Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Occupational cooking and risk of uveal melanoma: a meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND Many observational studies have assessed the possible association between occupational cooking and uveal melanoma risk, but reported results are controversial. Our goal was to evaluate the association between occupational cooking and uveal melanoma risk by conducting a meta-analysis of observational studies. METHODS PubMed, EMBASE, and Web of Science were searched through June 2012 to identify all eligible studies. The pooled odds ratio (OR) with its 95% confidence interval (95%CI) was used to evaluate this association. Either a fixed- or a random-effects model were used to calculate pooled ORs. RESULTS Five case-control studies involving a total of 1,199 cases and 6,927 controls were included in the meta-analysis. Overall, occupational cooking was associated with an increased risk of uveal melanoma (OR: 1.81, 95%CI 1.33-2.46, P < 0.001). Subgroup analysis by gender suggested occupational cooking was associated with increased risk of uveal melanoma in both men (OR: 2.16, 95%CI 1.06-4.40, P = 0.034) and women (OR: 1.92, 95%CI 1.19-3.10, P = 0.008). CONCLUSION This meta-analysis suggests that occupational cooking is associated with an increased risk of uveal melanoma in both men and women.
Aflatoxin B 1 damages peripheral blood lymphocytes in patients with primary hepatocellular carcinoma by inducing peroxidation

Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the effect of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) on lymphocytes in patients with primary hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and the underlying mechanism. Methods: Peripheral blood from 20 HCC patients (liver cancer group) and 10 healthy individuals (control group) were collected for isolating peripheral blood lymphocytes. The peripheral blood lymphocytes of each patient were cultured in vitro and divided into four subgroups; blank control subgroup and subgroups treated with AFB1 doses of 0.2 μg/mL (low toxicity), 2 μg/mL (mild toxicity), and 20 μg/mL (high toxicity). After incubation for 24 h, the level of the DNA damage marker, 8-hydroxyguanine (8-oxoG), was detected in the cells using flow cytometry and the activity of oxidative damage markers, hydroxy radical (OH-) and oxygen free radical, were detected using Fenton method and Xanthine oxidase method, respectively. Results: The content of 8-oxoG in liver cancer group was significantly higher than that in the control group (P < 0.05). It increased in an AFB1-dose-dependent manner in both groups. The same trend was also found with respect to the OHcontent. However, the total superoxide dismutase (T-SOD) activity decreased with increasing dose of AFB1. Partial correlation analysis showed that the content of 8-oxoG was negatively correlated with the T-SOD activity (r = 0.5539, P = 0.001), but positively correlated with the content of OH(r = 0.3812, P = 0.038). Conclusion: AFB1 causes more oxidative damage in lymphocytes of patients with HCC, by inducing peroxidation, than in lymphocytes of healthy individuals.
Comparison of Acute Daytime and Nocturnal Insulinization on Diurnal Glucose Homeostasis in NIDDM

OBJECTIVE The question of whether to use insulin in the evening or in the morning during combination therapy in patients with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) is controversial. We compared the acute effects of 12-h nocturnal or daytime insulin infusions on the 24-h glucose profile in 20 patients with NIDDM. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS NIDDM patients were 56 ± 2 (mean ± SE) years of age and had a body mass index of 29.6 ±1.1 kg/m2; fasting plasma glucose concentration of 12.2 ± 0.5 mM; and fasting C-peptide concentration of 0.9 ± 0.2 nM. Each patient was studied twice. On one occasion, the patient received a 12-h intravenous infusion of insulin (mean 1.5 ± 0.1 1U/h) during the day, and on the other occasion an identical dose of insulin was infused during the night. Blood glucose, insulin, c-peptide, and free fatty acid concentrations were determined for 24 h. RESULTS The mean 24-h free insulin concentrations were similar in both studies (150 ± 12 vs. 162 ± 12 pM, daytime versus nocturnal insulin infusion). The mean 24-h free fatty acid concentration was 18% lower in the nocturnal than in the daytime (309 ± 30 vs. 376 ± 30 μM, P < 0.001) insulin infusion study. The mean 24-h C-peptide concentration was less suppressed if insulin was infused overnight than during the day (1.3 ± 0.2 vs. 1.1 ± 0.2 nM, P < 0.01). The mean 24-h plasma glucose concentrations were identical in both studies (11.1 ±0.6 vs. 11.4 ± 0.7 mM, daytime versus nocturnal insulin infusion). We also searched for factors predicting the decrease in the blood glucose concentration during the nocturnal insulin infusion. The best predictors were a high initial blood glucose concentration at 2200 and a low fasting C-peptide concentration. These factors explained, independent of each other, 50% of the rate of decrease in the plasma glucose concentration. CONCLUSIONS Despite better suppression of lipolysis and less suppression of endogenous insulin secretion by nocturnal than daytime insulinization, the hypoglycemic effect of these two treatments is similar.
Coded caching under arbitrary popularity distributions

Caching plays an important role in reducing the backbone traffic when serving high-volume multimedia content. Recently, a new class of coded caching schemes have received significant interest because they can exploit coded multi-cast opportunities to further reduce backbone traffic. Without considering file popularity, prior works have characterized the fundamental performance limits of coded caching through a deterministic worst-case analysis. However, when heterogeneous file popularity is taken into account, there remain open questions regarding the fundamental limits of coded caching performance. In this work, for an arbitrary popularity distribution, we first derive a new information-theoretical lower bound on the expected transmission rate of any coded caching schemes. We then show that a simple coded-caching scheme attains an expected transmission rate that is at most a constant factor away from the lower bound (except a small additive term). Unlike other existing studies, the constant factor that we derived is independent of the popularity distribution.
Thermal Brownian motor

Recently, a thermal Brownian motor was introduced (Van den Broeck et al 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. 93 090601), for which an exact microscopic analysis is possible. The purpose of this paper is to review some further properties of this construction, and to discuss in particular specific issues including the relation with macroscopic response and the efficiency at maximum power.
Getting key players to work together and defending against diversion‐Oregon

In this report, the author, Executive Vice President of the American Cancer Society in Oregon, reviews the key factors in the crafting of the coalition leading to passage of a tobacco tax in Oregon. Mr. North also emphasizes the importance of institutionalizing the coalition after passage to provide the required leadership for future efforts. Cancer 1998;83:2713‐2716. © 1998 American Cancer Society.
incorporating lee-side cavity growth Instability modelling of drumlin formation

References html#ref-list-1 http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing. org/content/465/2109/2681.full. This article cites 24 articles Subject collections (61 articles) materials science  Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Email alerting service here the box at the top right-hand corner of the article or click Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article sign up in
Local and global navigational coordinate systems in desert ants

SUMMARY While foraging, the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis keeps track of its position with respect to its nest through a process of path integration (PI). Once it finds food, it can then follow a direct home vector to its nest. Furthermore, it remembers the coordinates of a food site, and uses these coordinates to return to the site. Previous studies suggest, however, that it does not associate any coordinates remembered from previous trips with familiar views such that it can produce a home vector when displaced to a familiar site. We ask here whether a desert ant uses any association between PI coordinates and familiar views to ensure consistent PI coordinates as it travels along a habitual route. We describe an experiment in which we manipulated the PI coordinates an ant has when reaching a distinctive point along a habitual route on the way to a feeder. The subsequent home vectors of the manipulated ants, when displaced from the food-site to a test ground, show that also when a route memory is evoked at a significant point on the way to a food site, C. fortis does not reset its PI coordinates to those it normally has at that point. We use this result to argue that local vector memories, which encode the metric properties of a segment of a habitual route, must be encoded in a route-based coordinate system that is separate from the nest-based global coordinates. We propose a model for PI-based guidance that can account for several puzzling observations, and that naturally produces the route-based coordinate system required for learning and following local vectors.
Partition-Based Caching in Large-Scale SIC-Enabled Wireless Networks

Existing designs for content dissemination do not fully explore and exploit potential caching and computation capabilities in advanced wireless networks. In this paper, we propose two partition-based caching designs, i.e., a coded caching design based on random linear network coding and an uncoded caching design. We consider the analysis and optimization of the two caching designs in a large-scale successive interference cancelation (SIC)-enabled wireless network. First, under each caching design, by utilizing tools from stochastic geometry, we derive a tractable expression for the successful transmission probability in the general file size regime. We also derive closed-form expressions in the small and large file size regimes, respectively. Then, under each caching design, we consider the successful transmission probability maximization in the general file size regime, which is an NP-hard problem. By exploring structural properties, we obtain a near optimal solution with 1/2 approximation guarantee and polynomial complexity. We also obtain closed-form asymptotically optimal solutions. The analysis and optimization results show the advantage of the coded caching design over the uncoded caching design, and reveal the impact of caching and SIC capabilities. Finally, we numerically show that the two proposed caching designs achieve significant performance gains over some baseline caching designs.
Public attitudes about health information technology, and its relationship to health care quality, costs, and privacy.

OBJECTIVE To understand Americans' attitudes concerning health information technology's (IT's) potential to improve health care and differences in those attitudes based on demographics and technological affinity. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING A random-digit-dial sample with known probability of selection for every household in the United States with a telephone, plus a supplemental sample of cell phone users. Telephone interviews were conducted from August 2009 through November 2009. STUDY DESIGN Data were analyzed to present univariate estimates of Americans' opinions of health IT, as well as multivariate logistic regressions to assess hypotheses relating individuals' characteristics to their opinions. Characteristics used in our model include age, race, ethnicity, gender, income, and affinity to technology. FINDINGS A large majority (78 percent) favor use of electronic medical records (EMRs); believe EMRs could improve care and reduce costs (78 percent and 59 percent, respectively); believe benefits of EMR use outweigh privacy risks (64 percent); and support health care information sharing among providers (72 percent). Regression analyses show more positive attitudes among those with higher incomes and greater comfort using electronic technologies. CONCLUSION The findings suggest that Americans believe that health IT adoption is an effective means to improve the quality and safety of health care.
Odometry from RGB-D Cameras for Autonomous Quadrocopters

This master’s thesis presents a robust, dense visual odometry method applicable to the stabilization of quadrocopters. In contrast to previous approaches using only sparse visual feature points in the image, the motion of the camera is estimated by aligning consecutive images based on the photo-consistency assumption using all image information. A novel RGB-D camera providing color and depth information is used. Robustness is achieved by embedding the motion estimation in a Bayesian framework. The involved probability distributions are modeled based on empirical data. In extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets the superior performance in terms of accuracy and speed in comparison to previous implementations is validated. Furthermore, experiments on a quadrocopter demonstrate the suitability of the approach for stable motion estimation in realtime control loops.
The brain of the beholder: honouring individual representational idiosyncrasies

In the early days of neuroimaging, brain function was investigated by averaging across voxels within a region, stimuli within a category and individuals within a group. These three forms of averaging discard important neuroscientific information. Recent studies have explored analyses that combine the evidence in better-motivated ways. Multivariate pattern analyses enable researchers to reveal representations in distributed population codes, honouring the unique information contributed by different voxels (or neurons). Condition-rich designs more richly sample the stimulus space and can treat each stimulus as a unique entity. Finally, each individual’s brain is unique and recent studies have found ways to model and analyse the interindividual representational variability. Here we review our field’s journey towards more sophisticated analyses that honour these important idiosyncrasies of brain representations. We describe an emerging framework for investigating individually unique pattern representations of particular stimuli in the brain. The framework models stimuli, responses and individuals multivariately and relates representations by means of representational dissimilarity matrices. Important components are computational models and multivariate descriptions of brain and behavioural responses. These recent developments promise a new paradigm for studying the individually unique brain at unprecedented levels of representational detail.
A rough set based minority class oriented learning algorithm for highly unbalanced data sets

Highly unbalanced data sets occur frequently in many practical applications and quite often the class of interest in such data sets is just a minority class. Like most standard machine learning methods, traditional rough sets based rule learning algorithms do not usually work well on highly unbalanced data sets. In this paper, we present a minority class rule learning algorithm for a highly unbalanced inconsistent data set where the class of interest is the minority one. The proposed algorithm pivots on discovery of the main features that discriminate the minority class from majority classes by finding the so called dominant minority subset. An illustrative example and a real application to customer churning prediction in Telecom are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
DNA methylation and cognitive aging

With ever-increasing elder population, the high incidence of age-related diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders has turned out to be a huge public concern. Especially the elders and their families dreadfully suffer from the learning, behavioral and cognitive impairments. The lack of effective therapies for such a horrible symptom makes a great demanding for biological mechanism study for cognitive aging. Epigenetics is an emerging field that broadens the dimensions of mammalian genome blueprint. It is, unlike genetics, not only inheritable but also reversible. Recent studies suggest that DNA methylation, one of major epigenetic mechanisms, plays a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of age-related neurodegenerations and cognitive defects. In this review, the evolving knowledge of age-related cognitive functions and the potential DNA methylation mechanism of cognitive aging are discussed. That indicates the impairment of DNA methylation may be a crucial but reversible mechanism of behavioral and cognitive related neurodegeneration. The methods to examine the dynamics of DNA methylation patterns at tissue and single cell level and at the representative scale as well as the whole genome single base resolution are also briefly discussed. Importantly, the challenges of DNA methylation mechanism of cognitive aging research are brought up, and the possible solutions to tackle these difficulties are put forward.
Grapheme-to-phoneme transcription rules for Spanish, with application to automatic speech recognition and synthesis

Large phonetic corpora including both standard and variant transcriptions are available for many languages. However, applications requiring the use of dynamic vocabularies make necessary to transcribe words not present in the dictionary. Also, additional alternative pronunciations to standard forms have shown to improve recognition accuracy. Therefore, new techniques to automatically generate variants in pronunciations have been investigated and proven to be very effective. However, rule-based systems still remain useful to generate standard transcriptions not previously available or to build new corpora, oriented chiefly to synthesis applications. The present paper describes a letter-to-phone conversion system for Spanish designed to supply transcriptions to the flexible vocabulary speech recogniser and to the synthesiser, both developed at CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni), Turin, Italy. Different sets of rules are designed for the two applications. Symbols inventories also differ, although the IPA alphabet is the reference system for both. Rules have been written in ANSI C and implemented on DOS and Windows 95 and can be selectively applied. Two speech corpora have been transcribed by means of these grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules: a) the SpeechDat Spanish corpus which includes 4444 words extracted from the phonetically balanced sentences of the database b) a corpus designed to train an automatic aligner to segment units for synthesis, composed of 303 sentences (3240 words) and 338 isolated words; rule-based transcriptions of this corpus were manually corrected. The phonetic forms obtained by the rules matched satisfactorily the reference transcriptions: most mistakes on the first corpus were caused by the presence of secondary stresses in the SpeechDat transcriptions, which were not assigned by the rules, whereas errors on the synthesis corpus appeared mostly on hiatuses and on words of foreign origin. Further developments oriented to recognition can imply addition of rules to account for Latin American pronunciations (especially Mexican, Argentinian and Paraguayan); for synthesis, on the other hand, rules to represent coarticulatory phenomena at word boundaries can be implemented, in order to transcribe whole sentences.
Robust Transceiver Design for Multiuser MIMO Downlink

In this paper, we consider robust joint linear precoder/receive filter design for multiuser multi-input multi-output (MIMO) downlink that minimizes the sum mean square error (SMSE) in the presence of imperfect channel state information (CSI). The base station is equipped with multiple transmit antennas, and each user terminal is equipped with multiple receive antennas. The CSI is assumed to be perturbed by estimation error. The proposed transceiver design is based on jointly minimizing a modified function of the MSE, taking into account the statistics of the estimation error under a total transmit power constraint. An alternating optimization algorithm, wherein the optimization is performed with respect to the transmit precoder and the receive filter in an alternating fashion, is proposed. The robustness of the proposed algorithm to imperfections in CSI is illustrated through simulations.
Structural Balance and Opinion Separation in Trust–Mistrust Social Networks

Structural balance theory has been developed in sociology and psychology to explain how interacting agents, for example, countries, political parties, opinionated individuals, with mixed trust and mistrust relationships evolve into polarized camps. Recent results have shown that structural balance is necessary for polarization in networks with fixed, strongly connected neighbor relationships when the opinion dynamics are described by DeGroot-type averaging rules. We develop this line of research in this paper in two steps. First, we consider fixed, not necessarily strongly connected, neighbor relationships. It is shown that if the network includes a strongly connected subnetwork containing mistrust, which influences the rest of the network, then no opinion clustering is possible when that subnetwork is not structurally balanced; all of the opinions become neutralized in the end. In contrast, it is shown that when that subnetwork is indeed structurally balanced, the agents of the subnetwork evolve into two polarized camps and the opinions of all other agents in the network spread between these two polarized opinions. Second, we consider time-varying neighbor relationships. We show that the opinion separation criteria carry over if the conditions for fixed graphs are extended to joint graphs. The results are developed for both discrete-time and continuous-time models.
Modeling and Simulation of Molecular Mechanism of Action of Dietary Polyphenols on the Inhibition of Anti-Apoptotic PI 3 K / AKT Pathway

In recent years, the role of dietary phenolic compounds in the regulation of cellular metabolism in normal and pathological conditions has become increasingly important in cancer research. In most cases, the molecular mechanism of action related to the anticarcinogenic effect of phenolic compounds has been studied in vitro and in animal models, but these studies are still not complete. It is precisely here where in silico approaches can be an invaluable tool for complementing in vitro and in vivo research. In this paper, we adopt a tuple space-based modeling and simulation approach, and show how it can be applied to the simulation of complex interaction patterns of intracellular signaling pathways. Specifically, we are working to explore and to understand the molecular mechanism of action of dietary phenolic compounds on the inhibition of the PI3K/AKT anti-apoptotic pathway. As a first approximation, using the tuple spacesbased in silico approach, we model and simulate the anti-apoptotic PI3K/AKT pathway in the absence and presence of phenolic compounds, in order to determine the effectiveness of our platform, to employ it in future prediction of experimentally non visualized interactions between the pathway components and phenolic compounds.