Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Obesity and the metabolic syndrome in children and adolescents.

BACKGROUND The prevalence and magnitude of childhood obesity are increasing dramatically. We examined the effect of varying degrees of obesity on the prevalence of the metabolic syndrome and its relation to insulin resistance and to C-reactive protein and adiponectin levels in a large, multiethnic, multiracial cohort of children and adolescents. METHODS We administered a standard glucose-tolerance test to 439 obese, 31 overweight, and 20 nonobese children and adolescents. Baseline measurements included blood pressure and plasma lipid, C-reactive protein, and adiponectin levels. Levels of triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and blood pressure were adjusted for age and sex. Because the body-mass index varies according to age, we standardized the value for age and sex with the use of conversion to a z score. RESULTS The prevalence of the metabolic syndrome increased with the severity of obesity and reached 50 percent in severely obese youngsters. Each half-unit increase in the body-mass index, converted to a z score, was associated with an increase in the risk of the metabolic syndrome among overweight and obese subjects (odds ratio, 1.55; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.16 to 2.08), as was each unit of increase in insulin resistance as assessed with the homeostatic model (odds ratio, 1.12; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.07 to 1.18 for each additional unit of insulin resistance). The prevalence of the metabolic syndrome increased significantly with increasing insulin resistance (P for trend, <0.001) after adjustment for race or ethnic group and the degree of obesity. C-reactive protein levels increased and adiponectin levels decreased with increasing obesity. CONCLUSIONS The prevalence of the metabolic syndrome is high among obese children and adolescents, and it increases with worsening obesity. Biomarkers of an increased risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes are already present in these youngsters.
Faecal indicator bacteria in New Zealand freshwater fish: a pilot study

ABSTRACT Recent studies have suggested that poikilothermic animals, such as fish, may represent a previously overlooked source of the faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) used for the assessment of water quality. However, quantitative studies of FIB in poikilotherms are scarce. We investigated the presence of FIB in the faeces of five freshwater fish species. E. coli and enterococci were detected in 71 and 76% of faecal samples, respectively. Concentrations were highly variable, with maximum concentrations (2.1 × 104 E. coli and 1.3 × 106 enterococci per gram of faecal material) up to four orders of magnitude higher than present in the water column. FIB were not detected in faecal samples from marine fish. Our findings suggest that FIB ingested from the environment may be capable of replication within the fish gut, making fish a potential source and transport mechanism for FIB in New Zealand freshwaters. This may have implications for water quality monitoring.
Plasma fatty acid-binding protein 4 increases with renal dysfunction in type 2 diabetic patients without microalbuminuria.

BACKGROUND Fatty acid-binding protein 4 (FABP4) has been linked to metabolic syndrome development, diabetes, and arteriosclerosis, but the role of FABP4 in target organ damage has not been assessed. We evaluated whether plasma FABP4 is associated with renal dysfunction in type 2 diabetic patients. METHODS In 263 individuals (161 type 2 diabetic patients and 102 healthy nondiabetic controls), we analyzed the correlation between FABP4 and creatinine or glomerular filtration index (MDRD-GFR) regarding the presence or absence of microalbuminuria. Patients with severe chronic kidney disease (MDRD-GFR <30 mL/min/1.73 m(2)) or albuminuria were not included. RESULTS FABP4 concentrations were higher in diabetic patients with MDRD-GFR <60 mL/min/1.73 m(2) (P <0.001). We observed a significant, direct correlation between FABP4 and creatinine (r = 0.446, P <0.001) and an inverse correlation between FABP4 and MDRD-GFR (r = -0.511, P <0.001) in type 2 diabetic patients, but not in nondiabetic individuals. These correlations were sustained when only those patients without microalbuminuria were analyzed (r = 0.414, P <0.001 and r = -0.510, P <0.001, respectively). Type 2 diabetic patients with FABP4 in the highest tertile compared with those in the lower tertiles had increased adjusted odds ratios for moderate renal dysfunction [7.5 (95%CI 1.8-30.7), P = 0.005 and 15.3 (3.1-76.4), P = 0.001; respectively], independent of microalbuminuria. CONCLUSIONS High FABP4 plasma concentrations are associated with high plasma creatinine and low MDRD-GFR in patients with type 2 diabetes even in the absence of microalbuminuria or clinically relevant alterations of creatinine and MDRD-GFR values. FABP4 concentrations should be taken into consideration as an early marker of kidney damage in patients with type 2 diabetes.
Enlargement of Catheter Ablation Lesions in Infant Hearts With Cryothermal Versus Radiofrequency Energy: An Animal Study

Background— Radiofrequency catheter ablation in immature hearts has been associated with marked enlargement of lesions over time, with potential for related late adverse events. It remains unknown whether cryothermal ablation lesions display a similar pattern of growth. Methods and Results— Ablation lesions (n=384) were performed in 32 infant miniature swine in right and left atria, ventricles, and atrioventricular (AV) grooves preselected by a randomized factorial design devised to compare radiofrequency and cryothermal lesions produced by 7F 4-mm electrode-tip catheters. Animals were euthanized acutely or at 1, 6, or 12 months, according to the randomization scheme. The miniature swine weighed 8.8±1.2 kg and were 63±13 days of age at time of ablation. The minimum temperature during cryoablation was −79.8±3.4°C and the average temperature during radiofrequency ablation was 54.4±5.5°C. On morphometric analyses, no differences in the rate of growth of ablation lesions were noted between the 2 energy modalities in atria (P=0.44), ventricles (P=0.57), or AV grooves (P=0.69). Lesion volumes increased 3.3-fold in atria (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.3 to 4.3; P=0.001) and 2.2-fold in ventricles (95% CI, 1.4 to 3.0; P<0.0001), with the difference between chambers being nonsignificant (P=0.22). Whereas the depth of AV groove lesions increased over time (1.9-fold; 95% CI, 1.5 to 2.3; P<0.0001), lesion volumes did not enlarge significantly (1.5-fold; 95% CI, 0.4 to 2.6; P=0.45). Conclusions— Ablation lesions produced by cryothermal energy in immature atrial and ventricular myocardium enlarge to a similar extent to radiofrequency ablation. In contrast, AV groove lesion volumes do not increase significantly with either energy modality.
Adaptively weighted subpattern-based sparse preserving projection for face recognition

In this paper, we propose an adaptively weighted subpattern-based sparse preserving projection (Aw-spSPP) algorithm for face recognition. Unlike SPP (Sparse preserving projection) based on a whole image pattern, the proposed AwSpSPP method operates on sub-patterns partitioned from an original whole face image and separately extracts corresponding local sub-features from them. Moreover, the contribution of each sub-pattern can be adaptively computed by sparse weights needless of additional parameter such as neighborhood size used in Aw-spLPP (adaptively weighted subpattern-based locality preserving projection). Experimental results on three bench mark face databases (ORL, YALE and PIE) show that Aw-spSPP can overcome the shortcomings of the existed subpattern-based methods and achieve promising recognition accuracy.
Approximate Bayesian inference in multivariate Gaussian process regression and applications to species distribution models

Gaussian processes are certainly not a new tool in the field of science. However, alongside the quick increasing of computer power during the last decades, Gaussian processes have proved to be a successful and flexible statistical tool for data analysis. Its practical interpretation as a nonparametric procedure to represent prior beliefs about the underlying data generating mechanism has gained attention among a variety of research fields ranging from ecology, inverse problems and deep learning in artificial intelligence. The core of this thesis deals with multivariate Gaussian process model as an alternative method to classical methods of regression analysis in Statistics. I develop hierarchical models, where the vector of predictor functions (in the sense of generalized linear models) is assumed to follow a multivariate Gaussian process. Statistical inference over the vector of predictor functions is approached by means of the Bayesian paradigm with analytical approximations. I developed also new parametrisations for the statistical models in order to improve the performance of the computations related to the inferential task. The methods developed in this thesis are also tightly connected to practical applications. The main applications considered involve multiple species surveys and species distribution modelling in quantitative ecology. This is a field of research which provides a rich variety of applications where statistical methods can be put at test.
Memory yield and complexity of built-in self-repair

This work describes the implementation of two different BISR algorithms for memories with spare rows and columns. The choice of BISR technology must depend on the final net yield due to area, susceptibility to defects, and repair probability. The Single Deferral algorithm has near the minimal memory requirement. The greedy algorithm is a standard heuristic algorithm that iteratively repairs the line with the most excess defects. The memory requirement for the greedy algorithm is quadratic in the number of spares while Single Deferral is linear. Since the repair probability with Single Deferral is near optimal, it is more cost-effective than greedy.
Environmentally Relevant Concentrations of the Flame Retardant Tris(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) Phosphate Inhibit the Growth and Reproduction of Earthworms in Soil

Tris(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate (TDCIPP) is a synthetic organophosphate flame retardant that has been used for decades in various products. Its environmental occurrence and toxicity to aquatic organisms has been reported. However, no study to date has been performed on the toxicity of TDCIPP to terrestrial invertebrates. In this study, earthworms (Eisenia fetida) were exposed to 0, 50, 500, and 5000 ng/g TDCIPP in soil for 28 d. The 500 and 5000 ng/g TDCIPP treatments significantly lowered (4.2% and 9.2%, respectively) the average body mass of earthworms, and the 5000 ng/g TDCIPP treatments significantly decreased (25.0%) the number of juveniles born per earthworm. Moreover, seminal vesicle injury, skin lesions, and muscle atrophy were observed. It is worth noting that E. fetida accumulated TDCIPP mainly via epidermal adsorption. Using a combination of transcriptomics and metabolomics, detailed molecular information was provided on the responses of earthworms to TDCIPP exposure. After 5000 ng/g TDCI.
The current state of mental health services in Canada's paediatric emergency departments.

OBJECTIVE To describe emergency mental health services in major paediatric centres across Canada. METHODS A cross-sectional study of mental health services in emergency departments (EDs) from all 15 Canadian tertiary care paediatric centres was conducted. RESULTS Fifteen individuals participated and were either a paediatric emergency physician with administrative responsibilities (60%) or an emergency mental health care provider (40%). Four participants reported that their ED used an evidence-based guideline, tool or policy, and one participant reported their ED based its services on published research evidence. Reported ED-based mental health resources included a crisis intervention team (five EDs), a mental health nurse (six EDs) and a social worker (five EDs). Thirteen participants reported on-site consultation with child psychiatry and six reported urgent follow-up as an adjunct service to ED care. CONCLUSIONS There is a wide variety of mental health care practices in Canadian paediatric EDs. Consideration of which resources are required to ensure evidence-based, effective services are provided to children and youth is necessary.
Work as a team or individual: Characterizing the system-level impacts of main memory partitioning

Modern multi-core systems employ shared memory architecture, entailing problems related to the main memory such as row-buffer conflicts, time-varying hot-spots across memory channels, and superfluous switches between reads and writes originating from different cores. There have been proposals to solve these problems by partitioning main memory across banks and/or channels such that a DRAM bank is dedicated to a single core, being free from inter-thread row-buffer conflicts. However, those studies either focused on only multi-programmed workloads on which cores operate independently, not cooperatively, or specific hardware configurations with a limited number of degrees of freedom in the number of main memory banks, ranks, and channels. We analyze the influence of memory partitioning on systems with various degrees of banks, ranks, and channels using multi-threaded and multi-programmed workloads, making the following key observations. Bank partitioning is beneficial when memory-intensive applications in a multi-programmed workload have similar characteristics in bank-level parallelism, bandwidth, and capacity demands. Any diversity in these demands with a limited memory capacity greatly diminishes the bank partitioning benefits. As memory access/usage patterns across cores are more easily manageable on multi-threaded workloads, bank partitioning is more often effective with memory intensive multithreaded applications. Channel partitioning becomes effective when the reduction of the negative impacts of time-varying hotspots across memory channels outweighs the load imbalance due to partitioning. We also demonstrate the benefits of rank partitioning with regard to minimizing read-write switches on multi-threaded applications where cores can coordinate memory accesses.
Anion binding to a protein–protein complex lacks dependence on net charge

The binding of anions to proteins occurs in numerous physiological and metabolic processes. In an effort to understand the factors important in these interactions, we have studied the weak binding of phosphate and sulfate to a protein–protein complex using isothermal titration calorimetry. To our knowledge, this is the first system in which the thermodynamics of anion binding have been determined calorimetrically. By studying both phosphate and sulfate binding and using a range of pH values, the charge on the anion was varied from ∼ −1 to −2. Surprisingly, no dependence of the binding energetics on the charge of the anion was observed. This result indicates that charge–charge interactions are not the dominant factor in binding and suggests the importance of hydrogen bonding in specifically recognizing and coordinating anions.
Combining behavior and situation information for reliably estimating multiple intentions

Intersections are the most accident-prone spots in the road network. In order to assist the driver in complex urban intersection situations, an ADAS will be required not only to recognize current but also to anticipate future maneuvers of the involved road users. Current approaches for intention estimation focus mainly on discerning only two intentions based on a vehicle's behavior. We argue that for distinguishing between more than two intentions not just a vehicle's kinematic behavior but also its driving situation needs to be taken into account. In our system we estimate four different intentions by modeling and recognizing driving situations in a Bayesian Network and using the behavior as additional evidence. For the behavior based estimation we present a newly engineered feature, the Anticipated Velocity at Stop line, that turned out to be a very strong indicator for the intention. Our system is evaluated on a real-world data set comprising approaches to seven different intersections on which we can show that our approach is able to estimate a driver's intention with a high accuracy.
A study of ranking behavior factors for online shopping by grey relation estimation

Abstract Online consumption is a new marketing channel, which allows consumers to shop with no boundaries and time restriction; furthermore, to provide consumers with in time product-related information and customized services. Compared with the traditional marketing channel, the online business has a significant strength on competitiveness. Thus, this paper adopts gray relation estimation to study college students in Fuzhou City, and find out weight relation among each factor by questionnaires. Then, business can make appropriate marketing or management strategies in accordance with the weight relation.
A physically-based facial skin model to simulate facial expressions on digitally scanned 3D models

In this paper we present a physically-based 3D facial skin model based on biomechanical properties of human facial anatomy. The skin model is mainly formed of two DNURBS surfaces as a two layered membrane structure. The model represents the soft tissue layer which covers the skull and is attached to the skull via muscle insertion points. The model is fitted on digitally scanned 3D facial surfaces and controlled via DNURBS control points, which are spatially close to muscle insertion points. The face (skin model) is modified by displacing control points to mimic muscle contraction in order to simulate facial expressions. The system is solved and the simulations are displayed on a graphics workstation, where near real-time performance is achieved as opposed to many other existing physically- based methods.
FPGA implementation of the CAR Model of the cochlea

The front end of the human auditory system, the cochlea, converts sound signals from the outside world into neural impulses transmitted along the auditory pathway for further processing. The cochlea senses and separates sound in a nonlinear active fashion, exhibiting remarkable sensitivity and frequency discrimination. Although several electronic models of the cochlea have been proposed and implemented, none of these are able to reproduce all the characteristics of the cochlea, including large dynamic range, large gain and sharp tuning at low sound levels, and low gain and broad tuning at intense sound levels. Here, we implement the `Cascade of Asymmetric Resonators' (CAR) model of the cochlea on an FPGA. CAR represents the basilar membrane filter in the `Cascade of Asymmetric Resonators with Fast-Acting Compression' (CAR-FAC) cochlear model. CAR-FAC is a neuromorphic model of hearing based on a pole-zero filter cascade model of auditory filtering. It uses simple nonlinear extensions of conventional digital filter stages that are well suited to FPGA implementations, so that we are able to implement up to 1224 cochlear sections on Virtex-6 FPGA to process sound data in real time. The FPGA implementation of the electronic cochlea described here may be used as a front-end sound analyser for various machine-hearing applications.
An Emerging Concatenated Multitone Air Interface for High Speed Access and Home Wireless Networks

This paper presents further enhancements to a recently proposed air interface that concatenates an inner filtered multitone (FMT) modulator with transmission over multiple antennas, and an outer space-time cyclically prefixed discrete multitone (ST-CP- DMT) modulator with frequency domain data spreading. We focus on the uplink with asynchronous mobile devices. The contribution is threefold. Firstly, we show an efficient implementation of the transmitter. Secondly, we propose an efficient multiuser receiver architecture that requires a single polyphase filter bank and a concatenation of DFTs. Thirdly, we analyze time domain pre- equalization (TEQ) to shorten the equivalent channel impulse response between the FMT filter bank output and the ST-CP-DMT receiver. The proposed multiuser receiver outperforms the bank of synchronous single user receivers yet requiring less complexity. TEQ has the potentiality of improving performance in severely dispersive channels, and to increase transmission rate since the DMT stage can use shorter cyclic prefix (CP).
Desenvolvimento de bebida láctea fermentada sabor umbu (Spondias tuberosa Arruda Câmara) com potencial atividade simbiótica

O desenvolvimento de bebida lactea fermentada com caracteristicas funcionais, adicionada de um fruto tropical, apresenta-se como uma alternativa promissora para a Ciencia e Tecnologia dos Alimentos.O objetivo deste estudo foi desenvolver formulacoes de bebidas lacteas a partir de culturas probioticas e adicao de prebioticoe polpa de umbu (Spondias tuberosa Arruda Câmara). Foi utilizada a metodologia de superficie de resposta com a finalidade de avaliar a influencia do soro lacteo (20%, 30% e 40%) e de FOS (Frutooligossacarideos)(2%, 4% e 6%) sobre os atributos sensoriais Cor, Sabor, Aroma, Consistencia e Qualidade Global, alem de Intencao de compra. Os ensaios experimentais foram realizados de acordo com o planejamento fatorial de 22 completo totalizando 7 ensaios. As formulacoes foram submetidas a analise sensorial de aceitacao, intencao de compra e ao Calculo de Indice de Aceitabilidade para selecao da formulacao com melhores resultados. Esta foi submetida as analises fisico-quimicas, composicao centesimal e avaliacao da estabilidade durante 28 dias de estocagem refrigerada.A avaliacao do efeito das variaveis demonstrou que o FOS contribuiu para a cor, sabor e intencao de compra, enquanto que o soro apresentou influencia apenas na cor da bebida lactea. A polpa de umbu apresentou resultados satisfatorios quanto a avaliacao fisico-quimica condizentes a literatura. A analise sensorial apontou o ensaio 3, com 6% de FOS e 20% de soro de leite, como a bebida lactea com melhor aceitacao sensorial. A bebida lactea selecionada apresentou acidez igual a 0,73g de acido lactico/100g, pH baixo (4,02), Solidos Totais 16,77°Brix e teores baixos de carotenoides (0,167 mg/100mL) e Fenolicos Totais (0,541 mgGAE/100mL). Quanto a composicao centesimal, apresentou elevada umidade, baixo teor de lipidios e cinzas, e teor proteico em conformidade com a legislacao. Quanto a vida de prateleira, apresentou boa estabilidade quanto ao pH, acidez e contagem de bacterias lacticas (6 log UFC/mL) ao final de 28 dias de armazenamento, concentracao minima preconizada pela legislacao. Portanto, os resultados obtidos apresentaram caracteristicas sensoriais, fisico-quimicas e funcionais satisfatorias, adequadas a Legislacao vigente, configurando uma bebida tecnologicamente viavel.
Weighted residual fusion with multi-modality features for high-resolution aerial scene classification

ABSTRACT In scene-level classification of remote sensing, fusion of multi-feature can significantly boost the performance. However, most methods directly fuse the features of different modalities without considering the importance of each feature modality. Based on the above considerations, in this work, multi-modality features weighted residual fusion method is proposed. First, the extracted high-level and low-level features of the scene image are encoded into a unified feature representation. Then the reconstruction residuals of each modality of each scene class are calculated based on two representation-based classification, i.e. sparse representation (SR) and collaborative representation (CR). After fusing the weighted reconstruction residuals of these two modalities with SR and CR, the class label is assigned to the category with the smallest residual. We make extensive evaluations on two challenging remote sensing data sets. The comparison with the state-of-the-art methods demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.