Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Renal effects of human urotensin-II in rats with experimental congestive heart failure.

BACKGROUND Urotensin II (U-II) and its receptor GPR-14 are expressed in the kidney and the cardiovascular system of various mammalian species. Recent studies suggested that the U-II/GPR-14 system is upregulated in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF). However, the involvement of the peptide in the alterations of renal function in CHF remains unknown. METHODS The effects of incremental doses (1.0-100.0 nmol/kg) of human U-II (hU-II) on renal haemodynamic and clearance parameters were assessed in rats with an aorto-caval fistula, an experimental model of CHF, and sham controls. Additionally, the effects of pre-treatment with the nitric oxide (NO) synthase blocker, nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME), and the cyclooxygenase inhibitor, indomethacin, on the renal haemodynamic response to hU-II were studied in CHF rats. RESULTS hU-II caused a decrease in mean arterial pressure in control and CHF rats. In controls, hU-II did not alter renal blood flow (RBF), and caused a minimal decrease (-12.5%) in renal vascular resistance (RVR). However, in CHF rats, the peptide induced a marked increase in RBF (+28%) and a decrease in RVR (-21.5%). These effects were attenuated by L-NAME, but not by indomethacin. Furthermore, hU-II caused a significant increase (+29%) in glomerular filtration rate (GFR) in CHF rats, whereas GFR tended to decrease in controls. Sodium excretion was not altered in control or in CHF rats in response to hU-II. CONCLUSIONS hU-II exerts an NO-dependent renal vasodilatation that is more pronounced in rats with CHF. The data further suggest that the U-II/GPR-14 system may be involved in the regulation of renal haemodynamics in CHF.
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The dynamics of coupled nonlinear neuronal oscillators using conductance-based neurons such as of the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) type have extensively been studied [1–6]. A basic question concerning the dynamics of these coupled oscillators is when phase locking can occur, i.e. when a stable periodic solution exists for which all the neuronal oscillators generate action potentials with a common period. The dynamics of such systems typically can not be solved analytically. However, in the case of weak coupling, averaging theory [7] can be used to reduce the system to a phase model for which the analysis is much simpler [3, 5, 8]. For the reduced phase model, the relevant dynamical variables are the local phase differences between the oscillators, and the effective interaction between oscillators only depends on these. Yet, the calculation of the interaction function, the so-called phase resetting curve, typically needs to be numerically evaluated [1, 3, 6].
The Determinants Of The Science-Based Cluster Growth: The Case Of Nanotechnologies

There is growing academic and policy interests in the factors that underpin the formation and the growth of clusters, especially for such 'hyped up' scientific and technological fields as the nanotechnologies. This paper analyses the determinants of scientific cluster growth (measured by the number of publications that emanate there from), distinguishing between structural effects (i.e. initial cluster size, scientific field composition and geographic location) on the one hand and its scientific variety, organizational diversity and degree of openness (in terms of collaboration with outside actors) on the other. Overall, scientific variety enhances clusters growth, but organizational diversity slows it down. However, patterns of growth are different in Asia, Europe and North America. It seems that cluster evolution is highly contingent on national systems of innovation and on the history of collaboration amongst local actors. Policy makers and cluster strategists must design specific policies by zone, and should not simply attempt to replicate best practices from one zone to another. Slow growth may reflect also 'elitist' strategies - those based on quality rather than on numbers
Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Assessment (POLQA), The Third Generation ITU-T Standard for End-to-End Speech Quality Measurement Part I-Temporal Alignment

In this and the companion paper Part II, the authors present the Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Assessment (POLQA), the third-generation speech quality measurement algorithm, standardized by the International Telecommunication Union in 2011 as Recommendation P.863. In contrast to the previous standard (P.862 Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality), a more complex temporal alignment was developed allowing for the alignment of a wide variety of complex distortions for which P.862 was known to fail, such as multiple delay variations within utterances as well as temporal stretching and compression of the degraded signal. When this new algorithm is used in combination with the advanced perceptual model described in Part II, it provides a new measurement standard for predicting Mean Opinion Scores that outperforms the older PESQ standard, especially for wideband and super wideband speech signals (7 and 14 kHz audio bandwidth). Part I provides the basics of the POLQA approach and outlines the core elements of the temporal alignment.
Critical Thinking : a Multifaceted and Integ rated Process in the English Language Learning ( ESL )

The increased complexity of our world today calls for learners’ active knowledge construction and collaboration in the learning process, as opposed to traditional approaches based on the assumption that knowledge is transmitted from teacher to student. Accordingly, YouTube, in parallel with Moodle forums, emerge as new learning environments, fostering a multifaceted and integrated process consistent with young digital natives’ profile and the challenges demanded by a knowledge-based society. A case study was conducted in English as a second language (ESL), involving eleventh-grade secondary education students in formal and non-formal learning environments, offline and online. The research focussed on the educational value of digital video and Moodle forum discussions and their effective contribution to a meaningful and in-depth learning, aiming to develop critical thinking skills. First phase results showed that not only were a vast majority of learners not aware of many of the skills involved in critical thinking, but clear intellectual standards inherent to disciplined and critical thinking did not govern them as well. Final results showed major differences regarding learners’ achievements, indicating that YouTube and Moodle have promoted the development of critical thinking in English (ESL). In this paper we present; a) theories that support the integration of digital videos for developing essential skills to the learning process; b) new insights into the way foreign language may be processed; c) methodologies with YouTube and Moodle in the educational context.
P o S ( A L P S 2 0 1 8 ) 0 0 1 Neutrinos and BSM Physics

Models of neutrino mass generation constitute well motivated scenarios of Beyond-the-StandardModel physics. The interplay between high energy collider physics and low energy searches provides us with an effective approach to rule out, constrain and pinpoint such models. In this report, we give a brief overview of examples where collider searches at the LHC can help determine the mechanism of light neutrino mass generation and potentially falsify baryogenesis mechanisms.
The knowledge-based mobile learning system applied in printing network instructive course for science museum

Providing a knowledge-based mobile learning interface and content is a good way to expand the user participation in a science museum with a web-based system, especially as the internet and computing fields grow more and more diversely. There are many ways for providing museum to collect information, however some yield better knowledge and interesting content than others. This paper presents a prototype of the National Science and Technology Museum (NSTM) showing how to design the museum's educational content for an interface as well as a brief evaluation of those approaches. It then concludes with the design of a mobile learning center that expectably will help produce real-time digital content of archive for museum's education.
A distribution-based parametrization for improved tomographic imaging of solute plumes

SUMMARY Difference geophysical tomography (e.g. radar, resistivity and seismic) is used increasingly for imaging fluid flow and mass transport associated with natural and engineered hydrologic phenomena, including tracer experiments, in situ remediation and aquifer storage and recovery. Tomographic data are collected over time, inverted and differenced against a background image to produce ‘snapshots’ revealing changes to the system; these snapshots readily provide qualitative information on the location and morphology of plumes of injected tracer, remedial amendment or stored water. In principle, geometric moments (i.e. total mass, centres of mass, spread, etc.) calculated from difference tomograms can provide further quantitative insight into the rates of advection, dispersion and mass transfer; however, recent work has shown that moments calculated from tomograms are commonly biased, as they are strongly affected by the subjective choice of regularization criteria. Conventional approaches to regularization (Tikhonov) and parametrization (image pixels) result in tomograms which are subject to artefacts such as smearing or pixel estimates taking on the sign opposite to that expected for the plume under study. Here, we demonstrate a novel parametrization for imaging plumes associated with hydrologic phenomena. Capitalizing on the mathematical analogy between moment-based descriptors of plumes and the moment-based parameters of probability distributions, we design an inverse problem that (1) is overdetermined and computationally efficient because the image is described by only a few parameters, (2) produces tomograms consistent with expected plume behaviour (e.g. changes of one sign relative to the background image), (3) yields parameter estimates that are readily interpreted for plume morphology and offer direct insight into hydrologic processes and (4) requires comparatively few data to achieve reasonable model estimates. We demonstrate the approach in a series of numerical examples basedonstraight-raydifference-attenuationradarmonitoringofthetransportofanionictracer, and show that the methodology outlined here is particularly effective when limited data are available.
An analysis of neural receptive field plasticity by point process adaptive filtering

Neural receptive fields are plastic: with experience, neurons in many brain regions change their spiking responses to relevant stimuli. Analysis of receptive field plasticity from experimental measurements is crucial for understanding how neural systems adapt their representations of relevant biological information. Current analysis methods using histogram estimates of spike rate functions in nonoverlapping temporal windows do not track the evolution of receptive field plasticity on a fine time scale. Adaptive signal processing is an established engineering paradigm for estimating time-varying system parameters from experimental measurements. We present an adaptive filter algorithm for tracking neural receptive field plasticity based on point process models of spike train activity. We derive an instantaneous steepest descent algorithm by using as the criterion function the instantaneous log likelihood of a point process spike train model. We apply the point process adaptive filter algorithm in a study of spatial (place) receptive field properties of simulated and actual spike train data from rat CA1 hippocampal neurons. A stability analysis of the algorithm is sketched in the Appendix. The adaptive algorithm can update the place field parameter estimates on a millisecond time scale. It reliably tracked the migration, changes in scale, and changes in maximum firing rate characteristic of hippocampal place fields in a rat running on a linear track. Point process adaptive filtering offers an analytic method for studying the dynamics of neural receptive fields.
Better Living through Monetary Economics

By John B. Taylor Stanford University January 2008 Ten years ago macroeconomists began noticing and studying a remarkable change in the performance of the U.S. economy. The economy had become much more stable than in the past. The change appeared to occur some fifteen years earlier, in the early 1980s. Not only had inflation and interest rates and their volatilities diminished compared with the experience of the 1970s, but the volatility of real GDP had reached lows never seen before. It appeared that economic expansions were becoming longer and stronger while recessions were becoming rarer and shorter. At the time I called this phenomenon the Long Boom (Taylor(1998). It was as if there was one long growth expansion starting with the end of the deep recession in November 1982 and continuing right through its fifteenth anniversary in November 1997, with the mild 1990-91 recession seeming like a small interruption compared to recessions of the past. Others called the phenomenon the Great Moderation (Blanchard and Simon (2001)), because of the general decline in volatility of output growth and the inflation rate. I conjectured that the improved macroeconomic performance could be explained by a regime shift in monetary policy, which also appeared to occur in the early 1980s. I argued that this shift in monetary policy could be explained by a major change in
POD: Performance Oriented I/O Deduplication for Primary Storage Systems in the Cloud

Recent studies have shown that moderate to high data redundancy clearly exists in primary storage systems in the Cloud. Our experimental studies reveal that data redundancy exhibits a much higher level of intensity on the I/O path than that on disks due to the relatively high temporal access locality associated with small I/O requests to redundant data. On the other hand, we also observe that directly applying data deduplication to primary storage systems in the Cloud will likely cause space contention in memory and data fragmentation on disks. Based on these observations, we propose a Performance-Oriented I/O Deduplication approach, called POD, rather than a capacity-oriented I/O deduplication approach, represented by iDedup, to improve the I/O performance of primary storage systems in the Cloud without sacrificing capacity savings of the latter. The salient feature of POD is its focus on not only the capacity-sensitive large writes and files, as in iDedup, but also the performance-sensitive while capacity-insensitive small writes and files. The experiments conducted on our lightweight prototype implementation of POD show that POD significantly outperforms iDedup in the I/O performance measure by up to 87.9% with an average of 58.8%. Moreover, our evaluation results also show that POD achieves comparable or better capacity savings than iDedup.
Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy for Localized Ureter Transitional Cell Carcinoma: Three Case Reports

The gold standard management for ureter transitional cell carcinoma (UTCC) is radical nephroureterectomy with excision of the bladder cuff. However, some patients cannot undergo this procedure for several reasons. In the case reports described herein, we performed stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) on three patients with inoperable or surgery-rejected localized UTCC. Two out of the three patients did not develop local recurrence or distant metastasis during the observation period. However, recurrence was detected in the bladder of one patient 22 months after the treatment. No acute or late adverse events occurred in any of the three patients. SBRT may become one of the treatment options for inoperable or surgery-rejected UTCC patients.
Internal representation of slip for a soft finger with vision and tactile sensors

To build an adaptive autonomous robot, it must have a certain number of external sensors to observe the environment. One physical phenomenon is observed as sensor signals flow through these sensors. In this paper, we focus on a "slip" phenomenon and try to build a network representation of slip of an anthropomorphic robot hand. A robot hand with distributed tactile sensors and a vision sensor is built to demonstrate how it acquires the representation of "slip". At the beginning of leaning, only the vision sensor can sense the slip as the movement of target, but after a while the tactile sensors can sense the slip even if it is so small that the vision sensor cannot sense it.
Analysis of Federated and Global Scheduling for Parallel Real-Time Tasks

This paper considers the scheduling of parallel real-time tasks with implicit deadlines. Each parallel task is characterized as a general directed acyclic graph (DAG). We analyze three different real-time scheduling strategies: two well known algorithms, namely global earliest-deadline-first and global rate-monotonic, and one new algorithm, namely federated scheduling. The federated scheduling algorithm proposed in this paper is a generalization of partitioned scheduling to parallel tasks. In this strategy, each high-utilization task (utilization ≥ 1) is assigned a set of dedicated cores and the remaining low-utilization tasks share the remaining cores. We prove capacity augmentation bounds for all three schedulers. In particular, we show that if on unit-speed cores, a task set has total utilization of at most m and the critical-path length of each task is smaller than its deadline, then federated scheduling can schedule that task set on m cores of speed 2, G-EDF can schedule it with speed 3 + √5/2 ≈ 2.618, and G-RM can schedule it with speed 2 + √3 ≈ 3.732. We also provide lower bounds on the speedup and show that the bounds are tight for federated scheduling and G-EDF when m is sufficiently large.
Interleaving Ontology Mapping for Online Semantic Annotation on Semantic Wiki

We have designed a system that automatically annotates language resources online by referring to the semantic correspondences obtained from ontology mapping methods. Every time user inputs a term, triplets are created using a predefined pattern-triplet mapping table. If an unidentifiable term has been entered (i.e., triplets could not be created from it), the system suggests alternative terms from a thesaurus. An ontology mapping task is to map the triplets into background ontologies, efficiently producing a semantic wiki page whose tag vocabularies are derived from the ontologies. In practice, collaborative editing is also available without leading to semantic inconsistency between editors, by allowing them to use their own background ontologies and aligning these different background ontologies.
Mouse Pancreas Tissue Slice Culture Facilitates Long-Term Studies of Exocrine and Endocrine Cell Physiology in situ

Studies on pancreatic cell physiology rely on the investigation of exocrine and endocrine cells in vitro. Particularly, in the case of the exocrine tissue these studies have suffered from a reduced functional viability of acinar cells in culture. As a result not only investigations on dispersed acinar cells and isolated acini were limited in their potential, but also prolonged studies on pancreatic exocrine and endocrine cells in an intact pancreatic tissue environment were unfeasible. To overcome these limitations, we aimed to establish a pancreas tissue slice culture platform to allow long-term studies on exocrine and endocrine cells in the intact pancreatic environment. Mouse pancreas tissue slice morphology was assessed to determine optimal long-term culture settings for intact pancreatic tissue. Utilizing optimized culture conditions, cell specificity and function of exocrine acinar cells and endocrine beta cells were characterized over a culture period of 7 days. We found pancreas tissue slices cultured under optimized conditions to have intact tissue specific morphology for the entire culture period. Amylase positive intact acini were present at all time points of culture and acinar cells displayed a typical strong cell polarity. Amylase release from pancreas tissue slices decreased during culture, but maintained the characteristic bell-shaped dose-response curve to increasing caerulein concentrations and a ca. 4-fold maximal over basal release. Additionally, endocrine beta cell viability and function was well preserved until the end of the observation period. Our results show that the tissue slice culture platform provides unprecedented maintenance of pancreatic tissue specific morphology and function over a culture period for at least 4 days and in part even up to 1 week. This analytical advancement now allows mid -to long-term studies on the cell biology of pancreatic disorder pathogenesis and therapy in an intact surrounding in situ.
Spatio-Temporal Environmental Correlation and Population Variability in Simple Metacommunities

Natural populations experience environmental conditions that vary across space and over time. This variation is often correlated between localities depending on the geographical separation between them, and different species can respond to local environmental fluctuations similarly or differently, depending on their adaptation. How this emerging structure in environmental correlation (between-patches and between-species) affects spatial community dynamics is an open question. This paper aims at a general understanding of the interactions between the environmental correlation structure and population dynamics in spatial networks of local communities (metacommunities), by studying simple two-patch, two-species systems. Three different pairs of interspecific interactions are considered: competition, consumer–resource interaction, and host–parasitoid interaction. While the results paint a relatively complex picture of the effect of environmental correlation, the interaction between environmental forcing, dispersal, and local interactions can be understood via two mechanisms. While increasing between-patch environmental correlation couples immigration and local densities (destabilising effect), the coupling between local populations under increased between-species environmental correlation can either amplify or dampen population fluctuations, depending on the patterns in density dependence. This work provides a unifying framework for modelling stochastic metacommunities, and forms a foundation for a better understanding of population responses to environmental fluctuations in natural systems.
Multiresolution compression and reconstruction

The paper presents a framework for multiresolution compression and geometric reconstruction of arbitrarily dimensioned data designed for distributed applications. Although being restricted to uniform sampled data, the versatile approach enables the handling of a large variety of real world elements. Examples include nonparametric, parametric and implicit lines, surfaces or volumes, all of which are common to large scale data sets. The framework is based on two fundamental steps: compression is carried out by a remote server and generates a bit-stream transmitted over the underlying network. Geometric reconstruction is performed by the local client and renders a piecewise linear approximation of the data. More precisely, the compression scheme consists of a newly developed pipeline starting from an initial B-spline wavelet precoding. The fundamental properties of wavelets allow progressive transmission and interactive control of the compression gain by means of global and local oracles. In particular the authors discuss the problem of oracles in semiorthogonal settings and propose sophisticated oracles to remove unimportant coefficients. In addition, geometric constraints such as boundary lines can be compressed in a lossless manner and are incorporated into the resulting bit-stream. The reconstruction pipeline performs a piecewise adaptive linear approximation of data using a fast and easy to use point removal strategy which works with any subsequent triangulation technique.