Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ocular ketoconazole-loaded proniosomal gels: formulation, ex vivo corneal permeation and in vivo studies

Abstract Context: Vesicular drug carriers for ocular delivery have gained a real potential. Proniosomal gels as ocular drug carriers have been proven to be an effective way to improve bioavailability and patient compliance. Objective: Formulation and in vitro/ex vivo/in vivo characterization of ketoconazole (KET)-loaded proniosomal gels for the treatment of ocular keratitis. Materials and methods: The effect of formulation variables; HLB value, type and concentration of non-ionic surfactants (Tweens, Spans, Brijs and Pluronics) with or without lecithin on the entrapment efficiency (EE%), vesicle size and in vitro KET release was evaluated. An ex vivo corneal permeation study to determine the level of KET in the external eye tissue of albino rabbits and an in vivo assessment of the level of KET in the aqueous humors were performed. Results and discussion: In vivo evaluation showed an increase in bioavailability up to 20-folds from the optimum KET proniosomal gel formula in the aqueous humor compared to drug suspension (KET-SP). The selected formulae were composed of spans being hydrophobic suggesting the potential use of a more hydrophobic surfactant as Span during the formulation of formulae. Factors that stabilize the vesicle membrane and increase the entrapment efficiency of KET (namely low HLB, long alkyl chain, high phase transition temperature) slowed down the release profile. Conclusions: Proniosomal gels as drug delivery carriers were proven to be a promising approach to increase corneal contact and permeation as well as retention time in the eye resulting in a sustained action and enhanced bioavailability.
Automating Workflow for Data Processing in Grid Architecture

Workflows are at the heart of data processing solutions. Because of the poor performance and the license cost, traditional relational database management systems are no longer good choices for processing huge amount of data. Nowadays many data processing companies turn to the workflow grid to process huge amount of data. Currently, the generation of workflow is made by human being, which is very tedious, labor intensive, and error prone, and hence becomes the bottleneck of the performance of data processing in the grid architecture. This paper proposes a workflow automation strategy that can replace the human being by a workflow generator that can automatically generate a workflow from given input. A prototype has been implemented and a simulation has been designed.
22. juli kommisjonen. Organisering, styring og ansvar [The 22. July Commission. Organization, steering and accountability].

textabstractINNLEIING 22. juli 2011 vart Norge ramma av to sjokkerande terroristangrep. Ei bilbombe oydela fleire sentrale regjeringsbygningar i Oslo og 8 personar vart drepne i angrepet. Nokre fa timar seinare vart 69 politisk aktive ungdomar fra Arbeiderpartiet si ungdomsorganisasjon massakrert pa ein leir pa Utoya – like nordvest for Oslo. Dei fleste av dei 69 offera var mellom 15 og 18 ar. Terroristen vart arrestert pa Utoya same kvelden og vedgjekk straks ugjerningane. Rettsaka vist at han var ein ‘einsam ulv’ som opererte aleine utan a vera tilknytt nokon organisasjon. 24. august 2012 vart han domt til 21 ars forvaring.
Glass Solutions for Packaging and IoT

Abstract The interest in glass as a semiconductor packaging material has continually grown over the past several years. Glass, and its material properties, provides many opportunities for application in advanced packaging. As an insulator, glass is well-suited due to its low electrical loss, particularly at high frequencies. The relatively high stiffness and ability to adjust coefficient of thermal expansion gives the opportunity to better manage warp in glass core substrates as well as bonded stacks, either in carrier or interposer applications. Forming processes allow the potential to both manufacture in a panel format as well as at thicknesses as low as 100 um. Both of these give real opportunity to provide cost-effective packaging solutions. Via fabrication technology development continues to advance providing via diameters < 20 um in size in a production ready environment. As the industry adopts glass solutions, significant advancements have been made in downstream processes such as glass handling an.
Do Autistic Traits Play a Role in the Bullying of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Social Phobia Sufferers?

Background: Social phobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) share several similarities: both are categorized as anxiety disorders, avoidant personality disorder and depression are common in both, they have a similar age of onset and course, and both disorders respond to treatments with serotonin reuptake inhibitors and cognitive behavioural therapy. However, OCD and social phobia differ in respect to their relation to autism spectrum disorders (ASD; i.e. Asperger’s syndrome, autism, pervasive disorder not otherwise specified). Findings that suggest a link between OCD and ASD have no parallel in social phobia. Moreover, obsessive-compulsive, paranoid and schizotypal personality disorders are prevalent in OCD and in ASD, but not in social phobia. Individuals with ASD are known to be frequent targets of bullying. We hypothesised that individuals with autistic traits would have been frequent targets for bullies during their childhood, as opposed to people without such traits. Methods: Adult patients with social phobia (n = 63) or OCD (n = 65) were assessed regarding autistic traits, and interviewed about being bullied at school. A reference group (n = 551) responded to questions about being bullied. Results: There was a significant difference in the prevalence of being bullied between OCD (50%), social phobia patients (20%) and the reference group (27%). Autistic traits were more common in OCD than in social phobia. A history of being bullied was related to autistic traits among patients. Conclusions: Falling victim to bullying is not a random event. Autistic traits, i.e. low social skills, may be a predictor of being bullied in school. The high rate of bullying victims in persons who later develop OCD is suggested to be related to the overlap between OCD and ASD.
SPC10-5: Computationally Efficient List Sphere Detectors with Reduced Storage Requirements

One method for approximating a-posteriori symbol probabilities is to marginalise over a reduced list of possible vectors. Several methods exist for obtaining suitable lists (e.g. the list sphere detector), but in many cases the list size required for an accurate approximation may still be large. This paper describes an implementation technique which removes the requirement for list storage, with minimal increase in complexity. The method updates the posterior probabilities in place, and works with any depth-first tree-search based detector. We then introduce a novel depth-first branch and bound algorithm, which is shown to be more computationally efficient than standard Fincke-Pohst enumeration. It is particularly effective in difficult channels, characterized by having channel matrices with small determinants.
Oceanobacillus limi sp. nov., a moderately halophilic bacterium from a salt lake.

A Gram-stain-positive, endospore-forming, rod-shaped, strictly aerobic, moderately halophilic bacterium, designated strain H9B(T), was isolated from a mud sample of the hypersaline lake Aran-Bidgol in Iran. Cells of strain H9B(T) were motile and produced colonies with a yellowish-grey pigment. Growth occurred between 2.5 and 10 % (w/v) NaCl and the isolate grew optimally at 7.5 % (w/v) NaCl. The optimum pH and temperature for growth of the strain were pH 7.0 and 35 °C, respectively, while it was able to grow over pH and temperature ranges of pH 6-10 and 25-45 °C, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed that strain H9B(T) is a member of the genus Oceanobacillus. The closest relative to this strain was Oceanobacillus profundus CL-MP28(T) with 97.1 % 16S rRNA gene sequences similarity. The level of DNA-DNA relatedness between the novel isolate and this phylogenetically related species was 17 %. The major cellular fatty acids of the isolate were anteiso-C15 : 0, anteiso-C17 : 0, iso-C15 : 0 and iso-C16 : 0. The polar lipid pattern of strain H9B(T) consisted of phosphatidylglycerol, diphosphatidylglycerol, four phospholipids and an aminolipid. It contained MK-7 as the predominant menaquinone and meso-diaminopimelic acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan. The G+C content of the genomic DNA of this strain was 37.1 mol%. Phenotypic characteristics, phylogenetic analysis and DNA-DNA relatedness data suggest that this strain represents a novel species of the genus Oceanobacillus, for which the name Oceanobacillus limi sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain of Oceanobacillus limi is strain H9B(T) ( = IBRC-M 10780(T) = KCTC 13823(T) = CECT 7997(T)).
Cognition and Behavior in Normal-Form Games: An Experimental Study

This paper reports experiments designed to measure strategic sophistication, the extent to which players' behavior reflects attempts to predict others' decisions, taking their incentives into account. Subjects played normal-form games with various patterns of iterated dominance and unique pure-strategy equilibria without dominance, using a computer interface that allowed them to look up hidden payoffs as often as desired, one at a time, while automatically recording their look-ups. Monitoring information search allows tests of game theory's implications for cognition as well as decisions, and subjects' deviations from search patterns suggested by equilibrium analysis help to predict their deviations from equilibrium decisions.
Persistence based analysis of consensus protocols for dynamic graph networks

This article deals with the consensus problem involving agents with time-varying singularities in the dynamics or communication in undirected graph networks. Existing results provide control laws which guarantee asymptotic consensus. These results are based on the analysis of a system switching between piecewise constant and time-invariant dynamics. This work introduces a new analysis technique relying upon classical notions of persistence of excitation to study the convergence properties of the time-varying multi-agent dynamics. Since the individual edge weights pass through singularities and vary with time, the closed-loop dynamics consists of a non-autonomous linear system. Instead of simplifying to a piecewise continuous switched system as in literature, smooth variations in edge weights are allowed, albeit assuming an underlying persistence condition which characterizes sufficient inter-agent communication to reach consensus. The consensus task is converted to edge-agreement in order to study a stabilization problem to which classical persistence based results apply. The new technique allows precise computation of the rate of convergence to the consensus value.
Necessity of high‐resolution for coarse‐grained modeling of flexible proteins

The popular MARTINI coarse‐grained (CG) force field requires the protein structure to be fixed, and is unsuitable for simulating dynamic processes such as protein folding. Here, we examine the feasibility of developing a flexible protein model within the MARTINI framework. The results demonstrate that the MARTINI CG scheme does not properly describe the volume and packing of protein backbone and side chains and leads to excessive collapse without structural restraints in explicit CG water. Combining atomistic protein representation with the MARTINI CG solvent, such as in the PACE model, dramatically improves description of flexible protein conformations. Yet, the CG solvent is insufficient to capture the conformational dependence of protein–solvent interactions, and PACE is unable to properly model context dependent conformational transitions. Taken together, high physical resolution at or near the atomistic level is likely necessary for flexible protein models with explicit, microscopic solvents, and the coarse‐graining needs to focus on possible simplification in interaction potentials. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Multiple Mating But Not Recombination Causes Quantitative Increase in Offspring Genetic Diversity for Varying Genetic Architectures

Explaining the evolution of sex and recombination is particularly intriguing for some species of eusocial insects because they display exceptionally high mating frequencies and genomic recombination rates. Explanations for both phenomena are based on the notion that both increase colony genetic diversity, with demonstrated benefits for colony disease resistance and division of labor. However, the relative contributions of mating number and recombination rate to colony genetic diversity have never been simultaneously assessed. Our study simulates colonies, assuming different mating numbers, recombination rates, and genetic architectures, to assess their worker genotypic diversity. The number of loci has a strong negative effect on genotypic diversity when the allelic effects are inversely scaled to locus number. In contrast, dominance, epistasis, lethal effects, or limiting the allelic diversity at each locus does not significantly affect the model outcomes. Mating number increases colony genotypic variance and lowers variation among colonies with quickly diminishing returns. Genomic recombination rate does not affect intra- and inter-colonial genotypic variance, regardless of mating frequency and genetic architecture. Recombination slightly increases the genotypic range of colonies and more strongly the number of workers with unique allele combinations across all loci. Overall, our study contradicts the argument that the exceptionally high recombination rates cause a quantitative increase in offspring genotypic diversity across one generation. Alternative explanations for the evolution of high recombination rates in social insects are therefore needed. Short-term benefits are central to most explanations of the evolution of multiple mating and high recombination rates in social insects but our results also apply to other species.
Robust minutiae hash for fingerprint template protection

A robust fingerprint minutiae hash generation algorithm is proposed in this paper to extract a binary secure hash bit string from each fingerprint minutia and its vicinity. First, ordering of minutiae points and rotation and translation geometric alignment of each minutiae vicinity are achieved; second, the ordered and aligned points are diversified by offsetting their coordinates and angles in a random way; and finally, an ordered binary minutia hash bit string is extracted by quantizing the coordinates and angle values of the points in the diversified minutiae vicinity. The generated hashes from all minutiae vicinities in the original template form a protected template, which can be used to represent the original minutia template for identity verification. Experiments show desirable comparison performance (average Equal Error Rate 0.0233 using the first two samples of each finger in FVC2002DB2_A) by the proposed algorithm. The proposed biometric reference requires less template storage capacity compared to their unprotected counterparts. A security analysis is also given for the proposed algorithm.
Visual tracking by appearance modeling and sparse representation

Appearance variation is a big challenge for object tracking. To deal with this problem, we propose a robust tracking method by online appearance modeling and sparse representation. In this method, we use the intensity matrix of image to represent the object, and learn a low dimensional subspace online to model the object appearance variations during tracking. Then applying the recent theory of sparse representation [1], we construct a likelihood function to measure the similarity between an object candidate and the learned appearance model. After that, tracking is led by the Bayesian inference framework, in which a particle filter is utilized to recursively estimate the object state over time. Theoretic analysis and experiments compared with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
An Overview about the DynaQuest Framework

The DynaQuest-Framework should reduce the effort for the creation of Internet-based virtual databases. These virtual databases are a special kind of federated database systems where the sources are no fully-fledged databases with a query language but rather simple and restricted data provider, like web-form-based sources (”hidden web”) or web services. To support the development of these systems, DynaQuest concerns four different aspects: a source description format, a source selection process, a query execution and monitoring framework to execute queries, and finally an agent based architecture with integrates the different components of DynaQuest.
A Noisy-Channel Account of Crosslinguistic Word-Order Variation

The distribution of word orders across languages is highly nonuniform, with subject-verb-object (SVO) and subject-object-verb (SOV) orders being prevalent. Recent work suggests that the SOV order may be the default in human language. Why, then, is SVO order so common? We hypothesize that SOV/SVO variation can be explained by language users’ sensitivity to the possibility of noise corrupting the linguistic signal. In particular, the noisy-channel hypothesis predicts a shift from the default SOV order to SVO order for semantically reversible events, for which potential ambiguity arises in SOV order because two plausible agents appear on the same side of the verb. We found support for this prediction in three languages (English, Japanese, and Korean) by using a gesture-production task, which reflects word-order preferences largely independent of native language. Other patterns of crosslinguistic variation (e.g., the prevalence of case marking in SOV languages and its relative absence in SVO languages) also straightforwardly follow from the noisy-channel hypothesis.
Elliptic Curve Based Zero Knowledge Proofs and their Applicability on Resource Constrained Devices

As the Internet of Things (IOT) arises, the use of low-end devices on a daily basis increases. The wireless nature of communication that these devices provide raises security and privacy issues. For protecting a user's privacy, cryptography offers the tool of zero knowledge proofs (ZKP). In this paper, we study well-established ZKP protocols based on the discrete logarithm problem and we adapt them to the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) setting, which consists an ideal candidate for embedded implementations. Then, we implement the proposed protocols on Wiselib, a generic and open source algorithmic library. For the first time, we present a thorough evaluation of the protocols on two popular hardware platforms equipped with low end microcontrollers (Jennic JN5139, TI MSP430) and 802.15. 4 RF transceivers, in terms of code size, execution time, message size and energy requirements. This work's results can be used from developers who wish to achieve certain levels of privacy in their applications.
Acoustic emission source characterisation using evolutionary optimisation

When a crack initiates and grows in a metal or composite structure, for example, due to high cycle fatigue, the crack propagation gives rise to acoustic emissions (AE)—ultrasonic waves travelling through the structure. Because the presence and rate of growth of any cracks are important pieces of information about the condition or health of the structure, the monitoring of AE activity using sensors mounted on its surface is a potentially useful technique of structural health monitoring. In tests, acoustic emissions are often simulated by breaking a pencil lead against the surface of the structure in a standardised way (a "Hsu‐Nielsen" source), but the forces that this imparts are not well understood at present. The current paper proposes a new evolutionary optimisation‐based approach to source characterisation. The principle is to introduce a parametrised representation of a general source and then identify the parameters that allow the source to best match responses measured elsewhere on the structure. The predicted responses are modelled using a local interaction simulation approach (LISA) algorithm to simulate the propagation of the ultrasonic waves. The approach is validated here using experiments on AE propagation in thin plate‐like structures, where the ultrasound propagates as Lamb waves. Three separate case studies are proposed here. In the first case, an idealised point source is simulated using laser‐generated ultrasound, and the optimisation algorithm uses a two‐dimensional LISA model. A differential evolution optimisation scheme is used to find the optimal profile of forcing to match the simulation with experiment. In the second case, the two‐dimensional LISA approach is used to characterise the forces associated with standard pencil lead breaks. The final study addresses the full three‐dimensional wave propagation. Because of the computational expense of the latter calculation, the LISA algorithm is implemented using a CUDA graphics card computer system.
Nonlinear control evaluation of two-stage matrix converter using ideal and non-ideal IGBT Models

This paper describes the use of an AC-AC matrix converter, as an alternative to back-to-back converters, to interface a high-speed micro-turbine generator to a utility load as a distributed generation unit. Principals of spatial modulation and IGBT bidirectional switch commutation in matrix converters are reviewed. The two-stage matrix converter presented is controlled by means of a feedback linearization technique and evaluated considering ideal and non-ideal IGBT Models. The assessment considers the input power factor expectations in each configuration, filter parameters accuracy and numerical issues in simulation results.
Sirtuins, Metabolism, and Cancer

More than a decade ago, sirtuins were discovered as a highly conserved family of NAD+-dependent enzymes that extend lifespan in lower organisms. In mammals, sirtuins are key regulators of stress responses and metabolism, influencing a range of diseases, including diabetes, neurodegeneration, and cancer. In recent years, new functions of sirtuins have been characterized, uncovering the underlying mechanisms of their multifaceted role in metabolism. Here, we specifically review recent progress on the role of sirtuins in DNA repair and energy metabolism, further discussing the implication of sirtuins in the biology of cancer.
The role of genetically engineered pigs in xenotransplantation research

There is a critical shortage in the number of deceased human organs that become available for the purposes of clinical transplantation. This problem might be resolved by the transplantation of organs from pigs genetically engineered to protect them from the human immune response. The pathobiological barriers to successful pig organ transplantation in primates include activation of the innate and adaptive immune systems, coagulation dysregulation and inflammation. Genetic engineering of the pig as an organ source has increased the survival of the transplanted pig heart, kidney, islet and corneal graft in non‐human primates (NHPs) from minutes to months or occasionally years. Genetic engineering may also contribute to any physiological barriers that might be identified, as well as to reducing the risks of transfer of a potentially infectious micro‐organism with the organ. There are now an estimated 40 or more genetic alterations that have been carried out in pigs, with some pigs expressing five or six manipulations. With the new technology now available, it will become increasingly common for a pig to express even more genetic manipulations, and these could be tested in the pig‐to‐NHP models to assess their efficacy and benefit. It is therefore likely that clinical trials of pig kidney, heart and islet transplantation will become feasible in the near future. Copyright © 2015 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.