Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Symptom Prevalence of Neurodegenerative Diseases among Minorities

Background: The annual number of neurodegenerative diseases among minorities is projected to increase by 524% between 1990 and 2040 in the US and there have been no studies looking at the incidence and prevalence of signs/symptoms among different racial and ethnic minority patients with Alzheimer's dementia (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and Motor neuron disease (MND). Methods: Retrospective review of all minority subgroups who presented to Mayo Clinic, Rochester (MN), with a diagnosis of AD, PD or MND between January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2015. We divided our study population into seven groups: Black, Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian/Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.Results: From a total of 8927 patients diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease at our institution over the 15 year time frame, 472 were minority [PD=220 (46.6%); AD=90 (19.1%) and MND=162 (34.3%)]. The most common races/ethnicity were Black or African American in 135 (28.6%), Asian in 101 (21.4%), South Asian in 69 (14.6%), Middle eastern in 60 (12.7%), Hispanic/Latino in 59 (12.5%) and American Indian/Alaskan Native/Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander in 48 (10.2%). For PD, there were differences in the frequency of micrographia, anosmia, levodopa induced dyskinesia, falls and dystonia, while for AD there were differences in executive dysfunction and visual spatial changes and for MND difference were present for muscle atrophy, limb fasciculation, inability to ambulate, tongue fasciculation, choking episodes and dysphagia.Conclusion: Neurodegenerative diseases afflict all minority races and ethnicities, including some not previously reported and the frequency of presenting signs and symptoms significantly vary across different minority/ethnic groups.
Funding Mass Tertiary Education: Assessing Alternative Policies and their Trade-Offs in England

England has experienced a variety of funding systems in tertiary education during the past three decades and there are currently several alternative policy proposals on the table. Each policy involves different trade offs. The first part of the article examines the current funding arrangements in the higher and further education sectors, and the debates on the strengths and weaknesses of these. The second part looks at alternative funding proposals and how they measure up in terms of affordability and equity in access and cost sharing.
International Graduate Students’ Perspectives on High-Stakes English Tests and the Language Demands of Higher Education

The internationalization of higher education in Canada has given rise to the increased use of standardized English language proficiency tests as gatekeeping measures in university admission policies. However, many international students who are successful on these tests still struggle with the academic and language demands of their programs. Drawing on a thematic analysis of life story interviews with five international graduate students at a major Canadian university, this study examines students’ perceptions on the skills elicited by the IELTS and TOEFL, the language demands and pragmatic norms of their graduate program in language education, and the university’s language support programs.
Examining the Factorial Validity of the Entrepreneurial Career Motives Scale: A Five-Nation Comparison

This study validates Shane et al.’s Entrepreneurial Career Motives Scale across nations. A total sample of 948 undergraduate and postgraduate students from five nations (China = 229, Hong Kong = 213, Holland = 136, United States = 155, and Ghana = 215) were recruited to complete a survey designed to measure their entrepreneurial motives and other related constructs. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the hypothesized four-factor structure, namely, perceived recognition, sense of independence, pursuit of learning, and perceived roles. Results of the measurement invariance comparisons satisfactorily established measurement equivalence of the scale across nations, language versions, and genders. Both convergent and discriminant validities were established as the motives were associated with different constructs in an expected manner. Interestingly, different patterns in the entrepreneurial career motives emerged across nations. Overall, our findings provide support for the construct validity of the Entrepreneurial Motives Scale. Implications for practice, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.
Causes of Non-Treatment of Nonconformities in a PIM Company X

To remain competitive, organizations have been adopting quality management systems to continually improve their performance and ensure the quality of products and services. However, many companies have shown some difficulty in the effectiveness of the corrective action process for nonconformities identified in external audits, internal assessments, and legal compliance assessments. This study aims to identify the causes that lead to the effective non-treatment of nonconformities in a company X of the Manaus Industrial Pole (PIM). The methodological approach used was the case study research, whose data collection was through brainstorming, Ishikawa diagram and meetings with managers and workforce in 2014. The compilation and analysis of the data allowed to conclude that the main faults detected were in the labor category, which showed that the teams did not have the knowledge and skills needed to handle nonconformities.
Evaluation of COX-2 expression in renal cell carcinoma and its correlation with clinicopathological factors: a tissue microarray study

Objectives: This study, aimed to evaluate the expression of COX-2 in renal cell carcinoma, and correlate it with different patient clinicopathological data, emphasizing on the role of COX-2 as a prognostic factor for renal cell carcinoma and to decide which cases more likely benefit from the targeted therapy later on. Patients and Methods: The present series consisted of tissue samples obtained from 47 patients (30 patients were males and 17 were females). All the tumor samples were collected from the Pathology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria University during the period from July 2009 to November 2010. Archival paraffin-embedded renal cell carcinoma tissue samples were used to prepare tissue microarray blocks for immunohistochemical staining with COX-2 antibody. Marker expression was categorized for statistical analysis then correlated to clinicopathological variables. Results: The histological types was significantly associated with COX-2 expression, with higher expression being more common in papillary and chromophobe renal cell carcinoma, the majority of these two types were in score 1 and 2 while majority of clear cell renal cell carcinoma had score 0 and 1. Conclusion: The association of COX-2 marker was related to the histologic type of tumor; COX-2 expression study might provide prognostic information regarding tumor aggressiveness. These findings suggested a potential impact of COX-2 targeted therapy in the treatment of renal cell carcinoma with overexpressed COX-2 that needs further investigation.
Reconfigurable and Low-Complexity Accelerator for Convolutional and Generative Networks Over Finite Fields

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained great success in various fields, such as computer vision and natural language processing. Besides, with the breakthrough in unsupervised learning, generative adversarial network (GAN) is recently utilized to generate virtual data from limited data sets. The generative model of GAN has impressive applications, such as style transfer and image super-resolution. However, the promising performance of CNN and GAN comes at the cost of prohibitive computation complexity. The convolution (CONV) in CNN and the transposed CONV (TCONV) in GAN are the two operations that dominant the overall complexity. The prior works exploit the fast algorithms, Winograd and fast Fourier transform (FFT), to reduce the complexity of spatial CONV. However, Winograd only supports fixed filter size while FFT has high transform overhead. Moreover, very few works apply fast algorithms to accelerate GAN models. In this article, a reconfigurable and low-complexity accelerator on ASIC for both CNN and GAN is proposed to address these problems. First, by exploiting Fermat number transform (FNT), we propose two FNT-based fast algorithms to reduce the complexity of CONV and TCONV computations, respectively. Then the architectures of the FNT-based accelerator are presented to implement the proposed fast algorithms. The methodology to determine the design parameters and optimize the dataflow is also described for obtaining maximum performance and optimal efficiency. Moreover, we implement the proposed accelerator on 65 nm 1P9M technology and evaluate it on various CNN and GAN models. The post-layout results show that our design achieves a throughput of 288.0 GOP/s on VGG-16 with 25.11 GOP/s/mm<sup>2</sup> area efficiency, which is superior to the state-of-the-art CNN accelerators. Furthermore, at least <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.7\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> speedup over the existing accelerators is obtained on GAN. The resulting energy efficiency is <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$275.3\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$12.5\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> of CPU and GPU.
A Compact Hepta-Band Mode-Composite Antenna for Sub (6, 28, and 38) GHz Applications

A codesigned hepta-band antenna with a large frequency ratio is presented by using a mode-composite method. The method is based on an idea that apart from a quasi-TE10 mode transmitting in a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) structure at millimeter-wave frequencies, additional radiation modes of the wire antennas can be excited simultaneously on the outer surface of a well-designed SIW structure at the microwave frequencies much lower than its cut-off frequency. In this design, a combination of a meander SIW section and an L-shaped SIW section that are connected with a metallic ground plane constructs the mode-composite structure. Two slot antenna arrays with a size of $2\times4$ are implemented in the SIW sections for the radiation in the 28 GHz and 38 GHz bands. Unidirectional features with low backward radiation can be achieved with the aid of parasitic dipole elements close to the slots. A T-shaped probe operating as a coupled feed is applied to excite five radiation modes existing on the outer surface of the mode-composite structure, which can cover five sub-6 GHz bands for the LTE and 5G mobile communications and the WLAN applications. Stable radiation characteristics are maintained at the microwave frequencies. The work paves a new means to design the compact multiband antenna with a large frequency ratio, which would be attractive for future portable devices operating in both microwave and millimeter-wave bands.
Differences in body density and percent body fat found by different methods of evaluating body composition

The objectives of this study were 1) to quantify the differences in body densities and percent body fat using various methods for evaluating body composition (e.g., underwater weighing (UWW), air displacement plethysmography (ADP), skinfold caliper (SKF) measurement, ultrasound (US), bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), and dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA)), and 2) to examine the relationship between trends of the differences in body density and percent body fat obtained by these methods and characteristics of morphology and body composition. To this end, the body compositions of 73 healthy male adults were measured using UWW, ADP, SKF, US, and BIA. Twenty-seven of these 73 subjects underwent further measurement using DXA. Differences in body densities determined with ADP, SKF, and US were compared with those measured using UWW as a reference, and the differences in percent body fat estimated with UWW, ADP, SKF, US and BIA were compared with those measured by DXA as a reference. The results of this study indicate that 1) ADP is useful as a method for evaluating body density, as the results differed insignificantly from the reference method and showed no systematic errors due to differences in morphological characteristics and body composition, and 2) UWW measurements exhibited the smallest difference in percent body fat from the reference method, however, more than in any other method, there were systematic errors due to differences in morphological characteristics and body composition, specifically, trunk composition. Jpn J Phys Fitness Sports Med, 66(5): 369-382 (2017)
3D LiDAR Map Compression for Efficient Localization on Resource Constrained Vehicles

Large scale 3D maps constructed via LiDAR sensor are widely used on intelligent vehicles for localization in outdoor scenes. However, loading, communication and processing of the original dense maps are time consuming for onboard computing platform, which calls for a more concise representation of maps to reduce the complexity but keep the performance of localization. In this paper, we propose a teacher-student learning paradigm to compress the 3D point cloud map. Specifically, we first find a subset of LiDAR points with high number of observations to preserve the localization performance, which is regarded as the teacher of map compression. An efficient optimization strategy is proposed to deal with the massive data in original map. With the supervision of compressed map, a student model is built by training a random forest model fed with geometric feature descriptors of each point. As a result, the student model is able to compress the map without referring to the expensive numerical optimization. Additionally, by incorporating the features, the innovative student model can be generalized to other new maps while no re-training is required. We conduct thorough experiments on multi-session dataset and KITTI dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed learning paradigm, and the comparison with other map compression methods. The final results show that the learned student model can achieve efficient map compression with comparable LiDAR based localization performance to the original map at the same time.
Monitoring Bond Wire Defects of IGBT Module Using Module Transconductance

Monitoring the defective insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) module is a cost-effective approach to improve the quality of customer service. In general, the parasitic parameters of bond wires inside the IGBT module are affected by aging. Module transconductance reflects the characteristics of the IGBT module and contains information about bond wire health status. It is investigated as a precursor parameter to monitor the bond wire defects in this article. The mathematical model of module transconductance is deduced to establish the relationship between module transconductance and the parameter of bond wires, which indicates that the module transconductance decreases with the increase of bond wire defects. For accurate and safe measurement, the influence of temperature difference caused by bond wire defects during measurement and safety measurement area where the module operates in the active region are discussed. Based on the safety measurement area and the method to eliminate the difference in temperature, a pulse ramp drive circuit is proposed to extract module transconductance. The simulation and experiments are carried out to validate the feasibility of the measurement method and correctness of the theoretical analysis.
Ultra-strong anisotropic photo-responsivity of bilayer tellurene: a quantum transport and time-domain first principle study

Abstract Unlike traditional two-dimensional layered materials, tellurium (Te) shows its one-dimensional van der Waals structure and triggers intensive researches. Through a density functional theory coupled with the nonequilibrium Green’s function calculation, we found that bilayer tellurene has a broad photoelectric response over the range from the visible to the near-infrared region. Besides, bilayer tellurene photodetector presents an ultra-strong anisotropic photo-responsivity and an ultra-high extinction ratio (~2812 at the photon energy of 3.4 eV) because of its non-layer/chain structure, which is superior to the antimonene (~145) and phosphorene/blue phosphorene bilayers (~240). Time-domain first principle study further reveals that the ultra-strong anisotropy comes from the transition of Te 5p bonding orbitals along or perpendicular to the chain directions. With these excellent optoelectronic merits, bilayer tellurene may become a promising candidate for next-generation photoelectronic devices.
Prevalence, Molecular Diversity, and Antimicrobial Resistance Patterns of Pathogenic Bacteria Isolated From Medical Foods, Food Staff, Cooking Instruments, and Clinical Samples in a Teaching Hospital in Tehran, Iran

Background: Medical foods could be vehicles of pathogenic microbes for vulnerable people in the hospitals. Hospital kitchen is considered as the main source of this cross-contamination. Objectives: Thecurrentstudyaimedatinvestigatingthefrequencyof bacterialspeciesandtheirantimicrobialresistancepatterns in foods, food handlers, and utensils compared with those of the clinical isolates in a hospital kitchen in Tehran, Iran. Methods: This cross sectional study was performed in a hospital in Tehran, Iran from April 2011 to January 2013. Accordingly, simple random sampling of raw and cooked food materials, swab samples of cooking utensils, and hands and noses of food staﬀ were done. Clinical samples were collected from blood, urine, wound, and respiratory aspirates of patients with hospital acquired infections. Bacterial isolates were identiﬁed according to biochemical standard identiﬁcation schema. Antimicrobial susceptibility of the strains was determined by disk diﬀusion method according to the CLSI (the clinical and laboratory standards institute) guidelines. Moleculardiversityof indicatorbacterialisolatesof Staphylococcusaureus andEscherichiacoliinthekitchenandthoseof the isolated ones from intensive care unit were also investigated by molecular typing method. The occurrence of cross-contamination was hypothesized based on the results of phylogenetic investigation and resistance biotyping. Results: Out of the 200 kitchen samples, S. aureus , E. coli , Acinetobacter spp. , Pseudomonas spp. , and Enterococcus spp. were isolated in frequencies of 15.5%, 8%, 2.5%, 0.5%, and 0.5%, respectively. Prevalence of multidrug resistant-methicillin resistant strains of S. aureus (MDR-MRSA) in the samples of the hospital kitchen vs the intensive care unit (ICU) was 18.7% (6/32), compared with 91.6% (22/24), respectively. Among the kitchen E. coli isolates, MDR pattern was detected in a frequency of 52.9%; the highest frequency was detected among the isolates of utensils. Although the results of the phylogenetic and resistance biotyping analyses did not conﬁrm signiﬁcant relationship between the isolates of the ICU and hospital kitchen, this similarity was conﬁrmed among the strains isolated from the foods, food handlers, and utensils. In this regard, food staﬀ and utensils were considered as the main sources of cross-contamination for S. aureus and E. coli , respectively. foodworkersandinadequatecookingtoeliminatethecontaminantsduringfoodprocess-ing were postulated as the main risk factors for transmission of these bacteria, through medical foods. into hospital.
Assessment of torrential flood susceptibility: Case study - Ukrina River Basin (B&H)

Torrential floods are the most frequent natural catastrophic events in the Republic of Srpska (B&H). The main objective of this study is susceptibility assessment to torrential floods in Ukrina River Basin using Index Based Method (IBM) and Flash Flood Potential Method (FFPI), which operates entirely in a GIS environment. The definition and identification of influencing factors for torrential floods was the first step in the process of developing the Torrential Flood Susceptibility Model (TFSM). According to the results of these models, 54.00% and 40.86% of the Ukrina Basin area is in the categories of strong and very strong susceptibility to torrential floods. The second task was to identify the torrential basins and create the Register and the Cadastre of Torrential Basins in the Ukrina River Basin. After detailed field survey and analyses, 154 torrential basins have been identified, occupying 551.37 km2 of the Ukrina Basin. According to the validation indicators of the Torrential Flood Susceptibility Model, 138 torrential basins are in the category of strong and very strong susceptibility according to Index Based Method, while 112 torrential basins are in the same category of susceptibility according to Flash Flood Potential Index Method, which are very good results of the validation. This paper presents the significant step towards better understanding of the phenomenon of torrential floods in the Republic of Srpska (B&H). The data presented in this paper are also significant to practical issues such as integral water management projects, spatial planning, sustainable land planning and protection of soil, forest ecosystems and environmental protection, sediment management, agriculture and other human activities.
Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs and Clinical Outcomes among Men with Prostate Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Abstract Background: Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have shown properties of inhibiting the progression of prostate cancer (PCa) in preclinical studies. However, epidemiological studies yield mixed results on the effectiveness of NSAIDs in PCa. Objective: The objective of this study was to determine the effect of NSAID use on clinical outcomes in PCa using systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods: Original articles published until the 1st week of October, 2016, were searched in electronic databases (Medline-Ovid, PubMed, Scopus, The Cochrane Library, and Web of Science) for studies on NSAID use in PCa. The main clinical outcomes for the review were: PCa-specific (PCM) and all-cause mortality (ACM), biochemical recurrence (BCR), and metastases. Meta-analysis was performed to calculate the pooled hazard ratio (pHR) and their 95% confidence interval (95% CI). Heterogeneity between the studies was examined using I2 statistics. Appropriate subgroup analyses were conducted to explore the reasons for heterogeneity. Results: Out of 4216 retrieved citations, 24 observational studies and two randomized controlled studies with a total of 89,436 men with PCa met the inclusion criteria. Overall, any NSAID use was not associated with PCM, ACM, and BCR, with significant heterogeneity. Neither precancer treatment aspirin use (pHR: 1.00, 95% CI: 0.83, 1.19, P = 0.97, 5 studies, I2: 51%) nor postcancer treatment aspirin use (pHR: 0.94, 95% CI: 0.72, 1.23, P = 0.67, 8 studies, I2: 86%) was associated with PCM. Similar findings, that is, no significant association was observed for NSAID use and ACM or BCR overall, and in subgroup by types of NSAID use, and NSAID use following radiation or surgery. Conclusion: Although NSAID use was not associated with ACM, PCM, or BCR among men with PCa, significant heterogeneity remained in the included studies even after subgroup analyses.