Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Ethyl Acetate Fraction of Moringa oleifera Lam. Inhibits Human Macrophage Cytokine Production Induced by Cigarette Smoke

Moringa oleifera Lam. (MO) has been reported to harbor anti-oxidation and anti-inflammatory activity and useful in the treatment of inflammatory diseases. However, despite these findings there has been little work done on the effects of MO on immune cellular function. Since macrophages, TNF and related cytokines play an important pathophysiologic role in lung damage induced by cigarette smoke, we examined the effects of MO on cigarette smoke extract (CSE)—induced cytokine production by human macrophages. An ethyl acetate fraction of MO (MOEF) was prepared from fresh leaves extract of Moringa and shown to consist of high levels of phenolic and antioxidant activities. Human monocyte derived macrophages (MDM) pre-treated with varying concentrations of MOEF showed decreased production of TNF, IL-6 and IL-8 in response to both LPS and CSE. The decrease was evident at both cytokine protein and mRNA levels. Furthermore, the extract inhibited the expression of RelA, a gene implicated in the NF-κB p65 signaling in inflammation. The findings highlight the ability of MOEF to inhibit cytokines (IL-8) which promote the infiltration of neutrophils into the lungs and others (TNF, IL-6) which mediate tissue disease and damage.
The number of colors perceived by dichromats when appreciating art paintings under standard illuminants

Centro de Fisica of Minho University, Braga, Portugal, by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (grants POSC/EEA-SRI/57554/2004 and POCTI/EAT/55416/2004). Joao M.M. Linhares was partially supported by grant SFRH / BD / 35874 / 2007
Comparison of Extended Lexicon Models in Search and Rescoring for SMT

We show how the integration of an extended lexicon model into the decoder can improve translation performance. The model is based on lexical triggers that capture long-distance dependencies on the sentence level. The results are compared to variants of the model that are applied in reranking of n-best lists. We present how a combined application of these models in search and rescoring gives promising results. Experiments are reported on the GALE Chinese-English task with improvements of up to +0.9% BLEU and -1.5% TER absolute on a competitive baseline.
Language Model Adaptation through Shared Linear Transformations

Language model (LM) adaptation is an active area in natural language processing and has been successfully applied to speech recognition and to many other applications. To provide fine-grained probability adaptation for each n-grams, we in this work propose three adaptation methods based on shared linear transformations: n-gram-based linear regression, interpolation, and direct estimation. Further, in order to address the problem of data sparseness, n-grams are clustered and those in the same cluster group are made to share the same adaptation parameters. We carry out evaluation experiments on a domain adaptation task with limited adaptation data. The experimental results show that the best LM after our adaption method can reduce the perplexity by half compared with the baseline LM without adaptation, and that it also achieves a perplexity reduction of 15% compared with the earlier state-of-the-art LM adaptation methods. The speech recognition experimental results show that the proposed LM adaptation method reduces the WER by 20.8% compared with the baseline LM without adaptation.
Sustainability, virtue ethics, and the virtue of harmony with nature

This article argues that the dominant sustainable development approach fails to acknowledge the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of social and environmental issues, and that sustainability requires a ‘transformational’ approach, involving a fundamental change in how humans relate to each other and to nature. The authors propose that virtue ethics, grounded in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, provides a framework with which to tackle such a transformation; to redress the human-nature relationship and help foster a more ecological perspective; to facilitate a more holistic and integrative view of sustainability; and to explore questions of how to live and flourish within a more sustainable world. Beginning with an overview of virtue ethics and critique of current approaches in environmental virtue ethics, this article proposes a new virtue, ‘harmony with nature’, that addresses the interconnectedness of our relationship with nature. This is followed by a proposal for the re-visioning of human flourishing as being necessarily situated within nature. The article concludes with some of the implications of a virtue ethics approach to sustainability, and the new virtue, for both sustainability education and moral education.
Inter-Frame Information Transfer Via Projection Onto Convex Set for Video Deblurring

We study the problem of interpolating blurred frames from their adjacent sharp frames using optical flow for video camera anti-shake deblurring post-processing. A new method is proposed that alternatively projects the resulting image onto two convex sets: an observed constraint set in the spatial domain and a detail constraint set in the wavelet domain. Experiments show that, it is effective for diversified scenes under various illumination conditions.
Have Child Protection Efforts Reduced Child Homicides? An Examination of Data from Britain and North America

Duncan Lindsey is an Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy and Social Research, Department of Social Welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his undergraduate training at the University of California and his doctorate at Northwestern University. He was a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University in the Social Systems Research Program. Recently he was a Pro fessor at the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto and a visiting scholar at the Child Welfare Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. He is Editor-in-Chief of Children and Youth Services Review (Pergamon Press), author of a recent book with Oxford University Press entitled The Welfare of Children, and editor of a book series entitled Child Welfare published by Oxford University Press.
Crystal structure of 3-(morpholin-4-yl)-1-phenyl-3-(pyridin-2-yl)propan-1-one

In the title compound C18H20N2O2, the morpholine ring adopts a chair conformation with the exocyclic N—C bond in an equatorial orientation. The N atom of the morpholine ring and the C atom of the carbonyl group are in an anti conformation about the central C—C bond [torsion angle = −162.92 (11)°] and the dihedral angle between the planes of the benzene ring and the pyridine ring is 83.30 (5)°. In the crystal, pairs of very weak C—H⋯π interactions link the molecules into inversion dimers.
Measuring cluster peculiar velocities with the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect: scaling relations and systematics

The fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) intensity due to the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect are the sum of a thermal and a kinetic contribution. Separating the two components to measure the peculiar velocity of galaxy clusters requires radio and microwave observations at three or more frequencies, and knowledge of the temperature T e of the intracluster medium (ICM) weighted by the electron number density. To quantify the systematics of this procedure, we extract a sample of 117 massive clusters at redshift z = 0 from an N-body hydrodynamical simulation, with 2 x 480 3 particles, of a cosmological volume 192 h -1 Mpc on a side of a flat cold dark matter model with Ω 0 = 0.3 and Ω Λ = 0.7. Our simulation includes radiative cooling, star formation and the effect of feedback and galactic winds from supernovae. We find that: (i) our simulated clusters reproduce the observed scaling relations between X-ray and SZ properties; (ii) bulk flows internal to the ICM affect the velocity estimate by less than 200 km s -1 in 93 per cent of the cases; (iii) using the X-ray emission weighted temperature, as an estimate of T e , can overestimate the peculiar velocity by 20-50 per cent, if the microwave observations do not spatially resolve the cluster. For spatially resolved clusters, the assumptions on the spatial distribution of the ICM, required to separate the two SZ components, still produce a velocity overestimate of 10-20 per cent, even with an unbiased measure of T e . Thanks to the large size of our cluster samples, these results set a robust lower limit of ∼200 km s -1 to the systematic errors that will affect upcoming measures of cluster peculiar velocities with the SZ effect.
LLLl lattice-basis reduction achieves the maximum diversity in MIMO systems

Diversity order is an important measure for the performance of different communication systems over MIMO fading channels. In this paper, we define the preceding diversity for the fixed-rate MIMO broadcast systems and we prove that in these systems, lattice-reduction-aided preceding achieves the preceding diversity. Also, we prove that lattice-reduction-aided decoding achieves the receive diversity in MIMO point-to-point and multiple-access systems
RTX toxin genotypes and phenotypes in Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae field strains

Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae serotype reference strains and 204 A. pleuropneumoniae field strains representing all 12 serotypes and both biovars 1 and 2, obtained from laboratories from various countries worldwide, were analyzed for the presence of the toxin genes apxIC, apxIA, apxIB, apxID, apxIIC, apxIIA, apxIIIC, apxIIIA, apxIIIB, and apxIIID by DNA-DNA hybridization with specific gene probes. Expression of the toxins ApxI, ApxII, and ApxIII was assessed by immunoblot analysis with monoclonal antibodies. The results show that the patterns of apx genes and those of the expressed Apx toxins in biovar 1 field strains are the same as those of the genes and toxins of corresponding serotype reference strain. We found only three strains which had certain apx genes missing compared with the genes in their serotype reference strains. Analysis of the expression of the three toxins showed that nearly all strains expressed their apx genes and produced the same Apx toxins as their serotype reference strain. We found only one strain that did not produce ApxI, although it contained the apxICABD genes, and one strain which did not express ApxII but which contained apxIICA. Several field strains which initially showed that their serotype did not correspond to the apx gene profile of the reference strain and which had an unexpected virulence for the given serotype revealed that their initial serotyping was erroneous. We show that the apx gene profiles are inherent to a given serotype. The method cannot differentiate between all 12 serotypes. However, it allowed us to distinguish five groups of toxin gene patterns which showed pathological, toxicological, and epidemiological significance. None of the biovar 2 strains contained apxIII genes. The apxI and apxII genes in the biovar 2 strains, however, were the same as those found in the serotype reference strains of biovar 1.
System Level Distributed Cooperative Design of Media SoC Using Application Profiling

Heterogeneous multi-core architectures of System-on-Chip can support various embedded real-time applications well. SoC design is very complex for multi-fields experts to collaborate on application analysis, system decision and hw/sw co-design. However, existing SoC design methods and environments can only support human-computer interaction, ignoring the collaboration interaction between multi-field experts. This paper presents a collaborative approach of media SoC design using application profiling. We create a distributed collaborative design environment for system decision engineers, software designers, hardware designers and application developers. The method not only utilizes the advantages of application profiling for SoC design, but also pro-vides a framework for multi-field experts to work collaboratively. Experimental results show that the method effectively improves the quality and speed of media SoC design.
Value-Based Notification Conditions in Large-Scale Publish/Subscribe Systems

We address the problem of providing scalable support for subscriptions with personalized value-based notification conditions in wide-area publish/subscribe systems. Notification conditions can be fine-tuned by subscribers, allowing precise and flexible control of when events are delivered to the subscribers. For example, a user may specify that she should be notified if and only if the price of a particular stock moves outside a "radius" around her last notified value. Naive techniques for handling notification conditions are not scalable. It is challenging to share subscription processing and notification dissemination of subscriptions with personalized value-based notification conditions, because two subscriptions may see two completely different sequences of notifications even if they specify the same radius. We develop and experimentally evaluate scalable processing and dissemination techniques for these subscriptions. Our approach uses standard network substrates for notification dissemination, and avoids pushing complex application processing into the network. Compared with other alternatives, our approach generates orders of magnitude lower network traffic, and incurs lower server processing cost.
On the stabilization of permanently excited linear systems

We consider control systems of the type x̃ = Ax+α(t)ub, where u ∈ R, (A; b) is a controllable pair and α is an unknown time-varying signal with values in [0; 1] satisfying a permanent excitation condition of the kind ∫<sup>t+T</sup><inf>t</inf> ε ≥ μfor 0 ≪ μ ≤ T independent on t. We prove that such a system is stabilizable with a linear feedback depending only on the pair (T; μ) if the real part of the eigenvalues of A is non positive. The stabilizability does not hold in general for matrices A whose eigenvalues have positive real part. Moreover, the question of whether the system can be stabilized with an arbitrarily large rate of convergence gives rise to a bifurcation phenomenon in dependence of the parameter μ/T.
"Chaque Professeur a Son Chien et son Assistant": Micro-Patriarchal Organization Violations in Academia

This article uses stories to explore the concept of micro-patriarchal organization violations and the emotional character of those violations. The stories are those of three women academics, who work for Portuguese universities, and they illustrate how women accommodate to micro-patriarchal organization violations by buffering, suppressing, and/or neutralizing undesired feelings and emotions. The study shows that women’s agency is marked by both advancements and setbacks in defying the male statu quo, and this is the case because women’s actions have to be understood as nonreflexive concerning the (un)intended consequences of the doing of gender. As an unintended side effect, all of the women in the study seem self-estranged from true emotions.
Gene structure of the Helicobacter pylori cytotoxin and evidence of its key role in gastric disease

The gram negative, microaerophilic bacterium Helicobacter pylori colonizes the human gastric mucosa and establishes a chronic infection that is tightly associated with atrophic gastritis, peptic ulcer, and gastric carcinoma. Cloning of the H. pylori cytotoxin gene shows that the protein is synthesized as a 140-kD precursor that is processed to a 94-kD fully active toxin. Oral administration to mice of the purified 94-kD protein caused ulceration and gastric lesions that bear some similarities to the pathology observed in humans. The cloning of the cytotoxin gene and the development of a mouse model of human gastric disease will provide the basis for the understanding of H. pylori pathogenesis and the development of therapeutics and vaccines.
[Culture, isolation and identification of new bunyavirus in African green monkey kidney(Vero) cells].

OBJECTIVE To culture, isolate and identify new bunyavirus in Vero cell line. METHODS Samples of 164 new bunyavirus positive by real time RT-PCR detection and well preserved serum specimens were selected from cases of fever, thrombocytopenia and leukopenia syndrome (FTLS) in Xinyang, Henan province in 2009 - 2011. These sera were cultured in Vero cell line and new bunyavirus were detected by observing cytopathic effect (CPE), Real-time RT-PCR, indirect immunofluorescence assay (IFA) and thin-section electron microscopy observation. A total of 10 positive PCR products were selected randomly for sequencing and the results were compared with sequence in Genbank. RESULTS Among 164 FTLS serum specimens cultured in Vero cell line, no special CPE were observed and 67 strains (40.85%) were positive detected by Real-time RT-PCR. Nucleic acid similarity of 10 specimens were 97.8% - 100% and there's also a high similarity (> 99%) between specimens and new bunyavirus isolates (Accession No. HQ141600.1). Among 67 positive strains, 58 of them showed specific fluorescence particles by IFA. The viral particles were observed to be spheres with a diameter of 80 - 100 nm by electron microscopy. CONCLUSION Vero cell line is suitable for culture, isolation and identification of new bunyavirus.
Quality Pain Management in Adult Hospitalized Patients: A Concept Evaluation.

AIM To explore the concept of quality pain management (QPM) in adult hospitalized patients. BACKGROUND Pain is common in hospitalized patients, and pain management remains suboptimal in some settings. DESIGN A concept evaluation based on Morse et al.'s method. DATA SOURCE Of more than 5,000 articles found, data were restricted to 37 selected key articles published in peer-reviewed journals. REVIEW METHODS Data were extracted from the selected articles and then synthesized according to the following: definition, characteristics, boundaries, preconditions, and outcomes. RESULTS QPM relates to the Structure: organizationally supported evidence-based policies, competent staff, interprofessional and specialized care, and staff accountability; PROCESS screening, assessment/reassessment and communication of pain and its treatment, patient/family education, individualized evidence-based treatment, embedded in safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable services; and OUTCOMES reduced pain severity and functional interference, decreased prevalence/severity of adverse consequences from pain or pain treatment, and increase in patient satisfaction. CONCLUSIONS QPM is a multifaceted concept that remains poorly defined in the literature. Studies should aim to develop valid, reliable, and operational measures of the pillars of QPM and to look at the relationship among these factors. Authors need to state how they define and what aspects of QPM they are measuring.
Wireless Multicast for Zoomable Video Streaming

Zoomable video streaming refers to a new class of interactive video applications, where users can zoom into a video stream to view a selected region of interest in higher resolutions and pan around to move the region of interest. The zoom and pan effects are typically achieved by breaking the source video into a grid of independently decodable tiles. Streaming the tiles to a set of heterogeneous users using broadcast is challenging, as users have different link rates and different regions of interest at different resolution levels. In this article, we consider the following problem: Given the subset of tiles that each user requested, the link rate of each user, and the available time slots, at which resolution should each tile be sent, to maximize the overall video quality received by all users. We design an efficient algorithm to solve this problem and evaluate the solution on a testbed using 10 mobile devices. Our method is able to achieve up to 12dB improvements over other heuristic methods.
Factored Language Model based on Recurrent Neural Network

Among various neural network language models (NNLMs), recurrent neural network-based language models (RNNLMs) are very competitive in many cases. Most current RNNLMs only use one single feature stream, i.e., surface words. However, previous studies proved that language models with additional linguistic information achieve better performance. In this study, we extend RNNLM by explicitly integrating additional linguistic information, including morphological, syntactic, or semantic factors. Our proposed RNNLM is called a factored RNNLM that is expected to enhance RNNLMs. A number of experiments are carried out that show the factored RNNLM improves the performance for all considered tasks: consistent perplexity and word error rate (WER) reductions. In the Penn Treebank corpus, the relative improvements over n-gram LM and RNNLM are 29.0% and 13.0%, respectively. In the IWSLT-2011 TED ASR test set, absolute WER reductions over RNNLM and n-gram LM reach 0.63 and 0.73 points. Title and Abstract in another language (Chinese) a a•”� ²d{{O O£aOUUn n
Mining the Web to Determine Similarity Between Words, Objects, and Communities

The World Wide Web provides a wealth of data that can be harnessed to help improve information retrieval and increase understanding of the relationships between different entities. In many cases, we are often interested in determining how similar two entities may be to each other, where the entities may be pieces of text, descriptions of some object, or even the preferences of a group of people. In this work, we examine several instances of this problem, and show how they can be addressed by harnessing data mining techniques applied to large web-based data sets. Specifically, we examine the problems of: (1) determining the similarity of short texts– even those that may not share any terms in common, (2) learning similarity functions for semi-structured data to address tasks such as record linkage between objects, and (3) measuring the similarity between on-line communities of users as part of a recommendation system. While we present rather different techniques for each problem, we show how measuring similarity between entities in all these domains has a direct application to the overarching goal of improving information access for users of web-based systems.
Illusory Stimuli Can Be Used to Identify Retinal Blind Spots

Background Identification of visual field loss in people with retinal disease is not straightforward as people with eye disease are frequently unaware of substantial deficits in their visual field, as a consequence of perceptual completion (“filling-in”) of affected areas. Methodology We attempted to induce a compelling visual illusion known as the induced twinkle after-effect (TwAE) in eight patients with retinal scotomas. Half of these patients experience filling-in of their scotomas such that they are unaware of the presence of their scotoma, and conventional campimetric techniques can not be used to identify their vision loss. The region of the TwAE was compared to microperimetry maps of the retinal lesion. Principal Findings Six of our eight participants experienced the TwAE. This effect occurred in three of the four people who filled-in their scotoma. The boundary of the TwAE showed good agreement with the boundary of lesion, as determined by microperimetry. Conclusion For the first time, we have determined vision loss by asking patients to report the presence of an illusory percept in blind areas, rather than the absence of a real stimulus. This illusory technique is quick, accurate and not subject to the effects of filling-in.