Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of reduced left ventricular, systolic blood volumes in ST segment potentials overlying diseased tissue of the ischemic heart

Myocardial ischemia is the response of the heart to reduced coronary blood flow, leading to changes in ST segment potentials. ST segment depression is regarded as an indicator of nontransmural myocardial ischemia; however, not all nontransmural ischemia results in ST depression. This apparent discrepancy may be the result of many complex factors in cardiac response mechanisms to reduced blood flow. As a result, sophisticated computer models have emerged that have provided key insights into this complex phenomenon and the circumstances surrounding ST depression. Though these models have been able to produce ST depressions, many have neglected the effect of intracavitary blood volume, associated with different phases of the cardiac cycle. To explore the influence of the cardiac blood volume variability on epicardial potentials during nontransmural ischemia, we incorporated a thin, subendocardial ischemic zone geometry into an anatomically realistic, image-based ventricular model, and generated a finite element, static bidomain solution to determine the resulting epicardial surface potentials. It was first determined that, under baseline conditions (i.e., expanded left ventricular volumes corresponding to diastole), a predictable ST depression developed over the ischemic region. Left ventricular volume was then incrementally reduced, while maintaining the size and general shape of the is-chemic region, in order to reflect the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle. As blood volume geometries decreased, epicardial ST depression overlying the ischemic region first increased in surface area as blood volume was reduced and before dramatically reducing near 30% blood volume reduction — accentuating the role and importance of blood volume variation in computational models ofischemia.
Economic models for resource management and scheduling in Grid computing

The accelerated development in peer‐to‐peer and Grid computing has positioned them as promising next‐generation computing platforms. They enable the creation of virtual enterprises for sharing resources distributed across the world. However, resource management, application development and usage models in these environments is a complex undertaking. This is due to the geographic distribution of resources that are owned by different organizations or peers. The resource owners of each of these resources have different usage or access policies and cost models, and varying loads and availability. In order to address complex resource management issues, we have proposed a computational economy framework for resource allocation and for regulating supply and demand in Grid computing environments. This framework provides mechanisms for optimizing resource provider and consumer objective functions through trading and brokering services. In a real world market, there exist various economic models for setting the price of services based on supply‐and‐demand and their value to the user. They include commodity market, posted price, tender and auction models. In this paper, we discuss the use of these models for interaction between Grid components to decide resource service value, and the necessary infrastructure to realize each model. In addition to usual services offered by Grid computing systems, we need an infrastructure to support interaction protocols, allocation mechanisms, currency, secure banking and enforcement services. We briefly discuss existing technologies that provide some of these services and show their usage in developing the Nimrod‐G grid resource broker. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of some of the economic models in resource trading and scheduling using the Nimrod/G resource broker, with deadline and cost constrained scheduling for two different optimization strategies, on the World‐Wide Grid testbed that has resources distributed across five continents. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Single Subcutaneous Administration of Chorionic Gonadotropin to Rats Induces a Rapid and Transient Increase in Testicular Expression of Pro-Inflammatory Cytokines

hCG has been reported to cause an inflammation-like effect in the testis, although the background and consequences of this phenomenon remain to be understood. This investigation reveals that a single injection of hCG (100 U) induces a transient surge in pro-inflammatory cytokine expression in the adult rat testis. Reverse transcriptase PCR analysis demonstrated onset of testicular expression of IL-1β and IL-6 mRNA and increases in the levels of mRNA encoding the constitutively expressed cytokines IL-1α, IL-1 receptor antagonist, and tumor necrosis factor-α 4 h after hCG injection and a maximal response after 8–12 h. These increases were accompanied by a transient increase in testicular IL-1 bioactive protein. Twenty-four hours after administration of hCG, the levels of all cytokine mRNA had decreased, although most were still elevated above control. Immunohistochemical staining revealed that the IL-1β protein was undetectable in normal testes but was seen to be localized to interstitial macrophages but not Leydig cells after hCG treatment. Testes devoid of Leydig cells after pretreatment with ethane dimethane sulphonate exhibited normal staining for interstitial macrophages but failed to respond to hCG with increases in IL-1β mRNA and protein expression. We conclude that hCG induces testicular inflammation via local activation by Leydig cells of the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines by resident macrophages. It remains to be investigated whether the high-dose hCG regimens used for treatment of boys with cryptorchidism could induce similar increases of pro-inflammatory cytokines in the human testis and if such treatments could adversely affect future testicular function.
Elevation of serum and ascites cancer antigen 125 levels in patients with liver cirrhosis

Background and Aim: Serum cancer antigen (CA) 125 elevation has been reported in patients with liver disease, but it is poorly characterized. The present study aimed to evaluate the range of serum and ascitic CA 125 levels in patients with liver cirrhosis and to explore possible factors associated with CA 125 elevation.
ROPecker: A Generic and Practical Approach For Defending Against ROP Attacks

Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a sophisticated exploitation technique that is able to drive target applications to perform arbitrary unintended operations by constructing a gadget chain reusing existing small code sequences (gadgets). Existing defense mechanisms either only handle specific types of gadgets, require access to source code and/or a customized compiler, break the integrity of application binary, or suffer from high performance overhead. In this paper, we present a novel system, ROPecker, to efficiently and effectively defend against ROP attacks without relying on any other side information (e.g., source code and compiler support) or binary rewriting. ROPecker detects an ROP attack at run-time by checking the presence of a sufficiently long chain of gadgets in past and future execution flow, with the assistance of the taken branches recorded in the Last Branch Record (LBR) registers and an efficient technique combining offline analysis with run-time emulation. We also design a sliding window mechanism to invoke the detection logic in proper timings, which achieves both high detection accuracy and efficiency. We build an ROPecker prototype on x86-based Linux computers and evaluate its security effectiveness, space cost and performance overhead. In our experiment, ROPecker can detect all ROP attacks from real-world examples and generated by the generalpurpose ROP compiler Q. It has small footprints on memory and disk storage, and only incurs acceptable performance overhead on CPU computation, disk I/O and network I/O.
Use of Confocal Laser as Light Source Reveals Stomata-Autonomous Function

In most terrestrial plants, stomata open during the day to maximize the update of CO2 for photosynthesis, but they close at night to minimize water loss. Blue light, among several environmental factors, controls this process. Stomata response to diverse stimuli seems to be dictated by the behaviour of neighbour stomata creating leaf areas of coordinated response. Here individual stomata of Arabidopsis leaves were illuminated with a short blue-light pulse by focusing a confocal argon laser. Beautifully, the illuminated stomata open their pores, whereas their dark-adapted neighbours unexpectedly experience no change. This induction of individual stomata opening by low fluence rates of blue light was disrupted in the phototropin1 phototropin2 (phot1 phot2) double mutant, which exhibits insensitivity of stomatal movements in blue-illuminated epidermal strips. The irradiation of all epidermal cells making direct contact with a given stoma in both wild type and phot1 phot2 plants does not trigger its movement. These results unravel the stoma autonomous function in the blue light response and illuminate the implication of PHOT1 and/or PHOT2 in such response. The micro spatial heterogeneity that solar blue light suffers in partially shaded leaves under natural conditions highlights the physiological significance of the autonomous stomatal behaviour.
The Growth Experience of Japan - What Lessons to Draw?

The Japanese economy experienced very rapid growth in the 1960s, but this growth significantly decelerated in the early 1970s. It is generally accepted that the growth potential underwent a ‘kink’, though the reason for this is still actively debated. Then, the economy showed a real growth rate of around 5 per cent on average for about 20 years. In the 1990s, however, the economy has been quite sluggish, and concerns are voiced whether Japan’s growth potential has undergone another downward kink.
Assessing planning skills and executive functions in the elderly: preliminary normative data for the Tower of London Test.

1Clinical Neuropsychologist of the Laboratory of Neuropsychological Investigations (LIN), Instituto Nacional de Ciencia e Tecnologia em Medicina Molecular (INCTMM), Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte MG, Brazil; 2Clinical Psychologists – Private Practice, Belo Horizonte MG, Brazil; 3Clinical Neuropsychologist of the Laboratory of Neuropsychological Investigations (LIN), Instituto Nacional de Ciencia e Tecnologia em Medicina Molecular (INCTMM), Mental Health Department of School of Medicine, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte MG, Brazil. Correspondence: Jonas Jardim de Paula; Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; Avenida Alfredo Balena 190; 30130-100 Belo Horizonte MG Brasil; E-mail: jonasjardim@gmail.com Conflict of interest: There is no conflict of interest to declare. Received 09 March 2012; Received in final form 03 May 2012; Accepted 10 May 2012
NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS OF WAVE-LIKE PHENOMENA CAUSED BY THE DISRUPTION OF AN UNSTABLE MAGNETIC CONFIGURATION

The origin of the Moreton wave observed in the chromosphere and the EIT wave observed in the corona during the eruption remains an active research subject. We investigate numerically in this work the evolutionary features of the magnetic configuration that includes a current-carrying flux rope, which is used to model the filament, after the loss of equilibrium in the system takes place in a catastrophic fashion. Rapid motions of the flux rope following the catastrophe invoke the velocity vortices behind the rope, and may also invoke slow- and fast-mode shocks in front of the rope. The velocity vortices at each side of the flux rope propagate roughly horizontally away from the area where they are produced, and both shocks expand toward the flank of the flux rope. The fast shock may eventually reach the bottom boundary and produce two echoes moving back into the corona, but the slow one and the vortices totally decay somewhere in the lower corona before arriving of the bottom boundary. The interaction of the fast shock with the boundary leads to disturbance that accounts for the Moreton wave observed in Hα, and the disturbance in the corona caused by the slow shock and the velocity vortices should account for the EIT wave whose speed is about 40% that of the Moreton wave. The implication of these results to the observed correlation of the type II radio burst to the fast- and the slow-mode shocks and that of EIT waves to coronal mass ejections and flares has also been discussed.
Self-reported knowledge and awareness about blood pressure and hypertension: a cross-sectional study of a random sample of men and women aged 60–74 years

Background In general, it is assumed that patient education, by increasing knowledge, may change behavior and lifestyle and promote health. In this context, it is a surprise that knowledge and awareness about blood pressure and hypertension among elderly people is poor. We hypothesized that knowledge about blood pressure and hypertension would be better among individuals with self-reported hypertension compared with subjects without self-reported hypertension. Methods We mailed a questionnaire to a random sample of 1,000 subjects living in the municipality of Silkeborg, Denmark. The study sample was drawn from the Central Person Registry. Results The response rate was 72%. Of these, 43% of responders had self-reported hypertension. The people with self-reported hypertension were older, less educated, had higher self-reported blood cholesterol levels, had higher body weight, and more often had a family history of hypertension. More than 80% reported that overweight and obesity increases blood pressure. More than 60% reported that untreated hypertension may cause heart disease or stroke. More than half of the responders did not know their blood pressure, and only 21% knew that hypertension can occur without symptoms. Knowledge about hypertension was independent of self-reported hypertension status, but awareness about blood pressure was most prominent among those with self-reported hypertension. Conclusion General knowledge about blood pressure and hypertension was reasonable, but there is still room for improvement in elderly people’s knowledge and awareness of blood pressure.
Unsupervised Learning of Image Transformations

We describe a probabilistic model for learning rich, distributed representations of image transformations. The basic model is defined as a gated conditional random field that is trained to predict transformations of its inputs using a factorial set of latent variables. Inference in the model consists in extracting the transformation, given a pair of images, and can be performed exactly and efficiently. We show that, when trained on natural videos, the model develops domain specific motion features, in the form of fields of locally transformed edge filters. When trained on affine, or more general, transformations of still images, the model develops codes for these transformations, and can subsequently perform recognition tasks that are invariant under these transformations. It can also fantasize new transformations on previously unseen images. We describe several variations of the basic model and provide experimental results that demonstrate its applicability to a variety of tasks.
Varying coe ffi cients partially linear models with randomly censored data ( Preliminary and incomplete )

This paper considers the problem of estimation and inference in semiparametric varying coefficients models when the response variable is subject to random censoring. The paper proposes an estimator based on combining inverse probability censoring weighting and profile least squares estimation. The resulting estimator is shown to be asymptotically normal. The paper proposes three test statistics with an asymptotic chi-squared calibration that can be used to test linear restrictions on the parametric components.The paper also considers the important issue of correct specification of the model and proposes a nonsmoothing test based on a Cramer-von Mises type of statistic. Monte Carlo simulations illustrate the finite sample properties of the estimators and test statistics.
Burkitt's lymphoma and sickle cell trait.

Only two areas of the world, tropical Africa and New Guinea, are endemic for Burkitt's lymphoma. These are the principal areas of the world where malaria still occurs in hyperand holo-endemic forms, and within these two areas the geographical distribution of the tumour coincides closely with that of endemic malaria. These observations suggest the possibility of a causal connection between chronic stimulation of lymphoid tissue by malaria and the development of the lymphoma (Dalldorf, Linsell, Barnhart, and Martyn, 1964; Edington, Maclean, and Okubadejo, 1964; Burkitt, 1969). Young children with AS haemoglobin (sickle cell trait) are substantially protected against severe falciparum malaria (Allison, 1963). If they could be shown to have a lower incidence of Burkitt's tumour than children with AA haemoglobin, it would provide additional evidence for a role of falciparum malaria in the aetiology of the disease. Williams (1966) compared the haemoglobin electrophoretic patterns of 100 microscopically proven Burkitt's lymphoma patients from Nigeria with those of control children, and he concluded that children with haemoglobin AA were more susceptible to the tumour than those with AS. This paper describes the preliminary results of a patient-control study in Uganda to test this hypo thesis further.
Acts and dispositions: A reconsideration of the Act Frequency Approach

The Act Frequency Approach (AFA) proposed by Buss and Craik was summarized and critically reviewed on the basis of a German replication study using six interpersonal traits each with 100 translated acts. The six traits studied were dominant, gregarious, agreeable, submissive, aloof, and quarrelsome. The internal structure of these categories was examined via multiple prototypicality ratings. It was demonstrated that many acts are highly prototypical for more than one category. The manifested categorical structure was tested by gathering retrospective act reports about performance and frequency of exhibiting each of these 600 acts using a sample of 213 adults. Aggregation of the acts according to their prototypicality key yielded reliable subscales. The validities obtained on the basis of the 25 highly prototypical acts were slightly higher compared with those of the 100 act set, as well as the sets with lower prototypicality. The validity gradient proposed by Buss and Craik was found using selected personality scales as well as global self‐ratings and peer‐ratings on some of the respective trait terms. In general, the results of the German study replicated the findings of Buss and Craik.
Platform competition in two sided markets

Many if not most markets with network externalities are two-sided. To succeed, platforms in industries such as software, portals and media, payment systems and the Internet, must “get both sides of the market on board”. Accordingly, platforms devote much attention to their business model, that is to how they court each side while making money overall. The paper builds a model of platform competition with two-sided markets. It unveils the determinants of price allocation and end-user surplus for different governance structures (profit-maximizing platforms and not-for-profit joint undertakings), and compares the outcomes with those under an integrated monopolist and a Ramsey planner.
A spectral-discrimination method for tear-film lipid-layer thickness estimation from fringe pattern images

Examination of the tear-film lipid layer is often helpful in the prognosis of prospective contact lens patients and contact lens related problems, and in the analysis of symptomatic noncontact lens-wearing patients. In particular, the thickness of the lipid layer is considered to be an informative cue in studying the tear-film stability and uncovering of certain disorders. The authors propose a method for the accurate estimation of the lipid-layer thickness, exploiting the intensity and color information in Fizeau fringe images. The technique is based on a quantitative measure for discriminating among the spectra associated with different thicknesses. The authors propose an optical system for imaging the interference patterns, develop a mathematical model based on the physics of the fringe formation and sensing, and describe the calibration of the optical system using this model. The thickness extraction is readily carried out utilizing a lookup table. The proposed method would enable objective evaluation of the lipid layer characteristics, and provide a means for examining the dynamic changes in its thickness and spatial distribution during inter-blink periods.
Systemic Vasculitis During the Course of Systemic Sclerosis

AbstractAlthough the presence of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA) has been reported in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc), the association of SSc and systemic vasculitis has rarely been described. We obtained information on cases of systemic vasculitis associated with SSc in France from the French Vasculitis Study Group and all members of the French Research Group on Systemic Sclerosis.We identified 12 patients with systemic vasculitis associated with SSc: 9 with ANCA-associated systemic vasculitis (AASV) and 3 with mixed cryoglobulinemia vasculitis (MCV). In all AASV patients, SSc was of the limited type. The main complication of SSc was pulmonary fibrosis. Only 2 patients underwent a D-penicillamine regimen before the occurrence of AASV. The characteristics of AASV were microscopic polyangiitis (n = 7) and renal limited vasculitis (n = 2). Anti-myeloperoxidase antibodies were found in 8 of the 9 patients. The Five Factor Score was above 1 in 3 of the 9 patients. Of the 3 patients with MCV, Sjögren syndrome was confirmed in 2. We compared our findings with the results of a literature review (42 previously reported cases of AASV with SSc). Although rare, vasculitis is a complication of SSc. AASV is the most frequent type, and its diagnosis can be challenging when the kidney is injured. Better awareness of this rare association could facilitate earlier diagnosis and appropriate management to reduce damage.
Excess Early Postnatal Weight Gain Leads to Increased Abdominal Fat in Young Children

Background. Increased childhood weight gain has been associated with later adiposity. Whether excess early postnatal weight gain plays a role in childhood abdominal fat is unknown. Design. In the ongoing Wheezing Illnesses Study Leidsche Rijn (WHISTLER), birth cohort weight and length from birth to age 3 months were obtained. In the first 316 five-year-olds, intra-abdominal and subcutaneous fat were measured ultrasonographically. Individual weight and length gain rates were assessed in each child. Internal Z-scores of weight for length gain (WLG) were calculated. Multiple imputation was used to deal with missing covariates. Results. Per-1-unit increase in Z-score WLG from birth to 3 months, BMI, waist circumference, and subcutaneous fat were significantly higher; 0.51 kg/m2, 0.84 cm, and 0.50 mm, respectively. After multiple imputation, a trend towards significance was observed for intra-abdominal fat as well (0.51 mm/SD). In the associations with 5-year adiposity, no interaction between postnatal Z-score WLG and birth size was found. Conclusion. Excess early postnatal weight gain is associated with increased general and central adiposity, characterized by more subcutaneous and likely more intra-abdominal fat at 5 years of age.