Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alcohol consumption and mortality. I. Characteristics of drinking groups.

AIMS This is the first of a set of three papers evaluating drinking status and mortality risk. Analyses of multiple studies describe associations of drinking patterns with characteristics hypothesized to confound the relationships between drinking status and mortality. Characteristics which both significantly differentiate drinking groups and are consistent across studies would suggest that mortality studies not controlling for them may be compromised. DESIGN AND PARTICIPANTS Associations are evaluated from the raw data of 10 general population studies which contained mortality data. Long-term abstainers are compared to former drinkers, long-term abstainers and former drinkers are compared to light drinkers (by quantity, frequency and volume in separate analyses) and moderate to heavy drinkers are compared to light drinkers. Tetrachoric correlation coefficients assess statistical significance; meta-analysis determines if associations are homogeneous across studies. MEASUREMENTS Measures of alcohol consumption are quantity, frequency and volume; long-term abstainers are differentiated from former drinkers. Multiple measures of health, social position, social integration and mental health characteristics are evaluated. FINDINGS Across studies, adult male former drinkers are consistently more likely to be heavier smokers, depressed, unemployed, lower SES and to have used marijuana than long-term abstainers. Adult female former drinkers are consistently more likely to be heavier smokers, in poorer health, not religious, and unmarried than long-term abstainers. Both types of abstainers tend to be of lower SES than light drinkers and report poorer health (not consistent). Female abstainers are more likely to be of normal or overweight than light drinkers. CONCLUSIONS Characteristics of two groups of abstainers, other than their non-use of alcohol, may confound the associations found between drinking and mortality risk.
Cyclosporine as Monotherapy for Psoriasis in the Setting of Chronic HCV Infection: A Forgotten Therapeutical Option

Background Treatment of psoriasis in the setting of chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is difficult, because standard therapies like methotrexate are associated with increased hepatic toxicity. Due to the HCV suppressive effect. Cyclosporine may represent a valid systemic alternative for psoriatic-HCV patients. Objectives In this study, we report the successful usage of intermittent cycles of cyclosporine in the setting of chronic HCV infection and we try to call the attention once again in a very effective and forgotten therapeutic option for severe chronic plaque psoriasis. Observation We describe a 48 years - old patient who has a 20 year history of severe chronic plaque psoriasis and HCV infection (aminotransferase levels are three times normal; HCV genotype 2a-2c and HCV-RNA titer of 2.050.000 UI-ml). Five courses (range of duration of three to six months) of oral cyclosporine (5 mg/kg/day) were followed during a 38 month period. The viral load and the transaminases’ levels diminished during the 38 months of intermittent cyclosporine therapy to the lowest level measured at 36th month. The good psoriatic response was associated to a slight improvement of the liver condition, even though the HCV-RNA was reduced by less than 1 log10 without normalization of aminotransferase’ levels. Conclusion The reduced liver toxicity, the potential anti-HCV properties and the well-known systemic anti-inflammatory effect, make cyclosporine a good alternative for recalcitrant psoriatic patients with HCV-liver disease
Pulse Distortion and Power Penalty Induced by Sinusoidal Amplitude and Phase Response Ripples for Gaussian Pulses

The frequency responses of wavelength-selective optical components often exhibit ripples in the amplitude and/or phase. These ripples can lead to signal distortion and hence a degradation in system performance. The pulse distortion induced by sinusoidal amplitude and phase response ripples is derived for chirped and unchirped Gaussian pulses, and closed-form expressions are presented for the power penalty in system performance. The analysis shows that the amplitude and phase response ripples have a similar impact on the transmitted signal, and that the power penalty induced by these ripples depends on the chirp and pulsewidth of the transmitted signal. The combined effect of the characteristics of the transmitted signal and ripple parameters on system performance is discussed in detail. It is shown that the dependence of the maximum power penalty on the chirp parameter differs for amplitude and phase response ripples. The results of the theoretical analysis are in good agreement with numerical simulations.
Double proportional fair user pairing algorithm for uplink virtual MIMO systems

In this letter, we study the user pairing algorithms for uplink virtual multiple-input multiple-output (V-MIMO) systems, and propose a new double proportional fair (D-PF) algorithm for user pairing of the uplink V-MIMO systems. The proposed D-PF algorithm uses the PF criterion to decide the first user, and a modified PF criterion is suggested to choose the pairing user. Simulation results show that the proposed D- PF algorithm outperforms the conventional determinant formula (DF) algorithm in terms of both throughput and fairness performances. Moreover, if compared with the conventional single PF (S-PF) algorithm, the proposed D-PF algorithm achieves a fairly good trade-off between the throughput and fairness, being able to trade with 5% throughput loss for 15% fairness enhancement.
Squared Earth Mover's Distance-based Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks

In the context of single-label classification, despite the huge success of deep learning, the commonly used cross-entropy loss function ignores the intricate inter-class relationships that often exist in real-life tasks such as age classification. In this work, we propose to leverage these relationships between classes by training deep nets with the exact squared Earth Mover's Distance (also known as Wasserstein distance) for single-label classification. The squared EMD loss uses the predicted probabilities of all classes and penalizes the miss-predictions according to a ground distance matrix that quantifies the dissimilarities between classes. We demonstrate that on datasets with strong inter-class relationships such as an ordering between classes, our exact squared EMD losses yield new state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we propose a method to automatically learn this matrix using the CNN's own features during training. We show that our method can learn a ground distance matrix efficiently with no inter-class relationship priors and yield the same performance gain. Finally, we show that our method can be generalized to applications that lack strong inter-class relationships and still maintain state-of-the-art performance. Therefore, with limited computational overhead, one can always deploy the proposed loss function on any dataset over the conventional cross-entropy.
Efficient Conference Key Distribution for Dynamic Groups

Life of modern people is greatly influenced byte emerging technologies and tremendous growth of the internet. The growth of the Internet is the driving force behind many popular multicast based group applications like e-learning, conferencing, TV over Internet, interactive gaming etc. These group based are vulnerable to many attacks. The features that make multicast so applicative, in turn make security a challenging issue. The dynamic changes in the group membership with frequent joins and evictions are the prime factor which makes the security difficult in any group based applications. Key distribution and key management is the challenging issue with any of these applications. This paper describes a novel technique for secure distribution of the group key. The idea proposed in this paper makes use of the hybrid key trees which allow the complete elimination of the secure channels for the distribution of the key material unlike many of the earlier proposed schemes, minimum storage requirements at each member, elimination of the chances of generation of week keys, less number of rounds and minimum computational overhead.
Gait Feature Subset Selection by Mutual Information

Feature selection is an important pre-processing step for pattern recognition. It can discard irrelevant and redundant information that may not only affect a classifier's performance, but also tell against system's efficiency. Meanwhile, feature selection can help to identify the factors that most influence the recognition accuracy. The result can provide valuable clues to understand and reason what is the underlying distinctness among human gait-patterns. In this paper, we introduce a computationally-efficient solution to the problem of human gait feature selection. We show that feature selection based on mutual information can provide a realistic solution for high-dimensional human gait data. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, experiments are carried out based on a 73-dimensional model-based gait features set and a 64 by 64 pixels model-free gait symmetry map. The experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of the method, removing about 50% of the model-based features and 95% of the symmetry map's pixels without significant accuracy loss, which outperforms correlation and ANOVA based methods.
Equilibrium sedimentation profiles of screened charged colloids: A test of the hard-sphere equation of state.

Suspensions of model colloidal particles represent, besides their intrinsic interest,a very important system for the study of basic properties of liquids because they show length scales accessible to optical scattering techniques, and interparticle potentials simple enough to allow quantitative tests of liquid state theories [1]. The usual experimental approach is that of deriving the static structure factor from scattering experiments. However, it is known that the measurement of the equation of state would constitute a more stringent test of the properties of the system, because of the greater sensitivity to the details of the interparticle interaction potential [2]. It has been noted [3–5] that a single measurement of the particle density profile of a colloidal suspension at sedimentation equilibrium under the gravitational field can directly yield the osmotic equation of state of the suspension, but sufficiently accurate data are not available, except for measurements of the osmotic pressure at melting in settling suspensions of polystyrene particles by Hachisu and Takano [4] and for the study of order-disorder transitions in suspensions of colloidal silica performed by Davis et al. [6]. It is very difficult to find an accurate probe of the local particle density over a wide range of volume fractions by using standard colloidal suspensions. Indeed, conventional polarized light scattering gives results which depend also on interparticle interactions.
Processing of Garden-Path Sentences Containing Silent and Filled Pauses in Stuttered Speech: Evidence From a Comprehensive Study

iii LIST OF FIGURES vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vii CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1 CHAPTER 2: BEHAVIORAL EXPERIMENT 15 2.1 METHODS 15 2.2 ANALYSIS 20 2.3 DISCUSSION 23 REFERENCES 34 APPENDIX A – TABLE A. LIST 1: TYPICAL DISFLUENT SPEECH 41 APPENDIX B – TABLE B. LIST 2: ATYPICAL DISFLUENT SPEECH 44 APPENDIX C – POST-VERB STIMULI INFORMATION 47 APPENDIX D – TABLE D.1, D.2 DATA FOR ACCURACY AND RESPONSE TIME MEANS.48
Competition between the Sendai Virus N mRNA Start Site and the Genome 3′-End Promoter for Viral RNA Polymerase

ABSTRACT The genomic and antigenomic 3′-end replication promoters of Sendai virus are bipartite in nature and symmetrical, composed of le or tr sequences; a gene start or gene end site, respectively; and a simple hexameric repeat. The relative strengths of these 3′-end promoters determines the ratios of genomes and antigenomes formed during infection and whether model mini-genomes can be rescued from DNA by nondefective helper viruses. Using these tests of promoter strength, we have confirmed that tr is stronger than le in this respect. We have also found that the presence of a gene start site within either 3′-end promoter strongly reduces 3′-end promoter strength. The negative effects of the gene start site on the 3′-end promoter suggest that these closely spaced RNA start sites compete with each other for a common pool of viral RNA polymerase. The manner in which this competition could occur for polymerase off the template (in trans) and polymerase on the template (in cis) adds insight into how the viral RNA polymerase switches between its dual functions as transcriptase and replicase.
Increased multidrug resistance-associated protein activity in mononuclear cells of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus.

UNLABELLED Multidrug resistance-associated proteins (MRPs, ATP binding cassette sub-family C), P-glycoprotein (P-gp) and ATP binding cassette (ABC) sub-family G member 2 (ABCG2) are important drug efflux pumps emerging after long-term medications. We intended to detect whether these molecules are expressed in immune-related cells of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) on long-term immunosuppressants. METHODS Mono nuclear cells (MNC) and polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMN) were isolated from healthy volunteers and SLE patients. The MPR-mediated transport activity of these cells was measured by using carboxy-2',7'-dichlorofluorescein diacetate (CFDA) efflux assay. P-gp-mediated transport activity of cells was detected by rhodamine 123 efflux assay. ABCG2-mediated transport assay was evaluated by mitoxantrone efflux assay. The intracellular expression of MRP1, MRP2, and MRP3 molecules in MNC was detected by flow cytometry. The results were compared between MNC and PMN derived from normal and SLE groups. RESULTS The specific dye-efflux function of MRPs in SLE-MNC is significantly higher than normal MNC. However, the expression of MRP1, MRP2, and MRP3 molecules in SLE-MNC was not different from normal MNC. We also noted that only the duration of corticosteroid treatment in different clinical/laboratory parameters was significantly correlated with the increased activity of MRPs in SLE-MNC. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that increased activity of MRPs in SLE-MNC is elicited by long-term corticosteroid therapy.
The London Classification of gastrointestinal neuromuscular pathology: a little more flexibility would be wise…

We read with interest the recent article on the London Classification of gastrointestinal neuromuscular pathology,1 drafted by a panel of pathologists and a few clinicians trying to bring some order to a complex and often mined field. While we agree on the need for a classification of the neuromuscular disorders of the gastrointestinal tract, and we endorse the increasing use of immunohistochemical methods (too often underemployed) in addition to the classic, standard H&E, we found such a classification somewhat ‘rigid’, and would like to add some personal comments on it. First we feel that, in the …
Stein Variational Autoencoder

A new method for learning variational autoencoders is developed, based on an application of Stein's operator. The framework represents the encoder as a deep nonlinear function through which samples from a simple distribution are fed. One need not make parametric assumptions about the form of the encoder distribution, and performance is further enhanced by integrating the proposed encoder with importance sampling. Example results are demonstrated across multiple unsupervised and semi-supervised problems, including semi-supervised analysis of the ImageNet data, demonstrating the scalability of the model to large datasets.
Reliability of Lead-Free Solder Joints Under a Wide Range of Thermal Cycling Conditions

In this paper, we report a comprehensive set of accelerated thermal cycling (ATC) tests that were performed on test vehicles with different package types, sizes, pitches, and solder joint alloy metallurgies using four different thermal cycling profiles: 0 to 100, -40 to 125, -55 to 125, and -60 to 150°C. Samples from the tests were analyzed for their failure modes, and failure rates were calculated by using Weibull statistics. The characterized life for each test condition was determined and analyzed. The impact of solder alloy metallurgies, package types, sizes, and pitches on acceleration factors of the ATC tests to fatigue life was also analyzed and discussed. The quantified discrepancies among several acceleration factors from different studies compared to the experimental data presented in this paper are illustrated. The results provide valuable guidance on the effects of package types, size, pitches, and solder joints alloy metallurgies on various ATC test conditions. In addition, failure analysis was performed at different stages of the tests for each thermal cycling condition. Dramatic failure mode shifts at extreme ATC conditions were observed. The significance and the long-term impact of the failure modes and failure mechanism shift between various ATC test conditions to the life prediction of lead-free solders are extensively discussed.
Characterization of Fine Particles from Machining in Automotive Plants

Sampling of the full range of particle sizes was carried out on 16 processes in six different General Motors plants over a period of 2.5 years. This article deals with particle characterization from five of the processes that relate to machining, specifically, wet machining with water-based fluids from old and new technology processes, grinding with straight oils from old and new technology processes, and dry machining. The concentrations measured by different instruments were in reasonable agreement, although the light-scattering instrument generally produced higher values than filters. Of the processes studied, the old technology grinding using straight oils generated the highest particle concentrations. The new technology controls (enclosed, vented machines) were highly effective but more so for large particles than small particles. The particle size distribution was shifted to smaller particles with enclosed processes. Dry machining generated the largest particles of all processes studied.
The Molecular Mechanisms Used by Neisseria gonorrhoeae To Initiate Infection Differ between Men and Women

SUMMARY The molecular mechanisms used by the gonococcus to initiate infection exhibit gender specificity. The clinical presentations of disease are also strikingly different upon comparison of gonococcal urethritis to gonococcal cervicitis. An intimate association occurs between the gonococcus and the urethral epithelium and is mediated by the asialoglycoprotein receptor. Gonococcal interaction with the urethral epithelia cell triggers cytokine release, which promotes neutrophil influx and an inflammatory response. Similarly, gonococcal infection of the upper female genital tract also results in inflammation. Gonococci invade the nonciliated epithelia, and the ciliated cells are subjected to the cytotoxic effects of tumor necrosis factor alpha induced by gonococcal peptidoglycan and lipooligosaccharide. In contrast, gonococcal infection of the lower female genital tract is typically asymptomatic. This is in part the result of the ability of the gonococcus to subvert the alternative pathway of complement present in the lower female genital tract. Gonococcal engagement of complement receptor 3 on the cervical epithelia results in membrane ruffling and does not promote inflammation. A model of gonococcal pathogenesis is presented in the context of the male and female human urogenital tracts.
Applications for next-generation sequencing in fish ecotoxicogenomics

The new technologies for next-generation sequencing (NGS) and global gene expression analyses that are widely used in molecular medicine are increasingly applied to the field of fish biology. This has facilitated new directions to address research areas that could not be previously considered due to the lack of molecular information for ecologically relevant species. Over the past decade, the cost of NGS has decreased significantly, making it possible to use non-model fish species to investigate emerging environmental issues. NGS technologies have permitted researchers to obtain large amounts of raw data in short periods of time. There have also been significant improvements in bioinformatics to assemble the sequences and annotate the genes, thus facilitating the management of these large datasets.The combination of DNA sequencing and bioinformatics has improved our abilities to design custom microarrays and study the genome and transcriptome of a wide variety of organisms. Despite the promising results obtained using these techniques in fish studies, NGS technologies are currently underused in ecotoxicogenomics and few studies have employed these methods. These issues should be addressed in order to exploit the full potential of NGS in ecotoxicological studies and expand our understanding of the biology of non-model organisms.
Characteristics of InGaN-Based UV/Blue/Green/Amber/Red Light-Emitting Diodes

Highly efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) emitting ultraviolet (UV), blue, green, amber and red light have been obtained through the use of InGaN active layers instead of GaN active layers. Red LEDs with an emission wavelength of 675 nm, whose emission energy was almost equal to the band-gap energy of InN, were fabricated. The dependence of the emission wavelength of the red LED on the current (blue shift) is dominated by both the band-filling effect of the localized energy states and the screening effect of the piezoelectric field. In the red LEDs, a phase separation of the InGaN layer was clearly observed in the emission spectra, in which blue and red emission peaks appeared. In terms of the temperature dependence of the LEDs, InGaN LEDs are superior to the conventional red and amber LEDs due to a large band offset between the active and cladding layers. The localized energy states caused by In composition fluctuation in the InGaN active layer contribute to the high efficiency of the InGaN-based emitting devices, in spite of the large number of threading dislocations and a large effect of the piezoelectric field. The blue and green InGaN-based LEDs had the highest external quantum efficiencies of 18% and 20% at low currents of 0.6 mA and 0.1 mA, respectively.
Multi-Modal Image Annotation with Multi-Instance Multi-Label LDA

This paper studies the problem of image annotation in a multi-modal setting where both visual and textual information are available. We propose Multimodal Multi-instance Multi-label Latent Dirichlet Allocation (M3LDA), where the model consists of a visual-label part, a textual-label part and a label-topic part. The basic idea is that the topic decided by the visual information and the topic decided by the textual information should be consistent, leading to the correct label assignment. Particularly, M3LDA is able to annotate image regions, thus provides a promising way to understand the relation between input patterns and output semantics. Experiments on Corel5K and ImageCLEF validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Towards proactive detection of advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks using honeypots

The Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks are special kind of slow moving attacks that are designed to defeat security controls using unique attack vectors and malware specifically developed for the target organization. Aim behind APT attacks is not to disrupt services but to steal valuable data and intellectual property. Therefore, timely detection of APT attack is very important. We believe that deception tools like honeypots can significantly increase the possibility of early detection of such sophisticated attacks. In this research effort, a framework is proposed in which Honeypot along with NIDS is used to actively alert the administrator and not leaving the detection of APT in the hands to administrator by correlating different network events. The proposed framework is also implemented to test effectiveness of the proposed technique.