Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INFLUENCE OF DIETARY CALCIUM ON SERUM 1,25‐DIHYDROXYVITAMIN D CONCENTRATIONS IN RENAL STONE FORMERS

The role of 1,25‐dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25(OH)2D) in the pathogenesis of idiopathic hypercalciuria was studied in 37 renal stone formers who, during two 10‐day periods, followed first a normal and then a low calcium diet. The following samples were taken during each diet; (1) 24 h urine; (2) fasting blood and urine; (3) blood and urine following a 1 g oral calcium load. Patients were divided according to serum calcium level, 24 h urinary calcium excretion on the first diet and fasting calcium excretion on the second diet. Eight patients were found to be normocalciuric (NSF), 16 had absorptive hypercalciuria (AH), five renal hypercalciuria (RH) and eight primary hyperparathyroidism. In NSF and AH, a positive correlation was found between the fasting and the 24 hour urinary calcium (r = 0.787, P<0.001), while negative correlations were found between the fasting urinary calcium and the serum parathyroid hormone (r= ‐0.703, P<0.001) or the fasting urinary cyclic AMP (r= ‐0.434, P < 0.01). Patients with RH had higher serum PTH and urinary cAMP levels for a given degree of fasting calciuria mainly on the low calcium diet. Mean serum 1,25(OH)2D was similar in NSF (43.6 ± 4.5 pg/ml), AH (43.6 ± 2.3 pg/ml) and RH (40.4 ± 4.8 pg/ml) on the first diet; increases were similar in all groups after 10 d of calcium restriction. A positive correlation was found between the serum 1,25(OH)2D concentrations and the 24 h urinary calcium excretion on the first diet in NSF (r = 0.889, P<0.001) but not in AH or RH. There was no evidence of such correlation with the low calcium diet. No correlation between the calciuric response to calcium loading and the serum concentrations of 1,25(OH)2D was found. The results suggest that serum concentrations of 1,25(OH)2D may be related to urinary calcium excretion in NSF more than in AH or RH. The factors responsible for the hyperabsorption of calcium in the latter patients remain to be elucidated.
Pseudotumor Cerebri and Pregnancy

Pseudotumor cerebri is described in a pregnant patient, and the literature pertaining to signs, symptoms, pathophysiology and treatment is reviewed. The syndrome of benign intracranial hypertension in pregnancy is diagnosed by exclusion. The fact that it appears to be a self-limiting illness in which neurosurgical or medical therapy, including pregnancy termination, may not be warranted, unless vision is threatened, is stressed.
Lifeguard - a personal physiological monitor for extreme environments

Monitoring vital signs in applications that require the subject to be mobile requires small, lightweight, and robust sensors and electronics. A body-worn system should be unobtrusive, noninvasive, and easy-to-use. It must be able to log vital signs data for several hours as well as transmit it on demand in real-time using secure wireless technologies. The NASA Ames Research Center (Astrobionics) and Stanford University (National Center for Space Biological Technologies) are currently developing a wearable physiological monitoring system for astronauts, called LifeGuard, that meets all of the above requirements and is also applicable to clinical, home-health monitoring, first responder and military applications.
Design and implementation of an interactive nurse robot

In this paper, an interactive nurse robot is developed which has worked successfully in home environment. The mobile robot, driven by two motors/wheels, consists of image processing, speech recognition, semantic analysis, local/remote interaction, and autonomous mobile components to provide nursing functions of surveillance, interaction, accompanying, patrol, and urgent announcement. Since the proposed robot is desired to service children and/or elders in home, its appearance and actions should be loveable and safe. The experimental results reveal the interactive nurse robot really reaches the goals of attracting and looking after children.
Composition Principles for Quality Depiction and Aesthetics

Composition is an important aspect of both traditional illustration practices and non-photorealistic rendering methods. Composition means combining drawing elements such as line, tone, texture, focus of attention and arranging them in order, to make one cohesive unit. In this paper we present commonly used terms for drawing composition, present important key principles (unit, balance, center of interest, emphasis), and discuss how such principles are used to precisely convey the information to be depicted, with images embodying rich aesthetic qualities. We present two NPR experiments illustrating compositional principles and aesthetical implications in the context of line rendering of single 3D objects and global illumination mesh interior models
The myocardial performance index in children with isolated left-to-right shunt lesions.

OBJECTIVE The myocardial performance index (MPI) measures the ratio of isovolumic time intervals to ventricular ejection time. The effects of altered ventricular preload or afterload on MPI have yet to be determined. This study was designed to determine the impact of altered preload on left and right ventricular myocardial performance index in the clinical setting of left-to-right lesions. METHODS The left and right ventricular myocardial performance indexes were measured in 17 patients with atrial septal defect (ages 6 to 148 months), 23 patients with ventricular septal defect (ages 2 to 160 months), and 24 healthy children (ages 3 to 160 months). A complete 2- dimensional and Doppler echocardiographic examination was performed in all study groups. RESULTS In patients with atrial septal defect, ventricular septal defect, and control group subjects, the left ventricular MPI was 0.38, 0.37 and 0.32, respectively, and the right ventricular MPI was 0.24, 0.21, and 0.20, respectively. No significant differences in the left and right ventricular myocardial performance indexes were seen between patients with left-to-right shunt lesions and control subjects. CONCLUSION This study documents that the myocardial performance index is a quantitative measure of ventricular function that appears to be relatively independent of changes in preload.
A Mapping Algorithm for Parallel Sparse Cholesky Factorization

A task-to-processor mapping algorithm is described for computing the parallel multifrontal Cholesky factorization of irregular sparse problems on distributed-memory multiprocessors. The performance of the mapping algorithm is compared with the only general mapping algorithm previously reported. Using this mapping, the distributed multifrontal algorithm is nearly as efficient on a collection of problems with irregular sparsity structure as it is for the regular grid problems.
Of Models and Methods: Our Analytic Armamentarium Applied to Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Pandemic Staphylococcus aureus and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) emerged as serious nosocomial pathogens years ago. Despite considerable attention in the literature and in clinical practice, the problem continues unabated. MRSA-associated morbidity and mortality is, in fact, increasing, as are the associated healthcare costs. This issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology contains four studies that explore nosocomial S. aureus and MRSA, approaching the problem using a variety of methodologies including a quasi-experimental design, a case-control study, a cohort study, and mathematical models. The diversity of approaches illustrates the impressive armamentarium at our disposal to meet the challenge of understanding the epidemiology of nosocomial infections. Furthermore, it highlights the challenges to hospital epidemiologists, who constantly face new data to interpret and incorporate into practice.
Robust hex-dominant mesh generation using field-guided polyhedral agglomeration

We propose a robust and efficient field-aligned volumetric meshing algorithm that produces hex-dominant meshes, i.e. meshes that are predominantly composed of hexahedral elements while containing a small number of irregular polyhedra. The latter are placed according to the singularities of two optimized guiding fields, which allow our method to generate meshes with an exceptionally high amount of isotropy. The field design phase of our method relies on a compact quaternionic representation of volumetric octa-fields and a corresponding optimization that explicitly models the discrete matchings between neighboring elements. This optimization naturally supports alignment constraints and scales to very large datasets. We also propose a novel extraction technique that uses field-guided mesh simplification to convert the optimized fields into a hexdominant output mesh. Each simplification operation maintains topological validity as an invariant, ensuring manifold output. These steps easily generalize to other dimensions or representations, and we show how they can be an asset in existing 2D surface meshing techniques. Our method can automatically and robustly convert any tetrahedral mesh into an isotropic hex-dominant mesh and (with minor modifications) can also convert any triangle mesh into a corresponding isotropic quad-dominant mesh, preserving its genus, number of holes, and manifoldness. We demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm on a large collection of shapes provided in the supplemental material along with all generated results.
Mechanism of action of cerulenin on fatty acid synthetase. Effect of cerulenin on iodoacetamide-induced malonyl-CoA decarboxylase activity.

Cerulenin, an antibiotic with the structure of (2R)(3S)-2,3-epoxy-4-oxo-7,10-dodecadienoylamide, irreversibly inactivates yeast fatty acid synthetase. Of all catalytic activities of the synthetase, only the condensation reaction is inhibited by cerulenin. At 0 degrees C and pH 6.5, the second-order rate constant of k = 88 M-1 . S-1 was obtained for the inactivation by cerulenin. This value was about 90-times greater than the rate constant for the inactivation of the enzyme by iodoacetamide. The enzyme was protected against the action of cerulenin by prior treatment with acetyl-CoA but not malonyl-CoA. Treatment of the enzyme with iodoacetamide, while impairing the synthetase activity, induced malonyl-CoA decarboxylase activity [Kresze, G. -B. , Steber, L. , Oesterhelt, D. , and Lynen, F. (1977) Eur. J. Biochem. 79, 191-199]. Cerulenin had no effect on the malonyl-CoA decarboxylase activity of the iodoacetamide-treated enzyme. N-Ethylmaleimide, in contrast, inhibited the iodoacetamide-induced malonyl-CoA decarboxylase activity. When the enzyme was preincubated with cerulenin, malonyl-CoA decarboxylase activity could not be detected even after treatment of the enzyme with iodoacetamide. These results indicated that the reaction of cerulenin with the peripheral SH-groups of the synthetase is responsible for the inactivation.
On the design of discrete-time Economic Model Predictive Controllers

This paper addresses the design of a suitable terminal set and terminal cost for discrete-time Economic Model Predictive Control schemes with convergence guarantees. Three design methods are proposed. The first two approaches rely on the existence of a (possibly nonlinear) auxiliary control law that stabilizes the origin of the error space defined by the distance to an economically optimal state-input trajectory pair. The first method exploits a given bound on the stage cost evaluated along the closed-loop system with the auxiliary control law. If such a bound is not available, but the auxiliary control law stabilizes the origin of the error space exponentially fast, then a second method is proposed. The last method addresses the case where the auxiliary control law is not available, but the linearization of the system around the desired economically optimal trajectory is stabilizable. Depending on the selection of the auxiliary law, the proposed method allows the design of closed-loop systems with a possibly global region of attraction even in the case of nonlinear constrained systems. An example is used to illustrate the properties of the proposed methods.
A Wheel-based Stair-climbing Robot with a Hopping Mechanism

In this chapter, we introduce a stair-climbing robot developed in our laboratory. This robot consists basically of two body parts connected by springs, and hops as a result of the vibration of a two-degrees-of-freedom (2-DOF) system. The excellent combination between the frequencies of the robotic body vibration and the tread-riser interval of stairs enables a small and simple robot fast stair climbing, soft landing, and energy saving. In an attempt to give the robot mobility in an environment such as an office building having steps and stairs, various mechanisms have been proposed and developed. Each one of which has different characteristics. For example, wheel-based robots are very simple in terms of both mechanical design and control, and they can travel quickly and stably. But their size tends to be big for climbing stairs, as they cannot surmount a riser higher than their wheel radius. On the other hand, although crawler-type robots can climb over a riser higher than a wheel-based robot, they are slow and noisy. Typical examples of crawler-type robots are TAQT (Hirose et al., 1992) that can carry a human and Kenaf (Yoshida et al., 2007) for rescue operations. Legged robots, especially humanoid ones, are well suited for climbing stairs, but require many DOFs and complex control. Honda’s ASIMO (ASIMO OFFICIAL SITE), AIST’s HRP (Harada et al., 2006) and Waseda University’s legged robot (Sugahara et al., 2007) are good examples. In addition, the hybrids of these types have been proposed and have improved upon mutual demerits. Chari-be (Nakajima et al., 2004), with two wheels and four legs, travels quickly on its wheels over flat terrain, and climbs using its legs in rough terrain such as a step and stairs. A biped-type robot with a wheel at the tip of its legs (Matsumoto et al., 1999) climbs stairs smoothly. RHex (Altendorfer et al., 2001) has six compliant rotary legs and travels speedily not only up and down stairs, but also even uncertain terrain such as a swamp. Moreover, modular robots such as an articulated snakelike robot and special mechanisms for stairs have also been proposed. Yim’s snake-like robot (Yim et al., 2001) climbs stairs, transforming its own loop form into a stair shape. These excellent mechanisms have improved the manoeuvrability of the robot for rough terrain, but as most are general-purpose robots for rough terrain, a more specialized mechanism must be developed if we focus solely on stair-climbing ability in an office building. 3
The creative turn: new challenges for computing

This is a call to action. The time is ripe for a creative turn in computing. This article sets out a vision of what Creative Computing is and what it might become. It distinguishes between Creative Computing and computational creativity, and then lays out a theoretical framework. It proposes that Creative Computing is mainly happening in software. It compares the process of software development with the process of artistic creation and looks at ways in which the two might productively overlap or merge. It considers the levels of abstraction required in both and interrogates both their semantics and underlying principles from a philosophical and practical point of view. Finally, it sets three types of new challenges for Creative Computing in terms of software.
Transcriptional Repression Mediated by Polycomb Group Proteins and Other Chromatin-associated Repressors Is Selectively Blocked by Insulators*

Polycomb group (PcG) proteins repress gene activity over a considerable distance, possibly by spreading along the chromatin fiber. Insulators or boundary elements, genetic elements within the chromatin, may serve to terminate the repressing action of PcG proteins. We studied the ability of insulators to block the action of chromatin-associated repressors such as PcG proteins, HP1, and MeCP2. We found that the Drosophila special chromatin structure insulator completely blocks transcriptional repression mediated by all of the repressors we tested. The Drosophilagypsy insulator was able to block the repression mediated by the PcG proteins Su(z)2 and RING1, as well as mHP1, but not the repression mediated by MeCP2 and the PcG protein HPC2. The 5′-located DNase I-hypersensitive site in the chicken β-globin locus displayed a limited ability to block repression, and a matrix or scaffold attachment region element was entirely unable to block repression mediated by any repressor tested. Our results indicate that insulators can block repression mediated by PcG proteins and other chromatin-associated repressors, but with a high level of selectivity. This high degree of specificity may provide a useful assay to define and characterize distinct classes of insulators.
Partially occluded pedestrian classification using histogram of oriented gradients and local weighted linear kernel support vector machine

One of the main challenges in pedestrian classification is partial occlusion. This study presents a new method for pedestrian classification with partial occlusion handling. The proposed method involves a set of part-based classifiers trained on histogram of oriented gradients features derived from non-occluded pedestrian data set. The score of each part classifier is then employed to weight features used to train a second stage full-body classifier. The full-body classifier based on local weighted linear kernel support vector machine is trained using both non-occluded and artificially generated partial occlusion pedestrian dataset. The new kernel allows to significantly focus on the non-occluded parts and reduce the impact of the occluded ones. Experimental results on real-world dataset, with both partially occluded and non-occluded data, show high performance of the proposed method compared with other state-of-the-art methods.
Insulin‐like growth factor I receptor primary structure: comparison with insulin receptor suggests structural determinants that define functional specificity.

To identify structural characteristics of the closely related cell surface receptors for insulin and IGF‐I that define their distinct physiological roles, we determined the complete primary structure of the human IGF‐I receptor from cloned cDNA. The deduced sequence predicts a 1367 amino acid receptor precursor, including a 30‐residue signal peptide, which is removed during translocation of the nascent polypeptide chain. The 1337 residue, unmodified proreceptor polypeptide has a predicted Mr of 151,869, which compares with the 180,000 Mr IGF‐I receptor precursor. In analogy with the 152,784 Mr insulin receptor precursor, cleavage of the Arg‐Lys‐Arg‐Arg sequence at position 707 of the IGF‐I receptor precursor will generate alpha (80,423 Mr) and beta (70,866 Mr) subunits, which compare with approximately 135,000 Mr (alpha) and 90,000 Mr (beta) fully glycosylated subunits.
Monoallelic expression of Krt12 gene during corneal-type epithelium differentiation of limbal stem cells.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to characterize a Krt12-Cre knock-in mouse line for corneal epithelium-specific gene ablation and to analyze the allelic selection of the keratin 12 (Krt12) gene during corneal type-epithelium differentiation. METHODS Knock-in mice were generated by gene targeting. The authors examined the expression patterns of several reporter genes in the corneas of bitransgenic Krt12cre/+/ROSA(EGFP), Krt12Cre/+/ZEG, and Krt12Cre/+/ZAP mouse lines. Krt12 and cre recombinase (Cre) immunostaining was performed. Corneal epithelial cells from bitransgenic Krt12Cre/+/ROSA(EGFP) mice were examined by fluorescence-activated cell sorter. RESULTS Mosaic and spiral expression patterns of EGFP were observed in young and adult bitransgenic Krt12Cre/+/ZEG mice, respectively. Immunostaining revealed that Cre- cells were also Krt12 negative in the corneal epithelia of Krt12Cre/-/ZAP mice. Using FACS analysis, 60% to 70% of the corneal epithelial cells from Krt12Cre/+/ROSAEGFP mice were EGFP positive, whereas 20% to 30% were negative. RT-PCR revealed that EGFP+ cells express both Krt12Cre and Krt12+ alleles, whereas EGFP- cells express only Krt12+. In the Krt12Cre/- cornea, the number of epithelial cells expressing Cre is the same as that found in Krt12Cre/Cre, which can be explained by the fragility of corneal epithelial cells that did not produce Krt12 because the Krt12Cre allele was not transcribed. CONCLUSIONS These observations are consistent with the notion that clonal limbal stem cells randomly activate Krt12 alleles in the process of terminal differentiation. The authors suggest that this selection is advantageous for retaining epithelial cells expressing the Krt12+ allele and that it allows tolerance to structural mutations of Krt12.
Erythropoiesis in vitro: effect of normal versus "transfusion-sensitized" mononuclear cells.

The effects of mononuclear cells from nontransfused and transfused dogs on the growth of erythroid colonies (EC) from DLA-identical littermates were studied. To this purpose, marrow samples were cultured both before and after one to three transfusions from the DLA-identical littermate. Mononuclear cells obtained before transfusions and cocultured with autologous marrow or marrow from DLAidentical littermates significantly increased the number of EC over that obtained in control cultures in 50 of 52 experiments. The magnitude of stimulation observed was dependent upon the ratio of mononuclear cells to EC precursors, suggesting that mononuclear cells interact directly with erythroid colony-forming units in some regulatory capacity. After transfusion, the effect of mononuclear cells on littermate marrow was significantly altered, resulting in most cases either in a failure to increase or an actual decrease in EC numbers. A lesser reduction in EC numbers in a smaller number of dogs was also seen with autologous mononuclear cells after transfusion. The strong reduction of littermate EC by mononuclear cells from most dogs after transfusion is presumably related to an immune reaction against minor tissue antigens, and it suggests that transfusion-induced sensitization must be considered when interpreting the effects of lymphocyte populations on the growth of erythroid colonies.
The PAULA Language for Designing Multi-Dimensional Dataflow-Intensive Applications

In this paper, we present the PAULA language which is designed for modeling dataflow-intensive applications. The language is intended for designing highly parallel algorithms at instruction, data, and loop level parallelism. The PAULA language allows very compact and efficient behavioral descriptions and serves as design entry when generating dedicated hardware accelerators, or might be used as high-level programming language for tightly coupled multi-processor architectures. The language covers a broad range of applications from the areas of digital image, video and other signal processing, linear algebra, cryptography, and many other scientific computing domains where efficient parallelization techniques and hardware accelerators are indispensable. Key features of the PAULA language are: Its functional programming paradigm that makes parallelism explicit, an intuitive and compact syntax for describing iteration spaces, the deployment of big operators, and the advantage to describe also architectural parts of a target architecture. The usage of PAULA as design entry for hardware synthesis in our PARO design tool is demonstrated for several selected algorithms.