Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sculpting with the `ball and mouse' metaphor

The author presents a user interaction methodology based on a six degree of freedom interactive input device called the Spaceball. This methodology is geared for computer graphics applications that require items to be positioned or displaced in three-dimensional space in a purely visual and esthetic fashion. When the Spaceball device is used in conjunction with a common 2-D mouse-the Spaceball device held in one hand and the mouse in other-overall visual depth perception on traditional 2-D displays can be considerably enhanced by exploiting a technique called motion parallax, thereby promoting full three-dimensional user interaction. This paper focusses on the application of this methodology to sculpting highly irregular polygon mesh surfaces, such as character faces or any other surfaces of arbitrary shape. The Spaceball device is used to move the object being sculpted while the mouse carries out the picking and deformation work, all of which is projected onto the screen in real time. As case studies, three common operations in polygon mesh sculpting are described in detail (vertex creation, primitive selection and local surface deformations)
Dietary supplements and physical exercise affecting bone and body composition in frail elderly persons.

OBJECTIVES This study determined the effect of enriched foods and all-around physical exercise on bone and body composition in frail elderly persons. METHODS A 17-week randomized, controlled intervention trial, following a 2 x 2 factorial design--(1) enriched foods, (2) exercise, (3) both, or (4) neither--was performed in 143 frail elderly persons (aged 78.6 +/- 5.6 years). Foods were enriched with multiple micronutrients; exercises focused on skill training, including strength, endurance, coordination, and flexibility. Main outcome parameters were bone and body composition. RESULTS Exercise preserved lean mass (mean difference between exercisers and non-exercisers: 0.5 kg +/- 1.2 kg; P < .02). Groups receiving enriched food had slightly increased bone mineral density (+0.4%), bone mass (+0.6%), and bone calcium (+0.6%) compared with groups receiving non-enriched foods, in whom small decreases of 0.1%, 0.2%, and 0.4%, respectively, were found. These groups differed in bone mineral density (0.006 +/- 0.020 g/cm2; P = .08), total bone mass (19 +/- g; P = .04), and bone calcium (8 +/- 21 g; P = .03). CONCLUSIONS Foods containing a physiologic dose of micronutrients slightly increased bone density, mass, and calcium, whereas moderately intense exercise preserved lean body mass in frail elderly persons.
Mitochondrial biogenesis

European Bioinformatics Institute, New York University Langone Medical Center, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Oregon Health and Science University. The contents of this document may be freely copied and distributed in any media, provided the authors, plus the institutions, are credited, as stated under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. For more information see our license. This is just an excerpt of a full-length report for this pathway. To access the complete report, please download it at the Reactome Textbook. 14/12/2022
Principals as Agents: Subjective Performance Measurement in Education

In this paper, we compare subjective principal assessments of teachers to the traditional determinants of teacher compensation – education and experience – and another potential compensation mechanism -- value-added measures of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement gains. We find that subjective principal assessments of teachers predict future student achievement significantly better than teacher experience, education or actual compensation, though not as well as value-added teacher quality measures. In particular, principals appear quite good at identifying those teachers who produce the largest and smallest standardized achievement gains in their schools, but have far less ability to distinguish between teachers in the middle of this distribution and systematically discriminate against male and untenured faculty. Moreover, we find that a principal’s overall rating of a teacher is a substantially better predictor of future parent requests for that teacher than either the teacher’s experience, education and current compensation or the teacher’s value-added achievement measure. These findings not only inform education policy, but also shed light on subjective performance assessment more generally.
Gossypium arboreum GHSP26 enhances drought tolerance in Gossypium hirsutum

Heat‐shock proteins (HSP) are molecular chaperones for protein molecules. These proteins play an important role in protein–protein interactions such as, folding and assisting in the establishment of proper protein conformation and prevention of unwanted protein aggregation. A small HSP gene GHSP26 present in Gossypium arboreum responds to dehydration. In the present study, an attempt was made to overcome the problem of drought stress in cotton. A cDNA of GHSP26 was isolated from G. arboreum, cloned in plant expression vector, pCAMBIA‐1301 driven by the cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter and introduced into Gossypium hirsutum. The integration and expression studies of putative transgenic plants were performed through GUS assay; PCR from genomic DNA, and quantitative real‐time PCR analysis. Transgenic cotton plants showed an enhanced drought tolerance, suggesting that GHSP26 may play a role in plant responsiveness to drought. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog. , 2010
Physically unclonable function using RTN-induced delay fluctuation in ring oscillators

This paper proposes RTN-PUF, a novel PUF that utilizes random telegraph noise (RTN) of transistors as the physical uniqueness of individual devices. Our proposed RTN-PUF generates a response from a pair of ring oscillators (ROs) by comparing the numbers of frequency changes, which depend on the time constants of RTN. Due to the log-uniform distribution of the time constants, our RTN-PUF provides more stable responses than the existing manufacturing-variation-based PUFs. The numerical experiments show that the RTN-PUF reduces false negative errors by about 60 times compared to the conventional RO-based PUF. This facilitates to implement PUF into security purposes.
Enabling role of governance in strategizing and implementing KM

Purpose – KM governance plays a vital role in KM strategy planning and its implementation. Despite the importance of KM governance, empirical research in this area so far has been limited. This research seeks to show how a federated and self‐governance framework enabled effective KM strategy planning and implementation in a captive offshoring unit in India.Design/methodology/approach – The approach takes the form of an in‐depth study of KM strategy planning and implementation process in a captive offshore unit of a leading financial services company, using the case research method.Findings – The research shows that a KM program, driven by a federated governance for strategizing and a self‐governance for implementation, results in successful adoption, practice and sustenance of organization‐wide KM. In addition, self‐governance has also helped the organization to achieve an efficient single‐person‐driven KM function to manage the entire KM program. KM function should be reporting to a governance committee .
An Ensemble Model using Genetic Algorithm for Feature Selection and rule mining using Apriori and FP-growth from Cancer Microarray data

Several dimension reduction techniques for microarray data have been developed over the years to get differentially expressed genes. However, a very little consensus in their resultant feature subsets for a particular dataset has been noticed. Therefore, to address the aforesaid issue an ensemble of feature selection technique is proposed in this paper. The ensemble is a combination of well balanced collection of filter and wrapper based feature selection methods. For further refinement of the resultant output of ensemble, we have taken genetic algorithm in pipeline to produce a non-local set of robust feature subset. An extensive computational experiment has been carried out on prostate cancer dataset for validation of the method. In addition, we have compared the performance of our method with group genetic algorithm (GGA). Finally, the resultant feature subsets of GA, GGA, and other constituents of ensemble in standalone mode are used for uncovering frequent patterns based on two popular association rule mining like Apriori and FP-growth. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method gives a stable result and is very effective in comparison to GGA for attribute clustering in the selection of relevant features.
Health of the Nation Outcome Scales for Elderly People (HoNOS 65+)

4= At least one serious physical attack on others (over and above Rating on 3); major and/or persistent destructive activity (e.g. fire-setting); persistent and serious threatening behaviour; severe overactivity or agitation; sexually disinhibited or other inappropriate behaviour (e.g. deliberate inappropriate urination and/or defecation); virtually constant restlessness and/or wandering, severe problems related to noncompliant/resistive behaviour.
Late-onset depression: genetic, vascular and clinical contributions

Background. Neuropsychiatric research needs to examine the relationships between aetiological, genotypic and clinical risk factors and behavioural phenotypes. These relationships can now be examined in older patients with depressive disorders. Methods. Key behavioural features, clinical and vascular risk factors and putative genotypes for late-onset neurodegenerative disorders and/or vascular disease were recorded in 78 older patients with depression (mean age = 54·9 years, S.D. = 14·1) and 22 healthy control subjects (mean age = 55·5 years, S.D. = 9·6). Results. Two or more vascular risks were more common in older patients (65% v. 26% of control subjects, P < 0·01), and in patients with late-onset disorders (82% v. 57% in patients with early-onset disorders, P < 0·05). Patients with late-onset depression had a higher prevalence of the homozygous or heterozygous forms of the C677T mutation of the methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase enzyme (MTHFR)(74% v. 48% in patients with early-onset disorders, P < 0·05). In a multivariate model, only presence of the MTHFR gene mutation predicted late-onset depression (odds ratio = 3·8, 95% CI = 1·1–12·9). Neither apolipoprotein E epsilon 4 or epsilon 2 was associated with depression, late-onset depression, cognitive impairment, or psychomotor change. Patients with apolipoprotein E epsilon 4 were less likely to have psychotic forms of depression. Conclusions. Patients with late-onset depression had an increased rate of the C677T MTHFR gene mutation and other vascular risk factors. This suggests that a proportion of these patients may have genetically-determined and/or other vascular aetiologies. Patients at risk of these disorders may be assisted by currently-available preventative strategies.
Titration of Toxoplasma gondii oocysts in non-pregnant sheep and the effects of subsequent challenge during pregnancy

Fifty-nine ewes, seronegative to Toxoplasma gondii, were allocated to four groups which received 2000, 200, 20 or no M1 strain toxoplasma oocysts 56 days before mating. Fifty-one of them subsequently became pregnant and were challenged with 10,000 oocysts between 78 and 83 days of gestation. Infection with 2000 oocysts induced a pyrexia, seroconversion and protective immunity in all the recipient animals. Ewes that received either 20 or no oocysts before pregnancy were susceptible to subsequent challenge and severe fetal mortality occurred. In this study 200 oocysts was the threshold value for the induction of toxoplasma infection in sheep, although not all the ewes that seroconverted to this dose were protected against further challenge.
Temperature-Insensitive Dual- $V_{\rm th}$ Synthesis for Nanometer CMOS Technologies Under Inverse Temperature Dependence

With the scaling of CMOS technologies, the gap between nominal supply voltage and threshold voltage has decreased significantly. This trend is further amplified in low-power nanometer libraries, which feature cells with identical size and functionality, but different threshold voltages. As a consequence, different cells may have different delay behaviors as the temperature varies within a circuit. For instance, cells with low-threshold devices may experience an increase in delay when temperature increases, whereas cells using high-threshold devices may experience the opposite behavior. The latter effect, also known as inverse temperature dependence (ITD), poses new challenges to circuit designers. Besides making timing analysis more difficult, ITD has important and unforeseeable consequences for power-aware logic synthesis. This paper describes the impact that ITD may have on the design of nanometer circuits. We also provide a threshold voltage assignment algorithm for dual threshold voltage synthesis, which guarantees temperature-insensitive operation of the circuits, together with a significant reduction of both leakage and total power consumption. Experiments performed on a set of standard benchmarks show timing compliance at any operating temperature, and an average leakage reduction around 28% compared to circuits synthesized with a standard synthesis flow that does not take ITD into account. We also apply our proposed synthesis algorithm to a realistic case study consisting of a 32-bit, IEEE-754 floating point unit.
Longitudinal and Immediate Effect of Kundalini Yoga on Salivary Levels of Cortisol and Activity of Alpha-Amylase and Its Effect on Perceived Stress

Context: Stress is defined as an alteration of an organism's balance in response to a demand perceived from the environment. Diverse methods exist to evaluate physiological response. A noninvasive method is salivary measurement of cortisol and alpha-amylase. A growing body of evidence suggests that the regular practice of Yoga would be an effective treatment for stress. Aims: To determine the Kundalini Yoga (KY) effect, immediate and after 3 months of regular practice, on the perception of psychological stress and the salivary levels of cortisol and alpha-amylase activity. Settings and Design: To determine the psychological perceived stress, levels of cortisol and alpha-amylase activity in saliva, and compare between the participants to KY classes performed for 3 months and a group that does not practice any type of yoga. Subjects and Methods: The total sample consisted of 26 people between 18 and 45-year-old; 13 taking part in KY classes given at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Chile and 13 controls. Salivary samples were collected, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was performed to quantify cortisol and kinetic reaction test was made to determine alpha-amylase activity. Perceived Stress Scale was applied at the beginning and at the end of the intervention. Statistical Analysis Used: Statistical analysis was applied using Stata v11.1 software. Shapiro–Wilk test was used to determine data distribution. The paired analysis was fulfilled by t-test or Wilcoxon signed-rank test. T-test or Mann–Whitney's test was applied to compare longitudinal data. A statistical significance was considered when P< 0.05. Results: KY practice had an immediate effect on salivary cortisol. The activity of alpha-amylase did not show significant changes. A significant decrease of perceived stress in the study group was found. Conclusions: KY practice shows an immediate effect on salivary cortisol levels and on perceived stress after 3 months of practice.
Spontaneous germinal centers and autoimmunity

Abstract Germinal centers (GCs) are dynamic microenvironments that form in the secondary lymphoid organs and generate somatically mutated high-affinity antibodies necessary to establish an effective humoral immune response. Tight regulation of GC responses is critical for maintaining self-tolerance. GCs can arise in the absence of purposeful immunization or overt infection (called spontaneous GCs, Spt-GCs). In autoimmune-prone mice and patients with autoimmune disease, aberrant regulation of Spt-GCs is thought to promote the development of somatically mutated pathogenic autoantibodies and the subsequent development of autoimmunity. The mechanisms that control the formation of Spt-GCs and promote systemic autoimmune diseases remain an open question and the focus of ongoing studies. Here, we discuss the most current studies on the role of Spt-GCs in autoimmunity.
Probiotics for the Prevention of Nosocomial Diarrhea in Children

ABSTRACT This document provides recommendations developed by the ESPGHAN Working Group on Probiotics and Prebiotics on the role of probiotics in the prevention of nosocomial diarrhea in children based on a systematic review of previously completed systematic reviews and of subsequently published randomized controlled trials. The quality of evidence was assessed using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation guidelines. Recommendations were given only if at least 2 randomized controlled trials examined the same probiotic strain. Based on currently available evidence the Working Group recommends using Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG if the use of probiotics for preventing nosocomial diarrhea in children is considered.
A fuzzy recognition-primed decision model-based causal association mining algorithm for detecting adverse drug reactions in postmarketing surveillance

The current approach to postmarketing surveillance primarily relies on spontaneous reporting. It is a passive surveillance system and limited by gross underreporting (<10% reporting rate), latency, and inconsistent reporting. We propose a new interestingness measure, causal-leverage, to signal potential adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from electronic health databases which are readily available in most modern hospitals. This measure is based on an experience-based fuzzy recognition-primed decision (RPD) model that we developed previously [1] which assesses the strength of association of a drug-ADR pair within each individual patient case. Using the causal-leverage measure, we develop a data mining algorithm to evaluate the associations between a given drug enalapril and all potential ADRs in a real-world electronic health database. The experimental results have shown that our approach can effectively shortlist some known ADRs. For example, the known ADR hyperkalemia caused by enalapril was ranked as top 1% among all the 3954 potential ADRs in our database.
Polymorphic differences in SOD‐2 may influence HCV viral clearance

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a pathogen causing chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver cancer occurring in about 3% of the world's population. Most individuals infected with HCV develop persistent viremia. Oxidative stress may play an important role in the pathogenesis of a number of diseases including HCV infection and diabetes mellitus. Polymorphisms in the antioxidant genes may determine cellular oxidative stress levels as a primary pathogenic role in HCV and/or in its complications. Patients with HCV and normal, healthy controls were investigated for a superoxide dismutase (SOD‐2) polymorphism in the mitochondrial targeting sequence with Ala/Val (C‐9T) substitution. Polymorphisms in antioxidant gene SOD‐2 were carried out by PCR, restriction fragment length polymorphism assays and by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. For the SOD‐2 polymorphism, the RNA positive group showed a higher percentage of “CT” genotype than the RNA negative group (89.3% vs. 66.1%, P = 0.001, χ2 = 11.9). The RNA negative group had more TT genotypes than the RNA positive group (27.4% vs. 6.80%, P = 0.01, χ2 = 11.6). The exposed uninfected group had an increased frequency of the “CT” genotype (86.2% vs. 66.1%, P = 0.02, χ2 = 5.5). The RNA positives had a higher frequency of the “CT” from the normal controls (72.1% vs. 89.2%, P = 0.005, χ2 = 7.8). J. Med. Virol. 86:941–947, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The noise conversion method for oscillatory systems

We present a method for calculating the amplitude and phase power spectral density (PSD) functions of an oscillatory system (resonator, oscillator, bandpass filter, selective circuit, etc) via the PSD of its intrinsic noise sources and relevant transformation coefficients. A systematic description of the method is given for the scalar and vector noise. As an illustration, the noise transformation coefficients are derived for a piezoelectric series branch with fluctuating motional inductance, capacity, and losses. where static capacity is disregarded. We clarify the rules regarding the shaping of either PSD function. The importance of this method resides in the fact that it enables us to study particular finite ranges of the PSD function without using the differential equations.
Reflections on Teaching Electrical and Computer Engineering Courses at the Bachelor Level

This paper reflects on a number of observations the authors have made over many years of teaching courses in electrical and computer engineering bachelor programmes. We suggest various methods and tips for improving lectures, attendance, group work, and compulsory coursework, and discuss aspects of facilitating active learning, focussing on simple in-classroom activities and larger problem-based activities such as assignments, projects, and laboratory work. Moreover, we identify solving real-world problems by means of practical application of relevant theory as key to achieving intended learning outcomes. Our observations and reflections are then put into a theoretical context, including students’ approaches of learning, constructive alignment, active learning, and problem-based versus problem-solving learning. Finally, we present and discuss some recent results from a student evaluation survey and draw some conclusions.
Physical Model of the Junctionless UTB SOI-FET

In this paper, we model the electrical properties of a junctionless (JL) ultrathin-body silicon-on-insulator field-effect transistor (SOI-FET), which has been proposed as a possible alternative to the junction-based SOI-FET. The model is based on improved depletion approximation, which provides a very accurate solution of Poisson's equation and allows for the computation of the substrate, as well as the Si-body lower- and upper-surface potentials by an iterative procedure, which accounts for the back-oxide (BOX) charge and thickness and the potential drop within the substrate. The drain current is then computed versus gate, drain, and substrate voltages via integral expression and validated by comparison with technology computer-aided design simulation results. Analytical models of the field-effect-transistor threshold voltage and subthreshold slope are worked out against the substrate voltage, highlighting the effect of the substrate doping and BOX thickness on the aforementioned parameters. In essence, this work provides the physical background for better understanding of the JL SOI-FET and its assessment for logic applications.