Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of pre-ejection period on the blood pressure estimation using pulse transit time

Owing to the prevalence of hypertension in recent decades, the non-invasive monitoring of blood pressure (BP) using pulse transit time (PTT) has been proposed for better evaluations of cardiovascular diseases. The effects of pre-ejection period (PEP) on the relationship between PTT and BP, however, have not been studied systematically. Our study was to investigate whether the inclusion of PEP in PTT measurement could improve the non-invasive BP estimation. PTTs with and without PEP inclusion were denoted as PAT and TT respectively. Linear regressions were given in the scatter plots, SBP versus PAT and TT, using least-square method. The results of this study showed that (1) only PAT changed significantly (p<0.001) when significant (p<0.001) systolic BP (SBP) change occurred and (2) the standard deviations (SD) of difference between the measured and least-square fitted SBP by PAT and TT were 5.6 mmHg and 8.6 mmHg respectively. The smaller SD of difference between measured and fitted SBP by PAT indicated an inclusion of PEP in the measurement of PTT was necessary to have an accurate PTT-based SBP estimation.
The application of modern information technologies for power monitoring and control in conditions of distributed generation

The article is devoted to modern information technologies application in power industry. In the article the structure of intelligent system of monitoring and control of power supply and consumption is proposed. The proposed system is developed for conditions of distributed generation on the basis of alternative and renewable power sources at the enterprises of raw mineral complex. The main factors and regularities which must be considered during monitoring and control of power supply and consumption are detected. The main problems which must be decided for effective functioning of power systems with distributed generation on the basis of alternative and renewable energy sources are defined. The use of wind power installations, solar power stations and micro turbine installations working on following oil gas as sources for distributed generation is proposed in the article. The necessity of use of information technologies of high-speed data transmission for monitoring and control of power supply and consumption modes for conditions of the distributed generation is proved in some publications [1] and here. The basic principles of information and control influence compiling for basic elements of proposed intelligent system are given. The basic directions of data analysis and processing during monitoring and control of power supply and consumption are detected in the area of proposed intelligent system. The actuality of necessity of complex monitoring and control of power supply and consumption is proved in conditions of distributed generation on the basis of alternative and renewable energy sources. The use of the intelligent caching satellite femtocells for mobile communication as the main technology of data transmission is proposed for monitoring and control of power supply and consumption in the conditions of the distributed generation.
Purification and Properties of Androgenic Gland Hormone from the Terrestrial Isopod Armadillidium vulgare

Abstract The androgenic gland hormone (AGH) is known to control sex differentiation in crustaceans. AGH was purified from isolated androgenic glands (AGs) of the male isopod Armadillidium vulgare by three steps of reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) and its chemical properties were examined. The purified AGH-active fraction showed masculinizing activity when 38 pg of this preparation was injected into a young female of the same species. Only 160 ng of the material was obtainable from 2000 animals at about an 11% rate of recovery. The elution of AGH activity by molecular sieve HPLC indicated that molecular weight of AGH was 11,000 ∼ 13,000. AGH was inactivated by treatment with trypsin or by reductive carboxymethylation. The AGH activity was not affected by heat treatment at 100°C for 3 min. These results indicated that AGH was a heat-stable protein with disulfide bond(s).
A Novel PF/PN Motif Inhibits Nuclear Localization and DNA Binding Activity of the ESX1 Homeoprotein

ABSTRACT Despite their significance for mammalian embryogenesis, the molecular mechanisms that regulate placental growth and development have not been well defined. The Esx1 homeobox gene is of particular interest because it is among the few regulatory genes that have specific expression and function in the placenta during murine development. In addition, the ESX1 protein contains several notable features that are not often associated with homeoproteins, including an atypical homeodomain of the paired-like class, a proline-rich region that contains an SH3 binding motif, and a novel repeat region consisting of prolines alternating with phenylalanines or asparagines that we term the PF/PN motif. We have found that the ESX1 protein is expressed in the labyrinth layer of the placenta in vivo, where its subcellular localization is primarily cytoplasmic. Our results suggest that this unexpected subcellular localization is conferred by the PF/PN motif, which inhibits nuclear localization of ESX1 in cell culture, as well as its DNA binding activity in vitro. Finally, we show that the proline-rich region of ESX1 mediates interactions in vitro with the c-abl SH3 domain as well as with certain WW domains. We propose that the PF/PN motif provides a novel mechanism for regulating nuclear entry and that the essential function of ESX1 during placental development is mediated by its ability to couple cytoplasmic signal transduction events with transcriptional regulation in the nucleus.
Bloomfish: A Highly Scalable Distributed K-mer Counting Framework

K-mer counting is a fundamental operation in DNA research and genome analytics; its application includes estimating genome assembly, understanding similarities in genomic samples, and merging a newly processed genome with a reference genome. As the genome dataset becomes larger and larger, designing a highly optimized distributed-memory implementation becomes more and more important. Current distributed-memory solutions have two limitations: they have a high memory footprint, and they do not provide advanced optimizations for loading enormous genome datasets into memory. Based on these observations, we present Bloomfish, a distributed, memory-efficient, scalable solution to the limits of current work. To keep a low memory footprint, Bloomfish leverages the compact hash array design of the single-node Jellyfish system and the optimized workflow of the high-performance MapReduce framework Mimir. We have also codesigned Mimir’s I/O to efficiently load enormous datasets. We ran Bloomfish on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer with large sequence datasets (up to 24 TB). Our results show that Bloomfish achieves unprecedented scalability in genome analytics.
Declining Home Bias and the Increase in International Risk Sharing: Lessons from European Integration

This paper provides further evidence on the recent increase in international consumption risk sharing. We show that this increase is more pronounced among EU and EMU countries than among non-E(M)U industrialised countries. We also show that the patterns of international but not intra-European risk sharing have started to diverge from what is found at the level of the OECD as a whole. During the 1990s, capital income flows have started to play a relatively more important role between European countries, whereas the increase in international risk sharing among the OECD as a whole is almost exclusively driven by better consumption smoothing through the accumulation or decumulation of foreign assets. This EMU effect on the pattern of risk sharing survives once we control for differences in international portfolio holdings: while we find that countries with higher equity cross-holdings also tend to share more risk through capital income flows there remains an independent EMU-effect on the way in which risk is shared. While it is too early to evaluate these findings conclusively, we discuss some possible interpretations and their implications for economic policy.
Divide et Impera! The Role of Firms in Large Open Source Software Consortia

Previously literature on the role of firms in open source software (OSS) development is mainly based on qualitative data and case studies rather than on proper data sets. Research has shown that firms involved in OSS development generally face the challenge to balance the tension between the wish for external knowledge and the demand for control. As it is not entirely clear how firms deal with this tension the goal of the paper is to deepen the understanding of the use of external knowledge, especially in firm-driven OSS consortia. Based on a theoretical background a research design and resulting hypotheses were developed. The data set is based on an agglomeration of a specific firm-driven community and consists of 912 committers and 116 firms organized in 109 independent projects.
The History of Annuities in the United States

This paper summarizes the development of private annuity markets in the United States. Annuities constituted a small share of the U.S. insurance market until the 1930s, when two developments contributed to their growth. First, concerns about the stability of the financial system drove investors to products offered by insurance companies, which were perceived to be stable institutions. Flexible payment deferred annuities, which permit investors to save and accumulate assets as well as draw down principal, grew rapidly in this period. Second, the group annuity market for corporate pension plans began to develop in the 1930s. The group annuity market grew more rapidly than the individual annuity market for several decades after World War II. The most recent development in the annuity marketplace has been the rapid expansion of variable annuities. These annuity products combine the investment features of mutual funds with the tax deferral available for life insurance products. Variable annuity premium payments increased by a factor of five in the most recent five years for which data are available.
Real-time music synthesis by patch-based method

This page proposed a new method to synthesize arbitrary length music sequences from a small database of music clips in real-time. The method actually is a patch-base method which is used commonly in texture synthesis of image or motion capture dates. We extracted the music patches automatically from each music clips of the training set. One music patch consisted of three parts: head, body and trail. Both the head part and the trail part were represented by the n-gram pattern feature vectors. To increase the speed of patch matching process, we employed the K-D tree structure to store the feature vectors due to its efficiency and accuracy of multi-dimension searching. Experimental results showed the proposed method is especially useful for interactive and real-time application such as background music generation for games and broadcasting.
Whole-exome sequencing identifies a novel heterozygous missense variant of the EN2 gene in two unrelated patients with autism spectrum disorder

To identify the underlying genetic cause of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we performed whole-exome sequencing in 10 unrelated Thai patients with ASD. We identified a novel heterozygous missense variant (c.425C>G, p.Pro142Arg) in the Engrailed 2 (EN2) gene in two patients. The G variant has never been reported in public databases and was absent in 100 Thai patients with ASD and 435 Thai controls. A case–control study showed that the G allele of c.425C>G was significantly associated with ASD (Fisher’s exact test, P=0.0359). In addition, the new variant was predicted to be possibly damaging to the EN2 protein by the PolyPhen-2 and FATHMM bioinformatic programs. Our findings suggest that the arginine variant of the EN2 protein may play an important role in the pathology of ASD. Therefore, EN2 protein functional studies should be carried out to determine whether the novel variant has an effect on protein expression.
BIOLOGICAL PROPERTIES AND CLASSIFICATION OF THE CAULOBACTER GROUP

INTRODUCTION. 232 OCCURRENCE OF CAULOBACTERS. 233 PROCEDURES FOR ISOLATION OF CAULOBACTERS. 233 Caulobacters From Freshwater . 234 Caulobacters From Seawater. 235 Caulobacters From Soil. 235 Caulobacters From Millipedes . 235 MAINTENANCE OF ISOLATED CAULOBACTERS . 235 SOURCES OF ISOLATED CAULOBACTERS . 235 GROSS MORPHOLOGY OF CAULOBACTERS. 236 Gross Morphology of Typical Caulobacters (Caulobacter) . 236 Gross Morphology of Excentral Caulobacters (Asticcacaulis) . 237 ILLUSTRATIONS OF GROSS MORPHOLOGY . 238 FINE STRUCTURE OF CA ULOBACTER . 238 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CELL DIVISION AND STALK DEVELOPMENT. 242 Observations on the Growth of Pure Populations of Swarmer Cells and Stalked Cells of Strain CB2. 253 Growth of Strain CB2 in Microcultures . 254 Growth of Other Isolates in Microcultures . 256 DEVELOPMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS OF FLAGELLUM, STALK, AND HOLDFAST MATERIAL. 256 THE PROPERTY OF ADHESIVENESS . 258 Rosette Formation . 258 Nature of Holdfast Material 260 Caulobacter as"Parasite". 260 Attachment to Other Bacteria-Qualitative Survey. 262 Attachment to Other Bacteria-Quantitative Experiments . 265 S. lutea as substratum. 265 Bacillus species as substrata. 265 A. agilis as substratum . 266 Attachment to Protozoa, Algae, and Yeasts. 268 CULTURAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS . 269 Growth on Solid Media. 269 Growth in Liquid Media. 269 Growth Rates. 269 Relations to Oxygen. 270 Effect of pH on Growth . 270 Effect of Temperature on Growth. 270 Antibiotic Sensitivity . 270 Inorganic Constituents of Media . 270 Organic Growth Factor Requirements. 271 Utilization of Carbon Compounds . 272 Intermediary Metabolism of Carbohydrates . 272 Reserve Materials. 273 Pigments. 274 BACTERIOPHAGES . 275
Hybrid Cloud Management: Foundations and Strategies

Adoption of cloud-based systems has been relatively modestâ€”regardless of significant marketing push by major public cloud providers. The cloud-based model utilizes distributed information technology services accessible over networks. The networks can be internal part of organizationsâ€™ infrastructureâ€”intranets, or external, such as internet or mobile networks. Utilization of internal networks and services is preferred by organizationsâ€”private clouds. External networks and services provided by public cloud providers pose significant risks. The major risks associated with public clouds are security, control and accessibility. In public clouds, valuable organizational data can be compromised and damaged by external entities. Organizations utilizing public clouds lose control over their critical data and services, while external entities gain control. Furthermore, external networks are inherently insecure, monitored and substantially less reliable than organizational intranets. Despite numerous disadvantages of public clouds, there is a potential in combining private and public cloud systemsâ€”hybrid clouds. Hybrid clouds present unique challenges and possibilities. We explore pertinent aspects of hybrid clouds and introduce suitable strategies for their effective management. Such actionable knowledge is essential for managers of information technologies.
Effects of Mondia whitei extracts on the contractile responses of isolated rat vas deferens to potassium chloride and adrenaline

Objective: To investigate the effects of the methylene chloride:methanol (CH2Cl2:MeOH, 1:1) extract of the dried roots of Mondia whitei Linn and its hexane and methanol fractions on potassium chloride (KCl) and adrenaline (Adr)-induced contractions of rat vas deferens. Materials and Methods: Isolated strips of normal adult rat vas deferens were mounted in a Ugo Basile single-organ bath containing Krebs solution. Cumulative concentration-response curves of KCl (1-7 x 10-2 M ) and adrenaline (1.21-8.45 x 10-7 M ) were established in the absence and presence of M. whitei (50-400 µg/ml). In separate experiments, after obtaining a stable plateau of contractions with KCl (60 m M ), M. whitei samples (50-400 µg/ml) were added cumulatively to relax the preparation. In KCl (60 m M ), containing depolarizing medium, cumulative concentration-contraction curve to CaCl2 (2-14 x 10-2 M ) was elicited in the absence and presence of the hexane fraction of M. whitei (50-400 µg/ml). Results: All the M. whitei samples produced rightward shift of the concentration-response curves to KCl and Adr. At high concentration of the plant extracts (400 µg/ml), a decrease of the maximal response to the contractile agents was observed compared with that obtained with the control. All the three extracts produced concentration-dependent relaxation of the plateau of contraction induced by KCl and the hexane fraction appeared to be the more potent. In calcium-free physiological salt solution, the hexane fraction of M. whitei produced rightward shift to the concentration-response curve to CaCl2 and completely abolished the contractile effect of calcium at high concentration (400 µg/ml). Conclusion: It is concluded that M. whitei extracts antagonized the contractile responses to KCl and Adr in isolated rat vas deferens, which could be due to the blockade of voltage-operated calcium channels.
Clinical Outcomes Associated with Thermal Pulsation System Treatment

Purpose To identify patient characteristics at a baseline ocular surface evaluation that correlate with improvement in dry eye symptoms at a follow-up visit after treatment with the LipiFlow Thermal Pulsation System. Methods Thirty-two patients completed a comprehensive baseline ocular surface evaluation and were treated with the LipiFlow Thermal Pulsation System followed by maintenance home therapy. Lipid layer thickness and blink pattern were determined using the LipiView Interferometer. Noninvasive tear breakup time was measured using a Medmont E300 Corneal Topographer. Slit lamp biomicroscopy was used to evaluate invasive tear breakup time and corneal staining after instillation of fluorescein dye. Conjunctival staining, location of the line of Marx, and presence of lid wiper epitheliopathy were evaluated with lissamine green dye. Meibomian gland expressibility was scored using the TearScience Meibomian Gland Evaluator, and meibography was imaged using the Oculus Keratograph. A logistic regression model was used to estimate the odds ratios for having a decreased posttreatment score (reduced symptoms) of Standard Patient Evaluation of Eye Dryness (SPEED). Results Baseline SPEED score (p = 0.01) and sex (p = 0.03) had significant odds ratios at the &agr; = 0.05 level. Baseline noninvasive tear breakup time (p = 0.07), number of grade 0 meibomian glands in the lower lid (p = 0.09), and conjunctival staining grade in the inferior region (p = 0.10) met an &agr; = 0.10 criterion for significant odds ratios, but not the typical &agr; = 0.05 criterion. Higher baseline SPEED score and male sex had greater odds for decreased posttreatment SPEED score. Conclusions Our results identified factors that better select candidates for LipiFlow Thermal Pulsation System.
Communication with www in Czech

This paper describes UIO, a multi--domain question--answering system for Czech language that looks for answers on the web. UIO exploits two fields, namely natural language interface to databases and question answering. In its current version, UIO can be used for asking questions about train and coach timetables, cinema and theatre performances, about currency exchange rates, name-days and on the Diderot Encyclopaedia. Much effort have been made into making addition of a new domain very easy. No limits concerning words or the form of a question need to be set in UIO. Users can ask syntactically correct as well as incorrect questions, or use keywords. A Czech morphological analyser and a bottom-up chart parser are employed for analysis of the question. The database of multiword expressions is automatically updated when a new item has been found on the web. For all domains UIO has an accuracy rate about 80%.
Behaviour of aggregated grey nurse sharks Carcharias taurus off eastern Australia: similarities and differences among life-history stages and sites

Stereo-video photogrammetry was used to document swimming and non-swimming behaviours of various life-history stages of the grey nurse shark Carcharias taurus at 8 east Aus- tralian aggregation sites (during daylight) in the absence of scuba diving tourism and fishers. Swimming behaviours included hovering, milling, and active swimming with significantly greater milling. Rates of movement were least during milling and greatest for active swimming. Pectoral fins were held 20 to 24° below horizontal, which was consistent with holding positions reported in shark swimming studies. Significantly lower caudal fin positions during hovering probably minimised forward propulsion. Tail-beat frequency decreased significantly with increasing total length and was likely due to greater propulsion from larger caudal fins. Low activity indicated that sharks minimised energy expenditure when aggregated, which was associated with migratory and reproductive behaviours. Significantly different pectoral fin positions among sites likely resulted from differing navigational requirements. Non-swimming behaviours were infrequent. Chafing, gill puff, head snapping and palatoquadrate protrusion were generally categorised as grooming behaviour. One gill puff sequence and all but one rapid withdrawal event were cate- gorised as 'flight'-response agonistic behaviour. The remaining rapid withdrawal and stand back were to avoid collision and categorised as swimming behaviour. The absence of 'fight'-response agonistic behaviour was consistent with previous descriptions of the species as docile. This partial ethogram will enhance ecological understanding, assist assessment and management of diving tourism, and contribute to the recovery and long-term conservation of this critically endangered species.
Multimarket Contact, Concavity, and Collusion

This dissertation consists of four self-contained essays primarily concerned with incorporating the objectives of real world top managers, as revealed by the available empirical evidence, in supergame-theoretic analyses of long-term competition between oligopolistic firms.The first essay, "Ownership, Control, and Collusion", considers how the separation between ownership and control affects firms' competitive attitudes when top managers have the preference for smooth profit streams revealed by the evidence on "income smoothing" and when managerial compensation has the low pay-performance sensitivity found in many empirical studies.In a similar fashion, the second essay, "Stock-Related Compensation and Product-Market Competition", deals with the effects of the apparently more aggressive managerial incentives linked to stock price (e.g. stock options), which have become increasingly common in the U.S., on long-term oligopolistic competition.In the third paper, "Debt as a (Credible) Collusive Device", shareholders’ commitments to reduce conflicts with debtholders by choosing a top manager with a highly valuable reputation or with "conservative" incentives are considered. These forms of commitment have been shown to reduce the (agency) cost of debt finance; this paper characterizes their effects on the relation between firms' capital structure and product market competition.The fourth paper, "Multimarket Contact, Concavity, and Collusion", addresses the relation between multimarket contact and firms’ ability to sustain collusive behavior in repeated oligopolies. It explores how this relation is affected by the strict concavity of firms’ objective function induced by managerial objectives and by other features of reality, discusses the effects of conglomeration and horizontal mergers, and extends the results to non-oligopolistic supergames.