Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Salivary Secretory Leukocyte Protease Inhibitor and Oral Candidiasis in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1-Infected Persons

ABSTRACT Oropharyngeal candidiasis, typically caused by Candida albicans, is the most common oral disease associated with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection. Secretory leukocyte protease inhibitor (SLPI), a 12-kDa antiprotease, suppresses the growth of C. albicans in vitro. To determine whether the mucosal protein plays a role in protecting oral tissues against fungal infection, we conducted a cross-sectional study investigating the oral and systemic health and salivary SLPI levels in 91 dentate HIV-1-infected adults receiving medical care in the southeastern United States. Participants with a self-reported history of clinical oropharyngeal candidiasis during the previous 2 years constituted the test group (n = 52), while the comparison group (n = 39) had no oropharyngeal candidiasis during that period. Data collected from medical records, oral examination, and SLPI enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay quantitation of whole saliva were analyzed by t test, analysis of variance, linear regression, and unconditional logistic regression. The test group had a significantly higher mean salivary SLPI level than the comparison group (1.9 μg/ml versus 1.1 μg/ml, P < 0.05). Linear regression modeling identified CD4 cell count and history of oropharyngeal candidiasis as key predictors of salivary SLPI and revealed a significant interaction (P < 0.05) between immunosuppression (CD4 cell count below 200 cells/μl) and positive history of oropharyngeal candidiasis in predicting salivary SLPI level. By logistic regression modeling, a salivary SLPI level exceeding 2.1 μg/ml, low CD4 count, antiretroviral monotherapy, and smoking were key predictors of oropharyngeal candidiasis. These data support a key role for SLPI in the oral mucosal defense against C. albicans. The antimicrobial mucosal protein may serve as an indicator of previous oropharyngeal candidiasis infection among immunosuppressed persons.
WiPLoc: Perpetual Indoor Localization with RF Wireless Power Transfer

Indoor localization is a cornerstone of mobile services. Until now most of the research effort has focused on achieving sub-meter localization accuracy because many mobile applications depend on precise localization measurements. In some scenarios, however, it is required to trade location accuracy for system maintainability. For example, in large-scale deployments of indoor networks, such as item-monitoring in smart buildings, attaining room-level localization accuracy may be sufficient, but replacing the batteries of the devices used for localization could lead to high operational costs. As indoor localization systems grow in popularity it will be important to provide them with full energy autonomy. To tackle this problem we propose WiPLoc: an indoor localization system aimed at operating perpetually without batteries. Our contributions are twofold. First, we propose a novel localization method that exploits capture effect and orthogonal codes to operate at energy levels that are low enough to operate within the energy budget provided by long-range wireless power transmission. Second, we implement WiPLoc using off-the-shelf components and test it extensively in a laboratory environment. Our test results show that with WiPLoc one wireless charger per (16 m$^{\text{2}}$) room can enable perpetual lifetime operation of mobile objects requiring localization with an average accuracy of almost 90%.
Towards Scalable and Robust Overlay Networks

Every peer-to-peer system is based on some overlay network connecting its peers. Many of the overlay network concepts proposed in the scientific community are based on the concept of virtual space. These designs are usually highly scalable, but they do not guarantee robustness against adversarial attacks, especially when considering open peer-to-peer systems. In these systems, determined adversaries may start both insider and outsider attacks in order to harm the overlay network as much as this is possible. We will focus on insider attacks in which the adversarial peers in the network perform join-leave attacks, and we will consider outsider attacks in which an adversary can perform a denial-of-service attack against any of the honest peers in the network. Strategies have been proposed that can defend an overlay network against even massive join-leave attacks, and strategies are also known that can defend an overlay network against limited denial-of-service attacks. However, none of these can protect an overlay network against combinations of these attacks. We illustrate in this paper why it is not easy to design strategies against these attacks and propose join and leave protocols for overlay networks based on the concept of virtual space that can make them provably robust against these attacks without creating
Evolution in quantum causal histories

We provide a precise definition and analysis of quantum causal histories (QCHs). A QCH consists of a discrete, locally finite, causal pre-spacetime with matrix algebras encoding the quantum structure at each event. The evolution of quantum states and observables is described by completely positive maps between the algebras at causally related events. We show that this local description of evolution is sufficient and that unitary evolution can be recovered wherever it should actually be expected. This formalism may describe a quantum cosmology without an assumption of global hyperbolicity; it is thus more general than the Wheeler–De Witt approach. The structure of a QCH is also closely related to quantum information theory and algebraic quantum field theory on a causal set.
Facial image de-identification using identiy subspace decomposition

How to conceal the identity of a human face without covering the facial image? This is the question investigated in this work. Leveraging the high dimensional feature representation of a human face in an Active Appearance Model (AAM), a novel method called the identity subspace decomposition (ISD) method is proposed. Using ISD, the AAM feature space is deposed into an identity sensitive subspace and an identity insensitive subspace. By replacing the feature values in the identity sensitive subspace with the averaged values of k individuals, one may realize a k-anonymity de-identification process on facial images. We developed a heuristic approach to empirically select the AAM features corresponding to the identity sensitive subspace. We showed that after applying k-anonymity de-identification to AAM features in the identity sensitive subspace, the resulting facial images can no longer be distinguished by either human eyes or facial recognition algorithms.
Poly-Si/AlN/HfSiO Stack for Ideal Threshold Voltage and Mobility in Sub-100 nm MOSFETs

A scalable poly-Si/AlN/HfSiO gate stack, implementing a new aluminum nitride (AlN) cap layer, combined with oxygen diffusion barrier, halo and counter doping engineering, high temperature spike anneal for gate and junction activation, and optional inverted gate implant, has been successfully developed to fully offset the large threshold voltage (Vt) shifts in poly-Si/HfSiO devices and achieve good thickness scalability and gate stack stability. The new AlN cap layers provide better PFET Vt control than, for example, Al2O3 layers, and can be removed from NFETs without impacting device properties. We thus have achieved sub-100 nm device Vt of 0.3-0.4 V with PFETs Ion ~ 140 muA/mum at Ioff ~13 pA/mum, suitable for low-power technologies. Carrier mobilities are close to those of SiON control devices. Thus the Vt problem impeding the implementation of poly-Si/high-k gate stacks for low power device applications has been resolved
Attitudes of Rural and Urban Adolescent Girls Toward Selected Concepts

Many theories common today concerning adolescent attitudes are based on what adults believe and not on actual research with the adolescent. This is especially true in relatively new areas such as attitudes toward birth control pills and amphetamines barbiturates and hallucinogenic drugs. To meet more effectively the challenge of educating youth to take their place in society it is important for educators to be aware of the attitudes and values of adolescents. It is also important to know in what areas of personal and interpersonal relationships the adolescent is uncertain of his attitude so that guidance might be given to him. It was with the foregoing views in mind that this study was planned the purposes of which were to gain insight into adolescent attitudes toward selected concepts and to determine whether differences exist between the attitudes of rural and urban junior and senior class girls toward those selected concepts. (excerpt)
High performance phylogenetic analysis on CUDA-compatible GPUs

The operation of phylogenetic analysis aims to investigate the evolution and relationships among species. It is widely used in the fields of system biology and comparative genomics. However, phylogenetic analysis is also a computationally intensive operation as the number of tree topology grows in a factorial way with the number of species involved. Therefore, due to the large number of species in the real world, the computational burden has largely thwarted phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we describe the detailed GPU-based multi-threaded design and implementation of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) maximum likelihood algorithm for phylogenetic analysis on a set of aligned nucleotide sequences. The implementation is based on the framework of the most widely used phylogenetic analysis tool, namely MrBayes. The proposed approach resulted in 6x-8x speed-up on an NVidia Geforce 460 GTX GPU compared to an optimized GPP-based software implementation running on a desktop computer with a single Intel Xeon 2.53 GHz CPU and 6.0 GB RAM.
i-POCA: Interference-aware partially overlapping channel assignment in 802.11-based meshes

In this paper, we address the problem of channel assignment considering partially overlapping channels (POCs) for interference avoidance in 802.11-based wireless mesh networks. A novel interference model is proposed which provides a systematic approach of measuring the interference caused by links operating on POCs by taking into account both the adjacent channel interference and the corresponding physical distance between mesh nodes. Based on this model, we design a centralized and a distributed interference-aware channel assignment algorithm called i-POCA which enables the use of smart ants for assigning orthogonal and non-orthogonal channels to radios in order to minimize total network interference. We evaluate our algorithms through extensive simulations and demonstrate that our proposed algorithms improve network throughput by efficient utilization of the available spectrum.
On the scaling of non-asymptotic capacity in multi-access networks with bursty traffic

The practicality of available (throughput) capacity results in multi-access networks, which dispense with coding schemes, is often questioned for several reasons including 1) the underlying asymptotic regimes, and 2) the assumption of saturated traffic sources. This paper jointly addresses these limitations by providing capacity results in non-asymptotic regimes, i.e., holding at all time scales and network sizes, for the very broad class of exponentially bounded burstiness (EBB) traffic sources. Both upper and lower bounds on capacity are derived in terms of probability distributions, which immediately yield all the moments. The explicit and closed-form nature of the results enable the investigation of the impact of burstiness on non-asymptotic network capacity. In particular, the results show that for the EBB class the non-asymptotic end-to-end capacity rate decays linearly in the number of hops.
Role of TRPM7 in Cancer: Potential as Molecular Biomarker and Therapeutic Target

The transient receptor potential melastatin-subfamily member 7 (TRPM7) is a ubiquitously expressed ion channel with intrinsic kinase activity. Molecular and electrophysiological analyses of the structure and activity of TRPM7 have revealed functional coupling of its channel and kinase activity. Studies have indicated the important roles of TRPM7 channel-kinase in fundamental cellular processes, physiological responses, and embryonic development. Accumulating evidence has shown that TRPM7 is aberrantly expressed and/or activated in human diseases including cancer. TRPM7 plays a variety of functional roles in cancer cells including survival, cell cycle progression, proliferation, growth, migration, invasion, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Data from a study using mouse xenograft of human cancer show that TRPM7 is required for tumor growth and metastasis. The aberrant expression of TRPM7 and its genetic mutations/polymorphisms have been identified in various types of carcinoma. Chemical modulators of TRPM7 channel produced inhibition of proliferation, growth, migration, invasion, invadosome formation, and markers of EMT in cancer cells. Taken together, these studies suggest the potential value of exploiting TRPM7 channel-kinase as a molecular biomarker and therapeutic target in human malignancies.
Entropy-constrained tree-structured vector quantizer design by the minimum cross entropy principle

The authors address the variable rate tree-structured vector quantizer design problem, wherein the rate is measured by the quantizer's entropy. For this problem, tree pruning via the generalized Breiman-Friedman-Olshen-Stone (1980) algorithm obtains solutions which are optimal over the restricted solution space consisting of all pruned trees derivable from an initial tree. However, the restrictions imposed on such solutions have several implications. In addition to depending on the tree initialization, growing and pruning solutions result in tree-structured vector quantizers which use a sub-optimal encoding rule. To remedy the latter problem, they consider a "tree-constrained" version of entropy-constrained vector quantizer design. This leads to an optimal tree-structured encoding rule for the leaves. In practice, though, improvements obtained in this fashion are limited by the tree initialization, as well as by the sub-optimal encoding performed at non-leaf nodes. To address these problems, they develop a joint optimization method which is inspired by the deterministic annealing algorithm for data clustering, and which extends their previous work on tree-structured vector quantization. The method is based on the principle of minimum cross entropy, using informative priors to approximate the unstructured solution while imposing the structural constraint. As in the original deterministic annealing method, the number of distinct codevectors (and hence the tree) grows by a sequence of bifurcations in the process, which occur as solutions of a free energy minimization. Their method obtains performance gains over growing and pruning methods for variable rate quantization of Gauss-Markov and Gaussian mixture sources. <<ETX>>
Projection of Argumentative Corpora from Source to Target Languages

Argumentative corpora are costly to create and are available in only few languages with English dominating the area. In this paper we release the first publicly available Mandarin argumentative corpus. The corpus is created by exploiting the idea of comparable corpora from Statistical Machine Translation. We use existing corpora in English and manually map the claims and premises to comparable corpora in Mandarin. We also implement a simple solution to automate this approach with the view of creating argumentative corpora in other less-resourced languages. In this way we introduce a new task of multi-lingual argument mapping that can be evaluated using our English-Mandarin argumentative corpus. The preliminary results of our automatic argument mapper mirror the simplicity of our approach, but provide a baseline for further improvements.
A localized planarization algorithm for realistic wireless networks

Planar graph routing works provably correct if the underlying network graph is connected and planar. Typically, wireless networks modeled as 2D graphs, are not planar and planar graph routing applied on such unprocessed network graphs may fail. Planarizing a given connected graph by removing intersecting links might be impossible if the outcome still needs to be a connected subgraph. It becomes even more difficult with distributed planarization techniques, where each node is allowed to use only the information about its local neighborhood. Furthermore, it is getting complicated if the nodes' assigned positions do not reflect the exact physical location. With or without exact location information, the outcome might be disconnected, nonplanar, or both of it. With all these unsolvable problems, the question arises how to apply planar graph routing in a realistic network setting? Fortunately, wireless network graphs bear one property which distinguishes them from arbitrary graphs: due to limited communication range, network links cannot become arbitrarily long. In this work we exploit this locality property to build a new localized planarization algorithm, which is location fault tolerant and which produces planar connected graphs in most cases in realistic wireless models. We evaluate our algorithm using the Log Normal Shadowing model and show that our algorithm always produces planar connected graphs in all simulations even when large location errors are present.
Filter design with secrecy constraints: The multiple-input multiple-output Gaussian wiretap channel with zero forcing receive filters

This paper considers the problem of filter design with secrecy constraints, where two legitimate parties (Alice and Bob) communicate in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve), over a Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel. This problem involves the design of transmit and receive filters which minimize the mean-square error (MSE) between the legitimate parties, whilst assuring that the eavesdropper MSE remains above a certain level. We characterize the form of the optimal transmit filter when both the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper employ Zero-Forcing (ZF) filters. By capitalizing on the dual problem, we also show that the original matrix optimization problem can be reduced to a simple scalar optimization problem, whose solution can be readily computed by employing a simple bisection method. Numerical results illustrate the main conclusions.
Religiosity and Spirituality and the Intake of Fruit, Vegetable, and Fat: A Systematic Review

Objectives. To systematically review articles investigating the relationship between religion and spirituality (R/S) and fruit, vegetable, and fat intake. Methods. PubMed, CINAHL, and PsycInfo were searched for studies published in English prior to March 2013. The studies were divided into two categories: denominational studies and degree of R/S studies. The degree of R/S studies was further analyzed to (1) determine the categories of R/S measures and their relationship with fruit, vegetable, and fat intake, (2) evaluate the quality of the R/S measures and the research design, and (3) determine the categories of reported relationship. Results. Thirty-nine studies were identified. There were 14 denominational studies and 21 degree of R/S studies, and 4 studies were a combination of both. Only 20% of the studies reported validity and 52% reported reliability of the R/S measures used. All studies were cross-sectional, and only one attempted mediation analysis. Most studies showed a positive association with fruit and vegetable intake and a mixed association with fat intake. Conclusion. The positive association between R/S and fruit and vegetable intake may be one possible link between R/S and positive health outcome. However, the association with fat intake was mixed, and recommendations for future research are made.
Circular and square SRR exploitation as a means for wireless power transfer

As wireless power transfer (WPT) systems emerge, the efficiency and achievable transmitting distance are two constraining factors for their prevalence over wired ones. In this paper, two split ring resonator (SRR)-based WPT configurations, with circular and square SRRs, as their transmitting and receiving elements, are investigated for various frequencies and distances. The efficiency is found to be very satisfactory in both cases, exceeding 98% for certain sets of parameters. Thus, the general response of both arrangements seems to be promising for effective power transfer over distances of a few centimeters.
alx, a Zebrafish Homolog of Chx10, Marks Ipsilateral Descending Excitatory Interneurons That Participate in the Regulation of Spinal Locomotor Circuits

Recent molecular genetic studies suggest that the expression of transcription factors in the developing spinal cord helps determine the morphological and physiological properties of neurons. Using the zebrafish preparation, we have examined the properties of neurons marked by alx, a zebrafish homolog of mammalian Chx10. We performed morphological and physiological studies using transgenic zebrafish expressing fluorescent reporter constructs in cells that had at any time point expressed alx (alx neurons). Our data reveal that zebrafish alx neurons are all ipsilateral descending neurons that are positive for vesicular glutamate transporter 2, suggesting that they are glutamatergic excitatory interneurons. Patch recordings show that earlier-born neurons are active during stronger movements such as escapes and fast swimming (strong movement class), whereas later-born ones are involved in sustained weak swimming (weak movement class). Paired recordings between alx neurons and motoneurons show that neurons of the strong movement class make frequent monosynaptic excitatory connections onto motoneurons. Thus, neurons of this class are likely premotor interneurons that regulate motoneuron activity during escapes and fast swimming. We also show the existence of a monosynaptic connection between an alx neuron of the weak movement class and a motoneuron. Collectively, our data demonstrate that alx marks ipsilateral descending neurons that are involved in the regulation of motoneuron activity during forms of locomotion, such as escape and swimming.
Receptor-Like Activity Evoked by Extracellular ADP in Arabidopsis Root Epidermal Plasma Membrane1

Extracellular purine nucleotides are implicated in the control of plant development and stress responses. While extracellular ATP is known to activate transcriptional pathways via plasma membrane (PM) NADPH oxidase and calcium channel activation, very little is known about signal transduction by extracellular ADP. Here, extracellular ADP was found to activate net Ca2+ influx in roots of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) and transiently elevate cytosolic free Ca2+ in root epidermal protoplasts. An inward Ca2+-permeable conductance in root epidermal PM was activated within 1 s of ADP application and repeated application evoked a smaller current. Such response speed and densitization are consistent with operation of equivalents to animal ionotropic purine receptors, although to date no equivalent genes for such receptors have been identified in higher plants. In contrast to ATP, extracellular ADP did not evoke accumulation of intracellular reactive oxygen species. While high concentrations of ATP caused net Ca2+ efflux from roots, equivalent concentrations of ADP caused net influx. Overall the results point to a discrete ADP signaling pathway, reliant on receptor-like activity at the PM.