Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Household Air Pollution and Under-Five Mortality in Bangladesh (2004–2011)

Household air pollution (HAP) is one of the leading causes of respiratory illness and deaths among children under five years in Bangladesh. This study investigates the association between HAP from cooking fuel and under-five mortality using Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) datasets over the period 2004–2011 (n = 18,308 children), and the extent to which this association differed by environmental and behavioral factors affecting level of exposure. The association between HAP and neonatal (age between 0–28 days), infant (age between 0 and 11 months) and under–five (age between 0 and 59 months) mortality was examined using multilevel logistic regression models. HAP was not strongly associated with overall neonatal (OR = 1.49, 95% CI = 1.01–2.22, p = 0.043), infant (OR = 1.27, 95% CI = 0.91–1.77, p = 0.157) or under-five mortality (OR = 1.14, 95% CI = 0.83–1.55, p = 0.422) in the context of overall decreasing trends in under-five mortality. The association was stronger for households with an indoor kitchen using polluting fuels, and in women who had never breastfed. Reductions in exposure to pollution from cooking fuel, given it is a ubiquitous and modifiable risk factor, can result in further declines in under-five mortality with household design and behavioural interventions.
The Z4-linearity of Kerdock, Preparata, Goethals, and related codes

Certain notorious nonlinear binary codes contain more codewords than any known linear code. These include the codes constructed by Nordstrom-Robinson (1967), Kerdock (1972), Preparata (1968), Goethals (1974), and Delsarte-Goethals (1975). It is shown here that all these codes can be very simply constructed as binary images under the Gray map of linear codes over Z/sub 4/, the integers mod 4 (although this requires a slight modification of the Preparata and Goethals codes). The construction implies that all these binary codes are distance invariant. Duality in the Z/sub 4/ domain implies that the binary images have dual weight distributions. The Kerdock and "Preparata" codes are duals over Z/sub 4/-and the Nordstrom-Robinson code is self-dual-which explains why their weight distributions are dual to each other. The Kerdock and "Preparata" codes are Z/sub 4/-analogues of first-order Reed-Muller and extended Hamming codes, respectively. All these codes are extended cyclic codes over Z/sub 4/, which greatly simplifies encoding and decoding. An algebraic hard-decision decoding algorithm is given for the "Preparata" code and a Hadamard-transform soft-decision decoding algorithm for the I(Kerdock code. Binary first- and second-order Reed-Muller codes are also linear over Z/sub 4/, but extended Hamming codes of length n/spl ges/32 and the Golay code are not. Using Z/sub 4/-linearity, a new family of distance regular graphs are constructed on the cosets of the "Preparata" code. >
Adopting feature-centric reuse of requirements assets: an industrial experience report

In this paper, we share practical experiences from an ongoing effort towards adopting a feature-centric method that enhances reuse of requirements at TRW Automotive's slip control system department (based in Koblenz, Germany). After introducing identified challenges in detail, key solution factors and a technical reuse concept for managing and deriving product-specific requirements are presented. Then, we demonstrate one way of implementing this solution approach based on industry-standard tools. In addition, identified pitfalls and lessons learned are discussed.
Soliciting sex on the Internet: what are the risks for sexually transmitted diseases and HIV?

BACKGROUND Strategies to meet sex partners have been augmented by the Internet. This medium is an environment of potential risk for acquiring or transmitting sexually transmitted disease (STD). GOAL To document how the Internet is used to find sex partners and what risks such activity poses for STD infection. STUDY DESIGN Participant observations of 175 chat rooms targeting men who have sex with men (MSM), heterosexuals, and couples seeking sex partners. RESULTS Findings indicate evidence of past meetings (9% of MSM-room observations, 15% of couple-room observations) and solicitation of sex (9% of heterosexual-room observations, 17% of MSM-room observations, 36% of couple-room observations) by members of these groups. Safer sex or risk-reduction behaviors were not frequently mentioned, but were sometimes acknowledged through solicitation of drug-free and disease-free partners. CONCLUSIONS Because people can use the Internet to solicit sex partners, it is a risk environment for sexually transmitted diseases. The Internet offers fast and efficient encounters resulting in sexual contact, which may translate into more efficient disease transmission. However, the Internet also offers many possibilities for innovative technologic approaches to promote STD and HIV prevention.
Ciliates along Oxyclines of Permanently Stratified Marine Water Columns

Studies of microbial communities in areas of the world where permanent marine water column oxyclines exist suggest they are “hotspots” of microbial activity, and that these water features and the anoxic waters below them are inhabited by diverse protist taxa, including ciliates. These communities have minimal taxonomic overlap with those in overlying oxic water columns. Some ciliate taxa have been detected in multiple locations where these stable water column oxyclines exist; however, differences in such factors as hydrochemistry in the habitats that have been studied suggest local selection for distinct communities. We compare published data on ciliate communities from studies of deep marine water column oxyclines in Caricao Basin, Venezuela, and the Black Sea, with data from coastal, shallower oxycline waters in Framvaren and Mariager fjords, and from several deep‐sea hypersaline anoxic basins in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Putative symbioses between Bacteria, Archaea, and ciliates observed along these oxyclines suggests a strategy of cooperative metabolism for survival that includes chemosynthetic autotrophy and exchanges of metabolic intermediates or end products between hosts and their prokaryotic partners.
Collimation, Proper Motions, and Physical Conditions in the HH 30 Jet from Hubble Space Telescope Slitless Spectroscopy

We present STIS spectral images of the HH 30 stellar jet taken through a wide slit over two epochs. The jet is unresolved spectrally, so the observations produce emission-line images for each line in the spectrum. This rich data set shows how physical conditions in the jet vary with distance and time, produces precise proper motions of knots within the jet, resolves the jet width close to the star, and gives a spectrum of the reflected light from the disk over a large wavelength range at several positions. We introduce a new method for analyzing a set of line ratios based on minimizing a quadratic form between models and data. The method generates images of the density, temperature, and ionization fraction computed using all the possible line ratios appropriately weighted. In HH 30, the density declines with distance from the source in a manner consistent with an expanding flow and is larger by a factor of 2 along the axis of the jet than it is at the periphery. Ionization in the jet ranges from ~5% to 40%, and high-ionization/excitation knots form at about 100 AU from the star and propagate outward with the flow. These high-excitation knots are not accompanied by corresponding increases in the density, so if formed by velocity variations the knots must have a strong internal magnetic pressure to smooth out density increases while lengthening recombination times.
Analysis of urban road congestion in China based on supply and demand perspective

According to economic analysis, the city road have exist its own supply and demand, the papers put forward the ways of relaxation of traffic jam. If want to relax the city traffic jam, we can interweave the measures as follows: lead the demand of citizen in peak load periods, developing the public traffic and appropriate city layout so that increase the supply of road.
Proteases for Cell Suicide: Functions and Regulation of Caspases

SUMMARY Caspases are a large family of evolutionarily conserved proteases found from Caenorhabditis elegans to humans. Although the first caspase was identified as a processing enzyme for interleukin-1β, genetic and biochemical data have converged to reveal that many caspases are key mediators of apoptosis, the intrinsic cell suicide program essential for development and tissue homeostasis. Each caspase is a cysteine aspartase; it employs a nucleophilic cysteine in its active site to cleave aspartic acid peptide bonds within proteins. Caspases are synthesized as inactive precursors termed procaspases; proteolytic processing of procaspase generates the tetrameric active caspase enzyme, composed of two repeating heterotypic subunits. Based on kinetic data, substrate specificity, and procaspase structure, caspases have been conceptually divided into initiators and effectors. Initiator caspases activate effector caspases in response to specific cell death signals, and effector caspases cleave various cellular proteins to trigger apoptosis. Adapter protein-mediated oligomerization of procaspases is now recognized as a universal mechanism of initiator caspase activation and underlies the control of both cell surface death receptor and mitochondrial cytochrome c-Apaf-1 apoptosis pathways. Caspase substrates have bene identified that induce each of the classic features of apoptosis, including membrane blebbing, cell body shrinkage, and DNA fragmentation. Mice deficient for caspase genes have highlighted tissue- and signal-specific pathways for apoptosis and demonstrated an independent function for caspase-1 and -11 in cytokine processing. Dysregulation of caspases features prominently in many human diseases, including cancer, autoimmunity, and neurodegenerative disorders, and increasing evidence shows that altering caspase activity can confer therapeutic benefits.
Saliency-based cooperative landing of a multirotor aerial vehicle on an autonomous surface vehicle

This paper presents a method for vision-based landing of a multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) equipped with a helipad. The method includes a mechanism for helipad behavioural search when outside the UAV's field of view, a learning saliency-based mechanism for visual tracking the helipad, and a cooperative strategy for the final vision-based landing phase. Learning how to track the helipad from above occurs during takeoff and cooperation results from having the ASV tracking the UAV for assisting its landing. A set of experimental results with both simulated and physical robots show the feasibility of the presented method.
Natural and artificial mutants as valuable resources for functional genomics and molecular breeding

With the completion of rice genome sequencing, large collection of expression data and the great efforts in annotating rice genomes, the next challenge is to systematically assign functions to all predicted genes in the genome. The generations and collections of mutants at the genome-wide level form technological platform of functional genomics. In this study, we have reviewed currently employed tools to generate such mutant populations. These tools include natural, physical, chemical, tissue culture, T-DNA, transposon or gene silencing based mutagenesis. We also reviewed how these tools were used to generate a large collection of mutants and how these mutants can be screened and detected for functional analysis of a gene. The data suggested that the current population of mutants might be large enough to tag all predicted genes. However, the collection of flanking sequencing tags (FSTs) is limited due to the relatively higher cost. Thus, we have proposed a new strategy to generate gene-silencing mutants at the genome-wide level. Due to the large collection of insertion mutants, the next step to rice functional genomics should be focusing on functional characterization of tagged genes by detailed survey of corresponding mutants. Additionally, we also evaluated the utilization of these mutants as valuable resources for molecular breeding.
Affective setting for sustainable E learning in higher education

Emotions play an essential role in decision making, managing, perceiving and learning and influencing rational thinking process of humans. Emotions are also important in teaching and learning and often find expression in particular ways, such as interactions with others, our interest and motivation in learning. The influence of emotions on learning is still under-emphasized. Continuous and increasing exploration of the complex set of parameters surrounding online learning reveals the importance of the emotional states of learners and especially the relationship between learning and affective behavior. This study aims to recognize learners' affective behavior in real class room environment and relate them in to the e learning environment. The proposed actions were based on the experiment carried out among the Sri Lankan university system regarding the learner behavior during teaching and learning. The results of the experiment have been used for the new developments of the e learning courses and there by the performances of the e learners will enhance accordingly.
Nonparametric motion model with applications to camera motion pattern classification

Motion information is a powerful cue for visual perception. In the context of video indexing and retrieval, motion content serves as a useful source for compact video representation. There has been a lot of literature about parametric motion models. However, it is hard to secure a proper parametric assumption in a wide range of video scenarios. Diverse camera shots and frequent occurrences of bad optical flow estimation motivate us to develop nonparametric motion models. In this paper, we employ the mean shift procedure to propose a novel nonparametric motion representation. With this compact representation, various motion characterization tasks can be achieved by machine learning. Such a learning mechanism can not only capture the domain-independent parametric constraints, but also acquire the domain-dependent knowledge to tolerate the influence of bad dense optical flow vectors or block-based MPEG motion vector fields (MVF). The proposed nonparametric motion model has been applied to camera motion pattern classification on 23191 MVF extracted from MPEG-7 dataset.
Communications-Efﬁcient Multithreading on Wide-Area Networks

This paper shows how to run multithreaded programs on a DRAM (Distributed Random Access Memory) parallel computer and demonstrates that such programs can run efﬁciently on a collection of machines distributed across thousands of miles over the internet. Suppose we have a fully strict multithreaded program has work (cid:0)(cid:2)(cid:1) and critical-path length (cid:0)(cid:4)(cid:3) , and we have a (cid:5) processor DRAM machine with (cid:6) an upper bound to the cost of routing any permutation. This paper presents a deterministic conservative DRAM scheduling algorithm that runs in time (cid:7)(cid:9)(cid:8)(cid:10)(cid:8)(cid:11)(cid:6)(cid:13)(cid:12)(cid:15)(cid:14)(cid:17)(cid:16)(cid:19)(cid:18)(cid:20)(cid:5)(cid:22)(cid:21)(cid:23)(cid:8) (cid:0) (cid:1)(cid:25)(cid:24) (cid:5)(cid:26)(cid:12) (cid:0) (cid:3) (cid:21)(cid:10)(cid:21) and a randomized conservative DRAM scheduling algorithm that runs in time (cid:0) (cid:1)(cid:27)(cid:24) (cid:5)(cid:28)(cid:12)(cid:29)(cid:7)(cid:9)(cid:8)(cid:10)(cid:8)(cid:11)(cid:6)(cid:30)(cid:12)(cid:31)(cid:14)(cid:17)(cid:16)(cid:19)(cid:18) (cid:5)(cid:22)(cid:21) (cid:0)
Improvements in linear transform based speaker adaptation

Presents three forms of linear transform based speaker adaptation that can give better performance than standard maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) adaptation. For unsupervised adaptation, a lattice-based technique is introduced which is compared to MLLR using confidence scores. For supervised adaptation, estimation of the adaptation matrices using the maximum mutual information criterion is discussed which leads to the MMILR approach. Recognition experiments show that lattice MLLR can reduce word error rates on a Switchboard task by 1.4% absolute. For recognition of non-native speech from the Wall Street Journal database, a reduction in word error rate of 10-16% relative was obtained using MMILR compared to standard MLLR.
El patrón de exploración modula la percepción de longitudes a través del tacto dinámico

Exploration styles modulate length perception through dynamic touch. One of the most surprising capacities of the haptic system is the ability to estimate different properties of objects, like weight or length, through invariants of rotational mechanics that are accessible via the proprioceptive system. This field of research is called Dynamic Touch. In its classical experimental paradigm, the participant firmly grasps a rod that can be wielded but not seen, and he or she tries to match the hand-held rod's length using another rod that can be seen but not wielded. In the experiment reported here, we focus on the role of the exploratory behavior, restricting the wielding in six conditions that vary both the amplitude and the frequency of movements. Increments in the speed of the movement are shown to increase the accuracy in the haptic estimation. It is argued that these results support the moment of inertia as the best informational candidate, given that it is an invariant property that only emerges when rotational torques are applied. Alternative candidates such as static moment or mass are discarded because they do not depend on differential movements.
Serum uric acid level is associated with the development of microalbuminuria in Korean men

Elevated serum uric acid (UA) could be a risk factor for hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease. In addition, elevated serum UA may be associated with impaired renal function. However, it is unclear whether elevated serum UA is a cause of microalbuminuria or not. Therefore, we performed a prospective cohort study of the temporal relationship between baseline elevated serum UA and the development of microalbuminuria in Korean men.
Blacks (African Americans) Have Shorter Free-Running Circadian Periods Than Whites (Caucasian Americans)

The length of the free-running period (τ) affects how an animal re-entrains after phase shifts of the light-dark (LD) cycle. Those with shorter periods adapt faster to phase advances than those with longer periods, whereas those with longer periods adapt faster to phase delays than those with shorter periods. The free-running period of humans, measured in temporal isolation units and in forced desychrony protocols in which the day length is set beyond the range of entrainment, varies from about 23.5 to 26 h, depending on the individual and the experimental conditions (e.g., temporal isolation vs. forced desychrony). We studied 94 subjects free-running through an ultradian LD cycle, which was a forced desychrony with a day length of 4 h (2.5 h awake in dim light, ∼35 lux, alternating with 1.5 h for sleep in darkness). Circadian phase assessments were conducted before (baseline) and after (final) three 24-h days of the ultradian LD cycle. During these assessments, saliva samples were collected every 30 min and subsequently analyzed for melatonin. The phase shift of the dim light melatonin onset (DLMO) from baseline to final phase assessment gave the free-running period. The mean ± SD period was 24.31 ± . 23 h and ranged from 23.7 to 24.9 h. Black subjects had a significantly shorter free-running period than Whites (24.18 ± .23 h, N =20 vs. 24.37 ± .22 h, N = 55). We had a greater proportion of women than men in our Black sample, so to check the τ difference we compared the Black women to White women. Again, Black subjects had a significantly shorter free-running period (24.18 ± .23, N = 17 vs. 24.41 ± .23, N = 23). We did not find any sex differences in the free-running period. These findings give rise to several testable predictions: on average, Blacks should adapt quicker to eastward flights across time zones than Whites, whereas Whites should adjust quicker to westward flights than Blacks. Also, Blacks should have more difficulty adjusting to night-shift work and day sleep, which requires a phase delay. On the other hand, Whites should be more likely to have trouble adapting to the early work and school schedules imposed by society. More research is needed to confirm these results and predictions. (Author correspondence: ceastman@rush.edu)
Identifying a Damped Oscillatory Thermohaline Mode in a General Circulation Model Using an Adjoint Model

A damped oscillatory mode of the thermohaline circulation (THC), which may play a role in interdecadal climate variability, is identified in a global primitive equation model. This analysis is done under mixed boundary conditions using an adjoint of the primitive equation model. The linearized versus nonlinear stability behavior of the model is studied by comparing the adjoint analysis to runs of the fully nonlinear model. It is shown that a steady-state solution obtained under larger amplitude freshwater surface forcing (and hence with a weaker North Atlantic overturning) is unstable, while a steadystate solution with stronger THC is stable. In a certain intermediate parameter regime it is found that the full nonlinear model state may be unstable, while the linearized analysis indicates that the model state is stable. It is proposed that this may be because either the instability mechanism at this intermediate regime is nonlinear or, while the model is linearly stable at this regime, it allows for temporary growth of small perturbations due to the non-normal nature of the problem. A clear signal of variations is not found in the amplitude of the horizontal gyre circulation, possibly indicating that the gyre effect that was found in THC oscillations in some previous studies may not be essential for the existence of the THC oscillation. The long timescale of the oscillation in the present model also seems to indicate that the gyre effect may not be a main active participant in the thermohaline oscillation mechanism.
Reduction of High Background Staining by Heating Unfixed Mouse Skeletal Muscle Tissue Sections Allows for Detection of Thermostable Antigens With Murine Monoclonal Antibodies

Antigen detection with indirect immunohistochemical methods is hampered by high background staining if the primary antibody is from the same species as the examined tissue. This high background can be eliminated in unfixed cryostat sections of mouse skeletal muscle by boiling sections in PBS, and several proteins including even the low abundant dystrophin protein can then be easily detected with murine monoclonal antibodies. However, not all antigens withstand the boiling procedure. Immunoreactivity of some of these antigens can be restored by subsequent washing in Triton X-100, whereas immunoreactivity of other proteins is not restored by this detergent treatment. When such thermolabile proteins are labeled with polyclonal primary antibodies followed by dichlorotriazinylaminofluorescein-conjugated secondary antibodies and boiled, the fluorescence signal persists, and sections can then be processed with a monoclonal antibody for double immunostaining of a protein unaffected by boiling. This stability of certain fluorochromes on heating can also be exploited for double immunofluorescence labeling of two different thermostable proteins with murine monoclonal antibodies as well as for combination with Y-chromosome fluorescence in situ hybridization. Our method should extend the range of monoclonal antibodies applicable to tissues derived from the same species as the monoclonal antibodies.