Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Virtual decomposition based motion/force control of two coordinated industrial manipulators KUKA361/KUKA160

Virtual decomposition control approach is applied to two coordinated industrial manipulators KUKA361 and KUKA160 subject to a rigid unilateral constraint. In order to accommodate motion/force control with the rigid unilateral constraint, the required velocity is re-designed by introducing filtered contact forces in full control space. This provides the controlled robots with a hybrid control behavior in case of a known contact geometry and with an impedance control behavior in case of an unknown contact geometry. The experiment demonstrates bouncing-free rigid contact control stability and filtered force tracking capability, in addition to asymptotic motion tracking.
Apoptosis signalling by 4-hydroxynonenal: a role for JNK–c-Jun/AP-1 pathway

Abstract 4-Hydroxynonenal (HNE) is one of the most abundant aldehyde components of ox-LDL and it exerts various effects on intracellular and extracellular signaling cascades. In this mini-review, a brief synopsis of HNE-modulated signaling pathways will be presented mainly focused on cell death, including recent studies from our laboratory. The results of a number of studies demonstrate the ability of HNE to induce apoptosis and ROS formation in a dose-dependent manner. Several signaling pathways have been shown to be modulated by HNE, including MAP kinases, PKC isoforms, cell-cycle regulators, receptor tyrosine kinases and caspases. In order to get insight into the mechanisms of apoptotic response by HNE, MAP kinase and caspase activation pathways have been studied in 3T3 fibroblasts; HNE induced early activation of JNK and p38 proteins but down-regulated the basal activity of ERK-1/2. We have shown that HNE-induced release of cytochrome c from mitochondria, caspase-9 and caspase-3 activation. Activation of AP-1 along with increased c-Jun and phospho-c-Jun levels could be inhibited by pretreatment of cells with certain molecules such as resveratrol. Additionally, overexpression of dominant negative c-Jun and JNK1 in 3T3 fibroblasts prevented HNE-induced apoptosis, which indicated a role for JNK–c-Jun/AP-1 pathway. JNK-dependent induction of c-Jun/AP-1 activation data in the literature indicates a critical potential role for JNK in the cellular response against toxic products of lipid peroxidation.
Paternalism, Autonomy, or Both? Experimental Evidence from Energy Saving Programs

Identifying who should be treated is a central question in economics. There are two competing approaches to targeting—paternalistic and autonomous. In the paternalistic approach, policymakers optimally target the policy given observable individual characteristics. In contrast, the autonomous approach acknowledges that individuals may possess key unobservable information on heterogeneous policy impacts, and allows them to self-select into treatment. In this paper, we propose a new approach that mixes paternalistic assignment and autonomous choice. Our approach uses individual characteristics and empirical welfare maximization to identify who should be treated, untreated, and decide whether to be treated themselves. We apply this method to design a targeting policy for an energy saving programs using data collected in a randomized field experiment. We show that optimally mixing paternalistic assignments and autonomous choice significantly improves the social welfare gain of the policy. Exploiting random variation generated by the field experiment, we develop a method to estimate average treatment effects for each subgroup of individuals who would make the same autonomous treatment choice. Our estimates confirm that the estimated assignment policy optimally allocates individuals to be treated, untreated, or choose themselves based on the relative merits of paternalistic assignments and autonomous choice for individuals types.
Acyl‐CoA synthetase short‐chain family member 2 (ACSS2) is regulated by SREBP‐1 and plays a role in fatty acid synthesis in caprine mammary epithelial cells

Sterol regulatory element binding protein 1 (SREBP‐1) is well‐known as the master regulator of lipogenesis in rodents. Acyl‐CoA synthetase short‐chain family member 2 (ACSS2) plays a key role in lipogenesis by synthesizing acetyl‐CoA from acetate for lipogenesis. ATP citrate lyase (ACLY) catalyzes the conversion of citrate and coenzyme A to acetyl‐CoA, hence, it is also important for lipogenesis. Although ACSS2 function in cancer cells has been elucidated, its essentiality in ruminant mammary lipogenesis is unknown. Furthermore, ACSS2 gene promoter and its regulatory mechanisms have not known. Expression of ACSS2 was high in lipid synthesizing tissues, and its expression increased during lactation compared with non‐lactating period. Simultaneous knockdown of both ACSS2 and ACLY by siRNA in primary goat mammary epithelial cells decreased (p < 0.05) the mRNA abundance of genes associated with de novo fatty acid synthesis (FASN, ACACA, SCD1) and triacylglycerol (TAG) synthesis (DGAT1, DGAT2, GPAM, and AGPAT6). Genes responsible for lipid droplet formation and secretion (PLIN2 and PLIN3) and fatty acid oxidation (ATGL, HSL, ACOX, and CPT1A) all decreased (p < 0.05) after ACSS2 and ACLY knockdown. Total cellular TAG content and lipid droplet formation also decreased. Use of a luciferase reporter assay revealed a direct regulation of ACSS2 by SREBP‐1. Furthermore, SREBP‐1 interacted with an SRE (SREBP response element) spanning at −475 to −483 bp on the ACSS2 promoter. Taken together, our results revealed a novel pathway that SREBP‐1 may regulate fatty acid and TAG synthesis by regulating the expression of ACSS2.
The design and implementation of declarative networks

In this dissertation, we present the design and implementation of declarative networks. Declarative networking proposes the use of a declarative query language for specifying and implementing network protocols, and employs a dataflow framework at runtime for com munication and maintenance of network state. The primary goal of declarative networking is to greatly simplify the process of specifying, implementing, deploying and evolving a network design. In addition, declarative networking serves as an important step towards an extensible, evolvable network architecture that can support flexible, secure and efficient deployment of new network protocols. Our main contributions are as follows. First, we formally define the Network Datalog (NDlog) language based on extensions to the Datalog recursive query language, and propose NDlog as a Domain Specific Language for programming network protocols. We demonstrate that NDlog can be used to express a large variety of network protocols in a handful of lines of program code, resulting in orders of magnitude reduction in code size. For example, the Chord overlay network can be specified in 48 NDlog rules. In addition, the core of the language (Datalog) has polynomial complexity, and our NDlog extensions can be statically analyzed for termination using standard analysis techniques. Second, to validate the design of NDlog, we present our implementation of P2, which is a full-fledged declarative networking system that compiles NDlog and executes it via a dataflow engine inspired by the Click modular router. We experimentally evaluate the P2 system on hundreds of distributed machines. The P2 system is publicly available for download and has been used in research projects at a number of institutions. Third, based on our experiences implementing declarative networks, we explore a wide variety of database research issues that are important for the practical realization of declarative networks. These include pipelined execution of distributed recursive queries, reason ing about query semantics based on the well-known distributed systems notion of "eventual consistency", incorporating the notion of soft-state into the logical framework of NDlog, and the use of query optimizations to improve the performance of network protocols.
Investigation into bacteremia and spontaneous bacterial peritonitis in patients with liver cirrhosis in Japan.

BACKGROUND/AIMS Liver cirrhosis patients tend to develop bacteremia, but relatively little has been reported about the situation in Japan. Therefore, we investigated the microorganisms involved and the outcome among liver cirrhosis patients with bacteremia, including spontaneous bacterial peritonitis. METHODS The subjects were 236 patients who underwent a total of 377 blood cultures and 30 patients diagnosed with spontaneous bacterial peritonitis, among 6,096 inpatients with liver cirrhosis admitted to several hospitals during the period 1991-2009. RESULTS The rate of positive blood culture was 37.1% (140/377), and the isolated microorganisms were predominantly Gram-negative bacteria. In patients with confirmed bacteremia, the Child-Pugh score and serum blood urea nitrogen and creatinine levels were significantly higher than in non-bacteremia cases. Moreover, short-term mortality (within 1 month) was 48.2% (53/110), being significantly higher than that among non-bacteremia cases (18.8%; 22/117). Among spontaneous bacterial peritonitis cases, mortality within one month was 33.3% (10/30). Again, the Child-Pugh score and serum blood urea nitrogen and creatinine levels were significantly higher among the fatalities than among survivors. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that severity of liver dysfunction and severity of renal dysfunction are both important determinants of short-term mortality among liver cirrhosis patients with bacteremia and spontaneous bacterial peritonitis in Japan.
Etiology of childhood diarrhea in Beijing, China

To determine the role of recently recognized enteropathogens in childhood diarrhea in China, 221 children with diarrhea and 108 controls seen at the Beijing Children's Hospital were studied during April and May 1989. Stools were examined for ova, parasites, and rotavirus, cultured for bacterial pathogens, and probed for enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC), enteroinvasive E. coli (EIEC), enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC), and enteropathogenic adherence factor-positive (EAF+) E. coli. Pathogens were identified in 56.5% of children with diarrhea and 43.5% of controls (P = 0.04). Detection of enteropathogens was significantly greater in patients examined within 1 week of symptom onset (65%) than in patients examined later (39%; P = 0.01). ETEC was the most frequently detected pathogen in children with diarrhea, accounting for 20% of the cases. Other agents identified in patients included the following: salmonellae, 12%; rotavirus, 7%; EIEC, 7%; EHEC, 7%; members of the Aeromonas hydrophila group, 6%; EAF+ E. coli, 5%; Ascaris lumbricoides, 3%; shigellae, 3%; campylobacters, 2%; and Vibrio spp. , 0.5%. The isolation rates of salmonellae (P = 0.02), EAF+ E. coli (P = 0.04), and mixed pathogens (P = 0.05) were significantly greater for diarrhea patients than for controls. Resistance to multiple antimicrobial agents occurred in 39% of the Salmonella isolates, 22% of the Aeromonas isolates, and 17% of the Shigella isolates. Multiresistant salmonellae (P = 0.05) and shigellae were recovered from diarrheal stools only. Ciprofloxacin, cefotaxime, and imipenem were the only agents tested to which all bacterial isolates were susceptible in vitro. These results suggest that both traditional and newly recognized agents are important causes of childhood diarrhea in Beijing and that therapy may be complicated by indigenous antimicrobial resistance.
Exploiting Expert-guided Symmetry Detection in Markov Decision Processes

Ofﬂine estimation of the dynamical model of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a non-trivial task that greatly depends on the data available to the learning phase. Sometimes the dynamics of the model is invariant with respect to some transformations of the current state and action. Recent works showed that an expert-guided pipeline relying on Density Estimation methods as Deep Neural Network based Normalizing Flows effectively detects this structure in deterministic environments, both categorical and continuous-valued. The acquired knowledge can be exploited to augment the original data set, leading eventually to a reduction in the distributional shift between the true and the learnt model. In this work we extend the paradigm to also tackle non deterministic MDPs, in particular 1) we pro-pose a detection threshold in categorical environments based on statistical distances, 2) we introduce a benchmark of the distributional shift in continuous environments based on the Wilcoxon signed-rank statistical test and 3) we show that the former results lead to a performance improvement when solving the learnt MDP and then applying the optimal policy in the real environment.
Distributionally Robust Group Backwards Compatibility

Machine learning models are updated as new data is acquired or new architectures are developed. These updates usually increase model performance, but may introduce backward compatibility errors, where individual users or groups of users see their performance on the updated model adversely affected. This problem can also be present when training datasets do not accurately reflect overall population demographics, with some groups having overall lower participation in the data collection process, posing a significant fairness concern. We analyze how ideas from distributional robustness and minimax fairness can aid backward compatibility in this scenario, and propose two methods to directly address this issue. Our theoretical analysis is backed by experimental results on CIFAR-10, CelebA, and Waterbirds, three standard image classification datasets. Code available at github.com/natalialmg/GroupBC
INTRODUCTION: EFFECTS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

In common with other biologic tissues, the nervous system responds sharply to raising or lowering its temperature, regardless of the means by which the change is achieved. Absorption of electromagnetic energy is inevitably associated with increased temperatures. Depending on the wavelength of the radiation and the geometry of the biologic preparation, significant thermal gradients may be established over quite small distances within the tissue. For these reasons, attention has been primarily focused on heating in evaluation of biologic effects of nonionizing radiation. Even a recent review body of the World Health Organization1 decided after discussion to dismiss from its concerns possible biologic effects that might occur in the absence of significant heating. It has become clear, however, that interactions with the mammalian central nervous system can be reliably produced by oscillating electric and electromagnetic fields without significant heating of tissues. Actual measurements in both intact brains and isolated cerebral tissue have shown that these fields are fully effective, with temperature changes of less than 0.1' C, and that brain temperature alterations that might be attributable to weak low-frequency electric fields that produce a variety of behavioral and physiologic responses2-* are far below the natural perturbations in brain temperature associated with eating, drinking, or environmental temperature shift^. ^ If this separation of so-called thermal from nonthermal effects were merely a taxonomic propriety, necessary as a possible guide to hazardous exposures that cause actual tissue damage, no very exciting prospects would appear to lie ahead in future research on biologic, and particularly central nervous, interactions with nonionizing electromagnetic radiation. On the contrary, it now seems that impressed oscillating electric fields may be very powerful tools in arriving a t an understanding of quite baffling problems in the structural and functional organization of the brain itself. Even from the viewpoint of potentially hazardous interactions, we must remember that the brain is an organ uniquely constructed of vast numbers of excitable elements and that it may be subtly influenced in ways that have no counterpart in liver, muscle, or kidney. We should also be aware that uniqueness in the structuring of brain tissue, as in the elaborate branching of dendritic fields of cortical neurons and the overlapping and functional contacts between adjacent dendritic fields, does not even occur in other parts of the mammalian central nervous system.6 We may therefore anticipate that responsiveness to weak electromagnetic fields in cerebral tissue is a manifestation of collective properties of its numerous cellular elements, which may not be discernible in the separate behavior of isolated elements. As pointed out elsewhere,? there is here a kinship with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, not so much in the effects of measurement on the system being measured, but rather in the effects of experimental isolation of a tissue or its cellular elements,
Difficulties in Diagnosing Narcotic Overdoses in Hospitalized Paitents

OBJECTIVE: To describe the clinical presentation of narcotic overdose in hospitalized patients and to differentiate this circumstance from other conditions often misdiagnosed as overdose. DESIGN: Case series. SETTING: Two acute-care teaching hospitals. PATIENTS: Forty-three hospitalized patients who received naloxone for a clinically suspected narcotic overdose. INTERVENTIONS: Two investigators independently evaluated each incident to determine whether the patient had a narcotic overdose. The patients were judged to have had an overdose if caregivers documented an immediate improvementin mental status, respiratory rate, or blood pressure after naloxone administration. MEASUREMENTS: The clinical presentation of a narcotic overdose in hospitalized patients was defined. Conditions misdiagnosed as an overdose were determined. MAIN RESULTS: Symptoms improved rapidly with the administration of naloxone in 28 incidents (65 percent) and were designated overdose. In 15 other instances there was no improvement in symptoms; these patients were designated nonoverdose. Only half of the overdose patients had a respiratory rate <8 breaths/min immediately prior to naloxone administration. Only two of the overdose patients had the classic triad of symptoms (respiratory depression, coma, and pinpoint pupils). Other overdose patients had only one or two of the classic signs. The clinical presentation of narcotic overdoses in hospitalized patients did not include respiratory depression, hypotension, or coma in the majority of patients. All overdose patients showed a decrease in mental status. The majority of nonoverdose patients had pulmonary conditions that were misdiagnosed as a narcotic overdose. CONCLUSIONS: Narcotic overdoses in hospitalized patients seldom fit the classic description. The lack of respiratory depression does not mean the absence of a narcotic overdose. Patients who receive narcotics and develop a signficant decrease in mental status should be evaluated for a possible overdose. Pulmonary, neurologic, cardiovascular, and electrolyte abnormalities often are misdiagnosed as a narcotic overdose in hospitalized patients.
The corporatization process: An owner perspective

The purpose of the paper is to: i) explore how the ownership-relationship between the public authority and the provider of the service is organized and managed to secure accountability in those cases the ownership remains public ii) how the purchaser-provider relationship is organized and managed so that public value are protected and iii) to what extent NPM still influences the reforms conducted within the public sector. Previous research has only touched upon the ownershiprelationship and the purchasing-provider relationship. This study shows that relationships are of importance for the outcome of the reform and thus for securing accountability and public value. A qualitatively oriented method with case studies is used and the empirical material is mainly gathered through semi-structured interviews. The results indicate that the outcome of the corporatization process is depending on the ownership-relationship as well as the purchaser-provider relationship and how these relationships are organized in the specific case. (Less)
Mycophenolic acid upregulates miR-142-3P/5P and miR-146a in lupus CD4+T cells

Background Mycophenolic acid (MPA), the active metabolite of mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), is a noncompetitive inhibitor of inosine monophosphate dehydrogenase, and is now widely used for the treatment of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Dysregulated expression of microRNA has been reported to be associated with the pathogenesis of SLE. However, it is unexplored whether altering microRNA expression in SLE patients is one of the therapeutic effects of MPA. Objectives This study thus aims to investigate the effect of MPA on microRNAs expression in lupus CD4+T cells and its underlying mechanisms. Results According to our microarray data, 101 upregulated microRNAs and 77 downregulated microRNAs were identified in MPA-treated lupus CD4+T cells. Among these microRNAs, miR-142-3p/5p and miR-146a expression was found to be significantly increased in MPA-treated lupus CD4+T cells compared to untreated controls. Furthermore, we observed that MPA-treated CD4+T cells from patients with SLE showed enriched levels of H4 acetylation in the putative miRNA-142 regulatory region and enhanced levels of H3 acetylation in the putative miRNA-146a regulatory region compared to untreated cells. Conclusion Data from this study suggest that MPA activates miR-142 and miR-146a expression through histone modification at the promoter region, which may partially explain the pharmacological mechanisms of MPA for SLE.
A survey of stereotactic body radiotherapy use in the United States

Stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) is a technique used to deliver high, ablative doses of radiation in a limited number of fractions to ≥1 extracranial target(s). To the authors' knowledge, the prevalence of SBRT use among radiation oncologists in the United States is unknown.
Periconceptional consumption of vitamins containing folic acid and risk for multiple congenital anomalies

Although it has been well established that periconceptional use of multivitamins containing folic acid (FA) reduces the risk for neural tube defects, two recent U.S. studies have shown an increased risk for multiple congenital anomalies (MCAs) associated with periconceptional use of vitamins containing FA. This study assessed the association between the periconceptional use of vitamins containing FA and MCAs in a third U.S. population. Mothers of infants with MCAs and a random sample of live births (control infants) born in Iowa during 1993–1995 were eligible to participate in the Birth Defects Risk Factor Surveillance case‐control study. During a telephone interview, participants reported on exposure to FA through vitamins, cereal, and food supplements. There was no association between taking vitamins containing FA during the periconceptional period (3 months before conception through the first trimester) and MCAs in the crude estimates or after adjusting for maternal race or ethnicity, education, gravidity, smoking, or alcohol use in the first trimester, or body mass index prior to pregnancy [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 1.12, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.75–1.69]. There was also no association between vitamin exposure beginning in the first trimester and MCAs outcome (aOR = 1.05, 95% CI 0.59–1.87). In contrast to the two recently published reports, there was no association between periconceptional vitamin exposure and MCAs in the Iowa population. Published 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.