Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A TANDEM QUEUE WITH TWO MARKOVIAN INPUTS AND RETRIAL CUSTOMERS

A tandem retrial queue consisting of two stations is studied. The first station has a single server. An input flow at the first station is described by the Markovian Arrival Process ( MAP ). If a customer from this flow meets the busy server, it goes to the orbit of infinite size and tries its luck later on in exponentially distributed random time. The service time distribution at the first station is assumed to be general. After service at this station the customer proceeds to the multi-server second station. If this customer meets a free server at the second station, it starts service immediately; else the customer leaves the system forever. Besides the customers proceeding from the first station, an additional MAP flow of customers arrives at the second station directly, not entering the first station. A customer from this flow is lost if there is no available server at the second station. The service time by a second station server is exponentially distributed. We derive the stationary distribution of the system states at embedded epochs and at an arbitrary time, calculate the main performance measures. Numerical results are presented.
Decreased interleukin 7 responsiveness of T lymphocytes in patients with idiopathic CD4 lymphopenia.

BACKGROUND Elevated serum interleukin 7 (IL-7) levels are observed in lymphopenic conditions, including idiopathic CD4 lymphopenia (ICL), which is characterized by CD4 lymphopenia in the absence of human immunodeficiency virus infection or other known immunodeficiency. METHODS To test whether defective IL-7 signaling could be an etiologic or contributing factor in ICL, peripheral blood mononuclear cells from patients with ICL (median CD4 T-cell count, 160 cells/μL) and healthy controls (median CD4 T-cell count, 582 cells/μL) were evaluated for expression of IL-7Rα chain (CD127) and intracellular phosphorylated STAT-5 (a marker of γc cytokine signaling) after cytokine stimulation. Gene expression was analyzed by real-time polymerase chain reaction following IL-7 stimulation. RESULTS The percentage of CD4+CD127+ T cells was lower in patients with ICL, compared with controls (P < .001). Lower levels of STAT-5 phosphorylation after IL-7 stimulation were observed in both CD4 and CD8 T cells from patients with ICL, compared with controls (P < .001 and P = .017, respectively), that inversely correlated in CD4 T cells with serum IL-7 levels (r = -0.734, P = .013). Destabilization of p27(kip1), a critical step for IL-7-induced T-cell cycling, was decreased in patients with ICL, compared with controls (P = .004), after IL-7 stimulation. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that diminished responsiveness to IL-7 in CD4 and CD8 T cells during ICL may be contributing to the dysregulation of T-cell homeostasis.
Road user detection with convolutional neural networks: An application to the autonomous shuttle WEpod

Over a million fatal accidents occur every year with road vehicles. Road user detection for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Autonomous Vehicles could significantly reduce the number of accidents. Despite the research focus on road user detection and such systems, there is a surprising lack of research in real-world applications. In this work, radar and camera data are combined on an autonomous shuttle called ‘WEpod’, driving on the public road in Wageningen, The Netherlands. With experiments we show that our method reduces the candidate region margin to 0.2m and reduces the miss rate significantly. Furthermore, our specifically trained Convolutional Neural Network improves the performance by 1.4% over vision-based road user detection, and combined with radars we improve by 7.6%. Finally, with our approach we show a performance of 95.1% on the WEpod while driving on the public road.
The Impact of Conservation Management on the Community Composition of Multiple Organism Groups in Eutrophic Interconnected Man-Made Ponds

Ponds throughout the world are subjected to a variety of management measures for purposes of biodiversity conservation. Current conservation efforts typically comprise a combination of multiple measures that directly and indirectly impact a wide range of organism groups. Knowledge of the relative impact of individual measures on different taxonomic groups is important for the development of effective conservation programs. We conducted a field study of 28 man-made ponds, representing four management types differing in the frequency of periodic pond drainage and the intensity of fish stock management. We disentangled the relative importance of direct and indirect effects of pond management measures on the community composition of phytoplankton, zooplankton, aquatic macro-invertebrates, submerged and emergent vascular plants. With the exception of phytoplankton, pond management had strong effects on the community composition of all investigated biota. Whether management affected communities directly or indirectly through its impact on fish communities or local environmental conditions in the pond varied between organism groups. Overall, the impact of pond drainage regime and fish community characteristics on the community composition of target organism groups were more important than local environmental conditions. The majority of taxa were negatively associated with fish density, whereas multiple emergent plant species and several taxa of aquatic macro-invertebrates were positively affected by increased drainage frequency. The effects of fish community and drainage tended to be largely independent. The present study indicates that pond drainage is an important element for biodiversity conservation in eutrophicated shallow and interconnected man-made ponds.
Neutrophil Gelatinase-Associated Lipocalin and Hepcidin: What Do They Have in Common and Is There a Potential Interaction?

Iron is the fourth most common element in the Earth’s crust and is crucial for life. Over the last few years, our understanding of iron metabolism has dramatically increased due to the discovery of hepcidin, which is produced by hepatocytes and modulated in response to anemia, hypoxia and inflammation. It has been found that anemia upregulates lipocalin 2 (NGAL; neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin) in the liver and serum. The aim of this review is to summarize the current knowledge dealing with a possible role of hepcidin and NGAL in iron metabolism and its regulation, particularly in kidney disease. Elevated NGAL a few days after insult is a possible preventive or protective mechanism limiting renal injury. NGAL is an innate antibacterial factor as well as hepcidin. NGAL binds siderophores, thereby preventing iron uptake by bacteria. Hepcidin, an antibacterial defensin, prevents iron absorption from the gut and iron release from macrophages, leading to hypoferremia and anemia. Both proteins sequester iron, but by different mechanisms. However, these proteins involved in iron metabolism do not seem to be independently related. Taking into account the antimicrobial moieties of NGAL, further studies are needed to address the role of NGAL in iron metabolism and inflammation in renal failure.
A Lightweight Discriminative Tracker Based on Classification and Similarity

Convolutional neural network (CNN) based trackers have achieved significant performances in tracking recently. Most existing CNN-based trackers regard tracking as a classification or similarity searching problem. The two methods have their respective superiorities and limitations because of different supervised objectives. In this paper, we propose a multi-task CNN for visual tracking, not only fully leveraging the training data, but also benefiting from a regularization effect that results in more general and discriminative representations that extend to tasks in new domains. Our multi-task CNN approach combines tasks of classification and similarity searching. Specifically, given a pair of examplar and search images, the network predicts the categories of the two images and search for the most similar regions to the examplar image in the search image. And then we use only the similarity module to conduct tracking, which makes our tracker operate at frame-rates beyond real-time. Extensive evaluation on the challenging benchmark sequences demonstrates that the proposed tracker performs favourably against the state-of-the-arts.
Electrocardiographic findings in correlation to magnetic resonance imaging patterns in African patients with isolated ventricular noncompaction

Objective: Isolated ventricular noncompaction is a rare primary genetic cardiomyopathy characterized by persistent embryonic myocardial morphology without any other cardiac anomalies. Arrhythmias are frequently present, including both tachyarrhythmia and conduction disturbance. Our study aimed to describe the electrocardiographic findings and to correlate them with the clinical presentation and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging findings. Methods: We retrospectively reviewed 24 patients diagnosed with isolated ventricular noncompaction (IVNC) by cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. Correlations were investigated between arrhythmias and the site of ventricular noncompaction, number of noncompacted segments, presence of fibrosis, and left ventricular dysfunction. Results: The mean age was 42.7±13.1 years. Patients were first presented with heart failure in 41.7% and arrhythmia in 45.8%. Electrocardiogram was abnormal in 91.6% of patients; the most common anomaly was left bundle branch block (LBBB) (41.7%), followed by supraventricular arrhythmias (29.1%), repolarization abnormalities (29.1%), and ventricular tachycardia (20.8%). A normal left ventricular systolic function was frequently observed in patients who first presented with rhythm disorders than heart failure (p=0.008). There was also a delayed diagnosis of IVNC when presented with arrhythmia versus heart failure (p=0.02). We found no correlation between arrhythmias and the noncompaction site or fibrosis, except for LBBB, which was associated to left ventricle lateral wall involvement (p=0.028). No correlation between systolic dysfunction and the number of noncompacted segments, fibrosis, or arrhythmia was demonstrated. Conclusion: While electrocardiographic abnormalities are frequent in isolated ventricular noncompactison, no specific patterns were identified. More large studies are needed for stratification of arrhythmic risk of this highly arrhythmogenic substrate.
Regression of retinal capillaries following N‐methyl‐D‐aspartate‐induced neurotoxicity in the neonatal rat retina

Degeneration of retinal capillaries occurs following N‐methyl‐D‐aspartate (NMDA)‐induced retinal neurotoxicity, and the degree of capillary degeneration decreases in an age‐dependent manner. To determine the role of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in the high susceptibility of capillaries to neuronal damage during the early postnatal stage, this study compares the vascular regression patterns between NMDA‐treated retinas and retinas treated with N‐[2‐chloro‐4‐{(6,7‐dimethoxy‐4‐quinazolinyl)oxy}phenyl]‐N′‐propylurea (KRN633), a VEGF receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor, in neonatal rats. Two days after a single intravitreal injection of NMDA (200 nmol/eye) on postnatal day (P) 7, substantial retinal neuron loss and delayed expansion of the retinal vascular bed were observed. The reduction in the capillary density in the central retina reached statistical significance 4 days after NMDA treatment. In retinas of rats injected subcutaneously with KRN633 (10 mg/kg) on P7 and P8, simplified vasculature attributable to capillary regression and prevention of endothelial cell growth were seen on P9, whereas no visible changes in the morphology of the retinal layers were observed. The degree of capillary degeneration in NMDA‐treated retinas was less than that in KRN633‐treated retinas. No apparent changes in immunoreactivities for VEGF were found 2 days after NMDA treatment. These results indicate that neuronal cell loss in the retina precedes retinal capillary degeneration following NMDA treatment, and VEGF‐dependent immature capillaries might be more susceptible to NMDA‐induced neuronal damage. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Provably Secure and Practical Onion Routing

The onion routing network Tor is undoubtedly the most widely employed technology for anonymous web access. Although the underlying onion routing (OR) protocol appears satisfactory, a comprehensive analysis of its security guarantees is still lacking. This has also resulted in a significant gap between research work on OR protocols and existing OR anonymity analyses. In this work, we address both issues with onion routing by defining a provably secure OR protocol, which is practical for deployment in the next generation Tor network. We start off by presenting a security definition (an ideal functionality) for the OR methodology in the universal compos ability (UC) framework. We then determine the exact security properties required for OR cryptographic primitives (onion construction and processing algorithms, and a key exchange protocol) to achieve a provably secure OR protocol. We show that the currently deployed onion algorithms with slightly strengthened integrity properties can be used in a provably secure OR construction. In the process, we identify the concept of predictably malleable symmetric encryptions, which might be of independent interest. On the other hand, we find the currently deployed key exchange protocol to be inefficient and difficult to analyze and instead show that a recent, significantly more efficient, key exchange protocol can be used in a provably secure OR construction. In addition, our definition greatly simplifies the process of analyzing OR anonymity metrics. We define and prove forward secrecy for the OR protocol, and realize our (white-box) OR definition from an OR black-box model assumed in a recent anonymity analysis. This realization not only makes the analysis formally applicable to the OR protocol but also identifies the exact adversary and network assumptions made by the black box model.
The granulin-epithelin precursor/PC-cell-derived growth factor is a growth factor for epithelial ovarian cancer.

PURPOSE The role of growth factors in ovarian cancer development and progression is complex and multifactorial. We hypothesized that new growth factors may be identified through the molecular analysis of ovarian tumors as they exist in their native environment. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN RNA extracted from microdissected serous low malignant potential (LMP) and invasive ovarian tumors was used to construct cDNA libraries. A total of 7300 transcripts were randomly chosen for sequencing, and those transcripts were statistically evaluated. Reverse transcription-PCR and immunohistochemistry were used to validate the findings in tumor tissue samples. Ovarian cancer cell lines were used to test gene effects on monolayer growth, proliferative capacity, and density-independent growth. RESULTS Analysis of the pooled library transcripts revealed 26 genes differentially expressed between LMP and invasive ovarian cancers. The granulin-epithelin precursor [GEP/PC-cell derived growth factor (PCDGF)] was expressed only in the invasive ovarian cancer libraries (P < 0.028) and was absent in the LMP libraries (0 of 2872 clones). All of the invasive tumor epithelia, 20% of the LMP tumor epithelia, and all of the stroma from both subsets expressed GEP by reverse transcription-PCR. Immunohistochemical staining for GEP was diffuse and cytosolic in invasive ovarian cancer tumor cells compared with occasional, punctate, and apical staining in LMP tumor epithelia. Antisense transfection of GEP into ovarian cancer cell lines resulted in down-regulation of GEP production, reduction in cell growth (P < 0.002), decrease in the S-phase fraction (P < 0.04), and loss of density-independent growth potential (P < 0.01). CONCLUSION cDNA library preparation from microdissected tumor epithelium provided a selective advantage for the identification of growth factors for epithelial ovarian cancer. Differential granulin expression in tumor samples and the antiproliferative effects of its antisense down-regulation suggest that GEP may be a new autocrine growth factor and molecular target for epithelial ovarian cancer.
General Morphology and Ultrastructure of the Venom Apparatus and Convoluted Gland of the Fire Ant, Solenopsis saevissima

Abstract A group of 13 species of the genus Solenopsis is markedly difficult to assess taxonomically, although they are of considerable economical and medical importance in some countries where some of them were introduced. These ants are aggressive and their venomous stings can be very allergenic. The venom apparatus has been described in fine detail for only two of these species, and differences in this structure among the different species might prove useful as taxonomic characters. The venom apparatus of Solenopsis saevissima Smith (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) is herein described with the aid of light and electron microscopy techniques, and compared to that of S. invicta and S. richteri. The cellular organization of the different parts present differences that suggest functional specialization. In general, the different tissues were abundant in vesiculae and mitochondria, but presented little endoplasmic reticulum and few ribosomes, probably because they produce little protein. The length of the free filaments of the venom gland and the width of their internal ducts seems to vary from what was described for S. richteri, but this may be of little use to taxonomy.
Wall-crossing functors and -modules

We study Translation functors and Wall-Crossing functors on infinite dimensional representations of a complex semisimple Lie algebra using D-modules. This functorial machinery is then used to prove the Endomorphism-theorem and the Structure-theorem, two important results established earlier by W. Soergel in a totally different way. Other applications to the category O of Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand are given, and some conjectural relationships between Koszul duality, Verdier duality and convolution functors are discussed. A geometric interpretation of tilting modules is given.
Communication between South Asian patients and GPs: comparative study using the Roter Interactional Analysis System.

BACKGROUND The UK South Asian population has poorer health outcomes. Little is known about their process of care in general practice, or in particular the process of communication with GPs. AIM To compare the ways in which white and South Asian patients communicate with white GPs. DESIGN OF STUDY Observational study of video-recorded consultations using the Roter Interactional Analysis System (RIAS). SETTING West Yorkshire, UK. METHOD One hundred and eighty-three consultations with 11 GPs in West Yorkshire, UK were video-recorded and analysed. RESULTS Main outcome measures were consultation length, verbal domination, 16 individual abridged RIAS categories, and three composite RIAS categories; with comparisons between white patients, South Asian patients fluent in English and South Asian patients nonfluent in English. South Asians fluent in English had the shortest consultations and South Asians non-fluent in English the longest consultations (one-way ANOVA F = 7.173, P = 0.001). There were no significant differences in verbal domination scores between the three groups. White patients had more affective (emotional) consultations than South Asian patients, and played a more active role in their consultations, as did their GPs. GPs spent less time giving information to South Asian patients who were not fluent in English and more time asking questions. GPs spent less time giving information to South Asian patients fluent in English compared with white patients. CONCLUSIONS These findings were expected between patients fluent and non-fluent in English but do demonstrate their nature. The differences between white patients and South Asian patients fluent in English warrant further explanation. How much of this was due to systematic differences in behaviour by the GPs, or was in response to patients' differing needs and expectations is unknown. These differences may contribute to differences in health outcomes.
Inhibition of access of bound somatomedin to membrane receptor and immunobinding sites: a comparison of radioreceptor and radioimmunoassay of somatomedin in native and acid-ethanol-extracted serum.

No agreement exists concerning the necessity for extracting serum somatomedin (Sm) before radioreceptor assay (RRA) and RIA. We have developed a simplified system of Sm extraction which has permitted a quantitative comparison of native and extracted Sm. To 0.8 ml of a mixture of 87.5% ethanol and 12.5% 2 N HC1, 0.2 ml serum is added. After centrifugation, 0.5 ml supernatant is neutralized with 0.2 ml 0.855 M Tris base (XT). Recovery of added 125I-labeled insulin-like growth factor I ([125I]IGF-I) was nearly quantitative. Neutral gel filtration studies established that virtually all of the binding complex was removed by acid-ethanol precipitation. The addition of 100 µl Tris-neutralized acid-ethanol buffer (AE B) to the [125I]IGF-I human placental membrane RRA produced an insignificant shift in the displacement curve with partially purified IGF reference preparation; the shift of the [125I]Sm C RIA displacement curve was greater but did not prevent accurate measurement when AE B was added to blank and stan.
The spatial variability of vehicle densities as determinant of urban network capacity

Due to the complexity of the traffic flow dynamics in urban road networks, most quantitative descriptions of city traffic so far have been based on computer simulations. This contribution pursues a macroscopic (fluid-dynamic) simulation approach, which facilitates a simple simulation of congestion spreading in cities. First, we show that a quantization of the macroscopic turning flows into units of single vehicles is necessary to obtain realistic fluctuations in the traffic variables, and how this can be implemented in a fluid-dynamic model. Then, we propose a new method to simulate destination flows without the requirement of individual route assignments. Combining both methods allows us to study a variety of different simulation scenarios. These reveal fundamental relationships between the average flow, the average density and the variability of the vehicle densities. Considering the inhomogeneity of traffic as an independent variable can eliminate the scattering of congested flow measurements. The variability also turns out to be a key variable of urban traffic performance. Our results can be explained through the number of full links of the road network, and approximated by a simple analytical formula.
A Maximum Entropy Approach to Natural Language Processing

The concept of maximum entropy can be traced back along multiple threads to Biblical times. Only recently, however, have computers become powerful enough to permit the widescale application of this concept to real world problems in statistical estimation and pattern recognition. In this paper, we describe a method for statistical modeling based on maximum entropy. We present a maximum-likelihood approach for automatically constructing maximum entropy models and describe how to implement this approach efficiently, using as examples several problems in natural language processing.
Estimation of illuminant direction, albedo, and shape from shading

A robust approach to recovery of shape from shading information is presented. Assuming uniform albedo and Lambertian surface for the imaging model, methods are presented for the estimation of illuminant direction and surface albedo. The illuminant azimuth is estimated by averaging local estimates. The illuminant elevation and surface albedo are estimated from image statistics. Using the estimated reflectance map parameters, the surface shape is computed using a procedure that implements the smoothness constraint by enforcing the gradients of reconstructed intensity to be close to the gradients of the input image. Typical results on real images are given to illustrate the usefulness of this approach. <<ETX>>