Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CORTICAL CYTOPLASMIC FILAMENTS OF CLEAVING EGGS: A STRUCTURAL ELEMENT CORRESPONDING TO THE CONTRACTILE RING

A sheath consisting of filaments 50–70 A in diameter has been demonstrated in association with the expanded, leading margins of the cleavage furrow in unilaterally and symmetrically cleaving eggs of a jellyfish and a polychaete worm, respectively. The observations suggest that the filament system might provide a structural basis for the existence of the contractile gel that, according to a hypothesis by Marsland and Landau, accomplishes cleavage. The filamentous sheath is present only in the furrow region and is arranged in an arcuate manner in unilaterally cleaving eggs and circumferentially in symmetrical cleavage. The filaments appear to be of finite length, and a number of them must overlap to span the length of the furrow. Contraction may be accomplished if the filaments slide relative to each other. However, contraction per se was experimentally not demonstrated in the studied systems. The disappearance of microvilli and the merocrine type secretion of mucoid droplets at the interdigitating or "spinning" membrane region of unilateral cleavage suggest that the unfolding of a pleated membrane and the insertion of intracytoplasmic membranes might contribute, at least in part, to the necessary extra cell membrane.
Respiratory mechanics of eleven avian species resident at high and low altitude

ABSTRACT The metabolic cost of breathing at rest has never been successfully measured in birds, but has been hypothesized to be higher than in mammals of a similar size because of the rocking motion of the avian sternum being encumbered by the pectoral flight muscles. To measure the cost and work of breathing, and to investigate whether species resident at high altitude exhibit morphological or mechanical changes that alter the work of breathing, we studied 11 species of waterfowl: five from high altitudes (>3000 m) in Perú, and six from low altitudes in Oregon, USA. Birds were anesthetized and mechanically ventilated in sternal recumbency with known tidal volumes and breathing frequencies. The work done by the ventilator was measured, and these values were applied to the combinations of tidal volumes and breathing frequencies used by the birds to breathe at rest. We found the respiratory system of high-altitude species to be of a similar size, but consistently more compliant than that of low-altitude sister taxa, although this did not translate to a significantly reduced work of breathing. The metabolic cost of breathing was estimated to be between 1 and 3% of basal metabolic rate, as low or lower than estimates for other groups of tetrapods. Highlighted Article: Work and cost of breathing in 11 species of waterfowl are reported to be lower than previously predicted in birds, but without effect of altitudinal habitat despite mechanical differences in highland species.
Segmental Copy‐Number Variation Observed in Japanese by Array‐CGH

Segmental copy‐number variations (CNVs) may contribute to genetic variation in humans. In this study, we examined 80 unrelated Japanese individuals using a microarray (2,238 Bac‐clones) based comparative genomic hybridization (array‐CGH) assay. We found a total of 251 CNVs at 30 different regions in the genome; of these, 14 (termed ‘rare’ CNVs) were found individually located within distinct genomic regions of 14 individuals, while the remaining 16 CNV regions (termed ‘polymorphic’ CNVs) were observed in two or more individuals. The rare CNVs were confirmed by quantitative polymerase chain reactions, and characterized more precisely than in previous reports using array CGH. Distinctive features of these CNVs were observed: most prominent was that the majority of the rare CNVs presented on Bac‐clones that did not overlap with regions of segmental duplication. About 90% of the polymorphic CNVs observed in this population had been previously identified, with the majority of those polymorphic CNVs located in regions of segmental duplication. It is likely, therefore, that rare and polymorphic CNVs arise through different genetic mechanisms. Since more than half of the rare CNVs are novel, it is also likely that different human populations bear different CNVs, as is the case for single‐nucleotide‐polymorphisms (SNPs) and insertion‐deletion (indel) polymorphisms.
A Logic and Adaptive Approach for Efficient Diagnosis Systems using CBR

Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is an intelligent way of thinking based on experience and capitalization of already solved cases (source cases) to find a solution to a new problem (target case). Retrieval phase consists on identifying source cases that are similar to the target case. This phase may lead to erroneous results if the existing knowledge imperfections are not taken into account. This work presents a novel solution based on Fuzzy logic techniques and adaptation measures which aggregate weighted similarities to improve the retrieval results. To confirm the efficiency of our solution, we have applied it to the industrial diagnosis domain. The obtained results are more efficient results than those obtained by applying typical measures.
Implementing the Boston Healthy Start Initiative: A Case Study of Community Empowerment and Public Health

This article examines the efforts on the part of a city health department, in partnership with a broad-based coalition of community-based, government, and social service agen cies, to plan and implement, using principles of empowerment and community partici pation, a federally funded infant mortality reduction program. It examines the social and institutional dynamics of sharing power in an environment highly charged politically. Infant mortality in Boston is much more than a public health problem. It is the focal point of complex racial, political, and institutional factors. This case study illustrates how empowerment moves from rhetoric to reality and the challenge to both traditional public health practice and traditional community mobilization. The article describes the federal Healthy Start Initiative and its community participation mandate, the background on infant mortality in Boston, a case study of the development of the Healthy Start program from the perspective of community empowerment, and finally, the lessons learned in the first 2 years of the program. It describes the controversies encountered, some of the mistakes made, and the ways found that government must be reinvented if empowerment is to be a real public health tool.
Impact of an unstressed canopy conductance on the Bouchet‐Morton complementary relationship

Indirect methods of quantifying evapotranspiration (λEa) are sought since regional estimations of λEa require prohibitive instrumentation or highly parameterized and data‐intensive land surface models (e.g., involving temporally and spatially varying soil moisture, soil hydraulic properties, and vegetation properties). Complementary relationship (CR) models, based on Bouchet's hypothesis, are one such method of estimating λEa from routinely measured meteorological variables. Bouchet's CR states that given a change in regional surface moisture availability (MA), changes in λEa are reflected in changes in potential evapotranspiration (λEp), such that λEa + λEp = 2λE0, where λE0 is an assumed equilibrium condition at which λEa = λEp = λE0 given sufficiently large MA. Whereas λEp conceptually includes a transpiration component, the treatment of vegetation in existing CR applications varies from neglecting it to indirectly accounting for it through recalibration of Penman's empirical wind function. We utilize the First International Land Surface Climatology Field Experiment (FIFE) data set to demonstrate that inclusion of a maximum (i.e., unstressed) canopy conductance (gc,max) in a Penman equation with stability‐corrected atmospheric conductance (i.e., replacing the Penman equation with an unstressed Penman–Monteith equation) significantly improves both CR convergence and symmetry. Inclusion of gc,max results in more accurate λEa estimates than are found with the Penman equation (using either Monin–Obukhov atmospheric conductance or using empirical wind functions in the literature). The proposed method also performs better than the 1992 advection‐aridity CR method, modified to include atmospheric stability effects, which attributes noncomplementarity to horizontal advection and corrects for it by adjusting λE0 by the magnitude of the potential sensible heat flux (∣Hp∣), found from the surface energy balance of the λEp calculation. In the proposed method a similar energy balance adjustment occurs naturally because the finite canopy conductance causes an increase of surface temperature and sensible heat flux in the λEp energy balance calculation. The proposed method is consistent with CR explanations that rely on feedbacks with the boundary layer vapor pressure deficit since the impact of such changes on both λEp and λEa would be modulated by stomatal conductance.
Taking Rights Seriously.

Introduction \ 1. Jurisprudence \ 2. The Model of Rules I \ 3. The Model of Rules II \ 4. Hard Cases \ 5. Constitutional Cases \ 6. Justice and Rights \ 7. Taking Rights Seriously \ 8. Civil Disobedience \ 9. Reverse Discrimination \ 10. Liberty and Moralism \ 11. Liberty and Liberalism \ 12. What Rights Do We Have? \ 13. Can Rights Be Controversial? \ Appendix: A Reply to Critics \ Index.
PRISM, an IP-based architecture for broadband access to TV and other streaming media

IP-based networks such as the Internet have been the focal point for innovative technologies, services, and applications. These networks have enabled hugely successful services like the World Wide Web, and they are even attracting traditional services such as telephony. The service model for accessing Web content offers tremendous control and choice to users. In particular the on-demand nature of this model provides users instant access to content of their choice. Another class of services enabled by IP networks is the delivery of streaming audio and video content. While the Web service model also extends to IP-based streaming content, the user experience today does not compare favorably with the quality of broadcast TV. Current broadcasting technologies such as TV, cable, and satellite offer high quality but provide limited choice and do not allow users to access content at arbitrary times (i.e. no on-demand access). Broadcasting is geared towards a “push” model where content distributors control what content is made available to viewers and the time at which it is broadcast. Furthermore, broadcasting systems are essentially closed to all but major media companies. This is in contrast to the Web model where anyone can be a content creator for a global audience. An IP-based model allows specialized producers of content to target arbitrarily small audiences. This in turn fosters the production of content that is rich in variety. Multimedia content generated in this environment will be much larger in volume than the “classical” entertainment content available today. This explosion in content makes the current broadcast service model infeasible. In this paper we present the Portal Infrastructure for Streaming Media (PRISM) architecture that offers a new service model combining the high quality of the broadcasting world with the immediacy of the Web. PRISM uses IP as the fundamental infrastructure for realizing this vision.
A CHART DEMONSTRATING VARIXTiONS IN ACUITY WITH RETINAL POSITION Visual acuity

Visual acuity is d&ned as the reciprocal of the visual angle, in minutes. subtended by a just resolvable stimulus. This critical dimension can be the gap in a Landolt C, the spatiat period of a grating or the offset of a vernier. etc. Acuity declines progressively from the fovea out to the periphery of the retina. It is down to half its maximum value at an eccentricity of only 30 min according to Jones and Higgins (1947). who used Landolt C’s or 105 min according to Ludvigh (1941). who used Snellen letters. Weymouth (1958) plotted the reciprocal of visual acuity. namely minimum angle of resolution, and found that several visual thresholds increased linearly with increasing retinal eccentricity. at least up to 30’. This was true of the data of Ludvigh (1941) on acuity for Snellen letters, Wertheim (1893) for gratings. Bourdon (1902) for vernier offsets, and Basler (1906. 1908) for movement detection thresholds. In step with these variations in acuity, the physiological grain becomes progressively coarser towards the periphery of thr retina-receptor density, receptive field size and amount of visual cortex available. Hallett’s review (1963) and Wilson’s experiments (1970) showed that retinal summatory areas increase progressively with eccentricity. Hubel and Wiesei (1960) found that the mean diameter of receptive fields increases more or less lineariy with eccentricity in the monkey retina. The same was true for the number of min arc of visual fieid handled by each mm of visual cortex (Daniel and Whitteridge 1961). Sixty-seven microns of cortex. containing about live cells, corresponded to one threshold unit anywhere in the retina. It appears to take a constant number of retinal receptive fields, and a constant amount of cortex. to do an equaliy fine discrimination. whether in the fovea or the periphery. We measured recognition thresholds for letters (Paratipe Helvetica medium typeface) at retinal eccentricities lying between 4’ and 55’. Two subjects were used, both of whom wore correcting eyeglasses. They viewed binocularly a white tangent screen of luminance 1% log ft-L from a distance of 57 cm. Individual letters were moved inwards on the horizontal meridian from the periphery towards the fovea until they were correctly identified. Trials on which the subject said he had involuntarily gIanced towards the target letter were discarded. Results are shown in Fig. 1. Recognition thresholds increased linearly with eccentricity up to 30’. with a 0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Polynomial-Time Construction of Contraction Hierarchies for Multi-Criteria Objectives

In this paper we consider a variant of the multi-criteria shortest path problem where the different criteria are combined in an arbitrary conic combination at query time. We show that contraction hierarchies (CH) — a very powerful speed-up technique originally developed for standard shortest path queries (Geisberger et al. 2008) — can be adapted to this scenario and lead - after moderate preprocessing effort - to query times that are orders of magnitudes faster than standard shortest path approaches. On the theory side we prove via some polyhedral considerations that the crucial node contraction operation during the CH construction can be performed in polynomial-time, while on the more practical side we complement our theoretical results with experiments on real-world data. Our approach extends previous results (Geisberger, Kobitzsch, and Sanders 2010) which only considered the bicriteria case. This is an extended abstract of the full paper published in (Funke and Storandt 2013).
Study of Dynamic Topology Change for Total Energy Consumption in Green IP Networks

In this work, we investigate the routing and dynamic link on/off management for green IP networks. Two approaches are evaluated: Global Topology Change (GTC) and Local Traffic Redirect (LTR). In GTC, the on/off state of each link is known by all of the routers in the network. Any link state change will trigger a network topology update in each router. In the transient period link state change, the inconsistency of topology images among different routers would result in traffic loops. In LTR, the link on/off states are only known by the owner of those links. The image of global network topology is remained fixed for each router no matter how the link state changes. The benefit of this approach is that the network topology is kept the same in each router. However, each router has to carefully maintain its own routing table to manage the flows going through it. The contribution of this paper includes four parts. First, we evaluate GTC and LTR to determine which is better for achieving green IP networks. Second, we address the dynamic control mechanism of link on/off states so as to alter network topology for power saving. A threshold-based scheme is proposed to determine the timing of changing link states. The third contribution comes from that we propose a protocol for updating link on/off states for the GTC approach. This protocol gives networks immunity from the traffic loop problems. It also prevents the network from being disconnected when multiple routers turn off their links at the same time. Since network survivability is mandatory to guarantee network integrity, in the fourth contribution of this paper, we propose an IP protection scheme to guarantee 100% network survivability against any single node failure while maintaining energy efficiency.
An Effective Methodology to Multi-objective Design of Application Domain-specific Embedded Architectures

—Today’s computer systems have become unbeliev-ably complex. Nowadays register-level design is an overwhelming task, especially in the embedded system area where the time-to-market is very short. Platform Based Design shifts the challenge on how to tune parametric platforms to achieve the best performance at the smallest cost. This task, called multi-objective Design Space Exploration, requires accurate strategies because the design space is too vast to be exhaustively evaluated. Even using efﬁcient exploration strategies proposed in the literature, simulation times can become a bottleneck in the design ﬂow. In this work we propose a novel approach to application-domain Design Space Exploration using a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm and employing HPC to reduce exploration times. The genetic algorithm is preceded by a correlation analysis of the different objectives. The search space is thus reduced by combining highly correlated objectives from different domains. We describe the steps needed to parallelize the exploration on the Grid, and present the results of extensive testing of the proposed approach. We obtained over one order of magnitude reduction in exploration times without hampering the quality of the solutions. Shorter simulation times allow more ideas to be explored in less time. This leads to shorter product time-to-market and a more thorough design space exploration. Furthermore the combination of correlated objectives favors the design of modern multi-purpose devices.
HMG-CoA Reductase Inhibitor Increases GTP Cyclohydrolase I mRNA and Tetrahydrobiopterin in Vascular Endothelial Cells

Objective—Endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) activity is supported by tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4), which appears to be important for generating protective NO but decreases uncoupling formation of superoxide. We investigated the effects of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors, or statins, in terms of BH4 metabolism in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). Methods and Results—We measured the mRNA levels of GTP cyclohydrolase I (GTPCH), the rate-limiting enzyme in the first step of de novo BH4 synthesis, by real-time polymerase chain reaction. The mRNA of GTPCH, as well as of eNOS, was upregulated in HUVECs treated with cerivastatin. This increase was time and dose dependent. Fluvastatin was also observed to enhance GTPCH and eNOS mRNA levels. In parallel with this observation, cerivastatin increased intracellular BH4. Incubating HUVECs with tumor necrosis factor (TNF-&agr;) was observed to increase GTPCH mRNA while decreasing eNOS mRNA. In the presence of cerivastatin, the TNF-&agr;–mediated increase in GTPCH mRNA was enhanced, and the TNF-&agr;–mediated decrease in eNOS mRNA was attenuated. Cerivastatin increased the stability of eNOS mRNA. However, it did not alter the stability of GTPCH mRNA but increased GTPCH gene transcription, as shown by nuclear run-on assays. Preteatment of HUVECs with the selective GTPCH inhibitor, 2,4-diamino-6-hydroxypyrimidine, caused a decrease in intracellular BH4 and decreased citrulline formation after stimulation with ionomycin. Furthermore, the potentiating effect of cerivastatin was decreased by limiting the cellular availability of BH4. Conclusions—Our data demonstrate that statins elevate GTPCH mRNA, thereby increasing BH4 levels in vascular endothelial cells. In addition to augmenting eNOS expression, statins potentiate GTPCH gene expression and BH4 synthesis, thereby increasing NO production and preventing relative shortages of BH4.
In-depth analysis of the Naming Game dynamics: the homogeneous mixing case

Language emergence and evolution have recently gained growing attention through multi-agent models and mathematical frameworks to study their behavior. Here we investigate further the Naming Game, a model able to account for the emergence of a shared vocabulary of form-meaning associations through social/cultural learning. Due to the simplicity of both the structure of the agents and their interaction rules, the dynamics of this model can be analyzed in great detail using numerical simulations and analytical arguments. This paper first reviews some existing results and then presents a new overall understanding.
Disability In Acne Patients - A Hospital Based Study In Rural Population Of Central India

Introduction : Acne vulgaris is chronic inflammatory disease of pilosebaceous unit. It has been found that acne is one of the most common distressing diseases that can affect all aspects of an individual’s health-related quality of life (HRQOL), particularly in feelings and emotions, personal relationships, sports, social life and to get employment opportunity. As per best of our knowledge, there was no study on disability in acne patients in rural population of India. Aim and Objectives : The aim was to assess quality of life of patient having acne vulgaris, with the objectives 1) to assess the impact of acne on the rural patients by executing Cardiff Acne Disability Index formula (i.e. physical, social and psychological aspects of the patient’s life) 2) to observe any relationship between severity of acne vulgaris and its impact on quality of life. Material and Methods : The patients who came to dermatology OPD having acne vulgaris at AVBRH were enrolled. Quality of life of all enrolled patients of acne vulgaris were evaluated by using Cardiff Acne Disability Index questionnaires. The parameters evaluated were aggressiveness, frustration, embarrassment, effect on social life, relation with members of opposite sex, concern for skin appearance, avoidance of changing facility. Acne grading will be done by IADVL grading system. Statistical analysis done with Chi-square (χ²) test. Result : Total 81 patients with Acne vulgaris were included. By using the parameters, we analyze a statistical significant impact on quality of life of acne patients were frustration, embarrassment, effect on social life, relation with members of opposite sex, concern for skin appearance and avoidance of changing facility. Aggressiveness was found to be statistically insignificant. It implies that acne is a disease of mild to moderate severity. There was a significant positive relationship between disease severities with scores of CADI. Conclusion : There was impairment in quality of life due to acne in a rural population.
Quirky Quantifiers: Optimal Models and Complexity of Computation Tree Logic

The satisfiability problem of the branching time logic CTL is studied in terms of computational complexity. Tight upper and lower bounds are provided for each temporal operator fragment. In parallel, the minimal model size is studied with a suitable notion of minimality. Thirdly, flat CTL is investigated, i.e., formulas with very low temporal operator nesting depth. A sharp dichotomy is shown in terms of complexity and minimal models: Temporal depth one has low expressive power, while temporal depth two is equivalent to full CTL.