Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhancement of dissolution of poorly water soluble raloxifene hydrochloride by preparing nanoparticles

Nanoparticle engineering offers promising methods for the formulation of poorly water soluble drug compounds. The aim of the present work was to enhance dissolution and oral bioavailability of poorly water-soluble Raloxifene Hydrochloride (RH) by preparing stable nanoparticles. Mechanism of dissolution enhancement was also investigated. nanoparticles were produced by combining the antisolvent precipitation and high pressure homogenization (HPH) approaches in the presence of HPMC E5 and SDS (2:1, w/w). Then the nanosuspensions were converted into dry powders by spray-drying. The effect of process variables on particle size and physical state of drug were investigated. The physicochemical properties of raw RH and nanoparticles were characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The images of SEM revealed spherical RH nanoparticles. Nanoparticles showed good dissolution profile. The process by combining the antisolvent precipitation under sonication and HPH was produce small, uniform and stable nanoparticles which markedly enhanced dissolution rate.
PLA MELT-BLOWN FIBROUS STRUCTURES FOR POTENTIAL BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS

In this study, nanofibrous composite scaffolds have been fabricated in order to mimic the physical architecture of native extracellular matrix. Gelatin is a good candidate to mimic the chemical composition of natural collagen. It has many integrin-binding sites for cell adhesion and differentiation, which are found in collagen. However, electrospun scaffold made of gelatin had very poor mechanical properties. Therefore, in this study, bilayer nanofibrous scaffolds made of gelatin and poly(caprolactone) were produced by sequential electrospinning. The microscopic morphology, mechanical properties and porosity of electrospun bilayer gelatin/polycaprolactone scaffold were investigated. Abstract The paper presents results of experiments on formation of nonwoven fabrics from PLA biopolymer. Fibrous structures with parameters advantageous for application as a scaffold for tissue engineering were prepared from polylactide by melt-blown technology. Process optimization enables to obtain ultra-fine fibers. Sizes of pores formed in the material during melt-blown process can be tailored by formation of fibers of defined diameters. Abstract Porous poly(L-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) membranes were prepared by solvent-casting/porogen leaching method. Poly(ethylene-glycol) (PEG) with two molecular weights was used as a pore former. Mechanical properties of the membranes were analyzed in tensile test. Topography, pore size and surface roughness were characterized by atomic force microscopy on both sites of the membranes. PEG leached out percentage, thickness and wettability were also measured. Osteoblast-like cells were cultured on the membranes for 24 h and 6 days, and morphology, distribution and number of adhered cells as well as secretion of proteins and nitric oxide were measured. The results show that PEG molecular weight affected size and distribution of pores on both surfaces of the membranes. It resulted also in different mechanical characteristics of the membranes. In vitro experiments show that the membranes support adhesion and growth of osteoblast- like cells suggesting their usefulness for guided tissue regeneration (GTR).
Introduction to the tm Package Text Mining in R

This vignette gives a short introduction to text mining in R utilizing the text mining framework provided by the tm package. We present methods for data import, corpus handling, preprocessing, metadata management, and creation of term-document matrices. Our focus is on the main aspects of getting started with text mining in R—an in-depth description of the text mining infrastructure offered by tm was published in the Journal of Statistical Software (Feinerer et al., 2008). An introductory article on text mining in R was published in R News (Feinerer, 2008).
Crosstalk between Mast Cells and Pancreatic Cancer Cells Contributes to Pancreatic Tumor Progression

Purpose: To assess the clinical and pathologic significance of mast cell infiltration in human pancreatic cancer and evaluate crosstalk between mast cells and cancer cells in vitro. Experimental Design: Immunohistochemistry for tryptase was done on 53 pancreatic cancer specimens. Mast cell counts were correlated with clinical variables and survival. Serum tryptase activity from patients with cancer was compared with patients with benign pancreatic disease. In vitro, the effect of pancreatic cancer–conditioned medium on mast cell migration was assessed. The effect of conditioned medium from the human mast cell line, LAD-2, on cancer and normal ductal cell proliferation was assessed by thymidine incorporation. Matrigel invasion assays were used to evaluate the effect of mast cell–conditioned medium on cancer cell invasion in the presence and absence of a matrix metalloproteinase inhibitor, GM6001. Results: Mast cell infiltration was significantly increased in pancreatic cancer compared with normal pancreatic tissue (11.4 ± 6.7 versus 2.0 ± 1.4, P < 0.001). Increased infiltrating mast cells correlated with higher grade tumors (P < 0.0001) and worse survival. Patients with pancreatic cancer had elevated serum tryptase activity (P < 0.05). In vitro, AsPC1 and PANC-1 cells induced mast cell migration. Mast cell–conditioned medium induced pancreatic cancer cell migration, proliferation, and invasion but had no effect on normal ductal cells. Furthermore, the effect of mast cells on cancer cell invasion was, in large part, matrix metalloproteinase–dependent. Conclusions: Tumor-infiltrating mast cells are associated with worse prognosis in pancreatic cancer. In vitro, the interaction between mast cells and pancreatic cancer cells promotes tumor growth and invasion. Clin Cancer Res; 16(8); 2257–65. ©2010 AACR.
FrameNet Translation Using Bilingual Dictionaries with Evaluation on the English-French Pair

Semantic Role Labeling cannot be performed without an associated linguistic resource. A key resource for such a task is the FrameNet resource based on Fillmores theory of frame semantics. Like many linguistic resources, FrameNet has been built by English native speakers for the English language. To overcome the lack of such resources in other languages, we propose a new approach to FrameNet translation by using bilingual dictionaries and filtering the wrong translations. We define six scores to filter, based on translation redundancy and FrameNet structure. We also present our work on the enrichment of the obtained resource with nouns. This enrichment uses semantic spaces built on syntactical dependencies and a multi-represented k-NN classifier. We evaluate both the tasks on the French language over a subset of ten frames and show improved results compared to the existing French FrameNet. Our final resource contains 15,132 associations lexical units-frames for an estimated precision of 86%.
Neural correlates of individual differences in circadian behaviour

Daily rhythms in mammals are controlled by the circadian system, which is a collection of biological clocks regulated by a central pacemaker within the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the anterior hypothalamus. Changes in SCN function have pronounced consequences for behaviour and physiology; however, few studies have examined whether individual differences in circadian behaviour reflect changes in SCN function. Here, PERIOD2::LUCIFERASE mice were exposed to a behavioural assay to characterize individual differences in baseline entrainment, rate of re-entrainment and free-running rhythms. SCN slices were then collected for ex vivo bioluminescence imaging to gain insight into how the properties of the SCN clock influence individual differences in behavioural rhythms. First, individual differences in the timing of locomotor activity rhythms were positively correlated with the timing of SCN rhythms. Second, slower adjustment during simulated jetlag was associated with a larger degree of phase heterogeneity among SCN neurons. Collectively, these findings highlight the role of the SCN network in determining individual differences in circadian behaviour. Furthermore, these results reveal novel ways that the network organization of the SCN influences plasticity at the behavioural level, and lend insight into potential interventions designed to modulate the rate of resynchronization during transmeridian travel and shift work.
The Expandable Split Window Paradigm for Exploiting Fine-grain Parallelism

We propose a new processing paradigm, called the Expandable Split Window (ESW) paradigm, for exploiting fine-grain parallelism. This paradigm considers a window of instructions (possibly having dependencies) as a single unit, and exploits fine-grain parallelism by overlapping the execution of multiple windows. The basic idea is to connect multiple sequential processors, in a decoupled and decentralized manner, to achieve overall multiple issue. This processing paradigm shares a number of properties of the restricted dataflow machines, but was derived from the sequential von Neumann architecture. We also present an implementation of the Expandable Split Window execution model, and preliminary performance results.
Organohalide respiration: microbes breathing chlorinated molecules

Bacterial respiration has taken advantage of almost every redox couple present in the environment. The reduction of organohalide compounds to release the reduced halide ion drives energy production in organohalide respiring bacteria. This process is centred around the reductive dehalogenases, an iron–sulfur and corrinoid containing family of enzymes. These enzymes, transcriptional regulators and the bacteria themselves have potential to contribute to future bioremediation solutions that address the pollution of the environment by halogenated organic compounds.
Triangles, Pyramids, Connections and Attentive Inhibition

LaBerge's Triangular Theory of Attention contributes to several important topics in the study of visual attention. First, it expands on the discussion of whether attentive influences manifest themselves as neural suppression or enhancement; LaBerge seems to favour the enhancement viewpoint. Second, the paper proposes circuit loops (triangles by nature of three nodes in the loop) that may be responsible for the observed enhancement. Finally, a link between awareness and attention is explored and the claim that a representation of self must be considered is made. Here, it will not be possible to provide sensible discussion on all of these points; rather, the focus will be on the first issue, namely whether attention is manifested as enhancement or suppression. I claim that observations of enhancement or suppression depend very much on exactly how measurements are taken. Specific predictions are made: a given neuron exhibits enhanced or suppressed responses as a result of attentive influence depending on where that neuron is located in relation to the three-dimensional structure of attentive influences within the visual processing network. I show here a local, internal, attention control mechanism as an alternate model that provides an explanation for both enhancement and suppression of neural responses. In addition, it solves an important second problem for attention models, namely, information routing, within the same mechanism. The routing problem seems to be ignored by LaBerge.
Quality Estimation for Machine Translation Using the Joint Method of Evaluation Criteria and Statistical Modeling

This paper is to introduce our participation in the WMT13 shared tasks on Quality Estimation for machine translation without using reference translations. We submitted the results for Task 1.1 (sentence-level quality estimation), Task 1.2 (system selection) and Task 2 (word-level quality estimation). In Task 1.1, we used an enhanced version of BLEU metric without using reference translations to evaluate the translation quality. In Task 1.2, we utilized a probability model Naive Bayes (NB) as a classification algorithm with the features borrowed from the traditional evaluation metrics. In Task 2, to take the contextual information into account, we employed a discriminative undirected probabilistic graphical model Conditional random field (CRF), in addition to the NB algorithm. The training experiments on the past WMT corpora showed that the designed methods of this paper yielded promising results especially the statistical models of CRF and NB. The official results show that our CRF model achieved the highest F-score 0.8297 in binary classification of Task 2.
AVIFAUNA OF THE NORTHERN PARAGUAYAN CHACO

Resumen. - Avifauna chaquena del norte de Paraguay. - Inventarios llevaros a acabo en cinco sitios en el chaco del norte de Paraguay indicaron la presencia de 233 especies de aves, incluyendo a Mosqueta Boreal (Empidonax alnorum), la cual se registra por primera vez en el pais. Se documentaron por primera vez tres especies por medio de especimenes (Chiripepe de Cabeza Gris (yrrhura molinae), Pijui Ocraceo (Poe- cilurus scutatus) y Batara Boliviano (Thamnophilus sticturus)) y una por grabaciones de cantos (Piojito Trinador ³Serpophaga griseiceps)). Se registraron dos especies nuevas para el chaco de Paraguay, y 22 especies nuevas para las zonas del Alto Chaco o Matogrosense (sensu Hayes 1995). Comparaciones preliminares entre sitios, junto con informacion adicional publicada, apoyan a la idea de que el recambio de especies de sitio a sitio es considerable en el bioma del chaco. La recien declarada Reserva de Biosfera del Chaco, si se imple- menta y se protege efectivamente, representa un paso importante hacia la conservacion de la avifauna del norte del chaco. Abstract. - Surveys at five sites in the chaco biome in northern Paraguay revealed the presence of 233 bird species including one species, Alder Flycatcher (Empidonax alnorum) new for the country. Four species were documented for the first time with specimens (Green-cheeked Parakeet (Pyrrhura molinae), Ochre-cheeked Spinetail (Poecilurus scutatus), and Bolivian Slaty-Antshrike (Thamnophilus sticturus)) or tape-recordings (Gray- crowned Tyrannulet (Serpophaga griseiceps)). Two additional species were new for the Paraguayan chaco and 22 species for the regions of Alto Chaco or Matogrosense (sensu Hayes 1995). Preliminary comparisons among sites, along with other published information, support the idea that site-to-site turnover of species is high in the chaco biome. The recently declared Reserva de Biosfera del Chaco, if effectively imple- mented and protected, will represent an important step towards the conservation of the northern chaco avifauna. Accepted 3 October 2002.
Identifying similarity in text: multi-lingual analysis for summarization

Early work in the computational treatment of natural language focused on summarization, and machine translation. In my research I have concentrated on the area of summarization of documents in different languages. This thesis presents my work on multi-lingual text similarity. This work enables the identification of short units of text (usually sentences) that contain similar information even though they are written in different languages. I present my work on SimFinderML, a framework for multi-lingual text similarity computation that makes it easy to experiment with parameters for similarity computation and add support for other languages. An in-depth examination and evaluation of the system is performed using Arabic and English data. I also apply the concept of multi-lingual text similarity to summarization in two different systems. The first improves readability of English summaries of Arabic text by replacing machine translated Arabic sentences with highly similar English sentences when possible. The second is a novel summarization system that supports comparative analysis of Arabic and English documents in two ways. First, given Arabic and English documents that describe the same event, SimFinderML clusters sentences to present information that is supported by both the Arabic and English documents. Second, the system provides an analysis of how the Arabic and English documents differ by presenting information that is supported exclusively by documents in only one language. This novel form of summarization is a first step at analyzing the difference in perspectives from news reported in different languages.
Application of the Actor-Critic Architecture to Functional Electrical Stimulation Control of a Human Arm

Clinical tests have shown that the dynamics of a human arm, controlled using Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES), can vary significantly between and during trials. In this paper, we study the application of the actor-critic architecture, with neural networks for the both the actor and the critic, as a controller that can adapt to these changing dynamics of a human arm. Development and tests were done in simulation using a planar arm model and Hill-based muscle dynamics. We begin by training it using a Proportional Derivative (PD) controller as a supervisor. We then make clinically relevant changes to the dynamics of the arm and test the actor-critic's ability to adapt without supervision in a reasonable number of episodes. Finally, we devise methods for achieving both rapid learning and long-term stability.
Dynamic Thermal Clock Skew Compensation using Tunable Delay Buffers

The thermal gradients existing in high-performance circuits may significantly affect their timing behavior, in particular by increasing the skew of the clock net and/or altering hold/setup constraints, possibly causing the circuit to operate incorrectly. The knowledge of the spatial distribution of temperature can be used to properly design a clock network that is able to compensate such thermal non-uniformities. However, re-design of the clock network is effective only if temperature distribution is stationary, i.e., does not change over time. In this work, we specifically address the problem of dynamically modifying the clock tree in such a way that it can compensate for temporal variations of temperature. This is achieved by exploiting the buffers that are inserted during the clock network generation, by transforming them into tunable delay elements. Temperature-induced delay variations are then compensated by applying the proper tuning to the tunable buffers, which is computed off-line and, stored in a tuning table inserted in the design. We propose an algorithm to minimize the number of inserted tunable buffers, as well as their tunable range (which directly relates to complexity). Results show that clock skew is kept within original bounds with minimum area and power penalty. The maximum increase in power is 23.2% with most benchmarks exhibiting less than 5% increase in power
Association between Activity Space Exposure to Food Establishments and Individual Risk of Overweight

Objective Environmental exposure to food sources may underpin area level differences in individual risk for overweight. Place of residence is generally used to assess neighbourhood exposure. Yet, because people are mobile, multiple exposures should be accounted for to assess the relation between food environments and overweight. Unfortunately, mobility data is often missing from health surveys. We hereby test the feasibility of linking travel survey data with food listings to derive food store exposure predictors of overweight among health survey participants. Methods Food environment exposure measures accounting for non-residential activity places (activity spaces) were computed and modelled in Montreal and Quebec City, Canada, using travel surveys and food store listings. Models were then used to predict activity space food exposures for 5,578 participants of the Canadian Community Health Survey. These food exposure estimates, accounting for daily mobility, were used to model self-reported overweight in a multilevel framework. Median Odd Ratios were used to assess the proportion of between-neighborhood variance explained by such food exposure predictors. Results Estimates of food environment exposure accounting for both residential and non-residential destinations were significantly and more strongly associated with overweight than residential-only measures of exposure for men. For women, residential exposures were more strongly associated with overweight than non-residential exposures. In Montreal, adjusted models showed men in the highest quartile of exposure to food stores were at lesser risk of being overweight considering exposure to restaurants (OR = 0.36 [0.21–0.62]), fast food outlets (0.48 [0.30–0.79]), or corner stores (0.52 [0.35–0.78]). Conversely, men experiencing the highest proportion of restaurants being fast-food outlets were at higher risk of being overweight (2.07 [1.25–3.42]). Women experiencing higher residential exposures were at lower risk of overweight. Conclusion Using residential neighbourhood food exposure measures may underestimate true exposure and observed associations. Using mobility data offers potential for deriving activity space exposure estimates in epidemiological models.
The Relation Between Physical Activity and Cognitive Change in Older Latinos

Cognitive impairment in older Latinos is of concern due to the rapid growth of this population and their increased risk for dementia due to chronic disease. Evidence, primarily from studies of non-Latino Whites, suggests that physical activity (PA) may reduce cognitive decline. Few longitudinal studies have included older Latinos, objective measures of PA, or neurocognitive tests that assess domains of cognition. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to explore the relationship between changes in PA and cognitive decline in older Latinos over an average of 5 years. Inclusion criteria for the baseline sample were age ≥50 years, Latino ethnicity (English or Spanish speaking), no ambulation disability, no evidence of dementia, and Chicago address. Of the 174 baseline participants, 59 (33.9%) participated at follow-up. PA was measured by questionnaire and accelerometer worn for 7 days. A battery of neurocognitive tests assessed episodic memory, perceptual speed, and semantic memory. Change in cognitive function was dichotomized to maintenance versus decline. Binary logistic regression results indicated that those who had less decline from baseline to follow-up in self-reported light PA maintained episodic memory, odds ratio (OR) = 1.16 (95% confidence interval [CI] [1.03, 1.32]), while those who had less decline in accelerometer moderate–vigorous bouts maintained semantic memory, OR = 16.08 (95% CI [1.53, 168.89]), controlling for baseline age, chronic health problems, depressive symptoms, and acculturation. These findings suggest that maintenance of PA with aging may prevent cognitive decline. This work can inform future intervention development that aims to maintain PA in order to prevent cognitive decline.