Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of skin color and tone on histamine iontophoresis and Doppler flowmetry measurements as a pharmacodynamic biomarker

Abstract The phenotypical manifestations of asthma among children are diverse and exhibit varying responses to therapeutic interventions. There is a need to develop objective biomarkers to improve the characterization of allergic and inflammatory responses relevant to asthma to predict therapeutic treatment responses. We have previously investigated histamine iontophoresis with laser Doppler flowmetry (HILD) as a potential surrogate biomarker that characterizes histamine response and may be utilized to guide the treatment of allergic and inflammatory disease. We have identified intra‐individual variability of HILD response type among children and adults with asthma and that HILD response type varied in association with racial classification. As laser Doppler flowimetry may be impacted by skin color, we aimed to further validate the HILD method by determining if skin color or tone is associated with observed HILD response type differences. We conducted an observational study utilizing quantification of skin color and tone obtained from photographs of the skin among participants during HILD assessments via the RGB color model. We compared RGB values across racial, ethnic, and HILD response type via the Kruskal‐Wallis test and calculated Kendall rank correlation coefficient to evaluate the relationship between RGB composite scores and HILD pharmacodynamic measures. We observed that RGB scores differed among racial groups and histamine response phenotypes (p < 0.05). However, there was a lack of correlation between the RGB composite score and HILD pharmacodynamic measures (r values 0.1, p > 0.05). These findings suggest that skin color may not impact HILD response variations, necessitating further research to understand previously observed differences across identified racial groups.
Network-assisted congestion control for information centric networking

Internet has grown very rapidly in the last couple of decades and still growing because of the expansion and utilization of various services and applications. Consequently, demand of delay and throughput sensitive services, like audio/video is also increasing. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is proposed as an architecture for the future Internet to meet the modern users and application requirements. In ICN users send requests (Interest Packets) for the Data they need. Interest packet is assigned a lifetime, which greatly affects the Quality of Experience (QoE) because user needs to resend the Interest, when the lifetime expires. Interest lifetime may be expired because of congestion, or Interest lifetime is shorter than the network delay, etc. Waiting for the expiration of an Interest lifetime to resend it is merely appropriate for best effort traffic, rather than services which require high throughput and are delay sensitive. In this paper, we propose Network-Assisted Congestion Control mechanism in ICN, which detects the congestion before it happens, and provides notification to downstream node. On reception of the notification, downstream node continuously reduces the traffic rate. However, when the downstream node fails to adjust the sending rate, the same procedure continues, until the sending node reduces the traffic rate through adjusting its congestion window. We have intensively evaluated our proposal by comparing it with similar proposal using ndnSIM. The experimental results show that our proposal achieves up to 59 percent performance improvement over other proposal in the literature.
Phase separation of ultrathin polymer-blend films on patterned substrates

A. Karim,rJ. F. Douglas,l'2 B. P. Lee,l'2 S. C. Glotzerl'2 J. A. Rogers,2 R. J. Jackman,3 E. J. Amis,l and G. M. whitesides3 tPolynars Division, NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899 2Center for Theoretical and. Computational Mateials Science NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899 3Departmenr of Chemistry and Depafiment of Chemical Biology, Horvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts ml38 (Received 6 February 1998)
A Bootstrapping Framework With Interactive Information Modeling for Network Alignment

Network alignment is an emerging research topic with great utility value. Its purpose is to recover the hidden alignment between different networks for subsequent cross-network research. Its applications benefit numerous domains including online social networks, biological researches, and so on. Hence, recently, it draws plenty of research attention. Existing attempts indicate that it is a promising direction. However, due to its recency, there are still several limitations. Existing literature mostly focuses on network alignment in specific scenarios and employs heuristically designed functions; thus, it does not provide general solutions. Besides, they only capture static information but not interactive information that is based not only on the isolated networks but also the alignment itself. In this paper, we propose a bootstrapping framework for network alignment (BoNA). Specifically, the framework starts from an imperfect seed alignment and then iteratively refines it by capturing interactive information until convergence. Within each iteration, we calculate the likelihoods of pairwise alignment by using supervised learning techniques; hence, heuristic functions are no longer required. Furthermore, we extend the framework by starting from multiple seed alignments to combine their advantages. We conduct experiments in both biology and online social networks to demonstrate the generality of our framework. Results indicate that BoNA outperforms existing aligners significantly in all evaluated scenarios in terms of both node correctness and topology conservation.
The protective role of self‐esteem, perceived social support and job satisfaction against psychological distress among Chinese nurses

AIM To determine the prevalence of psychological distress, and to explore the combined protective roles of self-esteem, perceived social support and job satisfaction against psychological distress. BACKGROUND Few studies have explored the combined protective effect of self-esteem, perceived social support and job satisfaction on nurses' mental health in the same theoretical framework. METHODS The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, a self-developed Job Satisfaction Questionnaire and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale were used to survey 581 nurses. The hypothesized model of the relationships among self-esteem, perceived social support, job satisfaction and psychological distress was tested with structural equation modelling. RESULTS The prevalence of psychological distress was 92.3%. Job satisfaction exerted the strongest direct protective effect against psychological distress, with perceived social support and self-esteem exerting the second and third strongest direct protective effects, respectively. Additionally, self-esteem had an indirect protective effect. CONCLUSIONS Chinese nurses showed a surprisingly high prevalence of psychological distress. Job satisfaction, self-esteem and perceived social support were identified, in this order of importance, as protective factors against psychological distress. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT Nurse administrators should take measures to improve nurses' job satisfaction and social support, and hire individuals with high self-esteem as nurses.
Salting our freshwater lakes

Significance In lakes, chloride is a relatively benign ion at low concentrations but begins to have ecological impacts as concentrations rise into the 100s and 1,000s of mg L−1. In this study, we investigate long-term chloride trends in 371 freshwater lakes in North America. We find that in Midwest and Northeast North America, most urban lakes and rural lakes that are surrounded by >1% impervious land cover show increasing chloride trends. Expanding on this finding, thousands of lakes in these regions are at risk of long-term salinization. Keeping lakes “fresh” is critically important for protecting the ecosystem services freshwater lakes provide, such as drinking water, fisheries, recreation, irrigation, and aquatic habitat. The highest densities of lakes on Earth are in north temperate ecosystems, where increasing urbanization and associated chloride runoff can salinize freshwaters and threaten lake water quality and the many ecosystem services lakes provide. However, the extent to which lake salinity may be changing at broad spatial scales remains unknown, leading us to first identify spatial patterns and then investigate the drivers of these patterns. Significant decadal trends in lake salinization were identified using a dataset of long-term chloride concentrations from 371 North American lakes. Landscape and climate metrics calculated for each site demonstrated that impervious land cover was a strong predictor of chloride trends in Northeast and Midwest North American lakes. As little as 1% impervious land cover surrounding a lake increased the likelihood of long-term salinization. Considering that 27% of large lakes in the United States have >1% impervious land cover around their perimeters, the potential for steady and long-term salinization of these aquatic systems is high. This study predicts that many lakes will exceed the aquatic life threshold criterion for chronic chloride exposure (230 mg L−1), stipulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in the next 50 y if current trends continue.
Genetic Testing in Immigration for Family Reunification: Ethical, Legal and Social Implications

This body of work addresses the ethical, legal and social implications of using genetic testing as part of US immigration procedures for family reunification. Last year, approximately two-thirds of immigrants who came to the US as legal permanent residents were family petitioned under the family reunification provision. Under this provision, a petitioner, who must be a US citizen or permanent resident, petitions to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to bring his or her immediate family members (spouse, children, parents or siblings) to the US. As part of the application process, the petitioner is required to show proof of the alleged family relationships claimed in the petition. This is typically done through documentation (e.g. birth certificates). But when documents are lacking or insufficient, or fraud is suspected, US immigration officials may suggest DNA testing (parentage or sibling testing) as a way to verify family relationships. In the past several years, DNA testing has become more frequent in immigration procedures, but the impact such testing may have on immigrants, their families or their communities is not clear. The objective of this study was to explore the positive and negative effects DNA testing may have on immigrant families, particularly regarding how test results might impact family relationships, social adaptability, and psychological well-being. This study incorporated interviews with immigrant families to (1) understand their experiences with DNA testing, and to (2) learn their opinions about the potential positive and negative effects of using DNA testing to prove alleged family relationships in immigration. Results from this research were used to develop educational materials including (a) an informational brochure for immigrants planning to petition for a family member under family reunification provision, and (b) an ethical "points-to-consider" document to inform policy-makers, immigration lawyers, advocates and immigrant communities about the study findings and the implications of using DNA testing in immigration for family reunification.
Exploiting GPU peak-power and performance tradeoffs through reduced effective pipeline latency

Modern GPUs share limited hardware resources, such as register files, among a large number of concurrently executing threads. For efficient resource sharing, several buffering and collision avoidance stages are inserted in the GPU pipeline. These additional stages increase the read-after-write (RAW) latencies of instructions. Since GPUs are often architected to hide RAW latencies through extensive multithreading, they typically do not employ power-hungry data-forwarding networks (DFNs). However, we observe that many GPGPU applications do not have enough active threads that are ready to issue instructions to hide these RAW latencies. In this paper, we first demonstrate that DFNs can considerably improve the performance of many compute-intensive GPGPU applications and then propose most recent result forwarding (MoRF) as a low-power alternative to the DFN. Second, for floating-point (FP) operations, we exploit a high-throughput fused multiply-add (HFMA) unit to further reduce both RAW latencies and the number of FMA units in the GPU without impacting instruction throughput. MoRF and HFMA together provide a geometric mean performance improvement of 18% and 29% for integer/single-precision and double-precision GPGPU applications, respectively. Finally, both MoRF and HFMA allow the GPU to effectively mimic a shallower pipeline for a large percentage of instructions. Exploiting such a benefit, we propose low-power pipelines that can reduce peak power consumption by 14% without affecting the performance or increasing the complexity of the forwarding network. The peak power reduction allows GPUs to operate more cores within the same power budget, achieving a geometric mean performance improvement of 33% for double-precision GPGPU applications.
Crooked, Coiled and Crimpled are three Ly6-like proteins required for proper localization of septate junction components

Cellular junction formation is an elaborate process that is dependent on the regulated synthesis, assembly and membrane targeting of constituting components. Here, we report on three Drosophila Ly6-like proteins essential for septate junction (SJ) formation. SJs provide a paracellular diffusion barrier and appear molecularly and structurally similar to vertebrate paranodal septate junctions. We show that Crooked (Crok), a small GPI-anchored Ly6-like protein, is required for septa formation and barrier functions. In embryos that lack Crok, SJ components are produced but fail to accumulate at the plasma membrane. Crok is detected in intracellular puncta and acts tissue-autonomously, which suggests that it resides in intracellular vesicles to assist the cell surface localization of SJ components. In addition, we demonstrate that two related Ly6 proteins, Coiled (Cold) and Crimpled (Crim), are required for SJ formation and function in a tissue-autonomous manner, and that Cold also localizes to intracellular vesicles. Specifically, Crok and Cold are required for correct membrane trafficking of Neurexin IV, a central SJ component. The non-redundant requirement for Crok, Cold, Crim and Boudin (Bou; another Ly6 protein that was recently shown to be involved in SJ formation) suggests that members of this conserved family of proteins cooperate in the assembly of SJ components, possibly by promoting core SJ complex formation in intracellular compartments associated with membrane trafficking.
The "Cannot Decide" Option in Thurstone-Type Attitude Scales

Sociology students were administered two Thurstone-type attitude scales (Capital Punishment and Sunday Observance), each under two conditions (with and without the option of responding"? " for "Cannot Decide"), and a measure of Ambiguity Tolerance. When available, "? " was used by a slight majority of subjects on both scales. The use of "? " was not found to be related to scores on the measure of ambiguity tolerance. Correlations between "? " and "no? " administrations were significant, and significantly stronger for Capital Punishment than for Sunday Observance, but means did not differ significantly between conditions, and mean differences did not differ significantly between scales. More use of "? " appeared in the Capital Punishment scale than in the Sunday Observance scale but "? " substituted fairly evenly for "Agree" and "Disagree" in Capital Punishment, while in Sunday Observance "? " substituted mainly for "Disagree. " Allowance for "? " is recommended. Observed differences are discussed in terms of assimilation-contrast theory, mainly the constructs of statement-attitude congruity, involvement with the attitude object, strength of the attitude, and development of the attitude.
Article Title: Multi-user Indoor Optical Wireless Communication System Channel Control Using a Genetic Algorithm Multi-user Indoor Optical Wireless Communication System Channel Control Using a Genetic Algorithm

This paper is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item and our policy information available from the repository home page for further information. To see the final version of this paper please visit the publisher's website. Access to the published version may require a subscription. Publisher statement: " © 2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. " Abstract A genetic algorithm controlled multispot transmitter is demonstrated that is capable of opti-mising the received power distribution for randomly aligned single element receivers in multiple fully diffuse optical wireless communications systems with multiple mobile users. Using a genetic algorithm to control the intensity of individual diffusion spots, system deployment environment changes, user movement and user alignment can be compensating for, with negligible impact on 1 the bandwidth and RMS delay spread. It is shown that the dynamic range, referenced against the peak received power, can be reduced by up to 27% for empty environments and by up to 26% when the users are moving. Furthermore, the effect of user movement, that can perturb the channel by up to 8%, can be reduced to within 5% of the optimised case. Compared to alternative bespoke designs that are capable of mitigating optical wireless channel drawbacks, this method provides the possibility of cost-effectiveness for mass-produced receivers in applications where end-user friendliness and mobility are paramount.
Whole-body Humanoid Robots for Firefighting

Council reported six potentially disruptive technologies for the year 2025, one of them being service robotics. The report states that, " […] robots for elder care applications and the development of human augmentation technologies, mean that robots could be working alongside humans in looking after and rehabilitating people. " On a related note, the European company Fatronik published a study [Eizmendi, 2007] showing that by age 80, 42% of the Spanish population is currently disabled. Looking at population pyramids and expected population growth, we could expect that by the year 2100, more than 1 billion people will be disabled worldwide. It is in light of those statistics that service robotics may play a major role in providing life comfort after losing mobility. In this context, the Human Centered Robotics Lab (HCRL) at the University of Texas at Austin is interested in the study of robotic systems for the assistance, augmentation, and representation of people to increase their social comfort, productivity, security and health. T he US Office of Naval Research has a comprehensive program in Cognitive Science and Human Robot Interaction. One of its main missions is to develop a robotic workforce that FIGURE 1 Depiction of NASA's Valkyrie humanoid robot working alongside humans in firefighting activities.
Preventing relay attacks in mobile transactions using infrared light

Near Field Technology (NFC) enables a smartphone to emulate a smart card, enabling it to provide services, like banking and transport ticketing. Similar to smart cards, NFC-based transactions are susceptible to relay attacks. Distance bounding protocols have been proposed for smart cards to counter relay attacks. However, this may not be effective in the field of mobile transactions, due to their requirement of high time-delay sensitivity and specialised hardware. A number of proposals are being put forward that show that sensing the natural ambient environment is an effective anti-relay mechanism. Existing literature neither involves a threat actor in their analysis nor they are in compliance with EMV's transaction requirement of 500ms. In this paper, we look at the anti-relay mechanism from a different point of view. Instead of measuring the natural ambience, we generate and measure a unique artificial ambient environment (AAE) using peripherals of the devices involved in a transaction. To evaluate our proposal and its effectiveness, we selected infrared from the proposed set of off-the-shelf actuator/sensor pairs available on modern smartphones. We designed and deployed six distinct test-beds, each based on a unique method of relay attack, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal in the context of infrared. From our experimentations, we can empirically state that infrared showed high success rate in relay attack detection - higher than any existing work in academic literature.
When POS data sets don’t add up: Combatting sample bias

Several works in Natural Language Processing have recently looked into part-of-speech annotation of Twitter data and typically used their own data sets. Since conventions on Twitter change rapidly, models often show sample bias. Training on a combination of the existing data sets should help overcome this bias and produce more robust models than any trained on the individual corpora. Unfortunately, combining the existing corpora proves difficult: many of the corpora use proprietary tag sets that have little or no overlap. Even when mapped to a common tag set, the different corpora systematically differ in their treatment of various tags and tokens. This includes both pre-processing decisions, as well as default labels for frequent tokens, thus exhibiting data bias and label bias, respectively. Only if we address these biases can we combine the existing data sets to also overcome sample bias. We present a systematic study of several Twitter POS data sets, the problems of label and data bias, discuss their effects on model performance, and show how to overcome them to learn models that perform well on various test sets, achieving relative error reduction of up to 21%.