Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mononuclear phagocytes egress from an in vitro model of the vascular wall by migrating across endothelium in the basal to apical direction: role of intercellular adhesion molecule 1 and the CD11/CD18 integrins

Little is known about how mononuclear phagocytes (MP) are cleared from sites of inflammation as inflammatory lesions resolve. In this study, the possibility that MP could be cleared from tissues by migrating across endothelium in the basal to apical direction was investigated. In an in vitro model of a blood vessel wall consisting of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) grown on amniotic tissue, a majority of MP that initially transmigrated into the amnion later exited by migrating back across the endothelium in the basal to apical direction. MP that egressed from these cultures adhered to the apical surface of the endothelium or were found nonadherent in the medium above the endothelium. Egression of MP continued throughout the 4-d period examined, displaying higher than first order kinetics and a t(1/2) of approximately 24 h. These kinetics were decreased by increasing the volume of medium bathing the cultures, suggesting that a soluble factor(s) regulates the rate of egression. In contrast, the kinetics were accelerated by pretreating the endothelium with IL-1. The initial phase of this increased rate of egression was inhibited by antibodies to inter- cellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1) or CD18 by 100 and 71%, respectively. Immunostaining revealed that ICAM-1 was present on the apical and basal surfaces of umbilical vein endothelium in vitro and in situ. These data demonstrate that MP can traverse endothelium in the basal to apical direction, and lend insight into the mechanisms by which this process occurs.
Information theoretic caching: The multi-user case

In this paper, we present information theoretic inner and outer bounds on the fundamental tradeoff between cache memory size and update rate in a multi-user cache network. Each user is assumed to have individual caches, while upon users' requests, an update message is sent though a common link to all users. The database is represented as a discrete memoryless source and the user request information is represented as side information that is available at the decoders and the update encoder, but oblivious to the cache encoder. We establish two inner bounds, the first based on a centralized caching strategy and the second based on a decentralized caching strategy. For the case when the user requests are i.i. d. with the uniform distribution, we show that the performance of the decentralized inner bound is within a multiplicative gap of 4 from the optimal cache-rate tradeoff. For general request distributions, we numerically compare the bounds and the baseline uncoded strategy, caching the most popular files.
Comparative evaluation of L and LCL filters in transformerless grid tied converters for active power injection

This paper presents a comparison between two different passive filters for power converters tied to the grid with the application of active power injection. It addresses the L (inductive) filter and the LCL (inductive-capacitive-inductive) filter in single-phase power converters for which are presented the parameter design and modeling. These filters provide coupling of the power converter to the electrical grid and mitigation of high frequency harmonics which are inherent to switching power converters. It is obtained the state-space model and the transfer function of both type of filters and some design considerations for active power injection are presented. An evaluation, by means of numerical simulations, is presented for a single-phase H-bridge inverter with unipolar pulse width modulation for active power injection.
Global Analysis of mRNA Decay in Halobacterium salinarum NRC-1 at Single-Gene Resolution Using DNA Microarrays

ABSTRACT RNA degradation is an important factor in the regulation of gene expression. It allows organisms to quickly respond to changing environmental conditions by adapting the expression of individual genes. The stability of individual mRNAs within an organism varies considerably, contributing to differential amounts of proteins expressed. In this study we used DNA microarrays to analyze mRNA degradation in exponentially growing cultures of the extremely halophilic euryarchaeon Halobacterium salinarum NRC-1 on a global level. We determined mRNA half-lives for 1,717 open reading frames, 620 of which are part of known or predicted operons. Under the tested conditions transcript stabilities ranged from 5 min to more than 18 min, with 79% of the evaluated mRNAs showing half-lives between 8 and 12 min. The overall mean half-life was 10 min, which is considerably longer than the ones found in the other prokaryotes investigated thus far. As previously observed in Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we could not detect a significant correlation between transcript length and transcript stability, but there was a relationship between gene function and transcript stability. Genes that are known or predicted to be transcribed in operons exhibited similar mRNA half-lives. These results provide initial insights into mRNA turnover in a euryarchaeon. Moreover, our model organism, H. salinarum NRC-1, is one of just two archaea sequenced to date that are missing the core subunits of the archaeal exosome. This complex orthologous to the RNA degrading exosome of eukarya is found in all other archaeal genomes sequenced thus far.
Entropy and Fragility in Supercooling Liquids

We review the Kauzmann paradox and what it implies about the configuration space energy hypersurface for “structural glassformers. ” With this background, we then show how the relaxation expression of Adam and Gibbs qualitatively accounts for most of the phenomenology of liquid and polymeric glassformers including the strong/fragile liquid pattern, and the behavior of non-ergodic systems. Extended temperature range relaxation studies are consistent with a relaxation time pre-exponent on the quasi-lattice vibration time scale. When this boundary condition is imposed on Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann fittings, correspondence of T0 with TK is found for liquids with Tg ranging over 1000 K. When it is imposed on the WLF equation C1 is obliged to become ~16, and the corresponding force-fitted C2 provides a measure of the polymer fragility which is generally not available from thermodynamic studies. Systems which exhibit discontinuous changes in configurational entropy on temperature increase, which include unfolding proteins, are briefly reviewed.
A Study on Techniques for Proactively Identifying Malicious URLs

As most of the malware nowadays use Internet as their main doorway to infect a new system, it has become imperative for security vendors to provide cloud-based solutions that can filter and block malicious URLs. This paper presents different practical considerations related to this problem. The key points that we focus on are the usage of different machine learning techniques and unsupervised learning methods for detecting malicious URLs with respect to memory footprint. The database that we have used in this paper was collected during a period of 48 weeks and consists in approximately 6,000,000 benign and malicious URLs. We also evaluated how detection rate and false positive rate evolved during that period and draw some conclusions related to current malware landscape and Internet attack vectors.
Intravitreal bevacizumab (Avastin) in choroidal neovascular membrane in angioid streaks

Angioid streaks are crack-like dehiscences in the Bruch′s membrane, which predispose to the development of a choroidal neovascular membrane (CNVM) that carries a poor visual outcome. We report successful treatment in a 25-year-old woman with bilateral angioid streaks and subfoveal CNVM in the left eye who received two doses of intravitreal bevacizumab (1.25 mg) injections six weeks apart, resulting in rapid regression of the CNVM.
TelegraphCQ : Continuous Dataflow Processing for an Uncertain World

Increasingly pervasive networks fuel the research and development of new data management technologies to deal with the streaming data and continuous queries that are typical of data stream applications. TelegraphCQ is the next generation of Telegraph System, which is a highly adaptive streaming dataflow system with shared processing that uses building blocks from conventional relational database systems.
Comparative physiological studies on four species of hemoflagellates in culture. II. Effect of carbohydrates and related substances and some amino compounds on the respiration.

Reports on the quantitative effect of carbohydrates and other potential energy sources on the respiration of hemoflagellates, especially from a comparative standpoint, are rather scanty. Colas-Belcour and Lwoff (1925), Noguchi (1926) and Kligler (1926) reported that some of the members of the group can ferment certain sugars in complex culture media. More recently, Chang (1948) using manometric techniques, reported the utilization of glucose and fructose but not maltose or lactose by Schizotrypanum cruzi and three species of Leishmania. Fulton and Joyner (1949) studied the oxidation of several carbohydrates by the flagellate form of L. donovani and Medina et al (1955) described similar studies with L. brasiliensis. The effect of certain carbohydrates and some amino compounds on the respiration of Trypanosoma lewisi and a form termed Strigomonas oncopelti have also been observed (Ryley, 1951, 1955). Thurston (1958) studied the oxygen uptake of T. lewisi and T. equiperdum in the presence of amino acids and similar substances. Finally, Chatterjee and Ghosh (1959) repeated part of the work done by Fulton and Joyner (loc. cit.) with the kala-azar organism. In this second report, data are presented on the effect of a series of carbohydrates and related substances and a few nitrogenous compounds on the respiration of the culture form of four species of hemoflagellates. Appreciation is expressed to Dr. Clark P. Read for his interest in the work and kind advice and criticism throughout the investigation.
Effect of Copper on Acid Phosphatase Activity in Yeast Yarrowia lipolytica

Acid phosphatase (APase) activity of the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica increased with increasing Cu2+ concentrations in the medium. Furthermore, the enzyme in soluble form was stimulated in vitro by Cu2+, Co2+, Ni2+, Mn2+ and Mg2+ and inhibited by Ag+ and Cd2+. The most effective ion was Cu2+, especially for the enzyme from cultures in medium containing Cu2+, whereas APase activity in wall-bound fragments was only slightly activated by Cu2+. The content of cellular phosphate involving polyphosphate was decreased by adding Cu2+, regardless of whether or not the medium was rich in inorganic phosphate. Overproduction of the enzyme stimulated by Cu2+ might depend on derepression of the gene encoding the APase isozyme.
Real‐Time Ray‐Casting and Advanced Shading of Discrete Isosurfaces

This paper presents a real-time rendering pipeline for implicit surfaces deﬁned by a regular volumetric grid of samples. We use a ray-casting approach on current graphics hardware to perform a direct rendering of the isosurface. A two-level hierarchical representation of the regular grid is employed to allow object-order and image-order empty space skipping and circumvent memory limitations of graphics hardware. Adaptive sampling and iterative reﬁnement lead to high-quality ray/surface intersections. All shading operations are deferred to image space, making their computational effort independent of the size of the input data. A continuous third-order reconstruction ﬁlter allows on-the-ﬂy evaluation of smooth normals and extrinsic curvatures at any point on the surface without interpolating data computed at grid points. With these local shape descriptors, it is possible to perform advanced shading using high-quality lighting and non-photorealistic effects in real-time
Drivers of land use change and carbon mapping in the savannah area of Ghana

Abstract Land-use and land-cover change in both forest reserves and off-reserves is a critical issue in sub Saharan Africa. Deforestation and conversion of forest land to agricultural land continue to be one of the major environmental problems in Africa, and for that matter, Ghana cannot be exceptional; and its resultant effect is the loss in the ecological integrity and the quality of forests, resulting in carbon loss and the resultant climate change effects (FAO 2016). The study area covers the Community Resource Management Areas (CREMA) of the Mole National Park in Ghana, and this study reveals that the area is well endowed with a diverse composition and structure of woodland including dense, open and riverine stretches, which – under the national definition of forest – qualifies as forest. The results reveal that there had been an annual deforestation rate of 0.11% over the period of review. It was concluded from the study that woodland had high carbon stocks with an average carbon of 80 tC/ha, the highest being 194 tC/ha and the lowest being 7 tC/ha, which was recorded in the dense woodland and grassland respectively. The fluxes within the land sector in the study area are moderate and the potential of the area to qualify for as REDD+ is very high. However, the drivers of deforestation, especially bush fires and illegal timber harvesting, are challenges that need to be addressed.
Sodium transport system in plant cells

Since sodium, Na, is a non-essential element for the plant growth, the molecular mechanism of Na+ transport system in plants has remained elusive for the last two decades. The accumulation of Na+ in soil through irrigation for sustainable agricultural crop production, particularly in arid land, and by changes in environmental and climate conditions leads to the buildup of toxic level of salts in the soil. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, extensive molecular research has identified several classes of Na+ transporters that play major roles in the alleviation of ionic stress by excluding toxic Na+ from the cytosol or preventing Na+ transport to the photosynthetic organs, and also in osmotic stress by modulating intra/extracellular osmotic balance. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge of three major Na+ transporters, namely NHX, SOS1, and HKT transporters, including recently revealed characteristics of these transporters.
Out-of-focus Blur: Image De-blurring

Image de-blurring is important in many cases of imaging a real scene or object by a camera. This project focuses on de-blurring an image distorted by an out-of-focus blur through a simulation study. A pseudo-inverse filter is first explored but it fails because of severe noise amplification. Then Tikhonov regularization methods are employed, which produce greatly improved results compared to the pseudo-inverse filter. In Tikhonov regularization, the choice of the regularization parameter plays a critical rule in obtaining a high-quality image, and the regularized solutions possess a semi-convergence property. The best result, with the relative restoration error of 8.49%, is achieved when the prescribed discrepancy principle is used to decide an optimal value. Furthermore, an iterative method, Conjugated Gradient, is employed for image de-blurring, which is fast in computation and leads to an even better result with the relative restoration error of 8.22%. The number of iteration in CG acts as a regularization parameter, and the iterates have a semi-convergence property as well.
Fault-tolerant control for uncertain linear systems via adaptive and LMI approaches

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a fault-tolerant control scheme for linear systems with mismatched uncertainties which are assumed to be norm-bounded, affine and polytopic, respectively. The linear fractional transformation (LFT) and linear matrix inequality (LMI) techniques are introduced to handle the mismatched uncertainties, and the adaptive techniques are used to compensate actuator faults. By using the cone complementary linearisation algorithm, the resulting stability criteria are converted into solvable ones. Then, on the basis of Lyapunov stability theory, it is shown that the solutions to the closed-loop system and error system are uniformly bounded, especially, the states converge asymptotically to zero. Finally, simulations are given to illustrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed theoretical results.
Vulnerability of core networks under different epidemic attacks

This paper is focused on the propagation of failures within a core telecommunication network (i.e. virus or malicious code spreading), which are commonly represented using epidemic models. This work conducts an analysis of the vulnerability of five core telecommunication networks subject to different epidemic attacks. The difference between the attacks relies on the method used to select the initial set of infected nodes. As a novelty, the investigation is focused on the initial stage of the epidemics (first 48 hours). The analysis is carried out taking into account the topological connectivity of the networks. Results are presented in two phases. The first one concerns the first 24 hours of the epidemics evolution and shows the reaction of core networks to different types of epidemic attacks. The second one is focused on the time frame between 24 and 48 hours and presents a study of the repairing times needed to eradicate the epidemics. Results show that the core telecommunication networks react differently depending on the type of epidemics. Thus, different repairing times need to be applied in order to maintain a specific level of connectivity of the networks.
Piecewise-linear artificial neural networks for PID controller tuning

A new algorithm of PID controller tuning is presented in this paper. It is well known that there have been introduced many techniques for PID controller tuning, both theoretical and experimental ones. However, this algorithm is suitable especially for highly nonlinear processes. It uses a model of the controlled process in the shape of piecewise-linear neural network which is linearized continuously and resulting linearized model is used for PID controller online tuning. While at the beginning of the paper the algorithm is described in theory, at the end there are mentioned some practical applications.
Bringing Change in Government Organizations: Evolution Towards Post-Bureaucracy with Web-Based IT Projects

This paper examines the following question: How do government organizations become more “post-bureaucratic” with web-based IT projects? It draws on evolutionary thinking to conceptualize processes of change in government organizations as involving sequences of variation, selection, and retention as well as to identify various sources of change: internal ones (e.g. administrators), as well as external ones (e.g. technological innovations and institutional pressures). The paper relates findings from four in-depth qualitative case studies of web-based IT projects in different government organizations. The interpretation of these findings helps expand the evolutionary conceptualization by suggesting how different sources of change interact in the change process and variously affect different stages of the evolution.
Did Nordic Countries Recognize the Gathering Storm of World War II? Evidence from the Bond Markets

This paper analyzes and compares different ways of assessing how people perceived impending threats of war in the past. Conventional Nordic historiography of World War II claims there were few, if any, people in the Nordic countries who perceived a significantly increased threat of war between 1938 and early 1940. At the same time, historical methods face problems when it comes to capturing the often tacitly held beliefs of a large number of people in the past. In this paper, we analyze these assessments by looking at sudden shifts in sovereign debt yields and spreads in the Nordic bond markets at that time. Our results suggest that Nordic contemporaries indeed perceived significant war risk increases around the time of major war-related geopolitical events. While these findings question some i? ½ but not all i? ½ of standard Nordic World War II historiography, they also demonstrate the value of analyzing historical market prices to reassess the often tacitly held views and opinions of large groups of people in the past.
Q-Gene: Processing Quantitative Real-time RT-PCR Data

SUMMARY Q-Gene is an application for the processing of quantitative real-time RT-PCR data. It offers the user the possibility to freely choose between two principally different procedures to calculate normalized gene expressions as either means of Normalized Expressions or Mean Normalized Expressions. In this contribution it will be shown that the calculation of Mean Normalized Expressions has to be used for processing simplex PCR data, while multiplex PCR data should preferably be processed by calculating Normalized Expressions. The two procedures, which are currently in widespread use and regarded as more or less equivalent alternatives, should therefore specifically be applied according to the quantification procedure used. AVAILABILITY Web access to this program is provided at http://www.biotechniques. com/softlib/qgene.html
Responding to Black Markets: Role of IT and Network Structures

This paper presents the unique black markets of asset pooling and leasing services, which exposes the nature and extent of industry-specific threats. We explore how firms providing such services together with their network structures that constitute the foundations of asset pooling and leasing respond to the threat of black markets. We encapsulate detecting and encountering the threat of black markets through the theoretical lens of agility, which encompasses the elements of sensing and responding (Overby et al. 2006; Roberts and Grover 2012). This novel concept of responding to threats using the agility lens has not been adequately addressed by past studies on enterprise agility. Through a case study of a global asset pooling and leasing company, we reveal the criticality of network structures, the impracticality of IT and inadequate tracking mechanisms that challenge firms in minimizing such threats.
Robust Low-Rank Tensor Recovery: Models and Algorithms

Robust tensor recovery plays an instrumental role in robustifying tensor decompositions for multilinear data analysis against outliers, gross corruptions, and missing values and has a diverse array of applications. In this paper, we study the problem of robust low-rank tensor recovery in a convex optimization framework, drawing upon recent advances in robust principal component analysis and tensor completion. We propose tailored optimization algorithms with global convergence guarantees for solving both the constrained and the Lagrangian formulations of the problem. These algorithms are based on the highly efficient alternating direction augmented Lagrangian and accelerated proximal gradient methods. We also propose a nonconvex model that can often improve the recovery results from the convex models. We investigate the empirical recoverability properties of the convex and nonconvex formulations and compare the computational performance of the algorithms on simulated data. We demonstrate through a number o.
Parallelization of Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) for Oil Reservoirs

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a parallel algorithm for data assimilation with ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) for oil reservoir management. The implemented application works on large number of observations from time-lapse seismic, which lead to a large turnaround time for the analysis step, in addition to the time consuming simulations of the realizations. Provided that parallel resources are used for the parallel simulations of the realizations, the analysis step also deserves parallelization. Our experiments show that parallelization of the analysis step in addition to the forecast step also scales well, exploiting the same set of resources with some additional efforts.