Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analgesic effects of neurotensin agonists in a rat bone cancer pain model

Bone metastases are a source of intractable pain, resistant to conventional opioid and non-opioid analgesics. The neurotensin system represents a potential pathway toward bone cancer pain (BCP) relieve via the inhibition of its receptors NTS1 and NTS2. Capitalizing on our recent results using neurotensin analogs in inflammatory and neuropathic pain models, we here show, for the first time, a potential role for neurotensin receptors agonists in the treatment of BCP. The novel non-selective agonist JMV-2009 (300 µg/kg) reversed mechanical allodynia in our rodent BCP model at both early and late stages of the disease. The NTS2-selective agonist JMV-431 (90 µg/kg), in addition to anti-allodynia, also had an effect on weight bearing deficits. In parallel, we tested proven analgesics from several classes to put the effect of neurotensin analogs in perspective and found that morphine (3 mg/kg), tramadol (15 mg/kg) and amitriptyline (10 mg/kg) had mild effects on BCP while the cannabinoid nabilone (1 mg/kg) significantly reversed both allodynia and weight bearing deficits. Taken together, our results affirm the potential of the modulation of the neurotensin system for the development of new analgesics for the treatment of bone cancer pain. Summary statement Opioid and non-opioid analgesics were used to alleviate pain in a new rodent model of bone metastasis. The effect of each compound depended on the context and the evaluation method.
Gait design of biped robot based on USBSSC32

In order to meet the urgent needs of dynamic equilibrium and path planning problem about biped robot gait design, on the basis of the analysis and imitation of human walking principle, combining with ZMP stability theory, using USBSSC32 multiple servo controller, we study various gait control methods, and develop related implementation program. The application results show that the design method has good stability, and can effectively control the biped robot to stably walk along straight line, circle, square and other routes.
Resource-based Theory, Dynamic Capabilities, and Real Options

A lthough early contributions to resource-based theory and dynamic capabilities came from the discipline of economics (e., during the last 20 years the business field of strategic management has made significant contributions to resource-based theory and dynamic capabilities (e. Logic dictates that (organizational) economic theory will continue to play an important role in the study of economic value creation and sustainable competitive advantage. After all, sustainable competitive advantage requires an understanding of market frictions, and there is a large and well-developed economics research literature on market failures that students studying the economics of organization can draw on. Although the market-failures literature is well developed, the organizational failures literature is comparatively less developed, thereby providing research opportunities for students studying the economics of organization. Furthermore, resource-based theory and dynamic capabilities and real options research may develop into a paradigmatic approach to strategic management, an important contribution to the evolving science of organization. Clearly, there is a need for rigorous empirical research to establish both the nature and the impact of dynamic capabilities on sustainable competitive advantage. Capabilities that can prove especially useful in dynamic business environments are operational and strategic flexibility. I begin this chapter with the seminal work of Penrose (1959), who provides (1) a general theory of the growth of the firm, (2) a theory of entrepreneurship based on the subjective opportunity set of the firm, (3) expansion based on indivisibility and the balance of processes, (4) a
Computer-Aided Detection of Solid and Ground Glass Nodules in Thoracic CT images using two independent CAD systems

In computed tomographic lung cancer screening, both solid and ground glass nodules are regularly encountered. Ground glass nodules may or may not have a solid component and it has been shown that they have a much higher chance of being malignant in comparison to solid nodules. Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems designed for solid nodules perform poorly on detection of ground glass nodules, and vice versa. Therefore, a CAD system that combines the output of two prototype CAD systems aimed at detection of ground glass nodules and solid nodules, respectively, could lead to efficient detection of the entire spectrum of lung nodules in chest CT scans. In this study, we combine the output of two prototype CAD systems and show results on a data set of 73 CT examinations containing both solid and ground glass nodules. The main category of nodules which are found by both CAD systems are ground glass nodules with a solid component.
A waypoint guidance strategy for underwater snake robots

In this paper, a waypoint guidance strategy is proposed for an underwater snake robot. The robot is directed to follow a path which is derived using path planning techniques. A first version of the path is derived by the path planner by using the artificial potential field method for obstacle avoidance. Afterwards, by subsampling the derived path, a set of waypoints are chosen along the path. The path is then defined by interconnecting these waypoints by straight lines. Secondly, a straight line path following controller is proposed, to make the underwater snake robot follow the desired path. Simulation results are presented, illustrating the performance of the proposed guidance control strategy for both lateral undulation and eel-like motion.
Keeping hot chips cool

With 90nm CMOS in production and 65nm testing in progress, power has been pushed to the forefront of design metrics. This paper outline practical techniques that are used to reduce both leakage as well as active power in a standard-cell library based high-performance design flow. We discuss the design and cost issues for using different power saving techniques such as: power gating to reduce leakage, multiple and hybrid threshold libraries for leakage reduction and multiple supply voltage based design. In addition techniques to reduce clock tree power are presented as power consumed in clocks accounts for a significant portion of total chip power. Practical aspects of implementing these techniques is also discussed.
SEGMENTATION DU MARCHÉ EN MATIÈRE DES SERVICES B TO B EN FONCTION DE LA MATRICE " COMPLEXITE DE SERVICE / RELATIONS DE FORCE "

Le present travail vise a apprecier l’utilite du marketing relationnel d’une part, pour contribuer a l’examen du phenomene complexe de la gestion des relations au sein d’un systeme de servuction [1] , et d'autre part, pour comprendre le comportement des differents acteurs en presence lors de l'achat du service B to B. La gestion des relations au moment de la realisation du service, necessite donc une connaissance approfondie des entreprises clientes, afin de les satisfaire tout au long du processus de la prestation. Ainsi, le concept de base pour deboucher sur une satisfaction de la clientele est la segmentation des clients identifies, avec pour objectif principal leur fidelisation. Ce travail cherche, en premier lieu, a etablir une matrice conduisant a une segmentation des clients en fonction de deux parametres a savoir la « complexite de service » et les « rapports de force » avec le prestataire. En second lieu, la validite des deux parametres de cette matrice sera testee par une etude empirique prealable aupres de cinq prestataires. [1] Servuction est un neologisme cree par Eiglier et Langeard pour designer le systeme de production du servic ; in EIGLIER P., LANGEARD E. (1982), Servuction, Marketing des services , Mc GRAW-HILL, Paris .
Pseudomonas aeruginosa Induces Type-III-Secretion-Mediated Apoptosis of Macrophages and Epithelial Cells

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a gram-negative opportunistic pathogen that is cytotoxic towards a variety of eukaryotic cells. To investigate the effect of this bacterium on macrophages, we infected J774A.1 cells and primary bone-marrow-derived murine macrophages with the P. aeruginosa strain PA103 in vitro. PA103 caused type-III-secretion-dependent killing of macrophages within 2 h of infection. Only a portion of the killing required the putative cytotoxin ExoU. By three criteria, terminal deoxynucleotidyltransferase-mediated dUTP-biotin nick end labeling assays, cytoplasmic nucleosome assays, and Hoechst staining, the ExoU-independent but type-III-secretion-dependent killing exhibited features of apoptosis. Extracellular bacteria were capable of inducing apoptosis, and some laboratory and clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa induced significantly higher levels of this form of cell death than others. Interestingly, HeLa cells but not Madin-Darby canine kidney cells were susceptible to type-III-secretion-mediated apoptosis under the conditions of these assays. These findings are consistent with a model in which the P. aeruginosa type III secretion system transports at least two factors that kill macrophages: ExoU, which causes necrosis, and a second, as yet unidentified, effector protein, which induces apoptosis. Such killing may contribute to the ability of this organism to persist and disseminate within infected patients.
The role of market and technological knowledge in recognizing entrepreneurial opportunities

Purpose – Opportunity recognition is an important aspect on entrepreneurship, especially for technology‐based ventures. Drawing on Austrian economic theory, recent studies have emphasized the importance of market knowledge in opportunity recognition. Although insightful, these studies do not take account of relationships that exist between different types of knowledge (e.g. technology and market knowledge). The authors aim to address this gap by integrating the Schumpeterian theory of opportunity development with Kirzner's theory of opportunity discovery to examine these relationships.Design/methodology/approach – The data consist of a longitudinal sample of 42 new biotechnology ventures from the USA, Finland, and Sweden.Findings – The paper finds that both market knowledge and technological knowledge (measured as the number of patents) contribute to firms' subsequent recognition of entrepreneurial opportunities.Originality/value – The results show the value and importance of early market knowledge and te.
Approximation and Inverse Control of Nonlinear System using Standard Continuous Piecewise Linear Neural Networks

The main difficulty for standard continuous piecewise linear neural networks (SCPLNN) approximation is how to partition the definitional domain into several simplices, which is called a triangulation. In this paper, we firstly propose a method of triangulation to perform SCPLNN approximation. Our scheme starts with an initial, coarse triangulation of the given data and subdivides simplex until the error of the SCPLNN approximation is smaller than some tolerance. Then SCPLNN based on triangulation is identified. The proposed method involving triangulation and identification of SCPLNN is shown to be useful in approximating nonlinear systems. In addition, for each simplex, the local inverse model can easily be calculated for each local model of SCPLNN is linear. From control perspective, we exploit the advantage of the piecewise linear property of SCPLNN and design controllers for each approximate model. The validity of this control scheme using inverse of the local linear model is tested by using a NARX model.
Identifying transcription factor functions and targets by phenotypic activation

Mapping transcriptional regulatory networks is difficult because many transcription factors (TFs) are activated only under specific conditions. We describe a generic strategy for identifying genes and pathways induced by individual TFs that does not require knowledge of their normal activation cues. Microarray analysis of 55 yeast TFs that caused a growth phenotype when overexpressed showed that the majority caused increased transcript levels of genes in specific physiological categories, suggesting a mechanism for growth inhibition. Induced genes typically included established targets and genes with consensus promoter motifs, if known, indicating that these data are useful for identifying potential new target genes and binding sites. We identified the sequence 5′-TCACGCAA as a binding sequence for Hms1p, a TF that positively regulates pseudohyphal growth and previously had no known motif. The general strategy outlined here presents a straightforward approach to discovery of TF activities and mapping targets that could be adapted to any organism with transgenic technology.
Character prominence and perspective in narrative comprehension

Current theories of narrative comprehension assume that readers attend to information about the protagonist, including his/her goals, location, and emotions. However, such a Limited view of narrative comprehension does not adequately address the complexity of text. Typically, the reader is exposed to an array of important secondary characters and their relations to the protagonist(s) in narratives. Also included in this story dynamic may be the beliefs or opinions of the secondary character(s) regarding the protagonist. Three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of character prominence and perspective on reading comprehension for narratives. The prominence distinction between two characters, a protagonist and secondary character, was established by controlling the order of mention and the number of references to each character by proper name and pronoun. Character perspective was introduced into the narratives by describing the beliefs of the secondary character regarding the protagonist. The effects of such belief-based descriptions on comprehension were compared to other protagonist descriptions that were asserted as true from an omniscient narrator's perspective. Reading time results showed that the beliefs of the secondary character regarding the protagonist were used to update the reader's mental representation of the protagonist. When the beliefs of the secondary character were inconsistent with a later action performed by the protagonist, readers experienced comprehension difficulty. However, this difficulty was delayed (i.e., observed on the second target sentence) relative to when that action was inconsistent with a previous description which was stated as true of the protagonist from the narrator's perspective (Experiment 1). Further, the effects of the second character's beliefs on reading comprehension were affected by the second character's location in the target action scene (Experiment 3). The comprehension difficulty observed when the second character was present in the target action scene was not observed when the second character was removed from that scene. These results contribute to the limited research on the role of secondary characters in narrative comprehension.
Altitude-dependent and -independent variations in Plasmodium falciparum prevalence in northeastern Tanzania.

BACKGROUND Effective malaria control requires information about intensity of transmission across large areas and populations. Estimates based on entomological factors lack precision and are not cost-effective to obtain. We tested altitude and rainfall measurements as correlates of transmission intensity in different ecological settings. METHODS We conducted 2 cross-sectional surveys of approximately 12,000 people (1-45 years old) in 6 altitude transects (150-1800 m) in the Kilimanjaro and Tanga regions of Tanzania. Data were analyzed for associations with altitude and rainfall estimates by use of appropriate regression models. RESULTS Plasmodium falciparum prevalence showed a negative relationship with altitude (19% and 21% decrease/100-m altitude increase, respectively, in children in Kilimanjaro and Tanga) and rainfall during the 3 months before the survey (46% decrease/100-mm rainfall increase in children in Kilimanjaro). Mean hemoglobin concentrations increased with altitude (0.05 and 0.09 g/dL/100-m altitude increase, respectively, in children in Kilimanjaro and Tanga) and rainfall (0.17 g/dL/100-mm rainfall increase in children and adults in Kilimanjaro). DISCUSSION Altitude and rainfall were correlated with parasite prevalence and mean hemoglobin concentration; however, the relationship varied according to ecological setting. Climatological variables alone cannot predict malarial outcomes. Local variations in seasonality of malaria transmission--together with vector species composition, topography, host and parasite genetics, and socioeconomic factors--may influence malaria prevalence.
Improving Text Normalization using Character-Blocks Based Models and System Combination

There are many abbreviation and non-standard tokens in SMS and Twitter messages. Normalizing these non-standard tokens will ease natural language processing modules for these domains. Recently, character-level machine translation (MT) and sequence labeling methods have been used for this normalization task, and demonstrated competitive performance. In this paper, we propose an approach to segment words into blocks of characters according to their phonetic symbols, and apply MT and sequence labeling models on such block-level. We also propose to combine these methods, as well as with other existing methods, in order to leverage their different strengths. Our experiments show our proposed approach achieved high precision and broad coverage. TITLE AND ABSTRACT IN CHINESE
The research of heterogeneous networked control systems based on modify Smith predictor and fuzzy adaptive control

Fuzzy control is simple in design, and has strong robustness. It can obtain ideal control effect in the case of not firmly knowing the system model, and can be applied to many nonlinear systems. In order to effectively restrain the impact of network delays for networked control systems (NCS), a novel approach is proposed that modified Smith predictor combined with fuzzy adaptive PID control for the heterogeneous networked control systems (HNCS). The HNCS adopt the cascade control system structure, use P control in the inner loop and fuzzy adaptive control in the outer loop. The data communications of loops adopt heterogeneous wired networks. Based on modified Smith predictor, achieve complete compensations for delays of networks and controlled plants. Because modified Smith predictor does not include network delay models, it is no need for measuring, identifying or estimating network delays on line. Therefore it is applicable to occasions that network delays are larger than one, even tens of sampling periods. Based on CSMA/AMP (CAN bus) in the inner loop and CSMA/CD (Ethernet) in the outer loop, and there are data packets loss, the results of simulation show validity of the control scheme, and can improve dynamic performance, enhance robustness, self-adaptability and anti-jamming abilities.
A lossless approach for external memory bandwidth reduction in video coding systems and its VLSI architecture

This paper presents the Reference Frame Context Adaptive Variable-Length Coder (RFCAVLC), which is a lossless solution to external memory bandwidth reduction in current video coding systems. The proposed approach is based on an adaptation of the traditional Huffman algorithm, and it uses eight static tables to avoid the cost of the on-the-fly statistical analysis. The best table to encode a block is defined using a context evaluation, resulting in a context-adaptive configuration. The use of RFCAVLC reached an average compression rate higher than 31% for the evaluated video sequences. The architectures that implement the RFCAVLC encoder and decoder were designed and synthesized to an FPGA device. The RFCAVLC design is able to reach real-time encoding for WQSXGA (3200 × 2048 pixels) at 30 fps. The synthesis results show that this solution can be easily coupled to a complete video encoder system with negligible hardware overhead and without compromising the throughput for real-time high-definition multimedia applications.
Retrieval of guitarist fingering information using computer vision

Writing musical notation for guitar, otherwise known as tablature (or colloquially, “tab”) can be a tedious and time-consuming task when performed by hand. Software exists that can detect the pitch of a signal emitted from a musical instrument, but this is insufficient for guitar tablature which also requires spatial information. Previous vision-based methods had low accuracy rates and required the camera to be fixed to the guitar neck. In this paper we propose an algorithm that uses a markerless approach to successfully locate a guitar fretboard in a webcam image, normalise it and detect the individual locations of the guitarist's fretting fingers. Preliminary testing of this system shows that it is more accurate at note recognition than existing methods which require a camera mounted on the guitar neck.
An improved EM algorithm for content based image retrieval

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) mainly contains two phases: first, to represent an image; second, to measure the dissimilarity between two images. Expectation-Maximization (EM) is a popular algorithm for clustering Gauss mixtures for the image representation, but the greedy nature of EM make it hard to get an optimal model for CBIR. In this paper, we introduce an improved EM algorithm for clustering Gaussian Mixtures (GMs) to represent an image, instead of regular EM algorithm. We also use different dissimilarity measures for different queries according to their statistics features. Experiments show this approach can greatly improve the performance of CBIR.
Postprocessing of block-coded videos for deflicker and deblocking

In this paper, we propose a novel postprocessing method to suppress both the flickering and blocking artifacts in block-coded videos. For reducing the flickering effect between adjacent frames, we propose an adaptive multi-scale motion filtering method to maintain the motion coherence of processed video. For blocking artifacts suppression, we adopt a patch-based scheme in which similar patches are grouped in a spatio-temporal domain and each patch group is recovered by solving a low rank matrix completion problem. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly reduce the flickering and blocking artifacts in the decoded videos.
A Case of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome Triggered by Combined Use of Lamotrigine and Valproic Acid

Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS) was first described by Stevens and Johnson in 1922. It is an acute mucocutaneous hypersensitivity reaction, involving skin and mucous membranes. This is a rare but life-threatening syndrome. The use of non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs, penicillin, antimalarials, sulphonamides, and anticonvulsants are common etiologic factors. In this report, we present a case of Stevens-Johnson syndrome related with concomitant use of lamotrigine and valproic acid. A 7 year-old boy referred to emergency clinic suffering from erythematous papules, predominantly on the face and neck, and lesions around the mouth. The patient was under valproic acid therapy for three years with the diagnosis of epilepsy. Because of poor control of the seizures, lamotrigine (25 mg/day) had been added to the treatment one month ago. Dose of the drug had been gradually increased to 50 mg/day in three-weeks period. After one week of this dose, skin eruptions had appeared. In conclusion, the clinicians should be aware of the fact that combined use of lamotrigine and valproic acid increases the risk of SJS especially in children. Patients who undergo anticonvulsant therapy should be informed about possible cutaneous adverse effects and treatment should be discontinued immediately if any rash appears.