LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
APPLICATION OF X-RAY TECHNIQUE IN NONDESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION OF EUCALYPT

X-rays were initially used for the inspection of special-purpose wood pieces for quantitative evaluation of wood properties of different species. X-ray densitometry has had its use expanded in dendroclimatology of Picea engelmannii trees. Subsequent laboratories developed applications of X-ray densitometry for environmental, wood science and technology, and related areas. This paper describes the basic methodology of X-ray densitometry applied to the eucalypt wood analysis, as well as presenting the results of applications in three areas: (i) evaluation of wood biodegradation by white rot fungi, (ii) detection of sapwood and heartwood, and (iii) determination of the effect of management on wood properties. The wood decayed by white rot fungi was detected by X-ray densitometry with a decreasing wood density due to the biodegradation of cell wall components. The sapwood and heartwood of eucalypts were separated in response to the attenuation of X-rays, refl ected by the wood anatomical structure and chemical composition. Also, in eucalypt trees after the application of irrigation and fertilizationirrigation characteristic wood density profi les were detected. In addition, the signifi cant potential of X-ray densitometry for eucalypt wood research and analysis is discussed.
Lipoic Acid Increases Hippocampal Choline Acetyltransferase and Acetylcholinesterase Activities and Improvement Memory in Epileptic Rats

In the present study we investigated the effect of seizures on rat performance in the Morris water maze task, as well as on choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activities in rat hippocampus. Wistar rats were treated with 0.9% saline (i.p., control group), lipoic acid (20 mg/kg, i.p., LA group), pilocarpine (400 mg/kg, i.p., pilocarpine group), and the association of LA (20 mg/kg, i.p.) plus pilocarpine (400 mg/kg, i.p.), 30 min before of administration of LA (LA plus pilocarpine group). After the treatments all groups were observed for 1 h. The effect of lipoic acid administration was observed on reference and working spatial memory of seized rats. The ChAT and AChE activities were measured using spectrophotometric methods and the results compared to values obtained from saline and pilocarpine-treated animals. Its activity was also determined after behavioral task. Results showed that pretreatment with lipoic acid did not alter reference memory when compared to saline-treated animals. In the working memory task, we observed a significant day’s effect with significant differences between control and pilocarpine-induced seizures and pretreated animals with lipoic acid. In LA plus pilocarpine group was observed a significantly increased in ChAT and AChE activities, when compared to pilocarpine group. Results showed that acute administration of lipoic acid alone did not alter hippocampal ChAT and AChE activities. Our findings suggest that seizures caused cognitive dysfunction and a decrease of ChAT and AChE activities that might be related, at least in part, to the neurological problems presented by epileptic patients. Lipoic acid can reverse cognitive dysfunction observed in seized rats as well as increase the ChAT and AChE activities in hippocampus of rats prior to pilocarpine-induced seizures, suggesting that this antioxidant could be used in clinic treatment of epilepsy.
A Passivity Framework for Modeling and Mitigating Wormhole Attacks on Networked Control Systems

Networked control systems consist of distributed sensors and actuators that communicate via a wireless network. The use of an open wireless medium and unattended deployment leaves these systems vulnerable to intelligent adversaries whose goal is to disrupt the system performance. In this paper, we study the wormhole attack on a networked control system, in which an adversary establishes a link between two geographically distant regions of the network by using either high-gain antennas, as in the out-of-band wormhole, or colluding network nodes as in the in-band wormhole. Wormholes allow the adversary to violate the timing constraints of real-time control systems by first creating low-latency links, which attract network traffic, and then delaying or dropping packets. Since the wormhole attack reroutes and replays valid messages, it cannot be detected using cryptographic mechanisms alone. We study the impact of the wormhole attack on the network flows and delays and introduce a passivity-based control-theoretic framework for modeling and mitigating the wormhole attack. We develop this framework for both the in-band and out-of-band wormhole attacks as well as complex, hereto-unreported wormhole attacks consisting of arbitrary combinations of in-and out-of band wormholes. By integrating existing mitigation strategies into our framework, we analyze the throughput, delay, and stability properties of the overall system. Through simulation study, we show that, by selectively dropping control packets, the wormhole attack can cause disturbances in the physical plant of a networked control system, and demonstrate that appropriate selection of detection parameters mitigates the disturbances due to the wormhole while satisfying the delay constraints of the physical system.
A lightweight methodology for rapid ontology engineering

UPON Lite focuses on users, typically domain experts without ontology expertise, minimizing the role of ontology engineers.
Extracting information from noise spectra of chemical sensors: single sensor electronic noses and tongues

Electronic noses and tongues can utilize noise data taken at the output of a chemical sensor. It is shown that even one single sensor may be suf®cient for realizing an electronic nose or tongue. # 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Predictive Representations of State

We show that states of a dynamical system can be usefully represented by multi-step, action-conditional predictions of future observations. State representations that are grounded in data in this way may be easier to learn, generalize better, and be less dependent on accurate prior models than, for example, POMDP state representations. Building on prior work by Jaeger and by Rivest and Schapire, in this paper we compare and contrast a linear specialization of the predictive approach with the state representations used in POMDPs and in k-order Markov models. Ours is the first specific formulation of the predictive idea that includes both stochasticity and actions (controls). We show that any system has a linear predictive state representation with number of predictions no greater than the number of states in its minimal POMDP model. In predicting or controlling a sequence of observations, the concepts of state and state estimation inevitably arise. There have been two dominant approaches. The generative-model approach, typified by research on partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), hypothesizes a structure for generating observations and estimates its state and state dynamics. The history-based approach, typified by k-order Markov methods, uses simple functions of past observations as state, that is, as the immediate basis for prediction and control. (The data flow in these two approaches are diagrammed in Figure 1.) Of the two, the generative-model approach is more general. The model's internal state gives it temporally unlimited memorythe ability to remember an event that happened arbitrarily long ago--whereas a history-based approach can only remember as far back as its history extends. The bane of generative-model approaches is that they are often strongly dependent on a good model of the system's dynamics. Most uses of POMDPs, for example, assume a perfect dynamics model and attempt only to estimate state. There are algorithms for simultaneously estimating state and dynamics (e.g., Chrisman, 1992), analogous to the Baum-Welch algorithm for the uncontrolled case (Baum et al., 1970), but these are only effective at tuning parameters that are already approximately correct (e.g., Shatkay & Kaelbling, 1997). observations (and actions) (a) state 1-----1-----1..rep'n observations¢E (and actions) / state t/' rep'n 1-step --+ . delays
A sustained increase in plasma NEFA upregulates the Toll-like receptor network in human muscle

Insulin-sensitive tissues (muscle, liver) of individuals with obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus are in a state of low-grade inflammation, characterised by increased Toll-like receptor (TLR) expression and TLR-driven signalling. However, the cause of this mild inflammatory state is unclear. We tested the hypothesis that a prolonged mild increase in plasma NEFA will increase TLR expression and TLR-driven signalling (nuclear factor κB [NFκB] and mitogen-activated kinase [MAPK]) and impair insulin action in muscle of lean healthy individuals. Twelve lean, normal-glucose-tolerant participants were randomised to receive a 48 h infusion (30 ml/h) of saline or Intralipid followed by a euglycaemic–hyperinsulinaemic clamp. Vastus lateralis muscle biopsies were performed before and during the clamp. Lipid infusion impaired insulin-stimulated IRS-1 tyrosine phosphorylation and reduced peripheral insulin sensitivity (p < 0.01). The elevation in circulating NEFA increased expression of TLR3, TLR4 and TLR5, and several MAPK (MAPK8, MAP4K4, MAP2K3) and inhibitor of κB kinase-NFκB (CHUK [IKKA], c-REL [REL] and p65 [RELA, NFKB3, p65]) signalling genes (p < 0.05). The lipid infusion also increased extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) phosphorylation (p < 0.05) and tended to reduce the content of inhibitor of kappa Bα (p = 0.09). The muscle content of most diacylglycerol, ceramide and acylcarnitine species was unaffected. In summary, insulin resistance induced by prolonged low-dose lipid infusion occurs together with increased TLR-driven inflammatory signalling and impaired insulin-stimulated IRS-1 tyrosine phosphorylation. A sustained, mild elevation in plasma NEFA is sufficient to increase TLR expression and TLR-driven signalling (NFκB and MAPK) in lean individuals. The activation of this pathway by NEFA may be involved in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance in humans. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01740817
Components of executive control with advantages for bilingual children in two cultures

The present study used a behavioral version of an anti-saccade task, called the 'faces task', developed by [Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., & Ryan, J. (2006). Executive control in a modified anti-saccade task: Effects of aging and bilingualism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 1341-1354] to isolate the components of executive functioning responsible for previously reported differences between monolingual and bilingual children and to determine the generality of these differences by comparing bilinguals in two cultures. Three components of executive control were investigated: response suppression, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Ninety children, 8-years old, belonged to one of three groups: monolinguals in Canada, bilinguals in Canada, and bilinguals in India. The bilingual children in both settings were faster than monolinguals in conditions based on inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility but there was no significant difference between groups in response suppression or on a control condition that did not involve executive control. The children in the two bilingual groups performed equivalently to each other and differently from the monolinguals on all measures in which there were group differences, consistent with the interpretation that bilingualism is responsible for the enhanced executive control. These results contribute to understanding the mechanism responsible for the reported bilingual advantages by identifying the processes that are modified by bilingualism and establishing the generality of these findings across bilingual experiences. They also contribute to theoretical conceptions of the components of executive control and their development.
Scaling walls: Applying dry adhesives to the real world

We present two foot mechanisms that allow relatively large patches of synthetic fibrillar dry adhesives applied inexactly by a climbing robot to perform at levels previously obtained only for small samples in precisely aligned and controlled bench-top tests. The mechanisms are inspired by the structures found in the toes of the gecko. The first mechanism uses ankles with roll and yaw flexures and a compliant structure behind the adhesive material to achieve approximately uniform pressures under nominal loading conditions on flat and curved surfaces. The second design uses a tendon-supported structure to achieve uniform loading and prevent premature peeling failures despite significant misalignment with a flat wall surface. The two designs are demonstrated on Stickybot III, an approximately 1 kg climbing robot, and can be scaled to larger areas and loads by tiling the basic structure.
Complete Penile Duplication with Structurally Normal Penises: A Case Report

BACKGROUND
Diphallia is a very rare anomaly and seen once in every 5.5 million live births. True diphallia with normal penile structures is extremely rare. Surgical management for patients with complete penile duplication without any penile or urethral pathology is challenging.


CASE REPORT
A 4-year-old boy presented with diphallia. Initial physical examination revealed first physical examination revealed complete penile duplication, urine flow from both penises, meconium flow from right urethra, and anal atresia. Further evaluations showed double colon and rectum, double bladder, and large recto-vesical fistula. Two cavernous bodies and one spongious body were detected in each penile body. Surgical treatment plan consisted of right total penectomy and end-to-side urethra-urethrostomy. No postoperative complications and no voiding dysfunction were detected during the 18 months follow-up.


CONCLUSION
Penile duplication is a rare anomaly, which presents differently in each patient. Because of this, the treatment should be individualized and end-to-side urethra-urethrostomy may be an alternative to removing posterior urethra. This approach eliminates the risk of damaging prostate gland and sphincter.
ROS Reality: A Virtual Reality Framework Using Consumer-Grade Hardware for ROS-Enabled Robots

Virtual reality (VR)systems let users intuitively interact with 3D environments and have been used extensively for robotic teleoperation tasks. While more immersive than their 2D counterparts, early VR systems were expensive and required specialized hardware. Fortunately, there has been a recent proliferation of consumer-grade VR systems at affordable price points. These systems are inexpensive, relatively portable, and can be integrated into existing robotic frameworks. Our group has designed a VR teleoperation package for the Robot Operating System (ROS), ROS Reality, that can be easily integrated into such frameworks. ROS Reality is an open-source, over-the-Internet teleoperation interface between any ROS-enabled robot and any Unity-compatible VR headset. We completed a pilot study to test the efficacy of our system, with expert human users controlling a Baxter robot via ROS Reality to complete 24 dexterous manipulation tasks, compared to the same users controlling the robot via direct kinesthetic handling. This study provides insight into the feasibility of robotic teleoperation tasks in VR with current consumer-grade resources and exposes issues that need to be addressed in these VR systems. In addition, this paper presents a description of ROS Reality, its components, and architecture. We hope this system will be adopted by other research groups to allow for easy integration of VR teleoperated robots into future experiments.
Touch interaction for children aged 3 to 6 years: Experimental findings and relationship to motor skills

Our present understanding of young children’s touch-screen performance is still limited, as only few studies have considered analyzing children’s touch interaction patterns so far. In this work, we address children aged between 3 and 6 years old during their preoperational stage according to Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory, and we report their touch-screen performance with standard tap and drag and drop interactions on smart phones and tablets. We show significant improvements in children’s touch performance as they grow from 3 to 6 years old, and point to performance differences between children and adults. We correlate children’s touch performance expressed with task completion times and target acquisition accuracy with sensorimotor evaluations that characterize children’s finger dexterity and graphomotor and visuospatial processing abilities, and report significant correlations. Our observations are drawn from the largest children touch dataset available in the literature, consisting in data collected from 89 children and an additional 30 young adults to serve as comparison. We use our findings to recommend guidelines for designing touch-screen interfaces for children by adopting the new perspective of sensorimotor abilities. We release our large dataset into the interested community for further studies on children’s touch input behavior. It is our hope that our findings on the little-studied age group of 3to 6-year-olds together with the companion dataset will contribute toward a better understanding of children’s touch interaction behavior and toward improved touch interface designs for small-age children.
Improvement of blast-induced fragmentation and crusher efficiency by means of optimized drilling and blasting in Aitik

Improvement of blast-induced fragmentation and crusher efficiency by means of optimized drilling and blasting in Aitik. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The thesis project presented in this report was conducted in Boliden's Aitik mine; thereby I wish to gratefully thank Boliden Mines for their financial and technical support. I would like to express my very great appreciation to Ulf Nyberg, my supervisor at Luleå University of Technology, and Evgeny Novikov, my supervisor in Boliden for their patient guidance, technical support and valuable suggestions on this project. Useful advice given by Dr. Daniel Johansson is also greatly appreciated; I wish to acknowledge the constructive recommendations provided by Nikolaos Petropoulos as well. My special thanks are extended to the staff of Boliden Mines for all their help and technical support in Aitik. I am particularly grateful for the assistance given by Torbjörn Krigsman, Nils Johansson and Peter Palo. I would also like to acknowledge the help provided collection in Aitik mine. I would also like to thank Forcit company for their assistance with the collection of the data, my special thanks goes to Per-Arne Kortelainen for all his contribution. Finally my deep gratitude goes to my parents for their invaluable support, patience and encouragement throughout my academic studies. SUMMARY Rock blasting is one of the most dominating operations in open pit mining efficiency. As many downstream processes depend on the blast-induced fragmentation, an optimized blasting strategy can influence the total revenue of a mine to a large extent. Boliden Aitik mine in northern Sweden is one of the largest copper mines in Europe. The annual production of the mine is expected to reach 36 million tonnes of ore in 2014; so continuous efforts are being made to boost the production. Highly automated equipment and new processing plant, in addition to new crushers, have sufficient capacity to reach the production goals; the current obstacle in the process of production increase is a bottleneck in crushers caused by oversize boulders. Boulders require extra efforts for secondary blasting or hammer breakage and if entered the crushers, they cause downtimes. Therefore a more evenly distributed fragmentation with less oversize material can be advantageous. Furthermore, a better fragmentation can cause a reduction in energy costs by demanding less amounts of crushing energy. In order to achieve a more favorable fragmentation, two alternative blast designs in addition to a reference design were tested and the results were evaluated and compared to the …
Towards a General RC4-Like Keystream Generator

RC4 was designed in 1987 when 8-bit and 16-bit processors were commercially available. Today, most processors use 32-bit or 64bit words but using original RC4 with 32/64 bits is infeasible due to the large memory constraints and the number of operations in the key scheduling algorithm. In this paper we propose a new 32/64-bit RC4like keystream generator. The proposed generator produces 32 or 64 bits in each iteration and can be implemented in software with reasonable memory requirements. It has a huge internal state and offers higher resistance to state recovery attacks than the original 8-bit RC4. Further, on a 32-bit processor the generator is 3.1 times faster than original RC4. We also show that it can resist attacks that are successful on the original RC4. The generator is suitable for high speed software encryption.
Non-invasive prenatal diagnosis for cystic fibrosis: detection of paternal mutations, exploration of patient preferences and cost analysis

OBJECTIVES
We aim to develop non-invasive prenatal diagnosis (NIPD) for cystic fibrosis (CF) and determine costs and implications for implementation.


METHODS
A next-generation sequencing assay was developed to detect ten common CF mutations for exclusion of the paternal mutation in maternal plasma. Using uptake data from a study exploring views on NIPD for CF, total test-related costs were estimated for the current care pathway and compared with those incorporating NIPD.


RESULTS
The assay reliably predicted mutation status in all control and maternal plasma samples. Of carrier or affected adults with CF (n = 142) surveyed, only 43.5% reported willingness to have invasive testing for CF with 94.4% saying they would have NIPD. Using these potential uptake data, the incremental costs of NIPD over invasive testing per 100 pregnancies at risk of CF are £9025 for paternal mutation exclusion, and £26,510 for direct diagnosis.


CONCLUSIONS
We have developed NIPD for risk stratification in around a third of CF families. There are economic implications due to potential increased test demand to inform postnatal management rather than to inform decisions around termination of an affected pregnancy.
Aligning security and usability

Conflicts between security and usability goals can be avoided by considering the goals together throughout an iterative design process. A successful design involves addressing users' expectations and inferring authorization based on their acts of designation.
Periostin (POSTN) Regulates Tumor Resistance to Antiangiogenic Therapy in Glioma Models.

Periostin (POSTN) interacts with multiple integrins to coordinate a variety of cellular processes, including epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and cell migration. In our previous study, anti-VEGF-A therapy was associated with resistance and EMT. This study sought to determine the role of POSTN in the resistance of glioma stem cells (GSC) to antiangiogenic therapy. In mouse xenograft models of human glioma, POSTN expression was associated with acquired resistance to anti-VEGF-A therapy and had a synergistic effect with bevacizumab in prolonging survival and decreasing tumor volume. Resistance to anti-VEGF-A therapy regulated by POSTN was associated with increased expression of TGFβ1 and hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF1α) in GSCs. At the molecular level, POSTN regulated invasion and expression of EMT (caveolin-1) and angiogenesis-related genes (HIF1α and VEGF-A) through activation of STAT3. Moreover, recombinant POSTN increased GSC invasion. Collectively, our findings suggest that POSTN plays an important role in glioma invasion and resistance to antiangiogenic therapy. Mol Cancer Ther; 15(9); 2187-97. ©2016 AACR.