Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Melatonin versus midazolam premedication in children undergoing surgery: A pilot study

Melatonin has been proposed as a premedication alternative to midazolam, preceding anaesthesia induction. However, to our knowledge, data concerning interaction between melatonin and intravenous anaesthetic drugs in children are not available. The aim of this prospective, randomized, double‐blind pilot study was to investigate the possible effect of melatonin premedication, in comparison to midazolam, on the required infusion of propofol in children undergoing surgery. As a secondary outcome, the effect of oral melatonin on the preoperative sedation level and on the post anaesthesia recovery score was evaluated.
Dynamic Properties of Lead Rubber Bearings and its Seismic Isolation Applications in High-Speed Railway Bridge

Lead rubber bearing (LRB) is a new type of earthquake-resistance rubber bearings, formed by inserting lead-core into ordinary laminated rubber bearing, vertical supporting, horizontal displacement and hysteretic damping are hung in single unit together. For lead-core can dissipate seismic energy and increase stiffness under load simultaneously, and most of the requirements of the Seismic isolation system can be satisfied, the material-device has been found widespread application prospect in bridge engineering. Hysteretic behaviors, ductility, and energy dissipation of LRB are mainly determined by some dynamical parameters such as characteristic intensity of LRB, post-yield, pre-yield stiffness and so on. Equivalent linear model of hysteretic characteristics, computational method and the varying range of dynamic parameters of LRB are presented. Dynamic responses of high-speed railway bridge fabricated LRB are calculated, and calculation results are compared with those fabricated common bearings, factors which influence seismic isolation are analyzed.
Mu in vitro Transposition Technology in Functional Genetics and Genomics: Applications on Mouse and Bacteriophages

11/2005 Pietri Puustinen Posttranslational Modifications of Potato Virus A Movement Related Proteins CP and VPg 12/2005 Irmgard Suominen Paenibacillus and Bacillus Related to Paper and Spruce Tree 13/2005 Heidi Hyytiainen Regulatory Networks Controlling Virulence in the Plant Pathogen Erwinia Carotovora Ssp. Carotovora 14/2005 Sanna Janhunen Different Responses of the Nigrostriatal and Mesolimbic Dopaminergic Pathways to Nicotinic Receptor Agonists 15/2005 Denis Kainov Packaging Motors of Cystoviruses 16/2005 Ivan Pavlov Heparin-Binding Growth-Associated Molecule (HB-GAM) in Activity-Dependent Neuronal Plasticity in Hippocampus 17/2005 Laura Seppa Regulation of Heat Shock Response in Yeast and Mammalian Cells 18/2005 Veli-Pekka Jaakola Functional and Structural Studies on Heptahelical Membrane Proteins 19/2005 Anssi Rantakari Characterisation of the Type Three Secretion System in Erwinia carotovora 20/2005 Sari Airaksinen Role of Excipients in Moisture Sorption and Physical Stability of Solid Pharmaceutical Formulations 21/2005 Tiina Hilden Affinity and Avidity of the LFA-1 Integrin is Regulated by Phosphorylation 22/2005 Ari Pekka Mahonen Cytokinins Regulate Vascular Morphogenesis in the Arabidopsis thaliana Root 23/2005 Matias Palva Interactions Among Neuronal Oscillations in the Developing and Adult Brain 24/2005 Juha T. Huiskonen Structure and Assembly of Membrane-Containing dsDNA Bacteriophages 25/2005 Michael Stefanidakis Cell-Surface Association between Progelatinases and s2 Integrins: Role of the Complexes in Leukocyte Migration 26/2005 Heli Kansanaho Implementation of the Principles of Patient Counselling into Practice in Finnish Community Pharmacies 1/2006 Julia Perttila Expression, Enzymatic Activities and Subcellular Localization of Hepatitis E Virus and Semliki Forest Virus Replicase Proteins 2/2006 Tero Wennberg Computer-Assisted Separation and Primary Screening of Bioactive Compounds 3/2006 Katri Makelainen Lost in Translation: Translation Mechanisms in Production of Cocksfoot Mottle Virus Proteins 4/2006 Kari Kreander A Study on Bacteria-Targeted Screening and in vitro Safety Assessment of Natural Products 5/2006 Gudrun Wahlstrom From Actin Monomers to Bundles: The Role of Twinfilin and a-Actinin in Drosophila melanogaster Development 6/2006 Jussi Joensuu Production of F4 Fimbrial Adhesin in Plants: A Model for Oral Porcine Vaccine against Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli
Atom-Probe Tomography of Meteoritic and Synthetic Nanodiamonds

SYNTHETIC NANODIAMONDS. P. R. Heck, M. J. Pellin, A. M. Davis, D. Isheim, D. N. Seidman, J. Hiller, A. Mane, J. Elam, M. R. Savina, T. Stephan, F. J. Stadermann, X. Zhao, T. L. Daulton, and C. Floss. Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, Dept. of Geology, The Field Museum, Chicago IL. E-mail: prheck@fieldmuseum.org. Chicago Center for Cosmochemistry, Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences, Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL. Enrico Fermi Institute, Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Northwestern Univ. Center for AtomProbe Tomography, Dept. of Materials Science & Engineering, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL. Energy Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL. Laboratory for Space Sciences, Physics Dept., Center for Materials Innovation, Wash. Univ., St. Louis, MO.
Bromodomain Factor 1 (Bdf1) Is Phosphorylated by Protein Kinase CK2

ABSTRACT Bromodomain factor 1 (Bdf1) associates with Saccharomyces cerevisiae TFIID and corresponds to the C-terminal half of higher eukaryotic TAF1. It also associates with the SWR-C complex, which is important for Htz1 deposition. Bdf1 binds preferentially to acetylated histone H4. Bdf1 is phosphorylated, but the mechanism and significance of this modification have been unclear. Two distinct regions within Bdf1 are phosphorylated; one is just C terminal to the bromodomains and the other is near the C terminus. Mutational analysis shows that phosphorylation is necessary for Bdf1 function in vivo. Endogenous protein kinase CK2 purifies with Bdf1 and phosphorylates both domains. A similar mechanism may be responsible for phosphorylation of the C-terminal region of mammalian TAF1. These findings suggest that CK2 phosphorylation of Bdf1 may regulate RNA polymerase II transcription and/or chromatin structure.
Are Gas Discharges Capable of Generating Maser Radiation?:—Part 2

Microwave radiation produced by the sliding (spark channel) discharges in the small gaps under the action of high (>MV/cm) electric field over the dielectric (plexiglass) substrates are studied in hydrogen/argon mixtures. Under certain condition, it is observed that the frequency of the radiation in the resonant cavity is 1.420 GHz. This frequency is related to the intrinsic property of the hydrogen atoms and corresponds to the radiation produced by the atomic hydrogen maser. Few examples how the resonant cavity affects the radiation produced by the quantum states of various bands is presented. This paper suggests why the super radiance is sometimes observed. Effect of the microwave radiation on the security of the electronic infrastructure is also mentioned.
A Context-aware Recommender System for Hyperlocal News: A Conceptual Framework

Recommender systems (RSs) have been popular in variety of application domains due to the increased demand for filtering and sorting items and information. Today, there is a numerous approaches and algorithms of data filtering and recommendations. This works presents a conceptual framework for constructing a mobile RS in hyper-local news domain. The mobile RS is designed to deal with specific requirements of news readers, such as spatial- temporal relevance, recency, real-time update and validated news. The implementation of the RS in a distributed file system is also discussed.
An Automatic Approach to Generate Haste Code from Simulink Specifications

One of the reasons that prevents digital designers to adopt asynchronous design methodologies is the lack of high level design tools that are available for asynchronous design. Nowadays, it is quite common to use Simulink, from The Mathworks, as a modeling tool and then to synthesize the developed diagram into RTL code automatically. In the synchronous domain some tools are able to synthesize such models. Until now however, such tools were not available in the asynchronous domain. Our work aims at filling this gap using the Haste language and TiDE tools from Handshake Solutions to facilitate mapping Simulink models onto selftimed circuits.The solution proposed is based on the CodeSimulink environment, a co-design tool, able to synthesize systems composed of hardware and software parts from Simulink descriptions.A model of a commercial audio CODEC has been converted using this approach, showing a significant reduction in development time.
Engineering design framework for a shape memory alloy coil spring actuator using a static two-state model

A shape memory alloy (SMA) coil spring actuator is fabricated by annealing an SMA wire wound on a rod. Four design parameters are required for the winding: the wire diameter, the rod diameter, the pitch angle and the number of active coils. These parameters determine the force and stroke produced by the actuator. In this paper, we present an engineering design framework to select these parameters on the basis of the desired force and stoke. The behavior of the SMA coil spring actuator is described in detail to provide information about the inner workings of the actuator and to aid in selecting the design parameters. A new static two-state model, which represents a force–deflection relation of the actuator at the fully martensitic state (M100%) and fully austenitic state (A100%), is derived for use in the design. Two nonlinear effects are considered in the model: the nonlinear detwinning effect of the SMA and the nonlinear geometric effect of the coil spring for large deformations. The design process is organized into six steps and is presented with a flowchart and design equations. By following this systematic approach, an SMA coil spring actuator can be designed for various applications. Experimental results verified the static two-state model for the SMA coil spring actuator and a case study showed that an actuator designed using this framework met the design requirements. The proposed design framework was developed to assist application engineers such as robotics researchers in designing SMA coil spring actuators without the need for full thermomechanical models.
Primary reconstruction after extensive chest wall resection.

BACKGROUND Chest wall resection and reconstruction has been proven to be a safe surgical procedure. This is particularly useful for breast cancer patients with chest wall recurrences or for those who first present with locally advanced cancer in the chest wall where there is both a large soft tissue and bony defect that need repair. In addition, many of these patients have had irradiation or chemotherapy, which can significantly impair wound healing. METHODS Thirty-four patients underwent chest wall resection and primary reconstruction over an 8-year period. RESULTS Twenty-three patients had breast carcinomas and six had breast and chest wall sarcomas. Of the breast carcinoma patients, 12 had local recurrences and 11 presented with locally advanced primary disease. Bony resection of the chest wall was required in 16 (47%) cases. Thirty myocutaneous flaps (18 rectus abdominis, four pectoralis major, eight latissimus dorsi) and three omental flaps were used for reconstruction. One required a deltovertebral skin flap. Skeletal reconstruction was necessary in four cases. All except one (97%) achieved primary wound healing. There was one mortality (3%) and three patients required further surgery for complications that were related to the reconstruction. Post-resection metastases occurred in 13 (42%) patients and only 2 (6%) had local recurrences. The 2-year survival rate was 78% with a mean survival time of 25.5 months. CONCLUSIONS Primary reconstruction for curative or palliative purposes is a useful and safe surgical procedure for patients with recurrent or locally advanced chest malignancies after extensive chest wall resection. Pedicled myocutaneous flap is the preferred option for skeletal and soft-tissue coverage.
Solution to problems of arc interruption and arc length control in tandem pulsed gas metal arc welding

In the tandem pulsed gas metal arc welding, it is the most important issue to prevent adverse effects caused by electromagnetic interaction between the two adjacent arcs to prevent arc interruption. A pulse timing control can reduce arc interference in tandem pulsed gas metal arc welding. One effective way is to delay the pulse end timing of trailing arc by 0·4–0·5 ms from that of leading arc. In addition, arc length control is assured by pulse frequency modulation for the leading wire and pulse peak modulation for the trailing wire with the pulse timing synchronised with the leading pulse. Consequently, leading and trailing arcs are maintained stable without arc interruption and a stable arc length control is established, which is hardly affected by fluctuations of wire feedrate and extension length.
Distributed Cross-layer Power Control in Pre-equalized Downlink of a MC-CDMA System

The main purpose of this elaboration is to determine the optimal powers of mobile users in a multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) system receiving data from a base station (BS). The downlink transmission is pre-equalized and the utility function is a generalized energy efficiency (EE) based on a cross-layer approach and taking into account the presence of a queue. We rely on game theory as a mathematical tool by considering a non-cooperative game whose equilibrium point is called Nash equilibrium (NE) defining the optimal powers. Accordingly, we developed a distributed algorithm aiming at determining this equilibrium. When the subcarriers number increases, important interference is then introduced. In such case, we showed that the social welfare (sum of utilities of all users) decreases while powers at NE increase. In addition, we deduced that a good choice of the consumed power leads to minimize the individual power and maximize the utility at the NE. Moreover, we noticed that when the packet arrival rate increases, the considered generalized EE can be maximized compared to the conventional EE approach while the power at the NE can be minimized. Therefore, we contribute to improve globally the system performances in terms of social welfare, individual utility function and individual power.
Improvement and Sensitivity Analysis of Placement Angle Optimization in Physical Vapor Deposition Process

Widely used to improve the lifespan of tools, Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) coating process yields hard coating film by creating high-energy beam of coating particles or plasma ions. The quality of the coat is largely depended on its evenness, which is achieved solely by the know-how and experience of coating companies. In dealing with a large, unfamiliar-shape workpiece, coating companies need a logical way to determine the optimal placement of the workpiece in the PVD oven. This work presents the improvement of placement angle optimization for a five-degrees-of-freedom jig fixture with self-rotation. The sensitivity of errors in the physical placement is found to be small.
Advanced cartogram construction using a constraint based framework

The visualization of social phenomena through classical thematic mapping often leads to unsatisfying representations. Classical political referendum maps, for instance, lead to an underestimation of the opinions expressed by populations of large urban agglomerations. Classical maps of BIP, religious belief, or social segregation give a distorted image of the world by linking the relative importance of quantitative and qualitative values of such variables to the Euclidian topographical extent of the statistical areas where these values are measured. Cartograms are a well-known technique used to compensate for this inconvenience by breaking the link between statistical regions and their topographical areas. Consequently, this liberates one visual variable (that of polygon size) for a more relevant use, such as the representation of the relative social importance of these regions (usually measured by the size of their populations), while leaving intact their topological relations. Although well-known, the cartogram technique is still underused. We relate this fact to three restricting factors: (a) a difficult lecture for a large public used to topographical space geometries (b) the inability of cartograms to represent complex spatial layers and (c) the unavailability of user-friendly stand-alone cartogram software. The goal of our work, as discussed in the present paper, is to compensate for these flaws.
The strategic use of noise in pragmatic reasoning

We combine two recent probabilistic approaches to natural language understanding, exploring the formal pragmatics of communication on a noisy channel. We first extend a model of rational communication between a speaker and listener, to allow for the possibility that messages are corrupted by noise. In this model, common knowledge of a noisy channel leads to the use and correct understanding of sentence fragments. A further extension of the model, which allows the speaker to intentionally reduce the noise rate on a word, is used to model prosodic emphasis. We show that the model derives several well-known changes in meaning associated with prosodic emphasis. Our results show that nominal amounts of actual noise can be leveraged for communicative purposes.
Biochemical diagnosis of Alzheimer disease by measuring the cerebrospinal fluid ratio of phosphorylated tau protein to beta-amyloid peptide42.

BACKGROUND The antemortem diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD) requires time-consuming and costly procedures. Therefore, biochemical tests that can direct the physician rapidly to the correct diagnosis are highly desirable. Measurement of single biochemical markers in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), such as total tau protein and beta-amyloid peptide42 (Abeta42), shows robust alterations that highly correlate with the clinical diagnosis of AD but generally lack sufficient diagnostic accuracy. OBJECTIVE To study the combination of CSF phosphorylated tau protein (phospho-tau) and Abeta42 as biochemical markers for AD. METHODS We combined CSF measurements of phospho-tau and Abeta42 in 100 consecutive patients who under-went diagnostic workup for dementia and in 31 healthy control subjects. RESULTS We found that the calculated ratio of phospho-tau to Abeta42 was significantly increased in patients with AD and provided high diagnostic accuracy in distinguishing patients with AD from healthy control subjects (sensitivity, 86%; specificity, 97%), subjects with non-AD dementias (sensitivity, 80%; specificity, 73%), and subjects with other neurological disorders (sensitivity, 80%; specificity, 89%). CONCLUSION The diagnostic usefulness of the CSF ratio of phospho-tau to Abeta42 is superior to either measure alone and can be recommended as an aid to evaluating individuals suspected of having dementia.
Altered Social Reward and Attention in Anorexia Nervosa

Dysfunctional social reward and social attention are present in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders including autism, schizophrenia, and social anxiety. Here we show that similar social reward and attention dysfunction are present in anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder defined by avoidance of food and extreme weight loss. We measured the implicit reward value of social stimuli for female participants with (n = 11) and without (n = 11) AN using an econometric choice task and also tracked gaze patterns during free viewing of images of female faces and bodies. As predicted, the reward value of viewing bodies varied inversely with observed body weight for women with anorexia but not control women, in contrast with their explicit ratings of attractiveness. Surprisingly, women with AN, unlike control women, did not find female faces rewarding and avoided looking at both the face and eyes – independent of observed body weight. These findings suggest comorbid dysfunction in the neural circuits mediating gustatory and social reward in anorexia nervosa.
High Performance Nanotube‐Reinforced Plastics: Understanding the Mechanism of Strength Increase

Polymer–multiwalled carbon nanotube composite films were fabricated using two types of polymer matrices, namely poly(vinyl alcohol), (PVA) and chlorinated polypropylene. In the first case, the PVA was observed to form a crystalline coating around the nanotubes, maximising interfacial stress transfer. In the second case the interface was engineered by covalently attaching chlorinated polypropylene chains to the nanotubes, again resulting in large stress transfer. Increases in Young's modulus, tensile strength, and toughness of × 3.7, × 4.3, and × 1.7, respectively were observed for the PVA‐based materials at less than 1 wt. ‐% nanotubes. Similarily for the polypropylene‐based composites, increases in Young's modulus, tensile strength and toughness of × 3.1, × 3.9, and × 4.4, respectively, were observed at equivalent nanotube loading levels. In addition, a model to describe composite strength was derived. This model shows that the tensile strength increases in proportion to the thickness of the interface region. This suggests that composite strength can be optimized by maximising the thickness of the crystalline coating or the thickness of the interfacial volume partially occupied by functional groups.
Texture Segmentation Using Statistical Characteristics of SOM and Multi-Scale Bayesian Estimation

This paper presents a novel texture segmentation method using Bayesian estimation and SOM (self organizing feature map). Multi-scale wavelet coefficients are used as input for SOM, and likelihood probabilities for observations are obtained from trained SOMs. Texture segmentation is performed by the likelihood probability from trained SOMs and ML (maximum likelihood) classification. The result of texture segmentation is improved using contextual information. The proposed segmentation method performed better than segmentation method using HMT (hidden Markov trees) model. In addition, texture segmentation results by SOM and multi-scale Bayesian image segmentation technique called HMTseg also performed better than those by HMT and HMTseg