Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-Term Effect of an Aqueous Fraxinus excelsior L. Seed Extract in Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats

The effect of long-term intake of different doses (20, 40, and 60 mg/kg/day) of a Fraxinus excelsior L. seed extract (FESE) on spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) was evaluated. Water was used as control and captopril (50 mg/kg/day) was used as positive control. Systolic blood pressure, body weight, and food and liquid intake were registered weekly in SHR. The antioxidant and vascular relaxing properties of FESE were also studied in these animals. The development of hypertension was attenuated in the groups treated with captopril or FESE. The antihypertensive effect was more accentuated in the captopril group than in the FESE groups, and it was paradoxically more accentuated in the groups treated with 20 mg/kg/day or 40 mg/kg/day of FESE than in the group treated with the highest dose of this extract. Body weight gain and food intake increased in the FESE groups. After removing the corresponding antihypertensive treatment, the arterial blood pressure and the body weight of the FESE treated animals returned to control values. In addition, FESE increased plasma antioxidant capacity and decreased plasma and liver malondialdehyde levels. Moreover, acetylcholine relaxation improved in the aorta rings from the FESE treated rats.
Electric Circuit Model for the Aerodynamic Performance Analysis of a Three-Blade Darrieus-Type Vertical Axis Wind Turbine: The Tchakoua Model

The complex and unsteady aerodynamics of vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) pose significant challenges for simulation tools. Recently, significant research efforts have focused on the development of new methods for analysing and optimising the aerodynamic performance of VAWTs. This paper presents an electric circuit model for Darrieus-type vertical axis wind turbine (DT-VAWT) rotors. The novel Tchakoua model is based on the mechanical description given by the Paraschivoiu double-multiple streamtube model using a mechanical‑electrical analogy. Model simulations were conducted using MATLAB for a three-bladed rotor architecture, characterized by a NACA0012 profile, an average Reynolds number of 40,000 for the blade and a tip speed ratio of 5. The results obtained show strong agreement with findings from both aerodynamic and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models in the literature.
Lévy-driven and fractionally integrated ARMA processes with continuous time parameter

The denition and properties of L evy-driven CARMA (continuous-time ARMA) processes are reviewed. Gaussian CARMA processes are special cases in which the driving L evy process is Brownian motion. The use of more general L evy processes permits the specication of CARMA processes with a wide variety of marginal distributions which may be asymmetric and heavier tailed than Gaussian. Non-negative CARMA processes are of special interest, partly because of the in- troduction by Barndor-Nielsen and Shephard (2001) of non-negative L evy-driven Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes as models for stochastic volatility. Replacing the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process by a L evy-driven CARMA process with non-negative kernel permits the modelling of non-negative, heavy-tailed processes with a con- siderably larger range of autocovariance functions than is possible in the Ornstein- Uhlenbeck framework. We also dene a class of zero-mean fractionally integrated L evy-driven CARMA processes, obtained by convoluting the CARMA kernel with a kernel corresponding to Riemann-Liouville fractional integration, and derive ex- plicit expressions for the kernel and autocovariance functions of these processes. They are long-memory in the sense that their kernel and autocovariance functions decay asymptotically at hyperbolic rates depending on the order of fractional inte- gration. In order to introduce long-memory into non-negative L evy-driven CARMA processes we replace the fractional integration kernel with a closely related abso- lutely integrable kernel. This gives a class of stationary non-negative continuous- time L evy-driven processes whose autocovariance functions at lag h also converge to zero at asymptotically hyperbolic rates.
A Histone Acetyltransferase p300 Inhibitor C646 Induces Cell Cycle Arrest and Apoptosis Selectively in AML1-ETO-Positive AML Cells

AML1-ETO fusion protein (AE) is generated by t(8;21)(q22;q22) chromosomal translocation, which is one of the most frequently observed structural abnormalities in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and displays a pivotal role in leukemogenesis. The histone acetyltransferase p300 promotes self-renewal of leukemia cells by acetylating AE and facilitating its downstream gene expression as a transcriptional coactivator, suggesting that p300 may be a potential therapeutic target for AE-positive AML. However, the effects of p300 inhibitors on leukemia cells and the underlying mechanisms have not been extensively investigated. In the current study, we analyzed the anti-leukemia effects of C646, a selective and competitive p300 inhibitor, on AML cells. Results showed that C646 inhibited cellular proliferation, reduced colony formation, evoked partial cell cycle arrest in G1 phase, and induced apoptosis in AE-positive AML cell lines and primary blasts isolated from leukemic mice and AML patients. Nevertheless, no significant inhibitory effects were observed in granulocyte colony-stimulating factor-mobilized normal peripheral blood stem cells. Notably, AE-positive AML cells were more sensitive to lower C646 doses than AE-negative ones. And C646-induced growth inhibition on AE-positive AML cells was associated with reduced global histone H3 acetylation and declined c-kit and bcl-2 levels. Therefore, C646 may be a potential candidate for treating AE-positive AML.
Bangladeshi Sign Language Recognition using fingertip position

Sign language is the only means of communication for deaf and dump people which uses manual communication and body language to convey meaning. For any sign language, an interpreter is essential to communicate with deaf and dump people. To enhance interaction with community, Sign Language Recognition (SLR) is a growing field of research now a days. The task of SLR is language specific and a number of prominent works are available for few major languages. On the hand, the works are very few for Bangladeshi Sign Language (BSL) although Bangla is a major language and Bangladesh has a large community of deaf and dump people. In this study a BSL recognition scheme has been investigated based on fingertip position. The method considered relative tip positions of five fingers in two dimension space and position vectors are used to train artificial neural network (ANN) for recognition purpose. The method seems efficient with respect to ANN training with pixel values of image as of previous studies. The proposed method has been tested on a prepared data set of 518 images of 37 signs and achieved 99% recognition rate. The proposed method is found better than exiting BSL recognition methods.
Foul 2050: thoughts on physical interaction in human-robot soccer

The RoboCup community has one definite goal: winning against the human world soccer champion team by the year 2050. This implies real tackles and fouls between humans and robots and rises safety concerns for the robots and even more important for the human players. Nowadays, similar questions are discussed in the field of physical human- robot interaction (pHRI), but mainly in the context of industrial and service robotics applications. Our paper is an attempt for a pHRI view on human-robot soccer. Technically, this will be years ahead, but still we believe it is enlighting to analyze the RoboCup vision from the perspective of pHRI. We take scenes from the 2006 FIFA World Cup as examples and discuss what could have happened if one of the teams consisted of robots instead of humans.
The Impact of Context-Aware Recommender Systems on Music in the Long Tail

Music discovery and consumption have changed dramatically in recent years. Nowadays, most people consume music on their personal computers and mobile devices via Internet. Web sites and online services now typically contain millions of music tracks, which complicate search, retrieval and discovery of music. Music recommender systems can address these issues by recommending relevant and novel music to a user based on personal musical tastes. A typical scenario in music recommendation is that the music consumption is focused on some popular tracks and the most unpopular tracks are rarely accessed (i.e., the Long Tail problem). In this paper, we evaluate the impact of using context-aware recommender systems to recommend music in the Long Tail. We perform a set of experiments by applying three different context-aware recommender systems on three different real world data sets. Our findings show that by using contextual information we can improve music recommendation in the Long Tail scenario.
Active Cookies for Browser Authentication

We propose active cookies as a tool for stronger user/client authentication on the Web. An ordinary cookie is automatically released to any server associated with a particular domain name. It is therefore vulnerable to capture by pharming, that is, spoofing of domain names. An active cookie, by contrast, resists such pharming attacks. Active cookies rely on a new protocol we propose that channels client communications to a specific, valid IP address. This protocol exploits a combination of cookie-based (or cached-object-based) authentication with a new type of IP-tracing protocol. This IP-tracing protocol helps defend against the presence of an attacker in the loop during an authentication session, but is unaffected by IP-address changes in clients
The application of a phenomenological framework to assess user experience with museum technologies

Providing visitors with a valuable experience of the past has become a crucial mission for cultural heritage institutions. The experience of the past is one where visitors understand the museum’s communications about the meaning of artefacts and where visitors undertake an active role in interpretation and reflection on the past. Several studies promote technologies as a good way for museums to reenergize their relationships with their visitors. But even as some research has concentrated more and more on visitor experiences, this work has neither particularly stressed on visitors’ experience of the past nor on their evaluation of museum technologies with respect to their potential for engendering a better experience of the past. Monod and Klein (2005) elaborated a phenomenological framework with six criteria to evaluate IT used in the cultural heritage. Since it has not been empirically “validated” yet, the objective of this paper is to employ these criteria with samples of users of museum technologies and in the process determine whether these criteria can be met by IT. Our field study indicates that technologies available in museums positively contribute to an experience of the past.
The prevalence of pathologic tooth migration with respect to the severity of periodontitis

Aim: Pathologic tooth migration (PTM) has been defined as tooth displacement that occurs when the balance among the factors that maintain physiologic tooth position is disturbed by periodontal disease. The aim of this cross-sectional epidemiological study was to determine the prevalence of pathologic tooth migration among patients with periodontitis. Materials and Methods: Recorded documents of 370 patients (72.4% females, 27.6% males) within the age range of 17 to 70 years (mean 37.77 ± 11.46) were studied. Statistical analysis was carried out using t-test and Chi-square test. Results: Pathologic migration prevalence was 11.4% (35/314 patients), however, there was no pathologic migration in patients with mild chronic periodontitis. The Chi-square test showed that there was no statistically significant difference between males and females. Conclusions: The results of this study confirm that pathologic tooth migration is relatively common among periodontal patients and its prevalence is increased by the severity of periodontal disease.
Automatic transfer rule induction from parallel corpora

Recently, many projects have been proposed aiming at auto- matically transforming the multilingual information available on parallel texts into linguistic knowledge useful for machine translation. This paper describes an ongoing PhD project in which the main goal is to automati- cally induce transfer rules and bilingual dictionaries from part-of-speech tagged and lexically aligned parallel corpora. The final goal of this project is to use the induced rules and bilingual entries to translate from (to)
Data envelopment analysis approach for discriminating efficient candidates in voting systems by considering the priority of voters

There are different ways to allow the voters to express their preferences on a set of candidates. In the traditional voting systems, it is assumed that the votes of all voters have the same importance and there is no preference between them. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to express the preference of voters on a set of candidates. In the proposed approach voters are classified into several categories with different importance levels in which the vote of a higher category may have a greater importance than that of the lower category. Then two models are introduced to measure the best preference scores of the target candidate from the virtual best candidate and the virtual worst candidate point of view. After that, two obtained preference scores are aggregated together in order to obtain an overall ranking. Finally, two numerical examples are provided for illustration the applications of the proposed approach.
Hpt, a bacterial homolog of the microsomal glucose- 6-phosphate translocase, mediates rapid intracellular proliferation in Listeria

Efficient replication in vivo is essential for a microparasite to colonize its host and the understanding of the molecular mechanisms by which microbial pathogens grow within host tissues can lead to the discovery of novel therapies to treat infection. Here we present evidence that the foodborne bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, a facultative intracellular parasite, exploits hexose phosphates (HP) from the host cell as a source of carbon and energy to fuel fast intracellular growth. HP uptake is mediated by Hpt, a bacterial homolog of the mammalian translocase that transports glucose-6-phosphate from the cytosol into the endoplasmic reticulum in the final step of gluconeogenesis and glycogenolysis. Expression of the Hpt permease is tightly controlled by the central virulence regulator PrfA, which upon entry into host cells induces a set of virulence factors required for listerial intracellular parasitism. Loss of Hpt resulted in impaired listerial intracytosolic proliferation and attenuated virulence in mice. Hpt is the first virulence factor to be identified as specifically involved in the replication phase of a facultative intracellular pathogen. It is also a clear example of how adaptation to intracellular parasitism by microbial pathogens involves mimicry of physiological mechanisms of their eukaryotic host cells.
Function-Specific Mixing Times and Concentration Away from Equilibrium

Slow mixing is the central hurdle when working with Markov chains, especially those used for Monte Carlo approximations (MCMC). In many applications, it is only of interest to estimate the stationary expectations of a small set of functions, and so the usual definition of mixing based on total variation convergence may be too conservative. Accordingly, we introduce function-specific analogs of mixing times and spectral gaps, and use them to prove Hoeffding-like function-specific concentration inequalities. These results show that it is possible for empirical expectations of functions to concentrate long before the underlying chain has mixed in the classical sense, and we show that the concentration rates we achieve are optimal up to constants. We use our techniques to derive confidence intervals that are sharper than those implied by both classical Markov chain Hoeffding bounds and Berry-Esseen-corrected CLT bounds. For applications that require testing, rather than point estimation, we show similar improvements over recent sequential testing results for MCMC. We conclude by applying our framework to real data examples of MCMC, providing evidence that our theory is both accurate and relevant to practice.
High Blood Pressure Trends in Children and Adolescents in National Surveys, 1963 to 2002

Background— Secular trend data on hypertension in children and adolescents are scarce and inconsistent. In the face of growing obesity, we sought to assess high blood pressure (HBP) secular trends in children and adolescents enrolled in national surveys and to determine whether the HBP trend reversed its course with the rise in obesity. Methods and Results— National survey data obtained from multistage probability sampling of the US noninstitutionalized population from 1963 to 2002 were examined; 8- to 17-year-old non-Hispanic blacks and whites and Mexican Americans were included. HBP ascertainment was based on age-, gender-, and height percentile–specific systolic and diastolic BPs. Weighted analyses were performed to account for the complex design. The BP, pre-HBP, and HBP trends were downward from 1963 to 1988 and upward thereafter. Pre-HBP and HBP increased 2.3% (P=0.0003) and 1% (P=0.17), respectively, between 1988 and 1999. Obesity increase, more so abdominal than general obesity, partially explained the rise in HBP and pre-HBP from 1988 to 1999. BP and HBP reversed their downward trends 10 years after the increase in the prevalence of obesity. Additionally, an ethnic and gender gap appeared in 1988 for pre-HBP and in 1999 for HBP; non-Hispanic blacks and Mexican Americans had a greater prevalence of HBP and pre-HBP than non-Hispanic whites, and males had a greater prevalence than females. Conclusions— HBP and pre-HBP in children and adolescents are on the rise. These new findings have implications for the cardiovascular disease public health burden, particularly the risk of a new cardiovascular disease transition. They reinforce the urgent call for early prevention of obesity and HBP and illustrate racial/ethnic disparities in this age group.
A statistical approach to reverberation in non-diffusive rectangular rooms based on the image source model

In this paper, a novel procedure for the estimation of the energy decay curve of the reverberation on rectangular non-diffusive rooms is presented. It is based on the calculation of the expected sound intensity using a room characteristic factor, the specific attenuation factor, also introduced in the paper. Complete knowledge of the probability density function of this factor leads to exact estimation of the energy decay curve of reverberation, even in the case of heavily irregular rooms and/or un-homogeneous walls.
A hybrid communication approach for disaster recovery system

In this paper, we proposed a hybrid communication approach for disaster recovery system. Playing an important role in rescuing victims, the communication system in the disaster area is usually destroyed. The mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) can replace the original system. MANET can be deployed in the form of peer-to-peer (P2P) approach or infrastructure-based (IB) approach. However, both approaches still have limited flexibility and reliability. Our hybrid approach overcomes the limitations by combining advantages of P2P approach and those of IB approach. The hybrid approach allows victims to directly communicate to rescuers in the disaster area. Since victims need immediate helps from rescuers, appropriate destinations must be selected. Our design of hybrid approach allows victims to quickly send messages to the nearest rescuers without compromising the traffic to a base station. The experiment shows that our hybrid approach provides more than 98% of packet delivery ratio to rescuers.
Enhancing User Immersion and Natural interaction in HMD based Virtual Environments with Real Time Visual Body Feedback using Multiple Microsoft Kinects

This paper presents an augmented VR system that provides real time visual body feedback with the help of multiple Microsoft Kinects. The advent of Microsoft Kinect provided the research community with an inexpensive but an extremely invaluable piece of equipment that can be used to obtain real time 3D information of the scene. We use this information to let users see their own self-representations in virtual environments. We also introduce in this paper, an IR-based position tracking system implemented using just the Kinects. We present here an analysis of the jitter and range of such a tracking system and the effects of interference on its performance for a common VR lab setup.
Literal and ProRulext: algorithms for rule extraction of ANNs

Artificial neural networks (ANN) present excellent capacity for generalization. Besides, they are applied to the most diverse human knowledge domains. However, since they represent knowledge in its topology, weight values and bias, explaining clearly how an ANN has obtained its outputs is not a trivial task for human experts. Usually such deficiency can be minimized through the "if/then" rule extraction from the trained network. Thus, this work presents two algorithms for the propositional rule extraction from trained ANNs: literal and ProRulext. Among other advantages, these methods can be applied to trained networks for pattern classification and time series forecast, obtaining rules that are compact, comprehensible and faithful to the networks from which they have been extracted, also at a lower computational cost compared to NeuroLinear.
Resting-state synchrony in short-term versus long-term abstinent alcoholics.

BACKGROUND We previously reported that when compared with controls, long-term abstinent alcoholics (LTAA) have increased resting-state synchrony (RSS) of the inhibitory control network and reduced synchrony of the appetitive drive network, and hypothesized that these levels of synchrony are adaptive and support the behavioral changes required to maintain abstinence. In this study, we investigate whether these RSS patterns can be identified in short-term abstinent alcoholics (STAA). METHODS Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected from 27 STAA, 23 LTAA, and 23 nonsubstance abusing controls (NSAC). We examined baseline RSS using seed-based measures. RESULTS We found ordered RSS effects from NSAC to STAA and then to LTAA within both the appetitive drive and executive control networks: increasing RSS of the executive control network and decreasing RSS of the reward processing network. Finally, we found significant correlations between strength of RSS in these networks and (i) cognitive flexibility, and (ii) current antisocial behavior. CONCLUSIONS Findings are consistent with an adaptive progression of RSS from short- to long-term abstinence, so that, compared with normal controls, the synchrony (i) within the reward network progressively decreases, and (ii) within the executive control network progressively increases.