Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
OS Support for a Commodity Database on PC clusters - Distributed Devices vs. Distributed File Systems

In this paper we attempt to parallelise a commodity database for OLAP on a cluster of commodity PCs by using a distributed high-performance storage subsystem. By parallelising the underlying storage architecture we eliminate the need to make any changes to the database software. We look at two options that differ in their complexity and features: Distributed devices and distributed file systems. The former aggregates several single disks within the cluster into a RAID device across the network. The latter offers all the features of a real file system at the price of a considerably increased complexity. We configured a Linux version of ORACLE to run on various distributed devices or distributed file systems, respectively, and ran a TPC-D benchmark on our cluster of commodity PCs interconnected by a Gigabit Ethernet. While distributed devices achieve at least the performance of local disks, they offer the benefit of using all surplus storage in a cluster. The distributed file systems seem to run into performance problems due to their increased complexity. We explain the experimental results with an analytic model of the cluster architecture and include a comparison of the same workload on an architecture that distributes the TPC-D queries at a higher level (and not just the underlying storage system). We conclude with suggestions for higher performances in future clusters of commodity PCs.
Hepatitis C–associated hepatocellular carcinoma

In the United States, a large percentage of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma are serologically negative for hepatitis B. We conducted a retrospective study to determine the prevalence of hepatitis C antibody in the sera of 59 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who were HBsAg‐negative and had no evidence of alcoholic liver disease, primary biiary cirrhosis, autoimmune hepatitis, hemochromatosis or α1‐antitrypsin deficiency. Twenty patients (34%) were hepatitis C antibody‐positive and hepatitis B core antibody‐negative. All twenty patients had underlying cirrhosis, and seven (35%) had histories of transfusions. Eleven (19%) additional patients were also hepatitis C antibody‐positive but were hepatitis B core antibody‐positive as well. Twenty‐one (36%) patients were both hepatitis C antibody‐ and hepatitis B core antibody‐negative and seven (12%) were hepatitis C antibody‐negative but hepatitis B core antibody‐positive.
A Real-Time Research Platform to Study Vestibular Implants With Gyroscopic Inputs in Vestibular Deficient Subjects

Researchers have succeeded in partly restoring damaged vestibular functionality in several animal models. Recently, acute interventions have also been demonstrated in human patients. Our previous work on a vestibular implant for humans used predefined stimulation patterns; here we present a research tool that facilitates motion-modulated stimulation. This requires a system that can process gyroscope measurements and send stimulation parameters to a hybrid vestibular-cochlear implant in real-time. To match natural vestibular latencies, the time from sensor input to stimulation output should not exceed 6.5 ms. We describe a system based on National Instrument's CompactRIO platform that can meet this requirement and also offers floating point precision for advanced transfer functions. It is designed for acute clinical interventions, and is sufficiently powerful and flexible to serve as a development platform for evaluating prosthetic control strategies. Amplitude and pulse frequency modulation to predetermined functions or sensor inputs have been validated. The system has been connected to human patients, who each have received a modified MED-EL cochlear implant for vestibular stimulation, and patient tests are ongoing.
Compromising Innovative Behaviour with Work Shame

While the consideration of negative affect as an influence of innovative behaviour has yielded conflicting results in the organisational science literature, the current study sought to consider the influence of the discrete emotion of shame on innovative behaviour. Research outside of the domain of organisations suggests that shame enacts withdrawal behaviour, the negative form of engagement. Based in Kahn's (1990) suggestion that engagement is comprised of psychological availability, psychological safety and psychological meaningfulness, this study aimed to investigate work shame as a compromise to innovative behaviour, while considering the pathways acting as the mediating mechanism. Employees and managers from two organisations in different industries were surveyed. Through the use of path analysis, findings suggest that work shame exerts an indirect effect on innovative behaviour through psychological availability. Implications for both emotions and innovative behaviour research are considered.
Gauss‐Green theorem for weakly differentiable vector fields, sets of finite perimeter, and balance laws

We analyze a class of weakly differentiable vector fields F : ℝn → ℝn with the property that F ∈ L∞ and div F is a (signed) Radon measure. These fields are called bounded divergence‐measure fields. The primary focus of our investigation is to introduce a suitable notion of the normal trace of any divergence‐measure field F over the boundary of an arbitrary set of finite perimeter that ensures the validity of the Gauss‐Green theorem. To achieve this, we first establish a fundamental approximation theorem which states that, given a (signed) Radon measure μ that is absolutely continuous with respect to ℋ︁N − 1 on ℝN, any set of finite perimeter can be approximated by a family of sets with smooth boundary essentially from the measure‐theoretic interior of the set with respect to the measure ||μ||, the total variation measure. We employ this approximation theorem to derive the normal trace of F on the boundary of any set of finite perimeter E as the limit of the normal traces of F on the boundaries of the approximate sets with smooth boundary so that the Gauss‐Green theorem for F holds on E. With these results, we analyze the Cauchy flux that is bounded by a nonnegative Radon measure over any oriented surface (i.e., an (N − 1)‐dimensional surface that is a part of the boundary of a set of finite perimeter) and thereby develop a general mathematical formulation of the physical principle of the balance law through the Cauchy flux. Finally, we apply this framework to the derivation of systems of balance laws with measure‐valued source terms from the formulation of the balance law. This framework also allows the recovery of Cauchy entropy flux through the Lax entropy inequality for entropy solutions of hyperbolic conservation laws. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A prototype robot speech interface with multimodal feedback

Speech recognition is available on ordinary personal computers and is starting to appear in standard software applications. A known problem with speech interfaces is their integration into current graphical user interfaces. This paper reports on a prototype developed for studying integration of speech into graphical interfaces aimed towards programming of industrial robot arms. The aim of the prototype is to develop a speech system for designing robot trajectories that would fit well with current CAD paradigms.
Temporal Variability and Social Heterogeneity in Disease Transmission: The Case of SARS in Hong Kong

The extent to which self-adopted or intervention-related changes in behaviors affect the course of epidemics remains a key issue for outbreak control. This study attempted to quantify the effect of such changes on the risk of infection in different settings, i.e., the community and hospitals. The 2002–2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Hong Kong, where 27% of cases were healthcare workers, was used as an example. A stochastic compartmental SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed) model was used: the population was split into healthcare workers, hospitalized people and general population. Super spreading events (SSEs) were taken into account in the model. The temporal evolutions of the daily effective contact rates in the community and hospitals were modeled with smooth functions. Data augmentation techniques and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods were applied to estimate SARS epidemiological parameters. In particular, estimates of daily reproduction numbers were provided for each subpopulation. The average duration of the SARS infectious period was estimated to be 9.3 days (±0.3 days). The model was able to disentangle the impact of the two SSEs from background transmission rates. The effective contact rates, which were estimated on a daily basis, decreased with time, reaching zero inside hospitals. This observation suggests that public health measures and possible changes in individual behaviors effectively reduced transmission, especially in hospitals. The temporal patterns of reproduction numbers were similar for healthcare workers and the general population, indicating that on average, an infectious healthcare worker did not infect more people than any other infectious person. We provide a general method to estimate time dependence of parameters in structured epidemic models, which enables investigation of the impact of control measures and behavioral changes in different settings.
Requirements guided dynamic software clustering

In this paper, we propose a requirements guided dynamic approach to address software clustering -which aims at providing the logically meaningful and high-level decompositions of large and complex systems. In our approach, the hierarchical structure of functional requirements are constructed by a text document clustering technique named hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) as a high-level skeleton to facilitate the further decomposition of source code through dynamic analysis. We also perform an experimental study based on a GNU system and present the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the experimental results.
Indirect reference intervals of plasma and serum thyrotropin (TSH) concentrations from intra-laboratory data bases from several German and Italian medical centres

Abstract Background: The dogma of establishing intra-laboratory reference limits (RLs) and their periodic review cannot be fulfilled by most laboratories due to the expenses involved. Thus, most laboratories adopt external sources for their RLs, often neglecting the problems of transferability. This is particularly problematic for analytes with a large diversity of existing RLs, as for example thyrotropin (TSH). Several attempts were taken to derive RLs from the large data pools stored in modern laboratory information systems. These attempts were further developed to a more sophisticated indirect procedure. The new approach can be considered a combined concept because it pre-excludes some subjects by direct criteria a-posterior. In the current study, the applicability of the new concept for modern protein bindings assays was examined for estimating RLs of serum and plasma TSH with data sets from several German and Italian laboratories. Methods: A smoothed kernel density function was estimated for the distribution of the total mixed data of the sample group (combined data of non-diseased and diseased subjects). It was assumed that the “central” part of the distribution of all data represents the non-diseased (“healthy”) population. The central part was defined by truncation points using an optimisation method, and was used to estimate a Gaussian distribution of the values of presumably non-diseased subjects after Box-Cox transformation of the empirical data. This distribution was now considered as the distribution of the non-diseased subgroup. The percentiles of this parametrical distribution were calculated to obtain RLs. Results: RLs determined by the indirect combined decomposition technique led to similar RLs as found by several recent study reports using a direct method according to international recommendations. Furthermore, the RLs obtained from 13 laboratories in two different European regions re-flected the well-known differences of various analytical procedures. Stratification for gender and age was necessary in contrast to earlier reports. With increasing age, an increase of the upper RL and the reference range was observed. Hospitalisation also affected the RLs. Common RLs appeared acceptable only within the same analytical systems. Some laboratories used RLs which were not appropriate for the population served. Conclusions: The proposed strategy of combining exclusion criteria with a resolution technique led to retrospective RLs from intra-laboratory data pools for TSH which were comparable with directly determined RLs. Differences between laboratories were due primarily to the well-known bias of the different analytical procedures and to the status of the population.
The Processes of Minority Influence in an Ideological Confrontation

In a situation of ideological confrontation, where the pressure for orthodoxy is very strong, a group of political militants reacts differently according to three factors: nature of the source, group consensus on the attested position, intensity of the initial opinion. Experimentation in a natural environment reveals the differentiating effects of this combination of variables.
Acute Kidney Injury in Neonates: From Urine Output to New Biomarkers

In the past 10 years, great effort has been made to define and classify a common syndrome previously known as acute renal failure and now renamed “acute kidney injury (AKI). ” Initially suggested and validated in adult populations, AKI classification was adapted to the pediatric population and recently has been modified for the neonatal population. Several studies have been performed in adults and older children using this consensus definition, leading to improvement in the knowledge of AKI incidence and epidemiology. In spite of these advances, the peculiar renal pathophysiology of critically ill newborn patients makes it difficult to interpret urine output (UO) and serum creatinine (SCr) levels in these patients to diagnose AKI. Also, new urine biomarkers have emerged as a possible alternative to diagnose early AKI in the neonatal population. In this review, we describe recent advances in neonatal AKI epidemiology, discuss difficulties in diagnosing AKI in newborns, and show recent advances in new AKI biomarkers and possible long-term consequences after AKI episode.
Design of Homogeneous Time-Varying Stabilizing Control Laws for Driftless Controllable Systems Via Oscillatory Approximation of Lie Brackets in Closed Loop

A constructive method for time-varying stabilization of smooth driftless controllable systems is developed. It provides time-varying homogeneous feedback laws that are continuous and smooth away from the origin. These feedbacks make the closed-loop system globally exponentially asymptotically stable if the control system is homogeneous with respect to a family of dilations and, using local homogeneous approximation of control systems, locally exponentially asymptotically stable otherwise. The method uses some known algorithms that construct oscillatory control inputs to approximate motion in the direction of iterated Lie brackets that we adapt to the closed-loop context.
The benefits of tight glycemic control in critical illness: Sweeter than assumed?

Hyperglycemia has long been observed amongst critically ill patients and associated with increased mortality and morbidity. Tight glycemic control (TGC) is the clinical practice of controlling blood glucose (BG) down to the “normal” 4.4–6.1 mmol/L range of a healthy adult, aiming to avoid any potential deleterious effects of hyperglycemia. The ground-breaking Leuven trials reported a mortality benefit of approximately 10% when using this technique, which led many to endorse its benefits. In stark contrast, the multi-center normoglycemia in intensive care evaluation–survival using glucose algorithm regulation (NICE-SUGAR) trial, not only failed to replicate this outcome, but showed TGC appeared to be harmful. This review attempts to re-analyze the current literature and suggests that hope for a benefit from TGC should not be so hastily abandoned. Inconsistencies in study design make a like-for-like comparison of the Leuven and NICE-SUGAR trials challenging. Inadequate measures preventing hypoglycemic events are likely to have contributed to the increased mortality observed in the NICE-SUGAR treatment group. New technologies, including predictive models, are being developed to improve the safety of TGC, primarily by minimizing hypoglycemia. Intensive Care Units which are unequipped in trained staff and monitoring capacity would be unwise to attempt TGC, especially considering its yet undefined benefit and the deleterious nature of hypoglycemia. International recommendations now advise clinicians to ensure critically ill patients maintain a BG of <10 mmol/L. Despite encouraging evidence, currently we can only speculate and remain optimistic that the benefit of TGC in clinical practice is sweeter than assumed.
Simulated binding of transcription factors to active and inactive regions folds human chromosomes into loops, rosettes and topological domains

Biophysicists are modeling conformations of interphase chromosomes, often basing the strengths of interactions between segments distant on the genetic map on contact frequencies determined experimentally. Here, instead, we develop a fitting-free, minimal model: bivalent or multivalent red and green ‘transcription factors’ bind to cognate sites in strings of beads (‘chromatin’) to form molecular bridges stabilizing loops. In the absence of additional explicit forces, molecular dynamic simulations reveal that bound factors spontaneously cluster—red with red, green with green, but rarely red with green—to give structures reminiscent of transcription factories. Binding of just two transcription factors (or proteins) to active and inactive regions of human chromosomes yields rosettes, topological domains and contact maps much like those seen experimentally. This emergent ‘bridging-induced attraction’ proves to be a robust, simple and generic force able to organize interphase chromosomes at all scales.
A utility optimization approach to network cache design

In any caching system, the admission and eviction policies determine which contents are added and removed from a cache when a miss occurs. Usually, these policies are devised so as to mitigate staleness and increase the hit probability. Nonetheless, the utility of having a high hit probability can vary across contents. This occurs, for instance, when service level agreements must be met, or if certain contents are more difficult to obtain than others. In this paper, we propose utility-driven caching, where we associate with each content a utility, which is a function of the corresponding content hit probability. We formulate optimization problems where the objectives are to maximize the sum of utilities over all contents. These problems differ according to the stringency of the cache capacity constraint. Our framework enables us to reverse engineer classical replacement policies such as LRU and FIFO, by computing the utility functions that they maximize. We also develop online algorithms that can be used by service providers to implement various caching policies based on arbitrary utility functions.
Sulphur flux through the sulphate assimilation pathway is differently controlled by adenosine 5′-phosphosulphate reductase under stress and in transgenic poplar plants overexpressing γ-ECS, SO, or APR

Sulphate assimilation provides reduced sulphur for the synthesis of cysteine, methionine, and numerous other essential metabolites and secondary compounds. The key step in the pathway is the reduction of activated sulphate, adenosine 5′-phosphosulphate (APS), to sulphite catalysed by APS reductase (APR). In the present study, [35S]sulphur flux from external sulphate into glutathione (GSH) and proteins was analysed to check whether APR controls the flux through the sulphate assimilation pathway in poplar roots under some stress conditions and in transgenic poplars. (i) O-Acetylserine (OAS) induced APR activity and the sulphur flux into GSH. (ii) The herbicide Acetochlor induced APR activity and results in a decline of GSH. Thereby the sulphur flux into GSH or protein remained unaffected. (iii) Cd treatment increased APR activity without any changes in sulphur flux but lowered sulphate uptake. Several transgenic poplar plants that were manipulated in sulphur metabolism were also analysed. (i) Transgenic poplar plants that overexpressed the γ-glutamylcysteine synthetase (γ-ECS) gene, the enzyme catalysing the key step in GSH formation, showed an increase in sulphur flux into GSH and sulphate uptake when γ-ECS was targeted to the cytosol, while no changes in sulphur flux were observed when γ-ECS was targeted to plastids. (ii) No effect on sulphur flux was observed when the sulphite oxidase (SO) gene from Arabidopsis thaliana, which catalyses the back reaction of APR, that is the reaction from sulphite to sulphate, was overexpressed. (iii) When Lemna minor APR was overexpressed in poplar, APR activity increased as expected, but no changes in sulphur flux were observed. For all of these experiments the flux control coefficient for APR was calculated. APR as a controlling step in sulphate assimilation seems obvious under OAS treatment, in γ-ECS and SO overexpressing poplars. A possible loss of control under certain conditions, that is Cd treatment, Acetochlor treatment, and in APR overexpressing poplar, is discussed.
Retransplantation of Multiple Organs: How Many Organs Should One Individual Receive?

Every year, the transplant waiting list gets longer, while donor numbers essentially remain the same. This makes the responsibility of being good stewards of this precious and limited resource greater than ever. Transplant teams, who are both committed to their patients and aware of this important responsibility, are left to make the difficult and ethical decisions regarding retransplantation. Retransplantation of organs in pediatric patients presents a different set of issues to consider, and the results are promising. This case study presents a boy who received a kidney transplant for focal segmental glomerulosclerosis at age 5. At age 11, because of the recurrence of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis and severe cardiomyopathy, he required a rare combined kidney-heart transplant. At age 17, he developed chronic renal failure and posttransplant coronary artery disease, most likely related to a period of noncompliance, and required yet another combined kidney-heart transplant. He is currently alive and well 2 years after transplantation.
Investigations of the testing effect.

This paper focuses on methodological problems arising in the study of the testing effect. These problems arise because processes that are correlated with, but logically independent of, the process of testing often differ across the study and test conditions. Carrier and Pashler (1992) recently reviewed these problems and proposed a paired-associate procedure for alleviating them. In this procedure, robust testing effects occurred, suggesting that the processes underlying testing may differ from those in a standard study condition. One potential problem with Carrier and Pashler's procedure is that opportunities to restudy previously tested items may be contributing to the testing effect. We use a modified Brown-Peterson paradigm (Peterson & Peterson, 1959) to provide converging evidence for Carrier and Pashler's (1992) conclusions. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate testing effects even when there are no opportunities to restudy previously tested items. Experiment 2 examines whether, as suggested by Carrier and Pashler (1992), stronger interitem associations might be producing the testing effect arising from an intervening free recall test. The results demonstrate that testing effects occur even when single item lists are used, ruling out the view that testing effects are due solely to stronger interitem associations.