Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Asymmetrical Molecular Junctions with different Alligator Clips

This paper describes different molecular junctions with different alligator clips connected to gold electrodes at nanometre-scale. Our objective was to determine the charge transport characteristics of these junctions and determine the optimum alligator clip pair. We scrutinised anthracenedithiol (ADT), anthracenediamine (ADA) and anthracenethiolamine (ATA) and computed their conductance parameters through our simulations via Semi Emperical Extended Huckel Theory Approach. We aimed at finding that whether symmetrical (same alligator clips at each side) or asymmetrical (different alligator clips at each side) is the optimised approach to connect the anthracene molecule with gold electrodes and found that different alligator clips i.e. thiol and amine exhibited more conduction than that of same clip pair i.e. ADT and ADA. We further examined the effect of changing alligator clips positions from para to meta and found varied quantum interference effects. Peak to valley current ratios (PVR) for ADT was found to be maximum as 7.05 whereas meta ATA exhibited lowest peak to valley current ratio of 1.44. 
Smoke Propagation in an Inclined Semi-Circular Long Tunnel

This work used FDS to simulate tunnel fires occur in a semi-circular longitudinally ventilated tunnel. By varying the parameters such as the tunnel gradient, the fire size, and the ventilation velocity, their influence on the backlayering effect and downstream propagation rate can be recognized. Under weak ventilation, the backlayering effect either advances or vanishes depending on the slope of the tunnel. Under stronger ventilation, the backlayering effect would break up. The temperature distributions may become less and less dependent on the tunnel gradient when the ventilation velocity is increased. Although the hot gases and smoke in uphill tunnels propagate faster than those in downhill tunnels, their difference reduces with ventilation velocity.
IRIS: Integrate. Relate. Infer. Share

In this paper we introduce a new semantic desktop system called IRIS, an application framework for enabling users to create a -personal map" across their office-related information objects. Built as part of the CALO Cognitive Assistant project, IRIS represents a step in our quest to construct the kinds of tools that will significantly augment the user's ability to perform knowledge work. This paper explains our design decisions, progress, and shortcomings. The IRIS project has grown from the past work of others and offers opportunities to augment and otherwise collaborate with other current and future semantic desktop projects. This paper marks our entry into the ongoing conversation about semantic desktops, intelligent knowledge management, and systems for augmenting the performance of human teams.
Notice of RetractionThe design of traffic lights fuzzy controller based on PLC

This traffic lights with fuzzy controller is designed based on PLC, assigned the traffic character of cross, fuzzy handled the traffic, apply the merit of PLC enough, according to traffic control standard. This controller can decrease the delay time of a vehicle through a cross, increase the ability of vehicle, display the traffic and the rate of break rules and regulations in the terminal, made it possible to adapt control for traffic signal and intelligent management.
Object-based stereo up-mixer for wave field synthesis based on spatial information clustering

To build an acoustic system that can maintain the localization of sound images included in stereo mixed signals, we propose a new object-based up-mixer that performs sound source separation and sound location estimation. First, in a preliminary experiment, we show the effectiveness of sound location estimation using the proposed up-mixer via objective tests. Next, we evaluate the perception accuracy of sound localization by wave field synthesis using the proposed up-mixer via subjective tests. The results show that the proposed up-mixer provides a good localization of sound images included in stereo mixed signals at several listening positions.
Use of endoscopy for management of acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding in the UK: results of a nationwide audit

Objectives To examine the use of endoscopy in the UK for acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding (AUGIB) and compare with published standards. To assess the organisation of endoscopy services for AUGIB in the UK. To examine the relationship between outcomes and out of hours (OOH) service provision. Design Multi-centre cross sectional clinical audit. Setting All UK hospitals accepting admissions with AUGIB. Patients All adults (≥16 yrs) presenting with AUGIB between 1st May and 30th June 2007. Data Collection A custom designed web-based reporting tool was used to collect data on patient characteristics, comorbidity and haemodynamic status at presentation to calculate the Rockall score, use and timing of endoscopy, treatment including endoscopic, rebleeding and in-hospital mortality. A mailed questionnaire was used to collect data on facilities and service organisation. Results Data on 6750 patients (median age 68 years) were analysed from 208 hospitals. 74% underwent inpatient endoscopy; of these 50% took place within 24 h of presentation, 82% during normal working hours and 3% between midnight and 8 am. Of patients deemed high-risk (pre-endoscopy Rockall score ≥5) only 55% were endoscoped within 24 h and 14% waited ≥72 h for endoscopy. Lesions with a high risk of rebleeding were present in 28% of patients of whom 74% received endoscopic therapy. Further bleeding was evident in 13% and mortality in those endoscoped was 7.4% (95% CI 6.7% to 8.1%). In 52% of hospitals a consultant led out of hours (OOH) endoscopy rota existed; in these hospitals 20% of first endoscopies were performed OOH compared with 13% in those with no OOH rota and endoscopic therapy was more likely to be administered (25% vs 21% in hospitals with no OOH rota). The risk adjusted mortality ratio was higher (1.21, p=0.10, (95%CI 0.96 to 1.51)) in hospitals without such rotas. Conclusions This audit has found continuing delays in performing endoscopy after AUGIB and underutilisation of standard endoscopic therapy particularly for variceal bleeding. In hospitals with a formal OOH endoscopy rota patients received earlier endoscopy, were more likely to receive endoscopic therapy and may have a lower mortality.
Shape retention in porcine and rabbit nasal septal cartilage using saline bath immersion and Nd:YAG laser irradiation

The process of altering the shape of cartilage using heat has been referred to as thermoforming, and presents certain clinical benefits in reconstructive surgical procedures within the head and neck. Thermoforming allows cartilage in the upper airway and face to be reshaped without the use of classic surgical maneuvers such as carving, morselizing, or suturing. The goal of this study was to determine the dependence of cartilage shape change on both temperature and laser dosimetry using two thermoforming methods: saline bath immersion and laser irradiation.
Daily electronic self-monitoring of subjective and objective symptoms in bipolar disorder—the MONARCA trial protocol (MONitoring, treAtment and pRediCtion of bipolAr disorder episodes): a randomised controlled single-blind trial

Introduction Electronic self-monitoring of affective symptoms using cell phones is suggested as a practical and inexpensive way to monitor illness activity and identify early signs of affective symptoms. It has never been tested in a randomised clinical trial whether electronic self-monitoring improves outcomes in bipolar disorder. We are conducting a trial testing the effect of using a Smartphone for self-monitoring in bipolar disorder. Methods We developed the MONARCA application for Android-based Smartphones, allowing patients suffering from bipolar disorder to do daily self-monitoring—including an interactive feedback loop between patients and clinicians through a web-based interface. The effect of the application was tested in a parallel-group, single-blind randomised controlled trial so far including 78 patients suffering from bipolar disorder in the age group 18–60 years who were given the use of a Smartphone with the MONARCA application (intervention group) or to the use of a cell phone without the application (placebo group) during a 6-month study period. The study was carried out from September 2011. The outcomes were changes in affective symptoms (primary), social functioning, perceived stress, self-rated depressive and manic symptoms, quality of life, adherence to medication, stress and cognitive functioning (secondary and tertiary). Analysis Recruitment is ongoing. Ethics Ethical permission has been obtained. Dissemination Positive, neutral and negative findings of the study will be published. Registration details The trial is approved by the Regional Ethics Committee in The Capital Region of Denmark (H-2-2011-056) and The Danish Data Protection Agency (2013-41-1710). The trial is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT01446406.
Memory bandwidth reduction in video coding systems through context adaptive lossless reference frame compression

This paper presents the Reference Frame Context Adaptive Variable-Length Compressor (RFCAVLC) for video coding systems. RFCAVLC aims to reduce the external memory bandwidth required to carry out this process. Six experiments were performed, all based on adaptations of the Huffman algorithm, and the best experiment achieved an average compression rate of more than 24% without any loss in quality for all targeted resolutions. This result is similar to the best solutions proposed in the literature, but it is the only one without losses in this process. The presented RFCAVLC splits the reference frames in 4×4 blocks and compresses these blocks using one of four static code tables in a context-adaptive way. An architecture that implements the encoder of the RFCAVLC solution was described in VHDL and synthesized to an Altera Stratix IV FPGA. The synthesis results achieved by the designed architecture indicate that this solution can be easily coupled to a complete video encoder system with negligible hardware overhead and without compromising throughput.
3D facial geometry recovery via group-wise optical flow

We describe an algorithm for automatically finding correspondences from face video sequences. This method is useful to many applications such as face tracking, face modeling and 3D face recovery. Given a sequence of images, the face feature points are tracked by a model-constraint optical flow algorithm. By employing a minimum description length (MDL) point-refinement framework, the drift-off error caused by the optical flow algorithm can be reduced and the correspondences can be matched robustly by optimizing the statistical model. As a result, the face is able to be tracked precisely. Furthermore, it offers a new method of building an appearance model automatically. The objective root mean square error (RMSE) is used to prove the efficiency of the algorithm. At the same time, the performance is evaluated subjectively by generating 3D face models based upon it.
Machine Translation Experiments on PADIC: A Parallel Arabic DIalect Corpus

We present in this paper PADIC, a Parallel Arabic DIalect Corpus we built from scratch, then we conducted experiments on crossdialect Arabic machine translation. PADIC is composed of dialects from both the Maghreb and the Middle-East. Each dialect has been aligned with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Three dialects from Maghreb are concerned by this study: two from Algeria, one from Tunisia, and two dialects from the MiddleEast (Syria and Palestine). PADIC has been built from scratch because the lack of dialect resources. In fact, Arabic dialects in Arab world in general are used in daily life conversations but they are not written. At the best of our knowledge, PADIC, up to now, is the largest corpus in the community working on dialects and especially those concerning Maghreb. PADIC is composed of 6400 sentences for each of the 5 concerned dialects and MSA. We conducted cross-lingual machine translation experiments between all the language pairs. For translating to MSA we interpolated the corresponding Language Model (LM) with a large Arabic corpus based LM. We also studied the impact of language model smoothing techniques on the results of machine translation because this corpus, even it is the largest one, it still very small in comparison to those used for translation of natural languages.
Evaluation of Antibacterial Activity of Plant Extracts of Euphorbia thymifolia Against Human Pathogenic Bacteria

The present study was aimed at assessing the antimicrobial potential of various extracts of Euphorbia thymifolia against human pathogenic strains of Salmonella typhimurium and Shigella boydii. The antibacterial activity was determined by agar disc diffusion and broth microdilution techniques. The results showed that the growth of the organisms were inhibited by both acetone and hexane extracts of Euphorbia thymifolia. The acetone extracts showed significantly higher zones of inhibition. The minimum inhibitory concentration of the leaf and stem extracts were 0.078, 0.156, 0.312mg/ml. The phytochemical analysis was carried out for the different parts of the plant. The qualitative analysis showed that alkaloids, phenols and flavonoids were present in both acetone and hexane extracts. The result of the present study indicate that Euphorbia thymifolia has many medicinal values and can be widely studied to extract natural compounds which are beneficial to human beings.
Nuclear factor kappaB in proliferation, activation, and apoptosis in rat hepatic stellate cells.

BACKGROUND/AIMS Activation of the transcription factor NFkappaB has been demonstrated in activated hepatic stellate cells (HSCs). We investigated the role of NFkappaB in proliferation, in activation, and in TNFalpha-induced apoptosis of HSCs. METHODS NFkappaB activation was inhibited using an adenovirus expressing an IkappaB dominant negative protein (Ad5IkappaB) in both quiescent and activated HSCs. Quiescent HSCs were infected with Ad5IkappaB or an adenovirus expressing beta-galactosidase (Ad5LacZ). The cells were cultured for 7 days. HSCs activation was determined by cell morphology, smooth muscle alpha-actin (alpha-sma) expression, and steady-state mRNA levels of alpha1(I) collagen as assessed by Western blot and RNase protection assay, respectively. Proliferation was determined in culture-activated HSCs by 3H-thymidine incorporation and direct cell counting. Apoptosis was analyzed by infecting quiescent or activated HSCs with Ad5IkappaB or Ad5LacZ, and then treating with TNFalpha. Apoptosis was demonstrated by determining cell number, assessing nuclear morphology, TUNEL assay and caspase 3 activity. RESULTS After 7 days in culture no differences were noted between the Ad5IkappaB- and the Ad5LacZ-infected cells in the morphology, alpha-sma expression or in alpha1(I) collagen mRNA levels. Ad5IkappaB infection did not modify proliferation in activated HSCs. TNFalpha induced apoptosis only in Ad5IkappaB-infected activated, but not quiescent HSCs. Apoptosis was initially demonstrated 12 h after exposure to TNFalpha. Twenty-four h after the TNFalpha treatment, 60% of the activated HSCs were apoptotic. CONCLUSION NFkappaB activity is not required for proliferation or activation of HSCs; however, NFkappaB protects activated HSCs against TNFalpha-induced apoptosis.
Antibodies to rat pancreas Golgi subfractions: identification of a 58- kD cis-Golgi protein

A 58-kD cis-Golgi protein has been identified by generating polyclonal antibodies against heavy (cis) Golgi subfractions. Total microsomes isolated from rat pancreatic homogenates were subfractionated to yield a rough microsomal fraction (B1) and three smooth membrane subfractions (B2-B4) enriched in cis-, middle, and trans-Golgi elements, respectively. The heavy (cis) subfraction, B2 (d = 1.17 g/ml), was fractionated by Triton X-114 phase separation, and the proteins recovered in the detergent phase were used to immunize rabbits. One of the anti-B2 antibodies obtained gave a "Golgi"-staining pattern when screened by immunofluorescence on normal rat kidney cells and mouse RPC 5.4 myeloma cells. In rat pancreatic exocrine cells the antibody reacted with the plasmalemma as well as elements in the Golgi region. By immunoelectron microscopy, the antigen recognized by anti-B2 IgG was found to be restricted to cis-Golgi elements in myeloma cells where it was concentrated in the fenestrated cis-most cisterna and in some of the tubules and vesicles located along the cis face of the Golgi complex. By immunoprecipitation and immunoblotting, the anti-B2 IgG exclusively recognized a 58-kD protein in myeloma cells. The anti-B2 IgG reacted with several proteins in solubilized pancreatic B2 membranes, including a 58-kD protein, but affinity-purified anti-58-kD IgG reacted exclusively with the 58-kD protein. These results suggest that the 58-kD protein is a specific component of cis-Golgi membranes.
Isolation and Sequence of ctaA , a Gene Required for Cytochrome aa 3 Biosynthesis and Sporulation in Bacillus subtilis

Cytochrome aa3 is one of two terminal oxidase complexes in the Bacillus subtilis electron transport chain. A novel genetic strategy was devised which permitted the isolation of B. subtilis mutants lacking cytochrome aa3 by selection for streptomycin-resistant clones which failed to oxidize the artificial electron donor N,N,N',N'tetramethyl-p-phenylenediamine. Two mutations were studied intensively. Spectroscopic examination showed that each mutant lacked cytochrome aa3; they were also asporogenous and unable to grow on lactate as the sole carbon and energy source. These mutations were mapped to a locus designated ctaA, located at 127 degrees between pyrD and metC on the B. subtilis chromosome. Both ctaA mutations were closely linked by transformation to the pycA locus. The ctaA locus and a portion of the pycA locus were cloned from a B. subtilis integration library constructed in Escherichia coli. A recombinant plasmid containing a 4.0-kilobase insert of B. subtilis DNA could transform both ctaA mutants to CtaA+. Gene disruption and complementation experiments with subcloned fragments revealed that the ctaA locus consisted of a single transcriptional unit about 1.35 kilobase pairs in size. The nucleotide sequence of the ctaA transcriptional unit contains a single open reading frame capable of coding for a protein with a predicted molecular weight of 34,065. The predicted protein is extremely hydrophobic, with several probable membrane-spanning domains. No sequence similiarity
The role of a non-canonical JAK-STAT pathway in IFN therapy of poxvirus infection and multiple sclerosis

Signaling by cytokines such as the interferons (IFNs) involves Janus kinases (JAKs) and signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) transcription factors. The beauty of the classical model of JAK-STAT signaling is its simplicity in that JAK-activated STATs in the nucleus are responsible for specific gene activation. The fact that many ligands, growth factors, and hormones use the same STAT transcription factors, but exert different functions at the level of the cell, tissue, and organ would suggest significant shortcomings in the classical model. Our studies have resulted in the development of a non-canonical, more complex model of IFN signaling that bears a striking resemblance to that of steroid hormone (SH)/steroid receptor (SR) signaling. Thus, both types I and II IFN signaling involves nuclear translocation of complexed ligand, receptor, activated JAKs, and activated STATs to the promoters of the genes that are specifically activated by the IFNs, where they are involved in specific gene activation and epigenetic remodeling. Receptor intracellular domains play an important role in binding the C-terminus of the IFNs, which is the basis for our development of IFN mimetics. The IFN mimetics are not recognized by poxvirus decoy receptors, since the decoy receptors compete for extracellular binding and not intracellular binding. Further, the type I IFN mimetics provide therapeutic protection against experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE), a model of multiple sclerosis, without the side effects. Extracellular receptor binding by intact IFN is the primary reason for undesirable side effects of flu-like symptoms, bone-marrow suppression, and weight loss. The non-canonical model of IFN signaling thus provides insight into the specificity of such signaling and a mechanism for development of IFN mimetics. It is our contention that this model applies to other cytokines.
Social Class, Social Mobility and Risk of Psychiatric Disorder - A Population-Based Longitudinal Study

Objectives This study explored how adult social class and social mobility between parental and own adult social class is related to psychiatric disorder. Material and Methods In this prospective cohort study, over 1 million employed Swedes born in 1949-1959 were included. Information on parental class (1960) and own mid-life social class (1980 and 1990) was retrieved from the censuses and categorised as High Non-manual, Low Non-manual, High Manual, Low Manual and Self-employed. After identifying adult class, individuals were followed for psychiatric disorder by first admission of schizophrenia, alcoholism and drug dependency, affective psychosis and neurosis or personality disorder (N=24 659) from the Swedish Patient Register. We used Poisson regression analysis to estimate first admission rates of psychiatric disorder per 100 000 person-years and relative risks (RR) by adult social class (treated as a time-varying covariate). The RRs of psychiatric disorder among the Non-manual and Manual classes were also estimated by magnitude of social mobility. Results The rate of psychiatric disorder was significantly higher among individuals belonging to the Low manual class as compared with the High Non-manual class. Compared to High Non-manual class, the risk for psychiatric disorder ranged from 2.07 (Low Manual class) to 1.38 (Low Non-manual class). Parental class had a minor impact on these estimates. Among the Non-manual and Manual classes, downward mobility was associated with increased risk and upward mobility with decreased risk of psychiatric disorder. In addition, downward mobility was inversely associated with the magnitude of social mobility, independent of parental class. Conclusions Independently of parental social class, the risk of psychiatric disorder increases with increased downward social mobility and decreases with increased upward mobility.