Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Haemopoietic stem cells and progenitors of functional T-lymphocytes in the bone marrow of 'nude' mice.

SUMMARY Thestemcell potential ofthymusless nu/numicemeasured intermsofCFU ratio andthecapacity toreprieve lethally irradiated micewassimilar tothat of nuf+ andCBA mice. Thethymus ofnu/nu-T6T6radiation chimaeras was repopulated bydonorcells. Proliferation ofdonorcells, presumed tobeTlymphocytes, wasobserved inregional lymphnodes 3days after sensitization with oxazolone. T6T6thymusgrafts implanted subcutaneously innu/numicerestored the response toC57BLskingrafts. Themitotic figures inthethymus implant 30 andmoredaysafter grafting werealmost exclusively ofhostkaryotype. Thehigh proportion ofhostcells dividing inthelymphnodesofthymus-grafted nu/nu micesuggested thatT-cells derived originally fromnu/nubonemarrowwere present. Allogeneic epithelial thymusgrafts partially restored theresponse of nu/nu micetooxazolone. Itisconcluded that thefailure ofthymic development innu/nu miceisnotdue toanabsence ofthymocyte precursors inthebonemarrowortoanything inthe general physiological environment whichprevents their differentiation tothymocytes andT-lymphocytes. Itispresumably theresult ofdefective embryonic development oftheepithelial rudiment.
Efficacy of stellate ganglion block with an adjuvant ketamine for peripheral vascular disease of the upper limbs

Stellate ganglion block (STGB) is commonly indicated in painful conditions like reflex sympathetic dystrophy, malignancies of head and neck, Reynaud’s disease and vascular insufficiency of the upper limbs. The sympathetic blockade helps to relieve pain and ischaemia. Diagnostic STGB is usually performed with local anaesthetics followed by therapeutic blockade with steroids, neurolytic agents or radiofrequency ablation of ganglion. There is increasing popularity and evidence for the use of adjuvants like opioid, clonidine and N Methyl d Aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist – ketamine – for the regional and neuroaxial blocks. The action of ketamine with sympatholytic block is through blockade of peripherally located NMDA receptors that are the target in the management of neuropathic pain, with the added benefit of counteracting the “wind-up” phenomena of chronic pain. We studied ketamine as an adjuvant to the local anaesthetic for STGB in 20 cases of peripheral vascular disease of upper limbs during the last 5 years at our institution. STGB was given for 2 days with 2 ml of 2% lignocaine + 8 ml of 0.25% bupivacaine, followed by block with the addition of 0.5 mg/kg of ketamine for three consecutive days. There was significant pain relief of longer duration with significant rise in hand temperature. We also observed complete healing of the gangrenous fingers in 17/19 patients.
Non Disruptive Data Services Towards Real-Time Traffic in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile wireless Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) naturally support a traffic mix of elastic and real-time flows but the shared nature and lossy properties of the radio medium make their coexistence challenging. We argue in this paper for a new kind of elastic data transport service which would preserve the quality of real-time priority flows while guaranteeing an acceptaple (tunable) end-to-end delivery time of elastic data. We propose to use mechanisms from Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) to support hop-by-hop data transfer from source to destination and an adaptation of TCP which monitors its agressiveness towards local VoIP traffic on each hop. The scheme is evaluated in simulation on a simple 4-node scenario and in a more realistic case where doubling data transfer time allows for the support of seven VoIP flows of medium quality against none for standard TCP.
A structural risk-neutral model of electricity prices

The objective of this paper is to present a model for electricity spot prices and the corresponding forward contracts, which relies on the underlying market of fuels, thus avoiding the electricity non-storability restriction. The structural aspect of our model comes from the fact that the electricity spot prices depend on the dynamics of the electricity demand at the maturity T, and on the random available capacity of each production means. Our model explains, in a stylized fact, how the prices of different fuels together with the demand combine to produce electricity prices. This modeling methodology allows one to transfer to electricity prices the risk-neutral probabilities of the market of fuels and under the hypothesis of independence between demand and outages on one hand, and prices of fuels on the other hand, it provides a regression-type relation between electricity forward prices and forward prices of fuels. Moreover, the model produces, by nature, the well-known peaks observed on electricity market data. In our model, spikes occur when the producer has to switch from one technology to the lowest cost available one. Numerical tests performed on a very crude approximation of the French electricity market using only two fuels (gas and oil) provide an illustration of the potential interest of this model.
Multimedia Information Filtering

In the film Minority Report (20th Century Fox, 2002), which is set in the near future, there is a scene where a man walks into a department store and is confronted by a holographic shop assistant. The holographic shop assistant recognises the potential customer by iris-recognition technology. The holographic assistant then welcomes the man by his name and starts to inform him of offers and items that he would be interested in based on his past purchases and what other shoppers who have similar tastes have purchased. This example of future personalised shopping assistants that can help a customer find shopping goods is not too far away from becoming reality in some form or another. Malone, Grant, Turbak, Brobst, and Cohen (1987) introduced three paradigms for information selection, cognitive, economic, and social, based on their work with a system they called the Information Lens. Their definition of cognitive filtering, the approach actually implemented by the Information Lens, is equivalent to the “content filter” defined earlier by Denning, and this approach is now commonly referred to as “content-based” filtering. Their most important contribution was to introduce an alternative approach that they called social (now also more commonly called collaborative) filtering. In social filtering, the representation of a document is based on annotations to that document made by prior readers of the document. In the 1990s much work was done on collaborative filtering (CF). There were three systems that were considered to be the quintessential recommender systems. The Grouplens project (Miller, Albert, Lam, Konstan, & Riedl, 2003) initially was used for filtering items from the Usenet news domain. This later became the basis of Movielens. The Bellcore Video recommender system (Hill, Stead, Rosenstein, & Furnas, 1995), which recommended video films to users based on what they had rented before, and Ringo (Shardanand & Maes, 1995), which later was published on the Web and marketed as Firefly, used social filtering to recommend movies and music. BACKGROUND
Characterization of the Hox cluster from the mosquito Anopheles gambiae (Diptera: culicidae)

SUMMARY The Hox genes have been found to encode transcription factors, which specify the morphological identity of structures along the anteroposterior axis of animals ranging from worms to mice. The canonical set of nine genes is organized in a cluster in the genome of several protostomes and deuterostomes. However, within insects, whereas the Hox genes are organized in a single cluster in the beetle Tribolium castaneum, they are split into two separate groups in the flies Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila virilis. The significance of a split Hox cluster is unknown and has been observed in only one organism outside the Drosophila lineage: the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. We have cloned a majority of the Hox genes from the mosquito Anopheles gambiae (Diptera: Culicidae) and compared their genomic organization with that of Tribolium and Drosophila to determine if a split Hox cluster is found in dipterans aside from the Drosophilidae. We find that the Hox genes in Anopheles, as in Tribolium, are organized in a single cluster that spans a genomic region of at least 700 kb. This finding suggests that, within the insect genome, the partition of the Hox cluster may have evolved exclusively within the Drosophila lineage. The genomic structures of the resident genes, however, appear to be largely conserved between A. gambiae and D. melanogaster.
The nested Chinese restaurant process and Bayesian inference of topic hierarchies

We present the nested Chinese restaurant process (nCRP), a stochastic process which assigns probability distributions to infinitely-deep, infinitely-branching trees. We show how this stochastic process can be used as a prior distribution in a Bayesian nonparametric model of document collections. Specifically, we present an application to information retrieval in which documents are modeled as paths down a random tree, and the preferential attachment dynamics of the nCRP leads to clustering of documents according to sharing of topics at multiple levels of abstraction. Given a corpus of documents, a posterior inference algorithm finds an approximation to a posterior distribution over trees, topics and allocations of words to levels of the tree. We demonstrate this algorithm on collections of scientific abstracts from several journals. This model exemplifies a recent trend in statistical machine learning--the use of Bayesian nonparametric methods to infer distributions on flexible data structures.
AN APPROXIMATION FORMULA IN HILBERT SPACE

Let {φk}1 be a frame for Hilbert space H. The purpose of this paper is to present an approximation formula of any f ∈ H by a linear combination of finitely many frame elements in the frame {φk}1 and show that the obtained approximation error depends on the bounds of frame and the convergence rate of frame coefficients of f as well as the relation among frame elements.
Dynamic motion vector refreshing for enhanced error resilience in HEVC

The high level of compression efficiency achieved by HEVC coding techniques decreases the error resilience performance under error prone conditions. This paper addresses the error resiliency of the HEVC standard, focusing on the new motion estimation tools. It is shown that the temporal dependency of motion information is comparatively higher than that in the H.264/AVC standard, causing an increase in the error propagation. Based on this evidence, this paper proposes a method to make intelligent use of temporal motion vector (MV) candidates during the motion estimation process, in order to decrease the temporal dependency, and improve the error resiliency without penalising the rate-distortion performance. The simulation results show that the proposed method improves the error resilience under tested conditions by increasing the video quality by up to 1.7 dB in average, compared to the reference method that always enables temporal MV candidates.
The Larval Specific Lymphatic Filarial ALT‐2: Induction of Protection Using Protein or DNA Vaccination

Genes from the infective stage of lymphatic filarial parasites expressed at the time of host invasion have been identified as potential vaccine candidates. By screening an L3 cDNA library with sera from uninfected longstanding residents of an area endemic for onchocerciasis, so‐called “endemic normals” (EN), we have cloned and characterized one such gene termed the abundant larval transcript two (ALT‐2). The stage specificity of ALT‐2 gene transcription and protein synthesis was confirmed by PCR using gene‐specific primers, and by western blot analysis of protein extracts from various stages of the parasite life cycle using specific antisera. Significant differences in antibody response to the recombinant ALT‐2 were observed in endemic populations with differing clinical manifestations of lymphatic filariasis with an antibody response present in sera from 18 of 25 (72%) EN subjects compared to 9 of 25 (36%) with subclinical microfilaracmia (MF) and 14 of 25 (52%) of those with chronic lymphatic obstruction (CP) (P=0.01 for comparison of EN to CP or to MF). This differential responsiveness suggests that the protective immunity postulated to account for their uninfected status might be associated with a response to this protein. When the utility of ALT‐2 as a vaccine candidate was tested in a murine model using either recombinant protein or a DNA vaccine construct, statistically significant protection was observed when compared to a control filarial gene product expressed across all stages of the parasite lifecycle (SXP‐1; P=0.02 for protein and P=0.01 for the DNA vaccine) or compared to adjuvant alone. This level of protection indicates that this vaccine is a promising candidate for further development.
Intraflagellar transport balances continuous turnover of outer doublet microtubules

A central question in cell biology is how cells determine the size of their organelles. Flagellar length control is a convenient system for studying organelle size regulation. Mechanistic models proposed for flagellar length regulation have been constrained by the assumption that flagella are static structures once they are assembled. However, recent work has shown that flagella are dynamic and are constantly turning over. We have determined that this turnover occurs at the flagellar tips, and that the assembly portion of the turnover is mediated by intraflagellar transport (IFT). Blocking IFT inhibits the incorporation of tubulin at the flagellar tips and causes the flagella to resorb. These results lead to a simple steady-state model for flagellar length regulation by which a balance of assembly and disassembly can effectively regulate flagellar length.
Inertia-Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimizer for Improved Global Search

This paper describes a method for improving the final accuracy and the convergence speed of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by adapting its inertia factor in the velocity updating equation and also by adding a new coefficient to the position updating equation. These modifications do not impose any serious requirements on the basic algorithm in terms of the number of Function Evaluations (FEs). The new algorithm has been shown to be statistically significantly better than four recent variants of PSO on an eight-function test-suite for the following performance matrices: Quality of the final solution, time to find out the solution, frequency of hitting the optima, and scalability.
Influenza-Like Illness Surveillance on Twitter through Automated Learning of Naïve Language

Twitter has the potential to be a timely and cost-effective source of data for syndromic surveillance. When speaking of an illness, Twitter users often report a combination of symptoms, rather than a suspected or final diagnosis, using naïve, everyday language. We developed a minimally trained algorithm that exploits the abundance of health-related web pages to identify all jargon expressions related to a specific technical term. We then translated an influenza case definition into a Boolean query, each symptom being described by a technical term and all related jargon expressions, as identified by the algorithm. Subsequently, we monitored all tweets that reported a combination of symptoms satisfying the case definition query. In order to geolocalize messages, we defined 3 localization strategies based on codes associated with each tweet. We found a high correlation coefficient between the trend of our influenza-positive tweets and ILI trends identified by US traditional surveillance systems.
Status-Quo-Bias and Voluntary Contributions: Can Lab Experiments Parallel Real World Outcomes for Generic Advertising?

Many commodities have programs assessing producers for generic advertising. Ads such as "Got Milk? " and the "Incredible Edible Egg" are a public good for producers. Most of these programs originally used the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism, but have now become mandatory because of free-riding. This research simulates both the economic and psychological details of the egg industry in experiments that produce strikingly realistic results. Because mandatory programs have recently been declared unconstitutional, we also the test the Provision Point Mechanism and show that observed low levels of free-riding for both mechanisms are the result of status quo bias.
Towards Tractable Inference for Resource-Bounded Agents

For a machine to act with common sense, it is not enough that information about commonsense things be written down in a formal language. What actual knowledge — i.e. conclusions available for informing actions — a formalization is meant to provide cannot be determined without some specification of what sort of reasoning is expected. The traditional view in epistemic logic says that agents see all logical consequences of the information they have, but that would give agents capabilities far beyond common sense or what is physically realizable. To work towards addressing this issue, we introduce a new epistemic logic, based on a three-valued version of neighborhood semantics, which allows for talking about the effort used in making inferences. We discuss the advantages and limitations of this approach and suggest that the ideas used in it could also find a role in autoepistemic reasoning.
Facet Segmentation-Based Line Segment Extraction for Large-Scale Point Clouds

As one of the most common features in the man-made environments, straight lines play an important role in many applications. In this paper, we present a new framework to extract line segments from large-scale point clouds. The proposed method is fast to produce results, easy for implementation and understanding, and suitable for various point cloud data. The key idea is to segment the input point cloud into a collection of facets efficiently. These facets provide sufficient information for determining linear features in the local planar region and make line segment extraction become relatively convenient. Moreover, we introduce the concept “number of false alarms” into 3-D point cloud context to filter the false positive line segment detections. We test our approach on various types of point clouds acquired from different ways. We also compared the proposed method with several other methods and provide both quantitative and visual comparison results. The experimental results show that our algorithm is efficient and effective, and produce more accurate and complete line segments than the comparative methods. To further verify the accuracy of the line segments extracted by the proposed method, we also present a line-based registration framework, which employs these line segments on point clouds registration.
High Temperature Brittleness of Non-Oriented Electrical Steel Containing Phosphrous

High temperature brittleness of non-oriented electrical steel containing 0.14wt% phosphorus was investigated by mechanical testing, scanning electrical microscopy (SEM) and Auger electron spectroscopy (AES). The steels were annealed at 800~950°C with hold time of 2~30min under dry hydrogen/nitrogen mixture and wet mixture gas. The mechanical testing results indicated that elongation and bend-to-failure times of steel sheets annealed in wet gas was decreased with hold time extending, and dramatically dropped when it exceeded some value. The critical time of brittleness was become shorter with increase of annealing temperature. It was shown by AES that the phosphorus segregation at grain boundary induced by decarbonizing under wet gas led to inter-granular brittle fracture in the steel sheets.
The role of 2D linear systems theory in the design and experimental verification of iterative learning control algorithms

Iterative learning control algorithms are applicable to the many industrial processes that complete the same finite duration task over and over again. One example is a gantry robot executing a pick and place operation in synchronization with a moving conveyor. The novel feature of these algorithms is the use of information from previous executions to update the control input for application on the next one. Iterative learning control has a 2D systems structure and this paper will give an overview of recent progress on the design of iterative learning control laws in this setting. A particular focus will be on the relative merits of this approach over alternatives and also experimental verification. Open research questions will also be discussed.
Mitochondria and Ischemia/Reperfusion Injury

Abstract: Cardiac ischemia/reperfusion injury results in a variable mixture of apoptotic, necrotic, and normal tissue that depends on both the duration and severity of ischemia. Injury can be abrogated by activation of protective pathways via ischemic and pharmacologic preconditioning. Mitochondria serve as final arbiters of life and death of the cell as these organelles not only are required to generate ATP but also can trigger apoptosis or necrosis. A key mechanism of mitochondrial injury is by the mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT) that has been shown to occur at reperfusion. The article hypothesizes that ischemia/reperfusion promotes MPT in two phases: (1) MPT priming during ischemia occurs as progressive inner mitochondrial membrane leak is accompanied by depressed electron transport in the setting of fatty acid accumulation and loss of cytochrome c and antioxidants; and (2) Triggering of MPT at reperfusion is determined by the interplay of mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm) with mitochondrial matrix Ca, reactive oxygen species, and pH. It has been found that strategies that promote mitochondrial recovery such as pharmacologic preconditioning by diazoxide are mediated by K+‐dependent regulation of matrix volume and ΔΨm, resulting in improved efficiency of ATP synthesis as well as prevention of cytochrome c loss. If mitochondria fail to recover, then MPT and hypercontracture can result as ΔΨm depolarization waves regeneratively cross the cell (0.1 to 0.2 μm/s).
Effects of Spatial Patch Arrangement and Scale of Covarying Resources on Growth and Intraspecific Competition of a Clonal Plant

Spatial heterogeneity in two co-variable resources such as light and water availability is common and can affect the growth of clonal plants. Several studies have tested effects of spatial heterogeneity in the supply of a single resource on competitive interactions of plants, but none has examined those of heterogeneous distribution of two co-variable resources. In a greenhouse experiment, we grew one (without intraspecific competition) or nine isolated ramets (with competition) of a rhizomatous herb Iris japonica under a homogeneous environment and four heterogeneous environments differing in patch arrangement (reciprocal and parallel patchiness of light and soil water) and patch scale (large and small patches of light and water). Intraspecific competition significantly decreased the growth of I. japonica, but at the whole container level there were no significant interaction effects of competition by spatial heterogeneity or significant effect of heterogeneity on competitive intensity. Irrespective of competition, the growth of I. japonica in the high and the low water patches did not differ significantly in the homogeneous treatments, but it was significantly larger in the high than in the low water patches in the heterogeneous treatments with large patches. For the heterogeneous treatments with small patches, the growth of I. japonica was significantly larger in the high than in the low water patches in the presence of competition, but such an effect was not significant in the absence of competition. Furthermore, patch arrangement and patch scale significantly affected competitive intensity at the patch level. Therefore, spatial heterogeneity in light and water supply can alter intraspecific competition at the patch level and such effects depend on patch arrangement and patch scale.