Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endothelial progenitor cells: new hope for a broken heart.

Mr S. is a 62-year-old restaurant owner who has had recurrent stable angina that has not improved despite maximal medical therapy and an earlier coronary bypass. On angiography, Mr S. has diffusely diseased coronary vessels and is no longer considered a candidate for further direct revascularization. An alternative treatment strategy for revascularizing ischemic tissue is therefore required. One potential strategy, therapeutic neovascularization, aims to promote the formation of natural bypasses or collaterals within the ischemic tissue by harvesting the potential of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs). This From Bench to Bedside article will explore the current concept of an EPC, the role EPCs play in neovascularization, the strategies used to maximize EPC number and function, the experimental and clinical evidence supporting EPC utility, and the future direction of EPC research. See p 2995 Progenitor cells are primitive bone marrow (BM) cells that have the capacity to proliferate, migrate, and differentiate into various mature cell types. EPCs, in particular, possess the ability to mature into the cells that line the lumen of blood vessels.1 The first evidence indicating the presence of EPCs in the adult circulation emerged when mononuclear blood cells from healthy human volunteers were shown to acquire an endothelial cell–like phenotype in vitro and to incorporate into capillaries in vivo.2 These putative EPCs were characterized via expression of CD34 and vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 (VEGFR-2), 2 antigens shared by embryonic endothelial progenitors, and hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Subsequent studies confirmed that CD34+ cells isolated from BM or umbilical cord blood also had the capacity to differentiate into mature endothelial cells.3–5 However, both CD34 and VEGFR-2 are expressed on mature endothelial cells.6 Thus, the search for more unique EPC markers continued. In addition to CD34, early hematopoietic progenitor cells express CD133 (AC133), which is not …
Social Norms, Local Interaction, and Neighborhood Planning

This paper examines optimal social linkage when each individual's repeated interaction with each of his neighbors creates spillovers. Individuals differ across rates of time preference. A planner must choose a local interaction system or neighborhood design before observing the realization of these rates. Given the planner's choice of design and a realization of discount factors, each individual plays a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game with his neighbors. We introduce the concept of a local trigger strategy equilibrium (LTSE) to describe a stationary sequential equilibrium in which, for any realization of discount factors, each individual conditions his cooperation on the cooperation of at least one "acceptable" group of neighbors. The presence of impatient types implies that some free riding may be tolerated in equilibrium. When residents' discount factors are known to the planner, the optimal design exhibits a cooperative "core" and an uncooperative "fringe. " Uncooperative (impatient) types are connected to cooperative ones who tolerate their free riding so that social conflict is kept to a minimum. By contrast, when residents' discount factors are independently distributed, the optimal design partitions individuals into maximally connected cliques (e.g., cul-de-sacs). In that case, each person's cooperation decision becomes a pure local public good. Finally, if types are correlated, then incomplete graphs with small overlap (e.g., grids) are possible.
Non-factoid Question Answering Experiments at NTCIR-6: Towards Answer Type Detection for Realworld Questions

In this paper, we investigate the answer type detection methods for realizing the Universal Question Answering (UQA), which returns an answer for any given question. For this purpose, the questions collected from a WWW question portal community site were analyzed to see how many kinds of questions were submitted in the real world. Then, we introduce the approach for UQA and proposed two methods for the answer type detection. The experimental evaluation using the NTCIR QAC4 test collection showed that the method using one binary classifier that detected the consistency between the types of the given question and the answer candidates was effective.
Extraction of Elusive Information from Text

This paper reports on techniques for extending Information Extraction capabilities beyond the recognition, tagging, and extraction of entities, events, and the relations amongst them that are reported in text to capture and represent the subtler aspects of content, whether in narratives, factual reports, or opinion pieces. As statements in text often exhibit subjective colorations that can be detected, analyzed, and interpreted by NLP algorithms for presentation to users for a more accurate understanding of what might otherwise be represented as straightforward information. This paper focuses on the temporal, certainty, and affective aspects, each of which have shown promise for greater sophistication in terms of what Information Extraction systems can glean from text.
Beyond the Divide: Boundaries for Patterning and Stem Cell Regulation in Plants

The initiation of plant lateral organs from the shoot apical meristem (SAM) is closely associated with the formation of specialized domains of restricted growth known as the boundaries. These zones are required in separating the meristem from the growing primordia or adjacent organs but play a much broader role in regulating stem cell activity and shoot patterning. Studies have revealed a network of genes and hormone pathways that establish and maintain boundaries between the SAM and leaves. Recruitment of these pathways is shown to underlie a variety of processes during the reproductive phase including axillary meristems production, flower patterning, fruit development, and organ abscission. This review summarizes the role of conserved gene modules in patterning boundaries throughout the life cycle.
Secure Auctions Without Cryptography (extended version)

An auction is a simple way of selling and buying goods. Modern auction protocols often rely on complex cryptographic operations to ensure manifold security properties such as bidder-anonymity or bid-privacy, non-repudiation, fairness or public verifiability of the result. This makes them difficult to understand for users who are not experts in cryptography. We propose two physical auction protocols inspired by Sako's cryptographic auction protocol. In contrast to Sako's protocol, they do not rely on cryptographic operations, but on physical properties of the manipulated mechanical objects to ensure the desired security properties. The first protocol only uses standard office material, whereas the second uses a special wooden box. We validate the security of our solutions using ProVerif.
Formal Modeling and Verifications of Deadlock Prevention Solutions in Web Service Oriented System

Competitions of shared web resources have been widely concerned today. Under the circumstances of networks, especially in distributed systems, central supervisor can hardly be implemented, which makes it more complicated to prevent deadlock problems. This paper describes the competitions of web services for shared web resources using CSP method. Deadlocks can be analyzed based on the formal model by means of the trace semantics. The capability of deadlock prevention solutions which have been applied in industry can be proved theoretically under this approach. Moreover, the FDR which is a model checking tool for CSP can be used to automate the verifications.
Exponential stability of periodic solutions for inertial Cohen-Grossberg-type BAM neural networks with time delays

Abstract: The paper is concerned with the existence and global exponential stability of periodic solutions for inertial Cohen-Grossberg-type BAM neural networks with time delays. With variable transformation the system is transformed to first order differential equations. Some new sufficient conditions ensuring the existence and global exponential stability of periodic solutions for the system are derived by constructing suitable Lyapunov functions, using Weierstrass criteria and boundedness of the solutions. Finally, an example is given to demonstrate the obtained results.
Sensorless Predictive Peak Current Control for Boost Converter Using Comprehensive Compensation Strategy

For a sensorless predictive-peak-current-controlled boost converter, the output voltage steady-state error cannot be eliminated by voltage loop PI controller. The basic cause for this is investigated through analysis and theoretical approaches. To eliminate the voltage steady-state error and achieve high-accuracy current estimation, a comprehensive compensation strategy is proposed. First, a compensation algorithm for output voltage sampling is introduced. It can not only effectively eliminate the output voltage steady-state error but also guarantee current observer convergence. The compensation schemes for component parasitic parameter effects and switching delay are also investigated. With this comprehensive compensation strategy, both the system transient response and current estimation accuracy are greatly improved. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by experimental results.
A role for the histone variant HTZ1 in meiotic chromosome segregation

In Eukaryotic cells, the packaging of genomic DNA into chromatin has important consequences for all DNA-dependent transactions. Chromatin structure is highly regulated by a variety of complex processes that are not well understood. These include nucleosome remodeling and post-translational modification of histone proteins (Dunn & Kingston, 2007; Kouzarides, 2007; Workman, 2006). An additional mechanism for chromatin regulation is the replacement of conventional histones with specific non-allelic variants. H2AZ, a highly conserved variant of histone H2A, is of particular interest because it is essential for viability in multicellular organisms and it has been implicated in many distinct and even contradictory functions. Despite extensive evidence implicating H2AZ in maintenance of genome stability, centromere structure and function, and chromosome segregation, a role for H2AZ in meiosis has not been investigated. The budding yeast Saccaromyces cerevisiae, a classical model for cell division studies, constitutes a highly amenable system in which to approach this question. In this study, deletion of the S. cerevisiae H2AZ homologue, Htz1, resulted in classical meiotic defect phenotypes such as reduced sporulation efficiency, impaired spore viability, and displayed a reduced ability to progress through meiosis. Htz1 deletion strains also showed an increase in chromosome nondisjunction during both meiosis I and II and premature sister chromatid separation during meiosis I. These results suggest a novel role for H2AZ in regulating meiotic chromosome segregation and possibly in centromeric protection and kinetochocore co-orientation and further illustrate how defects in H2AZ function may contribute to human diseases such as cancer. Thesis Supervisor: Laurie A. Boyer Title: Assistant Professor of Biology
System-Level Performance and Power Optimization for MPSoC

As the number of IPs in a multimedia Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) continues to increase, concurrent memory accesses from different IPs increasingly stress memory systems, which presents both opportunities and challenges for future MPSoC design. The impact of such requirements on the system-level design for MPSoC is twofold. First, contention among IPs prolongs memory access time, which exacerbates the persisting memory wall problem. Second, longer memory accesses lead to longer IP stall time, which results in unnecessary leakage waste. In this article, we propose two memory access-aware system-level design approaches for performance and leakage optimization. To alleviate the memory wall problem, we propose a Hierarchical Memory Scheduling (HMS) policy that schedules memory requests from the same IP and application consecutively to reduce interference among memory accesses from different IPs with a fairness guarantee. To reduce IP leakage waste due to long memory access, we propose a memory access-aware power-gating policy. A straightforward power-gating approach is to power gate an IP when it needs to fetch data from memory. However, due to the response time variation among memory accesses, aggressively power gating an IP whenever a memory request occurs may result in incorrect power-gating decisions. The proposed memory access-aware power-gating policy makes these decisions judiciously, based on the predicted memory latency of an individual IP and its energy breakeven time. The experimental results show that the proposed HMS memory scheduling policy improves system throughput by 42% compared to First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) and by 21% compared to First-Ready First-Come-First-Serve (FR-FCFS) on an MPSoC for mobile phones. For the improvement of fairness, HMS improves fairness by 1.52× compared to FCFS and by 1.23× compared to FRFCFS. In the aspect of leakage optimization, our memory access-aware power-gating mechanism improves energy savings by 3.88× and reduces the performance penalty by 70% compared to conventional timeout-based power gating. We further demonstrate that our HMS memory scheduler can regulate memory access orders, thereby reducing memory response time variation. This leads to more accurate power-down decisions for both conventional timeout power gating and the proposed memory access- aware power gating.
An Aggregation-Based Algebraic Multigrid Method for Power Grid Analysis

This paper develops an aggregation-based algebraic multigrid (AbAMG) method to efficiently analyze the power grids. Different from the conventional algebraic multigrid (AMG) scheme, an innovative constructing method of global inter-grid mapping operator is employed to not only enhance the sparsity of coarse grid operator for reducing the computational complexity but also solve the problem with better convergent rate. The proposed method can solve the circuit with size over two millions in 167.6 CPU seconds (including DC analysis, and transient analysis with 50 time steps), and the maximum error is less than 1%. The significant runtime improvement, over 26times faster than the InductWise (Chen et al., 2003) and over 1.25times faster than the conventional AMG method, and less memory usage, 40% of the memory usage in (Chen et al., 2003) are demonstrated
Approximation techniques for indexing two-dimensional constraint databases

Constraint databases have recently been proposed as a powerful framework to model and retrieve spatial data. The use of constraint databases should be supported by access data structures that make effective use of secondary storage and reduce query processing time. In this paper, we consider the indexing problem for objects represented by conjunctions of two-variable linear constraints and we analyze the problem of determining all generalized tuples whose extension intersects or is contained in the extension of a given half-plane. In an earlier paper we have shown that both selection problems can be reduced to a point location problem by using a dual transformation. If the angular coefficient of the half-plane belongs to a predefined set, we have proved that a dynamic optimal indexing solution, based on B/sup +/-trees, exists. In this paper we propose two approximation techniques that can be used to find the result when the angular coefficient does not belong to the predefined set. We also experimentally compare the proposed techniques with R-trees.
The overnight rate of interest under averaged reserve requirements: Some theoretical aspects and the finnish experience

Averaging the reserve requirement is often considered an efficient way to reduce volatility at the very short end of the money market yield curve.The Bank of Finland began to apply an averaging provision at the beginning of October 1995.Notably, the volatility of the overnight rate of interest in the Finnish money markets has increased since the start of the averaging scheme.This paper builds up a simple model of the determination of the overnight rate of interest.The effects of both the averaging scheme and the central bank's reaction to the bids it receives in money market tenders are evaluated against the model.The paper ends with an evaluation of the empirical evidence from the first two years that have passed since the introduction of the averaging provision in Finland. Keywords: money market tenders, minimum reserves, liquidity, averaging, convexity, interest rate volatility
The low-mass stellar-mass functions of rich, compact clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Context. The LMC is an ideal environment for studying stellar MFs, because it contains a large population of compact clusters at different evolutionary stages. We aim to obtain constraints on the initial MFs (IMFs) of our sample clusters on the basis of their present-day MFs, combined with our understanding of their dynamical and photometric evolution. Aims. We use Hubble Space Telescope photometry for six rich, compact star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), with ages ranging from 0.01 to 1.0 Gyr, to derive the clusters' stellar mass functions (MFs) at their half-mass radii. Methods. We derived the clusters' present-day MFs below 1.0 $M_{\odot}$ using deep observations with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and updated stellar population synthesis models. Results. Since the relaxation timescales of low-mass stars are very long, dynamical evolution will not have affected the MFs below 1.0 $M_{\odot}$ significantly, so that – within the uncertainties – the derived MFs are consistent with the solar-neighbourhood IMF, at least for the younger clusters. The IMF in the low-density, low-metallicity environment of the LMC disk is not significantly different from the IMF in the solar neighbourhood.
9 Structure Based Design of Cholera Toxin Antagonists Č

Cholera is an acute enteric infection, with huge pandemic potential, caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, the gram negative bacteria (Sack, Sack et al. 2004). The etiologic agent responsible for cholera was identified in 1883 when Robert Koch demonstrated that comma(-shaped) bacteria, later designated as V. cholerae, causes cholera infection (Koch 1884). Since Koch's discovery of cholera virulent factor, different specific strain variants of V. cholerae have been identified. For the majority of cholera's disease outbreaks two biotypes of V. cholerae'sserogroup O1 are responsible: Clasical and “El Tor”, as well serogroup O139 that was responsible for a large epidemic in Bangladesh and India (Ramamurthy, Garg et al. 1993). Non-O1 and non-O139 V. cholerae can cause mild diarrhoea but do not generate epidemics (Ramamurthy, Bag et al. 1993). Cholera transmission is closely related to inadequate environmental conditions that can be find in suburban slums where the basic infrastructure is not available, as well as in camps for internally displaced people or refugees, where minimum requirements of clean water and sanitation are not met. A typical example of such non-promising situation has induced an outbreak of Cholera after earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 (Andrews and Basu 2011). The short incubation period of two hours to five days, enhances the potentially explosive pattern of outbreaks. Intensive efforts for the identification of the basis of Cholera disease at a molecular level were done by different research groups during the 1960s, until Finkelstein and co-workers recognized a protein toxin as a major virulent factor that causes the massive fluid release in Cholera infection (Finkelstein, Atthasampunna et al. 1966). The efforts to solve a complete structure of Cholera toxin by X-ray diffraction analysis were concluded during the 1990s (Spangler 1992; Zhang, Scott et al. 1995). Up to date, 27 X-ray structures related to Cholera toxin (CT) are deposited in the Protein Databank. The structure and function of CT at the molecular level will be the subject of our review. In this work we will also show some examples of structure based design of various types of CT inhibitors; we will introduce catechin-like compounds as inhibitors of the enzymatic A unit of CT; mimics of oGM1 as inhibitors of the non-toxic pentamer of B subunits of CT (CTB); as well as multivalent inhibitors that very effectively prevent adhesion of CTB to GM1 receptors at the surface of epithelial cells. At the end, we will also describe a new strategy for developing inhibitors via targeting binding site for blood group antigens in Cholera Toxin.
A Hierarchical Concept Learner

A common problem for spatial navigation agents is quick adaption to changes in the environment. One approach is to use hypothetical look-ahead. This involves a \spreading activation" search along chains of rules from a given state to goal states. The bene-ts of this approach in learning speed and adaption have been demonstrated by both Learning Classiier systems and systems based on Q-Learning. For this approach to be feasible in realistic environments, abstract models are required. Learning Classiier systems (LCSs) typically use a genetic algorithm to discover abstract rules which may destroy rule chains by removing rules with low strength. This paper introduces an approach which discovers rules without using a genetic algorithm. The aim of the system is to develop chains of abstract rules capable of supporting hypothetical look-ahead. The system is based on principles of LCSs, such as their hybrid connectionist/rule-based approach, but uses a Boolean Network to represent its environment. The generalisation capabilities of this Boolean Network system are demonstrated on several concept learning problems. In some cases, the predictive performance of the network is better than that of some other, well-known, algorithms.
Some million thresholds: Nonlinearity and cross-country growth regressions

This paper examines the robustness of the determinants of economic growth in cross-country regressions allowing for nonlinearity in the specification of the data generating process. The nonlinearity is modelled as regime-dependent parameter heterogeneity, where the regime is determined by the level of the explanatory variable whose robustness we aim to measure. Using a generalization of the procedure in Sala-i-Martin (American Economic Review, 1998´7), strong evidence of nonlinearity is found for practically all of the variables that are robustly correlated to growth in the linear setting, including those variables which are usually included in most cross-county growth regressions.
Credit, liquidity and market risk in the term structure of swaps in pesetas

Este trabajo analiza empiricamente el efecto que la publicacion del beneficio anual tiene sobre el valor de mercado y el volumen de negociacion de las acciones admitidas a cotizacion en el mercado bursatil espanol para el periodo 1999-2001. Se examina la relacion existente entre los cambios en los volumenes alrededor del anuncio y los cambios en el precio de las acciones asi como la sensibilidad del volumen anormal al signo de las rentabilidades anormales acumuladas, ademas de las diferentes caracteristicas de las empresas como determinantes de los cambios en la negociacion alrededor del anuncio.
Study of fully-automatic red-eye removal algorithm

“Red-eye effect” is a phenomenon that when a flashgun is used, the center of pupils appears unnaturally reddish. The automatic red-eye removal system can detect and correct red-eye automatically without manual intervention. First, faces are detected using Face Detection based on AdaBoost Algorithm, then the red-eyes are located using kinds of image processing method. At last the located red-eyes are finished corrected. The experimental results indicate that, the system can remove the red-eye automatically and effectively in the digital photo and has good robustness and rapidity.