Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ignem: Upward Migration of Cold Data in Big Data File Systems

This paper investigates whether migrating cold data can yield significant speedup for big data jobs that run on modern big data file systems. Our work is motivated by two observations. First, improving the input stage of a job can provide significant speedup because many jobs spend a large part of their execution reading inputs. The second observation is that the inputs for many jobs are cold. Common techniques that aim to keep hot data in memory do not benefit these jobs. We analyze the Google production cluster trace data and find that the key ingredients for effectively migrating cold data do exist in such production environments. Encouraged by our findings, we design and implement Ignem, a framework for migrating cold data in big data file systems. We evaluate Ignem in a series of experiments and show that it provides significant speedup for both small and large jobs. Specifically, Hive queries are accelerated by up to 34%; the mean job duration in a trace-driven workload is reduced by 12% and the task duration by nearly 40%; other standalone jobs such as sort and wordcount also improve similarly by up to 30%.
Nonbifurcating Phylogenetic Tree Inference via the Adaptive LASSO

Abstract Phylogenetic tree inference using deep DNA sequencing is reshaping our understanding of rapidly evolving systems, such as the within-host battle between viruses and the immune system. Densely sampled phylogenetic trees can contain special features, including sampled ancestors in which we sequence a genotype along with its direct descendants, and polytomies in which multiple descendants arise simultaneously. These features are apparent after identifying zero-length branches in the tree. However, current maximum-likelihood based approaches are not capable of revealing such zero-length branches. In this article, we find these zero-length branches by introducing adaptive-LASSO-type regularization estimators for the branch lengths of phylogenetic trees, deriving their properties, and showing regularization to be a practically useful approach for phylogenetics. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
Squeezing for Life – Properties of Red Blood Cell Deformability

Deformability is an essential feature of blood cells (RBCs) that enables them to travel through even the smallest capillaries of the human body. Deformability is a function of (i) structural elements of cytoskeletal proteins, (ii) processes controlling intracellular ion and water handling and (iii) membrane surface-to-volume ratio. All these factors may be altered in various forms of hereditary hemolytic anemia, such as sickle cell disease, thalassemia, hereditary spherocytosis and hereditary xerocytosis. Although mutations are known as the primary causes of these congenital anemias, little is known about the resulting secondary processes that affect RBC deformability (such as secondary changes in RBC hydration, membrane protein phosphorylation, and RBC vesiculation). These secondary processes could, however, play an important role in the premature removal of the aberrant RBCs by the spleen. Altered RBC deformability could contribute to disease pathophysiology in various disorders of the RBC. Here we review the current knowledge on RBC deformability in different forms of hereditary hemolytic anemia and describe secondary mechanisms involved in RBC deformability.
Formulation of 5-fluorouracil Loaded Chitosan Nanoparticles By Emulsion Droplet Coalescence Method For Cancer Therapy

ABSTRACT Nano technology is the one of the emerging field in the World also the Medical sciences. Since, it over come most of the disadvantages of conventional therapy. There are many products related to this technology is already marketed, and giving good results in patient compliance with related to side effects and sustained release. The goal of the present investigation was to formulate and evaluate nanoparticles of 5-Fluorouracil using Emulsion droplet coalescence method. In the present study we have taken chitosan, a natural marine polymer for the preparation of Nanoparticles. Eudragit S 100 was used to produce secondary coating upon the chitosan layer and drug used is 5-fluorouracil. Emulsion droplet coalescence method was used for the preparation. This formulation meant for IV use. So the pH maintained at 7.4. DSC graph shows that there is no interaction between Polymer and drug in the nanoparticles. Invitro diffusion study was carried out using Franz diffusion cell and the formulation CF 2 shows good encapsulation capacity, sustained drug release up to 12 Hours. The goal of the present investigation was to formulate and evaluate nanoparticles of 5-Fluorouracil using Emulsion droplet coalescence method.
Anti‐Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor and the Evolving Management Paradigm for Retinopathy of Prematurity

Abstract: Diagnosis and management of pediatric retinal conditions such as retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) have been evolving significantly with the availability of new technology and treatments. New imaging systems, telemedicine, tele‐education, and anti‐vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) intravitreal pharmacotherapy are all changing the way we diagnose and deliver care to children with pediatric retinal disease. Fluorescein angiography and optical coherence tomography have the potential to improve our diagnosis and management of disease, and with improvements in retinal imaging, telemedicine is becoming more feasible. Telemedicine, tele‐education, and computer‐based image analysis may overcome many of the challenges we face in providing adequate care and access for children with pediatric retinal disease. Treatment options have also expanded with the use of anti‐VEGF therapy. Although the use of intravitreal anti‐VEGF for ROP has been documented in the literature for more than a decade, many questions still remain about its safety in the pediatric patient population. Several ongoing prospective studies are exploring the utility of anti‐VEGF agents for ROP, with attention to the optimal dose of drug, systemic safety, and our understanding of recurrence of disease. This review aims to provide an update on current diagnostic and therapeutic modalities, focusing predominantly on the role of anti‐VEGF therapy, for the management of ROP and other pediatric retinal vascular diseases.
Wireless scheduling with deadline and power constraints

This paper studies the problem of scheduling in a collocated wireless network under both deadline and power constraints. We consider a time-slotted system and assume time slots are grouped into frames such that each frame consists of T consecutive time slots. The channel condition of a link remains constant within each frame but varies from frame to frame. Packets with hard deadlines arrive at the transmitters at the beginning of each frame, and will be discarded if missing their deadlines, which are in the same frame. The deadlines can vary from frame to frame. Each link, say link l, is required to deliver at least pl fraction of packets on time with the average transmit power not exceeding βl. To guarantee both constraints, each link maintains two virtual queues, a deficit queue and a power queue, to keep track of the progresses of fulfilling these two constraints, respectively. A MaxWeight-type problem based on the virtual queues is first formulated in this paper for achieving throughput optimality. The computational complexity of solving the MaxWeight-type problem using exhaustive search is exponential in the frame size, which is prohibitive even for a small value of T. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a greedy algorithm, named PDMax (Power and Deadline constrained MaxWeight), with complexity O (LT log(LT)). PDMax schedules packets according to their deadlines and incremental weight gains to the objective of the MaxWeight problem which includes both deficit queues and power queues. The incremental weight gains are calculated by solving an optimal power control problem defined for a single link. We prove PDMax is throughput optimal. Our simulations further show that PDMax outperforms both Large-Deficit-First and greedy-MaxWeight in terms of both packet delivery ratio and average transmit power.
Breast and ovarian cancer penetrance of BRCA1/2 mutations among Hong Kong women

Germline mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 (BRCA1/2) are associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The penetrance of breast and ovarian cancer in BRCA1/2 mutation carriers has been well characterized in Caucasian but not in Asian. Two studies have investigated the breast cancer risk in Asian women with BRCA1/2 mutations, and no published estimates are available for ovarian cancer. Therefore, we estimated the age-specific cumulative risk of BRCA1/2-associated breast and ovarian cancer in Chinese women. From Jan 2007 to Nov 2015, the Hong Kong Hereditary Breast Cancer Family Registry identified 1635 families with hereditary breast-ovarian cancer. Among probands in these families, 66 had BRCA1 mutations, 84 had BRCA2 mutations, and 1,485 tested negative for BRCA1/2 mutations. Using the female first-degree relatives of these probands, we estimated the risk of breast and ovarian cancer using a modified marginal likelihood approach. Estimates of breast cancer penetrance by age 70 were 53.7% (95% CI 34.5-71.6%) for BRCA1 mutation carriers and 48.3% (95% CI 31.8-68.5%) for BRCA2. The estimated risk of ovarian cancer by age 70 was 21.5% and 7.3% for Chinese women carrying BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation respectively. A meta-analysis of available studies in Asian women revealed pooled estimates of breast cancer risk by age 70 of 44.8% (95% CI 33-57.2%) and 40.7% (95% CI 31.3-50.9%) for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers respectively. These data suggest that BRCA1/2-associated breast cancer risk for Chinese women is similar to that for Caucasian women, although BRCA1/2-associated ovarian cancer risks are lower for Chinese women.
Analysis of Liquid–Liquid Droplets Fission and Encapsulation in Single/Two Layer Microfluidic Devices Fabricated by Xurographic Method

This paper demonstrates a low cost fabrication approach for microscale droplet fission and encapsulation. Using a modified xurography method, rapid yet reliable microfluidic devices with flexible designs (single layer and double layer) are developed to enable spatial control of droplet manipulation. In this paper, two different designs are demonstrated, i.e., droplet fission (single layer) and droplet encapsulation (double layer). In addition, the current fabrication approach reduces the overall production interval with the introduction of a custom-made polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) aligner. Apart from that, the fabricated device is able to generate daughter droplets with the coefficient of variance (CV) below 5% and double emulsions with CV maintained within 10% without involvement of complex surface wettability modification.
Antifeedant Effects of Essential Oil, Extracts, and Isolated Sesquiterpenes from Pilgerodendron uviferum (D. Don) Florin Heartwood on Red Clover Borer Hylastinus obscurus (Coleoptera: Curculionidae)

The beetle Hylastinus obscurus Marsham (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), endemic to Europe and Northern Africa, is one of the most important red clover pests in Chile. As commercial insecticides are less effective against this pest, plant secondary metabolites have been considered as an alternative for its control. Here, we have investigated the chemical composition of essential oil (EO), petroleum ether extract (PEE), and dichloromethane extract (DCME) from Pilgerodendron uviferum heartwood. Additionally, the effects of EO and extracts on the feeding behavior (% of weight shift) of H. obscurus have been evaluated. The composition of EO, PEE, and DCME were analyzed using gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). The results showed the presence of a similar mixture of sesquiterpenes in the essential oil and in both of the extracts, which accounted for circa 60% of the total mixture. Sesquiterpenes were further isolated using chromatographic methods and were structurally characterized by optical rotation, GC–MS, FTIR, and 1D and 2D NMR experiments. The physicochemical properties of the isolated sesquiterpenes, including lipophilicity and vapor pressure, were also determined. The sesquiterpenes were identified as the following: (−)-trans-calamenene (1), cadalene (2), (−)-cubenol (3), (−)-epi-cubenol (4), (−)-torreyol (5), and (−)-15-copaenol (6). The antifeedant activity of EO, extracts, and isolated sesquiterpenes were evaluated using artificial diets in a non-choice test. Relative to the control, the EO, DCME extract, and the isolated sesquiterpenes, namely, (−)-trans-calamenene (1), cadalene (2), and (5) torreyol, were found to be the most effective treatments against H. obscurus. Our study showed that the compounds occurring in P. uviferum heartwood were effective in reducing the adult growth of H. obscurus. The physicochemical properties of the isolated sesquiterpenes might have been associated with antifeedant effects.
WIKIIDRANK : AN UNSUPERVISED APPROACH FOR ENTITY LINKING BASED ON INSTANCE CO-OCCURRENCE

In recent times there has been an interest in developing automatic techniques to create and/or populate knowledge bases (KB) and ontologies. One initiative along this line is the Knowledge Base Population (KBP) track of the Text Analysis Conference (TAC), which offers a framework for the evaluation of automatic systems designed to populate ontologies using information found in unstructured text. In KBP, the knowledge base population process has been divided into two complementary tasks: entity linking, whose goal is to detect mentions in text to instances in a reference KB, and slot filling, which extracts from text facts about the previously detected instances and adds these facts to the KB. In this paper, an automatic, unsupervised algorithm for entity linking is presented. The main novelty of the proposed approach, named WikiIdRank, comes from applying a PageRank-like algorithm to a network of instance co-occurrences to address the task. The algorithm was implemented and evaluated in the KBP 2010 with positive results. Furthermore, an analysis of the impact of instance co-occurrence information in the entity linking process was carried out, and indicates a gain of accuracy around 16% compared with a baseline approach relying on information retrieval techniques.
Unfair Reviews Detection on Amazon Reviews using Sentiment Analysis with Supervised Learning Techniques

Reputation and trust are significantly important and play a pivotal role in enabling multiple parties to establish relationships that achieve mutual benefit especially in an E-Commerce (EC) environment. There are several factors negatively affecting the sight of customers and sellers in terms of reputation. For instance, lack of credibility in providing feedback reviews, by which users might create phantom feedback reviews to support their reputation. Thus, we will feel that these reviews and ratings are unfair. In this study, we have used Sentiment Analysis (SA) which is now the subject generating the most interest in the field of text analysis. One of the major challenges confronting SA today is how to detect unfair negative reviews, unfair neutral reviews and unfair positive reviews from opinion reviews. Sentiment classification techniques are used against a dataset of consumer reviews. Precisely, we provide comparison of four supervised machine learning algorithms: Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT-J48), Logistic Regression (LR) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for sentiment classification using three datasets of reviews, including Clothing, Shoes and Jewelry reviews, Baby reviews as well as Pet Supplies reviews. In order to evaluate the performance of sentiment classification, this work has implemented accuracy, precision and recall as a performance measure. Our experiments’ results show that the Logistic Regression (LR) algorithm is the best classifier with the highest accuracy as compared to the other three classifiers, not merely in text classification, but in unfair reviews detection as well.
Au and AuCu Nanoparticles Supported on SBA-15 Ordered Mesoporous Titania-Silica as Catalysts for Methylene Blue Photodegradation

The photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue (MB) dye has been performed under UV irradiation in aqueous suspension, employing photocatalysts based on Au (1.5 wt %) and AuCu (Au/Cu = 1, 2.0 wt %), and supported on SBA-15-ordered mesoporous silica, with and without titania (Si/Ti = 3), in order to evaluate the versatility of this mesoporous support in this type of reaction of great impact from the environmental point of view. Samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), N2 adsorption-desorption at −196 °C, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), so as to study their structural, optical, and chemical properties. All the prepared catalysts were found to be active in the test reaction. The bimetallic AuCu-based catalysts attained very high MB degradation values, in particular AuCu/SBA-15 titania-silica sample reached 100% of dye oxidation after the monitored reaction period (120 min).
Rotating Crops , Turning Profits How Diversified Farming Systems Can Help Farmers While Protecting Soil and Preventing Pollution

HIGHLIGHTS Replacing a fraction of current Midwest corn and soybean acres with a more diverse crop rotation system would produce higher yields and maintain farmers’ profits while protecting their soil, cutting fertilizer and pesticide use and the associated costs, and reducing water pollution and global warming emissions. Our economic analysis of Iowa data shows that this more sustainable way of farming can be feasibly scaled up to as much as 40 percent of the state’s farmland, with significant benefits to farmers, taxpayers, and rural communities. Federal policy changes are needed to support farmers in adoption of such systems, especially regarding up-front costs and farmers’ need for practical, technical information. Today’s dominant Midwest farming system produces two commodities—corn and soybeans—in abundance; however, this system has grown steadily less beneficial for farmers over time. US corn and soybean growers achieved record-high harvests in 2016. But due to oversupply, prices farmers receive for these crops have plummeted, and US farm incomes were expected to drop to their lowest levels since 2002. The dominant two-crop farming system also has negative consequences for our environment and farmers’ long-term sustainability. It typically leaves fields bare for much of the year and employs tillage (plowing) practices that result in levels of erosion that cannot be sustained over time. The two-crop system relies on heavy fertilizer use, which allows the escape of excess nitrogen into the air and water; nitrogen pollution from agriculture costs the nation an estimated $157 billion per year in human health and environmental damages. Rural communities suffer many of the consequences. Iowa, for example, ranks high among states in surface water pollution from fertilizers, pesticides, and eroded soil. And the negative effects extend far beyond the Midwest. Corn Belt watersheds are major contributors to the annual “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural soil management comprise 5 percent of the United States’ share of heat-trapping gases responsible for climate change.
Sustainable development goals, universal health coverage and equity in health systems: the Orang Asli commons approach

Universal health coverage is a key health target in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that has the means to link equitable social and economic development. As a concept firmly based on equity, it is widely accepted at international and national levels as important for populations to attain ‘health for all’ especially for marginalised groups. However, implementing universal coverage has been fraught with challenges and the increasing privatisation of health care provision adds to the challenge because it is being implemented in a health system that rests on a property regime that promotes inequality. This paper asks the question, ‘What does an equitable health system look like? ’ rather than the usual ‘How do you make the existing health system more equitable? ’ Using an ethnographic approach, the authors explored via interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation a health system that uses the commons approach such as which exists with indigenous peoples and found features that helped make the system intrinsically equitable. Based on these features, the paper proposes an alternative basis to organise universal health coverage that will better ensure equity in health systems and ultimately contribute to meeting the SDGs.
Development and validation of a short food questionnaire to screen for low protein intake in community-dwelling older adults: The Protein Screener 55+ (Pro55+)

In old age, sufficient protein intake is important to preserve muscle mass and function. Around 50% of older adults (65+ y) consumes ≤1.0 g/kg adjusted body weight (BW)/day (d). There is no rapid method available to screen for low protein intake in old age. Therefore, we aimed to develop and validate a short food questionnaire to screen for low protein intake in community-dwelling older adults. We used data of 1348 older men and women (56–101 y) of the LASA study (the Netherlands) to develop the questionnaire and data of 563 older men and women (55–71 y) of the HELIUS study (the Netherlands) for external validation. In both samples, protein intake was measured by the 238-item semi-quantitative HELIUS food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). Multivariable logistic regression analysis was used to predict protein intake ≤1.0 g/kg adjusted BW/d (based on the HELIUS FFQ). Candidate predictor variables were FFQ questions on frequency and amount of intake of specific foods. In both samples, 30% had a protein intake ≤1.0 g/kg adjusted BW/d. Our final model included adjusted body weight and 10 questions on the consumption (amount on average day or frequency in 4 weeks) of: slices of bread (number); glasses of milk (number); meat with warm meal (portion size); cheese (amount and frequency); dairy products (like yoghurt) (frequency); egg(s) (frequency); pasta/noodles (frequency); fish (frequency); and nuts/peanuts (frequency). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.889 (95% CI 0.870–0.907). The calibration slope was 1.03 (optimal slope 1.00). At a cut-off of ≤0.8 g/kg adjusted BW/d, the AUC was 0.916 (96% CI 0.897–0.936). Applying the regression equation to the HELIUS sample, the AUC was 0.856 (95% CI 0.824–0.888) and the calibration slope 0.92. Regression coefficients were therefore subsequently shrunken by a linear factor 0.92. To conclude, the short food questionnaire (Pro55+) can be used to validly screen for protein intake ≤1.0 g/kg adjusted BW/d in community-dwelling older adults. An online version can be found at www.proteinscreener. nl. External validation in other countries is recommended.