Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parallel algorithms for the execution of relational database operations

This paper presents and analyzes algorithms for parallel processing of relational database operations in a general multiprocessor framework. To analyze alternative algorithms, we introduce an analysis methodology which incorporates I/O, CPU, and message costs and which can be adjusted to fit different multiprocessor architectures. Algorithms are presented and analyzed for sorting, projection, and join operations. While some of these algorithms have been presented and analyzed previously, we have generalized each in order to handle the case where the number of pages is significantly larger than the number of processors. In addition, we present and analyze algorithms for the parallel execution of update and aggregate operations.
Differential Roles for DUSP Family Members in Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition and Cancer Stem Cell Regulation in Breast Cancer

Dual-specificity phosphatases (DUSPs) dephosphorylate threonine/serine and tyrosine residues on their substrates. Here we show that DUSP1, DUSP4, and DUSP6 are involved in epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and breast cancer stem cell (CSC) regulation. DUSP1, DUSP4, and DUSP6 are induced during EMT in a PKC pathway signal-mediated EMT model. We show for the first time that the key chromatin-associated kinase PKC-θ directly regulates a subset of DUSP family members. DUSP1, DUSP4, and DUSP6 globally but differentially co-exist with enhancer and permissive active histone post-translational modifications, suggesting that they play distinct roles in gene regulation in EMT/CSCs. We show that nuclear DUSP4 associates with the key acetyltransferase p300 in the context of the chromatin template and dynamically regulates the interplay between two key phosphorylation marks: the 1834 (active) and 89 (inhibitory) residues central to p300’s acetyltransferase activity. Furthermore, knockdown with small-interfering RNAs (siRNAs) shows that DUSP4 is required for maintaining H3K27ac, a mark mediated by p300. DUSP1, DUSP4, and DUSP6 knockdown with siRNAs shows that they participate in the formation of CD44hi/CD24lo/EpCAM+ breast CSCs: DUSP1 knockdown reduces CSC formation, while DUSP4 and DUSP6 knockdown enhance CSC formation. Moreover, DUSP6 is overexpressed in patient-derived HER2+ breast carcinomas compared to benign mammary tissue. Taken together, these findings illustrate novel pleiotropic roles for DUSP family members in EMT and CSC regulation in breast cancer.
The Insulin-Mediated Modulation of Visually Evoked Magnetic Fields Is Reduced in Obese Subjects

Background Insulin is an anorexigenic hormone that contributes to the termination of food intake in the postprandial state. An alteration in insulin action in the brain, named “cerebral insulin resistance”, is responsible for overeating and the development of obesity. Methodology/Principal Findings To analyze the direct effect of insulin on food-related neuronal activity we tested 10 lean and 10 obese subjects. We conducted a magnetencephalography study during a visual working memory task in both the basal state and after applying insulin or placebo spray intranasally to bypass the blood brain barrier. Food and non-food pictures were presented and subjects had to determine whether or not two consecutive pictures belonged to the same category. Intranasal insulin displayed no effect on blood glucose, insulin or C-peptide concentrations in the periphery; however, it led to an increase in the components of evoked fields related to identification and categorization of pictures (at around 170 ms post stimuli in the visual ventral stream) in lean subjects when food pictures were presented. In contrast, insulin did not modulate food-related brain activity in obese subjects. Conclusions/Significance We demonstrated that intranasal insulin increases the cerebral processing of food pictures in lean whereas this was absent in obese subjects. This study further substantiates the presence of a “cerebral insulin resistance” in obese subjects and might be relevant in the pathogenesis of obesity.
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Contrapositive symmetry (CPS) is a tautology in classical logic. In fuzzy logic, not all fuzzy implications have CPS with respect to a given strong negation. Given a fuzzy implication J , towards imparting contrapositive symmetry to J with respect to a strong negation N two techniques, viz., upper and lower contrapositivisation, have been proposed by Bandler and Kohout [Semantics of implication operators and fuzzy relational products, Internat. In this work we investigate the N-compatibility of these contrapositivisation techniques, i.e., conditions under which the natural negation of the contrapositivised implication is equal to the strong negation employed. This property is equivalent to the neutrality of the contrapositivised implication. We have shown that while upper contrapositivisation has N-compatibility when the natural negation of the fuzzy implication J (given by N J (x) = J (x, 0)) is less than the strong negation N considered, the lower contrapositivisation is N-compatible in the other case. Also we have proposed a new contrapositivisation technique, viz., M-contrapositivisation, which is N-compatible independent of the ordering on the negations. Some interesting properties of M-contrapositivisation are also discussed. Since all S-implications have contrapositive symmetry, we investigate whether these contrapositivisations can be written as S-implications for suitable fuzzy disjunctions. Also some sufficient conditions for these fuzzy disjunctions to become t-conorms are given. In line with Fodor's [Contrapositive symmetry of fuzzy implications, Fuzzy Sets and Systems 69 (1995) 141–156] investigation, it is shown that the lower contrapositivisation of an R-implication J T can also be seen as the residuation of a suitable binary operator.
Detection of Lungs Status Using Morphological Complexities of Respiratory Sounds

Traditionally, the clinical diagnosis of a respiratory disease is made from a careful clinical examination including chest auscultation. Objective analysis and automatic interpretation of the lung sound based on its physical characters are strongly warranted to assist clinical practice. In this paper, a new method is proposed to distinguish between the normal and the abnormal subjects using the morphological complexities of the lung sound signals. The morphological embedded complexities used in these experiments have been calculated in terms of texture information (lacunarity), irregularity index (sample entropy), third order moment (skewness), and fourth order moment (Kurtosis). These features are extracted from a mixed data set of 10 normal and 20 abnormal subjects and are analyzed using two different classifiers: extreme learning machine (ELM) and support vector machine (SVM) network. The results are obtained using 5-fold cross-validation. The performance of the proposed method is compared with a wavelet analysis based method. The developed algorithm gives a better accuracy of 92.86% and sensitivity of 86.30% and specificity of 86.90% for a composite feature vector of four morphological indices.
A map-and-route approach for Segment Shared Protection in multi-domain networks

Routing and protection with an overlapping segment shared protection (OSSP) scheme in multi-domain networks is more difficult than that in single domain networks because of scalability requirements. We propose a novel approach for OSSP routing where the underlying idea is the prior identification of Potential Intra-domain Paths (PIP) for carrying working and backup traffic between domain border nodes. These PIPs help to reduce the multi-domain network to a simpler aggregated network where routing is performed without unnecessarily going down to the physical links. The novel approach offers an exact and highly scalable routing thanks to the prior identification of the PIPs and the introduction of a maximal share risk group feature. Experiments show that the quality of the proposed approach is close to the optimal single-domain network solution and outperforms the existing multi-domain network solutions.
Sex differences in type 2 diabetes: focus on disease course and outcomes

Background Women with type 2 diabetes (T2D) are less likely to reach the goals for hemoglobin A1c compared with men, and have higher all-cause mortality. The risk of cardiovascular disease is elevated among both men and women with T2D, however, the risk has declined among men over recent years while it remains stationary in women. Reasons for these sex differences remain unclear, and guidelines for diabetes treatment do not differentiate between sexes. Possible causes for varying outcome include differences in physiology, treatment response, and psychological factors. This review briefly outlines sex differences in hormonal pathophysiology, and thereafter summarizes the literature to date on sex differences in disease course and outcome. Methods Systematic searches were performed on PubMed using “sex”, “gender”, and various glucose-lowering therapies as keywords. Earlier reviews are summarized and results from individual studies are reported. Reference lists from studies were used to augment the search. Results There is an increased risk of missing the diagnosis of T2D when screening women with only fasting plasma glucose instead of with an oral glucose tolerance test. The impact of various risk factors for complications may differ by sex. Efficacy and side effects of some glucose-lowering drugs differ between men and women. Men with T2D appear to suffer more microvascular complications, while women have higher morbidity and mortality in cardiovascular disease and also fare worse psychologically. Conclusion Few studies to date have focused on sex differences in T2D. Several questions demand further study, such as whether risk factors and treatment guidelines should be sex-specific. There is a need for clinical trials designed specifically to evaluate sex differences in efficacy and outcome of the available treatments.
Towards real-time motion estimation in high-definition video based on points of interest

Currently used motion estimation is usually based on a computation of optical flow from individual images or short sequences. As these methods do not require an extraction of the visual description in points of interest, correspondence can be deduced only by the position of such points. In this paper, we propose an alternative motion estimation method solely using a binary visual descriptor. By tuning the internal parameters, we achieve either a detection of longer time series or a higher number of shorter series in a shorter time. As our method uses the visual descriptors, their values can be directly used in more complex visual detection tasks.
Can Gamma-Ray Bursts Be Used to Measure Cosmology? A Further Analysis

Three different methods of measuring cosmology with gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been proposed since a relation between the gamma-ray energy Eγ of a GRB jet and the peak energy Ep of the νFν spectrum in the burst frame was reported by Ghirlanda and coauthors. In method I, to calculate the probability for a favored cosmology, only the contribution of the Eγ-Ep relation that is already best-fitted for this cosmology is considered. We apply this method to a sample of 17 GRBs and obtain the mass density ΩM = 0.15 (1 σ) for a flat ΛCDM universe. In method II, to calculate the probability for some certain cosmology, contributions of all the possible Eγ-Ep relations that are best-fitted for their corresponding cosmologies are taken into account. With this method, we find a constraint on the mass density 0.14 < ΩM < 0.69 (1 σ) for a flat universe. In method III, to obtain the probability for some cosmology, contributions of all the possible Eγ-Ep relations associated with their unequal weights are considered. With this method, we obtain an inspiring constraint on the mass density 0.16 < ΩM < 0.45 (1 σ) for a flat universe and χ = 19.08/15 = 1.27 for the concordance model of ΩM = 0.27. Compared with the previous two methods, method III makes the observed 17 GRBs place much more stringent confidence intervals at the same confidence levels. Furthermore, we perform a Monte Carlo simulation and use a larger sample to investigate the cosmographic capabilities of GRBs with different methods. We find that a larger GRB sample could be used to effectively measure cosmology, no matter whether the Eγ-Ep relation is calibrated by low-z bursts or not. Ongoing observations of GRBs in the Swift era are expected to make the cosmological utility of GRBs progress from its babyhood into childhood.
Abatacept in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis

Over the past decade, biological immunotherapy has revolutionised the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The most widely used of these therapies targets tumour necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α). Approximately 20% of patients fail to respond to TNF‐α antagonism, however, and a significant number of additional patients become refractory to anti‐TNF‐α therapy over time. Thus investigators have sought to target other pathogenic elements of RA using novel biological therapies. Abatacept is the first immunotherapy directed against the process of T‐cell costimulation. Abatacept has shown clinical effectiveness in RA by improving disease activity, quality of life measures and radiographic progression of disease. In this article, we review the immunology of T‐cell activation and costimulation, define the role of abatacept in this process, and discuss the clinical trials that led to the approval of abatacept as the latest biological therapy in RA in the USA and Canada. We also address the role of abatacept in the greater context of biological therapy for RA.
Cataract blindness and visual outcome of cataract surgery in a tribal area in Pakistan

Aim: To estimate the rates of cataract blindness and cataract surgical coverage and to assess the visual outcome of cataract surgery among individuals aged ⩾50 years in Orakzai Agency, Pakistan. Methods: 1600 individuals aged ⩾50 years were selected using probability proportional to size sampling. The main outcome measure was bilateral cataract blindness which was defined as visual acuity of <3/60 in the better eye with best available correction and with obvious central lens opacities/absence of red reflex in both eyes. Results: A total of 1549 people were examined; the coverage rate was 96.8%. Of individuals who were examined, 958 (61.8%) were men. The overall prevalence of bilateral cataract blindness was 4.8% (95% CI: 3.8% to 5.9%). Women had a 2.1-fold greater prevalence of bilateral cataract blindness than men (7.1% (5.0% to 9.2%) v 3.4% (2.3% to 4.6%); p = <0.0001). However, cataract surgical coverage rates were lower for women than men. The overall quality of previous cataract surgery was poor: 43.1% eyes with cataract surgery had VA <6/60. 73.3% people with bilateral cataract blindness reported they could not undergo cataract surgery because they were too poor to afford its cost. Conclusion: The unacceptably high rates of cataract blindness and poor affordability and visual outcome of cataract surgery calls for the establishment, in the agency, of static cataract surgical services that are high quality, affordable, and gender sensitive.
The Economic Foundations of Education: Theory and Applications to Teaching

When dealing with the social sciences, it is very difficult to find a discipline that is not linked to the role of education in the society, in one way or another. There are profound philosophical arguments (whether we are closer to rationalism or empiricism) to establish that education is among the most important activities of mankind. Education would permit to preserve culture, increase wealth, allow change, but most of all, would contribute to finding truth. Economics as a science is no exception to the paragraph above and going back as far as the relevant work of Adam Smith (1776) that scholars are attempting to give an appropriate response to the role of education in an economic setting. This paper is an analytical review of the role of education in economics and constitutes an assessment of consistency between the economics of education and teaching economics at college level. Otherwise stated, I try to respond to the question: How well does teaching economics obeys to what the economic theory has told us on the role of education? Section I provides an introduction to the subject. Section II links economics and education and the inherent issues involved. Section III provides a review of literature in the field. Section IV deals with the main teaching strategies in economics and section V has concluding remarks.
THE EFFICACY OF DEEP REPETITIVE TRANSCRANIAL MAGNETIC STIMULATION OVER THE MEDIAL PREFRONTAL CORTEX IN OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER: RESULTS FROM AN OPEN‐LABEL STUDY

Significant numbers of patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) respond minimally to currently available treatments. Furthermore, the application of both high‐ and low‐frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has shown to be ineffective in the reduction of OCD symptoms. In this study, we instead targeted the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and applied low‐frequency rTMS to patients with OCD and assessed their clinical response.
The Impact of Corporate Structures on Physician Inclusion and Participation

This study examines the impact of corporate arrangements on the hospital-physician relationship. Specifically, it investigates the effects of for-profit ownership and membership in a multihospital system on physician inclusion (salaried employment, hospital-based practice) and participation (involvement in governance and management). Contrary to common perceptions and several hypotheses drawn from the literature, corporate arrangements are associated with low physician inclusion and high participation. There is no indication that corporatization of healthcare restricts the physician's freedom of movement or decision-making role. It is instead argued that health care corporations do just the opposite in order to please physicians, promote physician welfare, and to gain legitimacy.
Association of a haplotype in the serotonin 5‐HT4 receptor gene (HTR4) with Japanese schizophrenia

The serotonin 5‐HT4 receptor (5‐HT4) is implicated in cognitive function, of which impairment is hypothesized as one of the core disturbances of schizophrenia. Linkage analysis shows that 5q33.2, in which HTR4 is located, is schizophrenia‐susceptibility loci. We therefore hypothesized that variation in the 5‐HT4 receptor gene (HTR4) modifies genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia. HTR4 coding regions and introns that include the branch sites of HTR4 were investigated in 96 unrelated Japanese schizophrenics using denaturing high‐performance liquid chromatography analysis. One silent single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) within the coding region and six intronic SNPs were detected. 353 + 6G > A was located in the branch site that could be effect to RNA splicing. None of the four SNPs, in which rare‐allele frequencies were more than 10% was associated with 189 schizophrenics, in comparison to 299 controls. However, a highly significant association between schizophrenia and haplotype A‐T (OR = 0.13 [0.03–0.58]) was detected. These findings suggest that haplotype A‐T itself may inhibit the occurrence of schizophrenia, or that another susceptible genetic variants may exist within linkage disequilibrium. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
In vitro activity of Bay 09867, a new quinoline derivative, compared with those of other antimicrobial agents

The in vitro activity of Bay 09867, a new quinoline derivative, was compared with those of norfloxacin, nalidixic acid, ceftazidime, cefaclor, cefuroxime, gentamicin, and other antimicrobial agents, when appropriate, against 410 recent clinical isolates. The minimal inhibitory concentrations of Bay 09867 for 90% of Enterobacteriaceae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Haemophilus influenzae, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, streptococci, Staphylococcus aureus, and Bacteroides fragilis strains were between 0.008 and 2 micrograms/ml. Bay 09867 was considerably more active against the gram-negative bacteria tested than were other agents tested. Gentamicin-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, P. aeruginosa, and methicillin-resistant S. aureus were highly susceptible to Bay 09867. Strains less susceptible to nalidixic acid and norfloxacin tended to be less susceptible to Bay 09867. The protein binding of Bay 09867 was about 20%.
Toward a research agenda for competency-based medical education

Abstract Competency-based medical education (CBME) is both an educational philosophy and an approach to educational design. CBME has already had a broad impact on medical schools, residency programs, and continuing professional development in health professions around the world. As the CBME movement evolves and CBME programs are implemented, a wide range of emerging research questions will warrant scholarly examination. In this paper, we describe a proposed CBME research agenda developed by the International CBME Collaborators. The resulting framework includes questions about the meaning of key concepts of CBME and their implications for learners, faculty members, and institutional structures. Other research questions relate to the learning process, the meaning of entrustment decisions, fundamental measurement issues, and the nature and definition of standards. The exploration of these questions will help to solidify the theoretical foundation of CBME, but many issues related to implementation also need to be addressed. These pertain to, among other things, nurturing independent learning, assembling and using assessment results to make decisions about competence, structuring feedback, supporting remediation, and how best to evaluate the longer-term outcomes of CBME. High-quality research on these questions will require rigorous outcome measures with strong validity evidence. The complexity of CBME necessitates theoretical and methodological diversity. It also requires multi-institutional studies that examine effects at multiple levels, from the learner to the team, the institution, and the health care system. Such a framework of research questions can guide and facilitate scholarly discourse on the theoretical and practical body of knowledge related to competency-based health professions education.
Faster learning of deep stacked autoencoders on multi-core systems using synchronized layer-wise pre-training

Deep neural networks are capable of modelling highly non-linear functions by capturing different levels of abstraction of data hierarchically. While training deep networks, first the system is initialized near a good optimum by greedy layer-wise unsupervised pre-training. However, with burgeoning data and increasing dimensions of the architecture, the time complexity of this approach becomes enormous. Also, greedy pre-training of the layers often turns detrimental by over-training a layer causing it to lose harmony with the rest of the network. In this paper a synchronized parallel algorithm for pre-training deep networks on multi-core machines has been proposed. Different layers are trained by parallel threads running on different cores with regular synchronization. Thus the pre-training process becomes faster and chances of over-training are reduced. This is experimentally validated using a stacked autoencoder for dimensionality reduction of MNIST handwritten digit database. The proposed algorithm achieved 26\% speed-up compared to greedy layer-wise pre-training for achieving the same reconstruction accuracy substantiating its potential as an alternative.