Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Inclusion/Exclusion Issue: Including Students in Choosing Texts.

Which writers and which works to teach in any given course have always been at issue for college and university literature teachers, but only fairly recently have we become aware that our inclusions and exclusions have political implications. Trying to put our political awareness into practice, many of us have challenged and revised the canon, but continue to question whether we are, or should be, establishing alternative canons. We have also come to realize that our teaching style is political, and many of us have made attempts to adopt a less authoritarian role. We have tried to move toward the model of interactive or problem-posing teaching recommended by Paulo Freire and others, to (as Freire puts it) "liberate" our students rather than "domesticate" them. But it is often difficult to move away from old models, even in courses that have an explicitly political purpose. I realized how powerful the old models were when I started designing a Women in Literature course to be offered in the spring of 1990. In order to explore both commonality and difference, I had chosen ethnically diverse texts which could all be read as re-visions (to use Adrienne Rich's term) of heroic and mythological traditions. After making some difficult choices, I worked on the schedule and was confronted with a gap of about two weeks. Who else should I include? Who else would reveal the pattern further or challenge it? Who would perhaps go beyond the pattern to reveal some other issue we needed to see? And then the really important question, which was also an answer, surfaced: Why couldn't the students decide? I had certainly never intended to "domesticate" students, a particularly telling metaphor considering that the majority of the students in this class would be women. But the fact that I had not included them in the process of choosing made me realize how closely I had been bound by old models even when I thought I was committed to the interactive classroom. In my classes, students participate in presentations, discussions, and workshops and are encouraged to come up with their own ideas for papers. But I had never asked them to be responsible for choosing what we read, just as none of my teachers had ever asked that I take on that responsibility.1
Political Science and Public Policies: Notes for a Historical Reconstruction of their Relationship

The article presents some annotations that serve as tool for a historical reconstruction of the relationship between political science and policy sciences and the study of public policy. In doing so, it carries out a review of the literature that permits: first, to make a description of Harold Lasswell’s trans-disciplinary proposal; second, to synthesize the theoretical and practical developments of the study of public policy; third, to show how political science became the study of public policy in one of its sub-disciplines, generating a large quantity of works in the international context; and fourth, to present some allusions to the study of public policy in Latin America and Colombia.
A Minimal Model of Metabolism-Based Chemotaxis

Since the pioneering work by Julius Adler in the 1960's, bacterial chemotaxis has been predominantly studied as metabolism-independent. All available simulation models of bacterial chemotaxis endorse this assumption. Recent studies have shown, however, that many metabolism-dependent chemotactic patterns occur in bacteria. We hereby present the simplest artificial protocell model capable of performing metabolism-based chemotaxis. The model serves as a proof of concept to show how even the simplest metabolism can sustain chemotactic patterns of varying sophistication. It also reproduces a set of phenomena that have recently attracted attention on bacterial chemotaxis and provides insights about alternative mechanisms that could instantiate them. We conclude that relaxing the metabolism-independent assumption provides important theoretical advances, forces us to rethink some established pre-conceptions and may help us better understand unexplored and poorly understood aspects of bacterial chemotaxis.
Implementation and validation of dynamic scheduler based on LST on FreeRTOS

The main concern of real time systems is to deliver logically correct results within the given timing constraints. This requires scheduling algorithms which can use the processor in the most efficient manner possible. The current paper presents the implementation of a least slack time first dynamic scheduling algorithm to support number of real time applications on a single processor. The proposed implementation of algorithm is adaptable to different kinds of tasks — periodic, aperiodic and sporadic tasks and later for different types of real time applications. Mutex and semaphore concepts are used to illustrate the working of designed scheduler to support resource sharing and task synchronization. The algorithm is implemented on an ARM Cortex M4 based platform with real time applications. It is tested using numerous test cases and results are verified. The results obtained from simulation meet desired requirements of a robust scheduler.
Abnormal Erythrocyte Cation Transport in Primary Hypertension: Clinical and Experimental Studies

SUMMARY Several abnormalities concerning sodium (Na+) transport in erytbrocytes of essential hypertensive patients have been recently observed. An abnormal extrusion of an erythrocyte Na+ load was described in our laboratory. This defect appeared to be specific for essential hypertension since it was absent in the secondary forms of the disease. The present investigation was performed on 194 Caucasian subjects with essential hypertension or born of hypertensive parents, 86 normotensJve controls, and 14 families (78 subjects). studied over two to three generations. The distribution pattern of the erythrocyte defect is compatible with the expression of a single gene transmitted according to an autosomic and dominant mode. To confirm the genetic association between the red blood cell abnormality and primary hypertension, genetically hypertensive rats were investigated in parallel to our clinical studies. A reduction in the net Na+ extrusion from red blood cells was found in two varieties of genetic hypertension (SHR and H-prone-Na+-sensJtire Sabra rats). The abnormality could be detected before the development of a significant hypertension. When these various ret substrains were acutely or chronically loaded with Na+ (either intraperitoneally or orally), a significant increase in erythrocyte Na+ content was observed only in those substralns having a genetic propensity to develop hypertension.This finding, which appears to be a conscience of the reduction in net Na+ efflux, is of interest for several reasons. It confirms the existence of a close association between a genetic predisposition to develop high blood pressure and cell Na+ retention in the presence of an excess Na+ intake. It draws attention to the possible role of intracellular Na+ in the pathogenesis of primary hypertension. Of more practical importance, the abnormal Na+ handling in erythrocytes may be a genetic marker of primary hypertension. (Hypertension 3 (supp I): I-179-M83, 1981)
A new wide stopband microstrip bandpass filter with miniaturized interdigital capacitor resonator

A miniaturized interdigital capacitor resonator (ICR) is proposed in the design of a new wide stopband microstrip bandpass filter. Such an ICR has a curved geometry with small dimension, but with a large equivalent self-capacitance and higher the first spurious frequency. Curved interdigital capacitor structure is introduced to captured larger equivalent self-capacitor. Meanwhile, interdigital capacitor structure is adopted to obtain strong coupling between ICRs to achieve wide bandwidth. The developed filter exhibits sharp skirt and wide stopband, with an excellent agreements obtained between its measured and simulated S-parameters.
Immunotherapy with cytokine induced killer cells in solid and hematopoietic tumours: a pilot clinical trial

Background and Objectives: CIK cells are a novel population of efficient immune effector cells with high antitumour activity mainly due to the high proliferation of CD3+CD56+ cells, so may play a role in the development of new forms of adoptive cellular immunotherapy. We started a pilot clinical trial with autologous CIK cells in patients with refractory lymphoma and metastatic solid tumours. This study was aimed at determining the feasibility of generating a sufficient number of CIK cells in heavily pretreated patients and at assessing treatment toxicity. Design and Methods: CIK cells were generated from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (MNC) and incubated in the presence of IFN‐γ followed by OKT3 and IL‐2. Treatment schedule consisted of three cycles of CIK cells infusions at an interval of 3 weeks. Results: At present 12 patients were enrolled: 6 advanced lymphomas, 5 metastatic kidney carcinoma and 1 hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The median number of transferred cells per patient was 28 × 109 (range, 6–61). Protocol adherence was excellent and the toxicity profile was favourable. After CIK cells infusion, the absolute median count of lymphocytes, CD3+, CD8+ and CD3+CD56+ cells significantly increased in patient's peripheral blood. Clinical outcome appeared promising: three patients had complete response (CR) and two patients had stabilization of disease with a median follow‐up of 33 months (range, 9–44). Interpretations and Conclusions: These preliminary data showed that adoptive immunotherapy with CIK cells is a safe therapy with some suggestion of efficacy that significantly enhances immune functions increasing absolute numbers of effector cells without side effects. If confirmed in larger scale studies, these promising results may have a favourable impact on conventional treatment strategy of malignancies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Adversarial Cost-Sensitive Classification

In many classification settings, mistakes incur different application-dependent penalties based on the predicted and actual class labels. Cost-sensitive classifiers minimizing these penalties are needed. We propose a robust minimax approach for producing classifiers that directly minimize the cost of mistakes as a convex optimization problem. This is in contrast to previous methods that minimize the empirical risk using a convex surrogate for the cost of mistakes, since minimizing the empirical risk of the actual cost-sensitive loss is generally intractable. By treating properties of the training data as uncertain, our approach avoids these computational difficulties. We develop theory and algorithms for our approach and demonstrate its benefits on cost-sensitive classification tasks.
A one-shot inpainting algorithm based on the topological asymptotic analysis

The aim of this article is to propose a new method for the inpainting problem. Inpainting is the problem of filling-in holes in images. We consider in this article the crack localization problem, which can be solved using the Dirichlet to Neumann approach and the topological gradient. In a similar way, we can define a Dirichlet and a Neumann inpainting problem. We then define a cost function measuring the discrepancy between the two corresponding solutions. The minimization is done using the topological asymptotic analysis, and is performed in only one iteration. The optimal solution provides the best localization of the missing edges, and it is then easy to inpaint the holes.
RAID-II: a high-bandwidth network file server

In 1989, the RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) group at U.C. Berkeley built a prototype disk array called RAID-I. The bandwidth delivered to clients by RAID-I was severely limited by the memory system bandwidth of the disk array's host workstation. They designed their second prototype, RAID-II, to deliver more of the disk array bandwidth to file server clients. A custom-built crossbar memory system called the XBUS board connects the disks directly to the high-speed network, allowing data for large requests to bypass the server workstation. RAID-II runs Log-Structured File System (LFS) software to optimize performance for bandwidth-intensive applications. The RAID-II hardware with a single XBUS controller board delivers 20 megabytes/second for large, random read operations and up to 31 megabytes/second for sequential read operations. A preliminary implementation of LFS on RAID-II delivers 21 megabytes/second on large read requests and 15 megabytes/second on large write operations. <<ETX>>
Sentinel lymph node status as an indicator of the presence of metastatic melanoma in regional lymph nodes

The value of elective lymph node dissection (ELND) for melanoma patients with clinically uninvolved regional nodes remains controversial. However, it has been proposed that selective 'sentinel' lymph node biopsy reliably identifies individuals with micrometastases, who are most likely to benefit from full ELND. The aim of this study was to confirm that metastatic melanoma cells travelling in lymphatics do not bypass the sentinel node. After preoperative lymphoscintigraphy and intraoperative injection of blue dye around the primary melanoma site, sentinel node biopsy was performed in 118 melanoma patients for whom full ELND was planned as part of their definitive surgical treatment. A confidently identified sentinel node was tumour positive in 22 out of 105 regional lymph node fields (21%). In 18 cases the sentinel node was the only node found to be involved and in four cases, additional nodes were positive. In two other patients a positive node was found when the sentinel lymph node had been negative. However, in each case an avoidable error of technique had occurred and definite blue staining indicated that the positive node was in fact another sentinel node. This study thus confirms that sentinel lymph node status reliably indicates whether metastatic melanoma is present in regional lymph nodes.
H-Shaped Dielectric Resonator Antenna for Wideband Applications

A novel dielectric resonator antenna design is presented for wideband applications in this letter. By using a dielectric resonator with an optimized H-shaped across section and an optimized trapezoidal patch adhered on the concave surface of the resonator as a feeding mechanism, an impedance bandwidth of about 62% (for VSWR les 2) , covering the frequency range of 3.6-6.85 GHz, is achieved. The measured results in terms of bandwidth and radiation pattern agree well with the simulated ones, confirming the theoretical design.
Understanding Validity in Structuring Multi-Criteria Decision Problems

The first steps of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) are typically the decomposition and structuring of the decision problem at hand. As all subsequent process steps of MCDM are based on the initial structuring of the decision problem, the validity of the structure representing the decision problem is of particular importance for the quality of the decision making process. This paper seeks to further develop our understanding of validity in structuring multi-criteria decisions. For this purpose, we link the structuring of decision problems in MCDM to the theory of chunking, which describes how human cognition structures and perceives environmental information. Based on this, we propose that the validity of models representing multi-criteria decision problems can be assessed by evaluating the degree to which they match the structures formed by chunking. We discuss a preliminary framework of how the match between the cognitive and the MCDM model can be tested. To demonstrate how this framework can be utilized in research practice, we apply it to empirically show that algorithmic, bottom-up structuring of MCDM problems leads to valid goal-criteria hierarchies.
Two‐photon microscopy of deep intravital tissues and its merits in clinical research

Multiphoton excitation laser scanning microscopy, relying on the simultaneous absorption of two or more photons by a molecule, is one of the most exciting recent developments in biomedical imaging. Thanks to its superior imaging capability of deeper tissue penetration and efficient light detection, this system becomes more and more an inspiring tool for intravital bulk tissue imaging. Two‐photon excitation microscopy including 2‐photon fluorescence and second harmonic generated signal microscopy is the most common multiphoton microscopic application. In the present review we take diverse ocular tissues as intravital samples to demonstrate the advantages of this approach. Experiments with registration of intracellular 2‐photon fluorescence and extracellular collagen second harmonic generated signal microscopy in native ocular tissues are focused. Data show that the in‐tandem combination of 2‐photon fluorescence and second harmonic generated signal microscopy as two‐modality microscopy allows for in situ co‐localization imaging of various microstructural components in the whole‐mount deep intravital tissues. New applications and recent developments of this high technology in clinical studies such as 2‐photon‐controlled drug release, in vivo drug screening and administration in skin and kidney, as well as its uses in tumourous tissues such as melanoma and glioma, in diseased lung, brain and heart are additionally reviewed. Intrinsic emission two‐modal 2‐photon microscopy/tomography, acting as an efficient and sensitive non‐injurious imaging approach featured by high contrast and subcellular spatial resolution, has been proved to be a promising tool for intravital deep tissue imaging and clinical studies. Given the level of its performance, we believe that the non‐linear optical imaging technique has tremendous potentials to find more applications in biomedical fundamental and clinical research in the near future.
Expression of human herpesvirus 8-encoded cyclin D in Kaposi's sarcoma spindle cells.

BACKGROUND Human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8) DNA sequences have been detected in Kaposi's sarcoma, in primary effusion lymphoma (an unusual high-grade non-Hodgkin's lymphoma seen primarily in patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome [AIDS]), and in Castleman's disease (a rare lymphoproliferative disorder); however, proof that HHV-8 is involved in the pathogenesis of these diseases remains to be established. HHV-8 contains a gene, i.e., v-cyclin D, that is a homologue of the cellular cyclin D2 gene, which encodes a protein that promotes passage through G1 phase of the cell cycle. Previous studies have identified v-cyclin D messenger RNA (mRNA) in biopsy specimens of Kaposi's sarcoma. In this study, we isolated a full-length v-cyclin D complementary DNA and characterized the pattern of v-cyclin D mRNA expression in Kaposi's sarcoma. METHODS Standard methods were used to construct and to screen HHV-8 genomic and complementary DNA libraries. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) methods and in situ hybridization with RNA probes were used to examine v-cyclin D mRNA expression. RESULTS RT-PCR demonstrated the presence of v-cyclin D mRNA in biopsy specimens of AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma, in early-passage spindle cells from classical (i.e., not AIDS-related) Kaposi's sarcoma, and in spindle cells isolated from the peripheral blood of patients with AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma. In situ hybridization indicated that mRNAs for v-cyclin D and kaposin, an HHV-8 latency-associated gene, were present in approximately 1% of the spindle cells in early patch lesions and approximately 60% of the spindle cells in late nodular lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma. CONCLUSIONS Spindle cells of Kaposi's sarcoma, which have been regarded as the tumor cells of this cancer, contain v-cyclin D mRNA. Expression of v-cyclin D protein may be involved in the pathogenesis of Kaposi's sarcoma by promoting cell proliferation.
Ubiquitin-dependent and independent roles of SUMO in proteostasis

Cellular proteomes are continuously undergoing alterations as a result of new production of proteins, protein folding, and degradation of proteins. The proper equilibrium of these processes is known as proteostasis, implying that proteomes are in homeostasis. Stress conditions can affect proteostasis due to the accumulation of misfolded proteins as a result of overloading the degradation machinery. Proteostasis is affected in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and multiple polyglutamine disorders including Huntington's disease. Owing to a lack of proteostasis, neuronal cells build up toxic protein aggregates in these diseases. Here, we review the role of the ubiquitin-like posttranslational modification SUMO in proteostasis. SUMO alone contributes to protein homeostasis by influencing protein signaling or solubility. However, the main contribution of SUMO to proteostasis is the ability to cooperate with, complement, and balance the ubiquitin-proteasome system at multiple levels. We discuss the identification of enzymes involved in the interplay between SUMO and ubiquitin, exploring the complexity of this crosstalk which regulates proteostasis. These enzymes include SUMO-targeted ubiquitin ligases and ubiquitin proteases counteracting these ligases. Additionally, we review the role of SUMO in brain-related diseases, where SUMO is primarily investigated because of its role during formation of aggregates, either independently or in cooperation with ubiquitin. Detailed understanding of the role of SUMO in these diseases could lead to novel treatment options.
Normalised constant modulus algorithm for blind channel equalisation

A new constant modulus algorithm and two of its variants are presented for blind equalisation of complex-valued communication channels. The proposed algorithm is obtained by solving a novel deterministic optimisation criterion which comprises the dispersion minimisation of a priori as well as a posteriori quantities leading to an update equation having a particular zero-memory continuous nonlinearity. The convergence analysis of a variant of the proposed algorithm is presented.
Improved query performance prediction using standard deviation

Query performance prediction (QPP) is an important task in information retrieval (IR). In this paper, we (1) develop a new predictor based on the standard deviation of scores in a variable length ranked list, and (2) we show that this new predictor outperforms state-of-the-art approaches without the need for tuning.
Neuropsychological Investigations of Human Amnesia: Insights Into the Role of the Medial Temporal Lobes in Cognition

Abstract The past 30 years of research on human amnesia has yielded important changes in our understanding of the role of the medial temporal lobes (MTL) in memory. On the one hand, this body of evidence has highlighted that not all types of memory are impaired in patients with MTL lesions. On the other hand, this research has made apparent that the role of the MTL extends beyond the domain of long-term memory, to include working memory, perception, and future thinking. In this article, we review the discoveries and controversies that have characterized this literature and that set the stage for a new conceptualization of the role of the MTL in cognition. This shift toward a more nuanced understanding of MTL function has direct relevance for a range of clinical disorders in which the MTL is implicated, potentially shaping not only theoretical understanding but also clinical practice. (JINS, 2017, 23, 732–740)