Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of fluvastatin on intermediate density lipoprotein (remnants) and other lipoprotein levels in hypercholesterolemia.

The accelerated atherosclerosis in diseases associated with elevated remnant lipoprotein levels has directed interest toward the response of this lipoprotein species to lipid-lowering treatment. The effect of fluvastatin--a synthetic 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase inhibitor--was compared with that of placebo on parameters of remnant metabolism in 57 patients with moderate hypercholesterolemia, but not heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, type III hyperlipidemia, or endogenous hypertriglyceridemia. Fluvastatin therapy resulted in decreases versus baseline in plasma total cholesterol, low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and LDL apolipoprotein (apo) B levels of 18%, 20%, and 18%, respectively (p < 0.01). Plasma parameters related to remnant metabolism were also significantly decreased: intermediate density lipoprotein by 43% and apo E by 22% (p < 0.01). The percent decrease in plasma intermediate density lipoprotein cholesterol level was twice that of LDL-C and 50% greater than the decrease seen in very low density lipoprotein cholesterol (VLDL-C), which was decreased by 28%. Total triglycerides were reduced by 11% and VLDL apo B by 24%, whereas high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) rose significantly by 8%, HDL2-C by 24%, and HDL3-C by 3%. There were no increases in apo A-I levels compared with placebo nor any significant change in plasma lipoprotein(a) levels. The composition of LDL and VLDL particles did not appear to be altered by therapy, as assessed by the LDL-C:LDL-B, VLDL-C:VLDL-B, or triglyceride:VLDL-B ratios. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Thematic Roles in Somali: A Principles and Parameters Approach

This study describes the thematic roles of Somali; a language that manifests unorthodox grammatical structures due to the use of the focus particle. A mapping of some language features related to the semantic-syntactic interface is carried out. The effect of the meaning of the lexical items is tested to whether it affects the syntactic structures of the sentences. It was found that the word order of Somali is determined by pragmatic and sociolinguistics factors. The focus particle of Somali plays a key-role in the Surface structure of the sentences. However; the thematic roles of the language appear not to be influenced by the grammatical manifestation of the language at the surface structure. Rather, they are determined at the deep structure level. Somali, being a pro-drop language, shows that predicates require obligatory external arguments while internal arguments are determined by the verb class and kind. Some structures show that certain verbs require PPs as obligatory arguments. Keywords: Somali, Theta Theory, Thematic Roles
Complete Genome Sequence of Escherichia coli O157:H7 Bacteriophage phiJLA23 Isolated in Mexico

ABSTRACT The bacteriophage phiJLA23 was isolated from an animal feces sample and lytic activity was demonstrated against the Escherichia coli O157:H7 strain. We report the complete nucleotide sequence of bacteriophage phiJLA23, information which may be useful for determining whether this phage is a candidate for biocontrol or another biotechnological application.
Incidence of stroke subtypes, prognosis and prevalence of risk factors in Joinville, Brazil: a 2 year community based study

Background: There have been few population based studies on stroke risk factors and prognosis conducted in Brazil. The objective of this study was to evaluate, over a 2 year period, the incidence of the subtypes of first ever stroke, the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors and functional prognosis in a city located in the south of Brazil. Methods: The period from January 2005 to December 2006 was evaluated prospectively by compiling data on first ever stroke cases, medications used prior to the morbidity and the incidence of traditional risk factors. The annual incidence was adjusted for age using the direct method. Patients were monitored for at least 6 months following the event. Results: Of 1323 stroke cases, 759 were first ever stroke cases. Of these, 610 were classified as infarctions, 94 as intracerebral haemorrhage and 55 as subarachnoid haemorrhage. The crude incidence rate per 100 000 inhabitants was 61.8 for infarction (95% CI 57.0 to 66.9), 9.5 for intracerebral haemorrhage (95% CI 7.7 to 11.6) and 5.6 for subarachnoid haemorrhage (95% CI 4.2 to 7.3). The 30 day case fatality was 19.1%. The most prevalent cardiovascular risk factor was arterial hypertension. By post-stroke month 6, 25% had died (95% CI 21.4 to 29.1) whereas 61.5% had regained their independence (95% CI 56.2 to 68.3). Conclusions: Case fatality rate, prognosis and incidence adjusted for stroke subtypes were similar to those found in other population based studies. The prevalence rates of ischaemic heart disease, dyslipidaemia, arterial hypertension and diabetes suggest that Joinville presents a mixed pattern of cardiovascular risk, a pattern seen in developed and developing countries alike.
Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing a Chinese Term Clustering Mechanism for Generating Semantic Concepts of a News Ontology

In order to efficiently manage and use knowledge, ontology technologies are widely applied to various kinds of domain knowledge. This paper proposes a Chinese term clustering mechanism for generating semantic concepts of a news ontology. We utilize the parallel fuzzy inference mechanism to infer the conceptual resonance strength of a Chinese term pair. There are four input fuzzy variables, consisting of a Part-of-Speech (POS) fuzzy variable, Term Vocabulary (TV) fuzzy variable, Term Association (TA) fuzzy variable, and Common Term Association (CTA) fuzzy variable, and one output fuzzy variable, the Conceptual Resonance Strength (CRS), in the mechanism. In addition, the CKIP tool is used in Chinese natural language processing tasks, including POS tagging, refining tagging, and stop word filtering. The fuzzy compatibility relation approach to the semantic concept clustering is also proposed. Simulation results show that our approach can effectively cluster Chinese terms to generate the semantic concepts of a news ontology.
An evaluation system for string extraction in the airline coupon project

In this paper, we introduce an evaluation system to evaluate the performance of segmentation algorithm aimed to the airline coupon project. It is based on two databases which are constructed by a standard observer method and three error measures. Due to the idea of consolidating subjectivity to objectivity, it is proved effective and objective in segmentation evaluation work in the airline coupon project. It is also convenient to analyse the segmentation results and to flesh out the databases endlessly in a net-based integrated working environment.
High Cut‐Off Membrane Hemodiafiltration in Myoglobinuric Acute Renal Failure: A Case Series

Acute renal failure is a major complication of rhabdomyolysis. New membranes for hemodialysis have been developed with a high cut‐off pore size allowing efficient removal of myoglobin. We report on six patients treated by hemodiafiltration with a high cut‐off membrane (HCO‐HDF) for myoglobinuric acute renal failure. Rhabdomyolysis was caused by infection in two patients, by a statin in one patient and a non‐traumatic crush in another, and followed cardiovascular surgery in two others. Ten HCO‐HDF procedures were performed. A high cut‐off hemofilter was used, with citrate anticoagulation and postdilutional fluid substitution of 2–3 L/h, dialysate flow 500 mL/min, and blood flow within 250–300 mL/min. Albumin losses were replaced by infusion of human albumin solution, and the mean myoglobin reduction ratio was 77% (range, 62–89%). An excellent clearance of 81 mL/min (range 42–131 mL/min) was achieved. Nearly 5 g of myoglobin was removed into the dialysate collected in one of the procedures. A high rebound in serum myoglobin, on average to 244% of the post‐procedure myoglobin level, was observed. The four patients alive at the time remained anuric for a week. Slow myoglobin elimination with a mean half‐time of 39 h (range 19–59 h) was observed in that period. Highly efficient myoglobin removal by high cut‐off membrane hemodiafiltration was demonstrated in our patients. Rapid redistribution from the extracellular fluid and sustained myoglobin release were suggested by the high rebound observed. Elimination of myoglobin within the body was shown in our study to occur slowly during the period of anuria.
Towards a Design Theory of Usability and Generativity

Generativity is introduced and argued as essential as well as interdependent with usability in technology design. Where usability is well rooted in the design discourse, generativity, or how easy independent innovators can leverage on technology as a platform to develop new services and applications, has had little attention. We enquire into how the elements of usability and generativity are interrelated, how they contradict and how they can be combined. The mobile phone in general, as well as the Mobile Internet and iPhone in particular is used to illustrate our argument. We discuss different configurations of mobile phones, such as open, flexible and generative devices actively inviting and supporting free innovation and sophisticatedly designed appliances offering high quality services and superior usability. As an outcome of our discussion, we describe four different design approaches and ways to combine generativity and usability, and the properties of each of them.
La Responsabilidad Social Corporativa: el papel de la sociedad civil

Pública, Social y Cooperativa ISSN: 0213-8093 ciriec@uv.es Centre International de Recherches et d'Information sur l'Economie Publique, Sociale et Coopérative Organismo Internacional Vázquez Oteo, Orencio La Responsabilidad Social Corporativa: el papel de la sociedad civil CIRIEC-España, Revista de Economía Pública, Social y Cooperativa, núm. 53, noviembre, 2005, pp. 111-124 Centre International de Recherches et d'Information sur l'Economie Publique, Sociale et Coopérative Valencia, Organismo Internacional
Statistical Eigen-Beamforming With Selection Diversity for Spatially Correlated OFDM Downlink

Statistical eigen-beamforming is shown to be effective over a spatially correlated fading channel. In the paper, we investigate the use of the statistical eigen-beamforming with short-term selection for an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) downlink. The contributions of the paper are as follows: (1) an efficient statistical eigen-beamforming method with limited feedback for OFDM has been proposed; and (2) exact and asymptotic expressions of the average bit error rate for (transmitter side) spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channels are derived. In particular, the asymptotic expression allows us to gain insight to statistical eigen-beamforming with selection diversity in terms of array gain and diversity order.
Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–1992

Coherent democracies and harshly authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes are the most conflict-prone. Domestic violence also seems to be associated with political change, whether toward greater democracy or greater autocracy. Is the greater violence of intermediate regimes equivalent to the finding that states in political transition experience more violence? If both level of democracy and political change are relevant, to what extent is civil violence related to each? Based on an analysis of the period 1816–1992, we conclude that intermediate regimes are most prone to civil war, even when they have had time to stabilize from a regime change. In the long run, since intermediate regimes are less stable than autocracies, which in turn are less stable than democracies, durable democracy is the most probable end-point of the democratization process. The democratic civil peace is not only more just than the autocratic peace but also more stable.
Knowledge Systems Laboratory May 1994 Report No . KSL 94-23 Embedded Planning

We present a planner that generates nonlinear plans in real-time to control an autonomous agent. Requirements of plan generation in an embedded system are obtained by extending the action representation of [Chapman 87] and [McAllester & Rosenblitt 91]: To benefit from other dedicated capabilities of the agent, locations are represented using intended actions; Physical characteristics of an agent are represented by an arithmetic equations maintainance capability. The planner exhibits attractive real-time performances when additional knowledge of the environment is available (e.g., variables' domain). An autonomous agent embodying plan generation and monitoring has been successfully implemented. It has been tested on examples from various domains (including the ones this document). It actually controls a mobile robot at the KSL to assist in office work.
Infants' Understanding the Intention and Goal of an Adult's Action with Objects : Why Do They Look at the Adult's Hand?

Tool use is one of the goal directed actions infants learn efficiently through interacting with adults. This study examines the roles of infants’attention to an adult’s hand and joint engagement with an adult in learning tool use, and describes their development in understanding the intention of the adult. In Experiment 1,an experimenter inserted a toy car into an opaque tunnel,then showing how to extract the car by using a hammer. Forty-nine6-,10-, 12-and19-month-olds were then asked to get the car from the tunnel.19-month-olds could use the hammer as a tool by themselves,while more than80% “Failure”was recorded with the6-, 10-and12-month-olds. In Experiment2,the opaque tunnel was replaced by a transparent one. Thirty-five6-,10-,and 12-month-olds participated. Success in joint engagement was more observable with the transparent tunnel compared to the opaque one in10-and12-month-olds. 10-month-olds grasped the goal(the car coming out),connecting it to the actor(or her hand holding the hammer), through joint engagement with the adult. These results indicate that interaction with an adult and making the function of a tool transparent to infants both facilitate infant understanding of adult intention and causality with objects. masello( :tool use, attention to an adult’s hand, joint engagement, causality, goal directed actions Young children in their second year begin to use various types of tools such as spoons,pens, shovels and ultimately,language. Human infants especially learn tool use efficiently compared to other species. How do they succeed in learning these skills? We approached this question by examining the following two aspects;one is infants’propensity to imitate adults’actions,and the other is the role of adults interacting with the child. First, imitative learning is considered necessary for children to acquire the conventional use of many cultural artifacts. To he means t 1999),in his work on the social transmission of tool use in chimpanzees,differentiated between imitative learning and emulation learning;young children pay attention to an actor’s behavior or intentions,and successfully imitate the means used, however, primates focus on the salient outcome of an action and reinvent t methods l hrough a process of trial and error. Nagell, Oleguin, and Tomasello (1993) compared chimpanzees and2-year-old children on a tool-use task with two possible eading the eywords K
Isolation and Identification of miRNAs in Jatropha curcas

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNAs that play crucial regulatory roles by targeting mRNAs for silencing. To identify miRNAs in Jatropha curcas L, a bioenergy crop, cDNA clones from two small RNA libraries of leaves and seeds were sequenced and analyzed using bioinformatic tools. Fifty-two putative miRNAs were found from the two libraries, among them six were identical to known miRNAs and 46 were novel. Differential expression patterns of 15 miRNAs in root, stem, leave, fruit and seed were detected using quantitative real-time PCR. Ten miRNAs were highly expressed in fruit or seed, implying that they may be involved in seed development or fatty acids synthesis in seed. Moreover, 28 targets of the isolated miRNAs were predicted from a jatropha cDNA library database. The miRNA target genes were predicted to encode a broad range of proteins. Sixteen targets had clear BLASTX hits to the Uniprot database and were associated with genes belonging to the three major gene ontology categories of biological process, cellular component, and molecular function. Four targets were identified for JcumiR004. By silencing JcumiR004 primary miRNA, expressions of the four target genes were up-regulated and oil composition were modulated significantly, indicating diverse functions of JcumiR004.
A new 3-D volume processing method for polyp detection

Early diagnosis and removal of colonic polyps is effective in the elimination of subsequent carcinoma. This paper presents a new approach for computer-aided detection of polyps. The approach mimics the way the radiologists view CT abdomen images and utilizes several geometric attributes obtained from many triples of mutually orthogonal planes. The histogram of the attributes obtained from a sufficiently large number of perpendicular random images serves as a robust signature to represent the shape. We combine the new 3-D pattern recognition with a support vector machine classifier, and show that the number or the false positive detections in the initial polyp detection studies can be substantially reduced. One of the main contributions of this study is the thorough analysis of planar geometrical attributes. When an appropriate combination of planar attributes is used, the false positive rate is reduced by 87 percent beyond that of the initial stage detector, while maintaining a sensitivity level of 95 percent. Using such methods, radiologists should be able to view CTC data much more efficiently and accurately than without CAD.
Option Discovery in Reinforcement Learning using Frequent Common Subsequences of Actions

Temporally abstract actions, or options, facilitate learning in large and complex domains by exploiting sub-tasks and hierarchical structure of the problem formed by these sub-tasks. In this paper, we study automatic generation of options using common sub-sequences derived from the state transition histories collected as learning progresses. The standard Q-learning algorithm is extended to use generated options transparently, and effectiveness of the method is demonstrated in Dietterich's Taxi domain
Linking the concept of scale to studies of biological diversity: evolving approaches and tools

Although the concepts of scale and biological diversity independently have received rapidly increasing attention in the scientific literature since the 1980s, the rate at which the two concepts have been investigated jointly has grown much more slowly. We find that scale considerations have been incorporated explicitly into six broad areas of investigation related to biological diversity: (1) heterogeneity within and among ecosystems, (2) disturbance ecology, (3) conservation and restoration, (4) invasion biology, (5) importance of temporal scale for understanding processes, and (6) species responses to environmental heterogeneity. In addition to placing the papers of this Special Feature within the context of brief summaries of the expanding literature on these six topics, we provide an overview of tools useful for integrating scale considerations into studies of biological diversity. Such tools include hierarchical and structural‐equation modelling, kriging, variable‐width buffers, k‐fold cross‐validation, and cascading graph diagrams, among others. Finally, we address some of the major challenges and research frontiers that remain, and conclude with a look to the future.
IEEE 802.15.6 under saturation: Some problems to be expected

Because currently available wireless technologies are not appropriate for wireless body area networks (WBANs), the IEEE 802.15. 6 standard was introduced by the IEEE 802.15. 6 Task Group to satisfy all the requirements for a monitoring system that operates on, in, or around the human body. In this work, we develop an analytical model for evaluating the performance of an IEEE 802.15. 6-based WBAN under saturation condition and a noisy channel. We employ a three-dimensional Markov chain to model the backoff procedure as specified in the standard. Probability generating functions (PGFs) are used to compute the performance descriptors of the network. The results obtained from the analytical model are validated by simulation results. Our results indicate that under saturation condition, the medium is accessed by the highest user priority nodes at the vast majority of time while the other nodes are starving.
Effect of Fatty Acids on Chick Encephalomalacia.∗

Summary Corn oil or lard from which tocopherol had been removed, promoted chick encephalomalacia, whereas coconut oil, butter, linseed oil, and cod liver oil did not produce symptoms, and olive oil had a questionable effect. Dietary combinations of 2% corn oil with either 8% coconut oil, lauric acid, myristic acid, or a mixture of saturated fatty acids like coconut oil significantly increased the incidence of encephalomalacia over 2% corn oil alone, while 6% linseed oil, cod liver oil, or oleic acid inhibited the effect of 4% corn oil. Olive oil, butter, fatty acids like butter, palmitic acid, and stearic acid had no net effects upon the incidence of encephalomalacia induced by corn oil. The intake of linoleic acid appears to be a primary factor in the etiology of encephalomalacia, but some of the other fatty acids may secondarily increase or decrease this effect.
Identification of a Novel Alternatively Spliced Agrin mRNA That Is Preferentially Expressed in Non-neuronal Cells (*)

A novel agrin isoform was identified based on the isolation of an agrin cDNA from E9 chick brain that lacked 21 base pairs (bp) in the NH2-terminal encoding region of the agrin mRNA. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) of E9 chick brain mRNA confirmed the existence of this agrin isoform in brain, although the novel splice variant represents a minor fraction of agrin mRNA in brain. However, upon analysis of chick brain astrocyte mRNA, smooth muscle mRNA, and cardiac muscle mRNA by RT-PCR, we show that this novel agrin isoform is the predominant agrin isoform in these non-neuronal cell populations. We extended our analyses to examine the expression of this agrin mRNA isoform during chick development and show that the agrin mRNA lacking this 21-bp exon is up-regulated with brain development, consistent with the increase in glial number during brain development, while the agrin isoform that does not undergo splicing and thus contains the 21-bp exon is down-regulated in brain development. Because the 21-bp exon is inserted in the region of chick agrin which encodes the putative signal sequence of agrin, with the signal peptidase site immediately preceding the putative first amino acid of the mature protein being deleted as a result of splicing, these data raise the interesting possibility that the presence or absence of this alternatively spliced exon may differentially regulate processing of the agrin protein in neuronal and non-neuronal cells, respectively.