Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Policies for dynamic clock scheduling

Pocket computers are beginning to emerge that provide sufficient processing capability and memory capacity to run traditional desktop applications and operating systems on them. The increasing demand placed on these systems by software is competing against the continuing trend in the design of low-power microprocessors towards increasing the amount of computation per unit of energy. Consequently, in spite of advances in low-power circuit design, the microprocessor is likely to continue to account for a significant portion of the overall power consumption of pocket computers. This paper investigates clock scaling algorithms on the Itsy, an experimental pocket computer that runs a complete, functional multitasking operating system (a version of Linux 2.0.30). We implemented a number of clock scaling algorithms that are used to adjust the processor speed to reduce the power used by the processor. After testing these algorithms, we conclude that currently proposed algorithms consistently fail to achieve their goal of saving power while not causing user applications to change their interactive behavior.
Cardiac Electrophysiology of Adenosine: Basic and Clinical Concepts

A denosine is an endogenous nucleoside that has potent electrophysiologic effects.1-4 As an antiarrhythmic agent, adenosine has several unique properties: 1) it is an intermediate metabolite (Figure 1), 2) it has a very short half-life (less than 1.5 seconds), 3) its effects are mediated by specific membrane receptors coupled to guanine nucleotide binding proteins (G proteins), and 4) it has sitespecific actions in the myocardium with important differential effects in supraventricular and ventricular tissue. ' Adenosine also has an important role in regulating the myocardial oxygen supply-demand balance. Adenosine achieves this by increasing oxygen supply through coronary vasodilation and by reducing oxygen demand by decreasing myocardial contractility, antagonizing the effects of catecholamines, and depressing automaticity and conduction within the sinus and atrioventricular (AV) nodes. ' Recently, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the use of adenosine for therapy of paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia (PSVT), the first clinical application of adenosine. The purpose of this review is to present a rational approach for the therapeutic applications of adenosine for cardiac arrhythmias based on an understanding of its cellular and integrative mechanisms of action.
Early axonal damage in normal appearing white matter in multiple sclerosis: Novel insights from multi-shell diffusion MRI

Conventional diffusion-weighted MR imaging techniques provide limited specificity in disentangling disease-related microstructural alterations involving changes in both axonal density and myelination. By simultaneously probing multiple diffusion regimens, multi-shell diffusion MRI is capable of increasing specificity to different tissue sub-compartments and hence separate different contributions to changes in diffusion-weighted signal attenuation. Advanced multi-shell diffusion models impose significant requirements on the amount of diffusion weighting (i.e. gradient coil performance) and angular resolution (i.e. in-scanner subject time), which commonly limits their applicability in a clinical setting. In this paper, we apply a high-b-value, high angular resolution multi-shell diffusion MRI protocol to a population of early multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and healthy controls. Through the Composite Hindered and Restricted Model of Diffusion (CHARMED) model, we extract indices for axonal density as well as parameters sensitive to myelin. We demonstrate increased sensitivity to microstructural changes in normal appearing white matter and in lesions in MS as compared to traditional models like DTI. These changes appear to be predominantly in axonal density, pointing towards the existence of axonal damage mechanisms in early MS.
Chronic Intermittent Hypoxia Alters Local Respiratory Circuit Function at the Level of the preBötzinger Complex

Chronic intermittent hypoxia (CIH) is a common state experienced in several breathing disorders, including obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and apneas of prematurity. Unraveling how CIH affects the CNS, and in turn how the CNS contributes to apneas is perhaps the most challenging task. The preBötzinger complex (preBötC) is a pre-motor respiratory network critical for inspiratory rhythm generation. Here, we test the hypothesis that CIH increases irregular output from the isolated preBötC, which can be mitigated by antioxidant treatment. Electrophysiological recordings from brainstem slices revealed that CIH enhanced burst-to-burst irregularity in period and/or amplitude. Irregularities represented a change in individual fidelity among preBötC neurons, and changed transmission from preBötC to the hypoglossal motor nucleus (XIIn), which resulted in increased transmission failure to XIIn. CIH increased the degree of lipid peroxidation in the preBötC and treatment with the antioxidant, 5,10,15,20-Tetrakis (1-methylpyridinium-4-yl)-21H,23H-porphyrin manganese(III) pentachloride (MnTMPyP), reduced CIH-mediated irregularities on the network rhythm and improved transmission of preBötC to the XIIn. These findings suggest that CIH promotes a pro-oxidant state that destabilizes rhythmogenesis originating from the preBötC and changes the local rhythm generating circuit which in turn, can lead to intermittent transmission failure to the XIIn. We propose that these CIH-mediated effects represent a part of the central mechanism that may perpetuate apneas and respiratory instability, which are hallmark traits in several dysautonomic conditions.
Social Exclusion of the Elderly: A Comparative Study of EU Member States

Combating social exclusion is one of the key objectives of pension systems. This report focuses on social exclusion among the elderly (defined as the 55+ age group) in the EU’s member states. Social exclusion has been conceptualised as a state of individuals in relation to four dimensions. Two of these dimensions – material deprivation and social rights – are of a structural nature. The other two – social participation and normative integration – pertain to social settings and subcultural factors. Theoretically and empirically, the dimensions refer to one latent underlying social exclusion variable. The original method for measuring social exclusion was devised and tested for the Netherlands, making use of a dedicated dataset. In this study, the measuring instrument has been extended to EU member states, performing secondary analyses of various surveys.
The Escape of High-Energy Photons from Gamma-Ray Bursts

Eleven bright gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) detected by BATSE have also been seen at much higher energies by EGRET, six at energies above 10 MeV. Most distinctive among these is GRB 940217, which includes long duration, hard gamma-ray emission, and the most energetic GRB photon detection to date, around 18 GeV. Such observations imply that these bursts are optically thin to photon-photon pair production at all observed energies, for target photons both internal and external to the source. For bursts more than about 30 pc away, internal transparency can be achieved only if the source is moving with a relativistic bulk Lorentz factor Γ ≫ 1, or if the radiation is highly beamed. Early calculations of γγ → e+e- considerations for GRBs were limited to cases of a beam with opening half-angle ΘB ~ 1/Γ, or expansions of infinitely thin spherical shells. This paper presents our extension of pair production optical depth calculations in relativistically expanding sources to more general geometries, including shells of finite thickness and arbitrary opening angle. The problem is reduced analytically to a single integral in the special, but quite broadly applicable, case of observing photons only along the axis of the expansion. We find that the minimum bulk Lorentz factor for the EGRET sources to be optically thin, i.e., display no spectral attenuation, is only moderately dependent on the shell thickness and virtually independent of its opening solid angle if ΘB ≳ 1/Γ. This insensitivity to ΘB relieves the commonly perceived number problem for nonrepeating sources at cosmological distances, i.e., it is not necessary to invoke small ΘB to effect photon escape. The values of Γ obtained, typically of the order of 10 for halo bursts and ≳100 for sources of cosmological origin, depend somewhat on the choice of GRB timescale used to determine the expansion size. Our new limits on required velocity for given source geometries will aid in placing realistic constraints on GRB source models.
SYSTEMIC STEM CELL IMPROVEMENT IN CARDIAC FUNCTION AFTER ISCHAEMIC INJURY: LEAPING FORWARD SLOWLY

Over the past few years, our understanding and control of stem cell proliferation and differentiation has progressed rapidly. Within the context of this understanding, or maybe even without the understanding, many studies have shown the potentially beneficial effects of stem cell ‘therapies’ to repair damaged myocardium. In 1999, Tomita et al. showed that bone marrow cells were of little benefit when injected directly into cryoinjury induced cardiac scar tissue, but that bone marrow cells differentiated with 5-azacytidine into cardiomyocyte-like cells were of benefit to heart function. Later studies showed that the infusion of purified (expanded and transformed) bone marrow stromal cells into the ascending aorta led to their subsequent accumulation in both the infarct-induced scar tissue (as fibroblasts) and normal myocardium (as cardiomyocytes). Even later, it was suggested that direct cell-to-cell contact between cardiac myocytes and mesenchymal stem cells was necessary for the differentiation of stem cells into cardiac myocytes. In this issue of the journal, Braga et al. have demonstrated significant improvement in cardiac functional capacity, as well as reduced infarct area and mortality following the administration of bone marrow cells, but not cultivated mesenchymal stem cells, into spontaneously hypertensive rats suffering ischaemia-induced injury. There is much evidence that both bone marrow and mesenchymal stem cells improve post-infarct cardiac function, but there are aspects of this improvement that remain poorly defined.
Caspase-dependent and caspase-independent apoptosis induced by evodiamine in human leukemic U937 cells

Evodiamine is one of the major bioactive compounds that have been isolated and purified from the fruit of Evodiae fructus. Evodiamine exhibits antitumor activities against the human tumor cells, including multidrug-resistant tumor cells. However, the molecular mechanism involved in cell death induced by evodiamine treatment remains poorly understood. In the present study, we showed that evodiamine activated the caspase-dependent apoptotic pathway. This apoptosis was only partially inhibited by a pancaspase inhibitor benzyloxycarbonyl-Val-Ala-Asp-fluoromethyl ketone, which suggested that evodiamine-induced apoptosis in leukemic U937 cells is partially caspase independent. We observed the nuclear translocation of apoptosis-inducing factor in evodiamine-induced apoptosis of U937 cells, which may be responsible for the caspase-independent apoptotic execution. We next showed that evodiamine induced the substantial amount of apoptosis both in Bcl-2- and Akt-overexpressing U937 cells but not in human peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Although benzyloxycarbonyl-Val-Ala-Asp-fluoromethyl ketone inhibited caspase activity in Bcl-2-overexpressing U937 cells, it completely prevented neither the induction of apoptosis or the nuclear translocation of apoptosis-inducing factor, which suggests that evodiamine is, at least in part, able to bypass the resistance of leukemia cells via caspase-independent apoptotic pathways. Thus, therapeutic strategy using evodiamine may warrant further evaluation. [Mol Cancer Ther 2006;5(9):2398–409]
Edge-Compositions of 3D Surfaces

Origami-based design methods enable complex devices to be fabricated quickly in plane and then folded into their final 3D shapes. So far, these folded structures have been designed manually. This paper presents a geometric approach to automatic composition of folded surfaces, which will allow existing designs to be combined and complex functionality to be produced with minimal human input. We show that given two surfaces in 3D and their 2D unfoldings, a surface consisting of the two originals joined along an arbitrary edge can always be achieved by connecting the two original unfoldings with some additional linking material, and we provide a polynomial-time algorithm to generate this composite unfolding. The algorithm is verified using various surfaces, as well as a walking and gripping robot design.
Fine-Tuning for Neural Machine Translation with Limited Degradation across In- and Out-of-Domain Data

Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach which has shown competitive results to traditional MT approaches. Similar to other neural network based methods, NMT also suffers from low performance for the domains with less available training data. Domain adaptation deals with improving performance of a model trained on large general domain data over test instances from a new domain. Fine-tuning is a fast and simple domain adaptation method which has demonstrated substantial improvements for various neural network based tasks including NMT. However, it suffers from drastic performance degradation on the general or source domain test sentences, which is undesirable in real-time applications. To address this problem of drastic degradation, in this paper, we propose two simple modiﬁcations to the ﬁne-tuning approach, namely multi-objective learning and multi-output learning which are based on the “Knowledge distillation” framework. Experiments on English-German translations demonstrate that our approaches achieve results comparable to simple ﬁne-tuning on the target domain task with comparatively little loss on the general domain task.
Marine oil, and other prostaglandin precursor, supplementation for pregnancy uncomplicated by pre-eclampsia or intrauterine growth restriction.

BACKGROUND Population studies have shown that higher intakes of marine foods during pregnancy are associated with longer gestations, higher infant birthweights and a low incidence of pre-eclampsia. It is suggested that the fatty acids of marine foods may be the underlying cause of these associations. OBJECTIVES To estimate the effects of marine oil, and other prostaglandin precursor, supplementation during pregnancy on the risk of pre-eclampsia, preterm birth, low birthweight and small-for-gestational age. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group Trials Register (December 2005), The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (The Cochrane Library 2005, Issue 2) and MEDLINE (1966 to April 2005). SELECTION CRITERIA All randomised trials comparing oral marine oil, or other prostaglandin precursor, supplementation during pregnancy with either placebo or no treatment. Trials were excluded if their aim was to treat women with established pre-eclampsia or suspected intrauterine growth restriction. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two review authors independently assessed trials for inclusion, data extraction and trial quality. MAIN RESULTS Six trials, involving 2783 women, are included in this review. Three of these were rated as high quality, including the largest trial with 1477 women. Women allocated a marine oil supplement had a mean gestation that was 2.6 days longer than women allocated to placebo or no treatment (weighted mean difference (WMD), 2.55 days, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.03 to 4.07 days; 3 trials, 1621 women). This was not reflected in a clear difference between the two groups in the relative risk (RR) of birth before 37 completed weeks, although women allocated marine oil did have a lower risk of giving birth before 34 completed weeks' gestation (RR 0.69, 95% CI 0.49 to 0.99; 2 trials, 860 women). Birthweight was slightly greater in infants born to women in the marine oil group compared with control (WMD 47 g, 95% CI 1 g to 93 g; 3 trials, 2440 women). However, there were no overall differences between the groups in the proportion of low birthweight or small-for-gestational age babies. There was no clear difference in the relative risk of pre-eclampsia between the two groups. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS There is not enough evidence to support the routine use of marine oil, or other prostaglandin precursor, supplements during pregnancy to reduce the risk of pre-eclampsia, preterm birth, low birthweight or small-for-gestational age.
Buprenorphine and methadone in the treatment of opioid dependence: methods and design of the COBRA study

Buprenorphine and methadone are the two established substitution drugs licensed in many countries for the treatment of opioid dependence. Little is known, however, about how these two drugs are applied and how they work in clinical practice. In this paper we present the aims, methods, design and sampling issues of a collaborative multi‐stage epidemiological study (COBRA) to address these issues.
Modeling the airway epithelium in allergic asthma: Interleukin-13-induced effects in differentiated murine tracheal epithelial cells

SummaryMucous cells of the airway epithelium play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of human inflammatory airway diseases. Therefore, it is of importance to complement in vivo studies that use murine models of allergic asthma with in vitro mechanistic studies that use murine airway epithelial cells, including mucus-containing cells. In this study, we report the development and characterization of an in vitro culture system for primary murine tracheal epithelial (MTE) cells comprising ciliated cells and a substantial number of mucous cells. The increase in mucous cell number over that observed in the native murine airway, or in previously described murine cultures, creates a culture intermediate between the in vivo murine airway epithelium and in vitro cultures of human airway epithelial cells. To establish the usefulness of this culture system for the study of epithelial effects during inflammatory airway diseases, the cells were exposed to interleukin (IL)-13, a central inflammatory mediator in allergic asthma. The IL-13 induced two characteristic epithelial effects, proliferation and modulation of MUC5AC gene expression. There was a concentration dependence of these events, wherein high concentrations of IL-13 (10 ng/ml) induced proliferation, whereas lower concentrations (1 ng/ml) increased MUC5AC mRNA (where mRNA is messenger RNA). Interestingly, these effects occurred in an inverse manner, with the high concentration of IL-13 also provoking a significant decrease in MUC5AC gene expression. Thus, MTE cells cultured in this manner may provide an important link between experimental findings from animal models of allergic asthma and their application to human disease.
The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review

The emerging field of emotion regulation studies how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. This review takes an evolutionary perspective and characterizes emotion in terms of response tendencies. Emotion regulation is defined and distinguished from coping, mood regulation, defense, and affect regulation. In the increasingly specialized discipline of psychology, the field of emotion regulation cuts across traditional boundaries and provides common ground. According to a process model of emotion regulation, emotion may be regulated at five points in the emotion generative process: (a) selection of the situation, (b) modification of the situation, (c) deployment of attention, (d) change of cognitions, and (e) modulation of responses. The field of emotion regulation promises new insights into age-old questions about how people manage their emotions.
Language, Reading, and Math Learning Profiles in an Epidemiological Sample of School Age Children

Dyscalculia, dyslexia, and specific language impairment (SLI) are relatively specific developmental learning disabilities in math, reading, and oral language, respectively, that occur in the context of average intellectual capacity and adequate environmental opportunities. Past research has been dominated by studies focused on single impairments despite the widespread recognition that overlapping and comorbid deficits are common. The present study took an epidemiological approach to study the learning profiles of a large school age sample in language, reading, and math. Both general learning profiles reflecting good or poor performance across measures and specific learning profiles involving either weak language, weak reading, weak math, or weak math and reading were observed. These latter four profiles characterized 70% of children with some evidence of a learning disability. Low scores in phonological short-term memory characterized clusters with a language-based weakness whereas low or variable phonological awareness was associated with the reading (but not language-based) weaknesses. The low math only group did not show these phonological deficits. These findings may suggest different etiologies for language-based deficits in language, reading, and math, reading-related impairments in reading and math, and isolated math disabilities.
Fluorophore-Labeled Primers Improve the Sensitivity, Versatility, and Normalization of Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis

ABSTRACT Denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) is widely used in microbial ecology. We tested the effect of fluorophore-labeled primers on DGGE band migration, sensitivity, and normalization. The fluorophores Cy5 and Cy3 did not visibly alter DGGE fingerprints; however, 6-carboxyfluorescein retarded band migration. Fluorophore modification improved the sensitivity of DGGE fingerprint detection and facilitated normalization of samples from multiple gels by the application of intralane standards.
Activation of dormant follicles: a new treatment for premature ovarian failure?

Purpose of review Premature ovarian failure (POF) is diagnosed by amenorrhea before 40 years of age. Owing to exhaustion of follicles in POF ovaries, egg donation is the only option. Although menstrual cycles cease in POF patients, some of them still contain residual dormant follicles in ovaries. Recently, we developed a new infertility treatment and named it as in-vitro activation (IVA), which enables POF patients to conceive using their own eggs by activation of residual dormant follicles. Here, we summarize data showing the potential of IVA as a new infertility treatment for POF patients. Recent findings Transgenic mouse studies revealed that the stimulation of phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase-AKT-forkhead box O3 pathway activated dormant primordial follicles. In murine and human ovaries, the phosphatase and tensin homolog inhibitors and phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase activators were demonstrated to activate dormant primordial follicles in in-vitro cultures. Subsequent studies showed that ovarian fragmentation suppressed Hippo signaling pathway, leading to ovarian follicle growth. Combining these two methods in an IVA approach followed by ovarian tissue autotransplantation, successful follicle growth, and pregnancies were reported in POF patients. Currently, two healthy babies were delivered, together with two additional pregnancies. Summary IVA treatment is a potential infertility therapy for POF patients who have residual follicles.