Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MEMS for Plasmon Control of Optical Metamaterials

Metamaterials have attracted a great deal of attention as artificial electromagnetic materials having unique optical characteristics, and various innovative optical applications have been expected. Micro electromechanical systems (MEMS)-based reconfigurable metamaterials are candidate technologies for active optical control. In this paper, we focus on MEMS-based reconfigurable metamaterials operated in the optical region between visible and near-infrared wavelengths. A brief overview of static optical metamaterials and active optical metamaterials driven by MEMS actuators is presented. Moreover, points to be considered for a micromachining process of optical metamaterials are discussed with results of calculations.
Agility in Virtualized Utility Computing

Virtual machines have emerged as an attractive approach for utility computing platforms because applications running on VMs are fault- and security- isolated from each other, yet can share physical machines. An important property of a virtualized utility computing platform is how quickly it can react to changing demand. We refer to the capability of a utility computing platform to quickly reassign resources as the agility of the platform. We are targeting hosting utility provider environments where the entire platform is under the control of a single administrative domain and application instances often form application-level clusters. In this work, we examine resource reassignment mechanisms in these environments from the agility perspective and outline a new mechanism that exploits properties of a virtualized utility computing platform. This new mechanism employs ghost virtual machines (VMs), which participate in application clusters, but do not handle client requests until activated by the resource management system. We evaluate this, as well as other, mechanisms on a utility computing testbed. The results show that this ghost VM approach is superior to other approaches in its agility, and allows a new VM to be added to an existing application cluster in a few seconds with negligible overhead. This is a promising result as we develop resource management algorithms for a globally distributed utility computing platform.
Parental beliefs about child psychopathology: The relation with child gender and symptomatology

PARENTAL BELIEFS ABOUT CHILD PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: THE RELATION WITH CHILD GENDER AND SYMPTOMATOLOGY SEPTEMBER 1999 REBECCA M. STOWE, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF MAINE, ORONO M.S., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor David Harvey Arnold Keenan and Shaw (1997) suggested that gender differences in child and adolescent psychopathology might be related to the socializing of internalizing behaviors in girls. Some studies have suggested that parents respond differentially to some child behaviors depending on the sex of the child. Additionally, other studies support the notion that parents consider male-stereotypic behaviors more problematic in girls. However, past studies have not directly examined parental beliefs about symptoms in girls versus boys or examined how these beliefs relate to actual child symptoms in preschool children. The present study extends existing research by examining whether parents have different beliefs about internalizing and externalizing symptomatology depending on the sex of the child in which the symptom occurs and if these parental beliefs are related to parent and teacher report of child symptoms. The present study found gender differences in parental concern about hypothetical symptoms in girls versus boys in a sample of higher income, European American parents, but found no significant gender differences in a sample of lower income parents from racial and ethnic minority groups. The present study did not obtain significant findings with regard to the relation ot these beliefs with parent and teacher report of child symptoms. The importance of > conducting such research with diverse participants is discussed.
Japanese-to-Chinese spoken language translation based on the simple expression

This paper describes a Japanese-to-Chinese spoken language translation (SLT) method based on simple expression and presents the experimental results. The method is aimed at developing a compact speech translation system, which is robust for spontaneous spoken language phenomena, including the recognition errors and different expression from various speakers. The idea of translation method based on simple expression is that the mechanism interprets speech-act rather than the direct translation of the speaker’s words. The method is realized by mapping the simple expression instead of deep parsing. In this method, only keywords in speech recognition results are extracted, and the corresponding target sentences are extracted from the database by selecting similar example sentences with the keywords. All training sentences in the bilingual corpus are rewritten into the simple expression and grouped by rules. The rules are specially designed to develop the compact size example database for translation. Comparing with other example-based approaches to SLT, the method based on simple expression is easy to realize, and especially it is practical to develop the SLT systems limited in specific domains.
Drug use during early pregnancy: Cross-sectional analysis from the Childbirth and Health Study in Primary Care in Iceland

Abstract Objective. To analyse drug use in early pregnancy with special focus on socio-demographic factors associated with psychotropic and analgesic drug use. Design. Cross-sectional study. Setting and subjects. A total of 1765 women were invited via their local health care centres, and 1111 participated at 11–16 weeks of pregnancy by filling out a postal questionnaire concerning socio-demographic and obstetric background, stressful life events, and drug use. Main outcome measures. Drug use prior to and early on in pregnancy, socio-demographic factors, smoking, and adverse life events were investigated. Drug categories screened for were psychotropics (collective term for antidepressants, relaxants, and sleep medication), analgesics, hormones, nicotine, vitamins/minerals, and homeopathic medicine. Results. Drug use from the aforementioned drug categories, excluding vitamins/minerals and homeopathic medicine, was reduced by 18% during early pregnancy, compared with six months prior to conception (49% vs. 60%). Psychotropic drug use during early pregnancy was associated with elementary maternal education (p < 0.5), being unemployed (p < 0.001), being single/divorced/separated (p < 0.01), smoking prior to or during pregnancy (p < 0.01), forced to change job/move house (p < 0.001), and psychotropic drug use six months prior to pregnancy (p < 0.001). No items on the stressful life events scale were associated with increased analgesic use, which increased only with multiparity. Conclusions. Use of analgesics and psychotropic drugs seems common in pregnancy. Our results indicate that lack of a support network, stressful life events, and lower status in society may predispose women to more drug use. GPs and midwives responsible for maternity care could take this into account when evaluating risk and gain for women and foetuses in the primary care setting.
ENDF nuclear data in the physical, biological, and medical sciences

Abstract Purpose: This paper gives an overview of recent advances in the ENDF (Evaluated Nuclear Data File) database of neutron, proton, and photonuclear cross sections. ENDF nuclear data aim to provide accurate and comprehensive representations of all reaction processes that need to be simulated in radiation transport applications. The paper reviews some of the most importance capabilities embodied in the ENDF/B-VII.0 database released a few years ago, and describes new capabilities being developed for the forthcoming ENDF/B-VII.1 release planned for later in 2011. Conclusion: Illustrative examples are given for nuclear reactions of particular importance to Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) simulations of biological and medical applications. The examples show the utility of these evaluated ENDF data for simulating energy deposition and transport, for therapy and for radiation protection applications.
Cost-Sensitive Learning for Recurrence Prediction of Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is one of the top cancer-death causes and specifically accounts for 10.4% of all cancer incidences among women. The prediction of breast cancer recurrence has been a challenging research problem for many researchers. Data mining techniques have recently received considerable attention, especially when used for the construction of prognosis models from survival data. However, existing data mining techniques may not be effective to handle censored data. Censored instances are often discarded when applying classification techniques to prognosis. In this paper, we propose a cost-sensitive learning approach to involve the censored data in prognostic assessment with better recurrence prediction capability. The proposed approach employs an outcome inference mechanism to infer the possible probabilistic outcome of each censored instance and adopt the cost-proportionate rejection sampling and a committee machine strategy to take into account these instances with probabilistic outcomes during the classification model learning process. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for breast cancer recurrence prediction and include a censored-data-discarding method (i.e., building the recurrence prediction model by only using uncensored data) and the Kaplan-Meier method (a common prognosis method) as performance benchmarks. Overall, our evaluation results suggest that the proposed approach outperforms its benchmark techniques, measured by precision, recall and F1 score.
An Efficient Method for Computing a Bayesian Mixture of Feature-Based Models

We describe a computationally efficient method to produce a specific Bayesian mixture of all the models in a finite set of feature-based models that assign a probability to the observed data set. Special attention is given to the bound on the regret of using the mixture instead of the best model in the set. It is proven theoretically and verified through synthetic data that this bound is relatively tight. Comparing the workload of the proposed method with the direct implementation of the Bayesian mixture shows an almost exponential improvement of computing time.
Thrombectomy within 8 hours after symptom onset in ischemic stroke.

BACKGROUND We aimed to assess the safety and efficacy of thrombectomy for the treatment of stroke in a trial embedded within a population-based stroke reperfusion registry. METHODS During a 2-year period at four centers in Catalonia, Spain, we randomly assigned 206 patients who could be treated within 8 hours after the onset of symptoms of acute ischemic stroke to receive either medical therapy (including intravenous alteplase when eligible) and endovascular therapy with the Solitaire stent retriever (thrombectomy group) or medical therapy alone (control group). All patients had confirmed proximal anterior circulation occlusion and the absence of a large infarct on neuroimaging. In all study patients, the use of alteplase either did not achieve revascularization or was contraindicated. The primary outcome was the severity of global disability at 90 days, as measured on the modified Rankin scale (ranging from 0 [no symptoms] to 6 [death]). Although the maximum planned sample size was 690, enrollment was halted early because of loss of equipoise after positive results for thrombectomy were reported from other similar trials. RESULTS Thrombectomy reduced the severity of disability over the range of the modified Rankin scale (adjusted odds ratio for improvement of 1 point, 1.7; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.05 to 2.8) and led to higher rates of functional independence (a score of 0 to 2) at 90 days (43.7% vs. 28.2%; adjusted odds ratio, 2.1; 95% CI, 1.1 to 4.0). At 90 days, the rates of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage were 1.9% in both the thrombectomy group and the control group (P=1.00), and rates of death were 18.4% and 15.5%, respectively (P=0.60). Registry data indicated that only eight patients who met the eligibility criteria were treated outside the trial at participating hospitals. CONCLUSIONS Among patients with anterior circulation stroke who could be treated within 8 hours after symptom onset, stent retriever thrombectomy reduced the severity of post-stroke disability and increased the rate of functional independence. (Funded by Fundació Ictus Malaltia Vascular through an unrestricted grant from Covidien and others; REVASCAT ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01692379.).
Endogenous Acute Phase Serum Amyloid A Lacks Pro-Inflammatory Activity, Contrasting the Two Recombinant Variants That Activate Human Neutrophils through Different Receptors

Most notable among the acute phase proteins is serum amyloid A (SAA), levels of which can increase 1000-fold during infections, aseptic inflammation, and/or trauma. Chronically elevated SAA levels are associated with a wide variety of pathological conditions, including obesity and rheumatic diseases. Using a recombinant hybrid of the two human SAA isoforms (SAA1 and 2) that does not exist in vivo, numerous in vitro studies have given rise to the notion that acute phase SAA is a pro-inflammatory molecule with cytokine-like properties. It is however unclear whether endogenous acute phase SAA per se mediates pro-inflammatory effects. We tested this in samples from patients with inflammatory arthritis and in a transgenic mouse model that expresses human SAA1. Endogenous human SAA did not drive production of pro-inflammatory IL-8/KC in either of these settings. Human neutrophils derived from arthritis patients displayed no signs of activation, despite being exposed to severely elevated SAA levels in circulation, and SAA-rich sera also failed to activate cells in vitro. In contrast, two recombinant SAA variants (the hybrid SAA and SAA1) both activated human neutrophils, inducing L-selectin shedding, production of reactive oxygen species, and production of IL-8. The hybrid SAA was approximately 100-fold more potent than recombinant SAA1. Recombinant hybrid SAA and SAA1 activated neutrophils through different receptors, with recombinant SAA1 being a ligand for formyl peptide receptor 2 (FPR2). We conclude that even though recombinant SAAs can be valuable tools for studying neutrophil activation, they do not reflect the nature of the endogenous protein.
Evolution of C 4 Photosynthesis in the Genus Flaveria : How Many and Which Genes Does It Take to Make C 4 ? W

Selective pressure exerted by a massive decline in atmospheric CO 2 levels 55 to 40 million years ago promoted the evolution of a novel, highly efﬁcient mode of photosynthetic carbon assimilation known as C 4 photosynthesis. C 4 species have concurrently evolved multiple times in a broad range of plant families, and this multiple and parallel evolution of the complex C 4 trait indicates a common underlying evolutionary mechanism that might be elucidated by comparative analyses of related C 3 and C 4 species. Here, we use mRNA-Seq analysis of ﬁve species within the genus Flaveria , ranging from C 3 to C 3 -C 4 intermediate to C 4 species, to quantify the differences in the transcriptomes of closely related plant species with varying degrees of C 4 -associated characteristics. Single gene analysis deﬁnes the C 4 cycle enzymes and transporters more precisely and provides new candidates for yet unknown functions as well as identiﬁes C 4 associated pathways. Molecular evidence for a photorespiratory CO 2 pump prior to the establishment of the C 4 cycle-based CO 2 pump is provided. Cluster analysis deﬁnes the upper limit of C 4 -related gene expression changes in mature leaves of Flaveria as 3582 alterations.
Benign Breast Tumors NY-ESO-1 Expression and Immunogenicity in Malignant and Updated

NY-ESO-1 is a cancer/testis antigen expressed in normal adult tissues solely in the testicular germ cells of normal adults and in various cancers. It induces specific humoral and cellular immunity in patients with NYESO-1-expressing cancer. The aim of this study was to determine the frequency of NY-ESO-1 mRNA and protein expression in malignant and benign breast tumors. NY-ESO-1 mRNA expression was detected by conventional reverse transcription-PCR and real-time PCR, and that of the protein expression by immunohistochemistry and Western blot analysis. Expression of NY-ESO-1 mRNA was detected in 37 of 88 (42%) cancer specimens, whereas that of the NY-ESO-1 protein was detected only in 1 mRNA-positive specimen. In the latter case, expression level of NY-ESO-1 mRNA relative to that in the testis was relatively high (75% of testicular expression) and to the other among breast cancer specimens. In benign breast lesions, 21 of 31 (68%) specimens expressed low levels of NY-ESO-1 mRNA. In 1 case of fibroadenoma, NY-ESO-1 mRNA was 8% of the testicular level, and protein was detected by Western blot analysis. Only 1 breast cancer patient had detectable antibody at time of surgery, which disappeared within 2 years. Tumor specimen from this patient was both NY-ESO-1 mRNA and protein positive, and NY-ESO-1-specific CD8 T cells were detected in this patient by IFNenzyme-linked immunospot assay using NY-ESO-1 recombinant adeno and vaccinia virus. A higher rate of NY-ESO-1 expression was noted in breast cancer with high histological grade and negative hormone receptor status, suggesting NY-ESO-1 as a potential tumor antigen for immunotherapy in patients with breast cancer and poor prognosis.
Repository mirroring

Distributed administration of network repositories demands a low-overhead procedure for cooperating repositories around the world to ensure they hold identical contents. Netlib has adopted some refinements on the widespread scheme of anonymous ftp and s-R. Checksum files and two small C programs give an easily maintained system that copes with communication breakdowns and subtle changes in repository contents. The packaging of these C programs inside a shell pipeline provides an explicit command stream that can readily be checked before execution. Protecting files, keeping logs, and so forth become effortless and reliable. The same tools, applied on a smaller scale, allow more people to participate in the editorial work of maintaining a high-quality repository, by eliminating the need for directly manipulating files at remote sites.
C2-CODER: coverage-controlled network CODEd repetition for vehicular ad-hoc networks

In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), vehicles are aware of the state of the vehicles in their proximity by periodically broadcasting a safety message called beacon. Based on such state information, safety applications allow people to avoid hazardous situations. Recently, network coding (NC)-based repetition schemes have been proposed for the reliable transmission of life-critical beacons, where a sender combines (XORs) beacons from neighbors and repeats the XORed packets instead of its original beacon. Repeating the XORed packets improves the beacon delivery ratio. Although it could extend the coverage of beacon transmission, vehicles are more interested in the state of vehicles nearer to them since they are more likely to be exposed to dangerous situations with closer neighbors. In this paper, we therefore propose a Coverage-Controlled network CODEd Repetition (C2-CODER) scheme in order to allow scarce channel resources not to be wasted for extending the coverage unnecessarily. C2-CODER avoids coverage extension by restricting the maximum distance between the sender and the sources of beacons being combined into a XORed packet. Through our simulation study, it is verified that C2-CODER outperforms existing schemes in terms of higher beacon delivery rate.
Cigarette smoking and depression: tests of causal linkages using a longitudinal birth cohort

Background Research on the comorbidity between cigarette smoking and major depression has not elucidated the pathways by which smoking is associated with depression. Aims To examine the causal relationships between smoking and depression via fixed-effects regression and structural equation modelling. Method Data were gathered on nicotine-dependence symptoms and depressive symptoms in early adulthood using a birth cohort of over 1000 individuals. Results Adjustment for confounding factors revealed persistent significant (P<0.05) associations between nicotine-dependence symptoms and depressive symptoms. Structural equation modelling suggested that the best-fitting causal model was one in which nicotine dependence led to increased risk of depression. The findings suggest that the comorbidity between smoking and depression arises from two routes; the first involving common or correlated risk factors and the second a direct path in which smoking increases the risk of depression. Conclusions This evidence is consistent with the conclusion that there is a cause and effect relationship between smoking and depression in which cigarette smoking increases the risk of symptoms of depression.
Controlled Cortical Impact Traumatic Brain Injury in 3xTg-AD Mice Causes Acute Intra-Axonal Amyloid-β Accumulation and Independently Accelerates the Development of Tau Abnormalities

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized pathologically by progressive neuronal loss, extracellular plaques containing the amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides, and neurofibrillary tangles composed of hyperphosphorylated tau proteins. Aβ is thought to act upstream of tau, affecting its phosphorylation and therefore aggregation state. One of the major risk factors for AD is traumatic brain injury (TBI). Acute intra-axonal Aβ and diffuse extracellular plaques occur in ∼30% of human subjects after severe TBI. Intra-axonal accumulations of tau but not tangle-like pathologies have also been found in these patients. Whether and how these acute accumulations contribute to subsequent AD development is not known, and the interaction between Aβ and tau in the setting of TBI has not been investigated. Here, we report that controlled cortical impact TBI in 3xTg-AD mice resulted in intra-axonal Aβ accumulations and increased phospho-tau immunoreactivity at 24 h and up to 7 d after TBI. Given these findings, we investigated the relationship between Aβ and tau pathologies after trauma in this model by systemic treatment of Compound E to inhibit γ-secretase activity, a proteolytic process required for Aβ production. Compound E treatment successfully blocked posttraumatic Aβ accumulation in these injured mice at both time points. However, tau pathology was not affected. Our data support a causal role for TBI in acceleration of AD-related pathologies and suggest that TBI may independently affect Aβ and tau abnormalities. Future studies will be required to assess the behavioral and long-term neurodegenerative consequences of these pathologies.
Supporting Students of Diverse Sexual Orientation in Higher Education: An Ethnography of an LGBTAQ Center

The authors conducted an ethnography of a university queer cultural center‘s role on campus and in the surrounding community. The dataset included participant observation, in-depth interviews, and artifacts. The authors present a review of LGBTQA issues in higher education, heterosexual attitudes, transgender, ethics, and queer theory literature. The findings of roles/barriers to the Center‘s mission plus the devastating murder of a woman who was transgender and suicide of a Center student prompted the authors to use research poetry as a means to express the inexpressible. Furthermore, they illustrate tensions between contemporary queer and traditional gay theories through the telling of a straight tale (traditional report) and a gay tale (experiential report), interrupted with queer tales (poetic interludes) and queer asides. At the heart of the tale is the transformation of a gay man to a researcher and scholar of gay issues. This tale is therefore at all times queer, gay, and straight.