Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of prostaglandin and antioxidant availability in recovery from forearm ischemia–reperfusion injury in humans

Background: Endothelial dysfunction, manifesting as attenuated flow-mediated dilation (FMD), is clinically important. Antioxidants may prevent this dysfunction; however, the acute effects of oral administration in humans are unknown. Low flow-mediated constriction (L-FMC), a further parameter of endothelial health, is largely unstudied and the mechanisms for this response unclear. Methods: Twelve healthy participants (five women and seven men) completed three test conditions: control; antioxidant cocktail (&agr;-lipoic acid, vitamins C and E); and prostaglandin inhibitor ingestion (ibuprofen). Ultrasound measurements of brachial artery responses were assessed throughout 5 min of forearm ischemia and 3 min after. Subsequently, an ischemia–reperfusion injury was induced by a 20-min upper arm occlusion. Further, vascular function protocols were completed at 15, 30, and 45 min of recovery. Results: Endothelial dysfunction was evident in all conditions. FMD was attenuated at 15 min after ischemia–reperfusion injury (Pre: 6.24 ± 0.58%; Post15: 0.24 ± 0.75%; mean ± SD, P < 0.05), but recovered by 45 min. Antioxidant administration did not preserve FMD compared with control (P > 0.05). The magnitude of L-FMC was augmented at 15 min (Pre: 1.44 ± 0.27%; Post15: 3.75 ± 1.73%; P < 0.05) and recovered by 45 min. Ibuprofen administration produced the largest constrictive response (Pre: −1.13 ± 1.71%; Post15: −5.57 ± 3.82%; time × condition interaction: P < 0.05). Conclusion: Results demonstrate ischemia–reperfusion injury causes endothelial dysfunction and acute oral antioxidant supplementation fails to reduce its magnitude. Our results also suggest that a lack of shear stress during occlusion combined with suppression of prostaglandin synthesis magnifies L-FMC, possibly due to augmented endothelin-1 expression.
A Simple Model and Infrastructure for Context-Aware Browsing of the World

The imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services for "browsing the world", i.e., for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, interacting with it, and understanding it. However, for this to occur, proper models and infrastructures must be developed. In this paper we propose a simple model for the representation of contextual information, the design and implementation of a general infrastructure for browsing the world, as well as some exemplar services we have implemented over it
New shapes on the dance floor: influencing ambient sound and vision with computationally augmented poi

Abstract This article charts the design, development and build of an interactive performance piece created specifically for use in a club context. At the time of writing it remains work in progress but our aim here is to articulate our creative and research goals and unpack some of the issues surrounding creating hybridized work. The piece takes a traditional set of poi that clubbers often dance with in trance and techno clubs and attempts to augment them with sensor technology in order to allow the shapes, patterns and movements made by the participant to become visualized elsewhere in the club space. Choreographic motifs drawn from the participants' motion in space with the poi add a further layer to the performance, which seeks to set up physical conversations between the dancer, the space, the technology and the club context itself.
The nucleus isthmi of the frog

The nucleus or ganglion isthmi is a subject of much confusion in the literature of comparative neurology. It has been described in all groups of vertebrates except cyclostomes and mammals. According to Kappers ('21, p. 789) it first appears in the Plagiostomi. There is formed in this group a new differentiation in the dorsal part of the isthmus, lateral to the anterior medullary velum, which Kappers regards as the nucleus isthmi. Franz ('12) describes it in bony fishes, and it has long been recognized in the anuran amphibia. Joustra ('18) has studied its connections in the chameleon, in which form it is very large, and in the crocodile. He concludes that in these reptiles the nucleus isthmi is homologous with the medial geniculate body of mammals. Edinger ( '11) describes a nucleus of this name in various vertebrate groups, but does not always apply the term to structures having the same connections, as Johnston ('05) has pointed out. According to Kappers ('21, p. 867) the nucleus is present in birds. Regarding its presence in the mammalian brain the statement of Kappers (p. 894) is pertinent when he remarks "doch musste es jeden vergleichenden Neurologen auffallen, dass ein so konstanter Kern wie das Ganglion isthmi, welches namentlich bei den Reptilien bereits eine so machtige Entwicklung erreicht, bei den Saugern fehlen sollte. " Johnston ('05) considers the nucleus isthmi to correspond with his secondary visceral nucleus of fishes (Rindenknoten of Mayser, '82). In another place Johnston ('06) states that the nucleus isthmi of birds and of amphibia, as Edinger applied the name,
Millimeter-wave Radar Phenomenology of Power Lines and a Polarimetric Detection Algorithm

— In this paper, the radar phenomenology of high-voltage power lines and cables is studied for examining the feasibility of detecting power lines along the path of a low-flying aircraft using a millimeter-wave radar system. For this purpose, polarimetric backscatter measurements of power line samples of different diameters and strand arrangements were performed over a wide range of incidence angles with very fine increments at 94 GHz. Also, similar polarimetric backscatter measurements were conducted for cylinders of the same radii and lengths as the power line samples for identifying the scattering features caused by the braiding structure of the power lines. In addition, the effects of a thin layer of water and a layer of ice over the power line surface on its polarimetric scattering behavior are studied by repeating the polarimetric backscatter measurements. Based on this phenomenological study, a polarimetric detection algorithm that makes use of the scattering features caused by the braided structure of power lines is proposed. It is shown that the proposed algorithm is capable of detecting power lines in a relatively strong clutter background with a poor signal-to-clutter ratio. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated experimentally using a rough asphalt surface and a vegetation foliage as sample clutter backgrounds.
A novel kernel-based gene selection and classification scheme for microarray data

Classification is one of the most important issues in microarray data analysis. Due to the SSS problem and other properties of microarray data, how to select the differentially expressed genes and how a build a proper classification model according these selected genes are two crucial concerns in constructing a powerful classification scheme. In this study, a classification scheme named SVMSC is proposed. SVMSC adopts a variable importance measure that is directly derived from RBF kernel function for selecting genes. This kernel function will also be used in the following SVM classifier. Since both the gene selection and classification are based on the same kernel function, SVMSC can properly express the capability of SVM. By comparing to several other popular classifiers with several different data sets, the experiment results showed that most of the best performances are associated with SVMSC.
Stand-Allocation System (SAS): A Constraint-Based System Developed with Software Components

The stand-allocation system (SAS) is an AI application developed for the Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) at Chek Lap Kok. sas uses constraint-programming techniques to assign parking stands to aircraft and schedules tow movements based on a set of business and operational constraints. The system provides planning, real-time operation, and problem-solving capabilities. sas generates a stand-allocation plan that finely balances the objectives of the airline-handling agents, the convenience of passengers, and the operational constraints of the airport. The system ensures a high standard of quality in customer service, airport safety, and use of stand resources. This article describes our experience in developing an AI system using standard off-the-shelf software components. SAS is an example of how development methodologies used to construct modern AI applications have become fully inline with mainstream practices.
Using Ontologies for an Effective Design of Collaborative Learning Activities

Although artificial intelligence has been successfully introduced to enhance Education through technologies in the past few years, major challenges still remain. One of them is how to represent the knowledge of intelligent systems. To represent the knowledge of systems to support collaborative learning is particularly challenging because it is based on various learning theories and given the complexity of group learning. The main objective of this work is to introduce an ontological infrastructure on which we can build well-grounded theoretical knowledge based on learning theories and to show how we can use it to develop programs to support intelligent guidance for an effective design of group activities.
TSS: An Energy Efficient Communication Scheme for Low Power Wireless Networks

Wireless sensor networks typically require low cost devices and low power operations. Hence, such networks usually employ radios with only simple modulation techniques such as ASK, OOK and FSK. We propose a new energy efficient communication scheme for wireless sensor networks that is based on the ternary number system encoding of data. An efficient algorithm for conversion from binary to ternary and vice versa is used that does not involve any division or multiplication but only addition. Our Ternary with Silent Symbol (TSS) communication scheme is similar in concepts to the RBNSiZeComm protocol proposed. However, in contrast to RBNSiZeComm, TSS simultaneously saves energy at both the transmitter and receiver due to shortening of the transmission duration. We also propose a transceiver design that uses a hybrid modulation scheme utilizing FSK and ASK so to keep the cost/complexity of the radio devices low. With a non-coherent detection based receiver and assuming equal likelihood of all possible binary strings of a given length, there is a savings of about 20% in energy on an average at the transmitter compared to binary FSK, for additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Simultaneously, there is a savings of 36.9% at the receiver too, due to the reduced length of ternary encoded transmitted data, compared to binary encoding. Coupled with the low cost and low complexity of the transceiver, these results establish the effectiveness of TSS as a suitable candidate for communication in low power wireless sensor networks.
Learning discriminative local binary patterns for face recognition

Histograms of Local Binary Patterns (LBPs) and variations thereof are a popular local visual descriptor for face recognition. So far, most variations of LBP are designed by hand or are learned with non-supervised methods. In this work we propose a simple method to learn discriminative LBPs in a supervised manner. The method represents an LBP-like descriptor as a set of pixel comparisons within a neighborhood and heuristically seeks for a set of pixel comparisons so as to maximize a Fisher separability criterion for the resulting histograms. Tests on standard face recognition datasets show that this method can create compact yet discriminative descriptors.
Incorporating Future Price Expectations in a Model of Whether, What and How Much to Buy Decisions

We incorporate the eects of households’ future price expectations in an econometric model that simultaneously examines three purchase decisions at the household-level: purchase incidence, brand choice and purchase quantity. We do this by first modeling households’ future price expectations using one of two learning schemes: 1. a variant of the Beta-Bernoulli process, and 2. a Gamma-Poisson process. We construct an inclusive value variable, that captures the future attractiveness of the product category to the household, and include it as a covariate in the joint econometric model of the three household decisions. We estimate the proposed model using scanner panel data on paper towels, explicitly correcting for two sources of selectivity bias in observed purchase quantity outcomes, extending a recently proposed econometric technique (Van Ophem 2000). We find that 1. the eects of future price expectations are very important in households’ purchase incidence decisions, 2. brand-loyals pay more attention to future prices than brand-switchers, 3. households that make shopping trips less frequently rely more on future price expectations. We document the managerial implications of the statistical biases that arise from ignoring the eects of either future price expectations or endogenous self-selectivity correction in the quantity outcomes.
All Natural NPC Problems Have Average-Case Complete Versions

In 1984 Levin put forward a suggestion for a theory of average case complexity. In this theory a problem, called a distributional problem, is defined as a pair consisting of a decision problem and a probability distribution over the instances. Introducing adequate notions of ”efficiency-onaverage”, simple distributions and efficiency-on-average preserving reductions, Levin developed a theory analogous to the theory of NP-completeness. In particular, he showed that there exists a simple distributional problem that is complete under these reductions. But since then very few distributional problems were shown to be complete in this sense. In this paper we show a simple sufficient condition for anNP-complete decision problem to have a distributional version that is complete under these reductions (and thus to be ”hard on the average” with respect to some simple probability distribution). Apparently all known NP-complete decision problems meet this condition.
Analysis of Factors Influence Online Trust: A Unified Model

— online consumer trust (online trust) is based on consumer’s perception of the website's characteristic and its operators in e-commerce and m-commerce. However, lack of trust has been identified as a major deterrent to development of online shopping. Based on previous literature on online trust this paper will review and analyze the proposed antecedents of trust by scholars and asserts influence factors of online trust in order to increasing consumers trust. The study will suppose that scholar's studies and revealed factors mostly resemble one another with different rate of influence in reviewed context and researched group and proposed a model for on line trust with assuming mobile commerce and s-commerce are subset of e-commerce.
SOCS1 is an inducible host factor during HIV-1 infection and regulates the intracellular trafficking and stability of HIV-1 Gag

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) utilizes the macromolecular machinery of the infected host cell to produce progeny virus. The discovery of cellular factors that participate in HIV-1 replication pathways has provided further insight into the molecular basis of virus–host cell interactions. Here, we report that the suppressor of cytokine signaling 1 (SOCS1) is an inducible host factor during HIV-1 infection and regulates the late stages of the HIV-1 replication pathway. SOCS1 can directly bind to the matrix and nucleocapsid regions of the HIV-1 p55 Gag polyprotein and enhance its stability and trafficking, resulting in the efficient production of HIV-1 particles via an IFN signaling-independent mechanism. The depletion of SOCS1 by siRNA reduces both the targeted trafficking and assembly of HIV-1 Gag, resulting in its accumulation as perinuclear solid aggregates that are eventually subjected to lysosomal degradation. These results together indicate that SOCS1 is a crucial host factor that regulates the intracellular dynamism of HIV-1 Gag and could therefore be a potential new therapeutic target for AIDS and its related disorders.
The Effect of MicroRNA bantam on Baculovirus AcMNPV Infection in Vitro and in Vivo

The role of microRNA bantam, one of the most abundant microRNAs in Sf9 cells, was studied for its role in baculovirus infection in vitro and in vivo. The expression level of bantam was increased after AcMNPV infection in Sf9 cells and in Spodoptera litura larvae. In Sf9 cells, application of bantam inhibitor or mimic altered the expression of many virus genes, the most affected gene being lef8, gp41 and p10, the expression level of which was increased by 8, 10 and 40 times, respectively, in the presence of bantam inhibitor. Virus DNA replication was decreased in the presence of bantam mimic and increased in the presence of bantam inhibitor in a dose dependent manner. However, the production of budded virus did not change significantly. Feeding the larvae of S. litura and Spodoptera exigua with bantam antagomiR, a more stable form of the inhibitor, resulted in an abnormal larval growth and a decreased pupation rate. In S. litura, larvae died 3.5 days sooner than the control when bantam antagomiR was applied, together with AcMNPV. In infected S. exigua, larval mortality increased from 47% without antagomiR to 80% with it. The results suggest that microRNA bantam plays an important role in insect growth, as well as in baculovirus-insect interaction.
The conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer

This essay starts by first explaining, for elliptic curves defined over Q, the statement of the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer. Alongside, it contains a discussion of some results that have been proved in the direction of the conjecture, such as the theorem of Kolyvagin-Gross-Zagier and the weak parity theorem of Tim and Vladimir Dokchitser. The second, third and fourth part of the essay represent an account, with detailed proofs, of results about the cases of both week and strong Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture from the wonderful article by John Coates, Yongxiong Li, Ye Tian and Shuai Zhai [1]. Recently, working on the congruent number curve E : y2 = x3 − x, Ye Tian introduced a new method of attack for the following general problem. Problem. Given an elliptic curve E defined over Q, we would like to find a large explicit infinite family of square free integers M, coprime with the conductor C(E), such that L(E(M),s) has a simple zero at s = 1. Tian [21], [22] succeeded in doing this for his particular choice of curve, and, inspired by his work, the authors carry out this full programme for the elliptic curve A : y2 + xy = x3 − x2 −2x−1 in [1]. Mysteriously, this required them to prove a weak form of the 2-part of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for an infinite family of quadratic twists of A, which is described at the end of the third section of this essay. The last section combines results from all the previous ones to prove the highlight of this essay, an analogue of Tian’s result for the elliptic curve A : y2 + xy = x3 − x2 −2x−1, formulated in Theorem 47. The autors of [1] belive that there should be analogues of this theorem for every elliptic curve E defined over Q and it is an important problem to formulate them precisely and then to prove them.
A century-long struggle towards professionalism. Key factors in the growth of the physiotherapists’ role in the United States, from subordinated practitioners to autonomous professionals

Abstract This article, adopting a historical point of view, aims to shed light and provide some insights into the long-lasting, tortuous process that led to a full recognition of the legitimacy of physiotherapists’ professional role in the United States as we presently know it. To achieve this purpose, the paper singles out which were the most relevant components that contributed to shape physiotherapists’ identity, who, during the twentieth century, shifted from the role of mere practitioners to that one of autonomous professionals. If it is uncontested that a clear distinction was soon traced between physiotherapists and osteopaths, and a second one, although more contrasted, with chiropractors, the essay advocates that physiotherapy evolved from a various, heterogeneous set of body manipulators (namely, from ‘bonesetters’, fitness trainers, masseurs/masseuses, and general nurses), and that it would be simplistic to reduce the profession forerunners to the over-cited WWI ‘reconstruction aides’. The article furthermore argues that physiotherapists had to struggle with the solid medical dominance to achieve recognition as autonomous practitioners, and that two fundamental positive factors toward this goal were the foundation and growth of a nationwide professional organization, and the implementation of a standardized, accredited college education.
Evidence for assembly of prions with left-handed β-helices into trimers

Studies using low-resolution fiber diffraction, electron microscopy, and atomic force microscopy on various amyloid fibrils indicate that the misfolded conformers must be modular, compact, and adopt a cross-β structure. In an earlier study, we used electron crystallography to delineate molecular models of the N-terminally truncated, disease-causing isoform (PrPSc) of the prion protein, designated PrP 27–30, which polymerizes into amyloid fibrils, but we were unable to choose between a trimeric or hexameric arrangement of right- or left-handed β-helical models. From a study of 119 all-β folds observed in globular proteins, we have now determined that, if PrPSc follows a known protein fold, it adopts either a β-sandwich or parallel β-helical architecture. With increasing evidence arguing for a parallel β-sheet organization in amyloids, we contend that the sequence of PrP is compatible with a parallel left-handed β-helical fold. Left-handed β-helices readily form trimers, providing a natural template for a trimeric model of PrPSc. This trimeric model accommodates the PrP sequence from residues 89–175 in a β-helical conformation with the C terminus (residues 176–227), retaining the disulfide-linked α-helical conformation observed in the normal cellular isoform. In addition, the proposed model matches the structural constraints of the PrP 27–30 crystals, positioning residues 141–176 and the N-linked sugars appropriately. Our parallel left-handed β-helical model provides a coherent framework that is consistent with many structural, biochemical, immunological, and propagation features of prions. Moreover, the parallel left-handed β-helical model for PrPSc may provide important clues to the structure of filaments found in some other neurodegenerative diseases.