Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
IMPROVED OPTIMAL CONTROL OF DRY CLUTCH ENGAGEMENT

Abstract Optimal control of the engagement of a dry clutch is examined paying particular attention to the driver's comfort. Due to the strong constraints and large errors of the torque control for internal combustion engines, only the normal force on the clutch disks is considered as controlled input. The resulting analytically derived controller is tested on a highly realistic nonlinear model proving very good performance.
Osthole Mitigates Progressive IgA Nephropathy by Inhibiting Reactive Oxygen Species Generation and NF-κB/NLRP3 Pathway

Renal reactive oxygen species (ROS) and mononuclear leukocyte infiltration are involved in the progressive stage (exacerbation) of IgA nephropathy (IgAN), which is characterized by glomerular proliferation and renal inflammation. The identification of the mechanism responsible for this critical stage of IgAN and the development of a therapeutic strategy remain a challenge. Osthole is a pure compound isolated from Cnidiummonnieri (L.) Cusson seeds, which are used as a traditional Chinese medicine, and is anti-inflammatory, anti-apoptotic, and anti-fibrotic both in vitro and in vivo. Recently, we showed that osthole acts as an anti-inflammatory agent by reducing nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) activation in and ROS release by activated macrophages. In this study, we examined whether osthole could prevent the progression of IgAN using a progressive IgAN (Prg-IgAN) model in mice. Our results showed that osthole administration resulted in prevention of albuminuria, improved renal function, and blocking of renal progressive lesions, including glomerular proliferation, glomerular sclerosis, and periglomerular mononuclear leukocyte infiltration. These findings were associated with (1) reduced renal superoxide anion levels and increased Nrf2 nuclear translocation, (2) inhibited renal activation of NF-κB and the NLRP3 inflammasome, (3) decreased renal MCP-1 expression and mononuclear leukocyte infiltration, (4) inhibited ROS production and NLRP3 inflammasome activation in cultured, activated macrophages, and (5) inhibited ROS production and MCP-1 protein levels in cultured, activated mesangial cells. The results suggest that osthole exerts its reno-protective effects on the progression of IgAN by inhibiting ROS production and activation of NF-κB and the NLRP3 inflammasome in the kidney. Our data also confirm that ROS generation and activation of NF-κB and the NLRP3 inflammasome are crucial mechanistic events involved in the progression of the renal disorder.
Passive location developments in Elettronica SpA: System applications

Passive Location techniques (PL) are of primary importance in the field of Electronic Warfare. In 2004, Elettronica SpA (ELT) started the design of fast PL techniques using coherent receivers and advanced DSP methods. Such techniques jointly exploit the Frequency Difference Of Arrival (FDOA) and the Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA) of the incoming signal to achieve reliable estimates of the emitter location in short time (few seconds). Nowadays, this function is part of an Electronic Support Measure (ESM) System produced by ELT, currently operational on a Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA). In this work, we describe further advances for this function in terms of both theoretical formulation and system architecture used on MPA. In addition, we provide experimental results obtained exploiting live recorded data.
Reduced home advantage for basketball teams from capital cities in Europe

Abstract The aim of the present study was to investigate the home advantage effect in professional basketball leagues in Europe, especially the differences in home advantage between capital city teams and other teams in each country. All the teams (n=159) of seven national professional basketball leagues were studied (Bulgaria, Greece, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Spain, and Turkey) and classified as capital city teams or other teams. The data (n=7432 games) were gathered for six seasons (2003–2004 to 2008–2009). The results confirmed the existence of a home advantage effect in all seven basketball leagues. There was a significant difference (P<0.001) between the leagues, with home advantage highest in Romania (65.10%) and Greece (65.02%), and lowest in Turkey (58.12%) and Lithuania (56.13%). The results also show that capital city teams experienced lower home advantage compared with other teams in all seven countries. After controlling for team ability, this was statistically significant for Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Turkey (all P<0.05), but not for Lithuania, Russia or Spain (all P>0.10). These results are consistent with previous studies in football, which suggested that teams playing in capital cities in Europe had lower home advantage than those playing elsewhere. Possible reasons for this finding include a diminished sense of being part of a cohesive local community when playing in a capital city, a lower sense of territorial protection and, for the away team, a lessened feeling of unfamiliarity.
Possibilities of implementing progesterone eia test in the control of reproduction in dairy cows

The aim of this study was to implement the progesterone EIA test, developed in our laboratory by using an anti-progesterone antibody (Yamaguchi University, Japan), in order to determine the optimal moment for artifi cial insemination (AI) and to detect pregnancy in Holstein-Friesian cows according to the progesterone concentration in the whole milk. Also, the infl uence of β-carotene, applied at the day of insemination and human chorionic gonadotrophin applied on day 7 after AI on the progesterone level and the pregnancy rate were evaluated. For the accuracy of oestrus detection, the milk samples from 70 cows were collected on the day of insemination. Milk samples from 148 cows were collected 19-22 days following insemination for pregnancy check. After detection of naturally occurring oestrus (day 0) and AI, cows were divided into the following groups: group A (n = 19) was treated with 200 mg β-carotene (20 ml Carofertin® i.m. Alvetra u. Werfft Gmbh, Austria), group B (n = 17) was treated with 1500 IU hCG i.m. (Schering-Plough, the Netherlands) and control (non treated) group C (n = 18). The milk samples for EIA progesterone concentration analysis were collected on the day of AI, the 14th and the 20th day of the oestrus cycle. Oestrus detection errors and inappropriate moments of insemination according to the progesterone concentration were detected in 22.86% animals (16/70). The test accuracy for non-pregnant cows was 90.48% (76/84). The accuracy of the progesterone test in pregnant cows was 75% (48/64). False positive results (high progesterone level, but the cows were not pregnant) was detected in 25% of cows (16/64) as a result of a prolonged oestrus cycles, embrional mortality and endomethritis (10/16 cases). The treatment of cows with 1500 IU of hCG, on the day 7 of the oestrus cycle, resulted in statistically signifi cant increase of progesterone concentration in the dioestrus (p < 0.01). The most successful insemination was in the group of cows that was treated with hCG (47.05%; 8/17), then in the control group (38.88%; 7/18) and the least in the Carofertin group 36.84% (7/19). These differences were only numerical (p>0.05). The EIA test developed in our laboratory could be used for accurate progesterone determination in the whole milk during implementation of different methods for control of bovine reproduction.
Practical Lexicography: Principles and Methods of Dictionary-Making

Lexicography dictionary-users and types of dictionaries the collection and selection of material headwords pronunciation inflexion part of speech constructions collocations and idioms definitions in monolingual dictionaries equivalents in bilingual dictionaries encyclopedic information illustrations subject field and register labels etymology cross-references the dictionary entry - principles microstructure.
A critique of transformational leadership: Moral, professional and contingent dimensions of leadership within public services organizations

Our study of secondary schools in England illustrates the ineffective implementation of transformational leadership within public service organizations by policy-makers. First, a rather narrow, managerialist variant of transformational leadership is promoted, which is resisted by school teachers and principals. Second, associated with this, policy does not take account of the institutional context within which public services organizations operate. Third, policy-makers, rather than leaders transform the context within which leadership takes place and any leadership discretion is constrained by central government audit. Instead, moral, professional and contingent approaches to leadership are enacted at the local level with individualized, rather than dispersed leadership, as a consequence of regulatory and normative pressures.
Memristive stochastic plasticity enables mimicking of neural synchrony: Memristive circuit emulates an optical illusion

Memristive devices help address the binding problem: Their memory supports a transient connectivity in oscillator networks. The human brain is able to integrate a myriad of information in an enormous and massively parallel network of neurons that are divided into functionally specialized regions such as the visual cortex, auditory cortex, or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Each of these regions participates as a context-dependent, self-organized, and transient subnetwork, which is shifted by changes in attention every 0.5 to 2 s. This leads to one of the most puzzling issues in cognitive neuroscience, well known as the “binding problem. ” The concept of neural synchronization tries to explain the problem by encoding information using coherent states, which temporally patterns neural activity. We show that memristive devices, that is, a two-terminal variable resistor that changes its resistance depending on the previous charge flow, allow a new degree of freedom for this concept: a local memory that supports transient connectivity patterns in oscillator networks. On the basis of the probability distribution of the resistance switching process of Ag-doped titanium dioxide memristive devices, a local plasticity model is proposed, which causes an autonomous phase and frequency locking in an oscillator network. To illustrate the performance of the proposed computing paradigm, the temporal binding problem is investigated in a network of memristively coupled self-sustained van der Pol oscillators. We show evidence that the implemented network allows achievement of the transition from asynchronous to multiple synchronous states, which opens a new pathway toward the construction of cognitive electronics.
Mining multidimensional contextual outliers from categorical relational data

A wide range of methods have been proposed for detecting different types of outliers in full space and subspaces. However, the interpretability of outliers, that is, explaining in what ways and to what extent an object is an outlier, remains a critical open issue. In this paper, we develop a notion of contextual outliers on categorical data. Intuitively, a contextual outlier is a small group of objects that share strong similarity with a significantly larger reference group of objects on some attributes, but deviate dramatically on some other attributes. We develop a detection algorithm, and conduct experiments to evaluate our approach.
Two Layers Multi-class Detection method for network Intrusion Detection System

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are powerful systems which monitor and analyze events in order to detect signs of security problems and take action to stop intrusions. In this paper, the Two Layers Multi-class Detection (TLMD) method used together with the C5.0 method and the Naive Bayes algorithm is proposed for adaptive network intrusion detection, which improves the detection rate as well as the false alarm rate. The proposed TLMD algorithm also addresses some difficulties in data mining situations such as handling imbalance datasets, dealing with continuous attributes, and reducing noise in training dataset. We compared the performance of the proposed TLMD method with that of existing algorithms, using the detection rate, accuracy as well as false alarm rate on the KDDcup99 benchmark intrusion detection dataset. The experimental results prove that the proposed TLMD method has a reduced false alarm rate and a good detection rate based on the imbalanced dataset.
Diagnostic testing of patients suspected of primary ciliary dyskinesia.

RATIONALE Electron microscopy (EM) of ciliated epithelium is widely used to diagnose primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). Ciliary beat frequency (CBF) has been used to screen samples to determine whether EM is indicated. Beat pattern analysis has been advocated as an additional diagnostic test. Neither has been subject to formal review. OBJECTIVES To determine the ability of CBF and beat pattern analysis to predict EM-diagnosed PCD. METHODS CBF calculation and beat pattern analysis, using high-speed video microscopy, and EM were performed on nasal tissue from 371 patients consecutively referred to the Leicester Royal Infirmary for diagnostic assessment for PCD. With EM as the "gold standard," receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were constructed and sensitivity, specificity, and positive (PPV) and negative (NPV) predictive values were calculated for CBF less than 11 Hz, ciliary dyskinesia score equal to or exceeding 2, at least 90% of ciliated edges beating dyskinetically, and an immotility index equal to or exceeding 10%. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS PCD was excluded in 270 patients and confirmed in 70 by EM. The sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV for CBF less than 11 Hz were 87.1, 77.2, 50.0, and 95.8%, respectively. These values were higher for ciliary dyskinesia scores equal to or exceeding 2 (92.5, 97.6, 91.2, and 98.0%) and when at least 90% of ciliated edges were dyskinetic (97.1, 95.3, 84.6, and 99.2%). ROCs confirmed that the ciliary dyskinesia score and percentage of dyskinetic edges were superior screening indices compared with CBF and the immotility index. CONCLUSIONS The use of CBF alone to screen which biopsies should have EM will result in a significant number of missed diagnoses. Ciliary beat pattern analysis is a more sensitive and specific test for PCD with higher PPV and NPV.
Increased release of IL-12p70 by monocytes after periodontal therapy.

OBJECTIVES It has been suggested that periodontal inflammation may result in an altered immune response. The peripheral immune capacity in periodontitis patients can be investigated using lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated whole blood cell cultures (WBCC), known to reflect the behavior of monocytes in particular. A previous study in our laboratory revealed that monocytes in the stimulated cultures from periodontitis patients behaved functionally different compared with controls. The present study investigated whether this different response of periodontitis patients' monocytes is intrinsic or acquired. MATERIAL AND METHODS The release of inflammatory mediators was measured in Escherichia coli LPS-stimulated WBCC from 12 periodontitis patients before and after periodontal therapy. In addition, the total leukocyte and leukocyte differentiation counts were also determined in the patients before and after therapy. RESULTS The levels of interleukin (IL)-12p70 in cell culture supernatants increased two times and those of prostaglandin E2 showed a trend towards reduction after therapy, whereas the levels of IL-1beta, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, IL-12p40 and tumor necrosis factor-alpha did not change. The total number of white blood cells was decreased after periodontal therapy. CONCLUSIONS After periodontal therapy, the functional phenotype of the peripheral blood monocytes from patients was reconstituted, resembling that of subjects without periodontitis.
Acute generalized exanthematous pustulosis induced by hydroxychloroquine: a case with atypical clinical presentation*

Acute generalized exanthematous pustulosis is a rare drug-induced eruption that is characterized by acute, nonfollicular sterile pustules on an erythematous and edematous base. The most frequently implicated drugs are beta-lactam antibiotics. Hydroxychloroquine has been widely used to treat dermatologic and rheumatologic diseases and has been reported as a rare cause of acute generalized exanthematous pustulosis. A 42-year-old female presented with pustular lesions on the skin surface with erythema, facial edema, and occasional atypical target-like lesions after 21 days of treatment with 200mg/day hydroxychloroquine for rheumatoid arthritis, diagnosed one month previously. We report a case with acute generalized exanthematous pustulosis induced by hydroxychloroquine and treated with dapsone and systemic corticosteroid.
Toward a Holistic Theory of Knowledge and Adult Learning

This article proposes a holistic theory of knowledge and adult learning. The theory posits that knowledge consists of three indivisible facets—explicit, implicit, and emancipatory knowledge, and that each of the knowledge facets consists of three layers—foundation, manifestation, and orientation. The holistic theory calls for a dialectical perspective about the dynamic relationships among the three facets to better understand learning. Three contemporary paradigms of knowledge and learning are examined under the perspective of the holistic theory.
Comprehensive Analysis of CDKN2A Status in Microdissected Urothelial Cell Carcinoma Reveals Potential Haploinsufficiency, a High Frequency of Homozygous Co-deletion and Associations with Clinical Phenotype

Purpose: There are significant differences in reported frequencies, modes of inactivation, and clinical significance of CDKN2A in urothelial cell carcinoma (UCC). We aimed to address these issues by investigating all possible modes of inactivation and clinicopathologic variables in a single tumor panel. Experimental Design: Fifty microdissected UCCs were examined. CDKN2A gene dosage (quantitative real-time PCR), allelic status (microsatellite analysis), hypermethylation (methylation-specific PCR), mutation status (denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography and sequencing), protein expression (immunohistochemistry), and clinicopathologic variables (stage, grade, and disease recurrence during follow-up) were assessed. Results: Exon 2 was underrepresented in 20 of 46 (43%) and exon 1β in 21 of 46 (46%) of cases. Underrepresentation of exon 2 was accompanied by loss of heterozygosity (LOH) of 9p in 6 of 18 (30%) and of exon 1β in 11 of 19 assessable cases (58%). Overall, LOH of 9p was identified in 15/41 (37%). Homozygous deletion of exons 2 and 1β was detected in 16 of 46 (35%) and 10 of 46 tumors (22%), respectively. Co-deletion was most common, but exon 2–specific homozygous deletion was also detected. In tumors without homozygous deletion, p16 promoter hypermethylation was detected in 1 of 18 (6%). Hypermethylation of the p14ARF promoter or mutations in CDKN2A were not observed. Homozygous deletion of exon 2 or LOH on 9p were associated with invasion. Homozygous deletion of exon 2 or exon 1β was associated with recurrent disease. Conclusions: These results confirm CDKN2A as a clinically relevant target for inactivation in UCC and show that the true frequency of alteration is only revealed by comprehensive analysis. Our results suggest that CDKN2A may be haploinsufficient in human cancer.
Predicting School Adjustment in Early Elementary School: Impact of Teacher‐Child Relationship Quality and Relational Classroom Climate

This longitudinal study evaluated the impact of dyadic and classroom‐level teacher‐child relationship quality in first grade on children's psychosocial and academic adjustment in first (N = 3,784), second (N = 3,666), and third (N = 3,582) grade, controlling for several child features, namely, child demographics and children's initial levels of adjustment in kindergarten. Results of multilevel hierarchical regression analyses showed that first‐grade dyadic relationship variables (i.e., teacher‐child conflict and closeness) as well as classroom relational climate variables (i.e., the average level of teacher‐child conflict and closeness in the classroom) were associated with children's psychosocial adjustment in the first years of primary school. Associations between first‐grade dyadic relationship quality and classroom relational climate, on the one hand, and academic achievement on the other, however, were negligible.
Not all groups are equal: Differential vulnerability of social groups to the prejudice-releasing effects of disparagement humor

Three experiments tested hypotheses about why humor that disparages some groups fosters discrimination whereas humor that disparages others does not. Experiment 1 showed that disparagement humor fosters discrimination against groups for whom society’s attitudes are ambivalent. Participants higher in anti-Muslim prejudice tolerated discrimination against a Muslim person more after reading anti-Muslim jokes than after reading anti-Muslim statements or neutral jokes. Experiments 2 and 3 tested the hypothesis that disparagement humor promotes discrimination against groups for whom society’s attitudes are ambivalent but not groups for whom prejudice is justified. In Experiment 2 participants higher in anti-Muslim prejudice discriminated against Muslims more after reading anti-Muslim jokes than neutral jokes, while antiterrorist jokes did not promote discrimination against terrorists. In Experiment 3 participants higher in antigay prejudice discriminated against a gay student organization more after reading antigay jokes than after reading neutral or antiracist jokes; antiracist jokes did not promote discrimination against a racist student organization.
Coping with Family Demands Under Difficult Economic Conditions

Utilizing hierarchical linear modeling, we analyzed whether perceived family-related demands associated with social change – and the processes of dealing with these demands – relate to depressive symptoms, and whether these relationships vary by regional economic conditions. The sample comprised 2,519 respondents living in economically healthy versus weak regions of Germany. Results showed that higher levels of perceived family-related demands were associated with higher levels of depression. In addition, higher levels of engagement and lower levels of disengagement in coping with these demands were related to lower levels of depression. Respondents from economically disadvantaged regions reported higher levels of family-related demands, engagement in coping with these demands, and depression. However, the association of family-related demands, engagement, and disengagement with depression was weaker in economically disadvantaged regions. In addition, negative associations of engagement with depression we.