Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endothelium-Restricted Overexpression of Human Endothelin-1 Causes Vascular Remodeling and Endothelial Dysfunction

Background—Endothelin (ET)-1 is a potent vasoconstrictor that contributes to vascular remodeling in hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases. Endogenous ET-1 is produced predominantly by vascular endothelial cells. To directly test the role of endothelium-derived ET-1 in cardiovascular pathophysiology, we specifically targeted expression of the human preproET-1 gene to the endothelium by using the Tie-2 promoter in C57BL/6 mice. Methods and Results—Ten-week-old male C57BL/6 transgenic (TG) and nontransgenic (wild type; WT) littermates were studied. TG mice exhibited 3-fold higher vascular tissue ET-1 mRNA and 7-fold higher ET-1 plasma levels than did WT mice but no significant elevation in blood pressure. Despite the absence of significant blood pressure elevation, TG mice exhibited marked hypertrophic remodeling and oxidant excess-dependent endothelial dysfunction of resistance vessels, altered ET-1 and ET-3 vascular responses, and significant increases in ETB expression compared with WT littermates. Moreover, TG mice generated significantly higher oxidative stress, possibly through increased activity and expression of vascular NAD(P)H oxidase than did their WT counterparts. Conclusions—In this new murine model of endothelium-restricted human preproET-1 overexpression, ET-1 caused structural remodeling and endothelial dysfunction of resistance vessels, consistent with a direct nonhemodynamic effect of ET-1 on the vasculature, at least in part through the activation of vascular NAD(P)H oxidase.
Flexible hardware architecture for AES cryptography algorithm

In the numeric communication, much devoted efforts are dedicated to improve security and safety of numeric transactions. Hardware implementation of cryptography algorithm, as the AES, is a good solution to preserve confidentiality and accessibility to the information. In this context, this paper proposes an optimal hardware implementation of AES algorithm. Taking advantages of dynamic partially reconfigurable of FPGA. Implementation result of the proposed architecture shows the interest of this new approach, and confirms the contribution of the reconfigurable FPGA for robust and optimal implementation
Metadata Standard and Data Exchange Specifications to Describe, Model, and Integrate Complex and Diverse High-Throughput Screening Data from the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS)

The National Institutes of Health Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) program is generating extensive multidimensional data sets, including biochemical, genome-wide transcriptional, and phenotypic cellular response signatures to a variety of small-molecule and genetic perturbations with the goal of creating a sustainable, widely applicable, and readily accessible systems biology knowledge resource. Integration and analysis of diverse LINCS data sets depend on the availability of sufficient metadata to describe the assays and screening results and on their syntactic, structural, and semantic consistency. Here we report metadata specifications for the most important molecular and cellular components and recommend them for adoption beyond the LINCS project. We focus on the minimum required information to model LINCS assays and results based on a number of use cases, and we recommend controlled terminologies and ontologies to annotate assays with syntactic consistency and semantic integrity. We also report specifications for a simple annotation format (SAF) to describe assays and screening results based on our metadata specifications with explicit controlled vocabularies. SAF specifically serves to programmatically access and exchange LINCS data as a prerequisite for a distributed information management infrastructure. We applied the metadata specifications to annotate large numbers of LINCS cell lines, proteins, and small molecules. The resources generated and presented here are freely available.
Prognostic Significance of Delayed-Enhancement Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Survival of 857 Patients With and Without Left Ventricular Dysfunction

Background— Left ventricular ejection fraction is a powerful independent predictor of survival in cardiac patients, especially those with coronary artery disease. Delayed-enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (DE-MRI) can accurately identify irreversible myocardial injury with high spatial and contrast resolution. To date, relatively limited data are available on the prognostic value of DE-MRI, so we sought to determine whether DE-MRI findings independently predict survival. Methods and Results— The medical records of 857 consecutive patients who had complete cine and DE-MRI evaluation at a tertiary care center were reviewed regardless of whether the patients had coronary artery disease. The presence and extent of myocardial scar were evaluated qualitatively by a single experienced observer. The primary, composite end point was all-cause mortality or cardiac transplantation. Survival data were obtained from the Social Security Death Index. The median follow-up was 4.4 years; 252 patients (29%) reached one of the end points. Independent predictors of mortality or transplantation included congestive heart failure, ejection fraction, and age (P<0.0001 for each), as well as scar index (hazard ratio, 1.26; 95% confidence interval, 1.02 to 1.55; P=0.033). Similarly, in subsets of patients with or without coronary artery disease, scar index also independently predicted mortality or transplantation (hazard ratio, 1.33; 95% confidence interval, 1.05 to 1.68; P=0.018; and hazard ratio, 5.65; 95% confidence interval, 1.74 to 18.3; P=0.004, respectively). Cox regression analysis showed worse outcome in patients with any DE in addition to depressed left ventricular ejection fraction (<50%). Conclusion— The degree of DE detected by DE-MRI appears to strongly predict all-cause mortality or cardiac transplantation after adjustment for traditional, well-known prognosticators.
Trust and Risk based Access Control and Access Control Constraints

Access control in dynamic environments needs the ability to provide more access opportunities of information to users, while also ensuring protection information from malicious users. Trust and risk are essential factors and can be combined together in access control decision-making to meet the above requirement. In this paper, we propose the combination of the trust and risk in access control to balance information accessibility and protection. Access control decision is made on the basis of trustworthiness of users and risk value of permissions. We use potential relations between users and relations between permissions in access control. Our approach not only provides more access opportunities for trustworthy users in accessing permissions, but also enforces traditional access control constraints such as Chinese Wall policy and Separation of Duty (SoD) of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model in an effective way.
A Modal Sequent Calculus for Propositional Separation Logic

In this paper, we give a sequent calculus for separation logic. Unlike the logic of bunched implications, this calculus does not have a tree-shaped context { instead, we use labelled deduction to control when hypotheses can and cannot be used. We prove that cut-elimination holds for this calculus, and show that it is sound with respect to the provability semantics of separation logic.
A study of bouncing rod dynamics aiming at passive running

Passive running robot can run down shallow slope with no energy source without gravity. The robot can generate a stable limit cycle. Dynamics of passive running is very interesting target and important for developing the robot and understanding the human locomotion. By the way, running high jumper can jump very high. The point of jumping is to transfer horizontal velocity into lifting momentum through the hinged-movement. In this paper, we demonstrate the experimental passive running based on the hinged-movement. Moreover, we derive the fixed point of the passive running, and analyze its stability.
Catch-up growth in children after repair of Tetralogy of Fallot

Abstract Purpose To evaluate the growth of children after repair of Tetralogy of Fallot, as well as the influence of residual lesions and socio-economic status. Methods A total of 17 children, including 10 boys with a median age of 16 months at surgery, were enrolled in a retrospective cohort, in a tertiary care university hospital. Anthropometric (as z-scores), clinical, nutritional, and social data were collected. Results Weight-for-age and weight-for-height z-scores decreased pre-operatively and recovered post-operatively in almost all patients, most markedly weight for age. Weight-for-height z-scores improved, but were still lower than birth values in the long term. Long-term height-for-age z-scores were higher than those at birth, surgery, and 3 months post-operatively. Most patients showed catch-up growth for height for age (70%), weight for age (82%), and weight for height (70%). Post-operative residual lesions (76%) influenced weight-for-age z-scores. Despite the fact that most patients (70%) were from low-income families, energy intake was above the estimated requirement for age and gender in all but one patient. There was no influence of socio-economic status on pre- and post-operative growth. Bone age was delayed and long-term-predicted height was within mid-parental height limits in 16 children (93%). Conclusion Children submitted to Tetralogy of Fallot repair had pre-operative acute growth restriction and showed post-operative catch-up growth for weight and height. Acute growth restriction could still be present in the long term.
Evaluation of the streams-C C-to-FPGA compiler: an applications perspective

The Streams-C compiler ([5]) synthesizes hardware circuits for reconfigurable FPGA-based computers from parallel C programs. The Streams-C language consists of a small number of libraries and intrinsic functions added to a synthesizable subset of C, and supports a communicating process programming model. The processes may be either software or hardware processes, and the compiler manages communication among the processes transparently to the programmer. For the hardware processes, the compiler generates Register-Transfer-Level (RTL) VHDL, targeting multiple FPGAs with dedicated memories. For the software processes, a multi-threaded software program is generated. The Streams-C language and compiler offer a very high level of expressivity for reconfigurable computing application development, particularly for stream-processing applications. We find this is reflected in productivity, for a factor of up to 10 times improvement in time to produce a program. However, use of the tool in the ``real world'' is predicated on performance: only if such a compiler can deliver performance comparable to hand-coded performance will it be used in practice. This paper presents an application study of the Streams-C compiler. Four applications have been written in Streams-C and compiled to the AMC Wildforce board containing Xilinx 4036's. Those same applications have been hand-coded in a combination of RTL and structural VHDL. We compare performance of the generated code with the hand-optimized code. Our study shows that the compiler-generated designs are 1.37--4 times the area and $1/2$--1 times the clock frequency of the hand designs. We find that the compiler, based on the SUIF infrastructure, can be greatly improved through various standard compiler optimizations that are not currently being exploited. Thus we are currently re-writing a public domain version of Streams-C to better optimize and target the Virtex chip.
Oxidant-Antioxidant Balance in the Blood of Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease After Smoking Cessation

The effect of smoking cessation on the oxidative stress in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was assessed. We recruited 73 smokers with COPD (study group), whose blood was analysed before smoking cessation, after the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd months of abstinence, 35 healthy nonsmokers (Control I), and 35 smokers with COPD (Control II). Blood was taken once in Control I and 4 times (every month) in Control II. In the study group conjugated dienes (CDs) level in plasma and erythrocytes before smoking cessation was 3 and 6.5 times higher than in Control I, respectively (P < 0.001), while thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS) level was 89% (P < 0.001) and 51% higher (P < 0.01), respectively. Superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity was 40% higher (P < 0.05) while glutathione peroxidase (GPx) was 41% lower (P < 0.001) than in Control I. In Control II, the similar differences as compared to Control I were observed throughout the study. Smoking cessation resulted in decrease of CDs, TBARS, and SOD and GPx increase, with no changes in catalase and vitamins A and E. COPD is accompanied by oxidative stress. A three-month tobacco abstinence facilitated restoring the oxidant-antioxidant balance systemically, but it did not affect spirometric parameters.
Bayesian semiparametric regression in the presence of conditionally heteroscedastic measurement and regression errors

We consider the problem of robust estimation of the regression relationship between a response and a covariate based on sample in which precise measurements on the covariate are not available but error‐prone surrogates for the unobserved covariate are available for each sampled unit. Existing methods often make restrictive and unrealistic assumptions about the density of the covariate and the densities of the regression and the measurement errors, for example, normality and, for the latter two, also homoscedasticity and thus independence from the covariate. In this article we describe Bayesian semiparametric methodology based on mixtures of B‐splines and mixtures induced by Dirichlet processes that relaxes these restrictive assumptions. In particular, our models for the aforementioned densities adapt to asymmetry, heavy tails and multimodality. The models for the densities of regression and measurement errors also accommodate conditional heteroscedasticity. In simulation experiments, our method vastly outperforms existing methods. We apply our method to data from nutritional epidemiology.
Intelligent control and decision-making demonstrated on a simple compass-guided robot

The paper presents the architecture and algorithms developed for Dom Dinis, a simple compass-guided robot built by the authors. This includes environment exploration, task planning and task execution. Environment exploration, based on repeating a reactive goal search, enables a progressive construction of a grid based map. Based on the (possibly incomplete) map, the robot is able to plan its tasks. The execution capabilities of the robot include exception handling. Essential to all these capabilities is the knowledge of the robot's position in the world. The position is computed based on tracking traversed distances and followed orientations. Orientation is given by a compass. Dom Dinis does not use wheel encoders at all.
New Tricks for “Old” Domains: How Novel Architectures and Promiscuous Hubs Contributed to the Organization and Evolution of the ECM

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a defining characteristic of metazoans and consists of a meshwork of self-assembling, fibrous proteins, and their functionally related neighbours. Previous studies, focusing on a limited number of gene families, suggest that vertebrate complexity predominantly arose through the duplication and subsequent modification of retained, preexisting ECM genes. These genes provided the structural underpinnings to support a variety of specialized tissues, as well as a platform for the organization of spatio-temporal signaling and cell migration. However, the relative contributions of ancient versus novel domains to ECM evolution have not been quantified across the full range of ECM proteins. Here, utilizing a high quality list comprising 324 ECM genes, we reveal general and clade-specific domain combinations, identifying domains of eukaryotic and metazoan origin recruited into new roles in approximately two-third of the ECM proteins in humans representing novel vertebrate proteins. We show that, rather than acquiring new domains, sampling of new domain combinations has been key to the innovation of paralogous ECM genes during vertebrate evolution. Applying a novel framework for identifying potentially important, noncontiguous, conserved arrangements of domains, we find that the distinct biological characteristics of the ECM have arisen through unique evolutionary processes. These include the preferential recruitment of novel domains to existing architectures and the utilization of high promiscuity domains in organizing the ECM network around a connected array of structural hubs. Our focus on ECM proteins reveals that distinct types of proteins and/or the biological systems in which they operate have influenced the types of evolutionary forces that drive protein innovation. This emphasizes the need for rigorously defined systems to address questions of evolution that focus on specific systems of interacting proteins.
TuLiPA: Towards a Multi-Formalism Parsing Environment for Grammar Engineering

In this paper, we present an open-source parsing environment (Tubingen Linguistic Parsing Architecture, TuLiPA) which uses Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG) as a pivot formalism, thus opening the way to the parsing of several mildly context-sensitive formalisms. This environment currently supports tree-based grammars (namely Tree-Adjoining Grammars (TAG) and Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammars with Tree Tuples (TT-MCTAG)) and allows computation not only of syntactic structures, but also of the corresponding semantic representations. It is used for the development of a tree-based grammar for German.
An Ecosystemic Perspective in the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress and Substance Use Disorders in Veterans

This article reviews the prevalence of co-occurring posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorders (SUDs) in the veteran population. Recommendations regarding how to better understand, engage, and retain veterans with PTSD/SUDs in treatment are presented through an ecological perspective that takes into account the multiple systems and worldviews, including culture, ethnicity, family, and military culture, that are transacting with the individual. A case example illustrates the multifaceted approach that the authors feel is necessary to increase treatment participation and retention with military clients. This article can be useful for both civilian social work clinicians and those working in military or veteran treatment settings.
Small size circularly polarized patch antenna for 2.4 GHz WLAN applications

A very small size 19 mm × 19 mm × 0.4 mm circularly polarized (CP) square ring patch antenna for 2.4 GHz WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) applications is proposed. To excite CP radiation for this square ring patch antenna, a meandered structure loaded with a 100 Ω resistor chip is used as the feeding mechanism of this antenna. Furthermore, an open-ended L-shaped strip is also extended from this meandered feeding structure, so that good CP can be achieved at 2.4 GHz band. The measured 10-dB return loss of the proposed CP antenna was 9.42% (2285–2511 MHz), and its corresponding 3-dB axial bandwidth (AR) was 2.86% (2410–2480 MHz).
Pipelining vs. Multiprocessors – Choosing the Right Network Processor System Topology

Computer networks provide an increasing number of services that require complex processing of packets, for example firewalls, web server load balancing, network storage, and TCP/IP offloading. Such services are typically limited to the network edge, but still require the use of powerful network processors to provide the necessary performance and flexibility. To keep up with these demands, next generation network processors will provide dozens of embedded processor cores. One important question is which system-on-a-chip topology is most suitable for such a highly parallel system. Due to the inherent parallelism in network traffic, the design space for this problem is vast and ranges from pipelined to multiprocessor solutions. In this work, we present a methodology to explore this design space through performance modelling. It is crucial that such a model considers the NP workload in detail as the distribution of processing steps over the system has significant impact on system throughput. We present a mechanism for mapping the workload optimally to an arbitrary topology based on run-time traces. Our performance model determines the system performance and considers the effect of on-chip communication as well as off-chip memory accesses. We present results from several NP applications, show the performance tradeoffs between different system topology, and identify system bottlenecks.
Quantifying the Benefits of New Products: The Case of the Minivan

This paper proposes a technique for obtaining more precise estimates of demand and supply curves when one is constrained to market‐level data. The technique allows one to augment market share data with information relating consumer demographics to the characteristics of the products they purchase. This extra information plays the same role as consumer‐level data, allowing estimated substitution patterns and (thus) welfare to directly reflect demographic‐driven differences in tastes for observed characteristics. I apply the technique to the automobile market, estimating the economic effects of the introduction of the minivan. I show that models estimated without micro data yield much larger welfare numbers than the model using them, primarily because the micro data appear to free the model from a heavy dependence on the idiosyncratic logit “taste” error. I complete the welfare picture by measuring the extent of first‐mover advantage and profit cannibalization both initially by the innovator and later by the imitators. My results support a story in which large improvements in consumers’ standard of living arise from competition as firms cannibalize each other’s profits by seeking new goods that give them some temporary market power.
Is it easier to use a secure mother as a secure base? Attachment Q-sort correlates of the adult attachment interview.

Attachment theory hypothesizes that the quality of the child-mother attachment relationship is greatly influenced by the caregiving environment. The principal caregiver is considered to play a crucial role in affecting the organization of a child's attachment behavior and ultimately of her attachment system (Bowlby, 1969/1982). Current caregiver-child interactions, the history of previous interactions, and the context in which the attachment relationship develops determine the organization of a child's attachment behavior.