Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An unexpected role of a trace amount of water in catalyzing proton transfer in phosphine-catalyzed (3 + 2) cycloaddition of allenoates and alkenes.

Through the joint forces of computation and experiment, the detailed mechanism of the Lu phosphine catalyzed (3 + 2) cycloaddition of allenoates and alkenes has been elucidated. The overall potential energy surface of the Lu (3 + 2) reaction has been computed. More importantly, theory and experiment have confirmed that a trace amount of water plays a critical role in assisting the process of [1,2] proton shift in the Lu reaction.
Confirmation of the Neurophysiologically Predicted Therapeutic Effects of Trazodone on Its Target Symptoms Depression, Anxiety and Insomnia by Postmarketing Clinical Studies with a Controlled-Release Formulation in Depressed Outpatients

Early human pharmaco-EEG and subsequent sleep laboratory studies identified trazodone, a 5-HT2 antagonist and 5-HT reuptake inhibitor (SARI), as an antidepressant with therapeutic effects on its target symptoms depressed mood, anxiety and insomnia. On the occasion of the introduction of a controlled-release (CR) formulation (Trittico® 150 mg retard, marketed in Austria by CSC Pharmaceuticals Handels GmbH, Vienna, Austria) in Austria in July 2000, a multi-center, open, clinical post-marketing study on the therapeutic effects, safety and target symptoms of trazodone CR in depression was carried out at 80 offices of Austrian neuropsychiatrists. 549 outpatients (63% females) of all age groups suffering from five different subtypes of depression were enrolled in the study. After a 2-week fixed dose-titration regimen up to 150 mg and a 4-week adjustment period to the optimum dose, 66% of the patients remained on 150 mg, 20% increased the dose and 11% decreased it. Only 3.7% discontinued treatment. Rating by the neuropsychiatrists based on the Clinical Global Impression showed very much to much improvement in 78.3% of the patients, and no change or a deterioration in only 3.6%. In the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAMD) a statistically significant improvement from a baseline score of 21 to a score of 14 after 2 weeks was found, and a normalization to a score of 8 after 6 weeks. Therapeutic effects were similar in the five groups suffering from different subtypes of depression and in patients with and without comedication. Self-rating by the patients based on the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) and Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) also showed a significant improvement in the 2nd and 6th week of therapy. Evaluation of the target symptoms of trazodone by ranking the most improved symptoms identified insomnia as the most improvedpsychopathological item in all three scales. While in the observer ratings also suicidal tendencies and weight loss were found much improved, in the self-rated Zung SDS sadness and loss of drive came second and third in the improvement ranking, in the self-rated Zung SAS anxiety and the feeling of falling apart. Tolerability was very good. In the 2nd week only 16.9% and in the 6th week only 7.6% of the patients reported side effects, mostly characterized by tiredness and rarely by nausea and vertigo. The present clinical study is in agreement with previous studies identifying trazodone as a safe and effective antidepressant, specifically regarding its target symptoms insomnia, depression and anxiety. It also confirms our own early predictions based on neurophysiological investigations concerning the mode of action of the drug.
Detecting spatial and temporal patterns in NDVI time series using histograms

The aim of this study was to analyse bimodal histogram patterns of monthly National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) global area coverage (GAC) data and their relation to vegetation dynamics and climatic conditions for the period 1982‐1991 in Argentina. The proposed method was to split up bimodal histograms by the median criterion and to study each mode as a separate unimodal frequency distribution. Modes were analysed based on their histogram shape and statistical parameters, geographical distribution and dynamics, and climatic significance. For the latter, a multinomial statistical analysis was used. The split-up criterion yielded coherent results. Histogram shapes and statistical parameters changed according to season. For geographical dynamics, 84% of pixels remained in the same mode through the seasons, and 16% shifted temporarily to the other mode. Changes from low-NDVI mode to high-NDVI mode were caused by an improvement in water supply, rainfall or irrigation, and higher temperatures. Changes in the opposite direction were due to a reduction in vegetation cover produced by drought, harvest, or autumn effects. The low-NDVI mode was strongly related to the arid zone with 74.6% probability (α = 0.05), and the high-NDVI mode was related to humid (58.8%) and semiarid zones (38.4%). This contribution helps explain the dynamics of vegetation cover along the latitudinal range from 22° to 55°S, for nine growing cycles, with a simple methodology. Improving the knowledge of multimodal histograms may allow a better understanding of difficult classification results.
Mining Association Rules Based on Boolean Algorithm - a Study in Large Databases

With the wide applications of computers and automated data gathering tools, massive amounts of data have constantly collected in databases, which create immense demand for analyzing data and turning them into useful knowledge. Therefore, Knowledge Discovery and Data mining has become a research field in recent years to analyze the data in large databases. Association rule mining is one of the dominant methods for market basket analysis, which analyzes customer buying habits. The problem of association rule mining is that there are so many promising rules; it is obvious that such a vast amount of rules cannot be processed by inspecting each one. Therefore efficient algorithms restrict the search space and check only a subset of all rules. Boolean algorithm is one technique for mining association rules. The first objective of this study is to generate Association rules from massive databases in order to entrepreneurs can enlarge their own marketing strategies. The second objective of this study is to implement the program in the most efficient way in order to decrease the processing time and the memory consumption. This study can help retailers to build marketing strategies by gaining information about which items are frequently purchased together by customers.
HUMANS : suite logicielle pour la scénarisation d'environnements virtuels pour la formation à des situations socio-techniques complexes

Les environnements virtuels permettent aux apprenants d'experimenter, de s'entrainer et de voir l'impact de leurs decisions. L'un des challenges informatiques est de pou-voir scenariser ces environnements en orientant le scenario vers des situations d'apprentissage. L'approche HUMANS vise pour cette scenarisation un ensemble d'objectifs souvent consideres comme contradictoires : la liberte d'action pour favoriser l'apprentissage par l'erreur, le caractere dynamique et l'efficacite du controle exerce sur le scenario pour garantir des apprentissages, la coherence des com-portements pour permettre l'explicabilite et l'adaptabilite du systeme necessaire pour la variabilite des scenarios.
Intelligence and psychopathy: a correlational study on insane female offenders

Background The occurrence of a significant relationship between psychopathic traits and intelligence is still open to debate. Most of the relevant information has been obtained from crystallized IQ tests or on psychopathic male offenders. In this study we hypothesized a negative correlation between psychopathic traits and fluid intelligence on a sample of criminal female in-patients. Method We carried out a correlational study on a selected sample of 56 criminal female offenders. Variables that were measured include the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) total score (and, separately, the scores from its four subscales: Interpersonal, Affective, Lifestyle and Antisocial) and fluid IQ measured by Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Results Pearson's correlation between RPM IQ and total PCL-R score was negative (r 54 = − 0.55, p < 0.001); women with greater psychopathy traits (total PCL-R score) had lower IQ scores. Negative correlations were also found between IQ and the four PCL-R subscales, Interpersonal, Affective, Lifestyle and Antisocial (r 54 = − 0.35, p < 0.01, r 54 = − 0.52, p < 0.001, r 54 = − 0.53, p < 0.001, and r 54 = − 0.49, p < 0.001 respectively). Conclusions The results indicate a general negative relationship between PCL-R and IQ, equally distributed across the four subcomponents of the psychopathic trait, and support the view that unsuccessful psychopathic women have poor planning and are unable to foresee and represent future consequences of their actions.
In-network compression for multiterminal cascade MIMO systems

In this paper, we view the problem of receive beamforming in uplink cascade multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems as an instance of that of cascade multiterminal source coding for lossy function computation. Using this connection, we establish two coding schemes for the second and show that their application leads to efficient beamforming schemes for the first. In the first coding scheme, each terminal in the cascade sends a description of the source that it observes; the decoder reconstructs all sources, lossily, and then computes an estimate of the desired function. This scheme improves upon standard routing in that every terminal only compresses the innovation of its source w.r. t. the descriptions that are sent by the previous terminals in the cascade (i.e., conditional rate distortion). In the second scheme, the desired function is computed gradually in the cascade network, and each terminal sends a finer description of it. In the context of uplink cascade MIMO systems, the application of these two schemes leads to efficient centralized receive-beamforming and distributed receive-beamforming, respectively.
Dual-output capacitive DC-DC converter with power distribution regulator in 90 nm CMOS

A fully integrated Dual-Output capacitive DC-DC converter providing a total output power of 1 mW is presented. The converter realizes both a 2/3 and a 1/3 voltage conversion, from 1.2 V to respectively 0.755 V and 0.32 V. A hysteretic controller regulates both output voltages, independently of the power distribution between both outputs. It achieves an efficiency of 68.6 % for the nominal case, and a maximum efficiency of 75.3 %. The validity of the developed model and used design strategy were verified by a test chip implemented in a 90 nm bulk CMOS technology.
On the Surprising Difficulty of Simple Things: the Case of Radix Partitioning

Partitioning a dataset into ranges is a task that is common in various applications such as sorting [1,6,7,8,9] and hashing [3] which are in turn building blocks for almost any type of query processing. Especially radix-based partitioning is very popular due to its simplicity and high performance over comparison-based versions [6].
Hindlimb unloading rodent model : technical aspects

[PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , June, 2010; 298 (6): C1489-C1500. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol Zhi-Bin Yu and Jin Ma Man-Jiang Xie, Yu-Guang Ma, Fang Gao, Yun-Gang Bai, Jiu-Hua Cheng, Yao-Ming Chang, smooth muscle cells in simulated microgravity rats channel is associated with increased apoptosis of cerebrovascular Ca Activation of BK [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , August, 2010; 109 (2): 350-357. J Appl Physiol and Mary L. Bouxsein Erika B. Wagner, Nicholas P. Granzella, Hiroaki Saito, Dava J. Newman, Laurence R. Young musculoskeletal loading Partial weight suspension: a novel murine model for investigating adaptation to reduced [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , November, 15 2010; 588 (22): 4579-4591. J Physiol Desplanches and Olivier Birot Emilie Roudier, Charlotte Gineste, Alexandra Wazna, Kooroush Dehghan, Dominique type-specific dynamic process Angio-adaptation in unloaded skeletal muscle: new insights into an early and muscle [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , December, 2010; 299 (6): R1572-R1581. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol Janna R. Jackson, Michael J. Ryan, Yanlei Hao and Stephen E. Alway following muscle disuse in the gastrocnemius muscles of young and old rats Mediation of endogenous antioxidant enzymes and apoptotic signaling by resveratrol [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , February, 2011; 300 (2): R408-R417. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol Erwan Dupont, Caroline Cieniewski-Bernard, Bruno Bastide and Laurence Stevens without preventing soleus atrophy and restores slow phenotype through ERK Electrostimulation during hindlimb unloading modulates PI3K-AKT downstream targets
Backward Stochastic Differential Equations and Stochastic Controls: A New Perspective

It is well known that backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) stem from the study on the Pontryagin type maximum principle for optional stochastic control. A solution of a BSDE hits a given terminal value (which is a random variable) by virtue of an additional martingale term and an indefinite initial state. This paper attempts to view the relation between BSDEs and stochastic controls from s new perspective by interpreting BSDEs as some stochastic optimal control problems. More specifically, associated with a BSDE a new stochastic control problem is introduced with the same dynamics but a definite initial state. The martingale term in the origional BSDE is regarded as the control and the objective is to minimize the second moment of the difference between the terminal state and the given terminal value. This problem is solved in a closed form by the stochastic linear-quadratic theory developed recently. The general result is then applied to the Back-Scholes model, where an optimal feedback control is obtained expicitly in terms of the option price. Finally, a modified model is investigated where the difference between the state and the expectation of the given terminal value at any time is take into account.
Multiscale abstraction, planning and control using diffusion wavelets for stochastic optimal control problems

This work presents a multiscale framework to solve a class of stochastic optimal control problems in the context of robot motion planning and control in a complex environment. In order to handle complications resulting from a large decision space and complex environmental geometry, two key concepts are adopted: (a) a diffusion wavelet representation of the Markov chain for hierarchical abstraction of the state space; and (b) a desirability function-based representation of the Markov decision process (MDP) to efficiently calculate the optimal policy. In the proposed framework, a global plan that compressively takes into account the long time/length-scale state transition is first obtained by approximately solving an MDP whose desirability function is represented by coarse scale bases in the hierarchical abstraction. Then, a detailed local plan is computed by solving an MDP that considers wavelet bases associated with a focused region of the state space, guided by the global plan. The resulting multiscale plan is utilized to finally compute a continuous-time optimal control policy within a receding horizon implementation. Two numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the applicability and validity of the proposed approach.
Rosiglitazone increases bioactive testosterone and reduces waist circumference in hypogonadal men with type 2 diabetes

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of rosiglitazone on bioavailable, free and total testosterone levels in hypogonadal men with type 2 diabetes. Sixteen type 2 diabetic men with hypogonadism were studied before and after administration of rosiglitazone (8 mg/day) for six months, with assessments performed every two months on two consecutive days. We measured testosterone and sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), visceral adiposity, high-sensitivity CRP (hs-CRP), lipids, microalbuminuria and blood pressure. There was a significant increase in free (p=0.01), bioavailable (p=0.007) and total testosterone (p=0.002), as well as SHBG (p=0.03) levels, with rosiglitazone treatment. Waist circumference and waist/hip ratio decreased with the improvement in insulin sensitivity and glycaemic control (p=0.01). There was also a significant reduction in hs-CRP (p=0.02) and urinary albumin excretion. No significant effect on blood pressure or the ratio of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol to high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL to HDL) was seen. In conclusion, the insulin-sensitiser rosiglitazone increases bioavailable, free and total testosterone and SHBG levels in hypogonadal men with type 2 diabetes.
Intact transferrin receptors in human plasma and their relation to erythropoiesis.

Intact transferrin receptor molecules complexed with transferrin were found in human plasma. The concentration of receptors was determined by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay that uses polyclonal antibodies. The mean concentration of 8,279 micrograms/L in 56 normal adults appears to be unrelated to age or sex. Additional receptor measurements were performed on plasmas from 260 subjects with erythropoietic disorders. Decreased concentration of plasma receptors was found in patients with erythroid hypoplasia and increased numbers in those with erythroid hyperplasia. Ferrokinetic measurements of erythropoiesis were compared with numbers of receptors in 148 subjects, and a close correlation was found (r = .86). Both sets of values, measured in different conditions and expressed in relation to normal, were consistent with expected values. Receptor values were unproportionally increased only in conditions of iron deficiency. It is concluded that plasma receptors have a constant relationship to tissue receptors, and their number in most instances reflects the rate of erythropoiesis.
Real Options : A Survey

This survey paper provides an overview of real options, in particular the connection with financial options, valuation methods (analytical methods vs numerical methods based on simulation, lattice approximations to stochastic processes and finite-difference methods) and a wide array of application areas, from R&D to operations management to renewable energy project selection. 1 Real Options vs Financial Options Managers today must not only take decisions under high uncertainty in fast-changing environments, but think ahead to the decisions they might want to take in the future, such as expanding a plant, contracting capacity or purchasing real estate that had been leased, and ensure now that they will have the ability to take those decisions later. Those opportunities are known in the literature as real options due to their similarities with financial options on stocks as well as their application to tangible (real) assets. They have emerged as a significant tool in the decisionmaker’s toolkit; however, they are in many ways more complex than their financial counterparts. Indeed, while the specific decision that the option will allow if exercised is usually embedded in the definition of the option and is thus fairly straightforward to articulate, it is in general difficult to value real options accurately, for instance because – in contrast with stocks – the underlying asset is rarely traded on public stock exchanges. This makes it challenging to create a replicating portfolio, the price of which would be equal to the option’s fair value under the no-arbitrage principle. Another source of difficulty is that, while financial options are limited to the realm of finance, real options find applications in a vast array of domains, where the ∗Research Scientist, Amazon.com, Seattle WA, USA elc209@lehigh.edu. This work was done while the author was a doctoral student at Lehigh University and was not sponsored by Amazon. †Visiting Associate Professor, M.I. T. Sloan School of Management, Cambridge MA, USA aurelie@mit.edu.
An assessment of fixed-capacity models of visual working memory

Visual working memory is often modeled as having a fixed number of slots. We test this model by assessing the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) of participants in a visual-working-memory change-detection task. ROC plots yielded straight lines with a slope of 1.0, a tell-tale characteristic of all-or-none mnemonic representations. Formal model assessment yielded evidence highly consistent with a discrete fixed-capacity model of working memory for this task.
EBE: Elastic blob ensemble for coarse human tracking

We propose a novel probabilistic tracking algorithm based on an elastic blob ensemble (EBE) which is applicable to track flexible objects. It outputs a coarse motion cue in the form of the object's location and orientation together with the location of the blobs. The main assumption is that the orientation of the whole object does not change much between neighboring frames. A discrete solution space is created in the current frame around the blobs' positions from the previous frame. Our model then promotes solutions whose orientations are close to the prior orientation, which match the modeled to the observed appearance well, and which follow modeled spatial configuration. It combines the strengths of three popular approaches to visual tracking : mean-shift tracker, particle filtering, and pictorial structures. As a result, the proposed framework tracks human upper body composed of head, torso, and hips at the rate of 40 fps on a regular desktop PC.
A simple liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method for urinary free cortisol analysis: suitable for routine purpose

Abstract Background: The best index of adrenal dysfunction is urinary free cortisol (UFC) measurements performed using a 24-h urine collection. This measurement is also useful in the investigation of Cushing's syndrome. In this paper, we report a simple and selective method for the analysis of UFC by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) suitable for use in a high-volume clinical laboratory routine. The results were compared to those obtained using a commercial immunoassay method used in our laboratory. Methods: Urine samples containing 50 ng of internal standard (Cortisol-9,11,12,12-d4) were deproteinized using centrifugal filters with a molecular weight 10,000 Da cut-off and injected on a reversed phase column. Cortisol was analyzed in highly selective reaction monitoring in positive atmospheric pressure chemical ionization mode, at a resolution of 0.4 amu full width half maximum, and following the transitions related to the precursor 363.2 for cortisol and 367.2 for deuterated cortisol. The method validation included analysis of precision, linearity, sensitivity, recovery and interference from structurally similar steroids. UFC from 230 subjects was measured using LC-MS/MS and electrochemiluminescence immunoassay (ECLIA) methods. Results: The calibration curves exhibited linearity and reproducibility in the range 7–10,000 nmol/L. Total imprecision was lower than 10%. The limit of detection and limit of quantification were 2 and 7 nmol/L, respectively. Mean recovery was higher than 90%. Structurally similar steroids do not interfere in the proposed method, but cause a significant change in the ECLIA results. Cortisol values obtained using the ECLIA method were always higher than those obtained using the LC-MS/MS method, with the bias directly proportional to cortisol concentrations. The reference values calculated using 180 normal subjects were 11–70 μg/day. Conclusions: The proposed method is sensitive, simple, free from interferences and reliable for routine use. Clin Chem Lab Med 2010;48:1433–7.