Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glycaemic control with continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion compared with intensive insulin injections in patients with type 1 diabetes: meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Abstract Objective: To compare glycaemic control and insulin dosage in people with type 1 diabetes treated by continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (insulin infusion pump therapy) or optimised insulin injections. Design: Meta-analysis of 12 randomised controlled trials. Participants: 301 people with type 1 diabetes allocated to insulin infusion and 299 allocated to insulin injections for between 2.5 and 24 months. Main outcome measures: Glycaemic control measured by mean blood glucose concentration and percentage of glycated haemoglobin. Total daily insulin dose. Results: Mean blood glucose concentration was lower in people receiving continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion compared with those receiving insulin injections (standardised mean difference 0.56, 95% confidence interval 0.35 to 0.77), equivalent to a difference of 1.0 mmol/l. The percentage of glycated haemoglobin was also lower in people receiving insulin infusion (0.44, 0.20 to 0.69), equivalent to a difference of 0.51%. Blood glucose concentrations were less variable during insulin infusion. This improved control during insulin infusion was achieved with an average reduction of 14% in insulin dose (difference in total daily insulin dose 0.58, 0.34 to 0.83), equivalent to 7.58 units/day. Conclusions: Glycaemic control is better during continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion compared with optimised injection therapy, and less insulin is needed to achieve this level of strict control. The difference in control between the two methods is small but should reduce the risk of microvascular complications. What is already known on this topic Continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (insulin pump therapy) produces good long term control of blood glucose concentrations in people with type 1 diabetes Control of blood glucose concentration is substantially better on pump therapy than conventional (non-optimised) injection therapy It is unclear how glycaemic control on pump therapy compares with modern optimised insulin injection regimens What this study adds Though glycaemic control was better during continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion than optimised insulin injection therapy, the difference was relatively small Continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion is an effective form of intensive insulin therapy that should lower the risk of microvascular complications Insulin pump therapy is unnecessary for most people with type 1 diabetes and should be reserved for those with special problems with optimised insulin injections
Modeling methodology for NPC's using interpreted Petri Nets and feedback control

In the context of video games design, Artificial Intelligence (AI) a broad of techniques have been used to generate the behavior of Non-Players Characters (NPC's). In this document, is explored the use of Supervisory control in Discrete Event Systems for design the behavior of NPC's, where the interaction between them it is not blocking. The modeling tool used is Interpreted Petri Nets (IPN) which are an extension of Petri Nets (PN) allow to relate input signals and output signals for PN models.
Pipelined memory shared buffer for VLSI switches

Switch chips are building blocks for computer and communication systems. Switches need internal buffering, because of output contention; shared buffering is known to perform better than multiple input queues or buffers, and the VLSI implementation of the former is not more expensive than the latter. We present a new organization for a shared buffer with its associated switching and cut-through functions. It is simpler and smaller than wide or interleaved organizations, and it is particularly suitable for VLSI technologies. It is based on multiple memory banks, addressed in a pipelined fashion. The first word of a packet is transferred to/from the first bank, followed by a "wave" of similar operations for the remaining words in the remaining banks. An FPGA-based prototype is operational, while standard-cell and full-custom chips are being submitted for fabrication. Simulation of the full-custom version indicates that, even in a conservative 1-micron CMOS technology, a 64 Kbit central buffer for an 8&times;8 switch operates at 1 Gbps/link (worst case) and fits in 45 mm2 including crossbar and cut-through.
Modeling and Forecasting Intraday Electricity Load

This paper aims models electricity load curves for short-term forecasting purposes. A broad class of multivariate dynamic regression model is proposed to model hourly electricity load. Alternative forecasting models, special cases of our general model, include separate time series regressions for each hour and week day. All the models developed include components that represent trends, seasons at different levels (yearly, weekly etc.), dummies to take into account weekends/holidays and other special days, short-term dynamics and weather regression effects, discussing the necessity of nonlinear functions for cooling effects. Our developments explore the facilities of dynamic linear models such as the use of discount factors, subjective intervention, variance learning and smoothing/filtering. The elicitation of the load curve is considered in the context of subjective intervention analysis, which is especially useful to take into account the adjustments for daylight savings time. The theme of combination of probabilistic forecasting is also briefly addressed.
Message Denial and Alteration on IEEE 802.15.4 Low-Power Radio Networks

The severely constrained resources present in many IEEE 802.15. 4 wireless nodes limits the available security protocols which these nodes can run. Selecting protection for the resource-constrained devices requires understanding the attacks which can be performed. This paper presents several simple attacks which allow a reader of any background to understand the vulnerability of IEEE 802.15. 4 networks. Denial of Service (DoS), Passive Listening, and Man In The Middle (MITM) attacks are demonstrated running from a simple and low-cost platform. Considerations for real-life deployments of the attacks covers issues such as defeating channel hopping or attacking at a distance. The ease of performing the attacks demonstrates why security is critical on all networks. Protection against the attacks through both academic and industry-developed standards is briefly discussed.
Electronic Home Music Reproducing Equipment

This material is posted here with permission of the AES. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the AES by contacting the Managing Editor, William McQuaid. , WTM@aes.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.
Trends in alcohol consumption in Singapore 1992 2004.

AIMS To present trends in alcohol consumption between 1992 and 2004 in Singapore. METHODS Alcohol consumption data were derived from national health surveys conducted in 1992, 1998 and 2004. Age-adjusted prevalence of frequent (drinking 1-4 days a week), regular (drinking more than 4 days a week) and binge (having five or more drinks during a drinking session at least once in the month) drinking by gender and age group for the three surveys were compared. Multivariate analyses for binge drinking in 2004 were performed using logistic regression models. RESULTS Prevalence of frequent, regular and binge drinking increased between 1992 and 2004. Prevalence increase in binge drinking was highest (from 5.1 to 10.0%), followed by frequent drinking (from 4.5 to 7.5%) and regular drinking (from 2.9 to 3.1%). Uptake in binge drinking increased in both genders and across all age groups but was most evident among adults aged 18-29. Frequent drinking increase was observed for both genders but was most pronounced among women aged 18-29. The level of regular drinking declined in men but increased in women, especially those aged 18-29 and 30-49. Being younger, male, separated, divorced or widowed, a current smoker, or having a monthly household income of S$6000 and above were attributes positively associated with binge drinking. CONCLUSIONS Alcohol consumption, especially binge drinking, has increased among Singaporeans between 1992 and 2004. There is gender convergence in alcohol consumption.
Design of One-Dimensional Linear Phase Digital IIR Filters Using Orthogonal Polynomials

In the present paper, we discuss a method to design a linear phase 1-dimensional Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filter using orthogonal polynomials. The filter is designed using a set of object functions. These object functions are realized using a set of orthogonal polynomials. The method includes placement of zeros and poles in such a way that the amplitude characteristics are not changed while we change the phase characteristics of the resulting IIR filter.
Glutamine-dependent NAD+ Synthetase

Glutamine-dependent NAD+ synthetase, Qns1, utilizes a glutamine aminotransferase domain to supply ammonia for amidation of nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide (NaAD+) to NAD+. Earlier characterization of Qns1 suggested that glutamine consumption exceeds NAD+ production by 40%. To explore whether Qns1 is systematically wasteful or whether additional features account for this behavior, we performed a careful kinetic and molecular genetic analysis. In fact, Qns1 possesses remarkable properties to reduce waste. The glutaminase active site is stimulated by NaAD+ more than 50-fold such that glutamine is not appreciably consumed in the absence of NaAD+. Glutamine consumption exceeds NAD+ production over the whole range of glutamine and NaAD+ substrate concentrations with greatest efficiency occurring at saturation of both substrates. Kinetic data coupled with site-directed mutagenesis of amino acids in the predicted ammonia channel indicate that NaAD+ stimulates the glutaminase active site in the kcat term by a synergistic mechanism that does not require ammonia utilization by the NaAD+ substrate. Six distinct classes of Qns1 mutants that fall within the glutaminase domain and the synthetase domain selectively inhibit components of the coordinated reaction.
Approaches to machine translation

Accessibility to other language web documents has always been a concern for information professionals. Many translation tools such as Babelfish and Cooglc Translator arc extensively used by librarians and information professional to meet the varying demand of their users. These tools though do not produce exact translated verse but provides gist of the information that could be used by the librarians to understand the type of information contained in the document. Thus, it is important for librarians and information professionals to know about the various possibilities available for translation as well as the technology being used for it. The papers follow ups the different approaches used for mechanization of translation process along with a discussion over their features and limitations. The study concludes with the remark that dependency of library and information professionals over available translation tools should be up to certain extent, i.e., only for the initial sorting of the document. The translation tools available cannot be used as regular content analysis tool.
Functional Identification and Characterization of Genes Cloned from Halophyte Seashore Paspalum Conferring Salinity and Cadmium Tolerance

Salinity-affected and heavy metal-contaminated soils limit the growth of glycophytic plants. Identifying genes responsible for superior tolerance to salinity and heavy metals in halophytes has great potential for use in developing salinity- and Cd-tolerant glycophytes. The objective of this study was to identify salinity- and Cd-tolerance related genes in seashore paspalum (Paspalum vaginatum), a halophytic perennial grass species, using yeast cDNA expression library screening method. Based on the Gateway-compatible vector system, a high-quality entry library was constructed, which contained 9.9 × 106 clones with an average inserted fragment length of 1.48 kb representing a 100% full-length rate. The yeast expression libraries were screened in a salinity-sensitive and a Cd-sensitive yeast mutant. The screening yielded 32 salinity-tolerant clones harboring 18 salinity-tolerance genes and 20 Cd-tolerant clones, including five Cd-tolerance genes. qPCR analysis confirmed that most of the 18 salinity-tolerance and five Cd-tolerance genes were up-regulated at the transcript level in response to salinity or Cd stress in seashore paspalum. Functional analysis indicated that salinity-tolerance genes from seashore paspalum could be involved mainly in photosynthetic metabolism, antioxidant systems, protein modification, iron transport, vesicle traffic, and phospholipid biosynthesis. Cd-tolerance genes could be associated with regulating pathways that are involved in phytochelatin synthesis, HSFA4-related stress protection, CYP450 complex, and sugar metabolism. The 18 salinity-tolerance genes and five Cd-tolerance genes could be potentially used as candidate genes for genetic modification of glycophytic grass species to improve salinity and Cd tolerance and for further analysis of molecular mechanisms regulating salinity and Cd tolerance.
The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Automated information extraction from web APIs documentation

A fundamental characteristic of Web APIs is the fact that, de facto, providers hardly follow any standard practices while implementing, publishing, and documenting their APIs. As a consequence, the discovery and use of these services by third parties is significantly hampered. In order to achieve further automation while exploiting Web APIs we present an approach for automatically extracting relevant technical information from the Web pages documenting them. In particular we have devised two algorithms that automatically extract technical details such as operation names, operation descriptions or URI templates from the documentation of Web APIs adopting either RPC or RESTful interfaces. The algorithms devised, which exploit advanced DOM processing as well as state of the art Information Extraction and Natural Language Processing techniques, have been evaluated against a detailed dataset exhibiting a high precision and recall–around 90% for both REST and RPC APIs–outperforming state of the art information extraction algorithms.
Fe b 20 05 Neural Networks as a Composition Diagnostic for Ultra-high Energy Cosmic Rays

We analyze here the possibility of studying mass composition in the Auger data sample using neural networks as a diagnostic tool. Extensive air showers were simulated using the AIRES code, for the two hadronic interaction models in current use: QGSJet and Sibyll. Both, photon and hadron primaries were simulated and used to generate events. The output parameters from the ground array were simulated for the typical instrumental and environmental conditions at the Malargüe Auger site using the code SAMPLE. Besides photons, hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium and iron nuclei were also simulated. We show that Principal Components Analysis alone is enough to separate individual photon from hadron events, but the same technique cannot be applied to the classification of hadronic events. The latter requires the use of a more robust diagnostic. We show that neural networks are potentially powerful enough to discriminate proton from iron events almost on an event-by-event basis. However, in the case of a more realistic multi-component mixture of primary nuclei, only a statistical estimate of the average mass can be reliably obtained. Although hybrid events are not explicitly simulated, we show that, whenever hybrid information in the form of Xmax is introduced in the training procedure of the neural networks, a considerable improvement can be achieved in mass discrimination analysis.
Web Data Extraction and Alignment Tools: A Survey

Search engine generates the dynamic result page when user submits a query. Result page consists of query relevant data along with some auxiliary information such as advertisement, navigation panels. Decision making regarding which part of this web page has main content is easy for human but tough for computer programs. So in order to utilize this data, it is necessary to remove irrelevant data and automatically extract data from those result pages. Further extracted data can be aligned in structured format like table for comparison. This paper deals with the study of various automatic web data extraction and data alignment techniques. Web data extraction techniques are mainly classified as Wrapper programming languages, Wrapper induction and Automatic extraction. For data alignment some techniques rely only on structure of html tags or on both tag and data values.
Neural net architectures for temporal sequence processing

I present a general taxonomy of neural net architectures for processing time-varying patterns. This taxonomy subsumes many existing architectures in the literature, and points to several promising architectures that have yet to be examined. Any architecture that processes timevarying patterns requires two conceptually distinct components: a short-term memory that holds on to relevant past events and an associator that uses the short-term memory to classify or predict. My taxonomy is based on a characterization of short-term memory models along the dimensions of form, content, and adaptability. Experiments on predicting future values of a financial time series (US dollar–Swiss franc exchange rates) are presented using several alternative memory models. The results of these experiments serve as a baseline against which more sophisticated architectures can be compared. Neural networks have proven to be a promising alternative to traditional techniques for nonlinear temporal prediction tasks (e.g., Curtiss, Brandemuehl, & Kreider, 1992; Lapedes & Farber, 1987; Weigend, Huberman, & Rumelhart, 1992). However, temporal prediction is a particularly challenging problem because conventional neural net architectures and algorithms are not well suited for patterns that vary over time. The prototypical use of neural nets is in structural pattern recognition. In such a task, a collection of features—visual, semantic, or otherwise—is presented to a network and the network must categorize the input feature pattern as belonging to one or more classes. For example, a network might be trained to classify animal species based on a set of attributes describing living creatures such as “has tail”, “lives in water”, or “is carnivorous”; or a network could be trained to recognize visual patterns over a two-dimensional pixel array as a letter in {A,B, . , Z}. In such tasks, the network is presented with all relevant information simultaneously. In contrast, temporal pattern recognition involves processing of patterns that evolve over time. The appropriate response at a particular point in time depends not only on the current input, but potentially all previous inputs. This is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows the basic framework for a temporal prediction problem. I assume that time is quantized into discrete steps, a sensible assumption because many time series of interest are intrinsically discrete, and continuous series can be sampled at a fixed interval. The input at time t is denoted x(t). For univariate series, this input
Smart and physically-based navigation in 3D geovirtual environments

This paper describes an approach for smart and physically-based navigation, which aims at supporting effective and intuitive user interactions with 3D geovirtual environments (GeoVEs). The approach is based on two aligned concepts: 1) All navigation techniques are controlled by constraints that ensure user orientation and avoid "getting lost" situations. 2) All navigation techniques are handled in a time-coherent way achieving steady, continuous user movements using a physically-based motion model. Based on these concepts, we demonstrate several ways to improve commonly used navigation techniques for geovirtual environments.
Semantic Hierarchies for Visual Object Recognition

In this paper we propose to use lexical semantic networks to extend the state-of-the-art object recognition techniques. We use the semantics of image labels to integrate prior knowledge about inter-class relationships into the visual appearance learning. We show how to build and train a semantic hierarchy of discriminative classifiers and how to use it to perform object detection. We evaluate how our approach influences the classification accuracy and speed on the Pascal VOC challenge 2006 dataset, a set of challenging real-world images. We also demonstrate additional features that become available to object recognition due to the extension with semantic inference tools- we can classify high-level categories, such as animals, and we can train part detectors, for example a window detector, by pure inference in the semantic network.
A fertile peatland forest does not constitute a major greenhouse gas sink

Afforestation has been proposed as a strategy to mitigate the often high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural soils with high organic matter content. However, the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O) fluxes after afforestation can be considerable, depending predominantly on site drainage and nutrient availability. Studies on the full GHG budget of afforested organic soils are scarce and hampered by the uncertainties associated with methodology. In this study we determined the GHG budget of a spruce-dominated forest on a drained organic soil with an agricultural history. Two different approaches for determining the net ecosystem CO 2 exchange (NEE) were applied, for the year 2008, one direct (eddy covariance) and the other indirect (analyzing the different components of the GHG budget), so that uncertainties in each method could be evaluated. The annual tree production in 2008 was 8.3 ± 3.9 t C ha −1 yr −1 due to the high levels of soil nutrients, the favorable climatic conditions and the fact that the forest was probably in its phase of maximum C assimilation or shortly past it. The N 2 O fluxes were determined by the closed-chamber technique and amounted to 0.9 ± 0.8 t C eq ha −1 yr −1 . According to the direct measurements from the eddy covariance technique, the site acts as a minor GHG sink of −1.2 ± 0.8 t C eq ha −1 yr −1 . This contrasts with the NEE estimate derived from the indirect approach which suggests that the site is a net GHG emitter of 0.6 ± 4.5 t C eq ha −1 yr −1 . Irrespective of the approach applied, the soil CO 2 effluxes counter large amounts of the C sequestration by trees. Due to accumulated uncertainties involved in the indirect approach, the direct approach is considered the more reliable tool. As the rate of C sequestration will likely decrease with forest age, the site will probably become a GHG source once again as the trees do not compensate for the soil C and N losses. Also forests in younger age stages have been shown to have lower C assimilation rates; thus, the overall GHG sink potential of this afforested nutrient-rich organic soil is probably limited to the short period of maximum C assimilation.
SOM with Vulture Fest Model Discovers Feral Malware and Visually Profiles the Security of Subnets

We propose a model for using firewall log entries of denied inbound Internet traffic for indirect discovery of local IP addresses that have security problems. This method is used successfully to discover computers with security problems on a network. A hexagonal SelfOrganizing Map then illustrates the network landscape of wireless traffic comparing it with malicious traffic and contrasting it to traditional traffic.