Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of short-term administration of verapamil on left ventricular relaxation and filling dynamics measured by a combined hemodynamic-ultrasonic technique in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

The effects of short-term administration of verapamil on left ventricular isovolumetric relaxation and early and late diastolic filling dynamics were studied in 10 patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy by a combined hemodynamic-ultrasonic technique. Left ventricular pressures (recorded with high-fidelity micromanometers) were determined simultaneously with M mode echocardiography. After 10 mg of verapamil was given intravenously (2 mg/min), left ventricular contractility and systolic pressure dropped significantly (p less than .05). Left ventricular dP/dt fell from 1947 +/- 544 to 1489 +/- 334 mm Hg/sec, maximal velocity of the contractile element at zero load fell from 50 +/- 17 to 42 +/- 15 1/sec, peak velocity contraction of the contractile element fell from 37 +/- 10 1/sec to 29 +/- 10 1/sec (p less than .05), and left ventricular systolic pressure fell from 149 +/- 30 to 127 +/- 22 mm Hg. Left ventricular negative dP/dt increased from 1770 +/- 479 to 1477 +/- 377 mm Hg/sec (p less than .05), and the time constant of isovolumetric pressure decay was prolonged from 48 +/- 9 to 64 +/- 15 msec (p less than .05). Left ventricular end-diastolic pressure rose from 21 +/- 7 to 23 +/- 6 mm Hg (p less than .05). The time constant of isovolumetric pressure decay was calculated in three different ways, but none of these measurements was influenced by verapamil. Time of isovolumetric relaxation, duration of rapid ventricular filling, and peak rate of left ventricular lengthening were not significantly influenced by verapamil and remained highly abnormal. In contrast, peak rate of left ventricular posterior wall thinning declined further after verapamil from 2.9 +/- 1.2 to 2.4 +/- 1.4 1/sec (p less than .05). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
The QASE API: A Comprehensive Platform for Games-Based AI Research and Education

Computer games have belatedly come to the fore as a serious platform for AI research. Through our own experiments in the fields of imitation learning and intelligent agents, it became clear that the lack of a unified, powerful yet intuitive API was a serious impediment to the adoption of commercial games in both research and education. Parallel to our own specialised work, we therefore decided to develop a generalpurpose library for the creation of game agents, in the hope that the availability of such software would help stimulate further interest in the field. Though geared towards machinelearning, the API would be flexible enough to facilitate multiple forms of artificial intelligence, making it suitable for application in research and in undergraduate courses centring upon traditional AI and agent-based systems. In this paper, we present the result of our efforts; the Quake 2 Agent Simulation Environment (QASE) API. We first describe the theme of our work, the reasons for choosing Quake 2 as our testbed, and the necessity for an API of this nature. We then outline its most important features, before presenting an experiment from our own research to demonstrate QASE’s practical capabilities.
Generating hypergraph of term associations for automatic document concept clustering

This paper presents a novel approach to document clustering using hypergraph decomposition. Given a set of documents, the associations among frequently co-occurring terms in any of the documents define naturally a hypergraph, which can then be decomposed into connected components at various levels. Each connected component represents a primitive concept in the collection. The documents can then be clustered based on the primitive concepts. Experiments with three different data sets from web pages and medical literatures have shown that the proposed unsupervised clustering approach performs significantly better than traditional clustering algorithms, such as k-means , AutoClassand Hierarchical Clustering(HAC). The results indicate that hypergraphs are a perfect model to capture association rules in text and is very useful for automatic document clustering.
Divisibility properties of Kloosterman sums over finite fields of characteristic two

Let K(a) be the so-called classical Kloosterman sums over F2m, where m is even. In this paper, we compute K(a) modulo 24, completing our previous results for odd m. We extensively study the links between K(a) and other exponential sums, in particular with the cubic sums. We point out (as we did for odd m) that the values K(a) are related with cosets of weight 4 of primitive narrow sense extended BCH codes of length n = 2m and minimum distance 8.
Does Work Pay in France? Monetary Incentives and the Guaranteed Minimum Income

Most welfare programs generate high marginal tax rates on labor income. This paper uses a representative sample of individuals on France's main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary gains to employment for welfare recipients. This is based on the distribution of potential monthly earnings faced by each individual, as inferred from the distribution of observed wages and working time. Taking account of the welfare earnings top-up program (interessement), we find that gains are almost always positive, but that their amount is very low, especially for single mothers. Interessement is found to have a small impact, because of its provisional nature. Gains are positively related to the probability that a welfare recipient in 1996 will be observed in employment in 1998. Using a simple structural model, we interpret this as a labor supply effect.
Crystal structure and immunological properties of the first annexin from Schistosoma mansoni: insights into the structural integrity of the schistosomal tegument

Schistosomiasis is a major parasitic disease of humans, second only to malaria in its global impact. The disease is caused by digenean trematodes that infest the vasculature of their human hosts. These flukes are limited externally by a body wall composed of a syncytial epithelium, the apical surface membrane of which is a parasitism‐adapted dual membrane complex. Annexins are thought to be of integral importance for the stability of this apical membrane system. Here, we present the first structural and immunobiochemical characterization of an annexin from Schistosoma mansoni. The crystal structure of annexin B22 confirms the presence of the previously predicted α‐helical segment in the II/III linker and reveals a covalently linked head‐to‐head dimer. From the calcium‐bound crystal structure of this protein, canonical type II, type III and B site positions are occupied, and a novel binding site has been identified. The dimer arrangement observed in the crystal structure suggests the presence of two prominent features, a potential non‐canonical membrane binding site and a potential binding groove opposite to the former. Results from transcriptional profiling during development show that annexin B22 expression is correlated with life stages of the parasite that possess the syncytial tegument layer, and ultrastructural localization by immuno‐electron microscopy confirms the occurrence of annexins in the tegument of S. mansoni. Data from membrane binding and aggregation assays indicate the presence of differential molecular mechanisms and support the hypothesis of annexin B22 providing structural integrity in the tegument.
Central control of thermogenesis in mammals

Thermogenesis, the production of heat energy, is an essential component of the homeostatic repertoire to maintain body temperature in mammals and birds during the challenge of low environmental temperature and plays a key role in elevating body temperature during the febrile response to infection. The primary sources of neurally regulated metabolic heat production are mitochondrial oxidation in brown adipose tissue, increases in heart rate and shivering in skeletal muscle. Thermogenesis is regulated in each of these tissues by parallel networks in the central nervous system, which respond to feedforward afferent signals from cutaneous and core body thermoreceptors and to feedback signals from brain thermosensitive neurons to activate the appropriate sympathetic and somatic efferents. This review summarizes the research leading to a model of the feedforward reflex pathway through which environmental cold stimulates thermogenesis and discusses the influence on this thermoregulatory network of the pyrogenic mediator, prostaglandin E2, to increase body temperature. The cold thermal afferent circuit from cutaneous thermal receptors ascends via second‐order thermosensory neurons in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord to activate neurons in the lateral parabrachial nucleus, which drive GABAergic interneurons in the preoptic area to inhibit warm‐sensitive, inhibitory output neurons of the preoptic area. The resulting disinhibition of thermogenesis‐promoting neurons in the dorsomedial hypothalamus and possibly of sympathetic and somatic premotor neurons in the rostral ventromedial medulla, including the raphe pallidus, activates excitatory inputs to spinal sympathetic and somatic motor circuits to drive thermogenesis.
Retrofitting Network Security to Third-Party Applications - The SecureBase Experience

Systems such as Kerberos, designed to provide secure user and service authentication over insecure open networks, continue to gain acceptance in the UNIX world. There are both freely available and commercial products which reduce the vulnerabilities inherent in trusting "traditional" UNIX security in a distributed environment. However, such products generally do not provide similar protection for third-party applications which have their own network security paradigms. This paper show how such protection can be extended to encompass SYBASE, a widely-used distributed database system. The experience with SYBASE is generalized to other network applications.
RF transmitter with Cartesian feedback

 Abstract—This paper presents a 2.4 GHz transmitter with Cartesian Feedback for use in Bluetooth applications. The Cartesian feedback is used to improve the linearity of the system, allowing the power amplifier to be designed for efficiency. The Cartesian feedback loop consists of two independent I and Q feedback loops that are coupled only through their phase offset which can be compensated. The upconversion and downconversion mixers use a doubly balanced Gilbert cell topology with strong linearity requirements for the downconverting mixers. The transmitter is realized by the 0.13um IBM CMOS process.
A novel bandstop filter design using parallel coupled line resonators

In this paper, a novel compact bandstop filter having low insertion loss and low radiation loss is presented. The proposed filter uses a quarter-wavelength open-stub resonator with direct-connected microstrip transmission line. Due to the narrow gap between a resonator and a ground, we can realize low mismatch and the bandstop filter shows low insertion loss. In addition, this structure can reduce the radiation loss at the stopband due to the strong coupling between the resonator and the signal line. The fabricated bandstop filter with a single resonator has insertion loss of better than 0.5 dB in the passband, rejection of greater than 30 dB at stopband. The operating frequency of the proposed resonator can be varied by using the shunt capacitors between the resonator and the ground. Moreover, we will show several filter applications using this resonator.
Obscured Binary Quasar Cores in SDSS J104807.74+005543.5?

We report the discovery of a possible close binary system of quasars in SDSS J1048+0055. The [O III] λλ4959, 5007 emission lines are clearly double-peaked, and two discrete radio sources with a projected physical separation of ~20 pc are found in the Very Long Baseline Array milliarcsecond resolution image at 8.4 GHz. Each of the [O III] λλ4959, 5007 doublets and Hβ can be well modeled by two Gaussians, and the line ratio [O III] λ5007/Hβ ~ 7 is typical of Seyfert 2 galaxies. No broad component of Hβ was detected, and its [O III] λ5007 luminosity, L ≈ 9.2 × 1042 ergs s-1, is comparable to luminous quasars and is a few ×10 more luminous than typical Seyfert galaxies. One natural interpretation is that SDSS J1048+0055 contains two close quasar-like nuclei, and the broad-line region around them is obscured. Other possible models are also discussed. We suggest that a double-peaked narrow emission line profile may be an effective way of selecting candidates of binary black holes with intermediate separation.
Determining important criteria and factors for information systems integration success

The assessment of Information Systems (IS) integration is seen as an important exercise in organisation to enable the IS managers, as well as top management, to understand their return on investment in IS integration. Study has found out that very few organisations have proper assessment tool, and while other organisations have never done proper assessment to their IS integration works. Current tools on the market, however, are lack of comprehensive measures to really assess the success of IS integration in the organisation. The purpose of the paper is to provide an insight on the process of determining important factors and criteria of Information Systems integration and grouped them into domains which can be used as instrument to comprehensively assess information systems integration in organisation. The survey process and its result are discussed and the finding shows that expert opinions support the literature findings.
Cyanide fishing on Indonesian coral reefs for the live food fish market - what is the problem?

According to three precautionary estimations, the reef-degrading capacity of the cyanide fishery for food fish on Indonesia’s coral reefs amounts to a loss of live coral cover of 0.047, 0.052 and 0.060 m2 per 100 m2 of reef per year. These estimates for the rate of coral cover loss are low compared to published rates of natural coral recovery. Differences in growth rate between species of hard coral will cause coral reefs to take longer to recover from the effects of cyanide fishing than a direct comparison of the rate of coral cover loss with published rates of natural coral recovery would suggest. Still, the cyanide fishery for food fish may not be as threatening to Indonesia’s coral reefs as is sometimes assumed, especially not as compared to other threats such as blast fishing (responsible for a loss of live coral cover amounting to 3.75 m2 per 100 m2 of reef per year, (Pet-Soede, Cesar & Pet, 1999)), or coral bleaching caused by global climate change (cf. Hoegh‐Guldberg, 1999). Setting the input variables for the estimates at extreme values did not change these conclusions substantively. The depletion of grouper stocks by the trade in live reef food fish, however, is worrying from both fisheries and conservation perspectives. Strategies to abate the depletion of these grouper stocks should not only consider cyanide fishing, but also other fishing methods.
Intrinsic point cloud simplification

Modelling and visualisation methods working directly with point-sampled geometry have developed into attractive alternatives to more traditional mesh-based surface processing. In this paper, we consider a vital step in any point-based surface processing pipeline, point cloud simplification. Building upon the intrinsic point cloud simplification idea put forward in [14], we obtain a simplification algorithm allowing for intuitive density control and satisfying a set of important requirements unsupported by existing simplification techniques. The algorithm operates efficiently and gives a point set density guarantee. It supports both sub- and resampling of the input point set and allows for uniform and user-controlled feature-sensitive simplification. It can further deal with non-uniformly distributed point sets and point-sampled geometry featuring illegitimate holes of simple complexity. The algorithm is inherently progressive and supports the generation of multiresolution representations in the form of levels of detail. We are primarily concerned with describing the conceptual framework of our intrinsic approach and show its viability by giving a number of application examples using massive data sets.
A Joint Relay-and-Antenna Selection Scheme in Energy-Harvesting MIMO Relay Networks

Energy harvesting, which is a promising technology to prolong the lifetime of energy-constrained wireless networks, has attracted lots of attention. In this letter, we consider an energy-harvesting multiple-relay multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) decode-and-forward (DF) cooperation network. A joint relay-and-antenna selection (JRAS) scheme, which jointly determines the best transmit antenna at the source node, the best relay, and the best transmit antenna at the selected relay, is proposed to minimize the system outage probability. Then, we analyze the outage performance of the JRAS scheme, and the exact expression for the outage probability is derived. Finally, simulation results show the correctness of the theoretical analysis and the superiority of the JRAS scheme.
Bounded Rational Decision-Making in Changing Environments

A perfectly rational decision-maker chooses the best action with the highest utility gain from a set of possible actions. The optimality principles that describe such decision processes do not take into account the computational costs of finding the optimal action. Bounded rational decision-making addresses this problem by specifically trading off information-processing costs and expected utility. Interestingly, a similar trade-off between energy and entropy arises when describing changes in thermodynamic systems. This similarity has been recently used to describe bounded rational agents. Crucially, this framework assumes that the environment does not change while the decision-maker is computing the optimal policy. When this requirement is not fulfilled, the decision-maker will suffer inefficiencies in utility, that arise because the current policy is optimal for an environment in the past. Here we borrow concepts from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to quantify these inefficiencies and illustrate with simulations its relationship with computational resources.
HD 271791: An Extreme Supernova Runaway B Star Escaping from the Galaxy

Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) were first predicted by theory to be the result of the tidal disruption of a binary system by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) that accelerates one component to beyond the Galactic escape velocity (the Hills mechanism). Because the Galactic center hosts such a SMBH it is the suggested place of origin for HVSs. However, the SMBH paradigm has been challenged recently by the young HVS HD 271791 because its kinematics point to a birthplace in the metal-poor rim of the Galactic disk. Here we report the atmosphere of HD 271791 to indeed show a subsolar iron abundance along with an enhancement of the α-elements, indicating capture of nucleosynthesis products from a supernova or a more energetic hypernova. This implies that HD 271791 is the surviving secondary of a massive binary system disrupted in a supernova explosion. No such runaway star has ever been found to exceed the Galactic escape velocity; hence HD 271791 is the first hyperrunaway star. Such a runaway scenario is an alternative to the Hills mechanism for the acceleration of some HVSs with moderate velocities. The observed chemical composition of HD 271791 puts invaluable observational constraints on nucleosynthesis in a supernova from the core collapse of a very massive star (MZAMS≳ 55 M☉), which may be observed as a gamma-ray burst of the long-duration/soft-spectrum type.
GBLENDER: visual subgraph query formulation meets query processing

Due to the complexity of graph query languages, the need for visual query interfaces that can reduce the burden of query formulation is fundamental to the spreading of graph data management tools to wider community. We present a novel HCI (human-computer interaction)-aware graph query processing paradigm, where instead of processing a query graph after its construction, it interleaves visual query construction and processing to improve system response time. We demonstrate a system called GBLENDER that exploits GUI latency to prune false results and prefetch candidate data graphs by employing a novel action-aware indexing scheme and a data structure called spindle-shaped graphs (SPIG). We demonstrate various innovative features of GBLENDER and its promising performance in evaluating subgraph containment and similarity queries.
Grammaticalization Paths of Verbal Prefixes in Slavic and Other Indo-European Branches

Abstract Grammaticalization of verbal prefixes and the productivity of prefixes are important topics in contemporary Slavic linguistics and are being discussed against the background of their semantic scope. This article draws attention to the semantic scope of prefixes in ancient Indo-European languages that have properties similar to those of Slavic prefixes and are sometimes etymologically related to their Slavic counterparts. Initial steps towards grammaticalization can be observed in Germanic, Celtic, and Latin. Semantic and grammatical functions of Hittite Wackernagel sentence particles of local and deictic origin provide further insights. Complex act perfectives prefixed in za-, po-, pro-, ot-, na- as described by Janda (1985, 2007, and 2013) and the role of quantized verbs will be central to the investigation. The function of dynamic suffixes that play an aspectual role in Slavic will be compared to that of the IE *-sk̑e/o-suffix in Greek, Latin, and Hittite. Although a Slavic aspectual “pair” system did not develop in any of those languages, the properties of the suffixes and their interaction with the prefixation will provide a comparative background to the study of grammaticalization of Slavic aspect.