Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Serum Uric Acid Levels in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease: A Meta-Analysis

Background Serum uric acid (UA) could exert neuro-protective effects against Alzheimer's disease (AD) via its antioxidant capacities. Many studies investigated serum UA levels in AD patients, but to date, results from these observational studies are conflicting. Methods We conducted a meta-analysis to compare serum UA levels between AD patients and healthy controls by the random-effects model. Studies were identified by searching PubMed, ISI Web of Science, EMBASE, and the Cochrane library databases from 1966 through July 2013 using the Medical Subject Headings and keywords without restriction in languages. Only case-control studies were included if they had data on serum UA levels in AD patients and healthy controls. Begg's funnel plot and Egger's regression test were applied to assess the potential publication bias. Sensitivity analyses and meta-regression were conducted to explore possible explanations for heterogeneity. Results A total of 11 studies met the inclusion criteria including 2708 participants were abstracted. Serum UA levels were not significantly different in AD patients compared to healthy controls (standardized mean difference (SMD) = −0.50; 95% confidence interval (CI): −1.23 to 0.22). Little evidence of publication bias was observed. Sensitivity analyses showed that the combined SMD was consistent every time omitting any one study, except only one study which greatly influenced the overall results. Meta-regression showed that year of publication, race, sample size, and mean age were not significant sources of heterogeneity. Conclusion Our meta-analysis of case-control studies suggests that serum UA levels do not differ significantly in AD patients, but there may be a trend toward decreased UA in AD after an appropriate interpretation. More well-designed investigations are needed to demonstrate the potential change of serum UA levels in AD patients.
Hierarchical Structures of Neural Networks for Phoneme Recognition

This paper deals with phoneme recognition based on neural networks (NN). First, several approaches to improve the phoneme error rate are suggested and discussed. In the experimental part, we concentrate on temporal patterns (TRAPs) and novel split temporal context (STC) phoneme recognizers. We also investigate into tandem NN architectures. The results of the final system reported on standard TIMIT database compare favorably to the best published results
Glutamate Mediated Astrocytic Filtering of Neuronal Activity

Neuron-astrocyte communication is an important regulatory mechanism in various brain functions but its complexity and role are yet to be fully understood. In particular, the temporal pattern of astrocyte response to neuronal firing has not been fully characterized. Here, we used neuron-astrocyte cultures on multi-electrode arrays coupled to Ca2+ imaging and explored the range of neuronal stimulation frequencies while keeping constant the amount of stimulation. Our results reveal that astrocytes specifically respond to the frequency of neuronal stimulation by intracellular Ca2+ transients, with a clear onset of astrocytic activation at neuron firing rates around 3-5 Hz. The cell-to-cell heterogeneity of the astrocyte Ca2+ response was however large and increasing with stimulation frequency. Astrocytic activation by neurons was abolished with antagonists of type I metabotropic glutamate receptor, validating the glutamate-dependence of this neuron-to-astrocyte pathway. Using a realistic biophysical model of glutamate-based intracellular calcium signaling in astrocytes, we suggest that the stepwise response is due to the supralinear dynamics of intracellular IP3 and that the heterogeneity of the responses may be due to the heterogeneity of the astrocyte-to-astrocyte couplings via gap junction channels. Therefore our results present astrocyte intracellular Ca2+ activity as a nonlinear integrator of glutamate-dependent neuronal activity.
Automatic proof of strong secrecy for security protocols

We present a new automatic technique for proving strong secrecy for security protocols. Strong secrecy means that an adversary cannot see any difference when the value of the secret changes. Our technique relies on an automatic translation of the protocol into Horn clauses, and a resolution algorithm on the clauses. It requires important extensions with respect to previous work for the proof of (standard) secrecy and authenticity. This technique can handle a wide range of cryptographic primitives, and yields proofs valid for an unbounded number of sessions and an unbounded message space; it is also flexible and efficient. We have proved its correctness, implemented it, and tested it on several examples of protocols including JFK by W. Aiello et al. (2002).
Reservoir sampling techniques in modern data analysis

Reservoir sampling is an interesting statistical sampling technique, developed almost 40 years ago in order to enable analysis of large scale data (for that time) while utilizing limited computer memory resources. We present an overview of frequently used reservoir sampling techniques and discuss how they can be used for learning from data streams. While they are not perfect for all scenarios, they can easily be modified for many purpose, and also find place in surprisingly useful modern data analysis approaches.
Coloring k-colorable graphs using smaller palettes

We obtain the following new coloring results:<ul><li>A 3-colorable graph on <i>n</i> vertices with maximum degree Δ can be colored, in polynomial time, using <i>&Ogr;</i>((Δ log Δ)<sup>1/3</sup> ·log <i>n</i>) colors. This slightly improves an <i>&Ogr;</i>((Δ<sup>1/3</sup> log<sup>½</sup> Δ) · log <i>n</i>) bound given by Karger, Motwani and Sudan. More generally, <i>k</i>-colorable graphs with maximum degree Δ can be colored, in polynomial time, using <i>&Ogr;</i>((Δ<sup>1-2/<i>k</i></sup> log<sup>1/<i>k</i></sup> Δ) · log <i>n</i>) colors. </li><li>A 4-colorable graph on <i>n</i> vertices can be colored, in polynomial time, using <i>&Ogr;</i>(<i>n</i><sup>7/19</sup>) colors. This improves an <i>&Ogr;</i>(<i>n</i><sup>2/5</sup>) bound given again by Karger, Motwani and Sudan. More generally, <i>k</i>-colorable graphs on <i>n</i>-vertices can be colored, in polynomial time, using <i>&Ogr;</i>(<i>n</i><sup>αk</sup>) colors, where α<subscrpt>5</subscrpt> = 97/207, α<subscrpt>6</subscrpt> = 43/79, α<subscrpt>7</subscrpt> = 1391/2315, α<subscrpt>8</subscrpt> = 175/271, … </li></ul> The first result is obtained by a slightly more refined probabilistic analysis of the semidefinite programming based coloring algorithm of Karger, Motwani and Sudan. The second result is obtained by combining the coloring algorithm of Karger, Motwani and Sudan, the combinatorial coloring algorithms of Blum and an extension of a technique of Alon and Kahale (which is based on the Karger, Motwani and Sudan algorithm) for finding relatively large independent sets in graphs that are guaranteed to have very large independent sets. The extension of the Alon and Kahale result may be of independent interest.
A Pilot Study of Randomized Clinical Controlled Trial of Gait Training in Subacute Stroke Patients With Partial Body-Weight Support Electromechanical Gait Trainer and Functional Electrical Stimulation: Six-Month Follow-Up

Background and Purpose— This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of gait training using an electromechanical gait trainer with or without functional electrical stimulation for people with subacute stroke. Methods— This was a nonblinded randomized controlled trial with a 6-month follow-up. Fifty-four subjects were recruited within 6 weeks after stroke onset and were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 gait intervention groups: conventional overground gait training treatment (CT, n=21), electromechanical gait trainer (GT, n=17) and, electromechanical gait trainer with functional electrical stimulation (GT-FES, n=16). All subjects were to undergo an assigned intervention program comprising a 20-minute session every weekday for 4 weeks. The outcome measures were Functional Independence Measure, Barthel Index, Motricity Index leg subscale, Elderly Mobility Scale (EMS), Berg Balance Scale, Functional Ambulatory Category (FAC), and 5-meter walking speed test. Assessments were made at baseline, at the end of the 4-week intervention program, and 6 months after the program ended. Results— By intention-to-treat and multivariate analysis, statistically significant differences showed up in EMS (Wilks' &lgr;=0.743, P=0.005), FAC (Wilks' &lgr;=0.744, P=0.005) and gait speed (Wilks' &lgr;=0.658, P<0.0001). Post hoc analysis (univariate 2-way ANCOVA) revealed that the GT and GT-FES groups showed significantly better improvement in comparison with the CT group at the end of the 4 weeks of training and in the 6-month follow-up. Conclusions— For the early stage after stroke, this study indicated a higher effectiveness in poststroke gait training that used an electromechanical gait trainer compared with conventional overground gait training. The training effect was sustained through to the 6-month follow-up after the intervention.
Effect of different training mode on Interleukin-6 (IL-6) and C-reactive protein (CRP) in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients

[Purpose] This study was carried out to investigate the effects of different training modes on IL-6 and CRP in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). [Methods] The subjects consisted of 16 middle-aged women with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), all of whom had no other complications. The 16 subjects were randomly assigned to two experimental groups: the circuit training group (CTG, n = 8) and aerobic training group (ATG, n = 8). Based on measured THR (target heart rate) for maximum oxygen consumption rate, the circuit training group (CTG) exercised at 60% intensity, 60 min/day, 5 sets, 3 days/week for 12 weeks. Based on measured THR (target heart rate) for maximum oxygen consumption rate, the aerobic training group (ATG) exercised at 60% intensity (which was increased gradually in weeks 4, 7, and 10) 60 min/day, 3 days/week for 12 weeks. [Results] The results are as follows. Significant decreases in the post training values of weight, % Fat, BMI, IL-6 and CRP (p < .05) were observed in the CTG compared to pre-training. However, there were no differences in the physical characteristic and blood inflammatory factors between the groups (ATG & CTG). [Conclusion] In conclusion, the results of this study suggest that circuit training (CT) may be considered as an effective training mode for helping to decrease the blood inflammatory factors (IL-6 and CRP) in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).
A probabilistic model for natural language understanding

We propose a perception-based probabilistic model of language processing. Our model employs frequency analysis and pragmatic information in the interpretation of input sentences. The frequency analysis relates words and semantic constructs, while pragmatic are used to help identifi specific semantic categories within a sentence. Our model is realized as a semantic network that learns associations between words and semantic categories from sample sentences. To show the feasibility of the model we have developed a natural language interface for a subset of DOS. This pilot system functions effectively, providing evidence for the merit of our model.
Tell me more?: the effects of mental model soundness on personalizing an intelligent agent

What does a user need to know to productively work with an intelligent agent? Intelligent agents and recommender systems are gaining widespread use, potentially creating a need for end users to understand how these systems operate in order to fix their agent's personalized behavior. This paper explores the effects of mental model soundness on such personalization by providing structural knowledge of a music recommender system in an empirical study. Our findings show that participants were able to quickly build sound mental models of the recommender system's reasoning, and that participants who most improved their mental models during the study were significantly more likely to make the recommender operate to their satisfaction. These results suggest that by helping end users understand a system's reasoning, intelligent agents may elicit more and better feedback, thus more closely aligning their output with each user's intentions.
An Ontological Study of the Correlation between Colors and Korean Color Terms

The structures of current color ontologies are more flat than hierarchical. However, we argue that color terms should be structured hierarchically. We have conducted psychological experiments on the mapping between colors and Korean color terms. The continuous physical property of colors makes it impossible for us to refer to ¿every color¿. This property exerted a negative influence in proving a reasonable account of colors. We found out that some color terms are more salient than others and such saliency has induced the hierarchical clusters.
- 1-Stepwise Flattening for Model Checking

Model checking complex systems always suffers from the state explosion problem. Over the last 10 years there has been lots of researches on how to mitigate the state explosion problem. As a result, many techniques have been emerged such as absiraction, compositional reasoning, and exploiting symmetry. In line with these efforts, this paper proposes stepwise model checking which exploits hierarchical structure in model checking to reduce a set of states to be considered at one time. Thus it makes model checking faster and mitigates the state explosion. This paper shows how to effectively handle an ECTL model checking or an ACTL model checking in such a way with an example.
Minimal value parameters in RKHS

In this paper we develop a new algorithm to find the minimal value of the parameter number in the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) model which is the number of input / output measurements contained in a learning set. The proposed algorithm consists of computing a criterion for increasing values of this number and repering the value for which the criterion jumps suddenly. The proposed algorithm is validated on a chemical reactor.
A Recurrent Fuzzy Neural Network Based Adaptive Control and Its Application on Robotic Tracking Control

A kind of recurrent fuzzy neural network (RFNN) is constructed by using recurrent neural network (RNN) to realize fuzzy inference. In this kind of RFNN, temporal relations are embedded in the network by adding feedback connections on the first layer of the network. And a RFNN based adaptive control (RFNNBAC) is proposed, in which, two RFNN are used to identify and control plant respectively. Simulation experiments are made by applying proposed RFNNBAC on robotic tracking control problem to confirm its effectiveness.
Modelling Of Downhole Seismic Sources II: An Analysis Of The Heelan/Brekhovskikh Results And Comparison Of Point Source Radiation To Radiation From Boreholes

The work of Heelan (1952, 1953a,b) was one of the first studies of wave propagation from a cylindrical boundary. Heelan attempted to model the radiation emanating from a cylindrical shot hole filled with dynamite. To do so he applied a constant stress to a finite length of an empty infinite cylindrical cavity embedded in an infinite elastic, homogeneous medium. The stresses he considered were axial, torsional, and radial stresses. The radial and axial stresses were required to be proportional to each other and of the same duration. To date Heelan's work has been referenced in over 100 articles and 15 different journals including recent works (Paulsson, 1988) . His results have also been compared with results from the reciprocity theorem (White, 1953, 1960) and played an integral part of important books including those by Brekhovskikh (1960, 1980) and White (1965, 1983). His fundamental contributions were the description of shear wave lobes, the famous four-leaved rose, generated from a radial source in a borehole and that the radiation patterns for an axial source and a torsional source in a borehole have the same geometries as the point axial and torsional sources in infinite media. Despite the importance of this work, Heelan's results have been criticized by Jordan (1962) who dismissed the work as mathematically unsound and Abo-Zena (1977) who devoted an appendix of his 1977 paper to criticizing Heelan's results. The main point of contention has been the use of contour analysis in his first paper (Heelan, 1953a). Although Heelan's work did not include a fluid-filled borehole which is a crucial
On the turbulence models and turbulent Schmidt number in simulating stratified flows

Stratified flows are prevalent in indoor and outdoor environments. To predict these flows, this investigation evaluated the performance of seven turbulence models by comparing the simulation results with the experimental data of both weakly and strongly stratified jets. The models tested included six Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes models and one large eddy simulation (LES) model. The velocity, turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), and Reynolds stress distributions were examined. For the weakly stratified jet, all seven models could predict well the mean velocity, but for the strongly stratified jet, the Reynolds stress model and LES models overpredicted the velocity in the unstable stratification region. The Shear Stress Transport (SST) model was the best. This paper also introduced a new dynamic turbulent Schmidt number model which can improve the prediction of density distribution. In addition, this investigation analysed the computing costs of the models as well as the vorticity and entrainment ratios predicted by the models.
Long chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and incidence rate of coronary artery calcification in Japanese men in Japan and white men in the USA: population based prospective cohort study

Objective To determine whether serum concentrations of long chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCn3PUFAs) contribute to the difference in the incidence rate of coronary artery calcification (CAC) between Japanese men in Japan and white men in the USA. Methods In a population based, prospective cohort study, 214 Japanese men and 152 white men aged 40–49 years at baseline (2002–2006) with coronary calcium score (CCS)=0 were re-examined for CAC in 2007–2010. Among these, 175 Japanese men and 113 white men participated in the follow-up exam. Incident cases were defined as participants with CCS≥10 at follow-up. A relative risk regression analysis was used to model the incidence rate ratio between the Japanese and white men. The incidence rate ratio was first adjusted for potential confounders at baseline and then further adjusted for serum LCn3PUFAs at baseline. Results Mean (SD) serum percentage of LCn3PUFA was >100% higher in Japanese men than in white men (9.08 (2.49) vs 3.84 (1.79), respectively, p<0.01). Japanese men had a significantly lower incidence rate of CAC compared to white men (0.9 vs 2.9/100 person-years, respectively, p<0.01). The incidence rate ratio of CAC taking follow-up time into account between Japanese and white men was 0.321 (95% CI 0.150 to 0.690; p<0.01). After adjusting for age, systolic blood pressure, low density lipoprotein cholesterol, diabetes, and other potential confounders, the ratio remained significant (0.262, 95% CI 0.094 to 0.731; p=0.01). After further adjusting for LCn3PUFAs, however, the ratio was attenuated and became non-significant (0.376, 95% CI 0.090 to 1.572; p=0.18). Conclusions LCn3PUFAs significantly contributed to the difference in the incidence of CAC between Japanese and white men.
Application-aware Traffic Management for OpenFlow networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging networking paradigm aims to improve network management flexibility and efficiency. OpenFlow is the popular SDN de-facto standard, which has been prevalently adopted by both academia and industry for research and development purpose. OpenFlow provides rich programmable interface to network administrator to ease traffic monitoring and control. Because OpenFlow supports L4 network stack, it is feasible to provide application level traffic control by specifying TCP/UDP port number in flow rules. The major deficiency of the port-based traffic control is that it only provides the ability to control traffic from applications which have well-known TCP/UDP port numbers. In the case of port number change or dynamic (ephemeral) port allocation to an application, it is difficult to accurately control the application traffic. To be a solution, we propose an application-aware traffic management method by integrating Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) function with SDN controller. To show the feasibility, we design and implement Firewall and Bandwidth Manager applications based on the proposed management method. The applications perform on top of ONOS [1] controller, and FTP rate control example is shown to prove the feasibility of the proposed flow management method.
Extreme X-Ray Variability in the Narrow-Line QSO PHL 1092

A ROSAT observation of the narrow-line Fe II QSO PHL 1092 shows rapid variability that requires an efficiency of at least 0.13, exceeding the theoretical maximum for an accretion disk around a non-rotating black hole. Plausible explanations for this high efficiency incorporate anisotropic emission and/or accretion onto a rapidly rotating black hole, the latter recently suggested by Kwan et al. as a mechanism for generating PHL 1092's strong Fe II lines by mechanical heating in an accretion disk. The soft X-ray luminosity of PHL 1092 had also increased by a factor of 21 over the weak Einstein detection, to more than 5 x 10^46 ergs/s. Its photon spectral index of 4.2 is among the steepest of any AGN. These X-ray properties are characteristic of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies, of which PHL 1092 is evidently a very luminous member. Narrow-line QSOs also extend a significant correlation between X-ray luminosity and X-ray spectral index which we have found among a large sample of optically-selected, narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies observed by ROSAT.
Redundancy Rates of Slepian-Wolf Coding ∗

The results of Shannon theory are asymptotic and do not reflect the finite codeword lengths used in practice. Recent progress in design of distributed source codes, along with the need for distributed compression in sensor networks, has made it crucial to understand how quickly distributed communication systems can approach their ultimate limits. Slepian and Wolf considered the distributed encoding of length-n sequences x and y. If y is available at the decoder, then as n increases x can be encoded losslessly at rates arbitrarily close to the conditional entropy H(X|Y ). However, for any finite n there is a positive probability that x and y are not jointly typical, and so x cannot be decoded correctly. We examine a Bernoulli setup, where x is generated by passing y through a binary symmetric correlation channel. We prove that the finite n requires us to increase the rate above the conditional entropy by K( )/ √ n, where is the probability of error. We also study the cost of universality in Slepian-Wolf coding, and propose a universal variable rate scheme wherein the encoder for x receives PY = 1 n ∑ i yi. For PY < 0.5, our redundancy rate is K ′( )/ √ n above the empirical conditional entropy. When |PY −0.5| = O(n−1/6), K ′( ) = Ω(n1/6), and another scheme with redundancy rate O(n−1/3) should be used. Our results indicate that the penalties for finite n and unknown statistics can be large, especially for PY ≈ 0.5.