Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EDP user documentation: The missing link

To make documentation a strong link rather than the missing link between users and data processing systems, this guide introduces the professional-but not programmer-writer to software documentation. Included are recommendations on scope, conventions, language, types of instructions and aspects of format and layout. Procedures for reviewing and updating must also be considered and the draft document must be tested.
The detection of emphatic words using acoustic and lexical features

In this study, we describe an automatic detector for prosodically salient or emphasized words in speech. Knowledge of whether a word is emphatic or not could improve Text-to-Speech synthesis as well as spoken language summarization. Previous work on emphasis detection has focused on the automatic recognition of pitch accents. Our model extends earlier research by automatically identifying emphatic pitch accents, a subset of pitch accents that mark special discourse functions with extreme degrees of salience. The overall best performance achieved by our system was 87.8% correct, 8.0% above baseline performance. The results of a feature selection algorithm show that the top-performing features in our models are primarily acoustic measures. Our work identifies important cues for emphasis in speech and shows that it is possible for an automated system to distinguish between two levels of perceived prominence in pitch accents with a high degree of accuracy.
Lymphatic mapping and sentinel node biopsy in endometrial cancer--a feasibility study using cervical injection of radiotracer and blue dye.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and accuracy of sentinel lymph node (SLN) detection using preoperative lymphoscintigraphy and intra-operative gamma probe/blue dye for endometrial cancer patients. MATERIAL AND METHODS Twenty four consecutive patients with endometrial cancer were recruited. All patients underwent lymphatic mapping and sentinel node biopsy using combined intracervical radiotracer and blue dye injections. Pelvic lymph node dissection was performed for all patients. Para-aortic lymphadenectomy was done in high risk patients. All SLNs were examined by frozen section and Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) permanent sections. RESULTS Pre-operative lymphoscintigraphy showed at least one SLN in 21/24 patients. Intra-operatively, at least one SLN could be harvested by gamma probe and/or blue dye methods. A total of 95 SLNs were detected. Four SLNs were detected only by blue dye, 42 only by radiotracer, and 49 were hot/blue. Median number of SLN per patient was 3. Three patients had positive pelvic lymph nodes. All of them had positive SLN (no false negative case). Frozen section could identify SLN involvement in two of three patients with positive pathology. CONCLUSION Lymphatic mapping and sentinel node biopsy is feasible and accurate in endometrial cancer patients using combined radiotracer and blue dye methods. Frozen section accuracy was lower and underscores the importance of expert pathologists for SLN mapping technique.
A hybrid ankle/hip preemptive falling scheme for humanoid robots

If we are to one day rely on robots as assistive devices they should be capable of mitigating the impact of random disturbances and avoid falling. Humans are surprisingly apt at remaining on their feet when pushed; they rely on reflexes such as bending the ankles and/or the hips, or by taking a step if the magnitude of the disturbance is relatively large. This paper presents a fall avoidance scheme that is capable of applying both ankle and hip strategies on a humanoid robot. While both strategies serve the same purpose, the hip strategy can absorb larger disturbances but has a higher energy overhead and should be avoided when it is not necessary. Our system is capable of detecting at the onset of a disturbance if an ankle or hip strategy is more appropriate. The decision is taken based on a “decision surface” that is delimited by threshold values of the robot's state variables. The control is based on the intuitive Virtual Model Control (VMC) approach. The system is tested on a simulated robot developed under Gazebo. Results show successful fall avoidance with an ability to choose the optimum fall avoidance strategy
Cross-talk between type 3 innate lymphoid cells and the gut microbiota in inflammatory bowel disease

Purpose of review Innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) are a newly-identified population of immune cells prevalent in, but not limited to, mucosal tissues that not only play a significant role in immune homeostasis and host defense, but also in disease pathogenesis. This review highlights the importance of type 3 ILCs (ILC3s) and their interactions with the intestinal microflora, both in maintaining gut health and in the development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Recent findings Distinct lineages of ILCs are defined based on the presence of cell surface proteins, secretion of effector cytokines and expression of master transcription factors that determine their differentiation and inflammatory behavior. These ILC subgroups mirror corresponding CD4+ T-cell subsets, with which they share many phenotypic, morphologic and functional attributes. ILC3s, in particular, through direct and indirect interactions with the gut microbiota, have been identified to promote protection and maintenance of epithelial integrity, as well as to regulate intestinal inflammation and fibrosis, such as that observed in IBD. Summary Gut mucosal ILCs respond to environmental cues, such as diet and microflora composition, which can shape downstream immune function. As such, ILCs represent attractive targets for the development of therapeutic modalities to maintain gut health and to potentially treat IBD.
An epidemic of occupational contact dermatitis from an immersion oil for microscopy in laboratory personnel

Since November 1997, 14 successive cases of occupational contact dermatitis were observed in 13 laboratory technicians and 1 physician, working in a genetics laboratory in Leuven (Belgium) in 3 laboratories of bacteriology in Strasbourg, Montbéliard and Angers, and in the laboratory of hematology in Bordeaux (France). The dermatitis, located on the hands, forearms and face, relapsed after each exposure to an immersion oil for microscopy. Patch tests performed in 10 patients were positive to epoxy resin (ER) in the European standard series (10/10 patients) and to newly formulated Leica® immersion oil (7/7), 1 patient testing negatively with the former oil. A breakdown performed in 2 patients with the oil's ingredients confirmed sensitization to liquid modified ER components, contained at >80% concentration in the oil. The presence of DGEBA was demonstrated by HPLC analysis at a ±30% rate. Although the safety data sheet indicated a revision of the formula, nobody was alerted to the risk of sensitization and the need for skin protection. ERs, as a source of occupational allergy, can provoke epidemics of contact dermatitis in industry. This report of epidemic contact dermatitis from ERs, used for their optical properties in an immersion oil for microscopy, emphasizes the need for perpetual vigilance in occupational medicine and the usefulness of multicentre contacts in dermato‐allergology.
Protein S type III deficiency is no risk factor for venous and arterial thromboembolism in 168 thrombophilic families: a retrospective study

Free protein S rather than total protein S levels are currently measured to detect inherited protein S deficiency. Because type III (free protein S) deficiency is still not established as risk factor for thrombosis, we assessed the absolute risk of venous and arterial thromboembolism in a family cohort study. Annual incidences in first-degree relatives with and without protein S deficiency type III were compared. Probands had experienced thrombosis and had either the prothrombin G20210A mutation, increased factor VIII:C levels or hyperhomocysteinemia. Relatives were tested for these thrombophilic disorders and factor V Leiden. Levels of antithrombin, protein C, total and free protein S, and factor XI:C were additionally measured. Of 500 relatives enrolled, 105 were excluded from analysis because they could not be classified, due to acquired conditions. Protein S deficiency type III was demonstrated in 60/395 remaining relatives (15%). Other thrombophilic defects were equally distributed among deficient and non-deficient relatives. Annual incidences of venous thromboembolism were 0.28 per 100 person-years [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.09–0.66] in deficient relatives versus 0.20 per 100 person-years (95% CI, 0.12–0.30) in non-deficient relatives [hazard ratio, 1.4 (95% CI, 0.4–4.0)]. For arterial thromboembolism these values were 0.16 per 100 person-years (95% CI, 0.03–0.46) versus 0.10 per 100 person-years (95% CI, 0.05–0.19) [hazard ratio, 1.5 (95% CI, 0.3–6.0)]. These results suggest that protein S deficiency type III is not associated with an increased risk of either venous or arterial thromboembolism.
Secure cloud storage service and limited proxy re-encryption for enforcing access control in public cloud

Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm wherein the resources of the computing infrastructure are provided as services over the internet. The benefits offered by the public cloud encourage the data owners/organisations to store their data on to the cloud storage provided by the cloud storage provider. Cloud computing poses new security challenges as the users outsource their data to public cloud. Building a secure cloud storage service on top of a public cloud infrastructure where the service provider is not completely trusted by the data owner is a security challenge. The existing popular storage services does not provide cryptographic guarantee for the security. They are often guided by service level agreements and policies. In this paper, we propose and implement a secure storage service providing a cryptographic guarantee for the security to store, access and share the user's data. We propose the notion of limited proxy re-encryption scheme to restrict the proxy from re-encrypting more than specified number of delegator's ciphertexts. We give the security model and analyse the scheme for security. We use the proposed limited proxy re-encryption scheme as the primitive and design an improved and efficient sharing method for the secure storage service.
Increased Interferon Alpha Expression in Circulating Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cells of HIV-1-Infected Patients

Background:The role of plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDC) and interferon alpha (IFNα) in HIV-1 infection is still unclear. On one hand, HIV-1 disease is associated with a progressive decline of pDC, which displays reduced ability to produce IFNα after in vitro challenge. On the other hand, high IFNα serum levels in HIV-1-infected individuals have been proposed to promote immune hyper-activation and disease progression. Methods:We sought to determine whether disappearance of pDC in HIV-1 disease is due to homing in lymphoid tissues. We also studied IFNα and myxovirus resistance protein A (MxA) expression in unstimulated pDC and correlated these results with selected clinical and laboratory parameters. Results:We found that pDC decline markedly in peripheral blood of patients progressing to disease but at the same time express much higher levels of IFNα and MxA compared to control individuals. On the other hand, we observed steady pDC counts in lymph nodes of HIV-1 patients. The frequency of circulating pDC correlated directly with CD4 cell counts and inversely with viral load. However, we found no correlation between IFNα and MxA expression levels, CD4 counts, and viral load. Conclusions:Circulating pDC decline sharply in the course of HIV-1 disease, but express high levels of IFNα, which may represent a hallmark of systemic immune dysfunction.
Definiteness and Indefiniteness *

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs) determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categories definites have received rather more attention, and more than one researcher has characterized the category of definite NPs by enumerating NP types. Westerståhl (1985), who is concerned only with determiners in the paper cited, gives a very short list: demonstrative NPs, possessive NPs, and definite descriptions. Prince (1992) lists proper names and personal pronouns, as well as NPs with the, a demonstrative, or a possessive NP as determiner. She notes, in addition, that “certain quantifiers (e.g. all, every) have been argued to be definite” (Prince 1992: 299). This list, with the quantifiers added, agrees with that given by Birner & Ward (1998, 114). Ariel (1988, 1990) adds null anaphoric NPs. Casting our net widely, we arrive at the list in Table 1, ordered roughly from most definite or determined in some sense to least.
The prevalence rates of domestic abuse in women attending a family planning clinic

Context Domestic abuse has a detrimental impact on the mental and physical health of a woman. The abusive partner may use physical and sexual violence and ‘control’ the choice of contraception. Objective To examine the prevalence rates of domestic abuse. Design Data collection using anonymous questionnaire. Setting A family planning clinic. Participants Two hundred and ninety-two women. Main outcome measures The prevalence rate of past and present history of domestic abuse and the nature of the abuse. Results One in three women experienced domestic abuse at some time in their life. A significant relationship existed between the age of the woman and experiencing abuse within the last year. Women in full-time employment experienced the highest rates of abuse. Discussion The anonymity of the research and the method of implementation encouraged an excellent response rate. Conclusion During a woman's childbearing years, one-third of women may experience domestic abuse from their partner.
Design of a low-voltage CMOS mixer based on variable load technique

A CMOS active mixer based on variable load technique which can operate at 1.0V supply voltage is proposed and its operation principle is presented. The proposed mixer controls the load impedance according to the LO signal. It has only two stacked transistors at each branch, which is suitable for low-voltage applications. The mixer was designed in 0.18-µm CMOS process and measured in 2.4-GHz ISM band. With a 2.440GHz RF input signal and a 2.442GHz LO signal (4dBm), the conversion gain is 5.3dB, the input-referred third-order intercept point is 4.6dBm, the input-referred 1-dB compression point is -7.4dBm, and the single-sideband noise figure is 21.7dB. Current consumption is 3.5mA at 1.0V supply.
Evaluation of Leukocyte-Endothelial Interactions in Retinal Diseases

Purpose: We reviewed various methodologies for studying leukocyte-retinal endothelial interactions in vivo, and summarized the information obtained from studies employing these methods. Procedures: Fluorescence dye-enhanced scanning laser ophthalmoscopy facilitates study of leukocyte-cell interactions in the retinal microcirculation. Results: Various methods such as adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (AO-SLO), acridine orange digital angiography, and intravital microscopy provided evidence of the mechanisms of leukocyte recruitment in the retina and of their importance in the pathogenesis of various retinal diseases. Conclusions: Leukocyte behavior can be easily examined in the retina in vivo because the optical media is transparent. SLO substantially contributes to visualizing leukocyte-endothelial interactions in retinal vessels, although most of the methods employing SLO could only be used for animal studies. AO-SLO noninvasively demonstrates the movement of each leukocyte in the parafoveal capillaries in humans. Message: AO-SLO could be useful in investigating the leukocyte-retinal endothelial interactions in various diseases in humans.
Increasing the trustworthiness of commodity hardware through software

Advances in formal software verification has produced an operating system that is guaranteed mathematically to be correct and enforce access isolation. Such an operating system could potentially consolidate safety and security critical software on a single device where previously multiple devices were used. One of the barriers to consolidation on commodity hardware is the lack of hardware dependability features. A hardware fault triggered by cosmic rays, alpha particle strikes, etc. potentially invalidates the strong mathematical guarantees. This paper discusses improving the trustworthiness of commodity hardware to enable a verified microkernel to be used in some situations previously needing separate computers. We explore leveraging multicore processors to provide redundancy, and report the results of our initial performance investigation.
An Efficient Algorithm for Answering Graph Reachability Queries

Given a directed graph G, to check whether a node v is reachable from another node u through a path is often required. In a database system, such an operation is called a recursion computation or reachability checking and not efficiently supported. The reason for this is that the space to store the whole transitive closure of G is prohibitively high. In this paper, we address this issue and propose an 0(n2 + bnradic(b)) time algorithm to decompose a directed acyclic graph (DAG) into a minimized set of disjoint chains to facilitate reachability checking, where n is the number of the nodes and b is the DAG's width, defined to be the size of a largest node subset U of the DAG such that for every pair of nodes u, v isin U, there does not exist a path from u to v or from v to u. Using this algorithm, we are able to label a graph in 0(be) time and store all the labels in O(bn) space with O(logb) reachability checking time, where e is the number of the edges of the DAG. The method can also be extended to handle cyclic directed graphs. Experiments have been performed, showing that our method is promising.
Finite element analysis of reinforced concrete and steel fiber reinforced concrete slabs in punching shear

Punching shear capacity of reinforced concrete slabs is influenced by the following material properties: concrete compressive strength, flexural reinforcement ratio, inclusion of steel fibers in the concrete mix, and the reinforcing steel yield strength. A review of current finite element analysis models reveals that a unified approach to include all of these variables into one coherent model does not exist. This thesis presents a finite element model capable of making accurate predictions on the ultimate punching shear load and load – deflection response of a reinforced concrete slab. The model simulates the nonlinear constitutive properties of reinforced concrete by proposing a robust model to represent the behavior through the Concrete Damaged Plasticity (CDP) constitutive model. The thesis defines the parameters for the CDP model in a finite element analysis and develops an expression to mitigate mesh size dependency. A tension – stiffening model is proposed using an exponential decay expression with variables to account for varying concrete compressive strength, flexural reinforcement ratio, inclusion of steel fibers in the concrete mix, and the reinforcing steel yield strength. The model is calibrated using a series of experimental data from the literature and validated by successfully replicating the punching shear behavior of experimental specimens data from the literature.
Pumping Ability of the Hypertrophying Left Ventricle of the Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat

Cardiac pumping ability was assessed during the natural development of left ventricular hypertrophy by elevating venous pressure by infusing Tyrode's solution intravenously to produce peak cardiac output. This experiment was performed on spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) of three age groups (11, 24, and 83 weeks). From 11 to 24 weeks, peak cardiac output of SHR increased in direct proportion to the abnormally increased ventricular mass; Thus peak cardiac output per gram of left ventricle (LV) remained stable. Similar results were obtained for two strains of normotensive rats at each of the same three age groups. Thus, in the normotensive animal peak cardiac output per gram of LV remained stable over a wide range of ages and varying left ventricular weights. However, with progressive elevation of arterial pressure in aging SHR (83 weeks), we observed severe ventricular hypertrophy (100% increases in left ventricular to body weight ratio). In this oldest SHR group, unlike age-matched normotensive rats, there was a marked reduction in the pumping ability per gram of LV. Thus, during the natural development of left ventricular hypertrophy SHR demonstrated both a stable stage of hypertrophy in which the increased left ventricular mass maintained its pumping ability, and a later stage of deterioration in which there was a loss of the normal relationship between ventricular mass and pumping ability.
A fault diagnosis and tolerant method for switched reluctance motor drives

This paper proposes a fault diagnosis and tolerant method for switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives. In many industrial applications, the reliability of the power transistor of the power converter is the main problem. In this paper, two types of faults (short and open) are analyzed through the current pattern of the power converter for SRM drives. The fault is detected when the measured amplitude of the current differs from the normal state. The fault tolerant scheme is applied according to each fault type. Simulations have been performed in the 1.5kW SRM drive and their results are presented to verify the validity of the proposed method.
K 42 Overview

K42 is an open-source research kernel for cache-coherent 64-bit multiprocessor systems. K42 focuses on achieving good performance and scalability, providing a customizable and maintainable system, and being accessible to a large community through an open source development model. To that end, K42 fully supports the Linux API and ABI and uses Linux libraries, device drivers, file systems, and other code. In this paper we present a brief overview of K42, describe the goals of K42 and the core technologies we used to achieve those goals. More detailed descriptions of specific technologies and OS services are available in separate white papers.
Efficient Scheduling of Multiple Mobile Chargers for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we study the deployment of multiple mobile charging vehicles to charge sensors in a large-scale wireless sensor network for a given monitoring period so that none of the sensors will run out of energy, where sensors can be charged by the charging vehicles with wireless energy transfer. To minimize the network operational cost, we first formulate a charging scheduling problem of dispatching multiple mobile charging vehicles to collaboratively charge sensors such that the sum of travelling distance (referred to as the service cost) of these vehicles for this monitoring period is minimized, subject to that none of the sensors will run out of energy. Due to NP-hardness of the problem, we then propose a novel approximation algorithm with a guaranteed approximation ratio, assuming that the energy consumption rate of each sensor does not change for the given monitoring period. Otherwise, we devise a heuristic algorithm through modifications to the approximation algorithm. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms via experimental simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are very promising, which can reduce the service cost by up to 20% in comparison with the service costs delivered by existing ones.