Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Association Between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

pulmonary disease (COPD). However, contextual factors may also play a role. The objective of this study is to evaluate the association between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage measured by the area deprivation index (ADI) and COPD-related outcomes. Methods: Residential addresses of SubPopulations and InteRmediate Outcome Measures in COPD Study (SPIROMICS) subjects with COPD (FEV 1 /FVC <0.70) at baseline were geocoded and linked to their respective ADI national ranking score at the census block group level. The associations between the ADI and COPD-related outcomes were evaluated by examining the contrast between participants living in the most-disadvantaged (top quintile) to the least-disadvantaged (bottom quintile) neighborhood. Regression models included adjustment for individual-level demographics, socioeconomic variables (personal income, education), exposures (smoking status, packs per year, occupational exposures), clinical characteristics (FEV 1 % predicted, body mass index) and neighborhood rural status. Results: A total of 1800 participants were included in the analysis. Participants residing in the most-disadvantaged neighborhoods had 56% higher rate of COPD exacerbation (P<0.001), 98% higher rate of severe COPD exacerbation (P=0.001), a 1.6 point higher CAT score (P<0.001), 3.1 points higher SGRQ (P<0.001), and 24.6 meters less six-minute walk distance (P=0.008) compared with participants who resided in the least disadvantaged neighborhoods. Conclusion: Participants with COPD who reside in more-disadvantaged neighborhoods had worse COPD outcomes compared to those residing in less-disadvantaged neighborhoods. Neighborhood effects were independent of individual-level socioeconomic factors, suggesting that contextual factors could be used to inform intervention strategies targeting high-risk persons with COPD. the highest and the lowest quintile ADI. For count outcomes (exacerbations), negative binomial family distribution and log link function were employed, along with adjustment for the number of days in the study as an offset; and, the predicted difference represented the incidence rate ratio for the highest quintile ADI in comparison to the lowest quintile ADI. Adjusted model adjusted for age, sex, race, education, income, marital status, rural status, BMI, FEV1% Predicted, smoking status, pack years, and occupational exposure. a For regression analysis, airway thickness was rescaled by a factor of 100 in order that the effect estimates would represent the estimates at the hundredth level.
Conquering Hypertension in Vietnam- Solutions at Grassroots Level: Study Protocol of a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

an epidemiologic transition to that of a low-middle income country with an increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases. The key risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) are either on the rise or at levels in particularly (HTN). Inasmuch, the of CVD will continue to increase in the Vietnamese unless effective and control measures are put in place. The objectives of the proposed project are to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of two multi-faceted community and clinic-based strategies on the control of elevated blood pressure (BP) among adults in Vietnam via a cluster-randomized trial design.
Premitochondrial Step of Thymocyte Apoptosis Proteasome Activation Occurs at an Early,

2 Proteasomes and mitochondrial membrane changes are involved in thymocyte apoptosis. The hierarchical relationship between protease activation and mitochondrial alterations has been elusive. Here we show that inhibition of proteasomes by two speciﬁc agents, lactacystin or MG132, prevents all manifestations of thymocyte apoptosis induced by the glucocorticoid receptor agonist dexamethasone or by the topoisomerase II inhibitor etoposide. Lactacystin and MG132 prevent the early disruption of the mitochondrial transmembrane potential ( DC m ), which precedes caspase activation, exposure of phosphatidylserine, and nuclear DNA fragmentation. In contrast, stabilization of the DC m using the permeability transition pore inhibitor bongkrekic acid or inhibition of caspases by N -benzyloxycarbonyl-Val-Ala-Asp-ﬂuoromethylketone does not prevent the activation of proteasomes, as determined with the ﬂuorogenic substrate N -succinyl- L -leucyl- L -leucyl- L -valyl- L -tyrosine-7-amido-4-methylcoumarin. Thus, proteasome activation occurs upstream from mitochondrial changes and caspase activation. Whereas the proteasome-speciﬁc agents lactacystin and MG132 truly maintain thymocyte viability, a number of protease inhibitors that inhibit nuclear DNA fragmentation (acetyl-Asp-Glu-Val-Asp-ﬂuoromethylketone; N- Boc-Asp(OMe)-ﬂuoromethylketone; N- tosyl- L -Phe-chloromethylketone) do not prevent the cytolysis induced by DEX or etoposide. These latter agents fail to interfere with the preapoptotic DC performed on reg-istered all staining gener- ated by its cleavage was measured in a Kontron SFM 25 spectroﬂuorometer (Kontron AG, Zurich, Switzerland). The excitation wavelength was set at 380 nm, and the emission wavelength was set at 460 nM. Background values of nonstimulated cells were not reduced by the proteasome inhibitors MG132 (30 m M) or lactacystin (30 m M) and thus were subtracted from the experimental values.
Reactive collision avoidance for the teleoperation of a micro aerial vehicle

—Teleoperating an aerial vehicle might not be easy for naive users. A common approach to facilitate this task is to endow the robot with the autonomous capability of avoiding obstacles, while following the user command as much as possible. In this work, we present a reactive collision avoidance algorithm that, based on minimal sensing (monocular RGB camera), allows the safe navigation of a teleoperated micro aerial vehicle (MAV) in complex and unknown environments.
Modeling Non-Standard Language Use in Adolescents’ CMC: The Impact and Interaction of Age, Gender and Education

The present paper deals with Flemish adolescents’ informal computer-mediated communication (CMC) in a large corpus (2.9 million tokens) of chat conversations. We analyze deviations from written standard Dutch and possible correlations with the teenagers’ gender, age and educational track. The concept of non-standardness is operationalized by means of a wide range of features that serve different purposes, related to the chatspeak maxims of orality, brevity and expressiveness. It will be demonstrated how the different social variables impact on non-standard writing, and, more importantly, how they interact with each other. While the findings for age and education correspond to our expectations (more non-standard markers are used by younger adolescents and students in practice-oriented educational tracks), the results for gender (no significant difference between girls and boys) do not: they call for a more fine-grained analysis of non-standard writing, in which features relating to different chat principles are examined separately.
Neuropeptide S Receptor (NPSR) Gene - Converging Evidence for a Role in Panic Disorder

Animal studies have suggested neuropeptide S (NPS) and its receptor (NPSR) to be involved in the pathogenesis of anxiety-related behavior. In the present study, a multilevel approach was applied to further elucidate the role of NPS in the etiology of human anxiety. The functional NPSR A/T (Asn 107 Ile) variant (rs324981) was investigated for association with (1) panic disorder with and without agoraphobia in two large, independent case-control studies, (2) dimensional anxiety traits, (3) autonomic arousal level during a behavioral avoidance test and (4) brain activation correlates of anxiety-related emotional processing in panic disorder. The more active NPSR rs324981 T allele was found to be associated with panic disorder in the female subgroup of patients in both samples as well as in a meta-analytic approach. The T risk allele was further related to elevated anxiety sensitivity, increased heart rate and higher symptom reports during a behavioral avoidance test as well as decreased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal, lateral orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex during processing of fearful faces in patients with panic disorder. The present results provide converging evidence for a female-dominant role of NPSR gene variation in panic disorder potentially via heightened autonomic arousal and distorted processing of anxiety-relevant emotional stimuli.
Pinpointing Dream Settings onto Place Cookies

Dream reports are short pieces of text, where a dreamer summarizes the remembered experience of nightly dreams. Dream cartography addresses especially the spatial information contained in dream reports. In this context, the current formalization of space in GIScience such as points, lines, polygons, or labels, including place names or addresses, is not suﬃcient for mapping dream settings. In the best case, dream reports mention place names or streets. However, usually, the perception of space in dreams is designated in terms of whether this is familiar or not, inside or outside, safe or threatening. Moreover, basic comparisons between dream settings are meaningless with classic space deﬁnitions. This lead us to a diﬀerent approach of space: the personal circles of places or, with a nickname, the place cookie. Here, the dream setting can be pinpointed at a certain distance from the centre of the cookie, which represents the familiarity of the setting to the dreamer.
An Energy Efficient Intelligent Method for Sensor Node Selection to Improve the Data Reliability in Internet of Things Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) connects several objects with embedded sensors and they are capable of exchanging information between devices to create a smart environment. IoT smart devices have limited resources, such as batteries, computing power, and bandwidth, but comprehensive sensing causes severe energy restrictions, lowering data quality. The main objective of the proposal is to build a hybrid protocol which provides high data quality and reduced energy consumption in IoT sensor network. The hybrid protocol gives a flexible and complete solution for sensor selection problem. It selects a subset of active sensor nodes in the network which will increase the data quality and optimize the energy consumption. Since the unused sensor nodes switch off during the sensing phase, the energy consumption is greatly reduced. The hybrid protocol uses Dijkstra’s algorithm for determining the shortest path for sensing data and Ant colony inspired variable path selection algorithm for selecting active nodes in the network. The missing data due to inactive sensor nodes is reconstructed using enhanced belief propagation algorithm. The proposed hybrid method is evaluated using real sensor data and the demonstrated results show significant improvement in energy consumption, data utility and data reconstruction rate compared to other existing methods.
Lay Perspectives on Diabetes Mellitus: A Qualitative Analysis in Indonesian Context

— The trend of prevalence of people at risk of diabetes is increasing in the world. In Indonesia, the number of at-risk people of diabetes is almost twice higher than the prevalence of diabetes. This study used qualitative descriptive design aiming at identifying lay perspectives on diabetes mellitus in North Sumatera Province, Indonesia. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 53 people at risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus, 2 village headmen, and 11 health volunteers. The open semi-structured face-to-face interviews and focus group discussion were used to collect data, and content analysis was employed to analyze qualitative data. There were five themes emerged: 1) meaning of diabetes mellitus; 2) diabetes mellitus risk factors; 3) low self-care; 4) insufficient activities to prevent type 2 diabetes mellitus; and 5) no community policy. The information from this study provided useful insight regarding opinion of diabetes mellitus in the community and served as ground evidence for action plan on type 2 diabetes mellitus prevention in the community setting.
Recent Developments in Shock-Capturing Schemes

Abstract : This paper reviews the development of the shock capturing methodology, paying special attention to the increasing nonlinearity in its design and it relation to interpolation. It is well-known that high-order approximations to a discontinuous function generate spurious oscillation near the discontinuity (Gibbs phenomenon). Unlike standard finite difference methods which use a fixed stencil, modern shock-capturing schemes use an adaptive stencil which is selected according to the local smoothness of the solution. Near discontinuities this technique automatically switches to one-sided approximations, thus avoiding the use of discontinuous data which brings about spurious oscillations.
Charging Policies for PREYs used for Service Delivery: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

This work examines a cost optimization problem for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) used for service delivery, in the presence of energy consumption uncertainty. For the cost optimization problem, an optimal policy is found that dynamically decides, as the vehicle moves, at which charging station the vehicle should be charged, in order to minimize the service fuel cost. The problem is formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and is solved by applying reinforcement learning (RL). The RL charging policy (RLCP), found after solving the POMDP, is compared to two benchmark policies and it is shown that RLCP outperforms both. Most importantly, RLCP can be automatically adjusted to significant variations on the vehicle's energy consumption behavior by continuously training the RLCP model according to the most recent information obtained from the vehicle's environment.
Graph Based Real Sybil Detection in OSNs

: In current generation, the rapid growth of Online Social Networks (OSNs) have made far reaching effect on everyone’s social life. This increase in popularity, usage and anonymous nature of OSNs exposed the possibility of being attacked. In Sybil attack, a fake user can create massive amount of fake identities towards the target OSNs for unfairly increasing their influence. These Sybils performs the distribution of malwares, spams, bad products reviews and private data collection. Recently, there exist different schemes for detect and prevent the challenging Sybil attacks. This paper review some of those works that leverages the social graph structure and make a comparative study to identify their relevance in detection of Sybil identity in OSNs.
Combining High Spatial Resolution and Revisit Capabilities in the Thermal Infrared: the MISTIGRI Mission Project

This paper describes the MISTIGRI project of a satellite designed to observe the Earth in the thermal infrared (TIR), that could be developed by the French space organisation CNES in cooperation with Spain. MISTIGRI is a precursor mission which has the originality of combining a high spatial resolution (~50m) with a daily revisit. The scientific goals and expected applications of the mission are first described: they deal with (i) agriculture and hydrology, (ii) urban and (iii) coastal areas. Emphasis is set on the justification of the spatial resolution and revisit specifications. The other mission specifications are briefly examined and rapid overviews of the instrumental concept and of the proposed mission architecture given.
Energy Efficient Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (Ee-Aodv) Routing Protocol For Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

: The emergence of wireless technology leads to design and development of mobile ad hoc networks. Design and development of energy efficient routing is the challenging task in the field of mobile ad hoc networks. Such challenge gives birth to more vibrant research dimensions. Ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing is one of the conventional unipath routing protocol and this paper incorporates an energy efficient mechanism with AODV. In this research works, an energy efficient mechanism is incorporated with AODV routing protocol. Energy consumption and throughput which are the prime performance metrics for determining energy efficiency are taken into account under two different scenarios by varying number of nodes and pausetime. An extensive NS2 simulation result shows that the proposed EE-AODV outperforms the conventional AODV routing protocol.
Marrow Precursors Dendritic Cells from Bone intermediate CD11b + Differentiation of CD11c Estrogen Preferentially Promotes the

2 Sex biases in autoimmunity and infection suggest that steroid sex hormones directly modulate immune cells. We show in this study that 17- (cid:2) -estradiol (E2) promotes the differentiation of functional dendritic cells (DC) from murine bone marrow precursor cells. Remarkably, ex vivo DC differentiation was inhibited in steroid hormone-deﬁcient medium, and was restored by addition of physiological amounts of E2, but not dihydrotestosterone. DC differentiation was inhibited by the estrogen receptor (ER) antagonists ICI 182,780 and tamoxifen, and from ER (cid:3) (cid:4) / (cid:4) bone marrow cells, indicating that E2 acted via ERs. E2 addition was most effective in promoting DC differentiation immediately ex vivo, but did not increase DC proliferation. E2 treatment speciﬁcally promoted differentiation of a CD11c (cid:1) CD11b int DC population that displayed high levels of cell surface MHC class II and CD86, suggesting that E2 could augment numbers of potent APC. DC that differentiated in E2-supplemented medium were fully functional in their capability to mediate presentation of self and foreign Ags and stimulate the proliferation of naive CD4 (cid:1) T cells. The requirement for estrogen during DC differentiation suggests a mechanism by which E2 levels in peripheral tissues might modulate both the number and functional capabilities of DC in vivo, thereby inﬂuencing immune responses. The Journal of Immunology, 2004, 172: 1426–1436. from culture of BM in CDFCS or serum-free medium indicate that E2 promotes DC differentiation by acting on DC precursors present in freshly isolated BM, and suggest that a threshold amount of E2 is required to effect differentiation.
Institutionen för datavetenskap

As technology evolves, the need to use software for critical applications increases. It is then required that this software will always behave correctly. Verification is the process of formally proving that a program is correct. Model checking is a technique used to perform verification, which has been successful with finite state concurrent programs. In the recent years, there has been progress in the area of the verification of infinite state concurrent programs. There can be several sources of infiniteness. Relevant to this thesis are recent model checking techniques developed at LiU, that can automatically establish correctness for programs manipulating variables that range over infinite domains, and spawning arbitrary many threads, which can synchronize using shared variables, barriers, semaphores etc. These techniques resulted in the tool PACMAN for the verification of multi-threaded programs. The aim of this thesis is to extract analyzable models from multi-threaded C programs, in order to use them for verifying the program that they describe, by using PACMAN. In addition, we augment the C programming language to allow the possibility of expressing some important concepts of multi-threaded programs, such as non-determinism, atomicity etc, with the use of the traditional C syntax.
HOPF BIFURCATIONS OF A LENGYEL-EPSTEIN MODEL INVOLVING TWO DISCRETE TIME DELAYS

Hopf bifurcations of a Lengyel-Epstein model involving two discrete time delays are investigated. First, stability analysis of the model is given, and then the conditions on parameters at which the system has a Hopf bifurcation are determined. Second, bifurcation analysis is given by taking one of delay parameters as a bifurcation parameter while ﬁxing the other in its stability interval to show the existence of Hopf bifurcations. The normal form theory and the center manifold reduction for functional diﬀerential equations have been utilized to determine some properties of the Hopf bifurcation including the direction and stability of bifurcating periodic solution. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to support theoretical results. Analytical results together with numerics present that time delay has a crucial role on the dynamical behavior of Chlorine Dioxide-Iodine-Malonic Acid (CIMA) reaction governed by a system of nonlinear diﬀerential equations. Delay causes oscillations in the reaction system. These results are compatible with those observed experimentally.
Testing the Significance of Summary Response Functions

A simple method of testing the statistical significance of the summary response function derived by Pilcher and Gray is given and applied to European oak data. Es wird ein einfaches Verfahren zur Prufung der'summary response function' nach Pilcher und Gray vorgestellt und auf Jahrringdaten von Eichen angewandt. Une simple methode pour tester la signification de la fonction -reponse resumee par Pilcher et Gray est fournie et appliquee a des donnees provenant de chenes europeens. INTRODUCTION Fritts (1974) discussed the averaged response function of a group of clustered chronologies, and noted that, for the chronologies considered, the species differences were not as marked as the site differences. Such an averaged response function fulfills the same purposes as, but is different from, the summary response function derived by Pilcher and Gray (1982). The latter is a histogram composed of the counts of the numbers of significant positive and negative response function elements from a collection of response functions, in this case of oak chronologies. This paper describes the application of the binomial distribution to determine the significant months in a summary response function. THE U. K. OAK SUMMARY RESPONSE The application of the binomial distribution to determine the overall significance of an individual response function is described in Gray, Wigley, and Pilcher (1981). The method has been extended to consider the statistical significance of the summary response in any one month to either temperature or precipitation. To illustrate the method, it has been applied to the summary response in Pilcher and Gray (1982). Here, 16 site chronologies (Quercus robur, Q. petraea, and hybrids) in the United Kingdom are used to produce a summary response (Figure 1). The 16 chronologies exhibit 75 temperature and 77 precipitation elements which are significant at the 95% level, an average of 5 variables /response function. To evaluate the significance of the summary function of these chronologies, consider the probable summary functions that would arise if the significant coefficients of one variable, say temperature, were randomly distributed across the 14 months in the response function. Each month can have either a positive or negative response, so