Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Veri fi cation of Distributed Firewalls

The private computer network of any large enterprise has tens, or even hundreds, of firewalls. These firewalls are placed at the entry points of the network (where the network is connected with the rest of the Internet), and at many chosen points within the network. The result is a complex firewall network that seems hard to understand or analyze. In this paper, we propose a method for verifying the correctness of firewall networks with tree topologies. Our method is based on identifying two types of properties of firewall trees: accept and discard properties. An accept (or discard) property of a firewall tree specifies a class of packets that should be accepted (or discarded, respectively) by the firewall tree. We present two algorithms that can be used to decide whether a given firewall tree satisfies a given, accept or discard, property of that tree.
Natural hybridization between extremely divergent chromosomal races of the common shrew (Sorex araneus, Soricidae, Soricomorpha): hybrid zone in European Russia

The Moscow and Seliger chromosomal races of the common shrew differ by Robertsonian fusions and possibly whole‐arm reciprocal translocations (WARTs) such that their F1 hybrids produce a chain‐of‐eleven configuration at meiosis I and are expected to suffer substantial infertility. Of numerous hybrid zones that have been described in the common shrew, those between the Moscow and Seliger races involve the greatest chromosomal difference. We collected 211 individuals from this zone to generate a total dataset of 298 individuals from 187 unique global positioning system (GPS) locations within the vicinity of interracial contact. We used a geographic information system (GIS) to map the location of the hybrid zone, which follows a direct route between two lakes, as would be anticipated from tension zone theory. Even within the central area of the hybrid zone, there is a much higher frequency of pure race individuals than hybrid, making this a clear example of a bimodal zone in the sense of Jiggins & Mallet (2000) . The zone runs through good habitat for common shrews, but nevertheless it is very narrow (standard cline widths: 3–4 km), as would be anticipated from low hybrid fitness. There is clear potential for an interruption to gene flow and build‐up of reproductive isolation. As found in some other hybrid zones, there is a high frequency of novel genetic variants, in this case, new chromosomal rearrangements. Here, we report a de novo Robertsonian fission and a de novo reciprocal translocation, both for the first time in the common shrew. There is an extraordinarily high frequency of de novo mutations recorded in F1 hybrids in the zone and we discuss how chromosomal instability may be associated with such hybrids. The occurrence of a de novo Robertsonian fission is of considerable significance because it provides missing evidence that fissions are the basis of the novel acrocentric forms found and apparently selected for in certain common shrew hybrid zones.
Localization and Mapping for Autonomous Navigation in Outdoor Terrains : A Stereo Vision Approach

We consider the problem of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor terrains using vision sensors. The goal is for a robot to come into a new environment, map it and move to a given goal at modest speeds (1 m/sec). The biggest challenges are in building good maps and keeping the robot well localized as it advances towards the goal. In this paper, we concentrate on showing how it is possible to build a consistent, globally correct map in real time, using efficient precise stereo algorithms for map making and visual odometry for localization. While we have made advances in both localization and mapping using stereo vision, it is the integration of the techniques that is the biggest contribution of the research. The validity of our approach is tested in blind experiments, where we submit our code to an independent testing group that runs and validates it on an outdoor robot
Serious Complications after Self-expandable Metallic Stent Insertion in a Patient with Malignant Lymphoma

An 18-year-old woman was evaluated for a chronic productive cough and dyspnea. She was subsequently diagnosed with mediastinal non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). A covered self-expandable metallic stent (SEMS) was implanted to relieve narrowing in for both main bronchi. The NHL went into complete remission after six chemotherapy cycles, but atelectasis developed in the left lower lobe 18 months after SEMS insertion. The left main bronchus was completely occluded by granulation tissue. However, the right main bronchus and intermedius bronchus were patent. Granulation tissue was observed adjacent to the SEMS. The granulation tissue and the SEMS were excised, and a silicone stent was successfully implanted using a rigid bronchoscope. SEMS is advantageous owing to its easy implantation, but there are considerable potential complications such as severe reactive granulation, stent rupture, and ventilation failure in serious cases. Therefore, SEMS should be avoided whenever possible in patients with benign airway disease. This case highlights that SEMS implantation should be avoided even in malignant airway obstruction cases if the underlying malignancy is curable.
Gastrointestinal stromal tumors in a mouse model by targeted mutation of the Kit receptor tyrosine kinase

Oncogenic Kit mutations are found in somatic gastrointestinal (GI) stromal tumors (GISTs) and mastocytosis. A mouse model for the study of constitutive activation of Kit in oncogenesis has been produced by a knock-in strategy introducing a Kit exon 11-activating mutation into the mouse genome based on a mutation found in a case of human familial GIST syndrome. Heterozygous mutant KitV558Δ/+ mice develop symptoms of disease and eventually die from pathology in the GI tract. Patchy hyperplasia of Kit-positive cells is evident within the myenteric plexus of the entire GI tract. Neoplastic lesions indistinguishable from human GISTs were observed in the cecum of the mutant mice with high penetrance. In addition, mast cell numbers in the dorsal skin were increased. Therefore KitV558Δ/+ mice reproduce human familial GISTs, and they may be used as a model for the study of the role and mechanisms of Kit in neoplasia. Importantly, these results demonstrate that constitutive Kit signaling is critical and sufficient for induction of GIST and hyperplasia of interstitial cells of Cajal.
Efficient minimization of angle‐dependent potentials for polypeptides in internal coordinates

Angular potentials play an important role in the refinement of protein structures through angle‐dependent restraints (e.g., those determined by cross‐correlated relaxations, residual dipolar couplings, and hydrogen bonds). Analytic derivatives of such angular potentials with respect to the dihedral angles of proteins would be useful for optimizing such restraints and other types of angular potentials (i.e., such as we are now introducing into protein structure prediction) but have not been described. In this article, analytic derivatives are calculated for four types of angular potentials and integrated with the efficient recursive derivative calculation methods of Gō and coworkers. The formulas are implemented in publicly available software and illustrated by refining a low‐resolution protein structure with idealized vector‐angle, dipolar‐coupling, and hydrogen‐bond restraints. The method is now being used routinely to optimize hydrogen‐bonding potentials in ROSETTA. Proteins 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Addison's disease

Addison's disease is a condition in which your adrenal glands are not working as well as they should. In Addison's disease the adrenal glands do not produce as much of the steroid hormones (such as cortisol) as they normally do. These hormones are vital for your body and if you do not have enough of them, you can become very unwell. If the level of these hormones becomes very low, it can be life-threatening. Treatment is with replacement hormone tablets which you need to take every day.
Highly ordered vertical GaAs nanowire arrays with dry etching and their optical properties

We report fabrication methods, including metal masks and dry etching, and demonstrate highly ordered vertical gallium arsenide nanowire arrays. The etching process created high aspect ratio, vertical nanowires with insignificant undercutting from the mask, allowing us to vary the diameter from 30 nm to 400 nm with a pitch from 250 nm to 1100 nm and length up to 2.2 μm. A diameter to pitch ratio of ∼68% was achieved. We also measured the reflectance from the nanowire arrays and show experimentally diameter-dependent strong absorption peaks resulting from resonant optical mode excitations within these nanowires. The reflectance curves match very well with simulations. The work done here paves the way towards achieving high efficiency solar cells and tunable photodetectors using III–V nanowires.
GPLAC: Generalizing Vision-Based Robotic Skills Using Weakly Labeled Images

We tackle the problem of learning robotic sensorimotor control policies that can generalize to visually diverse and unseen environments. Achieving broad generalization typically requires large datasets, which are difficult to obtain for task-specific interactive processes such as reinforcement learning or learning from demonstration. However, much of the visual diversity in the world can be captured through passively collected datasets of images or videos. In our method, which we refer to as GPLAC (Generalized Policy Learning with Attentional Classifier), we use both interaction data and weakly labeled image data to augment the generalization capacity of sensorimotor policies. Our method combines multitask learning on action selection and an auxiliary binary classification objective, together with a convolutional neural network architecture that uses an attentional mechanism to avoid distractors. We show that pairing interaction data from just a single environment with a diverse dataset of weakly labeled data results in greatly improved generalization to unseen environments, and show that this generalization depends on both the auxiliary objective and the attentional architecture that we propose. We demonstrate our results in both simulation and on a real robotic manipulator, and demonstrate substantial improvement over standard convolutional architectures and domain adaptation methods.
Identification of the Polyketide Synthase Involved in the Biosynthesis of the Surface-Exposed Lipooligosaccharides in Mycobacteria

ABSTRACT Lipooligosaccharides (LOS) are highly antigenic glycolipids produced by a number of Mycobacterium species, which include “M. canettii,” a member of the M. tuberculosis complex, and the opportunistic pathogens M. marinum and M. kansasii. The various LOS share a core composed of trehalose esterified by at least 1 mole of polymethyl-branched fatty acid (PMB-FA) and differ from one another by their oligosaccharide extensions. In this study, we identified a cluster of genes, MSMEG_4727 through MSMEG_4741, likely involved in the synthesis of LOS in M. smegmatis. Disruption of MSMEG_4727 (the ortholog of pks5 of M. tuberculosis), which encodes a putative polyketide synthase, resulted in the concomitant abrogation of the production of both PMB-FA and LOS in the mutant strain. Complementation of the mutant with the wild-type gene fully restored the phenotype. We also showed that, in contrast to the case for “M. canettii” and M. marinum, LOS are located in deeper compartments of the cell envelope of M. smegmatis. The availability of two mycobacterial strains differing only in LOS production should help in defining the biological role(s) of this important glycolipid.
A biologically inspired computational vision front-end based on a self-organised pseudo-randomly tessellated artificial retina

This paper considers the construction of a biologically inspired front-end for computer vision based on an artificial retina pyramid with a self-organised pseudo-randomly tessellated receptive field tessellation. The organisation of photoreceptors and receptive fields in biological retinae locally resembles a hexagonal mosaic, whereas globally these are organised with a very densely tessellated central foveal region which seamlessly merges into an increasingly sparsely tessellated periphery. In contrast, conventional computer vision approaches use a rectilinear sampling tessellation which samples the whole field of view with uniform density. Scale-space interest points which are suitable for higher level attention and reasoning tasks are efficiently extracted by our vision front-end by performing hierarchical feature extraction on the pseudo-randomly spaced visual information. All operations were conducted on a geometrically irregular foveated representation (data structure for visual information) which is radically different to the uniform rectilinear arrays used in conventional computer vision.
Java Parallel Secure Stream for Grid Computing 1

Theemergenceof high speedwide areanetworksmakesgrid computinga reality. However grid applicationsthatneedreliabledatatransferstill havedifficultiesto achieve optimalTCPperformance due to network tuning of TCP window size to improve the bandwidthand to reducelatency on a high speedwide areanetwork. This paperpresentsa pureJava packagecalledJPARSS (Java Parallel SecureStream)thatdividesdatainto partitionsthat aresentover several parallelJava streams simultaneouslyandallows Java or Web applicationsto achieve optimal TCP performancein a gird environmentwithout thenecessityof tuning theTCPwindow size. Severalexperimentalresultsare providedto show thatusingparallelstreamis moreeffective thantuningTCPwindow size. In addition X.509 certificatebasedsinglesign-onmechanismandSSLbasedconnectionestablishment are integratedinto this package.Finally a few applicationsusingthis packagewill bediscussed. keywords:Java ParallelStreamSecuritySSLX.509Grid
Ventilatory Instability During Sleep: New Insights from the Computational Model

We developed a computational model of the human respiratory system and its chemoreflex control during sleep. Our model, which is an extension of the model of Grodins et al. (1967), combines an accurate description of a plant with a novel controller design. The controller consists of two feedback loops (central and peripheral) each with its own delay and gain. The overall minute ventilation is a sum of central and peripheral components. The model was employed to develop a new graphical method for stability analysis of the respiratory control system similar in concept to the phase plane. The relative chemosensitivities of the peripheral and central loops serve as the plane's coordinates. A region of stability exists with the normal operating point for the system lying well inside its boundaries. Changes to the sensitivities of either loop, caused by known pathologies, displace the operating point toward the border of the stability region. Furthermore, the shape and area of the stability region is significantly influenced by changes in the cerebral blood flow
The European ACQHE project: modular system for the calibration of capacitance standards based on the quantum Hall effect

Starting in 1998 a project funded by the European Commission has been carried out in a co-operation of seven partners. The aim of this project was to establish a measurement system which allows the calibration of standard capacitors in terms of R/sub K-90/. The whole system comprises suitable quantum Hall samples, an automated bridge system and auxiliary devices to calibrate and characterize the whole set-up. The uncertainty for the calibration of a 10-pF capacitor is about 1 part in 10/sup 7/.
COGNITIVE AND BEHAVIOURAL ASPECTS The Effects of Gender and a Co-occurring Depressive Disorder on Neurocognitive Functioning in Patients with Alcohol Dependence

Aims: The present study aims to examine neuropsychological impairments by comorbidity and gender among pa- tients with alcohol dependence. Methods: The study sample is comprised of 123 subjects who fulfilled a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th Edition (DSM-IV) diagnosis of alcohol dependence from January 2006 to December 2007. Subjects were asked to complete the following psychological tests: the Barratt Impulsivity Scale (BIS), Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Wechsler Memory Scale and Color Trails Test. We compared the results of neuropsychological assessments based on two types of classifications: people with comorbid depression and people without comorbidity; females and males. Results: The immediate visual memory and the BIS scores in patients with comorbid depression were significantly different from the scores in patients without co- morbidity. In addition, females performed significantly poorer on the Working Memory Index than males and had a later age of regular drinking. Conclusions: Further investigation of the mechanism associated with the gender difference on cognition and exploration of the temporal relationship between alcohol dependence and depressive disorder on the cognitive aspect is needed.
Regulation of Synaptic Transmission by CRF Receptors

Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF or CRH) and its family of related peptides have long been recognized as hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis peptides that function to regulate the release of other hormones, e.g., ACTH. In addition, CRF acts outside the HPA axis not as a hormone, but as a regulator of synaptic transmission, pre- and post-synaptically, within specific CNS neuronal circuits. Synaptic transmission within the nervous system is today understood to be a more complex process compared to the concepts associated with the term 'synapse' introduced by Sherrington in 1897. Based on more than a century of progress with modern cellular and molecular experimental techniques, prior definitions and functions of synaptic molecules and their receptors need to be reconsidered (see Glossary and Fig. 1), especially in light of the important roles for CRF, its family of peptides and other potential endogenous regulators of neurotransmission, e.g., vasopressin, NPY, etc. (see Glossary). In addition, the property of 'constitutive activity' which is associated with G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) provides a persistent tonic mechanism to fine-tune synaptic transmission during both acute and chronic information transfer. We have applied the term 'regulator', adapted from the hormone literature, to CRF, as an example of a specific endogenous substance that functions to facilitate or depress the actions of neuromodulators on fast and slow synaptic responses. As such, synaptic neuroregulators provide a basic substrate to prime or initiate silently plastic processes underlying neurotransmitter-mediated information transfer at CNS synapses. Here we review the role of CRF to regulate CNS synaptic transmission and also suggest how under a variety of allostatic changes, e.g., associated with normal plasticity, or adaptations resulting from mental disorders, the synaptic regulatory role for CRF may be 'switched' in its polarity and/or magnitude in order to provide a coping mechanism to deal with daily and life-long stressors. Thus, a prominent role we assign to non-HPA axis CRF, its family of peptides, and their receptors, is to maintain both acute and chronic synaptic stability.
T Helper1/T Helper2 Cells and Resistance/Susceptibility to Leishmania Infection: Is This Paradigm Still Relevant?

Work in large part on Leishmania major in the 1980s identified two distinct apparently counter-regulatory CD4+ T cell populations, T helper (h)1 and Th2, that controlled resistance/susceptibility to infection respectively. However, the generation of IL-4−/− mice in the 1990s questioned the paramount role of this Th2 archetypal cytokine in the non-healing response to Leishmania infection. The more recent characterization of CD4+ T cell regulatory populations and further effector CD4+ T helper populations, Th17, Th9, and T follicular (f)h cells as well as the acknowledged plasticity in T helper cell function has further added to the complexity of host pathogen interactions. These interactions are complicated by the multiplicity of cells that respond to CD4+ T cell subset signatory cytokines, as well as the diversity of Leishmania species that are often subject to significantly different immune-regulatory controls. In this article we review current knowledge with regard to the role of CD4+ T cells and their products during Leishmania infection. In particular we update on our studies using conditional IL-4Rα gene-deficient mice that have allowed dissection of the cell interplay dictating the disease outcomes of the major Leishmania species infecting humans.
Do Negative Campaigns Mobilize or Suppress Turnout? Clarifying the Relationship between Negativity and Participation

Does negative campaigning influence the likelihood of voting in elections? Our study of U.S. Senate campaigns indicates the answer is “yes. ” We find that people distinguish between useful negative information presented in an appropriate manner and irrelevant and harsh mudslinging. As the proportion of legitimate criticisms increases in campaigns, citizens become more likely to cast ballots. When campaigns degenerate into unsubstantiated and shrill attacks, voters tend to stay home. Finally, we find that individuals vary in their sensitivity to the tenor of campaigns. In particular, the tone is more consequential for independents, for those with less interest in politics, and for those with less knowledge about politics.
Auditory evoked cortical potentials with competing noise in children with auditory figure ground deficit

AbstractObjective: Listening in real life with noise competition is a great challenge for a considerable number of schoolchildren with auditory processing disorders. These children usually have difficulty in auditory figure ground (AFG) ability. Diagnosis and follow-up of those children is mainly conducted using psychophysical tests that may not be sufficient considering the possible learning effect of these tests or the testing difficulties at a young age. The aim of this study was to investigate a proposed objective tool for the diagnosis of an AFG deficit. Method: The cortical P1-N1 complex with and without ipsilateral competing noise (ICN) was measured for 15 schoolchildren demonstrating an AFG deficit psychophysically. The study group's results were compared to those of 15 age-matched children with normal peripheral and central hearing who comprised the control group (I), and eight age-matched children demonstrating auditory processing disorder(s) but not including an AFG deficit, as a further contro.
The tympanic membrane.

From an anatomical point of view the tympanic membrane (TM) is a unique structure in that it is distended in air. The TM is the only part of the middle ear that can be inspected directly through the external auditory canal. Most, if not all, pathological conditions of the middle ear will cause changes in the appearance of the TM. The TM will thus play a central role in middle ear diagnostics and a thorough knowledge of its normal histologic architecture and appearance is of the utmost importance in order to evaluate pathological conditions of the middle ear cavity.