Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regional differences in temperature sensation and thermal comfort in humans.

Sensations evoked by thermal stimulation (temperature-related sensations) can be divided into two categories, "temperature sensation" and "thermal comfort. " Although several studies have investigated regional differences in temperature sensation, less is known about the sensitivity differences in thermal comfort for the various body regions. In the present study, we examined regional differences in temperature-related sensations with special attention to thermal comfort. Healthy male subjects sitting in an environment of mild heat or cold were locally cooled or warmed with water-perfused stimulators. Areas stimulated were the face, chest, abdomen, and thigh. Temperature sensation and thermal comfort of the stimulated areas were reported by the subjects, as was whole body thermal comfort. During mild heat exposure, facial cooling was most comfortable and facial warming was most uncomfortable. On the other hand, during mild cold exposure, neither warming nor cooling of the face had a major effect. The chest and abdomen had characteristics opposite to those of the face. Local warming of the chest and abdomen did produce a strong comfort sensation during whole body cold exposure. The thermal comfort seen in this study suggests that if given the chance, humans would preferentially cool the head in the heat, and they would maintain the warmth of the trunk areas in the cold. The qualitative differences seen in thermal comfort for the various areas cannot be explained solely by the density or properties of the peripheral thermal receptors and thus must reflect processing mechanisms in the central nervous system.
WikiCell: a unified resource platform for human transcriptomics research.

Here we present a database, WikiCell, as a portal for a unified view of the human transcriptome. At present, WikiCell consists of Expressed Sequenced Tags (ESTs), and users can access, curate, and submit database data by interactive mode, and also can browse, query, upload, and download sequences. Researchers can utilize the transcriptome model based on a human taxonomy graph. The sequences in each model are sorted by attributes such as physiological and pathological samples. The Genbank EST data format are conserved. Gene information is provided, including housekeeping genes, taxonomy location, and gene ontology (GO) description. We believe that WikiCell provides a useful resource for defining expression pattern and tissue differentiation based on human taxonomy mode. It can be accessed at http://www.wikicell. org/.
Enterprise Systems and Business Process Agility - A Case Study

Agility has become a key competency today as businesses face uncertain and volatile environment. Organizations operating in highly dynamic environments need agile processes. Existing information technology infrastructure and systems including enterprise systems with their ability to achieve organizational integration pose a serious challenge to process agility, even though they have made business processes cost efficient. With enterprise systems in most of the large and medium sized enterprises, this paper analyses the impact of enterprise system on business process agility. Using a case study approach, this study observes that the characteristics integration and standardization have a varying influence on the firm's ability to build agility.
Heterogeneity of high density lipoprotein generated by ABCA1 and ABCA7 Published, JLR Papers in Press, June 1, 2005. DOI 10.1194/jlr.M500092-JLR200

The assembly of HDL by helical apolipoprotein and cellular lipid was studied using HEK293 cells to which ecdysone-inducible human ABCA1 or human ABCA7 was transfected. Expression of both ABCA1 and ABCA7 was induced linearly proportional to ponasterone A concentration in the medium. In the experimental conditions used, the ABC protein expression levels limited the rate of lipid release when the apolipoprotein concentration was high, and the apolipoprotein concentration was rate-limiting when the ABC protein expression levels were high. When ABCA1 expression increased in conditions in which it was rate-limiting, relative cholesterol content to phospholipid increased in the HDL produced. In contrast, it was constant when ABCA7 expression increased. To investigate the background mechanism, the HDL particles were analyzed by density gradient ultracentrifugation and high performance lipid chromatography. The ABCA1-mediated reaction produced two distinct HDLs, large cholesterol-rich and small cholesterol-poor particles, and the ABCA7-mediated reaction generated mostly small cholesterol-poor particles. The increase of HDL assembly with the increase of ABCA1 expression was predominant in large cholesterol-rich particles, whereas only small cholesterol-poor HDL increased as ABCA7 expression increased. We conclude that ABCA1 generates cholesterol-rich and cholesterol-poor HDL and that the former is more prominently dependent on the increase of ABCA1 expression. ABCA7 produces this HDL subfraction only as a very minor component.
A unique basaltic micrometeorite expands the inventory of solar system planetary crusts

Micrometeorites with diameter ≈100–200 μm dominate the flux of extraterrestrial matter on Earth. The vast majority of micrometeorites are chemically, mineralogically, and isotopically related to carbonaceous chondrites, which amount to only 2.5% of meteorite falls. Here, we report the discovery of the first basaltic micrometeorite (MM40). This micrometeorite is unlike any other basalt known in the solar system as revealed by isotopic data, mineral chemistry, and trace element abundances. The discovery of a new basaltic asteroidal surface expands the solar system inventory of planetary crusts and underlines the importance of micrometeorites for sampling the asteroids' surfaces in a way complementary to meteorites, mainly because they do not suffer dynamical biases as meteorites do. The parent asteroid of MM40 has undergone extensive metamorphism, which ended no earlier than 7.9 Myr after solar system formation. Numerical simulations of dust transport dynamics suggest that MM40 might originate from one of the recently discovered basaltic asteroids that are not members of the Vesta family. The ability to retrieve such a wealth of information from this tiny (a few micrograms) sample is auspicious some years before the launch of a Mars sample return mission.
Lipschitz Density-Ratios, Structured Data, and Data-driven Tuning

Density-ratio estimation (i.e. estimating f = fQ/fP for two unknown distributions Q and P ) has proved useful in many Machine Learning tasks, e.g., risk-calibration in transfer-learning, two-sample tests, and also useful in common techniques such importance sampling and bias correction. While there are many important analyses of this estimation problem, the present paper derives convergence rates in other practical settings that are less understood, namely, extensions of traditional Lipschitz smoothness conditions, and common high-dimensional settings with structured data (e.g. manifold data, sparse data). Various interesting facts, which hold in earlier settings, are shown to extend to these settings. Namely, (1) optimal rates depend only on the smoothness of the ratio f , and not on the densities fQ, fP , supporting the belief that plugging in estimates for fQ, fP is suboptimal; (2) optimal rates depend only on the intrinsic dimension of data, i.e. this problem – unlike density estimation – escapes the curse of dimension. We further show that near-optimal rates are attainable by estimators tuned from data alone, i.e. with no prior distributional information. This last fact is of special interest in unsupervised settings such as this one, where only oracle rates seem to be known, i.e., rates which assume critical distributional information usually unavailable in practice.
Genetically determined height and coronary artery disease.

BACKGROUND The nature and underlying mechanisms of an inverse association between adult height and the risk of coronary artery disease (CAD) are unclear. METHODS We used a genetic approach to investigate the association between height and CAD, using 180 height-associated genetic variants. We tested the association between a change in genetically determined height of 1 SD (6.5 cm) with the risk of CAD in 65,066 cases and 128,383 controls. Using individual-level genotype data from 18,249 persons, we also examined the risk of CAD associated with the presence of various numbers of height-associated alleles. To identify putative mechanisms, we analyzed whether genetically determined height was associated with known cardiovascular risk factors and performed a pathway analysis of the height-associated genes. RESULTS We observed a relative increase of 13.5% (95% confidence interval [CI], 5.4 to 22.1; P<0.001) in the risk of CAD per 1-SD decrease in genetically determined height. There was a graded relationship between the presence of an increased number of height-raising variants and a reduced risk of CAD (odds ratio for height quartile 4 versus quartile 1, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.68 to 0.84; P<0.001). Of the 12 risk factors that we studied, we observed significant associations only with levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides (accounting for approximately 30% of the association). We identified several overlapping pathways involving genes associated with both development and atherosclerosis. CONCLUSIONS There is a primary association between a genetically determined shorter height and an increased risk of CAD, a link that is partly explained by the association between shorter height and an adverse lipid profile. Shared biologic processes that determine achieved height and the development of atherosclerosis may explain some of the association. (Funded by the British Heart Foundation and others.).
Creating a Datascape: a game to support communities in using open data

Open data is a resource that both local governments and citizens can use for answering questions about a particular community and for innovating new products and services. In reality, there are a number of barriers to the use of open data, not least that citizens can find it difficult to make sense of available data and understand what sort of problems it may solve. In this paper we describe the development of a board game that is designed to help people to better understand the relationship between data, the environment from which it derives and the questions it can be used to answer. We describe the motivation for the game's development, its current design and our ultimate intention, to create a tangible interactive, datascape. This work has been undertaken as part of a smart city educational programme.
The use of social media for engaging stakeholders in sustainability reporting

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess if online interaction through social media, particularly Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, represents an effective stakeholder engagement mechanism in order to define the contents of social, environmental, or sustainability reporting (SESR). Design/methodology/approach – After examining 332 worldwide sustainability reports for the year 2013, drawn up according to the guidelines provided by the Global Reporting Initiative, the authors conducted a content analysis on the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube pages of the organisations who rely on these types of social media. This was done in order to assess the scope of interaction between the organisation and its stakeholders. Findings – The authors found that a small number of organisations use social media to engage stakeholders as a means of defining the contents of SESR, and that the level of interaction is generally low. Rather than assuming a deliberative approach that is aimed at forging a democratic consensus.
Identification and treatment of masked depression in a general medical practice.

The usefulness of the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale as a screening instrument to uncover masked depression, and the benefits of early identification and treatment with alprazolam, were evaluated in a general medical practice population. There was a 95% scale acceptance by patients and a 12% overall prevalence of depression based on SDS results. Patients who scored in the depressed range on the SDS were, on a randomized basis, either identified immediately to their physicians and treated with alprazolam (N = 21) or identified after 4 weeks (natural history controls, N = 20). Treatment resulted in improvement in 66% of the identified group versus a 35% spontaneous improvement in the control group (p less than .05).
Code Restructuring: Tool for Quality Improvment

Refactoring/restructuring is important part of maintenance activities which improves software quality. This paper focuses on various methods for restructuring for procedural languages, object oriented languages and web based applications. Restructuring activities are taken place in code to improve the quality of the software application.Repetative code components, frequent item sets, Long classes, God classes in the code are the main areas where restructuring can be applied. Different methods like extract method, rename method, move method, pull-up method are applied in different situations. These methods are used in combinations and conflicts should be avoided while applying the restructurings.
Some issues on self-calibration and critical motion sequences

This paper is concerned with the problem of selfcalibration. First some general concepts are discussed, then several methods are briefly discussed. In the second part of the paper the problem of critical motion sequences is treated. This problem could cause an important limitation to the practical use of self-calibration. In this context several interesting results are presented. self-calibration, critical motion sequences, absolute conic, ambiguous reconstruction.
pplication of artificial neural networks for the soil moisture retrieval rom active and passive microwave spaceborne sensors

Among the algorithms used for the retrieval of SMC from microwave sensors (both active, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar-SAR, and passive, radiometers), the artificial neural networks (ANN) represent the best compromise between accuracy and computation speed. ANN based algorithms have been developed at IFAC, and adapted to several radar and radiometric satellite sensors, in order to generate SMC products at a resolution varying from hundreds of meters to tens of kilometers according to the spatial scale of
Population Size Does Not Influence Mitochondrial Genetic Diversity in Animals

Within-species genetic diversity is thought to reflect population size, history, ecology, and ability to adapt. Using a comprehensive collection of polymorphism data sets covering ∼3000 animal species, we show that the widely used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) marker does not reflect species abundance or ecology: mtDNA diversity is not higher in invertebrates than in vertebrates, in marine than in terrestrial species, or in small than in large organisms. Nuclear loci, in contrast, fit these intuitive expectations. The unexpected mitochondrial diversity distribution is explained by recurrent adaptive evolution, challenging the neutral theory of molecular evolution and questioning the relevance of mtDNA in biodiversity and conservation studies.
Coevolution of Morphology and Virulence in Candida Species

ABSTRACT Many of the major human fungal pathogens are known to undergo morphological changes, which in certain cases are associated with virulence. Although there has been an intense research focus on morphology in fungi, very little is known about how morphology evolved in conjunction with a variety of other virulence properties. However, several recent important discoveries, primarily in Candida species, are beginning to shed light on this important area and answer many longstanding questions. In this minireview, we first provide a description of the major fungal morphologies, as well as the roles of morphology and morphology-associated gene expression in virulence. Next, focusing largely on Candida species, we examine the evolutionary relationships among specific morphological forms. Finally, drawing on recent findings, we begin to address the question of how specific morphological changes came to be associated with virulence of Candida species during evolution.
Calprotectin inhibits matrix metalloproteinases by sequestration of zinc

Background/Aims—Calprotectin, a 36 kDa protein present in neutrophil cytoplasm, has antimicrobial and apoptosis inducing activities, which are reversed by the addition of zinc. Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), a family of zinc dependent enzymes, are important in many normal biological processes including embryonic development, angiogenesis, and wound healing, but also pathological processes such as inflammation, cancer, and tissue destruction. The aim of this study was to investigate whether calprotectin can inhibit MMP activity, and whether such inhibition could be overcome by the addition of zinc. Methods—MMP activity was measured by the degradation of substrates precoated on to microwells, and visualised by Coomassie blue staining of residual substrate. Seven metalloproteinases (MMP-1, MMP-2, MMP-3, MMP-7, MMP-8, MMP-9, and MMP-13) were tested against two substrates: gelatin and α-casein. Results—All MMPs except MMP-1 were active against gelatin, whereas MMP-7 was the only enzyme active against α-casein. The addition of calprotectin inhibited the activity of all the MMPs, but different concentrations of the protein, from 0. 3μM to > 11μM, were necessary to produce a 50% inhibition of the MMPs. Inhibition by calprotectin was largely overcome by the addition of zinc. Conclusions—The findings suggest that calprotectin inhibits MMPs by sequestration of zinc. The data also suggest that MMPs have different affinities for zinc and that calprotectin has a lower zinc affinity than the MMPs.
Inflammation-induced expression of sialyl Lewis X-containing glycan structures on alpha 1-acid glycoprotein (orosomucoid) in human sera

The glycosylation of the acute phase glycoprotein alpha 1-acid glycoprotein (AGP) in human sera is subject to marked changes during acute inflammation as a result of the cytokine-induced hepatic acute phase reaction. The changes described thus far comprise alterations in the type of branching of the carbohydrate structures as revealed by increased reactivity of AGP with concanavalin A. We now report on acute inflammation-induced increases in alpha 1-->3-fucosylated AGP molecules, as detected by the reactivity of AGP towards the fucose- binding Aleuria aurantia lectin (AAL) in crossed affino- immunoelectrophoresis of human sera. Laparotomy of women, for the removal of benign tumors of the uterus, was used as a model for the development of the hepatic acute phase response. Hugh increases were detected in the amounts of strongly AAL-reactive fractions of AGP, presumably containing three or more fucosylated N-acetyllactosamine units. At least part of these Lewis X-type glycans (Gal beta 1-->[Fuc alpha 1-->3]GlcNAc-R) appeared to be substituted also with an alpha 2-- >3-linked sialic acid residue. This was revealed by the laparotomy- induced abundant staining of AGP with an antisialyl Lewis X monoclonal antibody (CSLEX-1) on blots of sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gels containing AGP isolated from the sera of a patient at various days after operation. It is concluded that acute inflammation induces a strong increase in sialyl Lewis X-substituted AGP molecules that persists at a high level throughout the inflammatory period. We postulate that these changes represent a physiological feedback response on the interaction between leukocytes and inflamed endothelium, which is mediated via sialylated Lewis X structures and the selectin endothelial-leukocyte adhesion molecule 1.
Implicit Learning, Tacit Knowledge, Expertise Development, and Naturalistic Decision Making

Implicit learning involves the largely unconscious learning of dynamic statistical patterns and features, which leads to the development of tacit knowledge. This kind of learning is a ubiquitous, robust phenomenon that likely occurs in most, if not all, tasks in which individuals engage throughout their lives. In this paper, we argue that implicit learning and its end state, tacit knowledge, may assist in the acquisition, retention, and transfer of expertise and thus provide a form of tacit scaffolding for expertise development. The notion of tacit scaffolding represents a novel and interesting area of future research for the field of naturalistic decision making and naturalistic cognition.
Resource-sensitive synchronisation inference by abduction

We present an analysis which takes as its input a sequential program, augmented with annotations indicating potential parallelization opportunities, and a sequential proof, written in separation logic, and produces a correctly-synchronized parallelized program and proof of that program. Unlike previous work, ours is not an independence analysis; we insert synchronization constructs to preserve relevant dependencies found in the sequential program that may otherwise be violated by a näıve translation. Separation logic allows us to parallelize fine-grained patterns of resource-usage, moving beyond straightforward points-to analysis. Our analysis works by using the sequential proof to discover dependencies between different parts of the program. It leverages these discovered dependencies to guide the insertion of synchronization primitives into the parallelized program, and to ensure that the resulting parallelized program satisfies the same specification as the original sequential program, and exhibits the same sequential behaviour. Our analysis is built using frame inference and abduction, two techniques supported by an increasing number of separation logic tools.
The Biofilm Matrix

The extracellular matrix is a complex and extremely important component of all biofilms, providing architectural structure and mechanical stability to the attached population. The matrix is composed of cells, water and secreted/released extracellular macromolecules. In addition, a range of enzymic and regulatory activities can be found within the matrix. Together, these different components and activities are likely to interact and in so doing create a series of local environments within the matrix which co-exist as a functional consortium. The matrix architecture is also subject to a number of extrinsic factors, including fluctuations in nutrient and gaseous levels and fluid shear. Together, these intrinsic and extrinsic factors combine to produce a dynamic, heterogeneous microenvironment for the attached and enveloped cells.
A Unified Approach to Generalized Stirling Functions

Here presented is a unified approach to generalized Stirling functions by using generalized factorial functions, k-Gamma functions, generalized divided difference, and the unified expression of Stirling numbers defined in (16). Previous well-known Stirling functions introduced by Butzer and Hauss (4), Butzer, Kilbas, and Trujilloet (6) and others are included as particular cases of our generalization. Some basic properties related to our general pattern such as their recursive relations, generating functions, and asymptotic properties are discussed, which extend the corresponding results about the Stirling numbers shown in (21) to the defined Stirling functions.