Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Repeated Administrations of Cardiac Progenitor Cells Are Superior to a Single Administration of an Equivalent Cumulative Dose

Background We have recently found that 3 repeated doses (12×106 each) of c‐kitPOS cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs) were markedly more effective than a single dose of 12×106 cells in alleviating postinfarction left ventricular dysfunction and remodeling. However, since the single‐dose group received only one third of the total number of CPCs given to the multiple‐dose group, it is unknown whether the superior therapeutic efficacy was caused by repeated treatments per se or by administration of a higher total number of CPCs. This issue has major clinical implications because multiple cell injections in patients pose significant challenges, which would be obviated by using 1 large injection. Accordingly, we determined whether the beneficial effects of 3 repeated CPC doses can be recapitulated by 1 large dose containing the same total number of cells. Methods and Results Rats with a 30‐day‐old myocardial infarction received 3 echo‐guided intraventricular infusions, 35 days apart, of vehicle‐vehicle‐vehicle, 36×106 CPCs‐vehicle‐vehicle, or 3 equal doses of 12×106 CPCs. Infusion of a single, large dose of CPCs (36×106 cells) produced an initial improvement in left ventricular function, but no further improvement was observed after the second and third infusions (both vehicle). In contrast, each of the 3 doses of CPCs (12×106) caused a progressive improvement in left ventricular function, the cumulative magnitude of which was greater than with a single dose. Unlike the single dose, repeated doses reduced collagen content and immune cell infiltration. Conclusions Three repeated doses of CPCs are superior to 1 dose even though the total number of cells infused is the same, possibly because of greater antifibrotic and anti‐inflammatory actions.
Jointly Learning Multiple Measures of Similarities from Triplet Comparisons

Similarity between objects is multi-faceted and it can be easier for human annotators to measure it when the focus is on a specific aspect. We consider the problem of mapping objects into view-specific embeddings where the distance between them is consistent with the similarity comparisons of the form "from the t-th view, object A is more similar to B than to C". Our framework jointly learns view-specific embeddings exploiting correlations between views. Experiments on a number of datasets, including one of multi-view crowdsourced comparison on bird images, show the proposed method achieves lower triplet generalization error when compared to both learning embeddings independently for each view and all views pooled into one view. Our method can also be used to learn multiple measures of similarity over input features taking class labels into account and compares favorably to existing approaches for multi-task metric learning on the ISOLET dataset.
Ultrasonic propagation characteristics for remnant icing detection

In the snowing and icing winter days, the aircraft must be implemented wing deicing process before takeoff to ensure flight safety. However, remnant ice that caused by incomplete deicing or secondary frozen is hidden trouble, causing aircraft disasters. In this article, ultrasonic nondestructive testing method is proposed. Normally, composites are anisotropic and heterogeneous, make ultrasound beam scattering. To understand the wave propagation behavior and utilize the full mechanical performances of the aircraft composite, a model based estimation method of ultrasonic echoes is developed. Firstly, ultrasonic wave propagation is studied and the ultrasonic finite element model of the composites is established. Then, the characteristics of the ultrasonic wave propagating in the homogeneous anisotropic medium were studied. And then, the characteristics of the ultrasonic propagating in the solid medium are analyzed in the terms of the material properties, to lay a solid foundation for the research of the multilayer composites in the future. The proposed method can help furthermore predict and characterize the flaw echoes accurately.
Influence of Spraying Process on Microstructure and Thermo-physical Property of Zirconia Coatings Fabricated by Plasma Spraying

Zirconia coatings were fabricated by atmospheric plasma spraying technique (APS). The microstructure was observed by SEM,and some thermo-physical properties were evaluated. The particle flying characteristics during plasma spraying process were measured by using SprayWatch-2i,and their influence on the microstructure and property of the deposited coatings were investigated. The results show that the coatings deposited under higher power have denser structure and lower porosity. Higher porosity coatings can be achieved under relatively lower spray power, which resulted in lower thermal diffusivity and thermal conductivity.
Ventral pallidal encoding of reward-seeking behavior depends on the underlying associative structure

Despite its being historically conceptualized as a motor expression site, emerging evidence suggests the ventral pallidum (VP) plays a more active role in integrating information to generate motivation. Here, we investigated whether rat VP cue responses would encode and contribute similarly to the vigor of reward-seeking behaviors trained under Pavlovian versus instrumental contingencies, when these behavioral responses consist of superficially similar locomotor response patterns but may reflect distinct underlying decision-making processes. We find that cue-elicited activity in many VP neurons predicts the latency of instrumental reward seeking, but not of Pavlovian response latency. Further, disruption of VP signaling increases the latency of instrumental but not Pavlovian reward seeking. This suggests that VP encoding of and contributions to response vigor are specific to the ability of incentive cues to invigorate reward-seeking behaviors upon which reward delivery is contingent.
DISPLACEMENTS AND STRESSES IN AN ANISOTROPIC MEDIUM DUE TO NON-UNIFORM SLIP ALONG A VERY LONG STRIKE-SLIP FAULT

The problem of static deformation of a homogeneous, orthotropic elastic uniform half-space due to non-uniform slip along a vertical strike-slip fault of infinite length and finite width has been studied. Closed-form analytical expressions of displacements and stresses for different slip profiles – parabolic, linear, elliptic, and cubic are obtained. The results obtained here are the generalization of the results for an isotropic medium (Singh et al., 1994) in the sense that medium of the present work is orthotropic which is more realistic than isotropic and results for an isotropic case can be derived from our results. The variations of the horizontal displacements and stresses with distance from the fault due to various slipprofiles at the surface have been studied to examine the effect of anisotropy on the deformation. Numerically, it has been found that for parabolic, linear, and elliptic slip profiles, the surface displacements in magnitude for isotropic elastic medium are greater than that for an orthotropic elastic medium while in case of cubic slip, the surface displacements in magnitude for orthotropic elastic medium is greater than that for the isotropic medium.
Differential roles for cryptochromes in the mammalian retinal clock

Cryptochromes 1 and 2 (CRY1/2) are key components of the negative limb of the mammalian circadian clock. Like many peripheral tissues, Cry1 and ‐2 are expressed in the retina, where they are thought to play a role in regulating rhythmic physiology. However, studies differ in consensus as to their localization and function, and CRY1 immunostaining has not been convincingly demonstrated in the retina. Here we describe the expression and function of CRY1 and ‐2 in the mouse retina in both sexes. Unexpectedly, we show that CRY1 is expressed throughout all retinal layers, whereas CRY2 is restricted to the photoreceptor layer. Retinal period 2::luciferase recordings from CRY1‐deficient mice show reduced clock robustness and stability, while those from CRY2‐deficient mice show normal, albeit long‐period, rhythms. In functional studies, we then investigated well‐defined rhythms in retinal physiology. Rhythms in the photopic electroretinogram, contrast sensitivity, and pupillary light response were all severely attenuated or abolished in CRY1‐deficient mice. In contrast, these physiological rhythms are largely unaffected in mice lacking CRY2, and only photopic electroretinogram rhythms are affected. Together, our data suggest that CRY1 is an essential component of the mammalian retinal clock, whereas CRY2 has a more limited role. —Wong, J.C. Y. , Smyllie, N. J., Banks, G. T. , Pothecary, C. A. , Barnard, A. R. , Maywood, E. S. , Jagannath, A. , Hughes, S. , van der Horst, G. T. J., MacLaren, R. E. , Hankins, M. W. , Hastings, M. H. , Nolan, P. M. , Foster, R. G. , Peirson, S. N. Differential roles for cryptochromes in the mammalian retinal clock. FASEB J. 32, 4302–4314 (2018). www.fasebj. org
Pandora's box: Photovoltaic energy and economic crisis in Greece

The Greek photovoltaic program was launched in 2006 and rebranded in 2011 as a way to repay debt and decrease national deficit. The scheme promotes new livelihood opportunities on all levels, from micro-scale home installations to macro-scale solar parks producing energy for international export. Offering potential economic stability to a nation at the fore of global neoliberal crisis, solar energy also presents an alternative to petroleum and lignite that currently dominate the energy sector. However, there are many hesitations and conflicting rhetorics surrounding the photovoltaic drive. Its success or failure as a sustainable economic pathway lies as much in understanding local nuances of social relations and historical consciousness as in governmental policy. This paper presents the findings from preliminary research that aims to “scale” all levels of the Greek photovoltaic experience and raises questions of energy policy, neoliberal rationale, and the relationship between local and global socioeconomic systems. It considers the everyday cultural complexities of implementing energy policy and assesses the contribution of an ethnographic approach to interdisciplinary energy research.
Suicide in Hong Kong: a case-control psychological autopsy study

Background. The relative contribution of psychosocial and clinical risk factors to suicide among Chinese populations is an important issue. In Hong Kong, this issue requires vigorous examination in light of a 50% increase in suicide rate between 1997 and 2003. Method. Using a case-control psychological autopsy method, 150 suicide deceased were compared with 150 living controls matched by age and gender. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the next-of-kin of the subjects. Data were collected on a wide range of potential risk and protective factors, including demographic, life event, clinical and psychological variables. The relative contribution of these factors towards suicide was examined in a multiple logistic regression model. Results. Six factors were found to significantly and independently contribute to suicide: unemployment, indebtedness, being single, social support, psychiatric illness, and history of past attempts. Conclusions. Both psychosocial and clinical factors are important in suicides in Hong Kong. They seem to have mediated suicide risk independently. In addition, socio-economic adversities seem to have played a relatively important role in the increasing suicide rate in Hong Kong.
Kinesins relocalize the chromosomal passenger complex to the midzone for spindle disassembly

Mitotic spindle disassembly after chromosome separation is as important as spindle assembly, yet the molecular mechanisms for spindle disassembly are unclear. In this study, we investigated how the chromosomal passenger complex (CPC), which contains the Aurora B kinase Ipl1, swiftly concentrates at the spindle midzone in late anaphase, and we researched the role of this dramatic relocalization during spindle disassembly. We showed that the kinesins Kip1 and Kip3 are essential for CPC relocalization. In cells lacking Kip1 and Kip3, spindle disassembly is severely delayed until after contraction of the cytokinetic ring. Purified Kip1 and Kip3 interact directly with the CPC and recruit it to microtubules in vitro, and single-molecule experiments showed that the CPC diffuses dynamically on microtubules but that diffusion stops when the CPC encounters a Kip1 molecule. We propose that Kip1 and Kip3 trap the CPC at the spindle midzone in late anaphase to ensure timely spindle disassembly.
Trophic Hierarchies Illuminated via Amino Acid Isotopic Analysis

Food web ecologists have long sought to characterize the trophic niches of animals using stable isotopic analysis. However, distilling trophic position from isotopic composition has been difficult, largely because of the variability associated with trophic discrimination factors (inter-trophic isotopic fractionation and routing). We circumvented much of this variability using compound-specific isotopic analysis (CSIA). We examined the 15N signatures of amino acids extracted from organisms reared in pure culture at four discrete trophic levels, across two model communities. We calculated the degree of enrichment at each trophic level and found there was a consistent trophic discrimination factor (~7.6‰). The constancy of the CSIA-derived discrimination factor permitted unprecedented accuracy in the measurement of animal trophic position. Conversely, trophic position estimates generated via bulk-15N analysis significantly underestimated trophic position, particularly among higher-order consumers. We then examined the trophic hierarchy of a free-roaming arthropod community, revealing the highest trophic position (5.07) and longest food chain ever reported using CSIA. High accuracy in trophic position estimation brings trophic function into sharper focus, providing greater resolution to the analysis of food webs.
Handbook of Polymers for Pharmaceutical Technologies

Both natural and man-made polymers are widely utilized as tablet binders and filler-binders. The physicochemical and mechanical properties such as particle size, shape and deformation behavior of polymeric binders are key in their effective use. Many such binders are applied as solution in a wet granulation process, which facilitate its facile distribution leading to improved effectiveness as a binder. Direct compression and dry granulation are recognized as routes with reduced process complexity and cost. These processes require a binder to be employed in a dry form and it can be more difficult to obtain a homogeneous distribution of a dry binder in a powder formulation. Therefore, these binders are required in high proportions to generate mechanically strong tablets. At lower proportions, they often are insufficient to create mechanically strong tablets. Recently, innovations in the generation of co-processed excipients have been proposed. Co-processing is a popular means of improving excipient functionalities, where two or more existing excipients are combined by some suitable means to generate new structures with improved and often combined functionalities as compared to the component excipients. Particle size reduction is known to improve the binder properties of an excipient, but also makes it highly cohesive and hard to blend. Via particle engineering, surface structure of smaller particles can be tailored to optimize the cohesive-adhesive balance (CAB) of the powder, allowing formation of interactive mixtures. This chapter reviews recent efforts to engineer surface-modified polymeric micro-excipient structures with the inherent ability to not only form an interactive mixture efficiently and provide flow enhancement, but also to create harder tablets at lower proportions. Hence, this approach represents a potential novel multifunctional prototype polymeric micro-excipient for direct compression and dry granulation processes.
Manifold preserving edit propagation

We propose a novel edit propagation algorithm for interactive image and video manipulations. Our approach uses the locally linear embedding (LLE) to represent each pixel as a linear combination of its neighbors in a feature space. While previous methods require similar pixels to have similar results, we seek to maintain the manifold structure formed by all pixels in the feature space. Specifically, we require each pixel to be the same linear combination of its neighbors in the result. Compared with previous methods, our proposed algorithm is more robust to color blending in the input data. Furthermore, since every pixel is only related to a few nearest neighbors, our algorithm easily achieves good runtime efficiency. We demonstrate our manifold preserving edit propagation on various applications.
What Catches the Eye? Visualizing and Understanding Deep Saliency Models

Deep convolutional neural networks have demonstrated high performances for fixation prediction in recent years. How they achieve this, however, is less explored and they remain to be black box models. Here, we attempt to shed light on the internal structure of deep saliency models and study what features they extract for fixation prediction. Specifically, we use a simple yet powerful architecture, consisting of only one CNN and a single resolution input, combined with a new loss function for pixel-wise fixation prediction during free viewing of natural scenes. We show that our simple method is on par or better than state-of-the-art complicated saliency models. Furthermore, we propose a method, related to saliency model evaluation metrics, to visualize deep models for fixation prediction. Our method reveals the inner representations of deep models for fixation prediction and provides evidence that saliency, as experienced by humans, is likely to involve high-level semantic knowledge in addition to low-level perceptual cues. Our results can be useful to measure the gap between current saliency models and the human inter-observer model and to build new models to close this gap.
Synthesis and magnetic properties of monodisperse Fe 3 O 4 nanoparticles

We report the high temperature reaction of iron acetylacetonate in phenyl ether in the presence of oleic acid and oleylamine that was used to synthesize monodisperse Fe3O4 nanoparticles. X-ray diffraction profile and high-angle annular dark-field images give evidence of self-assembled arrays with nanoparticle size of 4 nm. Magnetization versus temperature in the temperature range 2.5‐160 K was measured in zero-field-cooled and field-cooled experiments and a blocking temperatureT b 520 K was obtained. Above T b the nanoparticles show superparamagnetic behavior and the magnetization versus field for various temperature follows the Langevin function. M-H curves below Tb indicate the ferromagnetic behavior with Hc560‐ 400 Oe for temperature T52.5‐ 18.5 K. © 2004 American Institute of Physics. @DOI: 10.1063/1.1682783#
On the Moreau-Yosida Regularization of the Vector k-Norm Related Functions

Matrix optimization problems (MOPs) involving the Ky Fan $k$-norm arise frequently from many applications. In order to design algorithms to solve large scale MOPs involving the Ky Fan $k$-norm, we need to understand the first and second order properties of the Moreau--Yosida regularization of the Ky Fan $k$-norm function and the indicator function of the Ky Fan $k$-norm ball. According to the general theory on spectral functions, in this paper we shall conduct a thorough study on the Moreau--Yosida regularization of the vector $k$-norm function and the indicator function of the vector $k$-norm ball. In particular, we show that the proximal mappings associated with these two vector $k$-norm related functions both admit fast and analytically computable solutions. Moreover, we propose algorithms of low computational cost to compute the directional derivatives of these two proximal mappings and then completely characterize their Frechet differentiability. The work here thus builds the fundamental tools needed.
EFFECT OF TEN DAYS HIGH-INTENSITY TRAINING ON DNA DAMAGE

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of ten days high-intensity training on human PBMC DNA damage. 20 subjects were randomly assigned into two groups (n=10). The intervention group was performing daily cycle training for ten days, while the control group did not exercise at all. Blood samples were analysed the day before training starts in the morning after the last session and after four days of recovery. Daily training was quantified using the TRIMP the RPE scale and lactate concentration. Also the differences in the overall well-being was measured using the MDBF Two-way ANOVA showed no significant differences between the groups in DNA damage. Results have shown that the stress, initiated by the training was not represented in the PBMC.
A goodness-of-fit test for structural nested mean models

Abstract Coarse structural nested mean models are tools for estimating treatment effects from longitudinal observational data with time-dependent confounding. There is, however, no guidance on how to specify the treatment effect model, and model misspecification can lead to bias. We derive a goodness-of-fit test based on modified over-identification restrictions tests for evaluating a treatment effect model, and show that our test is doubly robust in the sense that, with a correct treatment effect model, the test has the correct Type I error if either the treatment initiation model or a nuisance regression outcome model is correctly specified. In a simulation study, we show that the test has correct Type I error and can detect model misspecification. We use the test to study how the timing of antiretroviral treatment initiation after HIV infection predicts the effect of one year of treatment in HIV-positive patients with acute and early infection.
Minimizing the reconfiguration overhead in content-based publish-subscribe

The publish-subscribe model provides strong decoupling among the components of a distributed application. This makes it amenable to highly dynamic environments. Nevertheless, publish-subscribe systems exploiting a distributed event dispatcher are typically not able to rearrange dynamically their operations to adapt to changes which impact the topology of the dispatching infrastructure. This paper presents a description and analysis of a novel algorithm to deal with this kind of reconfiguration. The strength of this algorithm is its ability to minimize the portion of the system affected by the reconfiguration by exploiting a novel concept we refer to as the reconfiguration path. Simulations compare our approach with two others and show a significant reduction (up to 76%) in the overhead caused by reconfiguration.
Reliable estimation of a neural network's domain of validity through interval analysis based inversion

Reliable estimation of a neural network's domain of validity is important for a number of reasons such as assessing its ability to cope with a given problem, evaluating the consistency of its generalization etc. In this paper we introduce a new approach to estimate the domain of validity of a neural network based on Set Inversion Via Interval Analysis (SIVIA), the methodology established by Jaulin and Walter [1]. This approach was originally introduced in order to solve nonlinear parameter estimation problems in a bounded error context and proved to be effective in tackling several types of problems dealing with nonlinear systems analysis. The dependence of a neural network output on the pattern data is a nonlinear function and hence derivation of the impact of the input data to the neural network function can be addressed as a nonlinear parameter estimation problem that can be tackled by SIVIA. We present concrete application examples and show how the proposed method allows to delimit the domain of validity of a trained neural network. We discuss advantages, pitfalls and potential improvements offered to neural networks.