Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Network Allocation Vector (NAV) Optimization for Underwater Handshaking-Based Protocols

In this paper, we obtained the optimized network allocation vector (NAV) for underwater handshaking-based protocols, as inefficient determination of the NAV leads to unnecessarily long silent periods. We propose a scheme which determines the NAV by taking into account all possible propagation delays: propagation delay between a source and a destination; propagation delay between a source and the neighbors; and propagation delay between a destination and the neighbors. Such an approach effectively allows the NAV to be determined precisely equal to duration of a busy channel, and the silent period can be set commensurate to that duration. This allows for improvements in the performance of handshaking-based protocols, such as the carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol, in terms of throughput and fairness. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, performance comparisons were carried out through simulations with prior NAV setting methods. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the other schemes in terms of throughput and fairness.
Adverse Cardiovascular Effects of Acute Salt Loading in Young Normotensive Individuals

We sought to explore the effects of salt loading in young normotensives on vascular endothelial function, echocardiographic left ventricular diastolic function, and electrocardiographic QT dispersion. Sixteen healthy normotensive male volunteers were randomized in a double-blind crossover fashion to 5-day treatment periods with either placebo or salt tablets (200 mmol/d of sodium) separated by a 2-week washout period. Throughout the study the volunteers were asked to maintain a low-salt diet. Forearm venous occlusion plethysmography and intraarterial infusions of acetylcholine (ACh), sodium nitroprusside (SNP), and NG-monomethyl-l-arginine (L-NMMA) were used to assess vascular reactivity. Baseline and postsalt loading 12-lead ECGs and echocardiograms were also obtained. Twenty-four-hour ambulatory systolic blood pressure rose (117±11 to 121±8 mm Hg) significantly with salt loading. The endothelium-dependent responses to ACh were significantly blunted with salt compared to placebo (&Dgr;FBF% 403 [50] versus 296 [31]; P<0.05) and L-NMMA (&Dgr;FBF% −47.2 [4] versus −31 [3]; P<0.01). In contrast, the endothelium-independent response to SNP was not different between treatments. Color M-mode flow propagation velocity (CMMFPV), a preload index of left ventricular diastolic function, was significantly reduced with salt (64 [6] versus 59 [16] cm/s; P<0.05) suggesting increased ventricular stiffness. QT dispersion was also significantly increased with salt (58 [16] versus 48 [17] ms; P=0.02). Salt loading impaired vascular endothelial function, left ventricular mechanical relaxation, and electric repolarization in young healthy normotensives.
Controlled trial of enalapril in patients with chronic fluid overload undergoing dialysis

About one third of patients receiving dialysis for end stage renal failure have chronic fluid overload despite advice to restrict their oral fluid intake. To investigate the potential of an angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor in reducing the urge to drink and consequent gain in weight, a double blind, placebo controlled crossover trial of enalapril was conducted in 25 patients receiving dialysis who had fluid overload. The trial comprised a baseline period of four weeks; two periods of treatment, each of four weeks, during which patients received either placebo or enalapril 5 mg twice each week; and a follow up period of four weeks. Five patients withdrew from the trial, one because of an adverse drug reaction to enalapril. A range of biochemical and behavioural variables was measured during the baseline period, at the completion of periods 1 and 2, and during follow up. These variables included gain in weight between dialysis sessions; blood pressure; plasma concentrations of sodium, angiotensin II, and vasopressin; plasma renin and angiotensin converting enzyme activities; osmolality; and estimations of thirst, intake of fluid, and control of drinking. Enalapril caused a significant reduction in gain in weight between dialysis sessions, thirst, and oral intake of fluid in parallel with significantly increased renin activity, significantly decreased angiotensin converting enzyme activity, and decreased concentrations of angiotensin II. Gain in weight and angiotensin converting enzyme activity returned to baseline values once patients stopped taking enalapril. These results suggest that enalapril may act on the renin-angiotensin system and reduce intake of fluid by inhibiting angiotensin converting enzyme.
‘Wind‐up’ in Parkinson's disease: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder mainly marked by selective degeneration of dopaminergic neurons that leads to disabling motor and cognitive impairment. This condition is less widely appreciated as a disease associated with a substantial variety of pain syndromes, although the prevalence of pain is relatively high. Repeated painful stimulation of peripheral nerves can cause pain ‘wind‐up’ if the frequency of the stimulation is adequate and specifically stimulates the afferent C‐fibres. We presumed that in case of PD, pain or pain severeness might be frequently caused by the aggravation of the ‘wind‐up’ phenomenon due to any central or peripheral lesions or functional alterations.
Cybernetical physics Part II: the EPR paradox and its implications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain the Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (EPR) paradox applying the multidimensionality of time and the perpendicularity of the temporal axes.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is an extension of the application of neuropsychology to physics, as previously described in Part I, to cosmology.Findings – The paper removes the apparent contradictions in physics implied by the EPR paradox.Practical implications – A theoretical basis for a possible instantaneous (faster than light) sending of messages to everywhere in the cosmos is provided.Originality/value – This theory is entirely new. The possible application is independent from the existence of tachions.
A Two-Stage Immmunocytochemical Method for Oestrogen Receptor Analysis: Correlation with Morphological Parameters of Breast Carcinomas

An immunocytochemical method for oestrogen receptor (ER) analysis of breast carcinomas is described and compared with the dextran-coated charcoal (DCC) assay and a cytochemical method. The method described is superior to the purely cytochemical, especially in terms of sensitivity, demonstration of nuclear receptors and correlation with the DCC assay. The DCC assay is reliable except in the case of poorly cellular tumours: in these the immunocytochemical method is far superior, being independent of tumour cellularity. With this new method, lobular carcinomas are shown to be ER-rich compared with their ductal counterparts, a conclusion currently disputed, largely because methods employed mostly fail to take account of tumour cellularity. A combination of the DCC assay and the immunocytochemical method here described gives the maximum information about the ER-status of a particular carcinoma.
Unlabeled Data Does Provably Help

A fully supervised learner needs access to correctly labeled examples whereas a semi-supervised learner has access to examples part of which are labeled and part of which are not. The hope is that a large collection of unlabeled examples significantly reduces the need for labeled-ones. It is widely believed that this reduction of "label complexity" is marginal unless the hidden target concept and the domain distribution satisfy some "compatibility assumptions". There are some recent papers in support of this belief. In this paper, we revitalize the discussion by presenting a result that goes in the other direction. To this end, we consider the PAC-learning model in two settings: the (classical) fully supervised setting and the semi-supervised setting. We show that the "label-complexity gap"' between the semi-supervised and the fully supervised setting can become arbitrarily large for concept classes of infinite VC-dimension (or sequences of classes whose VC-dimensions are finite but become arbitrarily large). On the other hand, this gap is bounded by O(ln |C|) for each finite concept class C that contains the constant zero- and the constant one-function. A similar statement holds for all classes C of finite VC-dimension.
Antimicrobial activity and evolution of the composition of essential oil from Algerian Anacyclus pyrethrum L. through the vegetative cycle

Essential oils from the aerial parts of Anacyclus pyrethrum L. were analysed at three developmental stages (vegetative, floral budding and flowering). Oil yield was found to vary depending on the stage of development, and the highest content of oil (0.019% w/w) was obtained at flowering stage. The chemical composition of essential oils studied by GC and GC–MS showed a total of 91 compounds. Whatever the analysed stage is, oxygenated sesquiterpenes were the most abundant group. Their level significantly increased during ripening and varied from 37.1% to 58.6%. The oil showed activity against Candida albicans and Staphylococcus aureus bacteria strains. Thus, they represent an inexpensive source of natural antibacterial substances that may potentially be used in pathogenic systems.
A unified approach to risk assessment for cancer and noncancer endpoints based on benchmark doses and uncertainty/safety factors.

A fundamental goal of toxicology is to determine safe levels of human exposure to toxic substances. In the absence of information to establish dose-response relationships at low exposure levels generally experienced by humans, high-dose to low-dose linear extrapolation is generally used for estimating carcinogenic risks and the no-observed-adverse-effect-level divided by uncertainty (safety) factors is widely used for establishing human exposure guidelines for noncancer effects. The basis and impact of this dichotomy is examined and questioned. It is proposed that a unified approach be adopted for establishing human exposure guidelines for both cancer and noncancer endpoints. It is suggested that a lower confidence limit on the dose estimated to produce an excess incidence of adverse health effects in 10% of the individuals in a human study or 10% of the animals in laboratory experiments be used as a point-of-departure. This dose would be divided by appropriate uncertainty factors to establish human exposure guidelines. For severe irreversible adverse health effects we suggest a total default uncertainty factor (divisor) for animal data on the order of 10,000, which is comparable to current guidelines. For reversible biological effects a smaller default uncertainty factor on the order of 1000 may be employed. This is comparable to the divisor often used currently when the point-of-departure is the lowest-observed-adverse-effect-level. It is asserted that the toxicological information generally available does not warrant numerical estimates of risk at low levels of human exposure. Rather, we support a unified approach for all adverse health effects of dividing a benchmark dose by appropriate uncertainty factors to establish guidelines for human exposures to toxic substances.
Compatibility and Resource Competition between Modalities of Input, Central Processing, and Output

Synthesized auditory displays and speech recognizers were used in two experiments to develop guidelines for their implementation in military aircraft. In the first experiment, the competition between encoding and response modalities of concurrent tasks was examined. The memory search task was more susceptible to competition for visual encoding, whereas the tracking task bore the greater impact from shared manual responding. The second experiment examined competition between tasks for encoding and response modalities and the optimum assignment of modalities to a given task. A simulated flight task was performed concurrently with either a spatial task (target acquisition) or a verbal task (memory). Best performance and least interference with the flight task were obtained when the spatial task was displayed visually and responded to manually and also when the verbal task was displayed auditorily and responded to with speech.
Constraint-Based Event Recognition for Information Extraction

We present a program for segmenting texts according to the separate events they describe. A modular architecture is described that allows us to examine the contributions made by particular aspects of natural language to event structuring. This is applied in the context of terrorist news articles, and a technique is suggested for evaluating the resulting segmentations. We also examine the usefulness of various heuristics in forming these segmentations.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging in Sporadic and Familial ( D 90 A SOD 1 ) Forms of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

T HERE IS CONSIDERABLE variation in the clinical presentation and rate of progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), but the basis of this heterogeneity is poorly understood. About 10% of ALS cases are inherited in a mendelian fashion, with mutations in the superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) gene (GenBank AY450286) being responsible for 20% of these. The D90A SOD1 mutation is commonly inherited as a recessive trait with high penetrance in homozygotes. Homozygous D90A SOD1 cases are genetically homogeneous, sharing a common founder about 60 generations ago. The resulting clinical phenotype is stereotyped as a spastic paraparesis progressing to upper limb and bulbar involvement. The disease is slowly progressive, with a much longer survival than with sporadic ALS (mean, 14 vs 3 years, respectively). Groups of patients with genetic forms of ALS that are clinically homogeneousprovideauniqueopportunity tostudy the pathologic basis of the relationship between genotype and phenotype in ALS. Neuroimaging techniques have been used in ALS in an attempt to improve diagnosis and to measure disease progression, as well as to provide a quantitative method of studying the pathophysiologic function of the disease in vivo. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a magnetic resonance (MR) imaging technique in which the signal is sensitized to the diffusion of water within brain tissue (which is restricted by barriers such as cell membranes and occurs preferentially along the direction of white matter tracts). Fractional anisotropy (FA) is a measure of the directionality of diffusion in a voxel (from 0 [complete lack of directionality of diffusion] to 1 [complete anisotropy]) and is reduced when white matter tracts are disrupted. Previous studies using region-ofinterest approaches to analyze DTI data in ALS have shown reduced FA in the corticospinal tract, consistent with the known pathologic features of the disease. Voxelbased approaches to analysis have demonstrated evidence of white matter damage in extramotor pathways. Some correlations between clinical measures and Author Affiliations: Medical Research Council Centre for Neurodegeneration Research and Department of Clinical Neuroscience (Drs Stanton, Turner, V. C. Williams, S. C. R. Williams, Blain, Leigh, and Simmons), Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences (Ms Shinhmar and Drs S. C. R. Williams and Simmons), National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health (Drs S. C. R. Williams and Simmons), Brain Image Analysis Unit, Department of Biostatistics and Computing (Dr Giampietro), and Division of Psychological Medicine and Psychiatry (Dr Catani), Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, and Department of Neurology, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford (Dr Turner), England; and Department of Neurology, Umeå University Hospital, Umeå, Sweden (Dr Andersen).
Perioperative concentrations of catecholamines in the cerebrospinal fluid and plasma during spinal anesthesia

Background: Catecholamine release is a physiological response to stress. The extent to which perioperative stress provokes the central release of catecholamines, which modulate pain perception in the spinal cord, still remains unknown. The perioperative course of catecholamine concentrations in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma was examined.
Altered brain structural networks in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder children revealed by cortical thickness

This study investigated the cortical thickness and topological features of human brain anatomical networks related to attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Data were collected from 40 attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder children and 40 normal control children. Interregional correlation matrices were established by calculating the correlations of cortical thickness between all pairs of cortical regions (68 regions) of the whole brain. Further thresholds were applied to create binary matrices to construct a series of undirected and unweighted graphs, and global, local, and nodal efficiencies were computed as a function of the network cost. These experimental results revealed abnormal cortical thickness and correlations in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and showed that the brain structural networks of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder subjects had inefficient small-world topological features. Furthermore, their topological properties were altered abnormally. In particular, decreased global efficiency combined with increased local efficiency in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder children led to a disorder-related shift of the network topological structure toward regular networks. In addition, nodal efficiency, cortical thickness, and correlation analyses revealed that several brain regions were altered in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder patients. These findings are in accordance with a hypothesis of dysfunctional integration and segregation of the brain in patients with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and provide further evidence of brain dysfunction in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder patients by observing cortical thickness on magnetic resonance imaging.
Tailored prophylaxis in severe hemophilia A: interim results from the first 5 years of the Canadian Hemophilia Primary Prophylaxis Study

Summary. Background: Prophylactic treatment for severe hemophilia A is likely to be more effective than treatment when bleeding occurs, however, prophylaxis is costly. We studied an inception cohort of 25 boys using a tailored prophylaxis approach to see if clotting factor use could be reduced with acceptable outcomes. Methods: Ten Canadian centers enrolled subjects in this 5‐year study. Children were followed every 3 months at a comprehensive care hemophilia clinic. They were initially treated with once‐weekly clotting factor; the frequency was escalated in a stepwise fashion if unacceptable bleeding occurred. Bleeding frequency, target joint development, physiotherapy and radiographic outcomes, as well as resource utilization, were determined prospectively. Results: The median follow‐up time was 4.1 years (total 96.9 person‐years). The median time to escalate to twice‐weekly therapy was 3.42 years (lower 95% confidence limit 2.05 years). Nine subjects developed target joints at a rate of 0.09 per person‐year. There was an average of 1.2 joint bleeds per person‐year. The cohort consumed on average 3656 IU kg−1year−1 of factor (F) VIII. Ten subjects required central venous catheters (three while on study); no complications of these devices were seen. One subject developed a transient FVIII inhibitor. End‐of‐study joint examination scores – both clinically and radiographically – were normal or near‐normal. Conclusions: Most boys with severe hemophilia A will probably have little bleeding and good joint function with tailored prophylaxis, while infusing less FVIII than usually required for traditional prophylaxis.
Altered resting-state ascending/descending pathways associated with the posterior thalamus in migraine without aura

This study aimed to investigate the dysfunctional ascending/descending pain pathways at the thalamic level in patients with migraine without aura (MWoA) using the effective connectivity analysis of the resting-state functional MRI. Twenty MWoA and 25 matched healthy controls participated in the resting-state functional MRI scans. The directional interactions between the posterior thalamus (PTH) and other brain regions were investigated using the Granger causality analysis and choosing bilateral PTH as two individual seeds. Pearson’s correlation analysis was carried out between the abnormal effective connectivity and the headache duration and pain intensity of MWoA. Compared with healthy controls, MWoA showed decreased inflows to the bilateral PTH from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the left precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex, decreased outflow from the left PTH to the ipsilateral dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and increased inflow to the right PTH from the ipsilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In addition, the abnormal inflows to the right PTH from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex correlated positively with the headache duration and pain intensity, respectively. The abnormal ascending/descending pain pathways between the thalamus and these cortical regions indicate a disrupted pain modulation in affective and sensory domains, which suggests a disequilibrium of pain inhibition and facilitation in MWoA. These findings may help to shed light on the pathophysiologic mechanisms of migraine.
High-Resolution Source Coding for Non-Difference Distortion Measures: Multidimensional Companding

Entropy-coded vector quantization is studied using high-resolution multidimensional companding over a class of nondifference distortion measures. For distortion measures which are "locally quadratic" a rigorous derivation of the asymptotic distortion and entropy-coded rate of multidimensional companders is given along with conditions for the optimal choice of the compressor function. This optimum compressor, when it exists, depends on the distortion measure but not on the source distribution. The rate-distortion performance of the companding scheme is studied using an asymptotic expression for the rate-distortion function which parallels the Shannon lower bound for difference distortion measures. It is proved that the high-resolution performance of the scheme is arbitrarily close to the rate-distortion limit for large quantizer dimensions if the compressor function and the lattice quantizer used in the companding scheme are optimal, extending an analogous statement for entropy-coded lattice quantization and MSE distortion. The companding approach is applied to obtain a high-resolution quantizing scheme for noisy sources.
Adaptive leader-following consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems with jointly connected topology

This paper studies the leader-following consensus problem of general multi-agent systems, in which dynamics of all agents are affected by unknown nonlinear dynamics. By parameterizing the unknown nonlinear terms, a distributed adaptive consensus algorithm is proposed for each follower agent. With a modified labeling rule, consensus analysis is conducted for the multi-agent systems with jointly connected topology based on algebraic graph theory and Lyapunov theory. Finally, a simulation example is provided to validate the theoretical results.