Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rapid Diagnosis of Bacterial Meningitis by Real-Time PCR and Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization

ABSTRACT Real-time PCR and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) were evaluated as rapid methods for the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis and compared to standard diagnostic procedures. For PCR, a LightCycler approach was chosen, implementing eubacterial and specific PCR assays for the most relevant bacteria. For FISH, a similar probe set containing eubacterial and specific probes was composed of published and newly designed probes. Both methods were evaluated by use of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples from patients with suspected bacterial meningitis. For all microscopy- and culture-positive samples (n = 28), the eubacterial PCR was positive. In addition, all identifiable pathogens were detected with specific PCR assays, according to an algorithm based on the Gram stain. The FISH method detected the pathogen in 13 of 18 positive samples. While the FISH method remained negative for all microscopy- and culture-negative samples (n = 113), the eubacterial PCR was positive for five of these samples. Sequencing of the amplicon revealed the presence of Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus agalactiae, and Haemophilus influenzae in three of these five samples. In addition, samples with discordant results by culture and microscopy were successfully investigated by PCR (10 samples) and FISH (5 samples). In conclusion, PCR is a highly sensitive tool for rapid diagnosis of bacterial meningitis. FISH is less sensitive but is useful for the identification of CSF samples showing bacteria in the Gram stain. Based on our results, an approach for laboratory diagnosis of meningitis including PCR and FISH is discussed.
Understanding the Nature of Face Processing Impairment in Autism: Insights From Behavioral and Electrophysiological Studies

This article reviews behavioral and electrophysiological studies of face processing and discusses hypotheses for understanding the nature of face processing impairments in autism. Based on results of behavioral studies, this study demonstrates that individuals with autism have impaired face discrimination and recognition and use atypical strategies for processing faces characterized by reduced attention to the eyes and piecemeal rather than configural strategies. Based on results of electrophysiological studies, this article concludes that face processing impairments are present early in autism, by 3 years of age. Such studies have detected abnormalities in both early (N170 reflecting structural encoding) and late (NC reflecting recognition memory) stages of face processing. Event-related potential studies of young children and adults with autism have found slower speed of processing of faces, a failure to show the expected speed advantage of processing faces versus nonface stimuli, and atypical scalp topography suggesting abnormal cortical specialization for face processing. Other electrophysiological studies have suggested that autism is associated with early and late stage processing impairments of facial expressions of emotion (fear) and decreased perceptual binding as reflected in reduced gamma during face processing. This article describes two types of hypotheses-cognitive/perceptual and motivational/affective--that offer frameworks for understanding the nature of face processing impairments in autism. This article discusses implications for intervention.
Teaching NeuroImages: Unilateral prosopometamorphopsia as a dominant hemisphere-specific disconnection sign

We report 2 patients who complained that the left half of faces appeared distorted. A 58-year-old right-handed woman explained that although the left side of the face was clearly visible, it appeared distorted “like a monster. ” The left eye looked elongated toward the left ear, while the nose appeared to be bent toward the left …
Fast Fourier Methods for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) one wishes to reconstruct the reflectivity function of a region on the ground from a set of radar measurements taken at several angles. The ground reflectivity is found by interpolating measured samples, which typically lie on a polar grid in frequency space, to an equally spaced rectangular grid in frequency space, then computing an inverse Fourier transform. The classical polar format algorithm (PFA) is often used to perform this interpolation. We describe two other methods for performing the interpolation and imaging efficiently and accurately. The first is the gridding method, which is widely used in the medical imaging community. The second method uses unequally- spaced fast Fourier transforms (USFFTs), a generic tool for arbitrary sampling geometries. We present numerical and computational comparisons of these three methods using both point scattering data and synthetic X-band radar reflectivity predictions of a construction backhoe.
New results of stability analysis for singular time-delay systems

This paper establishes the equivalence among several stability criteria, and presents a simplified stability criterion for singular time-delay systems. Furthermore, by using a delay decomposition method, a new stability criterion which is much less conservative than the existing ones is obtained. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness and less conservatism of the new proposed stability criterion.
Explicit Preemption Placement for Real-Time Conditional Code

In the limited-preemption scheduling model, tasks cooperate to offer suitable preemption points for reducing the overall preemption overhead. In the fixed preemption-point model, tasks are allowed to preempt only at statically defined preemption points, reducing the variability of the preemption delay and making the system more predictable. Different works have been proposed to determine the optimal selection of preemption points for minimizing the preemption overhead without affecting the system schedulability due to increased non-preemptivity. However, all works are based on very restrictive task models, without being able to deal with common coding structures like branches, conditional statements and loops. In this work, we overcome this limitation, by proposing a pseudo-polynomial-time algorithm that is capable of determining the optimal set of preemption points to minimize the worst-case execution time of jobs represented by control flow graphs with arbitrarily-nested conditional structures, while preserving system schedulability. Exhaustive experiments are included to show that the proposed approach is able to significantly improve the bounds on the worst-case execution times of limited preemptive tasks.
A Heuristic Bayesian Method for Segmenting DNA Sequence Alignments and Detecting Evidence for Recombination and Gene Conversion

We propose a heuristic approach to the detection of evidence for recombination and gene conversion in multiple DNA sequence alignments. The proposed method consists of two stages. In the first stage, a sliding window is moved along the DNA sequence alignment, and phylogenetic trees are sampled from the conditional posterior distribution with MCMC. To reduce the noise intrinsic to inference from the limited amount of data available in the typically short sliding window, a clustering algorithm based on the Robinson-Foulds distance is applied to the trees thus sampled, and the posterior distribution over tree clusters is obtained for each window position. While changes in this posterior distribution are indicative of recombination or gene conversion events, it is difficult to decide when such a change is statistically significant. This problem is addressed in the second stage of the proposed algorithm, where the distributions obtained in the first stage are post-processed with a Bayesian hidden Markov model (HMM). The emission states of the HMM are associated with posterior distributions over phylogenetic tree topology clusters. The hidden states of the HMM indicate putative recombinant segments. Inference is done in a Bayesian sense, sampling parameters from the posterior distribution with MCMC. Of particular interest is the determination of the number of hidden states as an indication of the number of putative recombinant regions. To this end, we apply reversible jump MCMC, and sample the number of hidden states from the respective posterior distribution.
Piezoelectric PZT MEMS technologies for small-scale robotics and RF applications

Thin-film piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT) is one of the most efficient electromechanical coupling transducer materials currently available for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This article reviews piezoelectric MEMS (piezo MEMS) technologies using PZT thin films in radio frequency (RF) devices for communications and radar applications and in the emerging field of millimeter-scale robotics. The electromechanical material properties of thin-film PZT uniquely enable insect-inspired and insect-scale autonomous robots. Recent progress on large force and displacement actuators for robotic leg joints, compact and high torque ultrasonic motors, and bioinspired millimeter-scale flapping wing platforms will be presented. The use of thin-film PZT to achieve high performance and low-voltage RF MEMS switches, ultralow power consumption nanomechanical logic circuits, and high coupling and low loss resonators, filters, and transformers are also reviewed.
Predicate routing: enabling controlled networking

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Adoption, motivation and success factors of social media for team collaboration in SMEs

In team collaboration we deal with collaboration among team members that may either belong to the same enterprise (intra-enterprise collaboration) or among team members belonging to different companies (e.g., in research projects). Social media provide an efficient and accessible means of encouraging and supporting team members working together on shared objects, i.e., performing collaborative tasks within these teams. Due to ease of use and access, especially small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may profit a lot from social media in team collaboration. Based on a number of case studies on the application of social media in SMEs, we analyze the adoption and implementation, the motivation of team members and their benefit, and success factors of the utilization of social media for team collaboration. To provide a set of case studies that allow for detailed comparison and in-depth analysis of multiple case studies, a standardized case study structure is introduced.
Ventral intraparietal area of the macaque: congruent visual and somatic response properties.

In a previous report, we described the visual response properties in the ventral intraparietal area (area VIP) of the awake macaque. Here we describe the somatosensory response properties in area VIP and the patterns of correspondence between the responses of single neurons to independently administered tactile and visual stimulation. VIP neurons responded to visual stimulation only or to visual and tactile stimulation. Of 218 neurons tested, 153 (70%) were bimodal in the sense that they responded to stimuli that were independently applied in either sensory modality. Unimodal visual and bimodal neurons were intermingled within the recording area and could not be distinguished on the basis of their visual response properties alone. Most of the cells with a tactile receptive field (RF) responded well to light touch or air puffs. The distribution of RF locations principally emphasized the head (85%), with approximately equivalent representations of the upper and lower face areas. The tactile and visual RFs were aligned in a congruent manner, with the intersection of the visual vertical and horizontal meridian having its tactile counterpart in the nose/mouth area. Small foveal visual RFs were paired with small tactile RFs on the muzzle, and peripheral visual RFs were associated with tactile RFs on the side of the head or body. Most cells showed a strong sensitivity to moving stimuli, and the preferred directions of visual and tactile motion coincided in 85% of bimodal cells. In some cases, bimodal responses patterns were complementary: cells responding to motion in depth toward the monkey had responses, whereas cells responding to motion in depth away form the monkey had responses. Other forms of bimodal response congruence included orientation selectivity, and , , and / response types. The large proportion of bimodal tactile and visual neurons with congruent response properties in area VIP indicates that there are important functional differences between area VIP and other dorsal stream areas involved in the analysis of motion. We suggest that VIP is involved in the construction of a multisensory, head-centered representation of near extrapersonal space.
Simulation of High Field Electron Transport in Wurtzite Phase of ZnO

Temperature and doping dependencies of electron drift velocity in wurtzite ZnO structure has been calculated using ensemble Monte Carlo method in steady-state and transient situation. The following scattering mechanisms, i.e, impurity, polar optical phonon and acoustic phonon are included in the calculation. The maximum electron drift velocity that is obtained at room temperature for 10 23 m -3 donor concentration is 2.2×10 7 cm/s for ZnO. For high applied electric field, transient electron drift velocity shows a significant overshoot.
Fast Neutron Damage Studies on NDFEB Materials

Many materials and electronics need to be tested for the radiation environment expected at linear colliders (LC) since both accelerator and detectors will be subjected to large fluences of hadrons, leptons and γ’s over the life of the facility[1]. While the linacs will be superconducting, there are still many uses for NdFeB in the damping rings, injection and extraction lines and final focus. Our understanding of the situation for rare earth, permanent magnet materials was presented at PAC03[2]. Our first measurements of fast neutron, stepped doses at the UC Davis McClellan Nuclear Reactor Center (UCD MNRC) were presented at EPAC04[3]. We have extended the doses, included other manufacturer’s samples, and measured induced radioactivities which are discussed in detail.
Automating the dispute resolution in a task dependency network

When perturbation or unexpected events do occur, agents need protocols for repairing or reforming the supply chain. Unfortunate contingency could increase too much the cost of performance, while breaching the current contract may be more efficient. In our framework the principles of contract law are applied to set penalties: expectation damages, opportunity cost, reliance damages, and party design remedies, and they are introduced in the task dependency model.
A Sensor Based Homing Strategy for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

A new sensor based homing integrated guidance and control law is presented to drive an underactuated autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) towards a fixed target, in 3D, using the information provided by an ultra-short base line (USBL) positioning system. The guidance and control law is firstly derived for the vehicle's kinematics expressed as the time differences of arrival (TDOAs) measured by the USBL sensor assuming the target at the infinity, and then extended for the dynamics of an underactuated AUV resorting to backstepping techniques. The proposed Lyapunov based control law yields almost global asymptotic stability (AGAS) in the absence of external disturbances and is further extended, keeping the same properties, to the case where known ocean currents affect the vehicle's dynamics. Simulations are presented and discussed that illustrate the performance and behavior of the overall closed loop system
An Analysis of the Nanosatellites Launches between 2004 and 2007

This article provides a historical look at the past four years of nanosatellites launch activity. In this period, there were recorded 55 nanosatellites launches, 16 of them were lost in 26th July 2006, as the launcher Dnepr-1 has exploded 86 seconds after launch.This paper presents an analysis of the nanosatellites launches in the period 2004 - 2007, based on the following criteria: the owner country of the payload, mass and mission category, type of orbit, type of launcher, spaceport, mission status and type of activity.
A GPHN point mutation leading to molybdenum cofactor deficiency

To the Editor : Molybdenum cofactor deficiency (MoCoD, MIM 252150) is an autosomal recessive and rare metabolic disease (1). Absence of the cofactor inactivates sulphite oxidase activity thereby resulting via elevated sulphite levels in severe and progressive neurological damage. Affected patients are found worldwide and usually come to clinical attention by intractable seizures with a prominent opisthotonus. Diagnostic hallmarks are elevated sulphite levels in fresh urine samples and low uric acid levels due to simultaneous deficiency of the cofactor-dependent xanthine dehydrogenase. Typically, the patients are severely retarded and die within early childhood. Most of the disease-causing mutations are found in the gene MOCS 1 (type A deficiency, MIM 603707) followed by mutations in MOCS 2 (type B deficiency, MIM 603708) (2). To date, only one mutation has been described in the gene GPHN (type C deficiency, MIM 603930) (3). The GPHN gene product gephyrin has a still bewildering dual function in cofactor synthesis as well as synaptic receptor clustering (4). The formerly described mutation was a frameshift deletion affecting the G domain of the protein responsible for adenylating molybdopterin as well as the E domain required for molybdenum insertion by simultaneous hydrolysis of the adenyl bondage. Absence of both domains and activities, respectively, leaves the molybdopterin unmodified and subject to non-enzymatic molybdenum insertion by high concentrations of inorganic molybdate, which is prohibited by the adenyl activation (3). This null mutation was identified post-mortem in a Danish patient who deceased 3 days after birth. The patient described here is the second child of healthy first cousin parents of Algerian origin. Her 4-year-old brother is unaffected and there is no family history of the disease. She was born after a normal pregnancy at 39 weeks of gestation with a weight of 3.640 kg, a height of 52 cm and a head circumference of 35 cm. Ten hours after birth, she developed global hypotonia with feeding difficulties. At day 2, generalized seizures Table 1. Metabolic findings in the patient
Television Exposure in Children after a Terrorist Incident

Abstract This study examined the influence of bomb-related television viewing in the context of physical and emotional exposure on posttraumatic stress symptoms—intrusion, avoidance, and arousal—in middle school students following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Over 2,000 middle school students in Oklahoma City were surveyed 7 weeks after the incident. The primary outcome measures were the total posttraumatic stress symptom score and symptom cluster scores at the time of assessment. Bomb-related television viewing in the aftermath of the disaster was extensive. Both emotional and television exposure were associated with post-traumatic stress at 7 weeks. Among children with no physical or emotional exposure, the degree of television exposure was directly related to posttraumatic stress symptomatology. These findings suggest that television viewing in the aftermath of a disaster may make a small contribution to subsequent posttraumatic stress symptomatology in children or that increased television viewing may be a sign of current distress and that it should be monitored. Future research should examine further whether early symptoms predict increased television viewing and/or whether television viewing predicts subsequent symptoms.
Role of metabotropic glutamate receptors in ventrolateral medulla of hypertensive rats.

Evidence is accumulating for the role of metabotropic, as well as ionotropic, glutamate receptors in cardiovascular regulation. We sought to determine whether stimulation of metabotropic glutamate receptors in the rostral ventrolateral medulla would evoke enhanced cardiovascular responses in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). Thus, we microinjected (1S,3R)-1-aminocyclopentane-1,3-dicarboxylic acid [(1S,3R)-ACPD], a selective agonist of metabotropic glutamate receptors, into the rostral ventrolateral medulla of urethane-anesthetized adult SHR and age-matched Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats. Microinjection of (1S,3R)-ACPD (1 nmol/50 nL) produced increases in mean arterial pressure and splanchnic sympathetic nerve activity in SHR (+41 +/- 6 mm Hg and +34 +/- 4%, respectively) that were significantly greater than those observed in WKY rats (+18 +/- 3 mm Hg and +22 +/- 3%, P < .005 and P < .05, respectively). The pressor responses evoked by microinjection of L-glutamate (2 nmol), N-methyl-D-aspartate (20 pmol), or alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methylisoxazole-4-propionic acid (5 pmol) were also significantly (P < .001) augmented in SHR (+55 +/- 3, +61 +/- 7, and +53 +/- 5 mm Hg, respectively, in SHR versus +31 +/- 1, +30 +/- 3, and +28 +/- 2 mm Hg in WKY rats). Results indicate that stimulation of metabotropic, as well as ionotropic, glutamate receptors in the rostral ventrolateral medulla evokes enhanced cardiovascular responses in SHR, which may contribute to hypertension in this model.
Effects of High Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Diet on the Aortic Wall Structure of New Zealand White Male Rabbits

There has been increased attention focused on atherosclerosis, with a rise in the number of investigations exploring its pathogenesis and ways of diagnosing and treating the disease. During the progression and development of atherosclerosis, the mechanical properties of the arterial wall have been extensively studied using animals fed a diet of high cholesterol and saturated fat. One view held is that the arterial wall becomes hardened, while others hold the opposite view. From the standpoints of diagnosis and treatment, dimensional and morphological changes in the arterial wall during the development of atherosclerosis are considered to play important roles. However, the dimensional and morphological changes in the arterial wall of animals fed a high cholesterol and saturated fat diet have not been well documented. Therefore, in this study, rabbits were fed a diet containing 0.5% cholesterol plus 0.5% olive oil for periods of 4, 8, and 12 weeks, and the cholesterol concentration of blood plasma, and the dimensional and morphological changes in the rabbit’s arterial wall were examined following each cholesterol feeding period. We found that the cholesterol concentration of blood plasma significantly increased throughout the cholesterol feeding period. In cholesterolfed rabbits, the arterial wall had a tendency to thicken; the ratio of wall thickness to radius of aortic ring specimens, measured immediately after procurement of the specimen, was significantly increased compared with normal-fed rabbits. Morphological examination revealed a marked increase in thickness of the intima, smooth muscle proliferation, and connective tissue formation; lipid-laden cells were observed near the basement of the lesion. The tunica media underlying plaques showed marked disruption of elastin, collagen, smooth muscle cells, and a focal loss of normal media architecture. These changes were noted to be more prominent in thoracic aortae than in abdominal aortae.