Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Right prefrontal activation produced by arterial baroreceptor stimulation: a PET study

This study was performed to test the hypothesis of greater right hemispheric involvement in the processing of baroreceptor stimuli. Carotid sinus baroreceptors were stimulated by rhythmically decreasing air pressure in a neck chamber, and under control conditions the thorax was stimulated in a similar manner. Changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were measured by PET. Baroreceptor stimulation resulted in rCBF increase in the right anterior–inferior prefrontal cortex (Brodmann areas (BA) 10/44/47) and bilaterally in BA 6/8. We conclude that in at least some stages of baroreceptor information processing the right hemisphere plays a greater role than the left hemisphere.
Convergence Analysis on Unstructured Meshes of a DDFV Method for Flow Problems with Full Neumann Boundary Conditions

A Discrete Duality Finite Volume (DDFV) method to solve on unstructured meshes the flow problems in anisotropic nonhomogeneous porous media with full Neumann boundary conditions is proposed in the present work. We start with the derivation of the discrete problem. A result of existence and uniqueness of a solution for that problem is given thanks to the properties of its associated matrix combined with adequate assumptions on data. Their theoretical properties, namely, stability and error estimates (in discrete energy norms and -norm), are investigated. Numerical test is provided.
A distributed algorithm for constrained optimization problem in multi-agent systems with communication delays

A constrained optimization problem, which needs to optimize a global cost function with equality constraints, is investigated in this paper. Based on the consensus theory of multi-agent systems, we provide a distributed algorithm to solve the constrained optimization problem. While the communication delays between agents are taken into account, some sufficient conditions for the convergence of the distributed algorithm are derived by applying the Nyquist stability criterion and the Gerschgorin disk theorem. Finally, a numerical example illustrates our theoretical results.
Development of a Master-Slave System for Active Endoscope Using a Multi-DOF Ultrasonic Motor

Endoscopes for industrial and medical fields are expected to have multi degree-of-freedom (DOF) motions. A multi-DOF ultrasonic motor we developed consists of a spherical rotor and a bar-shaped stator, and the rotor rotates around three perpendicular axes using three natural vibration modes of the stator. In this study, a multi-DOF unilateral master-slave system for active endoscope using the multi-DOF ultrasonic motor is developed. The configurations of master and slave arms for a ctive endoscope are similar, so that an operator can easily handle the master-slave system. First, driving characteristics of the multi-DOF ultrasonic motor are meas- ured in order to design the slave arm and its controller. Next, the master arm and the slave arm are designed. Then, the unilateral feedback contro ller for the master-slave system is developed. Finally, the motion contro l tests of rotor are conducted. As a result, the possibility of the endoscope is confirmed.
Obligations and the Specification of Agent Behavior

Recently several agent architectures have been proposed that incorporate obligations. However, agent specification or verification languages that take obligations into account have received less attention. Our research question is how properties involving obligations can be specified or verified in an extension of Rao and Georgeff's B D I C T L In Section 2 we extend B D I C T L with so-called Standard Deontic Logic, and in Section 3 and 4 we introduce various single agent and multiagent properties.
Reconstruction de la croissance d'une chaine de montagnes : le sud de taiwan

Ce memoire presente les resultats d'une etude du passage extension-subduction-collision dans partie sud de la chaine de collision plio-quaternaire de taiwan. Le premier chapitre est consacre aux necessaires rappels sur la geologie, de l'ile de taiwan, surtout aux donnees geophysiques et tectoniques particulierement interessantes pour notre reconstruction. Le deuxieme chapitre montre nos principaux resultats de recherche de terrain. Ce chapitre comprend trois sections principales qui sont du sud vers le nord-est : la peninsule d'hengchun, la partie sud de la chaine centrale et la chaine cotiere. Dans la peninsule d'hengchun et dans la partie sud de la chaine centrale, quatre principaux regimes tectoniques successifs ont ete reconnus apres une analyse detaillee des deformations cassantes. Ce resultat inclut un processus d'evolution d'un bassin de marge continentale, depuis son ouverture jusqu'a sa deformation intense dans le prisme d'accretion. Dans la chaine cotiere nos travaux se concentrent sur une zone de faille active situee entre la chaine cotiere et la chaine centrale. Cette zone de faille active s'est developpee pendant la collision entre la plaque d'eurasie et la plaque de la mer des philippines, le long d'une zone de faiblesse preexistante a l'ouest du bassin d'avant-arc. Elle a entraine un soulevement et un cisaillement des materiaux dans le bassin d'avant-arc et a permis la formation du melange de lichi. Le troisieme chapitre presente interpretation et modelisation. Notre etude conduit a proposer dans un premier temps un modele evolutif de la croissance du prisme d'accretion de taiwan. En outre, deux coupes lithospheriques de la zone de collision de taiwan sont proposees d'apres nos resultats et les donnees geophysiques. Un modele evolutif de l'orogene de taiwan est presente en conclusion de ce travail de these. Ce modele reconstitue la situation geologique de la chaine du sud de taiwan du miocene moyen (extension) jusqu'a l'actuel (collision intense).
Designing Effective Movement Digital Biomarkers for Unobtrusive Emotional State Mobile Monitoring

Mobile sensing technologies and machine learning techniques have been successfully exploited to build effective systems for mental health monitoring and intervention. Various approaches have recently been proposed to effectively exploit contextual information such as mobility, communication and mobile usage patterns for quantifying users' emotional states and wellbeing. In particular, it has been shown that location information collected by means of smartphones can be successfully used to monitor and predict depression levels, as measured by means of standard scores such as PHQ-8. In this paper, we investigate the design of novel digital biomarkers based on the fine-grained characterization of the mobility patterns of a user, also considering the temporal dimension of their movements (e.g., sequence of places visited by them). We show that the proposed biomarkers have a statistically significant association with emotional states. We also demonstrate that emotional states have a stronger relationship with mobility patterns of weekdays compared to all days of a week. Finally, we discuss the challenges in using these biomarkers in the implementation of "emotion-aware" systems for digital health.
Image classification with spectral and texture features based on SVM

In this paper, a three-step classification method is proposed for remote sensing images with the spectral and texture features based on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The image is first segmented into regions with the spectral features. Then, texture features are extracted from each region by the undecimated wavelet transform. Third, the SVM is used to classify the image with these extracted texture features. A postprocessing method is also proposed to handle the small regions and anomalistic regions.
Apoptotic morphology reflects mitotic‐like aspects of physiological cell death and is independent of genome digestion

Several hallmarks characterize what has come to be recognized as a common physiological process of cell death. In particular, the two defining characteristics are the apoptotic morphology of cell shrinkage and chromatin condensation originally described by Kerr et al. [(1972) Br. J. Cancer, 26:239–256] and the prelytic digestion of genomic DNA of the dying cell, as noted first by Wyllie [(1980) Nature, 284:555–556] and Russell et al. [(1982) J. Immunol. , 128:2087–2094]. Many suicidal stimuli are able to modulate this process; each of these suicidal inducers activates cell death via a specific pathway. While it remains to be established, we hypothesize that a single mechanism of physiological cell death pertains in all cases [Ucker (1991) New Biol., 3:103–109; Ucker et al. (1994) Immunol. Rev., 142:273–299]. The various modulatory processes act afferently on this single effector pathway. We have examined the significance of the hallmarks of physiological cell death in an effort to elucidate critical mechanistic elements of the cell death process. Here we describe our recent studies of genome digestion. Our work has centered on the characterization of a set of fibroblastic cell clones that vary in their ability to undergo genome digestion associated with physiological cell death induced by cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) and other stimuli. Our results demonstrate that genome digestion is dispensable for physiological cell death and that apoptotic morphology is independent of genome digestion. Our data suggest further that apoptotic morphology is reflective of mitotic‐like aspects of the cell death process. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Coastal tourism and local impact at Ngapali Beach: Initial Findings.

This short report summarises the initial findings of the scoping study carried out in Ngapali Beach, Rakhine State, Myanmar, during November 2014. From this scoping study, a few initial recommendations can be offered. Ngapali beach has – at present – a Unique Selling Point of its unspoilt beautiful beaches and low rise, unobtrusive hotel development with relatively small numbers of hotels and associated tourism infrastructure. At present it seems that the relatively low numbers of higher spending tourist in the area are having minimal negative social impacts, and significant positive impacts on the local host community. Instead of permitting unrestricted mass tourism at Ngapali, our initial findings suggest that lessons can be learnt from the case of the Seychelles and adapted for the context of coastal Myanmar. We suggest a model we call ‘Seychelles Plus’ be explored, that is, an emphasis on an upmarket resort offer of four/five star hotels plus boutique hotels combined with strong and effective economic linkages to the local economy to benefit the host community.
Trends in Early Outpatient Drug Therapy in Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Finland: A Nationwide Register-Based Study in 1999–2009

Objective. There are limited data on the changes of treatment strategies of disease-modifying drugs used to treat pediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Methods. We utilized data from two national registers: the Drug Reimbursement Register for drug costs (for identifying children with IBD) and the Drug Purchase Register (for exposure to drugs), both of which are maintained by the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. The frequencies and trends of drug therapy strategies during the first year of pediatric IBD were evaluated between 1999 and 2009. Results. A total of 481 children diagnosed with IBD were identified. During the first six months, 68% of the patients purchased systemic corticosteroids; these combined with 5-aminosalicylic acid in almost all cases. The use of corticosteroids was stable from the early years compared with the end of the study period. In Crohn's disease, there was a trend towards more active use of azathioprine: the therapy was introduced earlier and proportion of pediatric patients purchasing azathioprine increased by up to 51% (P < 0.05). Conclusions. In pediatric IBD, the majority of patients purchased corticosteroid within the first six months, reflecting moderate-to-severe disease. During recent years in pediatric Crohn's disease, the therapeutic strategies of oral medication have changed towards more active immunosuppression with azathioprine.
Distributed Shuffle Index in the Cloud: Implementation and Evaluation

The distributed shuffle index strengthens the guarantees of access confidentiality provided by the shuffle index through the distribution of data among three cloud providers. In this paper, we analyze architectural and design issues and describe an implementation of the distributed shuffle index integrated with different cloud providers (i.e., Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift, Google Cloud Storage, and EMC Elastic Cloud Storage). The experimental results obtained with our implementation confirm the protection guarantees provided by the distributed shuffle index and its limited performance overhead, demonstrating its practical applicability in cloud scenarios.
Stability from Structure: Metabolic Networks Are Unlike Other Biological Networks

In recent work, attempts have been made to link the structure of biochemical networks to their complex dynamics. It was shown that structurally stable network motifs are enriched in such networks. In this work, we investigate to what extent these findings apply to metabolic networks. To this end, we extend a previously proposed method by changing the null model for determining motif enrichment, by using interaction types directly obtained from structural interaction matrices, by generating a distribution of partial derivatives of reaction rates and by simulating enzymatic regulation on metabolic networks. Our findings suggest that the conclusions drawn in previous work cannot be extended to metabolic networks, that is, structurally stable network motifs are not enriched in metabolic networks.
Ethanol Modulation is Quantitatively Determined by the Transmembrane Domain of Human α1 Glycine Receptors.

BACKGROUND Mutagenesis and labeling studies have identified amino acids from the human α1 glycine receptor (GlyR) extracellular, transmembrane (TM), and intracellular domains in mediating ethanol (EtOH) potentiation. However, limited high-resolution structural data for physiologically relevant receptors in this Cys-loop receptor superfamily have made pinpointing the critical amino acids difficult. Homologous ion channels from lower organisms provide conserved models for structural and functional properties of Cys-loop receptors. We previously demonstrated that a single amino acid variant of the Gloeobacter violaceus ligand-gated ion channel (GLIC) produced EtOH and anesthetic sensitivity similar to that of GlyRs and provided crystallographic evidence for EtOH binding to GLIC. METHODS We directly compared EtOH modulation of the α1 GlyR and GLIC to a chimera containing the TM domain from human α1 GlyRs and the ligand-binding domain of GLIC using 2-electrode voltage-clamp electrophysiology of receptors expressed in Xenopus laevis oocytes. RESULTS EtOH potentiated α1 GlyRs in a concentration-dependent manner in the presence of zinc-chelating agents, but did not potentiate GLIC at pharmacologically relevant concentrations. The GLIC/GlyR chimera recapitulated the EtOH potentiation of GlyRs, without apparent sensitivity to zinc chelation. For chimera expression in oocytes, it was essential to suppress leakage current by adding 50 μM picrotoxin to the media, a technique that may have applications in expression of other ion channels. CONCLUSIONS Our results are consistent with a TM mechanism of EtOH modulation in Cys-loop receptors. This work highlights the relevance of bacterial homologs as valuable model systems for studying ion channel function of human receptors and demonstrates the modularity of these channels across species.
Sensor Data Dissemination through Ad Hoc Battlefield Communications ∗

We study the dissemination of sensor data (reports) from the sensor network to the mobile ground forces (soldiers) for sensor gateways deployed in a battlefield scenario. Our approach looks at both the addressing and distribution of sensor reports. First, we employ a subscription mechanism in which the sensor gateways address their reports to those soldiers who have currently subscribed to them. Second, we distinguish two schemes for propagating sensor reports. In a centralized approach, all sensor reports must go through one designated node (command post). In a distributed approach, the network routes sensor reports directly to the soldiers. In a generic soldier mobility model, soldiers move in small groups (squads) along a line to random destinations on the battlefield. Through simulations using this mobility model, we study the performance and overhead of the proposed methods for sensor data dissemination. We envision this research to be the first of a series of methods to manage information within mobile networks comprised of sensors and actuators in battlefield scenarios.
Do Women's Voices Provide Cues of the Likelihood of Ovulation? The Importance of Sampling Regime

The human voice provides a rich source of information about individual attributes such as body size, developmental stability and emotional state. Moreover, there is evidence that female voice characteristics change across the menstrual cycle. A previous study reported that women speak with higher fundamental frequency (F0) in the high-fertility compared to the low-fertility phase. To gain further insights into the mechanisms underlying this variation in perceived attractiveness and the relationship between vocal quality and the timing of ovulation, we combined hormone measurements and acoustic analyses, to characterize voice changes on a day-to-day basis throughout the menstrual cycle. Voice characteristics were measured from free speech as well as sustained vowels. In addition, we asked men to rate vocal attractiveness from selected samples. The free speech samples revealed marginally significant variation in F0 with an increase prior to and a distinct drop during ovulation. Overall variation throughout the cycle, however, precluded unequivocal identification of the period with the highest conception risk. The analysis of vowel samples revealed a significant increase in degree of unvoiceness and noise-to-harmonic ratio during menstruation, possibly related to an increase in tissue water content. Neither estrogen nor progestogen levels predicted the observed changes in acoustic characteristics. The perceptual experiments revealed a preference by males for voice samples recorded during the pre-ovulatory period compared to other periods in the cycle. While overall we confirm earlier findings in that women speak with a higher and more variable fundamental frequency just prior to ovulation, the present study highlights the importance of taking the full range of variation into account before drawing conclusions about the value of these cues for the detection of ovulation.
Etiology and pathogenesis of necrolytic migratory erythema: review of the literature.

CONTEXT Necrolytic migratory erythema (NME) is a characteristic skin condition seen in the presence of a pancreatic glucagonoma. The presence of NME in the absence of a pancreatic tumor has been termed the pseudoglucagonoma syndrome. In such cases, NME is commonly associated with conditions, such as liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, pancreatitis, malabsorption disorders (ie, celiac sprue), and other malignancies. There are many theories on the pathogenesis of NME, which include the direct action of glucagon in inducing skin necrolysis, hypoaminoacidemia-inducing epidermal protein deficiency and necrolysis, a nutritional or metabolic deficiency of zinc or essential fatty acids, liver disease, glucagon induction of inflammatory mediators, a substance secreted from pancreatic and other visceral tumors associated with NME, and generalized malabsorption. OBJECTIVE To present a review of the literature on the clinical presentation, etiology, pathogenesis, and treatment of NME. DESIGN Review of the literature on NME occurring in patients both with and without a pancreatic glucagonoma. METHODS We performed a PubMed review of the literature on the etiology and pathogenesis of NME to identify case reports and reviews published in both the internal medicine and dermatology literature. RESULTS Our literature review encompassed 17 primary case reports and literature reviews published in the dermatologic and internal medicine literature on NME in patients both with and without a pancreatic glucagonoma. Although we found no clear consensus among the investigators of a universally accepted pathogenesis for NME, we did identify 4 main categories of etiologic/pathogenetic mechanisms for NME (glucagon excess, nutritional deficiencies, inflammatory mediators, and liver disease) that were discussed by many of the investigators and validated by both clinical and scientific evidence. CONCLUSION The exact pathogenesis and treatment of NME remain ill-defined despite many case reports and studies on NME in the literature. The many systemic diseases and nutritional deficiencies that have been found to be associated with NME suggest a multifactorial model for the pathogenesis of the disease. The most comprehensive, postulated mechanism for NME involves a combination of zinc, amino acid, and fatty acid deficiencies (arising from a wide variety of causes, such as dietary insufficiency, malabsorption syndromes, liver disease, elevated glucagon levels, and disorders of metabolism) that contributes to increased inflammation in the epidermis in response to trauma and to the necrolysis observed in NME. The importance of gaining an understanding of the etiology and pathogenesis of NME lies in the fact that there is no universally accepted mechanism of pathogenesis for NME, and that the only treatment reported to resolve the rash in these patients is to adequately identify and treat the underlying associated systemic condition or nutritional deficiency.
Half-Lives of EigenFlows for Spectral Clustering

Using a Markov chain perspective of spectral clustering we present an algorithm to automatically find the number of stable clusters in a dataset. The Markov chain's behaviour is characterized by the spectral properties of the matrix of transition probabilities, from which we derive eigenflows along with their halflives. An eigenflow describes the flow of probability mass due to the Markov chain, and it is characterized by its eigenvalue, or equivalently, by the halflife of its decay as the Markov chain is iterated. A ideal stable cluster is one with zero eigenflow and infinite half-life. The key insight in this paper is that bottlenecks between weakly coupled clusters can be identified by computing the sensitivity of the eigenflow's halflife to variations in the edge weights. We propose a novel EIGENCUTS algorithm to perform clustering that removes these identified bottlenecks in an iterative fashion.
Performance Evaluation of Real-Time Multivariate Data Reduction Models for Adaptive-Threshold in Wireless Sensor Networks

This article presents a new metric to assess the performance of different multivariate data reduction models in wireless sensor networks. The proposed metric is called updating frequency metric that is defined as the frequency of updating the model reference parameters during data collection. A method for estimating the error threshold value during the training phase is also suggested. The proposed threshold of error is used to update the model reference parameters when it is necessary. Numerical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed metric validates its effectiveness in the performance of multivariate data reduction models in terms of the sensor node energy consumption. The adaptive threshold improves the frequency of updating the parameters by 80 and 52, in comparison to the nonadaptive threshold for multivariate data reduction models of MLR-B and PCA-B, respectively.