Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Environmental Health: a Global Access Science Source Maternal Fish Consumption and Infant Birth Size and Gestation: New York State Angler Cohort Study

Background: The scientific literature poses a perplexing dilemma for pregnant women with respect to the consumption of fish from natural bodies of water. On one hand, fish is a good source of protein, low in fat and a rich source of other nutrients all of which have presumably beneficial effects on developing embryos and fetuses. On the other hand, consumption of fish contaminated with environmental toxicants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) has been associated with decrements in gestation and birth size.
GAP-43 transgenic mice: dispersed genomic sequences confer a GAP-43- like expression pattern during development and regeneration

Using transgenic mice, we have examined the expression pattern conferred by regions of genomic GAP-43 coupled to beta-galactosidase. We demonstrate that gene constructions that include the GAP-43 5′- flanking region along with sufficient sequences of the first intron drive beta-galactosidase (lacZ) expression to mimic in many regards the complex spatial and temporal pattern of endogenous GAP-43 expression. Transgene expression reaches peak levels during development, and persists at high levels in particular adult brain regions, such as the hippocampus and olfactory bulb. The inclusion of a stretch of the first intron in the construction is necessary to prevent expression outside of the nervous system, indicating that some of the cell specificity of GAP-43 expression is due to suppression of expression in inappropriate tissues. Injury caused by sciatic nerve crush causes reexpression of the transgene in adult sensory and motor neurons. This genomic region of GAP-43, therefore, includes elements responsive to neuronal growth signals that regulate both development and regeneration.
Analysis of AP-1 function in cellular transformation pathways

To understand the role of endogenous AP-1 activity in cellular transformation induced by oncogenes, we have made use of a fos mutant (supfos-1) and a jun mutant (supjun-1), either of which can function as a transdominant inhibitor of AP-1-mediated transcriptional regulation. Chicken embryo fibroblasts (CEF) infected with a series of transforming retroviruses were doubly infected with retrovirus carrying supfos-1 or supjun-1, and suppression of cellular transformation was monitored in terms of reversion to normal cellular morphology or acquisition of anchorage-dependent growth. Cellular transformation induced by several exogenously expressed transforming genes of the fos or jun family was efficiently suppressed, as expected. CEF transformed by v-src, v-yes, v-fps, c-Ha-ras, and N-terminally truncated c-raf were also induced to revert to the normal phenotype by these transdominant mutants, suggesting that functional transcription factor AP-1 activity is essential for the cellular transformation induced by these oncogenes. The suppression is not attributable to nonspecific inhibition of cellular proliferation, because CEF transformed by v-ros or v-myc were not induced to revert to the normal phenotype. We next analyzed changes in all known components of chicken AP-1 induced by v-src, c-Ha-ras, or activated c-raf transformation. The levels of both Fra-2 and c-Jun expression were elevated two- to fourfold, and hyperphosphorylation of Fra-2 was also observed. We further showed that Fra-2-c-Jun heterodimer is mainly responsible for the elevated AP-1 DNA-binding activity in these transformed cells, and we propose that this heterodimer play a crucial role in the transformation induced by these oncogenes.
Salient object detection using bipartite dictionary

This paper considers a bipartite dictionary based salient object detection algorithm that assigns one of two labels (object/background) to each superpixel of an image. The algorithm will iteratively find for each of the labels two dictionaries referred to as the bipartite dictionary, and the dictionaries will in turn update the labels of the superpixels based on the assumption that features of a particular label is better represented by the dictionary of its own label than by the dictionary of the other label. This iteration stops when convergence is reached, in other words, when there is no update. An objective function is formulated such that the bipartite dictionary and superpixel labels maximize inter-class reconstruction error while simultaneously minimize intra-class reconstruction error. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the MSRA-1000 dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than state-of-the-art algorithms for the dataset when the initial conditions are set appropriately. We have also found that the proposed algorithm tends to highlight salient objects more uniformly than other algorithms.
Investigation of the activity of cytoxan against leukemia L1210 in mice.

Two prime limiting factors in the treatment of neoplastic disease are (a) the toxicity of active anti-tumor agents for the host, and (b) the origin, during therapy, of resistance to the agent being employed. The origin of resistant variant sublines to therapy with folic acid antagonists, antipurines, glutamine antagonists, etc., has been amply demonstrated (5, 6, 22, 25-31, 86, 37). For purposes of overcoming the limitation of drug toxicity in therapy, a primary objective of screening programs and of detailed structureactivity studies within active groups of compounds has been to uncover drugs with increased antitumor activity and reduced host toxicity (7, 17, 21, 35, 39, 41). With respect to the origin of resistance to treatment, the effort has been twofold: (a) To uncover more active congeners within the same structural series (2, 7, 17, 41) and (b) to obtain drugs which inhibit at sites in different metabolic pathways or at different loci within the same metabolic pathway (8, 38, 40). Such compounds have been employed in clinical studies of concomitant and sequential therapy (9). Combinations of drugs presumed to act at different sites have been employed in studies of anti-tumor synergism, empirically or in attempts at multiple biochemical blockade (12). In this laboratory, assay procedures for the quantitative evaluation of chemotherapeutic agents have been developed with the use of early and advanced leukemia L1210 in mice (14, 15). With these procedures, various purine and pyrimidine antagonists, nitrogen mustard, and folic acid antagonists etc. (18), demonstrated definite therapeutic effectiveness. The folic acid antagonists were particularly effective in increasing the survival time of mice with this leukemia (17, 18). Although amethopterin was markedly effective in this system, it was surpassed in therapeutic activity by various halogenated derivatives of amethopterin (11, 17). Notably, two of the dihalogenated derivatives of amethopterin, 3'5'-
The Level, Slope and Curve Factor Model for Stocks

I develop a method to extract only the priced factors from stock returns. First, I use multiple regression on anomaly characteristics to predict expected returns. Next, I form portfolios of stocks sorted by their expected returns. Then, I extract statistical factors from these sorts using principal components. The procedure isolates and emphasizes the comovement across assets that is related to expected returns as opposed to firm characteristics. The procedure produces level, slope and curve factors for stock returns. The factors perform better than the Fama and French (1993, 2014) three and five factor models and comparably to the four factor models of Carhart (1997), Novy-Marx (2013) and Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2012). Horse races show that other factors add little to the Level, Slope and Curve factors. The Level, Slope and Curve factors have macroeconomic interpretations. The factors capture strong variation in consumption growth across the sorted portfolios, and when embedded in an ICAPM, proxy for innovations to dividend yield, credit spread and stock volatility.
Perceived stigma and associated factors among people with epilepsy at Gondar University Hospital, Northwest Ethiopia: a cross-sectional institution based study.

BACKGROUND Epilepsy is the world's most common neurological disorder, affecting approximately 69 million people worldwide. Perceived stigma affects many domains of the lives of people with epilepsy. However, in Ethiopia there is dearth of study on perceived stigma specifically among people with epilepsy. OBJECTIVE To assess the prevalence of perceived stigma and associated factors among people with epilepsy (PWE) attending the outpatient department of the University of Gondar hospital, Northwest Ethiopia, 2014. METHODS Institution based quantitative cross - sectional study was employed among 408 individuals people with epilepsy. Single population proportion formula was used utilized to calculate sample size. The participants were selected using systematic random sampling technique. Perceived stigma was measured using by the modified Family Interview Schedule (FIS) tool. Binary logistic regression analysis and adjusted odds ratio with 95% confidence interval were used to identify the associated factors with perceived stigma. RESULTS Overall, the prevalence of perceived stigma was found to be 71.6%. Marital status [single (AOR = 0.23, CI: 0.25, 0.90), widowed ( AOR = 0.37, CI: 0.15, 0.90) duration of illness [2-5 years (AOR = 4.38, CI:1.98,9.62, 6-10 years (AOR =4.29, CI:1.90,9.64, ≥11 years (AOR = 4.31,CI:1.84,10.00) and seizure frequency of [1-11per year (AOR=2.34, CI:2.21,3.56), ≥1per month (AOR = 5.63, CI:3.42,10.32)] were factors associated with perceived stigma. CONCLUSION Overall, the prevalence of perceived stigma was found to be high. Marital status, long duration of illness and seizure frequency were factors associated with perceived stigma.
A declarative approach to business rules in contracts: courteous logic programs in XML

We address why, and especially how, to represent business rules in e-commerce contracts. By contracts, we mean descriptions of goods and services offered or sought, including ancillary agreements detailing terms of a deal. We observe that rules are useful in contracts to represent conditional relationships, e.g., in terms& conditions, service provisions, and surrounding business processes, and we illustrate this point with several examples. We analyze requirements (desiderata) for representing such rules in contracts. The requirements include: declarative semantics so as to enable shared understanding and interoperability; prioritized conflict handling so as to enable modular updating/revision; ease of parsing; integration into WWW-world software engineering; direct executability; and computational tractability. We give a representational approach that consists of two novel aspects. First, we give a new fundamental knowledge representation formalism: a generalized version of Courteous Logic Programs (CLP), which expressively extends declarative ordinary logic programs (OLP) to include prioritized conflict handling, thus enabling modularity in specifying and revising rule-sets. Our approach to implementing CLP is a courteous compiler that transforms any CLP into a semantically equivalent OLP with moderate, tractable computational overhead. Second, we give a new XML encoding of CLP, called Business Rules Markup Language (BRML), suitable for interchange between heterogeneous commercial rule languages. BRML can also express a broad subset of ANSI-draft Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) which overlaps with CLP. Our new approach, unlike previous approaches, provides not only declarative semantics but also prioritized conflict handling, ease of parsing, and integration into WWW-world software engineering. We argue that this new approach meets the overall requirements to a greater extent than any of the previous approaches, including than KIF, the leading previous declarative approach. We have implemented both aspects of our approach; a free alpha prototype called Common-Rules was released on the Web in July of 1999, at http://alphaworks.ibm. com.
Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal

Although deep learning has historical roots going back decades, neither the term "deep learning" nor the approach was popular just over five years ago, when the field was reignited by papers such as Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton's now classic (2012) deep network model of Imagenet. What has the field discovered in the five subsequent years? Against a background of considerable progress in areas such as speech recognition, image recognition, and game playing, and considerable enthusiasm in the popular press, I present ten concerns for deep learning, and suggest that deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques if we are to reach artificial general intelligence.
Acutely elevated vasopressin increases circulating concentrations of cortisol and aldosterone in fasting northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) pups

SUMMARY The physiological actions of vasopressin (VP) in marine mammals are not well defined. To help elucidate its hormonal and renal effects in this group of mammals, northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) pups (N=7; 99±4 kg) were first infused with 0.9% saline (control; 220 ml), followed 24 h later with VP (as a 20 ng kg-1 bolus, then 2 ng kg-1 min-1 for approximately 35 min in 225±16 ml saline). During both control and VP periods, blood samples were collected prior to infusion, and 15, 30, 60, 120 min and 24 h after infusion to examine the hormonal responses of the pups to VP. Renal responses were quantified from 24 h urine samples obtained prior to infusion (control) and 24 h post-infusion. Compared to the control period, infusion of VP increased plasma concentrations of cortisol over a 120 min period and aldosterone over 30 min, while plasma renin activity (PRA) was decreased for a 120 min period. The plasma urea:creatinine ratio was elevated following infusion of VP. Urine output and osmotic clearance were increased by 69±18% (mean ± s.e.m.) and 36±10%, respectively, but free water clearance and glomerular filtration rate were not significantly altered 24 h post-infusion of VP. Solute (osmolality, Na+, K+ and Cl-) excretion and fractional excretion of electrolytes were also increased when compared to control values. The increase in cortisol concentration suggests that VP may possess corticotropin releasing hormone-like activity in elephant seals. If osmotic diuresis and natriuresis are typical consequences of elevated [VP] in fasting pups, then not increasing VP normally during the fast may serve as a protective mechanism to avoid the potential loss of Na+ induced by elevated [VP]. Therefore, under natural fasting conditions, pups may be highly sensitive to small changes in [VP], resulting in the maintenance of water and electrolyte balance.
Broad MICA/B Expression in the Small Bowel Mucosa: A Link between Cellular Stress and Celiac Disease

The MICA/B genes (MHC class I chain related genes A and B) encode for non conventional class I HLA molecules which have no role in antigen presentation. MICA/B are up-regulated by different stress conditions such as heat-shock, oxidative stress, neoplasic transformation and viral infection. Particularly, MICA/B are expressed in enterocytes where they can mediate enterocyte apoptosis when recognised by the activating NKG2D receptor present on intraepithelial lymphocytes. This mechanism was suggested to play a major pathogenic role in active celiac disease (CD). Due to the importance of MICA/B in CD pathogenesis we studied their expression in duodenal tissue from CD patients. By immunofluorescence confocal microscopy and flow cytometry we established that MICA/B was mainly intracellularly located in enterocytes. In addition, we identified MICA/B+ T cells in both the intraepithelial and lamina propria compartments. We also found MICA/B+ B cells, plasma cells and some macrophages in the lamina propria. The pattern of MICA/B staining in mucosal tissue in severe enteropathy was similar to that found in in vitro models of cellular stress. In such models, MICA/B were located in stress granules that are associated to the oxidative and ER stress response observed in active CD enteropathy. Our results suggest that expression of MICA/B in the intestinal mucosa of CD patients is linked to disregulation of mucosa homeostasis in which the stress response plays an active role.
Improving gateway performance with a routing-table cache

A way to increase gateway throughput is to reduce the routing-table lookup time per packet. A routing-table cache can be used to reduce the average lookup time per packet and the purpose of this study is to determine the best management policies for this cache as well as its measured performance. The performance results of simulated caches for a gateway at MIT are presented. These results include the probability of reference versus previous access time, cache hit ratios, and the number of packets between cache misses. A simple, conservative analysis using the presented measurements shows that current gateway routing-table lookup time could be reduced by up to 65%. <<ETX>>
Gang scheduling with a queue for large jobs

Applying gang scheduling can alleviate the blockade problem caused by exclusively space-sharing scheduling. To simply allow jobs to ran simultaneously on the same processors as in conventional gang scheduling, however, may introduce a large number of time slots in the system. In consequence the cost of context switches will be greatly increased, and each running job can only obtain a small portion of resources including memory space and processor utilisation and so no jobs can finish their computations quickly. Therefore, the number of jobs allowed to run in the system should be limited. In this paper we present some experimental results to show that by limiting real large jobs time-sharing the same processors and applying the backfilling technique we can greatly reduce the average number of time slots in the system and significantly improve the performance of both small and large jobs.
Thrombocytopenia and Disorders of Platelet Function in Pregnancy

Pregnancy is associated with physiological and pathological changes in platelet numbers and function, which can be of clinical concern because of risks for maternal and fetal or neonatal bleeding. Thrombocytopenia in pregnancy is frequently encountered and may be due to increased platelet turnover and plasma dilution, immune-mediated mechanisms, or a complication of a more severe underlying pregnancy-related disorder such as preeclampsia. Inherited defects in platelet function and number may also manifest during pregnancy with the risk of bleeding dependent on the underlying problem. In some women, the diagnosis of thrombocytopenia will precede pregnancy but in others, the problem is first identified when routine pregnancy blood tests are performed. An accurate diagnosis and risk assessment in the antenatal period are essential for developing specific plans for any antenatal interventions and for management of delivery and the postpartum periods, and the neonate. Management of pregnant women with platelet disorders requires a multidisciplinary approach and close collaboration between the obstetric and hematology teams.
The Worst-Case Interference in DSL Systems Employing Dynamic Spectrum Management

Dynamic spectrum management (DSM) has been proposed to achieve next-generation rates on digital subscriber lines (DSL). Because the copper twisted-pair plant is an interference-constrained environment, the multiuser performance and spectral compatibility of DSM schemes are of primary concern in such systems. While the analysis of multiuser interference has been standardized for current static spectrum-management (SSM) techniques, at present no corresponding standard DSM analysis has been established. This paper examines a multiuser spectrum-allocation problem and formulates a lower bound to the achievable rate of a DSL modem that is tight in the presence of the worst-case interference. A game-theoretic analysis shows that the rate-maximizing strategy under the worst-case interference (WCI) in the DSM setting corresponds to a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies of a certain strictly competitive game. A Nash equilibrium is shown to exist under very mild conditions, and the rate-adaptive waterfilling algorithm is demonstrated to give the optimal strategy in response to the WCI under a frequency-division (FDM) condition. Numerical results are presented for two important scenarios: an upstream VDSL deployment exhibiting the near-far effect, and an ADSL RT deployment with long CO lines. The results show that the performance improvement of DSM over SSM techniques in these channels can be preserved by appropriate distributed power control, even in worst-case interference environments.
Computational capabilities of recurrent NARX neural networks

Recently, fully connected recurrent neural networks have been proven to be computationally rich-at least as powerful as Turing machines. This work focuses on another network which is popular in control applications and has been found to be very effective at learning a variety of problems. These networks are based upon Nonlinear AutoRegressive models with eXogenous Inputs (NARX models), and are therefore called NARX networks. As opposed to other recurrent networks, NARX networks have a limited feedback which comes only from the output neuron rather than from hidden states. They are formalized by y(t)=Psi(u(t-n(u)), . , u(t-1), u(t), y(t-n(y)), . , y(t-1)) where u(t) and y(t) represent input and output of the network at time t, n(u) and n(y) are the input and output order, and the function Psi is the mapping performed by a Multilayer Perceptron. We constructively prove that the NARX networks with a finite number of parameters are computationally as strong as fully connected recurrent networks and thus Turing machines. We conclude that in theory one can use the NARX models, rather than conventional recurrent networks without any computational loss even though their feedback is limited. Furthermore, these results raise the issue of what amount of feedback or recurrence is necessary for any network to be Turing equivalent and what restrictions on feedback limit computational power.
Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems with Shared Resources: Utilization Bound and Mapping

In real-time systems, both scheduling theory and resource access protocols have been studied extensively. However, there is very limited research on scheduling algorithms for real-time systems with shared resources, where the problem becomes more prominent with the emergence of multicore processors. In this paper, focusing on partitioned-EDF scheduling and MSRP resource access protocol, we study the utilization bound and efficient task mapping schemes for a set of periodic real-time tasks that access shared resources in multiprocessor/multicore systems. Specifically, with synchronization overhead being considered, we illustrate the schedulability anomaly for such systems. We develop the first synchronization-cognizant utilization bound and further analyze its non-monotonicity where the bound can decrease when more processors are deployed. Then, we show that finding the optimal mapping for tasks with shared resources is NP-hard. Based on a novel approach that iteratively tightens the synchronization overhead, we propose two efficient synchronization-cognizant task mapping algorithms (SC-TMA) with the goal of achieving better schedulability and balanced workload on deployed processors. Finally, the proposed SC-TMA schemes are evaluated through extensive simulations with synthetic tasks. The results show that, the schedulability ratio and (average) system load under SC-TMA are close to that of an INLP (Integer Non-Linear Programming) based solution for small task systems. When compared to the existing task mapping algorithms, SC-TMA obtain much better schedulability ratio and lower/balanced workload on all processors.