Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Module Isomorphism Problem for Finite Rings and Related Results

Let R be a finite ring and let M,N be two finite left R-modules. We present two distinct deterministic algorithms that decide in polynomial time whether or not M and N are isomorphic, and if they are, exhibit an isomorphism. As by-products, we are able to determine the largest isomorphic common direct summand between two modules and the minimum number of generators of a module. By not requiring R to contain a field, avoiding computation of the Jacobson radical and not distinguishing between large and small characteristic, both algorithms constitute improvements to known results. We have not attempted to implement either of the two algorithms, but we have no reason to believe that they would not perform well in practice.
A F Ormal Approach to Practical Software Verification 1 Radu Iosif

Fullllment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge my tutor, Professor Claudio Demartini without whom support over the past years, I would never have persevered. I thank also Professor Riccardo Sisto for being a patient collaborator during my Doctorate. I thank Professor Matthew Dwyer at Kansas State University and Doctor Willem Visser at NASA Ames for being the rst to really appreciate my w ork. I thank Professor James Corbett at Hawaii University for targeting dSPIN in Bandera and all his interesting suggestions. I thank Doctor Gerard Holzmann at Lucent T echnologies for the invaluable discussions we had during the Marktoberdorf 2000 Summer School. Also to all those that have participated in some way at this extraordinary event. Finally, to all users of dSPIN and JCAT from all over the net, for making my w ork worthwhile.
Scholarship@Western Scholarship@Western

Saccadic suppression—the reduction of visual sensitivity during rapid eye movements—has previously been proposed to reﬂect a speciﬁc suppression of the magnocellular visual system, with the initial neural site of that suppression at or prior to afferent visual information reaching striate cortex. Dysfunction in the magnocellular visual pathway has also been associated with perceptual and physiological anomalies in individuals with autism spectrum disorder or high autistic tendency, leading us to question whether saccadic suppression is altered in the broader autism phenotype. Here we show that individuals with high autistic tendency show greater saccadic suppression of low versus high spatial frequency gratings while those with low autistic tendency do not. In addition, those with high but not low autism spectrum quotient (AQ) demonstrated pre-cortical (35–45ms) evoked potential differences (saccade versus ﬁxation) to a large, low contrast, pseudo-randomly ﬂashing bar. Both AQ groups showed similar differential visual evoked potential effects in later epochs (80–160 ms) at high contrast. Thus, the magnocellular theory of saccadic suppression appears untenable as a general description for the typically developing population. Our results also suggest that the bias towards local perceptual style reported in autism may be due to selective suppression of low spatial frequency information accompanying every saccadic eye movement
Dynamic evolution of coagulopathy in the first day of severe sepsis: Relationship with mortality and organ failure*

Objective:To determine whether changes in coagulation biomarkers during the first day of severe sepsis correlate with progression from single to multiple organ failure and subsequent death. Design:Analysis of secondary endpoints in a prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled, multinational clinical trial (PROWESS). Setting:The study involved 164 medical centers. Patients:A total of 840 patients who met criteria for severe sepsis and were randomized to receive placebo plus supportive care. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:Coagulation biomarkers, prothrombin time, antithrombin activity, and D-dimer and protein C levels were measured, and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment was performed daily. Multiple logistic regression analysis identified baseline antithrombin activity <54% and changes in prothrombin time, D-dimer, and antithrombin activity during the first calendar day after the onset of the first sepsis-induced organ dysfunction (i.e., the first day of severe sepsis, day 1) as predictive of 28-day mortality (p ≤ .01). A composite coagulopathy score was determined using points for predetermined levels of change from baseline to day 1. The composite coagulopathy score correlated with progression from single to multiple organ failure (p = .0007), time to resolution of organ failure (p = .0004), and 28-day mortality (p < .0001). Combining the composite coagulopathy score with the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II score improved ability to identify patients who would progress to multiple organ failure (area under receiver operating characteristic curve 0.61 APACHE II vs. 0.65 APACHE II + composite coagulopathy score) and who would die (area under receiver operating characteristic curve 0.69 APACHE II vs. 0.74 APACHE II + composite coagulopathy score). Conclusions:Continuation or worsening of coagulopathy during the first day of severe sepsis was associated with increased development of new organ failure and 28-day mortality. These results further suggest that coagulation abnormalities contribute to organ failure and death.
Evaluation and Standardisation of the Antioxidant Properties of Two Indian Remedies with Biochemical Test Assays

Summary Two drugs composed of several different plant extracts are in use in Ayurvedic medicine for the treatment of asthma and arthritis, respectively. There is increasing evidence that reactive oxygen species (ROS) arising from several enzymatic reactions are mediators of inflammatory events such as the above mentioned. Plant extracts have the potential for scavenging such reactive oxygen species, dependent on the individual test system. Using biochemical model reactions relevant for the formation of ROS in vivo at inflammatory sites, inhibition of the indicator reaction for the formation of ROS is thought to represent a potential mechanism of the physiological activity of the corresponding preparation.
From thesaurus to ontology

Thesauri such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) provide structured vocabularies for describing art objects. However, if we want to create a knowledge-rich description of an (image of an) art object, such as required by the "semantic web", thesauri turn out to provide only part of the knowledge needed. In this paper we look at problems related to capturing background knowledge for art resources. We describe a case study in which we attempt to construct an ontology for a subset of art-object descriptions, namely antique furniture, using AAT as well as metadata standards as input. We discuss the representation requirements for such an ontology as well as representational problems for our sample ontology with respect to the emerging web standards for knowledge representation (RDF, RDFS, OIL).
Derivation of Multipotent Mesenchymal Precursors from Human Embryonic Stem Cells

Background Human embryonic stem cells provide access to the earliest stages of human development and may serve as a source of specialized cells for regenerative medicine. Thus, it becomes crucial to develop protocols for the directed differentiation of embryonic stem cells into tissue-restricted precursors. Methods and Findings Here, we present culture conditions for the derivation of unlimited numbers of pure mesenchymal precursors from human embryonic stem cells and demonstrate multilineage differentiation into fat, cartilage, bone, and skeletal muscle cells. Conclusion Our findings will help to elucidate the mechanism of mesoderm specification during embryonic stem cell differentiation and provide a platform to efficiently generate specialized human mesenchymal cell types for future clinical applications.
Image edge detection method based on the direction feature of fuzzy entropy

To improve the image edge detection capability, this paper presents an image edge detection method based on the direction feature of fuzzy entropy. Firstly, the proposed method operates the fuzzy membership function and fuzzy entropy function for achieving a neighborhood fuzzy entropy feature space from the image feature to enhance the fuzzy edge contrast, and defines twelve valid edge direction structures in the 3×3 neighborhood of the feature space. Then it extracts the valid direction structural information arrays of every pixel point, and combines the direction structure measurement arrays to make non-maxima suppression. Finally the proposed method implements an adaptive threshold to estimate and determine image edges. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method has better performance in the image edge detection with more image detail information.
PROTEST: A Test Suite for Evaluating Pronouns in Machine Translation

We present PROTEST, a test suite for the evaluation of pronoun translation by MT systems. The test suite comprises 250 hand-selected pronoun tokens and an automatic evaluation method which compares the translations of pronouns in MT output with those in the reference translation. Pronoun translations that do not match the reference are referred for manual evaluation. PROTEST is designed to support analysis of system performance at the level of individual pronoun groups, rather than to provide a single aggregate measure over all pronouns. We wish to encourage detailed analyses to highlight issues in the handling of specific linguistic mechanisms by MT systems, thereby contributing to a better understanding of those problems involved in translating pronouns. We present two use cases for PROTEST: a) for measuring improvement/degradation of an incremental system change, and b) for comparing the performance of a group of systems whose design may be largely unrelated. Following the latter use case, we demonstrate the application of PROTEST to the evaluation of the systems submitted to the DiscoMT 2015 shared task on pronoun translation.
MassTag Polymerase Chain Reaction for Differential Diagnosis of Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers

Viral hemorrhagic fevers are associated with high rates of illness and death. Although therapeutic options are limited, early differential diagnosis has implications for containment and may aid in clinical management. We describe a diagnostic system for rapid, multiplex polymerase chain reaction identification of 10 different causes of viral hemorrhagic fevers.
Comparison of the psychometric characteristics of the functional independence measure, 5 item Barthel index, and 10 item Barthel index in patients with stroke

Objectives: To compare the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of the motor subscale of the functional independence measure (FIM), the original 10 item Barthel index (BI), and the 5 item short form BI (BI-5) in inpatients with stroke receiving rehabilitation. Methods: 118 inpatients with stroke at a rehabilitation unit participated in the study. The patients were tested with the FIM motor subscale and original BI at admission to the rehabilitation ward and before discharge from the hospital. The distribution, internal consistency, concurrent validity, and responsiveness of each measure were examined. Results: The BI and FIM motor subscale showed acceptable distribution, high internal consistency (α coefficient ≥ 0.84), high concurrent validity (Spearman's correlation coefficient, rs ≥ 0.92, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) ≥ 0.83), and high responsiveness (standardised response mean ≥ 1.2, p < 0.001). The BI-5 exhibited a notable floor effect at admission but this was not found at discharge. The BI-5 showed acceptable internal consistency at admission and discharge (α coefficient ≥ 0.71). The concurrent validity of the BI-5 was poor to fair at admission (rs = 0.74, ICC ≤ 0.55) but was good at discharge (rs ≥ 0.92, ICC ≥ 0.74). It is noted that the responsiveness of the BI-5 was as high as that of the BI and the FIM motor subscale. Conclusions: The results showed that the BI and FIM motor subscale had very acceptable and similar psychometric characteristics. The BI-5 appeared to have limited discriminative ability at admission, particularly for patients with severe disability; otherwise the BI-5 had very adequate psychometric properties. These results may provide information useful in the selection of activities of daily living measures for both clinicians and researchers.
Enhancing Heart-Beat-Based Security for mHealth Applications

In heart-beat-based security, a security key is derived from the time difference between consecutive heart beats (the inter-pulse interval, IPI), which may, subsequently, be used to enable secure communication. While heart-beat-based security holds promise in mobile health (mHealth) applications, there currently exists no work that provides a detailed characterization of the delivered security in a real system. In this paper, we evaluate the strength of IPI-based security keys in the context of entity authentication. We investigate several aspects that should be considered in practice, including subjects with reduced heart-rate variability (HRV), different sensor-sampling frequencies, intersensor variability (i.e., how accurate each entity may measure heart beats) as well as average and worst-case-authentication time. Contrary to the current state of the art, our evaluation demonstrates that authentication using multiple, less-entropic keys may actually increase the key strength by reducing the effects of intersensor variability. Moreover, we find that the maximal key strength of a 60-bit key varies between 29.2 bits and only 5.7 bits, depending on the subject's HRV. To improve security, we introduce the inter-multi-pulse interval (ImPI), a novel method of extracting entropy from the heart by considering the time difference between nonconsecutive heart beats. Given the same authentication time, using the ImPI for key generation increases key strength by up to 3.4$\times$ (+19.2 bits) for subjects with limited HRV, at the cost of an extended key-generation time of 4.8 $\times$ (+45 s).
Association of manganese superoxide dismutase expression with progression of carcinogenesis in Barrett esophagus.

HYPOTHESIS The down-regulation of manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) expression plays a role in the progression of Barrett esophagus (BE). DESIGN An evaluation of 92 esophageal samples, including 17 patients with normal esophagus, 22 with intestinal metaplasia, 22 with indefinite/low-grade dysplasia, 16 with high-grade dysplasia (HGD), and 15 with esophageal adenocarcinoma were evaluated for MnSOD expression. We evaluated MnSOD expression using immunohistochemistry and graded it separately on a 2-category ordinal scale in relation to the mucosa and submucosa that ranged from 0 (no staining) to 3 (strong staining). The total grading score of MnSOD immunoreactivity was the addition of mucosa and submucosa intensity, from 0 (no immunoreactivity in any of the anatomic sites) to a maximum score of 6 (strong staining reaction in both of the histoanatomic sites). SETTING Study subjects were recruited from the Barrett's Esophageal Registry at the University of Louisville, Louisville, KY. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Manganese superoxide dismutase expression in established groups of progressive BE. RESULTS Ninety-two samples were evaluated for MnSOD expression. The expression of MnSOD was found to be significantly reduced in samples with specialized intestinal metaplasia (mean score, 1.8), low-grade dysplasia (mean, 2.2), high-grade dysplasia (mean, 2.4), and esophageal adenocarcinoma (mean, 2.4) when compared with normal esophagus (mean, 3.9; P = .002). Manganese superoxide dismutase expression was similar for esophageal adenocarcinoma and high-grade dysplasia. CONCLUSIONS Manganese superoxide dismutase expression is significantly reduced in patients with BE with high-grade dysplasia and esophageal adenocarcinoma. Manganese superoxide dismutase is related to the progression of BE and may represent one of the primary factors in oxidative stress protection. Further evaluation within genotypic expression and the role of antioxidants is needed in the effective screening and treatment of BE.
A processing approach to the assessment of language and verbal short-term memory in aphasia

Verbal short-term memory (STM) impairment is virtually always present in aphasia and varies in severity depending on the characteristics of verbal stimuli being held in STM and severity of the word processing disorder. The close association of processing and verbal STM impairment is worth considering in our approaches to assessment and rehabilitation of language disorders in aphasia. In this paper, we present a comprehensive test battery to assess language and verbal STM abilities in aphasia with data from thirty individuals with aphasia and ten aged-matched controls. Clinical and research applications of the test battery are discussed.
A Review of Automatic Rhythm Description Systems

This research was supported by the EU project FP6-507142 (SIMAC) and the national project Y99-INF sponsored by the Austrian Federal Ministryu of Education, Science and Culture in the form of a Start Research Prize. The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence acknowledges the support of the Austrian Federal Ministries of Education, Science and Culture and of Transport, Innovationa and Technology.
Smooth Muscle Cholesterol Enables BK &bgr;1 Subunit-Mediated Channel Inhibition and Subsequent Vasoconstriction Evoked by Alcohol

Objective—Hypercholesterolemia and alcohol drinking constitute independent risk factors for cerebrovascular disease. Alcohol constricts cerebral arteries in several species, including humans. This action results from inhibition of voltage- and calcium-gated potassium channels (BK) in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC). BK activity is also modulated by membrane cholesterol. We investigated whether VSMC cholesterol regulates ethanol actions on BK and cerebral arteries. Methods and Results—After myogenic tone development, cholesterol depletion of rat, resistance-size cerebral arteries ablated ethanol-induced constriction, a result that was identical in intact and endothelium-free vessels. Cholesterol depletion reduced ethanol inhibition of BK whether the channel was studied in VSMC or after rat cerebral artery myocyte subunit (cbv1+&bgr;1) reconstitution into phospholipid bilayers. Homomeric cbv1 channels reconstituted into bilayers and VSMC BK from &bgr;1 knockout mice were both resistant to ethanol-induced inhibition. Moreover, arteries from &bgr;1 knockout mice failed to respond to ethanol even when VSMC cholesterol was kept unmodified. Remarkably, ethanol inhibition of cbv1+&bgr;1 in bilayers and wt mouse VSMC BK were drastically blunted by cholesterol depletion. Consistently, cholesterol depletion suppressed ethanol constriction of wt mouse arteries. Conclusion—VSMC cholesterol and BK &bgr;1 are both required for ethanol inhibition of BK and the resulting cerebral artery constriction, with health-related implications for manipulating cholesterol levels in alcohol-induced cerebrovascular disease.
Article in Press Future Generation Computer Systems ( ) – Future Generation Computer Systems Scientific Workflow Design for Mere Mortals

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in research and development of scientific workflow systems. These systems promise to make scientists more productive by automating data-driven and compute-intensive analyses. Despite many early achievements, the long-term success of scientific workflow technology critically depends on making these systems useable by ''mere mortals'', i.e., scientists who have a very good idea of the analysis methods they wish to assemble, but who are neither software developers nor scripting-language experts. With these users in mind, we identify a set of desiderata for scientific workflow systems crucial for enabling scientists to model and design the workflows they wish to automate themselves. As a first step towards meeting these requirements, we also show how the collection-oriented modeling and design (comad) approach for scientific workflows, implemented within the Kepler system, can help provide these critical, design-oriented capabilities to scientists.
Scansite 2.0: proteome-wide prediction of cell signaling interactions using short sequence motifs

Scansite identifies short protein sequence motifs that are recognized by modular signaling domains, phosphorylated by protein Ser/Thr- or Tyr-kinases or mediate specific interactions with protein or phospholipid ligands. Each sequence motif is represented as a position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM) based on results from oriented peptide library and phage display experiments. Predicted domain-motif interactions from Scansite can be sequentially combined, allowing segments of biological pathways to be constructed in silico. The current release of Scansite, version 2.0, includes 62 motifs characterizing the binding and/or substrate specificities of many families of Ser/Thr- or Tyr-kinases, SH2, SH3, PDZ, 14-3-3 and PTB domains, together with signature motifs for PtdIns(3,4,5)P(3)-specific PH domains. Scansite 2.0 contains significant improvements to its original interface, including a number of new generalized user features and significantly enhanced performance. Searches of all SWISS-PROT, TrEMBL, Genpept and Ensembl protein database entries are now possible with run times reduced by approximately 60% when compared with Scansite version 1.0. Scansite 2.0 allows restricted searching of species-specific proteins, as well as isoelectric point and molecular weight sorting to facilitate comparison of predictions with results from two-dimensional gel electrophoresis experiments. Support for user-defined motifs has been increased, allowing easier input of user-defined matrices and permitting user-defined motifs to be combined with pre-compiled Scansite motifs for dual motif searching. In addition, a new series of Sequence Match programs for non-quantitative user-defined motifs has been implemented. Scansite is available via the World Wide Web at http://scansite.mit. edu.
Lumbar Repositioning Deficit in a Specific Low Back Pain Population

Study Design. A cross-sectional observational design study was conducted to determine lumbar repositioning error in 15 subjects who had chronic low back pain with a clinical diagnosis of lumbar segmental instability and 15 asymptomatic participants. Objective. To determine whether individuals with lumbar segmental instability have a decreased ability to reposition their lumbar spine into a neutral spinal position. Summary of Background Data. Proprioception of the lumbar spine has been investigated in individuals who have low back pain with variable results. The testing procedure’s lack of sensitivity and the nonhomogeneity of groups may be responsible for the conflicting findings. Methods. Repositioning accuracy of the lumbar spine was assessed using the 3Space Fastrak to determine error in 15 participants with lumbar segmental instability and 15 asymptomatic subjects. The participants were assisted into a neutral spinal sitting posture and then asked to reproduce this position independently over five trials separated by periods of relaxed full lumbar flexion. Results. Lumbosacral repositioning error was significantly greater in participants with lumbar segmental instability than in the asymptomatic group (t [28] = 2.48;P = 0.02. There also was a significant difference between the groups at each individual sensor. Conclusions. The results of this study indicate that individuals with a clinical diagnosis of lumbar segmental instability demonstrate an inability to reposition the lumbar spine accurately into a neutral spinal posture while seated. This finding provides evidence of a deficiency in lumbar proprioceptive awareness among this population.