Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Randomized, Controlled Pilot Study of Autologous CD34+ Cell Therapy for Critical Limb Ischemia

Background—Critical limb ischemia portends a risk of major amputation of 25% to 35% within 1 year of diagnosis. Preclinical studies provide evidence that intramuscular injection of autologous CD34+ cells improves limb perfusion and reduces amputation risk. In this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study, we evaluated the safety and efficacy of intramuscular injections of autologous CD34+ cells in subjects with moderate or high-risk critical limb ischemia, who were poor or noncandidates for surgical or percutaneous revascularization (ACT34-CLI). Methods and Results—Twenty-eight critical limb ischemia subjects were randomized and treated: 7 to 1×105 (low-dose) and 9 to 1×106 (high-dose) autologous CD34+ cells/kg; and 12 to placebo (control). Intramuscular injections were distributed into 8 sites within the ischemic lower extremity. At 6 months postinjection, 67% of control subjects experienced a major or minor amputation versus 43% of low-dose and 22% of high-dose cell-treated subjects (P=0.137). This trend continued at 12 months, with 75% of control subjects experiencing any amputation versus 43% of low-dose and 22% of high-dose cell-treated subjects (P=0.058). Amputation incidence was lower in the combined cell-treated groups compared with control group (6 months: P=0.125; 12 months: P=0.054), with the low-dose and high-dose groups individually showing trends toward improved amputation-free survival at 6 months and 12 months. No adverse safety signal was associated with cell administration. Conclusions—This study provides evidence that intramuscular administration of autologous CD34+ cells was safe in this patient population. Favorable trends toward reduced amputation rates in cell-treated versus control subjects were observed. These findings warrant further exploration in later-phase clinical trials. Clinical Trial Registration—URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00616980
No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews

Abstract The origin and history of the Ashkenazi Jewish population have long been of great interest, and advances in high-throughput genetic analysis have recently provided a new approach for investigating these topics. We and others have argued on the basis of genome-wide data that the Ashkenazi Jewish population derives its ancestry from a combination of sources tracing to both Europe and the Middle East. It has been claimed, however, through a reanalysis of some of our data, that a large part of the ancestry of the Ashkenazi population originates with the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking group that lived to the north of the Caucasus region ∼1,000 years ago. Because the Khazar population has left no obvious modern descendants that could enable a clear test for a contribution to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, the Khazar hypothesis has been difficult to examine using genetics. Furthermore, because only limited genetic data have been available from the Caucasus region, and because these data have been concentrated in populations that are genetically close to populations from the Middle East, the attribution of any signal of Ashkenazi-Caucasus genetic similarity to Khazar ancestry rather than shared ancestral Middle Eastern ancestry has been problematic. Here, through integration of genotypes from newly collected samples with data from several of our past studies, we have assembled the largest data set available to date for assessment of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic origins. This data set contains genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms in 1,774 samples from 106 Jewish and non-Jewish populations that span the possible regions of potential Ashkenazi ancestry: Europe, the Middle East, and the region historically associated with the Khazar Khaganate. The data set includes 261 samples from 15 populations from the Caucasus region and the region directly to its north, samples that have not previously been included alongside Ashkenazi Jewish samples in genomic studies. Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of population-genetic structure, we found that Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly populations that most closely represent the Khazar region. Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations, and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either from within or from north of the Caucasus region.
Outlook for benefits of sediment microbial fuel cells with two bio‐electrodes

The benefits of sediment microbial fuel cells (SMFCs) go beyond energy generation for low‐power applications. Aside from producing electrical energy, SMFCs can enhance the oxidation of reduced compounds at the anode, thus bringing about the removal of excessive or unwanted reducing equivalents from submerged soils. Moreover, an SMFC could be applied to control redox‐dependent processes in sediment layers. Several cathodic reactions that may drive these sediment oxidation reactions are examined. Special attention is given to two biologically mediated cathodic reactions, respectively employing an oxygen reduction and a manganese cycle. Both reactions imply a low cost and a high electrode potential and are of interest for reactor‐type MFCs as well as for SMFCs.
Pattern of macrovascular disease phenotypes amongst newly diagnosed type 2 diabetic patients in a rural institute in Uttar Pradesh, India

Background: The objective of current study was to determine the proportion of Macrovascular Disease (MVD) phenotypes amongst newly diagnosed type 2 diabetic patients in our institute by dividing the cases into sub-groups according to the MVD sites involved (NMVD - no macrovascular disease; NSCS - non-significant carotid stenosis; CBVD - cerebrovascular disease; CAD - coronary artery disease; PAD - peripheral artery disease; PVD - polyvascular disease) and studying the anthropometric, clinical and laboratory parameters in each group. Methods: The study included a cohort of 136 newly diagnosed patients with T2 DM. Demographic, clinical and laboratory parameters were included in analyses. Standardized procedures were used to assess the risk factors of associated metabolic syndrome (MetS). Results: The proportion of patients with MVD was 27.94% amongst the participants in the study. The majority of patients with MVD were in the CAD group (15.44%). Age, male sex and smoking history were independent risk factors in the CAD and PAD groups (P <0.01). A low HDL-C value was an independent risk factor in the CAD and PVD group P = 0.03). Very high frequencies of MetS were observed in the PAD and PVD groups (90% and 91.7% respectively). Prevalence of PVD was three times more common in males as compared to that in females. All patients with PAD had associated CAD also. Conclusion: This study projects a high proportion of MVD amongst newly diagnosed Type 2 diabetics in rural sub-population in Uttar Pradesh. High rates of mortality and morbidity in these patients due to macroangiopathy warrant early screening of MVD to ensure timely preventive and therapeutic measures.
Emotionally Biased Cognitive Processes: The Weakest Link Predicts Prospective Changes in Depressive Symptom Severity

Emotional biases in attention, interpretation, and memory are predictive of future depressive symptoms. It remains unknown, however, how these biased cognitive processes interact to predict depressive symptom levels in the long-term. In the present study, we tested the predictive value of two integrative approaches to model relations between multiple biased cognitive processes, namely the additive (i.e., cognitive processes have a cumulative effect) vs. the weakest link (i.e., the dominant pathogenic process is important) model. We also tested whether these integrative models interacted with perceived stress to predict prospective changes in depressive symptom severity. At Time 1, participants completed measures of depressive symptom severity and emotional biases in attention, interpretation, and memory. At Time 2, one year later, participants were reassessed to determine depressive symptom levels and perceived stress. Results revealed that the weakest link model had incremental validity over the additive model in predicting prospective changes in depressive symptoms, though both models explained a significant proportion of variance in the change in depressive symptoms from Time 1 to Time 2. None of the integrative models interacted with perceived stress to predict changes in depressive symptomatology. These findings suggest that the best cognitive marker of the evolution in depressive symptoms is the cognitive process that is dominantly biased toward negative material, which operates independent from experienced stress. This highlights the importance of considering idiographic cognitive profiles with multiple cognitive processes for understanding and modifying effects of cognitive biases in depression.
Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity

The rise of data-intensive "Web 2.0" Internet services has led to a range of popular new programming frameworks that collectively embody the latest incarnation of the vision of Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) systems, albeit at unprecedented scale. In this work, we empirically investigate modern ORM-backed applications' use and disuse of database concurrency control mechanisms. Specifically, we focus our study on the common use of feral, or application-level, mechanisms for maintaining database integrity, which, across a range of ORM systems, often take the form of declarative correctness criteria, or invariants. We quantitatively analyze the use of these mechanisms in a range of open source applications written using the Ruby on Rails ORM and find that feral invariants are the most popular means of ensuring integrity (and, by usage, are over 37 times more popular than transactions). We evaluate which of these feral invariants actually ensure integrity (by usage, up to 86.9%) and which---due to concurrency errors and lack of database support---may lead to data corruption (the remainder), which we experimentally quantify. In light of these findings, we present recommendations for database system designers for better supporting these modern ORM programming patterns, thus eliminating their adverse effects on application integrity.
Floors and Flexibility: Designing a Programming Environment for 4th-6th Grade Classrooms

The recent renaissance in early computer science education has provided K-12 teachers with multiple options for introducing children to computer science. However, tools for teaching programming for children with wide-scale adoption have been targeted mostly at pre-readers or middle school and higher grade-levels. This leaves a gap for 4th -- 6th grade students, who differ developmentally from older and younger students. In this paper, we investigate block-based programming languages targeted at elementary and middle school students and demonstrate a gap in existing programming languages appropriate for 4th -- 6th grade classrooms. We analyze the benefits of Scratch, ScratchJr, and Blockly for students and curriculum developers. We describe the design principles we created based on our experiences using block-based programming in 4th -- 6th grade classrooms, and introduce LaPlaya, a language and development environment designed specifically for children in the gap between grades K-3 and middle school students.
Experimental study on keyhole and melt pool dynamics in laser welding

A high speed digital camera with a spatial resolution of 64×64 pixels and a temporal resolution of 40,500 frames/sec has been employed to observe the melt dynamics and the keyhole oscillations in laser welding. Illumination of the interaction zone was provided by a secondary probe laser beam delivered through a multimode diffused fiber. High speed melt flow and wave patterns were observed to have originated from the keyhole region. The keyhole drives fluctuations in the interior of the melt. As a result, multimode volumetric wave patterns were observed. Quantification of the wave velocity and characterization of keyhole oscillation have been attempted. It is observed that as the translation speed increases, the keyhole oscillates more rapidly, leading to faster wave motion. The fluctuatuions in the flow field significantly influence the solidification process at the melt pool tail. Attempts have been made to establish a correlation between the keyhole oscillation and the fluctuations in the solidification process. However, no apparent correlation appears to exist.A high speed digital camera with a spatial resolution of 64×64 pixels and a temporal resolution of 40,500 frames/sec has been employed to observe the melt dynamics and the keyhole oscillations in laser welding. Illumination of the interaction zone was provided by a secondary probe laser beam delivered through a multimode diffused fiber. High speed melt flow and wave patterns were observed to have originated from the keyhole region. The keyhole drives fluctuations in the interior of the melt. As a result, multimode volumetric wave patterns were observed. Quantification of the wave velocity and characterization of keyhole oscillation have been attempted. It is observed that as the translation speed increases, the keyhole oscillates more rapidly, leading to faster wave motion. The fluctuatuions in the flow field significantly influence the solidification process at the melt pool tail. Attempts have been made to establish a correlation between the keyhole oscillation and the fluctuations in the solidification.
Future needs for nursing talent in Scandinavian countries: a systematic review protocol.

REVIEW QUESTION/OBJECTIVE The aim of this review is to systematically identify, appraise and synthesize available text and opinion papers from policy-makers and trade unions in Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) containing information about nursing talent needed in healthcare systems for the future. The overall objective is to identify and synthesize the opinions of various stakeholders of what they believe is required in terms of nursing talent in Scandinavia.In this review, "nursing talent" refers to certain skills or competencies that are essential within nursing to meet the challenges and demands of future health care. The purpose of this review is to provide knowledge about the opinions of two key stakeholders (policy-makers and trade unions) on nursing talent needed in future Scandinavian healthcare systems.
On Robust Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems with Communication Delays

In this paper, two robust consensus problems are considered for a multi-agent system with various disturbances. To achieve the robust consensus, two distributed control schemes for each agent, described by a second-order differential equation, are proposed. With the help of graph theory, the robust consensus stability of the multi-agent system with communication delays is obtained for both fixed and switching interconnection topologies. The results show the leaderless consensus can be achieved with some disturbances or time delays.
Supervised evaluation of Voronoi partitions

Since its introduction, the nearest neighbor rule has been widely refined and there exists many techniques for prototypes selection or construction. The underlying structure of such rules is the Voronoi partition induced by the prototypes. Construction of the best Voronoi partition often relies on the generalisation performance and thus faces the risk of overfitting the data.In this paper, we adopt a descriptive approach for the supervised evaluation of medoid-based Voronoi partitions. The resulting criterion measures the discrimination of the classes, is parameter free and prevents from overfitting. Experiments on real and synthetic datasets illustrate these properties. Although this criterion is not related to the classifying task, the accuracy and robustness of the induced classifier are also compared with standard methods, such as the nearest neighbor rule and the linear vector quantization method.
PengYuan@PKU: Extracting Infrequent Sense Instance with the Same N-Gram Pattern for the SemEval-2010 Task 15

This paper describes our infrequent sense identification system participating in the SemEval-2010 task 15 on Infrequent Sense Identification for Mandarin Text to Speech Systems. The core system is a supervised system based on the ensembles of Naive Bayesian classifiers. In order to solve the problem of unbalanced sense distribution, we intentionally extract only instances of infrequent sense with the same N-gram pattern as the complement training data from an untagged Chinese corpus -- People's Daily of the year 2001. At the same time, we adjusted the prior probability to adapt to the distribution of the test data and tuned the smoothness coefficient to take the data sparseness into account. Official result shows that, our system ranked the first with the best Macro Accuracy 0.952. We briefly describe this system, its configuration options and the features used for this task and present some discussion of the results.
SpacTor-T5: Pre-training T5 Models with Span Corruption and Replaced Token Detection

Pre-training large language models is known to be extremely resource intensive and often times inefficient, under-utilizing the information encapsulated in the training text sequences. In this paper, we present SpacTor, a new training procedure consisting of (1) a hybrid objective combining span corruption (SC) and token replacement detection (RTD), and (2) a two-stage curriculum that optimizes the hybrid objective over the initial $\tau$ iterations, then transitions to standard SC loss. We show empirically that the effectiveness of the hybrid objective is tied to the two-stage pre-training schedule, and provide extensive analysis on why this is the case. In our experiments with encoder-decoder architectures (T5) on a variety of NLP tasks, SpacTor-T5 yields the same downstream performance as standard SC pre-training, while enabling a 50% reduction in pre-training iterations and 40% reduction in total FLOPs. Alternatively, given the same amount of computing budget, we find that SpacTor results in significantly improved downstream benchmark performance.
A 26plex Autosomal STR Assay to Aid Human Identity Testing * †

Abstract: A short tandem repeat multiplex assay has been successfully developed with 25 autosomal loci plus the sex‐typing locus amelogenin for a total of 26 amplified products in a single reaction. Primers for the loci were designed so that all of the amplicons present were distributed from 65 base pairs (bp) to less than 400 bp within a five‐dye chemistry design with the fifth dye reserved for the sizing standard. A multiplex design strategy was developed to overcome challenges encountered in creating this assay. The limits of the multiplex were tested, resulting in the successful amplification of a wide range of genomic DNA sample concentrations from 2 ng to as low as 100 pg with 30 cycles of PCR. The 26plex has the potential to benefit the forensic community for reference sample testing and complex relationship evaluation.
A Note on Goldbach Partitions of Large Even Integers

Let $\Sigma_{2n}$ be the set of all partitions of the even integers from the interval $(4,2n], n>2,$ into two odd prime parts. We show that $|\Sigma_{2n}| \sim 2n^2/\log^2{n}$ as $n\to\infty$. We also assume that a partition is selected uniformly at random from the set $\Sigma_{2n}$. Let $2X_n\in (4,2n]$ be the size of this partition. We prove a limit theorem which establishes that $X_n/n$ converges weakly to the maximum of two random variables which are independent copies of a uniformly distributed random variable in the interval $(0,1)$. Our method of proof is based on a classical Tauberian theorem due to Hardy, Littlewood and Karamata. We also show that the same asymptotic approach can be applied to partitions of integers into an arbitrary and fixed number of odd prime parts.
Nonlinear image interpolation through extended permutation filters

This paper examines the application of extended permutation rank selection (EPRS) filters in image interpolation. EPRS filters are constrained to output an order statistic based on N observation samples and K statistics that are functions of the observation samples. By including the sample mean as the sole statistic when K=1, EPRS filters were shown to have superior edge-enhancing properties. By letting K=0, we can define a subset class known as rank conditioned rank selection (RCRS) filters. We show that these filters can also be applied to the issue of image interpolation. In this case, by extending the observation space by including more original samples and by adding additional linear statistics, EPRS filters produce results superior to traditional methods in the application of image interpolation.
Effect of Different Beverages on the Physical Properties of Sonicfill Dental Composite

Objective: To evaluate the effect of several beverages on the physical properties of SonicFill (Kerr Corp., USA), a new bulk-fill dental composite, over a period of time. Methods: A total of 28 discs (10 mm x 2 mm) were prepared and randomly assigned into 4 groups (n=7) according to the beverages they would be immersed in. The beverages chosen were Coca-Cola © , Nescafe © coffee, Lipton tea © and distilled water (control). Surface roughness, microhardness and colour stability were evaluated using 3D optical surface texture analyser, Vickers microhardness tester and spectrophotometer respectively. Readings were recorded at the time intervals of 24 hours, 1 week and 1 moth after immersion. The data obtained were analysed using one-way ANOVA, repeated measures ANOVA and MANOVA. Results: There were significant differences in surface roughness for only two pairs of groups (distilled water and Coca-Cola, distilled water and coffee). However, there was no significant difference between the groups within the chosen time. Statistical analysis showed significant difference in microhardness between time only for Coca-Cola, with significant differences between 24 hours and 1 week; and 24 hours and 1 month. For the colour evaluation, there was significant difference between the groups within time. Conclusions: All the beverages chosen were able to affect the physical properties of the SonicFill. However, no particular beverage had a higher or lower impact on the surface roughness than the other beverages. Microhardness was affected by distilled water and Coca-Cola, in ascending order. Colour was affected most by coffee, followed by tea and Coca-Cola.