Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A randomized, double-masked, placebo-controlled trial of recombinant granulocyte colony-stimulating factor administration to preterm infants with the clinical diagnosis of early-onset sepsis.

OBJECTIVE We performed a randomized, double-masked, parallel-groups, placebo-controlled trial of recombinant granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (rG-CSF) administration to 44 preterm neonates who had blood cultures obtained and antibiotics begun because of the clinical diagnosis of early-onset sepsis. Two primary outcome variables were tested 1) mortality and 2) development of nosocomial infections over the 2-week period after dosing. DESIGN AND METHODS The treatment group (n = 22) received 10 microgram/kg/day of intravenous rG-CSF once daily for 3 days and the placebo group (n = 22) received the same volume of a visually indistinguishable vehicle. Mortality and culture-proven nosocomial infections were recorded. Immediately before the first, second, and third doses, and again 10 days after the first dose, serum concentrations were determined for tumor necrosis factor-alpha, interleukin 6, granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor, and G-CSF, and blood leukocyte counts, absolute neutrophil counts, immature/total neutrophil ratios, platelet counts, and hemoglobin concentrations were measured. RESULTS The treatment and placebo groups were of similar gestational age (29 +/- 3 vs 31 +/- 3 weeks) and birth weight (1376 +/- 491 vs 1404 +/- 508 g), and had similar Apgar scores and 24-hour Score for Neonatal Acute Physiology scores. The mortality rate was not different between treatment and placebo groups. However, the occurrence of a subsequent nosocomial infection was lower in the rG-CSF recipients (relative risk:.19; 95% confidence interval:.05-.78). rG-CSF treatment did not alter the serum concentrations of the cytokines measured (except for G-CSF). Serum G-CSF levels and blood neutrophil counts were higher in the treatment than in the placebo group 24 hours and 48 hours after dosing. CONCLUSIONS Administration of 3 daily doses of rG-CSF (10 microgram/kg/day) to premature neonates with the clinical diagnosis of early-onset sepsis did not improve mortality but was associated with acquiring fewer nosocomial infections over the subsequent 2 weeks.
Seston dynamics in a saline Mexican lake

Organic and inorganic matter in aquatic ecosystems may occur in both dissolved and particulate form. Seston is the particulate matter present in the water column that is composed of 2 fractions: organic and inorganic matter (MARGALEF 1983, WETZEL 1983). Inorganic matter could be lithogenic (clay and silt), biogenic (silica), andlor originated by chemical precipitation (carbonates) (EFFLER et al. 2002, PENG & EFFLER 2005). The study of seston mass and composition is important to understanding the dynamics of the organic and mineral matter (PUNNING et al. 2003). Previous studies from a wide diversity of geographic regions covering temperate and tropical zones report organic matter as the most abundant fraction of seston, predominantly particulate organic carbon that exhibits seasonal dynamics similar to those of chlorophyll a (CALLIERI 1997, JÃRVINEN et al. 1999, BRZÁKOVÁ et al. 2003, PUNNING et al. 2003); however, the seston of some lakes, such as Lake Maggiore, could be dominated by the inorganic fraction during certain periods (CALLIERI 1997). Although previous studies on warm, monomictic Lake Alchichica relate to dynamic aspects such its hydrodynamics (ALcOCER et al. 2000), nutrient concentration (SÁNCHEZ SILVA 2006), and phytoplankton biomass (SÁNCHEZ REYES 2001), the dynamics ofthe seston concentration, distribution, and composition was unknown. The purpose of this investigation was to analyze the seasonal and vertical variation of seston in Lake Alchichica to better understand the organic and inorganic matter dynamics in tropical, saline lakes.
Symmetric and Asymmetric $k$-center Clustering under Stability

The k-center problem is a canonical and long-studied facility location and clustering problem with many applications in both its symmetric and asymmetric forms. Both versions of the problem have tight approximation factors on worst case instances: a 2-approximation for symmetric k-center and an $O(\log^*(k))$-approximation for the asymmetric version. In this work, we go beyond the worst case and provide strong positive results both for the asymmetric and symmetric k-center problems under a very natural input stability (promise) condition called $\alpha$-perturbation resilience \cite{bilu2012stable}, which states that the optimal solution does not change under any $\alpha$-factor perturbation to the input distances. We show that by merely assuming 2-perturbation resilience, the exact solution for the asymmetric k-center problem can be found in polynomial time. To our knowledge, this is the first problem that is hard to approximate to any constant factor in the worst case, yet can be optimally solved in polynomial time under perturbation resilience for a constant value of $\alpha$. Furthermore, we prove our result is tight by showing symmetric k-center under $(2-\epsilon)$-perturbation resilience is hard unless $NP=RP$. This is the first tight result for any problem under perturbation resilience, i.e., the first time the exact value of $\alpha$ for which the problem switches from being NP-hard, to efficiently computable, has been found. Our results illustrate a surprising relationship between symmetric and asymmetric k-center instances under perturbation resilience. Unlike approximation ratio, for which symmetric k-center is easily solved to a factor of 2 but asymmetric k-center cannot be approximated to any constant factor, both symmetric and asymmetric k-center can be solved optimally under resilience to 2-perturbations.
Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease and Barrett’s Esophagus

Over the past decade, medical and surgical approaches to the patient with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) have improved dramatically. Proton pump inhibitors have become the dominant medical therapy because of their high efficacy and safety. Laparoscopic surgical approaches have improved concomitantly with the advances in medical therapy, resulting in the perception that either continuous medical therapy or surgery are appropriate options for long-term maintenance of this chronic disorder. Recent approval of new endoscopic treatments for GERD has generated considerable interest, but acceptance of these techniques should be limited by the small number of patients studied to date, the lack of placebo controls, and the short duration of follow-up.
Use of knowledge brokering services in the innovation process

This paper investigates the use of knowledge brokers who provide a technology intelligence brokering service to help firm's access external knowledge for their innovation process, especially as part of `search and scanning'. This is seen as an important intermediation role. The paper provides an overview of the different functions of `knowledge brokers' that have emerged to assist firms with innovation by connecting clients with external partners with a view to better informing the `search and scanning' activities of the client firms. Two case studies presented here help to illustrate how UK manufacturing firms have benefitted from using intermediary organizations such as management consultants and Research Technology Organizations as part of their search and scan activities.
Robust 3-way tensor decomposition and extended state Kalman filtering to extract fetal ECG

This paper addresses the problem of fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) extraction from multichannel recordings. The proposed two-step method, which is applicable to as few as two channels, relies on (i) a deterministic tensor decomposition approach, (ii) a Kalman filtering. Tensor decomposition criteria that are robust to outliers are proposed and used to better track weak traces of the fetal ECG. Then, the state parameters used within an extended realistic nonlinear dynamic model for extraction of N ECGs from M mixtures of several ECGs and noise are estimated from the loading matrices provided by the first step. Application of the proposed method on actual data shows its significantly superior performance in comparison to the classic methods.
A Note On Spectral Clustering

Spectral clustering is a popular and successful approach for partitioning the nodes of a graph into clusters for which the ratio of outside connections compared to the volume (sum of degrees) is small. In order to partition into k clusters, one first computes an approximation of the bottom k eigenvectors of the (normalized) Laplacian of G, uses it to embed the vertices of G into k-dimensional Euclidean space R^k, and then partitions the resulting points via a k-means clustering algorithm. It is an important task for theory to explain the success of spectral clustering. Peng et al. (COLT, 2015) made an important step in this direction. They showed that spectral clustering provably works if the gap between the (k+1)-th and the k-th eigenvalue of the normalized Laplacian is sufficiently large. They proved a structural and an algorithmic result. The algorithmic result needs a considerably stronger gap assumption and does not analyze the standard spectral clustering paradigm; it replaces spectral embedding by heat kernel embedding and k-means clustering by locality sensitive hashing. We extend their work in two directions. Structurally, we improve the quality guarantee for spectral clustering by a factor of k and simultaneously weaken the gap assumption. Algorithmically, we show that the standard paradigm for spectral clustering works. Moreover, it even works with the same gap assumption as required for the structural result.
Distributed fault diagnosis and tolerant control for a large-scale power generator network

This paper addresses a distributed fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control problem for a multi-agent system modeling a large-scale power generator network. The goal is to enable all the agents to achieve the control objective of asymptotic stability without losing the system tracking performance. Before solving this DFTC problem, a distributed fault detection (DFD) method is provided for fault detection. Next, the designs focus on a DFTC scheme without estimating the upper bound of the coupled, nonlinear, state-dependent unknown input. A model-based distributed state estimator (DSE) together with a proportional-integral-like nonlinear distributed identifier (DI) is then developed to identify the unknown input. By exploiting the redundancies from the estimated states and unknown input information obtained from the DSE and DI, a novel continuous DFTC is designed to enable the agents to achieve asymptotic consensus tracking without losing the system tracking performance while achieving distributed unknown input identification. A power system example and numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed DFTC method.
MediFind - A Medicine Detection Framework for Vietnamese Medical Prescription

The pharmaceutical industry in Vietnam faces a significant challenge due to the time-consuming and inaccurate manual operational protocols. This results in incorrect pharmaceutical administration and antibiotic resistance, seriously affecting patient health. However, the implementation of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can help automate the extraction of medication information from prescriptions, leading to stream-lined drug administration and reduced errors. In this study, drug misuse patterns are analyzed, a novel method for extracting medication names from Vietnamese prescriptions is introduced, and an app named “MediFind” is created to enhance accessibility. This innovative solution enhances pharmaceutical practices and streamlines drug administration.
Myocardial Infarction in Patients Treated with Sippy and Other High‐Milk Diets: An Autopsy Study of Fifteen Hospitals in the U.S.A. and Great Britain

A study has been made of the incidence of myocardial infarcts among 3 groups of autopsied patients who were matched for age, sex, race, and place and period of death: (1) patients with peptic ulcers who had been treated with a Sippy diet or milk products, (2) patients with peptic ulcers who were not known to have been so treated, (3) a group consisting of non-ulcer patients matched with the other 2 groups. In the U.S.A. the incidence of myocardial infarcts was more than twice as high in the ulcer patients treated with Sippy diet than it was in either of the other 2 groups. The differences in each case were statistically highly significant. There was no significant difference in the incidence of myocardial infarcts between the ulcer patients not treated with the Sippy diet and the non-ulcer controls. Differences and similarities of the same degree were noted among corresponding groups from Great Britain. It is tempting to think that the high incidence of myocardial infarcts among the Sippy-treated patients was a result of the butter-fat content of their diets. Mere association, however, does not constitute proof and further study is needed before definitive conclusions are drawn.
Angiotensinogen Gene Haplotype and Hypertension: Interaction With ACE Gene I Allele

Abstract—There are many reports demonstrating the association of renin-angiotensin system gene polymorphisms with hypertension in different populations. In the present study, we used haplotype analyses of the angiotensinogen gene with a new permutation-based hypothesis testing method to determine the association between multilocus angiotensinogen gene polymorphisms and hypertension in a relatively homogeneous Taiwanese population. We also genotyped angiotensin-converting enzyme gene insertion/deletion polymorphism and angiotensin II type 1–receptor gene A1166C polymorphism to detect epistatic gene-gene interactions. There were 408 patients with hypertension (hypertensives) and 286 controls. The angiotensinogen gene haplotype frequencies were significantly different between hypertensives and controls, and this finding was only present in subjects with angiotensin-converting enzyme gene II genotypes when the analysis was stratified by genotype of this polymorphism. In addition, the angiotensinogen gene haplotype structure of hypertensives was more heterogeneous than that of controls. Our results showed that angiotensinogen gene haplotypes were associated with hypertension and might act synergistically with I allele of the angiotensin-converting enzyme gene.
Pedophilia and brain function

Pedophilia is defined as a sexual deviation in which an adult is sexually attracted to a prepubescent child. With relatively high prevalence rates and growing public concern over this issue, there has been a need to empirically investigate the neuropsychological basis of pedophilic behaviour. This literature review examines the resulting research, starting with research identifying the differences displayed in pedophilic individuals in IQ scores as compared to the general population. The developmental onset of pedophilia may also be linked to abnormal brain morphology: neurological structures in both the frontal/dysexecutive hypothesis and the temporal/limbic hypothesis have been proposed to be associated with pedophilia. Morphological differences between pedophilic individuals and non-pedophilic individuals have been further substantiated by the link between left-handedness and a diagnosis of pedophilia. Developmental reports of childhood head injury further support this claim, as pedophiles are more likely to have experienced head trauma at an early age. Finally, modern brain imaging studies have enabled researchers to discover that those individuals diagnosed with pedophilia display altered brain activity when presented with sexual stimuli in comparison with those not diagnosed. It must be emphasized that all of the findings may contain an innate bias due to the social denigration that is attached to research conducted on known pedophiles.
IoT-Based Smart Energy Monitoring, Management, and Protection System for a Smart MicroGrid

The electric power sector is making significant changes to the power grid in order to make the power supply more stable, meet rising demand, and optimize the use of distributed generators. The Internet of Things (IoT) and digital technologies are being used simultaneously in smart microgrids, a key strategy for future power grids. IoT -based smart energy monitoring and management systems are a type of technology that uses devices and software connected to the Internet to monitor, control, and manage the energy use of the micro grid. In this paper, IoT-based technology is used to create a smart energy monitoring, management, and protection system for a smart microgrid. The whole system can provide real-time monitoring, control, protection, and efficient management of the microgrid's energy resources, as well as ways to detect electric theft. Using wireless communication technology, the IoT platform can send and receive measured data from the control panel room. Once access permissions to the Blynk IoT cloud software for the ESP32 and ESP8266 modules for the system are set up, micro grid operators can simply monitor all electrical parameters and control relay modules of the control panel room, electric distribution poles, and energy meters using smartphones or personal computers at any-time from anywhere. So, the IoT-based smart energy monitoring, management, and control strategy presented in this research is set up to improve energy use efficiency, reduce energy costs, and improve grid stability through real-time monitoring, control, and protection systems.
BoostIID: Fault-agnostic Online Detection of WCET Changes in Autonomous Driving

The lifespan of autonomous vehicles is increasing, exposing them to aging and permanent faults that can impact timing safety based on design-time analyses such as worst-case execution time (WCET). Conventional fault-aware WCET methods incorporate potential faults into the analysis, which can result in severely pessimistic WCET estimates. The resulting underutilized system can exhibit significant energy inefficiency during normal operation. We propose BoostIID, a dynamic fault detection mechanism that achieves improved utilization and energy efficiency by monitoring changes in the statistical distribution of WCET at runtime. Unlike prior monitoring methods, BoostIID proactively detects faults before actual timing violations occur, allowing time for recovery measures. As a result, BoostIID eliminates the overhead of fault recovery from classical design-time WCET estimates, resulting in improved energy efficiency. We further improve the detection accuracy using a collection of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) tests with a boosting technique. Our experimental results with an autonomous driving benchmark suite show 62.6% energy reduction over pessimistic WCET methods, demonstrating BoostIID’s utility for energy-efficient safety-critical system design.
It-Enabled Healthcare Delivery: The U.K. National Health Service

Abstract Many national governments are investing in the electronic delivery of government services, including the use of Web services models. This article describes the United Kingdom's National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) initiative for the National Health Service (NHS), a $10 billion project to develop the infrastructure for a national electronic health record over a ten-year period. the case study discussion focuses on some of the challenges related to Web service delivery with multiple vendors in the context of a complex, public service organization.
Smile Reconstruction Through Bilateral Muscular Transplants Neurotized by Hypoglossal Nerves

Free transplant of gracilis muscle is the criterion-standard technique in dynamic rehabilitation of long-standing facial paralysis in which the facial musculature is atrophied. When the facial nerve is not available because of a bilateral lesion, other sources are the masseteric, hypoglossal, or accessory nerves. Although the use of hypoglossal nerve has been relegated to the background because of the morbidity caused by its loss, there are special situations in which the hypoglossal nerve should be considered the first option as donor motor nerve. The present article discusses the case of a patient with dynamic reanimation of bilateral facial paralysis with free-muscle transfer neurotized to the hypoglossal nerve. End-to-side coaptation of gracilis motor nerve and hypoglossal motor nerve allows neurotization of the transplanted muscle with minimum repercussion in speech or swallowing and can provide an adequate spontaneous smile with time.
A Privacy-Preserving Timing Attacks Mitigation in Information-Centric Edge Networks

In-network caching is one of the most important features of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which reduces data-retrieval latency, especially at edge networks. However, in-network caching can lead to privacy leakage with timing attacks, i.e., an adversary retrieves cached data and identifies it based on the difference of round trip time (rtt) of cached and non-cached data retrieval. Existing mitigation mechanisms either abandon in-network caching or intentionally add latency to cached data retrieval but fails to prove their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a timing attack mitigation mechanism based on differen-tial privacy exponential mechanism that strictly protects content privacy against timing attacks without significantly increasing the content retrieval delay. Theoretical analysis and evaluation results show that our mechanism protects content privacy effectively at a low cost.
Effects of some factors on callus growth and flavonoids formation in callus cultures of Saussurea medusa.

The effects of some physical and chemical factors on callus growth and flavonoids formation in callus cultures of Saussurea medusa Maxim were studied. The optimal temperature for callus growth and flavonoids formation were 25 degrees C. Flavonoids formation were greatly inhibited under dark condition, and stimulated by white light. Callus growth was promoted when 1 mg/L NAA and 0.2 mg/L KT were added to the media. The combination of 5% sucrose and 1% glucose was useful for callus growth and flavonoids formation. A fine callus strain of S.medusa was selected through irradiation with 4000 Gy of gamma-ray. The growth rate and flavonoids content of the callus strain were high and stable. Sensitive and rapid methods of high-performance liquid chromatography as well as UV spectrophotometry were developed for detecting the flavonoids in cultured cells. The results revealed that the content of total flavonoids in dry cells under white light condition was 3.2%, 4.4 times more than under dark condition and the control of flavonoids in dry cell culture at 25 degrees C was 2.02% which was 5 and 3.2 times more than those cultured at 20 degrees C and 35 degrees C respectively.