Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of Superconducting Multilayer Wiring for a 400-Pixel TES X-ray Microcalorimeter Array

Aiming at a large array of transition edge sensors for future astrophysical missions such as DIOS, we have been developing a multilayer readout wiring. Superconducting signal and return lines made of Al sandwich a SiO2 insulation layer. With this approach, self and mutual inductances are minimized and self fielding of bias leads can be reduced. We fabricated a 20 × 20 transition-edge sensor (TES) array on the multilayer wiring. A series of TES fabrication processes including absorber deposition and membrane formation were tested. However, resistance measurements at room temperature suggest that process yield is not high (~50 %). At low temperature, sharp superconducting transitions were observed for normal TES pixels, while their residual resistances were high (>;10 mΩ) and the critical currents were low (<;10 μA). Reasons for these phenomena and plans for a future TES array fabrication are discussed.
Risk Factors and Outcomes Associated With Severe Clostridium difficile Infection in Children

Background: The incidence and severity of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is increasing among adults; however, little is known about the epidemiology of CDI among children. Methods: We conducted a nested case-control study to identify the risk factors for and a prospective cohort study to determine the outcomes associated with severe CDI at 2 children's hospitals. Severe CDI was defined as CDI and at least 1 complication or ≥2 laboratory or clinical indicators consistent with severe disease. Studied outcomes included relapse, treatment failure, and CDI-related complications. Isolates were tested to determine North American pulsed-field gel electrophoresis type 1 lineage. Results: We analyzed 82 patients with CDI, of whom 48 had severe disease. Median age in years was 5.93 (1.78–12.16) and 1.83 (0.67–8.1) in subjects with severe and nonsevere CDI, respectively (P = 0.012). All patients with malignancy and CDI had severe disease. Nine subjects (11%) had North American pulsed-field gel electrophoresis type 1 isolates. Risk factors for severe disease included age (adjusted odds ratio [95% confidence interval]: 1.12 [1.02, 1.24]) and receipt of 3 antibiotic classes in the 30 days before infection (3.95 [1.19, 13.11]). If infants less than 1 year of age were excluded, only receipt of 3 antibiotic classes remained significantly associated with severe disease. Neither the rate of relapse nor treatment failure differed significantly between patients with severe and nonsevere CDI. There was 1 death. Conclusions: Increasing age and exposure to multiple antibiotic classes were risk factors for severe CDI. Although most patients studied had severe disease, complications were infrequent. Relapse rates were similar to those reported in adults.
Can Triaxial Accelerometry Accurately Recognize Inclined Walking Terrains?

The standard method for the analysis of body accelerations cannot accurately estimate the energy expenditure (EE) of uphill or downhill walking. The ability to recognize the grade of the walking surface will most likely improve upon the accuracy of the EE estimates for daily physical activities. This paper investigates the benefits of automatic gait analysis approaches including step-by-step gait segmentation and heel-strike recognition of the accelerometry signal in classifying various gradients. Triaxial accelerometry signals were collected from 12 subjects, performing walking on seven different gradient surfaces: 1) 92 m of 0° flat ground; 2) 85 m of ±2.70° inclined ramp; 3) 24 m of ±9.86° inclined ramp; and 4) 6-m pitch line of ±28.03° rake of stairway. Validity studies performed on a group of randomly selected healthy subjects showed high agreement scores between the automated heel-strike recognition markers, manual gait annotation markers, and video-based gait-segmentation markers. Thirteen subset features were found using a subset-selection search procedure from 57 extracted features which maximize the classification accuracy, performed with a Gaussian mixture model classifier, as estimated using sixfold cross-validation. An overall walking pattern-recognition accuracy of 82.46% was achieved on seven different inclined terrains using the 13 selected features. This system should, therefore, improve the accuracy of daily EE estimates with accurate measures on terrain inclinations.
How to assess social regulation of stress and emotions in daily family life? A computer-assisted family self-monitoring system (FASEM-C)

A major problem for scientific and practical work in many branches of psychology is the reliable access to phenomena under study. Traditional assessment procedures are often reliant on retrospective recall, self report measures and/or laboratory simulations. All these have their strengths and weaknesses. Ideally observations of people’s behaviour and interactions, and the monitoring of thoughts and feelings, should be of real events as they occur. This paper focuses on some methodological and reliability issues associated with development in handheld computer self-recording systems and describes a new computerassisted self-monitoring system for emotional processes in families with adolescents. The method is based on simultaneous self-observations of family members older than 13 years. The paper describes the procedures involved in using this approach and demonstrates how to obtain indicators for reactivity, reliability and some aspects of validity. Copyright C 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
“Shared sense of purposefulness”: a new concept to understand the practice of coordinating design in construction

Abstract Construction management literature sees the collective task of coordinating design as being about the “‘integration’” of “fragmented” discipline-specific design tasks/outputs, thus overlooking the important role of social interactions. This is not only conceptually problematic but also presents a practical management problem. As a response, a practice-based approach, which relies on a “becoming” ontology, is adopted for a practical explanation of design coordination for more effective design management. The adopted methodology suggests that design develops as a result of unfolding (path-dependent) individual actions and interdisciplinary interactions. Based on this, the concept of a “shared sense of purposefulness” is proposed to refer to the temporary and precarious organizational state of a design team in which each of the interacting team members has achieved a state of purposefulness to resume individual action. Hence, design coordination in construction is redefined as continuously re-establishing and maintaining “a shared sense of purposefulness”. The concept’s usefulness for understanding the practice of design coordination is demonstrated using data collected from a project in the UK. The discussion enables fresh insights into the everyday operation of design coordination. It is concluded that the proposed conception paves a way forward both for the research and practice in construction design management.
2 Human Capital and the Regional Italian Development : Does Unemployment matter ?

In this paper contrary to several empirical contributions we report a positive and significant influence of schooling investment on the long run growth of the Italian regions in the period 1963-1995. This result is obtained when the unemployment rate is added as an additional controlling dimension. In the theoretical part of the paper we propose a growth model that could account for these empirical results. The model is built on the idea that the accumulation of human capital is a learning-by-doing process where scholastic knowledge must be combined with working experience. The dynamic steady state of the model implies a negative relationship between long run growth and equilibrium unemployment rate. The transitional dynamics of the model implies an asymmetric convergence path. Economies starting with a relative human capital shortage converge at a slower speed toward the steady state growth than economies starting with a relative physical capital shortage. The dynamics of the model appears to be coherent with the basic stylized facts characterizing the Italian regional development.
Utility Independent Privacy Preserving Data Mining - Horizontally Partitioned Data

Micro data is a valuable source of information for research. However, publishing data about individuals for research purposes, without revealing sensitive information, is an important problem. The main objective of privacy preserving data mining algorithms is to obtain accurate results/rules by analyzing the maximum possible amount of data without unintended information disclosure. Data sets for analysis may be in a centralized server or in a distributed environment. In a distributed environment, the data may be horizontally or vertically partitioned. We have developed a simple technique by which horizontally partitioned data can be used for any type of mining task without information loss. The partitioned sensitive data at 'm' different sites are transformed using a mapping table or graded grouping technique, depending on the data type. This transformed data set is given to a third party for analysis. This may not be a trusted party, but it is still allowed to perform mining operations on the data set and to release the results to all the 'm' parties. The results are interpreted among the 'm' parties involved in the data sharing. The experiments conducted on real data sets prove that our proposed simple transformation procedure preserves one hundred percent of the performance of any data mining algorithm as compared to the original data set while preserving privacy.
Privacy-preserving encoding for cloud computing

Information in the cloud is under constant attack from cyber criminals as profitability increases; user privacy is also at risk with data being mined for monetary value – the new gold. A single leak could have devastating consequences for a person or organisation, yet users have limited control over their privacy. It is becoming clear that the current model for public cloud computing is flawed, where cloud vendors and their employees can no longer be trusted to protect user data. Privacy-preserving computation in the cloud keeps data private at all times but still remains functional, thus returning control of data back to users. The cloud could then perform operations using data that it cannot comprehend. The end-user would then be able to retrieve the results from the cloud and unlock the real answers. Homomorphic encryption is a solution for privacy-preserving processing, allowing computation over cipher text. At the time of writing, a fully homomorphic system allows arbitrary operations but requires minutes to compute an operation, whereas partially homomorphic encryption can only support a single operation, meaning it cannot be a generic solution to privacy-preserving computing. Another solution is multi-party computation, which uses a distributed approach built upon homomorphic encryption but currently suffers other limitations like reusability and lacks the ability to be truly dynamic. The primary objective of this research is to design a solution for the cloud that offers privacy-preserving data computation but provides performance and flexibility. A novel approach for multi-party computation is developed, where the combination of encoding and distribution helps provide the balance between security, performance and utility. Privacy is maintained by each distributed entity only receiving a small portion of the actual data through encoding, where attempting to brute-force the data results in a vast number of
Temporal autocorrelation functions for movement rates from global positioning system radiotelemetry data

Autocorrelation has been viewed as a problem in telemetry studies because sequential observations are not independent in time or space, therefore violating assumptions for statistical inference. Yet nearly all ecological and behavioural data are autocorrelated in both space and time. We argue that there is much to learn about the structure of ecological and behavioural data from patterns of autocorrelation. Such patterns include periodicity in movement and patchiness in spatial data, which can be characterized by an autocorrelogram, semivariogram or spectrum. We illustrate the utility of temporal autocorrelation functions (ACFs) for analysing step-length data from GPS telemetry of wolves (Canis lupus), cougars (Puma concolor), grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) and elk (Cervus elaphus) in western Alberta. ACFs often differ by season, reflecting differences in foraging behaviour. In wilderness landscapes, step-length ACFs for predators decay slowly to apparently random patterns, but sometimes display strong daily rhythms in areas of human disturbance. In contrast, step lengths of elk are consistently periodic, reflecting crepuscular activity.
Recommendations for the management of patients with obstructive sleep apnoea and hypertension

This article is aimed at addressing the current state-of-the-art in epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnostic procedures and treatment options for appropriate management of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) in cardiovascular (in particular hypertensive) patients, as well as for the management of cardiovascular diseases (in particular arterial hypertension) in OSA patients. The present document is the result of work performed by a panel of experts participating in the European Union COST (Cooperation in Scientific and Technological research) Action B26 on OSA, with the endorsement of the European Respiratory Society and the European Society of Hypertension. In particular, these recommendations are aimed at reminding cardiovascular experts to consider the occurrence of sleep-related breathing disorders in patients with high blood pressure. They are also aimed at reminding respiration experts to consider the occurrence of hypertension in patients with respiratory problems at night.
Cost Effective Cloud Environment Setup to Secure Corporate Data

In recent years ad-hoc parallel processing has emerged to be one among the killer applications for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Major Cloud computing firms have began to integrate frameworks for parallel processing in their product portfolio, creating it simple for purchasers to access these services and to deploy their programs. However, the process frameworks that area unit presently used are designed for static, consistent cluster setups and disrespect the actual nature of a cloud. Consequently, the allotted calculate resources could also be inadequate for giant components of the submitted job and unnecessarily increase time interval and value. During this paper we tend to discuss the opportunities and challenges for economical parallel processing in clouds and present our research HPSSD. HPSSD is the data processing framework to overtly utilize the dynamic resource portion presented by today’s IaaS clouds for each with hacker protection, task programming and execution. Specific tasks of a process job are often assigned to differing types of virtual machines that are mechanically instantiated and terminated throughout the task execution. Keywords-cloud computing; distributed cloud; virtual Networks; resource allocation system; network virtualization environment, HPSSD (Hacking Protection and secured software Delivery using Cloud Data Storage Environment)
Study on making omnistereo images for HMD using longer focal length

This paper presents a novel method for creating omnistereo images using longer focal lengths. The purpose of this study is to give the viewer with head mounted displays (HMD) or cardboard headsets a more cinematographic experience and to enable content creators to overcome present limitations in the aesthetics of virtual reality image recording. The presented method demonstrates the camera setup, the processing of mosaic images and the features required for the viewing device. The different sections are illustrated with examples from the experimental setups.
Admixture and diversity in West African cattle populations

We present a population genetic analysis of microsatellite variation in 16 West African cattle populations. West Africa represents a unique juxtaposition of different climatic and ecological zones in a relatively small geographical area. While more humid coastal regions are inhabited by the tsetse fly, a vector which spreads trypanosomiasis among cattle, the disease is not transmitted in the drier areas outside this zone. This is the most thorough study of genetic diversity in cattle within this area, which contains genetically important trypanotolerant Bos taurus breeds. Genetic relationships among the many breeds are examined and levels of diversity are assessed. Admixture levels were determined using a variety of methods. Ancestry informative or population‐associated alleles (PAAs) were selected using populations from India, the Near East and Europe. Multivariate analysis, the admix program and model‐based Bayesian admixture analysis approaches were also employed. These analyses reveal the direct impact of ecological factors and the profound effect of admixture on the cattle of this region. They also highlight the importance of efforts to prevent further dilution of African taurine breeds by B. indicus cattle.
Association of LEP G2548A and LEPR Q223R Polymorphisms with Cancer Susceptibility: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis

Background Numerous epidemiological studies have examined associations of genetic variations in LEP (G2548A, -2548 nucleotide upstream of the ATG start site) and LEPR (Q223R, nonsynonymous SNP in exon 6) with cancer susceptibility; however, the findings are inconsistent. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to comprehensively evaluate such associations. Methods We searched published literature from MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science and CBM for eligible publications. We also assessed genotype-based mRNA expression data from HapMap for rs7799039 (G2548A) and rs1137101 (Q223R) in normal cell lines derived from 270 subjects with different ethnicities. Results The final analysis included 16 published studies of 6569 cases and 8405 controls for the LEP G2548A and 19 studies of 7504 cases and 9581 controls for the LEPR Q223R. Overall, LEP G2548A was statistically significantly associated with an increased risk of overall cancer (AA vs. GG: OR=1.27, 95% CI=1.05-1.54; recessive model: OR=1.19, 95% CI=1.00-1.41). Further stratifications by cancer type showed an increased risk for prostate cancer (recessive model: OR=1.26, 95% CI=1.05-1.51) but not for other cancers. For LEPR Q223R, no statistical evidence for an association with risk of cancer was found for all; however, further stratification by ethnicity showed an increased risk for Africans but not for other ethnicities. No significantly differences in LEP and LEPR mRNA expression were found among genotypes or by ethnicity. Conclusions Despite some limitations, this meta-analysis found some statistical evidence for an association between the LEP 2548AA genotype and overall risk of cancer, particularly for prostate cancer, but given this variant did not have an effect on mRNA expression, this association warrants additional validation in large and well-designed studies.
Self organizing strategies for enhanced ICIC (eICIC)

Small cells have been identified as an effective solution for coping with the important traffic increase that is expected in the coming years. But this solution is accompanied by additional interference that needs to be mitigated. The enhanced Inter Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) feature has been introduced to address the interference problem. eICIC involves two parameters which need to be optimized, namely the Cell Range Extension (CRE) of the small cells and the ABS ratio (ABSr) which defines a mute ratio for the macro cell to reduce the interference it produces. In this paper we propose self-optimizing algorithms for the eICIC. The CRE is adjusted by means of load balancing algorithm. The ABSr parameter is optimized by maximizing a proportional fair utility of user throughputs. The convergence of the algorithms is proven using stochastic approximation theorems. Numerical simulations illustrate the important performance gain brought about by the different algorithms.
Sardine and anchovy spawning as related to temperature and upwelling in the California current system

Sardine and anchovy spawning was analyzed regarding its relation to sea-surface temperature and upwelling, using CalCOFI cruise data and Bakun's upwelling indices. Previous reports of temperature ranges for sardine and anchovy spawning have not taken into account the distribution of SST and have mostly referenced the cooler spawning area of the species. By obtaining the proportion of positive stations to total sampled stations for each tenth of a degree Celsius in the SST distribution, we were able to discriminate the ranges of preferred temperatures of spawning for both species. Sardines spawn in a much wider temperature range (13"-25°C) than anchovy (11.5"16.5"C). Two maxima of spawning occur in the California Current: at 15°C and 23°C. An additional peak is present in the Gulf of California at about 19°C. Only one maximum is evident for anchovy spawning, at about 14°C. The distribution of spawning as a function of upwelling was also analyzed for both species. There is a maximum for sardines at intermediate values of upwelling. There are two maxima for anchovy: a minor one at low levels of upwelling and a major one at the maximum values of upwelling. We conclude that sardines are eurythermic as compared to anchovies, but spawn only at intermediate values of upwelling, whereas anchovies are stenothermic but spawn at much wider ranges of upwelling, particularly at low and high values. The differences suggest exclusive competition, but more detailed analyses are needed. RESUMEN Se analiz6 el desove de sardina y anchoveta con respecto a su relaci6n con la temperatura superficial del mar y las surgencias, utilizando 10s datos de 10s cruceros CalCOFI y 10s indices de surgencia desarrollados por Bakun. Los intervalos de temperaturas de desove de sardina y anchoveta que se habian sefialado anterior