Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Outcomes With Quality Improvement Interventions in Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Objectives: Variations in chronic illness care are common in our health care system and may lead to suboptimal outcomes. Specifically, inconsistent use and suboptimal medication dosing have been demonstrated in the care of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Quality improvement (QI) efforts have improved outcomes in conditions such as asthma and diabetes mellitus, but have not been well studied in IBD. We hypothesized that QI efforts would lead to improved outcomes in our pediatric IBD population. Methods: A QI team was formed within our IBD center in 2005. By 2007, we began prospectively capturing physician global assessment (PGA) and patient-reported global assessment. Significant QI interventions included creating evidence-based medication guidelines, joining a national QI collaborative, initiation of preclinic planning, and monitoring serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Results: From 2007 to 2010, 505 patients have been followed at our IBD center. During this time, the frequency of patients in clinical remission increased from 59% to 76% (P < 0.05), the frequency of patients who report that their global assessment is >7 increased from 69% to 80% (P < 0.05), and the frequency of patients with a Short Pediatric Crohn's Disease Activity Index (sPCDAI) <15 increased from 60% to 77% (P < 0.05). The frequency of repeat steroid use decreased from 17% to 10% (P < 0.05). We observed an association between the use of a vitamin D supplement (P = 0.02), serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (P < 0.05), and quiescent disease activity. Conclusions: Our results show that significant improvements in patient outcomes are associated with QI efforts that do not rely on new medication or therapies.
Hereditary Nonpolyposis Colorectal Cancer and Cancer Syndromes: Recent Basic and Clinical Discoveries

Approximately one-third of individuals diagnosed with colorectal cancer have a family history of cancer, suggesting that CRCs may result from a heritable component. Despite the availability of current gene-identification techniques, only 5% of all CRCs emerge from well-identifiable inherited causes for predisposition, including polyposis and nonpolyposis syndromes. Hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer represents a large proportion of cases, and robustly affected patients are at increased risk for early onset, synchronous, and metachronous colorectal malignancies and extracolonic malignancies. HNPCC encompasses several cancer syndromes, such as Lynch syndrome, Lynch-like syndrome, and familial colorectal cancer type X, which have remarkable clinical presentations and overlapping genetic profiles that make clinical diagnosis a challenging task. Therefore, distinguishing between the HNPCC disorders is crucial for physicians as an approach to tailor different recommendations for patients and their at-risk family members according to the risks for colonic and extracolonic cancer associated with each syndrome. Identification of these potential patients through epidemiological characteristics and new genetic testing can estimate the individual risk, which informs appropriate cancer screening, surveillance, and/or treatment strategies. In the past three years, many appealing and important advances have been made in our understanding of the relationship between HNPCC and CRC-associated syndromes. The knowledge from the genetic profile of cancer syndromes and unique genotype-phenotype profiles in the different syndromes has changed our cognition. Therefore, this review presents and discusses HNPCC and several common nonpolyposis syndromes with respect to molecular phenotype, histopathologic features, and clinical presentation.
Dependabilidade em rede de computadores: uma análise baseada em importância para confiabilidade

Este artigo tem por objetivo o estudo de aspectos relativos a dependabilidade de redes de computadores corporativas, com vistas a que se garanta um melhor tempo de atividade e se alcance os objetivos organizacionais. Serao utilizados RBD e FT como abordagem de modelagem para avaliacao analitica de cenarios complexos. Uma combinacao de modelos de dependabilidade e confiabilidade sera utilizada para analise da disponibilidade do sistema em funcao dos componentes mais importantes.
MPSBL: Multiple Transmit Power Assisted Sequence-Based Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract-Construction workers who usually work in high altitudes and hazardous construction zones are prone to accidents that may lead to injuries and fatalities. This calls for advanced monitoring technologies that can locate workers and hazardous areas within a dynamically evolving outdoor/indoor area. More accurate localization techniques indicate more safety for protecting them from an accident. In this paper, a multiple transmit power assisted sequence-based localization (MPSBL) solution is developed to achieve high localization accuracy. The theoretical analysis and system model design illustrate the feasibility of MPSBL. Simulations and empirical experiments in construction zones have been conducted, which show that MPSBL outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
The Benefits of Residual Hair Cell Function for Speech and Music Perception in Pediatric Bimodal Cochlear Implant Listeners

Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the benefits of residual hair cell function for speech and music perception in bimodal pediatric Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant (CI) listeners. Design Speech and music performance was measured in 35 Mandarin-speaking pediatric CI users for unilateral (CI-only) and bimodal listening. Mandarin speech perception was measured for vowels, consonants, lexical tones, and sentences in quiet. Music perception was measured for melodic contour identification (MCI). Results Combined electric and acoustic hearing significantly improved MCI and Mandarin tone recognition performance, relative to CI-only performance. For MCI, performance was significantly better with bimodal listening for all semitone spacing conditions (p < 0.05 in all cases). For tone recognition, bimodal performance was significantly better only for tone 2 (rising; p < 0.05). There were no significant differences between CI-only and CI + HA for vowel, consonant, or sentence recognition. Conclusions The results suggest that combined electric and acoustic hearing can significantly improve perception of music and Mandarin tones in pediatric Mandarin-speaking CI patients. Music and lexical tone perception depends strongly on pitch perception, and the contralateral acoustic hearing coming from residual hair cell function provided pitch cues that are generally not well preserved in electric hearing.
Metal-carbon — Polymer water cells green energy source

In last five years, most of scientists and researchers have looked for new energy sources as a special innovation in the field of renewable energy. Water cell or hydroelectric power cell is the new innovation in this field of the green energy, and it can replace the carbon intensive energy, as a result it will challenge the global warming emissions. Water cell gives electricity when it immerses in water. Three samples of water cells were produced in this project, and these electrodes samples are Zn-Al, Zn-Cu, and Al-Cu cells. The thickness of each metal sheet is 0.3mm with 30 holes of 2mm diameter distributed uniformly area on 5∗5 cm2 metal sheets. The distance between the electrodes were (2 different metal sheets) is about t=2 mm. Pasty pellets of PMMA and carbon powder (1W/1W) % by weight set up inside the cell and sandwiched between the electrodes. The Al-Zn and Al-Cu cells were tested in 600 ml of deionized water, drinking water and 1 Molar NaCl solution. Zn-Cu cell was the main cell in this project depending on its results, and it was tested in 600 ml of deionized water, drinking water, 1 Molar NaCl solution, 1 Molar HCL solution, and 1 Molar NaOH solution to test the performance of the cell in different environments and conditions. All the currents, voltages, and powers were recorded. The maximum power gain from the Zn-Cu cell in deionized water, drinking water, 1 molar(M) NaCl, 1M HCL acid and 1M NaOH solution were (0.246mW), (1.7mW), (2.7mW), (57mW) and (70mW) respectively. The test of Al-Cu cell reflects the following results in deionized water, drinking water and 1M NaCl were (0.125mW), (0.5mW) and (3.5mW) respectively. The same test of the Al-Zn cell shows the following results: deionized water, drinking water and 1M NaCl were (0.002mW), (0.12mW), and (0.125mW) respectively.
Chapter 5 Plant-Parasitic Nematode Problems in Organic Agriculture

Crop protection approaches differ widely among organic growers both globally and regionally, yet organic farming faces the same plant-parasitic nematode (PPN) issues as conventional farming. Due to the restrictions on use of synthetic chemical inputs and the limited number of options for nematode management in organic fields, organic producers are often at greater risk to nematode problems than their conventional counterparts. While worldwide estimates of crop losses of about 12 % annually of food and fiber due to nematode damage are reported in the literature, such information for organic farming systems is scarce. Comparative studies of organic and conventional farming systems and surveys conducted in organic farms in distinct regions show that the genera of nematodes attacking organic crops are similar to that in conventional fields, including species of root-knot (Meloidogyne spp.), cyst (Heterodera and Globodera spp.), and root lesion (Pratylenchus spp.) nematodes, among others. For PPN management, organic farmers employ practices such as crop rotation, use of cover crops or resistant crop cultivars, and soil amendments. In many instances, however, these methods may not be sufficient for PPN management. Although resistant cultivars of some crops are available for root-knot and cyst nematodes, they are resistant to only a few races or species of nematodes and new races develop over time. Biological control, using microbial pathogens, endophytes, or antagonists may help control PPNs in organic production of some crops but have had limited commercial success. In contrast, use of soil amendments has provided some level of suppression of PPNs under field conditions. Increased populations of predatory nematodes or other beneficial species grazing microbial films and stimulating soil nutrient mineralization have been observed in organic systems, indicating an improvement in the soil health. Further studies are needed to estimate yield losses caused by the S.S. Briar (&) D. Wichman Central Agricultural Research Center, Montana State University, 52583 US Highway 87, Moccasin, MT 59462-9512, USA e-mail: shabeg.briar@montana.edu G.V. P. Reddy Western Triangle Agricultural Research Center, Montana State University, 9546 Old Shelby Rd, PO Box 656, Conrad, MT 59425, USA © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 D. Nandwani (ed.), Organic Farming for Sustainable Agriculture, Sustainable Development and Biodiversity 9, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-26803-3_5 107 economically important PPN species in organic systems and to develop suitable nematode management strategies given for organic farming.
A NN-based Feature Engineering Method and its Application in Analysis of User Behaviors on Internet

Nowadays Internet companies offer a full range of convenient services to ordinary customers in different regions. These acquisitions and interviews are exactly what these companies are collecting and analyzing in order to promote services and find products that have potential need for special customers, which place higher demands on the service or product of companies. This paper presents a hybrid unsupervised clustering method of analysis method based on web domain sequence. We combine NN-based skip-gram and t-sne methods as hybrid unsupervised clustering method for analyzing and visualizing changes interests of diverse users. From a raw web domains sequence, we find out distinct behavior of different characteristic branches.
NLRP3: A Novel Mediator in Cardiovascular Disease

Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of death worldwide. Inflammasome infiltration has been identified to play a central role in the pathological progression of certain cardiovascular diseases, such as vascular damage spanning atherosclerosis, aneurysm, or arteritis; ischemic heart disease; and other nonischemic heart diseases including diabetic cardiomyopathy, chronic heart failure, and hypertension- or virus-induced cardiac dysfunction. The NLRP3 inflammasome, a key participant in the innate immune response, requires both priming and activation signals for the initiation of inflammation. Piling evidence has revealed that the NLRP3 inflammasome could exert an inflammatory effect by inducing the secretion of proinflammatory cytokines (i.e., IL-1β, IL-18) or could cause pyroptosis, a novel programmed cell death process, in a caspase-1-dependent manner. The importance of the NLRP3 inflammasome in cardiac disease has been broadly investigated. In this review, we present the current knowledge regarding the function of NLRP in vascular disease, ischemic heart disease, and nonischemic heart disease and discuss the potential therapeutic options targeting the NLRP3 inflammasome.
Neural Joking Machine : Humorous image captioning

What is an effective expression that draws laughter from human beings? In the present paper, in order to consider this question from an academic standpoint, we generate an image caption that draws a "laugh" by a computer. A system that outputs funny captions based on the image caption proposed in the computer vision field is constructed. Moreover, we also propose the Funny Score, which flexibly gives weights according to an evaluation database. The Funny Score more effectively brings out "laughter" to optimize a model. In addition, we build a self-collected BoketeDB, which contains a theme (image) and funny caption (text) posted on "Bokete", which is an image Ogiri website. In an experiment, we use BoketeDB to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing the results obtained using the proposed method and those obtained using MS COCO Pre-trained CNN+LSTM, which is the baseline and idiot created by humans. We refer to the proposed method, which uses the BoketeDB pre-trained model, as the Neural Joking Machine (NJM).
f-Stop : a system for 3 D printed stop-motion facial animation

We present the first system for optimizing facial animation sequences to produce a set of replacement faces for use in 3D printed stopmotion animation. The input to our system is any sequence of topology invariant deforming meshes (typically faces). Inspired by the workflow adopted by recent stop-motion films we first segment the mesh along curves of minimal deformation. We present a novel algorithm to zero out the deformations along part boundaries, so that 3D printed replacement sets for each part can be interchangeably and seamlessly assembled together. For each part we independently optimize an energy function to find a replacement set using a graphcut technique. The size of the replacement sets can be automatically computed to adhere to a printing budget, quantitative deviation from the original animation, or user controlled for a qualitative approximation. We further instrument the replacement sets with plugs, so that parts can be efficiently swapped. Our approach has the potential reduce the printing time and cost by more than 100× for stop-motion animated shorts or feature films.
Mast Cells Exert Anti-Inflammatory Effects in an IL10−/− Model of Spontaneous Colitis

Mast cells are well established as divergent modulators of inflammation and immunosuppression, but their role in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) remains to be fully defined. While previous studies have demonstrated a proinflammatory role for mast cells in acute models of chemical colitis, more recent investigations have shown that mast cell deficiency can exacerbate inflammation in spontaneous colitis models, thus suggesting a potential anti-inflammatory role of mast cells in IBD. Here, we tested the hypothesis that in chronic, spontaneous colitis, mast cells are protective. We compared colitis and intestinal barrier function in IL10−/− mice to mast cell deficient/IL10−/− (double knockout (DKO): KitWsh/Wsh × IL10−/−) mice. Compared with IL10−/− mice, DKO mice exhibited more severe colitis as assessed by increased colitis scores, mucosal hypertrophy, intestinal permeability, and colonic cytokine production. PCR array analyses demonstrated enhanced expression of numerous cytokine and chemokine genes and downregulation of anti-inflammatory genes (e.g., Tgfb2, Bmp2, Bmp4, Bmp6, and Bmp7) in the colonic mucosa of DKO mice. Systemic reconstitution of DKO mice with bone marrow-derived mast cells resulted in significant amelioration of IL10−/−-mediated colitis and intestinal barrier injury. Together, the results presented here demonstrate that mast cells exert anti-inflammatory properties in an established model of chronic, spontaneous IBD. Given the previously established proinflammatory role of mast cells in acute chemical colitis models, the present findings provide new insight into the divergent roles of mast cells in modulating inflammation during different stages of colitis. Further investigation of the mechanism of the anti-inflammatory role of the mast cells may elucidate novel therapies.
When Hierarchy Meets 2-Hop-Labeling: Efficient Shortest Distance Queries on Road Networks

Computing the shortest distance between two vertices is a fundamental problem in road networks. Since a direct search using the Dijkstra's algorithm results in a large search space, researchers resort to indexing-based approaches. State-of-the-art indexing-based solutions can be categorized into hierarchy-based solutions and hopbased solutions. However, the hierarchy-based solutions require a large search space for long-distance queries while the hop-based solutions result in a high computational waste for short-distance queries. To overcome the drawbacks of both solutions, in this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical 2-hop index (H2H-Index) which assigns a label for each vertex and at the same time preserves a hierarchy among all vertices. With the H2H-Index, we design an efficient query processing algorithm with performance guarantees by visiting part of the labels for the source and destination based on the vertex hierarchy. We also propose an algorithm to construct the H2H-Index based on distance preserved graphs. The algorithm is further optimized by computing the labels based on the partially computed labels of other vertices. We conducted extensive performance studies using large real road networks including the whole USA road network. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve a speedup of an order of magnitude in query processing compared to the state-of-the-art while consuming comparable indexing time and index size.
Roundtrip engineering of NoSQL databases

In this article we present a framework describing a roundtrip engineering process for NoSQL database systems. This framework, based on the Model Driven Engineering approach, is composed of a knowledge base guiding the roundtrip process. Starting from a roundtrip generic scenario, we propose several roundtrip scenarios combining forward and reverse engineering processes. We illustrate our approach with an example related to a property graph database. The illustrative scenario consists of successive steps of model enrichment combined with forward and reverse engineering processes. Future research will consist in designing and implementing the main components of the knowledge base.
Distributed optimization in fog radio access networks — channel estimation and multi-user detection

In this paper, we consider the channel estimation and multi-user detection problems in fog radio access networks (F-RANs). Based on block coordinate descent algorithm, we propose two methods to solve a mixed ℓ2,1-regularization functional which exploits both the sparsity of user activities and the spatial sparsity of user signals in F-RAN. Both of our methods split the computation and corresponding data into multiple units of a cluster and solve the problem in a distributed manner. Hence they can be deployed flexibly at the distributed logical edges as well as the cloud baseband unit pool in F-RAN. The differences between the two methods are that the first one operates in a serial manner and is guaranteed to converge, while the second one works in parallel and under empirical guidance. Deployment details are also provided. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Privacy, Secrecy, and Storage With Multiple Noisy Measurements of Identifiers

The key-leakage-storage region is derived for a generalization of a classic two-terminal key agreement model. The additions to the model are that the encoder observes a hidden, or noisy, version of the identifier, and that the encoder and decoder can perform multiple measurements. To illustrate the behavior of the region, the theory is applied to binary identifiers and noise modeled via binary symmetric channels. In particular, the key-leakage-storage region is simplified by applying Mrs. Gerber’s lemma twice in different directions to a Markov chain. The growth in the region as the number of measurements increases is quantified. The amount by which the privacy-leakage rate reduces for a hidden identifier as compared to a noise-free (visible) identifier at the encoder is also given. If the encoder incorrectly models the source as visible, it is shown that substantial secrecy leakage may occur and the reliability of the reconstructed key might decrease.
Living upside down: patterns of red coral settlement in a cave

Background Larval settlement and intra-specific interactions during the recruitment phase are crucial in determining the distribution and density of sessile marine populations. Marine caves are confined and stable habitats. As such, they provide a natural laboratory to study the settlement and recruitment processes in sessile invertebrates, including the valuable Mediterranean red coral Corallium rubrum. In the present study, the spatial and temporal variability of red coral settlers in an underwater cave was investigated by demographic and genetic approaches. Methods Sixteen PVC tiles were positioned on the walls and ceiling of the Colombara Cave, Ligurian Sea, and recovered after twenty months. A total of 372 individuals of red coral belonging to two different reproductive events were recorded. Basal diameter, height, and number of polyps were measured, and seven microsatellites loci were used to evaluate the genetic relationships among individuals and the genetic structure. Results Significant differences in the colonization rate were observed both between the two temporal cohorts and between ceiling and walls. No genetic structuring was observed between cohorts. Overall, high levels of relatedness among individuals were found. Conclusion The results show that C. rubrumindividuals on tiles are highly related at very small spatial scales, suggesting that nearby recruits are likely to be sibs. Self-recruitment and the synchronous settlement of clouds of larvae could be possible explanations for the observed pattern.