Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SEMICONDUTTORI NANOSTRUTTURATI PER APPLICAZIONI TERMOELETTRICHE: UN CONCETTO INNOVATIVO DIMOSTRATO AL COMPUTER

I will discuss the thermal transport properties of nanostructured silicongermanium alloys for thermoelectric applications. By means of atomistic simulations, I will show that it is in fact possible to design a nanocomposite with optimal thermoelectric performances, i.e. maximizing its figure of merit. In particular, computer experiments provide quantitative evidence that the phonon flux from hot to cold regions (phonons are the microscopic heat carriers) is dramatically affected by the network of grain boundaries present in the nanocomposite
Detritus Quality Controls Macrophyte Decomposition under Different Nutrient Concentrations in a Eutrophic Shallow Lake, North China

Macrophyte decomposition is important for carbon and nutrient cycling in lake ecosystems. Currently, little is known about how this process responds to detritus quality and water nutrient conditions in eutrophic shallow lakes in which incomplete decomposition of detritus accelerates the lake terrestrialization process. In this study, we investigated the effects of detritus quality and water nutrient concentrations on macrophyte decomposition in Lake Baiyangdian, China, by analyzing the decomposition of three major aquatic plants at three sites with different pollution intensities (low, medium, and high pollution sites). Detritus quality refers to detritus nutrient contents as well as C∶N, C∶P, and N∶P mass ratios in this study. Effects of detritus mixtures were tested by combining pairs of representative macrophytes at ratios of 75∶25, 50∶50 and 25∶75 (mass basis). The results indicate that the influence of species types on decomposition was stronger than that of site conditions. Correlation analysis showed that mass losses at the end of the experimental period were significantly controlled by initial detritus chemistry, especially by the initial phosphorus (P) content, carbon to nitrogen (C∶N), and carbon to phosphorus (C∶P) mass ratios in the detritus. The decomposition processes were also influenced by water chemistry. The NO3-N and NH4-N concentrations in the lake water retarded detritus mass loss at the low and high pollution sites, respectively. Net P mineralization in detritus was observed at all sites and detritus P release at the high pollution site was slower than at the other two sites. Nonadditive effects of mixtures tended to be species specific due to the different nutrient contents in each species. Results suggest that the nonadditive effects varied significantly among different sites, indicating that interactions between the detritus quality in species mixtures and site water chemistry may be another driver controlling decomposition in eutrophic shallow lakes.
Cytomorphological tissue reaction patterns in lymph node tuberculosis and their correlation with bacterial density

Background- Diagnosis of extra pulmonary lymph node tuberculosis is made by demonstration of different cyto-morphological tissue reaction patterns on FNA smears however definitive diagnosis is made by demonstration of AFB by culture or Ziehl Neelsen stained smears. This procedure is technically demanding and time consuming and is liable to fail on occasion for unexplained reasons. If identification of cytomorphological patterns could predict bacterial density, it would help to improve diagnostic accuracy and also serve as a control on the acid-fast staining procedure. Therefore this study was being undertaken to determine the correlation between bacterial density and cytomorphological patterns in lymph node tuberculosis. Methods- FNA was performed on 505 clinically suspected lymph node tuberculosis patients. May Grunwald Giemsa stained smears were used to analyse cytomorphological patterns and ZN stained smears for AFB detection. Bacterial density (BI) was calculated by utilizing Ridley’s logarithmic scale. Results- Seven distinct cytomorphological tissue reaction patterns were observed. Pattern 1 was predominantly exudative response comprising of neutrophils and mononuclear phagocytes and was the most common tissue reaction pattern 160/505 (31.6%) followed by pattern 4 i.e. epithelioid cell granulomas with necrosis 148/505 (29.3%). This study showed that multibacillary lesion (BI>1) was more often associated with pattern 1. Although the BI varied significantly across different cytomorphological tissue reaction patterns (p value=0.004), no trend was observed as both paucibacillary as well as multibacillary was seen with various proportions with all patterns. Conclusion- Present study showed that multibacillary disease is more frequently associated with pattern 1 compare to pattern 4. However more studies are needed to establish a trend among different cytomorphological tissue reaction patterns.
Neuromorphic Atomic Switch Networks

Efforts to emulate the formidable information processing capabilities of the brain through neuromorphic engineering have been bolstered by recent progress in the fabrication of nonlinear, nanoscale circuit elements that exhibit synapse-like operational characteristics. However, conventional fabrication techniques are unable to efficiently generate structures with the highly complex interconnectivity found in biological neuronal networks. Here we demonstrate the physical realization of a self-assembled neuromorphic device which implements basic concepts of systems neuroscience through a hardware-based platform comprised of over a billion interconnected atomic-switch inorganic synapses embedded in a complex network of silver nanowires. Observations of network activation and passive harmonic generation demonstrate a collective response to input stimulus in agreement with recent theoretical predictions. Further, emergent behaviors unique to the complex network of atomic switches and akin to brain function are observed, namely spatially distributed memory, recurrent dynamics and the activation of feedforward subnetworks. These devices display the functional characteristics required for implementing unconventional, biologically and neurally inspired computational methodologies in a synthetic experimental system.
The “Mechanostat” Principle and the Osteoprotegerin—OPG/RANKL/RANK System PART II. The Role of the Hypothalamic—Pituitary Axis

Recent literature provides us with the indication that the ratio of OPG/RANKL concentrations fluctuate in a non‐linear (bell‐shaped) mode, according to Frost's “mechanostat” theory, during the application of mechanical strain. A similar cellular signal transduction mechanism to mechanical loading, that may also regulate bone resorptive activities, has nowdays been proposed. Since the skeleton is considered to be an endocrine organ, as such, it may likewise be subject to hypothalamic control. This central regulatory system may continually modulate the adaptation of the bone homeostatic system to external challenges. The hypothalamic‐pituitary‐gonadal axis may play a role in the regulation of OPG/RANKL secretion. The “mechanostat” principle may well characterize the oscillatory properties of the signal transduction mechanism that controls hard tissue metabolism and includes biochemical apart from mechanical stimuli. J. Cell. Biochem. 118: 962–966, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The Lived Experiences of Sexual Desire Among Chinese-Canadian Men and Women

How North American Chinese conceptualize and experience sexual desire is not well understood, and may have implications for understanding cross-cultural differences in sexual functioning. This study examined narratives of sexual desire among Chinese men and women in Canada. Ten each of Chinese men (age: M = 24.0, range = 18–42) and women (age: M = 23.5, range = 19–38) took part in semi-structured interviews in which they were invited to share personal accounts of sexual desire. A phenomenological analysis of participants’ responses showed men and women described desire as having genital, nongenital-physical, and cognitive-emotional components. Chinese cultural prohibitions against sexuality, particularly pronounced in women, were a common inhibitor of desire. Relationship factors appeared as a frequently endorsed context and target of desire. These findings suggest that relationship context is of paramount importance in Chinese individuals and that previous findings of low sexual functioning in this group may be due to inhibition from cultural factors. However, the experience of desire in Chinese individuals is also in many ways similar to that of existing conceptualizations from Western samples.
Cooperative Resource Management in Cognitive WiMAX with Femto Cells

WiMAX with femto cells is a cost-effective next generation broadband wireless communication system. Cognitive Radio (CR) has recently emerged as a promising technology to improve spectrum utilization by allowing dynamic spectrum access. There will be large potential benefits by applying the CR technique to WiMAX with femto cells, which are barely explored in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel cognitive WiMAX architecture with femto cells, where the base station and users are equipped with CRs and intelligently adjusts power, channel, and other resources to accommodate the entire network ecosystem. In this new design, we develop an optimization framework for location-aware cooperative resource management, by jointly employing multi-hop cooperative communication, power control, channel assignment, primary user protection, buffer management, and fairness, and incorporating user, channel, and cooperative diversities. To achieve optimality, it is designed based on stochastic Lyapunov optimization, aiming to take advantage of the radio flexibility and fully utilize the spectrum. Evaluated by the rigorous analysis and extensive simulations, our resource management protocol is near-optimal with closed-form bounds, with which cognitive WiMAX achieves substantial performance improvement.
Knowledge-based Recurrent Attentive Neural Network for Traffic Sign Detection

Accurate Traffic Sign Detection (TSD) can help drivers make better decision according to the traffic regulations. TSD, regarded as a typical small object detection problem in some way, is fundamental in the field of self-driving and advanced driver assistance systems. However, small object detection is still an open question. In this paper, we proposed a human brain inspired network to handle this problem. Attention mechanism is an essential function of our brain, we used a novel recurrent attentive neural network to improve the detection accuracy in a fine-grained manner. Further, as we human can combine domain specific knowledge and intuitive knowledge to solve tricky tasks, we proposed an assumption that the location of the traffic signs obeys the reverse gaussian distribution, which means the location is around the central bias of every picture. Experimental result shows that our methods achieved better performance than several popular methods used in object detection.
Implantable Defibrillator Therapy in Cardiac Arrest Survivors With a Reversible Cause

Background: Current guidelines recommend implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) therapy in survivors of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), except in those with completely reversible causes. We sought to examine the impact of ICD therapy on mortality in survivors of SCA associated with reversible causes. Methods and Results: We evaluated the records of 1433 patients managed at our institution between 2000 and 2012 who were discharged alive after SCA. A reversible and correctable cause was identified in 792 (55%) patients. Reversible SCA cause was defined as significant electrolyte or metabolic abnormality, evidence of acute myocardial infarction or ischemia, recent initiation of antiarrhythmic drug or illicit drug use, or other reversible circumstances. Of the 792 SCA survivors because of a reversible and correctable cause (age 61±15 years, 40% women), 207 (26%) patients received an ICD after their index SCA. During a mean follow-up of 3.8±3.1 years, 319 (40%) patients died. ICD implantation was highly associated with lower all-cause mortality (P<0.001) even after correcting for unbalanced baseline characteristics (P<0.001). In subgroup analyses, only patients whose SCA was not associated with myocardial infarction extracted benefit from ICD (P<0.001). Conclusions: In survivors of SCA because of a reversible and correctable cause, ICD therapy is associated with lower all-cause mortality except if the SCA was because of myocardial infarction. These data deserve further investigation in a prospective multicenter randomized controlled trial, as they may have important and immediate clinical implications.
Analyzing facts and opinions in Nepali subjective texts

Subjectivity Analysis is a relatively new field of research for the Nepali language. It offers a challenging area which has not been adequately studied till date systematically. Limited works that have been conducted in Nepali include works primarily on polarity detection [7]. In this work, we propose a Supervised Machine Learning based framework for analyzing facts and opinions for Nepali subjective texts. We train three different models using three Supervised Machine Learning Classifiers: (Logistic Regression, Multinomial Naïve Bayes, and Support Vector Machine) and conduct a comparative study based on the metrics: Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F-Measure. Our results show that the task of analyzing subjective sentences and making a distinction between facts and opinions can be conducted with reasonable accuracies close to 70%.
Application of Nanotechnology in Biomedicine: A Major Focus on Cancer Therapy

Most of mortality worldwide occurs because of cancer diseases. Nanostructures are the new compounds that have become one of the most important technologies for using in different fields over the past two years especially in medicine. In between, nanotechnology has the potential to cancer detection and therapy. This study is a review of prospects in applications of nano-materials for cancer detection and treatment. We have summarized the nano-materials (metal nanospheres, nanorods, nanoshells and nanotubes) in medical applications targeting cancer. We also discuss advances in established nanoparticle technologies such as liposomes, polymer micelles, and functionalization about tumor targeting, controlled release and drug delivery. This paper will discuss the therapeutic applications of different nano-materials with a major focus on their applications for the treatment of cancer. Briefly, the toxicity of conventional nanostructures was also mentioned in this paper.
Restless legs syndrome symptoms in primary care: a prevalence study.

BACKGROUND There are relatively few studies on the prevalence of restless legs syndrome (RLS) in the general population, even fewer that used diagnostic questions covering all 4 essential diagnostic criteria defining the RLS symptom complex, and none that have reported on the 2 RLS phenotypes for patients seen by family physicians. METHODS To determine the prevalence of the symptom complex, diagnostic for RLS in a primary care patient population, a prospective population-based single-center study was performed. Every adult patient presenting for care in a small rural primary care practice with mostly white patients was surveyed for a 1-year period using a validated RLS diagnostic questionnaire. RESULTS A total of 2099 patients completed the questionnaire. Analysis revealed that 24.0% of these patients were positive for all 4 of the essential symptoms used to make the diagnosis of RLS and 15.3% reported these symptoms at least weekly. In addition, the RLS symptom complex was reported significantly more often by women than men and, as a whole, patients reporting the RLS symptoms were significantly older than patients without symptoms. The prevalence of symptoms increased with age until about 60 years and then showed a steady decrease thereafter. Further, early-onset RLS was significantly more common in women than men. CONCLUSIONS A high prevalence of RLS symptoms was observed in this primary care population. This finding supports the need for heightened awareness in both the medical community and general population regarding this disorder, which can often be effectively treated within the primary care practice.
Quantitative Fundus Autofluorescence in Early and Intermediate Age-Related Macular Degeneration.

IMPORTANCE Increased lipofuscin accumulation is assumed to be an important factor in the pathogenesis of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), although direct evidence for this hypothesis is missing. OBJECTIVE To quantitatively investigate lipofuscin-associated fundus autofluorescence (AF) in patients with early and intermediate AMD. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A prospective, single-center, case-control study was conducted from August 1, 2014, to October 31, 2015, at a university referral center. Participants included 40 patients aged 65 years or younger and 108 individuals without eye disease serving as controls. All participants underwent quantitative fundus AF (qAF) imaging with a modified scanning laser ophthalmoscope equipped with an internal fluorescent reference. Mean qAF values of an 8-segment circular ring centered on the fovea (qAF8) were measured and compared between patients and controls. For subgroup analysis, drusen were categorized as soft drusen, cuticular drusen, and/or reticular pseudodrusen (RPD). MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The qAF8 levels. RESULTS In the 40 patients with AMD, mean (SD) age was 54.8 (5.6) years, and 32 (80%) were women. None of the investigated patients had qAF8 values above the 95% prediction interval (PI) of the 108 controls. In the soft drusen (28 [70%]) and cuticular drusen (8 [20%]) groups, qAF8 levels within the 95% PI were noted in 22 patients (79%; 95% CI, 60% to 90%) and 7 patients (88%; 95% CI, 51% to 99%) respectively. The qAF8 values in the RPD group (4 [10%]) were below the 95% PI in 3 patients (75%; 95% CI, 29% to 97%). Compared with the controls, statistical analysis revealed lower qAF8 values in the overall AMD cohort after adjusting for age (difference, -19.9% [95% CI, -25.6% to -12.7%], P < .001) as well as in all subgroups (soft drusen, -17.1% [95% CI, -24.1% to -9.5%], P < .001; cuticular drusen, -19.6% [95% CI, -30.3% to -7.2%], P = .003; and RPD, -34.5% [95% CI, -47.1% to -21.3%]; P < .001). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE The qAF8 measurements in this sample showed no increased lipofuscin-related fundus AF in patients with early and intermediate AMD. Lower qAF levels in certain subgroups may point to subnormal lipofuscin levels in the retinal pigment epithelium or, alternatively, limitations to detection of true retinal pigment epithelial lipofuscin content. The results of this study might expand the understanding of the pathogenesis of AMD and may have an effect on upcoming treatment trials that aim to modify lipofuscin accumulation.
Rapid consolidation processing of silicon nitride powders

Using a Plasma Assisted Sintering (PAS) process, submicron size, silicon nitride powders were consolidated to >99% of the theoretical density (TD) at 1750 °C in less than 5 min with retention of the a phase and the submicron grain size. The silicon nitride powders were sintered with 5 wt. % Y_2O_3 and 5 wt. % Y_2O_3 + 5 wt. % MgAl_2O_4 additives. The PAS processing method for the silicon nitride additive mixtures is attractive for retention of fine-grained microstructures favorable for superplastic deformation. Post superplastic forming heat treatments to transform the α−Si_3N_4 to lath-like, creep-resistant β−Si_3N_4 is another feature of the present processing method.
Speech Inconsistency in Children With Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Language Impairment, and Speech Delay: Depends on the Stimuli.

Purpose The current research sought to determine (a) if speech inconsistency is a core feature of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) or if it is driven by comorbid language impairment that affects a large subset of children with CAS and (b) if speech inconsistency is a sensitive and specific diagnostic marker that can differentiate between CAS and speech delay. Method Participants included 48 children ranging between 4;7 to 17;8 (years;months) with CAS (n = 10), CAS + language impairment (n = 10), speech delay (n = 10), language impairment (n = 9), or typical development (n = 9). Speech inconsistency was assessed at phonemic and token-to-token levels using a variety of stimuli. Results Children with CAS and CAS + language impairment performed equivalently on all inconsistency assessments. Children with language impairment evidenced high levels of speech inconsistency on the phrase "buy Bobby a puppy. " Token-to-token inconsistency of monosyllabic words and the phrase "buy Bobby a puppy" was sensitive and specific in differentiating children with CAS and speech delay, whereas inconsistency calculated on other stimuli (e.g., multisyllabic words) was less efficacious in differentiating between these disorders. Conclusions Speech inconsistency is a core feature of CAS and is efficacious in differentiating between children with CAS and speech delay; however, sensitivity and specificity are stimuli dependent.
Current perspectives: the impact of cyberbullying on adolescent health

Cyberbullying has become an international public health concern among adolescents, and as such, it deserves further study. This paper reviews the current literature related to the effects of cyberbullying on adolescent health across multiple studies worldwide and provides directions for future research. A review of the evidence suggests that cyberbullying poses a threat to adolescents’ health and well-being. A plethora of correlational studies have demonstrated a cogent relationship between adolescents’ involvement in cyberbullying and negative health indices. Adolescents who are targeted via cyberbullying report increased depressive affect, anxiety, loneliness, suicidal behavior, and somatic symptoms. Perpetrators of cyberbullying are more likely to report increased substance use, aggression, and delinquent behaviors. Mediating/moderating processes have been found to influence the relationship between cyberbullying and adolescent health. More longitudinal work is needed to increase our understanding of the effects of cyberbullying on adolescent health over time. Prevention and intervention efforts related to reducing cyberbullying and its associated harms are discussed.
Theoretical Caculation and ANSYS Simulation of Piezoceramics Actuation Capability

Free strains of piezoelectric actuator with conventional plane surface electrode pattern and interdigitated electrode pattern in x and y directions were studied through piezoceramic constitutive relations and ANSYS. A contrastive analysis was carried out between these results and experimental results achieved by N.Hagood. The results show that the ANSYS method get more accurate free strain which has a error of 0.35% and -14% respectively, however direct measurement on the wafer surface has big error which is 147% and 73.3% respectively. More anisotropic planar actuation can be obtained become of utilizing interdigitated electrode pattern,transverse effect coefficient is two times than that of conventional piezoelectric actuator.
Range-only sensing for formation shape control and easy sensor network localization

This paper is concerned with two related problems using graph theoretic methods for their solution. The central contribution to formation control is to demonstrate that if each agent senses a modest number of additional distances beyond those which are actively being controlled, and with limited message passing between neighboring agents, each agent can infer the relative positions of its neighbors in its own coordinate basis. Additional effort to related this to the basis used for viewing its controls may be required. Each agent can thus apply the known algorithms for formation shape control based on distance preservation, without needing to actually sense bearings. The contribution to sensor network localization is to identify circumstances in which the complexity is effectively linear in the number of nodes.