Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modified asymmetric explicit group (AEG) FDTD method for TM waves propagation

In this paper, a new numerical method for two dimensional electromagnetic wave propagation is presented in order to increase the maximum time step size arising from the stability consideration and to reduce its computational time. The method is based on the modified asymmetric approximation that can easily converted to explicit form. The performance of the method known as modified asymmetric explicit group (AEG) is compared with the conventional finite difference time domain (FDTD) and other methods of natural ordering.
Descemet's Stripping Automated Endothelial Keratoplasty: Then and Now

The first successful human EK dates back to 1956, when Tillet sutured a posterior stromal graft to the overlying recipient stroma after creating an anterior flap. However, this and other early EK techniques were wrought with the disadvantages associated with graft suturing. It was not until Melles et al used air to hold a posterior lamellar graft in place in 1998 that modern-day EK was born. This procedure, named posterior lamellar keratoplasty, performed through a 9-mm limbal incision, had the advantages of rapid visual recovery, conservation of the cornea’s anterior topography, and better tectonic strength than PK. Terry modified posterior lamellar keratoplasty with the introduction of new instruments, an artificial anterior chamber (AC), and cohesive viscoelastic. He debuted deep lamellar endothelial keratoplasty (DLEK) in a prospective clinical trial in the United States in 2000. Melles et al introduced his ‘‘descemetorhexis’’ in 2004, eliminating the challenging step of manual dissection and excision of the recipient posterior stroma before graft insertion. Price and Price’s ensuing modified procedure was called Descemet’s stripping endothelial keratoplasty (DSEK). In
Doubled Plots: Romance and History

Doubled Plots: Romance and History edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden, with essays by Susan L. Blake, Stephanie Burley, Mary Paniccia Carden, Rita B. Dandridge, Janet Dean, Charles H. Hinnant, Rita Keresztesi, Huining Ouyang, Susan Strehle, and Karin E. Westman. An examination of how two diverse genres parallel and reflect each other. In art, myth, and popular culture, romance is connected with the realm of emotions, private thought, and sentimentality. History, its counterpart, is the seemingly objective compendium of public fact. In theory, the two genres are diametrically opposed, offering widely divergent views of human experience. In this collection of essays, however, the writers challenge these basic assumptions and consider the two as parallel and as reflections of each other. Looking closely at specific narratives, they argue that romance and history share expectations and purposes and create the metaphors that can either hold cultures and institutions together or drive them apart. The writers explore the internal contradictions of both genres, as seen in works in which the elements of both romance and history are present. The theme that flows throughout this collection is that romance literature and art frequently engage with or comment on actual historical events or histories. Included among the contributions are discussions of romance and race in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, the Rudolph Valentino film classic The Sheik, the series of English "Regency Romance" novels, the constructs of love and history in two of Alice McDermott's novels, and a feminist reading of African American women's historical romances. Moreover, the essays approach romance and history from a variety of critical and political perspectives and examine a wide selection of romances from the 1800s to contemporary times. They look at bestsellers and literary classics, at texts by and for white audiences, and at works created by writers on the margins of Western culture. The anthology is a radical approach to romance, a genre often dismissed as diversionary and reactionary. It explores how well this genre serves for critical examinations of history. Susan Strehle is a professor of English at Binghamton University. Mary Paniccia Carden is an assistant professor of English at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.
Molecular profiling diagnosis in unknown primary cancer: accuracy and ability to complement standard pathology.

BACKGROUND Molecular tumor profiling (MTP) is a potentially powerful diagnostic tool for identifying the tissue of origin in patients with cancer of unknown primary (CUP). However, validation of the accuracy and clinical value of MTP has been difficult because the anatomic primary site in most patients is never identified. METHODS From March 2008 through January 2010, clinicopathologic data from 171 CUP patients who had MTP (CancerTYPE ID; bioTheranostics, Inc, San Diego, CA) performed on archived material were evaluated. The accuracy of MTP diagnoses was evaluated by comparison with (1) latent primary tumor sites found months/years later; (2) initial single diagnoses by immunohistochemistry (IHC); and (3) additional directed IHC and/or clinicopathologic findings evaluated after MTP diagnoses. RESULTS A single MTP diagnosis was made in 144 of 149 patients with adequate tumor specimens. Eighteen of 24 patients with latent primaries discovered months to years later had correct diagnoses by MTP (75%), and these diagnoses compared favorably with IHC. Single IHC diagnoses matched MTP diagnoses in 40 of 52 patients (77%). IHC predictions of 2 or more possible primaries compared poorly with MTP diagnoses. However, additional targeted IHC and clinical/histologic evaluation supported the MTP diagnosis in 26 of 35 patients (74%). Clinical features were usually consistent with MTP diagnoses (70%). CONCLUSIONS The diagnostic accuracy of this MTP assay was supported by a high level of agreement with identified latent primaries (75%), single IHC diagnoses (77%), and additional directed IHC and/or clinical/histologic findings (74%) prompted by the MTP diagnoses. MTP complements standard pathologic evaluation in determining the tissue of origin in patients with CUP, particularly when IHC is inconclusive.
An Interactive Approach with Off-Line and On-Line Handwritten Text Recognition Combination for Transcribing Historical Documents

Automatic transcription of historical documents is becoming an important research topic, specially because of the increasing number of digitised historical documents that libraries and archives are publishing. However, state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems are far from being perfect. Therefore, to have perfect transcriptions, human expert revision is required to really produce a transcription of standard quality. In this context, an interactive assistive scenario, where the automatic system and the human transcriber cooperate to generate the perfect transcription, would allow for a more effective approach. In this paper we present a multimodal interactive transcription system where user feedback is provided by means of touchscreen pen strokes, traditional keyboard and mouse operations. The combination of both the main and the feedback data stream is based on the use of Confusion Networks derived from the output of the on-line and off-line handwritten text recognition systems. The use of the proposed combination help to optimise overall performance and usability.
Self-Distillation Mixup Training for Non-autoregressive Neural Machine Translation

Recently, non-autoregressive (NAT) models predict outputs in parallel, achieving substantial improvements in generation speed compared to autoregressive (AT) models. While performing worse on raw data, most NAT models are trained as student models on distilled data generated by AT teacher models, which is known as sequence-level Knowledge Distillation. An effective training strategy to improve the performance of AT models is Self-Distillation Mixup (SDM) Training, which pre-trains a model on raw data, generates distilled data by the pre-trained model itself and finally re-trains a model on the combination of raw data and distilled data. In this work, we aim to view SDM for NAT models, but find directly adopting SDM to NAT models gains no improvements in terms of translation quality. Through careful analysis, we observe the invalidation is correlated to Modeling Diversity and Confirmation Bias between the AT teacher model and the NAT student models. Based on these findings, we propose an enhanced strategy named SDMRT by adding two stages to classic SDM: one is Pre-Rerank on self-distilled data, the other is Fine-Tune on Filtered teacher-distilled data. Our results outperform baselines by 0.6 to 1.2 BLEU on multiple NAT models. As another bonus, for Iterative Refinement NAT models, our methods can outperform baselines within half iteration number, which means 2X acceleration.
Expressed sequence tag analysis of human retina for the NEIBank Project: retbindin, an abundant, novel retinal cDNA and alternative splicing of other retina-preferred gene transcripts.

PURPOSE Expressed sequence tag (EST) analysis was performed on un-normalized, unamplified cDNA libraries constructed from adult human retina to examine the expression profile of the tissue and to contribute resources for functional genomics studies. METHODS Two size fractionated cDNA libraries (designated hd and he) were constructed from human retina RNA. Clones were randomly selected for sequencing and analyzed using the bioinformatics program GRIST (GRouping and Identification of Sequence Tags). PCR, Northern blotting and other techniques have been used to examine selected novel transcripts. RESULTS After informatics analysis, 2200 retina cDNAs yield 1254 unique clusters, potentially representing individual genes. Opsin is the most abundant transcript and other retina transcripts are prominently represented. One abundant cluster of cDNAs encodes retbindin, a novel, retina preferred transcript which has sequence similarity to riboflavin binding proteins and whose gene is on chromosome 19. Variant transcripts of known retina genes are also observed, including an alternative exon in the coding sequence of the transcription factor NRL and a skipped coding sequence exon in the phosphodiesterase gammasubunit (PDE6G). CONCLUSIONS The new retina cDNA libraries compare favorably in quality with those already represented in public databases. They are rich in retina specific sequences and include abundant cDNAs for a novel protein, retbindin. The function of retbindin remains to be determined, but it is a candidate for flavinoid or carotenoid binding. Analysis of multiple clones for highly expressed retina genes reveals several alternative splice variants in both coding and noncoding sequences which may have functional significance. The validated set of retina cDNAs will contribute to a nonredundant set for microarray construction.
What Can Low-Income Countries Expect from Adopting Inflation Targeting?

Inflation targeting (IT) is a relatively new monetary policy framework for low-income countries (LICs). The limited number of LICs with an IT framework and the short time that has elapsed since the adoption of this framework explains why there are no previous empirical studies on the performance of IT in LICs. This paper has made a first attempt at filling this gap. It finds that inflation targeting appears to be associated with lower inflation and inflation volatility. At the same time, there is no robust evidence of an adverse impact on output. This may explain the appeal of IT for many LICs, where building credibility of monetary policy is difficult and minimizing output costs of reducing inflation is imperative for social and political reasons.
Growing skull fracture with cerebrospinal fluid fistula: A rare case report and its management strategies

The growing skull fracture (GSF) occurs in younger age group as a sequel of trauma. The most common site of these lesions is parietal region. Here we are presenting a case of GSF of posterior fossa with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) fistula. As per literature, we have not found a single case of GSF in the posterior fossa with CSF fistula. The aim of this presentation is discussing the unusual presentation of GSF and its management.
Written action plans for asthma in children.

BACKGROUND While all asthma consensus statements recommend the use of written action plan (WAP) as a central part of asthma management, a recent systematic review of randomised trials highlighted the paucity of trials where the only difference between groups was the provision or not of a written action plan. OBJECTIVES The objectives of this review were firstly to evaluate the independent effect of providing versus not providing a written action plan in children and adolescents with asthma, and secondly to compare the effect of different written action plans. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Airways Group Specialised Register (November 2004), which is derived from searches of CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, as well as handsearched respiratory journals, and meeting abstracts. We also searched bibliographies of included studies and identified review articles. SELECTION CRITERIA Randomised controlled trials were included if they compared a written action plan with no written action plan, or different written action plans with each other. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two authors independently selected the trials, assessed trial quality and extracted the data. Study authors were contacted for additional information. MAIN RESULTS Four trials (three RCTs and one quasi-RCT) involving 355 children were included. Children using symptom-based WAPs had lower risk of exacerbations which required an acute care visit (N = 5; RR 0.73; 95% CI 0.55 to 0.99). The number needed to treat to prevent one acute care visit was 9 (95% CI 5 to 138). Symptom monitoring was preferred over peak flow monitoring by children (N = 2; RR 1.21; 95% CI 1.00 to 1.46), but parents showed no preference (N = 2; RR 0.96; 95% CI 0.18 to 2.11). Children assigned to peak flow-based action plans reduced by 1/2 day the number of symptomatic days per week (N = 2; mean difference: 0.45 days/week; 95% CI 0.04 to 0.26). There were no significant group differences in the rate of exacerbation requiring oral steroids or admission, school absenteeism, lung function, symptom score, quality of life, and withdrawals. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS The evidence suggests that symptom-based WAP are superior to peak flow WAP for preventing acute care visits although there is insufficient data to firmly conclude whether the observed superiority is conferred by greater adherence to the monitoring strategy, earlier identification of onset of deteriorations, higher threshold for presentation to acute care settings, or the specific treatment recommendations.
Rotational diffusion affects the dynamical self-assembly pathways of patchy particles

Significance Recent experiments show that the rotational diffusion of proteins and patchy colloids does not always follow the Stokes–Einstein relation, especially in crowded environments or with the use of external fields. Because cellular cytoplasm is very crowded, this finding can have consequences for protein complex formation such as viruses. We study the kinetic network of simple models for proteins and patchy colloids and find that their dynamical self-assembly pathways change with varying the rotational diffusion constant. In particular, lowering the rotational diffusion avoids frustrated intermediate states. Such control of kinetic networks would also benefit the design of new self-assembled functional materials. Predicting the self-assembly kinetics of particles with anisotropic interactions, such as colloidal patchy particles or proteins with multiple binding sites, is important for the design of novel high-tech materials, as well as for understanding biological systems, e.g., viruses or regulatory networks. Often stochastic in nature, such self-assembly processes are fundamentally governed by rotational and translational diffusion. Whereas the rotational diffusion constant of particles is usually considered to be coupled to the translational diffusion via the Stokes–Einstein relation, in the past decade it has become clear that they can be independently altered by molecular crowding agents or via external fields. Because virus capsids naturally assemble in crowded environments such as the cell cytoplasm but also in aqueous solution in vitro, it is important to investigate how varying the rotational diffusion with respect to transitional diffusion alters the kinetic pathways of self-assembly. Kinetic trapping in malformed or intermediate structures often impedes a direct simulation approach of a kinetic network by dramatically slowing down the relaxation to the designed ground state. However, using recently developed path-sampling techniques, we can sample and analyze the entire self-assembly kinetic network of simple patchy particle systems. For assembly of a designed cluster of patchy particles we find that changing the rotational diffusion does not change the equilibrium constants, but significantly affects the dynamical pathways, and enhances (suppresses) the overall relaxation process and the yield of the target structure, by avoiding (encountering) frustrated states. Besides insight, this finding provides a design principle for improved control of nanoparticle self-assembly.
Food aroma partition between packaging materials and fatty food simulants

By means of thermal desorption experiments, the partition equilibrium (partition coefficient, K) was analysed for six food aroma components (d-limonene, n-decane, ethyl caproate, phenylethanol, n-hexanol and hexanal) between three sealable polymer films suitable for direct food contact (ultra-low density polyethylene, ULDPE; ionomer, ION; and polyester, PET) and four fatty food simulants (ethanol 95%, EtOH; sunflower oil, Oil; n-heptane, HEP; and iso-octane, OCT). The results showed that aroma scalping is highly dependent on the fatty food simulant utilized. Polar aroma components were more sorbed into polymers in the presence of a non-polar fatty food simulant, and vice versa. K values in the presence of Oil were always between those in EtOH and in HEP or OCT. In general, PET was the packaging film which showed the lowest partition coefficient for non-polar components while ULDPE showed the lowest partition for polar aromas. The partition equilibrium of mixed d-limonene, ethyl caproate, and n-hexanol was also determined. The differences in K values between isolated aromas and mixed aromas were small. In general, the most sorbed aroma showed increased partition by mixture while the partition of the least sorbed was reduced.
A Power-Efficient Continuous-Time Incremental Sigma-Delta ADC for Neural Recording Systems

This paper presents an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) dedicated to neural recording systems. By using two continuous-time incremental sigma-delta ADCs in a pipeline configuration, the proposed ADC can achieve high-resolution without sacrificing the conversion rate. This two-step architecture is also power-efficient, as the resolution requirement for the incremental sigma-delta ADC in each step is significantly relaxed. To further enhance the power efficiency, a class-AB output stage and a dynamic summing comparator are used to implement the sigma-delta modulators. A prototype chip, designed and fabricated in a standard 0.18 μm CMOS process, validates the proposed ADC architecture. Measurement results show that the ADC achieves a peak signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio of 75.9 dB over a 4 kHz bandwidth; the power consumption is 34.8 μW, which corresponds to a figure-of-merit of 0.85 pJ/conv.
Effect of non-surgical periodontal therapy on serum levels of TNF-a, IL-6 and C-reactive protein in periodontitis subjects with stable coronary heart disease.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of periodontal non-surgical therapy on serum levels of the inflammatory cytokines in chronic periodontitis subjects with stable coronary heart disease. METHODS Seventy-five subjects with both chronic periodontitis (CP) and stable coronary heart disease (CHD) were enrolled in the study. Forty subjects received periodontal nonsurgical treatment including oral hygiene instruction, scaling and root planing, whereas 35 subjects received oral hygiene instruction only. At baseline and 3 months after completion of periodontal treatment, clinical periodontal parameters were recorded. Serum levels of tumour necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-6 (IL-6) and C-reactive protein (CRP), lipid profile markers and white blood cell count were assayed. Pearson's correlation analysis was applied to examine the correlation between the change of TNF-α, IL-6 and CRP levels and the change of periodontal parameters after non-surgical periodontal treatment. RESULTS At baseline, there were no statistical differences in all clinical, biochemical parameters and cytokine levels between these two groups. Three months later in the treatment group, all clinical parameters improved significantly and the serum levels of TNF-α, IL-6, and CRP reduced significantly. Reduction of TNF-α was significantly positively correlated with the reduction of bleeding index and plaque index; reduction of IL-6 was significantly positively correlated with the reduction of clinical attachment loss; reduction of CRP was significantly positively correlated with the reduction of clinical attachment loss and plaque index. CONCLUSION Non-surgical periodontal therapy decreased serum TNF-α, IL-6 and CRP levels in CP subjects with stable CHD, which could help to reduce the inflammatory burden of stable coronary heart disease subjects.
A Structural Basis for the Biosynthesis of the Major Chlorogenic Acids Found in Coffee1[W][OA]

Chlorogenic acids (CGAs) are a group of phenolic secondary metabolites produced by certain plant species and an important component of coffee (Coffea spp.). The CGAs have been implicated in biotic and abiotic stress responses, while the related shikimate esters are key intermediates for lignin biosynthesis. Here, two hydroxycinnamoyl-coenzyme A shikimate/quinate hydroxycinnamoyl transferases (HCT/HQT) from coffee were biochemically characterized. We show, to our knowledge for the first time, that in vitro, HCT is capable of synthesizing the 3,5-O-dicaffeoylquinic acid diester, a major constituent of the immature coffee grain. In order to further understand the substrate specificity and catalytic mechanism of the HCT/HQT, we performed structural and mutagenesis studies of HCT. The three-dimensional structure of a native HCT and a proteolytically stable lysine mutant enabled the identification of important residues involved in substrate specificity and catalysis. Site-directed mutagenesis confirmed the role of residues leucine-400 and phenylalanine-402 in substrate specificity and of histidine-153 and the valine-31 to proline-37 loop in catalysis. In addition, the histidine-154-asparagine mutant was observed to produce 4-fold more dichlorogenic acids compared with the native protein. These data provide, to our knowledge, the first structural characterization of a HCT and, in conjunction with the biochemical and mutagenesis studies presented here, delineate the underlying molecular-level determinants for substrate specificity and catalysis. This work has potential applications in fine-tuning the levels of shikimate and quinate esters (CGAs including dichlorogenic acids) in different plant species in order to generate reduced or elevated levels of the desired target compounds.