Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Maintaining Assignments Online: Matching, Scheduling, and Flows

Consider the following edge-orientation problem: edges of a graph appear online one-by-one and they to be directed---given an "orientation". We want to ensure that the in-degree of each vertex remains low. (This is a simple case of scheduling unit-sized jobs on machines, where each job can only go on one of two machines.) If the edge-orientations we assign are irrevocable, we suffer a significant loss in quality due to online decision-making (as compared to the offline performance). For instance the best online competitive ratio achievable is Θ(log m) for even this toy problem. But what if the decisions are not irrevocable --- what if we allow a limited number of reassignments? Can we do much better? We show that indeed we can. For instance, for edge-orientation, we can achieve a constant-competitive load while doing only a constant number of re-orientations per edge (in an amortized sense). For more substantial problems, our results are as follows: • For online matching, where the left vertices arrive online and must be matched to the right vertices, we give an algorithm that reassigns the left vertices an (amortized) constant number of times, and maintains a constant factor to the optimal load on the right vertices. We extend this to restricted machine scheduling with arbitrary sized jobs and give an algorithm that maintains load which is O(log log mn) times the optimum, and reassigns each job only an (amortized) constant number of times. • Consider a digraph with a single source, where sinks arrive online and want to send unit flow to the source. The goal is to minimize the congestion on the edges. Suppose there is an offline flow such that the total length of the flow paths is F*. We give an algorithm that reroutes flow along O(F*) edges and achieves a O(1)-approximation to the congestion.
Protective effects of N-acetylcysteine on triamcinolone acetonide-induced lens damage in rats

Abstract Objective: To examine the relationship of cataract forming effect of intravitreal triamcinolone acetonide (IVTA) injection with oxidative status and the effect of N-acetylcysteine (NAC) on these alterations. Materials and methods: Twenty-six Wistar-Albino rats were included in the study. Rats were assigned into four groups as follows: intravitreal saline injection group (controls); IVTA injection group; IVTA + intraperitoneal NAC injection group (IVTA + NAC); and intraperitoneal NAC injection group (NAC). Triamcinolone acetonide was intravitreally injected at a dose of 1 mg. NAC was intraperitoneally injected at a dose of 150 µg/g body weight. Animals were sacrificed and lens specimens were analyzed for levels of malondialdehyde (MDA) and protein carbonyl (PC) and activities of glutathione (GSH) and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px). Results: We found that the MDA and PC levels of lenses were increased in the IVTA group (p < 0.01). It was seen that GSH and GSH-Px in lenses were decreased in the IVTA group (p < 0.01). NAC administration significantly ameliorated these changes in the IVTA + NAC group (p < 0.05). Conclusion: These results indicate that the NAC produces a protective mechanism against IVTA-induced cataract and suggest a role of oxidative stress in pathogenesis.
Treatment of nail psoriasis: best practice recommendations from the Medical Board of the National Psoriasis Foundation.

IMPORTANCE Nail psoriasis can be difficult to treat and has a significant effect on quality of life. Relatively few controlled trials evaluating treatments for nail psoriasis have been published. There is an unmet need for treatment recommendations to guide therapeutic decisions. OBJECTIVE To develop treatment recommendations for nail psoriasis from the Medical Board of the National Psoriasis Foundation. EVIDENCE REVIEW A PubMed search for publications on nail psoriasis treatments was performed from January 1, 1947, through May 11, 2014, without language restrictions. FINDINGS Treatment recommendations for 4 clinical nail psoriasis scenarios were developed based on the evidence reviewed in this study and expert opinion of the Medical Board of the National Psoriasis Foundation. Treatment of nail psoriasis should balance consideration of the extent of skin disease, psoriatic arthritis, and severity of nail disease with concomitant impairment of quality of life. All patients should be evaluated for onychomycosis because this may complicate psoriatic nail disease. For disease limited to the nails, high-potency topical corticosteroids with or without calcipotriol are initial options. For patients with significant nail disease for whom topical therapy has failed, treatment with adalimumab, etanercept, intralesional corticosteroids, ustekinumab, methotrexate sodium, and acitretin are recommended. For patients with significant skin and nail disease, adalimumab, etanercept, and ustekinumab are strongly recommended, and methotrexate, acitretin, infliximab, and apremilast are recommended. Finally, for a patient with significant nail, skin, and joint disease, adalimumab, etanercept, ustekinumab, infliximab, methotrexate, apremilast, and golimumab are recommended. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Treatment of nail psoriasis poses a clinical challenge. Clinical trial data are limited, and results are reported inconsistently, making comparisons among treatment options difficult. The treatment recommendations from the Medical Board of the National Psoriasis Foundation will help guide treatment decisions for clinicians who are treating patients with nail psoriasis.
Solid Dispersions as Strategy to Improve Oral Bioavailability of Poor Water Soluble Drugs

A B S T R A C T Currently only 8% of new drug candidates have both high solubility and permeability. More than 60% of potential drug products suffer from poor water solubility. This frequently results in potentially important products not reaching the market or not achieving their full potential. Experience with solid dispersions over the last 20-30 years indicates that this is a very fruitful approach to improving the release rate and oral bioavailability of poorly water soluble drugs. So this article highlights technology various approaches for the preparation of solid dispersion, technology involved, detail description of poorly water soluble drugs & carriers.
Geographic variation in patient surveillance after colon cancer surgery.

PURPOSE Considerable variation among surgeons exists in the current practice of patient surveillance after colon cancer treatment. We evaluated whether geographic factors are responsible for this observed variation. METHODS Profiles of hypothetical patients and a detailed questionnaire based on the profiles were mailed to 2,733 members of two national surgical societies. The influence of the geographic location of the respondents on practice patterns were assessed in two ways. Repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to compare the practice patterns among 19 large metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and chi 2 analysis was used to determine whether these patterns differed by MSA population size. RESULTS Seven of nine commonly used surveillance modalities were ordered significantly more frequently with increasing tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage and significantly less frequently with year postsurgery among the 995 respondents with assessable responses, but MSA population size and geographic location of physicians generally had no effect on documented practice variability. The remaining two modalities (bone scan and computed tomography [CT]) were used so infrequently as to preclude meaningful analysis. CONCLUSION Surveillance after potentially curative colon cancer surgery for otherwise healthy patients is not significantly affected by the geographic location of the surgeon who performs the surveillance testing and only modestly affected by the population size of the MSA in which he/she practices. These data should help in the design of prospective trials of this topic.
Improved variations for Extreme Learning Machine: Space embedded ELM and optimal distribution ELM

Due to the simplicity of its implementation and the impressive performance, Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) has been widely used in applications of machine learning. However, there are two potential problems in ELM: 1) lack of an efficient method for minimizing error; 2) consideration of little inherent structural information about correlations among output components. To overcome those problems, this paper proposes two improvements of ELM: Optimal Distribution Extreme Learning Machine (OD-ELM) and Space Embedded Extreme Learning Machine (SE-ELM). Based on our recent discovery that the distributions of the input weights and the bias of hidden nodes in ELM play an important role in the performance of ELM, OD-ELM can reduce the training error by the usage of the derivatives of training error w.r. t the distributions. Simulation results tested on the UCI dataset demonstrate and verify that OD-ELM has better generalization performance than traditional ELM. SE-ELM can ‘embed’ the inherent structural information among outputs into the predictor. SE-ELM captures not only the interdependencies between variables, as in a typical ELM, but also those responses, so correlations among both inputs and outputs are considered. Meanwhile, SE-ELM retains some characteristics of ELM, such as the simplicity of implementation and the hidden layer without tuning. We examine the three methods of embedding on HumanEva benchmark, which is a well-known benchmark about 3D human pose reconstruction. As verified by the simulation results, SE-ELM tends to have better generalization performance than classical ELM.
A simple and convenient method guide to determine the magnification of digital X-rays for preoperative planning in total hip arthroplasty

Scaling of anteroposterior digital pelvic X-rays with variable magnification is the premise for accurate preoperative planning of total hip replacement with digital templating. Conn's method of placing a marker of known diameter beside the thigh at the level of the femur has been reproduced in many studies and confirmed as one of the most accurate methods. But in our experience, it is inconvenient for radiographers and is not well tolerated by some patients. We modified this method by placing a coin on the radiograph plate. One hundred patients who had undergone hip replacement were enrolled in the study and randomly divided into two groups. The actual diameter of the prosthesis head was taken as the gold standard for assessment of the magnification of the coin in Group A. The coin was within a mean of 117.95% (range 114.37–122.02%) of magnification for male, and 111.71% (range 114.37–120.93%) for female patients. The variation was small and limited, and had no correlation with body shape parameters (i.e. height, weight, BMI). Subsequently, the magnification of the coin was used to correct the measuring scale of the X-rays of the other 50 patients (Group B). Bias did not exceed 1.96 mm during measurement of the prosthesis with a diameter of less than 56 mm, and a range of absolute error of measurements of 56–66 mm (standard deviation, SD, 0.04–3.95 mm). Furthermore, in order to confirm the expressiveness of the modified method, CT scans of another 50 patients were randomly selected. The distance between the rotation center of the hip and the table, which is acknowledged to be a factor which influences magnification of the coin, changed little in response to body shape. Variation in magnification was caused by variation in distance between the rotation center of the hip and the table. The minimal change in distance for patients with different body shape led to easier and more convenient examination, and increased the feasibility of our modified coin method, except in cases where implantation of a very large-sized prosthesis is necessary.
A Software Gamification Model for Cross-Cultural Software Development Teams

Gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game context platforms such as services and marketing to motivate people to participate in planned activities to increase engagement and loyalty to achieve goals. Gamification has been applied to academic fields including software engineering in recent years. Some studies show that gamification can motivate engineers in Software Engineering (SE) if applied appropriately. However, most gamification implementations are lacking well-defined frameworks or models. This paper develops a software gamification model (SGM) with a well-defined framework that provides a robust process for implementing gamification for SE. This model also contains elements from applied psychology, Social Software Engineering (SSE), and the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Having those elements ensures that the model has a solid foundation in gamification and SE disciplines. The model is further tailored for cross-cultural software development teams (CCSDT). CCSDT have been popular in recent years due to the fact that software development has become a global business. However, as more and more CCSDT are formed, many challenges and issues have been raised in those cross-cultural environments stemming from miscommunication, misunderstanding, cultural differences and conflicts. This paper uses the SGM to help resolve the issues.
Antimicrobial resistance surveillance: current initiatives are not enough.

Antimicrobial resistance is without doubt one of the greatest current challenges to the effective treatment of infection and, by extension, to much of health care. Furthermore , there is every prospect of the problem continuing to worsen. A great deal has been said and written about resistance in the past few years, and this issue of the Journal consolidates some opinions as a contribution to the debate. Stimulated by the report on the meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine in April 2001, the issue focuses on surveillance. There have been a number of initiatives in the surveillance of resistance at the national and international levels, funded by a variety of sources, and this is to be welcomed. It is vital, however, that there is greater clarity of thought on why any particular piece of surveillance is being done, and how its outcomes might or should help to control resistance. Feeding back the results of surveillance in a thoroughly understandable and readily useable form to those who need them is a priority. A weakness to date of many published surveys has been the lack of reliable, or indeed any, denominator data, making it difficult to compare reliably the results between locations or in time, or to generalize them to larger populations. Perhaps more worrying than the deficiencies of the surveillance itself is the current obsession with it, giving the impression that it will itself somehow produce beneficial change. While good surveillance importantly can provide a measure of the extent of resistance and a basis for measuring the effects of active interventions, we could well be just observing the situation getting beyond our control. For example, much emphasis has been put on reducing the use of antimicrobials as a means of controlling resistance. But what if reducing prescribing to the minimal level compatible with the safe treatment of individual patients has no effect on the prevalence of resistance? Surely we should, if possible, know this sooner rather than later, and not be waiting on the institution of more effective surveillance before we do? Good surveillance will not be cheap, but large scale and well-designed research into the effect of restricting prescribing will be orders of magnitude more costly. Nevertheless, we should be setting out now to undertake such research alongside surveillance. Controlling resistance in hospitals by improving prescribing is presently hampered by a widespread lack of relevant IT, particularly individual patient …
A Video-Based System for Hand-Driven Stop-Motion Animation

Stop-motion is a well-established animation technique but is often laborious and requires craft skills. A new video-based system can animate the vast majority of everyday objects in stop-motion style, more flexibly and intuitively. Animators can perform and capture motions continuously instead of breaking them into increments and shooting one still picture per increment. More important, the system permits direct hand manipulation without resorting to rigs, achieving more natural object control for beginners. The system's key component is two-phase keyframe-based capturing and processing, assisted by computer vision techniques. With this system, even amateurs can generate high-quality stop-motion animations.
DNA polymerase kappa from Trypanosoma cruzi localizes to the mitochondria, bypasses 8‐oxoguanine lesions and performs DNA synthesis in a recombination intermediate

DNA polymerase kappa (Polκ) is a low‐fidelity polymerase that has the ability to bypass several types of lesions. The biological role of this enzyme, a member of the DinB subfamily of Y‐family DNA polymerases, has remained elusive. In this report, we studied one of the two copies of Polκ from the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi (TcPolκ). The role of this TcPolκ copy was investigated by analysing its subcellular localization, its activities in vitro, and performing experiments with parasites that overexpress this polymerase. The TcPOLK sequence has the N‐terminal extension which is present only in eukaryotic DinB members, but its C‐terminal region is more similar to prokaryotic and archaeal counterparts since it lacks C2HC motifs and PCNA interaction domain. Our results indicate that in contrast to its previously described orthologues, this polymerase is localized to mitochondria. The overexpression of TcPOLK increases T. cruzi resistance to hydrogen peroxide, and in vitro polymerization assays revealed that TcPolκ efficiently bypasses 8‐oxoguanine lesions. Remarkably, our results also demonstrate that the DinB subfamily of polymerases can participate in homologous recombination, based on our findings that TcPolκ increases T. cruzi resistance to high doses of gamma irradiation and zeocin and can catalyse DNA synthesis within recombination intermediates.
Gender influence on defecographic abnormalities in patients with posterior pelvic floor disorders.

AIM To compare defecographic abnormalities in symptomatic men and women and to analyze differences between men and age- and symptom-matched women. METHODS Sixty-six men (mean age: 55.4 years, range: 20-81 years) who complained of constipation and/or fecal incontinence and/or pelvic pain underwent defecography after intake of a barium meal. Radiographs were analyzed for the diagnosis of rectocele, enterocele, intussusception and perineal descent. They were compared with age- and symptom-matched women (n = 198) who underwent defecography during the same period. RESULTS Normal defecography was observed in 22.7% of men vs 5.5% of women (P < 0.001). Defecography in men compared with women showed 4.5% vs 44.4% (P < 0.001) rectocele, and 10.6% vs 29.8% (P < 0.001) enterocele, respectively. No difference was observed for the diagnosis of intussusception (57.6% vs 44.9%). Perineal descent at rest was more frequent in women (P < 0.005). CONCLUSION For the same complaint, diagnosis of defecographic abnormalities was different in men than in women: rectocele, enterocele and perineal descent at rest were observed less frequently in men than in women.
Image analysis of electron micrographs relating to mineralization in calcifying cartilage: theoretical considerations.

Biological mineralization kis a cell-mediated process which is believed to be triggered by a "nucleating agent. " Various matrix structures, such as matrix vesicles, collagen fibrils and macromolecules, have been claimed to be the source of this substance, since these components have been found by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of thin sections to be associated with early mineral crystals. Systematic image analysis of the relationships revealed in electron micrographs between specific matrix components and early mineral deposits has shown that unequivocal image interpretation is not possible. This is due principally to the problems posed by overprojection and truncation phenomena, since the structures being analyzed lie within the same dimensional range as thin section thickness. Various examples are illustrated and discussed. The site at which mineral crystals are initially laid down thus cannot be identified with any matrix structure using thin section TEM. Possible technical approaches to resolve this problem of image analysis are discussed.
pattern motorregional complexity to a segmentally distributed Bringing up the rear : new premotor interneurons

pattern motor regional complexity to a segmentally distributed Bringing up the rear: new premotor interneurons add You might find this additional info useful. generator Animal-to-animal variability of connection strength in the leech heartbeat central pattern including high resolution figures, can be found at: Updated information and services publishes original articles on the function of the nervous system. It is published 12 times a year Journal of Neurophysiology
Wireless Sensor Network -A Survey

Wireless sensor networks are the networks consisting of large number of small and tiny sensor nodes. The nodes are supplied with limited power, memory and other resources and perform in-network processing. In this paper, various issues are discussed that actually put the limitations in the well working and the life time of the network. In Wireless sensor network, nodes should consume less power, memory and so data aggregation should be performed. Security is another aspect which should be present in the network. Quality of service, routing, medium access schemes all are considered in designing the protocols.
Regulatory functional territory of PLK-1 and their substrates beyond mitosis

Polo-like kinase 1 (PLK-1) is a well-known (Ser/Thr) mitotic protein kinase and is considered as a proto-oncogene. As hyper-activation of PLK-1 is broadly associated with poor prognosis and cancer progression, it is one of the most extensively studied mitotic kinases. During mitosis, PLK-1 regulates various cell cycle events, such as spindle pole maturation, chromosome segregation and cytokinesis. However, studies have demonstrated that the role of PLK-1 is not only restricted to mitosis, but PLK-1 can also regulate other vital events beyond mitosis, including transcription, translation, ciliogenesis, checkpoint adaptation and recovery, apoptosis, chromosomes dynamics etc. Recent reviews have tried to define the regulatory role of PLK-1 during mitosis progression and tumorigenesis, but its’ functional role beyond mitosis is still largely unexplored. PLK-1 can regulate the activity of many proteins that work outside of its conventional territory. The dysregulation of these proteins can cause diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, tumorigenesis etc. and may also lead to drug resistance. Thus, in this review, we discussed the versatile role of PLK-1 and tried to collect data to validate its’ functional role in cell cycle regulation apart from mitosis.