Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evidence-based medicine: quality and comparability of clinical trials investigating the efficacy of prostaglandin F2α for the treatment of bovine endometritis

The objective of this study was to evaluate the quality and comparability of published literature, and to summarize the effect of prostaglandin F2α (PGF2α) for the treatment of endometritis. It has been postulated that there is a dearth of high-level evidence-based research results in veterinary medicine. Also, there is a marked variation in the quality of studies in veterinary and animal science. Post-partum uterine infections occur commonly in dairy cattle and are reported to have a negative impact on reproductive performance. A comprehensive literature search was conducted utilizing online databases revealing a total of 2723 references. After applying specific exclusion criteria, a total of 68 trials were eligible for further analysis. These articles were evaluated utilizing specific parameters listed in an evaluation form such as randomization and the involvement of control groups. The analysis revealed that more than half of the trials (51·5%) were at least 20 years old. Furthermore, we found that about one third (36·8%) of all trials were controlled and randomized, while 3 of those (4·4%) were also blinded. Of those trials which calculated a calving-to-conception interval (n=30), 50% of the authors claimed an improvement, which was statistically significant in 23·3% of the cases. We conclude that there is a wide discrepancy between research results investigating the efficacy of PGF2α.
Monoaminergic control of spinal locomotor networks in SOD1G93A newborn mice

Mutations in the gene that encodes Cu/Zn-superoxide dismutase (SOD1) are the cause of approximately 20% of familial forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disease characterized by the progressive loss of motor neurons. While ALS symptoms appear in adulthood, spinal motoneurons exhibit functional alterations as early as the embryonic and postnatal stages in the murine model of ALS, the SOD1 mice. Monoaminergic – i.e., dopaminergic (DA), serotoninergic (5-HT), and noradrenergic (NA) – pathways powerfully control spinal networks and contribute significantly to their embryonic and postnatal maturation. Alterations in monoaminergic neuromodulation during development could therefore lead to impairments in the motoneuronal physiology. In this study, we sought to determine whether the monoaminergic spinal systems are modified in the early stages of development in SOD1 mice. Using a post-mortem analysis by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), monoaminergic neuromodulators and their metabolites were quantified in the lumbar spinal cord of SOD1 and wild-type (WT) mice aged one postnatal day (P1) and P10. This analysis underscores an increased content of DA in the SOD1 lumbar spinal cord compared to that of WT mice but failed to reveal any modification of the other monoaminergic contents. In a next step, we compared the efficiency of the monoaminergic compounds in triggering and modulating fictive locomotion in WT and SOD1 mice. This study was performed in P1–P3 SOD1 mice and age-matched control littermates using extracellular recordings from the lumbar ventral roots in the in vitro isolated spinal cord preparation. This analysis revealed that the spinal networks of SOD1G93A mice could generate normal locomotor activity in the presence of NMA-5-HT. Interestingly, we also observed that SOD1 spinal networks have an increased sensitivity to NA compared to WT spinal circuits but exhibited similar DA responses.
A Pre-Run-Time Scheduling Algorithm For Hard Real-Time Systems

Process scheduling, an important issue in the design and maintenance of hard real-time systems, is discussed. A pre-run-time scheduling algorithm that addresses the problem of process sequencing is presented. The algorithm is designed for multiprocessor applications with preemptable processes having release times, computation times, deadlines and arbitrary precedence and exclusion constraints. The algorithm uses a branch-and-bound implicit enumeration technique to generate a feasible schedule for each processor. The set of feasible schedules ensures that the timing specifications of the processes are observed and that all the precedence and exclusion constraints between pairs of processes are satisfied. the algorithm was tested using a model derived from the F-18 mission computer operational flight program. >
A quantitative assessment of the insertional footprints of the hip joint capsular ligaments and their spanning fibers for reconstruction

Quantitative descriptions of the hip joint capsular ligament insertional footprints have been reported. Using a three‐dimensional digitizing system, and computer modeling, the area, and dimensions of the three main hip capsular ligaments and their insertional footprints were quantified in eight cadaveric hips. The iliofemoral ligament (ILFL) attaches proximally to the anterolateral supra‐acetabular region (mean area = 4.2 cm2). The mean areas of the ILFL lateral and medial arm insertional footprints are 4.8 and 3.1 cm2, respectively. The pubofemoral ligament (proximal footprint mean area = 1.4 cm2) blends with the medial ILFL anteriorly and the proximal ischiofemoral ligament (ISFL) distally without a distal bony insertion. The proximal and distal ISFL footprint mean areas are 6.4 and 1.2 cm2, respectively. The hip joint capsular ligaments have consistent anatomic and insertional patterns. Quantification of the ligaments and their attachment sites may aid in improving anatomic repairs and reconstructions of the hip joint capsule using open and/or arthroscopic techniques. Clin. Anat. 27:489–497, 2014. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
ESTIMATING THE RISK OF CATTLE EXPOSURE TO TUBERCULOSIS POSED BY WILD DEER RELATIVE TO BADGERS IN ENGLAND AND WALES

Wild deer populations in Great Britain are expanding in range and probably in numbers, and relatively high prevalence of bovine tuberculosis (bTB, caused by infection with Mycobacterium bovis) in deer occurs locally in parts of southwest England. To evaluate the M. bovis exposure risk posed to cattle by wild deer relative to badgers in England and Wales, we constructed and parameterized a quantitative risk model with the use of information from the literature (on deer densities, activity patterns, bTB epidemiology, and pathology) and contemporary data on deer, cattle, and badger (Meles meles) distribution and abundance. The median relative risk score for each of the four deer species studied—red (Cervus elaphus), fallow (Dama dama), and roe (Capreolus capreolus) deer, and muntjac (Muntiacus reevesi)—was lower than unity (the relative risk set for badgers, the putative main wildlife reservoir of M. bovis in England and Wales). However, the 95th percentiles associated with risk estimates were large, and the upper limits for all four deer species exceeded unity. Although M. bovis exposure risks to cattle from deer at pasture are likely to be lower than those from badgers across most areas of England and Wales where cattle are affected by bTB because these areas coincide with high-density badger populations but not high-density deer populations, we predict the presence of localized areas where relative risks posed by deer may be considerable. Moreover, wherever deer are infected, risks to cattle may be additive to those posed by badgers. There are considerable knowledge gaps associated with bTB in deer, badgers, and cattle, and data available for model parameterization were generally of low quality and high variability, and consequently model output were subject to some uncertainty. Improved estimates of the proportion of time that deer of each species spend at pasture, the likelihood and magnitude of M. bovis excretion, and local badger and deer densities appear most important for improving estimates of relative risk in this system.
Users Divided? Exploring the Gender Gap in Internet Use

Many believe that males and females use and regard computer technology differently. Males are generally assumed to be more comfortable with, more adaptable to, and less anxious with computer technology. The same biases are now being applied specifically to Internet technology. Based on research showing that men prefer to use the Internet for information gathering and entertainment, while women prefer to use the Internet for interpersonal communication, this study examined the effects of Internet use when both males and females engaged in the same activity. Participants engaged in synchronous, dyadic chat sessions, and changes in repeated measures of loneliness, depression, self-esteem, and perceived social support were tracked over time. Although previous studies have concluded not only that males and females differ in their computer cognitions and attitudes, but also that they differ in the types of applications they pursue online, no gender differences were found in the present study.
Cytokines in Alcoholic Liver Disease

Cytokines are low-molecular-weight mediators of cellular communication produced by multiple cell types in the liver, with the Kupffer cell critically important. Inflammatory cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor, interleukin-1, and interleukin-8, and hepatic acute-phase cytokines such as interleukin-6 play a role in modulating certain metabolic complications in alcoholic liver disease and probably play a role in the liver injury of alcoholic liver disease. Two potential inducers of cytokine production in alcoholic liver disease are endotoxin and reactive oxygen species generated after ethanol metabolism. Cytotoxic cytokines likely induce liver cell death by both necrosis and apoptosis in alcoholic liver disease. Anticytokine therapy has been highly successful in attenuating cell injury/death in a variety of toxin-induced models of liver injury, including alcohol-related liver injury. Anticytokine therapy has been used successfully in humans in disease processes such as Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis. There is an emerging rationale for use of anticytokine therapy in alcoholic liver disease, with the goal of maintaining beneficial effects of cytokines and inhibition of the deleterious effects of these potentially toxic agents.
Dielectrophoretic separation of bioparticles in microdevices: A review

In recent years, dielectrophoretic force has been used to manipulate colloids, inert particles, and biological microparticles, such as red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, cancer cells, bacteria, yeast, microorganisms, proteins, DNA, etc. This specific electrokinetic technique has been used for trapping, sorting, focusing, filtration, patterning, assembly, and separating biological entities/particles suspended in a buffer medium. Dielectrophoretic forces acting on particles depend on various parameters, for example, charge of the particle, geometry of the device, dielectric constant of the medium and particle, and physiology of the particle. Therefore, to design an effective micro‐/nanofluidic separation platform, it is necessary to understand the role of the aforementioned parameters on particle motion. In this paper, we review studies particularly related to dielectrophoretic separation in microfluidic devices. Both experimental and theoretical works by several researchers are highlighted in this article covering AC and DC DEP. In addition, AC/DC DEP, which uses a combination of low frequency AC and DC voltage to manipulate bioparticles, has been discussed briefly. Contactless DEP, a variation of DC DEP in which electrodes do not come in contact with particles, has also been reviewed. Moreover, dielectrophoretic force‐based field flow fractionations are featured to demonstrate the bioparticle separation in microfluidic device. In numerical front, a comprehensive review is provided starting from the most simplified effective moment Stokes‐drag (EMSD) method to the most advanced interface resolved method. Unlike EMSD method, recently developed advanced numerical methods consider the size and shape of the particle in the electric and flow field calculations, and these methods provide much more accurate results than the EMSD method for microparticles.
Telco Clouds - Modelling and Simulation

In this paper, we propose a telco cloud meta-model that can be used to simulate different infrastructure con- figurations and explore their consequences on the system performance and costs. To achieve this, we analyse current telecommunication and data centre infrastructure paradigms, describe the architecture of the telco cloud and detail the benefits of merging both infrastructures in a unified system. Next, we detail the dynamics of the telco cloud and identify the components that are the most relevant from the perspective of modelling performance and cost. A number of well established simulation technologies exist for most of the telco cloud components, we thus proceed with surveying existing models in an attempt to construct a suitable composite meta-model. Finally, we present a showcase scenario to demonstrate the scope of our telco cloud simulator. (Less)
Finding Interesting Patterns Using User Expectations

One of the major problems in the field of knowledge discovery (or data mining) is the interestingness problem. Past research and applications have found that, in practice, it is all too easy to discover a huge number of patterns in a database. Most of these patterns are actually useless or uninteresting to the user. But due to the huge number of patterns, it is difficult for the user to comprehend them and to identify those interesting to him/her. To prevent the user from being overwhelmed by the large number of patterns, techniques are needed to rank them according to their interestingness. In this paper, we propose such a technique, called the user-expectation method. In this technique, the user is first asked to provide his/her expected patterns according to his/her past knowledge or intuitive feelings. Given these expectations, the system uses a fuzzy matching technique to match the discovered patterns against the user's expectations, and then rank the discovered patterns according to the matching results. A variety of rankings can be performed for different purposes, such as to confirm the user's knowledge and to identify unexpected patterns, which are by definition interesting. The proposed technique is general and interactive.
Selective Random Cyclic Delay Diversity for HARQ in Cooperative Relay

In the next generation cellular system, relay has been considered to increase coverage extension and cell-edge throughput. Cooperative relay can provide transmission diversity gain to improve outage probability, overall throughput and energy efficiency. Cooperative beamforming has been considered as one of the cooperative relay if the relay nodes can get the feedback information from the destination. In this paper, a new cooperative relay scheme is proposed for hop-by-hop HARQ in cooperative relay. The scheme is to adopt selective random cyclic delay diversity (CDD) to the retransmission in HARQ, which can get rid of the relative bad relay nodes and form a better frequency selective channel to exploit diversity gain when channel coding is used. Performance evaluation and analysis have shown that the selective random CDD can achieve higher throughput and lower transmission delay than the conventional cooperative beamforming.
DYT1 directly regulates the expression of TDF1 for tapetum development and pollen wall formation in Arabidopsis.

The tapetum plays a critical role during the development and maturation of microspores. DYSFUNCTIONAL TAPETUM 1 (DYT1) is essential for early tapetal development. Here, we determined that the promoter region (-550 to -463 bp) contains indispensable cis-elements for DYT1 expression. Although DYT1 transcripts can be detected in both meiocytes and tapetal cells, localization of DYT1-GFP demonstrated that DYT1 is strictly located in tapetal cells during microsporogenesis. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) analysis revealed that DYT1 directly binds the promoter region of Defective in Tapetal Development and Function 1 (TDF1), a transcription factor essential for tapetum development. When TDF1 driven by the DYT1 promoter is expressed in a dyt1 mutant, the expression of the transcription factors AMS, MS188/MYB80, TEK and MS1 and the pollen wall-related genes are restored. Although the pollen wall is not formed and the microspores are ruptured, DIOC2 staining showed that fatty acids, the precursors of the pollen wall, were synthesized in the transgenic lines. These results indicate that DYT1 regulates the expression of AMS, MS188/MYB80, TEK and MS1 for pollen wall formation, primarily via TDF1.
Joint antenna selection and link adaptation for MIMO systems

Based on the observation that link adaptation and antenna selection problems are often coupled, this paper studies the problem of joint antenna subset selection and link adaptation for MIMO systems. After the formulation of the multidimensional joint optimization problem, the main contribution of this paper lies in the design of efficient algorithms approaching the optimal solution for both uncorrelated and correlated MIMO channels. Specifically, we propose one simplified antenna selection and link adaptation rule based on the expected optimal number of active antennas for uncorrelated MIMO with Raleigh fading, and one for correlated MIMO channels only based on the slowly varying channel correlation information. Our proposed algorithms are verified through numerical results, demonstrating significant gains over traditional MIMO signaling while feasible for practical implementation.
Repository ISTITUZIONALE

It is a common belief that using a virtual machine for portable executions of data-plane packet-processing applications would introduce too many penalties in terms of performance, because of the assumed overhead caused by the presence of a hardware abstraction layer. Even if common sense proves true in the case of general purpose virtual machines, such as the JVM and the CLR, it may be wrong in case of a special-purpose network-oriented virtual machine. This paper describes the architecture of a run-time environment and a compiler infrastructure for the Network Virtual Machine (NetVM), showing that the portability of packet-processing programs can be achieved without additional penalties even over heterogeneous platforms. Our implementation supports three different target architectures: one with a general purpose processor (Intel x86), one with a multi-core network processor (Cavium Octeon) and one with a systolic-array network processor (Xelerated X11), and shows that the NetVM model ( i ) is able to abstract such heterogeneous platforms and ( ii ) enables the exploitation of hardware functionalities provided by the specific architecture; finally, it demonstrates that the performances of NetVM programs compiled into native code are comparable to those obtained using commercial general purpose compilers.
Research on Mining Common Concern via Infinite Topic Modelling

This paper focuses on mining common concern among different textual data sources and analyzing their own eigen topics via infinite topic modelling. By incorporating non-parametric Bayesian approaches, our work achieves a good performance and better accords with the reality by avoiding restrictive assumptions. We proposed extended processes of Dirichlet process(DP) -- bidirectional stick-breaking process and multi-branches process -- based on strick-breaking construction to model multiple sequences of probability measures in one process rather than simply combine several DPs. On the basis of this new perspective of DP, we discover the common topics and eigen topics via infinite topic modelling in a simple way without setting topic number. The experiments are carried out on three corpora of BBC news, about the UK, the US and China forum respectively. The results present the common concern of these three districts and their eigen interests in other aspects.
Plasma vitamin A and zinc levels in HIV-infected adults in Cape Town, South Africa

A cross-sectional study of 132 adults attending an HIV clinic in Cape Town, South Africa, was conducted to determine predictors of low plasma vitamin A and Zn levels. No patients were on antiretroviral therapy. The possible confounding effect of the acute-phase response was controlled by including C-reactive protein levels in multivariate analysis and by excluding active opportunistic infections. Retinol levels were low (<1·05 μmol/l) in 39 % of patients with early disease (WHO clinical stages I and II) compared with 48 and 79 % of patients with WHO stage III and IV respectively (P<0·01). Plasma Zn levels were low (<10·7 μmol/l) in 20 % of patients with early disease v. 36 and 45 % with stage III and IV disease respectively (P<0·05). C-reactive protein levels were normal in 63 % of subjects. Weak, positive associations were found between CD4+ lymphocyte count and plasma levels of retinol (r 0·27; 95 % CI 0·1, 0·43) and Zn (r 0·31; 95 % CI 0·25, 0·46). Multivariate analysis showed the following independent predictors of low retinol levels: WHO stage IV (odds ratio 3·4; 95 % CI 2·1, 5·7) and body weight (odds ratio per 5 kg decrease 1·15; 95 % CI, 1·08, 1·25), while only body weight was significantly associated with low Zn levels (OR per 5 kg decrease 1·19; 95 % CI 1·09, 1·30). CD4+ lymphocyte count <200/μl was not significantly associated with either low retinol or Zn levels. In resource-poor settings, simple clinical features (advanced disease and/or weight loss) are associated with lowered blood concentrations of vitamin A and/or Zn. The clinical significance of low plasma retinol and/or Zn levels is unclear and more research is required to establish the role of multiple micronutrient intervention strategies in HIV disease.
Trends in the Inpatient Quality Indicators: The Veterans Health Administration Experience

Background:The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Inpatient Quality Indicators (IQIs), which include in-hospital mortality and utilization rates, have received little attention in the Veterans Health Administration (VA), despite extensive private sector use for quality improvement. Objectives:We examined the following: the feasibility of applying the IQIs to VA data; temporal trends in national VA IQI rates; temporal and regional IQI trends in geographic areas defined by Veterans Integrated Service Networks' (VISNs); and VA versus non-VA (Nationwide Inpatient Sample) temporal trends. Methods:We derived VA- and VISN-level IQI observed rates, risk-adjusted rates, and observed to expected ratios (O/Es), using VA inpatient data (2004–2007). We examined the trends in VA- and VISN-level rates using weighted linear regression, variation in VISN-level O/Es, and compared VA to non-VA trends. Results:VA in-hospital mortality rates from selected medical conditions (stroke, hip fracture, pneumonia) decreased significantly over time; procedure-related mortality rates were unchanged. Laparoscopic cholecystectomy rates increased significantly. A few VISNs were consistently high or low outliers for the medical-related mortality IQIs. Within any given year, utilization indicators, especially cardiac catheterization and cholecystectomy, showed the most inter-VISN variation. Compared with the non-VA, VA medical-related mortality rates for the above-mentioned conditions decreased more rapidly, whereas laparascopic cholecystectomy rates rose more steeply. Conclusions:The IQIs are easily applied to VA administrative data. They can be useful to tracks rate trends over time, reveal variation between sites, and for trend comparisons with other healthcare systems. By identifying potential quality events related to mortality and utilization, they may complement existing VA quality improvement initiatives.