Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Free-text and Structured Clinical Time Series for Patient Outcome Predictions

While there has been considerable progress in building deep learning models based on clinical time series data, overall machine learning (ML) performance remains modest. Typical ML applications struggle to combine various heterogenous sources of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data, often recorded as a combination of free-text clinical notes and structured EMR data. The goal of this work is to develop an approach for combining such heterogenous EMR sources for time-series based patient outcome predictions. We developed a deep learning framework capable of representing free-text clinical notes in a low dimensional vector space, semantically representing the overall patient medical condition. The free-text based time-series vectors were combined with time-series of vital signs and lab results and used to predict patients at risk of developing a complex and deadly condition: acute respiratory distress syndrome. Results utilizing early data show significant performance improvement and validate the utility of the approach.
RISK MANAGEMENT: A TOP PRIORITY FOR SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGERS

In recent research by IBM, the Global Chief Supply Chain Officer Study [3], four hundred supply chain executives from organizations around the world were interviewed. The results of this research identified five major challenges for supply chain leaders:  Cost containment  Supply chain visibility  Risk management  Increasing customer demands, and  Globalization These five issues were identified as being “significant” or “very significant” in the way they impact companies’ supply chains. This paper will focus on one of those challenges, risk management. We will review prior research to summarize the supply chain risks which have been identified and investigated. We will explore those primary supply chain risks further and discuss potential measures for reducing, mitigating and managing those risks.
The biology and epidemiology of human astroviruses

Human astroviruses (HAstV) are now recognised as important causes of acute gastroenteritis in young children world-wide. The development of improved and more reliable diagnostic methods such as enzyme immunoassays and molecular methods has led to an increase in our understanding of the characteristics of astroviruses and astrovirus infections. Astroviruses can be classified into genogroups, genotypes and serotypes depending on whether genetic or antigenic criteria are used. Epidemiological studies have shown that astrovirus infections are associated with sporadic infections of children in the community as well as focal outbreaks in settings such as hospital wards and day-care centres. Astrovirus outbreaks have also been noted among adults. Recent reports have shown that, in some settings, astrovirus is the second most common cause of diarrhoea in children, thus establishing the medical importance of HAstV. World-wide, HAstV-1 seems to be the predominant type with varied distribution of the other types. Continued studies of the epidemiology of astrovirus infection and the extent of genetic variability of clinical isolates, coupled with an increased understanding of immune responses to astrovirus infection, are needed to develop strategies for the control of disease caused by this enteric pathogen.
WORKING PAPER NOT TO BE CITED OR COPIED EXCEPT BY AUTHOR

Concern has recently intensified regarding increases in the consumption of energy services that often follow energy efficiency improvements, a phenomenon widely called the ‘rebound effect’. However, while some economists have precisely defined this as a metric, much discussion in academic and policy literature is imprecise, leading to confusion and miscommunication. This is especially so regarding direct ‘rebound effects’ in thermal retrofits of existing homes. This study surveys common usages of the term ‘rebound effect’ in domestic heating, identifying three main metrics, which employ different mathematical forms and therefore give different results, but are often lumped together. It defines these as the ‘classic’ rebound effect; the ‘energy savings deficit’, and the ‘energy performance gap’. It then applies these to an empirical case study of three recently retrofitted 30-apartment buildings in Germany. It finds that each metric gives different results for identical situations, ranging from 2.0% to 29.9% for one building, 15.7% to 56.8% for the second, and 43.7% to 272.9% for the third. This may be one reason so-called ‘rebound effect’ results from various studies are so disparate. Nevertheless, specific uses are identified for each of the three metrics, provided their precise definitions are made clear.
MEMS-BASED SOLID PROPELLANT MICROTHRUSTER DESIGN FOR CUBESAT APPLICATION

This paper presents some of the considerations developers of a MEMS-fabricated solid propellant microthruster should consider when designing it for the space environment. Space is a harsh environment in terms of the vacuum, vibrations and shock during launch, temperature extremes, and radiation. These aspects must be considered during the design phase in order to ensure the reliability of the device in orbit. These aspects are investigated by the team at York University and Defence Research and Development Canada-Valcartier when moving from a prototype solid propellant microthruster constructed using conventional materials and standard micromachining to a MEMS-fabricated microthruster.
DNA barcoding Australasian chondrichthyans: results and potential uses in conservation

DNA barcoding – sequencing a region of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase 1 gene (cox1) – promises a rapid and accurate means of species identification, and of any life history stage. For sharks and rays, it may offer a ready means of identifying legal or illegal shark catches, including shark fins taken for the profitable shark fin market. Here it is shown that an analysis of sequence variability in a 655 bp region of cox1 from 945 specimens of 210 chondrichthyan species from 36 families permits the discrimination of 99.0% of these species. Only the two stingarees Urolophus sufflavus and U. cruciatus could not be separated, although these could be readily distinguished from eight other congeners. The average Kimura 2 parameter distance separating individuals within species was 0.37%, and the average distance separating species within genera was 7.48%. Two specimens that clustered with congeners rather than with their identified species-cluster were noted: these could represent instances of hybridisation (although this has not be documented for chondrichthyans), misidentification or mislabelling. It is concluded that cox1 barcoding can be used to identify shark and ray species with a very high degree of accuracy. The sequence variability characteristics of individuals of five species (Aetomylaeus nichofii, Dasyatis kuhlii, Dasyatis leylandi, Himantura gerrardi and Orectolobus maculatus) were consistent with cryptic speciation, and it is suggested that these five taxa be subjected to detailed taxonomic examination to confirm or refute this suggestion. The present barcoding study holds out great hope for the ready identification of sharks, shark products and shark fins, and also highlights some taxonomic issues that need to be investigated further.
Chemical composition and anti-prolifertaive properties of the essential oil of Tanacetum annuum L

The essential oil (EO) of Tanacetum annuum L. was obtained from fresh aerial parts by steam distillation. The EO was analysed by gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC/MS) by using mass spectra and retention index data. This EO contains sabinene (22.3%), camphor (13.2%), beta-pinene (10.1%), p-cymene (8.9 %) and alpha-phellandrene (7.6 %) as major constituents, and presents cytotoxic activity against a human rhabdomyosarcoma cancerous cell line with an IC50 less than 25 μl/ml. This result suggests that T. annuum may have potential anti-cancer activity. Key word: Tanacetum annuum, cytotoxic activity, essential oil composition.
Rebuttal: controversial white adipose tissue innervation by the vagus nerve: seeing is believing

to the editor: In a recent letter to the editor, Kreier and Buijs (5a) attempted to clear up doubts about the existence of significant parasympathetic/vagal innervation of white adipose tissue in the rat. Using pseudorabies transneuronal retrograde tracing, these investigators had originally
Assessing Banks Internal Factors as Determinants of Non-Performing Loans: Evidence from Pakistani Commercial Banks

Non-Performing Loan (NPL) has been crucial factor these days in terms of Banking sector sustainability and profitability. This paper intends to assess factors that may influence the rising level of nonperforming loans in commercial banks of Pakistan. The study uses Size, Return on Assets, Earning per Share, Cash to Total Asset, and investment to Total Asset, Capital Adequacy Ratio and Breakup value per share as determinants of nonperforming loans as banks internal factors. Panel data from 2006-2016 was taken from published annual reports and State Bank of Pakistan data base. Descriptive Statistics, correlation analysis and random effect panel least square regression was used to analyze data through STATA application software. The analysis leads to the conclusion that reduced level of nonperforming loans leads to increased banks performance. It was also concluded that Return on Asset, Earning per share, Capital adequacy ratio and Breakup value per share has got a significant impact on non-
The Lovász Local Lemma : A constructive proof

The Lovász Local Lemma is a tool used to non-constructively prove existence of combinatorial objects meeting a certain conditions. Herein we prove a constructive variant of the lemma which improves upon work started by József Beck in 1991 by improving performance and relaxing restrictions, following the paper [2] of Moser and Tardos closely, then briefly discuss the applications of the lemma to Ramsey Theory.
Maximally Helicity Violating amplitudes

An important aspect in making quantum chromodynamics (QCD) predictions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the speed of the Monte Carlo (MC) event generators which are used to calculate them. MC event generators simulate a pure QCD collision at the LHC by first using fixed-order perturbation theory to calculate the hard (i.e. energetic) 2 → n scatter, and then adding radiative corrections to this with a parton shower approximation. The 2→ n scatter is traditionally calculated by summing Feynman diagrams, however the number of Feynman diagrams has a stronger than factorial growth with the number of final-state particles, hence this method quickly becomes infeasible. We can simplify this calculation by considering helicity amplitudes, in which each particle has its spin either aligned or anti-aligned with its direction of motion i.e. each particle has a specific helicity. In particular, it is well-known that the helicity amplitude for the maximally helicity violating (MHV) configuration is remarkably simple to calculate. In this thesis we describe the physics of the MHV amplitude, how we could use it within a MC event generator, and describe a program we wrote called VinciaMHV which calculates the MHV amplitude for the process qg → q + ng for n = 1, 2, 3, 4. We tested the speed of VinciaMHV against MadGraph4 and found that VinciaMHV calculates the MHV amplitude significantly faster, especially for high particle multiplicities. We also tested the precision of VinciaMHV by comparing its MHV amplitudes to those of MadGraph4. We found that the two programs agree to better than one part in a billion over 99% of the time, thus validating our program.
iversity of abundant bacteria in subsurface vertical flow onstructed wetlands

Microorganisms are mainly responsible for the transformation and mineralization of degradable organic pollutants within constructed wetlands (CWs). There is still a lack of knowledge concerning microbial community composition within CWs. In order to elucidate the diversity of bacteria inhabiting subsurface vertical flow CWs, the molecular fingerprint technique “terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism” (T-RFLP) derived from total community DNA, was applied. A comparison of the bacterial communities from a full-scale outdoor vertical flow CW with planted and unplanted indoor pilot-scale vertical flow CWs, operated under similar conditions, revealed that both systems are colonized by similar populations showing only little acterial community composition
Chromosome localization of genes that control synchronous development of pollen mother cells in wheat

Abstract Cytology at meiotic prophase I in pollen mother cells (PMCs) of the euploid wheat and its 21 nullisomic lines were investigated. The results revealed that all of the investigated materials had cytomixis between their PMCs, and in most lines the PMCs within a loculus of an anther developed synchronously, but asynchrony was observed in five nullisomic lines of 5A, 5B, 2D, 4D and 5D, suggesting that genes controlling meiotic synchrony among PMCs were localized on these chromosomes. Meiotic asynchrony could occur even between two neighboring pollen mother cells (PMCs) undergoing cytomixis, suggesting that cytomictic channels (CCs) alone could not sufficiently render the occurrence of this prominent phenomenon, and that some other factors must be involved in this process.
Factors affecting the somatic cells count in milk of Murciano-granadina goat breed: Preliminary results

Somatic cell count (SCC) in milk is an indicator of the udder ́s health. The National Association of Murciano-granadina Goat Breeders (CAPRIGRAN) has developed a program in order to improve the quantity and the quality of milk, being the SCC an important milk quality aspect. The aim of this study is to identify the factors significantly affecting the SCC content in milk of Murcia-granadina goats. Data from 18 farms were collected, with a total of 5799 lactations. 10 variables have been analyzed, 7 quantitative (number of births, lactation period days, drying period days, milk production per day, fat contain, protein contain and SCC) and 3 qualitative (type of system, drying treatment and milking valorization). The most influencing quantitative variables in the SCC are: milk production per day and lactation period days and the drying period days. The most influencing qualitative variables are: type of system and milking valorization. Further studies are necessary for better understanding the influence of type of system on the SCC, especially on factors related to facilities and the feeding.
Kam-Hansen 1..7

, 218ra5 (2014); 6 Sci Transl Med et al. Slavenka Kam-Hansen Migraine Attacks Altered Placebo and Drug Labeling Changes the Outcome of Episodic Editor's Summary components of medical care. treatment involves medication or placebo, the information provided to patients and the ritual of pill taking are important 50% of the drug effect. The benefits of placebo persisted even when the placebo was honestly described. Whether than that of no treatment. Relative to no treatment, the placebo, under each information condition, accounted for more progressively enhanced the effects of both placebo and Maxalt. The efficacy of open-label placebo was superior to attacks. Maxalt was superior to placebo for pain relief. Increasing information from negative to neutral to positive Maxalt). Each participant also reported on an initial no-treatment attack, yielding a total of 459 documented migraine placebo or Maxalt (10-mg rizatriptan) under three information conditions (told placebo, told Maxalt or placebo, told pain scores. In a randomized order over six consecutive attacks, 66 patients with episodic migraine received either patients, who received either active drug or placebo, modified their headache pain as measured by patient-reported provided to −− ranging from ''negative'' to ''neutral'' to ''positive'' −− investigated how information et al. Kam-Hansen Placebo and medication effects are intimately related in clinical practice and drug development. In new work, Placebo and Medication Effects in Episodic Migraine
Efficient Importance Sampling for the First Passage Time Problem

Motivated from the first passage model for default in credit risk, this paper extends the two-dimensional problem studied by Zhou (2001) to any finite dimension by means of Monte Carlo simulation. We derive a variational problem to characterize the importance sampling scheme for estimating joint default probabilities. The large deviation principle is applied to prove that the proposed importance sampling is asymptotic optimal.
PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN VIVO CAN BE LIMITED BY PHOSPHATE SUPPLY

SUMMARY Measurements of photosynthetic CO2 and 02 exchange, and associated chlorophyll fluorescence were made on leaves (from plants grown in complete nutrient medium) while the internal inorganic phosphate concentration was increased or decreased by feeding solutions through the vascular tissue. The data indicate that orthophosphate supply to the chloroplast can, in some circumstances, become the process that limits photosynthesis in vivo.
Novel ligands lacking a positive charge for the δ- and μ-opioid receptors

Recently we reported using minilibraries to replace Lys9 [somatostatin (SRIF) numbering] of the potent somatostatin agonist L-363,301 (c[-Pro-Phe-d-Trp-Lys-Thr-Phe-]) to generate the potent neurokinin receptor (NK-1) antagonist c[-Pro-Phe-d-Trp-p-F-Phe-Thr-Phe-]. This novel cyclic hexapeptide did not bind the SRIF receptor. Thus, a single mutation converted L-363,301, a SRIF agonist with potency ca. 2−8 times the potency of SRIF in laboratory animals,24 into a selective NK-1 receptor antagonist with an IC50 of 2 nM in vitro. During the screening of the same libraries for ligands of the δ-opioid receptor, we identified four compounds (1−4) which represent a new class of δ-opioid antagonists, some of which were also NK-1 receptor antagonists. The most potent δ-opioid antagonist, c[-Pro-1-Nal-d-Trp-Tyr-Thr-Phe-] (2), showed a Ke value of 128 nM in the mouse vas deferens assay and a δ-receptor binding affinity constant of 152 nM in the rat brain membrane binding assay. These results are of interest because th.
Timing and fidelity of breeding for Siskins Carduelis spinus in Scottish conifer plantations

The timing of breeding for Siskins in plantations in south-west Scotland was determined by reference to the incubation patch in trapped females. Breeding began earlier in years with good cone crops. Over a six-year period, individual birds returned to breed in the same area for several successive seasons. The proportion of first-time breeders in spring was apparently lower following a good cone year.
Understanding Road Layout From Videos as a Whole

In this paper, we address the problem of inferring the layout of complex road scenes from video sequences. To this end, we formulate it as a top-view road attributes prediction problem and our goal is to predict these attributes for each frame both accurately and consistently. In contrast to prior work, we exploit the following three novel aspects: leveraging camera motions in videos, including context cues and incorporating long-term video information. Specifically, we introduce a model that aims to enforce prediction consistency in videos. Our model consists of one LSTM and one Feature Transform Module (FTM). The former implicitly incorporates the consistency constraint with its hidden states, and the latter explicitly takes the camera motion into consideration when aggregating information along videos. Moreover, we propose to incorporate context information by introducing road participants, e.g. objects, into our model. When the entire video sequence is available, our model is also able to encode both local and global cues, e.g. information from both past and future frames. Experiments on two data sets show that: (1) Incorporating either global or contextual cues improves the prediction accuracy and leveraging both gives the best performance. (2) Introducing the LSTM and FTM modules improves the prediction consistency in videos. (3) The proposed method outperforms the SOTA by a large margin.
A local compactification of the Bridgeland stability manifold

Bridgeland stability manifolds of Calabi-Yau categories are of noticeable interest both in mathematics and in physics. By looking at some of the known example, a pattern clearly emerges and gives a fairly precise description of how they look like. In particular, they all seem to have missing loci, which tend to correspond to degenerate stability conditions vanishing on spherical objects. Describing such missing strata is also interesting from a mirror-symmetric perspective, as they conjecturally parametrize interesting types of degenerations of complex structures. All the naive attempts at constructing modular partial compactifications show how elusive and subtle the problem in fact is: ideally, the missing strata would correspond to stability manifolds of quotient triangulated categories, but establishing such correspondence on geometric level and viewing stability conditions on quotients of the original triangulated category as suitable degenerations of stability conditions is not straightforward. In this paper, we will present a method to construct such partial compactifications if some additional hypoteses are satisfied, by realizing our space of interest as a suitable metric completion of the stability manifold.
Filtered Inner Product Projection for Multilingual Embedding Alignment

Due to widespread interest in machine translation and transfer learning, there are numerous algorithms for mapping multiple embeddings to a shared representation space. Recently, these algorithms have been studied in the setting of bilingual dictionary induction where one seeks to align the embeddings of a source and a target language such that translated word pairs lie close to one another in a common representation space. In this paper, we propose a method, Filtered Inner Product Projection (FIPP), for mapping embeddings to a common representation space and evaluate FIPP in the context of bilingual dictionary induction. As semantic shifts are pervasive across languages and domains, FIPP first identifies the common geometric structure in both embeddings and then, only on the common structure, aligns the Gram matrices of these embeddings. Unlike previous approaches, FIPP is applicable even when the source and target embeddings are of differing dimensionalities. We show that our approach outperforms existing methods on the MUSE dataset for various language pairs. Furthermore, FIPP provides computational benefits both in ease of implementation and scalability.
Learning to Play No-Press Diplomacy with Best Response Policy Iteration

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have led to considerable progress in many 2-player zero-sum games, such as Go, Poker and Starcraft. The purely adversarial nature of such games allows for conceptually simple and principled application of RL methods. However real-world settings are many-agent, and agent interactions are complex mixtures of common-interest and competitive aspects. We consider Diplomacy, a 7-player board game designed to accentuate dilemmas resulting from many-agent interactions. It also features a large combinatorial action space and simultaneous moves, which are challenging for RL algorithms. We propose a simple yet effective approximate best response operator, designed to handle large combinatorial action spaces and simultaneous moves. We also introduce a family of policy iteration methods that approximate fictitious play. With these methods, we successfully apply RL to Diplomacy: we show that our agents convincingly outperform the previous state-of-the-art, and game theoretic equilibrium analysis shows that the new process yields consistent improvements.