Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vision-based nighttime vehicle detection and range estimation for driver assistance

This paper presents a real-time vision system for assisting driver during nighttime driving. The proposed system provides the following features: 1) effectively detection and tracking of oncoming and preceding vehicles based on image segmentation and pattern analysis techniques. 2) Robust and adaptive vehicle detection under various illuminated conditions at nighttime urban environments benefited by a novel automatic object segmentation scheme. 3) Providing beneficial information for assisting the driver to perceive surrounding traffic conditions outside the car during nighttime driving. 4) Providing a versatile control strategy for in-vehicle facilities of the autonomous vehicles. 5) Offering real-time traffic event-driven video surveillance machinery for recording evidences of possible traffic accidents. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system on nighttime driver assistance issues.
The Lytic Phase of Epstein-Barr Virus Requires a Viral Genome with 5-Methylcytosine Residues in CpG Sites

ABSTRACT Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a human herpesvirus which has been studied intensively for its role in certain human tumors. It also serves as a model of herpesviral latency because it establishes an immediate, latent infection in human B cells. When EBV infects quiescent, primary B cells it induces their continuous proliferation to yield growth-transformed B-cell lines in vitro. The lytic or productive phase of EBV's life cycle is induced by the expression of the viral BZLF1 gene in latently infected cells. The BZLF1 protein is a transactivator, which selectively binds to two classes of distinct DNA sequence motifs. One class is similar to the motifs that are bound by members of the AP-1 transcription factor family to which BZLF1 belongs. The second class, which contains CpG motifs, is predominant in viral promoters of early lytic genes and is BZLF1's preferred or exclusive target sequence when methylated. The BZLF1 gene is transiently expressed in newly infected B cells but fails to induce EBV's lytic cycle, potentially because the virion DNA is unmethylated. Here we report that the lack of 5-methylcytosine residues in CpG sites of virion DNA prevents the expression of essential lytic genes indispensable for viral DNA amplification during productive infection. This finding indicates that BZLF1 transactivates these promoters in a methylation-dependent fashion and explains how progeny virus synthesis is abrogated in newly infected B cells. Our data also reveal that viral lytic DNA synthesis precludes CpG methylation of virion DNA during EBV's lytic, productive cycle, which can be overcome by the ectopic expression of a prokaryotic cytosine methyltransferase to yield CpG-methylated virion DNA. Upon infection of B cells, randomly CpG-methylated virion DNA induces high expression of essential lytic genes in contrast to virion DNA free of 5-methylcytosine residues. Our data suggest that unmethylated virion DNA is part of EBV's strategy to prevent the viral lytic phase in newly infected B cells, allowing it to establish its characteristic latent infection in them.
Cystoid macular edema in aphakia and pseudophakia after use of prostaglandin analogs

Prostaglandin analogs are powerful ocular hypotensive agents that may also be associated with a breakdown of the blood-retinal barrier and cystoid macular edema. The association is evident in pseudophakic or aphakic patients. This paper presents a case of unilateral latanoprost-associated clinical cystoid macular edema in a bilaterally pseudophakic patient; the only difference between the two eyes was the presence of a capsulotomy in the affected eye. We review the literature concerning prostaglandin analog-associated cystoid macular edema, as well as the evidence for prostaglandin analog-associated breakdown of the bloodretinal barrier. Although some evidence is suggestive of a connection between prostaglandin analogs and cystoid macular edema, many questions concerning the complex physiology of prostanoids remain. Until our understanding of these issues is more advanced, judicious use of prostaglandin analogs in patients at risk for cystoid macular edema would be prudent.
Factors Determining Nurse Acceptance of Hospital Information Systems

This study proposed an evaluation model, derived from the Technology Acceptance Model and Information System Success Model, to explore factors influencing the acceptance of hospital information systems by nurses. Although many healthcare institutions have applied hospital information systems, relatively few studies have investigated the perceptions of nurses regarding the usefulness, ease of use, or acceptance of these systems. This study recruited the nursing staff of a regional hospital in Taiwan. A total of 297 questionnaires were sent, and 277 were returned, for a response rate of 93.3%. The results indicated that system quality, information quality, and service quality were positively correlated with the perceived ease of use (R2= 0.69) and perceived usefulness (R2 = 0.72). Information quality has the greatest influence on perceived usefulness (&ggr;3 = 0.57, P < .001) and ease of use (&ggr;4 = 0.61, P < .001). Perceived usefulness and ease of use have a significant influence on system acceptance (R2 = 0.75). Perceived usefulness (&bgr;1 = 0.61, P < .001) has a significant influence on system acceptance. These findings indicated that nursing care requires high-quality healthcare information tosupport the daily activities of nursing professionals. The results of this study also provide a valuable reference for hospital administrators in developing hospital information systems.
Index Futures Trading and Spot Market Volatility Evidence from an Emerging Market

Studies on the impact of futures introduction on the volatility of the underlying index report no increase in the spot volatility after the futures introduction. However, the prior studies do not comment on how exactly the information transmits from the futures market to the spot market. This paper focuses on investigating whether the change in the structure of spot volatility evolution process is due to the futures trading activity. The relation between the Futures trading activity (measured through trading volume and open interest) and spot index volatility is documented, following Bessembinder and Seguin (1992), by partitioning trading activity into expected and shock components by an appropriate ARMA model. The series are then appended in the variance equation through an appropriate ARMA-GARCH model, following Gulen and Mayhew (2000). Further, the study examines the effect of the Sept. 11th terrorist attack has had on the Nifty spot-futures relation. The study concludes that post the Sept. 11th attack, the relation between Futures Trading Activity and Spot volatility has strengthened, implying that the market has become more efficient in assimilating the information into its prices. This is evident in both volume and open interest (expected and activity shock) being significant post Sept. 11 while not being significant pre Sept. 11.
Intergovernmental Grants and Public Expenditures: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Abstract The relationship between intergovernmental grants and public expenditures is one of the most studied phenomena in the local public finance literature. However, little is known about whether the impact of unconditional grants is fundamentally different from that of other sources of municipal revenue. We study this question by means of a large-scale randomised survey experiment among Danish local politicians, which allows for a comparison of the impact of changes in various sources of municipal revenue. Our findings challenge the conventional conception in the public finance literature that money works differently depending on which sector they are generated in. Instead, ideology plays an important role in explaining how local politicians want to allocate resources when faced with changes in local government revenue.
[Expression of multiple drug resistance-associated proteins in non-small cell lung cancer tissues and its clinical significance].

BACKGROUND Multiple drug resistance is one of the important reasons that patients failed to chemotherapy and died of tumors. The aim of this study is to investigate the expression of resistance-related proteins, P-glycoprotein (P-gp), multidrug resistance-associated protein (MRP), lung resistance-related protein (LRP), topoisomerase II (Topo II) and glutathion-S-transferase-π (GST-π) in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tissues and their clinical significance. METHODS Expression of P-gp, MRP, LRP, Topo II and GST-π was measured in 98 NSCLC tissues by immunohistochemistry SP method. RESULTS The positive rate of P-gp, MRP, LRP, Topo II and GST-π was 27.6%, 11.2%, 75.5%, 50.0% and 64.3% respectively. Significant relationship was observed between expression of LRP and TopoII and histological classification. No remarkable difference in expression of multiple drug resistance-related proteins was found among different TNM stages. A total of 47 patients with NSCLC were treated with chemotherapy. There was significant relationship between expression of P-gp, LRP and GST-π and chemotherapy response (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS NSCLC has overexpression of multiple drug resistance-related proteins. Combined detection of these proteins may be useful to guide chemotherapy and predict the response for lung cancer.
MCSS-based Docking and Improved Scoring of Protein-Nucleotide Complexes: I. A step forward to the Fragment-Based Design of Oligonucleotides

Computational fragment-based approaches have been widely used in drug design and drug discovery. One of the limitations for their application is the lack of performance of the scoring functions. With the emergence of new fragment-based approaches for single-stranded RNA ligands, we propose an analysis of the docking power of an MCSS-based approach evaluated on nucleotide binding sites. Combined with a clustering of MCSS-generated poses and some state-of-the-art scoring functions, the results suggest that it could be used in the design of oligonucleotides.
Dynamic changes in chromatin conformation at the TNF transcription start site in T helper lymphocyte subsets

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) is one of the key primary response genes in the immune system that can be activated by a variety of stimuli. Previous analysis of chromatin accessibility to DNaseI demonstrated open chromatin conformation of the TNF proximal promoter in T cells. Here, using chromatin probing with restriction enzyme EcoNI and micrococcal nuclease we show that in contrast to the proximal promoter, the TNF transcription start site remains in a closed chromatin configuration in primary T helper (Th) cells, but acquires an open state after activation or polarization under Th1 and Th17 conditions. We further demonstrate that transcription factor c‐Jun plays a pivotal role in the maintenance of open chromatin conformation at the transcription start site of the TNF gene.
The Elevator Effect

This article examines the extent to which advertising outside of an explicit campaign environment has the potential to benefit the electoral fortunes of incumbent politicians. We make use of a novel case of non-campaign advertising, that of North Carolina Secretary of Labor Cherie Berry (R-NC), who has initiated the practice of having her picture and name displayed prominently on official inspection placards inside all North Carolina elevators. We extend Mayhew’s theory of advertising to a non-campaign environment and then theorize that Berry serves as a novel case of non-campaign-specific advertising via a priming mechanism. We then test our theory using spatial regression methods and find that Berry outperformed other statewide Republican candidates in the 2012 North Carolina elections. Our findings suggest that candidates can use this form of advertising to indirectly improve their electoral fortunes.
Geriatric Co‐Management of Proximal Femur Fractures: Total Quality Management and Protocol‐Driven Care Result in Better Outcomes for a Frail Patient Population

Hip fractures in older adults are a common event, leading to substantial morbidity and mortality. Hip fractures have been previously described as a “geriatric, rather than orthopedic disease. ” Patients with this condition have a high prevalence of comorbidity and a high risk of complications from surgery, and for this reason, geriatricians may be well suited to improve outcomes of care. Co‐management of hip fracture patients by orthopedic surgeons and geriatricians has led to better outcomes in other countries but has rarely been described in the United States. This article describes a co‐managed Geriatric Fracture Center program that has resulted in lower‐than‐predicted length of stay and readmission rates, with short time to surgery, low complication rates, and low mortality. This program is based on the principles of early evaluation of patients, ongoing co‐management, protocol‐driven geriatric‐focused care, and early discharge planning. This is a potentially replicable model of care that uses the expertise of geriatricians to optimize the management of a common and serious condition.
Triangular Ring Antennas for Dual-Frequency Dual-Polarization or Circular-Polarization Operations

In this letter, triangular ring (TRG) antennas are proposed for dual-frequency dual-polarization (DFDP) and circular-polarization (CP) operations. By simultaneously exciting the two orthogonal modes of the TRG, the DFDP or CP performance is achieved. By varying the vertex angle of the TRG, the frequency ratio (FR) of the two orthogonal modes could be continuously tunable for the DFDP operation. By moving the FR close to 1, a CP antenna element is developed for the sequential-rotation array. Due to the geometry advantage of the TRG, the array could be designed to have a low sidelobe level (SLL). Measured results show that an overlapped bandwidth (of return loss, axial ratio, and gain) of 10% and an SLL of below -20 dB are achieved. The fabricated 120 ° TRG (for the DFDP operation) and the 75 ° TRG (for the CP operation) are 28.2% and 65.5% the size of the conventional equilateral triangular patch antenna, respectively.
Intraoperative Ketamine Reduces Perioperative Opiate Consumption in Opiate-dependent Patients with Chronic Back Pain Undergoing Back Surgery

Background:Ketamine is an N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor antagonist that has been shown to be useful in the reduction of acute postoperative pain and analgesic consumption in a variety of surgical interventions with variable routes of administration. Little is known regarding its efficacy in opiate-dependent patients with a history of chronic pain. We hypothesized that ketamine would reduce postoperative opiate consumption in this patient population. Methods:This was a randomized, prospective, double-blinded, and placebo-controlled trial involving opiate-dependent patients undergoing major lumbar spine surgery. Fifty-two patients in the treatment group were administered 0.5 mg/kg intravenous ketamine on induction of anesthesia, and a continuous infusion at 10 &mgr;g kg−1min−1 was begun on induction and terminated at wound closure. Fifty patients in the placebo group received saline of equivalent volume. Patients were observed for 48 h postoperatively and followed up at 6 weeks. The primary outcome was 48-h morphine consumption. Results:Total morphine consumption (morphine equivalents) was significantly reduced in the treatment group 48 h after the procedure. It was also reduced at 24 h and at 6 weeks. The average reported pain intensity was significantly reduced in the postanesthesia care unit and at 6 weeks. The groups had no differences in known ketamine- or opiate-related side effects. Conclusions:Intraoperative ketamine reduces opiate consumption in the 48-h postoperative period in opiate-dependent patients with chronic pain. Ketamine may also reduce opioid consumption and pain intensity throughout the postoperative period in this patient population. This benefit is without an increase in side effects.
A parallel implementation of current-reinforced random walks

Reinforced random walks occur in many complex systems, in particular biological systems such as construction of blood vessels or neural networks and trail-laying ants can at some level be described by reinforced random walks. One particular type of reinforced random walk, the current-reinforced random walk, is implemented in C++ with the library OpenMP for parallelism. Results of simulating current-reinforced systems show that both the characteristics of the constructed network and the execution time needed until a solution is found strongly depend on the path maintenance parameter, μ, as well as on the number of sources versus the number of sinks and their placement. If in the linear state, i.e. μ = 1, the network will consist of the shortest paths from each source to each sink and it takes a long time to construct a stable network. If in the non-linear state, i.e. μ > 1, there is instead a preference to share paths rather than taking the shortest path and the time needed to find a solution is much smaller. Results also show that if the value of μ is large enough the simulation breaks down and the solution found does not represent any meaningful network. The model is also tested on a graph over the street network of the Uppsala, Sweden, where source are placed in the residential areas and sinks are placed in the city center. This can be seen as a simulation of traffic flow during rush hours and used to understand how to deal with traffic congestion. In order to improve the performance of the implementation, the nodes are ordered with the graph partitioning software METIS. Measurements of fixed-size speedup and scaled speedup show that the parallel implementation significantly increases the overall performance.
Genome-wide association studies in asthma: what they really told us about pathogenesis

Purpose of reviewOver the past years, several consortia have provided a data deluge from large-scale, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) for numerous asthma and allergy related traits. Dozens of reviews have already summarized the main results, although a coherent picture is still missing, referred to as ‘missing’ or ‘unexplained’ heritability. Recent findingsWe identify the factors responsible for the unexplained heritability including imprecise phenotyping, biased single-nucleotide polymorphism selection (preferentially gene-based and high allele frequency with poor linkage disequilibrium tagging capacity), heterogeneity and insufficient significance ranking test statistics. In spite of these problems, three major outcomes can already be identified. First, rare variants give the highest risk estimates but are limited to small subgroups indicating a complex origin of asthma that may involve hundreds of variants that are either population, family or individual specific. Second, only a few common variants are shared amongst all asthmatics where the IL33/ST2 pathway turns out to be the most relevant factor. Third, transcription factor binding sites are enriched amongst the top association results pointing towards disturbed regulatory network function in asthma. SummaryThe next wave of asthma genetic studies will use full-genome sequencing and overcome most GWAS-associated problems. It will be the last step of a century-long search for asthma genes, satisfying scientific curiosity and, hopefully, also providing data applicable in translational medicine.
Analysis of Sciellin (SCEL) as a candidate gene in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate whether a candidate gene, Sciellin (SCEL), mapping to the chromosome 13q21-q31 is mutated in esophageal cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS The coding region and intron-exon junctions of SCEL were sequenced in 13 esophageal squamous cell cancers and matching normal esophageal samples to detect mutations. RESULTS Three single nucleotide polymorphisms were detected in SCEL of which two were silent mutations (L640L and H654H) and one missense mutation (R366K). CONCLUSION Single nucleotide polymorphisms were detected in both matching tumor and normal esophageal tissues but no disease-associated mutations suggesting that SCEL is not a major factor in esophageal squamous cell carcinogenesis.
Prediction of coronary atherosclerotic disease with liver transaminase level

Background/Aims: Recent studies have shown that liver transaminases are associated with components of the metabolic syndrome including central obesity, type 2 diabetes, dyslipidaemia and high blood pressure, but their direct influence on coronary atherosclerosis has not been investigated before. We conducted this study to evaluate the predictive value of liver transaminases for angiography‐documented coronary atherosclerosis in patients with coronary heart disease.
Use of a caudoventral-craniodorsal oblique radiographic view made at 45° to the frontal plane to evaluate the pectoral girdle in raptors.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate use of a caudoventral-craniodorsal oblique radiographic view made at 45° to the frontal plane (H view) for assessment of the pectoral (thoracic) girdle in raptors. DESIGN Retrospective cross-sectional analysis. ANIMALS 24 raptors suspected to have a fracture of the thoracic girdle. PROCEDURES Standard ventrodorsal and H views were obtained for all birds. Radiographs were evaluated twice by a radiologist blinded to the final diagnosis, with each view first evaluated independently and views then evaluated in combination. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were calculated, with results of surgery or necropsy used as the gold standard. RESULTS 9 birds had thoracic girdle fractures; fractures were correctly identified in 8 of these 9 birds on the ventrodorsal view alone, 7 of these 9 birds on the H view alone, and all 9 birds on the 2 views in combination. Fifteen birds did not have thoracic girdle fractures; radiographs were correctly classified in 12 of these 15 birds when the ventrodorsal view was evaluated alone, all 15 birds when the H view was evaluated alone, and 14 of these 15 birds when the 2 views were evaluated in combination. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Results suggested that the H view or the addition of the H view to the VD view could be useful in raptors suspected to have fractures of the thoracic girdle. Agreement with the gold standard (ie, fracture present or absent) was higher with the H view and combination of views than with the ventrodorsal view alone.
Status epilepticus in children with Alpers’ disease caused by POLG1 mutations: EEG and MRI features

Purpose: Refractory convulsive status epilepticus in infancy and childhood is a rare emergency situation. Metabolic disorders frequently underlie this condition, in particular Alpers' disease caused by POLG1 mutations. Status epilepticus may be the first symptom. A pathognomonic electroencephalography (EEG) signature may facilitate diagnosis of Alpers' disease and allow timely avoidance of valproic acid, which is contraindicated in this disorder because it may trigger fatal liver failure.
Impossible Macroeconomic Trinity: The Challenge to Economic Governance in the Eurozone

Abstract Europe now faces a new impossible macroeconomic trinity: it is no longer possible to combine monetary union, German political requirements and coherent economic analysis. Economic analysis shows that there must be more inflation in Germany, a significant fiscal expansion in Germany, a significant easing of austerity in the GIIPS countries and a write-down of much of the debt of southern European sovereigns. These changes will be resisted by Germany. But they are necessary if the monetary union is to survive.