Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design optimization of high power and low RIN lasers for efficient Raman co-pumping

We experimentally characterize high-power (up to 2 W) and low-noise lasers, based on counter-pumped discrete Raman amplifiers, for efficient first- and higher-order distributed Raman co-pumping. We show that a proper optimization of the active fiber parameters effectively minimizes the output pump RIN.
Extracellular ATP: effects, sources and fate.

The intracellular role of ATP has been recognized for many years; it is an energy source for many important reactions. Cellshavecomplexmechanismsfor synthesizing ATP and maintaining or rapidly restoring the intracellular level, and one might therefore expect that release ofATP to the extracellular milieu would rarely occur; teleological reasoning suggests that cells should guard their intracellular ATP at all costs, and the established view is that ATP does not cross the plasma membrane of viable cells a suggestion that the selective release ofcytoplasmic ATP might be part of a physiological regulatory mechanism would, in the opinion of many, verge on the heretical. Nonetheless, extracellular ATP (and/or ADP) at low micromolar concentrations can influence many biological processes including platelet aggregation, vascular tone, neurotransmission (peripheral and central), cardiac function and muscle contraction. Nucleotides can be released from the cytoplasm of several cell types (and by exocytosis from platelets and neurones); they interact with specific receptors on the surface of many different cells and they aremetabolized locallybyectonucleotidases. The main purpose of this Review is to summarize current knowledge of these topics and to indulge in some modest speculation about the role ofextracellular ATP in biology and pathology.
Intraosseous Hemangioma of the Maxillofacial District: Clinical Analysis and Surgical Treatment in 10 Consecutive Patients

The aims of this study are to illustrate functional and esthetic results obtained with different surgical strategies and to report a review of the relevant literature. There were 6 female patients and 4 male patients included in this study, with an average age of 35.7 years. Zygomatic bone was affected in six cases, the mandible in two cases, the medial orbital wall in one case, and the upper jaw in one case. In all 10 patients, surgery consisted of a wide excision of the intraosseous hemangioma with margins of 3 mm at least to ensure complete removal. Immediate reconstruction was carried out in 5 of the 10 patients. An analysis indicates that intraosseous hemangiomas of the maxillofacial area are rare; diagnosis can be difficult and is mainly based on computed tomography scans. Surgical excision, with previous angiography and embolization in cases of intraosseous hemangioma with a larger dimension or abnormal blood supply, is the treatment of choice.
KNOWLEDGE AND UTILIZATION OF INSECTICIDE TREATED NETS TO PREVENT MALARIA IN CAMEROON (A CASE OF THE MOUNT FAKO REGION)

xvii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 General characteristics of Cameroon.1 1.1.1 History.1 1.1.2 Geography.1 1.1.3 Demography.4 I. Socio-demographic characteristics.4 II. Human development profile.5 1.2 The Global Situation of malaria.10 1.2. 1 Malaria in children under-5 years.12 1.2. 2 Malaria in pregnancy.14 1.3 Malaria Situation in Cameroon and the study area (Rationale of the study). 15 1.3. 1 Epidemiological profile.16
The influence of family history on cognitive heuristics, risk perceptions, and prostate cancer screening behavior.

OBJECTIVE To examine how family history of prostate cancer, risk perceptions, and heuristic decision strategies influence prostate cancer screening behavior. METHODS Men with a first-degree family history of prostate cancer (FDRs; n = 207) and men without a family history (PM; n = 239) completed a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) examining prostate cancer risk perceptions, PSA testing behaviors, perceptions of similarity to the typical man who gets prostate cancer (representativeness heuristic), and availability of information about prostate cancer (availability heuristic). A path model explored family history as influencing the availability of information about prostate cancer (number of acquaintances with prostate cancer and number of recent discussions about prostate cancer) to mediate judgments of risk and to predict PSA testing behaviors and family history as a moderator of the relationship between representativeness (perceived similarity) and risk perceptions. RESULTS FDRs reported greater risk perceptions and a greater number of PSA tests than did PM. Risk perceptions predicted increased PSA testing only in path models and was significant only for PM in multi-Group SEM analyses. Family history moderated the relationship between similarity perceptions and risk perceptions such that the relationship between these variables was significant only for FDRs. Recent discussions about prostate cancer mediated the relationships between family history and risk perceptions, and the number of acquaintances men knew with prostate cancer mediated the relationship between family history and PSA testing behavior. CONCLUSIONS Family history interacts with the individuals' broader social environment to influence risk perceptions and screening behavior. Research into how risk perceptions develop and what primes behavior change is crucial to underpin psychological or public health intervention that seeks to influence health decision making.
Fast exact summation using small and large superaccumulators

I present two new methods for exactly summing a set of floating-point numbers, and then correctly rounding to the nearest floating-point number. Higher accuracy than simple summation (rounding after each addition) is important in many applications, such as finding the sample mean of data. Exact summation also guarantees identical results with parallel and serial implementations, since the exact sum is independent of order. The new methods use variations on the concept of a "superaccumulator" - a large fixed-point number that can exactly represent the sum of any reasonable number of floating-point values. One method uses a "small" superaccumulator with sixty-seven 64-bit chunks, each with 32-bit overlap with the next chunk, allowing carry propagation to be done infrequently. The small superaccumulator is used alone when summing a small number of terms. For big summations, a "large" superaccumulator is used as well. It consists of 4096 64-bit chunks, one for every possible combination of exponent bits and sign bit, plus counts of when each chunk needs to be transferred to the small superaccumulator. To add a term to the large superaccumulator, only a single chunk and its associated count need to be updated, which takes very few instructions if carefully implemented. On modern 64-bit processors, exactly summing a large array using this combination of large and small superaccumulators takes less than twice the time of simple, inexact, ordered summation, with a serial implementation. A parallel implementation using a small number of processor cores can be expected to perform exact summation of large arrays at a speed that reaches the limit imposed by memory bandwidth. Some common methods that attempt to improve accuracy without being exact may therefore be pointless, at least for large summations, since they are slower than computing the sum exactly.
Anomalies in the atmospheric circulation associated with the rainfall excess or deficit in the Pampa Region in Argentina

[1] We have investigated the relationship between extreme anomalies in the monthly precipitation of the Pampa Region (PR), Argentina, and large-scale circulation anomalies over the South American continent and the neighboring oceans. The composite maps of the extreme rainfall anomalies reveal that this atypical behavior extends beyond the PR and that comparable anomalies simultaneously take place in the center and south of Chile and in the western South Atlantic Ocean. We have analyzed the anomalies in the water vapor flux and in the circulation of the lower and upper levels of the troposphere that occurred in 85 months with extreme rainfall anomalies between 1955 and 1998. The study combines the use of a complete set of observed precipitation data and several atmospheric variables from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction Reanalysis. We have found well-defined anomalous circulation patterns that embrace the south of the continent and the vicinity of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, which are very similar but of opposite signs for both rainfall extremes. The interaction between these anomalies in the high-level flow and the subtropical jet stream generates the necessary conditions for vorticity advection and flow divergence, which is consistent with the expected vertical motions. The principal component analysis was applied to the pressure anomaly fields to distinguish those aspects of the large-scale patterns that are more directly related with the rainfall extremes. The amplitudes of some of the dominant PC are significantly correlated with the precipitation anomalies, and they highlight the mechanisms leading to rainfall extremes during El Nino-Southern Oscillation, and neutral periods.
Graph-Theoretic Analysis and Synthesis of Relative Sensing Networks

This work provides a general framework for the analysis and synthesis of a class of relative sensing networks (RSNs) in the context of its <i>H</i><sub>2</sub> and <i>H</i><sub>∞</sub> performance. We consider RSNs with homogeneous and heterogeneous agent dynamics. In both cases, explicit graph theoretic expressions and bounds for the <i>H</i><sub>2</sub> and <i>H</i><sub>∞</sub> performance are derived. The <i>H</i><sub>2</sub> performance turns out to be a function of the number of edges in the graph, whereas the <i>H</i><sub>∞</sub> performance is structure dependent and related to the spectral radius of the graph Laplacian. The analysis results are then used to develop synthesis methods for RSNs. An optimal topology is designed using the Kruskal's Algorithm for <i>H</i><sub>2</sub> performance, and a semi-definite program for the <i>H</i><sub>∞</sub> performance of uncertain RSNs.
Pulmonary fungal infection with yeasts and pneumocystis in patients with hematological malignancy

Invasive fungal infections are an important cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with hematological malignancies, and in particular fungal pneumonia is the main clinical manifestation in this category of patients. The fungal agents responsible for this complication are various, but Aspergillus spp. and other molds such as Zygomycetes or Fusarium spp. represent the most frequently isolated micro‐organisms. Less commonly, pneumonia could be due to other ‘no‐molds’ fungal agents such as Candida spp, Cryptococcus spp, or Pneumocystis jirovecii. This review mainly focuses on practical aspects relevant to epidemiology, diagnosis and therapeutic management of the rare cases of pneumonia due to no‐molds agents in patients affected by hematological malignancies.
Synthesizing artificial cells from giant unilamellar vesicles: State‐of‐the art in the development of microfluidic technology

Microfluidic technology – the manipulation of fluids at micrometer scales – has revolutionized many areas of synthetic biology. The bottom‐up synthesis of “minimal” cell models has traditionally suffered from poor control of assembly conditions. Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) are good models of living cells on account of their size and unilamellar membrane structure. In recent years, a number of microfluidic approaches for constructing GUVs has emerged. These provide control over traditionally elusive parameters of vesicular structure, such as size, lamellarity, membrane composition, and internal contents. They also address sophisticated cellular functions such as division and protein synthesis. Microfluidic techniques for GUV synthesis can broadly be categorized as continuous‐flow based approaches and droplet‐based approaches. This review presents the state‐of‐the‐art of microfluidic technology, a robust platform for recapitulating complex cellular structure and function in synthetic models of biological cells.
Robust Speech Recognition via Anchor Word Representations

A challenge for speech recognition for voice-controlled household devices, like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, is robustness against interfering background speech. Formulated as a far-field speech recognition problem, another person or media device in proximity can produce background speech that can interfere with the device-directed speech. We expand on our previous work on device-directed speech detection in the far-field speech setting and introduce two approaches for robust acoustic modeling. Both methods are based on the idea of using an anchor word taken from the device directed speech. Our first method employs a simple yet effective normalization of the acoustic features by subtracting the mean derived over the anchor word. The second method utilizes an encoder network projecting the anchor word onto a fixed-size embedding, which serves as an additional input to the acoustic model. The encoder network and acoustic model are jointly trained. Results on an in-house dataset reveal that, in the presence of background speech, the proposed approaches can achieve up to 35% relative word error rate reduction.
Stable Isotope Probing Approaches to Study Anaerobic Hydrocarbon Degradation and Degraders

Stable isotope probing (SIP) techniques have become state-of-the-art in microbial ecology over the last 10 years, allowing for the targeted detection and identification of organisms, metabolic pathways and elemental fluxes active in specific processes within complex microbial communities. For studying anaerobic hydrocarbon-degrading microbial communities, four stable isotope techniques have been used so far: DNA/RNA-SIP, PLFA (phospholipid-derived fatty acids)-SIP, protein-SIP, and single-cell-SIP by nanoSIMS (nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry) or confocal Raman microscopy. DNA/RNA-SIP techniques are most frequently applied due to their most meaningful phylogenetic resolution. Especially using 13C-labeled benzene and toluene as model substrates, many new hydrocarbon degraders have been identified by SIP under various electron acceptor conditions. This has extended the current perspective of the true diversity of anaerobic hydrocarbon degraders relevant in the environment. Syntrophic hydrocarbon degradation was found to be a common mechanism for various electron acceptors. Fundamental concepts and recent advances in SIP are reflected here. A discussion is presented concerning how these techniques generate direct insights into intrinsic hydrocarbon degrader populations in environmental systems and how useful they are for more integrated approaches in the monitoring of contaminated sites and for bioremediation.
Responsibility Tokens in Supply Chain Management

The decentralized supply chain management scheme of Lee and Whang (1999) can be viewed as operationalizing the decentralized management scheme implicit in Clark and Scarf (1960). This paper proposes the use of what are called responsibility tokens (RTs) to further facilitate that operationalization. The proposal assumes that a management information system, presumably electronic, is established to monitor inventories and shipment quantities, and to carry out transfer payments between players. As in Lee and Whang(1999), the incentives of the system are aligned, so if each player is brilliantly self-serving, the system optimal solution will result. While the system administrator need not know how the system should be managed, the most upstream player must know how to manage the system optimally for the system optimal solution to be achieved. RTs endow the system with an attractive self-correcting property: An example illustrates that upstream players are given a mechanism and the incentive to correct for downstream overordering. The downstream players who over-order are penalized, but system performance is not degraded much. Extensions and further research are also discussed.
A Novel Feature Selection Algorithm Based on Hypothesis-Margin

Iterative search margin based algorithm(Simba) has been proven effective for feature selection. However, it still has the following disadvantages: (1) the previously proposed model still lacks enough robust to noises; and (2) the given model does not use any global information, in this way some useful discrimination information may be lost and the convergence speed is also influenced in some cases. In this paper, by incorporating global information, a novel margin based feature selection framework is introduced. According to the newly designed model, an improved margin based feature selection algorithm(Isimba) is proposed. By effectively adjusting the contribution of the global information, Isimba can efficiently reduce the computational cost and at the same time obtain more effective feature subsets as compared to Simba. The experiments on 6 artificial and 8 real-life benchmark datasets show that Isimba is effective and efficient.
PRACTICE GUIDELINE FOR THE PERFORMANCE OF MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (MRI) OF THE ADULT SPINE

MRI of the Adult Spine / 179 The American College of Radiology, with more than 30,000 members, is the principal organization of radiologists, radiation oncologists, and clinical medical physicists in the United States. The College is a nonprofit professional society whose primary purposes are to advance the science of radiology, improve radiologic services to the patient, study the socioeconomic aspects of the practice of radiology, and encourage continuing education for radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists, and persons practicing in allied professional fields. The American College of Radiology will periodically define new practice guidelines and technical standards for radiologic practice to help advance the science of radiology and to improve the quality of service to patients throughout the United States. Existing practice guidelines and technical standards will be reviewed for revision or renewal, as appropriate, on their fifth anniversary or sooner, if indicated. Each practice guideline and technical standard, representing a policy statement by the College, has undergone a thorough consensus process in which it has been subjected to extensive review, requiring the approval of the Commission on Quality and Safety as well as the ACR Board of Chancellors, the ACR Council Steering Committee, and the ACR Council. The practice guidelines and technical standards recognize that the safe and effective use of diagnostic and therapeutic radiology requires specific training, skills, and techniques, as described in each document. Reproduction or modification of the published practice guideline and technical standard by those entities not providing these services is not authorized.
Randomized study of two chemotherapy regimens for treatment of low-grade glioma in young children: a report from the Children's Oncology Group.

PURPOSE Surgery is curative therapy for pediatric low-grade gliomas (LGGs) in areas of the brain amenable to complete resection. However, LGGs located in areas where complete resection is not possible can threaten both function and life. The purpose of this study was to compare two chemotherapy regimens for LGGs in children younger than age 10 years for whom radiotherapy was felt by the practitioner to pose a high risk of neurodevelopmental injury. PATIENTS AND METHODS Previously untreated children younger than age 10 years with progressive or residual LGGs were eligible. Children were randomly assigned to receive carboplatin and vincristine (CV) or thioguanine, procarbazine, lomustine, and vincristine (TPCV). Children with neurofibromatosis are reported separately. Results Of 274 randomly assigned patients who met eligibility requirements, 137 received CV and 137 received TPCV. The 5-year event-free survival (EFS) and overall survival (OS) rates for all eligible patients were 45% ± 3.2% and 86% ± 2.2%, respectively. The 5-year EFS rates were 39% ± 4% for CV and 52% ± 5% for TPCV (stratified log-rank test P = .10; cure model analysis P = .007). On multivariate analysis, factors independently predictive of worse EFS and OS were younger age and tumor size greater than 3 cm(2). Tumor location in the thalamus was also associated with poor OS. CONCLUSION The difference in EFS between the regimens did not reach significance on the basis of the stratified log-rank test. The 5-year EFS was higher for TPCV on the basis of the cure model analysis. Differences in toxicity may influence physician choice of regimens.
Effects of maternal psychotropic drug dosage on birth outcomes

Background The aim of this retrospective study was to explore the relationship between psychotropic medication dosage and birth outcomes. Methods A total of 136 women were enrolled, who had an active mental disorder, were taking medication to prevent a relapse, or had a history of postpartum depression or psychosis. Medication use was evaluated for the three trimesters and during labor. Based on the defined daily dose, medication use was classified into three groups. Primary outcome variables included the infant gestational age at birth, birth weight, and Apgar scores at one and 5 minutes. Results Our study showed a significantly higher incidence of Apgar score ≤7 at 5 minutes in women taking psychotropic drugs as compared with the group taking no medication, respectively (16.3% versus 0.0%, P=0.01). There was no significant difference between the two groups in Apgar score at one minute or in gestational age and birth weight. The results showed no significant differences in gestational age, birth weight, or Apgar scores for a low–intermediate or high dose of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and for a low or intermediate dose of an antipsychotic. Conclusion This study does not indicate a relationship between doses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and antipsychotics and adverse neonatal outcomes.
Figure of Merit Enhancement of a Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensor Using a Low-Refractive-Index Porous Silica Film

In this paper; the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor with a porous silica film was studied. The effect of the thickness and porosity of the porous silica film on the performance of the sensor was analyzed. The results indicated that the figure of merit (FOM) of an SPR sensor can be enhanced by using a porous silica film with a low-refractive-index. Particularly; the FOM of an SPR sensor with 40 nm thick 90% porosity porous silica film; whose refractive index is 1.04 was improved by 311% when compared with that of a traditional SPR sensor. Furthermore; it was found that the decrease in the refractive index or the increase in the thickness of the low-refractive-index porous silica film can enlarge the FOM enhancement. It is believed that the proposed SPR sensor with a low-refractive-index porous silica film will be helpful for high-performance SPR sensors development.