Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of the food production chain from farm practices to vegetable processing on outbreak incidence

The popularity in the consumption of fresh and fresh‐cut vegetables continues to increase globally. Fresh vegetables are an integral part of a healthy diet, providing vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other health‐promoting compounds. The diversity of fresh vegetables and packaging formats (spring mix in clamshell container, bagged heads of lettuce) support increased consumption. Unfortunately, vegetable production and processing practices are not sufficient to ensure complete microbial safety. This review highlights a few specific areas that require greater attention and research. Selected outbreaks are presented to emphasize the need for science‐based ‘best practices’. Laboratory and field studies have focused on inactivation of pathogens associated with manure in liquid, slurry or solid forms. As production practices change, other forms and types of soil amendments are being used more prevalently. Information regarding the microbial safety of fish emulsion and pellet form of manure is limited. The topic of global climate change is controversial, but the potential effect on agriculture cannot be ignored. Changes in temperature, precipitation, humidity and wind can impact crops and the microorganisms that are associated with production environments. Climate change could potentially enhance the ability of pathogens to survive and persist in soil, water and crops, increasing human health risks. Limited research has focused on the prevalence and behaviour of viruses in pre and post‐harvest environments and on vegetable commodities. Globally, viruses are a major cause of foodborne illnesses, but are seldom tested for in soil, soil amendments, manure and crops. Greater attention must also be given to the improvement in the microbial quality of seeds used in sprout production. Human pathogens associated with seeds can result in contamination of sprouts intended for human consumption, even when all appropriate ‘best practices’ are used by sprout growers.
Medicated Anxious Children: Characteristics and Cognitive-Behavioural Treatment Response

Objective: To determine whether individual and family characteristics of children with anxiety disorders who take psychotropic medications differ from those that are unmedicated and whether there is a differential response to cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Method: Children ages 8 to 12 years (n = 102: 18 medicated, 84 unmedicated) were recruited in a specialized outpatient clinic over a 3-year period. All had a primary diagnosis of an anxiety disorder. Comparisons were done using t-tests for continuous measures and chi-square tests for discrete measures. Treatment-related changes were assessed using repeated measures analyses of variance. Results: Medicated and unmedicated groups did not differ by age, sex, socioeconomic status, or diagnostic profile. Initial ratings of anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and global functioning were comparable. Greater family dysfunction and family frustration were reported in medicated children. With treatment, both groups improved symptomatically and showed improved family functioning. Families of medicated children showed a greater reduction in frustration than families of unmedicated children, whereas unmedicated children showed greater gains in global functioning. Conclusions: Initial family functioning of medicated children seems to show more disturbances. Both medicated and unmedicated children can benefit from CBT. Further studies of differential treatment effects for medicated and unmedicated children are indicated.
Murine Features of Neurogenesis in the Human Hippocampus across the Lifespan from 0 to 100 Years

Background Essentially all knowledge about adult hippocampal neurogenesis in humans still comes from one seminal study by Eriksson et al. in 1998, although several others have provided suggestive findings. But only little information has been available in how far the situation in animal models would reflect the conditions in the adult and aging human brain. We therefore here mapped numerous features associated with adult neurogenesis in rodents in samples from human hippocampus across the entire lifespan. Such data would not offer proof of adult neurogenesis in humans, because it is based on the assumption that humans and rodents share marker expression patterns in adult neurogenesis. Nevertheless, together the data provide valuable information at least about the presence of markers, for which a link to adult neurogenesis might more reasonably be assumed than for others, in the adult human brain and their change with increasing age. Methods and Findings In rodents, doublecortin (DCX) is transiently expressed during adult neurogenesis and within the neurogenic niche of the dentate gyrus can serve as a valuable marker. We validated DCX as marker of granule cell development in fetal human tissue and used DCX expression as seed to examine the dentate gyrus for additional neurogenesis-associated features across the lifespan. We studied 54 individuals and detected DCX expression between birth and 100 years of age. Caveats for post-mortem analyses of human tissues apply but all samples were free of signs of ischemia and activated caspase-3. Fourteen markers related to adult hippocampal neurogenesis in rodents were assessed in DCX-positive cells. Total numbers of DCX expressing cells declined exponentially with increasing age, and co-expression of DCX with the other markers decreased. This argued against a non-specific re-appearance of immature markers in specimen from old brains. Early postnatally all 14 markers were co-expressed in DCX-positive cells. Until 30 to 40 years of age, for example, an overlap of DCX with Ki67, Mcm2, Sox2, Nestin, Prox1, PSA-NCAM, Calretinin, NeuN, and others was detected, and some key markers (Nestin, Sox2, Prox1) remained co-expressed into oldest age. Conclusions Our data suggest that in the adult human hippocampus neurogenesis-associated features that have been identified in rodents show patterns, as well as qualitative and quantitative age-related changes, that are similar to the course of adult hippocampal neurogenesis in rodents. Consequently, although further validation as well as the application of independent methodology (e.g. electron microscopy and cell culture work) is desirable, our data will help to devise the framework for specific research on cellular plasticity in the aging human hippocampus.
A partial task replication algorithm for fault- tolerant FPGA-based soft-multiprocessors

FPGA-based multiprocessors, referred as softmultiprocessors, have an increasing use in embedded systems due to appealing SRAM features. More than 95% of such FPGAs are occupied by SRAM cells constructing the configuration bits. These SRAM cells are highly vulnerable to soft errors threatening the reliability of the system. This paper proposes a fault-tolerant method to detect and correct errors in the configuration bits. The main of this method is to analyze the scheduled task graph and select a subset of tasks to be replicated in multiple processors based on the utilization of the processors in different execution phases. To this end, 1) errors are detected by re-executing a subset of tasks in multiple processors and comparing their output; 2) errors are corrected by re-downloading the fault-free bitstream; 3) errors are recovered from correct checkpoints. To evaluate the proposed method, a FPGA containing four and eight processors running randomly generated task graphs is evaluated. The simulation results show that the performance overhead of the proposed method for four and eight processors is 20% and 15%, respectively. These values for lockstep method are about 90% and 45%, respectively. Moreover, the area overhead of the proposed method is zero.
High fidelity telepresence systems: Design, control, and evaluation

An overview of subjectively selected recent topics and research trends in the area of modern telepresence and teleaction is given. Multi-modal telepresence systems are to enable human operators to become present and active in remote or inaccessible environments through a communication network and a suitable telerobotic system. The major challenges of such a multimodal telepresence system like stabilizing measures, and transparency, e.g. in the case of time-delay (latency) in the communication network, are discussed. A practical implementation of an integrated mobile and bimanual multi-user telepresence and teleaction system as well as some exemplary experiments are presented. Furthermore, it is discussed how the performance of telepresence systems can be improved by using psychophysical knowledge of human perception.
Cost-Effective Online Trending Topic Detection and Popularity Prediction in Microblogging

Identifying topic trends on microblogging services such as Twitter and estimating those topics’ future popularity have great academic and business value, especially when the operations can be done in real time. For any third party, however, capturing and processing such huge volumes of real-time data in microblogs are almost infeasible tasks, as there always exist API (Application Program Interface) request limits, monitoring and computing budgets, as well as timeliness requirements. To deal with these challenges, we propose a cost-effective system framework with algorithms that can automatically select a subset of representative users in microblogging networks in offline, under given cost constraints. Then the proposed system can online monitor and utilize only these selected users’ real-time microposts to detect the overall trending topics and predict their future popularity among the whole microblogging network. Therefore, our proposed system framework is practical for real-time usage as it avoids the high cost in capturing and processing full real-time data, while not compromising detection and prediction performance under given cost constraints. Experiments with real microblogs dataset show that by tracking only 500 users out of 0.6 million users and processing no more than 30,000 microposts daily, about 92% trending topics could be detected and predicted by the proposed system and, on average, more than 10 hours earlier than they appear in official trends lists.
Low power implementation of a wavelet based noise reduction system

Recently most attentions have been given to wavelet based speech enhancement systems rather other approaches like Fourier transform. Wavelet transform is capable of providing both time and frequency information at the same time, properties which make it very useful in non-stationary systems like speech signals. But the problem of wavelet transform is its computational complexity which is several times higher than traditional Fourier transform that increases power consumption. In order to solve this problem a flexible and efficient structure based on Weighted OverLap Add (WOLA) is used and its computational complexity is examined. This technique significantly reduces the complexity while providing a SNRI performance close to the previous wavelet transform. The simulation results are promising and decrease the computations about 22% in comparison to the wavelet transform.
A new approach for control of systems through high traffic communication networks

In this paper, a new method for real time prediction of uncertain network transmission time delays and a method for closed-loop control of plants through networks are introduced. The proposed delay prediction method is based on the Multi-Layer Perceptron neural model. For the purpose of minimizing the calculations needed in a real time implementation, a method for determination of the Markov order of the time delay sequence is presented. Furthermore, a new time varying control algorithm, with a variable feedback gain control scheme is proposed and applied to the predicted discretized model of the plant. Unlike many of the previously existing variable sampling algorithms, the proposed approach is shown, through well-known case studies, to be both accurate and fast enough for a real time implementation.
Autotagging music with conditional restricted Boltzmann machines

This paper describes two applications of conditional restricted Boltzmann machines (CRBMs) to the task of autotagging music. The first consists of training a CRBM to predict tags that a user would apply to a clip of a song based on tags already applied by other users. By learning the relationships between tags, this model is able to pre-process training data to significantly improve the performance of a support vector machine (SVM) autotagging. The second is the use of a discriminative RBM, a type of CRBM, to autotag music. By simultaneously exploiting the relationships among tags and between tags and audio-based features, this model is able to significantly outperform SVMs, logistic regression, and multi-layer perceptrons. In order to be applied to this problem, the discriminative RBM was generalized to the multi-label setting and four different learning algorithms for it were evaluated, the first such in-depth analysis of which we are aware.
State Merit Aid Programs: Responses by Florida Community Colleges. CCRC Brief. Number 35.

State financial aid policies have long focused on needbased aid programs to reduce inequalities in higher education access and completion. During the last 15 years, however, many states have shifted toward broad-based merit aid programs (Dynarski, 2004). Although such aid programs can increase access, they can also encourage grade inflation in high school (Henry & Rubenstein, 2002) and provide incentives for college students to enroll in fewer and easier courses, withdraw from classes, and increase summer school credits (Cornwell, Kyung, & Mustard, 2005). Thus, although the new merit aid programs seem to increase the probability of enrolling in higher education, they can lead to student behavior that partially undermines academic achievement. The implementation of new financial aid programs may also provide postsecondary institutions with incentives to alter the way that they operate, particularly when they exist in increasingly difficult and competitive funding environments. Despite the fact that community colleges currently enroll nearly half of all students in higher education (National Center for Education Statistics, 2006), previous research on the response of colleges to new aid programs has been largely limited to four-year colleges. A recent study conducted by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) sought to better understand how two-year public colleges react to new state merit-based financial aid programs by evaluating the institutional behavior of each of Florida’s 28 community colleges before and after the Florida Legislature created the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship (FBFS) program in 1997. This Brief describes the FBFS program, the dataset and model for analysis used in the research, as well as the study’s findings and conclusions.
Open Market Operations & Effectiveness of Monetary Policy

The paper attempts to explore and compare a number of key developments in monetary management in selected advanced economies with Thailand. It starts off with (i) a simple model of central banking, followed by (ii) a brief history of developments in monetary policy implementation, both in terms of market structural changes and central banks' reactions to them. It then provides (iii) the literature review of monetary transmission mechanisms in the context of micro-macro links of monetary operations, leading up to the question of (iv) whether Thailand's open market operation mechanisms have been effective. Finally, utilising both the international experiences as well as a recent report by an IMF mission, the paper attempts to draw some practical solutions on ways to develop and prepare the system for the future.
The Hagedorn temperature in a decoupled sector of AdS/CFT

We match the Hagedorn/deconfinement temperature of planar 𝒩 = 4 super Yang‐Mills (SYM) on ℝ × S3 to the Hagedorn temperature of string theory on Ads5 × S5. The match is done in a near‐critical region where both gauge theory and string theory are weakly coupled. On the gauge theory side we are taking a decoupling limit found in [7] in which the physics of planar 𝒩 = 4 SYM is given exactly by the ferromagnetic XXX1/2 Heisenberg spin chain. We find moreover a general relation between the Hagedorn/deconfinement temperature and the thermodynamics of the Heisenberg spin chain. On the string theory side, we identify the dual limit which is taken of string theory on a maximally symmetric pp‐wave background with a flat direction, obtained from a Penrose limit of Ads5 × S5. We compute the Hagedorn temperature of the string theory and find agreement with the Hagedorn/deconfinement temperature computed on the gauge theory side. Finally, we discuss a modified decoupling limit in which planar 𝒩 = 4 SYM reduces to the XXX1/2 Heisenberg spin chain with an external magnetic field.
Game chromatic index of k-degenerate graphs

We consider the following edge coloring game on a graph G. Given t distinct colors, two players Alice and Bob, with Alice moving first, alternately select an uncolored edge e of G and assign it a color different from the colors of edges adjacent to e. Bob wins if, at any stage of the game, there is an uncolored edge adjacent to colored edges in all t colors; otherwise Alice wins. Note that when Alice wins, all edges of G are properly colored. The game chromatic index of a graph G is the minimum number of colors for which Alice has a winning strategy. In this paper, we study the edge coloring game on k-degenerate graphs. We prove that the game chromatic index of a k-degenerate graph is at most Δ + 3k - 1, where Δ is the maximum vertex degree of the graph. We also show that the game chromatic index of a forest of maximum degree 3 is at most 4 when the forest contains an odd number of edges. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Graph Theory 36: 144–155, 2001
Structured illumination microscopy with unknown patterns and a statistical prior

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) improves resolution by down-modulating high-frequency information of an object to fit within the passband of the optical system. Generally, the reconstruction process requires prior knowledge of the illumination patterns, which implies a well-calibrated and aberration-free system. Here, we propose a new algorithmic self-calibration strategy for SIM that does not need to know the exact patterns a priori, but only their covariance. The algorithm, termed PE-SIMS, includes a pattern-estimation (PE) step requiring the uniformity of the sum of the illumination patterns and a SIM reconstruction procedure using a statistical prior (SIMS). Additionally, we perform a pixel reassignment process (SIMS-PR) to enhance the reconstruction quality. We achieve 2× better resolution than a conventional widefield microscope, while remaining insensitive to aberration-induced pattern distortion and robust against parameter tuning.
DISTRIBUTED GENERATION PLACEMENT AND SIZING USING NEWLY IMPROVED PSO FOR RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

This paper presents a new application of hybridized PSO for optimal allocation of single and multiple Distributed Generation (DG) units in distribution network. The proposed algorithm called Ranked Evolutionary Particle swarm optimization (REPSO) combines PSO with Evolutionary programming Optimization methods to simultaneously places and size DG units in radial distribution network. The performance of the proposed method shows significant reduction in power losses, improved voltage profile of the network and effectiveness in the search for optimal solutions. A 33-bus IEEE test system was employed to validate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm.
Explicit Congestion Avoidance: Cooperative Mechanisms for Reducing Latency and Proportionally Sharing Bandwidth

—This paper presents the design and evaluation of a cooperative congestion avoidance system suitable for corporate Intranets or home networks. Explicit Congestion Avoidance (ECA) relies on host operating systems to introduce appropriate per-flow virtual bottlenecks, with the intention of keeping queuing out of the network. The network provides an indication of the aggregate demand for resources on each path, and a cooperative distributed algorithm adjusts these virtual bottlenecks in proportion to per-flow weights, so as to maintain network utilization at a level where queuing is rare. In addition, network bandwidth is shared in proportion to the weights of the competing flows and end-to-end latency is greatly reduced. Unmodified higher level protocols merely see a reduced capacity channel and adapt to the available bandwidth. For example, the packets which TCP would normally force into router queues to increase the RTT, are instead voluntarily queued inside the operating system. Experiments show that time sensitive media streams can be protected from contention, and that response times for short HTTP requests can be improved by a factor of 5.
Harvesting Social Knowledge from Folksonomies 1 st

Collaborative tagging systems, or folksonomies, have the potential of becoming technologic infrastructure to support knowledge management activities in an organization or a society. There are many challenges, however. This paper presents designs that enhance collaborative tagging systems to meet some key challenges: community identification, ontology generation, user and document recommendation. Design components, evaluation methodology and selected preliminary results are presented.
Thrice weekly warfarin administration in haemodialysis patients.

BACKGROUND Medication adherence in haemodialysis patients is often challenging due to a high pill burden, complex and dynamic medication regimens and limited patient self-interest in care. The purpose of this study was to investigate the time within target INR and safety profile of thrice weekly warfarin administration in haemodialysis patients with a clinical indication for anticoagulation and documented nonadherence to medications. METHODS Thirty-seven patients from two haemodialysis units in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, were recruited, and 17 patients were treated with thrice weekly warfarin and compared to 20 patients treated with daily warfarin therapy. The patients were followed for 1 year with weekly international normalized ratio (INR), dosage and adverse events recorded. The primary outcome was percentage of time with INR in target and sub (<1.5)- and supra (>4)-therapeutic INR. Adverse events were recorded in the two groups. RESULTS The thrice weekly group had a higher burden of comorbidity (Charlson comorbidity index of 6.35 +/- 1.77 versus 4.55 +/- 1.64, P = 0.003) compared to the daily dosage group. In the thrice weekly dosage group, time within target INR was higher (56.9 versus 49.3%, P = 0.008), and time with supra-therapeutic INR > 4 lower (2.7 versus 4.3%, P = 0.03). Total bleeding events (7 versus 6) and major bleeding events (3 versus 2 events) were similar between the two groups. CONCLUSION In this pilot study, thrice weekly warfarin appears to be a safe and feasible dosing strategy in a select patient population. A randomized controlled trial of thrice weekly warfarin is warranted.