Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A combined PPAC-RCCE-ISAT methodology for efficient implementation of combustion chemistry

Probability density function (PDF) methods are now well established and can be used to accurately simulate flames with strong turbulence chemistry interactions. A pre-partitioned adaptive chemistry (PPAC) methodology (Liang et al., Combustion and Flame, 2015) has been proposed recently for the efficient implementation of combustion chemistry in particle PDF methods. PPAC generates a library of reduced kinetic models in an offline preprocessing stage. At runtime, PDF particles are dynamically assigned one reduced model and its corresponding reduced representation, leading to a significant decrease in both storage requirements and CPU time required for the integration of chemical source terms. In this work, we augment PPAC by combining it with storage retrieval and dimension reduction techniques. Specifically, this work combines PPAC with in-situ adaptive tabulation (ISAT) and rate-constrained chemical equilibrium (RCCE). Implementations for PPAC-ISAT, PPAC-RCCE, and PPAC-RCCE-ISAT are described and their performance is examined for a partially stirred reactor (PaSR) test case. The combined PPAC-RCCE-ISAT methodology shows a significant improvement over the stand-alone PPAC methodology by reducing the number of redundant direct integrations of similar compositions and reducing the number of variables that need to be retained at runtime.
Phytochemical and Safety Evaluation of Hydroethanolic Leaf Extract of Tecoma stans (L.) Juss. ex Kunth

Tecoma stans (yellow bell) is a popular ornamental plant mostly found in the tropical regions. It is reported to have significant pharmacological activity and has gained attention by natives of various cultures. This study focused on the phytoconstituents screening, antioxidant activity, and heavy metal analysis as well as the acute and subchronic toxicity of the hydroethanolic leaf extract (TSE) using standard methods. The presence of flavonoids, alkaloids, cardiac glycosides, saponins, coumarins, and terpenoids in the raw leaf of the plant was observed while the hydroethanolic extract contained coumarins, saponins, cardiac glycosides, and flavonoids. The DPPH percentage scavenging activity of the crude extract was 64.32% while the fractions, ethyl acetate (55.26%), methanol (60.72%), and hydro (36.97%.), gave varying activities. The UV-Vis and FT-IR indicated the presence of alcohols, phenols, alkanes, alkenes, carbonyls (general), aliphatic amines, aromatics, ketones, ethers, esters, carboxylic acids, alkyl halides, saturated aliphatic acids, 1° and 2° amines, amides, and α,β-unsaturated aldehydes. The heavy metal analysis showed a high level of iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn) in the raw leaf. The median acute toxicity (LD50) of the extract was determined to be <5000mg/kg body weight in mice. Subchronic use for 28 days resulted in significant weight gain, reduction in platelet levels, decrease in WBCs, and increase in blood glucose compared to the normal. TSE caused no adverse effects on vital organs. No mortality was recorded. The hydroethanolic extract of T. stans could therefore be considered safe in moderate doses.
α-Helical stabilization by side chain shielding of backbone hydrogen bonds

We study atomic models of the thermodynamics of the structural transition of peptides that form α-helices. The effect of sequence variation on α-helix formation for alanine-rich peptides, Ac-Ala21- methyl amide (A21) and Ac-A5 (AAARA)3A-methyl amide (Fs peptide), is investigated by atomic simulation studies of the thermodynamics of the helix-coil transition in explicit water. The simulations show that the guanidinium group in the Arg side chains in the Fs peptide interacts with the carbonyl group four amino acids upstream in the chain and desolvates backbone hydrogen bonds. This desolvation can be directly correlated with a higher probability of hydrogen bond formation. We find that Fs has higher helical content than A21 at all temperatures. A small modification in the amber force field reproduces the experimental helical content and helix-coil transition temperatures for the Fs peptide.
Vasoactive intestinal peptide stabilizes intestinal immune homeostasis through maintaining interleukin-10 expression in regulatory B cells

Rationale: Immune dysfunction is thought to play an important role in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD). However, the underlying mechanism requires further investigation. Vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) has immune regulatory functions, but its role in immune regulatory activities in the intestinal mucosa is not fully understood. This study aims to elucidate the role of VIP in the regulation of regulatory B cell (Breg) function in the intestine. Methods: Peripheral blood samples were collected from UC patients and healthy control (HC) subjects. Bregs were isolated from these samples and their immune regulatory function was analyzed. A murine colitis model was established to test the role of VIP in inhibiting inflammation in the intestine. Results: Serum IL-10 and VIP levels were lower in IgE+ (≥0.35 IU/mL) UC patients than that in HC subjects. The immune suppressive function of Bregs isolated from IgE+ UC patients was impaired. IL-10 mRNA decayed spontaneously in Bregs, which was reversed by VIP added to the culture. Tristetraprolin (TTP) bound IL-10 mRNA to speed its decay, which was blocked by VIP in the culture. Administration of VIP efficiently inhibited experimental colitis. Conclusions: Insufficient VIP levels in the microenvironment speeds IL-10 mRNA decay to cause Breg dysfunction. Administration of VIP can inhibit experimental colitis, suggesting the translational potential of VIP in the treatment of IgE+ UC.
Software Defined Optical Access Networks (SDOANs): A Comprehensive Survey

The emerging software defined networking (SDN) paradigm separates the data plane from the control plane and centralizes network control in an SDN controller. SDN facilitates the virtualization of network functions so that multiple virtual networks can operate over a given installed physical network. Optical network segments, such as passive optical networks (PONs), have become important for providing network access. In this article, we comprehensively survey studies that examine the concepts of SDN and network virtualization in optical access networks; in brief, we survey the area of software defined optical access networks (SDOANs). We organize the SDOAN studies into architecture and protocol focused studies. We then subclassify the studies according to the network layers. In particular, for protocol-focused studies, we consider subclassifications for the physical layer, medium access control (link) layer, and network layer. In addition, we consider subclassifications for studies focused on quality of service, multilayer (multitechnology) networking, and virtualization. Based on the survey, we identify open challenges for SDOANs and outline future directions.
Handwriting measures as reflectors of executive functions among adults with Developmental Coordination Disorders (DCD)

Planning ahead and organizational abilities in time and space are ingredients of high-level cognitive functions labeled as ‘Executive Functions’ (EF) required for daily activities such as writing or home management. EF deficits are considered a possible underlying brain mechanism involved in Developmental Coordination Disorders (DCD). The aim: of the study was to compare the handwriting process measures and the planning and organizational abilities in space and time of students with DCD with those of matched controls and to find whether handwriting measures can predict daily planning and organizational abilities among students with DCD. Method: 30 students diagnosed with DCD, between the ages of 24–41, and 30 age- and gender-matched controls participated in the study. They filled out the Handwriting Proficiency Screening Questionnaire (HPSQ) and the Adult Developmental Co-ordination Disorders Checklist (ADC). Furthermore, they copied a paragraph on a digitizer that is part of a computerized system Computerised Penmanship Evaluation Toll (ComPET). Results: Significant group differences were found for the HPSQ subscales scores as well as for the temporal and spatial measures of the paragraph copy task. Significant group differences were also found for the planning and organizational abilities in space and time as reflected through the ADC subscales. Significant medium correlations were found in both groups between the mean HPSQ time subscale and the ADC-B subscale mean score (r = 0.50/0.58, p < 0.05). Series of regression analyses indicated that two handwriting performance measures (mean HPSQ time subscale and mean stroke duration) predicted 19% of planning and organizational abilities as reflected through daily functions (ADC-B) [F(3, 54) = 38.37, β = 0.40, p < 0.0001]. Conclusion: The results support previous evidence about EF deficits as an underlying brain mechanism involved in motor coordination disorders, their significance as related to theoretical models of handwriting and daily function among DCD will be examined.
QU at TREC-2014: Online Clustering with Temporal and Topical Expansion for Tweet Timeline Generation

Abstract : In this work, we present our participation in the microblog track in TREC-2014, building upon our first participation last year. We present our approaches for the two tasks of this year: temporally-anchored ad-hoc search and tweet timeline generation. For the ad-hoc search task, we used topical expansion in addition to temporal models to perform retrieval. Our results show that our run based on the typical pseudo relevance feedback query expansion outperformed all of our other runs with a relatively high mean average precision (MAP). As for the timeline generation task, we approached this problem using online incremental clustering of tweets retrieved for a given query. Our approach allows the dynamic creation of semantic clusters while providing a framework for detecting redundant tweets and selecting representative ones to be added to the final timeline. The results demonstrate that using incremental clustering of tweets retrieved through a temporal retrieval model produced the best effectiveness among the submitted runs.
Sketch Matching on Topology Product Graph

Sketch matching is the fundamental problem in sketch based interfaces. After years of study, it remains challenging when there exists large irregularity and variations in the hand drawn sketch shapes. While most existing works exploit topology relations and graph representations for this problem, they are usually limited by the coarse topology exploration and heuristic (thus suboptimal) similarity metrics between graphs. We present a new sketch matching method with two novel contributions. We introduce a comprehensive definition of topology relations, which results in a rich and informative graph representation of sketches. For graph matching, we propose topology product graph that retains the full correspondence for matching two graphs. Based on it, we derive an intuitive sketch similarity metric whose exact solution is easy to compute. In addition, the graph representation and new metric naturally support partial matching, an important practical problem that received less attention in the literature. Extensive experimental results on a real challenging dataset and the superior performance of our method show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art.
The role of nitric oxide, superoxide and peroxynitrite in the anti‐arrhythmic effects of preconditioning and peroxynitrite infusion in anaesthetized dogs

Background and purpose: Both ischaemia preconditioning (PC) and the intracoronary infusion of peroxynitrite (PN) suppress ischaemia and reperfusion (I/R)‐induced arrhythmias and the generation of nitrotyrosine (NT, a marker of PN). However, it is still unclear whether this latter effect is due to a reduction in nitric oxide (NO) or superoxide (O2‐) production.
Performance Analysis of Different Diversity Schemes for Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Network

An energy-efficient communication schemes in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is highly desirable where energy consumption is constrained. In this paper, the mathematical model of energy consumption per bit in wireless sensor network using Cooperative MIMO is presented. Cooperative MIMO transmission and reception can simultaneously achieve the energy savings and the delay reduction over some distance ranges. Further, the best diversity scheme to minimize total energy consumption to send a given number of bits is analyzed. The simulation through MATLAB is carried out for various modulation techniques in Rayleigh fading channel.
Detecting Infection Source and Building Predictive Blacklists with an Attack-Source Scoring System

—We present a network behavior based scoring system dedicated to inferring the maliciousness of hosts outside the perimeter of an institution/enterprise. Our viewpoint is strictly from the perspective of a network administrator. The scores are generated for external hosts outside the perimeter of the institution where the system is deployed, which we call "attack-source score". The unique property of our approach is that, we believe most infections stem from interactions with unknown external hosts with the assumption that the external hosts are " responsible " and " accusable " when its internal counterpart exhibits malicious/suspicious behavior. This unique feature of our approach makes our system independent of particular attack vectors and abstracts away attack characteristics. With a real deployment, we show by experiments that the system provides a global view of the maliciousness/risks of external hosts, and demonstrates the application of our system in two use cases: (1) detecting the infection source or a ranked list of suspected infection sources for network forensic and incidence response purposes; (2) building a predictive blacklist to aid network administrators to be aware of potentially dangerous external IPs even before an attack has been detected and the IP exhibited on third-party blacklists.
Magnetic-based vehicle detection with sensor networks

An inexpensive, non-intrusive, energy-efficient magnetic sensor-based solution is proposed, which is able to detect vehicles and estimate their speed. In this paper the measurement algorithm is described in detail, which contains an adaptive auto-offset algorithm, a power-based detector and a correlation-based speed estimator. The performance of the proposed solution is illustrated by real measurement examples.
Effect of spinning workouts on affect

Abstract Background: Numerous physical exercises trigger positive changes in affect after relatively short workouts. Spinning, also known as indoor-cycling, is a very popular form of exercise, especially among women, but its impact on affect have not been examined to date. Aims: The purpose of the current work was to investigate the possible benefits of spinning on affect in self-controlled and in instructor-led exercise sessions. Methods: Using baseline measures and pre- to post-exercise design with a psychometrically validated questionnaire, the net effects of spinning (without music) on positive- and negative-affect were measured in two exercise conditions: (1) self-controlled workout (i.e. without an instructor) and (2) instructor-led workout. After both conditions, 18 women rated the extent which they enjoyed the exercise session on a 10-point Likert scale. Results: The findings revealed that positive affect increased while negative affect decreased after both workouts. Exerted effort, measured through the heart rate, did not differ between the two conditions. However, participants enjoyed more the instructor-led exercise session than the self-regulated workout (effect size, Cohen's d = 0.93). Conclusions: This research reveals that spinning improves post-exercise affect, even without music and regardless of instructor’s presence. Therefore, it demonstrates the net benefits of this popular exercise on affect.
Alcohol advertising and youth.

OBJECTIVE The question addressed in this review is whether aggregate alcohol advertising increases alcohol consumption among college students. Both the level of alcohol-related problems on college campuses and the level of alcohol advertising are high. Some researchers have concluded that the cultural myths and symbols used in alcohol advertisements have powerful meanings for college students and affect intentions to drink. There is, however, very little empirical evidence that alcohol advertising has any effect on actual alcohol consumption. METHOD The methods used in this review include a theoretical framework for evaluating the effects of advertising. This theory suggests that the marginal effect of advertising diminishes at high levels of advertising. Many prior empirical studies measured the effect of advertising at high levels of advertising and found no effect. Those studies that measure advertising at lower, more disaggregated levels have found an effect on consumption. RESULTS The results of this review suggest that advertising does increase consumption. However, advertising cannot be reduced with limited bans, which are likely to result in substitution to other available media. Comprehensive bans on all forms of advertising and promotion can eliminate options for substitution and be potentially more effective in reducing consumption. In addition, there is an increasing body of literature that suggests that alcohol counteradvertising is effective in reducing the alcohol consumption of teenagers and young adults. CONCLUSIONS These findings indicate that increased counteradvertising, rather than new advertising bans, appears to be the better choice for public policy. It is doubtful that the comprehensive advertising bans required to reduce advertising would ever receive much public support. New limited bans on alcohol advertising might also result in less alcohol counteradvertising. An important topic for future research is to identify the counteradvertising themes that are most effective with youth.
Consolidation of a pixel-based classification using neighborhood information

A two-step consolidation process is presented that reduces the effect of speckle in the classification result. The degree of consolidation or smoothing can be adjusted using a classification confidence measure and a threshold for the amount of neighborhood agreement needed. Results from AIRSAR ice data shown are compared to a classification result form pre-filtered data.
A Compact Framework for Voice Conversion Using Wavenet Conditioned on Phonetic Posteriorgrams

Voice conversion can benefit from WaveNet vocoder with improvement in converted speech’s naturalness and quality. However, nowadays approaches segregate the training of conversion module and WaveNet vocoder towards different optimization objectives, which might lead to the difficulty in model tuning and coordination. In this paper, we propose a compact framework to unify the conversion and the vocoder parts. Multi-head self-attention structure and bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) are employed to encode speaker independent phonetic posteriorgrams (PPGs) into an intermediate representation which is used as the condition input of WaveNet to generate target speaker’s waveform. In this way, we unify the conversion and vocoder parts into a compact system in which all parameters can be tuned simultaneously for global optimization. We compared the proposed method with the baseline system that consists of separately trained conversion module and WaveNet vocoder. Subjective evaluations show that the proposed method can achieve better results in both naturalness and speaker similarity.
Strategies for effective converged control of LTE and Wi-Fi networks

The booming of mobile communications has brought operators to face the issue to improve network capacity utilization to provide high quality of experience to end users. One way to exploit efficiently the available network capacity is mobile data offloading, which allows network operators to reduce congestion by offloading some traffic to other operators' networks, possibly based on different technologies, e.g. Long Term Evolution (LTE) or Wi-Fi. In this work, we focus on Operational Expenditures (OpEx) by defining, for a network operator, a cost metric accounting for the utilization of network infrastructure (e.g., associated to energy cost) and a “roaming cost” (i.e., the cost of offloading certain amount of traffic). Upon this, we define an optimization problem minimizing the overall OpEx for an operator, while guaranteeing the provisioning of traffic demands. We make the analysis from the perspective of an LTE network operator, which has the opportunity to offload traffic to either Wi-Fi Access Points, LTE small cells, or to LTE unlicensed spectrum. We study how mobile data offloading enables the reduction of network congestion and minimizes its OpEx.
Pseudoautosomal Region 1 Length Polymorphism in the Human Population

The human sex chromosomes differ in sequence, except for the pseudoautosomal regions (PAR) at the terminus of the short and the long arms, denoted as PAR1 and PAR2. The boundary between PAR1 and the unique X and Y sequences was established during the divergence of the great apes. During a copy number variation screen, we noted a paternally inherited chromosome X duplication in 15 independent families. Subsequent genomic analysis demonstrated that an insertional translocation of X chromosomal sequence into theMa Y chromosome generates an extended PAR. The insertion is generated by non-allelic homologous recombination between a 548 bp LTR6B repeat within the Y chromosome PAR1 and a second LTR6B repeat located 105 kb from the PAR boundary on the X chromosome. The identification of the reciprocal deletion on the X chromosome in one family and the occurrence of the variant in different chromosome Y haplogroups demonstrate this is a recurrent genomic rearrangement in the human population. This finding represents a novel mechanism shaping sex chromosomal evolution.
[Postpartum blues and depression].

Pathogenesis Common Assumptions I. Hormonal-Physiological Factors A) Change in oestrogene, gestagene and prolactin balance after birth * Lower oestrogene level * Ratio of free and total estriol * Hypersensivity of central D2receptors related to effects of oestrogene * Lower progesterone level * Lower prolactin level B) Change in cortisol and adrenaline balance * Higher serum-bound cortisol level * Level of circulating CRH * Lower placental steroids level * Reduction of circulating chatecholamines * Lower adrena_line/noradrenaline level * Diminished fall in platelet alpha-2-adrenoceptor capacity C) Thyroid dysfunction * Positive thyroid antibody status * Declination of T3 D) Change in endorphine and neurotransmitter balance * Beta-endorphine level * Decrease in platelet sub-3H-serotonine * Alterations of GABA-sub-(A) receptor sensivity