Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physiology and Pathophysiology of Sleep Apnea Mandibular advancement decreases pressures in the tissues surrounding the upper airway in rabbits

Kairaitis, Kristina, Rosie Stavrinou, Radha Parikh, John R. Wheatley, and Terence C. Amis. Mandibular advancement decreases pressures in the tissues surrounding the upper airway in rabbits. J Appl Physiol 100: 349–356, 2006. First published August 25, 2005; doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00560.2005. —The pharyngeal airway can be considered as an airway luminal shape formed by surrounding tissues, contained within a bony enclosure formed by the mandible, skull base, and cervical vertebrae. Mandibular advancement (MA), a therapy for obstructive sleep apnea, is thought to increase the size of this bony enclosure and to decrease the pressure in the upper airway extraluminal tissue space (ETP). We examined the effect of MA on upper airway airflow resistance (Rua) and ETP in a rabbit model. We studied 11 male, supine, anesthetized, spontaneously breathing New Zealand White rabbits in which ETP was measured via pressure transducer-tipped catheters inserted into the tissues surrounding the lateral (ETPlat) and anterior (ETPant) pharyngeal wall. Airflow, measured via surgically inserted pneumotachograph in series with the trachea, and tracheal pressure were recorded while graded MA at 75° and 100° to the horizontal was performed using an external traction device. Data were analyzed using a linear mixed-effects statistical model. We found that MA at 100° increased mouth opening from 4.7 0.4 to 6.6 0.4 (SE) mm (n 7; P 0.004), whereas mouth opening did not change from baseline (4.0 0.2 mm) with MA at 75°. MA at both 75° and 100° decreased mean ETPlat and ETPant by 0.1 cmH2O/mm MA (n 7–11; all P 0.0005). However, the fall in Rua (measured at 20 ml/s) with MA was greater for MA at 75° ( 0.03 mmH2O ml 1 s mm ) than at 100° ( 0.01 mmH2O ml 1 s mm ; P 0.02). From these findings, we conclude that MA decreases ETP and is more effective in reducing Rua without mouth opening.
User Modeling for Contextual Suggestion

Abstract : This paper describes our work on the Contextual Suggestion Track of the Twenty-Third Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2014). The key to our approach is user interest modeling. By building explicit models of user interests and information needs, we are able to make suggestions relevant to the user. We extended our Reinforcement and Aging Modeling Algorithm (RAMA) to create user interest models using the rated examples in a user profile as explicit relevance feedback. Two models, one for specific interests and the other for general interests, are built for each user profile. To ensure that the recommendations are contextually appropriate, we have also built a simple model to capture contextual relevance of a recommendation. Candidate suggestions are retrieved from the Yelp1 website using its application programming interface. For each candidate, we calculate three component scores based on the specific interest model, the general interest model, and the context model, respectively. Final scoring and ranking are computed as a weighted linear combination of the component scores. We hypothesize that the relative weighting of the components may affect the performance of our system. To test the hypothesis, we have submitted two runs with different weighting schemes. In particular, RUN1 has a specific interest priority whereas RAMARUN2 has a general interest priority. TREC evaluation reveals that both runs performed significantly better than the median of all submitted runs (i.e., the Track Median) on three performance metrics. In addition, RAMARUN2 has a slight performance edge over RUN1. The effectiveness of our approach is evidenced by the TREC evaluation result that RAMARUN2 and RUN1 ranked #2 and #6 out of the 31 runs submitted by the 17 participating teams from around the world.
Reliability and validity of blood pressure measurement in the Secondary Prevention of Small Subcortical Strokes study

RationaleThe Secondary Prevention of Small Subcortical Strokes study is a multicenter, international trial funded by the National Institutes of Health testing the role of lowering systolic blood pressure to <130 mmHg in the prevention of stroke recurrence and cognitive decline in patients with recent symptomatic small subcortical stroke. Reliable and unbiased blood pressure measurement is critical to successful completion of the trial. MethodsWe looked at the reliability and validity of both the device used for blood pressure measurement and observer performance during measurement to assess the quality of blood pressure determination in the study. The Colin 8800C blood pressure device was tested for performance to Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation standards and for presence of skipped digits. Observer performance was tested by examining adherence to the Secondary Prevention of Small Subcortical Strokes protocol. ResultsThe mean difference (in mmHg) between the Colin device and the average of the two observers was 3.9 (SD 6.7) and −2.1 (SD 6.1) for systolic and diastolic pressures respectively, thereby meeting Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation requirements. No skipped digits were found between 82–230 and 40–120 mmHg for systolic and diastolic pressures, respectively. Observer performance was excellent with greater than 90% of patients having blood pressure measured consistently according to the protocol. ConclusionsDevice and observer performance in Secondary Prevention of Small Subcortical Strokes is excellent. Interpretation of the Secondary Prevention of Small Subcortical Strokes data for the effect of lowering systolic blood pressure on patient outcomes will not likely be adversely affected by these factors. Accuracy will be monitored throughout the remainder of the trial to ensure that this high quality is maintained.
Integrating corpus tools and techniques in ESP courses

L’un des buts de la recherche en anglais de specialite, quelle que soit la definition que l’on en donne, est de fournir des analyses fines de differentes varietes de la langue. La linguistique de corpus offre de nombreuses possibilites a ce domaine, meme si aucune description cles en main ne peut parvenir a repondre a tous les besoins ou a toutes les questions. Cet article suggere quelques propositions destinees a aider l’utilisateur final – apprenant ou enseignant – a mettre en œuvre des outils et des techniques de corpus afin d’observer, en fonction de ses besoins, des usages reels de la langue dans des contextes pertinents. L’approche est articulee avec des approches pedagogiques courantes (par exemple, l’etude exploratoire de documents authentiques) et de pratiques frequentes (par exemple l’utilisation de moteurs de recherche sur Internet), ce qui permet a different types d’utilisateurs de mieux integrer ces outils et ces techniques dans leurs activites quotidiennes. Au-dela des recherches sur Internet, des corpus generiques en ligne peuvent etre exploites a des fins specifiques ; les utilisateurs qui ont des besoins perennes tres cibles peuvent aller plus loin en construisant leur propre corpus. L’article fournit des exemples de ces divers usages, et conclut par une breve mise en perspective des resultats de la recherche dans ce domaine.
Increasing SIP firewall performance by ruleset size limitation

To protect SIP communication networks from attacks, especially flooding attacks like denial-of-service or message spam, intrusion detection systems (IDS) are deployed at the ingress point of the network to filter potential malicious traffic. A key issue of IDS performance is the operation of its firewall to block malicious user requests. Depending on the complexity of the firewall ruleset, filtering performance of the IDS can decrease considerably during high-load flooding situations. In this paper we propose a scheme to increase IDS firewall performance by merging several similar rules into more general ones and ignoring lesser relevant rules to limit the number of firewall rules. We formalise a mathematical model to compute new firewall rules and show exemplary with traffic from SIP VoIP communication networks how the calculation can be performed. If applied to a VoIP IDS, the scheme can increase firewall thoughput considerably, while retaining most of its effectiveness.
Production and Purification of Two Recombinant Proteins from Transgenic Corn

This study reports the production, purification, and characterization of recombinant Escherichia coli β‐glucuronidase (GUS) and chicken egg‐white avidin from transgenic corn seed. The avidin and gus genes were stably integrated in the genome and expressed over seven generations. The accumulation levels of avidin and GUS in corn kernel were 5.7% and 0.7% of extractable protein, respectively. Within the kernel, avidin and GUS accumulation was mainly localized to the germ, indicating possible tissue preference of the ubiquitin promoter. The storage‐stability studies demonstrated that processed transgenic seed containing GUS or avidin can be stored at 10 °C for at least 3 months and at 25 °C for up to 2 weeks without a significant loss of activity. The heat‐stability experiments indicated that GUS and avidin in the whole kernels were stable at 50 °C for up to 1 week. The buffer composition also had an affect on the aqueous extraction of avidin and GUS from ground kernels. Avidin was purified in one step by using 2‐iminobiotin agarose, whereas GUS was purified in four steps consisting of adsorption, ion‐exchange, hydrophobic interaction, and size‐exclusion chromatography. Biochemical properties of purified avidin and GUS were similar to those of the respective native proteins.
Evaluation by Discussion: An Evaluation Design for Postsecondary Programs

Most evaluations promise to collect and document important information about an activity, to give direction and reason to planning, and to provide justification for the continuance or termination of the activity under scrutiny. During the past decade, evaluation has been suggested as an important tool for facilitating decisionmaking in postsecondary education [2]. During the same period, a variety of evaluation strategies have been developed (see [4]) from which the postsecondary educator can choose to guide an inquiry into the merit or worth of a program or activity. Most of these strategies, however, have been originally designed for use in public school (K-12) or social agency settings and many are couched in complex methodologies. Whether the demand for evaluation and/or accountability data and the recent proliferation of evaluation strategies have resulted in more quality evaluations of postsecondary programs is doubtful for at least three reasons. First, few administrators and faculty have had adequate preparation in evaluation methodology as distinct from research (see Weiss [11] for a discussion of the differences between research and evaluation). This relative lack of expertise makes it difficult for many potential evaluators to satisfactorily cope with the difficulties and obstacles encountered in an evaluation. Second, many existing evaluation strategies (e.g., [6, 10]) when applied to phenomena in postsecondary educational institutions tend to be quite expensive to mount. With budgets presently stretched to what seems to be imponderable limits, few large-scale evaluations-
Modeling malaria in humanized mice: opportunities and challenges

About half of the world is at risk for developing malaria, which killed over 600,000 people in 2012 alone. The limited host range of the Plasmodium species that cause malaria in humans poses challenges for studying these parasites in experimentally tractable in vivo systems. To address this challenge, humanized mice have been constructed in which the tissue compartments relevant to the mammalian stages of plasmodial parasites are humanized. The development of human liver chimeric mice, human erythroid chimeric mice, and dually engrafted mice now allows for faithful replication of the entire Plasmodium falciparum life cycle. Although refinements to these models are still needed, humanized mice provide a promising small‐animal model to study development of P. falciparum and, conceivably, other human malarial parasite species, and may also aid in drug and vaccine development.
Decrease in neuromuscular control about the knee with maturation in female athletes.

BACKGROUND Compared with male athletes, female athletes demonstrate increased dynamic valgus angulation of the knee during landing from a jump, although prior to maturation male and female athletes have similar forces and motions about the knee when they land from a jump. Our hypothesis was that musculoskeletal changes that accompany maturation result in poor neuromuscular control of the knee joint in female athletes. METHODS One hundred and eighty-one middle-school and high-school soccer and basketball players-100 girls and eighty-one boys-participated in the study. Dynamic control of the knee joint was measured kinematically by assessing medial knee motion and the lower-extremity valgus angle and was measured kinetically by assessing knee joint torques; the values were then compared between female and male athletes according to maturational stage. Lower-extremity bone length was measured with three-dimensional kinematic analysis. RESULTS Following the onset of maturation, the female athletes landed with greater total medial motion of the knees and a greater maximum lower-extremity valgus angle than did the male athletes. The girls also demonstrated decreased flexor torques compared with the boys as well as a significant difference between the maximum valgus angles of their dominant and nondominant lower extremities after maturation. CONCLUSIONS After girls mature, they land from a jump differently than do boys, as measured kinematically and kinetically.
A Novel Differential Evolution with Co-evolution Strategy

Differential evolution, termed DE, is a novel and rapidly developed evolution computation in recent year s . There are some advantages of DE, including simple structure, easy use and rapid convergence speed. Besides, DE can be also applied on the complex optimization problem. However, there are some issues , such as premature convergence and stagnation, remaining in DE algorithm. To overcome those disadvantages, a different method was proposed, named CO-DE, by combining with a simple co-evolutionary model and reset mechanism. Thus, CO-DE can maintain appropriate swarm diversity and reduce the premature convergence. On the other hand, a reset mechanism was set to avoid the particle stagnates, which can further improve the performance of differential evolution. The proposed model can be now successfully applied with some well-known benchmark functions.
Lipid-Regulating Effect of Traditional Chinese Medicine: Mechanisms of Actions

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been increasingly used for the treatment of dyslipidemia and cardiovascular disease. Recently, much progress has been made in studies on the mechanisms of action of the lipid-regulating effect of TCM in animal experiments. Current researches showed that the lipid-regulating effect of TCM may be related to the following actions: (1) inhibiting intestinal absorption of lipids; (2) reducing the biosynthesis of endogenous lipids; (3) increasing the catabolism of lipid, sterol substances in live system; (4) increasing the secretion of sterol substances in live system; (5) regulating transcription factors related to lipid metabolism. This paper provides an overview of the recent advances and discusses their implications in future development of lipid-lowering drugs from TCM.
Tendon and Ligament Tissue Engineering, Healing and Regenerative Medicine

Tendons transmit forces from muscle to bone and provide the joint function and ligaments transmit forces from bone to bone and provide joint stability. Tendon and ligament injuries have high incidence and management of tendon and ligament injuries is technically demanding because the healing response of these soft connective tissues is low. In addition, number of the available options to be considered as tissue replacement for large defects is low and healing of tendon and ligaments is faced to significant limitations. Among the available options, autografts are still gold standard but all the auto- allo and xenografts have their own limitations. Tissue engineering is a newer option but it is still primitive to be applicable extensively, in clinical setting. Tissue engineering could be divided into four categories including scaffolds, healing promotive factors, stem cells and gene therapy. To be able to have a good judgment regarding the management of tendon and ligament injuries, it is crucial to have a basic knowledge of tendon and ligament healing and regeneration. In this review, we discussed various types of tendon and ligament injuries and their incidence, and introduced the available and future options in managing large and massive tendon and ligament injuries. We specifically discussed the tissue engineering and it’s advantageous and disadvantageous. To give a better clarification for the readers, we described different phases and cascades of tendon and ligament healing, modeling and remodeling, host-graft interaction after implantation of the graft and various types of prosthetic implants and finally provided some suggestions for the future investigations.
PCA-based genetic operator for evolving movements of humanoid robot

This paper proposes a new genetic operator in order to evolve the humanoid movements, which is composed of principal component analysis (PCA) and descent-based local optimization with respect to robot dynamics. The aim of the evolution is to let humanoid robots generate human-like and energy-efficient motions in real-time. We first capture human motions and build a set of movement primitives. The set is then evolved to the optimal movement primitives for the specific robot, which contain its dynamic characteristics, by using an evolutionary algorithm with the proposed genetic operator. Finally, the humanoid robot can generate arbitrary motions in real-time through the mathematical interpolation of the movement primitives in the evolved set. The evolved set of movement primitives endows the humanoid robot with natural motions which require minimal torque. This technique gives a systematic methodology for a humanoid robot to learn natural motions from human considering dynamics of the robot. The feasibility of our genetic operator is investigated by simulation experiments in regard to catching a ball that a man throws of the humanoid robot.
Attachment and Couple Satisfaction: The Mediating Effect of Approach and Avoidance Commitment

Satisfactory couple relationships are demonstrated to have a myriad of benefits. However, the ability to establish couple satisfaction is shown to be strongly and negatively impacted by insecure romantic attachment patterns (i.e., anxious and avoidant attachment). This study sought to gain an enhanced understanding of the aforementioned link by means of investigating a novel mediator model incorporating two facets of romantic commitment: approach commitment (the desire to maintain a relationship due to benefits inherent within this) and avoidance commitment (the desire to maintain a relationship to avoid potential losses resulting from relationship dissolution). Bootstrap analyses demonstrated that insecure attachments were differentially related to commitment goals, such that anxious attachment was related with higher approach and avoidance commitment. Conversely, while avoidant attachment was negatively linked with approach commitment goals, no relation was revealed with avoidance commitment goals. Additionally, results demonstrated that one's idiosyncratic commitment goals partially mediated the strongly established link between insecure attachment and couple satisfaction.
Analysis of the size dependence of macromolecular crowding shows that smaller is better

Significance Cells contain 30–40% dissolved protein and RNA by volume. In vivo protein binding and stability might differ significantly from in vitro measurements. Crowding by the excluded volume of these macromolecules has been studied extensively by experiment and theory. When the crowding effects of macromolecules, water, and ions are treated on an equal footing, the effect is opposite to that commonly believed. Large molecules are less effective at crowding than water and ions. There is also a surprisingly weak dependence on crowder size. Molecules of medium size have the same effect as much larger macromolecules like proteins and RNA. These results require a reassessment of observed high-concentration effects and of strategies to mimic in vivo conditions with in vitro experiments. The aqueous milieu inside cells contains as much as 30–40% dissolved protein and RNA by volume. This large concentration of macromolecules is expected to cause significant deviations from solution ideality. In vivo biochemical reaction rates and equilibria might differ significantly from those measured in the majority of in vitro experiments that are performed at much lower macromolecule concentrations. Consequently crowding, a nonspecific phenomenon believed to arise from the large excluded volume of these macromolecules, has been studied extensively by experimental and theoretical methods. However, the relevant theory has not been applied consistently. When the steric effects of macromolecular crowders and small molecules like water and ions are treated on an equal footing, the effect of the macromolecules is opposite to that commonly believed. Large molecules are less effective at crowding than water and ions. There is also a surprisingly weak dependence on crowder size. Molecules of medium size, ∼5 Å radius, have the same effect as much larger macromolecules like proteins and RNA. These results require a reassessment of observed high-concentration effects and of strategies to mimic in vivo conditions with in vitro experiments.
Mining Security Vulnerabilities from Linux Distribution Metadata

Security vulnerability research has long been hindered by the difficulty in obtaining structured, detailed data on individual vulnerabilities in sufficient quantities for analysis. We mined vulnerabilities from historical change log data from Linux distribution packages, tapping a yet-unexplored source of security data. Change logs provide a unified view of a application's evolution, version branching structure, and vulnerability patching history, allowing for the large-scale compilation of data on susceptible (and, in some cases, non-susceptible) versions of the original application for each vulnerability. We then compiled vulnerability datasets for multiple releases of Debian and Ubuntu Linux, analyzing trends in vulnerability patching over time. Patching practices in Debian and Ubuntu were similar, and patch rates stayed constant throughout each distribution's lifetime.