Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Low Ankle Brachial Index in Acute Ischemic Stroke: Does ApoE Gene Polymorphism Have a Role?

Background: The existence of asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease among patients with acute ischemic stroke has been studied and proved. Low ankle brachial index (ABI) is considered as a marker of atherosclerosis, and its relation to stroke severity was documented in some studies. The effect of different alleles of ApoE gene on acute ischemic stroke presentation in patients with low ABI is not known. Objective: To study the effect of ApoE gene polymorphism on stroke severity, outcome and recurrence in patients with asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease identified by low ABI. Methods: Patients with acute ischemic stroke were screened for the presence of asymp-tomatic peripheral arterial disease by estimating the ABI using a pocket Doppler ultrasound device. Assay of ApoE gene was done using the real-time PCR technique. Results: Low ABI was present in 31% of patients with acute ischemic stroke. There was no significant difference among patients with different ApoE alleles regarding the severity of their symptoms. Also, there was no significant difference among patients with normal ABI and those with abnormal ABI regarding the ApoE gene polymorphism. Conclusion: The current study showed that there was no significant relation between ApoE gene polymorphism and low ABI in ischemic stroke patients who had asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease.
Link and Network Layers Design for Ultra-High-Speed Terahertz-Band Communications Networks

Abstract : Terahertz (THz)-band communication is an emerging technology that can address two relevant challenges for the U.S. Air Force. First, THz-band frequencies (0.1 to 10 THz) remain almost completely unutilized for communication; hence, being the first to exploit this band provides an unmatched technological advantage. Second, the huge transmission bandwidth associated with the THz-band can satisfy demand for higher data rates in communication networks, thereby enabling Terabit-per-second (Tbps) wireless links. The objective of this project is to establish the theoretical foundations for practical THz-band communication networks. Over the duration of the project (20 months), contributions have been made across different areas both related to THz device technologies as well as to physical and link layer solutions for THz communication networks. More specifically, in terms of THz devices, graphene-based plasmonic phase modulators and plasmonic nano-antenna arrays have been proposed, modeled and analyzed. In terms of physical and link layer solutions, new models for interference in THz communication, symbol detection and physical layer synchronization strategies; a packet size optimization framework; and link layer synchronization and medium access control protocols have been devised, formulated and modeled. These have also been validated by a combination of numerical, simulation and experimental results.
What are the demands on an observational program to detect trends in upper tropospheric water vapor anticipated in the 21st century?

An ensemble of runs made by a regional climate model was used to estimate the expected change in humidity in the atmosphere between 1950 and 2100. Output from the model runs at a midlatitude European site is used as a proxy for a perfect climate record of specific humidity at the 300 hPa level from which trends were derived. The trend analysis demonstrates that it takes 30 years for a trend to show up in the perfect climate record. The model output was degraded to simulate observations made with the best radiosonde equipment for recording water vapor. Results indicate that it would be necessary to conduct observations for at least five decades until a trend expected by current models could be confirmed by observations to within 20%.
Dark Trading Volume at Earnings Announcements

We examine how abnormal dark market share changes at earnings announcements and find a statistically and economically significant increase in abnormal dark market share in the weeks prior to, during, and following the earnings announcement. The increase in dark market share is larger for firms with a relatively high quality of information environment and a relatively low level of informed trading. These findings are consistent with informed (uninformed) traders facing lower execution (adverse selection) risk in dark venues for firms with a high quality information environment and for firms with low levels of informed trading.
Mapping model agreement on future climate projections

Climate change projections are often based on simulations from multiple global climate models and are presented as maps with some form of stippling or measure of robustness to indicate where different models agree on the projected anthropogenically forced changes. The criteria used to determine model agreement, however, often ignore the presence of natural internal variability. We demonstrate that this leads to misleading presentations of the degree of model consensus on the sign and magnitude of the change if the ratio of the signal from the externally forced change to internal variability is low. We present a simple alternative method of depicting multimodel projections which clearly separates lack of climate change signal from lack of model agreement by assessing the degree of consensus on the significance of the change as well as the sign of the change. Our results demonstrate that the common interpretation of lack of model agreement in precipitation projections is largely an artifact of the large noise from climate variability masking the signal, an issue exacerbated by performing analyses at the grid point scale. We argue that separating more clearly the case of lack of agreement from the case of lack of signal will add valuable information for stake‐holders' decision making, since adaptation measures required in the two cases are potentially very different.
Development of a Novel Methodology for Improving CTL Recognition of Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) for the Immunotherapy of Prostate Cancer

Abstract : The major goal of the proposed research is to develop a novel methodology for improving T cell epitopes. The underlying hypothesis is that T cells capable of recognizing tumor- associated antigens (TAA) are present but often difficult to activate. However, once activated such T cells might be effective against tumors due to the less stringent triggering requirements of mature effectors. We proposed to develop a novel bacterial expression system for modifying and screening the epitopes of PSA, a known TAA. In the current year, we have employed a saturation mutagenesis technique to a PSA peptide epitope we have identified. Expression libraries were constructed corresponding to each position in the peptide. These libraries were screened functionally, The clones showing enhanced activity were sequenced. From these screens, we were able to identify a number of enhanced peptide epitopes. Peptides were synthesized and tested in a functional assay. These peptides showed enhanced activity with the T cell hybridoma. The findings show that altered peptide ligands can be discovered using the novel methodology proposed. These approaches should be applicable to other tumor antigens.
IMAGE ENHANCEMENT USING A NEW SHOCK FILTER FORMALISM

We present a new approach based on Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) and shock filter theory for deblurring 2D Gaussian blurred images. The inherent problems of stability posed by the reverse heat equation and the discretization of shock filters are overcome by the use of only the initial conditions. This approach is not well suited for diffusion-oriented techniques since in this case the problem is ill-posed, but when dealing with multiple inputs (the case of fusion methods), it proves to provide sound results. The proposed deblurring model takes into account only the blur problem without having a noise removal component, this being a future step of our work .
OFDM receivers - impact on coverage of inter-symbol interference and FFT window positioning

The digital broadcasting systems DVB-T and T-DAB commonly exploit the single-frequency network (SFN) technique. In such networks, the treatment of inter-symbol interference and the synchronization strategy of the receivers is a crucial aspect in planning the networks and achieving the desired coverage. This is valid in two senses. Firstly, the performance of the receiver is strongly dependent on the way in which it positions the FFT window relative to the several received signals that can be present in a multipath environment or in an SFN. The position of the FFT window affects the receivers behaviour with regard to inter-symbol interference (ISI). Secondly, the modelling of receiver behaviour in network coverage simulations has to be in line with the synchronization strategies and the treatment of inter-symbol interference in the receivers, in order to give reliable coverage predictions. However, the synchronization strategies of individual manufacturers are commercially sensitive and not publicly available. Therefore, predictions have to be carried out on the basis of assumptions.
Family structure , rural livelihoods an d child health inequality in Tanzania

Extended abstract Background: Recent decades have witnessed substantial improvements in child health. Global child mortality has reduced by nearly 50% in the last 20 years (IGME 2012) and the prevalence of moderate-to-severe stunting (i.e. chronic malnutrition) declined from 47% to 30% between 1985 and 2011 throughout the developing world (Stevens et al. 2012). These achievements belie persistent and dramatic international inequalities, masking the stagnation of progress in sub-Saharan Africa. Stevens et al (2012), for example, report that while child health has been steadily improving in most world regions since the mid 1980s, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa experienced a period of increasing malnutrition until the late 1990s, followed by only modest gains in the last decade.
Dynamic Steerable Frame Networks

Filters in a convolutional network are typically parametrized in a pixel basis. As an orthonormal basis, pixels may represent any arbitrary vector in R. In this paper, we relax this orthonormality requirement and extend the set of viable bases to the generalized notion of frames. When applying suitable frame bases to ResNets on Cifar-10+ we demonstrate improved error rates by substitution only. By exploiting the transformation properties of such generalized bases, we arrive at steerable frames, that allow to continuously transform CNN filters under arbitrary Lie-groups. Further allowing us to locally separate pose from canonical appearance. We implement this in the Dynamic Steerable Frame Network, that dynamically estimates the transformations of filters, conditioned on its input. The derived method presents a hybrid of Dynamic Filter Networks and Spatial Transformer Networks that can be implemented in any convolutional architecture, as we illustrate in two examples. First, we illustrate estimation properties of steerable frames with a Dynamic Steerable Frame Network, compared to a Dynamic Filter Network on the task of edge detection, where we show clear advantages of the derived steerable frames. Lastly, we insert the Dynamic Steerable Frame Network as a module in a convolutional LSTM on the task of limited-data hand-gesture recognition from video and illustrate effective dynamic regularization and show clear advantages over Spatial Transformer Networks. In this paper, we have laid out the foundations of Frame-based convolutional networks and Dynamic Steerable Frame Networks while illustrating their advantages for continuously transforming features and data-efficient learning.
Application of the Co-design Finite State Machines Model for the Design of a Multiprocessor System

This paper presents the use of CFSMs, Co-design Finite State Machines, for the high level design of multiprocessor system. This technique is based on implementationindependant representation that can be generated from a variety of speci cation languages such as VHDL, for control-dominated oriented systems. This representation allows to preserve semantical correctness throughout the design process, since CFSMs assume unbounded, non-zero reaction delays, that correspond both to hardware and software behavior. Our technique illustrates the use of the CFSMs model to specify the multiprocessor target architecture. We focus on the speci cation of the control oriented part. Key-Words: Co-design, Co-veri cation, FSMS, CFSM.
RHETORIC THAT WINS CLIENTS: ENTREPRENEURIAL FIRMS USE OF INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS WHEN COMPETING FOR RESOURCES

Entrepreneurial firms such as professional service firms (PSFs) face constant challenges to acquire resources, one of the greatest of which is the challenge to win client engagements. Although rhetoric is at the center of the challenge to win client engagements, scholars have not identified what rhetorical strategies are the most persuasive to potential clients. By exploring one type of PSF, architecture firms, we argue that PSFs can compete for and legitimate themselves with clients by deploying institutional logics that provide symbolic frameworks and meaning. Since multiple institutional logics exist in society, a critical question for a PSF is which logic is most persuasive to clients. We analyze architecture firms’ written pitches to predict which rhetoric strategies win the valuable resource of a client engagement for a multiclient state project. Our results identify that rhetoric deploying a “profession” logic was most effective whereas a “business” logic was counter-productive in obtaining client engagements and securing resources for the firm.
Which-hunting and the Standard English relative clause: Online Supplement: Automatic Zero-Relative Detection

Alternation among restrictive relativizers in written Standard English is undergoing a massive shift from which to that. In corpora of written-edited-published British and American English covering the period from 1961–1992, American English spearheads this change. We study 16,868 restrictive relative clauses with inanimate antecedents from the Brown quartet of corpora. Predictors include additional areas of variation regulated by prescriptivism. We show that: (i) relativizer deletion follows different constraints from the selection of either that or which; (ii) this change is a case of institutionally backed colloquialization-cum-Americanization; and (iii) uptake of the precept correlates with avoidance of the passive voice at the text level but not with other prescriptive rules.
A Recruiting Challenge For Extension Education: A Comparison Of Nonparticipants And Participants In Homewoner Landscaping Programs

This study examines factors which influence homeowners’ participation in a Cooperative Extension Service (CES) yard care program. A survey was administered to two groups of homeowners program participants and nonparticipants from the same area. Six hundred fifty-two participants who attended one of 24 CES workshops completed a survey during Spring, 2000. The comparison group, a random sample of homeowners, was selected from the list of single-family residences from the same area. A total of 462 homeowners returned usable surveys for the comparison group. The data show that some market segments were better represented among participants, including persons with a college degree, using an irrigation system, a high level of sharing information, less concern about neighborhood norms, and more frequent use of CES services, than nonparticipants. No significant bias was found for environmental behavior. The findings suggest that improved recruiting can expand CES’ outreach efforts.
Adaptive Help for Speech Dialogue Systems Based on Learning and Forgetting of Speech Commands

In this paper we deal with learning and forgetting of speech commands in speech dialogue systems. We discuss two mathematical models for learning and four models for forgetting. Furthermore, we describe the experiments used to determine the learning and forgetting curve in our environment. Our findings are compared to the theoretical models and based on this we deduce which models best describe learning and forgetting in our automotive environment. The resulting models are used to develop an adaptive help system for a speech dialogue system. The system provides only relevant context specific information.
Near-Infrared-II (NIR-II) Bioimaging via Off-Peak NIR-I Fluorescence Emission

Significantly reduced photon scattering and minimal tissue autofluorescence levels in the second biological transparency window (NIR-II; 1000-1700 nm) facilitate higher resolution in vivo biological imaging compared to tradition NIR fluorophores (~700-900 nm). However, the existing palette of NIR-II fluorescent agents including semiconducting inorganic nanomaterials and recently introduced small-molecule organic dyes face significant technical and regulatory hurdles prior to clinical translation. Fortunately, recent spectroscopic characterization of NIR-I dyes (e.g., indocyanine green (ICG), IRDye800CW and IR-12N3) revealed long non-negligible emission tails reaching past 1500 nm. Repurposing the most widely used NIR dye in medicine, in addition to those in the midst of clinical trials creates an accelerated pathway for NIR-II clinical translation. This review focuses on the significant advantage of imaging past 1000 nm with NIR-I fluorophores from both a basic and clinical viewpoint. We further discuss optimizing NIR-I dyes around their NIR-II/shortwave infrared (SWIR) emission, NIR-II emission tail characteristics and prospects of NIR-II imaging with clinically available and commercially available dyes.
Anisotropic Second- and Third-Order Nonlinear Optical Response from Anisotropy-Controlled Metallic Nanocomposites

Plasmonics has become a route to develop ultracompact optical devices on a chip by using extreme light concentration. It also gives the ability to perform simultaneous electrical and optical functions, and facilitates dramatic enhancement of localized field intensities via metallic nanostructures. On the other hand, nonlinear optical interactions scale with the local intensity of the optical field, i.e., the dielectric polarization of a given material responds to the local electric field in a high-order way. For a metal-dielectric nanostructure, the combination of plasmonics with its nonlinear optical response offers the opportunity to manipulate nonlinear optical responses in sub-diffraction-limited volumes.
Conflict-Free Colorings

Conflict-free colorings are known as vertex-colorings of hypergraphs. In such a coloring each hyperedge contains a vertex whose color is not assigned to any other vertex within this edge. In this thesis the notion of conflict-free colorings is translated to edge-colorings of graphs. For graphs G and H a conflict-free coloring of G ensures an edge of unique color in each copy of H in G. The minimum number of colors in such a coloring is denoted by f(G,H) and is called conflict-free chromatic index of G. Since total multicolorings are conflict-free, f(G,H) is well defined. In accordance with the chromatic-index of a graph it is NP-hard to determine f(G,H) in general. Most results of the thesis are concerned with the asymptotic behavior of the function f(G,H) for fixed H and large G. The cases of arbitrary graphs G and H, of paths in trees and of subcliques of complete graphs are studied in detail. Several constructive as well as probabilistic upper bounds are established in these settings, some of which are tight for certain graphs. Some lower bounds are determined, as well. Moreover, tight relations between the two notions of conflict-free colorings and between conflict-free colorings and (inverse) Ramsey numbers are encountered.
Improved He I Emissivities in the Case B Approximation

We update our prior work on the case B collisional-recombination spectrum of He I to incorporate ab initio photoionization cross-sections. This large set of accurate, self-consistent cross-sections represents a significant improvement in He I emissivity calculations because it largely obviates the piecemeal nature that has marked all modern works. A second, more recent set of ab initio cross-sections is also available, but we show that those are less consistent with bound–bound transition probabilities than our adopted set. We compare our new effective recombination coefficients with our prior work and our new emissivities with those by other researchers, and we conclude with brief remarks on the effects of the present work on the He I error budget. Our calculations cover temperatures 5000 ≤ Te ≤ 25 000 K and densities 10 1 ≤ ne ≤ 10 14 cm −3 . Full results are available online (see Supporting Information).
Paxos Made Parallel

Standard state-machine replication involves consensus on a sequence of totally ordered requests through, for example, the Paxos protocol. Serialized request processing seriously limits our ability to leverage prevalent multicore servers. This tension between concurrency and consistency is not inherent because the total-ordering of requests is merely a simplifying convenience that is unnecessary for consistency. Replicated state machines can be made parallel by consensus on partial-order traces, rather than on totally ordered requests, that capture causal orders in one replica execution and to be replayed in an order-preserving manner on others. The result is a new multi-core friendly replicated state-machine framework that achieves strong consistency while preserving parallelism in multi-threaded applications. On 12-core machines with hyper-threading, evaluations on typical applications show that we can scale with the number of cores, achieving up to a 16 times throughput increase over standard replicated state machines.
A Structural Equation Modeling Approach for the Analysis of Cortisol Data Collected Using Pre–Post–Post Designs

Abstract This study introduces a novel application of structural equation modeling (SEM) for the analysis of cortisol data that are collected using a pre–post–post design. By way of an extended example, an SEM model is developed that permits an examination of both the overall level of cortisol, as well as changes in cortisol (reactivity and regulation), as predictors of cognitive (executive) and behavioral functioning in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 171) attending Head Start. The SEM model makes use of the parameterization of latent curve models. Throughout the extended example, the strengths of using an SEM approach for the analysis of cortisol data that are collected using pre–post–post designs is highlighted.