Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nicotine-induced Up-regulation and Desensitization of α4β2 Neuronal Nicotinic Receptors Depend on Subunit Ratio*

Desensitization induced by chronic nicotine exposure has been hypothesized to trigger the up-regulation of the α4β2 neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) in the central nervous system. We studied the effect of acute and chronic nicotine exposure on the desensitization and up-regulation of different α4β2 subunit ratios (1α:4β, 2α:3β, and 4α:1β) expressed in Xenopus oocytes. The presence of α4 subunit in the oocyte plasmatic membrane increased linearly with the amount of α4 mRNA injected. nAChR function and expression were assessed during acute and after chronic nicotine exposure using a two-electrode voltage clamp and whole-mount immunofluorescence assay along with confocal imaging for the detection of the α4 subunit. The 2α4:3β2 subunit ratio displayed the highest ACh sensitivity. Nicotine dose-response curves for the 1α4:4β2 and 2α4:3β2 subunit ratios displayed a biphasic behavior at concentrations ranging from 0.1 to 300 μm. A biphasic curve for 4α4:1β2 was obtained at nicotine concentrations higher than 300 μm. The 1α4:4β2 subunit ratio exhibited the lowest ACh- and nicotine-induced macroscopic current, whereas 4α4:1β2 presented the largest currents at all agonist concentrations tested. Desensitization by acute nicotine exposure was more evident as the ratio of β2:α4 subunits increased. All three α4β2 subunit ratios displayed a reduced state of activation after chronic nicotine exposure. Chronic nicotine-induced up-regulation was obvious only for the 2α4: 3β2 subunit ratio. Our data suggest that the subunit ratio of α4β2 determines the functional state of activation, desensitization, and up-regulation of this neuronal nAChR. We propose that independent structural sites regulate α4β2 receptor activation and desensitization.
Analogical Model Formulation for AP Physics Problems

One of the least studied problems in qualitative reasoning is computing structural descriptions, i.e., how to move from the unruly, broad set of concepts used in everyday life to a concise, formal vocabulary of abstractions that can be used effectively for problem solving. This paper describes how learning by analogy can be used to solve this problem in the domain of AP physics problems. The system starts with some basic mathematical skills, a broad ontology covering many aspects of everyday life, and some basic qualitative mechanics. By studying worked solutions, it learns equations and modeling strategies that can be used to solve AP Physics problems. By examining systematic variations of problems, we show that analogical model formulation can be used to solve three kinds of transfer problems: parameterization, restructuring, and restyling.
Gender and Public Spending : Insights from Benefit Incidence

This paper reviews the value added to benefit incidence analysis of public spending when results are disaggregated by gender, looking at education spending in Côte d’Ivoire (1995) and health care access in Ghana (1992). In Côte d’Ivoire the low incidence of benefits to poor households was due partly to high spending on tertiary education, which poor households do not access, but also to decisions by these households not to enrol girls in school. Similarly, the weak targeting of government spending on health care to poor households in Ghana was largely due to the refusal by poor households to allow women to access health care. Benefit incidence alone cannot explain outcomes, since these are also subject to (gender dependent) household decisions. Thus, budget analysts must go beyond benefit incidence to consider gender relations in households.
Wireless sensor forest anti-fire network simulation based on NS2

As the non-stop development of wireless sensor network, its application was enormous. Control network based on forest anti-fire was one of the application fields. This paper made simulation on several scenarios in order to produce the best effect on data collecting and transmission, including different setting pattern of sensor nodes, the amount of nodes and their movement pattern. All of them were simulated by NS2(network-simulating version-2), and were based on AODV(ad-hoc on-demand distance vector)routing protocol. Besides that, it used OTCL and C++ to improve former arithmetic, receiving statistics data such as balance time, power consumption and result was satisfying.
Towards a Descriptive Simulation of Russian Food Supply Chains

Work in progress towards a descriptive social simulation is described. The phenomena of concern are the systems that supply food to those in Russia – Russian food supply chains. The ultimate aim is to represent, within a single simulation framework, the situations in this regard at different stages in recent history, namely the situations in: the recent Soviet era; immediately after the collapse of the Soviet system; and the recent situation. The design of this simulation has been informed by consultations with experts, following a design/implement/present/redesign cycle. This process is on-going so that what is presented is a snapshot of the current state of the model. Some preliminary results of the model are presented illustrating some the characteristics of this.
An improved system for concept-based video retrieval

In this paper, we present a common framework of concept-based video retrieval and propose several methods to improve the performance of the system. 12 kinds of features, including color, texture, shape and local features are examined, including a modified HOG which is defined on image edges to reduce its computational complexity. The concept cooccurrence matrix and several assistant methods (B&W detection, audio detection and motion detection) are suggested to enhance the performance of the video retrieval system. Extensive experiments on TRECVID 2010 show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
α-Tocopherol Improves Microcirculatory Dysfunction on Fructose Fed Hamsters

Fructose, an everyday component of western diet associated to chronic hyperglycemia and enhanced free radical production, impairs endothelial function and supplementation with antioxidants might improve it. In this study we investigated if vitamin E could reverse the microvascular damage elicited by fructose. Male Syrian golden hamsters drank either 10% fructose solution (F) or filtered water (C), combined with three concentrations of vitamin E in their chows [zero, normal (VE) or 5X (5XVE)] during 60 days. Microvascular reactivity in response to topical application of acetylcholine (Ach; endothelium-dependent vasodilator) or sodium nitroprusside (SNP; endothelium-independent vasodilator) and macromolecular permeability increase induced by either 30 min ischemia followed by reperfusion (I/R) or topical application of histamine (5 μM) were assessed using the cheek pouch preparation. Compared to controls (drinking filtered water), fructose-drinking animals showed decreased vasodilatation to acetylcholine in all concentrations tested (-56.2% for 10-9M, -53.9% for 10-7M and -43.7% for 10-5M). On the other hand, vitamin E supplementation resulted in increased responses for both water and fructose drinking groups (177.4% for F vs. F/5XVE and 241.6% for C vs. C/5XVE for 10-5M Ach). Endothelial-independent vasodilatation explored by topical application of SNP was restored and even enhanced with the supplementation of 5X vitamin E in both groups (80.1% for F vs. F/5XVE; 144.2% for C vs. C/5XVE; 3.4% of difference for C/5XVE vs. F/5XVE on 10-5M SNP). The number of leaky sites after I/R and histamine stimuli in vitamin E supplemented animals decreased (-25.1% and -15.3% for F vs. F/5XVE; and -21.7% and -16% of leaky sites comparing C vs. C/5XVE, respectively for I/R and histamine stimuli) pointing to tightening of the endothelial barrier for macromolecular permeability. Our results strongly suggest that vitamin E could improve the endothelial function and permeability barrier and also reverse impairments elicited by sugar overload.
A Display System for Surgical Navigation in ORL Surgery

Minimally invasive surgery, developed during the last 15 years becomes a major field of surgical intervention. The patient benefits from little damage around the focus of surgery. Special skills of the surgeon are needed to work in narrow body cavities with little space for the endoscope and surgical tools. The surgeon’s navigation during surgery can be supported by modern visualisation techniques based on 3D medical image data. A tool for intra-operative navigation was developed providing three orthogonal sections through the image volume, a 3D display of surgical tools relative to sensitive anatomical structures, a virtual endoscopic image together with the video image through the endoscope. The user interface has a simple layout for easy handling to meet the needs in the surgical theatre.
Palmprint Identification Using Contourlet Transform

Palmprint based personal verification has gained preference over other biometric modalities due to its ease of acquisition, high user acceptance and reliability. This paper presents a novel palmprint based identification approach which uses the textural information available on the palmprint by employing the Contourlet Transform (CT). After establishing the region of interest (ROI), the two dimensional (2-D) spectrums is divided into fine slices, using iterated directional filterbanks. Next, directional energy component for each block from the decomposed subband outputs is computed. The proposed algorithm captures both local and global details in a palmprint as a compact fixed length palm code. Palmprint matching is then performed using normalized Euclidean distance classifier. The proposed algorithm is tested on a total of 7752 palm images, acquired from the standard database of Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. The experimental results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed system by exhibiting genuine acceptance rate of 88.91%, decidability index of 2.7748 and equal ierror rate of 0.2333%.
Principles-Based Standards and the Informativeness of Earnings

This study examines the relation between principles-based standards and the informativeness of earnings. To examine this question, we construct a firm-level instrument that measures the extent to which firms rely on principles-based standards. We view standards on a continuum where standards that contain few rules-based characteristics are defined as being more principles-based and standards that contain many rules-based characteristics are defined as being more rules-based. We find that earnings are more informative, are more persistent, and better predict future cash flows when the firm relies on principles-based standards. This evidence is consistent with the notion that managers use the additional discretion provided by principlesbased standards to more accurately convey the underlying economics of transactions to investors.
Association between NAG-B and cadmium in urine with no evidence of a threshold.

OBJECTIVES--To explore the significance of the increase in urinary excretion of the lysosomal enzyme beta-N-acetylglucosaminidase (NAG) at low exposures to cadmium (Cd) that is frequently found in the absence of any other sign of renal dysfunction. METHODS--The activity was measured of the two main isoenzymes of NAG (NAG-A secreted by exocytosis and NAG-B released with cell membranes) in the urine of 49 male workers employed in a Cd smelter and of 20 age matched controls. RESULTS--An increased urinary excretion of low molecular weight proteins was noted only in subjects who excreted > 10 micrograms Cd/g creatinine. The urinary activity of NAG-B showed a dose related increase that was already significant in the group excreting 0.5-2 micrograms Cd/g creatinine. In multiple regression analysis the NAG-B activity correlated with the excretion of Cd but not with that of lead or mercury. The NAG-A activity was by contrast unaffected by exposure to Cd but correlated with the urinary excretion of lead and copper. CONCLUSIONS--As NAG-B is considered to be the lesional form of NAG, the existence of a specific association between this enzyme and urinary Cd excretion with no detectable threshold suggests that this metal produces cellular alterations at exposures commonly found in the general population.
Optimization of pid controllers for a flexible robot manipulator using metamodeling approach

Offline optimization of controller parameters for complex robotic system can be time consuming, even with high performance computers. This project demonstrates how Metamodeling techniques can be utilized to tune the controller parameters for a robotic system quickly. The system used in this study is the flexible robot manipulator which is a high order system and intrinsically complex flexible structures. The Radial Basis Function Neural Network metamodel used was able to give a good approximation to the optimum controller parameters in this case.
Dynamics and Stagnation in the Malthusian Epoch

This paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential Malthusian theory, according to which improvements in the technological environment during the pre-industrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita, eventually leading to a larger, but not significantly richer, population. Exploiting exogenous sources of cross-country variations in land productivity and the level of technological advancement the analysis demonstrates that, in accordance with the theory, technological superiority and higher land productivity had significant positive effects on population density but insignificant effects on the standard of living, during the time period 1-1500 CE.
Determination of captopril in biological samples by high-performance liquid chromatography with ThioGlo 3 derivatization.

Captopril, a well-known angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor, is widely used for treatment of arterial hypertension. Recent studies suggest that it may also act as a scavenger of free radicals because of its thiol group. Therefore, the present study describes a rapid, sensitive and relatively simple method for the detection of captopril in biological tissues with reverse-phase HPLC. Captopril was first derivatized with ThioGlo 3 [3H-Naphto[2,1-b]pyran,9-acetoxy-2-(4-(2,5-dihydro-2,5-dioxo-1H-pyrrol-1-yl)phenyl-3-oxo-)]. It was then detected by fluorescence-HPLC using an Astec C(18) column as the stationary phase and a water:acetonitrile:acetic acid:phosphoric acid mixture (50:50; 1 mL/L acids) as the mobile phase (excitation wavelength, 365 nm; emission wavelength, 445 nm). The calibration curve for captopril was linear over a range of 10-2500 nM and the coefficient of variation acquired for the within- and between-run precision for captopril was 0.5 and 3.8%, respectively. The detection limit of captopril with this method was found to be 200 fmol/20 microL injection volume. Its relative recovery from biological samples was determined to the range from 93.3 to 105.3%. Based on these results, we believe that our method is advantageous for captopril determination.
New Greedy Heuristics For Set Cover and Set Packing

The Set Cover problem (SCP) and Set Packing problem (SPP) are standard NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Their decision problem versions are shown to be NP-Complete in Karp's 1972 paper. We specify a rough guide to constructing approximation heuristics that may have widespread applications and apply it to devise greedy approximation algorithms for SCP and SPP, where the selection heuristic is a variation of that in the standard greedy approximation algorithm. Our technique involves assigning to each input set a valuation and then selecting, in each round, the set whose valuation is highest. We prove that the technique we use for determining a valuation of the input sets yields a unique value for all Set Cover instances. For both SCP and SPP we give experimental evidence that the valuations we specify are unique and can be computed to high precision quickly by an iterative algorithm. Others have experimented with testing the observed approximation ratio of various algorithms over a variety of randomly generated instances, and we have extensive experimental evidence to show the quality of the new algorithm relative to greedy heuristics in common use. Our algorithms are somewhat more computationally intensive than the standard heuristics, though they are still practical for large instances. We discuss some ways to speed up our algorithms that do not significantly distort their effectiveness in practice on random instances.
Language and Statistics Final Project Recurrent Neural Network and High-Order N-Gram Models for POS Prediction

The task of part-of-speech (POS) language modeling typically includes a very small vocabulary, which significantly differs from traditional lexicalized language modeling tasks. In this project, we propose a high-order n-gram model and a stateof-the-art recurrent neural network model, which aims at minimizing the variance in this POS language modeling task. In our experiments, we show that the recurrent neural network model outperforms the n-gram model on various datasets, and the linear interpolation of the two models, which balances the pros and cons of discriminative and generative models, has significantly reduced the perplexities. 1. Recurrent Neural Network To introduce a simple recurrent neural network language model, we first denote the input layer x, hidden layer s, word w, and output layer y. Then, the input at time t is the concatenation of word w at t and the hidden layer at previous time stamp t− 1: x(t) = w(t) + s(t− 1) The hidden layer s at time t can be represented as the function f(z) taking the sum of product input layer u and each component of the weight vector u: sj(t) = f( ∑
Implementation of a Tool to Modify Behavior in a Chronic Disease Management Program

Chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia continue to be a significant burden on the US health care system. As a result, many healthcare providers are implementing strategies to prevent the incidence of heart disease and other chronic conditions. Among these strategies are proper drug therapy and lifestyle modifications. Behavior change is often the rate-limiting step in the prevention and maintenance of lifestyle modifications. The purpose of this paper is to describe a tool used to guide the progression and assess the effectiveness of a cardiovascular risk reduction program. The tool uses the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change to determine the readiness and confidence to change specific lifestyle behaviors pertinent to cardiovascular health. The tool aids the practitioner in developing a patient-centered plan to implement and maintain lifestyle changes and can be tailored to use in any situation requiring a behavior change on the part of the patient.
Hsp27 Protects against Ischemic Brain Injury via Attenuation of a Novel Stress-Response Cascade Upstream of Mitochondrial Cell Death Signaling

Heat shock protein 27 (Hsp27), a recently discovered member of the heat shock protein family, is markedly induced in the brain after cerebral ischemia and other injury states. In non-neuronal systems, Hsp27 has potent cell death-suppressing functions. However, the mechanism of Hsp27-mediated neuroprotection has not yet been elucidated. Using transgenic and viral overexpression of Hsp27, we investigated the molecular mechanism by which Hsp27 exerts its neuroprotective effect. Overexpression of Hsp27 conferred long-lasting tissue preservation and neurobehavioral recovery, as measured by infarct volume, sensorimotor function, and cognitive tasks up to 3 weeks following focal cerebral ischemia. Examination of signaling pathways critical to neuronal death demonstrated that Hsp27 overexpression led to the suppression of the MKK4/JNK kinase cascade. While Hsp27 overexpression did not suppress activation of an upstream regulatory kinase of the MKK/JNK cascade, ASK1, Hsp27 effectively inhibited ASK1 activity via a physical association through its N-terminal domain and the kinase domain of ASK1. The N-terminal region of Hsp27 was required for neuroprotective function against in vitro ischemia. Moreover, knockdown of ASK1 or inhibition of the ASK1/MKK4 cascade effectively inhibited cell death following neuronal ischemia. This underscores the importance of this kinase cascade in the progression of ischemic neuronal death. Inhibition of PI3K had no effect on Hsp27-mediated neuroprotection, suggesting that Hsp27 does not promote cell survival via activation of PI3K/Akt. Based on these findings, we conclude that overexpression of Hsp27 confers long-lasting neuroprotection against ischemic brain injury via a previously unexplored association and inhibition of ASK1 kinase signaling.
Three-dimensional geometrical changes of the human tibialis anterior muscle and its central aponeurosis measured with three-dimensional ultrasound during isometric contractions

Background. Muscles not only shorten during contraction to perform mechanical work, but they also bulge radially because of the isovolumetric constraint on muscle fibres. Muscle bulging may have important implications for muscle performance, however quantifying three-dimensional (3D) muscle shape changes in human muscle is problematic because of difficulties with sustaining contractions for the duration of an in vivo scan. Although two-dimensional ultrasound imaging is useful for measuring local muscle deformations, assumptions must be made about global muscle shape changes, which could lead to errors in fully understanding the mechanical behaviour of muscle and its surrounding connective tissues, such as aponeurosis. Therefore, the aims of this investigation were (a) to determine the intra-session reliability of a novel 3D ultrasound (3DUS) imaging method for measuring in vivo human muscle and aponeurosis deformations and (b) to examine how contraction intensity influences in vivo human muscle and aponeurosis strains during isometric contractions. Methods. Participants (n = 12) were seated in a reclined position with their left knee extended and ankle at 90° and performed isometric dorsiflexion contractions up to 50% of maximal voluntary contraction. 3DUS scans of the tibialis anterior (TA) muscle belly were performed during the contractions and at rest to assess muscle volume, muscle length, muscle cross-sectional area, muscle thickness and width, fascicle length and pennation angle, and central aponeurosis width and length. The 3DUS scan involved synchronous B-mode ultrasound imaging and 3D motion capture of the position and orientation of the ultrasound transducer, while successive cross-sectional slices were captured by sweeping the transducer along the muscle. Results. 3DUS was shown to be highly reliable across measures of muscle volume, muscle length, fascicle length and central aponeurosis length (ICC ≥ 0.98, CV < 1%). The TA remained isovolumetric across contraction conditions and progressively shortened along its line of action as contraction intensity increased. This caused the muscle to bulge centrally, predominantly in thickness, while muscle fascicles shortened and pennation angle increased as a function of contraction intensity. This resulted in central aponeurosis strains in both the transverse and longitudinal directions increasing with contraction intensity. Discussion. 3DUS is a reliable and viable method for quantifying multidirectional muscle and aponeurosis strains during isometric contractions within the same session. Contracting muscle fibres do work in directions along and orthogonal to the muscle’s line of action and central aponeurosis length and width appear to be a function of muscle fascicle shortening and transverse expansion of the muscle fibres, which is dependent on contraction intensity. How factors other than muscle force change the elastic mechanical behaviour of the aponeurosis requires further investigation.