Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dietary Exposure to Aluminium and Health Risk Assessment in the Residents of Shenzhen, China

Although there are great changes of dietary in the past few decades in China, few are known about the aluminium exposure in Chinese diet. The aim of this study is to systematically evaluate the dietary aluminium intake level in residents of Shenzhen, China. A total of 853 persons from 244 household were investigated their diet by three days food records. Finally, 149 kinds of foods in 17 food groups were selected to be the most consumed foods. From them, 1399 food samples were collected from market to test aluminium concentration. High aluminium levels were found in jellyfish (median, 527.5 mg/kg), fried twisted cruller (median, 466.0 mg/kg), shell (median, 107.1 mg/kg). The Shenzhen residents' average dietary aluminium exposure was estimated at 1.263 mg/kg bw/week which is lower than the PTWI (provisional tolerable weekly intake). But 0–2 and 3–13 age groups have the highest aluminium intake exceeding the PTWI (3.356 mg/kg bw/week and 3.248 mg/kg bw/week) than other age groups. And the main dietary aluminium exposure sources are fried twisted cruller, leaf vegetables and bean products. Our study suggested that even three decades rapid economy development, children in Shenzhen still have high dietary aluminium exposure risk. How to control high dietary aluminium exposure still is a great public health challenge in Shenzhen, China.
Mind the map: the impact of culture and economic affluence on crowd-mapping behaviours

Crowd-mapping is a form of collaborative work that empowers citizens to collect and share geographic knowledge. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a successful example of such paradigm, where the goal of building and maintaining an accurate global map of the changing world is being accomplished by means of local contributions made by over 1.2M citizens. While OSM has been subject to many country-specific studies, the relationship between national culture and economic affluence and users' participation has been so far unexplored. In this work, we systematically study the link between them: we characterise OSM users in terms of who they are, how they contribute, during what period of time, and across what geographic areas. We find strong correlations between these characteristics and national culture factors (e.g., power distance, individualism, pace of life, self expression), and well as Gross Domestic Product per capita. Based on these findings, we discuss design issues that developers of crowd-mapping services should consider to account for cross-cultural differences.
A Novel Blind Delay Spread Estimation using Frequency Correlation for Wireless OFDM Systems

In this paper we propose a novel blind Delay Spread (DS) estimator for wireless Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexed (OFDM) systems. DS gives a measure of the frequency selectivity of the wireless channel, which can be used for channel estimation and to adjust the guard interval size to avoid Inter-Symbol Interference. The estimator is based on the frequency correlation between subcarriers of one OFDM symbol and an expression between frequency correlation and DS is derived assuming an exponentially decaying power delay profile (PDP). To derive the frequency correlation values we use frequency separation values different to zero, which to the best of authors' knowledge is the first time that is introduced. The estimation accuracy, examined in environments with different PDPs, including transceiver mobility and channel sparsity, using several constellation schemes is very high from low SNR values with small variance.
Regression of Established Liver Tumor Induced by Monoepitopic Peptide-Based Immunotherapy1

Most types of cancer are difficult to eradicate, and some, like hepatocellular carcinoma, are almost always fatal. Among various interventions to improve the survival of patients with cancer, immunotherapy seems to hold some promises. However, it requires relevant animal models for preclinical development. In this study we report a new and relevant experimental model where liver tumors grow inside a nontumoral parenchyma of adult mice. This model is based on the intrasplenic injection in syngeneic recipient mice of hepatocytes from transgenic mice expressing SV40 large T oncogene specifically in the liver. Using this model where no apparent spontaneous cellular immune response was observed, immunization using a single injection of monoepitopic SV40 T Ag short peptide was sufficient to provoke liver tumor destruction, leading rapidly to complete remission. Tumor regression was associated with the induction of a long-lasting CD8+ T cell response, observed not only in the spleen but also, more importantly, in the tumoral liver. These results show the efficacy of peptide immunotherapy in the treatment of liver cancer.
Dual RSA and Its Security Analysis

We present new variants of an RSA whose key generation algorithms output two distinct RSA key pairs having the same public and private exponents. This family of variants, called dual RSA, can be used in scenarios that require two instances of RSA with the advantage of reducing the storage requirements for the keys. Two applications for dual RSA, blind signatures and authentication/secrecy, are proposed. In addition, we also provide the security analysis of dual RSA. Compared to normal RSA, the security boundary should be raised when applying dual RSA to the types of small-d, small-e, and rebalanced-RSA.
Do we need cross border education?: A Case of Pilot Course Multi-professional Approaches to Substance Abuse Care and Working with Addicts

The aim of this article is to examine studentsʼ experiences of cross-border education based on a single course carried out in collaboration between two networks, Barents Cross-Border University (BCBU) and the Thematic Network of Social Work (TNSWUA), as well as the experiences of teachers in the course. The course was a part of the curriculum for the Master’s Degree Programme (BCBU) in Comparative Social Work. Most of the students were studying in this Master’s Programme, some of them were exchange students at the University of Lapland (UL) and the rest were social work students at UL and the University of Iceland (UI). The course ran for two weeks in April 2015, and included lectures, discussions and workshops; parts of the course were delivered electronically, while other sections were delivered by teachers on-site. This course provided a broad multi-professional introduction to the field of addiction and substance abuse care. Students learned about screening the alcohol culture and the relationship between society, addiction, gender, family, life phases, ageing, maternity and substance use. The data for this study was collected through focus group discussion, with students reflecting on one question: ‘Do we need cross-border education? ’ Data from instructors was collected through discussions during the planning and post-course discussions. Overall, the experiences of students and instructors were positive. The collaboration did not face insuperable challenges. The findings highlighted four main themes: globalization, networking, comparing theory and practice, and using technology. Globalization has set new demands for social work and its professionals. Experts in cultural diversity and international social issues, as well as people with a comparative approach to different societies, are needed the world over. Regarding implications for cross-border education, we would recommend collaboration in the particular field of social work, developing specific courses together supported by both universities and international networks of universities.
Extending Conceptual Logic Programs with Arbitrary Rules

We present extended conceptual logic programs (ECLPs), for which reasoning is decidable and, moreover, can be reduced to finite answer set programming. ECLPs are useful to reason with both ontological and rule-based knowledge, which is illustrated by simulating reasoning in an expressive description logic (DL) equipped with DL-safe rules. Furthermore, ECLPs are more expressive in the sense that they enable nonmonotonic reasoning, a desirable feature in locally closed subareas of the Semantic Web.
Alpha-Beta Divergences Discover Micro and Macro Structures in Data

Although recent work in non-linear dimensionality reduction investigates multiple choices of divergence measure during optimization (Yang et al., 2013; Bunte et al., 2012), little work discusses the direct effects that divergence measures have on visualization. We study this relationship, theoretically and through an empirical analysis over 10 datasets. Our works shows how the α and β parameters of the generalized alpha-beta divergence can be chosen to discover hidden macrostructures (categories, e.g. birds) or microstructures (fine-grained classes, e.g. toucans). Our method, which generalizes t-SNE (van der Maaten, 2008), allows us to discover such structure without extensive grid searches over (α, β) due to our theoretical analysis: such structure is apparent with particular choices of (α, β) that generalize across datasets. We also discuss efficient parallel CPU and GPU schemes which are non-trivial due to the tree-structures employed in optimization and the large datasets that do not fully fit into GPU memory. Our method runs 20x faster than the fastest published code (Vladymyrov & Carreira-Perpinan, 2014). We conclude with detailed case studies on the following very large datasets: ILSVRC 2012, a standard computer vision dataset with 1.2M images; SUSY, a particle physics dataset with 5M instances; and HIGGS, another particle physics dataset with 11M instances. This represents the largest published visualization attained by SNE methods. We have open-sourced our visualization code: http://rll.berkeley. edu/absne/.
Convergence of Finite Volume Approximations for a Nonlinear Elliptic-Parabolic Problem: A "Continuous" Approach

We study the approximation by finite volume methods of the model parabolic-elliptic problem $b(v)_t={{\rm div \,}} (|Dv|^{p-2} Dv)$ on $(0,T)\times\Omega\subset \R\times\R^d$ with an initial condition and the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition. Because of the nonlinearity in the elliptic term, a careful choice of the gradient approximation is needed. We prove the convergence of discrete solutions to the solution of the continuous problem as the discretization step h tends to 0, under the main hypotheses that the approximation of the operator ${{\rm div \,}} (|Dv|p-2 Dv) provided by the finite volume scheme is still monotone and coercive, and that the gradient approximation is exact on the affine functions of $x\in \Om$. An example of such a scheme is given for a class of two-dimensional meshes dual to triangular meshes, in particular for structured rectangular and hexagonal meshes. The proof uses the rewriting of the discrete problem under a "continuous" form. This permits us to directly apply the Alt--Luckhaus variational techniques which are known for the continuous case.
Immunogenicity of a Recombinant Mycobacterium smegmatis Vaccine Expressing the Fusion Protein CMX in Cattle from Goiás State, Brazil

ABSTRACT This study aimed to evaluate the immunogenicity of a recombinant Mycobacterium smegmatis vaccine expressing the CMX fusion protein composed of immunodominant epitopes Ag85C, MPT51 and HspX of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which are important mycobacteria virulence factors. A group of Nelore heifers that were 10 to 12 months of age and negative for the tuberculin skin test (TST) were immunized with four doses of the recombinant vaccine mc2-CMX (M. smegmatis-Ag85C-MPT51-HspX) during a period of one year. Before each immunization, blood was collected to obtain sera for antibody analysis. Serological analysis demonstrated that mc2-CMX was able to induce a humoral response with increased levels of specific IgG antibodies against CMX, despite minimum antibody levels being detected for individual Ag85C, MPT51 or HspX recombinant antigens. However, there was no significant increase in specific CD4+ IFN-γ-positive T cells. Lymphadenomegaly was observed in superficial cervical lymph nodes adjacent to the site of vaccination among mc2-CMX-vaccinated bovines, and the histopathological analysis demonstrated follicular hyperplasia without inflammatory infiltrate or granuloma formation. Animals remained negative for the TST until the end of the experiments, showing no cross-reactivity with the recombinant vaccine and tuberculin proteins. We discuss the potential of mc2-CMX to induce an immune response in cattle.
Transactions Costs and Correlations in a Large Firm Index

This paper presents results showing an inverse relation between volatility and autocorrelation in an index of large firms. Evidence is given showing that index autocorrelation is also related to the level of trading volume. Tests are then performed on the individual fims that show much of this phenomenon is coming from cross firm correlations. Simple models with transactions costs are then simulated to see if they can replicate this phenomenon.
Object recognition under semantic impairment: The effects of conceptual regularities on perceptual decisions

Although patients with semantic deficits can sometimes show good performance on tests of object decision, we present evidence that this pattern applies when nonsense-objects do not respect the regularities of the domain. In a newly designed test of object-decision, 20 patients with semantic dementia viewed line drawings of a real and chimeric animal side-by-side, and were asked to decide which was real. The real animal was either more typical (real > nonreal) or less typical (nonreal > real) than the chimera. Performance was significantly better in the real > nonreal condition, and success in both conditions was modulated by patients’ degree of semantic impairment. A similar effect of item typicality was revealed in a subset of items selected from a standard test battery. Object-decision scores were highly correlated with other pictorial and verbal assessments of conceptual knowledge, suggesting that impaired performance on all tasks resulted from the degradation of a unitary underlying system.
MEASURING PRIVACY IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS

Online Social Networking has gained tremendous popularity amongst the masses. It is usual for the users of Online Social Networks (OSNs) to share information with friends however they lose privacy. Privacy has become an important concern in online social networks. Users are unaware of the privacy risks involved when they share their sensitive information in the network. [1] One of the fundamental challenging issues is measurement of privacy . It is hard for social networking sites and users to make and adjust privacy settings to protect privacy without practical and effective way to quantify , measure and evaluate privacy. In this paper, we discussed Privacy Index (PIDX) which is used to measure a user’s privacy exposure in a social network. We have also described and calculated the Privacy Quotient (PQ) i.e. a metric to measure the privacy of the user’s profile using the naive approach. [2] The users should be aware of their privacy quotient and should know where they stand in the privacy measuring scale. At last we have proposed a model that will ensure privacy in the unstructured data. It will utilize the Item Response Theory model to measure the privacy leaks in the messages and text that is being posted by the users of the online social networking sites.
Supporting Young Authors: Exploring the Identity, Positioning, and Blogging of Adolescents

As educators consider the challenges of technology’s continual evolution, in tandem with young people’s skill and interest in it, innovative teaching practices capable of navigating online social landscapes of literacy are in great demand. Conceptualizing a blog space as hybrid affinity space where participants recount stories and make meaning about topics relevant to their lives, this connective case study asks two salient questions: 1) How does online writing in an affinity space affect motivation to write? and 2) How do adolescents enact their identities as they position themselves and others in a blog space? Over the span of ten weeks, four young writers used style, genre, and discourse both independently and collectively, demonstrating motivation as they organized, wrote, embellished, and shared their writing. Positioning theory analysis of interviews, participant interactions, and blog events were used to interpret identity enactments in discourse pertaining to the bloggers’ poetry, short stories, and informational pieces, showing writers’ portrayal of identity in myriad ways. Additionally, the young authors learned how to locate and use a wider range of online formats, and encorporated these new practices into their writing, thus expanding their knowledge of what writing can be.
Rendering Softness: Integration of Kinesthetic and Cutaneous Information in a Haptic Device

While it is known that softness discrimination relies on both kinesthetic and cutaneous information, relatively little work has been done on the realization of haptic devices replicating the two cues in an integrated and effective way. In this paper, we first discuss the ambiguities that arise in unimodal touch, and provide a simple intuitive explanation in terms of basic contact mechanics. With this as a motivation, we discuss the implementation and control of an integrated device, where a conventional kinesthetic haptic display is combined with a cutaneous softness display. We investigate the effectiveness of the integrated display via a number of psychophysical tests and compare the subjective perception of softness with that obtained by direct touch on physical objects. Results show that the subjects interacting with the integrated haptic display are able to discriminate softness better than with either a purely kinesthetic or a purely cutaneous display.
Rise and fall of the peer-to-peer empire

The essence of the peer-to-peer design philosophy is to design protocols for end hosts, or “peers”, to work in collaboration to achieve a certain design objective, such as the sharing of a large file. From a theoretical perspective, it has been recognized that the peer-to-peer design paradigm resembles gossip protocols, and with appropriate algorithmic design, it maximizes the network flow rates in multicast sessions. Over the past ten years, research on peer-to-peer computing and systems, a unique and intriguing category of distributed systems, has received a tremendous amount of research attention from academia and industry alike. Peer-to-peer computing eventually culminated in a number of successful commercial systems, showing the viability of their design philosophy in the Internet. The peer-to-peer design paradigm has pushed all design choices of innovative protocols to the edge of the Internet, and in most cases to end hosts themselves. It represents one of the best incarnation of the end-to-end argument, one of the frequently disputed design philosophies that guided the design of the Internet. Yet, research on peer-to-peer computing has recently receded from the spotlight, and suffered from a precipitous fall that was as dramatic as its meteoric rise to the culmination of its popularity. This article presents a cursory glimpse of existing results over the past ten years in peer-to-peer computing, with a particular focus on understanding what has stimulated its rise in popularity, what has contributed to its commercial success, and eventually, what has led to its precipitous fall in research attention. Our insights in this article may be beneficial when we develop our thoughts on the design paradigm of cloud computing.
The theory and application of an electromagnetic target recognition method based on natural-resonance for multi-targets

This paper presents the application of an electromagnetic target recognition method based on natural resonance mechanism and MUSIC algorithm to the target sets containing single amd multi-targets. The simpler case of the proposed method was applied to single targets previously and successful results were obtained [1]. However, when multi-targets are added to the test target set, the method needs crucial modifications and these modifications are mentioned in detail in this study. Owing to these modifications, the method becomes highly invariant to aspect angle and the distance between the multiple targets observed at once. The final version of the mentioned method is applied for the recognition of a target set containing single and multiple perfectly conducting spheres and sufficient accuracy rates are obtained even for low signal-to-noise ratios.
Serological cross-reactivity of Trypanosoma cruzi, Ehrlichia canis, Toxoplasma gondii, Neospora caninum and Babesia canis to Leishmania infantum chagasi tests in dogs.

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to evaluate the serological cross-reactivity between Leishmania sp. and other canine pathogens. METHODS Positive serum samples for Ehrlichia canis, Babesia canis, Toxoplasma gondii, Neospora caninum and Trypanosoma cruzi were tested using three serological methods enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), indirect immunofluorescent antibody test (IFAT) and Kalazar Detect™, for canine visceral leishmaniasis. RESULTS Of the 57 dog samples tested, 24 (42.1%) tested positive using one of the three serological methods: 10/57 (17.5%) for ELISA, 11/57 (19.3%) for IFAT and 3/57 (5.3%) for Kalazar Detect™. CONCLUSIONS Our results demonstrated that the presence of other infectious agents may lead to cross-reactivity on leishmaniasis serological tests.
Incidence and Disability-Adjusted Life Years (Dalys) Attributable to Leishmaniasis In Iran, 2013

Background Leishmaniasis covers a range of clinical manifestations. Estimation of the burden of leishmaniasis may help guide healthcare management personnel and policy-makers in applying effective interventions. The present study aimed to calculate the incidence and burden of cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis in Iran in 2013. Methods To evaluate the epidemiological aspects of the disease in Iran, published studies over the past 20 years were searched and the viewpoints of relevant specialists in Iran were obtained. Data were collected from the Ministry of Health and from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences. To calculate years of life lost due to premature death, standard expected years of life lost was used. Standard life table of Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2010 with the life expectancy of 86.02 years for both sexes was used to calculate the remaining potential years of life at any age from death. Results The overall incidence of cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis was calculated as 22 and 0.092 per 100000 population of Iran, respectively. The burden of leishmaniasis was 99.5 years: 95.34 and 4.16 years for cutaneous and visceral, respectively. Sensitivity was analyzed and deaths predicted by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation added, the burden of visceral leishmaniasis was 726 years. Conclusion The share of leishmaniasis burden in Iran is lower than the global burden of the disease. GBD 2010 standard method is recommended to calculate the burden of leishmaniasis in different countries and set local priorities on the basis of these measures.