Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Traffic-Related Air Pollution and Incident Type 2 Diabetes: Results from the SALIA Cohort Study

Background Cross-sectional and ecological studies indicate that air pollution may be a risk factor for type 2 diabetes, but prospective data are lacking. Objective We examined the association between traffic-related air pollution and incident type 2 diabetes. Design Between 1985 and 1994, cross-sectional surveys were performed in the highly industrialized Ruhr district (West Germany); a follow-up investigation was conducted in 2006 using data from the Study on the Influence of Air Pollution on Lung, Inflammation and Aging (SALIA) cohort. Participants 1,775 nondiabetic women who were 54–55 years old at baseline participated in both baseline and follow-up investigations and had complete information available. Materials and Methods Using questionnaires, we assessed 16-year incidence (1990–2006) of type 2 diabetes and information about covariates. Complement factor C3c as marker for subclinical inflammation was measured at baseline. Individual exposure to traffic-related particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen dioxide was determined at different spatial scales. Results Between 1990 and 2006, 87 (10.5%) new cases of diabetes were reported among the SALIA cohort members. The hazards for diabetes were increased by 15–42% per interquartile range of PM or traffic-related exposure. The associations persisted when different spatial scales were used to assess exposure and remained robust after adjusting for age, body mass index, socioeconomic status, and exposure to several non–traffic-related sources of air pollution. C3c was associated with PM pollution at baseline and was a strong independent predictor of incident diabetes. Exploratory analyses indicated that women with high C3c blood levels were more susceptible for PM-related excess risk of diabetes than were women with low C3c levels. Conclusions Traffic-related air pollution is associated with incident type 2 diabetes among elderly women. Subclinical inflammation may be a mechanism linking air pollution with type 2 diabetes. Relevance to clinical practice Our study identifies traffic-related air pollution as a novel and potentially modifiable risk factor of type 2 diabetes.
Accounting for US current account deficits: an empirical investigation

The sources of US current account deficits are investigated using a number of macroeconomic variables and a vector error correction model. The variables are those typically emphasized by the traditional income - expenditure approach and the intertemporal (Ricardian) approach. The results indicate that macroeconomic variables explain the current account reasonably well, and the evidence seems to support the traditional approach where budget deficits and increases in real interest rates and terms of trade are associated with current account deficits.
Restorative affections about directed attention recovery and reflection in different environments

Objective:To investigate the perceived restorative effectiveness of four kinds of settings in two goal-set conditions based on attention restoration theory(ART). Methods: In experiment one,48 subjects were chosen and divided into four kinds of environment groups.Their stressful feelings were induced by numerical reasoning tasks and the changes of directed attention were reflected by correct reaction time(RT) in colored number recognition tasks.In experiment two,30 subjects were selected and evaluated the suitable degrees of reflection in four environments with five-point evaluating scales.Results: The correct RT were(534.8±7.3) ms for picture of urban nightscape,(557.2±7.7) ms for picture of nature environment,(605.1±9.4) ms for picture of sports environment,and(749.8±10.2) ms for picture of city environment.The correct RT for picture of city environment was longer than that for other pictures(Ps0.05). The scores of reflection were higher under the nature and urban nightscape environment than that under sports and city environment.Conclusion: The nature environment both facilitates the balance and recovery of attentional resources,as well as provides more opportunities of reflection.The restorative effectiveness of nature should be explored and utilized to promote the development of mental and physical health of people.
Generating OWL Ontology from Relational Database

The Semantic Web aims to enrich the existing Web by building an infrastructure layer of a web of data. Three-quarters of the data on the Web come from relational databases. Thus, in the context of the Semantic Web, it has become one of the most important topics to generate OWL ontologies from the legacy databases. For this purpose, the existing approaches typically define how to map the databases to the ontologies. However, the mappings are designed to work under highly normalized database schemas and to be carried out through a batch process of dumping database contents to the ontology repository for ontology population. The approaches can't contribute usefully to the proliferation of ontologies. In this paper, we propose a new set of mapping rules based on a view-based approach, which enables ontologies to be served even without their population through the massive dump process in advance. Consequently, the ontologies out of our approach can play as the complete OWL-described view on the database because they explicitly represent the semantics of relational model objects and operations. Compared with existing approaches, our approach is applicable to a wider range of database schemas, and besides it is designed to extract more meaningful relationships between entities by reasoning.
Accidents Mortality in Belarus The Effect of Gorbachev ’ s Anti-alcohol Campaign on Road Traffic

Background: The former Soviet republic Belarus has one of the highest road traffic fatality rates due to drunk driving, poor road conditions, and an out-dated vehicle fleet. Aim: The aim of the present paper was to analyse the trends in BAC-positive and BAC-negative road traffic accidents mortality in Belarus in relation to aggregate-level alcohol consumption. Method: Trends in aggregate alcohol consumption and BAC-positive and BAC-negative road traffic accidents mortality rates from 1979 to 2007 were analysed in order to asses bivariate relationship between the two time series. Results: The outcome indicated statistically significant cross-correlation between alcohol consumption levels and number of BAC-positive fatal road traffic accidents at zero (r=0.42; SE=0.20) and at first lag (r=0.57; SE=0.20). At the same time, there was no relation between alcohol consumption level and BAC-negative fatal road traffic accidents. Conclusion: This study suggests that the overall level of alcohol consumption is an important determinant of alcohol-related road traffic accidents mortality rates.
Diseño y Validación del Cuestionario “Smartphone y Universidad. Visión del Profesorado” (SUOL)

This article shows the design and validation of a questionnaire for university teachers on the importance, knowledge, use, benefits and difficulties of introducing the smartphone in teaching, learning, research and evaluation processes, as well as its training needs. The method of analysis and validation of the psychometric properties of the diagnostic evaluation instrument "Smartphone and University. Lecturers’ view" is presented. In order to do do this, the content validity is analyzed with the Delphi technique; the construct validity through factor analysis of first and second order; and internal consistency is tested with the values Cronbach's alpha. It is confirmed that the questionnaire constitutes an instrument with evidence of validity and reliability that can diagnose, among university teachers, sub-dimensions of special relevance that allow to know the pedagogical possibilities of the smartphone in university.
Cardiorespiratory response to spontaneous cortical arousals during stage 2 and rapid eye movement sleep in healthy children

Arousal from sleep is associated with transient and abrupt cardiorespiratory changes, and elevated arousals associated with sleep disorders may trigger adverse cardiovascular sequela. In this paper, we provide the first data in children on cardiorespiratory responses to cortical arousal. Heart rate and ventilatory responses to arousal from stage 2 and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep were investigated in 40 normal, healthy Caucasian children (age: 7.7 ± 2.6 years; body mass index z‐score: 0.30 ± 0.8). All children underwent overnight polysomnography studies. Cortical arousals were scored according to standard criteria. Heart rate changes were assessed over 30 s, starting 15 s prior to cortical arousal onset. Breathing rates were quantified three breaths before and after arousal onset. Arousals from stage 2 as well as REM sleep resulted in an R–R interval shortening of about 15%, independent of age and gender. The R–R interval shortening initiated at least 3 s before the cortical arousal onset. The breathing interval immediately after cortical arousal onset was significantly shortened (P < 0.001). In conclusion, cortical arousals in children are associated with an increase in breathing rate and significant heart rate accelerations, which typically precede the cortical arousal onset.
PROCEDURE TO IGNORE UNUSED VARIABLES

Invariants are generally implicit. Explicitly stating program invariants, help programmers to identify program properties that must be preserved while modifying the code. Existing dynamic techniques detect invariants which includes both relevant and irrelevant/unused variables and thereby relevant and irrelevant invariants involved in the program. Due to the presence of irrelevant variables and irrelevant invariants, speed and efficiency of techniques are affected. Also, displaying properties about irrelevant variables and irrelevant invariants distracts the user from concentrating on properties of relevant variables. To overcome these deficiencies only relevant variables are considered by ignoring irrelevant variables. Further, relevant variables are categorized as design variables and non-design variables. For this purpose a metrics suite is proposed. These metrics are validated against Weyuker’s principles and applied on RFV and JLex open source software. Similarly, relevant invariants are categorized as design invariants, non-design invariants and hybrid invariants. For this purpose a set of rules are proposed. This entire process enormously improves the speed and efficiency of dynamic invariant detection techniques.
Older adults report moderately more detailed autobiographical memories

Autobiographical memory (AM) is an essential component of the human mind. Although the([A-z]+) amount and types of subjective detail (content) that compose AMs constitute important dimensions of recall, age-related changes in memory content are not well characterized. Previously, we introduced the Cue-Recalled Autobiographical Memory test (CRAM; see http://cramtest.info), an instrument that collects subjective reports of AM content, and applied it to college-aged subjects. CRAM elicits AMs using naturalistic word-cues. Subsequently, subjects date each cued AM to a life period and count the number of remembered details from specified categories (features), e.g., temporal detail, spatial detail, persons, objects, and emotions. The current work applies CRAM to a broad range of individuals (18–78 years old) to quantify the effects of age on AM content. Subject age showed a moderately positive effect on AM content: older compared with younger adults reported ∼16% more details (∼25 vs. ∼21 in typical AMs). This age-related increase in memory content was similarly observed for remote and recent AMs, although content declined with the age of the event among all subjects. In general, the distribution of details across features was largely consistent among younger and older adults. However, certain types of details, i.e., those related to objects and sequences of events, contributed more to the age effect on content. Altogether, this work identifies a moderate age-related feature-specific alteration in the way life events are subjectively recalled, among an otherwise stable retrieval profile.
CEO Connectedness and Corporate Frauds

type="main"> We find that connections CEOs develop with top executives and directors through their appointment decisions increase the risk of corporate fraud. Appointment-based CEO connectedness in executive suites and boardrooms increases the likelihood of committing fraud and decreases the likelihood of detection. Additionally, it decreases the expected costs of fraud by helping conceal fraudulent activity, making CEO dismissal less likely upon discovery, and lowering the coordination costs of carrying out illegal activity. Connections based on network ties through past employment, education, or social organization memberships have insignificant effects on fraud. Appointment-based CEO connectedness warrants attention from regulators, investors, and corporate governance specialists.
SC 1327{312 & SC 1329{313: Two galaxy groups in-between a major merging event observed with Beppo{SAX

We present the results of two Beppo-SAX observations of the poor clusters SC 1327-312 and SC 1329-313: these objects are located in a huge structure, formed by three ACO clusters, which is probably the remnant of one of the largest and best studied major mergings known. Given the fact that these poor clusters are in between two interacting ACO clusters, the aim of this work is to study the physics of the intracluster medium and to look for the possible presence of shocks. We derived the gas distribution profiles, the global (i.e. within 0.3 h - 1 Mpc) temperatures and abundances and the temperature profiles and maps for SC 1327-312 and SC 1329-313. Also the presence of soft excess in LECS and hard excess in PDS have been examined. We do not find evidence of regions where the gas is shocked or significantly heated. The image of SC 1327-312 seems rather symmetric, while the gas profile of SC 1329-313 shows disturbed, "comet-like" shaped isophotes, with the tail pointing toward A3562 and a compression toward SC 1327-312. The presence of multiphase gas in SC 1329-313, as claimed by Hanami et al. (1999) based on ASCA data, has been found only at the 2σ confidence level. The lack of heating supports the hypothesis that the merging is at a late stage, after the first core-core encounter, when the main shock front had the time to travel to the external regions of the main clusters.
Nonnegative Least-Correlated Component Analysis for Separation of Dependent Sources by Volume Maximization

Although significant efforts have been made in developing nonnegative blind source separation techniques, accurate separation of positive yet dependent sources remains a challenging task. In this paper, a joint correlation function of multiple signals is proposed to reveal and confirm that the observations after nonnegative mixing would have higher joint correlation than the original unknown sources. Accordingly, a new nonnegative least-correlated component analysis (nLCA) method is proposed to design the unmixing matrix by minimizing the joint correlation function among the estimated nonnegative sources. In addition to a closed-form solution for unmixing two mixtures of two sources, the general algorithm of nLCA for the multisource case is developed based on an iterative volume maximization (IVM) principle and linear programming. The source identifiability and required conditions are discussed and proven. The proposed nLCA algorithm, denoted by nLCA-IVM, is evaluated with both simulation data and real biomedical data to demonstrate its superior performance over several existing benchmark methods.
Mildly Context-Sensitive Grammars for Estimating Maximum Entropy Parsing Models

The maximum-entropy framework provides great flexibility in specifying what features a model may take into account, making it effective for a wide range of natural language processing tasks. But because parameter estimation in this framework involves computations over the whole space of possible labelings, it is unwieldy for the parsing problem, where this space is very large. Researchers have tried several strategies for efficiently training parsing models in the maximum-entropy framework. Ratnaparkhi’s parser (1997) models the probabilities of actions of a pushdown automaton instead of the probabilities of entire parses, but for this reason is susceptible to the label-bias problem (Lafferty et al. 2001). Abney (1997) proposes random sampling of the parse space. Johnson et al. (1999) propose using conditional estimation instead of joint estimation. This reduces the space to the possible parses of a single sentence, which is much smaller but can still be unmanageably large for many grammars. Collins’ discriminative models (2000) are cast as parse-reranking models instead of parsing models, and are therefore dependent on his earlier generative model (Collins 1999). Geman and Johnson (2002) and Miyao and Tsujii (2002) propose compact representations of the parse space that make processing
Quantum cosmology and the arrow of time

Although most fundamental laws are invariant under time reversal, experience exhibits the presence of irreversible phenomena - the arrows of time. Their origin lies in cosmology, and I argue that only quantum cosmology can provide the appropriate formal framework. After briefly reviewing the formalism, I discuss how a simple and natural boundary condition can lead to the observed arrows of time. This yields at the same time interesting consequences for black holes.
Robust H ∞ Disturbance Attenuation for Uncertain Discrete-Time Systems with Time-Varying Delay

This paper discusses robust H∞ disturbance attenuation of uncertain discrete-time systems that have time-varying delay in state. There have been only a few results on H∞ disturbance attenuation for discrete-time delay systems. Especially, few results on robust H∞ disturbance attenuation for a class of uncertain discrete-time delay systems have appeared in the literature. Therefore, the study of robust H∞ disturbance attenuation for uncertain discrete-time delay systems is a very important problem. We first obtain an H∞ disturbance attenuation condition for nominal discrete-time systems with time varying delay via linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). To this end, we define a new Lyapunov function and use Leibniz-Newton formula and free weighting matrix method, which reduce the conservativeness and unnecessary LMI slack variables in our robust H∞ disturbance attenuation conditions. Then we extend to a robust H∞ disturbance attenuation condition for uncertain discrete-time delay systems. Finally, we give some numerical examples to show that our conditions are less conservative than other results in the literature.
Computer assisted interactive system: Understanding its implications on psychophysiology

Alertness is a state of one's consciousness which has been found to affect an individual's performance. Many individuals face the problems of unsatisfactory performance when assigned a task due to lack of alertness which is evident in day-to-day lives as well. This problem becomes severe for individuals with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism and brain injuries, etc. Presently available technology-assisted training approaches are mostly performance sensitive with lesser focus on one's alertness level during a task. Motivated by this need, we have designed a computer assisted interactive system (CAIS) which has the potential to affect one's performance. Additionally, CAIS can predict one's alertness level by analyzing physiological signals e.g., from electroencephalogram during his/her interaction with tasks of varying difficulty levels offered by our system. In this research we have designed a preliminary usability study where five typically developing participants took part and the initial results are promising.
Enhanced audio transmission over ADSL using prioritised DMT modulation and retransmissions

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) is a broadband communications technology which is widely used for transmitting high bandwidth data such as audio and video over the internet. However, ensuring a good Quality of Service (QoS) in the transmission of such data over ADSL is challenging due to channel impairments such as noise and crosstalk. Moreover, given that the total monthly fixed data traffic is increasing at a phenomenal rate, (QoS) management is becoming a crucial issue. This paper proposes an enhanced transmission scheme for audio over ADSL. The proposed scheme exploits the unequal importance of the subbands generated by an MP1 codec to offer varying protection to them during ADSL transmission. This is achieved by multiplexing the bit streams from the subbands before Discrete Multi-tone Modulation (DMT) so that bit streams corresponding to more important subbands are offered higher protection than the least important ones. Additionally, a sophisticated retransmission protocol is proposed which allows frames from more important subbands to benefit from a greater number of retransmissions than least important ones. The retransmission protocol uses eight different Negative Acknowledgement (NACK) packet types which allow adaptive multiplexing of frames at the transmitter. The proposed Unequal Error Protection (UEP) scheme provides an average gain of over 28 dB in Segmented Signal to Noise Ratio (SSNR) over a conventional Equal Error Protection (EEP) one but incurs a negligible loss in throughput.
A scientific visualization synthesizer

Methods for displaying scientific data using textures and raster operations rather than geometric techniques are described. The flexibility and simplicity of raster operations allow a greater choice of visualization techniques with only a small set of basic operations. In addition, texture mapping techniques that allow the representation of several variables simultaneously, without a high degree of clutter, are shown. The combination of traditional geometric techniques, image composition techniques, and image rendering techniques can be integrated into a single framework for the display of scientific data. A system for generating and operating on textures and images for the purposes of scientific visualization is presented. To illustrate its advantage, the development of bump maps for vector filters and contour lines is demonstrated. <<ETX>>
A Multi-Camera Visual Surveillance System for Tracking of Reoccurrences of People

This paper describes a software system to track the reoccurrences of objects in multi-camera visual surveillance. Specifically, it is designed for after-event tracking of people to aid in a typical investigation of events occurring in a certain location at a certain time. This is a nontrivial problem because of several aspects that influence the appearance of scenes and people, such as changes in viewpoints, lighting conditions, shadow, occlusion, and weather conditions. Another challenge, which is the focus of this paper, is to integrate different required components into a complete working system, namely (i) motion detection, (ii) object classification, (iii) object modeling and matching, and (iv) interactive retrieval and visualization. We have designed and implemented a robust system consisting of state-of-the-art technologies in each component. We performed experiments with the system on a real-life dataset gathered from 12 street surveillance cameras over two hours in a city area. The experiments showed promising results in retrieving the reoccurrences of four target subjects.