Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simulation of pulmonary edema in mitral and aortic valvular disease

This paper summerizes results of numerical solutions to pulsatile flow of pulmonary edema in mitral stenosis and aortic stenosis.Blood flow is analyzed by a computer simulation in a model of left ventricle and systemic arteries which is pathologically altered by pulmonary edema.The theoretical study of the flow is carried out under pulsatile flow conditions.The governing equations are solved numerically by MatLab. The results are presented as plots of pressure and flow waves in both ventricles, systemic pressure and flow and pulmonary venous pressure.In addition to the study of pulmonary edema in mitral and aortic stenosis disease, a comparison of the disease at rest and during exercise is carried out. This comparison proves that for the considered model under physiological flow conditions there is a significant difference in results. This significant differences is useful for an early diagnosis of the valvular disease.
Optimal Transport Data Science 2 AC 209

In this section we give an introduction to optimal transport (OT), where we present an operator over discrete and/or continuous measures that fulfill all distance properties (positivity, symmetry and triangularity). For historical reasons, the OT distance is also referred as Earth mover’s distance (EMD) in the computer science literature, or Wasserstein distance. Compared to standard divergences such as Kulback-Leibler, OT is well defined when comparing measures of non-overlapping supports, or different number of samples corresponding to empirical measures. We will present the different formulations of OT for discrete and continuous measures, show the metric properties of the operator, and discuss two applications that exploit its properties. The first application considers adding a Wasserstein loss to a classifier to measure semantic relations between classes. The second application discusses the framework of learning a classifier in a target domain where there are no labels available by transporting labels from a source domain where this information is available. 1 Historical overview The original idea of transport was described by Gaspard Monge in 1781, when he presented his investigations in [1]. He considered the problem of moving dirt from one place (d’eblais) to another (remblais) with minimal effort, by minimizing a displacement cost. In his original formulation, the transported mass from the original source had to match a predefined target mass at destination, requiring non-splitting of the original elements. Figure 1 shows the Monge-assignment problem. In the first case it simply consists of an assignment and two solutions are possible. In the second case the assignment problem is unique. However, his initial formulation led to a combinatorial problem which was hard to solve, so other authors after him considered more tractable problems. Frank Lauren Hitchcock formulated in 1941 his idea of a transportation problem by enunciating a the factories and warehouses problem (sometimes explained with mines and factories instead). There are n factories that manufacture some product, and m wharehouses, each with some finite capacity that store the product before selling it to the public. There are associated transport costs for
Air Pollution and Migration: Exploiting a Natural Experiment from the Czech Republic

This paper from Stěpan Mikula (Masaryk University) and Mariola Pytlikova (EconPol Europe, CERGE-EI) examines causal effects of air pollution on migration by exploiting a unique natural experiment of desulfurization of power plants in the region of North Bohemia in the Czech Republic after the fall of communism in 1989. They find that anti-emigration policies had no impact on emigration decisions, but the effect of air pollution on emigration tended to be stronger in municipalities with weaker social capital and in municipalities less equipped with man-made amenities. These results suggest that strengthening social capital, investing into better facilities in the area of education, health and social care, and promoting sport and cultural activities can partially mitigate the migratory response to air pollution.
Dengue fever. An Australian perspective.

BACKGROUND An estimated 2.5 billion people live in areas where dengue fever is endemic with around 100 million cases per year. A more serious form of the disease called dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) is the most common cause of hospitalisation and death among children in some Southeast Asian countries. OBJECTIVE This article reviews the ecology and the pathogenesis of the disease and its clinical features. The history of dengue fever in Australia will be presented and the prospects for the future discussed. DISCUSSION Dengue fever was common in Australia in the late 19th century and the first clinical description of DHF were published by an Australian clinician in Charters Towers north Queensland. Since that time there have been sporadic outbreaks of dengue fever. In recent years there has been an increase in the number of epidemics in north Queensland. If Australia follows a pattern observed elsewhere in the world there might again be cases of DHF recorded on Australian soil.
Drosophila , Plant and Xenopus Telomeres

tion of telomerase, a ribonucleoprotein that adds telomeric repeats onto existing telomeres (this issue). Telomerase, however, is not the only way to extend telomeres, as gene conversion has also been demonstrated in a number of organisms, including those using telomerase, telomere-specific retrotransposons have been observed in Drosophila (Mason and Biessmann, 1995), and alternative lengthening of telomeres (Bryan et al., 1995, 1997) by recombination has been found in many sarcomas that do not express telomerase (Henson et al., 2005). It has been proposed (de Lange, 2004) in fact that telomeres in early eukaryotes may have been maintained by a form of recombination dependent replication before the advent of telomerase. In Drosophila, genetic assays for the activity of reporter genes at or near the end of truncated chromosomes revealed two mechanisms of telomere maintenance, terminal gene conversion and targeted transposition of telomeric retrotransposons. In this review, we discuss factors that participate in the regulation of the two mechanisms. Transposition of the telomere-specific transposons may be modulated by transcriptional activity of these elements, which in turn is regulated by rasiRNA. Control of terminal gene conversion is still poorly understood in Drosophila, but a protein complex at the chromosome end seems to be important Abstract. Telomeres in all organisms must perform the same vital functions to ensure cell viability: to act as a protective chromosome cap that distinguishes natural chromosome ends from DNA double strand breaks, and to balance the loss of DNA from the chromosome end due to incomplete DNA replication. Most eukaryotes rely on a specialized reverse transcriptase, telomerase, to generate short repeats at the chromosome end to maintain chromosome length. Drosophila, however, uses retrotransposons that target telomeres. Transposition of these elements may be controlled by small RNAs and spreading of silent chromatin from the telomere associated sequence, both of which limit
Increased plasma anti-cardiolipin antibodies are associated with acute ischemic stroke

Objective: It has been shown that patients with cerebral infarction are more likely to test positive for plasma anti-cardiolipin antibodies (ACA). However, the function of ACA in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) remains unclear. This study aimed to assess the clinical implications of plasma ACA in patients with acute ischemic stroke. Methods: One hundred fifty-three patients who had a first ischemic stroke were enrolled in the study. The presence of plasma ACA was determined by ELISA, and the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score was used to assess the severity of the patients’ condition at admission. The Barthel index was employed to determine 3-month functional outcomes. Results: The rate of positive plasma ACA was higher among AIS cases compared with controls. ACA were an independent diagnostic biomarker for AIS. Patients with smaller cerebral infarctions had a higher rate of positive plasma ACA compared to those with larger cerebral infarctions, and those with mild stroke had a higher rate than those with severe stroke. Furthermore, the rate of positive plasma ACA was higher in AIS patients with worse outcomes than in those with better outcomes (P<0.001). Regression analysis showed that ACA was also an independent predictor of functional outcomes. Conclusion: Lower rates of positive plasma ACA are associated with greater stroke severity and a larger infarction volume among AIS patients. Therefore, ACA can be used as an independent diagnostic and predictive biomarker of AIS.
APPLICATION OF INSULIN PUMP IN THE TREATMENT OF DIABETES MELLITUS

Continuous subcutaneous insulin or the insulin pump has gained the popularity and sophistication as a near-physiologic programmable method of insulin delivery that is flexible and lifestyle-friendly. Insulin pump therapy is mainly used for people with type 1 diabetes and those with type 2 diabetes with increased insulin requirements. Insulin pump used provides a near physiological basal bolus insulin delivery method that, in theory, mimics normal pancreatic function better than injection. Although insulin pump therapy increases quality of life and decreases complications related diabetes but it requires increase frequency of blood glucose monitoring, and it may have complicated by infusion site infection and diabetic ketoacidosis.
Intent-based Compilation for Heterogeneous Parallel Architectures

Although a lot of research has been done in the field of automatic parallelization, the extent of parallelization that can be identified and extracted is still minimal compared to what can be potentially achieved. Thus, the gains in terms of performance improvement are minimum. Intent-based compilation, an approach presented in this paper to address this shortcoming, is based on identifying the intent of the programmer from the given serial code and generating the best possible implementation for a given architecture. Based on a collection of algorithmic variants the most parallelizable variant for the given architecture is then substituted for the pertinent slices in the identified code to achieve a higher performance gain than can be achieved by using just automatic parallelization. Three very contrasting studies have been used to illustrate the challenges involved in the process. A work-in-progress tool and results obtained are also described. Initial findings gave speedups close to manual parallelization.
Linguistic Impoliteness And Rudeness II ( LIAR II )

The new linguistic possibilities of interacting in a synchronic or asynchronic manner in an online environment have fascinated linguistics for over two decades. While there is already a large body on interpersonal issues discussed in the linguistic literature, the topic of politeness and impoliteness has not yet received the attention it deserves. In many instances, researchers have employed Brown and Levinson’s (1978/1987) model to discuss the character of face-threatening instances, as for example in the keynote lecture by Susan Herring, one of the prominent researchers on online language, at the Meeting of the International Pragmatics Association at Gothenburg in summer 2007. More recent developments in politeness research, as discussed in the Journal of Politeness Research, however, have only rarely been transferred to an analysis of online interaction. It seems timely to move our attention to online interaction for the following three reasons.
Large-Scale Extraction of Product Information on the Web

E-Commerce is growing at an explosive rate but in a highly competitive, increasingly transparent environment. Thus, online retailers and product manufacturers need effective, affordable and reliable price and product intelligence solutions, capable to answer to needs like price monitoring, better assortment management, improved and timely product perception analysis. The highest competition in the e-commerce market, and the limitations in existing price and product solutions, pose challenges to solve pains of online retailers and product manufacturers. In this Industrial paper, the Altilia company, spin-off of the Italian National Research Council, presents its model and system named ”Price and Product Intelligence Advisor” and describes lesson learned for bringing to the market an innovative and scalable solution that is able to offer price and product intelligence services to both online retailers and product manufacturers, even of small size.
First- and second-year k--12 teachers' computer self efficacy beliefs and level of technology implementation

This study describes the demographic characteristics, computer self efficacy beliefs and levels of technology implementation of a group of beginning teachers and support providers participating in a K–12 teacher induction program during the 2003–2004 school year. This study also describes the relationships between variables that the literature indicated may influence teachers' use of technology. Because little had been published concerning the effect recent changes to the technology requirements in teacher education programs and teacher credentialing were having on the technology practices of beginning teachers, the researcher proposed a non-experimental study to examine the effect these changes were having on the computer self efficacy beliefs and levels of technology implementation of the beginning teachers. The researcher selected the Computer Self Efficacy Scale and the Level of Technology Implementation questionnaire to measure the computer self efficacy beliefs and levels of technology implementation of a group of beginning teachers and their support providers. The data collected describe the beginning teachers' computer self efficacy beliefs and levels of technology implementation. The data also provided the opportunity to examine the relationships between demographic variables, computer self efficacy beliefs and levels of technology implementation. Data analysis indicated the beginning teachers who volunteered for this study scored below the national averages on the Levels of Technology Implementation questionnaire. The median Lori score for the subjects in the study was 1.5; the median national Lori score was 2. Additional data analysis indicated that there is no significant correlation between all beginning teachers' computer self efficacy beliefs and their level of technology implementation. When the beginning teachers were separated into 2 groups, 1st and 2 nd teachers, a significant relationship between the 1st year teachers' computer self efficacy beliefs and their level of technology implementation level (r = .58, p < .01) was discovered. The researcher identified that additional research is needed in the area related to the relationship between the mentor and protege and how the relationship between mentor and protege affects computer technology implementation in the classroom. Additionally, the idea of collective efficacy and the impact the school culture has on determining teachers' use of technology requires further exploration.
Final Year Project Report : Semantic Video Segmentation

As an important preprocessing step for many computer vision tasks such as object identification and scene parsing, semantic segmentation generally plays an important role not only in contemporary AI research, but also in various fields of industrial production, such as autonomous driving, robot vision, and medical imaging analysis. Focusing on the tasks of video segmentation, our final year project have initially investigated the state-of-the-art works in recent years, briefly classified them based on their perspective and research emphasis, and analyzed the key components leading them to better overall performance. Then, we raised a new metric, flow prediction matching rate (FPMR) to measure the temporal coherence of video segmentation result, which is applied and integrated to the cost function of the training process in deep neural network for greater labelling consistency along the video flow. Furthermore, based on the DeepLab v3+ approach for image segmentation, we included optical flow to facilitate the training of network, by constructing the ”fake ground truth” of previous frames based on the pairs of original images through spatial warping, to expand the training dataset and make use of temporal information, resulting in accurate and consistent video segmentation of Cityscapes dataset.
Collaborative Multi-Device Motion Estimation on Multi / Many-Core Platforms

Social media platforms offer their users the possibility of sharing videos. After such videos are uploaded, the media platform has to encode them into a common format that can be played in a browser. Motion estimation has been identified as the most compute intensive process of the video encoding. In this thesis, we analyze and optimize a reference motion estimation method that is commonly used in the literature. This method is intended to run on many-core devices (GPUs). Moreover, we design our own Collaborative Method for motion estimation. We prove that the Collaborative Method is not only faster than the Reference Method, but it also allows the user to encode videos with better quality (expressed in PSNR values). This is achieved by eliminating the Reference Method’s limitation in extending the search window size and allowing the user to choose arbitrary values for the search window size. Further, our Collaborative Method has been designed to make use of all compute devices available in the target system (CPUs, GPUs, accelerators). Multi-device scalability is also addressed and analyzed.
Local textures parameters of images in space domain obtained with different analytical approaches

The aim of this study is to determine and compare, in the spatial domain the different local texture parameters of 2D image. For this, we define the realizations of analytical images obtained in the spatial domain with three transformation approaches (Fourier, Hamilton and Riesz). The generalization to 3D image is envisaged.
Breakdown detection based on taxonomy of errors in chat-oriented dialogue

It is difficult to detect a breakdown of the chat dialogue arising from a variety of causes by one method. We examined breakdown detection methods that are suitable for each breakdown taxonomy that have been created by the dialog task group of the Project Next NLP. We also use a multilayer perceptron and the index output from the respective breakdown detector because we calculate the probability distribution of the breakdown detection result.
Enjoyable Pressure Cooker : Redesigning Physical Form of Products Based on Product Emotions and Usability Criteria

Physical form and appearance of products are essential and they serve as visceral stimuli for consumers in considering and making a decision to purchase the products. Attractive product design, therefore, is required to elicit positive emotional responses from the consumers. Usability is another critical factor that helps users to use a product easily, and thus enhances their satisfaction. This research focuses on redesigning the physical form of everyday products based on product emotions and usability criteria. Two electric pressure cookers with different brands, but had similar characteristics, were used as the object of study. Emotional responses from thirty participants to these products were measured using Product Emotions Measurement Instrument (PrEmo). Interviews were then conducted to clarify their responses. Following this, usability testing involving eight participants was conducted. Each participant was asked to perform eight predetermined tasks and to fill out a questionnaire for assessing usability aspects of the tested products. The procedures resulted in the scores of pleasant and unpleasant emotions, participants‟ concerns about the products, mean completion time of the given tasks, success rate of the tasks, and scores of usability aspects. These results were used as a basis for redesigning the pressure cookers through modifying their form, appearance, colors, layout of control panel and buttons, symbols on buttons, and information labels. Two new designs were represented in the form of rendered 3D images. Product emotions measurement and usability testing were reused to evaluate the redesigned pressure cookers. The redesigned products showed increased positive emotional responses and improved usability.
Do Empirical Pricing Factors Proxy for Innovations to State Variables in the ICAPM ? A Direct Time-Series Test ∗

We propose a new time-series test of empirically motivated and empirically successful pricing factors within the intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) framework. We discuss the relationship between the investment opportunity set, state variables, and pricing factors and show the importance of our test in understanding the nature of risk these factors represent. We also discuss the empirical difficulties in such tests and show how we get round these challenges. Lastly, we test if the risk premiums of size, value, momentum, and liquidity factors are associated with investors’ concerns over future changes in market risk and find little evidence. JEL Classification: G12, C13, C58
Lúpus Eritematoso Sistêmico ( LES ) em Goiânia , Brasil ( * ) Hepatitis C Virus Seroprevalence and Genotypes in Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus ( SLE ) in Goiânia , Brazil

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a source of concern in rheumatology because of its extrahepatic manifestations. Many studies have reported association between HCV infection and rheumatological manifestations such as: musculoskeletal pain, essential mixed cryoglobulinemia, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome, vasculitis, glomerulonephritis, Raynaud’s phenomenon, polyarteritis nodosa, myositis, autoantibody and other connective tissue diseases. In previous studies developed in our region, prevalences of 0.9%, 1.4%, 1.8% and 2.0% were detected among pregnant women, blood donors, leprosy patients and health professionals, respectively. Objective: to investigate the prevalence of hepatitis C virus infection among patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) in Goiânia, Brazil. Methods: 175 patients were interviewed and had blood samples tested for HCV antibodies (anti-HCV) by a third generation enzyme linked immunosorbant assay (ELISA). RNA-HCV was detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with primers complementary the 5’ non-coding region of the HCV genoma, in all anti-HCV positive serum samples and genotyped by a line probe assay. Results: an overall HCV infection prevalence of 2.3% (4/175) was found. Genotyping of RNA-HCV positive samples revealed HCV type 1 in 3 (75%) and type 3 in 1 (25%) patient. Clinical course was favorable in all HCV positive patients, except one, who died due to renal insuficiency related to lupus nephritis. Conclusions: anti-HCV prevalence among patients with SLE was slitghly higher than the prevanlence observed in pregnant women,
Banking crises in Europe : The importance of region-specific early warning models

Banking crises, albeit rare, can have nefarious consequences. As such, it is relevant to understand not only what factors cause these crises, but what variables can be used in their early detection. Economic integration still requires country specificities to be considered in macro-prudential monitoring. This project explores the dynamics of banking crises, the role of economic and stock market growth as warning variables for several European regions. Dynamic probit models are used in a panel dataset. Results show that real GDP, stock market growth and house price growth are good indicators of crisis, and separate models for regions within the Eurozone predict crisis more accurately.