Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strength prediction of braided composite plates with lateral holes by a finite element-based point stress criterion

Up to now, the notched strengths of composite plates with lateral cutouts cannot be predicted by the point stress criterion because of no analytical solutions available. In this study, this problem is tackled by a finite element-based point stress criterion. In this approach, the stress distribution of a braided composite plate with two semi-circular holes is first obtained by a finite element analysis, in which the experimental notched strength is applied at the boundary of the finite element model. Secondly, the point stress criterion is used to find the characteristic length for each plate with different size of hole by an interpolation of the finite element analysis results. The characteristic length is then expressed as an empirical function of the hole size as well as the width of the plate. Finally, the notched strengths of composite plates are predicted based on the empirical function and the finite element analysis results incorporated with the principle of superposition in elasticity. It is shown that the predicted notched strengths of composite plates with two lateral semi-circular holes by this new methodology agree well with the experimental results.
The Effect of Metrics and Workloads on the Evaluation of Computer Systems

Metrics ought to be objective, as they are the judge of performance. Workloads ought to be representative, so that evaluations will lead to applicable results. But sometimes metrics and workloads collude to taint the performance evaluation process, leading to results of dubious merit. We use a case study dealing with parallel job scheduling to investigate these issues. An analysis of interactions among the metrics, the workloads, and the systems being studied reveals that such interactions may dominate the evaluation results. Moreover, in some cases factors that were originally thought to be minor and ignorable are actually very important, and may overshadow the differences between the different systems.
The Gauge Dual of Gauged N=8 Supergravity Theory

The most general SU(3)-singlet space of gauged supergravity in four-dimensions is studied recently. The SU(3)-invariant six scalar fields are realized by six real four-forms. A family of holographic supersymmetric RG flows on M2-branes in three-dimensions is described. This family of flows is driven by three independent mass parameters from the theory and is controlled by two IR fixed points, -invariant one and -invariant one. The generic flow with arbitrary mass parameters is supersymmetric and reaches to the fixed point where the three masses become identical. A particular supersymmetric SU(3)-preserving RG flow from the -invariant fixed point to the -invariant fixed point is also discussed.
Role of UDP-Glucuronosyltransferase 1A1 in the Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics of Silymarin Flavonolignans in Patients with HCV and NAFLD

Silymarin is the most commonly used herbal medicine by patients with chronic liver disease. Silymarin flavonolignans undergo rapid first-pass metabolism primarily by glucuronidation. The aims of this investigation were: (1) to determine the association of UGT1A1*28 polymorphism with the area under the plasma concentration-time curves (AUCs) for silybin A (SA) and silybin B (SB); (2) to evaluate the effect of UGT1A1*28 polymorphism on the profile of flavonolignan glucuronide conjugates found in the plasma; and (3) to investigate the role of UGT1A1 enzyme kinetics on the pharmacokinetics of SA and SB. AUCs and metabolic ratios for thirty-three patients with chronic liver disease administered oral doses of silymarin were compared between different UGT1A1*28 genotypes. The AUCs, metabolic ratios, and the profiles of major SA and SB glucuronides did not differ significantly among the three UGT1A1 genotypes. In contrast, an increase in the proportion of sulfated flavonolignan conjugates in plasma was observed in subjects with UGT1A1*28/*28 genotype compared to subjects carrying wild type alleles. Differences in SA and SB in vitro intrinsic clearance estimates for UGTIA1 correlated inversely with SA and SB exposures observed in vivo indicating a major role for UGT1A1 in silymarin metabolism. In addition, a significant difference in the metabolic ratio observed between patients with NAFLD and HCV suggests that any effect of UGT1A1 polymorphism may be obscured by a greater effect of liver disease on the pharmacokinetics of silymarin. Taken together, these results suggest the presence of the UGT1A1*28 allele does not contribute significantly to a large inter-subject variability in the pharmacokinetics of silybin A and silybin B which may obscure the ability to detect beneficial effects of silymarin in patients with liver disease.
ZnO-Based UV Nanocomposites for Wood Coatings in Outdoor Applications

Nanocomposite UV coatings with adjustable properties for use on wood substrates in outdoor conditions were developed. Nanoscale ZnO was shown to be an efficient light absorber. Coatings were characterized in terms of elongation at brake, residual PI and double bond conversion, universal hardness, transparency, hydrophobicity, and yellowing. Coated samples were artificially weathered and studied with regard to their optical and mechanical properties, as well as to changes in brightness, transparency, hydrophobicity, and water permeability. The prepared wood coatings showed an increased weather fastness and improved optical properties. The suitability for use in outdoor conditions was assured by optimizing the elasticity of the coating and decreasing its water permeability.
Associations between activities and low back pain in adolescents

The aim of this cross‐sectional study was to explore associations between self‐reported leisure activities and low back pain (LBP). The material included all adolescents in eighth and ninth grade in two geographical areas in the school year 1996–1997. Eighty‐eight adolescents participated (mean age 14.7 years), making the response rate 84%. LBP during the preceding year was reported by 57%. Sixty‐six percent reported physical activity 3 times weekly or more. The median time spent on television or computer was 15 h. In multivariate analyses, LBP was inversely associated with time spent on physical activity, in particular with regular walking or bicycling. LBP was associated with the use of television or computer more than 15 h weekly, but not with the time spent reading. The results confirm studies showing inverse associations between walking and LBP. Future research should involve prospective studies of the potential effects of walking or bicycling and other specific activities on LBP.
Expression of CD133 in endometrial cancer cells and its implications

Cancer stem cells are an attractive therapeutic target for cancer. The present study examined stem cell characteristics of CD133+ cells isolated from endometrial cancer. Phenotypic characteristics, proliferation, migration, anchorage-independent growth, chemoresistance, gene expression profile and tumorigenicity of CD133+ tumor cells were assessed. Primary tumor exhibited immunoreactivity for CD133. Endometrial CD133+ tumor cells enhanced proliferation rate, colony formation, chemotaxis migration ability, and chemoresistance to cisplatin, paclitaxel, and doxorubicin than CD133- cells. CD133+ cells expressed more cancer stem cells markers such as EpCAM, aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 and insulin-like growth factor-1 receptor than CD133- cells. Moreover, CD133+ cells also increased expression of embryonic stem cell markers including oct4, nanog, sox2, and cmyc than CD133- cells. Finally, CD133+ tumor cells could generate xenograft but not CD133- tumor cells. CD133 and Ki67 were extensively expressed in the xenograft. In conclusion, endometrial CD133+ tumor cells displayed cancer stem cell characteristics and might represent a valuable tool for identifying endometrial cancer stem cells and hence a potential therapeutic target.
Thermoplastic processing, rheology, and extrudate properties of wheat, soy, and pea proteins

Plant protein isolates (wheat gluten, soy, and pea protein) were treated in a thermoplastic extrusion process, yielding protein based bioplastic material. The application of glycerol as plasticizer in amounts of 50–67% of total mass and high temperatures above 140°C led to smooth and homogeneous extrudates. Viscosity measurements of the protein melt under extrusion conditions confirmed the thermoplastic behavior, obeying the power law with power law indices of 0.31-0.4. Chemical changes in the material were qualitatively shown by amino acid analysis and fluorescence measurement. High moisture sensitivity and low mechanical stability of the extrudates, as determined by solubility, water vapor permeability, sorption isotherms, and tensile strength, can be partially ascribed to the high glycerol content. The application of pure protein bioplastics for technical purposes, e.g., as packing material, is discussed on basis of the presented data considering stability, appearance, and long time storage. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 55:1912–1919, 2015. © 2014 Society of Plastics Engineers
Nanostructured lipid carriers: An emerging platform for improving oral bioavailability of lipophilic drugs

Nowadays exploration of novel lipid-based formulations is akin to a magnet for researchers worldwide for improving the in vivo performance of highly lipophilic drugs. Over the last few years, new compositions of lipids have been developed, and the probable bioavailability enhancement has been investigated. We reviewed the most recent data dealing with backlogs of conventional lipid-based formulations such as physical instability, limited drug loading capacities, drug expulsion during storage along with all the possible hindrances resulting in poor absorption of highly lipophilic drugs such as P-glycoprotein efflux, extensive metabolism by cytochrome P450 etc. In tandem with these aspects, an exclusive formulation approach has been discussed in detail in this paper. Therefore, this review focuses on resolving the concerned ambiguity with successful oral administration of highly lipophilic drugs through designing novel lipidic formulations (nanostructured lipid carriers [NLC]) that constitute a blend of solid and liquid lipids. The article highlights the potential role of such formulation in normalizing the in vivo fate of poorly soluble drugs. Finally, the present manuscript discusses the dominance of NLC over other lipid-based formulations and provides a perspective of how they defeat and overcome the barriers that lead to the poor bioavailability of hydrophobic drugs.
Prophylactic Insulin Treatment of Syngeneically Transplanted Pre-diabetic BB-DP Rats

Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus is characterized by selective destruction of the pancreatic g -cells in the islets of Langerhans and insulitis. Subcutaneous insulin injections given to diabetes prone BioBreeding (BB-DP) rats reduce diabetes incidence. The underlying mechanism(s) are not known in detail. Previously, we showed that transplantation of 200 syngeneic neonatal islets under the kidney capsule is useful for studying molecular events during diabetes development in BB-DP rats. In the present study we tested if prophylactic insulin treatment of syngeneically transplanted BB-DP rats would protect both islets in situ and transplanted islets from destruction. Methods : BB-DP rats received transplants of 200 syngeneic neonatal islets under the kidney capsule at 30 days of age. They were given a subcutaneous insulin or placebo implant and were compared to control rats. Blood glucose was measured three times weekly. In total, 193 rats were transplanted and rats were sacrificed 7, 23, 50, 90 days post-transplantation or at onset of diabetes. Pancreatic and transplant sections were stained for insulin and mononuclear cell infiltration and insulitis was graded. Results : Eight (19%) rats developed diabetes in the insulin-treated group and 19 (63%) and 19 (65%) rats in the control and placebo, respectively ( p =0.0002 and p =0.0001). Onset of diabetes in the insulin treated group was delayed compared to control and placebo, (102, 77 and 81 days of age, respectively ( p =0.0001 and p =0.0001 )). Insulin treatment diminished mononuclear cell infiltration in the islets at day 50 after transplantation compared to placebo. Infiltration pattern in islets in situ correlates with infiltration in transplants ( r is 0.9076 and p <0.001). Conclusion/interpretation : These results suggest that insulin-treatment of syngeneically transplanted BB-DP rats considerably decreases the incidence of diabetes and that this model is well suited for studying molecular changes in the islet transplants.
Teleworks: a CSCW application for remote medical diagnosis support and teleconsultation

The paper describes methods for the design of both synchronous and asynchronous computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) procedures suitable for the medical application area and specifically for the purpose of medical teleconsultation and remote diagnosis support. The experimental implementation of a CSCW system built upon a PC/Windows platform is detailed as an example of a low-cost system suitable for adoption in a wide range of medical teleconsultation applications.
Potential effect of PCV13 introduction on Emergency Department accesses for lower respiratory tract infections in elderly and at risk adults

Liguria, an administrative region in northern Italy characterized by a decade of high PCV coverage in paediatric age group, has issued new PCV13 recommendations for free active immunization in adults with risk factors and subjects aged ≥ 70 years old. Main aims of this study are: (1) a descriptive epidemiology of the clinical burden of lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI) in adults ≥18 years of age; and (2) a crossover evaluation of the effect of introduction of PCV13 vaccination in adults aged ≥70 years old, in terms of ED accesses for LRTI, obtained by a Syndrome Surveillance System (SSS). The ED access, chief complaint based SSS will allow an active surveillance of a population cohort of >430 000 individuals resident in Genoa metropolitan area, aged ≥18 years old, for a period of 60 months. During pre-PCV period, annual cumulative incidence of ED accesses for LRTI was equal to 7/1000 and 2% in ≥65 and ≥85 year adults, respectively. In ≥65 years adults, more than 70% of subjects identified by the SSS has at least one risk condition, with a peak of 87% in ≥85 year cohort. New Ligurian PCV13 recommendations can potentially reach more than 75% of ED accesses for LRTI. Data highlights the heavy impact of LRTI in terms of ED accesses, especially in the elderly and subjects with chronic conditions and the usefulness of SSS tool for monitoring PCV vaccination effect.
The potential of chitosan for the oral administration of peptides

Over recent years, a major challenge in drug delivery has been the design of appropriate vehicles for the oral administration of macromolecular drugs (peptides and proteins). Indeed, despite the increasing market value of these complex molecules, their clinical use has been highly limited by their reduced oral bioavailability. Among the different delivery approaches explored so far, those based on the use of the polysaccharide chitosan have opened promising alternatives towards this ambitious goal. This is due to the interesting physicochemical and biopharmaceutical properties of this polymer. This article describes the advances that have been made in the design of chitosan-based systems specially adapted for the oral administration of peptides. These systems include solutions, microspheres, nanoparticles, nanocapsules and liposomes. More specifically, this article discusses the efficacy of the different delivery approaches for improving the absorption of peptides, and analyses the various mechanisms that have been proposed for the understanding of their efficacy.
Silent error detection in numerical time-stepping schemes

Errors due to hardware or low-level software problems, if detected, can be fixed by various schemes, such as recomputation from a checkpoint. Silent errors are errors in application state that have escaped low-level error detection. At extreme scale, where machines can perform astronomically many operations per second, silent errors threaten the validity of computed results. We propose a new paradigm for detecting silent errors at the application level. Our central idea is to frequently compare computed values to those provided by a cheap checking computation, and to build error detectors based on the difference between the two output sequences. Numerical analysis provides us with usable checking computations for the solution of initial-value problems in ODEs and PDEs, arguably the most common problems in computational science. Here, we provide, optimize, and test methods based on Runge–Kutta and linear multistep methods for ODEs, and on implicit and explicit finite difference schemes for PDEs. We take the heat equation and Navier–Stokes equations as examples. In tests with artificially injected errors, this approach effectively detects almost all meaningful errors, without significant slowdown.
Spectral-Efficient Cellular Communications With Coexistent One- and Two-Hop Transmissions

The cellular communications scenario involving the coexistence of the one-hop direct transmission and the two-hop relaying is studied in this paper. In contrast to conventional cellular systems featuring orthogonal information flows served by decoupled channel resources via, e.g., time division, we propose a novel protocol in which two information flows are served simultaneously via the shared channel resource, thus constituting a spectral-efficient solution for cellular communications. On the other hand, however, an inevitable issue associated with the proposed protocol is the interflow interference, which may lead to serious deterioration on both information flows. To tackle this issue, we develop an overhearing-based protocol that utilizes the overheard interference as useful side information in the receiver design. Specifically, depending on the interference levels, an adaptive linear minimum mean squared error (MMSE) and nonlinear MMSE successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver exploiting the overheard interference at the direct mobile terminal is developed. To balance between the two information flows, we develop the asymptotically optimum superposition coding at the base station (BS) in the high-power regime. Furthermore, the optimum relay beamforming matrix maximizing the bottleneck of the achievable rates of the two information flows is developed subject to a finite power constraint. Finally, simulations demonstrate a remarkable throughput gain over the conventional cellular systems.
Policy Gradient Methods for Robot Control

Reinforcement learning offers the most general framework to take traditional robotics towards true autonomy and versatility. However, applying reinforcement learning to high dimensional movement systems like humanoid robots remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we discuss different approaches of reinforcement learning in terms of their applicability in humanoid robotics. Methods can be coarsely classified into three different categories, i.e., greedy methods, ‘vanilla’ policy gradient methods, and natural gradient methods. We discuss that greedy methods are not likely to scale into the domain humanoid robotics as they are problematic when used with function approximation. ‘Vanilla’ policy gradient methods on the other hand have been successfully applied on a real-world robot. We demonstrate that these methods can be significantly improved using the natural policy gradient instead of the regular policy gradient. Proofs are provided that Kakade’s average of the natural gradient [10] is indeed the true natural gradient. A general algorithm for estimating the natural gradient, the Natural Actor-Critic algorithm, is introduced. This algorithm converges with probability one to the nearest local minimum in Riemannian space of the cost function. The algorithm outperforms non-natural policy gradients by far in a cart-pole balancing evaluation, and offers a promising route for the development of reinforcement learning for truly high-dimensionally continuous state-action systems.
Approximate Capacity Region of the MAC-IC-MAC

An approximate capacity region is established of a class of interfering multiple access channels consisting of two multiple-access channels (MACs), each with an arbitrary number of users, with interference from one of the transmitters of one MAC to the receiver of the other MAC, which we refer to henceforth as the MAC-IC-MAC. It is shown that, for the semi-deterministic MAC-IC-MAC, single-user coding at the non-interfering transmitters in each MAC and superposition coding at the interfering transmitter of each MAC achieves a rate region that is within a quantifiable gap of the capacity region, thereby generalizing the result by Telatar and Tse for the 2-user semi-deterministic interference channel. Next, with an explicit coding scheme, we establish an approximate capacity region that is within a one-bit gap of the capacity region for the Gaussian MAC-IC-MAC, thereby extending the work by Etkin et al for the two-user Gaussian interference channel. The symmetric generalized degrees of freedom (GDoF) of the symmetric Gaussian MAC-IC-MAC with more than one user per cell, which is a function of the interference strength (the ratio of INR to SNR at high SNR, both expressed in dB) and the numbers of users in each cell, is V-shaped with flat shoulders. An analysis based on the deterministic method shows that, when interference is sufficiently weak or strong, the non-interfering transmitters are not mere sharers of the degrees of freedom with the interfering transmitters. They instead also utilize power levels that cannot be accessed by interfering transmitters (due to the restriction of superposition coding), thereby improving the symmetric sum GDoF to up to one degree of freedom per cell under a range of SINR exponent levels. Time sharing between interfering and non-interfering transmitters is suboptimal.
Course setting and selected biomechanical variables related to injury risk in alpine ski racing: an explorative case study

Background Course setting has often been discussed as a potential preventative measure in the World Cup ski-racing community. However, there is limited understanding of how it is related to injury risk. Objective This study was undertaken to investigate the effect of increased horizontal gate distance on energy-related and injury mechanism-related variables. Methods During a video-based three-dimensional (3D)-kinematic field measurement, a top world-class racer performed giant slalom runs at two course settings with different horizontal gate distances. A full-body segment model was reconstructed in 3D and selected biomechanical parameters were calculated. Results For the analysed turn, no significant differences were found in turn speed for increased horizontal gate distance. However, a large effect size was observed for speed reduction towards the end of the turn. Turn forces were by tendency higher at the beginning and significantly higher towards the end of the turn. Additionally, significant differences were found in higher inward leaning, and large effect sizes were observed for a decreased fore/aft position after gate passage. Conclusions On the basis of the data of this study, no final conclusion can be made about whether, for a section of consecutive turns, increasing horizontal gate distance is an effective tool for speed reduction. However, this study pointed out two major drawbacks of this course setting modification: (1) it may increase fatigue as a consequence of loading forces acting over a longer duration; (2) it may increase the risk of out-of-balance situations by forcing the athlete to exhaust his backward and inward leaning spectrum.