Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Too Many Hierarchies? The Daily Struggle for Control of the Workspace

This paper reports research aimed at improving cross-tool support for personal information management (PIM). We present results from a study in which we investigated how users manage three collections of personal information: documents, email and web bookmarks. These findings have motivated the design of a software prototype that allows users to mirror folder structures between various PIM tools. We discuss the results of an initial evaluation that suggest that this approach may offers benefits to many users including improved control and consistency.
Improving Bayesian Reinforcement Learning Using Transition Abstraction

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (BRL) provides an optimal solution to on-line learning while acting, but it is computationally intractable for all but the simplest problems: at each decision time, an agent should weigh all possible courses of action by beliefs about future outcomes constructed over long time horizons. To improve tractability, previous research has focused on sparsely sampling possible courses of action that are most relevant to computing value; however, sampling alone does not scale well to larger environments. In this paper, we investigate whether an abstraction called projects— parts of the transition dynamics that bias the look ahead to areas of the environment that are promising—can scale up BRL to larger environments. We modify a sparse sampler to incorporate projects. We test our algorithm on standard problems that require effective exploration–exploitation balance and show that learning can be significantly sped up compared to a simpler BRL and the classic Q-learning.
Sulforaphane Restores Cellular Glutathione Levels and Reduces Chronic Periodontitis Neutrophil Hyperactivity In Vitro

The production of high levels of reactive oxygen species by neutrophils is associated with the local and systemic destructive phenotype found in the chronic inflammatory disease periodontitis. In the present study, we investigated the ability of sulforaphane (SFN) to restore cellular glutathione levels and reduce the hyperactivity of circulating neutrophils associated with chronic periodontitis. Using differentiated HL60 cells as a neutrophil model, here we show that generation of extracellular O2 . - by the nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADPH) oxidase complex is increased by intracellular glutathione depletion. This may be attributed to the upregulation of thiol regulated acid sphingomyelinase driven lipid raft formation. Intracellular glutathione was also lower in primary neutrophils from periodontitis patients and, consistent with our previous findings, patients neutrophils were hyper-reactive to stimuli. The activity of nuclear factor erythroid-2-related factor 2 (Nrf2), a master regulator of the antioxidant response, is impaired in circulating neutrophils from chronic periodontitis patients. Although patients’ neutrophils exhibit a low reduced glutathione (GSH)/oxidised glutathione (GSSG) ratio and a higher total Nrf2 level, the DNA-binding activity of nuclear Nrf2 remained unchanged relative to healthy controls and had reduced expression of glutamate cysteine ligase catalytic (GCLC), and modifier (GCLM) subunit mRNAs, compared to periodontally healthy subjects neutrophils. Pre-treatment with SFN increased expression of GCLC and GCM, improved intracellular GSH/GSSG ratios and reduced agonist-activated extracellular O2 . - production in both dHL60 and primary neutrophils from patients with periodontitis and controls. These findings suggest that a deficiency in Nrf2-dependent pathways may underpin susceptibility to hyper-reactivity in circulating primary neutrophils during chronic periodontitis.
Notice of RetractionThe generalized inverse inequalities for the sum of symmetric nonnegative definite matrices

Trace inequalities naturally arise in control theory and in communication systems with multiple input and multiple output. One application of Belmega's (2009) trace inequality has already been identified. In his paper, Belmega (2009) gave an important theorem, which was used to prove Belmega's (2009) trace inequality. In this paper, we improve a famous inequality and extend by this result Belmega's (2009) theorem.
Phenomenology of heterotic M theory with five-branes

We analyze some phenomenological implications of heterotic M-theory with five-branes. Recent results for the effective 4-dimensional action are used to perform a systematic analysis of the parameter space, finding the restrictions that result from requiring the volume of the Calabi-Yau to remain positive. Then the different scales of the theory, namely, the 11-dimensional Planck mass, the compactification scale and the orbifold scale, are evaluated. The expressions for the soft supersymmetry-breaking terms are computed and discussed in detail for the whole parameter space. With this information we study the theoretical predictions for the supersymmetric contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment, using the recent experimental result as a constraint on the parameter space. We finally analyze the neutralino as a dark matter candidate in this construction. In particular, the neutralino-nucleon cross-section is computed and compared with the sensitivities explored by present dark matter detectors.
Nanoscale resistive switching memory devices: a review

In this review the different concepts of nanoscale resistive switching memory devices are described and classified according to their I–V behaviour and the underlying physical switching mechanisms. By means of the most important representative devices, the current state of electrical performance characteristics is illuminated in-depth. Moreover, the ability of resistive switching devices to be integrated into state-of-the-art CMOS circuits under the additional consideration with a suitable selector device for memory array operation is assessed. From this analysis, and by factoring in the maturity of the different concepts, a ranking methodology for application of the nanoscale resistive switching memory devices in the memory landscape is derived. Finally, the suitability of the different device concepts for beyond pure memory applications, such as brain inspired and neuromorphic computational or logic in memory applications that strive to overcome the vanNeumann bottleneck, is discussed.
Homogeneity of Cluster Ensembles

The expectation and the mean of partitions generated by a cluster ensemble are not unique in general. This issue poses challenges in statistical inference and cluster stability. In this contribution, we state sufficient conditions for uniqueness of expectation and mean. The proposed conditions show that a unique mean is neither exceptional nor generic. To cope with this issue, we introduce homogeneity as a measure of how likely is a unique mean for a sample of partitions. We show that homogeneity is related to cluster stability. This result points to a possible conflict between cluster stability and diversity in consensus clustering. To assess homogeneity in a practical setting, we propose an efficient way to compute a lower bound of homogeneity. Empirical results using the k-means algorithm suggest that uniqueness of the mean partition is not exceptional for real-world data. Moreover, for samples of high homogeneity, uniqueness can be enforced by increasing the number of data points or by removing outlier partitions. In a broader context, this contribution can be placed as a further step towards a statistical theory of partitions.
Genome invasion by hypomethylated satellite repeat in Australian crucifer Ballantinia antipoda.

Repetitive sequences are ubiquitous components of all eukaryotic genomes. They contribute to genome evolution and regulation of gene transcription. However, uncontrolled activity of repetitive sequences can negatively affect genome functions and stability. Therefore, repetitive DNAs are embedded in highly repressive heterochromatic environment in plant cell nuclei. Here, we analyzed the sequence, composition and the epigenetic makeup of a peculiar non-pericentromeric heterochromatic segments in the genome of the Australian crucifer Ballantinia antipoda. By combination of high throughput sequencing, graph-based clustering and cytogenetics, we found that the heterochromatic segments consist of a mixture of unique sequences and an A-T rich 174 bp satellite repeat (BaSAT1). BaSAT1 occupies about 10% of B. antipoda nuclear genome in >250,000 copies. Unlike many other highly repetitive sequences, BaSAT1 repeats are hypomethylated, which contrasts with the normal patterns of DNA methylation in B. antipoda genome. Detailed analysis of several copies revealed that the non-methylated BaSAT1 repeats were also devoid of heterochromatic histone H3K9me2 methylation. However, the factors decisive for the methylation status of BaSAT1 repeats remain currently unknown. In summary, we show that even highly repetitive sequences can exist hypomethylated in plant nuclear genome. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
The phenomenology of premenstrual syndrome in female medical students: a cross sectional study

Background The premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is particularly common in the younger age groups and, therefore represents a significant public health problem in young girls. This study aims to estimate the prevalence, severity, determinants of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and its impact among the female medical students in Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia. Methods This study was performed at the College of Medicine, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia, from June through December 2009. It included 250 medical students. They filled different questionnaires covering American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) criteria to diagnose PMS, demographic & reproductive factors, physical activity and mental condition. Regression analysis was conducted for all the predictors. Results PMS was diagnosed in 35.6% of cases, distributed as 45% mild, 32.6% moderate and 22.4% severe. There were significant trends for older age, rural residence, family income and family history of PMS. The dominant limited activity was concentration in class (48.3%). Limitations of activities were significantly more frequent among severe cases. The prevalence of anxiety and depression was statistically more evident in the PMS group. Regression analysis revealed that, PMS was significantly associated with older age groups, rural residence, lower age at menarche, regularity of menses and family history. Conclusion PMS is a common problem in young Saudi students in Al Ahsa. Severe PMS was associated with more impairment of daily activities and psychological distress symptoms. Older student age, rural residence, earlier age of menarche, regular cycles and positive family history are possible risk factors for PMS.
Estimates of the 2016 global burden of kidney disease attributable to ambient fine particulate matter air pollution

Objective To quantitate the 2016 global and national burden of chronic kidney disease (CKD) attributable to ambient fine particulate matter air pollution ≤ 2.5 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM2.5). Design We used the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study data and methodologies to estimate the 2016 burden of CKD attributable to PM2.5 in 194 countries and territories. Population-weighted PM2.5 levels and incident rates of CKD for each country were curated from the GBD study publicly available data sources. Setting GBD global and national data on PM2.5 and CKD. Participants 194 countries and territories. Main outcome measures We estimated the attributable burden of disease (ABD), years living with disability (YLD), years of life lost (YLL) and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs). Results The 2016 global burden of incident CKD attributable to PM2.5 was 6 950 514 (95% uncertainty interval: 5 061 533–8 914 745). Global YLD, YLL and DALYs of CKD attributable to PM2.5 were 2 849 311 (1 875 219–3 983 941), 8 587 735 (6 355 784–10 772 239) and 11 445 397 (8 380 246–14 554 091), respectively. Age-standardised ABD, YLL, YLD and DALY rates varied substantially among geographies. Populations in Mesoamerica, Northern Africa, several countries in the Eastern Mediterranean region, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and several countries in Southeast Asia were among those with highest age-standardised DALY rates. For example, age-standardised DALYs per 100 000 were 543.35 (391.16–707.96) in El Salvador, 455.29 (332.51–577.97) in Mexico, 408.41 (283.82–551.84) in Guatemala, 238.25 (173.90–303.98) in India and 178.26 (125.31–238.47) in Sri Lanka, compared with 5.52 (0.82–11.48) in Sweden, 6.46 (0.00–14.49) in Australia and 12.13 (4.95–21.82) in Canada. Frontier analyses showed that Mesoamerican countries had significantly higher CKD DALY rates relative to other countries with comparable sociodemographic development. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that the global toll of CKD attributable to ambient air pollution is significant and identify several endemic geographies where air pollution may be a significant driver of CKD burden. Air pollution may need to be considered in the discussion of the global epidemiology of CKD.
SiP Wireless MicroPower Sensors

This paper presents the key design challenges encountered in system-in-package (SiP) wireless sensors. These sensors show tremendous promise for the test and evaluation of military equipment. These sensors should be small and autonomous to maximize utility; in this environment, energy management and system integration pose the greatest challenge. Fundamental limits exist on the amount of power required to process and transmit a signal a given distance with given accuracy, and approaching those limits requires careful energy use. Incorporating all necessary components on-chip or inpackage will require examining the trade-offs between volume and energy in many cases, as well as processing and packaging technology limitations. To illustrate these constraints, they are evaluated in the context of designing an EMI sensor.
"Flow Size Difference" Can Make a Difference: Detecting Malicious TCP Network Flows Based on Benford's Law

Statistical characteristics of network traffic have attracted a significant amount of research for automated network intrusion detection, some of which looked at applications of natural statistical laws such as Zipf's law, Benford's law and the Pareto distribution. In this paper, we present the application of Benford's law to a new network flow metric "flow size difference", which have not been studied before by other researchers, to build an unsupervised flow-based intrusion detection system (IDS). The method was inspired by our observation on a large number of TCP flow datasets where normal flows tend to follow Benford's law closely but malicious flows tend to deviate significantly from it. The proposed IDS is unsupervised, so it can be easily deployed without any training. It has two simple operational parameters with a clear semantic meaning, allowing the IDS operator to set and adapt their values intuitively to adjust the overall performance of the IDS. We tested the proposed IDS on two (one closed and one public) datasets, and proved its efficiency in terms of AUC (area under the ROC curve). Our work showed the "flow size difference" has a great potential to improve the performance of any flow-based network IDSs.
Multiscale hierarchical bioresorbable scaffolds for the regeneration of tendons and ligaments

Lesions of tendons and ligaments account for over 40% of the musculoskeletal lesions. Surgical techniques and materials for repair and regeneration are currently not satisfactory. The high rate of post-operative complications and failures mainly relates to the technical difficulties in replicating the complex multiscale hierarchical structure and the mechanical properties of the native tendons and ligaments. With the aim of overcoming the limitations of non-biomimetic devices, we developed a hierarchical structure replicating the organization of tendons and ligaments. The scaffold consists of multiple bundles made of resorbable electrospun nanofibers of Poly-L-Lactic acid (PLLA) having tailored dimensions, wrapped in a sheath of nanofibers able to compact the construct. The bundles in turn consist of electrospun nanofibers with a preferential direction. High-resolution x-ray tomographic investigation at nanometer resolution confirmed that the morphology of the single bundles and of the entire scaffold replicated the hierarchical arrangement in the natural tendons and ligaments. To confirm that these structures could adequately restore tendons and ligaments, we measured the tensile stiffness, strength and toughness. The mechanical properties were in the range required to replace and repair tendons and ligaments. Furthermore, human fibroblasts were able to attach to the scaffolds and showed an increase in cell number, indicated by an increase in metabolic activity over time. Fibroblasts were preferentially aligned along the electrospun nanofibers. These encouraging in vitro results open the way for the next steps towards in vivo regeneration of tendons and ligaments.
DWT Based Resolution Enhancement of Video Sequences

Mobile phones are one of the most commonly used tools in our daily life and many people record videos of the various events by using the embedded cameras, and usually due to low resolution of the cameras, reviewing the videos on the high resolution screens is not very pleasant. That is one of the reasons that nowadays resolution enhancements of low resolu‐ tion video sequences are at the centre of interest of many researchers. There are two main approaches in the literature for performing the resolution enhancement. The first approach is multi-frame super resolution based on the combination of image information from several similar images taken from a video sequence (M. Elad and A. Feuer, PAMI, 1999). The second approach is referred as single-frame super resolution, which uses prior training data to en‐ force super resolution over a single low resolution input image. In this work we are follow‐ ing the first approach which is multi frame resolution enhancement taken from low resolution video sequences.
Survey: Functional Module Detection from Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

A protein-protein interaction (PPI) network is a biomolecule relationship network that plays an important role in biological activities. Studies of functional modules in a PPI network contribute greatly to the understanding of biological mechanism. With the development of life science and computing science, a great amount of PPI data has been acquired by various experimental and computational approaches, which presents a significant challenge of detecting functional modules in a PPI network. To address this challenge, many functional module detecting methods have been developed. In this survey, we first analyze the existing problems in detecting functional modules and discuss the countermeasures in the data preprocess and postprocess. Second, we introduce some special metrics for distance or graph developed in clustering process of proteins. Third, we give a classification system of functional module detecting methods and describe some existing detection methods in each category. Fourth, we list databases in common use and conduct performance comparisons of several typical algorithms by popular measurements. Finally, we present the prospects and references for researchers engaged in analyzing PPI networks.
Integrated Clock Mesh Synthesis With Incremental Register Placement

A clock mesh planning and synthesis method is proposed which significantly reduces the power dissipation on the network while considering the power density and timing slack simultaneously. The proposed method is performed at the postplacement stage and consists of three major steps: 1) feasible moving region construction of each register considering timing slack; 2) mesh grid wire generation and placement; and 3) incremental register placement for stub wire minimization considering power density and timing slack. The advantages of the proposed method are the reduced power dissipation-28% on average on the benchmark circuits-the optimized power density, and the guaranteed nonnegative timing slack. These advantages are possible through a decreased timing slack (1.1% of the clock period) and change in the logic wirelength (+5.9%) on the benchmark circuits.
Accelerated Discovery of Organic Polymer Photocatalysts for Hydrogen Evolution from Water through the Integration of Experiment and Theory

Conjugated polymers are an emerging class of photocatalysts for hydrogen production where the large breadth of potential synthetic diversity presents both an opportunity and a challenge. Here, we integrate robotic experimentation with high-throughput computation to navigate the available structure–property space. A total of 6354 co-polymers was considered computationally, followed by the synthesis and photocatalytic characterization of a sub-library of more than 170 co-polymers. This led to the discovery of new polymers with sacrificial hydrogen evolution rates (HERs) of more than 6 mmol g–1 h–1. The variation in HER across the library does not correlate strongly with any single physical property, but a machine-learning model involving four separate properties can successfully describe up to 68% of the variation in the HER data between the different polymers. The four variables used in the model were the predicted electron affinity, the predicted ionization potential, the optical gap, and the dispersibility of the polymer particles in solution, as measured by optical transmittance.
Discontinuous Character Recognition Method in Variable Message Signs for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Variable Message Signs (VMSs) are a key element of Intelligent Transportation Systems. The VMSs generally displays dynamic text information that each character consists of matrix of a light-emitting diodes lamp, named LED character. Compared with general printed text, the LED character is quite difficult to be recognized due to its discontinuity. Hence, this paper addresses a novel method for recognizing the LED character. Firstly, color segmentation is performed in order to distinguish foreground (i.e. text) and background. The supporting points (SP) represented the center of a segment are then acquired. For generating character region, these points are grouped based on their properties. Lastly, feature extraction is applied by dividing component into several blocks and counting the number of SP in the block. Afterwards, character template matching approach is implemented for recognizing component as certain alphanumeric. Experimental results evince that the proposed method is a robust to recognize the LED text.
Pembrolizumab‐induced mucositis in a patient with recurrent hypopharynx squamous cell cancer

Pembrolizumab, an anti‐PD‐1 checkpoint inhibitor, is used in patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck who have received prior therapy with a platinum‐based regimen. As a monotherapy, it is generally well tolerated, but a small percentage of patients may develop immune‐mediated inflammatory reactions. We report a case of mucositis and laryngeal edema in a patient on pembrolizumab and review the literature. Laryngoscope, 130:E140–E143, 2020
Finite Higgs mass without supersymmetry

We identify a class of chiral models where the one-loop effective potential for Higgs scalar fields is finite without any requirement of supersymmetry. It corresponds to the case where the Higgs fields are identified with the components of a gauge field along compactified extra dimensions. We present a six-dimensional model with gauge group U(3)×U(3) and quarks and leptons accommodated in fundamental and bi-fundamental representations. The model can be embedded in a D-brane configuration of type I string theory and, upon compactification on a T2/ℤ2 orbifold, it gives rise to the standard model with two Higgs doublets.