Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of concomitant administration of piperacillin on the dispositions of isepamicin and gentamicin in patients with end-stage renal disease

Piperacillin inactivation of the aminoglycosides isepamicin and gentamicin in 12 chronic hemodialysis patients was assessed. Six subjects each received isepamicin (7.5 mg/kg of body weight) or gentamicin (2 mg/kg) alone and in combination with piperacillin (4 g every 12 h for four doses). Isepamicin and gentamicin concentrations in plasma and urine were monitored over 48 h after each dose and analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography and fluorescence polarization immunoassay, respectively. The pharmacokinetics of isepamicin were not significantly altered during combination treatment with piperacillin. The total body clearance (3.79 +/- 0.71 versus 3.94 +/- 1.05 ml/min), the steady-state volume of distribution (0.19 +/- 0.04 versus 0.18 +/- 0.03 liter/kg), and the terminal elimination half-life (47.91 +/- 7.20 versus 45.08 +/- 10.34 h) were not significantly altered in the presence of piperacillin. In contrast, the terminal elimination half-life (47.68 +/- 20.58 versus 35.67 +/- 11.18 h) of gentamicin was significantly reduced when gentamicin was given with piperacillin. The total body clearance (4.26 +/- 3.07 versus 4.89 +/- 1.94 ml/min) and the steady-state volume of distribution (0.19 +/- 0.04 versus 0.20 +/- 0.04 liter/kg) of gentamicin were not significantly altered during combination therapy; however, the nonrenal clearance of gentamicin administered in combination with piperacillin (3.56 +/- 0.38 ml/min) increased significantly compared with that of gentamicin (2.03 +/- 0.50 ml/min) given alone. The results of this study suggest that no additional dosage adjustment of isepamicin during concomitant therapy with piperacillin in hemodialysis patients is necessary. However, this does not preclude the need for appropriately ex vivo-handled specimens for monitoring isepamicin concentrations in plasma to ensure therapeutic efficacy and prevent toxicity. Furthermore, additional dosage adjustments may be necessary when gentamicin is used concomitantly with piperacillin, on the basis of the significant in vivo inactivation that takes place in end-stage renal disease patients.
On the role of non-local Menger curvature in image processing

Curvature is a fundamental component in differential geometry. It is used extensively in signal, image and shape processing, as a feature and in segmentation flows and regularization processes. In this paper we extend the notion of curvature in two ways. First, we present the Menger curvature which goes beyond classical curves and Riemannian manifolds to general metric spaces and is rigorously defined on a variety of discrete settings. We further extend the curvature to become a non-local entity using an adaptive, non-local integration measure, allowing curvature to be computed in a robust manner. Examples on natural and textural images highlight potential applications of these new concepts.
Orthodontic Treatment of a Patient with a Renal Transplant and Drug-Induced Gingival Overgrowth: A Case Report

The treatment of transplant patients is becoming an ever-increasing part of modern-day orthodontic practice. This report details the successful orthodontic management of a paediatric renal transplant patient with significant drug-induced gingival overgrowth. The problems that such patients present with are discussed before considering the specific orthodontic techniques employed. Recommendations are made for practitioners managing such cases.
Multi-platform Version of StarCraft: Brood War in a Docker Container: Technical Report

We present a dockerized version of a real-time strategy game StarCraft: Brood War, commonly used as a domain for AI research, with a pre-installed collection of AI developement tools supporting all the major types of StarCraft bots. This provides a convenient way to deploy StarCraft AIs on numerous hosts at once and across multiple platforms despite limited OS support of StarCraft. In this technical report, we describe the design of our Docker images and present a few use cases.
A Conditional Compression Distance that Unveils Insights of the Genomic Evolution

We describe a compression-based distance for genomic sequences. Instead of using the usual conjoint information content, as in the classical Normalized Compression Distance (NCD), it uses the conditional information content. To compute this Normalized Conditional Compression Distance (NCCD), we need a normal conditional compressor, that we built using a mixture of static and dynamic finite-context models. Using this approach, we measured chromosomal distances between Hominidae primates and also between Muroidea (rat and mouse), observing several insights of evolution that so far have not been reported in the literature.
XMG: eXtensible MetaGrammar

In this article, we introduce eXtensible MetaGrammar (XMG), a framework for specifying tree-based grammars such as Feature-Based Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammars (FB-LTAG) and Interaction Grammars (IG). We argue that XMG displays three features that facilitate both grammar writing and a fast prototyping of tree-based grammars. Firstly, XMG is fully declarative. For instance, it permits a declarative treatment of diathesis that markedly departs from the procedural lexical rules often used to specify tree-based grammars. Secondly, the XMG language has a high notational expressivity in that it supports multiple linguistic dimensions, inheritance, and a sophisticated treatment of identifiers. Thirdly, XMG is extensible in that its computational architecture facilitates the extension to other linguistic formalisms. We explain how this architecture naturally supports the design of three linguistic formalisms, namely, FB-LTAG, IG, and Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammar (MC-TAG). We further show how it permits a straightforward integration of additional mechanisms such as linguistic and formal principles. To further illustrate the declarativity, notational expressivity, and extensibility of XMG, we describe the methodology used to specify an FB-LTAG for French augmented with a unification-based compositional semantics. This illustrates both how XMG facilitates the modeling of the tree fragment hierarchies required to specify tree-based grammars and of a syntax/semantics interface between semantic representations and syntactic trees. Finally, we briefly report on several grammars for French, English, and German that were implemented using XMG and compare XMG with other existing grammar specification frameworks for tree-based grammars.
Why looking isn't always seeing: readership skills and graphical programming

Many believe that visual programming techniques are quite close to developers. This article reports on some fascinating research focusing on understanding how textual and visual representations for software differ in effectiveness. Among other things, it is determined that the differences lie not so much in the textual-visual distinction as in the degree to which specific representations support the conventions experts expect.
Towards the Design of Affective Survival Horror Games: An Investigation on Player Affect

An upcoming trend of affective gaming is where a player's emotional state is used to manipulate game play. This is an interesting field to explore especially for the survival horror genre that is excellent at producing player's intense emotions. In this research, we analyzed different player affective states prior to (i.e., Neutral, Anxiety, Suspense) and after (i.e., Low-Fear, Mid-Fear, High-Fear) a scary event using an affect annotation tool to collect player self-reports of their affective states during the game. Brainwave signals, heart rate and keyboard-mouse activity were also collected for analyzing the potential of automatically detecting horror-related affect. Results indicated that players were more likely to experience fear from a scary event when they were in a suspense state compared to when they were in a neutral state. In this state, players only experienced fear after experiencing surprise. Heart rate data gave the best result in classifying player affect, which achieved up to 90% overall accuracy. This highlights the potential of using player affect in survival horror games to adapt a scary event to evoke more fear from players.
Plant cooperation

Plants behave, but do plants help each other? This conceptual paper brings together theory developed for animal behaviour and insights from interspecific interactions between plants to address this question. The capabilities of plants and the empirical evidence indicate that altruism towards relatives, helping as a by-product of an adaptation to something else in the environment, and creating a mutual benefit are ways that plants may help other plants. Ongoing research indicates altruism towards relatives in competitive traits. Phenomena such as plant eavesdropping, pollinator attraction, predator swamping, and mutualisms with shared partners are potential examples of plant cooperation.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Physical Illness: Results from Clinical and Epidemiologic Studies

Abstract: Research indicates that exposure to traumatic stressors and psychological trauma is widespread. The association of such exposures with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health conditions is well known. However, epidemiologic research increasingly suggests that exposure to these events is related to increased health care utilization, adverse health outcomes, the onset of specific diseases, and premature death. To date, studies have linked traumatic stress exposures and PTSD to such conditions as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, gastrointestinal disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, musculoskeletal disorders, and other diseases. Evidence linking cardiovascular disease and exposure to psychological trauma is particularly strong and has been found consistently across different populations and stressor events. In addition, clinical studies have suggested the biological pathways through which stressor‐induced diseases may be pathologically expressed. In particular, recent studies have implicated the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) and the sympathetic‐adrenal‐medullary (SAM) stress axes as key in this pathogenic process, although genetic and behavioral/psychological risk factors cannot be ruled out. Recent findings, indicating that victims of PTSD have higher circulating T‐cell lymphocytes and lower cortisol levels, are intriguing and suggest that chronic sufferers of PTSD may be at risk for autoimmune diseases. To test this hypothesis, we assessed the association between chronic PTSD in a national sample of 2,490 Vietnam veterans and the prevalence of common autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, insulin‐dependent diabetes, and thyroid disease. Our analyses suggest that chronic PTSD, particularly comorbid PTSD or complex PTSD, is associated with all of these conditions. In addition, veterans with comorbid PTSD were more likely to have clinically higher T‐cell counts, hyperreactive immune responses on standardized delayed cutaneous hypersensitivity tests, clinically higher immunogolobulin‐M levels, and clinically lower dehydroepiandrosterone levels. The latter clinical evidence confirms the presence of biological markers consistent with a broad range of inflammatory disorders, including both cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases.
A specification of the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) testbed: experimentation and competition for trust in agent societies

A diverse collection of trust-modeling algorithms for multi-agent systems has been developed in recent years, resulting in significant breadth-wise growth without unified direction or benchmarks. Based on enthusiastic response from the agent trust community, the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Testbed initiative has been launched, charged with the task of establishing a testbed for agent trust- and reputation-related technologies. This testbed serves in two roles: (1) as a competition forum in which researchers can compare their technologies against objective metrics, and (2) as a suite of tools with flexible parameters, allowing researchers to perform customizable, easily-repeatable experiments. This paper first enumerates trust research objectives to be addressed in the testbed and desirable testbed characteristics, then presents a competition testbed specification that is justified according to these requirements. In the testbed's artwork appraisal domain, agents, who valuate paintings for clients, may gather opinions from other agents to produce accurate appraisals. The testbed's implementation architecture is discussed briefly, as well.
Pricing and Manufacturing Decisions When Demand is a Function of Prices in Multiple Periods

In most deterministic manufacturing decision models, demand is either known or induced by pricing decisions in the period that the demand is experienced. However, in more realistic market scenarios consumers make purchase decisions with respect to price, not only in the current period, but also in past and future periods. We model a joint manufacturing/pricing decision problem, accounting for that portion of demand realized in each period that is induced by the interaction of pricing decisions in the current period and in previous periods. We formulate a mathematical programming model and develop solution techniques. We identify structural properties of our models and develop closed-form solutions and effective heuristics for various special cases of our models. Finally, we conduct extensive computational experiments to quantify the effectiveness of our heuristics and to develop managerial insights.
Performance in children with hearing aids or cochlear implants: Bilateral stimulation and binaural hearing

It is well recognised that normal hearing people use their hearing in both ears to locate sounds and to understand speech in complex listening conditions. Whereas it is standard practice to provide two hearing aids to children with bilateral hearing loss, the situation with cochlear implantation is less certain. Questions remain as to what binaural aided functioning is possible for children who use a hearing aid and a cochlear implant in opposite ears (bimodal hearing). The first part of this paper draws on research at the National Acoustic Laboratories to show that children who used bimodal hearing devices obtained binaural advantages in localization. They could also take advantage of head shadow and binaural redundancy for speech intelligibility. The second part presents data showing that some hearing-impaired children may have binaural processing deficits even when bilateral stimulation is provided. Additional strategies may be necessary to develop or enable the use of binaural cues by these children.
Flowtune: Flowlet Control for Datacenter Networks

Rapid convergence to a desired allocation of network resources to endpoint traffic is a difficult problem. The reason is that congestion control decisions are distributed across the endpoints, which vary their offered load in response to changes in application demand and network feedback on a packet-by-packet basis. We propose a different approach for datacenter networks, flowlet control, in which congestion control decisions are made at the granularity of a flowlet, not a packet. With flowlet control, allocations have to change only when flowlets arrive or leave. We have implemented this idea in a system called Flowtune using a centralized allocator that receives flowlet start and end notifications from endpoints. The allocator computes optimal rates using a new, fast method for network utility maximization, and updates endpoint congestion-control parameters. Experiments show that Flowtune outperforms DCTCP, pFabric, sfqCoDel, and XCP on tail packet delays in various settings, converging to optimal rates within a few packets rather than over several RTTs. Benchmarks on an EC2 deployment show a fairer rate allocation than Linux's Cubic. A data aggregation benchmark shows 1.61× lower p95 coflow completion time.
GUANINE-DEAMINASE ACTIVITY IN RAT BRAIN AND LIVER.

1. Guanine deaminase in rat brain and liver was distributed among all the subcellular fractions: nuclei, ;heavy' mitochondria, ;light' mitochondria, microsomes and the supernatant fluid. The greater part of the activity passed into the soluble fraction. Among the particulate components, the ;light' mitochondria constituted the richest fraction. 2. The sum of the enzymic activities of the component fractions obtained on differential centrifugation was considerably greater than the activity of guanine deaminase in the whole homogenate. 3. The ;heavy'-mitochondrial fraction had a powerful inhibitory effect on the guanine-deaminase activity of the supernatant fraction. 4. All the sedimented fractions, except the microsomes, gave rise to higher guanine-deaminase activity on treatment with Triton X-100. 5. The inhibitory capacity of the ;heavy' mitochondria increased on treatment with Triton X-100; the detergent-treated nuclear fraction also brought about inhibition of the 5000g supernatant. 6. Guanine-deaminase inhibitor from the ;heavy' mitochondria was solubilized by high-speed grinding of the particles, followed by treatment with Triton X-100. The inhibitor appeared to be protein in nature, since it was precipitated by trichloroacetic acid and by half-saturation with ammonium sulphate, and was non-diffusible. It was inactivated by heating at 50 degrees for 5min. 7. It is possible that the guanine deaminase associated with particles differs from the soluble enzyme in its response to inhibitor.
Design studies for a financial management system for micro-credit groups in rural india

In this paper we describe the design process, results and observations obtained in designing a user interface for managing community-based financial institutions in rural India. The primary users are semi-literate village women from local communities. We present detailed observations from our field visits and the resulting evolution in our design vision. We describe a successful design artifact that is the result of this process, and list several important features that contributed to its success. We conclude with the current state of our work and our plans for the future.
Preliminary Evidence for the Psychophysiological Effects of a Technological Atmosphere in E-Commerce

As information and communication technologies (ICTs) become more advanced, consumers are able to experience retailing activities such as searching for products and services in online retail shops and for Internet-exclusive branded contents. Specifically, fashion retailers are facing the need to develop more novel experiential design than one another to maximize customers’ experience in Internet websites and secure sustainable competency. Confirming methods of organic integration of experiential and visual features of both online and mobile channels is an important aspect of the study of extended consumers’ interfaces of retail channels. Mehrabian and Russell’s stimulusorganism- response (S-O-R) paradigm and Sugiyama and Andree’s attention, interest, search, action, and share (AISAS) model were used for this research. Specifically, the present study considered the effect of e-commerce website features on consumers’ emotional reactions (pleasure and arousal) and the consequent impact on online consumer behaviors (search, action, and share). Hence, plus the self-reported survey methods, each subject’s psychophysiological indicators (i.e., pleasure and arousal) were measured to obtain more objective and reliable data and to redeem the results of the self-reported survey. Findings revealed the implications of the e-commerce website feature by comprehending the S-O-R paradigm and AISAS model and extending the understanding of the role of variables associated with comprehended frameworks based on psychophysiological data.
Safety and efficacy of a traditional herbal medicine (Throat Coat) in symptomatic temporary relief of pain in patients with acute pharyngitis: a multicenter, prospective, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the safety and efficacy of Throat Coat) (Traditional Medicinals,) Sebastopol, CA), a traditional demulcent herbal tea, in comparison with a placebo tea in the symptomatic treatment of acute pharyngitis. DESIGN Multicenter, prospective, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, two-armed, parallel-group clinical trial. SETTINGS Three primary care clinics in Duluth, MN, Madison, WI, and Middleton, WI. SUBJECTS Patients of both genders (>or=18 years of age) with clinical diagnoses of acute pharyngitis. INTERVENTIONS Patients (n = 60) were randomly assigned to receive 5-8 oz of Throat Coat (n = 30) or a placebo (n = 30), four to six times daily. The study period was 2 to 7 days with a window for the follow-up visit of 2-10 days accounting for the variable duration of sore throat symptoms. OUTCOME MEASURES Primary efficacy parameter: sum of pain intensity differences (SPID) for pain in throat on swallowing, calculated as the area under the curve (AUC) of pain intensity difference scores (assessed at 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and 30 minutes after treatment). Secondary efficacy parameter: total pain relief (TOTPAR), calculated as the AUC from time 0 (baseline) to 30 minutes of pain relief (assessed at 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and 30 minutes). RESULTS Compared to placebo, intensity of throat pain when swallowing was significantly reduced by Throat Coat in intention to treat and valid for efficacy analysis (VEA). Significant differences in change from baseline pain were observed at 5 min (p = 0.007), 10 min (p = 0.005), 15 minutes (p = 0.01), 20 minutes (p = 0.05), and 30 minutes (p = 0.04) after completion of the first dose (VEA analysis). There was a statistically significant improvement of SPID in the Throat Coat-treated group: Least square means +/- standard error of the means (SEM) of SPID were -16.5 +/- 13.9 in the placebo group and -43.8 +/- 11.9 in the Throat Coat-treated group (p = 0.012). TOTPAR was also significantly higher in the Throat Coat-treated group: Least square means +/- SEM of TOTPAR were 32.4 +/- 12.8 in the placebo group and 53.6 +/- 10.9 in the Throat Coat-treated group (p = 0.031). This study shows that Throat Coat is significantly superior to placebo and provided a rapid, temporary relief of sore throat pain in patients with pharyngitis.