Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic and environmental causes of variation in gestation length of Jersey crossbred cattle

Aim: The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of genetic and non-genetic factors and estimate the genetic parameter for gestation length (GL) of Jersey crossbred cattle. Materials and Methods: The data included the 986 parturition records on Jersey crossbred cattle maintained at the Eastern Regional Station of ICAR-National Dairy Research Institute, Kalyani, West Bengal, India during 36 years (1978-2013). The data were analyzed applying mixed model least square technique considering the fixed effects of genetic group, season of calving, period of calving, parity of animal, birth weight, and sex of calf born from animal. The effect of sire was included as a random effect in the model. Results: The genetic group of animal, season of calving, parity of animal, and birth weight of calf born were found to be a significant source of variation in the GL, whereas the period of calving and sex of calf did not affect this trait. Cows with <50% and >62.5% Jersey inheritance had the shortest and longest GLs, respectively. Cows calved in summer and rainy season had shorter GL than those calved in the winter season. Older cows in 4th parity carried calves for longer days than the cows in 1st parity. The increase in calf birth weight significantly (p<0.01) contributed to a linear increase in GL value in this study. The heritability estimate of GL was 0.24±0.08. Conclusion: It can be concluded that selection for lower GL without distressing future growth of calf can be used to reduce calving difficulty, but a very small standard deviation of GL limits the benefit. Moreover, more accurate prediction of calving date will help in better management and health care of pregnant animals.
Homeostatic Tissue Responses in Skin Biopsies from NOMID Patients with Constitutive Overproduction of IL-1β

The autoinflammatory disorder, Neonatal-onset Multisystem Inflammatory Disease (NOMID) is the most severe phenotype of disorders caused by mutations in CIAS1 that result in increased production and secretion of active IL-1β. NOMID patients present with systemic and organ-specific inflammation of the skin, central nervous system and bone, and respond dramatically to treatment with IL-1 blocking agents. We compared the cellular infiltrates and transcriptome of skin biopsies from patients with NOMID (n = 14) before treatment (lesional (LS) and non-lesional (pre-NL) skin) and after treatment (post-NL) with the IL-1 blocker anakinra (recombinant IL-1 receptor antagonist, Kineret®, Swedish Orphan Biovitrum AB, SOBI), to normal skin (n = 5) to assess tissue responses in the context of untreated and treated disease. Abundant neutrophils distinguish LS skin from pre-NL and post-NL skin. CD11c+ dermal dendritic cells and CD163+ macrophages expressed activated caspase-1 and are a likely source of cutaneous IL-1 production. Treatment with anakinra led to the disappearance of neutrophils, but CD3+ T cells and HLA-DR+ cells remained elevated. Among the upregulated genes IL-6, IL-8, TNF, IL-17A, CCL20, and the neutrophil defensins DEFA1 and DEFA3 were differentially regulated in LS tissues (compared to normal skin). Important significantly downregulated pathways in LS skin included IL-1R/TLR signaling, type I and II cytokine receptor signaling, mitochondrial dysfunction, and antigen presentation. The differential expression and regulation of microRNAs and pathways involved in post-transcriptional modification were suggestive of epigenetic modification in the chronically inflamed tissue. Overall, the dysregulated genes and pathways suggest extensive “adaptive” mechanisms to control inflammation and maintain tissue homeostasis, likely triggered by chronic IL-1 release in the skin of patients with NOMID.
Enhancement of osseointegration of polyethylene terephthalate artificial ligament by coating of silk fibroin and depositing of hydroxyapatite

Background Application of artificial ligament in anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction is one of the research focuses of sports medicine but the biological tendon–bone healing still remains a problem. The preliminary study of hydroxyapatite (HAP) coating on the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) surface could effectively induce the osteoblast differentiation, but the tendon–bone healing was still not stable. As a green synthesis process, the biomimetic mineralization can simulate the natural bone growth in vitro and in vivo. Methods HAP crystals were grown under the guide of silk fibroin (SF) PET surface by biomimetic route. Several techniques including scanning electron microscopy, attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy were utilized for proving the introduction of both SF and HAP. The viability and osseointegration of bone marrow stromal cells on the surface of three kinds of ligament, including PET group (non-coating group), PET+SF group (SF-coating group), and PET+SF+HAP group (combined HAP- and SF-coating group), were analyzed by CCK-8 assays and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) detection. Seventy-two mature male New Zealand rabbits were randomly divided into three groups. Among them, 36 rabbits were sacrificed for mechanical testing, and histological examination for the others. Results The SF and SF+HAP were successfully coated on the surface of PET fiber. The CCK-8 assay showed that the cell proliferation on PET+SF+HAP group was better than the other two groups from 24 to 120 hours. After 14 days of culture, the cells in the PET+SF+HAP group delivered higher levels of ALP than the other two groups. After 3 days of culture, the expression level of integrin β1 in the PET+SF+HAP group and PET+SF group were higher than in the PET group. The mean load to failure and the stiffness value of the PET+SF+HAP group were both higher than the other two groups. Hematoxylin and eosin staining showed that new bone tissue formation was only found in the PET+SF+HAP group 8 weeks postoperatively. Masson staining showed that in the PET+SF+HAP group 8 weeks postoperatively, the PET fibers were almost completely encircled by collagen. Histomorphometric analysis showed that the width of the graft–bone interface in the PET+SF+HAP group was narrower than that in the other two groups 4 and 8 weeks postoperatively. The mRNA level of BMP-7 in the PET+SF+HAP groups was significantly higher than those in the other two groups 4 and 8 weeks postoperatively. Conclusion The study showed that the combined SF and HAP coating by biomimetic route on the surface of PET artificial ligament could induce graft osseointegration in the bone tunnel, providing theoretical and experimental foundation for manufacturing novel artificial ligaments meeting the clinical needs.
Towards Zero-Time Wakeup of Line Cards in Power-Aware Routers

As the network infrastructure has been consuming more and more power, various schemes have been proposed to improve the power efficiency of network devices. Many schemes put links to sleep when idle and wake them up when needed. A presumption in these schemes, though, is that router's line cards can be waken up very quickly. However, through systematic measurement of a major vendor's high-end routers, we find that it takes minutes to get a line card ready under the current design. To address this issue, we propose a new line card design that 1) keeps the host processor in a line card standby, which only consumes a small fraction of power but will save considerable wakeup time, and 2) downloads a slim slot of popular prefixes with higher priority, so that the line card will be ready for forwarding most of the traffic much earlier. We design algorithms as well as architecture that ensure fast and correct longest prefix match during prioritized routing prefix download. Experiments on an FPGA-based prototype show that the customized hardware can be ready to forward packets in 127.27 ms, which is 0.3% of the time the original design takes. This can better support numerous power-saving schemes based on the sleep/wakeup mechanism.
SAL, Kodkod, and BDDs for Validation of B Models. Lessons and Outlook.

PROB is a model checker for high-level B and Event-B models based on constraint-solving. In this paper we investigate alternate approaches for validating high-level B models using alternative techniques and tools based on using BDDs, SAT-solving and SMT-solving. In particular, we examine whether PROB can be complemented or even supplanted by using one of the tools BDDBDDB, Kodkod or SAL.
High speed on-line motion planning in cluttered environments

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for online obstacle avoidance that accounts for robot dynamics and actuator constraints. The robot trajectory (path and speed) is generated on-line by avoiding obstacles optimally one at a time. This reduces the original problem from one with m obstacles to m simpler problems with one obstacle each, thus resulting in a planner that is linear, instead of exponential, in the number of obstacles. While this approach is quite general and applicable to any cost function and to any robot dynamics, it is treated here for minimum time motions, a point mass robot, and planar circular obstacles.
Depth-scale method in 3D registration of RGB-D sensor outputs

Automatic registration of 3D scans with RGB data is studied in this paper. In contrast to bulk of research in the field which deploy 3D geometry consistency, local RGB image feature matches are used to solve the unknown 3D rigid transformation. The key novelty in this work is the introduction of a new simple measure, we call “Depthscale measure”, which logically represents the size of the local image features in 3D world, thanks to the availability of the depth data from the sensor. Depending on the operating characteristics of the target application, we show this measure can be useful and efficient in eliminating outliers through experimental results. Also system level details are given to help scientists who want to build a similar system.
Optimizing the Replay Protection at the Link Layer Security Framework in Wireless Sensor Networks

 Abstract—Ensuring communications security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is very vital because the security protocols therein, should be devised to work at the link layer. Theoretically, any link layer security protocol must support three vital security attributes viz. Confidentiality, Message Integrity and Replay protection. However, in order to ensure lesser overhead, replay protection is often not incorporated as part of the link layer security framework. We argue here, that it is essential to implement replay protection at the link layer only and devise a simple scheme to do so. We first survey the common approaches to ensuring replay protection in conventional networks. We also implement the conventional algorithms for replay protection using the link layer framework for WSNs viz. TinySec as the underlying platform. Subsequently analyzing their limitations, we propose a novel Bloom-filter based replay protection algorithm for unicast communications. We show that our algorithm is better than the other contemporary approaches for ensuring replay protection in unicast communications in the WSNs.
Opportunistic Service Provisioning in the Cloud

There is an emerging trend to deploy services in cloud environments due to their flexibility in providing virtual capacity and pay-as-you-go billing features. Cost-aware services demand computation capacity such as virtual machines (VMs) from a cloud operator according to the workload (i.e., service invocations) and pay for the amount of capacity used following billing contracts. However, as recent empirical studies show, the performance variability, i.e., non-uniform VM performance, is inherently higher than in private hosting platforms, since cloud platforms provide VMs running on top of typically heterogeneous hardware shared by multiple clients. Consequently, the provisioning of service capacity in a cloud needs to consider workload variability as well as varying VM performance. We propose an opportunistic service replication policy that leverages the variability in VM performance, as well as the on-demand billing features of the cloud. Our objective is to minimize the service provisioning costs by keeping a lower number of faster VMs, while maintaining target system utilization. Our evaluation results on traces collected from in-production systems show that the proposed policy achieves significant cost savings and low response times.
Reinforcement Learning for P2P Searching

For a peer-to-peer (P2P) system holding massive amount of data, an efficient and scalable search for resource sharing is a key determinant to its practical usage. Unstructured P2P networks avoid the limitations of centralized systems and the drawbacks of a highly structured approach, because they impose few constraints on topology and data placement, and they support highly versatile search mechanisms. However their search algorithms are usually based on simple flooding schemes, showing severe inefficiencies. In this paper, to address this major limitation, we propose and evaluate the adoption of a local adaptive routing protocol. The routing algorithm adopts a simple Reinforcement Learning scheme (driven by query interactions among neighbors), in order to dynamically adapt the topology to peer interests. Preliminaries evaluations show that the approach is able to dynamically group peer nodes in clusters containing peers with shared interests and organized into a small world network.
An Adaptive Strategy for Quality-Based Data Reduction in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks allow fine-grained observations of real-world phenomena. However, providing constant measurement updates incurs high communication costs for each individual node, resulting in increased energy depletion in the network. Data reduction strategies aim at reducing the amount of data sent by each node, for example by predicting the measured values both at the source and the sink node, thus only requiring nodes to send the readings that deviate from the prediction. While effectively reducing power consumption, such techniques so far needed to rely on a-priori knowledge to correctly model the expected values. Our approach instead employs an algorithm that requires no prior modeling, allowing nodes to work independently and without using global model parameters. Using the LeastMean-Square (LMS) adaptive algorithm on a publicly available, real-world (office environment) temperature data set, we have been able to achieve up to 92% communication reduction while maintaining a minimal accuracy of 0.5 degree Celsius.
Distributed algorithms for maximum throughput in wireless networks

The optimal control of multi-hop wireless networks is a major research and design challenge due, in part, to the interference between nodes, the time-varying nature of the communication channels, the energy limitation of mobile nodes, and the lack of centralized coordination. This problem is further complicated by the randomness of data traffic arrivals. Although a complete solution to the problem is still elusive, a major advance is made in the seminal work of Tassiulas and Ephremides [1992], which obtains a throughput optimal routing and link activation policy without a priori knowledge of arrival statistics. The policy operates on the Maximum Differential Backlog (MDB) principle, which essentially seeks to achieve load-balancing in the network. The MDB policy has been extended to multi-hop networks with general capacity constraints in Neely et al. [2003]. There remains, however, a significant difficulty in applying the MDB policy to practical wireless networks. The mutual interference between wireless links implies that the evaluation of the MDB policy involves a centralized optimization. On the other hand, effective control strategies for large-scale wireless networks require distributed implementations with low control messaging overhead. Motivated by this concern, we investigate the distributed implementation of the MDB algorithm within interference-limited CDMA wireless networks, where transmission on any given link potentially interferes with transmissions on all other active links.
System design for DSP applications using the MASIC methodology

Expensive top-down iterations are often required in the design cycle of complex DSP systems. In this paper, we introduce two levels of abstraction in the design flow by systematically categorizing the architectural decisions. As a result, the top-down iteration loop is broken. We also present a technique to capture and inject the architectural decisions such that the system models can be created and simulated efficiently. The concepts are illustrated by a realistic speech processing example, which is implemented using the AMBA on-chip architecture. Our methodology offers a smooth path from the functional modeling phase to the implementation level, facilitates the reuse of HW and SW components, and enjoys existing tool support at the backend.
Perceived Nurse—Physician Communication in Patient Care and Associated Factors in Public Hospitals of Jimma Zone, South West Ethiopia: Cross Sectional Study

Background Nurse–physician communication has been shown to have a significant impact on the job satisfaction and retention of staff. In areas where it has been studied, communication failure between nurses and physicians was found to be one of the leading causes of preventable patient injuries, complications, death and medical malpractice claims. Objective The objective of this study is to determine perception of nurses and physicians towards nurse-physician communication in patient care and associated factors in public hospitals of Jimma zone, southwest Ethiopia. Methods Institution based cross-sectional survey was conducted from March 10 to April 16, 2014 among 341 nurses and 168 physicians working in public hospitals in Jimma zone. Data was collected using a pre-tested self-administered questionnaire; entered into EpiData version 3.1 and exported to Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16.0 for analysis. Factor analysis was carried out. Descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, linear regression and one way analysis of variance were used. Variables with P-value < 0.05 were considered as statistically significant. Results The response rate of the study was 91.55%. The mean perceived nurse-physician communication scores were 50.88±19.7% for perceived professional respect and satisfaction, and 48.52±19.7% for perceived openness and sharing of patient information on nurse-physician communication. Age, salary and organizational factors were statistically significant predictors for perceived respect and satisfaction. Whereas sex, working hospital, work attitude individual factors and organizational factors were significant predictors of perceived openness and sharing of patient information in nurse-physician communication during patient care. Conclusion Perceived level of nurse-physician communication mean score was low among nurses than physicians and it is attention seeking gap. Hence, the finding of our study suggests the need for developing and implementing nurse-physician communication improvement strategies to solve communication mishaps in patient care.
Defining the metabolic requirements for the growth and colonization capacity of Campylobacter jejuni

During the last decade Campylobacter jejuni has been recognized as the leading cause of bacterial gastroenteritis worldwide. This facultative intracellular pathogen is a member of the Epsilonproteobacteria and requires microaerobic atmosphere and nutrient rich media for efficient proliferation in vitro. Its catabolic capacity is highly restricted in contrast to Salmonella Typhimurium and other enteropathogenic bacteria because several common pathways for carbohydrate utilization are either missing or incomplete. Despite these metabolic limitations, C. jejuni efficiently colonizes various animal hosts as a commensal intestinal inhabitant. Moreover, C. jejuni is tremendously successful in competing with the human intestinal microbiota; an infectious dose of few hundreds bacteria is sufficient to overcome the colonization resistance of humans and can lead to campylobacteriosis. Besides the importance and clear clinical manifestation of this disease, the pathogenesis mechanisms of C. jejuni infections are still poorly understood. In recent years comparative genome sequence, transcriptome and metabolome analyses as well as mutagenesis studies combined with animal infection models have provided a new understanding of how the specific metabolic capacity of C. jejuni drives its persistence in the intestinal habitat of various hosts. Furthermore, new insights into the metabolic requirements that support the intracellular survival of C. jejuni were obtained. Because C. jejuni harbors distinct properties in establishing an infection in comparison to pathogenic Enterobacteriaceae, it represents an excellent organism for elucidating new aspects of the dynamic interaction and metabolic cross talk between a bacterial pathogen, the microbiota and the host.
A cognitive modeling of space using fingerprints of places for mobile robot navigation

In this work we address the problem of perception, spatial cognition and topological navigation for a mobile robot. The objective of this work is to enable the navigation of an autonomous mobile robot (or vehicle) in an indoor (or outdoor) structured environment without relying on maps a priori learned and without using artificial landmarks. A new method for incremental and automatic topological mapping and global localization using fingerprints of places is presented. The fingerprint-based representation permits a reliable, compact and distinctive environment-modeling. Experimental results for mapping indoor and outdoor environments with a mobile robot and a "SMART" vehicle, both equipped with a multi-sensor system composed of two 180deg laser range finders and an omnidirectional camera are also reported
Parvalbumin Is a Mobile Presynaptic Ca2+ Buffer in the Calyx of Held that Accelerates the Decay of Ca2+ and Short-Term Facilitation

Presynaptic Ca2+ signaling plays a crucial role in short-term plasticity of synaptic transmission. Here, we studied the role of mobile endogenous presynaptic Ca2+ buffer(s) in modulating paired-pulse facilitation at a large excitatory nerve terminal in the auditory brainstem, the calyx of Held. To do so, we assessed the effect of presynaptic whole-cell recording, which should lead to the diffusional loss of endogenous mobile Ca2+ buffers, on paired-pulse facilitation and on intracellular Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) transients evoked by action potentials. In unperturbed calyces briefly preloaded with the Ca2+ indicator fura-6F, the [Ca2+]i transient decayed surprisingly fast (τfast, ∼30 ms). Presynaptic whole-cell recordings made without additional Ca2+ buffers slowed the decay kinetics of [Ca2+]i and paired-pulse facilitation (twofold to threefold), but the amplitude of the [Ca2+]i transient was changed only marginally. The fast [Ca2+]i decay was restored by adding the slow Ca2+ buffer EGTA (50–100 μm) or parvalbumin (100 μm), a Ca2+-binding protein with slow Ca2+-binding kinetics, to the presynaptic pipette solution. In contrast, the fast Ca2+ buffer fura-2 strongly reduced the amplitude of the [Ca2+]i transient and slowed its decay, suggesting that the mobile endogenous buffer in calyces of Held has slow, rather than fast, binding kinetics. In parvalbumin knock-out mice, the decay of [Ca2+]i and facilitation was slowed approximately twofold compared with wild-type mice, similar to what is observed during whole-cell recordings in rat calyces of Held. Thus, in young calyces of Held, a mobile Ca2+ buffer with slow binding kinetics, primarily represented by parvalbumin, accelerates the decay of spatially averaged [Ca2+]i and paired-pulse facilitation.