Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE KERATINIZATION OF EPIDERMAL SCALES, FEATHERS AND HAIRS

Keratinization involves two quite separate processes: the synthesis of keratin fibrous protein, resistant to proteolytic enzymes, and the enzymic cytolysis of most of the non-keratin components of the cell. The balance of these two factors largely determines the type of horny cell formed. Soluble substances in horny cells are probably mainly products of cytolysis. Keratin is a polymerized fibrous protein and it varies both in molecular and chemical composition in different keratinized structures. Various substances, including calcium compounds, phospholipids, nucleic acids and probably some enzymes, although synthesized independently, sometimese become bound to the keratin, probably through side chains of the keratin molecule. Bound phospholipid is importantin waterproofing the horny layer. (2) In amphibia the keratin is less resistant to denaturation than in higher vertebrates. The cells also show little cytolysis. (3) Reptilian horny scales resemble the amphibian horny layer but are more strongly keratinized. The cells are solid in structure but lose their nuclear staining. Similar horny scales occur on the legs of birds and the tails of mammals. (4) Epidermal growth and keratinization are intermittent in lizards and snakes, the horny layer being formed and shed as a whole. This process differs from the continuous growth and keratinization of other reptiles and mammals. In these groups the keratin is mostly lost in small flakes. (5) A more flexible horny layer is formed in the hinge regions separating the rigid reptilian scales, and also in bird epidermis. It is composed of separated thin layers of solid horny cells and is quite different from the flexible horny layer of mammals. (6) Feathers and hairs are analogous structures, but keratinization of these structures shows many differences. Thus, in the growing feather, protein synthesis shown by the distribution of ribosomal ribonucleic acid, continues to occur until shortly before keratinization is completed. In the hair a zone of protein synthesis is followed by a discrete keratogenous zone where the final stages of keratinization occur. (7) A true granular layer of the epidermis probably occurs only in mammals and was first developed in hair follicles. It contains keratohyalin, which, however, is probably not a precursor of keratin. A characteristic type of flexible horny layer occurs in mammals and is always formed over a granular layer. It is composed of hollow cells with only the peripheral cytoplasm keratinized. The interior of these cells is largely broken down to soluble constituents. Some other types of horny cell are formed from a granular layer, as in the soles of the feet. (8) A retrogressive change in epidermal keratinization has occurred in some marine mammals. The flexible horny layer is replaced by a nucleated (parakeratotic) horny layer. This shows close similarities to reptilian scales. Parakeratosis in these animals is associated with the loss of hairs.
The third Volhard lecture. Tension and the artery: the experimental elucidation of pseudo-uraemia and malignant nephrosclerosis.

One of the main obstacles to the understanding of Bright’s disease is the fact that renal damage of many different kinds can cause secondary hypertension which, like some forms of primary hypertension, can impose its own pattern of vascular damage on the final picture. Disentangling cause and effect can come, in the first and last analysis, only from long observation of symptoms, signs and lesions and the first advance, after Bright’s own work, came when Mahomed (1881), Huchard (1889) and in particular Clifford Allbutt (1895) identified ‘hyperpiesia‘ (benign essential hypertension). The next landmark was Volhard & Fahr’s (1914) classification of Bright’s disease, which isolated another entity, malignant nephrosclerosis, which led to early death from renal failure and hypertension. Volhard and Fahr were united in their description of the new syndrome, but differed widely in the interpretation of the picture. Fahr, the histologist, was impressed by the inflammatory reaction surrounding the arterial and glomerular lesions and maintained to the end that this pointed to primary inflammation of the kidney and its vessels caused by a wide range of damaging agents. Volhard, the clinician, on the other hand, was equally insistent that the hypertension was the cause of the renal lesions and that the ‘convulsive uraemia’ which complicated the disease was also hypertensive and should be called pseudouraemia. At a time when Allbutt’s teaching had scarcely been assimilated, Volhard’s revolutionary views, opposed as they were by Fahr, were difficult to grasp, but confirmation by experienced clinicians like Keith (Keith, Wagener & Kernohan, 19281, Fishberg (1925) and Ellis (1938) gradually brought acceptance and Fahr’s dissenting views were in-
Dopaminergic basis of the psychosis-prone personality investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging of procedural learning

Previous evidence shows a reliable association between psychosis-prone (especially schizotypal) personality traits and performance on dopamine (DA)-sensitive tasks (e.g., prepulse inhibition and antisaccade). Here, we used blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI and an established procedural learning (PL) task to examine the dopaminergic basis of two aspects of psychosis-proneness (specific schizotypy and general psychoticism). Thirty healthy participants (final N = 26) underwent fMRI during a blocked, periodic sequence-learning task which, in previous studies, has been shown to reveal impaired performance in schizophrenia patients given drugs blocking the DA D2 receptor subtype (DRD2), and to correspond with manipulation of DA activity and elicit fronto-striatal-cerebellar activity in healthy people. Psychosis-proneness was indexed by the Psychoticism (P) scale of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R; 1991) and the Schizotypal Personality Scale (STA; 1984). EPQ-R Extraversion and Neuroticism scores were also examined to establish discriminant validity. We found a positive correlation between the two psychosis-proneness measures (r = 0.43), and a robust and unique positive association between EPQ-R P and BOLD signal in the putamen, caudate, thalamus, insula, and frontal regions. STA schizotypy score correlated positively with activity in the right middle temporal gyrus. As DA is a key transmitter in the basal ganglia, and the thalamus contains the highest levels of DRD2 receptors of all extrastriatal regions, our results support a dopaminergic basis of psychosis-proneness as measured by the EPQ-R Psychoticism.
Multiview discriminative learning for age-invariant face recognition

In this paper, we propose a new multiview discriminative learning (MDL) method for age-invariant face recognition, which is a challenging and important problem in many practical face recognition systems. Motivated by the fact that local appearance features are more robust to age variations, we first extract three different local feature descriptors including scale invariant feature transform (SIFT), local binary patterns (LBP) and gradient orientation pyramid (GOP) for each face image to exploit the discriminative information. Then, we develop a discriminative learning method with multiview feature representations, called MDL, to project different types of local features into a latent discriminative subspace where the intraclass variation of each feature is minimized, the interclass variation of each feature and the correlation of different features of the same person are maximized, simultaneously, such that more discriminative information can be boosted for recognition. Experimental results on the widely used MORPH and FG-NET face aging datasets are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed approach.
Do People Mean What They Say? Implications for Subjective Survey Data

Many surveys contain a wealth of subjective questions that are at first glance rather exciting. Examples include "How important is leisure time to you? " "How satisfied are you with yourself? "; or "How satisfied are you with your work? " Yet despite easy availability, this is one data source that economists rarely use. In fact, the unwillingness to rely on such questions marks an important divide between economists and other social scientists. This neglect does not come from disinterest. Most economists would probably agree that the variables these questions attempt to uncover are interesting and important. But they doubt whether these questions elicit meaningful answers. These doubts are, however, based on a priori skepticism rather than on evidence. This ignores a large body of experimental and empirical work that has investigated the meaningfulness of answers to these questions. Our primary objective in this paper is to summarize this literature for an audience of economists. Thereby turning a vague implicit distrust into an explicit position grounded in facts. Having summarized the findings, we integrate them into a measurement error framework so as to understand what they imply for empirical research relying on subjective data. Finally, in order to calibrate the extent of the measurement error problem, we perform some simple empirical work using specific subjective questions.
Reviewing emergency care systems 2: measuring patient preferences using a discrete choice experiment

Objective: To investigate patients’ strength of preferences for attributes associated with modernising delivery of out of hours emergency care services in Nottingham. Methods: A discrete choice experiment was applied to quantify preferences for key attributes of out of hours emergency care. The attributes reflected the findings of previous research, current policy initiatives, and discussions with local key stakeholders. A self complete questionnaire was administered to NHS Direct callers and adults attending accident and emergency, GP services and NHS walk-in centre. Regression analysis was used to estimate the relative importance of the different attributes. Results: Response was 74% (n = 457) although 61% (n = 378) were useable. All attributes were statistically significant. Being consulted by a doctor was the most important attribute. This was followed by being consulted by a nurse, being kept informed about waiting time, and quality of the consultation. Respondents were prepared to wait an extra 2 hours 20 minutes to be consulted by a doctor. There were no measurable preference differences between patients surveyed at different NHS entry points. Younger respondents preferred single telephone call access to health care out of hours. Although having services provided close to home and making contact in person were generally preferred, they were less important than others, suggesting that a range of service locations may be acceptable to patients. Conclusions: This study showed that local solutions for reforming emergency out of hours care should take account of the strength of patient preferences. The method was acceptable and the results have directly informed the development of a local service framework for emergency care.
Obtaining uniform deposition with variable wire feeding direction during wire-feed additive manufacturing

ABSTRACT Wire-feed additive manufacturing is cost competitive and efficient in producing large and complex components in aerospace applications. However, for the additive manufacturing technologies with lateral wire feeding, including laser wire additive manufacturing, electron beam freeform fabrication, plasma arc welding, and gas tungsten arc welding, it is difficult to obtain uniform deposit due to the variable wire feeding direction. In this work, high-angle wire feeding method is proposed to obtain uniform deposit in gas tungsten arc welding-based additive manufacturing. The results illustrate that low wire feeding angle (30°–50°) causes the deposition to break at the back feeding, meanwhile too high wire feeding angle (70°) leads to many littered droplets on one side of the deposition at the condition of side feeding. A uniform deposition can be obtained at the optimal wire feeding angle of 60° in any wire feeding direction, and the reasons have been discussed based on the temperature distribution characteristics of the arc and molten pool. Furthermore, the deposition layers exhibit similar columnar prior β grains, basketweave microstructure, and tensile properties from different wire feeding directions.
Capital Structure and Competition in the Banking Industry: Theory and Empirics

This paper incorporates the observation that in banking industries, debts are usually affected by current return and cannot be predetermined before competition. In a portfolio choice model, we have analyzed how two banks sequentially decide their capital structures through choosing equity levels, and then the levels of risky investment which is subject to the rival’s competition. Taking equity as control variable gives us a different aspect to examine the impact of banks’ financial decisions; In addition to the impact on the critical value of shock from uncertain demand, the banks’ financial decisions also affect banks’ cash flow reserve, as well as the costs paid to equityholders and debtholders. Our main result agrees with Brander and Lewis’ point that leverage is positively related to a
Image analysis of weaverbird nests reveals signature weave textures

In nature, many animals build structures that can be readily measured at the scale of their gross morphology (e.g. length, volume and weight). Capturing individuality as can be done with the structures designed and built by human architects or artists, however, is more challenging. Here, we tested whether computer-aided image texture classification approaches can be used to describe textural variation in the nests of weaverbirds (Ploceus species) in order to attribute nests to the individual weaverbird that built them. We found that a computer-aided texture analysis approach does allow the assignment of a signature to weaverbirds' nests. We suggest that this approach will be a useful tool with which to examine individual variation across a range of animal constructions, not just for nests.
Intelligent Voltage Ramp-Up Time Adaptation for Temperature Noise Reduction on Memory-Based PUF Systems

The efficiency and cost of silicon physically unclonable function (PUF)-based applications, and in particular key generators, are heavily impacted by the level of reproducibility of the bare PUF responses (PRs) under varying operational circumstances. Error-correcting codes (ECCs) can be used to achieve near-perfect reliability, but come at a high implementation cost especially when the underlying PUF is very noisy. When designing a PUF-based key generator, a more reliable PUF will result in a less complex ECC decoder and a smaller PUF footprint, and hence, an overall more efficient implementation. This paper proposes novel insight and resulting method for reducing noise on memory-based PRs, based on adapting supply voltage ramp-up time to ambient temperature. Circuit simulations on 45 nm low-power CMOS, as well as silicon measurements are presented to validate the proposed method. Our results demonstrate that choosing an appropriate voltage ramp-up for enrollment and adapting it according to the ambient temperature at key-reconstruction is a powerful method which makes memory-based PR noise up to 3× smaller. In addition, this paper investigates the competitiveness of integrating the proposed method in a commercial product; the investigation is done in two phases. First by determining the saved area, and second by implementing a circuit that maps the ambient temperature into an appropriate voltage ramp-up. The results show that the new system costs up to 82.1% less area while it delivers up to 3× higher reproducibility.
Automatic detection of English inclusions in mixed-lingual text with an application to parsing

The influence of English continues to grow to the extent that its expressions have begun to permeate the original forms of other languages. It has become more acceptable, and in some cases fashionable, for people to combine English phrases with their native tongue. This language mixing phenomenon typically occurs initially in conversation and subsequently in written form. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that currently at least one third of the advertising slogans used in Germany contain English words. The expansion of the Internet, coupled with an increased availability of electronic documents in various languages, has resulted in greater attention being paid to multilingual and language independent applications. However, the automatic identification of foreign expressions, be they words or named entities, is beyond the capability of existing language identification techniques. This failure has inspired a recent growth in the development of new techniques capable of processing mixed-lingual text. This thesis presents an annotation-free classifier designed to identify English inclusions in other languages. The classifier consists of four sequential modules being pre-processing, lexical lookup, search engine classification and post-processing. These modules collectively identify English inclusions and are robust enough to work across different languages, as is demonstrated with German and French. However, its major advantage is its annotation-free characteristics. This means that it does not need any training, a step that normally requires an annotated corpus of examples. The English inclusion classifier presented in this thesis is the first of its type to be evaluated using real-world data. It has been shown to perform well on unseen data in both different languages and domains. Comparisons are drawn between this system and the two leading alternative classification techniques. This system compares favourably with the recently developed alternative technique of combined dictionary and n-gram based classification and is shown to have significant advantages over a trained machine learner. This thesis demonstrates why English inclusion classification is beneficial through a series of real-world examples from different fields. It quantifies in detail the difficulty that existing parsers have in dealing with English expressions occurring in foreign language text. This is underlined by a series of experiments using both a treebank-induced and a hand-crafted grammar based German parser. It will be shown that interfacing
New approximation algorithms for graph coloring

The problem of coloring a graph with the minimum number of colorsis well known to be NP-hard, even restricted to<? Pub Fmt italic>k<? Pub Fmt /italic>-colorable graphs for constant<? Pub Fmt italic>k<? Pub Fmt /italic> ≥ 3. This paper explores theapproximation problem of coloring<? Pub Fmt italic>k<? Pub Fmt /italic>-colorable graphs with as fewadditional colors as possible in polynomial time, with special focus onthe case of <? Pub Fmt italic>k<? Pub Fmt /italic> = 3. The previous best upper bound on the number of colors needed forcoloring 3-colorable <? Pub Fmt italic>n<? Pub Fmt /italic>-vertex graphsin polynomial time was <inline-equation><f><it>o<fen lp="par"><rad><rcd>n/<rad><rcd><rm>log<it>n</it></rm></rcd></rad></rcd></rad><rp post="par"></fen></it></f></inline-equation> colors by Berger and Rompel, improving a bound of<inline-equation><f><it>o<fen lp="par"><rad><rcd>n</rcd></rad><rp post="par"></fen></it></f></inline-equation> colors by Wigderson. This paper presents an algorithmto color any 3-colorable graph with <inline-equation><f><it>o<fen lp="par">n<sup>3/8<inf><rm>polylog<fen lp="par"><it>n</it><rp post="par"></fen></rm></inf></sup><rp post="par"></fen></it></f></inline-equation> <? Pub Caret1>colors, thus breaking an“<? Pub Fmt italic>O((n<supscrpt>1/2-&ogr;(1)</supscrpt>)<? Pub Fmt /italic>barrier”. The algorithm given here is based on examiningsecond-order neighborhoods of vertices, rather than just immediateneighborhoods of vertices as in previous approaches. We extend ourresults to improve the worst-case bounds for coloring<? Pub Fmt italic>k<? Pub Fmt /italic>-colorable graphs for constant<? Pub Fmt italic>k<? Pub Fmt /italic> > 3 as well.
Brain peptides and glial growth. I. Glia-promoting factors as regulators of gliogenesis in the developing and injured central nervous system

Glia-promoting factors (GPFs) are peptides of the central nervous system which accelerate the growth of specific glial populations in vitro. Although these factors were first discovered in the goldfish visual system (Giulian, D., Y. Tomozawa, H. Hindman, and R. Allen, 1985, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA., 83:4287-4290), we now report similar peptides are found in mammalian brain. The cerebral cortex of rat contains oligodendroglia-stimulating peptides, GPF1 (15 kD) and GPF3 (6 kD), as well as astroglia-stimulating peptides, GPF2 (9 kD) and GPF4 (3 kD). The concentrations of specific GPFs increase in brain during periods of gliogenesis. For example, GPF1 and GPF3 are found in postnatal rat brain during a peak of oligondendroglial growth while GPF2 and GPF4 are first detected at a time of astroglial proliferation in the embryo. Stab wound injury to the cerebral cortices of rats stimulates astroglial proliferation and induces marked elevations in levels of GPF2 and GPF4. Our findings suggest that two distinct classes of GPFs, those acting upon oligodendroglia and those acting upon astroglia, help to regulate cell growth in the developing and injured central nervous system.
Ant Colony Optimization for Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks in Urban Environments

This report represents the draft English version of the book chapter (in French) Optimisation par colonie de fourmis pour le routage dans les rseaux mobiles ad hoc en environnement urbain, that will appear in the book: Nicolas Monmarche, Frederic Guinand, and Patrick Siarry, Eds., Fourmis artificielles, des bases algorithmiques aux concepts et ralisations avancs, Hermes Science Publications, 2008.
Polymorphisms XRCC 1R 399 Q and XRCC 3T 241 M and the Risk of Breast Cancer at the Ontario Site of the Breast Cancer Family Registry

This study investigates the role of two nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms in DNA repair genes, X-ray repair cross-complementing group 1 (XRCC1)-R399Q and X-ray repair cross-complementing group 3 (XRCC3)-T241M , in breast cancer. Incident cases of invasive breast cancer in Caucasian women [n = 402, mean age = 45.7 (SD = 6.2) years] and female Caucasian controls [n = 402, mean age = 45.2 (6.5) years] frequency matched on 5-year age intervals were identified from the Ontario Familial Breast Cancer Registry. No evidence for a main effect of the XRCC1-R399Q genotype on breast cancer risk was observed. Estimates of risk for a family history (FH) of breast cancer compared with no FH differed by XRCC1-R399Q genotype (P value for interaction = 0.001). Homozygote XRCC1-399 R/R individuals and FH+ were at a 2.92fold [95% confidence interval (95% CI) = 1.47–5.79] increased risk of disease compared with FH individuals; the estimate of risk increased for R/Q heterozygotes with FH+ [odds ratio (OR) = 3.85, 95% CI = 1.94–7.65] but not for Q/Q homozygotes with FH+ (OR = 0.54, 95% CI = 0.20–1.47) compared with homozygous R/R and FH individuals. A marginal positive association for XRCC3-241 M/M compared with T/T genotype was found (OR = 1.44, 95% CI = 0.94–2.19), but the heterozygous T/M was not associated with an increase in risk (OR = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.71–1.32). There was also some evidence for a combined effect of body mass index and XRCC3-T241M on estimates of risk. Our results suggest that these polymorphisms may influence breast cancer risk by modifying the effect of risk factors such as FH. There is a need for further study into the role of these polymorphisms as effect modifiers. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2004;13(4):583–591)