Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microvascular dysfunction: a potential pathophysiological role in the metabolic syndrome.

Obesity and a central body fat distribution, hypertension, insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, dyslipidemia, and proinflammatory and prothrombotic factors are all part of the metabolic syndrome. The metabolic syndrome defines a clustering of metabolic risk factors which confers an increased risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.1 In the past years a large amount of research has been aimed at elucidating the pathophysiology underlying this clustering of risk factors, because a better understanding may lead to new therapeutic approaches that specifically target underlying causes of the metabolic syndrome. Recently, it has become clear that microvascular dysfunction, by affecting both pressure and flow patterns, may have consequences not only for peripheral vascular resistance, but also for insulin-mediated changes in muscle perfusion and glucose metabolism, providing a novel pathophysiological framework for understanding the association between hypertension, obesity, and impaired insulin-mediated glucose disposal.2–4 The present article examines recent data concerning the role of microvascular dysfunction as an explanation for the associations among hypertension, obesity, and impaired insulin-mediated glucose disposal. Description of the Microcirculation An exact definition of the microcirculation is elusive. Morphologically, the microcirculation is widely taken to encompass vessels 150 m in diameter. It therefore includes arterioles, capillaries, and venules. Alternatively, a definition based on arterial vessel physiology rather than diameter or structure has been proposed. 3 By this definition, all arterial vessels that respond to increasing pressure by a myogenic reduction in lumen diameter are included in the microcirculation. Such a definition would include the smallest arteries and arterioles in the microcirculation in addition to capillaries and venules. Small arterial and arteriolar components should, therefore, be considered a continuum rather than distinct sites of resistance control. A primary function of the microcirculation is to optimize nutrient and oxygen supply within the tissue in response to variations in demand. A second important function is to avoid large fluctuations in hydrostatic pressure at the level of the capillaries causing disturbances in capillary exchange. Finally, it is at the level of the microcirculation that a substantial proportion of the drop in hydrostatic pressure occurs. The microcirculation is therefore extremely important in determining overall peripheral vascular resistance.
Computational Effects across Generated Binders Maintaining future-stage lexical scope

Code generation is the leading approach to making high-performance software reusable. Effects are indispensable in code generators, whether to report failures or to insert let-statements and ifguards. Extensive painful experience shows that unrestricted effects interact with generated binders in undesirable ways to produce unexpectedly unbound variables, or worse, unexpectedly bound ones. These subtleties prevent experts in the application domain, not in programming languages, from using and extending the generator. A pressing problem is thus to express the desired effects while regulating them so that the generated code is correct, or at least correctly scoped, by construction. In an imminently practical code-generation framework, we show how to express arbitrary effects, including mutable references and delimited control, that move open code across generated binders. The static types of our generator expressions not only ensure that a well-typed generator produces well-typed and well-scoped code, but also express the lexical scopes of generated binders and prevent mixing up variables with different scopes. This precise notion of lexical scope subsumes the complaints about intuitively wrong example generators in the literature. For the first time, we demonstrate statically safe let-insertion across an arbitrary number of binders. Our framework is implemented as a Haskell library that embeds an extensible typed higher-order domain-specific language. It may be regarded as ‘staged Haskell. ’ The library is convenient to use thanks to the maturity of Haskell, higher-order abstract syntax, and polymorphism over generated type environments.
Application of independent component analysis to lossless compression of 3D ultraspectral sounder data

The ultraspectral sounder data is known for its huge size and sensitivity to noise in ill-posed retrieval of geophysical parameters. It is thus desired to be lossless compressed for transfer and storage. The independent component analysis (ICA) features a decorrelation capability beyond second-order moments. It was traditionally used in blind source separation. Recently ICA has seen its use in lossy compression of hyperspectral imager data. It was mainly used to reduce the dimension of data for target detection. Meanwhile report of ICA in lossless compression of image data was also seen where ICA was used to reduce the redundancy of coefficients in wavelet lifting schemes. In this paper we will explore the use of ICA in lossless compression of ultraspectral sounder data. The compression result shows that ICA compares favorably with BZIP2, CALIC, JPEG2000, SPIHT, JPEG-LS, and CCSDS IDC 5/3 for the standard data set of 10 AIRS granules.
Characterization of Magnetic Shape Memory ( MSM ) Material and its Application in a Hybrid Micro Actuator

Magnetically controlled shape memory (MSM) alloys have extraordinary elongation capabilities. While both the inverse piezoelectric effect (in piezoelectric materials) and Joule’s magnetostriction (in soft magnetic materials) result in changes in length approx. 0.2 %, a change in length of up to 10 % has been observed in a Ni-Mn-Ga, an MSM alloy. To demonstrate the feasibility of using MSM material in microactuation, magnetically induced elongation tests were performed. Furthermore, a hybrid microactuator uses thin film coils and a pair of Ni-Mn-Ga stripes in a “push-push” mode is suggested.
Merging XML files: a new approach providing intelligent merge of XML data sets

As XML becomes ubiquitous so the need for powerful tools to manipulate XML data becomes more pressing. Merging XML is particularly tricky, but often necessary to consolidate data feeds from heterogeneous systems, or to synchronize submissions of XML fragments which make up a larger document. An automated mechanism for defining and controlling such merges has been developed and is demonstrated to provide a consistent, adaptable and resilient solution to this problem. Integration into an information pipeline allows limitless customization. As XML tools become more powerful and able to handle many of the peculiarities of real data, so the possibility of achieving a genuine, intelligent merge of XML data sets becomes a reality. Increasingly users are wanting to apply concurrent engineering to XML, i.e. to allow multiple users to add to a single data set simultaneously.
Risk Factors of Early Otitis Media in the Danish National Birth Cohort

Objective To assess risk factors of otitis media (OM) in six-months-old children. Method The sample consisted of 69,105 mothers and their children from the Danish National Birth Cohort. The women were interviewed twice during pregnancy and again 6 months after birth. The outcome “one or more” maternal reported episodes of OM at age six months. In total 37 factors were assessed, covering prenatal, maternal, perinatal and postnatal factors. Results At age six months 5.3% (95% CI 5.1–5.5) of the children had experienced one or more episodes of OM. From the regression analysis, 11 variables were associated with a risk of OM. When a Bonferroni correction was introduced, gender, prematurity, parity, maternal age, maternal self-estimated health, taking penicillin during pregnancy, and terminating breastfeeding before age six months, was associated with a risk of early OM. The adjusted ORs of OM for boys versus girls was 1.30 (95% CI 1.18–1.44). The OR having one sibling versus no siblings was 3.0 (95% CI 2.64–3.41). If the woman had been taking penicillin during pregnancy, the OR was 1.35 (95% CI 1.15–1.58). Children born before 38th gestational week had an increased OR for early OM of 1.49 (95% CI 1.21–1.82). Children of young women had an increased OR of early OM compared to children of older women. Additionally, children of women who rated their own health low compared to those rating their health as high, had an increased OR of 1.38 (95% CI 1.10–1.74). Finally, children being breastfeed less than 6 months, had an increased OR of 1.42 (95% CI 1.28–1.58) compared to children being breastfeed beyond 6 months. Conclusion These findings indicate that prenatal factors are of less importance regarding early OM before the age of six months. Postnatal risk factors seem to pose the main risk of early OM.
Does Social Isolation and Low Societal Participation Predict Disability Pension? A Population Based Study

Purpose The aim was to examine the potential influence of social isolation and low societal participation on the future risk of receiving disability pension among individuals in Sweden. A specific aim was to describe differences depending on disability pension diagnoses, and how the results were modified by sex and age. Method The study comprised representative samples of Swedish women and men, who had been interviewed in any of the annual Swedish Surveys of Living Conditions between 1990 and 2007. Information on disability pension and diagnoses was added from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency’s database (1991-2011). The mean number of years of follow-up for the 53920 women and men was twelve years (SD 5.5), and the study base was restricted to the ages 20 to 64 years of age. The predictors were related to disability pension by Cox’s proportional hazards regression. Results Social isolation and low societal participation were associated with future disability pension also after control for age, year of interview, socio demographic conditions and self reported longstanding illness. Lone individuals were at increased risk of disability pension, and the effect of living without children was modified by sex and age. An increase in risk was particularly noticeable among younger women who reported that they had sparse contacts with others, and no close friend. Both women and men who reported that they did not participate in political discussions and who could not appeal on a decision by a public authority were also at increased risk. The effects of social isolation were mainly attributed to disability pension with mental diagnoses, and to younger individuals. Conclusions The study suggests that social isolation and low societal participation are predictors of future disability pension. Social isolation and low societal participation increased particularly the risk of future disability pension in mental diagnoses among younger individuals.
Roles of MKK1/2-ERK1/2 and Phosphoinositide 3-Kinase–AKT Signaling Pathways in Erlotinib-Induced Rad51 Suppression and Cytotoxicity in Human Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer Cells

Erlotinib (Tarceva) is a selective epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor in the treatment of human non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). In this study, we investigated the roles of ERK1/2 and AKT signaling pathways in regulating Rad51 expression and cytotoxic effects in different NSCLC cell lines treated with erlotinib. Erlotinib decreased cellular levels of phosphorylated ERK1/2, phosphorylated AKT, Rad51 protein, and mRNA in erlotinib-sensitive H1650, A549, and H1869 cells, leading to cell death via apoptosis, but these results were not seen in erlotinib-resistant H520 and H1703 cells. Erlotinib decreased Rad51 protein levels by enhancing Rad51 mRNA and protein instability. Enforced expression of constitutively active MKK1 or AKT vectors could restore Rad51 protein levels, which were inhibited by erlotinib, and decrease erlotinib-induced cytotoxicity. Knocking down endogenous Rad51 expression by si-Rad51 RNA transfection significantly enhanced erlotinib-induced cytotoxicity. In contrast, overexpression of Rad51 by transfection with Rad51 vector could protect the cells from cytotoxic effects induced by erlotinib. Blocking the activations of ERK1/2 and AKT by MKK1/2 inhibitor (U0126) and phosphoinositide 3-kinase inhibitor (wortmannin) suppressed the expression of Rad51 and enhanced the erlotinib-induced cell death in erlotinib-resistant cells. In conclusion, suppression of Rad51 may be a novel therapeutic modality in overcoming drug resistance of erlotinib in NSCLC. (Mol Cancer Res 2009;7(8):1378–89)
Trace Factory: generating workloads for trace-driven simulation of shared-bus multiprocessors

A major concern with high-performance general-purpose workstations is to speed up the execution of commands, uniprocess applications, and multiprocess applications with coarse- to medium-grain parallelism. The authors have developed a methodology and a set of tools to generate traces for the performance evaluation of shared-bus, shared-memory multiprocessor systems. Trace Factory produces traces representing significant real workloads consisting of a flexible set of commands and uniprocess and multiprocess user applications. The authors evaluate its accuracy and show how it can be used to evaluate and compare the performance of five coherence protocols.
Effect of improved home ventilation on asthma control and house dust mite allergen levels

Background: The warm, humid environment in modern homes favours the dust mite population, but the effect of improved home ventilation on asthma control has not been established. We tested the hypothesis that a domestic mechanical heat recovery ventilation system (MHRV), in addition to allergen avoidance measures, can improve asthma control by attenuating re‐colonization rates.
An industrial case of exploiting product line architectures in agile software development

There has been an increased interest in exploring the ways of integrating agile software development and software product line approaches. Both approaches share several common goals, which provide the motivation for integrating them. However, there has been little empirical research for understanding how these approaches can be integrated in industrial settings. This paper presents the findings from a case study of a software development company that has successfully integrated software product line architecture and agile software development practices. The company's processes are described based on product line and agile practices. The results are expected to provide useful insights into the mechanics of exploiting product line practices in agile software development despite apparent philosophical clashes between the two approaches.
Root growth of Lotus corniculatus interacts with P distribution in young sandy soil

Large areas of land are restored with unweathered soil substrates following mining activities in eastern Ger- many and elsewhere. In the initial stages of colonization of such land by vegetation, plant roots may become key agents in generating soil formation patterns by introducing gradients in chemical and physical soil properties. On the other hand, such patterns may be influenced by root growth responses to pre-existing substrate heterogeneities. In particular, the roots of many plants were found to preferentially prolifer- ate into nutrient-rich patches. Phosphorus (P) is of primary interest in this respect because its availability is often low in unweathered soils, limiting especially the growth of legu- minous plants. However, leguminous plants occur frequently among the pioneer plant species on such soils, as they only depend on atmospheric nitrogen (N) fixation as N source. In this study we investigated the relationship between root growth allocation of the legume Lotus corniculatus and soil P distribution on recently restored land. As test sites, the ex- perimental Chicken Creek Catchment (CCC) in eastern Ger- many and a nearby experimental site (ES) with the same soil substrate were used. We established two experiments with constructed heterogeneity, one in the field on the experimen- tal site and the other in a climate chamber. In addition, we conducted high-density samplings on undisturbed soil plots colonized by L. corniculatus on the ES and on the CCC. In the field experiment, we installed cylindrical ingrowth soil cores (4.5◊ 10 cm) with and without P fertilization around single two-month-old L. corniculatus plants. Roots showed preferential growth into the P-fertilized ingrowth-cores. Pref- erential root allocation was also found in the climate chamber experiment, where single L. corniculatus plants were grown in containers filled with ES soil and where a lateral portion of the containers was additionally supplied with a range of different P concentrations. In the high-density samplings, we excavated soil-cubes of 10◊ 10◊ 10 cm size from the top- soil of 3 mini-plot areas (50 ◊ 50 cm) each on the ES and the CCC on which L. corniculatus had been planted (ES) or occurred spontaneously (CCC) and for each cube sepa- rated the soil attached to the roots (root-adjacent soil) from the remaining soil (root-distant soil). Root length density was negatively correlated with labile P (resin-extractable P) in the root-distant soil of the CCC plots and with water-soluble P in the root-distant soil of the ES plots. The results suggest that P depletion by root uptake during plant growth soon overrode the effect of preferential root allocation in the relationship between root density and plant-available soil P heterogene- ity.
Compressed Sensing in On-Grid MIMO Radar

The accurate detection of targets is a significant problem in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. Recent advances of Compressive Sensing offer a means of efficiently accomplishing this task. The sparsity constraints needed to apply the techniques of Compressive Sensing to problems in radar systems have led to discretizations of the target scene in various domains, such as azimuth, time delay, and Doppler. Building upon recent work, we investigate the feasibility of on-grid Compressive Sensing-based MIMO radar via a threefold azimuth-delay-Doppler discretization for target detection and parameter estimation. We utilize a colocated random sensor array and transmit distinct linear chirps to a small scene with few, slowly moving targets. Relying upon standard far-field and narrowband assumptions, we analyze the efficacy of various recovery algorithms in determining the parameters of the scene through numerical simulations, with particular focus on the ℓ 1-squared Nonnegative Regularization method.
A new miniature ultra wide band planar microstrip antenna based on the metamaterial transmission line

In this article, a simple and miniature ultra wide band (UWB) printed planar antenna with excellent radiate characteristics is presented. A method to reduce the size and enlarge the bandwidth of Metamaterial (MTM) antennas utilizing a composite right/left handed transmission line (CRLH-TL) is suggested. We proposed an efficient way to foot print area reduction and extend the bandwidth accompanying improvement the gain and the efficiency of metamaterial antennas, which has been examined by full-wave simulation. Compact size, UWB, low cost, high gain, unidirectional radiation patterns and fitting impedance characteristics are the chief advantages of the suggested antenna, which are obtained by proposed method. The antenna has a compact size of 12.2mm × 9.2mm × 1.6mm or 0. 08λ0× 0. 06λ0× 0. 01λ0 (λ0 : the free space wavelength at 2GHz), and provides the impedance bandwidth about 140% between 1.2 and 6.8GHz for VSWR <; 2 and also the peak gain and the maximum efficiency are 7.28dBi and 92.3%, respectively, at 5.2GHz. The suggested method can be utilized to design new miniature and UWB metamaterial antennas and microwave components for mobile handset implementations.
Contextual classification of 3D laser points with conditional random fields in urban environments

Online 3D point cloud classification and scene understanding are crucial tasks for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) equipped with multiple laser scanners. Due to the poor performance of traditional 2D image representation model for 3D point clouds, a novel Optimal Bearing Angle (OBA) model is therefore proposed to overcome the limitations of texture information losing and image blurring caused by the UGV's on-the-fly navigation. With the result of 3DSLIC based super-pixel segmentation in OBA images, the center of points belonging to each segmented OBA image patch is assigned as CRF graph node, so that a simplified CRF graph structure is constructed for online contextual classification of 3D laser points in urban environments. Moreover, total 29-dimensional features are extracted from both the raw 3D laser points and the corresponding OBA images. A large number of urban scenes selected from both DUT2 dataset and KAIST dataset are used as testing data in our experiments, and the results show the validity and performance of the proposed method.
Plasma concentration of IGF-I is independently associated with insulin sensitivity in subjects with different degrees of glucose tolerance.

OBJECTIVE We studied the relationships between plasma IGF-I concentrations and insulin sensitivity in subjects with various degrees of glucose tolerance. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total of 357 nondiabetic subjects, 54 subjects with impaired glucose tolerance and 98 newly diagnosed type 2 diabetic subjects, were consecutively recruited, and anthropometric and biochemical characteristics were collected. RESULTS IGF-I concentrations were negatively correlated with age, BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, triglyceride levels, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure. IGF-I concentrations were positively correlated with HDL cholesterol and homeostasis model assessment of insulin sensitivity (HOMA-S). The correlations remained significant after adjusting for sex, age, and BMI. Correlations for HOMA-S with these metabolic and anthropometric variables were of a similar degree and direction to those for IGF-I concentrations. Stepwise linear regression analysis in a model, which included well-known modulators of insulin sensitivity such as sex, age, BMI, glucose tolerance status, family history of diabetes, waist-to-hip ratio, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, HDL cholesterol, and triglyceride levels, revealed that IGF-I concentrations were independently associated with insulin sensitivity accounting for 10.8% of its variation (P < 0.0001). IGF-I concentrations were significantly lower in subjects with World Health Organization (WHO)-defined metabolic syndrome compared with subjects without metabolic syndrome (P < 0.0001). Logistic regression analysis showed that each unit increase in log-transformed IGF-I concentrations was associated with a 90.5% reduction in the risk of WHO-defined metabolic syndrome. CONCLUSIONS These data indicate that IGF-I has the characteristics to be a marker for the insulin resistance syndrome. This suggests that low IGF-I levels may be a useful marker for identifying subjects at risk for cardiovascular disease.