Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gallbladder and small intestinal regulation of biliary lipid secretion during intraduodenal infusion of standard stimuli.

The gallbladder and small intestine are reservoirs for the bile acid pool during its enterohepatic circulation and, as such, may regulate biliary secretion of bile acid. During studies of biliary bile acid secretion, a stimulus to gallbladder contraction is continuously infused into the duodenum. Under these conditions, it is assumed that the gallbladder is tonically contracted and that the rate of bile acid secretion into the duodenum equals the hepatic bile acid secretion rate. However, secretion rates vary by as much as 100%, depending upon which of two standard stimuli is used. Therefore, we studied the role of gallbladder emptying and small intestinal transit in determining biliary lipid secretion rate and composition during infusion of these stimuli in five healthy subjects. Each subject was studied with a liquid formula containing 40% of calories as fat, and with an amino acid solution for 10 h. Bile acid, phospholipid, cholesterol, and markers were measured in duodenal bile and hourly secretion rates were calculated by marker dilution technique. Real-time gallbladder sonographs and serum pancreatic polypeptide levels were obtained every 30 min. Small bowel transit time was estimated levels were obtained every 30 min. Small bowel transit time was estimated by the breath hydrogen response after giving lactulose intraduodenally.During liquid formula infusion, gallbladder emptying was more complete, small intestinal transit was faster, and pancreatic polypeptide levels were higher. Secretion rates of all lipids were greater and molar percent cholesterol was lower. For the combined data from both infusions, the secretory relationships of cholesterol to bile acid, cholesterol to phospholipid, and phospholipid to bile acid were curvilinear. We conclude that more complete gallbladder emptying and faster intestinal transit increase the enterohepatic cycling of bile acids and lower the molar percent cholesterol of bile. Some of the fluctuation observed in biliary lipid secretion rates, especially during amino acid infusion, is due to gallbladder refilling and emptying.
Advances in Automotive Conversion Coatings during Pretreatment of the Body Structure: A Review

Automotive conversion coatings consist of layers of materials that are chemically applied to the body structures of vehicles before painting to improve corrosion protection and paint adhesion. These coatings are a consequence of surface-based chemical reactions and are sandwiched between paint layers and the base metal; the chemical reactions involved distinctly classify conversion coatings from other coating technologies. Although the tri-cationic conversion coating bath chemistry that was developed around the end of the 20th century remains persistent, environmental, health, and cost issues favor a new generation of greener methods and materials such as zirconium. Environmental forces driving lightweight material selection during automobile body design are possibly more influential for transitioning to zirconium than the concerns regarding the body coating process. The chemistry involved in some conversion coatings processing has been known for over 100 years. However, recent advances in chemical processing, changes in the components used for vehicle body structures, environmental considerations and costs have prompted the automobile industry to embrace new conversion coatings technologies. These are discussed herein along with a historical perspective that has led to the use of current conversion coatings technologies. In addition, future directions for automobile body conversion coatings are discussed that may affect conversion coatings in the age of multi-material body structures.
Designing Price Incentives in a Network with Social Interactions

The recent ubiquity of social networks allows firms to collect vast amount of data on their customers and on their social interactions. We consider a setting where a monopolist sells an indivisible good to consumers who are embedded in a social network. This an important problem as sellers can use available data to design and send targeted promotions that account for social externality effects and ultimately increase their profits. We capture the interactions among consumers using a broad class of non-linear utility models. This class extends the existing models by explicitly capturing externalities from subsets of agents (communities or groups) and includes several existing models as special cases (e.g., full information version of the triggering model). Assuming complete information about the interactions, we model the optimal pricing problem as a two-stage game. First, the firm designs prices to maximize profits and then consumers choose whether or not to purchase the item. Under positive network externalities, we show the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium that is preferred by both the seller and the buyers. Using duality theory and integer programming techniques, we reformulate the problem into a linear mixed-integer program (MIP). We derive efficient ways to optimally solve the MIP using its linear programming relaxation for two pricing strategies: discriminative and uniform. Finally, we propose two intuitive heuristic algorithms to solve the problem for which we derive worst-case parametric performance bounds. We draw interesting insights on the structure of the optimal prices and the seller's profit. In particular, we quantify the effect on prices when using a non-linear utility model relative to a linear model and identify settings when it is beneficial to offer a price below cost to influential agents. Finally, we extend our model and results to the case where the seller offers incentives (in addition to prices) to solicit actions so as to ensure network externality effects.
Efficient multiprogramming for multicores with SCAF

As hardware becomes increasingly parallel and the availability of scalable parallel software improves, the problem of managing multiple multithreaded applications (processes) becomes important. Malleable processes, which can vary the number of threads used as they run, enable sophisticated and flexible resource management. Although many existing applications parallelized for SMPs with parallel runtimes are in fact already malleable, deployed run-time environments provide no interface nor any strategy for intelligently allocating hardware threads or even preventing oversubscription. Work up until SCAF either depends upon profiling applications ahead of time in order to make good decisions about allocations, or does not account for process efficiency at all. This paper presents the Scheduling and Allocation with Feedback (SCAF) system, a drop-in runtime solution which supports existing malleable applications in making intelligent allocation decisions based on observed efficiency without any paradigm change, changes to semantics, program modification, offline profiling, or even recompilation. Our existing implementation can control most unmodified OpenMP applications. Other malleable threading libraries can also easily be supported with small modifications, without requiring application modification. In this work, we present the SCAF daemon and a SCAF-aware port of the GNU OpenMP runtime. We demonstrate that applications running on the SCAF runtime still perform well when executing on a quiescent system. We present a new technique for estimating process efficiency purely at runtime using available hardware counters, and demonstrate its effectiveness in aiding allocation decisions. We evaluated SCAF using NAS NPB parallel benchmarks. When run concurrently pairwise, 70% of benchmark pairs on an 8-core Xeon processor saw improvements averaging 15% in sum of speedups compared to equipartitioning. For a 64-context Sparc T2 processor, 57% of pairs saw a similar 15% improvement. The improvement was 45% vs. equipartitioning when three selected benchmarks were concurrently run.
UMass at TREC 2006: Enterprise Track

Abstract : This paper gives an overview of the work done at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for the TREC 2006 Enterprise track. For the discussion search task, we compare two methods for incorporating thread evidence into the language models of email messages. For the expert finding task, we create implicit expert representations as mixtures of language models from associated documents.
Different sperm sources and parameters can influence intracytoplasmic sperm injection outcomes before embryo implantation

To evaluate the effects of sperm with different parameters and sources on the outcomes of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), 1972 ICSI cycles were analyzed retrospectively. Groups 1 to 5 were composed of cycles using ejaculated sperm and were grouped according to sperm quantity, quality, and morphology into normal (288 cycles), or mild (329 cycles), moderate (522 cycles), severe (332 cycles), and extremely severe (171 cycles) oligozoospermia and/or asthenozoospermia and/or teratozoospermia (OAT) groups. Group 6 was composed of 250 cycles using testicular or epididymal sperm, and Group 7 consisted of 80 cycles using frozen-thawed sperm. We found that fertilization rates were gradually reduced from Groups 1 to 6, and reached statistical difference in Groups 5 and 6 (P<0.05). The high-quality embryo rate was higher in Group 1 than in Groups 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7 (P<0.05). No statistical differences were observed in the rates of embryo cleavage, clinical pregnancy, miscarriage, live-birth, premature birth, low birth weight, weeks of premature birth, average birth weight, or sex ratio for all seven groups (P>0.05). A total of nine cases of malformation were observed, with a malformation rate of 1.25% (9/719). In conclusion, different sperm sources and parameters can affect ICSI outcomes before embryo implantation. A full assessment of offspring malformation will require further study using a larger sample size.
A computationally efficient approach to warp factor estimation in VTLN using EM algorithm and sufficient statistics

In this paper, we develop a computationally efﬁcient approach for warp factor estimation in Vocal Tract Length Normalization (VTLN). Recently we have shown that warped features can be obtained by a linear transformation of the unwarped features. Using the warp matrices we show that warp factor estimation can be efﬁciently performed in an EM framework. This can be done by collecting Sufﬁcient Statistics by aligning the un-warped utterances only once. The likelihood of warped features, which are necessary for warp factor estimation, are computed by appropriately modifying the sufﬁcient statistics using the warp matrices. We show using OGI, TIDIGITSand RM task that this approach has recognition performance that is comparable to conventional VTLN and yet is computationally more efﬁcient.
Concurrent counting

Our purpose is to implement clocks and, in general, counters in a shared memory environment. A concurrent counter is a counter that can be incremented and read, possibly at the same time by many processes. We study counters that achieve high level of concurrency and thus are likely to reduce memory contention; require only weak atomicity and thus are easy to implement; do not depend on the initial state of the memory and hence are more robust to memory changes; and are wait-free - one process cannot prevent another process from finishing its increment or read operations - and thus can tolerate any number of process failures. We concentrate on providing upper and lower bounds on the space complexity of the counters studied.
Effects of Storage and Heating on Serum Viscosity of Commercial Hot Break Tomato Paste

Samples of hot break tomato paste were collected from commercially produced aseptic totes after 6-11 months of storage at ambient temperature. Serum viscosity of the hot break tomato paste samples was analyzed at each sampling time and compared to the initial serum viscosity measured at the time of tomato paste manufacturing. As storage time increased, the serum viscosity of hot break tomato paste significantly decreased. After 7 months of storage, 16%-27% reduction of serum viscosity was observed in the hot break tomato paste. To evaluate effects of a heating on the serum viscosity of hot break tomato paste, the paste samples were reconstituted with water to 10° Brix, similar level of tomato solids in typical tomato sauce products. Diluted tomato paste was heated and held at 95 °C for 3 minutes and its serum viscosity was measured. After the heating, the serum viscosity of hot break tomato paste was slightly increased up to 5% of initial value, however the recovery was not significant (p < 0.05).
Managing Careers in Organizations

Firms’ organizational structures impose constraints on their ability to use promotion-based incentives. We develop a framework for identifying these constraints and exploring their consequences. We show that firms manage workers’ careers by choosing personnel policies that resemble an internal labor market. Firms may adopt forced turnover policies to keep lines of advancement open, and they may alter their organizational structures to relax these constraints. This gives rise to a trade-off between incentive provision at the worker level and productive efficiency at the firm level. Our framework generates novel testable implications that connect firm-level characteristics with workers’ careers.
Silicon based pentagon current control efficient-cell device memory with equidistant sensing

Latest technology in Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) system memories is fully depends onpower, size and cost. Generally static based memory is using to make memory devices. But the dis-advantages of static memory are logically less compatible, power consumption, high silicon foot print. Dynamic Efficient-Cell Enhanced Random Access Memory (DEC-ERAM) is proposed to overcome these drawbacks as compared static based memory. DEC-ERAM can store voltage with different level in a cell. In this paper the experiment was done ina three level storage within a cell. The area is directly proportional to memory to increase its capacity. DEC-ERAM was modeled in a sixty five (65 nm) technology using low overhead CMOS standard, fifty percent virtual display driver for device writes and equidistant composed of inclined sense DC-AC converter for components readout. DECERAM provides 3X reduction and this approach reduce the area to almost 50% when compared to static DRAM. RÉSUMÉ. Les dernières technologies dans le système intégréà très grande échelle (VLSI) des mémoires dépendent entièrement de la puissance, de la taille et du coût. Généralement, la mémoire statique est utilisé pour créer des périphériques de mémoire. But the dis-advantages of static memory are logically less compatible, power consumption, high silicon foot print.La mémoire à accès aléatoire améliorée à cellules efficaces dynamiques (DEC-ERAM) est proposée pour surmonter ces inconvénients par rapport à la mémoire statique.DEC-ERAM peut stocker une tension de niveau différent dans une cellule.Dans cet article, l'expérimentation a été réalisée dans une mémoire à trois niveaux dans une cellule.La surface est directement proportionnelle à la mémoire pour augmenter sa capacité. DEC-ERAM a été modélisé selon une technologie de soixante-cinq (65 nm) utilisant une norme CMOS à faible surcharge, un pilote d’affichage virtuel à cinquante pour cent pour les écritures de périphériques et équidistant composé d’un convertisseur DC-AC à sens incliné pour la lecture des composants. DEC-ERAM fournit une réduction 3X et cette approche réduit la surface à près de 50% par rapport à la DRAM statique.
FSL: A novel topology for on-Chip-Networks

Topology has a significant effect on the most important parameters of a network such as latency and power consumption. In this paper, different topologies are studied and their functions in networks are described. Ultimately, some novel topology are introduced and compared with existing ones in regard of factors such as power and delay. Results of comparisons show that proposed topology perform better than mesh and spidergon topologies. Although the proposed topology imposes the cost near to that of the mesh topology, the proposed topology 1) provides a lower diameter for Network-on-Chip, 2) offers better performance under the uniform and hotspot traffic pattern.
Initiation of Smad-Dependent and Smad-Independent Signaling via Distinct BMP-Receptor Complexes

Background: BMP-2 (bone morphogenetic protein-2) signals via two types of transmembrane serine/threonine kinase receptors (BRI and BRII), which form heteromeric complexes prior to and after ligand binding. Within a BMP-bound receptor complex, BRII transphosphorylates and activates BRI-a for further signaling. We investigated which signaling pathway is initiated by BMP-2 via preformed receptor complexes versus BMP-2-induced signaling receptor complexes.Methods: Immunofluorescence co-patching was used to study the oligomerization of receptors at the surface of live cells. Binding and chemical cross-linking of iodinated BMP-2 followed by immunoprecipitation was used to show association of receptors in the presence of ligand. Western blots with use of anti-phospho-Smad1 antibodies and reporter gene assays with use of SBE-lux were employed to show activation of the Smad pathway. Phosphorylation of p38-MAPK was shown by Western blots. Induction of alkaline phosphatase was determined by staining the cells. The cluster density of receptors was determined with use of image correlation spectroscopy.Results and Conclusion: We showed that the Smad pathway is induced by preformed receptor complexes, whereas BMP-2-induced signaling complexes result in the activation of p38-MAPK. We also found evidence that the clustering of BRI-a at the membrane is altered in the presence of BRII, suggesting that it associates with existing clusters of BRII to initiate efficient Smad signaling. These data clearly demonstrate that it is critical to fully understand receptor oligomerization in order to estimate signaling outcome for distinct receptor and ligand mutants.Clinical Relevance: The development of BMP-2 antagonists is of special importance for a number of human disorders caused by several members of the BMP/TGF-&bgr; (transforming growth factor-beta) superfamily. Since manipulation of BMP-signaling is complex, it is important to understand what influence it might have during the initiation of signaling—:i.e., the oligomerization of BMP receptors to form a signaling receptor complex. There might be cases where either the Smad or the p38 pathway should be targeted.
Progesterone receptor expression by human leukocyte cell lines: molecular mechanisms of cytokine suppression.

PURPOSE We investigated progesterone (P) signaling in human leukemia cells, shown to downregulate cytokines with P. METHODS The following tests were utilized: PCR with FAM labeled primers and Gene Scan with the Applied Biosystems 373 DNA sequencer for progesterone receptor (PR) mRNA, immunohistochemistry using monoclonal antibodies (Zymed and Ventana) for PR protein, RT-PCR for glucocorticoid receptor (GR), NFkappaB (p65, p50, p52), c-rel, IkappaB-alpha, c-jun, c-fos, mRNA, transient transfections with pNF-kappaB-SEAP, and pGRE-SEAP vectors with chemiluminescence detection for NFkappaB and GR activity. RESULTS PR transcripts were demonstrated in MOT, U937, K562, THP-1, 8226, U226, not in JUKAT, HL60, HUT102, isolated normal peripheral blood mononuclear cells, or purified CD4+ or CD8+ T cells. Estradiol increased PR mRNA in MOT and U937. MOT, U937, K562, KG-1, 8226, ATL, and CD8+HTLV-1 expressed PR protein. SRIH-BATL, 729PH6NEO, HS-1, R-CLL, and JURKAT were negative. Steady state mRNA for GR, NFkappaB (p65, p50, p52), IkappaB-alpha, c-jun were unchanged with P in MOT and U937; c-fos and c-rel were not detected. There was a concentration-dependent reduction of NFkappaB activity with P in MOT and U937. CONCLUSION The mechanism of cytokine suppression by P is mediated at least in part by suppression of NFkappaB, but the interaction of sex hormones, receptors, and transcription factors is complex.
Functional variants in TAS2R38 and TAS2R16 influence alcohol consumption in high-risk families of African-American origin.

BACKGROUND A novel family of G protein-coupled receptors, TAS2Rs, has recently been characterized and linked to sensitivity to bitter taste compounds. We have previously reported that a missense mutation in the TAS2R16 gene reduces the sensitivity of the receptor to bitter-taste stimuli and that it is associated with risk for alcohol dependence. Other family-based studies on the genetic transmittance of taste perception have previously demonstrated a correlation between genetic variation in TAS2R38 and sensitivity to bitter-taste compounds such as phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) and 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP). Haplotypes resulting from 3 common nonsynonymous coding single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the TAS2R38 gene have been shown to alter receptor functions and taste sensitivity to PTC and PROP. The perceived bitterness of PROP has also been associated with oral sensation and drinking behaviors. METHODS We used family-based association methods to test for association between TAS2R38 haplotypes and alcohol dependence as well as a measure of alcohol consumption (Maxdrinks) and age of onset of drinking behaviors in a sample of families densely affected with alcoholism. We have also extended our analysis of TAS2R16 to include the Maxdrinks phenotype. RESULTS A positive correlation was observed between TAS2R38 haplotypes and Maxdrinks in Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) high-risk women of African-American origin. The common taster haplotype is significantly associated with a lower mean Maxdrinks compared with the other haplotypes. Similarly, the allele of TAS2R16 that is associated with a lower risk for alcohol dependence is also associated with lower mean Maxdrinks scores in African-American families. In contrast to the previously reported significant association between TAS2R16 and alcohol dependence, we found no evidence that TAS2R38 haplotypes influence alcohol dependence in the COGA dataset. CONCLUSION Functional variants in both TAS2R16 and TAS2R38 correlate with alcohol consumption in African-American families.
Control of erythrocyte shape by calmodulin

Erythrocytes are deformable cells whose shapes can be altered by treatments with a variety of drugs. The forms the erythrocyte may assume vary continuously from the spiny "echinocytes" or crenated cells at one extreme to highly folded and dented "cupped" cells at the other extreme. Examination of 39 compounds for cup-forming activity revealed a remarkable correlation between their ability to form cupped cells and their inhibitory activity against the calcium regulatory protein, calmodulin. Calmodulin is known to interact with several erythrocyte proteins including spectrin, spectrin kinase, and the Ca++ ATPase calcium pump of the membrane. These proteins regulate the form of the cytoskeleton as well as intracellular calcium and ATP levels. It is proposed that calmodulin is required to maintain normal erythrocyte morphology and that in the presence of calmodulin inhibitors, the cell assumes a cupped shape.