Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In Situ Methods of Measurement—An Important Line of Evidence in the Environmental Risk Framework

Abstract A tiered framework provides a structured approach to assess and manage risk and underpins much of the legislation concerning chemicals and environmental management. Management decisions regarding appropriate controls can have high cost implications to the regulated community. The risk framework provides an evidence-based approach to reduce uncertainty in decision making. Traditional assessment is heavily dependent on laboratory-generated toxicity test data and estimations of exposure and effect. Despite many well documented demonstrations of in situ methodologies, they are rarely used by regulators to help improve assessment or to validate risk. Emerging legislation puts greater emphasis on environmental outcomes and represents a significant shift from the reliance on chemical measures alone toward biological responses that improve assessment and demonstrate ecological benefit. Diagnostic methods, that could include in situ–based measures, will help assess and manage environments failing to achieve good status and it is likely that a weight of evidence approach will be needed to help inform management decisions. The potential application of such measures in the risk framework is reviewed in the context of current and emerging legislation concerning chemicals. Effect measures on the basis of in situ methods provide an alternative line of evidence and can help reduce uncertainty in decision making. Criteria are presented to help select appropriate methods in a multiple-line, weight of evidence approach.
Iterative Nearest Neighborhood Oversampling in Semisupervised Learning from Imbalanced Data

Transductive graph-based semisupervised learning methods usually build an undirected graph utilizing both labeled and unlabeled samples as vertices. Those methods propagate label information of labeled samples to neighbors through their edges in order to get the predicted labels of unlabeled samples. Most popular semi-supervised learning approaches are sensitive to initial label distribution which happened in imbalanced labeled datasets. The class boundary will be severely skewed by the majority classes in an imbalanced classification. In this paper, we proposed a simple and effective approach to alleviate the unfavorable influence of imbalance problem by iteratively selecting a few unlabeled samples and adding them into the minority classes to form a balanced labeled dataset for the learning methods afterwards. The experiments on UCI datasets and MNIST handwritten digits dataset showed that the proposed approach outperforms other existing state-of-art methods.
Timing-drift channel model and marker-based error correction coding

Several types of insertion/deletion/substitution error correction codings have been proposed for channels with imperfect synchronization. Most of the conventional coding schemes assume insertion/deletion errors of bit granularity, while in some applications, e.g. bit patterned media recording, insertion/deletion errors occur as a result of accumulation of small synchronization errors. This paper considers a timing-drift channel model in which a fraction of bit (i.e., 1 /ν-bit) is inserted and deleted, and describes application of conventional marker-based IDS error correction coding to the channel. Also simulation results show bit error rates of the marker-based coding.
Length of Epstein-Barr Virus Termini as a Determinant of Epithelial Cell Clonal Emergence

ABSTRACT Reiterated terminal sequences of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) DNA are numerically heterogeneous among infectious virions, providing a viral measure of clonality in infected cells. After in vitro infection, carcinoma cells bearing EBV episomes with fewer terminal repeats (TRs) proliferated faster. In single-cell clones, TR number varied inversely to the quantity of latent membrane protein 2A (LMP2A) transcripts whose unspliced precursors cross joined TRs. Thus, EBV clonality may reflect selection for a TR number that optimizes LMP2A-enhanced tumor progression, with infection occurring after epithelial cell transformation.
Hierarchical Phosphorylation of δ-Opioid Receptor Regulates Agonist-induced Receptor Desensitization and Internalization*

Treatment of HEK293 cells expressing the δ-opioid receptor with agonist [d-Pen2,5]enkephalin (DPDPE) resulted in the rapid phosphorylation of the receptor. We constructed several mutants of the potential phosphorylation sites (Ser/Thr) at the carboxyl tail of the receptor in order to delineate the receptor phosphorylation sites and the agonist-induced desensitization and internalization. The Ser and Thr were substituted to alanine, and the corresponding mutants were transiently and stably expressed in HEK293 cells. We found that only two residues, i.e.Thr358 and Ser363, were phosphorylated, with Ser363 being critical for the DPDPE-induced phosphorylation of the receptor. Furthermore, using alanine and aspartic acid substitutions, we found that the phosphorylation of the receptor is hierarchical, with Ser363 as the primary phosphorylation site. Here, we demonstrated that DPDPE-induced rapid receptor desensitization, as measured by adenylyl cyclase activity, and receptor internalization are intimately related to phosphorylation of Thr358 and Ser363, with Thr358being involved in the receptor internalization.
Risk Adjustment for Health Plans Disproportionately Enrolling Frail Medicare Beneficiaries

There is concern about the adequacy of diagnosis-based risk adjusters for paying health plans that disproportionately enroll frail Medicare beneficiaries. The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) was used to examine the ability of two risk-adjustment models to predict Medicare costs for groups defined by institutional status and difficulty with activities of daily living (ADLs). Both models underpredicted average costs for non-institutionalized frail beneficiaries; however, the models slightly overpredicted expenses for most frail individuals and severely underpredicted for a minority. Further refinements are needed if diagnosis-based models are used to pay plans that disproportionately enroll frail beneficiaries.
Anthropomorphism, agency, and ethopoeia: computers as social actors

Attempts to generate anthropomorphic responses to computers have been based on complex, agent-based interfaces. This study provides experimental evidence that minimal social cues can induce computer-literate individuals to use social rules-praise of others is more valid than praise of self, praise of others is friendlier than pmise of self, and criticism of others is less friendly than criticism of self—to evaluate the performance of computers. We also demonstrate that different voices are treated as distinct agents.
Murine Models for Trypanosoma brucei gambiense Disease Progression—From Silent to Chronic Infections and Early Brain Tropism

Background Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) caused by Trypanosoma brucei gambiense remains highly prevalent in west and central Africa and is lethal if left untreated. The major problem is that the disease often evolves toward chronic or asymptomatic forms with low and fluctuating parasitaemia producing apparently aparasitaemic serological suspects who remain untreated because of the toxicity of the chemotherapy. Whether the different types of infections are due to host or parasite factors has been difficult to address, since T. b. gambiense isolated from patients is often not infectious in rodents thus limiting the variety of isolates. Methodology/Principal findings T. b. gambiense parasites were outgrown directly from the cerebrospinal fluid of infected patients by in vitro culture and analyzed for their molecular polymorphisms. Experimental murine infections showed that these isolates could be clustered into three groups with different characteristics regarding their in vivo infection properties, immune response and capacity for brain invasion. The first isolate induced a classical chronic infection with a fluctuating blood parasitaemia, an invasion of the central nervous system (CNS), a trypanosome specific-antibody response and death of the animals within 6–8 months. The second group induced a sub-chronic infection resulting in a single wave of parasitaemia after infection, followed by a low parasitaemia with no parasites detected by microscope observations of blood but detected by PCR, and the presence of a specific antibody response. The third isolate induced a silent infection characterised by the absence of microscopically detectable parasites throughout, but infection was detectable by PCR during the whole course of infection. Additionally, specific antibodies were barely detectable when mice were infected with a low number of this group of parasites. In both sub-chronic and chronic infections, most of the mice survived more than one year without major clinical symptoms despite an early dissemination and growth of the parasites in different organs including the CNS, as demonstrated by bioluminescent imaging. Conclusions/Significance Whereas trypanosome characterisation assigned all these isolates to the homogeneous Group I of T. b. gambiense, they clearly induce very different infections in mice thus mimicking the broad clinical diversity observed in HAT due to T. b. gambiense. Therefore, these murine models will be very useful for the understanding of different aspects of the physiopathology of HAT and for the development of new diagnostic tools and drugs.
A human homologue of the rat metastasis-associated variant of CD44 is expressed in colorectal carcinomas and adenomatous polyps

A recently described splice variant of CD44 expressed in metastasizing cell lines of rat tumors has been shown to confer metastatic potential to a non-metastasizing rat pancreatic carcinoma cell line and to non- metastasizing sarcoma cells. Homologues of this variant as well as several other CD44 splice variants are also expressed at the RNA level in human carcinoma cell lines from lung, breast, and colon, and in immortalized keratinocytes. Using antibodies raised against a bacterial fusion protein encoded by variant CD44 sequences, we studied the expression of variant CD44 glycoproteins in normal human tissues and in colorectal neoplasia. Expression of CD44 variant proteins in normal human tissues was readily found on several epithelial tissues including the squamous epithelia of the epidermis, tonsils, and pharynx, and the glandular epithelium of the pancreatic ducts, but was largely absent from other epithelia and from most non-epithelial cells and tissues. In human colorectal neoplasia CD44 variant proteins, including homologues of those which confer metastatic ability to rat tumors, were found on all invasive carcinomas and carcinoma metastases. Interestingly, focal expression was also observed in adenomatous polyps, expression being related to areas of dysplasia. The distribution of the CD44 variants in human tissues suggests that they play a role in a few restricted differentiation pathways and that in colorectal tumors one of these pathways has been reactivated. The finding that metastasis-related variants are already expressed at a relatively early stage in colorectal carcinogenesis and tumor progression, i.e., in adenomatous polyps, suggests the existence of a yet unknown selective advantage linked to CD44 variant expression. The continued expression in metastases would be compatible with a role in the metastatic process.
Future brain-like computing with non-volatile memory device

On-line machine learning has become the need for future data analytics. This work will show an RRAM-crossbar based l2-norm hardware solver for on-line machine learning that can significantly reduce training time when compared to the traditional gradient-based solution using backward propagation. Intensive matrix-vector multiplication in l2-norm solution can be mapped onto recent resistive switching random access memory (RRAM) devices. One incremental Cholesky factorization based l2-norm is proposed based on RRAM-crossbar implementation. Experimental results have shown that significant speedup can be achieved for matrix-vector multiplication in the l2-norm solver such that the overall training and testing time can be reduced respectively. In addition, large energy saving can be also achieved when compared to the traditional CMOS-based out-of-memory computing architecture.
On Farthest-Point Information in Networks

Consider the continuum of points along the edges of a network, an embedded undirected graph with positive edge weights. Distance between these points can be measured as shortest path distance along the edges of the network. We introduce two new concepts to capture farthest-point information in this metric space. The rst, eccentricity diagrams, are used to encode the distance towards farthest points for any point on the network compactly. With this, we can solve the minimum eccentricity feed-link problem, i.e., the problem to extend a network by one new point minimizing the largest network distance towards the new point. The second, network farthest-point diagrams, provide an implicit description of the sets of farthest points. A network farthest-point diagram is, in principle, a compressed farthest-point network Voronoi link diagram generated by the entire continuum of uncountably many points on the network at hand. We provide construction algorithms for data structures that allow for queries for the distance to farthest points as well as their location from any point on a network in optimal time. Thus, we establish rst bounds on construction times and storage requirements of such data structures.
A Fuzzy Approach to Clustering and Selecting Features for Classification of Gene Expression Data

Classification assigns a discrete value named label to each sample in a dataset with respect to its feature values. In this research, we aim to consider some datasets which contain a few samples whereas a huge amount of features are provided for each sample. Most of biological datasets such as micro-arrays has this property. A fundamental contribution of this article is a major extension of pervious works for crisp data clustering. The new approach is based on fuzzy feature clustering which is utilized to select the best features (genes). The proposed method has two advantages over the crisp method. Firstly, it leads to more stability and faster convergence; secondly, it improves the accuracy of the classifier using the selected features. Moreover, in this paper a novel method has been proposed for the discretization of continuous data using the Fisher criterion. In addition, a new method for initialization of cluster centers is suggested. The proposed method has achieved a considerable improvement compared with the crisp version. The leukemia dataset has been used to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.
Heuristic Algorithms for the Dynamic Taxipooling Problem Based on Intelligent Transportation System Technologies

The convergence of the intelligent transportation system (ITS) technologies has given rise to new opportunities for creative and incentive taxi services such as taxipooling. Taxipooling is similar to carpooling which is based on the idea that sets of users having the same travel destination and sharing vehicles. This paper presents two heuristic algorithms based on greedy method and the time-space network for the case of one origin to many destinations ("one- to-many") and many origins to one destination ("many-to-one"). These algorithms are used to support a field trial at Taipei Nei-Hu Science and Technology Park in Taiwan. The results of numerical tests have demonstrated that the outcomes of these heuristic algorithms are fairly plausible.
A proposal for a remote access method using GSCIP and IPsec

Demand for the system to make secure remote access from the Internet to enterprise networks has been increasing. However, the security of the existing remote access methods is vulnerable in Internets, although it is robust on the Internet. In order to solve this problem, we have studied a remote access method that uses IPsec and GSCIP in combination. This method can realize end-to-end secure communication not only for the Internet but also for intranets.
Anthropogenic and Natural Contributions to the Lengthening of the Summer Season in the Northern Hemisphere

Observed long-term variations in summer season timing and length in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) continents and their subregions were analyzed using temperature-based indices. The climatological mean showed coastal–inland contrast; summer starts and ends earlier inland than in coastal areas because of differences in heat capacity. Observations for the past 60 years (1953–2012) show lengthening of the summer season with earlier summer onset and delayed summer withdrawal across the NH. The summer onset advance contributed more to the observed increase in summer season length in many regions than the delay of summer withdrawal. To understand anthropogenic and natural contributions to the observed change, summer season trends from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) multimodel simulations forced with the observed external forcings [anthropogenic plus natural forcing (ALL), natural forcing only (NAT), and greenhouse gas forcing only (GHG)] were analyzed. ALL and GHG simulations were found to reproduce the overall observed global and regional lengthening trends, but NAT had negligible trends, which implies that increased greenhouse gases were the main cause of the observed changes. However, ALL runs tend to underestimate the observed trend of summer onset and overestimate that of withdrawal, the causes of which remain to be determined. Possible contributions of multidecadal variabilities, such as Pacific decadal oscillation and Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, to the observed regional trends in summer season length were also assessed. The results suggest that multidecadal variability can explain a moderate portion (about ±10%) of the observed trends in summer season length, mainly over the high latitudes.
Use of tree structures for processing files

In data processing problems, files are frequently used which must both be searched and altered. Binary search techniques are efficient for searching large files, but the associated file organization is not readily adapted to the file alterations. Conversely, a chained file allocation permits elcient alteration but cannot be searched efficiently. A file organized into a tree-like structure is discussed, and it is shown that such a file may both be searched and altered with times proportional to s log, N, where N is the number of file items and s is a parameter of the tree. It is also shown that optimizing the value of s leads to a search time which is only 25 per cent slower than the binary search. The tree organization employs two data chains and may be considered to be a compromise between the organizations for the binary search and the chained file. The relation of the tree organization to multidimensional indexing and to the trie structure is also discussed.
The burden of cancer at work: estimation as the first step to prevention

Objectives: Work-related cancers are largely preventable. The overall aim of this project is to estimate the current burden of cancer in Great Britain attributable to occupational factors, and identify carcinogenic agents, industries and occupations for targeting risk prevention. Methods: Attributable fractions and numbers were estimated for mortality and incidence for bladder, lung, non-melanoma skin, and sinonasal cancers, leukaemia and mesothelioma for agents and occupations classified as International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Group 1 and 2A carcinogens with “strong” or “suggestive” evidence for carcinogenicity at the specific cancer site in humans. Risk estimates were obtained from published literature and national data sources used for estimating proportions exposed. Results: In 2004, 78 237 men and 71 666 women died from cancer in Great Britain. Of these, 7317 (4.9%) deaths (men: 6259 (8%); women: 1058 (1.5%)) were estimated to be attributable to work-related carcinogens for the six cancers assessed. Incidence estimates were 13 338 (4.0%) registrations (men: 11 284 (6.7%); women 2054 (1.2%)). Asbestos contributed over half the occupational attributable deaths, followed by silica, diesel engine exhaust, radon, work as a painter, mineral oils in metal workers and in the printing industry, environmental tobacco smoke (non-smokers), work as a welder and dioxins. Occupational exposure to solar radiation, mineral oils and coal tars/pitches contributed 2557, 1867 and 550 skin cancer registrations, respectively. Industries/occupations with large numbers of deaths and/or registrations include construction, metal working, personal and household services, mining (not metals), land transport and services allied to transport, roofing, road repair/construction, printing, farming, the Armed Forces, some other service industry sectors and manufacture of transport equipment, fabricated metal products, machinery, non-ferrous metals and metal products, and chemicals. Conclusions: Estimates for all but leukaemia are greater than those currently used in UK health and safety strategy planning and contrast with small numbers (200–240 annually) from occupational accidents. Sources of uncertainty in the estimates arise principally from approximate data and methodological issues. On balance, the estimates are likely to be a conservative estimate of the true risk. Long latency means that past high exposures will continue to give substantial numbers in the near future. Although levels of many exposures have reduced, recent measurements of others, such as wood dust and respirable quartz, show continuing high levels.
Modified artificial potential field method for online path planning applications

This paper presents a modified potential field method for mobile robots and intelligent vehicles local navigation. The approach overcomes the well-known artificial potential field (APF) method issue, which is due to local minima that induce the standard APF method to trap in. Thus, the standard APF method is no longer useful in such cases. The advantage of the new proposed method, as opposed to those that resort to the global optimization methods, is the low computing time that lines up with the standardA-Star (A∗) method. The strategy consists of looking for a practical path in the potential field-according to the potential gradient descent algorithm (PGDA) — and adding a repulsive potential to the current state, in case of blocking configuration, a local minimum. When the PGDA reaches the global minimum, a new potential field will be constructed with only one minimum that matches the final destination of the robot, the global minimum. Finally, to determine the achievable trajectory, a second iteration is performed by the PGDA.