Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Determinants and Recurrence Sequences

We examine relationships between two minors of order n of some matrices of n rows and n + r columns. This is done through a class of determinants, here called n-determinants, the investigation of which is our objective. As a consequence of our main result we obtain a generalization of theorem of the product of two determinants. We show the upper Hessenberg determinants, with 1 on the subdiagonal, belong to our class. Using such determinants allow us to represent terms of various recurrence sequences in the form of determinants. We illustrate this with several examples. In particular, we state a few determinants, each of which equals a Fibonacci number. Also, several relationships among terms of sequences defined by the same recurrence equation are derived.
Isolation of mycobacteria from undecontaminated specimens with selective 7H10 medium

Media containing antimicrobial agents have been formulated for use as an adjunct to the standard media in an effort to reduce contamination and improve isolation of mycobacteria from clinical specimens. Selective 7H10 (S7H10) was developed for use in the isolation of mycobacteria from undecontaminated material. During a 33-month period, 10,782 clinical specimens were cultured in parallel on S7H10 without decontamination and on 7H11 after treatment with 2% sodium hydroxide-N-acetyl-L-cysteine. Results of this study show the overall contamination rate to be threefold lower on S7H10 than on 7H11 (304 versus 1,000). The number of specimens negative on NaOH-treated, 7H11-cultured specimens and contaminated on S7H10 was 282, whereas that negative on S7H10 but contaminated on NaOH-7H11 was 923. There were 6 positive cultures missed due to contamination on S7H10, compared with 61 on 7H11. Positive cultures on S7H10 outnumbered those on 7H11 by 106. This evaluation of S7H10 shows that it can be used with undecontaminated specimens in conjunction with standard methods and media for isolation of mycobacteria from clinical specimens.
Auricular Point Acupressure for Chronic Low Back Pain: A Feasibility Study for 1-Week Treatment

Objectives. The objective of this one-group, repeated-measures design was to explore the acceptance of auricular point acupressure (APA) to reduce chronic low back pain (CLBP) and estimate minimum clinically important differences (MCIDs) for pain intensity change. Methods. Subjects received 7-day APA treatment. After appropriate acupoints were identified, vaccaria seeds were carefully taped onto each selected auricular point for 7-day. The Brief Pain Inventory Short Form (BPI) was used to collect outcome data. Results. A total of 74 subjects participated in the study. Ten subjects dropped out and the retention rate was 87%. Subjects reported a 46% reduction in BPI worst pain, and over 50% reduction in BPI average pain, overall pain severity and pain interference by the end of study, and 62.5% subjects also reported less pain medication use. The MCIDs for the subscale of BPI ranged from . 70 to 1.86 points. The percentage improvement of MCIDs from baseline was between 14.5–24.9%. Discussion. APA appears to be highly acceptable to patients with CLBP. A sham group is needed in order to differentiate the true effects of APA from the possible psychological effects of more frequent visits by the auricular therapist and patients' expectation of the APA treatment.
Influence of microenvironment on mammary epithelial cell survival in primary culture

Mammary epithelial cells cultured on Engelbreth‐Holm‐Swarm (EHS) matrix form multicellular structures termed mammospheres, in which cells and matrix become arranged around a central luminal space. In the presence of lactogenic hormones, cells within mammospheres become polarized, form tight intercellular junctions, and secrete milk proteins vectorially into the luminal space. This study examined the mechanism of lumen formation. Histological examination of developing mammospheres showed that cavitation was associated spatially and temporally with the appearance of fragmented nuclear material in apoptotic bodies, and with the presence of cells positively labeled by terminal deoxynucleotide transferase‐mediated deoxyuridine nick end‐labeling (TUNEL). Analysis of [32P]‐deoxynucleotide end‐labeled genomic DNA by electrophoresis and autoradiography showed DNA laddering indicative of apoptosis. A transient increase in laddering coincided with both lumen formation and the presence of TUNEL‐positive cells. Lumen formation, DNA laddering, and detection of TUNEL‐positive cells were all accelerated when matrix composition was altered. They were also impaired coordinately when caspase inhibitor was present during the first two days of culture. Therefore, lumen formation in mammosphere cultures is due to selective apoptosis of centrally located cells. Mammosphere cavitation was accompanied by redistribution of matrix constituents to the mammosphere periphery. Western blotting and Western ligand blotting of culture medium showed that lumen formation was also associated with a transient increase in insulin‐like growth factor binding protein‐5 (IGFBP5), a factor implicated in mammary apoptosis in vivo. We propose that epithelial cell survival during mammosphere development is induced selectively through stabilization by basement membrane constituents, which may act directly on the epithelial cell or confer protection against autocrine apoptotic factors. J. Cell. Physiol. 181:304–311, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Recognition of Visual Activities and Interactions by Stochastic Parsing

This paper describes a probabilistic syntactic approach to the detection and recognition of temporally extended activities and interactions between multiple agents. The fundamental idea is to divide the recognition problem into two levels. The lower level detections are performed using standard independent probabilistic event detectors to propose candidate detections of low-level features. The outputs of these detectors provide the input stream for a stochastic context-free grammar parsing mechanism. The grammar and parser provide longer range temporal constraints, disambiguate uncertain low-level detections, and allow the inclusion of a priori knowledge about the structure of temporal events in a given domain. We develop a real-time system and demonstrate the approach in several experiments on gesture recognition and in video surveillance. In the surveillance application, we show how the system correctly interprets activities of multiple interacting objects.
MLLR transforms as features in speaker recognition

We explore the use of adaptation transforms employed in speech recognition systems as features for speaker recognition. This approach is attractive because, unlike standard framebased cepstral speaker recognition models, it normalizes for the choice of spoken words in text-independent speaker verification. Affine transforms are computed for the Gaussian means of the acoustic models used in a recognizer, using maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR). The high-dimensional vectors formed by the transform coefficients are then modeled as speaker features using support vector machines (SVMs). The resulting speaker verification system is competitive, and in some cases significantly more accurate, than state-of-the-art cepstral gaussian mixture and SVM systems. Further improvements are obtained by combining baseline and MLLR-based systems.
Catheter Ablation of Supraventricular Tachycardia in the Transplanted Heart:

Clinically important supraventricular arrhythmias are occasionally encountered in patients following cardiac transplantation and the use of catheter ablation as a treatment has been reported. The following three cases are described: (1) atrial flutter, including electroanatomic mapping of the donor and recipient components of the right atrium, (2) a mid‐septal accessory pathway, and (3) atrioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia (AVNRT). A Medline database search was performed and articles addressing catheter ablation following cardiac transplantation were reviewed. The efficacy of RFA for treating various arrhythmia mechanisms was evaluated based on a summary of published case reports. (PACE 2003; 26:1878–1886)
Potent antimalarial activity of the alkaloid nitidine, isolated from a Kenyan herbal remedy

Bioassay-guided fractionation of extracts of Toddalia asiatica, a plant used by the Pokot tribe of Kenya to treat fevers, has yielded the alkaloid nitidine as the major antimalarial component. Fractions containing nitidine have in vitro 50% inhibitory concentrations against Plasmodium falciparum in the range of 9 to 108 ng/ml for a range of chloroquine-susceptible and -resistant strains. The results show a lack of cross-resistance between chloroquine and nitidine.
Linked Data Platform as a novel approach for Enterprise Application Integration

Enterprises are increasingly using a wide range of heterogeneous information systems for executing and governing their business activities. Even if the adoption of service orientation has improved loose coupling and reusability, applications are still isolated data silos requiring complex transformation and mediation for integrating them. The W3C Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group aims to standardize a RESTful way to read and write Linked Data. This opens the door for industry to benefit more effectively from Linked Data by building interoperable LDP applications and implementing new approaches for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). For a wide industrial adoption of LDP-based EAI, the advantages of LDP have to be clearly illustrated and LDP needs to be assessed for enterprise readiness. This paper analyses LDP as an EAI approach by considering both its advantages over existing approaches and identifying the gaps and challenging enterprise EAI requirements it has to satisfy. The paper also presents lessons learned from a project that uses LDP for integrating open source Application Lifecycle Management tools.
SERUM ALBUMIN LEVELS ANTICIPATE ANTITHROMBIN III ACTIVITIES BEFORE AND AFTER ANTITHROMBIN III AGENT IN CRITICAL PATIENTS WITH DISSEMINATED INTRAVASCULAR COAGULATION

Elevated thrombin-antithrombin complex (TAT) or decreased serum albumin levels suggest heightened vascular permeability in disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). In such a situation, plasma antithrombin III (AT-III) may decrease because of the leakage. We thus examined whether AT-III activity before and after administration of an AT-III agent changed depending on plasma TAT and/or serum albumin levels in 20 consecutive patients with DIC. We also analyzed the pharmacokinetics for AT-III using a two-compartment model. Serum albumin levels before AT-III administration correlated with preadministered and postadministered AT-III activity, but TAT levels did not. Regardless of TAT levels, AT-III trough activity on the third day increased significantly. In patients with albumin levels of 2.5 g/dL or less, AT-III trough levels on the third day were significantly lower than those with higher levels of albumin. The half-life of the distribution phase for AT-III agent in the patients was shortened to less than one third the value reported in congenital AT-III deficiency, suggesting increased vascular permeability in the acute state patients here. The distribution volume of the agent increased remarkably compared with the previous control. We report here for the first time that in critical patients with DIC, plasma AT-III levels before and after AT-III administration could be predicted by preadministered serum albumin levels, but not by TAT. These findings could be explained by the pharmacokinetic profile, increased vascular permeability and distribution volume, observed in critical patients.
Demonstration of Phase-Conjugated Subcarrier Coding for Fiber Nonlinearity Compensation in CO-OFDM Transmission

In this paper, we demonstrate through computer simulation and experiment a novel subcarrier coding scheme combined with pre-electrical dispersion compensation (pre-EDC) for fiber nonlinearity mitigation in coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) systems. As the frequency spacing in CO-OFDM systems is usually small (tens of MHz), neighbouring subcarriers tend to experience correlated nonlinear distortions after propagation over a fiber link. As a consequence, nonlinearity mitigation can be achieved by encoding and processing neighbouring OFDM subcarriers simultaneously. Herein, we propose to adopt the concept of dual phase conjugated twin wave for CO-OFDM transmission. Simulation and experimental results show that this simple technique combined with 50% pre-EDC can effectively offer up to 1.5 and 0.8 dB performance gains in CO-OFDM systems with BPSK and QPSK modulation formats, respectively.
A Comparative Study of Corrosion Behavior of Hard Anodized and Micro-Arc Oxidation Coatings on 7050 Aluminum Alloy

Two kinds of metal oxide coatings were fabricated on 7050 Al alloy by hard anodization (HA) and micro-arc oxidation (MAO) techniques. The microstructure, phase composition, and corrosion behavior of the two coatings were studied by scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and corrosion tests, respectively. When compared with the HA coating, the MAO one was more effective to isolate the substrate from the corrosive environment. In addition, as confirmed by electrochemical tests, the MAO coating was of better corrosion resistance than the HA coating. Furthermore, it was revealed by neutral salt spray test that the MAO coating could protect substrate alloy over 1140 h, while the HA coating can only protect substrate alloy for 46 h due to the amorphous composition and through thickness defects (micro-pores and micro-cracks).
Stochastic Inner Product Core for Digital FIR Filters

The computational operations of stochastic computing (SC) are governed by probability rules which is different from conventional arithmetic computations. Applications of SC to digital signal and image processing problems have been recently reported in the literature. To improve the computational performance of SC based finite impulse response (FIR) digital filters, a new stochastic inner product (multiply and accumulate) core with an improved scaling scheme is presented for improving the accuracy and fault tolerance performance of the filters. Taking into account the symmetric property of the coefficients of linear phase FIR filters, the proposed inner product core is designed using tree structured multiplexers which is capable of reducing the critical path and fault propagation in the stochastic circuitry. The designed inner product core can lead to construction of SC based light weight and multiplierless FIR digital filters. As a result, an SC based FIR digital FIR filter is implemented on Altera Cyclone V FPGA which operates on stochastic sequences of 256-bits length (8-bits precision level). Experimental results show that the developed filter has lower hardware cost, better accuracy and higher fault tolerance level compared with other stochastic implementations.
Electricity generation from wastewater using a microbial fuel cell by using mixed bacterial culture

A microbial fuel cell (MFC) is a device that uses microorganisms as biocatalysts to transform chemical energy into electricity. This study demonstrated the electricity generation from the synthetic wastewater in a two chambered microbial fuel cell (MFC) inoculated with a mixed culture of cellulose degrading bacteria (CDB). With an initial addition of a nutrient broth having concentration of 13 g/l the power density reached 469.48 W/m 2 ; while the maximum voltage reached is 1.0 V. The maximum power for this two chambered MFC was 1.0 W (at current of 1.0 Amp). These results demonstrated that electricity can be produced from the synthetic wastewater by exploiting CDB as the biocatalyst. In this case, the synthetic wastewater consists of cellulosic material and hence the most suitable mixed culture of bacteria is cellulose degrading bacteria. The research study of this kind was done first time and provided satisfactory good results. This method suggests that, if the constituents of the wastewater are known then we can use a bacterial culture as per the constituting elements which can give us the maximum output for bioenergy production.
The Irradiance Volume

A major goal in computer graphics is realistic image synthesis. To this end, illumination methods have evolved from simple local shading models to physically based global illumination algorithms. Local illumination methods consider only the light energy transfer between an emitter and a surface (direct lighting), while global methods account for light energy interactions between all surfaces in an environment, considering both direct and indirect lighting. Even though the realistic effects that global illumination algorithms provide are frequently desirable, the computational expense of these methods is too great for many applications. Dynamic environments and scenes containing a very large number of surfaces often pose problems for global illumination methods. This article presents a different approach to calculating the global illumination of objects. Instead of striving for accuracy at the expense of performance, we rephrase the goal: to achieve a reasonable approximation with high performance. This places global illumination effects within reach of many applications in which visual appearance is more important than absolute numerical accuracy.
Interprocessor collective communication library (InterCom)

We outline a unified approach for building a library of collective communication operations that performs well on a cross-section of problems encountered in real applications. The target architecture is a two-dimensional mesh with worm-hole routing, but the techniques also apply to higher dimensional meshes and hypercubes. We stress a general approach, addressing the need for implementations that perform well for various sized vectors and grid dimensions, including non-power-of-two grids. This requires the development of general techniques for building hybrid algorithms. Finally, the approach also supports collective communication within a group of nodes, which is required by many scalable algorithms. Results from the Intel Paragon system are included. <<ETX>>
Expression of Cytokines by Human Astrocytomas Following Stimulation by C3a and C5a Anaphylatoxins

Abstract: C3a and C5a anaphylatoxins are two proinflammatory peptides generated during complement activation that act through distinct Gi protein‐coupled receptors named C3aR and C5aR, respectively. We have demonstrated previously that human astrocytes expressed C3aR and C5aR constitutively and were able to produce a functional complement. In this study, we examined the effect of an anaphylatoxin stimulation on cytokine expression by human astrocyte cell lines. Interleukin (IL)‐1β, IL‐6, tumor necrosis factor‐α, and transforming growth factor‐β mRNA expression was studied by quantitative RT‐PCR. Whereas IL‐1β, tumor necrosis factor‐α, and transforming growth factor‐β mRNA levels remained unchanged, stimulation of astrocytoma cells (T98G, CB193, U118MG) by C3a, C5a, and peptidic C3aR and C5aR agonists induced an increase in the IL‐6 mRNA level. The amount of IL‐6 was markedly increased at 3 and 6 h and returned to the basal level at 9 h of stimulation. This response was specific, because pretreatment of cells with pertussis toxin or with polyclonal anti‐C3aR or anti‐C5aR antibodies completely blocked the IL‐6 mRNA increase. The IL‐6 response was also investigated at the protein level, but IL‐6 protein was detected neither in cell lysates nor in supernatants of stimulated cells. The anaphylatoxin‐mediated transcriptional activation of IL‐6 gene suggests that C3a and C5a could play a role in priming glial cells during the inflammatory process in the brain.
N‐desmethylclozapine: a clozapine metabolite that suppresses haemopoiesis

Summary. Clozapine, a novel antipsychotic drug that is particularly effective in treatment‐resistant schizophrenia, causes severe agranulocytosis of unknown aetiology in approximately 0·8% of U.S. patients. We evaluated potential toxic mechanisms of drug‐induced agranulocytosis. Clozapine, the two major metabolites N‐desmethylclozapine and N‐oxide clozapine, and five other clozapine derivatives were screened for toxicity to normal haemopoietic precursors. For all compounds except N‐des‐methylclozapine, toxicity to CFU‐GM, BFU‐E and CFU‐GEMM occurred at concentrations at least 10 times the normal serum levels reported in unaffected patients. In contrast, the LD50 for N‐desmethylclozapine was 2·5 μg/ml for CFU‐GM, 3·2 μg/ml for BFU‐E, and 2·4 μg/ml for CFU‐GEMM, only 3–6 times the normal serum concentration. Bone marrow from patients with acute clozapine‐induced agranulocytosis was not more sensitive to clozapine or N‐desmethylclozapine than bone marrow from normal donors. These studies suggest that N‐desmethylclozapine, the major metabolite of clozapine, is itself toxic or is further metabolized to an unstable compound which is toxic to haemopoietic precursors of both myeloid and erythroid lineages.
Risk of venous and arterial thrombotic events in patients diagnosed with superficial vein thrombosis: a nationwide cohort study.

Recently, it has become apparent that superficial vein thrombosis (SVT) can have serious complications. However, the magnitude of the risk of subsequent deep venous and arterial thrombotic events remains unknown. We examined this in a nationwide population-based setting during a period when SVT was not treated routinely with anticoagulants. The Danish National Registry of Patients, covering all Danish hospitals, was used to identify 10 973 patients with a first-time diagnosis of SVT between 1980 and 2012. A comparison cohort of 515 067 subjects, matched by age, gender, and calendar year, was selected from the general Danish population. Outcomes were venous thromboembolism, acute myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke, and death. During median follow-up of 7 years, the incidence rate of venous thromboembolism was 18.0/1000 person-years (95% confidence interval [CI], 17.2-18.9). The highest risk occurred in the first 3 months (3.4%; 95% CI, 3.0-3.7). Compared with the general population, the hazard ratio was 71.4 (95% CI, 60.2-84.7) in this period, steadily decreasing to 5.1 (95% CI 4.6-5.5), 5 years after the SVT. The hazard ratios for acute myocardial infarction, stroke, and death were 1.2 (95% CI, 1.1-1.3), 1.3 (95% CI, 1.2-1.4), and 1.3 (95% CI, 1.2-1.3), respectively, with the highest risk also shortly after SVT. These data indicate the prognostic importance of SVT and may form the basis for clinical decision-making regarding anticoagulation.
Effects of Altering Student Seating Position on Student Learning in an 8th Grade Mathematics Classroom

There is a general lack of research on how altering student seating positions in middle and high school classrooms can affect students’ performance in learning the classroom content. In this study I aimed to create a seating position chart to optimize student learning through cooperative learning groups. Student seating positions in two classes were altered with two different methods to compare the effects on students learning and belief in learning.