Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Static antennae act as locomotory guides that compensate for visual motion blur in a diurnal, keen-eyed predator

High visual acuity allows parallel processing of distant environmental features, but only when photons are abundant enough. Diurnal tiger beetles (Carabidae: Cicindelinae) have acute vision for insects and visually pursue prey in open, flat habitats. Their fast running speed causes motion blur that degrades visual contrast, forces stop-and-go pursuit and potentially impairs obstacle detection. We demonstrate here that vision is insufficient for obstacle detection during running, and show instead that antennal touch is both necessary and sufficient for obstacle detection. While running, tiger beetle vision appears to be photon-limited in a way reminiscent of animals in low-light habitats. Such animals often acquire wide-field spatial information through mechanosensation mediated by longer, more mobile appendages. We show that a nocturnal tiger beetle species waves its antennae in elliptical patterns typical of poorly sighted insects. While antennae of diurnal species are also used for mechanosensation, they are rigidly held forward with the tips close to the substrate. This enables timely detection of path obstructions followed by an increase in body pitch to avoid collision. Our results demonstrate adaptive mechanosensory augmentation of blurred visual information during fast locomotion, and suggest that future studies may reveal non-visual sensory compensation in other fast-moving animals.
Socioeconomic impact of investments from the federal highway concession program in the state of Santa Catarina

This study aims to evaluate whether federal highway concessions in Brazil have brought significant socioeconomic benefits to the population of neighboring municipalities. The impact of two highway concessions in the state of Santa Catarina was assessed, covering 28 of the 293 municipalities existing in the state in 2012. Propensity Score Matching and Difference-in-differences techniques were used to calculate the impact that the concessions had on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Firjan Municipal Development Index (IFDM) of municipalities served by federal highways under concession, between 2007 and 2012. The results suggest that there was no significant impact on GDP caused by the concession. The average impact on the IFDM variable was significant, approximately 4.5%, and less developed municipalities were more positively affected by participation in the program.
Intra-Day Trading System Design Based on the Integrated Model of Wavelet De-Noise and Genetic Programming

Technical analysis has been proved to be capable of exploiting short-term fluctuations in financial markets. Recent results indicate that the market timing approach beats many traditional buy-and-hold approaches in most of the short-term trading periods. Genetic programming (GP) was used to generate short-term trade rules on the stock markets during the last few decades. However, few of the related studies on the analysis of financial time series with genetic programming considered the non-stationary and noisy characteristics of the time series. In this paper, to de-noise the original financial time series and to search profitable trading rules, an integrated method is proposed based on the Wavelet Threshold (WT) method and GP. Since relevant information that affects the movement of the time series is assumed to be fully digested during the market closed periods, to avoid the jumping points of the daily or monthly data, in this paper, intra-day high-frequency time series are used to fully exploit the short-term forecasting advantage of technical analysis. To validate the proposed integrated approach, an empirical study is conducted based on the China Securities Index (CSI) 300 futures in the emerging China Financial Futures Exchange (CFFEX) market. The analysis outcomes show that the wavelet de-noise approach outperforms many comparative models.
Acute infusion reactions to chemotherapeutic drugs: a single institute experience.

PURPOSE Treating cancer often involves the use of chemotherapeutic agents. Due to the growing incidence of cancer worldwide and the expanding number of treatment options, it is important to understand the risks of adverse events associated with these treatments. In this study, we monitored the occurrence of acute infusion reactions in an outpatient chemotherapy center from April 2011 to April 2012. METHODS For patients who developed infusion reactions, the causative drug, the dose and number of treatments received, the onset time of the reaction, the duration of the reaction, blood pressure, pulse, level of oxygen saturation during the reaction, and other symptoms were recorded. The severity of reactions was determined in accordance with NCI toxicity criteria. A reaction was considered as grade 1-2 (mild-moderate) if the patient experienced flushing, rash, fever, tremor, dyspnea, rigor, and mild hypotension. Symptoms such as severe hypotension, bronchospasm, cardiac dysfunction and anaphylaxis, requiring therapeutic intervention, were classified as severe, grade 3-4 reactions. RESULTS Of the 2213 patients receiving chemotherapy during the study period, 138 (62%) developed an infusion reaction to the treatment. Among 138 patients most commonly treated types of carcinoma included breast (39.2%), lung (17.8%), colorectal (10%), and ovarian (8.5%) cancers. Docetaxel administration resulted in the largest number of infusion reactions, though most reactions were mild to moderate and did not require the cessation of treatment. Patients with mild to moderate reactions (89.2%) were able to continue treatment, while those who developed severe reactions (10.8%) could not continue treatment with the same agent. CONCLUSION Although severe reactions are rare, the incidence of mild to moderate reactions against taxanes, platinum compounds, and monoclonal antibodies is quite high. Clinical symptoms do not vary widely among the agents, though the onset time of symptoms does vary. While reactions against platinum agents were of type 1 anaphylactic reactions, reactions against taxanes and monoclonal antibodies during the first infusion and in the following minutes suggest the activation of different mechanisms.
From A to E: analyzing TPC's OLTP benchmarks: the obsolete, the ubiquitous, the unexplored

Introduced in 2007, TPC-E is the most recently standardized OLTP benchmark by TPC. Even though TPC-E has already been around for six years, it has not gained the popularity of its predecessor TPC-C: all the published results for TPC-E use a single database vendor's product. TPC-E is significantly different than its predecessors. Some of its distinguishing characteristics are the non-uniform input creation, longer-running and more complicated transactions, more difficult partitioning etc. These factors slow down the adoption of TPC-E. In turn, there is little knowledge in the community about how TPC-E behaves micro-architecturally and within the database engine. To shed light on TPC-E, we implement it on top of a scalable open-source database engine, Shore-MT, and perform a workload characterization study, comparing it with the previous, much better known OLTP benchmarks of TPC: TPC-B and TPC-C. In parallel, we study the evolution of the OLTP benchmarks throughout the decades. Our results demonstrate that TPC-E exhibits similar micro-architectural behavior to TPC-B and TPC-C, even though it incurs less stall time and higher instructions per cycle. On the other hand, within the database engine it suffers more from logical lock contention. Therefore, we argue that, on the hardware side, TPC-E needs less aggressive processors. Whereas on the software side it can benefit from designs based on intra-transaction parallelism, logical partitioning, and optimistic concurrency control to minimize the effects of lock contention without introducing distributed transactions.
Stabilization of spatially non-causal reaction-diffusion equation

This paper addresses boundary control to stabilize a reaction-diffusion equation, in which heat source depends on the temperature of the whole space. A new backstepping transformation of two kernels is introduced. Mathematical tricks are employed to solve the kernel equations, thus, a control law is obtained specifically. The inverse transformation is derived, and stability of the closed loop established. Three figures show simulation results.
A procedure for estimating gestural scores from natural speech

Speech can be represented as a constellation of constricting events, gestures, which are defined at distinct vocal tract sites, in the form of a gestural score. Gestures and their output trajectories, tract variables, which are available only in synthetic speech, have recently been shown to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. In this paper we propose an iterative analysis-by-synthesis landmark based time-warping architecture to obtain gestural scores for natural speech. Given an utterance, the Haskins Laboratories Task Dynamics and Application (TADA) model was used to generate its prototype gestural score and the corresponding synthetic acoustic output. An optimal gestural score was estimated through iterative time-warping processes such that the distance between original and TADA-synthesized speech is minimized. We compared the performance of our approach to that of a conventional dynamic time warping procedure using Log-Spectral and Itakura Distance measures. We also performed a word recognition experiment using the gestural annotations to show that the gestural scores are suitable for word recognition. Index Terms: Articulatory Phonology, gestures, vocal tract variables, X-ray microbeam data, TADA model, time warping
NAEP: Provable Security in the Presence of Decryption Failures

We consider the impact of the possibility of decryption failures in proofs of security for padding schemes, where these failures are both message and key dependent. We explain that an average case failure analysis is not necessarily sufficient to achieve provable security with existing CCA2-secure schemes. On a positive note, we introduce NAEP, an efficient padding scheme similar to PSS-E designed especially for the NTRU one-way function. We show that with this padding scheme we can prove security in the presence of decryption failures, under certain explicitly stated assumptions. We also discuss the applicability of proofs of security to instantiated cryptosystems in general, introducing a more practical notion of cost to describe the power of an adversary.
Contribution of Atrial Fibrillation to Incidence and Outcome of Ischemic Stroke: Results From a Population-Based Study

Background and Purpose— Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a major risk factor for ischemic stroke and its prevalence increases steeply with age. Population-based data on its influence on stroke outcome are scarce. Methods— We evaluated the prevalence of AF and its influence on prognosis in patients with a first-ever ischemic stroke from a population-based registry. Results— The presence of AF at stroke onset and during the acute phase was confirmed by a standard electrocardiogram in 869 (24.6%) of 3530 patients with ischemic stroke. With respect to patients without the arrhythmia, those with AF were more frequently women, aged 80 years and older, with coronary heart disease and peripheral arterial disease. The presence of AF was associated with high 30-day (32.5%; 95% CI, 29.3 to 35.6) and 1-year case-fatality rates (49.5%; 95% CI, 46.2 to 52.8), with a higher stroke recurrence rate within the first year of follow-up (6.6% versus 4.4%; P=0.046) and with the worst survival after an average follow-up of 45.2 months (P<0.0001). At the multivariate Cox regression analysis, AF was an independent predictor of 30-day and 1-year mortality. Approximately 17% of all deaths were attributable to the presence of AF. Conclusions— We found a high prevalence of AF in patients with a first-ever ischemic stroke, especially among elderly women. The overall contribution of AF to stroke mortality was relevant, suggesting that together with new strategies to prevent the development of the arrhythmia more appropriate treatments are needed, mostly in elderly women.
Uses and gratifications of members of communities of practice

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present findings from a large-scale study which examined the uses and gratifications of communities of practice of the Israeli Ministry of Social Services. Design/methodology/approach – A twofold research methodology was applied: content analysis of 7,248 posts, as well as 71 semi-structured interviews with community members. Findings – Cognitive uses were perceived by community members as the key uses and gratifications from the communities of practice. The implications of these uses and gratifications, such as the de-isolation of isolated workers and personal empowerment, are studied. Originality/value – Contrary to much recent literature, the study presents the communities not mainly as platforms for social relations or emotional support, but rather as exchange platforms where information is transmitted between providers and consumers to the benefit of all community members.
Effect of Phase angle of Acceleration on Fatigue life in Frequency Domain of Vibration-Based Energy Harvester for Railway vehicle

This study aims to perform fatigue life prediction of vibration-based energy harvester (VEH) considering resonance characteristics. First, we investigated the vibration environment of a structure on which an energy harvester may be installed and determined the level and frequency range of the power spectral density (PSD) exerted on the energy harvester. On the one hand, this research considered random vibration load, because VEH was operated by resonance phenomena. So, to consider random load, life prediction was performed by durability test machine and system. And in order to consider dynamic effect by natural frequency, vibration fatigue analysis was performed in frequency domain. Also, we were performed durability test and vibration fatigue under random load, which is composed of the PSD. As results, accuracy of life prediction procedure for VEH by vibration fatigue analysis was verified.
Improving Statistical Language Model Performance with Automatically Generated Word Hierarchies

An automatic word-classification system has been designed that uses word unigram and bigram frequency statistics to implement a binary top-down form of word clustering and employs an average class mutual information metric. Words are represented as structural tags---n-bit numbers the most significant bit-patterns of which incorporate class information. The classification system has revealed some of the lexical structure of English, as well as some phonemic and semantic structure. The system has been compared---directly and indirectly---with other recent word-classification systems. We see our classification as a means towards the end of constructing multilevel class-based interpolated language models. We have built some of these models and carried out experiments that show a 7% drop in test set perplexity compared to a standard interpolated trigram language model.
A cell cycle checkpoint monitors cell morphogenesis in budding yeast

Checkpoint controls are regulatory pathways that inhibit cell cycle progression in cells that have not faithfully completed a prior step in the cell cycle. In the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, DNA replication and spindle assembly are monitored by checkpoint controls that prevent nuclear division in cells that have failed to complete these processes. During the normal cell cycle, bud formation is temporally coincident with DNA replication and spindle assembly, and the nucleus divides along the mother-bud axis in mitosis. In this report, we show that inhibition of bud formation also causes a dramatic delay in nuclear division. This allows cells to recover from a transient disruption of cell polarity without becoming binucleate. The delay occurs after DNA replication and spindle assembly, and results from delayed activation of the master cell cycle regulatory kinase, Cdc28. Cdc28 activation is inhibited by phosphorylation of Cdc28 on tyrosine 19, and by delayed accumulation of the B-type cyclins Clb1 and Clb2. These results suggest the existence of a novel checkpoint that monitors cell morphogenesis in budding yeast.
Speeding up model checking by exploiting explicit and hidden verification constraints

Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on compositional approaches and assume-guarantee reasoning. In recent years, most of the research efforts on verification constraints have focused on defining formats and techniques to encode, or to synthesize, constraints starting from the specification of the design. In this paper, we analyze the impact of constraints on the performance of model checking tools, and we discuss how to effectively exploit them. We also introduce an approach to explicitly derive verification constraints hidden in the design and/or in the property under verification. Such constraints may simply come from true design constraints, embedded within the properties, or may be generated in the general effort to reduce or partition the state space. Experimental results show that, in both cases, we can reap benefits for the overall verification process in several hard-to-solve designs, where we obtain speed-ups of more than one order of magnitude.
A Study on the Characteristic of Stator Winding Degradation Process and Its Life Estimation of Induction Motors

This paper presents an analysis on the characteristics of the stator winding degradation process. A diagnostic and prognostic parameter, which is derived using the sequence component approach, is proposed. It is estimated using only the measurements of voltages and currents, which are easily obtained, and hence, the method can be implemented in real-time applications. A test is designed for generating stator winding inter-turn fault and accelerating it. The characteristic of the degradation process based on the prognostic parameter is discussed. The collected data is modeled and the remaining useful life (RUL) is estimated.
Autologous olfactory mucosal cell transplants in clinical spinal cord injury: a randomized double-blinded trial in a canine translational model

This study was designed to determine whether an intervention proven effective in the laboratory to ameliorate the effects of experimental spinal cord injury could provide sufficient benefit to be of value to clinical cases. Intraspinal olfactory ensheathing cell transplantation improves locomotor outcome after spinal cord injury in ‘proof of principle’ experiments in rodents, suggesting the possibility of efficacy in human patients. However, laboratory animal spinal cord injury cannot accurately model the inherent heterogeneity of clinical patient cohorts, nor are all aspects of their spinal cord function readily amenable to objective evaluation. Here, we measured the effects of intraspinal transplantation of cells derived from olfactory mucosal cultures (containing a mean of ∼50% olfactory ensheathing cells) in a population of spinal cord–injured companion dogs that accurately model many of the potential obstacles involved in transition from laboratory to clinic. Dogs with severe chronic thoracolumbar spinal cord injuries (equivalent to ASIA grade ‘A’ human patients at ∼12 months after injury) were entered into a randomized double-blinded clinical trial in which they were allocated to receive either intraspinal autologous cells derived from olfactory mucosal cultures or injection of cell transport medium alone. Recipients of olfactory mucosal cell transplants gained significantly better fore–hind coordination than those dogs receiving cell transport medium alone. There were no significant differences in outcome between treatment groups in measures of long tract functionality. We conclude that intraspinal olfactory mucosal cell transplantation improves communication across the damaged region of the injured spinal cord, even in chronically injured individuals. However, we find no evidence for concomitant improvement in long tract function.
Tetrandrine inhibits Ca2+-activated chloride channel in cultured human umbilical vein endothelial cells.

AIM To characterize the electrophysiological and kinetic properties of Ca2+-activated chloride channel (CaCC) in cultured human umbilical vein endothelial cell line (HUVEC), and test the inhibitory effects of tetrandrine (Tet) on CaCC. METHODS Ca2+-activated Cl- currents (I(Cl,Ca)) were recorded by patch-clamp whole cell configurations. [Ca2+]i was measured via intracellular Fura-2 fluorescence intensities. RESULTS I(Cl,Ca) was activated by increasing [Ca2+]i via direct elevation of intracellular calcium. I(Cl,Ca) showed an apparent outward rectification properties, and it was activated in a voltage- and calcium-dependent mode. Tet dose-dependently inhibited I(Cl,Ca), the IC50 was (5.2+/-0.4) micromol/L (n=8 cells). Tet suppressed both voltage-dependent and calcium-dependent activation of I(Cl,Ca). The activation time constant was (326+/-12) ms [in the presence of 10 micromol/L Tet, compared to control (175+/-17) ms, at +100 mV], and Ca2+ concentration for half maximal activation was (387+/-61) nmol/L for Tet (compared to control (287+/-36) nmol/L. CONCLUSIONS Tet effectively blocked I(Cl,Ca), and such effects might be due to its inhibitory effects on the activation process of Ca2+-activated chloride channel.
Specific Immunotherapy in Food Allergy — Towards a Change in the Management Paradigm

This chapter addresses the epidemiology and natural history of food allergy, the mechanisms of immune tolerance to foods, the forms of desensitization and induction of tolerance to allergens with applications to foods, and affords an update on the experience gained with the induction of tolerance to different foods, the respective protocols and guides, efficacy and safety considerations, and adverse reaction risk factors. An evaluation is also made of the current state of biological therapy utilization in conjunction with specific immunotherapy for food allergens.