Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cysteine proteases in atherosclerosis

Atherosclerosis predisposes patients to cardiovascular diseases, such as myocardial infarction and stroke. Instigation of vascular injury is triggered by retention of lipids and inflammatory cells in the vascular endothelium. Whereas these vascular lesions develop in young adults and are mostly considered harmless, over time persistent inflammatory and remodeling processes will ultimately damage the arterial wall and cause a thrombotic event due to exposure of tissue factors into the lumen. Evidence from human tissues and preclinical animal models has clearly established the role of cathepsin cysteine proteases in the development and progression of vascular lesions. Hence, understanding the function of cathepsins in atherosclerosis is important for developing novel therapeutic strategies and advanced point of care diagnostics. In this review we will describe the roles of cysteine cathepsins in different cellular process that become dysfunctional in atherosclerosis, such as lipid metabolism, inflammation and apoptosis, and how they contribute to arterial remodeling and atherogenesis. Finally, we will explore new horizons in protease molecular imaging, which may potentially become a surrogate marker to identify future cardiovascular events.
Image Segmentation using Fuzzy-Kohonen Algorithm

In this paper we propose a hybrid soft-computing technique for segmentation of an image. The algorithm used is a modified version of the Kohonen’s algorithm found in neural networks. Our algorithm is formulated by modifying the objective function of the standard Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm. So this algorithm can also be called as a FuzzyKohonen clustering algorithm. KeywordsImage Segmentation, Kohonen algorithm, Fuzzy C-Means algorithm, Supervised and Unsupervised Learning, Fuzzy-Kohonen Algorithm.
ADP-ribosylation factor and phosphatidic acid levels in Golgi membranes during budding of coatomer-coated vesicles ”

MCF-7yAdrVp is a multidrug-resistant human breast cancer subline that displays an ATP-dependent reduction in the intracellular accumulation of anthracycline anticancer drugs in the absence of overexpression of known multidrug resistance transporters such as P glycoprotein or the multidrug resistance protein. RNA fingerprinting led to the identification of a 2.4-kb mRNA that is overexpressed in MCF-7yAdrVp cells relative to parental MCF-7 cells. The mRNA encodes a 663-aa member of the ATP-binding cassette superfamily of transporters that we term breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP). Enforced expression of the full-length BCRP cDNA in MCF-7 breast cancer cells confers resistance to mitoxantrone, doxorubicin, and daunorubicin, reduces daunorubicin accumulation and retention, and causes an ATP-dependent enhancement of the eff lux of rhodamine 123 in the cloned transfected cells. BCRP is a xenobiotic transporter that appears to play a major role in the multidrug resistance phenotype of MCF-7yAdrVp human breast cancer
Semiparametric Efficient Estimation of Partially Linear Quantile Regression Models

Lee (2003) develops a n-consistent estimator of the parametric component of a partially linear quantile regression model, which is used to obtain his one-step semiparametric efficient estimator. As a result, how well the efficient estimator performs depends on the quality of the initial n-consistent estimator. In this paper, we aim to improve the small sample performance of the one-step efficient estimator by proposing a new n-consistent initial estimator, which does not require any trimming procedure and is less sensitive to data outliers and the choice of bandwidth than Lee's (2003) initial consistent estimator. Monte Carlo simulation results confirm that the proposed estimator and the one-step efficient estimator derived from it have more desirable empirical features than Lee's estimators.
Regional white matter hyperintensity volume, not hippocampal atrophy, predicts incident Alzheimer disease in the community.

BACKGROUND New-onset Alzheimer disease (AD) is often attributed to degenerative changes in the hippocampus. However, the contribution of regionally distributed small vessel cerebrovascular disease, visualized as white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) on magnetic resonance imaging, remains unclear. OBJECTIVE To determine whether regional WMHs and hippocampal volume predict incident AD in an epidemiological study. DESIGN A longitudinal community-based epidemiological study of older adults from northern Manhattan, New York. SETTING The Washington Heights/Inwood Columbia Aging Project. PARTICIPANTS Between 2005 and 2007, 717 participants without dementia received magnetic resonance imaging scans. A mean (SD) of 40.28 (9.77) months later, 503 returned for follow-up clinical examination and 46 met criteria for incident dementia (45 with AD). Regional WMHs and relative hippocampal volumes were derived. Three Cox proportional hazards models were run to predict incident dementia, controlling for relevant variables. The first included all WMH measurements; the second included relative hippocampal volume; and the third combined the 2 measurements. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Incident AD. RESULTS White matter hyperintensity volume in the parietal lobe predicted time to incident dementia (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.194; P = .03). Relative hippocampal volume did not predict incident dementia when considered alone (HR = 0.419; P = .77) or with the WMH measures included in the model (HR = 0.302; P = .70). Including hippocampal volume in the model did not notably alter the predictive utility of parietal lobe WMHs (HR = 1.197; P = .049). CONCLUSIONS The findings highlight the regional specificity of the association of WMHs with AD. It is not clear whether parietal WMHs solely represent a marker for cerebrovascular burden or point to distinct injury compared with other regions. Future work should elucidate pathogenic mechanisms linking WMHs and AD pathology.
Integrating RTS noise into circuit analysis

A new methodology to include Random Telegraph Signals (RTS) noise in circuit analysis is proposed. The aim of this methodology is to allow integrated circuit designers to study the sensitivity of their circuits to RTS noise and thus minimise the impact of it. In this work, compact models extracted from three-dimensional ‘atomistic’ simulations based on random doping were used. These models define 35nm CMOS technology devices with single charge trapping at the Si-SiO2 interface, and therefore the amplitude of RTS noise. The timing parameters of RTS noise were predicted based on the Shockley-Reed-Hall statistics. The methodology was applied to a test circuit, four-quadrant Chible multiplier as an example, under both steady-state and time-varying bias conditions. Simulation results on variability in devices (based on Monte Carlo methods) and temperature sweep are also reported.
Topic-marking prepositions in Swedish: A corpus-based analysis of adpositional synonymy

This study analyses the relationship between four near-synonymous Swedish prepositions, namely angående, beträffande, gällande and rörande, which are used to establish what we call a topic-marking relation, as in statens avtal angående finansieringen ‘the agreement of the state regarding the financing’. By focusing on a single, loosely defined genre consisting of the written texts included in the Swedish PAROLE corpus, we address the question of what differences there are among these four prepositions, which intuitively seem highly similar and mutually interchangeable. In order to find out which contextual and grammatical factors might influence the choice of one preposition over the others, two complementary analyses were performed. First, a so-called collostructional analysis (see Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003, Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004) was performed on 791 cases of these prepositions found in the PAROLE corpus. Secondly, the corpus examples were annotated according to ten syntactic and four semantic criteria and a multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed on the annotated data set. The results show some tendencies pointing to differing usage patterns of the four prepositions. Beträffande stands out as the most frequent of them all and is also preferably used when no explicit head element is present, typically in sentence-initial position. Angående prefers words of communication while rörande is used when another topic-marking preposition is also present. On the other hand, neither of the two analyses leads to a clear distinction among the four prepositions, thus pointing to the fact that these topic-marking prepositions indeed constitute a fairly good case of adpositional synonymy, with few distinguishing factors separating one from the other.
Call-by-value Solvability

The notion of solvability in the call-by-value λ -calculus is defined and completely characterized, both from an operational and a logical point of view. The operational characterization is given through a reduction machine, performing the classical β -reduction, according to an innermost strategy. In fact, it turns out that the call-by-value reduction rule is too weak for capturing the solvability property of terms. The logical characterization is given through an intersection type assignment system, assigning types of a given shape to all and only the call-by-value solvable terms.
Database Engineering Processes with DB-MAIN

Software engineering needs more and more to be supported by CASE tools. Since databases are at the heart of information systems, they deserve a particular attention. More and more CASE tools allow method engineers to implement their own methodology and they allow users to record all their actions, with their rationales, in order to improve the quality of the design and the quality of the documentation of the design. DBMAIN is such a database oriented tool with a method description and a documentation generation facilities. But it has its particularities like its procedural non-deterministic Method Description Language, its well integrated multilevel histories and its userfriendly methodological engine.
Nativeness Classification with Suprasegmental Features on the Accent Group Level

We present a novel approach to discriminating native and nonnative utterances based on suprasegmental features extracted at the Accent Group (AG) level. Past studies have shown modeling a set of shared intonation patterns across AGs to be effective in predicting local f0 contour shapes. Here we demon-strate that AG level prosodic features are also effective in nativeness classiﬁcation. The proposed suprasegmental feature set is very low dimensional, and is derived from f0 and energy contours across the AG, as well as normalized duration of the syllables within each AG. A Random Forest back end classiﬁer is used to combine AG level scores from GMM and Decision Tree models, producing nativeness scores at the utterance level. The proposed prosodic nativeness classiﬁer achieves 83.3% accuracy for 2-AG utterances and 89.1% accuracy for 3-AG utterances, exceeding a baseline Gaussian Supervector system’s performance by more than 10% absolute. The vastly lower di-mensionality of the proposed feature set relative to the baseline method suggests the importance of suprasegmental features over traditional spectral cues in contributing to the perceived nativeness of a learner’s language.
Efficient calibration of infrared range finder PBS-03JN with scan-wise cubic hermite splines for indoor mobile robots

All sensors inevitably have various errors. These errors make output data from sensor to be inaccurate and mobile robot applications that use to be unstable. For this reason, there are many calibration methods to compensate the error. We propose a new calibration method for infrared range finder PBS-03JN. This method based on error characteristic of PBS-03JN and uses Cubic hermite as a calibration function. Cubic hermite is often used for data regression because it has continuity, smoothness and monotonicity. Our method makes output data from PBS-03JN to be more accurate efficiently. The performance of our calibration is shown by some data collection experiments and simulations.
A nomadic war machine in the metropolis

This paper builds upon Colin McFarlane's 2011 call in City for an ‘assemblage urbanism’ to supplement critical urbanism. It does so by mapping the spatio-political contours of London's 21st-century housing crisis through the geophilosophical framework of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus ([1980] 2013, London: Bloomsbury] and Hardt and Negri's analysis of the metropolis in Commonwealth (2009, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). The paper examines the Focus E15 housing campaign based around a group of young mothers in the East London borough of Newham. In 2013, the mothers were living in the Focus E15 foyer supported housing unit for young people in Newham, but they were subsequently threatened with eviction as a result of welfare cuts. After successfully contesting the mothers’ own prospective expulsion from the city, the campaign shifted to the broader struggle for ‘social housing not social cleansing’. The paper draws upon participant observation at campaign events and interviews with key members. The Focus E15 campaign has engaged in a series of actions which form a distinctive way of undertaking housing politics in London, a politics that can be understood using a Deleuzoguattarian framework. Several campaign actions, including temporary occupations, are analysed. It is argued that these actions have created ‘smooth space’ in a manner which is to an extent distinctive from many other London housing campaigns which are rooted in a more sedentary defensive approach based around the protection of existing homes and communities—‘our place’. It is such spatio-political creativity—operating as a ‘nomadic war machine'—which has given rise to the high-profile reputation of the Focus E15 campaigners as inspirational young women who do not ‘know their place’.
EXPLANATORY STYLES AMONG UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN A CHRISTIAN AND A STATE-SUPPORTED INSTITUTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION. PART 2: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

In an earlier study of Bible college students, no significant correlation was found between explanatory styles and academic achievement. Because optimistic selftalk has been shown to be associated with numerous vital aspects of life (e.g., motivation, problem-solving skills, emotional well-being, and physical health), follow-up research was conducted to ascertain if optimistic attributions are more frequently associated with students in programs of Christian education than with students in a public, state-supported university environment. The research was conducted with students at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. One hundred subjects completed the Academic Attributional Style Questionnaire and the Coping with Academic Failures Questionnaire that were developed by Peterson and Barrett (1987). The findings were compared with the data previously compiled on the students in the Christian course of studies at The Criswell College and Graduate School of the Bible in Dallas, Texas. A significant, positive difference was found to exist between the explanatory styles of students at the two schools. Students in Christian courses of study tended toward explanations for negative events that were external, unstable, and specific. The University of North Texas students tended toward explanations for negative events that were internal, stable, and global.
Neuropsychiatry of Huntington's disease

Psychiatric manifestations are an integral part of Huntington's disease. They may be divided into those syndromes which resemble idiopathic disorders, but for which HD patients may be particularly at risk, those constellations which are peculiar to HD and related conditions, such as the executive dysfunction syndrome, and those symptoms that can truly be regarded as nonspecific, such as delirium. Most of these problems are believed to arise from suhcorticai neuropathologic changes. Major depression is a common psychiatric diagnosis, but the executive dysfunction syndrome, a difficult-to-define condition characterized by often simultaneous apathy and disinhibition, may be even more widespread. There are no large controlled studies of psychiatric treatments in HD, but case series, anecdotal reports, and clinical experience indicate thai many of these syndromes respond readily to treatment Further study of the neuropsychiatry of HD may help to reveal the underpinnings of psychiatric conditions found in the general population.
Treatment of large hepatocellular carcinoma: comparison between techniques and long term results.

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to compare results over time of Transcatheter Arterial Chemo Embolization (TACE), Percutaneous Ethanol Injection (PEI), Laser Thermal Ablation (LTA) and combined therapy of large Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC). MATERIALS AND METHODS Between 1995 and 2003, 89 cirrhosis patients (51 Child-Pugh A, 38 Child-Pugh B) with at least one nodule of HCC =/> 40 mm, were included in this randomized study; 21 were treated with TACE, 20 with PEI, 29 with LTA and 19 with combined therapy. The total number of HCC nodules was 92 with a mean diameter of 52.9 mm. RESULTS No major complication occurred in all procedures. CT scan showed that complete necrosis was achieved in 83% of treated nodules (76 out of 92); as a whole, the disease relapsed in 18 (20.2%) patients (disease free interval being 18.2+/-9.4 months). The cumulative survival rates were 69.6%, 25.1% and 9.8% at 12, 36 and 60 months respectively. Univariate analysis of survival showed statistically significant differences in the comparison between Child-Pugh A group vs B (p<0.0001) and between single nodule vs multiple (p=0.0019). Patients subjected to combined therapy and LTA showed a statistically significant longer survival than those treated with TACE and PEI. CONCLUSIONS LTA proves to be the most effective treatment for HCC < 50 mm, combined therapy is the best choice for nodules =/> 50 mm since complete necrosis is achieved in almost all cases and better total survival in the treated patients.
Sophisticated Dynamic Adaptive Control of a Polymerization Process

The chemical process considered serves as an appropriate paradigm of multivariable dynamic systems of strong non-linear coupling in the control of which the state propagation of various internal degrees of freedom can neither be measured nor directly controlled. The desired output is a single real, nonlinear function of these quantities. In the present example only a single input variable is used for control purposes. In the paper quantitative model of the process is presented. For controlling this process various approaches were applied: genetic programming for the identification of the process, an ARMAX-type floating basis vector approach in the quasi-stationary limit, and fuzzy-type adaptive control with fixed and with variable speed in which the adaptation rule was determined on qualitative considerations. In the present approach the adaptation rule is determined in a sophisticated manner, on the basis of a modified version of the renormalization transformation, in which the system is observed real time. The quality of the control is investigated via simulation from the points of view of its robustness with respect to setting its free parameters, and sensitivity to the measurement noises. It is concluded that at the time-scale of about 0.067 s sampling time the ‘dynamics’ of the controlled process can well be traced, and on the basis of a simple planning method quite accurate dynamic control can be achieved.
Information Cyberspace and Future Cyber Homes

The current Internet combines very complex communications infrastructures, while connecting users globally and at the same time creating information cyberspace systems. Large companies such as Philips are working on communications technologies that will facilitate fully automated households (i.e., Cyber Homes). Today, people are using are using small digital pagers and phones with embedded computers and displays, palm-size computers such as Palm Pilot, notebook-size panel computers and wall-size displays. Current research and development trends in the field of Telecommunications and computing industries continues towards a human centric computing, smart spaces, smart devices, clothing, fully automated houses etc. This new technology creates environment where computers are everywhere and provide online access to information at any time to anyone. In this paper, the author discusses new technological trends directions in the Internet, E-commerce and Automation Industries, while presenting his own vision on application of ubiquitous computing in the future cyber home automation. In support of creating future fully automated cyber homes, the author promotes creation of interdisciplinary and multinational research and development teams world-wide.
A minimalistic all-atom approach to protein folding

Using simple sequence-based potentials, the folding properties of a designed three-helix-bundle protein, an α-helix and a β-hairpin are studied. The three-helix-bundle protein is modelled using 5–6 atoms per amino acid and is found to undergo a first-order-like folding transition in which chain collapse and helix formation cannot be separated, which is in accord with experimental data. The other two sequences are studied using a model that contains all atoms and are indeed found to make an α-helix and a β-hairpin, respectively, for exactly the same choice of parameters. The calculated melting curves are, moreover, in reasonable quantitative agreement with experimental data, for both peptides. The melting curves are found to be quite well described by a simple two-state model, although the energy distributions lack a clear bimodal shape.
Versajet hydrosurgery system in the debridement of skin necrosis after Ca gluconate extravasation: report of 9 infantile cases.

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to evaluate the results of debridement with Versajet hydrosurgery system in patients with skin necrosis after ca gluconate extravasation. METHODS We evaluated nine infants (mean age: 26 days; range: 1 day to 3 months) with calcium gluconate extravasation injury. Site of injury was the foot in 3 cases, the hand and wrist in 5 and the scalp in one. In all patients the skin necrosis was debrided with Versajet hydrosurgery system under general anesthesia without damaging the dermis layer. RESULTS Following debridement all wounds healed spontaneously by re-epithelization and the mean time of full epithelization was fourteen days. No patient required a second debridement. At a minimum follow-up of 1 year minimal scar formation was noted and there was no hypertrophic scar. CONCLUSION Versajet hydrosurgery system appears to be effective in the debridement of skin necrosis due to ca gluconate extravasation in pediatric population.