Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alcohol tolerance in patients with non-insulin-dependent (type 2) diabetes treated with sulphonylurea derivatives.

The oral ethanol loading test (0.5 g/kg body mass given as 40% solution) was carried out in 5 groups, each of 10 out-patients with non-insulin-dependent (type 2) diabetes before and after 10 days of treatment with one of the following sulphonylurea derivatives: tolbutamide (CAS 64-77-7) 0.5 t.i. d. , chlorpropamide (CAS 94-20-2) 0.5 once daily morning, glibornuride (CAS 26944-48-9) 0.025 t.i. d. , glibenclamide (CAS 10238-21-8) 0.005 t.i. d. and glipizide (CAS 29094-61-9) 0.005 t.i. d. The response to alcohol (facial flush, heart rate, blood pressure) were compared, and blood concentrations of ethanol, acetaldehyde, pyruvate, lactate, hydrocarbonates as well as blood pH, pO2 and pCO2 were determined in fasting state and during 6 hours after alcohol ingestion. In all patients the family history of diabetes and the presence and degree of vascular complications were registered. Evident flushing phenomenon was observed in 6 patients treated with chlorpropamide, in 3 treated with tolbutamide, in 2 treated with glibenclamide, in one receiving glibornuride and in none treated with glipizide. All drugs caused a greater rise of blood ethanol and acetaldehyde levels in relation to the control tests, but the difference reached statistical significance only in the group receiving chlorpropamide. Moreover, patients (pooled) with positive thermographic response had also significantly higher blood levels of ethanol and acetaldehyde during the second test. The ratio of acetaldehyde to ethanol concentration in blood (mumol:mmol) was not significantly changed in any group indicating parallel impairment of both steps of ethanol metabolism. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
The molecular basis of oxidative stress-induced cell death in an immortalized retinal ganglion cell line.

PURPOSE To characterize the molecular basis of oxidative stress-induced death, a process that has been implicated in several chronic eye diseases, in RGC-5 cells, an immortalized retinal ganglion cell (RGC) line. METHODS The responses of RGC-5 cells to oxidative stress induced by three different treatments--glutathione depletion, tert-butyl peroxide addition, and hydrogen peroxide addition--were examined and compared. The level of cell death was monitored with the MTT assay. The effects of glutathione depletion on the intracellular levels of glutathione, reactive oxygen species, and calcium were determined. The type of cell death was assessed with assays for DNA fragmentation and caspase activation. Compounds that were shown to be protective of central nervous system-derived nerve cells exposed to oxidative stress were tested to see whether they could also protect the RGC-5 cells. In addition, several compounds that have been found to be protective in primary cultures of RGCs or in animal models of retinal dysfunction were tested against each of the inducers of oxidative stress. RESULTS The cell death triggered by all three inducers of oxidative stress shared several features, suggesting that there is a final common pathway of oxidative stress-induced death in the RGCs. In addition, several compounds were identified that protected RGCs from multiple forms of oxidative stress. CONCLUSIONS The RGC-5 line is an excellent model for studying mechanisms of RGC death in response to oxidative stress and for the identification of neuroprotective compounds.
The effect of proximity on landmark use in Clark's nutcrackers

Clark's nutcrackers, Nucifraga columbiana, store thousands of pine seeds during the autumn and retrieve them throughout the winter. It has been shown that these birds are able to use visual cues to relocate hidden food in the laboratory. In this set of experiments, we trained three groups of Clark's nutcrackers to find a hidden food goal that was placed in the same spatial location relative to the testing room. During training, the location of two local cues in relation to the goal differed between the three groups. Group 1 learned the task with the cues closest to the goal, group 2 with the cues further from the goal, and group 3 with the cues furthest from the goal. To test whether the proximity of these two local cues to the goal affected how spatial information was used, we manipulated local and global information in a series of experiments. Results indicated that local cues were more important sources of spatial information for group 1, whereas global cues seemed to be used more by birds in groups 2 and 3. These findings suggest that the proximity of visual cues lead to overshadowing of other sources of spatial information surrounding the goal. Copyright 1999 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
Improved community mining method based on LFM and EAGLE

Community structures are crucial topological characteristic of complex networks. Consequently, network community structure mining has great significance to the real world. Complex networks have both hierarchy and overlaps, but it is still a problem to excavate the hierarchy and overlaps of networks efficiently and accurately at the same time by algorithm. This paper proposes an efficient and functional complex network community partition algorithm by combining fitness function optimization and community similarity, which can uncover both overlapping and hierarchical community structure of complex networks. Its basic idea is to use fitness function optimization at the bottom of hierarchy division to identify efficiently and accurately the underlying community structure which is with overlaps. Hierarchical structure is based on the community similarity to merge the underlying sub-communities with the principle of maximum similarity circulation. The experimental results utilizing Karate Club Network and US college football network show that the proposed algorithm is a manageable and accurate method for not only discovering the gradation community structure, but also overlap between excavated club.
Home Video Editing Made Easy - Balancing Automation and User Control

Hitchcock is a system to simplify the process of editing video. Its key features are the use of automatic analysis to find the best quality video clips, an algorithm to cluster those clips into meaningful piles, and an intuitive user interface for combining the desired clips into a final video. We conducted a user study to determine how the automatic clip creation and pile navigation support users in the editing process. The study showed that users liked the ease-of-use afforded by automation, but occasionally had problems navigating and overriding the automated editing decisions. These findings demonstrate the need for a proper balance between automation and user control. Thus, we built a new version of Hitchcock that retains the automatic editing features, but provides additional controls for navigation and for allowing users to modify the system decisions.
Search Query Recommendations using Hybrid User Profile with Query Logs

The exhaustive information available in the World Wide Web indeed, unfolds the challenge of exploring the apposite, precise and relevant data in every search result. Apparently, in such instances of web-searching, Query Recommendations is the ultimate application in information retrieval. The Query Recommendation technique provides alternative queries to the user to frame a meaningful and relevant query in the future and rapidly satisfies their information needs. Similar query
Brain Endo‐Oligopeptidase B: A Post‐Proline Cleaving Enzyme that Inactivates Angiotensin I and II

Rabbit brain endo-oligopeptidase B inactivates angiotensin I (Asp-Arg-Val-Tyr-Ile-His-Pro- Phe-His-Leu) and angiotensin II (Asp-Arg-Val-Tyr-Ile-Hls-Pro-Phe) by hydrolysis of the Pro'-Phe4 peptide bond. The site of hydrolysis was determined in preparative and analytical experiments in which both products were recovered in a molar ratio of 1:1, and the sum of the products plus unhydrolyzed substrate accounted for the starting material. The enzyme has a Km of 6.3 × 10−5 M for angiotensin II at pH 8.3 and is activated 30- fold with 4.8 mM dlthlothreitol. BPP90 (<Gui-Trp-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gln-Ile-Pro-Pro, SQ 20,881) inhibits the Inactivation of angiotensin II with an I50 of 5 × 10−5 M. BPP64 (<Glu-Lys-Trp-Ala-Pro, SQ 20,475) is less active and D-3-mercapto-2-methylpropanoyl-L-proline (captopril, SQ 14,225) has essentially no activity. These compounds are significantly more potent as inhibitors of angiotensln-converting enzyme. The role of brain endo-oligopeptidase B in angiotensin I and II metabolism remains to be established. (Hypertension 4: 178–184, 1982)
IconoNET: a tool for automated bandwidth allocation planning

Communication networks are expected to offer a wide range of services to an increasingly large number of users, with a diverse range of quality of service. This calls for efficient control and management of these networks. In this paper, we address the problem of quality-of-service routing, more specifically the planning of bandwidth allocation to communication demands. Shortest path routing is the traditional technique applied to this problem. However, this can lead to poor network utilization and even congestion. We show how an abstraction technique combined with systematic search algorithms and heuristics derived from artificial intelligence make it possible to solve this problem more efficiently and in much tighter networks, in terms of bandwidth usage.
Collagen XVII/BP180: a collagenous transmembrane protein and component of the dermoepidermal anchoring complex

Collagen XVII, or BP180, is a collagenous transmembrane protein and a structural component of the dermoepidermal anchoring complex. Molecular studies reveal that it has a globular cytosolic amino‐terminal domain and flexible‐rod extracellular carboxyterminal domain. The extracellular portion of collagen XVII is constitutively shed from the cell surface by ADAMs (proteinases that contain adhesive and metalloprotease domains). Cell biological analyses suggest that collagen XVII functions as a cell–matrix adhesion molecule through stabilization of the hemidesmosome complex. This concept is supported by investigations into human diseases of the dermoepidermal junction, in which collagen XVII is either genetically defective or absent (as in some forms of nonlethal junctional epidermolysis bullosa). Autoantibodies against collagen XVII (BP180) are seen in bullous pemphigoid, pemphigoid gestationis, mucous membrane pemphigoid, linear IgA disease, lichen planus pemphigoides and pemphigoid nodularis. In vivo and in vitro studies provide evidence for a pathogenic role of these autoantibodies, and suggest that the serum level and epitope specificity of these antibodies influences disease severity and phenotype. This review summarizes the structural and biological features of collagen XVII and its role in diseases of the basement membrane zone.
Texture smoothing and object segmentation using feature-adaptive weighted Gaussian filtering

Gaussian filter kernels can be used to smooth out textures in order to obtain uniform regions for image segmentation. In so-called anisotropic diffusion techniques, the smoothing process is adapted according to the edge direction in order to preserve the edges. However, the segment borders obtained with that approach do not necessarily coincide with physical object contours, especially in the case of textured objects. A novel segmentation technique by weighted Gaussian filtering is introduced. The extraction of true object masks is performed by smoothing edges due to texture and preserving true object borders. In this process additional features like disparity or motion are taken into account. The method presented has been successfully applied in the context of object segmentation in natural scenes and object-based disparity estimation for stereoscopic applications.
Enhanced Measurement Model for Subspace-Based Tracking

We present an efficient and robust measurement model for visual tracking. This approach builds on and extends work on measurement model of subspace representation. Subspace-based tracking algorithms have been introduced to visual tracking literature for a decade and show considerable tracking performance due to its robustness in matching. However, the measures used in their measurement models are not robust enough in cluttered backgrounds. We propose a novel measure of object matching referred to as WDIFS, which aims to improve the discriminability of matching within the subspace. Our measurement model can distinguish target from similar background clutters which often cause erroneous drift by conventional DFFS based measure. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracking algorithm under cluttered background.
Feature expansion and feature selection for general pattern recognition problems

Nonlinear classification problems are always assumed to be equivalent to a linear classification problem in some higher dimensional feature space. Kernel machines like support vector machines (SVMs) implicitly map the features to higher dimensional feature space by a kernel trick, and use all the mapped features for classification. This paper proposes an explicit polynomial feature expansion and feature selection method, which eliminates 'useless' features before designing a linear classifier. This method is almost automatic, and it is easier to use than selecting kernel functions and parameters for kernel machines. In our experiments, the method achieves good generalization ability on most of the benchmark datasets, and it can be a candidate method for solving general pattern recognition problems.
Interaction between Lexical Tone and Labial Movement in Cantonese Bilabial Plosive Production

The present study investigates the possible acoustic-articulatory interaction during production of Cantonese plosives at different lexical tones. Using electromagnetic articulography (EMA), movement of the jaw, and upper and lower lips was measured during production of word-initial bilabial plosives at six lexical tones. Preliminary data reveals a strong relationship between aspiration and lip opening velocity (LOV), as well as tone and range of labial separation. The present data indicate a dependency between the articulatory and phonatory systems of the human speech production mechanism.
Robust RO-PUFs with enhanced challenge-response set

Ring Oscillator (RO) Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are one of the best performing PUF types among various structures presented in the literature. The robustness problem of conventional RO-PUFs, that arises due to the noisy nature of ROs, is overcome with the Ordering-Based RO-PUFs presented recently. However, the shortage of usable Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs) still limits the use of RO-PUFs, especially for authentication protocols in security systems. For a fully secure authentication based on PUF circuits, CRPs should be independent from each other and a full read-out of all CRPs should be infeasible. In conventional RO-PUFs, the number of possible CRPs is very limited and in ordering based RO-PUFs, the CRP concept is not defined at all. In this work, two methods based on RO selection is proposed for generating enhanced CRP set in ordering based RO-PUFs and their performance is analyzed in terms of area efficiency and uniqueness. With the proposed methods, robust, area and power efficient RO-PUFs with a very high number of CRPs are available for use in many security applications.
Generalized deviations in risk analysis

Abstract.General deviation measures are introduced and studied systematically for their potential applications to risk management in areas like portfolio optimization and engineering. Such measures include standard deviation as a special case but need not be symmetric with respect to ups and downs. Their properties are explored with a mind to generating a large assortment of examples and assessing which may exhibit superior behavior. Connections are shown with coherent risk measures in the sense of Artzner, Delbaen, Eber and Heath, when those are applied to the difference between a random variable and its expectation, instead of to the random variable itself. However, the correspondence is only one-to-one when both classes are restricted by properties called lower range dominance, on the one hand, and strict expectation boundedness on the other. Dual characterizations in terms of sets called risk envelopes are fully provided.
Temporal lobe epilepsy: Differential pattern of damage in temporopolar cortex and white matter

Our purpose was to quantify structural changes of the temporopolar cortex (TPC) and its white matter (TPWM) in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) using MRI volumetry and texture analysis. We studied 23 patients with hippocampal atrophy, and 20 healthy controls. Gradient magnitude and entropy were calculated to model signal intensity blurring on T1‐MRI. Two observers assessed signal changes and atrophy visually. Compared to controls, TLE patients had a decrease in TPC and TPWM volume ipsilateral to the seizure focus. The gradient magnitude and entropy were decreased ipsilateral to the focus only in TPWM, indicating blurring of this compartment. Eighty‐seven percent of TLE patients had at least one volumetric or textural abnormality. Although sensitivity of visual and quantitative assessment of TPC atrophy was comparable (43 and 39%), specificity was higher for volumetry (54% vs. 95%). Compared to visual analysis of signal changes in TPWM on T1‐MRI, texture metrics had higher sensitivity (65% vs. 17%) and specificity (100% vs. 69%). The proportion of patients with blurring of TPWM as determined by texture analysis was higher than that seen on visual inspection of T2 images (78% vs. 43%). We found no clear association between volumetric or textural changes of TPC and TPWM and outcome after surgery. Structural changes of the anatomically distinct TPC and TPWM are found ipsilateral to the seizure focus in the majority of TLE patients with hippocampal sclerosis. MRI post‐processing allows dissociating different pathological tissue characteristics and shows that atrophy involves gray and white matter, whereas blurring is confined to white matter. Hum Brain Mapp, 2008. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Isocyanate exposure and occupational asthma: a case-referent study

OBJECTIVE To examine the quantitative relation between exposure to isocyanates and occupational asthma, and to explore the role of atopy and smoking in occurrence of the disease. METHOD A case-referent study was undertaken of cases from two manufacturing companies (A and B) from which referents without disease could be selected and reliable exposure measurements were available. In company A, 27 cases mainly attributed to toluene diisocyanate (TDI) were matched to 51 referents on work area, start and duration of employment, sex, and age. Exposures were estimated from existing measurements by job category. In company B there were seven cases attributed to 4,4′-diphenylmethane diisocyanate (MDI) in two areas of the plant; 12 non-cases from the same areas were used as referents. Personal exposure measurements were available for all cases and 11 referents. RESULTS No difference in peak exposures between cases and referents was found in either plant; but in both, time weighted average (TWA) exposures at the time of onset of asthma were higher for cases. In A, the mean TWA exposure for cases was 1.5 (95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.2 to 1.8) ppb compared with 1.2 (1.0 to 1.4) ppb for referents. From a matched analysis, the odds ratio (OR) associated with 8 hour TWA exposure to isocyanates greater than 1.125 ppb (the median concentration for the referent group) was 3.2 (95% CI 0.96 to 10.6; p=0.06). Occupational asthma was associated with a pre-employment history of atopic illness (OR 3.5, p=0.04) and, less strongly, with smoking (OR 2.1, p=0.14). In B, small numbers limited analysis, but three of seven cases had at least one TWA exposure measurement greater than 5 ppb compared with one of 11 referents (OR 7.5, p=0.09). CONCLUSION Asthma can occur at low concentrations of isocyanates, but even at low concentrations, the higher the exposure the greater the risk. By contrast with other studies, smoking and atopy seemed to increase the odds of occupational asthma due to isocyanates, but did not affect the estimate of risk associated with exposure.
Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Trends of Emerging Techniques for Augmented Reality-Based Maintenance

Augmented reality (AR) is a well-known technology that can be exploited to provide mass-market users an effective and customizable support in a large spectrum of personal applications, by overlapping computer-generated hints to the real world. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are playing a key role in the exponential growth of this kind of solutions. Nonetheless, there exists some application domains that just started to take advantage from the AR systems. Maintenance, repair, and assembly have been considered as strategic fields for the application of the AR technology from the 1990s, but often only specialists using ad hoc hardware were involved in limited experimental tests. Nowadays, AR-based maintenance and repair procedures are available also for end-users on consumer electronics devices. This paper aims to explore new challenges and opportunities of this technology, by also presenting the software framework that is being developed in the EASE-R3 project by exploiting reconfigurable AR procedures and tele-assistance to overcome some of the limitations of current solutions.
Survey Mental Health Status and Related Factors among Food Industry Workers in a Province of Iran

Most of the studies conducted on food workers were job-related physical illnesses and safety issues. Food industries workers may be exposed to mental disorders due to various work-related risk factors. Performing research in mental disorders is crucial because this factor has an important negative impact on job satisfaction and performance. This study was conducted among 636 workers of 11 food industries in Qom, a province of Iran, 2014. Data were collected using a general questionnaire for the demographic characteristic as well as general health questionnaire (GHQ-28). Data was analyzed by SPSS V20. All workers (except two point five percent) were males with a mean age of 31.96±7.48 years. The majorities (508; 79.9%) were married and others single. Based on the average scores released from GHQ (16.56±10.54), general Psychological morbidity was 20%. As well as for components i.e. somatic symptoms, sleep disorders and anxiety, social dysfunction and depression with 16%, 25.80%, 35.80% and 11.80% of food workers had experienced respectively. Data revealed that demographics might play an important role in mental health: single workers and men seem to be more affected by psychological distress than married personnel and women (p<0.05(. This relation between age and mental health were not significant (p>0.05). Studies have indicated tenuous links between working conditions, and health status. The mechanisms driving the association between work and health, however, remain uncertain and require further research. An intervention model for preventive efforts, regarding mental strain and mental ill-health in food industries is recommended.
Expressing Politeness in American TV Programmes

The bachelor thesis deals with the linguistic politeness topic, which has lately gained ground of the linguistic and pragmatic research of the English language. Given the broad field of the linguistic politeness and the limited extent of the bachelor thesis, the negative politeness and its devices stay ahead of the interest. The first part of the thesis analyses the principal theories of the linguistic politeness and their gradual development with the predominant focus on the Brown and Levinson{\crq}s politeness theory. The practical part of the thesis concerns already mentioned pragmatic markers, mainly the frequency of their usage and functions within the scope of linguistic politeness.