Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simultaneous administration of thromboxane A2- and serotonin S2-receptor antagonists markedly enhances thrombolysis and prevents or delays reocclusion after tissue-type plasminogen activator in a canine model of coronary thrombosis.

Dynamic changes of the thrombus after its formation due to platelet activation may affect the speed of thrombolysis. In the present study, we wanted to evaluate the role played by thromboxane A2 (TXA2) and serotonin (5HT) in mediating platelet activation during lysis of intracoronary thrombi with human recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator (t-PA). Coronary thrombi were induced in 26 anesthetized, open-chest dogs by inserting a copper coil into the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD). LAD blood flow was monitored throughout the experiment by means of a Doppler flow probe placed proximally to the coil. Presence of the thrombus was documented for 30 minutes. The dogs were then assigned to one of four groups as follows: group 1 dogs (n = 8), serving as controls, received a bolus of heparin (200 units/kg) and a bolus of t-PA (80 micrograms/kg) followed by a continuous infusion (8 micrograms/kg/min) for up to 90 minutes or until reperfusion was achieved; group 2 dogs (n = 10) received, immediately before heparin and t-PA, an intravenous bolus of SQ29548 (SQ) (0.4 mg/kg, a selective TXA2-receptor antagonist) and LY53857 (LY) (0.2 mg/kg, a selective serotonin S2-receptor antagonist); group 3 dogs (n = 7) received, before heparin and t-PA, an intravenous bolus of SQ alone (0.4 mg/kg); and group 4 dogs (n = 7) received, before heparin and t-PA, an intravenous bolus of LY alone (0.2 mg/kg). After thrombolysis, all dogs were monitored for 90 minutes or until a persistent reocclusion occurred. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Visualizing and Managing Network Topologies via Rectangular Dualization

Rectangular dualization is an effective, hierarchically oriented visualization method for network topologies and can be used in many other problems having in common with networks the condition that objects and their interoccurring relations are represented by means of a planar graph. However, only 4-connected triangulated planar graphs admit a rectangular dual. In this paper we present a linear time algorithm to optimally construct a rectangular layout for a general class of graphs and we discuss a variety of application fields where this approach represents an helpful support for visualization tools.
Instrumentation for Automatic Monitoring of Affective State in Human-Computer Interaction

In the modern world we interact with computers for many activities, such as working and learning. Computers are great tools for these tasks. However, some times our interaction with computers is degraded because they are inflexible and unaware of our own level of comfort in that interaction. The emerging field of ‘Affective Computing’ strives to give computers an awareness of the affective state of the user, and the ability to adjust to it. This research aims at sensing and recognizing typical negative emotional experiences, especially ‘frustration’, which may arise when people interact with computers. An integrated hardware – software setup has been developed to achieve real-time assessment of the affective status of a computer user. Three physiological signals: Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Pupil Diameter (PD) were collected and synchronized from each computer user participating in our experiments. Several signal processing approaches were then applied to recognize the ‘frustration’ state of computer users. Preliminary results indicate that there exists a strong correlation between changes in these physiological signals and the shift in the emotional states of a computer user when a frustrating stimulus is applied to the interaction environment.
2011 the International Conference on Advanced Power System Automation and Protection Research on a Three-phase Cascaded Inverter for Grid-connected Photo- Voltaic Systems

˖To meet the need of high performance and high efficiency, cascaded H-bridge grid-connected PV inverter is investigated. The cascaded multilevel inverter features several advantages such as lower voltage harmonics, smaller filters, reduced switching frequency, and the capacity to solve the problems of the partial shades and the mismatching of photovoltaic array, all of which is able to improve efficiency. However it requires a more sophisticated control method due to a non-integer ratio among the dc-link voltages. In this paper the proposed control method is based on traditional voltage oriented control with a cascaded dc-link voltage control and grid current control loop. Two extra stages are added to this traditional control scheme, one to introduce maximum power point tracking for each power cell, and another to control the dc-link voltages balancing due to unequal power in each power cell. The latter is performed by the addition of a simple feedforward control strategy directly in the modulation stage. Performance of the cascaded inverter and the corresponding controllers are evaluated based on the digital time domain simulation studies in the PSCAD/EMTDC environment.
Highly Conductive, Flexible, Polyurethane‐Based Adhesives for Flexible and Printed Electronics

Flexible interconnects are one of the key elements in realizing next‐generation flexible electronics. While wire bonding interconnection materials are being deployed and discussed widely, adhesives to support flip‐chip and surface‐mount interconnections are less commonly used and reported. A polyurethane (PU)‐based electrically conductive adhesive (ECA) is developed to meet all the requirements of flexible interconnects, including an ultralow bulk resistivity of ≈1.0 × 10−5 Ω cm that is maintained during bending, rolling, and compressing, good adhesion to various flexible substrates, and facile processing. The PU‐ECA enables various interconnection techniques in flexible and printed electronics: it can serve as a die‐attach material for flip‐chip, as vertical interconnect access (VIA)‐filling and polymer bump materials for 3D integration, and as a conductive paste for wearable radio‐frequency devices.
The genetic diversity of D-loop sequences in eastern bent-winged bats (Miniopterus fuliginosus) living in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan

The eastern bent-winged bat (Miniopterus fuliginosus) is an insectivorous bat that lives in the caves, throughout Japan [11]. The bats aggregate in cave in populations of tens to thousands of individuals. We examined the mitochondrial D-loop sequences of bats in Wakayama, Japan, and divided them into 35 haplotypes. The sequences of 3 haplotypes in Wakayama were the same as those of 10 Miniopterus fuliginosus individuals living in China. Given the substitution rate of the D-loop region, we speculated that the bats had moved between Japan and China within the last 16,000 years. We could not determine how the bats crossed the sea; however, it is possible that the bats undergo dynamic movement widely throughout East Asia.
Effective solutions for real-world Stackelberg games: when agents must deal with human uncertainties

How do we build multiagent algorithms for agent interactions with human adversaries? Stackelberg games are natural models for many important applications that involve human interaction, such as oligopolistic markets and security domains. In Stackelberg games, one player, the leader, commits to a strategy and the follower makes their decision with knowledge of the leader's commitment. Existing algorithms for Stackelberg games efficiently find optimal solutions (leader strategy), but they critically assume that the follower plays optimally. Unfortunately, in real-world applications, agents face human followers (adversaries) who --- because of their bounded rationality and limited observation of the leader strategy --- may deviate from their expected optimal response. Not taking into account these likely deviations when dealing with human adversaries can cause an unacceptable degradation in the leader's reward, particularly in security applications where these algorithms have seen real-world deployment. To address this crucial problem, this paper introduces three new mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs) for Stackelberg games to consider human adversaries, incorporating: (i) novel anchoring theories on human perception of probability distributions and (ii) robustness approaches for MILPs to address human imprecision. Since these new approaches consider human adversaries, traditional proofs of correctness or optimality are insufficient; instead, it is necessary to rely on empirical validation. To that end, this paper considers two settings based on real deployed security systems, and compares 6 different approaches (three new with three previous approaches), in 4 different observability conditions, involving 98 human subjects playing 1360 games in total. The final conclusion was that a model which incorporates both the ideas of robustness and anchoring achieves statistically significant better rewards and also maintains equivalent or faster solution speeds compared to existing approaches.
Power Efficient Traffic Grooming in Optical WDM Networks

Power-awareness in networking attracts more attention as the trends in the energy consumption of the Internet raise growing concerns about the environmental impacts and sustainability of the network expansion. Building energy efficient equipment is definitely an integral part of the solution. However, such a strategy should be complemented with appropriate network protocols and routing methods to achieve maximum performance. In this paper, total power consumption of an optical WDM network is modeled in terms of the power consumed by individual lightpaths. The proposed model is then used to develop an ILP (Integer Linear Programming) formulation of the grooming problem. The exact solution of the formulation on a small network indicates that significant energy savings can be achieved with power efficient grooming.
Visualizing Diffusion Tensor Dissimilarity using an ICA Based Perceptual Colour Metric

Diffusion-tensor data from medical MR imaging consists of a 3 × 3 symmetric positive semi-definite matrix at each voxel. The issue of how to understand, and how to meaningfully display this type of data has been gaining interest since its development as a noninvasive investigative tool [1]. Several schemes have been developed, usually aimed at the display of the spatial geometric structure of each voxel characterized by its eigenvectors. However these efforts have used colour merely as a visualization device, without regard to an underlying metric structure between voxels. At the same time, some work has been developed on analyzing whole-brain structure using independent component analysis, making use of similarity between tensors to identify separated overall structures, e.g. for de-noising of spatial features. In this paper we consider using colour to understand these separated structures, mapping a true metric giving a similarity measure between tensors into a perceptually uniform colour space, so that colour difference corresponds to true difference. We show that such a colour map can better discriminate regions of distinct diffusion properties in the brain than previous methods.
Escherichia Coli Keratitis Treated with Ultraviolet A/Riboflavin Corneal Cross-Linking: A Case Report

Purpose To describe a case of keratitis caused by the Gram-negative Escherichia coli, treated with UVA-riboflavin cross linking. Methods Case report. Results A 78-year-old woman with diabetes presented with a 1-week history of pain, photophobia, foreign body sensation, and lacrimation in the right eye. The patient underwent topical and systemic antimicrobial therapy, without improvement. The authors treated the patient with riboflavin and corneal UVA crosslinking, with the aim to promote healing of the ulceration. One day after the procedure, the corneal ulceration was covered by cicatricial tissue, and the patient reported a significant improvement in symptoms. One month after the treatment, corneal edema was almost completely resolved, corneal ulceration was healed, and the painful symptoms of the patient had disappeared. Conclusions UVA-riboflavin crosslinking can be useful for the treatment of corneal ulceration unresponsive to medical treatment.
Contamination of the Aquatic Environment with Neonicotinoids and its Implication for Ecosystems

The widespread use of systemic neonicotinoid insecticides in agriculture results first in contamination of the soil of the treated crops, and secondly in the transfer of residues to the aquatic environment. The high toxicity of these insecticides to aquatic insects and other arthropods has been recognised, but there is little awareness of the impacts these chemicals have on aquatic environments and the ecosystem at large. Recent monitoring studies in several countries, however, have revealed a world-wide contamination of creeks, rivers and lakes with these insecticides, with residue levels in the low μg/L (ppb) range. The current extent of aquatic contamination by neonicotinoids is reviewed first, and the findings contrasted with the known acute and chronic toxicity of neonicotinoids to various aquatic organisms. Impacts on populations and aquatic communities, mostly using mesocosms, are reviewed next to identify the communities most at risk from those that undergo little or no impact. Finally, the ecological links between aquatic and terrestrial organisms are considered. The consequences for terrestrial vertebrate species that depend mainly on this food source are discussed together with impacts on ecosystem function. Gaps in knowledge stem from difficulties in obtaining long-term experimental data that relates the effects on individual organisms to impacts on populations and ecosystems. The paper concludes with a summary of findings and the implications they have for the larger ecosystem.
Pathogenicity Island Markers, Virulence Determinants malX and usp, and the Capacity of Escherichia coli To Persist in Infants' Commensal Microbiotas

ABSTRACT Virulence-associated genes in bacteria are often located on chromosomal regions, termed pathogenicity islands (PAIs). Several PAIs are found in Escherichia coli strains that cause extraintestinal infections, but their role in commensal bowel colonization is unknown. Resident strains are enriched in adhesins (P fimbriae and type 1 fimbriae), capsular antigens (K1 and K5), hemolysin, and aerobactin and mostly belong to phylogenetic group B2. Here, we investigated whether six pathogenicity islands and the virulence determinants malX and usp are associated with fitness of E. coli in the infant bowel microbiota. E. coli strains isolated from stools of 130 Swedish infants during the first year of life were examined for their carriage of PAI markers, malX, and usp by PCR. Carriage was related to strain persistence: long-term colonizers (≥12 months) carried significantly more of PAI II from strain CFT703 (IICFT703), IV536, and IIJ96 and malX and usp than intermediate colonizers (1 to 11 months) and transient strains (<3 weeks). The accumulation of PAI markers in each individual strain correlated positively with its time of persistence in the colon. Phylogenetic group B2 accounted for 69% of long-term colonizers, 46% of intermediate colonizers and 14% of transient strains. These results support the hypothesis that some bacterial traits contributing to extraintestinal infections have in fact evolved primarily because they increase the fitness of E. coli in its natural niche, the colon; accordingly, they may be regarded as fitness islands in the gut.
Virtual Machine Coscheduling: A Game Theoretic Approach

When multiple virtual machines (VMs) are co scheduled on the same physical machine, they may undergo a performance degradation. The performance degradation is due to the contention for shared resources like last level cache, hard disk, network bandwidth etc. This can lead to service-level agreement violations and thereby customer dissatisfaction. The classical approach to solve the co scheduling problem involves a central authority which decides a co schedule by solving a constrained optimization problem with an objective function such as average performance degradation. In this paper, we use the theory of stable matchings to provide an alternate game theoretic perspective to the co scheduling problem wherein each VM selfishly tries to minimize its performance degradation. We show that the co scheduling problem can be formulated as a Stable Roommates Problem (SRP). Since certain instances of the SRP do not have any stable matching, we reduce the problem to the Stable Marriages Problem (SMP) via an initial approximation. Gale and Shapley proved that any instance of the SMP has a stable matching and can be found in quadratic time. From a game theoretic perspective, the SMP can be thought of as a matching game which always has a Nash equilibrium. There are distributed algorithms for both the SRP and SMP problems. A VM agent in a distributed algorithm need not reveal its preference list to any other VM. This allows each VM to have a private cost function. A principal advantage of this problem formulation is that it opens up the possibility of applying the rich theory of matching markets from game theory to address various aspects of the VM co scheduling problem such as stability, coalitions and privacy both from a theoretical and practical standpoint. We also propose a new workload characterization technique for a combination of compute and memory intensive workloads. The proposed technique uses a sentinel program and it requires only two runs per workload for characterization. VMs can use this technique in deciding their partner preference ranks in the SRP and SMP problems. The characterization technique has also been used in proposing two new centralized VM co scheduling algorithms whose performance is close to the optimal Blossom algorithm.
The Arabidopsis Histone Deacetylases HDA6 and HDA19 Contribute to the Repression of Embryonic Properties after Germination1[W]

Histone deacetylase (HDAC) is a chromatin-remodeling factor that contributes to transcriptional repression in eukaryotes. In Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), the transcription factors LEAFY COTYLEDON1 (LEC1), FUSCA3 (FUS3), and ABSCISIC ACID INSENSITIVE3 (ABI3) play key roles in embryogenesis. Although the repression of embryogenesis-related genes during germination has been proposed to occur, the role of HDAC in this process has not been elucidated. To address this question, the effects of an HDAC inhibitor and suppression of the Arabidopsis HDAC genes on this process were investigated. Here, we show that treatment of an HDA6 repression line with the HDAC inhibitor trichostatin A resulted in growth arrest and elevated transcription of LEC1, FUS3, and ABI3 during germination. The growth-arrest phenotype of the repression line was suppressed by lec1, fus3, and abi3. An HDA6/HDA19 double-repression line displayed arrested growth after germination and the formation of embryo-like structures on the true leaves of 6-week-old plants even without trichostatin A. The growth-arrest phenotype of this line was rescued by lec1. These results suggest that during germination in Arabidopsis, HDA6 and HDA19 redundantly regulate the repression of embryonic properties directly or indirectly via repression of embryo-specific gene function.
Chapter 5 Use of Distillers Co-proDUCts in Diets feD to poUltry

Co-products from distillation of cereal grains for alcohol production have been available to poultry and livestock producers for many years. Although the co-products were considered better suited for ruminants because of their relatively high fiber content, Morrison (1954) suggested that chick diets could contain up to 7% or 8% distillers grains and that diets for laying hens could contain up to 10% distillers grains without affecting performance. No adverse effects on growth performance of broiler chicken or egg production of laying hens were detected when diets with up to 20% distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) from beveragealcohol production were fed (Matterson, Tlustohowicz, and Singsen, 1966; Waldroup et al., 1981), although the feed utilization of broilers tended to decrease when 25% corn DDGS was included in the diet (Waldroup et al., 1981). In addition to being a source of protein and energy, distillers grains were especially useful as a source of the water-soluble vitamins before chemical synthesis and commercialization of vitamins (Morrison, 1954; Matterson, Tlustohowicz, and Singsen, 1966).
mTOR, a Potential Target to Treat Autism Spectrum Disorder

Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a key regulator in various cellular processes, including cell growth, gene expression, and synaptic functions. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is frequently accompanied by monogenic disorders, such as tuberous sclerosis complex, phosphatase and tensin homolog tumor hamartoma syndrome, neurofibromatosis 1, and fragile X syndrome, in which mTOR is hyperactive. Mutations in the genes involved in the mTOR-mediated signaling pathway have been identified in some cases of syndromic ASD. Evidences indicate a pathogenic role for hyperactive mTOR-mediated signaling in ASD associated with these monogenic disorders, and mTOR inhibitors are a potential pharmacotherapy for ASD. Abnormal synaptic transmission through metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 may underlie in a part of ASD associated with hyperactive mTOR-mediated signaling. In this review, the relationship between mTOR and ASD is discussed.
Relationship between Malocclusion and Oral Habits

In addition to heredity, oral habits are considered important factors in the etiology of malocclusion. This study was taken to assess the relationship between Malocclusion and Oral Habits. The sample comprised of 674 orthodontically untreated subjects, 324 males (48%) and 350 females (52%) 12 to 15-year-old schoolchildren from the southern part of Italy. Orthodontic variables and oral habits including mouth breathing and swallowing pattern; thumb, finger and lip sucking; and nail biting of the patients were evaluate. Two examiners, who had been previously trained in the use of occlusal indices, screened all the schoolchildren. The chi-square and binomial test was used to evaluate the data. A total of 589 of the subjects were found to have deleterious oral habits. Nail biting was found to be the most common habit (65.5%) followed by lip sucking (42.7%), mouth breathing (28.6%), abnormal swallowing pattern (22.7%) and thumb sucking (13.2%). Positive association exist between deleterious oral habits and malocclusions; however, there is no significant relationship between the type of oral habit and malocclusions.