Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of a Very Large Altavista Query Log" SRC Technical note #1998-14

In this paper we present an analysis of a 280 GB AltaVista Search Engine query log consisting of approximately 1 billion entries for search requests over a period of six weeks. This represents approximately 285 million user sessions, each an attempt to fill a single information need. We present an analysis of individual queries, query duplication, and query sessions. Furthermore we present results of a correlation analysis of the log entries, studying the interaction of terms within queries. Our data supports the conjecture that web users differ significantly from the user assumed in the standard information retrieval literature. Specifically, we show that web users type in short queries, mostly look at the first 10 results only, and seldom modify the query. This suggests that traditional information retrieval techniques might not work well for answering web search requests. The correlation analysis showed that the most highly correlated items are constituents of phrases. This result indicates it may be useful for search engines to consider search terms as parts of phrases even if the user did not explicitly specify them as such.
Influence of excitation in the experimental equivalent circuit parameters identification of a switched reluctance motor

This paper analyzes the influence of excitation in the experimental determination of flux linkage vs. current vs. position relationship of a switched reluctance motor. Results of the experimental characterization of the SRM in the cases of rectangular bipolar excitation, rectangular unipolar excitation and sinusoidal excitation are compared. An equivalent model of a motor phase including magnetic flux leakage and core losses is presented and the simulation results are discussed. The component values obtained experimentally with sinusoidal excitation are maintained for both cases of rectangular excitation. The good fit between the phase current obtained experimentally and that obtained from the simulation in all three cases demonstrates the validity of the model. This enables the study of the dependence of the effects of the magnetic core on the behavior of a phase of the SRM using the same model.
A Method to Prepare a Descemet's Stripping Automated Endothelial Keratoplasty (DSAEK) Graft Using Donor Corneas With Narrow Scleral Rims

AbstractDonor corneas with narrow scleral rims are often disqualified for Descemet's Stripping Automated Endothelial Keratoplasty (DSAEK), mainly because of fluid leak and low pressure when they are mounted onto an artificial anterior chamber (AAC). This report describes a novel method to tight-lock a donor cornea with a narrow scleral rim so that microkeratome cutting is possible, allowing a DSAEK procedure to be completed.A 50-year-old male suffering from Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) endotheliitis with resulting corneal edema in his left eye was the subject of this study. His best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) was 20/600. The patient underwent a DSAEK procedure; however, the microkeratome cutting of the donor cornea initially failed due to its narrow scleral rim, which caused the balance salt solution (BSS) to leak out of the AAC. A doughnut-shaped cushion was made from a surgical glove, which enabled a tight lock of the cornea to the AAC, enabling the chamber pressure to be raised and the microkeratome cutting to be completed. A subsequent DSAEK procedure was performed uneventfully.Postoperatively, the patient received oral valganciclovir 450 mg b.i. d. to prevent EBV recurrence. The graft remained clear at 5 months post-op, and the patient's BCVA improved to 6/7.5. His endothelial count was 1830, which was ∼ 79% of the original value.Inserting a self-made cushion can enable donor corneas with narrow scleral rims to be used in DSAEK procedures and avoids unwanted switching from endothelial keratoplasty to penetrating keratoplasty (PKP).
Experimental Evaluation of Simulation Abstractions for Wireless Sensor Network MAC Protocols

The evaluation of MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is often performed through simulation. These simulations necessarily abstract away from reality in many ways. However, the impact of these abstractions on the results of the simulations has received only limited attention. Moreover, many studies on the accuracy of simulation have studied either the physical layer and per link effects or routing protocol effects. To the best of our knowledge, no other work has focused on the study of the simulation abstractions with respect to MAC protocol performance. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental study of two often used abstractions in the simulation of WSN MAC protocols. We show that a simple SNR-based reception model can provide quite accurate results for metrics commonly used to evaluate MAC protocols. Furthermore, we provide an analysis of what the main sources of deviation are and thereby how the simulations can be improved to provide even better results.
Robustness of Interference Fractures that Promote Simultaneous Growth of Multiple Hydraulic Fractures

There is considerable interest in being able to ensure the simultaneous growth of all hydraulic fractures from an array with multiple perforation clusters. If the perforations are sufficiently far apart then it is possible to obtain simultaneous growth from all the clusters in the array [1-2]. However, from a production standpoint it desirable to achieve a far greater density of perforations in an array than that which would guarantee a uniform simultaneous growth over all the fractures in the array. Unfortunately, when the perforation spacing is sufficiently small compared to the extent of the fractures, a phenomenon known as stress shadowing [37] occurs, one result of which is fracture growth that is localized to the outer two fractures in the array while the growth of the interior fractures in the array is severely stunted. Recently, using a parallel-planar HF model with full 3D elastic coupling between the simultaneously propagating fractures, it was shown [8] that it is possible to significantly reduce the stress shadow effect by the appropriate placement of interference fractures close to the outer fractures to inhibit their growth relative to the other fractures in the array.
Daily sound recognition using Pitch-Cluster-Maps for mobile robot audition

This paper proposes a sound identification method for a mobile robot in home and office environment. We propose a simple sound database called Pitch-Cluster-Maps(PCMs) based on Vector Quantization approach. Binarized frequency spectrum is used for PCMs codebook generation. It can describe a variety of sound sources, not only voice, from short term sound input. The proposed PCMs sound identification requires several tens(msec) of sound input, and is suitable for a mobile robot application which condition is dynamically changing. We implemented the proposed method on our mobile robot audition system equipped with a 32ch microphone array. Robot noise reduction using proposed PCMs recognition is applied to each input signal of a microphone array. The performance of daily sound recognition for separated sound sources from robot in motion is evaluated.
Gaussian Moving Averages and Semimartingales

In the present paper we study moving averages (also known as stochastic convolutions) driven by a Wiener process and with a deterministic kernel. Necessary and sufficient conditions on the kernel are provided for the moving average to be a semimartingale in its natural filtration. Our results are constructive - meaning that they provide a simple method to obtain kernels for which the moving average is a semimartingale or a Wiener process. Several examples are considered. In the last part of the paper we study general Gaussian processes with stationary increments. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on spectral measure for the process to be a semimartingale.
Visualization of the Heterogeneous Internal Structure of So-called “Pancreatic Necrosis” by Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Acute Necrotizing Pancreatitis

Introduction Contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) is the gold standard for assessing the severity of acute pancreatitis, especially for evaluating the presence of pancreatic necrosis (poorly perfused area). However, the contrast medium used for CT is potentially toxic to the pancreas and kidney. Therefore, medical institutions without facilities for hemodialysis hesitate to acquire contrast-enhanced CT images. Diagnostic values of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in pancreatic diseases have been shown. Aim To evaluate the usefulness of MRI in the assessment of the severity of acute pancreatitis. Results All necrotic regions in the pancreas were visualized by gadolinium-enhanced MRI. Furthermore, MRI can discriminate the poorly perfused pancreatic area, namely so-called “pancreatic necrosis” judged on CT, into three parts: 1) necrotic area of the pancreatic parenchyma, 2) perinecrotic fluid collection, and 3) hemorrhagic foci. Inflammatory changes that were required for severity grading were also evaluated sufficiently by MRI. Conclusion These results suggest that MRI is useful for the assessment of severity of acute pancreatitis.
Mediator Subunit 12 Is Required for Neutrophil Development in Zebrafish

Hematopoiesis requires the spatiotemporal organization of regulatory factors to successfully orchestrate diverse lineage specificity from stem and progenitor cells. Med12 is a regulatory component of the large Mediator complex that enables contact between the general RNA polymerase II transcriptional machinery and enhancer bound regulatory factors. We have identified a new zebrafish med12 allele, syr, with a single missense mutation causing a valine to aspartic acid change at position 1046. Syr shows defects in hematopoiesis, which predominantly affect the myeloid lineage. Syr has identified a hematopoietic cell-specific requirement for Med12, suggesting a new role for this transcriptional regulator.
Neuroanatomy of extrinsic afferents supplying the gastrointestinal tract

Here we discuss the neuroanatomy of extrinsic gastrointestinal (GI) afferent neurones, the relationship between structure and function and the role of afferents in disease. Three pathways connect the gut to the central nervous system: vagal afferents signal mainly from upper GI regions, pelvic afferents mainly from the colorectal region and splanchnic afferents from throughout. Vagal afferents mediate reflex regulation of gut function and behaviour, operating mainly at physiological levels. There are two major functional classes − tension receptors, responding to muscular contraction and distension, and mucosal receptors. The function of vagal endings correlates well with their anatomy: tracing studies show intramuscular arrays (IMAs) and intraganglionic laminar endings (IGLEs); IGLEs are now known to respond to tension. Functional mucosal receptors correlate with endings traced to the lamina propria. Pelvic afferents serve similar functions to vagal afferents, and additionally mediate both innocuous and noxious sensations. Splanchnic afferents comprise mucosal and stretch‐sensitive afferents with low thresholds in addition to high‐threshold serosal/mesenteric afferents suggesting diverse roles. IGLEs, probably of pelvic origin, have been identified recently in the rectum and respond similarly to gastric vagal IGLEs. Gastrointestinal afferents may be sensitized or inhibited by chemical mediators released from several cell types. Whether functional changes have anatomical correlates is not known, but it is likely that they underlie diseases involving visceral hypersensitivity.
Influence of the microflora on gastrointestinal nitric oxide generation : Studies in newborn infants and germ-free animals

Interactions between intestinal bacteria and the host play an important role in physiological regulation of gut function and in development of various diseases. Nitric oxide (NO) exhibits a variety of biological actions in the gut including regulation of regional blood flow, gut motility, water and electrolyte transport and immunity. In patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) the mucosal production of NO from NO synthases is greatly increased but its role in the pathophysiology of IBD is still unclear. Denitrifying bacteria in soil generate NO from nitrate (NO 3 ) and nitrite (NO 2 ) as a part of the nitrogen cycle. In this project we wanted to investigate whether the micro-organisms residing in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract could contribute to NO generation and under which conditions this would occur in vivo. We developed several new methods to directly measure gaseous NO in vivo in the colon of newborn infants and in the entire GI tract of conventional and germ-free animals. In addition, in in vitro experiments we investigated NO generation and consumption of NO by different gut bacteria. We started this project by monitoring the initial bacterial colonization in newborn infants with repeated measurements of intracolonic hydrogen gas (H 2 ), fecal short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) and NO. These markers were virtually undetectable at birth but increased in a particular pattern bacterial products (H 2 and SCFA) appeared first followed by NO some days later. Interestingly, in some apparently healthy infants colonic NO levels increased to levels similar to those seen in adults with inflammatory bowel disease, indicating a vivid activation of the immune system in response to the emerging bacterial flora. Next we investigated if bacteria could be an alternative source of gastrointestinal NO in addition to the mucosa. We found that in conventional rats, NO levels were distinctly compartmentalized with very high levels in the stomach, intermediate levels in the cecum and lower levels in the small intestine and colon. In contrast, in germ-free rats, NO was low throughout the gastrointestinal tract. When we fed rats nitrate, gastric NO increased greatly in conventional but not in germ-free animals, thereby confirming nitrate to be a substrate for bacterial NO generation. We went on to demonstrate that lactic acid producing bacteria (Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria) can generate considerable amounts of NO from nitrite in vitro. A combined mixed faecal flora was capable of NO generation not only from nitrite but also from nitrate. In the final study we demonstrate that intestinal NO generation can be stimulated in vivo by dietary supplementation with substrate (nitrate) and lactobacilli. Furthermore, in vitro studies show that the generation of NO by some probiotic bacteria can be counteracted by rapid NO consumption by other strains (E. coli
Differential effects of calcium antagonist subclasses on markers of nephropathy progression.

BACKGROUND Numerous studies suggest that the dihydropyridine calcium antagonists (DCAs) and nondihydropyridine calcium antagonists (NDCAs) have differential antiproteinuric effects. Proteinuria reduction is a correlate of the progression of renal disease. In an earlier systematic review, calcium antagonists were shown as effective antihypertensive drugs, but there was uncertainty about their renal benefits in patients with proteinuria and renal insufficiency. METHODS A systematic review was conducted to assess the differential effects of DCAs and NDCAs on proteinuria in hypertensive adults with proteinuria, with or without diabetes, and to determine whether these differential effects translate into altered progression of nephropathy. Studies included in the review had to be randomized clinical trials with at least 6 months of treatment, include a DCA or NDCA treatment arm, have one or more renal end points, and have been initiated after 1986. Summary data were extracted from 28 studies entered into two identical but separate databases, which were compared and evaluated by independent reviewers. The effects of each drug class on blood pressure (N= 1338) and proteinuria (N= 510) were assessed. RESULTS After adjusting for sample size, study length, and baseline value, there were no statistically significant differences in the ability of either class of calcium antagonist to decrease blood pressure. The mean change in proteinuria was +2% for DCAs and -30% for NDCAs (95% CI, 10% to 54%, P= 0.01). Consistently greater reductions in proteinuria were associated with the use of NDCAs compared with DCAs, despite no significant differences in blood pressure reduction or presence of diabetes. CONCLUSION This analysis supports (1) similar efficacy between subclasses of calcium antagonists to lower blood pressure, and (2) greater reductions in proteinuria by NDCAs compared to DCAs in the presence or absence of diabetes. Based on these findings, NDCAs, alone or in combination with an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB), are suggested as preferred agents to lower blood pressure in hypertensive patients with nephropathy associated with proteinuria.
Constraint Satisfaction with Counting Quantifiers

We initiate the study of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) in the presence of counting quantifiers $\exists^{\geq j}$ which assert the existence of at least $j$ elements such that the ensuing property holds. These are natural variants of CSPs in the mould of quantified CSPs (QCSPs). Namely, $\exists^{\geq 1}:=\exists$ and $\exists^{\geq n}:=\forall$ (for the domain of size $n$). We observe that a single counting quantifier $\exists^{\geq j}$ strictly between $\exists$ and $\forall$ already affords the maximal possible complexity of QCSPs (which have both $\exists$ and $\forall$), namely, being Pspace-complete for a suitably chosen template. Therefore, to better understand the complexity of this problem, we focus on restricted cases for which we derive the following results. First, for all subsets of counting quantifiers on clique and cycle templates, we give a full trichotomy---all such problems are in P, NP-complete, or Pspace-complete. Second, we consider the problem with exactly two quantifiers: .
The integrin alpha 6 beta 4 is a laminin receptor

In this study, the putative laminin receptor function of the alpha 6 beta 4 integrin was assessed. For this purpose, we used a human cell line, referred to as clone A, that was derived from a highly invasive, colon adenocarcinoma. This cell line, which expresses the alpha 6 beta 4 integrin, adheres to the E8 and not to the P1 fragment of laminin. The adhesion of clone A cells to laminin is extremely rapid with half- maximal adhesion observed at 5 min after plating. Adhesion to laminin is blocked by GoH3, and alpha 6 specific antibody (60% inhibition), as well as by A9, a beta 4 specific antibody (30% inhibition). Most importantly, we demonstrate that alpha 6 beta 4 binds specifically to laminin-Sepharose columns in the presence of either Mg2+ or Mn2+ and it is eluted from these columns with EDTA but not with NaCl. The alpha 6 beta 4 integrin does not bind to collagen-Sepharose, but the alpha 2 beta 1 integrin does bind. Clone A cells do not express alpha 6 beta 1 as evidenced by the following observations: (a) no beta 1 integrin is detected in beta 1 immunoblots of GoH3 immunoprecipitates; and (b) no alpha 6 beta 1 integrin is seen in GoH3 immunoprecipitates of clone A extracts that had been immunodepleted of all beta 4 containing integrin using the A9 antibody. These data establish that laminin is a ligand for the alpha 6 beta 4 integrin and that this integrin can function as a laminin receptor independently of alpha 6 beta 1.
The Impact of e-Politician on the Adoption of e-Service: Perceptions from a sample of South African Municipal IT Heads

The purpose of this study is to establish whether the use of information technology (IT) by elected municipal representatives, for constituency work, emboldens the adoption of e-service in municipals of a developing country. The research data was obtained through the completion of a questionnaire by a sample of respondents who serve as authorities of IT in South African municipals. The findings from both descriptive and inferential data analysis of collected data confirm that the use of IT by elected municipal representatives for constituency work impacts the adoption of e-service in municipals. Furthermore, the use of IT by elected municipal representatives for constituency work correlated with both e-service laws and e-service security. This study contributes to a better understanding of choices needed when planning for the adoption of e-service initiatives in municipals of developing countries. Given that 87.2% of respondents are aware of a high access to telephone mobile, a further research is needed to clarify why most elected municipal representatives of a developing country choose not to exploit IT for their constituency work, and similarly why municipals of a developing country do not exploit IT to provide services.
Proximal Methods for Hierarchical Sparse Coding

Sparse coding consists in representing signals as sparse linear combinations of atoms selected from a dictionary. We consider an extension of this framework where the atoms are further assumed to be embedded in a tree. This is achieved using a recently introduced tree-structured sparse regularization norm, which has proven useful in several applications. This norm leads to regularized problems that are difficult to optimize, and in this paper, we propose efficient algorithms for solving them. More precisely, we show that the proximal operator associated with this norm is computable exactly via a dual approach that can be viewed as the composition of elementary proximal operators. Our procedure has a complexity linear, or close to linear, in the number of atoms, and allows the use of accelerated gradient techniques to solve the tree-structured sparse approximation problem at the same computational cost as traditional ones using the l1-norm. Our method is efficient and scales gracefully to millions of variables, which we illustrate in two types of applications: first, we consider fixed hierarchical dictionaries of wavelets to denoise natural images. Then, we apply our optimization tools in the context of dictionary learning, where learned dictionary elements naturally self-organize in a prespecified arborescent structure, leading to better performance in reconstruction of natural image patches. When applied to text documents, our method learns hierarchies of topics, thus providing a competitive alternative to probabilistic topic models.
Static Program Slicing- An Efficient Approach for Prioritization of Test Cases for Regression Testing

Testing is performed after modification of the program or software; it classified the existing test cases into re-used test cases and affected test cases after modification of the code. Test case prioritization is an approach of arranging the existing test cases in manner that most affected test cases (that generated maximum number of faults) test first after the other one. There are many techniques used for prioritization test cases at the time of regression testing. This paper present a new approach for prioritization of test cases using static executable program slices for regression testing. Program slicing is a process to classify the program into number of parts based on various types of dependencies between program statements. This paper presents an overview of basic concept of generating static program slices and on the basis of these programs slices prioritization of test cases at the time of regression testing Keywordstesting, Program dependency, static program slices, test cases prioritization and execution history