Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inflammatory and epithelial responses during the development of ozone-induced mucous cell metaplasia in the nasal epithelium of rats.

Rats repeatedly exposed to high ambient concentrations of ozone develop mucous cell metaplasia (MCM) in the nasal transitional epithelium (NTE). The present study was designed to determine the temporal relationships of ozone-induced inflammatory and epithelial responses and their correlation with subsequent MCM in the NTE of rats. Male F344/N rats were exposed to 0.5 ppm ozone, 8 h/day for 1, 2, or 3 days. Two h prior to sacrifice, all the rats were injected intraperitoneally with 5'-bromo-2-deoxyuridine (BrdU) to label epithelial cells undergoing DNA synthesis. Rats exposed to ozone for 1 or 2 days were killed 2 h after the exposure. Rats exposed to ozone for 3 days were killed 2 h or 1, 2, or 4 days after the exposure. Control rats were killed after a 7-day exposure to filtered air. One nasal passage from the anterior nasal cavity of each rat was fixed and processed for light microscopy to morphometrically determine the numeric densities of epithelial cells, neutrophils, and mucous cells, and the amount of intraepithelial mucosubstances in the NTE. The maxilloturbinate from the other nasal passage was processed for analysis of an airway mucin-specific gene (i.e., rMuc-5AC mRNA). Acute ozone exposure induced a rapid increase in rMuc-5AC mRNA levels prior to the onset of MCM, and the increased levels of rMuc-5AC mRNA persisted with MCM. Neutrophilic inflammation coincided with epithelial DNA synthesis and upregulation of rMuc-5AC, but was resolved when MCM first appeared in the NTE. The results of the present study suggest that upregulation of mucin mRNA by acute ozone exposure may be associated with the concurrent neutrophilic inflammation and epithelial hyperplasia in the NTE. Ozone-induced MCM may be dependent on these important pre-metaplastic responses (i.e., mucin mRNA upregulation, neutrophilic inflammation, and epithelial proliferation).
GLOBAL TWIST OF SUNSPOT MAGNETIC FIELDS OBTAINED FROM HIGH-RESOLUTION VECTOR MAGNETOGRAMS

The presence of fine structures in sunspot vector magnetic fields has been confirmed from Hinode as well as other earlier observations. We studied 43 sunspots based on the data sets taken from ASP/DLSP, Hinode (SOT/SP), and SVM (USO). In this Letter, (1) we introduce the concept of signed shear angle (SSA) for sunspots and establish its importance for non-force-free fields. (2) We find that the sign of global α (force-free parameter) is well correlated with that of the global SSA and the photospheric chirality of sunspots. (3) Local α patches of opposite signs are present in the umbra of each sunspot. The amplitude of the spatial variation of local α in the umbra is typically of the order of the global α of the sunspot. (4) We find that the local α is distributed as alternately positive and negative filaments in the penumbra. The amplitude of azimuthal variation of the local α in the penumbra is approximately an order of magnitude larger than that in the umbra. The contributions of the local positive and negative currents and α in the penumbra cancel each other giving almost no contribution for their global values for the whole sunspot. (5) Arc-like structures (partial rings) with a sign opposite to that of the dominant sign of α of the umbral region are seen at the umbral–penumbral boundaries of some sunspots. (6) Most of the sunspots studied belong to the minimum epoch of the 23rd solar cycle and do not follow the so-called hemispheric helicity rule.
Image‐Based Control for Aerial Manipulation

This paper presents a new image‐based servo control scheme that endows an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a robotic arm with the capability of automatically positioning elements on target objects. Through a new formalism, the proposed visual servo scheme controls both the UAV and the manipulator simultaneously. It takes into account the whole system redundancy as well as the peculiarity of under‐actuation related to rotary‐wing crafts. While it controls the system at the velocity level, it makes use of the mobility afforded by the UAV and the dexterity inherent to robot manipulators. The case of large initial errors is explicitly addressed. Results of simulations are reported to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Matchings in Benjamini-Schramm convergent graph sequences

We introduce the matching measure of a finite graph as the uniform distribution on the roots of the matching polynomial of the graph. We analyze the asymptotic behavior of the matching measure for graph sequences with bounded degree. A graph parameter is said to be estimable if it converges along every Benjamini-Schramm convergent sparse graph sequence. We prove that the normalized logarithm of the number of matchings is estimable. We also show that the analogous statement for perfect matchings already fails for d-regular bipartite graphs for any fixed d at least 3. The latter result relies on analyzing the probability that a randomly chosen perfect matching contains a particular edge. However, for any sequence of d-regular bipartite graphs converging to the d-regular tree, we prove that the normalized logarithm of the number of perfect matchings converges. This applies to random d-regular bipartite graphs. We show that the limit equals to the exponent in Schrijver's lower bound on the number of perfect matchings. Our analytic approach also yields a short proof for the Nguyen-Onak (also Elek--Lippner) theorem saying that the matching ratio is estimable. In fact, we prove the slightly stronger result that the independence ratio is estimable for claw-free graphs.
The effect of non-elastic taping on balance and gait function in patients with stroke

[Purpose] This study investigated the influence of exercise on balance ability and gait function in stroke patients after applying non-elastic tape, which can stabilize muscles and joints, to the lower extremities of the affected side. [Subjects and Methods] The subjects were 30 patients diagnosed with stroke. They were divided into an experimental group (n = 15) and a control group (n = 15). The experimental group performed mat and treadmill exercises three times a week for six weeks with non-elastic tape applied to the lower extremities of the affected side. The control group performed the same exercises but without taping. [Results] The intervention significantly improved Berg balance scale scores and timed up and go (TUG) test scores as well as reduced stance duration and stride duration in the experimental group. In the control group, statistically significant improvements were observed in TUG test scores. [Conclusion] Although some differences did not reach the level of statistical significance, the application of non-elastic tape stabilized the joints of the lower extremities, thereby increasing balance and reducing stance duration and one step duration, which resulted in a reduction of overall gait duration.
Beliefs About Health, Health Risks and Health Expectations from the Perspective of People with a Psychotic Disorder

Aim: To examine beliefs about health, health risks and health expectations from the perspective of people diagnosed with a psychotic disorder Background: People with psychotic disorders have a threefold higher risk of developing physical health problems than the general population, and prevention of these problems is warranted. Examining patients´ health beliefs could help deepen our understanding of how to plan successful health interventions with this group. Methods: Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted from November 2010 to October 2011 with 17 people with psychotic disorders. Data were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis. Results: An overall positive picture of health was found despite the fact that physical health was found to be hard to verbalize and understand. Health was mainly associated with psychological wellbeing, while health risks were found to be related to uncertain bodily identity, troublesome thoughts and inner voices, and exclusion from society. Interest in learning, and visions and goals of health seemed to increase awareness of health risks and health expectations, while not worrying could be viewed as a hindrance for health expectations. Conclusion: There is a lack of expressed awareness of physical health risks, but such awareness is fundamental to performing life-style changes [14]. Nurses thus have an important task to help patients understand and verbalize potential physical health risks, and to find out what motivates them to adopt health behaviors.
Main memory indexing: the case for BD-tree

We adapt and optimize the BD-tree for main memory data processing. We compare the memory-based BD-tree against the B/sup +/-tree and CSB/sup +/-tree. We present cost models for exact match query for these indexes, including L2 cache and translation lookahead buffer (TLB) miss model and execution time model. We also implemented these structures and conducted experimental study. Our analytical and experimental results show that a well-tuned BD-tree is superior in most cases.
Polinode: A web application for the collection and analysis of network data

We introduce Polinode, an online tool for performing network analysis. Polinode is aimed at commercial and non-commercial users alike and supports both research-related use cases as well as teaching network analysis to students. One of its primary advantages is that it is web-based. It therefore doesn't require any software downloads and opens up new avenues for collaboration and the incorporation of online content into network analysis. With Polinode you can upload arbitrary network data for online visualisation and analysis and you can also use the built-in relationship-based survey functionality to collect network data from respondents.
The Graphical Depiction of Design Patterns

If design patterns are to fulfill their promise of dramatically improving the quality, timeliness and reusability of software it is essential that techniques be found to document them concisely and accurately. Graphical notations offer a potentially powerful approach, but unfortunately current techniques for depicting object-oriented design patterns rely on notations that were initially developed for capturing analysis information, and are thus unable to describe some important aspects of patterns. This paper introduces some notational concepts which are tailored to the description of the implementation-level mechanisms from which design patterns are constructed, and are therefore better suited to their documentation. The concepts are first illustrated through their use in the depiction of the well known Observer (or Publisher-Subscriber) pattern, and then in their depiction of the essential elements of a new design pattern called Advertisement.
When Virtual is Harder than Real : Resource Allocation Challenges in Virtual Machine Based IT Environments

The primary motivation for enterprises to adopt virtualization technologies is the promise of creating a more agile and dynamic IT infrastructure — with server consolidation, high resource utilization, the ability to quickly add and adjust capacity on demand — while lowering total cost of ownership and responding more effectively to changing business conditions. However, effective management of virtualized IT environments introduces new and unique requirements such as dynamically resizing and migrating virtual machines in response to changing application demands. Such capacity management methods should work in ensemble with the underlying resource management mechanisms. Using Xen and its three different CPU schedulers, we analyze the impact of the choice of scheduler and its parameters on application perfomance and discuss challenges in estimating the application resource requirements in virtualized environments.
A Middleware for Constructing Highly Available, Fault Tolerant, and Attack Tolerant Services

This paper describes the design of a middleware that provides support for constructing highly available, secure, fault-tolerant, and attack-tolerant services. The central component of this middleware is a group communication service that comprises of six network protocols: atomic broadcast, group membership, failure detection, attack detection, group access control, and secure intermember communication protocols. The paper describes the motivation behind each of these protocols and discusses their functionalities.
The Impact of Cooperative Perception on Decision Making and Planning of Autonomous Vehicles

In this article, we investigate how cooperative perception gives the impact on decision making and planning of autonomous vehicles on the road. Cooperative perception is the exchange of local sensing information with other vehicles or infrastructures via wireless communications, by which the perception range can be considerably extended up to the boundary of connected vehicles. This augmented perception capability can provide oncoming traffic information beyond line-of-sight and field-of-view, which enables better control of both manned and unmanned vehicles. In this article, we first present an on-road sensing system to provide a see-through/lifted-seat/satellite view to drivers. Then, we investigate how the extended perception capability can contribute to situation awareness on the road. Finally, we provide methods for safer and smoother autonomous driving using the augmented situation awareness and perception capability. All introduced and proposed concepts are implemented and validated on autonomous vehicles.
A Corpus-Based Method for Product Feature Ranking for Interactive Question Answering Systems

At times choosing a product can be a difficult task due to the fact that customers need to consider many features before they can reach a decision. Interactive question answering (IQA) systems can help customers in this process, by answering questions about products and initiating a dialogue with the customer when their needs are not clearly defined. For this purpose we propose a corpus-based method for weighting the importance of product features depending on how likely they are to be of interest for a user. By using this method, we hope that users can select the desired product in an optimal way. For the experiments a corpus of user reviews is used, the assumption being that the features mentioned in a review are probably more important for a person who is likely to purchase a product. To improve the method, a sentiment classification system is also employed to distinguish between features mentioned in positive and negative contexts. Evaluation shows that the ranking method that incorporates this information is one of the best performing ones.
PAWS: Passive Human Activity Recognition Based on WiFi Ambient Signals

Indoor human activity recognition remains a hot topic and receives tremendous research efforts during the last few decades. However, previous solutions either rely on special hardware, or demand the cooperation of subjects. Therefore, the scalability issue remains a great challenge. To this end, we present an online activity recognition system, which explores WiFi ambient signals for received signal strength indicator (RSSI) fingerprint of different activities. It can be integrated into any existing WLAN networks without additional hardware support. Also, it does not need the subjects to be cooperative during the recognition process. More specifically, we first conduct an empirical study to gain in-depth understanding of WiFi characteristics, e.g., the impact of activities on the WiFi RSSI. Then, we present an online activity recognition architecture that is flexible and can adapt to different settings/conditions/scenarios. Lastly, a prototype system is built and evaluated via extensive real-world experiments. A novel fusion algorithm is specifically designed based on the classification tree to better classify activities with similar signatures. Experimental results show that the fusion algorithm outperforms three other well-known classifiers [i.e., NaiveBayes, Bagging, and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN)] in terms of accuracy and complexity. Important sights and hands-on experiences have been obtained to guide the system implementation and outline future research directions.
Increased genetic variation and evolutionary potential drive the success of an invasive grass

Despite the increasing biological and economic impacts of invasive species, little is known about the evolutionary mechanisms that favor geographic range expansion and evolution of invasiveness in introduced species. Here, we focus on the invasive wetland grass Phalaris arundinacea L. and document the evolutionary consequences that resulted from multiple and uncontrolled introductions into North America of genetic material native to different European regions. Continental-scale genetic variation occurring in reed canarygrass' European range has been reshuffled and recombined within North American introduced populations, giving rise to a number of novel genotypes. This process alleviated genetic bottlenecks throughout reed canarygrass' introduced range, including in peripheral populations, where depletion of genetic diversity is expected and is observed in the native range. Moreover, reed canarygrass had higher genetic diversity and heritable phenotypic variation in its invasive range relative to its native range. The resulting high evolutionary potential of invasive populations allowed for rapid selection of genotypes with higher vegetative colonization ability and phenotypic plasticity. Our results show that repeated introductions of a single species may inadvertently create harmful invaders with high adaptive potential. Such invasive species may be able to evolve in response to changing climate, allowing them to have increasing impact on native communities and ecosystems in the future. More generally, multiple immigration events may thus trigger future adaptation and geographic spread of a species population by preventing genetic bottlenecks and generating genetic novelties through recombination.
Time-stamped cross-coupled control in networked CNC systems

This paper proposes a time-stamped cross-coupled control (TSCCC) algorithm to deal with the asynchronous sampling and network-induced delays in networked computer numerical control (CNC) machines. It uses time-stamps to estimate the network-induced delays from the sampling instants of different axes to the controller node. The network-induced delays are considered for accurately estimating the contour error in real-time. Furthermore, a networked CNC simulation system based on TrueTime toolbox is constructed, on which the proposed TSCCC algorithm is compared with the cross-coupled control (CCC) algorithm. Simulation results on two DC servomotors show that the TSCCC algorithm achieves better contour accuracy than the CCC algorithm.
Beta Diversity in a Highly Heterogeneous Area: Disentangling Species and Taxonomic Dissimilarity for Terrestrial Vertebrates

Quantifying differences in species composition among communities provides important information related to the distribution, conservation and management of biodiversity, especially when two components are recognized: dissimilarity due to turnover, and dissimilarity due to richness differences. The ecoregions in central Mexico, within the Mexican Transition Zone, have outstanding environmental heterogeneity and harbor huge biological richness, besides differences in the origin of the biota. Therefore, biodiversity studies in this area require the use of complementary measures to achieve appropriate information that may help in the design of conservation strategies. In this work we analyze the dissimilarity of terrestrial vertebrates, and the components of turnover and richness differences, among six ecoregions in the state of Hidalgo, central Mexico. We follow two approaches: one based on species level dissimilarity, and the second on taxonomic dissimilarity. We used databases from the project “Biodiversity in the state of Hidalgo”. Our results indicate that species dissimilarity is higher than taxonomic dissimilarity, and that turnover contributes more than richness differences, both for species and taxonomic total dissimilarity. Moreover, total dissimilarity, turnover dissimilarity and the dissimilarity due to richness differences were positively related in the four vertebrate groups. Reptiles had the highest values of dissimilarity, followed by mammals, amphibians and birds. For reptiles, birds, and mammals, species turnover was the most important component, while richness differences had a higher contribution for amphibians. The highest values of dissimilarity occurred between environmentally contrasting ecoregions (i.e., tropical and temperate forests), which suggests that environmental heterogeneity and differences in the origin of biotas are key factors driving beta diversity of terrestrial vertebrates among ecoregions in this complex area.
Cultural Goods, Motivations and Consumer Behaviour.

There is wide theoretical consensus on the fact that present-day urban economic development is largely culture-led. This means that cities are special places for the production and consumption of symbolic goods. Urban economic performance depends on the administrative competence of local policy-makers to organize creative resources, talents and cultural images. Cities are cultural clusters, requiring closer attention to the factors that foster co-operative processes, the development of cultural activities and cultural consumption patterns. In this paper we focus on the last process. The motivations and expectations of cultural consumers are crucial elements for understanding the efficacy of the urban supply of cultural goods. Our empirical study, based on a sample of visitors to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, first describes the visitor features of an artistic good and then investigates the emotional-cognitive content of the visit itself.
Scoring Amino Acid Substitutions In 'hage Genomes

Substitution matrices are among the most widely used scoring techniques : BLAST, Mus- cle and other alignment packages, all use them. How- ever these matrices are general; they ignore organ- ism speciflc properties and do not provide customized scoring schemes. We present a 'hage-speciflc scoring matrix based on the abundances of aligned substitu- tions. These matrices use information from approx- imately flve and a half million similar protein align- ments from over flve hundred 'hage genomes. Our scoring matrix is difierent from the existing PAM and BLOSUM matrices. This indicates the need for simi- lar treatments for other groups of organisms.
0 50 51 41 v 1 3 0 M ay 2 00 5 On static spherically symmetric solutions of the vacuum Brans-Dicke theory

It is shown that among the four classes of the static spherically symmetric solution of the vacuum Brans-Dicke theory of gravity only two are really independent. Further by matching exterior and interior (due to physically reasonable spherically symmetric matter source) scalar fields it is found that only Brans class I solution with certain restriction on solution parameters may represent exterior metric for a nonsingular massive object. The physical viability of the black hole nature of the solution is investigated. It is concluded that no physical black hole solution different from the Schwarzschild black hole is available in the Brans-Dicke theory.