Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How to Assess the Link Between Vascular Biology and Arterial Hemodynamics?

See related article, pp 773–779 The main strength of the article by Zachariah et al1 was that it investigated the association of several hemodynamic factors and multiple growth factors in a large population of well-explored subjects. Its major finding is the emergence of insulin-like growth factor (IGF) 1 and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) as the 2 growth factors that were significantly related to several measures of vascular function. Specifically, the authors observed a pattern of negative correlations between circulating IGF-1 and both carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV; CF-PWV) and reflection coefficient but a positive association between VEGF concentration and CF-PWV. This latter relationship disappeared, however, after adjustment for mean arterial pressure, thus providing valuable information on the possible implication of growth factors on the steady component of arterial hemodynamics (continuous load) and on microcirculation status. Although similar results regarding the relationship between growth factors and arterial stiffness have already been reported in previous studies, the originality of the present analysis is 3-fold: (1) the simultaneous analysis of several growth factors and their receptors; (2) the measurement of several arterial parameters providing complementary information on both microcirculation and macrocirculation; and (3) achieving all of these analyses in a large, well-explored population. ### Multiple Approaches for Central Hemodynamic Assessment Recent development and validation of various software for applanation tonometry have enabled the analysis of pulse waves in several arterial segments with high accuracy. Among these, CF-PWV has been shown to be a more powerful cardiovascular risk factor than mean arterial pressure, systolic blood pressure, or pulse pressure.2 This relationship has been demonstrated in …
Impact of Vertigo and Spatial Disorientation on Concurrent Cognitive Tasks

Disorientation may draw attention from other activities and its impact on cognition may cause pilot error and problems of concentration in dizzy patients. Tasks used to study the impact of disorientation include number processing, intelligence scales and Brookes matrices (reproduction of 2xD patterns of numbers vs. nonsensical sentences), and Stroop tasks to probe selective effects on spatial versus verbally‐loaded tasks. This variety of tasks has been used to evaluate cognitive performance in numerous scenarios, including visual‐vestibular mismatch, vection, spinning, coriolis, balancing, and flight maneuvers. A meta‐analysis provides an overview of how spatial disorientation may affect cognition: Substantial individual differences in managing disorientation are to be expected; errors on cognitive tasks occur during the first few experiences of a disorienting situation and subjects rapidly learn to “quarantine” this “novelty effect”; familiarity with and practice on a test gives protection against disorientation; task performance continues to suffer if the protagonist is unaware of disorientation; with disorientation that demands external resolution (e.g., interpretation of instruments) the subject must learn to switch priority to the cognitive task; there is a moderate preferential impact of disorientation on spatial tasks; anxiety of real situations probably exacerbates the impact of disorientation.
HIV, syphilis infection, and sexual practices among transgenders, male sex workers, and other men who have sex with men in Jakarta, Indonesia

Objectives: To establish the prevalence of HIV, syphilis, and sexual risk behaviour among three groups of men who have sex with men in Jakarta, Indonesia, and to investigate sexual links between these men and broader heterosexual populations. Methods: Anonymous, cross sectional surveys among community recruited transgender and male sex workers and self recognised men who have sex with men (MSM) were undertaken in mid-2002 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Places where transgender and male sex workers sell sex and where men go to meet non-commercial male sex partners were mapped. Probability samples were selected for the sex worker populations, while a mixed probability and convenience sample was drawn for self recognised MSM. Blood was drawn for HIV and syphilis serology and community interviewers administered a standardised questionnaire. Results: HIV prevalence was 22% among transgender sex workers, 3.6% among male sex workers, and 2.5% among self recognised MSM, and syphilis prevalence was 19.3%, 2.0% and 1.1% respectively. 59.3% of transgender sex workers and 64.8% of male sex workers reported recent unprotected anal intercourse with clients, and 53.1% of other MSM reported unprotected anal sex with male partners. Some 54.4% of male sex workers and 18.3% of other MSM reported female partners in the preceding year. Conclusion: HIV has reached substantial levels among transgender sex workers, and is not negligible in other MSM groups. Risk behaviour is high in all subpopulations, and bisexual behaviour is common, meaning the threat of a wider epidemic is substantial. Prevention programmes targeting male-male sex are needed to reduce this threat.
Weakly Standard Interference Mappings: Existence of Fixed Points and Applications to Power Control in Wireless Networks

We propose novel approaches to identify the existence of fixed points of the so-called weakly standard interference mappings, which include the well-known standard and general interference mappings as particular cases. The approaches are based on the concept of spectral radius of asymptotic mappings, a mathematical tool recently introduced to study the behavior of wireless networks. We show that, for arbitrary weakly standard interference mappings, knowledge of the spectral radius of an associated asymptotic mapping gives a sufficient condition to determine the existence of fixed points or their absence in the positive orthant. If the mapping has a fixed point, we further prove that the set of fixed points has a minimal element that can be easily computed with a simple fixed point algorithm. The theory developed here is applied to the problem of power control for load planning in LTE networks. Unlike previous approaches in the literature, the proposed solution takes into account the limited number of modulation and coding schemes of practical transceivers.
User's gestural exploration of different virtual agents' expressive profiles

Designing affective user interfaces involving expressive characters raises several questions. The system should be able to display facial expressions of complex emotions as dynamic and realtime reactions to user's inputs. From a cognitive point of view, designers need to know how the user will perceive the dynamics of these facial expressions as a function of his/her input. We aim at evaluating if users can perceive different expressive profiles of a virtual character by manually controlling its expressions and observing its reaction to his/her input. This paper describes our platform that enables a virtual character to display blended facial expressions of emotions as realtime continuous reactions to users' gesture input. We explain the techniques underlying the computation of intermediate facial expressions of emotion, and their control in the 3D space PAD (Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance) using gesture input. Preliminary results of a perceptive study show the potential of such an approach for assessing the dynamics of the perception of emotional expressions during gesture interaction with virtual characters endowed with different expressive profiles.
Alcohol‐induced liver injury in mice lacking Cu, Zn‐superoxide dismutase

Because alcoholic liver disease has been linked to oxidative stress, we investigated the effect of a compromised antioxidant defense system, Cu, Zn‐superoxide dismutase (Sod1) deficiency, on alcohol‐induced liver injury. C57BL/129SV wild‐type (Sod1+/+) and Sod1 knockout (Sod1−/−) mice were fed dextrose or ethanol (10% of total calories) liquid diets for 3 weeks. Histologic evaluation of liver specimens of Sod1−/− mice fed ethanol showed the development of liver injury ranging from mild to extensive centrilobular necrosis and inflammation. Sod1+/+ mice fed ethanol showed mild steatosis; both Sod1+/+ and Sod1−/− mice fed the dextrose diet had normal histology. Alanine transaminase levels were significantly elevated only in Sod1−/− mice fed ethanol. Cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2e1) activity was elevated about 2‐fold by ethanol in Sod1+/+ and Sod1−/− mice. Ethanol consumption increased levels of protein carbonyls and lipid peroxidation aldehydic products in the liver of Sod1−/− mice. Hepatic adenosine triphosphate (ATP) content was reduced dramatically in Sod1−/− mice fed ethanol in association with a decrease in the mitochondrial reduced glutathione (GSH) level and activity of MnSOD. Immunohistochemical determination of 3‐nitrotyrosine (3NT) residues in liver sections of the Sod1 knockout mice treated with ethanol showed a significant increase of 3NT staining in the centrilobular areas. In conclusion, a rather moderate ethanol consumption promoted oxidative stress in Sod1−/− mice, with increased formation of peroxynitrite, protein carbonyls, and lipid peroxidation and decreased mitochondrial GSH and MnSOD. We speculate that the increased oxidative stress causes mitochondrial damage and reduction of ATP content, leading to alcoholic liver injury. This model may be useful in further mechanistic studies on alcohol‐induced liver injury.
Implementing policy innovations: resource dependence, struggle for discursive hegemony and institutional inertia in the Dutch river policy domain (rewritten version of ERSA/August 2005)

Due to climate changes, the volume of the water flowing in the rivers will continue to increase and the sea level will continue to rise. To be able to cope with potential future flood disasters, Dutch policy makers now try to elaborate and implement a new safety concept, called Â‘space for the riverÂ’. The basic idea of this new safety concept is to increase the amount of space for the rivers, and by that to enlarge their discharge capacity. The aim of the large national Â‘Space for RiversÂ’ project is to develop river-widening measures which improve both the safety of the inhabitants and the spatial quality of the riverine areas at the same time. Replacing dikes, digging out old river branches or creating new ones (bypasses) are some examples of possible measures. This paper focuses on the institutional dynamics brought about by this new safety concept. The national water management agency Rijkswaterstaat realised that for the implementation of this new safety concept it is largely dependent on the cooperation of other national ministries, provinces, municipalities, water boards, NGOs and inhabitants of the areas along the main rivers. Therefore, an innovative policy process was designed aimed at joint learning, and at creating administrative and societal support for an ambitious river policy program. During this process three key-dilemmas became apparent. First, there is a permanent tension, partly caused by financial scarcity, between the objectives of safety and spatial quality. Secondly, in spite of the interactive policy design chosen, existing institutions, such as the procedure for large scale infrastructure projects (Â‘PKB-procedureÂ’), do support governmental hierarchy rather than horizontal modes of governance. Finally, there is a tension between long term and short term policy objectives. In other words: what relative importance is attached to either reaching safety standards in the short run or anticipating future river discharges? The main argument of this paper is that to better understand these dilemmas we need to reconstruct the frames of reference of the parties involved and the different rules of the game water managers and spatial planners are used to play.
Towards dense moving object segmentation based robust dense RGB-D SLAM in dynamic scenarios

Based on the latest achievements in computer vision and RGB-D SLAM, a practical way for dense moving object segmentation and thus a new framework for robust dense RGB-D SLAM in challenging dynamic scenarios is put forward. As the state-of-the-art method in RGB-D SLAM, dense SLAM is very robust when there are motion blur or featureless regions, while most of those sparse feature-based methods could not handle them. However, it is very susceptible to dynamic elements in the scenarios. To enhance its robustness in dynamic scenarios, we propose to combine dense moving object segmentation with dense SLAM. Since the object segmentation results from the latest available algorithm in computer vision are not satisfactory, we propose some effective measures to improve upon them so that better results can be achieved. After dense segmentation of dynamic objects, dense SLAM can be employed to estimate the camera poses. Quantitative results from the available challenging benchmark dataset have proved the effectiveness of our method.
Productive Generation of Compound Words in Statistical Machine Translation

In many languages the use of compound words is very productive. A common practice to reduce sparsity consists in splitting compounds in the training data. When this is done, the system incurs the risk of translating components in non-consecutive positions, or in the wrong order. Furthermore, a post-processing step of compound merging is required to reconstruct compound words in the output. We present a method for increasing the chances that components that should be merged are translated into contiguous positions and in the right order. We also propose new heuristic methods for merging components that outperform all known methods, and a learning-based method that has similar accuracy as the heuristic method, is better at producing novel compounds, and can operate with no background linguistic resources.
Introductory Chapter: Transcriptome Analysis

The central dogma of molecular biology describes the flow of genetic information from genes to functions of the cells and organisms. This comprises a two-step process: first, DNA, the permanent, heritable, genetic information repository, is transcribed by the RNA polymerase enzymes into RNA, a short-lasting information carrier; second, a subset of RNA, the messenger RNAs, mRNAs, are translated into protein. The transcriptome, then, is the complete set of all RNA molecules in a cell, a population of cells or in an organism. in tissues.
Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile applications are becoming increasingly computational intensive, while many mobile devices still have limited battery power and cannot support computational intensive tasks. Mobile edge computing (MEC) computing is an extension of edge computing, and it refers to computing at the edge of a network. In mobile edge computing, computing and storage nodes are placed at the Internet's edge near mobile devices. It places the edge clouds at the candidate locations. This paper presents a brief introduction to MEC.
A Novel Approach for Organizing Web Search Results using Ranking and Clustering

World Wide Web is considered the most valuable place for Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery. While retrieving information through user queries, a search engine results in a large and unmanageable collection of documents. Web mining tools are used to classify, cluster and order the documents so that users can easily navigate through the search results and find the desired information content. A more efficient way to organize the documents can be a combination of clustering and ranking, where clustering can group the documents and ranking can be applied for ordering the pages within each cluster. Based on this approach, in this paper, a mechanism is being proposed that provides ordered results in the form of clusters in accordance with user‟s query. An efficient page ranking method is also proposed that orders the results according to both the relevancy and the importance of documents. This approach helps user to restrict his search to some top documents in particular clusters of his interest.
Laminin-driven Epac/Rap1 regulation of epithelial barriers on decellularized matrix

Decellularized tissues offer a unique tool for developing regenerative biomaterials or in vitro platforms for the study of cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions. One main challenge associated with decellularized lung tissue is that ECM components can be stripped away or altered by the detergents used to remove cellular debris. Without characterizing the composition of lung decellularized ECM (dECM) and the cellular response caused by the altered composition, it is difficult to utilize dECM for regeneration and specifically, engineering the complexities of the alveolar-capillary barrier. This study takes steps towards uncovering if dECM must be enhanced with lost ECM proteins to achieve proper epithelial barrier formation. To achieve this, epithelial barrier function was assessed on dECM coatings with and without the systematic addition of several key basement membrane proteins. After comparing barrier function on collagen, fibronectin, laminin, and dECM in varying combinations as an in vitro coating, the alveolar epithelium exhibited superior barrier function when dECM was supplemented with laminin as evidenced by trans-epithelial electrical resistance (TEER) and permeability assays. Increased barrier resistance with laminin addition was associated with upregulation of Claudin-18, E- cadherin, and junction adhesion molecule (JAM)-A, and stabilization of zonula occludens (ZO)-1 at junction complexes. The Epac/Rap1 pathway was observed to play a role in the ECM-mediated barrier function determined by protein expression and Epac inhibition. These findings reveal potential ECM coatings and molecular therapeutic targets for improved regeneration with decellularized scaffolds or edema related pathologies.
Virtual steering limitations for reversing an articulated vehicle with off-axle passive trailers

The paper reports on motion control for a non-holonomic vehicle pushing several passive trailers. To avoid inter-unit collisions, tractor steering limitations were successfully applied during forward motion in our previous work. Here, this approach is extended to the case of backward motion for off-axle trailers. To this end, the last trailer is considered to behave as a virtual tractor. Then, virtual steering is computed by applying any path tracking method for single non-holonomic mobile robots, incorporating limitations if necessary. Finally, kinematic relationships are used to translate motion commands to the actual tractor. The method has been validated experimentally with two heterogeneous off-axle trailers attached to the tracked mobile robot Auriga-¿.
Maximal column rank preservers of fuzzy matrices

This paper concerns two notions of rank of fuzzy matrices: maximal column rank and column rank. We investigate the difference of them. We also characterize the linear operators which preserve the maximal column rank of fuzzy matrices. That is, a linear operator T preserves maximal column rank if and only if it has the form T (X) = UXV with some invertible fuzzy matrices U and V .
Black holes and exact solutions in string theory

We review some recent results about exact classical solutions in string theory. In particular, we consider four dimensional extremal electric black holes which are related via dimensional reduction to the exact five dimensional fundamental string solutions. We also comment on the issue of \a' corrections to non-extremal black holes. (To appear in Proceedings of the Conference on Current Topics in Astrofundamental Physics, September 1994, Erice)
Parsing and Canonical Unparsing

Parsing and formatting have often been identified as problems that do not have elegant and widely accepted solutions in ANSI Common Lisp. Format strings tend to be parsimonious and can be very difficult to read. Destructuring primitives exist only for lists and their utility in parsing is further limited by the lack of non-deterministic features in Common Lisp. This paper demonstrates a simple implementation of non-deterministic parsing and canonical unparsing in Common Lisp. This method can provide a solution to both of these problems in a simple unified way. A single relation is constructed between an input string and a data-structure. This relation can provide a data-structure associated with a string, or construct a canonical string from the data-structure. While this type of solution may not meet performance requirements in some situations it is elegant, quite general and is easy to work with.
Antiherpes effects and pharmacokinetic properties of 9-(4-hydroxybutyl) guanine and the (R) and (S) enantiomers of 9-(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)guanine

Three acyclic guanosine analogs with similar structures, the (R) and (S) forms of 9-(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)guanine and 9-(4-hydroxybutyl)guanine, were compared for antiherpes activity in vivo and in vitro. The three guanosine analogs were viral thymidine kinase-dependent inhibitors of virus multiplication. In cell cultures, (S)-9-(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)guanine was the least active of these three drugs against a variety of herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and type 2 (HSV-2) strains. This was also the case for a certain HSV-1 or HSV-2 strain in different cell lines. In cell cultures, (R)-9-(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)guanine and 9-(4-hydroxybutyl)guanine had similar antiherpes activities. However, in vivo in cutaneous HSV-1 infections in guinea pigs treated topically and in systemic HSV-2 infections in mice treated orally or intraperitoneally, only (R)-9-(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)guanine had a therapeutic effect. The extremely short half-life in plasma and the high clearance of 9-(4-hydroxybutyl)guanine as compared with those of (R)-9-(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)guanine probably made 9-(4-hydroxybutyl)guanine inefficacious when given intraperitoneally or orally to mice infected with herpesvirus. On the other hand, no kinetic differences between (R)-9-(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)guanine and 9-(4-hydroxybutyl)guanine were observed in penetration through guinea pig skin ex vivo, and no preferential metabolism of 9-(4-hydroxybutyl)guanine in skin was noted. We deduced that high thymidine levels in guinea pig skin preferentially antagonize the antiviral effect of 9-(4-hydroxybutyl) guanine in cutaneous HSV-1 infections.
Combined algebraic and truncated differential cryptanalysis on reduced-round SIMON

Recently, two families of ultra-lightweight block ciphers were proposed, SIMON and SPECK, which come in a variety of block and key sizes (Beaulieu et al., 2013). They are designed to offer excellent performance for hardware and software implementations (Beaulieu et al., 2013; Aysu et al., 2014). In this paper, we study the resistance of SIMON-64/128 with respect to algebraic attacks. Its round function has very low Multiplicative Complexity (MC) (Boyar et al., 2000; Boyar and Peralta, 2010) and very low non-linearity (Boyar et al., 2013; Courtois et al., 2011) since the only non-linear component is the bitwise multiplication operation. Such ciphers are expected to be very good candidates to be broken by algebraic attacks and combinations with truncated differentials (additional work by the same authors). We algebraically encode the cipher and then using guess-then-determine techniques, we try to solve the underlying system using either a SAT solver (Bard et al., 2007) or by ElimLin algorithm (Courtois et al., 2012b). We consider several settings where P-C pairs that satisfy certain properties are available, such as low Hamming distance or follow a strong truncated differential property (Knudsen, 1995). We manage to break faster than brute force up to 10(/44) rounds for most cases we have tried. Surprisingly, no key guessing is required if pairs which satisfy a strong truncated differential property are available. This reflects the power of combining truncated differentials with algebraic attacks in ciphers of low non-linearity and shows that such ciphers require a large number of rounds to be secure.