Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuroprotective and Neuroregenerative Effects of Nimodipine in a Model System of Neuronal Differentiation and Neurite Outgrowth

Nimodipine is a Ca2+-channel antagonist mainly used for the management of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) to prevent cerebral vasospasms. However, it is not clear if the better outcome of nimodipine-treated patients is mainly due to vasodilatation or whether other cellular neuroprotective or neuregenerative effects of nimodipine are involved. We analysed PC12 cells after different stress stimuli with or without nimodipine pretreatment. Cytotoxicity of 200 mM EtOH and osmotic stress (450 mosmol/L) was significantly reduced with nimodipine pretreatment, while nimodipine has no influence on the hypoxia-induced cytotoxicity in PC12 cells. The presence of nimodipine also increased the NGF-induced neurite outgrowth in PC12 cells. However, nimodipine alone was not able to induce neurite outgrowth in PC12 cells. These results support the idea that nimodipine has general neuroprotective or neuregenerative effect beside its role in vasodilatation and is maybe useful also in other clinical applications beside aSAH.
Layer-Centered Approach for Multigraphs Visualization

Recent advances in network science allows the modeling and analysis of complex inter-related entities. These entities often interact with each other in a number of different ways. Simple graphs fail to capture these multiple types of relationships requiring more sophisticated mathematical structures. One such structure is multigraph, where entities (or nodes) can be linked to each other through multiple edges. In this paper we describe a new method to manage multiple types of relationships existing in multigraphs. Our approach is based on the concept of pair of nodes (edges) and, in particular, we study how nodes on different layers interact which each other considering the edges they share. We propose a two level strategy that summarizes global/local multigraph features. The global view helps us to gain knowledge related to the characteristics of layers and how they interact while the local view provides an analysis of individual layers highlighting edge properties such as cluster structure. Our proposal is complementary to standard node-link diagram and it can be coupled with such techniques in order to intelligently explore multigraphs. The proposed visualization is tested on a real world case study and the outcomes point out the ability of our proposal to discover patterns present in the data.
Hiding Sensitive Topics by Design? : An Experiment on the Reduction of Social Desirability Bias in Factorial Surveys

Factorial survey designs have gained increasing popularity within the social sciences. Compared to single-item questions, the method allows the researcher to model more realistic, multidimensional decision scenarios. Furthermore, it has been argued that assessing sensitive dimensions in factorial surveys can help to overcome social desirability bias. One rarely used implementation mode is the between subject design, in which the sensitive dimension varies only between respondents. This method is assumed to attract less attention than a design based on the usual within subject implementation, where respondents see variations on the sensitive dimension among their vignettes. In order to empirically evaluate the between design and its potential to reduce social desirability bias, we conducted an experiment within a general population online survey. Using a split-half design, the sensitive dimension in the vignette texts was either varied within or between subjects. More precisely, the factorial survey module under study assessed respondents’ judgements on just fees for early childcare. Among other dimensions, the vignette texts included the child’s religious denomination (Christian, Muslim, none) as one possible attribute on which discrimination can be based. The split-half approach allows us to compare the widely used within subject design to the alternative between approach. Furthermore, data on respondent characteristics is used to obtain insights about differential design effects for different education groups (differential social desirability bias) and respondents from different religious backgrounds (ingroup favouritism). While results concerning a differential social desirability bias were inconclusive, we found evidence for ingroup favouritism from respondents without a religious denomination in the between condition. In general, our findings suggest that the between subject design is a suitable method for reducing social desirability bias in factorial surveys.
Wireless Sensor Networks in industrial environment: Real-life evaluation results

The paper summarizes the results of the RealFusion project. One of the main objectives of this project was to study the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in real-life industrial environment. The results for the evaluation of different radios utilizing 433 MHz, 868 MHz and 2.4 GHz license-free industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) bands in real-life industrial environment are presented in the paper. Also, the paper discusses the results of development and evaluation of two real-life industrial WSN use cases: the WSN for remote monitoring the amount of bulk substances in the silos of a refractory materials factory and the WSN for remote warehouse monitoring.
Fund Turnover and Investment Performance

We examine the level of share dealing activity of UK long-term institutional funds and, for UK pension funds, assess the impact of this dealing activity on investment performance. The analysis is carried out using annual returns and activity from the WM Universe of UK funds. Previous published research has concentrated mainly on US mutual funds and has generally reported no relationship between annual turnover and returns within the same year. As we are studying UK institutional funds with long-term liabilities, our approach is to establish any relationship by straightforward observations over a ten year period. We conclude that dealing activity within the North American and Japanese equity portfolios of UK pension funds is generally detrimental to long-term investment performance.
Trust-aware opportunistic routing protocol for wireless networks

Next hop selection can be considered as the most important challenge regarding packet routing in wireless networks. Opportunistic Routing is a novel research topic which benefits from the broadcast nature of the wireless medium to route packets to their destination more reliably. Trust management protocols, on the other hand, are developed to assist in delivering data packets in presence of attacker nodes in the network. In this paper, a novel opportunistic routing protocol is proposed which selects next hop forwarder nodes not only according to the link delivery probability between nodes, but also based upon the trust level that nodes calculate for other nodes while communicating packets. Simulation results represent that the proposed method performs well in a hostile environment where malicious nodes prevent from forwarding received packets.
An overview of calf diarrhea - infectious etiology, diagnosis, and intervention

Calf diarrhea is a commonly reported disease in young animals, and still a major cause of productivity and economic loss to cattle producers worldwide. In the report of the 2007 National Animal Health Monitoring System for U.S. dairy, half of the deaths among unweaned calves was attributed to diarrhea. Multiple pathogens are known or postulated to cause or contribute to calf diarrhea development. Other factors including both the environment and management practices influence disease severity or outcomes. The multifactorial nature of calf diarrhea makes this disease hard to control effectively in modern cow-calf operations. The purpose of this review is to provide a better understanding of a) the ecology and pathogenesis of well-known and potential bovine enteric pathogens implicated in calf diarrhea, b) describe diagnostic tests used to detect various enteric pathogens along with their pros and cons, and c) propose improved intervention strategies for treating calf diarrhea.
MiR-499 Regulates Cell Proliferation and Apoptosis during Late-Stage Cardiac Differentiation via Sox6 and Cyclin D1

Background MiR-499 is a cardiac-abundant miRNA. However, the biological functions of miR-499 in differentiated cardiomyocytes or in the cardiomyocyte differentiation process is not very clear. Sox6 is believed to be one of its targets, and is also believed to play a role in cardiac differentiation. Therefore, our aim was to investigate the association between Sox6 and miR-499 during cardiac differentiation. Methodology/Principal Findings Using a well-established in vitro cardiomyocyte differentiation system, mouse P19CL6 cells, we found that miR-499 was highly expressed in the late stage of cardiac differentiation. In cells stably transfected with miR-499 (P-499 cells), it was found that miR-499 could promote the differentiation into cardiomyocytes at the early stage of cardiac differentiation. Notably, cell viability assay, EdU incorporation assay, and cell cycle profile analysis all showed that the P-499 cells displayed the distinctive feature of hyperplastic growth. Further investigation confirmed that miR-499 could promote neonatal rat cardiomyocyte proliferation. MiR-499 knock-down enhanced apoptosis in the late differentiation stage in P19CL6 cells, but overexpression of miR-499 resulted in a decrease in the apoptosis rate. Sox6 was identified as a direct target of miR-499 and its expression was detected from day 8 or day 10 of cardiac differentiation of P19CL6 cells. Sox6 played a role in cell viability, inhibited cell proliferation and promoted cell apoptosis in P19CL6 cells and cardiomyocytes. The overexpression of Sox6 could reverse the proliferation and anti-apoptosis effects of miR-499. It was also found that miR-499 might exert its function by regulating cyclin D1 via its influence on Sox6. Conclusions/Significance miR-499 probably regulates the proliferation and apoptosis of P19CL6 cells in the late stage of cardiac differentiation via its effects on Sox6 and cyclin D1.
Idiopathic pulmonary haemosiderosis revisited

Idiopathic pulmonary haemosiderosis is a rare cause of diffuse alveolar haemorrhage of unknown aetiology. It occurs most frequently in children, has a variable natural history with repetitive episodes of diffuse alveolar haemorrhage, and has been reported to have a high mortality. Many patients develop iron deficiency anaemia secondary to deposition of haemosiderin iron in the alveoli. Examination of sputum and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid can disclose haemosiderin-laden alveolar macrophages (siderophages), and the lung biopsy shows numerous siderophages in the alveoli, without any evidence of pulmonary vasculitis, nonspecific/granulomatous inflammation, or deposition of immunoglobulins. Contrary to earlier reports, corticosteroids alone or in combination with other immunosuppressive agents may be effective for either exacerbations or maintenance therapy of idiopathic pulmonary haemosiderosis.
A Comparison of Principals’ and Teachers’ Scores on the Leadership Practices Inventory and The Purdue Teacher Opinionaire

A Comparison of Principals’ and Teachers’ Scores on the Leadership Practices Inventory and The Purdue Teacher Opinionaire by Kimberly Graybeal Most research indicates that effective principals usually involve teachers in some of the decisionmaking processes that take place in a school. When teachers feel they have a voice in decisions, they are more likely to take ownership in their school. Great leaders have the power to change their school either for the advancement of the establishment, or they can bring about negativity in the workplace. The purpose of this study was to determine if there were differences on the 5 dimensions of the Kouzes-Posner Leadership Practices Inventory (Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart) between teachers’ scores and their principal’s score for participants in this study, and to determine if a relationship existed between teachers’ scores on the Purdue Teacher Opinionaire and their principal’s Leadership Practices Inventory score. For this research data were collected from 10 schools in a school system in East Tennessee that contained kindergarten through eighth grade. These schools are classified in 3 categories: kindergarten through eighth grade, third through fifth grade, or sixth through eighth grade.
Rateless coding for hybrid free-space optical and radio-frequency communication

Free-space optical (FSO) transmission systems enable high-speed communication with relatively small deployment costs. However, FSO suffers a critical disadvantage, namely susceptibility to fog, smoke, and conditions alike. A possible solution to this dilemma is the use of hybrid systems employing FSO and radio frequency (RF) transmission. In this paper we propose the application of a rateless coded automatic repeatrequest scheme for such hybrid FSO/RF systems. The advantages of our approach are (a) the full utilization of available FSO and RF channel resources at any time, regardless of FSO or RF channel conditions and temporal variations, and (b) no need for a-priori rate selection at the transmitter. In order to substantiate these claims, we establish the pertinent capacity limits for hybrid FSO/RF transmission and present simulation results for transmission with off-the-shelf Raptor codes, which achieve realized rates close to these limits under a wide range of channel conditions. We also show that in conditions of strong atmospheric turbulence, rateless coding is advantageous over fixed-rate coding with rate adaptation at the transmitter.
Randomized Optimal Design of Parallel Manipulators

This work intends to deal with the optimal kinematic synthesis problem of parallel manipulators under a unified framework. Observing that regular (e.g., hyper-rectangular) workspaces are desirable for most machines, we propose the concept of effective regular workspace, which reflects simultaneously requirements on the workspace shape and quality. The effectiveness of a workspace is characterized by the dexterity of the mechanism over every point in the workspace. Other performance indices, such as manipulability and stiffness, provide alternatives of dexterity characterization of workspace effectiveness. An optimal design problem, including constraints on actuated/passive joint limits and link interference, is then formulated to find the manipulator geometry that maximizes the effective regular workspace. This problem is a constrained nonlinear optimization problem without explicitly analytical expression. Traditional gradient based approaches may have difficulty in searching the global optimum. The controlled random search technique, as reported robust and reliable, is used to obtain an numerical solution. The design procedure is demonstrated through examples of a Delta robot and a Gough-Stewart platform.
A New Detail-Preserving Regularization Scheme

It is a challenging task to reconstruct images from their noisy, blurry, and/or incomplete measurements, especially those with important details and features such as medical magnetic resonance (MR) and CT images. We propose a novel regularization model that integrates two recently developed regularization tools: total generalized variation (TGV) by Bredies, Kunisch, and Pock; and shearlet transform by Labate, Lim, Kutyniok, and Weiss. The proposed model recovers both edges and fine details of images much better than the existing regularization models based on the total variation (TV) and wavelets. Specifically, while TV preserves sharp edges but suffers from oil painting artifacts, TGV “selectively regularizes” different image regions at different levels and thus largely avoids oil painting artifacts. Unlike the wavelet transform, which represents isotropic image features much more sparsely than anisotropic ones, the shearlet transform can efficiently represent anisotropic features such as edges, curves, .
The complexity of text-preserving XML transformations

While XML is nowadays adopted as the de facto standard for data exchange, historically, its predecessor SGML was invented for describing electronic documents, i.e., marked up text. Actually, today there are still large volumes of such XML texts. We consider simple transformations which can change the internal structure of documents, that is, the mark-up, and can filter out parts of the text but do not disrupt the ordering of the words. Specifically, we focus on XML transformations where the transformed document is a subsequence of the input document when ignoring mark-up. We call the latter text-preserving XML transformations. We characterize such transformations as copy- and rearrange-free transductions. Furthermore, we study the problem of deciding whether a given XML transducer is text-preserving over a given tree language. We consider top-down transducers as well as the abstraction of XSLT called DTL. We show that deciding whether a transformation is text-preserving over an unranked regular tree language is in PTime for top-down transducers, EXPTime-complete for DTL with XPath, and decidable for DTL with MSO patterns. Finally, we obtain that for every transducer in one of the above mentioned classes, the maximal subset of the input schema can be computed on which the transformation is text-preserving.
On the Cooperative Communication over Cognitive Interference Channel

In this paper, we investigate the problem of communication over cognitive interference channel (CIC) with partially cooperating (PC) destinations (CIC-PC). This channel consists of two source nodes communicating two independent messages to their corresponding destination nodes. One of the sources, referred to as the cognitive source, has a noncausal knowledge of the message of the other source, referred to as the primary source. Each destination is assumed to decode only its intended message. In addition, the destination corresponding to the cognitive source assists the other destination by transmitting cooperative information through a relay link. We derive a new upper bound on the capacity region of discrete memoryless CI-CPC. Moreover, we characterize the capacity region for two new classes of this channel: (1) degraded CIC-PC, and (2) a class of semideterministic CIC-PC.
Using bluetooth and GPS metadata to measure event similarity in SenseCam Images

The Microsoft SenseCam is a small multi-sensor camera worn around the user's neck. It was designed primarily for lifelog recording. At present, the SenseCam passively records up to 3,000 images per day as well as logging data from several on-board sensors. The sheer volume of image and sensor data captured by the SenseCam creates a number of challenges in the areas of segmenting whole day recordings into events, and searching for events. In this paper, we use content and contextual information to help aid in automatic event segmentation of a user's SenseCam images. We also propose and evaluate a number of novel techniques using Bluetooth and GPS context data to accurately locate and retrieve similar events within a user's lifelog photoset.
Pixel-Wise Unified Rate-Quantization Model for Multi-Level Rate Control

In this paper, we present a pixel-wise unified rate quantization (R-Q) model for a low-complexity rate control on configurable coding units of high efficiency video coding (HEVC). In the case of HEVC, which employs hierarchical coding block structure, multiple R-Q models can be employed for the various block sizes. However, we found that the ratios of distortions over bits for all the blocks are a nearly constant because of employment of the rate distortion optimization technique. Hence, one relationship model between rate and quantization can be derived from the characteristic of similar ratios of distortions over bits regardless of block sizes. Thus, we propose the pixel-wise unified R-Q model for HEVC rate control working on the multi-level for all block sizes. We employ a simple leaky bucket model for bit control. The rate control based on the proposed pixel-wise unified R-Q model is implemented on HEVC test model 6.1 (HM6.1). According to the evaluation for the proposed rate control, the average matching percentage to target bitrates is 99.47% and the average PSNR degradation is 0.76 dB. Based on the comparative study, we found that the proposed rate control shows low bit fluctuation and good RD performance, compared to R-lambda rate control for long sequences.
An Improved Algorithm for Frontal Face Feature Location Based on ASM

In this paper, we propose an improved algorithm for frontal face feature location based on Active Shape Models (ASM). There are two improvements in this algorithm. Firstly, to improve the accuracy of the initialization about average face model, we initialize the model using the size of eye and the location of the face in facial image. Secondly, to improve the accuracy and robustness of matching model points to target points in the algorithm, multi-level bilateral filtering is implemented. According to the times of filtering, the facial image is divided into different levels. This involves searching for the object from the least smoothing image that in the bottom level. Then points' location is refined in more smoothing image.
Multicast Routing Protocol with Low Transmission Delay in Multi-Rate, Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

With recent advances in wireless technology, the ability to use multiple transmission rates and multiple network interface cards (radios) in wireless networks has been widely recognized. In this paper, Multi-Rate and Multi-Radio (MR2) characteristics are exploited to reduce end-to-end transmission delay for reliable multicasts. To achieve this goal, a new routing metric, MR2_ETT, is introduced. It accounts for the link transmission time by considering the usable number of radios and the transmission rate on the link. This metric is used in a routing protocol that is also proposed in this work. The routing protocol, termed Multi-rate Multi-radio On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (MR2_ODMRP), makes ODMRP suitable for a MR2 environment. Simulation results show that MR2_ODMRP outperforms ODMRP in multi-rate or multi-radio wireless mesh networks.
Mitogen-activated protein kinase signal transduction and DNA repair network are involved in aluminum-induced DNA damage and adaptive response in root cells of Allium cepa L.

In the current study, we studied the role of signal transduction in aluminum (Al3+)-induced DNA damage and adaptive response in root cells of Allium cepa L. The root cells in planta were treated with Al3+ (800 μM) for 3 h without or with 2 h pre-treatment of inhibitors of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), and protein phosphatase. Also, root cells in planta were conditioned with Al3+ (10 μM) for 2 h and then subjected to genotoxic challenge of ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS; 5 mM) for 3 h without or with the pre-treatment of the aforementioned inhibitors as well as the inhibitors of translation, transcription, DNA replication and repair. At the end of treatments, roots cells were assayed for cell death and/or DNA damage. The results revealed that Al3+ (800 μM)-induced significant DNA damage and cell death. On the other hand, conditioning with low dose of Al3+ induced adaptive response conferring protection of root cells from genotoxic stress caused by EMS-challenge. Pre-treatment of roots cells with the chosen inhibitors prior to Al3+-conditioning prevented or reduced the adaptive response to EMS genotoxicity. The results of this study suggested the involvement of MAPK and DNA repair network underlying Al-induced DNA damage and adaptive response to genotoxic stress in root cells of A. cepa.