Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Superoxide Stimulates NaCl Absorption in the Thick Ascending Limb Via Activation of Protein Kinase C

Abnormal production of superoxide (O2−) contributes to hypertension, in part because of its effects on the kidney. The thick ascending limb absorbs 20% to 30% of the filtered load of NaCl. O2− stimulates NaCl absorption by the thick ascending limb by enhancing Na+/K+/2Cl− cotransporter activity; however, the signaling mechanism is unknown. We hypothesized that O2− stimulates NaCl absorption by activating protein kinase C (PKC). To test this, we measured the effect of O2− on: (1) Cl− absorption in the presence and absence of PKC inhibitors, (2) total PKC activity, and (3) activation of specific PKC isoforms. Isolated perfused medullary thick ascending limbs were exposed to O2− generated by xanthine oxidase (1 mU/mL) and hypoxanthine (0.5 mmol/L). O2− increased Cl− absorption by 42% (from 76.2±3.6 to 108.2±11.9 pmol/min per millimeter; n=5; P<0.05). After treatment with the general PKC inhibitor staurosporine (10 nmol/L), O2− did not stimulate Cl− absorption (Δ−5.7±8.6%; n=6). In thick ascending limb suspensions, O2− increased total PKC activity by 33% (from 66±11 to 88±12 mU/mg protein; n=5; P<0.05) and increased PKC-α and PKC-δ activity by 1.75- and 0.37-fold, respectively. The PKC-α/β–selective inhibitor Gö976 (100 nmol/L) blocked the ability of O2− to stimulate Cl− absorption by isolated perfused medullary thick ascending limbs (Δ4.5±15.0%; n=5). The role of PKC-δ could not be studied because of cell necrosis caused by the selective inhibitor rottlerin. We conclude that PKC-α is required for O2−-stimulated NaCl absorption in the thick ascending limb.
Recognition of female-spoken and male-spoken evaluative words: implications for a theory of schizophreniform development.

Abstract The theory has been proposed that given sustained maternal control and rejection, the son may develop one of two primary styles of adapting to social evaluation; a closed style combines defensive tactics of social withdrawal and perceptual blocking, whereas an open style involves manipulative social approach and perceptual vigilance. The schizophreniform character of these two styles has been noted, drawing upon their parallels with process and reactive distinctions in schizophrenia, thereby presenting a hypothetical linkage between mother-child dynamics and the learning of schizophrenic behaviors. The present study tested the prediction that closed-style late-adolescents would show a deficit in recognizing evaluative words spoken near threshold in a female (“mother-figure”) voice. This prediction was generated by both the adaptive-style theory and empirical demonstration of this deficit in process schizophrenics. Results confirmed the prediction. Closed-style subjects recognized fewer female-spo.
Superchords: decoding EEG signals in the millisecond range

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals’ interpretation is based on waveform analysis, where meaningful information should emerge from a plethora of data. Nonetheless, the continuous increase in computational power and the development of new data processing algorithms in the recent years have put into reach the possibility of analyzing raw EEG signals. Bearing that motivation, the authors propose a new approach using raw data EEG signals and deep learning neural networks, for the classification of motor activities (executed and imagery). The hypothesis to be presented here is: each instantaneous measurement of the raw signal of all EEG channels (superchord) is unique per motor activity regardless the moment of measurement. This study has confirmed the hypothesis (results with accuracy over 80%, mean for 109 subjects), reinforcing the need of further research for the understanding of mental processes.
Non-contact characterisation of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastics in hybrid aluminium / CFRP sheets using multi-frequency eddy current sensors

The characterization of hybrid aluminium / Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics (CFRP) sheets using multi-frequency eddy current sensors is presented in this paper. Both air-cored circular sensors and highly directional ferrite-cored sensors are designed for bulk conductivity measurements and directionality characterization. An analytical model describing the interaction of the circular sensors with the hybrid planar structure is developed. Finite element (FE) models that take into account of the anisotropicity of the CFRP have also been proposed. Both models are in good agreements with experimental results. The features of the sensor output signals are analyzed and explained. It is believed this is the first published report of using eddy current techniques for characterizing the hybrid aluminium / CFRP material.
Image Analysis Based Grading of Bladder Carcinoma. Comparison of Object, Texture and Graph Based Methods and Their Reproducibility

The possibility that computerized image analysis could increase the reproducibility of grading of bladder carcinoma as compared to conventional subjective grading made by pathologists was investigated. Object, texture and graph based analysis were carried out from Feulgen stained histological tissue sections. The object based features were extracted from gray scale images, binary images obtained by thresholding the nuclei and several other images derived through image processing operations. The textural features were based on the spatial gray‐tone co‐occurrence probability matrices and the graph based features were extracted from the minimum spanning trees connecting all nuclei. The large numbers of extracted features were evaluated in relation to subjective grading and to factors related to prognosis using multivariate statistical methods and multilayer backpropagation neural networks. All the methods were originally developed and tested on material from one patient and then tested for reproducibility on entirely different patient material. The results indicate reasonably good reproducibility for the best sets of features. In addition, image analysis based grading showed almost identical correlation to mitotic density and expression of p53 protein as subjective grading. It should thus be possible to use this kind of image analysis as a prognostic tool for bladder carcinoma.
Exploiting Object Similarity in 3D Reconstruction

Despite recent progress, reconstructing outdoor scenes in 3D from movable platforms remains a highly difficult endeavour. Challenges include low frame rates, occlusions, large distortions and difficult lighting conditions. In this paper, we leverage the fact that the larger the reconstructed area, the more likely objects of similar type and shape will occur in the scene. This is particularly true for outdoor scenes where buildings and vehicles often suffer from missing texture or reflections, but share similarity in 3D shape. We take advantage of this shape similarity by localizing objects using detectors and jointly reconstructing them while learning a volumetric model of their shape. This allows us to reduce noise while completing missing surfaces as objects of similar shape benefit from all observations for the respective category. We evaluate our approach with respect to LIDAR ground truth on a novel challenging suburban dataset and show its advantages over the state-of-the-art.
Di usion in poro-plastic media

A model is developed for the ow of a slightly compressible uid through a saturated inelastic porous medium. The initial-boundary-value problem is a system that consists of the di usion equation for the uid coupled to the momentum equation for the porous solid together with a constitutive law which includes a possibly hysteretic relation of elasto-visco-plastic type. The variational form of this problem in Hilbert space is a non-linear evolution equation for which the existence and uniqueness of a global strong solution is proved by means of monotonicity methods. Various degenerate situations are permitted, such as incompressible uid, negligible porosity, or a quasi-static momentum equation. The essential su cient conditions for the well-posedness of the system consist of an ellipticity condition on the term for di usion of uid and either a viscous or a hardening assumption in the constitutive relation for the porous solid. Copyright ? 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Our Schmittian Administrative Law

TABLE OF CONTENTS I. CARL SCHMITT VERSUS THE RULE OF LAW 1098 A. Schmitt's Account of Emergencies 1098 B. The Rule of (Administrative) Law 1101 C. Two Claims 1103 1. Schmittian Administrative Law 1103 2. Schmittianism As a Matter of Degree 1105 3. Emergencies and Exemptions 1105 4. Standards Versus Grey Holes 1106 II. THE BLACK AND GREY HOLES OF ADMINISTRATIVE LAW 1106 A. Black Holes 1107 1. The Definition of "Agency" 1107 2. What Is "Agency Action"? 1109 3. Exception(s) for "Military or Foreign Affairs Functions" 1112 4. "Committed to Agency Discretion by Law" 1113 5. Other Statutes, Nonstatutory Review, and the Constitution 1115 B. Grey Holes 1118 1. "Soft Look" Review 1119 2. "Substantial Evidence" Review and the Rule of Prejudicial Error 1121 3. The "Good Cause" Exception 1122 4. Statutory Interpretation: Chevron and Chevron Avoidance 1125 (a) Chevron: Issues and Applications 1125 (b) Chevron Avoidance 1127 (c) Chevron and Constitutional Questions 1130 (d) Interpretation As an Adjustable Parameter 1131 III. WHY SCHMITTIAN ADMINISTRATIVE LAW IS INEVITABLE 1131 A. The Inevitability of Black and Grey Holes 1132 B. Of Legislators and Aspirations 1137 C. The Convergence of Ordinary and Extraordinary Law 1139 D. Statutory Authorization and Emergency Powers 1140 IV. EXTENSIONS AND SPECULATIONS 1142 A. Emergencies and the New Legal Realism 1143 B. Soft Look Review: Emergencies and Ossification 1144 C. Reverse Vermont Yankee? The Supreme Court and the Lower Courts 1146 CONCLUSION 1149 How do the Administrative Procedure Act (1) (APA) and the larger body of administrative law respond to real or perceived emergencies? I suggest that our administrative law contains, built right into its structure, a series of legal "black holes" and "grey holes. " (2) Legal black holes arise when statutes or legal rules "either explicitly exempt[] the executive from the requirements of the rule of law or explicitly exclude[] judicial review of executive action. " (3) Grey holes, which are "disguised black holes," (4) arise when "there are some legal constraints on executive action--it is not lawless void--but the constraints are so insubstantial that they pretty well permit government to do as it pleases. " (5) Grey holes thus present "the facade or form of the rule of law rather than any substantive protections. " (6) David Dyzenhaus and other theorists of the rule of law show that black holes and grey holes are best understood by drawing upon the thought of Carl Schmitt, in particular his account of the relationship between legality and emergencies. If this is so, and in this sense, my claim is that the administrative law of emergencies just is Schmittian. (7) Moreover, the existence of these black and grey holes is inevitable. …
Discovering Your Possibilities: From Risk to Resilience: Does the Discovering Your Possibilities Progarm Increase Academic Success and Resiliency in At-Risk Youth?

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether or not a school-based program designed to increase academic success and resiliency in at-risk grade 10 students met its objectives. The study sought to assess the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between academic performance, as identified by student engagement, and the intervention, and that there is no relationship between resiliency and the intervention. The study investigated two research questions. Does the intervention, the Discovering Your Possibilities (DYP) program increase students‟ academic success, as identified by student engagement: increase in attendance, decrease in lates, improved credit accumulation and increase in grade point average (GPA), and does it increase the level of resiliency of at-risk youth? What elements in the program contributed to resiliency (if any) from the perceptions of the students, and from the perceptions of the Student Success Teachers (SSTs)? An explanatory mixed methods design was used in this study as both quantitative data was collected and analyzed and qualitative data, audio interviews of students and teachers, was gathered in order to explain and expand the quantitative results. The results of this study indicate that the intervention had a positive effect on academic success for those students who participated more fully in the intervention. While the quantitative data results indicate that there is no relationship between resiliency and the intervention, the qualitative data indicates that the intervention positively affected resiliency.
Design of an I/O balancing file system on Web server clusters

The paper presents the design of an I/O balancing file system on Web server clusters. High-speed networks allow machines to access remote data nearly as quickly as they can access local data. This trend motivates the introduction of an I/O balancing mechanism into cluster file systems. Two effective approaches are issued in the paper: file migration and unique cache. The former is to migrate the files from congested nodes to those uncongested ones to balance the I/O load among the cluster system. And the latter is to integrate the memory and disk cache to form a global memory-disk file cache. It extracts the ideas of cooperative cache and file replication to improve the file system performance. Also unique cache balances the I/O load at the file cache level. We can conclude that TH-CluFS is a suitable file system for Web server clusters.
Byzantine Agreement Service for Cooperative Wireless Embedded Systems

Recently there is a number of scenarios such as vehicle platooning, UAV swarms and cooperative robots, where a group of autonomous entities needs to make joint decisions to operate effectively. Distributed agreement protocols can play a key role to establish a common view on context parameters and to coordinate joint actions. Due to the harsh environmental conditions in some of these scenarios and their safety critical nature such protocols need to tolerate arbitrary faults and even malicious attacks.This paper presents a framework for Byzantine fault tolerant agreement for small-sized groups of autonomous, wirelessly connected systems. It focuses, besides providing support for general purpose value agreement, on the agreement of distributed sensor readings. The latter enables to establish a joint view on context conditions, thereby building the basis for joint coordinated actions. As classical Byzantine fault tolerant agreement protocols require 3t + 1 participants to tolerate t faulty nodes, we also consider a hybrid fault model by utilizing a trusted subsystem, which can only be subject to crashes. The latter reduces the required group size for agreement to 2t + 1 nodes and reduces the message complexity of the protocol, which is essential for the targeted scenarios. The experiment results show that the trusted subsystem can effectively increase the efficiency.
Variability in encoding precision accounts for visual short-term memory limitations

It is commonly believed that visual short-term memory (VSTM) consists of a fixed number of “slots” in which items can be stored. An alternative theory in which memory resource is a continuous quantity distributed over all items seems to be refuted by the appearance of guessing in human responses. Here, we introduce a model in which resource is not only continuous but also variable across items and trials, causing random fluctuations in encoding precision. We tested this model against previous models using two VSTM paradigms and two feature dimensions. Our model accurately accounts for all aspects of the data, including apparent guessing, and outperforms slot models in formal model comparison. At the neural level, variability in precision might correspond to variability in neural population gain and doubly stochastic stimulus representation. Our results suggest that VSTM resource is continuous and variable rather than discrete and fixed and might explain why subjective experience of VSTM is not all or none.
Large-scale path planning for Underwater Gliders in ocean currents

Underwater gliders are a class of AUVs designed for high endurance over long distances, but their reduced velocity makes them more susceptible to ocean currents during deployment. Thus, feasible paths need to be generated through the ocean current field. This paper proposes a method for determining energy-optimal paths that account for the influence of ocean currents. The proposed technique is based on Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRTs). Using real ocean current and bathymetry data, results produce comparable paths to grid based methods, and offer an improvement in terms of avoiding high-energy shallow regions. Future work will focus on heuristically biasing the RRT growth to further improve the generated paths, and implementation of the algorithms on a glider platform.
A Retrospective Study on Genetic Heterogeneity within Treponema Strains: Subpopulations Are Genetically Distinct in a Limited Number of Positions

Background Pathogenic uncultivable treponemes comprise human and animal pathogens including agents of syphilis, yaws, bejel, pinta, and venereal spirochetosis in rabbits and hares. A set of 10 treponemal genome sequences including those of 4 Treponema pallidum ssp. pallidum (TPA) strains (Nichols, DAL-1, Mexico A, SS14), 4 T. p. ssp. pertenue (TPE) strains (CDC-2, Gauthier, Samoa D, Fribourg-Blanc), 1 T. p. ssp. endemicum (TEN) strain (Bosnia A) and one strain (Cuniculi A) of Treponema paraluisleporidarum ecovar Cuniculus (TPLC) were examined with respect to the presence of nucleotide intrastrain heterogeneous sites. Methodology/Principal Findings The number of identified intrastrain heterogeneous sites in individual genomes ranged between 0 and 7. Altogether, 23 intrastrain heterogeneous sites (in 17 genes) were found in 5 out of 10 investigated treponemal genomes including TPA strains Nichols (n = 5), DAL-1 (n = 4), and SS14 (n = 7), TPE strain Samoa D (n = 1), and TEN strain Bosnia A (n = 5). Although only one heterogeneous site was identified among 4 tested TPE strains, 16 such sites were identified among 4 TPA strains. Heterogeneous sites were mostly strain-specific and were identified in four tpr genes (tprC, GI, I, K), in genes involved in bacterial motility and chemotaxis (fliI, cheC-fliY), in genes involved in cell structure (murC), translation (prfA), general and DNA metabolism (putative SAM dependent methyltransferase, topA), and in seven hypothetical genes. Conclusions/Significance Heterogeneous sites likely represent both the selection of adaptive changes during infection of the host as well as an ongoing diversifying evolutionary process.
A Nanofibrillar Surface Promotes Superior Growth Characteristics in Cultured Human Retinal Pigment Epithelium

Background: To evaluate the influence of surface topography on the proliferation of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) by comparing nanofibrillar and smooth substrates. Methods: Electrospun polyamide nanofibers (EPN) are an engineered surface mimicking native basement membranes. Commonly used plastic (polystyrene, PS) and glass substrates have a smooth topography. All were analyzed by scanning electron microscopy. RPE cultures were established from fetal and adult donors. Growth curves were established on the above substrates. Cell cycle and growth fractions were analyzed with 5-ethynyl-2′-deoxyuridine (EdU) and 4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI). Results: At a magnification of ×5,000, EPN showed randomly overlapping fibers and pores. The surface of glass was slightly studded yet regular, in contrast to ideally smooth PS. Polygonal cells grew on nanofibers in a colony-like distribution, while randomly spread spindle-shaped cell morphologies were seen on smooth surfaces. This was observed at all donor ages. Initial proliferation rates were higher on EPN, and similar final cell densities were reached in all age groups, compared to an age-related decline on PS. EdU/DAPI revealed faster cell cycles on EPN. Growth fractions were higher and maintained longer on EPN. Observed substrate differences in growth behavior were statistically significant. Conclusion: Surface topography appears to induce distinct RPE proliferation characteristics.
An interactive, graphical coding environment for EarSketch online using Blockly and Web Audio API

This paper presents an interactive graphical programming environment for EarSketch, using Blockly and Web Audio API. This visual programming element sidesteps syntactical challenges common to learning text-based languages, thereby targeting a wider range of users in both informal and academic settings. The implementation allows seamless integration with the existing EarSketch web environment, saving block-based code to the cloud as well as exporting it to Python and JavaScript.
Excitability and inhibitability of motoneurons of different sizes.

IN A RECENT PAPER (7) data were presented which indicate that during a gradually increasing stretch of an extensor muscle in a decerebrate cat the smallest alpha motoneurons of the muscle are the first to be discharged and that larger cells are recruited in order of increasing size. Some of the possible explanations for this relationship between size and order of recruitment were discussed briefly. It was concluded tentatively that the size or surface area of a motoneuron determines its excitability and hence its responsiveness to stretch-evoked impulses. If this conclusion is correct, we may infer that size is a prime determinant of excitability throughout the nervous system; if not, the size principle may apply only to motoneurons discharging in response to stretch. Fortunately, it is possible to test the proposed explanation experimentally. If size dictates excitability, the order in which a group of cells are recruited should be the same regardless of the source of the excitation and the particular circuits involved in mediating it. On the other hand, if the organization of the recruitment in input from , the stretch stretch receptors is responsible for the order of reflex, the order shoul . d change wi th d . ifferent types of excitatory input. Experiments were therefore designed in which the relative excitabilities of motoneurons were first determined by means of stretch reflexes and then retested by * means of crossed-extension reflexes, flexor reflexes, monosynaptic reflexes, and electrical “driving” from the muscle ner ve. The relative susceptibilities of neurons of different sizes to several varieties of inhibition were also investigated to ascertain whether inhibitibility bears some regular relation to cell size.
Co-Channel Interference Cancellation for Downlink Block Transmission with Cyclic Prefix

This paper proposes co-channel interference cancellation / equalization methods for downlink block transmission with cyclic prefix in multi-cell environments using multiple receiving antennas and iterative least-square (LS) interference cancellation. Due to circulant structure of channel matrices in block transmission schemes with cyclic prefix, pseudo inverse matrices, which is required in the iterative LS method, can be obtained with low computational complexity and is multiplied to the received signal in an efficient manner. Computer simulation results show that the proposed iterative LS interference cancellation and equalization method can achieve almost the same bit error rate (BER) performance as an minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) approach with lower computational complexity and without noise variance estimation.