Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Usage trends for memory and vitality-enhancing medicines: A pharmacoepidemiological study involving pharmacists of the Gujarat region

Objective: The aim of the study was to explore the trends and rationale of use of memory and vitality-enhancing medicines (MVEM) in the Gujarat region. Materials and Methods: A prospective pharmacoepidemiological study involving pharmacists of Gujarat region was carried out in the year 2005. Pharmacists (n = 351) working in general and Ayurvedic medical stores were selected from 12 districts of Gujarat region. The pharmacists were explained about the objective of the study and were given a pretested, validated questionnaire. Outcome Measures: The questionnaire included the questions regarding herbal MVEM used most commonly, percentage sale of herbal MVEM – sold with or without prescriptions – age group of patients and professional groups who used these drugs most commonly. Results: The number of individuals using MVEM was highest in the age group of 11–20 years (17.54%), followed by the 21–40 years group (17.12%), supporting the results that the professional group of students (17.29%) and the persons of business or service class (15.29%) are the highest users of these medicines. Evaluation of various constituents in the marketed polyherbal MVEM revealed that Brahmi (Bacopa monniera), Shankhpushpi (Evolvulus alsinoides), Ashwangandha (Withania somnifera), Jatamansi (Nardostychos jatamansi), Vacha (Acorus calamus) and Amla (Phyllanthus emblica) were the common ingredients in the polyherbal preparations. Conclusions: This study highlights commonly used Ayurvedic medicines that can be explored for safely enhancing memory and vitality performance. Hence, detailed and scientifically designed research on these drugs would help to identify safe and effective drugs for enhancing the same.
Ensuring Query Compatibility with Evolving XML Schemas

During the life cycle of an XML application, both schemas and queries may change from one version to another. Schema evolutions may affect query results and potentially the validity of produced data. Nowadays, a challenge is to assess and accommodate the impact of theses changes in rapidly evolving XML applications. This article proposes a logical framework and tool for verifying forward/backward compatibility issues involving schemas and queries. First, it allows analyzing relations between schemas. Second, it allows XML designers to identify queries that must be reformulated in order to produce the expected results across successive schema versions. Third, it allows examining more precisely the impact of schema changes over queries, therefore facilitating their reformulation.
Vocal traits and diet explain avian sensitivities to anthropogenic noise

Global population growth has caused extensive human-induced environmental change, including a near-ubiquitous transformation of the acoustical environment due to the propagation of anthropogenic noise. Because the acoustical environment is a critical ecological dimension for countless species to obtain, interpret and respond to environmental cues, highly novel environmental acoustics have the potential to negatively impact organisms that use acoustics for a variety of functions, such as communication and predator/prey detection. Using a comparative approach with 308 populations of 183 bird species from 14 locations in Europe, North American and the Caribbean, I sought to reveal the intrinsic and extrinsic factors responsible for avian sensitivities to anthropogenic noise as measured by their habitat use in noisy versus adjacent quiet locations. Birds across all locations tended to avoid noisy areas, but trait-specific differences emerged. Vocal frequency, diet and foraging location predicted patterns of habitat use in response to anthropogenic noise, but body size, nest placement and type, other vocal features and the type of anthropogenic noise (chronic industrial vs. intermittent urban/traffic noise) failed to explain variation in habitat use. Strongly supported models also indicated the relationship between sensitivity to noise and predictive traits had little to no phylogenetic structure. In general, traits associated with hearing were strong predictors – species with low-frequency vocalizations, which experience greater spectral overlap with low-frequency anthropogenic noise tend to avoid noisy areas, whereas species with higher frequency vocalizations respond less severely. Additionally, omnivorous species and those with animal-based diets were more sensitive to noise than birds with plant-based diets, likely because noise may interfere with the use of audition in multimodal prey detection. Collectively, these results suggest that anthropogenic noise is a powerful sensory pollutant that can filter avian communities nonrandomly by interfering with birds’ abilities to receive, respond to and dispatch acoustic cues and signals.
Microbial Diversity in Natural Asphalts of the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits

ABSTRACT Bacteria commonly inhabit subsurface oil reservoirs, but almost nothing is known yet about microorganisms that live in naturally occurring terrestrial oil seeps and natural asphalts that are comprised of highly recalcitrant petroleum hydrocarbons. Here we report the first survey of microbial diversity in ca. 28,000-year-old samples of natural asphalts from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, CA. Microbiological studies included analyses of 16S rRNA gene sequences and DNA encoding aromatic ring-hydroxylating dioxygenases from two tar pits differing in chemical composition. Our results revealed a wide range of phylogenetic groups within the Archaea and Bacteria domains, in which individual taxonomic clusters were comprised of sets of closely related species within novel genera and families. Fluorescent staining of asphalt-soil particles using phylogenetic probes for Archaea, Bacteria, and Pseudomonas showed coexistence of mixed microbial communities at high cell densities. Genes encoding dioxygenases included three novel clusters of enzymes. The discovery of life in the tar pits provides an avenue for further studies of the evolution of enzymes and catabolic pathways for bacteria that have been exposed to complex hydrocarbons for millennia. These bacteria also should have application for industrial microbiology and bioremediation.
Light-Weight Test Oracles for Resource Leaks Based on Finalizers

Garbage collectors automatically manage memory in an elegant way. However, finalization performs poorly in reclaiming finite system resources such as file descriptors and database connections, especially in Java. Resource leaks degrade application performance and can even result in system crashes. Unfortunately, it is hard to test resource leaks because they have no immediate symptoms. In this paper, we first investigate Java API classes for the usage of finalizers. Based on the common usage pattern of these finalizers, we then propose a lightweight, easy-to-use yet effective resource leak testing approach called Orbaf. Orbaf instruments resource classes to inspect whether the cleanup method of a resource object is called before its finalizer's execution. Test cases are also optionally instrumented to improve the incidence of object finalization. Orbaf can detect leaks of most system resources and does not require any formal specifications. It can be handily used by common software developers. Experiments show that Orbaf has high effectiveness and low overhead.
Bugalyze . com-Detecting Bugs Using Decompilation and Data Flow Analysis

Detecting bugs in programs is important to establish trusthworthy software. To achieve this, static analysis on source code is a common approach to discover bugs. However, source code is not always available, as in the case of a black box penetration test. Even if source code is available, it still remains prudent to test that compilation and link editing has not introduced new bugs into the software release. We propose a system, Bugwise, that performs bug detection on x86 binary-level programs. Our system employs static analysis and the novel application of decompilation to make that analysis tractable. We use data flow analysis as our static analysis which is able to detect a number of bug classes including use-after-frees, double frees, and buffer overflows using environment variables. We have also provided limited access to our system as a web service for the public to use. Our results have found tens of bugs and vulnerabilities in Debian Linux where we scanned the entire package repository of that Linux distribution. Bugwise shows that traditional static analysis can be applied to binaries through the use of decompilation techniques. Keywords—bug detection; static analysis
Stability of Discrete-Time Systems With Time-Varying Delays via a Novel Summation Inequality

This technical note is concerned with the stability analysis of discrete linear systems with time-varying delays. The novelty of the technical note comes from the consideration of a new inequality which is less conservative than the celebrated Jensen inequality employed in the context of discrete-time delay systems. This inequality is a discrete-time counterpart of the Wirtinger-based integral inequality that was recently employed for the improved analysis of continuous-tine systems with delays. However, differently from the continuous-time case, the proof of the new inequality is not based on the Wirtinger inequality. The method is also combined with an efficient representation of the improved reciprocally convex combination inequality in order to reduce the conservatism induced by the LMIs optimization setup. The effectiveness of the proposed result is illustrated by some classical examples from the literature.
FurIOS: A Web-Based Tool for Identification of Vibrionaceae Species Using the fur Gene

Gene based methods for identification of species from the Vibrionaceae family have been developed during the last decades to address the limitations of the commonly used 16S rRNA gene phylogeny. Recently, we found that the ferric-uptake regulator gene (fur) can be used as a single identification marker providing species discrimination, consistent with multi-locus sequencing analyses and whole genome phylogenies. To allow for broader and easy use of this marker, we have developed an online prediction service that allows the identification of Vibrionaceae species based on their fur-sequence. The input is a DNA sequence that can be uploaded on the web service; the output is a table containing the strain identifier, e-value, and percentage of identity for each of the matches with rows colored in green for hits with high probability of being the same species. The service is available on the web at: http://www.cbs. dtu.dk/services/furIOS-1.0/. The fur-sequences can be derived either from genome sequences or from PCR-amplification of the genomic region encoding the fur gene. We have used 191 strains identified as Vibrionaceae based on 16S rRNA gene sequence to test the PCR method and the web service on a large dataset. We were able to classify 171 of 191 strains at the species level and 20 strains remained unclassified. Furthermore, the fur phylogenetics and subsequent in silico DNA-DNA hybridization demonstrated that two strains (ATCC 33789 and ZS-139) previously identified as Vibrio splendidus are more closely related to V. tasmaniensis and V. cyclitrophicus, respectively. FurIOS is an easy-to-use online service that allows the identification of bacteria from the Vibrionaceae family at the species level using the fur gene as a single marker. Its simplistic design and straightforward pipeline makes it suitable for any research environment, from academia to industry.
Linear Discriminant Analysis versus Artificial Neural Network as Classifiers for Elbow Angular Position Recognition Purposes

The increasing popularity of an Artificial Neural Network for pattern recognition and the absence of comparative studies showing its real superiority over Discriminant Analysis Methods motivated the present study, aiming at comparing the accuracy levels achieved for a Feed-Forward Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and a Linear Discriminant Analysis (RLDA) applied to myoelectric signals to classify elbow angular positions. The results showed that there were no significant differences (t-student test p<0.05) between the average classification accuracies achieved for both methods even with the search of configuration parameters more appropriate to each situation. Both methods achieved average classification accuracies above 80% for a number of classes up to 4. However, 5 subjects achieved good results in a 5-class setup, which means a 20o shift between consecutive classes. Considering that for MLP there is an effort to define the architecture parameters and also learning parameters, its use is only justified if there is a need of generalization that cannot be achieved by the RLDA that does not require the predefinition of parameters, it is practical and fast, and performs very well.
Noncoherent amplify-and-forward cooperative OFDM in block fading channels

In this paper, we investigate noncoherent detection methods for amplify-and-forward cooperative OFDM systems in frequency-selective block fading channels. In particular, by exploiting the time-frequency relationship of OFDM, a noncoherent detector is proposed for phase-shift keying modulated signals. The proposed noncoherent detector uses only one OFDM block signal for data detection, and therefore is suitable for relatively fast time-varying environments. We show that the noncoherent detection can be cast as a quadratic maximization problem, which can be efficiently solved by the convex approximation technique, namely, semidefinite relaxation. Simulation results demonstrate that the noncoherent detector exhibits near-coherent performance and outperforms channel-estimation-aided detection methods.
Towards a classification of logical dependencies origins: a case study

Logical dependencies are implicit relationships established between software artifacts that have evolved together. Software engineering researchers have investigated this kind of dependency to assess fault-proneness, detect design issues, infer code decay, and predict likely changes in code. Despite the acknowledged relation between logical dependencies and software quality, the nature of the logical dependencies is unknown in the literature. Most authors hypothesize about their origins, but no empirical study has been conducted to investigate the real nature of these dependencies. In this paper, we investigated the origins of logical dependencies by means of a case study involving a Java FLOSS project. We mined the project repository, filtered out irrelevant data based on statistical analyses, and performed a manual inspection of the logical dependencies to identify their origins using information from the revision comments, code diffs, and informal interviews held with the developers of the analyzed project. Preliminary results showed that logical dependencies involved files that changed together for a series of different reasons, which ranged from changing software license to refactoring classes that belonged to the same semantic class.
Compact atomic magnetometer for global navigation (NAV-CAM)

Northrop Grumman Navigation Systems Division is developing an atom-based magnetometer technology that has the potential for providing a global position reference independent of GPS. The NAV-CAM sensor is a direct outgrowth of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Gyro under development by the same technical team. It will be the only known magnetic field sensor capable of providing all 3 axes of magnetic vector direction and magnitude simultaneously with a whole-field scalar measurement, all within a single multi-axis sensing element measuring 4 mm cube or smaller, essentially eliminating many of the problems encountered when using physically separate sensors or sensing elements. According to information presented by Ariyur et al at the 2010 American Control Conference [1], the anticipated accuracy of 10 pico-Tesla (pT) and precision of <;0.5 pT of the NAV-CAM sensor will enable magnetic determination of position with 20 meter accuracy and 1 meter resolution.
Interfacing with a speller using EOG glasses

Bio-signal based human computer interface (HCI) systems are a good alternative to standard touch based interfaces, offering subjects with motor impairments an alternative means of communication. This work investigates the use of electrooculography (EOG) to interface with a speller application. The use of a wireless EOG glasses currently on the market, known as JINS MEME, comprising only three dry electrodes, is compared to the standard two-pair EOG electrode configuration using wet electrodes. A blink accuracy of 97.63% and a saccade accuracy of 73.38% was obtained using a novel thresholding algorithm on the EOG data collected through the MEME glasses and the results were shown to be comparable to those obtained using wet surface electrodes. A real-time menu driven keyboard is also proposed and tested using the different eye movement recording techniques. In this case an average writing speed of 7.11 letters per minute, with a classification accuracy of 90.59% was obtained using signals recorded from the MEME glasses, showing that this new technology offers an ergonomic system that can easily be used in eye-based assistive applications.
A review of immobilized antimicrobial agents and methods for testing

AbstractAntimicrobial surfaces for food and medical applications have historically involved antimicrobial coatings that elute biocides for effective kill in solution or at surfaces. However, recent efforts have focused on immobilized antimicrobial agents (iAMA) to avoid toxicity, compatibility and reservoir limitations common to elutable agents. This review critically examines the assorted AMAs reported to have been immobilized with an emphasis around interpretation of antimicrobial testing as it pertains to discriminating between eluting and immobilized agents. Immobilization techniques and modes of antimicrobial action are also discussed.
Human-mouse comparative genomics: successes and failures to reveal functional regions of the human genome.

Deciphering the genetic code embedded within the human genome remains a significant challenge despite the human genome consortium's recent success at defining its linear sequence (Lander et al. 2001; Venter et al. 2001). While useful strategies exist to identify a large percentage of protein encoding regions, efforts to accurately define functional sequences in the remaining {approx}97 percent of the genome lag. Our primary interest has been to utilize the evolutionary relationship and the universal nature of genomic sequence information in vertebrates to reveal functional elements in the human genome. This has been achieved through the combined use of vertebrate comparative genomics to pinpoint highly conserved sequences as candidates for biological activity and transgenic mouse studies to address the functionality of defined human DNA fragments. Accordingly, we describe strategies and insights into functional sequences in the human genome through the use of comparative genomics coupled wit h functional studies in the mouse.
Elevation of Matrix Metalloproteinase-9 Level in Cerebrospinal Fluid of Tick-Borne Encephalitis Patients Is Associated with IgG Extravassation and Disease Severity

Background Tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), caused by tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV), is an infectious disease involving the central nervous system (CNS). The pathogenesis of CNS injury has not been clearly demonstrated. Matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9) and some cytokines, such as interleukin 6 (IL-6), may play important roles in the disruption of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the pathogenesis of TBE. Methods 72 cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples were collected from TBE patients in north eastern China. IgG levels in CSF and serum were compared and MMP-9 and IL-6 levels were evaluated by ELISA. The correlation between the elevated MMP-9 levels and IgG extravasation, disease severity, and neuroinflammation was analyzed. Results Increased concentration of MMP-9 was detected in some of the CSF samples, and the elevation was found to be closely related to CSF TBEV IgG extravasation and enhancement of IL-6 expression. Moreover, elevated levels of MMP-9 were found to be correlated with IL-6 enhancement. Four of the 72 patients, the ones who died, presented with high CSF MMP-9 levels. Conclusions In TBE patients, elevated CSF MMP-9 levels were associated with brain inflammatory reaction, disruption of the blood-brain barrier, and disease severity.
Performance analysis of a 2-tier caching proxy system for mobile RESTful services

With the increasing use of smartphones and mobile applications, users access the Internet from everywhere using mobile networks. Different applications require different connectivity types or amount of data and a slow network can lead to a drastic degradation in performance. These applications usually access data on servers which are also accessible via other technologies such as websites, web service consumption or RESTful services on non-mobile clients and to ensure the same service, a single application programming interface (API) is provided. When mobile users access these services, the same traditional techniques such as SOAP based web services or RESTful services are used but these are not always appropriate. Similarly, the use of current web caching methods do not provide the same performance gain when HTTP based RESTful services are called from mobile devices. This paper proposes a 2-tier caching proxy system, which can be easily deployed and used by producers and consumers of RESTful services. This system has been implemented and tested using a live system and performance evaluation showed that a performance gain of up to 59% can be achieved along with a bandwidth reduction of 70% for service providers and 86% for clients.
Cognitive Development Trajectories of Very Preterm and Typically Developing Children.

Cognitive impairment is common among children born very preterm (VPT), yet little is known about how this risk changes over time. To examine this issue, a regional cohort of 110 VPT (≤ 32 weeks gestation) and 113 full-term (FT) born children was prospectively assessed at ages 4, 6, 9, and 12 years using the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised and then Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, 4th ed. At all ages, VPT children obtained lower scores than their FT born peers (p < .001). Growth curve modeling revealed stable cognitive trajectories across both groups. Neonatal white matter abnormalities and family socioeconomic adversity additively predicted cognitive risk. Despite some intraindividual variability, cognitive functioning of typically developing and high-risk VPT children was stable and influenced by early neurological development and family rearing context.
RACS: A framework for Resource Aware Cloud computing

Porting of the enterprise IT infrastructure to the cloud based solutions has raised many issues particularly related to the cloud computing. Every enterprise wants to utilize reliable cloud infrastructure with a high level of performance by keeping cost as low as possible. We need a model to achieve this. In this paper, we introduce a framework, which increases the performance of the application and ensures high level of reliability during the scheduling of the process / application onto the cloud. It is a cloud scheduler module named as Resource Aware Cloud Scheduling (RACS) module, which helps the scheduler in making the scheduling decisions on the basis of different characteristics of cloud resources. These characteristics can be reliability, network latency, bandwidth, error rate, topology, proximity, processing power, fault tolerance, memory availability, library availability, environment compatibility, and monetary cost of the cloud services. RACS consists of multiple sub modules, which are responsible for their corresponding tasks.