Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Familial atrial fibrillation: simulation of the mechanisms and effects of a slow rectifier potassium channel mutation in human atrial tissue

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a critical pathology due to the risk of secondary diseases like thromboemboli and ventricular arrhythmia. A recent study identified a familial type of AF based on a mutation influencing the cardiac I/sub Ks/ channel. The mutant channel is characterized by a gain-of-function and a nearly linear current-voltage relationship. The kinetics and density of I/sub Ks/ in a model of atrial myocytes was adjusted to the measured characteristic to describe the mechanisms and effects of the mutation. A schematic anatomical model of the right atrium was designed to simulate the excitation propagation. The action potential duration of the mutant cell was reduced to 105 ms and the effective refractory period to 148 ms. Both factors lead to a reduction in wavelength and thus the risk of an initiation and perpetuation of AF rises. The results support the understanding of the complex behavior of cardiac cells. The described model will be used to investigate AF and potential treatments.
Functional Characterization of Pendrin in a Polarized Cell System

Pendred's syndrome is an autosomal recessive disorder characterized by sensorineural deafness, goiter, and impaired iodide organification. It is caused by mutations in the PDS/SLC26A4 gene that encodes pendrin. Functionally, pendrin is a transporter of chloride and iodide in Xenopus oocytes and heterologous mammalian cells and a chloride/base exchanger in β-intercalated cells of the renal cortical collecting duct. The partially impaired thyroidal iodide organification in Pendred's syndrome suggests a possible role of pendrin in iodide transport at the apical membrane of thyroid follicular cells, but experimental evidence for this concept is lacking. The iodide transport properties of pendrin were determined in polarized Madin-Darby canine kidney cells expressing the sodium iodide symporter (NIS), pendrin, or NIS and pendrin using a bicameral system-permitting measurement of iodide content in the basal, intracellular, and apical compartments. Moreover, we determined the functional consequences of two naturally occurring mutations (L676Q and FS306>309X). In polarized Madin-Darby canine kidney cells, NIS mediates uptake at the basolateral membrane. Only minimal amounts of iodide reach the apical compartment in the absence of pendrin. In cells expressing NIS and pendrin, pendrin mediates transport of iodide into the apical chamber. Wild type pendrin also mediates iodide efflux in transiently transfected cells. In contrast, both pendrin mutants lose the ability to promote iodide efflux. These results provide evidence that pendrin mediates apical iodide efflux from polarized mammalian cells loaded with iodide. Consistent with the partial organification defect observed in patients with Pendred's syndrome, naturally occurring mutations of pendrin lead to impaired transport of iodide.
The Empirical Role of Real Crude Oil Price and Real Exchange Rate on Economic Growth: The Case of Turkey

Mostly national economies need petroleum which is the basic weighted input of the energy day by day. The general price level and production are influenced as a result of the fact that changes in petroleum prices have an impact on input prices. At the same time, fluctuations in the real exchange rate have an important effect on national economies. The aim of this study is to analyze the relationships between economic growth and real crude oil prices and economic growth and real exchange rate and to compare out-of sample forecasting performances of several models. In this context, we use the Gregory and Hansen cointegration method which allows a structural break in the relationship during the period between 1984:1 and 2010:4. Consequently, we find a negative relationship between the real crude oil price and economic growth also negative relationship between the real exchange rate and economic growth in Turkey. We use cointegration equations to establish error correction models, and we obtain forecasts to find which model can characterize of the data better. It is seen that there is a difference between models in terms of out-of sample forecasting performances.
Comparison of copper disc and copper wafer polishing processes in terms of their kinetic, tribological, and thermal characteristics

Coefficients of friction, removal rate, and pad temperature analysis were used to compare chemical-mechanical polishing processes involving two substrates, copper discs and copper-deposited wafers with different grain sizes and degrees of flatness (i.e., concave or convex). The average coefficient of friction and the total mechanical energy of the processes (as measured by the spectral attributes of the raw frictional force) were higher for the copper-deposited wafers. This result is believed to be due to differences in the extent of convexity of the two types of substrates and the shapes of their bevels. Pad temperature transients as well as material removal rates were also slightly higher for the copper wafers, suggesting a thermally dependent removal mechanism. Grain sizes associated with the copper-deposited wafers used in this paper were larger compared to those of the copper discs. Grains are thought to have complex interactions with the chemical as well as mechanical attributes of the process, based on the fact that smaller grains led to greater chemical reaction rates, while they needed more mechanical force to abrade away. Based on these results, careful attention to copper grain size as well as deposited film and wafer geometry is recommended in experimental studies of copper polishing.
Modeling of multi-cavity composite soft pneumatic actuators

Soft actuators have allowed for a variety of innovative applications, however, the mathematical modeling of soft actuators is still in its infancy. In this paper, we present a multi-cavity composite soft pneumatic actuator constitutes of multiple layers with embedded multiple air channels. The principle of operation of this actuator is comprehensively analyzed and described through building the analytical model of the actuator with explicit relationships between input pressure and actuator bending angle. We experimentally verify the analytical model of the multi-cavity composite soft pneumatic actuator and finally demonstrated its validity. Such an establishment of theoretical model is of great significance for the design of multi-cavity composite soft pneumatic actuator and their performance prediction in the future.
On (not) assembling a market for sustainable energy: heat network infrastructure and British cities

ABSTRACT Energy policies increasingly rely on market instruments to meet societal objectives for climate change mitigation. We explore the application of such instruments in low carbon heat markets. Using a conceptual framework derived from actor network theory and economic sociology, we examine the role of technical-economic models as market devices in two heat network proposals in British cities. Government intermediaries relied on the models to enact the mutual financial and carbon benefits of an area-wide heat market, and to enrol multiple public sector organisations in innovation. In practice, the models produced the opposite response: parties synthesised the modelled cost–benefit calculations into the existing public services market agencement and translated the model numbers ino opportunities to secure competitive advantage for their own organisation. These activities undermined the projected cost and carbon saving logic of the collective actor solution. The findings demonstrate the potent economic agency of market-emulating public finance and competitive procurement instruments in governing such organisational decisions, and indicate the limited traction of a low carbon calculus, which lacked significant political or senior management sponsorship. Questions are posed about the formatting of economic agency suited to securing the common goods of a sustainable society.
Implementation of Business Judgment Rule Doctrine In Indonesia

Business Judgment Rule as one of the important doctrine in managing limited liability company. Business decision that focus on avoiding lost and just enhancing profit is not the main aim of business judgment rule. Eventhough, shareholders invest their money to get much profit, but the concept of business is managing risk and information, not only to get much profit for company. In Indonesia, this doctrine is still new, therefore, in criminal law enforcement in Indonesia is still unclear how to ascertain that business decision that makes company lost is part of crime or not. Lost is tort, one of the frame of thinking in criminal law enforcement in Indonesia. There is a regulation, article 97, paragraph 5 in Law No.40 year 2007 concerning Company Limited. In this article 97, paragraph 5 stipulated that Directors can not be held responsible for losses of limited liability company if it can prove: a. The loss was no fault or negligence; b. Has been doing maintenance in good faith and in the interest of prudence and in accordance with the purposes and objectives of the company; c. Not a conflict of interest, either directly or inderectly for all acts of management, d. Have taken action to prevent such losses arising or continuing. These stipulations regulate how business judgment of directors must be appreciated if all those aspects have been implemented. Criminal law enforcement in Indonesia has not fully implemented the doctrine to assess whether losses incurred from a business decision is a criminal element.
GeOpps-N: Opportunistic Routing for VANET in a Public Transit System

GeOpps-N, a new hybrid routing protocol for communications between buses and operation control centers in a Public Transportation System (PTS) is proposed. Bus location must be updated each 30 seconds. We model the system as a Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET), which includes buses and Road Side Units (RSU). The network has a low density and is usually clustered, thus requiring relaying of the data. Topology-based routing protocols have proven to be well suited for these low node density scenarios, as compared with other protocols such as geographic-based routing or flooding-based routing. In these protocols, instead of looking for the destination inside the source cluster, the best candidate to transport the message to its destination is found. GeOpps-N searches for relaying nodes which can efficiently transport or relay the data to the closest RSU. GeOpps-N brings together aspects from reactive network topology-based routing and geographic-based routing protocols for delay tolerant networks. In our simulations, it improves the packet delivery ratio by up to 159% over the results of reactive protocols, such as DYMO-UM and DYMO-FAU and up to 59% over GeOpps. GeOpps-N also improves the mean end-to-end delay by up to 36% as compared to GeOpps.
The burden of psychotropic drug prescribingin people with dementia: a populationdatabase study.

OBJECTIVE to compare psychotropic prescribing in older people with dementia and the general elderly population. DESIGN AND SETTING retrospective population database study in 315 General Practices. SUBJECTS there were 271,365 patients aged > or = 65, of which 10,058 (3.7%) recorded as having dementia. METHODS epidemiology of psychotropic prescribing in older people with and without dementia; multilevel modelling of patient and practice characteristics associated with antipsychotic prescribing. RESULTS people with dementia were currently prescribed an antipsychotic drug (17.7%), an antidepressant (28.7%) and a hypnotic/anxiolytic (16.7%). Compared to the general elderly population, antipsychotic prescribing was 17.4 [95% confidence interval (CI) 16.4-18.4], antidepressant prescribing 2.7 (95% CI 2.6-1.8) and hypnotic/anxiolytics 2.2 (95% 2.1-2.3) times more likely in people with dementia. Most antipsychotic prescribing in people with dementia was prolonged (> 16 weeks). Patients living in more deprived areas and registered with larger and more remote practices were more likely to be prescribed prolonged antipsychotics. CONCLUSIONS over one in six patients are currently prescribed antipsychotic drugs known to be of little benefit and causing significant harm, with other psychotropics equally commonly used. Changing this will require investment in services to support alternative management strategies for people with behavioural and psychological disturbance associated with dementia.
Option Implied Probability Density Functions: Methodology and Use in Understanding Investor Sentiment

In recent years there has been lots of research into the extraction of information from the options market. This signed article presents a modelling approach which depicts estimates of future movements of an asset price, as priced by investors. They are of benefit as they incorporate information from the full distribution of investor beliefs. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the benefits of such models and provide guidance on how they may be constructed and interpreted.
Quantification of Gestational Changes in the Uteroplacental Vascular Tree Reveals Vessel Specific Hemodynamic Roles During Pregnancy in Mice

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to establish the time course and hemodynamic significance of de novo formed and enlarged uteroplacental arteries during pregnancy. Using x-ray microcomputed tomography (n = 4–7 placentas from 2–4 dams/gestational group), uteroplacental arterial vascular dimensions were measured at individual implantation sites. Dimensions and topology were used to compute total and vessel-specific resistances and cross-sectional areas. Diameter enlargement of the uterine artery (+55% by Embryonic Day 5.5 [E5.5]) and preplacental radial arteries (+30% by E8.5) was significant only in early gestation. Formation of spiral arteries (E9.5–E11.5), maternal canals, and canal branches (E11.5–E13.5) during midgestation was followed by enlargement of these vessels such that, from E9.5 to E17.5 (near term), spiral artery resistance dropped 9-fold, and canal resistance became negligible. A 12-fold increase in terminal vessel cross-sectional area was nearly sufficient to offset known increases in flow so that blood velocity entering the exchange region was predicted to increase by only 2-fold. The calculated 47% decrease in total resistance downstream of the uterine artery, determined from vascular geometry, was in accord with prior uterine blood flow data in vivo and was due to enlarging spiral artery diameters. Interestingly, radial artery resistance was unchanged after E9.5 so that radial arteries accounted for 91% of resistance and pressure drop in the uteroplacental arterial network by E17.5. These findings led us to propose functional roles for the three morphologically defined vessel types: radial arteries to reduce pressure, spiral artery enlargement to increase flow with gestation, and maternal canal elaboration and enlargement to maintain low exit velocities into the exchange region.
Development of copepod nauplii to copepodites—a parameter for chronic toxicity including endocrine disruption

Test compounds including natural hormones, endocrine disrupters, environmentally occurringcompounds, and reference compounds were tested for acute toxicity and inhibitory effect on larval development in the copepod Acartia tonsa. Three compounds, 17α‐ethinylestradiol, p‐octylphenol, and tamoxifen, known for their differing effects on the vertebrate estrogen system, were potent inhibitors of naupliar development. Other estrogens, 17β‐estradiol, estrone, and bisphenol A, had little potency. Testosterone and progesterone did not inhibit development, but the antiandrogen flutamide had inhibitory effect. Juvenile hormone III was a potent inhibitor, as was expected based on the literature, whereas 20‐hydroxyecdysone had no effect. 3,4‐Dichloroaniline was inhibitory on development, whereas other control compounds, potassium dichromate and 3,5‐dichlorophenol, did not inhibit development. Six of the 17 test compounds had 50% lethal concentration to 50% effective concentration (EC50) ratios higher than 10. The results suggest that naupliar development, as a parameter, is able to detect hormonal disrupters in addition to other chemicals that have other specific modes of action.
A comparison of features for synthetic speech detection

The performance of biometric systems based on automatic speaker recognition technology is severely degraded due to spoofing attacks with synthetic speech generated using diff erent voice conversion (VC) and speech synthesis (SS) techniques. Various countermeasures are proposed to detect this type of attack, and in this context, choosing an appropriate feature extraction technique for capturing relevant information from speech is an important issue. This paper presents a concise experimental review of different features for synthetic speech detection task. A wide variety of features considered in this stud y include previously investigated features as well as some other potentially useful features for characterizing real and sy nthetic speech. The experiments are conducted on recently released ASVspoof 2015 corpus containing speech data from a large number of VC and SS technique. Comparative results using two different classifiers indicate that features representing spectral information in high-frequency region, dynamic information of speech, and detailed information related to subband characteristics are considerably more useful in detecting synthetic sp eech. Index Terms: anti-spoofing, ASVspoof 2015, feature extraction, countermeasures
Challenges to the measurement of health‐related quality of life in children receiving cancer therapy

Measures of health‐related quality of life (HRQL) assess those areas of a patient's functioning that are affected by their cancer and its therapy. Although HRQL measures are integrated frequently into studies of survivors of childhood cancer, their use in the assessment of children receiving therapy has been limited by several methodological challenges. These arise from issues specific to measuring HRQL in young children, who comprise a large proportion of the pediatric oncology population, and from issues associated with assessing HRQL during therapy, when the patient's health status is in constant flux. This study summarizes the commonly used HRQL measures, and examines factors that impact their broad application. These include the influence of developmental changes on the content and format of HRQL measures, the role of proxy assessors, the important characteristics of measurement tools used to assess patients receiving active therapy, and the issues related to the ideal timing of serial HRQL assessments in prospective trials. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Phylogenetic diversity of Archaea in the intestinal tract of termites from different lineages

Termites are among the few arthropods that emit methane to the atmosphere, which is a significant source of global greenhouse gas due to their huge biomass on earth. In this study, phylogenetic diversity of Archaea of five termite species from different lineages were analyzed based on 16S rRNA genes. Archaea associated with wood‐feeding lower termite, R. chinensis were exclusively Methanobrevibacter in the order Methanobacteriales. This type of methanogens was also found in Nasutitermes sp. and Microcerotermes sp. but not in the fungus‐cultivating termites, Odontotermes formosanus and Macrotermes barneyi, which harbor Archaea of the order Methanoplasmatales and Methanosarcinales in their guts. Archaeal diversity of wood‐feeding higher termites was higher than wood‐feeding lower termites. The highest archaeal diversity was found in Nasutitermes sp. In addition to methanogens affiliated with the orders Methanobacteriales, Methanomicrobiales, and Methanoplasmatales, 37% of archaeal clones were affiliated with non‐methanogenic Thaumarchaeota. The results of this study will be significant for further understanding of symbiotic relationship between intestinal microbiota and termites.
Very low levels of education and cognitive reserve

Objective: We conducted a clinicopathologic study in a large population with very low levels of education to determine whether very few years of education could contribute to cognitive reserve and modify the relation of neuropathologic indices to dementia. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we included 675 individuals 50 years of age or older from the Brazilian Aging Brain Study Group. Cognitive abilities were evaluated through a structured interview with an informant at the time of autopsy, including the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale. Neuropathologic examinations were performed using immunohistochemistry and following internationally accepted criteria. Multivariate linear regression models were conducted to determine whether the association between cognitive abilities (measured by CDR sum of boxes) and years of education was independent of sociodemographic variables and neuropathologic indices, including neuritic plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, lacunar infarctions, small-vessel disease, and Lewy bodies. In addition, interaction models were used to examine whether education modified the relation between neuropathologic indices and cognition. Results: Mean education was 3.9 ± 3.5 years. Formal education was associated with a lower CDR sum of boxes (β = −0.197; 95% confidence interval −0.343, −0.052; p = 0.008), after adjustment for sociodemographic variables and neuropathologic indices. Furthermore, education modified the relationship of lacunar infarcts with cognitive abilities (p = 0.04). Conclusions: Even a few years of formal education contributes to cognitive reserve.
An Evaluation of Cyclooxygenase-1 Inhibition Before Coronary Artery Surgery: Aggregometry Versus Patient Self-Reporting

BACKGROUND:Platelet dysfunction due to antiplatelet therapy contributes to perioperative bleeding. Several trials investigating the influence of aspirin intake within the 5 days before surgery reported that transfusion requirements were either increased or not significantly affected by aspirin intake. Our objective was to compare the assessment of aspirin intake by patient self-reporting and by measurement of platelet function with regard to transfusion requirements. METHODS:In a prospective trial, a standardized questionnaire was used in 100 patients for aspirin intake within the 5 days immediately before coronary artery bypass grafting. Whole blood platelet aggregation triggered by arachidonic acid was investigated using the Multiplate® platelet function analyzer. RESULTS:Eleven of 23 patients with aspirin intake within the 5 days before the intervention showed an abnormal aggregation response. Nine of 77 patients who reported no aspirin intake before surgery had an abnormal aggregation response. There were no significant differences in chest tube drainage and red blood cell transfusion over the first 24 h postoperatively between patients with and without reported aspirin intake. There was no significant difference in chest tube drainage over the first 24 h postoperatively between patients showing normal or abnormal aggregation response. Patients with abnormal aggregation before intervention (<51 U) received significantly more platelet transfusion than patients with normal aggregation (1.1 U compared to 0.3 U, P = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS:Our results suggest that arachidonic acid-induced aggregation in whole blood may be a better predictor of platelet-related coagulopathy and platelet transfusion than the assessment of aspirin intake by patient self-reporting.