Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between adiponectin levels and endometrial carcinoma risk: evidence from a dose–response meta-analysis

Objectives Epidemiological studies evaluating the association between adiponectin levels and endometrial carcinoma risk have produced inconsistent results. Thus, a meta-analysis was conducted to assess the association between them. Methods Pertinent studies were identified by a search of PubMed and Web of Knowledge through January of 2015. A random-effects model was used to combine the data for analysis. Dose–response relationship was assessed by restricted cubic spline and variance-weighted least squares regression analysis. Results Twelve articles (5 prospective studies and 7 case–control studies) involving 1916 endometrial carcinoma cases were included in this meta-analysis. Pooled results suggested that highest adiponectin levels versus lowest levels were significantly associated with the risk of endometrial carcinoma (summary relative risk (RR)=0.525, 95% CI 0.388 to 0.712, I2=64.2%). The association was also found in postmenopausal women (summary RR=0.646, 95% CI 0.433 to 0.964), but not in premenopausal women. A linear dose–response relationship was found, with the risk of endometrial carcinoma decreasing by 3% for every 1 μg/mL increase in adiponectin levels (summary RR=0.97, 95% CI 0.96 to 0.98). No publication bias was found. Conclusions Our analysis suggested that the higher adiponectin levels might have a protective effect against endometrial carcinoma, especially in postmenopausal women.
Permittivity matching effects on coil section of oil-immersed transformer

The lightning impulse breakdown voltage of the coil section of oil-immersed transformers is dominated by the partial discharge voltage of the wedge-shaped oil gaps made of the paper insulated conductors, mineral oil, and the coil section spacers. We have studied the permittivity matching effects on the lightning impulse breakdown voltage of the coil section models by means of the experiments and the electric field analyses. The relationship between the critical electric field E in the wedge-shaped oil gap when the breakdown occurred, and the gap length d was acquired. Moreover, the breakdown strength of the coil section models were estimated by using the above relationship within 6% error compared to the measured average values.
First Insights into the Genome Sequence of the Strictly Anaerobic Homoacetogenic Sporomusa sphaeroides Strain E (DSM 2875)

ABSTRACT Here, we report the draft genome sequence of Sporomusa sphaeroides strain E (DSM 2875), a strict anaerobic homoacetogenic bacterium. It is able to grow autotrophically on different one-carbon compounds. The strain possesses several genes of the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway. The genome consists of a single chromosome (4.98 Mb).
A Novel Harmonic and Reactive Currents Detection Method For Hybrid Active Power Filter

An improved adaptive harmonic detector based on adaptive control theory was presented, and analyzed systematically. The proposed method conquers the limitation of the average adaptive harmonic detection methods and is able to detect harmonic as well as extract distortion of currents. The transient speed of the novel adaptive is improved through chose of learning rate. Due to its excellent tracking performance, the improved adaptive one is good at time-varying harmonic's detection. The simulation results show that the proposed approach is faster than the previous average one for synchronous detection of harmonic and extraction of fundamental component. The proposed method can satisfy the power system's needs for harmonic current or harmonic voltage detection.
Mechanics of SWCNT Aggregates Studied by Incremental Constrained Minimization

AbstractThe stress-strain behavior of short single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) aggregates is investigated by a novel incremental constrained minimization approach. An AIREBO potential is used to model the interactions within and between CNTs. The idea is to homogenously disperse SWCNTs in the computational cell at random positions and orientations following spherical uniform distributions, and incrementally deform the cell although restraining the movement of atoms at the ends of nanotubes. The stress-strain response of the system is obtained in each loading direction, and it is shown to converge to an isotropic behavior (a similar response in all directions) as the number of CNTs in the system increases. It is also shown that the Young’s modulus of the system increases linearly with the CNT aggregates density. Finally, the method is shown to agree well with results obtained from molecular dynamics simulations running at near zero degrees kelvin, however they are obtained at only a fraction of the CPU .
Does Time Pressure Impair Performance? An Experiment on Queueing Behavior

We experimentally explore the effects of time pressure on decision making. Under different time allowance conditions, subjects are presented with a queueing situation and asked to join one of two queues that differ in length, server speed, and entry fee. The results can be grouped under two main categories. The first one concerns the factors driving customers' decisions in a queueing system. Only a proportion of subjects behave rationally and use the relevant information efficiently. The rest of the subjects seem to adopt a rule of thumb that ignores the information on server speed and follows the shorter queue. The second category is related to the effects of time pressure on decision performance. A significant proportion of the population is not affected by time limitations and shows a consistent behavior throughout the treatments. On the other hand, the majority of subjects' performance is impaired by time limitations. More importantly, this impairment is not due to the stringency of the limitation but mainly due to the fact that being exposed to a time limitation, even to a loose one, brings along stress and panic, and causes subjects to use time inefficiently.
Approximation algorithms via randomized rounding : a survey

Approximation algorithms provide a natural way to approach computationally hard problems. There are currently many known paradigms in this area, including greedy algorithms, primal-dual methods, methods based on mathematical programming (linear and semidefinite programming in particular), local improvement, and “low distortion” embeddings of general metric spaces into special families of metric spaces. Randomization is a useful ingredient in many of these approaches, and particularly so in the form of randomized rounding of a suitable relaxation of a given problem. We survey this technique here, with a focus on correlation inequalities and their applications.
To CNF or not to CNF? An Efficient Yet Presentable Version of the CYK Algorithm

The most familiar algorithm to decide the membership problem for context-free grammars is the one by Cocke, Younger and Kasami (CYK) using grammars in Chomsky normal form (CNF). We propose to teach a simple modification of the CYK algorithm that uses grammars in a much less restrictive binary normal form (2NF) and two precomputations: the set of nullable nonterminals and the inverse of the unit relation between symbols. The modified algorithm is equally simple as the original one, but highlights that the at most binary branching rules alone are responsible for the O(n 3 ) time complexity. Moreover, the simple transformation to 2NF comes with a linear increase in grammar size, whereas some transformations to CNF found in most prominent textbooks on formal languages may lead to an exponential increase.
Laval University and Lakehead University at TREC Dynamic Domain 2015: Combination of Techniques for Subtopics Coverage

— This paper describes the joint submission by Laval University and Lakehead University to the TREC 2015 Dynamic Domain track. We submitted four runs for the main track and one run for the judged-only track. In our view, the Dynamic Domain process can be separated into two phases: a traditional static information retrieval phase to generate an initial set of documents, followed by a dynamic information retrieval phase which takes user feedback into account to improve the results. We developed an algorithm that combines keyword search, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and K-Means clustering to take advantage of each technique to generate the best subset of results for the user. Our systems performed mostly over the median of the group of participants and our system for the “judged-only” task had the best score for a wide range of queries.
Image Analysis of Pellet Size for a Control System in Industrial Feed Production

When producing aquaculture fish feed pellets, the size of the output product is of immense importance. As the production method cannot produce pellets of constant and uniform size using constant machine settings, there is a demand for size control. Fish fed with feed pellets of improper size are prone to not grow as expected, which is undesirable to the aquaculture industry. In this paper an image analysis method is proposed for automatic size-monitoring of pellets. This is called granulometry and the method used here is based on the mathematical morphological opening operation. In the proposed method, no image object segmentation is needed. The results show that it is possible to extract a general size distribution from an image of piled disordered pellets representing both length and diameter of the pellets in combination as an area.
Wire grid and surface patch modelling for EMP interaction

The wire grid and surface patch modeling of structures for computation of EMP (electromagnetic pulse) interaction is considered. Currents on a wire grid model of a structure are computed using the numerical electromagnetic code (NEC), and are compared with those obtained by using an electric field integral equation (EFIE) formulation for triangular surface patches. A complicated wire grid model of an aircraft is considered as an example. Good agreement is obtained for both simple and complicated structures in most cases. <<ETX>>
Interactive Display of Large Scale Trimmed NURBS Models

We present an algorithm for interactive display of trimmed NURBS surfaces. The algorithm converts the NURBS surfaces to B ezier surfaces, tessellates each trimmed B ezier surface into triangles and renders them using the triangle rendering capabilities common in current graphics systems. It makes use of tight bounds for uniform tessellation of B ezier surfaces into cells and traces the trimming curves to compute the trimmed regions of each cell. This is based on trim curve tracing, intersection computation with the cells, and triangulation of the cells. The resulting technique also makes e cient use of spatial and temporal coherence between successive frames for cell computation and triangulation. Polygonization anomalies like cracks and angularities are avoided as well. The algorithm works well in practice and, on the high end graphics systems, is able to display trimmed models described using thousands of B ezier surfaces at interactive frame rates.
Temporal Tagging on Different Domains: Challenges, Strategies, and Gold Standards

In the last years, temporal tagging has received increasing attention in the area of natural language processing. However, most of the research so far concentrated on processing news documents. Only recently, two temporal annotated corpora of narrative-style documents were developed, and it was shown that a domain shift results in significant challenges for temporal tagging. Thus, a temporal tagger should be aware of the domain associated with documents that are to be processed and apply domain-specific strategies for extracting and normalizing temporal expressions. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of temporal expressions in different domains. In addition to news- and narrative-style documents, we add two further document types, namely colloquial and scientific documents. After discussing the challenges of temporal tagging on the different domains, we describe some strategies to tackle these challenges and describe their integration into our publicly available temporal tagger HeidelTime. Our cross-domain evaluation validates the benefits of domain-sensitive temporal tagging. Furthermore, we make available two new temporally annotated corpora and a new version of HeidelTime, which now distinguishes between four document domain types.
SwissAdmin: A multilingual tagged parallel corpus of press releases

SwissAdmin is a new multilingual corpus of press releases from the Swiss Federal Administration, available in German, French, Italian and English. We provide SwissAdmin in three versions: (i) plain texts of approximately 6 to 8 million words per language; (ii) sentence-aligned bilingual texts for each language pair; (iii) a part-of-speech-tagged version consisting of annotations in both the Universal tagset and the richer Fips tagset, along with grammatical functions, verb valencies and collocations. The SwissAdmin corpus is freely available at www.latl. unige.ch/swissadmin.
The Mobile Thylakoid Phosphoprotein TSP9 Interacts with the Light-harvesting Complex II and the Peripheries of Both Photosystems*

The localization of the plant-specific thylakoid-soluble phosphoprotein of 9 kDa, TSP9, within the chloroplast thylakoid membrane of spinach has been established by the combined use of fractionation, immunoblotting, cross-linking, and mass spectrometry. TSP9 was found to be exclusively confined to the thylakoid membranes, where it is enriched in the stacked grana membrane domains. After mild solubilization of the membranes, TSP9 migrated together with the major light-harvesting antenna (LHCII) of photosystem II (PSII) and with PSII-LHCII supercomplexes upon separation of the protein complexes by either native gel electrophoresis or sucrose gradient centrifugation. Studies with a cleavable cross-linking agent revealed the interaction of TSP9 with both major and minor LHCII proteins as identified by mass spectrometric sequencing. Cross-linked complexes that in addition to TSP9 contain the peripheral PSII subunits CP29, CP26, and PsbS, which form the interface between LHCII and the PSII core, were found. Our observations also clearly suggest an interaction of TSP9 with photosystem I (PSI) as shown by both immunodetection and mass spectrometry. Sequencing identified the peripheral PSI subunits PsaL, PsaF, and PsaE, originating from cross-linked protein complexes of around 30 kDa that also contained TSP9. The distribution of TSP9 among the cross-linked forms was found to be sensitive to conditions such as light exposure. An association of TSP9 with LHCII as well as the peripheries of the photosystems suggests its involvement in regulation of photosynthetic light harvesting.
Scoop Methodology: Modeling, Simulation And Analysis For Cooperative Systems

In this paper, we present our methodology proposal for cooperative remote systems modeling. Its aim is to develop models of existing or planned cooperative systems. These models are used to specify systems or to create dynamic working simulations. Comparative performances are deduced from the latter. The associated meta-model proposal is based, among other things, on the use of multiagent systems, Petri nets and stochastic Petri nets. After having described the whole methodology concepts, we show a set of general results extracted from simulations.
Constrained random walks on random graphs: routing algorithms for large scale wireless sensor networks

We consider a routing problem in the context of large scale networks with uncontrolled dynamics. A case of uncontrolled dynamics that has been studied extensively is that of mobile nodes, as this is typically the case in cellular and mobile ad-hoc networks. In this paper however we study routing in the presence of a different type of dynamics: nodes do not move, but instead switch between active and inactive states at random times. Our interest in this case is motivated by the behavior of sensor nodes powered by renewable sources, such as solar cells or ambient vibrations. In this paper we formalize the corresponding routing problem as a problem of constructing suitably constrained random walks on random dynamic graphs. We argue that these random walks should be designed so that their resulting invariant distribution achieves a certain load balancing property, and we give simple distributed algorithms to compute the local parameters for the random walks that achieve the sought behavior. A truly novel feature of our formulation is that the algorithms we obtain are able to route messages along all possible routes between a source and a destination node, without performing explicit route discovery/repair computations, and without maintaining explicit state information about available routes at the nodes. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first algorithms that achieve true multipath routing (in a statistical sense), at the complexity of simple stateless operations.
Sleep Improves Prospective Remembering by Facilitating Spontaneous-Associative Retrieval Processes

Memories are of the past but for the future, enabling individuals to implement intended plans and actions at the appropriate time. Prospective memory is the specific ability to remember and execute an intended behavior at some designated point in the future. Although sleep is well-known to benefit the consolidation of memories for past events, its role for prospective memory is still not well understood. Here, we show that sleep as compared to wakefulness after prospective memory instruction enhanced the successful execution of prospective memories two days later. We further show that sleep benefited both components of prospective memory, i.e. to remember that something has to be done (prospective component) and to remember what has to be done (retrospective component). Finally, sleep enhanced prospective remembering particularly when attentional resources were reduced during task execution, suggesting that subjects after sleep were able to recruit additional spontaneous-associative retrieval processes to remember intentions successfully. Our findings indicate that sleep supports the maintenance of prospective memory over time by strengthening intentional memory representations, thus favoring the spontaneous retrieval of the intended action at the appropriate time.
Analysis of cell differentiation by division tracking cytometry

We propose a quantitative method to characterize growth and differentiation dynamics of multipotent cells from time series carboxyfluorescein diacetate, succinimidyl ester (CFDA‐SE) division tracking data. The dynamics of cell proliferation and differentiation was measured by combining (CFDA‐SE) division tracking with phenotypic analysis. We define division tracking population statistics such as precursor cell frequency, generation time and renewal rate that characterize growth of various phenotypes in a heterogeneous culture system. This method is illustrated by study of the divisional recruitment of cord blood CD34+ cells by hematopoietic growth factors. The technical issue of assigning the correct generation number to cells was addressed by employing high‐resolution division tracking methodology and daily histogram analysis. We also quantified division‐tracking artifacts such as CFDA‐SE degeneration and cellular auto‐fluorescence. Mitotic activation of cord blood CD34+ cells by cytokines commenced after 2 days of cytokine stimulation. Mean generation number increased linearly thereafter, and it was conclusively shown that CD34+ cells cycle slower than CD34− cells. Generation times for CD34+ and CD34− cells were 24.7 ± 0.8 h and 15.1 ± 0.9 h (±SD, n = 5), respectively. The 20‐fold increase in CD34+ cell numbers at Day 6 could be attributed to a high CD34+ cell renewal rate (91% ± 2% per division). Although cultures were initiated with highly purified CD34+ cells (∼96%), CD34− numbers had expanded rapidly by Day 6. This rapid expansion could be explained by their short generation time as well as a small fraction of CD34+ cells (∼5%) that differentiated into CD34− cells. Multitype division tracking provides a detailed analysis of multipotent cell differentiation dynamics. © 2007 International Society for Analytical Cytology
Scaffolding physician communication through a daily progress note redesign

This paper explores the design of the daily progress note, a medical document written daily to record a patient's current status and clinical changes. The progress note is traditionally composed of four sections: subjective, objective, assessment and plan. At the start of this study, the original structure of the progress note did not mirror the verbal communication that takes place between physicians as they focus on the assessment and plan. Subject matter experts hypothesize that less experienced physicians find the subjective and objective sections of the note easiest to write and subsequently emphasize and spend more time filling out these sections. This study redesigned the structure of the progress note to prioritize the assessment and management plan as supported by the objective and subjective. This work was tested by the Division of Cardiology in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Virginia. The redesigned note was evaluated using a data entry and presentation comparison as well as a simulated handoff. The results show that the progress notes are presented by reading the information from the top down and thus, the layout of the note should follow (and prompt) the desired flow of communication. Also, the use of prompts and more specific fields helps scaffold the documentation to better facilitate the verbal communication about patients between physicians.
Targeting GGTase-I Activates RHOA, Increases Macrophage Reverse Cholesterol Transport, and Reduces Atherosclerosis in Mice

Background— Statins have antiinflammatory and antiatherogenic effects that have been attributed to inhibition of RHO protein geranylgeranylation in inflammatory cells. The activity of protein geranylgeranyltransferase type I (GGTase-I) is widely believed to promote membrane association and activation of RHO family proteins. However, we recently showed that knockout of GGTase-I in macrophages activates RHO proteins and proinflammatory signaling pathways, leading to increased cytokine production and rheumatoid arthritis. In this study, we asked whether the increased inflammatory signaling of GGTase-I–deficient macrophages would influence the development of atherosclerosis in low-density lipoprotein receptor–deficient mice. Methods and Results— Aortic lesions in mice lacking GGTase-I in macrophages (Pggt1b▵/▵) contained significantly more T lymphocytes than the lesions in controls. Surprisingly, however, mean atherosclerotic lesion area in Pggt1b▵/▵ mice was reduced by ≈60%. GGTase-I deficiency reduced the accumulation of cholesterol esters and phospholipids in macrophages incubated with minimally modified and acetylated low-density lipoprotein. Analyses of GGTase-I–deficient macrophages revealed upregulation of the cyclooxygenase 2–peroxisome proliferator-activated-&ggr; pathway and increased scavenger receptor class B type I– and CD36-mediated basal and high-density lipoprotein–stimulated cholesterol efflux. Lentivirus-mediated knockdown of RHOA, but not RAC1 or CDC42, normalized cholesterol efflux. The increased cholesterol efflux in cultured cells was accompanied by high levels of macrophage reverse cholesterol transport and slightly reduced plasma lipid levels in vivo. Conclusions— Targeting GGTase-I activates RHOA and leads to increased macrophage reverse cholesterol transport and reduced atherosclerosis development despite a significant increase in inflammation.