Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combined Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase Upregulation and Caveolin-1 Downregulation Decrease Leukocyte Adhesion in Pial Venules of Ovariectomized Female Rats

Background and Purpose— We recently found that chronic estrogen depletion enhances leukocyte adhesion in pial venules in the female rat, while estrogen repletion decreases it. Estrogen-associated repression of inflammation may be due to upregulation of the endothelial isoform of nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) and concomitant downregulation of the endogenous inhibitor of eNOS, caveolin-1 (CAV-1). In this study we examined the effects of estrogen-independent eNOS upregulation (via simvastatin) and/or CAV-1 downregulation (antisense) on pial venular leukocyte adhesion in ovariectomized (OVX) rats. Methods— Intact and OVX rats were prepared with closed cranial windows. Adherent rhodamine 6G–labeled leukocytes were viewed by intravital microscopy. To demonstrate the importance of pial venular eNOS in the resistance to leukocyte adhesion, intact female rats were treated with a nonselective (NG-nitro-l-arginine) or a neuronal NOS–selective (7-nitroindazole) inhibitor. In OVX females, leukocyte adhesion was compared in the following groups: (1) untreated; (2) treated with simvastatin; (3) treated with simvastatin plus CAV-1 antisense; (4) treated with simvastatin plus CAV-1 missense; (5) treated with CAV-1 antisense; and (6) treated with CAV-1 missense. Results— In intact females, pial venular leukocyte adhesion was increased when total NOS activity, but not neuronal NOS activity alone, was blocked. In OVX rats, basal leukocyte adhesion, measured as the percentage of venular area occupied by adherent leukocytes, was attenuated (by ≈60%) only in the presence of combined simvastatin plus CAV-1 antisense treatment. Conclusions— Present findings demonstrate that eNOS-derived NO plays an important role in limiting cerebral venular leukocyte adhesion in female rats. These data also suggest that simvastatin-induced upregulation of eNOS expression in OVX rats will not restore eNOS function, as measured by decreased leukocyte adhesion, unless CAV-1 levels are reduced as well.
Ablation of Dicer from Murine Schwann Cells Increases Their Proliferation while Blocking Myelination

The myelin sheaths that surround the thick axons of the peripheral nervous system are produced by the highly specialized Schwann cells. Differentiation of Schwann cells and myelination occur in discrete steps. Each of these requires coordinated expression of specific proteins in a precise sequence, yet the regulatory mechanisms controlling protein expression during these events are incompletely understood. Here we report that Schwann cell-specific ablation of the enzyme Dicer1, which is required for the production of small non-coding regulatory microRNAs, fully arrests Schwann cell differentiation, resulting in early postnatal lethality. Dicer−/− Schwann cells had lost their ability to myelinate, yet were still capable of sorting axons. Both cell death and, paradoxically, proliferation of immature Schwann cells was markedly enhanced, suggesting that their terminal differentiation is triggered by growth-arresting regulatory microRNAs. Using microRNA microarrays, we identified 16 microRNAs that are upregulated upon myelination and whose expression is controlled by Dicer in Schwann cells. This set of microRNAs appears to drive Schwann cell differentiation and myelination of peripheral nerves, thereby fulfilling a crucial function for survival of the organism.
Teaching Computer Vision: Bringing Research Benchmarks to the Classroom

This article concerns the design of effective computer vision programming exercises and presents a novel means of designing these assignments. We describe three recent case studies designed to evaluate the effectiveness of assigning graduate-level computer vision students with publicly available research benchmarks as competitive assignments. This was done rather than assigning more traditional exercises that require students to implement specific algorithms or applications. We allowed our students the freedom of designing or choosing their own methods, with the goal of obtaining the best performance on the benchmark chosen for each assignment. Students, therefore, competed against each other, as well as published state of the art. We detail the design, application, and results of these benchmark exercises. We show that not only are these benchmarks easily adapted for the classroom, but also that in some cases, student assignments matched published state-of-the-art performance. This observation provides strong evidence to support the effectiveness of the proposed exercise design. We conclude by discussing the benefits and drawbacks of these exercises compared to those traditionally employed in computer vision classrooms.
Adrenocorticotropic Hormone-producing Pituitary Tumors: 12- to 22-year Follow-up after Treatment with Stereotactic Radiosurgery

OBJECTIVETo study retrospectively long-term outcomes of patients with adrenocorticotropic hormone-producing pituitary tumors that were treated with stereotactic Leksell gamma knife unit radiosurgery. METHODSEighty-nine patients aged 5 to 67 years were treated between 1976 and 1985. Eighteen patients aged 18 to 68 years (mean age, 41 yr) were followed in detail. Fifteen patients were women. None had previously received conventional radiotherapy, but pituitary microsurgery had been performed in two patients, and one patient had had an adrenalectomy. In the remaining 15 patients, radiosurgery was the primary therapy. RESULTSSixty-four patients had one stereotactic treatment, and 25 patients had two or more treatments. No complications were observed during treatment and the immediate follow-up period. At follow-up, 17 patients had died 1 to 20 years after the first treatment. No deaths were related to the treatment. In our 18 patients, the follow-up time after the first radiosurgical treatment was 12 to 22 years (mean follow-up period, 17 yr). Urinary cortisol levels gradually normalized in 83% of the patients. No recurrences were observed. Pituitary hormone insufficiencies developed in about two of every three patients and occurred even more than 10 years after treatment. Eight patients had transient hyperprolactinemia. The patients’ vision and visual fields were unaffected, and none of them had signs of radiation-induced side effects such as brain tumors or brain necrosis. CONCLUSIONStereotactic radiosurgery is a safe and effective method in the treatment of patients with adrenocorticotropic hormone-producing pituitary tumors, and the effect of treatment is long-lasting. Stereotactic radiosurgery is mainly a complement to microsurgery because of its gradually appearing effect and the occurrence of pituitary insufficiency. New pituitary deficiencies may be found more than 10 years after treatment.
eyeView: focus+context views for large group video conferences

In this paper, we describe the design of eyeView, a video conferencing system that uses participant looking behavior to determine the size of online video conferencing windows. The system uses an elastic windowing algorithm that enlarges the image of the person most looked at by others, while maintaining a contextual view of other remote participants. eyeView measures interest by gauging whom participants look at using an eye tracker embedded in the display. Users can enter side conversations by looking at each other, and pressing the space bar. Cocktail-party filtering is aided by attenuating audio sources outside the social network constituted by glances between participants. By allocating both screen and audio real estate according to the joint attention of participants, eyeView supports smooth allocation of focus on the speaker, while maintaining awareness of the group.
The role of human ventral visual cortex in motion perception

Visual motion perception is fundamental to many aspects of visual perception. Visual motion perception has long been associated with the dorsal (parietal) pathway and the involvement of the ventral ‘form’ (temporal) visual pathway has not been considered critical for normal motion perception. Here, we evaluated this view by examining whether circumscribed damage to ventral visual cortex impaired motion perception. The perception of motion in basic, non-form tasks (motion coherence and motion detection) and complex structure-from-motion, for a wide range of motion speeds, all centrally displayed, was assessed in five patients with a circumscribed lesion to either the right or left ventral visual pathway. Patients with a right, but not with a left, ventral visual lesion displayed widespread impairments in central motion perception even for non-form motion, for both slow and for fast speeds, and this held true independent of the integrity of areas MT/V5, V3A or parietal regions. In contrast with the traditional view in which only the dorsal visual stream is critical for motion perception, these novel findings implicate a more distributed circuit in which the integrity of the right ventral visual pathway is also necessary even for the perception of non-form motion.
Conventional to Nano-Green Adsorbents for Water Pollution Management - A Review

Pure and clean water is a must for living a healthy life. However, the increasing influence of urbanization, industrialization, domestic and agricultural activities, is continuously adding both conventional and newly emerging pollutants to the earth's water bodies, seriously affecting both the terrestrial and aquatic flora and fauna. Thus water pollution has become a major issue in the global perspectives. In the last few decades, numerous methods, such as chemical precipitation, filtration, oxidation, ion exchange treatment and adsorption have been proposed for the purification of contaminated water. Among these methods, adsorption has taken an important position in water purification technology. This is because of its ease of operations, cost-effective maintenance, and availability of adsorbents in various forms with high surface area, porous structure and specific surface reactivity. Instead of having many attractive properties, many adsorbents have failed to achieve a good acceptability at commercial levels. In the recent years, nanotechnology approaches have introduced nanoadsorbent which is capable of removing water pollutants more efficiently. In this review, various water treatment techniques with their shortcomings followed by efficiency of adsorption and nanoadsorbent for pollutant removal are discussed with green chemistry perspectives.
Adaptive Energy Aware Data Aggregation Tree for Wireless Sensor Networks

To meet the demands of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where data are usually aggregated at a single source prior to transmitting to any distant user, there is a need to establish a tree structure inside to aggregate data. In this paper, an adaptive energy aware data aggregation tree (AEDT) is proposed. The proposed tree uses the maximum energy available node as the data aggregator node. The tree incorporates sleep and awake technology where the communicating node and the parent node are only in awake state rest all the nodes go to sleep state saving the network energy and enhancing the network lifetime. When the traffic load crosses the threshold value, then the packets are accepted adaptively according to the communication capacity of the parent node. The proposed tree maintains a memory table which stores the value of each selected path. Path selection is based on shortest path algorithm where the node with highest available energy is always selected as forwarding node. By simulation results, we show that our proposed tree enhances network lifetime minimizes energy consumption and achieves good delivery ratio with reduced delay.
A Combination of Hierarchical Structures and Particle Systems for Self-Collision Detection of Deforming Objects

In this paper, we propose an approach which combines hierarchical structures and particle systems for self-collision detection occurring in a deformable object. Numerous algorithms for collision detection have been proposed in computer graphics applications. Our algorithm exploits the efficiency of hierarchical structures to deal with many polygons, and particle systems because they can be used to extract colliding polygons. We have extended these two algorithms to deal with self-collision detection. The approach is split into two stages. Particles are distributed on the surface of a deformable object. Then, if the particles detect a possibility of a selfcollision, hierarchical self-collision detection is started. The algorithm has been implemented on a square cloth model as an example of a deformable object. We show that the algorithm efficiently reduces self-collision detection redundancy, and yet precisely detects self-collision events.
Improved DBSCALE Algorithm by using Ant Colony Optimization

The DBSCALE [1] algorithm is a popular algorithm in Data Mining field as it has the ability to mine the noiseless arbitrary shape Clusters in an elegant way. Such metaheuristic algorithms include Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms, Particle Swarm Optimizations and Genetic Algorithm has received increasing attention in recent years. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a technique that was introduced in the early 1990’s and it is inspired by the foraging behavior of ant colonies. This paper presents an application aiming to cluster a dataset with ACO-based optimization algorithm and to increase the working performance of colony optimization algorithm used for solving data-clustering problem, proposed two new techniques and shows the increase on the performance with the addition of these techniques [5]. We bring out a new clustering initialization algorithm which is scale-invariant to the scale factor. Instead of using the scale factor while the cluster initialization, in this research we determine the number and position of clusters according to the changes of cluster density with the division an agglomeration processes. Experimental results indicate that the proposed DBSCALE has a lower execution time than DBSCAN, and IDBSCAN clustering algorithms. IDBSCALE-ACO has a maximum deviation in clustering correctness rate. This algorithm is proposed to solve combinatorial optimization problem by using Ant Colony algorithm.
Fathers and child neglect.

OBJECTIVE To examine the association between father involvement and child neglect. DESIGN Cohort study. SETTING Participants were recruited from an inner-city pediatric primary care clinic and a clinic for children at risk for human immunodeficiency virus infection in a teaching hospital. PARTICIPANTS Mothers and fathers or father figures, and 244 five-year olds participating in a longitudinal study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Child neglect measured via home observation, a videotaped mother-child interaction, and child protective services reports. RESULTS A father or father figure was identified for 72% of the children. Rates of neglect ranged between 11% and 30%. Father absence alone was not associated with neglect. However, in families with an identified and interviewed father, a longer duration of involvement (P<.01), a greater sense of parenting efficacy (P<.01), more involvement with household tasks (P<.05), and less involvement with child care (P<.05) were associated with less neglect. The overall model explained 26.5% of the variance in neglect. CONCLUSIONS There is substantial involvement of fathers in a subset of this high-risk sample, although more than a quarter of the children lacked a father or father figure. The mere presence of a father did not significantly influence the neglect of the children; rather, the nature of his involvement did. Fathers who felt more effective as parents were less likely to have neglected their children. A greater sense of efficacy may reflect parenting skills and be important in enhancing the contribution of fathers to their children's well-being. Pediatric health care providers can play a valuable role in enhancing the involvement and skills of fathers.
Locally Compressed Suffix Arrays

We introduce a compression technique for suffix arrays. It is sensitive to the compressibility of the text and local, meaning that random portions of the suffix array can be decompressed by accessing mostly contiguous memory areas. This makes decompression very fast, especially when various contiguous cells must be accessed. Our main technical contributions are the following. First, we show that runs of consecutive values that are known to appear in function Ψ(i) = A−1[A[i] + 1] of suffix arrays A of compressible texts also show up as repetitions in the differential suffix array A'[i] = A[i] − A[i−1]. Second, we use Re-Pair, a grammar-based compressor, to compress the differential suffix array, and upper bound its compression ratio in terms of the number of runs. Third, we show how to compact the space used by the grammar rules by up to 50%, while still permitting direct access to the rules. Fourth, we develop specific variants of Re-Pair that work using knowledge of Ψ, and use much less space than the general Re-Pair compressor, while achieving almost the same compression ratios. Fifth, we implement the scheme and compare it exhaustively with previous work, including the first implementations of previous theoretical proposals.
Linearizing Symmetric Matrix Polynomials via Fiedler pencils with Repetition

Strong linearizations of a matrix polynomial P(λ) that preserve some structure of P(λ) are relevant in many applications. In this paper we characterize all the pencils in the family of the Fiedler pencils with repetition, introduced by Antoniou and Vologiannidis, associated with a square matrix polynomial P(λ) that are symmetric when P(λ) is. When some nonsingularity conditions are satisfied, these pencils are strong linearizations of P(λ). In particular, when P(λ) is a symmetric polynomial of degree k such that the coefficients of the terms of degree k and 0 are nonsingular, our family strictly contains a basis for DL(P), a k-dimensional vector space of symmetric pencils introduced by Mackey, Mackey, Mehl, and Mehrmann.
Characterization of abrasion-induced nanoparticle release from paints into liquids and air

Two standard methods for the characterization of the abrasion nanoparticle release into air and liquid from coatings containing nanoparticles were developed. Details of the abrasion processes and the measurement methods are shown. Paints were formulated in an industrial facility. Standard abrasion conditions in wet environments were simulated. The size distribution of the particles abraded into liquid was analyzed by a laser granulometer: submicrometric and micrometric particles were observed, but no nanometric particles. The nanoparticles released in liquid were deposited on filters for SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) analysis. No free or agglomerated nanoparticles were observed by SEM: nanoparticles seem to remain embedded in the paint matrix. The same coatings were abraded in the air using another standard method. The ELPI (Electrical Low Pressure Impactor) was used to determine the number size distribution of the dust generated. Abrasion is found to produce submicrometric and micrometric particles in the air but no nanoparticles. Further characterizations by SEM confirmed that no free or agglomerated nanoparticles were emitted: nanoparticles seem to remain embedded in the paint matrix.
Design-Dependent Process Monitoring for Wafer Manufacturing and Test Cost Reduction

Short-loop process monitoring structures (usually simple device I-V, C-V measurements made after M1 fabrication) are commonly put in wafer scribelines. These test structures are almost always design independent and measured or monitored by the foundry to keep track of process deviations. We propose a design-dependent process monitoring strategy that can accurately predict design performance based on Ieff-based delay and Ioff-based leakage power estimates. Further, we use the predicted delay and power for early yield estimation to: 1) prune bad wafers to save test and back-end manufacturing costs, and 2) prune bad dies to save testing costs. Combining chip pruning with wafer pruning, we can reduce the cost per good chip by up to 13%. Such design-dependent process monitoring can help reduce process optimization effort, and enable quicker yield ramp besides saving testing and manufacturing costs.
Numerical Experience with a Recursive Trust-Region Method for Multilevel Nonlinear Optimization

We consider an implementation of the recursive multilevel trust-region algorithm proposed by Gratton, Sartenaer and Toint (2004), and provide significant numerical experience on multilevel test problems. A suitable choice of the algorithm’s parameters is identified on these problems, yielding a very satisfactory compromise between reliability and efficiency. The resulting default algorithm is then compared to alternative optimization techniques such as mesh refinement and direct solution of the fine-level problem. The sensibility of the default variant with respect to most important algorithmic parameters is finally investigated.
ISAR Cross-Range Scaling Using Iterative Processing via Principal Component Analysis and Bisection Algorithm

In this paper, we propose a novel cross-range scaling technique to estimate the rotational velocity (RV) of a maneuvering target. The proposed method includes three steps. First, a feature from accelerated segment test (FAST) is applied to two sequential inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images to find the locations of their robust feature points. Second, the rotation angle (RA) is estimated using two major axes, which are obtained using a principal component analysis (PCA) of the two feature data sets scaled by a candidate RV. Third, an RV search operation based on the measured RA is carried out via the bisection algorithm, which optimizes a newly devised cost function. Compared with the conventional method, the proposed method has two main advantages: 1) it requires no information about the rotation center of a target, and 2) it can efficiently generate a well-scaled ISAR image within a very short time. Finally, the results of experiments using point scatterers and real flying aircraft are provided to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.
Quantum methods with Mathematica

The first quantum mechanics text published that ties directly into a computer algebra system, this book exploits Mathematica(r) throughout for symbolic, numeric, and graphical computing. It is a work designed for computer interaction in an upper-division undergraduate or first-year graduate quantum mechanics course. It is also a toolbox for the practicing physicist seeking to automate a variety of algebraic and numerical tasks with the computer. The book is divided into two parts: "Systems in One Dimension" and "Quantum Dynamics. " Part I emphasizes topics from a first-year course on quantum mechanics, while Part II includes more advanced topics. Although the text requires some familiarity with Mathematica, appendices are provided for gaining experience with the software and are referenced throughout the book. The text is task-oriented and integrated with numerous problems and exercises, with hints for working on the computer. James M. Feagin is a Professor of Physics at California State University, Fullerton. He was educated at Georgia Tech and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1980. He is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has served as visiting Professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Feagin is the author of numerous articles on collision physics and the dynamics of few-body systems. He has given a number of invited talks and hosted workshops on incorporating computers into the physics curriculum and is presently helping to introduce computing into the Introductory University Physics Project (IUPP) sponsored by the American Institute of Physics.