Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ectonucleotidase-Mediated Suppression of Lupus Autoimmunity and Vascular Dysfunction

Objectives CD39 and CD73 are surface enzymes that jut into the extracellular space where they mediate the step-wise phosphohydrolysis of the autocrine and paracrine danger signals ATP and ADP into anti-inflammatory adenosine. Given the role of vascular and immune cells’ “purinergic halo” in maintaining homeostasis, we hypothesized that the ectonucleotidases CD39 and CD73 might play a protective role in lupus. Methods Lupus was modeled by intraperitoneal administration of pristane to three groups of mice: wild-type (WT), CD39−/−, and CD73−/−. After 36 weeks, autoantibodies, endothelial function, kidney disease, splenocyte activation/polarization, and neutrophil activation were characterized. Results As compared with WT mice, CD39−/− mice developed exaggerated splenomegaly in response to pristane, while both groups of ectonucleotidase-deficient mice demonstrated heightened anti-ribonucleoprotein production. The administration of pristane to WT mice triggered only subtle dysfunction of the arterial endothelium; however, both CD39−/− and CD73−/− mice demonstrated striking endothelial dysfunction following induction of lupus, which could be reversed by superoxide dismutase. Activated B cells and plasma cells were expanded in CD73−/− mice, while deficiency of either ectonucleotidase led to expansion of TH17 cells. CD39−/− and CD73−/− mice demonstrated exaggerated neutrophil extracellular trap release, while CD73−/− mice additionally had higher levels of plasma cell-free DNA. Conclusion These data are the first to link ectonucleotidases with lupus autoimmunity and vascular disease. New therapeutic strategies may harness purinergic nucleotide dissipation or signaling to limit the damage inflicted upon organs and blood vessels by lupus.
Identifying Factors Affecting Construction Labour Productivity in Amravati

Poor labour productivity is a problem faced by the construction industry in developed as well as developing country. It is essential that attempts be made to improve labor productivity. Any improvement in productivity cannot be achieved without understanding the factors that adversely affect productivity. The objective of this research is to identifying the factors affecting the labour productivity in the construction projects in Amravati, Maharashtra. The study was carried out through questionnaire based survey. Questionnaire was composed of 30 productivity factors, classified under the following four primary groups: (1) management; (2) technological; (3) human/labor; and (4) external. Among these 30 factors the top 5 most significant factors in their effects on labor productivity: (1) clarity of technical specifications; (2) the extent of variation/change orders during execution; (3) lack of labour supervision; (4) coordination level among design disciplines; (5) design complexity level. The results obtained fill a gap in knowledge of factors affecting labor productivity in Amravati, which can be used by industry practitioners to develop a wider and deeper perspective of the factors influencing the efficiency of operatives and provide guidance to construction managers for efficient utilization of the labor force, hence assist in achieving a reasonable level of competitiveness and cost-effective operation.
Cohort profile: the Geoscience and Health Cohort Consortium (GECCO) in the Netherlands

Purpose In the Netherlands, a great variety of objectively measured geo-data is available, but these data are scattered and measured at varying spatial and temporal scales. The centralisation of these geo-data and the linkage of these data to individual-level data from longitudinal cohort studies enable large-scale epidemiological research on the impact of the environment on public health in the Netherlands. In the Geoscience and Health Cohort Consortium (GECCO), six large-scale and ongoing cohort studies have been enriched with a variety of existing geo-data. Here, we introduce GECCO by describing: (1) the phenotypes of the involved cohort studies, (2) the collected geo-data and their sources, (3) the methodology that was used to link the collected geo-data to individual cohort studies, (4) the similarity of commonly used geo-data between our consortium and the nationwide situation in the Netherlands and (5) the distribution of geo-data within our consortium. Participants GECCO includes participants from six prospective cohort studies (eg, 44 657 respondents (18–100 years) in 2006) and it covers all municipalities in the Netherlands. Using postal code information of the participants, geo-data on the address-level, postal code-level as well as neighbourhood-level could be linked to individual-level cohort data. Findings to date The geo-data could be successfully linked to almost all respondents of all cohort studies, with successful data-linkage rates ranging from 97.1% to 100.0% between cohort studies. The results show variability in geo-data within and across cohorts. GECCO increases power of analyses, provides opportunities for cross-checking and replication, ensures sufficient geographical variation in environmental determinants and allows for nuanced analyses on specific subgroups. Future plans GECCO offers unique opportunities for (longitudinal) studies on the complex relationships between the environment and health outcomes. For example, GECCO will be used for further research on environmental determinants of physical/psychosocial functioning and lifestyle behaviours.
A general score‐independent test for order‐restricted inference

In the analysis of ordered categorical data, the categories are often assigned a set of subjectively chosen order‐restricted scores. To overcome the arbitrariness involved in the assignment of the scores, several score‐independent tests have been proposed. However, these methods are limited to 2 × K contingency tables, where K is the number of ordered categories. We present an efficiency robust score‐independent test that is applicable to more general situations. The test is embedded into a flexible framework for conditional inference and provides a natural generalization of many familiar tests involving ordered categorical data, such as the generalized Cochran‐Mantel‐Haenszel test for singly or doubly ordered contingency tables, the Page test for randomized block designs and the Tarone‐Ware trend test for survival data. The proposed method is illustrated by several numerical examples.
PAC Ranking from Pairwise and Listwise Queries: Lower Bounds and Upper Bounds

This paper explores the adaptive (active) PAC (probably approximately correct) top-$k$ ranking (i.e., top-$k$ item selection) and total ranking problems from $l$-wise ($l\geq 2$) comparisons under the multinomial logit (MNL) model. By adaptively choosing sets to query and observing the noisy output of the most favored item of each query, we want to design ranking algorithms that recover the top-$k$ or total ranking using as few queries as possible. For the PAC top-$k$ ranking problem, we derive a lower bound on the sample complexity (aka number of queries), and propose an algorithm that is sample-complexity-optimal up to an $O(\log(k+l)/\log{k})$ factor. When $l=2$ (i.e., pairwise comparisons) or $l=O(poly(k))$, this algorithm matches the lower bound. For the PAC total ranking problem, we derive a tight lower bound, and propose an algorithm that matches the lower bound. When $l=2$, the MNL model reduces to the popular Plackett-Luce (PL) model. In this setting, our results still outperform the state-of-the-art both theoretically and numerically. We also compare our algorithms with the state-of-the-art using synthetic data as well as real-world data to verify the efficiency of our algorithms.
Pathological Gambling in Parkinson's disease: Autonomic measures supporting impaired decision‐making

According to the somatic marker hypothesis, autonomic measures and arousal modulation can reveal a difference in subgroups of patients developing impaired decision‐making because of addictions. Previously, pathological gambling (PG) and Parkinson's disease (PD) have been associated with differential arousal levels during gambling behavior. However, no research considered the specific autonomic responses of Parkinson's disease patients with pathological gambling and with a previous history of gambling. Thus, this study investigated skin conductance responses (SCRs), skin conductance level (SCL) and heart rate (HR) during the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) in two groups of PD patients with gambling disorder, active (PD Gamblers; n = 14) or remitted (PD Non‐Gamblers; n = 13) and a control group of patients with Parkinson's disease only (n = 13). Anticipatory autonomic responses to disadvantageous decks and advantageous decks during the Iowa Gambling Task were measured for each participant. The PD Gamblers group performed worse than the PD Non‐Gamblers and the control groups at the IGT task and exhibited lower SCRs, SCL, and HR during the decision‐making processing of cards belonging to disadvantageous decks. The role of autonomic and behavioral measures was considered.
EFFECTS OF TREATMENT ON THE METABOLIC CHARACTERISTICS OF GRADE 2 AND GRADE 3 GLIOMAS

Introduction: Recent research has shown that the evaluation of cellular metabolism can help with the diagnosis and assessment of treatment effects in patients with brain tumors. High-resolution magic angle spinning (HRMAS) spectroscopy provides metabolic data from whole tissue samples for investigating tumor biology. In this study, we used HRMAS to compare the differences in metabolism between newly diagnosed gliomas of grades 2 and 3, and recurrent gliomas of grades 2 and 3 who were treated using standard-of-care. Identifying differences in metabolic parameters between these two groups is important in understanding how tumor progression affects the pathways of glioma growth and invasion, and in identifying biomarkers that may be associated with treatment effects. In order to assess whether treated and untreated gliomas of the same grade are different entities, and thus might have different responses to subsequent therapy, we used a multivariate pattern recognition method to discriminate between them based on their metabolic profiles.
Associations between anthropometric indices, blood pressure and physical fitness performance in young Swiss men: a cross-sectional study

Objectives To assess the benefit of waist circumference (WC) measurements during routine conscription medical examination in two military conscription centres in Switzerland. We compared the prevalence of overweight and obesity assessed by body mass index (BMI) with the prevalence of elevated disease risks assessed by WC and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR). We investigated how these measures were associated with systolic blood pressure, physical fitness performance and socioeconomic determinants. Design Cross-sectional survey. Setting Two Swiss conscription centres in 2016. Participants 1548 Swiss male conscripts, 18–22 years old. Main outcome Prevalences of elevated WC, WHtR and BMI values according to WHO categories. Secondary outcomes include systolic blood pressure, physical fitness performance and endurance performance. Results Using BMI cut-points, 25.0% of all conscripts were overweight or obese. When applying WC cut-points, 9.2% had an increased disease risk, while 14.8% of the conscripts were at risk using WHtR cut-points. In the BMI range of 25.0–27.4 kg/m2, 3.6% showed an increased disease risk when using WC and 24.6% when using WHtR cut-points. Of the conscripts with a BMI of 27.5–29.9 kg/m2, 72.4% had an increased disease risk using WHtR, and 42.5% when using WC cut-points. Determinants of elevated BMI, WC and WHtR were low occupational status, rural residential area, older age and location in central and Northwest Switzerland. Systolic blood pressure increased with increasing BMI, WC and WHtR. Physical fitness and endurance test performances decreased with increasing BMI, WC and WHtR. Conclusion In addition to BMI, WC and WHtR add relevant information to the health assessment of young men. However, the prevalence of overweight/increased health risk differed when using BMI, WC or WHtR. Further studies should include measures of body composition to test whether these differences arise from muscular young men within the overweight BMI range, who had a normal WC.
Secret Data Hiding in Compressed Video Bit Streams for Privacy Information Protection

The project presents the compressed video bit streams and hiding privacy information to protect videos during transmission or cloud storage. Digital video sometimes needs to be stored and processed in a compressed format to maintain security and privacy. Data hiding approach is necessary to perform in these encoded videos for the purpose of content notation and ta mpering detection. In this way, data hiding in encoded domain without decoding preserves the confidentiality of the content. Here, da ta hiding directly in the version of H.264/AVC video stream is approached, which includes the following three parts, i.e., H.264/AVC video encoding, data embedding, and data extraction. By analyzing the property of H.264/AVC codec, the code words of intra predicti on modes, the code words of motion vector differences, and the code words of residual coefficients are coded using H.264 encoding technique. Then, a data hider may embed additional data in to it by using bits replacement technique, without knowing the ori ginal video content. Chaos crypto system is used here to encrypt/decrypt secret text data before/after data embedding/extraction. The project simulated results shows that used methods provides better performance in terms of computation efficiency ,high data security and video quality after decryption. The parameters such as Mean square error, PSNR, correlation are evaluated to measure its efficiency.
Analysis of Length Normalization in End-to-End Speaker Verification System

The classical i-vectors and the latest end-to-end deep speaker embeddings are the two representative categories of utterance-level representations in automatic speaker verification systems. Traditionally, once i-vectors or deep speaker embeddings are extracted, we rely on an extra length normalization step to normalize the representations into unit-length hyperspace before back-end modeling. In this paper, we explore how the neural network learns length-normalized deep speaker embeddings in an end-to-end manner. To this end, we add a length normalization layer followed by a scale layer before the output layer of the common classification network. We conducted experiments on the verification task of the Voxceleb1 dataset. The results show that integrating this simple step in the end-to-end training pipeline significantly boosts the performance of speaker verification. In the testing stage of our L2-normalized end-to-end system, a simple inner-product can achieve the state-of-the-art.
The CATCH checklist to investigate adult‐onset hypogonadism

Adult‐onset hypogonadism is a syndrome often underdiagnosed, undertreated, or incompletely explored. There are various reasons for this: firstly, undefined age range of men in whom testosterone levels should be investigated and then no definitive serum cutoff point for the diagnosis of hypogonadism; and finally, variable and non‐specific signs and symptoms; men and physicians do not pay adequate attention to sexual health. All these factors make the diagnostic criteria for hypogonadism controversial. The evaluation of the clinical features and causes of this syndrome, its link with age, the role of testosterone and other hormone levels, and the presence of any comorbidities are all useful factors in the investigation of this population. The purpose of this manuscript, after an accurate analysis of current literature, is to facilitate the diagnosis of hypogonadism in men through the use of the CATCH acronym and a checklist to offer a practical diagnostic tool for daily clinical practice. A narrative review of the relevant literature regarding the diagnosis of late‐onset hypogonadism or adult‐onset hypogonadism was performed. PubMed database was used to retrieve articles published on this topic. A useful new acronym CATCH (Clinical features [symptoms] and Causes, Age, Testosterone level, Comorbidities, and Hormones) and a practical checklist to facilitate the evaluation of hypogonadism in aging men were used. The evaluation of the clinical features and causes of hypogonadism, the link with age, the role of Testosterone and other hormones, and the evaluation of comorbidities are important in investigating adult‐onset hypogonadism. The CATCH checklist could be helpful for clinicians for an early diagnosis of both hypogonadism and associated comorbidities. We suggest the use of this acronym to advocate the investigation of declining testosterone in aging men.
Nonparametric Regression with Comparisons: Escaping the Curse of Dimensionality with Ordinal Information

In supervised learning, we leverage a labeled dataset to design methods for function estimation. In many practical situations, we are able to obtain alternative feedback, possibly at a low cost. A broad goal is to understand the usefulness of, and to design algorithms to exploit, this alternative feedback. We focus on a semi-supervised setting where we obtain additional ordinal (or comparison) information for potentially unlabeled samples. We consider ordinal feedback of varying qualities where we have either a perfect ordering of the samples, a noisy ordering of the samples or noisy pairwise comparisons between the samples. We provide a precise quantification of the usefulness of these types of ordinal feedback in non-parametric regression, showing that in many cases it is possible to accurately estimate an underlying function with a very small labeled set, effectively escaping the curse of dimensionality. We develop an algorithm called Ranking-Regression (RR) and analyze its accuracy as a function of size of the labeled and unlabeled datasets and various noise parameters. We also present lower bounds, that establish fundamental limits for the task and show that RR is optimal in a variety of settings. Finally, we present experiments that show the efficacy of RR and investigate its robustness to various sources of noise and model-misspecification.
Ground Kayak Paddling Exercise Improves Postural Balance, Muscle Performance, and Cognitive Function in Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Kayaking is an interesting and posturally challenging activity; however, kayaking may be limited by safety issues in older adults. The aim of this study was to determine whether ground kayak paddling (GKP) exercise can improve postural balance, muscle performance, and cognitive function in older adults with mild cognitive impairment. Material/Methods Sixty participants were randomly allocated to a GKP group (n=30; mean age, 74 years) or a control group (n=30; mean age, 74 years). GKP exercise consisted 5 types of exercise protocols, including paddling and multi-directional reaching with repetitive trunk and upper-extremities movements, which was performed for 60 min twice a week for 6 weeks. The outcome measures included the Timed Up and Go Test, the Functional Reach Test, the Berg Balance Scale, the Arm Curl Test, handgrip strength, and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. Results In this study, adherence to the regimen was 96% in the GKP group. Postural balance, muscle performance, and cognitive function were significantly improved after intervention (p<0.05), and all the values in the GKP group, except for the Berg Balance Scale scores, were significantly decreased or increased compared to the control group. Differences between the 2 groups were Timed Up and Go Test −0.74 s; Functional Reach Test +7.20 cm; Arm Curl Test +5.56 repetitions; right handgrip strength +3.57 kg; left handgrip strength +3.08 kg; and Montreal Cognitive Assessment, +3.46 score (p<0.05). Conclusions GKP exercise improves the physical and psychological ability of older adults with mild cognitive impairment.
Human Rights and the Excess of Identity

Identity is a central theme in contemporary politics, but legal academia lacks a rigorous analysis of this concept. The aim of this article is twofold: (i) firstly, it aims to reveal presumptions on identity in human rights law by mapping how the European Court of Human Rights approaches identity and (ii) secondly, it seeks to analyse these presumptions using theoretical insights on identity. By merging legal and theoretical analysis, this article contributes a reading of the Court’s case law which suggests that the tension between the political and apolitical is visible as a common thread in the Court’s use of identity. In case law concerning paternity, the Court appears to hold a specific view of what is presented as an unquestionable part of identity. This ostensibly pre-political notion of identity becomes untenable in cases where the nature of an identity feature, such as the headscarf, is contended or a minority has adopted a national identity that conflicts with the majoritarian national identity. The Court’s approach to identity in such cases reflects a paradox that is inherent to identity; identity is personal while simultaneously constituted and shaped by overarching power mechanisms.
Fast Stochastic AUC Maximization with O(1/n)-Convergence Rate

In this paper, we consider statistical learning with AUC (area under ROC curve) maximization in the classical stochastic setting where one random data drawn from an unknown distribution is revealed at each iteration for updating the model. Although consistent convex surrogate losses for AUC maximization have been proposed to make the problem tractable, it remains an challenging problem to design fast optimization algorithms in the classical stochastic setting due to that the convex surrogate loss depends on random pairs of examples from positive and negative classes. Building on a saddle point formulation for a consistent square loss, this paper proposes a novel stochastic algorithm to improve the standard O(1/ √ n) convergence rate to Õ(1/n) convergence rate without strong convexity assumption or any favorable statistical assumptions (e.g., low noise), where n is the number of random samples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first stochastic algorithm for AUC maximization with a statistical convergence rate as fast as O(1/n) up to a logarithmic factor. Extensive experiments on eight large-scale benchmark data sets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm comparing with existing stochastic or online algorithms for AUC maximization.
Findings of the Second Workshop on Neural Machine Translation and Generation

This document describes the findings of the Second Workshop on Neural Machine Translation and Generation, held in concert with the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018). First, we summarize the research trends of papers presented in the proceedings, and note that there is particular interest in linguistic structure, domain adaptation, data augmentation, handling inadequate resources, and analysis of models. Second, we describe the results of the workshop’s shared task on efficient neural machine translation, where participants were tasked with creating MT systems that are both accurate and efficient.