Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Niacin Reduces Atherosclerosis Development in APOE*3Leiden.CETP Mice Mainly by Reducing NonHDL-Cholesterol

Objective Niacin potently lowers triglycerides, mildly decreases LDL-cholesterol, and largely increases HDL-cholesterol. Despite evidence for an atheroprotective effect of niacin from previous small clinical studies, the large outcome trials, AIM-HIGH and HPS2-THRIVE did not reveal additional beneficial effects of niacin (alone or in combination with laropiprant) on top of statin treatment. We aimed to address this apparent discrepancy by investigating the effects of niacin without and with simvastatin on atherosclerosis development and determine the underlying mechanisms, in APOE*3Leiden.CETP mice, a model for familial dysbetalipoproteinemia (FD). Approach and Results Mice were fed a western-type diet containing cholesterol without or with niacin (120 mg/kg/day), simvastatin (36 mg/kg/day) or their combination for 18 weeks. Similarly as in FD patients, niacin reduced total cholesterol by -39% and triglycerides by −50%, (both P<0.001). Simvastatin and the combination reduced total cholesterol (−30%; −55%, P<0.001) where the combination revealed a greater reduction compared to simvastatin (−36%, P<0.001). Niacin decreased total cholesterol and triglycerides primarily by increasing VLDL clearance. Niacin increased HDL-cholesterol (+28%, P<0.01) and mildly increased reverse cholesterol transport. All treatments reduced monocyte adhesion to the endothelium (−46%; −47%, P<0.01; −53%, P<0.001), atherosclerotic lesion area (−78%; −49%, P<0.01; −87%, P<0.001) and severity. Compared to simvastatin, the combination increased plaque stability index [(SMC+collagen)/macrophages] (3-fold, P<0.01). Niacin and the combination reduced T cells in the aortic root (−71%, P<0.01; −81%, P<0.001). Lesion area was strongly predicted by nonHDL-cholesterol (R2 = 0.69, P<0.001) and to a much lesser extent by HDL-cholesterol (R2 = 0.20, P<0.001). Conclusion Niacin decreases atherosclerosis development mainly by reducing nonHDL-cholesterol with modest HDL-cholesterol-raising and additional anti-inflammatory effects. The additive effect of niacin on top of simvastatin is mostly dependent on its nonHDL-cholesterol-lowering capacities. These data suggest that clinical beneficial effects of niacin are largely dependent on its ability to lower LDL-cholesterol on top of concomitant lipid-lowering therapy.
Discrimination of voicing (aba vs. apa)on the basis of Envelope temporal cues in 6-month old infants

Several studies indicate that profoundly deaf children receiving a cochlear implant (CI) under the age of 2 years are able to develop linguistic skills at a rate equal to similarly aged children with normal hearing. CI devices deliver temporal envelope (E) cues in speech over a small number of frequency channels. This suggests that infants are able to use E speech cues efficiently at an early age. However, little work has been done to investigate the developmental time course of the ability to use E speech cues. A recent study suggests that normal hearing children are able to use such cues at adult levels by the age of 5 years, but information is lacking for younger children. The present study assessed the ability of 6-month-old infants with normal hearing to discriminate between voiced and unvoiced stop consonants (/aba/ versus /apa/) on the basis of E cues, using a Head-turn Preference Procedure and speech tokens processed via a noise vocoder. The spectral and temporal resolution of vocoders was varied to determine whether or not the ability to use E speech cues is similarly constrained in infants and adults.
On Geometric Spanners of Euclidean and Unit Disk Graphs

We consider the problem of constructing bounded-degree planar geometric spanners of Euclidean and unit-disk graphs. It is well known that the Delaunay subgraph is a planar geometric spanner with stretch factor $C_{delapprox 2.42$; however, its degree may not be bounded. Our first result is a very simple linear time algorithm for constructing a subgraph of the Delaunay graph with stretch factor $ ho =1+2pi(kcos{frac{pi{k)^{-1$ and degree bounded by $k$, for any integer parameter $kgeq 14$. This result immediately implies an algorithm for constructing a planar geometric spanner of a Euclidean graph with stretch factor $ ho cdot C_{del$ and degree bounded by $k$, for any integer parameter $kgeq 14$. Moreover, the resulting spanner contains a Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree (EMST) as a subgraph. Our second contribution lies in developing the structural results necessary to transfer our analysis and algorithm from Euclidean graphs to unit disk graphs, the usual model for wireless ad-hoc networks. We obtain a very simple distributed, {em strictly-localized algorithm that, given a unit disk graph embedded in the plane, constructs a geometric spanner with the above stretch factor and degree bound, and also containing an EMST as a subgraph. The obtained results dramatically improve the previous results in all aspects, as shown in the paper.
Simulation of Mechatronic Systems using Behavioural Hybrid Process Calculus

Omnipresence of computers increased software reliability requirements considerably. Consequently, it stimulated interest in formal modelling and analysis of diverse computer systems, among which substantial position is taken by hybrid systems. Hybrid systems combine continuous evolution and instant discrete changes. Well-known examples of hybrid systems are software controlled electromechanical systems, such as microwave oven. However, pure mechanical systems, such as bouncing ball or spring-mass system can be treated as hybrid systems as well. The growing interest in hybrid systems both in computer science and control theory has generated a new interest in models and formalisms that can be used to specify and analyse such systems. A prominent framework for hybrid systems is provided by the family of hybrid automata models (hybrid automata [1], hybrid behavioural automata [6], and hybrid input/output automata [10]). More recently, process algebraic models have been put forward as a vehicle for the study of hybrid systems [4, 2, 3]. Simulation is a de facto standard tool in both academia and industry for analysis of hybrid systems. It helps to detect potential weaknesses and errors, and provides information on performance of system. There is a number of simulation tools, which provide various facilities for analysis of hybrid systems. Hybrid χ [18] provides facilities for simulation of hybrid process calculus. HyVisual [9] is a Java based visual modeller and simulator for hierarchical continuous time dynamical and hybrid systems. Dymola, Stateflow/Simulink [5] and 20Sim provide industrial strength facilities for simulation of non-causal object oriented simulation language Modelica [12], hierarchical formalism and bond graphs [17], respectively. We report a work in progress, a technique for simulation of Behavioural Hybrid Process Calculus (BHPC) [7]. BHPC is a process calculus that extends the standard repertoire of operators that combine discrete functional behaviour with features to also represent and compose continuous-time behaviour. Dynamic behaviour is represented by the evolution of variables, which are typically defined in terms of differential equations. Following [14], behaviour can be simply seen as the set of all allowed real-time evolutions, or trajectories, of the system variables. The operational semantics of the calculus defines the transitions for the simulator. Choice operator provides a way to describe nondeterministic choice among processes. Concurrency is defined using parallel composition. An adapted version of the expansion law is used to solve parallel composition. Proposed simulation technique is assessed on hybrid simulator Bhave prototype, a part of Bhave toolset for hybrid systems modelling, analysis and simulation.
P‐77: Polymer‐Based Plastic Electrode Film for PDLC Applications

Plastic electrode films composed of poly (3,4‐ethylenedioxythiophene):p‐toluene sulfonate (PEDOT:PTS) have been fabricated by using depositing polymerization method in gas‐phase. These conductive PEDOT:PTS films have a high transparency up to 80%, and possess a very low sheet resistance down to 100 Ω/squre at 100‐nm thickness. We report on the fabrication and characterization of a PDLC device using a highly conductive PEDOT: PTS for the electrodes and demonstrate its superior performance relative to that of a similar device using the ITO layer as the electrodes.
Methods and Tools for Speech Data Acquisition exploiting a Database of German Parliamentary Speeches and Transcripts from the Internet

This paper describes methods that exploit stenographic transcripts of the German parliament to improve the acoustic models of a speech recognition system for this domain. The stenographic transcripts and the speech data are available on the Internet. Using data from the Internet makes it possible to avoid the costly process of the collection and annotation of a huge amount of data. The automatic data acquisition technique works using the stenographic transcripts and acoustic data from the German parliamentary speeches plus general acoustic models, trained on different data. The idea of this technique is to generate special finite state automata from the stenographic transcripts. These finite state automata simulate potential possible correspondences between the stenographic transcript and the spoken audio content, i.e. accurate transcript. The first step is the recognition of the speech data using finite state automaton as a language model. The next step is to find, to extract and to verify the match between sections of recognized words and actually spoken audio content. After this, the automatically extracted and verified data can be used for acoustic model training. Experiments show that for a given recognition task from the German Parliament domain the absolute decrease of the word error rate is 20%.
New probabilistic interest measures for association rules

Mining association rules is an important technique for discovering meaningful patterns in transaction databases. Many different measures of interestingness have been proposed for association rules. However, these measures fail to take the probabilistic properties of the mined data into account. We start this paper with presenting a simple probabilistic framework for transaction data which can be used to simulate transaction data when no associations are present. We use such data and a real-world database from a grocery outlet to explore the behavior of confidence and lift, two popular interest measures used for rule mining. The results show that confidence is systematically influenced by the frequency of the items in the left hand side of rules and that lift performs poorly to filter random noise in transaction data. Based on the probabilistic framework we develop two new interest measures, hyper-lift and hyper-confidence, which can be used to filter or order mined association rules. The new measures show significantly better performance than lift for applications where spurious rules are problematic.
Development of electrospun metallic hybrid nanofibers via metallization

The metallized hybrid nanofiber webs were prepared by using a combined technology of electrostatic spinning and metallization. The electrospun polyurethane (PU) nanofibers were metallized with different thicknesses of copper layer via metal vapor deposition technique. The thickness of the copper layer, which ranges from 10 to 100 nm, was monitored and controlled. The resultant metallized hybrid nanofiber webs were characterized using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), wide angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). FE-SEM images demonstrated that the nanoscaled copper layers are well deposited on the surface of the PU nanofibers. TGA result indicated that the thermal stability of the metallized hybrid PU nanofibers was dramatically enhanced due to the barrier effects of thin metallic copper layer. WAXD data confirmed that the crystalline copper layers were well deposited onto the PU nanofibers. Moreover, the mechanical properties of the metallized hybrid PU nanofiber webs were increased with increase in the thickness of deposited copper layer. Unlike the organic PU nanofiber webs, it was observed that the metallized hybrid PU nanofiber webs showed higher conductive properties depending on the thickness of the deposited copper layer. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Identification of a vesicular ATP release inhibitor for the treatment of neuropathic and inflammatory pain

Significance Although the incidence of chronic pain is estimated at 20–25% worldwide, optimal drug treatment regimens with few side effects have yet to be developed. In this study, we demonstrated that clodronate is a potent and selective inhibitor of vesicular ATP release that attenuates neuropathic and inflammatory pain unrelated to bone abnormalities. Clodronate was more effective and associated with comparatively fewer side effects than existing drugs. Thus, the nonopioid agent clodronate may represent a unique treatment strategy for chronic pain via inhibition of vesicular ATP release, suggesting that clodronate may be effective in the treatment of several diseases involving purinergic chemical transmission, including inflammatory diseases, diabetes, and neurological disorders. Our study identifies a transporter-targeted analgesic drug. Despite the high incidence of neuropathic and inflammatory pain worldwide, effective drugs with few side effects are currently unavailable for the treatment of chronic pain. Recently, researchers have proposed that inhibitors of purinergic chemical transmission, which plays a key role in the pathological pain response, may allow for targeted treatment of pathological neuropathic and inflammatory pain. However, such therapeutic analgesic agents have yet to be developed. In the present study, we demonstrated that clodronate, a first-generation bisphosphonate with comparatively fewer side effects than traditional treatments, significantly attenuates neuropathic and inflammatory pain unrelated to bone abnormalities via inhibition of vesicular nucleotide transporter (VNUT), a key molecule for the initiation of purinergic chemical transmission. In vitro analyses indicated that clodronate inhibits VNUT at a half-maximal inhibitory concentration of 15.6 nM without affecting other vesicular neurotransmitter transporters, acting as an allosteric modulator through competition with Cl−. A low concentration of clodronate impaired vesicular ATP release from neurons, microglia, and immune cells. In vivo analyses revealed that clodronate is more effective than other therapeutic agents in attenuating neuropathic and inflammatory pain, as well as the accompanying inflammation, in wild-type but not VNUT−/− mice, without affecting basal nociception. These findings indicate that clodronate may represent a unique treatment strategy for chronic neuropathic and inflammatory pain via inhibition of vesicular ATP release.
The Signed Distance Function: A New Tool for Binary Classification

From a geometric perspective most nonlinear binary classification algorithms, including state of the art versions of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN) classifiers, and are based on the idea of reconstructing indicator functions. We propose instead to use reconstruction of the signed distance function (SDF) as a basis for binary classification. We discuss properties of the signed distance function that can be exploited in classification algorithms. We develop simple versions of such classifiers and test them on several linear and nonlinear problems. On linear tests accuracy of the new algorithm exceeds that of standard SVM methods, with an average of 50% fewer misclassifications. Performance of the new methods also matches or exceeds that of standard methods on several nonlinear problems including classification of benchmark diagnostic micro-array data sets.
The Structure of Individual Differences in the Cognitive Abilities of Children and Chimpanzees

Most studies of animal cognition focus on group performance and neglect individual differences and the correlational structure of cognitive abilities. Moreover, no previous studies have compared the correlational structure of cognitive abilities in nonhuman animals and humans. We compared the structure of individual differences of 106 chimpanzees and 105 two-year-old human children using 15 cognitive tasks that posed problems about the physical or social world. We found a similar factor of spatial cognition for the two species. But whereas the chimpanzees had only a single factor in addition to spatial cognition, the children had two distinct additional factors: one for physical cognition and one for social cognition. These findings, in combination with previous research, support the proposal that humans share many cognitive skills with nonhuman apes, especially for dealing with the physical world, but in addition have evolved some specialized skills of social cognition.
Image Fusion-Based Land Cover Change Detection Using Multi-Temporal High-Resolution Satellite Images

Change detection is usually treated as a problem of explicitly detecting land cover transitions in satellite images obtained at different times, and helps with emergency response and government management. This study presents an unsupervised change detection method based on the image fusion of multi-temporal images. The main objective of this study is to improve the accuracy of unsupervised change detection from high-resolution multi-temporal images. Our method effectively reduces change detection errors, since spatial displacement and spectral differences between multi-temporal images are evaluated. To this end, a total of four cross-fused images are generated with multi-temporal images, and the iteratively reweighted multivariate alteration detection (IR-MAD) method—a measure for the spectral distortion of change information—is applied to the fused images. In this experiment, the land cover change maps were extracted using multi-temporal IKONOS-2, WorldView-3, and GF-1 satellite images. The effectiveness of the proposed method compared with other unsupervised change detection methods is demonstrated through experimentation. The proposed method achieved an overall accuracy of 80.51% and 97.87% for cases 1 and 2, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method performed better when differentiating the water area from the vegetation area compared to the existing change detection methods. Although the water area beneath moderate and sparse vegetation canopy was captured, vegetation cover and paved regions of the water body were the main sources of omission error, and commission errors occurred primarily in pixels of mixed land use and along the water body edge. Nevertheless, the proposed method, in conjunction with high-resolution satellite imagery, offers a robust and flexible approach to land cover change mapping that requires no ancillary data for rapid implementation.
To Sense or not to Sense: An Exploratory Study of Privacy, Trust and other related concerns in Personal Sensing Context-aware Applications

Due to increasing proliferation of smart devices, many users store a significant proportion of personal data on them. Thus, personal sensing applications that sense a user’s context via his smart device have significant privacy implications. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study of privacy, trust, risks and other concerns of users with smart phone based context-aware personal sensing systems and applications. Our study results show that users are concerned that their sensed data can be misused, used for personal identification and tracking or for commercial purposes. However, they are willing to trade privacy for additional benefits if their sensed information is used for effective and beneficial causes. Furthermore, they are willing to trust reputed technology companies, with their data, if the benefits are significant. Based on these results, we propose a few design guidelines for designers of personal sensing apps and outline some interesting directions for future research. Received on 15 May 2016; accepted on 27 June 2016; published on 12 September 2016
A Motion-Planning Algorithm for the Rolling-Body Problem

In this paper, we consider the control system defined by the rolling of a strictly convex surface S of IR3 on a plane without slipping or spinning. The purpose of this paper is to present the numerical implementation of a constructive planning algorithm for Σ, which is based on a continuation method. The performances of that algorithm, both in robustness and convergence speed, are illustrated through several examples.
Antiproliferative and apoptotic effects of spanish honeys

Background: Current evidence supports that consumption of polyphenols has beneficial effects against numerous diseases mostly associated with their antioxidant activity. Honey is a good source of antioxidants since it contains a great variety of phenolic compounds. Objective: The main objective of this work was to investigate the antiproliferative and apoptotic effects of three crude commercial honeys of different floral origin (heather, rosemary and polyfloral honey) from Madrid Autonomic Community (Spain) as well as of an artificial honey in human peripheral blood promyelocytic leukemia cells (HL-60). Material and Methods: HL-60 cells were cultured in the presence of honeys at various concentrations for up to 72 hours and the percentage of cell viability was evaluated by MTT assay. Apoptotic cells were identified by chromatin condensation and flow cytometry analysis. ROS production was determined using 2´,7´-dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate (H2DCFDA). Results: The three types of crude commercial honey induced apoptosis in a concentration and time dependent-manner. In addition, honeys with the higher phenolic content, heather and polyfloral, were the most effective to induce apoptosis in HL-60 cells. However, honeys did not generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) and N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) could not block honeys-induced apoptosis in HL-60 cells. Conclusion: These data support that honeys induced apoptosis in HL-60 cells through a ROS-independent cell death pathway. Moreover, our findings indicate that the antiproliferative and apoptotic effects of honey varied according to the floral origin and the phenolic content.
Logic and Prolog

Part 1 Logic - the foundation of analysis: structure logical status conditions and conditionals names and predicates quantifier and variable. Part 2 Prolog - analysis in action: beginning Prolog backtracking, negation and errors structuring information lists using numbers introducing recursion. Part 3 Logic - the art of deduction: reasoning assumptions, strategy reasoning further generalizations reasoning with existence further topics. Part 4 Prolog - logic plus control: lists and sets recursion and control operators - truth and proof engines of inference towards natural language.