Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ASSESSMENT OF STRESS DISTRIBUTION IN DARAB'S ROODBAL EMBANKMEND DAM USING COMMERCIAL CODE FLAC

Abstract. Evaluation of performance and behavior of a dam is viable by monitoring of dam using instrumentation. Stress and deformation analysis during end of construction is one of the important parameters in analysis, design, and stability of an embankment dam. In this study, a comparison between various models in stress and deformation analysis of Roodbal dam during end of construction using finite element method in FLAC software was established. The results showed that Mohr-Coulomb model has good accuracy in analysis of vertical settlement of dam core. It was also known that vertical displacement of Darab's Roodbal dam is slow ascending which is slower in upstream than downstream shell. The overall stress in dam body is also slow ascending that shifted from lower level near the core to middle lower level of core during first impoundment through the end of first 10-year utilization period. The analysis over whole body showed that after completion of construction and then initial impoundment of dam pore water pressure in the core of dam is 370 kPa which was the same in middle level of core. According to analysis conducted over whole body of dam, displacement reached 96 cm after completion of construction which was also the same for one-third middle level of core.
Maximising revenue in cloud computing markets by means of economically enhanced SLA management

This paper proposes a bidirectional communication between market brokers and resource managers in Cloud Computing Markets. This communication is implemented by means of an Economically Enhanced Resource Manager (EERM), that supports the negotiation process by deciding which tasks can be allocated or not, and under which economic and technical conditions. The EERM also uses the economic information that collects from market layers to manage the resources accordingly to concrete BLOs. This paper shows several Business Policies and Rules for maximizing the revenue of a Cloud Provider that sells its services and resources in a market. Their validity is demonstrated through several experiments that shown how the application of these rules can have a positive influence in the revenue and minimize the violations of Service-Level Agreements.
Natural Polyphenols Targeting Senescence: A Novel Prevention and Therapy Strategy for Cancer

Cancer is one of the most serious diseases endangering human health. In view of the side effects caused by chemotherapy and radiotherapy, it is necessary to develop low-toxic anti-cancer compounds. Polyphenols are natural compounds with anti-cancer properties and their application is a considerable choice. Pro-senescence therapy is a recently proposed anti-cancer strategy and has been shown to effectively inhibit cancer. It is of great significance to clarify the mechanisms of polyphenols on tumor suppression by inducing senescence. In this review, we delineated the characteristics of senescent cells, and summarized the mechanisms of polyphenols targeting tumor microenvironment and inducing cancer cell senescence for cancer prevention and therapy. Although many studies have shown that polyphenols effectively inhibit cancer by targeting senescence, it warrants further investigation in preclinical and clinical studies.
Sarcopenia in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction.

AIMS To evaluate the prevalence of pre-sarcopenia and sarcopenia and their relationship with clinical variables, physical activity, quality of life, and diet in patients with heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (HFrEF). METHODS We performed a cross-sectional study in patients with HFrEF and matched controls. Clinical, laboratory analysis, dual-emission X-ray densitometry, handgrip strength, and physical activity level questionnaire assessments were performed. Echocardiography, quality of life, gait speed, and 24-hour nutritional recall questionnaire were also analyzed. Pre-sarcopenia and sarcopenia were defined according to the European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People with the cut-off points of the Foundation for the National Institute of Health. RESULTS 79 patients and 143 controls were enrolled. Pre-sarcopenia was found in 30.4%, and sarcopenia in 10.1% of the patients. Pre-sarcopenic patients were older and shorter, and had more fractures, higher calcemia, and creatinine (P < 0.05). Sarcopenic patients were older and had higher creatinine and TSH (P < 0.05). After multiple logistic regression analysis, only age was associated with pre-sarcopenia (OR: 1.046; CI 1.004-1.095; P = 0.04) and SP (OR: 1.119; CI 1.039-1.229; P = 0.008). Women with HFrEF presented higher lean mass than controls (P < 0.001), but were weaker (P < 0.001), while men presented lower lean mass (P < 0.001). Low gait speed was associated with right ventricular dysfunction (P = 0.016) and lower left ventricular ejection fraction (P = 0.037). CONCLUSION Pre-sarcopenia and sarcopenia were associated with aging. Despite having higher lean mass, women with HFrEF were weaker. Low gait speed was associated with biventricular systolic dysfunction.
Role of Membrane Tubulation in NPC1-Mediated Cholesterol Efflux

by Amy Rohly Niemann Pick Disease Type C (NPC) is an autosomal recessive disorder characterized by abnormal lipid trafficking and storage. The majority of NPC cases are caused by mutations in the NPC1 protein, a multi-pass transmembrane protein found primarily in late endosomes and lysosomes. Preliminary studies have shown that wild type NPC1 localizes to tubulovesicular membranes (TVMs) that move rapidly between membrane compartments, whereas NPC1-I1061T mutant localizes primarily to immobile spherical vesicles. Observations from these experiments support the hypothesis that cholesterol transport is achieved through membrane tubulation and exchange. In order to determine the role of TVMs in cholesterol transport, TVM-associated proteins including EHD1 and Rabs7-9 were investigated in NPC1 TVMs through transfection of wild type and mutant constructs and immunoprecipitation studies. In addition, cholesterol localization was assessed in relation to NPC1 and Rab8 TVMs. Results indicate that EHD1, Rab8, and Rab9 are necessary for NPC1 TVM formation and
WaveCSN: Cascade Segmentation Network for Hip Landmark Detection

Landmark detection in hip X-ray images plays a critical role in diagnosis of Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip (DDH) and surgeries of Total Hip Arthroplasty (THA). Regression and heatmap techniques of convolution network could obtain reasonable results. However, they have limitations in either robustness or precision given the complexities and intensity inhomogeneities of hip X-ray images. In this paper, we propose a Wave-like Cascade Segmentation Network (WaveCSN) to improve the accuracy of landmark detection by transforming landmark detection into area segmentation. The WaveCSN consists of three basic sub-networks and each sub-network is composed of a U-net module, an indicate module and a max-MSER module. The U-net undertakes the task to generate masks, and the indicate module is trained to distinguish the masks and ground truth. The U-net and indicate module are trained in turns, in which process the generated masks are supervised to be more and more alike to the ground truth. The max-MSER module ensures landmarks can be extracted from the generated masks precisely. We present two professional datasets (DDH and THA) for the first time and evaluate the WaveCSN on them. Our results prove that the WaveCSN can improve 2.66 and 4.11 pixels at least on these two datasets compared to other methods, and achieves the state-of-the-art for landmark detection in hip X-ray images.
Sensor Sensibility—HIV-1 and the Innate Immune Response

Innate immunity represents the human immune system’s first line of defense against a pathogenic intruder and is initiated by the recognition of conserved molecular structures known as pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) by specialized cellular sensors, called pattern recognition receptors (PRRs). Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is a unique human RNA virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in infected individuals. During the replication cycle, HIV-1 undergoes reverse transcription of its RNA genome and integrates the resulting DNA into the human genome. Subsequently, transcription of the integrated provirus results in production of new virions and spreading infection of the virus. Throughout the viral replication cycle, numerous nucleic acid derived PAMPs can be recognized by a diverse set of innate immune sensors in infected cells. However, HIV-1 has evolved efficient strategies to evade or counteract this immune surveillance and the downstream responses. Understanding the molecular underpinnings of the concerted actions of the innate immune system, as well as the corresponding viral evasion mechanisms during infection, is critical to understanding HIV-1 transmission and pathogenesis, and may provide important guidance for the design of appropriate adjuvant and vaccine strategies. Here, we summarize current knowledge of the molecular basis for sensing HIV-1 in human cells, including CD4+ T cells, dendritic cells, and macrophages. Furthermore, we discuss the underlying mechanisms by which innate sensing is regulated, and describe the strategies developed by HIV-1 to evade sensing and immune responses.
Adaptive MapReduce Similarity Joins Extended

Similarity joins are a fundamental database operation. Given data sets S and R, the goal of a similarity join is to find all points x ∈ S and y ∈ R with distance at most r. Recent research has investigated how locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) can be used for similarity join, and in particular two recent lines of work have made exciting progress on LSH-based join performance. Hu, Tao, and Yi (PODS 17) investigated joins in a massively parallel setting, showing strong results that adapt to the size of the output. Meanwhile, Ahle, Aumüller, and Pagh (SODA 17) showed a sequential algorithm that adapts to the structure of the data, matching classic bounds in the worst case but improving them significantly on more structured data. We show that this adaptive strategy can be adapted to the parallel setting, combining the advantages of these approaches. In particular, we show that a simple modification to Hu et al.’s algorithm achieves bounds that depend on the density of points in the dataset as well as the total outsize of the output. Our algorithm uses no extra parameters over other LSH approaches (in particular, its execution does not depend on the structure of the dataset), and is likely to be efficient in practice.
RE : A point-to-point response to Reviewer # 1 ’ s comments “ Detection of atmospheric gaseous amines and amides by a high resolution time-of-flight chemical ionization mass spectrometer with protonated ethanol reagent ions ” ( acp-2016-484 )

RE: A point-to-point response to Reviewer #1’s comments “Detection of atmospheric gaseous amines and amides by a high resolution time-of-flight chemical ionization mass spectrometer with protonated ethanol reagent ions” (acp-2016-484) by Lei Yao, Ming-Yi Wang, Xin-Ke Wang, Yi-Jun Liu, Hang-Fei Chen, Jun Zheng, Wei Nie, Ai-Jun Ding, Fu-Hai Geng, Dong-Fang Wang, Jian-Min Chen, Douglas R. Worsnop, and Lin Wang
Sentiment Analysis using Optimal Feature and Ensemble Classifier

Sentiment Analysis means opinion mining. The goal is to identify people’s opinions, perceptions, emotions toward entities and their attribute. Opinions are in positive, negative, and neutral in nature. For classifications of these opinions, different classifier can be used. This paper, improve the accuracy of ensemble classifier i.e. random forest and also perform analysis on the large dataset of movie reviews with the help of various classifiers like Support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, naive bayes on proposed optimal features. The proposed method achieves better accuracy than the previous approaches by using optimal features and TF-IDF for finding the frequency of term occurs in a document and for identifying how the term important is. Here, three metrics are used i.e. F-measure, Precision and recall for evaluating the performance of classifiers.
Mechanism of soft x-ray continuum radiation from low-energy pinch discharges of hydrogen and ultra-low field ignition of solid fuels

EUV continuum radiation (10–30 nm) arising only from very low energy pulsed pinch gas discharges comprising some hydrogen was first observed at BlackLight Power, Inc. and reproduced at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The source was determined to be due to the transition of H to the lower-energy hydrogen or hydrino state H(1/4) whose emission matches that observed wherein alternative sources were eliminated. The identity of the catalyst that accepts 3 · 27.2 eV from the H to cause the H to H(1/4) transition was determined to HOH versus 3H. The mechanism was elucidated using different oxide-coated electrodes that were selective in forming HOH versus plasma forming metal atoms as well as from the intensity profile that was a mismatch for the multi-body reaction required during 3H catalysis. The HOH catalyst was further shown to give EUV radiation of the same nature by igniting a solid fuel comprising a source of H and HOH catalyst by passing a low voltage, high current through the fuel to produce explosive plasma. No chemical reaction can release such high-energy light. No high field existed to form highly ionized ions that could give radiation in this EUV region that persisted even without power input. This plasma source serves as strong evidence for the existence of the transition of H to hydrino H(1/4) by HOH as the catalyst and a corresponding new power source wherein initial extraordinarily brilliant light-emitting prototypes are already producing photovoltaic generated electrical power. The hydrino product of a catalyst reaction of atomic hydrogen was analyzed by multiple spectroscopic techniques. Moreover, the mH catalyst was identified to be active in astronomical sources such as the Sun, stars and interstellar medium wherein the characteristics of hydrino match those of the dark matter of the Universe.
On the Feasibility of Rerouting-Based DDoS Defenses

Large botnet-based flooding attacks have recently demonstrated unprecedented damage. However, the best-known end-to-end availability guarantees against flooding attacks require costly global-scale coordination among autonomous systems (ASes). A recent proposal called routing around congestion (or RAC) attempts to offer strong end-to-end availability to a selected critical flow by dynamically rerouting it to an uncongested detour path without requiring any inter-AS coordination. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the (in)feasibility of the RAC defense and points out that its rerouting approach, though intriguing, cannot possibly solve the challenging flooding problem. An effective RAC solution should find an inter-domain detour path for its critical flow with the two following desired properties: (1) it guarantees the establishment of an arbitrary detour path of its choice, and (2) it isolates the established detour path from non-critical flows so that the path is used exclusively for its critical flow. However, we show a fundamental trade-off between the two desired properties, and as a result, only one of them can be achieved but not both. Worse yet, we show that failing to achieve either of the two properties makes the RAC defense not just ineffective but nearly unusable. When the newly established detour path is not isolated, a new adaptive adversary can detect it in real time and immediately congest the path, defeating the goals of the RAC defense. Conversely, when the establishment of an arbitrary detour path is not guaranteed, more than 80% of critical flows we test have only a small number (e.g., three or less) of detour paths that can actually be established and disjoint from each other, which significantly restricts the available options for the reliable RAC operation. The first lesson of this study is that BGP-based rerouting solutions in the current inter-domain infrastructure seem to be impractical due to implicit assumptions (e.g., the invisibility of poisoning messages) that are unattainable in BGP's current practice. Second, we learn that the analysis of protocol specifications alone is insufficient for the feasibility study of any new defense proposal and, thus, additional rigorous security analysis and various network evaluations, including real-world testing, are required. Finally, our findings in this paper agree well with the conclusion of the major literature about end-to-end guarantees; that is, strong end-to-end availability should be a security feature of the Internet routing by design, not an ad hoc feature obtained via exploiting current routing protocols.
CVIA Dual-Layer Computed Tomography in Cardiovascular Imaging

Since the introduction of dual-energy CT (DECT) in 1976 [1,2], several studies have reported its advantages in various examinations, including the quantification of calcium [3], iron [4], and fat [5]. However, the dual-energy system remained limited to research applications because of its prolonged scan time. Approximately three decades later, Siemens introduced the dualsource DECT scanner (DSCT, SOMATOM Definition; Siemens, Erlangen, Germany) in 2005 [6], and GE launched the rapid peak kilovoltage (kVp) switching CT (KVSCT, Discovery CT750 HD; GE. Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, USA) scanner in 2010 [7], thereby drastically reducing the misregistration attributed to the motion in DECT and facilitating the procurement of dualenergy data in any examination during a single breath hold. However, to date, DECT has not been extensively used in clinical practice, especially cardiovascular imaging. In 2015, Philips introduced the dual-layer DECT scanner (DLCT, IQon Spectral CT; Philips Healthcare, Best, Netherlands), which is a new DECT system in 2018. This review aims to summarize the principle and clinical efficacy of DLCT compared to other DECT systems in cardiovascular imaging. BasIC pRINCIples Of DUal-eNeRgy COmpUTeD TOmOgRaphy
Exploring the consequences of human multitasking in industrial automation projects: a tool to mitigate impacts – Part II

Abstract Each industrial automation project includes tasks that strongly depend on human factors, many of which may belong to the critical path or chain of the project. Multitasking significantly affects human productivity. The reduction in productivity has a direct result of delaying the primary task, which may cause an overall delay to the project with cost and time overruns. A project should be seen with respect to a global environment, such as that of a company, where resources are shared among its portfolio of projects. Although multitasking might have negative results, it is something that cannot be eliminated but can be mitigated by project managers. This article presents the effects of multitasking on human productivity, especially when the tasks are complex, like programmable logic controller (PLC)/supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software development. Using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method, a simple tool is created to be used by project managers, in order to assist them in decision-making. Criteria that influence these decisions are referenced, and their priority vectors are proposed. In addition, some real examples are given. Project managers face a complex situation when they are asked to decide on the allocation of resources and priorities among different projects. Parameters that are difficult to predict in real situations may have a significant role in the decision-making process. There are a lot of published works based on AHP applications in different fields, but there is a gap in the field of industrial automation projects and the related project manager’s decision-making. This study focuses on these decision-making processes that determine which tasks should be paused or not for a better allocation of resources, taking into account the global environment of a technical company. The tool can be implemented with changing criteria and priority vectors to adapt to different types of projects. Future research could identify additional criteria and subcriteria with different priority vectors, depending on different project specifications. This article is the extended version (Part II) of CCC 2017 Procedia Engineering paper.
An Overview of Methods for Causal Inference from Observational Studies

This chapter provides a brief overview of causal-inference methods found in the health sciences. It is convenient to divide these methods into a few broad classes: Those based on formal models of causation, especially potential outcomes; those based on canonical considerations, in which causality is a property of an association to be diagnosed by symptoms and signs; and those based on methodologic modeling. These are by no means mutually exclusive approaches; for example, one may (though need not) base a methodologic model on potential outcomes, and a canonical approach may use modeling methods to address specific considerations. Rather, the categories reflect historical traditions that until recently had only limited intersection.
Serum procalcitonin concentrations in dogs with induced endotoxemia

Abstract Background Procalcitonin (PCT) is an important biomarker for sepsis in human medicine, but there is little information regarding PCT as a biomarker for sepsis in dogs. There are no controlled studies evaluating serial concentrations of PCT in dogs. Hypothesis/Objective That PCT would be rapidly detectable in serum after injection of LPS and would remain increased for at least 24 hours. Objective was to evaluate serial serum PCT concentrations in dogs after a single IV injection of LPS compared to placebo. Animals Six healthy mixed breed dogs. Methods A nonrandomized, placebo‐controlled, crossover study was performed. Dogs were initially injected with placebo (0.9% NaCl; 1 mL, IV) and then experimental endotoxemia was induced by injecting lipopolysaccharide (LPS; 2 μg/kg, IV, once) after a 5‐day washout period. Serial blood samples were collected for measurement of serum PCT after each injection. Difference in median PCT concentration between serial time points was assessed using a mixed effects model. Results After LPS administration, blood pressure decreased and body temperature increased along with the development of lethargy, vomiting, and diarrhea. Procalcitonin was significantly increased compared to baseline by 2 hours after injection of LPS (median = 67.9 versus 172.8, range = 46.0‐74.1 versus 99.5‐295.9, P = .0002) and remained significantly increased for 12 hours (median = 205.9, range = 119.9‐297.4) with return to baseline by 48 hours. Procalcitonin was significantly higher than placebo 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 24 hours after injection. There were no significant differences in PCT between time 0 and any of the subsequent time points in the saline group. Conclusions and Clinical Importance Procalcitonin expression is likely to be a clinically useful biomarker for sepsis in dogs and might have an additional role in prognostication and therapeutic decision‐making.