Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Meal Ingestion on Plasma Amylin Concentration in NIDDM and Nondiabetic Humans

Recent interest has focused on the potential role of amylin in the pathogenesis of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM). This 37-amino acid peptide is found in extracellular amyloid deposits in ∼50% of pancreatic islets of patients with NIDDM and has been shown to inhibit skeletal muscle glycogen synthesis in vitro. Immunocytochemical studies have colocalized amylin and insulin within β-cell secretory granules in nondiabetic humans, provoking the following questions. Is amylin cosecreted with insulin? Are circulating amylin concentrations higher in patients with NIDDM either before or after food ingestion? To answer these questions, we developed a sensitive and specific immunoassay to measure plasma concentrations of amylin in humans. Use of this assay indicated that, in lean nondiabetic subjects, glucose ingestion resulted in an increase (P < 0.001) in the plasma concentration of amylin (from 2.03 ± 0.22 to 3.78 ± 0.39 pM) and insulin (from 48.3 ± 3.1 to 265 ± 44 pM). There was a significant correlation between the concentrations of insulin and amylin (r = 0.74, P < 0.001) and the increase in insulin and amylin concentration (r = 0.65, P < 0.005). Fasting concentrations of amylin did not differ in diabetic and weight-matched nondiabetic subjects and showed a similar pattern of change after ingestion of a mixed meal. We conclude that amylin is secreted in response to ingestion of either glucose or a mixed meal and circulates at concentrations that do not differ in patients with NIDDM and nondiabetic subjects. It remains to be determined whether amylin at physiological concentrations influences carbohydrate metabolism and if so whether its effects differ in diabetic and nondiabetic humans.
Early development of chondrocranium in the tailed frog Ascaphus truei (Amphibia: Anura): Implications for anuran palatoquadrate homologies

Chondrocranial development in Ascaphus truei was studied by serial sectioning and graphical reconstruction. Nine stages (21–29; 9–18 mm TL) were examined. Mesodermal cells were distinguished from ectomesenchymal (neural crest derived) cells by retained yolk granules. Ectomesenchymal parts of the chondrocranium include the suprarostrals, pila preoptica, anterior trabecula, and palatoquadrate. Mesodermal parts of the chondrocranium include the orbital cartilage, posterior trabecula, parachordal, basiotic lamina, and otic capsule. Development of the palatoquadrate is as follows. The pterygoid process first connects with the trabecula far rostrally; their fusion progresses caudally. The ascending process connects with a mesodermal bar that extends from the orbital cartilage to the otic capsule, and forms the ventral border of the dorsal trigeminal outlet. This bar is the “ascending process” of Ascaphus adults; it is a neurocranial, not palatoquadrate structure. The basal process chondrifies in an ectomesenchymal strand running from the quadrate keel to the postpalatine commissure. Later, the postpalatine commissure and basal process extend anteromedially to contact the floor of the anterior cupula of the otic capsule, creating separate foramina for the palatine and hyomandibular branches of the facial nerve. Based on these data, and on comparison with other frogs and salamanders, the anuran anterior quadratocranial commissure is homologized with the pterygoid process of salamanders, the anuran basal process (=“pseudobasal” or “hyobasal” process) with the basal process of salamanders, and the anuran otic ledge with the basitrabecular process of salamanders. The extensive similarities in palatoquadrate structure and development between frogs and salamanders, and lacking in caecilians, are not phylogenetically informative. Available information on fossil outgroups suggests that some of these similarities are primitive for Lissamphibia, whereas for others the polarity is uncertain. J. Morphol. 231:63‐100, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Antidiabetic Agent Rosiglitazone Upregulates SERCA2 and Enhances TNF-α- and LPS-Induced NF-κB-Dependent Transcription and TNF-α-Induced IL-6 Secretion in Ventricular Myocytes

Positive hemodynamic effects of the antidiabetic agent rosiglitazone on perfused whole hearts have recently been described, but the mechanisms regulating these effects are not well understood. This study reports the effects of rosiglitazone on calcium regulation in isolated neonatal rat ventricular myocytes by measurement of Ca2+ transient decay rates and SERCA2 gene expression, and shows that rosiglitazone enhances known cardioprotective signaling pathways. Myocyte treatment with 10 μmol/L rosiglitazone accelerated Ca2+ transient decay rates by ñ30%, enhanced SERCA2 mRNA levels by ñ1.5-fold and SERCA2 production by ñ3-fold. Rosiglitazone treatment (1, 5, and 10 μmol/L) also led to a dose-dependent increase (ñ1.2-1.5-fold) in SERCA2 promoter activity. Comparable levels of cardiac SERCA overexpression have been associated with physiologically relevant and compensatory effects in vivo. These data link thiazolidinedione-induced improvement in cardiac myocyte function to an upregulation of SERCA2 gene expression. Since NF-κB-dependent pathways, including the upregulation of IL-6 secretion, were shown to protect neonatal rat ventricular myocytes from apoptosis upon TNFα stimulation, additional experiments were designed to determine whether rosiglitazone enhances TNFα-induced NF-κB-dependent transcription and IL-6 secretion. Because the endotoxin stress response in ventricular myocytes involves the upregulation of TNFα, and the activation of NF-κB, the effects of rosiglitazone on lipopolysaccharide-induced NF-κB-dependent transcription were also investigated. Treatment of neonatal rat ventricular myocytes with 10 μmol/L rosiglitazone enhanced TNF-α- and lipopolysaccharide-induced NF-κB-dependent transcription by ñ1. 8- and ñ1. 4-fold respectively, and TNF-α-induced IL-6 secretion by ñ1.5-fold. Rosiglitazone had no significant effects on basal levels of NF-κB-dependent transcription and IL-6 secretion. Thus, cardioprotective effects of rosiglitazone may be partly mediated by NF-κB.
A feasibility study into prognostics for the main bearing of a wind turbine

Maintenance for wind turbines, particularly offshore turbines, presents a significant cost component to wind farm operators. The main bearing, which supports the low-speed shaft, is one of the major wind turbine system components. Since maintenance is confined to suitable weather windows, which are unpredictable, there is a need for decision support tools to ensure that maintenance is carried out in a timely way, but also at minimum cost and with minimum turbine downtime. This paper presents a methodology for the estimation of the remaining useful life (RUL) of the main bearing for a commercial wind turbine. A residual model is used to highlight potentially faulty behaviour, which is then post processed to provide a suitable signal for extrapolation using particle filters. The RUL is then effectively specified as a probability distribution which narrows as the failure point is approached, providing an estimate of RUL and a confidence measure. Our results suggest that RULs beyond 30 days can be reasonably estimated.
High prevalence of antibiotic resistance in nasopharyngeal bacterial isolates from healthy children in rural Uganda: A cross-sectional study

Abstract Background: In Uganda, the main causes of death in children under 5 years of age are malaria and pneumonia—often due to delayed diagnosis and treatment. In preparation for a community case management intervention for pneumonia and malaria, the bacterial composition of the nasopharyngeal flora and its in vitro resistance were determined in children aged five or under to establish baseline resistance to commonly used antibiotics. Methods: In a population-based survey in April 2008, nasopharyngeal specimens were collected from 152 randomly selected healthy children under 5 years of age in the Iganga/Mayuge Health and Demographic Surveillance Site (HDSS). Medical history and prior treatment were recorded. Demographic characteristics and risk factors for carriage of resistant strains were obtained from the HDSS census. Bacteria were isolated and analysed for antibiotic susceptibility using disk diffusion and E test. Results: Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae) carriage was 58.6%, and, while most (80.9%) isolates had intermediate resistance to penicillin, none was highly resistant. Whereas no isolate was resistant to erythromycin, 98.9% were resistant to trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole (co-trimoxazole). Conclusions: In vitro resistance in S. pneumoniae to co-trimoxazole treatment was high, and the majority of isolates had intermediate resistance to penicillin. To inform treatment policies on the clinical efficacy of current treatment protocols for pneumonia in health facilities and at the community level, routine surveillance of resistance in pneumonia pathogens is needed as well as research on treatment efficacy in cases with resistant strains. Improved clinical algorithms and diagnostics for pneumonia should be developed.
A Dynamic Approach to thread Scheduling in Hardware ( DASH )

As thread level parallelism in applications has continued to grow, research in chip multiprocessors (CMP’s) has continued to expand. Recent calls by industry have led researchers to develop new techniques for writing multithreaded programs for non-server applications. In these programs thread level parallelism will no longer be at the embarrassingly high levels enjoyed previously. As more and more applications become multi-threaded we expect to find the number of threads executing on a machine outpacing the number of thread contexts that are available for use. Scheduling these threads will eventually grow to become a critical bottleneck for multi-threaded program performance. Since the number of threads to be executed will be significantly larger than the number of contexts, the operating system will require increasingly larger amount of CPU time to schedule these threads efficiently. Instead of perpetuating the trend of performing thread scheduling in the operating system, we propose the hardware scheduling algorithm DASH. DASH attempts to minimize the effect of thread level data dependencies and maintain efficient execution of all threads in the processor without excessive overhead for scheduling computation.
Fairness for All, Rate Allocation for Mobile Wireless Networks

Fair rate allocation deals with the fundamental problem of sharing the channel efficiently and fairly. In wireless networks, several notable works have proposed optimal solutions to this problem. These approaches work well for static networks, but rely on an assumption that renders them sub-optimal when nodes are mobile: at each computation step, nodes must collect the state of all their neighbors (1-hop knowledge assumption). In large-scale mobile networks, nodes need to continuously adapt to changing network conditions. Under these circumstances, it is hard to gather complete 1-hop information accurately and promptly. The key to any efficient solution in mobile networks is fast convergence with limited information. In this paper, we propose a simple decentralized algorithm for fair rate allocation that works well even with partial 1-hop information. The algorithm converges linearly and can be tuned to approach a wide range of trade-offs (from proportional to harmonic fairness). Our evaluation, using real-world mobility traces from 400 taxi cabs, shows that even in the challenging case of highly dynamic and dense networks, the algorithm assigns rate efficiently (mean error of 2.5% from the optimum), while using on average 37% of the 1-hop information.
Empirical Study of the Impact of Supervisor Board Characteristics to Executive Changes in Listed Companies

By 1368 sub-samples of general manager changes in 444 Chinese listed companies from 1998 to 2008, this paper used panel LOGIT model to empirically inquiry the impact of corporate Supervisor Board to the mechanism of executive changes and found that supervisor board played an important role in executives changes of listed companies. The stock holding of Supervisor Board had significantly positive correlation with the executive changes; there was a significant negative correlation between the size of Supervisor Board and the executive changes. This paper argues that companies need to rationalize the size of the supervisor board, small-scale Supervisor Board is more efficient in the decision of executive changes; members of the supervisor board in listed companies should be encouraged to hold the Company shares; listed companies in equity-based incentives for executives should not simply consider the incentive effects, should also be fully taken into account for the infirmness of the executives changes mechanism. This paper's contribution is to effectively extend the range of the related research of internal control mechanism in listed companies.
A Statistical Phrase/Accent Model for Intonation Modeling

This paper proposes a statistical phrase/accent model of voice fundamental frequency(F0) for speech synthesis. It presents an approach for automatic extraction and modeling of phrase and accent phenomena from F0 contours by taking into account their overall trends in the training data. An iterative optimization algorithm is described to extract these components, minimizing the reconstruction error of the F0 contour. This method of modeling local and global components of F0 separately is shown to be better than conventional F0 models used in Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis (SPSS). Perceptual evaluations confirm that the proposed model is significantly better than baseline SPSS F0 models in 3 prosodically diverse tasks – read speech, radio broadcast speech and audio book speech.
Exploring how males who encounter phenomena they identify as 'Conversion Disorder'/'Functional Neurological Disorder' experience agency in their lives

This research investigates the way that males who identify with the diagnostic label ‘conversion disorder/functional neurological disorder (CD/FND)’ experience agency in their lives. The historical developments, controversies and complexities around ‘CD/FND’ form the backdrop of this exploration into the lived experience of agency. A sample of eight participants were recruited via social networking sites and charities, and the data was collected through Skype-based interviews and analysed using the qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach. The analysis showed the following five main themes: ‘paradox of control’, ‘living within a dualistic framework’, ‘disconnection from self and others’, ‘engaged in a battle or fight’ and ‘meaning and reality as dependent on other people’. These master themes and their related subordinate themes are presented in light of existing research. The findings highlight the difficulty experienced by participants who identify with a diagnostic label that is at odds with a medicalised approach to understanding and treating illness. The limitations of this study and the potential avenues for future research are also discussed.
A low complexity channel estimation algorithm for massive MIMO system

An improved minimum mean square error (MMSE) channel method with low complexity is proposed for the massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system. In the method, the covariance matrix in the MMSE method is firstly approximately estimated by the received signal, where the optimal approximated weight is given, and then the Sherman-Morrison theorem is employed to transform the matrix inversion into the product of the matrix and vector. The simulation results show that the proposed method can greatly reduce the computational complexity of the MMSE method and only has a little performance loss. Moreover, compared with the available methods, the proposed method has a better performance and lower complexity.
Systematic high-level address code transformations for piece-wise linear indexing: illustration on a medical imaging algorithm

Exploring data transfer and storage issues is crucial to efficiently map data intensive applications (e.g., multimedia) onto programmable processors. Code transformations are used to minimise main memory bus load and hence also power and system performance, However this typically incurs a considerable arithmetic overhead in the addressing and local control. For instance, memory optimising in-place and data-layout transformations add costly module and integer division operations to the initial addressing code. In this paper, we show how the cycle overhead can be almost completely removed. This is done according to a systematic methodology which is a combination of an algebraic transformation exploration approach for the (non)linear arithmetic on top of an efficient transformation technique for reducing the piece-wise linear indexing to linear pointer arithmetic. The approach is illustrated on a real-life medical application, using a variety of programmable processor architectures. Total gains in cycle count ranging between a factor 5 and 25 are obtained compared to conventional compilers.
Stationary frame current regulation using Proportional Resonant controller for single phase grid connected inverter

This paper presented Proportional Resonant (PR) current control of single phase grid connected inverter for PV energy conversion to the utility grid. The synchronization mechanism is Second-Order Generalized Integrator (SOGI) phase locked loop (PLL). The PR current control is regulator in stationary reference frame and an advantage is reduce current distortion. The implemented software using Real Time Workshop and DS1103 Library in Matlab/Simulink environment. The simulation and HIL402 experimental results of single phase inverter has been shown that the current quality is satisfy with IEEE Std. 1547-2003.
Knowledge Discovery from Static Datasets to Evolving Data Streams and Challenges

Mining data streams has recently become an important active research work and more widespread in several fields of computer science and engineering. It has proven successfully in many domains such as wireless sensor networks, ATM transactions, search engines, web analysis and weather monitoring. Data steams can be considered a subfield of machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery. Data Mining is a step in the process of knowledge discovery from large amount of data. Traditional data mining techniques can not be easily applied to the data stream mining due to unique characteristics of data streams. In this research work, we will survey the main techniques and applications of data mining and data stream mining. We then study, the computational and miming challenges in particular, on-line mining of continuous, high-speed massive data streams.
Social psychology of persuasion applied to human-agent interaction

A bstract: This paper discusses and evaluates the application of a social psychologically enriched, user-centered approach to agent architecture design. The major aim is to facilitate human‐agent interaction () by making agents not only algorithmically more i ntelligent but also socially more skillful in communicating with the user. A decision-making model and communicative argumentation strategies have been incorporated into the agent architecture. In the presented content resource management experiments, enhancement of human task performance is demonstrated for users that are supported by a persuasive agent. This superior performance seems to be rooted in a more trusting collaborative relationship between the user and the agent, rather than in the appropriateness of the agent’s decision-making suggestions alone. In particular, the second experiment demonstrated that interface interaction design should follow the principles of taskorientation and implicitness. Making the influence of the agent too salient can trigger counterintentional effects, such as users’ discomfort and psychological reactance. K eywords: human-agent interaction, user-centered design, decision making, persuasion.
Sparse matrix inversion with scaled Lasso

We propose a new method of learning a sparse nonnegative-definite target matrix. Our primary example of the target matrix is the inverse of a population covariance or correlation matrix. The algorithm first estimates each column of the target matrix by the scaled Lasso and then adjusts the matrix estimator to be symmetric. The penalty level of the scaled Lasso for each column is completely determined by data via convex minimization, without using cross-validation. We prove that this scaled Lasso method guarantees the fastest proven rate of convergence in the spectrum norm under conditions of weaker form than those in the existing analyses of other $\ell_1$ regularized algorithms, and has faster guaranteed rate of convergence when the ratio of the $\ell_1$ and spectrum norms of the target inverse matrix diverges to infinity. A simulation study demonstrates the computational feasibility and superb performance of the proposed method. Our analysis also provides new performance bounds for the Lasso and scaled Lasso to guarantee higher concentration of the error at a smaller threshold level than previous analyses, and to allow the use of the union bound in column-by-column applications of the scaled Lasso without an adjustment of the penalty level. In addition, the least squares estimation after the scaled Lasso selection is considered and proven to guarantee performance bounds similar to that of the scaled Lasso.
Automating Data warehouse design using ontology

Requirement Analysis is a crucial and arduous task in data warehouse design process. We provide a solution to support data warehouse design, which combines need driven and data driven design approaches. Our solution is based on ontology representation language and work results on ontology alignment. Our design method occurs in two steps. The first one, which is interactive and semi-automatic, transforms user requirements into ontologies, the second step that is fully automatic, aligns the resulting ontologies from the first step and produces an ontology associated to the Multidimensional Data model. The waste management field will be our guideline to illustrate our approach.
Pkd 1 l 1 establishes left-right asymmetry and physically interacts with Pkd 2

INTRODUCTION The internal organs and vasculature of all vertebrates are left-right (L-R) asymmetrical in their position and patterning; this asymmetry is conserved, revealing a clearly ancient origin. Morphological asymmetry of the initially symmetrical embryo is first evident during somitogenesis, when the heart tube kinks asymmetrically to the right. During subsequent development of the embryo, the heart, lungs, gut and associated vasculature all become asymmetrically positioned and patterned. Defects in this process are associated with congenital human disorders, most significantly heart disease (Ramsdell, 2005). The earliest known event in establishing mammalian L-R asymmetry is a leftwards flow of liquid in the embryonic node, at ~8.0 days post-coitum (dpc) in mouse, resulting from the clockwise rotation of polarised, posteriorly tilted nodal cilia (Hirokawa et al., 2006; Shiratori and Hamada, 2006). This 'nodal flow' in turn results in activation of the left-sided Nodal signalling cascade. The TGF family member Nodal is expressed in the left, but not right, lateral plate mesoderm (LPM) (Collignon et al., 1996; Lowe et al., 1996), where it induces its own expression, as well as that of its antagonist Lefty2 and the downstream transcription factor Pitx2 (Shiratori and Hamada, 2006). Whereas Nodal and Lefty2 are expressed for only a few hours (between 3 and 6 somites), specifically left-sided Pitx2 expression is maintained into organogenesis and is argued to be the ultimate specifier of leftness