Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On independent data monitoring committees in oncology clinical trials.

BACKGROUND An independent data safety monitoring committee (IDMC) that is established to monitor the safety of participants in a clinical trial has, as its primary purpose, the protection of participants in the trial and the maintenance of the integrity of the trial. The IDMC should operate under a clear charter, with expectations understood by all its members. The investigators and sponsors should trust their IDMCs and give the IDMC the tools that it needs to operate effectively. The need to separate the investigators of randomized clinical trials from ongoing data has become widely appreciated. Especially when the study in question is a so-called 'phase III', or confirmatory, trial, knowledge of ongoing results can subtly or explicitly affect the care of participants in the trial, the methods of data collection, and the recruitment of new participants into the trial. These changes, if data-driven, can induce bias and therefore affect the scientific integrity of the trial. Failure to monitor the ongoing data, however, may put patients at undesirable risk, especially if emerging data indicate an unknown adverse consequence of therapy. The use of IDMCs has increased perhaps in response to the growing sophistication of the community of clinical trialists, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) draft guidance on data monitoring committees, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s current rules for data monitoring plans, and the Data Monitoring Committees: Lessons, Ethics, Statistics Study Group from the UK National Health Service (DAMOCLES) recommendations. METHODS This article summarizes and describes the design and operations of IDMCs in oncology. RESULTS IDMCs in oncology share many similarities with IDMCs in other disease areas, but the particular nature of cancer patients affects the operation of these committees. COMMENTS IDMC are important in oncology clinical trials because of the severity of illness and the often toxic effects of treatments.
Preparation and Mechanical Properties of Long Glass Fiber Reinforced PA6 Composites Prepared by a Novel Process

Long glass fiber reinforced PA6 (LGF/PA6) prepregs were prepared by impregnating PA6 oligomer melt into reinforcing glass fiber followed by subsequent solid-state polymerization (SSP) to obtain LGF/PA6 composite pellets. A conventional injection-molding machine suitable for short glass fiber reinforced composites was applied to the processing of the prepared composites, which reduced the fiber length in the final products. Mechanical properties, thermal property, and fiber length distribution of injection molding bars were investigated. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to observe the impact fracture surfaces and the surfaces of glass fiber after the SSP. It was found that the LGF/ PA6 composites were of favorable mechanical properties, especially the impact strength, although the average length of glass fiber was rather short. By this novel process, the content of glass fiber in composite could be high up to 60 wt. -% and the maximum level of heat distortion temperature (HDT) was close to the melting temperature of PA6. SEM images indicated the favorable interfacial properties between the glass fiber and matrix. The glass fiber surfaces were further observed by SEM after removing the matrix PA6 with a solvent, the results showed that PA6 macromolecules were grafted onto the surface. Furthermore, the grafting amount of PA6 was increased with SSP time.
Development of emotional tremor-based vision system

We aim to investigate biological function of emotional bodily movements while building a robot in the sense of survival. In this particular paper, we build a novel active vision system which detects weak signals by generating tremor actively. Proposed active vision system consists of a noise generator and a neural system. As a noise generator, we use motors with a decentered weight. And as a neural system in order to detect visual signals, we use ensemble of FitzHugh-Nagumo neurons. We first show that our robotic platform can generate several kinds of tremors; tremor around 40 Hz, 50Hz, and tremor which does not involve specific peak in its power spectrum. And, in order to evaluate the effect of tremor, we prepare clear-films as visual stimuli which move aperiodically in a dark environment. We show that as a result of sensory noise induced by tremor, and as a result of stochastic resonance, neural system successfully detects movements of clear films.
Inflammatory mediators in exhaled breath condensate of children with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome.

BACKGROUND Upper airway inflammation is now recognized in adults with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome. However, the role played by eicosanoids such as leukotrienes and prostaglandins is unclear. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether eicosanoids are measurable in exhaled breath condensate (EBC), and to determine whether differences in these inflammatory mediators emerge among children with and without sleep-disordered breathing (SDB). METHODS EBC was collected from 50 consecutive snoring children undergoing overnight polysomnography for suspected SDB, and from 12 nonsnoring control subjects. Prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), leukotriene B4 (LTB4), and cysteinyl leukotrienes (cys-LTs: leukotriene C4 [LTC4]/leukotriene D4 [LTD4]/leukotriene E4 [LTE4]) EBC levels were analyzed using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. RESULTS LTB4 levels were elevated in children with an apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) > 5/h (SDB; 97.6 +/- 6.3 pg/mL) compared to children with an AHI < 5/h (mild SDB; 66.4 +/- 19.1 pg/mL; p < 0.01) and control subjects (27.8 +/- 3.7 pg/mL; p < 0.01). Similarly, cys-LT (LTC4/LTD4/LTE4) concentrations were also increased in SDB (45.1 +/- 10.6 pg/mL in SDB vs 27.6 +/- 8.3 pg/mL in mild SDB, and 15.7 +/- 7.6 pg/mL in control subjects; p < 0.01). In contrast, PGE2 concentrations were similar among the three groups. CONCLUSIONS Inflammatory mediators such as leukotrienes and prostaglandins can be readily quantified in EBC collected from the upper airway of children. Disease severity-dependent increases in leukotriene concentrations (LTB4 and LTC4/LTD4/LTE4) emerge among children and may serve as a noninvasive tool in the clinical assessment of these children.
Gating Transitions in Bacterial Ion Channels Measured at 3 μs Resolution

Ion channels of high conductance (>200 pS) are widespread among prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Two examples, the Escherichia coli mechanosensitive ion channels Ec-MscS and Ec-MscL, pass currents of 125–300 pA. To resolve temporal details of conductance transitions, a patch-clamp setup was optimized for low-noise recordings at a time resolution of 3 μs (10–20 times faster than usual). Analyses of the high-resolution recordings confirm that Ec-MscL visits many subconductance states and show that most of the intersubstate transitions occur more slowly than the effective resolution of 3 μs. There is a clear trend toward longer transition times for the larger transitions. In Ec-MscS recordings, the majority of the observed full conductance transitions are also composite. We detected a short-lived (∼20 μs) Ec-MscS substate at 2/3 of full conductance; transitions between 2/3 and full conductance did not show fine structure and had a time course limited by the achieved resolution. Opening and closing transitions in MscS are symmetrical and are not preceded or followed by smaller, rapid currents (“anticipations” or “regrets”). Compared with other, lower-conductance channels, these measurements may detect unusually early states in the transitions from fully closed to fully open. Increased temporal resolution at the single-molecule level reveals that some elementary steps of structural transitions are composite and follow several alternative pathways, while others still escape resolution. High-bandwidth, low-noise single-channel measurements may provide details about state transitions in other high-conductance channels; and similar procedures may also be applied to channel- and nanopore-based single-molecule DNA measurements.
Optimal band for extra solar planet detection: Sub-millimeter spectral region

Most of the research on the exo-solar planet detection in the last 20 years concentrated first on the visible and then the IR region. The technology developments there were most pronounced, especially in terms of the telescope fabrication. We propose the sub-millimeter region where the signal to noise ratio is 1000 times more favorable than in the visible. We propose to place the observatory on the far side of Moon, where the stray-light noise from the Earth, near-Earth objects, and the Sun will be avoided.
Crack Behavior near Reinforcing Bars in Concrete Structures

Currently used design methods predict that the crack widths at the concrete surface will increase significantly with concrete cover Requirements concerning limitation of crack widths therefore make it difficult to use large concrete covers, which are otherwise desirable to reduce the reinforcement corrosion. For this reason, it would be more relevant to use the crack width in the vicinity of the reinforcing bars as an indicator. In this paper an experimental study to investigate how different parameters affect the crack width at the reinforcement level is presented. Axially loaded concrete prisms with central reinforcing bars were tested with a method that makes it possible to indirectly investigate crack widths near the reinforcement. Concrete cover bar diameter and concrete quality were varied. The test results show that the crack width close to the bar is affected only to a limited extent by concrete cover, bar diameter and concrete quality, as well as by the fact that steel stress is the dominating parameter. (Less)
Cryptographic Enforcement of Access Control while Mitigating Key Sharing

In this paper, we consider the well-studied problem of cryptographic enforcement of hierarchical-based access control. While this problem is well-studied, a significant drawback to prior approaches is that if a corrupt user shares his key, then any user can access the content of the corrupt user. This is particularly damaging since it is not possible to determine the identity of the corrupt user, and almost all previous schemes require some rekeying in order to revoke a key. To mitigate this key sharing attack, we propose a new model for cryptographic enforcement: Identity-based key management (IBKM). In this framework, each key is associated with an identity and this identity is required to access content. This allows the system to trace the source of key leakage and to revoke users without rekeying. The main disadvantage of this framework is the scheme does not have the ability to provide anonymous access, but it can be used to provide pseudonymous access. The main contributions of this paper are formal definitions for IBKM and schemes for achieving IBKM.
Time-kill curves as a tool for targeting ceftazidime serum concentration during continuous infusion.

1047 cases. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis of ApaI-digested genomic DNA was performed and banding patterns were compared visually. Nine distinct clones were defined, each containing 3–21 isolates. It is of interest that all but three of the 15 isolates that exhibited an MIC of imipenem of 8 mg/L were indistinguishable, indicating a clonal spread of these acinetobacters. This particular clone was not defined among the remaining low-level carbapenem-resistant isolates or among those that were fully susceptible. Carbapenem-resistant acinetobacters have been reported sporadically from clinical infections after prolonged exposure to carbapenems.2 However, the emergence of strains that exhibit low-level resistance to carbapenems is limited. In a UK burns unit, acinetobacters that exhibit MICs of 2 and 0.5 mg/L of meropenem and imipenem, respectively, have been reported.3 In addition, a USA electronic surveillance programme has recorded a yearly increase in A. baumanni strains with reduced susceptibility to imipenem.4 In our region, acinetobacters are one of the most frequent nosocomial pathogens, and the majority of them are multidrug-resistant, leading to an extensive use of carbapenems.5 The detection in one of the largest Greek hospitals that the vast majority of A. baumannii exhibit low-level resistance to carbapenems is a novel observation, suggesting a potential for wider dissemination. Since the disc diffusion method is not always sensitive in the detection of strains with lowlevel resistance to carbapenems,3 it is important that our diagnostic laboratories use a reference susceptibility method to screen periodically for the presence of such acinetobacters. The continuing spread of low-level carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii clones in our hospital demands more prudent use of antimicrobials and more strict infection control measures. Further studies, to determine if similar clones exist in other hospitals, are important in continuing to monitor this situation.
Time-Dependant Effect Evaluation of Surface Characters in Seawater of Fouling-Release Antifouling Coatings Based on Fluoro-Copolymer

To develop new non-toxic antifouling coating, some fouling-release(FR) coatings based on fluoro-copolymer and silicone polymer were formulated. Coatings specimens were rotated in a laboratory device at different simulating speeds of a ship for some periods. The film thickness, surface roughness, water contact angle of all coatings were measured and investigated. The relationship between the performance and testing time, and the effect of simulating speed on the performance were studied and discussed. The research results show that the time spent on evaluating the performance of ship antifouling coatings was shortened. The film thickness of all coatings decreases with test time. FR antifouling coatings surface roughness increase slowly, and their surface contact angle decrease gradually with time. Increasing of the simulating speed will accelerate the surface of all the coatings trend to rougher, increase the ablation rate of the coatings and the change of water contact angle of FR coatings.
MOKSLAS – LIETUVOS ATEITIS SCIENCE – FUTURE OF LITHUANIA

Iron salts are used at wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) for several reasons: for removing chemical phosphorus, preventing from struvite formation and reducing the content of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in biogas. Anaerobic digestion is a common scheme for sludge treatment due to producing biogas that could be used as biofuel. Laboratory analysis has been carried out using anaerobic digestion model W8 (Armfield Ltd, UK) to investigate any possible effect of adding FeCl3 on the anaerobic digestion of primary sludge (PS) and waste activated sludge (WAS) mixture as well as on releasing phosphates to digested sludge liquor. The obtained results showed that FeCl3 negatively impacted the anaerobic digestion process by reducing the volume of produced biogas. Fe-dosed sludge (max) produced 30% less biogas. Biogas production from un-dosed and Fe-dosed sludge (min) was similar to the average of 1.20 L/gVSfed. Biogas composition was not measured during the conducted experiments. Phosphorus content in sludge liquor increased at an average of 38% when digesting sludge without ferric chloride dosing. On the contrary, phosphate content in sludge liquor from digested Fe-dosed sludge decreased by approx. 80%.
Delay-dependent H∞ control of linear systems with time-varying delays using proportional-derivative state feedback

This paper considers H∞ control problem for input-delayed systems for time-varying delays. A proportional-derivative state feedback control law is used in this paper. By this means, the resulting closed-loop system turns into a specific time-delay system of neutral type. The significant specification of this neutral system is that its delayed term coefficients depend on the controller parameters. This condition provides new challenging issues in theoretical research as well as providing new applications. In the present paper, new delay-dependent sufficient condition is derived for the existence of H∞ controller in terms of matrix inequalities, in presence of varying time-delays. The resulting H∞ controller guarantees asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system as well as a guaranteed limited system induced norm smaller than a prescribed level. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
3333----Layer Security Using Face Recognition Layer Security Using Face Recognition Layer Security Using Face Recognition Layer Security Using Face Recognition inininin Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud

In cloud computing databases are the centralized large data centers, where the management of the data and services may not be fully trust worthy which is provided by large amount of computing and storage to customers provisioned as a service over the internet. Due lack of proper security and weakness in safeguard which lead to many vulnerability in cloud computing. This paper has been written to focus on the problem of data leakage. In first phase which is known as Data classification the classification of data is done by client before storing it. During this phase the data is to be categorized on the basis of CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability). The client who wants to send the data for storage needs to give the value of C (confidentiality), I (integrity), A(Availability). The value of C is based on level of secrecy of data processing and prevents unauthorized disclosure, value of I based on how much assurance of accuracy is provided, reliability of information and value of A is based on how frequently it is accessible. Second phase, known as Data Access uses 3-layer technique for accessing the data. The user wanting to access the data needs to be registered and before every access to data, his/her identity is authenticated for authorization. For the authentication purpose we use face recognition.
Acetazolamide attenuates transvascular fluid flux in equine lungs during intense exercise

• During high intensity exercise approximately 4% of the cardiac output leaves the pulmonary circulation into the interstitium. This fluid flux has been attributed to an increase in pulmonary transmural hydrostatic (Starling) forces. • Fluid efflux from erythrocytes may account for a considerable fraction of fluid exiting the pulmonary circulation. Transcapillary erythrocyte volume changes are largely determined by the Jacobs–Stewart cycle, a series of intracellular and extracellular diffusion and chemical reaction events of carbon dioxide, water, bicarbonate, hydrogen ions and chloride that are initiated when blood is exposed to a gradient such as when blood enters and traverses systemic and pulmonary capillaries. • We tested the hypothesis that the Jacobs–Stewart cycle contributes to pulmonary transvascular fluid fluxes during exercise by inhibiting red cell carbonic anhydrase, the activity of which is critical to rapid completion of the Jacobs–Stewart cycle during capillary transit. • Our results indicate that during exercise in horses, transvascular fluid fluxes in the lung appear to be dependent on the Jacobs–Stewart cycle and much less dependent upon transmural hydrostatic (Starling) forces. It also appears that pulmonary circulation transvascular fluid fluxes are mediated by chloride and water egress from erythrocytes directly into the interstitium without transit through plasma, which is likely the result of functional apposition of the erythrocyte and vascular endothelial membranes occurring during capillary transit.
APPLICATION OF A COMPRESSION-RELAXATION TEST FOR THE CHARACTERIZATION OF BURLAT SWEET CHERRY

Mechanical parameters of Burlat sweet cherries (Prunus avium) were studied as a function of ripening during three consecutive years by using a penetration test, a compression test between two plates, and a compression-relaxation test. The latter yields the “apparent secant modulus,” i. e. the ratio of the initial maximum compression force over the applied strain. This modulus is one of the most useful mechanical parameters to discriminate between batches because its value is clearly related to the variety and degree of ripeness. Thus, the compression-relaxation test consistently allowed the differentiation of cherries in five degrees of ripeness.
BREW: A bandwidth reservation protocol for multirate anypath routing in wireless mesh networks

In wireless mesh networks (WMNs), more and more applications, especially Video-on-Demand (VoD) services, appear to have strict requirements on guaranteed bandwidth. Most of the existing bandwidth reservation protocols for WMNs follow the approaches from wired networks, and cannot well adapt to the characteristics of wireless communication media, such as lossy and dynamic quality of wireless links. In this paper, we present the first of and width Reservation protocol for multirate anypath routing in WMNs, namely BREW. BREW aggregates bandwidths from multiple anypath routes to improve the flow acceptance ratio and the system-wide throughput, and can be integrated with most of the existing opportunistic routing (OR) protocols, especially the most efficient multirate anypath routing protocols. Furthermore, we extensively evaluate the performance of BREW. Our numerical results show that BREW outperforms the closely related work BORlAC, in terms of flow acceptance ratio and system-wide throughput.
The importance of cepstral parameter correlations in speech recognition

Abstract In this work we demonstrate that explicit modeling of correlations between spectral parameters in speech recognition improves speech models both in terms of their descriptive power (higher likelihoods) and classification accuracy. Most large-vocabulary speech recognition systems are based on some form of hidden Markov models (HMMs) modeling sub-word speech segments. Most of the time speech segments are represented using short term spectra. In this work we employ three-state left-to-right phone models and LPC cepstral parameters including their first and second order time differentials. We investigate the importance of modeling correlations between cepstral parameters for high accuracy phone recognition. Several different types of distributions for each HMM state are compared. The simplest uses a single multivariate Gaussian distribution with a full covariance matrix. The next uses a weighted mixture of multivariate Gaussian distributions with diagonal covariances. It uses implicit rather than explicit modeling of parameter correlations. The most elaborate model employs a mixture of Gaussian distributions, just like the previous model, but in addition it uses a parameter space rotation which is specific to a given state in an HMM. It thus explicitly models parameter correlations in exactly the same way as the simplest model which uses a single distribution per state. The highest phone accuracy on the DARPA Resource Management task Feb 89 test set is obtained using the most elaborate model, with mixtures and space rotation - 82·4% phone accuracy. The next best result was achieved using single distributions, which also explicitly model parameter correlations, with 80·8% phone accuracy. The worst result was obtained using distributions which only implicitly model parameter correlations, achieving 78·7% phone accuracy. These results clearly demonstrate the importance of explicitly modeling parameter correlations for improving speech recognition performance.
Allocation of Attention during Word Recognition by Good and Poor Readers

The current study investigated differences in allocation of attention between good and poor readers, using dual-task methodology. For 54 undergraduates classified as Good Readers and 54 classified as Poor Readers, based on their Nelson-Denny reading comprehension scores, significant main effects and interactions were found for word frequency, lexicality, and stimulus onset asynchrony, but no significant group differences (either in the form of main effects or interaction effects) were found between Good and Poor Readers. Possible explanations include task demands in the conditions and speed-accuracy trade-offs made by some subjects.