Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence of Livestock-Associated MRSA in Communities with High Pig-Densities in The Netherlands

Background Recently, livestock-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus CC398 has been discovered in animals, livestock farmers and retail meat. This cross-sectional study aimed to determine the spread to persons not in direct contact with livestock in areas with a high density of pig farms. Methodology/Principal Findings With a random mailing in 3 selected municipalities in the Netherlands, adult persons were asked to fill in a questionnaire and to take a nose swab. In total, complete information was obtained on 583 persons. Of the 534 persons without livestock-contact, one was positive for MRSA (0.2%; 95% confidence interval, <0.01–1.2). Of the 49 persons who did indicate to be working at or living on a livestock farm, 13 were positive for MRSA (26.5%; 95% confidence interval, 16.1–40.4). All spa-types belonged to CC398. Conclusions/Significance Livestock-associated MRSA has a high prevalence in people with direct contact with animals. At this moment it has not spread from the farms into the community.
PLL-based fractional-N frequency synthesizers

Recent trends in the commercial use of fractional-N frequency synthesis can be attributed to the characteristic of independent loop bandwidth-channel spacing that results in low phase noise and relaxes the phase-locked loop (PLL) design constraints. This paper reviews several techniques used to implement fractional-N frequency synthesizers and discusses the advantages and disadvantages. It also addresses design options and associated trade-offs.
Exclusive Block Matching for Moving Object Extraction and Tracking

Robust object tracking is required by many vision applications, and it will be useful for the motion analysis of moving object if we can not only track the object, but also make clear the corresponding relation of each part between consecutive frames. For this purpose, we propose a new method for moving object extraction and tracking based on the exclusive block matching. We build a cost matrix consisting of the similarities between the current frame's and the previous frame's blocks and obtain the corresponding relation by solving one-to-one matching as linear assignment problem. In addition, we can track the trajectory of occluded blocks by dealing with multi-frames simultaneously.
Strategy Research in Emerging Economies: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom

 This review and introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Strategy Research in Emerging Economies’ considers the nature of theoretical contributions thus far on strategy in emerging economies. We classify the research through four strategic options: (1) firms from developed economies entering emerging economies; (2) domestic firms competing within emerging economies; (3) firms from emerging economies entering other emerging economies; and (4) firms from emerging economies entering developed economies. Among the four perspectives examined (institutional theory, transaction cost theory, resource-based theory, and agency theory), the most dominant seems to be institutional theory. Most existing studies that make a contribution blend institutional theory with one of the other three perspectives, including seven out of the eight papers included in this Special Issue. We suggest a future research agenda based around the four strategies and four theoretical perspectives. Given the relative emphasis of research so far on the first and second strategic options, we believe that there is growing scope for research that addresses the third and fourth.
Design Criteria for Linear Precoders based on a Bitwise Capacity Argument

The use of linear precoding in bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding leads to a significant performance improvement on AWGN channels. In this contribution, we approach linear precoding from an information theoretical perspective. We compute the bitwise capacity as seen by each of the precoder inputs in order to investigate the impact of precoding for two scenarios: using (i) a non-iterative decoder and (ii) an iterative decoder under a perfect feedback assumption. When restricting to BPSK signaling, the bitwise capacity reveals simple precoding design rules for both scenarios. Simulation results confirm our analytical findings
A multi-objective evolutionary approach to peptide structure redesign and stabilization

The prediction of the native structures of proteins, the so-called protein folding problem, is a NP hard multi-minima optimization problem for which to date no routine solutions exist. Using an evolutionary approach we have addressed a problem that is related to protein folding though much simpler: the computational improvement of small proteins or peptides with respect to stability and biological function. The solution of this problem is relevant for the life sciences, e.g. because it would help to optimize peptide drugs.In a first experiment we used the proposed algorithm to stabilize a previously destabilized mutant of the otherwise stable folding Villin Headpiece. The algorithm generated amongst others a sequence that reverted the destabilizing mutation and introduced a second mutation. In terms of the used model this second mutation resulted in a more stable peptide than the original Villin Headpiece.
The serotonin transporter polymorphism (5‐HTTLPR): allelic variation and links with depressive symptoms

Background: We compare the genotype distribution for the serotonin transporter polymorphism (5‐HTTLPR) in a sample of older Taiwanese adults with samples of various racial and ethnic groups collected in other studies. We also explore interactions among sex, stressors, and 5‐HTTLPR genotype on depressive symptoms in our sample. Methods: Using a nationally representative sample of 984 Taiwanese aged 53 and older, we model depressive symptoms as a function of 5‐HTTLPR genotype and two classes of stressors: lifetime trauma and recent major life events. We test two‐ and three‐way interactions among stressors, 5‐HTTLPR, and sex. >Results: This sample exhibits higher frequency of S/S and lower frequency of L/L genotype than Western samples, but the distribution is comparable to those in East Asian populations. Nearly 9% carry an allele (XL) that has rarely been reported in the literature. Although the gene–environment (G×E) interaction with recent major life events is not significant, our results suggest that trauma has a worse effect on depressive symptoms for those with S/S or S/L genotype than for those who do not carry the S allele (P<0.05). We find no evidence that this G×E interaction varies by sex. Conclusions: Previous studies of this G×E interaction have been inconclusive, perhaps because interactions between genotype and stressful events are more prominent under extreme stressors. Our findings underscore the need to move beyond a bi‐allelic parameterization of the 5‐HTTLPR polymorphism and raise questions about why East Asian populations exhibit low rates of depression despite a high frequency of the S allele. Depression and Anxiety, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Understanding protein folding with energy landscape theory Part II: Quantitative aspects

1. Introduction 206 2. Quantifying the notions behind the energy landscape 206 2.1 Basic concepts of the Random Energy Model (REM) 206 2.2 Replica-symmetric partition functions and densities of states 209 2.3 The RHP phase diagram and avoided phase transitions 210 2.4 Basic concepts of the entropy of topologically constrained polymers 212 3. Beyond the Random Energy Model 219 3.1 The GREM and the glass transition in a finite RHP 222 4. Basics of configurational diffusion for RHPs and proteins 227 4.1 Kinetics on a correlated energy landscape 231 5. Thermodynamics and kinetics of protein folding 234 5.1 A protein Hamiltonian with cooperative interactions 234 5.2 Variance of native contact energies 235 5.3 Thermodynamics of protein folding 236 5.4 Free-energy surfaces and dynamics for a Hamiltonian with pair-wise interactions 240 5.5 The effects of cooperativity on folding 242 5.6 Transition-state drift 242 5.7 Phase diagram for a model protein 245 5.8 A non-Arrhenius folding-rate curve for proteins 246 6. Non-Markovian configurational diffusion and reaction coordinates in protein folding 247 6.1 An illustrative example 250 6.2 Non-Markovian rate theory and reaction surfaces 251 6.3 Application of non-Markovian rate theory to simulation data 257 7. Structural and energetic heterogeneity in the folding mechanism 259 7.1 The general strategy 261 7.2 An illustrative example 263 7.3 Free-energy functional 264 7.4 Dependence of the barrier height on mean loop length (contact order) and structural variance 268 7.5 Illustrations using lattice model proteins and functional theory 269 7.6 Connections of functional theory with experiments 271 8. Conclusions and future prospects 273 9. Acknowledgments 274 10. Appendices A. Table of common symbols 275 B. GREM construction for the glass transition 276 C. Effect of a Q-dependent diffusion coefficient 279 D. A frequency-dependent Einstein relation 279 11. References 281 We have seen in Part I of this review that the energy landscape theory of protein folding is a statistical description of a protein's complex potential energy surface, where individual folding events are sampled from an ensemble of possible routes on the landscape. We found that the most likely global structure for the landscape of a protein can be described as that of a partially random heteropolymer with a rugged, yet funneled landscape towards the native structure. Here we develop some quantitative aspects of folding using tools from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems, polymers, and phase transitions in finite-sized systems. Throughout the text we will refer to concepts and equations developed in Part I of the review, and the reader is advised to at least survey its contents before proceeding here. Sections, figures or equations from Part I are often prefixed with I- [e.g. Section I-1.1, Fig. I-1, Eq. (I-1.1)].
Ambulatory blood pressure in normotensive and hypertensive subjects: results from an international database

Objective To delineate more precisely an operational threshold for making clinical decisions based on ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) measurement by studying the ABP in subjects who were diagnosed as either normotensive or hypertensive by conventional blood pressure (CBP) measurement. Subjects: Twenty-four research groups recruited 7069 subjects. Of these, 4577 were normotensive (CBP 140/90 mmHg), 719 were borderline hypertensive (systolic CBP 141–159 mmHg or diastolic CBP 91–94 mmHg) and 1773 were definitely hypertensive. Of the subjects in the last of these categories, 1324 had systolic hypertension (systolic CBP 21 60 mmHg) and 131 0 had diastolic hypertension (diastolic CBP 295 mmHg). Combined systolic and diastolic hypertension was present in 861 subjects. Hypertension had been diagnosed from the mean of two to nine (median two) CBP measurements obtained at one to three (median two) visits. Results The 95th centiles of the ABP distributions in the normotensive subjects were (systolic and diastolic, respectively) 133 and 82 mmHg for 24-h ABP, 140 and 88mmHg for daytime ABP and 125 and 76mmHg for night-time ABP, respectively. Of the subjects with systolic hypertension, 24% had 24-h systolic ABP 4 33 mmHg. Similarly, 30% of those with diastolic hypertension had 24-h diastolic ABP 432 mmHg. The probability that hypertensive subjects had 24-h ABP below these thresholds tended to increase with age and was two- to fourfold greater if the CBP of the subject had been measured at only one visit and if fewer than three CBP measurements had been averaged for establishing the diagnosis of hypertension. By contrast, for each 1 O-mmHg increment in systolic CBP, this probability decreased by 54% for 24-h systolic ABP and by 26% for 24-h diastolic ABP, and for each 5-mmHg increment in diastolic CBP it decreased by 6 and 9%, respectively. In comparison with 24-h ABP, the overlap in the daytime and night-time ABP between normotensive and hypertensive subjects was of similar magnitude and was influenced by the same factors. Conclusions The ABP distributions of the normotensive subjects included in the present international database were not materially different from those in previous reports in the literature. One-fifth to more than one-third of hypertensive subjects had an ABP which was below the 95th centile of the ABP of normotensive subjects, but this proportion decreased if the hypertensive subjects had shown a higher CBP upon repeated measurement. The prognostic implications of elevated CBP in the presence of normal ABP remain to be determined.
Specification and Verification of Commitment-Regulated Data-Aware Multiagent Systems

In this paper we investigate multiagent systems whose agent interaction is based on social commitments that evolve over time, in presence of (possibly incomplete) data. In particular, we are interested in modeling and verifying how data maintained by the agents impact on the dynamics of such systems, and on the evolution of their commitments. This requires to lift the commitment-related conditions studied in the literature, which are typically based on propositional logics, to a first-order setting. To this purpose, we propose a rich framework for modeling data-aware commitment-based multiagent systems. In this framework, we study verification of rich temporal properties, establishing its decidability under the condition of "state-boundedness", i.e., data items come from an infinite domain but, at every time point, each agent can store only a bounded number of them.
Damage monitoring in fiber-reinforced composites under fatigue loading using carbon nanotube networks

The formation of carbon nanotube networks around the structural reinforcement in fiber composites has enabled in situ monitoring of matrix damage accumulation. Real-time monitoring of damage development under fatigue loading was studied. The electrical response of the fatigue specimens change synchronously with the applied fatigue loading and enable a quantitative measure of the damage state. The fatigue response of the nanotube network was examined and the damage accumulation validated using microscopic technique. Various damage stages in composite cross-ply laminates under fatigue loading can be clearly detected by adopting the quantitative parameter, damaged resistance change. The sensitivity of the technique to the onset and accumulation of damage may enable future life prediction methodologies.
Anelastic and Dielectric Effects in Polymeric Solids

Dynamic Mechanical Analysis-Kevin P. Menard 2002-01-01 Although dynamical mechanical analysis or spectroscopy has left the domain of the rheologist and has become a prevalent tool in the analytical laboratory, it is still common to hear, "What is DMA, and what will it tell me? " or "I think I could use a DMA, but I cannot justify its cost. " Previously, the novice in the field had to sort through texts on thermal analysis, rheology, and materials science just to find basic information — until now.
Type IVB Secretion Systems of Legionella and Other Gram-Negative Bacteria

Type IV secretion systems (T4SSs) play a central role in the pathogenicity of many important pathogens, including Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Helicobacter pylori, and Legionella pneumophila. The T4SSs are related to bacterial conjugation systems, and are classified into two subgroups, type IVA (T4ASS) and type IVB (T4BSS). The T4BSS, which is closely related to conjugation systems of IncI plasmids, was originally found in human pathogen L. pneumophila; pathogenesis by L. pneumophila infection requires functional Dot/Icm T4BSS. A zoonotic pathogen, Coxiella burnetii, and an arthropod pathogen, Rickettsiella grylli – both of which carry T4BSSs highly similar to the Legionella Dot/Icm system – are evolutionarily closely related and comprise a monophyletic group. A growing body of bacterial genomic information now suggests that T4BSSs are not limited to Legionella and related bacteria and IncI plasmids. Here, we review the current knowledge on T4BSS apparatus and component proteins, gained mainly from studies on L. pneumophila Dot/Icm T4BSS. Recent structural studies, along with previous findings, suggest that the Dot/Icm T4BSS contains components with primary or higher-order structures similar to those in other types of secretion systems – types II, III, IVA, and VI, thus highlighting the mosaic nature of T4BSS architecture.
Efficient validation and construction of border arrays

In this article we present an on-line linear time and space algorithm to check if an integer array f is the border array of at least one string w built on a bounded or unbounded size alphabet Σ. We first show some relations between the border array of some string w and the skeleton of the DFA recognizing Σ∗ ·w, independently of the explicit knowledge of w. This enables us to design algorithms for validating and generating border arrays that outperform existing ones [4, 3]. The validating algorithm lowers the delay (time spent on one element of the array) from O(|w|) to O(min{|Σ|, |w|}) comparing to algorithms in [4, 3]. Finally we give some results on the numbers of distinct border arrays on some alphabet sizes.
Metadata-Based Parallelization of Program Instrumentation

Program instrumentation has a wide variety of useful applications, but tool writers must overcome the challenge of substantial overheads caused by introducing additional code and data into a program. This paper observes that instrumentation usually operates on many discrete, independent data structures, which we call metadata parallelism. We proposes to exploit this phenomenon to reduce the overhead of instrumented programs by executing instrumentation function invocations that manipulate different pieces of metadata simultaneously in different threads. The key challenge to spreading instrumentation function execution across many threads is ensuring that metadata updates occur in the correct order, and do not suffer from data races. Metadata-based parallelization solves this problem by using a user-specified mapping of instrumentation function invocations to serialization sets. The runtime ensures that metadata updates are handled correctly by executing all function invocations in a given serialization set in the same thread. It achieves concurrency by spreading different serialization sets across multiple threads. Metadata-based parallelization improves on previous techniques to reduce the overhead of program instrumentation of a broad class of dynamic monitoring tools, including those that measure commoncase behavior, such as profilers, and those that check for anomalous behavior, such as debugging and testing tools. Our technique allows tool developers to leverage parallelism with a natural, intuitive programming interface, leaving the burden of correct synchronization of the parallelized execution to the instrumentation system. We have modified the EEL instrumentation system to support metadata-based parallelization, and we evaluate our prototype by comparing the performance of parallelized instrumentation on both multicore and SMP systems. We show that the fast communication provided by the multicore system is a key enabler for fine-grained parallelization, achieving speedups averaging 4.3X for value profiling and 2.9X for data dependence profiling using 8 additional thread contexts.
Two-phase locking performance and its thrashing behavior

A novel mean value analysis method for the two-phase locking (2PL) concurrency control method with the general waiting policy is presented here, which extends previous work to the important case of variable-size transactions, where size is determined by the number of locks requested by the transaction. We first analyze a transaction-processing system with 2PL considering transaction steps with identical processing time distributions. The analysis is then extended to the case of unequal processing times. The system performance in both cases can be determined by the fraction of blocked transactions in the system (β). In the former case β can be obtained by solving a cubic equation, whose coefficients are functions of a single parameter (α), which determines the degree of lock contention in the system
Plasma Homocysteine Is a Sensitive Marker for Tissue Deficiency of Both Cobalamines and Folates in a Psychogeriatric Population

The concentration of blood folates was decreased and the concentration of plasma homocysteine was increased in a psychogeriatric population, whereas the concentrations of methylmalonic acid or serum cobalamins were not changed compared with healthy subjects. The highest frequency of abnormal values was shown by plasma homocysteine concentration, which was increased in 88 of 168 patients. In 29 of these 88 patients increased concentration of plasma homocysteine could possibly be attributed to tissue cobalamin deficiency. One patient had only a lowered concentration of blood folate. Thirteen patients had elevated concentrations of serum creatinine which could explain increased plasma homocysteine concentration. Even if the remaining patients (n = 45) had normal vitamin levels in circulation, the increased plasma homocysteine concentration in most cases must be attributed to tissue deficiency of cobalamins and/or folates. Thus, many patients with increased plasma homocysteine concentrations need further vitamin supplementation despite their normal vitamin levels in serum and blood.
Mass-statistical analysis of the properties of concrete

Characteristics of several types of concrete were analyzed by the application of statistical methods, where the mass was the basic parameter determining the energy levels. Such method is mathematically simple yet leads to the results which agree satisfactorily with the experiments. The method was applied to the standard concrete and four types of polymerized concretes. It was concluded that only the polymer concrete (sand + india - rubber + water) has thermal isolation properties much better than the standard concrete. In all other cases, it was not possible to conclude that polymerization leads to any special advantages over the standard concrete.
Joint associations of body mass index and waist-to-height ratio with sleep duration among Saudi adolescents

Abstract Background: Numerous studies have shown significant associations between short sleep duration and overall or abdominal obesity. However, no study has reported on the joint association of body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) with sleep duration in adolescents. Aim: To examine the joint associations of BMI and WHtR with sleep duration among Saudi adolescents. Subjects and methods: A school-based cross-sectional study was conducted involving 2852 secondary-school students (51.7% females) aged 15–19 years, randomly selected using a multistage stratified cluster sampling. Self-reported sleep duration was assessed and BMI was classified into high and low categories according to the IOTF classification, whereas WHtR categories were based on above and below 0.5. Results: The low BMI–low WHtR category had the longest mean sleep duration (7.27 hours/day), whereas the high BMI-high WHtR group had the shortest sleep duration (7.02 hours/day; p = 0.003) (aOR = 0.832, 95% CI = 0.698–0.992, p = 0.040). In addition, high BMI–low WHtR or low BMI–high WHtR groups didn’t significantly associate with reduced sleep duration among adolescents. Conclusion: The joint association of high BMI–high WHtR increases adolescent’s risk of having reduced sleep duration. Future research should seek to confirm such findings and provide an explanation for this association.