Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Benefits of Probiotics in Human and Animal Nutrition

At birth, the gastrointestinal tract of any animals is sterile, and it is rapidly colonized by bacteria from the mother and the environment. This colonization by the gut microbiota plays an important role in intestinal tract maturation of newborn (in terms of anatomy, digestive physiology, and immunology) (Hooper 2004). After this colonization, considering healthy human individuals, the gastrointestinal tract harbors 10 or more times as many microbes than there are eukaryotic cells (1014 viable cells for indigenous microbiota/1013 body cells). These microorganisms, altogether weighing approximately 1.5 kg, can be considered as a complementary major organ, responsible for three main functions: colonization resistance, immunomodulation, and nutritional contribution (Hayashi et al., 2002; Zoetendal et al., 2011). Colonization resistance inhibits the installation of exogenous microorganisms as well as the uncontrolled multiplication of microorganisms belonging to the indigenous microbiota. Immunomodulation maintains the immune system under a watchful state, which permits a faster but adequate response in the case of infectious aggression. Nutritional contribution furnishes complementary sources of vitamins, enzymes, and energy substrates (volatile fatty acids).
Reproducing Interaction Contingency Toward Open-Ended Development of Social Actions: Case Study on Joint Attention

How can human infants gradually socialize through interaction with their caregivers? This paper presents a learning mechanism that incrementally acquires social actions by finding and reproducing the contingency in interaction with a caregiver. A contingency measure based on transfer entropy is used to select the appropriate pairs of variables to be associated to acquire social actions from the set of all possible pairs. Joint attention behavior is tested to examine the development of social actions caused by responding to changes in caregiver behavior due to reproducing the found contingency. The results of computer simulations of human-robot interaction indicate that a robot acquires a series of actions related to joint attention such as gaze following and alternation in an order that almost matches the infant development of joint attention found in developmental psychology. The difference in the order between them is discussed based on the analysis of robot behavior, and then future issues are given.
Modular model building

Mathematical models are increasingly used in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry to understand how phenotypes emerge from systems of molecular interactions. However, their current construction as monolithic sets of equations presents a fundamental barrier to progress. Overcoming this requires modularity, enabling sub-systems to be specified independently and combined incrementally, and abstraction, enabling general properties to be specified independently of specific instances. These in turn require models to be represented as programs rather than as datatypes. Programmable modularity and abstraction enables libraries of modules to be created for generic biological processes, which can be instantiated and re-used repeatedly in different contexts with different components. We have developed a computational infrastructure to support this. We show here why these capabilities are needed, what is required to implement them and what can be accomplished with them that could not be done previously.
Three-coloring triangle-free planar graphs in linear time

Grötzsch's theorem states that every triangle-free planar graph is 3-colorable, and several relatively simple proofs of this fact were provided by Thomassen and other authors. It is easy to convert these proofs into quadratic-time algorithms to find a 3-coloring, but it is not clear how to find such a coloring in linear time (Kowalik used a nontrivial data structure to construct an O(n log n) algorithm). We design a linear-time algorithm to find a 3-coloring of a given triangle-free planar graph. The algorithm avoids using any complex data structures, which makes it easy to implement. As a by-product, we give a yet simpler proof of Grötzsch's theorem.
Electrospun chitosan/polyvinyl alcohol nanofibre mats for wound healing

Chitosan (CS) aqueous salt blended with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) nanofibre mats was prepared by electrospinning. CS was dissolved with hydroxybenzotriazole (HOBt), thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) and ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) in distilled water without the use of toxic or hazardous solvents. The CS aqueous salts were blended with PVA at different weight ratios, and the effect of the solution ratios was investigated. The morphologies and mechanical and swelling properties of the generated fibres were analysed. Indirect cytotoxicity studies indicated that the CS/PVA nanofibre mats were non‐toxic to normal human fibroblast cells. The CS‐HOBt/PVA and CS‐EDTA/PVA nanofibre mats demonstrated satisfactory antibacterial activity against both gram‐positive and gram‐negative bacteria, and an in vivo wound healing test showed that the CS‐EDTA/PVA nanofibre mats performed better than gauze in decreasing acute wound size during the first week after tissue damage. In conclusion, the biodegradable, biocompatible and antibacterial CS‐EDTA/PVA nanofibre mats have potential for use as wound dressing materials.
Development of cytotoxic antibodies after a venous allograft.

The maintenance of adequate vascular access remains one of the major problems associated with long-term haemodialysis.1 For those patients for whom neither the creation of a Cimeno-Brescia fistula nor the insertion of a Scribner shunt is possible the insertion of a venous allograft has become increasingly common: in Europe, during 1975, 285 such operations were recorded.2 We report the development of cytotoxic antibodies after the insertion of a saphenous vein allograft in a patient awaiting renal transplantation. A positive cross-match result against lymphocytes from a potential cadaveric donor having three HLA antigens in common with the patient caused a transplant operation to be abandoned.
Multiscale Object Recognition under Affine Transformation

SUMMARY A method to recognize planar objects undergoing affine transformation is proposed in this paper. The method is based upon wavelet multiscale features and Hopfield neural networks. The feature vector consists of the multiscale wavelet transformed extremal evolution. The evolution contains the information of the contour primitives in a multiscale manner, which can be used to discriminate dominant points, hence a good initial state of the Hopfield network can be obtained. Such good initiation enables the network to converge more efficiently. A wavelet normalization scheme was applied to make our method scale invariant and to reduce the distortion resulting from normalizing the object contours. The Hopfield neural network was employed as a global processing mechanism for feature matching and made our method suitable to recognize planar objects whose shape distortion arising from an affine transformation. The Hopfield network was improved to guarantee unique and more stable matching results. A new matching evaluation scheme, which is computationally efficient, was proposed to evaluate the goodness of matching. Two sets of images, noiseless and noisy industrial tools, undergoing affine transformation were used to test the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results showed that our method is not only effective and robust under affine
Dual role for the latent transforming growth factor-beta binding protein in storage of latent TGF-beta in the extracellular matrix and as a structural matrix protein

The role of the latent TGF-beta binding protein (LTBP) is unclear. In cultures of fetal rat calvarial cells, which form mineralized bonelike nodules, both LTBP and the TGF-beta 1 precursor localized to large fibrillar structures in the extracellular matrix. The appearance of these fibrillar structures preceded the appearance of type I collagen fibers. Plasmin treatment abolished the fibrillar staining pattern for LTBP and released a complex containing both LTBP and TGF-beta. Antibodies and antisense oligonucleotides against LTBP inhibited the formation of mineralized bonelike nodules in long-term fetal rat calvarial cultures. Immunohistochemistry of fetal and adult rat bone confirmed a fibrillar staining pattern for LTBP in vivo. These findings, together with the known homology of LTBP to the fibrillin family of proteins, suggest a novel function for LTBP, in addition to its role in matrix storage of latent TGF-beta, as a structural matrix protein that may play a role in bone formation.
Spinal cord injury evaluation using morphological difference of somatosensory evoked potentials

It has been shown that the difference between somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) signals from a healthy and injured spinal cord is a strong indicator of the level of damage to the spinal pathway. This paper presents a method to evaluate the level of spinal cord injury (SCI) using the morphological difference between SEP signals. The dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm is a robust signal alignment technique that is sensitive to both amplitude and temporal differences. As such, the DTW alignment cost is used in this paper as a metric to evaluate the level of SCI. Results are presented using actual SEP signals collected on rodents with various levels of SCI.
Community Participation in Solid Waste Management

In Nigeria today, most urban centres are experiencing an increased rate of environmental deterioration, with refuse dumped along the streets, behind homes and drainage channels. Therefore the urban dweller is very much in contact with the waste generated by him. The government has not been able to handle satisfactorily the problem of solid waste. Every state government in Nigeria has an urban council charged with, among other things, keeping the urban environment free of solid waste. The Enugu State Environment Protection Agency [ ENSEPA] is charged with this responsibility in Enugu, Nigeria. We only need to come out of our houses, and the next thing we see is refuse heaps not up to ten metres away from the house. It is evident from the above discussion that the sanitary condition in Enugu, and in fact most of our urban areas present a dreadful picture. The main problem could therefore be inadequate arrangements for the collection and disposal of solid waste. However, in our rural communities, it has been observed that household solid waste does not pose a problem. This might be due to the fact that the rural communities organise themselves into community action groups, to keep their environment clean. Public places such as markets, village squares, cemeteries, streams or springs- water areas, as well as pathways connecting various compounds and villages are kept in good sanitary conditions.There is a kind of togetherness or neighbourliness going on in the rural communities. This communal living may have encouraged participation in local activities. Is it possible that we could encourage such communal living within urban neighbourhoods?
The First Decade of Informatics in Dutch High Schools

Informatics is currently being taught in high schools all over the world. In the Nether- lands, where all students are expected to become computer literate in the lower grades of high school (Hulsen et al., 2005), it has been decided not to consider computer literacy as being part of Informatics. What, then, should be the content of the Informatics curriculum taught in the higher grades? What should be taught, how and to whom? How should students' achievements be assessed? The answers to these questions completely depend on defining what the objectives of teaching Informatics are. This case study will discuss these objectives, along with the content of the Dutch High School Informatics Curriculum, the experiences resulting from the initial imple- mentation of this curriculum, including the setting in which Informatics presently finds itself, and in the course of this we will provide answers to the above questions.
Tackling femininity: The heterosexual paradigm and women's soccer in South Africa

Sport is a social institution that perpetuates gendered ideologies in the wider society through appealing to discourses of the naturalness of men's privilege and domination in society. Heteronormativity regulates the roles, behaviours, appearances and sexualities of, and relationships between and among, women and men. Moreover, heteronormative discourses normalise a particular relationship between sex, gender and sexuality that posits woman/feminine/heterosexual (and man/masculine/heterosexual) as a natural order from which variance is considered a punishable deviance. This paper outlines the effects of heteronormative discourses in the lives of women footballers in South Africa, through drawing on interviews with a wide range of women footballers. The paper shows how heteronormative discourses nurture homophobic attitudes that serve to regulate the appearances and performances of South African women.
Acute Renal Failure in Association with Community-Acquired Clostridium difficile Infection and McKittrick-Wheelock Syndrome

We report the case of a 65-year-old Caucasian woman who experienced two separate episodes of acute renal failure within an 18-month period, both requiring emergency admission and complicated treatment. Each episode was precipitated by hypovolaemia from intestinal fluid losses, but from two rare and independent pathologies. Her first admission was attributed to community-acquired Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhoea (CDAD) and was treated in the intensive therapy unit. She returned 18 months later with volume depletion and electrolyte disturbances, but on this occasion a giant hypersecretory villous adenoma of the rectum (McKittrick-Wheelock syndrome) was diagnosed following initial abnormal findings on digital rectal examination by a junior physician. Unlike hospital-acquired C. difficile, community-acquired infection is not common, although increasing numbers are being reported. Whilst community-acquired CDAD can be severe, it rarely causes acute renal failure. This case report highlights the pathological mechanisms whereby C. difficile toxin and hypersecretory villous adenoma of the rectum can predispose to acute renal failure, as well as the values of thorough clinical examination in the emergency room, and early communication with intensivist colleagues in dire situations.
Audiometric Notches in Noise-Induced Hearing Loss: 4K versus 6K as Related to Body Mass Index

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the association of the body mass index (BMI) with audiometric notches in noise exposed workers. Materials and Methods: This study is a cross-sectional analysis performed at an academic medical center. The pure-tone audiograms and basic personal information of noise-exposed workers were retrieved from the computerized database. The associations between age, height, weight, and BMI and audiometric notches were analyzed. Results: The audiograms of 4,598 ears from 2,299 noise-exposed workers were analyzed. Approximately one-third of the ears had notched audiograms. Subjects with left-ear notched audiograms had younger average age than subjects with right-ear notches. There was no significant association between the subjects' height and weight and audiometric notches. The mean BMIs of subjects with left-ear audiograms with notches at 4K and 6K were 25.66+/-3.23 and 25.09+/-3.30, respectively; the difference was statistically significant (t-test; p=0.022). Conclusions: Subjects with higher BMIs tended to have left-ear audiograms with notches at 4K. BMI information may assist in predicting audiogram notch frequency, thus aiding in early detection of noise-induced hearing loss.
Fast Manhattan sketches in data streams

The L1-distance, also known as the Manhattan or taxicab distance, between two vectors x, y in Rn is ∑_{i=1}overn |xi-y_i|. Approximating this distance is a fundamental primitive on massive databases, with applications to clustering, nearest neighbor search, network monitoring, regression, sampling, and support vector machines. We give the first 1-pass streaming algorithm for this problem in the turnstile model with O*(1/ε2) space and O*(1) update time. The O* notation hides polylogarithmic factors in ε, n, and the precision required to store vector entries. All previous algorithms either required Ω(1/ε3) space or Ω(1/ε2) update time and/or could not work in the turnstile model (i.e., support an arbitrary number of updates to each coordinate). Our bounds are optimal up to O*(1) factors.
A Cell Number Counting Factor Regulates Akt/Protein Kinase B To Regulate Dictyostelium discoideum Group Size

ABSTRACT Little is known about how individual cells can organize themselves to form structures of a given size. During development, Dictyostelium discoideum aggregates in dendritic streams and forms groups of ∼20,000 cells. D. discoideum regulates group size by secreting and simultaneously sensing a multiprotein complex called counting factor (CF). If there are too many cells in a stream, the associated high concentration of CF will decrease cell-cell adhesion and increase cell motility, causing aggregation streams to break up. The pulses of cyclic AMP (cAMP) that mediate aggregation cause a transient translocation of Akt/protein kinase B (Akt/PKB) to the leading edge of the plasma membrane and a concomitant activation of the kinase activity, which in turn stimulates motility. We found that countin− cells (which lack bioactive CF) and wild-type cells starved in the presence of anticountin antibodies (which block CF activity) showed a decreased level of cAMP-stimulated Akt/PKB membrane translocation and kinase activity compared to parental wild-type cells. Recombinant countin has the bioactivity of CF, and a 1-min treatment of cells with recombinant countin potentiated Akt/PKB translocation to membranes and Akt/PKB activity. Western blotting of total cell lysates indicated that countin does not affect the total level of Akt/PKB. Fluorescence microscopy of cells expressing an Akt/PKB pleckstrin homology domain-green fluorescent protein (PH-GFP) fusion protein indicated that recombinant countin and anti-countin antibodies do not obviously alter the distribution of Akt/PKB PH-GFP when it translocates to the membrane. Our data indicate that CF increases motility by potentiating the cAMP-stimulated activation and translocation of Akt/PKB.
Feasibility Study on Using Sunlit View Factor to Model Outdoor Thermal Comfort: A Case Study in Sha Tin, Hong Kong

The building facade not only serves as the outer surface of building itself, but also defines the boundaries of outdoor urban environment. This enclosure entraps more short-wave radiation from the sun due to its complex geometry and thermo-physical properties when compared with an unobstructed flat area. Building surface reflects and absorbs short-wave radiation, and is heated up to a higher surface temperature. The heated surface, especially the sunlit one, emits and exchanges more long-wave radiation with surrounding buildings and other outdoor objects. Therefore, to some extent, more long-wave radiant fluxes existing within urban environment could be regarded as one of the consequences of entrapping solar radiation by urban structure. In other words, more sunlit building area casted by urban morphology should lead to more long-wave radiant fluxes within urban environment. With more emitted longwave and reflected short-wave radiant fluxes by sunlit urban fabric, the resulting mean radiant temperature (Tmrt) will be higher causing human thermal discomfort in outdoor environment. Thus, it is important to identify and evaluate the empirical relations between the geometrical composition of sunlit urban surfaces and outdoor thermal comfort. By treating the urban structure as a black box, and using simple regression analysis, the objective of this feasibility study is to identify and evaluate the empirical relation between radiant fluxes (especially long-wave fluxes) from six directions within urban context and corresponding sunlit area of adjacent building facades in daytime. Radiant fluxes of both long-wave and short-wave were measured by net radiometers in outdoor space in Wo Che Estate, Sha Tin, Hong Kong. The measured radiant fluxes were smoothed out using 5-min mean value. View factor of sunlit area was captured by using fish-eye lens camera, and corresponding values were obtained with the aid of RayMan software. The radiant fluxes and mean radiant temperature are regressed on sunlit view factor. The results showed a strong correlation between sunlit view factor and outdoor thermal comfort.
Impaired parvocellular pathway in dyslexic children

Recent studies report that some children with dyslexia have impaired visual processing, specifically in the fast‐processing magnocellular pathway. The objective was to study the effect of varying luminance and temporal and spatial frequency on the latency and amplitude of the visual evoked potentials (VEPs) in normal and dyslexic Egyptian children who speak Arabic (a right‐left reading and writing system). VEPs were recorded in 52 dyslexic and 41 normal children in the fourth grade using a black and white checkerboard pattern with different checkerboard sizes and different rates of stimuli at high‐ and low‐contrast media. The peak of the major positive wave component (P100) of each waveform and the trough of the previous major negative wave component were identified, and the peak‐to‐trough amplitude was measured. The latency and amplitude of VEPs in response to different experimental conditions showed significant shortening of P100 latency under high‐contrast media and under low spatial frequency in children with dyslexia compared with normal readers. Furthermore, dyslexia children showed prolonged P100 latency in response to high spatial frequency stimulation compared with the low spatial frequency (P=0.003) and significantly higher N1–P1 amplitude under high‐contrast media compared with low‐contrast media (P=0.02), whilst no such changes were observed in normal readers. These results are suggestive of deficiency within the parvocellular pathway rather than the magnocellular pathway. As reading apparently places demands primarily on the ability to discriminate fine details, which is to say, on the parvocellular system, we suggested that deficiency in this system, at least in Arabic speaking children, could be a predisposing factor in dyslexia.
sequenced the amyloid protein found in meningeal arteries of brains of patients with Alzheimer disease and Down syndrome

Cerebral amyloid angiopathy is increasingly recognized as a major cause of hemorrhagic stroke in the elderly as well as an important contributor to the growing challenge of vascular cognitive impairment, even in cerebral amyloid angiopathy patients without hemorrhagic stroke. Among the advances highlighted in this update are: (1) the importance of sulcal bleeding events in early recurrent hemorrhagic stroke in cerebral amyloid angiopathy; (2) the varied clinical presentations and associated neuroimaging profiles of the disease; (3) the cognitive profile of cerebral amyloid angiopathy; (4) the cumulative importance of different pathologic lesions in cerebral amyloid angiopathy that contribute to cognitive decline and the emergence of techniques to measure this cumulative effect by assessing structural connectivity in the disease; (5) the role of impaired vascular reactivity early in disease course; and (6) the role of vascular amyloid in causing cerebral microbleeds in the disease.
Simulation and experimental studies of disturbance observer enhanced internal model control

A disturbance observer enhanced internal model control approach is addressed in this paper to control a typical industrial process system. By implementing the proposed method, both simulation and experimental studies have been carried out to control a practical level tank system which may subject to strong disturbances. The results show that the proposed method transparently improves the disturbance attenuation property of the internal model control method.