Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Error Resilience Tools for Improving the Quality of MPEG-4 Video Streams over Wireless Channels

The transmission of encoded video streams over heterogeneous networks, characterized by congestion losses in wired links and high bit error rate in the wireless channel, is under consideration in this paper. First of all, it is necessary to make a distinction between the different kinds of losses to achieve a high channel utilization. Then, when dealing with wireless losses, the robustness of the encoded stream has to be improved. This article shows an easy way of implementing a global adaptive algorithm for wireless networks. It proposes a new algorithm to adequate the parameters of video error resilience tools to the changing characteristics of the wireless channel. The aim of this algorithm is guaranteeing the quality of the video. Simplicity is the key, as the receiver of the video stream will be a handheld device (i.e. PDA, mobile phone, etc.) with limited processing capacity
The synergic antitumor effects of paclitaxel and temozolomide co-loaded in mPEG-PLGA nanoparticles on glioblastoma cells

To get better chemotherapy efficacy, the optimal synergic effect of Paclitaxel (PTX) and Temozolomide (TMZ) on glioblastoma cells lines was investigated. A dual drug-loaded delivery system based on mPEG-PLGA nanoparticles (NPs) was developed to potentiate chemotherapy efficacy for glioblastoma. PTX/TMZ-NPs were prepared with double emulsification solvent evaporation method and exhibited a relatively uniform diameter of 206.3 ± 14.7 nm. The NPs showed sustained release character. Cytotoxicity assays showed the best synergistic effects were achieved when the weight ratios of PTX to TMZ were 1:5 and 1:100 on U87 and C6 cells, respectively. PTX/TMZ-NPs showed better inhibition effect to U87 and C6 cells than single drug NPs or free drugs mixture. PTX/TMZ-NPs (PTX: TMZ was 1:5(w/w)) significantly inhibited the tumor growth in the subcutaneous U87 mice model. These results indicate that coordinate administration of PTX and TMZ combined with NPs is an efficient method for glioblastoma.
Masculinization of Gene Expression Is Associated with Exaggeration of Male Sexual Dimorphism

Gene expression differences between the sexes account for the majority of sexually dimorphic phenotypes, and the study of sex-biased gene expression is important for understanding the genetic basis of complex sexual dimorphisms. However, it has been difficult to test the nature of this relationship due to the fact that sexual dimorphism has traditionally been conceptualized as a dichotomy between males and females, rather than an axis with individuals distributed at intermediate points. The wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) exhibits just this sort of continuum, with dominant and subordinate males forming a gradient in male secondary sexual characteristics. This makes it possible for the first time to test the correlation between sex-biased gene expression and sexually dimorphic phenotypes, a relationship crucial to molecular studies of sexual selection and sexual conflict. Here, we show that subordinate male transcriptomes show striking multiple concordances with their relative phenotypic sexual dimorphism. Subordinate males were clearly male rather than intersex, and when compared to dominant males, their transcriptomes were simultaneously demasculinized for male-biased genes and feminized for female-biased genes across the majority of the transcriptome. These results provide the first evidence linking sexually dimorphic transcription and sexually dimorphic phenotypes. More importantly, they indicate that evolutionary changes in sexual dimorphism can be achieved by varying the magnitude of sex-bias in expression across a large proportion of the coding content of a genome.
Depression and risk for Alzheimer disease: systematic review, meta-analysis, and metaregression analysis.

CONTEXT A history of depression may increase risk for developing Alzheimer disease (AD) later in life. Clarifying this relation might improve understanding of risk factors for and disease mechanisms in AD. OBJECTIVE To systematically review and complete a meta-analysis on the relation of depression and AD. DATA SOURCES We conducted electronic bibliographic searches of MEDLINE, PsychLit, EMBASE, and BIOSIS using search terms sensitive to studies of etiology combined with searches on terms related to depression and AD and reviewed reference lists of articles. STUDY SELECTION Studies with data contrasting depressed vs nondepressed patients who did and did not later develop AD were included. Studies that related continuous measures of depression and cognitive status were excluded. DATA EXTRACTION Numerical data were independently extracted by 3 reviewers. They also rated studies on a scale that assessed quality indicators for observational studies. Data on the interval between observation of depression and the diagnosis of AD were collected when available. DATA SYNTHESIS Meta-analytic evaluation with random-effects models resulted in pooled odds ratios of 2.03 (95% confidence interval, 1.73-2.38) for case-control and of 1.90 (95% confidence interval, 1.55-2.33) for cohort studies. Findings of increased risk were robust to sensitivity analyses. Interval between diagnoses of depression and AD was positively related to increased risk of developing AD, suggesting that rather than a prodrome, depression may be a risk factor for AD. CONCLUSIONS A history of depression may confer an increased risk for later developing AD. This relation may reflect an independent risk factor for the disease.
Computationally efficient approaches for blind adaptive beamforming in SIMO-OFDM systems

In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based transmissions over single-input multiple-output (SIMO) wireless channels, adaptive beamforming can be employed at the receiver side to combat the effect of directional interference. To save channel bandwidth, there is strong incentive to use blind algorithms that attempt to restore properties of the transmitted digital signals. Among these, the recursive least-squares constant modulus algorithm (RLS-CMA) is of considerable interest due to its fast convergence and good interference cancelation properties. However, since a distinct copy of the RLS-CMA must be run on each individual sub-carrier in OFDM applications, this approach may entail considerable computations. In this paper, we investigate frequency interpolation schemes to reduce the computational complexity of the SIMO-OFDM beamforming system based on the RLS-CMA. These approaches, which exploit the coherence bandwidth of the broadband wireless channels, divide the sub-carriers into several contiguous groups and apply the RLS-CMA to a selected subcarrier in each group; the weight vectors at other frequencies are then obtained by interpolation. We show through simulations that an M-fold reduction in complexity can be achieved where M, the number of sub-carriers in each interpolation group, depends on the characteristics of the radio channel and OFDM system.
Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Diffusion Tensor Imaging to Assess Brain Damage in Alcoholics

Brain imaging using conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has revealed that several brain structures in people with a history of chronic alcohol dependence are smaller in volume than the same brain structures in nonalcoholic control subjects. Areas that are particularly affected are the frontal lobes, which are involved in reasoning, judgment, and problem solving. Older people are especially vulnerable to the damaging effects of alcohol. It is unclear whether women show consistently more vulnerability to these changes in the brain than men do. In general, alcoholics evaluated before and after a period of abstinence show some recovery of tissue volume, whereas alcoholics evaluated again after continued drinking show further reductions in brain tissue volume. A new MR technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) can aid in detecting the degradation of fibers (i.e., white matter) that carry information between brain cells (i.e., gray matter). With DTI, researchers studying alcoholics have been able to detect abnormalities in white matter not visible with conventional MRI. Ultimately DTI may be useful in elucidating the mechanisms that underlie macrostructural and functional brain changes seen with abstinence and relapse.
Contrasting Effects of Leptin on Food Anticipatory and Total Locomotor Activity

Obese, leptin deficient obob mice have profoundly decreased activity and increased food seeking behavior. The decreased activity has been attributed to obesity. In mice, we tested the hypothesis that leptin increases total locomotor activity but inhibits food anticipatory activity. We also sought to determine if leptin induced increases in total locomotor activity are independent of changes in body weight and obesity. We studied obob mice and also created a novel transgenic mouse where leptin is over-expressed in a tetracycline-off system and can be abruptly and non-invasively suppressed by doxycycline within few hours. The studies were performed using two independent behavioral assays: home cage activity (HCA) and running wheel activity (RWA). Systemic administration of leptin (150 ng/hr) to obob mice produced a 122%±30% (mean ± SEM) increase (p≤0.01) in locomotor activity within 2 days In addition, cerebroventricular administration of leptin (5 ng/hr) also produced an early and progressive increase in total locomotor activity beginning on the 1st day (+28±8%; p≤0.05) and increasing to +69±23% on day 3 without a decrease in body weight during this time. The increase in activity was restricted to the dark phase. Conversely, in a tet-off transgenic obob mouse line, acute leptin suppression reduced spontaneous locomotor activity. To further define activities that are leptin regulated, we assayed food anticipatory activity (FAA) and found that it was markedly augmented in obob mice compared to wild type mice (+38±6.7 in obob vs +20±6.3% in wild type at peak; mean ± SEM; p≤0.001) and abolished by leptin. Although melanocortin-3 receptors (MC3R) reportedly mediate FAA, we found augmented FAA and preserved inhibitory effects of leptin on FAA in MC3R−/−obob mice. In summary, this study demonstrates that total activity and FAA are regulated independently by leptin. Leptin, acting in the central nervous system and at physiologic levels, produces early increases in locomotor activity before substantial weight loss. In contrast, leptin suppresses augmented food anticipatory activity in obob mice.
Augmented topological mapping with semantic indoor labeling using a wearable catadioptric vision system

Current research on appearance based mapping goes towards richer semantic models of the environment, which may allow the robots to perform higher level tasks and provide better human-robot interaction. This work presents a new omnidirectional vision based approach for augmented topological mapping. Omnidirectional vision systems are of particular interest for vision based mapping because they allow to have more compact and efficient representation of the environment. Our proposal includes some novel ideas in order to augment the semantic information of a typical indoor topological map: we pay special attention to the semantic labels of the different types of transitions between places, and propose a simple way to include this semantic information as part of the criteria to segment the environment. This work is built on efficient catadioptric image representation based on the global Gist descriptor, which is used to classify the acquired views into types of indoor regions. The considered basic types of indoor regions are Places and Transitions, further divided into more specific subclasses, e.g., Transitions into doors, stairs and elevator. Besides using the result of this labeling, the proposed mapping approach includes a probabilistic model to account for temporal consistency. All the proposed ideas have been demonstrated and evaluated in a new indoor dataset acquired with our wearable catadioptric vision system with promising results in a realistic prototype.
Novel Influenza A (H1N1) infection vs. common Influenza-Like Illness: A prospective study

Summary Background On June 11th, 2009 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the first influenza pandemic of the 21st century. Data regarding the clinical characteristics and course of this viral infectious disease are still being assessed. The aim of this study was to investigate and compare the possible differences in clinical course and outcome between H1N1-positive [H1N1(+)] and negative [H1N1(−)] patients. Material/Methods This prospective study was conducted between July 2009 and January 2010 in a regional hospital in Greece. The study population consisted of 165 patients aged 14 years or older, with influenza-like illness (ILI) who, according to CDC recommendations, fulfilled the criteria for diagnostic influenza testing. Enrolled patients underwent a detailed diagnostic work-up. Infection by the H1N1 virus was diagnosed using real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction, from pharyngeal swab specimens. Results We identified 81 H1N1 (+) (49%) patients. Statistical analysis revealed that H1N1(+) patients were significantly younger (median age 27 vs. 35 years, p<0.05), had a decreased white blood cell count (median 7.200 vs. 8.415, p<0.05) and an increased percentage of monocytes (55.6% vs. 27.4%, p<0.05) compared to the H1N1(−) patients. The clinical presentation at the emergency department, as well as the hospital admission and disease complication rate, were not significantly different between the 2 groups. Conclusions The clinical characteristics of the new influenza virus appear to be mild and to resemble those of common influenza-like illnesses (ILI). The patients who tested positive for the H1N1 virus were younger and had an increased percentage of monocytes compared to the H1N1-negative patients.
The design space of robots: investigating children's views

Our study considers children's perceptions of robots in terms of physical attributes, personality and emotion traits. To examine children's attitudes towards robots, a questionnaire approach was taken with a large sample of children, followed by a detailed statistical framework to analyse the data. Results show that children clearly distinguish between emotions and behaviour when judging robots. The distinguishing robotic physical characteristics for positive and negative emotions and behaviour are highlighted. Children judge human-like robots as aggressive, but human-machine robots as friendly providing support for the uncanny valley. The paper concludes with discussing the results in light of design implications for children's robots.
Cross-cultural Exploration of Consumers’ Beliefs and Behavioral Intentions towards QR Codes in Marketing: An Experimental Study in India and USA

Current study focuses on examining consumers? beliefs and behavioral intentions towards QR Codes in marketing across different cultures such as India & USA. Study also examines select variables that moderate the relationship between beliefs and behavioral intentions. For this a scenario based experimental design was used. Findings suggest positive relationship between beliefs & behavioral intention and between culture & beliefs. Based on the empirical findings, study make important implications for the marketers so as to bring effectiveness in QR Code based marketing campaigns. Use of QR Codes in marketing is prevailing rapidly, however its effective integration in marketing mix remains mysterious as very little is known about consumers? beliefs and behavioral intentions towards it. Reason is that such academic research is practically non-existent, thus current study is of particular value.
Digoxin Reduces b -Adrenergic Contractile Response in Rabbit Hearts

Whereas mobilization of intracellular Ca 2 1 stimulates neuronal adenylyl cyclase via Ca 2 1 /calmodulin, mobilized Ca 2 1 directly inhibits adenylyl cyclase in other tissues. To determine the physiologic role of the Ca 2 1 -dependent interaction between Na 1 /Ca 2 1 exchange and b -adrenergic signal transduction in the intact heart, digoxin (0.3 mg/kg) was administered intravenously in rabbits. 30 min after the administration, digoxin impaired the peak left ventricular dP/dt response to dobutamine infusions by up to 38% as compared with control rabbits. This impairment was not caused by changes in either b -adrenergic receptor number or in the functional activity of stimulatory guanine nucleotide-binding protein. It was associated with 33–36% reductions in basal and stimulated adenylyl cyclase activities. Animals treated with calcium gluconate (20 mg/kg/min for 30 min) also demonstrated similar reductions in adenylyl cyclase activities. In addition, increasing the free Ca 2 1 concentration progressively inhibited adenylyl cyclase activity in the control, digoxin-treated, and calcium gluconate–treated sarcolemma preparations in vitro. Moreover, digoxin and calcium gluconate pretreatment blunted the increase in cAMP in myocardial tissue after dobutamine infusion in vivo. Thus, digoxin rapidly reduces b -adrenergic contractile response in rabbit hearts. This reduction may reflect an inhibition of adenylyl cyclase by Ca 2 1 mobilized via Na 1 /Ca 2 1 exchange. ( J. Clin. Invest. 1996. 97:6–13.)
Subsets During Persistent Infection in Mice Distinct Anatomical Locations and Cell -Herpesvirus Distribution in γ Differential

Murine (cid:1) -herpesvirus 68 (MHV-68) provides an important experimental model for analyzing (cid:1) -herpesvirus latent infection. After intranasal infection with MHV-68, we analyzed the distribution of the virus in different anatomical locations and puriﬁed populations of cells. Our data show that long-term latency is maintained in a variety of anatomical locations and cell populations with different frequencies. Importantly, we demonstrate that although latency in the lung is established in a variety of cell subsets, long-term latency in the lung is only maintained in B cells. In contrast, splenic latency is maintained in macrophages and dendritic cells, as well as in B cells. In blood, isotype-switched B cells constitute the major viral reservoir. These results show that the cell subsets in which latency is established vary within different anatomical sites. Finally, we demonstrate that long-term latency is accompanied by a low level of infectious virus in lung and spleen. These data have important implications for understanding the establishment and maintenance of latency by (cid:1) 2 -herpesviruses. The Journal of Immunology, 2003, 170: 3828–3834. he (cid:1) -herpesviruses are oncogenic viruses associated with a number of malignancies. After clearance of the initial acute infection by the immune system, they establish lifelong latency in asymptomatic carriers. This persistent infection is the result of delicate balance between immune control, viral latency, viral reactivation, and persistent replication. Only a minor proportion of the infected hosts eventually develop malignancies due to either immune breakdown or tumor cell escape as a consequence of phenotypic changes. The (cid:1) -herpesviruses have devel-oped multiple evolutionary mechanisms to evade immune surveil-lance, including the capacity to establish latency at very low frequencies in speciﬁc cell types. The human (cid:1) -herpesviruses,
Symbolic Execution in Di ffi cult Environments

Symbolic execution is a technique that can automatically generate high-coverage test cases for programs. The idea is to step through a program while keeping some input data symbolic—i.e. not fully specified. Then whenever a branch point is reached, the program state can be forked and both branches can be taken, with the symbolic data appropriately constrained on each branch. When a potentially dangerous operation on symbolic data is encountered, a contraint solver can be invoked used to try to generate concrete inputs that cause the program to go wrong at that operation. Symbolic execution becomes difficult for programs that interact with an external environment like a filesystem. Although one could achieve “high coverage” by returning arbitrary values from external calls, if these values are not consistent with the behavior of the real environment, any “bugs” found on these branches may be spurious. Thus, for symbolic execution to work in this case—specifically if we want there to be no false positives—then the behavior of these interactions must be modeled. The purpose of this project is to explore what is involved in such an undertaking.
Group Consensus with Switching Topology of Multi-agent Systems

In this paper, we consider group consensus problem with switching topology by giving a kind of new protocol in which communication graph weights are all nonnegative. This is also consistent with classic protocols. The sufficient conditions which group consensus under this kind of protocols can reach for both single and second order multi-agent system are obtained. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate our theoretical results.
Convergence of Iterative Waterfilling Algorithm for Gaussian Interference Channels

The full diversity gain provided by a multi-antenna channel can be achieved by transmit beamforming and receive combining. This requires the knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter which is difficult to obtain in practice. Quantized beamforming where fixed codebooks known at both the transmitter and the receiver are used to quantize the CSI has been proposed to solve this problem. Most recent works focus attention on limited feedback codebook design for the uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel. Such designs are sub-optimal when used in correlated channels. In this paper, we propose systematic codebook design for correlated channels when channel statistical information is known at the transmitter. This design is motivated by studying the performance of pure statistical beamforming in correlated channels and is implemented by maps that can rotate and scale spherical caps on the Grassmannian manifold. Based on this study, we show that even statistical beamforming is near-optimal if the transmitter covariance matrix is ill-conditioned and receiver covariance matrix is well-conditioned. This leads to a partitioning of the transmit and receive covariance spaces based on their conditioning with variable feedback requirements to achieve an operational performance level in the different partitions. When channel statistics are difficult to obtain at the transmitter, we propose a universal codebook design (also implemented by the rotation-scaling maps) that is robust to channel statistics. Numerical studies show that even few bits of feedback, when applied with our designs, lead to near perfect CSI performance in a variety of correlated channel conditions.
Association between Dietary Vitamin A Intake and the Risk of Glioma: Evidence from a Meta-analysis

The results from epidemiological studies between dietary vitamin A intake and glioma risk is not consistent. Thus, a meta-analysis was conducted to confirm the exact relationship between them. PubMed and Web of Knowledge were used to search the relevant articles up to May 2015. Pooled relative risk (RR) with 95% confidence interval (CI)was calculated using random-effect model. Egger’s test was used to assess the small-study effect. At the end, seven articles with eight case-control studies involving 1841 glioma cases and 4123 participants were included. Our study indicated that highest category of dietary vitamin A intake was significantly associated with reduced risk of glioma (RR = 0.80, 95% CI = 0.62–0.98, p = 0.014, I2 = 54.9%). Egger’s test did not find any publication bias. In conclusion, our study indicated that higher category of dietary vitamin A intake could reduce the glioma risk. However, we could not do a dose-response analysis for vitamin A intake with glioma risk due to the limited data in each reported individual article. Due to this limitation, further studies with detailed dose, cases and person-years for each category is wanted to assess this dose-response association.