Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electromagnetic Fields Act Similarly in Plants as in Animals: Probable Activation of Calcium Channels via Their Voltage Sensor

It has been shown that low intensity microwave/lower frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) act in animals via activation of voltage-gated calcium channels (VGCCs) in the plasma membrane, producing excessive intracellular calcium [Ca2+]i, with excessive [Ca2+]i leading to both pathophysiological and also in some cases therapeutic effects. The pathophysiological effects are produced largely through excessive [Ca2+]i signaling including excessive nitric oxide (NO), superoxide, peroxynitrite, free radical formation and consequent oxidative stress. The activation of the VGCCs is thought to be produced via EMF impact on the VGCC voltage sensor, with the physical properties of that voltage sensor predicting that it is extraordinarily sensitive to these EMFs. It is shown here that the action of EMFs in terrestrial, multicellular (embryophyte) plants is probably similar to the action in animals in most but not all respects, with calcium channel activation in the plasma membrane leading to excessive [Ca2+]i, leading in turn to most if not all of the biological effects. A number of studies in plants are briefly reviewed which are consistent with and supportive of such a mechanism. Plant channels most plausibly to be involved, are the so-called two pore channels (TPCs), which have a voltage sensor similar to those found in the animal VGCCs. A R T I C L E H I S T O R Y Received: December 14, 2015 Revised: February 9, 2016 Accepted: March 16, 2016
Exposure to alcohol advertising and alcohol consumption among Australian adolescents.

AIMS Underage drinking is a major problem in Australia and may be influenced by exposure to alcohol advertising. The objective of the present study was to collect data on 12-17 year old Australian adolescents' exposure to different types of alcohol advertising and examine the association between exposure to advertising and alcohol consumption. METHODS A cross-sectional survey of 1113 adolescents aged 12-17 years recruited with a variety of methods to gain a cross-section of participants across metropolitan, regional and rural New South Wales (including independent schools, mall intercepts and online). Participants answered a series of questions assessing adolescents' exposure to alcohol advertising across eight media (including television, Internet and point-of-sale). Alcohol consumption was assessed using three questions (initiation, recent consumption and frequency of consumption in the previous 12 months). RESULTS The majority indicated that they had been exposed to alcohol advertisements on television, in newspapers and magazines, on the Internet, on billboards/posters and promotional materials and in bottleshops, bars and pubs; exposure to some of these types of alcohol advertisements was associated with increased alcohol consumption, with differences by age and gender. CONCLUSION The results are consistent with studies from other countries and suggest that exposure to alcohol advertisements among Australian adolescents is strongly associated with drinking patterns. Given current high levels of drinking among Australian youth, these findings suggest the need to address the high levels of young people's exposure to alcohol advertising.
Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals

Digital self-tracking technologies offer many potential benefits over self-tracking with paper notebooks. However, they are often too rigid to support people's practical and emotional needs in everyday settings. To inform the design of more flexible self-tracking tools, we examine bullet journaling: an analogue and customisable approach for logging and reflecting on everyday life. Analysing a corpus of paper bullet journal photos and related conversations on Instagram, we found that individuals extended and adapted bullet journaling systems to their changing practical and emotional needs through: (1) creating and combining personally meaningful visualisations of different types of trackers, such as habit, mood, and symptom trackers; (2) engaging in mindful reflective thinking through design practices and self-reflective strategies; and (3) posting photos of paper journals online to become part of a self-tracking culture of sharing and learning. We outline two interrelated design directions for flexible and mindful self-tracking: digitally extending analogue self-tracking and supporting digital self-tracking as a mindful design practice.
The role of magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography-computed tomography combined in differentiating benign from malignant lesions contributing to vertebral compression fractures

Background: Obtaining tissue confirmation of the underlying pathology is the gold standard for establishing the etiology of nontraumatic vertebral compression fractures. However, newer investigative modalities such as the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) combined potentially offer the ability to distinguish between benign and malignant lesions, thereby circumventing the need for invasive tissue diagnostic/biopsy procedures. Methods: Twenty-four patients with nontraumatic, spontaneous vertebral compression fractures were prospectively studied. After clinical evaluation, all patients underwent MRI (with/without contrast) focusing on the spinal lesion, followed by whole-body PET-CT. This was followed by fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) of the lesion to confirm the diagnosis. The sensitivity and specificity of MRI and PET-CT studies were calculated for benign vs. malignant lesions. Results: The sensitivity/specificity of MRI for benign lesions were 78.57%/90%, while the sensitivity/specificity values of PET-CT for benign disease were 92.8%/90% respectively. Alternatively, the sensitivity/specificity of MRI for malignant lesions were 90%/78.57%, while the sensitivity/specificity of PET-CT for malignant disease were 90%/92.8%, respectively. Furthermore, the sensitivity for diagnosing malignant lesions utilizing both studies together was 100%, but the algorithm was not specific. Additionally, the specificity for MRI and PET-CT combined was 100% for benign lesions. PET-CT also helped in monitoring responses to empirical antitubercular treatment (ATT) therapy. Of interest, FNAC was inconclusive in four cases in which PET-CT findings helped further in either obtaining a tissue diagnosis from another location or institution of empirical therapy in suspected cases of tuberculosis. Conclusions: The specificity for MRI and PET-CT combined was 100% for benign lesions. Unfortunately, the specificity for MRI and PET-CT combined was not 100% for malignant vertebral lesions, though it was sensitive. The PET-CT scan was an extremely useful tool when FNAC from the affected site proved inconclusive. It gave additional information regarding the overall extent of disease, while identifying other locations amenable to FNAC. Furthermore, in countries where tuberculosis is endemic, the empirical response to ATT therapy could be monitored utilizing PET-CT.
A Scalable Object Store for Meteorological and Climate Data

Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and Climate simulations sit in the intersection between classically understood High Performance Computing (HPC) and the Big Data / High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) communities. Driven by ever more ambitious scientific goals, both the size and number of output data elements generated as part of NWP operations has grown by several orders of magnitude, and will continue to grow into the future. The total amount of data is expected to grow exponentially with time, and over the last 30 years this increase has been approximately 40% per year. This poses significant scalability challenges for the data processing pipeline, and the movement of data through and between stages is one of the most significant factors in this. At ECMWF, meteorological data within the HPC facility is stored in an indexed data store for retrieval according to a well defined schema of meteorological metadata. This paper discusses the design and implementation of the next version (5th) of this indexed data store, which aims to increase the range of contexts within the operational workflow in which it can be used, and to increase its tolerance to failure. Further, it aims to pre-emptively head off some upcoming scalability bottlenecks present in the previous versions.
Am I Self-Conscious? (Or Does Self-Organization Entail Self-Consciousness?)

Is self-consciousness necessary for consciousness? The answer is yes. So there you have it—the answer is yes. This was my response to a question I was asked to address in a recent AEON piece (https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference). What follows is based upon the notes for that essay, with a special focus on self-organization, self-evidencing and self-modeling. I will try to substantiate my (polemic) answer from the perspective of a physicist. In brief, the argument goes as follows: if we want to talk about creatures, like ourselves, then we have to identify the characteristic behaviors they must exhibit. This is fairly easy to do by noting that living systems return to a set of attracting states time and time again. Mathematically, this implies the existence of a Lyapunov function that turns out to be model evidence (i.e., self-evidence) in Bayesian statistics or surprise (i.e., self-information) in information theory. This means that all biological processes can be construed as performing some form of inference, from evolution through to conscious processing. If this is the case, at what point do we invoke consciousness? The proposal on offer here is that the mind comes into being when self-evidencing has a temporal thickness or counterfactual depth, which grounds inferences about the consequences of my action. On this view, consciousness is nothing more than inference about my future; namely, the self-evidencing consequences of what I could do.
Performance of quantitative CT parameters in assessment of disease severity in COPD: A prospective study

Abstract Background: Both emphysematous destruction of lung parenchyma and airway remodeling is thought to contribute to airflow limitation in cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Objective: To evaluate the value of quantitative computed tomography (QCT) parameters of emphysema and airway disease with disease severity in patients with COPD. Materials and Methods: We prospectively studied 50 patients with COPD, which included nonsmokers and patients with different degrees of cumulative smoking exposure. Three QCT parameters namely LAA% (low attenuation area percentage), WA% (Wall area percentage), and pi10 were calculated as per the standard technique. Forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1), BODE score, and MMRC dyspnea scale were used as measures of disease severity. Results: FEV1 was inversely and significantly associated with all three QCT parameters. Receiver operated characteristic curves in prediction of GOLD class 3 COPD yielded cut-off values of 12.2, 61.45, and 3.5 for LAA%, WA%, and pi10, respectively, with high sensitivities and specificities. In multiple linear regression model, however, only LAA% proved to be significantly associated with FEV1, BODE, and dyspnea. Conclusion: QCT indices of both emphysema and airway disease influence FEV1, dyspnea, and BODE score in patients with COPD. Emphysema, however, appears to be more closely related to disease severity.
FPGA-based evaluation platform for disaggregated computing

Disaggregated computing aims at overcoming the problem of fixed resource proportionality in existing infrastructures while advancing resource allocation to virtual machines, which is currently restricted by the physical boundaries of a server tray. Organizing resources into large homogeneous pools (e.g., compute, memory, accelerators, etc) enables the demand-driven, fine-grained allocation of resources, effectively leading to improved resource utilization and significant power savings. However, the success of this approach relies on how efficiently the underlying resources are utilized by the software application. To facilitate software development in disaggregated computing environments, we introduce a versatile multi-FPGA evaluation platform that can serve as an early exploration tool for the involved trade-offs and execution alternatives given the application at hand. To increase functionality of the proposed development/evaluation platform, we consider three types of building blocks, namely compute, memory, and accelerator ones, providing the developer with the option to instantiate and interconnect them in proportion to the application demands, thus facilitating both compute- and memory-intensive applications. We have implemented a fully fledged prototype platform, based on three interconnected Zynq boards, and rely on a thin user-level API to allocate compute and memory resources on remote blocks, transfer data, and deploy reconfigurable accelerators. As a case study, we employ one of the Seven Dwarfs of Symbolic Computation, the matrix multiply benchmark.
Fractal pattern of second-order non-linear digital filters: A new symbolic analysis

This paper studies the three-valued symbolic dynamics associated with the second-order non-linear digital filter which has been shown to be a chaotic system recently. A new necessary and sufficient condition is given for a periodic sequence to be an admissible one. the condition is further used to prove that four types of periodic sequences cannot be admissible.
Survey of secure processors

The convergence of information technology systems, data networks, embedded systems and Internet-of-Things (IoT) within the cyber-physical system (CPS) paradigm has led to the emergence of new security threats associated with the system hardware. To control risks of potential hardware security vulnerabilities, secure processors were developed using crypto-processors, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and secure boot. Secure processors have a critical role in achieving high assurance of security systems. They provide a secure execution environment for guarding against unauthorised access to secret keys and decrypted information. Besides, such secure execution environment are critical to sensitive operations such as secure key generation, management and storage. Moreover, secure processors mitigate information leakage through main and side channels. In this article, we survey the state of the art literature on secure processors, by focusing our attention on protective measures for hardware, boot and the execution environment. We also present current trends and design challenges.
Talking to GNOMEs: Exploring Privacy and Trust Around Internet of Things Devices in a Public Space

Privacy issues can be difficult for end-users to understand and are therefore a key concern for information-sharing systems. This paper describes a deployment of fifteen Bluetooth-beacon-enabled 'creatures' spread across London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which initiate conversations on mobile phones in their vicinity via push notifications. Playing on the common assumption that neutral public settings promote anonymity, users' willingness to converse with personified chatbots is used as a proxy for understanding their inclination to share personal and potentially disclosing information. Each creature is linked to a conversational agent that asks for users' memories and their responses are then shared with other creatures in the network. This paper presents the design of an interactive device used to test users' awareness of how their information propagates to others.
Personalizable and Interactive Sequence Recommender System

Sequence recommender systems assist people in making decisions, such as which product to purchase and what places to visit on vacation. Despite their ubiquity, most sequence recommender systems are black boxes and do not offer justifications for their recommendations or provide user controls for steering the algorithm. In this paper, we design and develop an interactive sequence recommender system (SeRIES) prototype that uses visualizations to explain and justify the recommendations and provides controls so that users may personalize the recommendations. We conducted a user study comparing SeRIES to a black-box system with 12 participants using real visitor trajectory data in Melbourne and show that SeRIES users are more informed about how the recommendations are generated, more confident in following the recommendations, and more engaged in the decision process.
Study of the impact of load and density on the behavior of routing protocols AODV and DSDV in the vanet networks

The VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network) has been progressing since its inception, many applications and routing mechanisms have been suggested to meet the needs of the specialties of this new class of networks. The obstacles to be overcome include the topological and temporal diversity, the density of traffic and the high mobility of vehicles. The technological advances that the world has experienced in terms of wireless communication have made it possible to extract several functionalities. Among them, there is a so-called smart vehicle from which Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have emerged. Thus, the notion of a VANET network. The vehicles have become qualified to communicate with each other through this new technological advance, exchanging messages to develop road safety, passenger comfort. To this end, the notion of quality of service (QoS) has become indispensable. This work consists of evaluating the performance of the Ad-hoc routing protocols, namely, DSDV and AODV with the two modes of communication: V2V (Vehicle to Vehicle) and V2I (Vehicle to Infrastructure), in two scenarios created using Mobility generator (SUMO) and the network simulator (NS2).
Inflammation mediates the pathogenesis of cerebral aneurysm and becomes therapeutic target

The treatment of cerebral aneurysms (CAs) is of social importance, because poor outcomes result in subarachnoid hemorrhages after rupture. However, there is currently no medical treatment available to prevent the progression and rupture of CAs, which results in a large number of patients without receiving treatment. Recent studies using human samples have revealed the presence of inflammatory responses in lesions and also the possible correlation of inflammation with CA progression or rupture. Furthermore, experimental studies using animal models of CAs have supported the notion from human studies and have clarified the crucial contribution of inflammation to the pathogenesis. In this process, a vicious cycle/positive feedback loop includes the nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-kB) activation, which plays a role in amplifying inflammatory responses to the point of chronicity. In addition, the infiltration of macrophages via NF-kB-mediated monocyte chemotactic protein 1 induction expands inflammation in whole arterial walls and contributes to the degeneration of media by producing various cytokines and tissue-destructive proteases. These series of studies have provided an important insight - antiinflammatory drugs can be therapeutically significant in the treatment of CAs. Indeed, in animal models, some drugs with an antiinflammatory effect effectively suppressed CA formation and progression, which supports this hypothesis. In addition, in human cases, some case-control studies have reported the preventive effect of statins and nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs on CA rupture. Therefore, the development of novel medical treatment for preventing the progression and rupture of CAs is needed in the near future. In this literature review, articles were selected by performing a PubMed search using the key words "cerebral aneurysm" and "inflammation".
Evaluation of open information extraction methods using Reuters-21578 database

The following article shows the precision, the recall and the F1-measure for three knowledge extraction methods under Open Information Extraction paradigm. These methods are: ReVerb, OLLIE and ClausIE. For the calculation of these three measures, a representative sample of Reuters-21578 was used; 103 newswire texts were taken randomly from that database. A big discrepancy was observed, after analyzing the obtained results, between the expected and the observed precision for ClausIE. In order to save the observed gap in ClausIE precision, a simple improvement is proposed for the method. Although the correction improved the precision of Clausie, ReVerb turned out to be the most precise method; however ClausIE is the one with the better F1-measure.
Hypogonadism and male obesity: Focus on unresolved questions

Obesity, increasing in prevalence globally, is the clinical condition most strongly associated with lowered testosterone concentrations in men and presents as one of the strongest predictors of receiving testosterone treatment. While low circulating total testosterone concentrations in modest obesity primarily reflect reduced concentrations of sex hormone binding globulin, more marked obesity can lead to genuine hypothalamic‐pituitary‐testicular axis (HPT) suppression. HPT axis suppression is likely mediated via pro‐inflammatory cytokine and dysregulated leptin signalling and aggravated by associated comorbidities. Whether oestradiol‐mediated negative hypothalamic‐pituitary feedback plays a pathogenic role requires further study. Although the obesity‐hypogonadism relationship is bidirectional, the effects of obesity on testosterone concentrations are more substantial than the effects of testosterone on adiposity. In markedly obese men submitted to bariatric surgery, substantial weight loss is very effective in reactivating the HPT axis. In contrast, lifestyle measures are less effective in reducing weight and generally only associated with modest increases in circulating testosterone. In randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs), testosterone treatment does not reduce body weight, but modestly reduces fat mass and increases muscle mass. Short‐term studies have shown that testosterone treatment in carefully selected obese men may have modest benefits on symptoms of androgen deficiency and body composition even additive to diet alone. However, longer term, larger RCTs designed for patient‐important outcomes and potential risks are required. Until such trials are available, testosterone treatment cannot be routinely recommended for men with obesity‐associated nonclassical hypogonadism. Lifestyle measures or where indicated bariatric surgery to achieve weight loss, and optimization of comorbidities remain first line.
Airavat: Improving energy efficiency of heterogeneous applications

An emerging class of applications attempt to make use of both the CPU and GPU in a heterogeneous system. The peak performance for these applications is achieved when both the CPU and GPU are used collaboratively. However, along with this increased gain in performance, power and energy management is a larger challenge. In this paper we address the issue of executing applications that utilize both the CPU and GPU in an energy efficient way. Towards this end, we propose a power management framework named Airavat that tunes the CPU, GPU and memory frequencies, synergestically, in order to improve the energy efficiency of collaborative CPU-GPU applications. Airavat uses machine learning-based prediction models, combined with feedback based Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling to improve the energy efficiency of such applications. We demonstrate our framework on the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 and observe an improvement in terms of Energy Delay Product (EDP) by 24% with negligible performance loss.