Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy of antigiardial drugs

The flagellated protozoa Giardia duodenalis is the most commonly detected parasite in the intestinal tract of humans. Infections with the parasite result in diarrhoeal disease in humans and animals, with infants at risk from failureto-thrive syndrome. The incidence of giardiasis worldwide may be as high as 1000 million cases. Current recommended treatments include the nitroheterocyclic drugs tinidazole, metronidazole and furazolidone, the substituted acridine, quinacrine, and the benzimidazole, albendazole. Paromomycin is also used in some situations, and nitazoxanide is proving to be useful. However, treatment failures have been reported with all of the common antigiardial agents, and drug resistance to all available drugs has been demonstrated in the laboratory. In addition, clinical resistance has been reported, including cases where patients failed both metronidazole and albendazole treatments. The identification of new antigiardial drugs is an important consideration for the future, but maintaining the usefulness of the existing drugs is the most cost-effective measure to ensure the continued availability of antigiardial drugs.
Germ Line Transcripts Are Processed by a Dicer-Like Protein That Is Essential for Developmentally Programmed Genome Rearrangements of Tetrahymena thermophila

ABSTRACT Abundant ∼28-nucleotide RNAs that are thought to direct histone H3 lysine 9 (H3K9) methylation and promote the elimination of nearly 15 Mbp of DNA from the developing somatic genome are generated during Tetrahymena thermophila conjugation. To identify the protein(s) that generates these small RNAs, we studied three Dicer-related genes encoded within the Tetrahymena genome, two that contain both RNase III and RNA helicase motifs, Dicer 1 (DCR1) and DCR2, and a third that lacks the helicase domain, Dicer-like 1 (DCL1). DCL1 is expressed upon the initiation of conjugation, and the protein localizes to meiotic micronuclei when bidirectional germ line transcription occurs and small RNAs begin to accumulate. Cells in which we disrupted the DCL1 gene (ΔDCL1) grew normally and initiated conjugation as wild-type cells but arrested near the end of development and eventually died, unable to resume vegetative growth. These ΔDCL1 cells failed to generate the abundant small RNAs but instead accumulated germ line-limited transcripts. Together, our findings demonstrate that these transcripts are the precursors of the small RNAs and that DCL1 performs RNA processing within the micronucleus. Postconjugation ΔDCL1 cells die without eliminating the germ line-limited DNA sequences from their newly formed somatic macronuclei, a result that shows that this Dicer-related gene is required for programmed DNA rearrangements. Surprisingly, ΔDCL1 cells were not deficient in overall H3K9 methylation, but this modification was not enriched on germ line-limited sequences as it is in wild-type cells, which clearly demonstrates that these small RNAs are essential for its targeting to specific loci.
Effects of nicardipine and clonidine on cognitive functions and electroencephalography in hypertensive patients

The aim of this study was to investigate the cognitive and electroencephalography (EEG) short‐term effects of a calcium antagonist, nicardipine, compared to placebo and clonidine (which, having known sedative effects, acted as a negative control) for 15 days in elderly hypertensive patients with memory complaints. Nicardipine and clonidine were compared with placebo in a double‐blind, randomized, three‐way cross‐over controlled study after a 2‐week placebo run‐in period. This was a phase II clinical study carried out on out‐patients in a single research centre. Fifteen elderly (63 ± 10 years) hypertensive patients, without dementia but with memory complaints, were included. Psychomotor performance and cognition were assessed using both an extensive battery of validated psychometric tests (which evaluated attention and vigilance, body sway and memory) and an EEG profile. Cardiovascular parameters measured were blood pressure and heart rate. No detrimental effects of nicardipine were found on attention, vigilance, body sway or memory. Nicardipine produced a significant increase in alpha EEG energies, which may indicate possible alerting effects. In contrast, clonidine induced well‐known deleterious sedative effects in psychometric tests and in EEG analysis (decrease in alpha and increase in delta and theta waves). The two drugs produced equivalent decreases in blood pressure at steady state. In conclusion, clonidine induced well‐known sedative effects, while nicardipine did not impair central nervous system activity and may have had some short‐term alerting effects in elderly hypertensive patients with memory complaints. This study supports the hypothesis of a dissociation between blood pressure and direct drug effects on the central nervous system.
Simultaneous On-State Voltage and Bond-Wire Resistance Monitoring of Silicon Carbide MOSFETs

In fast switching power semiconductors, the use of a fourth terminal to provide the reference potential for the gate signal—known as a kelvin-source terminal—is becoming common. The introduction of this terminal presents opportunities for condition monitoring systems. This article demonstrates how the voltage between the kelvin-source and power-source can be used to specifically monitor bond-wire degradation. Meanwhile, the drain to kelvin-source voltage can be monitored to track defects in the semiconductor die or gate driver. Through an accelerated aging test on 20 A Silicon Carbide Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor-Field-Effect Transistors (MOSFETs), it is shown that there are opposing trends in the evolution of the on-state resistances of both the bond-wires and the MOSFET die. In summary, after 50,000 temperature cycles, the resistance of the bond-wires increased by up to 2 mΩ, while the on-state resistance of the MOSFET dies decreased by approximately 1 mΩ. The conventional failure precursor (monitoring a single forward voltage) cannot distinguish between semiconductor die or bond-wire degradation. Therefore, the ability to monitor both these parameters due to the presence of an auxiliary-source terminal can provide more detailed information regarding the aging process of a device.
Synchronized Oscillator Composed of Plural CMOS Ring Oscillators

The synchronized oscillator composed of the plural CMOS ring oscillators is interesting for improving the performances of the oscillators. Several different circuits using the CMOS ring oscillators are discussed in this report. These are the tetrahedral oscillator, ORIGAMI oscillator, precise delay generator, braided connected oscillator, and the newly proposed oscillator embedded the pincer movement operation. These oscillators are applicable to different kind of applications. The oscillator embedded the pincer movement operation is simulated to show the performance, where 0. 18μmCMOS process models are used.
Pre-irradiation qualities of a parotid gland predicting the grade of functional disturbance by radiotherapy.

In the irradiation of head and neck tumours, often more than one of the major salivary glands and also many of the minor salivary glands are located within the therapy beams. This might then explain any functional disturbance of the salivary gland tissue causing xerostomia with difficulties in swallowing, a high incidence of caries, etc., after radiotherapy in this region. As the grade of these complications shows a great interindividual variation, it is questioned whether there is an individual sensitivity to irradiation therapy of the salivary gland tissue. To ascertain whether it is possible to predict in which patients radiotherapy will be more liable to cause a functional disturbance, a study has been made of 15 parotid glands located within the therapy beams at radiotherapy of malignant head and neck tumours to find whether any correlation exists between the pre-irradiation quality of the glands and their reaction to irradiation at different doses. The pre-irradiation quality of the parotid glands h.
Image Privacy Prediction Using Deep Features

Online image sharing in social media sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram can lead to unwanted disclosure and privacy violations, when privacy settings are used inappropriately. With the exponential increase in the number of images that are shared online, the development of effective and efficient prediction methods for image privacy settings are highly needed. In this study, we explore deep visual features and deep image tags for image privacy prediction. The results of our experiments show that models trained on deep visual features outperform those trained on SIFT and GIST. The results also show that deep image tags combined with user tags perform best among all tested features.
Risk Management and Rural to Urban Migration Decisions in Indonesia

This paper investigates the role of risk in rural to urban migration decisions using Indonesian household-level panel data. Speci cally, I use consumption data and measures of household risk aversion to test whether rural to urban migration is a means of managing risk among uninsured households via the diversi cation of household income ows. Most previous studies of risk and migration do not analyze the migrant's choice of destination but instead focus on the relationship between risk aversion and the likelihood of migration; however, if migration is motivated, in part, by household risk management, then the level of risk aversion should impact both the propensity to migrate and the destination of migration. In this paper I generate predictions regarding the relationship between household risk aversion and the economic riskiness of receiving regions and test these predictions using a multinomial logit estimation. Empirical results generally a rm the predictions of the model. Households prefer to send migrants to destinations with lower consumption variability and, as predicted, this preference is stronger among households with higher risk aversion. Also, all households prefer destinations where average consumption is less correlated with home consumption.
Hidden Markov model approach to skill learning and its application in telerobotics

The problem of how human skill can be represented as a parametric model using a hidden Markov (HMM), and how an HMM-based skill model can be used to learn human skill, is discussed. The HMM is feasible for characterizing two stochastic processes, measurable action and immeasurable mental states that are involved in the skill learning. Based on the most likely performance criterion, the best action sequence can be selected from previously measured action data by modeling the skill as an HMM. This selection process can be updated in real-time by feeding new action data and modifying HMM parameters. The implementation of the proposed method in a teleoperation-controlled space robot is discussed. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the method. <<ETX>>
The measurement of muscle strength in the hip joint expressed by the octagonal diagram.

For grasping hip joint function objectively and planning an adequate program for individual use in rehabilitation during and after the treatment for hip joint impairments, the octagonal diagram of the correct distribution of the hip joint muscle strength will be useful. The muscle strength was measured in the eight directions using the Cybex-II on the U.B. X.T. table not only on the peak torque but also on the maximum work and the maximum work/sec in eighty healthy subjects, forty of each male and female. No difference of the muscle strength between the dominant and the non-dominant legs of both male and female has shown. In the percentage of the values of the muscle strength, there are differences between the peak torque, the maximum work value and the maximum work/sec. The data obtained from this investigation will be available to judge the degree of hip joint impairment, and to make a better therapeutic program for the patients.
Table of Contents.

The chapter investigates the impact of unions on wages and wage inequality by using individual-level Turkish Household Income and Consumption Expenditure Survey data. To obtain the union wage premium we estimate the standard Mincerian wage equation, and then we employ Quintile Regression method to analyze the impact of unions along the distribution. We also produce separate estimations for males and females. The results suggest that despite the low union density, there is a substantial raw wage gap between the unionized and non-unionized workers. However the gap declines as the individual and firm-level characteristics are included. Additionally, unions are ineffective in decreasing wage inequality in Turkey as they raise the wages for the workers in the upper tails more than their counterparts in the lower tails. These effects only hold for male workers since for females, the unions are effective in compressing the wages.
Systematic Approaches for Incorporating Control Spots and Data Quality Information to Improve Normalization of cDNA Microarray Data

Background: Normalization and data quality control are two important aspects in microarray data analysis. Proper normalization and data quality control ensure that intensity ratios provide meaningful and accurate measurement of relative gene expression values. Control spots such as spikes and housekeeping genes with known concentrations in two channels are often used for calibrating experimental parameters. They provide valuable information about experimental variation which can be utilized for better normalization. They are also needed for proper normalization in cases that the most of the spots tend to change in one direction. In addition, it is desirable to include information on spot quality. Such information is available in a typical microarray data set, but is not fully utilized by existing normalization methods. Results: We propose two extensions of the two-way semi-linear model (TW-SLM) for appropriately combining control genes and spot quality information in normalization. The first extension (TW-SLMC) is designed to systematically incorporate control spots in a semi-parametric model to calibrate estimated normalization curves so that the relative fold changes of gene expressions are accurately estimated. Extrapolation is not required in this approach. The second extension (TW-SLMQ) is proposed to incorporate spot quality measure into normalization. This approach down-weights spots with lower quality scores in normalization. These two extensions can be used simultaneously for normalizing a data set. Two microarray data sets are used to demonstrate the proposed methods. Availability: An R based computing package is developed for the proposed methods and available from the corresponding authors. Contact: Deli Wang: deliwang@uab.edu or Jian Huang: jian-huang@uiowa.edu.
Initialization of 3D Human Hand Model and Its Applications in Human Hand Tracking

Initialization of 3D human hand gesture is one of the fundamental and key steps in the study of 3D hand tracking, and a novel approach to initialize 3D human hand gesture is put forward in this paper. This paper will cover the following points. First, a new approach to selecting a human hand gesture from the hand postures database is presented. Second, both techniques of visualization and human-computer interaction are used into the initialization process, through which the 3D human hand model is fine-tuned time after time until the required accuracy is satisfied. Lastly, the proposed initialization method is applied to 3D human hand tracking system based on PF (Particle Filtering), with real video data under complex background. In order to address high dimensional problem of 3D hand structures, a new concept, which is called key factor in this paper, is introduced to guide sampling; to improve robustness to changing light conditions, a new skin model is proposed. The main contributions of this paper include: (1) combine the techniques of the interaction between operator and computer and the visualization to achieve initialization of 3D human hand model. (2) use the key factors to address the issue of high dimensionality of 3D hand model, and (3) a new hand skin model is presented, as well as self-occlusion problem is effective addressed. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach is not only fast, accurate and robust, but also direct, natural and convenient for operators to handle.
Enhanced tissue plasminogen activator synthesis by the sympathetic neurons that innervate aging vessels

We investigated the source of the increased release of tissue plasminogen activator (t‐PA) into the circulation that occurs during natural aging. Both the basal release and the acute stress‐associated release induced by sympathetic stimulations are greater in older subjects. It is widely assumed that the source of these increases is vascular endothelium. However, the sympathetic neurons that densely innervate resistance vessel walls were recently shown to synthesize and transport active t‐PA to axon terminals in vascular smooth muscle, suggesting an alternative source. These fine t‐PA‐bearing axons lie in the seldom‐studied deep adventitia of vessel walls, where they are less visible than endothelium in tissue sections. Using Northern blot analysis, we observed that t‐PAmRNA synthesis is increased 54% in the ganglion parent neuron cell bodies that innervate aged vessels. The t‐PA release from isolated, aged ganglia in cultures was twofold greater than that from younger controls. In addition, aged whole‐artery explants showed a 20% greater basal and a 50% greater acute release of stored t‐PA in vitro. In vivo levels of active t‐PA were 33% greater in the blood and 40% greater in the aqueous humor. These results are consistent with an increased infusion of the active t‐PA protease from sympathetic axon terminals into the vessel wall extracellular matrix and the blood during natural aging, in addition to the basal endothelial release. We suggest that the cumulative impact of an accelerated plasmin production and matrix degradation within vessel walls, especially during repetitive stress, may play an unrecognized role in the pathogenesis of vascular aging. The possibility that increased sympathetic nervous system plasminogenesis influences the aging process in nonvascular tissues also deserves further investigation. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Reciprocal excitation of antagonistic muscles as a differentiating feature in spasticity

The electromyographic activity evoked by forced ankle rotation in spastic patients with cerebral palsy differs markedly from that found in normal subject or in patients with adult‐onset injuries to the central nervous system. Rapid dorsiflexion can produce a strong myotatic reflex electromyogram at 30 to 50 msec in the normal adult's stretched soleus muscle, while the antagonist tibialis anterior muscle remains quiet. The same is true of spastic patients whose injury has an adult onset. In patients with cerebral palsy this early response is found in both muscle groups. The pattern of “reciprocal excitation” is in marked contrast to the reciprocal inhibition normally seen. This reflex behavior suggests a fundamental developmental error in neuronal interconnections of the spinal cord in cerebral palsy.
Ictal Epileptic Headache: A Review of Current Literature and Differentiation From Migralepsy and Other Epilepsies

Ictal headaches are increasingly becoming the focus of research as more data demonstrate headaches existing as a sole manifestation of an epileptic event. Due to the difficulty in diagnosing the event as an epileptic phenomenon as opposed to a migraine, the condition is often misdiagnosed. This paper seeks to review the current published literature on ictal epileptic headaches as well as provide differentiation between ictal headaches and similarly presenting conditions. In doing so, we hope to improve the diagnosis of ictal headaches and thus improve patient care. We review two case studies that exemplify the potential of multiple conditions with comparable symptoms to ictal headaches, and discuss how to differentiate the variable diagnoses. As of the writing of this paper, there is no universally agreed upon set of features of ictal headaches; however, reviewing the current literature, there do seem to be several features that should be noted when treating patients. More research on the pathophysiology of ictal epileptic headaches needs to be done before the condition can be fully understood.
Isolation-stress increases small intestinal sensitivity to chemotherapy in rats.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Severe gastrointestinal damage often complicates the use of chemotherapeutic agents such as methotrexate for anticancer treatment. Psychologic stress is known to be detrimental to normal intestinal physiology. We set out to determine if psychologic stress adds to the intestinal damage provoked by chemotherapy. METHODS Rats were treated with various doses of methotrexate and housed either alone, which induces mental stress, or maintained in groups of 3 animals. Treatment was evaluated by (immuno)histologic parameters. RESULTS Epithelial crypt damage, increased lysozyme expression, decreased sucrase-isomaltase and sodium/glucose transporter 1 expression, and pathologic changes in mucin and trefoil factor protein expression could be prevented by avoiding isolation. Enhanced cytotoxicity of methotrexate through isolation was about 2-fold and involved an augmented inhibition of proliferation, increased epithelial apoptosis, increased villus damage, and delayed recovery. We could not identify a role for mucosal mast cells in the increased epithelial damage under isolated conditions. CONCLUSIONS The clear beneficial effects of avoiding mental stress on the protection of the intestinal epithelium during cytostatic drug-treatment may be an important element for the treatment of cancer patients.
Re: Treatment Noncompliance with Orally Disintegrating Olanzapine Tablets

Dear Editor: Treating patients with refractory depression is a common challenge for psychiatrists. There are several reasons for this. First, a substantial portion of patients starting pharmacologic treatment either fail to respond or cannot tolerate the drug (1,2). Even among responders to antidepressants, residual symptoms are common (3) and have been shown to be associated with a greater likelihood of relapse and a poorer prognosis (4).
A rate-determining proton relay in the pyruvate kinase reaction.

This study ascribes the large steady-state D2O isotope effect on kcat of pyruvate kinase (PEP + ADP----pyruvate + ATP) to the reprotonation of the product form of the enzyme for use in forming pyruvate. Previous tritium trapping experiments [Rose, I. A. , & Kuo, D. J. (1989) Biochemistry 28, 9579-9585] with muscle pyruvate kinase showed that the proton used for ketonization of enolpyruvate is derived from an enzyme "pool" that contains three kinetically equivalent hydrogens that could be trapped in a nontritiated "chase" medium by high levels of ADP and PEP. The exchange of this pool with the medium was rapid in the free enzyme (approximately 1400 s-1), prior to addition of PEP, and apparently much less in the completed complex. The dissociation rate constant was determined by using the dissociation-competition equation koffT = K1/2kcat/Km, where kcat/Km is the steady-state parameter for PEP and K1/2 is the concentration of PEP required to trap 50% of the isotope that could be trapped. The present study shows that the competition constant, K1/2, is decreased by approximately 5-fold in D2O, the same effect see on kcat under conditions where kcat/Km, measured in the steady state, is not changed. The common effect of D2O on kcat in the steady state and koffT in pulse/chase suggests that the forward reaction rate is determined by hydrogen transfer to the enzyme. Further evidence indicates that the kinetically important proton in question is the proton used for ketonization of enolpyruvate, the substrate proton. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)