Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calpain inhibitor MDL 28170 protects against the Ca2+ paradox in rat hearts

The calcium paradox represents an important model in which to study myocardial injuries due to intracellular Ca2+ overload. In a previous study, calpain was transiently activated in Ca2+‐paradoxic hearts. The aim of the present study was to determine the role of calpain in myocardial dysfunction in hearts subjected to the Ca2+ paradox and to elucidate the underlying mechanisms. Rat hearts were isolated, Langendorff perfused and subjected to the Ca2+ paradox, which was induced by 3 min Ca2+ depletion followed by 30 min Ca2+ repletion, in the presence or absence of the calpain inhibitor 10 umol/L MDL 28170. Cardiac function was evaluated. Furthermore, cell death and the degradation of troponin I (TnI) were assessed and calpain activity was determined by measurement of the α‐fodrin fragment and confocal image analysis. Upon Ca2+ repletion, the hearts immediately deteriorated, exhibiting a marked depression in cardiac function and an enlarged myocardial injury area. This was accompanied by significant increases in lactate dehydrogenase, mitochondrial release of cytochrome c, the apoptotic index and degraded TnI. These changes were significantly inhibited by MDL 28170, with the exception of TnI degradation. Compared with the control group, Ca2+‐paradoxic hearts showed a marked increase in cleaved 150 kDa fragments resulting from specific calpain‐mediated proteolysis of α‐fodrin. This effect was attenuated by MDL 28170. Confocal image analysis revealed the translocation of both μ‐ and m‐calpain to the sarcolemmal membrane in Ca2+‐paradoxic hearts, indicating increased activity of both isoforms. The results suggest that the Ca2+ paradox promotes calpain activity, leading to necrosis, apoptosis and myocardial dysfunction.
Parallel Iterative Linear Solvers on GPU: A Financial Engineering Case

In many numerical applications resulting from computational science and engineering problems, the solution of sparse linear systems is the most prohibitively compute intensive task. Consequently, the linear solvers need to be carefully chosen and efficiently implemented in order to harness the available computing resources. Krylov subspace based iterative solvers have been widely used for solving large systems of linear equations. In this paper, we focus on the design of such iterative solvers to take advantage of massive parallelism of general purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPU)s. We will consider Stabilized BiConjugate Gradient (BiCGStab) and Conjugate Gradient Squared (CGS) methods for the solutions of sparse linear systems with unsymmetric coefficient matrices. We discuss data structures and efficient implementation of these solvers on the NVIDIA's CUDA platform. We evaluate scalability and performance of our implementations in the context of a financial engineering problem of solving multidimensional option pricing PDEs using sparse grid combination technique.
Mining frequent itemsets with convertible constraints

Recent work has highlighted the importance of the constraint based mining paradigm in the context of frequent itemsets, associations, correlations, sequential patterns, and many other interesting patterns in large databases. The authors study constraints which cannot be handled with existing theory and techniques. For example, avg(S) /spl theta/ /spl nu/, median(S) /spl theta/ /spl nu/, sum(S) /spl theta/ /spl nu/ (S can contain items of arbitrary values) (/spl theta//spl isin/{/spl ges/, /spl les/}), are customarily regarded as "tough" constraints in that they cannot be pushed inside an algorithm such as a priori. We develop a notion of convertible constraints and systematically analyze, classify, and characterize this class. We also develop techniques which enable them to be readily pushed deep inside the recently developed FP-growth algorithm for frequent itemset mining. Results from our detailed experiments show the effectiveness of the techniques developed.
Clustering in MANET and VANET: A survey

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) as a special class of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) differs from the latter in a number of parameters. Clustering and Cluster Based Routing (CBR) protocols are the two important areas where a lot research work is in progress at present in both of these categories of networks, especially in VANET. The aim of this paper is to present a snapshot of clustering techniques and CBR protocols with a special focus on VANET since clusters ensure rapid and reliable data transmission.
Infertile women who screen positive for depression are less likely to initiate fertility treatments

STUDY QUESTION Are infertile women who screen positive for depression less likely to initiate infertility treatments? SUMMARY ANSWER Infertile women who screen positive for depression are less likely to initiate treatment for infertility. WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN Infertility imposes a psychological burden on many couples. Depression and anxiety have been demonstrated in ~40% of infertile women, which is twice that of fertile women. Further, the psychological burden associated with infertility treatment has been cited as a major factor for discontinuation of infertility care. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION Prospective, observational study in a clinical-based cohort of 416 women who completed a questionnaire after the new patient visit, from January 2013 until December 2014 inclusive. PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS All new female infertility patients (n = 959) seen between January 2013 and December 2014 at University of North Carolina Fertility received an electronic questionnaire to screen for mental health disorders and to evaluate their perception of mental health disorders on infertility. MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE Of 959 surveys sent, 416 women completed the questionnaire (43%). The prevalence screening positive for depression, using the NIH PROMIS screening tool, was 41%. Sixty-two percent of all women initiated infertility treatment, and of these, 81% did so within 4 months. In multivariate analysis, women who screened positive for depression had 0.55 times the odds of initiating treatment for infertility (95% CI: 0.31-0.95). Similarly, women who screened positive for depression had 0.58 times the odds of initiating infertility treatment within 4 months (95% CI: 0.35-0.97), which was the time of censoring from the most recent patient evaluated. Women who screened positive for depression were less likely to pursue treatment with oral medications or IVF (P = 0.01 and P = 0.03, respectively), as compared to women who did not screen positive for depression. LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION Questionnaire-based evaluations may result in a lower prevalence of psychological disorder as some participants feign emotional well-being. Although we did not identify differences in women who responded to our survey and those who did not, responder bias may still be present. In addition, infertility is a couple's disease. However, this study only included psychological evaluation of the female partner. We have no information about the women's previous treatment. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS Screening for depression is important in the infertility patient population, as further evaluation and psychological interventions may improve compliance with fertility treatments, quality of life, and potentially, the overall chance of pregnancy. STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTERESTS None.
Health effects associated with waterpipe smoking

Objective It is widely held that waterpipe smoking (WPS) is not associated with health hazards. However, several studies have documented the uptake of several toxicants and carcinogens during WPS that is strongly associated with harmful health effects. This paper reviews the literature on the health effects of WPS. Data sources Three databases-PubMed, MEDLINE and EMBASE-were searched until August 2014 for the acute and long-term health effects of WPS using the terms ‘waterpipe’ and its synonyms (hookah, shisha, goza, narghileh, arghileh and hubble-bubble) in various spellings. Study selection We included original clinical studies, case reports and systematic reviews and focused on clinical human studies. ∼10% of the identified studies met the selection criteria. Data extraction Data were abstracted by all three authors and summarised into tables. Abstracted data included study type, results and methodological limitations and were analysed jointly by all three authors. Data synthesis WPS acutely leads to increased heart rate, blood pressure, impaired pulmonary function and carbon monoxide intoxication. Chronic bronchitis, emphysema and coronary artery disease are serious complications of long-term use. Lung, gastric and oesophageal cancer are associated with WPS as well as periodontal disease, obstetrical complications, osteoporosis and mental health problems. Conclusions Contrary to the widely held misconception, WPS is associated with a variety of adverse short-term and long-term health effects that should reinforce the need for stronger regulation. In addition, this review highlights the limitations of the published work, which is mostly cross-sectional or retrospective. Prospective studies should be undertaken to assess the full spectrum of health effects of WPS, particularly in view of its growing popularity and attractiveness to youth.
A New Regional Climate Model for POLAR‐CORDEX: Evaluation of a 30‐Year Hindcast with COSMO‐CLM2 Over Antarctica

Continent‐wide climate information over the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is important to obtain accurate information of present climate and reduce uncertainties of the ice sheet mass balance response and resulting global sea level rise to future climate change. In this study, the COSMO‐CLM2 Regional Climate Model is applied over the AIS and adapted for the specific meteorological and climatological conditions of the region. A 30‐year hindcast was performed and evaluated against observational records consisting of long‐term ground‐based meteorological observations, automatic weather stations, radiosoundings, satellite records, stake measurements and ice cores. Reasonable agreement regarding the surface and upper‐air climate is achieved by the COSMO‐CLM2 model, comparable to the performance of other state‐of‐the‐art climate models over the AIS. Meteorological variability of the surface climate is adequately simulated, and biases in the radiation and surface mass balance are small. The presented model therefore contributes as a new member to the COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment project over the AIS (POLAR‐CORDEX) and the CORDEX‐CORE initiative.
Context-Based Photography Learning using Crowdsourced Images and Social Media

This paper presents a photography model based on machine learning which utilizes crowd-sourced images along with social media cues. As scene composition and camera parameters play a vital role in aesthetics of a captured image, the proposed system addresses the problem of learning photographic composition and camera parameters. Further, we observe that context is an important factor from a photography perspective, we therefore augment the learning with associated contextual information. We define context features based on factors such as time, geo-location, environmental conditions and type of image, which have an impact on photography. The meta information available with crowd-sourced images is utilized for context identification and social media cues are used for photo quality evaluation. We also propose the idea of computing the photographic composition basis, eigenrules and baserules, to support our composition learning method. The trained photography model can provide assistance to the user in determining image composition and camera parameters.
Self-Interest and Justice Principles

I introduce non-enforceable property rights over bargaining surplus in a two-stage dictator game in which the effort of the agents is differentially rewarded and determines the size of the pie. Using experimental data I elicit individual preferences over natural justice principles and provide evidence to support the inability of these principles to account for the observed behavior. I show that dictators do not follow a unique natural principle but instead employ self-interested criteria, maximizing their own payoffs constrained by these payoffs being considered just by one or more of the principles. The idea of the justice norm providing a constraint on otherwise selfmaximizing agents is robust when I isolate the effect of selfish agents and focus on unselfish dictators to perform the analysis.
Detecting Overlapping Protein Complexes by Rough-Fuzzy Clustering in Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

In this paper, we present a novel rough-fuzzy clustering (RFC) method to detect overlapping protein complexes in protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. RFC focuses on fuzzy relation model rather than graph model by integrating fuzzy sets and rough sets, employs the upper and lower approximations of rough sets to deal with overlapping complexes, and calculates the number of complexes automatically. Fuzzy relation between proteins is established and then transformed into fuzzy equivalence relation. Non-overlapping complexes correspond to equivalence classes satisfying certain equivalence relation. To obtain overlapping complexes, we calculate the similarity between one protein and each complex, and then determine whether the protein belongs to one or multiple complexes by computing the ratio of each similarity to maximum similarity. To validate RFC quantitatively, we test it in Gavin, Collins, Krogan and BioGRID datasets. Experiment results show that there is a good correspondence to reference complexes in MIPS and SGD databases. Then we compare RFC with several previous methods, including ClusterONE, CMC, MCL, GCE, OSLOM and CFinder. Results show the precision, sensitivity and separation are 32.4%, 42.9% and 81.9% higher than mean of the five methods in four weighted networks, and are 0.5%, 11.2% and 66.1% higher than mean of the six methods in five unweighted networks. Our method RFC works well for protein complexes detection and provides a new insight of network division, and it can also be applied to identify overlapping community structure in social networks and LFR benchmark networks.
Autoionization in Liquid Water

The dissociation of a water molecule in liquid water is the fundamental event in acid-base chemistry, determining the pH of water. Because of the short time scales and microscopic length scales involved, the dynamics of this autoionization have not been directly probed by experiment. Here, the autoionization mechanism is revealed by sampling and analyzing ab initio molecular dynamics trajectories. We identify the rare fluctuations in solvation energies that destabilize an oxygen-hydrogen bond. Through the transfer of protons along a hydrogen bond “wire,” the nascent ions separate by three or more neighbors. If the hydrogen bond wire connecting the two ions is subsequently broken, a metastable charge-separated state is visited. The ions may then diffuse to large separations. If, however, the hydrogen bond wire remains unbroken, the ions recombine rapidly. Because of their concomitant large electric fields, the transient ionic species produced in this case may provide an experimentally detectable signal of the dynamics we report.
Staying alive: Evolution, culture, and women's intrasexual aggression

Females' tendency to place a high value on protecting their own lives enhanced their reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation because infant survival depended more upon maternal than on paternal care and defence. The evolved mechanism by which the costs of aggression (and other forms of risk taking) are weighted more heavily for females may be a lower threshold for fear in situations which pose a direct threat of bodily injury. Females' concern with personal survival also has implications for sex differences in dominance hierarchies because the risks associated with hierarchy formation in nonbonded exogamous females are not offset by increased reproductive success. Hence among females, disputes do not carry implications for status with them as they do among males, but are chiefly connected with the acquisition and defence of scarce resources. Consequently, female competition is more likely to take the form of indirect aggression or low-level direct combat than among males. Under patriarchy, men have held the power to propagate images and attributions which are favourable to the continuance of their control. Women's aggression has been viewed as a gender-incongruent aberration or dismissed as evidence of irrationality. These cultural interpretations have “enhanced” evolutionarily based sex differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own aggression.
Analysis of emotional effect on speech-body gesture interplay

In interpersonal interactions, speech and body gesture channels are internally coordinated towards conveying communicative intentions. The speech-gesture relationship is influenced by the internal emotion state underlying the communication. In this paper, we focus on uncovering the emotional effect on the interrelation between speech and body gestures. We investigate acoustic features describing speech prosody (pitch and energy) and vocal tract configuration (MFCCs), as well as three types of body gestures, viz., head motion, lower and upper body motions. We employ mutual information to measure the coordination between the two communicative channels, and analyze the quantified speech-gesture link with respect to distinct levels of emotion attributes, i.e., activation and valence. The results reveal that the speech-gesture coupling is generally tighter for low-level activation and high-level valence, compared to high-level activation and low-level valence. We further propose a framework for modeling the dynamics of speech-gesture interaction. Experimental studies suggest that such quantified coupling representations can well discriminate different levels of activation and valence, reinforcing that emotions are encoded in the dynamics of the multimodal link. We also verify that the structures of the coupling representations are emotiondependent using subspace-based analysis. Index Terms: emotion attributes, body gesture, speech prosody, speech-gesture interplay, mutual information
Parent-observed thematic data on quality of life in children with autism spectrum disorder

Domains of quality of life in children with autism spectrum disorder have not previously been explored and there has been no quality of life measure developed for this population. Our study investigated parent observations to identify the domains important to children with autism spectrum disorder who also had an intellectual disability. In all, 21 parents (19 mothers, 2 fathers) of children with autism spectrum disorder (aged 6–17 years) participated in a qualitative study to discuss their child’s quality of life. Thematic analysis using a grounded theory framework was conducted and 10 domains emerged in relation to health and well-being, capacity to perform and develop skills in daily life, and connections with the community and environment. Unique aspects of quality of life included varying levels of social desire, consistency of routines, and time spent in nature and the outdoors, which are not comprehensively captured in existing measures. Parent observations provide an initial framework for understanding quality of life in autism spectrum disorder and support the development of a new measure for this population.
SABRINA: A SAR Bistatic Receiver for Interferometric Applications

This letter discusses the implementation of SABRINA, Synthetic Aperture radar Bistatic Receiver for Interferometric Applications. The ground resolution of a fixed-receiver bistatic system is studied, showing that it is comparable to that of a monostatic system. Due to the short distance from target to receiver, large sensitivity is obtained. The noncooperative nature of the bistatic system forces a conservative data-acquisition strategy based on continuously sampling the scattered signal during a temporal window around the predicted satellite overpass time. Also, to be able to synchronize the system in time and in frequency, sampling of a direct signal obtained through an antenna pointed at the satellite is required. Besides the signal processing required to phase-lock the received signal, the bistatic synthetic aperture radar processing needs to take into account the azimuth-dependent phase history. First focused images obtained with the SABRINA-ENVISAT combination are discussed
Characterization of Target Cells for Aberrant Mossy Fiber Collaterals in the Dentate Gyrus of Epileptic Rat

Previous studies have demonstrated formation of recurrent excitatory circuits between sprouted mossy fibers and granule cell dendrites in the inner molecular layer of the dentate gyrus (9, 28, 30). In addition, there is evidence that inhibitory nonprincipal cells also receive an input from sprouted mossy fibers (39). This study was undertaken to further characterize possible target cells for sprouted mossy fibers, using immunofluorescent staining for different calcium-binding proteins in combination with Timm histochemical staining for mossy fibers. Rats were injected intraperitoneally with kainic acid in order to induce epileptic convulsions and mossy fiber sprouting. After 2 months survival, hippocampal sections were immunostained for parvalbumin, calbindin D28k, or calretinin followed by Timm-staining. Under a fluorescent microscope, zinc-positive mossy fibers in epileptic rats were found to surround parvalbumin-containing neurons in the granule cell layer and to follow their dendrites, which extended toward the molecular layer. In addition, dendrites of calbindin D28k-containing cells were covered by multiple mossy fiber terminals in the inner molecular layer. However, the calretinin-containing cell bodies in the granule cell layer did not receive any contacts from the sprouted fibers. Electron microscopic analysis revealed that typical Timm-positive mossy fiber terminals established several asymmetrical synapses with the soma and dendrites of nonpyramidal cells within the granule cell layer. These results provide direct evidence that, in addition to recurrent excitatory connections, inhibitory circuitries, especially those responsible for the perisomatic feedback inhibition, are formed as a result of mossy fiber sprouting in experimental epilepsy.
Tumorigenesis and Neoplastic Progression Modulation of the Tumor Suppressor Protein (cid:1) -Catenin by Ischemic Microenvironment

Dysregulation or mislocalization of cell adhesion molecules and their regulators, such as E-cadherin, (cid:1) -catenin, and (cid:2) -catenin, usually correlates with loss of polarity, dedifferentiation, invasive tumor growth, and metastasis. A subpopulation of (cid:2) -catenin-negative cells within the DLD-1 colorectal carcinoma cell line causes it to display a heterogeneous morphological makeup, thus providing an excellent model system in which to investigate the role of (cid:2) -catenin in tumorigenesis. We re-established expression of (cid:2) -catenin protein in an (cid:2) -catenin-deficient subpopulation of the DLD-1 cell line and used it to demonstrate that loss of (cid:2) -catenin resulted in increased in vitro tumorigenic characteristics (increased soft agarose colony formation, clonogenic survival after suspension, and survival in suspension). When the cells were used to form tumor xenografts, those lacking (cid:2) -catenin showed faster growth rates because of increased cellular cycling but not increased tumor microvascular recruitment. (cid:2) -Catenin-expressing cells were preferentially located in well perfused areas of xenografts when tumors were formed from mixed (cid:2) -catenin-positive and -negative cells. We therefore evaluated the role of the ischemic tumor microenvironment on (cid:2) -catenin expression and demonstrated that cells lose expression of (cid:2) -catenin after prolonged