Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
One-year prevalence, comorbidities and cost of cachexia-related inpatient admissions in the USA

Background: Cachexia is a condition characterized as a loss in body mass or metabolic dysfunction and is associated with several prevalent chronic health conditions including many cancers, COPD, HIV, and kidney disease, with between 10 and 50% of patients with these conditions having cachexia. Currently there is little research into cachexia and our objective is to characterize cachexia patients, their healthcare utilization, and associated hospitalization costs. Given the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, it is important to better understand cachexia so that the condition can be better diagnosed and managed. Methods: We utilized one year (2009) of the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS). The NIS represents all inpatient stays at a random 20% sample of all hospitals within the United States. We grouped cachexia individuals by primary or secondary discharge diagnosis and then compared those with cachexia to all others in terms of length of stay (LOS) and total cost. Finally we looked into factors predicting increased LOS using a negative binomial model. Results: We estimated US prevalence for cachexia-related inpatient admissions at 161,898 cases. Cachexia patients were older, with an average age of 67.95 versus 48.10 years in their non-cachexia peers. Hospitalizations associated with cachexia had an increased LOS compared to non-cachexia patients (6 versus 3 days), with average costs per stay $4641.30 greater. Differences were seen in loss of function (LOF) with cachexia patients, mostly in the major LOF category (52.60%), whereas non-cachexia patients were spread between minor, moderate, and major LOF (36.28%, 36.11%, and 21.26%, respectively). Significant positive predictors of increased LOS among cachexia patients included urban hospital (IRR=1.21, non-teaching urban; IRR=1.23, teaching urban), having either major (IRR=1.41) or extreme (IRR=2.64) LOF, and having a primary diagnosis of pneumonia (IRR=1.15). Conclusion: We have characterized cachexia and seen it associated with increased length of stay, increased cost, and more severe loss of function in patients compared to those without cachexia.
Oxidative stress and aberrant signaling in aging and cognitive decline

Brain aging is associated with a progressive imbalance between antioxidant defenses and intracellular concentrations of reactive oxygen species (ROS) as exemplified by increases in products of lipid peroxidation, protein oxidation, and DNA oxidation. Oxidative conditions cause not only structural damage but also changes in the set points of redox‐sensitive signaling processes including the insulin receptor signaling pathway. In the absence of insulin, the otherwise low insulin receptor signaling is strongly enhanced by oxidative conditions. Autophagic proteolysis and sirtuin activity, in turn, are downregulated by the insulin signaling pathway, and impaired autophagic activity has been associated with neurodegeneration. In genetic studies, impairment of insulin receptor signaling causes spectacular lifespan extension in nematodes, fruit flies, and mice. The predicted effects of age‐related oxidative stress on sirtuins and autophagic activity and the corresponding effects of antioxidants remain to be tested experimentally. However, several correlates of aging have been shown to be ameliorated by antioxidants. Oxidative damage to mitochondrial DNA and the electron transport chain, perturbations in brain iron and calcium homeostasis, and changes in plasma cysteine homeostasis may altogether represent causes and consequences of increased oxidative stress. Aging and cognitive decline thus appear to involve changes at multiple nodes within a complex regulatory network.
Real time implementation of NARMA L2 feedback linearization and smoothed NARMA L2 controls of a single link manipulator

Robotics is a field of modern technology which requires knowledge in vast areas such as electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science as well as finance. Nonlinearities and parametric uncertainties are unavoidable problems faced in controlling robots in industrial plants. Tracking control of a single link manipulator driven by a permanent magnet brushed DC motor is a nonlinear dynamics due to effects of gravitational force, mass of the payload, posture of the manipulator and viscous friction coefficient. Furthermore uncertainties arise because of changes of the rotor resistance with temperature and random variations of friction while operating. Due to this fact classical PID controller can not be used effectively since it is developed based on linear system theory. Neural network control schemes for manipulator control problem have been proposed by researchers; in which their competency is validated through simulation studies. On the other hand, actual real time applications are rarely established. Instead of simulation studies, this paper is aimed to implement neural network controller in real time for controlling a DC motor driven single link manipulator. The work presented in this paper is concentrating on neural NARMA L2 control and its improvement called to as Smoothed NARMA L2 control. As proposed by K. S Narendra and Mukhopadhyay, Narma L2 control is one of the popular neural network architectures for prediction and control. The real time experimentation showed that the Smoothed NARMA L2 is effective for controlling the single link manipulator for both point-to-point and continuous path motion control.
Design and Properties of Transaction Processing System for Web Applications in the Cloud Computing

A transaction is a set of queries to be executed atomically on a single consistent view of a database. The main challenge to support transactional guarantees in a cloud computing environment is to provide the ACID properties of Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability without compromising the scalability properties of the cloud. However, the underlying data storage services provide only eventual consistency. We address this problem by creating a secondary copy of the application data in the transaction managers that handle consistency. Cloud computing platforms provide scalability and high availability properties for web applications but they sacrifice data consistency at the same time. However, many applications cannot afford any data inconsistency. We present a scalable transaction manager for cloud database services to execute ACID transactions of web applications, even in the presence of server failures. We demonstrate the scalability of our system using a prototype implementation. We demonstrate the scalability of our transactional database service using a prototype implementation. Our system exploits two properties typical of Web applications to allow efficient and scalable operations. First, each transaction is encapsulated in the processing of a particular request from a user. Second, Web applications tend to issue transactions that span a relatively small number of well143 Research Cell: An International Journal of Engineering Sciences ISSN: 2229-6913 Issue Sept 2011, Vol. 4 © 2011 Journal Anu Books identified data items. This means that the two-phase commit protocol for any given transaction can be confined to a relatively small number of servers holding the accessed data items.
Minerals: Their Constitution and Origin

The new edition of this popular textbook, once again, provides an indispensable guide for the next generation of mineralogists. Designed for use on one- or two-semester courses, this second edition has been thoughtfully reorganised, making it more accessible to students, whilst still being suitable for an advanced mineralogy course. Additions include expanded introductions to many chapters, a new introductory chapter on crystal chemistry, revised figures, and an extended plates section containing beautiful colour photographs. Text boxes include historical background and case studies to engage students, and end-of-chapter questions help them reinforce concepts. With new online resources to support learning and teaching, including laboratory exercises, PowerPoint slides, useful web links and mineral identification tables, this is a sound investment for students in the fields of geology, materials science and environmental science, and a valuable reference for researchers, collectors and anyone interested in minerals.
Identification of Coefficients in a Quadratic Moving Average Process Using the Generalized Method of Moments

The output of a causal, stable, time-invariant nonlinear filter can be approximately represented by the linear and quadratic terms of a finite parameter Volterra series expansion. We call this representation the “quadratic nonlinear MA model” since it is the logical extension of the usual linear MA process. Where the actual generating mechanism for the data is fairly smooth, this quadratic MA model should provide a better approximation to the true dynamics than the twostate threshold autoregression and Markov switching models usually considered.
Phase synchronization of delta and theta oscillations increase during the detection of relevant lexical information

During monitoring of the discourse, the detection of the relevance of incoming lexical information could be critical for its incorporation to update mental representations in memory. Because, in these situations, the relevance for lexical information is defined by abstract rules that are maintained in memory, a central aspect to elucidate is how an abstract level of knowledge maintained in mind mediates the detection of the lower-level semantic information. In the present study, we propose that neuronal oscillations participate in the detection of relevant lexical information, based on “kept in mind” rules deriving from more abstract semantic information. We tested our hypothesis using an experimental paradigm that restricted the detection of relevance to inferences based on explicit information, thus controlling for ambiguities derived from implicit aspects. We used a categorization task, in which the semantic relevance was previously defined based on the congruency between a kept in mind category (abstract knowledge), and the lexical semantic information presented. Our results show that during the detection of the relevant lexical information, phase synchronization of neuronal oscillations selectively increases in delta and theta frequency bands during the interval of semantic analysis. These increments occurred irrespective of the semantic category maintained in memory, had a temporal profile specific for each subject, and were mainly induced, as they had no effect on the evoked mean global field power. Also, recruitment of an increased number of pairs of electrodes was a robust observation during the detection of semantic contingent words. These results are consistent with the notion that the detection of relevant lexical information based on a particular semantic rule, could be mediated by increasing the global phase synchronization of neuronal oscillations, which may contribute to the recruitment of an extended number of cortical regions.
Using constant switching frequency in a linear-assisted DC-DC switching regulator

This article shows the proposal of a linear–assisted converter or linear–&–switching hybrid converter with a constant switching frequency. The control loop of the system is based on the current–mode technique. The main disadvantage of a converter with current–mode control is the inherent instability of the loop when switch duty ratios are greater than 0.5. In order to make stable the proposed linear–assisted converter, the article shows the technique based on a slope compensation. Keywords—DC-DC switching converters; voltage linear regulators; linear-assisted DC-DC voltage regulators
Face recognition with multimodal subspace analysis

Appearance based methods happen to be very useful for general face recognition tasks. The main problem with this methods is the multimodality of images under changing variations. In this study, we propose a novel approach which can be utilized against the multimodality. The technique, that is based on the nonlinear manifold embedding, defines a linear subspace for illumination variations. We obtained some promising recognition results which are comparable with state of art methods.
Semi-Universal Portfolios with Transaction Costs

Online portfolio selection (PS) has been extensively studied in artificial intelligence and machine learning communities in recent years. An important practical issue of online PS is transaction cost, which is unavoidable and nontrivial in real financial trading markets. Most existing strategies, such as universal portfolio (UP) based strategies, often rebalance their target portfolio vectors at every investment period, and thus the total transaction cost increases rapidly and the final cumulative wealth degrades severely. To overcome the limitation, in this paper we investigate new investment strategies that rebalances its portfolio only at some selected instants. Specifically, we design a novel on-line PS strategy named semi-universal portfolio (SUP) strategy under transaction cost, which attempts to avoid rebalancing when the transaction cost outweighs the benefit of trading. We show that the proposed SUP strategy is universal and has an upper bound on the regret. We present an efficient implementation of the strategy based on non-uniform random walks and online factor graph algorithms. Empirical simulation on real historical markets show that SUP can overcome the drawback of existing UP based transaction cost aware algorithms and achieve significantly better performance. Furthermore, SUP has a polynomial complexity in the number of stocks and thus is efficient and scalable in practice.
Principled Non-Linear Feature Selection

Recent non-linear feature selection approaches employing greedy optimisation of Centred Kernel Target Alignment(KTA) exhibit strong results in terms of generalisation accuracy and sparsity. However, they are computationally prohibitive for large datasets. We propose randSel, a randomised feature selection algorithm, with attractive scaling properties. Our theoretical analysis of randSel provides strong probabilistic guarantees for correct identification of relevant features. RandSel's characteristics make it an ideal candidate for identifying informative learned representations. We've conducted experimentation to establish the performance of this approach, and present encouraging results, including a 3rd position result in the recent ICML black box learning challenge as well as competitive results for signal peptide prediction, an important problem in bioinformatics.
Hyaluronic acid and wound healing.

BACKGROUND We developed an experimental model of ethanol-induced dermatotoxicity and hepatocytoxicity using normal human keratinocytes and normal human hepatocytes that preserve inducible cytochrome p450 activities. The original work was described in several articles. The objective of this study was to determine whether hyaluronic acid attenuates skin necrosis, and to further clarify its uses in wound repair in humans, animal models and in vitro studies. METHODS We performed a systematic review of the literature using the terms "hyaluronic acid" and "wound healing". PubMed was searched for studies published during the period 2010-2014. RESULTS Hyaluronic acid is used in tissue regeneration alone or in combination with herbal or Western medicine. Scaffolds made up of hyaluronic acid were used to embed basic fibroblast growth factor. CONCLUSION Hyaluronic acid extracts are safe and efficacious products to be used in skin repair.
Protein and amino acids for athletes

The main determinants of an athlete's protein needs are their training regime and habitual nutrient intake. Most athletes ingest sufficient protein in their habitual diet. Additional protein will confer only a minimal, albeit arguably important, additional advantage. Given sufficient energy intake, lean body mass can be maintained within a wide range of protein intakes. Since there is limited evidence for harmful effects of a high protein intake and there is a metabolic rationale for the efficacy of an increase in protein, if muscle hypertrophy is the goal, a higher protein intake within the context of an athlete's overall dietary requirements may be beneficial. However, there are few convincing outcome data to indicate that the ingestion of a high amount of protein (2–3 g · kg−1 BW · day−1, where BW = body weight) is necessary. Current literature suggests that it may be too simplistic to rely on recommendations of a particular amount of protein per day. Acute studies suggest that for any given amount of protein, the metabolic response is dependent on other factors, including the timing of ingestion in relation to exercise and/or other nutrients, the composition of ingested amino acids and the type of protein.
An Immuno-Inspired Approach to Misbehavior Detection in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

We propose and evaluate an immuno-inspired approach to misbehavior detection in ad hoc wireless networks. Node misbehavior can be the result of an intrusion, or a software or hardware failure. Our approach is motivated by co-stimulatory signals present in the Biological immune system. The results show that co-stimulation in ad hoc wireless networks can both substantially improve energy efficiency of detection and, at the same time, help achieve low false positives rates. The energy efficiency improvement is almost two orders of magnitude, if compared to misbehavior detection based on watchdogs. We provide a characterization of the trade-offs between detection approaches executed by a single node and by several nodes in cooperation. Additionally, we investigate several feature sets for misbehavior detection. These feature sets impose different requirements on the detection system, most notably from the energy efficiency point of view.
The danger of applying the breeder's equation in observational studies of natural populations

The breeder's equation, which predicts evolutionary change when a phenotypic covariance exists between a heritable trait and fitness, has provided a key conceptual framework for studies of adaptive microevolution in nature. However, its application requires strong assumptions to be made about the causation of fitness variation. In its univariate form, the breeder's equation assumes that the trait of interest is not correlated with other traits having causal effects on fitness. In its multivariate form, the validity of predicted change rests on the assumption that all such correlated traits have been measured and incorporated into the analysis. Here, we (i) highlight why these assumptions are likely to be seriously violated in studies of natural, rather than artificial, selection and (ii) advocate wider use of the Robertson–Price identity as a more robust, and less assumption‐laden, alternative to the breeder's equation for applications in evolutionary ecology.
The governance of climate change: science, economics, politics and ethics.

Editor's Introduction Part 1: The Challenge of Climate Change 1 The Challenge of Climate Change Sir David King 2 Climate Change, Science and Society Martin Manning 3 Global Shocks, Global Solutions: Meeting 21st Century Challenges Ian Goldin 4 Economics Piece Alex Bowen and James Rydge 5 Democracy, Climate Change, and Global Governance David Held and Angus Fane-Hervey 6 Until the Last Ton of Fossil Fuel Has Burnt to Ashes': Climate Change, Global Inequalities, and the Dilemma of Green Politics Ulrich Beck and Joost van Loon Part 2: Social Justice and Sustainability 7 Social Justice and Sustainability: Elastic Terms of Debate Baroness O'Nora O'Neill 8 Changing Values for a Just and Sustainable World Peter Singer 9 The Ends of Justice: Climate Vulnerability Beyond the Pale Michael Mason Part 3: Where to from here? 10 Green Peace: Energy, Europe, and the Global Order David Miliband 11 The Politics of Climate Change Edward Miliband 12 International climate policy after Copenhagen: towards a building blocks' approach Robert Falkner, John Vogler and Hannes Stephan
Linkages between motivation, self-efficacy, self-regulated learning and preferences for traditional learning environments or those with an online component

This study assessed 96 law school students’ preferences for online, hybrid, or traditional learning environments, and their reasons for these preferences, learning strategies, and motivational orientations. A discriminant analysis revealed that non-traditional learning environment familiarity, self-efficacy, and employment status were the strongest predictors of preferences for non-traditional learning environments. Preferences for traditional environments were attributed to students’ familiarity and ability to engage in and foster personal interaction. Preferences for hybrid and online environments were attributed to opportunities for enhanced learning given the convenience and flexible manner in which students with time and familial constraints could access these environments.
Office-Based Case Finding for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in Older Adults in Primary Care

Background. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is underdiagnosed in primary care. Aim. To explore the utility of proactive identification of COPD in patients 75 years of age and older in a Canadian primary care setting. Methods. Canadian Thoracic Society (CTS) screening questions were administered to patients with a smoking history of 20 pack-years or more; those with a positive screen were referred for postbronchodilator spirometry. Results. A total of 107 patients (21%), of 499 screened, had a 20-pack-year smoking history; 105 patients completed the CTS screening. Forty-four (42%) patients were positive on one or more questions on the screening; significantly more patients with a previous diagnosis of COPD (64%) were positive on the CTS compared to those without a previous diagnosis of COPD (30%). Of those who were not previously diagnosed with COPD (N = 11), four (36%) were newly diagnosed with COPD. Conclusion. A systematic two-stage method of screening for COPD, using CTS screening questions followed by spirometric confirmation, is feasible in the context of a busy primary care setting. More research is needed to assess the value of restricting screening to patients with a smoking history of 20 pack-years and on the sensitivity and specificity of these measures.