Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rehabilitation of deficient alveolar ridges using titanium grids before and simultaneously with implant placement: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND The aim of the present study is to perform a systematic review of the literature on the use of titanium grids for implant surgery before and simultaneously with implant placement and to assess the success rate of the procedure, as well as survival and success rates of implants placed in the regenerated areas. METHODS Medline was used to identify studies in English published from 1996 to 2011. An additional hand search was performed of the relevant journals and of the bibliographies of the papers identified. Articles retrieved by two independent authors were screened using specific inclusion criteria: randomized controlled trials (RCTs), controlled clinical trials, and prospective clinical studies regarding vertical and/or horizontal regeneration of the alveolar ridge using titanium grids, in association or not with biomaterials, before and simultaneously with implant placement. RESULTS Six articles were selected, including a total of 79 patients, 87 titanium grids, and 141 implants. Twenty-four implants were placed simultaneously with titanium grids, and 117 implants were inserted after a period of 4 to 9 months. Titanium grids in combination with autogenous bone were used in 43 cases, 25 in combination with a mixture of autogenous bone and bone substitutes, 14 in association with bone substitutes, five using only titanium grids. The overall success rate of the regenerative procedures was 98.86%; the overall survival and success rates of implants were 100% and 93.2%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS The main limit of the present systematic review is the scarcity of papers with an adequate and consistent methodology regarding the data collection and analysis and the lack of RCTs and large well-designed long-term trials. Survival and success rates of implants placed in the areas treated with titanium grids were comparable to those of implants placed in native, non-regenerated bone and of implants placed in bone regenerated with resorbable and non-resorbable membranes.
AN APPROACH TO DOCUMENT ENGINEERING AT FUNDACIÓN

Fundación Hullera Vasco-Leonesa is a company with a documental department responsible for managing the bibliographic information the company uses. That department manually elaborates and distributes periodic documents (press bulletins, environmental dossiers, etc). This paper describes an intelligent multiagent system as a way to solve the work handled by this department. The objective was to design and implement a digital library with all the tasks needed, like query management, automatic design and generation of electronic documents, selective information distribution, etc. Copyright © 2002 IFAC
Dynamic Community Mining and Tracking Based on Temporal Social Network Analysis

Nowadays, the analysis of social networks, as well as the community evolution has become a hotly discussed topic in social computing field. In this paper, we focus on mining and tracking the dynamic communities based on social networking analysis. Based on a generic framework for the dynamic community discovery, a computational approach is developed to extract users' static and dynamic features for the temporal trend detection. A dynamically socialized user networking model is then presented to describe users' various social relationships. A mechanism is proposed and developed to detect the dynamic user communities, and track their evolving changes. Experiments using Twitter data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in tracking how communities dynamically create, split, and merge from a group of connected people in social media environments.
A single-fed circularly polarized using water substrate patch antenna with small size low-profile and broadband

A single-feed circularly polarized (CP) patch antenna, characterized by small-size, low-profile and broadband, is proposed for UHF band applications (389MHz-610MHz). Its substrate, made up of water and rogers4003a, will greatly reduce the value of Q, so it can achieve wider bandwidth. The radiation structure consists of four planar spirals, a cross shaped microstrip line, and a T-shaped dipole The final prototype of the antenna, with an overall size of 200 mm× 200 mm× 1.732 mm (0.25 λ<inf>0</inf> ×0.25 λ<inf>0</inf> ×0.002 λ<inf>0</inf> at 389 MHz) is simulated. The −10 dB bandwidth of the antenna is closed to 44%, and a 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of 19%, the gain of this antenna can achieve to −1.5dB.
Stability analysis of a simple walking model driven by a nonlinear oscillator

Walking motion of a human is achieved through the interaction between the dynamics of the human mechanical system and the rhythmic signals of the central pattern generator (CPG). We analyze dynamic properties of a simple walking model of a biped robot driven by a nonlinear oscillator. The simple model consists of a hip and two legs which are connected at the hip and has touch sensors at the tips of the legs. The swing leg is controlled by the rhythmic signal of the oscillator. The oscillator receives feedback signals from the touch sensors and modifies the walking motion according to the signals. From the analysis of the stability of the periodic walking motion using a Poincare map, it is revealed that the simple model has the stabilization property and moreover the stability region is enlarged due to the signal feedbacks.
Lack of association between matrix metalloproteinase-1 (MMP-1) promoter polymorphism and risk of renal cell carcinoma.

OBJECTIVE Investigate the possible association of insertion/deletion (2G/G) polymorphism at nucleotide -1607 of the MMP-1 promoter with the development and progression of renal cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this study, we genotyped 217 individuals, 99 patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and 118 controls without cancer. DNA specimens were extracted from epithelial buccal cells and paraffin-embedded tissue of RCC patients and from epithelial buccal cells and blood cells of healthy controls. RESULTS The difference in frequency of 2G/2G genotype between controls (22.9%) and RCC patients (28.6%) was not statistically significant (p = 0.461). We also did not find correlation between 2G/2G and histological type of RCC. The comparison of genotype distribution and frequency of 2G allele in different populations showed a strong variability of 2G allele frequency among the different ethnic groups. This fact may influence on the collaboration of this 2G allele in RCC or others diseases. CONCLUSION Our data suggest that the matrix metalloproteinase-1 (MMP-1) promoter polymorphism may not play a significant role in renal cell carcinoma patients in Brazil.
Increasing Fgf4 expression in the mouse limb bud causes polysyndactyly and rescues the skeletal defects that result from loss of Fgf8 function

A major function of the limb bud apical ectodermal ridge (AER) is to produce fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) that signal to the underlying mesenchyme. Previous studies have suggested that of the four FGF genes specifically expressed in the mouse AER, Fgf8 is unique not only in its expression pattern, but also because it is the only such FGF gene that causes limb skeletal abnormalities when individually inactivated. However, when both Fgf8 and Fgf4 are simultaneously inactivated in the AER, the limb does not develop. One possible explanation for these observations is that although both of these FGF family members contribute to limb development, Fgf8 has functions that Fgf4 cannot perform. To test this hypothesis, we used a novel method to substitute Fgf4 for Fgf8 expression in the developing limb bud by concomitantly activating a conditional Fgf4 gain-of-function allele and inactivating an Fgf8 loss-of-function allele in the same cells via Cre-mediated recombination. Our data show that when Fgf4 is expressed in place of Fgf8, all of the skeletal defects caused by inactivation of Fgf8 are rescued, conclusively demonstrating that FGF4 can functionally replace FGF8 in limb skeletal development. We also show that the increase in FGF signaling that occurs when the Fgf4 gain-of-function allele is activated in a wild-type limb bud causes formation of a supernumerary posterior digit (postaxial polydactyly), as well as cutaneous syndactyly between all the digits. These data underscore the importance of controlling the level of FGF gene expression for normal limb development.
Unified Methods for Exploiting Piecewise Linear Structure in Convex Optimization

We develop methods for rapidly identifying important components of a convex optimization problem for the purpose of achieving fast convergence times. By considering a novel problem formulation—the minimization of a sum of piecewise functions—we describe a principled and general mechanism for exploiting piecewise linear structure in convex optimization. This result leads to a theoretically justified working set algorithm and a novel screening test, which generalize and improve upon many prior results on exploiting structure in convex optimization. In empirical comparisons, we study the scalability of our methods. We find that screening scales surprisingly poorly with the size of the problem, while our working set algorithm convincingly outperforms alternative approaches.
HELIOS VIII search and rescue robot: Design of an adaptive gripper and system improvements

Robotics research can help search and rescue operations with developing practical mobile platforms and tools for urban and industrial disaster response. Crawled vehicles, because of their terrain adaptability, have a considerable importance for rescue operations and tasks performed in unstructured environments. In this contribution we present the newest version of HELIOS robot (HELIOS VIII). It consists of the same mechanical concept introduced with its predecessor. Nevertheless all the efficient motion capabilities of HELIOS concept were maintained and improved. In this paper we will focus a lot on the development of a new gripper for HELIOS vehicle. It consists of four fingers actuated by one actuator and they can adapt to the grasped object surface. Besides we introduce also a special docking mechanism utilized for the connection of the vehicle with auxiliary crawler units.
Building Energy Management: Integrated Control of Active and Passive Heating, Cooling, Lighting, Shading, and Ventilation Systems

Buildings account for nearly 40% of global energy consumption. About 40% and 15% of that are consumed, respectively, by HVAC and lighting. These energy uses can be reduced by integrated control of active and passive sources of heating, cooling, lighting, shading and ventilation. However, rigorous studies of such control strategies are lacking since computationally tractable models are not available. In this paper, a novel formulation capturing key interactions of the above building functions is established to minimize the total daily energy cost. To obtain effective integrated strategies in a timely manner, a methodology that combines stochastic dynamic programming (DP) and the rollout technique is developed within the price-based coordination framework. For easy implementation, DP-derived heuristic rules are developed to coordinate shading blinds and natural ventilation, with simplified optimization strategies for HVAC and lighting systems. Numerical simulation results show that these strategies are scalable, and can effectively reduce energy costs and improve human comfort.
Distributed video streaming using multiple description coding and unequal error protection

This paper presents a distributed video streaming framework using unbalanced multiple description coding (MDC) and unequal error protection. In the proposed video streaming framework, two senders simultaneously stream complementary descriptions to a single receiver over different paths. To minimize the overall distortion and exploit the benefits of multipath transport when the characteristics of each path are different, an unbalanced MDC method for wavelet-based coders combined with a TCP-friendly rate allocation algorithm is proposed. The proposed rate allocation algorithm adjusts the transmission rates and the channel coding rates for all senders in a coordinated fashion to minimize the overall distortion. Simulation results show that the proposed unbalanced MDC combined with our rate allocation algorithm achieves about 1-6 dB higher peal signal-to-noise ratio compared to conventional balanced MDC when the available bandwidths along the two paths are different under time-varying network conditions.
A Novel Egr-1-Agrin Pathway and Potential Implications for Regulation of Synaptic Physiology and Homeostasis at the Neuromuscular Junction

Synaptic transmission requires intricate coordination of the components involved in processing of incoming signals, formation and stabilization of synaptic machinery, neurotransmission and in all related signaling pathways. Changes to any of these components cause synaptic imbalance and disruption of neuronal circuitry. Extensive studies at the neuromuscular junction (NMJ) have greatly aided in the current understanding of synapses and served to elucidate the underlying physiology as well as associated adaptive and homeostatic processes. The heparan sulfate proteoglycan agrin is a vital component of the NMJ, mediating synaptic formation and maintenance in both brain and muscle, but very little is known about direct control of its expression. Here, we investigated the relationship between agrin and transcription factor early growth response-1 (Egr-1), as Egr-1 regulates the expression of many genes involved in synaptic homeostasis and plasticity. Using chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP), cell culture with cell lines derived from brain and muscle, and animal models, we show that Egr-1 binds to the AGRN gene locus and suppresses its expression. When compared with wild type (WT), mice deficient in Egr-1 (Egr-1−/−) display a marked increase in AGRN mRNA and agrin full-length and cleavage fragment protein levels, including the 22 kDa, C-terminal fragment in brain and muscle tissue homogenate. Because agrin is a crucial component of the NMJ, we explored possible physiological implications of the Egr-1-agrin relationship. In the diaphragm, Egr-1−/− mice display increased NMJ motor endplate density, individual area and area of innervation. In addition to increased density, soleus NMJs also display an increase in fragmented and faint endplates in Egr-1−/− vs. WT mice. Moreover, the soleus NMJ electrophysiology of Egr-1−/− mice revealed increased quantal content and motor testing showed decreased movement and limb muscle strength compared with WT. This study provides evidence for the potential involvement of a novel Egr-1-agrin pathway in synaptic homeostatic and compensatory mechanisms at the NMJ. Synaptic homeostasis is greatly affected by the process of aging. These and other data suggest that changes in Egr-1 expression may directly or indirectly promote age-related pathologies.
A genetic analysis of group movement in an isolated population of tree-roosting bats

Group fission is an important dispersal mechanism for philopatric adults. In Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, Saskatchewan, tree-roosting big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) exhibit fission–fusion roosting behaviour. During 2004–2007, the majority of females previously resident to roosting area 1 (RA1) moved to a new roosting area (RA4). We examined how genetic relationships, inferred from data for microsatellite loci and mitochondrial DNA, influenced new roost area (RA) selection during 2006 when colony members were split between the RAs. We found that females who moved to RA4 had higher average relatedness than those that remained in RA1. We found that nearly all females belonging to matrilines with high average relatedness moved to RA4 while females from matrilines with low average relatedness were split between the two RAs. These results suggest that closely related maternal kin preferentially move to new RAs. However, daily roosting preferences within a RA are not based on genetic relationships probably because daily roosting associations between kin and non-kin are used to ensure adequate roost group size. Studying the effects of kinship on the fission and movements of groups not only enhances our understanding of social behaviour and population genetics but also informs conservation decisions.
Differential expression and functional role of GATA-2, NF-E2, and GATA-1 in normal adult hematopoiesis.

We have explored the expression of the transcription factors GATA-1, GATA-2, and NF-E2 in purified early hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs) induced to gradual unilineage erythroid or granulocytic differentiation by growth factor stimulus. GATA-2 mRNA and protein, already expressed in quiescent HPCs, is rapidly induced as early as 3 h after growth factor stimulus, but then declines in advanced erythroid and granulocytic differentiation and maturation. NF-E2 and GATA-1 mRNAs and proteins, though not detected in quiescent HPCs, are gradually induced at 24-48 h in both erythroid and granulocytic culture. Beginning at late differentiation/early maturation stage, both transcription factors are further accumulated in the erythroid pathway, whereas they are suppressed in the granulopoietic series. Similarly, the erythropoietin receptor (EpR) is induced and sustainedly expressed during erythroid differentiation, although beginning at later times (i.e., day 5), whereas it is barely expressed in the granulopoietic pathway. In the first series of functional studies, HPCs were treated with antisense oligomers targeted to transcription factor mRNA: inhibition of GATA-2 expression caused a decreased number of both erythroid and granulocyte-monocytic clones, whereas inhibition of NF-E2 or GATA-1 expression induced a selective impairment of erythroid colony formation. In a second series of functional studies, HPCs treated with retinoic acid were induced to shift from erythroid to granulocytic differentiation (Labbaye et al. 1994. Blood. 83:651-656); this was coupled with abrogation of GATA-1, NF-E2, and EpR expression and conversely enhanced GATA-2 levels. These results indicate the expression and key role of GATA-2 in the early stages of HPC proliferation/differentiation. Conversely, NF-E2 and GATA-1 expression and function are apparently restricted to erythroid differentiation and maturation: their expression precedes that of the EpR, and their function may be in part mediated via the EpR.
A feature selection algorithm for IDS

An intrusion detection system (IDS) monitors the network traffic looking for suspicious or malicious activities or policy violations, which could represent an attack or unauthorized access. Traditional systems were designed to detect known attacks but cannot identify unknown threats. They most commonly detect known threats based on predefined rules or behavioral analysis through baselining the network. Expert attackers can bypass these techniques, therefore the need for more intelligent intrusion detection is increasing by the day. Intelligent IDS collects and analyzes information from different areas and deals with large amount of data, which contains various redundant and irrelevant features and results in increased overfitting, processing (training) time and low detection rate. For that reason, feature selection should be applied as a preprocessing step to improve accuracy and system performance while shrinking large data sets. In this paper, filter method which is a method used in feature selection to identify important features and to eliminate the less effective features has been developed for three different class structures on the NSL KDD dataset. After this process, classification models were created and performance measures were used to evaluate the models.
THE ROLE OF EXPLORATION IN LEARNING CONTROL

Whenever an intelligent agent learns to control an unknown environment, two opposing objectives have to be combined. On the one hand, the environment must be su ciently explored in order to identify a (sub-) optimal controller. For instance, a robot facing an unknown environment has to spend time moving around and acquiring knowledge. On the other hand, the environment must also be exploited during learning, i.e., experience made during learning must also be considered for action selection, if one is interested in minimizing costs of learning. For example, although a robot has to explore its environment, it should avoid collisions with obstacles once it has received some negative reward for collisions. For e cient learning, actions should thus be generated in such a way that the environment is explored and pain is avoided. This fundamental trade-o between exploration and exploitation demands e cient exploration capabilities, maximizing the e ect of learning while minimizing the costs of exploration.
Examining Teacher Candidates' Attitudes towards Teaching Profession and Pupil Control Ideology

The attitude of teachers towards teaching profession is as important as teaching knowledge. It is estimated that teachers who have positive attitudes towards teaching profession may show humanistic attitudes and behaviors to students. Therefore, this study examines correlation between attitudes towards teaching profession and pupil control ideology of teacher candidates. The participants of the study comprise 281 teacher candidates at Ondokuz Mayis University's Faculty of Education. In this study, two instruments were used for data gathering. "Teaching Profession Attitude Scale" was used to evaluate the attitudes towards teaching profession of the teacher candidates. "Pupil Control Ideology Inventory" was used for determining the level of pupil control ideology of teacher candidates on a humanistic-custodial dimension. The results of Pearson moment correlation analysis indicated that the pupil control ideology was negatively correlated with the attitude towards teaching profession of teacher candidates. According to simple regression analysis, the attitude towards teaching profession is a significant predictor for pupil control ideology on teacher candidates T-test analysis indicated that there was no significant difference according to gender in terms of pupil control ideology and the attitude towards teaching profession of teacher candidates.
Recess and Reading Achievement of Early Childhood Students in Public Schools.

In recent years, schools have tended to eliminate recess period and to devote more time to instruction in order to increase academic achievement. Using a nationally representative sample, this study examined reading scores of students who experienced different numbers of recess days in a week, and different number of times and length of recess in a day. Students' gender, race, family socioeconomic status, initial reading scores, and age were controlled. Findings showed no significant main effects of recess; however, students who were exposed to a 16-30 minutes recess period tended to perform better. An interaction effect of race and the length of recess was found. It was concluded that recess does not have a significant effect on reading achievement. In other words, it does not improve or hurt academic achievement, but provides an opportunity for children to be physically active, play and socialize -- just to be a
A Creativity-Training Workshop: Short-Term, Long-Term, and Transfer Effects

Abstract A creativity-training workshop utilizing instructions, practice, and reinforcement (team points toward a course grade) increased Ss' (N = 14 male and female undergraduates) behaviorally defined creative responses, fluency, flexibility, and originality on both unusual uses and problem solution exercises. Transfers of training effects were noted in subjective ratings of student papers written independently of the workshop. Additionally, the workshop procedures increased Ss' scores on the Torrance tests of creativity immediately after the workshop, an increase which was still apparent 11 months later during a follow-up. No comparable effects were noted in a control group.