Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The World Gas Market in 2030: Development Scenarios Using the World Gas Model

In this paper, we discuss potential developments of the world natural gas industry at the horizon of 2030. We use the World Gas Model (WGM), a dynamic, strategic representation of world natural gas production, trade, and consumption between 2005 and 2030. We specify a "base case" which defines the business-as-usual assumptions based on forecasts of the world energy markets. We then analyze the sensitivity of the world natural gas system with scenarios: i) the emergence of large volumes of unconventional North American natural gas reserves, such as shale gas; ii) on the contrary, tightly constrained reserves of conventional natural gas reserves in the world; and iii) the impact of CO2-constraints and the emergence of a competing environmental friendly "backstop technology". Regional scenarios that have a global impact are: iv) the full halt of Russian and Caspian natural gas exports to Western Europe; v) sharply constrained production and export activities in the Arab Gulf; vi) heavily increasing demand for natural gas in China and India; and finally vii) constraints on liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure development on the US Pacific Coast. Our results show considerable changes in production, consumption, traded volumes, and prices between the scenarios. Investments in pipelines, LNG terminals and storage are also affected. However, overall the world natural gas industry is resilient to local disturbances and can compensate local supply disruptions with natural gas from other sources. Long-term supply security does not seem to be at risk.
International adoption: a four-year-old child with unusual behaviors adopted at six months of age.

CASE. Jenny, a 4-year-old child adopted from an orphanage in St. Petersburg, Russia, at 6 months of age, is seen for an initial office visit by a new pediatrician. According to the parents, she received poor nutrition and limited stimulation in the orphanage setting. During her first several months after arrival in her new home, Jenny avoided the gaze of her parents and looked away when they attempted to engage her in play or participation in feeding. She did not demonstrate any preference for her parents for several months. She appeared to be quite ‘‘aloof and solemn. ’’ She was easily frightened by certain visual and auditory stimuli, such as ceiling fans. By 1 year of age she spoke several words, followed simple directions, and walked. Jenny had difficulty tolerating many textures of foods. She often mouthed inedible objects during her second year of life and performed repetitive behaviors including dumping and filling containers. She was clumsy for her age. Her parents felt that she was ‘‘on the fringe of the family. ’’ Jenny received occupational and speech and language therapy at a functional feeding program that addressed her food intolerance and oral sensitivity. During her third year, defiance, noncompliance, and anger occurred frequently. She often placed herself in dangerous situations. She burned her hand and lower lip on a light bulb after being told to stay away from it. She frequently ate out of the garbage. Jenny was described as ‘‘highly verbal’’ and ‘‘superficially charming. ’’ Jenny followed women other than her mother in public spaces and wanted to hold their hands and sit on their laps. She began play therapy at age 3 years, while her mother received individual counseling with another therapist because she was having difficulty ‘‘bonding with Jenny’’ and felt rejected. At age 4 years, Jenny is described as ‘‘aloof and often angry. ’’ She is extremely jealous of attention directed toward her 6and 3-yearold brothers. Her mother feels she is ‘‘stuck like glue’’ to her. She will often talk nonstop and ask repetitive questions. Jenny has difficulty drawing a circle. She seems to be obsessed with the color purple, certain toys, and anything to do with ‘‘The Lion King. ’’ She has been asked to leave every preschool and camp she has attended because of nonstop talking, severe noncompliance, and unacceptable behaviors such as constantly asking her peers, ‘‘Do you poop in your pants? ’’ Recently, Jenny has performed more dangerous behaviors such as running into streets and climbing onto the roof from a window. She said to her mother, ‘‘The cars will not kill me. ’’ She frequently imitates behaviors of the family cat and eats from the floor. Challenged by Jenny’s background and current behaviors, her pediatrician attempts to understand Jenny’s developmental course and develop a plan for effective interventions. J Dev Behav Pediatr 24:63 – 69, 2003.
Estimates of Excess Medically Attended Acute Respiratory Infections in Periods of Seasonal and Pandemic Influenza in Germany from 2001/02 to 2010/11

Background The number of patients seeking health care is a central indicator that may serve several different purposes: (1) as a proxy for the impact on the burden of the primary care system; (2) as a starting point to estimate the number of persons ill with influenza; (3) as the denominator data for the calculation of case fatality rate and the proportion hospitalized (severity indicators); (4) for economic calculations. In addition, reliable estimates of burden of disease and on the health care system are essential to communicate the impact of influenza to health care professionals, public health professionals and to the public. Methodology/Principal Findings Using German syndromic surveillance data, we have developed a novel approach to describe the seasonal variation of medically attended acute respiratory infections (MAARI) and estimate the excess MAARI attributable to influenza. The weekly excess inside a period of influenza circulation is estimated as the difference between the actual MAARI and a MAARI-baseline, which is established using a cyclic regression model for counts. As a result, we estimated the highest ARI burden within the last 10 years for the influenza season 2004/05 with an excess of 7.5 million outpatient visits (CI95% 6.8–8.0). In contrast, the pandemic wave 2009 accounted for one third of this burden with an excess of 2.4 million (CI95% 1.9–2.8). Estimates can be produced for different age groups, different geographic regions in Germany and also in real time during the influenza waves.
Multiple Steps of Phosphorylation of Activated Rhodopsin Can Account for the Reproducibility of Vertebrate Rod Single-photon Responses

Single-photon responses (SPRs) in vertebrate rods are considerably less variable than expected if isomerized rhodopsin (R*) inactivated in a single, memoryless step, and no other variability-reducing mechanisms were available. We present a new stochastic model, the core of which is the successive ratcheting down of R* activity, and a concomitant increase in the probability of quenching of R* by arrestin (Arr), with each phosphorylation of R* (Gibson, S.K., J.H. Parkes, and P.A. Liebman. 2000. Biochemistry. 39:5738–5749.). We evaluated the model by means of Monte-Carlo simulations of dim-flash responses, and compared the response statistics derived from them with those obtained from empirical dim-flash data (Whitlock, G.G., and T.D. Lamb. 1999. Neuron. 23:337–351.). The model accounts for four quantitative measures of SPR reproducibility. It also reproduces qualitative features of rod responses obtained with altered nucleotide levels, and thus contradicts the conclusion that such responses imply that phosphorylation cannot dominate R* inactivation (Rieke, F., and D.A. Baylor. 1998a. Biophys. J. 75:1836–1857; Field, G.D., and F. Rieke. 2002. Neuron. 35:733–747.). Moreover, the model is able to reproduce the salient qualitative features of SPRs obtained from mouse rods that had been genetically modified with specific pathways of R* inactivation or Ca2+ feedback disabled. We present a theoretical analysis showing that the variability of the area under the SPR estimates the variability of integrated R* activity, and can provide a valid gauge of the number of R* inactivation steps. We show that there is a heretofore unappreciated tradeoff between variability of SPR amplitude and SPR duration that depends critically on the kinetics of inactivation of R* relative to the net kinetics of the downstream reactions in the cascade. Because of this dependence, neither the variability of SPR amplitude nor duration provides a reliable estimate of the underlying variability of integrated R* activity, and cannot be used to estimate the minimum number of R* inactivation steps. We conclude that multiple phosphorylation-dependent decrements in R* activity (with Arr-quench) can confer the observed reproducibility of rod SPRs; there is no compelling need to invoke a long series of non-phosphorylation dependent state changes in R* (as in Rieke, F., and D.A. Baylor. 1998a. Biophys. J. 75:1836–1857; Field, G.D., and F. Rieke. 2002. Neuron. 35:733–747.). Our analyses, plus data and modeling of others (Rieke, F., and D.A. Baylor. 1998a. Biophys. J. 75:1836–1857; Field, G.D., and F. Rieke. 2002. Neuron. 35:733–747.), also argue strongly against either feedback (including Ca2+-feedback) or depletion of any molecular species downstream to R* as the dominant cause of SPR reproducibility.
A High Visual Quality Embedding Method in Edges Based on Pixel Pair Difference

In this paper, we proposed a new data hiding method based on diamond encoding (DE) and pixel pair difference (PPD). DE proposes a pixel-wise algorithm which flexibly embeds different base digits to maximize payload and image visual quality. During DE embedding, digits embed in sequence without separately consider smooth areas and complex areas. We propose a method based on human visual system in that human eyes are more sensitive to the change of smooth areas where pixel pairs possess less difference. Embedding secret message in complex areas insignificantly affects visual quality of the image, correspondingly makes the stego image less detectable. The proposed method uses PPD to adaptively embed secret message in complex areas and thus improves DE performance. Experimental results illustrate that our algorithm has the same distortion with DE but provides a better visual quality of stego image.
Paracrine effect of vascular smooth muscle cells in the prevention of aortic aneurysm formation.

OBJECTIVE Inflammation and elastinolysis are observed in the media of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) where vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) density is decreased. In contrast, elastin and VSMCs are preserved in the noninflammatory media of stenotic atherosclerotic lesions. We have tested the hypothesis that VSMCs exert a protective effect against inflammation and proteolysis in a model of AAA in rats, in which medial elastin degradation is driven by inflammation and matrix metalloproteinases. METHOD Decellularized guinea pig aortas (xenografts) were implanted orthotopically into Fischer-344 rats and seeded with a suspension of rat VSMCs syngeneic to the rat recipient, or were infused with culture medium as a control. Diameter and elastin in the media were quantified 8 weeks after implantation. Inflammation, matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) and tissue inhibitor of matrix metalloproteinase (TIMP) expression were analyzed 1 and 2 weeks after implantation. RESULTS VSMC addition prevented AAA formation (mean +/- standard deviation diameter increase: 198.2% +/- 106.6% vs 35.3% +/- 17.8%, P =.009), elastin degradation, and decreased infiltration by monocyte-macrophages. Reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction, zymography and reverse zymography for MMP-2, MMP-9, TIMP-1, TIMP-2, and TIMP-3 demonstrated a shift of the proteolytic-antiproteolytic balance upon addition of VSMCs. Transcriptional changes were observed in the adventitia, although seeded VSMCs remained located in the intima. CONCLUSIONS VSMCs exert a paracrine effect on the adventitia that participate in artery wall homeostasis against inflammation and proteolysis. Failure of this protective mechanism results in AAA formation. The understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying VSMC protective effect may represent a new approach in the treatment of aneurysm and plaque rupture.
Experience of rofecoxib in patients with osteoarthritis previously treated with traditional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in Spain:results of phase 2 of theVICOXX study

SUMMARY Objectives: To compare patient and physician attitudes to osteoarthritis (OA) treatment with rofecoxib or traditional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (tNSAIDs). Methods: A 6-month prospective study involving 562 OA patients enrolled at 29 Spanish primary-care centres. Patients were continued on established tNSAID therapy for the first 3 months then switched to rofecoxib 12.5 or 25 mg/day. Results: Both patients and physicians were significantly more likely to be satisfied with rofecoxib treatment than with tNSAIDs (p < 0.001) and assessments of overall health status improved significantly during rofecoxib therapy (p < 0.001). Adherence to therapy was significantly better with rofecoxib than during tNSAID treatment (p < 0.001). Use of rofecoxib was associated with a significant reduction in the proportion of discontinuations attributed to lack of effectiveness (p < 0.001) or gastrointestinal (GI) adverse events (p < 0.001 compared with tNSAIDs). Rofecoxib was also associated with a >60% reduction in the proportion of patients experiencing a GI adverse event and a halving in the proportion of patients who received GI co-medications; concomitant analgesic use decreased by one-third during rofecoxib therapy. Conclusions: Use of rofecoxib was associated with marked improvements in several indices of treatment effectiveness and tolerability, and in patient and physician satisfaction and perception of general health status compared with tNSAIDs. Rofecoxib is a valuable additional medication for relieving the symptoms of OA and its use in place of tNSAIDs may lead to a reduction in the prescription of concomitant medications.
Developing a text categorization template for Turkish news portals

In news portals, text category information is needed for news presentation. However, for many news stories the category information is unavailable, incorrectly assigned or too generic. This makes the text categorization a necessary tool for news portals. Automated text categorization (ATC) is a multifaceted difficult process that involves decisions regarding tuning of several parameters, term weighting, word stemming, word stopping, and feature selection. In this study we aim to find a categorization setup that will provide highly accurate results in ATC for Turkish news portals. We also examine some other aspects such as the effects of training dataset set size and robustness issues. Two Turkish test collections with different characteristics are created using Bilkent News Portal. Experiments are conducted with four classification methods: C4.5, KNN, Naive Bayes, and SVM (using polynomial and rbf kernels). Our results recommends a text categorization template for Turkish news portals and provides some future research pointers.
Positional Language Models for Clinical Information Retrieval

The PECO framework is a knowledge representation for formulating clinical questions. Queries are decomposed into four aspects, which are Patient-Problem (P), Exposure (E), Comparison (C) and Outcome (O). However, no test collection is available to evaluate such framework in information retrieval. In this work, we first present the construction of a large test collection extracted from systematic literature reviews. We then describe an analysis of the distribution of PECO elements throughout the relevant documents and propose a language modeling approach that uses these distributions as a weighting strategy. In our experiments carried out on a collection of 1.5 million documents and 423 queries, our method was found to lead to an improvement of 28% in MAP and 50% in P@5, as compared to the state-of-the-art method.
LearnLexTo: a machine-learning based word segmentation for indexing Thai texts

Thai language is considered as an unsegmented language in which words are written continuously without the use of word delimiters. To index Thai texts via the inverted index, a word segmentation algorithm is usually required to tokenize a text into a series of terms. Recent works on word segmentation reported Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) as the best machine learning algorithm, outperforming the dictionary-based approach and other machine learning algorithms. Our main contribution is to propose a new hybrid approach, LearnLexTo, which further improves the CRF model by integrating the dictionary-based approach. The key idea is to solve the ambiguity problem in the CRF model by using the dictionary-based approach which relies on a valid word set. Experimental results showed that the proposed hybrid approach yields the highest F1 value of 88.46%, compared to 82.07% by using the dictionary-based approach and 85.71% by using the CRF model.
Recent Trends in Porous Sound-Absorbing Materials

Sound-absorbing materials absorb most of the sound energy striking them, making them very useful for the control of noise. They are used in a variety of locations - close to sources of noise, in various paths, and sometimes close to receivers. Although all materials absorb some incident sound, the term "acoustical material" has been primarily applied to those materials that have been produced for the specific purpose of providing high values of absorption. The major uses of absorbing materials are almost invariably found to include the reduction of reverberant sound pressure levels and, consequently, the reduction of the reverberation time in enclosures, or rooms. A wide range of sound-absorbing materials exist. In the 1970s, public health concerns helped change the main constituents of sound-absorbing materials from asbestos-based materials to new synthetic fibers. Although, these new fibers are much safer for human health, more recently, issues related to global warming may increase the use of natural fibers instead of synthetic ones.
The dynamic role of genetics on cortical patterning during childhood and adolescence

Significance Quantitative genetic studies have established that evolutionarily novel regions of the cerebral cortex have high heritability within human populations. Longitudinal imaging studies have demonstrated that the cerebral cortex is highly dynamic in childhood. In the current study, we examine how genetic effects on cortical thickness change longitudinally over childhood and adolescence using a large genetically informative imaging sample. We find rapid changes in genetic effects in early childhood, with stabilization in late adolescence. The areas with the greatest changes include evolutionarily novel regions. These findings have implications for future molecular genetic studies of imaging endophenotypes and further our sparse understanding of how genes help to shape the brain after birth. Longitudinal imaging and quantitative genetic studies have both provided important insights into the nature of human brain development. In the present study we combine these modalities to obtain dynamic anatomical maps of the genetic contributions to cortical thickness through childhood and adolescence. A total of 1,748 anatomic MRI scans from 792 healthy twins and siblings were studied with up to eight time points per subject. Using genetically informative latent growth curve modeling of 81,924 measures of cortical thickness, changes in the genetic contributions to cortical development could be visualized across the age range at high resolution. There was highly statistically significant (P < 0.0001) genetic variance throughout the majority of the cerebral cortex, with the regions of highest heritability including the most evolutionarily novel regions of the brain. Dynamic modeling of changes in heritability over time demonstrated that the heritability of cortical thickness increases gradually throughout late childhood and adolescence, with sequential emergence of three large regions of high heritability in the temporal poles, the inferior parietal lobes, and the superior and dorsolateral frontal cortices.
Hypergraphs and degrees of parallelism, a completeness result

In order to study relative PCF-de(cid:12)nability of boolean functions, we associate a hypergraph H f to any boolean function f (following [2, 4]). We introduce the notion of timed hypergraph morphism and show that it is: { Sound: if there exists a timed morphism from H f to H g then f is PCF-de(cid:12)nable relatively to g . { Complete for subsequential functions: if f is PCF-de(cid:12)nable relatively to g , and g is subsequential, then there exists a timed morphism from H f to H g .
Extracting semantic structure of web documents using content and visual information

This work aims to provide a page segmentation algorithm which uses both visual and content information to extract the semantic structure of a web page. The visual information is utilized using the VIPS algorithm and the content information using a pre-trained Naive Bayes classifier. The output of the algorithm is a semantic structure tree whose leaves represent segments having unique topic. However contents of the leaf segments may possibly be physically distributed in the web page. This structure can be useful in many web applications like information retrieval, information extraction and automatic web page adaptation. This algorithm is expected to outperform other existing page segmentation algorithms since it utilizes both content and visual information.
Deriving sufficient conditions for global asymptotic stability of delayed neural networks via nonsmooth analysis

In this paper, we obtain new sufficient conditions ensuring existence, uniqueness, and global asymptotic stability (GAS) of the equilibrium point for a general class of delayed neural networks (DNNs) via nonsmooth analysis, which makes full use of the Lipschitz property of functions defining DNNs. Based on this new tool of nonsmooth analysis, we first obtain a couple of general results concerning the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium point. Then those results are applied to show that existence assumptions on the equilibrium point in some existing sufficient conditions ensuring GAS are actually unnecessary; and some strong assumptions such as the boundedness of activation functions in some other existing sufficient conditions can be actually dropped. Finally, we derive some new sufficient conditions which are easy to check. Comparison with some related existing results is conducted and advantages are illustrated with examples. Throughout our paper, spectral properties of the matrix (A + A/sup /spl tau//) play an important role, which is a distinguished feature from previous studies. Here, A and A/sup /spl tau// are, respectively, the feedback and the delayed feedback matrix defining the neural network under consideration.
Language understanding using hidden understanding models

Describes a sentence understanding system that is completely based on learned methods both for understanding individual sentences and for determining their meaning in the context of the preceding sentences. We describe the models used for each of three stages in the understanding: semantic parsing, semantic classification and discourse modeling. When we ran this system on the December 1994 test of the ARPA Air Travel Information System (ATIS) task, we achieved a 14.5% error rate. The error rate for those sentences that are context-independent (class A) was 9.5%.