bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Improving the Performance of Deduplication-Based Backup Systems via Container Utilization Based Hot Fingerprint Entry Distilling
Authors: Zhang Datong , Deng Yuhui , Zhou Yi , Zhu Yifeng , Qin Xiao
Published: October 2021

Data deduplication techniques construct an index consisting of fingerprint entries to identify and eliminate duplicated copies of repeating data. The bottleneck of disk-based index lookup and data fragmentation caused by eliminating duplicated chunks are two challenging issues in data deduplication. Deduplication-based backup systems generally employ containers storing contiguous chunks together with their fingerprints to preserve data locality for alleviating the two issues, which is still inadequate. To address these two issues, we propose a container utilization based hot fingerprint entry distilling strategy to improve the performance of deduplication-based backup systems. We divide the index into three parts: hot fingerprint entries, fragmented fingerprint entries, and useless fingerprint entries. A container with utilization smaller than a given threshold is called a
sparse container
. Fingerprint entries that point to non-sparse containers are hot fingerprint entries. For the remaining fingerprint entries, if a fingerprint entry matches any fingerprint of forthcoming backup chunks, it is classified as a fragmented fingerprint entry. Otherwise, it is classified as a useless fingerprint entry. We observe that hot fingerprint entries account for a small part of the index, whereas the remaining fingerprint entries account for the majority of the index. This intriguing observation inspires us to develop a hot fingerprint entry distilling approach named
HID
. HID segregates useless fingerprint entries from the index to improve memory utilization and bypass disk accesses. In addition, HID separates fragmented fingerprint entries to make a deduplication-based backup system directly rewrite fragmented chunks, thereby alleviating adverse fragmentation. Moreover, HID introduces a feature to treat fragmented chunks as unique chunks. This feature compensates for the shortcoming that a Bloom filter cannot directly identify certain duplicated chunks (i.e., the fragmented chunks). To take full advantage of the preceding feature, we propose an evolved HID strategy called
EHID
. EHID incorporates a Bloom filter, to which only hot fingerprints are mapped. In doing so, EHID exhibits two salient features: (i) EHID avoids disk accesses to identify unique chunks and the fragmented chunks; (ii) EHID slashes the false positive rate of the integrated Bloom filter. These salient features push EHID into the high-efficiency mode. Our experimental results show our approach reduces the average memory overhead of the index by 34.11% and 25.13% when using the Linux dataset and the FSL dataset, respectively. Furthermore, compared with the state-of-the-art method HAR, EHID boosts the average backup throughput by up to a factor of 2.25 with the Linux dataset, and EHID reduces the average disk I/O traffic by up to 66.21% when it comes to the FSL dataset. EHID also marginally improves the system's restore performance.
Two Reconfigurable NDP Servers: Understanding the Impact of Near-Data Processing on Data Center Applications
Authors: Song Xiaojia , Xie Tao , Fischer Stephen
Published: October 2021

Existing near-data processing (NDP)-powered architectures have demonstrated their strength for some data-intensive applications. Data center servers, however, have to serve not only data-intensive but also compute-intensive applications. An in-depth understanding of the impact of NDP on various data center applications is still needed. For example, can a compute-intensive application also benefit from NDP? In addition, current NDP techniques focus on maximizing the data processing rate by always utilizing all computing resources at all times. Is this “always running in full gear” strategy consistently beneficial for an application? To answer these questions, we first propose two reconfigurable NDP-powered servers called RANS (
R
econfigurable
A
RM-based
N
DP
S
erver) and RFNS (
R
econfigurable
F
PGA-based
N
DP
S
erver). Next, we implement a single-engine prototype for each of them based on a conventional data center and then evaluate their effectiveness. Experimental results measured from the two prototypes are then extrapolated to estimate the properties of the two full-size reconfigurable NDP servers. Finally, several new findings are presented. For example, we find that while RANS can only benefit data-intensive applications, RFNS can offer benefits for both data-intensive and compute-intensive applications. Moreover, we find that for certain applications the reconfigurability of RANS/RFNS can deliver noticeable energy efficiency without any performance degradation.
Student Leadership, Systems Change: Opportunities and Tensions for Youth Impact on District-Wide Computer Science Initiatives
Authors: Phelps David , Santo Rafi
Published: October 2021

Computer Science education (CSed)
often aims to position youth as designers, creators, and those with a voice in their world. But do youth have opportunities to design, create, and have voice around the shape of their CSed learning experiences? In this study, we explore ways that school districts engage youth to contribute to the shaping and enactment of their CS instructional systems, efforts districts make to have these leadership roles create impact within these systems, and the tensions associated with these processes. Through in depth analysis of five district case studies, our findings highlight variance around the nature of leadership
roles
, how
access
to leadership roles is structured, student
autonomy
within and
ownership
over leadership roles, how roles
reach
into and index differential
power over instructional systems
,
and how district processes of
scaffolding
and
infrastructuring
mediate the ultimate impact that students in these roles are able to have on CS instructional systems. Findings also surfaced ways that district actors dealt with a number of tensions associated with student leadership within CS instructional systems. This study provides educators, administrators, and researchers with an expansive view of the potential for students to play legitimate roles within the context of system-wide instructional efforts around CS, and aims to expand conceptions of ‘equitable computer science’—up to this point largely conceived of through the lenses of access to, participation in, and experiences of CS learning—to focus on equity as also being about who has ‘a seat at the table’ when it comes to CS.
GeCoAgent: A Conversational Agent for Empowering Genomic Data Extraction and Analysis
Authors: Crovari Pietro , Pidò Sara , Pinoli Pietro , Bernasconi Anna , Canakoglu Arif , Garzotto Franca , Ceri Stefano
Published: October 2021

With the availability of reliable and low-cost DNA sequencing, human genomics is relevant to a growing number of end-users, including biologists and clinicians. Typical interactions require applying comparative data analysis to huge repositories of genomic information for building new knowledge, taking advantage of the latest findings in applied genomics for healthcare. Powerful technology for data extraction and analysis is available, but broad use of the technology is hampered by the complexity of accessing such methods and tools.

This work presents GeCoAgent, a big-data service for clinicians and biologists. GeCoAgent uses a dialogic interface, animated by a chatbot, for supporting the end-users’ interaction with computational tools accompanied by multi-modal support. While the dialogue progresses, the user is accompanied in extracting the relevant data from repositories and then performing data analysis, which often requires the use of statistical methods or machine learning. Results are returned using simple representations (spreadsheets and graphics), while at the end of a session the dialogue is summarized in textual format. The innovation presented in this article is concerned with not only the delivery of a new tool but also our novel approach to conversational technologies, potentially extensible to other healthcare domains or to general data science.
FluidSMR: Adaptive Management for Hybrid SMR Drives
Authors: Wu Fenggang , Li Bingzhe , Du David H. C.
Published: October 2021

Hybrid Shingled Magnetic Recording (H-SMR) drives are the most recently developed SMR drives, which allow dynamic conversion of the recording format between Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) and SMR on a single disk drive. We identify the unique opportunities of H-SMR drives to manage the tradeoffs between performance and capacity, including the possibility of adjusting the SMR area capacity based on storage usage and the flexibility of dynamic data swapping between the CMR area and SMR area.

We design and implement FluidSMR, an adaptive management scheme for hybrid SMR Drives, to fully utilize H-SMR drives under different workloads and capacity usages. FluidSMR has a two-phase allocation scheme to support a growing usage of the H-SMR drive. The scheme can intelligently determine the sizes of the CMR and the SMR space in an H-SMR drive based on the dynamic changing of workloads. Moreover, FluidSMR uses a cache in the CMR region, managed by a proposed loop-back log policy, to reduce the overhead of updates to the SMR region.

Evaluations using enterprise traces demonstrate that FluidSMR outperforms baseline schemes in various workloads by decreasing the average I/O latency and effectively reducing/controlling the performance impact of the format conversion between CMR and SMR.
Differentially Private Medical Texts Generation Using Generative Neural Networks
Authors: Al Aziz Md Momin , Ahmed Tanbir , Faequa Tasnia , Jiang Xiaoqian , Yao Yiyu , Mohammed Noman
Published: October 2021

Technological advancements in data science have offered us affordable storage and efficient algorithms to query a large volume of data. Our health records are a significant part of this data, which is pivotal for healthcare providers and can be utilized in our well-being. The clinical note in electronic health records is one such category that collects a patient’s complete medical information during different timesteps of patient care available in the form of free-texts. Thus, these unstructured textual notes contain events from a patient’s admission to discharge, which can prove to be significant for future medical decisions. However, since these texts also contain sensitive information about the patient and the attending medical professionals, such notes cannot be shared publicly. This privacy issue has thwarted timely discoveries on this plethora of untapped information. Therefore, in this work, we intend to generate synthetic medical texts from a private or sanitized (de-identified) clinical text corpus and analyze their utility rigorously in different metrics and levels. Experimental results promote the applicability of our generated data as it achieves more than

80\%

accuracy in different pragmatic classification problems and matches (or outperforms) the original text data.
Automatic Speech Classifier for Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Dementia
Authors: Bertini Flavio , Allevi Davide , Lutero Gianluca , Montesi Danilo , Calzà Laura
Published: October 2021

The World Health Organization estimates that 50 million people are currently living with dementia worldwide and this figure will almost triple by 2050. Current pharmacological treatments are only symptomatic, and drugs or other therapies are ineffective in slowing down or curing the neurodegenerative process at the basis of dementia. Therefore, early detection of cognitive decline is of the utmost importance to respond significantly and deliver preventive interventions. Recently, the researchers showed that speech alterations might be one of the earliest signs of cognitive defect, observable well in advance before other cognitive deficits become manifest. In this article, we propose a full automated method able to classify the audio file of the subjects according to the progress level of the pathology. In particular, we trained a specific type of artificial neural network, called autoencoder, using the visual representation of the audio signal of the subjects, that is, the spectrogram. Moreover, we used a data augmentation approach to overcome the problem of the large amount of annotated data usually required during the training phase, which represents one of the most major obstacles in deep learning. We evaluated the proposed method using a dataset of 288 audio files from 96 subjects: 48 healthy controls and 48 cognitively impaired participants. The proposed method obtained good classification results compared to the state-of-the-art neuropsychological screening tests and, with an accuracy of 90.57%, outperformed the methods based on manual transcription and annotation of speech.
Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation for Organ Matching
Authors: Shojaee Parshin , Chen Xiaoyu , Jin Ran
Published: October 2021

Reducing the shortage of organ donations to meet the demands of patients on the waiting list has being a major challenge in organ transplantation. Because of the shortage, organ matching decision is the most critical decision to assign the limited viable organs to the most “suitable” patients. Currently, organ matching decisions are only made by matching scores calculated via scoring models, which are built by the first principles. However, these models may disagree with the actual post-transplantation matching performance (e.g., patient's post-transplant
quality of life (QoL)
or graft failure measurements). In this paper, we formulate the organ matching decision-making as a top-N recommendation problem and propose an
Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation (AWTR)
method. AWTR improves performance of the current scoring models by using limited actual matching performance in historical datasets as well as the collected covariates from organ donors and patients. AWTR sacrifices the overall recommendation accuracy by emphasizing the recommendation and ranking accuracy for top-N matched patients. The proposed method is validated in a simulation study, where KAS [
60
] is used to simulate the organ-patient recommendation response. The results show that our proposed method outperforms seven state-of-the-art top-N recommendation benchmark methods.
A High-throughput Parallel Viterbi Algorithm via Bitslicing
Authors: Monfared Saleh Khalaj , Hajihassani Omid , Mohsseni Vahid , Rahmati Dara , Gorgin Saeid
Published: October 2021

In this work, we present a novel bitsliced high-performance Viterbi algorithm suitable for high-throughput and data-intensive communication. A new column-major data representation scheme coupled with the bitsliced architecture is employed in our proposed Viterbi decoder that enables the maximum utilization of the parallel processing units in modern parallel accelerators. With the help of the proposed alteration of the data scheme, instead of the conventional bit-by-bit operations, 32-bit chunks of data are processed by each processing unit. This means that a single bitsliced parallel Viterbi decoder is capable of decoding 32 different chunks of data simultaneously. Here, the Viterbi’s Add-Compare-Select procedure is implemented with our proposed bitslicing technique, where it is shown that the bitsliced operations for the Viterbi internal functionalities are efficient in terms of their performance and complexity. We have achieved this level of high parallelism while keeping an acceptable bit error rate performance for our proposed methodology. Our suggested hard and soft-decision Viterbi decoder implementations on GPU platforms outperform the fastest previously proposed works by

and

, achieving 21.41 and 8.24 Gbps on Tesla V100, respectively.
Evaluation of U-Net Based Architectures for Automatic Aortic Dissection Segmentation
Authors: Feiger Bradley , Lorenzana-Saldivar Erick , Cooke Colin , Horstmeyer Roarke , Bishawi Muath , Doberne Julie , Hughes G. Chad , Ranney David , Voigt Soraya , Randles Amanda
Published: October 2021

Segmentation and reconstruction of arteries is important for a variety of medical and engineering fields, such as surgical planning and physiological modeling. However, manual methods can be laborious and subject to a high degree of human variability. In this work, we developed various
convolutional neural network
(
CNN
) architectures to segment Stanford
type B aortic dissections
(
TBADs
), characterized by a tear in the descending aortic wall creating a normal channel of blood flow called a true lumen and a pathologic channel within the wall called a false lumen. We introduced several variations to the
two-dimensional
(
2D
) and
three-dimensional
(3
D
) U-Net, where small stacks of slices were inputted into the networks instead of individual slices or whole geometries. We compared these variations with a variety of CNN segmentation architectures and found that stacking the input data slices in the upward direction with 2D U-Net improved segmentation accuracy, as measured by the
Dice similarity coefficient
(
DC
) and point-by-point
average distance
(
AVD
), by more than

15\%

. Our optimal architecture produced DC scores of 0.94, 0.88, and 0.90 and AVD values of 0.074, 0.22, and 0.11 in the whole aorta, true lumen, and false lumen, respectively. Altogether, the predicted reconstructions closely matched manual reconstructions.
Leveraging NVMe SSDs for Building a Fast, Cost-effective, LSM-tree-based KV Store
Authors: Li Cheng , Chen Hao , Ruan Chaoyi , Ma Xiaosong , Xu Yinlong
Published: October 2021

Key-value (KV) stores support many crucial applications and services. They perform fast in-memory processing but are still often limited by I/O performance. The recent emergence of high-speed commodity non-volatile memory express solid-state drives (NVMe SSDs) has propelled new KV system designs that take advantage of their ultra-low latency and high bandwidth. Meanwhile, to switch to entirely new data layouts and scale up entire databases to high-end SSDs requires considerable investment. As a compromise, we propose SpanDB, an LSM-tree-based KV store that adapts the popular RocksDB system to utilize
selective deployment of high-speed SSDs
. SpanDB allows users to host the bulk of their data on cheaper and larger SSDs (and even hard disc drives with certain workloads), while relocating write-ahead logs (WAL) and the top levels of the LSM-tree to a much smaller and faster NVMe SSD. To better utilize this fast disk, SpanDB provides high-speed, parallel WAL writes via SPDK, and enables asynchronous request processing to mitigate inter-thread synchronization overhead and work efficiently with polling-based I/O. To ease the live data migration between fast and slow disks, we introduce TopFS, a stripped-down file system providing familiar file interface wrappers on top of SPDK I/O. Our evaluation shows that SpanDB simultaneously improves RocksDB's throughput by up to 8.8

\times

and reduces its latency by 9.5–58.3%. Compared with KVell, a system designed for high-end SSDs, SpanDB achieves 96–140% of its throughput, with a 2.3–21.6

\times

lower latency, at a cheaper storage configuration.
On Communication Complexity of Fixed Point Computation
Authors: Ganor Anat , S. Karthik C. , Pálvölgyi Dömötör
Published: October 2021

Brouwer’s fixed point theorem states that any continuous function from a compact convex space to itself has a fixed point. Roughgarden and Weinstein (FOCS 2016) initiated the study of fixed point computation in the two-player communication model, where each player gets a function from

[0,1]^n

to

[0,1]^n

, and their goal is to find an approximate fixed point of the
composition
of the two functions. They left it as an open question to show a lower bound of

2^{\Omega (n)}

for the (randomized) communication complexity of this problem, in the range of parameters which make it a total search problem. We answer this question affirmatively.

Additionally, we introduce two natural fixed point problems in the two-player communication model.

Each player is given a function from

[0,1]^n

to

[0,1]^{n/2}

, and their goal is to find an approximate fixed point of the
concatenation
of the functions.

Each player is given a function from

[0,1]^n

to

[0,1]^{n}

, and their goal is to find an approximate fixed point of the
mean
of the functions.

We show a randomized communication complexity lower bound of

2^{\Omega (n)}

for these problems (for some constant approximation factor).

Finally, we initiate the study of finding a panchromatic simplex in a Sperner-coloring of a triangulation (guaranteed by Sperner’s lemma) in the two-player communication model: A triangulation

T

of the

d

-simplex is publicly known and one player is given a set

S_A\subset T

and a coloring function from

S_A

to

\lbrace 0,\ldots ,d/2\rbrace

, and the other player is given a set

S_B\subset T

and a coloring function from

S_B

to

\lbrace d/2+1,\ldots ,d\rbrace

, such that

S_A\dot{\cup }S_B=T

, and their goal is to find a panchromatic simplex. We show a randomized communication complexity lower bound of

|T|^{\Omega (1)}

for the aforementioned problem as well (when

d

is large). On the positive side, we show that if

d\le 4

then there is a deterministic protocol for the Sperner problem with

O((\log |T|)^2)

bits of communication.
Two-Sided Random Matching Markets: Ex-Ante Equivalence of the Deferred Acceptance Procedures
Authors: Mauras Simon
Published: October 2021

Stable matching in a community consisting of

N

men and

N

women is a classical combinatorial problem that has been the subject of intense theoretical and empirical study since its introduction in 1962 in a seminal work by Gale and Shapley.

When the input preference profile is generated from a distribution, we study the output distribution of two stable matching procedures: women-proposing-deferred-acceptance and men-proposing-deferred-acceptance. We show that the two procedures are ex-ante equivalent—that is, under certain conditions on the input distribution, their output distributions are identical.

In terms of technical contributions, we generalize (to the non-uniform case) an integral formula, due to Knuth and Pittel, which gives the probability that a fixed matching is stable. Using an inclusion-exclusion principle on the set of rotations, we give a new formula that gives the probability that a fixed matching is the women/men-optimal stable matching.
Ensuring Improved Security in Medical Data Using ECC and Blockchain Technology with Edge Devices
Authors: Christo Mary Subaja , Jesi V. Elizabeth , Priyadarsini Uma , Anbarasu V. , Venugopal Hridya , Karuppiah Marimuthu
Published: October 2021

Hospital data management is one of the functional parts of operations to store and access healthcare data. Nowadays, protecting these from hacking is one of the most difficult tasks in the healthcare system. As the user’s data collected in the field of healthcare is very sensitive, adequate security measures have to be taken in this field to protect the networks. To maintain security, an effective encryption technology must be utilised. This paper focuses on implementing the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) technique, a lightweight authentication approach to share the data effectively. Many researches are in place to share the data wirelessly, among which this work uses Electronic Medical Card (EMC) to store the healthcare data. The work discusses two important data security issues: data authentication and data confidentiality. To ensure data authentication, the proposed system employs a secure mechanism to encrypt and decrypt the data with a 512-bit key. Data confidentiality is ensured by using the Blockchain ledger technique which allows ethical users to access the data. Finally, the encrypted data is stored on the edge device. The edge computing technology is used to store the medical reports within the edge network to access the data in a very fast manner. An authenticated user can decrypt the data and process the data at optimum speed. After processing, the updated data is stored in the Blockchain and in the cloud server. This proposed method ensures secure maintenance and efficient retrieval of medical data and reports.
Effect of Applying Binocular Visual Training after Slanted Lateral Rectus Recession on Orthophoric Rate and Binocular Visual Function Recovery on Patients with Convergence Insufficiency-Type Intermittent Exotropia
Authors: Dai Shuying , Sun Weifeng , Xu Hongjia , Wang Yanan , Liu Yuan , Han Aijun , Han Lixiao , Wang Juan , Liao Rujuan , Liu Sujiang , Gao Yu , Han Huifang
Published: October 2021

Objective. To explore the effect of applying binocular visual training after slanted lateral rectus recession on orthophoric rate and binocular visual function recovery on patients with convergence insufficiency-type intermittent exotropia (CI-IXT). Methods. A total of 76 CI-IXT child patients treated at the Strabismus and Pediatric Ophthalmology Department of our hospital from June 2019 to June 2020 were selected as the research objects, and those who met the inclusion criteria were equally divided into group A (63 eyes) and group B (61 eyes) according to the sealed envelope randomization. All child patients accepted the slanted lateral rectus recession, and after that, those in group A accepted the binocular visual training and those in group B accepted the conventional visual function rehabilitation training, so as to compare their position of eye, the best corrected visual acuity, etc., after training for statistical analysis. Results. Compared with group B after one month of surgery, group A had significantly less patients with grade I binocular vision function (

P

 < 0.001) and more patients with grade II and III vision function (

P

 < 0.05); between group A and group B, after 3 months and 6 months of treatment, the number of eyes with normal stereoscopic vision was significantly higher in group A (

P

 < 0.05); at 15 days, 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months of treatment, the visual strain scores of group A were significantly lower (

P

 < 0.001); after treatment, the number of orthophoria eyes was significantly higher in group A (

P

 < 0.001), while the numbers of overcorrected eyes and undercorrected eyes were significantly higher in group B (

P

 < 0.001); and the total incidence rate of adverse reactions was significantly lower in group A (

P

 < 0.05). Conclusion. Applying binocular visual training to child patients with CI-IXT after slanted lateral rectus recession can promote the recovery of binocular vision and ensure higher safety, and further study will help to establish a better solution for the affected children.
Adaptive rewiring in nonuniform coupled oscillators
Authors: Haqiqatkhah MohamamdHossein Manuel , van Leeuwen Cees
Published: October 2021

Structural plasticity of the brain can be represented in a highly simplified form as adaptive rewiring, the relay of connections according to the spontaneous dynamic synchronization in network activity. Adaptive rewiring, over time, leads from initial random networks to brain-like complex networks, that is, networks with modular small-world structures and a rich-club effect. Adaptive rewiring has only been studied, however, in networks of identical oscillators with uniform or random coupling strengths. To implement information-processing functions (e.g., stimulus selection or memory storage), it is necessary to consider symmetry-breaking perturbations of oscillator amplitudes and coupling strengths. We studied whether nonuniformities in amplitude or connection strength could operate in tandem with adaptive rewiring. Throughout network evolution, either amplitude or connection strength of a subset of oscillators was kept different from the rest. In these extreme conditions, subsets might become isolated from the rest of the network or otherwise interfere with the development of network complexity. However, whereas these subsets form distinctive structural and functional communities, they generally maintain connectivity with the rest of the network and allow the development of network complexity. Pathological development was observed only in a small proportion of the models. These results suggest that adaptive rewiring can robustly operate alongside information processing in biological and artificial neural networks.
He Thinks He Knows Better than the Doctors: BERT for Event Factuality Fails on Pragmatics
Authors: Jiang Nanjiang , de Marneffe Marie-Catherine
Published: October 2021

We investigate how well BERT performs on predicting factuality in several existing English datasets, encompassing various linguistic constructions. Although BERT obtains a strong performance on most datasets, it does so by exploiting common surface patterns that correlate with certain factuality labels, and it fails on instances where pragmatic reasoning is necessary. Contrary to what the high performance suggests, we are still far from having a robust system for factuality prediction.
PAQ: 65 Million Probably-Asked Questions and What You Can Do With Them
Authors: Lewis Patrick , Wu Yuxiang , Liu Linqing , Minervini Pasquale , Küttler Heinrich , Piktus Aleksandra , Stenetorp Pontus , Riedel Sebastian
Published: October 2021

Open-domain Question Answering models that directly leverage question-answer (QA) pairs, such as closed-book QA (CBQA) models and QA-pair retrievers, show promise in terms of speed and memory compared with conventional models which retrieve and read from text corpora. QA-pair retrievers also offer interpretable answers, a high degree of control, and are trivial to update at test time with new knowledge. However, these models fall short of the accuracy of retrieve-and-read systems, as substantially less knowledge is covered by the available QA-pairs relative to text corpora like Wikipedia. To facilitate improved QA-pair models, we introduce Probably Asked Questions (PAQ), a very large resource of 65M automatically generated QA-pairs. We introduce a new QA-pair retriever, RePAQ, to complement PAQ. We find that PAQ preempts and caches test questions, enabling RePAQ to match the accuracy of recent retrieve-and-read models, whilst being significantly faster. Using PAQ, we train CBQA models which outperform comparable baselines by 5%, but trail RePAQ by over 15%, indicating the effectiveness of explicit retrieval. RePAQ can be configured for size (under 500MB) or speed (over 1K questions per second) while retaining high accuracy. Lastly, we demonstrate RePAQ’s strength at selective QA, abstaining from answering when it is likely to be incorrect. This enables RePAQ to “back-off” to a more expensive state-of-the-art model, leading to a combined system which is both more accurate and 2x faster than the state-of-the-art model alone.
Updated checklist of semi-terrestrial and estuarine crabs (Crustacea: Decapoda: Brachyura) of Barbados, West Indies
Authors: PARASRAM NADESHINIE , SANTANA WILLIAM , VALLÈS HENRI
Published: October 2021

Considering the growing threats to the biodiversity of small Caribbean islands (e.g., habitat loss and fragmentation, overexploitation, invasive species, and climate change), it is important to establish biodiversity inventories that serve as baselines for monitoring and evaluation of conservation efforts. In Barbados (West Indies), the most recent comprehensive taxonomic account of brachyuran crabs came from Rathbun (1921) reporting the specimens collected by the University of Iowa Barbados-Antigua Expedition in 1918. The present study fills the 100-year gap in knowledge by providing an updated taxonomic checklist of brachyuran crabs associated with semi-terrestrial and estuarine habitats in Barbados. A total of 245 specimens representing three superfamilies, six families, nine genera, and 13 species were collected over a period of 425 search-hours in twenty-seven sampling locations in semi-terrestrial and estuarine habitats of Barbados between September 2018 and November 2020. The families with the highest numbers of species identified were Gecarcinidae (3) and Portunidae (3), followed by Grapsidae (2), Sesarmidae (2), Ocypodidae (2), and Varunidae (1). The species Armases ricordi (H. Milne Edwards, 1853), Cyclograpsus integer H. Milne Edwards, 1837, and Callinectes sapidus Rathbun, 1896, are recorded here for the first time for Barbados.
Further addition to the Indian fauna of Euryleptidae (Polycladida: Cotylea) with description of a new Cycloporus Lang, 1884 and Eurylepta Ehrenberg, 1831
Authors: PITALE RESHMA , APTE DEEPAK
Published: October 2021

A study of polyclad fauna in Maharashtra along the west coast of India and the Andaman group of Islands was carried out in the period 2018–2020. The paper describes Cycloporus decoratus sp. nov. and Eurylepta alicula sp. nov. based on external and internal anatomical features. The study also reports Eurylepta turma for the first time from the Indo-Pacific region and this is the second record of the species after its first formal description from Brazil in 1952. The paper comments on the distribution pattern of the genus Eurylepta and Cycloporus.
A new species of Polyophthalmus (Annelida, Opheliidae) from the Arabian Gulf, with an insight on internal anatomy and diversity of the genus
Authors: PARAPAR JULIO , AL-KANDARI MANAL , CANDÁS MARÍA , MOREIRA JUAN
Published: October 2021

Polyophthalmus zhadanae sp. nov. (Annelida, Opheliidae), is described from the coast of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (Arabian Gulf) after specimens collected in the intertidal and shallow subtidal. This new species is characterised by the body pigmentation pattern, distribution of lateral eyes, presence of small dorsal and ventral parapodial cirri and pygidial features. External and internal anatomy was described after examination with SEM and micro-CT. The presence of several body structures in the genus such as a cephalic palpode-like papilla is discussed. Furthermore, the diversity of genus Polyophthalmus and the presence of Polyophthalmus pictus (Dujardin, 1839) in the Indo-Pacific is reviewed and a key to species is provided.
A revision of the treehopper genus Bubalopa Stål illuminates the systematics of Hyphinoini (Hemiptera: Auchenorrhyncha: Membracidae)
Authors: FLÓREZ-V CAMILO , EVANGELISTA OLIVIA
Published: October 2021

Bubalopa Stål, 1869 (Darninae: Hyphinoini) is an obscure genus of treehoppers endemic to the Northern Andes. In this work, we reassess the taxonomic boundaries of Bubalopa based on primary types and comparative material. Newly reported characters from adults and nymphs expand the current concept of Hyphinoini, for which an amended diagnosis is presented. Identification keys, species redescriptions, illustrations, and distribution maps are provided for the three species that now constitute Bubalopa: B. furcata (Fairmaire, 1846), B. obscuricornis Stål, 1869 and B. iguaque sp. nov. (Cordillera Oriental, Colombia). Immatures of Hyphinoe obliqua (Walker, 1858) and B. furcata are described for the first time with notes on their life history. A nomenclatural change is proposed for Hyphinoe punctorum Buckton, 1903, previously included in Bubalopa, now considered to be a junior synonym of Eualthe punctum (Fairmaire, 1846). A lectotype is designated for Hemiptycha furcata Fairmaire, 1846, currently housed at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien.
New species of Ticoplinae (Hymenoptera: Mutillidae) from India
Authors: LELEJ ARKADY S. , TERINE JOSHUA B. , KUMAR GIRISH P.
Published: October 2021

The subfamily Ticoplinae is Afrotropical, Oriental and Palaearctic in distribution with six species in two genera (Eosmicromyrmilla Lelej & Krombein, 2001 and Hindustanilla Lelej in Lelej & Krombein, 2001) known from the Oriental Region. Two new species, E. subbuka sp. nov., and E. balakrishnani sp. nov. were recently discovered in India (Western Ghats). Keys to the Old World genera of tribe Smicromyrmillini and species of Eosmicromyrmilla are provided. An updated diagnosis for males of Eosmicromyrmilla and photos of male genitalia for the genus are given. A new combination is proposed for E. margalla (Lelej & Ullah, 2007), comb. nov. The genus Eosmicromyrmilla is newly recorded from the fauna of Pakistan instead of the genus Smicromyrmilla Suárez, 1965, which is excluded from that fauna.
Novel Difolate Targeting Nano-Level Ultrasound Contrast Agent for Therapy of Breast Cancer Tumor Cells
Authors: Liu Guangheng , Yang Xiangfeng , Niu Qiming , Sun Wenkui
Published: October 2021

ABSTRACTA new type of difolate targeting nano-level ultrasound contrast agent ((folate molecule, FOL)2-TUAs) was prepared, so as to investigate its targeted binding effect with human breast cancer mammary carcinoma cells (MCF-7) in vitro. L-2-aminoadipic
acid (L-2-AD) as a branch unit was inserted at the hydroxyl end of distearoyl phosphatidylethanolamine (DISP)-PEG2000-COOH to construct a tree structure. At this time, the free hydroxyl group in the distearoyl phosphatidylethanolamine (DISP)-PEG2000-COOH structure modified the FOL with the
help of N-Hydroxysuccinimide/N,N'-dicyclohexylcarbodiimide (NHS/DCC). Each 1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphoethanolamine-N-[methoxy(polyethylene glycol)-2000] (DISP-PEG2000) connected two FOLs to generate difolate targeted nanomaterials. Nano laser particle size (PS)
and Zeta potential analyzer (ZPA) were applied to analyze the physical characteristics of the material such as PS and dispersion, and the enhanced development effect in vitro was detected by the ultrasonic diagnostic instrument. Besides, the targeted binding ability of the contrast
agent based on this material to folate receptor (FR) overexpressing MCF-7 cells was analyzed by flow cytometry (FCM) and fluorescence microscope. In the experiment, hydrogen-1 nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR) demonstrated that (FOL)2-TUAs was successfully synthesized.
The surface of this material was round and uniformly distributed without aggregation. According to the relative number of FOL molecules, non-targeted nano-agent (U-TUA), monofolate targeted nano-agent (FOL-TUA), and difolate targeted nano-agent ((FOL)2-TUA) were obtained. The in
vitro imaging showed that different materials exhibited enhanced imaging effects in ultrasonic diagnostic equipment. FCM and fluorescence microscopy both indicated that the difolate TUA could achieve a good binding to MCF-7 cells. Most of the nano-agents were attached to the cell membrane,
surrounded by red fluorophore, namely increasing the FOL content of DISP-PEG2000 chain could enhance the targeted binding ability of tumor cells.
Experimental investigations on two-sided upward flame spreading over thin flax fabric under the influence of restricted distance
Authors: Gao Yunji , Yang Xiaolong , Luo Yueyang , Li Zhisheng , Gong Liang
Published: October 2021

Up to 2021, most previous work focused on upward flame spread over thin solid fuel completely attached to objects or with both sides freely exposed to the air, but did not take the restricted distance (distance between fuel and objects) effects into account. In this paper, the restricted distance effects on upward flame spread over thin solid fuels were investigated using 0.65 mm thick, 120 cm tall and 6.0 cm wide flax fabric sheets under various restricted distances of 1.0–3.5 cm. The essential parameters were monitored and analyzed simultaneously, including flame length, pyrolysis spread rate, surface temperature and ignition time. The main conclusions drawn are as follows: when the restricted distance is no more than 1.5 cm, the flame length on the unrestricted side is larger than that on the restricted side, whereas the variation exhibits the opposite trend when the restricted distance is beyond 1.5 cm. As the restricted distance increases from 1.0 to 3.5 cm, the flame length and flame spread rate first increase and then decrease, reaching a maximum value at 3.0 cm restricted distance, whereas the ignition time shows the opposite trend. The decrease rate of the surface temperature with the distance from the pyrolysis front first drops and then rises as the restricted distance increases, which qualitatively characterizes that the heat flux received by the virgin surface first increases and then decreases with restricted distance. The non-monotonic trends of heat flux received by the virgin surface and consequently the flame spread rate as a function of restricted distance are due to the combined restricted distance effects of the chimney effect, wall radiation and restricting oxygen supply. The results of this paper are not only helpful in better understanding the upward flame spread over a thin flax fabric under restricted distance, but also provide some basic data for fire prevention of thin solid fuels.
Effect of the addition of aliphatic diamine-functionalized carbon nanotubes on the interfacial adhesion of glass fiber/epoxy composites
Authors: Fan Yecheng , Ziyue Shen , Zeng Shaohua , Chen Pengpeng , Xu Ying , Nie Wangyan , Zhou Yifeng
Published: October 2021

To improve the interfacial adhesion of glass fiber (GF)/epoxy composites, the GF surface was treated by dispersing aliphatic diamine-functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs). Carboxyl MWCNTs were first modified by aliphatic diamine with different alkyl chain lengths and then deposited on the surface of GF. The effect of aliphatic diamine chain lengths on the MWCNTs’ dispersion and interfacial properties of resultant composites was investigated in detail. The results showed that uniform dispersion of MWCNTs and strong fiber/matrix interfacial adhesion could be achieved, based on the grafting of 1,8-octanediamine onto MWCNTs. Compared with the control sample, the interlaminar shear, flexural, and tensile strengths of the treated composites increased by 41%, 29%, and 30%, respectively; the interlaminar fracture toughness and storage modulus in the glass region were significantly enhanced; and the glass transition temperature increased by more than 8°C. This work demonstrates that the carbon nanotubes functionalized by appropriate chain lengths of amine modifier can improve the fiber/matrix interfacial interactions and thus enhance the strength, toughness, and stiffness of fiber-reinforced composites.
Characterization of a polyaniline/pre-oxidized fiber felt electromagnetic wave absorbing composite
Authors: Wang Yi , Liu Yuanjun , Zhao Xiaoming
Published: October 2021

Firstly, a polyaniline/pre-oxidized fiber felt composite was prepared by in situ polymerization using pre-oxidized fiber felt as the substrate, aniline as the monomer, ammonium persulfate as the oxidant, and p-toluenesulfonic acid as the dopant. Secondly, the electromagnetic wave absorbing property and tensile property of the polyaniline/pre-oxidized fiber felt composite were investigated. Finally, the structure and composition were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and differential scanning calorimetry. The results show that the reflection loss of the polyaniline/pre-oxidized fiber felt composite is the smallest at the 3000 MHz frequency, reaching –8.23 dB, and the average surface resistance is 2059.84 Ω, with good conductivity. The characterization analysis shows that polyaniline has been successfully loaded on the pre-oxidized fiber felt, and the protonation reaction occurs at the nitrogen atom on the imine -N-. The polyaniline structure is doped by p-toluenesulfonic acid with a certain degree of order and crystallinity, and the composite has good thermal stability.
Multiple osteolytic primary peripheral T-cell bone lymphoma: the first case report
Authors: Li Chen , Wang Weiguo , Xu Lingyun , Zheng Dingyun , Zhang Miao , Zhang Qin , Wu Xiaoqian , Yao Yue , Huang Wenyue , Li Xue , Ying Peipei , Wang Xiuxiu , Shang Liu , Feng Yuhu
Published: October 2021

Peripheral T-cell lymphoma accounts for about 10% of all cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. However, less than 5% of patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma present with hypercalcaemia as the initial symptom, and less than 1% present with primary bone lesions. We herein describe a 76-year-old Chinese man who was diagnosed with primary bone adult T-cell lymphoma with extensive osteolysis, including bone loss in the radius, as the initial manifestation. He had developed severe generalised bone pain and an inability to raise his arms. X-ray examination revealed osteolytic destruction of the forearm with loss of the radial diaphysis. The patient was diagnosed with peripheral T-cell lymphoma based on his immunohistochemical results. He began treatment with the CHOPE chemotherapy regimen, which resulted in significant improvement of his bone pain.
Buderas—A Pastoralist Community of High Himalayan Society: Migration, Identity, Existence and Belief
Authors: Saklani Dinesh Prasad
Published: October 2021

Buderas are inhabitants of Gangi, Pinswar and Ginwali, three villages in Tehri district of Uttarakhand. They are basically grazers, who, at a certain point of time in history, migrated from Kashmir via Himachal Pradesh. The migration and settlement of Buderas is very interesting, being interwoven with the tale of their deity. They, in general, follow Hinduism, only in certain aspects but are specifically devoted to their deity Somesu or Samosa, as they call it. Somesu is the focal point of their life and society.

In the present article, which is based on my field study of Gangi village in Tehri district of Garhwal, way back in 1999, the focus is on the rituals and worship related to Somesu for the well-being of the cattle folk of the Buderas. How they propitiate and please the deity for taking care of their cattle folk, while away in pastures for months and months, are focal points of the present article. The element of change and continuity in the performance of the rituals and religion is also highlighted in the this article.
A snapshot of venous ultrasound examinations in Australia and New Zealand: Implications for diagnosis and management of chronic venous disease interventions
Authors: Liu Gaorui , Clarke Jillian L , Mohan Irwin
Published: October 2021

Objective

Chronic venous disease is a common vascular condition, affecting up to 60% of the population worldwide. In Australia and New Zealand, chronic venous insufficiency ultrasound examinations are primarily performed by sonographers. This research aimed to explore how ultrasound examinations are being performed, providing insights into current practices and recommendations for quality improvement.

Method

A questionnaire was distributed to capture demographics, practices of ultrasound, examination techniques, the use of nomenclature and experience of the respondents.

Results

The analysis of 97 responses showed a heterogeneity in the clinical application of ultrasound. Most sonographers performed less than two scans per day within 30–45 minutes. Deep venous incompetence was routinely excluded by all respondents. The majority used standing, sitting and reverse Trendelenburg position except for a few using supine position. Manual augmentation was the preferred provocation manoeuvre. Anatomical variations at the junctional level were not adequately evaluated. Although Giacomini’s vein was assessed by 80%, 57% of those did not evaluate paradoxical reflux. Seventy-five per cent routinely assessed non-saphenous reflux; however, over 50% were unfamiliar with lymph node venous networks. A significant number of out-dated venous terms were still being used. A low participation rate in continuing professional development was identified, which might be attributable to limited education and training programs.

Conclusion

The study is a multi-faceted exploration that identified a need for standardized diagnostic and reporting guidelines. Our results could explain discrepancies in diagnostic findings and inconsistencies in the use of medical terminology, with implications for clinical decision making and assessment of surgical outcome.