Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Input Impedance of the Systemic Circulation

The hydraulic load presented to the left ventricle by the systemic circulation was characterized by expressing pressure-flow relationships in the ascending aorta as input impedance. This was determined by spectral or Fourier analysis of simultaneously recorded pressure and flow waves in 1 unanesthetized and 27 anesthetized dogs. Impedance modulus fell steeply from its value at zero frequency (the peripheral resistance) and its value was lowest (less than 1/20th of the peripheral resistance) over that band of frequencies (usually between 1.5 and 10 cycle/sec) which contained most of the energy of the left ventricular ejection (flow) wave. The patterns of modulus and phase of ascending aortic impedance were found to result from the presence of two functionally discrete reflecting sites in the systemic circulation, one in the upper part of the body and the other in the lower. The presence of these two sites appears to be an important factor in maintaining a low impedance modulus between 1.5 and 10 cycle/sec, and so in providing a favorable impedance to pulsatile flow from the heart. Both modulus and phase of impedance in the ascending aorta showed changes similar to those seen in other arteries when blood pressure was altered and when vasodilation occurred in the vascular bed.
In-Memory Parallel Processing of Massive Remotely Sensed Data Using an Apache Spark on Hadoop YARN Model

MapReduce has been widely used in Hadoop for parallel processing larger-scale data for the last decade. However, remote-sensing (RS) algorithms based on the programming model are trapped in dense disk I/O operations and unconstrained network communication, and thus inappropriate for timely processing and analyzing massive, heterogeneous RS data. In this paper, a novel in-memory computing framework called Apache Spark (Spark) is introduced. Through its merits of transferring transformation to in-memory datasets of Spark, the shortages are eliminated. To facilitate implementation and assure high performance of Spark-based algorithms in a complex cloud computing environment, a strip-oriented parallel programming model is proposed. By incorporating strips of RS data with resilient distributed datasets (RDDs) of Spark, all-level parallel RS algorithms can be easily expressed with coarse-grained transformation primitives and BitTorrent-enabled broadcast variables. Additionally, a generic image partition method for Spark-based RS algorithms to efficiently generate differentiable key/value strips from a Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) is implemented for concealing the heterogeneousness of RS data. Data-intensive multitasking algorithms and iteration-intensive algorithms were evaluated on a Hadoop yet another resource negotiator (YARN) platform. Experiments indicated that our Spark-based parallel algorithms are of great efficiency, a multitasking algorithm took less than 4 h to process more than half a terabyte of RS data on a small YARN cluster, and 9*9 convolution operations against a 909-MB image took less than 260 s. Further, the efficiency of iteration-intensive algorithms is insensitive to image size.
Strabismus Measurements in the Siamese Cat*

&NA; Anatomical and neurophysiological studies suggest a relationship between “abnormal” visual pathways and strabismus found in the Siamese cat. A telephotographic method for measuring eye positions in these cats reveals that newborn Siamese cats have a conspicuous exotropia appearance. Adult animals appear to have esotropia, orthophoria, or exotropia, which can be intermittent.
Targeted risk communication for computer security

Attacks on computer systems are rapidly becoming more numerous and more sophisticated, and current preventive techniques do not seem able to keep pace. Many successful attacks can be attributed to user errors: for example, while focused on other tasks, users may succumb to 'social engineering' attacks such as phishing or trojan horses. Warnings about the danger of these attacks are often vaguely worded and given long before the dangers are realized, and are therefore too easy to ignore. However, we hypothesize that users are more likely to be persuaded by messages that (1) leverage mental models to describe the dangers, (2) describe particular vulnerabilities that the user may be exposed to and (3) are delivered close in time before the danger may actually be realized. We discuss the design and initial implementation of a system to achieve this. It first shows a video about a potential danger, then creates warnings tailored to the user's environment and given at the time they may be most useful, displaying a still frame or snippet from the video to remind the user of the potential danger. The system uses templates of user activities as input to a markov logic network to recognize potentially risky behaviors. This approach can identify likely next steps that can be used to predict immediate danger and customize warnings.
Identifying the queries' topics based-on computing domain ontology

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a massive data repository that continues to grow daily. Most people in the world are familiar with the WWW and use it to find information on any domain. However, most of the search engines usually are based on the vocabulary of queries to find information, some of the results coming back from WWW are good, and the others are not good. To resolve this problem, a large sum of past search engines have relied on the methods related to lexical-syntactic analysis and the handcrafted knowledge sources; conversely, this paper proposes a method used to explore latent semantic features in order to identify topics of queries automatically based on the domain specific ontology. Besides, we select for our experiments with two real data sets. The first is the ACM Digital Library and the second is the queries, which are input made directly by users. The experimental results are evaluated by Precision, Recall measures. We provide details of the technical implementation and extensive experimental evaluation.
Cheaters in the Steam Community Gaming Social Network

Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population. One unfortunate phenomenon, however, poisons the competition and the fun: cheating. The costs of cheating span from industry-supported expenditures to detect and limit cheating, to victims’ monetary losses due to cyber crime. This paper studies cheaters in the Steam Community, an online social network built on top of the world’s dominant digital game delivery platform. We collected information about more than 12 million gamers connected in a global social network, of which more than 700 thousand have their proles agged as cheaters. We also collected in-game interaction data of over 10 thousand players from a popular multiplayer gaming server. We show that cheaters are well embedded in the social and interaction networks: their network position is largely undistinguishable from that of fair players. We observe that the cheating behavior appears to spread through a social mechanism: the presence and the number of cheater friends of a fair player is correlated with the likelihood of her becoming a cheater in the future. Also, we observe that there is a social penalty involved with being labeled as a cheater: cheaters are likely to switch to more restrictive privacy settings once they are tagged and they lose more friends than fair players. Finally, we observe that the number of cheaters is not correlated with the geographical, real-world population density, or with the local popularity of the Steam Community. This analysis can ultimately inform the design of mechanisms to deal with anti-social behavior (e.g., spamming, automated collection of data) in generic online social networks.
Antifungal Activity of Colistin against Mucorales Species In Vitro and in a Murine Model of Rhizopus oryzae Pulmonary Infection

ABSTRACT In immunosuppressed hosts, mucormycosis is a life-threatening infection with few treatment options. We studied the activity of colistin (polymyxin E) against Mucorales species in vitro and in a murine model of pulmonary Rhizopus oryzae infection. Colistin exhibited fungicidal activity in vitro against Mucorales spores and mycelia. At the colistin MIC, initial R. oryzae hyphal damage was followed by rapid regrowth; however, regrowth was prevented by combining colistin with a subinhibitory concentration of amphotericin B. Using electron microscopy and FM4-64 staining, we demonstrated that colistin disrupts R. oryzae cytoplasmic and vacuolar membranes, resulting in the leakage of intracellular contents. The prophylactic intranasal treatment of immunosuppressed mice with colistimethate significantly reduced the mortality rate and pulmonary fungal burden resulting from inhalational challenge with R. oryzae spores, whereas intraperitoneal colistimethate treatment had no effect. We conclude that colistin has modest in vitro and in vivo fungicidal activity against Mucorales spp. Further studies are warranted to assess the use of this drug in the prevention and treatment of mucormycosis.
Simultaneous calcium fluorescence imaging and MR of ex vivo organotypic cortical cultures: a new test bed for functional MRI

Recently, several new functional (f)MRI contrast mechanisms including diffusion, phase imaging, proton density, etc. have been proposed to measure neuronal activity more directly and accurately than blood‐oxygen‐level dependent (BOLD) fMRI. However, these approaches have proved difficult to reproduce, mainly because of the dearth of reliable and robust test systems to vet and validate them. Here we describe the development and testing of such a test bed for non‐BOLD fMRI. Organotypic cortical cultures were used as a stable and reproducible biological model of neuronal activity that shows spontaneous activity similar to that of in vivo brain cortex without any hemodynamic confounds. An open‐access, single‐sided magnetic resonance (MR) “profiler” consisting of four permanent magnets with magnetic field of 0.32 T was used in this study to perform MR acquisition. A fluorescence microscope with long working distance objective was mounted on the top of a custom‐designed chamber that keeps the organotypic culture vital, and the MR system was mounted on the bottom of the chamber to achieve real‐time simultaneous calcium fluorescence optical imaging and MR acquisition on the same specimen. In this study, the reliability and performance of the proposed test bed were demonstrated by a conventional CPMG MR sequence acquired simultaneously with calcium imaging, which is a well‐characterized measurement of neuronal activity. This experimental design will make it possible to correlate directly the other candidate functional MR signals to the optical indicia of neuronal activity in the future. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Preparation of nanoporous carbons from graphite nanofibres

In this study we manufactured highly porous graphite nanofibres (GNFs) by physical activation in order to develop promising energy storage materials. The activation was performed at activation temperatures in the range of 800–1050 °C. The pore structures of the porous GNFs were analysed using N2/77 K adsorption isotherms. After the activation, the porous GNFs showed a decrease in diameter and scratches on their surfaces, resulting from surface oxidation and the opening of the graphitic layers, respectively. It was found that the specific surface area of the porous GNFs prepared at 1050 °C was more than 2000 m2 g−1 without loss of their fibre shape or serious increase in electrical resistivity. This result indicates that porous GNFs prepared under optimal conditions can have a much higher specific surface area and are promising materials for energy storage technologies.
MINT: software to identify motifs and short-range interactions in trajectories of nucleic acids

Structural biology experiments and structure prediction tools have provided many high-resolution three-dimensional structures of nucleic acids. Also, molecular dynamics force field parameters have been adapted to simulating charged and flexible nucleic acid structures on microsecond time scales. Therefore, we can generate the dynamics of DNA or RNA molecules, but we still lack adequate tools for the analysis of the resulting huge amounts of data. We present MINT (Motif Identifier for Nucleic acids Trajectory) — an automatic tool for analyzing three-dimensional structures of RNA and DNA, and their full-atom molecular dynamics trajectories or other conformation sets (e.g. X-ray or nuclear magnetic resonance-derived structures). For each RNA or DNA conformation MINT determines the hydrogen bonding network resolving the base pairing patterns, identifies secondary structure motifs (helices, junctions, loops, etc.) and pseudoknots. MINT also estimates the energy of stacking and phosphate anion-base interactions. For many conformations, as in a molecular dynamics trajectory, MINT provides averages of the above structural and energetic features and their evolution. We show MINT functionality based on all-atom explicit solvent molecular dynamics trajectory of the 30S ribosomal subunit.
Acetazolamide in the Treatment of Acute Mountain Sickness: Clinical Efficacy and Effect on Gas Exchange

OBJECTIVE To determine the efficacy of acetazolamide in the treatment of patients with acute mountain sickness and the effect of the drug on pulmonary gas exchange in acute mountain sickness. DESIGN A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. SETTING The Denali Medical Research Project high-altitude research station (4200 m) on Mt. McKinley, Alaska. PARTICIPANTS Twelve climbers attempting an ascent of Mt. McKinley (summit, 6150 m) who presented to the medical research station with acute mountain sickness. INTERVENTION Climbers were randomly assigned to receive acetazolamide, 250 mg orally, or placebo at 0 (baseline) and 8 hours after inclusion in the study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES An assessment of acute mountain sickness using a symptom score and pulmonary gas exchange measurements was done at baseline and at 24 hours. MAIN RESULTS After 24 hours, five of six climbers treated with acetazolamide were healthy, whereas all climbers who received placebo still had acute mountain sickness (P = 0.015). Arterial blood gas specimens were obtained from three of the six acetazolamide recipients and all of the placebo recipients. The alveolar to arterial oxygen pressure difference (PAO2-PaO2 difference) decreased slightly over 24 hours in the acetazolamide group (-0.8 +/- 1.2 mm Hg) but increased in the placebo group (+3.3 +/- 2.3 mm Hg) (P = 0.024). Acetazolamide improved PaO2 over 24 hours (+2.9 +/- 0.8 mm Hg) when compared with placebo (-1.3 +/- 2.8 mm Hg) (P = 0.045). CONCLUSION In established cases of acute mountain sickness, treatment with acetazolamide relieves symptoms, improves arterial oxygenation, and prevents further impairment of pulmonary gas exchange.
Developing a measurement system for improving daily lives of Cycling Wheel Chair patients

To break out of a debilitating cycle caused by his deterioration of his ability, a patient participates in rehabilitation programs and actively rehearses his degraded abilities. A Cycling Wheel Chair (CWC) provides a rehabilitation option for preventing one's legs weakening and/or nervous system atrophy. This paper discusses desired functionalities on the CWC for effectively supporting patients becoming healthier. Various sensors are attached in order to collect data. Application examples of the device are given.
On model checking data-independent systems with arrays without reset

A system is data-independent with respect to a data type $X$ iff the operations it can perform on values of type $X$ are restricted to just equality testing. The system may also store, input and output values of type $X$. We study model checking of systems which are data-independent with respect to two distinct type variables $X$ and $Y$, and may in addition use arrays with indices from $X$ and values from $Y$. Our main interest is the following parameterised model-checking problem: whether a given program satisfies a given temporal-logic formula for all non-empty finite instances of $X$ and $Y$. Initially, we consider instead the abstraction where $X$ and $Y$ are infinite and where partial functions with finite domains are used to model arrays. Using a translation to data-independent systems without arrays, we show that the $\mu$-calculus model-checking problem is decidable for these systems. From this result, we can deduce properties of all systems with finite instances of $X$ and $Y$. We show that there is a procedure for the above parameterised model-checking problem of the universal fragment of the $\mu$-calculus, such that it always terminates but may give false negatives. We also deduce that the parameterised model-checking problem of the universal disjunction-free fragment of the $\mu$-calculus is decidable. Practical motivations for model checking data-independent systems with arrays include verification of memory and cache systems, where $X$ is the type of memory addresses, and $Y$ the type of storable values. As an example we verify a fault-tolerant memory interface over a set of unreliable memories.
EXO modifies sucrose and trehalose responses and connects the extracellular carbon status to growth

Plants have the capacity to adapt growth to changing environmental conditions. This implies the modulation of metabolism according to the availability of carbon (C). Particular interest in the response to the C availability is based on the increasing atmospheric levels of CO2. Several regulatory pathways that link the C status to growth have emerged. The extracellular EXO protein is essential for cell expansion and promotes shoot and root growth. Homologous proteins were identified in evolutionarily distant green plants. We show here that the EXO protein connects growth with C responses. The exo mutant displayed altered responses to exogenous sucrose supplemented to the growth medium. Impaired growth of the mutant in synthetic medium was associated with the accumulation of starch and anthocyanins, altered expression of sugar-responsive genes, and increased abscisic acid levels. Thus, EXO modulates several responses related to the C availability. Growth retardation on medium supplemented with 2-deoxy-glucose, mannose, and palatinose was similar to the wild type. Trehalose feeding stimulated root growth and shoot biomass production of exo plants whereas it inhibited growth of the wild type. The phenotypic features of the exo mutant suggest that apoplastic processes coordinate growth and C responses.
Development of a Novel Electrochemical Method to Deposit High Corrosion Resistant Silicate Layers on Metal Substrates

A novel method for electrodepositing silicates on metallic substrates from aqueous solutions has been developed. The technique is demonstrated by forming a passive film on galvanized steel. The silicate layer was deposited cathodically from a bath containing PQ Corporation N sodium silicate solution ~3.22 weight ratio sodium silicate, 37.5% solution in water! A post-treatment drying process increased the Si content in the coating and improved the corrosion characteristics of the silicate layer. Deposition parameters like bath concentration and temperature have been optimized using corrosion characteristics and surface morphology of the final coating. Finally, stability studies show that the silicate coatings obtained using this method have higher barrier resistance and better stability as compared to chrome passivates. The technique developed here shows promise as an alternative to chrome passivation for corrosion protection of metals.
Robust Video Object Segmentation Based on K-Means Background Clustering and Watershed in Ill-Conditioned Surveillance Systems

A robust video object segmentation algorithm for complex conditions in surveillance systems is proposed in this paper. This algorithm contains an unsupervised K-Means background clustering technique to model the temporal distribution in RGB domain for each spatial position. Based on the proposed background model, the object mask generation process integrates noise reduction, cast shadow cancellation, and improved watershed transform to obtain satisfying object masks. Experiments show that it can be applied on low-fame-rate and noisy video sequences in surveillance systems in which temporal tracking becomes impractical, and achieve better segmentation results than the previous works for complex lighting conditions and outdoor scenes.
Gender-Specific Effects of Depression and Suicidal Ideation in Prosocial Behaviors

Background Prosocial behaviors are essential to the ability to relate to others. Women typically display greater prosocial behavior than men. The impact of depression on prosocial behaviors and how gender interacts with those effects are not fully understood. We explored the role of gender in the potential effects of depression on prosocial behavior. Methods We examined prosocial behaviors using a modified version of the Trust Game in a clinical population and community controls. Study participants were characterized on the severity of depression and anxiety, presence of suicidal ideation, history of childhood trauma, recent stressful life events, and impulsivity. We correlated behavioral outcomes with gender and clinical variables using analysis of variance and multiple regression analysis. Results The 89 participants comprised four study groups: depressed women, depressed men, healthy women and healthy men (n = 16–36). Depressed men exhibited reciprocity more frequently than healthy men. Depression induced an inversion of the gender-specific pattern of self-centered behavior. Suicidal ideation was associated with increased reciprocity behavior in both genders, and enhancement of the effect of depression on gender-specific self-centered behavior. Conclusions Depression, particularly suicidal ideation, is associated with reversal of gender-specific patterns of prosocial behavior, suggesting abnormalities in sexual hormones regulation. This explanation is supported by known abnormalities in the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal and hypothalamus-pituitary-gonadal axes found in depression.
Binaural Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance Beamformer for Hearing Aid Applications

In many cases hearing impaired persons suffer from hearing loss in both ears, necessitating two hearing apparatuses. In such cases, the applied speech enhancement algorithms should be capable of preserving the, so called, binaural cues. In this paper, a binaural extension of the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformer is proposed. The proposed algorithm, denoted binaural linearly constrained minimum variance (BLCMV) beamformer, is capable of extracting desired speakers while suppressing interference speakers. The BLCMV maintains the binaural cues of both the desired and the interference sources in the constrained space. The ability of preserving the binaural cues makes the BLCMV beamformer particularly suitable for hearing aid applications. It is further proposed to obtain a reduced complexity implementation by sharing common blocks in both sides of the hearing aid device. The performance of the proposed method, in terms of imposed distortion, interference cancellation and cue preservation, is verified by an extensive experimental study using signals recorded by a dummy head in an actual room.