Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ligamentous Laxity Across C0‐C1-C2 Complex: Axial Torque‐Rotation Characteristics Until Failure

The axial torque until failure of the ligamentous occipitoatlanto-axial complex (C0-C1-C2) subjected to axial angular rotation (8) was characterized using a biaxial MTS system. A special fixture and gearbox that permitted right axial rotation of the specimen until failure without imposing any additional constraints were designed to obtain the data. The average values for the axial rotation and torque at the point of maximum resistance were, respectively, 68.1° and 13.6 N-m. The specimens offered minimal resistance (∼ 0.5 N-m), up to an average axial rotation of 21° across the complex. The torque-angular rotation (T-0) curve can be divided into four regions: regions of least and steadily increasing resistances, a transition zone that connects these two regions, and the increasing resistance region to the point of maximum resistance. The regions of least and steadily increasing resistances may be represented by two straight lines with average slopes of 0.028 and 0.383 N-m/degree, respectively. Post-test dissection of the specimens disclosed the following. The point of maximum resistance corresponded roughly to the value of axial rotation at which complete bilateral rotary dislocation of the C1-C2 facets occurred. The types of injuries observed were related to the magnitude of axial rotation imposed on a specimen during testing. Soft-tissue injuries alone (like stretch/rupture of the capsular ligaments, subluxation of the C1-C2 facets, etc.) were confined to specimens rotated up to or close to the point of maximum resistance. The specimens that were subjected to rotations up to the point of maximum resistance of the curve spontaneously reduced completely on removal from the testing apparatus. Spontaneous reduction was not possible for specimens tested slightly beyond their points of maximum resistance. Specimens that were rotated well beyond the point of maximum resistance showed, in addition to the soft tissue damage and subluxation, avulsion fractures of the bone at the points of attachment of the alar ligament to either the occipital condyles or odontoid process (dens), or fractures of the odontoid process inferior to the level of alar ligament attachment. The alar ligaments did not rupture in any of the specimens.
A Release Rate Study for Controlled Drug Delivery Using Niosomes

The emerging technology of drug-encapsulated nanoparticles plays a critical role in the development of treatment for various life-threatening diseases due to the versatility, control, and future potential of the design of these systems. A current treatment technique for the treatment of brain tumor cells, after major surgery, utilizes a drug adhered to a biodegradable polymer wafer that provides the release of medication over about 120 hours. The setback to a design such as this is the levels of toxicity that can be delivered to other organs in the body due to over-medication of the drug, causing adverse reactions in the patients. This project proposes to design a drug-delivery vehicle that utilizes a double controlled mechanism that is based on a package within a package system, or a smart-packaging system. The drug will be encapsulated in non-ionic surfactant vesicles, or niosomes, and then embedded in a biodegradable temperatureand pH-sensitive chitosan polymer hydrogel. This double packaging system will allow for the controlled release of the drug based on the diffusion properties and physical characteristics of the niosomes and chitosan hydrogel. The goal of this investigation was to study the release rate of the drug from the niosome in an in vitro environment. The niosomes were prepared by thin film hydration and sonication, and 5(6)carboxyfluorescein dye was encapsulated in the vesicles to mimic the behavior of the drug. The concentration of the dye varied from 4mM to 5mM to 14mM. The niosome solution was placed in a semi-permeable cellulose membrane and submerged in a bulk solution of either Milli-Q water or PBS. The system was placed on a stirring plate and allowed to run for 72 hours. Samples were taken from the contents in the membrane and contents in the bulk solution at different time intervals. Fluorescence spectroscopy was used to measure the intensity and concentration of the samples. It was found that the dye was released from the niosomes submerged in the water solution within the first 10 hours of the experiment, indicating their instability in that environment. It was also found that the niosomes submerged in the PBS solution maintained their stability, with their release rates being relatively lower than in the water solution. It was shown that the release rate behavior of the niosomes was similar regardless of initial concentration of dye encapsulated in the vesicles. It can be concluded that the niosomes are unstable in Milli-Q water and require a hydrogel that will stabilize the vesicles, similar to PBS. The hydrogel will prevent the premature release of the drug from the vesicles. This technique allows for control over the release rates of the drugs, which can decrease toxicity to other parts of the body, increase direct utilization of the drug, and increase the survival time of brain cancer patients. It is the goal of this research to design a novel drugdelivery technique that will be safe and effective for the treatment for brain tumor cells, while improving the quality of life and duration of survival for these patients.
Bayesian Tracking by Online Co-Training and Sequential Evolutionary Importance Resampling

Object tracking is an indispensable ingredient of many machine vision applications such as intelligent visual surveillance, traffic monitoring, robot and vehicle navigation, human computer interactions, virtual and augmented realities, video compression and indexing, etc. and has drawn considerable attention from computer research communities in recent years. Actually, in the real world scenarios, that is a very challenging task due to the interference of noise, clutters, occlusions, illumination variations and dynamic changes of the object and the background appearance in the complex scene; a quite variety of tracking methods have been proposed to tackle these difficulties in decades (Yilmaz et al., 2006), which can be roughly divided into two categories: the deterministic method and the statistical methods. The deterministic method performs tracking typically by seeking the local extreme of a matching function which measures the similarity between a template and a candidate image; the most widely used similarity measures include the sum of squared differences, the histogram intersection distance, the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the normalized cross correlation coefficient, and the Bhattacharyya coefficient. Some optimization techniques have been proposed to search the local extreme of the matching function such as the meanshift method (Comaniciu et al., 2003) and the optical flow based method (Baker & Matthews, 2004). The drawback of these methods is if the matching function takes into account only the object and not the background, then it might not be able to correctly distinguish the object from the background and tracking might fail. More robust similarity measures are presented recently such as the posterior probability measure (Feng et al., 2008.) and the log likelihood ratio of features (Collins et al., 2005), which takes the background interference into account. Recently, object tracking is treated as a binary classification problem, where the object have to be identified from the background with multiple image cues and better performance over the matching function based approaches such as the template-matching method (Lucas & Kanade, 1981), the view-based method (Black & Jepson, 1998), and the kernel-based method (Comaniciu et al., 2003), etc. was reported in literatures, where a discriminative model for separating the object from the background is trained offline and applied before tracking and termed tracking-by-detection method (Andriluka et al., 2008 ; Avidan 2004; Breitenstein et al., 2009 ; Choudhury et al., 2003; Leibe et al., 2008; Okuma et al., 2004; Wu & Nevatia, 2007). However, to formulate that as an object-background discrimination problem, two important factors need to be treated carefully: what features to choose and how to train the classifiers. Furthermore, since the object and background appearance may change greatly
Genetic interactions link ARF1, YPT31/32 and TRS130

A genetic screen for synthetic lethal interactions with arf1− identified a recessive mutation in TRS130, one of 10 components in the trafficking protein particle (TRAPP) complex (Sacher et al., 2000 ). As TRS130 is an essential gene, the synthetic lethal allele (trs130‐101) is a novel one that requires ARF1 for viability. This allele was found to exhibit no defects in secretory function, i.e. processing of carboxypeptidase Y or invertase. YPT31 and YPT32 were identified in a subsequent screen as high‐copy suppressors of arf1−trs130‐101. Increasing the gene dosage of YPT31/32 also suppressed lethality resulting from deletion of TRS130 or TRS120 but not three other essential TRAPP subunit‐encoding genes. Although unable to suppress defects in several alleles of ARF1, increasing the gene dosage of YPT31/32 suppressed the cold sensitivity of gcs1−, an Arf GTPase‐activating protein (GAP). Thus, these genetic interactions provide initial evidence for linkage of Arf and TRAPP signalling and for Ypt31/32 proteins functioning downstream of both components in the TRAPP complex and of Arf signalling via the Gcs1 Arf GAP. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A finite element post-processing for skew effects in brushless doubly-fed induction machines

Brushless doubly-fed induction machines have great potential as variable-speed generators in wind turbines. Undesired space harmonics exist because the special rotor needs to couple both stator windings which with different pole-pair numbers and different frequencies. These undesired space harmonics lead to a bigger torque ripple compared with conventional induction machines. Previously, a 2D multi-slice finite element (FE) method was applied to study the effects of rotor skew on torque responses in brushless DFIMs. It results in a significant computing time because several 2D FE slices are coupled and calculated simultaneously in one model. It is not efficient to use such a model to predict how much average torques and torque ripples would be reduced by applying skewed slots at the beginning of design. This paper makes use of normal 2D FEM results and applies skew factors in post-processing to investigate the influence of rotor skew on the torque responses. The proposed method can give an approximate prediction of skew effects on torque responses with limited computing time.
Market and Innovation Orientation: A Typology of Public Housing Companies in Sweden

Abstract— The purpose of this paper is to develop a typology based on market orientation (MO) and innovation orientation (IO), and to illustrate to what extent housing companies in Sweden fit within this framework. A qualitative study on 11 public housing companies in the central part of Sweden has been conducted by the help of open and semi-structured questions for data collection. Four public housing company types’ i.e. reactive prospector, proactive prospector, reactive defender and proactive defender have been identified by the combination of MO-IO dimensions. Future research can include other dimensions like entrepreneurship and network to observe how it particularly affects MO. An empirical study can compare public and private housing companies on the basis of MO and IO dimensions. One major contribution of the paper is the proposition of typology which can be used to describe public housing companies and deciding their future course of actions. Keywords— Customer-led, economy, innovativeness, market orientation.
Body fat and skinfold thicknesses: A dimensional analytic approach

Background: Body fat may be estimated from skinfold thickness measurements (Skfs), but current prediction equations are dimensionally inconsistent and do not properly allow for the influence of body size on fat mass. Aim: To find a dimensionally correct formula relating fat content to Skfs and body size. Subjects and methods: 285 African children aged 9–11 years, with fat content measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, were studied. Because least-squares regression parameters can be a misleading guide to true functional relationships, the real data were compared with simulated data sets conforming to a dimensionally correct statistical model. Results: The data are consistent with functional relationships such that fat mass is proportional to Skf×height2. The mean ratio (fat mass)/(Skf×height2) is 6% higher in the girls than in the boys. Discussion: Appropriately, Skf×height2 has the dimensions of fat mass/density. Height2 has no obvious physical significance and a more meaningful expression might be ‘height×X', where X corresponds to some measure of body width or girth. Conclusion: In formulae for predicting fat mass, multiplying Skfs by height2 gives better estimates, especially for the tallest and shortest individuals. Fat mass, rather than percentage body fat (%BF), is best taken as the variable initially predicted.
Time‐of‐flight MR angiography

Time‐of‐flight effects depend on the displacement of blood with respect to a region of excitation. When combined with static material suppression and projection imaging, time‐of‐flight effects provide a flexible means of flow sensitization for magnetic resonance (MR) angiography. Bolus tracking, flow enhancement by spin replacement, and selective tagging are three classes of methods being pursued for MR angiography. © 1990 Academic Press, Inc.
Extensive transcriptional response associated with seasonal plasticity of butterfly wing patterns

In the eastern United States, the buckeye butterfly, Junonia coenia, shows seasonal wing colour plasticity where adults emerging in the spring are tan, while those emerging in the autumn are dark red. This variation can be artificially induced in laboratory colonies, thus making J. coenia a useful model system to examine the mechanistic basis of plasticity. To better understand the developmental basis of seasonal plasticity, we used RNA‐seq to quantify transcription profiles associated with development of alternative seasonal wing morphs. Depending on the developmental stage, between 547 and 1420 transfrags were significantly differentially expressed between morphs. These extensive differences in gene expression stand in contrast to the much smaller numbers of differentially expressed transcripts identified in previous studies of genetic wing pattern variation in other species and suggest that environmentally induced phenotypic shifts arise from very broad systemic processes. Analyses of candidate endocrine and pigmentation transcripts revealed notable genes upregulated in the red morph, including several ecdysone‐associated genes, and cinnabar, an ommochrome pigmentation gene implicated in colour pattern variation in other butterflies. We also found multiple melanin‐related transcripts strongly upregulated in the red morph, including tan and yellow‐family genes, leading us to speculate that dark red pigmentation in autumn J. coenia may involve nonommochrome pigments. While we identified several endocrine and pigmentation genes as obvious candidates for seasonal colour morph differentiation, we speculate that the majority of observed expression differences were due to thermal stress response. The buckeye transcriptome provides a basis for further developmental studies of phenotypic plasticity.
Differential requirements for DNA replication in the activation of mitotic checkpoints in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Checkpoints prevent inaccurate chromosome segregation by inhibiting cell division when errors in mitotic processes are encountered. We used a temperature-sensitive mutation, dbf4, to examine the requirement for DNA replication in establishing mitotic checkpoint arrest. We used gamma-irradiation to induce DNA damage and hydroxyurea to limit deoxyribonucleotides in cells deprived of DBF4 function to investigate the requirement for DNA replication in DNA-responsive checkpoints. In the absence of DNA replication, mitosis was not inhibited by these treatments, which normally activate the DNA damage and DNA replication checkpoints. Our results support a model that indicates that the assembly of replication structures is critical for cells to respond to defects in DNA metabolism. We show that activating the spindle checkpoint with nocodazole does not require prior progression through S phase but does require a stable kinetochore.
A REINFORCEMENT LEARNING APPROACH TO CONGESTION CONTROL OF HIGH-SPEED MULTIMEDIA NETWORKS

ABSTRACT A reinforcement learning scheme on congestion control in a high-speed network is presented. Traditional methods for congestion control always monitor the queue length, on which the source rate depends. However, the determination of the congested threshold and sending rate is difficult to couple with each other in these methods. We proposed a simple and robust reinforcement learning congestion controller (RLCC) to solve the problem. The scheme consists of two subsystems: the expectation-return predictor is a long-term policy evaluator and the other is a short-term rate selector, which is composed of action-value evaluator and stochastic action selector elements. RLCC receives reinforcement signals generated by an immediate reward evaluator and takes the best action to control source flow in consideration of high throughput and low cell loss rate. Through on-line learning processes, RLCC can adaptively take more and more correct actions under time-varying environments. Simulation results have shown that the proposed approach can increase system utilization and decrease packet losses simultaneously in comparison with the popular best-effort scheme.
CYP24A1 Mutations in a Cohort of Hypercalcemic Patients: Evidence for a Recessive Trait.

CONTEXT Loss-of-function mutations of CYP24A1 (which encodes the 25-OH-D3-24-hydroxylase) have recently been reported to cause hypercalcemia. OBJECTIVES The aims of this study were: 1) to evaluate the frequency of CYP24A1 mutations in patients with medical history of hypercalcemia; 2) to show the clinical utility of a simultaneous assay of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 (25-OH-D3) and 24,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (24,25-[OH]2D3) by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS); and 3) to investigate biochemical parameters in heterozygous gene carriers with CYP24A1 mutations. PATIENTS AND METHODS We screened for CYP24A1 mutations in 72 patients with serum calcium levels > 2.6 mmol/L and PTH levels < 20 pg/mL and recruited 24 relatives after genetic counseling for subsequent investigations. Vitamin D metabolite concentrations were assessed in a subset of patients by LC-MS/MS and results expressed as a ratio (R) of 25-OH-D3:24,25-(OH)2D3. RESULTS Twenty-five patients with hypercalcemia (35%) harbored CYP24A1 variations. Twenty (28%) had biallelic variations, mostly found in subjects with nephrocalcinosis or renal stones (19/20). Five patients, all neonates, were heterozygous, without renal disease. We describe 15 new variations leading to loss-of-function according to pathogenicity prediction programs, and we functionally characterized 5 of them in vitro. A dramatic increase of R, usually >80, was found in patients harboring biallelic mutations providing evidence in vivo for the loss of CYP24A1 activity. In contrast, R value remains <25 in patients without CYP24A1 mutations. Subjects carrying one mutant allele, hypercalcemic individuals, as well as gene-carrier relatives, had a detectable 24,25-(OH)2D3 level and R < 25, indicating normal 24-hydroxylase activity. CONCLUSION CYP24A1 biallelic mutations are frequently found in patients presenting with hypercalcemia, low PTH, and renal disease. We confirm the accuracy and effectiveness of a novel blood test estimating the ratio between relevant vitamin D metabolites as a useful screening tool for CYP24A1 mutations. Haploinsufficiency is not associated with CYP24A1 deficiency.
End-to-end delay models for interactive services on a large-scale IP network

In addition to the traditional best-effort Internet service, the Internet community now explores new Internet service models with guaranteed QoS levels. Work in this area has in particular been co-ordinated by the IETF working groups on Integrated Services (intserv) and on Differentiated Services (diffserv). The goal of these working groups is to define new QoS mechanisms for the Internet to be able to provide IP transport services with sufficient quality to support interactive services. A key aspect is the end-to-end delay that may be expected from using these services. Because no widely deployed networks exist which provide these low-delay services, this article addresses models for assessing the major components in the end-to-end delay. The models can be applied to both the intserv and the diffserv approach. An IP network configuration is considered consisting of a high-speed IP core network and two lower-speed access parts. For the core network queuing models are presented. In addition, it is concluded that, if some ‘loose requirements’ are fulfilled by the core network, the delay due to queuing can be kept below 8 ms; the propagation delay is to be added to this figure. For the access parts, very simple models can be used if it is assumed that only a single interactive application uses the access. Simple expressions are presented covering various protocols (including PPP with suspend/resume) to be used on the access parts.
Human Matrix Attachment Regions Insulate Transgene Expression from Chromosomal Position Effects in Drosophila melanogaster

ABSTRACT Germ line transformation of white−Drosophila embryos with P-element vectors containingwhite expression cassettes results in flies with different eye color phenotypes due to position effects at the sites of transgene insertion. These position effects can be cured by specific DNA elements, such as the Drosophila scs and scs′elements, that have insulator activity in vivo. We have used this system to determine whether human matrix attachment regions (MARs) can function as insulator elements in vivo. Two different human MARs, from the apolipoprotein B and α1-antitrypsin loci, insulatedwhite transgene expression from position effects inDrosophila melanogaster. Both elements reduced variability in transgene expression without enhancing levels of whitegene expression. In contrast, expression of whitetransgenes containing human DNA segments without matrix-binding activity was highly variable in Drosophila transformants. These data indicate that human MARs can function as insulator elements in vivo.