Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High Rate of Subclinical Chikungunya Virus Infection and Association of Neutralizing Antibody with Protection in a Prospective Cohort in The Philippines

Background Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a globally re-emerging arbovirus for which previous studies have indicated the majority of infections result in symptomatic febrile illness. We sought to characterize the proportion of subclinical and symptomatic CHIKV infections in a prospective cohort study in a country with known CHIKV circulation. Methods/Findings A prospective longitudinal cohort of subjects ≥6 months old underwent community-based active surveillance for acute febrile illness in Cebu City, Philippines from 2012-13. Subjects with fever history were clinically evaluated at acute, 2, 5, and 8 day visits, and at a 3-week convalescent visit. Blood was collected at the acute and 3-week convalescent visits. Symptomatic CHIKV infections were identified by positive CHIKV PCR in acute blood samples and/or CHIKV IgM/IgG ELISA seroconversion in paired acute/convalescent samples. Enrollment and 12-month blood samples underwent plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT) using CHIKV attenuated strain 181/clone25. Subclinical CHIKV infections were identified by ≥8-fold rise from a baseline enrollment PRNT titer <10 without symptomatic infection detected during the intervening surveillance period. Selected CHIKV PCR-positive samples underwent viral isolation and envelope protein-1 gene sequencing. Of 853 subjects who completed all study procedures at 12 months, 19 symptomatic infections (2.19 per 100 person-years) and 87 subclinical infections (10.03 per 100 person-years) occurred. The ratio of subclinical-to-symptomatic infections was 4.6:1 varying with age from 2:1 in 6 month-5 year olds to 12:1 in those >50 years old. Baseline CHIKV PRNT titer ≥10 was associated with 100% (95%CI: 46.1, 100.0) protection from symptomatic CHIKV infection. Phylogenetic analysis demonstrated Asian genotype closely related to strains from Asia and the Caribbean. Conclusions Subclinical infections accounted for a majority of total CHIKV infections. A positive baseline CHIKV PRNT titer was associated with protection from symptomatic CHIKV infection. These findings have implications for assessing disease burden, understanding virus transmission, and supporting vaccine development.
Intersection theory of coassociative submanifolds in G_(2)-manifolds and Seiberg-Witten invariants

We study the problem of counting instantons with coassociative boundary condition in (almost) G2-manifolds. This is analog to the open GromovWitten theory for counting holomorphic curves with Lagrangian boundary condition in Calabi-Yau manifolds. We explain its relationship with the Seiberg-Witten invariants for coassociative submanifolds. Intersection theory of Lagrangian submanifolds is an essential part of the symplectic geometry. By counting the number of holomorphic disks bounding intersecting Lagrangian submanifolds, Floer and others defined the celebrated Floer homology theory. It plays an important role in mirror symmetry for Calabi-Yau manifolds and string theory in physics. In M-theory, Calabi-Yau threefolds are replaced by seven dimensional G2-manifolds M (i.e. oriented Octonion manifolds [18]). The analog of holomorphic disks (resp. Lagrangian submanifolds) are instantons or associative submanifolds (resp. coassociative submanifolds or branes) inM [17]. An important project is to count the number of instantons with coassociative boundary conditions. In particular we want to study the following problem.
Short Term Behaviour of Fixed-Loop Cortical Suspension System Used for Surgical Treatment of Hallux valgus

Hallux valgus represents an acquired foot deformity characterized by lateral deviation of the hallux and medial deviation of the first metatarsal. Pain during gait is the main complain and is caused by reduction of plantar pressure under the first ray leading to insufficiency of the first ray and overload of the lesser rays. Treatment can be nonoperative or surgical with more than one hundred surgical techniques described so far. The scope of this study was to assess the short term reliability and stability of fixed loop suspension systems used for surgical treatment of this pathology using radiological evaluation of hallux valgus angle and the intermetatarsal angle. Our results show good stability of the reduction and good reliability of the suspension system, with a six months follow-up. Only one specific complication (failure of the wiring material) is highlighted by our conclusions and the need for biomechanical testing in controlled laboratory studies.
The pulmonary physician in critical care • 10: Difficult weaning

The study of patients being weaned from mechanical ventilation has offered new insights into the physiology of respiratory failure. Assessment of the balance between respiratory muscle strength, work and central drive is essential if difficulty in weaning occurs, and optimisation of these elements may improve the success of weaning. Psychological support of patients and the creation of units specialising in weaning have also resulted in a higher success rate.
Akt inhibition promotes autophagy and sensitizes PTEN-null tumors to lysosomotropic agents

Although Akt is known as a survival kinase, inhibitors of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)–Akt pathway do not always induce substantial apoptosis. We show that silencing Akt1 alone, or any combination of Akt isoforms, can suppress the growth of tumors established from phosphatase and tensin homologue–null human cancer cells. Although these findings indicate that Akt is essential for tumor maintenance, most tumors eventually rebound. Akt knockdown or inactivation with small molecule inhibitors did not induce significant apoptosis but rather markedly increased autophagy. Further treatment with the lysosomotropic agent chloroquine caused accumulation of abnormal autophagolysosomes and reactive oxygen species, leading to accelerated cell death in vitro and complete tumor remission in vivo. Cell death was also promoted when Akt inhibition was combined with the vacuolar H+–adenosine triphosphatase inhibitor bafilomycin A1 or with cathepsin inhibition. These results suggest that blocking lysosomal degradation can be detrimental to cancer cell survival when autophagy is activated, providing rationale for a new therapeutic approach to enhancing the anticancer efficacy of PI3K–Akt pathway inhibition.
Post Training in Deep Learning with Last Kernel

One of the main challenges of deep learning methods is the choice of an appropriate training strategy. In particular, additional steps, such as unsupervised pre-training, have been shown to greatly improve the performances of deep structures. In this paper, we introduce a new training step,the post-training, which takes place after the training and where only specific layers are trained. In particular, we focus on the particular case -- named Last Kernel -- where only the last layer is trained. This step aims to find the optimal use of data representation learned during the other phases of the training. We show that Last Kernel can be effortlessly added to most learning strategies, is computationally inexpensive, does not cause overfitting and often produces significant improvement. Additionally, we show that with commonly used losses and activation functions, Last Kernel solves a convex closed optimization problems, offering rapid convergence -- or even closed-form solutions.
Human Neuroscience Original Research Article Stronger Misdirection in Curved than in Straight Motion

Illusions developed by magicians are a rich and largely untapped source of insight into perception and cognition. Here we show that curved motion, as employed by the magician in a classic sleight of hand trick, generates stronger misdirection than rectilinear motion, and that this difference can be explained by the differential engagement of the smooth pursuit and the saccadic oculomotor systems. This research exemplifies how the magician's intuitive understanding of the spectator's mindset can surpass that of the cognitive scientist in specific instances, and that observation-based behavioral insights developed by magicians are worthy of quantitative investigation in the neuroscience laboratory.
Simulations of optimized anguilliform swimming

SUMMARY The hydrodynamics of anguilliform swimming motions was investigated using three-dimensional simulations of the fluid flow past a self-propelled body. The motion of the body is not specified a priori, but is instead obtained through an evolutionary algorithm used to optimize the swimming efficiency and the burst swimming speed. The results of the present simulations support the hypothesis that anguilliform swimmers modify their kinematics according to different objectives and provide a quantitative analysis of the swimming motion and the forces experienced by the body. The kinematics of burst swimming is characterized by the large amplitude of the tail undulations while the anterior part of the body remains straight. In contrast, during efficient swimming behavior significant lateral undulation occurs along the entire length of the body. In turn, during burst swimming, the majority of the thrust is generated at the tail, whereas in the efficient swimming mode, in addition to the tail, the middle of the body contributes significantly to the thrust. The burst swimming velocity is 42% higher and the propulsive efficiency is 15% lower than the respective values during efficient swimming. The wake, for both swimming modes, consists largely of a double row of vortex rings with an axis aligned with the swimming direction. The vortex rings are responsible for producing lateral jets of fluid, which has been documented in prior experimental studies. We note that the primary wake vortices are qualitatively similar in both swimming modes except that the wake vortex rings are stronger and relatively more elongated in the fast swimming mode. The present results provide quantitative information of three-dimensional fluid-body interactions that may complement related experimental studies. In addition they enable a detailed quantitative analysis, which may be difficult to obtain experimentally, of the different swimming modes linking the kinematics of the motion with the forces acting on the self-propelled body. Finally, the optimization procedure helps to identify, in a systematic fashion, links between swimming motion and biological function.
Round-Based Public Transit Routing (Extended Abstract)

We study the problem of computing all Pareto-optimal journeys in a dynamic public transit network for two criteria: arrival time and number of transfers. Existing algorithms consider this as a graph problem, and solve it using variants of Dijkstra's algorithm. Unfortunately, this leads to either high query times or suboptimal solutions. We take a different approach. We introduce RAPTOR, our novel round-based public transit router. Unlike previous algorithms, it is not Dijkstra-based, looks at each route (such as a bus line) in the network at most once per round, and can be made even faster with simple pruning rules and parallelization using multiple cores. Because it does not rely on preprocessing, RAPTOR works in fully dynamic scenarios. Moreover, it can be easily extended to handle flexible departure times or arbitrary additional criteria, such as fare zones. When run on London's complex public transportation network, RAPTOR computes all Pareto-optimal journeys between two random locations an order of magnitude faster than previous approaches, which easily enables interactive applications. This is an extended abstract of the paper published at ALENEX 2012.
Portable Parallel Programming on Emerging Platforms

Clusters of symmetric shared memory multiprocessors (SMPs) are fast becoming a highly available platform for parallel computing. There is a need for a uniform programming paradigm that allows users to transparently extend parallelism across multiple SMP nodes. A shared memory paradigm leverages the available hardware to handle sharing within an SMP, in addition to providing programming ease. Software distributed shared memory (SDSM) systems support the illusion of shared memory across the cluster via a software run-time layer between the application and the hardware. This approach can potentially provide a cost-effective alternative to larger hardware shared mem ory systems for executing certain classes of workloads. We describe one such system, and discuss its interface, performance, and portability, through an example real-world application from the scientific domain.
MANUAL CODING VERSUS WIZARDS : EXAMING THE EFFECTS OF USER INTERACTION ON MARKUP LANGUAGE PERFORMANCE AND SATISFACTION

The role of the user interface(mode of interaction) can have an impact on both performance and satisfaction with regards to using a programming language--a well-designed user interface can improve performance and satisfaction, The impact of interaction mode, in this case commandbased coding, versus using a form-fill-in wizard, is examined, with respect to performance and satisfaction while performing a survey-oriented task. Wizards brought about better performance than using the command language, and the difference between modes was far greater for novices than for experienced users. Using the wizard tended to equalize performance across skill levels. For system satisfaction, there were significant differences between interaction modes, however no differences were reported between skill levels.
Coordinating agents : an analysis of coordination in supply-chain management tasks

A multi-agent planning problem consists of a set of activities that need to be planned by several agents. Here, plan coordination methods play an important role, since the independently generated plans by different agents can lead to an infeasible joint solution. We study one particular plan coordination approach, called coordination-by-design, which allows each agent to make its own plan completely independent of the others, while guaranteeing the feasibility of the combined plan of all the agents as a joint solution to the multi-agent planning problem. In this paper, we are interested in a class of multi-agent planning problems that arise in supply-chain management applications. Although the coordination problem in general is Σ 2 -complete, it turns out for this special class, the complexity of coordination checking is polynomial and deciding a minimum coordination set is NP-complete. We develop a polynomial-time approximation algorithm to compute a sufficient
Imaging of Electric Fields at the GaN/Ni Interface Using Electron Beam Induced Current in a Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope

Gallium nitride is a promising wide bandgap material for demanding applications such as hightemperature and high-power electronics, as well as for space applications where its higher resistance to high fluxes of proton and electron radiation compared to Si represents an important advantage [1]. Electron irradiation of GaN is believed to create both N and Ga vacancies, as well as to induce threading dislocation glide. Typically, the creation or modification of structural defects in GaN are studied in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) retrofitted with cathodoluminescence (CL) or electron beam induced current (EBIC) tools, which identify locations of high defect concentration as dark regions due to increased (non-radiative) recombination rates. Unfortunately, the spatial resolution of these methods is limited due to the relatively large interaction volumes generated by primary electrons. While scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) enables the requisite spatial resolution necessary to understand the mechanisms of how defects are created and/or propagated under electron beam irradiation, it is still rarely combined with CL or EBIC, which can identify electronically active defects. Here we report the first STEM based EBIC characterization of Schottky diodes consisting of Ni contacts to free-standing hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE) grown GaN with a threading dislocation density of ~10/cm.
P o S ( C E N e t 2 0 1 5 ) 0 5 6 Constructing Cost Sensitive Decision Trees Based on Multi-Objective Optimization

We propose a multi-objective optimization based on the cost sensitive decision tree building method. The misclassification cost, test cost, waiting time cost and information gain rate as four optimization goals by using the method of linear weighting are adopted to transfer the multiobjective optimization problem into a single objective optimization problem, as the splitting attribute selection criterion; and then we put forward the specific strategy of building the minimum cost decision tree and a hybrid testing decision tree method; finally, use our algorithm and two other algorithms in two real datasets to build and test the decision trees. The experimental results show that our method of decision tree features less cost, more efficient and stronger generalization ability. The method is especially useful in terms of medical diagnostic.
Natural Occurrence of Alternaria Toxins in the 2015 Wheat from Anhui Province, China

The exposure to Alternaria toxins from grain and grain-based products has been reported to be related to human esophageal cancer in China. In this study, a total of 370 freshly harvested wheat kernel samples collected from Anhui province of China in 2015 were analyzed for the four Alternaria toxins tenuazonic acid (TeA), tentoxin (TEN), alternariol (AOH) and alternariol monomethyl ether (AME) by high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method (HPLC-MS/MS). TeA was the predominant toxin detected followed by TEN, AOH and AME. The concentrations of the four Alternaria toxins varied geographically. The samples from Fuyang district showed higher TEN concentration levels than the other regions studied (p < 0.05). Furthermore, 95% (352/370) of the wheat samples were positive for more than one type of Alternaria toxins. Positive correlation was observed between concentration levels of TeA and TEN, AOH and AME, TeA and AOH, and the total dibenzopyrone derivatives (AOH + AME) and TeA. Results indicate that there is a need to set the tolerance limit for Alternaria toxins in China, and more data on the contamination of these toxins in agro-products is required.
Reduced latency IEEE floating-point standard adder architectures

The design and implementation of a double precision floating-point IEEE-754 standard adder is described which uses "flagged prefix addition" to merge rounding with the significand addition. The floating-point adder is implemented in 0.5 /spl mu/m CMOS, measures 1.8 mm/sup 2/, has a 3-cycle latency and implements all rounding modes. A modified version of this floating-point adder can perform accumulation in 2-cycles with a small amount of extra hardware for use in a parallel processor node. This is achieved by feeding back the previous un-normalised but correctly rounded result together with the normalisation distance. A 2-cycle latency floating-point adder architecture with potentially the same cycle time that also employs flagged prefix addition is described. It also incorporates a fast prediction scheme for the true subtraction of significands with an exponent difference of 1, with one less adder.
The cardiovascular world is definitely not flat.

Thomas Friedman’s revolutionary book The World Is Flat describes how recent changes in technology are transforming the world.1 The ubiquitous nature of the Internet now facilitates rapid information exchange, thus empowering the consumer. As a result, the world is becoming more “flat”; ie, traditional regional boundaries are breaking down, and opportunities are more evenly spread. In stark contrast to this new world of commerce, Ko and colleagues2 demonstrate just how “nonflat” the cardiovascular world has been. Rather than homogenized delivery of evidence-based care, the authors observe remarkable intercountry and intracountry variability in both treatments and outcomes. Article p 196 The study by Ko et al, published in this week’s Circulation , was well performed. The authors had access to detailed clinical information on a large random sample of US Medicare acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients and a similar cohort of elderly AMI patients from Ontario, Canada, all hospitalized between 1998 and 2001. The authors paid special attention to creating similar entry criteria and examining comparable process indicators. Short and intermediate outcomes also were compared only after risk adjustment. Overall, the study found that AMI patients hospitalized in the United States were slightly less likely to receive aspirin, β-blockers, or angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors but much more likely to receive invasive cardiac procedures than their Canadian peers. Yet, the study also demonstrates that the term, US AMI care, is a misnomer in that regional differences within the United States were as large as or larger than those seen across international boundaries. An important first question is whether these findings are of historical interest or applicable to current day practice. Since the 1990s, many publications have highlighted the problems of underuse of evidence-based AMI therapies. Thankfully, recent data demonstrate that the gap between evidence and practice is narrowing.3–6 Using data …
The acute and long‐term effects of intracoronary Stem cell Transplantation in 191 patients with chronic heARt failure: the STAR‐heart study

Despite accumulated evidence that intracoronary bone marrow cell (BMC) therapy may be beneficial in acute myocardial infarction, there are only limited data available on the effectiveness of BMC's in chronic heart failure. The aim of this study was to quantitatively investigate ventricular haemodynamics, geometry, and contractility as well as the long‐term clinical outcome of BMC treated patients with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) due to chronic ischaemic cardiomyopathy.
Recovery of iron from copper flash smelting slags

Copper slag is produced in large amounts in seven copper smelter plants in Chile, and it is estimated that around four million tons of slag are disposed every year, and another 40–45 million tons are historically cumulated. Copper slag contains iron in the range of 42–45%, which can be recovered and recycled along with the contained copper to obtain an iron–copper alloy and a final slag rich in oxides. Therefore, the present work shows the experimental results of the reduction of a flash smelting slag using coke as reductant up to 150% of the stoichiometric carbon required to reduce copper oxide and magnetite. The characterisation and thermodynamic stability of compounds contained in the slag are presented, and the obtained results show the feasibility for recovering an iron rich alloy with iron contents higher than 98% and copper in the range of 0·6–0·8% using a two‐step process.