Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differential effects of tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase (TIMP)-1 and TIMP-2 on atherosclerosis and monocyte/macrophage invasion

Aims MMPs contribute to atherosclerotic plaque progression and instability, but the relative potency of their endogenous tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) as protective factors has not been defined. We therefore investigated the impact of TIMP-1 and TIMP-2 knockout on atherosclerotic plaque burden and composition in apolipoprotein E-knockout (Apoe−/−) mice and studied the underlying effects on monocyte/macrophage behaviour. Methods and results Analysis of brachiocephalic artery plaques revealed comparable atherosclerotic lesion areas between TIMP-1−/− Apoe−/− or TIMP-2−/− Apoe−/− double deficient mice and relevant age-matched, strain-matched Apoe−/− controls after 8 weeks of high-fat feeding. However, lesions from TIMP-2−/− Apoe−/− mice had higher levels of markers associated with plaque vulnerability, including increased macrophage: vascular smooth muscle cell ratios, larger necrotic core areas, reduced collagen contents, increased macrophage proliferation, and apoptosis frequencies, compared with TIMP-1−/−Apoe−/− and controls. In contrast, TIMP-1−/− Apoe−/− animals only had a significant reduction in vascular smooth muscle cell content compared with Apoe−/− controls. In vitro and in vivo findings implicated heightened monocyte/macrophage invasion in the detrimental effects observed on atherosclerotic plaque composition in TIMP-2−/− Apoe−/− mice. Moreover, TIMP-2 specifically decreased MMP-14-dependent monocyte/macrophage infiltration into sites of experimentally induced inflammation and established atherosclerotic lesions. Conclusion Our data demonstrate that TIMP-2 plays a greater protective role than TIMP-1 during the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis, in part by suppressing MMP-14-dependent monocyte/macrophage accumulation into plaques.
3.5 A 1.0-to-2.5GHz beamforming receiver with constant-Gm vector modulator consuming < 9mW per antenna element in 65nm CMOS

Beamforming phased-array receivers aim to increase receiver sensitivity and reject interferers in the spatial domain [1,2]. A receiver with programmable phase shift and high linearity is crucial to cope with interference. Switched-capacitor vector modulators can provide adequate phase shift and linearity [3,4], but so far, at the cost of a high power consumption. As power consumption increases linearly with the number of antenna elements, it is one of the bottlenecks hindering commercialization of beamforming. In this paper, we demonstrate several design techniques on architectural and circuit levels, to reduce the power consumption per element, while still achieving competitive Spurious Free Dynamic Range (SFDR).
Production of Muramic δ-Lactam in Bacillus subtilis Spore Peptidoglycan

ABSTRACT Bacterial spore heat resistance is primarily dependent upon dehydration of the spore cytoplasm, a state that is maintained by the spore peptidoglycan wall, the spore cortex. A peptidoglycan structural modification found uniquely in spores is the formation of muramic δ-lactam. Production of muramic δ-lactam in Bacillus subtilis requires removal of a peptide side chain from the N-acetylmuramic acid residue by a cwlD-encoded muramoyl-l-Alanine amidase. Expression of cwlD takes place in both the mother cell and forespore compartments of sporulating cells, though expression is expected to be required only in the mother cell, from which cortex synthesis derives. Expression of cwlD in the forespore is in a bicistronic message with the upstream gene ybaK. We show that ybaK plays no apparent role in spore peptidoglycan synthesis and that expression of cwlD in the forespore plays no significant role in spore peptidoglycan formation. Peptide cleavage by CwlD is apparently followed by deacetylation of muramic acid and lactam ring formation. The product of pdaA (yfjS), which encodes a putative deacetylase, has recently been shown to also be required for muramic δ-lactam formation. Expression of CwlD in Escherichia coli results in muramoyl l-Alanine amidase activity but no muramic δ-lactam formation. Expression of PdaA alone in E. coli had no effect on E. coli peptidoglycan structure, whereas expression of CwlD and PdaA together resulted in the formation of muramic δ-lactam. CwlD and PdaA are necessary and sufficient for muramic δ-lactam production, and no other B. subtilis gene product is required. PdaA probably carries out both deacetylation and lactam ring formation and requires the product of CwlD activity as a substrate.
Exploiting a Large Data Base by Longman

We wish to explore some of the aspects of the exp lo i t a t i on of two d i c t i o n a r y f i l e s by LONGHAN Ltd, one for ' c o r e ' [mglish and one for Imglish idioms. We'l l t r y to show the f e a s i b i l i t y o f an approach to language process ing based on a lexicon, conceived of as the r epos i to ry of grammatical, semantic and knowledge-of-theworld information. Af te r giving a b r i e f de sc r ip t i on of the computer :fi les (Section I) w e ' l l focus on the following points : a) a l ex ica l approach to granmar allows a considerable s i m p l i f i c a t i o n of the PSG component o f a pars ing system (Section I I , Part One)~ b) the s y n t a c t i c po t en t i a l of many lexemes (at surface s t ruc tu r e level) can serve as a guide to t h e i r deep s t ruc tu r e conf igura t ions (Section I I s P a r t Two)j c) provided tha t a d i c t i o n a r y makes use of a l imi ted def in ing vocabulary, the t ex t s of the d i c t i ona ry d e f i n i t i o n s can be processed on the bas is of co r r e l a t i ons between s y n t a c t i c s t ruc tu res ( f i l l e d with individual lexenms or lexemes belonging to spec i f i ab l e c lasses ) and semantic r e l a t i onsh ips such as tha t between a process verb and an instrument (Section I I I ) .
Optimizing Link Assignment to Enhance Service in Probabilistic Network

We consider service enhancement in a wireless environment in which clients try to obtain service directly from a set of servers. Each client desires a minimum overall service success probability, which is achieved by establishing multiple connections with multiple servers. Given the service success probability of each potential client-server connection, our problem is to assign the connections such that the number of satisfied clients is maximized subject to server capacity constraints. We define the above problem as the "link assignment for successful service problem" (LASS). We focus on the case where there is no interference between the communication connections, so that solving this restricted version immediately gives us an upper bound for the case with interference. While LASS can be reduced to maximum matching in the deterministic case, we show that in the probabilistic case it is NP-hard. Also, an equivalent integer programming for LASS is obtained, and various heuristics are designed. Furthermore, in the special case where the underlying network graph is a tree, we show that LASS can be solved in linear time based on a simple greedy algorithm. Experimental evaluations are performed and the results demonstrate the practicality of the algorithms and the heuristics.
Occupational contact dermatitis due to a marbler's exposure to benzoyl peroxide

A 27-year-old man presented with a history of acne after beginning his research for the graduate dissertation in a chemical laboratory. His work involved manipulation of o-dichlorobenzene once a day and no contact with any other chemical substances except acetone. 3 months after starting this work, he had begun to show initial manifestations of acne and had then accidental hand contact with o-dichlorobenzene because of a broken vial. Soon after this episode, acne symptoms worsened, prompting him to seek medical advice. On examination, there were open comedones and straw-coloured cysts on the cheeks and malar crescent. No lesions were apparent on the forehead, the neck or the chest. Blood tests were normal and there was no evidence of other diseases. The patient was removed from further exposure, treated with systemic antibiotic therapy, and after 3 months showed evident improvement. In order to help confirm the role of o-dichlorobenzene exposure, passive diffusion samplers (Radiello, Aquaria, Milano, Italy) were placed in the laboratory for the duration of the work shift, desorbed with CS2 and then analysed by means of gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. O-dichlorobenzene present in the air was in the range of 0.8–2.2 p.p.b. , that is hundreds of times lower than the ACGIH TLVTWA of 25 p.p.m.
An overview of the knowledge discovery meta-model

Modernization of existing software systems is expensive and not always successive process that involves many challenging activities. In order to support these activities, the Object Management Group within the Architecture-Driven Modernization initiative proposes a number of standard representations of views on existing software systems. The Knowledge Discovery Meta-model plays the fundamental role in this set of representations as it defines common concepts of software assets and their operational environments. This paper addresses issues related to the extraction of knowledge from the software assets and the representation according to the Knowledge Discovery Meta-model in order to abstract the business logic implemented in the system. It observes that although this meta-model minimizes the effort required to obtain representation, it has several drawbacks that limits its capability to express domain specific knowledge. It is believed that this paper will enable researchers and practitioners to get a better understanding of this kind of representation, prepare for the modernization activities, and provide a basis for the further research.
Improving Flash Write Performance by Using Update Frequency

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are quickly becoming the default storage medium as the cost of NAND flash memory continues to drop. However, flash memory introduces new challenges, as data cannot be eciently updated in-place. To overcome the technology's limitations, SSDs incorporate a software Flash Translation Layer (FTL) that implements out-of-place updates, typically by storing data in a log-structured fashion. Despite a large number of existing FTL algorithms, SSD performance, predictability, and lifetime remain an issue, especially for the write-intensive workloads specific to database applications. In this paper, we show how to design FTLs that are more efficient by using the I/O write skew to guide data placement on flash memory. We model the relationship between data placement and write performance for basic I/O write patterns and detail the most important concepts of writing to flash memory: i) the trade-o between the extra capacity available and write overhead, ii) the benefit of adapting data placement to write skew, iii) the impact of the cleaning policy, and iv) how to estimate the best achievable write performance for a given I/O workload. Based on the findings of the theoretical model, we propose a new principled data placement algorithm that can be incorporated into existing FTLs. We show the benefits of our data placement algorithm when running micro-benchmarks and real database I/O traces: our data placement algorithm reduces write overhead by 20% - 75% when compared to state-of-art techniques.
Unraveling the Interaction of Information Systems and Ecosystems - A Comprehensive Classification of Literature

Pervasive digitalization substantially influences how contemporary firms interact with their business environments. Increasing connectivity of firms, things, and people lead to more complex interrelations, rendering an ecosystem perspective relevant. Accordingly, research increasingly points to the value of the ecosystem construct for explaining the phenomena of digital transformation. Although prominent in most recent studies, the challenge of achieving a clear understanding of this construct and its interaction with information systems remains a relevant obstacle for progress in current research. Therefore, we systematically identified and analyzed high quality literature on ecosystems and information systems, resulting in a set of 42 relevant journal publications. Our findings summarize the current state of knowledge and highlight important gaps in the literature. Moreover, we derive valuable insights on the role of information systems in ecosystem genesis as well as development and, by drawing on the origins in biology, offer interesting avenues for further research.
RepRev: Mitigating the Negative Effects of Misreported Ratings

Reputation models depend on the ratings provided by buyers togauge the reliability of sellers in multi-agent based e-commerce environment. However, there is no prevention forthe cases in which a buyer misjudges a seller, and provides a negative rating to an original satisfactory transaction. In this case,how should the seller get his reputation repaired andutility loss recovered? In this work, we propose a mechanism to mitigate the negativeeffect of the misreported ratings. It temporarily inflates the reputation of thevictim seller with a certain value for a period of time. This allows the seller to recover hisutility loss due to lost opportunities caused by the misreported ratings. Experiments demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.
Solving Temporal Problems Using SMT: Weak Controllability

Temporal problems with uncertainty are a well established formalism to model time constraints of a system interacting with an uncertain environment. Several works have addressed the definition and the solving of controllability problems, and three degrees of controllability have been proposed: weak, strong, and dynamic. In this work we focus on weak controllability: we address both the decision and the strategy extraction problems. Extracting a strategy means finding a function from assignments to uncontrollable time points to assignments to controllable time points that fulfills all the temporal constraints. We address the two problems in the satisfiability modulo theory framework. We provide a clean and complete formalization of the problems, and we propose novel techniques to extract strategies. We also provide experimental evidence of the scalability and efficiency of the proposed techniques.
A Cognitive Approach for Safe Sodium Phosphate Enema Administration by Implementing Wireless Body Area Network

Recent clinical analysis and medical examinations have reported a numerous adverse effects induced due to improper administration of sodium phosphate colonic preparations given to the patients. Sodium phosphate enema preparation is the treatment for bowel cleansing purposes prior to colonoscopy. It induces serious electrolytic abnormalities in the elderly of which intestinal potassium loss is more prevalent (1). Inadequate elimination of potassium eventually results in multi-organ failure. This paper encompasses implementation of potassium based biosensors, microcontroller unit for processing and WBAN (Wireless Body Area Network) for precise dosage of sodium phosphate enema preparations. Crown ether layer deposited Ion selective Field Effect Transistor (ISFET) serves the purpose of determining potassium ion concentration in the human blood serum. The results of experimental characterization of the ISFET with ion selective coating as a function of K + ion concentration have been demonstrated. This information gathered from MEMFET (Membrane Field effect transistor) is further carried to microcontroller unit for safe level detection of serum potassium level. Each individual sensor nodes will directly transmit the sensed physiological data to a control unit (CCU) and then to remote stations for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes using UWB and WMTS bands. KeywordsWide Band (UWB), Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), Ion selective field effect transistors (ISFET), ARM microcontroller, safe enema.
Plant diversity and structure describe the presence of a new, threatened Australian marsupial within its highly restricted, post-fire habitat

Management of critical habitat for threatened species with small ranges requires location-specific, fine-scale survey data. The silver-headed antechinus (Antechinus argentus) is known from only two isolated, fire-prone locations. At least one of these populations, at Kroombit Tops National Park in central-eastern Queensland, Australia, possesses a very small range. Here, we present detailed vegetation species diversity and structure data from three sites comprising the known habitat of A. argentus at Kroombit Tops and relate it to capture data obtained over two years. We found differences in both vegetation and capture data between burnt and unburnt habitat. Leaf litter and grasstrees (Xanthorrhoea johnsonii) were the strongest vegetative predictors for A. argentus capture. The species declined considerably over the two years of the trapping study, and we raise concern for its survival at Kroombit Tops. We suggest that future work should focus on structural vegetative variables (specifically, the diameter and leaf density of grasstree crowns) and relate them to A. argentus occurrence. We also recommend a survey of invertebrate diversity in grasstrees and leaf litter with a comparison to A. argentus prey. The data presented here illustrates how critical detailed monitoring is for planning habitat management and fire regimes, and highlights the utility of a high-resolution approach to habitat mapping. While a traditional approach to fire management contends that pyrodiversity encourages biodiversity, the present study demonstrates that some species prefer long-unburnt habitat. Additionally, in predicting the distribution of rare species like A. argentus, data quality (i.e., spatial resolution) may prevail over data quantity (i.e., number of data).
Enhancing timbre model using MFCC and its time derivatives for music similarity estimation

One of the popular methods for content-based music similarity estimation is to model timbre with MFCC as a single multivariate Gaussian with full covariance matrix, then use symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence. From the field of speech recognition, we propose to use the same approach on the MFCCs' time derivatives to enhance the timbre model. The Gaussian models for the delta and acceleration coefficients are used to create their respective distance matrix. The distance matrices are then combined linearly to form a full distance matrix for music similarity estimation. In our experiments on two datasets, our novel approach performs better than using MFCC alone. Moreover, performing genre classification using k-NN showed that the accuracies obtained are already close to the state-of-the-art.
FairSquare: probabilistic verification of program fairness

With the range and sensitivity of algorithmic decisions expanding at a break-neck speed, it is imperative that we aggressively investigate fairness and bias in decision-making programs. First, we show that a number of recently proposed formal definitions of fairness can be encoded as probabilistic program properties. Second, with the goal of enabling rigorous reasoning about fairness, we design a novel technique for verifying probabilistic properties that admits a wide class of decision-making programs. Third, we present FairSquare, the first verification tool for automatically certifying that a program meets a given fairness property. We evaluate FairSquare on a range of decision-making programs. Our evaluation demonstrates FairSquare’s ability to verify fairness for a range of different programs, which we show are out-of-reach for state-of-the-art program analysis techniques.
On the Assessment of Surface Heat Flux and Evaporation Using Large-Scale Parameters

Abstract In an introductory review it is reemphasized that the large-scale parameterization of the surface fluxes of sensible and latent heat is properly expressed in terms of energetic considerations over land while formulas of the bulk aerodynamic type are most suitahle over the sea. A general framework is suggested. Data from a number of saturated land sites and open water sites in the absence of advection suggest a widely applicable formula for the relationship between sensible and latent heat fluxes. For drying land surfaces, we assume that the evaporation rate is given by the same formula for evaporation multiplied by a factor. This factor is found to remain at unity while an amount of water, varying from one site to another, is evaporated. Following this a linear decrease sets in, reducing the evaporation rate to zero after a further 5 cm of evaporation, the same at several sites examined.
Efficient and Exact Sampling of Simple Graphs with Given Arbitrary Degree Sequence

Uniform sampling from graphical realizations of a given degree sequence is a fundamental component in simulation-based measurements of network observables, with applications ranging from epidemics, through social networks to Internet modeling. Existing graph sampling methods are either link-swap based (Markov-Chain Monte Carlo algorithms) or stub-matching based (the Configuration Model). Both types are ill-controlled, with typically unknown mixing times for link-swap methods and uncontrolled rejections for the Configuration Model. Here we propose an efficient, polynomial time algorithm that generates statistically independent graph samples with a given, arbitrary, degree sequence. The algorithm provides a weight associated with each sample, allowing the observable to be measured either uniformly over the graph ensemble, or, alternatively, with a desired distribution. Unlike other algorithms, this method always produces a sample, without back-tracking or rejections. Using a central limit theorem-based reasoning, we argue, that for large , and for degree sequences admitting many realizations, the sample weights are expected to have a lognormal distribution. As examples, we apply our algorithm to generate networks with degree sequences drawn from power-law distributions and from binomial distributions.
Microwave Characterization of Thin Ferroelectric Films

A simple technique for characterization of dielectrics at high microwave frequencies is proposed and verified experimentally. The technique makes use of the measured impedance of a test structure. The latter is a simple capacitor, formed on the top of a substrate with an arbitrary number of dielectric/conductor layers and contains a material under test (MUT) layer with unknown loss tangent and dielectric constant. Assuming that all other layers are specified, a simple method is given to calculate RF impedance of such a structure enabling extraction of MUT properties