Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Non-Stationary Relationship between Global Climate Phenomena and Human Plague Incidence in Madagascar

Background Plague, a zoonosis caused by Yersinia pestis, is found in Asia and the Americas, but predominantly in Africa, with the island of Madagascar reporting almost one third of human cases worldwide. Plague's occurrence is affected by local climate factors which in turn are influenced by large-scale climate phenomena such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The effects of ENSO on regional climate are often enhanced or reduced by a second large-scale climate phenomenon, the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). It is known that ENSO and the IOD interact as drivers of disease. Yet the impacts of these phenomena in driving plague dynamics via their effect on regional climate, and specifically contributing to the foci of transmission on Madagascar, are unknown. Here we present the first analysis of the effects of ENSO and IOD on plague in Madagascar. Methodology/principal findings We use a forty-eight year monthly time-series of reported human plague cases from 1960 to 2008. Using wavelet analysis, we show that over the last fifty years there have been complex non-stationary associations between ENSO/IOD and the dynamics of plague in Madagascar. We demonstrate that ENSO and IOD influence temperature in Madagascar and that temperature and plague cycles are associated. The effects on plague appear to be mediated more by temperature, but precipitation also undoubtedly influences plague in Madagascar. Our results confirm a relationship between plague anomalies and an increase in the intensity of ENSO events and precipitation. Conclusions/significance This work widens the understanding of how climate factors acting over different temporal scales can combine to drive local disease dynamics. Given the association of increasing ENSO strength and plague anomalies in Madagascar it may in future be possible to forecast plague outbreaks in Madagascar. The study gives insight into the complex and changing relationship between climate factors and plague in Madagascar.
Protein-protein Interaction Passage Extraction Using the Interaction Pattern Kernel Approach for the BioCreative 2015 BioC Track

Discovering the interactions between proteins mentioned in biomedical literatures is one of the core topics of text mining in the field of life science. In this paper, we propose a system under interaction pattern generation approach to capture frequent PPI patterns in text with the use of official BioC API and Semantic Class Labeling. We also present an interaction pattern tree kernel method that integrates the PPI pattern with convolution tree kernel to extract protein-protein interactions. Empirical evaluations on the LLL, IEPA, and HPRD50 corpora demonstrate that our method is effective and outperforms several well-known PPI extraction methods.
Inferring Directions of Undirected Social Ties

The directionality is a significant but inherent property of social ties, though usually ignored in undirected social networks due to its invisibility. However, we believe most social ties are natively directed, and the perception of directionality can improve our understanding about the network structures and further benefit other tasks upon social networks. In this study, we address the latent tie direction inference problem in undirected social networks. We engage in the investigation of directionality on real-world large-scale directed social networks and summarize our findings using four patterns. Upon that we propose a family of ReDirect approaches, including ReDirect-N, ReDirect-T and ReDirect-One, to inferring the hidden directions of undirected social ties based on the network topology only. ReDirect can incorporate with other predictive tasks, and introduce supervision to improve performance. We also present a simple but effective strategy to construct self-labeled data. Experimental results show that even without external information, our approach can recover the directions of networks effectively. Moreover, we find the ReDirect approaches can benefit the predictive tasks remarkably in an experimental study on link prediction. The ReDirect family can be a beneficial general data preprocess tool for various network analysis tasks by uncovering the hidden directions.
The Rapid Simulation of Proximal-Interaction Particle Systems

We present a fast, general solution to the problem of simulating particle systems that are based on interactions between nearby particles. Such simulations include, but are not limited to, collision-based simulations, meshed-structure simulations, and molecular dynamics. Our algorithm combines the well known techniques of spatial subdivision and discrete event simulation with adaptive probabilistic displacement information gathered during the simulation. This method uses probabilistic distributions to extract spatio-temporal bounds on particles’ motions without any a priori knowledge of their behavior. In addition to significantly speeding up the underlying spatial subdivision algorithm and providing a tradeoff mechanism between accuracy and speed, statistical bounds provide a way to adjust the integration time step to reduce inacuracy. We also show that for worst-case simulations our algorithm gracefully degrades to performance of the spatial subdivision.
ADVANTAGES OF FORAGE SORGHUM FOR SILAGE IN LIMITED INPUT SYSTEMS

Water shortages are threatening the sustainability of irrigated agriculture in dry environments such as the Southern High Plains (SHP) of the U.S. Corn has been a staple silage crop grown to supply the enormous forage demand associated with dairy and beef feeding industries. The relatively high water use of corn, however, is limiting the extent to which corn can be grown. Although irrigated, corn in the SHP is greatly dependent upon growing season rainfall. Recent droughts have exposed the vulnerability of many of the corn systems and well capacities in the region. Forage sorghum can be a viable alternative to corn in silage systems experiencing water reductions and where extended dry periods affect the ability of marginal irrigation systems to meet the water demand of corn. While the benefits of forage sorghum are many, a few weaknesses of the crop, coupled with little practical experience, has limited broad utilization. Improvements in varieties and a better understanding of proper management should lead to a greater acceptance and willingness to grow this alternative silage crop. However, the lack of water and desperation will likely be the main drivers behind any major cropping changes.
Impact of Collaterals on Successful Revascularization in Solitaire FR With the Intention for Thrombectomy

Background and Purpose— Collaterals at angiography before endovascular therapy were analyzed to ascertain the effect on a novel end point of successful revascularization without symptomatic hemorrhage in the Solitaire FR With the Intention for Thrombectomy (SWIFT) study. Methods— Collateral grade (American Society of Interventional and Therapeutic Neuroradiology/Society of Interventional Radiology) on baseline angiography was independently assessed, blind to other data, with statistical analyses delineating the relationship with clinical, laboratory, and imaging parameters. Results— Angiographic data on collaterals were available in 119 of 144 subjects (mean age, 67±12 years; 52% woman; median National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale, 18 [range, 8–28]). Worse collaterals were noted in subjects with elevated baseline blood glucose (P=0.013) and those with elevated baseline systolic blood pressure (P=0.039). Multivariate predictors of partial or worse collaterals included absence of prior hypertension (odds ratio, 4.049, P=0.012), smoking history (odds ratio, 3.822; P=0.013), and higher blood glucose (odds ratio, 1.017; P=0.022). Collaterals were strongly related to Alberta Stroke Program Early CT Score (ASPECTS) at baseline (0–1: median 8 [3–10]; 2–9 [5–10]; 3–9 [7–10]; 4–9 [8–10]; P<0.001) and 24 hours (0–1: median 1 [0–5]; 2–6 [0–10]; 3–8 [0–10]; 4–8 [4–8]; P<0.001). Better collaterals were linked with Thrombolysis in Cerebral Infarction 2b/3 reperfusion (P=0.019), better median National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale at day 7/discharge (P<0.001), and better day 90 modified Rankin Scale (P<0.001). Better collateral grade was associated with successful revascularization without symptomatic hemorrhage, mean 2.3 (95% confidence interval, 2.1–2.5) versus 1.9 (95% confidence interval, 1.7–2.2), P=0.021. Conclusions— Better collaterals were associated with lower glucose, lower blood pressure, smaller baseline infarcts in SWIFT, and greater likelihood of successful revascularization without hemorrhage and good clinical outcomes. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT01054560.
The UK immunisation schedule: changes to vaccine policy and practice in 2013/14

Summary Vaccination programmes are implemented either as new vaccines become available or evidence about them accumulates, or in response to specific situations. In the United Kingdom, development and implementation of the national immunisation programme is centrally coordinated and funded by the Department of Health on behalf of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. A number of significant changes were made to the UK immunisation schedule for 2013/2014. Three new vaccines were introduced: intranasal influenza and oral rotavirus for children and subcutaneous shingles for older adults. To ensure protection against meningococcal C infection into adulthood, there has been a change to the schedule for meningitis C vaccination. The temporary pertussis vaccination programme for pregnant women, set up in response to an increase in the number of cases of pertussis particularly among young babies, has been extended until further notice. Furthermore, in response to large outbreaks of measles in south Wales and other parts of the UK, a national measles, mumps and rubella catch-up campaign specifically targeted at unvaccinated children aged 10–16 years was launched to ensure that all children and young people have received two doses of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. This review describes the rationale behind these policy changes.
A Multivariate Modeling Approach for Generating Ensemble Climatology Forcing for Hydrologic Applications

This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. For more information, please contact pdxscholar@pdx.edu. Recommended Citation Khajehei, Sepideh, "A Multivariate Modeling Approach for Generating Ensemble Climatology Forcing for Hydrologic Applications" (2015). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 2403.
An application of a semidiscrete version of the Petitot model of the human primary visual cortex to invariant object recognition in SVM context

In this paper we propose a supervised object recognition method using new global features. The proposed technique, based on the Fourier transform evaluated on a regular hexagonal grid, allows extracting descriptors which are invariant to geometric transformations (rotations, scale invariant, translations.). The obtained descriptors are next used in order to feed an SVM classifier. We have tested our method against COIL image database and ORL face database, and compared it with other techniques based on traditional descriptors. The obtained results have shown that our approach outperforms the other techniques.
Transliteration considering context information based on the maximum entropy method

This paper proposes a method of automatic transliteration from English to Japanese words. Our method successfully transliterates an English word not registered in any bilingual or pronunciation dictionaries by converting each partial letters in the English word into Japanese katakana characters. In such transliteration, identical letters occurring in different English words must often be converted into different katakana. To produce an adequate transliteration, the proposed method considers chunking of alphabetic letters of an English word into conversion units and considers English and Japanese context information simultaneously to calculate the plausibility of conversion. We have confirmed experimentally that the proposed method improves the conversion accuracy by 63% compared to a simple method that ignores the plausibility of chunking and contextual information.
An Energy-Efficient Task Scheduler for Multi-core Platforms with Per-core DVFS Based on Task Characteristics

Energy-efficient task scheduling is a fundamental issue in many application domains, such as energy conservation for mobile devices and the operation of green computing data centers. Modern processors support dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) on a per-core basis, i.e., the CPU can adjust the voltage or frequency of each core. As a result, the core in a processor may have different computing power and energy consumption. To conserve energy in multi-core platforms, we propose task scheduling algorithms that leverage per-core DVFS and achieve a balance between performance and energy consumption. We consider two task execution modes: the batch mode, which runs jobs in batches, and the online mode in which jobs with different time constraints, arrival times, and computation workloads co-exist in the system. For tasks executed in the batch mode, we propose an algorithm that finds the optimal scheduling policy, and for the online mode, we present a heuristic algorithm that determines the execution order and processing speed of tasks in an online fashion. The heuristic ensures that the total cost is minimal for every time interval during a task's execution.
Diffusively-driven overturning of a stable density gradient

We present the results of an experimental study on the formation and propagation of thermohaline intrusions from an initial state that is stably stratified in two diffusing components. The intrusions form in a layer that contains compensating horizontal gradients of the two components and that lies above a denser reservoir layer that is homogeneous. In the initial state, a vertical barrier separates the upper layer into two half layers each with a different concentration but with the same density. Differential diffusion of solute from the reservoir into the upper layer initiates intrusions that are separated by an interface and that move in opposite directions. The propagation of these intrusions is augmented by double-diffusive fluxes across the interface. Our experiments show that the formation of a diffusive interface between the two intrusions is a robust feature for all experiments that initially have a stable stratification in both diffusing components. A series of contrasting experiments with a fingering interface between the two intrusions was also performed using an initial density profile that favored fingering between part of the upper layer and the reservoir. A simple model is presented for intrusion propagation and density evolution in the intrusions, and the results are compared to measurements from the experiments. These experiments may help illuminate how thermohaline intrusions form in regions of the ocean where both temperature and salinity are stably stratified.
Examining a supramodal network for conflict processing : A systematic review and novel fMRI data for related visual and auditory Stroop tasks

Cognitive control over conflicting information has been studied extensively using tasks such as the colour-word Stroop, flanker, and spatial conflict task. Neuroimaging studies typically identify a fronto-parietal network engaged in conflict processing, but numerous additional regions are also reported. Ascribing putative functional roles to these regions is problematic, since some may have less to do with conflict processing per se, but could be engaged in specific processes related to the chosen stimulus modality, stimulus feature, or type of conflict task. In addition, some studies contrast activation on incongruent and congruent trials, even though a neutral baseline is needed to separate the effect of inhibition from that of facilitation. In the first part of this paper, we report a systematic review of 34 neuroimaging publications, which reveals that conflict-related activity is reliably reported in anterior cingulate cortex and bilaterally in lateral prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, and the parietal lobe. In the second part, we further explore these candidate ‘conflict’ regions through a novel fMRI experiment in which the same group of subjects perform related visual and auditory Stroop tasks. By carefully controlling for the same task (Stroop), the same to-be-ignored stimulus dimension (word meaning), and by separating out inhibitory processes from those of facilitation, we attempt to minimise the potential differences between the two tasks. The results provide converging evidence that the regions identified by the systematic review are reliably engaged in conflict processing. Despite carefully matching the Stroop tasks, some regions of differential activity remained, particularly in the parietal cortex. We discuss some of the taskspecific processes which might account for this finding.
Tracking and regulation control of a 2-DOF robot arm with unbalance

Servomechanism synthesis for a two degree-offreedom robot arm assembled on a vessel and affected from sea disturbances is considered. Dynamic equations of the robot arm with unbalance and of an approximate base disturbance model are derived. Direct linear controller synthesis based on a linearized model is then studied. It is shown that, although the plant model is nonlinear, linear controller that is synthesized based on the “internal model principle” provide good performance and perform better than the commonly used PID controllers.
Designing recommender systems for e-commerce: an integration approach

In electronic commerce applications, prospective buyers may be interested in receiving recommendations to assist with their purchasing decisions. Previous research has described two main models for automated recommender systems: collaborative filtering and knowledge-based approaches. In this paper, we present an architecture for designing a hybrid recommender system that combines these two approaches. We then discuss how such a recommender system can switch between the two methods, depending on the current support for providing good recommendations from the behavior of other users, required for the collaborative filtering option. We also comment on how the overall design is useful to support recommendations for a variety of product areas and present some directions for future work.
Real time occlusion handling using Kalman Filter and mean-shift

Tracking objects using Mean Shift algorithm fails when there is a full/partial occlusion or when the background color and the desired object are close. In this paper we proposed a method using Kalman Filter and Mean Shift for handling these situations. Using similarity measure of Mean Shift algorithm we are able to detect an occlusion. Kalman Filter comes into the play for occlusion handling in a Buffer-Mode Process. We implemented this algorithm both on PC and DSP 64x+ Texas Instrument and the results are both tabulated. The results reveal the ability of our method to locate the object soon after occlusion disappearance.
Electronic contract negotiation as an application niche for mobile agents

We propose electronic contract negotiation-a sub-part of the more general area of electronic commerce-as an example application for mobile agents. We start by presenting a set of requirements that an application should fulfil in order to take advantage of mobile agents and show that not all distributed applications meet these requirements. We then present contract negotiation, an example of an application that can potentially take full advantage of mobile agents. The paper also contains an introduction to a mobile agent system being developed at Hamburg University and show how it can be used to implement contract negotiation.
Improving the Performance of Processing for Small Files in Hadoop : A Case Study of Weather Data Analytics

-Hadoop is an open source Apache project that supports master slave architecture, which involves one master node and thousands of slave nodes. Master node acts as the name node, which stores all the metadata of files and slave nodes acts as the data nodes, which stores all the application data. Hadoop is designed to process large data sets (petabytes). It becomes a bottleneck, when handling massive small files because the name node utilize more memory to store the metadata of files and the data nodes consumes more CPU time to process massive small files. In this paper, the author proposes the Optimized Hadoop, consists of Merge Model to merge massive small files into a single large file and introduced the efficient indexing mechanism. Our experimental result shows that Optimized Hadoop improves performance of processing small files drastically up to 90.83% and effectively reduces the memory utilization of the name node to store the metadata of files. Keywords—Hadoop; Hadoop Distributed File System,; Map Reduce; Small Files.
Nonclassic actions of vitamin D.

CONTEXT Vitamin D receptors are found in most tissues, not just those participating in the classic actions of vitamin D such as bone, gut, and kidney. These nonclassic tissues are therefore potential targets for the active metabolite of vitamin D, 1,25(OH)(2)D. Furthermore, many of these tissues also contain the enzyme CYP27B1 capable of producing 1,25(OH)(2)D from the circulating form of vitamin D. This review was intended to highlight the actions of 1,25(OH)(2)D in several of these tissues but starts with a review of vitamin D production, metabolism, and molecular mechanism. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION Medline was searched for articles describing actions of 1,25(OH)(2)D on parathyroid hormone and insulin secretion, immune responses, keratinocytes, and cancer. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS Vitamin D production in the skin provides an efficient source of vitamin D. Subsequent metabolism to 1,25(OH)(2)D within nonrenal tissues differs from that in the kidney. Although vitamin D receptor mediates the actions of 1,25(OH)(2)D, regulation of transcriptional activity is cell specific. 1,25(OH)(2)D inhibits PTH secretion but promotes insulin secretion, inhibits adaptive immunity but promotes innate immunity, and inhibits cell proliferation but stimulates their differentiation. CONCLUSIONS The nonclassic actions of vitamin D are cell specific and provide a number of potential new clinical applications for 1,25(OH)(2)D(3) and its analogs. However, the use of vitamin D metabolites and analogs for these applications remains limited by the classic actions of vitamin D leading to hypercalcemia and hypercalcuria.