Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bridging Viterbi and posterior decoding: a generalized risk approach to hidden path inference based on hidden Markov models

Motivated by the unceasing interest in hidden Markov models (HMMs), this paper reexamines hidden path inference in these models, using primarily a risk-based framework. While the most common maximum a posteriori (MAP), or Viterbi, path estimator and the minimum error, or Posterior Decoder (PD) have long been around, other path estimators, or decoders, have been either only hinted at or applied more recently and in dedicated applications generally unfamiliar to the statistical learning community. Over a decade ago, however, a family of algorithmically defined decoders aiming to hybridize the two standard ones was proposed elsewhere. The present paper gives a careful analysis of this hybridization approach, identifies several problems and issues with it and other previously proposed approaches, and proposes practical resolutions of those. Furthermore, simple modifications of the classical criteria for hidden path recognition are shown to lead to a new class of decoders. Dynamic programming algorithms to compute these decoders in the usual forward-backward manner are presented. A particularly interesting subclass of such estimators can be also viewed as hybrids of the MAP and PD estimators. Similar to previously proposed MAP-PD hybrids, the new class is parameterized by a small number of tunable parameters. Unlike their algorithmic predecessors, the new risk-based decoders are more clearly interpretable, and, most importantly, work "out-of-the box" in practice, which is demonstrated on some real bioinformatics tasks and data. Some further generalizations and applications are discussed in the conclusion.
An Efficient Algorithm for Optimal Addition Chains

The computational aspects of finding the shortest addition chains for an integer are investigated in this work. Theoretically developed lower and upper bounds for the minimal length of the addition chains for an integer are exploited to construct a subtle pruning function for backtracking algorithm. These techniques are finally combined to build an efficient algorithm for finding the optimal addition chains.
Comparative studies on anti-inflammatory activity of Coriandrum sativum, Datura stramonium and Azadirachta indica.

Coriandrum sativum, Datura stramonium and Azadirachta indica are traditionally used in treatment of inflammation. Ethanolic extracts of fruits of Coriandrum sativum, leaves of Datura stramonium and Azadirachta indica were subjected to preliminary screening for anti-inflammatory activity in albino rats. All ethanolic extracts exhibited significant anti-inflammatory activity comparable to the standard drug Diclofenac sodium against carrageenan induced rat paw edema method. Among these plant Azadirachta indica showed maximum anti-inflammatory activity every hour.
Proinflammatory cytokine secretion is suppressed by TMEM16A or CFTR channel activity in human cystic fibrosis bronchial epithelia

Functional expression of either CFTR or the calcium-activated chloride channel TMEM16A attenuates expression and secretion of the proinflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-8, and CXCL1/2 in respiratory epithelia. Thus augmented proinflammatory cytokine secretion caused by defective anion transport may contribute to lung inflammation in cystic fibrosis.
Prognostic Markers in Patients with Ascites and Hepatorenal Syndrome

Cirrhosis is a progressive liver disorder characterized by a distorted liver architecture due to fibrosis which eventually leads to portal hypertension. It is a common cause of mortality accounting for over 26,000 deaths annually in the United States [1]. The natural course of patients with cirrhosis is frequently complicated by the accumulation of fluid in the peritoneal space in the form of ascites. This is caused by an abnormal regulation of extracellular fluid volume which leads to alterations in renal function with renal sodium retention, solute-free water retention, and renal vasoconstriction. These changes are responsible for fluid accumulation in the form of ascites, dilutional hyponatremia and hepatorenal syndrome (HRS) respectively. Ascites is the most common complication of cirrhosis and poses and increased risk for infections, renal failure and mortality. Patients with cirrhosis and ascites have a poor prognosis and it is estimated that nearly half of these individuals will die in approximately 5 years without liver transplantation. Hypervolemic hyponatremia and HRS occur later and confer an even a worse prognosis. This article reviews common prognostic markers and models in cirrhotic patients with ascites, hypervolemic hyponatremia and HRS.
Strong converse for the capacity of quantum Gaussian channels

We prove that a strong converse theorem holds for the classical capacity of all phase-insensitive bosonic Gaussian channels, when imposing a maximum photon number constraint on the inputs of the channel. This class is a natural extension of classical continuous Gaussian channels, and the well studied pure-loss, thermal, additive noise, and amplifier channels are all in this class of channels. The statement of the strong converse theorem is that the probability of correctly decoding a classical message rapidly converges to zero in the limit of many channel uses if the communication rate exceeds the classical capacity. We prove this theorem by relating the success probability of any code with its rate of data transmission, the effective dimension of the channel output space, and the purity of the channel as quantified by the minimum output entropy. Our result bolsters the understanding of the classical capacity of these channels by establishing it as a sharp dividing line between possible and impossible communication rates over them.
Early expression of the myogenic regulatory gene, myf-5, in precursor cells of skeletal muscle in the mouse embryo.

We have analysed by in situ hybridization the expression of myf-5, the murine homologue of the human myogenic regulatory sequence myf5, during embryogenesis in the mouse. myf-5 sequences were first detected in the earliest somites (from about 8 days p.c.) in the dermomyotome, before formation of the dermatome, myotome and sclerotome. The dermomyotome is classically considered to give rise to the precursor muscle cells of body and limb skeletal muscle. myf-5-positive cells were also detected early in the visceral arches and limb buds. In this case, as in somites, myf-5 expression precedes that of the two related myogenic regulatory sequences, myogenin and MyoD1, and indeed any other skeletal muscle marker examined to date. myf-5 is not detected at any stage in developing cardiac muscle. From 11.5 days p.c. , the level of myf-5 transcripts begins to decrease to become undetectable (by in situ hybridization) from 14 days p.c. Both the appearance and disappearance of myf-5 follow the anteroposterior gradient of somite formation and maturation in the embryo. The time and place of myf-5 expression are consistent with a role in the early events of myogenic differentiation, possibly during determination of the myogenic lineage.
Distributed hash table based ID management optimization for internet of things

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging network which is designed to combine sensor networks and other things with the Internet. IoT includes numerous things, each of which is allocated an unique identity (UID). UID management plays an very important role in guaranteeing the efficiency of IoT system. Since IoT is a task-oriented network, there must be a coupling relation among UIDs. Based on this consideration, a correlated lookup scheme is proposed to improve the performance of UID management. Meanwhile, the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) is adopted as the underlying structure to construct the basic UID management methodology. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the inherent relation is leveraged to improve the efficiency of UID Management. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed lookup scheme.
Implicit Multisensory Associations Influence Voice Recognition

Natural objects provide partially redundant information to the brain through different sensory modalities. For example, voices and faces both give information about the speech content, age, and gender of a person. Thanks to this redundancy, multimodal recognition is fast, robust, and automatic. In unimodal perception, however, only part of the information about an object is available. Here, we addressed whether, even under conditions of unimodal sensory input, crossmodal neural circuits that have been shaped by previous associative learning become activated and underpin a performance benefit. We measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging before, while, and after participants learned to associate either sensory redundant stimuli, i.e. voices and faces, or arbitrary multimodal combinations, i.e. voices and written names, ring tones, and cell phones or brand names of these cell phones. After learning, participants were better at recognizing unimodal auditory voices that had been paired with faces than those paired with written names, and association of voices with faces resulted in an increased functional coupling between voice and face areas. No such effects were observed for ring tones that had been paired with cell phones or names. These findings demonstrate that brief exposure to ecologically valid and sensory redundant stimulus pairs, such as voices and faces, induces specific multisensory associations. Consistent with predictive coding theories, associative representations become thereafter available for unimodal perception and facilitate object recognition. These data suggest that for natural objects effective predictive signals can be generated across sensory systems and proceed by optimization of functional connectivity between specialized cortical sensory modules.
An Agent Based Framework to Monitor and Control High Performance Data Transfers

We present a distributed agent based system used to monitor, configure and control complex, large scale data transfers in the wide area network. The localhost information service agent (LISA) is a lightweight dynamic service that provides complete system and applications monitoring, is capable to dynamically configure system parameters and can help in optimizing distributed applications. As part of the MonALISA (monitoring agents in a large integrated services architecture) system, LISA is an end host agent capable to collect any type of monitoring information, to distribute them, and to take actions based on local or global decision units. The system has been used for the bandwidth challenge at supercomputing 2006 to coordinate global large scale data transfers using fast data transfer (FDT) application between hundreds of servers distributed on major grid sites involved in processing high energy physics data for the future large hadron collider experiments.
Estudo da mudança nas práticas de Controlo de Gestão em Portugal

This study seeks to analyse the nature of management accounting change in firms operating in Portugal in the last decade, and to contribute for the comprehension of the reasons why firms changed their practices. Four research questions were posed when designing the investigation: (i) ‘Did Portuguese firms change their management accounting practices, and if so, how deep were the changes? ’; (ii) ‘Which factors triggered change? ’; (iii) ‘Which techniques were adopted by firms? ’; and (iv) ‘What were the factors that explained firms resistance to change? ’. Burns et al.’s (2000) questionnaire was adopted to support the investigation. The questionnaire was sent to the finance directors and controllers of 687 firms of large, medium and small size, and 116 responses were received. Similarly to the findings obtained in the UK, Portuguese firms have been changing considerably their management accounting practices. Therefore, the study did not support Johnson and Kaplan’s (1987) contention that there is a gap between management accounting practices and firms’ business environment.
Fast-yet-accurate variation-aware current and voltage modelling of radiation-induced transient fault

For robust systems, it is important to mitigate radiation effect in early stages to reduce the design cost. Traditionally, a double-exponential current source is widely used to model the transient fault for analyzing the radiation effects. However, in light of complicating effects in the advanced technologies, such approach is no longer sufficient to estimate transient faults and may lead to inaccurate results. Therefore, we propose a fast-yet-accurate approach to model the radiation-induced transient fault, meanwhile considering the interaction between its transient current and transient voltage. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 105X speedup with an average accuracy loss of only 2.6% compared to the 3D mixed-mode TCAD simulation. Moreover, variation sources also become big issues with the progressing technology nodes and thus the proposed method is then extended to incorporate these variations during transient-fault analysis. As a result, sensitivity analysis that covers voltage, gate-length and device-width variations can be performed fast and accurately in our method.
Internalized Heterosexism, Social Support, and Career Development in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Undergraduate and Graduate Students: An Application of Social Cognitive Career Theory

Using a the framework of Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994), we examined the relationships between one potential career-related barrier, internalized heterosexism (IH), and social support on career decision-making self-efficacy (CDMSE) and vocational outcome expectations in lesbian, gay, and bisexual undergraduate and graduate students. Specifically, we predicted that internalized heterosexism would be negatively related to CDMSE and vocational outcome expectations, and that social support would serve as a buffer that moderates these relationships. Results indicated that IH and social support were both unique predictors of outcome expectations. There was also a significant interaction effect between IH and social support in relation to vocational outcome expectations, such that for those with lower levels of social support, there was a significant, positive relationship between IH and outcome expectations, whereas for those with higher levels of social support, there was no significant relationship between IH and outcome expectations. Social support was also significantly related to CDMSE, but neither IH, nor the interaction of social support and IH were significantly related to CDMSE. The implications are discussed within the context of the bottleneck hypothesis and competing psychological demands (e.g., Hetherington, 1991).
Essays in organizational economics

This thesis is a collection of essays on organizational economics and finance-related topics. Firms and individuals who sell opinions may bias their reports for either behavioral or strategic reasons. Chapter 1 proposes a new methodology for measuring these biases, particularly whether opinion producers under or over emphasize their private information, i.e. whether they herd or exaggerate their differences with the consensus. Applying the methodology to I/B/E/S analysts reveals that they do not herd as is often assumed, but rather they exaggerate their differences with the consensus by an average factor of about 2.4. Analysts also overweight their prior-period private information and thus under-update based on last period's forecast error; this under-updating helps explain the apparently conflicting over and under-reaction results of DeBondt and Thaler (1990) and Abarbanell and Bernhard (1992). A useful by-product of the methodology is a measure of the incremental information content of an analyst's forecasts. Using this measure reveals that analysts differ greatly in performance: the information content of the future forecasts of the top 10 percent of analysts is roughly six times that of the bottom 40 percent. Chapter 2 examines whether career concerns can create an incentive for opinion-producing agents to exaggerate. We find that they can, the reason being that high-ability agents have opinions that are more different from the consensus on average and potential clients will learn more quickly about how different an agent's opinions are from the consensus on average that about whether or not they are exaggerating. The model predicts that agents should exaggerate more when they are underrated by their clients, when the realizations of the variables they are forecasting are expected to be especially noisy, and when they expect to make fewer future forecasts. We find that these predictions are consistent with the empirical data on equity analyst's earnings forecasts. In models by Fershtman and Judd (1987) and Sklivas (1987), firms competing in quantities benefit strategically from commiting to managerial incentives that are biased toward revenue maximization. Little empirical evidence has been produced in support of these models, and their assumption that incentive contracts are observable has been criticized as unrealistic. Chapter 3 proposes an alternative model in which firms competing in strategic substitutes commit to using less precise profit measures, which biases the optimal unobservable contract towards revenue maximization. This model performs better empirically. Firms that compete in strategic substitutes choose less precise profit measures across six different …
Learning a Stratified Grammar

Phonological processes and structures are often limited to a particular set of a language’s words, such as loanwords, Latinate words in English, or Yamato words in Japanese. Typically, the etymologically older, or “core” set of words is more restricted in the structures that it permits, and is (hence) subject to more processes. To capture such restrictions in Optimality Theory, Ito and Mester (1999) propose stratified grammars of the form in (1), where M stands for a Markedness constraint, and Faith stands for a faithfulness constraint. Faith-L1 is a lexically specific version of that faithfulness constraint (see also Pater 2000 for other arguments for lexically specific constraints).
What Keeps Patients from Adhering to a Home Blood Pressure Program?

Background: Home blood pressure monitoring (HBPM) predicts cardiovascular risk and increases hypertension control. Non-participation in HBPM is prevalent and decreases the potential benefit. Methods: Telephone surveys were conducted with a random quota sample of non-participants in a HBPM program, which supplied a complimentary automated blood pressure cuff and utilized a centralized reporting system. Questioning assessed use of monitors, perceived benefit, communication with providers, and barriers. Results: There were 320 completed surveys (response rate 53%). Of non-participants, 70.2% still used HBPM cuffs and 58% communicated values to providers. Spanish-speakers were 4.4 times more likely to not use cuffs (95% CI, 2.22–8.885). Barriers to participation were largely personal (forgetting, not having time, or self-described laziness). Reasons for not communicating readings with providers were largely clinic factors (no doctor visit, doctor didn’t ask, thinking doctor wouldn’t care). Lack of knowledge of HBPM and program design also contributed. After being surveyed, patients were over three times more likely to use the central reporting system. Discussion: Most non-participants still used HBPM and communicated values to providers, suggesting many “drop-outs” may still receive clinical benefit. However, much valuable information is not utilized. Future programs should focus on reminder systems, patient motivation, education, and minimizing time involvement.
Commentary Pragmatic Markers in English

In an earlier paper (Fraser, 1996), 1 onílined in sume detail my view of pragmatie markers. ¡ suggested ihat [he semanlie analysis of a sentence is separable into two, mutually exclusive parts: a proposiliunal cuntent, perhaps cumplex, which serves as Ihe mcssagc contení for ihe basic message cunveycd by Ihe utierance of [he sentence; and a set of pragmatie markers, structures and cxprcssions which linguistically encude aspects uf [he speaker’s direcí cummunícative intentiun i. When expressiuns such as ¡ promise, frank/y, please, sadly really and reportedly funclion as pragmatie markers, as in ihe fullowing exampíes,
Optimal designs for free knot least squares splines

In this paper D-optimal designs for free knot least squares spline estimation are investigated. In contrast to most of the literature on optimal design for spline regression models it is assumed that the knots of the spline are also estimated from the data, which yields to optimal design problems for nonlinear models. In some cases local D-optimal designs can be found explicitly. Moreover, it is shown that the points of minimally supported D-optimal designs are increasing and real analytic functions of the knots and these results are used for the numerical construction of local D-optimal designs by means of Taylor expansions. In order to obtain optimal designs which are less sensitive with respect to a specification of the unknown knots a maximin approach is proposed and standardized maximin D-optimal designs for least square splines with estimated knots are determined in the class of all minimally supported designs.
3 Testa et al BVS Technology to Treat CAD Bioresorbable Vascular Scaffold Use in the Clinical Arena : Evidence From the Absorb Trials and Registries Absorb Trials

Bioresorbable vascular scaffolds (BVS) represent a promising novel approach for the treatment of coronary artery disease. BVS promise to address some of the well-known limitations of current drug-eluting stents, while providing a transient scaffolding of the vessel to prevent acute vessel closure/recoil. Drug elution by BVS prevents neointimal proliferation in a similar fashion to drug-eluting stents, and complete bioresorption is associated with late vessel lumen enlargement, plaque regression, and restoration of vasomotion. Based on the pathophysiological reasons and on the results derived from clinical studies, BVS are increasingly being used in clinical practice. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of the current evidence supporting the use of BVS in clinical practice. In particular, we will discuss the randomized controlled trials and registries evaluating the clinical outcome of these devices, with a special focus on their application in patients with acute coronary syndrome and in specific lesion subsets (bifurcations, chronic total occlusions, and in-stent restenosis). (Circ Cardiovasc Interv. 2016;9: e003978. DOI: 10.1161/CIRCINTERVENTIONS.116.003978.)
Nitric Oxide-dependent Cilia Regulatory Enzyme Localization in Bovine Bronchial Epithelial Cells

Airway epithelial-derived nitric oxide (NO), through the activation of nucleotide cyclases and downstream kinases, stimulates ciliary beating, yet the precise locations of these enzymes are unknown. We hypothesized that these NO-activated enzymes are located within, or adjacent to, the ciliary axoneme. Immunohistochemistry of intact ciliated cells revealed that endothelial-type nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), the RII isoform of the cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA-RII), the type I isoform of the cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG-I), and guanylate cyclase β (GC-β) all colocalized with pericentrin to the basal body. In contrast, the PKA-RI isoform and the PKG-II isoform localized to ciliary axonemes. Western blot analysis of isolated demembranated ciliary preparations detected eNOS, GC-β, and both isoforms of PKA and PKG. An A-kinase-anchoring protein was also detected. Our findings suggest that these enzymes are sequestered close to their points of action into a discrete ciliary metabolon, enabling targeted phosphorylation and efficient upregulation of ciliary beating.