Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Alpha-Ketoglutarate on Growth and Metabolism of Cells Cultured on Three-Dimensional Cryogel Matrix

Alpha- ketoglutarate (α-KG) is a well-known intermediate of Kreb's cycle and thus one of the important candidates in the role of cellular metabolism. The aim was to investigate the effect of α-KG on the growth and proliferation of different cells (fibroblasts and chondrocytes). Further change in the consumption of glucose and release of ammonia in the media, upon the addition of α-KG was also examined. NIH3T3 and chondrocytes were seeded on two different macroporous cryogel matrices synthesized by poly (hydroxyethylmethaacrylate)-gelatin (HG) and alginate-gelatin (AG). Higher proliferation was observed for both the cell lines in 2-D as well as 3-D where α-KG was added to the media compared to the controls. It was evident that the chondrocytes were metabolically more active in the case of α-KG containing samples as early extracellular matrix (ECM) accumulation was observed. In comparison to the 6-8 weeks duration required by the chondrocytes for ECM accumulation in normal in-vitro culture conditions, α-KG containing samples showed an earlier accumulation within 3 weeks. In order to further validate the results, scanning electron microscopic (SEM) analysis was performed showed high ECM deposition and cells embedded in the matrix. Homogenous distribution of cells on both the synthesized matrix was reported using 4'-6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI) and propidium iodide (PI) staining. The results clearly showed reduction in ammonia concentration in α-KG containing samples thus leading to decreased ammonia toxicity that builds up during long cell culture conditions thereby enhancing the proliferation and metabolic activity. Thus α-KG can be used potentially for long batch-cultures for the production of vaccines or antibody as well as can play an important role as a bioactive molecule for in vitro neo-cartilage generation.
Quality of Life in Patients with Minimal Change Nephrotic Syndrome

Aim. The goal of the study was to investigate quality of life (QOL) in adult patients with minimal change nephrotic syndrome (MCNS) and to test the relationship of QOL with the level of self-care. Materials and Methods. We distributed two questionnaires to 30 outpatients with MCNS. The MOS 36-item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36v2) was used to examine health-related QOL in comparison with normative data from the general Japanese population and a population with two chronic diseases. SF-36v2 consists of 36 questions classified into 8 subscales. We also used the Self-Care Behavior Scale for patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), which consists of 31 questions with 4 subscales. Results. The SF-36v2 social functioning subscale was most impaired and bodily pain was least affected in patients with MCNS. The self-care subscales of information/communication and positive behavior had positive correlations with the QOL subscales of mental health (P<0.05) and vitality (P<0.05). The correlation between social functioning and information/communication was close to significant (P=0.051). Conclusion. In MCNS, social functioning was particularly impaired. Our results suggest that better self-care can have a positive impact on QOL in patients with MCNS.
Balanced Ocean-Data Assimilation near the Equator

Abstract The question is addressed whether using unbalanced updates in ocean-data assimilation schemes for seasonal forecasting systems can result in a relatively poor simulation of zonal currents. An assimilation scheme, where temperature observations are used for updating only the density field, is compared to a scheme where updates of density field and zonal velocities are related by geostrophic balance. This is done for an equatorial linear shallow-water model. It is found that equatorial zonal velocities can be detoriated if velocity is not updated in the assimilation procedure. Adding balanced updates to the zonal velocity is shown to be a simple remedy for the shallow-water model. Next, optimal interpolation (OI) schemes with balanced updates of the zonal velocity are implemented in two ocean general circulation models. First tests indicate a beneficial impact on equatorial upper-ocean zonal currents.
DAHM: A green and dynamic web application hosting manager across geographically distributed data centers

Dynamic Application Hosting Management (DAHM) is proposed for geographically distributed data centers, which decides on the number of active servers and on the workload share of each data center. DAHM achieves cost-efficient application hosting by taking into account: (i) the spatio-temporal variation of energy cost, (ii) the data center computing and cooling energy efficiency, (iii) the live migration cost, and (iv) any SLA violations due to migration overhead or network delay. DAHM is modeled as fixed-charge min-cost flow and mixed integer programming for stateless and stateful applications, respectively, and it is shown NP-hard. We also develop heuristic algorithms and prove, when applications are stateless and servers have an identical power consumption model, that the approximation ratio on the minimum total cost is bounded by the number of data centers. Further, the heuristics are evaluated in a simulation study using realistic parameter data; compared to a performance-oriented application assignment, that is, hosting at the data center with the least delay, the potential cost savings of DAHM reaches 33%. The savings come from reducing the total number of active servers as well as leveraging the cost efficiency of data centers. Through the simulation study, the article further explores how relaxing the delay requirement for a small fraction of users can increase the cost savings of DAHM.
Membranes by Metastatic Cells Proteinases , and Collagenase IV on the Invasion of Basement Effects of Inhibitors of Plasminogen Activator , Serine Updated

Using both human and murine cell lines, we show that malignant cells are able to invade through basement membrane and also secrete elevated amounts of collagenase IV, an enzyme implicated in the degradation of basement membranes. Using serine proteinase inhibitors and antibodies to plasminoceli activators as well as a newly described collagenase inhibitor we demonstrate that a protease cascade leads to the activation of an enzyme(s) that cleaves collagen IV. Inhibition at each step reduces the invasion of the tumor cells through reconstituted basement membrane in vitro. Treatment with a collagenase inhibitor reduced the incidence of lung lesions in mice given i.v. injections of malignant melanoma cells.
Setting a research agenda for interprofessional education and collaborative practice in the context of United States health system reform

ABSTRACT Interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative practice (CP) have been prolific areas of inquiry exploring research questions mostly concerned with local program and project assessment. The actual sphere of influence of this research has been limited. Often discussed separately, this article places IPE and CP in the same conceptual space. The interface of these form a nexus where new knowledge creation may be facilitated. Rigorous research on IPE in relation to CP that is relevant to and framed by health system reform in the U.S. is the ultimate research goal of the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education at the University of Minnesota. This paper describes the direction and scope for a focused and purposive IPECP research agenda linked to improvement in health outcomes, contextualized by health care reform in the U.S. that has provided a revitalizing energy for this area of inquiry. A research agenda articulates a focus, meaningful and robust questions, and a theory of change within which intervention outcomes are examined. Further, a research agenda identifies the practices the area of inquiry is interested in informing, and the types of study designs and analytic approaches amenable to carrying out the proposed work.
Maternal Continuing Folic Acid Supplementation after the First Trimester of Pregnancy Increased the Risk of Large-for-Gestational-Age Birth: A Population-Based Birth Cohort Study

Supplementation with folic acid (FA) was proven to prevent neural tube defects (NTDs) and was recommended worldwide before and during early pregnancy. However, much less is known regarding the role of FA after the 12th gestational week (GW). This study aimed to investigate the related effects of continued FA supplementation after the first trimester of pregnancy on fetal growth. The study subjects came from the Ma’anshan-Anhui Birth Cohort Study (MABC) that recruited 3474 pregnant women from the city of Ma’anshan in Anhui Province in China during the period of May 2013 to September 2014. The information on use of vitamin and mineral supplements was recorded in different periods (the first/second/third trimester of pregnancy). Small-for-gestational-age (SGA) births were live-born infants that were <10th percentile of birth weight, and large-for-gestational-age (LGA) births were live-born infants that were ≥90th percentile of birth weight according to nomograms based on gender and gestational age from the latest standards. We used multivariable logistic regression to evaluate the effects of FA supplement consumption in the second/third trimester of pregnancy on the risk of LGA and SGA. In addition, propensity score analysis was also performed to examine the effects. In this prospective birth cohort study conducted in Chinese women who had taken FA in the first trimester of pregnancy, we found that continued FA supplementation with 400 micrograms/day in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy significantly increased the risk of LGA (RR = 1.98 (1.29, 3.04)). This relation was strong or monotonic after adjusting for maternal age, newborn’s gender, maternal pre-pregnancy BMI, maternal education level, smoking, alcohol consumption and calcium supplementation. We did not observe that continuing FA supplementation after the first trimester of pregnancy remarkably decreased the risk of SGA. The propensity score analysis showed similar results. To confirm these findings, additional investigations or trials with a large sample and the tracking of folate status throughout pregnancy are recommended.
Food intake recognition conception for wearable devices

Obesity is a growing healthcare challenge in present days. Objective automated methods of food intake monitoring are necessary to face this challenge in future. A method for non-invasive monitoring of human food intake behavior by the evaluation of chewing and swallowing sounds has been developed. A wearable food intake sensor has been created by integrating in-ear microphone and a reference microphone in a hearing aid case. A concept for food intake monitoring requiring low computational cost is presented. After the detection of food intake activity periods, signal recognition algorithms based on Hidden Markov Models distinguish several types of food based on the sound properties of their chewing sounds. Algorithms are developed using manual labeled records of the food intake sounds of 40 participants.
Analysis of vibration signals using cyclostationary indicators

The purpose of this paper is to take advantage of the cyclostationary indicators, in order to detect and classify the defects that can occur on mechanical parts of a system, such as the gearboxes and the bearings. The set of data used includes a variety of signals that describe the healthy state of a bearing, as well as other faulty states. After resampling the signals in the angular domain, a synchronous averaging is then performed in order to calculate the second, third and fourth order cumulants. The calculated cumulants, in addition to the first order moment, are the tools needed to calculate the cyclostationary indicators. Those indicators will be used as input parameters for an artificial neural network, in order to lead to an efficient fault detection and classification, with a high accuracy, and using the minimum number of parameters. This paper offers for the first time, the analysis of bearing signals using higher-order cyclostationary indicators up to the fourth order. Moreover, it permits to test how powerful would be the cyclostationarity indicators when used with an artificial neural network, as this kind of parameters is not typically used in the previous mechanical fault classification procedures.
The GOMS Family of Analysis Techniques: Tools for Design and Evaluation

Since the seminal Card, Moran, & Newell (1983) book, "The psychology of human-computer interaction", the concept of the GOMS model has been one of the few widely known theoretical concepts in human-computer interaction. This concept has spawned much research to verify and extend the original concept and has been used in real-world design and evaluation situations. The original presentation of the GOMS concept left substantial room for interpretation and subsequent researchers and practitioners have applied the idea in a variety of ways. While this variety shows that the GOMS concept is fruitful, there is some confusion about the GOMS concept and the various approaches that share this label yet appear to be radically different. This paper synthesizes the previous work on GOMS to provide an integrated view of GOMS models and how they can be used in design. The major variants of GOMS that have matured sufficiently be be used in real-world design and evaluation situations are described and related to the original GOMS proposal and to each other. A single example is used to illustrate all of the techniques. Guidance is provided to practitioners who wish to use GOMS for their design and evaluation problems, and examples of actual applications of GOMS techniques are presented.
Fixational and pursuit eye movements in infantile nystagmus: oculomotor control and perception

: Infantile nystagmus (IN) is a pathological condition of continuous, horizontal eye oscillations. Despite ongoing eye movements, those with IN do not experience oscillopsia, i.e. the illusory perception that the environment is moving to-and fro. The correct use of neural compensation for their eye movements, just as in typical individuals, is hypothesised to account for this lack of oscillopsia. This neural mechanism requires that an estimate of eye velocity (‘extra-retinal signal’) be compared to an estimate of the motion of the retinal image (‘retinal signal’), and any difference due to object motion. Despite this hypothesis, there have been no previous investigations on how accurately those with IN can estimate object motion. Even in typical adults, eye movement compensation is not perfect, which underlies a number of pursuit-based illusions. One such illusion, the Filehne illusion can be used to investigate the relative mismatch between the extra-retinal and retinal signals as individuals judge their perception of stationarity while attempting to follow a moving target. This illusion was used to investigate, through comparison with typical individuals, whether those with IN correctly recover object motion. Experiments were conducted to characterise the ability of those with IN to fixate as well as follow targets, using a novel two-dimensional eye movement measure. Under repeated testing, the fixation gaze angle at which the IN oscillation is minimum (a null zone) was not consistent. Moreover, those with IN were unable to accurately or precisely follow targets using their slow phase. Results from a comparison of fixation and pursuit performance in those with IN suggested no difference in either the accuracy or precision. Importantly, the psychophysical judgements of those with IN pursuit eye movements are prone to similar compensation errors as typical controls. However, the mechanisms by which this is achieved will require further exploration.
Fingerpointing : Just-inTime Problem Diagnosis for Distributed Systems

Distributed systems are growing both in terms of size and complexity. As a result, when a component fails, it can be difficult to determine which part of the system failed, let alone the cause of the failure. As the cost of downtime in production systems increases, it becomes economically important for problems to be discovered and repaired expediently. Recent research has explored the creation of tools that attempt to automatically determine which component in a system failed. The resulting tools and algorithms are able to successfully implicate a faulty component in many situations. However, at this time, these tools see little, if any, use monitoring production systems. A likely reason why systems administrators have not embraced tools for problem diagnosis is that existing tools cannot provide timely notification of problems. These tools collect data from the observed system continually, but only perform analysis a posteriori, after it was determined that a failure occurred by other means. Offline analysis, while useful for the evaluation of fingerpointing algorithms, is unlikely to excite operators in industry’s data centers. This thesis describes and evaluates FPT, a framework for online fingerpointing. FPT emphasizes flexibility while taking efforts to keep processing overheads low. The primary goal of this work is to explore the feasibility of just-in-time problem diagnosis. Additionally, it is hoped that FPT’s flexibility will aid future research in problem diagnosis.
Viewpoint invariant features from single images using 3D geometry

In this paper we present a novel approach for generating viewpoint invariant features from single images and demonstrate their application for robust matching over widely separated views. The key idea consists of retrieving building structure from single images and then utlising the recovered 3D geometry to improve the performances of feature extraction and matching. Urban environments usually contain many structured regularities, so that the images of those environments contain straight parallel lines and vanishing points, which can be efficiently exploited for 3D reconstruction. We present an effective scheme to recover 3D planar surfaces using the extracted line segments and their associated vanishing points. The viewpoint invariant features are then computed on the normalized front-parallel views of the obtained 3D planes. The advantages of the proposed approach include: (1) the new feature is very robust against perspective distortions and viewpoint changes due to its consideration of 3D geometry; (2) the features are completely computed from single images and do not need information from additional devices (e.g. stereo cameras, or active ranging devices). Experiments are carried out to demonstrate the proposed scheme ability to effectively handle very difficult wide baseline matching tasks in the presence of repetitive building structures and significant viewpoint changes.
Evaluation of Different Phenotypic Techniques for the Detection of Slime Produced by Bacteria Isolated from Clinical Specimens

Introduction Microorganisms use various strategies for their survival in both the environment and in humans. Slime production by bacteria is one such mechanism by which microbes colonize on the indwelling prosthetic devices and form biofilms. Infections caused by such microorganisms are difficult to treat as the biofilm acts as a shield and protects microbes against antimicrobial agents. There are several methods for the detection of slime produced by bacteria, and they include both phenotypic and molecular methods. The present study evaluated the Congo red agar/broth method, Christensen’s method, dye elution technique, and the latex agglutination method for the demonstration of slime production by different bacterial clinical isolates. Materials & Methods We collected 151 bacterial clinical isolates (both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria) from various specimens and tested them for the production of slime both by qualitative and quantitative tests. Congo red agar/broth method, Christensen's method, dye elution technique, and latex agglutination methods were used for detecting the slime or slime-like substance. Results We found that 103 (68.2%) strains were positive for slime production by Congo red agar/broth method. It was found that 18 (94.7%) strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae, 21 (84.0%) strains of S aureus and 25 (65.7%) strains of coagulase-negative Staphylococci were positive for slime or slime-like substances by Congo red agar/broth method. A total of 41.0% of the strains positive by Christensen's method and 15.2% of the strains by dye elution technique were found to be more adherent organisms and that have the potential to form biofilms. Only the gram-positive organisms showed nonspecific agglutination with latex suspension. Conclusion Among the various phenotypic methods compared in this study the Congo red agar/broth method is a simple, economical, sensitive, and specific method that can be used by clinical microbiology laboratories for screening the strains for the presence of slime or slime-like substances.
There ain't no plain key: A PUF based first-order side-channel resistant encryption construction

The confidentiality of all modern symmetric encryption schemes relies on the sealing of the secret key. Hence, it is crucial to secure the secret key or other sensitive credentials in protected memory such as a secure key storage. An alternative to a key storage is a physical unclonable function, which generates a unique secret key for each device online. But still, the secret might leak during intermediate processing when used in an encryption scheme. In this paper, we propose a encryption scheme, which uses keys generated by a blinded PUF. The unmasking of these keys is done during the encryption operation of the block cipher, instead of directly after key generation. As a side effect the entire scheme provides resistance against first-order power analysis attacks while only public credentials are need to be stored.
A web based virtual environment as a connection platform between people and IoT

Smart objects are present in our cities everywhere, thus it is becoming more and more necessary to have a connection platform, not only capable to make those objects talk with each other, but to present the results of their functions also to the citizens/users. Objective of this paper is the definition and development of a model that represents a connection and interaction layer between smart objects and people. In particular, we propose an immersive virtual platform, able to engage endusers and let people be aware of the where, what and how factors: where smart objects are deployed in the city, what functionalities/data they offer, and how those data represent context for the urban areas. To prove this particular model, we developed a prototypical Virtual Environment of Things (VEoT), within an immersive 3D environment in which the user can explore the virtualized urban area and interact with the available smart objects through gestures and affordable VR devices. The VEoT is fed by real-time data produced by a multi-protocol sensing middleware that simplifies the interaction with physical devices through high-level (RESTful) APIs. Paying attention to interconnection of people and things, this prototype will empower final users with engaging tools in order to enhance the fruition of the IoT paradigm.
H-SRTF: A real-time framework supporting state machine model

The state machine can be used to describe reactive event-driven software system effectively. Existing commercial tools which can generate code from the state diagram all base on real-time framework mostly. But the code size of these frameworks is a little more, it will be a big shortage for military weapon systems that the hardware resources are limited and time is critical. By the detailed analysis of mapping strategy from state diagram model to real-time framework, a smart real-time framework is designed and implemented by C language. The framework can adapt to two cases, i.e. operating system exists or not, and can adapt to two types of active objects, i.e. task and interruption.