Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Constant Delay Algorithms for Regular Document Spanners

Regular expressions and automata models with capture variables are core tools in rule-based information extraction. These formalisms, also called regular document spanners, use regular languages in order to locate the data that a user wants to extract from a text document, and then store this data into variables. Since document spanners can easily generate large outputs, it is important to have good evaluation algorithms that can generate the extracted data in a quick succession, and with relatively little precomputation time. Towards this goal, we present a practical evaluation algorithm that allows constant delay enumeration of a spanner's output after a precomputation phase that is linear in the document. While the algorithm assumes that the spanner is specified in a syntactic variant of variable set automata, we also study how it can be applied when the spanner is specified by general variable set automata, regex formulas, or spanner algebras. Finally, we study the related problem of counting the number of outputs of a document spanner, providing a fine grained analysis of the classes of document spanners that support efficient enumeration of their results.
Health Beliefs of Mexican Americans With Type 2 Diabetes

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to compare 2 culturally competent diabetes self-management interventions designed for Mexican Americans: an original extended program (24 hours of education, 28 hours of support groups) versus a shorter, more resource-efficient compressed strategy (16 hours of education, 6 hours of support groups). The effects of the interventions on health beliefs are compared. METHODS The authors recruited 216 persons between 35 and 70 years of age diagnosed with type 2 diabetes for at least 1 year. Intervention groups of 8 participants and 8 support persons were randomly assigned to 1 of the interventions. RESULTS Mean health belief scores on each subscale improved for both intervention groups. Both intervention groups reported significant improvements in perceptions of control of their diabetes. Improvements in health beliefs were more sustained at 12 months for individuals in the longer, extended program. The health belief subscale control was the most significant predictor of HbA1c levels at 12 months. CONCLUSIONS Both culturally competent diabetes self-management education interventions were effective in promoting more positive health beliefs. These findings on health beliefs indicate a dosage effect of the intervention and support the importance of ongoing contact through support groups to attain more sustainable improvements in health beliefs.
Robustness to incorrect priors in partially observed stochastic control

We study the continuity properties of optimal solutions to stochastic control problems with respect to initial probability measures and applications of these to the robustness of optimal control policies applied to systems with incomplete or incorrect priors. It is shown that for single and multi-stage optimal cost problems, continuity and robustness cannot be established under weak convergence or Wasserstein convergence in general, but that the optimal cost is continuous in the priors under the convergence in total variation under mild conditions. By imposing further assumptions on the measurement models, robustness and continuity also hold under weak convergence of priors. We thus obtain robustness results and bounds on the mismatch error that occurs due to the application of a control policy which is designed for an incorrectly estimated prior in terms of a distance measure between the true prior and the incorrect one. Positive and negative practical implications of these results in empirical learning for stochastic control will be presented, where almost surely weak convergence of i.i. d. empirical measures occurs but stronger notions of convergence, such as total variation convergence, in general, do not.
Cardiac cell-derived exosomes: changing face of regenerative biology.

This editorial refers to ‘Exosomes secreted by cardiosphere-derived cells reduce scarring, attenuate adverse remodelling, and improve function in acute and chronic porcine myocardial infarction’, by R. Gallet et al . , doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehw240 … The difference between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusionAlbert Einstein Repair of the damaged cardiac tissue has been considered the holy grail of cardiac medicine driving researchers for years. Myocardial damage in an adult heart leads to widespread cardiomyocyte loss without active replacement of the dead cardiac tissue, ultimately resulting in formation of scar at the site of injury. Current therapies are designed only to limit the extent of scar formation and are unable to offer restoration of lost cardiac tissue, leading to a progressive decline in cardiac function. As a consequence, cardiac diseases continue to rise and are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality around the world. The last 10 years have witnessed the dawn of stem cell therapy for cardiac repair with promising true cellular replacement and restoration of cardiac tissue damaged due to pathological injury. Multiple stem cell types derived from bone marrow, heart, adipose tissue, and cortical bone have been tested in small and large animal models of myocardial damage. Among these, stem cells derived from the heart hold particular interest and represent the most suitable cell type for cardiac repair.1 Different populations of cardiac stem cells have been reported to date and, importantly, all of them have been shown to differentiate into three cardiac cell types, i.e. myocytes, endothelial cells, and smooth muscle cells, contribute towards neovascularization, and significantly improve function after myocardial damage.1,2 Promising pre-clinical results have laid …
No Evolutionary Shift in the Mating System of North American Ambrosia artemisiifolia (Asteraceae) Following Its Introduction to China

The mating system plays a key role during the process of plant invasion. Contemporary evolution of uniparental reproduction (selfing or asexuality) can relieve the challenges of mate limitation in colonizing populations by providing reproductive assurance. Here we examined aspects of the genetics of colonization in Ambrosia artemisiifolia, a North American native that is invasive in China. This species has been found to possess a strong self-incompatibility system and have high outcrossing rates in North America and we examined whether there has been an evolutionary shift towards the dependence on selfing in the introduced range. Specifically, we estimated outcrossing rates in one native and five invasive populations and compared levels of genetic diversity between North America and China. Based on six microsatellite loci we found that, like the native North American population, all five Chinese populations possessed a completely outcrossing mating system. The estimates of paternity correlations were low, ranging from 0.028–0.122, which suggests that populations possessed ∼8–36 pollen donor parents contributing to each maternal plant in the invasive populations. High levels of genetic diversity for both native and invasive populations were found with the unbiased estimate of gene diversity ranging from 0.262–0.289 for both geographic ranges based on AFLP markers. Our results demonstrate that there has been no evolutionary shift from outcrossing to selfing during A. artemisiifolia's invasion of China. Furthermore, high levels of genetic variation in North America and China indicate that there has been no erosion of genetic variance due to a bottleneck during the introduction process. We suggest that the successful invasion of A. artemisiifolia into Asia was facilitated by repeated introductions from multiple source populations in the native range creating a diverse gene pool within Chinese populations.
Cloud Based Collaborative Software Development: A Review, Gap Analysis and Future Directions

Organizations who have transitioned their development environments to the Cloud have started realizing benefits such as: cost reduction in hardware; relatively accelerated development process via reduction of time and effort to set up development and testing environments; unified management; service and functionality expansion; on-demand provisioning and access to resources and development environments. These benefits represent only a fraction of the full potential that could be achieved via leveraging Cloud Computing for the collaborative software development process. Related efforts in this area have been mainly in the areas of: asynchronous collaboration; collaboration in isolated aspects of the Software Development process, such as coding activities; use of open-source tools for contributing, improving, and managing code, etcetera. Although these efforts represent valid contributions and important enablers, they are still missing important aspects which enable a more holistic process, with solid theoretical foundation. This paper reviews this research area, in order to better assess factors and gaps creating the need to enhance the collaborative software development process in the Cloud, to better meet the pressure to collaboratively create better cloud-agnostic applications.
More Flexible Differential Privacy: The Application of Piecewise Mixture Distributions in Query Release

There is an increasing demand to make data "open" to third parties, as data sharing has great benefits in data-driven decision making. However, with a wide variety of sensitive data collected, protecting privacy of individuals, communities and organizations, is an essential factor in making data "open". The approaches currently adopted by industry in releasing private data are often ad hoc and prone to a number of attacks, including re-identification attacks, as they do not provide adequate privacy guarantees. While differential privacy has attracted significant interest from academia and industry by providing rigorous and reliable privacy guarantees, the reduced utility and inflexibility of current differentially private algorithms for data release is a barrier to their use in real-life. This paper aims to address these two challenges. First, we propose a novel mechanism to augment the conventional utility of differential privacy by fusing two Laplace or geometric distributions together. We derive closed form expressions for entropy, variance of added noise, and absolute expectation of noise for the proposed piecewise mixtures. Then the relevant distributions are utilised to theoretically prove the privacy and accuracy guarantees of the proposed mechanisms. Second, we show that our proposed mechanisms have greater flexibility, with three parameters to adjust, giving better utility in bounding noise, and mitigating larger inaccuracy, in comparison to typical one-parameter differentially private mechanisms. We then empirically evaluate the performance of piecewise mixture distributions with extensive simulations and with a real-world dataset for both linear count queries and histogram queries. The empirical results show an increase in all utility measures considered, while maintaining privacy, for the piecewise mixture mechanisms compared to standard Laplace or geometric mechanisms.
Endocrine Implications of Neurofibromatosis 1 in Childhood

In 1882, von Recklinghausen described a group of patients with multiple tumors arising from the ‘endoneurium' of peripheral nerves, and called them ‘neurofibromas'. The term von Recklinghausen disease was used up to the end of the 20th century, when the gene of neurofibromatosis (NF1) was cloned on chromosome 17q11.2. The gene product is a cytoplasmic protein termed neurofibromin, regulating proliferation and maturation of both glial and neuronal progenitors during embryogenesis. Loss of neurofibromin function determines the hyperactivation of the proto-oncogene RAS, leading to an increased risk of tumor formation, predominantly affecting the skin, bone and the nervous system. NF1 is clinically and genetically distinct from neurofibromatosis type 2, characterized by bilateral vestibular schwannomas and other nervous system tumors. An increased incidence of central precocious puberty, diencephalic syndrome, GH deficiency and GH hypersecretion has been described in NF1 children. These conditions are commonly complications of optic pathway gliomas (OPG) involving the hypothalamic and sellar region. Nevertheless, these endocrine disorders have been observed also in children without evidence of OPG at magnetic resonance imaging. Clinical and laboratory follow-up is crucial in all children with NF1, particularly in those with an OPG, aiming at the early identification of signs suggestive of secondary endocrine alterations.
Masturbation Experiences of Swedish Senior High School Students: Gender Differences and Similarities

Research about masturbation tends to be limited to the assessment of masturbation incidence and frequency. Consequently, little is known about what people experience connected to masturbation. This might be one reason why theoretical approaches that specifically address the persistent gender gap in masturbation frequency are lacking. The aim of the current study was to explore several aspects of masturbation in young men and women, and to examine possible associations with their social backgrounds and sexual histories. Data from 1,566 women and 1,452 men (ages 18 to 22) from 52 Swedish senior high schools were analyzed. Comparisons between men and women were made regarding incidence of and age at first masturbation, the use of objects (e.g., sex toys), fantasies, and sexual functioning during masturbation, as well as about their attitudes toward masturbation and sexual fantasies. Cluster analysis was carried out to identify similarities between and differences within the gender groups. While overall more men than women reported experience with several of the investigated aspects, cluster analyses revealed that a large proportion of men and women reported similar experiences and that fewer experiences are not necessarily associated with negative attitudes toward masturbation. Implications of these findings are discussed in consideration of particular social backgrounds.
Performance-Based Constraints for Multidimensional Networks

A stochastic analysis of multidimensional networks with unidirectional or bidirectional links between nodes is presented. The analysis allows the development of an accurate model for examining the performance and cost trade-offs of different network configurations. The model is validated through simulation and does not rely on the simplifying assumptions of previous models. In addition, the model is valid for the hypercube network. Two new performance-based design constraints are introduced: constant maximum throughput and constant unity queue. These new constraints are fundamentally different than previous constraints, which are based on some characterization of hardware implementation costs. Both of the new constraints allow performance and cost comparisons of different network configurations to be made on the basis of an equal ability to handle a range of traffic load. Results under the new constraints clearly show that a low dimensional network, while offering the lowest message latency, must be significantly more expensive than a comparable high dimensional network and, in some cases, may be impractical to implement. In addition, the constraints demonstrate that performance is highly dependent on offered load.
Raiders of the lost mark – endothelial cells and their role in transplantation for hematologic malignancies

Abstract Endothelial cells (EC) are crucial for normal angiogenesis and important for patients with leukemia, myeloma, and lymphoma during and after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). Knowledge of endothelial dysfunction in hematologic malignancies is provided by translational studies analyzing soluble endothelial markers, morphologic and functional changes of EC cultured in patients’ sera or enumeration of circulating EC or endothelial progenitor cells (EPC). EC are important for stem cell homing and maintenance. Endothelial activation or damage is a central component in the pathogenesis of several complications after HSCT, like acute and chronic graft-versus-host disease, sinusoidal obstruction syndrome, capillary leak syndrome, engraftment syndrome, diffuse alveolar syndrome, idiopathic pneumonia syndrome, and transplant-associated microangiopathy. Finally, EC or EPC may facilitate tumor cell survival thus representing potential factors for both disease progression and relapse in hematologic malignancies.
Implementing a Sleep Health Education and Sleep Disorders Screening Program in Fire Departments

Objective: The objective of this study is to compare three methods of administering a sleep health program (SHP) in fire departments. Methods: An SHP, comprising sleep health education and screening for common sleep disorders, was implemented in eight fire departments using three approaches: expert-led, train-the-trainer, and online. Participation rates, knowledge assessments, surveys, and focus group interviews were analyzed to assess the reach and effectiveness of the methodologies. Results: The Expert-led SHP had the highest participation rate, greatest improvement in knowledge scores, and prompted more firefighters to seek clinical sleep disorder evaluations (41%) than the other approaches (20 to 25%). Forty-two percent of focus group participants reported changing their sleep behaviors. Conclusion: All approaches yielded reasonable participation rates, but expert-led programs had the greatest reach and effectiveness in educating and screening firefighters for sleep disorders.
Subthreshold leakage reduction: A comparative study of SCL and CMOS design

The large subthreshold leakage current of static CMOS logic circuits designed in modern nanometer-scale technologies is one of the main barriers for implementing ultra-low power digital systems. Subthreshold source-coupled logic (STSCL) circuits are based on an NMOS differential pair that is switching a constant tail bias current between the two output branches while biased at very low current levels. The power consumption of each STSCL gate depends on the tail bias current that can be controlled very well even for current levels in the range of few tens of pico-Amperes. The precise control on the power consumption of each gate, makes this topology very attractive for ultra-low power applications, where the power consumption of conventional static CMOS system is practically limited by the subthreshold leakage current. In this work, an analytical approach supported by simulation and measurement results will be presented to study the main issues in design of ultra-low power static CMOS and STSCL systems.
On Balance among Energy, Performance and Recovery in Storage Systems

With the increasing size of the clusters as well as the increasing capacity of each storage node, current storage systems are spending more time on recovery. When node failure happens, the system enters degradation mode in which node reconstruction/block recovery is initiated. This very process needs to wake up a number of disks and takes a substantial amount of I/O bandwidth which will not only compromise energy efficiency but also performance. This raises a natural problem: how to balance the performance, energy, and recovery in degradation mode for an energy efficient storage system? Without considering the I/O bandwidth contention between recovery and performance, we find that the current energy proportional solutions cannot answer these question accurately. This paper presents a mathematical model called Perfect Energy, Reliability, and Performance (PERP) which provides guidelines of provisioning active nodes number and recovery speed at each time slot with respect to the performance and recovery constraints. We apply our model to practical data layouts and test the effectiveness on our 25-node CASS cluster. Experimental results validate that our model helps realize 25% energy savings while meeting both performance and recovery constraints and the saving is expected to increase with a larger number of nodes.
A Nash stable cross-layer coalition formation game for device-to-device communications

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications is a key aspect of future 5G cellular networks, as it can help improve spectral efficiency, system capacity, resource utilization, and quality-of-service (QoS), for the overall network. In this paper, a dynamic cross-layer leave-and-join based coalition formation game with non-transferable utility (NTU) is proposed. Our proposed game jointly optimizes mode selection (at the network layer), and resource allocation from the cell and cellular user/s, including power control (at the physical layer), in a distributed wireless network with D2D communications. Moreover, we aim to maximize channel rate and minimize transmit power for both cellular users and D2D pairs, while selecting optimal transmission mode for all D2D pairs. The coalition partition of the proposed game converges to a Nash stable outcome, which is socially efficient. The simulation results illustrate that once a Nash stable coalition partition is achieved, then optimal transmit power and channel rate are achieved for all D2D pairs and cellular users.
Environmental and biotic contamination by persistent organic pollutants (Pops) in the Asia-Pacific region.

This article reviews the results of comprehensive investigations conducted in our laboratory, Center for Marine Environmental Studies (CMES), Ehime University over the past three decades on the distribution, sources, temporal trends and toxic impacts of the bioaccumulative persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in the Asia-Pacific region with a particular emphasis on the developing countries. Prominent contamination was found in the regions where they have been heavily used. The eastern Asian region is probably a potential source of pollution, particularly by the new contaminants such as polybrominated diphenyls ethers (PBDEs). These groups of contaminants, together with polychlorinated biphenyls, exhibited either decreasing or increasing trends depending on the extent of industrialization in the Asian developing region, indicating the necessity for long term monitoring. The open dumping sites for municipal wastes in major cities are significant sources of many toxic chemicals, and these areas are probably one of the challenges for future research due to the possible long term impacts on the environmental quality and human health. The formation of dioxins and related compounds in such dumping sites and their elevated residues found in breast milk of residents living in and around warrant long term impacts of dioxins upon next generations. Comprehensive and long term monitoring programs are still urgently needed with close collaboration and proper capacity building in developing countries in order to mitigate POPs emission and their risk on ecosystems and human health.
The pulmonary collectins, SP-A and SP-D, orchestrate innate immunity in the lung.

The data presented here suggest that SP-A and SP-D perform distinct, as well as complementary, host defense functions in the lung. Although both proteins are agglutinins, opsonins, and inflammatory immunomodulators, they interact uniquely with various pathogens and inflammatory cells. For instance, SP-A and SP-D appear to have opposite effects on the phagocytosis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and on regulation of oxidant responses from alveolar macrophages. The pulmonary collectins partition into different microdomains within the airway lining; SP-D appears to prefer the aqueous phase of the ALL but may be weakly associated with the surface of epithelial cells, whereas SP-A is enriched in tubular myelin and at surfactant membrane interfaces. While the initial view held that tubular myelin would be required for surfactant regulation and function, it now appears more likely that it serves a primary host defense role as a solid-phase, high-density SP-A array that optimizes the surface properties of surfactant and the interception of inhaled microbes at the air-lung interface.