Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Loss of gap junctional intercellular communication in rat lung epithelial cells exposed to carbon or silica-based nanoparticles

Abstract The aim of this study was to investigate whether fine and ultrafine carbon black (fC and ufC), and fine and ultrafine silica (fS, ufS) particles affect gap junctional intercellular communication (GJIC) in rat lung epithelial cells. Exposure of cells to subcytotoxic doses of ufC, fS and ufS resulted in a 63%, 59% and 77% reduction of GJIC, respectively, as determined in a dye transfer assay. In contrast to ufC, fC did not significantly alter GJIC. Changes in subcellular localization of the major gap junction protein in RLE cells, connexin-43 (Cx43), and of β-catenin were observed in cells exposed to ufC, fS or ufS. The loss of GJIC was counteracted by N-acetyl cysteine and was largely prevented by specific inhibitors of epidermal growth factor receptor-dependent signaling, pointing to the crucial role of two known major mediators of nanoparticle action, namely reactive oxygen species and membrane-receptor signaling, in particle-induced modulation of GJIC.
THE EFFICACY OF WORKING MEMORY COMPUTER ASSISTED PROGRAM ON EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS IMPROVEMENT IN DEAF STUDENTS

he present study examined the effects of working memory computer assisted program on improving executive functions of deaf students. Eighteen male deaf students were selected and randomly assigned to either experimental or control groups. Students were administered Stroop Test (Stroop, 1935), Continuous Performance test (Rosvold, Mirsky, Sarason, Bransom, & Beck, 1965), the computerized version of Tower of London Test (Morris, Ahmed, Sted, & Toone, 1993), and the Working Memory Test (Cornoldi & Vecchia, 1995). The experimental group received 20 training sessions (45 minutes a session) of working memory computer assisted program (Bokharayian, 2010). The results of t tests indicated experimental group performed better than the control group. Furthermore, one month follow-up indicated no change in executive function scores of deaf students. The findings suggested the effect of working memory computer assisted program on improving of executive functions of deaf students.
Temporal Evolution, Research Themes, and Emerging Trends in Case-Based Reasoning Literature

Case-based reasoning, a methodology of artificial intelligence, is applicable to various fields, such as fault diagnosis, medical and health decision support, engineering aided design, and risk pre-alert, etc. In recently years, this area has attracted contributions from many researchers, but little work has described the overall development of case-based reasoning research through informetrics or literature visualization. To analyze the temporal evolution, research themes, and emerging trends in case-based reasoning, in this paper, we completed an informetrics analysis based on 4460 articles about case-based reasoning published from 2000 to 2015 in SCI-E, SSCI, CPCI-S and CPCI-SSH, the sub-databases of Web of Science, using visual knowledge maps and informetrics methods. This paper summarizes conclusions on the temporal evolution, research themes, and emerging trends for case-based reasoning. The results will help researchers rapidly grip the overall development and future directions of case-based reasoning.
Dual coenzyme specificity of Archaeoglobus fulgidus HMG‐CoA reductase

Comparison of the inferred amino acid sequence of orf AF1736 of Archaeoglobus fulgidus to that of Pseudomonas mevalonii HMG‐CoA reductase suggested that AF1736 might encode a Class II HMG‐CoA reductase. Following polymerase chain reaction‐based cloning of AF1736 from A. fulgidus genomic DNA and expression in Escherichia coli, the encoded enzyme was purified to apparent homogeneity and its enzymic properties were determined. Activity was optimal at 85°C,ΔHa was 54 kJ/mol, and the statin drug mevinolin inhibited competitively with HMG‐CoA (Ki 180 μM). Protonated forms of His390 and Lys277, the apparent cognates of the active site histidine and lysine of the P. mevalonii enzyme, appear essential for activity. The mechanism proposed for catalysis of P. mevalonii HMG‐CoA reductase thus appears valid for A. fulgidus HMG‐CoA reductase. Unlike any other HMG‐CoA reductase, the A. fulgidus enzyme exhibits dual coenzyme specificity. pH‐activity profiles for all four reactions revealed that optimal activity using NADP(H) occurred at a pH from 1 to 3 units more acidic than that observed using NAD(H). Kinetic parameters were therefore determined for all substrates for all four catalyzed reactions using either NAD(H) or NADP(H). NADPH and NADH compete for occupancy of a common site. kcat[NAD(H)]/kcat[NADP(H)] varied from unity to under 70 for the four reactions, indicative of slight preference for NAD(H). The results indicate the importance of the protonated status of active site residues His390 and Lys277, shown by altered KM and kcat values, and indicate that NAD(H) and NADP(H) have comparable affinity for the same site.
Mitogen-activated Protein Kinase Kinase Antagonized Fas-associated Death Domain Protein–mediated Apoptosis by Induced FLICE-inhibitory Protein Expression

Fas and Fas-associated death domain (FADD) play a critical role in the homeostasis of different cell types. The regulation of Fas and FADD-mediated cell death is pivotal to many physiological functions. The activation of T lymphocytes by concanavalin A (Con A) inhibited Fas-mediated cell death. We identified that among the several activation signals downstream of Con A stimulation, mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase kinase (MKK) was the major kinase pathway that antagonized Fas-triggered cell death. MKK1 suppressed FADD- but not caspase-3– induced apoptosis, indicating that antagonism occurred early along the Fas-initiated apoptotic cascade. We further demonstrated that activation of MKK1 led to expression of FLIP, a specific inhibitor of FADD. MKK1 inhibition of FADD-induced cell death was abrogated if induction of FLIP was prevented, indicating that FLIP mediates MKK1 suppression of FADD-mediated apoptosis. Our results illustrate a general mechanism by which activation of MAP kinase attenuates apoptotic signals initiated by death receptors in normal and transformed cells.
Effects of Chinese herbal monomers on oxidative phosphorylation and membrane potential in cerebral mitochondria isolated from hypoxia-exposed rats in vitro

Mitochondrial dysfunction is the key pathogenic mechanism of cerebral injury induced by high-altitude hypoxia. Some Chinese herbal monomers may exert anti-hypoxic effects through enhancing the efficiency of oxidative phosphorylation. In this study, effects of 10 kinds of Chinese herbal monomers on mitochondrial respiration and membrane potential of cerebral mitochondria isolated from hypoxia-exposed rats in vitro were investigated to screen anti-hypoxic drugs. Rats were exposed to a low-pressure environment of 405.35 mm Hg (54.04 kPa) for 3 days to establish high-altitude hypoxic models. Cerebral mitochondria were isolated and treated with different concentrations of Chinese herbal monomers (sinomenine, silymarin, glycyrrhizic acid, baicalin, quercetin, ginkgolide B, saffron, piperine, ginsenoside Rg1 and oxymatrine) for 5 minutes in vitro. Mitochondrial oxygen consumption and membrane potential were measured using a Clark oxygen electrode and the rhodamine 123 fluorescence analysis method, respectively. Hypoxic exposure significantly decreased the state 3 respiratory rate, respiratory control rate and mitochondrial membrane potential, and significantly increased the state 4 respiratory rate. Treatment with saffron, ginsenoside Rg1 and oxymatrine increased the respiratory control rate in cerebral mitochondria isolated from hypoxia-exposed rats in dose-dependent manners in vitro, while ginsenoside Rg1, piperine and oxymatrine significantly increased the mitochondrial membrane potential in cerebral mitochondria from hypoxia-exposed rats. The Chinese herbal monomers saffron, ginsenoside Rg1, piperine and oxymatrine could thus improve cerebral mitochondrial disorders in oxidative phosphorylation induced by hypobaric hypoxia exposure in vitro.
PI3K inhibition synergizes with glucocorticoids but antagonizes with methotrexate in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia

The PI3K pathway is frequently hyperactivated in primary T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) cells. Activation of the PI3K pathway has been suggested as one mechanism of glucocorticoid resistance in T-ALL, and patients harboring mutations in the PI3K negative regulator PTEN may be at increased risk of induction failure and relapse. By gene expression microarray analysis of T-ALL cells treated with the PI3K inhibitor AS605240, we identified Myc as a prominent downstream target of the PI3K pathway. A significant association was found between the AS605240 gene expression signature and that of glucocorticoid resistance and relapse in T-ALL. AS605240 showed anti-leukemic activity and strong synergism with glucocorticoids both in vitro and in a NOD/SCID xenograft model of T-ALL. In contrast, PI3K inhibition showed antagonism with methotrexate and daunorubicin, drugs that preferentially target dividing cells. This antagonistic interaction, however, could be circumvented by the use of correct drug scheduling schemes. Our data indicate the potential benefits and difficulties for the incorporation of PI3K inhibitors in T-ALL therapy.
Neural Network Techniques for Proactive Password Checking

This paper deals with the access control problem. We assume that valuable resources need to be protected against unauthorized users and that, to this aim, a password-based access control scheme is employed. Such an abstract scenario captures many applicative settings. The issue we focus our attention on is the following: password-based schemes provide a certain level of security as long as users choose good passwords, i.e., passwords that are hard to guess in a reasonable amount of time. In order to force the users to make good choices, a proactive password checker can be implemented as a submodule of the access control scheme. Such a checker, any time the user chooses/changes his own password, decides on the fly whether to accept or refuse the new password, depending on its guessability. Hence, the question is: how can we get an effective and efficient proactive password checker? By means of neural networks and statistical techniques, we answer the above question, developing suitable proactive password checkers. Through a series of experiments, we show that these checkers have very good performance: error rates are comparable to those of the best existing checkers, implemented on different principles and by using other methodologies, and the memory requirements are better in several cases. It is the first time that neural network technology has been fully and successfully applied to designing proactive password checkers
Application of UL144 Molecular Typing To Determine Epidemiology of Cytomegalovirus Infections in Preterm Infants

ABSTRACT Sequence analysis of the UL144 gene of human cytomegalovirus (CMV) was used to investigate the epidemiology of CMV infections in preterm infants. Nosocomial transmission of CMV from congenitally infected infant to preterm twins was excluded based on distinct molecular profiles of CMV strains. Indistinguishable molecular profiles between strains from the mother and the infant indicated postnatal acquisition of CMV through breastfeeding.
A noval microstrip ultra-wide bandpass filter with highpass filter and lowpass filter

A novel microstrip ultra-wideband (UWB) bandpass filter is proposed and implemented by using a highpass filter and a lowpass filter, aiming at transmitting the signals in the whole UWB passband of 3.1-10.6 GHz. The method utilizes combining individually designed highpass and lowpass filters into each other, followed by an optimization for tuning in-band performance. Detailed design procedures are provided; simulation result of the proposed filter is presented. Due to its simple design procedures and structure, the ultra-wideband bandpass filter newly introduced in this paper is suitable for integration in the single-chipped circuit or implementation on printed circuit boards.
Predicting Inpatient Readmission and Outpatient Admission in Elderly

AbstractRecognizing potentially avoidable hospital readmission and admissions are important health care quality issues. We develop prediction models for inpatient readmission and outpatient admission to hospitals for older adultsIn the retrospective cohort study with 2 million sampling file of the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan, older adults (aged ≥65 y/o) with a first admission in 2008 were enrolled in the inpatient cohort (N = 39,156). The outpatient cohort included subjects who had ≥1 outpatient visit in 2008 (N = 178,286). Each cohort was split into derivation (3/4) and validation (1/4) data set.Primary outcome of the inpatient cohort: 30-day readmission from the date of discharge. The outpatient cohort included hospital admissions within the 1-year follow-up period. Candidate risk factors include demographics, comorbidities, and previous health care utilizations. Series of logistic regression models were applied with area under the receiver operating curves (AUCs) to identify the best model.Roughly 1 of 7 (14.6%) of the inpatients was readmitted within 30 days, and 1 of 5 (19.1%) of the outpatient cohort was admitted within 1 year. Age, education, use of home health care, and selected comorbidities (e.g., cancer with metastasis) were included in the final model. The AUC of the inpatient readmission model was 0.655 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.646–0.664) and outpatient admission model was 0.642 (95% CI 0.639–0.646). Predictive performance was maintained in both validation data sets. The goodness-to-fit model demonstrated good calibration in both groups.We developed and validated practical clinical prediction models for inpatient readmission and outpatient admissions for general older adults with indicators easily obtained from an administrative data set.
Caregiver Burden, Health Utilities, and Institutional Service Costs Among Community-dwelling Patients With Alzheimer Disease

This study examined the moderating effect of caregiver burden on the relationship between patients' health status and institutional costs in Alzheimer disease (AD). Data were obtained on whether 421 community-dwelling patients with AD in the CATIE-AD trial received institutional services in the month preceding baseline and at 3-month, 6-month, and 9-month follow-up. All participants had a caregiver who lived with or visited them regularly. Outcome variables include hospital, nursing home, residential, and combined institutional costs. Mixed models were employed to estimate the interaction of Health Utility Index (HUI)-III scores (a health status measure) and 5 measures of caregiver burden. Wherever significant, results indicate that greater caregiver burden weakens the inverse relationship between health utilities and institutional costs, leading to greater costs than would be expected at a given level of health. Altogether 45.0% of the models (9/20) showed this effect (positive coefficient on the burden-HUI interaction term). Interventions to support caregivers should be based on caregiver burden, regardless of care recipient health status, for even seemingly manageable patients may be at heightened risk for institutionalization if caregivers experience sufficiently high levels of burden.
Moods and Programmers' Performance

We tested the impact of mood on the debugging performance of programmers. Four movie clips were used to induce programmer’s mood. In the test, 72 programmers watched both a neutral video clip and one of the four mood evoking video clips and after each of these they took a debugging test. Examination of the test results revealed an almost significant effect for the arousal mood-dimension on both debug score (F (1, 70) = 3.33, p = 0.07) and on the number of questions attempted within the required time (F (1, 70) = 6.26, p = 0.015). However, no significant effect was found for the valance mood dimension. These results seem to suggest that the programmer’s ability to find and correct errors in program code depends on their level of arousal.
Out-of-Core Bundle Adjustment for 3 D Workpiece Reconstruction Out-of-Core Bündelblockausgleichung für die 3 D-Rekonstruktion von Werkstücken

In this thesis, we developed an RGB-D-based 3D reconstruction framework with a special emphasis on out-of-core bundle adjustment. Our approach is suitable for 3D workpiece reconstruction as well as for the reconstruction of arbitrary scenes. We first acquire RGB-D data of the scene by using a hand-held RGB-D sensor. The acquired depth map is preprocessed to achieve reduced sensor noise. Camera tracking is performed using a robust feature-based 3D alignment algorithm based on RANSAC. An initial map of the environment, which consists of camera poses, 3D landmarks and observations, is built using frame-to-frame tracking and is augmented with detected loop closures. In order to reduce the effects of accumulated drift and inaccuracies in the map over time, bundle adjustment is applied. We minimize 3D alignment errors instead of 2D reprojection errors to improve robustness, convergence behaviour and accuracy. Since full bundle adjustment is unfeasible for large datasets, we introduce a novel combination of an efficient submap-based approach together with the minimization of 3D alignment errors. Our submap-based approach partitions the bundle adjustment problem into submaps, which are optimized independently of each other afterwards. After an efficient global alignment of the submaps, they are again optimized internally, but with fixed separators. We finally integrate the RGB-D frames into an octree-based 3D representation to generate a dense 3D model. Our submap-based bundle adjustment method significantly improves the runtime compared to full bundle adjustment, especially for large datasets. Further, our method approaches the accuracy of full bundle adjustment and outperforms the RGB-D SLAM system. Finally, we present reconstructed 3D models of workpieces of compelling visual quality and metric accuracy, which makes them suitable for visual inspection, measuring tasks and reverse-engineering.
ABC analyses with recursive method for warehouse

The paper focuses on redistribution of stock sections. By analyzing the warehouse according to the turnover of the raw materials and redistributing the warehouse according to the ABC method and ABC method with recursive function. The recursive method again redistributes the warehouse. These two approaches are subsequently compared together. The result is to identify the boundaries advantage using these two methods. All simulations are being performed in the Witness Lanner program.
Stressing academia? Stress-as-offence-to-self at Danish universities

ABSTRACT Academic work has traditionally been seen as relatively stress free. However, a growing number of studies have reported increases in occupational stress experienced by university researchers. In order to explain stress among this group, we build on a new perspective in occupational stress research: the so-called stress-as-offence-to-self perspective. In line with this perspective, we have investigated the incongruence between the researchers’ work values and their perceptions of the working conditions provided by the organisation. The analysis is based on a sample of 2127 Danish university researchers. The results show that person-organisation incongruence with regard to freedom and independence in the job, job security, personal and professional development at work, and receiving peer recognition are associated with higher levels of stress among the researchers. Based on these results, we suggest three strategies for managers at universities to mitigate stress among academic employees: a tough recruitment process, a team-based organisation and a proactive human resource strategy.
Angle and time of arrival statistics for circular and elliptical scattering models

With the introduction of antenna array systems into wireless communication networks comes the need to better understand the spatial characteristics of the channel. Scattering models provide both angle of arrival (AOA) and time of arrival (TOA) statistics of the channel. A number of different scattering models have been proposed in the literature including elliptical and circular models. These models assume that scatterers lie within an elliptical and circular region in space, respectively. In this paper, the joint TOA/AOA, the marginal TOA, and the marginal AOA probability density functions (PDFs) are derived for the elliptical and circular scattering models. These PDFs provide insight into the properties of the spatial wireless channel.
Chinese Word Segmentation with Maximum Entropy and N-gram Language Model

This paper presents the Chinese word segmentation systems developed by Speech and Hearing Research Group of National Laboratory on Machine Perception (NLMP) at Peking University, which were evaluated in the third International Chinese Word Segmentation Bakeoff held by SIGHAN. The Chinese character-based maximum entropy model, which switches the word segmentation task to a classification task, is adopted in system developing. To integrate more linguistics information, an n-gram language model as well as several post processing strategies are also employed. Both the closed and open tracks regarding to all four corpora MSRA, UPUC, CITYU, CKIP are involved in our systems’ evaluation, and good performance are achieved. Especially, in the closed track on MSRA, our system ranks 1st.
Collapse of a Degenerate Fermi Gas

A degenerate gas of identical fermions is brought to collapse by the interaction with a Bose-Einstein condensate. We used an atomic mixture of fermionic potassium-40 and bosonic rubidium-87, in which the strong interspecies attraction leads to an instability above a critical number of particles. The observed phenomenon suggests a direction for manipulating fermion-fermion interactions on the route to superfluidity.
Robust multi-objective control for systems involving human-in-the-loop passivity constraints with application to electric power steering

This paper is concerned with the stability and synthesis of fixed structure controllers satisfying robust multi-objective H2/H∞ performance for systems involving human-in-the-loop actuation. Closed loop robust stability conditions are studied for both sector-bounded and passive uncertainties. An iterative algorithm comprised of both genetic algorithms and semi-definite programming is presented for control synthesis purposes. This approach is used to design a 2-degree-of-freedom controller for an Electric power steering system. Experimental results using hardware-in-the-loop setup are given. The results indicate that the control design did satisfy the criteria for robust performance.
A Comparison of the Sherali-Adams, Lovász-Schrijver, and Lasserre Relaxations for 0-1 Programming

htmlabstractSherali and Adams [SA90], Lovasz and Schrijver [LS91] and, recently, Lasserre [Las01b] have proposed lift and project methods for constructing hierarchies of successive linear or semidefinite relaxations of a 0-1 polytope P⊆ Rn converging to P in n steps. Lasserre's approach uses results about representations of positive polynomials as sums of squares and the dual theory of moments. We present the three methods in a common elementary framework and show that the Lasserre construction provides the tightest relaxations of P. As an application this gives a direct simple proof for the convergence of the Lasserre's hierarchy. We describe applications to the stable set polytope and to the cut polytope.