Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ventilatory Inefficiency as a Limiting Factor for Exercise in Patients With COPD

BACKGROUND: Ventilatory inefficiency increases ventilatory demand; corresponds to an abnormal increase in the ratio of minute ventilation (V̇E) to CO2 production (V̇CO2); represents increased dead space, deregulation of respiratory control, and early lactic threshold; and is associated with expiratory flow limitation that enhances dynamic hyperinflation and may limit exercise capacity. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the influence of ventilatory inefficiency over exercise capacity in COPD patients. METHODS: Prospective study of 35 COPD subjects with different levels of severity, in whom cardiopulmonary stress test was performed. Ventilatory inefficiency was represented by the V̇E/V̇CO2 relation. Its influence over maximal oxygen consumption (V̇O2max), power (W), and ventilatory threshold was evaluated. Surrogate parameters of cardiac function, like oxygen pulse (V̇O2/heart rate) and circulatory power (%V̇O2max × peak systolic pressure), were also evaluated. RESULTS: Cardiopulmonary stress test was stopped due to dyspnea with elevated V̇E and marked reduction of breathing reserve. A severe increase in V̇E/V̇CO2 (mean ± SD 35.9 ± 5.6), a decrease of V̇O2max (mean ± SD 75.2 ± 20%), and a decrease of W (mean ± SD 68.6 ± 23.3%) were demonstrated. Twenty-eight patients presented dynamic hyperinflation. Linear regression showed a reduction of 2.04% on V̇O2max (P < .001), 2.6% on W (P < .001), 1% on V̇O2/heart rate (P = .049), and 322.7 units on circulatory power (P = .02) per each unit of increment in V̇E/V̇CO2, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Ventilatory inefficiency correlates with a reduction in exercise capacity in COPD patients. Including this parameter in the evaluation of exercise limitation in this patient population may mean a contribution toward the understanding of its pathophysiology.
Endogenous Circadian Rhythm in Vasovagal Response to Head-Up Tilt

Background— The incidence of syncope exhibits a daily pattern with more occurrences in the morning, possibly as a result of influences from the endogenous circadian system and/or the daily pattern of behavioral/emotional stimuli. This study tested the hypothesis that the circadian system modulates cardiovascular responses to postural stress, leading to increased susceptibility to syncope at specific times of day. Methods and Results— Twelve subjects underwent a 13-day in-laboratory protocol in which subjects' sleep-wake cycles were adjusted to 20 hours for 12 cycles. A 15-minute tilt-table test (60° head-up) was performed ≈4.5 hours after scheduled awakening in each cycle so that 12 tests in each subject were distributed evenly across the circadian cycle. Of 144 tests, signs/symptoms of presyncope were observed in 21 tests in 6 subjects. These presyncope events displayed a clear circadian rhythm (P=0.028) with almost all cases (17/21) occurring in the half of the circadian cycle corresponding to the biological night (10:30 PM to 10:30 AM). Significant circadian rhythms were also observed in hemodynamic and autonomic function markers (blood pressure, heart rate, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and indices of cardiac vagal tone) that may underlie the circadian rhythm of presyncope susceptibility. Conclusions— The circadian system affects cardiovascular responses to postural stress, resulting in greater susceptibility to presyncope during the night. This finding suggests that night-shift workers and people with disrupted sleep at night may have greater risk of syncope as a result of their exposure to postural stress during the biological night.
Instabilities and Inaccuracies in the Integration of Highly Oscillatory Problems

By means of a two-frequency test problem, we analyze the instabilities and inaccuracies that may impair the performance of multiple time steps/split operator integrators in highly oscillatory situations, such as those encountered in molecular dynamics, astrophysics, or partial differential equations describing waves. Considered are the impulse (Verlet-I/r-RESPA) method, the mollified impulse method, and the reversible averaging integrator. The analysis covers errors in positions, momenta, and energy.
Leaf-Induced Gibberellin Signaling Is Essential for Internode Elongation, Cambial Activity, and Fiber Differentiation in Tobacco Stems[C][W]

In plants, the directional flow and sites of hormone accumulation facilitate organ development. Identifying leaves as the source of a mobile signal that induces gibberellin accumulation and signaling revealed the hormone’s roles in plant primary and secondary growth. It is demonstrated that leaf-induced gibberellin is required for stem elongation, cambial activity, and fiber formation. The gibberellins (GAs) are a group of endogenous compounds that promote the growth of most plant organs, including stem internodes. We show that in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) the presence of leaves is essential for the accumulation of bioactive GAs and their immediate precursors in the stem and consequently for normal stem elongation, cambial proliferation, and xylem fiber differentiation. These processes do not occur in the absence of maturing leaves but can be restored by application of C19-GAs, identifying the presence of leaves as a requirement for GA signaling in stems and revealing the fundamental role of GAs in secondary growth regulation. The use of reporter genes for GA activity and GA-directed DELLA protein degradation in Arabidopsis thaliana confirms the presence of a mobile signal from leaves to the stem that induces GA signaling.
FAILURE OF THE $L^{1}$ POINTWISE AND MAXIMAL ERGODIC THEOREMS FOR THE FREE GROUP

Let $F_{2}$ denote the free group on two generators $a$ and $b$. For any measure-preserving system $(X,{\mathcal{X}},{\it\mu},(T_{g})_{g\in F_{2}})$ on a finite measure space $X=(X,{\mathcal{X}},{\it\mu})$, any $f\in L^{1}(X)$, and any $n\geqslant 1$, define the averaging operators $$\begin{eqnarray}\displaystyle {\mathcal{A}}_{n}f(x):=\frac{1}{4\times 3^{n-1}}\mathop{\sum }_{g\in F_{2}:|g|=n}f(T_{g}^{-1}x), & & \displaystyle \nonumber\end{eqnarray}$$ where $|g|$ denotes the word length of $g$. We give an example of a measure-preserving system $X$ and an $f\in L^{1}(X)$ such that the sequence ${\mathcal{A}}_{n}f(x)$ is unbounded in $n$ for almost every $x$, thus showing that the pointwise and maximal ergodic theorems do not hold in $L^{1}$ for actions of $F_{2}$. This is despite the results of Nevo–Stein and Bufetov, who establish pointwise and maximal ergodic theorems in $L^{p}$ for $p>1$ and for $L\log L$ respectively, as well as an estimate of Naor and the author establishing a weak-type $(1,1)$ maximal inequality for the action on $\ell ^{1}(F_{2})$. Our construction is a variant of a counterexample of Ornstein concerning iterates of a Markov operator.
Cosmological Implications of the BIMA 30 GHz Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect Galaxy Cluster Survey

We explore the cosmological implications of seven deep survey fields observed at the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association (BIMA) array with 30 GHz receivers. These observations probe the cosmic microwave background anisotropy on scales corresponding to l ~ 5500, and an earlier analysis of these data detected no galaxy clusters via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (SZE). We use numerical cluster simulations and mock observations to characterize the cluster detection efficiency for each of the BIMA fields. With these detection efficiencies we derive constraints on the cosmological parameters ΩM and σ8, ruling out those models that overproduce galaxy clusters. Using only these seven BIMA fields, we calculate a 2 σ upper limit of σ8 < 1. 00Ω for flat models with 0.1 ≤ ΩM ≤ 1. When the power spectrum of density fluctuations is COBE-normalized, we find ΩM < 0.63 at 95% confidence level for flat models. This constraint includes our estimate of the large uncertainties in the SZE flux-virial mass relationship, as well as published uncertainties in the Hubble parameter, the COBE power spectrum normalization, and the primordial power spectrum index. In addition, we account for the effects of sample variance. Thus, given the sensitivity and solid angle of the deepest SZE survey to date, we conclude that no cluster detections were to be expected in a low-ΩM universe. Because of the redshift-independent nature of the SZE, our constraint is driven by the absence of sufficiently massive clusters in the redshift range 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 1, making this analysis quite different and complementary to the deepest existing X-ray cluster survey analyses.
A New Modularity for Detecting One-to-Many Correspondence of Communities in Bipartite Networks

Real-world relations are often represented as bipartite networks, such as paper-author networks and event-attendee networks. Extracting dense subnetworks (communities) from bipartite networks and evaluating their qualities are practically important research topics. As the attempts for evaluating divisions of bipartite networks, Guimera and Barber propose bipartite modularities. This paper discusses the properties of these bipartite modularities and proposes another bipartite modularity that allows one-to-many correspondence of communities of different vertex types.
Optical Burst Signal Receiver for ONU in Optical Switched Access Network

To economically realize optical burst signal receivers for the Optical Network Unit (ONU) in the Ethernet Optical Switched Access Network (E-OSAN), we previously introduced optical burst receivers with AC-coupling and DC-coupling using off the shelf components, evaluated them, and then showed that the AC-coupling version had better performance. This paper proposes optical burst signal receivers that are based on the transfer function of order n, Gn(s)=1? Hn(s), where Hn(s) denotes a Bessel filter transfer function of order n. We present a design method for the proposed receivers and show their performances. We confirm that the proposed optical burst receiver has better performance than the previous AC-coupling one, and that raising the order of the transfer function improves receiver performance.
Mycobacterial glycoproteins: a novel subset of vaccine candidates

Over the last two decades significant research efforts and resources have been devoted to identifying mycobacterial proteins of value to diagnostic assays and vaccine formulations. These scientific endeavors were often preceded by first identifying a target population of proteins, for example cytoplasmic, cell envelope, or extracellular. However, many of these endeavors have overlooked the posttranslational modifications (PTM) to which these protein subsets may be targets of. Consequently, we may be missing essential molecular information relevant to the function and antigenicity of these effector molecules, and in turn the pathobiology of these bugs. Moreover, heterologous expression of mycobacterial proteins in hosts lacking homologous PTM systems negates any functional and/or antigenic role the PTM may impart. Functional and pathogenic roles of PTMs, such as protein glycosylation, have been reported for other Gram-positive bacteria, especially in reference to mucosal pathogens (reviewed by Szymanski and Wren, 2005). Our objective in this piece is to shed light on the lack of PTM studies so that current and future researchers hunting for diagnostic and vaccine candidates shall: (i) be made aware of PTMs of mycobacterial proteins, and (ii) come to understand their growing importance to both pathobiology and immunogenicity. Interestingly, the last 5 years has only yielded 2 reports on the global analyses of mycobacterial glycoproteins, both for M. tuberculosis (Mtb), and over the last decade only a few studies demonstrated the importance of PTMs to the pathobiology and antigenicity of select proteins in Mtb, M. bovis, and Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP). In this communication we present the opinion that in a world of cross-reactive epitopes, and high amino acid sequence similarity between M. bovis, MAP, and their saprophytic counterparts, PTM diversity amongst these species may confer a new level of epitope-specificity for select antigens. We will also highlight that in the case of protein glycosylation, the type and extent of glycosyl moieties should not been seen as having the same outcome. Furthermore, the presence or absence of the PTM of proteins included in subunit vaccine formulations or attenuated strains, may enhance or mask the processing, presentation, and immunogenicity of relevant epitopes. Collectively, these data call to action critical analyses of the components we use to formulate mycobacterial vaccines. As the vast majority of PTM studies have focused on glycosylation, this PTM will be the focal point of discussion.
Integrated Sequence Tagging for Medieval Latin Using Deep Representation Learning

In this paper we consider two sequence tagging tasks for medieval Latin: part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization. These are both basic, yet foundational preprocessing steps in applications such as text re-use detection. Nevertheless, they are generally complicated by the considerable orthographic variation which is typical of medieval Latin. In Digital Classics, these tasks are traditionally solved in a (i) cascaded and (ii) lexicon-dependent fashion. For example, a lexicon is used to generate all the potential lemma-tag pairs for a token, and next, a context-aware PoS-tagger is used to select the most appropriate tag-lemma pair. Apart from the problems with out-of-lexicon items, error percolation is a major downside of such approaches. In this paper we explore the possibility to elegantly solve these tasks using a single, integrated approach. For this, we make use of a layered neural network architecture from the field of deep representation learning.
The Mouse Pink-Eyed Dilution Gene: Association with Human Prader-Willi and Angelman Syndromes

Complementary DNA clones from the pink-eyed dilution (p) locus of mouse chromosome 7 were isolated from murine melanoma and melanocyte libraries. The transcript from this gene is missing or altered in six independent mutant alleles of the p locus, suggesting that disruption of this gene results in the hypopigmentation phenotype that defines mutant p alleles. Characterization of the human homolog revealed that it is localized to human chromosome 15 at q11.2-q12, a region associated with Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes, suggesting that altered expression of this gene may be responsible for the hypopigmentation phenotype exhibited by certain individuals with these disorders.
Chemical Compositions, Phytotoxicity, and Biological Activities of Acorus Calamus Essential Oils from Nepal

Four essential oils from the leaf (P23) and rhizomes (P19, P22, P24) of Acorus calamus L. , collected from various parts of Nepal, were obtained by hydrodistillation and analyzed by GC-MS. From a total of 61 peaks, 57 compounds were identified among the four essential oils accounting for 94.3%, 96.2%, 97.6%, and 94.1% of the oils, respectively. All of the essential oils were dominated by (Z)-asarone (78.1%–86.9%). The essential oils also contained (E)-asarone (1.9%–9.9%) and small amounts of γ-asarone (2.0–2.3%), (Z)-methyl isoeugenol (1.5–2.0%), and linalool (0.2–4.3%). Allelopathic testing of the rhizome oil showed inhibition of seed germination of Lactuca sativa and Lolium perenne with IC50 values of 450 and 737 μg/mL, respectively. The rhizome essential oil demonstrated stronger seedling growth inhibition of L. perenne than of L. sativa, however. The rhizome oil also showed notable brine shrimp lethality (LC50 = 9.48 μg/mL), cytotoxic activity (92.2% kill on MCF-7 cells at 100 μg/mL), and antifungal activity against Aspergillus niger (MIC = 19.5 μg/mL).
Brownian motion conditioned to stay in a cone

A result of R. Durrett, D. Iglehart and D. Miller states that Brownian meander is Brownian motion conditioned to stay positive for a unit of time, in the sense that it is the weak limit, as $x$ goes to $0$, of Brownian motion started at $x>0$ and conditioned to stay positive for a unit of time. We extend this limit theorem to the case of multidimensional Brownian motion conditioned to stay in a smooth convex cone.
Rates of referable eye disease in the Scottish National Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Programme

Aims Diabetic retinopathy screening aims to detect people at risk of visual loss due to proliferative diabetic retinopathy, but also refers cases of suspected macular oedema (maculopathy). At the introduction of screening, ophthalmology was concerned that referral rates would be unmanageable. We report yield of referable disease by referral reason for the first 5 years of the programme. Methods We extracted screening results from a nationwide clinical diabetes database to calculate annual referral rates to ophthalmic clinics. We used logistic regression to examine associations between clinical measures and referable disease. Results 182 397 people underwent ≥1successful retinal screening between 2006 and 2010. The yield of referable eye disease was highest in the first 2 years of screening (7.0% and 6.0%) before stabilising at ∼4.3%. The majority of referrals are due to maculopathy with 73% of referrals in 2010 based on a finding of maculopathy. Conclusions The commonest cause for referral is for suspected macular oedema (maculopathy). Referral rates for retinopathy have stabilised, as predicted, at relatively low rates. However, ophthalmology workload continues to rise as new treatment options (ie, monthly intraocular injections) have unexpectedly increased the impact on ophthalmology. A review of the screening referral path for maculopathy may be timely.
Parents do matter: a longitudinal two-part mixed model of early college alcohol participation and intensity.

OBJECTIVE We hypothesized that etiologically relevant parental, peer, and demographic variables would predict both the transition into alcohol use and consequences and the increase in intensity of these outcomes from prematriculation to the sophomore year of college. METHOD College students (N = 388) at a midsized northeastern public university were assessed during the summer before matriculation and during the spring semesters of their freshman and sophomore years. A recently developed mixed model for analyzing longitudinal response patterns with predominating zeros was employed to examine categorical transitions (binary portion) and growth (intensity portion). RESULTS As expected, there were strong effects of time reflected in both the binary and intensity portions of the models across the three outcomes (weekly alcohol use, heavy episodic drinking, and alcohol-related problems). Parental permissiveness of drinking and student intention to affiliate with fraternity/sorority organizations predicted the transition to use and consequence status for all three outcomes and for increases in alcohol use and consequences. Peer disapproval of drinking strongly predicted all alcohol use and consequence outcomes. Parental disapproval of heavy drinking, parental monitoring, and male gender were variably influential across the outcomes at low to moderate levels. CONCLUSIONS Our findings indicate the importance of the parental context (e.g., parental permissiveness of drinking) as well as peer influences (e.g., intended fraternity/sorority involvement) in drinking behavior among college students. These findings underscore the need to examine both onset and growth of drinking outcomes. Intervention and prevention implications are explored.
Ieee Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 1 Fast Combinatorial Vector Field Topology

—This paper introduces a novel approximation algorithm for the fundamental graph problem of combinatorial vector field topology (CVT). CVT is a combinatorial approach based on a sound theoretical basis given by Forman's work on a discrete Morse theory for dynamical systems. A computational framework for this mathematical model of vector field topology has been developed recently. The applicability of this framework is however severely limited by the quadratic complexity of its main computational kernel. In this work we present an approximation algorithm for CVT with a significantly lower complexity. This new algorithm reduces the runtime by several orders of magnitude, and maintains the main advantages of CVT over the continuous approach. Due to the simplicity of our algorithm it can be easily parallelized to improve the runtime further.
Effect of topical prostaglandin analogues on corneal hysteresis

Editor, W e congratulate Bolivar et al. (2015) for their study entitled ‘Effect of topical prostaglandin analogues on corneal hysteresis’. The authors investigated the effect of the prostaglandin (PG) analogues on the corneal hysteresis (CH) and corneal biomechanical behaviour. The authors found that topical PG analogues increase the CH and this increase is not related to the amount of the decrease in the intra-ocular pressure measured by Goldmann applanation tonometry. As mentioned in the study, PG analogues lead a change in central corneal thickness (CCT), increase in keratocyte density in the corneal stroma and induce extracellular matrix remodelling. How much each of this factors contributes to the PG analogue-induced CH change is unknown. In literature, there are several papers reporting CCT decrease in the human cornea after PG analogue use (Viestenz et al. 2004; Maruyama et al. 2014). Rosa et al. (2014) investigated the relationship between CH and ocular parameters, and they reported that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between CH and CCT. In other words, PG analogues seem to make a minimal decrease in CH due to slightly decrease in CCT. In the study, authors stated that CCT was measured before enrolment of the study, but there is no information for the measurement of CCT at the end of the study. We want to ask kindly to the authors if available, is there a statistically significant change in CCT and is there a significant correlation between change in CH and CCT?
A Gaussian Process Guided Particle Filter for Tracking 3D Human Pose in Video

In this paper, we propose a hybrid method that combines Gaussian process learning, a particle filter, and annealing to track the 3D pose of a human subject in video sequences. Our approach, which we refer to as annealed Gaussian process guided particle filter, comprises two steps. In the training step, we use a supervised learning method to train a Gaussian process regressor that takes the silhouette descriptor as an input and produces multiple output poses modeled by a mixture of Gaussian distributions. In the tracking step, the output pose distributions from the Gaussian process regression are combined with the annealed particle filter to track the 3D pose in each frame of the video sequence. Our experiments show that the proposed method does not require initialization and does not lose tracking of the pose. We compare our approach with a standard annealed particle filter using the HumanEva-I dataset and with other state of the art approaches using the HumanEva-II dataset. The evaluation results show that our approach can successfully track the 3D human pose over long video sequences and give more accurate pose tracking results than the annealed particle filter.