Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The influence of plant natural fibers on swelling behavior of polymer hydrogels

Central composite design method was used to design and optimize the best content of initiator, cross-linker, neutralizer and plant natural fibers of cotton and oil empty fruit bunch. The effect of buffer and saline solution on plant natural fiber based polymer hydrogel composites was investigated. The influences of plant natural fiber content and swelling behavior of polymer hydrogels were studied. Natural fibers had positive effect on polymer hydrogels in terms of absorption capacity and swelling rate. Polymer hydrogel composite of natural fiber with higher cellulose content had better swelling properties than that of less cellulose content and plain hydrogels. Polymer hydrogel composite base of high cellulose fiber content is less affected by the pH and ion concentration of the external solutions.
Incremental Kernel Mapping Algorithms for Scalable Recommender Systems

Recommender systems apply machine learning techniques for filtering unseen information and can predict whether a user would like a given item. Kernel Mapping Recommender (KMR) system algorithms have been proposed, which offer state-of-the-art performance. One potential drawback of the KMR algorithms is that the training is done in one step and hence they cannot accommodate the incremental update with the arrival of new data making them unsuitable for the dynamic environments. From this line of research, we propose a new heuristic, which can build the model incrementally without retraining the whole model from scratch when new data (item or user) are added to the recommender system dataset. Furthermore, we proposed a novel perceptron-type algorithm, which is a fast incremental algorithm for building the model that maintains a good level of accuracy and scales well with the data. We show empirically over two datasets that the proposed algorithms give quite accurate results while providing significant computation savings.
An Analytic System for User Gender Identification through User Shared Images

Many social media applications, such as recommendation, virality prediction, and marketing, make use of user gender, which may not be explicitly specified or kept privately. Meanwhile, advanced mobile devices have become part of our lives and a huge amount of content is being generated by users every day, especially user shared images shared by individuals in social networks. This particular form of user generated content is widely accessible to others due to the sharing nature. When user gender is only accessible to exclusive parties, these user shared images are proved to be an easier way to identify user gender. This work investigated 3,152,344 images by 7,450 users from Fotolog and Flickr, two image-oriented social networks. It is observed that users who share visually similar images are more likely to have the same gender. A multimedia big data system that utilizes this phenomenon is proposed for user gender identification with 79% accuracy. These findings are useful for information or services in any social network with intensive image sharing.
Acceptable reperfusion delay to prefer primary angioplasty over fibrin-specific thrombolytic therapy is affected (mainly) by the patient's mortality risk: 1 h does not fit all.

AIMS The mortality benefit of primary percutaneous coronary angioplasty (PPCI) is time-dependent. We explored the relationship between risk and PPCI delay, adjusted for the delay at presentation, which leads to equivalent 30-day mortality between PPCI and fibrin-specific thrombolytic therapy (TT). METHODS AND RESULTS Sixteen randomized trials were analysed. The mortality rate in the TT arm was interpreted as a proxy for mortality risk. We calculated the PPCI-related delay as the difference between 'door-to-balloon minus door-to-needle' time and PPCI survival benefit as 30-day mortality after TT minus 30-day mortality after PPCI. Baseline mortality risk (P = 0.004), PPCI delay (P = 0.006), and presentation delay (P = 0.03) were correlated with 30-day survival benefit of PPCI. By the regression analysis, the following equation: Z = 0.59X - 0.033Y - 0.0003W - 1.3 (where Z is the absolute reduction in mortality of PPCI over TT, X the mortality risk, Y the PPCI-delay, and W the presentation delay), can be calculated. According to this equation, acceptable angioplasty-related delay shows a wide range based mainly on the different risk profiles. CONCLUSION Baseline mortality risk of ST elevation myocardial infarction patients is a major determinant of the acceptable time delay to choose the most appropriate therapy. Although a longer delay lowers the survival advantage of PPCI, a longer PPCI-related delay could be acceptable in high-risk STEMI patients.
Hemodynamic Response to Profound Hypoxia in Intact Rhesus Monkeys

Respiring rhesus monkeys with 2.5 or 4.5% oxygen greatly decreased their cardiac contractility, stroke volume and blood pressure but altered their total peripheral vascular resistance only slightly and inconsistently. All monkeys exposed to 15 minutes and 2 of 4 exposed to 30 minutes of hypoxia recovered and surrived without brain Injury. Though all animals recorered full cardiovascular function immediately after they were reoxygenated, 2 respired with 4.5% oxygen for 30 minutes began showing declines in blood pressure after a delay of 1 to 2 hours and both subsequently died in shock. Their reductions In blood pressure were associated with reductions in cardiac contractility and stroke volume. The hypotension the animals exhibited both during hypoxia and during derelopmeot of shock afterwards resulted from pump failure rather than a reduced vascular resistance or an inadequate venous return.
Nascent peptides that block protein synthesis in bacteria

Significance Ribosomes synthesize all proteins in living cells. There are limits, however, to which sequences they can make. We identified short motifs within translating proteins that inhibit their own synthesis. We developed in vitro methods to determine the molecular mechanism of ribosome stalling by these motifs. Some act by blocking the formation of peptide bonds; in a few of these cases, a translation factor, elongation factor P, alleviates stalling. Other motifs block release of the protein at stop codons. Stalling motifs occur less often than expected in bacterial proteins, suggesting that proteins have evolved to be synthesized efficiently. Although the ribosome is a very general catalyst, it cannot synthesize all protein sequences equally well. For example, ribosomes stall on the secretion monitor (SecM) leader peptide to regulate expression of a downstream gene. Using a genetic selection in Escherichia coli, we identified additional nascent peptide motifs that stall ribosomes. Kinetic studies show that some nascent peptides dramatically inhibit rates of peptide release by release factors. We find that residues upstream of the minimal stalling motif can either enhance or suppress this effect. In other stalling motifs, peptidyl transfer to certain aminoacyl-tRNAs is inhibited. In particular, three consecutive Pro codons pose a challenge for elongating ribosomes. The translation factor elongation factor P, which alleviates pausing at polyproline sequences, has little or no effect on other stalling peptides. The motifs that we identified are underrepresented in bacterial proteomes and show evidence of stalling on endogenous E. coli proteins.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) A matter of trust : Dynamic attitudes in epistemic logic

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Challenges in Packet Scheduling in 4G Wireless Networks

Network information theory states that novel methods, such as, cooperative communication and relaying can increase the overall network transport capacity. These methods are not utilized in current networking technologies. The 3G RAN will not scale up to meet the requirements set for telecommunication in the next decade. We need a novel fourth generation (4G) RAN design. This paper analyses challenges in wireless packet scheduling algorithms for 4G systems and proposes energy efficient scheduling and queue management solutions for the 4G wireless environment. Focus in our work is kept on a relay networking scenarios, which comprise of operator managed RAN including relays together with user controlled mobile routers
Certificateless public auditing for data integrity in the cloud

Due to the existence of security threats in the cloud, many mechanisms have been proposed to allow a user to audit data integrity with the public key of the data owner before utilizing cloud data. The correctness of choosing the right public key in previous mechanisms depends on the security of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and certificates. Although traditional PKI has been widely used in the construction of public key cryptography, it still faces many security risks, especially in the aspect of managing certificates. In this paper, we design a certificateless public auditing mechanism to eliminate the security risks introduced by PKI in previous solutions. Specifically, with our mechanism, a public verifier does not need to manage certificates to choose the right public key for the auditing. Instead, the auditing can be operated with the assistance of the data owner's identity, such as her name or email address, which can ensure the right public key is used. Meanwhile, this public verifier is still able to audit data integrity without retrieving the entire data from the cloud as previous solutions. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first certificateless public auditing mechanism for verifying data integrity in the cloud. Our theoretical analyses prove that our mechanism is correct and secure, and our experimental results show that our mechanism is able to audit the integrity of data in the cloud efficiently.
Comparative anatomy of the nectary spur in selected species of Aeridinae (Orchidaceae).

BACKGROUND AND AIMS To date, the structure of the nectary spur of Aeridinae has not been studied in detail, and data relating to the nectaries of ornithophilous orchids remain scarce. The present paper compares the structural organization of the floral nectary in a range of Aeridinae species, including both entomophilous and ornithophilous taxa. METHODS Nectary spurs of Ascocentrum ampullaceum (Roxb.) Schltr. var. aurantiacum Pradhan, A. curvifolium (Lindl.) Schltr. , A. garayi Christenson, Papilionanthe vandarum (Rchb.f.) Garay, Schoenorchis gemmata (Lindl.) J.J. Sm. , Sedirea japonica (Rchb.f.) Garay & H.R. Sweet and Stereochilus dalatensis (Guillaumin) Garay were examined by means of light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. KEY RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS The diverse anatomy of the nectary is described for a range of Aeridinae species. All species of Ascocentrum investigated displayed features characteristic of ornithophilous taxa. They have weakly zygomorphic, scentless, red or orange flowers, display diurnal anthesis, possess cryptic anther caps and produce nectar that is secluded in a relatively massive nectary spur. Unicellular, secretory hairs line the lumen at the middle part of the spur. Generally, however, with the exception of Papilionanthe vandarum, the nectary spurs of all entomophilous species studied here (Schoenorchis gemmata, Sedirea japonica, Stereochilus dalatensis) lack secretory trichomes. Moreover, collenchymatous secretory tissue, present only in the nectary spur of Asiatic Ascocentrum species, closely resembles that found in nectaries of certain Neotropical species that are hummingbird-pollinated and assigned to subtribes Maxillariinae Benth. , Laeliinae Benth. and Oncidiinae Benth. This similarity in anatomical organization of the nectary, regardless of geographical distribution and phylogeny, indicates convergence.
System design of an Insertable Robotic Effector Platform for Single Port Access (SPA) Surgery

This paper presents a novel design and preliminary kinematic analysis of an Insertable Robotic Effector Platform (IREP) for Single Port Access (SPA) Surgery. The IREP robot can be deployed into body cavity through a Ø15mm skin incision to perform SPA procedures. It consists of two snake-like continuum robots as slave surgical assistants for tissue manipulation, two parallelogram mechanisms for the continuum robots' placement, and one controllable stereo vision module with integrated light source for depth perception and tool tracking. Design considerations and alternatives, calculations and preliminary simulations of this 17-DoF surgical robotic system are presented in this paper. The overall control system hierarchy for tele-manipulation using the IREP robot is also presented.
Efficient In Vivo Electroporation of the Postnatal Rodent Forebrain

Functional gene analysis in vivo represents still a major challenge in biomedical research. Here we present a new method for the efficient introduction of nucleic acids into the postnatal mouse forebrain. We show that intraventricular injection of DNA followed by electroporation induces strong expression of transgenes in radial glia, neuronal precursors and neurons of the olfactory system. We present two proof-of-principle experiments to validate our approach. First, we show that expression of a human isoform of the neural cell adhesion molecule (hNCAM-140) in radial glia cells induces their differentiation into cells showing a neural precursor phenotype. Second, we demonstrate that p21 acts as a cell cycle inhibitor for postnatal neural stem cells. This approach will represent an important tool for future studies of postnatal neurogenesis and of neural development in general.
Compiler-based register name adjustment for low-power embedded processors

We present an algorithm for compiler-driven register name adjustment with the main goal of power minimization on instruction fetch and register file access. In most instruction set architecture (ISA) designs, the register fields reside in fixed positions within the instruction encoding, hence forming streams of indices on the instruction bus and to the register file address decoder. The number of bit transitions in these streams greatly determines the power consumption on the address bus and the register file decoder. While general-purpose registers are semantically indistinguishable and hence interchangeable, the particular register indices do have a direct impact on power consumption. The algorithms presented in this paper address this power minimization problem by reassigning/encoding the registers so that the bit transitions within the register index streams are minimized.
Sudden cardiac death and obesity

For individuals and the society as a whole, the increased risk of sudden cardiac death in obese patients is becoming a major challenge, especially since obesity prevalence has been increasing steadily around the globe. Traditional risk factors and obesity often coexist. Hypertension, diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea and metabolic syndrome are well-known risk factors for CV disease and are often present in the obese patient. Although the bulk of evidence is circumstantial, sudden cardiac death and obesity share common traditional CV risk factors. Structural, functional and metabolic factors modulate and influence the risk of sudden cardiac death in the obese population. Other risk factors such as left ventricular hypertrophy, increased number of premature ventricular complexes, altered QT interval and reduced heart rate variability are all documented in both obese and sudden cardiac death populations. The present review focuses on out-of-hospital sudden cardiac death and potential mechanisms leading to sudden cardiac death in this population.
Cross-layer design of coding operation and rate selection for network coding-based multihop wireless network

Network coding has the potential to greatly improve the throughput of wireless networks. In the current proposals for wireless network coding, network nodes transmit packets at a fixed transmission rate. It is notable, however, that by dynamically selecting the rate we can effectively improve the node transmission efficiency. In this paper, we study the application of rate-adaptive transmission mechanism in network coding-based multihop wireless networks. In such networks, whether a coding solution is satisfactory depends not only on the number of involved native packets, but also on the packet loss probabilities of intended nexthops and the transmission time, both of which depend on the transmission rate. Therefore, we propose an efficient algorithm for jointly finding the good combinations of coding solution and transmission rate. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to the rate-fixed transmission, the rate-adaptive transmission based on our algorithm can significantly improve the node transmission efficiency.
Evolutionary image enhancement with user behaviour modeling

paper we present a novel method for image enhancement of gray-scale images based on the simulation of evolution. Our method employs Genetic Algorithms to evolve the shape of the contrast curve in the image, while attempting to partially automate the subjective process of image evaluation (e.g. user behaviour) by performing multiple regression on fitness values. Results obtained show the robustness and efficiency of the evolutive method for image enhancement. For several images in th e test set our method obtains better results than the classical histogra equalization technique. Extensive statistics performed, show that multiple regression can be effectively applied to model the user behaviour.
Reliability of extraction/chromatography RIAs.

In their editorial (1) in a recent issue of Clinical Chemistry , entitled “Immunoassays for Testosterone in Women: Better than a Guess? ”, David Herold and Robert Fitzgerald discussed the article by Taieb et al. (2) that appeared in the same issue. The latter authors compared serum testosterone concentrations measured with 10 different commercially available direct immunoassays with corresponding values determined by isotope dilution–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (ID-GC/MS). They found that none of the immunoassays tested was sufficiently reliable, as assessed by agreement with ID-GC/MS, for quantifying testosterone in women, children, or men with low testosterone concentrations. We evaluated four different commercial direct testosterone immunoassays (3). Using RIA with preceding organic solvent extraction and Celite column partition chromatography (extraction/chromatography …
Phenotypic Screening of a Targeted Mutant Library Reveals Campylobacter jejuni Defenses against Oxidative Stress

ABSTRACT During host colonization, Campylobacter jejuni is exposed to harmful reactive oxygen species (ROS) produced from the host immune system and from the gut microbiota. Consequently, identification and characterization of oxidative stress defenses are important for understanding how C. jejuni survives ROS stress during colonization of the gastrointestinal tract. Previous transcriptomic studies have defined the genes belonging to oxidant stimulons within C. jejuni. We have constructed isogenic deletion mutants of these identified genes to assess their role in oxidative stress survival. Phenotypic screening of 109 isogenic deletion mutants identified 22 genes which were either hypersensitive or hyposensitive to oxidants, demonstrating important roles for these genes in oxidant defense. The significance of these genes in host colonization was also assessed in an in vivo chick model of C. jejuni colonization. Overall, our findings identify an indirect role for motility in resistance to oxidative stress. We found that a nonmotile flagellum mutant, the ΔmotAB mutant, displayed increased sensitivity to oxidants. Restoration of sensitivity to superoxide in the ΔmotAB mutant was achieved by fumarate supplementation or tandem deletion of motAB with ccoQ, suggesting that disruption of the proton gradient across the inner membrane resulted in increased superoxide production in this strain. Furthermore, we have identified genes involved in cation transport and binding, detoxification, and energy metabolism that are also important factors in oxidant defense. This report describes the first isogenic deletion mutant library construction for screening of relevant oxidative stress defense genes within C. jejuni, thus providing a comprehensive analysis of the total set of oxidative stress defenses.
Inter-ACT: an affective and contextually rich multimodal video corpus for studying interaction with robots

The Inter-ACT (INTEracting with Robots - Affect Context Task) corpus is an affective and contextually rich multimodal video corpus containing affective expressions of children playing chess with an iCat robot. It contains videos that capture the interaction from different perspectives and includes synchronised contextual information about the game and the behaviour displayed by the robot. The Inter-ACT corpus is mainly intended to be a comprehensive repository of naturalistic and contextualised, task-dependent data for the training and evaluation of an affect recognition system in an educational game scenario. The richness of contextual data that captures the whole human-robot interaction cycle, together with the fact that the corpus was collected in the same interaction scenario of the target application, make the Inter-ACT corpus unique in its genre.
Design problems of spacecraft for communication missions

The process of designing a spacecraft for geosynchronous communications is described from the point where the mission and key payload performance requirements have been defined. Following a description of the launch and injection process, the constraints which this and the communications requirements impose on the satellite platform are described together with their potential design implications. Types of stabilization are compared with emphasis on selection between the dual spin and body stabilized classes. Typical guidelines are given for the design of each major spacecraft subsystem. The paper concludes with more general considerations such as mass and reliability optimization as well as configuration synthesis.
Implementing the Surviving Sepsis Campaign in an Ambulatory Clinic for Patients With Hematologic Malignancies.

BACKGROUND Infectious complications can occur in patients receiving cancer treatment and are the most common cause of death not directly related to malignancy. Established international best practices for recognition and management of early sepsis with bundled interventions reduce sepsis-related morbidity and mortality in many patient populations. Integration of these practices is common in emergency departments but has not been documented in ambulatory oncology clinics, where many patients with cancer present for evaluation of infectious symptoms. OBJECTIVES The current quality improvement project embedded sepsis best practices into routine care for ambulatory clinic patients receiving chemotherapy or undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for hematologic disease or malignancies. METHODS An interprofessional protocol was implemented that included guideline-based universal screening, nurse-activated standing orders for recommended interventions, and clinician-supported decision making for the first six hours. FINDINGS Evaluation of implementation of the protocol showed improved timeliness and adherence to sepsis practice guidelines. Postintervention adherence to threshold times for obtaining blood cultures and blood lactate and start of antibiotics showed improvement. All recommended interventions were completed within the target time frame for the majority of patients.