Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PEQUAL - E-commerce websites quality evaluation methodology

Website quality evaluation is an important research task. Evolution and a growing set of available methods are observed. The article presents the authors' evaluation methodology of the quality of websites named PEQUAL. The formal foundation of the proposed methodology is the broadening of the classical EQUAL method with aspects of preference modelling and evaluation aggregation used in Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). Its empirical verification has been carried out for top e-commerce websites. The conducted research has revealed significant practical possibilities of analysis and interpretation of obtained final rankings.
Total Antioxidant Capacity and Malondialdehyde in Depressive Rotational Shift Workers

Shift work is associated with sleep deprivation, occupational stress, and increased risk of depression. Depressed patients show increased oxidative stress. During excessive oxidative stress, Malondialdehyde (MDA) increases and total antioxidant capacity (TAC) decreases in body. This cross-sectional study was conducted to determine the serum level of TAC and MDA among depressed rotational shift workers in Shahid Tondooyan Tehran Oil Refinery. 21-item Beck Depression Inventory was used to measure depression level. The level of TAC and MDA was measured by 8 mL fasting blood sample. MDA was determined by thiobarbituric acid reaction. Serum total antioxidants were measured using the ABTS. Results of this study showed that TAC mean and standard deviation concentration was 2.451 (±0.536) mg/dL and MDA was 3.725 (±1.098) mic·mol/L, and mean and standard deviation of depression score and BMI were 14.07 (±3.84) and 24.92 (±3.65) kg/m2, respectively. Depression score had a positive correlation with rotational shift work experience and work experience (r = 0.218 and r = 0.212), respectively, (P < 0.05).
Participation with alcohol marketing and user-created promotion on social media, and the association with higher-risk alcohol consumption and brand identification among adolescents in the UK

Abstract Aim: To explore participation with alcohol marketing (i.e. commenting on brand statuses) and user-created promotion on social media (i.e. photos of peers drinking) by young people in the United Kingdom (UK), and what association this has with higher-risk consumption and brand identification. Method: Online cross-sectional survey with 11–19-year olds in the UK (n = 3,399) (average age: 15 years old). Past-month participation was measured for five forms of alcohol marketing on social media and one form of user-created promotion (all Yes/No). Past-month awareness of nine wider alcohol marketing activities, social media apps used at least weekly, and ownership of branded merchandise were included as covariates. Outcomes included higher-risk consumption in current drinkers (≥5 AUDIT-C) and brand identification in all respondents (8 pictures with brand names removed). Results: Over one-in-ten respondents (13.2%) had participated with at least one form of marketing on social media or participated with user-created promotion (12.2%). For both, participation was greater in current drinkers and those of legal purchasing age. A logistic regression found that participation with two or more forms of marketing on social media (AOR = 1.96, p < .01) and participation with user-created promotion (AOR = 3.46, p < .001) were associated with higher-risk drinking. Respondents, on average, identified 2.58 (SD = 2.12) alcohol brands. A linear regression found participation with marketing on social media was not associated with brand identification (β = 0.01, p = .42) but participation with user-created promotion was (β = 0.05, p < .001). Conclusion: Social media provides opportunities for adolescents to participate with commercial marketing and user-created promotion and this is associated with higher-risk consumption and brand identification.
PCP Theorem by Gap Ampliﬁcation

The PCP Theorem provides a new classiﬁcation of NP. Since the original proof by [AS98], several new proofs occured. While the ﬁrst proof used highly sophisticated methods, the new approaches try to use simpler ones. In this paper the proof by [Din05] is presented. It uses the equivalence of this problem to the NP-hardness of gap-3SAT, i.e. it is this hardness that is shown. The satisﬁability gap of a set of constraints is the smallest fraction of unsatisﬁed constraints over all assignments for the variables. Gap-3SAT is the problem of deciding whether this gap is 0 or greater than a positive constant. In this paper therefore 3SAT is polynomially reduced to gap-3SAT via gap ampliﬁcation, i.e. the gap is blown up to a constant fraction.
Intracranial Aneurysms: Wall Motion Analysis for Prediction of Rupture

SUMMARY: Intracranial aneurysms are a common pathologic condition with a potential severe complication: rupture. Effective treatment options exist, neurosurgical clipping and endovascular techniques, but guidelines for treatment are unclear and focus mainly on patient age, aneurysm size, and localization. New criteria to define the risk of rupture are needed to refine these guidelines. One potential candidate is aneurysm wall motion, known to be associated with rupture but difficult to detect and quantify. We review what is known about the association between aneurysm wall motion and rupture, which structural changes may explain wall motion patterns, and available imaging techniques able to analyze wall motion.
Neuro Fuzzy System Based Condition Monitoring of Power Transformer

A power transformer is a static piece of apparatus with two or more windings. By electromagnetic induction, it transforms a system of alternating voltages and current into another system of alternating voltages and current of different values, of the same frequency, for the purpose of transmitting electrical power. For example, distribution transformers convert high-voltages electricity to lower voltages levels acceptable for use in home and business. A power transformer is one of the most expensive pieces of equipment in an electricity system. Monitoring the performance of a transformer is crucial in minimizing power outages through appropriate maintenance thereby reducing the total cost of operation. This idea provides the use of neural fuzzy technique in order to better predict oil conditions of a transformer. The preliminary phase is the first and most important step of a neural fuzzy modeling process. It aims to collect a set of data, which is expected to be a representative sample of the system to be modeled. In this phase, known as data processing, data are cleaned to make learning easier. This involves incorporation of all relevant domain knowledge at the level of an initial data analysis, including any sort of preliminary filtering of the observed data such as missing data treatment or feature selection. The preprocessing phase returns the data set in a structured input-output form, commonly called a training set. Once this preliminary phase is completed, the learning phase begins. This paper will focus exclusively on this second phase assuming that data have already been preprocessed. The learning phase is essentially a search, in a space of possible model configurations, of the model that best represents the power transformer testing values. As in any other search task, the learning procedure requires a search space, where the solution is to be found, and some assessment criterion to measure the quality of the solution. Key-Word: Insulting Oil, Breakdown test, ANFIS, Fuzzy logic
On Faster Convergence of Cyclic Block Coordinate Descent-type Methods for Strongly Convex Minimization

The cyclic block coordinate descent-type (CBCD-type) methods, which performs iterative updates for a few coordinates (a block) simultaneously throughout the procedure, have shown remarkable computational performance for solving strongly convex minimization problems. Typical applications include many popular statistical machine learning methods such as elastic-net regression, ridge penalized logistic regression, and sparse additive regression. Existing optimization literature has shown that for strongly convex minimization, the CBCD-type methods attain iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(p\log(1/\epsilon))$, where $\epsilon$ is a pre-specified accuracy of the objective value, and $p$ is the number of blocks. However, such iteration complexity explicitly depends on $p$, and therefore is at least $p$ times worse than the complexity $\mathcal{O}(\log(1/\epsilon))$ of gradient descent (GD) methods. To bridge this theoretical gap, we propose an improved convergence analysis for the CBCD-type methods. In particular, we first show that for a family of quadratic minimization problems, the iteration complexity $\mathcal{O}(\log^2(p)\cdot\log(1/\epsilon))$ of the CBCD-type methods matches that of the GD methods in term of dependency on $p$, up to a $\log^2 p$ factor. Thus our complexity bounds are sharper than the existing bounds by at least a factor of $p/\log^2(p)$. We also provide a lower bound to confirm that our improved complexity bounds are tight (up to a $\log^2 (p)$ factor), under the assumption that the largest and smallest eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix do not scale with $p$. Finally, we generalize our analysis to other strongly convex minimization problems beyond quadratic ones.
A fast and seamless route repairing algorithm for ad-hoc networks

AODV is one of the most widely studied routing protocols for the networks, which have high topology variance. It can quickly build and repair the route from source to destination to recover the broken connection. In this paper, we propose a fast and seamless route repairing (FSRR) algorithm to improve the route recreation procedure in AODV. To seamlessly repairing the route, the FSRR monitors the links on the route and triggers the repairing procedure before the links break off. The major difference between AODV and FSRR is that both source and destination broadcast the RREQ packet simultaneously to repair the route. This bi-direction broadcasting mechanism can reduce the route repairing time. In addition, we also design the redundant RREQ blocking mechanism to moderate the route overhead. Simulation results show that the FSRR cannot only save route repairing time in AODV more than 20% but also decreases about 10%~20% nodes, which participate in broadcasting the RREQ packets by retaining the same route length as the AODV.
Stream chaining: exploiting multiple levels of correlation in data prefetching

Data prefetching has long been an important technique to amortize the effects of the memory wall, and is likely to remain so in the current era of multi-core systems. Most prefetchers operate by identifying patterns and correlations in the miss address stream. Separating streams according to the memory access instruction that generates the misses is an effective way of filtering out spurious addresses from predictable streams. On the other hand, by localizing streams based on the memory access instructions, such prefetchers both lose the complete time sequence information of misses and can only issue prefetches for a single memory access instruction at a time. This paper proposes a novel class of prefetchers based on the idea of linking various localized streams into predictable chains of missing memory access instructions such that the prefetcher can issue prefetches along multiple streams. In this way the prefetcher is not limited to prefetching deeply for a single missing memory access instruction but can instead adaptively prefetch for other memory access instructions closer in time. Experimental results show that the proposed prefetcher consistently achieves better performance than a state-of-the-art prefetcher -- 10% on average, being only outperformed in very few cases and then by only 2%, and outperforming that prefetcher by as much as 55% -- while consuming the same amount of memory bandwidth.
Extended DCEL data structure for mobile computing

Face routing is one of the effective techniques for constructing source destination route in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET). Face routing can always construct path if the MANET is connected. However, face routing can generate routes with large number of hops. We propose an improved face routing algorithm that constructs shorter routes even when the route is forced to go through a face with large number of edges. We propose a new data structure ExtDCEL that can be used to represent both planar and nonplanar networks. We present an implementation of several location based routing algorithms by using the proposed data structure.
Inheritance and drug response.

he promise of pharmacogenetics, the study of the role of in heritance in the individual variation in drug response, lies in its potential to identify the right drug and dose for each patient. Even though individual differences in drug response can result from the effects of age, sex, disease, or drug interactions, genetic factors also influence both the efficacy of a drug and the likelihood of an adverse reaction. 1-3 This article briefly reviews concepts that underlie the emerging fields of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics, with an emphasis on the pharmacogenetics of drug metabolism. Although only a few examples will be provided to illustrate concepts and to demonstrate the potential contribution of pharmacogenetics to medical practice, it is now clear that virtually every pathway of drug metabolism will eventually be found to have genetic variation. The accompanying article by Evans and McLeod 4 expands on many of the themes introduced here. Once a drug is administered, it is absorbed and distributed to its site of action, where it interacts with targets (such as receptors and enzymes), undergoes metabolism, and is then excreted. 5,6 Each of these processes could potentially involve clinically significant genetic variation. However, pharmacogenetics originated as a result of the observation that there are clinically important inherited variations in drug metabolism. Therefore, this article — and the examples highlighted — focuses on the pharmacogenetics of drug metabolism. However, similar principles apply to clinically significant inherited variation in the transport and distribution of drugs and their interaction with their therapeutic targets. The underlying message is that inherited variations in drug effect are common and that some tests that incorporate pharmacogenetics into clinical practice are now available, with many more to follow. The concept of pharmacogenetics originated from the clinical observation that there were patients with very high or very low plasma or urinary drug concentrations, followed by the realization that the biochemical traits leading to this variation were inherited. Only later were the drug-metabolizing enzymes identified, and this discovery was followed by the identification of the genes that encoded the proteins and the DNA-sequence variation within the genes that was associated with the inherited trait. Most of the pharmacogenetic traits that were first identified were monogenic — that is, they involved only a single gene — and most were due to genetic polymorphisms; in other words, the allele or alleles responsible for the variation were relatively common. Although drug effect is a complex phenotype that depends on many factors, early and often dramatic examples involving succinylcholine and isoniazid facilitated acceptance of the fact that inheritance can have an important influence on the effect of a drug. Today there is a systematic search to identify functionally significant variations in DNA sequences in genes that influence the effects of various drugs. 4 t
Meta-Regression Analysis in Economics and Business

1: Introduction 2: Identifying and Coding Meta-Analysis Data 3: Summarizing Meta-Analysis Data 4: Publication Bias and Its Discontents 5: Explaining Economics Research 6: Economic Theory and Meta-Regression Analysis 7: Further Topics in Meta-Regression Analysis 8: Summary and Conclusions
Characterization of a Streptococcus pneumoniae mutant with altered electric transmembrane potential

It is possible to select transmembrane potential (delta psi)-altered mutants in Streptococcus pneumoniae on the basis of their resistance to the antifolate methotrexate. Comparison of such a mutant strain ( amiA9 ) with its parent was used to evaluate the role of delta psi in the uptake of certain amino acids. The delta psi-dependent uptake of isoleucine, leucine, valine, and asparagine showed a reduced maximum velocity of uptake, and decrease in the transport constant of the energy-dependent, delta psi-independent uptake of lysine, methionine, and glutamine was observed. No reduction of the intracellular pool of ATP or of lactate excretion could be detected in the mutant strain. Moreover, studies on membrane preparations suggest that the phenotype expressed by the amiA mutation is not a consequence of alteration of its ATPase activity or susceptibility to N,N'-dicyclohexylcarbodiimide. Therefore, it is unlikely that the amiA mutation affects the H+ F1F0 ATPase which is involved in the establishment of the proton motive force in anaerobic bacteria. We propose that another function contributes to delta psi in S. pneumoniae. The amiA gene may be the structural gene of that function.
Data Fitting with Cubic A-Splines

We present algorithms for constructing iso-contours from image data or tting scattered point data C, C or C piecewise smooth chains of single sheeted real cubic algebraic curve segments called cubic A-splines (short for cubic algebraic splines). Using cubic A-splines we achieve data tting with either a higher order of continuity or greater local exibility for xed continuity, than numerous prior schemes.
Hyperactivation of Akt/mTOR and deficiency in tuberin increased the oxidative DNA damage in kidney cancer patients with diabetes

Recent study from our laboratory showed that patients with diabetes are at a higher risk of developing kidney cancer. In the current study, we have explored one of the mechanisms by which diabetes accelerates tumorigenesis in the kidney. Kidney cancer tissue from patients with diabetes showed a higher activity of Akt and decreased in total protein of tuberin compared to kidney cancer patient without diabetes or diabetes alone. In addition, a significant increase in phospho-Akt/tuberin expression was associated with an increase in Ki67 expression and activation of mTOR in kidney tumor with or without diabetes compared to diabetes alone. In addition, decrease in tuberin expression resulted in a significant decrease in protein expression of OGG1 and increased in oxidative DNA damage, 8-oxodG in kidney tissues from patients with cancer or cancer+diabetes. Importantly, these data showed that the majority of the staining of Akt/tuberin/p70S6K phosphorylation was more prominently in the tubular cells. In addition, accumulation of oxidative DNA damage is localized only in the nucleus of tubular cells within the cortex region. These data suggest that Akt/tuberin/mTOR pathway plays an important role in the regulation DNA damage and repair pathways that may predispose diabetic kidneys to pathogenesis of renal cell carcinoma.
Local and Global Isotropy Analysis of Mobile Robots with Three Active Caster Wheels

In the near future, personal service robots are expected to come into human daily life as supporters in education, leisure, house care, health care, and so on. Most of them are built on an omnidirectional mobile robot so as to navigate in an environment restricted in space and cluttered with obstacles. Caster wheels have been chosen for the development of an omnidirectional mobile robot, as reported in (Holmberg, 2000), among several omnidirectional wheel mechanisms, including universal wheels, Swedish wheels, orthogonal wheels, and ball wheels. This is because caster wheels can operate without additional peripheral rollers or support structure, and maintain good performance even though payload or ground condition changes. There have been several works on the kinematics of a caster wheeled omnidirectional mobile robot (COMR), including the kinematic modeling, the design and control, the isotropy analysis, as reported in (Holmberg, 2000; Muir & Neuman, 1987; Campion et al., 1996; Kim & Kim, 2004; Park et al., 2002; Kim & Moon, 2005; Oetomo et al., 2005; Kim & Jung, 2007). Previous isotropy analysis, as reported in (Kim & Kim, 2004; Park et al., 2002; Kim & Moon, 2005; Oetomo et al., 2005), has been made only for a COMR in which the steering link offset is equal to the wheel radius, except our recent work, as reported in (Kim & Jung, 2007). It was found that such a restriction is necessary to have globally optimal isotropic characteristics of a COMR, as reported in (Park et al., 2002; Kim & Moon, 2005; Oetomo et al., 2005). Nevertheless, many practical COMR's in use take advantage of the steering link offset which is different from the wheel radius, mainly for improved tipover stability, as reported in (McGhee & Frank, 1968; Papadopoulos & Rey, 1996). The tipover stability becomes critical when a COMR makes a rapid turn or sudden external forces are applied to a COMR. The accuracy of the velocity kinematics of a robotic system depends on the condition number of the Jacobian matrix involved. Based on the Euclidean norm, the condition number of a matrix can be defined as the ratio of the largest to smallest singular values of the matrix, as reported in (Strang, 1988), whose value ranges from unity to infinity. For a given linear system b Ax = , the condition number of A represents the amplification of the
Structure and function of the feed-forward loop network motif

Engineered systems are often built of recurring circuit modules that carry out key functions. Transcription networks that regulate the responses of living cells were recently found to obey similar principles: they contain several biochemical wiring patterns, termed network motifs, which recur throughout the network. One of these motifs is the feed-forward loop (FFL). The FFL, a three-gene pattern, is composed of two input transcription factors, one of which regulates the other, both jointly regulating a target gene. The FFL has eight possible structural types, because each of the three interactions in the FFL can be activating or repressing. Here, we theoretically analyze the functions of these eight structural types. We find that four of the FFL types, termed incoherent FFLs, act as sign-sensitive accelerators: they speed up the response time of the target gene expression following stimulus steps in one direction (e.g., off to on) but not in the other direction (on to off). The other four types, coherent FFLs, act as sign-sensitive delays. We find that some FFL types appear in transcription network databases much more frequently than others. In some cases, the rare FFL types have reduced functionality (responding to only one of their two input stimuli), which may partially explain why they are selected against. Additional features, such as pulse generation and cooperativity, are discussed. This study defines the function of one of the most significant recurring circuit elements in transcription networks.