Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Decreasing Quality of the New Generations of Anti-Müllerian Hormone Assays

Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) measurements are widely used to optimize the stimulation protocols. First generation AMH kits correlated well with ovarian reserve and response to stimulation. In the present study we aimed to asses if the new generation kits share the same accurate correlations. Retrospective data were collected from 8323 blood samples. For comparison we used Immunotech I generation kit (ImI 4035 samples), Beckman Coulter II generation kit RUO (BCII RUO 3449, samples) and Beckman Coulter II generation kit with IVD certificate (BCII IVD 839 samples). We compared average AMH concentrations measured with different kits, as well as correlation between kits. We also compared average AMH concentrations in sera collected on different cycle days and samples of different quality of preservation. AMH serum concentrations differed for each kit, ranging 4.4 ± 4.12 (mean ± SD) for the ImI, 2.68 ± 3.15 for the BCII RUO, and 1.64 ± 2.85 for BCII IVD. The mean differences from an adjusted regression model were −48.7%, −40%, and −69.2%, respectively. In conclusion, the changes of the BC AMH kits are unpredictable; however, the improvement of them is still possible. It would be very dangerous to use elaborated stimulation protocol (based on the Ist generation AMH results) with the results from the IInd generation assays.
Blood Concentrations of Cadmium and Lead in Multiple Sclerosis Patients from Iran

Since industrial revolution heavy metals such as lead (Pb) and cadmium (Cd) have been extensively dispersed in environment which, unknown biological effects and prolong biological half-life make them as a major hazard to human health. In addition, the sharp increase in Multiple sclerosis incidence rateshas been recorded in Iran. The propose of this study was to measuring blood lead and cadmium concentration and their correlation with smoking habit in a group of 69 RRMS patients and 74 age/gender-matched healthy individuals resident in Tehran as most polluted city in Iran. All subjects were interviewed regarding age, medical history, possible chemical exposure, acute or chronic diseases, smoking and dietary habits. Blood Pb and Cd levels were measured by double beam GBC plus 932 atomic absorption spectrometer. Our result indicated a significant difference in Cd level (p = 0.006) in which, MS patients had higher blood concentration (1.82 ± 0.13 μg/L) in comparison with healthy individuals (1.47 ± 0.11 μg/L). A comparable blood Cd level to similar recent study (1.78 µg/L vs.1.82 µg/L) was observed. With respect to Pb there was no significant difference between cases and controls, however the geometric means of blood Pb concentration were considerably higher in males than in females in MS patients (57.1 ± 33.7 μg/L vs. 36.7 ± 21.9 μg/L. P = 0.02). Taking into consideration tobacco smoking, an elevated contents of each metal were observed in smoker subjects (p<0.0001). A significant correlation between cigarette smoking and risk of multiple sclerosis was shown before. Thus, high level of Cd in smokers might affect the susceptibility to multiple sclerosis and could increase the risk of disease development.
The effect of dielectric relaxation on charge-redistribution A/D converters

The authors examine the extent to which dielectric relaxation in typical monolithic capacitors degrades the performance of charge-redistribution analog-to-digital (A/D) converters. They present experimental device data from a monolithic capacitor test circuit, describe an empirical capacitor model fit to the measurements, and compare simulated A/D system errors with those observed in a monolithic, 10-b, 3.3-&mu;s A/D converter. It is believed that these techniques for modeling and predicting A/D converter errors will play an important role in making appropriate technology decisions and in guiding system and circuit design of high-precision monolithic converters of the future
Understanding GPU errors on large-scale HPC systems and the implications for system design and operation

Increase in graphics hardware performance and improvements in programmability has enabled GPUs to evolve from a graphics-specific accelerator to a general-purpose computing device. Titan, the world's second fastest supercomputer for open science in 2014, consists of more dum 18,000 GPUs that scientists from various domains such as astrophysics, fusion, climate, and combustion use routinely to run large-scale simulations. Unfortunately, while the performance efficiency of GPUs is well understood, their resilience characteristics in a large-scale computing system have not been fully evaluated. We present a detailed study to provide a thorough understanding of GPU errors on a large-scale GPU-enabled system. Our data was collected from the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and a GPU cluster at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. We also present results from our extensive neutron-beam tests, conducted at Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) and at ISIS (Rutherford Appleron Laboratories, UK), to measure the resilience of different generations of GPUs. We present several findings from our field data and neutron-beam experiments, and discuss the implications of our results for future GPU architects, current and future HPC computing facilities, and researchers focusing on GPU resilience.
Configurational Affinities between Building

This study is aimed at understanding the effect of shapes of floorplates of buildings on office layouts accommodated in them. It constructs a configurational model and proposes that floorplate shapes influence the spatial integration of layouts according to the design principles used for generating the layouts. Gauging the potential of building shells for accommodating various office layouts is directly linked to the adaptive reuse and the sustainability of buildings in general and workplaces in particular.
A Survey on Music Listening and Management Behaviours

We report the results of a survey on music listening and management behaviours. The survey was conducted online with 222 participants with mostly technical backgrounds drawn from a college age population. The median size of offline music collections was found to be roughly 2540 songs (both physical media and digital files). The major findings of our survey show that elements such as familiarity of songs, how distracting they are, how much they match the listener’s mood, and the desire of changing the mood within one listening session, are all affected by the activity during which music is listened to. While people want to have options for manipulating the above elements to control their experience, they prefer a minimal amount of interaction in general. Current music players lack such flexibility in their controls. Finally, online recommender systems have not gained much popularity thus far.
Antimalarial efficacy and drug interactions of the novel semi-synthetic endoperoxide artemisone in vitro and in vivo.

OBJECTIVES The in vitro and in vivo efficacy and drug-drug interactions of the novel semi-synthetic endoperoxide artemisone with standard antimalarials were investigated in order to provide the basis for the selection of the best partner drug. METHODS Antimalarial activity and drug interactions were evaluated in vitro against Plasmodium falciparum by the incorporation of [(3)H]hypoxanthine. In vivo efficacy and drug interactions were assessed using the standard 4-day Peters' test. RESULTS Artemisone was 10 times more potent than artesunate in vitro against a panel of 12 P. falciparum strains, independent of their susceptibility profile to antimalarial drugs, and consistently 4 to 10 times more potent than artesunate in rodent models against drug-susceptible and primaquine- or sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine-resistant Plasmodium berghei lines and chloroquine- or artemisinin-resistant lines of Plasmodium yoelii. Slight antagonistic trends were found between artemisone and chloroquine, amodiaquine, tafenoquine, atovaquone or pyrimethamine and additive to slight synergistic trends with artemisone and mefloquine, lumefantrine or quinine. Various degrees of synergy were observed in vivo between artemisone and mefloquine, chloroquine or clindamycin. CONCLUSIONS These results confirm the increased efficacy of artemisone over artesunate against multidrug-resistant P. falciparum and provide the basis for the selection of potential partner drugs for future deployment in areas of multidrug-resistant malaria. Artemisone represents an important addition to the repertoire of artemisinin combination therapies currently in use, as it has enhanced antimalarial activity, improved bioavailability and stability over current endoperoxides.
PyraNet: an efficient and reliable pyramidal wireless sensor network

In comparison to randomly deployed WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks), pre-configured WSNs are superior in network performance for many aspects, including end-to-end delay time, data delivery ratio, and energy consumption. Several topologies concerning with pre-configured WSNs, such as grid, hexagonal, or de Bruijn, were proposed in past studies. The common flaws among them are that, the number of neighbors a node could have is so scarce as to significantly affect their fault-tolerance capabilities, and a longer network diameter often introduces a considerable transmission delay. In this paper, we thus propose an efficient and reliable network architecture, named as PyraNet, for pre-configured WSNs. In PyraNet, sensor nodes are first deployed as a pyramidal shape, and then a hypercube address allocation scheme is employed for its routing. Simulation results show that, for large-scale faulty networks, the proposed integrated architecture can achieve about 6%~14% improvement on data delivery ratio, compared to existing architectures. In addition, the energy consumption can also be reduced by 27%~61%, and thus effectively prolongs the network lifetime.
Are Applied Growth Factors Able to Mimic the Positive Effects of Mesenchymal Stem Cells on the Regeneration of Meniscus in the Avascular Zone?

Meniscal lesions in the avascular zone are still a problem in traumatology. Tissue Engineering approaches with mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) showed successful regeneration of meniscal defects in the avascular zone. However, in daily clinical practice, a single stage regenerative treatment would be preferable for meniscus injuries. In particular, clinically applicable bioactive substances or isolated growth factors like platelet-rich plasma (PRP) or bone morphogenic protein 7 (BMP7) are in the focus of interest. In this study, the effects of PRP and BMP7 on the regeneration of avascular meniscal defects were evaluated. In vitro analysis showed that PRP secretes multiple growth factors over a period of 8 days. BMP7 enhances the collagen II deposition in an aggregate culture model of MSCs. However applied to meniscal defects PRP or BMP7 in combination with a hyaluronan collagen composite matrix failed to significantly improve meniscus healing in the avascular zone in a rabbit model after 3 months. Further information of the repair mechanism at the defect site is needed to develop special release systems or carriers for the appropriate application of growth factors to support biological augmentation of meniscus regeneration.
MIDAZOLAM AND CYCLOSPORIN A METABOLISM IN TRANSGENIC MICE WITH LIVER-SPECIFIC EXPRESSION OF HUMAN CYP3A4

Cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4) is a major determinant of the metabolism of many drugs, including important anticancer drugs, with sometimes profound impact on therapeutic efficacy and toxic side effects. To study in vivo CYP3A(4) functions, we have generated and characterized transgenic mice with functional expression of human CYP3A4 cDNA in the liver. Two transgenic lines displayed substantial, physiologically relevant and stable CYP3A4 levels in liver and moderate levels in kidney, but not in small intestine. The mice did not display obvious physiological abnormalities. The CYP3A4 substrate drugs midazolam and cyclosporin A were used to test functional activity of CYP3A4 in liver. The area under the plasma concentration versus time curve (AUC) of intravenously administered midazolam (30 mg/kg) was 2.2-fold decreased in the transgenic mice compared with wild-type (5.45 ± 0.21 versus 11.7 ± 0.46 μg · hml–1; P < 0.01), and early formation of the primary metabolite 1-hydroxymidazolam was about 2-fold increased, demonstrating the functionality of CYP3A4 in the liver. Similarly, following intravenous administration of cyclosporin A (20 mg/kg), CYP3A4 transgenic mice displayed a reduced plasma AUC compared with wild-type (24.3 ± 0.66 versus 35.8 ± 0.53 μg · hml– 1; P < 0.01). Thus, midazolam and cyclosporin A, compounds with markedly different clearance rates and half-lives, both demonstrated clearly accelerated kinetics in the CYP3A4 transgenic mice. We expect that this CYP3A4 transgenic model will provide a useful tool to study the impact of CYP3A4 on drug levels, especially when combined with other transgenic and knockout strains.
Characterization and analysis of dynamic parallelism in unstructured GPU applications

GPUs have been proven very effective for structured applications. However, emerging data intensive applications are increasingly unstructured - irregular in their memory and control flow behavior over massive data sets. While the irregularity in these applications can result in poor workload balance among fine-grained threads or coarse-grained blocks, one can still observe dynamically formed pockets of structured data parallelism that can locally effectively exploit the GPU compute and memory bandwidth. In this study, we seek to characterize such dynamically formed parallelism and and evaluate implementations designed to exploit them using CUDA Dynamic Parallelism (CDP) - an execution model where parallel workload are launched dynamically from within kernels when pockets of structured parallelism are detected. We characterize and evaluate such implementations by analyzing the impact on control and memory behavior measurements on commodity hardware. In particular, the study targets a comprehensive understanding of the overhead of current CDP support in GPUs in terms of kernel launch, memory footprint and algorithm overhead. Experiments show that while the CDP implementation can generate potentially 1.13x-2.73x speedup over non-CDP implementations, the non-trivial overhead causes the overall performance an average of 1.21x slowdown.
An Autocrine VEGF/VEGFR2 and p38 Signaling Loop Confers Resistance to 4-Hydroxytamoxifen in MCF-7 Breast Cancer Cells

Tamoxifen, a partial estrogen receptor antagonist, is part of the standard treatment of both primary and advanced breast cancers. However, significant proportions of breast cancers are either de novo resistant or develop tamoxifen resistance during the course of treatment through mechanisms which have been only partly characterized. We have previously found that high vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) or VEGF receptor 2 (VEGFR2) expression and concomitant high p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase activity within breast cancers predict a poor outcome for tamoxifen-treated patients. Here, we have molecularly dissected how VEGF/VEGFR2 and p38 are linked, and contribute to tamoxifen resistance within breast cancer using a MCF-7 BC cell model with different 4-hydroxytamoxifen (4-OHT) responsiveness. We report that MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines with tamoxifen resistance have increased secretion of VEGF and increased signaling through VEGFR2 compared with parental MCF-7 cells. 4-OHT treatment caused the ablation of VEGF secretion in parental MCF-7 cells, whereas in the tamoxifen-resistant subline, a VEGF/VEGFR2 signaling loop was still evident upon treatment. Increased basal levels of total and phosphorylated p38 were observed in tamoxifen-resistant cells. Pharmacologic inhibition of p38 reduced the proliferation of both tamoxifen-responsive and tamoxifen-resistant cells and showed an additive growth-inhibitory effect in combination with 4-OHT. A connection between VEGF/VEGFR2 and p38 signaling was identified by VEGF and VEGFR2 knockdown, which equally reduced both the total and the active forms of p38 in tamoxifen-resistant cells. Taken together, our results suggest that decreased sensitivity to 4-OHT is caused by a death-protecting VEGF/VEGFR2 and p38 growth factor loop in breast cancer cells. Inhibition of these signaling pathways may be beneficial to overcome tamoxifen resistance. (Mol Cancer Res 2008;6(10):1630–8)
A Novel Current Mode Full Adder Based on Majority Function

In this paper we present a new design of current mode full adder cell, which uses two threshold detectors based on majority function. The proposed new full adder demonstrates better performance compared to the conventional current mode full adder, especially in delay, accuracy and area. Both of the new and the conventional full adders are simulated at 0.18 µm CMOS technology with 1.8v Vdd, using Hspice. We considered that the unit of current is equal to 20µA. To have a realistic simulation environment, we cascaded five full adder cells and focused on one of the middle cells. The simulation results show that the delay of the new current mode full adder cell has about 51% reduction, compared to the best existing counterpart.
Evidence for time‐variant decision making

Computational models based on diffusion processes have been proposed to account for human decision‐making behaviour in a variety of tasks. The basic idea is that the brain keeps accumulating noisy sensory evidence until a critical level is reached. This study explores whether such models account for the speed and accuracy of perceptual decisions in a reaction‐time random dot motion direction discrimination task, and whether they explain the decision‐related activity of neurons recorded from the parietal cortex (area LIP) of monkeys performing the task. While a simple diffusion model can explain the psychometric function and the mean response times of correct responses, it fails to account for the longer response times observed for errors and for the response time distributions. Here I demonstrate that a time‐variant version of the diffusion model can explain the psychometric function, the mean response times and the shape of the response time distributions. Such a time‐variant mechanism could be implemented in different ways, but the best match between the physiological data and model predictions is provided by a diffusion process with a gain of the sensory signals, which increases over time. It can be shown that such a time‐variant decision process allows the monkey to perform optimally (in the sense of maximizing reward rate) given the risk of aborting a trial by breaking fixation before a choice can be reported. The results suggest that the brain trades off speed and accuracy not only by adjusting parameters between trials but also by dynamic adjustments during an ongoing decision.
Photocross-linking of nascent chains to the STT3 subunit of the oligosaccharyltransferase complex

In eukaryotic cells, polypeptides are N glycosylated after passing through the membrane of the ER into the ER lumen. This modification is effected cotranslationally by the multimeric oligosaccharyltransferase (OST) enzyme. Here, we report the first cross-linking of an OST subunit to a nascent chain that is undergoing translocation through, or integration into, the ER membrane. A photoreactive probe was incorporated into a nascent chain using a modified Lys-tRNA and was positioned in a cryptic glycosylation site (-Q-K-T- instead of -N-K-T-) in the nascent chain. When translocation intermediates with nascent chains of increasing length were irradiated, nascent chain photocross-linking to translocon components, Sec61α and TRAM, was replaced by efficient photocross-linking solely to a protein identified by immunoprecipitation as the STT3 subunit of the OST. No cross-linking was observed in the absence of a cryptic sequence or in the presence of a competitive peptide substrate of the OST. As no significant nascent chain photocross-linking to other OST subunits was detected in these fully assembled translocation and integration intermediates, our results strongly indicate that the nascent chain portion of the OST active site is located in STT3.
On-line signature verification based on three-dimensional force signals at critical points

It is an open problem to extract stable and distinguishable features from force signals of handwriting signatures. Based on the writing habits and kinematics of human, a hypothesis was proposed that force signal at critical points, e.g. the starting, the turning and the ending of a signature. etc, consists of personalized features which can distinguish signatures of different persons. Using stroke curvature, the critical points were extracted, and the 3-dimensional force signals at the critical points were also recorded. Employing Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) method, based on a preliminary signature database, verification experiments were carried out using the force signals of a whole stroke and the force signal at the critical points of the stroke respectively. The results look encouraging to verify the hypothesis.
The Discursive Dynamic of Sensemaking

According to the traditional way of thinking of the communication process (more generally: of the discoursive dynamic), actors exchange ready-made meanings. In other words, communication entails pre-defined semiotic devices, resulting from previous stipulation. Therefore, intersubjectivity is based on a repertoire of shared meanings, pre-existent to the social exchange. To underline the quality of product of a meta-stipulation, we refer below to this general model of communication with the label: contractual model. The socio-constructivist model of communication (below we use this label in a broad sense) proposes a different way of looking at intersubjectivity. This way underlines that meaning is a social construction that happens within and by the social exchange. Hence, meaning is not given prior to the discourse; rather, it is the communication dynamic that depicts the situated semantic value of the symbolic devices which the discourse unfolds (Vygotsky, 1934; Bruner 1990; Billig, 1996). The socio-constructivist conception is an alternative way of seeing meaning-making that reaps Wittgenstein’s lesson (Wittgenstein, 1953). This approach underlines that meaning-making is not an autonomous process, but it always unfolds as a function of the social context. According to this point of view, the socio-constructivist model underlines that meaning devices (concepts, categories, codes, signs, scripts.) are not given and fixed entities for this reason universal and independent of time – but open signs, that shape their significance in situation, according to the way the actors use them within the linguistic games they carry out. On the one hand, the dialogic construction of meaning is accomplished at the level of the communication content. At this level, discoursive actors regulate their reciprocal positioning in the shared activity; by so doing they negotiate some kind of agreement on sets of representation, stories and statements referring to the world they share. Thus, these sets of consensual social-made meanings work as instituted mediators of the social exchange (Berger & Luchmann, 1966). To give just one reference, a lot of studies on social representations deal with this level of significance (Farr & Moscovici, 1984; Jodelet, 1989). On the other hand, the discourse process operates in such a way that it entails continuous transformation of the semiotic devices. At this level, the focus is on the structure of the devices. Valsiner (2001) deals with this structural level (as we have labelled it) when he speaks about the semiogenetics of the sign.