Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increased life expectancy of world class male athletes.

Reliable data are scanty on the incidence of chronic diseases and life expectancy (LE) of highly trained athletes. We therefore studied Finnish male world class athletes to estimate the LE of athletes. Finnish team members in the Olympic games, World or European championships or intercountry competitions during 1920-1965 in track and field athletics, cross-country skiing, soccer, ice hockey, basketball, boxing, wrestling, weight lifting, and shooting were included (N = 2613 men). The reference cohort, 1712 men, was selected from the Finnish Defence Forces conscription register matched on age and area of residence. All referents were classified completely healthy at the time of induction to military service. The stratified Kaplan-Meier product limit method and the Cox proportional hazards model were used to estimate the life expectancies and the mortality odds ratios (OR) and their confidence limits. The mean LE adjusted for occupational group, marital status, and the age at entry to the cohort (and its 95% confidence limits) was in endurance sports (long distance running and cross-country skiing) 75.6 (73.6, 77.5) yr; in team games (soccer, ice hockey, basketball, as well as jumpers and short-distance runners from track and field (73.9 (72.7, 75.1) yr; in power sports (boxing, wrestling, weight lifting, and throwers from field athletics) 71.5 (70.4, 72.2) yr; and in the reference group 69.9 (69.0, 70.9) yr. The increased mean life expectancies were mainly explained by decreased cardiovascular mortality (endurance sports mortality odds ratio OR = 0.49 (95% CL 0.26, 0.93), team sports OR = 0.61 (0.41, 0.92) compared with referents). For maximum life span no differences between the groups were observed. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Sharing a Placenta is Associated With a Greater Similarity in DNA Methylation in Monochorionic Versus Dichorionic Twin Pars in Blood at Age 14

Monozygotic (MZ) twins provide a natural system for investigating developmental plasticity and the potential epigenetic origins of disease. A major difference in the intrauterine environment between MZ pairs is whether they share a common placenta or have separate placentas. Using DNA methylation measured at >400,000 points in the genome on the Illumina HumanMethylation450 array, we demonstrate that the co-twins of MZ pairs (average age of 14) that shared a common placenta (n = 18 pairs) have more similar DNA methylation levels in blood throughout the genome relative to those with separate placentas (n = 16 pairs). Functional annotation of the genomic regions that show significantly different correlation between monochorionic (MC) and dichorionic (DC) MZ pairs found an over-representation of genes involved in the regulation of transcription, neuronal development, and cellular differentiation. These results support the idea that prenatal environmental exposures may have a lasting effect on an individual's epigenetic landscape, and the potential for these changes to have functional consequences.
An average velocity-based routing protocol with low end-to-end delay for wireless sensor networks

To reduce energy consumption, in most MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks, listen-sleep cycles are adopted. However, even though it is a good solution for energy efficiency, it may introduce a large end-to-end delay due to sleep delay, since a node with a packet to transmit should wait until the next-hop node of the packet awakes. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we propose the average velocity-based routing (AVR) protocol for wireless sensor networks that aims at reducing the end-to-end delay. The AVR protocol is a kind of a geographic routing protocol that considers both location of a node and waiting time of a packet at the MAC layer. When a node can use information of n-hop away neighbor nodes, it calculates the n-hop average velocity for each of its one-hop neighbor nodes and forwards a packet to the neighbor node that has the highest n-hop average velocity. Simulation results show that as the knowledge range, n, increases, the average end-to-end delay decreases.
Robot navigation in simulated pedestrian areas based on swarm intelligence

In this paper we present a method that relies on swarm intelligence to confront the problem of navigating in non-structured dynamic environments. The collective behavior of a group of particles is used to find an obstacle-free path that is able to adapt its course as the structure of the environment changes. Of particular importance is the rule that governs collision avoidance in that it not only takes into account the positions of the obstacles, but also their velocities.
A cumulative damage model for bone fracture

A mathematical model is presented to describe the combined time‐dependent and cycle‐dependent fracture characteristics of devitalized cortical bone. Failure is interpreted based on a linear‐life fraction rule, which accounts for cumulative creep and fatigue damage under arbitrary loading histories. The model is successful in describing the influence of loading rate on monotonic tensile strength, the time to failure in constant stress creep‐fracture tests, and bone fracture in zero‐tension and tension‐compression cyclic loading. The possible implications of the model to in vivo bone fracture, deformity, and remodelling in response to various loading histories are considered.
Mechanical properties of mother of pearl in tension

Mother of pearl, or nacre, is one of a number of characteristic skeletal structures of molluscs, occurring in cephalopods, gastropods and bivalves. It consists of plates of aragonite, about 0.3 μm thick, arranged in sheets, with a tenuous protein matrix. Mechanical tests of nacre from all three classes show that it has a tensile strength of between 35 and 110 MN m-2. It is slightly viscoelastic, and shows marked, though not extensive, plastic deformation. The maximum measured strain was 0.018. While undergoing plastic deformation the material shows considerable optical changes. The regions where plastic flow is occurring show ‘tension lines’, probably equivalent to similar lines in bone. These are probably caused by voids forming in the protein matrix. The work of fracture is very different in different loading directions, being about 1.65 x 103 J m-2 when fractured across the grain, and 1.5 x 102 J m-2 when fractured along it. Nacre shows considerable ability to stop cracks. An attempt is made to explain qualitatively the mechanical behaviour of nacre in terms of its submicroscopic structure. It is concluded that the precise geometric arrangement of the plates is most important, and that this constraint may make nacre less suitable for shells that must be built quickly.
Performance Analysis of Virtual Memory Time-Sharing Systems

The performance of VM/370 systems is analyzed in relation to the multiprogramming level and the user work load. Saturation conditions are examined, and methods for locating bottlenecks in the CPU, main storage, paging, and I/O subsystems are given. The paper also describes the data requirements, along with techniques for data collection and reduction. The techniques are illustrated with data from an actual case study.
Highly tunable propagating surface plasmons on supported silver nanowires

Surface plasmons, the quanta of the collective oscillations of free electrons at metal surface, can be easily tuned by changing the surrounding dielectric materials, which is well known for metal nanoparticles and metal surfaces, but less is known for one-dimensional metal nanowires. Here, we find an extremely large tunability of surface plasmons on Ag nanowires with a beat period of the near-field distribution pattern increasing by 90 nm per nanometer of Al2O3 coating, or by 16 µm per refractive index unit change in the surrounding medium. Such high sensitivity is crucial to directly control the optical signal distribution for various routing and demultiplexing functions in plasmonic circuits and may pave the way to the development of on-chip ultrasensitive biosensing.
Regeneration of the adult zebrafish brain from neurogenic radial glia-type progenitors

Severe traumatic injury to the adult mammalian CNS leads to life-long loss of function. By contrast, several non-mammalian vertebrate species, including adult zebrafish, have a remarkable ability to regenerate injured organs, including the CNS. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms that enable or prevent CNS regeneration are largely unknown. To study brain regeneration mechanisms in adult zebrafish, we developed a traumatic lesion assay, analyzed cellular reactions to injury and show that adult zebrafish can efficiently regenerate brain lesions and lack permanent glial scarring. Using Cre-loxP-based genetic lineage-tracing, we demonstrate that her4.1-positive ventricular radial glia progenitor cells react to injury, proliferate and generate neuroblasts that migrate to the lesion site. The newly generated neurons survive for more than 3 months, are decorated with synaptic contacts and express mature neuronal markers. Thus, regeneration after traumatic lesion of the adult zebrafish brain occurs efficiently from radial glia-type stem/progenitor cells.
Transmission Characteristics Analysis for Double Trapezoida-Ridge Waveguide by the Vector Finite-Element Method

The wave transmission characteristics of double trapezoida-ridge rectangular waveguide are analyzed by using the vector finite-element method. The cutoff wavelength of trapezoida-ridge waveguide and anti-trapezoid ridge waveguide which ridges are on the waveguide short side are calculated respectively. The results show that the ridge position on the short side of waveguide may shrink sing-mode bandwidth. The variation of bandwidth with physical dimensions has been studied. It is helpful for optimizing this kind of structure.
A Semantic Approach for the Generation of Test Cases from Activity Diagram

testing is the process of evaluating a system or its modules in the intent to find that the software is acquiring the efficient requirements or not. In simple words testing is the execution of the system in order to find their gaps, ambiguity and inconsistency. Software testing comprises into three factors: test case generation, test cases execution and test cases evaluation. This paper implemented a semantic approach for the generation of test cases on UML model i.e., Activity Diagram. In this approach an Activity diagram is created then it automatically generated a Activity Dependency table (ADT) from Activity diagram. From the ADT an Activity Dependency Graph (ADG) is introduced. Finally After the automatic generation of ADG a consistent test case are generated. This approach includes the validation of the test cases by their consistency and efficiency. This approach saves the cost, time, efforts and increases the quality of generated test cases. KeywordsModeling Language Model (UML), automatic generated test cases, Model Based testing (MBT), Genetic Algorithm, branch coverage criterion
Nondestructive Evaluation of Adhesively Bonded Joints by Acousto-Ultrasonic Technique and Acoustic Emission

Reliable applications of adhesively bonded joints require an effective nondestructive evaluation technique for their bond strength prediction. To properly evaluate factors affecting bond strength, effects of defects such as voids and disbonds on stress distribution in the overlap region must be understood. At the same time, in order to use acousto-ultrasonic (AU) technique to evaluate bond quality, the effect of these defects on dynamic response of single lap joints must be clear. The stress distribution in a single lap joint with and without defects (void or disbond) is analyzed. A bar-Theta parameter which contains adherend and adhesive thickness and properties is introduced. It is shown for bonded joints with bar-Theta greater than 10, that a symmetric void or disbond in the middle of overlap up to the 70 percent of overlap length has negligible effect on bond strength. In contrast frequency response analyses by a finite element technique showed that the dynamic response is affected significantly by the presence of voids or disbonds. These results have direct implication in the interpretations of AU results. Through transmission attenuation and a number of AU parameters for various specimens with and without defects are evaluated. It is found that although void and disbond have similar effects on bond strength (stress distribution), they have completely different effects on wave propagation characteristics. For steel-adhesive-steel specimens with voids, the attenuation changes are related to the bond strength. However, the attenuation changes for specimens with disbond are fairly constant over a disbond range. In order to incorporate the location of defects in AU parameters, a weighting function is introduced. Using an immersion system with focused transducers, a number of AU parameters are evaluated. It is found that by incorporating weighting functions in these parameters better sensitivities (AU parameters vs. bond strength) are achieved. Acoustic emission (AE) activities of steel-adhesive-steel specimens with bar-Theta equal to 3.4 are monitored. Two different formats of energy vs. time have resulted, each corresponding to the perfect specimens or the specimens with void or disbond. The relative acoustic energy and the number of events at failure are found to be a means for predicting the bond strength.
Heterogeneous NetwOrk Policy Enforcement in data centers

With the emergence of network function virtualization, data center start to deploy a variety of network function boxes (NFBs) in both physical and virtual form factors in order to combines inherent efficiency offered by physical NFBs with the agility and flexibility of virtual ones. However, existing schemes are limited to exclusively consider physical or virtual NFBs, which may reduce the performance efficiency of services running atop. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous NetwOrk Policy Enforcement scheme (HOPE) to overcome these challenges. An efficient algorithm that can closely approximate optimal latency-wise NF service chaining is proposed. The experimental results have also shown that HOPE can outperform greedy algorithm by 25% in terms of network latency and is 56× more efficient than naive depth-first search algorithm.
Remote PPG based vital sign measurement using adaptive facial regions

This paper proposes a remote photoplethysmography measurement technique where human skin color variations are analysed for observing human vital signs including but not limited to average heart rate and variation. Remote monitoring of the vital signs could be useful for non-contact physiological and psychological diagnosis. For this purpose, an off-the-self non-invasive video camera is used. Facial appearance modelling is performed for stabilizing color variations in the selected facial region during the signal acquisition stage. The proposed method offers a novel signal processing approach for extracting the periodic component of the raw color signal for the heart rate and variation estimation. To this end, we have collected a ground truth dataset using a PPG instrument attached to the skin of the subject under observation. Objective performance tests show strong correlation with the ground truth values for the estimated heart rate and variation.
Multi-Level Domain Modeling with M-Objects and M-Relationships

Using traditional semantic data modeling, multi-level modeling can be achieved by representing objects in different abstraction hierarchies, namely classification, aggregation and generalization. This, however, leads to accidental complexity, complicating maintenance and extension. Several modeling techniques, like deep instantiation, powertypes and materialization, have been proposed to reduce unnecessary complexity in modeling objects at multiple levels. Multilevel objects (m-objects) and multi-level relationships (m-relationships) build on these results and provide a natural, intuitive representation of the concretization of objects and relationships along multiple levels of abstraction. By integrating aspects of the different abstraction hierarchies in a single concretization hierarchy, they improve readability and simplify maintenance and extension as compared to previous approaches. The discussion on conceptual modeling is complemented by a brief presentation of M-SQL, a data manipulation and query language for working with m-objects and m-relationships in an object-relational setting.
Corrosion Behaviour of Lead-Free and Sn-Pb Solders in 3.5wt% NaCl

The current need to produce lead-free solders in the electronic industries makes it necessary for the replacing solders to have properties which are comparable if not better than the conventional Sn-Pb solders. Thus this research was conducted to compare the corrosion behaviour of lead-free solders with composition Sn-4.0Ag-0.5Cu (SAC405), and Sn-3.0Ag-0.5Cu (SAC305) with conventional Sn-37Pb solders. Corrosion tests were conducted using salt spray tests with 3.5% sodium chloride (NaCl) solutions. The samples were characterized after corrosion tests by using SEM, EDS and XRD. The results showed that the elements present in the solders contributed to galvanic corrosion mechanism that affected the overall corrosion behaviour of the solders.
A Consensus-Based Framework for Distributed Bundle Adjustment

In this paper we study large-scale optimization problems in multi-view geometry, in particular the Bundle Adjustment problem. In its conventional formulation, the complexity of existing solvers scale poorly with problem size, hence this component of the Structure-from-Motion pipeline can quickly become a bottle-neck. Here we present a novel formulation for solving bundle adjustment in a truly distributed manner using consensus based optimization methods. Our algorithm is presented with a concise derivation based on proximal splitting, along with a theoretical proof of convergence and brief discussions on complexity and implementation. Experiments on a number of real image datasets convincingly demonstrates the potential of the proposed method by outperforming the conventional bundle adjustment formulation by orders of magnitude.
H3K27me3 Protein Is a Promising Predictive Biomarker of Patients’ Survival and Chemoradioresistance in Human Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Trimethylation of lysine 27 on histone H3 (H3K27me3) is an epigenetic change which plays a critical role in tumor development and/or progression. However, the molecular status of H3K27me3 and its clinicopathologic/prognostic significance in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) have not been elucidated. In this study, the methods of Western blotting and immunohistochemistry (IHC) were utilized to examine the expression of H3K27me3 protein in NPC tissues and nonneoplastic nasopharyngeal epithelial tissues. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was used to determine the cutpoint for H3K27me3 high expression. High expression of H3K27me3 could be observed in 127/209 (60.8%) of NPCs and in 8/50 (16.0%) normal nasopharyngeal epithelial tissues (P < 0.001). Further correlation analysis demonstrated that high expression of H3K27me3 was positively associated with tumor later T classification, tumor metastasis, advanced clinical stage and chemoradioresistance (P < 0.05). Moreover, high expression of H3K27me3 was closely associated with NPC patient shortened survival time as evidenced by univariate and multivariate analysis (P < 0.05). Consequently, a new clinicopathologic prognostic model with three poor prognostic factors (H3K27me3 expression, distant metastasis and treatment regimen) was constructed. The model could stratify risk significantly (low, intermediate and high) for overall survival and progression-free survival (P < 0.0001). These findings provide evidence that H3K27me3 expression, as examined by IHC, has the potential to be used as an immunomarker to predict NPC chemoradiotherapy response and patient prognosis. The combined clinicopathologic prognostic model may become a useful tool for identifying NPC patients with different clinical outcomes.
A Fault Model for Upgrades in Distributed Systems (CMU-PDL-08-115)

Recent studies, and a large body of anecdotal evidence, suggest that upgrades are unreliable and often end in failure, causing downtime and data-loss. While this is sometimes due to software defects in the new version, most upgradefailures are the result of faults in the upgrade procedure, such as broken dependencies. In this paper, we present data on upgrade failures from three independent sources — a user study, a survey and a field study — and, through statistical cluster analysis, we construct a novel fault model for upgrades in distributed systems. We identify four distinct types of faults: (1) simple configuration errors (e.g., typos); (2) semantic configuration errors (e.g., misunderstood effects of parameters); (3) broken environmental dependencies (e.g., incorrect libraries, port conflicts); and (4) complex procedural errors. We estimate that, on average, Type 1 faults occur in 15.2 % of upgrades, and Type 4 faults occur in 16.8 % of upgrades. A Fault Model for Upgrades in Distributed Systems Tudor Dumitras, Soila Kavulya and Priya Narasimhan Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15217 tudor@cmu.edu spertet@ece.cmu.edu priya@cs.cmu.edu Abstract Recent studies, and a large body of anecdotal evidence, suggest that upgrades are unreliable and often end in failure, causing downtime and data-loss. While this is sometimes due to software defects in the new version, most upgradefailures are the result of faults in the upgrade procedure, such as broken dependencies. In this paper, we present data on upgrade failures from three independent sources — a user study, a survey and a field study — and, through statistical cluster analysis, we construct a novel fault model for upgrades in distributed systems. We identify four distinct types of faults: (1) simple configuration errors (e.g., typos); (2) semantic configuration errors (e.g., misunderstood effects of parameters); (3) broken environmental dependencies (e.g., incorrect libraries, port conflicts); and (4) complex procedural errors. We estimate that, on average, Type 1 faults occur in 15.2 % of upgrades, and Type 4 faults occur in 16.8 % of upgrades.Recent studies, and a large body of anecdotal evidence, suggest that upgrades are unreliable and often end in failure, causing downtime and data-loss. While this is sometimes due to software defects in the new version, most upgradefailures are the result of faults in the upgrade procedure, such as broken dependencies. In this paper, we present data on upgrade failures from three independent sources — a user study, a survey and a field study — and, through statistical cluster analysis, we construct a novel fault model for upgrades in distributed systems. We identify four distinct types of faults: (1) simple configuration errors (e.g., typos); (2) semantic configuration errors (e.g., misunderstood effects of parameters); (3) broken environmental dependencies (e.g., incorrect libraries, port conflicts); and (4) complex procedural errors. We estimate that, on average, Type 1 faults occur in 15.2 % of upgrades, and Type 4 faults occur in 16.8 % of upgrades.
Microscopy of the morphology in low styrene emission glass fiber/unsaturated polyester laminates

Low styrene emission (LSE) unsaturated polyester resins are of interest in the context of increasing environmental concerns in the society. LSE resins have been developed to decrease styrene emission during the processing of composites based on unsaturated polyesters. In this article we applied a microscopy methodology to study morphology effects in laminates based on LSE polyesters. The study connects to the longer term objective to improve the understanding of how additives reduce styrene emission without imparting delamination resistance in composite laminates based on LSE polyesters. The major morphology differences between laminates made from different polyesters are discussed, including birefringent layers present as an interphase between different layers. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 71: 1555–1562, 1999