Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of UGT1A1 genotype upon toxicities of combination with low‐dose irinotecan plus platinum

Irinotecan‐induced severe toxicities are possibly related to UGT1A1*6 and *28 genotypes. However, the correlation between UGT1A1 polymorphisms and the risk of toxicities induced by low‐dose irinotecan plus platinum combination therapy still remains controversial. This prospective observational study aimed to examine the correlation between UGT1A1 genotypes and clinical outcomes of low‐dose irinotecan (median 60 mg/m2, range 25–115 mg/m2) plus platinum in Japanese patients with solid tumors.
MINIMAL SORTING NETWORK REALIZATION ON FPGA FOR GENETIC PROGRAMMING

This paper describes how the minimal sorting network (MSN) for selection operation of genetic programming can be implemented on Flex10K FPGA by using MaxPlus II tool of Altera.Four different implementations of sorting network have been realised to accelerate the time-consuming process of sorting individuals in the tournament in ascending order of their fitness values.Especially in the fourth one, with the help of the parallel processing capability of the reconfigurable computing on FPGA, total number of comparison-exchange operations has been successfully reduced. Therefore, the fitness measurement process of the genetic programming has been accelerated.
Determining Mechanical Properties of Yarns and Two-Ply Cords from Single-Filament Data

Part I provided a detailed description of a model developed to predict the mechanical properties of yarns and cords from single-filament properties. The objective in Part II is to assess the accuracy of the model by comparing predicted results with experimental data. Multifilament PET yams were obtained from various manufacturing facilities. For all but one case, the bundles were formed into twisted yams and two-ply cords using laboratory- scale equipment. The model shows good agreement with experimental force-elongation data, although there is some deviation at higher twist levels. This discrepancy is likely due to slight non-uniformities present in the laboratory-produced yarns and cords. A cord with a high level of twist and uniformity produced at a manufacturing site demonstrates excellent agreement between model and experimental results. As an example of its predictive capabilities, the model calculates the elongation to break and tenacity at break within 5% of the experimental value for the vast majority of twisted yarns and cords studied.
Revisiting MAC Design for an 802 . 11-based Mesh Network

This paper deals with an 802.11-based access network for rural villages. 802.11’s CSMA/CA MAC is known to perform poorly in mesh networks. In this paper, we present the design of a novel MAC suited to a mesh network with outdoor, long-distance, point-to-point links. Multi-hop 802.11 networks are a topic of great interest currently, and our design represents a novel way to build such a network. Our MAC is a simple, 2-phase TDMA-based protocol (2-P). 2-P makes the wireless mesh network resemble a wired network closely – to the extent that all the links can operate simultaneously without mutual interference. 2-P is based on a novel flexibility in our network: Simultaneous Synchronous Operation (SynOp). We experimentally demonstrate SynOp on our field testbed. We discuss 2-P/SynOp’s dependences, and their applicability in other multi-hop network scenarios.
Evaluating the Fitness Cost of Protein Expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Protein metabolism is one of the most costly processes in the cell and is therefore expected to be under the effective control of natural selection. We stimulated yeast strains to overexpress each single gene product to approximately 1% of the total protein content. Consistent with previous reports, we found that excessive expression of proteins containing disordered or membrane-protruding regions resulted in an especially high fitness cost. We estimated these costs to be nearly twice as high as for other proteins. There was a ten-fold difference in cost if, instead of entire proteins, only the disordered or membrane-embedded regions were compared with other segments. Although the cost of processing bulk protein was measurable, it could not be explained by several tested protein features, including those linked to translational efficiency or intensity of physical interactions after maturation. It most likely included a number of individually indiscernible effects arising during protein synthesis, maturation, maintenance, (mal)functioning, and disposal. When scaled to the levels normally achieved by proteins in the cell, the fitness cost of dealing with one amino acid in a standard protein appears to be generally very low. Many single amino acid additions or deletions are likely to be neutral even if the effective population size is as large as that of the budding yeast. This should also apply to substitutions. Selection is much more likely to operate if point mutations affect protein structure by, for example, extending or creating stretches that tend to unfold or interact improperly with membranes.
Theia: Visual Signatures for Problem Diagnosis in Large Hadoop Clusters

Diagnosing performance problems in large distributed systems can be daunting as the copious volume of monitoring information available can obscure the root-cause of the problem. Automated diagnosis tools help narrow down the possible root-causes--however, these tools are not perfect thereby motivating the need for visualization tools that allow users to explore their data and gain insight on the root-cause. In this paper we describe Theia, a visualization tool that analyzes application-level logs in a Hadoop cluster, and generates visual signatures of each job's performance. These visual signatures provide compact representations of task durations, task status, and data consumption by jobs. We demonstrate the utility of Theia on real incidents experienced by users on a production Hadoop cluster.
A review on circular polarization antenna for wireless MIMO application

This paper will review the development of wireless MIMO communication system and the circular polarization antenna. It is impossible to fulfil the demand of the wireless communication system due to limitations in channel capacity on single input single output (SISO) systems. Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system has become a famous research field for the next generation wireless communication system in order to overcome this problem. Since polarization diversity is effective to avoid the fading loss caused by multipath effects, therefore, polarization diversity becomes one of the most important techniques that can be used to enhance MIMO system performances. It can be utilized to improve the communications channel capacity and utilize the frequency spectrum with frequency reuse technique. Therefore, the development of polarized antenna is significant in order to improve the wireless MIMO system performance based on polarization diversity technique.
Dopaminergic Suppression of Synaptic Transmission in the Lateral Entorhinal Cortex

Dopaminergic projections to the superficial layers of the lateral entorhinal cortex can modulate the strength of olfactory inputs to the region. We have found that low concentrations of dopamine facilitate field EPSPs in the entorhinal cortex, and that higher concentrations of dopamine suppress synaptic responses. Here, we have used whole-cell current clamp recordings from layer II neurons to determine the mechanisms of the suppression. Dopamine (10 to 50 μM) hyperpolarized membrane potential and reversibly suppressed the amplitude of EPSPs evoked by layer I stimulation. Both AMPA- and NMDA-mediated components were suppressed, and paired-pulse facilitation was also enhanced indicating that the suppression is mediated largely by reduced glutamate release. Blockade of D2-like receptors greatly reduced the suppression of EPSPs. Dopamine also lowered input resistance, and reduced the number of action potentials evoked by depolarizing current steps. The drop in input resistance was mediated by activation of D1-like receptors, and was prevented by blocking K+ channels with TEA. The dopaminergic suppression of synaptic transmission is therefore mediated by a D2 receptor-dependent reduction in transmitter release, and a D1 receptor-dependent increase in a K+ conductance. This suppression of EPSPs may dampen the strength of sensory inputs during periods of elevated mesocortical dopamine activity.
Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API’s evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.
Power Optimized Transceivers for Future Switched Networks

Network equipment power consumption is under increased scrutiny. To understand and decompose transceiver power consumption, we have created a toolkit incorporating a library of transceiver circuits in 45-nm CMOS and MOS current mode logic (MCML) and characterize power consumption using representative network traffic traces with digital synthesis and SPICE tools. Our toolkit includes all the components required to construct a library of different transceivers: line coding, frame alignment, channel bonding, serialization and deserialization, clock-data recovery, and clock generation. For optical transceivers, we show that photonic components and front end drivers only consume a small fraction (<;22%) of total serial transceiver power. This implies that major reductions in optical transceiver power can only be obtained by paying attention to the physical layer circuits such as clock recovery and serial-parallel conversions. We propose a burst-mode physical layer protocol suitable for optically switched links that retains the beneficial transmission characteristics of 8b/10b, but, even without power gating and voltage controlled oscillator power optimization, reduces the power consumption during idle periods by 29% compared with a conventional 8b/10b transceiver. We have made the toolkit available to the community at large in the hope of stimulating work in this field.
Image and text correction using language models

We report on experiments with the use of learned classifiers for improving OCR accuracy and generating word-level correction candidates. The method involves the simultaneous application of several image- and text-correction models, followed by a performance evaluation that enables the selection of the best image-processing model for each document and the most likely corrections for each word. It relies on a training set comprising document images and their transcriptions, plus a domain corpus used to build the language model. It is applicable to any language with simple segmentation rules and performs well on morphologically-rich languages. Experiments with an Arabic newspaper corpus show a 50% reduction in word error rate, with per-document image enhancement a major contributor.
Small Group Detection in Crowds using Interaction Information

Small group detection is still a challenging problem in crowds. Traditional methods use the trajectory information to measure pairwise similarity which is sensitive to the variations of group density and interactive behaviors. In this paper, we propose two types of information by simultaneously incorporating trajectory and interaction information, to detect small groups in crowds. The trajectory information is used to describe the spatial proximity and motion information between trajectories. The interaction information is designed to capture the interactive behaviors from video sequence. To achieve this goal, two classifiers are exploited to discover interpersonal relations. The assumption is that interactive behaviors often occur in group members while there are no interactions between individuals in different groups. The pairwise similarity is enhanced by combining the two types of information. Finally, an efficient clustering approach is used to achieve small group detection. Experiments show that the significant improvement is gained by exploiting the interaction information and the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. key words: small group detection, interaction, trajectory clustering
Tracking and analysis of human head motion during Guided fMRI motor tasks

In this work, we studied human head motions during upper extremity motor task, conducted in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. The experiments were performed on a mock up of the MRI bench. Three kinds of linear movements in the caudal-cranial, left-right and anterior-posterior directions, a reaching movement as well as single joint movements at shoulder, elbow and wrist, were investigated at three different speeds with the right arm. Optical markers tracked by a high-precision motion tracking system were used to detect head and arm movements. For each task, the head moved principally in the direction of right-caudal-posterior to left-cranial-anterior, parallel to the line from the right shoulder joint to the head. No principal rotation axis was observed. The translational and rotational head motions were 1.7 ∼ 8.4 mm and 0.15° ∼ 0.96°, respectively. We then applied a special head fixation to stabilize the head, and repeated all the experiments. The translational and rotational head motions were significantly suppressed by 78% and 73%, to the range of 0.3 ∼ 2.4 mm and 0.04°. ∼ 0.39°
Kinect depth inpainting in real time

RGBD cameras are used in many fields, such as monitoring, robot navigation and assistive solutions for visually impaired people. The advance in technology led to the development of cheap and easy to use cameras, such as Kinect, that gained a lot of popularity. One of the technologies that allow the capturing of depth maps, the D component in RGBD sequences, is structured light. The main drawback of this technology is the noise introduced during the acquisition process and the missing values for many pixels in the depth map. This paper presents several new depth inpainting algorithms and their results. The algorithms improve depth signal significantly and can be used as a pre-processing step for segmentation or reconstruction of RGBD images based on depth maps.
A novel method with a deep network and directional edges for automatic detection of a fetal head

In this paper, we propose a novel method for the automatic detection of fetal head in 2D ultrasound images. Fetal head detection has been a challenging task, as the ultrasound images usually have poor quality, the structures contained in the images are complex, and the gray scale distribution is highly variable. Our approach is based on a deep belief network and a modified circle detection method. The whole process can be divided into two steps: first, a deep learning architecture is applied to search the whole image and determine the result patch that contains the entire fetal head; second, a modified circle detection method is used along with Hough transform to detect the position and size of the fetal head. In order to validate our method, experiments are performed on both synthetic data and clinic ultrasound data. A good performance of the proposed method is shown in the paper.
The Role of Tetraether Lipid Composition in the Adaptation of Thermophilic Archaea to Acidity

Diether and tetraether lipids are fundamental components of the archaeal cell membrane. Archaea adjust the degree of tetraether lipid cyclization in order to maintain functional membranes and cellular homeostasis when confronted with pH and/or thermal stress. Thus, the ability to adjust tetraether lipid composition likely represents a critical phenotypic trait that enabled archaeal diversification into environments characterized by extremes in pH and/or temperature. Here we assess the relationship between geochemical variation, core- and polar-isoprenoid glycerol dibiphytanyl glycerol tetraether (C-iGDGT and P-iGDGT, respectively) lipid composition, and archaeal 16S rRNA gene diversity and abundance in 27 geothermal springs in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. The composition and abundance of C-iGDGT and P-iGDGT lipids recovered from geothermal ecosystems were distinct from surrounding soils, indicating that they are synthesized endogenously. With the exception of GDGT-0 (no cyclopentyl rings), the abundances of individual C-iGDGT and P-iGDGT lipids were significantly correlated. The abundance of a number of individual tetraether lipids varied positively with the relative abundance of individual 16S rRNA gene sequences, most notably crenarchaeol in both the core and polar GDGT fraction and sequences closely affiliated with Candidatus Nitrosocaldus yellowstonii. This finding supports the proposal that crenarchaeol is a biomarker for nitrifying archaea. Variation in the degree of cyclization of C- and P-iGDGT lipids recovered from geothermal mats and sediments could best be explained by variation in spring pH, with lipids from acidic environments tending to have, on average, more internal cyclic rings than those from higher pH ecosystems. Likewise, variation in the phylogenetic composition of archaeal 16S rRNA genes could best be explained by spring pH. In turn, the phylogenetic similarity of archaeal 16S rRNA genes was significantly correlated with the similarity in the composition of C- and P-iGDGT lipids. Taken together, these data suggest that the ability to adjust the composition of GDGT lipid membranes played a central role in the diversification of archaea into or out of environments characterized by extremes of low pH and high temperature.
Hepatic Enzyme Alterations in HIV Patients on Antiretroviral Therapy: A Case-Control Study in a Hospital Setting in Ghana

Background Diagnosing hepatic injury in HIV infection can be a herculean task for clinicians as several factors may be involved. In this study, we sought to determine the effects of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and disease progression on hepatic enzymes in HIV patients. Methods A case-control study conducted from January to May 2014 at the Akwatia Government Hospital, Eastern region, Ghana, The study included 209 HIV patients on ART (designated HIV-ART) and 132 ART-naive HIV patients (designated HIV-Controls). Data gathered included demography, clinical history and results of blood tests for hepatic enzymes. We employed the Fisher’s, Chi-square, unpaired t-test and Pearson’s correlation in analysis, using GraphPad Prism and SPSS. A P value < 0.05 was considered significant. Results Median CD4 lymphocyte count of HIV-ART participants (604.00 cells/mm3) was higher than that of HIV-Controls (491.50 cells/mm3; P = 0.0005). Mean values of ALP, ALT, AST and GGT did not differ between the two groups compared (P > 0.05). There was a significant positive correlation between hepatic enzymes (ALP, ALT, AST and GGT) for both groups (p < 0.01 each). Duration of ART correlated positively with ALT (p < 0.05). The effect size of disease progression on hepatic enzymes for both groups was small. Conclusion Antiretroviral therapy amongst this population has minimal effects on hepatic enzymes and does not suggest modifications in therapy. Hepatic injury may occur in HIV, even in the absence of ART and other traditional factors. Monitoring of hepatic enzymes is still important in HIV patients.
Crossing the LINE Toward Genomic Instability: LINE-1 Retrotransposition in Cancer

Retrotransposons are repetitive DNA sequences that are positioned throughout the human genome. Retrotransposons are capable of copying themselves and mobilizing new copies to novel genomic locations in a process called retrotransposition. While most retrotransposon sequences in the human genome are incomplete and incapable of mobilization, the LINE-1 retrotransposon, which comprises~17% of the human genome, remains active. The disruption of cellular mechanisms that suppress retrotransposon activity is linked to the generation of aneuploidy, a potential driver of tumor development. When retrotransposons insert into a novel genomic region, they have the potential to disrupt the coding sequence of endogenous genes and alter gene expression, which can lead to deleterious consequences for the organism. Additionally, increased LINE-1 copy numbers provide more chances for recombination events to occur between retrotransposons, which can lead to chromosomal breaks and rearrangements. LINE-1 activity is increased in various cancer cell lines and in patient tissues resected from primary tumors. LINE-1 activity also correlates with increased cancer metastasis. This review aims to give a brief overview of the connections between LINE-1 retrotransposition and the loss of genome stability. We will also discuss the mechanisms that repress retrotransposition in human cells and their links to cancer.
Disturbance propagation in vehicle strings

This note focuses on disturbance propagation in vehicle strings. It is known that using only relative spacing information to follow a constant distance behind the preceding vehicle leads to string instability. Specifically, small disturbances acting on one vehicle can propagate and have a large effect on another vehicle. We show that this limitation is due to a complementary sensitivity integral constraint. We also examine how the disturbance to error gain for an entire platoon scales with the number of vehicles. This analysis is done for the predecessor following strategy as well as a control structure where each vehicle looks at both neighbors.
Female reproductive synchrony predicts skewed paternity across primates

Recent studies have uncovered remarkable variation in paternity within primate groups. To date, however, we lack a general understanding of the factors that drive variation in paternity skew among primate groups and across species. Our study focused on hypotheses from reproductive skew theory involving limited control and the use of paternity “concessions” by investigating how paternity covaries with the number of males, female estrous synchrony, and rates of extragroup paternity. In multivariate and phylogenetically controlled analyses of data from 27 studies on 19 species, we found strong support for a limited control skew model, with reproductive skew within groups declining as female reproductive synchrony and the number of males per group increase. Of these 2 variables, female reproductive synchrony explained more of the variation in paternity distributions. To test whether dominant males provide incentives to subordinates to resist matings by extragroup males, that is, whether dominants make concessions of paternity, we derived a novel prediction that skew is lower within groups when threat from outside the group exists. This prediction was not supported as a primary factor underlying patterns of reproductive skew among primate species. However, our approach revealed that if concessions occur in primates, they are most likely when female synchrony is low, as these conditions provide alpha male control of paternity that is assumed by concessions models. Collectively, our analyses demonstrate that aspects of male reproductive competition are the primary drivers of reproductive skew in primates.