Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimizing Local File Accesses for FUSE-Based Distributed Storage

Modern distributed file systems can store huge amounts of information while retaining the benefits of high reliability and performance. Many of these systems are prototyped with FUSE, a popular framework for implementing user-level file systems. Unfortunately, when these systems are mounted on a client that uses FUSE, they suffer from I/O overhead caused by extra memory copies and context switches during local file access. Overhead imposed by FUSE on file systems is not small and becomes more pronounced during local file access. This overhead may significantly degrade the performance of data-intensive applications running with distributed file systems that aggressively use local storage. In this paper, we propose a mechanism that achieves rapid local file access in FUSE-based distributed file systems by reducing the number of memory copies and context switches. We then incorporate the mechanism into the FUSE framework and demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments, using the Gfarm distributed file system.
A longitudinal examination of health-related quality of life in children and adolescents with spina bifida.

OBJECTIVE The current study examined (1) spina bifida (SB) youths' health-related quality of life (HRQOL) compared with nonclinical and chronic health condition (CHC) samples, (2) parent-child agreement regarding HRQOL, and (3) prospective changes in HRQOL. METHODS Child and parent-proxy reports of Pediatric Quality of Life were collected at two time waves (Time 1: N = 134, ages 8-15 years; Time 2: N = 109, ages 10-17 years) as part of a larger longitudinal study. RESULTS SB youth had statistically and clinically reduced physical HRQOL compared with the nonclinical and CHC samples at both time points. There were significant discrepancies between youth and parent-proxy reports of HRQOL; youth reported higher levels of physical and social HRQOL than parents. The majority of parent- and child-reported HRQOL domains remained stable, yet youth-reported social HRQOL increased over time. CONCLUSIONS Youth with SB are at risk for poor HRQOL. Examining modifiable condition and social-environmental predictors of youth HRQOL will be important in informing future interventions.
Improved survival with bevacizumab in advanced cervical cancer.

BACKGROUND Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) promotes angiogenesis, a mediator of disease progression in cervical cancer. Bevacizumab, a humanized anti-VEGF monoclonal antibody, has single-agent activity in previously treated, recurrent disease. Most patients in whom recurrent cervical cancer develops have previously received cisplatin with radiation therapy, which reduces the effectiveness of cisplatin at the time of recurrence. We evaluated the effectiveness of bevacizumab and nonplatinum combination chemotherapy in patients with recurrent, persistent, or metastatic cervical cancer. METHODS Using a 2-by-2 factorial design, we randomly assigned 452 patients to chemotherapy with or without bevacizumab at a dose of 15 mg per kilogram of body weight. Chemotherapy consisted of cisplatin at a dose of 50 mg per square meter of body-surface area, plus paclitaxel at a dose of 135 or 175 mg per square meter or topotecan at a dose of 0.75 mg per square meter on days 1 to 3, plus paclitaxel at a dose of 175 mg per square meter on day 1. Cycles were repeated every 21 days until disease progression, the development of unacceptable toxic effects, or a complete response was documented. The primary end point was overall survival; a reduction of 30% in the hazard ratio for death was considered clinically important. RESULTS Groups were well balanced with respect to age, histologic findings, performance status, previous use or nonuse of a radiosensitizing platinum agent, and disease status. Topotecan-paclitaxel was not superior to cisplatin-paclitaxel (hazard ratio for death, 1.20). With the data for the two chemotherapy regimens combined, the addition of bevacizumab to chemotherapy was associated with increased overall survival (17.0 months vs. 13.3 months; hazard ratio for death, 0.71; 98% confidence interval, 0.54 to 0.95; P=0.004 in a one-sided test) and higher response rates (48% vs. 36%, P=0.008). Bevacizumab, as compared with chemotherapy alone, was associated with an increased incidence of hypertension of grade 2 or higher (25% vs. 2%), thromboembolic events of grade 3 or higher (8% vs. 1%), and gastrointestinal fistulas of grade 3 or higher (3% vs. 0%). CONCLUSIONS The addition of bevacizumab to combination chemotherapy in patients with recurrent, persistent, or metastatic cervical cancer was associated with an improvement of 3.7 months in median overall survival. (Funded by the National Cancer Institute; GOG 240 ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00803062.).
K-Medoids based clustering of PlanetLab's slice-centric data

This paper investigates the application of widely used K-Medoids based clustering algorithm on data collected through CoMon facility for the PlanetLab testbed. The averaged values of various metrics in passively collected slice-centric data has been considered for clustering purposes. Various groups of slices, depicting similar resource usage patterns have been identified in original data set. These clusters have been represented in reduced dimensional space formed by first two principal components of original data set. In order to capture variations in pattern of resource usage by various slices at a PlanetLab node, clustering of standard deviations of various metrics have also been carried out. It has been found that K-medoid based clustering can effectively split the original data space into various sub-spaces of different resource usage behaviour of slices. Thus, it can lead to better resource management and control in publicly available testbeds.
Co-adjustment of yolk antioxidants and androgens in birds

Mothers can shape the developmental trajectory of their offspring through the transmission of resources such as hormones, antioxidants or immunoglobulins. Over the last two decades, an abundant literature on maternal effects in birds has shown that several of these compounds (i.e. androgens, glucocorticoids and antioxidants) often influence the same offspring phenotypic traits (i.e. growth, immunity or oxidative stress levels), making interaction effects between egg components a likely scenario. However, the potential interactive effects of maternally transmitted compounds on offspring development and potential co-adjustment of these compounds within an egg are still poorly understood. Here, we report the results of an interspecific comparative analysis on birds' egg yolk composition (i.e. androgens and antioxidants) where we found that yolk carotenoid and vitamin E concentrations are positively associated, supporting the hypothesis that these two antioxidants act in synergy. The concentrations of vitamin E also increased with increasing concentrations of testosterone. This last result confirms the emerging idea that androgens and antioxidants are co-adjusted within eggs and that maternally transmitted antioxidants might limit the potential direct and indirect effects of prenatal exposure to high testosterone levels on oxidative stress.
De-Ossifying the Internet Transport Layer: A Survey and Future Perspectives

It is widely recognized that the Internet transport layer has become ossified, where further evolution has become hard or even impossible. This is a direct consequence of the ubiquitous deployment of middleboxes that hamper the deployment of new transports, aggravated further by the limited flexibility of the application programming interface (API) typically presented to applications. To tackle this problem, a wide range of solutions have been proposed in the literature, each aiming to address a particular aspect. Yet, no single proposal has emerged that is able to enable evolution of the transport layer. In this paper, after an overview of the main issues and reasons for transport-layer ossification, we survey proposed solutions and discuss their potential and limitations. The survey is divided into five parts, each covering a set of point solutions for a different facet of the problem space: 1) designing middlebox-proof transports; 2) signaling for facilitating middlebox traversal; 3) enhancing the API between the applications and the transport layer; 4) discovering and exploiting end-to-end capabilities; and 5) enabling user-space protocol stacks. Based on this analysis, we then identify further development needs toward an overall solution. We argue that the development of a comprehensive transport layer framework, able to facilitate the integration and cooperation of specialized solutions in an application-independent and flexible way, is a necessary step toward making the Internet transport architecture truly evolvable. To this end, we identify the requirements for such a framework and provide insights for its development.
Geochemical evidence for mélange melting in global arcs

Arc lavas form from melting of mélange rocks; sediment melts and slab-derived fluids are not major contributors. In subduction zones, sediments and hydrothermally altered oceanic crust, which together form part of the subducting slab, contribute to the chemical composition of lavas erupted at the surface to form volcanic arcs. Transport of this material from the slab to the overlying mantle wedge is thought to involve discreet melts and fluids that are released from various portions of the slab. We use a meta-analysis of geochemical data from eight globally representative arcs to show that melts and fluids from individual slab components cannot be responsible for the formation of arc lavas. Instead, the data are compatible with models that first invoke physical mixing of slab components and the mantle wedge, widely referred to as high-pressure mélange, before arc magmas are generated.
Minimum left ventricular pressure during beta-adrenergic stimulation in human subjects. Evidence for elastic recoil and diastolic "suction" in the normal heart.

The influence of elastic recoil and restoring forces on diastolic left ventricular pressure decay and minimum left ventricular pressures has been demonstrated in animal models but has not been studied in the human heart. To investigate this issue in the normal human left ventricle, we studied eight patients with chest pain and normal coronary arteries with simultaneous measurement of left ventricular volume (by radionuclide angiography) and pressure (by micromanometer catheter) and coronary sinus blood flow. Electrocardiographic-gated data were obtained in the basal state, during rapid atrial pacing, and during isoproterenol infusion to a similar heart rate. Compared with pacing, isoproterenol increased ejection fraction and reduced end-systolic volume (p less than 0.005), end-systolic pressure (p less than 0.005), and the half-time of pressure decline after peak negative dP/dt (T1/2) (p less than 0.001). Negative diastolic pressure developed in seven of eight patients during isoproterenol (range, -0.5 to -2.4 mm Hg) but in only one of eight during pacing (-0.2 mm Hg). These reduced diastolic pressures during isoproterenol were accompanied by increased stroke volume (reflecting increased transmitral flow) and diminished pulmonary wedge pressure (reflecting left atrial pressure). The magnitude of reduction in minimum diastolic pressure during pacing and isoproterenol was related to the change in end-systolic volume (r = 0.79, p less than 0.001), ejection fraction (r = -0.74, p less than 0.001), T1/2 (r = -0.57, p less than 0.02), and coronary sinus flow (r = 0.73, p less than 0.005). Stronger correlations were observed in analyzing changes during isoproterenol alone. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
A Generative Model for Extracting Parallel Fragments from Comparable Documents

Although parallel corpora are essential language resources for many NLP tasks, they are rare or even not available for many language pairs. Instead, compara- ble corpora are widely available and con- tain parallel fragments of information that can be used applications like statisti- cal machine translations. In this research, we propose a generative LDA based model for extracting parallel fragments from comparable documents without us- ing any initial parallel data or bilingual lexicon. The experimental results show significant improvement if the extracted sentence fragments generated by the pro- posed method are used in addition to an existing parallel corpus in an SMT task. According to human judgment, the accu- racy of the proposed method for an Eng- lish-Persian task is about 66%. Also, the OOV rate for the same task is reduced by 28%.
Towards an adaptive RED algorithm for achieving delay–loss performance

Random early detection (RED) proposed by Floyd and Jacobson (1993) is an active queue management strategy that has been deployed extensively in routers. However, its effectiveness has been limited owing to the difficulty in tuning its parameters under different network conditions. The authors define the notion of an operating point that an active queue management (AQM) policy should target. They suggest that the RED parameters should be set or varied with the aim of reaching this operating point. Extensive simulations have been performed to understand the effect of max/sub th/ and max/sub p/ on the network dynamics. Based on these simulations, guidelines are given to adapt the RED parameters.
A Physics-Based Model for a SiC JFET Device Accounting for the Mobility Dependence on Temperature and Electric Field

In this work a physical model for a SiC Junction Field Effect Transistor (JFET) is presented. The novel feature of the model is that the mobility dependence on both temperature and electric field is taken into account. This is particularly important for high-current power devices, where the maximum conduction current is limited by drift velocity saturation in the channel. The model equations are described in detail, emphasizing the differences introduced by the field-dependent mobility model. The model is then implemented in Pspice. Both static and dynamic simulation results are given. The results are validated with experimental results under static conditions and under resistive switching conditions.
MICA-Expressing Monocytes Enhance Natural Killer Cell Fc Receptor-Mediated Antitumor Functions

Natural killer (NK) cells secrete immunostimulatory factors like IFNγ in response to tumors. Engagement of monocyte MICA and NK cell NKG2D promoted and enhanced the NK response to HER2+ breast tumors treated with mAb to HER2 in a murine model. Natural killer (NK) cells are large granular lymphocytes that promote the antitumor response via communication with other cell types in the tumor microenvironment. Previously, we have shown that NK cells secrete a profile of immune stimulatory factors (e.g., IFNγ, MIP-1α, and TNFα) in response to dual stimulation with the combination of antibody (Ab)-coated tumor cells and cytokines, such as IL12. We now demonstrate that this response is enhanced in the presence of autologous monocytes. Monocyte enhancement of NK cell activity was dependent on cell-to-cell contact as determined by a Transwell assay. It was hypothesized that NK cell effector functions against Ab-coated tumor cells were enhanced via binding of MICA on monocytes to NK cell NKG2D receptors. Strategies to block MICA–NKG2D interactions resulted in reductions in IFNγ production. Depletion of monocytes in vivo resulted in decreased IFNγ production by murine NK cells upon exposure to Ab-coated tumor cells. In mice receiving trastuzumab and IL12 therapy, monocyte depletion resulted in significantly greater tumor growth in comparison to mock-depleted controls (P < 0.05). These data suggest that NK cell–monocyte interactions enhance NK cell antitumor activity in the setting of monoclonal Ab therapy for cancer. Cancer Immunol Res; 5(9); 778–89. ©2017 AACR.
Intensive care of the patient following open abdominal aortic surgery

Purpose of reviewAbdominal aortic aneurysms still require open repair despite the advances that endovascular aneurysm repair has made in treating patients with significant operative risk. Older patients with significant comorbidities require open repair of their complex aneurysms when they fail to meet anatomic criteria for endovascular aneurysm repair. This review discusses the physiologic insult of abdominal aortic surgery. It aims to address which patients are the highest risk of postoperative morbidity, and advances in their intensive care unit management to reduce such morbidity. Recent findingsAdvanced age, chronic health dysfunction, emergency surgery, and multiple organ failure are independent predictors of postoperative mortality. Myocardial ischemia is the largest contributor to patient morbidity, with any rise in postoperative cardiac troponin I predicting increased in-hospital myocardial infarction and mortality. Highest-risk patients benefit most from optimizing perioperative cardiac status with β-blockade. Perioperative treatment with fenoldopam may improve renal outcome. Tracheostomy to aid in weaning is associated with increased mortality but may improve outcome in patients with preoperative chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. SummaryDemographic trends indicate that open aortic surgery will continue to be performed on older patients with complex aneurysms. Identifying patients at risk and optimizing their postoperative risk factors will improve outcomes.
Observation of the breast cancer patient with a tumor-positive sentinel node: implications of the ACOSOG Z0011 trial.

Axillary lymph node status has been the most important prognostic factor for breast cancer throughout the past century. During the past decade, intraoperative lymphatic mapping with sentinel lymph node dissection (SLND) has been investigated as an alternative staging modality. This technique may be as accurate as ALND, and certainly is less invasive. Adjuvant treatment recommendations, which historically were made on the basis of lymph node status alone, now take into account primary tumor features, molecular markers, and patient characteristics. This evolution of current treatment patterns is driven in part by the diminishing size of tumors, the simultaneous decrease in the presence of axillary metastases, and a better understanding of tumor-specific risk factors. How do these trends affect the interpretation of a tumor-positive sentinel node (SN)? Can an axilla with a positive SN be observed? Should it be observed? This review examines the implications of a positive SN in the context of smaller tumor size, decreased nodal disease, and increased reliance on alternative prognostic factors for treatment decisions. The historical data comparing ALND to no ALND in clinically node-negative patients is reviewed and discussed in the context of observation for a positive SN. These are the issues underlying the ACOSOG Z0010 and Z0011 trials.
Tangential Biopsy Thickness versus Lesion Depth in Longitudinal Melanonychia: A Pilot Study

Longitudinal melanonychia can be caused by melanocyte activation (hypermelanosis) or proliferation (lentigo, nevus or melanoma). Histopathologic examination is mandatory for suspicious cases of melanomas. Tangential biopsy of the matrix is an elegant technique avoiding nail plate dystrophy, but it was unknown whether the depth of the sample obtained by this method is adequate for histopathologic diagnosis. Twenty-two patients with longitudinal melanonychia striata were submitted to tangential matrix biopsies described by Haneke. The tissue was stained with hematoxylin-eosin and the specimens were measured at 3 distinct points according to the total thickness: largest (A), intermediate (B) and narrowest (C) then divided into 4 groups according to the histopathologic diagnosis (G1: hypermelanosis; G2: lentigos; G3: nevus; G4: melanoma). The lesions were measured using the same method. The mean specimen/lesion thickness measure values for each group was: G1: 0,59/0,10 mm, G2: 0,67/0,08 mm, G3: 0,52/0,05 mm, G4: 0,58/0,10 mm. The general average thickness for all the specimens/lesions was 0,59/0,08 mm. We concluded that the tangential excision, for longitudinal melanonychia, provides an adequate material for histopathological diagnosis.
Automated Sequence Clustering of Audio Signals using Conditional Random Fields

In this paper, we propose a new conditional random ﬁeld (CRF) based algorithm for automated sequence clustering of audio signals, where the term sequence clustering is used in the same way as in biomedical signal clustering. Usual CRF based methods are trained in an observed manner, that is, for the training data, we need a corresponding state sequence. For automated sequence clustering, we have no such known state sequence in the beginning. We therefore adapt the training of the CRFs to the case of an unknown state sequence and apply the trained model for classiﬁcation of new instances of the audio signals. This analysis of the acoustical signals can be used, for example, for scene analysis or novelty detection, where one uses abstract states regularly and therefore manual prelabeling is not reasonable. In the experiments, we successfully have applied the trained model for sequence clustering to audio signals and were able to detect the signiﬁcant clusters.
Synthesis of Micheliolide Derivatives and Their Activities against AML Progenitor Cells

Micheliolide (MCL) derivatives with etherification or esterification of the hydroxyl group at the C4 position were synthesized and evaluated for their activities against different acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) cell lines. These derivatives demonstrated comparable activities against AML cell lines HL-60 and doxorubicin resistant cell line HL-60/A. As to multi-drug resistant AML progenitor cells KG-1a, MCL and some of its derivatives maintained significant activities, and only 1.1–2.7 fold activity reductions were observed when compared with the activities against HL-60, while doxorubicin showed 20-fold activity reduction. Our study demonstrated that the C4 hydroxyl group of MCL might not only be a suitable position for structural modifications, but also be a starting point for the design of appropriate molecular probes to explore the specific targets in the progenitor cell line KG-1a.
The PAR-aPKC system: lessons in polarity

Ten years ago, par-1 and par-3 were cloned as two of the six par genes essential for the asymmetric division of the Caenorhabditis elegans zygote. PAR-1 is a protein kinase, whereas PAR-3 is a PDZ-domain-containing scaffold protein. Work over the past decade has shown that they are part of an evolutionarily conserved PAR-aPKC system involved in cell polarity in various biological contexts. Recent progress has illustrated the common principle that the PAR-aPKC system is the molecular machinery that converts initial polarity cues in the establishment of complementary membrane domains along the polarity axis. In most cases, this is achieved by mutually antagonistic interactions between the aPKC-PAR-3-PAR-6 complex and PAR-1 or PAR2 located opposite. However, accumulating evidence has also revealed that mechanisms by which the asymmetrically localized components of the PAR-aPKC system are linked with other cellular machinery for developing polarity are divergent depending on the cell type.