Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Size-selective fishing gear and life history evolution in the Northeast Arctic cod

Industrial fishing has been identified as a cause for life history changes in many harvested stocks, mainly because of the intense fishing mortality and its size‐selectivity. Because these changes are potentially evolutionary, we investigate evolutionarily stable life‐histories and yield in an energy‐allocation state‐dependent model for Northeast Arctic cod Gadus morhua. We focus on the evolutionary effects of size‐selective fishing because regulation of gear selectivity may be an efficient management tool. Trawling, which harvests fish above a certain size, leads to early maturation except when fishing is low and confined to mature fish. Gillnets, where small and large fish escape, lead to late maturation for low to moderate harvest rates, but when harvest rates increase maturation age suddenly drops. This is because bell‐shaped selectivity has two size‐refuges, for fish that are below and above the harvestable size‐classes. Depending on the harvest rate it either pays to grow through the harvestable slot and mature above it, or mature small below it. Sustainable yield on the evolutionary time‐scale is highest when fishing is done by trawling, but only for a small parameter region. Fishing with gillnets is better able to withstand life‐history evolution, and maintains yield over a wider range of fishing intensities.
Atmospheric pollutants and hospital admissions due to pneumonia in children

OBJECTIVE: To analyze the relationship between exposure to air pollutants and hospitalizations due to pneumonia in children of Sorocaba, São Paulo, Brazil. METHODS: Time series ecological study, from 2007 to 2008. Daily data were obtained from the State Environmental Agency for Pollution Control for particulate matter, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, besides air temperature and relative humidity. The data concerning pneumonia admissions were collected in the public health system of Sorocaba. Correlations between the variables of interest using Pearson cofficient were calculated. Models with lags from zero to five days after exposure to pollutants were performed to analyze the association between the exposure to environmental pollutants and hospital admissions. The analysis used the generalized linear model of Poisson regression, being significant p<0.05. RESULTS: There were 1,825 admissions for pneumonia, with a daily mean of 2.5±2.1. There was a strong correlation between pollutants and hospital admissions, except for ozone. Regarding the Poisson regression analysis with the multi-pollutant model, only nitrogen dioxide was statistically significant in the same day (relative risk - RR=1.016), as well as particulate matter with a lag of four days (RR=1.009) after exposure to pollutants. CONCLUSIONS: There was an acute effect of exposure to nitrogen dioxide and a later effect of exposure to particulate matter on children hospitalizations for pneumonia in Sorocaba.
On the Impact of Aspect-Oriented Programming on Object-Oriented Metrics

Aspect-oriented programming is a new paradigm designed to fulfill the limitations of object-oriented programming regarding separation of concerns. The advent of a new paradigm requires software engineers to define new metrics and quality models to measure the quality of programs in this paradigm. The close relationship of aspect-oriented programming and object-oriented languages drives us to wonder about the impact of this new paradigm over object-oriented languages, and especially over object metrics. In this position paper, we attempt to present an approach to study and to understand the impact of aspect-oriented programming on object-oriented metrics.
A Wearable Mobile Electrocardiogram measurement device with novel dry polymer-based electrodes

A Wearable Mobile Electrocardiogram Monitoring System (WMEMS), which mainly consists of a wearable Electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition device, a mobile phone with global positioning system, and a healthcare server, was developed in this study. Most of telemedicine systems for long-term ECG monitoring focus on the application of communication techniques. However, how to monitor long-term ECG state more comfortably in daily life is also an important issue. In this study, a novel dry foam electrode was designed and applied for the wearable ECG acquisition device in our WMEMS. These novel dry foam electrodes without conduction gels can provide good conductivity to acquire ECG signal effectively, and can adapt to irregular skin surface to maintain low skin-electrode impedance and reduce motion artifacts under movement. Therefore, the wearable ECG acquisition device is suitable for long-term ECG monitoring in daily life. Moreover, by combining with wireless communication technique, our WMEMS can monitor patient's heart rate continuously anywhere in the globe if they are under the coverage of GSM cellular network. Experiment results showed that our WMEMS really provides a good system prototype for ECG telemedicine applications.
AN ENHANCED APPROACH FOR SECURING MOBILE AGENTS FROM THE ATTACK OF OTHER MALICIOUS MOBILE AGENTS

The area of mobile agent security is in a state of immaturity, but rapidly improving. Emphasis is begi nning to move toward developing techniques that are oriented towards protecting the agent. Agent technology has been used in many crit ical applications like business process management, e-commerce, artificial intellig ence, distributed processing etc. The mobile agent technology has encountered many security threats during the itinerary period . security schemes presented in this paper for mo bile agent address the code, data and itinerary security issues. An environment that protects the legitimate mobile agent from the malicious mobile agent is provided. A checksum method is used to detect a mal icious mobile agent which is appending to a legitim ate mobile agent. The confidentiality of the data that are retrieved from each remote server is ensured by encryption mechan isms. The itinerary is also protected by allowing only registered users to crea te new mobile agents and is controlled by a central co-coordinator. Thus an enhanced security mechanism is presented to protect the mobile agent’s code, data and route.
CoSMo: Intent-based composition of shader modules

We propose a novel shader programming model which operates on intent-oriented shader modules instead of specific programs for dedicated GPU rasterization pipeline stages. In constrast to existing pipeline shader frameworks, our system exposes a radically simplified pipeline, which we purposefully aligned with our basic intuition of shaders as per-primitive and per-pixel operations and compositions thereof. This simplicity lends itself to structure modules purely based on their intent, instead of dealing with structure enforced by specific versions of graphics APIs. Consequently, this offers great flexibility when it comes to reusing and combining modules with completely different semantics, or when targeting different graphics APIs. The simplicity and uniformity of our system also motivates automatic parameterization and simplification of shader programs as well as interesting interactive shader development and management techniques.
Coalitional game theory as a promising approach to identify candidate autism genes

Despite mounting evidence for the strong role of genetics in the phenotypic manifestation of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the specific genes responsible for the variable forms of ASD remain undefined. ASD may be best explained by a combinatorial genetic model with varying epistatic interactions across many small effect mutations. Coalitional or cooperative game theory is a technique that studies the combined effects of groups of players, known as coalitions, seeking to identify players who tend to improve the performance--the relationship to a specific disease phenotype--of any coalition they join. This method has been previously shown to boost biologically informative signal in gene expression data but to-date has not been applied to the search for cooperative mutations among putative ASD genes. We describe our approach to highlight genes relevant to ASD using coalitional game theory on alteration data of 1,965 fully sequenced genomes from 756 multiplex families. Alterations were encoded into binary matrices for ASD (case) and unaffected (control) samples, indicating likely gene-disrupting, inherited mutations in altered genes. To determine individual gene contributions given an ASD phenotype, a “player” metric, referred to as the Shapley value, was calculated for each gene in the case and control cohorts. Sixty seven genes were found to have significantly elevated player scores and likely represent significant contributors to the genetic coordination underlying ASD. Using network and cross-study analysis, we found that these genes are involved in biological pathways known to be affected in the autism cases and that a subset directly interact with several genes known to have strong associations to autism. These findings suggest that coalitional game theory can be applied to large-scale genomic data to identify hidden yet influential players in complex polygenic disorders such as autism.
Pathogens associated with acute lower respiratory tract infection in young children

To determine the agents associated with acute lower respiratory infection in young children, we studied 102 hospitalized children less than 5 years old using culture and serology for viruses and Chlamydia trachomatis, fluorescent anti-body testing for pertussis and respiratory syncytial virus, blood cultures and counterimmunoelectrophoresis of nasopharyngeal secretions and urine for pneumococcal and Haemophilus influenzae type b antigens. At least one agent was detected in 87 children and multiple agents were found in 33. Viruses were detected 80 times; respiratory syncytial virus was most common (61 cases) and was detected as often by fluorescent antibody testing as by culture. C. trachomatis was detected in 10 children; all were less than 4 months old and 9 had mixed infections. Bacteria were detected 32 times, were usually pneumococcus (23) or H. influenzae (5) and were detected more often by counterimmunoelectrophoresis than by blood culture. Compared with children yielding only C. trachomatis or viruses, those with bacteria were significantly more likely to have fever, a band count over 2000/mm3 and radiographic consolidation. In this study acute lower respiratory infection was associated commonly with viruses, often with multiple pathogens but not with C. trachomatis after 4 months of age.
Modeling the Risk &amp; Utility of Information Sharing in Social Networks

With the widespread of social networks, the risk of information sharing has become inevitable. Sharing a user's particular information in social networks is an all-or-none decision. Users receiving friendship invitations from others may decide to accept this request and share their information or reject it in which case none of their information will be shared. Access control in social networks is a challenging topic. Social network users would want to determine the optimum level of details at which they share their personal information with other users based on the risk associated with the process. In this paper, we formulate the problem of data sharing in social networks using two different models: (i) a model based on \emph{diffusion kernels}, and (ii) a model based on access control. We show that it is hard to apply the former in practice and explore the latter. We prove that determining the optimal levels of information sharing is an NP-hard problem and propose an approximation algorithm that determines to what extent social network users share their own information. We propose a trust-based model to assess the risk of sharing sensitive information and use it in the proposed algorithm. Moreover, we prove that the algorithm could be solved in polynomial time. Our results rely heavily on adopting the super modularity property of the risk function, which allows us to employ techniques from convex optimization. To evaluate our model, we conduct a user study to collect demographic information of several social networks users and get their perceptions on risk and trust. In addition, through experimental studies on synthetic data, we compare our proposed algorithm with the optimal algorithm both in terms of risk and time. We show that the proposed algorithm is scalable and that the sacrifice in risk is outweighed by the gain in efficiency.
ImageSpace: an Image Ontology Creation and Annotation Tool for the Semantic Web

Ontologies are central to the architecture of the Semantic Web, the next generation Web that is currently under active development. We have developed ImageSpace, an image ontology creation and annotation tool that features (1) full support for the standard web ontology language DAML+OIL; (2) image ontology creation, image annotation and display in one integrated framework; (3) ontology consistency assurance; and (4) storing ontologies in relational databases. It is expected that the availability of such a tool will greatly facilitate the creation of image repositories as islands of the Semantic Web.
Semi-Supervised Maximum Entropy Based Approach to Acronym and Abbreviation Normalization in Medical Texts

Text normalization is an important aspect of successful information retrieval from medical documents such as clinical notes, radiology reports and discharge summaries. In the medical domain, a significant part of the general problem of text normalization is abbreviation and acronym disambiguation. Numerous abbreviations are used routinely throughout such texts and knowing their meaning is critical to data retrieval from the document. In this paper I will demonstrate a method of automatically generating training data for Maximum Entropy (ME) modeling of abbreviations and acronyms and will show that using ME modeling is a promising technique for abbreviation and acronym normalization. I report on the results of an experiment involving training a number of ME models used to normalize abbreviations and acronyms on a sample of 10,000 rheumatology notes with ~89% accuracy.
Update in serotonin and bone.

CONTEXT Serotonin (5-HT) may be an important regulatory agent in bone, and agents that modify 5-HT signaling, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are in widespread clinical use. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION Evidence was obtained by PubMed search and the author's knowledge of the field. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS Recent data suggest that gut-derived 5-HT may mediate the skeletal effects of LDL receptor-related protein 5, stimulating intense interest in a novel mechanism for regulating bone mass. However, the specific biochemical nature of serotonergic pathways influencing bone and their direct and/or indirect effects on bone metabolism are still unclear. The weight of epidemiological evidence suggests that SSRIs are associated with reduced bone mass, increased bone loss, and increased risk of fractures. Interpretation of these studies is complicated by the confounding effects of depression, the usual indication for treatment with SSRIs. The mechanisms for putative SSRI-induced deleterious effects on the skeleton are unknown, and are likely multifactorial. CONCLUSIONS 5-HT may have regulatory effects on bone. Initial preclinical data suggest that its effects may be deleterious and may be regulated by low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 5. These studies need confirmation, as well as elucidation, of the biochemical pathways utilized and the feedback loops involved among bone, gut, and perhaps brain. Paradoxically, targeting of 5-HT synthesis and/or signaling in selective tissues may hold promise as an anabolic intervention for bone. Epidemiological data suggest that clinicians should be vigilant about detection of bone disease in patients who are using SSRIs.
Liquid Melevodopa Versus Standard Levodopa in Patients With Parkinson Disease and Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth

Objectives Patients with Parkinson disease exhibit a highly increased prevalence of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), which has been also associated with the severity of motor fluctuations. Aim of this study was to test the efficacy of liquid levodopa with higher bioavailability in patients with SIBO. Methods Thirty-three patients with Parkinson disease underwent both lactulose and glucose breath tests to assess the presence of SIBO. A urea breath test was performed to assess the presence of a concomitant Helicobacter pylori infection. Patients were challenged with 250 mg of levodopa and 314 mg of levodopa methylester. Drug challenges were performed on different days and at baseline and 1 month after SIBO eradication. During the tests, the motor condition and the plasma levodopa concentrations were evaluated. Results At baseline, the onset of motor benefit was significantly shorter after melevodopa than after standard levodopa, as confirmed by the latency to motor on condition and t max (time to the on condition, 28.8±11.5 vs 55.5±40.2 minutes; P=0.0004; and t max, 28.2±9.7 vs 50.0±11.0 minutes; P=0.002). The duration of the on time or area under the curve was not significantly different. The underlying gastrointestinal condition did not influence these results. Conclusions The reduction of the latency to the on condition in the absence of a reduction of the on duration is a promising feature of melevodopa because this effect would increase the total daily on duration. Future studies that evaluate the usefulness of melevodopa beyond the acute challenge (eg, using motor diaries) in patients with gastrointestinal infections are warranted.
Development and optimization of self microemulsifying drug delivery of domperidone

This study outlines the diagnosis stage of 201 Municipal Pharmaceutical Assistance Plans sent to the Directorate of Pharmaceutical Assistance of the State Secretariat for Health of Santa Catarina (DIAF-SES/SC) between November 12, 2005 and July 6, 2006. Multiple Correspondence Analysis was used in conjunction with SPAD 3.5 software, followed by hypothesis testing. The variables "pharmacist presence" and "population" were those which most contributed to the formation of the three clusters of municipalities observed. The number of drugs contained in the Municipal Lists of Essential Drugs (REMUMEs) ranged from 15 to 413. A total of 67 towns had between 101 and 200 drugs- a range considered ideal in this study according to the 2006 National List of Essential Drugs. No tendency toward correlation between number of drugs listed in the REMUMES and municipality population size was found. Results confirmed the known disparity in Pharmaceutical Assistance among municipalities of different sizes and highlighted the need for structuring the activities of Pharmaceutical Assistance in the municipalities studied. There is also a need for greater commitment from all management spheres so that activities of Pharmaceutical Assistance at a local level ensure access to quality drugs and services, while fostering rational use.
Human Endothelial Cell Life Extension by Telomerase Expression*

Normal human endothelial cells, like other somatic cells in culture, divide a limited number of times before entering a nondividing state called replicative senescence. Expression of the catalytic component of human telomerase, human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT), extends the life span of human fibroblasts and retinal pigment epithelial cells beyond senescence without causing neoplastic transformation (Bodnar, A. G., Ouellette, M., Frolkis, M., Holt, S. E., Chiu, C. P., Morin, G. B., Harley, C. B., Shay, J. W., Lichtsteiner, S., and Wright, W. E. (1998) Science 279, 349–352; Jiang, X. , Jimenez, G. , Chang, E. , Frolkis, M. , Kusler, B. , Sage, M. , Beeche, M. , Bodnar, A. , Wahl, G. , Tlsty, T. , and Chiu, C. -P. (1999) Nat. Genet. 21, 111–114). Here, we show that both human large vessel and microvascular endothelial cells also bypass replicative senescence after introduction of hTERT. For the first time, we report that hTERT expression in these life-extended vascular cells does not affect their differentiated and functional phenotype and that these cells maintain their angiogenic potential in vitro. Furthermore, hTERT(+) microvascular endothelial cells have normal karyotype, and hTERT(+) endothelial cell strains do not exhibit a transformed phenotype. Relative to parental cells at senescence, hTERT-expressing endothelial cells exhibit resistance to induction of apoptosis by a variety of different conditions. Such characteristics are highly desirable for designing vascular transplantation and gene therapy delivery systemsin vivo.
Structure and sequence of the rfb (O antigen) gene cluster of Salmonella serovar typhimurium (strain LT2)

The rfb gene cluster of Salmonella LT2 has been cloned and sequenced. The genes rfbA, rfbB, rfbD, rfbF, rfbG, rfbK, rfbM and rfbP were located individually and the gene rfbL was located outside the cluster. Approximately 16 open reading frames were found in the region which is essential for the expression of O antigen. The gene products of rfbB and rfbG were found to have homology with the group of dehydrogenase and related enzymes described previously. Analysis of the G+C ratio of the rfb cluster extended the area of low‐G+C composition previously found in the sequence of rfbJ to the whole rfb gene cluster. Three to five segments with discrete G+C contents and codon adaptation indices are present in the rfb region, indicating a heterogeneous origin of these segments. Potential promoters were found near the start of the rfb region, supporting the possibility that the rfb gene cluster is an operon.
The Basic Principles of Competitive Strategy: External and Internal Diagnosis

Firms operate in a more and more complex, dynamic, less predictable environment. This situation requires following different approaches of strategic positioning and strategic planning and developing new patterns of strategic thinking. There are several strategic models and tools. Most of them have advantages and disadvantages. In spite of these limitations, these models must be examined. The purpose of this chapter is to conduct a strategic analysis (external and internal diagnoses). It familiarizes the reader with the forces that shape competition in a company’s external environment and then analyzes internal strategic capabilities for identifying strategic sustainable competitive advantage.
On the choice of wavelet filters for audio compression

We address the issue of choosing an optimal wavelet packets transform for audio compression. We present a comparison method based on a perceptual approach, which provides an entropic bit-rate for "transparent" coding of a given audio signal. The test with different wavelets leads to the conclusion that the most significant synthesis criterion for audio compression is the so-called "coding gain", while frequency selectivity, regularity and orthogonality seem less relevant.
Realization of narrowband thermal emission with optical nanostructures

The control of thermal emission spectra using optical resonances has been attracting increased attention both with respect to fundamental science and for various applications, including infrared sensing, thermal imaging, and thermophotovoltaics. In this mini-review, we describe the recent experimental demonstrations of narrowband thermal emission with optical nanostructures, including metallic cavities, metamaterials, and all-dielectric photonic crystals. The spectral features of the controlled thermal emission (e.g., wavelength, linewidth, peak emissivity, and angular characteristics) are strongly dependent on the choice of both materials and structures of the emitters. Through the appropriate design of optical nanostructures, arbitrary shaping of thermal emission spectra, from single-peak ultra-narrowband (Q>100) emission for midinfrared sensing to a stepwise emissivity spectrum for thermophotovoltaics, has been successfully realized.