Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Induction of acute hepatic injury by endotoxin in mice.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the changes of scavenger receptor (SR) and CD14 in Kupffer cells in endotoxemia in order to uncover the mechanism of the liver to turn a defense organ into effector one in sepsis. METHODS Mouse models of endotoxemia of different severity were reproduced by injection of different doses of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) via the tail vein. The expression of SR and CD14 in the liver was assayed by immunohistochemistry and was subsequently analyzed with an image analysis system. The levels of TNF-alpha and IL-6 in liver tissue were determined with ELISA. RESULTS The expression of SR in the liver in the high-dose group was markedly decreased one hour after injection of LPS, and also in the low-dose group at 3 hours. The expression of SR in the liver in the two groups was shown to be progressively decreased with the time prolonged. There was significant difference in average optical density (OD) values of SR between the two groups. The expression of CD14 in the two groups was shown to be significantly increased one hour after injection of LPS, and more significantly with the time prolonged. But there was no significant difference in OD values of CD14 between the two groups. The contents of intrahepatic proinflammatory mediators TNF-alpha, IL-6, ALT and TBIL were significantly increased after injection of LPS. Correlation analysis revealed that the changes of TNF-alpha, IL-6, ALT, and TBIL were negatively correlated with the expression of SR, and positively with the expression of CD14. CONCLUSION The up-regulation of CD14 expression and down-regulation of SR expression on Kupffer cells might be one of the important mechanisms for the conversion of Kupffer cells from immune defensive to inflammatory response cells in acute hepatic injury.
The default network and self‐generated thought: component processes, dynamic control, and clinical relevance

Though only a decade has elapsed since the default network (DN) was first defined as a large‐scale brain system, recent years have brought great insight into the network's adaptive functions. A growing theme highlights the DN as playing a key role in internally directed or self‐generated thought. Here, we synthesize recent findings from cognitive science, neuroscience, and clinical psychology to focus attention on two emerging topics as current and future directions surrounding the DN. First, we present evidence that self‐generated thought is a multifaceted construct whose component processes are supported by different subsystems within the network. Second, we highlight the dynamic nature of the DN, emphasizing its interaction with executive control systems when regulating aspects of internal thought. We conclude by discussing clinical implications of disruptions to the integrity of the network, and consider disorders when thought content becomes polarized or network interactions become disrupted or imbalanced.
Inhibition of de novo ceramide synthesis upregulates phospholipase D and enhances myogenic differentiation

In L6 skeletal myoblasts induced to differentiate by Arg8-vasopressin treatment, a short-lived lowering of ceramide levels was observed, followed by a long-lasting elevation that was prevented by inhibitors of the de novo synthesis pathway, fumonisin B1 and myriocin. Both inhibitors increased the expression of myogenic differentiation markers and cell fusion rate, whereas short-chain ceramides inhibited these responses. Similar drug effects were observed on primary mouse satellite cell differentiation. Furthermore, bacterial sphingomyelinase overexpression suppressed myogenin nuclear accumulation in L6 cells. These data suggested that endogenous ceramide mediates a negative feedback mechanism limiting myogenic differentiation, and that inhibitors of ceramide synthesis promoted myogenesis by removing this control. Phospholipase D (PLD), a recognized target of ceramide, is required for myogenesis, as shown by the negative effects of PLD1 isoform depletion obtained by siRNA treatment. Fumonisin induced an increase in PLD activity of L6 cells, whereas C6-ceramide decreased it. The expression of PLD1 mRNA transcripts was selectively decreased by C6-ceramide, and increased by ceramide synthesis inhibitors. An early step of myogenic response is the PLD1-dependent formation of actin stress fiber-like structures. C6-ceramide addition or overexpression of sphingomyelinase impaired actin fiber formation. Ceramide might thus regulate myogenesis through downregulation of PLD1 expression and activity.
Beyond 6 Hours: With MR Selection, Improved Outcomes after Successful Late Thrombectomy in Anterior Circulation Large Vessel Occlusion Stroke

Mechanical thrombectomy can markedly improve long-term outcomes after anterior circulation large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke. (Jovin et al. 2015; Saver et al. 2015; Campbell et al. 2015; Goyal et al. 2015; Berkhemer et al. 2015) The success of recent clinical trials is attributed to the use of third generation thrombectomy devices and limiting intervention to patients with proximal large vessel occlusion as confirmed with advanced imaging, typically CT angiography. Most patients enrolled in these trials were treated at early time points. Although time is considered important, patient specific factors such as collateral status may also be key determinants of outcome. (Bang et al. 2011; ChengMEDICINE
Anywhere, Anytime Code Inspections: Using the Web to Remove Inspection Bottlenecks in Large-Scale Software Development

The dissemination of critical information and the synchronization of coordinated activities are critical problems in geographically separated, large-scale, software development. While these problems are not insurmountable, their solutions have varying trade-offs in terms of time, cost and effectiveness. Our previous studies have shown that the inspection interval is typically lengthened because of schedule conflicts among inspectors which delay the (usually) required inspection collection meeting. We present and justify a solution using an intranet web that is both timely in its dissemination of information and effective in its coordination of distributed inspectors. First, exploiting a naturally occurring experiment (reported here), we conclude that the asynchronous collection of inspection results is at least as effective as the synchronous collection of those results. Second, exploiting the information dissemination qualities and the on-demand nature of information retrieval of the web, and the platform independence of browsers, we built an inexpensive tool that integrates seamlessly into the current development process. By seamless we mean an identical paper flow that results in an almost identical inspection process. The acceptance of the inspection tool has been excellent. The cost savings just from the reduction in paper work This work is supported in part by a National Science Fotmdation Faculty Early Career Development Award, CCR-9501354. Permission to make digitnbhnrd copies of all or pert of this material for pcrsonnl or chtssroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copyright is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires specific pcnnission and/or fee ICSE 97 Boston MA LJSA Copyright I997 ACM O-89791-914-9/97/05 . $3.50 14 M. W. Wade Quality Management Group Lucent Technologies Inc Naperville, IL 60566 michaelwwade@lucent . com and the time savings from the reduction in distribution interval of the inspection package (sometimes involving international mailings) have been substantial. These savings together with the seamless integration into the existing environment are the major factors for this acceptance. From our viewpoint as experimentalists, the acceptance came too readily. Therefore we lost our op portunity to explore this tool using a series of controlled experiments to isolate the underlying factors or its effectiveness. Nevertheless, by using historical data we can show that the new process is less expensive in terms of cost and at least as effective in terms of quality (defect detection effectiveness).
The Switch Reordering Contagion: Preventing a Few Late Packets from Ruining the Whole Party

Packet reordering has now become one of the most significant bottlenecks in next-generation switch designs. A switch practically experiences a reordering delay contagion, such that a few late packets may affect a disproportionate number of other packets. This contagion can have two possible forms. First, since switch designers tend to keep the switch flow order, i.e., the order of packets arriving at the same switch input and departing from the same switch output, a packet may be delayed due to packets of other flows with little or no reason. Further, within a flow, if a single packet is delayed for a long time, then all the other packets of the same flow will have to wait for it and suffer as well. In this paper, we suggest solutions against this reordering contagion. We first suggest several hash-based counter schemes that prevent inter-flow blocking and reduce reordering delay. We further suggest schemes based on network coding to protect against rare events with high queueing delay within a flow. Last, we demonstrate using both analysis and simulations that the use of these solutions can indeed reduce the resequencing delay. For instance, resequencing delays are reduced by up to an order of magnitude using real-life traces and a real hashing function.
Effect of magnetic and electric coupling fields on micro- and nano- structure of carbon films in the CVD diamond process and their electron field emission property

In this paper, both electric field and magnetic field were used to assist the hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) and we systematically investigated the effects of which on the (1) phase composition, (2) grain size, (3) thickness and (4) preferred orientation of diamond films through SEM, Raman and XRD. The application of magnetic field in electric field, so called ‘the magnetic and electric coupling fields’, enhanced the graphitization and refinement of diamond crystals, slowed down the decrease of film thickness along with the increase of bias current, and suppressed diamond (100) orientation. During the deposition process, the electric field provided additional energy to HFCVD system and generated large number of energetic particles which might annihilate at the substrate and lose kinetic energy, while the Lorentz force, provided by magnetic field, could constrict charged particles (including electrons) to do spiral movement, which prolonged their moving path and life, thus the system energy increased. With the graphitization of diamond films intensified, the preferred orientation of diamond films completely evolved from (110) to (100), until the orientation and diamond phase disappeared, which can be attributed to (I) the distribution and concentration ratio of carbon precursors (C2H2 and CH3) and (II) graphitization sequence of diamond crystal facets. Since the electron field emission property of carbon film is sensitive to the phase composition, thickness and preferred orientation, nano- carbon cones, prepared by the negative bias current of 20 mA and magnetic field strength of 80 Gauss, exhibited the lowest turn-on field of 6.1 V −1 μm−1.
Concurrent Reinforcement Learning from Customer Interactions

In this paper, we explore applications in which a company interacts concurrently with many customers. The company has an objective function, such as maximising revenue, customer satisfaction, or customer loyalty, which depends primarily on the sequence of interactions between company and customer. A key aspect of this setting is that interactions with different customers occur in parallel. As a result, it is imperative to learn online from partial interaction sequences, so that information acquired from one customer is efficiently assimilated and applied in subsequent interactions with other customers. We present the first framework for concurrent reinforcement learning, using a variant of temporal-difference learning to learn efficiently from partial interaction sequences. We evaluate our algorithms in two large-scale test-beds for online and email interaction respectively, generated from a database of 300,000 customer records.
Surgery for Unruptured Spetzler-Martin Grade 3 Brain Arteriovenous Malformations: A Prospective Surgical Cohort.

BACKGROUND There is uncertainty regarding the management of unruptured Spetzler-Martin grade 3 brain arteriovenous malformations (SMG3 ubAVM). OBJECTIVE To analyze our series of patients treated by surgery. METHODS A single-surgeon database of consecutively enrolled bAVMs (between 1989 and 2014) was analyzed. Adverse outcomes due to surgery were assigned within the first 6 weeks following surgery and outcome was prospectively recorded and assigned at the last follow-up visit by using modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score. RESULTS Of the 137 reviewed patients, 112 (82%) were treated by surgery, 15 (11%) were treated elsewhere or by radiosurgery, and 10 (7%) were recommended for conservative management. Surgery for SMG3 ubAVM was associated with adverse outcomes with a new permanent neurological deficit of mRS >1 in 23 of 112 (21%) patients. Permanent neurological deficit leading to a mRS >2 from surgery was 3.6% (95% confidence interval, 1.1%-9.1%). Late recurrence of a bAVM occurred in 3 of 103 (2.9%) patients who had complete obliteration of bAVM confirmed immediately after surgery and who were subsequently later followed with radiological studies during the mean follow-up period of 3.0 years (range, 6 days to 18.8 years). CONCLUSION When discussing surgical options for SMG3 ubAVM, a thorough understanding of the significance and incidence of adverse events and outcomes is required to fully inform patients. For our series, the additional subclassification of SMG ubAVM (based on variables contributing to the SMG or age) would not have been of use.
Impact of Air Pollution on Allergic Diseases

The incidence of allergic diseases in most industrialized countries has increased. Although the exact mechanisms behind this rapid increase in prevalence remain uncertain, a variety of air pollutants have been attracting attention as one causative factor. Epidemiological and toxicological research suggests a causative relationship between air pollution and the increased incidence of asthma, allergic rhinitis, and other allergic disorders. These include ozone, nitrogen dioxide and, especially particulate matter, produced by traffic-related and industrial activities. Strong epidemiological evidence supports a relationship between air pollution and the exacerbation of asthma and other respiratory diseases. Recent studies have suggested that air pollutants play a role in the development of asthma and allergies. Researchers have elucidated the mechanisms whereby these pollutants induce adverse effects; they appear to affect the balance between antioxidant pathways and airway inflammation. Gene polymorphisms involved in antioxidant pathways can modify responses to air pollution exposure. While the characterization and monitoring of pollutant components currently dictates pollution control policies, it will be necessary to identify susceptible subpopulations to target therapy/prevention of pollution-induced respiratory diseases.
Nilvadipine, a new calcium channel blocker, reduces ischemic brain injury in rats.

The effects of nilvadipine, a dihydropyridine type calcium channel blocker, on cerebral infarction induced by focal brain ischemia was studied in rats. The area of infarction was measured 24 hr after occlusion of the middle cerebral artery (MCA) in spontaneously hypertensive rats using triphenyltetrazolium chloride. Nilvadipine, given immediately after MCA occlusion, reduced the area of infarction significantly at doses of 0.32 mg/kg (i.p.) and 3.2, 10 and 32 mg/kg (p.o.). Nicardipine suppressed the area of infarction at a dose of 32 mg/kg (p.o.). The results suggest that nilvadipine is effective against ischemic brain injury.
Building dependable distributed applications using AQUA

Building dependable distributed systems using ad hoc methods is a challenging task. Without proper support, an application programmer must face the daunting requirement of having to provide fault tolerance at the application level, in addition to dealing with the complexities of the distributed application itself. This approach requires a deep knowledge of fault tolerance on the part of the application designer, and has a high implementation cost. What is needed is a systematic approach to providing dependability to distributed applications. Proteus, part of the AQuA architecture, fills this need and provides facilities to make a standard distributed CORBA application dependable, with minimal changes to an application. Furthermore, it permits applications to specify, either directly or via the Quality Objects (QuO) infrastructure, the level of dependability they expect of a remote object, and will attempt to configure the system to achieve the requested dependability level. Our previous papers have focused on the architecture and implementation of Proteus. This paper describes how to construct dependable applications using the AQuA architecture, by describing the interface that a programmer is presented with and the graphical monitoring facilities that it provides.
Top-N recommendations on Unpopular Items with Contextual Knowledge

Traditional recommender systems provide recommendations of items to users; recently, some of them also consider the context related to predictions. In this paper we propose a technique that relies on classical recommendation algorithms and post-filters recommendations on the basis of contextual information available for them. Association rules are exploited to identify the most significant correlations among context and item characteristics. The mined rules are used to filter the predictions performed by traditional recommender systems to provide contextualized recommendations. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach allows improving the output of classical algorithms proposed in the literature, especially in the case of unpopular items.
The user non-acceptance paradigm: INFOSEC's dirty little secret

This panel will address users' perceptions and misperceptions of the risk/benefit and benefit/nuisance ratios associated with information security products, and will grope for a solution, based on the psychology of personality trait-factoring results, among other multidisciplinary approaches, to the problem of user non-acceptance of information security products. This problem has acquired a much more scientific guise when amalgamated with the psychology of personality and reinforced by reflections from the field on patterns of user behavior. A gross simplification of the main thrust of the panel is this thesis: if we start profiling the defenders rather than the offenders and do it on the basis of real science rather than very crude personality tests, then we will, at the very least, understand what is happening and possibly create a desirable profile for sysadmins, CIOs, and perhaps even CFOs. This swept-under-the-rug problem is information security's "dirty little secret. " No other forum is designed to address this, and it may well become yet another major conceptual and paradigmatic shift in the field, of the type initiated in the NSPWs over the last decade. We know that the panel will generate an assured considerable interest among the participants.
Fault Classification Oriented Spectrum Based Fault Localization

The commonly-used software fault localization approaches mainly utilize test coverage information and test cases execution results to calculate the suspiciousness of each program entity to identify the location of faults, namely spectrum based software fault localization (SBFL). It had been argued that such techniques are not helpful in real debugging process, since the low accuracy of localization and few information provided to programmers. In this paper we consider the combination of statement based fault classification with the SBFL, aiming at increasing accuracy of fault localization and provide additional possible fault information to programmers. An improved technique, fault classification oriented SBFL (FC-SBFL), is proposed in this paper, in which the suspiciousness value is adjusted dynamically based on the probability of statement being faulty. Experimental results on real application programs show that FC-SBFL is more effective than SBFL to locate faults, and studies with Tarantula and OP2 show that more than 75% faults have been identified in a better effectiveness.
Secret Share Dissemination across a Network

Secret sharing is an important component of several cryptographic protocols. These include protocols for secure multiparty function computation, key management, and secure archival storage. Most protocols assume that the dealer has direct communication links with every participant, in which case, the dealer can directly communicate the respective shares to all participants. In this paper, we consider the problem of disseminating shares of a secret when the dealer and the participants form a general network. We provide an algorithm for secret share dissemination that is communication-efficient, distributed and deterministic. Interestingly, the solution constitutes an instance of a network coding problem admitting a distributed and deterministic solution, and furthermore, handles the case of nodal-eavesdropping, about which very little appears to be known in the literature.
Unsupervised Learning in a Framework of Information Compression by Multiple Alignment, Unification and Search

This paper describes a novel approach to unsupervised learning that has been developed within a framework of "information compression by multiple alignment, unification and search" (ICMAUS), designed to integrate learning with other AI functions such as parsing and production of language, fuzzy pattern recognition, probabilistic and exact forms of reasoning, and others.
Implementing buck converter for battery charger using soft switching techniques

This paper describes the performance of the resonant buck converter battery charger using soft switching, which has been seen as a good and convincing solution for switched mode electronic power converter. The switching frequency of the power semiconductor devices has been increased in order to decrease the losses and the stress of the switching. As a result of that, the efficiency and the reliability of the buck converter obviously increased. The proposed charger circuits with both zero voltage switching and zero current switching were analyzed and tested using MATLAB-SIMULINK software for a 12V 4 Ah lead acid battery. The structure of the proposed circuits does not require complex control mechanisms and a large number of components.
Modeling the Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Post-Acute Care Resource for Stroke Patients in Taiwan

A new regulation for Post-Acute Care (PAC) resource for stroke patients has been newly implemented in Taiwan. The effect of such new health insurance policy is yet to be analyzed. This research intends to use the National Health Insurance Research Database to collect "Cohort Dataset". NHI enrollees from 2013 to 2014 before random sampling for analysis in accordance with code 430 to 437 of the International Classification of Diseases, the 9th Revision. By constructing hierarchical linear models (HLM), the PAC effects of patient-ward level can then be statistically analyzed. Meanwhile, the repetitive measurement and observation at different time points within the first, the third, and the sixth month, can also be constructed and conducted in the future for the service mode between PAC ward and general ward.