Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic associations with valvular calcification and aortic stenosis.

BACKGROUND Limited information is available regarding genetic contributions to valvular calcification, which is an important precursor of clinical valve disease. METHODS We determined genomewide associations with the presence of aortic-valve calcification (among 6942 participants) and mitral annular calcification (among 3795 participants), as detected by computed tomographic (CT) scanning; the study population for this analysis included persons of white European ancestry from three cohorts participating in the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology consortium (discovery population). Findings were replicated in independent cohorts of persons with either CT-detected valvular calcification or clinical aortic stenosis. RESULTS One SNP in the lipoprotein(a) (LPA) locus (rs10455872) reached genomewide significance for the presence of aortic-valve calcification (odds ratio per allele, 2.05; P=9.0×10(-10)), a finding that was replicated in additional white European, African-American, and Hispanic-American cohorts (P<0.05 for all comparisons). Genetically determined Lp(a) levels, as predicted by LPA genotype, were also associated with aortic-valve calcification, supporting a causal role for Lp(a). In prospective analyses, LPA genotype was associated with incident aortic stenosis (hazard ratio per allele, 1.68; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.32 to 2.15) and aortic-valve replacement (hazard ratio, 1.54; 95% CI, 1.05 to 2.27) in a large Swedish cohort; the association with incident aortic stenosis was also replicated in an independent Danish cohort. Two SNPs (rs17659543 and rs13415097) near the proinflammatory gene IL1F9 achieved genomewide significance for mitral annular calcification (P=1.5×10(-8) and P=1.8×10(-8), respectively), but the findings were not replicated consistently. CONCLUSIONS Genetic variation in the LPA locus, mediated by Lp(a) levels, is associated with aortic-valve calcification across multiple ethnic groups and with incident clinical aortic stenosis. (Funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and others.).
Contribution to diffuse gamma-rays in the Galactic Centre region from unresolved millisecond pulsars

Diffuse gamma-rays in the Galactic Centre region have been studied. We propose that there exists a population of millisecond pulsars in the Galactic Centre, which emit GeV gamma-rays through synchrotron-curvature radiation as predicted by outer gap models. These GeV gamma-rays from unresolved millisecond pulsars probably contribute to the diffuse gamma-ray spectrum detected by EGRET which displays a break at a few GeV. We have used a Monte Carlo method to obtain simulated samples of millisecond pulsars in the Galactic Centre region covered by EGRET (∼1.°5) according to the different period and magnetic field distributions from observed millisecond pulsars in the Galactic field and globular clusters, and superposed their synchrotron-curvature spectra to derive the total GeV flux. Our simulated results suggest that there probably exist about 6000 unresolved millisecond pulsars in the region of angular resolution of EGRET, the emissions of which could contribute significantly to the observed diffuse gamma-rays in the Galactic Centre.
Pulse Skipping Modulated DC to DC Step Down Converter Under Discontinuous Conduction Mode

Reduced switching loss favours Pulse Skipping Modulation mode of switching dc-to-dc converters at light loads. Under certain conditions the converter operates in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM). Inductor current starts from zero in each switching cycle as the switching frequency is constant and not adequately high. A DC-to-DC buck converter is modelled and simulated in this paper under DCM. Effect of ESR of the filter capacitor in input current frequency components is studied. The converter is studied for its operation under input voltage and load variation. The operating frequency is selected to be close to and above audio range. Keywords—Buck converter, Discontinuous conduction mode, Electromagnetic Interference, Pulse Skipping Modulation.
Ovarian cancer: new developments in clear cell carcinoma and hopes for targeted therapy

Until recently, ovarian clear cell carcinoma was recognized by its unique morphology and unfavorable patient outcome primarily due to tumor chemoresistance. Recently, specific molecular characteristics of ovarian clear cell carcinoma, such as PI3CA mutation, ARID1a mutation and MET amplification, have been elucidated. In addition, an association between endometriosis and the tumor has also been a focus of research in recent years. The aim of this review is to discuss the specificity and importance of molecular changes and various intriguing points that are not solved until today. Finally, future aspects, including hopes for the development of novel therapies, are discussed.
Predictive analog-digital-conversion in fiber optics communication

Advances in digital hardware had enabled a new generation of fiber optics communication receivers. Extensive digital-signal-processing (DSP) allows compensating for channel impairments and, in turn, scaling up in data rate. One of the main challenges in modern receivers is implementing a high-rate, high-precision analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) that could meet the system requirements. Since ADCs technology is usually far from the highest rates available, reducing required resolution is imperative for present and future receivers. In this paper a predictive quantization approach is investigated. We show that common optical channel and components impairments introduce sufficient waveform correlation, which may be leveraged to significantly improve the Analog-to-digital-conversion process. Simulation results had shown that implementing low-complexity predictive quantization systems improves SNR performance, and may be used to reduce required resolution.
Two Explanations for Negativity Effects in Political Behavior

Evidence is provided for two different types of negativity effects in political behavior, a perceptual "figure-ground" negativity based on the greater salience of negative information in a largely positive world, and a motivational "cost orientation" negativity based on the survival value of avoiding costs rather than approaching gains. It is argued that the perception of presidential candidates is affected by both types of negativity effects, but that negativity in congressional elections is based solely on perceptual processes. The implications of these two different types of negativity effects for the future of American politics are discussed.
Student's t robust bundle adjustment algorithm

Bundle adjustment (BA) is the problem of refining viewing and structure estimates in multi-view scene reconstruction subject to a scene model (e.g. a set of geometric constraints). Mismatched interest points cause serious problems for the standard least squares approach, as a single mismatch (i.e. outlier) will affect the entire reconstruction. We propose a novel robust Student's t BA algorithm (RST-BA), using the heavy tailed t-distribution to model reprojection errors. We design a custom algorithm to find the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates of the camera and viewing parameters. The algorithm exploits the same structure as L2-BA, matching the performance of fast L2 implementations. RST-BA is more accurate than either L2-BA or L2-BA with a σ-edit outlier removal rule for a range of simulated error generation scenarios. RST-BA also achieved better median reproduction error recovery than SBA [1] or SBA with outlier removal for large publicly available datasets.
Sick days at work.

The sequential deletion method is generally used to locate the functional domain of a protein. With this method, in order to find the various N-terminal truncated mutants, researchers have to investigate the ATG-like codons, to design various multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) forward primers and to do several PCR experiments. This web server (N-terminal Truncated Mutants Generator for cDNA) will automatically generate groups of forward PCR primers and the corresponding reverse PCR primers that can be used in a single batch of a multiplex PCR experiment to extract the various N-terminal truncated mutants. This saves much time and money for those who use the sequential deletion method in their research. This server is available at http:// oblab.cs. nchu.edu. tw:8080/WebSDL/.
Performance evaluation of front-end algorithms for robust speech recognition

Conventional speech feature extraction front-end algorithms (LPCC, PLP and MFCC) suffer severe performance degradation in noisy environment, especially when there is a noise level mismatch between the training and testing environments. Two more recently developed algorithms, namely Gammatone Cepstral Coefficients (GTCC) and Zero-crossings with Peak Amplitude (ZCPA), are claimed to have better performance than the conventional algorithms. To verify the claim, HMMbased speaker-independent continuous speech recognition experiments are conducted using TIMIT database. In these experiments, training data is kept in clean condition while various levels of white Gaussian noise are added to the testing data. Results suggest that GTCC outperforms PLP, which is the best amongst the three conventional algorithms, by 1.6% in 0dB SNR to 4.4% in 20dB SNR. While ZCPA does not perform well in clean conditions, it performs better than PLP by 1.5% in 20dB SNR to 4.1% in 0dB SNR. However, it has much higher computational complexity than all other evaluated algorithms.
Personalizing the dynamic information resources in a self organized web system using CAS and MAS

The Web is a constantly growing dynamic environment where the components are changed in non-linear ways. These components represent the targets to researches in order to better understand the behavior of the Web, where the owners and the users in this environment exist as out factors. Web page Usage information is the term which describes ways and methods of using the Web. Various factors affect the use of the diversity of the resources in the Web, The non-linear way of its growth, and the evolution in the methods for how we build the Web pages which eventually leads to reflecting the users’ interests. Personalizing the results of search engines are created to meet the users need for information on the Web. Generally, the researchers seek user’s satisfaction through utilizing these search engines to serve the user. One of the most efficient methods in this domain is the use of semantic measure algorithms to personalize and recognize the outputs of the information resources according to the users' needs. The Web is represented as three aspects: Content, Structure, and Usage. Three components can lead to a personalized Web in order to reinforce the semantic value. This paper will present a model that uses new Web Usage information to see the effects on the semantic values, and how it will help us achieve a robust well personalized and organized Web. It will consider the Usage space as the field of our research as we will simulate this environment in the MAS “Multi Agents System” and CAS “Complex Adaptive System “paradigm.
Dynamic characteristic analysis and control parameter estimation of tubular type moving-magnet linear actuator with Halbach array

This paper deals with the dynamic characteristic analysis and parameter estimation of tubular type moving-magnet linear actuator with Halbach array. Control parameters are estimated by experiments and two-dimensional (2-D) analytical solution, derived in terms of magnetic vector potential and cylindrical coordinate systems. And then, the dynamic simulation algorithm is obtained from the voltage and motion equation. Finally, for various values of frequency, the dynamic simulation results for the characteristics of the voltage, current and displacement and the variation of displacement with voltage are given and validated extensively by experiments
A sectorized object matching approach for breast magnetic resonance image similarity study

In this paper, we propose a new image retrieval method consisting of shape feature data. In this approach we assume the images are classified into single objects through other known classification methods such as K-means and SVM algorithms. From collected binary object images, we develop a new algorithm that has less computation but equal efficiency as using shape feature - the curvature of the contour. We have experimented with classified binary object image from actual breast medical images used in real medical diagnosis. Actual experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves equal results against traditional image retrieval using curvature of the contour with higher efficiency.
Frequency characteristic of resonance- based wireless energy transfer

For the purpose of practical application of wireless energy transfer, the frequency characteristic is investigated based on an electromagnetic resonance system. Considering the circuit model of electromagnetic coupling theory, different working status of receiver, including the performance of system harmonic oscillation, damped oscillation and forced oscillation is analyzed from the physical standpoint. With the discussion to the forced oscillation status of the receiver, the relation between frequency of external excitation of alternating magnetic field and the power of the transmission system is derivated. Depending on the type of excitation source of power supply device (voltage source or current source), the mathematical expression with frequency and other circuit parameters which can make the transfer system generate the electromagnetic resonance is put forward and point out the power of the load will be maximum when the receiver circuit resonates. This conclusion is verified by the simulation and the experiment results.
RIGOR IN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION RESEARCH REPORTING: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DISCIPLINE Nicholas E. Fuhrman, Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist

Agricultural education has been criticized for publishing research lacking many of the rigorous qualities found in publications of other disciplines. A few agricultural education researchers have suggested strategies for improving the rigor with which agricultural education studies report on methods and findings. The purpose of this study was to determine whether studies in agricultural education have followed the methodological suggestions proposed by these select researchers. Every study published in the Journal of Agricultural Education between 2000 and 2006 (N = 244) was examined using content analysis techniques. Specifically, quantitative, inferential studies were assessed with regard to the conveyance of practical significance, the stating of research hypotheses, and explicitly acknowledging how statistical assumptions were addressed and confirmed. Of the 88 inferential studies published in the Journal since 2000, 52% did not convey the practical significance of their research findings and 74% did not explicitly state research hypotheses. Nearly 80% did not acknowledge how the assumptions associated with statistical tests used were addressed and confirmed. Studies that conveyed practical significance, stated hypotheses, and addressed statistical assumptions are cited as examples to follow. Perhaps an increase in pages allotted to each article would provide authors with adequate space to report such items.
kIP: a Measured Approach to IPv6 Address Anonymization

Privacy-minded Internet service operators anonymize IPv6 addresses by truncating them to a fixed length, perhaps due to long-standing use of this technique with IPv4 and a belief that it's "good enough. " We claim that simple anonymization by truncation is suspect since it does not entail privacy guarantees nor does it take into account some common address assignment practices observed today. To investigate, with standard activity logs as input, we develop a counting method to determine a lower bound on the number of active IPv6 addresses that are simultaneously assigned, such as those of clients that access World-Wide Web services. In many instances, we find that these empirical measurements offer no evidence that truncating IPv6 addresses to a fixed number of bits, e.g., 48 in common practice, protects individuals' privacy. To remedy this problem, we propose kIP anonymization, an aggregation method that ensures a certain level of address privacy. Our method adaptively determines variable truncation lengths using parameter k, the desired number of active (rather than merely potential) addresses, e.g., 32 or 256, that can not be distinguished from each other once anonymized. We describe our implementation and present first results of its application to millions of real IPv6 client addresses active over a week's time, demonstrating both feasibility at large scale and ability to automatically adapt to each network's address assignment practice and synthesize a set of anonymous aggregates (prefixes), each of which is guaranteed to cover (contain) at least k of the active addresses. Each address is anonymized by truncating it to the length of its longest matching prefix in that set.
Beyond solitary play in computer games: The social practices of eSports

This article adopts the theory of social practices as a critical lens for understanding computer game consumption as multiple ‘nexuses of doings and sayings’, which represent the elements of and are situated within the broader context of consumer culture. Specifically, we explore an emerging phenomenon of an organised and competitive approach to computer gaming, referred to as ‘electronic sports’ or ‘eSports’, by offering a novel conceptualisation of eSports as an assemblage of consumption practices. In our endeavour, we illustrate that eSports practices are performed by consumers through multiple interconnected nexuses of unique understandings, tools, competencies and skills, whereby these nexuses transcend the elements of digital play to include the watching and governing of eSports. Accordingly, eSports consumers take on multiple roles beyond being considered merely as ‘players’, engaging with this phenomenon using different nexuses of practical activities. Our findings suggest that, in order to gain a more comprehensive perspective of what consumers actually do with computer games, we should explore gaming consumption in relation to different social practices that co-constitute multifaceted consumer engagement within this genre.
A Review on Application of Differential Evolution Algorithm for Solution of Optimal Power Flow Problem

In this paper we have a tendency to deals with the various sorts of optimization of power flow downside through interconnected system. The target of this paper is to use Differential Evolution formula for resolution optimum power flow problem. The target of this paper is to attenuate the overall fuel price of thermal generating units having quadratic price characteristics subjected to limits on generator real and reactive power outputs, bus voltages, electrical device faucets and power flow of transmission lines of various ways of optimum power flow. The work can introduce an abstract summary and elaborate rationalization of Differential Evolution formula also as however it may be used for resolution. Optimum power flow issues. Inherent defect of the normal ways of finding the optimum power answer are going to be mentioned at the side of different biological process ways of finding optimum power answer. A comparative study of various biological process programming technique is going to be done and also the effectiveness of Differential Evolution formula is going to be tested. The projected methodology is going to be tested beneath simulated conditions on IEEE systems. The optimum power flow results victimization Differential Evolution are going to be compared with different ways.
NASAL CARRIAGE OF METHICILLIN-RESISTANT STAPHYLOCOCCUS AUREUS IN SCHOOL CHILDREN WITHOUT IDENTIFIABLE RISK FACTORS IN NORTHERN TAIWAN

In a nasal culture survey of school children, 5 (1.9%) of 262 school children and 18 (13%) of 137 health care workers (HCWs) were colonized with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). One common genotype accounted for most isolates from the school children and from the HCWs. Based on genotyping, MRSA strains circulating in the community in Taiwan were similar to the hospital strains.
A linguistic K-nearest prototype with an application to management surveys

For many years, one of the problems in pattern recognition is classification. There are many methods that deal with this type of problem. The data sets are sometimes in the binary form (real number) and represented by vectors of binary numbers (real numbers) although there are uncertainties in the data, e.g., data collected in management questionnaires. In this paper, we developed a linguistic K-nearest prototype algorithm with vectors of fuzzy numbers as inputs. This algorithm is based on the extension principle and the decomposition theorem. We apply this algorithm to linguistic vectors derived from a set of thirty-nine subjects answering questions about students' satisfaction with communication to their university.
Motor-Unit Recruitment in the Trapezius Muscle during a Computer Typing Task

The possible linkage between intense computer work and chronic shoulder pain was studied on the basis of the motor-unit overuse theory. By using a four-lead wire-electrode intramuscular electromyography was recorded from the upper trapezius muscle of seven healthy subjects during a computer typing task. The task consisted of text entry from a manuscript. Motor unit action potentials (MUAPs) were tracked using an automatic classification program with possibilities for manual corrections. The duration of the work task was 10 min. After 5 minutes typing, one surface and three intramuscular EMG channels were sampled in periods of 20 seconds each minute (5 periods in total). For the surface EMG, the maximum voluntary electrical activation was measured, for normalization, in the end of the experiment. One to twelve units were identified per subject (median 6, totally 40). In six of the seven subjects at least half of the motor units were identified in all five minutes (in total, 22 of 34). In the seventh subject, four units that were identified in minutes 6 and 7 were substituted by five others that were active in the remaining three minutes. The surface EMG RMS values ranged from 1.3 to 8.5 %MVE (mean, 4.7). Since many of the motor units were active in all periods, the basic hypothesis was supported, but since others were active in a subset of the periods, it is was concluded that long time measurements are needed to anatomize the recruitment pattern during enduring work with computer input devices.
Distributed MPC for thermal house comfort with shifting loads and limited energy resources

This paper presents a distributed predictive control methodology for indoor thermal comfort that optimizes the consumption of a limited shared energy resource using a demand-side management approach that involves a power price auction and shifting appliance loads. The control objective of each subsystem is to minimize the energy cost while maintaining the indoor temperature in range. In a distributed coordinated environment, the control uses multiple dynamically decoupled agents (one for each subsystem/house) aiming to achieve satisfaction of available energy coupling constraints. The system is simulated with several houses in a distributed environment.