Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dietary lipoic acid-dependent changes in the activity and mRNA levels of hepatic lipogenic enzymes in rats

Effects of dietary α-lipoic acid on hepatic and serum lipid concentrations and the activity and mRNA levels of lipogenic enzymes were examined in rats. Rats were fed experimental diets containing varying amounts of lipoic acid (0, 1, 2·5, 5 g/kg) for 21 d. Lipoic acid profoundly decreased serum and liver concentrations of TAG, and also lowered serum concentrations of phospholipid and NEFA, and the concentration of cholesterol in the liver. A hypoglycaemic effect of this compound was also observed. Lipoic acid dose-dependently decreased the activity and mRNA levels of fatty acid synthase, ATP-citrate lyase, glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase, malic enzyme and pyruvate kinase in the liver despite that reductions were considerably attenuated in the NADPH-producing enzymes. This compound also dose-dependently lowered the mRNA levels of spot 14, adiponutrin, stearoyl-CoA desaturase 1, and Δ5- and Δ6-desaturases. In addition, lipoic acid dose-dependently lowered serum concentrations of insulin and leptin, but increased those of adiponectin. Lipoic acid appeared to reduce hepatic lipogenesis and hence decreases serum and liver lipid levels. Alterations in serum concentrations of insulin and (or) adiponectin may trigger this consequence.
Body Weight Estimation for Dose-Finding and Health Monitoring of Lying, Standing and Walking Patients Based on RGB-D Data

This paper describes the estimation of the body weight of a person in front of an RGB-D camera. A survey of different methods for body weight estimation based on depth sensors is given. First, an estimation of people standing in front of a camera is presented. Second, an approach based on a stream of depth images is used to obtain the body weight of a person walking towards a sensor. The algorithm first extracts features from a point cloud and forwards them to an artificial neural network (ANN) to obtain an estimation of body weight. Besides the algorithm for the estimation, this paper further presents an open-access dataset based on measurements from a trauma room in a hospital as well as data from visitors of a public event. In total, the dataset contains 439 measurements. The article illustrates the efficiency of the approach with experiments with persons lying down in a hospital, standing persons, and walking persons. Applicable scenarios for the presented algorithm are body weight-related dosing of emergency patients.
Monaural Speech Separation with Deep Neural Networks

This thesis presents an implementation and performance evaluation of an endto-end system for speech separation from background noise in monaural voice recordings. Separation is achieved by applying a mask to a time-frequency representation of the input signal and through a subsequent reconstruction path for the clean speech signal. The mask is estimated from the noisy input data using deep neural networks which are trained on a synthetic dataset obtained by additive mixing of separate recordings of clean speech and background noises at a tightly-controlled signalto-noise ratio. The expected intelligibility of the reconstructed audio is compared using the automated intelligibility metric STOI. We discover that a fully-connected feed-forward network achieves superior performance at adapting to signal-to-noise ratios not encountered during training when the psychoacoustically motivated smoothed cochleagram features instead of features obtained by weighting a spectrogram in proportion to the magnitude gain of gammatone filters are employed. This result is further improved by having the neural network adapt the finite impulse response of the bandpass filters during training when using the raw waveform as model input. Hiermit versichere ich, dass ich die vorliegende Diplomarbeit selbst und ohne fremde Hilfe implementiert und verfasst habe. Sämtliche verwendeten Quellen und Hilfsmittel sind im Literaturverzeichnis angegeben. Textstellen, die fremden Werken wörtlich oder sinngemäß entnommen wurden, sind entsprechend kenntlich gemacht. Karlsruhe, den 25. September 2017
Liability dollarization and the bank channel

Banks in developing economies often face a mismatch in the currency denomination of their liabilities (foreign currency denominated debt incurred from foreign lenders) and assets (domestic currency loans to domestic borrowers). We study the e ect of this mismatch on business cycles and monetary policy in a sticky price, dynamic general equilibrium model of a dependent economy. We show that a ° xed exchange rate rule that stabilizes the balance sheets of banks o ers greater stability to a developing economy than would an in ation targeting interest rate rule. This result di ers sharply from standard macroeconomic intuition which suggests that in ation targeting ameliorates the destabilizing e ects of sticky prices.
Unexpected Activity of Oral Fosfomycin against Resistant Strains of Escherichia coli in Murine Pyelonephritis

Fosfomycin tromethamine activity is well established for oral treatment of uncomplicated lower urinary tract infections, but little is known about its potential efficacy in pyelonephritis. Ascending pyelonephritis was induced in mice infected with 6 strains of Escherichia coli (fosfomycin MICs, 1 μg/ml to 256 μg/ml). The urine pH was 4.5 before infection and 5.5 to 6.0 during infection. ABSTRACT Fosfomycin tromethamine activity is well established for oral treatment of uncomplicated lower urinary tract infections, but little is known about its potential efficacy in pyelonephritis. Ascending pyelonephritis was induced in mice infected with 6 strains of Escherichia coli (fosfomycin MICs, 1 μg/ml to 256 μg/ml). The urine pH was 4.5 before infection and 5.5 to 6.0 during infection. Animals were treated for 24 h with fosfomycin (100 mg/kg of body weight subcutaneously every 4 h), and the CFU were enumerated in kidneys 24 h after the last fosfomycin injection. Peak (20.5 μg/ml at 1 h) and trough (3.5 μg/ml at 4 h) levels in plasma were comparable to those obtained in humans after an oral dose of 3 g. Fosfomycin treatment significantly reduced the bacterial loads in kidneys (3.65 log10 CFU/g [range, 1.83 to 7.03 log10 CFU/g] and 1.88 log10 CFU/g [range, 1.78 to 5.74 log10 CFU/g] in start-of-treatment control mice and treated mice, respectively; P < 10−6). However, this effect was not found to differ across the 6 study strains (P = 0.71) or between the 3 susceptible and the 3 resistant strains (P = 0.09). Three phenomena may contribute to explain this unexpected in vivo activity: (i) in mice, the fosfomycin kidney/plasma concentration ratio increased from 1 to 7.8 (95% confidence interval, 5.2, 10.4) within 24 h in vitro when the pH decreased to 5, (ii) the fosfomycin MICs for the 3 resistant strains (64 to 256 μg/ml) decreased into the susceptible range (16 to 32 μg/ml), and (iii) maximal growth rates significantly decreased for all strains and were the lowest in urine. These results suggest that local fosfomycin concentrations and physiological conditions may favor fosfomycin activity in pyelonephritis, even against resistant strains.
Financial stress and sovereign debt composition

ABSTRACT Using a panel of 13 advanced economies for the period 1980–2012, we find that periods of impaired financial intermediation mainly accrue to maturity mismatches in sovereign debt. Thus, a higher (lower) share of short-term (medium and long-term) debt leads to an increase in the financial stress index. From a policy perspective, our work suggests that debt management policies translated into longer average maturities of sovereign debt not only reduce the expected debt servicing cost, but also mitigate strains in the financial sector.
An anatomical and mechanical analysis of the douc monkey (genus Pygathrix), and its role in understanding the evolution of brachiation.

OBJECTIVES Pygathrix is an understudied Asian colobine unusual among the Old World monkeys for its use of arm-swinging. Little data exists on the anatomy and mechanics of brachiation in this genus. Here, we consider this colobine to gain insight into the parallel evolution of suspensory behavior in primates. MATERIALS AND METHODS This study compares axial and appendicular morphological variables of Pygathrix with other Asian colobines. Additionally, to assess the functional consequences of Pygathrix limb anatomy, kinematic and kinetic data during arm-swinging are included to compare the douc monkey to other suspensory primates (Ateles and Hylobates). RESULTS Compared to more pronograde species, Pygathrix and Nasalis share morphology consistent with suspensory locomotion such as its narrower scapulae and elongated clavicles. More distally, Pygathrix displays a gracile humerus, radius, and ulna, and shorter olecranon process. During suspensory locomotion, Pygathrix, Ateles, and Hylobates all display mechanical convergence in limb loading and movements of the shoulder and elbow, but Pygathrix uses pronated wrist postures that include substantial radial deviation during arm-swinging. DISCUSSION The adoption of arm-swinging represents a major shift within at least three anthropoid clades and little data exist about its transition. Across species, few mechanical differences are observed during arm-swinging. Apparently, there are limited functional solutions to the challenges associated with moving bimanually below branches, especially in more proximal forelimb regions. Morphological data support this idea that the Pygathrix distal forelimb differs from apes more than its proximal end. These results can inform other studies of ape evolution, the pronograde to orthograde transition, and the convergent ways in which suspensory locomotion evolved in primates.
Improving Pitch Class Profile for Musical Chords Recognition Combining Major Chord Filters and Convolution Neural Networks

In this paper, we consider the challenging problem of music recognition and present an effective deep learning based method using a convolution neural network for chord recognition. It has known that a pitch class profile (PCP) is the commonly signal representation of musical harmonic analysis. However, the PCP vector is not expressive enough for chord recognition, which often occurs in many real-world environments. In this study, we extend the PCP vector scheme to address the limitation. Our proposed method basically consists of two major steps. First, we introduce novel filters and apply then to PCP vector to transform the vector into membership of 7 major chords as features to represent the input matrix. The second step is to efficiently learning feature on the transformed matrix (2D-PCP) using convolution neural network. We propose a trainable, data-driven approach that automatically learns features and its classifier simultaneously. Experimental results conducted on the task of musical chords recognition that the proposed method achieves improvements of classification accuracy more than 40% in accuracy in comparing with based line methods.
PAD-Net: Multi-tasks Guided Prediction-and-Distillation Network for Simultaneous Depth Estimation and Scene Parsing

Depth estimation and scene parsing are two particularly important tasks in visual scene understanding. In this paper we tackle the problem of simultaneous depth estimation and scene parsing in a joint CNN. The task can be typically treated as a deep multi-task learning problem [42]. Different from previous methods directly optimizing multiple tasks given the input training data, this paper proposes a novel multi-task guided prediction-and-distillation network (PAD-Net), which first predicts a set of intermediate auxiliary tasks ranging from low level to high level, and then the predictions from these intermediate auxiliary tasks are utilized as multi-modal input via our proposed multi-modal distillation modules for the final tasks. During the joint learning, the intermediate tasks not only act as supervision for learning more robust deep representations but also provide rich multi-modal information for improving the final tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging datasets (i.e. NYUD-v2 and Cityscapes) for both the depth estimation and scene parsing tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Sequence type 17 Streptococcus agalactiae with unusual ‘ shell-like ’ phenotype was detected with Xpert ® GBS assay

We report the isolation of a Streptococcus agalactiae (group B Streptococcus, GBS) strain showing a previously undescribed morphology. The isolate was collected during antenatal screening for GBS and formed colonies with irregular shapes and edges, along with a rough surface. Hence, we labeled it as ‘shell-like’. Although this strain was not recognized by eye as being GBS, given its unusual features, the Cepheid Xpert® GBS assay (Sunnyvale, US) allowed us to timely provide identification of it as S. agalactiae. The strain possessed the capsular serotype III and belonged to Sequence Type 17, which is the most represented in neonatal invasive infections. Unexpected GBS phenotypes may be responsible for falsely negative antenatal screening results, then for an increased risk for neonate disease and, consequently, newborn mortality.
On Weight-Prioritized Multitask Control of Humanoid Robots

We propose a formal analysis with some theoretical properties of weight-prioritized multitask inverse-dynamics-like control of humanoid robots, being a case of redundant “manipulators” with a nonactuated free-floating base and multiple unilateral frictional contacts with the environment. The controller builds on a weighted-sum scalarization of a multiobjective optimization problem under equality and inequality constraints, which appears as a straightforward solution to account for state and control input viability constraint characteristic of humanoid robots that were usually absent from early existing pseudoinverse and null-space projection-based prioritized multitask approaches. We argue that our formulation is indeed well founded and justified from a theoretical standpoint, and we propose an analysis of some stability properties of the approach. Lyapunov stability is demonstrated for the closed-loop dynamical system that we analytically derive in the unconstrained multiobjective optimization case. Stability in terms of solution existence, uniqueness, continuity, and robustness to perturbations is then formally demonstrated for the constrained quadratic program.
Comprehensive Performance Study of Existing Techniques in Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Tumor Detection

The Magnetic Resonance Imaging techniques has been proved to be a powerful tool in the field of medicine. Detection of the presence of tumor on time is important for treatment planning. Brain Magnetic resonance Imaging is fragmented in four consequent phases applied on captured image namely; Pre-processing, segmentation, feature Extraction, Approximate reasoning and classification. We have studied various techniques in Brain Magnetic resonance imaging for a tumor detection. Now present the analysis of performance of existing techniques in Brain Magnetic resonance imaging for a tumor detection. Our study is presented on the basis of various techniques used in tumor detection and includes the strength and the scope of improvements for each technique. These observations will be highly useful to the researchers putting efforts in the domain of detection of tumor for improving the accuracy rate particularly.
Central Insulin Regulates Heart Rate and Arterial Blood Flow

OBJECTIVE—Central neural insulin regulates glucose homeostasis, but less is known about its cardiovascular effects. Endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS)-derived nitric oxide (NO) represents a molecular link between metabolic and cardiovascular disease. Its role in the central nervous system remains to be determined. We studied the effects of central insulin infusion on femoral arterial blood flow and heart rate in normal chow–fed, high-fat diet–fed diabetic, and eNOS-null mice. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS —We recorded heart rate and femoral blood flow (ultrasonic flow probe) during 3-h central insulin infusion in conscious, freely moving mice. To study the role of NO in this setting, we assessed total and phosphorylated eNOS in the hypothalamus and examined the effects of brain infusion of NO donors/NOS inhibitors on cardiovascular responsiveness to central insulin in these experimental mouse models. RESULTS —In normal mice, central insulin rapidly increased heart rate by 30% and more progressively increased blood flow by 40%. In high-fat diet–fed mice, the cardiovascular effects of insulin were blunted and associated with a 50% reduction of the total and phosphorylated eNOS expression in the hypothalamus, suggesting a causal link. In line with this hypothesis, in eNOS-null mice and central NG-monomethyl-l-arginine–infused normal mice, the cardiovascular effects of insulin were abolished, whereas central NO donor infusion restored these effects in eNOS-null mice. In high-fat diet–fed mice, central NO donor infusion mimicked the cardiovascular responses evoked by central insulin in normal mice. CONCLUSIONS —Central insulin has cardiovascular effects in conscious, freely moving mice that are mediated, at least in part, by central neural eNOS. These effects are impaired in insulin-resistant high-fat diet–fed mice.
Epidemiological Survey on Scorpion Sting Envenomation in South-West, Iran

1. Department of Medical Entomology and Vector Control, Faculty of Health, Ahwaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahwaz, Iran 2. Department, Member of Student Research Committee of Ahwaz, Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahwaz, Iran 3. Department of Agricultural Extension and Education, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran 4. Department of Medical Entomology, Faculty of Public Health and Health Sciences Research Centre, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Sari, Iran Article information Abstract
Compact Modeling of Single Electron Memory Based on Perceptron Designs

In this work, we present a Single electron random access memories based on perceptron designs used as the basic artificial bio-inspired neural processing element. The operation principles are described and illustrated for the first time by simulations results. Combining the Monte Carlo method with a direct solution of the stationary master equation, we use SIMON simulator and MATLAB for training process. The main goal of this work is to build a multilayer neural network used in recognition and classification using single electron devices. We further provide a write/Erase/ Read states chronogram to provide the key element of our work which is the charge stored in output neuron’s quantum dots.
Programmable Caches with a Data Management Language and Policy Engine

Our analysis of the key-value activity generated by the ParSplice molecular dynamics simulation demonstrates the need for more complex cache management strategies. Baseline measurements show clear key access patterns and hot spots that offer significant opportunity for optimization. We use the data management language and policy engine from the Mantle system to dynamically explore a variety of techniques, ranging from basic algorithms and heuristics to statistical models, calculus, and machine learning. While Mantle was originally designed for distributed file systems, we show how the collection of abstractions effectively decomposes the problem into manageable policies for a different application and storage system. Our exploration of this space results in a dynamically sized cache policy that does not sacrifice any performance while using 32-66% less memory than the default ParSplice configuration.
Case Report: The Clinical Application of a Surgical Navigation System forImplant-Prosthetic Rehabilitation of the Patient with Maxillary LateralIncisors Agenesis

Introduction: A precise transfer of planned procedures to a real operative field can be provided by surgical robots. This technology, still unique, is increasingly applied in new medical specialties. The aim of this paper was to describe the clinical application of an active navigation in the dental implant treatment. Case Report: The patient was imaged by CBCT computed tomography Gendex GXCB-500/i-CAT while wearing an individually fitted interfacing acrylic splint. Thereafter, CT data were imported to the Image Guided Implantology System and precise 3-dimensional implant treatment plan was contemplated. This system allows real-time interactive carrying out of implantological procedures with three-dimensional visualization of the anatomical structures during the procedure. Conclusions: The system of active navigation ensures the coordination of prosthetic and surgical treatment which guarantees optimal surgical and prosthetic effect of the therapy, including both anatomical structures and prosthetic requirements.
Does G2677T Polymorphism of the MDR1 Gene Make a Difference in the Therapeutic Response to Paroxetine in Depressed Patients in a Slovakian Population?

Background The role of multidrug resistance 1 gene (MDR1 or ABCB1) polymorphism G2677T was studied in relation to paroxetine therapeutic efficacy and its side effects, as well as its association with selected demographic and clinical characteristics of patients with depressive disorder. Material/Methods To evaluate therapeutic efficacy, all patients (n=61) were rated at week 0, 2, 4, and 6 using the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAMD-21). They were labelled as “responders” (a decrease in HAMD ≥50%) and “nonresponders”. The frequency of the side effects of nausea and sexual dysfunction were assessed using the Utvalg for Kliniske Undersogelser rating scale. The PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism method was used for genotyping. Results A significantly enhanced therapeutic efficacy of paroxetine was observed in patients carrying at least one T allele at week 4 (GG versus GT: 0.049; GG versus GT+TT: 0.035) and week 6 (GG versus TT: 0.001; GG versus GT+TT: 0.016; GG+GT versus TT: 0.003; G versus T: 0.001). On the other hand, carriers of the T allele showed only a nonsignificant increase in HAMD-21 score reduction. In the present study, no significant association between G2677T polymorphism and side effects was detected. However, we found a marginally significant difference between GG and GT genotypes regarding family history of depressive disorder (p=0.049). Conclusions Our study provided evidence for the potential effect of MDR1 G2677T polymorphism on paroxetine therapeutic efficacy, and eventually on depressive disorder family history. Larger multicenter studies and studies across other ethnic groups are needed to elucidate the contradictory implications of G2677T polymorphism with depressive disorder and its treatment.
Leading Change under Pressure: An Examination of Principal Leadership in Low-Performing Schools

Through case studies of 10 elementary schools in Chicago, this article examines principal leadership in low-performing schools. The data include 331 interviews with teachers, administrators, external partners, and others over a 2-year period. Using transformational leadership as a lens, we found that principals in schools that moved off probation in a short period articulated the school vision, provided support and resources to teachers, established collaborative structures and norms, developed commitment to collective goals, and managed the school. Their leadership responses were closely linked to their interpretation of the accountability policy. All the principals centralized decision making. Our study suggests that districts should carefully assign to these schools leaders with appropriate knowledge and skills and reassign ineffective principals given the critical role that principals play in bringing about improvement under pressure.