Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Control of precision positioning of low rigid high inertia objects

The article focuses on the problem of control of precision angle positioning of low rigid and high inertia objects, such as steam turbine. Analysis includes mathematical modeling dynamics of positioning and control system. It is based on computing calculation in Matlab & Simulink. The problems of identification of dynamic system parameters are considered. This paper considers the mathematical model and steps required to identify the dynamic model of the positioning system with the method of least squares. In its turn, it is based on series of experiments at the angular positioning of the power turbine rotor. Identification was performed by the method of least squares with dummy variables modification. Some nonlinear features of considered system depending on the boundary friction (Striebeck curve) were revealed with the use of dummy variables.
Orchestrating Cache Management and Memory Scheduling for GPGPU Applications

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) are delivering tremendous computing horsepower by running tens of thousands of threads concurrently. The massively parallel execution model has been effective to hide the long latency of off-chip memory accesses in graphics and other general computing applications exhibiting regular memory behaviors. With the fast-growing demand for general purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU), GPU workloads are becoming highly diversified, and thus requiring a synergistic coordination of both computing and memory resources to unleash the computing power of GPUs. Accordingly, recent graphics processors begin to integrate an on-die level-2 (L2) cache. The huge number of threads on GPUs, however, poses significant challenges to L2 cache design. The experiments on a variety of GPGPU applications reveal that the L2 cache may or may not improve the overall performance depending on the characteristics of applications. In this paper, we propose efficient techniques to improve GPGPU performance by orchestrating both L2 cache and memory in a unified framework. The basic philosophy is to exploit the temporal locality among the massive number of concurrent memory requests and minimize the impact of memory divergence behaviors among simultaneously executed groups of threads. Our major contributions are twofold. First, a priority-based cache management is proposed to maximize the chance of frequently revisited data to be kept in the cache. Second, an effective memory scheduling is introduced to reorder memory requests in the memory controller according to the divergence behavior for reducing average waiting time of warps. Simulation results reveal that our techniques enhance the overall performance by 10% on average for memory intensive benchmarks, whereas the maximum gain can be up to 30%.
The lateralizing significance of versive head and eye movements during epileptic seizures

We studied 37 patients who had head and eye turning during 74 spontaneous epileptic seizures. Videotapes and EEGs were analyzed independently. Turning movements were classified without knowledge of EEG or clinical data as either versive (unquestionably forced and involuntary, resulting in sustained unnatural positioning) or nonversive (mild, unsustained, wandering, or seemingly voluntary). Videotape observations were then correlated with the EEG location of seizure onset. Contralateral versive head and eye movements occurred during 61 seizures in 27 patients, but ipsilateral versive movements did not occur. Nonversive lateral head and eye movements occurred ipsilaterally and contralaterally with equal frequency and were nonlocalizing, but versive movement was a reliable lateralizing sign.
Toxigenic Potential of Some Fusarium Isolates from Southeast Asia

The isolation and characterization of 10 isolates of six Fusarium spp. from plant and soil samples collected in Southeast Asia is reported. The ability of these isolates to produce trichothecenes both in liquid cultures (CZ, GYEP, and MYRO) and on rice was assessed, and their toxigenic potential was examined by skin assay and gavage studies with culture filtrates. Although culture filtrates of all the isolates caused minor damage to test animals, only that of F. equiseti DAOM 189762 produced trichothecenes.
New evidence for, and challenges in, linking small CGG repeat expansion FMR1 alleles with Parkinson's disease

We recently reported a significant increase in the frequency of carriers of grey zone (GZ) alleles of FMR1 gene in Australian males with Parkinson's disease (PD) from Victoria and Tasmania. Here, we report data comparing an independent sample of 817 PD patients from Queensland to 1078 consecutive Australian male newborns from Victoria. We confirmed the earlier finding by observing a significant excess of GZ alleles in PD (4.8%) compared to controls (1.5%). Although both studies provided evidence in support of an association between GZ‐carrier status and increased risk for parkinsonism, the existing evidence in the literature from screening studies remains equivocal and we discuss the need for alternative approaches to resolve the issue.
Intramuscular SP1017‐formulated DNA electrotransfer enhances transgene expression and distributes hHGF to different rat tissues

The systemic administration of a therapeutic protein is a common approach for the treatment of multiple disorders. Intramuscular (i.m.) injection of plasmids, followed by electroporation, has been shown to facilitate naked DNA gene transfer in skeletal muscle allowing proteins to be produced and secreted at therapeutically relevant levels.
Heterogeneity of Renin Alleles in Outbred Dahl Salt‐Sensitive (Brookhaven) Rats

Selectively outbred Dahl salt-sensitive (DS) and salt-resistant (DR) rats were compared with the inbred Dahl salt-sensitive (SS/Jr) and salt-resistant (SR/Jr) rats developed from the original Brookhaven stocks by J.P. Rapp. The animals were evaluated for genotype at the renin locus. The inbred strains are uniformly homozygous for their respective alleles, s in SS/Jr and r in SR/Jr. DR rats were also uniformly homozygous for the r renin allele. In DS rats, however, three renin alleles were segregating. In addition to the s and r alleles, a third allele, designated the z allele, was found. The gene frequencies in DS rats were 5=0.690, r=0.284, and z=0.026. Continued use of DS and DR rats in most experimental work is inappropriate because of genetic heterogeneity in the DS stock.
Fast Parallel Cosine K-Nearest Neighbor Graph Construction

The k-nearest neighbor graph is an important structure in many data mining methods for clustering, advertising, recommender systems, and outlier detection. Constructing the graph requires computing up to n2 similarities for a set of n objects. This has led researchers to seek approximate methods, which find many but not all of the nearest neighbors. In contrast, we leverage shared memory parallelism and recent advances in similarity joins to solve the problem exactly, via a filtering based approach. Our method considers all pairs of potential neighbors but quickly filters those that could not be a part of the k-nearest neighbor graph, based on similarity upper bound estimates. We evaluated our solution on several real-world datasets and found that, using 16 threads, our method achieves up to 12.9x speedup over our exact baseline and is sometimes faster even than approximate methods. Moreover, an approximate version of our method is up to 21.7× more efficient than the best approximate state-of-the-art baseline at similar high recall.
MO-DE-207A-05: Dictionary Learning Based Reconstruction with Low-Rank Constraint for Low-Dose Spectral CT.

PURPOSE Spectral CT enabled by an energy-resolved photon-counting detector outperforms conventional CT in terms of material discrimination, contrast resolution, etc. One reconstruction method for spectral CT is to generate a color image from a reconstructed component in each energy channel. However, given the radiation dose, the number of photons in each channel is limited, which will result in strong noise in each channel and affect the final color reconstruction. Here we propose a novel dictionary learning method for spectral CT that combines dictionary-based sparse representation method and the patch based low-rank constraint to simultaneously improve the reconstruction in each channel and to address the inter-channel correlations to further improve the reconstruction. METHODS The proposed method has two important features: (1) guarantee of the patch based sparsity in each energy channel, which is the result of the dictionary based sparse representation constraint; (2) the explicit consideration of the correlations among different energy channels, which is realized by patch-by-patch nuclear norm-based low-rank constraint. For each channel, the dictionary consists of two sub-dictionaries. One is learned from the average of the images in all energy channels, and the other is learned from the average of the images in all energy channels except the current channel. With average operation to reduce noise, these two dictionaries can effectively preserve the structural details and get rid of artifacts caused by noise. Combining them together can express all structural information in current channel. RESULTS Dictionary learning based methods can obtain better results than FBP and the TV-based method. With low-rank constraint, the image quality can be further improved in the channel with more noise. The final color result by the proposed method has the best visual quality. CONCLUSION The proposed method can effectively improve the image quality of low-dose spectral CT. This work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61302136), and the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (No. 2014JQ8317).
Induction of Dentin Formation on Canine Amputated Pulp by Recombinant Human Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP)-2 and -4

Dental pulp cells have the potential to differentiate into odontoblasts. The molecular mechanisms underlying differentiation are not clear. Demineralized dentin matrix is osteoinductive and contains bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) activity. BMPs have been implicated in embryonic odontogenic differentiation and hence may play a role in the differentiation of adult pulp cells into odontoblasts during pulpal healing. This study examined the hypothesis that BMPs induce dentin formation on amputated canine pulp. Recombinant human BMP-2 and BMP-4 were capped with inactivated dentin matrix on amputated pulp. At two months, the amputated pulp was filled with tubular dentin in the lower part and osteodentin in the upper part. The amount of dentin formed was markedly diminished when dentin matrix alone was implanted. These findings imply that recombinant human BMP-2 and BMP-4 induce differentiation of adult pulp cells into odontoblasts. Thus, BMPs may have a role in dentistry as a bioactive pulp-capping agent to induce dentin formation.
Plays nice with others? Multiple ecosystems, various roles and divergent engagement models

In strategic management, the term meta-organisation is discussed as a network of firms and individuals in which members coexist, collaborate and evolve through a set of relationships and together form a larger organism. We focus on the meta-organisation form of an ecosystem in the IT industry, which often is based around a technical architecture or platform. Studies often discuss one network and selected members in such a network, but few mention that firms can work in multiple ecosystems and need to apply divergent engagement models. We study how firms engage in multiple ecosystems through three qualitative case studies. The article contributes with the following: (1) firms often operate in multiple ecosystems for which they need to dynamically adapt their engagement strategy. (2) Firms are striving to balance between strategic divergences: power versus symbiosis and a collaborative approach versus a competitive approach.
Opponent modeling in a PGM framework

We consider games with the following characteristics. The scene is visible to all players. Each player has a set of actions, which have an effect on the state of the scene. The players act concurrently, and the joint effect of the two actions may be non-deterministic. Each player is assigned a score, which is a function of the state of the scene, and it does not change during the game. This assignment is known only to the player. We assume everything to be finite, and we consider games with only two players. We shall call this kind of games a Simple Sequential Bayesian Game (SSBG). Formally, an SSBG consists of two players ♥, ♠ and a world W with a finite set of states. We assume ♥ to be female and ♠ to be male. The players have finite sets of moves, M and M, which affect W . The transition between world states at time t to time t + 1 is determined by a probabilistic function τ , τ : W × M × M × W → R, where τ (w,m, m, w) is the probability of Wt+1 being in state w given that Wt was in state w 1 and the two players make the moves m and m, respectively. Furthermore, each player draws an assignment from a finite set A. The assignment is a particular score function reflected in utility numbers over states of the world. We shall assume that ♥ has received the assignment a1. The structure of the game and the world state is always known by both players, but the actual assignment of the other player remains hidden. When both players have decided their moves, the game continues with the next time step. There is no prefixed limit on the number of moves, but the time for playing the game is so short that discounting is not relevant. That is, the players aim for maximizing the sum of the utilities gained during the game. 2. RECURSIVE INFLUENCE DIAGRAMS
In vitro and in vivo antithrombotic and cytotoxicity effects of ferulic acid

We discovered recently in vitro and in vivo antithrombotic and cytotoxicity effects of ferulic acid. The cytotoxicity assays showed that ferulic acid (∼300 μg/mL) did not cause any significant toxicity on three cell lines, platelets, leukocytes, and erythrocytes. In vitro assays showed inhibitory effects of ferulic acid on thrombin (THR)‐ or collagen/epinephrine‐stimulated platelet activation by inhibiting platelet aggregation, and decreasing clot retraction activity. The in vitro effect of ferulic acid on THR‐stimulated platelet activation was proved by the decrease in the secretion of serotonin from the platelets. The anticoagulant effects of ferulic acid were confirmed by the prolongation of the intrinsic or/and extrinsic pathways and the delay of recalcification time in plasma coagulation. Ferulic acid had antithrombotic effect in acute thromboembolism model in vivo, and decreased the expression of αIIbβ3/FIB and phosphorylation of AKT in THR‐stimulated platelet activation in vivo, and their antithrombotic efficacies hold promise for therapeutic targeting in our ongoing studies.
Impatient task mapping in elastic cloud using genetic algorithm

Problem statement: Task scheduling is the main factor that determines the performance of any distributed system. Cloud computing comes with a paradigm of distributed datacenters. Each datacenter consists of physical machines that host virtual machines to execute customers' tasks. Resources allocation on the cloud is different from other paradigms and the mapping algorithms need to be adapted to the new characteristics. This study takes the problem of immediate task scheduling under an intercloud infrastructure using a genetic algorithm. An impatient task needs to be scheduled as soon as it enters the system taking into account the input and output files location and its QoS requirements. Approach: This study proposes an algorithm that can find a fast mapping using genetic algorithms with "exist if satisfy" condition to speed up the mapping process and ensures the respecting of all task deadlines. Cloudsim simulator was used to test the proposed algorithm with real datasets collected as a cloud benchmark. Mapping time and makespan are the performance metrics that are used to evaluate the proposed system. Results: The results show an improvement in the proposed system compared to MCT algorithm as illustrated throughout the study. Conclusion: Batch mapping via genetic algorithms with throughput as a fitness function can be used to map jobs to cloud resources.
Interleukin-1 (IL-1alpha and IL-1beta) and its receptors (IL-1RI, IL-1RII, and IL-1Ra) in prostate carcinoma.

BACKGROUND The principal components of the interleukin-1 (IL-1) family are two secreted factors (IL-1alpha and IL-1beta), two transmembrane receptors (IL-1RI [biologically active] and IL-1RII [inert receptor]), and a natural antagonist receptor of IL-1 function (IL-1Ra). Changes in the expression pattern of these IL-1 members have been reported to be related to disease progression. The objective of the current study was to evaluate these changes in prostatic tissue by means of immunohistochemistry and Western blot analysis. METHODS Immunohistochemical and Western blot analyses were performed in 20 normal samples, 35 samples of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and 27 samples from patients with prostate carcinoma (PC). RESULTS In normal prostate samples, immunoreactions to IL-1beta and IL-1RI were positive, whereas there were no immunoreactions observed to IL-1alpha, IL-1RII, or IL-1Ra. In BPH, in addition to immunoreactions to IL-1beta and IL-1RI, immunoreactions to IL-1alpha, IL-1RII, and IL-1Ra were observed in many samples. In samples of PC with low Gleason grade, most tumors had positive immunoreactions to IL-1alpha and IL-1RI. In samples of PC with high Gleason grade, immunoreactions were seen only to IL-1alpha, IL-1RI, and IL-1RII. CONCLUSIONS The current results suggested that high expression levels of IL-1alpha and IL1-RI in epithelial cells in BPH and PC samples were involved in cell proliferation and that the loss of immunoexpression of IL-1beta and IL-1Ra was a characteristic feature of PC compared with normal prostate samples and BPH. Because this loss is progressive up to a complete absence of immunoexpression in PC of high Gleason grade, the evaluation of IL-1beta and IL-1Ra in PC may be significant in assessing for malignancy.
Rare Complications After Second Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation for Thalassemia Major

We describe an 11-year-old girl with thalassemia major who underwent a second hematopoietic stem cell transplantation from a matched related donor and who subsequently developed posttransplant lymphoproliferative disorder complicated by severe ascending paralysis resembling Guillian-Barré syndrome. Six months later she developed a massive pericardial effusion. She received a multimodal treatment for these complications and currently, 18 months after transplantation, she is in a good clinical condition, is transfusion independent, with no evidence of graft-versus-host disease and off all treatment. This case highlights the dilemma surrounding second hematopoietic stem cell transplantations in hemoglobinopathies and the need for a careful, well informed, and collaborative decision-making process by patients, families, and medical professionals.
Predesign of the wind field measuring radar for FengYun-3E meteorological satellite

Spaceborne microwave scatterometers have successfully provided global ocean surface wind field for two decades. Ocean wind data have become as a critical tool utilized daily by operational weather forecast and warming centers around the world. However current scatterometers still can not satisfy the requirement of achieve ocean wind vectors in nearly all weather and all wind conditions. The wind field measuring radar (WIFIR) onboard Chinese FengYun-3E meteorological satellite is being developed to attempt to overcome their shortcomings. This paper describes the predesign of the WIFIR, including the mission requirements, system design, and performance analysis.
Optimization of a Wireless Power Transfer System With a Repeater Against Load Variations

Power transfer efficiency (PTE) and transferred power (TP) are the key performance indices for the design of wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. An optimization method for WPT system with the use of a repeater is presented to enhance both PTE and TP. A tuning technique is investigated for the performance improvement against load variations. The self-resonance frequencies of transmitter, receiver, and repeater coils, and the operating frequency can be optimized to improve the load characteristics. The analytical approach presented in this paper is found to be capable of reaching the global optimum solution for a given design condition. Theoretical analysis is supported with the numerical and experimental results.
Mercaptoethanol and dithiothreitol decrease the difference of electrochemical proton potentials across the yeast plasma and vacuoar membranes and activate their H+‐ATPases

Mercaptoethanol and dithiothreitol (DTT) inhibited the acidification of external medium by by Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis cells and protoplasts during glucose oxidation. The inhibition was also observed when cells were incubated with mercaptoethanol or when mercaptoethanol and DTT were used to prepare protolasts. Experiments with S. carlsbergensis plasma membrene vesicles and vacuoles showed these thiol reagents to inhibitATP‐dipendent generation of ΔpH and Em across plasma membrane vesicles and vacuoles but to activate their H+‐ATPases. Mercaptoethanol and DTT are suggested to de‐energize plasmalemma as well as tonoplast by increasing their H+‐permeability and to disturb the cell ion homeostasis.
Comparison between transcutaneous bilirubinometry and total serum bilirubin measurements in preterm infants <35 weeks gestation

Background Neonatal hyperbilirubinaemia is a common treatable cause of brain injury. The treatment for this condition is phototherapy. The decision whether to use phototherapy is currently dependent upon serum bilirubin assay results. However, repeated blood sampling is not only traumatic but may also be a cause of anaemia in neonates. We evaluated a transcutaneous bilirubin assay method to determine whether it was suitable for routine use in preterm infants. Methods One hundred and eighty-three transcutaneous bilirubin measurements were taken contemporaneously with blood samples for laboratory measurement of serum bilirubin. The study was carried out with informed parental consent and approval by the local research ethics committee. Results The transcutaneous bilirubin method (BiliChek ®) exhibited a consistent positive bias compared with the laboratory bilirubin assay. Consequently, for a given detection rate, the transcutaneous method had a higher screen positive rate, i.e. more neonates would be given phototherapy if transcutaneous bilirubin results were used to decide. There was a margin of safety in the transcutaneous bilirubin assay calibration. Conclusion The BiliChek transcutaneous bilirubin assay is a safe alternative to laboratory bilirubin assay in deciding whether to give preterm neonates phototherapy.