Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of MDMA on body temperature in humans

Hyperthermia is a severe complication associated with the recreational use of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, Ecstasy). In this review, the clinical laboratory studies that tested the effects of MDMA on body temperature are summarized. The mechanisms that underlie the hyperthermic effects of MDMA in humans and treatment of severe hyperthermia are presented. The data show that MDMA produces an acute and dose-dependent rise in core body temperature in healthy subjects. The increase in body temperature is in the range of 0.2-0.8°C and does not result in hyperpyrexia (>40°C) in a controlled laboratory setting. However, moderately hyperthermic body temperatures >38.0°C occur frequently at higher doses, even in the absence of physical activity and at room temperature. MDMA primarily releases serotonin and norepinephrine. Mechanistic clinical studies indicate that the MDMA-induced elevations in body temperature in humans partially depend on the MDMA-induced release of norepinephrine and involve enhanced metabolic heat generation and cutaneous vasoconstriction, resulting in impaired heat dissipation. The mediating role of serotonin is unclear. The management of sympathomimetic toxicity and associated hyperthermia mainly includes sedation with benzodiazepines and intravenous fluid replacement. Severe hyperthermia should primarily be treated with additional cooling and mechanical ventilation.
The Effect of Niobium in the Heat-affected Zone of Microalloyed Steel

The effects of niobium in the heat-affected zone of microalloyed steel Neelabhro Madhav Bhattacharya The controlled, fine-grained microstructure of thermomechanically processed Nb microalloyed linepipe steels is destroyed in the vicinity of welds used in fabricating pipelines. There are conflicting views on the influence of niobium in the ‘heat-affected zone’, particularly in the region closest to the weld fusion line which is most dramatically impacted by the thermal cycling that occurs during welding. Consequently, there is a need to fully characterise the influence of niobium on the evolution of structures and properties in this zone. The aim of the work presented in this thesis was to quantify and charac-
Long-Term Results of Radiofrequency Ablation Treatment of Stage I Non-small Cell Lung Cancer: A Prospective Intention-to-Treat Study

Introduction: About one-fifth of patients with resectable non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) are unsuitable for surgical treatment. Radiofrequency ablation offers an alternative minimally invasive option. We report the result of an intention-to-treat study with long-term follow-up. Methods: From 2001 to 2009, we performed 80 percutaneous radiofrequency ablations of 59 stage I NSCLC in 57 inoperable patients. Two patients were treated for two separate lesions. The study group consisted of 45 males and 12 females, with mean age of 74 years (range, 40–88 years). All patients had pathological evidence of NSCLC, which was in stage IA in 44 cases and in stage IB in the other 15 cases. The mean size of the lesions was 2.6 cm (range, 1.1–5 cm). Fourteen lesions were retreated up to five times. The procedure was always performed under local anesthesia and conscious sedation. Most of the procedures were performed under computed tomography guidance, with nine under ultrasonography guidance. Results: In all cases, the procedure was technically successful. No mortality was recorded, and major morbidity consisted of four cases of pneumothorax requiring pleural drainage. At a mean follow-up of 47 months, the complete response rate was 59.3% (stage Ia 65.9%, stage Ib 40%, p = 0.01), with a mean local recurrence interval of 25.9 months. Median overall survival and cancer-specific survival were 33.4 and 41.4 months, respectively. Cancer-specific actuarial survival was 89% at 1 year, 59% at 3 years, and 40% at 5 years. Conclusions: Radiofrequency ablation treatment of early-stage NSCLC seems to be a effective minimally invasive therapy even in the long-term period, particularly for stage Ia tumors.
Shape optimization of orthopedic fixation plate based on static stress analysis

Excessive displacement of fracture blocks and stress shielding at fracture position are two important reasons of bone reduction malformation, secondary fracture in plate fixation. In order to improve biomechanical environment of bone after plate implanting, a novel method of shape optimization based on static analysis was proposed in this paper. Combined with clinical operation constraints, the plate geometry was automatically optimized based on the minimization principle of plate stress and block offset. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only can decrease the displacement of fractured femur and reduce the stress of fracture site, but can provide a good biomechanical environment for fracture treatment.
Different Topographic Response Between Mild to Moderate and Advanced Keratoconus After Accelerated Collagen Cross-linking

Purpose: To evaluate the clinical and topographic effects after accelerated corneal collagen cross-linking (CXL) in keratoconus. Methods: This was a prospective interventional study in 25 eyes of 24 Asian patients with keratoconus, where 10 eyes in group 1 had mild to moderate keratoconus with the steepest keratometry reading (Kmax) < 58 diopters (D), and 15 eyes in group 2 had advanced keratoconus with Kmax ≥ 58.0 D. The patients underwent accelerated CXL with 18 W/cm2 UV-A light for 5 minutes. Clinical and topographic parameters were obtained before and 1 year after treatment. Results: Overall, spectacle-corrected distance visual acuity, refraction, average keratometry readings, Kmax, anterior elevation at the apex, and corneal endothelial cell density remained stable (P < 0.102). Posterior elevation at the apex increased at 1 year (P = 0.002). The thinnest pachymetry readings also showed significant reduction (P < 0.001). Kmax in group 1 increased by 1.00 ± 1.63 D (range, −2.2 to 5.4 D; P = 0.012), whereas Kmax in group 2 reduced by 1.69 ± 2.61 D (range, −8.4 to 3.2 D; P = 0.013) at 1 year after accelerated CXL. The change in Kmax between the 2 groups was significantly different (P < 0.001). There was no intergroup difference for the change in other parameters. A significant correlation was found between the preoperative Kmax and postoperative change in Kmax at 1 year (r = −0.648; P < 0.001). Conclusions: Accelerated CXL seems to be effective in preventing progression and causing topographic flattening in advanced cases of keratoconus but not as effective in the less progressed counterparts.
A hybrid segmental neural net/hidden Markov model system for continuous speech recognition

The current state-of-the-art in large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition is based on the use of hidden Markov models (HMM). In an attempt to improve over HMM performance, the authors developed a hybrid system that combines the advantages of neural networks and HMM using a multiple hypothesis (or N-best) paradigm. The connectionist component of the system, the segmental neural net (SNN), models all the frames of a phonetic segment simultaneously, thus overcoming the well-known conditional-independence limitation of the HMM. They describe the hybrid system and discuss various aspects of SNN modeling, including network architectures, training algorithms and context modeling. Finally, they evaluate the hybrid system by performing several speaker-independent experiments with the DARPA Resource Management (RM) corpus, and demonstrate that the hybrid system shows a consistent improvement in performance over the baseline HMM system. >
Fyn Accelerates M Phase Progression by Promoting the Assembly of Mitotic Spindle Microtubules

The mitotic spindle is the major piece of cellular machinery essential for faithful chromosome segregation. Whereas Fyn, a member of Src‐family kinases, is known to be localized to the meiotic and mitotic spindle microtubules, the role of Fyn in mitotic spindle formation has not yet been completely elucidated. In this study, we studied the role of Fyn in spindle formation and effects on M‐phase progression. Re‐expression of Fyn induced increases in the fluorescence intensity of mitotic spindle microtubules in SYF cells having triple knock‐out mutations of c‐Src, c‐Yes, and Fyn. Cold treatment results showed that Fyn increases the maximum length of microtubules in HeLa S3 cells in a manner dependent on Fyn kinase activity. Complete depolymerization of microtubules under cold treatment and the following release into 37°C revealed that the increase in the microtubule length in Fyn‐expressing cells may be attributed to the promotion of microtubule polymerization. After cold treatment, Fyn promotes the accumulation of EB1, which is a plus‐end tracking protein and facilitates microtubule growth, in a manner dependent on the kinase activity. Furthermore, Fyn accelerates the M phase progression of cells from nocodazole arrest. These results suggest that Fyn facilitates mitotic spindle formation through the increase in microtubule polymerization, resulting in the acceleration of M‐phase progression. J. Cell. Biochem. 117: 894–903, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Reliable and efficient opportunistic multicast routing for MANETs

Opportunistic routing is a recent routing paradigm that achieves high throughput in the face of universally lossy wireless links in mobile ad hoc networks, likewise, network coding popularly investigated by many institutes is another approach for improving the throughput in wireless networks. How to combine both the techniques is an interesting research. To our knowledge, this is still an open issue to implement the multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks simultaneously employing both the mechanisms. Due to feedback explosion, most existing wireless network multicast protocols do not guarantee the reliable delivery. In this paper, we propose a novel reliable multicast protocol based on the opportunistic routing and network coding. Additionally, we also provide an expected number of transmission-based cost metric formula of the multicast sub-group. Extensive simulation reveals that the performance of the novel presented multicast routing protocol outperforms the conventional multicast routing protocol in ad hoc wireless networks.
Roll-to-roll processing of nanocellulose into coatings

VI SVENSK SAMMANFATTNING. VIII LIST OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATIONS . X AUTHOR’S CONTRIBUTION . XI LIST OF SUPPORTING PUBLICATIONS . XII Articles in Peer-reviewed International Journals and Conferences . xii Non-reviewed Conference Publications . xiii NOMENCLATURE . XV CONTENTS . XVII
Impact of cryopreservation on serum concentration of matrix metalloproteinases (MMP)-7, TIMP-1, vascular growth factors (VEGF) and VEGF-R2 in Biobank samples

Abstract Background: Blood biomarkers are subject to pre-analytical variability. In many cases, the stability of important new tissue biomarkers during freeze cycles and storage has not been studied sufficiently. Methods: To test the stability of matrix metalloproteinases-7 (MMP-7) and their tissue inhibitors (TIMP-1), vascular growth factors (VEGF) and VEGF-receptor, serum samples were frozen and then thawed up to six times. The impact of storage temperature was investigated using an accelerated stability testing protocol. Stability at –20°C and –75°C was calculated using the Arrhenius equation. Results: The average concentration of TIMP-1 was stable, even after six freeze/thaw cycles. One thawing did not change the concentration of MMP-7 and VEGF-receptor. However, repeated freeze/thaw cycles increased the measured values significantly. Decreases in VEGF concentrations were dramatic, even after the first freeze/thaw cycle. According to the Arrhenius calculation, MMP-7 showed excellent stability, at least 5 years at –20°C and several 100 years at –75°C. The VEGF-receptor maintains 90% of its initial concentration at –20°C over 3 months, and decades at –75°C. TIMP-1 and VEGF showed poor stability with cryopreservation, even at –75°C. Conclusions: The stability of MMP-7, TIMP-1, VEGF or VEGF-receptor in biobanking is highly variable, and this should be taken into account in the interpretation of results. A temperature –20°C is unsuitable for prolonged storage of the biomarkers investigated, and repeated thawing of sera is not recommended. VEGF is especially unstable and should be quantitated using serum that has never been frozen.
Examining Wikipedia across linguistic and temporal borders

The Web has grown to be an integral part of modern society offering novel ways for humans to communicate, interact, and share information. New collaborative platforms are forming which are providing individuals with new communities and knowledge bases and, at the same time, offering insights into human activity for researchers, policy-makers and engineers. On a global scale, the role of cultural and language barriers when studying such phenomena becomes particularly relevant and presents significant challenges: due to insufficient information, it is often hard to establish the cultural or language groups in which individuals belong, while there are technical difficulties in establishing the relevance and in analysing resources in different languages. This paper presents a framework to the end of addressing those issues by leveraging data on the use of Wikipedia. Resources available in different languages are explicitly correlated in Wikipedia along with time-stamped logs of access to its articles. This paper provides a framework to enable temporal page views in Wikipedia to be associated with specific geographic profiles. This framework is then used to examine the exchange of information between the English speaking and Chinese speaking localities and reports initial findings on the role of language and culture in diffusion in this context.
Methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus carriage among veterinary staff and dogs in private veterinary clinics in Hokkaido, Japan

To explore the prevalence and molecular characteristics of methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in veterinary medical practices, MRSA carriage was tested among 96 veterinarians (Vets), 70 veterinary technicians (VTs) and 292 dogs with which they had contact at 71 private veterinary clinics (VCs) in Hokkaido, Japan. MRSA isolates were obtained from 22 Vets [22.9%] and 7 VTs [10%]. The prevalence of MRSA among Vets was as high as that found in an academic veterinary hospital in our previous study. In contrast, only two blood donor dogs and one dog with liver disease (1.0%, 3/292) yielded MRSA. All MRSA‐positive dogs were reared or treated in different VCs, in each of which at least one veterinary staff member carrying MRSA worked. Sequence types (ST) identified by multilocus sequence typing, spa types, and SCCmec types for canine MRSA isolates (ST5‐spa t002‐SCCmec II [from two dogs] or ST30‐spa t021‐SCCmec IV [from a dog]) were concordant with those from veterinary staff members in the same clinics as the MRSA‐positive dogs, with which they had potentially had contact. Most MRSA isolates from veterinary staff were the same genotype (SCCmec type II and spa type t002) as a major hospital‐acquired MRSA clone in Japan. The remaining MRSA was the same genotypes as domestic and foreign community‐associated MRSA. Measures against MRSA infection should be provided in private VCs.
Performance analysis of scheduling rules in remanufacturing operations using stochastic Petri nets

In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling a typical remanufacturing shop and analyzing the scheduling rules using the stochastic Petri nets (SPNs). Previous Works primarily concerned on static scheduling using queuing theory which has difficulty in model extension and complexity analysis, while Petri nets as a well-developed mathematical approach is preferable in considering more complicated stochastic characteristics in scheduling assessment in remanufacturing operations. Based on the proposed SPN framework, we discuss three basic scheduling rules and present three interdependent scheduling algorithms. Furthermore, the numeric results are provided to illustrate the influence of different parameters and scheduling rules on the performance.
Hardware Design for Machine Learning

Things like growing volumes and varieties of available data, cheaper and more powerful computational processing, data storage and large-value predictions that can guide better decisions and smart actions in real time without human intervention are playing critical role in this age. All of these require models that can automatically analyse large complex data and deliver quick accurate results – even on a very large scale. Machine learning plays a significant role in developing these models. The applications of machine learning range from speech and object recognition to analysis and prediction of finance markets. Artificial Neural Network is one of the important algorithms of machine learning that is inspired by the structure and functional aspects of the biological neural networks. In this paper, we discuss the purpose, representation and classification methods for developing hardware for machine learning with the main focus on neural networks. This paper also presents the requirements, design issues and optimization techniques for building hardware architecture of neural networks.
Operationalizing and Detecting Disengagement within Online Science Microworlds Relationship between Engagement and Motivation

In recent years, there has been increased interest in engagement during learning. This is of particular interest in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains, in which many students struggle and where the U.S. needs skilled workers. This article lays out some issues important for framing research on this topic, and provides a review of some existing work with similar goals on engagement in science learning. Specifically, here we seek to help better concretize engagement, a fuzzy construct, by operationalizing and detecting (i.e., identifying using a computational method) disengaged behaviors that are antithetical to engagement. We, in turn, describe our real-time detector (i.e., machine learned model) of disengaged behavior and how it was developed. Lastly, we address our ongoing research on how our detector of disengaged behavior will be used to intervene in real time in order to better support students' science There has been a surge of interest and research on the topic of engagement in the last twenty years (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012). Student engagement is an important topic for teachers, parents, and other stakeholders. Student engagement is critical to study for three reasons (Skinner & Pitzer, 2012). First, it is a necessary condition for students' learning because engagement is a critical component of long-term engagement plays a role in students' academic resilience, and the development of resources for coping adaptively with stressors, which in turn, may affect the development of long-term academic mindsets (Skinner & Pitzer, 2012). In terms of research findings, engagement is associated with positive outcomes along academic, social, and emotional lines (Klem & O'Connell, 2004) and is a very 4 supporting STEM learning have changed considerably over the last century, one key aspect of science education remains the same: students become disengaged and fall behind; thus, if not addressed, this is likely to continue. Second, successful learning of science skills and concepts is increasingly necessary to students' future success both on high-stakes exams and in determining access to and success in STEM careers (Autor, Levy, & Murnane, 2003). Increasingly, engagement is thought to be critical to addressing low achievement and high dropout rates (for a review, see Fredericks et al., 2004). For example, off-task behavior as early as middle school is an excellent predictor of high school dropout rate (Tobin & Sugai, 1999), and gaming the system in middle school predicts eventual college attendance (San Pedro et al., 2013). Engagement is an …
Accuracy and robustness in measuring the lexical similarity of semantic role fillers for automatic semantic MT evaluation

We present larger-scale evidence overturning previous results, showing that among the many alternative phrasal lexical similarity measures based on word vectors, the Jaccard coefficient most increases the robustness of MEANT, the recently introduced, fully-automatic, state-of-the-art semantic MT evaluation metric. MEANT critically depends on phrasal lexical similarity scores in order to automatically determine which semantic role fillers should be aligned between reference and machine translations. The robustness experiments were conducted across various data sets following NIST MetricsMaTr protocols, showing higher Kendall correlation with human adequacy judgments against BLEU, METEOR (with and without synsets), WER, PER, TER and CDER. The Jaccard coefficient is shown to be more discriminative and robust than cosine similarity, the Min/Max metric with mutual information, Jensen Shannon divergence, or the Dice’s coefficient. We also show that with Jaccard coefficient as the phrasal lexical similarity metric, individual word token scores are best aggregated into phrasal segment similarity scores using the geometric mean, rather than either the arithmetic mean or competitive linking style word alignments. Furthermore, we show empirically that a context window size of 5 captures the optimal amount of information for training the word vectors. The combined results suggest a new formulation of MEANT with significantly improved robustness across data sets.
The strength of R&D network ties in high-tech sectors – a multi-dimensional analysis of the effects of tie strength on innovation performance

We study the effect of the tie strength of inter-firm R&D partnerships on the innovation performance of companies in four high-tech sectors (pharmaceuticals, computers, semi-conductors and telecom). Returning to Granovetter's (1973) seminal contribution, tie strength is analysed through a broad multi-dimensional perspective. We find that inter-firm R&D network ties that are stronger in terms of their extent (measured by the length and multitude of R&D partnerships) and weaker in terms of their depth (the degree of cooperation and the similarity of ties of companies) improve the innovation performance of companies. Interestingly, we find strong support for the role of these R&D ties in the context of the run-of-the-mill innovation performance of companies. However, there is no support for this effect on significant innovations of companies.
Liver X receptor β (LXRβ): A link between β-sitosterol and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis–Parkinson's dementia

Administration of β-sitosterol (42 mg/kg per day) for 3 weeks to 8-month-old male LXRβ−/− mice resulted in the death of motor neurons in the lumbar region of the spinal cord and loss of tyrosine hydroxylase-positive dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra. In mice at 5 months of age, β-sitosterol had no observed toxicity but at 16 months of age, it caused severe paralysis and symptoms typical of dopaminergic dysfunction in LXRβ−/− mice. WT mice were not affected by these doses of β-sitosterol. In 5-month-old mice, levels of the intestinal transporters, ABCG5/8 and Niemann-Pick C1 Like 1, were not affected by loss of liver X receptor (LXR) β and/or treatment with β-sitosterol nor were there changes in plasma levels of cholesterol or β-sitosterol. In 8-month-old LXRβ−/− mice there was activation of microglia in the substantia nigra pars reticulata and aggregates of ubiquitin and TDP-43 in the cytoplasm of large motor neurons in the lumbar spinal cord. Brain cholesterol concentrations were higher in LXRβ−/− than in their WT counterparts, and treatment with β-sitosterol reduced brain cholesterol in both WT and LXRβ−/− mice. In LXRβ−/− mice but not in WT mice levels of 24-hydrocholesterol were increased upon β-sitosterol treatment. These data indicate that multiple mechanisms are involved in the sensitivity of LXRβ−/− mice to β-sitosterol. These include activation of microglia, accumulation of protein aggregates in the cytoplasm of large motor neurons, and depletion of brain cholesterol.