Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Segregation of TRAF6‐mediated signaling pathways clarifies its role in osteoclastogenesis

Signals emanating from the receptor for interleukin‐1 (IL‐1), lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or osteoclast differentiation factor/receptor activator of NFκB ligand (ODF/RANKL) stimulate transcription factors AP‐1 through mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) activation and NFκB through IκB kinase (IKK) activation. These kinases are thought to be activated by tumor necrosis factor receptor‐associated factor 6 (TRAF6). However, molecular mechanisms by which TRAF6 activates various downstream kinases remain to be elucidated. We identified functional domains of TRAF6 under physiological conditions established by appropriate expression of TRAF6 mutants in TRAF6‐deficient cells. In IL‐1 and LPS signaling pathways, the RING finger and first zinc finger domains are not required for NFκB activation but are required for full activation of MAPK. However, IL‐1 and LPS signals utilize distinct regions within the zinc finger domains of TRAF6 to activate NFκB. Furthermore, the RING finger domain is not required for differentiation of splenocytes to multinuclear osteoclasts, but is essential for osteoclast maturation. Thus, TRAF6 plays essential roles in both the differentiation and maturation of osteoclasts by activating various kinases via its multiple domains.
Optimal Organization : Centralization , Decentralization or Delegation ?

The paper addresses the issue of optimal organization of production. I compare three organizational forms: centralization (one agent produces different inputs), decentralization (each of two agents produces a different input and contracts directly with the principal), and delegation (two agents produce different inputs, the principal contracts only with one of them). The key issue in the comparison of these organizational forms is whether having more information about costs of production hurts or benefits an agent. I demonstrate that the answer to this question depends on the degree of substitutability/complementarity between the inputs. I also address the issue of collusion between agents in the decentralized organization and characterize conditions under which a stake of collusion exists. JEL Fields: D2, D82, L23
Influence of pressure and radio frequency power on deposition rate and structural properties of hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin films prepared by plasma deposition

The influence of radio frequency (rf) power and pressure on deposition rate and structural properties of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a‐Si:H) thin films, prepared by rf glow discharge decomposition of silane, have been studied by phase modulated ellipsometry and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. It has been found two pressure regions separated by a threshold value around 20 Pa where the deposition rate increases suddenly. This behavior is more marked as rf power rises and reflects the transition between two rf discharges regimes (α and γ). The best quality films have been obtained at low pressure and at low rf power but with deposition rates below 0.2 nm/s. In the high pressure region, the enhancement of deposition rate as rf power increases first gives rise to a reduction of film density and an increase of content of hydrogen bonded in polyhydride form because of plasma polymerization reactions. Further rise of rf power leads to a decrease of polyhydride bonding and the material density remains.
Advancements in Contact-free Heart Rate Measurements Using Human Face Videos

Recently, several methods have been reported for the contact-free measurement of heart rate from human face videos. Typically, these are based on applying Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to sequences of colour values from tracked face patches and selecting the peak value within a fixed range in the frequency spectrum. Those methods performed well enough under controlled conditions, but in realistic situations their performance degraded significantly. In this paper, we have highlighted issues such as light reflection and participant’s movement, and proposed solutions to those factors that reduce the performance of existing methods. We experiment with calculating a robust mean of the skin colour pixels values using a mean shift algorithm and estimating an optimal frequency selection function in the Fourier domain. Preliminary results show that these methods can improve the results of existing methods.
[Nutritional status at the time of admission among patients admitted to a tertiary-care paediatric hospital].

OBJECTIVE To analyze the nutrition status of the pediatric patients at the time of hospital admission throughout a calendar year in a tertiary level hospital and to identify those patients and/or groups of pathologies with a higher risk of malnutrition. MATERIAL AND METHODS Retrospective evaluation of nutrition status of 852 patients hospitalized in 2013 in a pediatric hospital (462 males and 390 females). Sex, age, body mass index at the moment of admission and days of hospitalization and diagnosis codified according to the International Classification of Diseases were registered. RESULTS The prevalence of malnutrition patients registered at the moment of admission was 8.2%. Excess body weight (overweight and obesity) was detected in 18% of the patients. The diseases of the nervous system (22.9%), together with the diseases of the respiratory system, the infectious diseases (18.6%), the congenital malformations (11.4%) and the diseases of the genitorurinary system (8.6%) account for 84.4% of the cases with malnutrition. CONCLUSIONS The overall prevalence rate for malnutrition in pediatric patients at the moment of admission in our hospital was 8.2%, being this figure similar to those published in occidental countries. It should be mandatory to accomplish an initial screening and follow up during hospitalization of younger patients and those suffering from diseases of the nervous and/or respiratory system and, especially, from congenital diseases.
Hardware-Efficient Implementation of Half-Band IIR Filter for Interpolation and Decimation

This brief deals with a simple heuristic method for the hardware optimization of a half-band infinite-impulse response (IIR) filter. The optimization method that is proposed here is intended for a quick design selection at the system level, without the need for computationally intensive calculations and simulations. The aim is to arrive at a design with low hardware complexity that is measured in terms of the number of adders. In the approach that is presented here, the filter specification is treated with some flexibility at the topmost system level. The half-band filter is implemented as a parallel connection of two all-pass filter cells. The filter is designed by first fixing the most sensitive filter coefficient to a convenient value that can be quantized by using only a few adders. Subsequently, the overdesign margin is used to coarsely quantize the remaining filter coefficients and thereby minimize hardware demands. The complexity of the resulting IIR filter is evaluated by counting all the adders in the filter, i.e., the adders for both the filter coefficients and the filter cells. The result of the method is compared with state-of-the-art works where the filter is designed by using the fixed filter specification and advanced algorithms to minimize the hardware that is used to implement filter coefficients.
Optimal locally repairable codes and connections to matroid theory

Petabyte-scale distributed storage systems are currently transitioning to erasure codes to achieve higher storage efficiency. Classical codes like Reed-Solomon are highly suboptimal for distributed environments due to their high overhead in single-failure events. Locally Repairable Codes (LRCs) form a new family of codes that are repair efficient. In particular, LRCs minimize the number of nodes participating in single node repairs during which they generate small network traffic. Two large-scale distributed storage systems have already implemented different types of LRCs: Windows Azure Storage and the Hadoop Distributed File System RAID used by Facebook. The fundamental bounds for LRCs, namely the best possible distance for a given code locality, were recently discovered, but few explicit constructions exist. In this work, we present an explicit and simple to implement construction of optimal LRCs, for code parameters previously established by existence results. For the analysis of the optimality of our code, we derive a new result on the matroid represented by the code's generator matrix.
An Error-Checking Method for Delta-Sigma Analog-to-Digital Converters Employing M th-Order Sinc Filters

Oversampling analog-to-digital converters often employ sinc-shaped filters for noise shaping and decimation. These digital filters exhibit a limited slew rate and other deterministic characteristics. By knowing these characteristics, consecutive samples of an analog-to-digital converter can be analyzed to verify fundamental data integrity. If excursions are observed, it is likely that some corruption of the digitized data has occurred and appropriate action can be taken. This paper develops a patent-pending error-checking method for analog-todigital converters and analyzes the transfer function for an Mthorder sinc-shaped filter with an oversample ratio of N. It also solves the impulse and step responses of an arbitrary sinc filter and discusses several properties of the impulse and step responses via theorems with corresponding proofs. It proves that, for a sinc filter reporting values every Nth term referred to the input rate, there is a maximum change in value between any two consecutive output samples. The paper calculates the maximum change in value for a sinc filter of an arbitrary order and decimation rate. Finally, additional characteristics of limited slew rates are discussed, and a three-limit error-checking scheme is developed for the specific case of a third-order modulator with an oversample ratio of 64. Test results using a commercially available analog-to-digital converter are presented, which indicate that the error-checking scheme is useful for detecting catastrophic data converter failures.
GUILeak : Identifying Privacy Practices on GUI-Based Data

As the most popular mobile platform, Android devices have millions of users around the world. As these devices are used everyday and collects various data from users, effective privacy protection has been a well known challenge in the Android world. Existing privacy-protection approaches focus on information accessed from Android API methods, such as location and device ID, while existing security-enhancement approaches are not fine-grained enough to map user input data to concepts in privacy policies. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach that automatically detects privacy leakage on user input data for a given Android app, and determines whether such leakage may violate privacy policies coming with the Android app. For evaluation, we applied our approach to 80 popular apps from two important app categories: finance and health. The results show that our approach is able to detect 20 strong violations, and 10 weak violations from the studied apps.
Supermarket food purchases and child nutritional outcomes in Kenya

In many developing countries, supermarkets are spreading rapidly at the expense of traditional food markets and shops. Changing retail environments and food choices may affect consumer diets and nutritional outcomes. Previous research suggested that supermarkets may contribute to rising rates of obesity. However, most existing research looked at adult populations. Here, we analyze effects of supermarkets on child nutrition with panel data from medium-sized towns in Kenya. Instrumental variable regressions show that supermarket food purchases significantly increase child height-for-age and weight-for age Z-scores. The effects on height are larger than the effects on weight. These are welcome findings, because child stunting continues to be a major nutrition problem in developing countries that is declining more slowly than child underweight. Supermarkets do not seem to be a driver of childhood obesity in Kenya. The positive effects of supermarkets on child nutrition are channeled through improvements in food variety and dietary quality.
Human breast lesions: characterization with contrast-enhanced in vivo proton MR spectroscopy--initial results.

PURPOSE To assess the clinical usefulness of localized proton (hydrogen 1) magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy in the characterization of contrast material-enhanced breast lesions on the basis of choline detection. MATERIALS AND METHODS Examinations were performed at 1.5 T with use of a standard breast coil. Contrast-enhanced MR imaging was performed in 30 consecutive patients (mean age, 50 years; age range, 20--80 years) who had nonspecific lesions (>1.5 cm in diameter) on sonograms or mammograms. Single-voxel (1)H MR spectroscopy was performed in the enhancing lesions by using a point-resolved spectroscopic sequence with echo times of 38, 135, and 270 msec. MR spectroscopic and histopathologic findings were determined in blinded fashion and compared. RESULTS Twenty-four patients had carcinoma of the breast (tumor size, 2.0--11.2 cm; mean, 4.7 cm), and six had benign lesions (lesion size, 1.8--3.8 cm; mean, 2.7 cm). Choline was detected in 22 patients with carcinoma. Choline was not detected in five patients with benign lesions and in two patients with carcinoma. The preliminary results indicate that this technique had a sensitivity of 92%, specificity of 83%, and accuracy of 90%. CONCLUSION Choline can be reliably detected in less than 45 minutes in large contrast-enhanced breast lesions by using a multiecho point-resolved spectroscopic protocol. The presence of water-soluble choline metabolites obtainable with (1)H MR spectroscopy could complement MR imaging findings to improve specificity and to reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies.
Does Aligning Phenotypic and Genotypic Modularity Improve the Evolution of Neural Networks?

Many argue that to evolve artificial intelligence that rivals that of natural animals, we need to evolve neural networks that are structurally organized in that they exhibit modularity, regularity, and hierarchy. It was recently shown that a cost for network connections, which encourages the evolution of modularity, can be combined with an indirect encoding, which encourages the evolution of regularity, to evolve networks that are both modular and regular. However, the bias towards regularity from indirect encodings may prevent evolution from independently optimizing different modules to perform different functions, unless modularity in the phenotype is aligned with modularity in the genotype. We test this hypothesis on two multi-modal problems---a pattern recognition task and a robotics task---that each require different phenotypic modules. In general, we find that performance is improved only when genotypic and phenotypic modularity are encouraged simultaneously, though the role of alignment remains unclear. In addition, intuitive manual decompositions fail to provide the performance benefits of automatic methods on the more challenging robotics problem, emphasizing the importance of automatic, rather than manual, decomposition methods. These results suggest encouraging modularity in both the genotype and phenotype as an important step towards solving large-scale multi-modal problems, but also indicate that more research is required before we can evolve structurally organized networks to solve tasks that require multiple, different neural modules.
Results of surgery for epiretinal membranes and their recurrences.

AIMS/BACKGROUND: This study was performed to identify factors predictive for recurrence of idiopathic and secondary epiretinal membranes after vitrectomy. Long term visual outcome was determined and compared with eyes without recurrence of epiretinal tissue. METHODS: Out of 350 consecutive cases vitrectomised for removal of epiretinal macular membranes, 42 patients (42 eyes) with recurrence of epiretinal membranes were re-examined and their records reviewed. Recurrence of epiretinal membranes was determined by new appearance of epiretinal tissue or abnormal sheen of the central retina. The preoperative findings, best postoperative and final visual acuity of these patients were compared with a comparable cohort of eyes without recurrence after removal of macular pucker (131 eyes). The eligibility criterion was a follow up of at least 6 months. RESULTS: The best postoperative (0.46 (SD 0.24)) and the final visual acuity (0.39 (0.26)) of eyes with recurrent membranes (42 eyes) was statistically better than preoperative vision (0.27 (0.22)) (p = 0.0003 and 0.0089). Because of reduced or distorted vision eight of the 42 eyes underwent a revitrectomy during the follow up (mean 23 months). Best postoperative visual acuity (0.50 (0.21)) and final visual acuity (0.47 (0.25)) of eyes which received a second vitrectomy (n = 8) were not statistically different from the 32 eyes with recurrence of epiretinal tissue but without revitrectomy (p = 0.253 and 0.343). In addition, eyes with recurrence showed no different visual outcome compared with eyes without recurrence of epiretinal membranes after vitrectomy (p = 0.84). Recurrence of epiretinal membranes was correlated with neither the type of membrane (thick or thin) nor incomplete membrane removal during pars plana vitrectomy. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates the overall favourable visual prognosis of patients with vitrectomy for macular pucker, even with recurrence of the premacular membrane.
CoBaS: Introducing a Component Based Scheduling Framework

Many-Core systems and heterogeneous systems are getting more and more common and may soon enter the mainstream market. To harvest their capabilities to their full potential, the runtime system's scheduling policies have to be adapted and, in many cases, tailored to the specific system. The runtime system can be both an operating system or management infrastructure of an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform. Developing, implementing, and testing those scheduling policies is a challenging task in general. In this work we present CoBaS, a component based scheduling framework for multi and many-core runtime systems. The main purpose of CoBaS is the simplification of the scheduling policy implementation and an increased code reuse to save time during development. CoBaS uses a novel approach to reach that goal. It allows the breakdown of the policy implementation into several components that can be reused. Through composition, a fast prototyping, testing and evaluation of new scheduling policies is possible without implementing every functional part again. CoBaS uses an event based approach to distribute information about system states and state changes between the runtime system and components as well as between components themselves. Furthermore, it has a facility to hand over ordered task sets between components. We have adapted both the Linux and Free BSD kernel to use CoBaS by completely removing the native scheduler. The integration of CoBaS into those kernels shows the feasibility of our approach.
Synthesis modulo recursive functions

We describe techniques for synthesis and verification of recursive functional programs over unbounded domains. Our techniques build on top of an algorithm for satisfiability modulo recursive functions, a framework for deductive synthesis, and complete synthesis procedures for algebraic data types. We present new counterexample-guided algorithms for constructing verified programs. We have implemented these algorithms in an integrated environment for interactive verification and synthesis from relational specifications. Our system was able to synthesize a number of useful recursive functions that manipulate unbounded numbers and data structures.
Familial Sinistrals Avoid Exact Numbers

We report data from an internet questionnaire of sixty number trivia. Participants were asked for the number of cups in their house, the number of cities they know and 58 other quantities. We compare the answers of familial sinistrals – individuals who are left-handed themselves or have a left-handed close blood-relative – with those of pure familial dextrals – right-handed individuals who reported only having right-handed close blood-relatives. We show that familial sinistrals use rounder numbers than pure familial dextrals in the survey responses. Round numbers in the decimal system are those that are multiples of powers of 10 or of half or a quarter of a power of 10. Roundness is a gradient concept, e.g. 100 is rounder than 50 or 200. We show that very round number like 100 and 1000 are used with 25% greater likelihood by familial sinistrals than by pure familial dextrals, while pure familial dextrals are more likely to use less round numbers such as 25, 60, and 200. We then use Sigurd’s (1988, Language in Society) index of the roundness of a number and report that familial sinistrals’ responses are significantly rounder on average than those of pure familial dextrals. To explain the difference, we propose that the cognitive effort of using exact numbers is greater for the familial sinistral group because their language and number systems tend to be more distributed over both hemispheres of the brain. Our data support the view that exact and approximate quantities are processed by two separate cognitive systems. Specifically, our behavioral data corroborates the view that the evolutionarily older, approximate number system is present in both hemispheres of the brain, while the exact number system tends to be localized in only one hemisphere.
Parallel-Correctness and Containment for Conjunctive Queries with Union and Negation

Single-round multiway join algorithms first reshuffle data over many servers and then evaluate the query at hand in a parallel and communication-free way. A key question is whether a given distribution policy for the reshuffle is adequate for computing a given query, also referred to as parallel-correctness. This article extends the study of the complexity of parallel-correctness and its constituents, parallel-soundness and parallel-completeness, to unions of conjunctive queries with negation. As a by-product, it is shown that the containment problem for conjunctive queries with negation is coNEXPTIME-complete.
Event-based feature extraction for analyzing the first damage of coral under temperature and light intensity stressor

This paper deals with event-based feature extraction to analyze the incubation time of coral under two stressor: temperature and light intensity. The study is conducted in Kho Sichang Island, Thailand during hot season. The method for extracting the important events is Hilbert Huang Transform (HHT). The event as a result of Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and Instantaneous Frequency (IF) are confirmed with the time duration of first symptom appearance in Acrophora Hummilis coral. The result shows variation of incubation time of coral disease under different event combination. The important finding in this research is incubation time of coral disease under different situation. It is important for early warning in coral damage.