Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CSF levels of soluble HLA-G and Fas molecules are inversely associated to MRI evidence of disease activity in patients with relapsing—remitting multiple sclerosis

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) concentrations of soluble human leukocyte antigen class I (HLA-I) (sHLA-I), HLA-G (sHLA-G) and anti-apoptotic Fas (sFas) molecules were measured by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay technique in 65 relapsing—remitting (RR) MS patients classified according to clinical and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) evidence of disease activity. Sixty-four patients with other inflammatory neurological disorders (OIND) and 64 subjects with noninflammatory neurological disorders (NIND) served as controls. CSF concentrations were higher in RRMS and in OIND than in NIND patients for sHLA-I (P < 0.02), greater in RRMS than in OIND and in NIND for sHLA-G (P < 0.001 and P < 0.01, respectively) and lower in RRMS than in OIND and in NIND for sFas (P < 0.001 and P < 0.02, respectively). An increase in CSF levels was identified in MRI active RRMS for sHLA-I (P < 0.01) and in MRI stable RRMS for sHLA-G (P < 0.01), whereas CSF values of sFas were decreased in RRMS without Gd-enhancing lesions (P < 0.02). In MS patients with no evidence of MRI disease activity, a trend towards an inverse correlation was found between CSF concentrations of sHLA-G and sHLA-I and between CSF levels of sHLA-G and sFas. Our results indicate that enhanced CSF levels of sHLA-I antigens most likely represent an indirect manifestation of intrathecal immune activation taking place in neuroinflammation. Conversely, reciprocal fluctuations in CSF sHLA-G and sFas levels observed when MRI disease activity resolved suggest that sHLA-G could play an immunomodulatory role in MS through Fas/FasL-mediated mechanisms. Multiple Sclerosis 2008; 14: 446—454. http://msj.sagepub. com
Ferroelectric Polymer Nanocomposites with Complementary Nanostructured Fillers for Electrocaloric Cooling with High Power Density and Great Efficiency

The exploration of electrocaloric cooling is of great importance to address the environmental and energy-efficiency issues in the currently available refrigeration technologies. Although pronounced electrocaloric effect (ECE) has been demonstrated in ferroelectric materials, it is a necessary but far from sufficient condition to achieve substantial cooling. For instance, the narrow operation temperature windows and limited thermal conductivities of ferroelectric materials pose challenging obstacles for ferroelectric materials to realize high cooling power density and great cooling efficiency. In this work, we present polymer nanocomposites with multiple nanostructured fillers, including barium strontium titanate nanowires (BST NWs) with systematically varied Curie temperatures and boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs). The introduced BST NWs effectively enhance EC strength and significantly extend the operating temperature so that giant ECE is achieved at relatively low electric fields in a wide temperature ra.
SELF-ADAPTIVE MORPHOLOGICAL FILTER FOR NOISE REDUCTION OF PARTIAL DISCHARGE SIGNALS

Partial Discharge assessment in the insulation of high voltage equipment is one of the most popular approaches for prevention of the insulation breakdown. In the procedure of this assessment, noise reduction of partial discharge signals to get the original PD signal for accurate evaluation is inevitable. This denoising process shall be carried out such a way that the main features of the partial discharge signal like “amplitude”, “rise time”, “energy” and etc. are kept as much as possible. Wavelet Transform and Mathematical Morphology are the useful signal processing algorithms which are exploited and proposed in literatures for noise reduction of partial discharge signals. In this paper two Wavelet based filters which have promising results are explored and finally compared with the proposed Morphological based filter. Unlike the traditional morphological based filters the advantage of the proposed method is the ability of structure element length selection in a completely self-adaptive procedure. Also the results of noise reduction in different noise level are presented that the proposed method shows superiority in all circumstance.
TeCaS: A Template Caching System for Dynamic Web Pages

Caching static web pages in proxy caches has reduced bandwidth consumption and retrieval latency. However, web-caching performance is hard to increase further due to the growing number of non-cacheable dynamic web pages. In this paper, we present TeCaS, a transparent template caching system that uses template, delta and compression to increase the performance of dynamic web traffic. TeCaS has four advantages. First, it’s transparent to both clients and web servers, and is independent on the web technologies used by web servers. Second, template has high reusability and small storage requirements. Third, it has reasonable computation overheads. Fourth, it has no privacy or security concerns. Extensive experimental results show that TeCaS can reduce retrieval time by a factor of 3.46 to 17.37 for dynamic web pages, without suffering from significant computation overheads or storage requirements.
Recurrent neural networks for incremental disfluency detection

For dialogue systems to become robust, they must be able to detect disfluencies accurately and with minimal latency. To meet this challenge, here we frame incremental disfluency detection as a word-by-word tagging task and, following their recent success in Spoken Language Understanding tasks, we test the performance of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We experiment with different inputs for RNNs to explore the effect of context on their ability to detect edit terms and repair disfluencies effectively. Although not eclipsing the state of the art in terms of utterance-final performance, RNNs achieve good detection results, requiring no feature engineering and using simple input vectors representing the incoming utterance as their training input. Furthermore, RNNs show very good incremental properties with low latency and very good output stability, surpassing previously reported results in these measures.
Multiple Low-Dose Streptozocin–induced Diabetes in NOD-scid/scid Mice in the Absence of Functional Lymphocytes

The murine severe combined immunodeficiency (scid) mutation was used to assess whether the diabetogenic effects of multiple low-dose streptozocin (MD-STZ) administration required the presence of functional T-cells. An STZ dose as low as 30 mg/kg body wt for 5 days induced hyperglycemia in young NOD/Lt-+/+ male mice, whereas a dose of 50 mg/kg for 5 days was required to elicit comparable hyperglycemia in C.B. -17-+/+ male mice. The greater NOD strain sensitivity was not a function of preexisting insulitis, because insulitis- and diabetes-free NOD male mice congenic for a diabetes-resistant major histocompatibility complex haplotype were equally susceptible to MD-STZ. This was confirmed in NOD-scid/scid and C.B. -17-scid/scid males. Both were completely insulitis-free, and despite the absence of functional T- cells and B-cells, both congenic stocks were as sensitive to MD-STZ as congenic +/+ controls. Indeed, MD-STZ-induced hyperglycemia in NOD-scid/scid male mice was significantly higher than in NOD/Lt-+/+ male mice. The NOD-scid/scid mouse as a recipient of adoptively transferred splenocytes clearly delineated a distinct pathogenesis of spontaneous insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) versus MD-STZ-induced hyperglycemia. Splenocytes from spontaneously diabetic NOD/Lt males, but not those from donors given MD-STZ, readily transferred IDDM, even when host beta-cells were sensitized by a single injection of STZ before adoptive transfer. We conclude that IDDM induced by MD-STZ is not mediated by T-cell- or B-cell-dependent autoimmune mechanisms in a fashion analogous to the spontaneous IDDM characteristic of NOD mice.
Query Recommendation for Improving Search Engine Results

As web contents grow, the importance of search engines become more critical and at the same time user satisfaction decreases. Query recommendation is a new approach to improve search results in web. In this paper a method is proposed that, given a query submitted to a search engine, suggests a list of queries that are related to the user input query. The related queries are based on previously issued queries, and can be issued by the user to the search engine to tune or redirect the search process. The proposed method is based on clustering processes in which groups of semantically similar queries are detected. The clustering process uses the content of historical preferences of users registered in the query log of the search engine. This facility provides queries that are related to the ones submitted by users in order to direct them toward their required information. This method not only discovers the related queries but also ranks them according to a similarity measure. The method has been evaluated using real data sets from the search engine query log.
Self-assembled peptide nanostructures for electrical, optical, and magnetic applications

xiii 1 Motivation / Research Objectives/Introduction.1 1.1 Motivation . 1 1.2 Objectives . 2 1.3 Introduction to Peptide Nanostructures (FF-MNS) . 4 2 Experimental and Theoretical Methodologies.11 2.1 Structural Characterization Techniques . 11 2.1.1 X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) . 11 2.1.2 X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) . 14 2.1.3 Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) . 15 2.2 Optical Characterization Techniques . 17 2.2.1 Absorption Spectroscopy . 17 2.2.2 Photoluminescence Spectroscopy . 18 2.2.3 Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) . 20 2.2.4 Raman Spectroscopy . 21 2.3 Second Harmonic Generation Experimental Setup . 25 2.4 Magnetic Characterization Technique: SQUID Magnetometer . 27 2.5 Density Functional Theory (DFT) . 29
Systemic lupus erythematosus in three ethnic groups. XII. Risk factors for lupus nephritis after diagnosis

The purpose of this study was to determine the cumulative incidence of lupus nephritis (LN) and the factors predictive of its occurrencein a multiethnic systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) cohort. We studied 353 SLE patients as de” ned by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria (65 Hispanics, 93 African-Americans and 91 Caucasians). First, we determined the cumulative incidence of LN in all patients. Next, we determined the predictors for LN in those with nephritis occurring after diagnosis. The dependent variable, LN, was de” ned by: (1) A renal biopsy demonstrating World Health Organization (WHO), class II–V histopathology; and/or (2) proteinuria≥ 0.5 g=24 h or 3 + proteinuria attributable to SLE; and/or (3) one of the following features also attributable to SLE and present on two or more visits, which were performed at least 6 months apart— proteinuria≥ 2 +, serum creatinine≥ 1.4 mg/dl, creatinine clearance ≤ 79 ml/min, 10 RBCs or WBCs per high power ” eld (hpf), oŗ 3 granular or cellular casts per hpf. Independent variables assessed at diagnosis, and if absent, at baseline, were from four domains: sociodemographic, clinical, immunologic and immunogenetic (including the complete antibody pro” le and MHC class II alleles), and health habits. Variables with P < 0.05 by chi square analyses were entered into domain-speci”c stepwise logistic regression analyses controlling for disease duration, with LN as the dependent variable. Signi” cant domain-speci”c regression variables (P ≤ 0.1) were then entered into an overall model. The cumulative incidence of LN was 54.3% in all patients, and 35.3% for those developing LN after diagnosis. LN after diagnosis occurred in 43.1% of 65 Hispanics, 50.5% of 93 African-Americans, and 14.3% of 91 Caucasians, P < 0.0001. The duration of follow-up for those with LN after diagnosis was 5.5§ 2.4 vs 4.0§ 2.9 years for those without LN. Hispanic (odds ratio (OR) = 2.71, 95% con” dence limits (CL) = 1.07–6.87, P < 0.04) and African-American ethnicities (OR = 3.13, 95% CL = 1.21–8.09, P < 0.02), not married or living together (OR = 3.45, 95% CL = 1.69–7.69, P < 0.0003), higher SLAM score (OR = 1.11, 95% CL = 1.02–1.19, P < 0.007), anti-dsDNA (OR = 3.14, 95% CL = 1.50–6.57, P < 0.0001) and anti-RNP (OR = 4.24, CL = 1.98–9.07, P < 0.0001) antibodies were shown to be signi” cant predictors of the occurrence of LN. Repeated analyses excluding the patients with missing HLA data showed that absence of HLA-DQB1*0201 was also a signi” cant predictor for the occurrence of LN (OR = 2.34, CL = 1.13–5.26, P < 0.04). In conclusion, LN occurred signi” cantly more often in Hispanics and African-Americans with SLE. Sociodemographic,clinical and immunologic/immunogenetic factors seem to be predictive of LN occurring after the diagnosis of SLE has been made.
Identification of Methyl Halide-Utilizing Genes in the Methyl Bromide-Utilizing Bacterial Strain IMB-1 Suggests a High Degree of Conservation of Methyl Halide-Specific Genes in Gram-Negative Bacteria

ABSTRACT Strain IMB-1, an aerobic methylotrophic member of the alpha subgroup of the Proteobacteria, can grow with methyl bromide as a sole carbon and energy source. A single cmugene cluster was identified in IMB-1 that contained six open reading frames: cmuC, cmuA, orf146, paaE, hutI, and partialmetF. CmuA from IMB-1 has high sequence homology to the methyltransferase CmuA from Methylobacterium chloromethanicum and Hyphomicrobium chloromethanicum and contains a C-terminal corrinoid-binding motif and an N-terminal methyltransferase motif. However,cmuB, identified in M. chloromethanicumand H. chloromethanicum, was not detected in IMB-1.
Multigrid Preconditioning and Toeplitz Matrices

In this paper we discuss multigrid methods for symmetric Toeplitz matrices. Then the restriction and prolongation operators can be seen as projected Toeplitz matrices. Because of the intimate connection between such matrices and trigonometric series we can express the multigrid algorithm in terms of the underlying functions with special zeros. This shows how to choose the prolongation/restriction operator in order to get fast convergence. We start considering Toeplitz matrices with generating functions having a single zero of finite order in $]-\pi,\pi]$ and extend previous results on multigrid for Toeplitz matrices, in particular by introducing a natural coarse grid operator. Afterwards we carry over our reasoning to cases with more than one zero and study how the previous cases relate to Toeplitz systems resulting from the discretization of Fredholm integral equations of the first kind as they arise from image processing. Finally, we take a short view on Block Toeplitz systems with Toeplitz Blocks: We show how the one-dimensional techniques can be carried over easily for positive definite problems with a single zero in $]-\pi,\pi]^2$ and we also present a multigrid algorithm for linear systems arising from practical image deblurring problems. Finally, we give a new characterization of the well known difficulties encountered in the indefinite case.
Research on the intrusion detection algorithm centered on active learning and rough sets

Intrusion detection system (IDS) acts as an important role in fighting against these malicious network intrusions. In this paper, an effective active learning algorithm is proposed by training the classifier with unlabeled instances with a rough set theory to reduce the size of the training set to reduce the training sample size and training time. As further optimization, a novel rough set theory framework is introduced to further simplify the initial data operation to achieve higher testing efficiency which is known as IDS based Novel Algorithm on RS-SVM (IR2SVM).
Panel Data Discrete Choice Models of Consumer Demand

1. Introduction This chapter deals with the vast literature on panel data discrete choice models of consumer demand. The reason this area is so active is that very high quality data is available. Firms like Nielsen and IRI have, for over 30 years, been collecting panel data on households' purchases of consumer goods. This is known as ―scanner data,‖ because it is collected by check-out machine scanners. Available scanner data sets often follow households for several years, and record all their purchases in several different product categories. The typical data set not only contains information on the universal product codes (UPC) of the consumer goods that households buy on each shopping trip, but also information on several exogenous forcing variables, such as price and whether the goods were displayed or advertised in various ways. To my knowledge the first paper using scanner data to study the impact of price and other marketing variables on consumer demand was Guadagni and Little (1983) in Marketing Science. But few economists knew about scanner data until the mid to late 90s. Once they became aware of this treasure trove of data, they started to use it very actively. Today, estimation of demand models on scanner data has become a major part of the field of empirical industrial organization. Thus, the consumer demand literature based on scanner data is unusual relative to other literatures discussed in this Handbook in two respects. First, it remains true that the majority of work in this area is by marketers rather than economists. Second, this is an uncommon case where the ―imperial science‖ of economics (see, e.g., Stigler (1984)) has experienced a substantial knowledge transfer from another area (i.e., marketing). Furthermore, it should be noted that discrete choice models of consumer demand are also widely used in other fields like transportation research, agricultural and resource economics, environmental economics, etc. Given that the literature on panel data models of consumer demand is so large, I will make no attempt to survey all the important papers in the field. Instead, I will focus on the main research questions that dominate this area, and the progress that has been made in addressing them. Thus, I apologize in advance for the many important papers that are not cited. The most salient feature of scanner panel data is that consumers exhibit substantial persistence in their brand choices. In the language of marketing, consumers show …
Genetically Modified Rice Adoption: Implications for Welfare and Poverty Alleviation

The first generation of genetically modified (GM) crop varieties sought to increase producer profitability through cost reductions or higher yields, while the next generation of GM food research is focusing on breeding for attributes of interest to consumers. Golden Rice, for example, has been genetically engineered to contain a higher level of vitamin A and thereby boost the health of poor people in developing countries. This paper analyzes the potential economic effects of adopting both types of innovation in Asia, including its impact on rice producers and consumers. It does so using the global economy-wide computable general equilibrium model known as GTAP. The results suggest the farm productivity gains could be dwarfed by the welfare gains resulting from the potential health-enhancing attributes of golden rice, which would boost the productivity of unskilled workers among Asia's poor.
Abnormal landing strategies after ACL reconstruction

The objective was to analyze muscle activity and movement patterns during landing of a single leg hop for distance after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction. Nine (six males, three females) ACL‐reconstructed patients 6 months after surgery and 11 (eight males, three females) healthy control subjects performed the hop task. Electromyographic signals from lower limb muscles were analyzed to determine onset time before landing. Biomechanical data were collected using an Optotrak Motion Analysis System and force plate. Matlab was used to calculate kinetics and joint kinematics. Side‐to‐side differences in ACL‐reconstructed patients and healthy subjects as well as differences between the patients and control group were analyzed. In ACL‐reconstructed limbs, significantly earlier onset times were found for all muscles, except vastus medialis, compared with the uninvolved side. The involved limbs had significantly reduced knee flexion during the take‐off and increased plantarflexion at initial contact. The knee extension moment was significantly lower in the involved limb. In the control group, significantly earlier onset times were found for the semitendinosus, vastus lateralis and medial gastrocnemius of the non‐dominant side compared with the dominant side. Muscle onset times are earlier and movement patterns are altered in the involved limb 6 months after ACL reconstruction.
Seed germination strategies: an evolutionary trajectory independent of vegetative functional traits

Seed germination strategies vary dramatically among species but relatively little is known about how germination traits correlate with other elements of plant strategy systems. Understanding drivers of germination strategy is critical to our understanding of the evolutionary biology of plant reproduction. We present a novel assessment of seed germination strategies focussing on Australian alpine species as a case study. We describe the distribution of germination strategies and ask whether these are correlated with, or form an independent axis to, other plant functional traits. Our approach to describing germination strategy mimicked realistic temperatures that seeds experience in situ following dispersal. Strategies were subsequently assigned using an objective clustering approach. We hypothesized that two main strategies would emerge, involving dormant or non-dormant seeds, and that while these strategies would be correlated with seed traits (e.g., mass or endospermy) they would be largely independent of vegetative traits when analysed in a phylogenetically structured manner. Across all species, three germination strategies emerged. The majority of species postponed germination until after a period of cold, winter-like temperatures indicating physiological and/or morphological dormancy mechanisms. Other species exhibited immediate germination at temperatures representative of those at dispersal. Interestingly, seeds of an additional 13 species “staggered” germination over time. Germination strategies were generally conserved within families. Across a broad range of ecological traits only seed mass and endospermy showed any correlation with germination strategy when phylogenetic relatedness was accounted for; vegetative traits showed no significant correlations with germination strategy. The results indicate that germination traits correlate with other aspects of seed ecology but form an independent axis relative to vegetative traits.
3-D model-based tracking of humans in action: a multi-view approach

We present a vision system for the 3-D model-based tracking of unconstrained human movement. Using image sequences acquired simultaneously from multiple views, we recover the 3-D body pose at each time instant without the use of markers. The pose-recovery problem is formulated as a search problem and entails finding the pose parameters of a graphical human model whose synthesized appearance is most similar to the actual appearance of the real human in the multi-view images. The models used for this purpose are acquired from the images. We use a decomposition approach and a best-first technique to search through the high dimensional pose parameter space. A robust variant of chamfer matching is used as a fast similarity measure between synthesized and real edge images. We present initial tracking results from a large new Humans-in-Action (HIA) database containing more than 2500 frames in each of four orthogonal views. They contain subjects involved in a variety of activities, of various degrees of complexity, ranging from the more simple one-person hand waving to the challenging two-person close interaction in the Argentine Tango.