Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Limits to sustained energy intake. XIV. Heritability of reproductive performance in mice

SUMMARY Limits to sustained energy intake (SusEI) are important because they constrain many aspects of animal performance. Individual variability in SusEI may be imposed by genetic factors that are inherited from parents to offspring. Here, we investigated heritability of reproductive performance in MF1 mice. Food intake, milk energy output (MEO) and litter mass were measured in mothers (F0) and daughters (F1) that were raising litters of 10 pups. Cross-fostering was designed so that half of each litter consisted of biological offspring and the rest came from one unrelated female (i.e. fostered pups). Food intake increased linearly during early lactation and reached a plateau during late lactation (day 9–13, called the asymptotic food intake, FIAS, equivalent to SusEI). Parent–offspring regression showed that FIAS, MEO and litter mass were all positively and significantly related between mothers and their biological daughters, but no significant relationships were found between the same traits for mothers and fostered daughters. FIAS at peak lactation was significantly correlated to adult food intake and body mass when the mice were 6 months old and not lactating. In conclusion, a large part of the variation in FIAS could be explained by genetic variation or maternal effects in pregnancy whereas non-genetic maternal effects in lactation were negligible. As a consequence, biological daughters of mothers with high reproductive performance (i.e. high milk production and hence higher litter mass at weaning) had a better reproductive performance themselves, independent of the mother that raised them during lactation.
Polo-like kinase is required for Golgi and bilobe biogenesis in Trypanosoma brucei

A bilobed structure marked by TbCentrin2 regulates Golgi duplication in the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei. This structure must itself duplicate during the cell cycle for Golgi inheritance to proceed normally. We show here that duplication of the bilobed structure is dependent on the single polo-like kinase (PLK) homologue in T. brucei (TbPLK). Depletion of TbPLK leads to malformed bilobed structures, which is consistent with an inhibition of duplication and an increase in the number of dispersed Golgi structures with associated endoplasmic reticulum exit sites. These data suggest that the bilobe may act as a scaffold for the controlled assembly of the duplicating Golgi.
Homomorphic processing techniques for near-infrared images

The images of objects in total darkness can be captured using a relatively low cost camcorder with the NightShot/spl reg/ function. However, the resulting images exhibit non-uniformity due to irregular illumination. We investigate the characteristics of and propose an image formation model for near-infrared images. A homomorphic processing technique built upon the image model is then developed to reduce the artifact of the captured images. We discuss how the parameters of the homomorphic filter should be selected and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image processing technique with experimental results.
Extraction of Chemical Kinetics Insights with Special CSP Data

The following are interesting questions for any chemical reaction system of interest: in any time epoch, which reactions are already exhausted, and which reactions are currently dormant? Which reactions are currently rate-controlling? For each reaction, which chemical species are the major participants and which are the minor participants? Are there chain-branching processes going on? What happens if some of the kinetic rate parameters were wrong? We shall show how insightful answers to these and other questions can be obtained by inspection of CSP-derived equations and analytical formulas.
Insulin resistance is a cellular antioxidant defense mechanism

We know a great deal about the cellular response to starvation via AMPK, but less is known about the reaction to nutrient excess. Insulin resistance may be an appropriate response to nutrient excess, but the cellular sensors that link these parameters remain poorly defined. In the present study we provide evidence that mitochondrial superoxide production is a common feature of many different models of insulin resistance in adipocytes, myotubes, and mice. In particular, insulin resistance was rapidly reversible upon exposure to agents that act as mitochondrial uncouplers, ETC inhibitors, or mitochondrial superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) mimetics. Similar effects were observed with overexpression of mitochondrial MnSOD. Furthermore, acute induction of mitochondrial superoxide production using the complex III antagonist antimycin A caused rapid attenuation of insulin action independently of changes in the canonical PI3K/Akt pathway. These results were validated in vivo in that MnSOD transgenic mice were partially protected against HFD induced insulin resistance and MnSOD+/− mice were glucose intolerant on a standard chow diet. These data place mitochondrial superoxide at the nexus between intracellular metabolism and the control of insulin action potentially defining this as a metabolic sensor of energy excess.
“Expresses-an-opinion-about”: using corpus statistics in an information extraction approach to opinion mining

We present a technique for identifying the sources and targets of opinions without actually identifying the opinions themselves. We are able to use an information extraction approach that treats opinion mining as relation mining; we identify instances of a binary "expresses-an-opinion-about" relation. We find that we can classify source-target pairs as belonging to the relation at a performance level significantly higher than two relevant baselines. This technique is particularly suited to emerging approaches in corpus-based social science which focus on aggregating interactions between sources to determine their effects on socio-economically significant targets. Our application is the analysis of information technology (IT) innovations. This is an example of a more general problem where opinion is expressed using either sub- or supersets of expressive words found in newswire. We present an annotation scheme and an SVM-based technique that uses the local context as well as the corpus-wide frequency of a source-target pair as data to determine membership in "expresses-an-opinion-about". While the presence of conventional subjectivity keywords appears significant in the success of this technique, we are able to find the most domain-relevant keywords without sacrificing recall.
Leveraging model-based study designs and serial micro-sampling techniques to understand the oral pharmacokinetics of the potent LTB4 inhibitor, CP-105696, for mouse pharmacology studies

Abstract 1. Leukotriene B4 (LTB4) is a proinflammatory mediator important in the progression of a number of inflammatory diseases. Preclinical models can explore the role of LTB4 in pathophysiology using tool compounds, such as CP-105696, that modulate its activity. To support preclinical pharmacology studies, micro-sampling techniques and mathematical modeling were used to determine the pharmacokinetics of CP-105696 in mice within the context of systemic inflammation induced by a high-fat diet (HFD). 2. Following oral administration of doses > 35 mg/kg, CP-105696 kinetics can be described by a one-compartment model with first order absorption. The compound’s half-life is 44–62 h with an apparent volume of distribution of 0.51–0.72 L/kg. Exposures in animals fed an HFD are within 2-fold of those fed a normal chow diet. Daily dosing at 100 mg/kg was not tolerated and resulted in a >20% weight loss in the mice. 3. CP-105696’s long half-life has the potential to support a twice weekly dosing schedule. Given that most chronic inflammatory diseases will require long-term therapies, these results are useful in determining the optimal dosing schedules for preclinical studies using CP-105696.
Glucagon-like peptide 1 increases secretory burst mass of pulsatile insulin secretion in patients with type 2 diabetes and impaired glucose tolerance.

The insulinotropic gut hormone glucagon-like peptide (GLP)-1 increases secretory burst mass and the amplitude of pulsatile insulin secretion in healthy volunteers without affecting burst frequency. Effects of GLP-1 on secretory mechanisms in type 2 diabetic patients and subjects with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) known to have impaired pulsatile release of insulin have not yet been studied. Eight type 2 diabetic patients (64+/-9 years, BMI 28.9+/-7.2 kg/m2, HbA1c 7.7+/-1.3%) and eight subjects with IGT (63+/-10 years, BMI 31.7+/-6.4 kg/m2, HbA1c 5.7+/-0.4) were studied on separate occasions in the fasting state during the continued administration of exogenous GLP-1 (1.2 pmol x kg(-1) x min(-1), started at 10:00 P.M. the evening before) or placebo. For comparison, eight healthy volunteers (62+/-7 years, BMI 27.7+/-4.8 kg/m2, HbA1c 5.4+/-0.5) were studied only with placebo. Blood was sampled continuously over 60 min (roller-pump) in 1-min fractions for the measurement of plasma glucose and insulin. Pulsatile insulin secretion was characterized by deconvolution, autocorrelation, and spectral analysis and by estimating the degree of randomness (approximate entropy). In type 2 diabetic patients, exogenous GLP-1 at approximately 90 pmol/l improved plasma glucose concentrations (6.4+/-2.1 mmol/l vs. placebo 9.8+/-4.1 mmol/l, P = 0.0005) and significantly increased mean insulin burst mass (by 68%, P = 0.007) and amplitude (by 59%, P = 0.006; deconvolution analysis). In IGT subjects, burst mass was increased by 45% (P = 0.019) and amplitude by 38% (P = 0.02). By deconvolution analysis, insulin secretory burst frequency was not affected by GLP-1 in either type 2 diabetic patients (P = 0.15) or IGT subjects (P = 0.76). However, by both autocorrelation and spectral analysis, GLP-1 prolonged the period (lag time) between subsequent maxima of insulin concentrations significantly from approximately 9 to approximately 13 min in both type 2 diabetic patients and IGT subjects. Under placebo conditions, parameters of pulsatile insulin secretion were similar in normal subjects, type 2 diabetic patients, and IGT subjects based on all methodological approaches (P > 0.05). In conclusion, intravenous GLP-1 reduces plasma glucose in type 2 diabetic patients and improves the oscillatory secretion pattern by amplifying insulin secretory burst mass, whereas the oscillatory period determined by autocorrelation and spectral analysis is significantly prolonged. This was not the case for the interpulse interval determined by deconvolution. Together, these results suggest a normalization of the pulsatile pattern of insulin secretion by GLP-1, which supports the future therapeutic use of GLP-1-derived agents.
Rational Unified Process for Systems Engineering Part 1 : Introducing RUP SE Version 2 . 0

Editor's Note: The IBM Rational Unified Process,® or RUP,® offers software development organizations a framework for streamlining all activities related to the development lifecycle. Since its formal debut in 1996, RUP has evolved to support a variety of development requirements, including "systems engineering," or SE. In 2001, the first RUP Plug-In to support systems engineering was proposed by Rational Software's strategic services organization. The RUP SE v1 Plug-In was made generally available in 2002, and it continues to be supported by the newly created IBM Rational brand services team.
MC-RANSAC: A Pre-processing Model for RANSAC using Monte Carlo method implemented on a GPU

RANSAC is a repeating hypothesize-and-verify procedure for parameter estimation and filtering of noise or outlier data. In the traditional approach, this algorithm is evaluated without any prior information on the set of data points which leads to an increase in the number of iterations and compute time. In this paper, we present a GPU based RANSAC algorithm with pre-processing of the assumed sample set of hypothetical inliers by Monte Carlo method. Based on our implementation and results using the Point Cloud Library and NVIDIA CUDA framework for data intensive tasks we obtain significant improvement in the performance of plane segmentation algorithm over the randomly sampled subset of hypothetical inliers. The final consensus set is formed with less number of iterations using our pre-processing model. We can conclude that a pre-processed sample set of hypothetical inliers results in a faster determination of the consensus set consisting of maximum inliers.
The use of support groups in the treatment of cancer : an interactional approach

This study addresses the importance of studies of human psychoneuroimmunology in understanding the role of psychological factors in cancer. Research trends in psychosocial aspects of cancer are reviewed, exploring the role of distress and the support group as an intervention which potentially reduces distress through enhancing interpersonal relationships, emotional adjustment and communication with health professionals, in these ways helping the patient to cope with the symptoms of treatment. In South Africa, most hospitals which treat cancer patients medically do not simultaneously have support groups for the newly diagnosed patient to join in order to discuss immediate fears and acquire more knowledge about their particular disease. Following an experimental cancer support group involving patients who had recently undergone a bone marrow transplant (some considerable time after their first cancer diagnosis) in Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital, the researcher, as one of the participants in the fortnightly meetings convened to dicuss psychosocial issues related to each patient's experience of the cancer and transplant process, transferred the themes, concepts and questions that arose in that scenario, to a cancer clinic in Pretoria where recently diagnosed patients were asked to volunteer to participate in such a group. It was felt that these patients would derive some benefit early in their treatment programme. Psychosocial concerns are left to the individual patient to seek therapy should it be required. Presently, it is reported in the body of knowledge about cancer, that interventions aimed at alleviating the psychosocial distress of cancer '· ' patients highlight hypnosis, guided imagery and relaxation therapy. It is contended that a more appropriate intervention for the majority of people with cancer in South Africa would entail a fellow-patient support group meeting on a regular basis.
The cooperative web: a complement to the semantic web

The Web is a colossal document repository that is nowadays processed by humans only. The machines' role is just to transmit and display the contents, barely being able to do something else. The Semantic Web tries to change this status so that software agents can manipulate the semantic contents of the Web. There are some technologies proposed for this task that facilitate the definition of ontologies and the semantic markup of documents based on those ontologies. However, although the Semantic Web can be very useful in fields such as e-business, digital libraries or knowledge management inside corporate intranets, it is difficult to apply to the global Web. We propose a different, although complementary, approach: The Cooperative Web. With this approach, it would be possible to extract semantics from the Web without the need of ontological artifacts. Besides, the experience of the users would also be leveraged.
An exploration of the impact of external experiences upon the evolving sense of self.

Aim of the research: To explore the psychological impact that the London Bombings may have had on young Asian men living in London. Method: Ten participants aged between 19 and 32 were interviewed about their experiences in the aftermath of the London Bombings. Semi-structured interviews were employed so that there was some flexibility in the interview process with regards to the information that was elicited. Three of these participants were Muslim, three were Hindu, three were Sikh and one had no religion. The data was analysed utilising Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Analysis: The analysis revealed eleven super-ordinate themes: 1) Initial reactions to the bombings, 2) Reflecting upon societal impact, 3) Perceptions within British society, 4) Feelings towards Muslims as a result of the bombings, 5) Fear/Threat, 6) Other key emotions, 7) The media, 8) Connections, links, associations, 9) Dimensions that influence identity / sense of self, 10) Ways of coping and 11) Making new meaning of one’s existence. The commonalities as well as the differences in participants’ accounts were highlighted and the links between the super-ordinate themes were identified. Four main areas seemed to be most prevalent in the themes: the issues that the participants had around defining their sense of self and their identity, the experience of covert discrimination, the coping mechanisms they employed and the long-term implications of the stress reactions felt by the participants. Conclusions: The analysis results suggest that, at least for the men involved in this study, the London bombings have had consequences on the everyday lives of Asian men and the way that they view their world. It became apparent that they felt that even though they were still the same people internally (and their beliefs about life had not changed), others’ perceptions of them had changed. This could have long-term psychological implications for their sense of self and identity in relation to their experiences of covert discrimination in the aftermath of the bombings. There could also be long-term consequences in relation to the coping mechanisms that the men had utilised in the aftermath of the London Bombings and the stress reactions experienced. The implications for Counselling Psychology are discussed and suggestions for future research are highlighted.
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) Auctions

A VCG auction (named after their inventors Vickrey, Clarke, and Groves) is a generalization of the single-good, second price Vickrey auction to the case of a combinatorial auction (multiple goods, from which any participant can bid on each possible combination). We formalize in this entry VCG auctions, including tie-breaking and prove that the functions for the allocation and the price determination are well-defined. Furthermore we show that the allocation function allocates goods only to participants, only goods in the auction are allocated, and no good is allocated twice. We also show that the price function is non-negative. These properties also hold for the automatically extracted Scala code.
Cloud versus in-house cluster: Evaluating Amazon cluster compute instances for running MPI applications

The emergence of cloud services brings new possibilities for constructing and using HPC platforms. However, while cloud services provide the flexibility and convenience of customized, pay-as-you-go parallel computing, multiple previous studies in the past three years have indicated that cloud-based clusters need a significant performance boost to become a competitive choice, especially for tightly coupled parallel applications. In this work, we examine the feasibility of running HPC applications in clouds. This study distinguishes itself from existing investigations in several ways: 1) We carry out a comprehensive examination of issues relevant to the HPC community, including performance, cost, user experience, and range of user activities. 2) We compare an Amazon EC2-based platform built upon its newly available HPC-oriented virtual machines with typical local cluster and supercomputer options, using benchmarks and applications with scale and problem size unprecedented in previous cloud HPC studies. 3) We perform detailed performance and scalability analysis to locate the chief limiting factors of the state-of-the-art cloud based clusters. 4) We present a case study on the impact of per-application parallel I/O system configuration uniquely enabled by cloud services. Our results reveal that though the scalability of EC2-based virtual clusters still lags behind traditional HPC alternatives, they are rapidly gaining in overall performance and cost-effectiveness, making them feasible candidates for performing tightly coupled scientific computing. In addition, our detailed benchmarking and profiling discloses and analyzes several problems regarding the performance and performance stability on EC2.
Planning with Loops: Some New Results

In AI planning, there has been an increasing interest in solving a class of problems, rather than individual problems, with a generalized notion of “plan. ” One such generalization is plans with loops, i.e. programlike plans, whose execution on a specific problem in the class results in a sequential plan. Levesque’s KPLANNER falls into this paradigm: it generates robot programs, a type of loopy plan, that solves a range of parametrized planning problems. In this paper, we build on that work, and propose another plan representation along with a novel planning algorithm. We show that the new plan representation is more general than robot programs, and the new planner more efficient than KPLANNER.
Structural Characterization and Antioxidant Activities of Polysaccharides Extracted from the Pulp of Elaeagnus angustifolia L.

In this study, two polysaccharides (Elaeagnus angustifolia L. polysaccharide-1 (PEA-1) and PEA-2) were prepared from Elaeagnus angustifolia L. Then, the preliminary structure and antioxidant activities of all the samples were investigated. The results showed that the average molecular weights for PEA-1 and PEA-2 were 9113 and 5020 Da, respectively. And, PEA-1 was mainly composed of rhamnose, xylose, mannose, glucose, and galactose, respectively. The components of PEA-2 were rhamnose, mannose, glucose, and galactose, respectively. Moreover, the Antioxidant assays demonstrated that PEA-1 possessed of strong free radicals scavenging activity and hydroxyl radicals scavenging activities, suggesting that PEA-1 could potentially be used as natural antioxidant.
Micropower wireless sensors

This paper describes circuit architectures and techniques to meet the specialized requirements of energyautonomous micro-sensor nodes. We address the fundamental components, namely the ADC, DSP, and radio, at the node-level to isolate important optimizations and functions. Using prototyped implementations, low energy and power-aware circuits are presented. These, state-of-the-art techniques demonstrate that practical self-powered nodes are possible.
Adherence to ARRIVE Guidelines in Chinese Journal Reports on Neoplasms in Animals

Background The Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments (ARRIVE) guidelines were published in 2010 with the aim of improving the quality of studies involving animals. However, how well Chinese studies involving animal neoplasms adhere to these guidelines has not been assessed. Objective To evaluate the reporting quality of such experiments published between 2010 and 2012 in Chinese journals with support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Methods We searched the Chinese Science Citation and Chinese Journal Full-Text Databases for articles published between 2010 and 2012 involving neoplasms in animals. The data were extracted into pre-prepared forms. Reporting quality was assessed using the ARRIVE checklist—39 items plus information on blinding. Results Three hundred and ninety-six animal studies were included in the analysis: 127 studies published in 2010, 140 studies published in 2011, and 129 studies published in 2012. The range of ARRIVE score is from 12 to 27 with a maximum possible score of 40. Studies published in 2012 (P = 0.012), 2011 (P = 0.015), 2010, July~Dec (P<0.017) had a significantly larger ARRIVE checklist score than those published in Jan.~June, 2010, respectively. Conclusions Experiments involving neoplasms in animals published in Chinese journals generally have not comprehensively reported the information recommended by the ARRIVE guidelines. We strongly recommend that researchers conducting such studies report this information.