Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plant polyphenols: How to translate their in vitro antioxidant actions to in vivo conditions

Epidemiological evidence demonstrates that diets rich in fruit and vegetables promote health, and attenuate, or delay, the onset of various diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, certain cancers, and several other age‐related degenerative disorders. The chemical components and the physiological and molecular mechanisms by which fruit and vegetables reduce the risk for these pathophysiological conditions are matters of intense investigation. Regarding plant components, polyphenols are a group of phytochemicals that are gaining acceptance as responsible for the health benefits offered by fruit and vegetables. Because of their chemical structure, plant polyphenols are able to scavenge free radicals and inactivate other pro‐oxidants. The connection of these chemical properties to a physiological antioxidant action has triggered extensive research aimed to relate the consumption of plant polyphenols with human health. Although significant progress has been made, there are still some critical areas that need to be elucidated to arrive at definitive conclusions on the mechanisms linking plant polyphenol consumption, reduction in oxidative damage, and health improvement. Some of these topics will be discussed in this review of alternative molecular mechanisms, based on polyphenol‐membranes and polyphenol‐proteins interactions that develop in an antioxidant protection but are not directly related to free radical scavenging or metal chelating. IUBMB Life, 59: 308‐315, 2007
Analogical retrieval in reuse-oriented requirements engineering

Computational mechanisms are presented for analogical retrieval of domain knowledge as a basis for intelligent tool-based assistance for requirements engineers. A first mechanism, called the domain matcher, retrieves object system models which describe key features for new problems. A second mechanism, called the problem classifier, reasons with analogical mappings inferred by the domain matcher to detect potential incompleteness, overspecification and inconsistencies in entered facts and requirements. Both mechanisms are embedded in AIR, a toolkit that provides co-operative reuse-oriented assistance for requirements engineers.
Pattern Recognition by Probabilistic Neural Networks - Mixtures of Product Components versus Mixtures of Dependence Trees

We compare two probabilistic approaches to neural networks - the first one based on the mixtures of product components and the second one using the mixtures of dependence-tree distributions. The product mixture models can be efficiently estimated from data by means of EM algorithm and have some practically important properties. However, in some cases the simplicity of product components could appear too restrictive and a natural idea is to use a more complex mixture of dependence-tree distributions. By considering the concept of dependence tree we can explicitly describe the statistical relationships between pairs of variables at the level of individual components and therefore the approximation power of the resulting mixture may essentially increase. Nonetheless, in application to classification of numerals we have found that both models perform comparably and the contribution of the dependence-tree structures decreases in the course of EM iterations. Thus the optimal estimate of the dependence-tree mixture tends to converge to a simple product mixture model. Regardless of computational aspects, the dependence-tree mixtures could help to clarify the role of dendritic branching in the highly selective excitability of neurons.
Autoimmune type antiphospholipid antibodies in a patient with Q fever.

Q fever is a zoonosis caused by Coxiella burnetti which has been associated with a range of haematological manifestations like bone marrow necrosis, haemophagocytosis, haemolytic anaemia, transient monoclonal gammopathy, lymphadenopathy mimicking lymphoma, transient hypoplastic anaemia and spontaneous splenic rupture. Also a number of autoantibodies have been reported in association with acute Q fever including antiphospholipid antibodies –aPA(lupus anticoagulant-LA-, anticardiolipin -aCAand anti-β2 glycoprotein-I-β2gpI-) which are one of the most relevant autoimmune markers reported in this setting.
Gender-Specific Physiology , Carbon Isotope Discrimination , and Habitat Distribution in Boxelder ,

In the semiarid Intermountain West, boxelder, Acer negundo var. interior, a deciduous, dioecious tree, exhibits significant habitat-specific sex ratio biases. Although the overall sex ratio (male/female) does not deviate significantly from one, the sex ratio is significantly male biased (1.62) in drought-prone habitats, while it is significantly female biased (0.65) in moist, streamside habitats. The causes underlying gender-specific habitat associations in this species are not known. We hypothesized that spatial segregation of the sexes is maintained by differences in gender-specific photosynthetic behavior, water relations characteristics, and both instantaneous and integrated water-use efficiency. Genderspecific physiological characteristics were measured and related to growth, reproduction, population age structure, and habitat distribution of male and female trees. Under both field and controlled-environment conditions, males and females differed significantly in a number of physiological traits. Males maintained lower stomatal conductance to water vapor (g), transpiration (E), net carbon assimilation (A), leaf internal CO2 concentration (ci), carbon isotope discrimination (AL; an index of time-integrated ci and water-use efficiency), and higher instantaneous (A/E) and long-term (A) water-use efficiency than females. Furthermore, male trees exhibited greater stomatal sensitivity to both declining soil water content and increasing leaf-to-air vapor pressure gradients, a measure of evaporative demand. Higher rates of carbon fixation in female trees were correlated with higher g, higher leaf nitrogen concentrations, and greater stomatal densities. For females growing in both wet and dry habitats, vegetative shoots had higher growth rates than reproductive shoots, while for males, growth rates of the two shoot types did not differ. In streamside habitats, female trees exhibited significantly greater vegetative shoot growth when compared to male trees. In contrast, males showed slightly greater vegetative and much greater reproductive shoot growth in non-streamside habitats. Regardless of habitat or growing conditions, females allocated proportionately more of their aboveground biomass to reproduction than did males. These results suggest that (1) gender-specific physiological traits can help explain the maintenance of habitat-specific sex ratio biases in A. negundo along a soil moisture gradient, and (2) that the combination of the gender-specific physiology, growth, and allocation differences contribute to differences in the size (=age) structure of male and female plants within the population. Gender-specific physiological differences may have evolved as a product of selection to meet significantly different costs associated with reproduction in male and female plants.
Trends in the Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the United States: 2002–2007

In this study we seek to assess recent trends in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use based on a comparative analysis of data from the 2002 and 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). The findings suggest that CAM use, in particular the use of provider-based CAM therapies such as chiropractic care, massage, and acupuncture, have grown significantly in the U.S. This growth was more pronounced among non-Hispanic Whites than among racial and ethnic minorities, increasing an already existing White-minority gap in CAM use. Findings from this study also reveal that CAM use becomes more likely when access to conventional care has been restricted. In both 2002 and 2007, having unmet needs in medical care or having delayed care due to cost were associated with a higher chance of CAM use.
Full‐length sequence of genotype 3 hepatitis E virus derived from a pig in Thailand

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection in pigs was investigated in two principal swine farming areas in Thailand. Anti‐HEV antibodies and HEV RNA in sera were examined in 258 pigs reared on five commercial farms from age 1 to 6.5 months and sows. Overall, 167 of 258 (64.7%) pigs were positive for anti‐HEV IgG, while 20 of 258 (7.75%) had detectable HEV RNA. Sequence analysis of 20 HEV isolates obtained from viremic pigs revealed that they were 92.3–100% identical to each other and had 82.2–88.2% nucleotide similarity to other reported genotype 3 isolates in 415 nucleotide sequences within ORF2 region. Further characterization by sequencing the complete genome of the Thai swine HEV isolate (named Thai‐swHEV07) and phylogenetic analysis showed that Thai‐swHEV07 segregated into a cluster consisting of swine isolates from Japan, Mongolia, and Kyrgyzstan within the HEV genotype 3. The Thai‐swHEV07 had a genomic length of 7,229 nt excluding the polyadenylated region at 3′ terminus of the genome. Comparison of Thai‐swHEV07 and 27 reported strains of genotype 3 revealed 80.4–85.9% nucleotide identity, with the highest identity of 85.9% to the novel swHEV strain from Mongolia. These findings suggest that genotype 3 HEV isolates are markedly heterogeneous. J. Med. Virol. 81:657–664, 2009 © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
High frequency analysis of an integrated planar transformer with common mode EMI suppression capability

High frequency transformers are one of the essential building blocks to provide galvanic isolation for power converters. Due to the switching nature of the converter, electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) of these converters is an essential requirement, to ensure not only its own operation but also the safe and secure operation of surrounding electrical equipment that are connected to same power distribution network. Thus, strict EMC standards such as CISPR 12 or SAEJ551/5 are imposed to provide safe and reliable operation of the power converters. Conventional passive filters used for EMI mitigation in power converters, comes at the expense of cost, size and weight, power losses and PCB real estate. In this paper, an integrated EMI filter embedded into the main high frequency planar transformer used in the DC/DC converter is proposed as a very cost-effective and efficient solution. The proposed structure is able to significantly suppress the Common-Mode (CM) EMI noise generated in the DC/DC converter. In order to evaluate the performance of the integrated transformer, a high frequency simulation through HFSS has been performed. Also, a prototype has been implemented to assess the feasibility of the proposed structure and confirm the HFSS simulation results. The results obtained from a 3KW prototype show that the proposed integrated EMI filter can effectively suppress the CM noise particularly for power converters operating at high switching frequency. The proposed structure can be a very simple and cost-effective EMI filtering solution for many applications such as future plug-in electric vehicle.
Exponential stability of delayed bidirectional associative memory neural networks with reaction diffusion terms

This article considers a class of delayed bi-directional associative memory (BAM) neural networks with reaction diffusion terms and delays. We obtain some simple criteria ensuring the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium and its global exponential stability by applying homeomorphism mapping, constructing a new Lyapunov functional and inequality techniques. These criteria are independent of delays and posses infinitely adjustable real parameters, which improve and extend some recent results [J. Cao and M. Dong, “Exponential stability of delayed bidirectional associative memory networks”, Appl. Math. Comput. , 135, pp. 105–112, 2003; J. Cao and L. Wang, “Exponential stability and periodic oscillatory solution in BAM networks with delays”, IEEE Trans. Neural Networ. , 13, pp. 457–463, 2002; Q. Song and J. Cao, “Global exponential stability and existence of periodic solutions in BAM networks with delays and reaction-diffusion terms”, Chaos Soliton. Fract. , 23, pp. 421–430, 2005. ] and have an important instructional significance in the designs and applications of bidirectional associative memory neural networks.
Applying N-gram Alignment Entropy to Improve Feature Decay Algorithms

Abstract Data Selection is a popular step in Machine Translation pipelines. Feature Decay Algorithms (FDA) is a technique for data selection that has shown a good performance in several tasks. FDA aims to maximize the coverage of n-grams in the test set. However, intuitively, more ambiguous n-grams require more training examples in order to adequately estimate their translation probabilities. This ambiguity can be measured by alignment entropy. In this paper we propose two methods for calculating the alignment entropies for n-grams of any size, which can be used for improving the performance of FDA. We evaluate the substitution of the n-gram-specific entropy values computed by these methods to the parameters of both the exponential and linear decay factor of FDA. The experiments conducted on German-to-English and Czech-to-English translation demonstrate that the use of alignment entropies can lead to an increase in the quality of the results of FDA.
Improved Iris Recognition using Parabolic Normalization and Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network

Iris signature is considered as one of the richest, unique, and stable biometrics. This permits to an iris identification system to identify a person even after many years from his first iris signature extraction. In this paper we investigate a new method of iris normalization where iris features are normalized in a parabolic function. Thus iris information close to the pupil is privileged to that close to the sclera. A multilayer perceptron artificial neural network is then used to test the normalization effect and compare it with classical linear normalization method. The study is tested on CASIA V3 database iris images. Accuracy at the equal error rate operating point and receiver operating characteristics curves show better results with the parabolic normalization method and thus propose its use for better iris recognition system
Dietary Fiber in the Prevention and Treatment of Metabolic Syndrome: A Review

Inclusion of fiber in the diet has been linked to the prevention of a range of illnesses and conditions. This review contains several ideas about the possible benefits of dietary fiber intake in patients with metabolic syndrome. The principal beneficial effects of a fiber-rich diet in these patients are: prevention of obesity, improved glucose levels, and control of the profile of blood lipids. We now also know that dietary fiber may favor the control of arterial blood pressure. Animal experiments have also shown the benefit of different types of fiber on these variables. Of particular relevance are the studies using obese Zucker rats, which present similar anomalies to those seen in patients with metabolic syndrome. There is therefore a growing interest in discovering new sources of natural fiber. Some of these different kinds of fiber may then be used as functional ingredients to obtain foods with properties that are beneficial to health.
Correction: Emergence of Noise-Induced Oscillations in the Central Circadian Pacemaker

The files for Datasets S1 and S5 were switched. The file that appears as Dataset S1 should be Dataset S5, and the file that appears as Dataset S5 should be Dataset S1. The legends appear in the correct order. Likewise, the file that appears as Dataset S2 should be Dataset S6, and the file that appears as Dataset S6 should be Dataset S2. These legends also appear in the correct order.
International trends in coronary heart disease mortality, morbidity, and risk factors.

This paper reviews the recent international data on trends in coronary heart disease mortality and morbidity and risk factor levels and assesses the possible explanations for the changes in mortality rates. The implications of the trends and the associated investigations for the prevention and control of coronary heart disease and other noncommunicable diseases are discussed. (EXCERPT)
Do the Roles of the CEO and CFO Differ when it comes to Data Security Breaches?

Using a sample of S&P 1500 firms from 2005-2013, we investigate the independent relationships of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) IT expertise, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) IT expertise, and board level technology committees with data security breaches. Overall, our results indicate that firms that either employ a CEO with IT expertise or implement a technology committee are more likely to detect and report breaches. Further, firms that employ a CFO with IT expertise are less likely to report a breach, suggesting that these firms are better at preventing breaches. The aggregate findings build on the extant corporate governance and risk management literatures.
Seasonal Abundance, Host Suitability, and Feeding Injury of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Halyomorpha halys (Heteroptera: Penatomidae), in Selected Vegetables

Abstract The invasive brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys (Stål) (Heteroptera: Penatomidae), is a major pest of agricultural crops in the Mid-Atlantic States. Here we report the seasonal abundance, host preference, and injury potential of H. halys on tomato, bell pepper, green bean, sweet corn, eggplant, and okra in a small-scale, diversified vegetable farm setting. Life-stage densities, feeding injury, and crop phenology were monitored throughout the growing season in each crop. Populations consisted of both overwintered adults and F1 progeny and encompassed almost two generations over the growing season. H. halys preferred host plants with reproductive structures for feeding and was more abundant and capable to reproduce on vegetable crops that had extended periods of fruiting. Sweet corn, okra, and bell pepper had significant higher abundances of adults and nymphs compared with green bean, eggplant, and tomato. Results showed significant differences in the reproductive suitability of the host plants, as evident by the relative proportion of nymphal stages to adults. Eggplant, okra, and bell pepper were the most suitable host plants for reproduction and development, as evident by higher proportions of nymphs, with abundance trends indicating progressive development to adult eclosion. Crop loss potential due to H. halys feeding injury varied significantly among vegetable host plants. Sweet corn, okra, bell pepper, and tomato were very susceptible and experienced the highest injury rate per stink bug. The implications of these findings with respect to sampling and management of H. halys in vegetable production are discussed.
Recent developments in the pharmacological treatment and prevention of corneal graft rejection

At present, given the high initial success rate of corneal transplantation (although late survival is poor), immunosuppression is often reserved for ‘high-risk’ patients. Despite immune privilege, corneal graft rejection remains the leading cause of corneal allograft failure. Interpreting the limited and also restricted design of most trials, immunosuppressive therapy has not enjoyed the success seen in solid organ grafts. This review discusses the limited data available whilst proposing newer therapies that have developed as a result of our increased understanding of the immunobiology of corneal graft rejection.
Computationally Related Problems

We look at several problems from areas such as network flows, game theory, artificial intelligence, graph theory, integer programming and nonlinear programming and show that they are related in that any one of these problems is solvable in polynomial time if all the others are, too. At present, no polynomial time algorithm for these problems is known. These problems extend the equivalence class of problems known as P-Complete. The problem of deciding whether the class of languages accepted by polynomial time nondeterministic Turing machines is the same as that accepted by polynomial time deterministic Turing machines is related to P-Complete problems in that these two classes of languages are the same if each P-Complete problem has a polynomial deterministic solution. In view of this, it appears very likely that this equivalence class defines a class of problems that cannot be solved in deterministic polynomial time.
Primary hybrid total hip arthroplasty with a roughened femoral stem: integrity of the stem-cement interface.

One hundred and two consecutive cemented femoral stems were evaluated in 92 patients at an average 9-year follow-up and a minimum 5-year follow-up (range, 5-14 years). The stem used was cobalt chromium with a collar, normalization steps, and a roughened surface (Ra 40); the stem was inserted using contemporary cementing techniques. This series demonstrated a femoral component aseptic loosening rate of 2.0% and a femoral component survivorship of 97.2 +/- 2.0% at 10 years. One of 2 failed stems was revised at 95 months for failure at the cement-bone interface. The second failed stem showed failure at the cement-bone interface with incomplete debonding radiographically at 65 months. The remaining femoral components did not demonstrate any evidence of debonding at the stem-cement interface. These results compare favorably with other series of cemented femoral stems, as well as with those with a polished surface.
A quantum-well waveguide photodetector for high-precision wavelength monitoring about 1.55 μm

A two-segment InGaAsP rib waveguide photodetector is shown to function as a high resolution wavelength monitor in the 1.55-/spl mu/m spectral region. For two in-line detector elements, the ratio of photocurrents produced is a sensitive function of the input wavelength near the material's absorption edge. This ratio varies rapidly with wavelength over a range from 1.53 to 1.565 /spl mu/m and is independent of the optical input power. By utilizing the quantum confined Stark effect, the operating range of the device can be extended to over 50 nm. An average wavelength sensitivity of 3 pm is demonstrated.
Attributes of adult stem cells

While cultured embryonic stem (ES) cells can be harvested in abundance and appear to be the most versatile of cells for regenerative medicine, adult stem cells also hold promise, but the identity and subsequent isolation of these comparatively rare cells remains problematic in most tissues, perhaps with the notable exception of the bone marrow. The ability to continuously self‐renew and produce the differentiated progeny of the tissue of their location are their defining properties. Identifying surface molecules (markers) that would aid in stem cell isolation is a major goal. Considerable overlap exists between different putative organ‐specific stem cells in their repertoire of gene expression, often related to self‐renewal, cell survival and cell adhesion. More robust tests of ‘stemness’ are now being employed, using lineage‐specific genetic marking and tracking to show production of long‐lived clones and multipotentiality in vivo. Moreover, the characterization of normal stem cells in specific tissues may provide a dividend for the treatment of cancer. The successful treatment of neoplastic disease may well require the specific targeting of neoplastic stem cells, cells that may well have many of the characteristics of their normal counterparts. Copyright © 2008 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.