Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lipid composition of hepatic and adipose tissues from normal cats and from cats with idiopathic hepatic lipidosis.

The purpose of this study was to characterize the lipid classes in hepatic and adipose tissues from cats with idiopathic hepatic lipidosis (IHL). Concentrations of triglyceride, phospholipid phosphorus, and free and total cholesterol were determined in lipid extracts of liver homogenates from 5 cats with IHL and 5 healthy control cats. Total fatty acid composition of liver and adipose tissue was also compared. Triglyceride accounted for 34% of liver by weight in cats with IHL (338 +/- 38 mg/g wet liver) versus 1% in control cats (9.9 +/- 1.0 mg/g wet liver, P < .001). The mass of cholesterol ester was significantly higher in triglyceride-free (TG-free) liver from cats with IHL (741 +/- 340 micrograms/g TG-free wet liver) compared to healthy cats (31 +/- 11 micrograms/g TG-free wet liver, P < .05). Total fatty acid composition of hepatic tissue in the 2 groups differed; palmitate was higher (19.5 +/- 1.1% of total fatty acids in cats with IHL versus 9.2 +/- 2.7% in controls, P < .05), stearate was lower (8.5 +/- 0.8% versus 16.8 +/- 1.1%, P < .05), oleate was higher (41.2 +/- 1.6% versus 31.1 +/- 1.8%, P < .05), and arachidonate was lower (1.2 +/- 0.2% versus 6.0 +/- 0.9%, P < .05). The total fatty acid composition of adipose tissue also differed between the 2 groups; palmitate was higher (26.2 +/- 1.2% in cats with IHL versus 21.3 +/- 0.6% in controls, P < .05), total monounsaturated fatty acids were higher (48.4 +/- 1.0% versus 45.0 +/- 0.8%, P < .05), linolenate was lower (13.3 +/- 1.6% versus 17.5 +/- 0.9%, P < .05), total (n-6) fatty acids were lower (13.8 +/- 1.38% versus 18.4 +/- 0.83%, P < .05), linolenate was lower (0.2 +/- 0.04% versus 0.7 +/- 0.06%, P < .06), and total (n-3) fatty acids were lower (0.3 +/- 0.02% versus 1.3 +/- 0.32%, P < .05). The fatty acid composition of both liver and adipose tissue was similar for stearate, oleate, linoleate, and linolenate in cats with IHL. These results support the hypothesis that the origin of hepatic triglyceride in cats with IHL is the mobilization of fatty acids from adipose tissue.
Assimilation of Spatially Sparse In Situ Soil Moisture Networks into a Continuous Model Domain

Growth in the availability of near‐real‐time soil moisture observations from ground‐based networks has spurred interest in the assimilation of these observations into land surface models via a two‐dimensional data assimilation system. However, the design of such systems is currently hampered by our ignorance concerning the spatial structure of error afflicting ground and model‐based soil moisture estimates. Here we apply newly developed triple collocation techniques to provide the spatial error information required to fully parameterize a two‐dimensional (2‐D) data assimilation system designed to assimilate spatially sparse observations acquired from existing ground‐based soil moisture networks into a spatially continuous Antecedent Precipitation Index (API) model for operational agricultural drought monitoring. Over the contiguous United States (CONUS), the posterior uncertainty of surface soil moisture estimates associated with this 2‐D system is compared to that obtained from the 1‐D assimilation of remote sensing retrievals to assess the value of ground‐based observations to constrain a surface soil moisture analysis. Results demonstrate that a fourfold increase in existing CONUS ground station density is needed for ground network observations to provide a level of skill comparable to that provided by existing satellite‐based surface soil moisture retrievals.
The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments

Online survey data were collected from 30,000 users of Massively Multi-User Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) over a three year period to explore users' demographics, motivations, and derived experiences. Not only do MMORPGs appeal to a broad age range (Mage = 26.57, range = 11–68), but the appeal is strong (on average 22 hours of usage per week) across users of all ages (r = −.04). An exploratory factor analysis revealed a five factor model of user motivations—Achievement, Relationship, Immersion, Escapism, and Manipulation—illustrating the multifaceted appeal of these online environments. Male players were significantly more likely to be driven by the Achievement and Manipulation factors, while female players were significantly more likely to be driven by the Relationship factor. Also, the data indicated that users derived meaningful relationships and salient emotional experiences, as well as real-life leadership skills from these virtual environments. MMORPGs are not simply a pastime for teenagers, but a valuable research venue and platform where millions of users interact and collaborate using real-time 3D avatars on a daily basis.
ANLRED: A Robust AQM Mechanism for Congestion Avoidance

Internet over the past few years has undergone dramatic changes in terms of scale, penetration rate and the diversity of applications. The demand for continuous network connectivity is profilerating. Moreover, it has been observed that the usage of real time applications like Voice over IP (VoIP) and Live Streaming has increased drastically. Passive Queue Management (PQM) mechanisms in the routers do not react to congestion till the buffers overflow. This has two severe consequences: (i) large queueing delays that hurt the performance of real time traffic because such traffic is sensitive to delay and (ii) a large number of consecutive packet drops which affect the network stability. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the deployment of Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms in modern Internet routers to overcome drawbacks of buffer overflow. Although Random Early Detection (RED) is the most widely studied AQM mechanism, it is highly sensitive to parameter settings. In this paper, we propose a robust AQM mechanism named Adaptive Nonlinear RED (ANLRED) which minimizes the parameter sensitivity of RED. Results obtained using ns-2 in a wide variety of Internet scenarios show that ANLRED improves the overall performance of the network in terms of link utilization while maintaining an acceptable mean queue length and minimal packet drop rate. Moreover, ANLRED implementation requires minimum algorithmic changes and hence, is easy to deploy.
The Synergy between Complex Channel-Specific FIR Filter and Spatial Filter for Single-Trial EEG Classification

The common spatial pattern analysis (CSP), a frequently utilized feature extraction method in brain-computer-interface applications, is believed to be time-invariant and sensitive to noises, mainly due to an inherent shortcoming of purely relying on spatial filtering. Therefore, temporal/spectral filtering which can be very effective to counteract the unfavorable influence of noises is usually used as a supplement. This work integrates the CSP spatial filters with complex channel-specific finite impulse response (FIR) filters in a natural and intuitive manner. Each hybrid spatial-FIR filter is of high-order, data-driven and is unique to its corresponding channel. They are derived by introducing multiple time delays and regularization into conventional CSP. The general framework of the method follows that of CSP but performs better, as proven in single-trial classification tasks like event-related potential detection and motor imagery.
Comparing Web Services with other Software Components

Software metrics are vital for the management of software development, especially when a new technology is being adopted and established practices have yet to emerge. As a kind of software components, Web service technology has flourished and attracted a flurry of research activities. Despite the vast amount of research on mechanisms of Web services, there have been little investigations of the overall nature of existing Web services from a software component point of view. This paper is the first attempt to compare Web services with other software components in terms of established metrics in software engineering, including object oriented metrics and interface metrics. In this study we conclude that there are statistical differences between the interface, variable name and other OO metrics when one compares a large sample of Web services with typical OO systems. The distributions obtained give insight into the typical characteristics of Web services and can be used to identify candidates for wrapping into Web services.
Association between SNP Heterozygosity and Quantitative Traits in the Framingham Heart Study

Associations between multilocus heterozygosity and fitness traits, also termed heterozygosity and fitness correlations (HFCs), have been reported in numerous organisms. These studies, in general, indicate a positive relationship between heterozygosity and fitness traits. We studied the association between genome‐wide heterozygosity at 706 non‐synonymous and synonymous SNPs and 19 quantitative traits, including morphological, biochemical and fitness traits in the Framingham Heart Study. Statistically significant association was found between heterozygosity and systolic and diastolic blood pressures as well as left ventricular diameter and wall thickness. These results suggest that heterozygosity may be associated with traits, such as blood pressure that closely track environmental variations. Balancing selection may be operating in the maintenance of heterozygosity and the major components of blood pressure and hypertension. Genome wide SNP heterozygosity may be used to understand the phenomenon of dominance as well as the evolutionary basis of many quantitative traits in humans.
A legacy of control? The capital subsidy for housing, and informal settlement intervention in South Africa

Control over the urbanization process in South Africa was redefined after the mid‐1980s, when the policy of ‘orderly urbanization’ replaced that of racially based ‘influx control’. In the early 1990s, under the inspiration of the private sector‐funded policy think tank, the Urban Foundation, a standardized capital subsidy was introduced as a means of financing the orderly settlement of poor households on peri‐urban land. Currently, the capital subsidy may be considered the cornerstone of the South African national housing policy. This article examines how the capital subsidy framework has perpetuated the practice of control by submitting urban expansion in the lowest income sector to rigid regulation. It discusses recent responses from various sectors of the South African society, while also examining how continuity in the intervention approach was maintained from previous decades. The article points to a need to depart from the capital subsidy framework as a basis for informal settlement intervention in South Africa. En Afrique du Sud, la maitrise du processus d'urbanisation a ete redefinie vers la fin des annees 1980, alors que la politique publique de ‘l'urbanisation ordonnee’ remplacait celle du ‘contro le des flux’ aux criteres raciaux. Au debut des annees 1990, inspiree d'un groupe de reflexion strategique finance par le secteur prive, la Urban Foundation, une subvention d'equipement classique, a ete lancee comme moyen de financer l'implantation ordonnee des menages pauvres dans les terres peri‐urbaines. Actuellement, la subvention d'equipement peut etre consideree comme la pierre angulaire de la politique nationale du logement en Afrique du Sud. L'article examine comment le systeme des subventions d'equipement a perpetue l'exercice du controle en soumettant l'expansion urbaine a une reglementation rigide pour la population aux plus faibles revenus. Il etudie les reactions recentes de plusieurs secteurs de la societe sud‐africaine, tout en approfondissant comment la continuite de cette demarche a ete preservee a partir des dernieres decennies. Ces travaux soulignent la necessite de sortir du systeme des subventions d'equipement comme fondement d'intervention pour l'habitat sauvage en Afrique du Sud.
Regulatory Fit Effects in a Nonlinearly Separable Category Learning Task

The regulatory fit-cognitive flexibility hypothesis was tested in two experiments using a non-linearly separable category set, where cognitive flexibility was hypothesized to be advantageous for category learning. A promotion or a prevention focus was induced and subjects performed the task with either a gains or losses reward structure, creating two conditions of regulatory fit (promotion/gain, prevention/loss) and two conditions of regulatory mismatch (promotion/loss, prevention/gain). It was predicted that subjects in the regulatory fit conditions would be more likely to reach a criterion of performance and learn a complex rule, while subjects in the regulatory mismatch conditions would be less likely to reach a criterion of performance and more likely to use a suboptimal rule. Regulatory fit advantages were not apparent in either the gains or losses versions of the task.
Hearing impairment and audiovisual speech integration ability: a case study report

Research in audiovisual speech perception has demonstrated that sensory factors such as auditory and visual acuity are associated with a listener's ability to extract and combine auditory and visual speech cues. This case study report examined audiovisual integration using a newly developed measure of capacity in a sample of hearing-impaired listeners. Capacity assessments are unique because they examine the contribution of reaction-time (RT) as well as accuracy to determine the extent to which a listener efficiently combines auditory and visual speech cues relative to independent race model predictions. Multisensory speech integration ability was examined in two experiments: an open-set sentence recognition and a closed set speeded-word recognition study that measured capacity. Most germane to our approach, capacity illustrated speed-accuracy tradeoffs that may be predicted by audiometric configuration. Results revealed that some listeners benefit from increased accuracy, but fail to benefit in terms of speed on audiovisual relative to unisensory trials. Conversely, other listeners may not benefit in the accuracy domain but instead show an audiovisual processing time benefit.
Characterization of interferon gamma receptors on osteoclasts: Effect of interferon gamma on osteoclastic superoxide generation

Osteoclasts are the primary cells responsible for bone resorption. Osteoclast formation and bone resorption activities involve processes tightly controlled by a network of cytokines. The presence of interferon gamma (IFN‐γ) receptors on osteoclasts is a necessary prerequisite for IFN‐γ to directly affect osteoclastic activity. To date, the presence of the IFN‐γ receptor on osteoclasts has not been established. This study provides evidence that osteoclasts express the IFN‐γ receptor. Specific binding of IFN‐γ to the osteoclastic receptor stimulates osteoclastic superoxide generation. The p91 and p47 components of the NADPH oxidase increase after IFN‐γ stimulation and may account for the enhanced superoxide generation. Antisense experiments targeting p91 and p47 subunits abrogate the increased osteoclastic superoxide production stimulated by IFN‐γ. Thus, superoxide generation by osteoclasts is stimulated by activation of a functional IFN‐γ receptor on the osteoclast. J. Cell. Biochem. 84: 645–654, 2002. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Improvement of the Consistent Fuzzy Preference Relation Method and Comparison with the AHP Method

AHP is always a popular method adopted by researchers in dealing with the issues of multiple criteria decision making. However, with the increase in the criteria, the traditional AHP may cause a problem in terms of the consistency of the questionnaires. Later on, the method of Consistent Fuzzy Preference Relation was developed to resolve such issue. But currently the utilization rate of this method is low, -probably because most researchers still doubt the result of the CFPR method. The main purpose of this study is using experiment and statistics analysis to compare the two methods. The final report shows that the results obtained by the CFFR method and the traditional AHP method are similar. It indicates CFPR is a good method for dealing with the MCDM problem. Moreover, this study also proposes a suggestion to improve the CFPR, so as to resolve the issue of screening out the valid questionnaires. Finally, this study used the CFPR method to code the software for use of follow-up researchers.
Adaptive Sampling for Feature Detection, Tracking, and Recognition on Mobile Platforms

Local image features have become ubiquitous for a wide range of computer vision tasks. For embedded and low power devices, speed and memory efficiency is of main concern, and therefore, there have been several recent attempts to improve these issues. In this paper, we are concerned with the early components of the object recognition pipeline, namely, feature detection, feature description, and feature tracking. In particular, we propose a novel approach to speed up feature detectors and to inform feature tracking that speeds up the recognition process by using the concept of adaptive sampling. We select two examples of visual algorithms to be modified by adaptive sampling and present comparative results with and without modifications. We show how processing time and memory footprint can benefit by this approach with little impact on overall output quality. We implement our proposed methods on a chipset commonly found on smartphones and we discuss the obtained improvements.
Universality and predictability in molecular quantitative genetics

Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary point of view, are important as targets of natural selection. We review recent developments in evolutionary theory and experiments that are expected to become building blocks of a quantitative genetics of molecular traits. We focus on universal evolutionary characteristics: these are largely independent of a trait’s genetic basis, which is often at least partially unknown. We show that universal measurements can be used to infer selection on a quantitative trait, which determines its evolutionary mode of conservation or adaptation. Furthermore, universality is closely linked to predictability of trait evolution across lineages. We argue that universal trait statistics extends over a range of cellular scales and opens new avenues of quantitative evolutionary systems biology.
Region Based Exemplar References for Image Segmentation Evaluation

Quantitative evaluation of image segmentation quality is usually based on comparing a segmentation with multiple reference segmentations. Instead of holistically comparing with each reference, we propose a region based evaluation framework, where an exemplar reference is adaptively constructed and applied to a generally defined evaluation measure. As examples, we implement three well-known evaluation measures and present an efficient scheme to compute each measure. Extensive experiments on the benchmark databases show that the proposed evaluation framework can improve the evaluation precision of existing measures.
Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) and Related Perfluorinated Compounds in Human Maternal and Cord Blood Samples: Assessment of PFOS Exposure in a Susceptible Population during Pregnancy

Fluorinated organic compounds (FOCs), such as perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), perfluoro-octanoate (PFOA), and perfluorooctane sulfonylamide (PFOSA), are widely used in the manufacture of plastic, electronics, textile, and construction material in the apparel, leather, and upholstery industries. FOCs have been detected in human blood samples. Studies have indicated that FOCs may be detrimental to rodent development possibly by affecting thyroid hormone levels. In the present study, we determined the concentrations of FOCs in maternal and cord blood samples. Pregnant women 17-37 years of age were enrolled as subjects. FOCs in 15 pairs of maternal and cord blood samples were analyzed by liquid chromatography-electrospray mass spectrometry coupled with online extraction. The limits of quantification of PFOS, PFOA, and PFOSA in human plasma or serum were 0.5, 0.5, and 1.0 ng/mL, respectively. The method enables the precise determination of FOCs and can be applied to the detection of FOCs in human blood samples for monitoring human exposure. PFOS concentrations in maternal samples ranged from 4.9 to 17.6 ng/mL, whereas those in fetal samples ranged from 1.6 to 5.3 ng/mL. In contrast, PFOSA was not detected in fetal or maternal samples, whereas PFOA was detected only in maternal samples (range, < 0.5 to 2.3 ng/mL, 4 of 15). Our results revealed a high correlation between PFOS concentrations in maternal and cord blood (r2 = 0.876). However, we did not find any significant correlations between PFOS concentration in maternal and cord blood samples and age bracket, birth weight, or levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone or free thyroxine. Our study revealed that human fetuses in Japan may be exposed to relatively high levels of FOCs. Further investigation is required to determine the postnatal effects of fetal exposure to FOCs. Key words: cord blood, fluorinated organic compounds, human, PFOA, PFOS, PFOSA, pregnancy.
Complex dynamics in hard oscillators: the influence of constant inputs

AbstractSystems with the coexistence of different stable attractors are widely exploited insystems biology in order to suitably model the differentiating processes arising inliving cells. In order to describe genetic regulatory networks several deterministicmodels based on systems of nonlinear ordinary differential equations have beenproposed.Few studies have been developed to characterize how either an external inputor the coupling can drive systems with different coexisting states. For the sake ofsimplicity, in this manuscript we focus on systems belonging to the class of radialisochron clocks that exhibits hard excitation, in order to investigate their complexdynamics, local and global bifurcations arising in presence of constant externalinputs. In particular the occurrence of saddle node on limit cycle bifurcations isdetected.Keywords: complex dynamics, bioinspired systems, hard excitation, saddle nodeon limit cycle bifurcation, constant input1. IntroductionBeing the most diffuse formalism to model dynamical systems in science andengineering, ordinary differential equations (ODEs) have been widely used in sys-tems biology as well. In particular, nonlinear dynamical systems that can exhibit
Low-Voltage, Low-Distortion and Rail-to-Rail CMOS Sample and Hold Circuit

In this letter, we propose a sample and hold circuit (S/H circuit) with the clock boost technique and the input signal tracking technique. The proposed circuit block generates the clock with the amplitude of VDD+vin, and the clock is used to control the MOS switch. By applying this circuit to a S/H circuit, we can deal with the rail-to-rail signal with maintaining low distortion. Furthermore, the hold error caused by the charge injection and the clock feedthrough can be also reduced by using the dummy switch. The Star-HSPICE simulation results are reported in this letter.