Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nutritional Intervention Study with Argan Oil in Man: Effects on Lipids and Apolipoproteins

Aim: To evaluate whether the consumption of virgin argan oil (VAO) is associated with a change in serum lipids and reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease in healthy Moroccans. Methods: Sixty volunteers consumed butter (25 g/day) during 2 weeks (stabilization period) and were randomly divided into two groups: the treatment group received 25 g/day of VAO during 3 weeks (intervention period), and the control group received 25 g/day of extra virgin olive oil (EVO). Throughout the study, weight, blood pressure, and daily food intake were measured. Serum total cholesterol and low- and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglycerides, and apolipoproteins A-I and B were measured at the end of each diet period. Results: Analysis of food intake showed that the daily diet is isocaloric for the butter regimen (2,537 ± 244 kcal/day) as well as for the VAO and EVO regimens (2,561± 246 and 2,560 ± 253 kcal/day, respectively). Analysis of the lipid intake showed a reduction in saturated fatty acids with VAO and EVO regimens (27 ± 1.4 and 26.4 ± 3.4%, respectively) as compared with the stabilization period (41.6 ± 2.4%). The analysis of serum lipids showed a significant increase in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and apolipoprotein A-I in both VAO group (8.4%, p = 0.012, and 5.2%, p = 0.027, respectively) and EVO group (17.3%, p = 0.001, and 5.9%, p = 0.036, respectively). However, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and apolipoprotein B (13.8%, p = 0.037, and 7.8%, p = 0.039, respectively) decreased significantly only in EVO group as compared with the stabilization period, while triglycerides decreased significantly by 17.5% (p = 0.039) only in VAO group. Conclusion: These results confirm the cholesterol-lowering effect of EVO and show for the first time the triglyceride-lowering effect of VAO in men.
Cheops: a compact explorer for complex hierarchies

As the amount of electronic information explodes, hierarchies to handle this information become huge and complex. Visualizing and interacting with these hierarchies become daunting tasks. The problem is exacerbated if the visualization is to be done on mass-market personal computers, with limited processing power and visual resolution. Many of the current visualization techniques work effectively for hierarchies of 1000 nodes, but as the number of nodes increases toward 5000, these techniques tend to break down. Hierarchies above 5000 nodes usually require special modifications such as clustering, which can affect visual stability. This paper introduces Cheops, a novel approach to the representation, browsing and exploration of huge, complex information hierarchies such as the Dewey Decimal Classification system, which can contain between a million and a billion nodes. The Cheops approach maintains context within a huge hierarchy, while simultaneously providing easy access to details. This paper presents some preliminary results from usability tests performed on an 8-wide-by-9-deep classification hierarchy, which if fully populated would contain over 19 million nodes.
Performance analysis of the dual sign algorithm for additive contaminated-Gaussian noise

In the previous analysis of the dual sign algorithm (DSA), Gaussian signals were assumed. When the desired response contains additive impulsive interference, however, the analysis seems to be inadequate. In this article, a performance analysis of the DSA is considered when the signals are zero-mean stationary Gaussian, and the additive noise of the desired response is zero-mean stationary contaminated-Gaussian (CG). Through computer simulations, our analysis is validated. It is also shown that the DSA is less vulnerable to impulsive interference than the least-mean square (LMS) algorithm. <<ETX>>
On Frequency Reuse in Distributed Antenna Systems

With the capability of reducing the radio transmission distance, the microcellular system and distributed antenna system (DAS) became two promising systems to provide high data rate for future wireless communications. In this paper, in order to achieve high spectrum efficiency, spectrum reuse is exploited in both of the microcellular system and the DAS. The performances between the two systems are theoretically compared in a network topology with seven macrocells. Numerical results show that, when spectrum reuse is adopted, the spectrum efficiency in the DAS is larger than these in the microcellular system.
Immunizations with Chimeric Hepatitis B Virus-Like Particles to Induce Potential Anti-Hepatitis C Virus Neutralizing Antibodies

Background Virus-like particles (VLPs) are highly immunogenic and proven to induce protective immunity. The small surface antigen (HBsAg-S) of hepatitis B virus (HBV) self-assembles into VLPs and its use as a vaccine results in protective antiviral immunity against HBV infections. Chimeric HBsAg-S proteins carrying foreign epitopes allow particle formation and have the ability to induce anti-foreign humoral and cellular immune responses. Methods/results The insertion of the hypervariable region 1 (HVR1) sequence derived from the envelope protein 2 (E2) of hepatitis C virus (HCV) into the major antigenic site of HBsAg-S (‘a’-determinant) resulted in the formation of highly immunogenic VLPs that retained the antigenicity of the inserted HVR1 sequence. BALB/c mice were immunized with chimeric VLPs, which resulted in antisera with anti-HCV activity. The antisera were able to immunoprecipitate native HCV envelope complexes (E1E2) containing homologous or heterologous HVR1 sequences. HCV E1E2 pseudotyped HIV-1 particles (HCVpp) were used to measure entry into HuH-7 target cells in the presence or absence of antisera that were raised against chimeric VLPs. Anti-HVR1 VLP sera interfered with entry of entry-competent HCVpps containing either homologous or heterologous HVR1 sequences. Also, immunizations with chimeric VLPs induced anti-surface antigen (HBsAg) antibodies, indicating that HBV-specific antigenicity and immunogenicity of the ‘a’-determinant region is retained. Conclusions A multivalent vaccine against different pathogens based on the HBsAg delivery platform should be possible. We hypothesize that custom design of VLPs with an appropriate set of HCV-neutralizing epitopes will induce antibodies that would serve to decrease the viral load at the initial infecting inoculum.
Hepatitis A outbreak among men who have sex with men (MSM) predominantly linked with the EuroPride, the Netherlands, July 2016 to February 2017

Between July 2016 and February 2017, 48 male cases of hepatitis A were notified in the Netherlands. Of these, 17 identified as men who have sex with men (MSM). Ten of the 13 cases for whom sequencing information was available, were infected with a strain linked with the EuroPride that took place in Amsterdam in 2016. This strain is identical to a strain that has been causing a large outbreak among MSM in Taiwan.
Course and prognosis of elbow complaints: a cohort study in general practice

Objective: To describe the course of new episodes of elbow complaints in general practice, and to identify predictors of short term and long term outcome in terms of pain intensity and functional disability. Methods: 181 patients with elbow complaints filled in questionnaires at baseline and at 3, 6, and 12 months of follow up. Baseline scores of pain and disability, characteristics of the complaint, sociodemographic and psychosocial factors, physical activity, general health, and comorbidity were investigated as possible predictors of outcome. Outcome measures were analysed separately using multiple regression analyses. Results: 13% of the patients reported recovery at the 3 month follow up and 34% at 12 months. Irrespective of outcome and length of follow up, a longer duration of the complaint before consulting the general practitioner, having musculoskeletal comorbidity, and using “retreating” as coping style increased the likelihood of an unfavourable outcome. Less social support was associated with an unfavourable outcome at 3 months, and having a history of elbow complaints and using “worrying” as coping style were associated with an unfavourable outcome at 12 months. The explained variance of the models ranged from 46% to 49%. Conclusions: Recovery of patients with elbow complaints in general practice was poor. Besides characteristic of the complaint, passive coping and less social support were related to a worse prognosis. The results of this study may help general practitioners to provide patients with more accurate information about their prognosis.
Estimation of Acreage under Mango Integrating Remote Sensing and Survey Data in West Godavari District

Horticulture which is fastest growing sector within agriculture is now contributing more significantly to national GDP and thus needs utmost emphasis in terms of reliable agricultural statistics. Mango the king of fruits is cultivated in 42 % of total area accounting for 40% of total production in the country. Therefore, development of reliable and timely estimates of area under mango at national level is essential for policy makers and planners for market planning and export. Previously only survey methodologies were used for area estimation under horticultural crops which are time consuming, requires extensive ground survey and involves huge cost. Modern space technology i.e. satellite data can be used as auxiliary variable to improve estimates obtained by survey. One category of classifiers is parametric, of which the traditional Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC) is the most popular, reliable and widely used for land use land cover classification. Besides this, there are other recent machine learning classifiers like Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). SVMs are particularly appealing in the remote sensing field due to their ability to successfully handle small training data sets, often producing higher classification accuracy than the traditional methods. ANN has also demonstrated remarkable accuracy in dealing with multiple sourced data. Therefore, Support Vector Machine using three different kernel functions namely Radial basis function, Sigmoid kernel and polynomial kernel and Artificial Neural Network were used to improve the classification accuracy for delineation of mango. Best classification method was selected on the basis of kappa coefficient and overall accuracy. SVMRBF outperformed over all the methods with overall accuracy of 94.44 and kappa coefficient 0.9218. The present methods used for area estimation of horticulture crops relies on extensive field data collection. Modern space technology i.e. satellite data can be used as auxiliary variable to improve estimates obtained by survey. The estimates of area under Mango were obtained by usual method of estimation using survey data and by classified image. These estimates were further improved by integrating survey data and satellite data as auxiliary variable in ratio and regression estimators. From the results it was observed that the regression estimator was found to be better than ratio and survey estimate with minimum percentage standard error. Thus, the study concludes that by integrating survey data and remote sensing data as auxiliary variable improved estimates of area under mango can be obtained.
Importancia de la invariancia de medida de la confi anza a través del tiempo. El caso de España Importance of Measurement Invariance of Trust over Time. The Spanish Case

Social trust and political trust are, amongst others, key social capital factors. This paper examines the accuracy of their measurement and comparability across different time periods. Multiple-group confi rmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) is performed and different levels of measurement invariance (confi gural, metric and scalar) are tested. Data used are from European Social Survey for the years 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008, in relation to Spanish citizens. Factor means for social and political trust are compared across time in Spain. Political and social trust show stability across time, except in 2004 with a higher level of political trust and 2006 with a higher level of social trust in Spain. Comparison with traditional composite scores shows the inaccuracy of such measurement for data comparison across time. Finally, consequences of using inaccurate measurements, and methodological recommendations concerning model fi t structural equation models are delineated.
Comparison of ibuprofen, cyclobenzaprine or both in patients with acute cervical strain: a randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE We compared pain severity and time to resumption of activities in patients with cervical strains treated with a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), a centrally acting muscle relaxant or both. METHODS We performed a double-blinded, randomized controlled trial of adults with cervical strains from motor vehicle collisions or from falls who presented to a suburban academic emergency department (ED). Patients were randomly assigned to receive ibuprofen 800 mg, cyclobenzaprine 5 mg or both, 3 times daily as needed for up to 7 days. Outcome measures included a pain score on a 100-mm visual analog scale, pain relief scores, the time to resumption of normal activities, the use of rescue medications, and adverse outcomes. We used repeated-measures analysis of variance to compare pain relief over time. Our sample size of 20 patients in each group had a power of 80% to detect a difference of 15 mm in pain relief scores between the highest and lowest groups. RESULTS We randomly assigned 61 patients to receive ibuprofen (n = 20), cyclobenzaprine (n = 21) or both (n = 20). Mean (standard deviation) age was 34 (11) years; 58% were women and 72% were white. Although pain scores improved over time in all groups, there were no significant differences between the groups in any of the outcome measures. The rate of adverse events was also similar between groups. CONCLUSION Our study suggests that there is little benefit to routinely using or adding cyclobenzaprine to NSAIDs for ED patients with acute cervical strain.
Session State: Beyond Soft State

The cost and complexity of administration of large systems has come to dominate their total cost of ownership. Stateless and soft-state components, e.g. Web servers or network routers, are easy to manage: capacity can be scaled incrementally by adding more nodes, rebalancing of load after failover is easy, and reactive or proactive ("rolling") reboots can be used to handle transient failures. We show that it is possible to achieve the same ease of management for the state-storage subsystem by subdividing persistent state according to the specific guarantees needed by each type. While other systems [19,17] have addressed persistent-until-deleted state, we describe SSM, a store for a previously unaddressed class of state - user-session state - that exhibits the same manageability properties as stateless nodes while providing firm storage guarantees. Any node can be proactively or reactively rebooted at any time to recover from transient faults, without impacting online performance or losing data. We exploit this simplified manageability by pairing SSM with an application-generic, statistical-anomaly-based framework that detects crashes, hangs, and performance failures, and automatically attempts to recover from them by rebooting faulty nodes. Although the detection techniques generate some false positives, the cost of recovery is so low that the false positives have low impact. We provide microbenchmarks to demonstrate SSM's built-in overload protection, failure management and self-tuning. We benchmark SSM integrated into a production enterprise-scale interactive service to demonstrate that these benefits need not come at the cost of significantly decreased throughput or response time.
Data Management in Data Grids-Habilitation Overview

Preliminary visions of Grid computing have been presented in the late 90ies. Since this time, the technology has changed tremendously and several contributions have been made by the research community in which we have participated since early 2000. Originally, Grid computing mainly focused on computing intensive tasks whereas Data Grids gained popularity in 2000. CERN’s LHC programme, its Grid projects and activities have been main driving forces. In the following habilitation 1 we cover a broad Grid research field that starts with early architectural ideas, covers concrete Grid services for research and academia and then gives an outlook on how Grids can be used in a business environment. A strong focus is on data and replica management, storage systems and workload management. This article provides a short introduction to the field of Grid computing and then outlines the following chapters of this habilitation. In detail, a selection of 20 papers will follow that have been written mainly in the years from 2000 to 2005. A strong focus is put on the work done within international Grid projects co-ordinated by CERN.
A Lightweight Framework for Runtime Reconfigurable System Prototyping

This paper describes a lightweight framework for prototyping runtime reconfigurable systems in a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA. The framework provides a reconfiguration and control infrastructure that allows components of the prototype system to be modified or exchanged at runtime by means of partial reconfiguration of the FPGA. The system state may be monitored and influenced by a programmable controller which is part of the framework. The area overhead of the framework is kept low by efficiently utilising the two hard-wired PowerPC processor cores inside the FPGA while avoiding the use of resource-intense bus structures. Specific lean input/output modules are used with the one processor core while the other implements a Xilinx UltraController-II based design.
Event-Triggered State Estimation for Complex Networks With Mixed Time Delays via Sampled Data Information: The Continuous-Time Case

In this paper, the event-triggered state estimation problem is investigated for a class of complex networks with mixed time delays using sampled data information. A novel state estimator is presented to estimate the network states. A new event-triggered transmission scheme is proposed to reduce unnecessary network traffic between the sensors and the estimator, where the sampled data is transmitted to the estimator only when the so-called “event-triggered condition” is satisfied. The purpose of the problem addressed is to design an estimator for the complex network such that the estimation error is ultimately bounded in mean square. By utilizing Lyapunov theory combined with the stochastic analysis approach, sufficient conditions are established to guarantee the ultimate boundedness of the estimation error in mean square. Then, the desired estimator gain matrices are obtained via solving a convex problem. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the results.
Efficient periodicity extraction based on sine-wave representation and its application to pitch determination of speech signals

This paper presents a novel low-complexity method for extracting periodicity of signals based on their sine-wave representation. In this representation, the signal is modeled as a finite sum of sine-waves, with time-varying amplitudes, phases and frequencies. We describe how one can modify the familiar spectral-comb analysis method to obtain a guaranteed and effective procedure to find the fundamental-frequency which gives the best harmonic approximation of the signal spectrum. The search is efficiently carried out in the frequency domain. The procedure obtains a successive refinement of possible pitch values which are consistent with an increasing number of sine wave components. Other pitch intervals are pruned at an early stage of the search. The advantage of this algorithm is its high accuracy achieved at a relatively low complexity. We also briefly describe one possible application in the area of pitch determination of speech signals.
Feature extraction for human identification based on envelogram signal analysis of cardiac sounds in time-frequency domain

Currently there are many security systems relying on tradition biometrics for the purpose of authorization of legal users into a system. However, traditional biometrics systems which commonly use behavioral biometrics have shown serious drawbacks, violating two of the main requirements of a reliable biometrics, namely permanence and circumvention. The paper explores the effectiveness of the features extracted from the envelogram of joint time-frequency domain of a generic heart sound signal to be used as biometric human identifiers. A powerful signal processing tool, The Wavelet Transform is used to analyze the signal in time-frequency domain and to extract suitable features by with the help of computational software, Matlab.
Geostatistics applied to the study of the spatial distribution of insects and its use in integrated pest management

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programs based on the temporal variability of insect pests have been successfully implemented worldwide. These programs have been carried out by applying control strategies based on the existing knowledge about pest biology and population dynamics. However, systems based on temporal variability are insufficient to optimize plant protection and especially to reduce the environmental impact of areawide control measures. This situation drove to the new concept of “site-specific IPM”. Currently, there are tools to implement large-scale studies (at a zonal and a regional level), allowing to describe and analyze the spatial distribution of insect populations via the management and analysis of large data sets (GIS, GPS, and geostatistics). Geostatistics measures the spatial fluctuations of the variables under study based on rigorous sampling, afterwards adjusting a semivariogram, interpolating and building maps of iso-lines with different levels of population densities. This has allowed to simplify forecasting and monitoring systems, determining both the location and the optimum number of samples to be taken on sites showed by iso-lines. In order to decide where control measurements should be applied, maps with geographical coordinates showing the spatial location of spots with high population density are used (regardless of the control strategy applied). Furthermore, these methods can be used to identify areas where, considering their special characteristics, selective large-scale control tactics, as mating disruption or the release of natural enemies could be applied.
Replication fork regression in repetitive DNAs

Among several different types of repetitive sequences found in the human genome, this study has examined the telomeric repeat, necessary for the protection of chromosome termini, and the disease-associated triplet repeat (CTG)·(CAG)n. Evidence suggests that replication of both types of repeats is problematic and that a contributing factor is the repetitive nature of the DNA itself. Here we have used electron microscopy to investigate DNA structures formed at replication forks on large model DNAs containing these repeat sequences, in an attempt to elucidate the contributory effect that these repetitive DNAs may have on their replication. Visualization of the DNA revealed that there is a high propensity for a paused replication fork to spontaneously regress when moving through repetitive DNAs, and that this results in a four-way chickenfoot intermediate that could present a significant block to replication in vivo, possibly leading to unwanted recombination events, amplifications or deletions.