Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Responses of neurons in the nucleus tractus solitarius to stimulation of heart and lung receptors in the rat.

To characterize central integration of reflex responses to stimulation of mechanically and chemically sensitive receptors in the heart and lung, male rats (350 to 425 g) were anesthetized (pentobarbital, 50 mg/kg IP) and paralyzed (gallamine triethiodide, 25 mg/kg IV) and then they underwent bilateral sinoaortic denervation. Extracellular activity of neurons in the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) was recorded in response to bolus intra-atrial saline (50, 100, 200, or 300 microL) or phenylbiguanide (PBG, 16 micrograms/kg in 100 microL) administered in random sequence. Changes in mean arterial pressure (MAP), mean right atrial pressure, and right atrial systolic pressure (RASP) were measured as correlates of stimulus intensity, and heart rate (HR) and renal sympathetic nerve activity (RSNA) were used to assess efferent reflex effects of cardiac and pulmonary receptor stimulation. NTS neurons with possible afferent input from stretch and chemically sensitive receptors were identified by an excitatory evoked response to electrical stimulation of the ipsilateral vagus nerve (1 Hz, 500 microA, 1-millisecond duration). Thirty-eight vagus nerve-evoked NTS units with onset latencies of 25.3 +/- 0.9 milliseconds displayed excitatory or inhibitory responses to saline or PBG injections or to both interventions. Saline administration elicited volume-dependent transient increases in MAP and RASP, which were followed by reflex decreases in MAP, HR, and RSNA. PBG injections also evoked hypotension, bradycardia, and sympathoinhibition. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Layered video multicast with retransmission (LVMR): evaluation of error recovery schemes

This paper proposes a novel scheme for distributing MPEG-coded video over a best-effort heterogeneous network, such as the Internet. The key contributions of the proposed scheme are: error recovery using smart retransmissions and adaptive playback point; and dynamic adjustment of video reception rate at the receivers using a hierarchical control mechanism. This paper focuses on the first feature. The protocols are developed on the Internet and the performance of the system has been measured on the Mbone. Some results from the measurement are presented and evaluated in this paper.
Disparities in testing for renal function in UK primary care: cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND In the UK, explicit quality standards for chronic disease management, including for diabetes and chronic kidney disease (CKD), are set out National Service Frameworks and pay-for-performance indicators. These conditions are common with a prevalence of 4% and 5.4%, respectively. CKD is largely asymptomatic, detected following renal function testing and important because associated with increased mortality and morbidity, especially in people with diabetes and proteinuria. OBJECTIVES To investigate who has their renal function tested and any association with age, sex, ethnicity and diabetes. METHOD A cross-sectional survey in a primary care research network in south-west London (n = 220 721). The following data were extracted from routine data: age, gender, ethnicity, latest serum creatinine, diagnosis of diabetes and recording of proteinuria. We used logistic regression to explore any association in testing for CKD. RESULTS People (82.1%) with diabetes had renal function and proteinuria tested; the proportion was much smaller (<0.5%) in those without. Women were more likely to have a creatinine test than men (28% versus 24%, P < 0.05), but this association was modified by age, ethnicity and presence of diabetes. People >75 years and with diabetes were most likely to have been tested. Black [adjusted odds ratio (AOR) 2.1, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.0-2.2] and south Asian (AOR 1.65, 95% CI 1.56-1.75) patients were more likely to be tested than whites. Those where ethnicity was not stated were the only group not tested more than whites. CONCLUSIONS Quality improvement initiatives and equity audits, which include CKD should take account of disparities in renal function testing.
High availability in IMS virtualized network

Virtualization, in telecommunication, has been given great interest over the 20 past years. Migrating operating system instances between physical hosts is one of the most important features of this technology. It allows network administrators to resolve serious problem such us hardware failure, lack in server capacity, while facilitates the management and the upgrade of their systems. With the strong use of Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) by most of third Generation (3G) network operators as a common infrastructure, live migration may be useful to resolve the overload problem that affects Call Session Control Function (CSCF) components. Our objective is to propose a High availability solution in order to avoid performance degradation. Thus, we aim to proof that when introducing the migration technique within the IMS architecture, we resolve the overload problem and guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for IMS client. Based on previous work on high availability using virtualization, we describe, in this paper, our methodology and implementation of an experimental scenario using live migration. Then, we evaluate the registration and the session setup delays. The use of migration reduces considerably the delays by 40% for registration and by 38% for session setup. So, we obtain acceptable values compared to the thresholds.
Instruction-Isomorphism in Program Execution

This paper identifies a fundamental runtime program property: Instruction–Isomorphism . A n instruction instance is said to be isomorphic if its component - information derived from the instruction and its backward dynamic data dependence graph - is identical to the component of an instruction executed earlier. By definition an isomorphic instruction will produce exactly the same output with the earlier instruction. This work introduces a taxonomy of isomorphic behavior, describes transformations that can change the isomorphic behavior of an instruction, characterizes empirically various aspects of instruction–isomorphism and suggests directions for improving predictors and performance. The empirical analysis shows that there is very little instruction–isomorphism in the dynamic dependencegraphofaprogram. Thisisduetoprogrammingconventionsandarchitecturalsemantics that introduce a lot of “overhead” nodes and dependences. However, by transforming the dynamic dependence graph closer to its dataflow form, instruction–isomorphism becomes prominent. The data show that for SPEC benchmarks, depending on the benchmark and dataset, 65 to 99.9% of the dynamic instructions are isomorphic.
The Period Changes of the Cepheid RT Aurigae

Observations of the light curve for the 3.7 day Cepheid RT Aur both before and since 1980 indicate that the variable is undergoing an overall period increase, amounting to +0.082 ± 0.012 s yr−1, rather than a period decrease, as implied by all observations prior to 1980. Superposed on the star’s O - C variations is a sinusoidal trend that cannot be attributed to random fluctuations in pulsation period. Rather, it appears to arise from light travel time effects in a binary system. The derived orbital period for the system is P = 26,429 ± 89 days (72.36 ± 0.24 yr). The inferred orbital parameters from the O - C residuals differ from those indicated by existing radial velocity data. The latter imply the most reasonable results, namely a1 sin i = 9.09(± 1.81) × 108 km and a minimum secondary mass of M2 = 1.15 ± 0.25 M⊙. Continued monitoring of the brightness and radial velocity changes in the Cepheid are necessary to confirm the long‐term trend and to provide data for a proper spectroscopic solution to the orbit.
A New Boosting Algorithm for Classification on Distributed Databases

In this paper, we propose a new boosting algorithm for distributed databases. The main idea of the proposed method is to utilize the parallelism of the distributed databases to build an ensemble of classifiers. At each round of the algorithm, each site processes its own data locally, and calculates all needed information. A center site will collect information from all sites and build the global classifier, which is then a classifier in the ensemble. This global classifier is also used by each distributed site to compute required information for the next round. By repeating this process, an ensemble of classifiers, which is almost identical to the one built on the whole data, will be produced from the distributed databases. The experiments were performed on 5 different datasets from the UCI repository [9]. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed algorithm is almost equal to or higher than the accuracy when applying boosting algorithm to the whole database.
Phenomenology of infant death rates. Identification of the peaks of viral and bacterial diseases

After birth setting up an effective immune system is a major challenge for all living organisms. In this paper we show that this process can be explored by using the age-specific infant death rate as a kind of sensor. This is made possible because, as shown by the authors in Berrut et al. (2016), between birth and a critical age t_c, for all mammals the death rate decreases with age as an hyperbolic function. For humans t_c is equal to 10 years. At some ages the hyperbolic fall displays spikes which, it is assumed, correspond to specific events in the organism's response to exogenous factors. One of these spikes occurs 10 days after birth and there is another at the age of about 300 days. It is shown that the first spike is related to viral infections whereas the second is related to bacterial diseases. By going back to former time periods during which infant mortality was much higher than currently, it is possible to get a magnified view of these peaks which in turn may give us useful information about how an organism adapts to new conditions. Apart from pathogens, the same methodology can be used to study the response to changes in other external conditions, e.g. supply of food, temperature or oxygen level.
The SNP rs402710 in 5p15.33 Is Associated with Lung Cancer Risk: A Replication Study in Chinese Population and a Meta-Analysis

Background Lung cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and leading cause of cancer mortality in the world. A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs402710, located in 5p15.33, was firstly identified to be associated with the lung cancer risk in a genome-wide association study. However, some following replication studies yielded inconsistent results. Methodology and Findings A case-control study of 611 cases and 1062 controls in a Chinese population was conducted, and then a meta-analysis integrating the current and previously published studies with a total 31811 cases and 36333 controls was performed to explore the real effect of rs402710 on lung cancer susceptibility. Significant associations between the SNP rs402710 and lung cancer risk were observed in both case-control study and meta-analysis, with ORs equal to 0.77 (95%CI = 0.63–0.95) and 0.83 (95%CI = 0.81–0.86) in dominant model, respectively. By stratified analysis of our case-control study, the associations were also observed in never smoker group and non-small cell lung cancer(NSCLC) group with ORs equal to 0.71 (95%CI = 0.53–0.95) and 0.69 (95%CI = 0.55–0.87), which was remarkable that larger effect of the minor allele T was seen in the two groups than that in overall lung cancer. Besides, the sensitive and cumulative analysis indicated the robust stability of the current results of meta-analysis. Conclusion The results from our replication study and the meta-analysis provided firm evidence that rs402710 T allele significantly contributed to decreased lung cancer risk, and the case-control study implied that the variant may yield stronger effect on NSCLC and never smokers. However, the mechanism underlying the polymorphism conferring susceptibility to lung cancer is warranted to clarify in the follow-up studies.
The Impacts of Technical Barriers to Trade on Different Components of International Trade

This research studies the impacts of technical barriers to trade (TBT) on trade performance of 103 countries over the period 1995–2008. The paper analyzes how TBT influences the trade probability, trade volume and trade duration. The trade volume is further decomposed into the number of products traded (extensive margin) and the trade value of each product (intensive margin). It is found that TBT imposes inconsistent impacts on the different components of trade, and that the effects differ by country. First, TBT reduces trade probability, but increases the volume and duration of existing trade relationships. Second, the positive effect of TBT on trade volume is mainly driven by an increase in the extensive margin, and the effect on the intensive margin is not statistically significant. Finally, TBT raised by developed countries have a stronger negative impact on trade probability, while TBT implemented by developing countries have a greater positive effect on trade volume.
Guidance of Unmanned Surface Vehicles: Experiments in Vehicle Following

Virtual target-based path-following techniques are extended to execute the task of vehicle following in the case of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). Indeed, vehicle following is reduced to the problem of tracking a virtual target moving at a desired range from a master vessel, while separating the spatial and temporal constraints, giving priority to the former one. The proposed approach is validated experimentally in a harbor area with the help of the prototype USVs ALANIS and Charlie, developed by Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche-Istituto di Studi sui Sistemi Intelligenti per lAutomazione (CNR-ISSIA).
Current Concepts in Myopia Control

Current animal and human models of myopia progression show that beside genetics, there are several environmental factors that contribute to the axial elongation process, the underlying cause for progressive myopia. During last years, extensive research in this field revealed some apparently independent mechanisms, which play an important role in myopisation. Understanding of these processes led to the introduction of novel techniques in optical corrective approach, pharmacological interventions as well as suggestions in environmental control. Many of these methods were proven effective for specific cases; however follow up sometimes shows efficacy drop and the catching up of myopia on longer term. In the present paper an overview of pharmacological and optical corrective options as well as environmental manipulation for the purpose of myopia control is presented and their efficacy is discussed.
Two Independent Functions of Collier/Early B Cell Factor in the Control of Drosophila Blood Cell Homeostasis

Blood cell production in the Drosophila hematopoietic organ, the lymph gland, is controlled by intrinsic factors and extrinsic signals. Initial analysis of Collier/Early B Cell Factor function in the lymph gland revealed the role of the Posterior Signaling Center (PSC) in mounting a dedicated cellular immune response to wasp parasitism. Further, premature blood cell differentiation when PSC specification or signaling was impaired, led to assigning the PSC a role equivalent to the vertebrate hematopoietic niche. We report here that Collier is expressed in a core population of lymph gland progenitors and cell autonomously maintains this population. The PSC contributes to lymph gland homeostasis by regulating blood cell differentiation, rather than by maintaining core progenitors. In addition to PSC signaling, switching off Collier expression in progenitors is required for efficient immune response to parasitism. Our data show that two independent sites of Collier/Early B Cell Factor expression, hematopoietic progenitors and the PSC, achieve control of hematopoiesis.
SALWARE: Salutary Hardware to design Trusted IC.

Fabless semiconductor industries are facing the rise of design costs of integrated circuits. This rise is link to the technology change and the complexity increasing. It follows that integrated circuits have become targets of counterfeiting and theft. The SALWARE project aims to study (theoretically and experimentally) salutary hardware design in order to fight against theft, illegal cloning and counterfeiting of integrated circuits. Salutary hardware means an embedded hardware system, hardly detectable / circumvented, inserted in an integrated circuit or a virtual component (Intellectual Property), used to provide intellectual property information (eg watermarking or hardware license) and / or to remotely activate the circuit or IP after manufacture and during use.
Joint Eurographics -ieee Tcvg Symposium on Visualization (2003) Using Graphs for Fast Error Term Approximation of Time-varying Datasets

We present a method for the efficient computation and storage of approximations of error tables used for error estimation of a region between different time steps in time-varying datasets. The error between two time steps is defined as the distance between the data of these time steps. Error tables are used to look up the error between different time steps of a time-varying dataset, especially when run time error computation is expensive. However, even the generation of error tables itself can be expensive. For n time steps, the exact error look-up table (which stores the error values for all pairs of time steps in a matrix) has a memory complexity and pre-processing time complexity of O(n 2), and O(1) for error retrieval. Our approximate error look-up table approach uses trees, where the leaf nodes represent original time steps, and interior nodes contain an average (or best-representative) of the children nodes. The error computed on an edge of a tree describes the distance between the two nodes on that edge. Evaluating the error between two different time steps requires traversing a path between the two leaf nodes, and accumulating the errors on the traversed edges. For n time steps, this scheme has a memory complexity and pre-processing time complexity of O(n log(n)), a significant improvement over the exact scheme; the error retrieval complexity is O(log(n)). As we do not need to calculate all possible n 2 error terms, our approach is a fast way to generate the approximation.
Formal foundation and conceptual design of dynamic adaptations in a workflow management system

While the different aspects of flexible workflow management are still under discussion, the ability to adapt the structure of running workflow instances to modified workflow schemas is an important property of a flexible workflow management system. In this paper, we present the formal foundation and conceptual design of dynamic adaptations in an object-oriented workflow management system. We describe in some detail how workflow schemas are represented. The system architecture, based on the CORBA object-oriented middleware, is overviewed, and the implementation of dynamic adaptations is sketched. An example introduces the graphical user interface of the system and shows a dynamic adaptation.
Influence of the Tachocline on Solar Evolution

Abstract: Recently, helioseismic observations have revealed the presence of a shear layer at the base of the convective zone related to the transition from differential rotation in the convection zone to almost uniform rotation in the radiative interior, the tachocline. At present, this layer extends only over a few percent of the solar radius and no definitive explanations have been given for the thinness. Following Spiegel and Zahn (1992, The solar tachocline, Astron. Astrophys. 265: 106–114), who invoke anisotropic turbulence to stop the spread of the tachocline deeper in the radiative zone as the Sun evolves, we give some justifications for their hypothesis by taking into account recent results on rotating shear instability (Richard & Zahn, 1999, Astron. Astrophys.). We study the impact of the macroscopic motions present in this layer on the Sun's structure and evolution by introducing a macroscopic diffusivity DT in updated solar models. We find that a time dependent treatment of the tachocline significantly improves the agreement between computed and observed surface chemical species, such as the 7Li and modify the internal structure of the Sun (Brun, Turck‐Chièze & Zahn, 1999, in Astrophys. J.).
Graph Rewriting and Copying

Graph rewrite systems play an important role in the implementation of functional programming languages. This paper focusses on the theoretical aspects of graph rewriting. Graph reduction is described in terms of general operations on graphs, leading to a substitution-like mechanism called graph replacement. Some basic theory on the interaction of these operations is developed. The ordering induced by graph homomorphisms is investigated. Equipped with this ordering, various sets of graphs have nice domain theoretical properties. Moreover, a lazy copying mechanism is added to the notion of graph reduction. This copying concept is analyzed by splitting it into more elementary graph operations, leading to a connuence result. Finally, some ideas are presented on the use of copying in practice.
Global Optimization strategies for two-mode clustering

Two-mode clustering is a relatively new form of clustering that clusters both rows and columns of a data matrix. To do so, a criterion similar to k-means is optimized. However, it is still unclear which optimization method should be used to perform two-mode clustering, as various methods may lead to non-global optima. This paper reviews and compares several optimization methods for two-mode clustering. Several known algorithms are discussed and a new, fuzzy algorithm is introduced. The meta-heuristics Multistart, Simulated Annealing, and Tabu Search are used in combination with these algorithms. The new, fuzzy algorithm is based on the fuzzy c-means algorithm of Bezdek (1981) and the Fuzzy Steps approach to avoid local minima of Heiser and Groenen (1997) and Groenen and Jajuga (2001). The performance of all methods is compared in a large simulation study. It is found that using a Multistart meta-heuristic in combination with a two-mode k-means algorithm or the fuzzy algorithm often gives the best results. Finally, an empirical data set is used to give a practical example of two-mode clustering.
Organizational Learning in Multinationals: R&D Networks of Japanese and US MNEs in the UK*

The institutional approach treats organisational forms and behaviour as contingent upon institutions that are durable and socially embedded and so several authors have argued that the nature and modes of operation of multinational enterprises (MNEs) vary according to their national origins. This paper examines the ways in which national patterns of organisation and innovation affect Japanese and US MNEs' global R&D networks and transnational learning, based on case studies of their R&D laboratories in the U.K. In particular, it focuses on how these MNEs tap into foreign academic knowledge base and scientific labour through collaborative links with higher education institutions. Relative to many Japanese MNEs, U.S. firms have developed a greater organisational capacity for coordinating globally dispersed learning and embedding themselves in local innovation networks because the liberal institutional environment within which US MNEs have developed enables them to extend their organisational and human resource systems across institutional and geographical boundaries. By contrast, Japanese MNEs appear to be more limited in their transnational learning because of the much more tightly integrated organisational and business system within which they are embedded. The paper also illustrates how the contrasting logics of the US 'professional community' and the Japanese 'organisational community' model of learning are manifested in MNEs