Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of Excipient Type and Level on Drug Release from Controlled Release Tablets Containing HPMC

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of excipient type and level on the release of alprazolam formulated in controlled release matrix tablets containing hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC). Each tablet formulation contained alprazolam, HPMC (Methocel K4MP), excipients, and magnesium stearate. The soluble excipients investigated were lactose monohydrate, sucrose, and dextrose, and the insoluble excipients included dicalcium phosphate dihydrate, dicalcium phosphate anhydrous, and calcium sulfate dihydrate. The similarity factor (f2 factor) was used to compare the dissolution profile of each formulation. The insoluble excipients, especially dicalcium phosphate dihydrate, caused the drug to be released at a slower rate and to a lesser extent than the soluble excipients. Soluble excipients created a more permeable hydrated gel layer for drug release, increased the porosity resulting in faster diffusion of drug, and increased the rate of tablet erosion. Use of binary mixtures of lactose monohydrate and dicalcium phosphate dihydrate produced release profiles of intermediate duration. Rapid drug dissolution was obtained when only 9.1% w/w of lactose monohydrate was present in the tablet formulation. Only when the dicalcium phosphate dihydrate level was sufficiently high (36.5% w/w) was the release rate and extent decreased. It was demonstrated that the type and level of excipient influenced the rate and extent of drug release from controlled release tablets containing HPMC. The release mechanism of alprazolam from each tablet formulation was described by either the Hixson–Crowell cube root kinetics equation or Peppas's equation. However, the different excipient types investigated did not influence the release mechanism of alprazolam from the final tablets.
An autonomous multi-robot system for stigmergy-based construction

Original version in English An autonomous construction system (ACS) is envisioned to be a solution to the construction of structures in environments that are too hazardous for humans and where remote operation is not possible. Drawing inspiration from the construction behavior of social insects, we advance the state of the art by proposing a completely decentralized control strategy for a multi-robot ACS. This control strategy is based on previous work by Theraulaz and Bonabeau, who demonstrated multi-agent construction using a three-dimensional lattice-based simulation. In order to study the proposed decentralized control strategy, we set about designing a multi-robot ACS that consists of two components, a building material and autonomous robots. In our multi-robot ACS, an autonomous robot is capable of locating the building material in its environment, picking it up, transporting it, and attaching it to a structure. The multi-robot ACS is designed to be completely autonomous and capable of constructing three-dimensional structures. To test and evaluate our multi-robot ACS and its decentralized control strategy, we provide two implementations of our system. The primary implementation is realized using hardware and the secondary implementation is realized using simulation. Through the use of both implementations, we demonstrate how our decentralized control strategy can be used to coordinate the autonomous construction of three-dimensional structures. After discussing these demonstrations, we conclude this thesis by suggesting future research directions. Übersetzung ins Deutsche Ein autonomes Bausystem ist eine Lösung für den Bau von Strukturen in Umgebungen, die für Menschen zu gefährlich ist und wo auch das Fernbedienen nicht möglich ist. Inspiriert durch das Bauverhalten von sozialen Insekten, treiben wir den Stand der Technik voran und schlagen eine vollständig dezentralisierte Steuerungsstrategie für ein Multi-Roboter-Bausystem vor. Diese Vorgehensweise basiert auf der bisherigen Arbeit von Theraulaz und Bonabeau, die eine dreidimensionale Gitter-basierte Simulation verwendet haben um Bauverfahren mit einem Multiagentensystem zu demonstrieren. Um die vorgeschlagene dezentralisierte Steuerungsstrategie zu untersuchen, wurde ein Multi-Roboter-Bausystem entwickelt. Dieses Bausystem besteht aus zwei Kompo-
Power spectral density bounds

The determination of a power density spectrum from a finite set of correlation samples is an ill-posed problem. Furthermore. it is not possible even to bound the values that consistent power density spectra can take on at a particular point. A more reasonable problem is to try to determine the total spectral power in some frequency interval. Although this power cannot be determined exactly, upper and lower bounds on its possible values can be determined. This observation leads to a unified treatment of certain classical and modern spectral estimation techniques and to new interpretations for two data adaptive spectral estimators. maximum likelihood method (MLM) and data adaptive spectral estimator (DASE). According to these new interpretations. MLM and DASE provide upper bounds on spectral power in a specified frequency region subject to the assumption that the spectral density is constant in that region. These methods make no use of an extendibility constraint that can be used to obtain tight upper bounds, as well as nontrivial lower bounds on power. Cybenko has studied a related problem of bounding windowed power, for an arbitrary window, with no assumptions about the form of the spectral density. A new type of classical resolution limit for these bounds is derived and a numerical example is presented.
Vagal modulation of epicardial coronary artery size in dogs. A two-dimensional intravascular ultrasound study.

BACKGROUND Because the role of tonic vagus nerve activity in regulating conduit coronary artery size remains undefined, we investigated the response of epicardial coronary artery size to changes in resting vagal tone resulting from vagotomy and muscarinic receptor blockade. METHODS AND RESULTS Using intravascular ultrasound to measure left circumflex coronary artery cross-sectional area continuously, we examined the effects of vagotomy on left circumflex cross-sectional area in nine dogs. Lumen area decreased 20% from 8.70 +/- 2.81 to 6.92 +/- 1.97 mm2 after right vagotomy, 17% to 7.19 +/- 2.80 mm2 after left vagotomy (both P < .05 versus baseline), and 38% to 5.42 +/- 2.00 mm2 after bilateral vagotomy (P < .05 versus unilateral vagotomy). Vasoconstriction occurred despite increases in heart rate and an unchanged rate-pressure product. In six additional dogs, after acetylcholine (100 micrograms/kg i.v.), lumen area increased by 18%, although heart rate, blood pressure, and rate-pressure product were unchanged. Vasodilation was prevented by prior muscarinic blockade with glycopyrrolate. With glycopyrrolate administration and heart rate control by pacing, lumen area decreased by 26% (P = .011). When stellate stimulation was performed in a third group of eight dogs with heart rate, blood pressure, and rate-pressure product controlled by a combination of pacing and exsanguination, there was no change in coronary area, thus precluding reflex sympathetic activation as a contributor to the vasoconstriction produced by vagal withdrawal. CONCLUSIONS Vagus nerve activity maintains tonic dilation of the left circumflex coronary artery by muscarinic receptor activation. Each vagus nerve contributes approximately equally to the tonically dilated state. Vagotomy-induced vasoconstriction occurs independently of local metabolic factors and coronary distending pressure and is a result of cholinergic withdrawal rather than reflex sympathetic activation.
Spatial and temporal patterns of water flow generated by suction-feeding bluegill sunfish Lepomis macrochirus resolved by Particle Image Velocimetry

SUMMARY The suction-feeding fish generates a flow field external to its head in order to draw prey into the mouth. To date there are very few empirical measurements that characterize the fluid mechanics of suction feeding, particularly the temporal and spatial patterns of water velocity in front of the fish. To characterize the flow in front of suction-feeding bluegill sunfish Lepomis macrochirus, measurements with high spatial (<1 mm) and temporal (500 Hz) resolution were taken using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). In an analysis separate from the PIV, high-speed video sequences were used for a novel method of visually tracking every seed particle for the duration of each feeding in order to determine directly the total parcel of water that the fish ingests. PIV measurements and particle tracking show that water is drawn from all around the mouth. Fluid velocity decreases rapidly with distance from the mouth and is only significant (>5% of speed at the mouth) within roughly 1 mouth diameter of the fish. Suction feeders gain little in terms of extending this flow field by even substantial increases in the fluid speed at the mouth opening. Instead, the chief advantage of increased flow speed at the mouth may be the increased magnitude of generated forces within the space very close to the mouth. After scaling of the velocity field based on size of the mouth opening and the measured fluid speed at a fixed position, the measured velocity profiles for all feedings are very similar to one another, so that a functional relationship for the magnitude of fluid speed as a function of distance from the predator mouth is presented and shown to be accurate over the range of kinematic variables tested. This relationship describes the velocity field both along the centerline of the fish and along transects lying at an angle to the centerline within both the mid-sagittal and frontal planes. Comparison of the time-resolved fluid velocity measurements to gape kinematics demonstrate that peak fluid speed occurs simultaneously with 95% of peak gape, showing that the bluegill maximizes nearly simultaneously both the generated forces and size of the region over which these forces act. The magnitude of peak fluid speed during each strike decreases as a function of increasing time to peak gape (r2=0.87), demonstrating a strong relationship between the rate of buccal cavity expansion and maximum generated flow speed.
Clinical Applicability of Transient Elastography for Estimating Liver Stiffness in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Background: Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a risk factor for the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which can lead to liver fibrosis and ultimately to cirrhosis. Transient elastography (TE), by using the FibroScan, and is a non-invasive ultrasonography method to measure liver elasticity. TE has been related with the degree of liver fibrosis. Objective: To investigate the applicability of TE in daily clinical practice among T2DM patients. Method: In a non-academic teaching hospital, T2DM patients without a history of liver disease the degree of liver stiffness was measured using TE. Successful measurements were defined as 10 validated measurements per patient and an interquartile range (IQR) to median ratio of ≤30%. Results: In 90 of 126 patients (71%) valid measurements were be obtained. Among the patients with invalid measurements, 33 had < 10 valid measurements and 3 had a IQR to median ratio of <30%. The percentage of invalid measurements was 12% in patients with a BMI <30 kg/m2 and 39% in patients with a BMI ≥30 kg/m2. Among the 90 patients with valid liver stiffness measurements, the median liver stiffness was 6.7 [4.6-8.5] kPa with a IQR of measurements of 1.1 [0.6-1.8] kPa and IQR to median ratio of 17 (13-23)%. Conclusion: The success rate of TE measurements using the FibroScan in patients with T2DM was 71%, with a lower success rate in patients with a BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2. This diagnostic modality needs further investigation being introduced as a marker of fibrosis in daily diabetes practice.
Active Preference-Based Learning of Reward Functions

—Our goal is to efﬁciently learn reward functions encoding a human’s preferences for how a dynamical system should act. There are two challenges with this. First, in many problems it is difﬁcult for people to provide demonstrations of the desired system trajectory (like a high-DOF robot arm motion or an aggressive driving maneuver), or to even assign how much numerical reward an action or trajectory should get. We build on work in label ranking and propose to learn from preferences (or comparisons) instead: the person provides the system a relative preference between two trajectories. Second, the learned reward function strongly depends on what environments and trajectories were experienced during the training phase. We thus take an active learning approach, in which the system decides on what preference queries to make. A novel aspect of our work is the complexity and continuous nature of the queries: continuous trajectories of a dynamical system in environments with other moving agents (humans or robots). We contribute a method for actively synthesizing queries that satisfy the dynamics of the system. Further, we learn the reward function from a continuous hypothesis space by maximizing the volume removed from the hypothesis space by each query. We assign weights to the hypothesis space in the form of a log-concave distribution and provide a bound on the number of iterations required to converge. We show that our algorithm converges faster to the desired reward compared to approaches that are not active or that do not synthesize queries in an autonomous driving domain. We then run a user study to put our method to the test with real people.
Longitudinal Changes in the Physical Activity Patterns of Police Officers

The main objective of this study is to compare the frequency of physical activity and the use of training goals and training programmes among 139 police students at the end of their police studies and after three years' work as police officers. The priority level of different forms of training is also compared among the same police officers during the same period. Participants answered two surveys about their activity level and the priority level of different forms of training. The results show that their physical activity levels and the use of training programmes and training goals dropped after three years' work as police officers. During this period, the priority level increased for endurance, power and sprint training, but decreased for maximum strength training and bodybuilding. It is suggested that police chiefs in police districts make it easier for officers to engage in physical activity during work hours, according to the instructions of the National Police Directorate. Conducting mandatory physical fitness testing annually at police stations may also increase officers' motivation to engage in physical training. A longitudinal study on the priority of physical training is needed to determine whether this negative trend continues. Future studies should also investigate the ways in which to increase physical activity among police officers.
Krylov-subspace recycling via the POD-augmented conjugate-gradient algorithm

This work presents a new Krylov-subspace-recycling method for efficiently solving sequences of linear systems of equations characterized by a non-invariant symmetric-positive-definite matrix. As opposed to typical truncation strategies used in recycling such as deflation, we propose a truncation method inspired by goal-oriented proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) from model reduction. This idea is based on the observation that model reduction aims to compute a low-dimensional subspace that contains an accurate solution; as such, we expect the proposed method to generate a low-dimensional subspace that is well suited for computing inexact solutions. In particular, we propose specific goal-oriented POD ‘ingredients’ that align the optimality properties of POD with the objective of Krylov-subspace recycling. To compute solutions in the resulting ‘augmented’ POD subspace, we propose a hybrid direct/iterative three-stage iterative method that leverages (1) the optimal ordering of POD basis vectors, and (2) well-conditioned reduced matrices. Numerical experiments performed on real-world solid-mechanics problems highlight the benefits of the proposed method over standard approaches for Krylov-subspace recycling.
Irinotecan pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics and UGT1A genetic polymorphisms in Japanese: roles of UGT1A1*6 and *28

Objectives SN-38, an active metabolite of irinotecan, is detoxified by glucuronidation with UGT1A isoforms, 1A1, 1A7, 1A9, and 1A10. The pharmacogenetic information on UGT1A haplotypes covering all these isoforms is important for the individualized therapy of irinotecan. Associations between UGT1A haplotypes and pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics of irinotecan were investigated to identify pharmacogenetic markers. Methods Associations between UGT1A haplotypes and the area under concentration curve ratio (SN-38 glucuronide/SN-38) or toxicities were analyzed in 177 Japanese cancer patients treated with irinotecan as a single agent or in combination chemotherapy. For association analysis, diplotypes of UGT1A gene segments [(1A1, 1A7, 1A9, 1A10), and Block C (common exons 2–5)] and combinatorial haplotypes (1A9-1A7-1A1) were used. The relationship between diplotypes and toxicities was investigated in 55 patients treated with irinotecan as a single agent. Results Among diplotypes of UGT1A genes, patients with the haplotypes harboring UGT1A1*6 or *28 had significantly reduced area under concentration curve ratios, with the effects of UGT1A1*6 or *28 being of a similar scale. A gene dose effect on the area under concentration curve ratio was observed for the number of haplotypes containing *28 or *6 (5.55, 3.62, and 2.07 for 0, 1, and 2 haplotypes, respectively, P<0.0001). In multivariate analysis, the homozygotes and double heterozygotes of *6 and *28 (*6/*6, *28/*28 and *6/*28) were significantly associated with severe neutropenia in 53 patients who received irinotecan monotherapy. Conclusions The haplotypes significantly associated with reduced area under concentration curve ratios and neutropenia contained UGT1A1*6 or *28, and both of them should be genotyped before irinotecan is given to Japanese and probably other Asian patients.
Lysinibacillus alkalisoli sp. nov., isolated from saline-alkaline soil.

A Gram-stain-positive, aerobic bacterial strain, designated Y2A20T, with peritrichous flagella was isolated from the top layer saline-alkaline soil, Hangjin Banner, Inner Mongolia, northern China. Phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed that strain Y2A20T formed a stable clade with 'Lysinibacillus jejuensis' N2-5T. Strain Y2A20T shared highest 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity with 'L. jejuensis' N2-5T (97.4 %), but lower 16S rRNA gene sequence similarities with all other type strains (<97.0 %). The major polar lipids of strain Y2A20T were diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidyethanolamine, two unknown aminophospholipids and three unknown phospholipids. Menaquinone-7 was the predominant menaquinone, while iso-C15 : 0, iso-C16 : 0 and iso-C17 : 0 were the major cellular fatty acids. Its genomic DNA G+C content was 39.0 mol%. DNA-DNA hybridization revealed that strain Y2A20T showed 26±5 % genomic DNA relatedness with its closest relative, 'L. jejuensis' N2-5T. The results of physiological and biochemical tests allowed the discrimination of strain Y2A20T from its phylogenetic relatives. Lysinibacillus alkalisoli sp. nov. is therefore proposed with Y2A20T (=CGMCC 1.15760T=KCTC 33825T) as the type strain.
Energetic consequences of being a Homo erectus female

Body size is one of the most important characteristics of any animal because it affects a range of behavioral, ecological, and physiological traits including energy requirements, choice of food, reproductive strategies, predation risk, range size, and locomotor style. This article focuses on the implications of being large bodied for Homo erectus females, estimated to have been over 50% heavier than average australopithecine females. The energy requirements of these hominins are modeled using data on activity patterns, body mass, and life history from living primates. Particular attention is given to the inferred energetic costs of reproduction for Homo erectus females based on chimpanzee and human reproductive scheduling. Daily energy requirements during gestation and lactation would have been significantly higher for Homo erectus females, as would total energetic cost per offspring if the australopithecines and Homo erectus had similar reproductive schedules (gestation and lactation lengths and interbirth intervals). Shortening the interbirth interval could considerably reduce the costs per offspring to Homo erectus and have the added advantage of increasing reproductive output. The mother would, however, incur additional daily costs of caring for the dependent offspring. If Homo erectus females adopted this reproductive strategy, it would necessarily imply a revolution in the way in which females obtained and utilized energy to support their increased energetic requirements. This transformation is likely to have occurred on several levels involving cooperative economic division of labor, locomotor energetics, menopause, organ size, and other physiological mechanisms for reducing the energetic load on females. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 14:551–565, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Calibración de una prueba de química por el modelo de Rasch

The Rasch model was used to calibrate a general chemistry test for the purpose of analyzing the advantages and information the model provides. The sample was composed of 219 college freshmen. Of the 12 questions used, good fit was achieved in 10. The evaluation shows that although there are items of variable difficulty, there are gaps on the scale; in order to make the test complete, it will be necessary to design new items to fill in these gaps.
Selecting Tools for Renewable Energy Analysis in Developing Countries: An Expanded Review

Renewable energy planners in developing countries should be cautious in using analytical tools formulated in developed countries. Traditional energy consumption, economic and demography transitions, high-income inequality, and informal economy are some characteristics of developing countries that may contradict the assumptions of mainstream, widely used analytical tools. In this study, we synthesize the debate in previous review studies on energy models for developing countries and then extend the scope of the previous studies by highlighting emerging methods of system thinking, life cycle thinking, and decision support analysis. We then discuss how these tools have been used for renewable energy analysis in developing countries and found out that not all studies are aware of the emerging critical issues in developing countries. We offer here a guidance to select the most appropriate analytical tool, mainly when dealing with energy modeling and analysis for developing countries. We also suggest potential future improvements to the analytical tool for renewable energy modeling and analysis in the developing countries.
In Search of Autocorrelation Based Vocal Cord Cues for Speaker Identification

In this paper we investigate a technique to find out vocal source based features from the LP residual of speech signal for automatic speaker identification. Autocorrelation with some specific lag is computed for the residual signal to derive these features. Compared to traditional features like MFCC, PLPCC which represent vocal tract information, these features represent complementary vocal cord information. Our experiment in fusing these two sources of information in representing speaker characteristics yield better speaker identification accuracy. We have used Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based speaker modeling and results are shown on two public databases to validate our proposition.