Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning Semantic Tags from Big Data for Clinical Text Representation

In clinical text mining, it is one of the biggest challenges to represent medical terminologies and n-gram terms in sparse medical reports using either supervised or unsupervised methods. Addressing this issue, we propose a novel method for word and n-gram representation at semantic level. We first represent each word by its distance with a set of reference features calculated by reference distance estimator (RDE) learned from labeled and unlabeled data, and then generate new features using simple techniques of discretization, random sampling and merging. The new features are a set of binary rules that can be interpreted as semantic tags derived from word and n-grams. We show that the new features significantly outperform classical bag-of-words and n-grams in the task of heart disease risk factor extraction in i2b2 2014 challenge. It is promising to see that semantics tags can be used to replace the original text entirely with even better prediction performance as well as derive new rules beyond lexical level.
A Direct Electric Field-Aided Biomimetic Mineralization System for Inducing the Remineralization of Dentin Collagen Matrix

This in vitro study aimed to accelerate the remineralization of a completely demineralized dentine collagen block in order to regenerate the dentinal microstructure of calcified collagen fibrils by a novel electric field-aided biomimetic mineralization system in the absence of non-collagenous proteins. Completely demineralized human dentine slices were prepared using ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA) and treated with guanidine hydrochloride to extract the bound non-collagenous proteins. The completely demineralized dentine collagen blocks were then remineralized in a calcium chloride agarose hydrogel and a sodium hydrogen phosphate and fluoride agarose hydrogel. This process was accelerated by subjecting the hydrogels to electrophoresis at 20 mA for 4 and 12 h. X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were used to evaluate the resultant calcification of the dentin collagen matrix. SEM indicated that mineral particles were precipitated on the intertubular dentin collagen matrix; these densely packed crystals mimicked the structure of the original mineralized dentin. However, the dentinal tubules were not occluded by the mineral crystals. XRD and EDX both confirmed that the deposited crystals were fluorinated hydroxyapatite. TEM revealed the existence of intrafibrillar and interfibrillar mineralization of the collagen fibrils. A novel electric field-aided biomimetic mineralization system was successfully developed to remineralize a completely demineralized dentine collagen matrix in the absence of non-collagenous proteins. This study developed an accelerated biomimetic mineralization system which can be a potential protocol for the biomineralization of dentinal defects.
Analysing Greek-Turkish disaster-related cooperation: A disaster diplomacy perspective

This article contributes to the disaster diplomacy literature in examining the conditions under which disasters can lead to long-term disaster-related collaboration (e.g. in disaster response, recovery or risk reduction) at both governmental and non-governmental level among states in conflict. In particular, the article focuses on the role of the 1999 earthquakes in enhancing such collaboration between Greece and Turkey over the past decade. While acknowledging the diversity and complexity of disaster diplomacy situations, the article suggests that disasters can lead to long-term disaster-related cooperation among states in conflict when: (1) one party providing disaster relief to another party is followed by a similar reciprocal gesture (i.e. tit-for-tat diplomacy); (2) there is a realization and acceptance that neighbours should come to each other’s assistance in times of disaster; and (3) there is an enabling broader context (e.g. a rapprochement process) conducive to sustaining the long-term cooperation.
Scalable Hierarchical Recommendations Using Spatial Autocorrelation

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most successful and widely used approaches behind Recommendation Algorithms. CF algorithms use the known preferences of a group of users to make recommendations or predictions of the unknown preferences for other users. In this paper, we deal with the Scalability issue which is one of the main challenges to the CF algorithms. In Collaborative Filtering, finding similarity amongst N users is an O(N2) process. If N is large then similarity computation becomes very expensive. In this work, we propose a Quadtree based user partitioning technique that partitions the entire users' space into regions based on the location. We develop a Spatially Aware Recommendation Algorithm, where the Recommendation Algorithm is applied separately to each region and therefore allows us to reduce the quadratic complexity associated with the CF process. The proposed work tries to measure the Spatial Autocorrelation indices, such as Geary's index in the regions or cells formed by the Quadtree decomposition. One of the main objectives of our work is to reduce the running time as well as maintain a good quality of recommendation. This approach of recommendation using the decomposition method makes our algorithm feasible to work with large datasets. We have tested our algorithms on the MovieLens and the Book-Crossing datasets.
IMPACT OF ELECTRIC VEHICLE CHARGING ON RESIDENTIAL DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS: AN IRISH DEMONSTRATION INITIATIVE

This paper presents details of an electric vehicle impact assessment trial currently being undertaken in Dublin, Ireland. The trial involves three stages, each of which are described in this paper. The first stage investigated the potential impact from electric vehicle charging on the operating conditions of existing residential network. During the trial, electric vehicles were driven and charged by typical residential electricity customers. The data recorded during the trial details the charging patterns of the vehicles and the associated effects on the network. Stages 2 and 3 of the trial, which are currently ongoing, will involve examining basic control charging techniques and the effects of network reconfiguration respectively. (4 pages)
Linear Coherent Receiver based on a Broadband and Sampling Optical Phase-Locked Loop

A novel coherent receiver for linear optical phase demodulation is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The receiver, based on a broadband optical phase-lock loop has a bandwidth of 1.45 GHz. Using the receiver in an analog link experiment, a spurious free dynamic range of 125 dBHz2/3 is measured at 300 MHz. Further, theoretical investigations are presented demonstrating receiver operation at high frequencies (>2 GHz) using a sampling phase-locked loop.
Effective part selection for part-based gait identification

Different cofactors can affect different body parts and make difficulties for gait identification We study the contributions of very small segment in term recognition rate for dividing the body into five parts. Depending on the positive or negative effects for recognition, three parts are selected as effective parts and other two parts discarded as redundant. Experimental result shows promising performance in comparison with other part based methods.
Prolonged sitting: is it a distinct coronary heart disease risk factor?

Purpose of review Prolonged sitting (sedentary behavior) has deleterious cardiovascular and metabolic correlates; however, little is known about the associations of too much sitting with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality risk. In addition to the adverse effects of total sitting time, the manner in which it is accumulated has also been postulated to be important for cardiovascular health. Recent findings We describe recent evidence from several research papers published in the last 12–18 months, showing deleterious relationships of sedentary behavior with mortality outcomes. We also explore emerging findings on breaking up sedentary time and its potential beneficial impact on cardiovascular health. Summary Consistent independent associations have been observed between sitting time/sedentary behaviors and elevated all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality risk. Generally, these associations have persisted following adjustment for physical activity. Furthermore, total sedentary time (measured objectively via accelerometer) is detrimentally associated with several cardiovascular risk factors, whereas breaking up sedentary time (independent of total sedentary time and moderate-to-vigorous intensity activity) is beneficially associated. This evidence provides further support to the importance of avoiding prolonged, uninterrupted periods of sitting time for cardiovascular health. However, further evidence from intervention trials is required to establish the causal pathways.
The disguised rationality of solidarity: Gift giving in informal relations

The concept of solidarity as we use it nowadays generates a series of rather diverging associations: the clenched fist of international workers’ solidarity; solidarity as group integration based on shared values and beliefs; a sense of attachment between individuals who are related to one another by ascriptive properties such as age, sex, kinship, ethnicity, or linguistic or territorial affinities (cf. Lockwood, 1992); forms of mutual support among certain communities such as the neighborhood, church, or family; and finally, individual acts of solidarity with those who are in need (cf. the Oliner and Oliner's study on helpers of Jews during the World War II, 1989). In its common‐sense linguistic use, solidarity seems to have predominantly positive connotations: no one is actually against solidarity, as it seems to cover a content which is “morally good,” solidarity is conceived as opposite to the values embodied in individualism, competition, purely instrumental rationality, and the market, and its main connotations are with unselfishness and a willingness to act in the interest of other people.
Seasonal Pulses of Marburg Virus Circulation in Juvenile Rousettus aegyptiacus Bats Coincide with Periods of Increased Risk of Human Infection

Marburg virus (family Filoviridae) causes sporadic outbreaks of severe hemorrhagic disease in sub-Saharan Africa. Bats have been implicated as likely natural reservoir hosts based most recently on an investigation of cases among miners infected in 2007 at the Kitaka mine, Uganda, which contained a large population of Marburg virus-infected Rousettus aegyptiacus fruit bats. Described here is an ecologic investigation of Python Cave, Uganda, where an American and a Dutch tourist acquired Marburg virus infection in December 2007 and July 2008. More than 40,000 R. aegyptiacus were found in the cave and were the sole bat species present. Between August 2008 and November 2009, 1,622 bats were captured and tested for Marburg virus. Q-RT-PCR analysis of bat liver/spleen tissues indicated ∼2.5% of the bats were actively infected, seven of which yielded Marburg virus isolates. Moreover, Q-RT-PCR-positive lung, kidney, colon and reproductive tissues were found, consistent with potential for oral, urine, fecal or sexual transmission. The combined data for R. aegyptiacus tested from Python Cave and Kitaka mine indicate low level horizontal transmission throughout the year. However, Q-RT-PCR data show distinct pulses of virus infection in older juvenile bats (∼six months of age) that temporarily coincide with the peak twice-yearly birthing seasons. Retrospective analysis of historical human infections suspected to have been the result of discrete spillover events directly from nature found 83% (54/65) events occurred during these seasonal pulses in virus circulation, perhaps demonstrating periods of increased risk of human infection. The discovery of two tags at Python Cave from bats marked at Kitaka mine, together with the close genetic linkages evident between viruses detected in geographically distant locations, are consistent with R. aegyptiacus bats existing as a large meta-population with associated virus circulation over broad geographic ranges. These findings provide a basis for developing Marburg hemorrhagic fever risk reduction strategies.
Allelic Diversity and Recombination inCampylobacter jejuni

ABSTRACT The allelic diversity and population structure ofCampylobacter jejuni were studied by multilocus nucleotide sequence analysis. Sequences from seven housekeeping genes were obtained from 32 C. jejuni isolates isolated from enteritis patients in Germany, Hungary, Thailand, and the United States. Also included was strain NCTC 11168, the complete genomic sequence of which has recently been published. For all loci analyzed, multiple strains carried identical alleles. The frequency of synonymous and nonsynonymous sequence polymorphisms was low. The number of unique alleles per locus ranged from 9 to 15. These alleles occurred in 31 different combinations (sequence types), so that all but two pairs of strains could be distinguished from each other. Sequences were analyzed for evidence of recombination by the homoplasy test and split decomposition. These analyses showed that intraspecific recombination is frequent in C. jejuni and has generated extensive diversity of allelic profiles from a small number of polymorphic nucleotides.
Expertise in basketball modifies perceptual discrimination abilities, underlying cognitive processes, and visual behaviours

In this paper, the links between cognitive constraints, visual behaviours, and perceptual judgements are examined. Two experiments investigated the perceptual processes employed during same-different judgement tasks. In Experiment 1, experts' eye movements (i.e., number of fixations and fixation duration) were consistent across discrepant source and target conditions where the number of displaced elements was manipulated. In contrast, novices decreased the number of fixations employed as the number of elements displaced increased. The findings are consistent with the view that both experts and novices process information in a manner (relational or attributional) that constrains the type of visual search used (low or high sensitive to attributional change). In Experiment 2, manipulation of target presentation confirmed that recognition was viewpoint dependent for both expert and novice players. The degradation in performance was accompanied by a change in the visual search behaviours employed by experts, which confirmed thr strength of the search–cognition–performance links
Performance of Adaptive Query Processing in the Mariposa Distributed Database Management System

Performance of Adaptive Query Processing in the Mariposa Distributed Database Management System Jeff Sidell University of California, Berkeley jsidell@cs.berkeley. edu Abstract The Mariposa distributed database management system is based on an economic paradigm in which processing sites buy and sell resources such as CPU time, I/O capacity and network bandwidth [STO96]. In a Mariposa economy, a site assigns a price to perform a service and may adjust its prices as it sees fit. In designing Mariposa, it was our hope that market forces could be used to achieve good performance while maintaining the independence of each processing site. In this paper, we address the problem of distributed query processing in Mariposa and compare its performance to a traditional cost-based distributed query optimizer. We demonstrate the ability of a Mariposa system to adapt to a dynamic workload by using simple economic concepts such as the effect of supply and demand on prices. We investigate the benefits of adaptive distributed query processing in Mariposa and its interaction with multi-user workloads, network latencies and query size. We present performance results which show that in multi-user situations, when response time is used as a metric, the Mariposa system outperforms a static optimizer by causing work to be distributed more evenly among the available sites and that the overhead introduced by Mariposa’s bidding protocol is insignificant when used with large, expensive queries and is outweighed by the benefits of load balancing, even for relatively small queries. Our experiments demonstrate that the point at which our approach outperforms a static optimizer is affected by network latency and query size. Our performance comparisons are based on the TPC-D benchmark.
LPV water delivery canal control based on prescribed order models

This article addresses the problem of designing an LPV controller for a water delivery canal based on reduced complexity linear models with a priori chosen order. For that sake, by applying a method based on the Laplace transform and the linearization of the Saint-Venant equations, a finite dimensional rational transfer function is obtained for each canal reach. An LPV gain-scheduling controller that relies on H∞ optimization is then designed for local upstream canal control. The scheduling variables are the inlet canal flow and the downstream-reach mean level. The uncertainty bound is computed on the basis of the high frequency error of the frequency response of the model used with respect to the one of the infinite-dimensional model by linearizing the Sain-Venant equations. This approach has the advantage of yielding an LPV controller that relies on a model with specified complexity and to relate model uncertainty to physical canal parameters, allowing operation over an extended envelop of water flow and level equilibria.
ATLAS: A Chip-Multiprocessor with Transactional Memory Support

Chip-multiprocessors are quickly becoming popular in embedded systems. However, the practical success of CMPs strongly depends on addressing the difficulty of multithreaded application development for such systems. Transactional memory (TM) promises to simplify concurrency management in multithreaded applications by allowing programmers to specify coarse-grain parallel tasks, while achieving performance comparable to fine-grain lock-based applications. This paper presents ATLAS, the first prototype of a CMP with hardware support for transactional memory. ATLAS includes 8 embedded PowerPC cores that access coherent shared memory in a transactional manner. The data cache for each core is modified to support the speculative buffering and conflict detection necessary for transactional execution. The authors have mapped ATLAS to the BEE2 multi-FPGA board to create a full-system prototype that operates at 100MHz, boots Linux, and provides significant performance and ease-of-use benefits for a range of parallel applications. Overall, the ATLAS prototype provides an excellent framework for further research on the software and hardware techniques necessary to deliver on the potential of transactional memory
Generation of mesenchymal stem cells as a medicinal product in organ transplantation

Purpose of reviewMesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are emerging as an alternative treatment in solid-organ transplantation. The use of MSCs as a therapeutic product requires the translation of basic research protocols into a production process under good manufacturing practice (GMP) to obtain a safe product of high quality. This requires a different mindset from the academic setting of changing protocols into a well defined, controlled and documented process. This review describes some of the challenges faced by culturing MSCs as a medicinal product. Recent findingsClinical-grade MSCs are used in the clinical trials and proved to be safe as a medicinal product. Because of the differences in the type of MSCs and in the production process, clinical outcome is not always comparable. New standardized methods in the culture condition such as the use of alternatives for fetal bovine serum (FBS), standardized plating densities or the use of bioreactors may further standardize the production process. SummaryTo generate MSCs as a medicinal product in organ transplantation, regulation requires that MSCs have to be generated under GMP. During the whole production process, all critical steps should be known and described. Further steps should be taken to optimize and standardize the production process.
"Judgable" people: personality, behavior, and competing explanations.

Judgability" discriminates people who are open and knowable from those who are closed and enigmatic. The current study investigated this individual difference characteristic and its personality and behavioral correlates. Subjects (N = 164) were videotaped interacting with a partner of the opposite sex. They completed several personality measures, and each subject was described by 2 friends. Three indices--subject-peer agreement, peer-peer agreement, and peer-behavior agreement--formed a reliable composite index of judgability. The correlates of judgability included extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and, more generally, psychological adjustment.
Enterprise support and ethnic minority firms

Abstract Encouraging ethnic minority communities into business has been an implicit feature of the small firm policy agenda since the 1980s. However, comparatively little is known of the views of those directly involved in providing enterprise development support. This subject is addressed here through a study on the experiences of those engaged in the ‘front‐line’ provision of such support to ethnic enterprise. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 22 key informants in four British cities ‐ Birmingham, Liverpool, London and Manchester ‐ data relating to organisational objectives, funding, service delivery, and networking, are presented. The results highlight significant constraints upon the delivery of effective enterprise support. First, there was a lack of basic data on the make‐up of local ethnic minority firms. Second, the rationale for interventions was often unclear; were they to promote competitive advantage, economic development or equality of opportunity? Third, the funding regimes of support a.
Intraflagellar transport is essential for endochondral bone formation

While cilia are present on most cells in the mammalian body, their functional importance has only recently been discovered. Cilia formation requires intraflagellar transport (IFT), and mutations disrupting the IFT process result in loss of cilia and mid-gestation lethality with developmental defects that include polydactyly and abnormal neural tube patterning. The early lethality in IFT mutants has hindered research efforts to study the role of this organelle at later developmental stages. Thus, to investigate the role of cilia during limb development, we generated a conditional allele of the IFT protein Ift88 (polaris). Using the Cre-lox system, we disrupted cilia on different cell populations within the developing limb. While deleting cilia in regions of the limb ectoderm had no overt effect on patterning, disruption in the mesenchyme resulted in extensive polydactyly with loss of anteroposterior digit patterning and shortening of the proximodistal axis. The digit patterning abnormalities were associated with aberrant Shh pathway activity, whereas defects in limb outgrowth were due in part to disruption of Ihh signaling during endochondral bone formation. In addition, the limbs of mesenchymal cilia mutants have ectopic domains of cells that resemble chondrocytes derived from the perichondrium, which is not typical of Indian hedgehog mutants. Overall these data provide evidence that IFT is essential for normal formation of the appendicular skeleton through disruption of multiple signaling pathways.