Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
407 REGULATION OF HUMAN MALE GERM CELL DEATH BY MODULATORS OF ATP PRODUCTION

Purpose ATP production regulates the death process of many cells, including testicular cells. However, it is not known whether it is the ATP (or its level) or the ATP producing machinery, or some component, such as the mitochondrial respiratory chain or its complexes, or the ATP synthetase, or other mediators, which may be crucial. Based on this uncertainty, we investigated the role of ATP production in human male germ cell death. Results and Methods We found, that incubation of human seminiferous tubule segments under serum and hormone free culture conditions induced germ cell apoptosis, detected by Southern blot analysis of DNA fragmentation, TUNEL and electron microscopy. Inhibitors of different complexes (I to IV) of mitochondrial respiration and of the ATP synthetase (oligomycin) depleted the ATP levels (analyzed by HPLC), and suppressed apoptosis at 4h. An uncoupler (DNP) and oligomycin, the combination that allows activity of the respiratory chain while ATP synthetase is blocked, also suppressed death at 4h, as did the DNP by itself. Inhibition of glycolysis by 2-DG neither suppressed apoptosis nor altered the results obtained with the mitochondrial modulators. Furthermore, at 4h, apoptosis was not induced by Fas activation in the presence of inhibitors of ATP production. After 24h, many of the cells underwent delayed apoptosis despite ATP-depletion mediated by any of the mitochondrial modulators (± 2-DG). In addition, some of the spermatocytes and spermatids showed signs of necrosis or toxicity. Conclusion The mitochondrial ATP production plays an important role in regulating Fas associated primary pathways of human male germ apoptosis, triggered by the culture conditions. It appears that it is not any of the studied distinct mitochondrial components, but rather 1) the whole functional mitochondrial ATP production machinery, 2) some yet undefined part, or 3) possibly the ATP level as such, which is crucial for these primary pathways. We also conclude that there seem to secondary pathways of human testicular apoptosis that do not require mitochondrial ATP production and perhaps not ATP either.
Simulations of Solar Granulation. I. General Properties

Numerical simulations provide information on solar convection not available by direct observation. We present results of simulations of near surface solar convection with realistic physics: an equation of state including ionization and three-dimensional, LTE radiative transfer using a four-bin opacity distribution function. Solar convection is driven by radiative cooling in the surface thermal boundary layer, producing the familiar granulation pattern. In the interior of granules, warm plasma ascends with ≈ 10% ionized hydrogen. As it approaches and passes through the optical surface, the plasma cools, recombines, and loses entropy. It then turns over and converges into the dark intergranular lanes and further into the vertices between granulation cells. These vertices feed turbulent downdrafts below the solar surface, which are the sites of buoyancy work that drives the convection. Only a tiny fraction of the fluid ascending at depth reaches the surface to cool, lose entropy, and form the cores of these downdrafts. Granules evolve by pushing out against and being pushed in by their neighboring granules, and by being split by overlying fluid that cools and is pulled down by gravity. Convective energy transport properties that are closely related to integral constraints such as conservation of energy and mass are exceedingly robust. Other properties, which are less tightly constrained and/or involve higher order moments or derivatives, are found to depend more sensitively on the numerical resolution. At the highest numerical resolution, excellent agreement between simulated convection properties and observations is found. In interpreting observations it is crucial to remember that surfaces of constant optical depth are corrugated. The surface of unit optical depth in the continuum is higher above granules and lower in the intergranular lanes, while the surface of optical depth unity in a spectral line is corrugated in ways that are influenced by both thermal and Doppler effects.
A novel color feature extraction technique for retrieval of oral pathology images

Medical images form an essential source of information for various important tasks such as diagnosis of diseases, surgical planning, medical reference, research and training. A content-based medical image retrieval system has been proposed in this paper which indexes and retrieves images from a digital oral pathology image database. The visual features of the images are extracted based on color content using the novel technique of combining single channel color histogram and Haar wavelet co-efficient. The user supplied query image is compared with that of the images in the database and similar images are retrieved and ranked accordingly. The retrieval of images are compared in CIE L∗u∗v∗ color histogram and CIE L-channel histogram. Results show that the single channel color histograms yield better retrieval performance for oral pathology images than the conventional histogram methods.
MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ON TEACHER EVALUATION IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Defining what makes up teaching effectiveness has proved to be a complex task for researchers in language pedagogy. The present study attempts to shed light on the perceptual differences of effective teaching by providing a comparison of the evaluations of teaching effectiveness of one instructor with those of his/her students from two beginning Spanish classes and three peer evaluators. Furthermore, this study provides insight into the factors that students consider when filling out university Teacher-Course Evaluation Forms (TCE). In this study, the students completed a five-item questionnaire from the TCE forms where they evaluated their instructor’s teaching effectiveness and explained what factors they had taken into account in rating the instructor. Next, all the participants completed a 35-item questionnaire evaluating the instructor’s effectiveness. The researchers found a significant difference between all of the participants except between the observers and one of the classes. Given these results, this research supports the notion of using multiple perspectives in teacher evaluation. In addition, this study raises some concerns regarding the validity of student and self-evaluations, hence the TCE may not truthfully reflect the teacher’s effectiveness. The qualitative data showed a wide variety of reasons for students’ responses that did not always correlate to the numerical score given the instructor.
Active Noise Controller with reinforcement learning

This paper presents a new solution for Active Noise Control problem based on Q-Learning algorithm. This feedback method, needs no information about primary and secondary transfer functions and it is fully robust to subsystem dynamics changes. It is shown through simulation that the proposed method can work properly for a single tone periodic sinusoidal acoustic noise even thought some parameters are changed during the operation. Then, this is extended for multi tones periodic noise and its proper function is satisfied by simulation.
Potential Applications of Granular Computing in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

In this paper, we argue that granular computing may have many potential applications in knowledge discovery and data mining. Three related basic operations of granular computing are examined: granulation of the universe, characterization of granules, and relationships between granules. Their connections to the tasks of knowledge discovery and data mining are analyzed.
Further insight into molecular mechanism underlying thoracic spinal cord injury using bioinformatics methods

The present study aimed to explore the molecular mechanisms underlying the development of thoracic spinal cord injury (SCI). The gene expression profile of GSE20907, which included 12 thoracic non-injured spinal cord control samples and 12 thoracic transected spinal cord samples at different stages of SCI, was obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus database. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified using the limma package in R/Bioconductor. DEG-associated pathways were analyzed using the Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes database. A protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was constructed and transcription factors (TFs) were predicted using cytoscape. Compared with the control samples, there were 1,942, 396, 188 and 396 DEGs identified at day 3 (d3), week 1 (wk1), wk2 and month 1 (m1), respectively. Cluster analysis indicated that the DEGs at m1 were similar to those in the control group. Downregulated DEGs were enriched in nervous system disease pathways, such as Parkinson's disease. Upregulated DEGs were enriched in immune response-associated pathways, such as Fc γ R-mediated phagocytosis at early stages (d3 and wk1). Upregulated DEGs were enriched in pathways associated with cancer and pyrimidine metabolism at wk2 and m1, respectively. In the PPI network, nodes including RAC2, CD4, STAT3 and JUN were identified. Furthermore, ATF3, JUN and EGR1 were identified as TFs associated with SCI. In conclusion, the results of the present study showed that the number of DEGs decreased in a time-dependent manner following SCI. OLIG1, ATF3 and JUN may represent SCI regeneration-associated genes. Immune-associated inflammation was shown to be important in SCI, and SCI exhibits causal associations with other diseases, including cardiovascular disease and cancers. The present study provided novel insight into the molecular mechanisms of SCI regeneration, which may aid in the development of strategies to enhance recovery following SCI.
Adaptive message authentication for vehicular networks

Public key cryptography can introduce significant processing delays in vehicular communication platforms. This can lead to serious performance issues, especially in the case of multi-hop Inter-Vehicle Communication. In this paper we propose Adaptive Message Authentication (AMA), a lightweight filtering scheme that reduces the number of cryptographic operations performed by the nodes. Based only on local observations and with no additional communication channel, our scheme achieves global improvement of network performance. We show through simulation that the scheme successfully adapts the number of cryptographic operations to the locally observed number of adversaries.
Building a plane equation solver based on random sample consensus and its application

It is hard to solve plane equations with exceptional points with a classical plane equation solving algorithm. A robust plane equation solving algorithm based on RANSAC is advanced to solve this problem. Three points are selected randomly to compute plane parameters, and the number of inner points is counted with proper threshold. This processing is repeated for certain times and points group with the most inner points as selected, and with these points the least square method is used to plane equation solving. Fitting experiments are carried out with various kinds of error and exceptional points, and after that it is used in plane equation to solve of city building exterior wall surface, which is generated with binocular system. Conclusions are drawn that when comparing the classical methods with the proposed method it can adapt to various situations of error and exception and steadily obtain fine planar parameters. It is a robust plane equation solving algorithm.
Dynamic Update Cube for Range-sum Queries

A range-sum query is very popular and becomes important in finding trends and in discovering relationships between attributes in diverse database applications. It sums over the selected cells of an OLAP data cube where target cells are decided by the specified query ranges. The direct method to access the data cube itself forces too many cells to be accessed, therefore it incurs a severe overhead. The response time is very crucial for OLAP applications which need interactions with users. In the recent dynamic enterprise environment, data elements in the cube are frequently changed. The response time is affected in such an environment by the update cost as well as the search cost of the cube. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to reduce the update cost significantly while maintaining reasonable search efficiency, by using an index structure called the ∆ -tree. In addition, we propose a hybrid method to provide either an approximate result or a precise one to reduce the overall cost of queries. It is useful for various applications that need a quick approximate answer rather than an accurate one, such as decision support systems.
Strategy Purification

There has been significant recent interest in computing good strategies for large games. Most prior work involves computing an approximate equilibrium strategy in a smaller abstract game, then playing this strategy in the full game. In this paper, we present a modification of this approach that works by constructing a deterministic strategy in the full game from the solution to the abstract game; we refer to this procedure as purification. We show that purification, and its generalization which we call thresholding, lead to significantly stronger play than the standard approach in a wide variety of experimental domains. One can view these approaches as ways of achieving robustness against one's own lossy abstraction.
KAMD : A Progress Estimator for MapReduce Pipelines

Limited user-feedback exists in cluster computing environments such as MapReduce. Accurate, time-oriented progress indicators could provide much utility to users in this domain, where job execution times can have high variance due to the amount of data being processed, the amount of parallelism available, and the types of operators (often user-defined) that perform the processing. This feedback would help users make informed decisions, such as whether a job should be terminated and restarted at a later time when the cluster has more resources available. However, none of the techniques used by existing tools or available in the literature provide a non-trivial progress indicator for queries running in a distributed environment. In this paper, we apply recently developed techniques for estimating the progress of single-site SQL queries to parallel environments. In particular, we target environments where queries consist of MapReduce job pipelines. We also present techniques that improve the accuracy and usefulness of progress estimators operating in this environment. We implemented our estimators in the Pig system and demonstrate its performance on experiments with real data (search logs) and with a real cluster.
Review of Robust Video Watermarking Techniques

There has been a remarkable increase in the data exchange over web and the widespread use of digital media. The mounting interest with reference to digital watermarking throughout the last decade is certainly due to the increase in the need of copyright protection. Applications of video watermarking in copy control, broadcast monitoring, finger printing, video authentication, copyright protection etc is immensely rising. The main aspects of information hiding are capacity, security and robustness. The skill of anyone detecting the information is security and robustness refers to the resistance to modification of the cover content before concealed information is destroyed. Video watermarking algorithms normally prefers robustness. In robust algorithm it is not possible to eliminate the watermark without rigorous degradation of the cover content. In this paper, we introduce the notion of Video Watermarking and features required to design a robust watermarked video for valuable application and focus on various domains of video watermarking techniques. General Terms Video watermarking, Security, Algorithms.
Mechanical Ventilation for Comatose Patients with Inoperative Acute Intracerebral Hemorrhage: Possible Futility of Treatment

Background Comatose patients with acute intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) diagnosed as inoperative due to their severe comorbidity will be treated differently between countries. In certain countries including Japan, aggressive medical care may be performed according to the patients' family requests although the effects on the outcome are obscure. For respiratory distress in comatose patients with inoperative acute ICH, the role of mechanical ventilation on the outcome is unknown. We speculated that the efficacy of a ventilator in such a specific condition is limited and possibly futile. Methods We retrospectively evaluated the in-hospital mortality and further outcome of 65 comatose patients with inoperative ICH. Among the patients, 56 manifested respiratory distress, and the effect of the ventilator was evaluated by comparing the patients treated with and without the ventilator. Results The in-hospital mortality was calculated as 80%. A statistically significant parameter affecting the mortality independently was the motor subset on the Glasgow Coma Scale (P = 0.015). Among the patients who manifested respiratory distress, 7.7% of patients treated with a ventilator and 14.0% of patients not treated with a ventilator survived; an outcome is not significantly different. The mean survival duration of patients treated with a ventilator was significantly longer than the mean survival duration of patients not treated with a ventilator (P = 0.021). Among the surviving 13 patients, 7 patients died 5 to 29 months after onset without significant consciousness recovery. Another 6 patients suffered continuous disablement due to prolonged severe consciousness disturbances. Conclusion The current results indicate that treating comatose patients resulting from inoperative acute ICH may be futile. In particular, treating these patients with a ventilator only has the effect of prolonging unresponsive life, and the treatment may be criticized from the perspective of the appropriate use of public medical resources.
Real-time estimation of geometrical transformation between views in distributed smart-cameras systems

We present a method to automatically estimate the geometric relations among different views of cameras with partially overlapping fields of view using the position of moving objects visible at the same time in two or more views. The correspondences among objects are found by comparing their appearance based on dominant colour descriptors. The geometric transformation are computed iteratively and may be used to solve the consistent labelling problem. As a significant part of the processing is performed on smart cameras, the method has been conceived by taking into account the limited resources and low computational capability of the aforementioned devices. Experiments are done on publicly available datasets in order to show the accuracy of the geometric relations found by our method.
Vers une plate-forme communautaire d'hébergement à base de micro-services collaboratifs

Cet article propose une solution pour heberger des services a destination d'une communaute sur des equipements partages par ses membres. Ces equipements possedent des ressources de calcul, de stockage et de communication heterogenes ainsi qu'une disponibilite non garantie. Afin de s'adapter a ces contraintes, nous proposons une approche qui s'appuie sur les micro-services virtualises dans des conteneurs logiciels. Cette solution a ete mise en oeuvre sur des equipements reels distribues chez des utilisateurs afin de valider la pertinence de l'approche.
Relationships between the Level of Alcohol Consumption and Abnormality in Biomarkers According to Facial Flushing in Korean Male Drinkers

Background This research investigated the association between facial flushing after drinking and alcohol-induced biomarker abnormalities. Methods This retrospective study included 374 male drinkers who visited the department of Family Medicine of Chungnam National University Hospital between January and December of 2010. The participants were classified into two groups: the flushing group (n = 107) and the non-flushing group (n = 267). The biomarkers assessed were % carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) and gamma glutamyl transferase (rGTP). The upper limits of %CDT and rGTP were set as 2.47 and 50, respectively. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to obtain the cut-off value for the amount of drinking that caused abnormal %CDT and rGTP levels in the two groups. The sensitivity and specificity of the cut-off drinking amount for %CDT and rGTP abnormalities were analyzed in each group. Results In the flushing group, the cut-off value for alcohol-induced %CDT abnormality was 3.38 drinks (1 drink: 14 g of alcohol) per week, with sensitivity of 77.8% and specificity of 70.4%. In the non-flushing group, the cut-off value was 11.25 drinks per week, with sensitivity of 62.2% and specificity of 69.6%. The cut-off value for the amount of alcohol that induced rGTP abnormality was 3.38 drinks per week in the flushing group, with sensitivity of 68.0% and specificity of 76.8%, whereas it was 8.75 drinks in the non-flushing group, with sensitivity of 71.1% and specificity of 66.7%. The area under the ROC of the drinking level was 0.726 in the flushing group and 0.684 in the non-flushing group for %CDT. For rGTP, the value was 0.738 in the flushing group and 0.718 in the non-flushing group. Conclusion The weekly drinking amount required to induce biomarker abnormalities was lower in the flushers than in the non-flushers.
Activities performed by programmers while using framework examples as a guide

It is now a common approach pursued by programmers to develop new software systems using Object-Oriented Application Frameworks such as Spring, Struts and, Eclipse. This improves the quality and the maintainability of the code. Furthermore, it reduces development cost and time. However, the main problem is that these frameworks usually have a complicated Application Programming Interface (API), and typically suffer from the lack of enough documentation and appropriate user manuals. To solve these problems, programmers often refer to existing sample applications of those frameworks to learn how to implement the desired functionality in their own code. This is called the Monkey See, Monkey Do rule in software engineering literature. The aim of this paper is to investigate and analyze the activities programmers perform to achieve a successful use of this rule. The results of this analysis will help us to build automated tools which are helpful for programmers while perusing the aforementioned Monkey See, Monkey Do rule.
Lower Cervical Posterior Element Fractures in the National Football League: A Report of 2 Cases and a Review of the Literature

BACKGROUND AND IMPORTANCE:Injuries in professional football players are common because of the nature of the collisions and the frequency of axial loading to the cervical spine. These injuries should be thoroughly evaluated because they can put the player at risk of future injury and even paralysis. The focus of this report is to present 2 cases of this injury and review the current body of literature. CLINICAL PRESENTATION:We present 2 cases of professional football players who experienced injuries to the lower posterior elements of their cervical spine simultaneously on a kickoff during a game. Both players described transient symptoms consistent with a “stinger,” which is commonly encountered. Workup revealed fractures of the lower cervical spine in both patients. One patient was able to be managed conservatively and returned to football the following season. The second patient had an unstable fracture that ultimately required operative intervention, and the patient retired from professional football. CONCLUSION:Cervical spine injuries in football players need to be adequately evaluated, and in many cases can be career threatening. We recommend that players with persistent pain after a transient neurapraxia undergo radiography and computed tomography of the cervical spine to evaluate for a fracture.