Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DNA tile assembly model for 0–1 knapsack problem

Research results shows that reasonable solution for NP-complete problem could be achieved using DNA self-assembly model, in which the parallel computing ability of DNA computation could be get a full play. In DNA computing paradigm, the information is encoded in DNA tiles, which can be self-assembled via sticky-end associations. In this paper, the DNA self-assembly model for 0–1 knapsack problem is constructed. This model is composed of three units: nondeterministic guess system, adder system and comparator system. Results shows that the three systems can be carried out in polynomial time with optimal 0(1) distinct tile types in parallel. All of these demonstrate the feasibility of DNA tiles self-assembly for NP-problems.
Dyslipidemia in Obesity: Mechanisms and Potential Targets

Obesity has become a major worldwide health problem. In every single country in the world, the incidence of obesity is rising continuously and therefore, the associated morbidity, mortality and both medical and economical costs are expected to increase as well. The majority of these complications are related to co-morbid conditions that include coronary artery disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, respiratory disorders and dyslipidemia. Obesity increases cardiovascular risk through risk factors such as increased fasting plasma triglycerides, high LDL cholesterol, low HDL cholesterol, elevated blood glucose and insulin levels and high blood pressure. Novel lipid dependent, metabolic risk factors associated to obesity are the presence of the small dense LDL phenotype, postprandial hyperlipidemia with accumulation of atherogenic remnants and hepatic overproduction of apoB containing lipoproteins. All these lipid abnormalities are typical features of the metabolic syndrome and may be associated to a pro-inflammatory gradient which in part may originate in the adipose tissue itself and directly affect the endothelium. An important link between obesity, the metabolic syndrome and dyslipidemia, seems to be the development of insulin resistance in peripheral tissues leading to an enhanced hepatic flux of fatty acids from dietary sources, intravascular lipolysis and from adipose tissue resistant to the antilipolytic effects of insulin. The current review will focus on these aspects of lipid metabolism in obesity and potential interventions to treat the obesity related dyslipidemia.
Employment protection and regional worker flows in Italy

In this paper we point out that the theoretical predictions concern-ing Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) are not fully confirmed by empirical evidence in Italy, a strict EPL country in the nine-ties, according to OECD indexes. In particular, worker and job flow rates are remarkably high, also in comparison with the other Euro-pean countries. Furthermore, the differences in regional worker flow rates -computed on both the social security database and the LFS- are relevant, no matter which measure of worker flows is considered. While EPL is the same across regions, the highest worker flow rates are observed in the South, an area generally recognised as the least dynamic of the country, followed by the Northeast, the Centre and the Northwest. For possible alternative explanations of regional differences investigation focuses on economic structural composi-tion, the black labour market, non-standard contracts, the public sector and self-employment incidence, labour productivity and firm seniority. Using Logit estimates we find that none of these factors can fully explain these differences. Moreover, the predicted nega-tive relation between worker flows and unemployment duration does not seem to hold in the case of Italy.
Hey, you have given me too many knobs!: understanding and dealing with over-designed configuration in system software

Configuration problems are not only prevalent, but also severely impair the reliability of today's system software. One fundamental reason is the ever-increasing complexity of configuration, reflected by the large number of configuration parameters ("knobs"). With hundreds of knobs, configuring system software to ensure high reliability and performance becomes a daunting, error-prone task. This paper makes a first step in understanding a fundamental question of configuration design: "do users really need so many knobs? " To provide the quantitatively answer, we study the configuration settings of real-world users, including thousands of customers of a commercial storage system (Storage-A), and hundreds of users of two widely-used open-source system software projects. Our study reveals a series of interesting findings to motivate software architects and developers to be more cautious and disciplined in configuration design. Motivated by these findings, we provide a few concrete, practical guidelines which can significantly reduce the configuration space. Take Storage-A as an example, the guidelines can remove 51.9% of its parameters and simplify 19.7% of the remaining ones with little impact on existing users. Also, we study the existing configuration navigation methods in the context of "too many knobs" to understand their effectiveness in dealing with the over-designed configuration, and to provide practices for building navigation support in system software.
What is Existential Positive Psychology

Positive psychology (PP) with its focus on what is good and right with people is Pollyannaish, because it ignores the bleak reality of human existence. Existential psychology (EP) with its focus on death anxiety, meaninglessness and alienation is dark, because it does not pay enough attention to the joy of living. Positive psychology without existential insights and phenomenological analysis is full of adolescent exuberance but lacking in depth. Existential psychology without rigorous research on human strengths and positive affects is full of wisdom but lacking in youthful vitality. Therefore, it makes sense to bring these two separate domains of psychology together, resulting in existential positive psychology (EPP) or positive existential psychology (PEP), depending on one’s preference. The Journal of IJEPP is home to all kinds of articles related to EPP.
Thermal cycling reliability of polycrystalline diamond and aluminium nitride substrates

In this paper, thermal cycling of silicon power semiconductor dies mounted on polycrystalline diamond and aluminum nitride insulated substrates is presented. Thermal strain, stress and safety factor was analysed using ANSYS® static structural analyses tool to understand the dependence of thermal strain and stress. Polycrystalline diamond system exhibits higher thermal stress and low safety factor when compared over aluminium nitride system, further the thermal stress and safety factor were analysed based upon varying insulation layer thicknesses. Simulation results predict that thermal stress is inversely proportional to insulation layer thickness and proportionally to metallisation thickness.
Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board , Washington , D . C . The Analytics of SVARs : A Unified Framework to Measure Fiscal Multipliers

Does scal policy stimulate output? SVARs have been used to address this question but no stylized facts have emerged. We derive analytical relationships between the output elasticities of scal variables and scal multipliers. We show that standard identi cation schemes imply different priors on elasticities, generating a large dispersion in multiplier estimates. We then use extra-model information to narrow the set of empirically plausible elasticities, allowing for sharper inference on multipliers. Our results for the U.S. for the period 1947-2006 suggest that the probability of the tax multiplier being larger than the spending multiplier is below 0.5 at all horizons. JEL Classi cation: E62; C52.
Automatic classification of breathing sounds during sleep

Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) is a highly prevalent condition associated with many adverse health problems. As the current means of diagnosis (polysomnography) is obtrusive and ill-suited for mass screening of the population, we explore a non-contact, automatic approach that uses acoustics-based methods. We present a method for automatically classifying breathing sounds produced during sleep. We compare the performance of several acoustic feature representations for detecting diagnostically-relevant sleep breathing events to predict overall SDB severity. Our subject-independent method tracks rest in the breathing cycle with 84-87% accuracy, and predicts SDB severity at a level similar to polysomnography.
On image similarity in the context of multimedia social computing

Social multimedia content had an unprecedented increasing trend in recent years, and receiving a number of research attentions. Images, an exceedingly expressive form of social multimedia, can be widely seen in news report for social emergency. Among the vast number of images for social emergency are many repurposed images, that is, variants not interpreted as what the original images express. Such repurposed images appear in many online pages and may mislead the public. This make it being an interesting and challenging task to identify whether an image is repurposed. We propose a novel framework, called SOFC, to identify the repurposed images. A SIFT-based identical parts finding algorithm is used to find and align all potential identical blocks in the repurposed images and the original images. We then compute the similarity of the potential identical blocks by implementing an object-based likelihood measuring algorithm, to determine whether these blocks are identical in the two images. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed identification method is validated by experiments on a image set of real social emergency.
Blood eosinophils to direct corticosteroid treatment of exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a randomized placebo-controlled trial.

RATIONALE Exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and responses to treatment are heterogeneous. OBJECTIVES Investigate the usefulness of blood eosinophils to direct corticosteroid therapy during exacerbations. METHODS Subjects with COPD exacerbations were entered into a randomized biomarker-directed double-blind corticosteroid versus standard therapy study. Subjects in the standard arm received prednisolone for 2 weeks, whereas in the biomarker-directed arm, prednisolone or matching placebo was given according to the blood eosinophil count biomarker. Both study groups received antibiotics. Blood eosinophils were measured in the biomarker-directed and standard therapy arms to define biomarker-positive and -negative exacerbations (blood eosinophil count > and ≤ 2%, respectively). The primary outcome was to determine noninferiority in health status using the chronic respiratory questionnaire (CRQ) and in the proportion of exacerbations associated with a treatment failure between subjects allocated to the biomarker-directed and standard therapy arms. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS There were 86 and 80 exacerbations in the biomarker-directed and standard treatment groups, respectively. In the biomarker-directed group, 49% of the exacerbations were not treated with prednisolone. CRQ improvement after treatment in the standard and biomarker-directed therapy groups was similar (0.8 vs. 1.1; mean difference, 0.3; 95% confidence interval, 0.0-0.6; P = 0.05). There was a greater improvement in CRQ in biomarker-negative exacerbations given placebo compared with those given prednisolone (mean difference, 0.45; 95% confidence interval, 0.01-0.90; P = 0.04). In biomarker-negative exacerbations, treatment failures occurred in 15% given prednisolone and 2% of those given placebo (P = 0.04). CONCLUSIONS The peripheral blood eosinophil count is a promising biomarker to direct corticosteroid therapy during COPD exacerbations, but larger studies are required.
Adaptive Semantic Publishing

The paper describes the approach, methodology and main software components of an Adaptive Semantic Publishing Platform for digital medias; applied previously to numerous use cases and publishers like the BBC, Euro-Money and Press Association. The semantic publishing relies on the interaction among the common sense model in ontologies, the world knowledge in Linked Open Data (LOD), the named entity categorization and the set of domain-specific keywords. Hence, the contribution of the related LOD datasets is briefly considered. The adaptive publishing relies on the user's requirements (interests, searches, activities) provided as summaries of articles on selected topics (sports, politics, society, etc.). Also, approaches to gold standard data are presented, which enable the fast and high quality clusterization of numerous information streams per topic.
Unmasking Mode Errors: A New Application of Task Knowledge Principles to the Knowledge Gaps in Cockpit Design

In the complexity of modern, computerised systems, the current system state can come as an unpleasant shock to even an experienced user. The dominant thinking in this field [Palmer, 1995, Palmer et al, 1993, Degani et al, 1996, Rushby 1999] suggests that much of this "automation surprise" [Palmer 1995] comes as a result of mode error. In this paper, we will show that this is a fundamental misclassification and show the existence of a deeper problem, which we identify as a task knowledge gap [Johnson 1992] between operator and system. We suggest a new design solution, based on this re-classification and evaluate this new approach through the redesign of interfaces in a simulation of a well-documented air-incident. The results of our evaluation show the redesign to be significantly less prone to the depicted error. We conclude by considering the implications of these results in terms of task knowledge principles.
Frapbot: An open‐source application for FRAP data

We introduce Frapbot, a free‐of‐charge open source software web application written in R, which provides manual and automated analyses of fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) datasets. For automated operation, starting from data tables containing columns of time‐dependent intensity values for various regions of interests within the images, a pattern recognition algorithm recognizes the relevant columns and identifies the presence or absence of prebleach values and the time point of photobleaching. Raw data, residuals, normalization, and boxplots indicating the distribution of half times of recovery (t1/2) of all uploaded files are visualized instantly in a batch‐wise manner using a variety of user‐definable fitting options. The fitted results are provided as . zip file, which contains . csv formatted output tables. Alternatively, the user can manually control any of the options described earlier. © 2017 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry
Knowledge extracting system for non-expert miners

Argo is a global array of 3,000 free-drifting profiling floats that will measure the temperature, pressure and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. This will allow continuous monitoring of the climate state of the ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection. Conceptually, Argo builds on the existing upper-ocean thermal networks, extending their spatial and temporal coverage, depth range and accuracy, and enhancing them through addition of salinity and velocity measurements. Also the float reads its latitude and longitude values. All these information in combination called as dataset and processed with some pre-processing and mining strategies. Pre-processing technique allows to extract the features that are required to define the ocean behaviour. Mining defines the similar patterns present in the dataset. Extracted pattern describes the behaviour of saline water by giving the tsunami alerts and PFZ's.
Transmission disequilibrium testing of the chromosome 15q11‐q13 region in autism

Evidence implicates the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) and the 15q11‐q13 genes as candidates for autism as well as restricted repetitive behavior (RRB). We conducted dense transmission disequilibrium mapping of the 15q11‐q13 region with 93 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 86 strictly defined autism trios and tested association between SNPs and autism using the transmission disequilibrium test (TDT). As exploratory analyses, parent‐of‐origin effects were examined using likelihood‐ratio tests (LRTs) and genotype–phenotype associations for specific RRB using the Family‐Based Association Test (FBAT). Additionally, gene–gene interactions between nominally associated 15q11‐q13 variants and 5‐HTTLPR, the common length polymorphism of SLC6A4, were examined using conditional logistic regression (CLR). TDT revealed nominally significant transmission disequilibrium between autism and five SNPs, three of which are located within close proximity of the GABAA receptor subunit gene clusters. Three SNPs in the SNRPN/UBE3A region had marginal imprinting effects. FBAT for genotype–phenotype relations revealed nominally significant association between two SNPs and one ADI‐R subdomain item. However, both TDT and FBAT were not statistically significant after correcting for multiple comparisons. Gene–gene interaction analyses by CLR revealed additive genetic effect models, without interaction terms, fit the data best. Lack of robust association between the 15q11‐q13 SNPs and RRB phenotypes may be due to a small sample size and absence of more specific RRB measurement. Further investigation of the 15q11‐q13 region with denser genotyping in a larger sample set may be necessary to determine whether this region confers risk to autism, indicated by association, or to specific autism phenotypes. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Biphasic flow: structure and upscaling, consequences on macroscopic transport properties

In disordered porous media, two-phase flow of immiscible fluids (biphasic flow) is organized in patterns that sometimes exhibit fractal geometries over a range of length scales, depending on the capillary, gravitational and viscous forces at play. These forces, as well as the boundary conditions, also determine whether the flow leads to the appearance of fingering pathways, i.e., unstable flow, or not. We present here a short review of these aspects, focusing on drainage and summarizing when these flows are expected to be stable or not, what fractal dimensions can be expected, and in which range of scales. We base our review on experimental studies performed in two-dimensional Hele-Shaw cells, or addressing three dimensional porous media by use of several imaging techniques. We first present configurations in which solely capillary forces and gravity play a role. Next, we review configurations in which capillarity and viscosity are the main forces at play. Eventually, we examine how the microscopic geometry of the fluid clusters affects the macroscopic transport properties. An example of such an upscaling is illustrated in detail: For air invasion in a mono-layer glass-bead cell, the fractal dimension of the flow structures and the associated scale-ranges, are shown to depend on the displacement velocity. This controls the relationship between saturation and the pressure difference between the two phases at the macroscopic scale. We provide in this case expressions for dynamic capillary pressure and residual fluid phase saturations.
A Proteomic and Cellular Analysis of Uropods in the Pathogen Entamoeba histolytica

Exposure of Entamoeba histolytica to specific ligands induces cell polarization via the activation of signalling pathways and cytoskeletal elements. The process leads to formation of a protruding pseudopod at the front of the cell and a retracting uropod at the rear. In the present study, we show that the uropod forms during the exposure of trophozoites to serum isolated from humans suffering of amoebiasis. To investigate uropod assembly, we used LC-MS/MS technology to identify protein components in isolated uropod fractions. The galactose/N-acetylgalactosamine lectin, the immunodominant antigen M17 (which is specifically recognized by serum from amoeba-infected persons) and a few other cells adhesion-related molecules were primarily involved. Actin-rich cytoskeleton components, GTPases from the Rac and Rab families, filamin, α-actinin and a newly identified ezrin-moesin-radixin protein were the main factors found to potentially interact with capped receptors. A set of specific cysteine proteases and a serine protease were enriched in isolated uropod fractions. However, biological assays indicated that cysteine proteases are not involved in uropod formation in E. histolytica, a fact in contrast to the situation in human motile immune cells. The surface proteins identified here are testable biomarkers which may be either recognized by the immune system and/or released into the circulation during amoebiasis.
Bihemispheric Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Enhances Effector-Independent Representations of Motor Synergy and Sequence Learning

Complex manual tasks—everything from buttoning up a shirt to playing the piano—fundamentally involve two components: (1) generating specific patterns of muscle activity (here, termed “synergies”); and (2) stringing these into purposeful sequences. Although transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the primary motor cortex (M1) has been found to increase the learning of motor sequences, it is unknown whether it can similarly facilitate motor synergy learning. Here, we determined the effects of tDCS on the learning of motor synergies using a novel hand configuration task that required the production of difficult muscular activation patterns. Bihemispheric tDCS was applied to M1 of healthy, right-handed human participants during 4 d of repetitive left-hand configuration training in a double-blind design. tDCS augmented synergy learning, leading subsequently to faster and more synchronized execution. This effect persisted for at least 4 weeks after training. Qualitatively similar tDCS-associated improvements occurred during training of finger sequences in a separate subject cohort. We additionally determined whether tDCS only improved the acquisition of motor memories for specific synergies/sequences or whether it also facilitated more general parts of the motor representations, which could be transferred to novel movements. Critically, we observed that tDCS effects generalized to untrained hand configurations and untrained finger sequences (i.e., were nonspecific), as well as to the untrained hand (i.e., were effector-independent). Hence, bihemispheric tDCS may be a promising adjunct to neurorehabilitative training regimes, in which broad transfer to everyday tasks is highly desirable.
AN EFFICIENTBINARIZATION TECHNIQUE FOR HISTORICAL DOCUMENT IMAGES

Binarization is an important preprocessing step in several document image processing tasks. Binarization of historical document with poor contrast, strong noise, and non-uniform illumination is a challenging problem. A new binarization algorithm has been developed to address this problem. In this paper, we describe a new method which does not utilize statistical properties of the intensity histogram of a gray-scale image to determine a threshold. Our method is based on the “Divide and Conquer” strategy for calculating a threshold value which is based on the list of gray levels in that image. It uses low pass Weiner filter method as a preprocessing step to enhance the image by deblurring the image. It uses Median Filter method as a postprocessing step to reduce noise in the image. Our result shows that this new binarization method produce high quality binary image for historical document than any other global methods such as Otsu’s method.