Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Send Orders of Reprints at Reprints@benthamscience.net Acetylcholinesterase Inhibitors: Pharmacology and Toxicology

Acetylcholinesterase is involved in the termination of impulse transmission by rapid hydrolysis of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in numerous cholinergic pathways in the central and peripheral nervous systems. The enzyme inactivation, induced by various inhibitors, leads to acetylcholine accumulation, hyperstimulation of nicotinic and muscarinic receptors, and disrupted neurotransmission. Hence, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, interacting with the enzyme as their primary target, are applied as relevant drugs and toxins. This review presents an overview of toxicology and pharmacology of reversible and irreversible acetylcholinesterase inactivating compounds. In the case of reversible inhibitors being commonly applied in neurodegenerative disorders treatment, special attention is paid to currently approved drugs (donepezil, rivastigmine and galantamine) in the pharmacotherapy of Alzheimer's disease, and toxic carbamates used as pesticides. Subsequently, mechanism of irreversible acetylcholinesterase inhibition induced by organophosphorus compounds (insecticides and nerve agents), and their specific and nonspecific toxic effects are described, as well as irreversible inhibitors having pharmacological implementation. In addition, the pharmacological treatment of intoxication caused by organophosphates is presented, with emphasis on oxime reactivators of the inhibited enzyme activity administering as causal drugs after the poisoning. Besides, organophosphorus and carbamate insecticides can be detoxified in mammals through enzymatic hydrolysis before they reach targets in the nervous system. Carboxylesterases most effectively decompose carbamates, whereas the most successful route of organophosphates detoxification is their degradation by corresponding phosphotriesterases. 1. CHOLINESTERASES Cholinesterase is a family of enzymes that catalyzes the hydrolysis of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh) into choline and acetic acid, a reaction necessary to allow a cholinergic neuron to return to its resting state after activation. It involves two types: 1. Acetylcholinesterase (AChE, acetycholine acetylhydrolase, E.C. 3.1.1.7) is found in many types of conducting tissue: nerve and muscle, central and peripheral tissues, motor and sensory fibers, and cholinergic and noncholinergic fibers. The activity of AChE is higher in motor neurons than in sensory neurons [1-3]. AChE is also found in the red blood cell membranes, where it constitutes the Yt blood group antigen. The enzyme exists in multiple molecular forms, which possess similar catalytic properties, but differ in their oligomeric assembly and mode of attachment to the cell surface. In the mammalian brain the majority of AChE occurs as a tetrameric, G4 form (10) with much smaller amounts of a monomeric G1 (4S) form [4]. as plasma cholinesterase, butyrylcholinesterase, or acylcholine acylhydrolase, is found primarily in the liver. Different from AChE, BuChE hydrolyzes butyrylcholine more quickly than ACh [5]. The …
Searching for invariants using genetic programming and mutation testing

Invariants are concise and useful descriptions of a program's behaviour. As most programs are not annotated with invariants, previous research has attempted to automatically generate them from source code. In this paper, we propose a new approach to invariant generation using search. We reuse the trace generation front-end of existing tool Daikon and integrate it with genetic programming and a mutation testing tool. We demonstrate that our system can find the same invariants through search that Daikon produces via template instantiation, and we also find useful invariants that Daikon does not. We then present a method of ranking invariants such that we can identify those that are most interesting, through a novel application of program mutation.
From MU massive MISO to pathwise MU massive MIMO

The Interfering Broadcast Channel (IBC) applies to the downlink of cellular and heterogenous networks, which are limited by multi-user (MU) interference. The interference alignment (IA) concept has shown that interference does not need to be inevitable. In particular spatial IA in MIMO IBC allows for low latency. However, IA requires perfect and typically global Channel State Information at the Transmitter(s) (CSIT), whose acquisition does not scale with network size. Hence, designs that are optimal in terms of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) may not be so in terms of more relevant net DoF, accounting for CSI acquistion or at finite SNR. Also, the design of transmitters (Txs) and receivers (Rxs) is coupled and hence needs to be centralized or duplicated. Here we propose to take advantage of Massive MIMO simplifications, esp. for mmWave, by considering (multi-)path CSIT for crosslinks, which can be obtained without feedback. We consider a hierarchical cross/direct link beamformer design, maximizing Weighted Sum Rate (WSR) with partial CSIT at finite SNR, requiring on local CSIT. We also point out the use of receive antennas in genuine MU Massive MIMO.
Load-Balanced Recovery Schemes for Single-Disk Failure in Storage Systems with Any Erasure Code

As increasingly growing volume of data demanding high reliability are stored in disk arrays protected by erasure code, various codes with different error detection and correction capabilities are proposed. For higher reliability, codes that can correct multiple errors (such as RDP, EVENODD, and STAR) become popular. For each of the codes, there can be a number of recovery schemes for re-generating lost data. Among them the one recovering data for a single disk failure is the most critical to systems' performance and reliability as in most systems the recovery process is initiated as soon as the first failure is detected to reduce the window of vulnerability. Although there are efforts on improving recovery performance for single-disk failure, they either focus only on minimizing the total amount of data accessed for the recovery, which is not necessarily translated into minimal recovery time, or design only for specific codes and lack generality. In this paper, we propose two recovery algorithms that can not only work with any erasure code and produce minimal amount of accessed data, but also minimize the variation of volume of the data accessed on different disks. By minimizing the variation, the disk access can be fully parallelized and the recovery load is balanced, resulting in a faster recovery. We have implemented the recovery schemes in the Jerasure (ver. 1.2) library and evaluated them on a system with 16 SAS disks. Our measurements show that the recovery schemes generated by our algorithms reduce the recovery time for single disk failure situations by as high as 19.9% compared with the state-of-the-art recovery schemes.
Imaging coseismic rupture in far field by slip patches

SUMMARY Since the end of the 1970s, teleseismic waves are used routinely to infer the first-order characteristics of the event (location, depth, duration, focal mechanism), but finding the second-order kinematic parameters (spatial distribution of slip, rupture velocity and more basically the discrimination between the fault plane and the other nodal plane) of distant events remains a difficult task. Classically, these events are studied by two different methods; either they are seen as a succession of subevents, each of which is considered as a point source, or like in near field, as extended sources where the kinematic parameters are retrieved on a grid. The first approach is not physically satisfactory and can lead to erroneous interpretations of the
Four meanings of introversion: Social, thinking, anxious, and inhibited introversion: (634112013-457)

Guilford demonstrated in the 1930s that the various attempts at transforming Jungian and other conceptualizations of Introversion-Extroversion into personality questionnaires were resulting in ambiguous multiple-factor scales. Proposed measurement models subdividing introversion into components resulted in heated but inconclusive debate, as exemplified by the exchange between Eysenck and Guilford in 1977 and seen again in the critique of Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, and Shao (2000) by Ashton, Lee, and Paunonen (2002). Carrigan (1960) argued that introversion was not effectively captured as a unitary construct, and pressure to clearly define introversion with a comprehensive conceptual and operational model continues (e.g., Block, 1995; 2010).
Discovering Emerging Businesses

In the last few years, extensive research has been done on user-item graphs in order to enable modern users to easily find interesting new items and tap into the so-called ”long tail”. We focused on the problem of restaurants in a network which have limited amount of reviews. We intend to understand the impact that initial reviewers have on predicting the success of a business, and using these insights to aid in developing a recommender system for restaurants with low review counts. Since traditional collaborative filtering and latent factor models perform poorly with little data, we explore how SimRank and the Status of initial reviewers can help predict how successful an emerging business will be.
Detecting Screen Shot Images within Large-Scale Video Archive

In this paper a particular issue is addressed: matching still images (screen shots) with videos. A content-based similarity search approach using image queries is proposed. A fast method based on local visual patterns both for matching and indexing is employed. But we argue that using every frames may limit the scalability of the approach. Therefore only keyframes are extracted and used. The main contribution of this paper is an investigation over the trade-off between accuracy and scalability using different keyframe rates for sampling the video database. This trade-off is evaluated on a ground truth using a large reference video database (1000 hours).
An Exploration of Problematic Smartphone Use among Chinese and British University Students

This body of research aimed to explore the prevalence and correlates of problematic smartphone use (PSU) among Chinese and UK university students. The studies presented in the thesis tested a hypothesised model of relationships between PSU and factors including academic anxiety, procrastination, self-regulation and life satisfaction. A cross-cultural comparison of PSU among Chinese and British undergraduates was also undertaken. The studies presented used self-reported questionnaire data and semi-structured interview data to address a series of research questions about the prevalence and correlates of PSU. Data were gathered from 475 undergraduates studying in a Chinese university, and 303 British undergraduates. Path analysis and framework analysis were used to analyse the data. A good model fit was found for the Chinese, but not the UK sample, in which PSU predicted academic procrastination and academic anxiety; and self-regulation predicted PSU, academic anxiety, academic procrastination and life satisfaction. Chinese undergraduates reported significantly higher levels of PSU than British students, with a medium to large effect size. In both China and the UK, females scored significantly higher for PSU than males. In both samples similar explanations were given for PSU. However, only the Chinese students cited difficulties in adapting to a freer college life after the sharp transition from a strictly managed high school life as an explanation. This thesis aims to enhance our understanding of the PSU, mental health and well-being of college students, and to explore some of the possible mechanisms underpinning it. This research indicates the importance of considering cultural factors and educational/contextual backgrounds when conducting studies on problematic smartphone use.
Resistance-Sized Arteries Structure and Capillary Density Changes in Glioblastoma and Meningioma Peritumoral Brain Tissue

Background: Brain vessels play a relevant role in the development of malignant primary tumors. Previous studies performed in preclinical models of brain tumors demonstrated the irregular morphology of vessels in glioblastoma, characterized by multiple abnormalities in shape, permeability and relationship with the contacting structures, such as the basement membrane; however no data about microvascular structural alterations in the brain of patients affected by brain tumors have been previously reported. Methods: We studied small vessels structural alterations, microvascular rarefaction and vascular collagen content in the peritumoral brain tissue of two groups of patients, respectively affected by glioblastoma and by meningioma, who underwent a surgical operation in order to remove the tumor. The two groups of patients were matched for clinical, laboratory variables and risk factors, with the exception of sex. Results: Media to lumen ratio was significantly higher in patients with meningioma compared to patients affected by glioblastoma. Vessels in the brain surrounding glioblastomas show a less organized structure, as demonstrated by the thinner media, by the lower content in collagen and by the lower capillary density. Conclusions: For the first time, we used an in vitro ex vivo technique to analyze structural alterations of resistance sized arteries of peritumoral brain tissue at the radiological tumor-brain interface in patients affected by glioblastoma and meningioma. This approach, together with immunohistochemical evaluation of microvessel density, has supplied new data about the brain microcirculation. These findings can be the result of the aberrant angiogenic process that characterizes glioblastomas and can finally play a role in tumor growth. Further studies are needed to confirm our data, to identify the pathways that lead to this microvascular pattern and to identify possible clinical applications
Earnings Risk and Demand for Higher Education: A Cross-Section Test for Spain

We develop a simple human capital model for optimum schooling length when earnings are stochastic, and highlight the pivotal role of risk attitudes and the schooling gradient of earnings risk. We use Spanish data to document the gradient and to estimate individual response to earnings risk in deciding on attending university education, by measuring risk as the residual variance in regional earnings functions. We find that the basic response is negative but that in households with lower risk aversion, the response will be dampened substantially and may even be reversed to positive.
Experimental Study on Full-Polarization Micro-Doppler of Space Precession Target in Microwave Anechoic Chamber

Based on the background of radar target detection and recognition of space precession targets, an experimental study on full-polarization micro-Doppler of those targets is introduced. The wide-band scattering properties of space precession targets are analyzed, and then the theoretical full-polarization micro-Doppler models are proposed. The scenario of the experiment is introduced, and the measured data are analyzed, and then the differences of full-polarization micro-Doppler of different scattering structures can be observed during precession.
Temporal Planning with Preferences and Time-Dependent Continuous Costs

Temporal planning methods usually focus on the objective of minimizing makespan. Unfortunately, this misses a large class of planning problems where it is important to consider a wider variety of temporal and non-temporal preferences, making makespan lower-order concern. In this paper we consider modeling and reasoning with plan quality metrics that are not directly correlated with plan makespan, building on the planner POPF. We begin with the preferences defined in PDDL3, and present a mixed integer programming encoding to manage the the interaction between the hard temporal constraints for plan steps, and soft temporal constraints for preferences. To widen the support of metrics that can be expressed directly in PDDL, we then discuss an extension to soft-deadlines with continuous cost functions, avoiding the need to approximate these with several PDDL3 discrete-cost preferences. We demonstrate the success of our new planner on the benchmark temporal planning problems with preferences, showing that it is the state-of-the-art for such problems. We then analyze the benefits of reasoning with continuous (versus discretized) models of domains with continuous cost functions, showing the improvement in solution quality afforded through making the continuous cost function directly available to the planner.
Opioid peptides and gastrointestinal symptoms in autism spectrum disorders

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by deficits in the individual’s ability to socialize, communicate, and use the imagination, in addition to stereotyped behaviors. These disorders have a heterogenous phenotype, both in relation to symptoms and regarding severity. Organic problems related to the gastrointestinal tract are often associated with ASD, including dysbiosis, inflammatory bowel disease, exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, celiac disease, indigestion, malabsorption, food intolerance, and food allergies, leading to vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition. In an attempt to explain the pathophysiology involved in autism, a theory founded on opioid excess has been the focus of various investigations, since it partially explains the symptomatology of the disorder. Another hypothesis has been put forward whereby the probable triggers of ASDs would be related to the presence of bacteria in the bowel, oxidative stress, and intestinal permeability. The present update reviews these hypotheses.
Tree spanners of small diameter

A graph that contains a spanning tree of diameter at most $t$ clearly admits a tree $t$-spanner, since a tree $t$-spanner of a graph $G$ is a sub tree of $G$ such that the distance between pairs of vertices in the tree is at most $t$ times their distance in $G$. In this paper, graphs that admit a tree $t$-spanner of diameter at most $t+1$ are studied. For $t$ equal to 1 or 2 the problem has been solved. For $t=3$ we present an algorithm that determines if a graph admits a tree 3-spanner of diameter at most 4. For $t\geq4$ it is proved that it is an NP-complete problem to decide whether a graph admits a tree $t$-spanner of diameter at most $t+1$.
Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: Cardinal Directions as an Example

ABSTRACT Abstract. Geographers use spatial reasoning extensively in large-scale spaces, i.e., spaces that cannot be seen or understood from a single point of view. Spatial reasoning differentiates several spatial relations, e.g. topological or metric relations, and is typically formalized using a Cartesian coordinate system and vector algebra. This quantitative processing of information is clearly different from the ways human draw conclusions about spatial relations. Formalized qualitative reasoning processes are shown to be a necessary part of Spatial Expert Systems and Geographical Information Systems. Addressing a subset of the total problem, namely reasoning with cardinal directions, a completely qualitative method, without recourse to analytical procedures, is introduced and a method for its formal comparison with quantitative formula is defined. The focus is on the analysis of cardinal directions and their properties. An algebraic method is used to formalize the meaning of directions. The standard .
Fractional processing-based active noise control algorithm for impulsive noise

This paper deals with active noise control (ANC) for impulsive noise sources for which the filtered-x least mean square (FxLMS) algorithm becomes unstable. By minimizing the fractional lower order moment, the resulting filtered-x least mean p-power (FxLMP) algorithm has an update vector being computed using sign operator and fractional power of the residual error signal. This results in improved robustness as compared with the FxLMS algorithm; however, the convergence speed is very slow. Improvement in convergence speed can be achieved by computing a fractional power for the error as well as for the (filtered) reference signal, combined with efficient normalization of the step-size parameter. This results in filtered-x modified generalized normalized Least mean p-power (FxMGNLMP) algorithm. In this paper we develop a new fractional processing-based adaptive algorithm for ANC of impulsive noise sources. The main idea is to compute a modified update vector for FxMGNLMP algorithm by computing fractional power of the tap-weight vector, and add this update term (after including an appropriate scaling factor) to the original update equation of the FxMGNLMP algorithm. The results of computer simulations demonstrate improved performance of the proposed approach especially when the noise source is highly impulsive.
Mathematical morphology based face segmentation and facial feature extraction for facial expression recognition

In this work, image processing and pattern recognition techniques are applied to extract human faces and facial features from color and gray images for facial expression recognition. Firstly, the image is segmented into skin and non-skin regions by using a color space model. Mathematical Morphology based techniques are applied for noise removal and hole filling. Then, ellipse region properties are used to determine whether a segmented skin region is a face or not. Secondly, the eyes and mouth areas are roughly located. Finally, eye features are extracted using the threshold values, and lip feature are extracted by using K-mean clustering. Both the above features are refined using morphological operations.
Gradient Boosted Trees to Predict Store Sales

Machine learning forecasting techniques have a number of applications for businesses. In particular, these methods can work quite well for large chain stores that are able to gather significant amounts of data. Using this data to make informed decisions for the future can have large financial consequences when scaling to a large number of stores. Specifically, this information can inform businesses on optimal staff levels, product shipments, and sales promotions at each branch. On the data science competition website Kaggle, the German pharmacy Rossmann posted a challenge to the data science community to predict the sales of their stores for a 6 week interval in the Fall of 2015 using data gathered from their stores from the previous 30 months [5]. In detail, each training example consisted of the following features and response variable:
Stabilization of polynomial fuzzy large-scale system: Sum-of-square approach

This paper presents a polynomial fuzzy method approach to stabilize the nonlinear large-scale system. Unlike conventional T-S fuzzy system, polynomial fuzzy system contains polynomial matrix. Since polynomial fuzzy system has polynomial matrix, this system has less IF-THEN rules than T-S fuzzy system. Based on the proposed method, stabilization condtiion is derived in the form of polynomial and solved by sum-of-square method. Finally, some examples demonstrate that the proposed condition is adoptable in modeling and stabilization for the nonlinear large-scale system.
Challenges in Coordinating and Managing Services and Supports in Secondary and Postsecondary Options (NCSET Issue Brief)

A brief identifying for secondary and postsecondary educational administrators, state policymakers, rehabilitation counselors, and researchers the barriers to successfully managing supports for individuals with disabilities, and providing recommendations for overcoming these barriers. Current practices and policies, including differences between youth and adult service delivery systems and the lack of interagency collaboration, complicate service coordination for youth with disabilities. It seeks to answer the question, "How can service coordination become more flexible, youth-centered, and culturally responsive? "