Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relationship between the Increased Haemostatic Properties of Blood Platelets and Oxidative Stress Level in Multiple Sclerosis Patients with the Secondary Progressive Stage

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the autoimmune disease of the central nervous system with complex pathogenesis, different clinical courses and recurrent neurological relapses and/or progression. Despite various scientific papers that focused on early stage of MS, our study targets selective group of late stage secondary progressive MS patients. The presented work is concerned with the reactivity of blood platelets in primary hemostasis in SP MS patients. 50 SP MS patients and 50 healthy volunteers (never diagnosed with MS or other chronic diseases) were examined to evaluate the biological activity of blood platelets (adhesion, aggregation), especially their response to the most important physiological agonists (thrombin, ADP, and collagen) and the effect of oxidative stress on platelet activity. We found that the blood platelets from SP MS patients were significantly more sensitive to all used agonists in comparison with control group. Moreover, the platelet hemostatic function was advanced in patients suffering from SP MS and positively correlated with increased production of O2 −∙ in these cells, as well as with Expanded Disability Status Scale. We postulate that the increased oxidative stress in blood platelets in SP MS may be primarily responsible for the altered haemostatic properties of blood platelets.
Thematic review series: Systems Biology Approaches to Metabolic and Cardiovascular Disorders. Lipidomics: a global approach to lipid analysis in biological systems Published, JLR Papers in Press, August 10, 2006.

Lipids are water-insoluble molecules that have a wide variety of functions within cells, including: 1) maintenance of electrochemical gradients; 2) subcellular partitioning; 3) first- and second-messenger cell signaling; 4) energy storage; and 5) protein trafficking and membrane anchoring. The physiological importance of lipids is illustrated by the numerous diseases to which lipid abnormalities contribute, including atherosclerosis, diabetes, obesity, and Alzheimer's disease. Lipidomics, a branch of metabolomics, is a systems-based study of all lipids, the molecules with which they interact, and their function within the cell. Recent advances in soft-ionization mass spectrometry, combined with established separation techniques, have allowed the rapid and sensitive detection of a variety of lipid species with minimal sample preparation. A “lipid profile” from a crude lipid extract is a mass spectrum of the composition and abundance of the lipids it contains, which can be used to monitor changes over time and in response to particular stimuli. Lipidomics, integrated with genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, will contribute toward understanding how lipids function in a biological system and will provide a powerful tool for elucidating the mechanism of lipid-based disease, for biomarker screening, and for monitoring pharmacologic therapy.
The YouTube-8M Kaggle Competition: Challenges and Methods

We took part in the YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge hosted on Kaggle, and achieved the 10th place within less than one month's time. In this paper, we present an extensive analysis and solution to the underlying machine-learning problem based on frame-level data, where major challenges are identified and corresponding preliminary methods are proposed. It's noteworthy that, with merely the proposed strategies and uniformly-averaging multi-crop ensemble was it sufficient for us to reach our ranking. We also report the methods we believe to be promising but didn't have enough time to train to convergence. We hope this paper could serve, to some extent, as a review and guideline of the YouTube-8M multi-label video classification benchmark, inspiring future attempts and research.
Cochrane Reviews on the Benefits/Risks of Fluoride Toothpastes

This concise review presents two Cochrane Reviews undertaken to determine: (1) the relative effectiveness of fluoride toothpastes of different concentrations in preventing dental caries in children and adolescents; and (2) the relationship between the use of topical fluorides in young children and their risk of developing dental fluorosis. To determine the relative effectiveness of fluoride toothpastes of different concentrations, we undertook a network meta-analysis utilizing both direct and indirect comparisons from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The review examining fluorosis included evidence from experimental and observational studies. The findings of the reviews confirm the benefits of using fluoride toothpaste, when compared with placebo, in preventing caries in children and adolescents, but only significantly for fluoride concentrations of 1000 ppm and above. The relative caries-preventive effects of fluoride toothpastes of different concentrations increase with higher fluoride concentration. However, there is weak, unreliable evidence that starting the use of fluoride toothpaste in children under 12 months of age may be associated with an increased risk of fluorosis. The decision of what fluoride levels to use for children under 6 years should be balanced between the risk of developing dental caries and that of mild fluorosis.
Allocation and Pricing of Substitutable Goods: Theory and Algorithm

Abstract Motivated by the thriving market of online display advertising, we study a problem of allocating numerous types of goods among many agents who have concave valuations (capturing risk aversion) and heterogeneous substitution preferences across types of goods. The goal is both to provide a theory for optimal allocation of such goods, and to offer a scalable algorithm to compute the optimal allocation and the associated price vectors. Drawing on the economic concept of Pareto optimality, we develop an equilibrium pricing theory for heterogeneous substitutable goods that parallels the pricing theory for financial assets. We then develop a fast algorithm called SIMS (Standardization-and-Indicator-Matrix-Search). Extensive numerical simulations suggest that the SIMS algorithm is very scalable and is up to three magnitudes faster than well-known alternative algorithms. Our theory and algorithm have important implications for the pricing and scheduling of online display advertisement and beyond.
Bidirectional coupling between integrin-mediated signaling and actomyosin mechanics explains matrix-dependent intermittency of leading-edge motility

A physicochemical model is used to describe the coupling of adhesion, cytoskeletal, and signaling dynamics during cell migration. Analysis of stochastic simulations predicts relationships between measurable quantities that reflect partitioning of stress between F-actin–bound adhesions, which act as a molecular clutch, and retrograde F-actin flow.
Exploring the Moral Dimension of Professors' Folk Pedagogy

This study explores the intersection of two major conceptions in higher education: professors’ folk pedagogies and teaching’s moral dimension. Folk pedagogy is the accumulated set of beliefs, conceptions and assumptions that professors personally hold about the practice of teaching (Bruner, 1996). When these beliefs and conceptions are enacted as a teaching practice, they are conceivably undertaken on behalf of students as the means to a good end. Professors, in the course of enacting their folk pedagogies, make educational decisions -value determinations in essence -about what they believe are in the best interests of their students. In so doing they have entered moral territory. To make these decisions, issues related to moral perception, moral imagination, and moral responsiveness are present. This moral dimension of teaching was found in this study to be an inherent feature of the participants’ folk pedagogy. Pursuing tangible exemplars of these ideas, this study accomplished three key objectives. First, it explored and described some key features of professors’ folk pedagogies. Second, it examines the discourse that emerged from the folk pedagogy investigation for its moral expressions and the insights it offered toward understanding how professors conceive of teaching as a moral endeavor. Finally, using narrative analysis as the guiding methodology, it retold professors’ personal narratives their discursive practices as a unified story of moral agency and moral discourse in university teaching. These objectives were satisfied through case study investigations of three professors, wherein each participant professor was interviewed and observed teaching over the course of nine weeks. Although this investigation sought to explore moral discourse, four additional discourses were discovered interacting with the moral discourse the personal discourse, a professional discourse, an academic discourse, and the institutional discourse. It was found that rather than there being one singular moral discourse, each independent discourse possessed its own moral substance. A full view of the moral discourse, therefore, can only be achieved by looking across all of the independent discourses themselves. Interestingly, the nature of the moral discourse and moral agency varied for each professor depending upon which independent discourse dominated her or his practice. For example, those professors engaged in professional disciplines (i.e., business and engineering) exhibited practices dominated by what is termed here a professional discourse. In contrast, the practice of the philosophy professor was dominated by the academic discourse. In each case, however, the moral discourse revealed itself most often when professors’ engaged in closer, more personal interactions with students and during their consideration of students in their course planning. Moral discourse and moral agency for the professors in this study played an important role in their overall folk pedagogy and in many instances served as an unintentional pedagogical tool.
Synthesis of reactive control protocols for switch electrical power systems for commercial application with safety specifications

This paper presents a method for the reactive synthesis of fault-tolerant optimal control protocols for a finite deterministic discrete event system subject to safety specifications. A Deterministic Finite State Machine (DFSM) and Behavior Tree (BT) were used to model the system. The synthesis procedure involves formulating the policy problem as a shortest path dynamic programming problem. The procedure evaluates all possible states when applied to the DFSM, or over all possible actions when applied to the BT. The resulting strategy minimizes the number of actions performed to meet operational objectives without violating safety conditions. The effectiveness of the procedure on DFSMs and BTs is demonstrated through three examples of switched electrical power systems for commercial application and analyzed using run-time complexity analysis. The results demonstrated that for large order system BTs provided a tractable model to synthesize an optimal control policy.
Polycomb group gene silencing proteins are concentrated in the perichromatin compartment of the mammalian nucleus

Human Polycomb group (PcG) proteins are involved in cell-type-dependent epigenetic gene silencing in an evolutionarily conserved manner. We have analysed the subnuclear localisation of these regulatory proteins in two different human cell lines and in rat liver tissue by means of light and electron immunomicroscopy using specific antibodies. We find that the PcG proteins HPC2, HPH1, BMI1 and RING1 are highly concentrated in the perichromatin compartment, situated at the surface of condensed chromatin domains. This compartment was demonstrated earlier to be the nuclear site where most pre-mRNA synthesis takes place. Interestingly, these PcG proteins are virtually absent from the interior of condensed chromatin areas. The present observations therefore show that transcriptionally active and PcG-silenced loci occur within the same spatially limited nuclear domain. Our novel high-resolution data strongly support the idea that epigenetic PcG-mediated gene silencing is a local event, rather than affecting large chromatin domains. In addition to being associated with the perichromatin region, PcG proteins also occur in the interchromatin space. Implications of these observations for higher order chromatin structure and for the mechanisms of PcG-mediated gene silencing are discussed.
Improving localization in wireless sensor networks with an evolutionary algorithm

Wireless sensor networks are highly useful for many location-sensitive applications including environmental monitor- ing, military applications, disaster management, etc. Localization in wireless sensor networks concerns about the precise estimation of node positions given a relatively small portion as anchor nodes with their absolute positions predetermined. Intrinsically, localization is an unconstrained optimization problem based on various distance/path measures. Most of the existing work focus on increasing the accuracy in position estimation typically by using different heuristic-based or mathematical techniques. On the other hand, there were many complex optimization problems successfully tackled by the nature inspired search algorithms including the ant-based or genetic algorithms. In this paper, we propose to adapt an evolutionary approach, namely a micro- genetic algorithm, and integrate as a post-optimizer into some existing localization techniques such as the Ad-hoc Positioning System (APS) to further improve their position estimation. Clearly, our proposed MGA is so adaptable that it can easily be integrated into other localization methods. More importantly, the remarkable improvements obtained by the prototype of our proposed evolutionary optimizer on certain anisotropic topologies of our simulation tests prompt for further investigation. methods have been developed. Instead of requiring every node to have GPS installed, all localization methods assume only a few nodes (≥ 3) are equipped with GPS hardware. These nodes are called anchor or beacon nodes and they know their positions without communicating with other nodes. Other normal sensors then obtain distance information through talking to each other and derive their positions based on the information. A good localization protocol should reduce the error in position estimation by using reasonable number of messages. The computation and memory required should be limited as well due to the nature of sensor networks mentioned above.
Gantry Scheduling for Multi-Gantry Production System by Online Task Allocation Method

For a multi-gantry production system, in which several gantries move among the machines and load/unload parts, the assignment of gantries directly impacts the system performance. Gantry scheduling problem is extremely important, involving when and where the gantries are assigned to the machines. This letter formulates the gantry scheduling problem as an online task allocation (OTA) problem, and solves for an optimal gantry assignment policy to maximize the system throughput. The multi-gantry production system is analyzed and important system properties are derived. The production system performance is evaluated through permanent production loss and opportunity window. Such knowledge is used to define the key parameters in the OTA problem. Based on the analysis of the system production performance, the optimization problem is solved and consequently a gantry assignment policy is proposed. A numerical study is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed policy by comparing with first-come-first-served policy.
Time-Optimal Convergecast With Separated Packet Copying: Scheduling Policies and Performance

Convergecast, in which packets originating from multiple sources are reported to a single sink, is a fundamental primitive for data collection in wireless sensor networks. This paper investigates the time-optimal link-scheduling problem for time-division multiple-access (TDMA)-based convergecast, aiming to minimize the amount of time required to complete convergecast. We observe that packet copying between the microcontroller and the radio transceiver in existing sensor platforms has a big impact on the packet forwarding delay, and we propose a novel model for convergecast in which packet copying is separated from packet transmission and reception. We establish tight lower bounds on the number of time slots required for convergecast in networks with line and tree routing topologies, and we present both centralized and distributed algorithms for constructing the time-optimal convergecast schedules. We evaluate our scheme in both simulations and experiments on hardware. The results show that our scheme can achieve a system throughput (defined as the number of data bits received by the sink per second) of 202.8 kb/s, which is 86.31% of the theoretical bound. In comparison with the traditional TDMA-based convergecast schemes, our scheme can achieve up to a 86.22% improvement on system throughput.
Price Jump Prediction in Limit Order Book

A limit order book provides information on available limit order prices and their volumes. Based on these quantities, we give an empirical result on the relationship between the bid-ask liquidity balance and trade sign and we show that liquidity balance on best bid/best ask is quite informative for predicting the future market order's direction. Moreover, we de ne price jump as a sell (buy) market order arrival which is executed at a price which is smaller (larger) than the best bid (best ask) price at the moment just after the precedent market order arrival. Features are then extracted related to limit order volumes, limit order price gaps, market order information and limit order event information. Logistic regression is applied to predict the price jump from the limit order book's feature. LASSO logistic regression is introduced to help us make variable selection from which we are capable to highlight the importance of di erent features in predicting the future price jump. In order to get rid of the intraday data seasonality, the analysis is based on two separated datasets: morning dataset and afternoon dataset. Based on an analysis on forty largest French stocks of CAC40, we nd that trade sign and market order size as well as the liquidity on the best bid (best ask) are consistently informative for predicting the incoming price jump.
Designing and comparing two scratch-based teaching approaches for students aged 10--12 years

Programming and computational thinking are becoming more important in primary education. This raises the question of how different approaches to teaching programming in primary schools compare with each other. We designed two approaches to teach programming to primary school students. One approach uses the instructionistic 4C/ID model, the other approach uses constructionism. The learning gains of these two approaches were compared using a pre- and post test. In total, 129 students from two different schools participated. A significant difference (p = .020, d = .66) between the two approaches was found on one of the schools, favoring the 4C/ID approach. On the other school and for the total group no significant difference was found.
On the Selection of Management/Monitoring Nodes in Highly Dynamic Networks

This paper addresses the problem of provisioning management/monitoring nodes within highly dynamic network environments, particularly virtual networks. In a network, where nodes and links may be spontaneously created and destroyed (perhaps rapidly) there is a need for stable and responsive management and monitoring, which does not create a large load (in terms of traffic or processing) for the system. A subset of nodes has to be chosen for management/monitoring, each of which will manage a subset of the nodes in the network. A new, simple, and locally optimal greedy algorithm called Pressure is provided for choice of node position to minimize traffic. This algorithm is combined with a system for predicting the lifespan of nodes, and a tunable parameter is also given so that a system operator could express a preference for elected nodes to be chosen to reduce traffic, to be "stable,&#x201D; or some compromise between these positions. The combined algorithm called PressureTime is lightweight and could be run in a distributed manner. The resulting algorithms are tested both in simulation and in a testbed environment of virtual routers. They perform well, both at reducing traffic and at choosing long lifespan nodes.
The GalF protein of Escherichia coli is not a UDP‐glucose pyrophosphorylase but interacts with the GalU protein possibly to regulate cellular levels of UDP‐glucose

We report the functional characterization of the galF gene of strain VW187 (Escherichia coli O7:K1), which encodes a polypeptide displaying structural features common to bacterial UDP‐glucose pyrophosphorylases, including the E. coli GalU protein. These enzymes catalyse a reversible reaction converting UTP and glucose‐1‐phosphate into UDP‐glucose and PPi. We show that, although the GalF protein is expressed in vivo, GalF‐expressing plasmids cannot complement the phenotype of a galU mutant and extracts from this mutant which only produces GalF are enzymatically inactive. In contrast, the presence of GalU and GalF proteins in the same cell‐free extract caused a significant reduction in the rate of pyrophosphorolysis (conversion of UDP‐glucose into glucose‐1‐phosphate) but no significant effect on the kinetics of synthesis of UDP‐glucose. The presence of GalF also increased the thermal stability of the enzyme in vitro. The effect of GalF in the biochemical properties of the UDP‐glucose pyrophosphorylase required the co‐synthesis of GalF and GalU, suggesting that they could interact as components of the oligomeric enzyme. The physical interaction of GalU and GalF was demonstrated in vivo by the co‐expression of both proteins as fusion products using a yeast two‐hybrid system. Furthermore, using a pair of galF +/galU + and galF/galU + isogenic strains, we demonstrated that the presence of GalF is associated with an increased concentration of intracellular UDP‐glucose as well as with an enhancement of the thermal stability of the UDP‐glucose pyrophosphorylase in vivo. We propose that GalF is a non‐catalytic subunit of the UDP‐glucose pyrophosphorylase modulating the enzyme activity to increase the formation of UDP‐glucose, and this function is important for bacterial adaptation to conditions of stress.
Pregnancy-related mortality--Georgia, 1990-1992.

Many pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. State-based surveillance is important for identifying such deaths and developing prevention strategies. Surveillance for pregnancy-related deaths based only on ascertainment through death certificates underestimates actual deaths (1-7). However, when this surveillance method has been supplemented by linking death certificates of reproductive-aged women to birth and fetal death records, ascertainment has increased 1%-153% (1,2,4,6,7). In 1994, the Division of Public Health, Georgia Department of Human Resources, assessed the completeness of reporting of pregnancy-related deaths during 1990-1992 by comparing current death-certificate-based surveillance with a supplemental method of linking women's death records and infants' birth records. This report characterizes the increase in the total number of pregnancy-related deaths identified and presents specific causes of pregnancy-related deaths in Georgia. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)