Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NIST Special Database 10 Supplemental Fingerprint Card Data for NIST Special Database 9

1.0 INTRODUCTION This document describes the NIST fingerprint database, NIST Special Database 10. The database provides a large sample of patterns for transitional fingerprint classes and classes with a low natural frequency of occurrence in NIST Special Database 9. The 552 fingerprint cards in NIST Special Database 10 are non-mated cards archived on a set of three CD-ROM's with the first CD-ROM containing 2160 fingerprint images and the last two CD-ROMs containing 1680 fingerprints each. All fingerprints are stored in NIST's IHead raster data format and compressed using a non-standard implementation of the JPEG lossless [1] compression algorithm. The prints are 832 (w) X 768 (h) pixels (see Appendix A). Image data stored on the first CD-ROM requires approximately 690 megabytes of storage. The second and third CD-ROMs require approximately 590 megabytes of storage. The average compression ratio for all the images is 1.9 : 1. The data was collected by selecting non-mated fingerprint cards, from the FBI's Technical Master File, which contained the most occurrences of the desired fingerprint patterns. Since the entire card was digitized, there is a mix of other classes within the specific class groupings. The data also includes a significant number of referenced fingerprints. Appendix C shows the exact distribution of the classes and referencing for each major class group that was collected. The fingerprints are classified using the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) classes assigned by the FBI [2]. All classes and references are stored in the NIST IHead id field of each file. The compression used was developed from techniques outlined in the WG10 " JPEG " (draft) standard [1] for 8-bit gray scale images with modifications to the compressed data format. This is the same code used in NIST Special Database 4 and 9. The NIST IHead format already contained most of the information needed in the decompression algorithm, so the JPEG compressed data format was modified to contain only the information needed when reconstructing the Huffman code tables
Characterization in vitro and in vivo of progressively adriamycin-resistant B16-BL6 mouse melanoma cells.

Adriamycin (ADR)-resistant sublines of B16-BL6 mouse melanoma selected by exposure to increasing concentrations of ADR were characterized in vitro for growth properties and in vivo for tumorigenicity and pulmonary metastases. The progressively resistant sublines adapted to grow in the presence of 0.025, 0.05, 0.1, and 0.25 microgram/ml ADR in monolayer culture were found to be 5-, 10-, 20-, and 40-fold ADR-resistant, respectively, compared to the parental sensitive cells, using a soft-agar colony assay and continuous ADR treatment for 7 days. The doubling time in monolayer culture of the parent sensitive and progressively ADR-resistant sublines of B16-BL6 melanoma cells was approximately 16-18 h. Although the colony-forming efficiency in soft agar of parental sensitive cells was only 0.5-4%, the 5-, 10-, 20-, and 40-fold ADR-resistant sublines had colony-forming efficiencies of 15, 20, 30, and 77%, respectively. Tumorigenicity in C57BL/6 mice of progressively ADR-resistant sublines was similar to parental sensitive cells following s.c. and i.p. implantation of 10(5)-10(6) tumor cells. Experimental pulmonary metastases were significantly lower in ADR-resistant sublines with progressive resistance. Additionally, unlike the parental sensitive and 5-fold ADR-resistant B16-BL6 cells, the 10-, 20-, and 40-fold ADR-resistant sublines were spontaneously nonmetastatic. Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and immunochemical detection of P-glycoprotein revealed the presence of a Mr 170,000 plasma membrane glycoprotein in the 40-fold ADR-resistant subline and its counterpart maintained for 1 year in ADR-free medium. Results from this study suggest that progressively ADR-resistant B16-BL6 mouse melanoma cells selected in vitro demonstrate a marked increase in colony formation in soft agar and a decrease in the ability to produce pulmonary metastases, without alterations in tumorigenicity.
Generalized Poincaré Plots-A New Method for Evaluation of Regimes in Cardiac Neural Control in Atrial Fibrillation and Healthy Subjects

Classical Poincaré plot is a standard way to measure nonlinear regulation of cardiovascular control. In our work we propose a generalized form of Poincaré plot where we track correlation between the duration of j preceding and k next RR intervals. The investigation was done in healthy subjects and patients with atrial fibrillation, by varying j,k ≤ 100. In cases where j = k, in healthy subjects the typical pattern was observed by “paths” that were substituting scatterplots and that were initiated and ended by loops of Poincaré plot points. This was not the case for atrial fibrillation patients where Poincaré plot had a simple scattered form. More, a typical matrix of Pearson's correlation coefficients, r(j,k), showed different positions of local maxima, depending on the subject's health condition. In both groups, local maxima were grouped into four clusters which probably determined specific regulatory mechanisms according to correlations between the duration of symmetric and asymmetric observed RR intervals. We quantified matrices' degrees of asymmetry and found that they were significantly different: distributed around zero in healthy, while being negative in atrial fibrillation. Also, Pearson's coefficients were higher in healthy than in atrial fibrillation or in signals with reshuffled intervals. Our hypothesis is that by this novel method we can observe heart rate regimes typical for baseline conditions and “defense reaction” in healthy subjects. These data indicate that neural control mechanisms of heart rate are operating in healthy subjects in contrast with atrial fibrillation, identifying it as the state of risk for stress-dependent pathologies. Regulatory regimes of heart rate can be further quantified and explored by the proposed novel method.
Group Interaction Prompted by a Simple Assessed Open Learner Model that can be Optionally Released to Peers

This paper describes a study of a simple open learner model that can be optionally released to peers in named or anonymous form, to facilitate collaborative and competitive learning in a situation where the learner model contents contributed to students' assessment. Results suggest that, under the right conditions, students may start working sooner; discussion amongst students can be increased; many will find the individual learner models of others useful; and most will open their model to other users even if they do not find peer models helpful themselves - thus ensuring the availability of peer models for those who wish to use them. We consider the extent to which these findings may be transferable to other settings.
Speedy Browsing and Sampling with NeedleTail

Exploratory data analysis often involves repeatedly browsing small samples of records that satisfy certain ad-hoc predicates, to form and test hypotheses, identify correlations, or make inferences. Unfortunately, existing database systems are not optimized for queries with a LIMIT clause---operating instead in an all-or-nothing manner. While workload aware caching, indexing, or precomputation schemes may appear promising remedies, they do not apply in an exploratory setting where the queries are ad-hoc and unpredictable. In this paper, we propose a fast sampling engine, called NeedleTail, aimed at letting analysts browse a small sample of the query results on large datasets as quickly as possible, independent of the overall size of the result set. NeedleTail introduces density maps, a lightweight in-memory indexing structure, and a set of efficient algorithms (with desirable theoretical guarantees) to quickly locate promising blocks, trading off locality and density. In settings where the samples are used to compute aggregates, we extend techniques from the statistics literature---in particular, from survey sampling---to mitigate the bias from using our sampling algorithms. Our experimental results demonstrate that NeedleTail returns results an order of magnitude faster while occupying up to 30x less memory than existing sampling techniques.
QoS Provisioning in a Scalable Wireless Mesh Network for Intelligent Transportation Systems

The wireless mesh network (WMN) is an economical low-power solution to provide wireless broadband access in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). This paper investigates how to deploy access points (APs) to improve throughput and quality-of-service (QoS), when the multihop communication is used to extend the coverage of wireless ITS network. Frequency planning is suggested to improve the capacity with QoS provisioning and to make the system more scalable. To investigate the overall tradeoffs among QoS, throughput, and coverage, we develop an analytical model to evaluate throughput, frame delay, and jitter for the considered ITS WMN using the carrier-sense multiple-access (CSMA) medium access control (MAC) protocol. Then, we apply an optimization approach to determine the optimal separation distances between APs with the delay requirement. To provide a guideline for network planning, we compare the uniform-spacing and increasing-spacing AP deployment strategies. The uniform-spacing strategy is to make all the APs with the same separation distance. In the increasing-spacing strategy, the separation distances between APs are increased from the central AP to the outer APs. Because of the shorter separation distance, the AP closer to the central AP can deliver higher traffic. It is shown that the increasing-spacing strategy outperforms the uniform-spacing strategy in terms and a profit function, considering the capacity and the total cost for deploying APs.
Learning Preference of Dependency between Japanese Subordinate Clauses and its Evaluation in Parsing

Utsuro et al., 2000) proposed statistical method for learning dependency preference of Japanese subordinate clauses, in which scope embedding preference of subordinate clauses is exploited as a useful information source for disambiguating dependencies between subordinate clauses. Following (Utsuro et al., 2000), this paper presents detailed results of evaluating the proposed method by comparing it with several closely related existing techniques and shows that the proposed method outperforms those existing techniques.
A New Consensus Model for Group Decision Making Problems With Non-Homogeneous Experts

In the literature, we find that the consensus models proposed for group decision making problems are guided by consensus degrees and/or similarity measures and/or consistency measures . When we work in heterogeneous group decision making frameworks, we have importance degrees associated with the experts by expressing their different knowledge levels on the problem. Usually, the importance degrees are applied in the weighted aggregation operators developed to solve the decision situations. In this paper, we study another application possibility, i.e., to use heterogeneity existing among experts to guide the consensus model. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to present a new consensus model for heterogeneous group decision making problems guided also by the heterogeneity criterion. It is also based on consensus degrees and similarity measures, but it presents a new feedback mechanism that adjusts the amount of advice required by each expert depending on his/her own relevance or importance level.
Functional-decode-forward for the general discrete memoryless two-way relay channel

We consider the general discrete memoryless two-way relay channel, where two users exchange messages via a relay, and propose two functional-decode-forward coding strategies for this channel. Functional-decode-forward involves the relay decoding a function of the users' messages rather than the individual messages themselves. This function is then broadcast back to the users, which can be used in conjunction with the user's own message to decode the other user's message. Via a numerical example, we show that functional-decode-forward with linear codes is capable of achieving strictly larger sum rates than those achievable by other strategies.
A Coupled Statistical/Semantic Framework for Merging Heterogeneous Domain-Specific Ontologies

Discovering semantic correspondences between ontology elements is a crucial task for merging heterogeneous ontologies. Most ontology merging tools use several methods to aggregate and combine similarity measures. In addition, some of the ontology merging systems exploit external resources such as, Linguistic Knowledge Bases (e.g. WordNet) to support this task. However, the quality of their results is subjected to the limitations of the exploited knowledge base. In this paper, we present a framework that exploits multiple knowledge bases that cover information in multiple domains for: i) Indentifying and correcting incorrect semantic relations between the concepts of domain-specific ontologies. This is a primary step before ontology merging; ii) Merging domain-specific ontologies; and iii) Handling the issue of missing background knowledge in the exploited knowledge bases by utilizing statistical techniques. An experimental instantiation of the framework and comparisons with state-of-the-art syntactic and semantic-based systems validate our proposal.
Lysophosphatidic acid promotes matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activation and MMP-dependent invasion in ovarian cancer cells.

Ovarian cancer is an highly metastatic disease characterized by ascites formation and diffuse i.p. adhesion, invasion, and metastasis. Levels of lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) are elevated in the plasma of patients with ovarian carcinoma, including 90% of patients with stage I disease, suggesting that LPA may promote early events in ovarian carcinoma dissemination. Expression of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) is also up-regulated in ovarian cancer tissues and ascites, and numerous studies have provided evidence for a direct role of MMPs in i.p. invasion and metastasis. Using three-dimensional type I collagen cultures or immobilized beta1 integrin subunit-specific antibodies, we previously demonstrated that beta1 integrin clustering promotes activation of proMMP-2 and processing of membrane type 1 MMP in ovarian cancer cells (S. M. Ellerbroek et al., Cancer Res., 59: 1635-1641, 1999). In the current study, the effect of LPA on MMP expression and invasive activity was investigated. Treatment of ovarian cancer cells with pathophysiological levels of LPA increased cellular adhesion to type I collagen and beta1 integrin expression. A significant up-regulation of MMP-dependent proMMP-2 activation was observed in LPA-treated cells, leading to enhanced pericellular MMP activity. As a result of increased MMP activity, haptotactic and chemotactic motility, in vitro wound closure, and invasion of a synthetic basement membrane were enhanced. These data indicate that LPA contributes to metastatic dissemination of ovarian cancer cells via up-regulation of MMP activity and subsequent downstream changes in MMP-dependent migratory and invasive behavior.
Variation in Aromatase Activity in the Medial Preoptic Area and Plasma Progesterone Is Associated with the Onset of Paternal Behavior

The effects of aromatase within the brain on sexual behavior have been studied in a wide variety of species. Relatively few non-mating behaviors have been considered, despite evidence that estrogen affects many social behaviors. Testosterone promotes paternal behavior in California mouse (Peromyscus californicus) fathers, acting primarily via aromatization to estradiol. Virgin male California mice rarely exhibit paternal behavior, so we investigated whether aromatase in the brain changed with the onset of paternal behavior in California mouse fathers. In the medial preoptic area (MPOA), a brain area known to regulate parental behavior in rodents, we found that fathers had significantly more aromatase activity than mated males without pups, suggesting that an increase in estrogen production in this brain area contributes to the onset of paternal behavior. We also found that progesterone (P4) levels were lower in fathers compared to sexually inexperienced males and that P4 was negatively correlated with aromatase activity in the MPOA. These P4 findings agree with a recent study that found an inhibitory effect of P4 on paternal behavior. Overall, we found that aromatase activity and P4 levels change in association with an important life history transition, and may provide a mechanistic basis for plasticity in paternal behavior.
Primo Vascular System in the Subarachnoid Space of a Mouse Brain

Objective. Recently, a novel circulatory system, the primo vascular system (PVS), was found in the brain ventricles and in the central canal of the spinal cord of a rat. The aim of the current work is to detect the PVS along the transverse sinuses between the cerebrum and the cerebellum of a mouse brain. Materials and Methods. The PVS in the subarachnoid space was analyzed after staining with 4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI) and phalloidin in order to identify the PVS. With confocal microscopy and polarization microscopy, the primo vessel underneath the sagittal sinus was examined. The primo nodes under the transversal sinuses were observed after peeling off the dura and pia maters of the brain. Results. The primo vessel underneath the superior sagittal sinus was observed and showed linear optical polarization, similarly to the rabbit and the rat cases. The primo nodes were observed under the left and the right transverse sinuses at distances of 3,763 μm and 5,967 μm. The average size was 155 μm × 248 μm. Conclusion. The observation of primo vessels was consistent with previous observations in rabbits and rats, and primo nodes under the transverse sinuses were observed for the first time in this work.
Lovastatin overcomes gefitinib resistance through TNF-α signaling in human cholangiocarcinomas with different LKB1 statuses in vitro and in vivo

Gefitinib resistance has been shown to complicate cancer therapy. Lovastatin is a proteasome inhibitor that enhances gefitinib-induced antiproliferation in non-small cell lung cancer. The objective of this study is to investigate the mechanism of lovastatin-induced antiproliferation in gefitinib-resistant human cholangiocarcinoma. Two gefitinib-resistant cholangiocarcinoma cell lines, SSP-25 and HuH-28, were used in this study to determine how to compensate gefitinib resistance. The combined effect of these two drugs was examined using the MTT assay, qPCR, immunoblotting, flow cytometry, and in vivo xenograft. Results indicated that lovastatin enhanced TNF-α-induced cell death in vitro. In addition, the combination of lovastatin with gefitinib enhanced accumulation of TNF-α. Furthermore, the treatment induced a synergistic cytotoxic effect and antiproliferation through apoptosis in SSP-25 cells and cell cycle arrest in HuH-28 cells. Reproductive results were also observed in in vivo xenografts. These observations suggest that the combination of gefitinib and lovastatin might have additive antiproliferative effects against gefitinib-resistant cholangiocarcinoma cells. Based on these observations, we concluded that the combination of gefitinib and lovastatin could be used to overcome gefitinib resistance in cholangiocarcinoma cells.
NLTE models of line-driven stellar winds - I. Method of calculation and first results for O stars

New numerical models of line-driven stellar winds of late O stars are presented. Statistical equilibrium (NLTE) equations of the most abundant elements are solved. Properly obtained occupation numbers are used to calculate consistent radiative force and radiative heating terms. Wind density, velocity and temperature are calculated as a solution of model hydrodynamical equations. Contrary to other published models we account for a multicomponent wind nature and do not simplify the calculation of the radiative force (e.g. using force multipliers). We discuss the convergence behaviour of our models. The ability of our models to predict correct values of mass-loss rates and terminal velocities of selected late O stars (mainly giants and supergiants) is demonstrated. The systematic difference between predicted and observed terminal velocities reported in the literature has been removed. Moreover, we found good agreement between the theoretical wind momentum-luminosity relationship and the observed one for Cyg OB2 supergiants.
Verified sharp bounds for the real gamma function over the entire floating-point range

An algorithm is presented for computing verified and accurate bounds for the value of the gamma function over the entire real double precision floating-point range. It means that for every double precision floating-point number x except the poles −k for 0 ≤ k ∈ N the true value of Γ(x) is included within an almost maximally accurate interval with floating-point bounds. The application to interval arguments x ∈ IF, thus enclosing the range of Γ over x, is discussed as well.
Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology Open Access Pyrazine Derivatives in Cigarette Smoke Inhibit Hamster Oviductal Functioning

Background: Our past studies have shown that cigarette smoke inhibits oviductal functioning in vivo and in vitro. The goals in this study were to identify pyrazine derivatives in cigarette smoke solutions that inhibit ciliary beat frequency, oocyte pickup rate, and infundibular smooth muscle contraction in the hamster oviduct and to determine their lowest observable adverse effect levels (LOAELs) using in vitro bioassays.
Host Genetics and Pediatric Sepsis

Susceptibility to, and outcome from, sepsis in children is highly variable due in part to genetic variation in genes coding for components of the innate immune response. This review article will discuss evidence for the influence of host genetic variability on the susceptibility to, and outcome from, sepsis in children and adults. Polymorphisms in genes coding for proteins involved in the recognition of bacterial pathogens (TLR4, CD-14, Fc￻ RIIa, and mannose binding lectin) and the response to bacterial pathogens (TNF-￻ , IL-1￻ , IL-1￻ , IL-1RA, IL-6, IL-10, heat shock proteins, ACE, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1) can influence the amount or function of the protein produced in response to bacterial stimuli. Evidence is discussed suggesting that some of these genetic polymorphisms influence the susceptibility to, and outcome from, sepsis. Conclusion: Host genetic variability in the regulatory and coding regions of genes for components of the innate immune system may influence the susceptibility to and/or outcome from sepsis. The disparate results observed in many studies of polymorphisms in sepsis emphasize the need for future studies to be larger, to include the analysis of multiple polymorphisms, and to be better designed with respect to control populations in order to identify the degree of influence that genetic variability has on sepsis.
Biomarkers in Autism

Prevalence of neurodevelopm ental disorders is increasing now-a-days with the incidence of Autism spectrum disorder gaining momentum. It is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder classified as a pervasive developmental disorder of childhood characterized by behavioral abnormalities in social interaction; in communication; and restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behaviors, interests and activities. Detection of autism becomes easier when we know the biomarkers. This review focuses on common biomarkers that can effectively and efficiently detect the occurrence of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Detection of this disorder at an early stage is possible by analyzing biochemical markers that provide inkling about the development of Autism spectrum disorder.