Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Complementary mechanisms of action and rationale for the fixed combination of perindopril and indapamide in treating hypertension – update on clinical utility

Although reducing blood pressure is the most important approach to reduce cardiovascular outcomes in the hypertensive population, the majority of patients fail to attain the targets. Most patients with hypertension need at least 2 antihypertensive agents to achieve blood pressure goals. The 2007 European hypertension guidelines state that combined therapy is needed when monotherapy does not attain blood pressure objectives and as a first-line treatment in high-risk patients. This point has been reinforced in the 2009 update of the European guidelines. The advantages of combination therapy are well documented with the potential for increased antihypertensive efficacy as a result of different mechanisms of action, and a lower incidence of adverse effects because of the lower doses used and the possible compensatory responses. Moreover, the use of fixed dose combinations are specially recommended as they facilitate treatment compliance. The inhibition of the renin-angiotensin system appears to be very beneficial in the treatment of patients with hypertension along the cardiovascular continuum and the combination of a renin-angiotensin system inhibitor and a diuretic is particularly recommended. Many clinical trials have demonstrated the benefits of the fixed combination perindopril/indapamide in the treatment of hypertension. The aim of this manuscript is to update the published data on the efficacy and safety of this fixed combination.
International Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iemss) 7th Intl. Congress on Env. Modelling and Software, a Proposed Approach to the Development of Federated Model Sets

Integrated modelling is a critical environmental modelling tool that brings together sets of models and data to describe the impacts of various management practices and choices within the environment. Although each model may (or may not) run on separate hardware, typically these model sets are organized together as a large integrated, centralized model. These integrated models share a single conceptual schema and semantic framework. Additionally, information flow and convergence of boundary conditions between the models are generally built on a fixed framework. Although this is a logical approach that has proven to be effective, it has several limitations. The models need to be managed and coordinated by a centralized administrator, and adding new models to the model set or revising the existing models can be time consuming and challenging. Moreover, as larger, more complex systems are modelled across various scales, the management and coordination challenges increase geometrically. This paper describes a proposed decentralized approach to the coordinated sharing and exchange of information between autonomous models. The proposed approach consists of independent models and model systems loosely federated together to represent various environmental choices. As envisioned here, a federated model consists of self-describing information entities (e.g., models, data, and user input); a library that contains the set of available models and manages the model development community; a federation schema that defines the purpose of the federation, describes the models used in the federation, and defines the topology of the federation; and a federation management system that coordinates information transport, convergence of boundary conditions, and error. 1 INTRODUCTION Many natural and built systems are composed of interdependent parts, each of which can be represented by a separate model. Integrated modelling seeks to bring these independent models together to form a holistic basis for understanding the behaviour of the system and its component parts in response to various design and management choices (Arnold, 2013). The challenge of integrated modelling is that the integrated modelling process is significantly different from the traditional applications development paradigm. In a traditional application an individual or group of individuals work together to develop a single coherent monolithic information artefact. This artefact may or may not be a single piece of code but shares a common taxonomy, ontology, set of controls, and centralized information processing. If composed of separately conceived and developed models, these models are captured and brought into the larger systems model. Alternately, information is shared between …
Location optimization in opportunistic cooperative wireless networks

In this paper, we investigate the location optimization for opportunistic cooperative networks under Rayleigh fading channels. We study both decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) and derive the closed-form solution for the optimal location. It is interesting to find that the optimal relay location is identical for either DF or AF, and it is related to the power configuration of nodes and the pathloss exponent. Simulation and numerical results prove that the analysis is validated, and with location optimization, the minimal outage probability can be obtained.
Serious Game based on first aid education for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using android mobile devices

Within the group of individuals with ASD there are a number of people who interact well with the new technologies, which makes them the main beneficiaries of this project. The project described in this paper consists of designing and implementing a multimedia application within the framework of Serious Games. The main aim is to create a system composed of a set of Serious Games oriented to first aid education: what to do in certain situations, basic knowledge about healthcare, medical specialties… all employing the use of new technologies such as the Android operating system implemented on mobile phones or tablets. Not only technological results have been analyzed, but the opinions of users and specialists taking part in the application's validation and initial testing have also been taken into account.
Energetic radiation and the sulfur chemistry of protostellar envelopes: Submillimeter interferometry of AFGL 2591

Context. The chemistry in the inner few thousand AU of accreting envelopes around young stellar objects is predicted to vary greatly with far-UV and X-ray irradiation by the central star. Aims. We search for molecular tracers of high-energy irradiation by the protostar in the hot inner envelope. Methods. The Submillimeter Array (SMA) has observed the high-mass star forming region AFGL 2591 in lines of CS, SO, HCN, HCN(v(2) = 1), and (HCN)-N-15 with 0.6" resolution at 350 GHz probing radial scales of 600-3500 AU for an assumed distance of 1 kpc. The SMA observations are compared with the predictions of a chemical model fitted to previous single-dish observations. Results. The CS and SO main peaks are extended in space at the FWHM level, as predicted in the model assuming protostellar X-rays. However, the main peak sizes are found smaller than modeled by nearly a factor of 2. On the other hand, the lines of CS, HCN, and (HCN)-N-15, but not SO and HCN(v(2) = 1), show pedestal emissions at radii less than or similar to 3500 AU that are not predicted. All lines except SO show a secondary peak within the approaching outflow cone. A dip or null in the visibilities caused by a sharp decrease in abundance with increasing radius is not observed in CS and only tentatively in SO. Conclusions. The emission of protostellar X-rays is supported by the good fit of the modeled SO and CS amplitude visibilities including an extended main peak in CS. The broad pedestals can be interpreted by far-UV irradiation in a spherically non-symmetric geometry, possibly comprising outflow walls on scales of 3500-7000 AU. The extended CS and SO main peaks suggest sulfur evaporation near the 100 K temperature radius. The effects of the corresponding abundance jumps may be reduced in visibility plots by smoothing due to inhomogeneity at the evaporation radius, varying by +/- 10% or more in different directions.
Spectrum Sharing Models and Possible Bands on Management Policy

A shared band of spectrum may be managed directly by the regulator, or this responsibility may be delegated in large part to a license-holder. New forms of spectrum sharing that greatly improve spectral efficiency and alleviate scarcity, if policies are in place that support these forms of sharing. On the other hand, new technology that is inconsistent with spectrum policy will have little impact. This paper discusses general approaches to viable spectrum sharing models and possible bands in Korea that can enable or facilitate the use of many spectrum-sharing arrangements, where spectrum sharing arrangements are categorized as being based on coexistence, and as either sharing among equals or primary-secondary sharing. The next, spectrum sharing possible bands in Korea referred to sharing among equals and a primary licensed and one or more secondary users, where secondary users may not cause harmful interference to the primary spectrum user. These approaches offers policy-makers the opportunity to improve new challenges for policy enforcement in primary licensed networks as broadcasting, mobile, enterprise, and unlicensed. First of all, expanding unlicensed bands and new spectrum commons are expected to heat up and also seek innovative ways to leads to highly efficient use of spectrum in which will not cause harmful interference. Keywords— spectrum policy, spectrum sharing, unlicensed band, primary-secondary sharing
Compressive sampling with chaotic dynamical systems

We investigate the possibility of using different chaotic sequences to construct measurement matrices in compressive sampling. In particular, we consider sequences generated by Chua, Lorenz and Rössler dynamical systems and investigate the accuracy of reconstruction when using each of them to construct measurement matrices. Chua and Lorenz sequences appear to be suitable to construct measurement matrices. We compare the recovery rate of the original sequence with that obtained by using Gaussian, Bernoulli and uniformly distributed random measurement matrices. We also investigate the impact of correlation on the recovery rate. It appears that correlation does not influence the probability of exact reconstruction significantly.
Fluctuation-dissipation relations for a general class of master equations

The fluctuation-dissipation relation is calculated for a class of stochastic models obeying a master equation. The transition rates are assumed to obey detailed balance also in the presence of a field. It is shown that in general the linear response cannot be expressed via time-derivatives of the correlation function alone, but an additional function $\xi(t,t_w)$, which has been rarely discussed before is required. This function depends on the two times also relevant for the response and the correlation and vanishes under equilibrium conditions. It can be expressed in terms of the propagators and the transition rates of the master equation but it is not related to any physical observable in an obvious way. Instead, it is determined by inhomogeneities in the temporal evolution of the distribution function of the stochastic variable under consideration. $\xi(t,t_w)$ is considered for some examples of stochastic models, some of which exhibit true non-equilibrium dynamics and others approach equilibrium in the long term. In particular, models in which a relevant variable, e.g. a magnetization, is related in a prescribed way to the states of the system are considered as projections from a composite Markov process. From these model calculations, it is conjectured that $\xi(t,t_w)$ vanishes when one is concerned with measurements of the analogue of a structure factor for large wave-vectors or if every transition among the states randomizes the value of the stochastic variable considered.
Benchmark for OLAP on NoSQL technologies comparing NoSQL multidimensional data warehousing solutions

The plethora of data warehouse solutions has created a need comparing these solutions using experimental benchmarks. Existing benchmarks rely mostly on the relational data model and do not take into account other models. In this paper, we propose an extension to a popular benchmark (the Star Schema Benchmark or SSB) that considers non-relational NoSQL models. To avoid data post-processing required for using this data with NoSQL systems, the data is generated in different formats. To exploit at best horizontal scaling, data can be produced in a distributed file system, hence removing disk or partition sizes as limit for the generated dataset. Experimental work proves improved performance of our new benchmark.
Dynamic speech emotion recognition with state-space models

Automatic emotion recognition from speech has been focused mainly on identifying categorical or static affect states, but the spectrum of human emotion is continuous and time-varying. In this paper, we present a recognition system for dynamic speech emotion based on state-space models (SSMs). The prediction of the unknown emotion trajectory in the affect space spanned by Arousal, Valence, and Dominance (A-V-D) descriptors is cast as a time series filtering task. The state space models we investigated include a standard linear model (Kalman filter) as well as novel non-linear, non-parametric Gaussian Processes (GP) based SSM. We use the AVEC 2014 database for evaluation, which provides ground truth A-V-D labels which allows state and measurement functions to be learned separately simplifying the model training. For the filtering with GP SSM, we used two approximation methods: a recently proposed analytic method and Particle filter. All models were evaluated in terms of average Pearson correlation R and root mean square error (RMSE). The results show that using the same feature vectors, the GP SSMs achieve twice higher correlation and twice smaller RMSE than a Kalman filter.
The Orchard Algorithm: Building Multicast Trees for P2P Video Multicasting Without Free-Riding

The main purpose of many current peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is off-line file sharing. However, a potentially very promising use of such networks is to share video streams (e.g., TV programs) in real time. In order to do so, the peers in a P2P network who are interested in the same video stream may employ Application Level Multicasting (ALM). In existing P2P networks, peers may exhibit behavior which is problematic for ALM: they are not always willing to donate resources (free-riding), and they may arrive and depart at a high rate (churn). In this paper we propose the Orchard algorithm for creating and maintaining ALM trees in P2P networks, which deals with both these problems. By employing a technique called Multiple Description Coding, we split a video stream into several substreams. Orchard creates a dynamic spanning tree for each of these substreams in such a way that in the resulting forest, no peer has to forward more substreams than it receives. Based on an analysis of the expected performance of Orchard and on experiments in a real system, we find that Orchard is capable of maintaining a multicast forest, even when peers join and leave the forest at a high rate.
EU Company Law: Past, Present and … Future?

Abstract As 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the approval of the first Directive on EU Company Law, it is a good time to review its past and present in order to assess whether its foreseeable future meets the needs of European enterprises. The study of the evolution of EU Company Law demonstrates that its evolution has been discontinuous. It started with a lot of ambition, but suffered a crisis that conditioned its future development: regulated issues were considerably restricted, legal instruments were extended and legislative technique was modified, essentially to circumvent the reservations of the Member States. It could seem that these changes are working, because the Action Plan 2012 is starting to bear fruits. Three legal rules have been approved and several projects are underway. Nonetheless, there are reasons to doubt whether EU Company Law is meeting its objectives: the impact of the new legal rules is minimal, the future of the project is uncertain and, although the bureaucratic burdens have been reduced, there are various needs of European firms, especially those of SMEs, that have not been yet satisfied.
SPLiCE: a software product line for healthcare

In face of well-known inhibitor factors for the dissemination of Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) - "e.g., high development cost, lack of standardization, and technology-orientation" - model-driven engineering (MDE) in general, and OMG's model-driven architecture (MDA) in particular, has been referred to in the medical informatics literature as a cost-effective proposal to advance maintainable HIS. In this paper, we propose an MDE method for HISes that goes beyond MDA. This method seeks a higher degree of maintainability and reuse by adhering to three main principles: transversalization of data models and architecture models, dualization of information and clinical data models, and stylization of architecture models. To support this method on the generation of HIS skeletons, we are progressing work on the development of a software product line called SPLiCE (Software Product Line for healthCarE) that weaves together clinical data models described according to the openEHR specifications and architecture models specified in the Acme language.
Inhaled corticosteroids and mortality in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Background: Clinical studies suggest that inhaled corticosteroids reduce exacerbations and improve health status in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, their effect on mortality is unknown. Methods: A pooled analysis, based on intention to treat, of individual patient data from seven randomised trials (involving 5085 patients) was performed in which the effects of inhaled corticosteroids and placebo were compared over at least 12 months in patients with stable COPD. The end point was all-cause mortality. Results: Overall, 4% of the participants died during a mean follow up period of 26 months. Inhaled corticosteroids reduced all-cause mortality by about 25% relative to placebo. Stratification by individual trials and adjustments for age, sex, baseline post-bronchodilator percentage predicted forced expiratory volume in 1 second, smoking status, and body mass index did not materially change the results (adjusted hazard ratio (HR) 0.73; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.55 to 0.96). Although there was considerable overlap between subgroups in terms of effect sizes, the beneficial effect was especially noticeable in women (adjusted HR 0.46; 95% CI 0.24 to 0.91) and former smokers (adjusted HR 0.60; 95% CI 0.39 to 0.93). Conclusions: Inhaled corticosteroids reduce all-cause mortality in COPD. Further studies are required to determine whether the survival benefits persist beyond 2–3 years.
A Reenement Technique in Sdl Design of a Telephone Exchange 1

Formal description of a Telephone Exchange involves concurrent call processing. In the speciication language SDL such concurrently operating processes can easily be speciied by independent instances of a single process type for call handling. In this paper we suggest a method that rst simpliies each instance of such a call handling process by reducing it to a single-state process, and then reenes it by reducing multiple instances of such a process into a single process, thereby reducing both the interleaving freedom and required resources. The method is illustrated for a realistic telephone exchange example. The whole SDL design for the telephone exchange is reviewed.
A Novel Design Approach and Operational Strategy for an Active Ankle-Foot Prosthesis

1 Introduction In order to enable lower limb amputees to regain natural and versatile walking patterns, the development of active ankle-foot prostheses is required. During locomotion, above-knee amputees show a lower walking speed for keeping the energy effort in the range of non-amputee walking [2]. To avoid this, prostheses with adaptable characteristics and the possibility to store and reuse energy can provide advantages like more dynamic locomotion and secure operation on uneven terrains without increasing the user s energy effort. Using an actuated prosthesis, a supporting torque can be applied to the ankle joint and thus enable users to walk with less energy effort. By this, such components might also protect amputees against medical consequences due to compensation movements [1]. 2 State of Art The large majority of commercially available foot prostheses are passive prostheses with a fixed angle between shank and foot [3]. The applied elastic elements like carbon springs are designed for a basic adjustment to uneven terrain and a partial recuperation of energy during a gait cycle. Further, the mechanical characteristics can be customized by design, e.g. by splitting those springs to support eversion or inversion motions. Semi active foot prostheses do not support users with direct actuation, but are able to adjust position or characteristics of the foot and thus can reduce energy effort and provide more natural gait patterns. Currently, there are two active ankle foot prostheses coming into the market: The iWalk BiOM [4] and the Springactive Odyssey [5]. Further, active prosthetic ankle joints are developed in academic research projects such as the AMP Foot 2.0 [6]. Those prostheses support locomotion with a motor spring complex. While most active approaches use a serial elastic actuator (SEA) composed of a motor, gears to transform rotational into translational motion, and springs, parallel setups of spring and actuator can also be applied. 3 Concept In [1] it is shown that the creation of a natural walking pattern requires variable ankle stiffness, energy storage as well as active support synchronized with individual gait. Figure 1. The drive train consists of two DC motors with a power of 90W and a continuous torque of 0.2Nm. Two ball screws with gear ratios of 6283 are attached to the motors to transform the rotational motion of the motor shaft into a translational motion of the screws. The lower ends of the screws are connected to two parallel extension springs placed in …
Mononuclear Phagocytes in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients and their Relatives – Family Similarity

The aim of this work was to study the peripheral blood monocyte functions in patients with advanced RA and their predisposed to RA relatives in comparison with those in women, not hereditary tainted with autoimmune diseases (donors). In groups comprising 24 RA patients, 24 relatives, and 24 donors the following monocyte functions were assessed: engulfment and digestion (radioisotope method); release of lysosomal glucuronidase in response to opsonized zymosan (fluorescent method); reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation (chemiluminescence), and serum levels of proinflammatory cytokines (ELISA). The monocyte specific feature in patients and their relatives is chiefly extracellular digestion due to the delayed engulfment. The digestive activity, probably inhibited in relatives, is increased in advanced RA. ROS generation by the cells and serum levels of TNF-alpha and IL-1-beta are abundant both in the patients and their relatives. High levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, presumably, of monocyte origin, and increased levels of stimulated ROS generation may be due to the priming and prolonged activation of monocytes in relatives. Conclusion: We show for the first time that the functioning of circulating mononuclear phagocytes in the assumed to be healthy predisposed to RA individuals differs from that in the healthy people not hereditary tainted with autoimmune diseases and in general resembles the functioning of the cells in the patients with advanced RA.