Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of bilayered stearate ion-modified MgAl layered double hydroxide on the thermal and mechanical properties of silicone rubber nanocomposites

The homogeneous dispersion of nanofillers in polymer matrices to form polymer nanocomposites remains a challenge in the development of high-performance polymer materials for various applications. In the work reported, a stearate ion-modified MgAl layered double hydroxide (St-LDH) as nanofiller was incorporated in a silicone rubber (SR) matrix by solution intercalation and subsequently characterized. X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy studies confirm the formation of a predominantly exfoliated dispersion of St-LDH layers of 75–100 nm in width and about 1–2 nm in thickness in the SR. Thermogravimetric analysis shows that the thermal degradation temperature of the exfoliated SR/St-LDH (1 wt%) nanocomposites is about 80 °C higher than that of pure SR. Differential scanning calorimetric studies indicate that the melting and crystallization temperatures are higher by 4 and 10 °C for 5 and 8 wt% St-LDH-loaded SR nanocomposites compared to neat SR. A significant improvement of 97% in tensile strength and 714% in storage modulus and a reduction of 82% in oxygen permeability have been achieved at 3 wt% St-LDH loading in SR. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry
Determining Word Sense Dominance Using a Thesaurus

The degree of dominance of a sense of a word is the proportion of occurrences of that sense in text. We propose four new methods to accurately determine word sense dominance using raw text and a published thesaurus. Unlike the McCarthy et al. (2004) system, these methods can be used on relatively small target texts, without the need for a similarly-sensedistributed auxiliary text. We perform an extensive evaluation using artificially generated thesaurus-sense-tagged data. In the process, we create a word–category cooccurrence matrix, which can be used for unsupervised word sense disambiguation and estimating distributional similarity of word senses, as well.
FeatureForge: A Novel Tool for Visually Supported Feature Engineering and Corpus Revision

In many fields of NLP, supervised machine learning methods reach the best performance results. Apart from creating new classification models, there are two possibilities to improve classification performance: (i) improve the comprehensiveness of feature representations of linguistic instances, and (ii) improve the quality of the training gold standard. While researchers in some fields can rely on standard corpora and feature sets, others have to create their own domain specific corpus and feature representations. The same is true for practitioners developing NLP-based applications. We present a software prototype that uses interactive visualization to support researchers and practitioners in two aspects: (i) spot problems with the feature set and define new features to improve classification performance, and (ii) find groups of instances hard to label or that get systematically mislabeled by annotators to revise the annotation guidelines.
An analysis of the chinese wall pattern for guaranteeing confidentiality in grid-based virtual organisations

Virtual organisations (VO) allow independent organisations to share resources and collaborate to achieve common goals. When a VO is defined in a business context and confidential information is shared, security becomes a main concern. Furthermore, business contexts the VO need to adapt quickly to changes in the environment. Maintaining security in a dynamic environment is particularly challenging open issue in current Grids. The security issues are not only related to the protection from the outside world but also to the protection of the integrity and confidentiality of each organisation against potentially conflicting goals within the VO. To tackle this problem, this paper shows how the general Chinese wall security model can be adapted for use in Gridbased VO. The result is a reusable Chinese wall pattern that is expressed in terms of a VO ontology. The pattern formalization is also proved using the Alloy SAT-based technology. This work is a first step towards deploying Chinese walls in operational Grid-based VO.
Using CNN-based high-level features for remote sensing scene classification

In this paper, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is employed for remote-sensing scene classification, which fully utilizes the semantic features extracted from the images while ignoring some traditional features. Consider the limited labeled samples, CaffeNet model as the pre-trained architecture is adopted. By fine-tuning the pre-trained models, the proposed method is expected to be robust and efficient. Its performance is evaluated with two remote-sensing scene datasets. From the experimental results, the proposed CNN-based scene classification method does provide more excellent performance and be superior to several state-of-the-art methods.
A General Theorem on Angular-Momentum Changes due to Potential Vorticity Mixing and on Potential-Energy Changes due to Buoyancy Mixing

An initial zonally symmetric quasigeostrophic potential vorticity (PV) distribution qi( y) is subjected to complete or partial mixing within some finite zone jyj , L, where y is latitude. The change in M, the total absolute angular momentum, between the initial and any later time is considered. For standard quasigeostrophic shallow-water beta-channel dynamics it is proved that, for any qi( y) such that dqi/dy . 0 throughout jyj , L, the change in M is always negative. This theorem holds even when ‘‘mixing’’ is understood in the most general possible sense. Arbitrary stirring or advective rearrangement is included, combined to an arbitrary extent with spatially inhomogeneous diffusion. The theorem holds whether or not the PV distribution is zonally symmetric at the later time. The same theorem governs Boussinesq potential-energy changes due to buoyancy mixing in the vertical. For the standard quasigeostrophic beta-channel dynamics to be valid the
The lipid-lowering effect of dietary proanthocyanidins in rats involves both chylomicron-rich and VLDL-rich fractions

Proanthocyanidins have been shown to improve postprandial hypertriacylglycerolaemia. The present study aims to determine the actual contribution of chylomicrons (CM) and VLDL in the hypotriacylglycerolaemic action of grape seed proanthocyanidin extract (GSPE) in the postprandial state and to characterise the mechanisms by which the GSPE treatment reduces TAG-rich lipoproteins in vivo. A plasma lipid tolerance test was performed on rats fasted for 14 h and orally loaded with lard containing either GSPE or not. GSPE (250 mg/kg body weight) markedly blocked the increase in plasma TAG induced by lard, with a statistically significant reduction of 22 % in the area under the curve. The VLDL-rich fraction was the major contributor (72 %) after 1 h, whereas the CM-rich fraction was the major contributor (85 %) after 3 h. At 5 and 7 h after treatment, CM-rich and VLDL-rich fractions showed a similar influence. Plasma post-heparin lipoprotein lipase (LPL) activity and LPL mRNA levels in white adipose tissue and muscle were not affected by GSPE. On the contrary, GSPE treatment significantly repressed (30 %) the secretion of VLDL-TAG. In the liver, GSPE treatment induced different effects on the expression of acyl-coenzyme A synthetase long-chain family member 1, Apoc3 and 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase at 1 h and Cd36 at 5 h, compared to those induced by lard. Furthermore, GSPE treatment significantly increased the activity of carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1a at 1 h. In conclusion, both CM-rich and VLDL-rich fractions contributed to the hypotriacylglycerolaemic action of GSPE, but their influence depended on time. GSPE induces hypotriacylglycerolaemic actions by repressing lipoprotein secretion and not by increasing LPL activity.
Prevalence of Circadian Misalignment and Its Association with Depressive Symptoms in Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder.

STUDY OBJECTIVE To examine the prevalence of circadian misalignment in clinically diagnosed DSPD, and compare mood and daytime functioning in those with and without a circadian basis for the disorder. METHODS 182 DSPD patients aged 16 to 64 years, engaged in regular employment or school, underwent sleep-wake monitoring in the home, followed by a sleep laboratory visit for assessment of salivary dim light melatonin onset (DLMO). Based on the DLMO assessments, patients were classified into two groups: circadian DSPD, defined as DLMO occurring at or after desired bedtime, or non-circadian DSPD, defined as DLMO occurring before desired bedtime. RESULTS 103 patients (57%) were classified as circadian DSPD and 79 (43%) as non-circadian DSPD. DLMO occurred 1.66 h later in circadian DSPD compared to non-circadian DSPD (p<0.001). Moderate-severe depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory-II) were more prevalent in circadian DSPD (14.0%) than in non-circadian DSPD (3.8%; p<0.05). Relative to non-circadian DSPD patients, circadian DSPD patients had 4.31 times increased odds of at least mild depressive symptoms (95% CI 1.75 to 10.64, p<0.01). No group differences were found for daytime sleepiness or function, but DSPD symptoms were rated by clinicians to be more severe in those with circadian DSPD. CONCLUSIONS Almost half of patients clinically diagnosed with DSPD did not show misalignment between the circadian pacemaker and the desired bedtime, suggesting that the reported difficulties initiating sleep at the desired bedtime are unlikely to be explained by the (mis)timing of the circadian rhythm of sleep propensity. Circadian misalignment in DSPD is associated with increased depressive symptoms and DSPD symptom severity.
Downregulation of mouse CCR3 by lentiviral shRNA inhibits proliferation and induces apoptosis of mouse eosinophils

RNA interference has been considered as an effective gene silencing method in basic and preclinical investigations. The aims of the present study were to construct a lentiviral vector expressing a short hairpin RNA (shRNA) targeting the murine CC chemokine receptor 3 (mCCR3), and to investigate its effects on the proliferation and apoptosis of mouse eosinophils. A recombinant lentiviral vector expressing four fragments of mouse CCR3 shRNA (pLVX-mCCR3-1+2+3+4-shRNA) was constructed using subcloning techniques. This novel lentivirus was then packaged into 293T cells by co-transduction with plasmids, including Baculo p35, pCMV R8.2 and VSV. The interference effects of the vector were verified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and western blot analyses. The effects of the interference on the proliferation and apoptosis of mouse eosinophils were investigated using 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-5-(3-carboxymethoxyphenyl)-2-(4-sulfophenyl)-2H-tetrazolium and terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling methods, respectively. The results of the PCR and western blot analyses confirmed that the novel recombinant vector, pLVX-mCCR3-1+2+3+4-shRNA, had high efficiency in inhibiting the mRNA and protein expression levels of mCCR3 in mouse eosinophils. The downregulation of mCCR3 significantly inhibited proliferation of the eosinophils. Furthermore, the present study found that the downregulation of mCCR3 significantly promoted apoptosis of the eosinophils. Therefore, the downregulation of mCCR3 led to the inhibition of proliferation and induction of apoptosis in mouse eosinophils. The predominant characteristics of allergic rhinitis are eosinophil infiltration and release of inflammatory mediators, which appear in a variety of clinical manifestations. The results of the present study indicate that mCCR3 silencing may serve as a putative approach for the treatment of allergic rhinitis.
Biomarkers of Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer has a high mortality rate since early diagnosis is difficult and radical operation is challenging. Classical tumor markers are reliable parameters to determine disease progression during chemotherapy or recurrence after surgery, but they are not adequate to identify suspected disease or for screening. Endoscopic brushing cytology or biopsy from the stenotic duct is widely performed for the histological evidence of pancreatic cancer, but still suffers from low sensitivity. Recently, several molecules were found to be specifically expressed in pancreatic cancer, and these novel molecular markers are reported to improve the sensitivity of cytology or biopsy. In some cases, novel markers are tested for the diagnosis of cystic neoplasms. In addition, advances in endoscopic ultrasonography-guided fine needle aspiration biopsy enabled sampling of the cancer tissue before surgery or treatment, which delineates the individualized therapeutic strategy against pancreatic cancer, via the assessment of prognosis- or therapy resistance-related factors. Furthermore, novel transcriptomic or metabolomic biomarkers in the clinical samples collected by non-invasive methods, e.g. blood or saliva samples, are now applied for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. These methods will be beneficial for the screening and early detection of pancreatic cancer.
Wood's anomaly in two-dimensional plasmon-assisted magnetophotonic crystals

Wood's anomaly is experimentally observed in 2D plasmon-assisted nickel magnetophotonic crystals. It is shown to be accompanied by ≃ 2 times enhancement of longitudinal Kerr effect. Wood's anomaly appears only for p-polarization of incident light at any angle of incidence in the range between 10° and 70°. It vividly indicates surface plasmon-polariton inducing on nickel surface. The experimental results are proved by numerical calculations.
Structural Determinants for the Binding of Morphinan Agonists to the μ-Opioid Receptor

Atomistic descriptions of the μ-opioid receptor (μOR) noncovalently binding with two of its prototypical morphinan agonists, morphine (MOP) and hydromorphone (HMP), are investigated using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Subtle differences between the binding modes and hydration properties of MOP and HMP emerge from the calculations. Alchemical free energy perturbation calculations show qualitative agreement with in vitro experiments performed in this work: indeed, the binding free energy difference between MOP and HMP computed by forward and backward alchemical transformation is 1.2±1.1 and 0.8±0.8 kcal/mol, respectively, to be compared with 0.4±0.3 kcal/mol from experiment. Comparison with an MD simulation of μOR covalently bound with the antagonist β-funaltrexamine hints to agonist-induced conformational changes associated with an early event of the receptor’s activation: a shift of the transmembrane helix 6 relative to the transmembrane helix 3 and a consequent loss of the key R165-T279 interhelical hydrogen bond. This finding is consistent with a previous proposal suggesting that the R165-T279 hydrogen bond between these two helices indicates an inactive receptor conformation.
Single-phase voltage-doubler SEPIC rectifier with high power factor

This paper introduces a single-phase PWM rectifier topology based on a discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) SEPIC converter. The structure integrates two SEPIC rectifiers, which work as half-wave rectifiers, one for each half-line cycle, in a unique converter, and the novel rectifier is designed as voltage-doubler SEPIC rectifier. A comparison with the classic SEPIC rectifier shows that the proposed converter might either provide reduced voltage stress on the semiconductors to the same output voltage level, or it might supply double the gain in the output voltage with the same voltage stress. This structure provides high power factor with no current control, as a classical DCM SEPIC rectifier. As a result, the proposed rectifier can be applied in order to improve the static gain of the DCM SEPIC rectifier and thus make it suitable for applications that demand high voltage level. The topology and theoretical analysis are presented in the paper and they were verified by experimental results, which were obtained in a prototype with the following specification: 1000W output power; 220V input voltage; 400V output voltage and 50 kHz switching frequency.
Helping Software Engineering Students Analyzing Their Performance Data: Tool Support in an Educational Environment

Process PAIR is a novel tool for automating the performance analysis of software developers. Based on a performance model calibrated from the performance data of many developers, it automatically identifies and ranks potential performance problems and root causes of individual developers. We present the results of a controlled experiment involving 61 software engineering master students, half of whom used ProcessPAIR in a performance analysis assignment. The results show significant benefits in terms of students' satisfaction (average score of 4.78 out of 5 for ProcessPAIR users, against 3.81 for other users), quality of the analysis outcomes (average grades achieved of 88.1 out of 100 for ProcessPAIR users, against 82.5 for other users), and time required to do the analysis (average of 252 min for ProcessPAIR users, against 262 min for other users, but with much room for improvement).
Adherence and ingestion of Escherichia coli serotype 055 by trophozoites of Entamoeba histolytica

Carbohydrate-binding activity present on the Entamoeba histolytica cell surfaces was found to mediate the adherence of two types of bacteria, Escherichia coli serotype 055 and Salmonella greenside 050. Adherence was inhibited by low-molecular-weight carbohydrates (10 mg/ml) such as galactose, lactose, and N-acetylgalactosamine, as well as by asialofetuin and the lipopolysaccharide extracted from E. coli 055. Mild periodate oxidation of the bacteria inhibited their adherence, whereas heat inactivation, glutaraldehyde fixation, or gamma-irradiation had no effect. On the other hand, pretreatment of trophozoites with glutaraldehyde, cytochalasin B, or cold (5 degrees C) abolished adherence. None of these treatments, however, affected the attachment of bacteria that contain on their cell surface type I pili with mannose-binding capacity. These findings lend further support to our earlier observations on how amoebae interact with bacteria.
Engineering publish/subscribe systems and event-driven applications

Driven by advances in information and communication technology, computing infrastructures continue to grow in size and complexity while people increasingly depend on them. To better master their inherent scale and complexity, modern computing systems are often designed to be self-managing. They are aware of their state as well as of their environment so that they can dynamically react on changes caused by internal or external events in order, for example, to adapt and optimize their configuration or to better support and assist their users. Publish/subscribe systems provide a versatile basis for building distributed eventbased infrastructures. Components communicate by publishing notifications about occurred events and by subscribing to those notifications of interest. The resulting characteristic loose coupling between participating components is both a big strength and a severe weakness. On the one side, the indirect communication decouples components in space, time, and control flow and, thereby, provides the flexibility and extensibility required by modern event-driven applications. On the other side, when systems grow in size, it becomes difficult or, in practice, even impossible to keep track of all effects and side-effects that may be caused by a published notification. In this thesis, we address the latter problem and develop structuring means to modularly design and engineer large-scale event-based infrastructures. We consider modularity and related engineering aspects at the level of the architecture, the middleware, and the application. For publish/subscribe systems, we propose a broker architecture based on the concept of features and their composition. This way, middleware developers can easily modify, extend, or add individual broker features in order to tailor the overall functionality to actual application requirements and environment conditions. We show how features are implemented as pluggable broker components and discuss interfaces and guidelines for their composition. With scoping, we present a module concept to structure publish/subscribe networks and event-driven applications. Scopes bundle related components to new application artifacts providing them an isolated environment for interaction. Therefore, the visibility of a notification is restricted to components of the same scope only, unless the scope interface allows its exchange with other components. Scopes can flexibly be arranged in hierarchies that help decomposing applications
Multiscale Multispectral Optoacoustic Tomography by a Stationary Wavelet Transform Prior to Unmixing

Multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) utilizes broadband ultrasound detection for imaging biologically-relevant optical absorption features at a range of scales. Due to the multiscale and multispectral features of the technology, MSOT comes with distinct requirements in implementation and data analysis. In this work, we investigate the interplay between scale, which depends on ultrasonic detection frequency, and optical multispectral spectral analysis, two dimensions that are unique to MSOT and represent a previously unexplored challenge. We show that ultrasound frequency-dependent artifacts suppress multispectral features and complicate spectral analysis. In response, we employ a wavelet decomposition to perform spectral unmixing on a per-scale basis (or per ultrasound frequency band) and showcase imaging of fine-scale features otherwise hidden by low frequency components. We explain the proposed algorithm by means of simple simulations and demonstrate improved performance in imaging data of blood vessels in human subjects.
Epidemiology of molluscum contagiosum in children: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND Molluscum contagiosum (MC) is a common skin condition that primarily affects children, a common reason for presenting in primary care and is commonly seen in children presenting with other conditions in primary and secondary care. It is usually asymptomatic but can present with pain, pruritus, erythema and bacterial superinfection. Aim. To synthesize the current epidemiology of MC. Design and setting. A systematic literature review of bibliographical databases on the prevalence, incidence, risk factors, age distribution and association with other conditions for MC in children. RESULTS Data on the epidemiology of MC is largely of poor quality. The largest incidence is in children aged between 0 and 14 years, where the incidence rate ranged from 12 to 14 episodes per 1000 children per year. Incidence rates in the UK were highest in those aged 1-4 years. Meta-analysis suggests a point prevalence in children aged 0-16 years of between 5.1% and 11.5%. There is evidence for an association between swimming and having MC and MC is more common in those with eczema; however, there is little evidence for other risk factors. CONCLUSIONS MC is a common condition, with the greatest incidence being in those aged 1-4 years. Swimming and eczema are associated with the presence of MC, but the causal relationships are unclear. There is a lack of data regarding the natural history of MC and published data are insufficient to determine temporal or geographic patterns in incidence, risk factors, duration of symptoms or transmission between family members.