Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The quantitative determination of bile acids by means of a new color reaction and monochromatic light

A survey of the literature reveals the fact that numerous methods, direct and indirect, have been employed by various workers for the determination of bile acids. Due to the many advantages offered by a calorimetric method for the determination of small quantities of a substance, the Pettenkofer reaction (1) as modified by Mylius (2) seemed most worthy of consideration. A critical study of the quantitative possibilities of this reaction, however, soon revealed several undesirable features: (1) The red or reddish violet color varied greatly as to color shade, making comparison in the calorimeter very difficult; (2) the quantitative recovery of pure sodium glycocholate was very irregular with errors of from 1 to 12 per cent; (3) the color reaction was not specific for bile acids, Mylius finding 150 other substances which gave the Pettenkofer reaction. It was obvious that the Pettenkofer reaction, as commonly described, was wholly unsuitable for quantitative purposes even on pure solutions of bile acids and unreliable for even qualitative work on body fluids. During the course of a spectrophotometric study of the reaction between glycocholic and sulfuric acids and furfural, a blue-colored compound was discovered. When to a dilute bile acid solution were added 34 volume per cent of HzS04 and 0.05 volume per cent of furfural and the mixture heated for 30 minutes at 65”, a pure blue color results. This color is different from any that has been reported in the literature. Pettenkofer (1) described the color he obtained as violet-red, Vogel and Dragendorff (3) obtained a brown color, Mylius (2) describes the end-product as “blood red,” Jolles (4) and Hirschfelder (5) reported a red to brown color, Gilbert,
Generalized monotone schemes, discrete paths of extrema, and discrete entropy conditions

Solutions of conservation laws satisfy the monotonicity property: the number of local extrema is a non-increasing function of time, and local maximum/minimum values decrease/increase monotonically in time. This paper investigates this property from a numerical standpoint. We introduce a class of fully discrete in space and time, high order accurate, difference schemes, called generalized monotone schemes. Convergence toward the entropy solution is proven via a new technique of proof, assuming that the initial data has a finite number of extremum values only, and the flux-function is strictly convex. We define discrete paths of extrema by tracking local extremum values in the approximate solution. In the course of the analysis we establish the pointwise convergence of the trace of the solution along a path of extremum. As a corollary, we obtain a proof of convergence for a MUSCL-type scheme that is second order accurate away from sonic points and extrema.
Convergence analysis of primal-dual algorithms for total variation image restoration

Recently, some attractive primal-dual algorithms have been proposed for solving a saddle-point problem, with particular applications in the area of total variation (TV) image restoration. This paper focuses on the convergence analysis of existing primal-dual algorithms and shows that the involved parameters of those primal-dual algorithms (including the step sizes) can be significantly enlarged if some simple correction steps are supplemented. As a result, we present some primal-dual-based contraction methods for solving the saddle-point problem. These contraction methods are in the prediction-correction fashion in the sense that the predictor is generated by a primal-dual method and it is corrected by some simple correction step at each iteration. In addition, based on the context of contraction type methods, we provide a novel theoretical framework for analyzing the convergence of primal-dual algorithms which simplifies existing convergence analysis substantially.
Use Citrus aurantium plant as bio-indicator of air pollution in Baghdad city

The current study was conducted to demonstrate the effects of air pollution on different biochemical parameters in Citrus aurantium plant and calculation the Air Pollution Tolerance Index (APTI). Five sites were selected to collect plant leaves, four of them within the city of Baghdad, namely Al-Jadriya, Al-Andlous, Al-Doura and close to the private generators to represent the urban areas and Abu Ghraib site to represent the rural area. Seasonal samples were collected for the period from October 2016 to June 2017. Eleven biochemical parameters total chlorophyll, ascorbic acid, leaf extract pH, relative water content, total nitrogen, total protein content, total sugar content, proline, electrical conductivity, cadmium and lead. The results of Citrus plant showed high chlorophyll concentration and ascorbic acid content in private generator site reached to (10.620 mg/g and 0.403 mg/g) respectively. While relative water content recorded high concentration (57.563 %) at Al-Jadriya site. pH recorded high value (6.358) at Al-Doura site. In addition, values of APTI of the Citrus plant were calculated to determine the sensitivity of the plant to air pollution. Highest value of APTI (6.23) was recorded at Al-Jadriya site, while lowest value of APTI (5.03) was recorded at Al-Andlous site. The results of present study revealed that Citrus aurantium is sensitive to air pollution and can be used as bio-indicator under pollution stress.
Agronomic performance of F1, F2 and F3 hybrids between weedy rice and transgenic glufosinate-resistant rice.

BACKGROUND Studies of hybrid fitness, of which agronomic performance may be an indicator, can help in evaluating the potential for introgression of a transgene from a transgenic crop to wild relatives. The objective of this study was to assess the agronomic performance of reciprocal hybrids between two transgenic glufosinate-resistant rice lines, Y0003 and 99-t, and two weedy rice accessions, WR1 and WR2, in the greenhouse. RESULTS F1 hybrids displayed heterosis in height, flag leaf area and number of spikelets per panicle. The agronomic performance of F1 between WR1 and Y0003 was not affected by crossing direction. The tiller and panicle numbers of F1 individuals were higher than their F2 counterparts. However, these traits did not change significantly from the F2 to the F3 generation or in hybrids with weedy rice as maternal or paternal plants. For all hybrids, the in vitro germination rates of fresh pollen were similar and significantly lower than those of their parents, seed sets were similar to or of lower value than those of weedy rice parents and seed shattering characteristics were partially suppressed, but the survival of hybrids over winter in the field was similar to that of weedy rice parents. All F1, F2 and F3 hybrids had similar composite agronomic performance to weedy rice parents. CONCLUSION There was no significant decrease in the composite agronomic performance of any of the hybrids compared with weedy rice. This implies that gene flow from transgenic cultivated rice to weedy rice could occur under natural conditions.
High Prevalence Rates of Anemia, Vitamin A Deficiency and Stunting Imperil the Health Status of Bedouin Schoolchildren in North Badia, Jordan

Aims: This survey aimed to identify nutritional deficits affecting Bedouin children as they enter school age and illustrate their families’ dietary consumption patterns. Methods: 560 healthy schoolchildren aged 5.5–10 years from 8 Badia hamlets were nutritionally investigated by applying anthropometric, laboratory and dietary assessment methods. Results: Mean and median serum retinol concentrations (SRCs) were 228 and 218 μg/l, respectively. Mean prevalence of nutritional deficits among children were stunting (23.4%), anemia (57.5%), vitamin A deficiency (29.5%), iron deficiency (28.4%), and vitamin E deficiency (17.1%). Including those with borderline values, the proportion of children vulnerable to VAD threats reached 90%. Compared to normal subjects, anemic children had lower SRC (207 vs. 233 μg/l; p < 0.001) and ferritin (9.6 vs. 11.3 μg/l; p < 0.001) levels; stunted children had lower serum vitamin E (6.5 vs. 7.3 mg/l; p < 0.001) and ferritin (10.3 vs. 11.1 μg/l; p < 0.001) levels; vitamin A-deficient children had lower hemoglobin (11.3 vs. 11.8 g/dl; p < 0.001), serum vitamin E (6.69 vs. 7.23 mg/l; p < 0.01), and serum ferritin (10.4 vs. 11.2 μg/l; p < 0.001) levels, and vitamin E-deficient subjects had lower SRC levels (206 vs. 232 μg/l; p < 0.001). Except for hemoglobin status, no significant differences between genders were detected. SRC correlated strongly with hemoglobin, vitamin E, BMI and serum ferritin. The frequency of consumption of meat and fats seemed to be among the determinants of SRC and hemoglobin values. Conclusion: Urbanization has brought Bedouins towards poverty and undernutrition, with older children suffering more severe consequences in comparison with preschool-age children. This multifaceted nutritional problem requires implementation of multicomponent interventions.
A Direct Boosting Approach for Semi-supervised Classification

We introduce a semi-supervised boosting approach (SSDBoost), which directly minimizes the classification errors and maximizes the margins on both labeled and unlabeled samples, without resorting to any upper bounds or approximations. A two-step algorithm based on coordinate descent/ascent is proposed to implement SSDBoost. Experiments on a number of UCI datasets and synthetic data show that SSDBoost gives competitive or superior results over the state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised boosting algorithms in the cases that the labeled data is limited, and it is very robust in noisy cases.
A method for on-road night-time vehicle headlight detection and tracking

A novel method for vehicle detection and tracking, which is capable to correctly detect and track vehicle headlights in rural and urban areas is presented. The detection procedure does not require image thresholding, or other preprocessing, which is commonly used in other methods, thus offering robustness and performance. A tracking method based on Joint Probability Data Association Filter (JPDAF) efficiently associates object detections with existing tracks and provides a track management system. The method deals with object appearance and disappearance and can handle false detections introduced by the frame-based detector.
Biventricular and atrial diastolic function assessment using conventional echocardiography and tissue-Doppler imaging in adults with Marfan syndrome.

AIMS Previous studies provided evidence about left ventricular systolic and diastolic dysfunction in adults with Marfan syndrome (MFS). However, in the literature, data on right ventricular and bi-atrial diastolic function are limited. We aimed to investigate whether, in the absence of significant valvular disease, diastolic dysfunction is present not only in both ventricles but also in the atrial cavities. METHODS AND RESULTS Seventy-two adult unoperated MFS patients and 73 controls without significant differences in age, sex, and body surface area from the patient group were studied using two-dimensional, pulsed, and colour-Doppler and tissue-Doppler imaging (TDI). Biventricular early filling measurements were significantly decreased in MFS patients when compared with controls (P < 0.001). Pulsed TDI early filling measurements obtained from five mitral annular regions and over the lateral tricuspid valve corner were significantly reduced in the patient group (P < 0.001). Indices reflecting atrial function at the reservoir, conduit and contractile phases were also significantly decreased in MFS patients (P < 0.001). CONCLUSION This study demonstrated significant biventricular diastolic and biatrial systolic and diastolic dysfunction in MFS patients. Our findings suggest that MFS affects diastolic function independently. Diastolic abnormalities could be attributed to fibrillin-1 deficiency and dysregulation of transforming growth factor-beta activity in the cardiac extracellular matrix.
Retinoic acid signaling in Sertoli cells regulates organization of the blood-testis barrier through cyclical changes in gene expression

Mammalian spermatogenesis contributes a constant production of large numbers of spermatozoa, which is achieved by a cyclically regulated program known as the seminiferous epithelial cycle. Sertoli cells, functionally unique somatic cells, create a microenvironment to support the continuous differentiation of germ cells especially through the formation of a blood-testis barrier (BTB). The BTB is essential for maintaining homeostasis in seminiferous tubules and opens transiently at stages VII-VIII to ensure constant differentiation of spermatogenic cells. However, it is poorly understood how the dynamic organization of BTB is regulated. In our current study, we find that the overexpression of a dominant-negative form of RARα (dnRARα) in Sertoli cells disrupts the BTB at stages VII-XII and causes the large-scale apoptosis of differentiating germ cells. These abnormal events are found to be associated with cyclical gene expression changes in Sertoli cells, which can be represented by abnormal activation and repression of genes showing peaks of expression during stages I-VI and VII-XII, respectively. We find that one such gene, Ocln, encoding a tight junction component, partly contributes to the BTB disruption caused by dnRARα. Taken together, our data suggest that the cyclical activation of RA signaling in Sertoli cells during stages VII-XII contributes to a periodic organization of the BTB through changes in stage-dependent gene expression.
A local perspective on community structure in multilayer networks

Abstract The analysis of multilayer networks is among the most active areas of network science, and there are several methods to detect dense “communities” of nodes in multilayer networks. One way to define a community is as a set of nodes that trap a diffusion-like dynamical process (usually a random walk) for a long time. In this view, communities are sets of nodes that create bottlenecks to the spreading of a dynamical process on a network. We analyze the local behavior of different random walks on multiplex networks (which are multilayer networks in which different layers correspond to different types of edges) and show that they have very different bottlenecks, which correspond to rather different notions of what it means for a set of nodes to be a good community. This has direct implications for the behavior of community-detection methods that are based on these random walks.
Evolving Gaussian process models for predicting chaotic time-series

Gaussian process (GP) models are nowadays considered among the state-of-the-art tools in modern dynamic system identification. GP models are probabilistic, non-parametric models based on the principles of Bayesian probability. As a kernel methods they do not try to approximate the modelled system by fitting the parameters of the selected basis functions, but rather by searching for relationships among the measured data. While GP models are Bayesian models they are more robust to overfitting. Moreover, their output is normal distribution, expressed in terms of mean and variance. Due to these features they are used in various fields, e.g. model-based control, time-series prediction, modelling and estimation in engineering applications, etc. But, due to the matrix inversion calculation, whose computationally demand increases with the third power of the number of input data, the amount of training data is limited to at most a few thousand cases. Therefore GP models in principle are not applicable for modelling dynamic systems whose states evolve in time, such as chaotic time-series. In this paper we demonstrate an Evolving GP (EGP) models for predicting chaotic time-series. The EGP is iterative method which adapts model with information obtained from streaming data and concurrently optimizes hyperparameter values. To assess the viability of the EGP an empirical tests were carried out together with a comparative study of various evolving fuzzy methods on a benchmark chaotic time-series MacKey-Glass. The results indicate that the EGP can successfully identify MacKey-Glass chaotic time-series and demonstrate superior performance.
IS-Linked Movement of a Restriction-Modification System

Potential mobility of restriction-modification systems has been suggested by evolutionary/bioinformatic analysis of prokaryotic genomes. Here we demonstrate in vivo movement of a restriction-modification system within a genome under a laboratory condition. After blocking replication of a temperature-sensitive plasmid carrying a PaeR7I restriction-modification system in Escherichia coli cells, the plasmid was found integrated into the chromosome of the surviving cells. Sequence analysis revealed that, in the majority of products, the restriction-modification system was linked to chromosomal insertion sequences (ISs). Three types of products were: (I) apparent co-integration of the plasmid and the chromosome at a chromosomal IS1 or IS5 copy (24/28 analyzed); (II) de novo insertion of IS1 with the entire plasmid except for a 1–3 bp terminal deletion (2/28); and (III) reciprocal crossing-over between the plasmid and the chromosome involving 1–3 bp of sequence identity (2/28). An R-negative mutation apparently decreased the efficiency of successful integration by two orders of magnitude. Reconstruction experiments demonstrated that the restriction-dependence was mainly due to selection against cells without proper integration: their growth was inhibited by the restriction enzyme action. These results demonstrate collaboration of a mobile element and a restriction-modification system for successful joint migration. This collaboration may have promoted the spread and, therefore, the long-term persistence of these complexes and restriction-modification systems in a wide range of prokaryotes.
A Distributed Spatio-Temporal Event Correlation Protocol for Multi-Layer Virtual Networks

We present a distributed spatio-temporal event correlation protocol for multi-layer networks. The problems that we address relate to scalability in stacked overlay networks and network equipment with asynchronous clocks, which complicates the problem of event correlation. We describe a cross-layer protocol designed to address these problems, operating in a fully distributed manner and taking into account asynchronous timestamps. It is assumed that events in one layer may arise from a series of events in lower layers. Detected events that are spatially related in one layer are aggregated using a gossip-like protocol, and constitute a root cause. The set of aggregated events is disseminated to lower layers and used for temporal correlation. We have tested the scalability and the performance of the distributed event protocol, using both synthetically generated and real-world topologies. The results indicate that the average overhead produced for collecting events down the stack of overlays increases with the number of layers. For a fixed number of layers, the protocol scales similarly with the graph-theoretic properties for a network of increasing size.
NCTU-ISU's Evaluation for the User-Centered Search Task at ImageCLEF 2004

We participated in the user-centered search task at ImageCLEF 2004. In this paper, we proposed two interactive Cross-Language image retrieval systems - T_ICLEF and VCT_ICLEF. The first one is implemented with a practical relevance feedback approach based on textual information while the second one combines textual and image information to help users find a target image. The experimental results show that VCT_ICLEF has a better performance than T_ICLEF in almost all cases. Overall, VCT_ICLEF helps users find the image within a fewer iterations with a maximum of 2 iterations saved.
Classification of medical documents according to diseases

Medical text classification is still one of the popular research problems inside text classification domain. Apart from some text data compiled from hospital records, most of the researchers in this field evaluate their classification methodologies on documents from MEDLINE database. When whole documents in the database are taken into consideration, MEDLINE is a multi-class and multi-label database. A dataset, containing a small subset of MEDLINE documents belonging to disease categories, is constructed in this study. It is a multi-class but single-label dataset. Due to the highly unbalanced distribution of this dataset, only documents belonging to top-10 disease categories are used in the experiments. The performances of three different pattern classifiers are analyzed on disease classification problem using this dataset. These three pattern classifiers are Bayesian network, C4.5 decision tree, and Random Forest trees. Experiments are realized for the two different cases where the stemming preprocessing step is applied or not. Experimental results show that the most successful classifier among three classifiers is Bayesian network classifier. Also, the best performance is obtained without applying stemming.
On the mobile‐to‐mobile linear time‐variant shallow‐water acoustic channel response

We expose some concepts concerning the channel impulse response (CIR) of linear time‐varying (LTV) channels to give a proper characterization of the mobile‐to‐mobile underwater channel. We find different connections between the linear time‐invariant (LTI) CIR of the static channel and 2 definitions of LTV CIRs of the dynamic mobile‐to‐mobile channel. These connections are useful to design a dynamic channel simulator from the static channel models available in the literature. Such feature is particularly interesting for overspread channels, which are hard to characterize by a measuring campaign. Specifically, the shallow water acoustic (SWA) channel is potentially overspread because of the signal low velocity of propagation, which prompts long delay spread responses and great Doppler effect. Furthermore, from these connections between the LTI static CIRs and the LTV dynamic CIRs, we find that the SWA mobile‐to‐mobile CIR does not only depend on the relative speed between transceivers, but also on the absolute speed of each of them referred to the velocity of propagation. Nevertheless, publications about this topic do not consider it and formulate their equations in terms of the relative speed between transceivers. We illustrate our find using 2 couples of examples where, even though the relative speed between the mobiles is the same, their CIRs are not.
Collocation Polarity Disambiguation Using Web-based Pseudo Contexts

This paper focuses on the task of collocation polarity disambiguation. The collocation refers to a binary tuple of a polarity word and a target (such as or ), in which the sentiment orientation of the polarity word ("long") changes along with different targets ("battery life" or "startup"). To disambiguate a collocation's polarity, previous work always turned to investigate the polarities of its surrounding contexts, and then assigned the majority polarity to the collocation. However, these contexts are limited, thus the resulting polarity is insufficient to be reliable. We therefore propose an unsupervised three-component framework to expand some pseudo contexts from web, to help disambiguate a collocation's polarity. Without using any additional labeled data, experiments show that our method is effective.