Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measuring vaccination coverage in a hard to reach minority.

BACKGROUND Although childhood vaccination programmes have been very successful, there are some hard to reach minority groups that object to vaccination. The Netherlands has experienced several epidemics of vaccine-preventable diseases, confined to the orthodox Protestant minority. However, vaccination coverage in this minority is still unknown and this hampers prevention and control of epidemics. METHODS We estimated vaccination coverage among the orthodox Protestant minority and its various subgroups (denominations), using two sub-studies with different design and study population. For both sub-studies separately, we determined overall vaccination coverage and vaccination coverage per denomination. The results were compared and discussed. RESULTS An online survey was filled out by 1778 orthodox Protestant youngsters, invited via orthodox Protestant media using a snowball method. Next to that, results of a national sample study on vaccination were used, of which only orthodox Protestant respondents were included in our analyses (N = 2129). Overall vaccination coverage among orthodox Protestants in The Netherlands was estimated to be at minimum 60%. Moreover, in both sub-studies three clusters of denominations could be identified, with high (>85%), intermediate (50-75%) and low (<25%) vaccination coverage. CONCLUSION The integration of both sub-studies, with their own specific strengths and weaknesses, added to our insight in the vaccination coverage in this minority. Based on these results, we recommend to focus prevention and control of vaccine-preventable diseases on the orthodox Protestant subgroups with intermediate and low vaccination coverage.
: Using Live Streaming to Evade Internet Censorship

We design, implement, and evaluate CovertCast, a censorship circumvention system that broadcasts the content of popular websites in real-time, encrypted video streams on common live-streaming services such as YouTube. CovertCast does not require any modifications to the streaming service and employs the same protocols, servers, and streaming software as any other user of the service. Therefore, CovertCast cannot be distinguished from other live streams by IP address filtering or protocol fingerprinting, raising the bar for censors. DOI 10.1515/popets-2016-0024 Received 2015-11-30; revised 2016-03-01; accepted 2016-03-02.
A bipartite-graph based approach for disaster susceptibility comparisons among cities

People are attracted to large cities because of more employment opportunities, convenient facilities, and rich cultural activities. However, large cities are also more vulnerable to natural disasters, which have caused widespread physical destructions, great loss of life and property, and immense havoc. "Which city is less susceptible to natural disasters? " is thus one of the most critical questions one faces when making decisions on travelling or job and business relocation. In this work, we propose a bipartite-graph based framework to compare the impacts of disasters on two cities by answering different queries using textual documents collected online. Besides intuitive simple comparison using statistics, our system also generates textual comparative summaries to better describe the differences between the two cities in terms of safety. Although a number of online services provide disaster events statistic information for cities, our framework compares the impacts of disasters on cities in a more straightforward and comprehensive way.
Blood Tracer Kinetics in the Arterial Tree

Evaluation of blood supply of different organs relies on labeling blood with a suitable tracer. The tracer kinetics is linear: Tracer concentration at an observation site is a linear response to an input somewhere upstream the arterial flow. The corresponding impulse response functions are currently treated empirically without incorporating the relation to the vascular morphology of an organ. In this work we address this relation for the first time. We demonstrate that the form of the response function in the entire arterial tree is reduced to that of individual vessel segments under approximation of good blood mixing at vessel bifurcations. The resulting expression simplifies significantly when the geometric scaling of the vascular tree is taken into account. This suggests a new way to access the vascular morphology in vivo using experimentally determined response functions. However, it is an ill-posed inverse problem as demonstrated by an example using measured arterial spin labeling in large brain arteries. We further analyze transport in individual vessel segments and demonstrate that experimentally accessible tracer concentration in vessel segments depends on the measurement principle. Explicit expressions for the response functions are obtained for the major middle part of the arterial tree in which the blood flow in individual vessel segments can be treated as laminar. When applied to the analysis of regional cerebral blood flow measurements for which the necessary arterial input is evaluated in the carotid arteries, present theory predicts about 20% underestimation, which is in agreement with recent experimental data.
Smartest recompilation

To separately compile a program module in traditional statically-typed languages, one has to manually write down an import interface which explicitly specifies all the external symbols referenced in the module. Whenever the definitions of these external symbols are changed, the module has to be recompiled. In this paper, we present an algorithm which can automatically infer the “minimum” import interface for any module in languages based on the Damas-Milner type discipline (e.g., ML). By “minimum”, we mean that the interface specifies a set of assumptions (for external symbols) that are just enough to make the module type-check and compile. By compiling each module using its “minimum” import interface, we get a separate compilation method that can achieve the following optimal property: A compilation unit never needs to be recompiled unless its own implementation changes.
Progress in Chinese research on water masses and circulation in the Arctic and subarctic ocean

The Arctic Ocean and Arctic sea ice have undergone a series of rapid changes. Oceanographic surveying has become one of the key missions of the Chinese National Arctic Research Expeditions since 1999. Using the data obtained in these surveys and from other sources, Chinese researchers have carried out a series of studies in the field of Arctic physical oceanography. The Near Sea-surface Temperature Maximum, freshwater content and heat flux in different regions of the Arctic have drawn wide attention from Chinese researchers. Arctic circulation is changing with the decline of sea ice, which is also influencing the structure and distribution of water masses. Studies have also focused on these issues. In this paper, the main results of research on water masses, currents, the structure of the upper ocean and other major hydrological phenomena over the past two decades are summarized. Citation: Cao Y, Zhao J P, Shao Q L. Progress in Chinese research on water masses and circulation in the Arctic and subarctic ocean. Adv Polar Sci, 2017, 28 (2): 91-99, doi:10.13679/j.advps. 2017.2. 00091
Robustness of the outcome of adult bumblebee infection with a trypanosome parasite after varied parasite exposures during larval development

The outcome of defence by the invertebrate immunity has recently been shown to be more complex than previously thought. In particular, the outcome is affected by biotic and abiotic environmental variation, host genotype, parasite genotype and their interaction. Knowledge of conditions under which environmental variation affects the outcome of an infection is one important question that relates to this complexity. We here use the model system of the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, infected by the trypanosome, Crithidia bombi, combined with a split‐colony design to test the influence of the parasite environment during larval rearing on adult resistance. We find that genotype‐specific interactions are maintained and adult resistance is not influenced. This demonstrates that environmental dependence of bumblebee–trypanosome interactions is not ubiquitous, and yet unknown constraints will maintain standard coevolutionary dynamics under such environmental deviations.
Ensuring video QoE using HTTP Adaptive Streaming: Issues and challenges

HTTP adaptive streaming is used by a numerous video streaming services in the internet. It facilitates video streaming through heterogeneous network, without the need of a dictated streaming infrastructure. The benefit of HTTP Adaptive Streaming, compared to classical HTTP, is the reduction of the interruption, i.e. stalling event, and the use of bandwidth. This technology tries to adapt the video to the variation of the network condition. It take into account different information such as end user device capacity, available bandwidth, video quality level, current network conditions, and current server load. It enable, also, the service provide to improve resource utilization and the perceived video quality, i.e. Quality of Experience. This paper introduces the reader this important concept. It presents also a newest classification of different HAS's influencing factors. The different issues and challenges related to HTTP Adaptive Streaming are also discussed in this paper.
Upregulation of STAT3 Marks Burkitt Lymphoma Cells Refractory to Epstein-Barr Virus Lytic Cycle Induction by HDAC Inhibitors

ABSTRACT A fundamental problem in studying the latent-to-lytic switch of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and the viral lytic cycle itself is the lack of a culture system fully permissive to lytic cycle induction. Strategies to target EBV-positive tumors by inducing the viral lytic cycle with chemical agents are hindered by inefficient responses to stimuli. In vitro, even in the most susceptible cell lines, more than 50% of cells latently infected with EBV are refractory to induction of the lytic cycle. The mechanisms underlying the refractory state are not understood. We separated lytic from refractory Burkitt lymphoma-derived HH514-16 cells after treatment with an HDAC inhibitor, sodium butyrate. Both refractory- and lytic-cell populations responded to the inducing stimulus by hyperacetylation of histone H3. However, analysis of host cell gene expression showed that specific cellular transcripts Stat3, Fos, and interleukin-8 (IL-8) were preferentially upregulated in the refractory-cell population, while IL-6 was upregulated in the lytic population. STAT3 protein levels were also substantially increased in refractory cells relative to untreated or lytic cells. This increase in de novo expression resulted primarily in unphosphorylated STAT3. Examination of single cells revealed that high levels of STAT3 were strongly associated with the refractory state. The refractory state is manifest in a unique subpopulation of cells that exhibits different cellular responses than do lytic cells exposed to the same stimulus. Identifying characteristics of cells refractory to lytic induction relative to cells that undergo lytic activation will be an important step in developing a better understanding of the regulation of the EBV latent to lytic switch.
Geometric landscape of homologous crossover for syntactic trees

The relationship between search space, distances and genetic operators for syntactic trees is little understood. Geometric crossover and geometric mutation are representation-independent operators that are well-defined once a notion of distance over the solution space is defined. In this paper we apply this geometric framework to the syntactic tree representation and show how the well-known structural distance is naturally associated with homologous crossover and sub-tree mutation
Overflow effect on the dynamics of the zooplankton community in cascade lake systems

In cascade lake systems, the overflow effect was determined to be an important factor influencing temporal changes in population density and functional feeding organisation of plankton community along the longitudinal gradient. This is based on the fact that during thermal stratification, epilimnetic water impoverished by nutrients flows over the barriers from one lake into another. In two largest lakes of the Plitvice cascade system located in the karstic Dinaric area we observed that these overflows and the retention of nutrients by plankton metabolic activity in lakes located upstream influence the seasonal dynamics of the zooplankton community in a lake located downstream. These two different zooplankton cycles were explained by the temporal fluctuation of available food caused by the overflow of epilimnetic water impoverished in nutrients from the upstream into the lake located downstream.
How to Protect the Protector

This paper describes ongoing research to harden the lower part of the software stack, normally not covered by existing software-based fault-tolerance mechanisms. I discuss a combination of four techniques to harden the operating system kernel against hardware faults: resilient data structures, asynchronous checks, restartable OS services, and message protection. I present initial performance results for resilient data structures and message protection. The hardened operating system is the base layer for additional techniques like resilient I/O and resource management, a resilience-aware OS/application interface and exception handling, and usage of possible hardware extensions, which are briefly discussed.
MAT-2000 - design, collection, and validation of a Mandarin 2000-speaker telephone speech database

Mandarin speech data Across Taiwan (MAT) is a project initiated by members of the Association for Computational Lin-guistics and Chinese Language Processing (ACLCLP) to collect speech data through public telephone networks in Taiwan. Totally over 7000 Taiwanese individuals have provided speech data. The results were released as a series of MAT speech databases to the research community in Taiwan. Two databases, MAT-160 and MAT-400, have been used for the first and second Assessment of Speech Recognition Technique in Taiwan. Now, release preparation of a larger database of over 2000 speakers, called MAT-2000, has been completed. In this joint project conducted by ACLCLP and Philips Research East-Asia, considerable effort has been spent on validating the database to ensure its quality. MAT-2000 consists of over 80 hours of recordings and contains about 640,000 Mandarin syllables in over 140,000 speech files. These speech files are grouped into five sub-databases for different application purposes.
Mixing and Crystal Scavenging in the Main Ethiopian Rift Revealed by Trace Element Systematics in Feldspars and Glasses

For many magmatic systems, crystal compositions preserve a complex and protracted history, which may be largely decoupled from their carrier melts. The crystal cargo may hold clues to the physical distribution of melt and crystals in a magma reservoir and how magmas are assembled prior to eruptions. Here we present a geochemical study of a suite of samples from three peralkaline volcanoes in the Main Ethiopian Rift. While whole‐rock data show strong fractional crystallization signatures, the trace element systematics of feldspars, and their relationship to their host glasses, reveals complexity. Alkali feldspars, particularly those erupted during caldera‐forming episodes, have variable Ba concentrations, extending to high values that are not in equilibrium with the carrier liquids. Some of the feldspars are antecrysts, which we suggest are scavenged from a crystal‐rich mush. The antecrysts crystallized from a Ba‐enriched (more primitive) melt, before later entrainment into a Ba‐depleted residual liquid. Crystal‐melt segregation can occur on fast timescales in these magma reservoirs, owing to the low‐viscosity nature of peralkaline liquids. The separation of enough residual melt to feed a crystal‐poor postcaldera rhyolitic eruption may take as little as months to tens of years (much shorter than typical repose periods of 300–400 years). Our observations are consistent with these magmatic systems spending significant portions of their life cycle dominated by crystalline mushes containing ephemeral, small (< 1 km3) segregations of melt. This interpretation helps to reconcile observations of high crustal electrical resistivity beneath Aluto, despite seismicity and ground deformation consistent with a magma body.
Trailing TRAIL Resistance: Novel Targets for TRAIL Sensitization in Cancer Cells

Resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs is the major hindrance in the successful cancer therapy. The tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) is a member of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) family of ligands, which initiates apoptosis in cancer cells through interaction with the death receptors DR4 and DR5. TRAIL is perceived as an attractive chemotherapeutic agent as it specifically targets cancer cells while sparing the normal cells. However, TRAIL therapy has a major limitation as a large number of the cancer develop resistance toward TRAIL and escape from the destruction by the immune system. Therefore, elucidation of the molecular targets and signaling pathways responsible for TRAIL resistance is imperative for devising effective therapeutic strategies for TRAIL resistant cancers. Although, various molecular targets leading to TRAIL resistance are well-studied, recent studies have implicated that the contribution of some key cellular processes toward TRAIL resistance need to be fully elucidated. These processes primarily include aberrant protein synthesis, protein misfolding, ubiquitin regulated death receptor expression, metabolic pathways, epigenetic deregulation, and metastasis. Novel synthetic/natural compounds that could inhibit these defective cellular processes may restore the TRAIL sensitivity and combination therapies with such compounds may resensitize TRAIL resistant cancer cells toward TRAIL-induced apoptosis. In this review, we have summarized the key cellular processes associated with TRAIL resistance and their status as therapeutic targets for novel TRAIL-sensitizing agents.
Reservoir Sedimentation Rates in the Little Washita River Experimental Watershed, Oklahoma: Measurement and Controlling Factors

Forty‐five flood control reservoirs, authorized in the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act 1954, were installed by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) between 1969 and 1982 in the Little Washita River Experimental Watershed (LWREW), located in central Oklahoma. Over time, these reservoirs have lost sediment and flood storage capacity due to sedimentation, with rates dependent on upstream land use and climate variability. In this study, sedimentation rates for 12 reservoirs representing three major land use categories within LWREW were measured based on bathymetric surveys that used acoustic profiling system. Physiographic and climate attributes of drainage area of surveyed reservoirs were extracted from publicly available data sources including topographic maps, digital elevation models, USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service soils, and weather station databases. Correlation, principal component analysis, and stepwise regression were utilized to analyze the relationship between normalized reservoir sedimentation rates (ReSRa) and the drainage area characteristics to determine the major variables controlling sedimentation within the LWREW. Percent of drainage area with extreme slopes, saturated hydraulic conductivity, and maximum daily rainfall event recorded in spring explained most of the variability in ReSRa. It was also found that percent reduction in reservoir surface area can be used as a surrogate for estimating ReSRa. The implications of the results are discussed.
Hobbit — Smaller but faster than a dwarf: Revisiting lightweight SHA-3 FPGA implementations

In this paper, we revisit lightweight FPGA implementations for SHA-3 and improve upon the state of the art by applying a new optimization technique to the slice-oriented architecture, which is based on a shallow pipeline. As a result, the area for the implementation reduces by almost one quarter (23%), compared to the up to now smallest implementation for Virtex-5 FPGAs. The proposed design also improves on the throughput-area ratio by 59%. For Virtex-6 FPGAs, the improvements are even higher, showing a throughput-area ratio increase by over 150% upon previously reported results for this FPGA. Furthermore, we evaluate several additional implementation trade-offs. First, we provide the maximum number of pipeline stages for lightweight architectures, which process several slices in parallel and for variants of SHA-3 with only 800 and 400 bits of internal state. Second, we evaluate several hardware interfaces. This evaluation shows, that the hardware interface may have a significant impact on the area consumption and the throughput.
Ultrastretchable and Flexible Copper Interconnect‐Based Smart Patch for Adaptive Thermotherapy

Unprecedented 800% stretchable, non-polymeric, widely used, low-cost, naturally rigid, metallic thin-film copper (Cu)-based flexible and non-invasive, spatially tunable, mobile thermal patch with wireless controllability, adaptability (tunes the amount of heat based on the temperature of the swollen portion), reusability, and affordability due to low-cost complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible integration.
''Playstation eyetoy games'' improve upper extremity-related motor functioning in subacute stroke: a randomized controlled clinical trial.

AIM To evaluate the effects of ''Playstation EyeToy Games'' on upper extremity motor recovery and upper extremity-related motor functioning of patients with subacute stroke. METHODS The authors designed a randomized, controlled, assessor-blinded, 4-week trial, with follow-up at 3 months. A total of 20 hemiparetic inpatients (mean age 61.1 years), all within 12 months post-stroke, received 30 minutes of treatment with ''Playstation EyeToy Games'' per day, consisting of flexion and extension of the paretic shoulder, elbow and wrist as well as abduction of the paretic shoulder or placebo therapy (watching the games for the same duration without physical involvement into the games) in addition to conventional program, 5 days a week, 2-5 hours/day for 4 weeks. Brunnstrom's staging and self-care sub-items of the functional independence measure (FIM) were performed at 0 month (baseline), 4 weeks (post-treatment), and 3 months (follow-up) after the treatment. RESULTS The mean change score (95% confidence interval) of the FIM self-care score (5.5 [2.9-8.0] vs 1.8 [0.1-3.7], P=0.018) showed significantly more improvement in the EyeToy group compared to the control group. No significant differences were found between the groups for the Brunnstrom stages for hand and upper extremity. CONCLUSION ''Playstation EyeToy Games'' combined with a conventional stroke rehabilitation program have a potential to enhance upper extremity-related motor functioning in subacute stroke patients.