Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatiotemporal Expression, Distribution, and Processing of POMC and POMC-derived Peptides in Murine Skin

In murine skin, after depilation-induced anagen, there was a differential spatial and temporal expression of pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) mRNA, of the POMC-derived peptides β-endorphin, ACTH, β-MSH, and α-MSH, and of the prohormone convertases PC1 and PC2 in epidermal and hair follicle keratinocytes and in the cells of sebaceous units. Using a combination of in situ hybridization histochemistry and immunohistochemistry, we found cell-specific variations in the expression of POMC mRNA that were consistent with immunoreactivities for POMC-derived peptides. Cells that contained POMC peptide immunoreactivity (IR) also expressed POMC mRNA, and where the IR increased there was a parallel increase in mRNA. The levels of PC1-IR and PC2-IR also showed cell-specific variations and were present in the same cells that contained the POMC peptides. Based on the cleavage specificities of these convertases and on the spatial and temporal expression of the convertases and of ACTH, β-endorphin, β-MSH, and α-MSH, we can infer that the activities of PC1 and PC2 are responsible for the cell-specific differential processing of POMC in murine skin.
Impact of rapid screening tests on acquisition of meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus: cluster randomised crossover trial

Objective To determine whether introducing a rapid test for meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) screening leads to a reduction in MRSA acquisition on hospital general wards. Design Cluster randomised crossover trial. Setting Medical, surgical, elderly care, and oncology wards of a London teaching hospital on two sites. Main outcome measure MRSA acquisition rate (proportion of patients negative for MRSA who became MRSA positive). Participants All patients admitted to the study wards who were MRSA negative on admission and screened for MRSA on discharge. Intervention Rapid polymerase chain reaction based screening test for MRSA compared with conventional culture. Results Of 9608 patients admitted to study wards, 8374 met entry criteria and 6888 had full data (82.3%); 3335 in the control arm and 3553 in the rapid test arm. The overall MRSA carriage rate on admission was 6.7%. Rapid tests led to a reduction in median reporting time from admission, from 46 to 22 hours (P<0.001). Rapid testing also reduced the number of inappropriate pre-emptive isolation days between the control and intervention arms (399 v 277, P<0.001). This was not seen in other measurements of resource use. MRSA was acquired by 108 (3.2%) patients in the control arm and 99 (2.8%) in the intervention arm. When predefined confounding factors were taken into account the adjusted odds ratio was 0.91 (95% confidence interval 0.61 to 1.234). Rates of MRSA transmission, wound infection, and bacteraemia were not statistically different between the two arms. Conclusion A rapid test for MRSA led to the quick receipt of results and had an impact on bed usage. No evidence was found of a significant reduction in MRSA acquisition and on these data it is unlikely that the increased costs of rapid tests can be justified compared with alternative control measures against MRSA. Trial registration Clinical controlled trials ISRCTN75590122.
Virtual Body Swap: A New Feasible Tool to Be Explored in Health and Education

Virtual reality has been widely explored to immerse users in environments other than those considered to be their surrounding realities. We discuss the possibility of immersion not in another environment but in another person's body. The power of body swap illusion opens up a great deal of possibilities and applications in several areas, such as neuroscience, psychology, and education. For this experiment, we used a low budget system that reproduces a person's head movements as if one's own head were in another body viewed through a head mounted display (HMD) while having body agency, i.e., controlling the movements of another real body as if it was a "real avatar". In this pilot study we describe the tool in details and discuss its feasibility and preliminary results based on the analysis of the participants' perceptions collected through validated questionnaires and in-depth interviews. We observed that the system does promote higher levels of realism and involvement ("presence") compared with an immersion experience without body agency. Moreover, spontaneous declarations by the participants also showed how impactful this experience may be. Future applications of the tool are discussed.
Mapping Hierarchical Sources into RDF Using the RML Mapping Language

Incorporating structured data in the Linked Data cloud is still complicated, despite the numerous existing tools. In particular, hierarchical structured data (e.g., JSON) are underrepresented, due to their processing complexity. A uniform mapping formalization for data in different formats, which would enable reuse and exchange between tools and applied data, is missing. This paper describes a novel approach of mapping heterogeneous and hierarchical data sources into RDF using the RML mapping language, an extension over R2RML (the W3C standard for mapping relational databases into RDF). To facilitate those mappings, we present a toolset for producing RML mapping files using the Karma data modelling tool, and for consuming them using a prototype RML processor. A use case shows how RML facilitates the mapping rules' definition and execution to map several heterogeneous sources.
TGF-β Signaling Initiated in Dendritic Cells Instructs Suppressive Effects on Th17 Differentiation at the Site of Neuroinflammation

While the role of Transforming Growth Factor β (TGF-β) as an intrinsic pathway has been well established in driving de novo differentiation of Th17 cells, no study has directly assessed the capacity of TGF-β signaling initiated within dendritic cells (DCs) to regulate Th17 differentiation. The central finding of this study is the demonstration that Th17 cell fate during autoimmune inflammation is shaped by TGF-β extrinsic pathway via DCs. First, we provide evidence that TGF-β limits at the site of inflammation the differentiation of highly mature DCs as a means of restricting Th17 cell differentiation and controlling autoimmunity. Second, we demonstrate that TGF-β controls DC differentiation in the inflammatory site but not in the priming site. Third, we show that TGF-β controls DC numbers at a precursor level but not at a mature stage. While it is undisputable that TGF-β intrinsic pathway drives Th17 differentiation, our data provide the first evidence that TGF-β can restrict Th17 differentiation via DC suppression but such a control occurs in the site of inflammation, not at the site of priming. Such a demarcation of the role of TGF-β in DC lineage is unprecedented and holds serious implications vis-à-vis future DC-based therapeutic targets.
Evolutionary Algorithms for Selecting the Architecture of a MLP Neural Network: A Credit Scoring Case

Neural Networks are powerful tools for classification and Regression, but it is difficult and time consuming to determine the best architecture for a given problem. In this paper two evolutionary algorithms, Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPS), are used to optimize the architecture of a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP), in order to improve the predictive power of the credit risk scorecards. Results show that both methods outperform the Logistic Regression and a default neural network in terms of predictability, but the GA are more time consuming than the BPS. The predictive power of both methods is similar to the Global Optimum but it is found in a reasonable time.
Reduced Mad2 expression keeps relaxed kinetochores from arresting budding yeast in mitosis

A study of the consequences of removing one copy of Mad2 in diploid budding yeast shows that MAD2 haploinsufficiency is due to subunit imbalance in the Mad1–Mad2 complex and that a normal Mad2:Mad1 ratio is essential for cells to respond to a loss of tension on mitotic chromosomes but is dispensable for a response to unattached chromosomes.
Prognostic factors after non‐Hodgkin lymphoma in patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus

The prognosis for survival of patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) who develop non‐Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) usually is considered to be poor. To the authors' knowledge the impact of highly active antiretroviral therapy, recently introduced in HIV disease case management, has not yet been studied in such circumstances.
Automatic Voice Classification System Based on Traditional Korean Medicine

— This paper introduces an automatic voice classification system for the diagnosis of individual constitution based on Sasang Constitutional Medicine (SCM) in Traditional Korean Medicine (TKM). For the developing of this algorithm, we used the voices of 309 female speakers and extracted a total of 134 speech features from the voice data consisting of 5 sustained vowels and one sentence. The classification system, based on a rule-based algorithm that is derived from a non parametric statistical method, presents 3 types of decisions: reserved, positive and negative decisions. In conclusion, 71.5% of the voice data were diagnosed by this system, of which 47.7% were correct positive decisions and 69.7% were correct negative decisions.
FSAIPACK

The Factorized Sparse Approximate Inverse (FSAI) is an efficient technique for preconditioning parallel solvers of symmetric positive definite sparse linear systems. The key factor controlling FSAI efficiency is the identification of an appropriate nonzero pattern. Currently, several strategies have been proposed for building such a nonzero pattern, using both static and dynamic techniques. This article describes a fresh software package, called FSAIPACK, which we developed for shared memory parallel machines. It collects all available algorithms for computing FSAI preconditioners. FSAIPACK allows for combining different techniques according to any specified strategy, hence enabling the user to thoroughly exploit the potential of each preconditioner, in solving any peculiar problem. FSAIPACK is freely available as a compiled library at http://www.dmsa. unipd.it/~janna/software.html, together with an open-source command language interpreter. By writing a command ASCII file, one can easily perform and test any given strategy for building an FSAI preconditioner. Numerical experiments are discussed in order to highlight the FSAIPACK features and evaluate its computational performance.
Around Average Behavior: 3-lambda Network Model

The analysis of networks affects the research of many real phenomena. The complex network structure can be viewed as a network's state at the time of the analysis or as a result of the process through which the network arises. Research activities focus on both and, thanks to them, we know not only many measurable properties of networks but also the essence of some phenomena that occur during the evolution of networks. One typical research area is the analysis of co-authorship networks and their evolution. In our paper, the analysis of one real-world co-authorship network and inspiration from existing models form the basis of the hypothesis from which we derive new 3-lambda network model. This hypothesis works with the assumption that regular behavior of nodes revolves around an average. However, some anomalies may occur. The 3-lambda model is stochastic and uses the three parameters associated with the average behavior of the nodes. The growth of the network based on this model assumes that one step of the growth is an interaction in which both new and existing nodes are participating. In the paper we present the results of the analysis of a co-authorship network and formulate a hypothesis and a model based on this hypothesis. Later in the paper, we examine the outputs from the network generator based on the 3-lambda model and show that generated networks have characteristics known from the environment of real-world networks.
Migration of The Japanese Healthcare Enterprise from a Financial to Integrated Management: Strategy and Architecture

The Hospital Information System (HIS) has been positioned as the hub of the healthcare information management architecture. In Japan, the billing system assigns an "insurance disease names" to performed exams based on the diagnosis type. Departmental systems provide localized, departmental services, such as order receipt and diagnostic reporting, but do not provide patient demographic information. The system above has many problems. The departmental system's terminals and the HIS's terminals are not integrated. Duplicate data entry introduces errors and increases workloads. Order and exam data managed by the HIS can be sent to the billing system, but departmental data cannot usually be entered. Additionally, billing systems usually keep departmental data for only a short time before it is deleted. The billing system provides payment based on what is entered. The billing system is oriented towards diagnoses. Most importantly, the system is geared towards generating billing reports rather than at providing high-quality patient care. The role of the application server is that of a mediator between system components. Data and events generated by system components are sent to the application server that routes them to appropriate destinations. It also records all system events, including state changes to clinical data, access of clinical data and so on. Finally, the Resource Management System identifies all system resources available to the enterprise. The departmental systems are responsible for managing data and clinical processes at a departmental level. The client interacts with the system via the application server, which provides a general set of system-level functions. The system is implemented using current technologies CORBA and HTTP. System data is collected by the application server and assembled into XML documents for delivery to clients. Clients can access these URLs using standard HTTP clients, since each department provides an HTTP compliant web-server. We have implemented an integrated system communicating via CORBA middleware, consisting of an application server, endoscopy departmental server, pathology departmental server and wrappered legacy HIS. We have found this new approach solves the problems outlined earlier. It provides the services needed to ensure that data is never lost and is always available, that events that occur in the hospital are always captured, and that resources are managed and tracked effectively. Finally, it reduces costs, raises efficiency, increases the quality of patient care, and ultimately saves lives. Now, we are going to integrate all remaining hospital departments, and ultimately, all hospital functions.
Vulnerability Assessment in Autonomic Networks and Services: A Survey

Autonomic networks and services are exposed to a large variety of security risks. The vulnerability management process plays a crucial role for ensuring their safe configurations and preventing security attacks. We focus in this survey on the assessment of vulnerabilities in autonomic environments. In particular, we analyze current methods and techniques contributing to the discovery, the description and the detection of these vulnerabilities. We also point out important challenges that should be faced in order to fully integrate this process into the autonomic management plane.
Split Bregman Methods and Frame Based Image Restoration

Split Bregman methods introduced in [T. Goldstein and S. Osher, SIAM J. Imaging Sci., 2 (2009), pp. 323–343] have been demonstrated to be efficient tools for solving total variation norm minimization problems, which arise from partial differential equation based image restoration such as image denoising and magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction from sparse samples. In this paper, we prove the convergence of the split Bregman iterations, where the number of inner iterations is fixed to be one. Furthermore, we show that these split Bregman iterations can be used to solve minimization problems arising from the analysis based approach for image restoration in the literature. We apply these split Bregman iterations to the analysis based image restoration approach whose analysis operator is derived from tight framelets constructed in [A. Ron and Z. Shen, J. Funct. Anal. , 148 (1997), pp. 408–447]. This gives a set of new frame based image restoration algorithms that cover several topics in image restorations.
Capturing travel entities to facilitate travel behaviour analysis

The increase in population, accompanied by an increase in the availability of travel opportunities have kindled the interest in understanding how people make use of the space around them and their opportunities. Understanding the travel behaviour of individuals and groups is difficult because of two main factors: the travel behaviour’s wide coverage, which encompasses different research areas, all of which model different aspects of travel behaviour, and the difficulty of obtaining travel diaries from large groups of respondents, which is imperative for analysing travel behaviour and patterns. A travel diary allows an individual to describe how she performed her activities by specifying the destinations, purposes and travel modes occurring during a predefined period of time. Travel diaries are usually collected during a large-scale survey, but recent developments show that travel diaries have important drawbacks such as the collection bias and the decreasing response rate. This led to a surge of studies that try to complement or replace the traditional declaration-based travel diary collection with methods that extract travel diary specific information from trajectories and auxiliary datasets. With the automation of travel diary generation in sight, this thesis presents a suitable method for collecting data for travel diary automation (Paper I), a framework to compare multiple travel diary collection systems (Paper II), a set of relevant metrics for measuring the performance of travel mode segmentation methods (Paper III), and applies these concepts during different case studies (Paper IV).
Portable absolute orientation estimation device with wireless network under accelerated situation

In this paper, we develop an absolute orientation estimation device equipped with a wireless network. Accelerometers and magnetometers are used to measure the gravity and the geomagnetic field respectively. Gyroscope sensors are used to measure the local angular velocity. The geomagnetic field varies according to the environment. Therefore the device can obtain the information about the magnetic field through the wireless network. The orientation estimation task can be also requested to the other computers with the wireless network. By integrating the measured gravity and geomagnetic field with the local angular velocity using Sigma-Points Kalman Filters (SPKFs), the stability and the robustness of estimating the absolute orientation are improved over either sensor alone. We also propose an estimation method which excludes the effect of motion and magnetic disturbances for the accurate estimation.
Adaptive-Differential-Evolution-Based Design of Two-Channel Quadrature Mirror Filter Banks for Sub-Band Coding and Data Transmission

This paper proposes an improved and adaptive variant of the differential evolution algorithm for the design of two-channel quadrature mirror filters with linear phase characteristics. To match the ideal system response characteristics, the algorithm is employed to optimize the values of the filter bank coefficients. The filter response is optimized in both passband and stopband. The overall filter bank response aims at minimizing objectives like reconstruction error, mean square error in passband, and mean square error in stopband. Effective designing can be achieved by efficiently minimizing the objective function. The proposed algorithm is able to perform better than the other existing design methods. Five different design examples are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach over other conventional design techniques, as well as state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms found in the literature.
Discrimination between computer generated and natural human faces based on asymmetry information

The recent development of information and communication technology has made computer software able to create highly realistic multimedia contents that can be, for human, impossible to distinguish from the natural ones. This fact leads to the need for tools and techniques that can reliably discriminate between natural and computer generated multimedia data in forensics applications. In this paper, we focus on the specific class of images containing faces, since we consider critical to be able to discriminate between photographic faces and the photorealistic ones. To this aim, we present a new geometric-based approach relying on face asymmetry information. Experimental results show that asymmetry information could be used as a hint to tackle this problem without requiring classification tools and training or combined with state-of-the-art approaches to improve their performances.
In vitro antioxidant activities of extract and oil from roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.) seed against sunflower oil autoxidation.

INTRODUCTION In order to overcome the stability problems of oils and fats, synthetic antioxidants such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) and tert-butyl hydroquinone (TBHQ) have widespread use as food additives in many countries. Recent reports reveal that these compounds may be implicated in many health risks, including cancer and carcinogenesis. Hence, there is a move towards the use of natural antioxidants of plant origin to replace these synthetic antioxidants. METHODS In this study, roselle seed oil (RSO) and extract (RSE) were mixed with sunflower oil, respectively to monitor degradation rate and investigate antioxidant activity during accelerated storage. RESULTS The antioxidant activity was found to stabilise sunflower oil of various samples and in the order of RSE>RSO>tocopherol>sunflower oil. The total percentage increased after 5 days of storage period in free fatty acid (FFA), peroxide value (PV) and anisidine value (AV). Total oxidation value (TOx) of sunflower oil supplemented with 1500 ppm RSE was 33.3%, 47.7%, 14.5%, and 45.5%, respectively. While the total percentage increased under different analysis methods, sunflower oil supplemented with 5% RSO was 17.2%, 60.4%, 36.2% and 59.0% in the order of FFA, PV, AV and TOTOX. Both RSO and RSE were found to be more effective in stabilisation of sunflower oil compared to tocopherol. Total phenolic content of RSE was 46.40 +/- 1.51 mg GAE/100g of oil while RSO was 12.51 +/- 0.15 mg GAE/ 100g of oil. CONCLUSION The data indicates that roselle seed oil and seed extract are rich in phenolics and antioxidant activities and may be a potential source of natural antioxidants.
A Diesel Engine Performance Investigation fueled with Nickel oxide nano fuel-methyl ester

ABSTRACT: . In current paper the Performance investigations were conducted on a Single Cylinder Tangential Vertical-I VCR Engine which was fuelled with blends of palm oil methyl ester and conventional diesel in volumetric proportions of 10%, 20 % and 30% naming B10, B20 and B30. The blends were tested thermo-physically for determing various properties according IS standards. Later Nickel Oxide Nanoparticle is dosed in all the above said mixtures of POME-Diesel in two concentric proportions of 20 and 40ppm in each blend each. The nanoparticle was prepared and various characterization techniques were done to check the preparation and for studying the structural and physical properties of nickel oxide nano particle. The experimental analysis revealed that the fuel dosed with Nanoparticle showed better thermal efficiency of 6.2% and reduction in BSEC and BSFC by 5.119% and 5.6% respectively in comparison to their regular Biodiesel blends. A Diesel Engine Performance Investigation fueled with Nickel oxide nano fuel-methyl ester