Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CMOS imager based on single photon avalanche diodes

In this paper we report on a 32/spl times/32 optical imager based on single photon avalanche diodes integrated in CMOS technology. The maximum measured dynamic range is 120dB and the minimum noise equivalent intensity is 1.3 /spl times/ 10/sup -3/ lx. The minimum integration time per pixel is 4 /spl mu/s. The output of each pixel is digital, thereby requiring no complex read-out circuitry, no amplification, no sample and hold, and no ADC.
Tumor Necrosis Factor-α Induces Neurotoxicity via Glutamate Release from Hemichannels of Activated Microglia in an Autocrine Manner*

Glutamate released by activated microglia induces excitoneurotoxicity and may contribute to neuronal damage in neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and multiple sclerosis. In addition, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) secreted from activated microglia may elicit neurodegeneration through caspase-dependent cascades and silencing cell survival signals. However, direct neurotoxicity of TNF-α is relatively weak, because TNF-α also increases production of neuroprotective factors. Accordingly, it is still controversial how TNF-α exerts neurotoxicity in neurodegenerative diseases. Here we have shown that TNF-α is the key cytokine that stimulates extensive microglial glutamate release in an autocrine manner by up-regulating glutaminase to cause excitoneurotoxicity. Further, we have demonstrated that the connexin 32 hemichannel of the gap junction is another main source of glutamate release from microglia besides glutamate transporters. Although pharmacological blockade of glutamate receptors is a promising therapeutic candidate for neurodegenerative diseases, the associated perturbation of physiological glutamate signals has severe adverse side effects. The unique mechanism of microglial glutamate release that we describe here is another potential therapeutic target. We rescued neuronal cell death in vitro by using a glutaminase inhibitor or hemichannel blockers to diminish microglial glutamate release without perturbing the physiological glutamate level. These drugs may give us a new therapeutic strategy against neurodegenerative diseases with minimum adverse side effects.
Staged generic programming

Generic programming libraries such as Scrap Your Boilerplate eliminate the need to write repetitive code, but typically introduce significant performance overheads. This leaves programmers with the regrettable choice between writing succinct but slow programs and writing tedious but efficient programs. Applying structured multi-stage programming techniques transforms Scrap Your Boilerplate from an inefficient library into a typed optimising code generator, bringing its performance in line with hand-written code, and so combining high-level programming with uncompromised performance.
Analysis of the concept of educational equity from the Amartya Sen capabilities standpoint

The purpose of this research is to analyze the concept of educational equity from the capabilities standpoint proposed by Amartya Sen. To do this, first the literature on the notion of equity is reviewed and a philosophical discussion about it is presented. Second, it is applied to the educational field. Third, according to the Sen approach, educational equity is defined as equality in outcomes in abilities that individuals aquire in the educational system (secondary level). Finally, it is concluded that under this conception it is possible recommend policies to compensate original differences.
A question of credibility – Effects of source cues and recommendations on information selection on news sites and blogs

Abstract Internet users have access to a multitude of science-related information – on journalistic news sites but also on blogs with user-generated content. In this context, we investigated in two studies the factors which influence laypersons’ selective exposure (N = 101). In an experiment with a collection of online news, parents were asked to search for information about the controversy surrounding violence in the media. Texts from high-reputation sources were clicked on more frequently – regardless of content –, whereas ratings by others had limited effects. In a second experiment, the expertise and gender of blog authors as well as valence and number of ratings were varied. In this setting, texts from sources with positive ratings were read for longer. Results show that laypersons make use of credibility cues when deciding which articles to read. For online news sites, media reputation is most important, whereas in blogs, ratings are taken into account more frequently.
Ideal Network Enabled Server Environment

Network Enabled Server environments developed quickly in the mid 1990s. Different approaches adopting diverse technologies have emerged and these environments have continued to evolve. In this paper we have envisioned the characteristics of an ideal NES environment for the perspective of usability and efficiency. It is hoped that this information, synthesized from Surveying many Network Enabled Server Environments, will facilitate developers in improving these environments. The perspective of administrators, application vendors, developers, owners and users on popular Network Enabled Server Environments are presented.
Measuring the Similarity between TV Programs using Semantic Relations

This paper presents a novel method of measuring the similarity between TV programs by using summaries of the Electronic Program Guide (EPG). Most previous methods use statistics such as the TFIDF based cosine measure of word vectors, whose elements are words appearing in the summaries. However, these approaches are not effective because TV program summaries, especially short ones, do not necessarily share many words even when they have similar meanings. The proposed method generates a graph structure whose nodes are TV programs and nouns. These nouns are connected by semantic relations that are extracted from the Web automatically. The similarity between two TV programs is measured in terms of the relativeness of two TV program’s nodes in the graph structure by using a random walk algorithm. Experiments showed that our method is better at measuring similarities between two TV programs compared with baseline methods.
An Improved Approximation Algorithm for the Hard Uniform Capacitated k-median Problem

In the $k$-median problem, given a set of locations, the goal is to select a subset of at most $k$ centers so as to minimize the total cost of connecting each location to its nearest center. We study the uniform hard capacitated version of the $k$-median problem, in which each selected center can only serve a limited number of locations. Inspired by the algorithm of Charikar, Guha, Tardos and Shmoys, we give a $(6+10\alpha)$-approximation algorithm for this problem with increasing the capacities by a factor of $2+\frac{2}{\alpha}, \alpha\geq 4$, which improves the previous best $(32 l^2+28 l+7)$-approximation algorithm proposed by Byrka, Fleszar, Rybicki and Spoerhase violating the capacities by factor $2+\frac{3}{l-1}, l\in \{2,3,4,\dots\}$.
Medical students’ perceptions of professional misconduct: relationship with typology and year of programme

Aim To examine the contribution of programme year and demographic factors to medical students’ perceptions of evidence-based classification categories of professional misconduct. Methods Students at an Irish medical school were administered a cross-sectional survey comprising 31 vignettes of professional misconduct, which mapped onto a 12-category classification system. Students scored each item using a 5-point Likert scale, where 1 represents the least severe form of misconduct and 5 the most severe. Results Of the 1012 eligible respondents, 561 students completed the survey, providing a response rate of 55%. Items pertaining to disclosure of conflict of interest were ranked as the least severe examples of professional misconduct, and this perception was highest among finalyear students. While ratings of severity declined for items related to ‘inappropriate conduct not in relation to patient’ and ‘inappropriate use of social media’ between years 1 and 3, ratings for both categories increased again among clinical cycle (fourth and final year) students. Conclusions Increased clinical exposure during years 4 and 5 of the undergraduate programme was associated with better recognition of the importance of selected professional domains. Disclosure of conflict of interest is identified as an area of medical professionalism that requires greater emphasis for students who are at the point of transition from student to doctor.
Kinetics of plasma particles and electron transport in the current-carrying plasma adjacent to an evaporating and electron emitting wall

The paper reviews the vaporization phenomena at a target heated by heat flux from an adjacent plasma in vacuum and in low-pressure discharges. The kinetics of a nonequilibrium layer and the direct and returned mass fluxes formed in the vicinity of the target are described. The mechanism of cathode vaporization taking into account cathode electron emission in vacuum arcs is considered. It is shown that in vacuum arcs, the cathode electron beam relaxation region is an energetic zone which supports the generation of charged particles by atom ionization, balancing losses from ion motion towards the cathode and electron current. The mechanism of electron transport from the cathode to the plasma for cathode materials with strongly different thermal properties is considered. It is shown that the cathode electron current is controlled by a near-cathode space charge sheath whose structure depends on the thermo-physical properties of the cathode material. The potential structures has a large electric field at the cathode surface (like Cu), or a virtual cathode (W), or double plasma sheath (Hg), depending on the ratio of the electron emission flux to the vaporized atom flux, which in turn depends on the cathode material
Near-field modeling of radar antennas: An intrinsic approach

Full-wave inversion of near-field radar data for nondestructive characterization of material properties requires an accurate electromagnetic model, which in particular accounts for complex antenna-medium interactions. We present an intrinsic way for modeling radar antennas for the particular case of planar layered media. Fundamental antenna features consist of an equivalent set of infinitesimal electric dipoles, field points and associated frequency-dependent, global reflection and transmission coefficients. These antenna characteristic functions permit to describe wave propagation between the radar reference plane and the equivalent source dipoles and field points. Near-field antenna-medium coupling is thereby inherently accounted for. Hence, the antenna characteristic functions do not depend on the medium. We show an example of application in which the dielectric permittivity of a sand subject to a range of water contents is estimated from measurements collected with a vector network analyzer and a 0.8-4 GHz Vivaldi antenna.
Human resource development in small organizations

This article draws upon case-study research into human resource development (HRD) within three small organizations in the north west of England. It positions the case-study work within an overall framework of doctoral research and summarizes the research design; discusses the characteristics and values of small organizations and how they influence HRD policies and practices: presents findings and conclusions about HRD in the case-study organizations, focusing in particular upon one case in the voluntary sector; compares and contrasts the different models of HRD in the three cases; and concludes with some suggestions for further research.
Expression of Late Cell Cycle Genes and an Increased Proliferative Capacity Characterize Very Early Relapse of Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Purpose: In childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), ∼25% of patients suffer from relapse. In recurrent disease, despite intensified therapy, overall cure rates of 40% remain unsatisfactory and survival rates are particularly poor in certain subgroups. The probability of long-term survival after relapse is predicted from well-established prognostic factors (i.e., time and site of relapse, immunophenotype, and minimal residual disease). However, the underlying biological determinants of these prognostic factors remain poorly understood. Experimental Design: Aiming at identifying molecular pathways associated with these clinically well-defined prognostic factors, we did gene expression profiling on 60 prospectively collected samples of first relapse patients enrolled on the relapse trial ALL-REZ BFM 2002 of the Berlin-Frankfurt-Münster study group. Results: We show here that patients with very early relapse of ALL are characterized by a distinctive gene expression pattern. We identified a set of 83 genes differentially expressed in very early relapsed ALL compared with late relapsed disease. The vast majority of genes were up-regulated and many were late cell cycle genes with a function in mitosis. In addition, samples from patients with very early relapse showed a significant increase in the percentage of S and G2-M phase cells and this correlated well with the expression level of cell cycle genes. Conclusions: Very early relapse of ALL is characterized by an increased proliferative capacity of leukemic blasts and up-regulated mitotic genes. The latter suggests that novel drugs, targeting late cell cycle proteins, might be beneficial for these patients that typically face a dismal prognosis.
Exercise is medicine for depression: even when the “pill” is small

and incorporate the Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial (unported, v3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/). By accessing the work you hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms (https://www.dovepress.com/terms.php). Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 2016:12 2715–2721 Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment Dovepress
The impact of partitioning on phylogenomic accuracy

Several strategies have been proposed to assign substitution models in phylogenomic datasets, or partitioning. The accuracy of these methods, and most importantly, their impact on phylogenetic estimation has not been thoroughly assessed using computer simulations. We simulated multiple partitioning scenarios to benchmark two a priori partitioning schemes (one model for the whole alignment, one model for each data block), and two statistical approaches (hierarchical clustering and greedy) implemented in PartitionFinder and in our new program, PartitionTest. Most methods were able to identify optimal partitioning schemes closely related to the true one. Greedy algorithms identified the true partitioning scheme more frequently than the clustering algorithms, but selected slightly less accurate partitioning schemes and tended to underestimate the number of partitions. PartitionTest was several times faster than PartitionFinder, with equal or better accuracy. Importantly, maximum likelihood phylogenetic inference was very robust to the partitioning scheme. Best-fit partitioning schemes resulted in optimal phylogenetic performance, without appreciable differences compared to the use of the true partitioning scheme. However, accurate trees were also obtained by a “simple” strategy consisting of assigning independent GTR+G models to each data block. On the contrary, leaving the data unpartitioned always diminished the quality of the trees inferred, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the simulated scenario. The analysis of empirical data confirmed these trends, although suggesting a stronger influence of the partitioning scheme. Overall, our results suggests that statistical partitioning, but also the a priori assignment of independent GTR+G models, maximize phylogenomic performance.
Efficient gridmaps for SLAM with Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filters

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has been an important field of research in the robotics community in recent years. A successful class of SLAM algorithms are Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filters (RBPF), where the particles approximate the pose belief distribution, while each particle contains a separate map. So far, RBPF with landmark based environment representations as well as gridmaps have been shown to work. Existing gridmap approaches typically used laser range scanners, because the high accuracy of that sensor keeps the state uncertainty low and allows for efficient solutions. In this paper, we present a combination of our previous work on map-matching with RBPF, which enable us to solve the SLAM problem also with low-resolution sonar range sensors. Furthermore, we introduce a simple and fast but very efficient shared representation of gridmaps which reduces the memory cost overhead caused by inherent redundancy between the particles.
Superantigen gene profiles, genetic relatedness and biological activity of exosecretions of Staphylococcus aureus isolates obtained from milk of cows with clinical mastitis

This study evaluated the superantigen gene profiles, genetic relatedness and biological activity of exosecretions of 50 Staphylococcus aureus isolates obtained from milk of cows with clinical mastitis. Genomic relatedness of S. aureus was determined by pulsed field gel electrophoresis analysis of macro‐restricted chromosomes. The presence of genes encoding superantigens was confirmed by multiplex PCR. To study the biological activity of S. aureus exosecretions, the supernatants from bacterial liquid cultures were classified into three groups: those with leukotoxin‐like properties, those with superantigen‐like properties and those with no particular activity on leukocytes cultured in vitro. It was shown that all analyzed bacterial isolates belonged to the same clonal type and harbored the same combination of superantigen genes, namely sed, selj and ser. However, 22% of all isolates produced factors with superantigen‐like and 48% of them with leukotoxin‐like activities. Finally, although there were no detectable genetic differences between the analyzed bacterial isolates, the virulence factors secreted by them differed considerably.
Influence of Perinatal Stress on the Hormone Content in Immune Cells of Adult Rats: Dominance of ACTH

Rat dams were stressed by total deprivation of food and water for 48 h just before or directly after delivery and the offspring were studied when adult. The immune cells' hormone content (ACTH, histamine, serotonin, and T(3)) was measured by immunocytochemical flow cytometry. The elevation of ACTH content in males was convincing in each cell type (lymphocytes, monocytes and granulocytes, and mast cells). The change in histamine and T(3) content was inconsistent, while serotonin level did not change at all. As ACTH is the key hormone in the General Adaptation Syndrome, it seems likely that the perinatal stress primarily caused elevation in ACTH level and it was provoking the life-long hormonal imprinting. There was a difference between the reaction of males and females (with males' advance), which points to the gender dependence of the phenomenon. It is important that the effect of stress on the offspring was similar in case of direct (prenatal, in the mother) and indirect (postnatal, transmitted by milk) stress treatment, which calls attention to the danger of stress during this latter period.
FEARLUS-W : An Agent-Based Model of River Basin Land Use and Water Management

This paper describes a spatially-explicit agent-based model of river basin land use and water management. The model is being implemented within a project aimed at investigating ways of synthesising stakeholder priorities, taking the EU Water Framework Directive as a case study. There are many human activities that take place in a river basin and can alter the ecological status of the water, and there are also many activities whose outcomes depend on that ecological status. These interactions between the socio-economic and the ecological aspects of the river basin are shaped by the spatial distribution of the situation. Water users upstream generally have an advantage over those downstream: the first chance to use (and perhaps abstract or pollute) the water. The flowing nature of water creates asymmetries in the interactions between users. FEARLUS-W is a spatiallyexplicit agent-based model built to increase our understanding of these complex interactions and explore how common-pool resource problems in river basin management might be tamed through socio-economic interactions between stakeholders (primarily rural land managers), and through management strategies aimed at shaping these interactions. FEARLUS-W is being constructed within an extended version of an existing spatiallyexplicit agent-based model of land use change, FEARLUS (Polhill, Gotts and Law, 2001), drawing on theories of common-pool resource use, and on survey work among stakeholders. The main extensions to FEARLUS deal with water, water flow and water pollution on the one hand and allow for agents with multiple and potentially conflicting top-level goals on the other. FEARLUS-W: An Agent-Based Model of River Basin Land Use and Water Management Introduction__________________________________________________ 1 Clean water as a common-pool resource ___________________________ 2 Why agents? _________________________________________________ 3 The existing FEARLUS model___________________________________ 4 Context: the Water Framework Directive project_____________________ 5 Modelling CPR dilemmas: the symmetrical case _____________________ 6 Agents with multiple dimensions of utility__________________________ 8 Representing social approval___________________________________ 8 The decision making algorithm_________________________________ 9 Water, water flow and water pollution: the asymmetrical case _________ 12 Conclusions_________________________________________________ 17 Acknowledgement ___________________________________________ 18 References__________________________________________________ 18
Personality disorders and nonfatal unintentional injuries among US adults

Objective: To investigate the association between personality disorders and nonfatal unintentional injuries in a representative sample of US adults. Methods: Data on self-reported nonfatal unintentional injuries during the 12 months before the interview were obtained from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) were analyzed; 43 093 adults ⩾18 years participated in the NESARC wave I survey in 2001–02. Personality disorders were determined using the NIAAA Alcohol Use Disorders and Associated Disabilities Interview Schedule-DSM-IV. Results: Individuals with at least one personality disorder had a significantly higher 12-month incidence of injuries than people without any personality disorder (p<0.001). After accounting for sociodemographic characteristics or other mental disorders, OR was 1.54 (95% CI 1.39 to 1.71) for individuals with one personality disorder and 1.80 (95% CI 1.58 to 2.05) for individuals with two or more personality disorders compared with people with no personality disorder. Conclusion: Personality disorders were associated with a significantly increased risk of unintentional injuries. This information has important implications for the treatment of patients with these disorders.