Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronic treatment with the neuroactive steroid ganaxolone in the rat induces anticonvulsant tolerance to diazepam but not to itself.

Ganaxolone (3alpha-hydroxy-3beta-methyl-5alpha-pregnane-20-one), an orally active synthetic analog of the neuroactive steroid allopregnanolone, is a positive allosteric modulator of gamma-aminobutyric acid(A) receptors with anticonvulsant properties. We sought to determine whether tolerance occurs to the anticonvulsant activity of ganaxolone in the pentylenetetrazol seizure test and whether there is cross-tolerance with diazepam. Rats were treated with two daily injections of a 2 x ED(50) dose of ganaxolone (7 mg/kg s.c.), diazepam (4 mg/kg i.p.), or vehicle for 3 or 7 days. On the day after the chronic treatment periods, the anticonvulsant potencies of ganaxolone and diazepam were determined. The ED(50) values for ganaxolone after 3- and 7-day treatment with ganaxolone were not significantly different from that in naive rats (ED(50) = 3.5 mg/kg). In contrast, in animals that were treated chronically with ganaxolone for 7 days, there was a significant reduction in the anticonvulsant potency of diazepam (ED(50) = 4.0 versus 1.9 mg/kg for naive controls). Chronic treatment with diazepam was not associated with a reduction in the potency of ganaxolone, but there was a reduction in the potency of diazepam (ED(50) = 3.7 mg/kg). Plasma ganaxolone determinations indicated that the pharmacokinetic properties of ganaxolone were unchanged after 7-day chronic ganaxolone treatment. The estimated equilibrium plasma concentrations of ganaxolone associated with threshold (750-950 ng/ml) and 50% seizure protection (1215-1295 ng/ml) were similar in naive and chronically treated rats. We conclude that there is no tolerance to the anticonvulsant activity of ganaxolone nor is there cross-tolerance to ganaxolone when tolerance develops to diazepam. However, there is cross-tolerance to diazepam with chronic ganaxolone treatment.
Strength Prediction Models for PVA Fiber-Reinforced High-Strength Concrete

AbstractDuring the last decade, synthetic fibers have been used widely in the structure application; however, the strength models of synthetic fiber-reinforced concrete are not available, as most of the models have been proposed for steel fiber–reinforced concrete only. Extensive experimental investigation has been conducted on poly-vinyl alcohol (PVA) fiber-reinforced high-strength concrete to develop the strength model based on multiple linear regressions analysis through least square error. Regression models have been obtained for the different responses of concrete as a function of process variables, i.e., compressive strength of concrete, fiber matrix interface, and fraction of metakaolin (MK) as cement-replacing material. A total of 50 mixes of concrete have been examined using metakaolin of 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20% by weight of cement and PVA fibers of aspect ratio 45, 60, 90, and 120 with volume fraction of 0, 1, 2, and 3%. Five mixes without PVA fiber have been used as control mixes. For each mix, t.
Amphibian Breeding Distribution in an Urbanized Landscape

Abstract: Amphibians commonly use wetlands for breeding habitat, and given the concern about their ongoing global declines, the effects of urbanization on the breeding distribution of amphibians need to be quantified. Thus, we conducted a survey of the larval amphibian community in central Pennsylvania (U.S.A.) wetlands along an urbanization gradient. Wetlands in urban areas had less surrounding forest and wetlands and greater road density than rural wetlands. Urbanization was also associated with increases in hydroperiod (i.e., wetland permanency) and the presence of fish predators. Moreover, urban wetlands had lower larval amphibian species richness than rural wetlands. This decrease in richness was attributable to a decrease in occurrence of wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) and ambystomatid salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum and A. jeffersonianum) in urban sites. Wood frogs and ambystomatid salamanders were positively associated with the amount of forest surrounding sites and negatively associated with hydroperiod. As a result, we hypothesize that these species are sensitive to the effects of urban development. The remaining species in this study appear fairly resilient to the effects of urbanization. These data demonstrate the importance of quantifying both local and landscape attributes when describing the factors that limit the breeding distribution of amphibians. We recommend that to preserve amphibian biodiversity in urbanized landscapes, it is best to focus on regional diversity, which protects a variety of sites that encompass various hydroperiods, have adequate buffer habitat, and are connected by dispersal routes.
The Case for Non-Preemptive Scheduling in Distributed Real-Time Systems

Contrary to traditional belief, we show in this paper, that for distributed systems non-preemptive scheduling can perform better than preemptive scheduling in the worst case in terms of task schedulability, under certain circumstances. We derive a worst-case delay bound for tasks scheduled using non-preemptive scheduling in a distributed system, where the task flow paths form a directed acyclic graph. The delay bound leads to a reduction of the distributed system to an equivalent hypothetical uniprocessor system scheduled using preemptive scheduling. This transformation enables the wealth of uniprocessor schedulability theory to be applied to analyze schedulability under non-preemptive scheduling in distributed directed acyclic systems. Our simulation studies show that non-preemptive scheduling can perform better than preemptive scheduling for distributed systems. We also characterize through simulations the scenarios under which non-preemptive is better than preemptive scheduling, and scenarios where the opposite is true. We hope this paper will serve as a first step towards more extensive study and use of non-preemptive scheduling in distributed systems.
Asthma control in asthmatic patients treated for lung cancer.

BACKGROUND The balance of the Th1 and Th2 immune response plays an important role in the regulation of the immune system and in general health. Tumor bearing hosts are supposed to have a balance shifting to the Th2 pathway, while a favorable Th1 anti-tumor pathway is induced in tumor-resected hosts. The clinical impacts of a tumor-related Th2 environment have not been clearly studied. The present study was conducted to test the hypothesis that nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has an impact on control of asthma, a wellknown Th2-predominant inflammatory disease. METHOD Thirty-eight patients with the diagnoses of both asthma and lung cancer were retrospectively enrolled. Patients were divided into two groups according to their response to lung cancer treatment, the responder group (complete regression, partial regression and stable disease) and non-responder group (progression of disease). Asthma control test (ACT) scores were analyzed one year before diagnosis, at the time of diagnosis of lung cancer, and at the time of re-staging after cancer treatment. RESULTS All the asthmatics with lung cancer had worsening of their symptoms according to their ACT scores at the time of diagnosis of lung cancer compared to scores in the preceding year (21.6 ± 0.5 vs. 16.5 ± 0.8, n = 38, p < 0.001). The ACT scores in the responder group (17.3 ± 5.1) were significantly improved after effective lung cancer treatment (22.1 ± 1.8, n = 18, p < 0.01). However, the ACT scores in the non-responder group were even worse after disease progression (15.8 ± 5.0 vs. 11.6 ± 4.2, n = 18, p < 0.001). CONCLUSION Our observations indicate that asthmatic patients with acquisition or progression of NSCLC may have worsening of their asthma control status. Those patients with good responses to cancer treatment had improved asthma control. These observations indicate that the Th2 pathway in lung cancer may be a contributing factor in asthma control, another Th2 predominant disorder. More sophisticated clinical and biological investigations are necessary to confirm the role of Th1/Th2 counterbalance in lung cancer in the clinical impact on related immune disorders.
ACTA UNIVERSITATIS APULENSIS No 16/2008 SCHEMES DOMINATED BY ALGEBRAIC VARIETIES AND SOME CLASSES OF SCHEME MORPHISMS. I

The subject of this lecture is dedicated to the memory of Professor Gheorghe Galbura (1916-2007), the age dean of the Romanian mathematical community, the supervisor of my PhD thesis. Honorary member of the Committee of the International Conference ICTAMI, he passed away few time before the opening of the fifth edition of this Conference. I thank the organizers of the Conference for the invitation to deliver this lecture.
Computing generators of free modules over orders in group algebras II

Let E be a number field and G be a finite group. Let A be any O_E-order of full rank in the group algebra E[G] and X be a (left) A-lattice. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for X to be free of given rank d over A. In the case that the Wedderburn decomposition of E[G] is explicitly computable and each component is in fact a matrix ring over a field, this leads to an algorithm that either gives an A-basis for X or determines that no such basis exists. Let L/K be a finite Galois extension of number fields with Galois group G such that E is a subfield of K and put d=[K:E]. The algorithm can be applied to certain Galois modules that arise naturally in this situation. For example, one can take X to be O_L, the ring of algebraic integers of L, and A to be the associated order A of O_L in E[G]. The application of the algorithm to this special situation is implemented in Magma under certain extra hypotheses when K=E=Q.
Äännemallien vertailua jatkuvassa suuren sanaston puheentunnistuksessa

Tässä työssä on verrattu erilaisia äännemalleja jatkuvass a suomenkielisessä puheentunnistuksessa. Käytetyt mallit ovat tavallinen fo neemimalli (monofonimalli), kontekstiherkkä foneemimalli (trifonimalli) j a tavumalli. Lähtökohtana on foneemimalli, jossa jokaiselle suomen kielen fonee mille on oma akustinen mallinsa. Käytännössä foneemin ääntämiseen vaikutt vat merkittävästi sitä ympäröivät foneemit, joten tarkempaa mallinnusta var ten tehdään joka foneemille useita kontekstiriippuvia malleja. Tällainen trifonimalli on käytössä useimmissa moderneissa puheentunnistimissa. Suome n kielessä on lisäksi selkeä tavurakenne, joka on kuultavissa foneemien pa inotuksessa. Tässä työssä rakennettiin joka tavulle oma mallinsa ja kokeilt iin, miten tällainen malli toimii. Malleja verrattiin sekä jatkuvasta puheesta poimittujen yksittäisten sanojen että jatkuvan puheen tunnistuksessa. Jatk uvan puheen testit tehtiin sekä kielimallin kanssa että ilman. Puheaineiston a käytettiin ääneen luettua kirjaa. Havaittiin että trifonimalli on vertaillu ista malleista paras.
Construction, Characterization, and Immunogenicity of an Attenuated Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhimurium pgtE Vaccine Expressing Fimbriae with Integrated Viral Epitopes from the spiC Promoter

ABSTRACT Transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) is a porcine coronavirus that causes diarrhea, leading to near 100% mortality in neonatal piglets with corresponding devastating economic consequences. For the protection of neonatal and older animals, oral live vaccines present the attractive property of inducing desired mucosal immune responses, including colostral antibodies in sows—an effective means to passively protect suckling piglets. Newly attenuated Salmonella vaccine constructs expressing TGEV S protein epitopes were studied and evaluated for improved humoral immune response to TGEV. The macrophage-inducible Salmonella ssaH and spiC/ssaB promoters were compared for their ability to express the TGEV C and A epitopes in the context of the heterologous 987P fimbriae on Salmonella vaccines. Compared to the ssaH promoter, the Salmonella cya crp vector elicited significantly higher levels of mucosal and systemic antibodies in orally immunized mice when the chimeric fimbriae were expressed from the spiC promoter. The Salmonella spiC promoter construct induced the highest level of chimeric fimbriae after being taken up by the J774A.1 macrophagelike cells. The Salmonella cya crp vaccine vector was shown to incorporate into 987P partially degraded chimeric subunits lacking the TGEV epitopes. In contrast, its isogenic pgtE mutant produced fimbriae consisting exclusively of intact chimeric subunits. Mice immunized orally with the Salmonella pgtE vaccine expressing chimeric fimbriae from the spiC promoter elicited significantly higher systemic and mucosal antibody titers against the TGEV epitopes compared to the parental vaccine. This study indicates that the Salmonella cya crp pgtE vector and the spiC promoter can be used successfully to improve immune responses toward heterologous antigens.
Multiple queries for large scale specific object retrieval

The aim of large scale specific-object image retrieval systems is to instanta neously find images that contain the query object in the image database. Current s ystems, for example Google Goggles, concentrate on querying using a single view of an object, e.g. a photo a user takes with his mobile phone, in order to answer the question “what is this? ”. Here we consider the somewhat converse problem of finding all images of an object given that the user knows what he is looking for; so the input modality is text, not a n image. This problem is useful in a number of settings, for example media production teams are interested in searching internal databases for images or video footage to accompany news reports and newspaper articles. Given a textual query (e.g. “coca cola bottle”), our approach is to firs t obtain multiple images of the queried object using textual Google image search. These images are then used to visually query the target database to discover images containing the object of interest. We compare a number of different methods for combining the multiple query images, including discriminative learning. We show that issuing multiple queries significantly improves recall and enables the system to find quite challenging occu rrences of the queried object. The system is evaluated quantitatively on the standard Oxford Buildings benchmark dataset where it achieves very high retrieval performance, and also qualitatively on the TrecVid 2011 known-item search dataset.
From Unlabelled Tweets to Twitter-specific Opinion Words

In this article, we propose a word-level classification model for automatically generating a Twitter-specific opinion lexicon from a corpus of unlabelled tweets. The tweets from the corpus are represented by two vectors: a bag-of-words vector and a semantic vector based on word-clusters. We propose a distributional representation for words by treating them as the centroids of the tweet vectors in which they appear. The lexicon generation is conducted by training a word-level classifier using these centroids to form the instance space and a seed lexicon to label the training instances. Experimental results show that the two types of tweet vectors complement each other in a statistically significant manner and that our generated lexicon produces significant improvements for tweet-level polarity classification.
Map-based Indoor People Localization using an Inertial Measurement Unit

In this paper, we propose a new approach to map-based indoor localization for walking people using an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Generally, an office building includes various components such as corridors, rooms, floors, staircases, elevators. We consider the components for personal positioning. We present two mapping methods that are a map representation method and a position compensation method. The map representation method is applied to classification and representation of components in an indoor building map. The position compensation method is derived based on the distance and direction estimation using a dynamic scale factor. To evaluate our proposed methods, we have developed an indoor localization device using a small IMU and experimented on an office building. We show that our proposed approach achieves higher accuracy than traditional dead reckoning navigation.
The creep of wood destabilized by change in moisture content. Part 3: The influence of changing moisture history on creep behavior

Abstract The creep of wood increases remarkably during moisture changes, a phenomenon called mechano-sorptive creep. The microstructure in cell walls of wood is destabilized by changes in temperature and/or moisture content. The mechanical properties of destabilized wood change over long periods of time. In the present study, the influence of moisture conditioning history on bending creep was examined. During changes in moisture, greater creep occurred in wood subjected to the first moisture change after long-term moisture conditioning than immediately after desorption or adsorption. This result indicates a kind of memory effect immediately after moisture change. During desorption processes, greater creep occurred immediately after slow adsorption than immediately after rapid adsorption. In the course of adsorption, the reverse was observed: the creep was greater immediately after rapid desorption than immediately after slow desorption. Accordingly, greater instability immediately after a change in moisture does not always cause greater creep during the next moisture change. The size of the moisture change and the load level affect the recovery of creep during adsorption processes.
Differential behavior of photoactivated microtubules in growing axons of mouse and frog neurons

To characterize the behavior of axonal microtubules in vivo, we analyzed the movement of tubulin labeled with caged fluorescein after activation to be fluorescent by irradiation of 365-nm light. When mouse sensory neurons were microinjected with caged fluorescein-labeled tubulin and then a narrow region of the axon was illuminated with a 365- nm microbeam, photoactivated tubulin was stationary regardless of the position of photoactivation. We next introduced caged fluorescein- labeled tubulin into Xenopus embryos and nerve cells isolated from injected embryos were analyzed by photoactivation. In this case, movement of the photoactivated zone toward the axon tip was frequently observed. The photoactivated microtubule segments in the Xenopus axon moved out from their initial position without significant spreading, suggesting that fluorescent microtubules are not sliding as individual filaments, but rather translocating en bloc. Since these observations raised the possibility that the mechanism of nerve growth might differ between two types of neurons, we further characterized the movement of another component of the axon structure, the plasma membrane. Analysis of the position of polystyrene beads adhering to the neurites of Xenopus neurons revealed anterograde movement of the beads at the rate similar to the rate of microtubule movement. In contrast, no movement of the beads relative to the cell body was observed in mouse sensory neurons. These results suggest that the mode of translocation of cytoskeletal polymers and some components of the axon surface differ between two neuron types and that most microtubules are stationary within the axon of mammalian neurons where the surface-related motility of the axon is not observed.
The alteration of gray matter volume and cognitive control in adolescents with internet gaming disorder

Objective: Internet gaming disorder (IGD) has been investigated by many behavioral and neuroimaging studies, for it has became one of the main behavior disorders among adolescents. However, few studies focused on the relationship between alteration of gray matter volume (GMV) and cognitive control feature in IGD adolescents. Methods: Twenty-eight participants with IAD and twenty-eight healthy age and gender matched controls participated in the study. Brain morphology of adolescents with IGD and healthy controls was investigated using an optimized voxel-based morphometry (VBM) technique. Cognitive control performances were measured by Stroop task, and correlation analysis was performed between brain structural change and behavioral performance in IGD group. Results: The results showed that GMV of the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), precuneus, supplementary motor area (SMA), superior parietal cortex, left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), left insula, and bilateral cerebellum decreased in the IGD participants compared with healthy controls. Moreover, GMV of the ACC was negatively correlated with the incongruent response errors of Stroop task in IGD group. Conclusion: Our results suggest that the alteration of GMV is associated with the performance change of cognitive control in adolescents with IGD, which indicating substantial brain image effects induced by IGD.
Design and analysis of single carrier base station cooperation system under frequency selective channel

This paper investigates the effectiveness of base station cooperation (BSC) in single carrier (SC) multiantenna cellular system under frequency selective channel (FSC). The feature of this paper is to consider wideband multiuser system without frequency domain processing like the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), but instead adopting time domain operation using tapped delay line. After some weight design approaches for multiuser (multiple point to multiple point) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system with and without BSC are described, actual effect of BSC under FSC is evaluated through computer simulations taking into account the path loss, shadowing, and fading. The results show the significant performance improvement by BSC and its problems which further need investigations.
Approches empiriques et modélisation statistique de la parole. (Empirical methods and statistical modeling of speech)

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Approches empiriques et modélisation statistique de la parole Adda Gilles
Eigenmode Transmission for the MIMO Broadcast Channel with Semi-Orthogonal User Selection

This paper investigates a low complexity zero-forcing dirty paper coding based transmission approach for the MIMO broadcast channel, employing eigenmode transmission with greedy semi-orthogonal user selection (SUS). We prove that as the number of users K grows large, our scheme achieves the optimal sum rate scaling of the MIMO broadcast channel (i.e. linear scaling with the number of transmit antennas, and double-logarithmic scaling with K). In addition, we show that whilst the number of receive antennas only affects the asymptotic sum rate scaling via the second-order behavior of the multiuser diversity gain; for finite K, the benefit due to multiple receive antennas can be very significant. Finally, we show the interesting result that the semi-orthogonality constraint imposed by the SUS algorithm, whilst facilitating a very low complexity user selection procedure, does not reduce the multiuser diversity gain in either first or second-order.