Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intergenerational effect of weight gain in childhood on offspring birthweight

Background Some studies suggest that weight gain in childhood may increase the risk of chronic diseases in adulthood, and recent studies have noticed that the timing of weight gain may be related to its long-term consequence. However, weight gain in childhood has clear short-term benefits, and the literature on the pro and cons of weight gain in childhood is limited. Methods In 1982, all 5914 hospital births (over 99% of all deliveries) occurring in Pelotas, Southern Brazil, were identified and studied prospectively on several occasions. In 2004–05, we attempted to trace the whole cohort and information on offspring birthweight was collected. Conditional growth modelling was used to assess the association between offspring birthweight and weight gain from birth to 20 months, and from 20 to 42 months. Results In 2004–05, we interviewed 4297 subjects, with a follow-up rate of 77.4%. This manuscript includes data from 848 women who had already delivered a child and 525 men who were fathers at the mean age of 23 years. Maternal birthweight, weight and length for age Z-score at 20 months of age were positively associated with next-generation birthweight, whereas paternal variables were not related to the outcome. Conditional growth modelling analyses showed that women whose weight gain in the first 20 months of life was faster than predicted had heavier babies, whereas paternal weight gain was not associated. The association was strongest for mothers whose birthweight for gestational age was in the lowest tertile. Conclusion Maternal, but not paternal birthweight and weight gain in early childhood are positively associated with next-generation birthweight.
A haplotype of cyclooxygenase-2 gene is associated with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

BACKGROUND Cyclooxygenase-2, a key regulatory enzyme in the synthesis of the antifibrotic agent prostaglandin E2, is downregulated in lung tissue from patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between COX2.3050 (G --> C), COX2.8473 (C --> T) and COX2.926 (G --> C) single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) and the susceptibility to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and the progression of the disease. DESIGN Genetic polymorphisms were analyzed in 121 out of 225 available control subjects and in all of 174 patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis by real time polymerase chain reaction. Logistic regression analysis of covariance and chi-squares test were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS While analysis of disease development did not find any significant association with single SNP genotype, a haplotype analysis revealed a strong association between the disease development and one haplotype [GC] at loci COX2.3050 and COX2.8473, and suggested a recessive genetic effect of this haplotype. Further analysis concluded that subjects having two copies of [GC] haplotype, or equivalently (GG/CC) genotype at the two SNPs, had an increased risk after adjusting for age and sex. Due to the interaction, this elevated risk increased slowly with age, and the estimated odds ratio (OR) decreased with age from OR = 1.4 at age 30 to OR = 1 at age 74 and OR = 0.96 at age SO. The OR was significantly greater than 1 up to age 66, and not significant for age older than 66. Therefore, the recessive effect of [GC] haplotype increased the risk of IPF of subjects younger than 66 years, but its effect diminished for seniors older than 66. One hundred and forty-nine patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis were followed up for 33.7 +/- 2.1 months. Further analysis of disease progressions, defined by the changes in pulmonary function tests, did not reveal any association with either SNP genotypes or haplotypes. CONCLUSIONS The carriage of double homozygote (GG/CC) at the SNP loci of COX2.3050 and COX2.8473 polymorphisms may increase the susceptibility to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, by approximately 1.4 folds at age 30 and by a smaller fold greater than 1 up to age 66 years, but not the progression of the disease. These findings may help to improve our understanding of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis pathogenesis and may lead to the development of new therapeutic strategies.
Model-Based Design Structure Matrix: Deriving a DSM from an Object-Process Model

We investigate potential benefits of employing Design Structure Matrix (DSM) in the context of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) for the purposes of analyzing and improving the design of a product-project ensemble. Focusing on process DSM, we present an algorithm for bidirectional transformation frame between a product-project system model and its corresponding Model-Based DSM (MDSM). Using Object-Process Methodology (OPM) as the underlying modeling language, we examine and characterize useful and insightful relationships between the system model and its MDSM. An unmanned aerial vehicle case study demonstrates the semantics of and analogy between various types of relationships as they are reflected in both the OPM system model and the MDSM derived from it. Finally, we conclude with further research direction on showing how clustering of DSM processes can be reflected back as an improvement of the OPM model.
A Simple Method for Computing Far-Field Sound in Aeroacoustic Computations

When computing aerodynamic noise from moderate Mach number flows, compressible flow equations are often solved numerically in a finite region of space containing the noise sources and the near acoustic field [1]. However, whether this is done by direct numerical simulation or with some modeling approximations (e.g., large-eddy simulation or unsteady Reynolds averaging), such simulations typically involve a range of length and time scales and are therefore expensive. To cope with this, the computational domain is often truncated in an acoustic region that is not too far beyond the unsteady flow. The sound at greater distances is then computed by solving relatively simple acoustic equations. Several numerical methods for extending the solution in this fashion are reviewed by Shih et al. [2]. One approach is to use wave equation solutions formulated as surface integrals, so-called Kirchhoff or Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings methods [3–5]. The integral evaluation operations scale as O(N2) per “measurement. ” So, if the acoustic field is needed at a series ofN times in anN3 volume, the total scaling isO(N6). Providing this data is at times impractical due to computer memory limitations; and, though binning techniques are available, application is complicated by the fact that data are required at retarded times. When extensive sound field data are needed it is at times better to solve a wave equation (or similar set of acoustic equations) into the far field using direct methods. After an initial transient, this approach scales like O(N4) (three spatial dimensions plus time) for O(N4) measurements. 1 The implementation of the direct solver is simpler because the data are now only needed sequentially. Existing direct methods are formulated either as an
Optical Counterparts of Ultraluminous X-Ray Sources

We present the optical identification and characterization of counterparts of four objects previously cataloged as ultraluminous X-ray (ULX) sources. The objects were selected from the E. Colbert & A. Ptak catalog. The optical counterparts are identified as pointlike objects with magnitudes in the range of ~17-19. The optical spectra of three of the sources (IXO 32, 37, and 40) show the presence of emission lines typical of quasars. The position of these lines allows a precise estimation of their redshifts (2.769, 0.567, and 0.789 for IXO 32, 37, and 40, respectively). The fourth X-ray source, IXO 35, is associated with a red object that has a spectrum typical of an M star in our Galaxy. These identifications are useful for building clean samples of ULX sources, selecting suitable targets for future observations, and performing statistical studies on the different populations of X-ray sources.
Safety, immunogenicity, and surrogate markers of clinical efficacy for modified vaccinia Ankara as a smallpox vaccine in HIV-infected subjects.

BACKGROUND Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected persons are at higher risk for serious complications associated with traditional smallpox vaccines. Alternative smallpox vaccines with an improved safety profile would address this unmet medical need. METHODS The safety and immunogenicity of modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) was assessed in 91 HIV-infected adult subjects (CD4(+) T-cell counts, ≥350 cells/mm(3)) and 60 uninfected volunteers. The primary objectives were to evaluate the safety of MVA and immunogenicity in HIV-infected and uninfected subjects. As a measure of the potential efficacy of MVA, the ability to boost the memory response in people previously vaccinated against smallpox was evaluated by the inclusion of vaccinia-experienced HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected subjects. RESULTS MVA was well tolerated and immunogenic in all subjects. Antibody responses were comparable between uninfected and HIV-infected populations, with only 1 significantly lower total antibody titer at 2 weeks after the second vaccination, while no significant differences were observed for neutralizing antibodies. MVA rapidly boosted the antibody responses in vaccinia-experienced subjects, supporting the efficacy of MVA against variola. CONCLUSIONS MVA is a promising candidate as a safer smallpox vaccine, even for immunocompromised individuals, a group for whom current smallpox vaccines have an unacceptable safety profile.
The role of probiotics and natural bioactive compounds in modulation of the common molecular pathways in pathogenesis of atherosclerosis and cancer

Atherosclerosis and cancer are ranked among the most serious health problems in human medicine. Various predictive and etiological factors, biomarkers and molecular pathways of disease development and progression common to atherosclerosis and cancer suggest that the two most common diseases in worldwide dimension are far more closely aligned than previously believed. It is hypothesized that atherosclerosis and cancer are variants of a similar disease process. Shared disease progression in atherosclerosis and cancer is the emergence of similar novel approaches to therapy. On previous knowledge, it may be hypothesized that not only common approaches to therapy but also preventive strategies could be efficacious in both diseases. The results of in vitro and in vivo animal experiments, clinical and epidemiological studies and also the results of our experiments using animal experimental models of atherosclerosis and carcinogenesis indicate that probiotics, prebiotics, plants and their extracts and poly-unsaturated fatty acids could be effectively used in prevention of both atherosclerosis and colorectal cancer and decrease the disease risk. Future research should answer the question whether probiotic microorganisms and natural bioactive substances could effectively influence the molecular mechanisms in pathogenesis of atherosclerosis and cancer.
Mechanisms of nutritional and hormonal regulation of lipogenesis

Fat build‐up is determined by the balance between lipogenesis and lipolysis/fatty acid oxidation. In the past few years, our understanding of the nutritional, hormonal and particularly transcriptional regulation of lipogenesis has expanded greatly. Lipogenesis is stimulated by a high carbohydrate diet, whereas it is inhibited by polyunsaturated fatty acids and by fasting. These effects are partly mediated by hormones, which inhibit (growth hormone, leptin) or stimulate (insulin) lipogenesis. Recent research has established that sterol regulatory element binding protein‐1 is a critical intermediate in the pro‐ or anti‐lipogenic action of several hormones and nutrients. Another transcription factor implicated in lipogenesis is the peroxisome proliferator activated receptor γ. Both transcription factors are attractive targets for pharmaceutical intervention of disorders such as hypertriglyceridemia and obesity.
VIDEO MINING VIDEO MINING

This chapter discusses a framework for segmenting and categorizing videos. Instead of using a direct method of content matching, we exploit the semantic structure of the videos and employ domain knowledge. There are general rules that television and movie directors often follow when presenting their programs. In this framework, these rules are utilized to develop a systematic method for categorization that corresponds to human perception. Extensive experimentation was performed on a variety of video genres and the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
On Money and Credit in Europe: The Selected Essays of Martin M. G. Fase

Part 1 Aggregate money demand: Price and income expectations and the demand for money, some quarterly evidence for the Netherlands, 1952-1971 the demand for money in the EU countries the demand for money in the Netherlands revisited the demand for money in the Netherlands and the other EC countries in search for stability - an empirical appraisal of the demand for money in the G7 and EC countries wealth and the demand for money - empirical evidence for the Netherlands and Belgium money demand within EMU - an analysis with the divisa measure divisa aggregates and the demand for money in core EMU. Part 2 Monetary desegregation - asset demand, bank credit, notes and coins: the demand for financial assets - time series evidence for the Netherlands: 1963-1975 the demand for commercial bank loans and the lending rate the way we pay with money the demand for large bank-notes forecasting the demand for bank-notes - some empirical results for the Netherlands forecasting the need for coins - a case study for the Netherlands.
Functional Affordance Archetypes: a New Perspective for Examining the Impact of IT Use on Desirable Outcomes

IT usage is generally viewed as a key indicator of adoption success and a prerequisite for deriving benefits. Yet, while IT usage can provide a good measure of adoption success, it does not necessarily yield desirable outcomes, i.e., the individual benefits expected by its designers. This paper investigates how IT use leads to its desirable outcomes based on a functional affordance (FA) perspective (Markus and Silver 2008). Specifically, we define perceived functional affordances (PFA) as an IT’s afforded possibilities for action as perceived by an individual user. Further, by following Eisenhardt’s (1989) approach of theory building from multiple cases, we develop a PFA typology and introduce four PFA archetypes: i.e. Facilitator, Guardian Angel, Imposer, and Inhibitor. Subsequently, we intend to use these archetypes to explain under what conditions the PFA of an e-health system can be transformed into usage that is conducive to the attainment of its desirable outcomes.
A COOPERATION SCENARIO IN THE MARINE ENVIRONMENT: FIRST OUTLOOK

Abstract Marine environments offer suggestive scenarios for Automatic control and Cooperation strategies to be applied. The present paper focus on a particular one: Two ships towing together an off-shore oil retaining boom. Basic dynamical equations are presented for the combined displacement of both ships plus the boom. Computer simulation of basic manoeuvres works out the basic control implications of the problem and suggests cooperation among the ships as a more reliable technique to fulfil ships goals and minimize boom strain.
Finite volumes and nonlinear diffusion equations

On demontre la convergence d'un schema de volumes finis pour un probleme de Stefan, defini par l'equation de diffusion non lineaire u t - Δφ(u) = v avec une condition aux limites de Neumann homogene et une condition initiale bornee. La demonstration de la convergence s'appuie sur des estimations a priori dans L∞ et sur l'application du theoreme de Kolmogorov sur la compacite relative d'ensembles de L 2 .
Digitally-Assisted Analog Front-end for Biomedical Sensors

Biomedical sensors are used to measure a myriad of biopotential signals including electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (EKG), electromyogram (EMG), and neural field potential (NFP) signals [1], [2], [3]. Most of the useful information in these signals resides in the frequency range of 0.5 Hz to 1 kHz, allowing ultralow power circuits to be used when processing them. This is critical for systems that are implanted, since energy is extremely scarce, and the lifetime of the device must be on the order of 10 years. Unfortunately, these signals are often as small as 10 μVs, and their low frequency location make them vulnerable to aggressors such as DC offset, powerline noise, and flicker noise. DC offset can result from charge accumulation at the interface between the metal electrodes and the skin, and also from amplifier offsets caused by random mismatches. While chopper stabilization has proved effective at mitigating the effects of amplifier DC offset and flicker noise, electrode DC offset cannot be removed through chopping and must be high-pass filtered at the front end of the system to prevent saturation [1], [2], [3]. Powerline noise, typically at 50 or 60 Hz, is mostly a common-mode signal that requires adequate common-mode rejection. However, if there are mismatches or inductive loops in the electrodes, these aggressors can become differential-mode signals, corrupting the desired signal, and potentially saturating the system. In closed-loop deep brain stimulation systems, another aggressor arises from stimulation artifacts [4]. In that case, the NFPs can be much smaller than stimulation artifacts placing stringent requirements on the dynamic range of the system and potentially leading to signal corruption.
Data protection: Combining fragmentation, encryption, and dispersion

In this paper, we first present a general description of what is a fragmentation system including a number of high level requirements. Then, we focus on fragmentation of two kinds of data. First, a bitmap image is split in two parts a public one and a private one. We describe two processes and address the question of performance. Then, we survey works on fragmentation of text: in a brute force manner then considering data stored in a structured database.
Fast Information Retrieval and Social Network Mining via Cosine Similarity Upper Bound

Similarity search is a key function for many applications including databases, pattern recognition and recommendation systems to name a few. In this paper, we first propose ε-query, a similarity search based on the popular cosine similarity for information retrieval and social network analysis. In contrast to traditional similarity search ε-query returns results whose cosine similarities with the query are larger than a threshold ε. The major contribution of this paper is an efficient ε-query processing algorithm by using an upper bound for binary data. Our evaluation using two of the largest publicly available real datasets, ClueWeb09 and Twitter, demonstrated that the proposed method could achieve several orders of magnitude speedup in comparison with the traditional approach. Last but not least, we applied the proposed method for information retrieval from ClueWeb and finding community structures from Twitter. The outcome further proved the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Mining knowledge using Decision Tree Algorithm

— Industry is experiencing more and more competitions in recent years. The battle is over their most valuable customers. With massive industry deregulation across the world, each customer is facing an ever-growing number of choices in telecommunications and financial services. As a result, an increasing number of customers are switching from one service provider to another. This phenomenon is called customer “churning” or “attrition,” which is a major problem for these companies and makes it hard for them to stay profitable. The data sets are often cost sensitive and unbalanced. If we predict a valuable customer who will be an attritor as loyal, the cost is usually higher than the case when we classify a loyal customer as an attritor. Similarly, in direct marketing, it costs more to classify a willing customer as a reluctant one. Such information is usually given by a cost matrix, where the objective is to minimize the total cost. In addition, a CRM data set is often unbalanced; the most valuable customers who actually churn can be only a small fraction of the customers who stay. The main focus is on the output of decision tree algorithms as the input to post processing algorithms. This algorithm relies on not only a prediction, but also a probability estimation of the classification, such as the probability of being loyal. Such information is available from decision trees.
Genetic Programming for Guiding Branch and Bound Search

We propose how Genetic Programming (GP) can be used for developing, in real time, problem-specific heuristics for Branch and Bound (B&B) search. A GP run, embedded into the B&B process, exploits the characteristics of the particular problem being solved, evolving a problem-specific heuristic expression. The evolved heuristic replaces the default one for the rest of the B&B search. The application of our method to node selection for B&B based Mixed Integer Programming is illustrated by incorporating the GP node selection heuristic generator into a B&B MIP solver. The hybrid system compares well with the unmodified solver utilizing DFS, BFS, or even the advanced Best Projection heuristic when confronted with hard MIP problems from the MIPLIB3 benchmarking suite.
Current gain collapse in HBTs analysed by transient interferometric mapping method

Thermal distribution during a current gain collapse event is investigated in multi-finger InGaP/GaAs HBTs using the transient interferometric mapping method. The onset of the collapse is observed at time of about 1ms in devices with a low emitter ballasting resistance RE, while for HBTs with a high RE, the current is distributed equally over the fingers. 3D thermal simulation supports the results and allows an estimation of temperature at which the collapse occurs.
Discovering Cache Partitioning Optimizations for the K Computer

The processor architecture available on the K computer (SPARC64 VIIIfx) features an hardware cache partitioning mechanism called sector cache. This facility enables software to split the memory cache in two independent sectors: data loads in one sector cannot trigger the eviction of data in the second one. Moreover, software is responsible for data placement in each sector by issuing special instructions tagging the various memory loads performed during execution. The implementation details of this cache partitioning mechanism also enable fast redistribution of the cache during an application’s runtime, without any cost, allowing any optimization using the sector cache to be applied multiple times, with different setups, in the event of phase changes. Unfortunately, in its current state, the compilers provided on the K Computer do not implement any automatic optimization using this cache facility. In the contrary, the only high-level interface to this mechanism is a set of directive to instruct the compiler to generate tagging instructions over a code region. Thus, only application programmers with intricate knowledge of both the memory access patterns of their code and the K Computer architecture can take advantage of this facility. To address this issue and to study new optimization schemes using cache partitioning, we present in this paper a framework using binary instrumentation and reuse distance analysis to discover the locality of important data structures in an application and to suggest appropriate data distribution schemes for the sector cache. These optimizations are then translated into calls to the source-level API provided by the K Computer compilers. We applied our framework to analyze and optimize a set of HPC benchmarking applications and demonstrate significant performance improvements.