Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection of recombinant human erythropoietin in urine by isoelectric focusing.

BACKGROUND Doping with erythropoietic proteins such as recombinant human erythropoietin (rHuEPO) and darbepoetin alfa is a serious issue in sport. There is little information on the time course of detection of rHuEPO in urine and on methods to evaluate electrophoresis-based data. METHODS We used a recently described isoelectric focusing method for detecting rHuEPO and endogenous EPO in urine obtained from individuals treated with placebo or epoetin alfa. The latter was administered subcutaneously at 50 IU/kg on days 0, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, and 18. Blood and urine samples were collected during the morning of study days -3, 0, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, and 18 and on days 2, 3, 4, and 7 postadministration. We developed visual and numerical (two-band ratio) techniques to evaluate the electropherograms for the presence of rHuEPO. RESULTS Compared with the placebo group, the epoetin alfa-treated group responded with increases in hematocrit, reticulocytes, macrocytes, serum EPO, and serum soluble transferrin receptor. The electropherograms showed that the pattern of bands arising from urinary rHuEPO is different from that of endogenous urinary EPO. Both the two-band ratio and the visual technique detected rHuEPO in all 14 epoetin alfa-treated individuals 3 days after the last dose. On the 7th day after the last dose, both techniques detected rHuEPO in approximately one-half of the participants. rHuEPO was not detected in the placebo-treated individuals. CONCLUSIONS The isoelectric focusing method detects rHuEPO in most urine samples collected 3 days after nine doses of epoetin alfa. The numerical two-band ratio was equivalent to a visual method for detecting rHuEPO in urine.
Expression of a zebrafish caudal homeobox gene correlates with the establishment of posterior cell lineages at gastrulation.

This paper deals with the first identification of a caudal cDNA containing a homeobox of the Drosophila caudal family in the zebrafish. A cDNA library from late gastrula stage embryos was constructed and screened with a mouse Cdx 1 homeobox probe. A 1.6 kb cDNA clone containing a homeobox related to other caudal homeoboxes was isolated and called cdx[Zf-cad1]. Analysis of the predicted 301 amino acid translation product reveals additional regions of homology outside the homeodomain with other members of the caudal family. Particularly, the cdx[Zf-cad1] putative protein shares a conserved N-terminal region with its chicken homolog CHox-cad. Transcripts are first detected just before the onset of gastrulation. At the beginning of gastrulation, a single 1.8 kb cdx[Zf-cad1] transcript is located near the blastoderm margin with a high level of expression restricted to the epiblast. At this stage, the hypoblast is clearly negative. At the end of gastrulation, cdx[Zf-cad1] is widely expressed in vegetal (i.e. prospective posterior) epiblast and hypoblast, with a somewhat weaker expression in the dorsal hypoblast. During somitogenesis, cdx[Zf-cad1] exhibits a posterior regionalization in the neurectoderm. In contrast, no expression is detected in the mesoderm of 22 h embryos (late somitogenesis). Posterior endoderm is also positive at this stage. cdx[Zf-cad1] transcripts cease to be detected about 48 h after fertilization. They are undetectable in the adult, particularly in female gonads. The pattern of cdx[Zf-cad1] expression during and after gastrulation is consistent with its possible involvement in the regionalization of the embryo at these stages. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
A quadratic programming approach to image labelling

Image labelling tasks are usually formulated within the framework of discrete Markov random fields where the optimal labels are recovered by extremising a discrete energy function. The authors present an alternative continuous relaxation approach to image labelling, which makes use of a quadratic cost function over the class labels. The cost function to be minimised is convex and its discrete version is equivalent up to a constant additive factor to the target function used in discrete MRF approaches. Moreover, its corresponding Hessian matrix is given by the graph Laplacian of the adjacency matrix. Therefore the optimisation of the cost function is governed by the pairwise interactions between pixels in the local neighbourhood. This leads to a sparse Hessian matrix for which the global minimum of the continuous relaxation problem can be efficiently found by solving a system of linear equations using the Cholesky factorisation. The authors elaborate on the links between the method and other techniques elsewhere in the literature and provide results on synthetic and real-world imagery. The authors also provide a comparison with competing approaches.
The Molecular Mechanism for the Genetic Disorder Familial Defective Apolipoprotein B100*

Familial defective apolipoprotein B100 (FDB) is a genetic disorder in which low density lipoproteins (LDL) bind defectively to the LDL receptor, resulting in hypercholesterolemia and premature atherosclerosis. FDB is caused by a mutation (R3500Q) that changes the conformation of apolipoprotein (apo) B100 near the receptor-binding site. We previously showed that arginine, not simply a positive charge, at residue 3500 is essential for normal receptor binding and that the carboxyl terminus of apoB100 is necessary for mutations affecting arginine 3500 to disrupt LDL receptor binding. Thus, normal receptor binding involves an interaction between arginine 3500 and tryptophan 4369 in the carboxyl tail of apoB100. W4369Y LDL and R3500Q LDL isolated from transgenic mice had identically defective LDL binding and a higher affinity for the monoclonal antibody MB47, which has an epitope flanking residue 3500. We conclude that arginine 3500 interacts with tryptophan 4369 and facilitates the conformation of apoB100 required for normal receptor binding of LDL. From our findings, we developed a model that explains how the carboxyl terminus of apoB100 interacts with the backbone of apoB100 that enwraps the LDL particle. Our model also explains how all known ligand-defective mutations in apoB100, including a newly discovered R3480W mutation in apoB100, cause defective receptor binding.
Development and characterization of high performance solvent cast soy protein isolate composite films

DEVELOPMENT AND CHARACTERIZATION OF HIGH PERFORMANCE SOLVENT CAST SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE COMPOSITE FILMS Alexander Matthew Jensen Advisor: Dr. Loong-Tak Lim University of Guelph, 2012 Committee Member: Dr. Massimo Marcone Committee Member: Dr. Shai Barbut The application of current soy protein films are limited due to their low mechanical strength and high moisture sensitivity compared to synthetic materials. This research studied several methods to improve the mechanical properties [tensile strength (TS), elongation at break (EAB), Young’s modulus of elasticity (YM)] of solvent cast soy protein isolate (SPI) films. Drying times were significantly reduced through the use of a heated casting surface. Neutral (pH 7) SPI films were prepared but were found to have lower TS, EAB and YM than control films prepared under alkaline conditions. Cellulose was extracted from soybean wastes and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) verified the existence of nano-sized fibres. Composite SPI films were prepared using either extracted cellulose fibres or titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles and their mechanical and barrier properties (water vapour, and oxygen permeability) were evaluated under different relative humidity (RH) conditions. In general, TS and YM decreased and EAB increased with increasing RH. Films with 5% (w/w) added cellulose exhibited significant (p-value < 0.05) improvements in TS and YM but decreased EAB. TiO2 composites possessed similar TS, YM, and EAB values to control films. Barrier properties were comparable across all samples, and decreased with increasing RH. Samples were characterized using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Preliminary work investigating synthesis of filler materials using cross-linked sodium alginate particles increased the TS and YM of SPI films to a similar extent as extracted cellulose. A method for electrospinning cellulose using ionic liquids was developed, but requires further process optimization to be used for fibre/filler synthesis.
(1S,5R)-1-(4-Fluorophenyl)-3-azoniabicyclo[3.1.0]hexane chloride

The absolute structure of the title compound, C11H13FN+·Cl−, has been determined. The five-membered ring has an envelope conformation with the N atom at the flap position. In the crystal structure, the Cl− anion links with the organic cation via N—H⋯Cl hydrogen bonding.
Pattern Classification Using Eigenspace Projection

Covariance matrices play the key role for dimension reduction in eigenspace projection methods for pattern recognition. Two scatters, an intraclass scatter and an interclass scatter, are obtained from samples for describing the sample distributions. The representation for these two scatters is classified into four categories. In this study, we focus on the analysis of the intraclass and interclass scatters. Three experiments, the evaluation for a music genre dataset, a bird sound dataset, and four face datasets, are conducted to make the comparisons of several state-of-the-art algorithms.
TABLEFS: Enhancing Metadata Efficiency in the Local File System

File systems that manage magnetic disks have long recognized the importance of sequential allocation and large transfer sizes for file data. Fast random access has dominated metadata lookup data structures with increasing use of B-trees on-disk. Yet our experiments with workloads dominated by metadata and small file access indicate that even sophisticated local disk file systems like Ext4, XFS and Btrfs leave a lot of opportunity for performance improvement in workloads dominated by metadata and small files. In this paper we present a stacked file system, TABLEFS, which uses another local file system as an object store. TABLEFS organizes all metadata into a single sparse table backed on disk using a Log-Structured Merge (LSM) tree, LevelDB in our experiments. By stacking, TABLEFS asks only for efficient large file allocation and access from the underlying local file system. By using an LSM tree, TABLEFS ensures metadata is written to disk in large, non-overwrite, sorted and indexed logs. Even an inefficient FUSE based user level implementation of TABLEFS can perform comparably to Ext4, XFS and Btrfs on data-intensive benchmarks, and can outperform them by 50% to as much as 1000% for metadata-intensive workloads. Such promising performance results from TABLEFS suggest that local disk file systems can be significantly improved by more aggressive aggregation and batching of metadata updates.
Methods for studying technology in the home

Technology is becoming ever more integral to our home lives, and visions such as ubiquitous computing, smart technologies and the Internet of Things represent a further stage of this development. However studying interactions and experiences in the home, and drawing understanding from this to inform design, is a substantial challenge. A significant strand of research on technology in home life has developed in the CHI community and beyond, with a range of methods being created, adapted and used in combination. This workshop brings together a diverse group of researchers to develop a coherent understanding of this methodological space, and to identify connections and gaps, where further development of methods can occur to overcome issues specific to studying the home.
Adaptive Fuzzy Output Feedback Control for Switched Nonstrict-Feedback Nonlinear Systems With Input Nonlinearities

This paper studies adaptive fuzzy output feedback tracking control problem for nonstrict-feedback switched nonlinear systems. The switched systems under consideration contain unknown nonlinearities, unmeasured states, and unknown deadzones. Fuzzy logic systems are utilized to approximate the unknown nonlinearities, and a switched fuzzy state observer is designed, and thus, the immeasurable states are estimated via it. In the framework of observer-based output feedback control, and by using the certainty equivalence deadzone inverse, a novel adaptive fuzzy output feedback control design method with the parameters adaptation laws is developed. The stability of the closed-loop system and the convergence of the tracking error are proved based on Lyapunov function and the average dwell-time methods. Two simulation examples are provided to check the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Dynamic Bayesian activity modeling in video via multi-feature integration

We present a Bayesian approach to unsupervised clustering of activity within video imagery. Vehicles and pedestrians are tracked within the video imagery and their collective activity in each time frame is measured and categorized using a natural extension of the dynamic latent Dirichlet allocation model. Our extension involves use of multiple types of simultaneously observed features from multiple classes of objects within the video imagery. Within the prior for the model these features are treated as independent, and modeled as draws from a variety of appropriate distribution types. By including multiple features, the model generates a richer set of activities; we quantitatively show that this yields better predictions of physical attributes within the scene, relative to currently available models that use only the single best feature. We show this by comparing model prediction of traffic light states within a busy intersection, which we ground-truth manually within the video imagery.
Evaluation of Candida ID, a New Chromogenic Medium for Fungal Isolation and Preliminary Identification of Some Yeast Species

ABSTRACT Candida ID, a new chromogenic medium, allows identification ofCandida albicans (blue colonies) and preliminary identification into a group of four species (pink colonies). In comparison with Albicans ID2 and Sabouraud gentamicin chloramphenicol on 446 fungal strains, Candida ID allowed the isolation of more species than Albicans ID 2 (95.5% versus 91.2%).
Design of GPC's in State Space*

This paper introduces a methodology for the original design of generalised predictive controllers (GPC's) based on the use of a state space CARIMA model to carry out those predictions. The CARIMA model presented is equivalent to the CARIMA model commonly used in the input/output (I/O) formulation of the GPC's. A connection is settled among the stochastic part of this model and the filter polynomials T i (z -1 ), making possible the design of the controller once any one of them is known. It is also remarkable that for the estimation of non-mea surable states, a full rank observer is proposed, and the fact that its poles are equal to the roots of the filter poly -nomials T i (z -1 ) can also be appreciated.
[Migraine and oral contraceptives].

The relationship of oral contraceptives to migraine headaches is reviewed. Although progestagens have long been known to relieve migraine, progestagens are thought to be responsible, because the headaches tend to appear in the days between pill cycles. As in pregnancy, oral contraceptives relieve migraine in some women, but probably migraines appear or are aggravated in more women (3.2-60%). In 30% of the women in one study, migraines were replaced by milder but constant tension headaches, thought to be due to guilt feelings over contraception. The declining level or ratio to estrogen of progestagens probably brings on migrains, therefore formulation lower in progestagens will lessen the indicence of migraines. 2 other explanations offered for the mechanism of progestagens in causing migraines are abnormal EEG patterns and abnormal structure of arterioles observed in endometrium, but postulated also to occur in the cerebral vessels. It seems that lower doses of progestagens, particularly for women without migraines, or low dose continuous progestagens for women with migraine should be prescribed.
Towards Automated Building Management through Cooperative Sensor-actuator Networks

Sensor-actuator networks require sharing of actuators across multiple applications. Here, simple device arbitration is not enough because actuators have lasting (or irreversible) effects on their environment. For example, actuating a heater not only affects the internal program state of the controlling application, but the nearby temperature as well. This change in external environment often has impact on application-level decision making. We present CAhoot, a preliminary software infrastructure to enable cooperative sensor actuator applications through communication of actuator ranges, and show how it can be applied to automate building-level energy control.
Genome macrorestriction analysis of sequential Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates from bronchiectasis patients without cystic fibrosis

The respiratory tracts of bronchiectasis patients may be persistently colonized with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, despite intensive chemotherapy. The organism may undergo phenotypic changes in these patients, providing misleading typing results by conventional methods. We prospectively studied eight bronchiectasis patients without cystic fibrosis over a period of 1 year. A high microbial load of P. aeruginosa was found in 70% of sputum samples collected. Of these, 55 sequential P. aeruginosa isolates were characterized by a genotyping method, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, to overcome the problem of differentiating the P. aeruginosa strains during chemotherapy. Genome macrorestriction fingerprinting patterns were analyzed after digestion with XbaI restriction endonuclease. Of the eight patients, six harbored a single dominant strain of P. aeruginosa, with an intrapatient macrorestriction similarity pattern range of 96 to 100%. The other two patients were infected with mixed bacterial isolates including P. aeruginosa. However, diversity was observed in the P. aeruginosa isolates from all eight patients, with a relatedness of only 55 to 65%. The study further strengthens the fact that pulsed-field gel electrophoresis can be used efficiently and effectively to differentiate P. aeruginosa strains in bronchiectasis patients without cystic fibrosis.
Power reduction technique using adiabatic logic

This paper presents the implementation of a 4-bit serial in serial out (SISO) shift register and a 2-to-1 multiplexer using Complementary Energy Path Adiabatic Logic (CEPAL). This static adiabatic logic has proved its advantage through the minimization of the l/2CVdd2 energy dissipation occurring every cycle. Firstly, the performance characteristics of CEPAL basic gates are compared against the conventional static CMOS logic counterpart to identify its adiabatic power advantage. The basic gates - NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR have been simulated. Finally a 4-bit serial in serial out (SISO) shift register is implemented with both the technologies and comparisons have been made. The analysis is carried out using the industry standard EDA design environment using 250 nm technology libraries from Tanner. The results prove that the CEPAL shift register is 76% more power efficient than the CMOS shift register at 100MHz and at 2.5V operating voltage.
A multi-objective coincidence memetic algorithm for a mixed-model U-line sequencing problem

A mixed-model U-line (MMUL) is a type of just-in-time (JIT) production systems where varieties of product models with similar product characteristics are assembled. Sequencing of product models to the MMUL is crucial to achieve the main benefits of JIT, i.e., set-up time reduction and levelled workload. In this paper, a new algorithm, namely combinatorial optimisation with coincidence plus memetic algorithm (COIN-MA), is proposed to find Pareto-optimal solutions for mixed-model sequencing problems. The performances of COIN-MA are compared with NSGA II, MNSGA II, and COIN against the metrics of convergence, spread, ratio of Pareto-optimal solutions, and CPU time. COIN-MA shows several outstanding characteristics against the others.
Question Answering Considering Semantic Categories and Co-Occurrence Density

In this paper, we present a Question Answering system called KUQA (Korea University Question Answering system) developed by using semantic categories and co-occurrence density. Semantic categories are used for computing the semantic similarity between a question and an answer, and co-occurrence density is used for measuring the proximity of the answer to the words of the question. KUQA is developed based on the hypothesis that the words that are semantically similar to the question and locally close to the words a ppeared in the question are likely to be the answer to the question.
Optimum Grip of a Polygon

It has been shown by Baker, Fortune and Grosse that any two-dimensional polygonal object can be prehended stably with three fingers, so that its weight (along the third dimension) is balanced. Besides, in this paper we show that form closure of a polygon object can be achieved by four fingers (previous proofs were not complete). We formulate and solve the problem of finding the optimum stable grip or form closure of any given polygon. For stable grip it is most natural to minimize the forces needed to balance through friction the object''s weight along the third dimension. For form closure, we minimize the worst-case forces needed to balance any unit force acting on the center of gravity of the object. The mathematical techniques used in the two instances are an interesting mix of Optimization and Euclidean geometry. Our results lead to algorithms for the efficient computation of the optimum grip in each case.
Effects of exercise adherence on physical function among overweight older adults with knee osteoarthritis.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether high exercise adherence improved physical function among older adults with knee osteoarthritis (OA) who were overweight or obese. METHODS Associations between exercise adherence, changes in 6-minute walking distance in meters, and self-reported disability (Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index function subscale) after 6 and 18 months were examined among an Arthritis, Diet, and Activity Promotion Trial subsample (n = 134) using multiple linear regression models. RESULTS Higher exercise adherence was associated with greater improvements in 6-minute walking distance after 6 and 18 months and in disability after 6 months. Pain and body mass index (BMI) contributed, to some extent, to explaining the link between exercise adherence and changes in physical performance and self-reported disability. CONCLUSION Higher exercise adherence is associated with improved physical function in overweight and obese older adults with knee OA. This indicates that promoting adherence is clinically relevant when prescribing exercise regimens that also focus on decreasing pain and BMI.
Efficient inference in occlusion-aware generative models of images

We present a generative model of images based on layering, in which image layers are individually generated, then composited from front to back. We are thus able to factor the appearance of an image into the appearance of individual objects within the image --- and additionally for each individual object, we can factor content from pose. Unlike prior work on layered models, we learn a shape prior for each object/layer, allowing the model to tease out which object is in front by looking for a consistent shape, without needing access to motion cues or any labeled data. We show that ordinary stochastic gradient variational bayes (SGVB), which optimizes our fully differentiable lower-bound on the log-likelihood, is sufficient to learn an interpretable representation of images. Finally we present experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the model for inferring foreground and background objects in images.