Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The physiological role of orexin/hypocretin neurons in the regulation of sleep/wakefulness and neuroendocrine functions

The hypothalamus monitors body homeostasis and regulates various behaviors such as feeding, thermogenesis, and sleeping. Orexins (also known as hypocretins) were identified as endogenous ligands for two orphan G-protein-coupled receptors in the lateral hypothalamic area. They were initially recognized as regulators of feeding behavior, but they are mainly regarded as key modulators of the sleep/wakefulness cycle. Orexins activate orexin neurons, monoaminergic and cholinergic neurons in the hypothalamus/brainstem regions, to maintain a long, consolidated awake period. Anatomical studies of neural projections from/to orexin neurons and phenotypic characterization of transgenic mice revealed various roles for orexin neurons in the coordination of emotion, energy homeostasis, reward system, and arousal. For example, orexin neurons are regulated by peripheral metabolic cues, including ghrelin, leptin, and glucose concentration. This suggests that they may provide a link between energy homeostasis and arousal states. A link between the limbic system and orexin neurons might be important for increasing vigilance during emotional stimuli. Orexins are also involved in reward systems and the mechanisms of drug addiction. These findings suggest that orexin neurons sense the outer and inner environment of the body and maintain the proper wakefulness level of animals for survival. This review discusses the mechanism by which orexins maintain sleep/wakefulness states and how this mechanism relates to other systems that regulate emotion, reward, and energy homeostasis.
The Evolution of Prognostic Factors in Multiple Myeloma

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a heterogeneous hematologic malignancy involving the proliferation of plasma cells derived by different genetic events contributing to the development, progression, and prognosis of this disease. Despite improvement in treatment strategies of MM over the last decade, the disease remains incurable. All efforts are currently focused on understanding the prognostic markers of the disease hoping to incorporate the new therapeutic modalities to convert the disease into curable one. We present this comprehensive review to summarize the current standard prognostic markers used in MM along with novel techniques that are still in development and highlight their implications in current clinical practice.
Observation of atmospheric tides in the Martian exosphere using Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter radio tracking data

Based on the perturbations of the trajectory of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter due to atmospheric drag, we estimate, using Precision Orbit Determination, the density of the Martian exosphere near 250 km altitude with much better temporal (and therefore spatial) resolution than previously possible with this method. Small longitudinal density variations are observed to be consistent over long time periods. Although they appear fixed with respect to the planet, we interpret them as non‐migrating tides because of the Sun‐synchronous spacecraft orbit. Similar tides were observed previously by MGS at much lower altitude (∼125 km), and our results agree to first order with the MGS findings.
Small World Communications Lcd01g Gmr–1 High Speed Ldpc Decoder Lcd01g Features

GEO Mobile Radio (GMR–1) compatible Nominal code rates of 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5 and 9/10 Data lengths from 488 to 8880 bits Optional QPSK, 16APSK and 32APSK demap-ping, descrambling and deinterleaving Includes ping–pong input and output memories Up to 223 MHz internal clock Up to 117 Mbit/s with 30 decoder iterations 8–bit log–likelihood–ratio (LLR) or 9–bit inphase and quadrature two's complement input data Programmable signal points Up to 256 iterations Scaled min–sum Gauss–Seidel decoding algorithm Optional power efficient early stopping Parity check output Free simulation software Available as EDIF core and VHDL simulation core for Xilinx Virtex–II, Spartan–3, Virtex–4, Virtex–5, Virtex–6, Spartan–6 and 7–Series FPGAs under SignOnce IP License. Actel, Al-tera and Lattice FPGA cores available on request .
Derivatization of phytochelatins from Silene vulgaris, induced upon exposure to arsenate and cadmium: comparison of derivatization with Ellman's reagent and monobromobimane.

Phytochelatins (PCs) are a family of thiol-rich peptides, with the general structure (gamma-Glu-Cys)(n)()-Gly, with n = 2-11, induced in plants upon exposure to excessive amounts of heavy metals and some metalloids, such as arsenic. Two types of PC analyses are currently used, i.e., acid extraction and separation on HPLC with either precolumn derivatization (pH 8.2) with monobromobimane (mBBr) or postcolumn derivatization (pH 7.8) with Ellman's reagent [5, 5'-dithiobis(2-nitrobenzoic acid), DTNB]. Although both methods were satisfactory for analysis of Cd-induced PCs, formation of (RS)(3)-As complexes during extraction of As-induced PCs rendered the DTNB method useless. This paper shows that precolumn derivatization with mBBr, during which the (RS)(3)-As complexes are disrupted, provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of both Cd- and As-induced PCs. In addition, derivatization efficiencies of both methods for the oligomers with n = 2-4 (PC(2)(-)(4)) are compared. Derivatization efficiency decreased from 71.8% and 81.4% for mBBr and DTNB derivatization, respectively, for PC(2) to 27.4% and 50.2% for PC(4). This decrease is most likely due to steric hindrance. Correction of measured thiol concentration is therefore advised for better quantification of PC concentrations in plant material.
Social Capital, Structural Holes and Team Composition: Collaborative Networks of the Open Source Software Community

OSS developers bring to a project more than the skills and knowledge acquired through years of experience. They bring with them the ability to acquire resources from their social networks. The skills and capabilities of the developers referred to as ‘human capital’ by economists are supplemented by the capabilities to access resources from the network referred to as ‘social capital ’ by sociologists. Since, OSS is developed in an open and social environment, social capital drawn from the collaboration network of developers would play an important role in developer productivity. In this study, we investigate the influence of social ca pital of team members on the productivity of the OSS development team. Specifically, we investigate whether teams composed of developers who form cohesive ties in their social space or teams composed of developers who tap into different knowledge pools are more productive in terms of technical development and commercial success of the software they produce. To examine this issue we focus on three key elements of the team members’ social network: direct ties, indirect ties and structural holes. Results from empirical analysis of OSS projects hosted at Sourceforge, suggest that both direct and indirect ties positively influence the productivity of teams. We further found that the greater the cohesive ties that the team members form in their social network the more productive they are.
An analysis of IEEE publications in biomedical engineering.

In an energy subtraction processing for radiation images, a plurality of stimulable phosphor sheets laid one upon the other are simultaneously exposed to a radiation of high energy passing through an object, and then a different stimulable phosphor sheet is exposed to a radiation of low energy passing through the same object. Digital image signals detected from the stimulable phosphor sheets exposed to the high energy radiation are weighted and subjected to arithmetic averaging. A subtraction processing is carried out between an image signal obtained by the arithmetic averaging and an image signal detected from the stimulable phosphor sheet exposed to the low energy radiation.
Three-Quark Potential in SU(3) Lattice QCD.

The static three-quark ( 3Q) potential is studied in SU(3) lattice QCD with 12(3)x24 and beta = 5.7 at the quenched level. From the 3Q Wilson loop, 3Q ground-state potential V(3Q) is extracted using the smearing technique for ground-state enhancement. With accuracy better than a few percent, V(3Q) is well described by a sum of a constant, the two-body Coulomb term, and the three-body linear confinement term sigma(3Q)L(min), with L(min) the minimal value of total length of color flux tubes linking the three quarks. Comparing with the Q-&Qmacr; potential, we find a universal feature of the string tension, sigma(3Q) approximately sigma(Q&Qmacr;), and the OGE result for Coulomb coefficients, A(3Q) approximately 1 / 2A(Q&Qmacr;).
Monocular Vision System that Learns with Approximation Spaces

This paper introduces a monocular vision system that learns with approximation spaces to control the pan and tilt operations of a digital camera that is tracking a moving target. This monocular vision system has been designed to facilitate inspection by a line-crawling robot that moves along an electric power transmission line. The principal problem considered in this article is how to use various forms of reinforcement learning to control movements of a digital camera. Prior work on the solution to this problem was done by Chris Gaskett using neural Q-learning starting in 1998 and more recently by Gaskett in 2002. However, recent experiments have revealed that both classical target tracking as well as other forms of reinforcement learning control outperform Q-learning. This article considers various forms of the Actor Critic (AC) method to solve the camera movement control problem. Both the conventional AC method as well as a modified AC method that has a built-in run-and-twiddle (RT) control strategy mechanism, are considered in this article. The RT mechanism introduced by Oliver Selfridge in 1981 is an action control strategy, where an organism continues what it has been doing while things are improving (increasing action reward) and twiddles (changes its action strategy) when past actions yield diminishing rewards. In this work, RT is governed by measurements (by a critic) of the degree of overlap between past behaviour patterns and a behavior pattern template representing a standard are carried out within the framework provided by approximation spaces introduced by Zdzisław Pawlak during the early 1980s. This paper considers how to guide reinforcement learning based on knowledge of acceptable behavior patterns. The contribution of this article is an introduction to actor critic learning methods that benefit from approximation spaces in controlling camera movements during target tracking.
Ultrasonography for Screening and Follow-Up of Diaphragmatic Dysfunction in the ICU

Purpose: Reversibility and impact of diaphragmatic dysfunction (DD) are unknown. The principal aim was to describe diaphragmatic function as assessed by ultrasonography during weaning trials. Materials and Methods: The present study is a 6-month single-center prospective study. All patients under mechanical ventilation for more than 7 days and eligible for a spontaneous breathing trial (SBT) were enrolled prospectively. Intervention: Two blinded ultrasonographers evaluated each hemidiaphragm during SBT. Prevalence of DD among weaning failure and death and interobserver reproducibility have been evaluated. Results: The 34 included patients had a mean Simplified Acute Physiology Score version II of 55.7 ± 14 and a median intensive care unit (ICU) stay length of 17 days (13-30). Diaphragmatic dysfunction was found in 13 (38%) patients, on both sides in 8. Bilateral DD resolved before ICU discharge in 5 of the 7 reevaluated patients. No weaning failures were recorded. The ICU mortality was higher in patients with DD (37% vs 5%, P = .048). Mean interobserver agreement rate was 91%. Reproducibility was better with M-mode. Conclusion: The ICU-acquired DD usually improves before ICU discharge but might constitute a marker for greater disease severity. The present preliminary results require confirmation in a larger prospective multicenter study.
Spatially Interpolated Disease Prevalence Estimation Using Collateral Indicators of Morbidity and Ecological Risk

This paper considers estimation of disease prevalence for small areas (neighbourhoods) when the available observations on prevalence are for an alternative partition of a region, such as service areas. Interpolation to neighbourhoods uses a kernel method extended to take account of two types of collateral information. The first is morbidity and service use data, such as hospital admissions, observed for neighbourhoods. Variations in morbidity and service use are expected to reflect prevalence. The second type of collateral information is ecological risk factors (e.g., pollution indices) that are expected to explain variability in prevalence in service areas, but are typically observed only for neighbourhoods. An application involves estimating neighbourhood asthma prevalence in a London health region involving 562 neighbourhoods and 189 service (primary care) areas.
R2P: Recomposition and Retargeting of Photographic Images

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for performing joint recomposition and retargeting of photographic images (R2P). Given a reference image of interest, our method is able to automatically alter the composition of the input source image accordingly, while the recomposed output will be jointly retargeted to fit the reference. This is achieved by recomposing the visual components of the source image via graph matching, followed by solving a constrained mesh-warping based optimization problem for retargeting. As a result, the recomposed output image would fit the reference while suppressing possible distortion. Our experiments confirm that our proposed R2P method is able to achieve visually satisfactory results, without the need to use pre-collected labeled data or predetermined aesthetics rules.
Statistical Parsing

Given a corpus of trees, it is easy to extract a CFG and estimate its parameters. Every tree can be thought of as a CFG derivation, and we just perform relative frequency estimation (count and divide) on them. That is, let c(A → β) be the number of times that the rule A → β was observed, and then c(A) = β c(A → β) (6.1) ˆ P (A → β | A) = c(A → β) c(A) (6.2) 6.1 Parser evaluation Evaluation of parsers almost always uses labeled precision and recall or the labelled F1 score Black et al., 1991. To define this metric, we make use of the notion of a multiset, which is a set where items can occur more than once. If A and B are multisets, define A(x) to be the number of times that x occurs in A, and define |A| = x A(x) (6.3) (A ∩ B)(x) = min{A(x), B (x)} (6.4) We view a tree as a multiset of brackets [X , i , j ] for each node of the tree, where X is the label of the node and w i +1 · · · w j is its span. Note that in Penn Treebank style trees, every word is an only child and its parent is a part-of-speech tag. The part-of-speech tag nodes (also called preterminal nodes) are not included in the multiset. Let t (for test) be the parser output and g (for gold) be the gold-standard tree that we are evaluating against. Then define the precision p(t , g) and recall g (t , g) to be: p(t , g) = |t ∩ g | |t | (6.5) r (t , g) = |t ∩ g | |g |
Intimacy and Distancing

This study examinedhow 32 pairs of 19-to 22-year-oldEuro-Americanmale friends constructed intimacy when telling romantic-relationship stories in casual conversations. Analyses centered on the emergence of two types of conversational positions: intimate positions and distancing positions. Intimate positions constructed young men as warm, caring, and emotionally vulnerable; distancing positions functioned to diminish intimacy, care, and vulnerability. Although intimate positions were present, they did not arise in a straightforward or unmarked way. Instead, intimate positions were often eclipsed or supplanted by distancing positions. The findings provide a conversationally nuanced understanding of how young men practice intimacy by constructing themselves as moving both toward and away from close relationships with women. For emerging adult males, we suggest that such shifting positions can help to develop a clearer sense of what one wants, and does not want, in a love relationship.
Design of a compact UWB bandpass filter with notched band

In this paper, a compact ultra-wideband (UWB) bandpass filter (BPF) with a controllable notched band is proposed and implemented for the application in UWB wireless communication system. Stepped-impedance stub loaded resonator (SISLR), which can generate three resonant modes over the UWB passband with two transmission zeros at both lower and upper stopband, is developed in the filter design with aperture-backed interdigital coupled-lines to improve in-band performance and skirt selectivity. To eliminate the interference of the coexisting wireless local area network (WLAN) within the UWB spectrum, two pairs of folded stepped-impedance resonators (SIRs) are added to the coupled-lines at both sides. The notched band can be easily generated, the bandwidth of which are controllable by adjusting the gaps between the folded SIRs and the coupled-lines. The design is successfully realized and verified by the simulations and experiments.
Do Cost Functions for Tracking Error Generalize across Tasks with Different Noise Levels?

Control of human-machine interfaces are well modeled by computational control models, which take into account the behavioral decisions people make in estimating task dynamics and state for a given control law. This control law is optimized according to a cost function, which for the sake of mathematical tractability is typically represented as a series of quadratic terms. Recent studies have found that people actually use cost functions for reaching tasks that are slightly different than a quadratic function, but it is unclear which of several cost functions best explain human behavior and if these cost functions generalize across tasks of similar nature but different scale. In this study, we used an inverse-decision-theory technique to reconstruct the cost function from empirical data collected on 24 able-bodied subjects controlling a myoelectric interface. Compared with previous studies, this experimental paradigm involved a different control source (myoelectric control, which has inherently large multiplicative noise), a different control interface (control signal was mapped to cursor velocity), and a different task (the tracking position dynamically moved on the screen throughout each trial). Several cost functions, including a linear-quadratic; an inverted Gaussian, and a power function, accurately described the behavior of subjects throughout this experiment better than a quadratic cost function or other explored candidate cost functions (p<0.05). Importantly, despite the differences in the experimental paradigm and a substantially larger scale of error, we found only one candidate cost function whose parameter was consistent with the previous studies: a power function (cost ∝ errorα) with a parameter value of α = 1.69 (1.53–1.78 interquartile range). This result suggests that a power-function is a representative function of user’s error cost over a range of noise amplitudes for pointing and tracking tasks.
COMMUNITIES OF DOMINATION? RECONCEPTUALISING SENSEMAKING, LEARNING AND POWER IN ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE

In identifying a bias within situated learning theory towards routine work practices, this paper develops a theoretical framework for assessing the relationships between learning, sensemaking and power in the non-routine practices of temporary organising. The paper locates processes of sensemaking and learning in a model of organisational change that attempts to render power in communities of practice more visible than has been the case in theorising hitherto by focusing on sensegiving in change projects. Change is conceived in terms of an oscillation between the routines of permanent organising and the more experimental, innovative actions of temporary organising where leaders mobilise actors to explore new ideas. The role of sensegiving in such processes, it is argued, helps shed light on the political nature of micro-processes of change.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Behavioural Regulation in Exercise Questionnaire - Portuguese Version

Exercise constitutes one of the pillars of a healthy lifestyle (USDHHS, 1996). Paradoxically, more than 40% of Europeans are sedentary (Eurobarometer 213, 2004), although some interventions, at both community and individual levels, have been established to improve this situation. Some of these interventions are based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT: Deci & Ryan, 1985), which state that more internalized types of behaviour regulation lead to feelings of self-determination in one’s chosen activities and, consequently, to greater likelihood of behavioural adherence. Today, SDT is one of the most popular approaches to the study of exercise, thus the cross-cultural validation of instruments that can measure its constructs is a necessary step to further advance in the study of exercise motivation.
The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics Functional Arabic Morphology

is is a summary of the author’s PhD dissertation defended on September 17, 2007 at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague. e results comprised in the thesis were obtained within the author’s doctoral studies in Mathematical Linguistics during the years 2001–2007. e complete dissertation is available via http://sourceforge.net/projects/elixir-fm/.
Development of a portable fiber-optic current sensor for power systems monitoring

The paper presents a portable fiber-optic current sensor (FOCS), based on the Faraday effect, with a magnetic concentrator. Both the optical sensing head and electronic processing block are illustrated. A detailed experimental study to confirm the performance of the device is also reported. According to the measured values of ac rms current up to 1 kA, a calibration procedure was performed. The paper provides an analysis of the results obtained for various conductor displacements within the concentrator. The well-known temperature dependence of the Faraday current sensor and its influence on the measurement accuracy are tested by means of a special double-layer thermal insulated chamber. The calibrated and characterized FOCS is applied for harmonic analysis of the current. The results clearly illustrate the nature of the sensing process and demonstrate odd-order harmonics presence, as predicted by the mathematical model. The paper indicates that the developed device is suitable for the power systems monitoring.
Nonparametric Quantile Estimation

In regression, the desired estimate of y|x is not always given by a conditional mean, although this is most common. Sometimes one wants to obtain a good estimate that satisfies the property that a proportion, τ, of y|x, will be below the estimate. For τ = 0.5 this is an estimate of the median. What might be called median regression, is subsumed under the term quantile regression. We present a nonparametric version of a quantile estimator, which can be obtained by solving a simple quadratic programming problem and provide uniform convergence statements and bounds on the quantile property of our estimator. Experimental results show the feasibility of the approach and competitiveness of our method with existing ones. We discuss several types of extensions including an approach to solve the quantile crossing problems, as well as a method to incorporate prior qualitative knowledge such as monotonicity constraints.