Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deciphering microbial interactions and detecting keystone species with co-occurrence networks

Co-occurrence networks produced from microbial survey sequencing data are frequently used to identify interactions between community members. While this approach has potential to reveal ecological processes, it has been insufficiently validated due to the technical limitations inherent in studying complex microbial ecosystems. Here, we simulate multi-species microbial communities with known interaction patterns using generalized Lotka-Volterra dynamics. We then construct co-occurrence networks and evaluate how well networks reveal the underlying interactions and how experimental and ecological parameters can affect network inference and interpretation. We find that co-occurrence networks can recapitulate interaction networks under certain conditions, but that they lose interpretability when the effects of habitat filtering become significant. We demonstrate that networks suffer from local hot spots of spurious correlation in the neighborhood of hub species that engage in many interactions. We also identify topological features associated with keystone species in co-occurrence networks. This study provides a substantiated framework to guide environmental microbiologists in the construction and interpretation of co-occurrence networks from microbial survey datasets.
Awareness, Attitude and Impact of Perceived Depression in the Workplace in Korea

MethodsZZThis study is a cross-sectional web-based survey of 1000 workers recruited from online sites. Selected panel members were invited to participate in the survey through Ipsos MORI (www.ipsos-mori.com/) between 10th and 19th February 2014. The participants were Korean workers, aged 16–64, who are either currently working or had worked within the past year. Subjects were encouraged to respond to a 13-item questionnaire on the awareness, attitude, and impact of depression.
Spotty Calcification Typifies the Culprit Plaque in Patients With Acute Myocardial Infarction: An Intravascular Ultrasound Study

Background—Calcification is a common finding in human coronary arteries; however, the relationship between calcification patterns, plaque morphology, and patterns of remodeling of culprit lesions in a comparison of patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS) and those with stable conditions has not been documented. Methods and Results—Preinterventional intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images of 178 patients were studied, 61 with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), 70 with unstable angina pectoris (UAP), and 47 with stable angina pectoris (SAP). The frequency of calcium deposits within an arc of less than 90° for all calcium deposits was significantly different in culprit lesions of patients with AMI, UAP, and SAP (P<0.0001). Moreover, the average number of calcium deposits within an arc of <90° per patient was significantly higher in AMI than in SAP (P<0.0005; mean±SD, AMI 1.4±1.3, SAP 0.5±0.8). Conversely, calcium deposits were significantly longer in SAP patients (P<0.0001; mean±SD, AMI 2.2±1.6, UAP 1.9±1.8, and SAP 4.3±3.2 mm). In AMI patients, the typical pattern was spotty calcification, associated with a fibrofatty plaque and positive remodeling. In ACS patients showing negative remodeling, no calcification was the most frequent observation. Conversely, SAP patients had the highest frequency of extensive calcification. Conclusions—Our observations show that IVUS allows the identification of vulnerable plaques in coronary arteries, not only by identifying a fibrofatty plaque and positive remodeling, but also by identifying a spotty pattern of calcification.
Spectral analysis of changes in electroencephalographic activity after the chewing of gum

Abstract The present study aimed to examine the psychosomatic effect in the chewing of marketed gum using eletroencephalogram (EEG) as an index. The EEG were taken in two sets: (i) a resting period before chewing (control recording) and a resting record (post‐resting recording) for examining reproducibility; and (ii) a control recording and resting period after gum‐chewing for 3 min (post‐chewing recording). The ratio of each frequency band to the total frequency power, the mean frequency of the alpha band and laterality of the frequency power was calculated. In the examination of the reproducibility, no statistically significant differences were observed between control recording and post‐resting recording in all indices. In the reflection of EEG after gum‐chewing, there were no significant differences between control recording and the post‐chewing recording. However, a significant interaction was observed among these indices by analysis of variance. In addition, the alpha power in the post‐chewing recording was significantly higher than that in the control recording at almost all the positions. In conclusion, the intra‐individual reproducibility of EEG was confirmed in the recording method. Furthermore, it was suggested that a significant interaction and a rising trend of the mean frequency of the alpha band after gum‐chewing reflected ‘arousal’ psychosomatic responses by the chewing of marketed gum.
Message analysis method based on a stream database for information system management

The authors conducted a detailed survey of a large-scale data center. They found that automated monitoring of messages produced by operating systems, middleware, and applications was adopted as a key method for detecting system failures and malfunctions, and found that this was an effective method for improving the quality of system management operations. The survey revealed that message occurrences are not only monitored, they are also analyzed for particular patterns. Those patterns include multiple occurrences surpassing a threshold in a predefined time period, consecutive occurrences within a predefined time interval, or occurrences violating predefined sequences, and so on. A custom-made application is currently used for this message analysis. The authors found some problems in implementation of the application. To overcome these problems and aid information system management, the authors proposed a message analysis method using a stream database. An experiment proved the effectiveness of the method.
If I Had a Hammer: The Changing Methodological Repertoire of Collective Behavior and Social Movements Research

During the 1970s a theoretical shift occurred in social movement and collective behavior scholarship. Movement was away from grievances, relative deprivation, and interactional processes and towards organizational structura4 and political factors. Dramatic changes in the research methodologies were also associated with the shift. We explore those changes with a systematic comparison of research articles in major U.S. journals of sociology before and after the theoretical realignment. Between the early 1960s and the recent period, research designs became far more diverse, supplanting the earlier methodological hegemony of survey designs. Researchers increasingly utilized units of analysis other than individuals and employed mobilizing and political opportunity structures as key independent variables.
OVERSEAS PLEASURE TRAVEL MOTIVATIONS OF OLDER ALUMNAE OF A JAPANESE WOMEN'S UNIVERSITY

Takaya Sachiko (Writer) (Last Name) (First) (Initial) OVERSEAS PLEASURE TRAVEL MOTIVATIONS OF OLDER ALUMNAE (Title) OF A JAPANESE WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY Hospitality and Tourism Bob Davies August, 2002 91 (Graduate Major) (Research Advisor) (Month/Year) (No. of Pages) American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual (Name of Style Manual Used in this Study) This study examined overseas pleasure travel motivations of Tsuda College (a women’s university in Tokyo, Japan) older alumnae, whose approximate ages ranged from 55 to 79 years old. Along with tourist motivations, the study also investigated barriers to travel, both of which were analyzed in relation to the data on demographics and overseas trip characteristics of older alumnae. The date were collected through a questionnaire mailed to each of 207 alumnae in May 2002, who were systematically chosen as a sample from the college’s alumnae list. A total of 132 usable responses were returned for a response rate of 63.8%. Results indicated that the older alumnae were most likely to seek
The Local Optimality of Reinforcement Learning by Value Gradients, and its Relationship to Policy Gradient Learning

In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that learning the gradient of the value-function at every point along a trajectory generated by a greedy policy is a sufficient condition for the trajectory to be locally extremal, and often locally optimal, and we argue that this brings greater efficiency to value-function learning. This contrasts to traditional value-function learning in which the value-function must be learnt over the whole of state space. It is also proven that policy-gradient learning applied to a greedy policy on a value-function produces a weight update equivalent to a value-gradient weight update, which provides a surprising connection between these two alternative paradigms of reinforcement learning, and a convergence proof for control problems with a value function represented by a general smooth function approximator.
Aging of the Cerebral Cortex

Significant structural trimming of neuronal structures in the cerebral cortex has long been considered as a primary cause of various age-related cortical dysfunctions. While recent findings provided additional data to support this notion, current understanding of cortical neuronal functions in aging also revealed the relationship of neuronal plasticity and imbalances between different neurotransmitter systems with the formation of age-related cortical dysfunctions. Manipulating these age-related alterations in neuronal function may be a novel therapeutic approach in the treatment of cortical dysfunctions in aging. This review will focus our current understanding of age-related changes in neuronal structures and functions in the cerebral cortex. Implication of these age-related alterations will be discussed. The importance of the cerebral cortex in various motor and cognitive functions have drawn scientists' attention to the study of its age-related modifications in the last few decades. Although substantial structural and neurochemical changes in the aged cerebral cortex have been frequently reported, these changes displayed both temporal and regional specificity with age. In the following sections, critical findings regarding modifications in the aged cerebral cortex will be reviewed.
An Effective Method for Detecting Chaos in fractional-Order Systems

This paper illustrates a reliable binary test for detecting the presence of chaos in nonlinear systems described by fractional-order differential equations. The method, which is inspired by the technique proposed in [Gottwald & Melbourne, 2004] for integer-order differential equations, does not require phase space reconstruction of the fractional system. It consists of obtaining the data series, constructing a random walk-type process and studying how the variance of the random walk scales with time. In order to show the capabilities of the approach, the test is successfully applied to three well-known dynamical systems, i.e. fractional Chua, Chen and Lorenz systems.
Importance Sampling for Sums of Lognormal Distributions with Applications to Operational Risk

In this paper we use Importance Sampling to estimate tail probabilities for a finite sum of lognormal distributions. We use a defensive mixture, and develop a method of choosing the parameters via the EM algorithm; we also consider the technique which assumes the importance sampling density to belong to the same parametric family of the random variables to be summed. In both cases, the instrumental density is found by minimizing Cross-Entropy. A comparison based on several simulation experiments shows that the defensive mixture has the best performance. Finally, we study the Poisson-lognormal compound distribution framework and present a real-data application.
Impact of Nitrogen on PBTI Characteristics of HfSiON/TiN Gate Stacks

The impact of nitrogen on charge trapping induced positive bias temperature instability (PBTI) characteristics in HfSiON/TiN gate stacks is investigated. While thickness is found to be the primary parameter to reduce charge trapping, plasma nitrogen reduces PBTI effects in thick (2.7 nm) HfSiON films. Thin films (1.8 nm) show significantly lower threshold voltage (VTH) shift than thick films and seem to be insensitive to N content. Thermal nitridation exacerbates the PBTI effects more than plasma nitridation
Incorporating Feedback from Multiple Sensory Modalities Enhances Brain–Machine Interface Control

The brain typically uses a rich supply of feedback from multiple sensory modalities to control movement in healthy individuals. In many individuals, these afferent pathways, as well as their efferent counterparts, are compromised by disease or injury resulting in significant impairments and reduced quality of life. Brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) offer the promise of recovered functionality to these individuals by allowing them to control a device using their thoughts. Most current BMI implementations use visual feedback for closed-loop control; however, it has been suggested that the inclusion of additional feedback modalities may lead to improvements in control. We demonstrate for the first time that kinesthetic feedback can be used together with vision to significantly improve control of a cursor driven by neural activity of the primary motor cortex (MI). Using an exoskeletal robot, the monkey's arm was moved to passively follow a cortically controlled visual cursor, thereby providing the monkey with kinesthetic information about the motion of the cursor. When visual and proprioceptive feedback were congruent, both the time to successfully reach a target decreased and the cursor paths became straighter, compared with incongruent feedback conditions. This enhanced performance was accompanied by a significant increase in the amount of movement-related information contained in the spiking activity of neurons in MI. These findings suggest that BMI control can be significantly improved in paralyzed patients with residual kinesthetic sense and provide the groundwork for augmenting cortically controlled BMIs with multiple forms of natural or surrogate sensory feedback.
PENERAPAN VARIABEL TRUST IN A BRAND DAN THREAT EMOTIONS DALAM MEMPENGARUHI CUSTOMER BUYING MOTIVE DECISION

ABSTRACT Not many researches were conducted to examine how emotion influences consumer decision making. The feeling of fear turns out to be an internal pressure for the consumers and urges them to reduce the tension by making up a decision. In making a decision to buy, consumers are always driven by needs or motivation. Many prior researches have proved the role of various forms of motivation in influencing the judgment that leads to a decision to buy. Results of several researches showed the significant influence of consumers’ fear towards their buying decision as they believe that the product is the answer to overcome their fear. Many articles were explained trust in a brand and threat emotions were influenced to customer buying motive decision. Key word : Trust in a brand, Threat Emotions, Customer buying motive decision
Polyamine depletion of tumor tissue and subsequent elevation of spermidine in the sera of rats with 3924A hepatomas after 5-fluorouracil administration.

The level of spermidine in the sera of rats with 3924A hepatomas more than doubled within 36 hr of the administration of 5-fluorouracil. During the same time period, the concentration of spermidine of the tumor dropped to 67% of that detectable prior to treatment. The level of spermidine in the liver of tumor-bearing rats decreased slightly within the first 24 hr and then increased within 72 hr to a level higher than that present initially. These data suggest that the elevated level of spermidine in the sera of tumor-bearing rats after 5-fluorouracil administration is mainly a result of spermidine release from the tumor tissue.
The Partial Weighted Set Cover Problem with Applications to Outlier Detection and Clustering

We define the partial weighted set cover problem, a generic combinatorial optimization problem, that includes some classical data mining problems as special cases. We prove that it is computationally intractable and give a local search algorithm for this problem. As application examples, we then show how to translate clustering and outlier detection problems into this generic problem. Our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets indicate that the quality of the solution produced by the generic local search algorithm is comparable to that obtained by state-of-the-art clustering and outlier detection algorithms.
UCHT-based complex sequences for asynchronous CDMA system

The use of orthogonal spreading codes has attracted much attention due to their ability to suppress interference from other users, compared with the nonorthogonal sequences in the synchronous case. In this paper, new sets of orthogonal sequences derived from the unified complex Hadamard transforms (UCHTs) are investigated. Various correlation properties of the sequences are mathematically derived and analyzed. It is shown that some UCHT sequences provide better autocorrelation properties than orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard sequences. Performance comparisons between UCHT sequences, Gold, small set of Kasami, and m-sequences show that some UCHT sequences outperform these well-known spreading sequences under simulation of systems in the presence of multiple access interference and additive white Gaussian noise.
A Scalable FPGA-based Multiprocessor

It has been shown that a small number of FPGAs can significantly accelerate certain computing tasks by up to two or three orders of magnitude. However, particularly intensive large-scale computing applications, such as molecular dynamics simulations of biological systems, underscore the need for even greater speedups to address relevant length and time scales. In this work, we propose an architecture for a scalable computing machine built entirely using FPGA computing nodes. The machine enables designers to implement large-scale computing applications using a heterogeneous combination of hardware accelerators and embedded microprocessors spread across many FPGAs, all interconnected by a flexible communication network. Parallelism at multiple levels of granularity within an application can be exploited to obtain the maximum computational throughput. By focusing on applications that exhibit a high computation-to-communication ratio, we narrow the extent of this investigation to the development of a suitable communication infrastructure for our machine, as well as an appropriate programming model and design flow for implementing applications. By providing a simple, abstracted communication interface with the objective of being able to scale to thousands of FPGA nodes, the proposed architecture appears to the programmer as a unified, extensible FPGA fabric. A programming model based on the MPI message-passing standard is also presented as a means for partitioning an application into independent computing tasks that can be implemented on our architecture. Finally, we demonstrate the first use of our design flow by developing a simple molecular dynamics simulation application for the proposed machine, which runs on a small platform of development boards
Patient on ACS Pathway – Hypomagnesaemia a Contributory Factor to Myocardial Ischemia

Magnesium is the 4th most abundant intracellular cation in the body. Normal adult plasma concentration ranges from 1.7 to 2.5 mg/dL. Most of the body’s reserves are found in the skeletal bone mass. Hypomagnesaemia is a common electrolyte abnormality seen in around 12% hospitalized patients and has an incidence as high as 60 to 65 % in Intensive Care Unit patients. Clinical signs and symptoms are only possible in severe magnesium deficiency. Surprisingly, magnesium depletion can present despite a near normal serum magnesium level. Common nutritional sources include green leafy vegetables, legumes, nuts, animal proteins, seafood and sea greens like kelp. Absorption takes place in the upper small intestine, where nearly 30 to 50% of consumed magnesium is taken up depending upon the endogenous magnesium status. Magnesium is excreted by the kidneys. In circulation 33% is albumin bound (non-filterable), 12% complexed with anions & 55% is in the free ionized form (filterable fraction)
Aniseikonia, metamorphopsia and perceived entoptic pattern: some effects of a macular epiretinal membrane, and the subsequent spontaneous separation of the membrane

Following cryo surgery for retinal hole repair, visual effects in the senior author's eyes were caused by an epiretinal membrane. Subjectively, metamorphopsia was noted, and entoptically perceived radial striae were observed centred near fixation. After subsequent cataract surgery, metamorphopsia was not detectable. Several months later, the centre of the striate entoptic pattern was observed to be centred several degrees from fixation. Concurrently, loss of contrast in the central visual field was noted. In time, both the entoptic pattern and the contrast effects became less visible (contrast improved much faster). The epiretinal membrane had spontaneously separated from the fovea. Repeated measurements of aniseikonia were obtained before cataract surgery, and after cataract surgery both prior to, and after the separation of the epiretinal membrane. Inferences are drawn.
High-Performance VNS for the Max-Cut Problem using Commodity Graphics Hardware

The Max-Cut problem consists of finding a partition of the graph nodes into two subsets, such that the sum of the edge weights having endpoints in different subsets is maximized. This NPhard problem for non planar graphs has different applications in areas such as VLSI and ASIC design. In the last decade, consumer graphics cards (GPUs) have increased their power due to the computer games industry. These cards are now programmable and capable of processing huge amounts of data in a Streaming Pipelined Architecture. This paper proposes a high-performance GPU implementation of Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) for the Max-Cut problem. This algorithm is tested and compared with the non-parallel implementation of VNS in CPU.
Eigenespacios de belleza paramétricos como máquina calificadora

Resumen. Este articulo presenta una maquina calificadora de belleza facial. El concepto de Maquina calificadora se debe a Eisenthal et al [4]. La maquina calificadora es implementada haciendo uso de un Eigenenespacio de belleza parametrico, tomando como ensamble vectores de distancias entre puntos de referencia de rostros. La maquina calificadora propuesta parte de la seleccion asistida de un conjunto de caracteristicas faciales predefinidas, a partir de estas caracteristicas faciales y de la posicion de los puntos de referencia relativos a la imagen facial, se calcula un conjunto de distancias entre dichas caracteristicas, se localizan 66 puntos de referencia, con estos puntos se construye una malla o mascara. El objetivo final de la mascara es formar un vector de distancias o longitudes entre los puntos de referencia que definen las caracteristicas faciales. Estos vectores de distancias son utilizados para contruir un Eigenespacio. Las curva parametrica acarrean la calificacion de belleza de cada rostro del ensamble. La forma mas simple de determinar la calificacion de un rostro es proyectarla al Eigenespacio y buscar el vector mas cercano. Mostramos como esto es suficiente para dar una calificacion acertada a un rostro de entrada original.