Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Distributed Information Divergence Estimation over Data Streams

In this paper, we consider the setting of large scale distributed systems, in which each node needs to quickly process a huge amount of data received in the form of a stream that may have been tampered with by an adversary. In this situation, a fundamental problem is how to detect and quantify the amount of work performed by the adversary. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm AnKLe for estimating the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an observed stream compared with the expected one. AnKLe combines sampling techniques and information-theoretic methods. It is very efficient, both in terms of space and time complexities, and requires only a single pass over the data stream. We show that AnKLe is an (ε, δ)-approximation algorithm with a space complexity Õ(1/ε + 1/ε2) bits in "most" cases, and Õ(1/ε + (n-ε-1)/ε2) otherwise, where n is the number of distinct data items in a stream. Moreover, we propose a distributed version of AnKLe that requires at most O (rℓ (log n + 1)) bits of communication between the ℓ participating nodes, where r is number of rounds of the algorithm. Experimental results show that the estimation provided by AnKLe remains accurate even for different adversarial settings for which the quality of other methods dramatically decreases.
1 2 Ja n 19 98 Energetics of Forced Thermal Ratchet

Molecular motors are known to have the high efficiency of energy transformation in the presence of thermal fluctuation[1]. Motivated by the surprising fact, recent studies of thermal ratchet models[2] are showing how and when work should be extracted from non-equilibrium fluctuations[3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. One of the important finding was brought by Magnasco[6] where he studied the temperature dependence on the fluctuation-induced current in a ratchet (multistable) system and showed that the current can generically be maximized in a finite temperature. The interesting finding has been interpreted that thermal fluctuation is not harmful for the fluctuationinduced work and even facilitates its efficiency. We show, however, this interpretation turns out to be incorrect as soon as we go into the realm of the energetics[11]: the efficiency of energy transformation is not maximized at finite temperature, even in the same system[6] that Magnasco considered. The maximum efficiency is realized in the absence of thermal fluctuation. The result presents an open problem whether thermal fluctuation could facilitate the efficiency of energetic transformation from force-fluctuation into work.
Community Health Workers and Stand-Alone or Integrated Case Management of Malaria: A Systematic Literature Review

A systematic literature review was conducted to assess the effectiveness of strategies to improve community case management (CCM) of malaria. Forty-three studies were included; most (38) reported indicators of community health worker (CHW) performance, 14 reported on malaria CCM integrated with other child health interventions, 16 reported on health system capacity, and 13 reported on referral. The CHWs are able to provide good quality malaria care, including performing procedures such as rapid diagnostic tests. Appropriate training, clear guidelines, and regular supportive supervision are important facilitating factors. Crucial to sustainable success of CHW programs is strengthening health system capacity to support commodity supply, supervision, and appropriate treatment of referred cases. The little evidence available on referral from community to health facility level suggests that this is an area that needs priority attention. The studies of integrated CCM suggest that additional tasks do not reduce the quality of malaria CCM provided sufficient training and supervision is maintained.
Evaluation of the Effect of Ecologic on Root Knot Nematode, Meloidogyne incognita, and Tomato Plant, Lycopersicon esculenum

Nonchemical methods and strategies for nematode management including cultural methods and engineered measures have been recommended as an alternative to methyl bromide (a major soil fumigant), due to its role in the depletion of the ozone layer. Hence, an international agreement has recently been reached calling for its reduced consumption and complete phasing out. This present research evaluates the potential of Ecologic, a biological, marine shell meal chitin material, as a soil amendment management agent for root knot nematode, Meloidogyne incognita, control, and its effect on the growth of Floradel tomato plant, Lycopersicon esculentum. To accomplish this goal, studies were conducted during which, experimental pots were set up in greenhouse environments using sterilized soil inoculated with 5,000 root-knot eggs per 1500 g soil. There were 4 treatments and 5 replications. Treatments were: No chitin; 50 g chitin; 100 g chitin; and 200 g chitin. A two-week wait period following Ecologic amendment preceded Floradel tomato planting to allow breakdown of the chitin material into the soil. Fresh and dry weights of shoot and root materials were taken as growth end-points. A statistically significant difference (p ≤ 0.05) was obtained with regard to the growth rate of L. esculentum at 100 g chitin treatment compared to the control with no chitin. Mean fresh weights of Floradel tomato were 78.0 ± 22.3g, 81.0 ± 20.3g, 109.0 ± 25.4g and 102.0 ± 33.3g at 0, 50, 100 and 200g chitin, respectively. The analysis of root knot nematode concentrations indicated a substantial effect on reproduction rate associated with chitin amendment. Study results showed a significant decrease in both root knot nematode eggs and juveniles (J2) at 100g and 200g Ecologic chitin levels, however, an increase in nematode concentrations was recorded at the 50g Ecologic chitin level (p ≤ 0.05). The mean amounts of J2 population, as expressed per 1500cm3 soil, were 49,933 ± 38,819, 86,050 ± 25248, 103 ± 133 and 103 ± 133 for 0, 50, 100 and 200g chitin, respectively. Similarly, the mean numbers of root knot nematode eggs (per 1500cm3 of soil) were 40,759 ± 36,712, 66,048 ± 39,730, 9,904 ± 16,591 and 9,257 ± 17,204. Root gall rating was also significantly lower (p ≤ 0.05) at the 100g and 200g chitin levels compared to the control. Percent gall ratings were 3.3 ± 1.0%, 3.2 ± 1.0%, 1.0 ± 0.5%, and 1.0% ± 0.6% for amendment levels of 0, 50, 100, and 200g chitin, respectively.
Study Of Retinal Nerve Fibre Layer Thickness In Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus By 3-Dimensional Optical Coherence Tomography From Eastern India -

Abstract: 250 words Purpose: Three dimensional optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a novel technique to diagnose retinal disorders. In diabetes, loss of retinal neurons is said to be an early event. We did a small pilot study from Eastern India to find the usefulness of OCT in detecting changes in retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) in diabetics. Patients and methods: We selected adult type 2 diabetics without overt retinopathy. Patients aged more than 60 or with pre-existing problems like glaucoma or vasculitis were excluded. RNFL thickness was measured using HRA-OCT Spectralis analyser. A 12o area around optic nerve head was analysed and depth of each quadrant was separately measured. The patient values were compared with normative Indian data to detect aberrations. Also, the venous blood sugar levels were measured and correlation studies were done with the retinal thickness values. Standard statistical methods were used. Results and analysis: We had 10 diabetic cases (20 eyes) and 11 controls (22 eyes). There was significant thinning of RNFL in 6 (60%) diabetic cases and none of the controls. Two of the diabetics had severe thinning around optic nerve head. 83% of the patients had thinning on temporal side and 50% on nasal side. Mean blood glucose levels were higher in those with RNFL thinning. Both FBS and PPBS showed significant negative correlation with retinal thickness measurements. Conclusion: This is probably the first study of its kind from India. 3-D OCT can be a valuable tool in screening diabetics for complications. However, more studies are needed to better elucidate the role of this novel technology.
Health monitoring sensors for a personal mobility aid for the elderly

To accommodate the needs of seniors living in Assisted Living Facilities, MIT's Field and Space Robotics Laboratory is developing PAMM, a walker-based robotic aid. Intended to facilitate mobility by providing support and guidance to the user, the walking aid is also to have health monitoring capabilities. This thesis describes the design of pulse and hydration sensors for integration on PAMM. The development of a noninvasive, robust, ECG-based pulse sensor is presented, along with the design of the electronics and the algorithm used to process the signal. Experimental results demonstrate the overall competency of the sensor. Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA), a diagnostic tool that relates an individual's hydration level to their body's electrical impedance, is utilized to assess water imbalance. A new, qualitative technique is proposed to interpret the raw data obtained from BIA readings. An experimental set-up is designed and various validation tests are conducted to evaluate the new methodology. Considerations for future work are noted. Thesis Supervisor: Dr.Steven Dubowsky Professor of Mechanical Engineering Acknowledgments I would like to recognize the National Science Foundation and the Home Health Care Consortium for their financial assistance. The multidisciplinary nature of this work required the assistance of many medical professionals-thanks to all those who took the time to meet with me, especially Dr.Chaus Hamann and Dr.Joseph Kehayias. Special thanks to the volunteers who participated in the sensor experiments, especially Carmine Matteo, Vita Matteo, members of the FSRL and MIT's men's track team. Thank you to Dr.Dubowsky for giving me the opportunity to work on such an interesting project (and for being a subject in the hydration testing). To Shane MacNamara and Vivek Sujan, thank you for your technical guidance and friendship. To my dear friend Melissa Rosenblum, thanks for your thoughtful insight and shared epiphanies. This work could not have been accomplished without the constant support and understanding of my family. (Thanks Papa for the laptop! ) To Deanna, Geoff & Anthony, thank you for the unconditional encouragement. Thanks to my Dad, who demonstrates the power of a determined, informed (and well-fed) mind, and to my Mom, whose latenight chats helped to keep me sane. Acknowledgements 3 3 Table of
An engine for logic program analysis

An engine that is based on unfolding of semantic equations is presented. A main advantage of the unfolding engine is a uniform treatment of structural information in a program. In particular, reasoning about partially instantiated structures, an area where traditional algorithms have been weak, is greatly enhanced. It is shown that the engine is uniformly more accurate than the standard engine in the sense that, given an abstract domain, its output, for any program is more accurate than that of the standard engine. <<ETX>>
Citizen Empowerment by a Technical Approach for Privacy Enforcement

It is a fundamental right of every natural person to control which personal information is collected, stored and processed by whom, for what purposes and how long. In fact, many (cloud based) services can only be used if the user allows them broad data collection and analysis. Often, users can only decide to either give their data or not to participate in communities. The refusal to provide personal data results in significant drawbacks for social interaction. That is why we believe that there is a need for tools to control one's own data in an easy and effective way as protection against economic interest of global companies and their cloud computing systems (as data collector from apps, mobiles and services). Especially, as nowadays everybody is permanently online using different services and devices, users are often lacking the means to effectively control the access to their private data. Therefore, we present an approach to manage and distribute privacy settings: PRIVACY-AVARE is intended to enable users to centrally determine their data protection preferences and to apply them on different devices. Thus, users gain control over their data when using cloud based services. In this paper, we present the main idea of PRIVACY-AVARE.
Functional status of elderly adults before and after initiation of dialysis.

BACKGROUND It is unclear whether functional status before dialysis is maintained after the initiation of this therapy in elderly patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). METHODS Using a national registry of patients undergoing dialysis, which was linked to a national registry of nursing home residents, we identified all 3702 nursing home residents in the United States who were starting treatment with dialysis between June 1998 and October 2000 and for whom at least one measurement of functional status was available before the initiation of dialysis. Functional status was measured by assessing the degree of dependence in seven activities of daily living (on the Minimum Data Set-Activities of Daily Living [MDS-ADL] scale of 0 to 28 points, with higher scores indicating greater functional difficulty). RESULTS The median MDS-ADL score increased from 12 during the 3 months before the initiation of dialysis to 16 during the 3 months after the initiation of dialysis. Three months after the initiation of dialysis, functional status had been maintained in 39% of nursing home residents, but by 12 months after the initiation of dialysis, 58% had died and predialysis functional status had been maintained in only 13%. In a random-effects model, the initiation of dialysis was associated with a sharp decline in functional status, indicated by an increase of 2.8 points in the MDS-ADL score (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.5 to 3.0); this decline was independent of age, sex, race, and functional-status trajectory before the initiation of dialysis. The decline in functional status associated with the initiation of dialysis remained substantial (1.7 points; 95% CI, 1.4 to 2.1), even after adjustment for the presence or absence of an accelerated functional decline during the 3-month period before the initiation of dialysis. CONCLUSIONS Among nursing home residents with ESRD, the initiation of dialysis is associated with a substantial and sustained decline in functional status.
Temperature-related differential expression of antigens in the Lyme disease spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi

Previous studies have demonstrated that Borrelia burgdorferi in the midguts of infected ticks shows increased expression of the antigenic outer surface protein OspC after the ticks have ingested a blood meal. This differential expression is at least partly due to a change in temperature, as an increase in OspC levels is also observed when cultures are shifted from 23 to 35 degrees C. Immunoblotting of bacterial lysates with sera from infected mice indicated that the levels of several additional antigens were also increased in bacterial cultures shifted to 35 degrees C; we have identified one antigen as OspE. We have also observed differential expression of OspF, which has been proposed to be coexpressed in an operon with the gene encoding OspE.
OE: WSD Using Optimal Ensembling (OE) Method

Optimal ensembling (OE) is a word sense disambiguation (WSD) method using word-specific training factors (average positive vs negative training per sense, posex and negex) to predict best system (classifier algorithm / applicable feature set) for given target word. Our official entry (OE1) in Senseval-4 Task 17 (coarse-grained English lexical sample task) contained many design flaws and thus failed to show the whole potential of the method, finishing -4.9% behind top system (+0.5 gain over best base system). A fixed system (OE2) finished only -3.4% behind (+2.0% net gain). All our systems were 'closed', i.e. used the official training data only (average 56 training examples per each sense). We also show that the official evaluation measure tends to favor systems that do well with high-trained words.
A first approach for cost-sensitive classification with linguistic Genetic Fuzzy Systems in imbalanced data-sets

Classification in imbalanced domains has become one of the most relevant problems within the area of Machine Learning at the present. This problem has raised in significance due to its presence in many real applications and it occurs when the distribution of the available examples to carry out the learning process is very different between the classes (often for binary class data-sets). Usually, the underrepresented class is the concept of the most interest for the problem, being the cost derived from a misclassification of these examples much higher than that of the remaining examples. In this work we analyze the behaviour of a cost-sensitive learning method for Fuzzy Rule Based Classification Systems in the scenario of high imbalanced data-sets. Specifically, we focus on one representative rule learning approach for Genetic Fuzzy Systems, the Fuzzy Hybrid Genetics-Based Machine Learning algorithm. The experimental results show how our cost-sensitive approach in this type of domains will help us to obtain very accurate solutions in shorter training times and also with a lower complexity with respect to other possibilities proposed for classification with imbalanced problems such as the use of preprocessing to rebalance the class distribution.
A study of reported hallucinations in a southeastern county.

: In traditional Western psychiatric theory, seeing or hearing things that other people do not think are there could be termed a hallucination which is often considered indicative of underlying psychopathology. The psychiatric interpretation of pathological meanings of these experiences for an individual can be contrasted with an anthropologic approach which considers whether there are underlying cultural influences to account for certain distributions of reported hallucinations and their content and to ask about the social and spiritual, as well as psychologic, meanings of such experiences. This paper presents data on reported hallucinations in a random sample of the general population of a county in north central Florida. When the results of the questions on hallucinations were compared in relation to sociodemographic variables, it was found that hallucinations were more commonly reported by the young, by blacks, by members of the lower socioeconomic quintiles and by those belonging to certain church types. These data will be discussed from the complementing and contrasting psychiatric and anthropologic viewpoints.
Performance Comparison of Time-Frequency Distributions for Estimation of Instantaneous Frequency of Heart Rate Variability Signals

The instantaneous frequency (IF) of a non-stationary signal is usually estimated from a time-frequency distribution (TFD). The IF of heart rate variability (HRV) is an important parameter because the power in a frequency band around the IF can be used for the interpretation and analysis of the respiratory rate but also for a more accurate analysis of heart rate (HR) signals. In this study, we compare the performance of five states of the art kernel-based time-frequency distributions (TFDs) in terms of their ability to accurately estimate the IF of HR signals. The selected TFDs include three widely used fixed kernel methods: the modified B distribution, the S-method and the spectrogram; and two adaptive kernel methods: the adaptive optimal kernel TFD and the recently developed adaptive directional TFD. The IF of the respiratory signal, which is usually easier to estimate as the respiratory signal is a mono-component with small amplitude variations with time, is used as a reference to examine the accuracy of the HRV IF estimates. Experimental results indicate that the most reliable estimates are obtained using the adaptive directional TFD in comparison to other commonly used methods such as the adaptive optimal kernel TFD and the modified B distribution.
Plant Innate Immunity Multicomponent Model

Our understanding of plant–pathogen interactions is making rapid advances in order to address issues of global importance such as improving agricultural productivity and sustainable food security. Innate immunity has evolved in plants, resulting in a wide diversity of defense mechanisms adapted to specific threats. The postulated PTI/ETI model describes two perception layers of plant innate immune system, which belong to a first immunity component of defense response activation. To better describe the sophisticated defense system of plants, we propose a new model of plant immunity. This model considers the plant’s ability to distinguish the feeding behavior of their many foes, such as a second component that modulates innate immunity. This hypothesis provides a new viewpoint highlighting the relevance of hormone crosstalk and primary metabolism in regulating plant defense against the different behaviors of pathogens with the intention to stimulate further interest in this research area.
Protein Folding as a Complex Reaction: A Two-Component Potential for the Driving Force of Folding and Its Variation with Folding Scenario

The Helmholtz decomposition of the vector field of probability fluxes in a two-dimensional space of collective variables makes it possible to introduce a potential for the driving force of protein folding [Chekmarev, J. Chem. Phys. 139 (2013) 145103]. The potential has two components: one component (Φ) is responsible for the source and sink of the folding flow, which represent, respectively, the unfolded and native state of the protein, and the other (Ψ) accounts for the flow vorticity inherently generated at the periphery of the flow field and provides the canalization of the flow between the source and sink. Both components obey Poisson’s equations with the corresponding source/sink terms. In the present paper, we consider how the shape of the potential changes depending on the scenario of protein folding. To mimic protein folding dynamics projected onto a two-dimensional space of collective variables, the two-dimensional Müller and Brown potential is employed. Three characteristic scenarios are considered: a single pathway from the unfolded to the native state without intermediates, two parallel pathways without intermediates, and a single pathway with an off-pathway intermediate. To determine the probability fluxes, the hydrodynamic description of the folding reaction is used, in which the first-passage folding is viewed as a steady flow of the representative points of the protein from the unfolded to the native state. We show that despite the possible complexity of the folding process, the Φ-component is simple and universal in shape. The Ψ-component is more complex and reveals characteristic features of the process of folding. The present approach is potentially applicable to other complex reactions, for which the transition from the reactant to the product can be described in a space of two (collective) variables.