Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transient flow-induced crystallization of a polyethylene melt

Extensional, flow-induced crystallization (FIC) of a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) melt has been studied using a four-roll mill flow cell. Simultaneous measurement of the birefringence and scattering dichroism are used to quantify the crystallization process during and following transient flow deformation in planar extensional flow. Suspension of the HDPE phase as a droplet in a linear low-density polyethylene carrier phase prevents die blockage on crystallization and allows measurement of the flow kinematics. Initial crystallization rates following a transient flow deformation show a stress-strain dependence. Crystallization induction times during flow correlate with the extension rate during the transient flow deformation. Measurement of the HDPE melt steady and oscillatory flow rheological properties, along with measurements of time constants following step-shear and extensional strains, allow determination of the viscoelastic properties which enhance FIC. Parameters obtained from these experiments are used in a phenomenological model for FIC which allows qualitative and semiquantitative analysis of the data trends, particularly the relaxation behavior of the birefringence during flow cessation/crystallization.
The Effect of Slider Geometry on the Performance of a Powder Lubricated Bearing

The experimental investigation was carried out for dry contact tribosystems to elucidate the ascertained, yet uncharacterized, relationship between the coefficient of friction, η and apparent contact geometry in sliders. This paper presents the results of various experimentally evaluated slider pad width to length ratios, B/L (L is signified with direction of motion), while maintaining the unit loading constant. The empirical data is intended to provide guidance in design and in theoretical prediction of optimum bearing geometry for solid/powder lubricated systems. In this experiment, a liquid lubricant, two different dry powders (MoS2 and TiO2), and four test specimens with B/L ratios ranging from 0.5 to 2.0 were used. An alternative experimental method has been used to simulate wear debris in the dry contact tribosystems, vis-a-vis dry powders, which were introduced into the interface gap to address the affinity of the wear process. Slider pads' performance characteristics as a function of the applied l.
Cost-effectiveness of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase inhibitors in the secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease: forecasting the incremental benefits of preventing coronary and cerebrovascular events.

OBJECTIVE To forecast the long-term benefits and cost-effectiveness of lipid modification in the secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. METHODS A validated model based on data from the Lipid Research Clinics cohort was used to estimate the benefits and cost-effectiveness of lipid modification with 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins) based on results from the Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study (4S), including a 35% decrease in low-density-lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol levels and an 8% increase in high-density-lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol levels. After comparing the short-term outcomes predicted for the 4S with the results actually observed, we forecast the long-term risk of recurrent myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, transient ischemic attacks, arrhythmias, and strokes and the need for surgical procedures such as coronary artery bypass grafting, catheterization, angioplasty, and pacemaker insertions. Outpatient follow-up care costs were estimated, as were the costs of hospital care and drug therapy. All costs were expressed in 1996 US dollars. RESULTS The short-term outcomes predicted for the 4S were consistent with the observed results. The long-term benefits of lipid modification among low-risk subjects (normotensive nonsmokers) with a baseline LDL/ HDL ratio of 5 but no other risk factors ranged from $5424 to $9548 per year of life saved for men and $8389 to $13747 per year of life saved for women. In high-risk subjects (hypertensive smokers) with an LDL/HDL ratio of 5, the estimated costs ranged from $4487 to $8532 per year of life saved in men and $5138 to $8389 per year of life saved in women. Assuming that lipid modification has no effect on the risk of stroke, cost-effectiveness increased by as much as 100%. CONCLUSIONS These long-term cost estimates are consistent with the short-term economic analyses of the published 4S results. The long-term treatment of hyperlipidemia in secondary prevention is forecasted to be cost-effective across a broad range of patients between 40 and 70 years of age. Recognizing the additional effects of lipid changes on cerebrovascular events can substantially improve the cost-effectiveness of treating hyperlipidemia.
Designing a Long Acting Erythropoietin by Fusing Three Carboxyl-Terminal Peptides of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin β Subunit to the N-Terminal and C-Terminal Coding Sequence

A new analog of EPO was designed by fusing one and two CTPs to the N-terminal and C-terminal ends of EPO (EPO-(CTP)3), respectively. This analog was expressed and secreted efficiently in CHO cells. The in vitro test shows that the activity of EPO-(CTP)3 in TFI-1 cell proliferation assay is similar to that of EPO-WT and commercial rHEPO. However, in vivo studies indicated that treatment once a week with EPO-(CTP)3 (15 μg/kg) dramatically increased (~8 folds) haematocrit as it was compared to rHuEPO. Moreover, it was found that EPO-(CTP)3 is more effective than rHuEPO and Aranesp in increasing reticulocyte number in mice blood. The detected circulatory half-lives of rHuEPO, Aranesp, and EPO-(CTP)3 following IV injection of 20 IU were 4.4, 10.8, and 13.1 h, respectively. These data established the rational for using this chimera as a long-acting EPO analog in clinics. The therapeutic efficacy of EPO-CTP analog needs to be established in higher animals and in human clinical trials.
Person re-identification in multi-camera networks

In this paper, we present an approach for person re-identification in multi-camera networks. This approach employs the Implicit Shape Model and SIFT features for person re-identification. One important property of the re-identification approach is that it is closely coupled to a person detection and tracking and uses SIFT feature models which are built during the tracking. We hold this coupling to be an important point because re-identification depends on models that are to be acquired during tracking. These models are then used to re-identify a person when it reappears in the system's field of view. Re-identification itself is performed in a 3-staged approach which allows for efficient re-identification and is perfectly suited for distributed processing where bandwidth concerns are relevant. We show that this re-identification approach — which was formerly only evaluated for single camera person re-identification can be successfully applied to the task of multi-camera re-identification. Evaluation in a challenging real-world multi-camera scenario shows that the generic approach which does not use color or other sensor specific features and thus is applicable independently of such sensor specifics — shows performance at least comparable to specialized state-of-the-art approaches.
Influence of the LPC Filter Upon the Perception of Breathiness and Vocal Effort

According to the source-filter paradigm, the perception of breathiness and vocal effort should be primarily controlled by the glottal source and be little affected by the formant filter. This experiment investigates whether the formant filter estimated by linear prediction (LPC) can influence the perception of breathiness and vocal effort. The experiment starts with a pair of voice samples. One sample exhibits high effort and the other sample exhibits breathiness. LPC estimates a filter and residual for each sample. The influence of the residual is eliminated by providing both filters with the same artificial source during resynthesis. The synthesized samples differ only according to the difference between the two filters. Three pairs of samples were evaluated by seven people in listening tests. The results demonstrate that the LPC filters do influence the perception of breathiness and vocal effort. When a voice changes between breathiness and vocal effort, the spectral envelope changes. This change is captured by the LPC filter rather than the residual. A closer look at the LPC algorithm provides an explanation for this result
Towards the design of a platform for abuse detection in OSNs using multimedial data analysis

Online social networks (OSNs) are becoming increasingly popular every day. The vast amount of data created by users and their actions yields interesting opportunities, both socially and economically. Unfortunately, these online communities are prone to abuse and inappropriate behaviour such as cyber bullying. For victims, this kind of behaviour can lead to depression and other severe problems. However, due to the huge amount of users and data it is impossible to manually check all content posted on the social network. We propose a pluggable architecture with reusable components, able to quickly detect harmful content. The platform uses text-, image-, audio- and video-based analysis modules to detect inappropriate content or high risk behaviour. Domain services aggregate this data and flag user profiles if necessary. Social network moderators need only check the validity of the flagged profiles. This paper reports upon key requirements of the platform, the architectural components and important challenges.
Morphological and Rheological Properties of Polyamide 6/Poly(propylene)/Organoclay Nanocomposites

Summary: Polyamide 6 (PA6)/Poly(propylene) (PP)/organoclay (octadecylamine intercalated montmorillonite) systems with and without compatibilizer (maleated poly(propylene) and ethylene/propylene-based rubber (PPgMA and EPRgMA, respectively)) were produced by extrusion melt blending and the clay dispersion was characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The rheological behaviour of the nanocomposites was determined by various methods, viz melt flow index (MFI), capillary and plate/plate rheological measurements. Attempts were made to trace the rheological parameters that reliably reflect the observed changes in the clay dispersion. It was found that some parameters in the viscoelastic range derived from frequency sweep measurements using a plate/plate rheometer are a suitable indicator for changes in the clay dispersion. High initial viscosity with a strong reduction as a function of frequency was attributed to improved clay exfoliation. The latter was also reflected by a high initial shear storage modulus (G′) along with its small change with the frequency. Variation of the storage modulus (G′) as a function of frequency for the PA6/PP nanocomposites. Note: this figure also indicates how the slopes at low and high shear rates were determined.
An Early Description of the Gerstmann Syndrome

IN 1924 Josef Gerstmann described “finger agnosia,” an apparently hitherto unrecognized behavioral deficit appearing as a consequence of cerebral disease.l In this and subsequent papers, he called attention to the frequent association of finger agnosia with right-left disorientation, dyscalculia, and d y ~ g r a p h i a . ~ ~ ~ His observations were soon confirmed by other investigators, and the tetrad of symptoms has come to be known as the Gerstmann syndrome. While right-left disorientation, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia were phenomena that had long been familiar to clinicians, it is generally believed that finger agnosia, that is, the inability to localize fingers subjected to tactual stimulation or to name or otherwise indicate them upon verbal command, was not known before the appearance of Gerstmann’s communication. This impression is not altogether correct. In 1888 the French ophthalmologist, Jules Badal, published a detailed case report4 describing a female patient who, during a considerable period of study following severe eclampsia characterized by edema, convulsions, coma, and anemia, showed a variety of behavioral deficits including finger agnosia and the other elements of the Gerstmann syndrome. Other deficits, sometimes considered to be associated with the syndrome, such as constructional apraxia and spatial and temporal disorientation, were also present. Badal’s case report was evidently not unknown to neurologists 50 years ago. In a monograph published in 1898 Pick quoted rather extensively from it, and in a communication ten years later he referred to it as “the well known case of Badal. ”jV6 However, this early contribution appears to have been overlooked in recent years, for it is not mentioned in the reasonably complete historical surveys included in current mon~graphs. ~-l~ Hence, it seems worthwhile to recall attention to this once “well known” case report, both as a matter of intrinsic historical interest and because it poses a problem which is still unsettled.
Online Support Program for Parents of Children With a Chronic Kidney Disease Using Intervention Mapping: A Development and Evaluation Protocol

Background The care for children with a chronic kidney disease (CKD) is complex. Parents of these children may experience high levels of stress in managing their child’s disease, potentially leading to negative effects on their child’s health outcomes. Although the experienced problems are well known, adequate (online) support for these parents is lacking. Objective The objective of the study is to describe the systematic development of an online support program for parents of children with CKD, and how this program will be evaluated. Methods Intervention Mapping (IM) was used for the development of the program. After conducting a needs assessment, defining program objectives, searching for theories, and selecting practical applications, the online program e-Powered Parents was developed. e-Powered Parents consist of three parts: (1) an informative part with information about CKD and treatments, (2) an interactive part where parents can communicate with other parents and health care professionals by chat, private messages, and a forum, and (3) a training platform consisting of four modules: Managing stress, Setting limits, Communication, and Coping with emotions. In a feasibility study, the potential effectiveness and effect size of e-Powered Parents will be evaluated using an explorative randomized controlled trial with parents of 120 families. The outcomes will be the child’s quality of life, parental stress and fatigue, self-efficacy in the communication with health care professionals, and family management. A process evaluation will provide insight in parents’ experiences, including their experienced level of support. Results Study results are expected to be published in the summer of 2016. Conclusions Although the development of e-Powered Parents using IM was time-consuming, IM has been a useful protocol. IM provided us with a systematic framework for structuring the development process. The participatory planning group was valuable as well; knowledge, experiences, and visions were shared, ensuring us that parents and health care professionals support the program. Trial Registration Dutch Trial Registration: NTR4808; www.trialregister. nl (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6cfAYHcYb)
Raising the Bar for Using GPUs in Software Packet Processing

Numerous recent research efforts have explored the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) as accelerators for software-based routing and packet handling applications, typically demonstrating throughput several times higher than using legacy code on the CPU alone. In this paper, we explore a new hypothesis about such designs: For many such applications, the benefits arise less from the GPU hardware itself as from the expression of the problem in a language such as CUDA or OpenCL that facilitates memory latency hiding and vectorization through massive concurrency. We demonstrate that in several cases, after applying a similar style of optimization to algorithm implementations, a CPU-only implementation is, in fact, more resource efficient than the version running on the GPU. To "raise the bar" for future uses of GPUs in packet processing applications, we present and evaluate a preliminary language/compiler-based framework called G-Opt that can accelerate CPU-based packet handling programs by automatically hiding memory access latency.
A fully automatic evolutionary classification of protein folds: Dali Domain Dictionary version 3

The Dali Domain Dictionary (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/dali/domain) is a numerical taxonomy of all known structures in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The taxonomy is derived fully automatically from measurements of structural, functional and sequence similarities. Here, we report the extension of the classification to match the traditional four hierarchical levels corresponding to: (i) supersecondary structural motifs (attractors in fold space), (ii) the topology of globular domains (fold types), (iii) remote homologues (functional families) and (iv) homologues with sequence identity above 25% (sequence families). The computational definitions of attractors and functional families are new. In September 2000, the Dali classification contained 10 531 PDB entries comprising 17 101 chains, which were partitioned into five attractor regions, 1375 fold types, 2582 functional families and 3724 domain sequence families. Sequence families were further associated with 99 582 unique homologous sequences in the HSSP database, which increases the number of effectively known structures several-fold. The resulting database contains the description of protein domain architecture, the definition of structural neighbours around each known structure, the definition of structurally conserved cores and a comprehensive library of explicit multiple alignments of distantly related protein families.
Signal detection and noise suppression using a wavelet transform signal processor: application to ultrasonic flaw detection

The utilization of signal processing techniques in nondestructive testing, especially in ultrasonics, is widespread. Signal averaging, matched filtering, frequency spectrum analysis, neural nets, and autoregressive analysis have all been used to analyze ultrasonic signals. The Wavelet Transform (WT) is the most recent technique for processing signals with time-varying spectra. Interest in wavelets and their potential applications has resulted in an explosion of papers; some have called the wavelets the most significant mathematical event of the past decade. In this work, the Wavelet Transform is utilized to improve ultrasonic flaw detection in noisy signals as an alternative to the Split-Spectrum Processing (SSP) technique. In SSP, the frequency spectrum of the signal is split using overlapping Gaussian passband filters with different central frequencies and fixed absolute bandwidth. A similar approach is utilized in the WT, but in this case the relative bandwidth is constant, resulting in a filter bank with a self-adjusting window structure that can display the temporal variation of the signal's spectral components with varying resolutions. This property of the WT is extremely useful for detecting flaw echoes embedded in background noise. The detection of ultrasonic pulses using the wavelet transform is described and numerical results show good detection even for signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of -15 dB. The improvement in detection was experimentally verified using steel samples with simulated flaws.
Vacuum forming of thermoplastic foam

The process of thermoforming of foam sheet is analyzed using both finite element modeling and experiments. A simple constitutive model for finite tensile deformations of closed cellular material around its glass transition temperature is proposed, starting from well-known results from Gibson and Ashby (1988). The model is implemented in a finite element code and applied in isothermal vacuum forming simulations. The distributions of thickness and in plane strains are in adequate accordance to the experimental results.
Parallel Olfactory Processing in the Honey Bee Brain: Odor Learning and Generalization under Selective Lesion of a Projection Neuron Tract

The function of parallel neural processing is a fundamental problem in Neuroscience, as it is found across sensory modalities and evolutionary lineages, from insects to humans. Recently, parallel processing has attracted increased attention in the olfactory domain, with the demonstration in both insects and mammals that different populations of second-order neurons encode and/or process odorant information differently. Among insects, Hymenoptera present a striking olfactory system with a clear neural dichotomy from the periphery to higher-order centers, based on two main tracts of second-order (projection) neurons: the medial and lateral antennal lobe tracts (m-ALT and l-ALT). To unravel the functional role of these two pathways, we combined specific lesions of the m-ALT tract with behavioral experiments, using the classical conditioning of the proboscis extension response (PER conditioning). Lesioned and intact bees had to learn to associate an odorant (1-nonanol) with sucrose. Then the bees were subjected to a generalization procedure with a range of odorants differing in terms of their carbon chain length or functional group. We show that m-ALT lesion strongly affects acquisition of an odor-sucrose association. However, lesioned bees that still learned the association showed a normal gradient of decreasing generalization responses to increasingly dissimilar odorants. Generalization responses could be predicted to some extent by in vivo calcium imaging recordings of l-ALT neurons. The m-ALT pathway therefore seems necessary for normal classical olfactory conditioning performance.
Two-loop test of Buscher's T duality

We study the two loop quantum equivalence of sigma models related by Buscher's T-duality transformation. The computation of the two loop perturbative free energy density is performed in the case of a certain deformation of the SU(2) principal sigma model, and its T-dual, using dimensional regularization and the geometric sigma model perturbation theory. We obtain agreement between the free energy density expressions of the two models.