Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distributed Instance Retrieval in Heterogeneous Ontologies

The problem of ontology querying is of a crucial importance for a practically usable semantic web. Recent research in standard Description Logics has produced a number of algorithms and implementations for reasoning with instances for answering ontological queries. In this work, we extend these techniques to enable a querying of distributed heterogeneous ontologies with heterogeneous populations. We follow a peer-to-peer paradigm that of combining local ontology query answering with answering over other semantically related ontologies. Our approach is formally grounded on Distributed Description Logics (DDLs) and limited to the instance retrieval queries. The contribution of the paper is twofold. From the theoretical perspective we extend the semantics of DDLs with instances which allows to define an instance retrieval algorithm. From the practical hand, we describe how the proposed algorithm can be implemented on top of DRAGO distributed reasoner.
[Intubating laryngeal mask].

To improve the success of blind intubation through a laryngeal mask, Dr. A.I.J. Brain constructed the intubating laryngeal mask airway (ILMA), marketed under the name Fastrach. The new construction allows blind intubation with highly flexible endotracheal tubes up to 8 mm ID with cuff (straight Woodbridge type), securing the airway around the intubation process and maintaining most of the characteristics of a standard laryngeal mask airway (SLMA), including contraindications. An additional contraindication is the existence of a Zenker diverticle. Up to now, eight working groups reported a success rate of blind intubation through the ILMA of more than 90% in about 1,200 patients, with a success rate of blind intubation of more than 50% for the first intubation attempt. Ten percent of the patients were difficult to intubate with the same success rate for blind intubation as in normal patients. Reduced mouth opening does not seem to hinder the use of the ILMA in spite of its increased outer diameter of 2 cm, as long as it is possible to enlarge the mouth opening to > 2 cm during anaesthesia. The new ILMA more than doubles the success of blind intubation compared to an SLMA, irrespective of a large variety of intubation difficulties. Correct judgement of endotracheal tube position is mandatory. The ILMA has the potential to be used in patients who are difficult to intubate and to substitute the SLMA in "cannot ventilate--cannot intubate" situations. The future will show if the ILMA also will improve emergency airway management by inexperienced personnel, including intubation, as has been shown for the standard laryngeal mask airway in cardiopulmonary resuscitation for ventilation only.
Effect of platelet-rich plasma on polypropylene meshes implanted in the rabbit vagina: histological analysis

ABSTRACT Purpose The polypropylene mesh (PPM) is used in many surgical interventions because of its good incorporation and accessibility. However, potential mesh-related complications are common. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) improves the healing of wounds and is inexpensive. Thus, the purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of the PRP-gel coating of a PPM on inflammation, production of collagen, and smooth muscle in the rabbit vagina. Materials and Methods The intervention consisted of a 1.5cm incision and divulsion of the vaginal mucosa for the implantation of a PRP-coated PPM. The PRP-coated mesh was implanted in 15 rabbits, and in the second group, the same implant was used without the PRP coating. In the sham group, the intervention consisted of the incision, divulsion, and suture. The rabbits were euthanized at 7, 30 and 90 days, and full-thickness sagittal sections of the posterior vaginal wall and rectum were scored. The inflammatory infiltrate was evaluated using hematoxylin and eosin staining. The Sirius Red stain was used to examine deposition of collagen I and III, and Masson’s trichrome staining was used to visualize the smooth muscle. Results The group with PRP-coated meshes had a lower inflammatory infiltrate count at 30 days. Deposition of collagen III increased with the use of PRP-coating at 90 days. Conclusions The area of inflammatory infiltrate was significantly increased in the group without the PRP-coated mesh at 30 days but not in the group with the PRP-coated mesh, indicating a less intense inflammatory response. In addition, a significant increase in collagen III occurred at 90 days.
Rapid assessment of correlated amino acids from pair-to-pair (P2P) substitution matrices

UNLABELLED Identification of correlated amino acids in proteins has been a topic of broad interest in view of its functional implications and importance in protein design. A new set of pair-to-pair (P2P) substitution matrices for amino acids was recently introduced as a useful tool for inferring information on such correlated sites. We present a website developed for automated application of these matrices for analysis of query sequences. The site offers options for graphical analysis of correlations, as well as visualization of correlated amino acids on representative, structurally characterized, members of the examined family of sequences. AVAILABILITY http://www.ccbb. pitt.edu/p2p.
Introducing technique choice support into an existing requirement acquisition process

Requirement acquisition is recognized as a highly problematic activity in software development. To support this activity, it is possible to use a predefined methodology that can help to give structure to the work. This thesis explores aspects of using such a methodology. A particular requirements acquisition process in Hitachi Ltd. is investigated and problems are identified. This process is then used as an example to test improvement suggestions. 3 Acknowledgements I want to thank Hitachi for the generosity they have shown me. I would like to thank Mr. Chiaki Hirai, Mr. Jun Shimabukuro and the rest of my team for guiding me and discussing with me. I also want to give a special thank you to Mr. Katsumi Kawai for his invaluable help with all kinds of practical things in addition to discussing the research. I want to thank the 506 research unit for welcoming me, and for showing great hospitality during all of my stay. I really enjoyed talking with all of you, and I learned a lot about Japan and Japanese people. Thank you also Tekn. Lic. Daniel Karlström for all help, both with practical arrangements for the trip and with the report. I also want to thank Dr. Björn Regnell for encouragement and for supervising the thesis. In the original project description, it was stated that the purpose of this project was to identify current requirements engineering challenges and evaluate new acquisition practices in the software development process. The scope of this statement needed to be narrowed down to make the project feasible. In the process of doing so the attention was drawn towards the elicitation of requirements, and more specifically to how to choose the different techniques in this activity. In this thesis, the word process is used to describe both arbitrary processes, and to refer to a specific documented process in Hitachi that has been examined. There should be no confusion about this. The word methodology is used to refer to processes on a higher level and is used to highlight the fact that the process examined here is part of a much larger context. In particular, it is used to refer to Methodology A, which is the big methodology in which Process A is the part concerned with elicitation. To use the word process to describe Process A is a choice I made for practical reasons to distinguish it from the large Methodology A. …
Functional Outcomes of Revision Total Knee Arthroplasty Following Failed Unicompartmental Knee Arthroplasty

Introduction: Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) can be used to treat medial compartment osteoarthritis of the knee. Some of these knees will eventually fail, and need to be revised. There is controversy about using UKA in younger patients as a definitive procedure or as a means to delay total knee arthroplasty (TKA) because the outcomes of subsequent revision surgery may be inferior to a primary TKA. Methods: We retrospectively reviewed a series of 46 revision TKA patients following failed UKA (UKA revisions) using functional outcomes questionnaires and compared the results with a cohort of age and gender matched primary TKA patients. Our hypothesis was that UKA revision surgery would be inferior to primary TKA surgery. Results: Data was collected on 33 knees after a mean follow-up period of five years. There was no significant difference in the Oxford Knee Score (33.7 vs 37.1, p = 0.09) or the Western Ontario and MacMasters Universities Arthritis Index (WOMAC) (24.8 vs. 19.1, p = 0.22). A subgroup analysis demonstrated that UKAs, which fail early, are more likely to produce an inferior outcome following revision surgery than those that survive more than five years. Discussion: We conclude that UKA can be used effectively in appropriately selected patients, as the functional outcome of their subsequent revision to TKA is not significantly inferior to a primary TKA. Keywords: unicompartmental knee arthroplasty, revision knee arthroplasty
Infant perceptual development for faces and spoken words: An integrated approach

There are obvious differences between recognizing faces and recognizing spoken words or phonemes that might suggest development of each capability requires different skills. Recognizing faces and perceiving spoken language, however, are in key senses extremely similar endeavors. Both perceptual processes are based on richly variable, yet highly structured input from which the perceiver needs to extract categorically meaningful information. This similarity could be reflected in the perceptual narrowing that occurs within the first year of life in both domains. We take the position that the perceptual and neurocognitive processes by which face and speech recognition develop are based on a set of common principles. One common principle is the importance of systematic variability in the input as a source of information rather than noise. Experience of this variability leads to perceptual tuning to the critical properties that define individual faces or spoken words versus their membership in larger groupings of people and their language communities. We argue that parallels can be drawn directly between the principles responsible for the development of face and spoken language perception.
Integrated model of primary and secondary eye care for underserved rural areas: The L V Prasad Eye Institute experience

Blindness is a major global public health problem and recent estimates from World Health Organization (WHO) showed that in India there were 62 million visually impaired, of whom 8 million are blind. The Andhra Pradesh Eye Disease Study (APEDS) provided a comprehensive estimate for prevalence and causes of blindness for the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP). It also highlighted that uptake of services was also an issue, predominantly among lower socio-economic groups, women, and rural populations. On the basis of this analysis, L V Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI) developed a pyramidal model of eye care delivery. This article describes the LVPEI eye care delivery model. The article discusses infrastructure development, human resource development, and service delivery (including prevention and promotion) in the context of primary and secondary care service delivery in rural areas. The article also alludes to opportunities for research at these levels of service delivery and the amenability of the evidence generated at these levels of the LVPEI eye health pyramid for advocacy and policy planning. In addition, management issues related to the sustainability of service delivery in rural areas are discussed. The article highlights the key factors required for the success of the LVPEI rural service delivery model and discusses challenges that need to be overcome to replicate the model. The article concludes by noting the potential to convert these challenges into opportunities by integrating certain aspects of the existing healthcare system into the model. Examples include screening of diabetes and diabetic retinopathy in order to promote higher community participation. The results of such integration can serve as evidence for advocacy and policy.
A virtual deployment testing environment for enterprise software systems

Modern enterprise software systems often need to interact with a large number of heterogeneous systems in an enterprise IT environment. The distributedness, large-scale-ness, and heterogeneity of such environment makes it difficult to test a system's quality attributes such as performance and scalability before it is actually deployed in the environment. In this paper, we present a Coloured Petri nets (CPN) based system behaviour emulation approach and a lightweight virtual testing framework for provisioning the deployment testing environment of an enterprise system so that its quality attributes, especially scalability, can be evaluated without physically connecting to the real production environment. This testing environment is scalable and has a flexible pluggable architecture to support the emulation of the behaviour of heterogeneous systems in the environment. To validate the feasibility of this approach, a CPN emulation model for LDAP has been developed and applied in testing the scalability of a real-life identity management system. An in-lab performance study has been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.
BER ANALYSIS OF 2X2 MIMO SPATIAL MULTIPLEXING UNDER AWGN AND RICIAN CHANNELS FOR DIFFERENT MODULATIONS TECHNIQUES

The multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna system provides very promising gain in capacity without increasing the use of spectrum, throughput, and power consumption. This is also less sensitive to fading, hence leading to a breakthrough in the data rate of wireless communication systems. In such systems, the antenna properties as well as the multipath channel characteristics play a key role in determining communication performance. This paper proposes the analysis and performance of Spatial Multiplexing technique of MIMO system.Here different fading channels like AWGN and Rician are used for analysis purpose. Moreover we analyzed the technique using high level modulations (i.e. M-PSK for different values of M). Detection algorithms used are Zero- Forcing and Minimum mean square estimator.
Gamma Oscillations and Stimulus Selection

More coherent excitatory stimuli are known to have a competitive advantage over less coherent ones. We show here that this advantage is amplified greatly when the target includes inhibitory interneurons acting via GABAA-receptor-mediated synapses and the coherent input oscillates at gamma frequency. We hypothesize that therein lies, at least in part, the functional significance of the experimentally observed link between attentional biasing of stimulus competition and gamma frequency rhythmicity.
Immunological properties of gap junction protein from mouse liver

Hepatic gap junctions were purified as plaques from BALB/c mice and separated by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in the presence of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). Antisera were raised in rabbits and rats against gap junction plaques as well as against protein bands of the following apparent molecular weights: 44K to 49K (“dimer” proteins), 26K, and 21K. Using an enzyme immunoassay, we found that the reactivities of the different antisera towards gap junction plaques decreased in the following order: anti‐plaque antisera, anti‐26K antisera, anti‐“dimmer” protein antisera, and anti‐21K antisera.
A global insight into a cancer transcriptional space using pancreatic data: importance, findings and flaws

Despite the increasing wealth of available data, the structure of cancer transcriptional space remains largely unknown. Analysis of this space would provide novel insights into the complexity of cancer, assess relative implications in complex biological processes and responses, evaluate the effectiveness of cancer models and help uncover vital facets of cancer biology not apparent from current small-scale studies. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of pancreatic cancer-expression space by integrating data from otherwise disparate studies. We found (i) a clear separation of profiles based on experimental type, with patient tissue samples, cell lines and xenograft models forming distinct groups; (ii) three subgroups within the normal samples adjacent to cancer showing disruptions to biofunctions previously linked to cancer; and (iii) that ectopic subcutaneous xenografts and cell line models do not effectively represent changes occurring in pancreatic cancer. All findings are available from our online resource for independent interrogation. Currently, the most comprehensive analysis of pancreatic cancer to date, our study primarily serves to highlight limitations inherent with a lack of raw data availability, insufficient clinical/histopathological information and ambiguous data processing. It stresses the importance of a global-systems approach to assess and maximise findings from expression profiling of malignant and non-malignant diseases.
2 4 A ug 2 01 1 Odd-frequency Cooper Pairs and Their Effects on Surface Impedance

Yasuhiro Asano, Alexander A. Golubov, Yakov V. Fominov, and Yukio Tanaka Department of Applied Physics and Center for Topological Science & Technology, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-8628, Japan Faculty of Science and Technology and MESA+ Institute of Nanotechnology, University of Twente, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands L. D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, RAS, 119334 Moscow, Russia Department of Applied Physics, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan (Dated: August 25, 2011)
Hemostatic absorbable gelatin sponge loaded with 5-fluorouracil for treatment of tumors

Background Surgical tumor resection is the main treatment for tumors however the treatment process often results in massive bleeding and tumor cell residue. The main aim of this research was to address problems such as bleeding, systemic chemotherapy side effects while enhancing quality of life, and increasing drug concentrations at the tumor site by developing a novel formulation with local long-term efficacy for treatment of tumors and to stop bleeding. Methods 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) was suspended in an ethyl acetate solution of poly D,L-lactide-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) and a vacuum drying method was applied. The hemostatic gelatin sponge loaded with 5-FU was prepared by absorption of the suspension. The in vitro and in vivo characteristics of the hemostatic gelatin sponge loaded with 5-FU (5-FU-HAGS) were investigated. Results 5-FU-HAGS (hemostatic absorbable gelatin sponge loaded with 5-fluorouracil) was successfully produced with controlled release of the content and was reproducibly suitable for local tumor treatment as an implant to stop bleeding. The encapsulation efficiency of 5-FU-HAGS was above 98%. The in vitro 5-FU release kinetic profile matched a near zero-order equation for 20 days. The in vivo 5-FU plasma concentration was at a more stable level than when 5-FU solution was administered by subcutaneous injection. Bleeding can be stopped more effectively by coating a piece of blank gelatin sponge. The survival ratio of tumor-bearing mice using a 5-FU-HAGS subcutaneous implant was higher when compared to mice given a subcutaneous injection of 5-FU solution. Conclusion The 5-FU-HAGS system is a potential and effective way of enhancing the survival ratio and improving the quality of life of tumor-bearing mice.
Forced Sales and House Prices

This paper uses data on house transactions in the state of Massachusetts over the last 20 years to show that houses sold after foreclosure, or close in time to the death or bankruptcy of at least one seller, are sold at lower prices than other houses. Foreclosure discounts are particularly large on average at 28% of the value of a house. The pattern of death-related discounts suggests that they may result from poor home maintenance by older sellers, while foreclosure discounts appear to be related to the threat of vandalism in low-priced neighborhoods. After aggregating to the zipcode level and controlling for regional price trends, the prices of forced sales are mean-reverting, while the prices of unforced sales are close to a random walk. At the zipcode level, this suggests that unforced sales take place at approximately efficient prices, while forced-sales prices reflect time-varying illiquidity in neighborhood housing markets. At a more local level, however, we find that foreclosures that take place within a quarter of a mile, and particularly within a tenth of a mile, of a house lower the price at which it is sold. Our preferred estimate of this effect is that a foreclosure at a distance of 0.05 miles lowers the price of a house by about 1%.
Cloud detection based on the spectral, multi-angular, and polarized characteristics of cloud

This paper, we detect clouds in China regions from combination of POLarization and Directionality of the Earth's Reflectances(POLDER) data and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer(MODIS) data, based on the spectral, multi- angular, and polarized characteristics of cloud. Four tests are applied to the measurements. The first one is blue channel reflectance test. The second one is the test on polarization at 865 nm. The third one is the test on reflectance at 1380 nm. The fourth one is the test on reflectance at 645 nm and 1640 nm. At last, the performance of method is evaluated using a large dataset of surface face observations of cloud cover. The result demonstrate the methods of cloud detection are feasible and believable.
Analysis of ESCRT functions in exosome biogenesis, composition and secretion highlights the heterogeneity of extracellular vesicles

Summary Exosomes are extracellular vesicles (EVs) secreted upon fusion of endosomal multivesicular bodies (MVBs) with the plasma membrane. The mechanisms involved in their biogenesis have not yet been fully identified although they could be used to modulate exosome formation and therefore are a promising tool in understanding exosome functions. We have performed an RNA interference screen targeting 23 components of the endosomal sorting complex required for transport (ESCRT) machinery and associated proteins in MHC class II (MHC II)-expressing HeLa-CIITA cells. Silencing of HRS, STAM1 or TSG101 reduced the secretion of EV-associated CD63 and MHC II but each gene altered differently the size and/or protein composition of secreted EVs, as quantified by immuno-electron microscopy. By contrast, depletion of VPS4B augmented this secretion while not altering the features of EVs. For several other ESCRT subunits, it was not possible to draw any conclusions about their involvement in exosome biogenesis from the screen. Interestingly, silencing of ALIX increased MHC II exosomal secretion, as a result of an overall increase in intracellular MHC II protein and mRNA levels. In human dendritic cells (DCs), ALIX depletion also increased MHC II in the cells, but not in the released CD63-positive EVs. Such differences could be attributed to a greater heterogeneity in size, and higher MHC II and lower CD63 levels in vesicles recovered from DCs as compared with HeLa-CIITA. The results reveal a role for selected ESCRT components and accessory proteins in exosome secretion and composition by HeLa-CIITA. They also highlight biogenetic differences in vesicles secreted by a tumour cell line and primary DCs.
Device performance of transistors with high-/spl kappa/ dielectrics using cross-wafer-scaled interface-layer thickness

A technique has been developed to fabricate transistors using a continuously scaled 0-2.5-nm SiO/sub 2/ interface layer between a silicon substrate and high-/spl kappa/ dielectric, on a single wafer. The transistor results are promising with good mobility values and drive current. The slant-etching process has no detrimental effect on the electrical characteristics of the Si/SiO/sub 2/ interface. This technique provides a powerful tool in examining the effect of the process variations on device performance.