Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor modulates stromal-derived factor-1 through CD26/dipeptidyl peptidase IV to inhibit laser-induced choroidal neovascularization

Purpose Stromal-derived factor (SDF)-1 is a chemokine that recruits bone marrow-derived endothelial precursor cells (EPCs) for choroidal neovascularization (CNV) development. Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors mediate the compensatory effects of ACE and CD26/dipeptidyl peptidase IV (DPP IV), which results in the degradation and inactivation of SDF-1 in vivo. ACE inhibitors, such as imidapril, exhibit potential antiangiogenic effects on laser-induced CNV in mice. The role that this imidapril–mediated effect plays in modulating SDF-1 signals has not been defined. The present study assessed the effect of the CD26/SDF-1 signaling pathway on the inhibitory effect of imidapril in CNV development. Methods CNV was induced in C57BL/6J mice by focally rupturing Bruch’s membrane using a 532-nm diode laser. The animals were pretreated with PBS, imidapril, diprotin-A (a DPP IV antagonist), or imidapril plus diprotin-A for 5 days before photocoagulation. Treatments were continued daily for 14 days following the laser induction. The normal control group did not undergo laser rupture or receive treatment. CD26 activity was measured using a substrate conversion assay and flow cytometry. SDF-1 levels in both the blood and the bone marrow were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and the number of circulating endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) and leukocytes was quantified. Functional analyses of circulating SDF-1 were performed using actin polymerization blood biomarker assays, and the CNV-related responses were evaluated using fluorescein angiography and isolectin-B4-labeled flatmounts. Results Imidapril directly amplified CD26 activity and had a minor effect on the number of CD26+ cells in the bone marrow. However, decreased CD26 activity in the plasma was secondary to a decrease in the number of circulating CD26+ cells and blood leukocytes. Furthermore, imidapril increased SDF-1 concentrations in the peripheral circulation via CD26-induced degradation of SDF-1 in the bone marrow, an effect that coincided with elevated numbers of circulating EPCs. CD26-mediated SDF-1 inactivation was demonstrated by a decrease in SDF-1-induced actin polymerization in the whole blood of imidapril-treated mice. Imidapril markedly decreased angiographic leakage and CNV size. CD26 inhibition completely blocked the CD26/SDF-1 signaling pathway in vivo and reduced the antiangiogenic effect of imidapril. Conclusions These results strongly suggest that the antiangiogenic effects of imidapril on laser-induced CNV partially involve the modulation of the CD26/SDF-1 signaling pathway.
Application of Oligonucleotide Microarrays for Bacterial Source Tracking of Environmental Enterococcus sp. Isolates

In an effort towards adapting new and defensible methods for assessing and managing the risk posed by microbial pollution, we evaluated the utility of oligonucleotide microarrays for bacterial source tracking (BST) of environmental Enterococcus sp. isolates derived from various host sources. Current bacterial source tracking approaches rely on various phenotypic and genotypic methods to identify sources of bacterial contamination resulting from point or non-point pollution. For this study Enterococcus sp. isolates originating from deer, bovine, gull, and human sources were examined using microarrays. Isolates were subjected to Box PCR amplification and the resulting amplification products labeled with Cy5. Fluorescent-labeled templates were hybridized to in-house constructed nonamer oligonucleotide microarrays consisting of 198 probes. Microarray hybridization profiles were obtained using the ArrayPro image analysis software. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) were compared for their ability to visually cluster microarray hybridization profiles based on the environmental source from which the Enterococcus sp. isolates originated. The PCA was visually superior at separating origin-specific clusters, even for as few as 3 factors. A Soft Independent Modeling (SIM) classification confirmed the PCA, resulting in zero misclassifications using 5 factors for each class. The implication of these results for the application of random oligonucleotide microarrays for BST is that, given the reproducibility issues, factor-based variable selection such as in PCA and SIM greatly outperforms dendrogram-based similarity measures such as in HCA and K-Nearest Neighbor KNN.
Organochlorine pesticide contamination of foods in Africa: incidence and public health significance

Organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) have been used worldwide, particularly in Africa, for several decades. Although many are banned, several African countries still use OCPs especially for the prevention and control of malaria. OCPs are characterized by their bio-accumulation in the environment, especially in the food chain, where they find their way into the human body. Despite no clear epidemiological studies confirming hazardous effects of these chemicals on human health, many studies have reported positive associations between the use of OCPs and neurological and reproductive disorders, and cancer risk. There is a clear gap in published reports on OCPs in Africa and their potential health hazards. Thus, the aim of this review is to summarize the incidence of OCP contamination in various foods in Africa, to demonstrate the potential transmission of these chemicals to people and to discuss their possible health hazards.
Fast Template Matching Using Pruning Strategy with Haar-like Features

Template matching is one of the most popular problems in computer vision applications. Many methods are proposed to enhance the accuracy and performance in terms of processing time. With the rapid development of digital cameras/recorders and HD video, images captured by modern devices have much higher resolution than before. Therefore it is necessary to have novel real-time processing template matching algorithms. This motivates our proposal to improve the speed of matching an arbitrary given template, especially in a large size image. Our key idea is based on a pruning strategy to remove certain unmatchable positions in a large size image with only a few simple computational operations. Our proposed method has a flexibility for users to select various dissimilarity measures to increase the accuracy of the system in practical applications. Experiments show that our algorithm is faster than the standard algorithm implemented in OpenCV using Fast Fourier Transform about 8 to 10 times.
An experimental setup for performance evaluation of spectrum sensing via energy detector: indoor environment

Spectrum sensing is an essential task for cognitive radios (CRs) and next generation wireless networks (NGWNs). In this study, an experimental setup which can emulate a spectrum sensing scheme through the use of energy detector is proposed. Both line--of--sight (LOS) and non--line--of--sight (NLOS) scenarios are considered. NLOS scenarios take into account the light and heavy shadowing cases as well. The impact of having perfect spectral knowledge on the performance of spectrum sensing is also studied. Results and relevant discussions are given. Conclusions and future directions are outlined.
A Developmental Model of Syntax Acquisition in the Construction Grammar Framework with Cross-Linguistic Validation in English and Japanese

The current research demonstrates a system inspired by cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology that learns to construct mappings between the grammatical structure of sentences and the structure of their meaning representations. Sentence to meaning mappings are learned and stored as grammatical constructions. These are stored and retrieved from a construction inventory based on the constellation of closed class items uniquely identifying each construction. These learned mappings allow the system to processes natural language sentences in order to reconstruct complex internal representations of the meanings these sentences describe. The system demonstrates error free performance and systematic generalization for a rich subset of English constructions that includes complex hierarchical grammatical structure, and generalizes systematically to new sentences of the learned construction categories. Further testing demonstrates (1) the capability to accommodate a significantly extended set of constructions, and (2) extension to Japanese, a free word order language that is structurally quite different from English, thus demonstrating the extensibility of the structure mapping model.
Acoustics of American English Speech: A Dynamic Approach

For more than 100 years, researchers have studied the relation between the production of speech sounds and the resulting acoustic signal. Early scholars such as Willis, Helmholtz, A.G. Bell, and Lloyd were aware of the existence of concentrations of energy, or formants, in vowel sounds. These formants, however, could be detected only through careful listening or by cumbersome analysis with resonators. Indeed, the very number of formants in a vowel was in question. The introduction of the sound spectrograph, a tool to visualize the frequency and time structure of speech, revolutionized the field of acoustic phonetics. In their landmark publication Visible Speech (henceforth VS), Potter, Kopp, and Green (1947) introduced the spectrograph as an invaluable tool to investigate the acoustic-phonetic structure of speech. VS contained hundreds of spectrograms of American English speech and has served as the standard reference work since its first edition. Now, 46 years later, Olive, Greenwood, and Coleman, researchers at AT&T Bell Laboratories, have published Acoustics of American English Speech (henceforth AAES), which the authors claim is “the most contemporary and comprehensive description of American English today” (p.v). Both VS and AAES represent the speech signal by means of sound spectrograms. However, the focus ofAAES differs from that of VS. One of the original goals of Potter et al. (1947) was to use spectrograms as a means to teach the deaf to speak. That is, deaf students would be trained such that spectrograms of their own speech would eventually be similar to those of their hearing teacher. Perhaps, as a consequence, the emphasis of VS was on showing similarities and consistencies in speech patterns, without introducing too much Variability. Although Potter et al. (1947) acknowledged that adjacent sounds can affect each other, most of their examples were taken from carefully pronounced monoand bisyllabic words. AAES makes an effort to show not only the consistency of natural speech, but its variability as well. This variability is primarily illustrated by investigating the acoustic properties of sounds in a variety of contexts. This broader focus, building on knowledge gained in the intervening years, makes AAES a welcome addition to a comprehensive spectrographic description of American English.
Interaction Model to Predict Subjective-Specificity of Search Results

Exploratory search is becoming more common as the web is used more increasingly as a medium for learning and discovery. Compared to traditional known-item search, exploratory search is more challenging and difficult to support because it initiates with poorly defined search goals, while the user knowledge and information needs constantly change throughout the search process. Modeling the user behavior in exploratory search is a hard problem to solve. In spite of a large amount of research on personalization, little attention has been devoted to personalization in the context of exploratory search taking into account the evolving information needs of the user. We propose a formal model— motivated by Information Foraging Theory—for predicting specificity of search results with respect to the evolving knowledge and information needs of the user in exploratory search.
The kinematics and calibration of a 5 degrees-of-freedom hybrid serial-parallel kinematics manipulator

Hybrid serial-parallel link manipulators combine the advantages and eliminate disadvantages of their ancestors the pure parallel or serial kinematics manipulators. The particular type of hybrid machine shown in this paper consists of two planar three degrees-of-freedom manipulators assembled together in a special configuration. This paper developed the kinematic analysis of this mechanism, namely the inverse and forward kinematics of these manipulators. Furthermore, this paper developed a calibration model for this type of manipulators, and calibration model results were very promising. A graphical tool was developed to assist user in visualizing postures and for solving the different kinematics problems.
Improving interval enclosures

This paper serves as background information for the Vienna proposal for interval standardization, explaining what is needed in practice to make competent use of the interval arithmetic provided by an implementation of the standard-to-be. Discussed are methods to improve the quality of interval enclosures of the range of a function over a box, considerations of possible hardware support facilitating the implementation of such methods, and the results of a simple interval challenge that I had posed to the reliable computing mailing list on November 26, 2008. Also given is an example of a bound constrained global optimization problem in 4 variables that has a 2-dimensional continuum of global minimizers. This makes standard branch and bound codes extremely slow, and therefore may serve as a useful degenerate test problem. (The 2015 version differs from earlier versions by more details in the section on centered forms.)
Evidence for mechanical and chemical alteration of iron‐nickel meteorites on Mars: Process insights for Meridiani Planum

[1] The weathering of meteorites found on Mars involves chemical and physical processes that can provide clues to climate conditions at the location of their discovery. Beginning on sol 1961, the Opportunity rover encountered three large iron meteorites within a few hundred meters of each other. In order of discovery, these rocks have been assigned the unofficial names Block Island, Shelter Island, and Mackinac Island. Each rock presents a unique but complimentary set of features that increase our understanding of weathering processes at Meridiani Planum. Significant morphologic characteristics interpretable as weathering features include (1) a large pit in Block Island, lined with delicate iron protrusions suggestive of inclusion removal by corrosive interaction; (2) differentially eroded kamacite and taenite lamellae in Block Island and Shelter Island, providing relative timing through crosscutting relationships with deposition of (3) an iron oxide–rich dark coating; (4) regmaglypted surfaces testifying to regions of minimal surface modification, with other regions in the same meteorites exhibiting (5) large-scale, cavernous weathering (in Shelter Island and Mackinac Island). We conclude that the current size of the rocks is approximate to their original postfall contours. Their morphology thus likely results from a combination of atmospheric interaction and postfall weathering effects. Among our specific findings is evidence supporting (1) at least one possible episode of aqueous acidic exposure for Block Island; (2) ripple migration over portions of the meteorites; (3) a minimum of two separate episodes of wind abrasion; alternating with (4) at least one episode of coating-forming chemical alteration, most likely at subzero temperatures.
Reliabilität und Validität von Ganganalyse-Skalen

Hintergrund: Ziel: Edinburgh Visual Gait Score Physician Rating Scale Methode: Ergebnisse: Observational Gait Scale Visual Gait Assessment Scale Schlussfolgerungen: Background: Objective: Edinburgh Visual Gait Score Physician Rating Scale Method: Results: Edinburgh Visual Gait Score Physician Rating Scale Observational Gait Scale Visual Gait Assessment Scale Conclusions:
Bayesian game-theoretic energy management for residential users in smart grid

Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) are attracting much attention in Demand-side management (DSM) for the function of shifting loads from peak hours and discharging to the smart grid. In this paper, energy consumption scheduling of residential users with PEVs is proposed with incomplete information. In our proposed scenario, PEVs can be employed as vehicles or storage device which can discharge to the grid. Residential users are divided into different types according to the consumption preference on PEVs as vehicles. The type is private information, thus users don't know other users' types. In order to shift loads from peak hours and minimize the cost of residential users, we formulate a Bayesian game model where users must evaluate other users' types with probability distribution of the types before scheduling their energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed Bayesian game model is beneficial for all users.
Spatial resolution in a multi-focus plenoptic camera

Evaluation of the state of the art plenoptic cameras is necessary for design and application purposes. In this work, spatial resolution is investigated in a multi-focus plenoptic camera using two approaches: empirical and model-based. The Raytrix R29 plenoptic camera is studied which utilizes three types of micro lenses with different focal lengths in a hexagonal array structure to increase the depth of field. The modelbased approach utilizes the previously proposed sampling pattern cube (SPC) model for representation and evaluation of the plenoptic capturing systems. For the experimental resolution measurements, spatial resolution values are extracted from images reconstructed by the provided Raytrix reconstruction method. Both the measurement and the SPC model based approaches demonstrate a gradual variation of the resolution values in a wide depth range for the multi focus R29 camera. Moreover, the good agreement between the results from the model-based approach and those from the empirical approach confirms suitability of the SPC model in evaluating high-level camera parameters such as the spatial resolution in a complex capturing system as R29 multi-focus plenoptic camera.
A Case of Spontaneous Osteonecrosis of the Knee with Early and Simultaneous Involvement of the Medial Femoral Condyle and Medial Tibial Plateau

Spontaneous osteonecrosis of the knee (SPONK) usually involves a single condyle, most often the medial femoral condyle (MFC). Involvement of the medial tibial plateau (MTP) is less common, occurring in about 2% of knees with SPONK. Early onset SPONK on the ipsilateral side of the medial compartment is very rare, with, to our knowledge, only four cases reported to date. We describe a very rare case of SPONK with early simultaneous development in the MFC and MTP. Serial plain radiographs and magnetic resonance imaging showed that SPONK in both condyles followed a similar progressive course. The pathological findings in these lesions were similar to those observed in subchondral insufficiency fractures.
Investigation of fracture mechanical properties of materials using digital image correlation

Extracted data from a tensile test applied on a compact tension specimen are not sufficient to have an accurate statement about fracture mechanical properties of materials. Verification of these data using finite element analysis cannot be directly validated on the crack tip due to its singularity and material nonhomogeneity. This paper presents implementation of digital image correlation (DIC) algorithms to fill this deficiency. A brittle material is chosen as the case study. Required measurement setup is explained. Experimental results are reported and verified by finite element analysis. The used DIC algorithm is explained and its reliability is discussed.
Open Pore Block of Connexin26 and Connexin32 Hemichannels by Neutral, Acidic and Basic Glycoconjugates

The mechanisms of molecular discrimination by connexin channels are of acute biological and medical importance. The availability of affinity or open-pore blocking reagents for reliable and specific study of the connexin permeability pathway, would make possible the rigorous cellular and physiological studies required to inform, in molecular terms, the underlying role of intercellular communication pathways in development and disease. Previous work utilized a series of glucosaccharides labeled with an uncharged fluorescent aminopyridine (PA-) group to establish steric constraints to permeability through connexin hemichannels. In that work, the smallest probe permeable through homomeric Cx26 and heteromeric Cx26–Cx32 channels was the PA-disaccharide, and the smallest probe permeable through homomeric Cx32 channels was the PA-trisaccharide. The larger impermeable probes did not block permeation of the smaller probes. Building on this work, a new set of glucosaccharide probes was developed in which the label was one of a homologous series of novel anthranilic acid derivatives (ABG) that carry negative or positive formal charge or remain neutral at physiological pH. When the PA-label of the smallest impermeant PA-derivatized oligosaccharides was replaced by ABG label, the resulting probes acted as reversible, high-affinity inhibitors of large molecule permeation through connexin pores in a size and connexin-specific manner.
On the Design of High-Performance CMOS 1-Bit Full Adder Circuits

this paper, two high performance full adder circuits are proposed. We simulated these two full adder circuits using Cadence VIRTUOSO environment in 0.18 μm UMC CMOS technology and compared the Power dissipation, time delay, and power delay product (PDP) of the proposed circuits with other 10 transistor full adders. Simulation results show that for the supply voltage of 1.8V, these circuits are suitable for arithmetic circuits and other VLSI applications with very low power consumption and very high speed performance.
Ageing, health, and health care

The population in the developed world has experienced a significant increase in life expectancy over the last 50 years. Simultaneously, while the onset of comorbidities has been deferred to older age groups, health-care expenditure has grown dramatically, primarily owing to the advancement of medical technology and the expansion of individual income levels, along with population ageing in the wake of increased longevity. However, the contribution of population ageing to health expenditure growth is subject to some theoretical and empirical scrutiny. This paper takes the question of ageing and health and health care to the data to evaluate the net impact of ageing. We focus on two main questions, namely the welfare valuation of longevity improvements for various OECD countries, along with the 'red herring' hypothesis which suggests that population ageing has a small and almost negligible impact on health-care expenditure. Our estimates lead us to suggest an average gain in longevity of 4.5 years since 1980, corresponding to about 13.5 per cent of lifetime income of a 20-year-old in 2000. Furthermore, we confirm a weak red-herring claim, that is, that population ageing accounts for only a 0.5 per cent annual growth rate of health-care expenditure. Finally, we find that the rise in longevity leads to a further demand for life-prolonging medical care. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.