Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving the Performance of Program Package for 3D Simulation of Low Frequency Magnetic Field in Medical Therapy

The purpose of this article is to present one particular application of the new . NET technologies: Windows Forms and asynchronous programming model. These technologies are used in the development of the software solution tor 3-dimensional simulation of low frequency magnetic field. The simulation requires preparation and processing of the 3-dimensional vector data which is a time consuming task and thus requires special cares for optimizing both the user interface and the organization of the calculations. Bibl. 6 (in English; summaries in English, Russian and Lithuanian).
Dynamic role of single‐celled fungi in ruminal microbial ecology and activities

In ruminants, high fermentation capacity is necessary to develop more efficient ruminant production systems. Greater level of production depends on the ability of the microbial ecosystem to convert organic matter into precursors of milk and meat. This has led to increased interest by animal nutritionists, biochemists and microbiologists in evaluating different strategies to manipulate the rumen biota to improve animal performance, production efficiency and animal health. One of such strategies is the use of natural feed additives such as single‐celled fungi yeast. The main objectives of using yeasts as natural additives in ruminant diets include; (i) to prevent rumen microflora disorders, (ii) to improve and sustain higher production of milk and meat, (iii) to reduce rumen acidosis and bloat which adversely affect animal health and performance, (iv) to decrease the risk of ruminant‐associated human pathogens and (v) to reduce the excretion of nitrogenous‐based compounds, carbon dioxide and methane. Yeast, a natural feed additive, has the potential to enhance feed degradation by increasing the concentration of volatile fatty acids during fermentation processes. In addition, microbial growth in the rumen is enhanced in the presence of yeast leading to the delivery of a greater amount of microbial protein to the duodenum and high nitrogen retention. Single‐celled fungi yeast has demonstrated its ability to increase fibre digestibility and lower faecal output of organic matter due to improved digestion of organic matter, which subsequently improves animal productivity. Yeast also has the ability to alter the fermentation process in the rumen in a way that reduces methane formation. Furthermore, yeast inclusion in ruminant diets has been reported to decrease toxins absorption such as mycotoxins and promote epithelial cell integrity. This review article provides information on the impact of single‐celled fungi yeast as a feed supplement on ruminal microbiota and its function to improve the health and productive longevity of ruminants.
Neoadjuvant Talazoparib for Patients With Operable Breast Cancer With a Germline BRCA Pathogenic Variant.

PURPOSE Talazoparib has demonstrated efficacy in patients with BRCA-positive metastatic breast cancer. This study evaluated the pathologic response of talazoparib alone for 6 months in patients with a known germline BRCA pathogenic variant (gBRCA-positive) and operable breast cancer. METHODS Eligibility included 1 cm or larger invasive tumor and gBRCA-positive disease. Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive tumors were excluded. Twenty patients underwent a pretreatment biopsy, 6 months of once per day oral talazoparib (1 mg), followed by definitive surgery. Patients received adjuvant therapy at physician's discretion. The primary end point was residual cancer burden (RCB). With 20 patients, the RCB-0 plus RCB-I response rate can be estimated with a 95% CI with half width less than 20%. RESULTS Twenty patients were enrolled from August 2016 to September 2017. Median age was 38 years (range, 23 to 58 years); 16 patients were gBRCA1 positive and 4 patients were gBRCA2 positive. Fifteen patients had triple-negative breast cancer (estrogen receptor/progesterone receptor < 10%), and five had hormone receptor-positive disease. Five patients had clinical stage I disease, 12 had stage II, and three had stage III, including one patient with inflammatory breast carcinoma and one with metaplastic chondrosarcomatous carcinoma. One patient chose to receive chemotherapy before surgery and was not included in RCB analyses. RCB-0 (pathologic complete response) rate was 53% and RCB-0/I was 63%. Eight patients (40%) had grade 3 anemia and required a transfusion, three patients had grade 3 neutropenia, and 1 patient had grade 4 thrombocytopenia. Common grade 1 or 2 toxicities were nausea, fatigue, neutropenia, alopecia, dizziness, and dyspnea. Toxicities were managed by dose reduction and transfusions. Nine patients required dose reduction. CONCLUSION Neoadjuvant single-agent oral talazoparib once per day for 6 months without chemotherapy produced substantial RCB-0 rate with manageable toxicity. The substantive pathologic response to single-agent talazoparib supports the larger, ongoing neoadjuvant trial (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03499353).
Determinants of Acquisition and Clearance of Human Papillomavirus Infection in Previously Unexposed Young Women

Lifetime number of sex partners, marital status, and history of sexually transmitted disease were associated with human papillomavirus (HPV) acquisition among women without prior exposure to HPV infection, with no observed differences in risk determinants patterns for HPV infections by length of follow-up. Supplemental digital content is available in the text.
Affective reactivity, resting heart rate variability, and marital quality: A 10-year longitudinal study of U.S. adults.

Increasing evidence suggests that heightened affective reactivity to daily stressors has implications for mental and physical health, yet little is known about the long-term repercussions of day-to-day stress reactivity for marital quality. This study examined associations between affective reactivity and two indicators of marital well-being (marital satisfaction and marital risk) over a 10-year period. An additional aim was to investigate the potential role of resting high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), an index of cardiac vagal regulation, in moderating the association between affective reactivity and marital quality. These relationships were examined using data from 344 married adults in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS II and III) study. Respondents completed daily telephone interviews and longitudinal reports of stressors, affect, and marital quality. HF-HRV was measured at rest. Greater affective reactivity to daily stressors predicted lower marital satisfaction and higher marital risk 10 years later. These associations remained after adjustments for potential confounders, including demographics, physical and behavioral factors, and psychological characteristics. In addition, HF-HRV moderated the associations between affective reactivity and marital quality. Results are consistent with a buffering effect, in which high levels of HF-HRV offset the inverse association between affective reactivity and marital quality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Major dietary patterns and their relationship to obesity among urbanized adult Tibetan pastoralists.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES This study investigated major dietary patterns and their relationship to obesity among urbanized Tibetan pastoralists. METHODS AND STUDY DESIGN Using a cross-sectional design, this study assessed 782 urbanized Tibetan pastoralists aged 18-84 y. A food frequency questionnaire and anthropometric measurements were conducted in 2018. Principal component analysis was used to identify dietary patterns. Logistic regression was applied to compare the risks for overweight (BMI >=24 kg/m2), obesity (BMI >=28 kg/m2), and central obesity (waist circumference >=80 cm for women and >=85 cm for men) across quintiles of dietary pattern scores after controlling for gender, age, education, medical insurance, smoking status, alcohol consumption and physical activity. RESULTS This study identified three major dietary patterns: an urban pattern characterized by high intake of vegetables, tubers/roots, and refined carbohydrates; a western pattern characterized by sugary drinks, snacks, and desserts; and a pastoral pattern characterized by tsamba (roasted Tibetan barley), Tibetan cheese, and buttered/milk tea. Subjects in the highest quintile of urban pattern scores were more likely to be overweight (OR=2.58, 95% CI 1.48-4.49) (p-for-trend=0.001), obese (2.94, 1.57-5.49) (p-for-trend=0.001), and centrally obese (1.94, 1.12-3.36) (p-for-trend=0.019) compared to those in the lowest quintile with confounders controlled. The western dietary pattern was positively associated with overweight (p-for-trend=0.037). No clear association was observed for the pastoral dietary pattern. CONCLUSIONS Urban and western dietary patterns independently predict the likelihood of being overweight. Improved nutrition education may contribute to healthier eating behaviors, thus reducing or preventing obesity.
Coarse-to-fine Kidney Segmentation Framework Incorporating with Abnormal Detection and Correction

In this paper, we formulated the kidney segmentation task in a coarse-to-fine fashion, predicting a coarse label based on the entire CT image and a fine label based on the coarse segmentation and separated image patches. A key difference between the two stages lies in how input images were preprocessed; for the coarse segmentation, each 2D CT slice was normalized to be of the same image size (but possible different pixel size), and for the fine segmentation, each 2D CT slice was first resampled to be of the same pixel size and then cropped to be of the same image size. In other words, the image inputs to the coarse segmentation were 2D CT slices of the same image size whereas those to the fine segmentation were 2D MR patches of the same image size as well as the same pixel size. In addition, we design an abnormal detection method based on component analysis and use another 2D convolutional neural network to correct these abnormal regions between two stages. A total of 168 CT images were used to train the proposed framework and the evaluations were conducted qualitatively on other 42 testing images. The proposed method showed promising results and achieved 94.53 \% averaged DSC in testing data.
Out the Window: A Crowd-Sourced Dataset for Activity Classification in Surveillance Video

The Out the Window (OTW) dataset is a crowdsourced activity dataset containing 5,668 instances of 17 activities from the NIST Activities in Extended Video (ActEV) challenge. These videos are crowdsourced from workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk using a novel scenario acting strategy, which collects multiple instances of natural activities per scenario. Turkers are instructed to lean their mobile device against an upper story window overlooking an outdoor space, walk outside to perform a scenario involving people, vehicles and objects, and finally upload the video to us for annotation. Performance evaluation for activity classification on VIRAT Ground 2.0 shows that the OTW dataset provides an 8.3% improvement in mean classification accuracy, and a 12.5% improvement on the most challenging activities involving people with vehicles.
SHIFTY VOWELS

The "vowel shift" alternations in English are not explained by the traditional approach to vowel features, in which vowels are described by the height and retraction of the tongue. In order to understand the alternations, äs well äs the historical processes that gave rise to them (the Great Vowel Shift) and similar processes in other languages a different approach to vowel features is needed. This study discusses such an approach. Combining earlier approaches to the phonetics and phonology of vowels with the theory of feature geometry, it is proposed that there are three articula tor tiers that define vowel articulations: Labial, Coronal, and Mandibular, the latter deüning degree of aperture. In addition, tenseness is described äs a narrowing of the air passage by muscular action in the tongue. Under such a system, the alternations seen in the English vowel system are accounted for by very natural rules, instead of the conventional alpha-switching approach. The historical Great Vowel Shift can also be better explained by such an approach. It is the goal of generative grammar to provide explanations for grammatical processes. The present study examines a phonological phenomenon which we shall refer to here äs shifty vowels. Shifty vowels are vowels which undergo a rule-governed change in quality under certain conditions, most frequently triggered by tenseness. The best-known case of shifty vowels, and the one from which the term is transparently derived, is the phenomenon of Vowel Shift in Modern English, where this term can be used ambiguously to refer either to the historic Great Vowel Shift of Early Modern English or to the long-short alternations of present-day English which are the synchronic reflex of this historic process. Vowel Shift has received much attention in the literature of generative phonology, but despite many technical improvements in the analysis we are no closer to an explanation today than we were with the publication of Chomsky and Halle (1968), henceforth SPE. The explanation must lie in the nature of the phonological features which define vowels. Most contemporary studies of the phonology of vowels assume the feature system of SPE, with slight Foiia Lingüistica XXV/3-4 0165^004/91/25-483 $ 2,(C) Mouton/de Gruyter, Berlin Societas Linguistica, Europaea
SOAR TESS Survey. I. Sculpting of TESS Planetary Systems by Stellar Companions

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is finding transiting planet candidates around bright, nearby stars across the entire sky. The large field of view, however, results in low spatial resolution; therefore, multiple stars contribute to almost every TESS light curve. High angular resolution imaging can detect the previously unknown companions to planetary candidate hosts that dilute the transit depths, lead to host star ambiguity, and, in some cases, are the source of false-positive transit signals. We use speckle imaging on the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope to search for companions to 542 TESS planet candidate hosts in the southern sky. We provide correction factors for the 117 systems with resolved companions due to photometric contamination. The contamination in TESS due to close binaries is similar to that found in surveys of Kepler planet candidates. For the solar-type population, we find a deep deficit of close binary systems with projected stellar separations less than 100 au among planet candidate hosts (44 observed binaries compared to 124 expected based on field binary statistics). The close binary suppression among TESS planet candidate hosts is similar to that seen for the more distant Kepler population. We also find a large surplus of TESS planet candidates in wide binary systems detected in both SOAR and Gaia DR2 (119 observed binaries compared to 77 expected). These wide binaries almost exclusively host giant planets, however, suggesting that orbital migration caused by perturbations from the stellar companion may lead to planet–planet scattering and suppress the population of small planets in wide binaries. Both trends are also apparent in the M dwarf planet candidate hosts.
Stationary Reflection and the failure of SCH

In this paper we prove that from large cardinals it is consistent that there is a singular strong limit cardinal $\nu$ such that the singular cardinal hypothesis fails at $\nu$ and every collection of fewer than $\mathrm{cf}(\nu)$ stationary subsets of $\nu^+$ reflects simultaneously. For uncountable cofinality, this situation was not previously known to be consistent. Using different methods, we reduce the upper bound on the consistency strength of this situation for $\mathrm{cf}(\nu) = \omega$ to below a single partially supercompact cardinal. The previous upper bound of infinitely many supercompact cardinals was due to Sharon.
Computational approaches for parametric imaging of dynamic PET data

Parametric imaging of nuclear medicine data exploits dynamic functional images in order to reconstruct maps of kinetic parameters related to the metabolism of a specific tracer injected in the biological tissue. From a computational viewpoint, the realization of parametric images requires the pixel-wise numerical solution of compartmental inverse problems that are typically ill-posed and nonlinear. In the present paper we introduce a fast numerical optimization scheme for parametric imaging relying on a regularized version of the standard affine-scaling Trust Region method. The validation of this approach is realized in a simulation framework for brain imaging and comparison of performances is made with respect to a regularized Gauss-Newton scheme and a standard nonlinear least-squares algorithm.
Generation of Cooperative Perception Messages for Connected and Automated Vehicles

Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) utilize a variety of onboard sensors to sense their surrounding environment. CAVs can improve their perception capabilities if vehicles exchange information about what they sense using V2X communications. This is known as cooperative or collective perception (or sensing). A frequent transmission of collective perception messages could improve the perception capabilities of CAVs. However, this improvement can be compromised if vehicles generate too many messages and saturate the communications channel. An important aspect is then when vehicles should generate the perception messages. ETSI has proposed the first set of message generation rules for collective perception. These rules define when vehicles should generate collective perception messages and what should be their content. We show that the current rules generate a high number of collective perception messages with information about a small number of detected objects. This results in an inefficient use of the communication channel that reduces the effectiveness of collective perception. We address this challenge and propose an improved algorithm that modifies the generation of collective perception messages. We demonstrate that the proposed solution improves the reliability of V2X communication and the perception of CAVs.
Multi-Agent Coordination of Thermostatically Controlled Loads by Smart Power Sockets for Electric Demand Side Management

This article presents a multi-agent control architecture and an online optimization method based on a dynamic average consensus to coordinate the power consumption of a large population of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs). Our objective is to penalize peaks of power demand, smooth the load profile, and enable demand-side management. The proposed architecture and methods exploit only local measurements of power consumption via smart power sockets (SPSs) with no access to their internal temperature. No centralized aggregator of information is exploited, and agents preserve their privacy by cooperating anonymously only through consensus-based distributed estimation. The interactions among devices occur through an unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) network over the Internet. Methods for parameter identification, state estimation, and mixed logical modeling of TCLs and SPSs are included. The architecture is designed from a multi-agent and plug-and-play perspective, in which existing household appliances can interact with each other in an urban environment. Finally, a novel low-cost testbed is proposed along with numerical tests and experimental validation.
The Single-Face Ideal Orientation Problem in Planar Graphs

We consider the ideal orientation problem in planar graphs. In this problem, we are given an undirected graph $G$ with positive edge lengths and $k$ pairs of distinct vertices $(s_1, t_1), \dots, (s_k, t_k)$ called terminals, and we want to assign an orientation to each edge such that for all $i$ the distance from $s_i$ to $t_i$ is preserved or report that no such orientation exists. We show that the problem is NP-hard in planar graphs. On the other hand, we show that the problem is polynomial-time solvable in planar graphs when $k$ is fixed, the vertices $s_1, t_1, \dots, s_k, t_k$ are all on the same face, and no two of terminal pairs cross (a pair $(s_i, t_i)$ crosses $(s_j, t_j)$ if the cyclic order of the vertices is $s_i,s_j,t_i,t_j$). For serial instances, we give a simpler and faster algorithm running in $O(n \log n)$ time, even if $k$ is part of the input. (An instance is serial if the terminals appear in cyclic order $u_1, v_1, \dots, u_k, v_k$, where for each $i$ we have either $(u_i, v_i) = (s_i, t_i)$ or $(u_i, v_i) = (t_i, s_i)$. ) Finally, we consider a generalization of the problem in which the sum of the distances from $s_i$ to $t_i$ is to be minimized; in this case we give an algorithm for serial instances running in $O(kn^5)$ time.
Computing secure key rates for quantum key distribution with untrusted devices

Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) provides the strongest form of secure key exchange, using only the input-output statistics of the devices to achieve information-theoretic security. Although the security principles of DIQKD are now well-understood, it remains a technical challenge to derive reliable security bounds for generic DIQKD protocols beyond the standard ones. In this Letter, we present a numerical framework based on semi-definite programming that gives reliable lower bounds on the asymptotic secret key rate of any QKD protocol using untrusted devices. In particular, our method can in principle be utilized to find achievable secret key rates for any DIQKD protocol, based on the full input-output probability distribution instead of specialized Bell inequalities.
Privacy-Aware Distributed Hypothesis Testing

A distributed binary hypothesis testing (HT) problem involving two parties, a remote observer and a detector, is studied. The remote observer has access to a discrete memoryless source, and communicates its observations to the detector via a rate-limited noiseless channel. The detector observes another discrete memoryless source, and performs a binary hypothesis test on the joint distribution of its own observations with those of the observer. While the goal of the observer is to maximize the type II error exponent of the test for a given type I error probability constraint, it also wants to keep a private part of its observations as oblivious to the detector as possible. Considering both equivocation and average distortion under a causal disclosure assumption as possible measures of privacy, the trade-off between the communication rate from the observer to the detector, the type II error exponent, and privacy is studied. For the general HT problem, we establish single-letter inner bounds on both the rate-error exponent-equivocation and rate-error exponent-distortion trade-offs. Subsequently, single-letter characterizations for both trade-offs are obtained (i) for testing against conditional independence of the observer’s observations from those of the detector, given some additional side information at the detector; and (ii) when the communication rate constraint over the channel is zero. Finally, we show by providing a counter-example where the strong converse which holds for distributed HT without a privacy constraint does not hold when a privacy constraint is imposed. This implies that in general, the rate-error exponent-equivocation and rate-error exponent-distortion trade-offs are not independent of the type I error probability constraint.