Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Peripheral Administration of an Angiotensin Ii at 1 Receptor Antagonist Decreases the Hypothalamic- Pituitary-adrenal Response to Isolation Stress

Angiotensin II, which stimulates AT 1 receptors, is a brain and peripheral stress hormone. We pretreated rats with the AT 1 receptor antagonist candesartan for 13 d via sc-implanted osmotic minipumps, followed by 24-h isolation in individual metabolic cages. We measured angiotensin II receptor-type binding and mRNAs and tyrosine hydroxylase mRNA by quantitative autoradiography and in situ hybridization, cat-echolamines by HPLC, and hormones by RIA. Isolation increased AT 1 receptor binding in hypothalamic para-ventricular nucleus as well as anterior pituitary ACTH, and decreased posterior pituitary AVP. Isolation stress also increased AT 1 receptor binding and AT 1B mRNA in zona glomerulosa and AT 2 binding in adrenal medulla, adrenal catecholamines, tyrosine hydroxylase mRNA, aldosterone, and corticosterone. Candesartan blocked AT 1 binding in para-ventricular nucleus and adrenal gland; prevented the isolation induced alterations in pituitary ACTH and AVP and in adrenal corticosterone, aldosterone, and catecholamines; abolished the increase in AT 2 binding in adrenal medulla; and substantially decreased urinary AVP, corticosterone, aldoste-rone, and catecholamines during isolation. Peripheral pre-treatment with an AT 1 receptor antagonist blocks brain and peripheral AT 1 receptors and inhibits the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal response to stress, suggesting a physiological role for peripheral and brain AT 1 receptors during stress and a possible beneficial effect of AT 1 antagonism in stress-related disorders. A NGIOTENSIN II (Ang II) regulates fluid and electrolyte homeostasis, hormone secretion, and the autonomic nervous system through receptors present within the brain and many peripheral tissues (1–3). In addition, Ang II may influence other brain functions, including the central regulation of peripheral sympathetic activity and hormonal secretion from the anterior and posterior pituitary gland (2, 3). In particular, Ang II was implicated in the response of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis to stress. Stress increases the production of circulating Ang II (4) and the expression of Ang II receptors in brain areas such as the hy-pothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) that are crucial for the central control of the stress reaction (2, 3, 5, 6). Ang II stimulates CRH formation in the PVN during stress (7, 8). Released into the hypothalamic portal system, CRH increases pituitary ACTH release. In turn, increased adrenal corticoids regulate the expression of Ang II receptors in the PVN (6, 9). In the anterior pituitary, locally synthesized and circulating Ang II enhances the secretion of ACTH during stress (2). In addition, Ang II has direct effects on adrenal function, stimulating aldosterone secretion from the zona glomerulosa …
A psychoacoustic approach for sound quality assessment of automotive power windows

Psychoacoustic methodologies were investigated and applied to a case study within a cooperation project of the University of Pisa and Magna Closures S.p.A. mainly focused on the acoustics of power windows. The project included tests on closing-opening event sequences of the power window rail, to evaluate the component noise. Different trials were performed varying the test conditions. Time-frequency analyses, psychoacoustic metrics and models were applied to the Sound Pressure Level (SPL) time functions of the raw microphone signals and compared with threshold values from the literature. Scalar parameters quantifying the electric motor steadiness were also computed to characterize the noise excitation source while accelerometer signals were analysed in the frequency domain to extract modal parameters. The SPL time function appeared highly related to supply voltage, motor type and silent block insertion whereas psychoacoustic parameters were able to highlight further peculiarities of sound timbre.
Stimulus-Specific Adaptation at the Synapse Level In Vitro

Stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) is observed in many brain regions in humans and animals. SSA of cortical neurons has been proposed to accumulate through relays in ascending pathways. Here, we examined SSA at the synapse level using whole-cell patch-clamp recordings of primary cultured cortical neurons of the rat. First, we found that cultured neurons had high firing capability with 100-Hz current injection. However, neuron firing started to adapt to repeated electrically activated synaptic inputs at 10 Hz. Next, to activate different dendritic inputs, electrical stimulations were spatially separated. Cultured neurons showed similar SSA properties in the oddball stimulation paradigm compared to those reported in vivo. Single neurons responded preferentially to a deviant stimulus over repeated, standard stimuli considering both synapse-driven spikes and excitatory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs). Compared with two closely placed stimulating electrodes that activated highly overlapping dendritic fields, two separately placed electrodes that activated less overlapping dendritic fields elicited greater SSA. Finally, we used glutamate puffing to directly activate postsynaptic glutamate receptors. Neurons showed SSA to two separately placed puffs repeated at 10 Hz. Compared with EPSCs, GABAa receptor-mediated inhibitory postsynaptic currents showed weaker SSA. Heterogeneity of the synaptic inputs was critical for producing SSA, with glutamate receptor desensitization participating in the process. Our findings suggest that postsynaptic fatigue contributes largely to SSA at low frequencies.
Plötzlicher, unerwarteter Tod bei Epilepsie: Mechanismen und Prävention

Zusammenfassung SUDEP ist ein Akronym aus dem Englischen (sudden, unexpected death in epilepsy) und benennt den plötzlichen, unerwarteten Tod von Menschen mit Epilepsie. Es handelt sich um eine seltene, aber gravierende Gefahr für Epilepsiepatienten. Im Folgenden soll gezeigt werden, welche Mechanismen und Risikofaktoren eine Rolle spielen und wie das Auftreten von SUDEP verhindert werden kann.
Noise-power Trade-off In CMOS-G/sub M/-C Channel Select Filters

The channel selection in direct-downconversion receivers can be performed using analog or digital filters or a combination of both. For an appropriate partitioning in early design phase knowledge about the power-performance tradeoffs of the building blocks is necessary without knowledge about too many implementation details. This paper proposes a method to carry out the noise-power trade-off of analog Gm-C filters. For a particular example where the demand on adjacent channel rejection is very high it is shown that the analog solution is very promising when compared to the digital channel selection
The harmonic oscillator on Riemannian and Lorentzian configuration spaces of constant curvature

The harmonic oscillator as a distinguished dynamical system can be defined not only on the Euclidean plane but also on the sphere and on the hyperbolic plane, and more generally on any configuration space with constant curvature and metric of any signature, either Riemannian (definite positive) or Lorentzian (indefinite). In this paper we study the main properties of these “curved” harmonic oscillators simultaneously on any such configuration space, using a Cayley–Klein (CK)-type approach, with two free parameters κ1,κ2 which altogether correspond to the possible values for curvature and signature type: the generic Riemannian and Lorentzian spaces of constant curvature (sphere S2, hyperbolic plane H2, AntiDeSitter sphere AdS1+1, and DeSitter sphere dS1+1) appear in this family, with Euclidean and Minkowski spaces as flat particular cases. We solve the equations of motion for the curved harmonic oscillator and obtain explicit expressions for the orbits by using three different methods: by direct integratio.
A Robust Active Learning Framework Using Itemset Based Dynamic Rule Sampling

Active learning is a rapidly growing field of machine learning which aims at reducing the labeling effort of the oracle (human expert) in acquiring informative training samples in domains where the cost of labeling is high. Associative classification is a well established prediction method which possesses the advantages of high accuracy and faster learning rates in classification. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm which unifies associative classification with active learning. The algorithm has two major procedures of Rule generation and rule pruning. The algorithm selects unlabeled instances from the pool of available samples and uses a unique dynamic rule sampling procedure for updating the model. The rules are dynamically sampled class association rules (CAR) which are generated using the mined Minimal infrequent itemsets. The results derived over 10 datasets from the UCI-ML repository for our approach have been compared with those from the ACTIVE-DECORATE algorithm. We also analyze our sampling method against the state of art sampling frameworks and show that our method performs better.
Novel Formulation of a Reconstituted High-Density Lipoprotein (CSL112) Dramatically Enhances ABCA1-Dependent Cholesterol Efflux

Objective—The ability of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) to remove cholesterol from atherosclerotic plaque is thought to underlie its inverse correlation with cardiovascular risk. Our objective was to produce and characterize a human apolipoprotein AI (apoA-I) product optimized to treat clinical atherosclerotic disease. Approach and Results—A new formulation of full length, plasma-derived human apoA-I termed CSL112 was designed to maximize the cholesterol efflux from cells and exhibit favorable pharmacological properties. CSL112 is a disc-shaped particle that strongly elevates cholesterol esterification and shows good pharmacokinetics in rabbits. Infusion of CSL112 into rabbits caused a strong and immediate increase in the ATP binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1)-dependent efflux capacity of plasma, an increase in plasma unesterified cholesterol and rapid subsequent cholesterol esterification. In the presence of human plasma, CSL112 was significantly more potent than native HDL at enhancing cholesterol efflux from macrophages, and the efflux elevation was predominantly via the ABCA1 transporter. Consistent with this observation, addition of CSL112 to plasma led to generation of high levels of HDL-VS, a favorable substrate for ABCA1. The lipid profile of plasma did not affect these behaviors. In studies with whole human blood, CSL112 reduced expression of intercellular adhesion molecule 1 and cytokine secretion, and as with cholesterol efflux, these activities were substantially greater than those of native HDL assayed in parallel. Conclusions—CSL112 has favorable pharmacological properties and strongly elevates the ability of plasma to withdraw cholesterol from cells. Preferential elevation of ABCA1-dependent efflux may target atherosclerotic plaque for cholesterol removal and this property makes CSL112 a promising candidate therapy for acute coronary syndrome.
Topic modeling of public repositories at scale using names in source code

Programming languages themselves have a limited number of reserved keywords and character based tokens that define the language specification. However, programmers have a rich use of natural language within their code through comments, text literals and naming entities. The programmer defined names that can be found in source code are a rich source of information to build a high level understanding of the project. The goal of this paper is to apply topic modeling to names used in over 13.6 million repositories and perceive the inferred topics. One of the problems in such a study is the occurrence of duplicate repositories not officially marked as forks (obscure forks). We show how to address it using the same identifiers which are extracted for topic modeling. We open with a discussion on naming in source code, we then elaborate on our approach to remove exact duplicate and fuzzy duplicate repositories using Locality Sensitive Hashing on the bag-of-words model and then discuss our work on topic modeling; and finally present the results from our data analysis together with open-access to the source code, tools and datasets.
Tools for Constructing Distributed Reactive

This paper describes Meta, a toolkit for the construction of reliable non-real-time reactive systems. The intended use for Meta is for building applications such as monitoring and debug-ging systems, tool integration services, and network and distributed application managers. In order to use Meta, a distributed program is rst instrumented with a software sensor and actuator abstraction that exposes the state of the program for purposes of control. Then, a control program is written that monitors the state of the instrumented program and changes the state when speciied conditions occur. Issues that are addressed by Meta include the construction of a consistent global state for detection, replication for fault-tolerance where appropriate, and the decentralization of control in order to reduce latency. A reactive system 11] structure is characterized by a control program that interacts with an in-strumented process called the environment. The control program is input-driven: it monitors the environment and reacts to signiicant events by sending commands to the environment. The most common use of a reactive system structure is for process control systems, in which case the environment is a physical process, such as an assembly line or a physical plant. A reactive system structure, however, can be used for more than process control systems. Monitoring and debugging systems 9, 17] have a reactive system structure. Similarly, tool integration services 10, 19] can be cast as reactive systems. Tool integration services relate actions in one software tool to actions in other tools: for example, selecting text in a text editor and setting a breakpoint in a program debugger. A tool integration service can be built as control program that monitors tool actions and invokes tool operations when some sequence of actions occurs. Distributed application management 14] can also be accomplished using a reactive structure. In this case, the environment consists of the distributed application and its supporting services (for example, the operating system, network servers, and hardware), and the purpose of the control program is to
A Region-Growing Permutation Alignment Approach in Frequency-Domain Blind Source Separation of Speech Mixtures

The convolutive blind source separation (BSS) problem can be solved efficiently in the frequency domain, where instantaneous BSS is performed separately in each frequency bin. However, the permutation ambiguity in each frequency bin should be resolved so that the separated frequency components from the same source are grouped together. To solve the permutation problem, this paper presents a new alignment method based on an inter-frequency dependence measure: the powers of separated signals. Bin-wise permutation alignment is applied first across all frequency bins, using the correlation of separated signal powers; then the full frequency band is partitioned into small regions based on the bin-wise permutation alignment result. Finally, region-wise permutation alignment is performed in a region-growing manner. The region-wise permutation correction scheme minimizes the spreading of the misalignment at isolated frequency bins to others, hence to improve permutation alignment. Experiment results in simulated and real environments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Analysis demonstrates that the proposed frequency-domain BSS method is computationally efficient.
Recognition of conversational telephone speech using the JANUS speech engine

Recognition of conversational speech is one of the most challenging speech recognition tasks to-date. While recognition error rates of 10% or lower can now be reached on speech dictation tasks over vocabularies in excess of 60,000 words, recognition of conversational speech has persistently resisted most attempts at improvements by way of the proven techniques to date. Difficulties arise from shorter words, telephone channel degradation, and highly disfluent and coarticulated speech. In this paper, we describe the application, adaptation, and performance evaluation of our JANUS speech recognition engine to the Switchboard conversational speech recognition task. Through a number of algorithmic improvements, we have been able to reduce error rates from more than 50% word error to 38%, measured on the offical 1996 NIST evaluation test set. Improvements include vocal tract length normalization, polyphonic modeling, label boosting, speaker adaptation with and without confidence measures, and speaking mode dependent pronunciation modeling.
PENGARUH STORE ENVIRONMENT, PERSONAL VALUE, WORKING SELF CONCEPT, DAN AFFECT TERHADAP IMPULSE BUYING Studi pada Generasi Y yang Berbelanja di Departemen Store dalam Mall

Actually the research on Impulse Buying has already been conducted by many researchers. However, it still becomes an interesting topic to discuss. There are many opportunities to explore, such as the causes, objects, kinds and effects of it. These show that up to now, several differences either the result or the cause are still found. It was said that the previous researches on Impulse Buying were only dominated by emotional factor of consumers with no support of cognitive factor. Meanwhile, in terms of decision making, there should be a cognitive factor included although the portion is only a little. Besides, studies on impulse buying involving social factor of cognitif were still limited. Furthermore, the population of this research was women having gen Y as the consumers of fashion product at Matahari departemen store located in several malls in Surabaya. The ages of those women having Gen Y were between 22 and 39 years old who did shopping. The sampling technique employed was purposive sampling and the hypothesis study required was Structural Equation Modeling. The research result showed that all hypothess were accepted. H1: Store environment positively influenced working self concept; H2: Personal value positively influenced Working self concept; H3: Store environment positively influenced affect; H4: Personal value positively influenced affect; H5: Working Self concept positively influenced affect; H6: Store environment positively influenced impulse buying; H7: Personal value positively influenced impulse buying, and finally H8: Affect positively influenced impulse buying.
An optimized multimodal biometric system with hierachical classifiers and reduced features

The paper presents an optimized multimodal biometric system for identification applications. This solution is based on innovative and computational-efficient biometric data hierarchical classifiers (with detection and discrimination stages) and also with a post-classification fusion. The detection-based classification is very suitable for applications with several security levels in which the end-users have various authorization degrees. The proposed solution supports an optimal trade-off between the identification accuracy and the computational complexity, which is important for the medium- and large-scale identification biometric applications.
Epidemiological Features of Nontraumatic Spontaneous Subarachnoid Hemorrhage in China: A Nationwide Hospital-based Multicenter Study

Background: Nontraumatic spontaneous subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is associated with a high mortality. This study was conducted to investigate the epidemiological features of nontraumatic spontaneous SAH in China. Methods: From January 2006 to December 2008, the clinical data of patients with nontraumatic SAH from 32 major neurosurgical centers of China were evaluated. Emergent digital subtraction angiography (DSA) was performed for the diagnosis of SAH sources in the acute stage of SAH (⩽3 days). The results and complications of emergent DSA were analyzed. Repeated DSA or computed tomography angiography (CTA) was suggested 2 weeks later if initial angiographic result was negative. Results: A total of 2562 patients were enrolled, including 81.4% of aneurysmal SAH and 18.6% of nonaneurysmal SAH. The total complication rate of emergent DSA was 3.9% without any mortality. Among the patients with aneurysmal SAH, 321 cases (15.4%) had multiple aneurysms, and a total of 2435 aneurysms were detected. The aneurysms mostly originated from the anterior communicating artery (30.1%), posterior communicating artery (28.7%), and middle cerebral artery (15.9%). Among the nonaneurysmal SAH cases, 76.5% (n = 365) had negative initial DSA, including 62 cases with peri-mesencephalic nonaneurysmal SAH (PNSAH). Repeated DSA or CTA was performed in 252 patients with negative initial DSA, including 45 PNSAH cases. Among them, the repeated angiographic results remained negative in 45 PNSAH cases, but 28 (13.5%) intracranial aneurysms were detected in the remaining 207 cases. In addition, brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM, 7.5%), Moyamoya disease (7.3%), stenosis or sclerosis of the cerebral artery (2.7%), and dural arteriovenous fistula or carotid cavernous fistula (2.3%) were the major causes of nonaneurysmal SAH. Conclusions: DSA can be performed safely for pathological diagnosis in the acute stage of SAH. Ruptured intracranial aneurysms, AVM, and Moyamoya disease are the major causes of SAH detected by emergent DSA in China.
Wolbachia in two insect host–parasitoid communities

Wolbachia form a group of intracellular bacteria that alter reproduction in their arthropod hosts. Two major phylogenetic subdivisions (A and B) of Wolbachia occur. Using a polymerase chain reaction assay we surveyed for the A and B group Wolbachia in 82 insect species from two temperate host–parasitoid communities (food webs) and a general collection of Lepidoptera caught at a light trap. One host–parasitoid community was based around leaf‐mining Lepidoptera, and the other around Aphids. We found that: (i) 22.0% of insects sampled were infected with Wolbachia; and (ii) the prevalence and type (A or B) of Wolbachia infection differed significantly between communities and taxonomic groups. We obtained DNA sequences from the ftsZ gene for the group B Wolbachia found in six leaf‐mining species and one of their parasitoids, as well as four of the Lepidoptera caught by a light trap. Taken together, the results of our survey and phylogenetic analyses of the sequence data suggest that host–parasitoid transfer of Wolbachia is not the major route through which the species we have examined become infected. In addition, the Wolbachia strains observed in five leaf‐mining species from the same genus were not closely related, indicating that transfer between species has not occurred due to a shared feeding niche or cospeciation.