Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neutrophils from p40phox−/− mice exhibit severe defects in NADPH oxidase regulation and oxidant-dependent bacterial killing

The generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by the reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) oxidase complex plays a critical role in the antimicrobial functions of the phagocytic cells of the immune system. The catalytic core of this oxidase consists of a complex between gp91phox, p22phox, p47phox, p67phox, p40phox, and rac-2. Mutations in each of the phox components, except p40phox, have been described in cases of chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), defining their essential role in oxidase function. We sought to establish the role of p40phox by investigating the NADPH oxidase responses of neutrophils isolated from p40phox−/− mice. In the absence of p40phox, the expression of p67phox is reduced by ∼55% and oxidase responses to tumor necrosis factor α/fibrinogen, immunoglobulin G latex beads, Staphylococcus aureus, formyl-methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine, and zymosan were reduced by ∼97, 85, 84, 75, and 30%, respectively. The defect in ROS production by p40phox−/− neutrophils in response to S. aureus translated into a severe, CGD-like defect in the killing of this organism both in vitro and in vivo, defining p40phox as an essential component in bacterial killing.
Preclinical evaluation of the novel small-molecule integrin alpha5beta1 inhibitor JSM6427 in monkey and rabbit models of choroidal neovascularization.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the pharmacologic activity and tolerability of JSM6427, a potent and first selective small-molecule inhibitor of integrin alpha5beta1, in monkey and rabbit models of choroidal neovascularization (CNV). METHODS JSM6427 selectivity for alpha5beta1 was evaluated by in vitro binding assays while the ability of JSM6427 to inhibit CNV was investigated in a laser-induced monkey model and a growth factor-induced rabbit model. Intravitreal injections of JSM6427 (100, 300, or 1000 microg) or vehicle were administered immediately after the CNV induction procedure and at weekly intervals for 4 weeks. Fluorescein angiography was performed weekly. Ocular tolerability was evaluated ophthalmoscopically and histologically in both models; additional assessments in monkeys included electroretinography, biomicroscopy, pathological examination, and analysis of JSM6427 pharmacokinetics. RESULTS JSM6427 was highly selective for the alpha5beta1-fibronectin interaction. Weekly intravitreal injections of JSM6427 resulted in a statistically significant dose-dependent inhibition of CNV in laser-induced and growth factor-induced models without any ocular JSM6427-related adverse effects. JSM6427 was cleared through the systemic circulation with no evidence of systemic accumulation. CONCLUSIONS Intravitreal JSM6427 provided dose-dependent inhibition of CNV in monkey and rabbit experimental models. CLINICAL RELEVANCE JSM6427 may provide a new approach for the treatment of ocular neovascular diseases such as age-related macular degeneration in humans.
Sex‐Specific Differences in the Predictive Value of Cholesterol Homeostasis Markers and 10‐Year Cardiovascular Disease Event Rate in Framingham Offspring Study Participants

Background Available data are inconsistent regarding factors influencing plasma cholesterol homeostasis marker concentrations and their value in predicting subsequent cardiovascular disease (CVD) events. Methods and Results To address this issue, the relationship between markers of cholesterol absorption (campesterol, sitosterol, cholestanol) and synthesis (squalene, desmosterol, lathosterol) and 10‐year CVD incidence was assessed in Framingham Offspring Study participants (cycle 6) who were without CVD at baseline and not taking lipid‐lowering medications (N=2616). The primary end point was “hard” coronary heart disease (HCHD; coronary death and myocardial infarction), and the secondary end point was full CVD (HCHD plus stroke, coronary insufficiency, angina pectoris, peripheral artery disease, and congestive heart failure). In cross‐sectional analysis, significant differences by sex, age, body mass index, blood pressure, and smoking status were observed. In both women and men, lower cholesterol absorption was associated with higher triglyceride and lower high‐density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol concentrations, whereas lower cholesterol synthesis was associated with higher low‐density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol concentrations (P for trend <0.05). In women only, lower cholesterol synthesis and absorption were associated with higher non–HDL cholesterol concentrations. Using Cox proportional hazards model adjusting for standard CVD risk factors, squalene concentrations were associated with lower HCHD in women (hazard ratio=0.70 [0.5 to 0.9]). In contrast, squalene (hazard ratio=1.40 [1.1 to 1.8]) concentrations were associated with higher HCHD in men (P<0.0001 for interaction). The cholesterol absorption markers were not predictive of HCHD or full CVD in either women or men. Conclusions These data suggest significant sex differences in the 10‐year prognostic value of cholesterol synthesis markers and HCHD, specifically coronary death and incidence of myocardial infarction. Clinical Trial Registration URL:http://ClinicalTrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT00074464.
Comparing P2PTV Traffic Classifiers

Peer-to-Peer IP Television (P2PTV) applications represent one of the fastest growing application classes on the Internet, both in terms of their popularity and in terms of the amount of traffic they generate. While network operators require monitoring tools that can effectively analyze the traffic produced by these systems, few techniques have been tested on these mostly closed-source, proprietary applications. In this paper we examine the properties of three traffic classifiers applied to the problem of identifying P2PTV traffic. We report on extensive experiments conducted on traffic traces with reliable ground truth information, highlighting the benefits and shortcomings of each approach. The results show that not only their performance in terms of accuracy can vary significantly, but also that their usability features suggest different effective aspects that can be integrated.
Characteristics of diffusion in Al-Mg alloys with ultrafine grain sizes

Abstract Equal-channel angular pressing (ECAP) was used to refine the grain sizes of pure Al and an Al-3 wt% Mg alloy containing minor additions of either Sc or Zr. Following ECAP, the grain sizes were in the ultrafine submicrometre range. Diffusion couples were prepared from the fine-grained material produced by ECAP and from the coarse-grained material without ECAP and these couples were used to measure the interdiffusion coefficients for Mg in an Al lattice. The results show the interdiffusion coefficient is larger in the fine-grained material and the experimental data from this couple agree with predictions from molecular dynamic simulations using the embedded-atom method. An activation energy of about 87 kJ mol−1 is estimated for grain-boundary diffusion of Mg in Al where this value is consistent with the expectations from measurements of the activation energy for lattice diffusion of Mg in Al. There is no evidence for enhanced diffusion in the boundaries produced by ECAP due, it is suggested, to the rapid equilibration of these non-equilibrium boundaries at elevated temperatures.
Effects of the electrospray ionization parameters on the formation and morphology of colloidal microspheres of polyacrylonitrile

Polyacrylonitrile colloidal microspheres have been successfully prepared with different concentrations of electrospraying polyacrylonitrile solutions. The morphology of the colloidal spheres has two kinds of structures and is strongly affected by electrospray-ionization parameters, such as the polymer concentration, applied voltage, and distance between the electrodes. The solvent can also affect the morphology of polyacrylonitrile. The optimum conditions for preparing colloidal spheres have been found, and differential scanning calorimetry results indicate that polyacrylonitrile colloid spheres are amorphous. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 102: 2889–2893, 2006
RNC: A high-precision Network Coordinate System

Network Coordinate System (NCS) has drawn much attention over the past years thanks to the increasing number of large-scale distributed systems that require the distance prediction service for each pair of network hosts. The existing schemes suffer seriously from either low prediction precision or unsatisfactory convergence speed. In this paper, we present a novel distributed network coordinate system based on Robust Principal Component Analysis, RNC, that uses a few local distance measurements to calculate high-precision coordinates without convergence process. To guarantee the non-negativity of predicted distances, we propose Robust Nonnegative Principal Component Analysis (RUN-PACE) which only involves convex optimization, consequently resulting in low computation complexity. Our experimental results indicate that RNC outperforms the state-of-the-art NCS schemes.
Protocol and lessons learnt from the production of parallel corpora for the evaluation of speech translation systems

Machine translation evaluation campaigns require the production of reference corpora to automatically measure system output. This paper describes recent efforts to create such data with the objective of measuring the quality of the systems participating in the Quaero evaluations. In particular, we focus on the protocols behind such production as well as all the issues raised by the complexity of the transcription data handled.
Refactoring the aspectizable interfaces: an empirical assessment

Aspect oriented programming aims at addressing the problem of the crosscutting concerns, i.e., those functionalities that are scattered among several modules in a given system. Aspects can be defined to modularize such concerns. In this work, we focus on a specific kind of crosscutting concerns, the scattered implementation of methods declared by interfaces that do not belong to the principal decomposition. We call such interfaces aspectizable. All the aspectizable interfaces identified within a large number of classes from the Java Standard Library and from three Java applications have been automatically migrated to aspects. To assess the effects of the migration on the internal and external quality attributes of these systems, we collected a set of metrics and we conducted an empirical study, in which some maintenance tasks were executed on the two alternative versions (with and without aspects) of the same system. In this paper, we report the results of such a comparison.
Evaluation of Artery Visualizations for Heart Disease Diagnosis

Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States, and finding indicators of the disease at an early stage is critical for treatment and prevention. In this paper we evaluate visualization techniques that enable the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. A key physical quantity of medical interest is endothelial shear stress (ESS). Low ESS has been associated with sites of lesion formation and rapid progression of disease in the coronary arteries. Having effective visualizations of a patient's ESS data is vital for the quick and thorough non-invasive evaluation by a cardiologist. We present a task taxonomy for hemodynamics based on a formative user study with domain experts. Based on the results of this study we developed HemoVis, an interactive visualization application for heart disease diagnosis that uses a novel 2D tree diagram representation of coronary artery trees. We present the results of a formal quantitative user study with domain experts that evaluates the effect of 2D versus 3D artery representations and of color maps on identifying regions of low ESS. We show statistically significant results demonstrating that our 2D visualizations are more accurate and efficient than 3D representations, and that a perceptually appropriate color map leads to fewer diagnostic mistakes than a rainbow color map.
Adverse drug events in hospitalized patients.

To the Editor. —I noted with interest 3 articles1-3dealing with adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and their consequences. Since the hospital to which I admit my patients has started what they describe as a mandatory ADR reporting system, I have 2 points. First, in our institution, trivial events are required to be reported as an ADR. If a cancer patient receiving chemotherapy has nausea or loses his or her hair, that is an ADR; if an asthmatic patient develops mild hyperglycemia from receiving steroids, that is a reportable ADR; if a patient is given antacids for an upset stomach and develops a mild case of selflimited diarrhea, that is a reportable ADR. There seems to be little rational consensus on what constitutes an ADR. The second point is that physicians are in a double bind. If we do not make a selective report to the pharmacy about a
The Impact Of Transients On Simulation Variance Estimators

Given a stationary simulation process with unknown mean μ , interest frequently lies in, and various methods exist for, developing estimates and confidence intervals for μ . Typically, the sample mean is used as the point estimate for μ . It is also useful to estimate the variance parameter, σ , a measure of sample mean’s precision. While there are many methods for estimating the variance parameter for such processes, they usually assume that the process has reached steady state before data collection begins. If this is not the case, then transient behavior can have a significant impact on the estimates of μ and σ . We present empirical evidence which suggests that transient behavior distorts some variance estimators much more than others. Specifically we consider batchmeans estimators and standardized time series based Lpnorm estimators; and we show that the batch-means estimators appear to be significantly less robust to bias.
Rethinking the Word Frequency Effect: The Neglected Role of Distributional Information in Lexical Processing

Attempts to quantify lexical variation have produced a large number of theoretical and empirical constructs, such as Word Frequency, Concreteness, and Ambiguity, which have been claimed to predict between-word differences in lexical processing behavior. Models of word recognition that have been developed to account for the effects of these variables have typically lacked adequate semantic representations, and have dealt with words as if they exist in isolation from their environment. We present a new dimension of lexical variation that is addressed to this concern. Contextual Distinctiveness(CD), a corpus-derived summary measure of the frequency distribution of the contexts in which a word occurs, is naturally compatible with contextual theories of semantic representation and meaning. Experiment 1 demonstrates that CD is a significantly better predictor of lexical decision latencies than occurrence frequency, suggesting that CD is the more psychologically relevant variable. We additionally explore the relationship between CD and six subjectively-defined measures: Concreteness, Context Availability, Number of Contexts, Ambiguity, Age of Acquisition and Familiarity and find CD to be reliably related to Ambiguity only. We argue for the priority of immediate context in determining the representation and processing of language.
Surgery in Language Learning

The architecture of generative phonology brings with it a difficult challenge for any learner: underlying forms must be acquired at the same time as the phonology – the system of rules or constraint-rankings. Yet, each depends on the other, and neither is known in advance. If the learner had prior knowledge of the underlying forms, then the constraint-ranking could be determined by familiar procedures. If the learner knew the ranking, then the range of viable underlying forms would be greatly limited, simplifying the process of finding them. In addition, the learner must identify a phonology which is maximally restrictive, so that distributional restrictions implicit in the data are enforced, rather than being portrayed as accidental gaps in the lexicon. Since it is impossible to explore all possible lexicon-phonology pairings, an effective learner must use an incremental strategy which goes back and forth between hypotheses about the lexicon and hypotheses about the phonology, testing and improving each until a satisfactory match is found. A principal issue in designing any such procedure is deciding what to do when the mapping fails: should the lexicon be changed or should the phonology be changed?
Changing Indications for Penetrating Keratoplasty, 1989–1993

The purpose of this study was to identify new trends in the changing indications for penetrating keratoplasty. We retrospectively reviewed the clinical and pathologic diagnoses of 1,104 corneal buttons that had been submitted to the Estelle Doheny Eye Pathology Laboratory, Los Angeles, during the 5-year period 1989–1993. The leading indications, in order of decreasing frequency, were pseudophakic corneal edema (24.8%), regrafts (21.3%), scarring with or without chronic inflammation (11.1%), keratoconus (7.1%), aphakic corneal edema (6.4%), and ulcerative conditions (5.8%). The incidence of pseudophakic corneal edema remained stable over the study period and was actually surpassed by regraft in the last year of the study. Although pseudophakic corneal edema remains the predominant indication for penetrating keratoplasty, our findings suggest that its occurrence rate has begun to level off.
Making psychological theory useful for implementing evidence based practice: a consensus approach

Background: Evidence-based guidelines are often not implemented effectively with the result that best health outcomes are not achieved. This may be due to a lack of theoretical understanding of the processes involved in changing the behaviour of healthcare professionals. This paper reports the development of a consensus on a theoretical framework that could be used in implementation research. The objectives were to identify an agreed set of key theoretical constructs for use in (1) studying the implementation of evidence based practice and (2) developing strategies for effective implementation, and to communicate these constructs to an interdisciplinary audience. Methods: Six phases of work were conducted to develop a consensus: (1) identifying theoretical constructs; (2) simplifying into construct domains; (3) evaluating the importance of the construct domains; (4) interdisciplinary evaluation; (5) validating the domain list; and (6) piloting interview questions. The contributors were a “psychological theory” group (n = 18), a “health services research” group (n = 13), and a “health psychology” group (n = 30). Results: Twelve domains were identified to explain behaviour change: (1) knowledge, (2) skills, (3) social/professional role and identity, (4) beliefs about capabilities, (5) beliefs about consequences, (6) motivation and goals, (7) memory, attention and decision processes, (8) environmental context and resources, (9) social influences, (10) emotion regulation, (11) behavioural regulation, and (12) nature of the behaviour. Conclusions: A set of behaviour change domains agreed by a consensus of experts is available for use in implementation research. Applications of this domain list will enhance understanding of the behaviour change processes inherent in implementation of evidence-based practice and will also test the validity of these proposed domains.
Age and Gender Predict Volume Decline in the Anterior and Posterior Hippocampus in Early Adulthood

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides a noninvasive method for investigating brain morphology. Within the medial temporal lobe, special attention has been paid to the hippocampus (HC) and amygdala (AG) because of their role in memory, depression, emotion, and learning. Volume changes in these areas have been observed in conjunction with certain disease states, e.g. Alzheimer's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression. Aging has also been shown to result in gray matter volume loss of the overall brain, including the HC. With regard to gender specificity, results suggest a larger shrinkage for men of brain gray matter, with controversial observations being made for the HC. With recently refined MRI acquisition and segmentation protocols, the HC and AG of 80 subjects in early adulthood (39 men and 41 women, age 18–42 years) were investigated. Whereas the volume of the AG appeared to be independent of age and gender, a significant negative correlation with age for both left and right HC was found in men (r = −0.47 and −0.44, respectively) but not in women (r = 0.01 and 0.02, respectively). The volume decline in men appeared to be linear, starting at the beginning of the third life decade and approximating 1.5% per annum. Using voxel-based regressional analysis, it was shown that changes with age occurred mostly in the head and tail of the HC. This finding underscores the need to include sociodemographic variables in functional and anatomical MRI designs.
CYCLIC PLASTICITY AND LOW CYCLE FATIGUE LIFE IN VARIABLE AMPLITUDE LOADING

— Low cycle plastic stress-strain response and fatigue life of low carbon steel in variable amplitude loading is investigated. Repeated block straining with defined probability distribution of strain peaks within a block was chosen. With the help of rain-flow analysis of a strain block the cyclic hardening/softening curves as well as the service cyclic stress-strain curves during random amplitude block loading were obtained. The relation between service stress-strain curves and the basic stress-strain curve was established. The fatigue life prediction based on the actual cyclic stress-strain response and rain-flow analysis was found to be in agreement with experimental results.
Grammar-Driven versus Data-Driven: Which Parsing System Is More Affected by Domain Shifts?

In the past decade several parsing systems for natural language have emerged, which use different methods and formalisms. For instance, systems that employ a handcrafted grammar and a statistical disambiguation component versus purely statistical data-driven systems. What they have in common is the lack of portability to new domains: their performance might decrease substantially as the distance between test and training domain increases. Yet, to which degree do they suffer from this problem, i.e. which kind of parsing system is more affected by domain shifts? Intuitively, grammar-driven systems should be less affected by domain changes. To investigate this hypothesis, an empirical investigation on Dutch is carried out. The performance variation of a grammar-driven versus two data-driven systems across domains is evaluated, and a simple measure to quantify domain sensitivity proposed. This will give an estimate of which parsing system is more affected by domain shifts, and thus more in need for adaptation techniques.