Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risky business: a longitudinal study examining cigarette smoking initiation among susceptible and non-susceptible e-cigarette users in Canada

Objectives Given that many adolescent e-cigarette users are never-smokers, the possibility that e-cigarettes may act as a gateway to future cigarette smoking has been discussed in various studies. Longitudinal data are needed to explore the pathway between e-cigarette and cigarette use, particularly among different risk groups including susceptible and non-susceptible never-smokers. The objective of this study was to examine whether baseline use of e-cigarettes among a sample of never-smoking youth predicted cigarette smoking initiation over a 2-year period. Design Longitudinal cohort study. Setting 89 high schools across Ontario and Alberta, Canada. Participants A sample of grade 9–11 never-smoking students at baseline (n=9501) who participated in the COMPASS study over 2 years. Primary and secondary outcome measures Participants completed in-class questionnaires that assessed smoking susceptibility and smoking initiation. Results Among the baseline sample of non-susceptible never-smokers, 45.2% of current e-cigarette users reported trying a cigarette after 2 years compared with 13.5% of non-current e-cigarette users. Among the baseline sample of susceptible never-smokers, 62.4% of current e-cigarette users reported trying a cigarette after 2 years compared with 36.1% of non-current e-cigarette users. Overall, current e-cigarette users were more likely to try a cigarette 2 years later. This association was stronger among the sample of non-susceptible never-smokers (AOR=5.28, 95% CI 2.81 to 9.94; p<0.0001) compared with susceptible never-smokers (AOR=2.78, 95% CI 1.84 to 4.20; p<0.0001). Conclusions Findings from this large, longitudinal study support public health concerns that e-cigarette use may contribute to the development of a new population of cigarette smokers. They also support the notion that e-cigarettes are expanding the tobacco market by attracting low-risk youth who would otherwise be unlikely to initiate using cigarettes. Careful consideration will be needed in developing an appropriate regulatory framework that prevents e-cigarette use among youth.
Analysis of mutation, selection, and epistasis: an informed approach to cancer clinical trials

Currently, drug development efforts and clinical trials to test them are often prioritized by targeting genes with high frequencies of somatic variants among tumors. However, differences in oncogenic mutation rate—not necessarily the effect the variant has on tumor growth—contribute enormously to somatic variant frequency. We argue that decoupling the contributions of mutation and cancer lineage selection to the frequency of somatic variants among tumors is critical to understanding—and predicting—the therapeutic potential of different interventions. To provide an indicator of that strength of selection and therapeutic potential, the frequency at which we observe a given variant across patients must be modulated by our expectation given the mutation rate and target size to provide an indicator of that strength of selection and therapeutic potential. Additionally, antagonistic and synergistic epistasis among mutations also impacts the potential therapeutic benefit of targeted drug development. Quantitative approaches should be fostered that use the known genetic architectures of cancer types, decouple mutation rate, and provide rigorous guidance regarding investment in targeted drug development. By integrating evolutionary principles and detailed mechanistic knowledge into those approaches, we can maximize our ability to identify those targeted therapies most likely to yield substantial clinical benefit.
Versatile Auxiliary Regressor with Generative Adversarial network (VAR+GAN)

Being able to generate constrained samples is one of the most appealing applications of the deep generators. Conditional generators are one of the successful implementations of such models wherein the created samples are constrained to a specific class. In this work, the application of these networks is extended to regression problems wherein the conditional generator is restrained to any continuous aspect of the data. A new loss function is presented for the regression network and also implementations for generating faces with any particular set of landmarks is provided.
Validation of Ion TorrentTM Inherited Disease Panel with the PGMTM Sequencing Platform for Rapid and Comprehensive Mutation Detection

Quick and accurate molecular testing is necessary for the better management of many inherited diseases. Recent technological advances in various next generation sequencing (NGS) platforms, such as target panel-based sequencing, has enabled comprehensive, quick, and precise interrogation of many genetic variations. As a result, these technologies have become a valuable tool for gene discovery and for clinical diagnostics. The AmpliSeq Inherited Disease Panel (IDP) consists of 328 genes underlying more than 700 inherited diseases. Here, we aimed to assess the performance of the IDP as a sensitive and rapid comprehensive gene panel testing. A total of 88 patients with inherited diseases and causal mutations that were previously identified by Sanger sequencing were randomly selected for assessing the performance of the IDP. The IDP successfully detected 93.1% of the mutations in our validation cohort, achieving high overall gene coverage (98%). The sensitivity for detecting single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and short Indels was 97.3% and 69.2%, respectively. IDP, when coupled with Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM), delivers comprehensive and rapid sequencing for genes that are responsible for various inherited diseases. Our validation results suggest the suitability of this panel for use as a first-line screening test after applying the necessary clinical validation.
A Thematic Analysis of Health Care Workers’ Adoption of Mindfulness Practices

Mindfulness training, which teaches individuals to bring awareness and acceptance to the present moment, has been effective in improving the well-being of health care workers. Limited research examines the adoption of mindfulness practices using health behavior theories. The current study sought to conceptualize hospital health care workers’ experiences in adopting mindfulness practices using the Health Belief Model (HBM), a theoretical framework used by health promotion practitioners to design and implement health behavior change interventions. Hospital health care workers in Colorado participated in an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. Participants (n = 19) answered open-ended questions about their experiences adopting mindfulness practices. A theory-driven thematic analysis approach was used to analyze data with key constructs of the HBM acting as the framework for the analysis. Results showed that HBM constructs, including internal cues to action, perceived benefits and barriers, and self-efficacy, helped portray the participants’ experiences and challenges in adopting and adhering to the mindfulness practices taught in the MBSR course.
Nitrogen Addition and Understory Removal but Not Soil Warming Increased Radial Growth of Pinus cembra at Treeline in the Central Austrian Alps

Beside low temperatures, limited tree growth at the alpine treeline may also be attributed to a lack of available soil nutrients and competition with understory vegetation. Although intra-annual stem growth of Pinus cembra has been studied intensively at the alpine treeline, the responses of radial growth to soil warming, soil fertilization, and below ground competition awaits clarification. In this study we quantified the effects of nitrogen (N) fertilization, soil warming, and understory removal on stem radial growth of P. cembra at treeline. Soil warming was achieved by roofing the forest floor with a transparent polyvinyl skin, while understory competition was prevented by shading the forest floor with a non-transparent foil around six trees each. Six trees received N- fertilization and six other trees served as controls. Stem growth was monitored with band dendrometers during the growing seasons 2012–2014. Our 3 years experiment showed that soil warming had no considerable effect on radial growth. Though understory removal through shading was accompanied by root-zone cooling, understory removal as well as N fertilization led to a significant increase in radial growth. Hardly affected was tree root biomass, while N-fertilization and understory removal significantly increased in 100-needle surface area and 100-needle dry mass, implying a higher amount of N stored in needles. Overall, our results demonstrate that beside low temperatures, tree growth at cold-climate boundaries may also be limited by root competition for nutrients between trees and understory vegetation. We conclude that tree understory interactions may also control treeline dynamics in a future changing environment.
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using Bitmask Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory Networks

This paper introduces a new method to classify sentiment polarity for aspects in product reviews. We call it bitmask bidirectional long short term memory networks. It is based on long short term memory (LSTM) networks, which is a frequently mentioned model in natural language processing. Our proposed method uses a bitmask layer to keep attention on aspects. We evaluate it on reviews of restaurant and laptop domains from three popular contests: SemEval-2014 task 4, SemEval-2015 task 12, and SemEval-2016 task 5. It obtains competitive results with state-of-the-art methods based on LSTM networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate the benefit of using sentiment lexicons and word embeddings of a particular domain in aspect-based sentiment analysis.
Radiative and EW Penguin $B$ Decays at Belle

We report on new results on $B \to K^* \gamma$ and recent studies on $B \to K^* \ell^+ \ell^-$ and $B \to h \nu \bar{\nu}$ at Belle at KEKB accelerator. All the analyses used full data sample of 711~fb${}^{-1}$ taken on $\Upsilon(4S)$ resonance.
Multi-Hop Locks for Secure, Privacy-Preserving and Interoperable Payment-Channel Networks

Tremendous growth in the cryptocurrency usage is exposing the inherent scalabilty issues with the permissionless blockchain technology. Among few alternatives, payment-channel networks (PCNs) have emerged as the most popular and practically deployed solution to overcome the scalability issues, allowing the bulk of payments between any two users to be carried out oﬀ-chain. Unfortunately, as reported in the literature and further demonstrated in this paper, current PCNs do not provide meaningful security and privacy guarantees. In this work, we lay the foundations for the design of secure and privacy-preserving PCNs. For that, we formally deﬁne multi-hop locks, a novel cryptographic primitive that serves as a cornerstone for the design of secure and privacy-preserving PCNs, and design several provably secure cryptographic instantiations that make multi-hop locks compatible with the vast majority of cryptocurrencies. In particular, we show that (partial) homomorphic one-way functions suﬃce to construct multi-hop locks for PCNs supporting a script language (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), and oﬀer two constructions based on Schnorr and ECDSA that allow for the development of PCNs even without scripts . Further multi-hop locks constitute a generic primitive whose usefulness goes beyond regular PCNs and use those to realize atomic swaps and interoperable PCNs. Finally, our performance evaluation on a commodity machine ﬁnds that multi-hop locks operations can be performed in less than 100 milliseconds and require less than 500 bytes, even in the worst case. This shows the practicality of our approach towards enhancing security, privacy, interoperability, and scalability of today’s cryptocurrencies.
A robust adaptive control scheme for under-actuated non-linear systems

An adaptive control architecture for uncertain, under-actuated, non-linear systems is proposed. The proposed methodology is tested in simulation in order to control a planar double inverted pendulum apparatus. The approach can be extended and applied to similar systems such mobile robots and exoskeletal assisted devices. Closed loop results show good performance of the adaptive control methodology.
Health Care Professionals’ Attitudes Toward, and Experiences of Using, a Culture-Sensitive Smartphone App for Women with Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Qualitative Study

Background The increasing prevalence of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) among women of different ethnic backgrounds provides new challenges for health care professionals, who often find it difficult to provide information about the management of this disease to such individuals. Mobile health (mHealth) may act as a useful tool for blood sugar control and care process enhancement. However, little is known about health care professionals’ experiences and attitudes toward the use of mHealth for women with GDM. Objective The aim of this study was to explore how health care professionals perceived the provision of care to pregnant women who managed their GDM using the culture-sensitive Pregnant+ app in a randomized controlled trial. Methods Individual interviews with 9 health care professionals providing care for women with GDM were conducted. Braun and Clark’s method of thematic content analysis inspired the analysis. This study included health care professionals who were primarily responsible for providing care to participants with GDM in the Pregnant+ randomized controlled trial at 5 diabetes outpatient clinics in Oslo, Norway. Results Health care professionals perceived mHealth, particularly the Pregnant+ app, as an appropriate tool for the care of women with GDM, who were described as individuals comprising a heterogeneous, motivated group that could be easily approached with health-related information. Some participants reported challenges with respect to provision of advice to women with different food cultures. The advantages of the Pregnant+ app included provision of information that women could access at home, the information provided being perceived as trustworthy by health care professionals, the culture sensitivity of the app, and the convenience for women to register blood sugar levels. Technical problems, particularly those associated with the automatic transfer of blood glucose measurements, were identified as the main barrier to the use of the Pregnant+ app. Strict inclusion criteria and the inclusion of participants who could not speak Norwegian were the main challenges in the recruitment process for the randomized controlled trial. Conclusions The findings of this study suggest that mHealth is a useful tool to enhance the care provided by health care professionals to women with GDM. Future mobile apps for the management of GDM should be developed by a trustworthy source and in cooperation with health care professionals. They should also be culture sensitive and should not exhibit technical problems.
Loss of Pigments and Higher Methylglyoxal Contents in Leaves of Maize Seedlings Under Salinity Are Associated with Saline Susceptibility

Salinity is the most detrimental stress which impairs the growth and development of plants. Seven days old seedlings of two contrast genotypes of maize ( Zea mays L.), two tolerant genotypes (9120 and Super Gold) and two susceptible genotypes (Pacific 984 and PS999), were subjected to 12 dSm -1 salinity stress for five days and contents of chlorophyll ( Chl ), carotenoid (Car), methylglyoxal (MG) as well as activities of glyoxalase I (Gly I) and glyoxalase II (Gly II) were investigated in fully expanded leaves. Loss of Chl and Car contents were higher in the susceptible genotypes compared to those in tolerant genotypes. Production of MG was also higher in the susceptible genotypes, Pacific 984 and PS999, compared to that in tolerant ones under salinity stress. Under salinity, Pacific 984 showed 105 and 91% higher MG over 9120 and Super Gold, respectively, while PS999 showed 75 and 63% higher MG over 9120 and Super Gold, respectively. On the other hand, both of the tolerant genotypes showed higher Gly I and Gly II activities as compared to susceptible genotypes which played important role in reducing cytotoxic MG in tolerant genotypes.
The Preseptic Period and Inflammatory Markers in the Prediction of the Course of Sepsis

Background The aim of this study was to find a simple and easily accessible scoring system that could predict the development of sepsis in the preseptic period. Material/Methods The study included 161 patients with a basal sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA) value of 2 or more. The sepsis group (n=83) comprised patients with infection reported in culture results; the control group (n=78) comprised patients not showing evidence of infection in blood, urine, and phlegm cultures; samples were taken on three consecutive days. Results The patients in both groups were divided into subgroups of non-survivor and survivor patients. The preseptic and septic SOFA score, neutrophil lymphocyte ratio (NLR), and procalcitonin (PRC) and lactate (Lac) values were determined to be statistically significantly higher in the sepsis group than in the control group. When the values related to sepsis were examined, a strong relationship was determined between sepsis and SOFA score, PRC values, and Lac values in the preseptic period and a weak relationship with NLR. In the model formed using multiple regression analysis with defined cutoff values for the preseptic and the septic periods, we found that in the septic period, a diagnosis of sepsis could be made with 83.8% accuracy. The diagnostic value of the same parameters evaluated in the preseptic period was 77.9%. Conclusions The diagnostic value of the combination of Lac, PRC, SOFA, and NLR were found to be similar in the preseptic period as the sepsis period; thus these combined values could safely be used for the early diagnosis of sepsis.
Assessing indocyanine green pharmacokinetics in mouse liver with a dynamic diffuse fluorescence tomography system

Fluorescence pharmacokinetic rates in tissues can provide additional specific and quantitative physiological and pathological information for evaluating organ function. This modality requires a highly sensitive diffuse fluorescence tomography (DFT) working in dynamic way to finally extract the pharmacokinetic rates from the measured pharmacokinetics‐associated temporally varying boundary intensity, normally with the support of a priori anatomy. This paper is devoted to study pharmacokinetics of indocyanine green (ICG) in mouse liver based on synergistic dynamic‐DFT and X‐ray computer tomography (XCT): A highly sensitive dynamic DFT system of CT‐scanning mode working with parallel 4 photomultiplier‐tube photon‐counting channels generates informative and instantaneous sampling datasets; An XCT system provides priori information of the target localization for improvement of the reconstruction quality; An analysis procedure extracts the pharmacokinetic rates from the reconstructed ICG concentration‐time curves, using the Gauss‐Newton scheme for fitting to a 2‐compartment model. The uptake and excretion rates of ICG which were obtained in livers of 10 healthy mice in the in vivo experiments can be used to quantitatively evaluate liver function. The results can validate the effectiveness of both the imaging measurements system and pharmacokinetic analysis method.
Early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer: Current trends and concerns

Early detection of pancreatic cancer (PC) is essential for a better prognosis. Some recent studies have demonstrated that a slight dilatation of the main pancreatic duct (MPD) and small cystic lesions were detected initially in most cases diagnosed at an early stage. Detecting these abnormal findings in cases with high risk factors through an effective screening system including image diagnosis, some biological markers, or familial cancer registrations should contribute to early diagnosis of PC. It has been reported that endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) is essential for detecting tumors <10 mm with a favorable prognosis. Additionally, EUS‐guided fine‐needle aspiration biopsy is useful for confirming final histological diagnosis. For the diagnosis of stage 0 PC, local irregular stenosis of MPD should be an important initial abnormal sign detected by EUS or magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography. Cytodiagnosis multiple times using pancreatic juice obtained by endoscopic nasopancreatic drainage should be essential for the final diagnosis. Recently, activities of regional networks between specialist doctors in medical centers and general practitioners for early diagnosis of PC have been reported in Japan. In the future, these activities may play an important role in the early diagnosis of PC.
A survey and method for analysing SoHo router firmware currency

Network routers are a core component of contemporary SoHo networks. The firmware within these devices provides routing, control and monitoring functionality coupled with mechanisms to ensure a secure and reliable network. End-users are typically reliant on manufacturers to provide timely firmware updates to mitigate known vulnerabilities. An investigation was undertaken to identify the underlying software components used in the firmware of currently available, SoHo network devices used in Australia. Firmware from 37 devices was deconstructed to identify potential security issues; in each instance, the firmware images were found to include vulnerabilities, obsolete software and out-of-date operating system components. 95% of the deconstructed firmware was based on Linux. The Linux kernels identified were typically discontinued and are no longer actively maintained. This paper demonstrates a method for undertaking the analysis and summaries the outcomes of the research.
Overview of the Quench Heater Performance for MQXF, the Nb3Sn Low-β Quadrupole for the High Luminosity LHC

In the framework of the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider, the U.S. LARP collaboration and CERN are jointly developing a 150 mm aperture Nb3Sn quadrupole for the LHC interaction regions. Due to the large stored energy density and the low copper stabilizer section, the quench protection of these magnets is particularly challenging, relying on a combination of quench heaters attached to the coil surface and coupling loss induced quench (CLIQ) units electrically connected to the coils. This paper summarizes the performance of the quench heater strips in different configurations relevant to machine operation. The analysis is focused on the inner layer quench heaters, where several heater strips failed during powering tests. Failure modes are discussed in order to address the technology issues and provide guidance for future tests.
On-off control based multi-frequency multi-load inverter configuration for induction cooking application

Multiple load induction cooking application is in much demand today. This paper presents a Full bridge inverter operated at multiple frequencies for powering multiple induction heating loads. ADC control and PDM are employed. Three induction cooking loads are used. Each induction cooking load and one resonant capacitor forms a series resonant circuit. Two series resonant load circuits are simultaneously powered in one half cycle and another load is powered during next half cycle. Each load is operated at a constant frequency. Independent load power control is provided. The operation of the proposed inverter and simulation results are presented.