Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Safety and Effectiveness of Central Venous Catheterization in Patients with Cancer: Prospective Observational Study

This study investigated the safety and effectiveness of each type of central venous catheters (CVC) in patients with cancer. We prospectively enrolled patients with cancer who underwent catherization involving a subclavian venous catheter (SVC), peripherally inserted central venous catheter (PICC), or chemo-port (CP) in our department. From March 2007 to March 2009, 116 patients underwent 179 episodes of catherization. A SVC was inserted most frequently (46.4%). Fifty-four complications occurred (30.1%): infection in 23 cases, malpositioning or migration of the tip in 18 cases, thrombosis in eight cases, and bleeding in five cases. Malpositioning or migration of the tip occurred more frequently with a PICC (P<0.001); infection occurred more often with a tunneled catheter (P=0.028) and was observed more often in young patients (P=0.023). The catheter life span was longer for patients with solid cancer (P=0.002) than for those with hematologic cancer, with a CP (P<0.001) than a PICC or SVC, and for an indwelling catheter with image guidance (P=0.014) than a blind procedure. In conclusion, CP is an effective tool for long term use and the fixation of tip is important for the management of PICC.
Stability parameter tracking in stair climbing to control robotic prostheses

This paper describes stability parameters to control an active robotic prosthesis. Its focus is on determination of four characteristic parameters during stair climbing: Center of Pressure (COP) point, Zero-moment Point (ZMP), vertical projection of the center of mass to the ground surface (pCOM) and extrapolated center of mass (xCOM). By analysing experimental measurement results on seven healthy subjects, the paper presents trajectories of stability parameters during stair climbing. The trajectories of COP and ZMP are compared and the results show that the trajectories in a dynamically stable gait are similar. Our study also demonstrates that the zero-moment point can be determined for human motion using 3-D position measurements and an anthropometric model of the human body. Also, on the basis of the presented results, it is shown that stability tracking is possible by using only wearable sensors, such as inertial measurement units and instrumented insoles.
Tashkent+: memory-aware load balancing and update filtering in replicated databases

We present a memory-aware load balancing (MALB) technique to dispatch transactions to replicas in a replicated database. Our MALB algorithm exploits knowledge of the working sets of transactions to assign them to replicas in such a way that they execute in main memory, thereby reducing disk I/O. In support of MALB, we introduce a method to estimate the size and the contents of transaction working sets. We also present an optimization called update filtering that reduces the overhead of update propagation between replicas. We show that MALB greatly improves performance over other load balancing techniques -- such as round robin, least connections, and locality-aware request distribution (LARD) -- that do not use explicit information on how transactions use memory. In particular, LARD demonstrates good performance for read-only static content Web workloads, but it gives performance inferior to MALB for database workloads as it does not efficiently handle large requests. MALB combined with update filtering further boosts performance over LARD. We build a prototype replicated system, called Tashkent+, with which we demonstrate that MALB and update filtering techniques improve performance of the TPC-W and RUBiS benchmarks. In particular, in a 16-replica cluster and using the ordering mix of TPC-W, MALB doubles the throughput over least connections and improves throughput 52% over LARD. MALB with update filtering further improves throughput to triple that of least connections and more than double that of LARD. Our techniques exhibit super-linear speedup; the throughput of the 16-replica cluster is 37 times the peak throughput of a standalone database due to better use of the cluster's memory.
A Microtext Corpus for Persuasion Detection in Dialog

Automatic detection of persuasion is essential for machine interaction on the social web. To facilitate automated persuasion detection, we present a novel microtext corpus derived from hostage negotiation transcripts as well as a detailed manual (codebook) for persuasion annotation. Our corpus, called the NPS Persuasion Corpus, consists of 37 transcripts from four sets of hostage negotiation transcriptions. Each utterance in the corpus is hand annotated for one of nine categories of persuasion based on Cialdini's model: reciprocity, commitment, consistency, liking, authority, social proof, scarcity, other, and not persuasive. Initial results using three supervised learning algorithms (Naive Bayes, Maximum Entropy, and Support Vector Machines) combined with gappy and orthogonal sparse bigram feature expansion techniques show that the annotation process did capture machine learnable features of persuasion with F-scores better than baseline.
Experimental Comparison of Multicast Authentication for Wide Area Monitoring Systems

Multicast is proposed as a preferred communication mechanism for many power grid applications. One of the biggest challenges for multicast in smart grid is ensuring source authentication without violating the stringent time requirement. The research community and standardization bodies have proposed several authentication mechanisms for smart grid multicast applications. In this paper, we evaluate different authentication schemes and identify the best candidates for phasor data communication in wide area monitoring systems (WAMS). We first do an extensive literature review of existing solutions and establish a short list of schemes to evaluate. Second, we make an experimental comparison of the chosen schemes in an operational smart grid pilot and evaluate the performance of these schemes by using the following metrics: computation, communication, and key management overheads. The best candidates we consider are two variants of ECDSA, TV-HORS and three variants of incomplete-key-set. We find ECDSA without pre-computed tokens and all the incomplete-key-set variants are inapplicable for WAMS due to their high computation overhead. The ECDSA variant that uses pre-computed tokens and TV-HORS perform well in all metrics; however, TV-HORS has potential drawbacks due to a large key management overhead as a result of the frequent distribution of a large public key per source.
Hyperbaric Oxygen as an Adjunct in Zygomycosis: Randomized Controlled Trial in a Murine Model

ABSTRACT Zygomycosis was induced by injecting CD-1 mice with 5 mg of intraperitoneal deferoxamine and then 106 CFU of intravenous and intrasinus Rhizopus arrhizus. The addition of hyperbaric oxygen (2.0 atm absolute twice daily) to amphotericin B did not improve survival over that achieved with amphotericin B and placebo air treatments.
Tropical Ocean Contributions to California’s Surprisingly Dry El Niño of 2015/16

AbstractThe major El Nino of 2015/16 brought significantly less precipitation to California than previous events of comparable strength, much to the disappointment of residents suffering through the state’s fourth consecutive year of severe drought. Here, California’s weak precipitation in 2015/16 relative to previous major El Nino events is investigated within a 40-member ensemble of atmosphere-only simulations run with historical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and constant radiative forcing. The simulations reveal significant differences in both California precipitation and the large-scale atmospheric circulation between 2015/16 and previous strong El Nino events, which are similar to (albeit weaker than) the differences found in observations. Principal component analysis indicates that these ensemble-mean differences were likely related to a pattern of tropical SST variability with a strong signal in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific and a weaker signal in the eastern equatorial Pacific and subtrop.
Global and Arctic climate engineering: numerical model studies

We perform numerical simulations of the atmosphere, sea ice and upper ocean to examine possible effects of diminishing incoming solar radiation, insolation, on the climate system. We simulate both global and Arctic climate engineering in idealized scenarios in which insolation is diminished above the top of the atmosphere. We consider the Arctic scenarios because climate change is manifesting most strongly there. Our results indicate that, while such simple insolation modulation is unlikely to perfectly reverse the effects of greenhouse gas warming, over a broad range of measures considering both temperature and water, an engineered high CO2 climate can be made much more similar to the low CO2 climate than would be a high CO2 climate in the absence of such engineering. At high latitudes, there is less sunlight deflected per unit albedo change but climate system feedbacks operate more powerfully there. These two effects largely cancel each other, making the global mean temperature response per unit top-of-atmosphere albedo change relatively insensitive to latitude. Implementing insolation modulation appears to be feasible.
Phosphonoformic Acid Prevents Vascular Smooth Muscle Cell Calcification by Inhibiting Calcium-Phosphate Deposition

Objective—The role of inorganic phosphate in the pathogenesis of vascular calcification (VC) has been studied extensively in recent years. Phosphonoformic acid (PFA), an inhibitor of type II Pi transporters, has been traditionally used to study the involvement of Pi transport in VC, because PFA also prevents calcium deposition in vitro. However, aortic vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) only express PFA-resistant, type III transporters (Pit-1 and Pit-2). Therefore, in this article we have studied the mechanism of VC prevention by PFA. Methods and Results—Radiotracer Pi uptake in rat VSMCs was not inhibited at the concentrations at which PFA prevents calcification. Alternative mechanisms whereby PFA could prevent calcification, such as cytotoxicity or phosphodiesterase inhibition, have also been excluded. The progression of calcification also took place in fixed cells. The kinetics of VC prevention by PFA, pyrophosphate, phosphonoacetate, and bisphosphonates was similar in live and fixed cells, showing mean effective concentrations in the micromolar range. Conclusions—PFA mainly prevents VC through a physicochemical mechanism that is independent of any cellular metabolic activity, including Pi transport. Conversely, PFA seems to act similarly to its chemical analogues, inorganic pyrophosphate, and bisphosphonates, as suggested decades ago.
A flexible DSP block to enhance FPGA arithmetic performance

We propose a new DSP block for use in modern high-performance FPGAs. Current DSP blocks contain fixed-bitwidth multipliers that can be combined efficiently to form larger multipliers. Our approach is similar, but includes a bypass layer following the partial product generator that exposes the compressor tree used for partial product reduction directly to the user. As a consequence, the proposed DSP block can accelerate multi-input addition operations in addition to multiplication. To increase the flexibility of the device, the partial product reduction tree used within our DSP block uses a fixed-function compression logic along with a field programmable compressor tree (FPCT), the latter of which is user-configurable to meet the needs of the application at hand. Multi-input addition operations can be mapped directly onto the FPCT without compromising any of the other functionality of the DSP block.
Efficient Multilingual Phoneme-to-Grapheme Conversion Based on HMM

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (GTPC) has been achieved in most European languages by dictionary look-up or using rules. The application of these methods, however, in the reverse process, (i.e., in phoneme-to-grapheme conversion [PTGC]) creates serious problems, especially in inflectionally rich languages. In this paper the PTGC problem is approached from a completely different point of view. Instead of rules or a dictionary, the statistics of language connecting pronunciation to spelling are exploited. The novelty lies in modeling the natural language intraword features using the theory of hidden Markov models (HMM) and performing the conversion using the Viterbi algorithm. The PTGC system has been established and tested on various multilingual corpora. Initially, the first-order HMM and the common Viterbi algorithm were used to obtain a single transcription for each word. Afterwards, the second-order HMM and the N-best algorithm adapted to PTGC were implemented to provide one or more transcriptions for each word input (homophones). This system gave an average score of more than 99% correctly transcribed words (overall success in the first four candidates) for most of the seven languages it was tested on (Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish). The system can be adapted to almost any language with little effort and can be implemented in hardware to serve in real-time speech recognition systems.
Intra‐Arc Crustal Seismicity: Seismotectonic Implications for the Southern Andes Volcanic Zone, Chile

We examine the intra‐arc crustal seismicity of the Andean Southern Volcanic Zone. Our aim is to resolve interseismic deformation in an active magmatic arc dominated by both margin‐parallel (Liquiñe‐Ofqui fault system, LOFS) and Andean transverse faults. Crustal seismicity provides information about the schizosphere tectonic state, delineating the geometry and kinematics of high strain domains driven by oblique‐subduction. Here, we present local seismicity based on 16‐month data collected from 34 seismometers monitoring a ~200‐km‐long section of the Southern Volcanic Zone, including the Lonquimay and Villarrica volcanoes. We located 356 crustal events with magnitudes between Mw 0.6 and Mw 3.6. Local seismicity occurs at depths down to 40 km in the forearc and consistently shallower than 12 km beneath the volcanic chain, suggesting a convex shape of the crustal seismogenic layer bottom. Focal mechanisms indicate strike‐slip faulting consistent with ENE‐WSW shortening in line with the long‐term deformation history revealed by structural geology studies. However, we find regional to local‐scale variations in the shortening axes orientation as revealed by the nature and spatial distribution of microseismicity, within three distinctive latitudinal domains. In the northernmost domain, seismicity is consistent with splay faulting at the northern termination of the LOFS; in the central domain, seismicity distributes along ENE‐ and WNW‐striking discrete faults, spatially associated with, hitherto seismic Andean transverse faults. The southernmost domain, in turn, is characterized by activity focused along a N15°E striking master branch of the LOFS. These observations indicate a complex strain compartmentalization pattern within the intra‐arc crust, where variable strike‐slip faulting dominates over dip‐slip movements.
Objective measurement of shade color in age estimation

Introduction: Age estimation is an important subspecialty of forensic medicine. Dental hard tissues are highly resistant to degradation and putrefaction. Enamel is translucent and varies in color from light yellow to grey white. The color of the teeth has been reported to be affected by chronological age. Enamel color may also depend on environmental factors viz. diet, occupational habits, vitamin deficiencies, fluoride level in drinking water etc., It has been found that color changes in dentin vary from white to yellow. Studies have been done to measure the dentin color for age estimation. Aim: To find a correlation between the enamel color and chronological age and secondly to estimate the age of an individual from enamel color. Material and Methods: A total of 300 patients visiting the outpatient department of oral medicine and radiology were selected. Out of those, 150 were men and 150 women. The patients were divided into V groups based on the age. A thorough case history was taken for all the patients. Maxillary Central and Lateral incisor was used for the estimation of shade. The enamel color was evaluated using a VITA classical shade guide. Statistical Analysis: Data were exported to an Excel spread sheet and statistical analysis was performed using the SPSS. Linear regression analysis was used to find correlations between age and enamel shade. Results: In the group 1 and 2 i.e. from 15 to 36 years, the shades A 2 and B 2 (reddish hue) was found to be most common. While in the group 3 and 4, shades ranged from A 3 to B 3 (brownish to yellowish hue). In the patients above 59 years i.e. group 5 the enamel shade with greyish hue was found to be most common. Conclusion: Age determination using enamel color can be tried in forensic cases in the identification of individuals with no birth records.
Imprecise schema: a rationale for relations with embedded subrelations

Exceptional conditions are anomalous data which meet the intent of a schema but not the schema definition, represent a small proportion of the database extension, and may become known only after the schema is in use. Admission of exceptional conditions is argued to suggest a representation that locally stretches the schema definition by use of relations with embedded subrelations. Attempted normalization of these relations to 1NF does not yield the static schema typically associated with such transformations. A class of relations, termed Exceptional Condition Nested Form (ECNF), is defined which allows the necessary representation of exceptional conditions while containing sufficient restrictions to prevent arbitrary and chaotic inclusion of embedded subrelations. Queries on a subset of exceptional conditions, the exceptional constraints, are provided an interpretation via an algorithm that transforms ECNF relations into 1NF relations containing two types of null values. Extensions of relational algebraic operators, suitable for interactive query navigation, are defined for use with ECNF relations containing all forms of exceptional conditions.
Quality Practices in Open Source Software Development Affecting Quality Dimensions

Purpose: The quality of open source software has been a matter of debate for a long time now since there is a little concrete evidence to justify it. The main concern is that many quality attributes such as reliability, efficiency, maintainability and security need to be carefully checked, and that fixing software defects pertaining to such quality attributes in OSDM (Open Source Development Model) can never be guaranteed fully. In order to diminish such concerns, we need to look at the practices which affect these quality characteristics in OSS (Open Source Software) negatively. This paper presents an exploratory study of the quality dimensions and quality practices and problems in OSDM. An insight of these problems can serve as a start point for improvements in quality assurance of open source software. Design/Methodology/Approach: A survey was administered based on existing literature. On the basis of this survey those practices in OSDM are described which affect quality attributes negatively in OSS. Findings: The quality characteristics which should be taken into consideration to select or evaluate OSS are presented. Furthermore, quality practices in OSDM which affect the quality of OSS in a negative manner have also been highlighted. Research Implications: Further research is suggested to identify other quality problems not found in this paper and to evaluate the impact of different practices on project quality. Originality/Value: As a first step in the development of practices and processes to assure and further improve quality in open software projects, in addition to quality attributes, existing quality practices and quality problems have to be clearly identified. This paper can serve as a start point for improvements in quality assurance of open source software’s.
About a Snail, a Toad, and Rodents: Animal Models for Adaptation Research

Neural adaptation mechanisms have many similarities throughout the animal kingdom, enabling to study fundamentals of human adaptation in selected animal models with experimental approaches that are impossible to apply in man. This will be illustrated by reviewing research on three of such animal models, viz. (1) the egg-laying behavior of a snail, Lymnaea stagnalis: how one neuron type controls behavior, (2) adaptation to the ambient light condition by a toad, Xenopus laevis: how a neuroendocrine cell integrates complex external and neural inputs, and (3) stress, feeding, and depression in rodents: how a neuronal network co-ordinates different but related complex behaviors. Special attention is being paid to the actions of neurochemical messengers, such as neuropeptide Y, urocortin 1, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor. While awaiting new technological developments to study the living human brain at the cellular and molecular levels, continuing progress in the insight in the functioning of human adaptation mechanisms may be expected from neuroendocrine research using invertebrate and vertebrate animal models.
Risk Factors for Kala-Azar in Bangladesh

Since 1990, South Asia has experienced a resurgence of kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis). To determine risk factors for kala-azar, we performed cross-sectional surveys over a 3-year period in a Bangladeshi community. By history, active case detection, and serologic screening, 155 of 2,356 residents had kala-azar with onset from 2000 to 2003. Risk was highest for persons 3–45 years of age, and no significant difference by sex was seen. In age-adjusted multivariable models, 3 factors were identified: proximity to a previous kala-azar patient (odds ratio [OR] 25.4, 95% confidence interval [CI] 15–44 within household; OR 3.2 95% CI 1.7–6.1 within 50 m), bed net use in summer (OR 0.7, 95% CI 0.53–0.93), and cattle per 1,000 m2 (OR 0.8, 95% CI 0.70–0.94]). No difference was seen by income, education, or occupation; land ownership or other assets; housing materials and condition; or keeping goats or chickens inside bedrooms. Our data confirm strong clustering and suggest that insecticide-treated nets could be effective in preventing kala-azar.
[Risk factors for atherosclerosis in offspring of parents with primary hypertriglyceridemia].

High triglycerides and low fibrinolysis activity are considered as a significant predictors for atherosclerosis. The aim of our study was: 1-to compare these risk factors levels in children with positive family history of hypertriglyceridemia (HTG) with children from healthy families and 2-to assess the association between triglyceride and fibrinolysis activity in offspring (y) and parental risk factors (xl . xn) for atherosclerosis. The study population consisted of: I Group 15 children 7-12 years old and their parents from HTG families and II Group 26 control children 5-12 years old from healthy families. Triglyceride (TG), total cholesterol, cholesterol esters, LDL-Ch, HDL-Ch, HDL2Ch, apolipoprotein AI and BII, fibrinogen plasma level were determined. Plasminogen activator inhibitor (PAI-1) and fibrinolysis activity and (ELT) were determined. We found significant differences in clinical examinations (higher blood pressure and ECG disturbances more frequently), HDL-Ch and HDL2-Ch plasma level was lower in children with positive family history than in control children. Multiple regression analysis of parental variables demonstrated, that children's TG and ELT are strongly determined by parental lipids and haemostasis parameters in children with positive family history of HTG.