Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What kind of problems do protein interactions raise for anaphora resolution? - A preliminary analysis

In this preliminary study, we analyzed the kind of anaphoric expressions that occur in expressions describing protein interactions found in biological text. We also studied the impact of anaphora resolution on protein interaction extraction, when an off-the-shelf anaphoric resolver (i.e., not one specially developed for this domain) is used, and looking at full texts as well as abstracts. Our results suggest that about 5% of the descriptions of protein-protein interactions contain anaphoric expressions when full texts are considered. These anaphoric expressions are primarily pronouns, even though most anaphoric expressions are full NPs. The use of our anaphoric resolver gives a small improvement over our baseline system.
Experimental studies in insect parasitism. IX. The reactions of a stick insect to an alien parasite

Eggs and larvae of an ichneumon fly, Nenteritis canescens, injected into adults of a stick insect, Carausius morosus, elicited two defence reactions. Dark material, probably melanin, was deposited on their surface; and they were invested with haemocytes which, within 24 h, formed unorganized clumps of irregular shape about them. The haemocytic reaction was less vigorous in confined spaces than in the main blood stream, and several observations support the view that the haemocytes did not flock to the parasite from a distance but accumulated by chance encounter of, at most, a small chemotactic field. The size of the clumps reached a maximum about 24 h after injection of the parasite. The melanin reaction, on the other hand, was as strong in confined spaces as in the main blood stream, and was progressive, eventually encasing the parasite in a brittle black sheath. In nymphs of 1/2, and in young nymphs of 1/20, adult weight, the two reactions were essentially the same as in adults; the melanin reaction was indistinguishable from that in the adult; the haemocytic reaction in the large nymphs was a little, and in the small nymphs was much, less massive. The deposition of melanin about the parasite was inhibited by simultaneous injection of phenylthiourea. The haemocytic reaction could not be inhibited by injections of Chinese ink, because blood cells blackened by the carbon particles they had engulfed nevertheless invested the parasite. The two reactions were elicited both by living and by dead parasites; the haemocytic reaction appeared to be elicited by clean glass rods, but the melanin reaction was not. Most Nenteritis eggs failed to hatch in Carausius although the fully developed larva could be seen moving within them, and no Nenteritis larva was observed to live longer than 48 h in this host. But larvae that had hatched in Carausius and after 24 h were transferred to the normal host, Ephestia, lived and developed. Moreover, eggs hatched normally in the blood of Carausius in hanging-drop cultures, and the larvae lived as long as 75 h. The death of this parasite in Carausius does not appear to be due either to toxic properties of the blood as a fluid, or to its unsuitability as food, but to active processes, the haemocytic and melanin reactions, that take place in the living host.
Specification of real-time systems using a timed automata model with shared variables and verification of partial-deadlock freeness

We propose a timed automata model with shared variables (TASV). A TASV is a set of extended timed automata (ETAs) with shared boolean variables. For this model, we propose (I) an algorithm which decides whether a given TASV is partial-deadlock free, and (2) a sufficient condition that we can efficiently prove a given TASV is partial-deadlock free. Each ETA in a TASV can access to /modify, shared boolean variables independently. By constructing a tuple automaton for all ETAs in a given TASV we can decide the existence of deadlocks. However, such an approach causes the state explosion problem. Our algorithm and our proposed sufficient condition reduce the possibility of the state explosion by dividing the ETAs into some sets and proving their partial-deadlock freeness independently.
A Duflo Star Product for Poisson Groups

Let $G$ be a finite-dimensional Poisson algebraic, Lie or formal group. We show that the center of the quantization of $G$ provided by an Etingof-Kazhdan functor is isomorphic as an algebra to the Poisson center of the algebra of functions on $G$. This recovers and generalizes Duflo's theorem which gives an isomorphism between the center of the enveloping algebra of a finite-dimensional Lie algebra $\mathfrak{a}$ and the subalgebra of ad-invariant in the symmetric algebra of $\mathfrak{a}$. As our proof relies on Etingof-Kazhdan construction it ultimately depends on the existence of Drinfeld associators, but otherwise it is a fairly simple application of graphical calculus. This shed some lights on Alekseev-Torossian proof of the Kashiwara-Vergne conjecture, and on the relation observed by Bar-Natan-Le-Thurston between the Duflo isomorphism and the Kontsevich integral of the unknot.
Anticarcinogenic Effects of the Ethanolic Extract of Salix aegyptiaca in Colon Cancer Cells: Involvement of Akt/PKB and MAPK Pathways

The bark from Salix species of plants has been traditionally consumed for its antiinflammatory properties. Because inflammation frequently accompanies the progress of colorectal cancer (CRC), we have evaluated the anticancer properties of the ethanolic extract from the bark (EEB) of S. aegyptiaca, a Salix species endogenous to the Middle East, using HCT-116 and HT29 CRC cell lines. Fresh bark from S. aegyptiaca was extracted with ethanol, fractionated by solvent-solvent partitioning and the fractions were analyzed by tandem mass spectrometry. Catechin, catechol, and salicin were the most abundant constituents of the extract. Interestingly, EEB showed the highest anticancer effect in the colon cancer cells followed by its fractions in ethyl acetate and water, with catechin, catechol, and salicin showing the least efficacy. EEB could strongly reduce the proliferation of the cancer cells, but not of CCD-18Co, normal colon fibroblast cell line. Accompanying this was cell cycle arrest at G1/S independent of DNA damage in the cancer cells, induction of apoptosis through a p53 dependent pathway and an inhibition of PI3K/Akt and MAP Kinase pathways at levels comparable to known commercial inhibitors. We propose that the combination of the polyphenols and flavonoids in EEB contributes toward its potent anticarcinogenic effects. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Nutrition and Cancer for the following free supplemental resource(s): Supplementary Figure 1 and Supplementary Figure 2. ]
A Practical Sense of Knowing: Exploring Awareness Strategies in a Mobile Workplace

This paper presents and discusses strategies used by homecare workers to establish and maintain awareness in a mobile workplace. It capitalizes on data derived from a longitudinal translocal ethnographic study of homecare and the utilization of mobile technology. The study exposes two distinct dimensions of the work context, denoted the Case and Base dimensions, which are used as vehicles to describe situations of collaborative practice that occur (1) in a coordination meeting, (2) on a homecare visit, and (3) in an on-the-fly 'illicit' use of mobile technology. We propose a new conception of collaborative awareness as a 'practical sense of knowing'. Findings from the ethnographic study are consistent with a well-worn distinction between “knowing that”, declarative knowledge, and “knowing how”, procedural knowledge. Conventional structures of organizational control, encoded both procedurally and as declarations of responsibility, are routinely broken and reformed. This happens as workers devise new strategies in order to maintain the keen sense of their collaborative situation required to sustain an orderly workplace.
Understanding the burden of musculoskeletal conditions

The burden is huge and not reflected in national health priorities Musculoskeletal conditions have an enormous and growing impact world wide. “Health 21,” the health for all policy framework for the World Health Organization's European region,1 identifies musculoskeletal conditions as a target, yet national health care priorities in the United Kingdom and most European countries do not include them. To address this imbalance the United Nation, the WHO, governments, and professional and patients' organisations have declared 2000-10 the “bone and joint decade” with the aim of improving the health related quality of life of people with musculoskeletal conditions. Although one of the aims of the decade is to increase the recognition and understanding of the burden posed by musculoskeletal conditions, there are already enough data to show the size of the problem. Musculoskeletal impairments ranked number one in chronic impairments in the United States,2 and chronic musculoskeletal pain is reported in surveys by 1 in 4 people in both less and more developed countries.3 Musculoskeletal conditions were the most expensive disease category in a Swedish cost of …
Induction motor stator windings asymmetry influence on frequency converter autonomous voltage inverter

One of the reasons for deterioration of the efficiency of operation of a variable-frequency electric drive (VFED) with scalar control consists in occurrence of asymmetry of induction motor (IM) parameters. Apart from appearance of variable components of consumed power and electromagnetic torque, such asymmetry causes deterioration of operating mode of an autonomous voltage inverter (AVI). Assessment of IM stator windings asymmetry influence on heating losses revealed non-uniform current loading and, in its turn, uneven heating of transistors and bypass diodes of the AVI. The work included verification of VFED operation at different levels of stator windings asymmetry and use of a system of compensation for influence of IM asymmetry on the basis of the cross-vector theory of instantaneous power. Obtained results proved that the use of this compensation system causes decrease of unevenness of distribution of heating loss on power keys of the AVI.
Asymmetries in Mating Preferences Between Species: Female Swordtails Prefer Heterospecific Males

In male swordtails (Xiphophorus nigrensis) there are three size classes that derive from allelic variation at the pituitary locus on the Y chromosome. Progeny analysis and preference tests suggest that females prefer to mate with larger males. In the closely related X. pygmaeus, there is no allelic variation at this locus; this species consists of males similar in size only to smaller X. nigrensis males. In addition to being smaller than most X. nigrensis males, these X.pygmaeus males also lack both the swordtail and a major component of the courtship display common in most X. nigrensis males. Usually, female X. pygmaeus prefer to mate with heterospecific males rather than conspecifics, regardless of body size and the presence of a swordtail. However, the smallest X. nigrensis males lack the same courtship component as do the X. pygmaeus males, and in this comparison female X. pygmaeus show no preference. Although sexual selection, through its action on divergence of courtship displays, has been implicated as a factor leading to speciation, in this case sexual selection could lead to the congealing of gene pools between heterospecifics.
Carbonic anhydrase II in the cerebrospinal fluid: its value as a disease marker

Carbonic anhydrase (CA) II is the predominant CA isoenzyme in the brain of mammals. We have recently developed a dual‐label time‐resolved immunofluorometric assay to quantify minute amounts of CA I and II in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). The present study was aimed at elucidating the clinical value of such measurements in the case of neurological disorders. Lumbar CSF samples were obtained from 111 patients suffering from various neurological diseases and from 97 control patients with no specific signs of central nervous system diseases. The highest CA II concentrations were found in patients with brain infarction (median 66.5 μg L−1, n = 20), whereas the control patients had markedly lower values (median 7.8 μg L−1, n = 97). Relative to a reference range calculated from the control material (10.2 ± 17.2 μgL −1), the sensitivity of CA II measurement in differentiating brain infarction was 100%. Patients with transient ischaemic attack (median 11.2 μg L−1, n = 9), multiple sclerosis (median 14.7 μg L−1, n = 18) or epilepsy (median 20.3 μg L−1, n = 17) usually had CA II concentrations within the normal range, but those with central nervous system infection (n = 14), dementia (n = 19) or trigeminal neuralgia (n = ;6) tended to have higher CA II levels in their CSF, the median values being 39.1 μg L−1, 45.5 μg L−1 and 44.0 μg L−1 respectively. The findings indicate that the concentration of CA II in the CSF marks disease activity in patients with brain damage. This finding could provide a basis for further studies estimating the value of CA II measurement as a new laboratory marker of diseases affecting the brain.
Beat classification for use in arrhythmia analysis

An important step in the classification of arrhythmias is beat classification. The aim of this work is to classify the beats in the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database and to investigate pertinent features for beat classification. A comparison is made of the classification performance using features obtained after three different processing tasks on the electrocardiogram. QRS detection, QRS onset/offset detection and P wave onset detection. Linear discriminants and quadratic discriminants were employed to model the classifier. The best classification performance of 82% was achieved by employing the QRS width as an input feature to the linear discriminant classifier.
Comparing GMM-based speech transformation systems

This article deals with a study on GMM-based voice conversion systems. We compare the main linear conversion functions found in the literature on an identical speech corpus. We insist in particular on the risks of over-ﬁtting and over-smoothing . We propose three alternatives for robust conversion functions in order to minimize these risks. We show, on two experimental speech databases, that the approach suggested by Kain remains the more precise but leads to an over-ﬁtting ratio of 1 . 72% . The alternatives which we propose, present an average degradation of 2 . 8% for a 0 . 52% over-ﬁtting ratio.
Volatile nitrosamine levels in common foods from tunisia, south china and greenland, high‐risk areas for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC)

On the basis of anthropological pilot studies on diet in Tunisia, south China and Greenland, food items consumed frequently by these populations at high risk for NPC were analysed for volatile nitrosamines using gas chromatography combined with a thermal energy analyzer. Relatively high levels of N‐nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), N‐nitrosopyrrolidine (NPYR) and N‐nitrosopiperidine (NPIP) were detected in Tunisian stewing base (“Touklia”) and dried mutton preserved in olive oil (“Qaddid”). NDMA was also detected at levels ranging from trace amounts to 133 μg/kg in several Chinese salted and dried marine fish and in Greenland dried, unsalted fish preparations. NPYR and NPIP were also occasionally detected in several vegetables fermented in brine collected in Tunisia and China. The possible role of nitrosamines in the etiology of NPC is discussed.
Hypothyroidism and Its Rapid Correction Alter Cardiac Remodeling

The cardiovascular effects of mild and overt thyroid disease include a vast array of pathological changes. As well, thyroid replacement therapy has been suggested for preserving cardiac function. However, the influence of thyroid hormones on cardiac remodeling has not been thoroughly investigated at the molecular and cellular levels. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of hypothyroidism and thyroid replacement therapy on cardiac alterations. Thirty Wistar rats were divided into 2 groups: a control (n = 10) group and a group treated with 6-propyl-2-thiouracil (PTU) (n = 20) to induce hypothyroidism. Ten of the 20 rats in the PTU group were then treated with L-thyroxine to quickly re-establish euthyroidism. The serum levels of inflammatory markers, such as C-reactive protein (CRP), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), interleukin 6 (IL6) and pro-fibrotic transforming growth factor beta 1 (TGF-β1), were significantly increased in hypothyroid rats; elevations in cardiac stress markers, brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) and cardiac troponin T (cTnT) were also noted. The expressions of cardiac remodeling genes were induced in hypothyroid rats in parallel with the development of fibrosis, and a decline in cardiac function with chamber dilation was measured by echocardiography. Rapidly reversing the hypothyroidism and restoring the euthyroid state improved cardiac function with a decrease in the levels of cardiac remodeling markers. However, this change further increased the levels of inflammatory and fibrotic markers in the plasma and heart and led to myocardial cellular infiltration. In conclusion, we showed that hypothyroidism is related to cardiac function decline, fibrosis and inflammation; most importantly, the rapid correction of hypothyroidism led to cardiac injuries. Our results might offer new insights for the management of hypothyroidism-induced heart disease.
Acceleration of SQL Restrictions and Aggregations through FPGA-Based Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration

SQL query processing on large database systems is recognized as one of the most important emerging disciplines of computing nowadays. However, current approaches do not provide a substantial coverage of typical query operators in hardware. In this paper, we provide an important step to higher operator coverage by proposing a) full dynamic data path generation for support also complex operators such as restrictions and aggregations. b) Also, an analysis of the computation times of a real database queries when running on a normal desktop computer is proposed to show that c) speedups ranging between 4 and 50 are obtainable by providing generative support also for the important restrict and aggregate operators using FPGAs.
Sentence paraphrase detection: When determiners and word order make the difference

Researchers working on distributional semantics have recently taken up the challenge of going beyond lexical meaning and tackle the issue of compositionality. Several Compositional Distributional Semantics Models (CDSMs) have been developed and promising results have been obtained in evaluations carried out against data sets of small phrases and as well as data sets of sentences. However, we believe there is the need to further develop good evaluation tasks that show whether CDSM truly capture compositionality. To this end, we present an evaluation task that highlights some differences among the CDSMs currently available by challenging them in detecting semantic differences caused by word order switch and by determiner replacements. We take as starting point simple intransitive and transitive sentences describing similar events, that we consider to be paraphrases of each other but not of the foil paraphrases we generate from them. Only the models sensitive to word order and determiner phrase meaning and their role in the sentence composition will not be captured into the foils’ trap.
Molecular Signatures Differentiate Immune States in Type 1 Diabetic Families

Mechanisms associated with type 1 diabetes (T1D) development remain incompletely defined. Using a sensitive array-based bioassay where patient plasma is used to induce transcriptional responses in healthy leukocytes, we previously reported disease-specific, partially interleukin (IL)-1−dependent signatures associated with preonset and recent onset (RO) T1D relative to unrelated healthy control subjects (uHC). To better understand inherited susceptibility in T1D families, we conducted cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of healthy autoantibody-negative (AA−) high HLA−risk siblings (HRS) (DR3 and/or DR4) and AA− low HLA−risk siblings (LRS) (non-DR3/non-DR4). Signatures, scored with a novel ontology-based algorithm, and confirmatory studies differentiated the RO T1D, uHC, HRS, and LRS plasma milieus. Relative to uHC, T1D family members exhibited an elevated inflammatory state, consistent with innate receptor ligation that was independent of HLA, AA, or disease status and included elevated plasma IL-1α, IL-12p40, CCL2, CCL3, and CCL4 levels. Longitudinally, signatures of T1D progressors exhibited increasing inflammatory bias. Conversely, HRS possessing decreasing AA titers revealed emergence of an IL-10/transforming growth factor-β−mediated regulatory state that paralleled temporal increases in peripheral activated CD4+/CD45RA−/FoxP3high regulatory T-cell frequencies. In AA− HRS, the familial innate inflammatory state also was temporally supplanted by immunoregulatory processes, suggesting a mechanism underlying the decline in T1D susceptibility with age.
But What About that Gigantic Elephant in the Room

When I began my career, more than half a century ago, behaviorism had a stranglehold on the field of psychology. It focused almost entirely on learning by direct experiences through paired stimulation and response consequences. This type of theorizing was at odds with the conspicuous social reality that much of what people learn is through the power of social modeling. Direct experience is an unmercifully tough teacher. Hence, people shortcut the tedious, costly, and potentially hazardous process of trial and error by observational learning from the myriad modeling influences in their social and symbolic environment.
Plasma chromogranin a in patients with inflammatory bowel disease

Background: Circulating chromogranin A (CgA) levels, a marker for neuroendocrine tumors including carcinoids, have recently been found elevated in some patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), although their significance is unclear. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate CgA levels and their possible relationship with clinical and biochemical disease activity indexes in 119 IBD patients. Methods: The study groups comprised 75 patients with ulcerative colitis, 44 with Crohn's disease, in both active and quiescent phases, and 85 controls. Results: Mean CgA levels were significantly higher in IBD patients than in controls (20.4 ± 14.0 [SD] versus 11.3 ± 4.3 U/L, P < 0.001), without any statistical significant difference among the IBD subgroups. However, CgA levels were above the normal range (20 U/L) in 25/45 patients with active IBD (55%; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 40%–70%) and in 18/74 patients with remission IBD (24%; 95% CI: 15%–36%) (P < 0.001, Fisher's test). Among biochemical parameters, CgA correlated with serum TNF‐&agr; levels (rs = 0.398, P < 0.001). Conclusions: High CgA levels can occur in IBD. The disease activity and TNF‐&agr; levels seem to influence the CgA pattern, which could reflect the neuroendocrine system activation in response to inflammation. From a clinical point of view, the possibility of high CgA levels in IBD should be taken into consideration when a carcinoid is suspected in such patients, since this event seems to be more frequent than previously considered. Indeed, revision of our 83 patients with gastrointestinal carcinoids, studied between 1997 and 2006, showed that 4 patients had IBD, with a prevalence of 4.8%, which is markedly higher than that of the general population.