Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design and performance analysis of infrared micro-polarizer array

This paper presents a design method of micro-polarizer array (MPA) placed in front of a focal plane imaging sensor to capture polarized images in the infrared spectrum. There are a number of possible configurations of micro-polarizers in an MPA according to the ways to calculate different Stokes vectors. This paper introduces a polarization frequency structure matrix since representations of MPA are crucial in demosaicking of polarized images. Experiments on small target detection using eight different MPA configurations showed that the MPA has a big impact on both objective and subjective quality of demosaicked images.
Improvement in antiproliferative activity of Angelica gigas Nakai by solid dispersion formation via hot-melt extrusion and induction of cell cycle arrest and apoptosis in HeLa cells

Angelica gigas Nakai (AGN) is one of the most popular herbal medicines and widely used as a functional food product. In this study, AGN was firstly processed by a low-temperature turbo mill and a hot melting extruder to reduce particle size and form solid dispersion (SD). Anticancer activity against HeLa cells was then examined. AGN-SD based on Soluplus was formed via hot-melt extrusion (HME) and showed the strongest cytotoxic effect on HeLa cells. In addition, the possible mechanism of cell death induced by AGN-SD on HeLa cells was also investigated. AGN-SD decreased cell viability, induced apoptosis, increased the production of reactive oxygen species, regulated the expression of Bcl-2 and Bax, and induced G2/M phase arrest in HeLa cells. This study suggested that AGN-SD based on Soluplus and the method to improve antiproliferative effect by SD formation via HME may be suitable for application in the pharmaceutical industry. Graphical abstract AGN-SD based on Soluplus was prepared via hot-melt extrusion and AGN-SD decreased the viability of HeLa cells and regulated the expression of Bcl-2 and Bax.
Evaluating the stator winding inter-tern short circuit fault of permanent magnet motor using FEA combined with experiment

Three-phase permanent magnet (PM) brushless machines are used in many applications where the reliability and fault tolerance are important requirements. A 3-phase, 10-pole, 12-slot PM machine is simulated using Maxwell 14 transient model. The magnetic field distribution under inter-turn short-circuit condition is given out. At the same time, the stator current waveform and the frequency spectrum is given out. The simulation showed that the amplitude of stator current under inter-turn short-circuit fault increased with the number of shorted turns. There are apparent frequency component under inter-turn short-circuit fault condition. The experiment result shows that the simulation result is correct and the simulation method is a useful and easy method to study the fault condition of PM brushless motor.
B-Flow, a Non-Doppler Technology for Flow Mapping: Early Experience in the Abdomen

B-flow imaging is a non-Doppler technology for blood flow imaging that was introduced on high-frequency transducers at the end of the last decade. It has only recently become available on convex array and sector transducers suitable for abdominal examination. B-flow technology is not plagued by some of the troublesome pitfalls often encountered during color and power Doppler flow imaging, and appears promising as an adjunct to Doppler evaluation of blood flow in the abdomen. This article introduces the author's early experience using B-flow in the abdomen, and illustrates the potential advantages this technique offers relative to Doppler flow mapping.
The Microwave Syndrome: A Preliminary Study in Spain

A health survey was carried out in Murcia, Spain, in the vicinity of a Cellular Phone Base Station working in DCS‐1800 MHz. This survey contained health items related to “microwave sickness” or “RF syndrome. ” The microwave power density was measured at the respondents' homes. Statistical analysis showed significant correlation between the declared severity of the symptoms and the measured power density. The separation of respondents into two different exposure groups also showed an increase of the declared severity in the group with the higher exposure.
A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Brief Intervention to Reduce Alcohol Use Among Female Sex Workers in Mombasa, Kenya

Objective:We assessed whether a brief alcohol intervention would lead to reduced alcohol use and sexually transmitted infection (STI)/HIV incidence and related sexual risk behaviors among moderate drinking female sex workers. Methods:A randomized controlled intervention trial was conducted with 818 female sex workers affiliated with the AIDS, Population, Health, and Integrated Assistance II project in Mombasa, Kenya. Eligible women were hazardous or harmful drinkers who scored between 7 and 19 (full range, 1–40) on the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. Intervention participants received 6 counseling sessions approximately monthly. The equal-attention control group received 6 nutrition sessions. Participants were followed for 6 and 12 months after the intervention, with at least 86% retention at both time points. We used general linear models in intention-to-treat analyses, adjusting for recruitment setting and HIV status at enrollment. Results:There was a statistically significant reduction in alcohol use and binge drinking at 6 and 12 months, with intervention participants reporting less than one third of the odds of higher levels of drinking than the control group. The intervention did not impact laboratory-confirmed STI/HIV incidence, self-reported condom use, or sexual violence from nonpaying partners. However, the odds of reporting sexual violence from clients was significantly lower among intervention than control participants at both 6 and 12 months. Conclusions:We found that a brief alcohol intervention can reduce self-reported alcohol consumption among a nondependent and non–treatment-seeking population most at risk for HIV. More attention is needed to understand the pathway from drinking to sexual behavior and STI/HIV acquisition.
Ordering Policies for Periodic-Review Inventory Systems with Quantity-Dependent Fixed Costs

We consider a stochastic periodic-review inventory control system in which the fixed cost depends on the order quantity. In particular, we investigate the optimal ordering policies under three fixed cost structures. The first structure is motivated by transportation and production contracts and considers two fixed costs: if the order size is within a specified limit C, then the fixed cost is K1; otherwise, it is K2, where K1 ≼ K2. The second structure contains multiple fixed costs in which the same incremental fixed cost K is incurred for any additional order quantity up to a given identical batch capacity C. In the third structure, in addition to the K incurred as in the previous case, a common fixed cost is charged for any nonzero order size. An example of the former case arises when an order is shipped with a homogeneous fleet of trucks with per-truck fixed costs. A situation in which a fixed administrative cost plus a quantity-dependent trucking cost is incurred for each shipment exemplifies the latter case. For the first cost structure, we separate the analysis according to the conditions (1) K1 ≼ K2 ≼ 2K1 and (2) K1 ≼ K2. Under condition (1), we introduce a new concept called C-(K1, K2)-convexity, which enables us to almost completely characterize the optimal ordering policy. Under the general condition (2), we utilize a modified notion to provide a partial characterization of the optimal policy and propose a heuristic policy that performs well under a wide variety of model parameters. For the second cost structure, we show that it is optimal to order an integer multiple of the batch capacity to raise the inventory level to a specified range or band of length C, and then to order an additional full or partial batch size depending on the cost function, with no ordering required above the band. We also characterize a similar optimal policy for the third cost structure. Using different techniques, our study extends or redevelops several existing results in the literature.
Quality of life among Iranian patients with beta-thalassemia major using the SF-36 questionnaire

ABSTRACT CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE: Patients with beta-thalassemia major (β-TM) experience physical, psychological and social problems that lead to decreased quality of life (QoL). The aim here was to measure health-related QoL and its determinants among patients with β-TM, using the Short Form-36 (SF-36) questionnaire. DESIGN AND SETTING: Cross-sectional study at the Hematology Research Center of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, in southern Iran. METHODS: One hundred and one patients with β-TM were randomly selected. After the participants’ demographics and disease characteristics had been recorded, they were asked to fill out the SF-36 questionnaire. The correlations of clinical and demographic factors with the QoL score were evaluated. RESULTS: There were 44 men and 57 women of mean age 19.52 ± 4.3 years (range 12-38). On two scales, pain (P = 0.041) and emotional role (P = 0.009), the women showed significantly lower scores than the men. Lower income, poor compliance with iron-chelating therapy and presence of comorbidities were significantly correlated with lower SF-36 scores. These factors were also found to be determinants of worse SF-36 scores in multivariate analysis. CONCLUSIONS: We showed that the presence of disease complications, poor compliance with iron-chelating therapy and poor economic status were predictors of worse QoL among patients with β-TM. Prevention and proper management of disease-related complications, increased knowledge among patients regarding the importance of managing comorbidities and greater compliance with iron-chelating therapy, along with psychosocial and financial support, could help these patients to cope better with this chronic disease state.
Assay of Serum Inorganic Phosphate without Deproteinisation: Automated and Manual Micromethods

Several current techniques for the determination of serum inorganic phosphate in the presence of proteins are shown to have important disadvantages. An improved manual micromethod is described in which proteins are kept in solution by the use of sodium lauryl sulphate and the phosphate determined by the molybdenum blue reaction. The procedure has been adapted for the Technicon AutoAnalyzer and the Vickers D-300 and M-300, and has been shown to give very good precision in routine use.
Two‐dimensional MHD simulation of the solar wind interaction with magnetic field anomalies on the surface of the Moon

Two‐dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the solar wind interaction with the magnetized regions on the surface of the Moon suggest “mini‐magnetospheres” can form around the regions on the Moon when the magnetic anomaly field strength is above 10 nT at 100 km above the surface (for a surface field strength of 290 nT) and when the solar wind ion density is below 40 cm−3, with typical observations placing anomalous magnetic field strengths around 2 nT at 100 km above the surface. The results suggest that not only can a bow shock and magnetopause form around the small anomalies, but their position and shape can change dramatically with changes in the solar wind conditions. A switch from southward to northward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) causes the size of the mini‐magnetosphere to increase by 90% and the magnetic field at various positions inside the bow shock to increase by a factor of 10. In addition to affecting the stand‐off distance, changes in the IMF can also cause the mini‐magnetosphere to go from very round to flat and elongated. The scale size of the mini‐magnetospheres is 100 km for the range of typical solar wind conditions and the surface magnetic field strengths measured by Lunar Prospector. A stagnation point inside the shock region also exists for several solar wind conditions.
A cross-corpus study of subjectivity identification using unsupervised learning†

Abstract In this study, we investigate using unsupervised generative learning methods for subjectivity detection across different domains. We create an initial training set using simple lexicon information and then evaluate two iterative learning methods with a base naive Bayes classifier to learn from unannotated data. The first method is self-training, which adds instances with high confidence into the training set in each iteration. The second is a calibrated EM (expectation-maximization) method where we calibrate the posterior probabilities from EM such that the class distribution is similar to that in the real data. We evaluate both approaches on three different domains: movie data, news resource, and meeting dialogues, and we found that in some cases the unsupervised learning methods can achieve performance close to the fully supervised setup. We perform a thorough analysis to examine factors, such as self-labeling accuracy of the initial training set in unsupervised learning, the accuracy of the added examples in self-training, and the size of the initial training set in different methods. Our experiments and analysis show inherent differences across domains and impacting factors explaining the model behaviors.
Hyperkinetic adult. Study of the "paradoxical" amphetamine response.

A form of the hyperkinetic syndrome, assumed to be a juvenile condition, has been found in an adult with a previously undiagnosed condition. The pathognomonic paradoxical calming of the hyperkinetic by amphetamine was shown in a 22-year-old man and further elucidated by quantitative self-estimation of mood following doubleblind administrations of dextroamphetamine sulfate and placebo. Compared to his response to placebo, he not only showed externally visible calming and depression, but also subjectively reported decreased anxiety, increased depression, and increased concentration, with no change in self-esteem.
Vitamin D concentrations in Asian children aged 2years living in England: population survey

Editorial by Wharton Clinical review p 39 The Social Survey Division of the Office for National Statistics on behalf of the Department of Health carried out a survey between 1994and 1996of infant feeding practices of mothers of Bangladeshi, Indian, or Pakistani origin living in England.1 A blood sample was taken during October-November 1996from a subsample of children aged 2years for analysis of iron and 25-hydroxycholecalciferol (vitamin D) concentrations. Details for iron concentration are published elsewhere. 1 2 We here report the vitamin D concentration. Vitamin D concentration was measured in 618of the children. No evidence was found of bias influencing the selection of this subgroup, which seems to be representative of Asian children in England. The table shows serum 25-hydroxycholecalciferol concentrations for the three groups in comparison with data from the national diet and …
Prenatal stress: opposite effects on anxiety and hypothalamic expression of vasopressin and corticotropin‐releasing hormone in rats selectively bred for high and low anxiety

We studied the mechanisms of genetic–early environmental interactions to modulate adult stress‐coping and tested the hypothesis that prenatal stress (PS) can differentially alter the consequences of a genetic predisposition to either hyper‐ or hypo‐anxiety. Exposure of male Wistar rats, bred for high (HAB) or low (LAB) anxiety‐related behaviour, to PS between pregnancy days 4 and 18 resulted in opposite effects on anxiety in adulthood, i.e. HAB rats became less and LAB rats became more anxious compared with their unstressed controls (plus‐maze and holeboard). The high anxiety of HAB controls was accompanied by elevated expression of vasopressin and corticotropin‐releasing hormone (CRH) mRNA within the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus compared with LAB rats. PS reduced CRH mRNA expression in HAB rats but increased vasopressin mRNA expression in LAB rats, which may explain the opposite effects of PS on adult emotionality. Differential effects of PS were also found with respect to hypothalamo‐pituitary‐adrenal axis reactivity; the hypothalamo‐pituitary‐adrenal hyper‐response in virgin female HAB controls became attenuated after PS, without affecting plasma corticosterone concentrations in LAB rats. Differences in maternal plasma corticosterone measured between pregnancy days 6 and 14 of HAB and LAB dams or differential effects of PS on maternal behaviour can be excluded. In conclusion, exposure of rats with genetically determined high or low emotionality to PS mitigates the extremes in behavioural and neuroendocrine stress‐coping, thus allowing adequate and similar behavioural responses to potentially dangerous stimuli in adulthood. Differential effects of PS on the activity of the brain vasopressin and CRH systems might represent possible underlying molecular mechanisms.
Relationship of epidermal growth factor receptor expression to ErbB-2 signaling activity and prognosis in breast cancer patients.

PURPOSE To examine the relationship of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expression to ErbB-2 signaling activity in breast cancer and the impact that this interaction has on the prognosis of patients with early-stage breast cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS Paraffin tumor sections were collected retrospectively from 807 breast cancer patients diagnosed between 1976 and 1983. Immunohistochemical assays for ErbB-2, phosphorylated (activated) ErbB-2, and EGFR were performed, and the results were correlated with clinicopathologic variables and outcome. RESULTS EGFR expression was detectable in 15% of 807 invasive breast cancers, including 35% of the 306 ErbB-2-positive patients. Conversely, the majority (87%) of EGFR-positive tumors co-overexpressed ErbB-2. Ninety-seven percent of tumors with phosphorylated ErbB-2 co-overexpressed EGFR. Patients whose cancers demonstrated ErbB-2 phosphorylation or co-overexpression of ErbB-2 and EGFR had the shortest survival. In contrast, patients whose tumors were negative for all three markers and those tumors that expressed only EGFR or only nonphosphorylated ErbB-2 had a relatively favorable outcome. CONCLUSION These data provide the first clinical evidence that EGFR expression is linked to activation of ErbB-2 in human breast cancers. We have further shown that the adverse prognostic value of ErbB-2 overexpression is observed only when ErbB-2 is in the phosphorylated (activated) state or coexpressed with EGFR. These data suggest that ligand-dependent mechanisms of ErbB-2 activation are important in human breast cancer. These results also suggest that agents targeting EGFR may be useful in the treatment of tumors with activated ErbB-2.
Positive solutions of nth-order impulsive differential equations with integral boundary conditions

Abstract This paper is concerned with the existence and nonexistence of positive solutions of nth-order impulsive boundary value problem with integral boundary conditions. The fixed point theorem of cone expansion and compression is used to investigate the existence of at least one positive solution. Also, an example is given to illustrate the effective of our results.
Severity of negative symptoms significantly affects cognitive functioning in patients with chronic schizophrenia: The slowing in cognitive processing

Studies in patients with schizophrenia have shown a decreased overall cognitive performance, and it was found that processing speed and working memory functions are affected. The aim of this study was to describe the general cognitive performance of patients with chronic schizophrenia and analyze its relationship with the severity of psychotic symptoms. Methods: Forty-eight patients diagnosed with DSM IV-TR schizophrenia disorder were examined for symptom improvement, measured by scales SAPS and SANS. Participants also completed the full scale WAIS-III. Results: The results show a generalized cognitive deficit, reflected in the low level of general intelligence, as well as the different index that comprise the scale. The most compromised index was the processing speed. The correlations showed that the overall severity of negative symptoms significantly affects cognitive functioning of chronic patients. The formal thought disorder and alogia significantly correlated with almost all the WAIS-III measures. Conclusions: Multiple studies of specific cognitive domains in schizophrenia have shown that deficits in processing speed are the core element of cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. We support the hypothesis about the slowing in cognitive processing affect both the performance of the basic and more complex cognitive task
Radiography of the Temporomandibular Joint in Female Patients with TMJ Pain or Dysfunction

One hundred and twenty-four patients with temporomandibular joint (TMJ) pain/dysfunction were examined radiographically and 54 of these patients were reexamined at a follow-up approximately after 7 years. The radiographic examination included submentovertical, oblique lateral transcranial and transmaxillary projections. Abnormalities of structure and shape of the bony components were found in 50% of the joints; cortical/subcortical erosion was recorded in 15%, sclerosis in 33% and deviation in shape in 48%. Abnormal condylar position was observed in 46% of the joints. The 20 patients examined only at the follow-up demonstrated a frequency of these findings similar to those observed in patients selected for examination during the treatment period. At the 7-year follow-up, a slight increase in number of all types of abnormalities was found as well as a slight progression of abnormalities present at the first examination.
A FILTRABLE VIRUS AS THE CAUSE OF THE EARLY STAGE OF THE PRESENT EPIDEMIC OF INFLUENZA

A PRELIMINARY note by MIUM. Chlarles Nicolle and Clharles Lebailly on investigations suagestitig the etiological part played by a filtrable virus in influenza cases was communicated recently to the Acadelmie des Sc.iences. i A simiiilar claim for tlle importance of a filtrable organisn in thle production of coimmon colds lhad previously been put forward by Major Dates of George B. Foster, Junr. , Medical Corps, Q_bsertation 7 8
The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents

In this paper, the author examines the characteristics of information agency, the work of librarians and of intelligent agents as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculates on the future of human and software agency. A typical medical library-based information need is presented and the attendant information processes are examined. The author describes the future of information mediation as based on efficient interaction between human and software agents and provides examples of possible collaborative information tasks.
A Novel Layer Stack-Up With Free Cavity Resonance for High-Performance Power Noise Suppression

In this paper, a novel layer stack-up with free cavity resonance is proposed for high-performance power noise suppression. In this layer stack-up, power planes for power delivery are sandwiched by ground planes and are moved close to the component sides, so that they are separated from signal layers. Signal layers are isolated by ground planes, which provide ideal ground reference. Arrays of ground shorting vias are introduced to ac short ground reference plane pairs to remove their cavity resonances. This structure has free cavity resonance under the corner frequency of the periodic via array, and it has an excellent wideband noise suppression with starting point from dc. This stack-up not only has high-performance noise suppression, but also can significantly improve the signal integrity and reduce the electromagnetic interference of the board. Simulation and measurement are performed to verify the validity of the proposed layer stack-up.