Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tests for cooperative behaviour between stallions

Breeding groups with multiple stallions occur sympatrically with single-stallion breeding groups in feral horse, Equus caballus, populations. Mutualism and reciprocal altruism between stallions have been proposed to explain the origin and functioning of multistallion bands. However, empirical support for these hypotheses is contradictory and incomplete. Furthermore, there are no explicit tests of the predictions that each hypothesis makes about stallion behaviour and social structure. We compared nine multistallion and 18 single-stallion bands in the Kaimanawa Ranges, New Zealand. Compared with agonistic behaviours, affiliative behaviours were relatively unimportant in the relationships between stallions within bands. The number of stallions in the band did not have a positive influence on mare group size, stability, home range quality or reproductive success in bands. Furthermore, there was a positive relationship between aggression ('intolerance') by the dominant towards subordinate stallions and the subordinates' effort in mare group defence ('helping') but a negative relationship between helping effort by subordinates and their proximity to, and mating with, the bands' mares. Therefore, the predictions of the mutualism and reciprocal altruism hypotheses were not supported. Indeed, for some of the predictions we found the opposite outcomes to be true. Multistallion bands had significantly poorer reproductive success, and dominant stallions were less tolerant of subordinates that helped most and reduced their access to mares. Nevertheless, in all other respects Kaimanawa stallions in multistallion bands behaved like those described elsewhere. Thus, we reject cooperative hypotheses for multimale breeding groups in horses and discuss the mate parasitism and consort hypotheses as better alternatives. Copyright 2000 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
Cost-effectiveness in clinical trials: using multiple imputation to deal with incomplete cost data

Background Cost-effectiveness has become an important outcome in many clinical trials and has resulted in the collection of resource use data and the calculation of costs for individual patients. A specific example is a Cancer Research UK phase III trial comparing chemotherapy (CT) against standard palliative care in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Resource usage from trial entry until death were collected and costs obtained on a subset of 115 trial patients. For some patients, however, the unavailability of medical notes resulted in some cost components, and hence total cost, being missing. The 82 patients with complete data were not representative of all trial patients in terms of effectiveness and thus it was necessary to address the missing data problem. Methods Multiple imputation (MI) was used to impute values for the unobserved individual cost components, allowing total cost to be calculated and cost-effectiveness carried out for all patients in the cost sub-study. The results are compared with those from a complete case analysis. Results After MI, the results indicated that CT had a high probability of being cost-effective for a societal willingness to pay over £20 000 per life-year gained. This was in stark contrast with the complete case analysis, which suggested that CT was not a cost-effective use of resources at any reasonable level of willingness to pay for a life-year. Limitations Our findings are based on a relatively small retrospective study with all events observed. Conclusion In conclusion, cost-effectiveness analysis of the complete cases only may give biased results, and therefore, in situations where there are missing costs, MI is recommended. Clinical Trials 2007; 4: 154—161. http://ctj.sagepub. com
An Ultra-High Field Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Study of Post Exercise Lactate, Glutamate and Glutamine Change in the Human Brain

During strenuous exercise there is a progressive increase in lactate uptake and metabolism into the brain as workload and plasma lactate levels increase. Although it is now widely accepted that the brain can metabolize lactate, few studies have directly measured brain lactate following vigorous exercise. Here, we used ultra-high field magnetic resonance spectroscopy of the brain to obtain static measures of brain lactate, as well as brain glutamate and glutamine after vigorous exercise. The aims of our experiment were to (a) track the changes in brain lactate following recovery from exercise, and (b) to simultaneously measure the signals from brain glutamate and glutamine. The results of our experiment showed that vigorous exercise resulted in a significant increase in brain lactate. Furthermore, both glutamate and glutamine were successfully resolved, and as expected, although contrary to some previous reports, we did not observe any significant change in either amino acid after exercise. We did however observe a negative correlation between glutamate and a measure of fitness. These results support the hypothesis that peripherally derived lactate is taken up by the brain when available. Our data additionally highlight the potential of ultra-high field MRS as a non-invasive way of measuring multiple brain metabolite changes with exercise.
Polypyrrole, Formation and Use

Abstract : Radar absorbing materials require resistive or magnetic materials that will convert the electromagnetic energy into heat. The electrical properties of polypyrrole make it a suitable candidate for a radar absorbing material. There are several simple ways to make the polymer with controlled conductivity, and many strategies to process it into a robust material. Interesting materials include polypyrrole-paint, polypyrrole-polyvinylchloride injection moulded composites and polypyrrole coated fabrics and fibres. The highest imaginary component of the permittivity for a polypyrrole composite occurs at the percolation threshold. This is also the region where the permittivity changes rapidly with the amount polypyrrole in the composite and so a high degree of control is required for reproducible making the same formulation. At the conductivities required for microwave absorption, the dc conductivity dominates and the ac component is negligible. Polypyrrole stability is an issue for fabricating a radar absorber, and stability can be improved through a barrier protecting the polypyrrole from oxygen. In this paper many aspects of the formulation and characterisation of polypyrrole materials are considered with an emphasis on its suitability as a microwave absorber.
Bis[3-(pyrazin-2-yl)-5-(pyridin-2-yl-κN)-1,2,4-triazol-1-ido-κN 1]copper(II)

In the mononuclear title complex, [Cu(C11H7N6)2], the CuII atom lies on a crystallographic inversion centre and is coordinated by four N atoms from two bidentate chelate monoanionic 3-(pyrazin-2-yl)-5-(pyridin-2-yl-1,2,4-triazol-1-ido ligands, two from the triazolide rings [Cu—N = 1.969 (2) Å] and two from the pyridine rings [Cu—N = 2.027 (2) Å], giving a slightly distorted square-planar geometry.
ERK5 Activity Is Required for Nerve Growth Factor-induced Neurite Outgrowth and Stabilization of Tyrosine Hydroxylase in PC12 Cells*

Extracellular signal-regulated kinases (ERKs) play important physiological roles in proliferation, differentiation, and gene expression. ERK5 is approximately twice the size of ERK1/2, and its amino-terminal half contains the kinase domain that shares homology with ERK1/2 and TEY activation motif, whereas the carboxyl-terminal half is unique. In this study, we examined a physiological role of ERK5 in rat pheochromocytoma cells (PC12), comparing it with ERK1/2. Nerve growth factor (NGF) induced phosphorylation of both ERK5 and ERK1/2, whereas the cAMP analog dibutyryl cAMP (Bt2cAMP) caused only ERK1/2 phosphorylation. U0126, at 30 μm, that blocks ERK1/2 signaling selectively attenuated neurite outgrowth induced by NGF and Bt2cAMP, but BIX02188 and BIX02189, at 30 μm, that block ERK5 signaling and an ERK5 dominant-negative mutant suppressed only NGF-induced neurite outgrowth. Next, we examined the expression of tyrosine hydroxylase, a rate-limiting enzyme of catecholamine biosynthesis. Both NGF and Bt2cAMP increased tyrosine hydroxylase gene promoter activity in an ERK1/2-dependent manner but was ERK5-independent. However, when both ERK5 and ERK1/2 signalings were inhibited, tyrosine hydroxylase protein up-regulation by NGF and Bt2cAMP was abolished, because of the loss of stabilization of tyrosine hydroxylase protein by ERK5. Taking these results together, ERK5 is involved in neurite outgrowth and stabilization of tyrosine hydroxylase in PC12 cells, and ERK5, along with ERK1/2, plays essential roles in the neural differentiation process.
Epigenetic Changes in Individuals with Arsenicosis

Inorganic arsenic (iAs) is an environmental toxicant currently poisoning millions of people worldwide, and chronically exposed individuals are susceptible to arsenicosis or arsenic poisoning. Using a state-of-the-art technique to map the methylomes of our study subjects, we identified a large interactome of hypermethylated genes that are enriched for their involvement in arsenic-associated diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Notably, we have uncovered an arsenic-induced tumor suppressorome, a complex of 17 tumor suppressors known to be silenced in human cancers. This finding represents a pivotal clue in unraveling a possible epigenetic mode of arsenic-induced disease.
A Robust Linguistic Platform for Efficient and Domain specific Web Content Analysis

Web semantic access in specific domains calls for specialized search engines with enhanced semantic querying and indexing capacities, which pertain both to information retrieval (IR) and to information extraction (IE). A rich linguistic analysis is required either to identify the relevant semantic units to index and weight them according to linguistic specific statistical distribution, or as the basis of an information extraction process. Recent developments make Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques reliable enough to process large collections of documents and to enrich them with semantic annotations. This paper focuses on the design and the development of a text processing platform, Ogmios, which has been developed in the ALVIS project. The Ogmios platform exploits existing NLP modules and resources, which may be tuned to specific domains and produces linguistically annotated documents. We show how the three constraints of genericity, domain semantic awareness and performance can be handled all together.
malERA: An updated research agenda for diagnostics, drugs, vaccines, and vector control in malaria elimination and eradication

Since the turn of the century, a remarkable expansion has been achieved in the range and effectiveness of products and strategies available to prevent, treat, and control malaria, including advances in diagnostics, drugs, vaccines, and vector control. These advances have once again put malaria elimination on the agenda. However, it is clear that even with the means available today, malaria control and elimination pose a formidable challenge in many settings. Thus, currently available resources must be used more effectively, and new products and approaches likely to achieve these goals must be developed. This paper considers tools (both those available and others that may be required) to achieve and maintain malaria elimination. New diagnostics are needed to direct treatment and detect transmission potential; new drugs and vaccines to overcome existing resistance and protect against clinical and severe disease, as well as block transmission and prevent relapses; and new vector control measures to overcome insecticide resistance and more powerfully interrupt transmission. It is also essential that strategies for combining new and existing approaches are developed for different settings to maximise their longevity and effectiveness in areas with continuing transmission and receptivity. For areas where local elimination has been recently achieved, understanding which measures are needed to maintain elimination is necessary to prevent rebound and the reestablishment of transmission. This becomes increasingly important as more countries move towards elimination.
A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN K-MEDOIDS AND FUZZY C-MEANS CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS FOR STATISTICALLY DISTRIBUTED DATA POINTS

Data clustering is a process of putting similar data into groups. A clustering algorithm partitions a data set into several groups such that the similarity within a group is larger than among groups. In the field of data mining, various clustering algorithms are proved for their clustering quality. This research work deals with, two of the most representative clustering algorithms namely centroid based K-Medoids and representative object based Fuzzy C-Means are described and analyzed based on their basic approach using the distance between two data points. For both the algorithms, a set of n data points are given in a two-dimensional space and an integer K (the number of clusters) and the problem is to determine a set of n points in the given space called centers, so as to minimize the mean squared distance from each data point to its nearest center. The performance of the algorithms is investigated during different execution of the program for the given input data points. Based on experimental results the algorithms are compared regarding their clustering quality and their performance, which depends on the time complexity between the various numbers of clusters chosen by the end user. The total elapsed time to cluster all the data points and Clustering time for each cluster are also calculated in milliseconds and the results compared with one another.
QCD vacuum properties in a magnetic field from AdS/CFT: chiral condensate and Goldstone mass

Chiral condensate and ? ' meson mass spectrum are studied under the influence of an external Abelian magnetic field. We work within the D3/D7 Karch-Katz model of flavoured AdS/CFT with supersymmetry broken by the Constable-Myers deformation of the metric. It is shown that this setting yields an analytic (quadratic) dependence of condensate on field, typical for the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, rather than the non-analytic (linear in field) result, typical for chiral perturbation theory in the exact chiral limit. We conjecture that the analytic (quadratic) result might be put into correspondence with the leading-order in the 1/Nc decomposition for the condensate. This leading order in the 1/Nc approximation has not yet been derived from the chiral perturbation theory. Thus the dual model yields the quadratic field dependence of the condensate, which is beyond the range of feasibility of chiral perturbation theory.
Combined suicide and cytokine gene therapy for peritoneal carcinomatosis

BACKGROUND Gene therapy is a novel approach for the treatment of cancers, and tumours disseminated in the peritoneal cavity are suitable for in situ delivery of a therapeutic gene. AIMS The efficacy of a therapy combining a suicide gene (herpes simplex virus type I thymidine kinase (HSV-TK)) and cytokine genes was investigated in a model of peritoneal carcinomatosis induced by colon carcinoma cells in syngeneic rats. MATERIAL AND METHODS Pre-established macroscopic tumours in BDIX rats were treated by intraperitoneal injections of retrovirus producing cells (FLYA13 TK, FLYA13 granulocyte macrophage-colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF), FLYA13 interleukin 12 (IL-12)) and ganciclovir (GCV). RESULTS TK/GCV treated animals showed a slight increase in survival time (72 days) compared with the control group (63 days) while the association of cytokine and TK/GCV gene therapy resulted in significantly improved survival, with a large proportion of animals remaining tumour free on day 480 (60% and 40% for TK/GCV/GM-CSF and TK/GCV/IL-12 treated animals, respectively). Histological analysis of treated animals showed that the remaining tumour nodes were infiltrated by mononuclear cells but no major differences were observed between the various treatments. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed that lymphoid CD4+and CD8+ T cells as well as macrophages accumulated outside untreated tumour nodes while CD8+ and CD25+activated T cells and macrophages heavily infiltrated the tumours after the different treatments. CONCLUSIONS Our data indicate that combined suicide and cytokine gene therapy is a powerful approach for the treatment of macroscopic peritoneal carcinomatosis.
Detection of biological analytes using nanomechanical infrared spectroscopy with a nanoporous microcantilever

The highly sensitive nanoporous cantilever beam without immobilized receptors was combined with highly selective mid-infrared (IR) spectroscopy for molecular recognition of analytes using characteristic molecular vibrations. Unlike conventional IR spectroscopy, in addition, the detection sensitivity and resolution are drastically enhanced by combining high power tunable quantum cascade laser with a nanoporous cantilever having large surface area, low modulus, and nanowell structures. Further, analytes can be easily loaded on the porous microcantilever without receptor due to nanowells. In addition, orthogonal signals, variations in the mass and IR spectrum, provide more reliable and quantitative results including physical as well as chemical information of samples. We have used this technique to rapidly identify single and double stranded DNA.
Exploiting redundancy in question answering

Our goal is to automatically answer brief factual questions of the form ``When was the Battle of Hastings? '' or ``Who wrote The Wind in the Willows? ''. Since the answer to nearly any such question can now be found somewhere on the Web, the problem reduces to finding potential answers in large volumes of data and validating their accuracy. We apply a method for arbitrary passage retrieval to the first half of the problem and demonstrate that answer redundancy can be used to address the second half. The success of our approach depends on the idea that the volume of available Web data is large enough to supply the answer to most factual questions multiple times and in multiple contexts. A query is generated from a question and this query is used to select short passages that may contain the answer from a large collection of Web data. These passages are analyzed to identify candidate answers. The frequency of these candidates within the passages is used to ``vote'' for the most likely answer. The approach is experimentally tested on questions taken from the TREC-9 question-answering test collection. As an additional demonstration, the approach is extended to answer multiple choice trivia questions of the form typically asked in trivia quizzes and television game shows.
Numerical Analysis of Thermal Stratification in a Circular Pipe

This paper presents an effective numerical method for predicting the stratified flow in a horizontal circular pipe. The method employs a body-fitted, nonorthogonal grid system to accommodate the pipe wall of circular geometry and the interface of the two fluids at different temperatures, of which the level is variable. The transient behaviors of fluid flow and temperature distribution in the piping are simulated using the finite volume approach. The convection term is approximated by a higher-order bounded scheme named HLPA, which is known as a high-resolution and bounded discretization scheme. The cell-centered, nonstaggered grid arrangement is adopted and the resulting checkerboard pressure oscillation is prevented by the application of modified momentum interpolation scheme. The SIMPLE algorithm is employed for the pressure and velocity coupling. The new way of treating the unsteady conjugate heat transfer problem is presented. The present method has been applied to the stratified flow in the pressurizer surge line of the nuclear reactor, and the results have been discussed. In addition, this study has investigated the effects of level of the interface between the two stratified fluids on the transient evolution of temperature distributions in the piping wall.
A framework of assistive pointers for low vision users

Manipulating a mouse pointer is often difficult for the low vision computer user. Working with such a small, mobile screen object is very visually demanding. Although several techniques have been used to address this problem, the design space of assistive pointers has not been fully explored by the current state of the art. This paper proposes a four dimensional framework to fully articulate the design space of assistive pointers for low vision users. The dimensions of the framework describe the key attributes of assistance offered to users by any pointing solution: the perceptual channel that carries the assistance, the stage of targeting supported by the assistance, the relationship between the assistance and the interface, and the degree of availability associated with the assistance.
Real-Time Deformation of Subdivision Surfaces from Object Collisions

We present a novel real-time approach for fine-scale surface deformations resulting from collisions. Deformations are represented by a high-resolution displacement function. When two objects collide, these offsets are updated directly on the GPU based on a dynamically generated binary voxelization of the overlap region. Consequently, we can handle collisions with arbitrary animated geometry. Our approach runs entirely on the GPU, avoiding costly CPU-GPU memory transfer and exploiting the GPU's computational power. Surfaces are rendered with the hardware tessellation unit, allowing for adaptively-rendered, high-frequency surface detail. Ultimately, our algorithm enables fine-scale surface deformations from geometry impact with very little computational overhead, running well below a millisecond even in complex scenes. As our results demonstrate, our approach is ideally suited to many real-time applications such as video games and authoring tools.
Recent Strategies of Data compression in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) constitute a continuously growing technology, taking advantage of new technology in electronic miniaturization that consume less energy for both processing and communication. Power consumption is the main issue that affects the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. A number of techniques are available to solve these issues. Among these techniques Data compression can be used to reduce the transmitted data over wireless channels. This leads to reduction in the required internodes communication, which is the main source of power consumer in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a review of recent data compression techniques in wireless sensor network is provided. First a classification of existing techniques is presented to define the need of practical data compression in wireless sensor networks. Next details of techniques currently used by various technologists are taken into consideration. Finally their performance, open issues, limitations and suitable application are analyzed and compared based on the criteria given by practical data compression techniques in WSN’s. Keywords—compression, sensors, energy consumption and nodes etc