Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of Migraineurs Having Allodynia: Results of a Large Population-based Study

Objective:Allodynia reflects the clinical correlate of central sensitization, but it is usually neglected in clinical headache management. We aimed to report the prevalence and previously unnoticed associations of allodynia in migraineurs by a nationwide face-to-face questionnaire-based study by physicians. Methods:A total of 5323 households were examined for headache according to the diagnostic criteria of International Classification of Headache Disorders-II. Detailed headache features, premonitory signs, demographics, socio-economic status, and hormonal status of female individuals were analyzed with regard to the presence of allodynia in patients with definite migraine. Results:Allodynia was present in 61.1% of migraineurs in the general population of Turkey. The duration and severity of attacks (P<0.0001), photophobia (P=0.001), phonophobia, and also osmophobia (P<0.0001), as well as premonitory signs (P=0.018), showed significant associations with allodynia. Migraineurs with aura or family history of migraine more often reported allodynia in comparison with those without (P=0.001 and 0.028, respectively). Allodynic migraineurs had a higher rate of physician consults and high levels on the Migraine Disability Assessment questionnaire, reflecting increased burden of headache. Furthermore, migraineurs with allodynia had high probability of attacks close to menses. Migraine improved during pregnancy, but it worsened after menopause or during oral contraceptive use in individuals experiencing allodynia when compared with those without allodynia. Discussion:The duration, severity, and disability of migraine attacks, photophobia, phonophobia, and osmophobia, as well as premonitory signs, showed significant associations with allodynia in the general population. Moreover, migraineurs with aura or family history of migraine more often reported allodynia, and allodynic migraneurs were more sensitive to hormonal changes. Allodynia, which seems to indicate higher tendency to central sensitization, should be implemented in daily headache practice to predict the prognosis and high levels of migraineous involvement.
Evolving and managing trust in grid computing systems

A grid computing system is a geographically distributed environment with autonomous domains that share resources amongst themselves. One primary goal of such a grid environment is to encourage domain-to-domain interactions and increase the confidence of domains to use or share resources: (a) without losing control over their own resources; and (b) ensuring confidentiality for others. To achieve this, the "trust" notion needs to be addressed so that trustworthiness makes such geographically distributed systems become more attractive and reliable for day-to-day use. In this paper we view trust in two steps: (a) verifying the identity of an entity and what that identity is authorized to do; and (b) monitoring and managing the behavior of the entity and building a trust level based on that behavior The identity trust has been the focus of many researchers, but unfortunately the behavior trust has not attracted much attention. We present a formal definition of behavior trust and reputation and discuss a behavior trust management architecture that models the process of evolving and managing of behavior trust in grid computing systems.
International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems Non-collision Conditions in Multi-agent Virtual Leader-based Formation Control Regular Paper

which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Formation control is one of the most important issues of group coordination for multi‐agent robots systems. Some schemes are based on the leader‐ followers approach where some robots are considered as group leaders which influence the group behaviour. In this work, we address a formation strategy using a virtual leader which has communication with the rest of the follower robots, considered as omnidirectional robots. The virtual leader approach presents advantages such as analysis simplification and fewer sensing requirements in the control law implementation. The formation control is based on attractive potential functions only. The control law guarantees the convergence to the desired formation but, in principle, does not avoid inter‐agent collisions. A set of necessary and sufficient non‐collision conditions based on the explicit solution of the closed‐loop system is derived. The conditions allow concluding from the initial conditions whether or not the agents will collide. The results are extended to the case of unicycle‐type robots. 1. Introduction Multi‐agent robots systems (MARS) are understood as groups of autonomous robots (called agents) coordinated to achieve cooperative tasks. The range of applications includes toxic residue cleaning, transportation and manipulation of large objects, exploration, search and rescue, and simulation of biological entities' behaviours [1]. The research areas of MARS encompass motion coordination, task assignment, communications, sensor networks, etc. [2]. Formation control is an important sub‐ area of motion coordination. It refers both to omnidirectional and mobile wheeled robots. The goal is to guarantee the convergence to a particular formation pattern avoiding inter‐agent collision at the same time [3, 11]. The problem is complex because it is assumed that the agents have a limited sensing capacity and no robot possesses global information about the position of all robots. Therefore, the control strategies are decentralized and the main intention is to achieve the desired global behaviours through local interactions [13]. Different schemes of formation control exist [4, 5]. Some schemes consider all agents with the same capacities and achieve formation patterns, without a specific position,
Modulation of Cancer Traits by Tumor Suppressor microRNAs

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are potent post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression. In mammalian cells, miRNAs typically suppress mRNA stability and/or translation through partial complementarity with target mRNAs. Each miRNA can regulate a wide range of mRNAs, and a single mRNA can be regulated by multiple miRNAs. Through these complex regulatory interactions, miRNAs participate in many cellular processes, including carcinogenesis. By altering gene expression patterns, cancer cells can develop specific phenotypes that allow them to proliferate, survive, secure oxygen and nutrients, evade immune recognition, invade other tissues and metastasize. At the same time, cancer cells acquire miRNA signature patterns distinct from those of normal cells; the differentially expressed miRNAs contribute to enabling the cancer traits. Over the past decade, several miRNAs have been identified, which functioned as oncogenic miRNAs (oncomiRs) or tumor-suppressive miRNAs (TS-miRNAs). In this review, we focus specifically on TS-miRNAs and their effects on well-established cancer traits. We also discuss the rising interest in TS-miRNAs in cancer therapy.
Integrating DB and IR Technologies: What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Databases (DB) and information retrieval (IR) have evolved as separate fields. However, modern applications such as customer support, health care, and digital libraries require capabilities for both data and text management. In such settings, traditional DB queries, in SQL or XQuery, are not flexible enough to handle applicationspecific scoring and ranking. IR systems, on the other hand, lack efficient support for handling structured parts of the data and metadata, and do not give the application developer adequate control over the ranking function. This paper analyzes the requirements of advanced text- and data-rich applications for an integrated platform. The core functionality must be manageable, and the API should be easy to program against. A particularly important issue that we highlight is how to reconcile flexibility in scoring and ranking models with optimizability, in order to accommodate a wide variety of target applications efficiently. We discuss whether such a system needs to be designed from scratch, or can be incrementally built on top of existing architectures. The results of our analyses are cast into a series of challenges to the DB and IR communities.
Complementary and alternative medicine: attitudes and patterns of use by German physicians in a national survey.

OBJECTIVE To generate valid data on attitudes about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as well as patterns of use in a large stochastic sample of general practitioner physicians and specialists. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey in a large random sample of 516 German outpatient care physicians with qualifications in 13 medical fields representative of a basic population of 118,085 statutory health insurance physicians. MATERIALS AND METHODS Telephone interviews with 36 wide-ranging questions about CAM attitudes and preferred techniques were conducted in November and December 2005 as part of a national healthcare survey. RESULTS In our sample, 51% were in favor of CAM use (26% were very much in favor, 25% were in favor). The methods most frequently prescribed (combining answers for "very often" and "at times") were physical therapy (71%), phytomedicine (67%), exercise (63%), nutrition and dieting (62%), massage (61%), relaxation techniques (55%), followed by more typical CAM interventions such as homeopathy (38%), acupuncture (37%), and traditional Chinese medicine (18%). Primary care physicians were significantly more inclined to use CAM than were specialists. No striking differences were observed with respect to gender or age. CONCLUSIONS This survey demonstrates a broader acceptance and practice of CAM by physicians than hitherto believed. Methods traditionally known as "natural medicine" were more frequently used than more typical CAM procedures. Further research should focus on physicians' differing motivations and observed results.
Laser-Induced Current Transients in Silicon-Germanium HBTs

Device-level current transients are induced by injecting carriers using two-photon absorption from a subbandgap pulsed laser and recorded using wideband transmission and measurement equipment. These transients exhibit three distinct temporal trends that depend on laser pulse energy as well as the transverse and vertical charge generation location. The nature of the current transient is controlled by both the behavior of the subcollector-substrate junction and isolation biasing. However, substrate potential modulation, due to deformation of the subcollector-substrate depletion region, is the dominant mechanism affecting transient characteristics.
Clonal diversity of Neisseria meningitidis from a population of asymptomatic carriers

Genetic diversity and relationships among 109 isolates of Neisseria meningitidis obtained from throat cultures of healthy individuals in Norway in 1984 were assessed by analyzing electrophoretically demonstrable allelic variation at 15 enzyme-encoding chromosomal genes. Seventy-eight distinctive electrophoretic types (ETs), representing multilocus genotypes, were identified. The mean genetic diversity per locus among the 78 ETs (0.538) was equivalent to that among 19 ETs represented by 66 isolates collected from patients with meningococcal disease in Norway in the first 5 months of 1984. The clonal composition of the collection of carrier strains was, however, quite different from that of strains from patients. The two groups of clones, the ET-5 complex and the ET-37 complex, that were responsible for 91% of the cases of systemic disease in Norway in 1984 were identified in only 7 and 9%, respectively, of the throat cultures from healthy individuals, and their frequencies in the human population sampled were only 0.7% for clones of the ET-5 complex and 0.9% for those of the ET-37 complex. The complex of clones that was most frequently represented by isolates from carriers (19%) has never been recovered from patients with meningococcal disease in Norway or elsewhere, which suggests that these clones have a low virulence potential. Children attending the same day care center or school seldom harbored the same clone in their throats.
Joint use of luminance and color invariants in partial image retrieval

Object color plays an important role in object image matching. Color invariants are robust features under varying illumination conditions. In this work, we analyze the estimation process of the color invariants by Geusebroek et al. from RGB images, and propose a novel invariant feature H' based on the basic invariants to meet the circular continuity residing in the mapping between colors and their invariants and improve the color selectivity. The proposed invariant H' in combination with luminance, contributes to enhance the retrieval performances of partial image matching under varying illumination conditions.
Appendix : Multimodal Omics Data Integration Using Max Relevance-Max Significance Criterion Pradipta Maji and

This paper presents a novel supervised regularized canonical correlation analysis, termed as CuRSaR, to extract relevant and significant features from multimodal high dimensional omics data sets [1]. The proposed method extracts a new set of features from two multidimensional data sets by maximizing the relevance of extracted features with respect to sample categories and significance among them. It integrates judiciously the merits of regularized canonical correlation analysis (RCCA) and rough hypercuboid approach. An analytical formulation, based on spectral decomposition, is introduced to establish the relation between canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and RCCA. It makes the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm significantly lower than existing methods. The concept of hypercuboid equivalence partition matrix of rough hypercuboid is used to compute both relevance and significance of a feature. The equivalence partition matrix also offers an efficient way to find optimum regularization parameters employed in CCA. The superiority of the proposed algorithm over other existing methods, in terms of computational complexity and classification accuracy, is established extensively on real life data.
Comparing results of large clinical trials to those of meta‐analyses

We consider methods for assessing agreement or disagreement between the results of a meta‐analysis of small studies addressing a clinical question and the result of a large clinical trial (LCT) addressing the same clinical question. We recommend basing conclusions about agreement upon the difference between the two results (relative risk, log‐odds ratio or similar summary statistic), in the light of the estimated standard error of that difference. To estimate the standard error of the meta‐analytic result we recommend a random effects analysis, and where a between‐studies variance component is found, that component of variance should be used twice: once in the estimated standard error for the meta‐analytic result and again in the standard error of the LCT result (augmenting the internal standard error of that statistic). Such broadening of the standard error reduces the appearance of disagreement. We also offer a critique of a different published approach, which is based on consistency of findings of statistical significance, a matter of how the two results regard zero, which is a poor measure of how closely they agree with each other. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Antigen presentation by chemically modified splenocytes induces antigen- specific T cell unresponsiveness in vitro and in vivo

We investigated the antigen specificity and presentation requirements for inactivation of T lymphocytes in vitro and in vivo. In vitro studies revealed that splenocytes treated with the crosslinker 1-ethyl- 3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)-carbodiimide (ECDI) and soluble antigen fragments failed to stimulate significant proliferation by normal pigeon cytochrome c-specific T cell clones, suggesting that the chemical treatment inactivated full antigen presentation function. However, T cell clones exposed to ECDI-treated splenocytes and antigen in vitro were rendered unresponsive for at least 8 d to subsequent antigen stimulation with normal presenting cells. As predicted by the in vitro results, specific T cell unresponsiveness was also induced in vivo in B10.A mice injected intravenously with B10.A, but not B10.A(4R), splenocytes coupled with pigeon cytochrome c via ECDI. The antigen and MHC specificity of the induction of this T cell unresponsiveness in vitro and in vivo was identical to that required for T cell activation. These results suggest that nonmitogenic T cell recognition of antigen/MHC on ECDI-modified APCs results in the functional inactivation of T cell clones.
Characterization of the MFα pheromone of the human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans

Cryptococcus neoformans is an important human pathogenic fungus with a defined sexual cycle and well‐developed molecular and genetic approaches. C. neoformans is predominantly haploid and has two mating types, MATa and MATα. Mating is known to be regulated by nutritional limitation and thought also to be regulated by pheromones. Previously, a portion of the MATα locus was cloned, and a presumptive pheromone gene, MFα1, was identified by its ability to induce conjugation tube‐like filaments when introduced by transformation into MATa cells. Here, the ability of the MFα1 gene to induce these morphological changes in MATa cells was used as a phenotypic assay to perform a structure–function analysis of the gene. We show that the MFα1 open reading frame is required for the morphological response of MATa cells. We also find that the cysteine residue of the C‐terminal CAAX motif is required for activity of the MFα1 pheromone. In addition, we use a reporter system to measure the expression levels of the MFα1 pheromone gene and find that two signals, nutrient starvation and the presence of factors secreted by mating partner cells, impinge on this promoter and regulate MFα1 expression. We identify a second pheromone gene, MFα2, and show phenotypically that this gene is also expressed. Finally, we have synthesized the MFα1 pheromone and show that only the predicted mature modified form of the α‐factor peptide triggers morphological responses in MATa cells.
Majorization-Minimization for Manifold Embedding

Nonlinear dimensionality reduction by manifold embedding has become a popular and powerful approach both for visualization and as preprocessing for predictive tasks, but more efficient optimization algorithms are still crucially needed. MajorizationMinimization (MM) is a promising approach that monotonically decreases the cost function, but it remains unknown how to tightly majorize the manifold embedding objective functions such that the resulting MM algorithms are efficient and robust. We propose a new MM procedure that yields fast MM algorithms for a wide variety of manifold embedding problems. In our majorization step, two parts of the cost function are respectively upper bounded by quadratic and Lipschitz surrogates, and the resulting upper bound can be minimized in closed form. For cost functions amenable to such QL-majorization, the MM yields monotonic improvement and is efficient: In experiments, the newly developed MM algorithms outperformed five state-ofthe-art optimization approaches in manifold embedding tasks.
Transcriptome Analysis in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease on Hemodialysis Disclosing a Key Role for CD16+CX3CR1+ Monocytes

The risk for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality is increased in chronic kidney disease; in this process micro-inflammation plays an essential role. Responsible mechanisms remain to a large extent unidentified. In this pilot study transcriptome analysis of peripheral blood monocytes was used to identify in an unprejudiced manner which factors could be discriminative for cardiovascular disease in patients with chronic kidney disease on hemodialysis. Forty gender- and age-matched, non-diabetic, non-smoking subjects with CRP < 20 mg/L were recruited: 9 healthy controls, 11 patients with eGFR > 60 mL/min/1.73m2 and a history of cardiovascular event (CVE), 10 patients with chronic kidney disease stage 5 on hemodialysis without previous cardiovascular event (CKD5HD) and 10 with a previous cardiovascular event (CKD5HD/CVE). Monocytes were isolated and their mRNA was submitted to focused transcriptome analysis using a macroarray platform containing ca. 700 genes associated with macrophage functional capacity. The macroarray data indicated 9 genes (8 upregulated and 1 downregulated) with a significant differential expression in CKD5HD/CVE vs. CVE alone, after excluding genes differentially expressed in CKD5HD vs. control. For FCGR3A (CD16) and CX3CR1 (chemokine receptor) the upregulation vs. control and vs. CVE could be confirmed by quantitative RT-PCR for all CKD5HD patients. Furthermore, CX3CR1 relative expression on monocytes correlated with CRP. Flow cytometric analysis of purified monocytes confirmed a significant increase in the percentage of CD16 positive monocytes in all CKD5HD patients vs. control and CVE. The present study indicates the importance of a specific pro-inflammatory monocyte subpopulation, positive for CD16 and the co-expressed chemokine receptor, CX3CR1, discriminative for CKD5HD patients.
A dynamic utility-based radio resource management scheme for mobile multimedia DS-CDMA systems

Radio resource management is one of the key ways for providing quality-of-service (QoS) to users in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a utility-based radio resource management scheme for mobile multimedia DS-CDMA systems. The algorithm is aiming at the maximization of the system overall utilities. In order to reduce the computational complexity, the radio resource management is decomposed into two levels of subproblems. With the proposed algorithm, transmit power and data rate assigned to users are dynamically adjusted according to their QoS requirements, channel conditions and current system load, so that the optimal resource allocation is achieved. Simulation results show that our scheme is flexible and efficient for managing radio resources in mobile multimedia DS-CDMA environments.
Evaluation and validation of problem solving and thinking skills based on student academic performance

Engineering Companies today, along with technical knowledge of the subject, expect various skills to be present in a candidate when they go for external hiring. Highly skilled workers are replacing well educated people in the industries. This has forced Universities and colleges to move from a traditional way of imparting technical education to enhancing skills like problem solving and thinking skills. But such skills may be inherent among some students and may be lacking among others. Hence, there is a need of a model which can evaluate problem solving and thinking skills, so that students lacking the skill can be trained. This paper suggests a weighted score clustering model, which can evaluate problem solving skills in a student. The model can be used by universities to identify low skilled students, so that special skills training can be imparted to them. The paper also validates the model with the help of the student's Job placement record.