Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calcium Intake From Diet and Supplements and the Risk of Coronary Artery Calcification and its Progression Among Older Adults: 10‐Year Follow‐up of the Multi‐Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA)

Background Recent randomized data suggest that calcium supplements may be associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) events. Using a longitudinal cohort study, we assessed the association between calcium intake, from both foods and supplements, and atherosclerosis, as measured by coronary artery calcification (CAC). Methods and Results We studied 5448 adults free of clinically diagnosed CVD (52% female; aged 45–84 years) from the Multi‐Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. Baseline total calcium intake was assessed from diet (using a food frequency questionnaire) and calcium supplements (by a medication inventory) and categorized into quintiles. Baseline CAC was measured by computed tomography, and CAC measurements were repeated in 2742 participants ≈10 years later. At baseline, mean calcium intakes across quintiles were 313.3, 540.3, 783.0, 1168.9, and 2157.4 mg/day. Women had higher calcium intakes than men. After adjustment for potential confounders, among 1567 participants without baseline CAC, the relative risk (RR) of developing incident CAC over 10 years, by quintile 1 to 5 of calcium intake, were 1 (reference), 0.95 (0.79–1.14), 1.02 (0.85–1.23), 0.86 (0.69–1.05), and 0.73 (0.57–0.93). After accounting for total calcium intake, calcium supplement use was associated with increased risk for incident CAC (RR=1.22 [1.07–1.39]). No relation was found between baseline calcium intake and 10‐year changes in log‐transformed CAC among those participants with baseline CAC >0. Conclusions High total calcium intake was associated with a decreased risk of incident atherosclerosis over long‐term follow‐up, particularly if achieved without supplement use. However, calcium supplement use may increase the risk for incident CAC.
On the realizability of biorthogonal, m-dimensional two-band filter banks

We show an algebraic approach for the design of ladder structures for causal biorthogonal filter banks. The key ingredient of the approach is known in literature as Euclid's algorithm. Using this algorithm we derive some strong result on the design freedom for ladder structures. In particular we show that the dimensionality of the problem plays an important role. We end by with some conjectures concerning the extensions to multichannel and noncausal filter banks. >
Vehicle sideslip angle observers

This paper compares four observers of vehicle sideslip angle. The first is linear and uses a linear vehicle model. Next observers use an extended nonlinear model. The three nonlinear observers are: extended Luenberger observer, extended Kalman filter and sliding mode observer. Modelling and model simplification are described, and an observability analysis is performed for the entire vehicle trajectory. The paper also deals with three different sets of sensors. Comparison is first done by simulation, and then observers are used on experimental data.
Risk factors and mechanisms of hepatocarcinogenesis with special emphasis on alcohol and oxidative stress

Abstract Hepatocellular cancer is the fifth most frequent cancer in men and the eighth in women worldwide. Established risk factors are chronic hepatitis B and C infection, chronic heavy alcohol consumption, obesity and type 2 diabetes, tobacco use, use of oral contraceptives, and aflatoxin-contaminated food. Almost 90% of all hepatocellular carcinomas develop in cirrhotic livers. In Western countries, attributable risks are highest for cirrhosis due to chronic alcohol abuse and viral hepatitis B and C infection. Among those with alcoholic cirrhosis, the annual incidence of hepatocellular cancer is 1–2%. An important mechanism implicated in alcohol-related hepatocarcinogenesis is oxidative stress from alcohol metabolism, inflammation, and increased iron storage. Ethanol-induced cytochrome P-450 2E1 produces various reactive oxygen species, leading to the formation of lipid peroxides such as 4-hydroxy-nonenal. Furthermore, alcohol impairs the antioxidant defense system, resulting in mitochondrial damage and apoptosis. Chronic alcohol exposure elicits hepatocyte hyperregeneration due to the activation of survival factors and interference with retinoid metabolism. Direct DNA damage results from acetaldehyde, which can bind to DNA, inhibit DNA repair systems, and lead to the formation of carcinogenic exocyclic DNA etheno adducts. Finally, chronic alcohol abuse interferes with methyl group transfer and may thereby alter gene expression.
The effect of treatment time on dimensionally stability, moisture content and mechanical properties of heat treated anatolian chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) wood.

In this study, the eff ect of treatment time on dimensional stability, moisture content, and mechanical properties of heat-treated Anatolian chestnut ( Castanea sativa Mill.) were investigated. Test specimens were subjected to a temperature of 180°C at atmospheric pressure for fi ve diff erent treatment times (2, 4, 6, 8, and 12 hours). After the heat treatment of the specimens was completed, their moisture contents at relative humidity (RH) conditions of 45, 55, 65, 80, and 95%, their dimensional stabilities, their mechanical properties, e.g., bending strength, modulus of elasticity, and compression strength, were determined. Th e data obtained were analyzed using variance analysis, and then the statistical analysis of Tukey’s test was conducted. Th e results showed that heat treatment resulted in decreased (i.e., improved) moisture content, enhanced dimensional stability, and reductions of the mechanical properties. Th e decrease of mechanical properties that resulted from the 12-hour test was greater than the reductions observed for the tests that lasted 2, 4, 6, and 8 hours.
Towards Calm Displays

We present a system for making emissive computer displays (LCDs) look like they are reflective, i.e. not emitting light but instead reflecting ambient light, an effect that we call a “calm display”. We achieve this effect by using a light sensor and a one-time calibration process to drive an algorithm which controls the display's backlight intensity and gamma correction functionality to continually match the brightness and chromaticity of the ambient light. We present an experimental evaluation of our system, showing quantitatively that the color and brightness output by our system is perceptually close to that of a piece of paper under similar lighting conditions. We argue that calm displays can more easily fade into the background, and further that they are more suitable for environments such as bedrooms where glowing displays are often out-of-place. We validate these claims and more generally explore users’ perception of calm displays, through a field study of an LCD display deployed in participants’ bedrooms.
Oxidative stress and antioxidant defense system in healthy, elderly men: relationship to physical activity

The aim of the present study was to compare selected markers of oxidative stress and the antioxidant system between groups of men aged 65 or more, differentiated by their level of physical activity. Thirty-one community-dwelling healthy, elderly men (mean age 73.4 ± 6.1 years) with a good nutritional status participated in the study. The Caltrac accelerometer was used to estimate energy expenditure related to physical activity. Subjects were divided into two groups according to the criteria proposed by Bauman: less active (< 1600 kcal/week) and more active (> 1600 kcal/week). In all the men, plasma total antioxidant status (TAS), thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) concentrations and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) levels were determined. The reduced glutathione (GSH) content and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) activity in hemolyzed red blood cells were also measured. There were no significant differences in TAS, H2O2 concentrations and the activity of GPx between less and more active men. In the group of more active subjects, plasma levels of GSH were higher, while TBARS concentrations were lower compared with the group of less active men (p < 0.05). Negative correlation between GSH and TBARS levels was observed (r = -0.71; p < 0.01), and GSH concentrations positively correlated with level of physical activity (r = 0.63; p < 0.05). The results indicate that habitual physical activity can favorably affect antioxidant potential and prevent lipid peroxidation in healthy, elderly men.
Requirement for host transcription in the replication of Sindbis virus

Host cell involvement in Sindbis virus (SB) replication was examined in cells which had been treated with either actinomycin D (AMD) or alpha-amanitin (alpha-A). Treatment with these inhibitors of host transcription before infection reduced the ability of cells to support SB growth by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude, while having little or no effect on the replication of vesicular stomatitis virus. SB replication was sensitive to alpha-A in wild-type Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells but was resistant to alpha-A in CHOama-1 cells, a line which contains an alpha-A-resistant RNA polymerase II. A mutant of SB, SBamr, was isolated by mutagenesis followed by selection in cells which had been treated with AMD. SBamr grew normally not only in cells treated with AMD but also in alpha-A-treated cells. Our results suggest (i) that the synthesis of cellular mRNA (and presumably protein) is required for replication of SB, (ii) that prior treatment with either drug affects the same aspect of SB replication, and (iii) that mutations in the SB genome allow the virus to overcome the effect of inhibitors of host transcription.
Stability of chitosan/montmorillonite nanohybrid towards enzymatic degradation on grafting with poly(lactic acid)

Abstract Enzymatic degradation of nanohybrid based on intercalation of chitosan (CS) within the galleries of montmorillonite (MMT) clay and grafted with poly(lactic acid) (PLA) was studied using esterase enzyme in phosphate buffered solution. Chitosan was first intercalated between the galleries of natural unmodified sodium MMT clay and subsequently grafted with PLA to prepare nanohybrids of CS-g-PLA/MMT. The prepared membranes were characterised by X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and NMR spectroscopy. The specimens were then subjected to enzymatic degradation to understand the effect of copolymerisation with PLA and the effect of incorporation of MMT in the CS matrix. The presence of MMT clay provided stability towards degradation of polymer matrix because of nanoscale dispersibility, thereby acting as a barrier towards the permeation of water molecules to induce hydrolysis of PLA. Similarly, the grafting of CS with crystalline PLA stabilised the CS matrix towards degradation, rendering it suitable for tissue engineering applications.
Phase I study of tandem high‐dose chemotherapy with autologous peripheral blood stem cell rescue for children with recurrent brain tumors: A pediatric blood and marrow transplant consortium study

High‐dose chemotherapy with autologous stem cell rescue (HDC/SCR) has produced responses and prolonged survival for some children with recurrent brain tumors, but is associated with considerable morbidity and mortality. A Phase I trial of two cycles of HDC/SCR for recurrent brain tumors in children was performed to determine the maximum tolerated doses for a novel regimen.
Obstacles Underserved Women Face to Access Postpartum Sterilization: Ethical Obligation for Modification

Postpartum tubal ligation is an effective, safe method of sterilization. Underserved women face many barriers in their attempt to access this time sensitive postpartum contraception. A major barrier for many of these women who are without the means of availing themselves of this procedure is the Federal policy regarding Medicaid sterilization funding. The two main barriers are a) The Medicaid form must be signed 30-180 days prior to the procedure and brought to the hospital on the procedure day and b) The reading level and design of the consent form is not patient friendly. Barriers enacted by Federal regulations may prevent disenfranchised women from exercising the same degree of reproductive healthcare autonomy as their more socio-economically advantaged counterparts. In addition to the consent form that needs to be signed and verified before the procedure, other barriers include the age of the woman, in which some hospitals restrict sterilization procedures on woman younger than 30, even though Medicaid funds sterilization for woman over 21, restrictions from Catholic affiliated hospitals where sterilization is not permitted, and the shortage of operating rooms and resources. We suggest change in clinical and legal practice fostered by revised Federal regulations is urgently needed to adhere to ethical standards of medical practice.
AAA and PKI in Ad Hoc Networks

Both AAA and PKI are frameworks that address security concerns in a network. AAA provides a mechanism for authentication, authorization and accounting whereas PKI provides a mechanism for managing cryptographic keys. The use of these frameworks is limited mainly to networks with fixed infrastructure. Their use in networks with no fixed infrastructure (or ad hoc networks) is still a research topic. In this paper we propose some ideas for using these technologies in ad hoc networking environment. The ideas that we propose here are still at the conceptual level and require more work to make them feasible.
Target-less camera-LiDAR extrinsic calibration using a bagged dependence estimator

The goal of this study is to achieve automatic extrinsic calibration of a camera-LiDAR system that does not require calibration targets. Calibration through maximization of statistical dependence using mutual information (MI) is a promising approach. However, we observed that existing methods perform poorly on outdoor data sets. Because of their susceptibility to noise, objective functions of previous methods tend to be non-smooth, and gradient-based searches fail in local optima. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel dependence estimator called bagged least-squares mutual information (BLSMI). BLSMI is a combination of methods composed of a kernel-based dependence estimator and noise reduction by bootstrap aggregating (bagging), which can handle richer features and robustly estimate dependence. We compared ours with previous methods using indoor and outdoor data sets, and observed that our method performed best in terms of calibration accuracy. While previous methods showed degraded performance on outdoor data sets because of the local optima problem, our method exhibited high calibration accuracy both on indoor and outdoor data sets.
DRESS Syndrome in the ICU: When a Patient Is Treated with Multiple Drugs

The Drug Reaction with Eosinophilia and Systemic Symptoms (DRESS) syndrome is life-threatening. It associates a skin condition with hematological and visceral disorders. The DRESS syndrome diagnosis in the intensive care unit (ICU) is difficult as clinical features are nonspecific. Furthermore, the need to treat patients with multiple drugs usually prevents the identification of the causative drug. We report the case of a patient who developed two bouts of DRESS caused by piperacillin-tazobactam, the first being complicated with a distributive shock. Cases of DRESS occurring inside ICU are seldom reported. However, any intensivist may encounter this situation during his career and should be aware of its diagnostic and management specific aspects.
From Personal Desktops to Personal Dataspaces: A Report on Building the iMeMex Personal Dataspace Management System

We propose a new system that is able to handle the entire Personal Dataspace of a user. A Personal Dataspace includes all data pertaining to a user on all his disks and on remote servers such as network drives, email and web servers. This data is represented by a heterogeneous mix of files, emails, bookmarks, music, pictures, calendar data, personal information streams and so on. State-of-the-art tools such as desktop search engines and desktop operating systems (including the upcoming Vista) are not enough as they neither solve the problem of physical personal information independence (where is my data) nor format and data model independence (how is it stored and which application do I have to use in order to access that data). Our work builds on the visions presented in [DSKB05], which calls for a single system to manage the personal information jungle, and [FHM05], which advocates dataspaces as a new abstraction for information management. In contrast to [FHM05] this paper presents a concrete implementation of a Personal DataSpace Management System (PDSMS) termed iMeMex: integrated memex. We discuss the core architecture of iMeMex and services offered by our system. As we will show, a PDSMS can be seen as a system that occupies the middleground between a search engine, a database management system, and a traditional information integration system. A PDSMS has to bridge these separate worlds and requires: (1) no full control on data, i.e., data may be accessed bypassing the interfaces of a PDSMS, (2) simple keyword search on all data available in a dataspace without performing any semantic data integration, (3) rich querying able to mix structural, attribute, and content predicates, (4) pay-as-you-go integration capabilities, (5) the ability to define arbitrary logical views on all data, (6) durability and consistency guarantees to avoid loss of data assigned to a dataspace, and (7) update capabilities. iMeMex is the first implementation of a PDSMS we are aware of. This paper presents the architecture of iMeMex and reports on the current state of the iMeMex research project at ETH Zurich. ∗This work is partially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) under contract 200021112115.
Crystallization behavior and mechanical properties of poly(ε-caprolactone)/cyclodextrin biodegradable composites

The poly(e-caprolactone) (PCL)/α-cyclodextrin (α-CD) inclusion complex (PCLIC) was successfully prepared, and its effect on the thermal behavior and mechanical properties of PCL was thoroughly studied. It is shown that the addition of PCLIC greatly increased the crystallization rate and thermal stability of the PCL. The Young's modulus and yield strength of PCL/PCLIC composite are about 2 and 1.3 times of the pure PCL, and the elongation at break of the PCL/PCLIC composites kept above 350%, when the PCLIC composition is 15 wt %. It is shown that PCLIC is a good enforcing biofiller for the PCL. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009
An Echo-Based Gait Phase Determination Method of Lower Limb Prosthesis

The gait phase determination is the basis of the control of intelligent prosthesis. The prosthetic usually determines the gait phase according to its own motion parameters, which will cause the asymmetry gait of the prosthesis wearer during level walking due to the lack of contralateral motion information. By using of a variety of sensors installed in the healthy leg and prosthesis, the gait phase determination method based on echo control can achieve good symmetry, but at the same time also made calculation difficult. Based on the existing echo method, a gait phase determination method by utilize of the contralateral motion parameters is proposed. According to gait test data collected from healthy subjects, motion parameters and their relation can be obtained. Then the proposed method can determine its gait phase and contralateral phase. Preliminary experiment is conducted and verified the effective of the method.
Regime Change: Bit-Depth Versus Measurement-Rate in Compressive Sensing

The recently introduced compressive sensing (CS) framework enables digital signal acquisition systems to take advantage of signal structures beyond bandlimitedness. Indeed, the number of CS measurements required for stable reconstruction is closer to the order of the signal complexity than the Nyquist rate. To date, the CS theory has focused on real-valued measurements, but in practice measurements are mapped to bits from a finite alphabet. Moreover, in many potential applications the total number of measurement bits is constrained, which suggests a tradeoff between the number of measurements and the number of bits per measurement. We study this situation in this paper and show that there exist two distinct regimes of operation that correspond to high/low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In the measurement compression (MC) regime, a high SNR favors acquiring fewer measurements with more bits per measurement; in the quantization compression (QC) regime, a low SNR favors acquiring more measurements with fewer bits per measurement. A surprise from our analysis and experiments is that in many practical applications it is better to operate in the QC regime, even acquiring as few as 1 bit per measurement.
Hormone-mediated maternal effects in birds: mechanisms matter but what do we know of them?

Over the past decade, birds have proven to be excellent models to study hormone-mediated maternal effects in an evolutionary framework. Almost all these studies focus on the function of maternal steroid hormones for offspring development, but lack of knowledge about the underlying mechanisms hampers further progress. We discuss several hypotheses concerning these mechanisms, point out their relevance for ecological and evolutionary interpretations, and review the relevant data. We first examine whether maternal hormones can accumulate in the egg independently of changes in hormone concentrations in the maternal circulation. This is important for Darwinian selection and female physiological trade-offs, and possible mechanisms for hormone accumulation in the egg, which may differ among hormones, are reviewed. Although independent regulation of plasma and yolk concentrations of hormones is conceivable, the data are as yet inconclusive for ovarian hormones. Next, we discuss embryonic utilization of maternal steroids, since enzyme and receptor systems in the embryo may have coevolved with maternal effect mechanisms in the mother. We consider dose–response relationships and action pathways of androgens and argue that these considerations may help to explain the apparent lack of interference of maternal steroids with sexual differentiation. Finally, we discuss mechanisms underlying the pleiotropic actions of maternal steroids, since linked effects may influence the coevolution of parent and offspring traits, owing to their role in the mediation of physiological trade-offs. Possible mechanisms here are interactions with other hormonal systems in the embryo. We urge endocrinologists to embark on suggested mechanistic studies and behavioural ecologists to adjust their interpretations to accommodate the current knowledge of mechanisms.