Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circadian Clock Control of Nox4 and Reactive Oxygen Species in the Vasculature

Recent studies have shown that circadian clock disruption is associated with pathological remodeling in the arterial structure and vascular stiffness. Moreover, chronic circadian disruption is associated with dysfunction in endothelial responses and signaling. Reactive oxygen species have emerged as key regulators in vascular pathology. Previously, we have demonstrated that circadian clock dysfunction exacerbates superoxide production through eNOS uncoupling. To date, the impact of circadian clock mutation on vascular NADPH oxidase expression and function is not known. The goal in the current study was to determine if the circadian clock controls vascular Nox4 expression and hydrogen peroxide formation in arteries, particularly in endothelial and vascular smooth muscle cells. In aorta, there was an increase in hydrogen peroxide and Nox4 expression in mice with a dysfunctional circadian rhythm (Bmal1-KO mice). In addition, the Nox4 gene promoter is activated by the core circadian transcription factors. Lastly, in synchronized cultured human endothelial cells, Nox4 gene expression exhibited rhythmic oscillations. These data reveal that the circadian clock plays an important role in the control of Nox4 and disruption of the clock leads to subsequent production of reaction oxygen species.
Query Load Balancing by Caching Search Results in Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval Networks

For peer-to-peer web search engines it is important to keep the delay between receiving a query and providing search results within an acceptable range for the end user. How to achieve this remains an open challenge. One way to reduce delays is by caching search results for queries and allowing peers to access each others cache. In this paper we explore the limitations of search result caching in large-scale peer-to-peer information retrieval networks by simulating such networks with increasing levels of realism. We find that cache hit ratios of at least thirty-three percent are attainable.
AN INCREMENTAL SLAM ALGORITHM FOR INDOOR AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION

Robots indoor autonomous navigation is a crucial requirement for many challenging applications like the inspection of unstructured and harsh environments. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a key component to navigate autonomously. A novel embedded incremental algorithm that could be used on ground or aerial robots to localize and create 3D maps of an unknown GPS-denied environment, is presented. The algorithm is processing-wise light, is executed on board in real time and is suitable to be integrated in a full framework for autonomous navigation. It has been validated using a minimal set of sensors composed of a laser scanner and an inertial unit. Preliminary test results of the algorithm are presented using the CERN test facilities as case study.
Squatting revisited: comparison of haemodynamic responses in normal individuals and heart transplantation recipients.

BACKGROUND--Squatting produces a prompt increase in cardiac output and arterial blood pressure which is accompanied by an immediate decrease in heart rate and forearm vascular resistance. The rise in cardiac output and blood pressure has been attributed to augmented venous return from compression of leg veins, while the decreases in heart rate and forearm vascular resistance are probably due to activation of cardiopulmonary and arterial baroreflexes. Haemodynamic patterns in nine normal men and six heart transplant recipients during 2 min of squatting were examined to determine the role of cardiac innervation in the mediation of these responses. METHODS--Stroke volume was monitored by ensemble averaged thoracic impedance cardiography and blood pressure was determined with an Ohmeda fingertip plethysmograph. These techniques provided continuous measurements which were capable of detecting transient and non-steady state changes. Forearm blood flow was measured with venous occlusion plethysmography. Measurements were obtained after 3 min of quiet standing, immediately after squatting, and at 20, 60, and 120 s of sustained squatting. RESULTS--Both groups exhibited similar increases in stroke volume index (normal individuals 10.5 ml/m2; heart transplant recipients 10.3 ml/m2) and mean arterial pressure (normal individuals 8.5 mm Hg; heart transplant recipients 5.0 mm Hg) which were sustained throughout squatting. Each group also showed an initial decrease in peripheral resistance (normal individuals 3.6 units; heart transplant recipients 7.7 units) followed by a return to baseline values after 20 s. Heart rate decreased in normal individuals (10 beats/min) but was unchanged or minimally increased (2 beats/min) in heart transplant recipients. Forearm vascular resistance was conspicuously decreased in normal individuals (47.8 units) but only minimally (20.9 units) and not significantly in heart transplant recipients. CONCLUSIONS--The major haemodynamic responses to squatting (increased cardiac output and blood pressure) are similar in normal individuals and heart transplant recipients. These responses are primarily due to augmented venous return and are not altered by cardiac denervation. Both groups also exhibited a transient decline in peripheral vascular resistance which is most likely mediated by arterial baroreflexes activated by the acute rise in arterial blood pressure. The absence of a significant decrease in forearm vascular resistance in heart transplant recipients suggests that this response is partially mediated by cardiopulmonary or ventricular baroreflexes or that local forearm flow mediated vasodilatation remains impaired after heart transplantation.
Automating Electronic Document Organisation

The organisation of an electronic document collection c a utilise the principles which have been developed for non-electronic document coll ecti ns. The application of those principles in a different environment is not a si mple one, but should try to take advantage of the capabilities that the new environment ha s. The capabilities of the information technology environment which we are investigat in are those of artificial intelligence, machine learning and information retrieval. We are investigating combining these capabilities in a library context. We describe an experimental automatic document classification system, outlining its design, a series of tests and the results obtained so far. The results of these tests suggest that the design approa ch of the system is viable. This is suggestive for further work in both machine learning and autom ated document classification.
Optimized 3D Magnetization-Prepared Rapid Acquisition of Gradient Echo: Identification of Thalamus Substructures at 3T

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Because the substructures of the thalamus are not visible on standard T1- and T2-weighted MR images, planning of deep brain stimulation implantation relies on stereotactic atlas coordinates. The goal of the present work was to test whether an optimized 3D MPRAGE protocol can depict thalamus substructures. MATERIALS AND METHODS: After optimization of the TI to maximize contrast between gray matter and white matter, 6 healthy subjects were scanned at 3T with the optimized 3D MPRAGE. The results were compared with stereotactic atlases, and 2 expert readers trained in thalamic anatomy identified the 4 large thalamic nuclei groups. RESULTS: There was a high agreement between the different atlases and the resulting MR images. The 4 large thalamic nuclei groups (anterior, lateral, medial, posterior) could be detected reliably. The inter-reader consistency on the size and location was 75%–92%. CONCLUSIONS: The optimized 3D MPRAGE protocol improves contrast in the thalamus, and the 4 large thalamic nuclei groups can be identified with high inter-reader agreement.
Direct conversion of patient fibroblasts demonstrates non-cell autonomous toxicity of astrocytes to motor neurons in familial and sporadic ALS

Significance Direct conversion is a recently established method to generate neuronal progenitor cells (NPCs) from skin fibroblasts in a fast and efficient manner. In this study, we show that this method can be used to model neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Because the origin of ALS is mainly sporadic with unknown cause, methods to model the disease are urgently needed. The produced NPCs are differentiated into astrocytes, which are involved in motor neuron death in ALS. Strikingly, skin-derived astrocytes show similar toxicity toward motor neurons as astrocytes from autopsies of patients. This tool now allows studying ALS while the patient is still alive and can help in testing potential therapeutics for individual patients. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) causes motor neuron degeneration, paralysis, and death. Accurate disease modeling, identifying disease mechanisms, and developing therapeutics is urgently needed. We previously reported motor neuron toxicity through postmortem ALS spinal cord-derived astrocytes. However, these cells can only be harvested after death, and their expansion is limited. We now report a rapid, highly reproducible method to convert adult human fibroblasts from living ALS patients to induced neuronal progenitor cells and subsequent differentiation into astrocytes (i-astrocytes). Non-cell autonomous toxicity to motor neurons is found following coculture of i-astrocytes from familial ALS patients with mutation in superoxide dismutase or hexanucleotide expansion in C9orf72 (ORF 72 on chromosome 9) the two most frequent causes of ALS. Remarkably, i-astrocytes from sporadic ALS patients are as toxic as those with causative mutations, suggesting a common mechanism. Easy production and expansion of i-astrocytes now enables rapid disease modeling and high-throughput drug screening to alleviate astrocyte-derived toxicity.
A security framework for smart metering with multiple data consumers

The increasing diffusion of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) has raised many concerns about the protection of personal data related to energy, water or gas consumption, from which details about the habits of the users can be inferred. On the other hand, aggregated measurements about consumption are crucial for several goals, including resource provisioning, forecasting, and monitoring. This paper proposes a framework for allowing information Consumers, such as utilities and third parties, to collect data with different levels of spatial and temporal aggregation from smart meters without revealing information about individual customers. The proposed infrastructure introduces a new set of functional nodes, namely the Privacy Preserving Nodes (PPNs), which collect customer data masked by means of a secret sharing scheme with homomorphic properties, and aggregate them directly in the masked domain, according to the Consumer's needs and access rights. The information Consumers can recover the aggregated data by collecting multiple shares from the PPNs. The paper describes an Integer Linear Programming formulation and a greedy algorithm to address the problem of deploying the information flows between the information Producers (i.e. the customers), the PPNs, and the Consumers and evaluates the scalability of the infrastructure both under the assumption that the communication network is reliable and timely and in presence of communication errors.
BFC: correcting Illumina sequencing errors

UNLABELLED BFC is a free, fast and easy-to-use sequencing error corrector designed for Illumina short reads. It uses a non-greedy algorithm but still maintains a speed comparable to implementations based on greedy methods. In evaluations on real data, BFC appears to correct more errors with fewer overcorrections in comparison to existing tools. It particularly does well in suppressing systematic sequencing errors, which helps to improve the base accuracy of de novo assemblies. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION https://github.com/lh3/bfc CONTACT hengli@broadinstitute.org SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Utilizing non-QA data to improve questions routing for users with low QA activity in CQA

Community Question Answering (CQA) systems, such as Yahoo! Answers and Stack Overflow, represent a well-known example of collective intelligence. The existing CQA systems, despite their overall successfulness and popularity, fail to answer a significant amount of questions in required time. One option for scaffolding collaboration in CQA systems is a recommendation of new questions to users who are suitable candidates for providing correct answers (so called question routing). Various methods have been proposed so far to find appropriate answerers, but almost all approaches heavily depend on previous users' activities in a particular CQA system (i.e. QA-data). In our work, we attempt to involve a whole community including users with no or minimal previous activity (e.g. newcomers or lurkers). We proposed a question routing method which analyses users' non-QA data from a CQA system itself as well as from external services and platforms, such as blogs, micro-blogs or social networking sites, in order to estimate users' interests and expertise early and more precisely. Consequently, we can recommend new questions to a wider part of a community as well as more accurately. Evaluation on a dataset from Stack Exchange platform showed that considering non-QA data leads not only to better recognition of users with low activity as suitable answerers, but also to higher overall precision of the recommendations. It implies that non-QA data can supplement QA data during expertise estimation in question routing and thus also improve a success rate of a questions answering process.
Racism: Against Jorge Garcia's moral and psychological monism

In this article, we argue that it can be fruitful for philosophers interested in the nature and moral significance of racism to pay more attention to psychology. We do this by showing that psychology provides new arguments against Garcia's views about the nature and moral significance of racism. We contend that some scientific studies of racial cognition undermine Garcia's moral and psychological monism about racism: Garcia disregards (1) the rich affective texture of racism and (2) the diversity of what makes racial ills morally wrong.
Android based semi-autonomous collision avoidance robot

Modern Smartphones have become amazing devices which house processors that match processing speeds of a standard entry level computer. In this paper a model for using an Android™ based Smartphone as the main computational device for a semi-autonomous robot is presented. A stripped down National Instrument (NI) LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit chassis together with a combination of an IOIO Board and a Android Smartphone serve as the hardware structure of the robot. The processes for designing a custom Android™ Application, issues with hardware and the shortcomings of technologies used are also presented. Finally a robot which is controlled remotely with integrated obstacle detection and avoidance is achieved.
Recent Developments of Totalitarian Capitalism and the Evolving World Order: Some Implications for Social Movements

ABSTRACT Under current circumstances, the lasting and exacerbated crisis of world capitalism, its far-reaching transformations, and intensified socio-political and geopolitical conflicts lead to highly uncertain conditions and an increasing world disorder. After some methodological remarks and a brief analysis of the recent developments of world capitalism, this article more specifically investigates the capital–state relations, and critically considers competing explanations (including imperialism, globalization, empire, transnational and totalitarian capitalism) of the currently evolving world (dis-)order, as well as the urgent search for new forms of global governance. Based on this analysis, an attempt is made to draw some conclusions concerning social movements and struggles for social change.
Optimizing Xen Hypervisor by Using Lock-Aware Scheduling

System virtualization enables multiple isolated running environments to be safely consolidated on a physical server, achieving better physical resource utilization and power saving. Virtual machine has been an essential component in most of the cloud/data-center system software stacks. However, virtualization brings negative impacts on synchronization in guest operating system (guest OS) and thus dramatically degrades the performance of the virtual machine. Therefore, how to effectively eliminate or alleviate the disadvantageous impacts has been becoming an open research issue. Xen hyper visor is a wide used virtualized platform in the area of industry and research. In this work, our aim is to optimize Xen hyper visor to minimize the impacts of virtualization on synchronization in guest OS. We propose a lock-aware scheduling mechanism, which focuses on improving the performance of virtual machines where spin-lock primitive is frequently invoked, as well as guaranteeing the scheduling fairness. The mechanism adopts a flexible scheduling algorithm based on the information of spin-lock, which is updated dynamically. We have modified Xen and Linux to implement the scheduling mechanism. Experimental results show that the optimized system can nearly eliminate the impacts of virtualization on synchronization and improve the performance of virtual machines substantially. Although the proposed mechanism is aimed at optimizing Xen hyper visor, it can also be applied to some other Para virtualized platforms.
Hardware Design of Wireless Physical Token Ring System for Mobile and Cellular Communication

A wireless network system based on an infrared and Laser scanning Physical Token Ring architecture (W-PTRS) was designed, built and tested successfully. The network provides a different way of utilizing the concept of a token ring network but with a higher efficiency related to the speed of data transfer and the ability to parallel process client-server requests leading to a new concept of the token ring system, which will not fail simply because of ring breakage. The study proposes a new wireless communication protocol, which is neither IEEE802.11 nor Bluetooth. This newly developed protocol could prove to be an excellent communication media if supported by industry. If implemented, this wireless system will provide an alternative but efficient way of wireless communication.
Dual Roles of the C2B Domain of Synaptotagmin I in Synchronizing Ca2+-Dependent Neurotransmitter Release

Although the vesicular protein synaptotagmin I contains two Ca2+-binding domains (C2A and C2B), Ca2+ binding to the C2B domain is more important for triggering synchronous neurotransmitter release. We have used point mutagenesis to determine the functional contributions of the five negatively charged aspartate (Asp) residues that constitute the Ca2+-binding sites in the C2B domain of synaptotagmin I. Transfecting wild-type synaptotagmin I DNA into cultured hippocampal neurons from synaptotagmin I knock-out mice rescued Ca2+-dependent synchronous transmitter release and reduced a slower, asynchronous component of release, indicating that synaptotagmin I suppresses asynchronous release. Mutating either the second or third Asp residues of the C2B domain potently inhibited the ability of synaptotagmin I to rescue synchronous release but did not change its ability to suppress asynchronous release. Synaptotagmin I with mutations in the first or fourth Asp residues of the C2B domain partially rescued synchronous release and partially suppressed asynchronous release, whereas neutralizing the fifth Asp residue had no effect on the ability of synaptotagmin I to rescue transmitter release. Thus, we conclude that the C2B domain of synaptotagmin I regulates neurotransmitter release in at least two ways. Synchronous release absolutely requires binding of Ca2+ to the second and third Asp residues in this domain. For the suppression of asynchronous release, Ca2+ binding to the C2B domain of synaptotagmin I apparently is not necessary because mutation of the second Asp residue inhibits Ca2+ binding, yet still allows this protein to suppress asynchronous release.
Improved binary feature matching through fusion of hamming distance and fragile bit weight

In this paper, we define a new metric, the Fragile Bit Weight (FBW), which is used in binary feature matching and measures how two features differ. High FBWs are associated with genuine matches between two binary features and low FBWs are associated with impostor ones. One bit in binary feature is deemed fragile if its sign of value reverses easily across the local image patch that has changed slightly. Previous binary feature extract algorithms ignore the fact that the signs of fragile bits are not stable through image transform. Rather than ignore fragile bits completely, we consider what beneficial information can be obtained from those fragile bits. In our approach, we exploit FBW as a measure in binary feature match to remove the false matches. In experiments, using FBW can effectively remove the false matches and highly improve the accuracy of feature match. Then, we find that fusion of FBW and Hamming distance work better in feature matching than Hamming distance alone. Furthermore, FBW can easily integrate in the well-established binary feature schemes if those descriptor bit in extract from comparison of pixels.
DFKI KeyWE: Ranking Keyphrases Extracted from Scientific Articles

A central issue for making the content of a scientific document quickly accessible to a potential reader is the extraction of keyphrases, which capture the main topic of the document. Keyphrases can be extracted automatically by generating a list of keyphrase candidates, ranking these candidates, and selecting the top-ranked candidates as keyphrases. We present the KeyWE system, which uses an adapted nominal group chunker for candidate extraction and a supervised ranking algorithm based on support vector machines for ranking the extracted candidates. The system was evaluated on data provided for the SemEval 2010 Shared Task on Keyphrase Extraction.
Fat King Penguins Are Less Steady on Their Feet

Returning to the shore after a feeding sojourn at sea, king penguins often undertake a relatively long terrestrial journey to the breeding colony carrying a heavy, mostly frontal, accumulation of fat along with food in the stomach for chick-provisioning. There they must survive a fasting period of up to a month in duration, during which their complete reliance on endogenous energy stores results in a dramatic loss in body mass. Our aim was to determine if the king penguin’s walking gait changes with variations in body mass. We investigated this by walking king penguins on a treadmill while instrumented with an acceleration data logger. The stride frequency, dynamic body acceleration (DBA) and posture of fat (pre-fasting; 13.2 kg) and slim (post fasting; 11 kg) king penguins were assessed while they walked at the same speed (1.4km/h) on a treadmill. Paired statistical tests indicated no evidence for a difference in dynamic body acceleration or stride frequency between the two body masses however there was substantially less variability in both leaning angle and the leaning amplitude of the body when the birds were slimmer. Furthermore, there was some evidence that the slimmer birds exhibited a decrease in waddling amplitude. We suggest the increase in variability of both leaning angle and amplitude, as well as a possibly greater variability in the waddling amplitude, is likely to result from the frontal fat accumulation when the birds are heavier, which may move the centre of mass anteriorly, resulting in a less stable upright posture. This study is the first to use accelerometry to better understand the gait of a species within a specific ecological context: the considerable body mass change exhibited by king penguins.