Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A 10-year follow-up study on the health status of heroin addicts based on official registers.

AIMS To determine the health status of a cohort of heroin addicts. DESIGN Longitudinal follow-up study of a cohort for 10.5 years (March/July 1985-December 1995) based on official registers. SETTING Catalonia, Spain. PARTICIPANTS One hundred and thirty-five heroin addicts who started treatment in four specialized drug addiction services in Catalonia in 1985. MEASUREMENTS (a) Total and annual numbers of AIDS and tuberculosis diagnoses and admissions to drug treatment; (b) annual morbidity rate; (c) average annual morbidity rate; and (d) standardized morbidity ratio. Kaplan-Meier (log rank test) was used to assess predictive factors. FINDINGS During the follow-up period, 34 heroin addicts were diagnosed with AIDS (25%), the average annual morbidity rate was 2.7% and the standardized morbidity ratio was 82. The most frequent diseases indicative of AIDS were Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (11 cases) and tuberculosis (seven cases of disseminated or extrapulmonary tuberculosis and two cases of pulmonary tuberculosis). Twenty addicts were diagnosed with tuberculosis and 15 were co-infected with AIDS and tuberculosis. Seventy-six addicts were readmitted to treatment and generated 124 drug treatment episodes, 94 of whom were drug-free and 30 on methadone maintenance. CONCLUSIONS Follow-up through registers is a novel, low-cost technique that may provide important and comparable information on the long-term evolution of drug addicts in different European regions. The measures of disease frequency and association obtained allow us to describe and compare the distribution of patterns of infectious complications (AIDS and tuberculosis) and relapses in such a pervasive disorder as heroin addiction. Other advantages of follow-up based on official registers are efficiency, reliability, sensibility and comparability.
Case-Based Reasoning for General Electric Appliance Customer Support

A case-based reasoning system was created to support customers who purchased appliances from General Electric. When a customer calls General Electric for help, a call-taker uses the system to diagnose the problem and step the customer through its solution. The system has been in use by 300 call-takers since 1999. It has resulted in a 20 percent increase in the probability the customer's problem can be solved over the phone. This has greatly improved customer satisfaction and saved GE $44.5 million between 2000 and 2005 from reduced cost of visits of field service technician to customer's homes.
Progenitor Cells in Infantile Hemangioma

Infantile hemangioma is a vascular tumor that occurs in 5% to 10% of infants of European descent. A hallmark of infantile hemangioma is its life cycle, which is divided into 3 stages. The proliferating phase spans in the first year of postnatal life and is characterized by cellular masses without a defined vascular architecture and nascent blood vessels with red blood cells evident within the lumenal space. The involuting phase begins at 1 year of age and continues for 3 to 5 years. Proliferation slows or stops in this phase, and histologic examination shows that the blood vessel architecture becomes more obvious and vessel size is enlarged. The involuted phase reaches 5 to 8 years of age, at which point blood vessels are replaced with a fibrofatty residuum and capillary-sized channels. The growth and involution life cycle of infantile hemangioma are very different from other vascular tumors and vascular malformations, which do not regress and can occur at any time during childhood or adult life. Many laboratories have reported on the endothelial characteristics of the cellular masses that are prominent in the proliferating phase of infantile hemangioma, as well as their immature appearance. These studies, along with isolation and characterization of hemangioma-derived cell populations with progenitor cell properties, have lead to an emerging hypothesis that hemangioma is caused by an abnormal or delayed differentiation of mesodermal progenitor cells into the disorganized mass of blood vessels. In this paper, we discuss the literature that supports this emerging hypothesis.
Resource Discovery Services for Grid Computing Training

Resource discovery is a core function of e-learning. While initially confined to library environments, it has become pervasive, partly due to the advent of web-based searching and also service-oriented approach. The latter is the focus of this paper as resource discovery (web) services enable existing resources to be identified from a source (library) and re-purposed for educational purposes in other systems such as virtual learning environments. This paper describes the development of such resource discovery services developed as part of an initiative to pilot e-learning and a shared digital library infrastructure for Grid Computing training projects in Europe. The development is also related to a project funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on publisher metadata interoperability. The resource discovery services correspond to an emerging international service-oriented framework for developing e-learning. This paper also provides an overview of the framework and the use-scenarios in which the resource discovery services have been deployed.
Accommodation portfolio and market differentiation: the case of Aruba.

Introduction Small tropical islands in the Caribbean show that most tourist destinations are characterized by the dominance of international hotel chains which leads to a reliance on a single geographic market (Wilkinson, 1989; Albuquerque & McElroy, 1992). Reliance on a single market is risky as economic difficulties in the source country have direct and adverse impacts on the receiving countries (UNEP, 1996). In addition, the international hotel chains typically cater for short–stay package tourists from North America to fill the hotel rooms all year round (Wilkinson, 1989; Albuquerque & Mc Elroy, 1992; Grandoit, 2005). This kind of tourist development has been criticized, because of the significant risks for the islands in terms of economic and ecological vulnerability. The economic vulnerability stems from an excessive reliance on a single major source of Haime Croes
Are Religious Tolerance and Pluralism Reachable Ideals? A Psychological Perspective

Abstract The aim of this article is to consider the psychological mechanisms that may prevent individuals from achieving religious tolerance and religious pluralism. After defining these concepts and explaining why they are desirable outcomes, four psychological obstacles to the achievement of religious tolerance and religious pluralism will be explored by considering both research in psychology and the literature on religious education. The aim of identifying these obstacles is to enable us to suggest how they might be overcome through education, and what the implications for religious education are.
A Two-Stage Robust Reactive Power Optimization Considering Uncertain Wind Power Integration in Active Distribution Networks

Traditional reactive power optimization aims to minimize the total transmission losses by control reactive power compensators and transformer tap ratios, while guaranteeing the physical and operating constraints, such as voltage magnitudes and branch currents to be within their reasonable range. However, large amounts of renewable resources coming into power systems bring about great challenges to traditional planning and operation due to the stochastic nature. In most of the practical cases from China, the wind farms are centrally integrated into active distribution networks. By the use of conic relaxation based branch flow formulation, the reactive optimization problem in active distribution networks can be formulated as a mixed integer convex programming model that can be tractably dealt with. Furthermore, to address the uncertainties of wind power output, a two-stage robust optimization model is proposed to coordinate the discrete and continuous reactive power compensators and find a robust optimal solution that can hedge against any possible realization within the uncertain wind power output. Moreover, the second order cone programming-based column-and-constraint generation algorithm is employed to solve the proposed two-stage robust reactive power optimization model. Numerical results on 33-, 69- and 123-bus systems and comparison with the deterministic approach demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Interactions between visceral and cutaneous nociception in the rat. I. Noxious cutaneous stimuli inhibit visceral nociceptive neurons and reflexes.

1. Numerous studies have demonstrated that neural, behavioral, and reflex responses to a nociceptive test stimulus are inhibited by conditioning nociceptive stimuli; this inhibition has supraspinal, intraspinal, and segmental components. The general phenomenon is defined here as nocigenic inhibition. The present study of nocigenic inhibition documents that noxious cutaneous pinch and heat, used as conditioning stimuli, inhibit neuronal and reflex responses evoked by a noxious visceral stimulus, colorectal distension. 2. A total of 196 dorsal horn neurons were examined: 110 were short latency-abrupt (SL-A) neurons that were excited at short latency by colorectal distension and returned to baseline activity abruptly after termination of the distending stimulus, and 86 were short latency-sustained (SL-S) neurons that also were excited by colorectal distension at short latency, but demonstrated after-discharges for 4-240 s after termination of the distending stimulus. All SL-A and SL-S neurons studied had convergent cutaneous receptive fields. 3. The spontaneous activities of 100% of the 110 SL-A neurons tested were inhibited by greater than 25% by noxious pinch in sites distant from their convergent cutaneous receptive fields. In both anesthetized, intact, and spinalized rats, noxious conditioning pinch or noxious conditioning heat significantly reduced responses of SL-A neurons during noxious test colorectal distension. The magnitude of this nocigenic inhibition was graded with the intensity of the noxious conditioning stimulus. Noxious conditioning tail heating produced a parallel shift to the right in stimulus-response functions relating neuronal responses to the intensity of colorectal distension (20-100 mmHg). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
From plant tissue culture to biotechnology: Scientific revolutions, abiotic stress tolerance, and forestry

SummaryPlant biotechnology—especially in vitro regeneration and cell biology, DNA manipulation and biochemical engineering—is already changing the agricultural scene in three major areas: control of plant growth, protecting plants against biotic stress, and production of specialty foods, biochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Plant biotechnology faces several major challenges in the coming decades: alleviating the hazards of abiotic stress (especially salinity, drought, and extreme temperatures), improving pest control, maintenance and improvement of the environment, improvement of food quality and design of ‘specialty food’ using biochemical engineering, and production of biomaterials. Two parallel research approaches will most likely exist simultaneously in the near future: the transgenic approach (expression of unique genes and specific promoters and transcription factors), and the non-transgenic approach (genomics-assisted gene discovery, marker-assisted selection, efficient mutations, and clonal agriculture). Drought and salinity are the most serious threats to agriculture and to the environment in many parts of the world. Key molecular factors that are being used for genetic engineering of stress-tolerant plants include: over-expression of specific transcription factors, characterization of dehydrin proteins, over-production of osmoprotectants, expression of water channel proteins and ion transporters, expression and characterization of molecular chaperones, including a novel boiling-stable homo-oligomeric SP1 protein. Although molecular breeding is routine in agriculture, forest-tree species have been left far behind. However, the increasing demand for wood and its products and the reduction of available harvestable forests has recently led to the introduction of several molecular and biotechnological tools into forest-tree research and improvement. Among these are in vitro propagation, the identification of molecular markers, and genetic engineering for specific traits. Achievements today in plant biotechnology have already surpassed all previous expectations. The full realization and impact of the new developments depend not only on continued successful and innovative research and development activities, but also on a favorable regulatory climate and public acceptance. Plant scientists now have a central role in society.
Multiwavelength Raman Fiber Lasers Using Hi-Bi Photonic Crystal Fiber Loop Mirrors Combined With Random Cavities

Different multiwavelength Raman fiber lasers based on a hybrid cavity setup are proposed. The lasing schemes are based in highly birefringent photonic crystal fiber loop mirrors combined with random cavities. The Hi-Bi PCF loop mirrors are characterized by an interferometric output; whereas the random mirrors are created by cooperative Rayleigh scattering due to Raman gain. This configuration allows suppression of Rayleigh associated noise growth, while taking advantage of it as an active part of the laser cavity, enhancing the achievable gain. The proposed fiber lasers present stable operation at room temperature although different output maxima and shapes depending on the fiber loop mirror/random mirror combination.
An investigation into the source of power for AIRS, an artificial immune classification system

The AIRS classifier, based on metaphors from the field of artificial immune systems, has shown itself to be an effective general purpose classifier across a broad spectrum of classification problems. This research examines the new classifier empirically, replacing one of the two likely sources of its classification power with alternative modifications. The results are slightly less effective, but not statistically significantly so. We conclude that the modifications, which are computationally somewhat more efficient, provide fast test versions of AIRS for users to experiment with. We also conclude that the chief source of classification power of AIRS must lie in its replacement and maintenance of its memory cell population.
Efficient TB-NEGF simulations of ultra-thin body tunnel FETs

InAs ultra-thin-body (UTB) tunnel FETs (TFETs) are investigated by the sp3d5s* spin-on tight-binding (TB) method. We have successively implemented the reduced transformation for the TB Hamiltonian and thus highly efficient quantum-mechanical calculations based on the non-equilibrium Green's function method are made possible. Simulations of the UTB devices with body thickness up to 10nm are performed. Full quantum transport calculations by using the full TB Hamiltonian and reduced-sized mode-space Hamiltonian agree very well, while the agreement between the two depends on both the energy range for extracting the basis set and the band-to-band tunneling energy range of TFETs.
The Role of Lifestyle Behaviors on 20-Year Cognitive Decline

This study examined the association between smoking, physical activity and dietary choice at 36 and 43 years, and change in these lifestyle behaviors between these ages, and decline in verbal memory and visual search speed between 43 and 60–64 years in 1018 participants from MRC National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD, the British 1946 birth cohort). ANCOVA models were adjusted for sex, social class of origin, childhood cognition, educational attainment, adult social class, and depression; then the lifestyle behaviors were additionally mutually adjusted. Results showed that healthy dietary choice and physical activity were associated, respectively, with slower memory and visual search speed decline over 20 years, with evidence that increasing physical activity was important. Adopting positive health behaviors from early midlife may be beneficial in reducing the rate of cognitive decline and ultimately reducing the risk of dementia.
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF NEW ROUTING STRATEGY FOR ENHANCED ENERGY EFFICIENT IN WSN

Energy consumption is a key element in the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) design. Indeed, sensor nodes are really constrained by energy supply. Hence, how to improve the network lifetime is a crucial and challenging task. Several techniques are available at different levels of the OSI model to maximize the WSN lifetime and especially at the network layer which uses routing strategies to maintain the routes in the network and guarantee reliable communication. In this paper we intend to propose a new protocol called Combined Energy and Distance Metrics Dynamic Routing Protocol (CEDM-DR). Our new approach considers not only the distance between wireless sensors but also the energy of node acting as a router in order to find the optimal path and achieve a dynamic and adaptive routing. The performance metrics exploited for the evaluation of our protocol are average energy consumed, network lifetime and packets lost. By comparing our proposed routing strategy to protocol widely used in WSN namely Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector(AODV), simulation results show that CEDM-DR strategy might effectively balance the sensor power consumption and permits accordingly to enhance the network lifetime. As well, this new protocol yields a noticeable energy saving compared to its counterpart.
Discovering Latent Structure in Social Annotations

The advent of social tagging systems has enabled a new community-based view of the Web in which objects like images, videos, and Web pages are annotated by thousands of users. Understanding the emergent semantics inherent in the socially-generated collection of annotations has important research implications for information discovery and knowledge sharing. To this end, we propose a novel probabilistic generative model for discovering latent structure in large-scale social annotations. The generative model identifies latent community-based “categories” of interest that can be used to group semantically-related tags and to augment traditional content-based information search and discovery. We validate the proposed approach over large collections of Web objects annotated by the Flickr and Delicious communities. Additionally, we show how to integrate the annotation-based categorical model with traditional contentbased approaches for the effective focused discovery and exploration of Web objects.
A broadband multilayer slot-coupled antenna array

In this paper, a X-band broadband antenna array with 4-elements is designed and fabricated. Firstly, various methods, such as multi-resonant and slot-coupling, are applied hybridly to broaden the bandwidth of the ordinary microstrip antenna element. Simulation results show that VSWR<;2 bandwidth of the proposed antenna is over 50%, with center frequency of 10GHz. Then, in order to achieve high gain, an array is built with a broadband and compact microstrip feeding network. On the basis of retaining the broadband characteristic, the measured gain of the designed array is over 12.5 dB, in the whole X-band.
When the diagnosis is cancer: Patient communication experiences and preferences

Discrepancies exist between reported experiences of patients when they have been given a diagnosis of cancer, published guidelines for telling a diagnosis, and patterns of communication patients rate as favorable. Several studies have identified what happened and what is important to cancer patients when told their diagnosis, but no studies have addressed subsequent communications concerning the implications of the diagnosis and treatment choices. This study extended previous research by investigating the experiences and preferences for communication about diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of patients diagnosed with breast cancer or melanoma.
Uptake of triacylglycerol-rich lipoproteins of differing triacylglycerol molecular species and unsaponifiable content by liver cells

The fatty acid composition of dietary oils can modulate the incorporation of triacylglycerol-rich lipoproteins (TRL) into hepatocytes, thus affecting the atherogenicity of these particles. However, nothing is known about the effect of the unsaponifiable fraction of the oils. In the present study, we evaluated the influence of these components on the uptake of TRL by rat primary hepatocytes. TRL were isolated from human serum after the intake of meals enriched in high-oleic sunflower oil (HOSO), virgin olive oil (VOO) or VOO enriched in its own unsaponifiable fraction (EVO). HOSO and HOSO-TRL differed from VOO and EVO and their corresponding TRL in the composition of triacylglycerol molecular species and of the unsaponifiable fraction. Furthermore, the increase in the unsaponifiable fraction of VOO led to changes in the triacylglycerol molecular species in the EVO-TRL. On incubation with hepatocytes, HOSO-TRL were taken up at a faster rate than VOO-TRL or EVO-TRL. In addition, in comparison to VOO-TRL, HOSO-TRL increased the expression of mRNA for the LDL receptor-related protein receptor, which plays an important role in the internalisation of remnant lipoproteins. EVO-TRL also increased LDL receptor-related protein mRNA expression in comparison with VOO-TRL, but this change was not accompanied by a rise in the uptake rate, suggesting that the unsaponifiable fraction of VOO may inhibit LDL receptor-related protein expression or activity post-transcriptionally. In conclusion, TRL from dietary oils with differing triacylglycerol molecular species and unsaponifiable fraction content are taken up by liver cells at different rates, and this may be important in the atherogenicity of these particles.
Scheduling Algorithms for MU-MIMO with Partial Current CSIT and Full Delayed CSIT

Recently, a novel class of high-performance multi-round MU- MIMO schemes were developed by Yang et al. [1] for the practically attractive scenario in which the transmitter has available partial channel state information (CSI) regarding the current state of the channel, but also full delayed CSI. We study methods for combining user scheduling with these multi-round transmission schemes, in order to realize some of their multiplexing gains in the form of high-rates in the SNR regime of practical interest. In these multi-round schemes several differently encoded signals are transmitted to each user over many time-dispersed slots. The challenge in designing schedulers is that certain signals intended for a given user are transmitted in different forms and combinations with other-user signals over multiple slots, occurring at distinctly different times with distinctly different channels. We develop a simple and novel scheduling framework based on appropriate resource division between transmission rounds and round-specific scheduling criteria. Simulation-based performance analysis of the proposed scheduling algorithms, operated on the 2-user transmission scheme of Yang et al. [1] and a 3-user extension suggest that these schemes can harvest significant scheduling benefits in some scenarios.
Polynomial algorithms for clearing multi-unit single-item and multi-unit combinatorial reverse auctions

This paper develops new algorithms for clearing multi-unit single-item and multi-unit combinatorial reverse auctions. Specifically, we consider settings where bids are submitted in the form of a supply function and the auctions have sub-additive pricing with free disposal. Our algorithms are based on a greedy strategy and we show that they are of polynomial complexity. Furthermore, we show that the solutions they generate are within a finite bound of the optimal.