Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reference Values for a Panel of Cytokinergic and Regulatory Lymphocyte Subpopulations

Lymphocyte subpopulations producing cytokines and exerting regulatory functions represent key immune elements. Given their reciprocal interdependency lymphocyte subpopulations are usually assayed as diagnostic panels, rather than single biomarkers for specialist clinical use. This retrospective analysis on lymphocyte subpopulations, analyzed over the last few years in an outpatient laboratory in Northeast Italy, contributes to the establishment of reference values for several regulatory lymphocytes currently lacking such reference ranges for the general population. Mean values and ranges in a sample of Caucasian patients (mean age 42±8,5 years), were provided for Th1, Th2, Th17, Th-reg, Tc-reg, Tc-CD57+ and B1 lymphocytes. The results are consistent with what is found in literature for the single subtypes and are: Th1 157.8±60.3/µl (7.3%±2.9); Th2 118.2±52.2/µl (5.4%±2.5); Th17 221.6±90.2/µl (10.5%±4.4); Th-reg 15.1±10.2/µl (0.7%±0.4); Tc-reg 5.8±4.7/µl (0.3%±0.2); Tc-CD57+ 103.7±114.1/µl (4.6%±4.7); B1 33.7±22.8/µl (1.5%±0.9); (Values are mean±SD). The results show that despite their variability, mean values are rather consistent in all age or sex groups and can be used as laboratory internal reference for this regulatory panel. Adding regulatory cells to lymphocyte subpopulations panels allows a more complete view of the state of the subject's immune network balance, thus improving the personalization and the “actionability” of diagnostic data in a systems medicine perspective.
Immunosuppressive cytokines (IL‐10, TGF‐β) genes expression in human gastric carcinoma tissues

Contribution of immunosuppressive cytokines to tumor progression in many types of cancers has been suggested. To characterize the in vivo expression of immunosuppressive cytokines in gastric cancer, we analyzed the messenger RNA (mRNA) expression of transforming growth factor‐β (TGF‐β) and interleukin‐10 (IL‐10) in human gastric carcinoma tissues.
A Lagrangian relaxation network for graph matching

Presents a Lagrangian relaxation network for graph matching. The problem is find a permutation matrix M that minimizes a distance between the two graphs. The authors adopt a deterministic annealing approach which is similar to a Lagrangian decomposition approach in that the row and column constraints of the permutation matrix are satisfied separately and Lagrange multipliers are used to equate the two "solutions". A fixpoint preserving transformation is applied to the graph matching constraint. A symmetry-breaking term is added in order to obtain a permutation matrix and is reversed via another fixpoint preserving transformation. The resulting network performs minimization with respect to the Lagrange parameters and maximization with respect to the match matrix variables. Simulation results are shown on 100 node random graphs and for a wide range of connectivities. <<ETX>>
Invasive Crayfish Threaten the Development of Submerged Macrophytes in Lake Restoration

Submerged macrophytes enhance water transparency and aquatic biodiversity in shallow water ecosystems. Therefore, the return of submerged macrophytes is the target of many lake restoration projects. However, at present, north-western European aquatic ecosystems are increasingly invaded by omnivorous exotic crayfish. We hypothesize that invasive crayfish pose a novel constraint on the regeneration of submerged macrophytes in restored lakes and may jeopardize restoration efforts. We experimentally investigated whether the invasive crayfish (Procambarus clarkii Girard) affects submerged macrophyte development in a Dutch peat lake where these crayfish are expanding rapidly. Seemingly favourable abiotic conditions for macrophyte growth existed in two 0.5 ha lake enclosures, which provided shelter and reduced turbidity, and in one lake enclosure iron was added to reduce internal nutrient loading, but macrophytes did not emerge. We transplanted three submerged macrophyte species in a full factorial exclosure experiment, where we separated the effect of crayfish from large vertebrates using different mesh sizes combined with a caging treatment stocked with crayfish only. The three transplanted macrophytes grew rapidly when protected from grazing in both lake enclosures, demonstrating that abiotic conditions for growth were suitable. Crayfish strongly reduced biomass and survival of all three macrophyte species while waterfowl and fish had no additive effects. Gut contents showed that crayfish were mostly carnivorous, but also consumed macrophytes. We show that P. clarkii strongly inhibit macrophyte development once favourable abiotic conditions for macrophyte growth are restored. Therefore, expansion of invasive crayfish poses a novel threat to the restoration of shallow water bodies in north-western Europe. Prevention of introduction and spread of crayfish is urgent, as management of invasive crayfish populations is very difficult.
INACTIVATION OF BACTERIAL EXOTOXINS AND ENDOTOXIN BY IRON

After incubation with various agents in vitro, the lethal effects of aqueous solutions of Cl. perfringens alpha toxin, C. diphtheriae toxin, and E. coli endotoxin were tested in mice, guinea pigs, and rabbits, respectively. Iron, copper, cysteine, ascorbic acid, and versene counteracted the lethal effects of alpha toxin in mice, while magnesium, manganese, zinc, and citrate did not. Iron also counteracted the lethal effects of diphtheria toxin in guinea pigs. After incubation of endotoxin with iron, its lethal effects and tissue-necrotizing actions in rabbits were counteracted. However, the pyrogenic properties of the toxin were not affected. The solubilities of perfringens alpha toxin and diphtheria toxin were markedly reduced after incubation with detoxifying metals, and resolubilization of these toxins with chelators resulted in partial restoration of toxicity. Addition of versene to detoxified endotoxin also resulted in partial recovery of lethal effectiveness. The inactivation of bacterial toxins by iron under in vitro conditions is not specific to this metal, is a reversible process, and may be due to desolubilization, reduction, or to competition by the metal for sites on the toxin normally bound by other cations in vivo. Although no evidence is presented in this paper to support the view that there is a relationship between the inactivation of endotoxin and the storage iron in the reticuloendothelial system of shocked animals, the observation of an in vitro inactivation of endotoxin by inorganic iron warrants consideration of such a mechanism.
The performance impact of block sizes and fetch strategies

The interactions between a cache's block size, fetch size, and fetch policy from the perspective of maximizing system-level performance are explored. It has been previously noted that, given a simple fetch strategy, the performance optimal block size is almost always four or eight words. If there is even a small cycle time penalty associated with either longer blocks or fetches, then the performance optimal size is noticeably reduced. In split cache organizations, where the fetch and block sizes of instruction and data caches are all independent design variables, instruction cache block size and fetch size should be the same. For the workload and write-back write policy used in this trace-driven simulation study, the instruction cache block size should be about a factor of 2 greater than the data cache fetch size, which in turn should be equal to or double the data cache block size. The simplest fetch strategy of fetching only on a miss and stalling the CPU until the fetch is complete works well. Complicated fetch strategies do not produce the performance improvements indicated by the accompanying reductions in miss ratios because of limited memory resources and a strong temporal clustering of cache misses. For the environments simulated, the most effective fetch strategy improved performance by between 1.7% and 4.5% over the simplest strategy described above. <<ETX>>
Tetrachloroethene transformation to trichloroethene and cis-1,2-dichloroethene by sulfate-reducing enrichment cultures

Tetrachloroethene, also known as perchloroethylene, was reductively dechlorinated to trichloroethene and cis-1,2-dichloroethene by laboratory sulfate-reducing enrichment cultures. The causative organism or group was not identified. However, tetrachloroethene was dechlorinated to trichloroethene in 50 mM bromoethane-sulfonate-inhibited enrichments and to trichloroethene and cis-1,2-dichloroethene in 3 mM fluoroacetate-inhibited enrichments. Overall transformation varied from 92% tetrachloroethene removal in 13 days to 22% removal in 65 days, depending on conditions of the inoculum, inhibitor used, and auxilliary substrate used. Neither lactate, acetate, methanol, isobutyric acid, valeric acid, isovaleric acid, hexanoic acid, succinic acid, nor hydrogen appeared directly to support tetrachloroethene dechlorination, although lactate-fed inocula demonstrated longer-term dechlorinating capability.
Timed model checking with abstractions: towards worst-case response time analysis in resource-sharing manycore systems

Multicore architectures are increasingly used nowadays in embedded real-time systems. Parallel execution of tasks feigns the possibility of a massive increase in performance. However, this is usually not achieved because of contention on shared resources. Concurrently executing tasks mutually block their accesses to the shared resource, causing non-deterministic delays. Timing analysis of tasks in such systems is then far from trivial. Recently, several analytic methods have been proposed for this purpose, however, they cannot model complex arbitration schemes such as FlexRay which is a common bus arbitration protocol in the automotive industry. This paper considers real-time tasks composed of superblocks, i.e., sequences of computation and resource accessing phases. Resource accesses such as accesses to memories and caches are synchronous, i.e., they cause execution on the processing core to stall until the access is served. For such systems, the paper presents a state-based modeling and analysis approach based on Timed Automata which can model accurately arbitration schemes of any complexity. Based on it, we compute safe bounds on the worst-case response times of tasks. The scalability of the approach is increased significantly by abstracting several cores and their tasks with one arrival curve, which represents their resource accesses and computation times. This curve is then incorporated into the Timed Automata model of the system. The accuracy and scalability of the approach are evaluated with a real-world application from the automotive industry and benchmark applications.
A TTX‐sensitive local circuit is involved in the expression of PK2 and BDNF circadian rhythms in the mouse suprachiasmatic nucleus

The roles of a local circuit of electrophysiological activity were examined in the expression of circadian rhythms in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the adult mouse. The neuronal activity of cultured SCN was suppressed with tetrodotoxin (TTX), an Na+ channel blocker, and the circadian rhythms in mRNA level were assessed for 13 genes by in situ hybridization. SCN slices were cultured for 3 days and TTX was applied at the peak phase of Per1 expression rhythm. The SCN slices were examined at 4‐h intervals up to 32 h after TTX application. The circadian rhythms in the expression of clock genes, Per1, Per2, Bmal1 and Cry1, and of clock‐associated genes, Dec1, Dec2, Rev‐erbα, Rev‐erbβ and DBP, were not affected by TTX treatment. By contrast, TTX completely abolished the circadian rhythm in the BDNF mRNA level and substantially damped the rhythm in PK2. The circadian rhythm in the AVP mRNA level was not changed significantly by TTX. These findings indicate that input through Na+‐channel‐dependent electrophysiological activity is not necessary for the expression of the circadian rhythms of clock and clock‐associated genes, but necessary for full expression of the circadian rhythms of BDNF and PK2 in the SCN. A TTX‐sensitive circuit is involved in the expression of BDNF and PK2 circadian rhythms in the mouse SCN.
Incorporating covariance information in one class support vector classification

Unlike multi-class problems, the low variance directions in the training data are important for one-class classification. However, projecting in these directions before classification will result in loss of important data properties. This paper introduces a Covariance-guided One-Class Support Vector Machine (COSVM) classification method which emphasizes the low variance projectional directions of the training data without compromising any important characteristics. COSVM combines the global information from the covariance matrix of the training data with the local information of Support Vectors. Our proposed method is a convex optimization problem resulting in one global solution, which can be found efficiently with the help of existing numerical methods. The method also keeps the principal structure of the OSVM method intact, and can be implemented easily with the existing OSVM applications. Comparative experimental results with contemporary one-class classifiers on numerous benchmark datasets verify that our method results in significantly better performance.
Usability of "Fatchum": A Mobile Application Recipe Recommender System

This study1 determined the factors that influenced the usability of "Fatchum" - a mobile application Filipino recipe recommender system. Toward this goal, two sets of data were gathered to determine the usability of the mobile app. The first set of data gathered the demographic factors (i.e., age, gender, occupation, level of occupation, and level of knowledge in cooking) and the subjective measures of usability of the app in terms of its design-related factors. The design-related factors were measured in terms of user-interface, navigability, and functionality. It was shown that age, gender, and navigability were significant factors that influenced the usability of the app. The objective measures showed that the app can provide recipe names quickly but fails to share the recipes in a social networking site. Thus, the system is partially successful in meeting its intended purpose. Recommendations for future studies are also offered.
An Energy-Efficient and High-Speed Mobile Memory I/O Interface Using Simultaneous Bi-Directional Dual (Base+RF)-Band Signaling

A fully-integrated 8.4 Gb/s 2.5 pJ/b mobile memory I/O transceiver using simultaneous bidirectionaldual band signaling is presented. Incorporating both RF-band and baseband transceiver designs, this prototype demonstrates an energy-efficient and high-bandwidth solution for future mobile memory I/O interface. The proposed amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulator/demodulator with on-chip band-selective transformer obviates a power hungry pre-emphasis and equalization circuitry, revealing a low-power, compact and standard mobile memory-compatible solution. Designed and fabricated in 65-nm CMOS technology, each RF-band and baseband transceiver consumes 10.5 mW and 11 mW and occupies 0.08 mm2 and 0.06 mm2 die area, respectively. The dual-band transceiver achieves error-free operation (BER <; 10-15 ) with 223- 1 PRBS at 8.4 Gb/s over a distance of 10 cm.
Quantitative Proteomic and Transcriptional Analysis of the Response to the p38 Mitogen-activated Protein Kinase Inhibitor SB203580 in Transformed Follicular Lymphoma Cells*S

The p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) is a key mediator of stress, extracellular-, growth factor-, and cytokine-induced signaling, and has been implicated in the development of cancer. Our previous work showed evidence for p38 MAPK activation in a subset of transformed follicular lymphomas (Elenitoba-Johnson et al. (2003) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 7259). We demonstrated that inhibition of p38 MAPK by SB203580 resulted in dose- and time-dependent caspase-3-mediated apoptosis. In order to further elucidate the basis of the cellular effects of SB203580, we have employed a systems biologic approach involving cDNA microarray and quantitative proteomic analysis of transformed follicular lymphoma derived-cells (OCI Ly-1) treated with SB203580. Gene expression profiling revealed differential expression (≥1.5-fold) of 374 genes/ESTs in cells treated for 3 h and 515 genes/ESTs in cells treated for 21 h. The majority (52% at 3 h and 91% at 21 h) were down-regulated, including genes encoding growth cytokines, transcriptional regulators and cytoskeletal proteins. Quantitative proteomic analysis using ICAT-LC-MS/MS identified 277 differentially expressed proteins at 3 h and 350 proteins at 21 h of treatment with SB203580, the majority of which were also down-regulated. Analysis of functional groups of the differentially expressed proteins implicated components of diverse overlapping pathways including the IL-6/phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase, insulin-like growth factor 2/Ras/Raf, WNT8d/Frizzled, MAPK-activated protein kinase 2, and nuclear factor κB. The differential phosphorylation status of selected kinase-active proteins was validated by Western blotting analysis. Our complementary genomic and proteomic approach reveal the global cellular consequences of SB203580 treatment and provide insights into its growth inhibitory effect on transformed follicular lymphoma cells.
Product Adoption Networks and Their Growth in a Large Mobile Phone Network

To understand the diffusive spreading of a product in a telecom network, whether the product is a service, handset, or subscription, it can be very useful to study the structure of the underlying social network. By combining mobile traffic data and product adoption history from one of Telenor’s markets, we can define and measure an adoption network—roughly, the social network of adopters. By studying the time evolution of adoption networks, we can observe how different products diffuses through the network, and measure potential social influence. This paper presents an empirical and comparative study of three adoption networks evolving over time in a large telecom network. We believe that the strongest spreading of adoption takes place in the dense core of the underlying network, and gives rise to a dominant largest connected component (LCC) in the adoption network, which we call “the social network monster”. We believe that the size of the monster is a good indicator for whether or not a product is taking off. We show that the evolution of the LCC, and the size distribution of the other components, vary strongly with different products. The products studied in this article illustrate three distinct cases: that the social network monsters can grow or break down over time, or fail to occur at all. Some of the reasons a product takes off are intrinsic to the product; there are also aspects of the broader social context that can play in. Tentative explanations are offered for these phenomena. Also, we present two statistical tests which give an indication of the strength of the spreading over the social network. We find evidence that the spreading is dependent on the underlying social network, in particular for the early adopters.
Mental models, cognitive style, and organisational learning : the development of shared understanding in organisations

Mental Models, Cognitiye Style, and Organisational Learning: The Development of Shared Understanding in Organisations David Philip Spicer Organisational learning is seen by many to be a key determinant of organisational performance. This is demonstrated by the growth of the 'learning company' concept (Pedler et al. 1991), and by the suggestion that the ability to learn faster than one's competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage (DeGeus 1988). Consequently, organisations need to integrate and maximise the knowledge and learning of their individuals, and central to the learning process in firms is an effective means of transferring knowledge and learning between individuals and their organisation as a whole. Mental models (individual and shared) have been postulated as a mechanism through which this occurs (Senge 1990a; Kim 1993; Hayes and Allinson 1998). An individual mental model can be characterised as a simplification or representation of understanding of an idea, notion, process or system which provides the cognitive framework in which that individual's knowledge in respect of that issue is stored, whilst shared (group or organisational) mental models can be characterised as the common elements that exist between individual mental models. Both of these have been theoretically linked with individual and organisational learning. Literature in respect of individual and organisational learning, mental models and a third issue cognitive style is reviewed. Cognitive style represents the way individuals obtain, store and operationalise knowledge, and is included here as it is recognised as potentially affecting how learning and mental models interact (Hayes and Allinson 1998). A research model is posited which integrates key theory in respect of these three concepts, and research undertaken in two phases is presented. Phase One focused upon the representation of individual and shared mental models through semi-structured causal interviews with senior mangers in participant organisations, whilst Phase Two involved organisation wide surveys of these models, aspects of learning and cognitive style. Results obtained suggest that the complexities of an organisation, its environment, learning and mental models all mitigate against the identification of a simple relationship between these constructs. However some of the sources of these complexities are identified and suggested, and it is posited that the progression of work addressing organisational learning would best be served through a case study approach addressing the sources of complexity and effectiveness of learning in relation to specific mental models and within organisations.
Comparison of arterial pressure waveform analysis with the lithium dilution technique to monitor cardiac output in anesthetized dogs.

OBJECTIVE To assess agreement between arterial pressure waveform-derived cardiac output (PCO) and lithium dilution cardiac output (LiDCO) systems in measurements of various levels of cardiac output (CO) induced by changes in anesthetic depth and administration of inotropic drugs in dogs. ANIMALS 6 healthy dogs. PROCEDURE Dogs were anesthetized on 2 occasions separated by at least 5 days. Inotropic drug administration (dopamine or dobutamine) was randomly assigned in a crossover manner. Following initial calibration of PCO measurements with a LiDCO measurement, 4 randomly assigned treatments were administered to vary CO; subsequently, concurrent pairs of PCO and LiDCO measurements were obtained. Treatments included a light plane of anesthesia, deep plane of anesthesia, continuous infusion of an inotropic drug (rate adjusted to achieve a mean arterial pressure of 65 to 80 mm Hg), and continuous infusion of an inotropic drug (7 microg/kg/min). RESULTS Significant differences in PCO and LiDCO measurements were found during deep planes of anesthesia and with dopamine infusions but not during the light plane of anesthesia or with dobutamine infusions. The PCO system provided higher CO measurements than the LiDCO system during deep planes of anesthesia but lower CO measurements during dopamine infusions. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE The PCO system tracked changes in CO in a similar direction as the LiDCO system. The PCO system provided better agreement with LiDCO measurements over time when hemodynamic conditions were similar to those during initial calibration. Recalibration of the PCO system is recommended when hemodynamic conditions or pressure waveforms are altered appreciably.