Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pathogenesis of calcific aortic valve disease: a disease process comes of age (and a good deal more).

BACKGROUND Over the past 10 to 15 years, calcific aortic valve disease, which includes aortic sclerosis and aortic stenosis, has come to be recognized as an active process, based on: (1) epidemiologic studies demonstrating associations of specific risk factors with increased prevalence or rate of progression of aortic valve disease; (2) identification, in valve lesions, of histopathologic features of chronic inflammation, lipoprotein deposition, renin-angiotensin system components, and molecular mediators of calcification; and (3) identification of cell-signaling pathways and genetic factors that may participate in valve disease pathogenesis. These studies will be reviewed and organized into a proposed global hypothesis for the pathogenesis of calcific aortic valve disease.
Coloring powers of planar graphs

We give nontrivial bounds for the inductiveness or degeneracy of power graphs Gk of a planar graph G. This implies bounds for the chromatic number as well, since the inductiveness naturally relates to a greedy algorithm for vertex-coloring the given graph. The inductiveness moreover yields bounds for the choosability of the graph. We show that the inductiveness of a square of a planar graph G is at most $\lceil 9\Delta /5 \rceil$, for the maximum degree $\Delta$ sufficiently large, and that it is sharp. In general, we show for a fixed integer $k\geq1$ the inductiveness, the chromatic number, and the choosability of Gk to be $O(\Delta^{\lfloor k/2 \rfloor})$, which is tight.
Using the RBFN model and GIS technique to assess wind erosion hazard of Inner Mongolia, China

Soil wind erosion is the primary process and the main driving force for land desertification and sand‐dust storms in arid and semi‐arid areas of Northern China. While many researchers have studied this issue, this study quantified the various indicators of soil wind erosion, using the GIS technology to extract the spatial data and to construct a RBFN (Radial Basis Function Network) model for Inner Mongolia. By calibrating sample data of the different levels of wind erosion hazard, the model parameters were established, and then the assessment of wind erosion hazard. Results show that in the southern parts of Inner Mongolia wind erosion hazards are very severe, counties in the middle regions of Inner Mongolia vary from moderate to severe, and in eastern are slight. Comparison of the results with other research shows conformity with actual conditions, proving the reasonability and applicability of the RBFN model. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
SIMULATION OF ELASTIC MEMBRANES AND SOFT TISSUE WITH TRIANGULATED SPRING MESHES

Spring meshes have been used to model elastic material by numerous researchers, with skin, textiles, and soft tissue being typical applications. However, given a specified set of elastic material properties, the question of whether a particular spring mesh accurately simulates those properties, has been largely ignored in the literature. Indeed, from the finite element literature, it would appear that, even for a uniform, isotropic elastic membrane, such a simulation is generally impossible. In two dimensions, given a discretization of a membrane as a triangle mesh, the standard finite element method analyzes each triangle approximately as a membrane with specified elastic properties, computing stresses and strains. An alternative is to regard each edge as a spring, assuming the springs are connected by "pin-joints" at the vertices of the discretization. This alternative, called a "spring mesh", is computationally more attractive. Previous reports on the technique are silent on the subject of assigning stiffness to the various springs. This paper shows that assigning the same stiffness to all springs fails to simulate a uniform elastic membrane, for equilibrium calculations. A formula for spring stiffness that provides an accurate simulation is then derived.
The Effect of Photodynamic Therapy Using Indole-3-Acetic Acid and Green Light on Acne Vulgaris

Background Photodynamic therapy (PDT) using topical aminolevulinic acid (ALA) has increasingly been used for the treatment of acne vulgaris and several studies have shown its clinical efficacy. However, ALA-PDT needs a relatively long incubation period and is frequently associated with adverse effects. Indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) has been introduced as a new photosensitizer for the treatment of acne in recent study. IAA-PDT requires only a short incubation period and the procedure is relatively painless in contrast to ALA-PDT. Objective To investigate the efficacy and safety of IAA- PDT in the treatment of acne. Methods Twenty-five patients with facial acne lesions were enrolled in this study. IAA-PDT was performed for five sessions at 1-week intervals (week 0~4). IAA was treated with 15 minute occlusion, and green light was given for 15 minutes. Clinical efficacy was determined by evaluating acne lesion counts, severity grading, and the Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI) at week 0, 2, 4, and 5. Sebum secretion and erythema index was measured by Sebumeter and Mexameter, respectively, at baseline and one week after each treatment session (week 1~5). Histopathological examination was performed at baseline and week 5. Adverse effects were recorded throughout the study. Results All the patients completed the study. Numbers of both inflammatory and non-inflammatory acne lesions were significantly decreased. Acne severity grade and the DLQI showed significant reduction. Sebum secretion and erythema were also reduced. Histopathological examination showed a reduction in inflammatory reactions. No adverse effects were observed except for transient pruritus in one patient. Conclusion PDT using IAA and green light was an effective, simple and safe treatment for acne.
Hemozoin Inhibition and Control of Clinical Malaria

Malaria has a negative impact on health and social and economic life of residents of endemic countries. The ultimate goals of designing new treatment for malaria are to prevent clinical infection, reduce morbidity, and decrease mortality. There are great advances in the understanding of the parasite-host interaction through studies by various scientists. In some of these studies, attempts were made to evaluate the roles of malaria pigment or toxins in the pathogenesis of malaria. Hemozoin is a key metabolite associated with severe malaria anemia (SMA), immunosuppression, and cytokine dysfunction. Targeting of this pigment may be necessary in the design of new therapeutic products against malaria. In this review, the roles of hemozoin in the morbidity and mortality of malaria are highlighted as an essential target in the quest for effective control of clinical malaria.
Development and improvement of acoustic sensors for the detection of pollutants in aquatic environments

In this paper, we present initially a demonstrator developed to detect pollutants in aquatic environments using screen-printed acoustic components. We then discuss the improvement on the waves emitted by the transducers when working on the PZT material or the system. Finally, we present the production and testing of components on the LTCC substrate. This technology facilitates the integration of the system.
Interacting Frobenius Algebras are Hopf

Theories featuring the interaction between a Frobenius algebra and a Hopf algebra have recently appeared in several areas in computer science: concurrent programming, control theory, and quantum computing, among others. Bonchi, Sobocinski, and Zanasi [9] have shown that, given a suitable distribution law, a pair of Hopf algebras forms two Frobenius algebras. Here we take the opposite approach, and show that interacting Frobenius algebras form Hopf algebras. We generalise [9] by including non-trivial dynamics of the underlying object—the so-called phase group—and investigate the effects of finite dimensionality of the underlying model, and recover the system of Bonchi et al as a subtheory in the prime power dimensional case. However the more general theory does not arise from a distributive law.
A community authorization service for group collaboration

In "grids" and "collaboratories", we find distributed communities of resource providers and resource consumers, within which often complex and dynamic policies govern who can use which resources for which purpose. We propose a new approach to the representation, maintenance and enforcement of such policies that provides a scalable mechanism for specifying and enforcing these policies. Our approach allows resource providers to delegate some of the authority for maintaining fine-grained access control policies to communities, while still maintaining ultimate control over their resources. We also describe a prototype implementation of this approach and an application in a data management context.
International Journal of Computer Science and Technology 793

A P2P-based framework supporting the extraction of aggregates from historical multidimensional data is proposed, which provides efficient and robust query evaluation. When a data population is published, data are summarized in a synopsis, consisting of an index built on top of a set of subsynopses (storing compressed representations of distinct data portions). The index and the subsynopses are distributed across the network, and suitable replication mechanisms taking into account the query workload and network conditions are employed that provide the appropriate coverage for both the index and the subsynopses. In this paper we are introducing virtual Datacubes which holds historical aggregated data at different level of aggregations following the subsynopses. I. Introduction PEER-TO-PEER (P2P) networks have become very popular in the last few years. Nowadays, they are the most widespread approach for exchanging data among large communities of users in the file sharing context. In this scenario, the success of P2P-based solutions is strictly related to the use of lossy data compression techniques (such as MPEG formats), which yield reasonable detail levels in representing large amounts of information and make data exchange feasible in practice by significantly reducing data transmission costs. However, the problem of suitably extending-data-compression-based solutions to application contexts other than file sharing has not been deeply investigated yet. Specifically, no P2P-based solution has imposed itself as an effective evolution of traditional distributed databases. This is quite surprising, as the huge amount of resources provided by P2P networks (in terms of storage capacity, computing power, and data transmission capability) could effectively support data management. From this standpoint, one of the application contexts which are likely to benefit from the support of a P2P network is the analysis of multidimensional data. In this scenario, information is represented as points in a multidimensional space whose dimensions correspond to different perspectives over data: users explore data and retrieve aggregates by issuing range queries, i.e., queries specifying an aggregate operator and the range of the data domain from which the aggregate information should be retrieved. Specifically, we will consider the case of analytical applications dealing with historical data, which typically require huge computation and storage capabilities, due to the large amount of data which need to be accessed to evaluate queries. Although the multidimensional data model is substantially more complex than the representation paradigm adopted in the file sharing context (where data are organized according to hname; filei pairs), analytical applications dealing …
ANALYSING THE ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA AMONG THE CONCEPTS FOR GENERATING AUTOMATED ONTOLOGIES

The semantic search yields fruitful results while searching the concepts. Ontologies play a crucial role in searching the concepts in a semantic way. It is otherwise said that, wherever search is needed, ontology search is more preferable when compared to the text based approach. XML plays an important role in information retrieval systems. Since XML is a common format, it is easy to understand as well as easy to construct. OWL is an ontology language, which is purely based on XML, that owl files can be automatically generated using programming languages, like Java and can be viewed using OWL editors. An approach to relate the concepts, based on user search queries and to generate an automated ontology has been discussed in this paper.
Chemical and microbiological changes in Norway spruce deadwood during the early stage of decomposition as a function of exposure in an alpine setting

ABSTRACT Alpine ecosystems are vulnerable to ever-changing environmental conditions, leading to shifts in vegetation distribution and composition with implications on soil functionality and carbon (C) turnover. Although deadwood represents an important global C stock, scarce information is available on how slope exposure influences the wood-inhabiting microbiota throughout the decomposition process in an Alpine setting. We therefore evaluated the impact of slope exposure (north- vs. south-facing sites) on physicochemical and microbiological properties (microbial abundance based on real-time PCR: fungal 18S rRNA, dinitrogen reductase [nifH]; microbial biomass: double strand DNA; and microbial activity: hydrolytic enzyme activities of the main nutrient cycles) of Picea abies wood blocks and the underlying soil in a field experiment in the Italian Alps during a three-year period. Overall, a higher abundance of fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria was recorded in the soil at the north-facing site where cooler and moister conditions were observed. In contrast, no exposure effects were found for these two microbial groups in the wood blocks, while their abundance increased over time, accompanied by more acidic conditions with progressing decay. The impact of exposure was also enzyme specific and time dependent for both the P. abies wood blocks and the underlying soil.
The sufficient minimal set of miRNA seed types

Motivation: Pairing between the target sequence and the 6–8 nt long seed sequence of the miRNA presents the most important feature for miRNA target site prediction. Novel high-throughput technologies such as Argonaute HITS-CLIP afford meanwhile a detailed study of miRNA:mRNA duplices. These interaction maps enable a first discrimination between functional and non-functional target sites in a bulky fashion. Prediction algorithms apply different seed paradigms to identify miRNA target sites. Therefore, a quantitative assessment of miRNA target site prediction is of major interest. Results: We identified a set of canonical seed types based on a transcriptome wide analysis of experimentally verified functional target sites. We confirmed the specificity of long seeds but we found that the majority of functional target sites are formed by less specific seeds of only 6 nt indicating a crucial role of this type. A substantial fraction of genuine target sites arenon-conserved. Moreover, the majority of functional sites remain uncovered by common prediction methods. Contact: florian.buettner@helmholtz-muenchen.de v.stuempflen@helmholtz-muenchen.de Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Poet: the Online Preference Elicitation Tool *

If the goal of eliciting accurate user preferences over a com­ plex value space is to be realized, the elicitation process must be through while at the same time not overly burdensome to the user. An ideal preference elicitation tool would max­ imize the information about preferences acquired from the user while minimizing the number of queries required. To this end, we present POET: the Online Preference Elicitation Tool. POET is a graphical Java applet designed to elicit complex preference structures to form a utility function. Once the elic­ itation process is complete POET outputs the resulting utility function as an XML document. Internally, POET represents utility for independent and dependent values as a set of depen­ dency trees. Though POET's output and internal representa­ tion involves real numbers, from the user's point-of-view, the experience is completely symbolic.
Curcumin Inhibits Glutamate Release from Rat Prefrontal Nerve Endings by Affecting Vesicle Mobilization

Curcumin, one of the major constituents of Curcuma longa, has been shown to inhibit depolarization-evoked glutamate release from rat prefrontocortical nerve terminals by reducing voltage-dependent Ca2+ entry. This study showed that curcumin inhibited ionomycin-induced glutamate release and KCl-evoked FM1-43 release, suggesting that some steps after Ca2+ entry are regulated by curcumin. Furthermore, disrupting the cytoskeleton organization using cytochalasin D abolished the inhibitory action of curcumin on ionomycin-induced glutamate release. Mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase (MEK) inhibition also prevented the inhibitory effect of curcumin on ionomycin-induced glutamate release. Western blot analyses showed that curcumin decreased the ionomycin-induced phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1 and 2 (ERK1/2) and synaptic vesicle-associated protein synapsin I, the main presynaptic target of ERK. These results show that curcumin-mediated inhibition of glutamate release involves modulating downstream events by controlling synaptic vesicle recruitment and exocytosis, possibly through a decrease of MAPK/ERK activation and synapsin I phosphorylation, thereby decreasing synaptic vesicle availability for exocytosis.
Challenges for Cloud-Based Simulation Games

As business applications such as highly integrated Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP) become more complex, system-integrated business simulation games are vital for educating tomorrow's white collar work force. Especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) cloud-based business applications are a serious alternative. The Education as a Service (EaaS) approach gets more and more into the focus, hence. In order to yield a fruitful scientific dispute on the matter a cloud-based simulation game design is proposed in this paper. That design also identifies challenges implementing and operating a cloud-based simulation game. It reveals issues such as the composition of the simulation model and its relation to the host system as well as communication matters (change of interfaces) and the coordination between customer, host system and the simulation itself. Furthermore, the choice of the right service and deployment model affects the design of the simulation game.
Causal Inference of Ambiguous Manipulations

Over the last two decades, a fundamental outline of a theory of causal inference has emerged. However, this theory does not consider the following problem. Sometimes two or more measured variables are deterministic functions of one another, not deliberately, but because of redundant measurements. In these cases, manipulation of an observed defined variable may actually be an ambiguous description of a manipulation of some underlying variables, although the manipulator does not know that this is the case. In this article we revisit the question of precisely characterizing conditions and assumptions under which reliable inference about the effects of manipulations is possible, even when the possibility of “ambiguous manipulations” is allowed.
Barriers to healthy eating among Norwegian-Pakistani women participating in a culturally adapted intervention

Aims: To explore barriers to healthy dietary changes experienced by Pakistani immigrant women participating in a culturally adapted intervention, and whether these barriers were associated with intentions to change dietary behaviours. Methods: Participants were randomly assigned to control and intervention group. The 7-month intervention consisted of six educational group sessions on diet and physical activity, based on knowledge about Pakistani lifestyle and focusing on blood glucose control. Data on barriers for and intentions to healthy dietary changes were collected through an interview with help of a questionnaire. The article is based on data from follow-up assessments in the intervention group, comprising 82 women, aged 28—62 years, without a history of type 2 diabetes. Results: The most important barriers to healthy dietary changes were preferences of children and other family members and perceived expectations during social gatherings. The perceived pressure from other family members was especially strong when the women were trying to change to more vegetables, lentils, and fish and to use less oil in food preparation. The barriers were inversely related to intentions to change. Conclusions: The women encountered various types of barriers when trying to change to healthier food habits, the most prominent being those related to the social dimensions of food consumption, as well as to awareness of the amount of oil used for cooking.
NMR studies of conduction mechanisms in electrolyte materials for fuel cells

Fuel cells are clean and efficient electrochemical energy conversion devices which have garnered much scientific attention in recent years as clean renewable sources of energy. However, development is currently restrained by materials limitations, particularly those associated with the electrolyte. A number of liquid electrolytes are currently in use in commercial applications but solid electrolytes are preferable as they are more robust, more efficient and less susceptible to corrosion. In this work, a number of solid conducting materials which have potential to be applied in fuel cells were studied by NMR techniques. By gaining detailed mechanistic insight into charge transport we hope to contribute to the development of these materials. In the first part of this thesis charge conduction mechanisms is investigated in ionic conductors. In Chapter 3 19F NMR relaxometry is applied to investigate fluoride ion dynamics in the fluoride conducting superionic material, PbSnF4 and in Chapter 4 1H NMR relaxometry is used to examine proton motions along hydrogen bonds in the novel superprotonic material, Cs6(HSO4)3(H2PO4)4. The results of the NMR analysis show good agreement with bulk physical properties from diffraction and conductivity techniques for both materials and a new mechanism for fluoride ion conduction in PbSnF4 is proposed. In the second part of this thesis, the synthesis and analysis of conducting polyaniline is presented. In Chapter 5 the synthesis of amorphous polyaniline samples with varying dopant content is presented and in Chapter 6 a number of methods for the synthesis of nano-structured doped polyaniline are examined. Both amorphous and semi-crystalline polymers are analysed by 19F and 1H NMR relaxometery and show similar dependence on the dimensionality of charge carriers through the heterogeneous regions of the material. The dimensionality of this motion is shown to be dependent on both the conductivity and the relative dopant concentration. In an appendix, preliminary NMR relaxometry results on molecular dynamics in ionic liquids are presented.
Optimal Weighting Functions for Feature Detection

One approach to feature detection is to match a parametric model of the feature to the image data. Naturally, the performance of such detectors is highly dependent upon the function used to measure the degree of fit between the feature model and the image data. In this paper, we first show how an existing detector can be extended to use a weighted norm as the matching function with minimal extra computation. Next, we propose optimality criteria for the two fundamental aspects of feature detection performance: feature detection robustness and parameter estimation accuracy. We also show how to combine these criteria in various ways. We analyze the optimality criterion for parameter estimation under the approximating assumption that the feature manifold is locally linear. We also present a numerical algorithm that can be used to estimate the optimal weighting functions for the other optimality criteria. We include the results of applying this algorithm for step edge, line, and corner features.