Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic strict fractional frequency reuse for software-defined 5G networks

The surge of mobile data traffic has spurred academia and industries to begin developing 5G networks. 5G is meant to overcome limitations of 4G cellular technology relying on the dominant trend of mobile network densification with the deployment of small cell base stations. To accelerate this process, low complexity and inexpensive remote radio heads (RRHs) are deployed massively and connected to a centralized pool of resources. In this work, we study the problem of inter-cell interference (ICI) which arises in frequency reuse one multi-tier 5G networks. We entrust the management of RRHs to a software-defined network controller and we take advantage of network functions virtualization. Our contributions consist of proposing Dynamic Strict Fractional Frequency Reuse (DSFFR), a method to relieve ICI which dynamically divides the small cell area in a different number of sectors. Furthermore, we formulate a joint scheduling problem composed of two schedulers which operate at different time granularity to transmit downlink packets. Modeling the coverage area with the tool of stochastic geometry and solving with simulations the joint scheduling problem, we are able to show that DSFFR outperforms the static scheme. Performances are addressed in terms of spectral efficiency and packet blocking probability.
Effects of Volleyball Training on Visual Time Perception

Athletes excel in both movement control and sensory perception in their sport-specific domains since most sports are challenging both physically and cognitively. Experimental evidence has shown that superior visual skills must be cultivated to master a fast, time-constrained sport like volleyball. Time perception is a particularly crucial element of successful volleyball performance. However, less is known about whether visual time perception is one of these superior skills developable through volleyball training. Methods: The study details two experiments. In Experiment 1, we compared the performance in a visual time perception task across volleyball athletes, dancers and non-athletic controls. There were 20 participants (10 men and 10 women) in each group. It is hypothesized that volleyball athletes, but not the dancer experts, would have better performance than non-athletes in a visual time perception task. The relationship between volleyball training and visual time perception was further confirmed in Experiment 2, which had a longitudinal design meant to track performance improvements over an 18-week volleyball training regime oriented to novices. 28 female university students were recruited in this experiment. None of them participated in Experiment 1 nor had any experience of sports training. Of the participants, 14 (mean age=18.6 ± 0.93 years old) voluntarily joined the volleyball training program as an after-school sports activity. It is hypothesized that visual time perception performance of novices is improved after 18 weeks of volleyball training. Results: In Experiment 1, all participants had comparable accuracy, but only the volleyball athletes had shorter reaction time when compared to non-athletes. In Experiment 2, the performance changes over the 18-week period were significantly improved only in the volleyball training group and not in the control group in terms of both reaction time and error rate in visual time perception. Conclusion: A positive effect of volleyball training on visual time perception was observed by both sets of results. The present findings suggest that visual time perception is another domain-specific skill associated with volleyball expertise, and a potential training regime for better sports performance is discussed.
Performance analysis of speculative concurrency control algorithms based on wait depth limited for distributed database systems

Distributed Database Management Systems offer advantages and new possibilities to centralized database systems. However, some aspects and issues need to receive further consideration. Concurrency control is one of these aspects that has to be improved in order to increase system performance. Strict Two Phase locking s2pl is the concurrency control mechanism that is used in most commercial database systems. The performance of s2pl can be greatly improved using speculative techniques with speculative Two Phase Locking algorithms sp2pl. In this paper we present extensions of the sp2pl algorithm based on Wait Depth Limited techniques wdl-sp2pl. A comprehensive simulation model is developed from which the performance of sp2pl and the wdl-sp2pl’s are evaluated. Our analysis also shows that the new algorithms give a better performance than sp2pl, maintaining the robustness of sp2pl.
Blood-brain barrier permeability of gefitinib in patients with brain metastases from non-small-cell lung cancer before and during whole brain radiation therapy

Introduction To explore the ability of gefitinib to penetrate blood brain barrier (BBB) during whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT). Patients and Methods Enrolled in this study were eligible patients who were diagnosed with BM from NSCLC. Gefitinib was given at 250 mg/day for 30 days, then concurrently with WBRT (40 Gy/20 F/4 w), followed by maintenance. Serial CSF and blood samples were collected on 30 day after gefitinib administration, and at the time of 10, 20, 30 and 40 Gy following WBRT. CSF and plasma samples of 13 patients without BM who were treated with gefitinib were collected as control. CSF and plasma gefitinib levels were measured by LC-MS/MS. Results Fifteen BM patients completed gefitinib plus WBRT. The CSF-to-plasma ratio of gefitinib in patients with BM was higher than that in patients without BM (1.34% vs. 0.36%, P < 0.001). The CSF-to-plasma ratio of gefitinib increased with the increased dose of WBRT and reached the peak (1.87 ± 0.72%) at 30 Gy, which was significantly higher than that 1.34 ± 0.49% at 0 Gy (P = 0.01). The median time to progression of brain lesions and the median overall survival were 7.07 and 15.4 months, respectively. Conclusion The BBB permeability of gefitinib increased in accordance with escalated dose of WBRT.
Noninvasive Risk Stratification of Subjects with a Brugada‐Type Electrocardiogram and No History of Cardiac Arrest

Background: Recent studies suggest that the Brugada‐type electrocardiogram (ECG) is much more prevalent than the manifest Brugada syndrome. Although invasive electrophysiologic investigations have been proposed as a risk stratifier, their value is controversial, and alternative noninvasive techniques may be preferred. We sought a noninvasive strategy to detect a high‐risk group in a long‐term follow‐up study of subjects with a Brugada‐type ECG, and no history of cardiac arrest.
Efficient conformal regressors using bagged neural nets

Conformal predictors use machine learning models to output prediction sets. For regression, a prediction set is simply a prediction interval. All conformal predictors are valid, meaning that the error rate on novel data is bounded by a preset significance level. The key performance metric for conformal predictors is their efficiency, i.e., the size of the prediction sets. Inductive conformal predictors utilize real-valued functions, called nonconformity functions, and a calibration set, i.e., a set of labeled instances not used for the model training, to obtain the prediction regions. In state-of-the-art conformal regressors, the nonconformity functions are normalized, i.e., they include a component estimating the difficulty of each instance. In this study, conformal regressors are built on top of ensembles of bagged neural networks, and several nonconformity functions are evaluated. In addition, the option to calibrate on out-of-bag instances instead of setting aside a calibration set is investigated. The experiments, using 33 publicly available data sets, show that normalized nonconformity functions can produce smaller prediction sets, but the efficiency is highly dependent on the quality of the difficulty estimation. Specifically, in this study, the most efficient normalized nonconformity function estimated the difficulty of an instance by calculating the average error of neighboring instances. These results are consistent with previous studies using random forests as underlying models. Calibrating on out-of-bag did, however, only lead to more efficient conformal predictors on smaller data sets, which is in sharp contrast to the random forest study, where out-out-of bag calibration was significantly better overall.
Recovery of compressive video sensing via dictionary learning and forward prediction

In this paper, we propose a new framework for compressive video sensing (CVS) that exploits the inherent spatial and temporal redundancies of a video sequence, effectively. The proposed method splits the video sequence into the key and non-key frames followed by dividing each frame into the small non-overlapping blocks of equal sizes. At the decoder side, the key frames are reconstructed using adaptively learned sparsifying (ALS) basis via £o minimization, in order to exploit the spatial redundancy. Also, three well-known dictionary learning algorithms are investigated in our method. For recovery of the non-key frames, a prediction of the current frame is initialized, by using the previous reconstructed frame, in order to exploit the temporal redundancy. The prediction is employed in a proper optimization problem to recover the current non-key frame. To compare our experimental results with the results of some other methods, we employ pick signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) index as the quality assessor. The numerical results show the adequacy of our proposed method in CVS.
Catastrophic Cervical Spine Injuries in Contact Sports

Study Design Systematic review. Objectives To determine the incidence of catastrophic cervical spine injuries (CCSIs) among elite athletes participating in contact team sports and whether the incidence varies depending on the use of protective gear or by player position. Methods Electronic databases and reference lists of key articles published from January 1, 2000, to January 29, 2016, were searched. Results Fourteen studies were included that reported CCSI in rugby (n = 10), American football (n = 3), and Irish hurling (n = 1). Among Rugby Union players, incidence of CCSI was 4.1 per 100,000 player-hours. Among National Football League players, the CCSI rate was 0.6 per 100,000 player-exposures. At the collegiate level, the CCSI rate ranged from 1.1 to 4.7 per 100,000 player-years. Mixed populations of elite and recreational rugby players in four studies report a CCSI rate of 1.4 to 7.2 per 100,000 player-years. In this same population, the scrum accounted for 30 to 51% of total reported CCSIs in Rugby Union versus 0 to 4% in Rugby League. The tackle accounted for 29 to 39% of injuries in Rugby Union and 78 to 100% of injuries in Rugby League. Making a tackle was responsible for 29 to 80% of injuries in American football. Conclusion CCSIs are infrequent among elite athletes. There is insufficient evidence to determine the effect of protective gear (e.g., helmets, padding) on CCSI incidence. Scrum and tackle in rugby and tackling in American football account for the majority of CCSIs in each respective sport.
The prognostic value of C-reactive protein and serum amyloid a protein in severe unstable angina.

BACKGROUND The pathogenesis of unstable angina is poorly understood, and predicting the prognosis at the time of hospital admission is problematic. Recent evidence suggests that there may be active inflammation, possibly in the coronary arteries, in this syndrome. We therefore studied the prognostic value of measurements of the circulating acute-phase reactants C-reactive protein and serum amyloid A protein, which are sensitive indicators of inflammation. METHODS We measured C-reactive protein, serum amyloid A protein, creatine kinase, and cardiac troponin T in 32 patients with chronic stable angina, 31 patients with severe unstable angina, and 29 patients with acute myocardial infarction. RESULTS At the time of hospital admission, creatine kinase and cardiac troponin T levels were normal in all the patients, but the levels of C-reactive protein and serum amyloid A protein were > or = 0.3 mg per deciliter (exceeding the 90th percentile of the normal distribution) in 4 of the patients with stable angina (13 percent), 20 of the patients with unstable angina (65 percent), and 22 of the patients with acute myocardial infarction (76 percent). The 20 patients with unstable angina who had levels of C-reactive protein and serum amyloid A protein > or = 0.3 mg per deciliter had more ischemic episodes in the hospital than those with levels < 0.3 mg per deciliter (mean [+/- SD] number of episodes per patient, 4.8 +/- 2.5 vs. 1.8 +/- 2.4; P = 0.004); 5 patients subsequently had a myocardial infarction, 2 died, and 12 required immediate coronary revascularization. In contrast, no deaths or myocardial infarction occurred among the 11 patients with levels of C-reactive protein and serum amyloid A protein < 0.3 mg per deciliter, and only 2 of them required coronary revascularization. Among the patients admitted with a diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction, unstable angina preceded infarction in 14 of the 22 patients (64 percent) with levels of C-reactive protein and serum amyloid A protein > or = 0.3 mg per deciliter but in none of the 7 patients with levels < 0.3 mg per deciliter. CONCLUSIONS Elevation of the sensitive acute-phase proteins C-reactive protein and serum amyloid A protein at the time of hospital admission predicts a poor outcome in patients with unstable angina and may reflect an important inflammatory component in the pathogenesis of this condition.
Phase-locked loop architecture for enhanced voltage-controlled oscillator phase-noise suppression

In traditional phase-locked loop (PLL) designs, the loop bandwidth is limited to ~1/10th of the frequency of the reference clock due to the discrete-time nature of the system. The loop bandwidth also sets the frequency above which no significant suppression of the phase noise of the oscillator in the PLL occurs. This paper describes a PLL architecture in which the output of an additional charge pump drives a feed-forward path that extends outside of the PLL's feedback loop. This path drives a phase interpolator, allowing for phase-error correction to occur beyond the bandwidth of the PLL. The proposed architecture is investigated through linear analysis. Measurements of a test chip designed in TSMC 90 nm technology show that the proposed architecture is effective in reducing PLL phase noise.
Tied Factor Analysis for Face Recognition Across Large Pose Changes

Face recognition algorithms perform very unreliably when the pose of the probe face is different from the stored face: typical feature vectors vary more with pose than with identity. We propose a generative model that creates a one-to-many mapping from an idealized “identity” space to the observed data space. In this identity space, the representation for each individual does not vary with pose. The measured feature vector is generated by a posecontingent linear transformation of the identity vector in the presence of noise. We term this model “tied” factor analysis. The choice of linear transformation (factors) depends on the pose, but the loadings are constant (tied) for a given individual. Our algorithm estimates the linear transformations and the noise parameters using training data. We propose a probabilistic distance metric which allows a full posterior over possible matches to be established. We introduce a novel feature extraction process and investigate recognition performance using the FERET database. Recognition performance is shown to be significantly better than contemporary approaches.
Inhibitory phosphorylation of a mitotic cyclin-dependent kinase regulates the morphogenesis, cell size and virulence of the smut fungus Ustilago maydis

The regulation of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) activity through inhibitory phosphorylation seems to play an important role in the eukaryotic cell cycle. We have investigated the influence that inhibitory phosphorylation of the catalytic subunit of mitotic CDK has on cell growth and pathogenicity of the corn smut fungus Ustilago maydis. This model pathogen is worthy of attention since it is well suited to analyze the relationships between the cell cycle, morphogenesis and pathogenicity. We set out to study these relationships by producing a cdk1 mutant allele that was refractory to inhibitory phosphorylation. The expression of this mutant in U. maydis cells dramatically altered their morphology. Since this kind of mutation makes the CDK catalytic subunit resistant to regulation by Wee1-related kinases in other organisms, we characterized the orthologous Wee1 kinase from U. maydis. We found that Wee1 is essential in U. maydis. Overexpression of wee1 produces cell cycle arrest in G2, the target of Wee1 apparently being the Cdk1/Clb2 complex, which is required specifically for the onset of mitosis. Given the connection between the cell cycle control and pathogenesis in U. maydis, we also analyzed whether cells with impaired inhibitory phosphorylation of Cdk1 were able to infect plants. We found that inhibitory phosphorylation was required for mating, a prerequisite to initiate pathogenic development. By examining plant-specific expression of the constitutively unphosphorylated cdk1AF allele, we also found that appropriate levels of inhibitory phosphorylation were required at stages of infection subsequent to penetration by the fungus. These data reinforces the connections between cell cycle, morphogenesis and virulence in this smut fungus.
Decreased Antithrombin III Activity in Diabetes May Be Due to Non-Enzymatic Glycosylation – A Preliminary Report

Summary Antithrombin III activity was moderately but significantly decreased in insulin dependent diabetics (p <0.005), while no difference has been found between the diabetic (n = 25) and control groups (n = 22) in antithrombin III plasma concentration. Moreover, antithrombin III activity was inversely correlated with glycosylated plasma proteins (r = -0.57; p <0.01). These data show that in diabetes there is a depressed biological activity of antithrombin III and suggest that this reflects nonenzymatic glycosylation of antithrombin III protein.
Variable thermal experience and diel thermal patterns of homing sockeye salmon in coastal marine waters

Temperature is recognized as a key factor influencing physiology, behaviour and survival of anadromous salmonids, yet little is known about their thermal experience, nor factors affecting it, during marine homeward migrations. In 2006 and 2010, approximately 1000 Fraser River sockeye salmon Oncorhynchus nerka were captured and tagged in coastal marine waters, ~215 km from the river mouth, during their spawning migration. Individual salmon were blood sampled, gastrically implanted with temperature loggers fixed to radio or acoustic tags, and released. We recovered 50 loggers from freshwater locales containing 14690 hourly temperature readings. Mixed-effects models were used to characterize marine thermal experience, and examine the association of thermal experience with initial physiological status as well as oceanographic and meteorological conditions. Sockeye salmon thermal experience was highly variable (8.4°C to 20.5°C), and we detected opposite diel patterns between study years that could be associated with moon phase, behavioural thermoregulation, olfactory/celestial navigation or predator avoidance. We were unable to find any relationships between thermal experience and environmental conditions or fish physiological state. Nonetheless, we found that the greatest variability in thermal experience was attributed to within-individual variation, suggesting that environmental and physiological variables need to be examined at different temporal and spatial scales, and/or additional environmental and physiological variables need to be assessed. Overall, the factors associated with the thermal experience of homing sockeye salmon in coastal marine environments are more complex than previously thought, and multiple year studies are needed before generalizing behavioural patterns observed from single year studies.
Diastolic dysfunction is a predictor of poor outcomes in patients with cirrhosis, portal hypertension, and a normal creatinine

We investigated left ventricular diastolic dysfunction (LVDD) and its relationship with circulatory function and prognosis in cirrhosis with portal hypertension and normal creatinine. Conventional and tissue Doppler (TDI) echocardiography, systemic and hepatic hemodynamics, and the activity of endogenous vasoactive systems (AEVS) were measured prospectively in 80 patients. Plasma renin activity (PRA; >4 ng/mL/hour) was used as a surrogate of effective arterial blood volume. Patients were followed up for 12 months. Thirty‐seven patients had LVDD (19 with grade 1 and 18 with grade 2). Left ventricular hypertrophy, left atrial volume, AEVS, and natriuretic peptide levels were significantly greater in patients with LVDD than without LVDD. Patients with grade 2 LVDD, compared to grade 1 LVDD and without LVDD, had significantly lower mean arterial pressure and higher Model for End‐Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score, E‐wave transmitral/early diastolic mitral annular velocity (E/e' ratio), cardiopulmonary pressures, PRA, and natriuretic peptide levels. Systolic and cardiac chronotropic function were significantly lower in patients with grade 2 LVDD than without LVDD. LVDD was more frequent in patients with ascites and increased PRA than patients without ascites or with ascites but normal PRA. Fourteen patients with LVDD developed hepatorenal syndrome (HRS) type 1 on follow‐up. Survival was different according to degree of LVDD (without LVDD: 95%; grade 1 LVDD: 79%; grade 2 LVDD: 39%; P < 0.001). Independent predictive factors of mortality were MELD score and E/e' ratio. Conclusion: LVDD occurs simultaneously with other changes in cardiac structure and function and is associated with an impairment of effective arterial blood volume. LVDD is a sensitive marker of advanced cirrhosis, type 1 HRS development, and mortality. (Hepatology 2013;58:1732–1741)
Size, Centralization and Organizational Adoption of Innovations

This study concerns attributes of organizations likely to facilitate or inhibit the adoption of innovations by organizations. First, it offers an interpretation of the often-found relationship between size and adoption frequency. Second, it investigates relationships between structural attributes-specialization, functional differentiation and centralization-and adoption and it develops a model which specifies interactions between these attributes and the type of innovation adopted. An interaction between size and centralization is also posited, and the model is tested using data gathered from a sample of U.S. hospitals. The findings on the whole are consistent with the hypothesis that adoption of innovations compatible with the interests or perspectives of lower-level decision-makers occurs more frequently in large, specialized, functionally-differentiated and decentralized hospitals. Centralization and the interaction between size and centralization do not appear to affect adoption of innovations which are not compatible with the interests of lower-level decision-makers. Contrary to expectations, the data indicate that functional differentiation facilitates adoption of this type of innovation. A revised model of adoption behavior is suggested, and its implications for a general theory of organizational adoption behavior are explored.