Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The neuroprotective role of endocannabinoids against chemical‐induced injury and other adverse effects

Considerable progress has been made, recently, in understanding the role of the endocannabinoid system in regard to neuroprotection. Endogenous cannabinoids have received increasing attention as potential protective agents in several cases of neuronal injury. The endocannabinoid system is comprised of cannabinoid receptors (CB1 and CB2), their endogenous ligands (endocannabinoids) and proteins responsible for their metabolism. Endocannabinoids serve as retrograde signalling messengers in GABAergic and glutamatergic synapses, as well as modulators of post‐synaptic transmission, interacting with other neurotransmitters, including norepinephrine and dopamine. Furthermore, endocannabinoids modulate neuronal, glial and endothelial cell function and exert neuromodulatory, anti‐excitotoxic, anti‐inflammatory and vasodilatory effects. Physiological stimuli and pathological conditions lead to differential increases in brain endocannabinoids that regulate distinct biological functions. The purpose of this review is to present the available in vivo and in vitro experimental data, up to date, regarding the endocannabinoid system and its role in neuroprotection, as well as its possible therapeutic perspectives. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Single-donor, marginal-dose islet transplantation in patients with type 1 diabetes.

CONTEXT Islet allografts from 2 to 4 donors can reverse type 1 diabetes. However, for islet transplants to become a widespread clinical reality, diabetes reversal must be achieved with a single donor to reduce risks and costs and increase the availability of transplantation. OBJECTIVE To assess the safety of a single-donor, marginal-dose islet transplant protocol using potent induction immunotherapy and less diabetogenic maintenance immunosuppression in recipients with type 1 diabetes. A secondary objective was to assess the proportion of islet transplant recipients who achieve insulin independence in the first year after single-donor islet transplantation. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Prospective, 1-year follow-up trial conducted July 2001 to August 2003 at a single US center and enrolling 8 women with type 1 diabetes accompanied by recurrent hypoglycemia unawareness or advanced secondary complications. INTERVENTIONS Study participants underwent a primary islet allotransplant with 7271 (SD, 1035) islet equivalents/kg prepared from a single cadaver donor pancreas. Induction immunosuppression was with antithymocyte globulin, daclizumab, and etanercept. Maintenance immunosuppression consisted of mycophenolate mofetil, sirolimus, and no or low-dose tacrolimus. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Safety (assessed by monitoring the severity and duration of adverse events) and efficacy (assessed by studying the recipients' insulin requirements, C-peptide levels, oral and intravenous glucose tolerance results, intravenous arginine stimulation responses, glycosylated hemoglobin levels, and hypoglycemic episodes) associated with the study transplant protocol. RESULTS There were no serious, unexpected, or procedure- or immunosuppression-related adverse events. All 8 recipients achieved insulin independence and freedom from hypoglycemia. Five remained insulin-independent for longer than 1 year. Graft failure in 3 recipients was preceded by subtherapeutic sirolimus exposure in the absence of measurable tacrolimus trough levels. CONCLUSIONS The tested transplant protocol restored insulin independence and protected against hypoglycemia after single-donor, marginal-dose islet transplantation in 8 of 8 recipients. These results may be related to improved islet engraftment secondary to peritransplant administration of antithymocyte globulin and etanercept. These findings may have implications for the ongoing transition of islet transplantation from clinical investigation to routine clinical care.
A Novel Human–Machine Collaborative Interface for Aero-Engine Pipe Routing

Despite the rapid advance of information technology (IT), a fully automated Enterprise Information System (EIS) for designing and planning of complex products and assemblies is still not available, and human interventions are required in one way or another. Therefore, one of the challenges in developing an EIS for complex multidisciplinary design is how to design human-machine interfaces and integrate experts' knowledge in decision-making. In this paper, a rule-based methodology is proposed to take into consideration experts' experience; the rules are applied based on human designers' visual perception. The strength of IT and human experts can be synthesized to find a suboptimized solution efficiently. To illustrate the performance of the developed methodology, an EIS for aero-engine pipe routing is used as a case study. Pipe routing is a typical no-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) problem; in addition, many factors, such as fluid dynamics, sequences of pipes, installation, maintenance, machinability, stability, and vibration, have to be taken into consideration simultaneously. Experts' guidance is essential to find a vital solution in the confined 3-D space. In the implementation, virtual objects have been determined to define feasible spaces for pipes based on the analysis of fluid structure interaction. A new algorithm is developed to find the possible graphs of pipes routes and improve the solutions with the help of human visual perception. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology has been verified.
Maintaining Temporal Coherency of Cooperating Dynamic Data Repositories

On-line decision making often involves significant amount of time-varying data. Examples of time-varying data include financial information such as stock prices and currency exchange rates, real-time traffic and weather information, and data from industrial process control applications. The coherency requirements associated with time-varying data depends on the nature of the data and user tolerances. This paper examines techniques to efficiently disseminate time-varying data from sources to a set of repositories. A particular focus of our work is to examine how such repositories can cooperate with one another and the source to improve the efficiency of the dissemination process, while meeting user coherency requirements. We consider two key issues: (i) When should the source and/or the repositories push changes of interest to other repositories so as to meet all user-specified coherency requirements? (ii) How should an overlay network of such repositories be organized so as to minimize the overheads of maintaining temporal coherency of all data items stored in the various repositories? We examine these questions in turn, offer a set of alternative solutions to address these questions and experimentally evaluate their performance using real-world traces of dynamically changing data (specifically, stock prices). We show that cooperation helps reduce the systemwide overheads for maintaining coherency across all repositories. However, contrary to intuition, we also show that increasing the degree of cooperation beyond a certain point can, in fact, be detrimental to the overall goals of achieving high fidelity at low overheads. To address this issue, we propose techniques to (i) derive the “optimal” degree of cooperation among repositories, and (ii) derive the logical structure of an overlay network of cooperating repositories so as to maintain temporal coherency of data at low cost.
Pattern Based GUI Testing for Mobile Applications

This paper presents a study aiming to assess the feasibility of using the Pattern Based GUI Testing approach, PBGT, to test mobile applications. PBGT is a new model based testing approach that aims to increase systematization, reusability and diminish the effort in modelling and testing. It is based on the concept of User Interface Test Patterns (UITP) that contain generic test strategies for testing common recurrent behaviour, the so-called UI Patterns, on GUIs through its possible different implementations after a configuration step. Although PBGT was developed having web applications in mind, it is possible to develop drivers for other platforms in order to test a wide set of applications. However, web and mobile applications are different and only the development of a new driver to execute test cases over mobile applications may not be enough. This paper describes a study aiming to identify the adaptations and updates the PBGT should undergo in order to test mobile applications.
The Observed Wander of the Natural Frequencies in a Structure

The Southern California Seismic Network (scsn) has recently installed seismic stations in two buildings on the Caltech campus (Millikan Library and the Broad Center). Continuous real-time accelerometer data from these structures are now freely available to the community. This dataset provides a new opportunity to observe, and better understand, the variances in the primary dynamic property of a building system, its natural frequencies. Historical data (triggered strong-motion records, ambient and forced vibration tests) from the well-studied Millikan Library show dramatic decreases in natural frequencies, attributed mainly to moderately large local earthquakes. The current forced vibration east–west fundamental frequency is 22% lower than that originally measured in 1968. Analysis of the new continuous data stream allows the examination of other previously unrecognized sources of measurable change in the fundamental frequencies, such as weather (wind, rain, and temperature), as well as nonlinear building vibrations from small local and moderate regional earthquakes. Understanding these nonlinear shifts is one of the long-term goals of real-time building instrumentation and is critical if these systems are to be used as a postearthquake damage assessment tool.
Decision Making for Autonomous Navigation

Robots can automate a wide range of physical tasks from warehouse management to space exploration. Many of these tasks require robots to navigate autonomously. Such a robot should continuously choose and execute actions from a set of available actions until it reaches the destination. The robot's decision should avoid collisions and other damaging outcomes while it ensures favorable ones, such as reduced travel distance and time. This paper reviews decision-making techniques for effective navigation. In particular, it reviews different methods to acquire information about the environment and how this information can be used for effective decision making.
Design of low-power random number generator using signal quantization error in Smart Grid

The Smart Grid, as a current progressive new field, brings new possibilities and also new challenges. This paper deals with cyber security challenges in Smart Grid area. We provide a random number generator, which might be used for cryptographic purpose in low-power parts of Smart Grid network. The presented solution use hardware events and it is an effective solution for true random number needs with keeping the low-power and low-cost attributes. We also provide a basic analysis of this solution as a prove of security and show the use in our secure framework for Smart Grid.
Exchange Rate Pass-Through to Domestic Prices: Does the Inflationary Environment Matter?

The paper tests a hypothesis suggested by Taylor (2000) that a low inflationary environment leads to a low exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices. To test this hypothesis, the paper derives a pass-through relation based on new open economy macroeconomic models. A large database that includes 1979-2000 data for 71 countries is used to estimate this relation. There is strong evidence of a positive and significant association between the pass-through and the average inflation rate across countries and periods. The inflation rate, moreover, dominates other macroeconomic variables in explaining cross-regime differences in the pass-through.
Globally distributed system developers: their trust expectations and processes

Trust remains a challenge in globally distributed development teams. In order to investigate how trust plays out in this context, we conducted a qualitative study of 5 multi-national IT organizations. We interviewed 58 individuals across 10 countries and made two principal findings. First, study participants described trust in terms of their expectations of their colleagues. These expectations fell into one of three dimensions: that socially correct behavior will persist, that team members possess technical competency, and that individuals will demonstrate concern for others. Second, our study participants described trust as a dynamic process, with phases including formation, dissolution, adjustment and restoration. We provide new insights into these dimensions and phases of trust within distributed teams which extend existing literature. Our study also provides guidelines on effective practices within distributed teams in addition to providing implications for the extension of software engineering and collaboration tools.
Risk factors for cerebral hemorrhage and cerebral infarction in a Japanese rural community.

A ten-year follow-up study of stroke among residents 40 years and older in a rural community located on Shikoku Island, Japan, was completed in 1977. The response rate for the initial examinations was 85% of 920 males and 90% of 1,012 females. Seven hundred and seventy-two males and 901 females who were initially free of stroke were followed from July 1967 through June 1977. The incidence of all strokes was 10.47 per thousand person-years for males and 6.41 per thousand person-years for females. The statistically significant risk factors for stroke were age, male sex, elevated blood pressure, ECG abnormalities, and funduscopic abnormalities. Elevated blood pressure was the strongest risk factor and mean arterial pressure was the best predictive measure. Twice as high a proportion of strokes were subclassified as cerebral hemorrhage (26%) in this study as have been reported in comparable studies in the United States (12–15%). An inverse relationship between serum cholesterol levels and cerebral hemorrhage incidence, but not cerebral infarct, was observed. High alcohol intake was a risk factor for cerebral hemorrhage but not for cerebral infarct. No relationship between stroke and weight was observed despite the relationship of stroke to blood pressure and of weight to blood pressure.
Evaluation of Cervical Mucosa in Transmission Bottleneck during Acute HIV-1 Infection Using a Cervical Tissue-Based Organ Culture

Background Although there are different strains of HIV-1 in a chronically infected individual, only one or limited virus strains are successfully transmitted to a new individual. The reason for this “transmission bottleneck” is as yet unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings A human cervical explant model was used to measure HIV-1 transmission efficiency of viral strains from chronic infections, and transmitter/founder variants. We also evaluated the genetic characteristics of HIV-1 variants in the inoculums compared to those transmitted across the cervical mucosa. Eight different HIV-1 isolates were used in this study, six chronic isolates and two transmitter/founder viruses. The transmission efficiency of the chronic and transmitter/founder virus isolates and the viral diversity of chronic isolates before and after viral transmission were assessed. The results indicate that transmitter/founder viruses did not display higher transmission efficiency than chronic HIV-1 isolates. Furthermore, no evidence for a difference in diversity was found between the inoculums and transmitted virus strains. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that the sequences of variants in the inoculums and those present in transmitted virus intermingled irrespective of co-receptor usage. In addition, the inoculum and transmitted variants had a similar pairwise distance distribution. Conclusion There was no selection of a single or limited number of viral variants during HIV-1 transmission across the cervical mucosa in the organ culture model, indicating that the cervical mucosa alone may not produce the transmission bottleneck of HIV-1 infection observed in vivo.
Graph Laplacian and dictionary learning, Lagrangian method for image denoising

Removing the noise while keeping the image features like edges, textures is a challenging problem in image denoising. Because it is an under-determined problem, defining appropriate image priors to regularize the problem plays an important role. Recently a popular one among proposed image priors is the graph Laplacian regularizer, which can exploit the local geometry structure of the image. Introducing a graph Laplacian matrix term and a dictionary learning term, in this paper we propose a new model to restore the original image. The objective consists of a data fidelity term, a graph Laplacian regularizer term and a sparse representation term. To solve this non-convex model, we propose an alternating minimization method via Lagrangian optimization. In addition, we choose the eigenvectors of the normalized graph Laplacian matrix as the initial dictionary for the sparse coding. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms BF and NLM, in terms of both objective measurements and perceptual quality.
Collectivity in the Brain Sensory Response

A question of cooperative effects in auditory brain processing on various space- and time-scales is addressed. The experimental part of our study is based on Multichannel Magnetoencephalography recordings in normal human subjects. Left, right and binaural stimulations were used, in separate runs, for each subject. The resulting time-series representing left and right auditory cortex activity provide a clear evidence for two levels of neuronal cooperation. One is the local hemispheric collective response, termed M100 for its maximum at around 100ms after a stimulus onset. Its only global characteristics turn out to be time-locked to a stimulus, however, which means that the detailed neuronal evolution is largely stochastic. This, together with the $1/f$ character of the corresponding power spectrum indicates self-organized criticality as an underlying mechanism. The second level is communication between the two hemispheres with clear laterality effects: as a rule, the contralateral hemisphere leads by $\sim$10ms. Mutual information analysis points to a direct information transport as a way of this communication.
Communication at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency

This thesis investigates what a sample of employees the Swedish County Administration Boards think of their communication with the Natural Resources Department at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. Further the study includes an investigation of how employees at the Natural Resources Department perceive their external and internal communication. The result shows that in general the external communication between the counties and the Natural Resources Department works well but there are however some problems. The main problems mentioned are that the counties sometimes receive mixed messages from different units within the department and also that the county administrators want more face-to-face meetings with employees at the department. The internal communication is also perceived as problematic by some of the informants. The main conclusion is that it is important to improve the internal communication before the problems with the mixed messages to the counties can be prevented. The internal communication can be strengthened by encouraging and improving relations between the different units.
A 0.13 μm BiCMOS 10 Gb/s Adaptive Equalizer with Improved Power Supply Noise Rejection

A 10 Gb/s continuous-time linear adaptive equalizer IC for 10 Gigabit short-reach optical interconnects using GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) 0.13 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology is described. The circuit consists of a continuous-time linear equalizer, an adaptation loop using spectrum balancing technique, an on-chip bandgap reference (BGR), and a low-dropout regulator (LDO). The adaptation loop is designed to minimize the inter-symbol interference (ISI) according to the variety of the characteristics of front-end devices. The BGR and LDO are designed and optimized to improve the power supply noise rejection (PSNR). The whole chip occupies an area of 900 μm × 850 μm and dissipates 106 mW from a 3.3 V power supply. The adaptive equalizer has a boosting factor up to 19 dB at 5 GHz and the PSNR is better than 35 dB over the frequency range up to 10 MHz.
Microquasars: disk–jet coupling in stellar-mass black holes

Abstract Microquasars provide new insights into: 1) the physics of relativistic jets from black holes, 2) the connection between accretion and ejection, and 3) the physical mechanisms in the formation of stellar-mass black holes. Furthermore, the studies of microquasars in our Galaxy can provide in the future new insights on: 1) a large fraction of the ultraluminous X-ray sources in nearby galaxies, 2) gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) of long duration in distant galaxies, and 3) the physics in the jets of blazars. If jets in GRBs, microquasars and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are due to a unique universal magnetohydrodynamic mechanism, synergy of the research on these three different classes of cosmic objects will lead to further progress in black hole physics and astrophysics.
Journal of Emerging Trends in Computing and Information Sciences Video Synthesis System for Monitoring Closed Sections

This study is aimed at developing view synthesis system for closed sections such as Tunnel, Bridge etc. to monitor and track the vehicle movement. For this purpose, video storage and synthesis systems were developed and demonstrated, making use of the video taken and stored in 4 web cameras. Consequently original technology has been secured but for commercialization, application to the sites with system supplementation is more than important. What noteworthy is, this system is highly evaluated by the potential users including the monitoring managers of regional construction and management administration.
Studying The Evolution Of The Inter-Organizational Information Infrastructure (LOII) In Finnish Health Care From A Practice Theoretical Perspective

Finland has been chosen to study the evolution of the inter-organizational information infrastructure (IOII) in health care due to its advanced national and regional initiatives since the late 1960ies. Based on data collected in 2010 and 2012, we reconstruct the evolution of the IOII in respect to prescribing and dispensing medicines in Finland. Our aim is to understand how such a complex infrastructure is created and co-created by several interrelated stakeholders with different work practices and practical logics. By adopting a socio-technical and practice-based approach and on the basis of the concept of boundary objects, the spatio-temporal transmission of practical logics and the consequences for the respective local practices are studied. Preliminary results indicate that 1) local stakeholders co-design national programs through the support of inter-organizational actors resulting in the blurring of design boundaries, 2) some inter-organizational mediators tend to neglect the interprofessional perspective which, however, is necessary for successfully co-designing an IOII, 3) the actively designed IOII offers opportunities for undesigned, emerging uses in other areas , and 4) the social embedding influences the perception of opportunities and constraints considerably resulting in slightly changing local practices of the same professional purpose.