Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The lipid formulations of amphotericin B

Amphotericin B spectrum covers most of the fungal pathogens involved in human diseases. Its use is limited by infusion-related effects and nephrotoxicity. As a result of strong lipophilic properties, encapsulation in liposomes or binding to lipid complexes led to the development of lipid formulations in an attempt to increase both efficacy and safety. Three lipid formulations of amphotericin B are commercially available: a liposomal preparation, a lipid complex and a colloidal dispersion. They differ in their lipid composition, shape, pharmacokinetic behaviour and clinical effects. The nephrotoxicity of these formulations is significantly decreased compared to their parent compound. Infusion-related events are lowest with liposomal amphotericin B. Increased efficacy of the lipid formulations over conventional amphotericin B, however, still has to be demonstrated. These formulations are mainly indicated for the treatment of documented fungal infections in patients failing conventional amphotericin B or with renal impairment. Liposomal amphotericin B is also indicated for empirical therapy of suspected fungal infections in febrile neutropenic patients giving this compound an advantage over the two other formulations. Lipid formulations of amphotericin B are extremely expensive. Whether the increase in cost translates into a long-term benefit for the patient is still unknown.
Experience enrichment based task independent reward model

For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex interactions between agents and environments. In this paper, we propose an implicit generic reward model for reinforcement learning. Unlike those rewards that are manually defined for specific tasks, such implicit reward is task independent. It only comes from the deviation from the agents' previous experiences.
Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Title Individual Differences in Rational Thinking

Individual difference studies suggest that reasoners highest in cognitive capacity favor analytic, normative responses over fallacious, heuristic responses. The present study complemented reasoning accuracy with timing data to obtain an indication of the nature of the reasoning process underlying the response selection. A total of 199 participants were presented with a measure of working memory capacity and a syllogistic reasoning task. As predicted, higher spans were not only more likely to draw a correct conclusion but also reasoned longer when believability and logical status of the conclusion conflicted. Working memory capacity did not predict reasoning accuracy or time when believability and logic were consistent. Findings validate basic processing assumptions of a dual process framework of thinking.
Evaluation of Power Systems Congestions Using Nodal Price Analysis

In the deregulated power systems, the congestion management is a fundamental task for an independent system operator (ISO). This paper explores the share of the market participants in the nodal prices congestion component. In the paper, the nodal prices have been divided into a component for the generation and the losses and a system congestions component. The computation and the analysis of the nodal prices have been realized with a modified version of MATPOWER. In addition this paper analyses the consequences of system participants’ bid behaviour and its effect on the systems congestion. Results from simulated experiments are presented on a 15-nodes test system as well as on a realistic high voltage network.
Localize car door handles with image segmentation and saliency detection

Importance of little objects in cars such as door handles is obvious, both in daily lives and in industrial manufacture. However, since the lack of the distinctive appearance and feature, obtaining the location of them is still remaining a challenge. This paper proposes an effective approach for the detection of the door handles of cars. The method innovatively combines frequency and spatial domains' algorithms to detect the location of little objects of cars in a relatively large image. To illustrate the method more concisely, our method localizes door handles through image segmentation and visual saliency detection. First, by segmenting the image we can remove the unnecessary area to improve the speed and accuracy of our approach. After finding the region of interest, our approach uses a visual saliency detection algorithm named Spectral Residual Approach which can get the location of door handles accurately. At last, the approach is tested by different kinds of images of vehicles. The results of the experiments show that our approach is obvious and practical.
Serum thyroglobulin, a biomarker for iodine deficiency, is not associated with increased risk of upper gastrointestinal cancers in a large Chinese cohort

Iodine concentrates in gastric tissue and may act as an antioxidant for the stomach. We previously showed that self‐reported goiter was associated with significantly increased risk of gastric noncardia adenocarcinoma (GNCA) and nonsignificantly increased risks of gastric cardia adenocarcinoma (GCA) and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) in a prospective case–cohort study in a high‐risk population in China. Negatively correlated with iodine levels, serum thyroglobulin (Tg) is a more sensitive biomarker of iodine deficiency than goiter. Our study aimed to determine whether baseline serum Tg was also associated with development of GNCA, GCA and ESCC in the same cohort, the Linxian General Population Nutrition Intervention Trial. Sera from ∼200 subjects of each case type and 400 noncases were tested for serum Tg concentration using appropriate assays. Tg was modeled as sex‐ and assay‐specific quartiles in Cox regression models adjusted for age, smoking, alcohol, Helicobacter pylori status, pepsinogens I/II ratio, family history and commune of residence. In the final combined analysis, participants in the highest quartile of serum Tg, compared to those in the lowest quartile, had adjusted hazard ratios of 0.88 (95% confidence interval 0.50–1.52), 1.14 (0.63–2.05) and 0.78 (0.47–1.31) for GNCA, GCA and ESCC, respectively. Using serum Tg, a sensitive biomarker of iodine deficiency, we found no association between serum Tg concentrations and risk of these upper gastrointestinal (UGI) cancers in the study population. Our results do not support the hypothesis that iodine deficiency, as assessed by serum Tg, is associated with an increased risk of UGI cancers.
This study is dedicated to my parents Dismas Ochieng ’ and Risper Ochieng and to my dearest loving children

* CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION.1 1.1 Background Information.1 1.1.1 Productivity. 2 1.1.2 Information Technology. 3 1.1.3 Kenya Vision 2030, First medium term plan (2008-2012). 4 1.1.4 National Oil Corporation of Kenya.5 1.2 Problem Statement. 6 1.3. 1 Research Question. 8 1.4 Objective of the study. 8 1.5 Importance of the study. 8 1.6 Limitations of the study.9 CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW.10 2.
Discussing aspects of AOP

Aspect-oriented programming is a new evolution in the line of technology for separation of concerns technology that allows design and code to be structured to reflect the way developers want to think about the system. AOP builds on existing technologies and provides additional mechanisms that make it possible to affect the implementation of systems in a crosscutting way.
On the Performance Degradation of Poly(3-Hexylthiophene) Field-Effect Transistors

Polymeric transistor degradation was investigated on bottom and top gate structures. Shelf-lifetime studies in both kinds of devices demonstrate an accelerated increase in effective charge carrier mobility, threshold voltage, and off current in modulus when poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) is exposed to atmospheric gases. Although P3HT is underneath PMMA dielectric and gold gate electrode films, electrical parameters degradation can be only delayed by 100 h. Therefore, only glass encapsulation of the active area is capable of effectively preventing current modulation decrease after exposure to atmospheric gases. Differently from their bottom-gate counterparts, capped top-gate TFTs clearly present negative threshold voltage and positive hysteresis. An interface with reduced deep traps concentration and electrical characterization influence on shallow traps filling are believed to play a significant role in these top-gate P3HT/PMMA transistors under operating conditions. Alternating gate voltage stress along 3000 cycles provides evidence of electrical sweep as a cause of performance degradation. Similarly, dc gate bias stress monitored for 127 min can impair current modulation and shifts threshold voltage depending on its sign. Finally, reversibility of both kinds of stress points that shallow traps are the major problem in these capped devices.
Minimising Computational Complexity of the RRT Algorithm -A Practical Approach

Sampling based techniques for robot motion planning have become more widespread during the last decade. The algorithms however, still struggle with for example narrow passages in the configuration space and suffer from high number of necessary samples, especially in higher dimensions. A widely used method is Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT’s). One problem with this method is the nearest neighbour search time, which grows significantly when adding a large number of vertices. We propose an algorithm which decreases the computation time, such that more vertices can be added in the same amount of time to generate better trajectories. The algorithm is based on subdividing the configuration space into boxes, where only specific boxes needs to be searched to find the nearest neighbour. It is shown that the computational complexity is lowered from a theoretical point of view. The result is an algorithm that can provide better trajectories within a given time period, or alternatively compute trajectories faster. In simulation the algorithm is verified for a simple RRT implementation and in a more specific case where a robot has to plan a path through a human inhabited environment.
A new descriptive clustering algorithm based on Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) provides a way for finding a part-based representation of nonnegative data. An important property of NMF is that it can produce a sparse representation of the data; however, in some applications, especially in text clustering, the sparse representation always consists of separated words, which cannot explicitly express the meaning of the basis vector. This paper presents a new descriptive clustering algorithm based on NMF, called DC-NMF that can avoid this separated word problem. In our proposed method, we embrace the phrase-by-document matrix in addition to the commonly used term-by-document matrix. Then, we use conjunct gradient descent to minimize the mean squared error objective function. Finally, we describe each cluster with the highest weighted element corresponding to one particular phrase. Our experimental results indicate that our method can obtain more ldquopurerdquo clusters than other methods.
Synthesis and in vitro evaluation of MR molecular imaging probes using J 591 mAb-conjugated SPIONs for speci fi c detection of prostate cancer

Carcinoma of the prostate is the most frequent diagnosed malignant tumor in men and is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in this group. The cure rate of prostate cancer is highly dependent on the stage of disease at the diagnosis and early detection is key to designing effective treatment strategies. The objective of the present study is to make a specific MR imaging probe for targeted imaging of cancer cells. We take advantage of the fact that many types of prostate cancer cells express high levels of prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) on their cell surface. The imaging strategy is to use superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs), attached to an antibody (J591) that binds to the extracellular domain of PSMA, to specifically enhance the contrast of PSMA-expressing prostate cancer cells. Conjugation of mAb J591 to commercial SPIONs was achieved using a heterobifunctional linker, sulfo-SMCC. Two types of prostate cancer cell lines were chosen for experiments: LNCaP (PSMA+) and DU145 (PSMA ). MRI and cell uptake experiments demonstrated the high potential of the synthesized nanoprobe as a specific MRI contrast agent for detection of PSMA-expressing prostate cancer cells. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Reducing the Cost of Precise Types

Programs involving precise types enforce more properties via type-checking, but precise types also prevent the reuse of functions throughout a program since no single precise type is used throughout a large program. My work is a step toward eliminating the underlying dilemma regarding type precision versus function reuse. It culminates in a novel traversal operator that recovers the reuse by automating most of each conversion between “similar” precise types, for a notion of similarity that I characterize in both the intuitive and technical senses. The benefits of my techniques are clear in side-by-side comparisons; in particular, I apply my techniques to two definitions of lambda-lifting. I present and implement my techniques in the Haskell programming language, but the fundamental ideas are applicable to any staticallyand strongly-typed programming functional language with algebraic data types.
A Comprehensive Phylogeny Reveals Functional Conservation of the UV-B Photoreceptor UVR8 from Green Algae to Higher Plants

Ultraviolet-B (UV-B) is present in sunlight (280–315 nm) and has diverse effects on living organisms. Low fluence rate of exposure induces a specific photomorphogenic response regulated by the UV-B response locus 8 (UVR8) receptor. UVR8 was first described in Arabidopsis thaliana. In the absence of stimuli it is located in the cytoplasm as a homodimer. However, upon UV-B irradiation, it switches to a monomer and interacts with the ubiquitin ligase E3 COP1 via the UVR8 β-propeller domain and the VP core. This induces the expression of the transcription factor HY5 leading to changes in the expression of genes associated with UV-B acclimation and stress tolerance. UVR8 senses UV-B through tryptophan residues being Trp233 and 285 the most important. Based on the comparison and analysis of UVR8 functionally important motifs, we report a comprehensive phylogeny of UVR8, trying to identify UVR8 homologs and the ancestral organism where this gene could be originated. Results obtained showed that Chlorophytes are the first organisms from the Viridiplantae group where UVR8 appears. UVR8 is present in green algae, bryophytes, lycophytes, and angiosperms. All the sequences identified contain tryptophans 233 and 285, arginines involved in homodimerization and the VP domain suggesting they are true UVR8 photoreceptors. We also determined that some species from bryophytes and angiosperms contain more than one UVR8 gene copy posing the question if UVR8 could constitute a gene family in these species. In conclusion, we described the functional conservation among UVR8 proteins from green algae to higher plants.
Title Communication Using a Large-Scale Array of UbiquitousAntennas : A Geometry Approach

The recent trends of densification and centralized signal processing in radio access networks suggest that future networks may comprise ubiquitous antennas coordinated to form a network-wide gigantic array, referred to as the ubiquitous array (UA). In this paper, the UA communication techniques are designed and analyzed based on a geometric model. Specifically, the UA is modeled as a continuous circular/spherical array enclosing target users and free-space propagation is assumed. First, consider the estimation of multiuser UA channels induced by user locations. Given single pilot symbols, a novel channel estimation scheme is proposed that decomposes training signals into Fourier/Laplace series and thereby translates multiuser channel estimation into peak detection of a derive function of location. The process is shown to suppress noise. Moreover, it is proved that estimation error due to interference diminishes with the increasing minimum user-separation distance following the power law, where the exponent is 1/3 and 1 for the circular and spherical UA, respectively. If orthogonal pilot sequences are used, channel estimation is found to be perfect. Next, consider channel-conjugate data transmission that maximizes received signal power. The power of interference between two users is shown to decay with the increasing user-separation distance sub-linearly and super-linearly for the circular and spherical UA, respectively. Furthermore, a novel multiuser precoding design is proposed by exciting different phase modes of the UA and controlling the mode weight factors to null interference. The number of available degrees of freedom for interference nulling using the UA is proved to be proportional to the minimum user-separation distance.
Multiobjective flow control in telecommunication networks

Pareto optimality is studied in the context of multiclass telecommunications networks with constraints on the maximum allowable user delays. The performance objective of each individual class is the maximization of throughput under a delay constraint. Users share the network on a processor sharing basis. The multiobjective problem that arises is solved via a transformation that leads to a multicriterion linear program. The solution method is outlined by a thorough study of a simple example. Pareto optimal solutions are compared on the basis of fairness given to different configurations and traffic characteristics. <<ETX>>
The Effects of Information Asymmetries on the Ex-Post Success of Stock Option Listings

We examine a number of unexplored factors that affect the ex-post adoption rates of newly listed stock options. We show that a variety of measures of information asymmetries for underlying stocks predict option adoption rates. This occurs even when we control for factors that have been found to be significant in earlier literature, such as stock volatility and volume. However, option listings induce a reduction in the strength of the information asymmetries in the underlying stock. Further, option bid-ask spreads start from low initial levels and increase over time, which is consistent with a modest initial aggressiveness of informed investors.Keywords: Stock options; option listings; asymmetric information; adoption rates; option volume, open interest. JEL Codes: D82; G10; G14; O31.Series:IGIER Working Paper Series
Trainable pedestrian detection

Robust, fast object detection systems are critical to the success of next-generation automotive vision systems. An important criteria is that the detection system be easily configurable to a new domain or environment. In this paper, we present work on a general object detection system that can be trained to detect different types of objects; we focus on the task of pedestrian detection. This paradigm of learning from examples allows us to avoid the need for a hand-crafted solution. Unlike many pedestrian detection systems, the core technique does not rely on motion information and makes no assumptions on the scene structured or the number of objects present. We discuss an extension to the system that takes advantage of dynamical information when processing video sequences to enhance accuracy. We also describe a real, real-time version of the system that has been integrated into a DaimlerChrysler test vehicle.
Human fibrinogen.

The structure and physical properties of human fibrinogen and fibrin are reviewed along with methods for the detection of products of their metabolism. Interactions of human fibrinogen with thrombin, factor XIII, plasminogen, glycoprotein IIb/IIIa, and other proteins are related to their relevance to thrombosis and hemostasis. To the extent information is available, the structural determinants of these interactions are delineated, and kinetic and thermodynamic parameters associated with the interactions are listed. Individual steps in the reaction pathway for the conversion of fibrinogen to cross-linked fibrin are characterized. The altered hemostatic properties of mutational variants of fibrinogen are related to their altered structure. The structures of the genes coding for the polypeptide chains of fibrinogen are discussed along with the current state of knowledge of the control and regulation of fibrinogen synthesis. Fibrinogen catabolism and fibrinolysis are also reviewed.
The New Price Makers: An investigation into the impact of financial investment on coffee price behaviour

The collapse of the international commodity agreements in the 1980s, together with the liberalisation of marketing systems in commodity exporting developing countries under structural adjustment programs have removed the role of the state in the pricing of commodities. The logic of liberalisation was to remove impediments to the efficient market discovery of commodities prices where state intervention was seen as the main culprit. Mainstream economics has also promoted the role of derivatives exchanges in efficient price discovery on physical markets in international commodity markets with globally fragmented production. By rapidly exploiting opportunities to profit from price deviations between futures and spot markets, rational and informed speculators are seen to drive any price deviations in the market quickly to the equilibrium price that reflect international supply and demand realities. Such a view, however, fails to consider the role of differentiated market participants on international exchanges in driving commodity prices, by assuming that all trading activities are efficiency enhancing irrespective of the motives behind them. There has been much media interest in the role of speculation on commodity prices, in particular food commodities, over the recent months. There has, however, been very little systematic evidence gathered on the extent to which speculative activities affect prices of exchange traded commodities. Using the example of international prices for coffee, this paper shows that increases in trading activities by non-physical market actors for the purposes of financial investment have led to a dislocation between prices on international exchanges and supply and demand realities. With increasing participation by various institutional investors such as hedge and pension funds, prices have become increasingly driven by trading that arises owing to changes in the financial investment environment more generally, such as the dot-com crash of the late 1990s and the recent credit crunch.
The causal relationship between GDP and electricity demand at a disaggregate level: A case study of Ireland

In order to optimally target economic policies aimed at electricity conservation, it is crucial to understand the relationship between economic activity and electricity consumption. Previous studies have investigated the relationship at an aggregate level, whereas this research investigates the relationship at both aggregate and disaggregate levels (residential, commercial and industrial electricity consumptions) under a Vector Error Correction Model. The flndings show the existence of bi-directional Granger causality between economic growth and electricity consumption growths at a disaggregate level while there is unidirectional Granger causality running from economic growth to total electricity consumption at an aggregate level. Finally, impulse response functions showed that there are heterogeneous efiects of electricity demand shocks on economic growth and vice versa. Therefore, it is found that electricity conservation policy needs to be sector-speciflc rather than a general policy.