Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ginsenoside Re ameliorates inflammation by inhibiting the binding of lipopolysaccharide to TLR4 on macrophages.

Ginseng (the root of Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer, family Araliaceae), which contains protopanaxadiol ginsenoside Rb1 and protopanaxatriol ginsenoside Re as main constituents, is frequently used to treat cancer, inflammation, and stress. In the preliminary study, protopanaxatriol ginsenoside Re inhibited NF-κB activation in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated murine peritoneal macrophages. Therefore, we investigated its anti-inflammatory effect in peptidoglycan (PGN)-, LPS-, or tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α)-stimulated peritoneal macrophages and, in addition, in LPS-induced systemic inflammation and 2,4,6-trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS)-induced colitis in mice. Ginsenoside Re inhibited IKK-β phosphorylation and NF-κB activation, as well as the expression of proinflammatory cytokines, TNF-α and IL-1β, in LPS-stimulated peritoneal macrophages, but it did not inhibit them in TNF-α- or PG-stimulated peritoneal macrophages. Ginsenoside Re also inhibited IRAK-1 phosphorylation induced by LPS, as well as IRAK-1 and IRAK-4 degradations in LPS-stimulated peritoneal macrophages. Ginsenoside Re inhibited the binding of Alexa Fluor 488-conjugated LPS to TLR4 on peritoneal macrophages. Furthermore, ginsenoside Re inhibited the binding of LPS to TLR4 on peritoneal macrophages transiently transfected with MyD88 siRNAs. Orally administered ginsenoside Re significantly inhibited the expression of IL-1β and TNF-α on LPS-induced systemic inflammation and TNBS-induced colitis in mice. Ginsenoside Re inhibited colon shortening and myeloperoxidase activity in TNBS-treated mice. Ginsenoside Re reversed the reduced expression of tight-junction-associated proteins ZO-1, claudin-1, and occludin. Ginsenoside Re (20 mg/kg) inhibited the activation of NF-κB in TNBS-treated mice. On the basis of these findings, ginsenoside Re may ameliorate inflammation by inhibiting the binding of LPS to TLR4 on macrophages.
Pegylated interferon-alpha plus taurine in treatment of rat liver fibrosis.

AIM To investigate the antifibrotic effects of peginterferon-alpha 2b and taurine on oxidative stress markers and hepatocellular apoptosis. METHODS Sixty rats with CCl4-induced liver fibrosis were divided into 4 groups (n=15). Group 1 was left for spontaneous recovery (SR). Groups 2-4 received peginterferon-alpha 2b, taurine, and their combination, respectively, for four weeks. Histological fibrosis scores, histomorphometric analysis, tissue hydroxyproline, tissue MDA, GPx and SOD activities were determined. Activated stellate cells and hepatocellular apoptosis were also evaluated. RESULTS The degree of fibrosis decreased in all treatment groups compared to spontaneous recovery group. Taurine alone and in combination with peginterferon-alpha 2b reduced oxidative stress markers, but peginterferon-alpha 2b alone did not. Apoptotic hepatocytes and activated stellate cells were higher in groups 2-4 than in group 1. Combined taurine and peginterferon-alpha 2b further reduced fibrosis and increased activated stellate cell apoptosis, but could not improve oxidative stress more than taurine alone. CONCLUSION Peginterferon-alpha 2b exerts anti-fibrotic effects on rat liver fibrosis. It seems ineffective against oxidative stress in vivo. Peginterferon-alpha 2b in combination with taurine seems to be an antifibrotic strategy.
Case studies of visual language based design patterns recovery

In this paper, we present case studies of recovering structural design patterns from object-oriented source code. The proposed recovery technique is based on the use of visual language parsing techniques, and is supported by a visual environment automatically produced by a grammar based visual environment generator. We have applied the recovery technique to public-domain programs and libraries obtaining encouraging results. In particular, for the considered software our recovery approach is characterized by higher recall and precision values with respect to other recovery techniques
Gaze and Touch Interaction on Tablets

We explore how gaze can support touch interaction on tablets. When holding the device, the free thumb is normally limited in reach, but can provide an opportunity for indirect touch input. Here we propose gaze and touch input, where touches redirect to the gaze target. This provides whole-screen reachability while only using a single hand for both holding and input. We present a user study comparing this technique to direct-touch, showing that users are slightly slower but can utilise one-handed use with less physical effort. To enable interaction with small targets, we introduce CursorShift, a method that uses gaze to provide users temporal control over cursors during direct-touch interactions. Taken together, users can employ three techniques on tablets: direct-touch, gaze and touch, and cursor input. In three applications, we explore how these techniques can coexist in the same UI and demonstrate how tablet tasks can be performed with thumb-only input of the holding hand, and with it describe novel interaction techniques for gaze based tablet interaction.
X-Band dielectric resonator bandpass filter

This paper presents a new approach of designing a bandpass filter by applying a combination of microstrip and cylindrical shape of dielectric resonators for X-Band application. Three dielectric resonators with a same permittivity and diameter of 60 and 5 mm respectively are applied in the circuit in order to obtain a wideband of more than 1.0 GHz. The interaction between the microstrip transmission line and dielectric resonators increases the coupling effect as well as minimizing the insertion loss in the filter passband. An analysis on the effect of the height of the dielectric resonators has been investigated in order to prove that the new approach contributes more advantages and viable at the desired application band.
Genetics and sport performance: current challenges and directions to the future

In recent years there has been a great progress in molecular biology techniques, which has facilitated the researches on influence of genetics on human performance. There are specific regions of DNA that can vary between individuals. Such variations (i.e., polymorphisms) may, in part, explain why some individuals have differentiated responses to certain stimuli, including the responses to sports training. In a particular sport, the presence of specific polymorphisms may contribute to high levels of performance. Since 1998, several polymorphisms have been associated with athletic phenotypes; however the accumulation of information generated over these 15 years shows that the influence of genetics to sport is extremely complex. In this review, we will summarise the current status of the field, discussing the implications of available knowledge for the practice of professionals involved with the sport and suggesting future directions for research. We also discuss topics related to the importance of polygenic profile characterization of athletes, methods for the identification of new polymorphisms associated with physical performance, the use of genetic testing for predicting competitive success, and how crucial is the genetic profile for the success athletes in competition.
“Short-Dot”: Computing Large Linear Transforms Distributedly Using Coded Short Dot Products

We consider the problem of computing a matrix-vector product <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Ax$ </tex-math></inline-formula> using a set of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> parallel or distributed processing nodes prone to “straggling,” <italic>i.e.</italic>, unpredictable delays. Every processing node can access only a fraction <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$({s}/{N})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-length vector <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$x$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, and all processing nodes compute an equal number of dot products. We propose a novel error correcting code-that we call “Short-Dot”–that introduces redundant, shorter dot products such that only a subset of the nodes’ outputs are sufficient to compute <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Ax$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. To address the problem of straggling in computing matrix-vector products, prior work uses replication or erasure coding to encode parts of the matrix <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$A$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, but the length of the dot products computed at each processing node is still <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. The key novelty in our work is that instead of computing the long dot products as required in the original matrix-vector product, we construct a larger number of redundant and short dot products that only require a fraction of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$x$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to be accessed during the computation. Short-Dot is thus useful in a communication-constrained scenario as it allows for only a fraction of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$x$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to be accessed by each processing node. Further, we show that in the particular regime where the number of available processing nodes is greater than the total number of dot products, Short-Dot has lower <italic>expected computation time</italic> under straggling under an exponential model compared to existing strategies, e.g. replication, in a scaling sense. We also derive fundamental limits on the trade-off between the length of the dot products and the recovery threshold, i.e., the required number of processing nodes, showing that Short-Dot is near-optimal.
Gender Differences in Verbal Communication between Popular and Unpopular Children During an Interactive Task

This study investigated gender differences in communication effectiveness between popular and unpopular 5- to 7-year-old children. Because previous research suggests that there may be gender differences in how popular and unpopular children communicate with each other, 24 same-gender pairs (each containing a popular and an unpopular child) were videotaped playing a game. Communication effectiveness was assessed by measuring the incidence of forms of speech associated with successful collaboration (questions, directives, and elaborations). Results revealed a popularity by gender interaction. Popular girls used a greater incidence of these forms of speech compared to unpopular girls. By contrast, there was no difference in the speech of popular and unpopular boys. Findings are interpreted in relation to the nature of the task and the characteristics of popular and unpopular children.
Wavelets and Support Vector Machine for Forecasting the Meteorological Pollution

The paper presents the method of daily air pollution forecasting by using support vector machine (SVM) and wavelet decomposition. The considerations are presented for the NO2, CO, SO2 and dust concentrations. The prediction is made on the basis of the past pollution observation as well as the meteorological parameters, like wind, temperature, humidity and pressure. We propose the forecasting approach, applying the neural network of SVM type, working in the regression mode and wavelet decomposition of the measured time series data. The paper presents the results of numerical experiments on the basis of the measurements made by the meteorological stations, situated in the northern region of Poland
CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE APPLIED PROBABILITY TRUST

Consider a random multigraph G∗ with given vertex degrees d1, . , dn, constructed by the configuration model. We give a new proof of the fact that, asymptotically for a sequence of such multigraphs with the number of edges 1 2 ∑ i di → ∞, the probability that the multigraph is simple stays away from 0 if and only if ∑ i d 2 i = O( ∑ i di ). The new proof uses the method of moments, which makes it possible to use it in some applications concerning convergence in distribution. Corresponding results for bipartite graphs are included.
Testing the Vision: Preschool Settings as Places for Meeting, Bonding and Bridging

The OECD (2006 Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. OECD Publishing: Paris) envisions early childhood education and care settings as meeting places for diverse social groups; places that build social capital. This vision was assessed in a comparison of three preschools types: full-fee paying, subsidised-fee and publicly funded. The social composition within each was examined and the connectedness of the children (n=472) who attended compared. Publicly funded preschools had more socially diverse populations. The quantity of social connectedness did not differ but children in publicly funded preschools described higher quality social relationships. Not all preschool settings are socially diverse but, where they are, the quality of relationships is highest. © 2010 The Author(s). Children & Society
The Value of Social Validation in Single-Case Methods in Sport and Exercise Psychology

Social validation is used to determine satisfaction with an intervention and has been utilized in many single-case studies within sport and exercise psychology research and consultancy. This article reviews current social validation procedures and makes recommendations of how a more thorough consideration of the technique could add greater value to the understanding of single-case protocols within research and applied practice. Recommendations include using semi-structured interviews for data collection, using content analysis to analyze these data, reporting social validation results in a thorough manner, collecting social validation information from significant others, and collecting social validation data as frequently as possible.
Arterial Intimal Damage in Avulsion and Crush Injuries in Rat Limbs

A stereotypical pattern of arterial intimal damage has been demonstrated in rat avulsed and crushed injuries. These intimal tears can be found up to 6 cm proximal to the site of injury in avulsion injuries and are found at a delayed time with crush injuries. In both types of injury, circumferential intimal and subintimal tears spaced approximately 1 mm apart were demonstrated. These findings suggest a structural arrangement of the muscular artery wall that predisposes it to a reproducible pattern of damage. Veins undergoing the same avulsion and crushing procedure did not manifest any change. The presence of musculature rings or a weakened medial layer in artery walls after avulsion and crush injuries may influence short term patency and also long-term clinical replantation results.
Hunting for truly relevant articles in bioinformatics literature: a preliminary study

For researchers interested in reading articles concerning a specific topic, the current document search techniques, based primarily on keyword matching, are insufficient. They tend to return too many "hits", most of which are not truly relevant. An individualized text filtering system that can select/recommend useful articles would be a tremendous time-saver for researchers, especially in the field of bioinformatics, in which numerous articles are published daily. Machine learning tools such as text classification may be the answer to this need. This paper describes some preliminary work on developing such a text filtering system. Support Vector Machine is used to classify articles from Journal of Bacteriology to determine whether an article addresses issues related to "gene function". Preliminary results, problems, and difficulties encountered are discussed.
Learning unbelievable marginal probabilities

Loopy belief propagation performs approximate inference on graphical models with loops. One might hope to compensate for the approximation by adjusting model parameters. Learning algorithms for this purpose have been explored previously, and the claim has been made that every set of locally consistent marginals can arise from belief propagation run on a graphical model. On the contrary, here we show that many probability distributions have marginals that cannot be reached by belief propagation using any set of model parameters or any learning algorithm. We call such marginals `unbelievable. ' This problem occurs whenever the Hessian of the Bethe free energy is not positive-definite at the target marginals. All learning algorithms for belief propagation necessarily fail in these cases, producing beliefs or sets of beliefs that may even be worse than the pre-learning approximation. We then show that averaging inaccurate beliefs, each obtained from belief propagation using model parameters perturbed about some learned mean values, can achieve the unbelievable marginals.
Robust dependency parsing for spoken language understanding of spontaneous speech

We describe in this paper a syntactic parser for spontaneous speech geared towards the identification of verbal subcategorization frames. The parser proceeds in two stages. The first stage is based on generic syntactic resources for French. The second stage is a reranker which is specially trained for a given application. The parser is evaluated on the MEDIA corpus.
A Dialectical Analysis of Organizational Conflict

Susan V. Lourengo and John C. Glidewell This study uses a dialectical form of analysis to explain the conflict over social control between a local television station and its company headquarters. Conflict centered around the perceived abuse of legitimate authority by the parent organization. Over the 15-month period of observation, some slight modification in control took place. Resolution of the conflict seemed to be in the direction of a synthesis and was interpreted to involve a more complex structure of social control. Conflict and its resolution were also analyzed as a mixed-motive game by imposing a dialectical framework on game theory.
Portable low-power IR-UWB system

Indoor environments are typically complex wireless propagation channels with numerous multi-paths created by closely spaced scattering objects. The ability to resolve these multi-paths is very important for good ranging resolution and positioning accuracy. Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) is a promising technology to fulfill these usage requirements in indoor cluttered environment. A portable low-power IR-UWB system for indoor channel characterization and time of arrival ranging measurements is presented in this paper. The system consists of battery powered transmitters and a four channel receiver array system powered from the USB port of a notebook computer. A novel repetitive coding and stroboscopic sampling technique are used to reduce power consumption while maintaining precise ranging using time of arrival based technique. The repetitive coding also enables data communication capability through thecoding also enables data communication capability through the same wireless channel. Power saving and precision ranging is achieved by optimization of the circuit design for ultra short pulses as well as system architecture and operation. The transmitted pulse is captured by low-cost energy-detection receivers with analogue to digital converters running at around 3.2MHz rate.
Real-time head tracking and 3D pose estimation from range data

In this paper a head tracking algorithm using 3D data is described. The system relies on a novel 3D sensor that generates a dense range image of the scene. By not relying on brightness information, the proposed system guarantees robustness under various illumination conditions, and content of the scene. The main novelty of the proposed algorithms, with respect to other head tracking techniques, is the capability for accurate tracking of the 6 degrees of freedom of the head by explicitly utilising 3D head-shoulder geometry. A Bayesian tracking framework is also proposed for continuous 3D head pose estimation. The proposed system has been tested in a real-time application scenario.
A Method of Measuring Shape Similarity between multi-scale objects

Similarity measure is a key issue in evaluation of map generalization, object matching and object recognition. The measures of similarity include shape similarity, location similarity and semantic content similarity (Frank & Ester, 2006). Among these similarity measures, the shape similarity measure is very important because of the easy collecting of the necessary parameters and the well matching of human intuition (Zhang et al., 2002). As a matter of fact, most existing shape similarity measures (e.g. Arkin et al., 1991; Basri et al., 1998; Veltkamp & Latecki, 2006) are developed based on the concept of dissimilarity by measuring the distance or cost between objects. In practice, it is not as easy as a real similarity measure to distinguish how similar two objects are.
Re-Thinking Citizenship: (Un)Healthy Bodies and the Canadian Borde

The Canadian state screens potential citizens based on their physical and mental health in order to assess individuals' likelihood of becoming contributive and productive members of Canadian society. Immigrants are not only screened as potential security risks in a traditional sense, but appear in Canadian discourse as threats to economic stability. These potential citizens are consequently screened and surveilled for health concerns. This essay examines these screening practices from a critical political science approach using Foucault's theory of biopolitics to evaluate the correlation between biopolitics – the governance of life – and immigration by focusing on Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) Canada's policy and legislative discourse. This essay argues that Canadian modern political subjectivity is predicated on the notion that citizens must be healthy in order to be truly political and to have political voice and agency. Finally, the essay calls for a re-conceptualization of the category of "citizen" in the modern Canadian state.
Weekly 5-fluorouracil and leucovorin: achieving lower toxicity with higher dose-intensity in adjuvant chemotherapy after colorectal cancer resection.

BACKGROUND Current standard therapy following resection of high-risk colon cancer is intravenous bolus 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) with leucovorin (LV), but there is no consensus on the optimum regimen of these drugs: practice ranges from the high toxicity Mayo Clinic schedule to the very low toxicity weekly QUASAR schedule. We present data for a weekly schedule that aims to provide moderately dose-intense treatment with low toxicity. PATIENTS AND METHODS One hundred and sixty-two patients were studied: 60% male; median age 65 years (36% over 70 years); 94% colorectal primary. Treatment was intravenous bolus (5 min) 5-FU 425 mg/m(2) plus D,L-LV 45 mg flat rate once weekly, for a planned 24 weeks. Data for toxicity, dose-reductions, delays and stoppages were collected. RESULTS Overall, 20% of patients experienced any grade > or = 3 toxicity, most commonly diarrhoea (14% patients). Dose reductions were made in 35% of patients (although only 21% required 20% or more reduction); toxicity contributed to a decision to stop treatment before 24 weeks in 16% of patients. Median delivered dose intensity (DI) was 96% of planned (407 mg/m(2)/week) during treatment, and 91% of planned (385 mg/m(2)/week) over the full 24 week treatment plan. Female sex and age >70 years were significantly associated with higher rates of toxicity and dose adjustment, and lower delivered DI. CONCLUSIONS Weekly treatment at these doses is convenient and well-tolerated for the large majority of patients, and achieves DI comparable with the 5 days a month QUASAR schedule and other more toxic standard regimens.