Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Innovative Free-Range Resonant Electrical Energy Delivery System (FREE-D System) for a Ventricular Assist Device Using Wireless Power

Technological innovation of a smaller, single moving part has an advantage over earlier large pulsatile ventricular assist devices (VADs) prone to mechanical failure. Drivelines limit the potential for extended patient survival durations with newer pumps and act as source for infection, increased morbidity, rehospitalizations, and reduced quality of life. The Free-range Resonant Electrical Energy Delivery (FREE-D) wireless power system uses magnetically coupled resonators to efficiently transfer power. We demonstrate the efficiency over distance of this system. The experimental setup consists of an radiofrequency amplifier and control board which drives the transmit resonator coil, and a receiver unit consisting of a resonant coil attached to a radiofrequency rectifier and power management module. The power management module supplies power to the axial pump, which was set at 9,600 rpm. To achieve a seamless wireless delivery in any room size, we introduced a third relay coil. This relay coil can be installed throughout a room, whereas a single relay coil could be built into a jacket worn by the patient, which would always be within range of the receive coil implanted in the patient’s body. The power was delivered over a meter distance without interruptions or fluctuations with coil, rectifier, and regulator efficiency more than 80% and overall system efficiency of 61%. The axial pump worked well throughout the 8 hours of continuous operation. Having same setup on the opposite side can double the distance. A tether-free operation of a VAD can be achieved by FREE-D system in room-size distances. It has the potential to make the VAD therapy more acceptable from the patient perspective.
Serum Phthalate Levels and Time to Pregnancy in Couples from Greenland, Poland and Ukraine

Phthalates are ubiquitous industrial chemicals that have been associated with altered reproductive function in rodents. Several human studies have reported an inverse association between male testosterone and phthalate levels. Our aim was to investigate time to pregnancy (TTP) according to serum levels of diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) and diisononyl phthalate (DiNP) metabolites in both partners. In 2002-2004 we enrolled 938 pregnant women and 401 male spouses from Greenland, Poland and Ukraine. Six oxidized metabolites of DEHP and DiNP were summarized for each of the two parent compounds to provide proxies of the internal exposure. We used Cox discrete-time models to estimate fecundability ratios (FR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) for men and women according to their proxy-DEHP or -DiNP serum levels adjusted for a fixed set of covariates. The FR was slightly elevated among women with high levels of DEHP (FR=1.14, 95% CI 1.00;1.30) suggesting a shorter TTP in these women. The FR was unrelated to DiNP in women, whereas the results for men were inconsistent pointing in opposite directions. First-time pregnant women from Greenland with high serum DiNP levels had a longer TTP. This study spanning large contrast in environmental exposure does not indicate adverse effects of phthalates on couple fecundity. The shorter TTP in women with high levels of DEHP metabolites is unexplained and needs further investigation.
Small bowel obstruction caused by sigmoid mesocolic hernia

Internal hernia is an unusual cause of small bowel obstruction and classified several types according to locations. Sigmoid mesocolic hernia is an uncommon condition and among others intramesosigmoid hernia was rarely reported in the literature. We report the case of a 49-year-old female with a rare type of congenital internal hernia, through the mesosigmoid, causing small bowel obstruction. She suffered from obstructive symptoms but with no previous history of laparotomy. The diagnosis of internal hernia was suggested by computed tomography, but the type of internal hernia was confirmed by laparoscopic exploration. She underwent laparoscopic detachment of peritoneal attachment comprising hernia sac without defect repair. The postoperative course was uneventful and the patient is free from symptoms and recurrence. This report presents a case of intrasigmoid hernia managed successfully by the laparoscopic approach and shows another surgical technique according to hernia types.
The Impact of Passive DNS Collection on End-user Privacy

There are two distinct problems in determining the impact of passive DNS (pDNS) on end-user privacy. One is whether or not pDNS would allow the observer to reconstruct an individual end-user's DNS behavior. The other is if DNS behavior constitutes personally identifiable information (PII) or is otherwise legally protected. This paper develops a framework to discuss both aspects of the privacy issue. From the technical point of view, DNS sensor architecture is analyzed and a statistical model is developed to describe the sensor's ability to violate end- user privacy. To the other end, a review of various jurisdictions' privacy legislation is presented and analyzed in the context of DNS as a system and pDNS as a collection mechanism. In general, we find that pDNS, properly configured, does not violate end-user privacy. Index Terms—Passive DNS, Privacy and the DNS, Measure- ment studies
Reconfigurable Hardware Architecture of a Shape Recognition System Based on Specialized Tiny Neural Networks With Online Training

Neural networks are widely used in pattern recognition, security applications, and robot control. We propose a hardware architecture system using tiny neural networks (TNNs) specialized in image recognition. The generic TNN architecture allows for expandability by means of mapping several basic units (layers) and dynamic reconfiguration, depending on the application specific demands. One of the most important features of TNNs is their learning ability. Weight modification and architecture reconfiguration can be carried out at run-time. Our system performs objects identification by the interpretation of characteristics elements of their shapes. This is achieved by interconnecting several specialized TNNs. The results of several tests in different conditions are reported in this paper. The system accurately detects a test shape in most of the experiments performed. This paper also contains a detailed description of the system architecture and the processing steps. In order to validate the research, the system has been implemented and configured as a perceptron network with back-propagation learning, choosing as reference application the recognition of shapes. Simulation results show that this architecture has significant performance benefits.
Identification and Expression Profiles of Six Transcripts Encoding Carboxylesterase Protein in Vitis flexuosa Infected with Pathogens

Plants protect themselves from pathogen attacks via several mechanisms, including hypersensitive cell death. Recognition of pathogen attack by the plant resistance gene triggers expression of carboxylesterase genes associated with hypersensitive response. We identified six transcripts of carboxylesterase genes, Vitis flexuosa carboxylesterase 5585 (VfCXE5585), VfCXE12827, VfCXE13132, VfCXE17159, VfCXE18231, and VfCXE47674, which showed different expression patterns upon transcriptome analysis of V. flexuosa inoculated with Elsinoe ampelina. The lengths of genes ranged from 1,098 to 1,629 bp, and their encoded proteins consisted of 309 to 335 amino acids. The predicted amino acid sequences showed hydrolase like domains in all six transcripts and contained two conserved motifs, GXSXG of serine hydrolase characteristics and HGGGF related to the carboxylesterase family. The deduced amino acid sequence also contained a potential catalytic triad consisted of serine, aspartic acid and histidine. Of the six transcripts, VfCXE12827 showed upregulated expression against E. ampelina at all time points. Three genes (VfCXE5585, VfCXE12827, and VfCXE13132) showed upregulation, while others (VfCXE17159, VfCXE18231, and VfCXE47674) were down regulated in grapevines infected with Botrytis cinerea. All transcripts showed upregulated expression against Rhizobium vitis at early and later time points except VfCXE12827, and were downregulated for up to 48 hours post inoculation (hpi) after upregulation at 1 hpi in response to R. vitis infection. All tested genes showed high and differential expression in response to pathogens, indicating that they all may play a role in defense pathways during pathogen infection in grapevines.
HIV Drug Resistance in Antiretroviral Treatment-Naïve Individuals in the Largest Public Hospital in Nicaragua, 2011-2015

Background Increasing HIV pre-treatment drug resistance (PDR) levels have been observed in regions with increasing antiretroviral treatment (ART) coverage. However, data is lacking for several low/middle-income countries. We present the first PDR survey in Nicaragua since ART introduction in the country in 2003. Methods HIV-infected, ART-naïve Nicaraguan individuals were enrolled at Roberto Calderón Hospital, the largest national HIV referral center, from 2011 to 2015. HIV pol sequences were obtained at a WHO-accredited laboratory in Mexico by Sanger and next generation sequencing (NGS). PDR was assessed using the WHO surveillance drug resistance mutation (SDRM) list and the Stanford HIVdb tool. Results 283 individuals were enrolled in the study. The overall PDR prevalence based on the list of SDRMs was 13.4%. Using the Stanford HIVdb tool, overall PDR reached 19.4%; with both nucleoside and non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI and NNRTI) PDR levels independently reaching moderate levels (6.7% and 11.3% respectively). Protease inhibitor PDR was low (2.8%). Using NGS with 2% threshold to detect SDRMs, PDR increased to 25.3%. K103N and M41L were the most frequent SDRMs and were present mostly in proportions >20% in each individual. A significant temporal increase in NNRTI PDR was observed (p = 0.0422), with no apparent trends for other drug classes. Importantly, PDR to zidovudine + lamivudine + efavirenz and tenofovir + emtricitabine + efavirenz, the most widely used first-line regimens in Nicaragua, reached 14.6% and 10.4% respectively in 2015. Of note, a higher proportion of females was observed among individuals with PDR compared to individuals without PDR (OR 14.2; 95% CI: 7.1–28.4; p<0.0001). Conclusions Overall PDR in the Nicaraguan cohort was high (19.4%), with a clear increasing temporal trend in NNRTI PDR. Current HIVDR to the most frequently used first-line ART regimens in Nicaragua reached levels >10%. These observations are worrisome and need to be evidenced to strengthen the national HIV program. Also, our observations warrant further nationally representative HIVDR surveillance studies and encourage other countries to perform national surveys. Cost-effectiveness studies are suggested to analyze the feasibility of implementation of baseline HIV genotyping as well as to review the choice of first-line ART regimens in Nicaragua.
Disorders of memory.

This paper reviews disorders of memory. After a brief survey of the clinical varieties of the amnesic syndrome, transient and persistent, selected theoretical issues will be considered by posing a series of questions. (i) What is impaired and what is spared in anterograde amnesia? (ii) Do temporal lobe, diencephalic and frontal lobe amnesias differ? (iii) How independently semantic is semantic memory? (iv) What determines the pattern and extent of retrograde memory loss? (v) Can retrograde amnesia ever be "isolated"? (vi) Does psychogenic amnesia involve the same mechanisms as organic amnesia? (vii) How and when do false memories arise? Commonalities as well as differences across separate literatures will be emphasized, and the case for a more "dynamic" (interactionist) approach to the investigation of amnesia will be advocated.
A culture-based study on information density of e-commerce websites

This study investigates cultural effects on computer performance of users to e-commerce websites with different information density, and ways to design appropriate interfaces to accommodate cultural effects in order to enhance computer performance for Chinese users. There are many differences in page layout and information density of Chinese and Western e-commerce websites. An experiment was conducted to examine the usability and reliability of the selected Chinese and Western e-commerce websites. Thirty Chinese participants in China participated in this study. Information search tasks with different information density websites were designed to study selected websites' usability. And questionnaires were used to research their reliability. Results indicate that, for Chinese users, higher information density website is associated with lower usability and higher reliability.
Language independent word segmentation for statistical machine translation

This paper proposes an unsupervised word segmentation algorithm that identifies word boundaries in continuous text in order to optimize the translation quality of statistical machine translation (SMT) approaches. The proposed method is language-independent and uses a parallel corpus to align source language characters to the corresponding word units separated by whitespace in the target language. Successive characters aligned to the same target words are merged to a larger source language unit and a Maximum Entropy (ME) algorithm is applied to learn the word segmentation that optimizes the translation quality of an SMT system trained on the re-segmented bitext. Experimental results translating five Asian languages into English revealed that the proposed method outperforms a baseline system that translates unigram segmented source language sentences.
Teaching Software Development to Non-Software Engineering Students

This paper argues that although the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm is appropriate for students taking programming modules on Higher Education (HE) software engineering course, this paradigm is not as relevant for students from other courses who study programming modules. It is also asserts that adopting another paradigm when teaching programming to non-software engineering students need not prevent the encouragement of good software engineering practices The paper discusses the software development model, procedures, techniques and programming language that the author requires non-software engineering students to employ when developing their software. This discussion also includes consideration of implementation issues in an educational context. The paper concludes that his alternative approach has been successfully implemented, that it requires the student to adopt a rigorous approach to development and that it encourages best software engineering practices. The conclusions also note that delivering this alternative offers the opportunity to include good educational practice, such as role-play.
Resveratrol: brain effects on SIRT1, GPR50 and photoperiodic signaling

Silent information regulator-1 (SIRT1) deacetylase, a sensor of intermittent energy restriction, is inextricably intertwined with circadian regulation of central and peripheral clock genes. The purpose of this study was to identify SIRT1-specific target genes that are expressed in a circadian rhythm pattern and driven, in part, by specific components of foodstuffs. Using human cells and rats fed with a resveratrol diet we show that SIRT1 binds to, and transcriptionally regulates, a gene locus encoding the G protein-coupled receptor (GPR), GPR50 in the brain. GPR50 is the mammalian orthologue of the melatonin1c membrane-bound receptor which has been identified as a genetic risk factor for bipolar disorder and major depression in women. In general, our findings support and expand the notion that circadian clock signaling components and dietary interventions are adaptively linked, and suggest that the brain may be particularly sensitive to metabolic events in response to light-dark cycles.
A Codebook Based Precoding Scheme for 3GPP TDD Systems

In time-division duplex (TDD) system, precoding matrix for downlink transmission can be obtained from estimation of uplink pilots by using reciprocity. However, if the channel is time-varying, the channel difference would cause codeword mismatch between transmitter and receiver, which leads to performance degradation. In this paper, a codebook based precoding scheme is proposed for TDD systems to decrease the probability of codeword mismatch between both sides. Moreover, a linear interpolation method is used to estimate the uplink channel at the receiver, which would reduce the channel difference caused by time delay. Simulations show that the proposed scheme could significantly improve the link performance compared to the existing methods.
An Algorithm of Text Automatic Proofreading Based on Chinese Word Segmentation

Chinese text automatic proofreading opens up broad possibilities for the application of natural language processing. According to the distribution of Chinese single-character after word segmentation in Chinese text with the characteristic of errors and character trigram model, presents an effective text automatic proofreading algorithm. Experiments show that our method achieves better precision and recall.
HBV is a risk factor for poor patient prognosis after curative resection of hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract Controversy exists regarding pathological factors affecting the prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients with hepatitis B virus (HBV-HCC). Their postoperative clinical behaviors and the exact HBV Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) thresholds that distinguish good and poor prognoses are unknown. This study aimed to compare clinicopathological, pre- and postoperative clinical factors and overall and recurrence-free survival (RFS) between HBV-HCC patients and nonhepatitis B and nonhepatitis C HCC (NBC-HCC) patients to determine the optimal prognostic HBV DNA threshold. Data from 1440 patients with HBV-HCC and NBC-HCC who underwent curative hepatectomy were retrospectively analyzed. Liver function in the HBV-HCC group was significantly worse than in the NBC-HCC group. Compared with NBC-HCC patients, HBV-HCC patients had significantly more vascular invasion and advanced HCC. The HBV-HCC patients also had significantly worse liver function and more complications. Further survival analysis showed significantly lower overall and RFS rates and a higher early recurrence rate in the HBV-HCC group. Univariate analysis indicated that HBV was a risk factor for overall and RFS. Finally, X-tile analysis revealed that the optimal HBV DNA cutoff points for predicting RFS and overall survival in HCC patients were 10,100 and 12,800 IU/mL, respectively. After hepatectomy for HCC, HBV-HCC patients had more complications and a worse prognosis than NBC-HCC patients. Antiviral therapy should be considered before hepatectomy in patients with high (more than approximately 104 IU/mL) HBV DNA levels.
The IRF family of transcription factors

Members of the interferon-regulatory factor (IRF) proteins family were originally identified as transcriptional regulators of the Type I interferon system. Thanks to consistent advances made in our understanding of the immunobiology of innate receptors, it is now clear that several IRFs are critical for the elicitation of innate pattern recognition receptors, and—as a consequence—for adaptive immunity. In addition, IRFs have attracted great attentions as they modulate cellular responses that are involved in tumorigenesis. The regulation of oncogenesis by IRFs has important implications for understanding the host susceptibility to several Types of cancers, their progression, as well as the potential for therapeutic interventions.
Patch-based Face Hallucination with Locality Preserving Projection

In video surveillance, the resolution of face image is very important for Police Criminal Investigation. A novel method for super-resolution of face images is proposed in this paper. The method use LPP(Locality Preserving Projection) to discover the hidden nonlinear structure in high-dimensional data space, and construct the feature subspace of face image by analyze its internal manifold. We divided the input low resolution face image into patches and select the nearest patches for each patch in the subspace. Then use the selected samples restore the high-resolution face images in the absence of high frequency components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the traditional schemes significantly both in subjective and objective quality.
S3: Smart selection of sampling function for passive network measurement

Flow size statistics is a fundamental task of passive measurement. In order to bound the estimation error of passive measurement for both small and large flows, previous probabilistic counter updating algorithms used linear or nonlinear sampling function to automatically adjust the sampling rate. However, each of these methods employed a pre-set and fixed sampling function during the measurement period. As a result, the performance would vary for different flow distributions. In this paper, we propose a Smart Selection Sampling (S3) approach, which can tune the sampling function to reach a comparatively lower relative error. The key component of S3 is a heuristic algorithm leveraging the flow distribution information to determine a better sampling function so as to achieve better measurement accuracy. Experiments under real trace and synthetic traces demonstrate that S3 is more accurate than the previous work if given the same memory sizes to accommodate flow statistics counters.
A Three-Dimensional DRAM Using Floating Body Capacitance Cells in an FD-SOI Process

This paper describes a three-dimensional DRAM in which the floating body capacitance (FBC) of a fully depleted SOI (FD-SOI) device is used as a storage node. This 1T DRAM lends itself particularly well to a 3D wafer- to-wafer bonding process because of the absence of deep etched and filled trench capacitor structure, and the im- proved thickness control tolerance in wafer thinning. A novel three-tier, 3D, 1T embedded DRAM is presented that can be vertically integrated with a microprocessor, achieving low cost, high-density on-chip main memory. A 394 Kbits test chip has been designed and fabricated using the Lincoln Labs 3-Tier 3D 0.18 um fully depleted SOI CMOS process where an earlier (and previously re- ported) successful 3D SRAM was obtained. The measured retention time under holding conditions in this 180 nm process is greater than 10 ms. The test chip measures an access time of 50 ns and operates at 10 MHz.
Mechanism design and dynamics analyses for an under-actuated three-joint acrobot

The acrobot is an under-actuated three-joint planar robot that mimics the human acrobat who hangs from a bar and tries to swing up to a perfectly balanced upside-down position with his/her hands still on the bar. In this paper we first design the under-actuated three-joint acrobot which like human being both in actuate and appearance. And then, dynamic model is derived by Lagrange equations, and controllable of the acrobot is analyzed. Finally, simulation shows that the acrobot is satisfied with respond quickly and allowable static error.
Construction of undersampled graph filter banks via row subset selection

This paper introduces a construction method of M-channel under-sampled spectral graph filter banks. They can be applied to any kind of undirected graphs, use arbitrary critically sampled or oversampled analysis filters, and obtain low redundancy, which is less than 1, regardless of the number of the analysis filters. We formulate the construction problem as a row subset selection method of the transform matrix of the prototype (critically sampled or oversampled) filter banks. In the experiment, a graph signal on Minnesota Traffic Graph is decomposed to examine the performance of our spectral graph filter banks.