Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circadian activity rhythms in chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs) under constant conditions.

Under constant conditions of temperature and light, with food and water always available and without perturbation by periodic noises, individually caged chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs L.) show a clear circadian rhythm of locomotor activity. The period τ is divided in activity-time α and rest-time ρ. Period and activity-time as well as the average amount of activity per 24 hours depend on intensity of illumination. With an increase in light intensity from about 0.2 lux to about 5.0 lux, the period becomes shorter and the activity-time longer. The amount of activity increases more than proportionally to the lengthening of activity-time. These results are in agreement with the circadian rule for light-active animals. They are interpreted in view of a special model. This model describes the discontinuous rhythm of activity and rest by a continuous basic oscillation which passes twice during each period through a threshold. The bird is active as long as the oscillation is above the threshold. Changes in the α:ρ-ratio, in combination with the changes in amount of activity, are explained as changes in the position of the level of the oscillation relative to the position of the threshold. Level and frequency of the circadian oscillation are positively correlated to each other and to the intensity of illumination.
Effect of the aetiology and severity of liver disease on oral health and dental treatment prior to transplantation

Elimination of dental infection foci has been recommended before liver transplantation (LT) because lifelong immunosuppression may predispose to infection spread. Association between pre‐LT oral health and the aetiology and severity of chronic liver disease (CLD) was investigated retrospectively. A total of 212 adult patients (median age 51.1) who had received LT during 2000–2006 in Finland were included. Their oral health had been pre‐operatively examined. Patients were divided into seven different CLD groups. Common indications for LT were primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC 25.5%), alcohol cirrhosis (ALCI 17.5%) and primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC 14.6%). Patients were also categorized by the Model for End stage Liver Disease (MELD) scoring system. Medical, dental and panoramic jaw x‐ray data were analysed between groups. PBC patients had the lowest number of teeth with significant difference to PSC patients (19.7 vs. 25.6, P < 0.005, anova, t‐test). ALCI patients had the highest number of tooth extractions with significant difference in comparison to PSC patients (5.6 vs. 2.5, P < 0.005). Lower MELD score resulted in fewer tooth extractions but after adjusting for several confounding factors, age was the most important factor associated with extractions (P < 0.005). The aetiology of CLD associated with the oral health status and there was a tendency towards worse dental health with higher MELD scores.
Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War

Maps vii Acknowledgements ix Preface xi Chapter 1: Introducing Kashmir 1 Chapter 2: Independence 27 Chapter 3: Accession 49 Chapter 4: Special Status? 73 Chapter 5: Diplomacy and War 99 Chapter 6: Bravado and Despair 127 Chapter 7: Vale of Tears 143 Chapter 8: Hearts and Minds 163 Chapter 9: Conflict or Consensus? 189 Chapter 10: New Century, New Vision? 225 Glossary 247 Notes 249 Bibliography & Sources 277 Index 287
Biofilm formation, control and novel strategies for eradication

Maria Esperanza Cortes; Jessika Consuegra Bonilla; Ruben Dario Sinisterra Associated Professor, Department of Restorative Dentistry, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.Av. Antonio Carlos, 6627, CEP 31270901. Belo Horizonte, Brazil; 2 Microbiologist, Biopharmaceutical Innovation Magister Program candidate, ICB, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 3 Titular Professor, Chemistry Department *Correspondence author phone 55-31-34092437; Fax: 55-31-34092430; E-mail: mecortes@ufmg.br
cdc2 phosphorylation of threonine 124 activates the origin-unwinding functions of simian virus 40 T antigen

Phosphorylation of simian virus 40 (SV40) T antigen on threonine 124 activates viral DNA replication in vivo and in vitro. We have manipulated the modification of T-antigen residue 124 both genetically and biochemically and have investigated individual replication functions of T antigen under conditions suitable for in vitro DNA replication. We find that the hexamer assembly, helicase, DNA polymerase alpha-binding, and transcriptional-autoregulation functions are independent of phosphorylation of threonine 124. In contrast, neither T antigen with an alanine mutation of threonine 124 made in human cells nor unphosphorylated T antigen made in Escherichia coli binds the SV40 replication origin as stably as phosphorylated wild-type T antigen does. Furthermore, modification of threonine 124 is essential for complete unwinding of the SV40 replication origin. We conclude that phosphorylation of threonine 124 enhances specific interactions of T antigen with SV40 origin DNA. Our findings do not exclude the possibility that phosphorylation of threonine 124 may affect additional undefined steps in DNA replication. We also show that DNase footprinting and KMnO4 modification assays are not as stringent as immunoprecipitation and origin-dependent strand displacement assays for detecting defects in the origin-binding and -unwinding functions of T antigen. Differences in the assays may explain discrepancies in previous reports on the role of T-antigen phosphorylation in DNA binding.
A 4.86 mW 15-bit 22.5 MS/s pipelined ADC with 74 dB SNDR in 90 nm CMOS using averaging correlated level shifting technique

This paper proposes an averaging correlated level shifting (Averaging-CLS) technique as a switched-capacitor amplification technique for reducing finite opamp gain error. The Averaging-CLS inverts the finite opamp gain error in the second amplifying phase and then averages it with that in the first amplifying phase. With Averaging-CLS, a high-resolution pipelined ADC can employ medium-accuracy high-efficiency ring amplifiers, which lowers the power consumption and cost of the ADC. Compared with conventional CLS, Averaging-CLS halves the sampling capacitance under the same SNR requirement. A 15-bit pipelined ADC, which operates from a 1.2 V power supply and utilizes an input range of 2.2 V peak-to-peak differential, was realized in a 90 nm CMOS technology. The ADC achieves a 74 dB peak SNDR at 22.5 MS/s conversion rate and consumes 4.86 mW, resulting in the Walden and Schreier Figure-of-Merits of 52.7fJ/conv. -step and 167.6dB, respectively.
Path Selection on VC-Networks within a Distributed Media Server for Concurrent Stream Retrieval

This article addresses path selection problems that arise in a large-scale media server. In particular, the problem on a distributed server with two tiers of server nodes connected by a VC-enabled interconnection network is considered. To serve each incoming request, a pair of server nodes should be selected to handle the request. In addition, a network path in the interconnection network should be arranged to pipe the program stream between the pair of server nodes for the request. The problem is modeled as a network flow problem. A two-pass flow (TPF) algorithm is proposed to solve the flow problem that involves multiple types of flow. The proposed algorithm allocates system resources effectively to maximize the number of admitted requests without violating resource constraints. Unlike some other works, the algorithm does not need to rely on assumptions about any particular configuration of the underlying interconnection network.
Patients' Perceptions of Bedside Handoff: The Need for a Culture of Always

Current literature on patients' perceptions of bedside handoff describes studies using qualitative, anecdotal, and/or indirect measurement. This study identifies patients' perceptions of the bedside handoff through direct and quantitative measurement. The statistically significant findings from a survey of 103 medical surgical adult patients demonstrate that registered nurse bedside handoff has a positive effect on patient perceptions of safety, understanding, and satisfaction. Bedside end-of-shift handoff is most effective when it is performed consistently.
Doppler sonography to diagnose venous congestion in a modified right lobe graft after living donor liver transplantation.

OBJECTIVE The objective of our study was to assess the value of Doppler sonography for the diagnosis of hepatic venous congestion in a modified right lobe graft during the early postoperative period after living donor liver transplantation. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Doppler sonography examinations were prospectively performed in 54 patients within 24 hours after living donor liver transplantation with a modified right lobe graft in which large (> 5 mm) middle hepatic vein (MHV) tributaries were reconstructed. The number, flow direction, and waveform of the MHV tributaries; the echogenicity of the surrounding parenchyma; and the flow direction of the corresponding portal branch were evaluated. Hepatic venous congestion was diagnosed when there was no color flow or a monophasic waveform of an MHV tributary. The sensitivity of Doppler sonography for the detection of MHV tributaries was assessed using donors' preoperative CT scans and surgical records as references. The diagnostic values of Doppler sonography for hepatic venous congestion were assessed using recipients' postoperative CT scans as references. Differences in prevalence of Doppler sonography findings between the group with hepatic venous congestion and the non-hepatic venous congestion group were assessed. RESULTS Doppler sonography enabled us to identify 90% (155/173) of all and 98% (129/131) of the large MHV tributaries. The sensitivity and specificity of Doppler sonography for hepatic venous congestion were 90% (28/31) and 77% (96/124), respectively, for all and 88% (15/17) and 85% (95/112), respectively, for large MHV tributaries. Parenchymal hyperechogenicity was more commonly seen in the hepatic venous congestion group (65%, 20/31) than in non-hepatic venous congestion group (6%, 7/124) (p < 0.01). All five MHV tributaries with reversed flow were seen in the non-hepatic venous congestion group. All five portal branches with hepatofugal flow were seen in the hepatic venous congestion group. CONCLUSION Doppler sonography provides a reliable noninvasive surveillance tool for hepatic venous congestion in a modified right lobe graft during the early postoperative period after living donor liver transplantation.
Memantine Enhances the Effect of Olanzapine in Patients With Schizophrenia: A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Study.

Glutamate dysregulation may be involved in the neuropathology of schizophrenia. Memantine, a drug approved by the FDA for the treatment of moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease, acts as a partial uncompetitive NMDA receptor antagonist. The aim of this study was to examine the efficacy of memantine as an adjunctive treatment to olanzapine in patients with schizophrenia. In this double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, patients with schizophrenia according to DSM-IV clinical criteria were selected. Patients were randomly assigned to receive either memantine (week 1:10 mg/day; weeks 2-6:20 mg/day) plus olanzapine (15-20 mg/day) or olanzapine plus placebo. At baseline, no statistically significant difference regarding the mean total PANSS scores between treatment groups was found. Results showed that memantine significantly improved the positive and negative PANSS score in patients maintained on olanzapine after six weeks compared to olanzapine alone (P<0.001). Furthermore, female patients showed significantly better response than males, especially in positive PANSS score. No significant changes in extrapyramidal symptoms were observed.These findings indicate that olanzapine efficacy might be augmented with memantine. Furthermore, this effect is more remarkable in female patients with schizophrenia.
Validation of Minimally-Invasive Sample Collection Methods for Measurement of Telomere Length

Objective: The discovery of telomere length (TL) as a biomarker of cellular aging and correlate of age-related disease has generated a new field of research in the biology of healthy aging. Although the most common method of sample collection for TL is venous blood draw, less-invasive DNA collection methods are becoming more widely used. However, how TL relates across tissues derived from these sample collection methods is poorly understood. The current study is the first to characterize the associations in TL across three sample collection methods: venous whole blood, finger prick dried blood spot and saliva. Methods: TL was measured in 24 healthy young adults using three modes of sample collection for each participant: venous whole blood, finger prick dried blood spot and saliva. Relative TL was measured using quantitative polymerase chain reaction. Results: TL in finger prick dried blood spots (DBS) washighly correlated with TL in whole blood (r = 0.84, p < 0.001). Salivary TL was also correlated with whole blood TL (r = 0.56, p = 0.005), but this association was not as strong as that of dried blood spot TL (Steiger’s Z = 2.12, p = 0.034). TL was longer in saliva than in whole blood or DBS (p’s < 0.001). Conclusions: These findings have important implications for future study design by supporting the validity of less-invasive methods that can be implemented with vulnerable populations or in the field. Further, these findings aid in interpreting the burgeoning area of biological aging research and may shed light on our understanding of inconsistencies in the empirical literature.
Sphingolipids in Ventilator Induced Lung Injury: Role of Sphingosine-1-Phosphate Lyase

Mechanical ventilation (MV) performed in respiratory failure patients to maintain lung function leads to ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI). This study investigates the role of sphingolipids and sphingolipid metabolizing enzymes in VILI using a rodent model of VILI and alveolar epithelial cells subjected to cyclic stretch (CS). MV (0 PEEP (Positive End Expiratory Pressure), 30 mL/kg, 4 h) in mice enhanced sphingosine-1-phosphate lyase (S1PL) expression, and ceramide levels, and decreased S1P levels in lung tissue, thereby leading to lung inflammation, injury and apoptosis. Accumulation of S1P in cells is a balance between its synthesis catalyzed by sphingosine kinase (SphK) 1 and 2 and catabolism mediated by S1P phosphatases and S1PL. Thus, the role of S1PL and SphK1 in VILI was investigated using Sgpl1+/− and Sphk1−/− mice. Partial genetic deletion of Sgpl1 protected mice against VILI, whereas deletion of SphK1 accentuated VILI in mice. Alveolar epithelial MLE-12 cells subjected to pathophysiological 18% cyclic stretch (CS) exhibited increased S1PL protein expression and dysregulation of sphingoid bases levels as compared to physiological 5% CS. Pre-treatment of MLE-12 cells with S1PL inhibitor, 4-deoxypyridoxine, attenuated 18% CS-induced barrier dysfunction, minimized cell apoptosis and cytokine secretion. These results suggest that inhibition of S1PL that increases S1P levels may offer protection against VILI.
Revisiting sociotechnical systems in a case of unreported use of health information exchange system in three hospital emergency departments.

BACKGROUND Health information exchange (HIE) allows clinicians to access patient level health care information. HIE can potentially improve patient care in emergency departments. METHODS We present a selected piece of evaluation of an HIE implementation in three Midwestern emergency departments. Data were collected through over 210 hours of direct observations and short interviews with 13 clinicians. RESULTS The results suggest that the usage rate of the HIE was low. Moreover, two ways of unreported use of the HIE system by clinicians was uncovered: (1) The HIE system was being used mostly for patients only with specific characteristics. (2) The information from the HIE system could be used to confront with the patients. DISCUSSION This study provides a case of how social system may shape a HIE technology. In order to fully benefit from HIE, understanding organizational and social context during the HIE design and implementation is needed. Such an understanding will also allow us to identify and detail required additional resources and organizational interventions that will complement HIE such as a case management strategy.
Effect of Sub-MICs of Antibiotics on the Hydrophobicity and Production of Acidic Polysaccharide by Vibrio vulnificus

Background: Subinhibitory concentrations of antibiotics, which can occur in vivo, have been demonstrated to alter the production of bacterial virulence factors, including the capsule, or the interaction between microorganism and phagocyte by affecting surface hydrophobicity. Methods: Using a microtiter assay system, the effect of subinhibitory concentrations of amikacin, gentamicin, cephalothin and doxycycline on the surface hydrophobicity and production of acidic polysaccharide by Vibrio vulnificus (8 human isolates, 8 environmental isolates) was determined. Results: All four drugs, in a dose-dependent manner, caused alterations in adherence to polystyrene, a measure of surface hydrophobicity, and the production of acidic polysaccharides, as determined by Alcian blue staining. Conclusion: The changes in capsule production and surface hydrophobicity measured in response to sub-MICs of antibiotics appear to be independent variables.
The Monkeytyping Solution to the YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge

This article describes the final solution of team monkeytyping, who finished in second place in the YouTube-8M video understanding challenge. The dataset used in this challenge is a large-scale benchmark for multi-label video classification. We extend the work in [1] and propose several improvements for frame sequence modeling. We propose a network structure called Chaining that can better capture the interactions between labels. Also, we report our approaches in dealing with multi-scale information and attention pooling. In addition, We find that using the output of model ensemble as a side target in training can boost single model performance. We report our experiments in bagging, boosting, cascade, and stacking, and propose a stacking algorithm called attention weighted stacking. Our final submission is an ensemble that consists of 74 sub models, all of which are listed in the appendix.
Predictive Prefetching for Parallel Hybrid Storage Systems

In this paper, we present a predictive prefetching mechanism that is based on probability graph approach to perform prefetching between different levels in a parallel hybrid storage system. The fundamental concept of our approach is to invoke parallel hybrid storage system’s parallelism and prefetch data among multiple storage levels (e.g. solid state disks, and hard disk drives) in parallel with the application’s on-demand I/O reading requests. In this study, we show that a predictive prefetching across multiple storage levels is an efficient technique for placing near future needed data blocks in the uppermost levels near the application. Our PPHSS approach extends previous ideas of predictive prefetching in two ways: (1) our approach reduces applications’ execution elapsed time by keeping data blocks that are predicted to be accessed in the near future cached in the uppermost level; (2) we propose a parallel data fetching scheme in which multiple fetching mechanisms (i.e. predictive prefetching and application’s on-demand data requests) can work in parallel; where the first one fetches data blocks among the different levels of the hybrid storage systems (i.e. low-level (slow) to high-level (fast) storage devices) and the other one fetches the data from the storage system to the application. Our PPHSS strategy integrated with the predictive prefetching mechanism significantly reduces overall I/O access time in a hybrid storage system. Finally, we developed a simulator to evaluate the performance of the proposed predictive prefetching scheme in the context of hybrid storage systems. Our results show that our PPHSS can improve system performance by 4% across real-world I/O traces without the need of using large size caches.
The effect of first chromosome long arm duplication on survival of endometrial carcinoma

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of first chromosome long arm duplication (dup(1q)) in cases with endometrial carcinoma detected with array based comperative genomic hybridization (aCGH) on survival from the cancer. Materials and Methods: A total of 53 patients with the diagnosis of endometrial carcinom due to endometrial biopsy and who have been operated for this reason have been allocated in the study. Frozen section biopsy and staging surgery have been performed for all the cases. Samples obtained from the tumoral mass have been investigated for chromosomal aberrations with aCGH method. Kaplan-Meier and Cox-regression analysis have been performed for survival analysis. Results: Among 53 cases with endometrial carcinomas, dup(1q) was diagnosed in 14 (26.4%) of the cases. For the patient group that has been followed-up for 24 months (3-33 months), dup(1q) (p=.01), optimal cytoreduction (p<.001), lymph node positivity (p=.006), tumor stage >1 (p=.006) and presence of high risk tumor were the factors that were associated with survival. Cox-regression analysis has revealed that optimal cytoreduction was the most important prognostic factor (p=.02). Conclusion: Presence of 1q duplication can be used as a prognostic factor in the preoperative period.
Diel Vertical Movements of the Cyanobacterium Oscillatoria terebriformis in a Sulfide-Rich Hot Spring Microbial Mat

Oscillatoria terebriformis, a thermophilic cyanobacterium, carried out a diel vertical movement pattern in Hunter's Hot Springs, Oreg. Throughout most daylight hours, populations of O. terebriformis covered the surface of microbial mats in the hot spring outflows below an upper temperature limit of 54°C. Upon darkness trichomes moved downward by gliding motility into the substrate to a depth of 0.5 to 1.0 mm, where the population remained until dawn. At dawn the population rapidly returned to the top of the mats. Field studies with microelectrodes showed that the dense population of O. terebriformis moved each night across an oxygen-sulfide interface, entering a microenvironment which was anaerobic and reducing, a dramatic contrast to the daytime environment at the mat surface where oxygenic photosynthesis resulted in supersaturated O2. Laboratory experiments on motility with the use of sulfide gradients produced in agar revealed a negative response to sulfide at concentrations similar to those found in the natural mats. The motility response may help explain the presence of O. terebriformis below the mat surface at night. The movement back to the surface at dawn appears to be due to a combination of phototaxis, photokinesis, and the onset of oxygenic photosynthesis which consumes sulfide.