Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prototyping Bubba, A Highly Parallel Database System

Bubba is a highly parallel computer system for data-intensive applications. The basis of the Bubba design is a scalable shared-nothing architecture which can scale up to thousands of nodes. Data are declustered across the nodes (i.e. horizontally partitioned via hashing or range partitioning) and operations are executed at those nodes containing relevant data. In this way, parallelism can be exploited within individual transactions as well as among multiple concurrent transactions to improve throughput and response times for data-intensive applications. The current Bubba prototype runs on a commercial 40-node multicomputer and includes a parallelizing compiler, distributed transaction management, object management, and a customized version of Unix. The current prototype is described and the major design decisions that went into its construction are discussed. The lessons learned from this prototype and its predecessors are presented. >
A novel topology of solid state transformer

This paper introduces a new topology for implementing a solid state transformer. The advantages of the proposed topology include a reduced number of SiC MOSFETs, lower cost and smaller switching losses. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed topology. Experimental results are included to show the capability of the power electronic transformer.
Assessment of the effectiveness of platelet rich fibrin in the treatment of Schneiderian membrane perforation

BACKGROUND The objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of Platelet rich fibrin (PRF) treatment of maxillary sinus membrane perforation on bone formation and new vascular supply and the success of dental implant survival rate. METHODS The dataset for this retrospective study consists of patients who received sinus augmentation using the lateral wall technique. A total of 16 patients (20 sinuses) the patients without sinus membrane perforation (10 maxiller sinus area with sinus floor augmentation) and with Schneiderian perforation (10 maxiller sinus area repairing with PRF and augmented sinus floor area) were included in this study. The bone height was measured by comparing the preoperative and postoperative dental CBCT scans. Histological sections were evaluated for possible vasculogenesis augmented sinuses area. RESULTS In both groups, it was observed that the possible vasculogenesis augmented sinuses area increased. Implant survival rates in both groups found that one hundred percent and any bone loss around implants were not observed. An apparent increase in alveolar bone height was observed and measured in CBCT scans. CONCLUSIONS PRF can be considered as an alternative material for repairing sinus perforations because it is fully autogenous and easy manipulated.
Congenital abnormalities of the gastrointestinal tract.

Knowledge of a few basics of gastrointestinal mbryology makes it easy to understand the varied ypes of congenital malformations that occur in his system. At about the fourth week of developent, the primordial gut is closed at both the ranial and caudal ends by the oropharyngeal and loacal membranes. The primordial gut forms as he flat, trilaminar embryonic disc goes through the rocess of median and horizontal plane infolding, ulling a portion of the yolk sac along with it. At this point, there are simultaneous events that urther differentiate this originally featureless tube nto their final, familiar forms. Formation of the racheal bud along with infolding and fusion of the racheoesphageal folds separate the trachea from he esophagus. There is asymmetric enlargement nd rotation of the distal part of the foregut to form he embryonic stomach. The duodenum forms rom a combination of the distal-most foregut and roximal midgut, is pulled along with rotation of he stomach, and goes through a normal period of emporary obliteration because of proliferation of ts epithelial cells. The jejunum, ileum, and a large ortion of the colon are derived from the midgut. uring the period of rapid growth of the midgut, here is a normal herniation of bowel into the roximal portion of the umbilical cord. This occurs t the sixth week of development and lasts until bout the tenth week when the intestines return to he embryonic abdomen. As the intestines return to he abdominal cavity, they undergo a 180° counerclockwise rotation. In the normal situation, roation and posterior positioning of most of the uodenum and all of the ascending colon leads to bsorption of their mesenteries such that these tructures become retroperitoneal. Finally, the disal colon and rectum are derived from the hindgut. he urorectal septum separates the urinary tract
Instability in patient and nurse characteristics, unit complexity and patient and system outcomes.

AIMS To explore key factors related to nursing unit instability, complexity and patient and system outcomes. BACKGROUND The relationship between nurse staffing and quality of patient outcomes is well known. The nursing unit is an important but different aspect that links to complexity and to system and patient outcomes. The relationship between the instability, complexity and outcomes needs further exploration. DESIGN Descriptive. METHODS Data were collected via a nurse survey, unit profile and review of patient records on 62 nursing units (wards) across three states of Australia between 2008-2010. Two units with contrasting levels of patient and nurse instability and negative system and patient outcomes, were profiled in detail from the larger sample. RESULTS Ward A presented with greater patient stability (low occupancy, high planned admissions, few ICU transfers, fewer changes to patient acuity/work re-sequencing) and greater nurse instability (nurses changing units, fewer full-time staff, more temporary/casual staff) impacting system outcomes negatively (high staff turnover). In contrast, Ward B had greater patient instability, however, more nurse stability (greater experienced and permanent staff, fewer casuals), resulting in high rates for falls, medication errors and other adverse patient outcomes with lower rates for system outcomes (lower intention to leave). CONCLUSION Instability in patient and nurse factors can contribute to ward complexity with potentially negative patient outcomes. The findings highlight the variation of many aspects of the system where nurses work and the importance of nursing unit managers and senior nurse executives in managing ward complexity.
High-throughput Identification of Phage-derived Imaging Agents

The use of phage-displayed peptide libraries is a powerful method for selecting peptides with desired binding properties. However, the validation and prioritization of “hits” obtained from this screening approach remains challenging. Here, we describe the development and testing of a new analysis method to identify and display hits from phage-display experiments and high-throughput enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay screens. We test the method using a phage screen against activated macrophages to develop imaging agents with higher specificity for active disease processes. The new methodology should be useful in identifying phage hits and is extendable to other library screening methods such as small-molecule and nanoparticle libraries.
Epoxy Vitrimers: The Effect of Transesterification Reactions on the Network Structure

Vitrimers are covalently crosslinked polymers that behave as conventional thermosets below the glass transition temperature (Tg) but can flow above a particular temperature, Tv > Tg, by bond exchange reactions. In epoxy vitrimers, transesterification reactions are responsible for their behavior at T > Tv that enables flow, thermoforming, recycling, self-healing and stress relaxation. A statistical analysis based on the fragment approach was performed to analyze the evolution of the network structure of epoxy vitrimers during transesterification reactions. An analytical solution was obtained for a formulation based on a diepoxide and a dicarboxylic acid. A numerical solution was derived for the reaction of a diepoxide with a tricarboxylic acid, as an example of the way to apply the model to polyfunctional monomers. As transesterification acts as a disproportionation reaction that converts two linear fragments (monoesters) into a terminal fragment (glycol) and a branching fragment (diester), its effect on network structure is to increase the concentration of crosslinks and pendant chains while leaving a sol fraction. Changes in the network structure of the epoxy vitrimer can take place after their synthesis, during their use at high temperatures, a fact that has to be considered in their technological applications.
Differential glycosylation of auditory and vestibular hair bundle proteins revealed by peanut agglutinin

Up to four morphologically distinct types of cross‐link are found between the stereocilia in the hair bundles of avian hair cells. These links are involved in mechanotransduction, force transmission across the bundle, and maintenance of hair bundle structure. They appear to be specialisations of the cell coat, but very little is known about their molecular composition. Chick inner ear tissues were therefore screened with a number of different lectins to find markers for specialisations of the hair bundle surface. One lectin, peanut agglutinin (PNA), which recognises the dissacharide Galβ1‐3GalNAc, was found to be a fairly selective marker for vestibular hair bundles, but it does not stain the stereocilia of auditory hair cells. The staining patterns observed with PNA in the vestibular system closely resemble those seen with a monoclonal antibody (mab) directed against a 275 kD component of the hair cell's apical surface known as the hair‐cell antigen (HCA). However, unlike PNA, the mab recognises both vestibular and auditory hair cells. A detailed comparison of the fluorescence staining patterns observed with PNA and the anti‐HCA mab indicates that binding sites for both ligands spatially codistribute on the surface of vestibular hair cells. The lectin and the anti‐HCA mab binding sites are both sensitive to trypsin treatment, and, with sections of the vestibular system, PNA pretreatment blocks subsequent anti‐HCA mab staining. Immunoelectron microscopy of vestibular hair bundles shows that PNA and the anti‐HCA mab both label a type of cross‐link known as the shaft connector. This link type is present on both auditory and vestibular hair bundles but reacts with PNA only in the vestibular system. The lectin jacalin, which has greater specificity for Galβ1‐3GalNAc than does PNA, also only labels vestibular and not auditory hair bundles. Although terminal sialic acid residues can block both PNA and jacalin binding, neuraminidase treatment does not unmask cryptic binding sites for these lectins on auditory hair cells but does reveal PNA and jacalin staining at a number of other locations in the inner ear. The results obtained with the lectins PNA and jacalin indicate that either the HCA or other components of the shaft links are differentially glycosylated in the vestibular and auditory epithelia of the bird. The functional significance for such a difference in glycosylation remains to be determined, but auditory and vestibular hair cells operate over different frequency ranges, and variations in glycosylation might confer different micromechanical properties on the hair bundles in these two systems. © 1994 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Transcranial Doppler Identifies a Malfunctioning Extraventricular Drain

Transcranial Doppler (TCD) is an invaluable tool allowing real‐time monitoring of physiologic blood flow velocity changes. We present a case where TCD monitoring for vasospasm after subarachnoid hemorrhage identified blood flow velocity changes consistent with sudden increased intracranial pressure (ICP) due to a malfunctioning extraventricular drain. The primary team was alerted to these findings, and immediately revised her shunt with normalization of ICP and TCD. Serial TCD monitoring allowed identification of an imminently fatal complication in time to allow a life saving intervention. TCD is a portable, inexpensive, real‐time tool providing important physiologic data regarding blood flow velocities and intracranial pressure that is crucial to the care of critically ill patients.
Lung cancer screening: minimum tube current required for helical CT.

PURPOSE To investigate the minimum tube current required for helical computed tomography (CT) for lung cancer screening. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty helical scans of the lung were obtained at effective tube currents of 50, 30, 20, 18, 12, 10, and 6 mAs in seven healthy volunteers. Computer-generated nodules 6 mm in diameter that showed ground-glass opacity were superimposed on the images. The image quality and detectability of nodules were evaluated subjectively by six observers. The SDs of measured CT numbers were calculated. The results were analyzed according to location in the lung. RESULTS Compared with the subjective quality of images obtained at 50 mAs, the subjective quality of images obtained at 20 mAs was not significantly different. The detectability of nodules was not significantly degraded by reducing the tube current to 20 mAs in the upper zone of the lung, to 12 mAs in the middle zone, or to 18 mAs in the lower zone. The SDs at the apex and base of the lung were larger than those at other levels, and the difference became greater as the dose was reduced. CONCLUSION The minimum tube current required for screening helical CT differs for different locations in the lung. An ideal CT protocol for the lung should permit the tube current to be changed during helical scanning.
Twenty four-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring in women with pre-eclampsia.

The aim of our study was to evaluate by means of ambulatory 24 h monitoring the diurnal systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure profiles in a group (n = 18) of gravid patients with pre-eclampsia compared with a group (n = 17) of healthy control subjects matched for age and week of gestation to assess whether: (i) ambulatory BP is also raised in pre-eclampsia; (ii) the increase of BP, if present, occurs to the same extent during both daytime and night; and (iii) a blunted BP pattern is consistently present in pre-eclampsia. BP was recorded at intervals of 15 min for 25 h using a TM2420 non-invasive pressurometer. The presence of a circadian rhythm of BP was assessed by cosinor analysis. SBP was higher in women with pre-eclampsia (24 h average 115 +/- 11 vs. 136 +/- 12, P = 6 x 10(-6); daytime 117 +/- 12 vs. 139 +/- 13, P = 6 x 10(-6); night 110 +/- 11 vs. 129 +/- 14, P = 5 x 10(-5) as well as DBP (24 h average 67 +/- 5 vs. 86 +/- 6, P = 8 x 10(-12); daytime 69 +/- 6 vs. 89 +/- 5, P = 2 x 10(-11); night 62 +/- 4 vs. 80 +/- 8, P = 5 x 10(-10). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Toward mining user movement behaviors in indoor environments

In this paper, we explore a new mining paradigm, called User Visited Patterns (abbreviated as UVP), to discover user visited behavior in the mall-like indoor environment. It is a highly challenging issue, in the indoor environment, to retrieve the frequent UVP, especially when the concern of user privacy is highlighted nowadays. The mining of UVP will face the critical challenge from spatial uncertainty. In this paper, the proposed system framework utilizes the probabilistic mining to identify top-k UVP over uncertain dataset collected from the RFID-based sensing result. Moreover, we redesign the indoor symbolic model to enhance the accuracy and efficiency. Our experimental studies show that the proposed system framework can overcome the impact from location uncertainty and efficiently discover high-quality UVP, to provide insightful observation for marketing collaborations.
When molecules and morphology clash: reconciling conflicting phylogenies of the Metazoa by considering secondary character loss

Summary Molecular and morphological data sets have yielded conflicting phylogenies for the Metazoa. So far, no general explanation for the existence of this conflict has been suggested. However, I believe that a neglected aspect of metazoan cladistics has introduced a systematic and substantial bias into morphological phylogenetic analyses. Most characters used for metazoan cladistics are coded as binary absence/presence characters. For most of these characters, the absence states are assumed to be uninformative default plesiomorphies, if they are defined at all. This character coding strategy could seriously underestimate the number of informative apomorphic absences or secondary character losses. Because nodes in morphological metazoan phylogenies are typically supported by relatively small numbers of characters each with a potentially strong impact on tree topology, failure to distinguish between primary absence and secondary loss of characters before a cladistic analysis may mislead morphological cladistics. This may falsely suggest conflict with molecular phylogenies, which are not sensitive to this bias. To test the existence of this bias, I compare the phylogenetic placement of a variety of metazoan taxa in molecular and morphological trees. In all instances investigated here, phylogenetic conflict can be resolved by allowing for secondary loss of morphological characters, which were assumed to be primitively absent in cladistic analyses. These findings suggest that we should be cautious in interpreting the results of morphological metazoan cladistic analyses and additionally illustrate the value of a more functional approach to comparative morphology in certain circumstances.
Oxygenated Kidney Preservation Techniques

Improving preservation techniques to minimize injury is of particular importance in organs from marginal donors. Since the introduction of transplantation and routine use of hypothermic temperatures for kidney preservation, there has been much debate on whether it is necessary to add oxygen to support the low level of metabolism under these conditions. Supplementing the kidney with oxygen during hypothermic preservation is not common practice. However, there is evidence to support its application. Oxygen can be added by various techniques such as retrograde persufflation whereby filtered and humidified oxygen is bubbled through the vasculature; under hyperbaric conditions using specialized pressurized chambers; during hypothermic machine perfusion; with the addition of oxygen carriers; and under normothermic conditions. Evidence suggests that oxygenation is particularly beneficial in restoring cellular levels of adenosine triphosphate after kidneys have been subjected to warm or cold ischemic injury. However, under normal conditions, the benefits are less convincing, but the evidence is insufficient to draw any conclusions. This overview explores the ways in which oxygen can be administered during preservation in experimental and clinical models of kidney transplantation.
Towards iTV services for older people: Exploring their interactions with online video portals in different cultural backgrounds

With a growing ageing population and the advent of interactive TV (iTV), understanding how older people use iTV services is a timely and important task. Working towards this end, this paper reports on in situ conversations of, and observations with, almost 400 older people, with different levels of educational attainment and experience with ICTs, while talking about and using online video portals and similar interactive systems in Spain, Brazil and Denmark. The results show more similarities than differences in their reasons for adopting online video portals and patterns of use. All our participants used these portals for keeping or remaining in touch with people they trusted. The results also show that privacy online was a common concern to all the participants. Differences in the acceptance of e-government services and the type of content that drove most of their interactions were also found. Implications for designing more accessible and meaningful iTV services are discussed.
Disclosing and overcoming inexact nonlinearity cancellation issues

A natural way of controlling linear systems feedback interconnected with memoryless nonlinearities is canceling this latter with a first feedback loop, and then designing a linear controller for the remaining linear dynamics. Nevertheless, this procedure may provide unsatisfactory performance, and even lead to instability, when the nonlinearity can not be exactly cancelled due to lack of information or limitations on the nonlinear approximation. In this paper the interplay between the robustness with respect to state estimation and the quality of the approximation of the nonlinearity is investigated and on such insights an alternative approach guaranteeing sufficient conditions for the stability is derived. A comparison with standard methods on a benchmark system shows that taking explicitly into account such an interplay leads to less conservative solutions.
Gated lateral BJT gas sensor for toluene gas detection under room temperature condition

A room temperature gas sensor for toluene detection using gated lateral bipolar junction transistor (BJT) was reported in this study. The proposed device which matches a metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) and a BJT was fabricated in a standard 0.35-μm logic process with one-poly and four-metal structure. Then, the 4-aminophthalimide (4AP) dye as a kind of solvatochromic dye which has the charge-transfer (CT) characteristic was used as the sensing membrane. The 4AP dye was immobilized on the floating gate of the gated lateral BJT using self-assembled monolayer (SAM) method. We set this kind of gated lateral BJT operating in the MOSFET-BJT hybrid mode. The electric current changes of the lateral BJT with respect to toluene gas concentrations were obtained by using semiconductor test & analyzer (STA).
Selection of Audio Features for Music Emotion Recognition Using Production Music

[1] Mathieu Barthet, David Marston, Chris Baume, György Fazekas, and Mark Sandler. Design and Evaluation of Semantic Mood Models for Music Recommendation. In Proc. International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 2013. A selected set of 1760 tracks was evaluated, using one-third for testing and 2-fold cross-validation. Every pair of features were tested before taking the top 12, testing those with every other feature and repeating. The results show that 32 spectral, harmonic, rhythmic and temporal features are needed for optimum performance, but as the error converges quickly, good performance can be achieved with much fewer.
Neuroprotection and stroke: time for a compromise

In April 2007, there existed a repertory of 286 trials concerned with acute ischemic stroke on the Stroke Trials Registry (http://www.strokecenter.org/trials/), of which 209 trials were considered as complete (with no evidence of patient benefit unless one considers the much hard fought for and modest results of the tPA studies). Among other questions arising from such failures, one can wonder whether the plethora of pharmacological agents that exhibited neuroprotective properties in pre‐clinical studies were selected for clinical trials entirely based upon their experimental efficacy. This mini‐review will try to point out some of the weaknesses that could underline the failure of both researchers and clinicians involved in the field of stroke to obtain their ultimate goal – brain protection.