Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An interleaved dual-battery power supply for battery-operated electronics

After a detailed analysis and discussion of two important characteristics of today's battery cells (i.e., their current-capacity and current-voltage curves), this paper describes the design principles and architecture of a dual-battery power supply system for portable electronics. The key idea is to integrate two battery types with different energy capacity and current rate curves into the power supply system, and then use them in an interleaved manner in response to varying current requirement of the VLSI circuit that is powered by this dual-battery system. Analytical and empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the new battery architecture in maximizing the service life of a battery system with fixed volume (or weight).
How Culture, Age, and Manual Dominance Affect Directionality in Drawing Side View Objects

The aim of the present experiment was to investigate the extent to which the orientation of objects drawn in side view is a function of culture, age, and manual dominance. Right-handed French and Syrian children aged between 6 and 10 years and right-handed adults from the same cultural groups were asked to produce side views of faces, vehicles (car and airplane), self-centered tools with a handle (mug and toothbrush), object-centered tools with a handle (jug and hammer), and animals (dog and fish) using their dominant and nondominant hands. The French participants exhibited a leftward directional bias, whereas their Syrian counterparts displayed a rightward bias. However, no differences between the two cultural groups were observed in the 6-year-olds, who did not present any systematic directional bias in their drawings. Furthermore, regardless of culture, the children did not modify the orientation of the objects in their drawings as a function of the hand used, whereas the hand effect was strong in adults. Finally, despite their directional bias toward the right, the Syrian participants tended to draw the self- and object-centered tools facing leftward. These results are discussed with reference to the current literature on this topic.
On detecting malicious behaviors in interactive networks: Algorithms and analysis

Interactive networks are vulnerable to various attacks due to the existence of malicious nodes which do not comply with the network protocol so as to achieve their own purposes. For example, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming system, since each peer needs to participate in uploading data to other peers, malicious peers may choose to upload bogus data so as to damage the playback and degrade the watching experience of normal peers in the system. This is known as pollution attack in P2P networks, and it can cause severe impact to the performance of P2P streaming systems. Other examples include pollution attack in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) where malicious nodes forward modified and polluted packets to other nodes, and the shill attack in online social networks (OSNs) where malicious users give wrong recommendations to others so as to mislead their purchases. In this paper, we propose a general and fully distributed detection framework which can be executed by each legitimate node in an interactive network to identify its malicious neighbors. To illustrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our detection framework, we apply it to three realistic applications: P2P streaming networks, WMNs and OSNs, and show how to defend against the attacks launched by malicious nodes. We also quantify the performance of our detection algorithms and validate our analysis via extensive simulations.
Deficiency of natural killer cell activity in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Natural killer (NK)6 cell activity of peripheral blood lymphocytes against human leukemia cell lines was measured in patients with chronic B‐cell lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and age‐ and sex‐matched controls. In order to remove the leukemia cells that interfere with the in vitro assay we (1) isolated lymphocytes that form rosettes with sheep red blood cells (SRBC) or (2) lysed the CLL cells with a monoclonal anti‐B cell antibody and complement. NK activity in either lymphocyte preparation from nine of 10 patients with advanced disease was not detectable and, when calculated in terms of lytic units per ml of blood, was at least seven times lower than in controls; only one of these patients exhibited activity within the control range. Two patients with early disease had measurable, but low, NK‐cell activity. Prolongation of the NK cell assay from 6 to 18h gave rise to significant killing in the CLL patients lacking NK cell activity in the 6‐h assay; however, the activity still was six times lower than in controls. Treatment of leukemia cell‐depleted lymphocytes from CLL patients with human fibroblast interferon or the interferon inducer poly I:C enhanced NK‐cell activity in the two early stage patients but this treatment was ineffective in three later stage patients. The percentage of cells with characteristics of NK cells, i.e. those with receptors for SRBC and Fc‐portion of IgG, was four times higher in CLL patients and the percentage of lymphocytes binding to NK‐sensitive target cells was equal to that in controls despite the fact that, in the majority of patients, lysis of the target cells by the lymphocytes does not ensue. The NK deficiency may be responsible for the increased incidence of secondary malignancies in CLL patients.
The Microcirculation in Sepsis

Summary Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality in critically ill patients. The pathophysiology of sepsis involves a highly complex and integrated response, including the activation of various cell types, inflammatory mediators, and the haemostatic system. Recent evidence suggests an emerging role of the microcirculation in sepsis, necessitating a shift in our locus away Irom the macrohaemodynamics to ill icrohaemodynanmics in a septic patient. This review article provides a brief overview of the microcirculation, its assessment techniques, and specific therapies to resuscitate the microhaemodynamics.
Targeted degradation of sense and antisense C9orf72 RNA foci as therapy for ALS and frontotemporal degeneration

Significance The most frequent genetic cause of ALS and frontotemporal degeneration is a hexanucleotide expansion in a noncoding region of the C9orf72 gene. Similar to other repeat expansion diseases, we characterize the hallmark feature of repeat expansion RNA-mediated toxicity: nuclear RNA foci. Remarkably, two distinct sets of foci are found, one containing RNAs transcribed in the sense direction and the other containing antisense RNAs. Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) are developed that selectively target sense strand repeat-containing RNAs and reduce sense-oriented foci without affecting overall C9orf72 expression. Importantly, reducing C9orf72 expression does not cause behavioral or pathological changes in mice and induces only a few genome-wide mRNA alterations. These findings establish ASO-mediated degradation of repeat-containing RNAs as a significant therapeutic approach. Expanded hexanucleotide repeats in the chromosome 9 open reading frame 72 (C9orf72) gene are the most common genetic cause of ALS and frontotemporal degeneration (FTD). Here, we identify nuclear RNA foci containing the hexanucleotide expansion (GGGGCC) in patient cells, including white blood cells, fibroblasts, glia, and multiple neuronal cell types (spinal motor, cortical, hippocampal, and cerebellar neurons). RNA foci are not present in sporadic ALS, familial ALS/FTD caused by other mutations (SOD1, TDP-43, or tau), Parkinson disease, or nonneurological controls. Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) are identified that reduce GGGGCC-containing nuclear foci without altering overall C9orf72 RNA levels. By contrast, siRNAs fail to reduce nuclear RNA foci despite marked reduction in overall C9orf72 RNAs. Sustained ASO-mediated lowering of C9orf72 RNAs throughout the CNS of mice is demonstrated to be well tolerated, producing no behavioral or pathological features characteristic of ALS/FTD and only limited RNA expression alterations. Genome-wide RNA profiling identifies an RNA signature in fibroblasts from patients with C9orf72 expansion. ASOs targeting sense strand repeat-containing RNAs do not correct this signature, a failure that may be explained, at least in part, by discovery of abundant RNA foci with C9orf72 repeats transcribed in the antisense (GGCCCC) direction, which are not affected by sense strand-targeting ASOs. Taken together, these findings support a therapeutic approach by ASO administration to reduce hexanucleotide repeat-containing RNAs and raise the potential importance of targeting expanded RNAs transcribed in both directions.
Collective Investigation into THE INCIDENCE OF CANCER OF THE BREAST, AND ITS HISTORY AFTER TREATMENT

The British Medical Association in 1928 initiated a collective investigation scheme, and started with an inquiry into the treatment of varicose ulceration, which was followed in 1929-30 by an inquiry into the afterhistory of gastro-enterostomy ; in connexion with both of those investigations reports have been issued. ' In 1929 it was decided to conduct an inquiry into the incidence of cancer and its history after treatment. A memorandum was issued to medical practitioners stating that the inquiry was limited to the following conditions: carcinoma of the breast, cervix, rectum, and tongue. It was to cover a period of one year from October, 1929, to September, 1930, and practitioners taking part in the inquiry were requested to keep a record of all cases that
Atlas of Pancreatic Cytopathology: With Histopathologic Correlations

Foreword. Preface. Acknowledgments. Normal Pancreas and Fine Needle Aspiration Contaminants. Radiologic Characteristics of Pancreatic Disease. Nonneoplastic Lesions. Solid Neoplasms: Exocrine Pancreas. Cystic Neoplasms. Solid Neoplasms: Endocrine Pancreas. Primary Mesenchymal and Other Rare Neoplasms. Metastatic and Secondary Neoplasms. Index.
How Can Collaboration Assist School Leaders in Effectively Implementing New Programs?

Elementary school students at a suburban K-12 charter school are facing a difficult transition into the secondary program. In an effort to ease this transition and retain students, the principal requires the secondary teachers to implement a study skills program into the daily curriculum. Initially, the teachers do not voice any objections to the principal, but as the workload increases, their frustration is communicated in a staff meeting. Moreover, students have displayed a negative attitude toward the program. The principal understands that he must diffuse the resentment of the teachers and gain student support to preserve the positive culture of the school.
Phonological awareness deficits in Arabic-speaking children with learning disabilities

Background Phonological awareness refers to the language ability to perceive and manipulate the sounds of spoken words. It is an understanding of the structure of spoken language - that it is made up of words, and that words consist of syllables, rhymes, and sounds. The presence of a relationship between performance in phonological awareness tasks and reading ability is undisputed. Materials and methods 100 normal children together with 30 learning -disabled children were evaluated with the Arabic phonological awareness test to detect their performance on phonological awareness. Results A large amount of evidence has been accumulated to show that the more knowledge children have about the constituent sounds of words, the better they tend to be at reading. Aim Many studies have been conducted to detect phonological awareness deficits in English-speaking children, but very few studies have been conducted on Arabic-speaking children.
An automated semantic annotation based-on Wordnet ontology

The construction of metadata which annotates the documents is one of the major tasks for making data understandable to the machine on the Semantic Web. Most of the exiting Semantic Web authoring tools allow user with limited knowledge Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL to markup documents with semantics. These tools help to create the semantic annotations to the documents either during or after composing the documents. The common is these approaches all need human annotator to manually determine the semantic information of the content and then create the metadata which describes this information via tools. This research proposes an approach to bridge the gap between today's Web and the Semantic Web. The word sense disambiguation technique is utilized to automatically discover the underlying semantic information of the text document, based on the popular open-domain vocabulary ontology — the Wordnet. This semantic information is then annotated to the documents in RDF that conforms to the Semantic Web standards for future reuse. We believe this is one of the feasible ways to bring a large-scale of documents to the Semantic Web.
El resumen de los resultados en los artículos de investigación de Ciencias Comportamentales

El objetivo principal sera la aplicacion de desarrollos metodologicos recientes de cara a la adecuada elaboracion del apartado de resultados propio de los articulos de investigacion, atendiendo especialmente al campo de la Psicologia y disciplinas comportamentales afines. Para ello, se exponen las generalidades sobre el resumen de informacion, resaltando especialmente la explicacion detallada sobre la eleccion de la medida de error. En una segunda parte se presentan aspectos mas especificos, discutiendo con detenimiento la adaptacion de la medida de variabilidad error en funcion de dos parametros basicos: el tipo de diseno de investigacion y el grado de generalidad de la hipotesis de investigacion. El trabajo se cierra con un ejemplo de aplicacion de los conceptos expuestos con unos breves apuntes sobre la forma de agregar barras de error a los graficos a partir de un programa de Hoja de Calculo, como Microsoft Excel©.
Cross-domain Text Classification using Wikipedia

Traditional approaches to document classification requires labeled data in order to construct reliable and accurate classifiers. Unfortunately, labeled data are seldom available, and often too expensive to obtain, especially for large domains and fast evolving scenarios. Given a learning task for which training data are not available, abundant labeled data may exist for a different but related domain. One would like to use the related labeled data as auxiliary information to accomplish the classification task in the target domain. Recently, the paradigm of transfer learning has been introduced to enable effective learning strategies when auxiliary data obey a different probability distribution. A co-clustering based classification algorithm has been previously proposed to tackle cross-domain text classification. In this work, we extend the idea underlying this approach by making the latent semantic relationship between the two domains explicit. This goal is achieved with the use of Wikipedia. As a result, the pathway that allows to propagate labels between the two domains not only captures common words, but also semantic concepts based on the content of documents. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our semantic-based approach to cross-domain classification using a variety of real data.
Tuberculosis in AIDS patients.

Tuberculosis is the top agenda among opportunistic diseases and the most leading cause of death in HIV/AIDS patients. A total of 406 AIDS patients were recruited in this retrospective and descriptive study. 123/406 (30.3%) were diagnosed as AIDS-related tuberculosis (TB). Their age range from 17 to 69 years with a mean (±SD) of 37.2 (±9.51. There were significant association between occupation, or mode of HIV transmission and tuberculosis infection (p< 0.05). Pulmonary tuberculosis 104/123 (84.6%) was the most common disease location among TB patients. We found the significant association between the clinical presentations i.e. fever, cough, sputum or hemoptysis and TB patients (p<0.05), moreover, the level of CD4 cell count plays a significant role in association with the disease (p<0.05) in this study.
The Angiopathy of Subarachnoid Hemorrhage I. Role of Vessel Wall Catecholamines

Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) due to rupture of the right middle cerebral artery (RMCA) produced specific anatomical and biophysiological responses in the involved feline vessels. The RMCA showed morphological alterations that became progressively more severe with time and were widespread within the cerebral vascular tree. SAH also resulted in an acute depletion of vessel catechola- mlne levels which remained depressed over a 30 day period. When the cerebral vessels of cats were severely depleted of catecholamines (using reserpine) prior to induced SAH, morphological alterations were signifi- cantly reduced both in severity and in degree of spread within the cerebral vascular network. The results of this study suggest that the concentration of noreplnephrine within the vessel at the time of hemorrhage plays a significant role in the production of the angiopathy that follows SAH. Stroke Vol 15, No 2, 1984
Fan-Shaped Clustering for Large-Scale Sensor Networks

The main objective of large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is to monitor physical phenomenon of interest in a given Region of Interest using sensors and provide collected data to the sink node. Designing of such WSNs should focus on minimizing nodes' energy consuming so as to keep the network alive as long as possible. In this paper, we propose to partition this large-scale network (sensor field) into fan-shaped clusters. Then based on this clustering, we design mechanisms including cluster head (CH) selection, cluster re-partition, and routing, to achieve network lifetime maximization.
Epipolar constrained motion estimation for reconstruction from video sequences

In this paper we present a method for matching two different views of a static scene without any calibration information on the camera. To that end, we use a technique derived from optical flow estimation which takes into account epipolar constraint. The epipolar geometry is directly computed from image data. We assume the dense disparity field to be smooth in any planar region. Smoothness is realized using a regularization method. By adding a robust M-estimator on the smoothness term, the resulting model implicitly takes into account depth discontinuities. We use a multiresolution scheme that allows to recover large displacement. Results are shown on real pairs of images.
Teaching Courses Online: A Review of the Research

This literature review summarizes research on online teaching and learning. It is organized into four topics: course environment, learners’ outcomes, learners’ characteristics, and institutional and administrative factors. The authors found little consistency of terminology, discovered some conclusive guidelines, and identified developing lines of inquiry. The conclusions overall suggest that most of the studies reviewed were descriptive and exploratory, that most online students are nontraditional and Anglo American, and that few universities have written policies, guidelines, or technical support for faculty members or students. Asynchronous communication seemed to facilitate in-depth communication (but not more than in traditional classes), students liked to move at their own pace, learning outcomes appeared to be the same as in traditional courses, and students with prior training in computers were more satisfied with online courses. Continued research is needed to inform learner outcomes, learner characteristics, course environment, and institutional factors related to delivery system variables in order to test learning theories and teaching models inherent in course design.
ADH4 intronic variations are associated with alcohol dependence: results from an Italian case–control association study

Objectives This study investigated the involvement of ADH4 gene polymorphisms in the susceptibility to alcohol use disorders. Methods Thirty-eight single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in and around the ADH4 gene were investigated in 136 Italian alcoholics and 276 healthy controls. A new approach based on a bioinformatic method selected 26 SNPs that may affect the splicing sites, destroying or creating binding sites of splicing regulatory proteins. Results Case–control comparisons for allele and genotype frequencies showed that ADH4 SNPs were associated with alcohol dependence but not with alcohol abuse. The association signal was strongest for rs1009145, rs13148577 (both P=0.0008) and rs7689753 (P=0.0007), whose minor alleles were predicted to alter the target protein sequences involved in mRNA splicing. A pairwise linkage disequilibrium analysis showed that all SNPs except five were located in a single haplotype block. Six haplotype tag SNPs were selected to infer haplotypes and to estimate their frequency distributions. A logistic regression analysis confirmed the association between ADH4 variants and alcohol dependence when sex, age, years of education, marital status and the allele genotype, haplotype and diplotype data of the six haplotype tag SNP were considered. Haplotype ATAAAT, which contained the minor allele of rs10009145 and the major allele of rs7689753, increased the risk of alcohol dependence, whereas haplotype GGGGAT, bearing the major allele of rs10009145 and the minor allele of rs7689753, protected against it. Again, there was no evidence of an association with alcohol abuse. Conclusion These data suggest that ADH4 intronic variants play a role in alcohol dependence susceptibility in Italian populations. Functional studies are needed to establish the role of the genetic variations that seem to affect the splicing mechanism.
Vitamin D Receptor Gene and Aggrecan Gene Polymorphisms and the Risk of Intervertebral Disc Degeneration — A Meta-Analysis

Background A series of studies have been conducted to evaluate the associations between vitamin D receptor (VDR) and aggrecan variable numbers of tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphisms and the risk of intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD), but produced conflicting results. Objective we performed a meta-analysis to address a more accurate estimation of the associations between the above gene polymorphisms and the risk of IDD. Methods A comprehensive literature search was conducted to identify all the relevant studies. The fixed or random effect model was selected based on the heterogeneity test among studies evaluated using the I 2. Publication bias was estimated using Begg's funnel plots and Egger's regression test. Results A total of 9, 5, 3, and 7 studies were finally included in the analyses for the associations between the VDR TaqI (rs731236), FokI (rs2228570), ApaI (rs7975232), or aggrecan VNTR polymorphisms and the risk of IDD, respectively. The combined results showed that none of the VDR (TaqI, FokI, ApaI) polymorphisms were significantly associated with the risk of IDD. In contrast, the alleles with shorter VNTR length was found to significantly increase the risk of IDD (≦25 vs. >25: OR = 1.850, 95%CI 1.477–2.318; ≦23 vs. >23: OR = 1.955, 95%CI 1.41–2.703). Subgroup analysis confirmed the above results. After excluding studies deviated from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) in controls, no other studies were found to significantly influence the pooled effects in each genetic model. No potential publication bias was detected. Conclusion This meta-analysis suggested that the alleles with shorter VNTR length significantly increased the risk of IDD, while the VDR (TaqI, FokI, ApaI) gene polymorphisms were not significantly associated with the risk of IDD. Since potential confounders could not be ruled out completely, further studies are needed to confirm these results.