Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Formulation and optimization of piroxicam proniosomes by 3-factor, 3-level box-behnken design

The aim of this study was to investigate the combined influence of 3 independent variables in the preparation of piroxicam proniosomes by the slurry method. A 3-factor, 3-level Box-Behnken design was used to derive a second-order polynomial equation and construct contour plots to predict responses. The independent variables selected were molar ratio of Span 60:cholesterol (X1), surfactant loading (X2), and amount of drug (X3). Fifteen batches were prepared by the slurry method and evaluated for percentage drug entrapment (PDE) and vesicle size. The transformed values of the independent variables and the PDE (dependent variable) were subjected to multiple regression to establish a full-model second-order polynomial equation. F was calculated to confirm the omission of insignificant terms from the full-model equation to derive a reduced-model polynomial equation to predict the PDE of proniosome-derived niosomes. Contour plots were constructed to show the effects of X1, X2 and X3 on the PDE. A model was validated for accurate prediction of the PDE by performing checkpoint analysis. The computer optimization process and contour plots predicted the levels of independent variables X1, X2, and X3 (0, −0.158 and -0.158 respectively), for maximized response of PDE with constraints on vesicle size. The Box-Behnken design demonstrated the role of the derived equation and contour plots in predicting the values of dependent variables for the preparation and optimization of piroxicam proniosomes.
Queue-driven cut-through medium access in wireless ad hoc networks

In multihop ad hoc networks the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, in its distributed version, dramatically degrades the performance in terms of throughput and delay. This is due to a protocol property, which tries to provide equal probability of channel access to all nodes. But in multihop ad hoc network a more frequent channel access might be necessary at certain nodes that are intermediate hops and forward other nodes' data. This paper proposes a modification to the protocol that leads to a higher throughput and lower delay by combining the ACK for one packet with the channel access procedure for another, queued-to-be-sent packet. Hence, nodes receiving many packets, probably forwarder, have a higher chance of accessing the channel. Additionally, these changes provide a scheme of packet forwarding more robust to different layouts than original IEEE 802.11, where performance can heavily deteriorate in certain configurations.
Migration in virtual resource management

Large-scale data centers, the workload in each node changes dynamically over time, causing the imbalance of workload, so the workload in some machines may exceeds the threshold, which not only can't guarantee the quality of service requirements (QoS), may also waste resources. This paper designs a resource manager based on migration cost, resource utilization and the number of machines, which develops relevant migration policy for virtual machine migration. The manager is divided into two stages. The initial phase will decide the virtual machines (VM) which should be migrated. The goal is to meet QoS, maximize resource utilization and minimize migration overhead. The second phase develops migration program to resolve the issue of where to move to. The target is to improve resource utilization and reduce the number of machines. Simulation results verify the superiority and rationality of this resource manager.
Automatic Extraction of Information on Protein-Protein Interaction from Scientific Literature

Biological processes are controlled by direct and specific molecular interactions, involving DNA, RNA and proteins. The integration of the structure and function of them with the knowledge of macromolecular interactions and networks is an important step towards the construction of a unified and physiological view of the organism. Most of the data resources on biological functions such as expressed patterns and interactions are still only in the biological literature. The rapid growth of these collections makes it difficult for human beings to access the required information in a convenient and effective manner. The problem is that most of the documents are written in a natural language that computers can not deal with easily, and it is time-consuming for human beings to extract the knowledge from them. Therefore, the biologists have started asking for an intelligent information extraction system be developed method to save time and labor [1, 2, 3]. Here, we propose a system for the information extraction of protein-protein interactions from scientific text. We think that the system presented here could support biological researchers in various situations, e.g. constructing a database on protein interaction.
Should an IRB Approve a Placebo-Controlled Randomized Trial of Analgesia for Procedural Pain in Neonates?

* Abbreviations: IRB — : institutional review board PIPP — : premature infant pain profile One of the most controversial issues in neonatology today is the appropriate treatment of procedural pain in the NICU. Infants in the NICU undergo numerous painful procedures. Policies and practices for the treatment of pain vary from NICU to NICU and from doctor to doctor. Numerous studies have been done to clarify the best methods of relieving pain, but the studies themselves are ethically problematic. What is the gold standard? How should we assess pain? When have we learned enough to consider certain practices as proven? Should proven practices be considered as the standard of care, even if we know that they are not widely used? In this ethics column, we asked experts in pain and palliative care to consider a proposed randomized trial for procedural pain in newborns and to discuss whether an institutional review board should approve the trial. Dr Bellieni is a neonatologist and bioethicist in Sienna, Italy. Dr Taddio is a pharmacologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Dr Linebarger is Medical Director of the Palliative Care Program at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. The following proposal was submitted to an institutional review board (IRB) at a children’s hospital to study different interventions for procedural pain in newborns. ### Efficacy of Sucrose and Breast Milk as Analgesia for Procedural Pain in Newborns #### Background Numerous studies reveal that both oral sucrose and breast milk can reduce duration of crying in newborns after a heel stick.1 Repeated doses of sucrose during prolonged hospitals stays are associated with developmental problems. To better understand the efficacy of breast milk and sucrose, we want to test them against placebo. We will recruit 150 healthy full-term newborns. They will be randomly assigned into 3 groups of 50 infants: “Mother’s milk group”: each newborn will be given 2 mL mother’s milk 2 minutes before the procedure by using a syringe with the needle removed. … Address correspondence to John D. Lantos, MD, Children’s Mercy Hospital, 2401 Gillham Rd, Kansas City, MO 64105. E-mail: jlantos{at}cmh.edu
Effects of ω-3 PUFAs Supplementation on Myocardial Function and Oxidative Stress Markers in Typical Rett Syndrome

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a devastating neurodevelopmental disorder with a 300-fold increased risk rate for sudden cardiac death. A subclinical myocardial biventricular dysfunction has been recently reported in RTT by our group and found to be associated with an enhanced oxidative stress (OS) status. Here, we tested the effects of the naturally occurring antioxidants ω-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (ω-3 PUFAs) on echocardiographic parameters and systemic OS markers in a population of RTT patients with the typical clinical form. A total of 66 RTT girls were evaluated, half of whom being treated for 12 months with a dietary supplementation of ω-3 PUFAs at high dosage (docosahexaenoic acid ~71.9 ± 13.9 mg/kg b.w./day plus eicosapentaenoic acid ~115.5 ± 22.4 mg/kg b.w./day) versus the remaining half untreated population. Echocardiographic systolic longitudinal parameters of both ventricles, but not biventricular diastolic measures, improved following ω-3 PUFAs supplementation, with a parallel decrease in the OS markers levels. No significant changes in the examined echocardiographic parameters nor in the OS markers were detectable in the untreated RTT population. Our data indicate that ω-3 PUFAs are able to improve the biventricular myocardial systolic function in RTT and that this functional gain is partially mediated through a regulation of the redox balance.
Discipline and Punishment in Global Politics: Illusions of Control

Preface Challenges to Authority in Global Politics- J. Leatherman Crossing the Line: Insights from Foucault on the U.S. and Torture- J. Mertus and K. Rawls Disciplining Women, Disciplining Women's Rights- K. Hunt Shielding America: Missile Defense and the Reification of Domesticity- D. Nowacki and D. Gutterman Citizenship as Government: Disciplining Populations post 9/1- K. Rygiel The Nation-State, Global Media and the Regime of Supervision- A. Riaz and A. DiMaggio Disciplining Perceptions, Punishing Violations: Captivity in Televisual Narratives of the Iraq Conflict- M. Dartnell Discipline and Resistance in Diplomacy: Religion and the UN Declaration of Commitment on HIV/Aids- E. Bush The Global Compact and Its Critics: Activism, Power Relations, and Corporate Social Responsibility- G. Knight and J.Smith Illusions of Control- J. Leatherman
Physiological Endpoints for Potential SSRI Interactions in Fish

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are among the pharmaceutical compounds frequently detected in sewage treatment plant effluents and surface waters, albeit at very low concentrations, and have therefore become a focus of interest as environmental pollutants. These neuroactive drugs are primarily used in the treatment of depression but have also found broader use as medication for other neurological dysfunctions, consequently resulting in a steady increase of prescriptions worldwide. SSRIs, via inhibition of the serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) reuptake mechanism, induce an increase in extracellular 5-HT concentration within the central nervous system of mammals. The phylogenetically ancient and highly conserved neurotransmitter and neurohormone 5-HT has been found in invertebrates and vertebrates, although its specific physiological role and mode of action is unknown for many species. Consequently, it is difficult to assess the impact of chronic SSRI exposure in the environment, especially in the aquatic ecosystem. In view of this, the current knowledge of the functions of 5-HT in fish physiology is reviewed and, via comparison to the physiological role and function of 5-HT in mammals, a characterization of the potential impact of chronic SSRI exposure on fish is provided. Moreover, the insight on the physiological function of 5-HT strongly suggests that the experimental approaches currently used are inadequate if not entirely improper for routine environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals (e.g., SSRIs), as relevant endpoints are not assessed or impossible to determine.
Robust scale initialization for long-range stereo visual odometry

Achieving a robust, accurately scaled pose estimate in long-range stereo presents significant challenges. For large scene depths, triangulation from a single stereo pair is inadequate and noisy. Additionally, vibration and flexible rigs in airborne applications mean accurate calibrations are often compromised. This paper presents a technique for accurately initializing a long-range stereo VO algorithm at large scene depth, with accurate scale, without explicitly computing structure from rigidly fixed camera pairs. By performing a monocular pose estimate over a window of frames from a single camera, followed by adding the secondary camera frames in a modified bundle adjustment, an accurate, metrically scaled pose estimate can be found. To achieve this the scale of the stereo pair is included in the optimization as an additional parameter. Results are presented both on simulated and field gathered data from a fixed-wing UAV flying at significant altitude, where the epipolar geometry is inaccurate due to structural deformation and triangulation from a single pair is insufficient. Comparisons are made with more conventional VO techniques where the scale is not explicitly optimized, and demonstrated over repeated trials to indicate robustness.
An emulation infrastructure for multi-hop wireless communication networks

In this paper, a novel approach for wireless network emulation is proposed. The emulation infrastructure is built on a virtualized Linux kernel (User Mode Linux) which allows for highly realistic emulations. The virtualized kernel is extended with software based wireless cards which are plugged in a generic physical layer emulator. The emulator proposed in this paper tries to reduce the gap between simulations and implementations by allowing a developer to test his/her implementation in an almost real, but entirely software-based environment. The advantage of such an approach is that its cost, in terms of required infrastructure and learning curve for the developer is reduced to a minimum.
Beowulf: harnessing the power of parallelism in a pile-of-PCs

The rapid increase in performance of mass market commodity microprocessors and significant disparity in pricing between PCs and scientific workstations has provided an opportunity for substantial gains in performance to cost by harnessing PC technology in parallel ensembles to provide high end capability for scientific and engineering applications. The Beowulf project is a NASA initiative sponsored by the HPCC program to explore the potential of Pile-of-PCs and to develop the necessary methodologies to apply these low cost system configurations to NASA computational requirements in the Earth and space sciences. This paper describes the technologies and methodologies employed to achieve the increased performance of PCs. Both opportunities afforded by this approach and the challenges confronting its application to real-world problems are discussed in the framework of hardware and software systems as well as the results from benchmarking experiments. Finally, near term technology trends and future directions of the Pile-of-PCs concept are considered.
Implementation of Generalized Regression Neural Network to Establish a Relation between Vibration Parameters and Time of Vibration for Welded Joints

This paper presents implementation of Generalized Regression Neural Network to establish a relation between vibration parameters and properties of vibration welded joints. During the welding of metals along with mechanical vibrations, uniform and finer grain structures can be produced. This increases the toughness and hardness of the metals, because of solidification effects at the weld pool surface. So, physical experiments have been conducted on the homogeneous welded joints by providing vibrations during the welding period. The voltage used to generate the vibration and the time of vibration are used as vibration parameters. Hardness of the welded joint is considered as one of the mechanical properties of the welded joint.
TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAXES OF MASSIVE STAR-FORMING REGIONS. I. S 252 & G232.6+1.0

We are conducting a large program with the NRAO Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to measure trigonometric parallaxes of massive star-forming regions across the Milky Way. Here we report measurement of the parallax and proper motion of methanol masers in S 252 and G232.6+1.0. The parallax of S 252 is 0.476 ± 0.006 mas (2.10+0.027−0.026 kpc), placing it in the Perseus spiral arm. The parallax of G232.6+1.0 is 0.596 ± 0.035 mas (1.68+0.11−0.09 kpc), placing it between the Carina–Sagittarius and Perseus arms, possibly in a Local (Orion) spur of the Carina–Sagittarius arm. For both sources, kinematic distances are significantly greater than their parallax distances. Our parallaxes and proper motions yield full space motions accurate to ≈1 km s−1. Both sources orbit the Galaxy ∼13 km s−1 slower than circular rotation.
A Power-Aware Based Storage Architecture for High Performance Computing

The energy crisis of the last years and the ever increasing conscience about the negative effects of energy waste on the climate change have brought the sustainability both into public attention, industry, and scientific scrutiny. Energy demand has been increasing in many subsystems, specially in data centers and supercomputers. This paper considers the problem of saving energy on storage systems taking advantage of SSD devices. SSDs and magnetic disk devices offer different power characteristics, being SSD devices much less power consuming than conventional magnetic disk devices. We propose a novel power saving solution based on SSD devices, namely SSD-PASS. Our storage system obtains benefits of permanent caching on SSDs in storage nodes. Nowadays we can find solutions that do not consider the viability and feasibility of the SSD-based storage systems, in terms of monetary cost. We present a cost analysis and evaluate our proposed architecture, in terms of saved energy and performance. Our cost model takes into account magnetic disk and SSD devices reliability metrics, current energy prices, and replacement costs. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution achieves a significant reduction in energy consumption and subsequent monetary savings by up to 66\%. We have evaluated the proposed approach with realistic workloads of three well-known HPC applications.
Análise do processo de gestão do conhecimento em uma empresa de base tecnológica da cidade de Joinville-SC

Atualmente o conhecimento e considerado o principal fator de producao das organizacoes. Dentre as empresas que mais se destacam como intensivas em conhecimento, estao as organizacoes de base tecnologica. Assim, o objetivo do presente estudo e mostrar as acoes de gestao do conhecimento realizadas por uma empresa de base tecnologica de Joinville/SC. Foi realizado um estudo de caso qualitativo, de carater exploratorio e explicativo, com utilizacao de dados primarios, coletados em duas etapas. A primeira coleta foi feita por meio de um instrumento de pesquisa com perguntas abertas, enviadas por e-mail, a dois colaboradores da organizacao em foco; e a segunda, por intermedio de ligacoes telefonicas para os mesmos colaboradores com o objetivo de conhecer melhor a realidade da empresa e analisar as respostas dadas ao questionario. Dentre os principais resultados encontrados, pode-se citar o fato de a empresa fazer uso de ferramentas como Comunidades de Pratica, identificadas na rotina organizacional.
Semantic Pattern for User-Interactive Question Answering

A new semantic pattern is proposed in this paper, which can be used by users to post questions and answers in user-interactive question answering (QA) system. The necessary procedures of using semantic pattern in a QA system are also presented, which include question structure analysis, pattern matching, pattern generation, pattern classification and answer extraction. A user interface of using semantic pattern is also implemented in our QA system, which allows users to effectively post and answer questions. It gains good overall user satisfaction.
Atmospheric contribution to the dissipation of the gravitational tide of Phobos on Mars

Here, we investigate the possibility of a significant atmospheric contribution to the tidal dissipation of the Phobos‐Mars system. We apply the classical tidal theory and we find that most of the gravitational forcing is projected onto the first symmetric Hough mode which has an equivalent depth of about 57 km and is significantly trapped in the vertical. Therefore, no significant dissipation occurs through the vertical propagation of energy and subsequent breaking of the tidal wave as the wave amplifies with height. Alternatively, from the energy stored in the first trapped mode we estimate that the time scale required for the dissipative mechanisms to account for the total dissipation of the tides is of order 102 s. This time scale is unrealistically short, since it would contradict observations of propagating thermal tides in Mars atmosphere. Therefore we conclude that the dissipation of the tidal potential that explains the observed acceleration of Phobos most likely occurs within the solid planet.
Process and device simulation of power VDMOS transistors in Bipolar / CMOS / DMOS technology

This paper presents two-dimensional process and device simulation results of power VDMOS one-cell in a Bipolar/CMOS/DMOS technology. The VDMOS process simulation is divided for more accuracy in three bricks: buried layer, active zone and sinker; it takes into account all thermal budget. For process simulation, good results on sheet resistance, lateral and vertical doping diffusions are compared to experimental results. Electrical simulations are performed using mobility models for conduction regime, and impact ionisation model for breakdown voltage; they are in good agreement with experimental ones, confirming the good choice of models and possibility of device optimisation with TCAD approach. VDMOS transistors for automotive applications are submitted to high temperatures which can degrade electrical parameters; electrical simulations of threshold voltage, onresistance, and saturation current are performed using previous models in function of temperature in the range 323K to 423K.
Prediction of Lung Cells Oncogenic Transformation for Induced Radon Progeny Alpha Particles Using Sugarscape Cellular Automata

Background Alpha particle irradiation from radon progeny is one of the major natural sources of effective dose in the public population. Oncogenic transformation is a biological effectiveness of radon progeny alpha particle hits. The biological effects which has caused by exposure to radon, were the main result of a complex series of physical, chemical, biological and physiological interactions. The cellular and molecular mechanisms for radon-induced carcinogenesis have not been clear yet. Methods Various biological models, including cultured cells and animals, have been found useful for studying the carcinogenesis effects of radon progeny alpha particles. In this paper, sugars cape cellular automata have been presented for computational study of complex biological effect of radon progeny alpha particles in lung bronchial airways. The model has included mechanism of DNA damage, which has been induced alpha particles hits, and then formation of transformation in the lung cells. Biomarkers were an objective measure or evaluation of normal or abnormal biological processes. In the model, the metabolism rate of infected cell has been induced alpha particles traversals, as a biomarker, has been followed to reach oncogenic transformation. Results The model results have successfully validated in comparison with “in vitro oncogenic transformation data” for C3H 10T1/2 cells. This model has provided an opportunity to study the cellular and molecular changes, at the various stages in radiation carcinogenesis, involving human cells. Conclusion It has become well known that simulation could be used to investigate complex biomedical systems, in situations where traditional methodologies were difficult or too costly to employ.