Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circulating Matrix Metalloproteinase-9 Level Is Associated with Cerebral White Matter Hyperintensities in Non-Stroke Individuals

Backgrounds: The pathogenesis of cerebral white matter hyperintensities (WMH) has been poorly understood. Our aim was to investigate the association of circulating proteins, the biomarkers of inflammation, blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction, and thrombosis with WMH in non-stroke individuals. Methods: Demographic, laboratory, and brain magnetic resonance imaging parameters were prospectively analyzed in 137 subjects. The relationship between plasma interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-α, matrx-metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9), plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 and overt WMH (Fazekas grading score ≥2) was analyzed. Results: In univariate analysis, old age, high blood pressure, history of hypertension, and elevated plasma MMP-9 level were associated with overt WMH. In multivariate analysis, plasma MMP-9 still maintained a significant association with WMH. Plasma MMP-9 level was weakly but significantly associated with WMH volume (r = 0.232, p = 0.006). All the other circulating proteins examined failed to demonstrate a significant relationship with WMH. Conclusions: Plasma MMP-9 is associated with pathophysiology of WMH development.
Oceanic Scene Recognition Using Graph-of-Words (GoW)

In this paper, we focus on recognition of oceanic scene images. This task is particularly important for monitoring the oceanic environment with the cameras mounted at different locations. For this purpose, a new image dataset, namely, Flickr Oceanic Scene Dataset (FOSD) 1, is collected. Although it is intuitive to use this dataset to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) from scratch, the relatively limited size of this dataset prevents us from doing so. One option is to encode the visual words learnt from deep convolutional features and it has been shown that these visual words outperform the fully-connected (FC) features extracted using a pre-trained CNN. However, it is commonly known that these word encoders generally do not utilise the spatial layout of words, whereas the spatial information is important to representation of long-range image characteristics. Thus, we propose a new image descriptor: Graph-of-Words (GoW), to capture the higher order spatial relationship between words, simply because graphs are able to encode the complicated spatial layout of node. This descriptor is also fused with three state-of-the-art word encoders to exploit richer characteristics. The GoW descriptor and the fused variants produce promising results in the oceanic and aerial scene recognition tasks. We attribute these results to the fact that the GoW descriptor encodes both the short-range and long-range higher-order spatial relationships between words.
Defective interfering influenza viruses.

INTRODUCTION . 620 NOMENCLATURE . 620 PRODUCTION OF INFLUENZA DI VIRUS . 621 ASSAY OF INFLUENZA DI VIRUS. 621 PROPERTIES OF INFLUENZA DI VIRUS . 623 GENOME OF INFLUENZA DI VIRUS . 624 Standard Virus RNAs . 625 DI Viral RNAs . 626 ROLE OF DI RNA IN VIRAL INTERFERENCE . 627 ORIGIN OF DI RNA. 629 Oligonucleotide Mapping 629 Nucleotide Sequencing 633 Influenza DI RNA is Formed by Internal Deletion of Progenitor RNA 634 MECHANISM OF DI VIRUS-MEDIATED INTERFERENCE . 636 EFFECT OF HOST ON INFLUENZA DI VIRUS FORMATION. 637 EFFECT OF DI VIRUS ON HOST . 639 Establishment of Persistently Infected Cultures of Influenza Virus 639 CONCLUSION. 642
Losing the Plot? Middle Managers and Identity

There is now a large body of research attempting to `discover' the `answer' to the question `what is happening to middle management in contemporary organizations? ', following unprecedented levels of delivering, downsizing and restructuring. Two contrasting views, positive and negative, on the state of middle management have been identified in the literature. Adopting a social constructionist framework, this paper argues that there is a need to move beyond current attempts to find the most `accurate' and `truthful' picture on the state of middle management, to adopt a theoretical framework that can accommodate both diversity and agency. Drawing from interviews with middle managers, the paper illustrates how middle managers construct their identities, what discourses they draw on in this construction process and what tensions are present in their attempts to secure economic and social legitimacy during organizational restructuring.
Thyroid cancer: An epidemic of disease or an epidemic of diagnosis?

Dear Editor, La Vecchia et al. published in this Journal a comprehensive review of trends in thyroid cancer (TC) mortality rates for all available countries worldwide and incidence rates in selected countries. They showed that incidence rates were increasing in nearly all countries driven by the rise in papillary carcinomas (i.e., the by far most frequent TC type nowadays). Conversely, TC mortality rates have declined or, at least, stabilized at lowest risk. They concluded that the declines in mortality reflect reductions in iodine deficiency (see, for instance, the declines of TC mortality in Switzerland since the 1920s after the introduction of salt iodization) and improvements in TC diagnosis and treatment. However, the same diagnostic changes led to large rises in observed TC incidence. We would like to further address the question of whether we are witnessing an epidemic of disease or an epidemic of diagnosis. Figure 1 shows trends in age-standardized (world population) incidence rates of TC in women in a selection of European and extra-European very high-income countries (http:// ci5.iarc.fr) already included in La Vecchia et al. Contrary to these authors, however, we plotted incidence rates on the same scale to better visualize the large between-country differences in the magnitude of the TC epidemic. TC incidence rates were relatively low and increased little in Denmark (1968–2007, nationwide) and the United Kingdom (1988– 2007, seven registries from England and all Scotland) whereas steep upward trends were seen in France (1988–2007, eight registries) and Italy (1988–2007, nine registries) (Fig. 1a). By far the largest increase (5-fold) was found in the Republic of Korea (1993–2007, Seoul) (Fig. 1b). Upward trends were also present in the United States (1973–2007, nine SEER registries), and Australia (1983–2007, seven registries) but not in Japan (1978–2007, Miyagi and Osaka). The 5-year prevalence of TC per 100,000 women in 2012 was estimated to vary from <30 in Denmark and the United Kingdom to over 100 in Italy and the United States. In Korea, 6 out of 1,000 women were estimated to be 5-year TC-survivors (http://globocan.iarc.fr). TC incidence trends in men in individual countries were consistent with those in women although TC incidence is approximately 3-fold higher in women (http://ci5.iarc.fr). TC diagnosis at an earlier age in women has been attributed to the greater use of health services before middle age by women than men due to events related to reproduction and peri-menopausal symptoms. Until the 1970s, most TCs were found in patients who presented with nodules causing compression symptoms or visible neck masses. Only relatively big nodules (>20 mm) were assessed by palpation and biopsy. The advent of neck ultrasonography in the 1980s and then ultrasound-guided biopsy enabled detection and biopsy of nodules as small as 2 mm. Additional increases in TC diagnoses have resulted from the spread of portable ultrasound machines and, after 2000, new imaging technologies used for a variety of medical
Disintegration of water drops in an electric field

The disintegration of drops in strong electric fields is believed to play an important part in the formation of thunderstorms, at least in those parts of them where no ice crystals are present. Zeleny showed experimentally that disintegration begins as a hydrodynamical instability, but his ideas about the mechanics of the situation rest on the implicit assumption that instability occurs when the internal pressure is the same as that outside the drop. It is shown that this assumption is false and that instability of an elongated drop would not occur unless a pressure difference existed. When this error is corrected it is found that a drop, elongated by an electric field, becomes unstable when its length is 1.9 times its equatorial diameter, and the calculated critical electric field agrees with laboratory experiments to within 1 %. When the drop becomes unstable the ends develop obtuse-angled conical points from which axial jets are projected but the stability calculations give no indication of the mechanics of this process. It is shown theoretically that a conical interface between two fluids can exist in equilibrium in an electric field, but only when the cone has a semi-vertical angle 49.3°. Apparatus was constructed for producing the necessary field, and photographs show that conical oil/water interfaces and soap films can be produced at the calculated voltage and that their semi-vertical angles are very close to 49.3°. The photographs give an indication of how the axial jets are produced but no complete analytical description of the process is attempted.
A New Supervised Learning Algorithm of Recurrent Neural Networks and L2 Stability Analysis in Discrete-Time Domain

In the past decades, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) has attracted extensive research interests in various disciplines. One important motivation of these investigations is the RNN's promising ability of modeling time-behavior of nonlinear dynamic systems. It has been theoretically proved that RNN is able to map arbitrary input sequences to output sequences with infinite accuracy regardless underline dynamics with sufficient training samples [1]. Moreover, from biological point of view, RNN is more plausible to the real neural models as compared to other adaptive methods such as Hidden Markov Models (HMM), feed-forward networks and Support Vector Machines (SVM). From the practical point of view, the dynamics approximation and adaptive learning capability make RNN a highly competitive candidate for a wide range of applications. See [2] [3] [4] for examples. Among the various applications, the realtime signal processing has constantly been one of the active topics of RNN. In such kind of applications, the convergence speed is always an important concern because of the tight timing requirement. For example, the conventional training algorithms of RNN, such as the Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) and the Real Time Recurrent Learning (RTRL) always suffer from slow convergence speed. If a large learning rate is selected to speed up the weight updating, the training process may become unstable. Thus it is desirable to develop robust learning algorithms with variable or adaptive learning coe±cients to obtain a tradeoff between the stability and fast convergence speed. The issue has already been extensively studied for linear adaptive filters, e.g., the famous Normalized Least Mean Square (N-LMS) algorithm. However, for online training algorithms of RNN this is still an open topic. Due to the inherent feedback and distributive parallel structure, the adjustments of RNN weights can affect the entire neural network state variables during network training. Hence it is difficult to obtain the error derivative for gradient type updating rules, and in turn difficulty in the analysis of the underlying dynamics of the training. So far, a great number of works have been carried out to solve the problem. To name a few, in [5], B. Pearlmutter presented a detail survey on gradient calculation for RNN training algorithms. In [6] [7] , M. Rupp et al introduced a robustness
A paradigm for probabilistic path planning

4 Application to nonholonomic robots, and experimental results 12 4.1 Application to general carlike robots . 14 4.1. 1 Filling in the details . 15 4.1. 2 Experimental results . 16 4.2 Application to forward carlike robots . 17 4.2. 1 Experimental results . 18 4.3 Application to tractor-trailer robots . 18 4.3. 1 Experimental results . 19
Fiscal convergence and sustainability in the European Union

This paper analyzes fiscal convergence and sustainability in the European Union using data on government debt, revenues, and expenditures. Absolute fiscal divergence is present in the EU, especially after the sovereign debt crisis. However, we find evidence of fiscal club convergence when clubs are endogenously determined. Club convergence is important for the EU because there is no single fiscal policy and member statesâ€™ policies are heterogeneous. Endogenous clubs do not share the usual geographical, political, or development similarities. Fiscal policy in the EU is found to be unsustainable, but it is countercyclical. We use a policy response function where the primary surplus is a function of public debt and the output gap. The primary surplus does not respond to changes in public debt, and this is considered to be unsustainable. However, it increases in expansions and decreases in recessions thus being countercyclical. The countercyclical primary surplus is important for smoothing business cycles.
Co-registration of high resolution MRI sub-volumes in non-human primates

Dynamic structural and functional remodeling of the Central Nervous System occurs throughout the lifespan of the organism from the molecular to the systems level. MRI offers several advantages to observe this phenomenon: it is non-invasive and non-destructive, the contrast can be tuned to interrogate different tissue properties and imaging resolution can range from cortical columns to whole brain networks in the same session. To measure these changes reliably, functional maps generated over time with high resolution fMRI need to be registered accurately. This article presents a new method for registering automatically thin cortical MR volumes that are aligned with the functional maps. These acquisitions focus on the primary somato-sensory cortex, a region in the anterior parietal part of the brain, responsible for fine touch and proprioception. Currently, these slabs are acquired in approximately the same orientation from acquisition to acquisition and then registered by hand. Because they only cover a small portion of the cortex, their direct automatic registration is difficult. To address this issue, we propose a method relying on an intermediate image, acquired with a surface coil that covers a larger portion of the head to which the slabs can be registered. Because images acquired with surface coils suffer from severe intensity attenuation artifact, we also propose a method to register these. The results from data sets obtained with three squirrel monkeys show a registration accuracy of thirty micrometers.
The bithorax complex.

INTRODUCTION . 285 Overview. 285 The BX-C Genes Are Expressed Within Parasegments 286 THE VBX DOMAIN . 287 The Effects oj Ubx Alleles 287 Mutations Affecting Sub Junctions oj the Ubx Domain. 288 RNA and Protein Products oj the Ubx Domain 289 The Ubx Proteins Execute Most or All Functions oj the Ubx Domain 293 The Role oj the bxd and pbx Regions 294 Does the bxd Region Have Functions Independent oj the Ubx Unit? 295 A Possible Trans-Regulatory Interaction Within the Ubx Domain 296 Role oj the abx and bx Regions 297 Gain-oj-Function Mutations in the Ubx Domain 297 Transvection . 298 THE ABDOMINAL DOMAINS . 300 The Abdominal Region of the BX-C Is Composed of Two Large Domains 300 Sub functions of the abd-A and Abd-B Domains 301 Are the abd-A and Abd-B Domains Independent of One Another? 305 Gain-oj-Function Mutations in the Abdominal Domains 306 ROLE OF THE BX-C IN INTERNAL TISSUES . 308 SPATIAL REGULATION OF THE BX-C . 309 CONCLUDING REMARKS . 3 1 2
Twenty five year mortality and air pollution: results from the French PAARC survey

Aims and Methods: Long term effects of air pollution on mortality were studied in 14 284 adults who resided in 24 areas from seven French cities when enrolled in the PAARC survey (air pollution and chronic respiratory diseases) in 1974. Daily measurements of sulphur dioxide, total suspended particles, black smoke, nitrogen dioxide, and nitric oxide were made in 24 areas for three years (1974–76). Cox proportional hazards models controlling for individual confounders (smoking, educational level, body mass index, occupational exposure) were applied, and frailty models used to take into account spatial correlation. Indicators of air pollution were the mean concentration. Results: Models were run before and after exclusion of six area monitors influenced by local traffic (NO/NO2 >3 in ppb). After exclusion of these areas, analyses showed that adjusted risk ratios (95% CI) for TSP, BS, NO2, and NO for non-accidental mortality were 1.05 (1.02 to 1.08), 1.07 (1.03 to 1.10), 1.14 (1.03 to 1.25), and 1.11 (1.05 to 1.17) for 10 μg/m3 respectively. Consistent patterns for lung cancer and cardiopulmonary causes were observed. Conclusions: Urban air pollution assessed in the 1970s was associated with increased mortality over 25 years in France.
Genetic Variability, Twin Hybrids and Constant Hybrids, in a Case of Balanced Lethal Factors.

PACE . THE PROBLEM O F FACTOR VARIABILITY AND T H E CASE OF BEADED WSNGS. 422 PRELIM~NARY CROSSES AND FORMULATION OF A WORKING HYPOTHESIS . 428 SUBSTANTIATION OF THE HYPOTHESIS, A N D CORRELATIVE EXPERIMENTS. ( I ) Existence of two kinds of chromosomes in beaded stock ve ( 2 ) Crossover frequencies of the two chromosomes; position of beaded. 440
Sales and Operations Planning: Design and Implementation of S&OP process in a multinational company

II ACKNOWLEDGMENTS III LIST OF TABLES V LIST OF FIGURES V LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS VI CHAPTER 1, COMPANY DESCRIPTION 7 1.1 AKER SOLUTIONS – FROM A WORKSHOP TO A MULTINATIONAL GROUP 7 1.2 AKER SOLUTIONS PROCESS SYSTEMS 8 1.3 BUSINESS MODEL 9 CHAPTER 2, LITERATURE REVIEW 11 2.1 THE SALES AND OPERATIONS PLANNING CONCEPT AND GOALS 11 2.2 THE S&OP PROCESS 13 2.3 IMPLEMENTATION 15 CHAPTER 3, METHODOLOGY – MATURITY MODELS 18 3.1 GRIMSON AND PYKE MODEL 18 3.2 LAPIDE S “FOUR-STAGE S&OP PROCESS MATURITY MODEL” 23 3.3 MODELS ANALYSIS 25 CHAPTER 4, DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A S&OP IN A MULTINATIONAL COMPANY 27 4.1 INTRODUCTION STRATEGY SHIFT 27 4.2 DESIGNING THE SALES AND OPERATIONS PLANNING PROCESS 28 4.2.1 Assessing the initial situation 29 MATURITY EVALUATION – FIRST EVALUATION 32 4.2.2 Building the Operations Planning tool 33 4.2.3 Building the Operational Planning tool – post-research approach 36 4.3 IMPLEMENTATION OF THE OPERATIONS PLANNING TOOL 38 4.4 THE FIRST S&OP ROUND OF MEETINGS 40 4.4.1 Sales Planning meeting 40 4.4.2 Operational Planning meeting 41 MATURITY EVALUATION – SECOND EVALUATION 43 4.4.3What was learned evolution of the tool 45 4.4.4 Flowchart 45 4.4.5 Changes in disciplines and increasing the level of detail 45 4.5 THE SECOND S&OP ROUND OF MEETINGS 47 4.5. 1 Set up the 2 meeting 47 4.5. 2 Results from the Sales Planning meeting 47 4.5. 3 Operations Planning meeting 48 MATURITY EVALUATION – THIRD EVALUATION 50 4.6 THE CURRENT SITUATION 52
FM-Tools 2000: the 4th Workshop on Tools for System Design and Verification

There is a growing awareness that tool support is needed to develop high-assurance industry-size software/hardware systems. The aim of these workshops was to provide a forum of researchers interested in the use and development of tools which support the use of mathematical techniques for the specification, development, analysis and verification of systems. This workshop was the fourth in a series of biennial events devoted to this topic. The first three workshops took place in Kiel (1994), Bremen (1996) and Malente (1998), Germany. This workshop was held at the “Reisensburg”, a beautiful castle near Ulm in South Germany. The following technical report contains all accepted submissions chronologically ordered according to the workshop programme. Nr. 2000-07 Ulmer Informatik Berichte Mai 2000 Accepted Submissions An open software architecture for the verification of industrial controllers Heinz Treseler, Stefan Kowalewski . 5 DisCo Toolset – The New Generation Timo Aaltonnen, Mika Katara, Risto Pitkänen . 11 RAVEN: Real-Time Analyzing and Verification Environment Jürgen Ruf . 17 Do you trust your model checker ? Wolfgang Reif, Jürgen Ruf, Gerhard Schellhorn, Tobias Vollmer . 23 Modelling Realtime in VSE-II Werner Stephan, Georg Rock, Andreas Nonnengart . 41 Strategies for the Verification of Object-oriented Programs J. Meyer, A. Poetzsch-Heffter . 47 A Practical Extension Mechanism for Decision Procedures Alessandro Armando, Silvio Ranise . 53 Modeling Sequences within the RelView System Rudolf Berghammer, Thorsten Hoffmann . 59 Automated Testing with RT-Tester – Theroretical Issues Driven by Practical Needs Markus Dahlweid, Oliver Meyer, Jan Peleska . 65 Automatic test generation for Java-Card applets Lydie Du Bousquet, Hugues Martin . 71 Formal data mining an visualization at procedure level Nikolai Mansurov, Djenana Campara, Elena Laskavaya, Igor Ivanov . 75 Data Structures for Z Testing Tools Mark Utting . 81 The Korrigan Environment Christine Choppy, Pascal Poizat, Jean-Claude Royer . 87 The Coalgebraic Class Specification Language CCSL Jan Rothe, Hendrik Tews, Bart Jacobs . 93 Program Generation via Declarative Term Graph Attribution Frank Derichsweiler, Wolfram Kahl . 99 Fred: An approach to generating real, correct, reusable programs from proofs John Crossley, Iman Poernomo . 105
A variational problem associated with the minimal speed of travelling waves for spatially periodic reaction-diffusion equations

We consider the equation ut = uxx + b(x)u(1 − u); x2 R;where b(x) is a nonnegative measure on R that is periodic in x:In the case where b(x) is a smooth periodic function, it is known that there exists a travelling wave with speed c for any cc � (b); where c � (b) is a certain positive number depending on b:Such a travelling wave is often called a "pulsating travelling wave" or a "periodic travelling wave", and c � (b) is called the "minimal speed". In this paper, we first extend this theory by showing the existence of the minimal speed c � (b) for any nonnegative measure b with period L:Next we study the question of maximizing c � (b) under the constraint R (0,L) b(x)dx = �L; where � is an arbitrarily given constant. This question is closely related to the problem studied by mathematical ecologists in late 1980's but its answer has not been known. We answer this question by proving that the maximum is attained by periodically arrayed Dirac's delta functionsL P k2Z �(x + kL):