Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physiological responding to stress in middle-aged males enriched for longevity: a social stress study

Abstract Individuals enriched for familial longevity display a lower prevalence of age-related diseases, such as cardiovascular- and metabolic diseases. Since these diseases are associated with stress and increased cortisol levels, one of the underlying mechanisms that may contribute to healthy longevity might be a more adaptive response to stress. To investigate this, male middle-aged offspring from long-lived families (n = 31) and male non-offspring (with no familial history of longevity) (n = 26) were randomly allocated to the Trier Social Stress Test or a control condition in an experimental design. Physiological (cortisol, blood pressure, heart rate) and subjective responses were measured during the entire procedure. The results showed that Offspring had lower overall cortisol levels compared to Non-offspring regardless of condition, and lower absolute cortisol output (AUCg) during stress compared to Non-Offspring, while the increase (AUCi) did not differ between groups. In addition, systolic blood pressure in Offspring was lower compared to Non-offspring during the entire procedure. At baseline, Offspring had significantly lower systolic blood pressure and reported less subjective stress than Non-offspring and showed a trend towards lower heart rate. Offspring from long-lived families might thus be less stressed prior to potentially stressful events and consequently show overall lower levels in physiological responses. Although attenuated physiological responding cannot be ruled out, lower starting points and a lower peak level in physiological responding when confronted with an actual stressor, might already limit damage due to stress over a lifetime. Lower physiological responding may also contribute to the lower prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and other stress-related diseases in healthy longevity.
License plate detection using cluster run length smoothing algorithm (CRLSA)

Vehicle license plate recognition has been intensively studied in many countries. Due to the different types of license plates being used, the requirement of an automatic license plate recognition system is different for each country. In this paper, an automatic license plate recognition system is proposed for Malaysian vehicles with standard license plates based on image processing, clustering, feature extraction and neural networks.The image processing library is developed in-house which referred to as Vision System Development Platform (VSDP). Fixed filter, Minimum filter, Median Filter and Homomorphic Filtering are used in image enhancement process. After applying image enhancement, the image is segmented using blob analysis, horizontal scan line profiles, clustering and run length smoothing algorithm approach to identify the location of the license plate. Thoroughly each image is transformed into blob objects and its important information such as total of blobs, location, height and width, are being analyzed for the purpose of cluster exercising and choosing the best cluster with winner blobs. Here, new algorithm called Cluster Run Length Smoothing Algorithm (CRLSA) approach was applied to locate the license plate at the right position. CRLSA consisted of two separate new proposed algorithm which applied new edge detector algorithm using 3×3 kernel masks and 128 grayscale offset plus a new way (3D method) to calculate run length smoothing algorithm (RLSA), which can improve clustering techniques in segmentation phase. Three separate experiments were performed; Cluster and Threshold value 130 (CT130) and CRLSA with Threshold value 1 (CCT1). From those experiments, analysis of error tables based on segmentation errors were constructed. The prototyped system has an accuracy more than 96% and suggestions to further improve the system are discussed in this paper pertaining to analysis of the error.
Shear moduli of two dimensional colloidal mixtures

In this thesis a Mode Coupling Theory (MCT) equation is derived that calculates the shear modulus for multi-component colloidal mixtures in two-dimensional systems in linear approximation. With this equation, the plateau shear modulus G∞ is calculated for two two-dimensional systems at the glass transition: for a binary mixture of hard spheres and for a binary mixture of dipolar particles. The results for the shear modulus are compared with a three-dimensional system of hard spheres using data by Gotze and Voigtmann. The plateau shear modulus has about the size G∞ nkBT ≈ 20 and a variation of ±10 for all systems. Here n denotes the total number density. We find that for all systems (the dipolar, the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional hard sphere system) the critical surface (φc resp. Γc) and G∞ have maxima in the region of large differences in the size of the particles and large concentration of the smaller particles. We disagree with the common explanation of depletion attraction for this effect but show that the maxima in the plateau shear modulus are produced by the big particles and the force of the small ones on them. With exception of the region of these maxima, all systems show a lowering of G∞ through mixing. This can be compared to the effect of plasticizing for polymers. The glass transition surface shows that for all systems the liquid is stabilized, but for the hard sphere systems there exists a threshold for the size ratio of the particles. Above that the glass is stabilized. This threshold is lower for the two-dimensional system. For the dipolar system there exist experimental values for the system developed by Konig et al. A comparison shows a good agreement of the plateau shear modulus. The transition parameter Γc is overestimated by MCT by a factor two, as has been found for other systems. A perturbational method, where the shear moduli of the particles are calculated separately as would be done for a monodisperse system and then added up, shows good qualitative and mostly even quantitative agreements with the two-component calculation, although the maximum in the region of large differences in the size of the particles and large concentration of the smaller particles is overestimated. Overall MCT seems to yield good results for the systems studied here. Only close to the boundaries some small-scale crystallizing is visible in the particle plots of the dipolar system.
Log-concavity Results on Gaussian Process Methods for Supervised and Unsupervised Learning

Log-concavity is an important property in the context of optimization, Laplace approximation, and sampling; Bayesian methods based on Gaussian process priors have become quite popular recently for classification, regression, density estimation, and point process intensity estimation. Here we prove that the predictive densities corresponding to each of these applications are log-concave, given any observed data. We also prove that the likelihood is log-concave in the hyperparameters controlling the mean function of the Gaussian prior in the density and point process intensity estimation cases, and the mean, covariance, and observation noise parameters in the classification and regression cases; this result leads to a useful parameterization of these hyperparameters, indicating a suitably large class of priors for which the corresponding maximum a posteriori problem is log-concave.
The vanilloid receptor initiates and maintains colonic hypersensitivity induced by neonatal colon irritation in rats.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Robust chemical or mechanical irritation of the colon of neonatal rats leads to chronic visceral hypersensitivity. The clinical and physiologic relevance of such noxious stimulation in the context of human irritable bowel syndrome is questionable. The aims of this study were to determine whether mild chemical irritation of the colon of neonatal rats produced persistent changes in visceral sensitivity and to evaluate the role of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) in the initiation and maintenance of visceral hypersensitivity. METHODS Ten-day-old rat pups received an intracolonic infusion of 0.5% acetic acid in saline. TRPV1 inhibitors were administered 30 minutes before acetic acid sensitization. Sensitivity of the colon to balloon distention (CRD) in adults was measured by grading their abdominal withdrawal reflex and electromyographic responses. In adult rats, TRPV1 antagonist was injected intraperitoneally 30 minutes before CRD. RESULTS Neonatal acetic acid treatment resulted in higher sensitivity to CRD in adult rats compared with controls in the absence of histopathologic signs of inflammation. Treatment of colons of adult rats with acetic acid did not produce persistent sensitization. Antagonism of the TRPV1 before neonatal administration of acetic acid and after established visceral hypersensitivity attenuated sensitivity to CRD. TRPV1 expression was increased in dorsal root ganglia-containing colon afferent neurons. CONCLUSIONS We have described a new model for persistent colonic sensory dysfunction following a transient noxious stimulus in the neonatal period and a potentially important role for TRPV1 in initiation and maintenance of persistent visceral hypersensitivity.
Investigation of electric field formed in a multilayer mirror under simultaneous irradiation of two wavelengths

Electric field intensity formed in a multilayer mirror has been investigated numerically based on the analytical calculation, for the case where two laser beams with different wavelengths enter the mirror simultaneously. In this case, the intensity changes with time due to the interference between the two waves. By taking into account it, a design method of a multilayer mirror for high power lasers is proposed.
Determination of Stress-Acoustic Coefficients of Rayleigh Wave by Use of Laser Doppler Velocimetry

In the present paper, 1) a new non-contact ultrasonic stress measurement technique is proposed based on acoustoelasticity, in which ultrasonic wave motion is detected by use of a laser Doppler velocimeter, and 2) the stress-acoustic coefficients of Rayleigh wave for aluminum alloy and structural steel are determined by the technique. In the measurement system, Rayleigh waves are emitted into the specimen by a wedge-type piezoelectric transducer and vertical velocities of the surface motions of the traveling Rayleigh waves are detected by the laser Doppler velocimeter at two points of 4 cm apart. In order to measure the traveling time of the wave between the two points, the converted voltage signals are supplied both to i) a sing-around unit and ii) to a digital oscilloscope. The time-of-flight over the distance between the two points is obtained either by subtracting the sing-around periods measured at the two points or by direct reading at zero-cross of the overlapped images of the two waves on the CR display of the oscilloscope. Both measurements are made at the same time under increasing or decreasing loads. The stress-acoustic coefficients obtained are −1.2×10-5/MPa and −0.21×10-5/MPa for aluminum alloy 5052 and structural steel SS400, respectively. These results are in good agreement with those determined using two knife-edge contact piezoelectric transducers. This study shows that the proposed non-contact measuring technique by use of laser velocimetry is applicable to determining the stress-acoustic coefficients.
Heated hatha yoga to target cortisol reactivity to stress and affective eating in women at risk for obesity-related illnesses: A randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE Cortisol reactivity to stress is associated with affective eating, an important behavioral risk factor for obesity and related metabolic diseases. Yoga practice is related to decreases in stress and cortisol levels, thus emerging as a potential targeted complementary intervention for affective eating. This randomized controlled trial examined the efficacy of a heated, hatha yoga intervention for reducing cortisol reactivity to stress and affective eating. METHOD Females (N = 52; ages 25-46 years; 75% White) at risk for obesity and related illnesses were randomly assigned to 8 weeks of Bikram Yoga practice or to waitlist control. Cortisol reactivity to a laboratory stress induction were measured at Weeks 0 (pretreatment) and 9 (posttreatment). Self-reported binge eating frequency and coping motives for eating were assessed at Weeks 0, 3, 6, and 9. RESULTS Among participants with elevated cortisol reactivity at pretreatment ("high reactors"), those randomized to the yoga condition evidenced greater pre- to posttreatment reductions in cortisol reactivity (p = .042, d = .85), but there were not significant condition differences for the "low reactors" (p = .178, d = .53). Yoga participants reported greater decreases in binge eating frequency (p = .040, d = .62) and eating to cope with negative affect (p = .038, d = .54). CONCLUSIONS This study provides preliminary support for the efficacy of heated hatha yoga for treating physiological stress reactivity and affective eating among women at risk for obesity-related illnesses. (PsycINFO Database Record
Robust estimation of adaptive deblurring using simulated annealing algorithm

Motion blur is actually sprinkling of images, which is caused due to the relative motion of camera and scene objects, while capturing the images with long exposure time. Blurring will significantly diminish the visual quality of images. One of the solutions to reduce the blurring effect is to try to remove the blur offline. Among the deblurring processes, the estimation of blur kernel is considered as the vital step. In this paper, we present a robust estimation of adaptive deblurring using simulated annealing algorithm. The proposed algorithm provides efficient fitness for the estimation process, even in the presence of noise as well as large blurs. The experimental result shows that, the problems of low deblurring efficiency and low PSNR ratios have been efficiently overcome by using this algorithm of adaptive deblurring using simulated annealing algorithm. Also, convergence speed of the optimization algorithm is more compared to other optimization algorithms.
Improving Rule-Based Method for Arabic POS Tagging Using HMM Technique

Part-of-speech (POS) tagger plays an important role in Natural Language Applications like Speech Recognition, Natural Language Parsing, Information Retrieval and Multi Words Term Extraction. This study proposes a building of an efficient and accurate POS Tagging technique for Arabic language using statistical approach. Arabic Rule-Based method suffers from misclassified and unanalyzed words due to the ambiguity issue. To overcome these two problems, we propose a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) integrated with Arabic Rule-Based method. Our POS tagger generates a set of 4 POS tags: Noun, Verb, Particle, and Quranic Initial (INL). The proposed technique uses the different contextual information of the words with a variety of the features which are helpful to predict the various POS classes. To evaluate its accuracy, the proposed method has been trained and tested with the Holy Quran Corpus containing 77 430 terms for undiacritized Classical Arabic language. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency of our method for Arabic POS Tagging. The obtained accuracies are 97.6% and 94.4% for respectively our method and for the Rule based tagger method.
Crystal Structure of YegS, a Homologue to the Mammalian Diacylglycerol Kinases, Reveals a Novel Regulatory Metal Binding Site*

The human lipid kinase family controls cell proliferation, differentiation, and tumorigenesis and includes diacylglycerol kinases, sphingosine kinases, and ceramide kinases. YegS is an Escherichia coli protein with significant sequence homology to the catalytic domain of the human lipid kinases. We have solved the crystal structure of YegS and shown that it is a lipid kinase with phosphatidylglycerol kinase activity. The crystal structure reveals a two-domain protein with significant structural similarity to a family of NAD kinases. The active site is located in the interdomain cleft formed by four conserved sequence motifs. Surprisingly, the structure reveals a novel metal binding site composed of residues conserved in most lipid kinases.
Parallel Numerical Solution of 2-D Heat Equation

In this paper, we will discuss the numerical solution of the two dimensional Heat Equation. An approximation to the solution function is calculated at discrete spatial mesh points, proceeding in discrete time steps. The starting values are given by an initial value condition. We will ﬁrst explain how to transform the diﬀerential equation into a ﬁnite diﬀerence equation, respectively a set of ﬁnite diﬀerence equations, that can be used to compute the approximate solution. We will then modify this algorithm in order to parallelize this task on multiple processors. Special focus is given on the performance respectively performance improvement of a parallelized algorithm on diﬀerent hardware platforms. Additionally we will run the implemented algorithm on two diﬀerent clusters and calculate speedup based on the execution time of 1 to 32 CPUs.
deepBase: a database for deeply annotating and mining deep sequencing data

Advances in high-throughput next-generation sequencing technology have reshaped the transcriptomic research landscape. However, exploration of these massive data remains a daunting challenge. In this study, we describe a novel database, deepBase, which we have developed to facilitate the comprehensive annotation and discovery of small RNAs from transcriptomic data. The current release of deepBase contains deep sequencing data from 185 small RNA libraries from diverse tissues and cell lines of seven organisms: human, mouse, chicken, Ciona intestinalis, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenhorhabditis elegans and Arabidopsis thaliana. By analyzing ∼14.6 million unique reads that perfectly mapped to more than 284 million genomic loci, we annotated and identified ∼380 000 unique ncRNA-associated small RNAs (nasRNAs), ∼1.5 million unique promoter-associated small RNAs (pasRNAs), ∼4.0 million unique exon-associated small RNAs (easRNAs) and ∼6 million unique repeat-associated small RNAs (rasRNAs). Furthermore, 2038 miRNA and 1889 snoRNA candidates were predicted by miRDeep and snoSeeker. All of the mapped reads can be grouped into about 1.2 million RNA clusters. For the purpose of comparative analysis, deepBase provides an integrative, interactive and versatile display. A convenient search option, related publications and other useful information are also provided for further investigation. deepBase is available at: http://deepbase.sysu. edu.cn/.
Techniques for Multicore Thermal Management: Classification and New Exploration

Power density continues to increase exponentially with each new technology generation, posing a major challenge for thermal management in modern processors. Much past work has examined microarchitectural policies for reducing total chip power, but these techniques alone are insufficient if not aimed at mitigating individual hotspots. The industry's trend has been toward multicore architectures, which provide additional opportunities for dynamic thermal management. This paper explores various thermal management techniques that exploit the distributed nature of multicore processors. We classify these techniques in terms of core throttling policy, whether that policy is applied locally to a core or to the processor as a whole, and process migration policies. We use Turandot and a HotSpot-based thermal simulator to simulate a variety of workloads under thermal duress on a 4-core PowerPCtrade processor. Using benchmarks from the SPEC 2000 suite we characterize workloads in terms of instruction throughput as well as their effective duty cycles. Among a variety of options we find that distributed control-theoretic DVFS alone improves throughput by 2.5times under our test conditions. Our final design involves a PI-based core thermal controller and an outer control loop to decide process migrations. This policy avoids all thermal emergencies and yields an average of 2.6times speedup over the baseline across all workloads
A fuzzy qualitative framework for indoor rowing kinematics analysis

In this article an outline of a fuzzy qualitative framework for the indoor rowing kinematics analysis have been proposed. Main goal of introducing this fuzzy qualitative framework is to bridge the gap between high level of quantitative details obtained with various present-day sensory or video inputs and symbolic representation used by rowing experts. A Fuzzy qualification process of kinematic parameters is done on the basis of previously collected quantitative data and with possession of prior contextual knowledge for their qualification by rowing experts. Quantitative data acquisition is included indoor rowing kinematics recording by video motion tracking system. Generalizations of the proposed method on kinematics analysis of a common indoor human motion, problems of symbolic representation, as well as guidelines for method improvement are briefly discussed.
Can adipokines serum levels be used as biomarkers of hand osteoarthritis?

Abstract Purpose: To evaluate serum levels of visfatin, resistin and adiponectin in patients with erosive (E) and non-erosive (NE) osteoarthritis (OA) of the hand (HOA) compared to normal controls (NC). Methods: 94 outpatients with E HOA and NE HOA and 21 NC were enrolled. The radiological assessment of both hands was performed according to the Kellgren–Lawrence and Kallman score. Patients were divided into two subsets (lone HOA or generalized OA) based on clinically OA involvement of knee and hip. Serum visfatin, resistin and adiponectin levels were determined by ELISA assay. Results: Visfatin was significantly higher in E HOA patients in comparison to NC and NE HOA group. Resistin showed a significant increase in both E HOA and NE HOA groups versus NC, in particular in generalized OA. No significant differences among groups were found in adiponectin. The Kallman score was more severe in the two subsets of E HOA patients compared to NE HOA. Conclusions: This study showed increased levels of resistin in erosive and non-erosive HOA, and higher visfatin levels in E HOA in comparison to NE HOA. These data suggest the adipokines possible role in the pathogenesis of HOA and their potential usefulness as biomarkers of the disease.
Correlation of chemical shrinkage of polyacrylonitrile fibres with kinetics of cyclization

It has been established that the most important step in the production of carbon fibres from polyacrylonitrile (PAN) precursor fibres is the oxidative thermal treatment applied. During this treatment, physical phenomena and chemical reactions take place accompanied by the shrinkage of the fibres, which has a physical or chemical origin, depending on the nitrile cyclization reactions. The aim of the present study is to establish a correlation between the chemical shrinkage of PAN fibres and the kinetics of cyclization reactions. Based on the isothermal treatment of PAN fibres, we developed a method in order to distinguish between physical and chemical shrinkages. The onset time for the chemical shrinkage follows a relationship with temperature. Chemical shrinkage versus cyclization time data were fitted with the exponential rise to the maximum of the curves. Furthermore, the cyclization kinetics was studied using differential scanning calorimetry and the kinetic parameters determined were identical to those calculated from the chemical shrinkage, demonstrating that the latter is directly related to the kinetics of the cyclization reactions. It was therefore concluded that according to the method developed to distinguish the physical from the chemical shrinkages: (1) there exists a certain onset time for a given treatment temperature to trigger the chemical shrinkage; (2) cyclization reactions do not start below a limiting temperature of 168 °C; (3) at 340 °C, the temperature where the cyclization reactions are completed, the maximum shrinkage is 24%; and (4) the oxidized PAN fibres contain mainly ladder polymer structures with approximately symmetrical sequences connected in angled positions. Copyright © 2007 Society of Chemical Industry