Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use and toxicity of pyrethroid pesticides in the Central Valley, California, USA

The use of pyrethroid insecticides is increasing for agriculture, commercial pest control, and residential consumer use. In addition, there is a trend toward the use of newer and more potent compounds. Little is known about the toxicity of sediment‐associated pyrethroid residues to aquatic organisms, yet recent work has shown they commonly are found in aquatic sediments in the heavily agricultural Central Valley of California, USA. Minimal data exist on the sensitivity of standard sediment toxicity testing species to pyrethroids, despite two or more decades of agricultural use of these compounds. Sediment concentrations causing acute toxicity and growth impairment to the amphipod Hyalella azteca were determined for six pyrethroids in three sediments, ranging from 1.1 to 6.5% organic carbon (OC). In order of decreasing toxicity of sediment‐associated residues, the compounds tested were bifenthrin (average 10‐d median lethal concentration [LC50] = 0.18 μg/g OC), lambda‐cyhalothrin (0.45 μg/g OC), deltamethrin (0.79 μg/g OC), esfenvalerate (0.89 μg/g OC), cyfluthrin (1.08 μg/g OC), and permethrin (4.87 μg/g OC). In a sediment containing about 1% OC, most pyrethroids, except permethrin, would be acutely toxic to H. azteca at concentrations of 2 to 10 ng/g dry weight, a concentration only slightly above current analytical detection limits. Growth typically was inhibited at concentrations below the LC50; animal biomass on average was 38% below controls when exposed to pyrethroid concentrations roughly one‐third to one‐half the LC50. Survival data are consistent with current theory that exposure occurs primarily via the interstitial water rather than the particulate phase. A reanalysis of previously reported field data using these toxicity data confirms that the compounds are exceeding concentrations acutely toxic to sensitive species in many agriculture‐dominated water bodies.
Estimation of significance thresholds for genomewide association scans

The question of what significance threshold is appropriate for genomewide association studies is somewhat unresolved. Previous theoretical suggestions have yet to be validated in practice, whereas permutation testing does not resolve a discrepancy between the genomewide multiplicity of the experiment and the subset of markers actually tested. We used genotypes from the Wellcome Trust Case‐Control Consortium to estimate a genomewide significance threshold for the UK Caucasian population. We subsampled the genotypes at increasing densities, using permutation to estimate the nominal P‐value for 5% family‐wise error. By extrapolating to infinite density, we estimated the genomewide significance threshold to be about 7.2 × 10−8. To reduce the computation time, we considered Patterson's eigenvalue estimator of the effective number of tests, but found it to be an order of magnitude too low for multiplicity correction. However, by fitting a Beta distribution to the minimum P‐value from permutation replicates, we showed that the effective number is a useful heuristic and suggest that its estimation in this context is an open problem. We conclude that permutation is still needed to obtain genomewide significance thresholds, but with subsampling, extrapolation and estimation of an effective number of tests, the threshold can be standardized for all studies of the same population. Genet. Epidemiol. 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Effects of Carperitide on Contrast-Induced Acute Kidney Injury with a Minimum Volume of Contrast in Chronic Kidney Disease Patients

Background/Aims: Although contrast-induced acute kidney injury (CIAKI) is a major complication associated with angiography, the prophylaxis is not well established. Use of a low dose of carperitide for preventing CIAKI remains controversial. We examined the protective effect of carperitide on CIAKI after coronary angiography with a small contrast volume in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients with coronary artery disease. Methods: We randomly assigned 112 consecutive patients to a carperitide or a control group. The contrast volume was kept under 150 ml. The primary endpoint was the incidence of CIAKI defined by a serum creatinine of ≥25% or a serum creatinine of ≥0.5 mg/dl from baseline within 48 h. The secondary endpoint was a change in renal function at 1 week after the procedure. Results: The baseline characteristics and contrast volumes (carperitide group: 67.4 ± 38.2 ml vs. control group: 64.8 ± 20.5 ml, p = 0.661) were comparable in the two groups. The incidence of CIAKI was similar in the two groups (carperitide group: 8.5% vs. control group: 5.7%, p = 0.564). A multivariate analysis revealed that a hypotension ≥20 mm Hg was a significant predictor of developing CIAKI in the carperitide group (p = 0.015). The incidence of CIAKI in the carperitide group without hypotension was rare, but not significantly different (carperitide group: 2.4% vs. control group: 5.7%, p = 0.432). Conclusions: This study indicated that the use of a small contrast volume suppressed the incidence of CIAKI and that carperitide had no prophylactic effect against CIAKI. Our results also revealed the impact of hypotension on the development of CIAKI in the carperitide group.
03 06 03 6 v 1 5 J un 2 00 3 Cavity field ensembles from nonselective measurements

We continue our investigations of cavity QED with time dependent parameters. In this paper we discuss the situation where the state of the atoms leaving the cavity is reduced but the outcome is not recorded. In this case our knowledge is limited to an ensemble description of the results only. By applying the Demkov-Kunike level-crossing model, we show that even in this case, the filtering action of the interaction allows us to prepare a preassigned Fock state with good accuracy. The possibilities and limitations of the method are discussed and some relations to earlier work are presented.
TOWARDS PROTEIN NETWORK ANALYSIS USING TIS IMAGING AND EXPLORATORY DATA ANALYSIS

Identification, analysis and visualization of functional molecular networks are key objectives in systems biology and the logical extension of existing molecular profiling techniques. Here we used TIS (toponome imaging system) imaging to visualize co-location of proteins in tissue samples, thereby integrating two distinct information domains, morphology and molecular interaction. Using a library of 13 selected dye-conjugated antibodies, TIS recorded a stack of 13 fluorescence images, each showing the same visual field, with high fluorescence values indicating the presence of the corresponding bio-molecule or protein. We show first results obtained using machine learning approaches that allow the identification and spatial analysis of co-location patterns without manual thresholding. The authors believe that TIS imaging in combination with advanced visual data mining methods can contribute substantially to addressing several outstanding issues in systems biology where molecular co-location is involved.
Refactoring a web academic information system using design patterns

The Integrated System for Academic Activities Management (Sistema Integrado de Gestão de Atividades Acadêmicas - SIGAA), is the software information system developed to control the academic activities at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Most recently, technical cooperation agreements allowed the software to be adopted by other federal universities in Brazil. In order to ease the adaptation of the software to the reality of such institutions, in addition to enabling the rapid adaptation to changes of the regulation of the universities, refactorings were necessary in many use cases of SIGAA. This paper presents such refactorings, showing the existing problems in those use cases, the goals that should be achieved and the design patterns that helped to achieve such goals.
Multiscale sparse representation of high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) lung images for diffuse lung disease classification

A multiscale sparse representation scheme based on wavelet and contourlet transforms is employed to describe four patterns of diffuse lung disease patterns: normal, emphysema, ground glass opacity (GGO) and honey-combing based on HRCT lung images. First, using sparse representation, four discriminative dictionaries are trained for the four patterns respectively. After that, in the classification phase, a patch or ROI is assigned to the pattern with minimum resconstruction error. The method is tested on a collection of 89 slices from 38 patients, each slice of size 512×512, 16 bits/pixel in DICOM format. The dataset contains 73,000 ROIs of those slices marked by experienced radiologists. We employ this technique with 2-scale wavelet and [2 3] contourlet transform for diffuse lung disease classification. The technique presented here has the overall sensitivity of 91.05% and specificity 97.01%.
Evaluation of a brief community‐based mindfulness intervention for people with multiple sclerosis: A pilot study

ObjectiveMindfulness-based interventions can improve quality of life (QoL) in people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS); however, the potential benefits of brief mindfulness group programs delivered in community settings have not been investigated with this population. This pilot study evaluated a brief (five-session) community-based group mindfulness program for PwMS.MethodParticipants were 23 PwMS recruited through Multiple Sclerosis Queensland, Australia. The study had a single intervention condition with pre-intervention, post-intervention and eight-week follow-up assessments. Primary outcomes were QoL, psychological distress and fatigue, and secondary outcomes were mindfulness, self-compassion, and acceptance.ResultsAnalyses revealed improvements in psychological distress, perceived stress, the mental health QoL dimension, mindfulness, self-compassion, and acceptance. All participants agreed they would recommend the program to others with multiple sclerosis and most reported that the program was helpful and enjoyable. Qualitative data showed that participants gained in present moment awareness, coping skills, self-compassion, acceptance, support, and changed perspectives.ConclusionsResults suggest that brief mindfulness interventions may improve psychological wellbeing in PwMS; however, a longer intervention period or programs that incorporate mindful movement activities may be needed to bring about improvements in physical health QoL dimensions and fatigue.
All together now ? Arguments for a bigbang solution to eurozone problems

Muddling through isn’t working. This commentary argues that troubled eurozone nations should simultaneously open restructuring talks while continuing to service their debts normally. Germany, France and other core eurozone nations would have to stand ready to recapitalise the banks most exposed to the restructured debt. The ECB would then stabilise the banking system and the EFSF would stabilise sovereign debt. This big bang could be prepared in a weekend; the market already seems to be pricing it in.
Computer modeling and simulation of MPC control for grid connected renewable power sources

Renewable energy test site installed at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan is considered as a controlled plant for modeling, design and simulation of proposed model predictive control (MPC) technique for the power system with nominal power up to 10 kW. The mathematical and simulation model of the control plant assumes that disturbance from consumer grid side is generated by pseudorandom numbers. The control strategy relies on switching between several controllers LCL-filter and is shortly discussed. The MISO control system is designed using the switching between two MPC controllers. The results of simulation show significant reduction of THD value which proves the effectiveness of the designed control.
Integrating European Qualification Systems with OWL Ontologies

The present work describes the work carried out in the EU LdV HELeN Projec regarding the use of Web ontologies as a way to tackle the qualification systems' integration for enabling transparency and mobility of students at European level. Qualification systems at post-secondary non-academic level of nine EU countries have been formalized in terms of profile, activities, competences, learning outcomes, etc. first using UML for a human-readable model and then using OWL for a machine-processable one. In addition, concrete qualification profiles have been used as study case to validate the ontology correctness.
Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere

This study explores time trends in public trust in science in the United States from 1974 to 2010. More precisely, I test Mooney’s (2005) claim that conservatives in the United States have become increasingly distrustful of science. Using data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Survey, I examine group differences in trust in science and group-specific change in these attitudes over time. Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest. The patterns for science are also unique when compared to public trust in other secular institutions. Results show enduring differences in trust in science by social class, ethnicity, gender, church attendance, and region. I explore the implications of these findings, specifically, the potential for political divisions to emerge over the cultural authority of science and the social role of experts in the formation of public policy.
Property (M), M-ideals, and almost isometric structure of Banach spaces.

We study $M$-ideals of compact operators by means of the property~$(M)$ introduced in \cite{Kal-M}. Our main result states for a separable Banach space $X$ that the space of compact operators on $X$ is an $M$-ideal in the space of bounded operators if (and only if) $X$ does not contain a copy of $\ell_{1}$, has the metric compact approximation property, and has property~$(M)$. The investigation of special versions of property~$(M)$ leads to results on almost isometric structure of some classes of Banach spaces. For instance, we give a simple necessary and sufficient condition for a Banach space to embed almost isometrically into an $\ell_{p}$-sum of finite-dimensional spaces resp. \ into $c_{0}$, and for $2<p<\iy$ we prove that a subspace of $L_{p}$ embeds almost isometrically into $\ell_{p}$ if and only if it does not contain a subspace isomorphic to $\ell_{2}$.
Packet loss consideration of P2P-based VoD system with interleaved video frame distribution

Following the advancement in digital technology and broadband communication technology, video streaming service has become an essential one for next generation Internet. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network structure is widely employed for video streaming applications due to its flexible extensibility and ability to share data stream loading among different peer nodes. This paper considers the problems of network packet loss and native peer random leave in P2P network environment. An XOR-based frame loss protection scheme is proposed based on the recently proposed interleaved video frame distribution (IVFD) P2P architecture to mitigate the effect of peer leave and network packet loss. The proposed scheme is not only able to recover the network packet loss, but also able to resist the peer leaving churn. Analysis reveals that the proposed scheme has 43% performance improvement than no frame loss protection in term of frame loss rate.
Jackknifing Documents and Additive Smoothing for Naive Bayes with Scarce Data

Naïve Bayes (NB) classifiers are well-suited to several applications owing to their easy interpretability and maintainability. However, text classification is often hampered by the lack of adequate training data. This motivates the question: how can we train NB more effectively whentraining data is very scarce? In this paper, we introduce an established subsampling techniquefrom statistics -- the jackknife -- into machine learning. Our approachjackknifes documents themselves to create new "pseudo-documents. " Theunderlying idea is that although these pseudo-documents do not havesemantic meaning, they are equally representative of the underlyingdistribution of terms. Therefore, they could be used to train any classifierthat learns this underlying distribution, namely, any parametric classifiersuch as NB (but not, for example, non-parametric classifiers such as SVMand k-NN). Furthermore, the marginal value of this additional trainingdata should be the highest precisely when the original data is inadequate. We then show that our jackknife technique is related to the questionof additively smoothing NB via an appropriately defined notion of"adjointness. " This relation is surprising since it connects a statisticaltechnique for handling scarce data to a question about the NB model. Accordingly, we are able to shed light on optimal values of the smoothingparameter for NB in the very scarce data regime. We validate our approach on a wide array of standard benchmarks -- both binary and multi-class -- for two event models of multinomial NB. Weshow that the jackknife technique can dramatically improve the accuracyfor both event models of NB in the regime of very scarce training data. Inparticular, our experiments show that the jackknife can make NB moreaccurate than SVM for binary problems in the very scarce training dataregime. We also provide a comprehensive characterization of the accuracyof these important classifiers (for both binary and multiclass) in the veryscarce data regime for benchmark text datasets, without feature selectionand class imbalance.
Zinc and Excitotoxic Brain Injury: A New Model

It has been nearly 15 years since the suggestion that synaptically released Zn2+ might contribute to excitotoxic brain injury after seizures, stroke, and brain trauma. In the original “zinc-translocation” model, it was proposed that synaptically released Zn2+ ions penetrated postsynaptic neurons, causing injury. According to the model, chelating zinc in the cleft was predicted to be neuroprotective. This proved to be true: zinc chelators have proved to be remarkably potent at reducing excitotoxic neuronal injury in many paradigms. Promising new zinc-based therapies for stroke, head trauma, and epileptic brain injury are under development. However, new evidence suggests that the original translocation model was incomplete. As many as three sources of toxic zinc ions may contribute to excitotoxicity: presynaptic vesicles, postsynaptic zincsequestering proteins, and (more speculatively) mitochondrial pools. The authors present a new model of zinc currents and zinc toxicity that offers expanded opportunities for zinc-selective therapeutic chelation interventions.
An Analytical Approach in Analysis of Local Oscillator Near-the-Carrier AM Noise Suppression in Microwave Balanced Mixers

In this paper, a new formulation based on conversion matrix method is proposed to analyze ldquonear-the-carrier local ocillator (LO) noiserdquo down conversion to IF in microwave mixers. This method could be easily applied to analyze LO noise down conversion in any type of mixer. Practical results of this method have been compared with the envelope method and measurement results. It is shown that despite the conventional AM noise suppression in balanced mixers, the near-the-carrier LO noise suppression does not occur necessarily at the center frequency of hybrid in balanced mixers. AM noise suppression values are predicted precisely.
An Absolute Index (Ab-index) to Measure a Researcher’s Useful Contributions and Productivity

Bibliographic analysis has been a very powerful tool in evaluating the effective contributions of a researcher and determining his/her future research potential. The lack of an absolute quantification of the author’s scientific contributions by the existing measurement system hampers the decision-making process. In this paper, a new metric system, Absolute index (Ab-index), has been proposed that allows a more objective comparison of the contributions of a researcher. The Ab-index takes into account the impact of research findings while keeping in mind the physical and intellectual contributions of the author(s) in accomplishing the task. The Ab-index and h-index were calculated for 10 highly cited geneticists and molecular biologist and 10 young researchers of biological sciences and compared for their relationship to the researchers input as a primary author. This is the first report of a measuring method clarifying the contributions of the first author, corresponding author, and other co-authors and the sharing of credit in a logical ratio. A java application has been developed for the easy calculation of the Ab-index. It can be used as a yardstick for comparing the credibility of different scientists competing for the same resources while the Productivity index (Pr-index), which is the rate of change in the Ab-index per year, can be used for comparing scientists of different age groups. The Ab-index has clear advantage over other popular metric systems in comparing scientific credibility of young scientists. The sum of the Ab-indices earned by individual researchers of an institute per year can be referred to as Pr-index of the institute.
A research on discrete probability estimate (DPE) localization algorithm in wireless sensor networks

This paper, from the law of normal distribution, we try some new methods of data acquisition and processing. Through depth analysis of probability distribution mechanism, this paper presents that we can use the rectangular area to replace the overlap regions. Through rasterization method, a kind of discrete probability estimate localization algorithm is established. In reducing the calculation of the node as far as possible, the new algorithm is easy to understanding and application, which overcome shortcomings of continuous probability distribution algorithm. Experiment results show that the algorithm we proposed in the paper has better location performance, compared with the typical location algorithm.
(going) Groupe d'Observation Et d'Investigation Des Nouvelles Gouvernances,

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Territoire physique & Virtuel : quelle cohabitation ? (going) Groupe d’Observation Et d’Investigation Des Nouvelles Gouvernances, Yann Bertacchini
Hopf algebra structure of incidence algebras

The incidence algebra of a partially ordered set (poset) sup ports in a nat- ural way also a coalgebra structure, so that it becomes a m-weak bialgebra even a m-weak Hopf algebra with Mobius function as antipode. Here m- weak means that multiplication and comultiplication are not required to be coalgebra- or algebra-morphisms, respectively. A rich theory is obtained in computing modulo an equivalence relation on the set of intervals in the poset.