Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Associations between an Obesity Related Genetic Variant (FTO rs9939609) and Prostate Cancer Risk

Observational studies suggest that obese men have a lower risk of incident prostate cancer, but an increased risk of advanced and fatal cancers. These observations could be due to confounding, detection bias, or a biological effect of obesity. Genetic studies are less susceptible to confounding than observational epidemiology and can suggest how associations between phenotypes (such as obesity) and diseases arise. To determine whether the associations between obesity and prostate cancer are causal, we conducted a genetic association study of the relationship between a single nucleotide polymorphism known to be associated with obesity (FTO rs9939609) and prostate cancer. Data are from a population-based sample of 1550 screen-detected prostate cancers, 1815 age- and general practice matched controls with unrestricted prostate specific antigen (PSA) values and 1175 low-PSA controls (PSA <0.5 ng/ml). The rs9939609 A allele, which was associated with higher BMI in the sample, was inversely associated with overall (odds ratio (OR) versus all controls = 0.93; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.85–1.02 p = 0.12 per allele) and low-grade (OR = 0.90; 0.81–0.99 p = 0.03 per allele) prostate cancer risk, but positively associated with high-grade cancer among cases (OR high- versus low-grade cancer = 1.16; 0.99–1.37 p = 0.07 per allele). Although evidence for these effects was weak, they are consistent with observational data based on BMI phenotypes and suggest that the observed association between obesity and prostate cancer is not due to confounding. Further research should confirm these findings, extend them to other BMI-related genetic variants and determine whether they are due to detection bias or obesity-related hormonal changes. Trial Registration Controlled-Trials.com ISRCTN20141297
NihonGo: A Computer-Aided Learning Package of Japanese Language for Beginner Level

This paper describes the development of a computer-aided learning package, NihonGo that teaches Japanese Language in an easy way. It comprises eight main modules – Lessons, Exercises, Quizzes, Writing, Games, Dictionary, Karaoke and Maintenance. It is a bilingual system that allows the users a choice of either English or Malay language for the instructions. NihonGo was developed using the incremental evolution technique through rapid prototyping. The development tools used include VB.Net, Microsoft Access and Adobe Photoshop CS2. Adobe Photoshop CS2 is used to design the system’s graphical user interface. VB,NET connects the application with the Microsoft Access database. The eight modules were first developed and tested individually before they were integrated and tested to form a complete system. User Acceptance Test (UAT) was conducted on the NihonGo.
Simplification of Global‐Illumination Meshes

We present a methodfor simplifying the meshes produced as solutions to global illumination problems, reducing geometric complexity while retaining the perceived imagefidelity. The method has been applied to produce meshes of linearly, quadratically and cubically colour‐interpolated triangles. The goal of our work is to permit interactive rendering of more complex global illumination solutions through the application of simplification algorithms as well as the use of more powerful rendering primitives.
Nucleosome assembly of simian virus 40 DNA in a mammalian cell extract

We report here a mammalian cell-free system that can support chromatin assembly. Effective nucleosome assembly in HeLa cell extracts occurred at 125 to 200 mM KCl or potassium glutamate. At this physiological K+ ion concentration, two types of chromatin assembly were observed. The first was interfered with by Mg2+. Other cations such as Mn2+, Ca2+, Fe3+, and spermidine also inhibited this type of nucleosome assembly. The second type of assembly occurred in the presence of Mg2+ and at least equimolar ATP. However, even in the presence of ATP, excess Mg2+ inhibited assembly and promoted catenation of DNA; these effects could be circumvented by excess ATP, GTP, EDTA, or polyglutamic acid. The critical DNA concentration for optimum assembly in both pathways suggested a stoichiometric association of histones with DNA. The spacing of nucleosomes formed by both types of assembly on linear and circular DNA was reasonably regular, but chromatin assembled in the presence of ATP and Mg2+ was more stable.
Distributed Q-learning based dynamic spectrum management in cognitive cellular systems: Choosing the right learning rate

This paper presents the concept of the Win-or-Learn-Fast (WoLF) variable learning rate for distributed Q-learning based dynamic spectrum management algorithms. It demonstrates the importance of choosing the learning rate correctly by simulating a large scale stadium temporary event network. The results show that using the WoLF variable learning rate provides a significant improvement in quality of service, in terms of the probabilities of file blocking and interruption, over typical values of fixed learning rates. The results have also demonstrated that it is possible to provide a better and more robust quality of service using distributed Q-learning with a WoLF variable learning rate, than a spectrum sensing based opportunistic spectrum access scheme, but with no spectrum sensing involved.
CD4+ Th1 Cells Induced by Dendritic Cell-Based Immunotherapy in Mice Chronically Infected with Leishmania amazonensis Do Not Promote Healing

ABSTRACT The susceptibility of mice to Leishmania amazonensis infection is thought to result from an inability to develop a Th1 response. Our data show that the low levels of gamma interferon (IFN-γ) produced by the draining lymph node (DLN) cells of chronically infected mice could be enhanced in vitro and in vivo with L. amazonensis antigen-pulsed bone marrow-derived dendritic cells (BM-DC) and the Th1-promoting cytokine interleukin-12 (IL-12). Given intralesionally to chronically infected mice, this treatment induced the upregulation of mRNA levels for IFN-γ, the transcription factor T-box expressed in T cells, and IL-12 receptor β2 in CD4+ T cells from the DLN and an increase in parasite-specific immunoglobulin G2a in the serum. However, this Th1 response was not associated with healing, and the antigen-specific enhancement of IFN-γ production remained impaired in the DLN. However, addition of IL-12 to the in vitro recall response was able to recover this defect, suggesting that antigen-presenting cell-derived IL-12 production may be limited in infected mice. This was supported by the fact that L. amazonensis amastigotes limited the production of IL-12p40 from BM-DC in vitro. Altogether, our data indicate that the immune response of mice chronically infected with L. amazonensis can be enhanced towards a Th1 phenotype but that the presence of Th1 CD4+ T cells does not promote healing. This suggests that the phenotype of the CD4+ T cells may not always be indicative of protection to L. amazonensis infection. Furthermore, our data support growing evidence that antigen-presenting cell function, such as IL-12 production, may limit the immune response in L. amazonensis-infected mice.
Mesocentrism and Students of Mexican Background: A Community Intervention for Culturally Relevant Instruction

How does the integration of information about a student's ancestral culture elicit a more positive motivation for their learning at school? Chicano activists in the Southwest exposed middle school students to a program of instruction based on Mesoamerican ancestry. The program's effectiveness is analyzed through a quasi-experiment. A pre- and postsurvey measured cultural awareness, desire, effect, reading preference, self-esteem, and self-concept. Informal student narratives were used to interpret treatment effects. Results indicated that the intervention enhanced students' sense of cultural awareness and voluntary reading preferences. Implications for the study include how culturally relevant instruction can be a valuable stepping stone for motivating traditionally marginalized students into a meaningful engagement with content-area literacy. Key words: content area literacy, culturally relevant instruction, mesoamerican, mesocentrism, Mexican American, reading preferences
Using Earth observations to enhance water resources decision-making and disaster assessment processes in the United States and the developing world

This paper provides an overview and discussion of water-related Applied Sciences Program (ASP) activities within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth Science Division. These activities seek to enhance decision-making processes that relate to water resources and disaster assessment in the United States (U.S.) and abroad. We evaluate the various approaches that are employed to improve the utility of and access to Earth observations in decision support for water challenges; in particular, we consider the development of applications and activities that strengthen capacity to use these applications. Applications include products like maps, decision support system improvements and tools, and related services. This paper also identifies potential next steps for continuing to facilitate a coordinated water strategy amongst the Applied Sciences Applications Areas and the ASP Capacity Building Program.
Do women fare worse: a metaanalysis of gender differences in traumatic brain injury outcome.

OBJECT The purpose of this metaanalysis was to investigate possible gender differences in traumatic brain injury (TBI) sequelae. The case fatality rates in patients after TBI have previously been shown to be significantly higher in women as compared with men. METHODS A quantitative review of published studies of TBI outcome revealed eight studies (20 outcome variables) of TBI, in which outcome was reported separately for men and women. CONCLUSIONS Outcome was worse in women than in men for 85% of the measured variables, with an average effect size of -0.15. Although clinical opinion is often that women tend to experience better outcomes than men after TBI, the opposite pattern was suggested in the results of this metaanalysis. However, this conclusion is limited by the fact that, in only a small percentage of the total published reports on TBI outcome, was outcome described separately for each sex. A careful, prospective study of sex differences in TBI outcome is clearly needed.
Trajectories of Maintenance and Resilience in Healthful Eating and Exercise Behaviors in Older Adults

Objective: Our objective was to describe behavioral change trajectories for healthful eating and exercise in a group of community-dwelling older adults. A secondary aim was to determine predictors of maintenance and resilience. Method: Subjects were participants in the Study of Exercise and Nutrition in Older Rhode Islanders (SENIOR) I study who had achieved postaction stage of change for at least one behavior by its end. They were recruited for SENIOR II, a 48-month study with annual assessments on demographic, anthropometric, cognitive, psychosocial, and behavioral variables. Results: Maintainers generally had higher levels of healthy behaviors and better cognitive function. Resilient older adults were similar to maintainers but were older and had greater functional limitations. Discussion: Findings suggest that both physical health and psychological capital provide important resources upon which to draw as older adults grow even older. The trajectory model can provide useful information for developing resilience interventions for older adults.
Broadcasting Major League Baseball as a Governmental Instrument in South Korea

This study investigates governmentality in the relationships between local governments and global sports by examining the contexts of broadcasting Major League Baseball (MLB) in South Korea. Compared to how the Korean Baseball League (KBO) was used in the 1980s to divert public interest from political issues and encourage state nationalism, the sensational popularity of MLB in the 1990s helped construct alternative governmentality during the International Monetary Fund intervention. This new governmentality not only legitimated global competition but also emphasized responsible individuals and a new kind of citizen. Rather than arguing either total failure or success of the governmentality of the 1990s, this study suggests that individuated nationalism was its consequence, meaning that most Koreans remained deeply involved with nationalistic discourse but responded to it in different and diverse ways.
Minorities in the Newsroom and Community: A Comparison

Since the American Society of Newspaper Editors set minority hiring goals in 1978, the number of minorities working in newsrooms has crept up from about 4% to nearly 8% by 1990. But the goal of racial “equivalency” to be met by year 2000 finds the minority community growing so fast that gains are being wiped out. Comparing individual newspaper minority news staffs with the actual minorities in the circulation area, this study finds successes and failures for a large sample of newspapers for which data are available. Daily newspapers that achieve minimum minority hiring goals are in communities with, proportionately speaking, small numbers of minorities. When communities have minorities of at least 15%, newspapers, whether large or small, cannot seem to match that percentage on news staffs.
Relation of Body Weight to Development of Coronary Heart Disease: The Framingham Study

Interrelationships between weight change, serum cholesterol, blood pressure levels, and the risk of developing coronary heart disease have been explored in 5,127 men and women who have been followed over 12 years for signs of initial development of coronary heart disease. Antecedent relative weight and weight gain after age 25 years proved to be strongly related to risk of angina pectoris and sudden death but were unassociated with development of myocardial infarction. An excess risk of angina pectoris and sudden death appeared to exist in obese men both with and without elevations of blood pressure and serum cholesterol, indicating an independent contribution of obesity to the rate of development of these manifestations of coronary heart disease. Unless accompanied by an increase in blood pressure and serum cholesterol level, obesity appeared to play a negligible role in women. Subjects with both these predisposing factors and obesity had a pronounced increase in risk, greater than that associated with either factor alone. The data suggest that overweight may be instrumental in bringing out symptoms of angina pectoris or in precipitating sudden death by imposing an increased workload on a heart with an already compromised coronary circulation.
Evaluating an Improved Parameterization of the Soil Emission in L-MEB

In the forward model [L-band microwave emission of the biosphere (L-MEB)] used in the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity level-2 retrieval algorithm, modeling of the roughness effects is based on a simple semiempirical approach using three main “roughness” model parameters: HR, QR, and NR. In many studies, the two parameters QR and NR are set to zero. However, recent results in the literature showed that this is too approximate to accurately simulate the microwave emission of the rough soil surfaces at L-band. To investigate this, a reanalysis of the PORTOS-93 data set was carried out in this paper, considering a large range of roughness conditions. First, the results confirmed that QR could be set to zero. Second, a refinement of the L-MEB soil model, considering values of NR for both polarizations (namely, NRV and NRH), improved the model accuracy. Furthermore, simple calibrations relating the retrieved values of the roughness model parameters HR and (NRH - NRV) to the standard deviation of the surface height were developed. This new calibration of L-MEB provided a good accuracy (better than 5 K) over a large range of soil roughness and moisture conditions of the PORTOS-93 data set. Conversely, the calibrations of the roughness effects based on the Choudhury approach, which is still widely used, provided unrealistic values of surface emissivities for medium or large roughness conditions.
Are cross-national surveys the best way to study the extreme-right vote in Europe?

ABSTRACT In recent years, various authors have tried to develop a comprehensive explanation for the electoral success of extreme-right parties in Europe. While some authors stress individual-level factors (ethnocentrism, political cynicism, distrust), others stress macro-level variables (party strategy, electoral system). In this field of research cross-national survey data are often used to ascertain the strength of extreme-right parties and the motivation of those who vote for them. Hooghe and Reeskens question the external cross-cultural validity of these measurements, on the grounds of both response and measurement bias. Using the European Social Survey (29 observations) they find a huge diversity in the external validity of the data, with anything from 15 to 90 per cent of the electoral strength of the extreme-right party being covered in the survey. Using a multiple regression model, they identify survey response rate, voter turnout and the populist appeal of the party itself as possible causes for this selective under-representation. The only possible conclusion is that cross-national surveys do not succeed in establishing cross-cultural external validity for questions of extreme-right voting.
A Generic and Scalable Pipeline for GPU Tetrahedral Grid Rendering

Recent advances in algorithms and graphics hardware have opened the possibility to render tetrahedral grids at interactive rates on commodity PCs. This paper extends on this work in that it presents a direct volume rendering method for such grids which supports both current and upcoming graphics hardware architectures, large and deformable grids, as well as different rendering options. At the core of our method is the idea to perform the sampling of tetrahedral elements along the view rays entirely in local barycentric coordinates. Then, sampling requires minimum GPU memory and texture access operations, and it maps efficiently onto a feed-forward pipeline of multiple stages performing computation and geometry construction. We propose to spawn rendered elements from one single vertex. This makes the method amenable to upcoming Direct3D 10 graphics hardware which allows to create geometry on the GPU. By only modifying the algorithm slightly it can be used to render per-pixel iso-surfaces and to perform tetrahedral cell projection. As our method neither requires any pre-processing nor an intermediate grid representation it can efficiently deal with dynamic and large 3D meshes
VOEditor: a Visual Environment for Ontology Construction and Collaborative Querying of Semantic Web Resources

In this paper, a visual ontology modeling tool called VOEditor and an architecture based on the tool aimed at collaborative querying of Semantic Web resources are presented. A visual environment for ontology construction is deployed, providing a convenient mechanism for ontology engineers to create and edit their ontologies in a graphical mode. Search and coordination activities are carried out by a system of multi-agent designed for such environments. Finally, the tool and the architecture are demonstrated in the Tourism Recommendation System which is based on a tourism domain ontology created by the VOEditor.
AutoWitness: locating and tracking stolen property while tolerating GPS and radio outages

We present AutoWitness, a system to deter, detect, and track personal property theft, improve historically dismal stolen property recovery rates, and disrupt stolen property distribution networks. A property owner embeds a small tag inside the asset to be protected, where the tag lies dormant until it detects vehicular movement. Once moved, the tag uses inertial sensor-based dead reckoning to estimate position changes, but to reduce integration errors, the relative position is reset whenever the sensors indicate the vehicle has stopped. The sequence of movements, stops, and turns are logged in compact form and eventually transferred to a server using a cellular modem after both sufficient time has passed (to avoid detection) and RF power is detectable (hinting cellular access may be available). Eventually, the trajectory data are sent to a server which attempts to match a path to the observations. The algorithm uses a Hidden Markov Model of city streets and Viterbi decoding to estimate the most likely path. The proposed design leverages low-power radios and inertial sensors, is immune to intransit cloaking, and supports post hoc path reconstruction. Our prototype demonstrates technical viability of the design; the volume market forces driving machine-to-machine communications will soon make the design economically viable.
Predictors of Coping Behavior after a Layoff

In a longitudinal study of laid-off industrial workers, we examined the effects of individual differences and situational characteristics on individuals' use of six job loss coping strategies. In each case the predictors explained a significant portion of the variance (30–47 percent) although different predictors were significantly associated with each of the six coping strategies. The results also suggest that the use of problem-focused and symptom-focused coping strategies are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. The study's implications and directions for future research are discussed as well. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
K-ary Regression Forests for Continuous Pose and Direction Estimation

In this work, we propose a novel K-ary splitting method for regression trees and incorporate it into the regression forest framework. Unlike standard binary splitting, where the splitting rule is selected from a predefined set of binary splitting rules via trial-and-error, the proposed K-ary splitting method first finds clusters of the training data which at least locally minimize the empirical loss without considering the input space. Then splitting rules which preserve the found clusters as much as possible are determined by casting the problem into a multiclass classification problem. Consequently, our K-ary splitting method enjoys more freedom in choosing the splitting rules, resulting in more efficient tree structures. In addition to the Euclidean target space, we present a variant which can naturally deal with a circular target space by the proper use of circular statistics. We apply the regression forest employing our K-ary splitting to head pose estimation (Euclidean target space) and car direction estimation (circular target space) and demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods as well as regression forests based on standard binary splitting. The code will be available at our website.
The Theory That Would Not Die : How Bayes ' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code , Hunted Down Russian

"The Theory That Would Not Die" makes for an interesting and captivating read especially considering that writing about history of mathematics and statistics for general audience is a daunting task when compared with relatively popular topics like astronomy or physics. In this easy reading for popular-science audience, author covers over three hundred years of the history behind Bayes rule with its applications and engrossing stories of mathematical luminaries; some of which thought it was a brilliant way to model real-life scenarios while others considered it unscientific, an exercise in futility and vehemently fought against the idea of incorporating prior beliefs. Aside from providing thorough research on the subject matter, this text also delves into significant details about life and works of important scientists, mathematicians and statisticians including but not limited to Turing, Von Neumann, Price, Shannon, Bailey, Laplace, Fisher and Feynman. Regarding modern times, I was delighted to see Daphne Koller and Heckerman's work mentioned as well as the role Bayesian techniques played in contemporary discipline of Machine learning. Book Review