Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
New mobile payment protocol: Mobile pay center protocol 4 (MPCP4) by using new key agreement protocol: VAC2

Growing of wireless networks and popularity of mobile devices represents an incredible opportunity to empower them as a payment device. Unfortunately, some problems hindering the widespread acceptance of mobile payment for example: accountability properties, privacy protection, limitation of wireless networks and mobile devices. Recently, many public-key cryptography protocols have been presented for mobile payment. However, limited capabilities of mobile devices and wireless networks make these protocols unsuitable for mobile network. Moreover, these protocols were designed to preserve traditional flow of payment data, which is vulnerable to attack and increase the user's risk. In this paper, we propose a private mobile payment protocol which is based on client centric model and works by employing symmetric key operations. The proposed mobile payment protocol not only minimizes the computational operations and communications between the engaging parties, but also achieves a completely privacy protection for the payer, avoid repudiating transaction from each of them and decrease risk of replay attacks. In according to limitation of wireless networks and mobile devices, this paper recommends VAC2 key agreement protocol for generating shared session key between n parties that have fewer problems than Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol. It is used instead of Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol that works only for two parties.
A digital signal processor implementation of silent/electrolaryngeal speech enhancement based on real-time statistical voice conversion

In this paper, we present a digital signal processor (DSP) implementation of real-time statistical voice conversion (VC) for silent speech enhancement and electrolaryngeal speech enhancement. As a silent speech interface, we focus on nonaudible murmur (NAM), which can be used in situations where audible speech is not acceptable. Electrolaryngeal speech is one of the typical types of alaryngeal speech produced by an alternative speaking method for laryngectomees. However, the sound quality of NAM and electrolaryngeal speech suffers from lack of naturalness. VC has proven to be one of the promising approaches to address this problem, and it has been successfully implemented on devices with sufficient computational resources. An implementation on devices that are highly portable but have limited computational resources would greatly contribute to its practical use. In this paper we further implement real-time VC on a DSP. To implement the two speech enhancement systems based on real-time VC, one from NAM to a whispered voice and the other from electrolaryngeal speech to a natural voice, we propose several methods for reducing computational cost while preserving conversion accuracy. We conduct experimental evaluations and show that real-time VC is capable of running on a DSP with little degradation. Index Terms: statistical voice conversion, real-time processing, reduction of computational cost, DSP, non-audible murmur, electrolaryngeal speech
Gem- And Co-Gem-Free Graphs Have Bounded Clique-Width

The P4 is the induced path of four vertices. The gem consists of a P4 with an additional universal vertex being completely adjacent to the P4, and the co-gem is its complement graph. Gem- and co-gem-free graphs generalize the popular class of cographs (i. e. P4-free graphs). The tree structure and algebraic generation of cographs has been crucial for several concepts of graph decomposition such as modular and homogeneous decomposition. Moreover, it is fundamental for the recently introduced concept of clique-width of graphs which extends the famous concept of treewidth. It is well-known that the cographs are exactly those graphs of clique-width at most 2. In this paper, we show that the clique-width of gem- and co-gem-free graphs is at most 16.
A 3.9–4.5GHz class-C VCO with accurate current injection based on capacitive feedback

A class-C VCO with dual negative feedback architecture is proposed to break the trade-off between amplitude stability of oscillation and bias current flicker noise. Inherent dynamic biasing of this architecture maximizes available voltage swing and provides robust current control without any additional circuits. To inject current exactly at the peak of oscillation, a capacitive feedback technique is proposed which improves phase noise performance further by compensating current injection delay caused due to cross-coupled pair parasitics. This VCO has been implemented in 130nm BiCMOS technology using BJT based cross-coupled pair. It exhibits phase noise performance of −131dBc/Hz @ 1MHz offset when running at 3.9GHz. It exhibits a 14% tuning range, and presents an FoM of 184dBc/Hz.
Drawing Clustered Bipartite Graphs in Multi-circular Style

Bipartite graphs are often used to illustrate relationships between two sets of data, such as web pages and visitors. At the same time, information is often organized hierarchically, for example, web pages are divided into directories by their contents. The hierarchical structures are useful for analyzing information. Graphs with both a bipartite structure and a hierarchical structure are called “clustered bipartite graphs. ” A new clustered bipartite graphs visualization technique was developed for representing both bipartite and hierarchical structures simultaneously. In this technique, nodes in one set of the bipartite graph, which are leaves of a tree, are arranged in hierarchical multi-circular style. Then, nodes in the other set of the bipartite graph are arranged by the force-directed method. The technique enables step-by-step exploration for large-scale bipartite graphs.
Depressive disorders in caregivers of dementia patients: A systematic review

Although depressive symptomatology has been well studied in caregivers of patients with dementia, depressive disorders have been examined much less. We conducted a systematic literature search in major bibliographical databases (Medline, Psychinfo, Dissertation Abstracts), and included studies examining caregivers of dementia patients that reported the prevalence of major depressive disorder, according to diagnostic criteria as assessed with a standardized psychiatric diagnostic interview. Ten studies with a total of 790 caregivers were identified (sample sizes: 22–147). In only one of the studies, a representative community sample was used. A total of 176 subjects (22.3%) had a depressive disorder (prevalence range from 0.15–0.32). In the three studies reporting differential prevalence rates for men and women somewhat smaller prevalence rates were found for men than for women. In six studies caregivers were compared to a (mostly matched) control group. The relative risks of having a depressive disorder in caregivers ranged from 2.80–38.68 (all RR's were significant). In the three prospective studies relatively high incidence rates were found (0.48). This study made it clear that prevalence and incidence of depressive disorders are increased in caregivers of dementia patients. More research is clearly needed in this population.
Neuro-Intensive Treatment Targeting Intracranial Hypertension Improves Outcome in Severe Bacterial Meningitis: An Intervention-Control Study

Objective To evaluate the efficacy of early intracranial pressure (ICP)-targeted treatment, compared to standard intensive care, in adults with community acquired acute bacterial meningitis (ABM) and severely impaired consciousness. Design A prospectively designed intervention-control comparison study of adult cases from September 2004 to January 2012. Patients Included patients were confirmed ABM-cases, aged 16–75 years, with severely impaired mental status on admission. Fifty-two patients, given ICP-targeted treatment at the neuro-intensive care unit, and 53 control cases, treated with conventional intensive care, were included. All the patients received intensive care with mechanical ventilation, sedation, antibiotics and corticosteroids according to current guidelines. Additional ICP-treatment in the intervention group included cerebrospinal fluid drainage using external ventricular catheters (n = 48), osmotherapy (n = 21), hyperventilation (n = 13), external cooling (n = 9), gram-doses of methylprednisolone (n = 3) and deep barbiturate sedation (n = 2) aiming at ICP <20 mmHg and a cerebral perfusion pressure of >50 mmHg. Measurements The primary endpoint was mortality at two months and secondary endpoint was Glasgow outcome score and hearing ability at follow-up at 2–6 months. Outcomes The mortality was significantly lower in the intervention group compared to controls, 5/52 (10%) versus 16/53 (30%; relative risk reduction 68%; p<0.05). Furthermore, only 17 patients (32%) in the control group fully recovered compared to 28 (54%) in the intervention group (relative risk reduction 40%; p<0.05). Conclusions Early neuro-intensive care using ICP-targeted therapy, mainly cerebrospinal fluid drainage, reduces mortality and improves the overall outcome in adult patients with ABM and severely impaired mental status on admission.
ReCloud: semantics-based word cloud visualization of user reviews

User reviews, like those found on Yelp and Amazon, have become an important reference for decision making in daily life, for example, in dining, shopping and entertainment. However, large amounts of available reviews make the reading process tedious. Existing word cloud visualizations attempt to provide an overview. However their randomized layouts do not reveal content relationships to users. In this paper, we present ReCloud, a word cloud visualization of user reviews that arranges semantically related words as spatially proximal. We use a natural language processing technique called grammatical dependency parsing to create a semantic graph of review contents. Then, we apply a force-directed layout to the semantic graph, which generates a clustered layout of words by minimizing an energy model. Thus, ReCloud can provide users with more insight about the semantics and context of the review content. We also conducted an experiment to compare the efficiency of our method with two alternative review reading techniques: random layout word cloud and normal text-based reviews. The results showed that the proposed technique improves user performance and experience of understanding a large number of reviews.
Risk of Intestinal Parasitic Infections in People with Different Exposures to Wastewater and Fecal Sludge in Kampala, Uganda: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background There are health risks associated with wastewater and fecal sludge management and use, but little is known about the magnitude, particularly in rapidly growing urban settings of low- and middle-income countries. We assessed the point-prevalence and risk factors of intestinal parasite infections in people with different exposures to wastewater and fecal sludge in Kampala, Uganda. Methodology A cross-sectional survey was carried out in September and October 2013, enrolling 915 adults from five distinct population groups: workers maintaining wastewater facilities; workers managing fecal sludge; urban farmers; slum dwellers at risk of flooding; and slum dwellers without risk of flooding. Stool samples were subjected to the Kato-Katz method and a formalin-ether concentration technique for the diagnosis of helminth and intestinal protozoa infections. A questionnaire was administered to determine self-reported signs and symptoms, and risk factors for intestinal parasite infections. Univariate and multivariate analyses, adjusted for sex, age, education, socioeconomic status, water, sanitation, and hygiene behaviors, were conducted to estimate the risk of infection with intestinal parasites and self-reported health outcomes, stratified by population group. Principal Findings The highest point-prevalence of intestinal parasite infections was found in urban farmers (75.9%), whereas lowest point-prevalence was found in workers managing fecal sludge (35.8%). Hookworm was the predominant helminth species (27.8%). In urban farmers, the prevalence of Trichuris trichiura, Schistosoma mansoni, Ascaris lumbricoides, and Entamoeba histolytica/E. dispar was 15% and above. For all investigated parasites, we found significantly higher odds of infection among urban farmers compared to the other groups (adjusted odds ratios ranging between 1.6 and 12.9). In general, female participants had significantly lower odds of infection with soil-transmitted helminths and S. mansoni compared to males. Higher educational attainment was negatively associated with the risk of intestinal protozoa infections, while socioeconomic status did not emerge as a significant risk factor for any tested health outcome. Conclusions/Significance Urban farmers are particularly vulnerable to infections with soil-transmitted helminths, S. mansoni, and intestinal protozoa. Hence, our findings call for public health protection measures for urban farmers and marginalized communities, going hand-in-hand with integrated sanitation safety planning at city level.
Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 as a marker of cardiovascular response in professional mountain ultra-marathon runners

*Corresponding author: Giovanni Lombardi, PhD, Laboratory of Experimental Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Galeazzi, 20161 Milan, Italy, Phone/Fax: 00390266214068, E-mail: giovanni.lombardi@grupposandonato.it Gianluca Vernillo: Department of Biomedical Sciences for Health, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy; CeRiSM, Research Centre “Sport, Mountain and Health”, Università degli Studi di Verona, Rovereto, Italy; and Human Performance Laboratory, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada Veronica Sansoni and Silvia Perego: Laboratory of Experimental Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Galeazzi, Milan, Italy Andrea Barbuti: Department of Biosciences, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy; and Interuniversity Centre for Molecular Medicine and Applied Biophysics (CIMMBA), Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy Giampiero Merati: Department of Biomedical Sciences for Health, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy; and IRCCS Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi, Milan, Italy Federico Schena: CeRiSM, Research Centre “Sport, Mountain and Health”, Università degli Studi di Verona, Rovereto, Italy; and Deptartment of Neurological and Movement Sciences, Università degli Studi di Verona, Verona, Italy Giuseppe Banfi: Laboratory of Experimental Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Galeazzi, Milan, Italy; and Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy Antonio La Torre: Department of Biomedical Sciences for Health, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy Letter to the Editor
Screening for coeliac disease—has the time come for mass screening?

Several recent studies, in particular the Italian SIGEP study, have demonstrated that mass screening for coeliac disease using gliadin and endomysial antibody testing is now a realistic possibility. If mass screening is to receive serious consideration then it must be shown to be (i) effective, (ii) acceptable, and (iii) worthwhile (cost‐effective). At present there is insufficient evidence as to the health benefits from treating screen‐detected disease and as to the size of the risks associated with having undetected coeliac disease. It is also unclear whether truly asymptomatic screen‐detected coeliacs will accept long‐term dietary restriction. To answer these questions randomized trials of screening are needed. On current evidence, mass screening cannot be justified. Efficient case‐finding may prove as effective and more acceptable.
What are the Driving Factors Behind the Rise of Spreads and CDSs of Euro-area Sovereign Bonds? A FAVAR Model for Greece and Ireland

This paper examines the dynamics of selected euro-area sovereign bonds by employing a factor augmenting vector autoregressive (FAVAR) model for the first time in the literature. This methodology identifies the underlying transmission mechanisms of several factors, and in particular, market liquidity and credit risk. Departing from the classical vector autoregressive (VAR) models allows us to relax limitations regarding the choice of variables that could drive spreads and CDS of euro-area sovereign debts. The results show that liquidity, credit risk and flight to quality drive both spreads and CDS of five years maturity over swaps for Greece and Ireland in recent years. Greece, in particular, is facing an elastic demand for its sovereign bonds that further stretches liquidity. Moreover, in illiquid debt markets spreads continue to follow a steep upward trend which is expected to have certain adverse implications for financial stability. We also observe a negative feedback effect from counterparty credit risk.
Clustering Ensembles for Categorical Data

Cluster ensembles offer a solution to challenges inherent to clustering arising from its ill-posed nature. In this paper we focus on the design of ensembles for categorical data. Our approach leverages diverse input clusterings discovered in random subspaces. We experimentally demostrate the efficacy of our technique in combination with the categorical clustering algorithm COOLCAT.
Statistical Modeling for Unit Selection in Speech Synthesis

Traditional concatenative speech synthesis systems use a number of heuristics to define the target and concatenation costs, essential for the design of the unit selection component. In contrast to these approaches, we introduce a general statistical modeling framework for unit selection inspired by automatic speech recognition. Given appropriate data, techniques based on that framework can result in a more accurate unit selection, thereby improving the general quality of a speech synthesizer. They can also lead to a more modular and a substantially more efficient system.We present a new unit selection system based on statistical modeling. To overcome the original absence of data, we use an existing high-quality unit selection system to generate a corpus of unit sequences. We show that the concatenation cost can be accurately estimated from this corpus using a statistical n-gram language model over units. We used weighted automata and transducers for the representation of the components of the system and designed a new and more efficient composition algorithm making use of string potentials for their combination. The resulting statistical unit selection is shown to be about 2.6 times faster than the last release of the AT&T Natural Voices Product while preserving the same quality, and offers much flexibility for the use and integration of new and more complex components.
Hospital Transaction Prices and Managed-Care Discounting for Selected Medical Technologies.

It is generally assumed that managed care has been successful at capturing discounts from medical providers, but the implications have been a matter of debate. Critics argue that managed-care organizations attain savings by reducing intensity of services, while others have argued that savings are “real” and are a consequence of discounts per unit of care rather than reduced intensity. Because medical services tend to be bundled together into episodes of care, separating out prices and quantities can be difficult. Given available data, past studies focused on an “average” price for the aggregate hospital, calculated from total revenue divided by the number of inpatient days or cases (e.g., Glenn A. Melnick et al., 1992; Emmett B. Keeler and Melnick, 1999). David Dranove and Richard Ludwick, (1999) caution that these methods provide approximations of actual prices and are subject to measurement error due to unobservable differences in service mix. Examining treatment episode for acute myocardial infarctions (heart attacks), David Cutler et al. (2000) infer that discounts attained by managedcare plans are only partly due to reductions in intensity. Here, we employ data that enable us to observe transaction prices (i.e., actual payments borne by the payer and received by the hospital) for major procedures on an “unbundled” basis. Our analysis differs from previous studies in several important dimensions. Among these is the focus on pricing differences between various insurers and employers rather than differences within a single large insurer; as a consequence, we derive an empirical specification based on the bargaining framework due to John M. Brooks et al. (1997), rather than their insurerbased model. Moreover, to identify pure unit discounts we focus on the narrowly defined procedure. Like Cutler et al., we focus on coronary heart disease, a leading cause of death. We examine a major procedure used to treat this disease, one that is costly and relatively common. In bypass surgery (more fully, coronary arterial bypass graft, or CABG) healthy segments of artery are surgically inserted around the diseased arteries. In 2002 about 344,000 CABG’s were performed in the United States, with expenditures exceeding $21 billion. Other economists have focused on these procedures to examine market phenomena such as the hospital’s entry decision (Michael Chernew et al., 2002) or information diffusion (Dranove et al., 2003), yet the pricing decision was not treated fully.
Co‐orthology of Pax4 and Pax6 to the fly eyeless gene: molecular phylogenetic, comparative genomic, and embryological analyses

The functional equivalence of Pax6/eyeless genes across distantly related animal phyla has been one of central findings on which evo‐devo studies is based. In this study, we show that Pax4, in addition to Pax6, is a vertebrate ortholog of the fly eyeless gene (and its duplicate, twin of eyeless [toy] gene, unique to Insecta). Molecular phylogenetic trees published to date placed the Pax4 gene outside the Pax6/eyeless subgroup as if the Pax4 gene originated from a gene duplication before the origin of bilaterians. However, Pax4 genes had only been reported for mammals. Our molecular phylogenetic analysis, including previously unidentified teleost fish pax4 genes, equally supported two scenarios: one with the Pax4–Pax6 duplication early in vertebrate evolution and the other with this duplication before the bilaterian radiation. We then investigated gene compositions in the genomic regions containing Pax4 and Pax6, and identified (1) conserved synteny between these two regions, suggesting that the Pax4–Pax6 split was caused by a large‐scale duplication and (2) its timing within early vertebrate evolution based on the duplication timing of the members of neighboring gene families. Our results are consistent with the so‐called two‐round genome duplications in early vertebrates. Overall, the Pax6/eyeless ortholog is merely part of a 2:2 orthology relationship between vertebrates (with Pax4 and Pax6) and the fly (with eyeless and toy). In this context, evolution of transcriptional regulation associated with the Pax4–Pax6 split is also discussed in light of the zebrafish pax4 expression pattern that is analyzed here for the first time.
Host-cell reactivation in mammalian cells. I. Survival of ultra-violet-irradiated herpes virus in different cell-lines.

SummaryThe different repair-replication abilities of cells from different species of mammals suggest that mammalian cells may express different levels of host-cell reactivation. This was confirmed using u.v. -irradiated herpes simplex virus assayed in mouse, rat, monkey, and human cells. The survival curves usually had two components, the slopes of both varying among the different cells. The slopes of the first, sensitive components varied considerably (factor of 4), implying that there are different amounts of host-cell reactivation in this component. The slopes of the second, resistant components also varied, implying different extents of host-cell reactivation there also. That the HCR of the first component apparently varied independently of that of the second component among the different host cells suggested that different mechanisms were responsible for the two HCR's. At the virus concentrations used, multiplicity reactivation was not found. The known cellular radiation recovery mechanisms, repair re.