change despite the fluctuations in ITL. In conclusion, a periodized training program evoked changes in ITL in elite female basketball players, which appeared to influence their recovery-stress state. The training plan was effective in preparing participants for competition, as indicated by improvements in recovery-stress state and physical performance after tapering.
The Acquisition and Function of Religious Beliefs: A Review and Synthesis of Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives

ABSTRACT Two main scientific approaches have renewed in the last decade the scientific study of religion: the cognitive and the adaptationist. The former is focused on proximate causes, the latter is looking for ultimate causes of religious beliefs and behaviours. Both approaches are useful and promising. However, in both cases, various important aspects and contexts associated with the origin, acquisition, and transmission of religious beliefs have been neglected. The present paper offers an approach that conjoins both models after reviewing several critical issues, to highlight a distinction between cognitive conditions and structures, on one side; and developments or applications, on the other. As a result greater attention needs to be paid to religious functions and their cultural framework to better understand religion and to explain some current processes, like massive secularization in several areas.
Modélisation de la ségrégation superficielle dans les aciers FeNi par des approches atomistiques

Le vieillissement des aciers est un probleme crucial dans bien des industries (automobile, nucleaire) puisqu’il determine la duree de vie des elements. En effet, la segregation aux defauts du materiau d'elements tels que le carbone, ou les additifs metalliques (nickel, chrome), modifie fortement ses proprietes mecaniques d'une part, et sa resistance a la corrosion d'autre part. Modeliser de tels phenomenes n'est pas chose simple. Jusqu'ici, le choix des methodes utilisees s'est partage entre des calculs dits "de premiers principes", bases sur la Theorie de la Fonctionnelle de la Densite, trop lourds pour rendre compte de materiaux realistes, et des methodes basees sur des potentiels semi-empiriques difficilement transferables d'un systeme a l'autre. Dans ce travail de these, nous avons developpe une approche effective de la structure electronique originale, fondee sur l'approximation des Liaisons Fortes, pour decrire les aciers Fer-Nickel. Nous avons du pour cela identifier les regles d’auto-coherence auxquelles doivent obeir les charges electroniques et les populations de spin : neutralite locale pour les premieres, variation en concentration du moment magnetique pour les secondes Cette methodologie nous a permis de mettre en evidence le role essentiel joue par le magnetisme dans les phenomenes d’ordre-desordre en volume, et de segregation d’equilibre en surface, premiere etape vers une modelisation cinetique du vieillissement de ces aciers.
Artificial learners adopting normative conventions from human teachers

Abstract This survey provides an overview of implemented systems, theoretical work, as well as studies of biological systems relevant to the design of artificial learners trying to figure out what a human teacher would like them to do. Implementations of artificial learners are covered, with a focus on experiments trying to find better interpretations of human behavior, as well as algorithms that autonomously improve a model of the teacher. A distinction is made between learners trying to interpret teacher behavior in order to learn what the teacher would like the learner to do on the one hand, and learners whose explicit or implicit goal is to get something from the teacher on the other hand (for example rewards, or knowledge about how the world works). The survey covers the former type of systems. Human teachers are covered, focusing on studies that say something concrete about how one should interpret the behavior of a human teacher that is interacting with an artificial learner. Certain types of biological learners are interesting as inspiration for the types of artificial systems we are concerned with. The survey focus on studies of biological learners adopting normative conventions, as well as joint intentionality team efforts.
N-gramas sintácticos no-continuos

Resumen—En este articulo presentamos el concepto de los n- gramas sintacticos no-continuos. En nuestros trabajos previos hemos introducido un concepto general de los n-gramas sintacticos, es decir, los n-gramas que se construyen siguiendo las rutas en un arbol sintactico. Su gran ventaja consiste en que permiten introducir information puramente linguistic;! (sintactica) en los metodos computacionales de aprendizaje automatico. Su desventaja esta relacionada con la necesidad de realizar el analisis sintactico automatico previo. Tambien hemos demostrado que la aplicacion de los n-gramas sintacticos en la tarea de atribucion de autoria da mejores resultados que el uso de los n-gramas tradicionales. Sin embargo, en dichos trabajos solo hemos considerado los n-gramas sintacticos continuos, es decir, durante su construccion no se permiten bifurcaciones en las rutas sintacticas. En este articulo, estamos proponiendo a quitar esta limitacion, y de esa manera considerar todos los sub-arboles de longitud n de un arbol sintactico como los n-gramas sintacticos no- continuos. Cabe mencionar que los n-gramas sintacticos continuos son un caso particular de los n-gramas sintacticos no-continuos. El trabajo futuro debe mostrar que tipo de n-gramas es mas util y para que tareas de PLN. Se propone la manera formal de escribir un n-grama sintactico no-continuo usando parentesis y comas, por ejemplo, “a b [c [d, e], f]”. Tambien presentamos en este articulo ejemplos de construccion de n-gramas sintacticos no-continuos para los arboles sintacticos obtenidos usando FreeLing y el parser de Stanford.Palabras clave—Modelo de espacio vectorial, n-gramas, n- gramas sintacticos continuos, n-gramas sintacticos no-continuos.
Discovery of two novel families of proteins that are proposed to interact with prokaryotic SMC proteins, and characterization of the Bacillus subtilis family members ScpA and ScpB

Structural maintenance of chromosomes (SMC) proteins are present in all eukaryotes and in many prokaryotes. Eukaryotic SMC proteins form complexes with various non‐SMC subunits, which affect their function, whereas the prokaryotic homologues had no known non‐SMC partners and were thought to act as simple homodimers. Here we describe two novel families of proteins, widespread in archaea and (Gram‐positive) bacteria, which we denote ‘segregation and condensation proteins’ (Scps). ScpA genes are localized next to smc genes in nearly all SMC‐ containing archaea, suggesting that they belong to the same operon and are thus involved in a common process in the cell. The function of ScpA was studied in Bacillus subtilis, which also harbours a well characterized smc gene. Here we show that scpA mutants display characteristic phenotypes nearly identical to those of smc mutants, including temperature‐ sensitive growth, production of anucleate cells, formation of aberrant nucleoids, and chromosome splitting by the so‐called guillotine effect. Thus, both SMC and ScpA are required for chromosome segregation and condensation. Interestingly, mutants of another B. subtilis gene, scpB, which is localized downstream from scpA, display the same phenotypes, which indicate that ScpB is also involved in these functions. ScpB is generally present in species that also encode ScpA. The physical interaction of ScpA and SMC was proven (i) by the use of the yeast two‐hybrid system and (ii) by the isolation of a complex containing both proteins from cell extracts of B. subtilis. By extension, we speculate that interaction of orthologues of the two proteins is important for chromosome segregation in many archaea and bacteria, and propose that SMC proteins generally have non‐SMC protein partners that affect their function not only in eukaryotes but also in prokaryotes.
A novel strategy for vienna-type rectifier with light unbalanced input voltage

A natural abc frame based current control loop, which considerably reduces total algorithm complexity, and also helps to reduce the reactive components size and total loss in comparison to the traditional dual current control schemes, is proposed for a Vienna rectifier under unbalanced input conditions. Experimental results are presented to verify the validity of the proposed controller.
A novel 2D-to-3D scheme by visual attention and occlusion analysis

We propose a novel 2D to 3D scheme by considering perceived 3D experience caused by occlusion and visual attention. In this scheme, initial depth model, the saliency map of visual attention and occlusion analysis are integrated in depth calculation. Mean-while, characteristics of human visual system are also considered as weight factors. Then, depth normalization and refining are implemented. The experimental results show that the final depth map presents proper depth order, details of objects and interesting region of 3D perception and the perceived 3D experiences for the converted images and videos are satisfied.
Tula hantavirus in Belgium

European common voles (Microtus arvalis), captured in Belgium in 1999, were proven by molecular as well as by serological techniques to be infected with Tula hantavirus (TULV). This is the first evidence for the presence of TULV in this country. No indication of spill-over infections of Puumala virus, known to be highly endemic among bank voles (Clethrionomys glareolus) within the same geographical regions as the trapped TULV-infected common voles, was observed. Together with previous reports on the circulation of TULV in eastern/central Europe, this finding suggests a more wide-spread circulation of this hantavirus serotype throughout the continent.
Carbon Nanostructures as Low Cost Counter Electrode for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

In the last two decades, dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have gained extensive attention as a low cost alternative to conventional Si solar cells (Oregan & Gratzel 1991; Fan et al. 2008; Xie et al. 2009; Alibabaei et al. 2010; Gajjela et al. 2010; Xie et al. 2010; Yum et al. 2010). A typical DSSC is made of a TiO2 photoanode and a Pt counter electrode separated by an electrolyte comprising an iodide/triiodide (I/I3) redox couple. The photoanode is usually prepared from TiO2 nanoparticles on a transparent conducting oxide (TCO), while the counter electrode is a thin layer of Pt deposited on another TCO substrate. The dye molecules are adsorbed onto TiO2 surface. When exposed to sunlight, photoelectrons are generated and injected into the photoanode. Afterward, the electrons travel to counter electrode through an outside load. The oxidized dye molecules then retake electrons from I ions and oxidize I into I3. Meanwhile, the I3 is reduced into I by taking electrons from counter electrode. Pt counter electrode has been extensively used as an efficient electrocatalyst for reduction of I3 ions in DSSCs (Gratzel 2003; Sun et al. 2010). However, Pt is an expensive metal and can also be corroded by I/I3 redox couple (Kay & Gratzel 1996). Recently, various carbonaceous materials including graphite, carbon black, and carbon nanotubes have been studied as a low cost replacement for Pt as an electrocatalyst for reduction of I3 ions (Kay & Gratzel 1996; Burnside et al. 2000; Imoto et al. 2003; Imoto et al. 2003; Suzuki et al. 2003; Murakami et al. 2006; Ramasamy et al. 2007; Fan et al. 2008; Hinsch et al. 2008; Joshi et al. 2009; Lee et al. 2009; Skupien et al. 2009; Calandra et al. 2010). The carbonaceous materials are plentiful, inexpensive, and also exhibit high resistivity to corrosion (Ramasamy et al. 2007). Replacement of Pt with carbon-based materials can also speed up DSSC commercialization (Burnside et al. 2000; Hinsch et al. 2008; Han et al. 2009; Skupien et al. 2009; Joshi et al. 2010). In this chapter, we review some carbon nanostructures including carbon nanoparticles and electrospun carbon nanofibers that have been successfully used as a low cost alternative to Pt in DSSCs. The carbon nanoparticleand carbon nanofiber-based DSSCs showed comparable performance as that of Pt-based devices in terms of short circuit current density (Jsc) and open circuit voltage (Voc). Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements indicated that the carbon nanoparticle and carbon nanofiber counter electrodes showed lower charge transfer resistance (Rct), suggesting that carbon nanoparticle and carbon nanofiber counter electrodes are an efficient electrocatalyst for DSSCs. In addition, the series resistance of carbon-based counter electrodes was found to be a little