Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ketamine does not affect intestinal microcirculation in pentobarbital-anaesthetized rats during experimental endotoxaemia

The objective of the study was to evaluate the effects of ketamine on intestinal microcirculation in pentobarbital-anaesthetized rats during experimental endotoxaemia. A prospective, randomized, controlled study was carried out using 32 male Lewis rats. The animals were divided into four groups (n = 8 each). All animals were initially anaesthetized with 60 mg/kg pentobarbital (i.p.). Group 1 served as a control (18.5 mg/kg/h pentobarbital i.v.). Groups 2 and 4 received an endotoxin intravenous infusion of 15 mg/kg lipopolysaccharide (LPS) from Escherichia coli. Groups 3 and 4 also received 10 mg/kg/h ketamine (i.v.). After 2 h of observation, the animals were examined for intestinal functional capillary density (FCD) and leukocyte adherence to the venular endothelium by means of intravital fluorescence microscopy (IVM). Subsequent to this examination, blood samples were collected to determine release of the cytokines tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6 and IL-10. Endotoxaemia tended to decrease intestinal FCD (mucosa: −10.1%, muscularis longitudinalis: −2%, muscularis circularis: −9.8%) and significantly increase leukocyte adherence within submucosal venules (collecting venules: +133%, postcapillary venules: +207%; P<0.05). TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6 and IL-10 levels were significantly elevated following endotoxin challenge. The addition of ketamine to pentobarbital anaesthesia did not significantly affect FCD, leukocyte behaviour or cytokine levels. In conclusion, intravenous pentobarbital anaesthesia with the additional administration of ketamine did not cause alterations within the microcirculation or changes in cytokine release during endotoxaemia. In rats, the combination of pentobarbital and ketamine is suitable for use during the study of intestinal microcirculation in experimental endotoxaemia.
Modeling and Performance Analysis of D2D Communications with Interference Management in 3-D HetNets

In this paper, a general 3-D model for K-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is proposed to investigate the performances of device-to-device (D2D) communications in highrise centers. The new model is based on stochastic geometry, where a 3-D Mat'ern hard- core process (MHCP) is used to describe the different cells positions in the network with realistic constraints. We derive the expressions of average successful transmission probability (STP) for D2D and standard cellular (SC) communications with different well known interference management techniques. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to evaluate the analytical results. These results confirm the accuracy of the proposed model which presents an efficient description and tractable model to evaluate the performance of dense small cells deployment in HetNets.
SoLoc: Self-organizing indoor localization for unstructured and dynamic environments

Self-organization is critical to enable novel indoor Location-Based Services (LBSs) for users and businesses in large, complex and unstructured buildings. Inspired by high densities of smartphones in public indoor spaces, in this paper we propose a self-organizing indoor localization approach that allows the use of available WiFi Access Points (APs) and iBeacons in the area to improve location accuracy and environment adaptability. Our approach is based on a semi-anchored localization that estimates the unknown location of smartphones, given known-location anchors (APs) and unknown-location anchors (iBeacons). We exploit the capabilities of Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm to accurately estimate smartphone locations in realtime, in contrast to fingerprinting methods that require a tedious off-line training phase. Moreover, we use a clustering method based on the Received Signal Strength (RSS) values to obtain the initial estimated location for the optimization. We evaluate our approach using available APs and non-coordinated iBeacons in a large building to localize smartphones. The experimental results confirm that our self-organizing approach not only effortlessly estimates the position of mobile devices, but also provides a higher localization accuracy than other widely used approaches such as extant fingerprinting techniques for both scenarios, with and without iBeacons.
The impact of tattoo segmentation on the performance of tattoo matching

Tattoos are an important trait for criminal and victim identification and have been widely used by law enforcement agencies around the world. To facilitate it, tattoo images of prisoners, gangsters and other suspects are collected regularly. Up until now, these tattoo images are still manually annotated by law enforcement officers and text-based searching is used to retrieve tattoos of criminals and victims. Researchers have applied image-based matching methods to tattoos. Tattoo images collected from prisoners and crime scenes always include background and body sites other than tattoos. The aim of this paper is to evaluate how these non-tattoo regions impact on the performance of the image based matching methods. In this paper, SIFT and SURF are used as the matching methods. Four experimental settings are designed and over 4000 tattoo images are used in this evaluation. The experimental results pinpoint clearly that non-tattoo regions have negative impact on the matching performance and imply that tattoo matching will benefit from accurate tattoo detection.
Do Managers Withhold Good News from Labor Unions?

With scarce empirical support, prior literature argues that managers tend to withhold good news and promote bad news to preserve their bargaining power against labor unions. This paper provides empirical evidence of this rarely supported argument. Using comprehensive firm-level data from South Korea, where labor unions have a long tradition of making credible threats, we find that overall disclosure frequency is negatively related to labor union strength, and that this relation is more pronounced in firms with good news. We also find that firms with strong labor unions withhold good news during the labor negotiation period and release it in a gradual fashion afterward and that this pattern is more prominent than that of firms with weak or no unions, implying that managers time news disclosures according to bargaining schedules to achieve better outcomes in labor negotiations. These results are robust to various sensitivity tests.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi. org/10.1287/mnsc.2014. 2075 . This paper was accepted by Mary Barth, accounting .
Low voltage ride-through of DFIG wind turbines complying with Western-Power grid code in Australia

Western Power has recently imposed stringent low voltage ride-through (LVRT) requirements on wind power plants that seek connection to the Western Australian transmission system. Doubly-fed induction generators (DFIGs) are the dominant technology used in wind generation systems. However, this type of wind generator is very sensitive to fault conditions and without efficient “ride-through” strategy, continuous operation of DFIG may fail due to destructive overcurrents in the rotor winding or large overvoltages in the dc-link capacitor. This paper introduces a hybrid current control scheme, implemented in the rotor-side converter of DFIG, to enhance its LVRT capability in compliance with the Western Power grid code. The proposed control scheme is constituted of two switching strategies: standard PI current controllers for normal operating conditions and vector-based hysteresis current controllers for DFIG protection during severe fault conditions. Simulation studies are carried out to examine the effectiveness of the proposed LVRT strategy under symmetrical and asymmetrical voltage sags. It is shown that this hybrid control scheme can constrain the rotor current and dc-link voltage within the safety limits of DFIG and as a result, the wind generator meets the strict regulations defined by Western Power.
Implications for Radiotherapy VEGF Expression and Increases Tumor Oxygenation : and α Nelfinavir Down-regulates Hypoxia-Inducible Factor 1

The phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt pathway can increase vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and hypoxia-inducible factor 1A (HIF-1A) expression. We examined the effect of nelfinavir, an HIV protease inhibitor that inhibits Akt signaling, on VEGF and HIF-1A expression and on angiogenesis, tumor oxygenation, and radiosensitization. Nelfinavir decreases VEGF expression under normoxia via the transcription factor Sp1, which regulates the proximal core VEGF promoter. Nelfinavir decreased Sp1 phosphorylation and decreased Sp1 binding to a probe corresponding to the proximal VEGF promoter in a gel shift assay. Nelfinavir also decreased the hypoxic induction of HIF-1A, which also regulates the VEGF promoter, most likely by decreasing its translation. The effect of nelfinavir on VEGF expression had the functional consequence of decreasing angiogenesis in an in vivo Matrigel plug assay. To determine the effect this might have on tumor radiosensitization, we did tumor regrowth assays with xenografts in nude mice. The combination of nelfinavir and radiation increased time to regrowth compared with radiation alone whereas nelfinavir alone had little effect on tumor regrowth. This radiosensitizing effect was greater than suggested by in vitro clonogenic survival assays. One possible explanation for the discordance is that nelfinavir has an effect on tumor oxygenation. Therefore, we examined this with the hypoxia marker EF5 and found that nelfinavir leads to increased oxygenation within tumor xenografts. Our results suggest that nelfinavir decreases HIF-1A/VEGF expression and tumor hypoxia, which could play a role in its in vivo radiosensitizing effect. These data support the use of nelfinavir in combination with radiation in future clinical trials. (Cancer Res 2006; 66(18): 9252-9)
Comparing Linguistic Interpretation Schemes for English Corpora

Project AMALGAM explored a range of Partof-Speech tagsets and phrase structure parsing schemes used in modern English corpus-based research. The PoS-tagging schemes and parsing schemes include some which have been used for hand annotation of corpora or manual postediting of automatic taggers or parsers; and others which are unedited output of a parsing program. Project deliverables include: a detailed description of each PoS-tagging scheme, and multi-tagged corpus; a “Corpus-neutral ” tokenization scheme; a family of PoS-taggers, for 8 PoS-tagsets; a method for “PoS-tagset conversion”, a sample of texts parsed according to a range of parsing schemes: a MultiTreebank; an Internet service allowing researchers worldwide free access to the above resources, including a simple email-based method for PoS-tagging any English text with any or all PoS-tagset(s). We conclude that the range of tagging and parsing schemes in use is too varied to allow agreement on a standard; and that parserevaluation based on ‘bracket-matching ’ is unfair to more sophisticated parsers.
Macrophage Bactericidal Activities against Staphylococcus aureus Are Enhanced In Vivo by Selenium Supplementation in a Dose-Dependent Manner

Background Dietary selenium is of fundamental importance to maintain optimal immune function and enhance immunity during infection. To this end, we examined the effect of selenium on macrophage bactericidal activities against Staphylococcus aureus. Methods Assays were performed in golden Syrian hamsters and peritoneal macrophages cultured with S. aureus and different concentrations of selenium. Results Infected and selenium-supplemented animals have significantly decreased levels of serum nitric oxide (NO) production when compared with infected but non-selenium-supplemented animals at day 7 post-infection (p < 0.05). A low dose of 5 ng/mL selenium induced a significant decrease in macrophage NO production, but significant increase in hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) levels (respectively, p = 0.009, p < 0.001). The NO production and H2O2 levels were significantly increased with increasing concentrations of selenium; the optimal macrophage activity levels were reached at 20 ng/mL. The concentration of 5 ng/mL of selenium induced a significant decrease in the bacterial arginase activity but a significant increase in the macrophage arginase activity. The dose of 20 ng/mL selenium induced a significant decrease of bacterial growth (p < 0.0001) and a significant increase in macrophage phagocytic activity, NO production/arginase balance and S. aureus killing (for all comparisons, p < 0.001). Conclusions Selenium acts in a dose-dependent manner on macrophage activation, phagocytosis and bacterial killing suggesting that inadequate doses may cause a loss of macrophage bactericidal activities and that selenium supplementation could enhance the in vivo control of immune response to S. aureus.
CS 229 Final Project Report : Using Yelp Reviews to Improve Businesses

For this project, we investigated running sentiment analysis on topics extracted from review text in order to determine what aspects of businesses are important to customers. The topics for each review were generated from high scoring term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) keywords, then used as features for a classification model which would try to predict whether a review was ‘extreme’ or ‘neutral’. After some experimentation, we found that our Support Vector Machine (SVM) model obtained the highest performance and provided topic weights that suggested reviewers care more about quality of the main course and quality of customer service than they care about restaurant gimmicks or perks.
ForestStream: Accurate Measurement of Cascades in Online Social Networks

Various Online Social Network (OSN) based applications depend on the interactions between users to disseminate information and recruit more users. The temporal evolution of adoption or cascade process of new products, applications or ideas is important to advertisers, OSN operators and application developers. Interactions between users are represented by massive directed graphs, so graph sampling methods were proposed to capture their properties. Existing graph sampling methods, such as a simple random walk, however, are ill- suited for capturing this and other dynamic properties of the graph. We propose ForestStream, a measurement method that relies on a combination of sampling and streaming with the goal of capturing the statistical properties of cascades in OSN graphs. We demonstrate our method's accuracy over existing methods in inferring the cascade statistics, with a low memory usage.
TOTAL REWARDS FOR TECHNICAL WORKERS

Qualitative research methods are gaining popularity among Information System (IS) researchers (Myers, 1997). Among the various qualitative methods, action research (AR) is considered both effective and controversial. Action research as a methodology is becoming more common in the IS research field, although its validity is sometimes questioned (Baskerville & Wood-Harper, 1996; Myers, 1997). One particular action research method that has been used in organizational development since the 1980’s is known as Appreciative Inquiry (AI). AI was developed by Cooperrider and Srivastva (1987) and has been used as an action research intervention in organizations for many years. One area in which AI does not seem to be used is in IS. A literature search revealed no articles relating AI to IS. This paper will explore the possibility of using appreciative inquiry specifically in an IS research setting. The paper will be organized as follows: First, the research question will be articulated. Next, action research will be defined, explained, and some of its criticisms explored. Following this, appreciative inquiry will be defined and examined. Finally, a theoretical application of AI in an IS research scenario will be proposed.
Does the physiological success of CPAP titration predict clinical success?

Patients commencing continuous positive airway pressure therapy (CPAP) undergo overnight airway pressure titration in sleep centres to optimize breathing and sleep patterns. We tested the hypothesis that data from formal scoring of the sleep and breathing patterns observed at the best achievable pressure during titration can predict CPAP use and effectiveness, as our clinical experience suggested otherwise. The relationship between CPAP titration scores (apnoea/hypopnoea. frequency, arousal frequency and sleep staging) and subsequent CPAP use was examined in 150 sleep apnoea/hypopnoea syndrome patients. One hundred patients were continuing CPAP therapy and 50 were randomly selected patients who had discontinued CPAP. Within the CPAP group, titration scores were compared with CPAP machine use, subjective daytime sleepiness and requirements for airway pressure adjustment. Respiratory irregularities and arousals during titration did not relate to outcome. Sleep‐stage analysis revealed a weak relationship between more wakefulness during titration and CPAP discontinuation (P = 0.02). There was a correlation between more prolonged Stage 4 sleep during titration and reduced sleepiness on established therapy (P = 0.002), but this explained less than 12% of the variance. The absence of rapid eye movement sleep during titration was not associated with poorer outcomes. We conclude that routine scoring of breathing and sleep patterns observed during CPAP titration is of little clinical value, as the results do not predict outcome for individual patients. Satisfactory CPAP therapy may be established even if significant numbers of apnoeasjhypopnoeas or arousals are observed at the optimal pressure during titration.
A Bayesian Analysis Strategy for Cross-Study Translation of Gene Expression Biomarkers

We describe a strategy for the analysis of experimentally derived gene expression signatures and their translation to human observational data. Sparse multivariate regression models are used to identify expression signature gene sets representing downstream biological pathway events following interventions in designed experiments. When translated into in vivo human observational data, analysis using sparse latent factor models can yield multiple quantitative factors characterizing expression patterns that are often more complex than in the controlled, in vitro setting. The estimation of common patterns in expression that reflect all aspects of covariation evident in vivo offers an enhanced, modular view of the complexity of biological associations of signature genes. This can identify substructure in the biological process under experimental investigation and improved biomarkers of clinical outcomes. We illustrate the approach in a detailed study from an oncogene intervention experiment where in vivo factor profiling of an in vitro signature generates biological insights related to underlying pathway activities and chromosomal structure, and leads to refinements of cancer recurrence risk stratification across several cancer studies.
The development of automated palmprint identification using major flexion creases

This work or any part thereof has not previously been presented in any form to the University or to any other body whether for the purposes of assessment, publication or for any other purpose (unless otherwise indicated). Save for any express acknowledgements, references and/or bibliographies cited in the work, I confirm that the intellectual content of the work is the result of my own efforts and of no other person.
Mandibular bone mineral density in patients with Behçet’s disease

Objectives Behçet’s disease (BD) is a chronic, recurring vasculitis of unknown etiology. Patients with BD may use a lot of medications associated with the clinical symptoms. Drugs that are used in the treatment of BD may cause bone loss. The aims of the current study were to compare the bone mineral density (BMD) values between BD and healthy volunteers and describe the effect of disease duration on mandibular BMD. Materials and methods The study comprised 30 healthy volunteers (15 males and 15 females, mean age 35.50±6.80 years) and 45 patients with BD (24 males and 21 females, mean age 38.93±8.93 years). The BD group was subdivided according to disease duration (0–5, 6–10, and >10 years). The BMD value of the mandibular body was determined by the dual energy X-ray absorptiometry technique. Results The mean mandibular body BMD values were 1.294±0.21 g/cm2 in the control group and 1.216±0.22 g/cm2 in the BD patients, although there was no statistically significant difference. The BMD was observed to decrease with increased disease duration but not to a statistically significant degree. Conclusion The results of this study showed that although the BMD value decreased as the duration of the disease increased, no statistically significant difference was found between the BD patients and the healthy control group.
On a directed tree problem motivated by a newly introduced graph product

In this paper we introduce and study a directed tree problem motivated by a new graph product that we have recently introduced and analysed in two conference contributions in the context of periodic real-time processes. While the two conference papers were focussing more on the applications, here we mainly deal with the graph theoretical and computational complexity issues. We show that the directed tree problem is NP-complete and present and compare several heuristics for this problem.
A four-quadrant thrust controller for marine propellers with loss estimation and anti-spin : theory and experiments

In this paper a nonlinear thrust controller for fixed pitch marine propellers with torque loss estimation and an antispin strategy is presented. The controller, designed to operate in the four-quadrant plane composed by the shaft speed and the vessel speed, is a combination of a thrust controller developed for calm/moderate sea states and an anti-spin strategy to reduce power peaks and wear-and-tear in extreme sea conditions. The thrust controller aims at producing the demanded thrust independently from the propeller losses. The anti-spin algorithm lowers the shaft speed once large torque losses are detected and increases the shaft speed to normal when the loss situation is considered over. The torque losses are estimated with a nonlinear observer. The performance of the proposed controller is validated by experiments carried out in a towing tank.
Pharmacokinetic interaction between itraconazole and rifampin in Yucatan miniature pigs

The objective of this study was to examine the effects of rifampin on itraconazole pharmacokinetics, at steady state, in three Yucatan miniature pigs. Daily for 3 weeks, the pigs received 200 mg of itraconazole orally at the beginning of each meal, and for the following 2 weeks they received itraconazole orally combined with intravenous administration of rifampin at 10 mg/kg/day. Coadministration of rifampin resulted in an 18-fold decrease in the maximum concentration of itraconazole in serum, from 113.0 (standard deviation [SD] 17.2) to 6.2 (SD, 3.9) ng/ml and a 22-fold decrease in the area under the concentration-time curve, from 1,652.7 (SD, 297.7) to 75.6 (SD, 30.0) ng.h/ml. The active metabolite of itraconazole, hydroxyitraconazole, was undetectable. This study demonstrates that rifampin affects itraconazole kinetics considerably at steady state in this miniature-pig model, probably by inducing hepatic metabolism of itraconazole.