Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Protective Effect of MK‐801 on Infarct Development over a Period of 24 h as Assessed by Diffusion‐Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Diffusion‐weighted MRI has been used to investigate therapeutic intervention with MK‐801 in an animal model of permanent focal cerebral ischaemia. The animals were imaged continuously for 4 h and again at 24 h following occlusion of the middle cerebral artery (MCA) allowing the development of the ischaemic lesion to be monitored continuously in the same animals. An increased DWI signal, seen as a region of hyperintensity, was detected 1 h after MCA‐occlusion in the lateral cortex and caudate nucleus in both control and MK‐801 (administered at a dose of 3 mg/kg i.p. 5 min post‐ischaemia) treated animals. However, the volume of hemispheric and cortical hyperintensity was smaller in the MK‐801‐treated animals. The area of hyperintensity progressively increased in the control group over the 4 h imaging time and there was also an increase in the area of hyperintensity between 4 and 24 h. At these time points the area of hyperintensity encompassed the dorsolateral cortex and caudate nucleus. MK‐801 treated animals also demonstrated some progressive increase in the area of hyperintensity between 1 and 3 h, but no significant increase in the area of hyperintensity was seen after this time. The hyperintense regions at 4 and 24 h were restricted to the so‐called "core areas' of the lesion in MK‐801‐treated animals. Thus, using DWI the tissue "at risk' following ischaemia could be identified and the protective effect of therapeutic intervention demonstrated
Comparative study of antioxidant enzymes in tissues surrounding implant in rabbits

There is a possible role of reactive oxygen species (SROS) in the complication of implants although there is presently little information. The aim of this study was to investigate the alterations in lipid peroxidation (LP) and antioxidant enzyme activities in tissues surrounding implants in rabbits. Thirty New Zealand albino male rabbits were used. They were randomly divided into five groups. The first group (I) was used as control. Groups II, III, IV and V were implanted with stainless steel, ceramic, titanium and polyethylene, respectively. One month after the administration of implant, the tissues surrounding the implant were carefully removed for antioxidant enzyme analysis. Glucose‐6‐phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), glutathione reductase (GR), superoxide dismutases (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), catalase (CAT) in tissues surrounding the implants in the groups II, III and IV were significantly (p<0.05–p<0.001) lower than in the control group although glutathione S‐transferase (GST) activities and LP values were increased. CAT activity and LP level did not decrease in group V. In conclusion, these data demonstrate that there is an increase in lipid peroxidation in the tissues surrounding ceramic and titanium implants of animals whereas there is a decrease in antioxidant enzymes. Oxidative stress plays a very important role in the complications of ceramic and titanium implants. The polyethylene implant seems to be the best of the four implant materials tested. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Determination of chemical identity and occupancy from experimental density maps

Three basic electronic properties of molecules, electron density (ED), charge density (CD), and electrostatic potentials (ESP), are dependent on both atomic mobility and occupancy of components in the molecules. Small protein subunits may bind large macromolecular complexes with a reduced occupancy or an increased atomic mobility or both due to affinity‐based functional regulation, and so may substrates, products, cofactors, ions or solvent molecule to the active sites of enzymes. A quantitative theory is presented in this study that describes the dependence of atomic functions on atomic B‐factor in Fourier transforms of the corresponding maps. An application of this theory is described to an experimental ED map at 1.73‐Å resolution, and to an experimental CD map at 2.2‐Å resolution. All the three density functions are linearly proportional to occupancy when the structure factor F(000) term of Fourier transforms of experimental density maps is included. Upon application of this theory to both experimental CD and ESP maps recently reported for photosystem II‐light harvesting complex II supercomplex at 3.2‐Å resolution, the occupancy of two extrinsic protein subunits PsbQ and PsbP is determined to be 20.4 ± 0.2%, and the negative mean ESP value of vitreous ice displaced by the supercomplex on electron scattering path is estimated to be 3% of the mean ESP value of protein α‐helices.
Call Center Key Performance Indicators and Customer Satisfaction

This article purports to investigate the relationship – in an empirical way – between the various key performance indicators currently used for the management of call centers in Brazil and customer satisfaction. In this context, a set of call centers rendering services to a telecommunications company will be analyzed in order to verify which of their indicators are positively associated with customer satisfaction. A methodological approach based on surveys as well as stepwise multiple linear regressions is developed and applied in order to achieve the objective of this paper. It is seen that just the “FirstContact Resolution Rate” and the “Average Handle Time After the Call” indicators present a statistically significant relationship with customer satisfaction. Lastly, some alternative call center key performance indicators are proposed, in an exploratory way, so as to convey to an enhanced relationship between call center performance and customer satisfaction.
Packaging of ZnO nanobelts as nanosensors: Synthesis, Alignment and Characterization

One-dimensional ZnO nanobelt exhibits unique properties which makes it a perfect candidate for sensors in various applications. In this paper, synthesis of ZnO nanobelts is described. Design and fabrication of electrodes are presented. Alignment of nanobelts, which is assisted by the optimized designed electrode, is discussed. Dramatic improvement of the contact resistance is found after the sample is annealed at 500degC for 1 min. This work lays the foundation for further fabrication, fictionalization and packaging of ZnO nanobelt based sensors
Assessing the welfare of laboratory mice in their home environment using animal-based measures – a benchmarking tool

Welfare problems in laboratory mice can be a consequence of an ongoing experiment, or a characteristic of a particular genetic line, but in some cases, such as breeding animals, they are most likely to be a result of the design and management of the home cage. Assessment of the home cage environment is commonly performed using resource-based measures, like access to nesting material. However, animal-based measures (related to the health status and behaviour of the animals) can be used to assess the current welfare of animals regardless of the inputs applied (i.e. the resources or management). The aim of this study was to design a protocol for assessing the welfare of laboratory mice using only animal-based measures. The protocol, to be used as a benchmarking tool, assesses mouse welfare in the home cage and does not contain parameters related to experimental situations. It is based on parameters corresponding to the 12 welfare criteria established by the Welfare Quality® project. Selection of animal-based measures was performed by scanning existing published, web-based and informal protocols, and by choosing parameters that matched these criteria, were feasible in practice and, if possible, were already validated indicators of mouse welfare. The parameters should identify possible animal welfare problems and enable assessment directly in an animal room during cage cleaning procedures, without the need for extra equipment. Thermal comfort behaviours and positive emotional states are areas where more research is needed to find valid, reliable and feasible animal-based measures.
Tool Gear: Infrastructure for Parallel Tools

Tool Gear is a software infrastructure for developing performance analysis and other tools. Unlike existing integrated toolkits, which focus on providing a suite of capabilities, Tool Gear is designed to help tool developers create new tools quickly. It combines dynamic instrumentation capabilities with an efficient database and a sophisticated and extensible graphical user interface. This paper describes the design of Tool Gear and presents examples of tools that have been built with it.
Reduced Clinical Efficacy of Pazufloxacin against Gonorrhea Due to High Prevalence of Quinolone-Resistant Isolates with the GyrA Mutation

ABSTRACT Forty-two men with gonococcal urethritis were treated with an oral dosage of 200 mg of pazufloxacin, a new fluoroquinolone, three times daily for 3 days. Only 28 of the 42 men (66.7%) had negative culture results for Neisseria gonorrhoeae during follow-up. Of the 42 isolates, 41 could be recultured for antibiotic susceptibility testing and DNA sequencing. In 26 of the 41 isolates (63.4%), GyrA mutations with or without ParC mutations were identified. Among the 26 isolates, 23 contained a single GyrA mutation, 1 contained two GyrA mutations, and 2 contained three mutations including double GyrA and single ParC mutations. A single Ser-91-to-Phe mutation, which was detected in 14 of the 26 isolates, was the most common GyrA mutation, followed by an Ala-75 to Ser mutation and an Asp-95 to Asn or Gly mutation in GyrA. All three isolates with two or three mutations contained the Ser-91-to-Phe GyrA mutation. Eleven of the 14 isolates with the single Ser-91-to-Phe mutation within GyrA and all 3 isolates with two or three mutations persisted after pazufloxacin treatment. On the other hand, all 15 wild-type and 9 mutant isolates with a substitution at codon Ala-75 or Asp-95 were eradicated. The mean MIC of pazufloxacin for mutants with the single Ser-91-to-Phe mutation in GyrA was 66-fold higher than that for the wild type. The results obtained in this study suggest that a high prevalence of fluoroquinolone-resistant gonococcal isolates with the Ser-91-to-Phe mutation in GyrA reduced the efficacy of pazufloxacin as treatment for gonococcal urethritis.
Abstract Representations of Object-Directed Action in the Left Inferior Parietal Lobule

Prior neuroimaging and neuropsychological research indicates that the left inferior parietal lobule in the human brain is a critical substrate for representing object manipulation knowledge. In the present functional MRI study we used multivoxel pattern analyses to test whether action similarity among objects can be decoded in the inferior parietal lobule independent of the task applied to objects (identification or pantomime) and stimulus format in which stimuli are presented (pictures or printed words). Participants pantomimed the use of objects, cued by printed words, or identified pictures of objects. Classifiers were trained and tested across task (e.g., training data: pantomime; testing data: identification), stimulus format (e.g., training data: word format; testing format: picture) and specific objects (e.g., training data: scissors vs. corkscrew; testing data: pliers vs. screwdriver). The only brain region in which action relations among objects could be decoded across task, stimulus format and objects was the inferior parietal lobule. By contrast, medial aspects of the ventral surface of the left temporal lobe represented object function, albeit not at the same level of abstractness as actions in the inferior parietal lobule. These results suggest compulsory access to abstract action information in the inferior parietal lobe even when simply identifying objects.
NUCLEOSYNTHETIC LAYERS IN THE SHOCKED EJECTA OF CASSIOPEIA A

We present a three-dimensional analysis of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A using high-resolution spectra from the Spitzer Space Telescope. We observe supernova ejecta both immediately before and during the shock–ejecta interaction. We determine that the reverse shock of the remnant is spherical to within 7%, although the center of this sphere is offset from the geometric center of the remnant by 810 km s−1. We determine that the velocity width of the nucleosynthetic layers is ∼1000 km s−1 over 4000 arcsec2 regions, although the velocity width of a layer along any individual line of sight is <250 km s−1. Si and O, which come from different nucleosynthetic layers in the progenitor star, are observed to be coincident in velocity space in some directions, but segregated by up to ∼500 km s−1 in other directions. We compare these observations of the nucleosynthetic layers to predictions from supernova explosion models in an attempt to constrain such models. Finally, we observe small-scale, corrugated velocity structures that are likely caused during the supernova explosion itself, rather than hundreds of years later by dynamical instabilities at the remnant's reverse shock.
HRD Learning Participation: An Empirical Study of E-Learning Completion.

This study offers empirical evidence in HRD e-learning completion. Based on the Learning Participation Theory (LPT) (Wang & Wang, 2004), a study was conducted with U.S. corporate e-learners to explore the determinants of e-learning completion. The results generally confirmed the hypothesis by the LPT that individual, learning process, and organizational clusters, as well as environmental factors, as specified in the study, are significant determinants of e-learning completion. The implications of the results are also discussed.
Corporate Taxes and Securitization

This paper highlights how corporate income taxes create incentives for banks to securitize loans. Most banks are subject to corporate income taxation while special purpose corporations that hold securitized loans are not. We present a model that analyzes different banks’ securitization incentives. The model shows that if a bank has significant loan origination opportunities but limited deposit market power, its incentive to sell loans is an increasing function of its corporate income tax rate. Empirical tests of the model’s predictions are carried out on two different samples of U.S. commercial banks’ loan sales during the period 2001 to 2008: one sample using Call Report data and the other sample based on Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) filings. Consistent with the model’s predictions, both sets of data show that banks having relatively high lending opportunities are more likely to sell mortgages and non-mortgage loans when they operate in states that impose higher corporate income taxes. An implication is that corporate taxation of bank income may have contributed to the recently excessive growth in securitization.
Design of controller for XCP router achieving efficient and fair bandwidth allocation

As the product of bandwidth and latency increases, TCP becomes inefficient and prone to instability, regardless of the queuing scheme. The eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP) is a novel and promising congestion control protocol that outperforms TCP in terms of efficiency, fairness, persistent queue length, packet loss rate and convergence speed. However, in a multi-bottleneck environment, XCP may cause some bottleneck links to be under-utilized, and a flow may only receive a small fraction of its max-min fair allocation. In this paper, according to the robust control theory, with the help of a recently developed Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, we propose an XCP bandwidth compensation algorithm based on state feedback (S-XCP). Extensive simulations have shown that S-XCP achieves efficient and fair bandwidth allocation in a multi-bottleneck environment. Simulations also have shown that S-XCP preserves the good properties of XCP, including fast convergence, low persistent queue length and negligible packet loss rate.
Regulation of Growth of the Mother Cell and Chromosome Replication during Sporulation of Bacillus subtilis

ABSTRACT During spore formation, Bacillus subtilis divides asymmetrically, resulting in two cells with different fates. Immediately after division, the transcription factor σF becomes active in the smaller prespore, followed by activation of σE in the larger mother cell. We recently showed that a delay in σE activation resulted in the novel phenotype of two spores (twins) forming within the same mother cell. Mother cells bearing twins are substantially longer than mother cells with single spores. Here we explore the regulation of the growth and DNA replication of the mother cell. We find that length correlates with chromosome number in the mother cell. We show that replication and growth could occur after asymmetric division in mother cells with no active σE. In contrast, when σE was active, replication and growth ceased. In growing mother cells, with no active σE, Spo0A-directed transcription levels remained low. In the presence of active σE, Spo0A-directed gene expression was enhanced in the mother cells. Artificial Spo0A activation blocked mother cell growth in the absence of σE. Spo0A activation blocked growth even in the absence of SirA, the Spo0A-directed inhibitor of the initiation of replication. Together, the results indicate that the burst of Spo0A-directed expression along with the activation of σE provides mechanisms to block the DNA replication and growth of the mother cell.
Bendable plaster antenna for 2.45 GHz applications

A plaster antenna for 2.45 GHz applications is presented. Measurement results for different use cases are given, and bending effects are examined. The proposed structure exhibits a 6 dBi on-body gain, and covers the 2.4-2.5 GHz ISM band in all use cases. The effect of bending the antenna on the SAR has been investigated by simulations. The antenna is suitable for medical applications.
Assigning Keywords to Automatically Extracted Personal Cliques from Social Networks

In Twitter and other microblogging services, users often have large social networks formed around cliques (communities) such as friends, coworkers or former classmates. However, the membership of each user in multiple cliques makes it difficult to process information and interact with other clique members. We address this problem by automatically dividing the social network of a Twitter user into personal cliques and assigning keywords to each clique to identify the common ground of its members. In this way, the user can understand the structure of their social network and interact with the members of each clique independently. Our proposed method improves clique annotation by not only extracting keywords from the tweet history of the clique members, but individually weighting the extracted keywords of each member according to the relevance of their tweets for the clique. The keyword weight is influenced by two factors. The first factor is calculated based on the number of connections of a user within the clique, and the second factor depends on whether the user publishes personal information or information of general interest. We developed the prototype of a Twitter client with clique management functionality and conducted an experiment in which on average 46.96% of the keywords extracted from our proposed method were relevant for the cliques as opposed to 38.31% for the baseline method.
The Use and Limitations of Exome Capture to Detect Novel Variation in the Hexaploid Wheat Genome

The bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) pangenome is a patchwork of variable regions, including translocations and introgressions from progenitors and wild relatives. Although a large number of these have been documented, it is likely that many more remain unknown. To map these variable regions and make them more traceable in breeding programs, wheat accessions need to be genotyped or sequenced. The wheat genome is large and complex and consequently, sequencing efforts are often targeted through exome capture. In this study, we employed exome capture prior to sequencing 12 wheat varieties; 10 elite T. aestivum cultivars and two T. aestivum landrace accessions. Sequence coverage across chromosomes was greater toward distal regions of chromosome arms and lower in centromeric regions, reflecting the capture probe distribution which itself is determined by the known telomere to centromere gene gradient. Superimposed on this general pattern, numerous drops in sequence coverage were observed. Several of these corresponded with reported introgressions. Other drops in coverage could not be readily explained and may point to introgressions that have not, to date, been documented.
Reciprocity Calibration for Massive MIMO Systems by Mutual Coupling between Adjacent Antennas

Scaling up the conventional multiple-input multiple- output (MIMO) by orders of magnitude, massive MIMO technique brings huge improvement in spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency. However, under time- division duplex (TDD) operation, the reciprocity calibration need to be necessarily investigated, since the mismatches of the transceiver radio frequency (RF) circuits at both sides of the link will make the whole communication channels non-reciprocal. In this paper, by utilizing the strong mutual coupling between adjacent antennas, a new calibration algorithm called adjacent mutual coupling method (AdjMC) is proposed for massive MIMO systems with zero forcing (ZF) precoding. Exploiting this method, the base station (BS) can perform the reciprocity calibration without the involvement of user equipments (UEs). Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that, comparing with the several methods in the least squares (LS) framework, the AdjMC method significantly reduces the complexity and achieves the high performance.
Introgressing cry1Ac for Pod Borer Resistance in Chickpea Through Marker-Assisted Backcross Breeding

The gram pod borer Helicoverpa armigera is a major constraint to chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) production worldwide, reducing crop yield by up to 90%. The constraint is difficult to overcome as chickpea germplasm including wild species either lacks pod borer resistance or if possessing resistance is cross-incompatible. This study describes conversion of elite but pod borer-susceptible commercial chickpea cultivars into resistant cultivars through introgression of cry1Ac using marker-assisted backcross breeding. The chickpea cultivars (PBG7 and L552) were crossed with pod borer-resistant transgenic lines (BS 100B and BS 100E) carrying cry1Ac that led to the development of BC1F1, BC1F2, BC1F3, BC2F1, BC2F2, and BC2F3 populations from three cross combinations. The foreground selection revealed that 35.38% BC1F1 and 8.4% BC1F2 plants obtained from Cross A (PBG7 × BS 100B), 50% BC1F1 and 76.5% BC1F2 plants from Cross B (L552 × BS 100E), and 12.05% BC2F2 and 82.81% (average) BC2F3 plants derived from Cross C (PBG7 × BS 100E) carried the cry1Ac gene. The bioassay of backcross populations for toxicity to H. armigera displayed up to 100% larval mortality. BC1F1 and BC1F2 populations derived from Cross B and BC2F3 population from Cross C segregated in the Mendelian ratio for cry1Ac confirmed inheritance of a single copy of transgene, whereas BC1F1 and BC1F2 populations obtained from Cross A and BC2F2 population from Cross C exhibited distorted segregation ratios. BC1F1 plants of Cross A and Cross B accumulated Cry1Ac protein ranging from 11.03 to 11.71 µgg−1 in leaf tissue. Cry1Ac-positive BC2F2 plants from Cross C demonstrated high recurrent parent genome recovery (91.3%) through background selection using SSR markers and phenome recovery of 90.94%, amongst these 30% plants, were homozygous for transgene. The performance of BC2F3 progenies derived from homozygous plants was similar to that of the recurrent parent for main agronomic traits, such as number of pods and seed yield per plant. These progenies are a valuable source for H. armigera resistance in chickpea breeding programs.