Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Blood Manganese Levels and Visceral Adipose Tissue in the United States: A Population-Based Study

Background: Manganese (Mn) is an essential trace element with a narrow toxic margin for human health. The association between Mn exposure and adverse visceral adipose tissue (VAT) accumulation is unclear. Objective: This study aimed to estimate the associations of blood Mn levels with VAT mass or visceral obesity in the general population in the United States. Method: This cross-sectional study included data of 7297 individuals released by National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). VAT was quantified with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, and blood Mn was measured using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The generalized linear model and generalized additive model (GAM) were applied to estimate the linear and non-linear associations between Mn levels and VAT mass, respectively. Logistic regression was used to estimate the associations between blood Mn levels and the risk of visceral obesity. Results: Fully adjusted generalized linear regression revealed that individuals in the higher quantile of Mn had increased VAT mass compared with those in the lower quantile (β per quantile change = 0.025; 95% CI of 0.017, 0.033; p < 0.001). Positive associations were also observed in males and females (males: β per quantile change = 0.012, 95% CI of 0.002, 0.022 (p = 0.020); female: β per quantile change = 0.036; 95% CI of 0.023, 0.048 (p < 0.001)). The GAM illustrated that the non-linear associations between blood Mn levels and VAT mass were in U-shape patterns (effective degree of freedom >1 in total participants, males, and females). A stratified analysis found significant interactions between Mn and the family income-to-poverty ratio (PIR) in males, with stronger associations in males with a PIR < 1.3 (β = 0.109; 95% CI of 0.048, 0.170). Additional analyses revealed that individuals in the highest quantile of Mn had a 39% higher risk of visceral obesity (OR = 1.39; 95% CI of 1.15–1.69; p < 0.001). Conclusions: Higher blood Mn levels were positively associated with increased VAT mass and visceral obesity risk. The adverse VAT phenotype associated with excessive blood Mn levels should be further investigated.
Utility-oriented Offloading with Multiple Service Constraints for Mobile-Edge Computing

As one of the key technologies to facilitate the development of 5G/6G technologies, mobile edge computing (MEC) is a new computing model for mobile devices to provide services in close proximity. Due to the limited resources, designing a reasonable and efficient task offloading and resource allocation scheme for MEC systems is of importance to meet the high quality of experience (QoE) and to improve the service performance of the system. In this paper, due to the different quality requirements of each user, we design individualized utility metrics for each user based on the transmission capabilities of different devices. Then the constraints of computational resources and system time-average energy consumption are added to formulate a stochastic optimization problem, which jointly optimizes the offloading strategy, power resource allocation, and channel resource allocation to maximize the time-average utility. We decouple the original problem into deterministic subproblems on each time slot with Lyapunov optimization theory and propose an online optimization algorithm for utility quality (OAUQ). The simulation results show that the algorithm can maximize the utility while ensuring the long-term stability of the system.
Quantum Hall transitions: An exact theory based on conformal restriction

We revisit the problem of the plateau transition in the integer quantum Hall effect. Here we develop an analytical approach for this transition, based on the theory of conformal restriction. This is a mathematical theory that was recently developed within the context of the Schramm-Loewner evolution which describes the stochastic geometry of fractal curves and other stochastic geometrical fractal objects in 2D space. Observables elucidating the connection with the plateau transition include the so-called point-contact conductances (PCCs) between points on the boundary of the sample, described within the language of the Chalker-Coddington network model. We show that the disorder-averaged PCCs are characterized by classical probabilities for certain geometric objects in the plane (pictures), occurring with positive statistical weights, that satisfy the crucial restriction property with respect to changes in the shape of the sample with absorbing boundaries. Upon combining this restriction property with the expected conformal invariance at the transition point, we employ the mathematical theory of conformal restriction measures to relate the disorder-averaged PCCs to correlation functions of primary operators in a conformal field theory (of central charge $c=0$). We show how this can be used to calculate these functions in a number of geometries with various boundary conditions. Since our results employ only the conformal restriction property, they are equally applicable to a number of other critical disordered electronic systems in 2D. For most of these systems, we also predict exact values of critical exponents related to the spatial behavior of various disorder-averaged PCCs.
Physiotherapy for Cervical Dystonia: A Systematic Review of Randomised Controlled Trials

Physiotherapy is mentioned as an adjunctive treatment to improve the symptoms of cervical dystonia in terms of pain, function and quality of life. However, botulinum neurotoxin injection remains the treatment of choice. This systematic review emphasizes physical therapy and evaluates it by including six studies. The methodology is based on a previous systematic review on this topic to provide better comparability and actuality. For this purpose, two databases were searched using the previously published keywords. This time, only randomised controlled trials were evaluated to increase the power. In conclusion, additional physical therapy and active home exercise programs appear to be useful. Further research should focus on the dose–response principle to emphasize physical therapy treatment modalities.
Bootstrap Algebraic Multigrid: status report, open problems, and outlook

This paper provides an overview of the main ideas driving the bootstrap algebraic multigrid methodology, including compatible relaxation and algebraic distances for defining effective coarsening strategies, the least squares method for computing accurate prolongation operators and the bootstrap cycles for computing the test vectors that are used in the least squares process. We review some recent research in the development, analysis and application of bootstrap algebraic multigrid and point to open problems in these areas. Results from our previous research as well as some new results for some model diffusion problems with highly oscillatory diffusion coefficient are presented to illustrate the basic components of the BAMG algorithm.
The Dirichlet problem for the minimal hypersurface equation with Lipschitz continuous boundary data on domains of a Riemannian manifold

Given a C2-domain with compact boundary in an arbitrary complete Riemannian manifold, we search for smallness conditions on the boundary data for which the Dirichlet problem for the minimal hypersurface equation is solvable. We obtain an extension to Riemannian manifolds of an existence result of G. H. Williams ( J. Reine Angew. Math. 354:123-140, 1984).
Chitin Derived Small Molecule AVR-48 Reprograms the Resting Macrophages to an Intermediate Phenotype and Decrease Pseudomonas aeruginosa Mouse Lung Infection

AVR-48 is a structural derivative of chitin previously shown by our laboratory to significantly decrease lung injury parameters in LPS, hyperoxia and sepsis-induced rodent models. The current study objectives are to determine the cellular mechanism of action and demonstrate efficacy in a mouse bacterial lung infection model. For in vitro receptor binding and macrophage polarization studies, C57Bl/6J mouse derived spleens and human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (hPBMCs) were treated with AVR-48 ± LPS or biotin conjugated AVR-48. Different macrophage types were determined using flow cytometry and secreted cytokines were measured using ELISA. In vivo, a CD-1 mouse Pseudomonas aeruginosa lung infection was treated with AVR-48, assessing bacterial colony forming unit (CFU), IL-10 and IL-17A levels in lung and blood samples. AVR-48 binds to both the toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and the CD163 receptor on mouse monocytes. In hPBMCs, frequency of intermediate macrophages increased upon AVR-48 treatment for 72 h. Increased bacterial phagocytosis/intracellular killing were observed in THP-1 cells and reduction in CFU in CD-1 mouse lungs. Binding of AVR-48 to both TLR4 and CD163 receptors bring the macrophages to an intermediary stage, resulting in increased phagocytosis and decreased inflammation, altogether providing an optimal immune balance for treating lung injury and infection.
Sinkhorn Algorithm for Lifted Assignment Problems

Recently, Sinkhorn's algorithm was applied for approximately solving linear programs emerging from optimal transport very efficiently. This was accomplished by formulating a regularized version of the linear program as Bregman projection problem onto the polytope of doubly-stochastic matrices, and then computing the projection using the efficient Sinkhorn algorithm, which is based on alternating closed-form Bregman projections on the larger polytopes of row-stochastic and column-stochastic matrices. In this paper we suggest a generalization of this algorithm for solving a well-known lifted linear program relaxations of the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), which is known as the Johnson Adams (JA) Relaxation. First, an efficient algorithm for Bregman projection onto the JA polytope by alternating closed-form Bregman projections onto one-sided local polytopes is devised. The one-sided polytopes can be seen as a high-dimensional, generalized version of the row/column-stochastic polytopes. Second, a new method for solving the original linear programs using the Bregman projections onto the JA polytope is developed and shown to be more accurate and numerically stable than the standard approach of driving the regularizer to zero. The resulting algorithm is considerably more scalable than standard linear solvers and is able to solve significantly larger linear programs.
Expensive Optimization via Surrogate-Assisted and Model-Free Evolutionary Optimization

The surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithm (SAEA) is one of the most efficient approaches for solving expensive optimization problems. However, it still faces challenges when dealing with complex and high-dimensional problems. To fill this gap, a new algorithm (called SAMFEO) that combines surrogate-assisted and model-free evolutionary optimization is proposed in this article. SAMFEO consists of a local surrogate-assisted multioperator evolutionary optimization (LSA-MoEO) and a model-free single-operator evolutionary optimization (MF-SoEO). Specifically, LSA-MoEO adopts multiple evolutionary operators to generate a set of offspring and prescreens the best one as the final offspring by using a lightweight local surrogate model trained by some newest evaluated solutions. MF-SoEO follows the traditional evolutionary optimization paradigm and is triggered based on the optimization utility of the LSA-MoEO. It plays a crucial role in preventing the population from getting stagnation. Experimental results show that SAMFEO has significant advantages over several state-of-the-art SAEAs on some complex benchmark problems and one real-world problem.
MECaNIC: SmartNIC to Assist URLLC Processing in Multi-Access Edge Computing Platforms

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) providing server capabilities at near end-users is introduced to enable Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) for mission-critical and time-sensitive networked services. However, the current MEC simply shortens the physical travel distance of traffic but does not include any architectural approach for supporting URLLC. As a result, MEC implicates resource contention issues, and important packets can be easily delayed or lost, resulting in critical flaws for those services. To address these problems, we introduce MECaNIC, which extends the data plane of MEC to SmartNIC and assists URLLC of MEC. It provides i) precise packet scheduling that handles traffic priorities into two dimensions of reliability and latency, and ii) task offloading that accelerates MEC applications, including payload matching and response caching. The prototype implemented using NetFPGA shows that MECaNIC reduces the average latency of the high-priority traffic from $2,883\ \mu s$ to $397\ \mu s$ while ensuring packet delivery, even when the traffic competes with other lower priority traffic. Also, task offloading improves a MEC's payload processing 4-fold and reduces file downloading time and video random access time by 44% and 17%, respectively.
Generalized dual Sudakov minoration via dimension-reduction—a program

We propose a program for establishing a conjectural extension to the class of (origin-symmetric) log-concave probability measures $\mu$, of the classical dual Sudakov Minoration on the expectation of the supremum of a Gaussian process: \begin{equation} \label{eq:abstract} M(Z_p(\mu), C \int ||x||_K d\mu \cdot K) \leq \exp(C p) \;\;\, \forall p \geq 1 . \end{equation} Here $K$ is an origin-symmetric convex body, $Z_p(\mu)$ is the $L_p$-centroid body associated to $\mu$, $M(A,B)$ is the packing-number of $B$ in $A$, and $C > 0$ is a universal constant. The Program consists of first establishing a Weak Generalized Dual Sudakov Minoration, involving the dimension $n$ of the ambient space, which is then self-improved to a dimension-free estimate after applying a dimension-reduction step. The latter step may be thought of as a conjectural "small-ball one-sided" variant of the Johnson--Lindenstrauss dimension-reduction lemma. We establish the Weak Generalized Dual Sudakov Minoration for a variety of log-concave probability measures and convex bodies (for instance, this step is fully resolved assuming a positive answer to the Slicing Problem). The Separation Dimension-Reduction step is fully established for ellipsoids and, up to logarithmic factors in the dimension, for cubes, resulting in a corresponding Generalized (regular) Dual Sudakov Minoration estimate for these bodies and arbitrary log-concave measures, which are shown to be (essentially) best-possible. Along the way, we establish a regular version of (\ref{eq:abstract}) for all $p \geq n$ and provide a new direct proof of Sudakov Minoration via The Program.
A note on maximal lattice growth in SO(1,n)

Correspondence to be sent to: raimbault@math.jussieu. fr We show that the number of maximal lattices with volume less than v is at least exponential in v. To do this we construct families of noncommensurable Gromov/Piatetski-Shapiro manifolds having the same volume.
Level sets of certain classes of $\alpha$-analytic functions

For an open set $V\subset\mathbb{C}^n$, denote by $\mathscr{M}_{\alpha}(V)$ the family of $\alpha$-analytic functions that obey a boundary maximum modulus principle. We prove that, on a bounded domain $\Omega\subset \mathbb{C}^n$, with continuous boundary (that in each variable separately allows a solution to the Dirichlet problem), a function $f \in \mathscr{M}_{\alpha}(\Omega\setminus f^{-1}(0))$ automatically satisfies $f\in \mathscr{M}_{\alpha}(\Omega)$, if it is $C^{\alpha_j-1}$-smooth, in the $z_j$ variable, $\alpha\in \mathbb{Z}^n_+$, up to the boundary. For a submanifold $U\subset \mathbb{C}^n$, denote by $\mathfrak{M}_{\alpha}(U)$ the set of functions locally approximable by $\alpha$-analytic functions where each approximating member and its reciprocal (off the singularities) obey the boundary maximum modulus principle. We prove, that for a $C^3$-smooth hypersurface, $\Omega$, a member of $\mathfrak{M}_{\alpha}(\Omega)$, cannot have constant modulus near a point where the Levi form has a positive eigenvalue, unless it is there the trace of a polyanalytic function of a simple form.
Coherence-breaking channels and coherence sudden death

Quantum noise is ubiquitous to quantum systems as they incessantly interact with their surroundings and results in degrading useful resources such as coherence for single quantum systems and quantum correlations for multipartite systems. Given the importance of these resources in various quantum information processing protocols, it is of utmost importance to characterize how deteriorating is a particular noise scenario (quantum channel) in reference to a certain resource? Here we develop a theory of coherence breaking channels for single quantum systems. Any quantum channel on a single quantum system will be called a coherence breaking channel if it is an incoherent channel and maps any state to an incoherent state. We explicitly and exhaustively characterize these coherence breaking channels. Moreover, we define the coherence breaking indices for incoherent quantum channels and present various examples to elucidate this concept. We further introduce the concept of coherence sudden death under noisy evolutions and make an explicit connection of the phenomenon of coherence sudden death with the coherence breaking channels and the coherence breaking indices together with various suggestive examples. Furthermore, for higher dimensional Hilbert spaces, we establish the typicality of the dynamics of coherence under any incoherent quantum channel exploiting the concentration of measure phenomenon.
Non-Myelofibrosis Chronic Myeloproliferative Neoplasm Patients Show Better Seroconversion Rates after SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination Compared to Other Hematologic Diseases: A Multicentric Prospective Study of KroHem

Disease- and treatment-mediated immunodeficiency might render SARS-CoV-2 vaccines less effective in patients with hematologic diseases. We performed a prospective non-interventional study to evaluate humoral response after one and two doses of mRNA-1273, BNT162b2, or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine in 118 patients with different malignant or non-malignant hematologic diseases from three Croatian treatment centers. An electrochemiluminescent assay was used to measure total anti-SARS-CoV-2 S-RBD antibody titers. After one vaccine dose, 20/66 (33%) achieved seropositivity with a median antibody titer of 6.1 U/mL. The response rate (58/90, 64.4%) and median antibody titer (>250 U/mL) were higher after two doses. Seropositivity varied with diagnosis (overall p < 0.001), with the lowest rates in lymphoma (34.6%) and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (52.5%). The overall response rate in chronic myeloproliferative neoplasms (CMPN) was 81.3% but reached 100% in chronic myeloid leukemia and other non-myelofibrosis CMPN. At univariable analysis, age > 67 years, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, active treatment, and anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody therapy increased the likelihood of no vaccine response, while hematopoietic stem cell recipients were more likely to respond. Age and anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody therapy remained associated with no response in a multivariable model. Patients with the hematologic disease have attenuated responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, and significant variations in different disease subgroups warrant an individualized approach.
Common DC Bus Charging System for EVs with Solar, Wind, Battery and Fuel Cell Sources

A promising solution to meet the growing charging demand of electric vehicles (EVs), is to incorporate renewable energy resources based charging stations. Thus, a cascaded IIR filter is utilized here for the EV charging system based on PV array, fuel cell stack and wind turbine sources. The satisfactory operation during the grid availability/unavailability is attained through the current and voltage based control mechanisms, along with the seamless transition capability via switching (STS-1/0) of the static transfer switches. Therefore, for adequate operation during modes associated with grid existence and non-existence, a cascaded IIR filter is utilized. Moreover, with respect to various weak grid conditions, adequate system performance is observed.
Using drawings and explanations based on attentive teaching as a means for understanding the social-ecological systems concept

Abstract The concept of ‘social-ecological systems’, which explores the relationships between society and the environment, was at the center of this study. The study aims to describe Israeli environmental-education master students’ level of understanding of the social-ecological systems concept. We used a designated rubric score to analyze drawings and explanations and to identify the levels of understanding asking: How can the analysis of drawings and explanations, using Attentive Teaching as an educational approach, enable the identification of conceptual changes in understanding the social-ecological systems concept? The 270 drawings and explanations of 49 participants were analyzed, and they indicated a general increase in the level of understanding of the social-ecological systems concept. Attentive Teaching, as an educational approach, was found to lead to conceptual change. Drawings and explanations, as an assessment methodology may lead to better understanding of the social-ecological systems concept and may encourage action in relation to the environmental crisis.
Mapping and Optimization Method of SpMV on Multi-DSP Accelerator

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) solves the product of a sparse matrix and dense vector, and the sparseness of a sparse matrix is often more than 90%. Usually, the sparse matrix is compressed to save storage resources, but this causes irregular access to dense vectors in the algorithm, which takes a lot of time and degrades the SpMV performance of the system. In this study, we design a dedicated channel in the DMA to implement an indirect memory access process to speed up the SpMV operation. On this basis, we propose six SpMV algorithm schemes and map them to optimize the performance of SpMV. The results show that the M processor’s SpMV performance reached 6.88 GFLOPS. Besides, the average performance of the HPCG benchmark is 2.8 GFLOPS.
A rank $2$ Dijkgraaf–Moore–Verlinde–Verlinde formula

We conjecture a formula for the virtual elliptic genera of moduli spaces of rank 2 sheaves on minimal surfaces $S$ of general type. We express our conjecture in terms of the Igusa cusp form $\chi_{10}$ and Borcherds type lifts of three quasi-Jacobi forms which are all related to the Weierstrass elliptic function. We also conjecture that the generating function of virtual cobordism classes of these moduli spaces depends only on $\chi(\mathcal{O}_S)$ and $K_S^2$ via two universal functions, one of which is determined by the cobordism classes of Hilbert schemes of points on $K3$. We present generalizations of these conjectures, e.g. to arbitrary surfaces with $p_g>0$ and $b_1=0$. We use a result of J. Shen to express the virtual cobordism class in terms of descendent Donaldson invariants. In a prequel we used T. Mochizuki's formula, universality, and toric calculations to compute such Donaldson invariants in the setting of virtual $\chi_y$-genera. Similar techniques allow us to verify our new conjectures in many cases.