Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implication des phagocytes mononucléés dans les pathologies inflammatoires chroniques : exploration d’un modèle murin d’athérosclérose et du xanthogranulome chez l’homme

Les pathologies inflammatoires chroniques representent la premiere cause de mortalite dans le monde avec une part importante des cardiopathies et autres maladies lipido-inflammatoires telles que l'atherosclerose. Ainsi, comprendre l'ensemble des mecanismes impliques dans l'initiation mais aussi la resolution de ces maladies represente un enjeu majeur en sante publique. Nos travaux sur l'implication des phagocytes mononuclees dans des modeles murins d'atherosclerose montrent qu'en modulant la demi-vie de certaines cellules du systeme immunitaire on est capable de limiter le developpement de la pathologie. Ces resultats sont associes a une diminution globale de l'inflammation dans les animaux et une amelioration du metabolisme lipidique. Ainsi, moduler les acteurs de l'inflammation au sein du systeme immunitaire peut s'averer une nouvelle cible therapeutique complementaires aux medicaments hypocholesterolemiants actuels. Dans cette optique, nous avons realise la plus importante caracterisation d'une pathologie humaine : le xanthogranulome. Les patients atteints montrent une association entre une deregulation du metabolisme des lipides et l'inflammation cutanee soutenue par les macrophages et les cellules dendritiques. Le traitement par injection intraveineuse d'immunoglobulines d'une des patientes montre une reduction globale de l'inflammation, une normalisation des acteurs cellulaires sanguins qui se traduit cliniquement par une amelioration des symptomes de la pathologie.
Developing a Social Cost of Carbon for U.S. Regulatory Analysis: A Methodology and Interpretation* Michael Greenstone Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER

The United States Government recently developed a range of values representing the monetized global damages associated with an incremental increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, commonly referred to as the social cost of carbon (SCC). These values are currently used in benefit-cost analyses to assess potential federal regulations. For 2010, the central value of the SCC is $21 per ton of CO2 emissions, with sensitivity analyses to be conducted at $5, $35, and $65 per ton of CO2 (2007$). This article summarizes the methodology and interagency process used to develop these SCC values, offers our own commentary on how the SCC can be used to inform regulatory decisions, and identifies priorities for further research. JEL Codes: Q54, Q51, and Q58
An Ancient Greek Pain Remedy for Athletes

Abstract: While Hippocratic writings make no reference to the actual Olympics, there is frequent mention of diet, exercise, and the treatment of injuries sustained by the athletic participants. Indeed, Galen in his Composition of Medicines gives details of a remedy prescribed for the relief of pains and swellings, which was reserved for use by the winners of Olympic events, the so‐called “Fuscum Olympionico inscriptum”—(ointment) entitled “dark Olympic victor’s. ” In a time when the Olympic games have recently returned to their homeland, we examine the potential efficacy of this ancient remedy in terms of pain relief, the novelty of transdermal pain management, and the ability of ancient physicians to attend to the sports‐related needs of highly tuned athletes.
On the ability of a physiologically constrained area function model of the vocal tract to produce normal formant patterns under perturbed conditions.

An area function model of the vocal tract is tested for its ability to produce typical vowel formant frequencies with a perturbation at the lips. The model, which consists of a neutral shape and two weighted orthogonal shaping patterns (modes), has previously been shown to produce a nearly one-to-one mapping between formant frequencies and the weighting coefficients of the modes [Story and Titze, J. Phonetics, 26, 223-260 (1998)]. In this study, a perturbation experiment was simulated by imposing a constant area "lip tube" on the model. The mapping between the mode coefficients and formant frequencies was then recomputed with the lip tube in place and showed that formant frequencies (F1 and F2) representative of the vowels [u,o,u] could no longer be produced with the model. However, when the mode coefficients were allowed to exceed their typical bounding values, the mapping between them and the formant frequencies was expanded such that the vowels [u,o,u] were compensated. The area functions generated by these exaggerated coefficients were shown to be similar to vocal-tract shapes reported for real speakers under similar perturbed conditions [Savariaux, Perrier, and Orliaguet, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. , 98, 2428-2442 (1995)]. This suggests that the structure of this particular model captures some of the human ability to configure the vocal-tract shape under both ordinary and extraordinary conditions.
Learning From Big Data: A Survey and Evaluation of Approximation Technologies for Large-Scale Reinforcement Learning

A key problem in large-scale reinforcement learning is to deal with big data, in terms of a very large number of environment states and many possible actions. Function approximation can improve the ability of a reinforcement learner to solve large-scale problems. Tile coding and Kanerva coding are two classical methods for implementing function approximation, but these methods may give poor performance when applied to large-scale, high-dimensional instances. In the paper, we evaluate a collection of hard instances of the predator-prey pursuit problem, a classic reinforcement learning platform with scalable state-action space, to compare these two methods and their optimization techniques. We first show that Kanerva coding gives better results than Tile coding when the dimension of the instances increases. We then describe a feature optimization mechanism and show that it can increase the fraction of instances that are solved by both Tile coding and Kanerva coding. Finally, we demonstrate that a fuzzy approach to function approximation can further increase the fraction of instances. We show that our fuzzy approach to Kanerva coding outperforms fuzzy Tile coding when feature optimization is applied. We conclude that discrete and fuzzy Kanerva coding represent powerful function approximation techniques that can outperform discrete and fuzzy Tile coding on large-scale, high-dimensional learning problems.
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) Sibling Pairs Data

This article describes the design and phenotype and genotype data available for sibling pairs with varying genetic relatedness in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Add Health is a nationally representative longitudinal study of over 20,000 adolescents in the United States in 1994–1995 who have been followed for 15 years into adulthood. The Add Health design included oversamples of more than 3,000 pairs of individuals with varying genetic resemblance, ranging from monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins, full siblings, half siblings, and unrelated siblings who were raised in the same household. Add Health sibling pairs are therefore nationally representative and followed longitudinally from early adolescence into adulthood with four in-home interviews during the period 1994–2009. Add Health has collected rich longitudinal social, behavioral, environmental, and biological data, as well as buccal cell DNA from all sample members, including sibling pairs. Add Health has an enlightened dissemination policy and to date has released phenotype and genotype data to more than 10,000 researchers in the scientific community.
ROCK as a therapeutic target for ischemic stroke

ABSTRACT Introduction: Stroke is a major cause of disability and the fifth leading cause of death. Currently, the only approved acute medical treatment of ischemic stroke is tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), but its effectiveness is greatly predicated upon early administration of the drug. There is, therefore, an urgent need to find new therapeutic options for acute stroke. Areas covered: In this review, we summarize the role of Rho-associated coiled-coil containing kinase (ROCK) and its potential as a therapeutic target in stroke pathophysiology. ROCK is a major regulator of cell contractility, motility, and proliferation. Many of these ROCK-mediated processes in endothelial cells, vascular smooth muscle cells, pericytes, astrocytes, glia, neurons, leukocytes, and platelets are important in stroke pathophysiology, and the inhibition of such processes could improve stroke outcome. Expert commentary: ROCK is a potential therapeutic target for cardiovascular disease and ROCK inhibitors have already been approved for human use in Japan and China for the treatment of acute stroke. Further studies are needed to determine the role of ROCK isoforms in the pathophysiology of cerebral ischemia and whether there are further therapeutic benefits with selective ROCK inhibitors.
Distributed antenna selection algorithms for improving BER in MIMO interference channels

In this paper, distributed antenna selection algorithms are proposed to improve uncoded bit-error-rate (BER) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels. The well known distributed power control algorithm by Yates in 1995 is used in all proposed schemes together with distributed antenna search algorithms, explicitly distributed exhaustive search, relaxed exhaustive search, and cross-entropy optimization techniques. While maximization of minimum signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) is the antenna selection metric, power minimization subject to SINR constraint is the power control problem used in the proposed schemes. It is shown that the proposed algorithms improve the BER of the system with acceptable sum-rate and fairness achieved in the system. Prioritization of streams can improve the BER of the system such as by assigning higher priorities to more important streams. Although for simplicity, equal stream priority, i.e., fairness among streams, is considered in this work, the proposed schemes can be extended to prioritization scenarios.
Screening for gonococcal arthritis.

The sera of 995 patients admitted for the first time to the Rheumatism Foundation Hospital were screened for Neisserial antibodies with complement-fixation and immunofluorescence tests. Twelve sera were reactive in both tests. The mean age of the patients was 41 years with a range from 18 to 68 years. Two of the patients were males. Five patients had erosive rheumatoid arthritis, and they all had either a history of urinary tract infections or pyuria during the stay at the hospital. One male patient had an acute nonpurulent arthritis following a bacteriologically verified gonococcal infection. Five other patients had a similar type of arthritis, in one instance associated with pyuria. Finally, 1 patient had arthralgia after a urinary tract infection. The series differs from first-admission patients in general with respect to the frequency of acute transient arthritis and urinary tract infections.
Cambio climático, desarrollo sostenible y fiscalidad ambiental

Se trata la problematica del cambio climatico y el desarrollo sostenible, analizando el papel de la fiscalidad ambiental ante los compromisos adquiridos internacionalmente. Se realizan propuestas a la vista de las medidas fiscales adoptadas como complemento a los instrumentos de mercado y en particular, con el regimen de comercio de derechos de emision. Se explica el marco teorico de las politicas ambientales, las medidas adoptadas en la Union Europea, los modelos tributarios y las tendencias de la OCDE y se apuesta por el sector de la energia como clave para combinar eficazmente los distintos instrumentos tanto a nivel politico como de tecnicas juridicas.
The vitamin D status of Australian dermatologists

tions of end-stage renal disease. J Am Acad Dermatol 2000; 43: 975–86. 3 Essary LR, Wick MR. Cutaneous calciphylaxis. Am J Clin Pathol 2000; 113: 280–7. 4 Angelis M, Wong L, Myers S et al. Calciphylaxis in patients on hemodialysis: a prevalence study. Surgery 1997; 122: 1083–90. 5 Fine A, Zacharias J. Calciphylaxis is usually non-ulcerating. Risk factors, outcome and therapy. Kidney Int 2002; 61: 2210–17.
Seasonal Sap Flow of Four Salix Varieties Growing on the Solvay Wastebeds in Syracuse, NY, USA

Sap flow of four shrub willow varieties was measured to study their potential use as an evapotranspiration (ET) cover on the Solvay wastebeds to reduce deep percolation and leaching of chloride. Stem and stand-level sap flow and crop coefficients (Kc) were different among four willow varieties measured between early June and mid November 2006. Diameter and cross sectional area had a significant impact on stand level sap flow. Peak stand-level sap flow of 7 mm d−1 occurred in June, due to coupling of the willow with the atmosphere, and not in July or August when peak LAI was measured. The coupling also resulted in high Kc values of 3 in June and above 2 in October with an average of 1.1–1.3 for the entire season. Our measurements confirmed the potentials of shrub willow in ET cover applications in the northeastern USA. Total transpiration for the growing season ranged between 494 mm and 533 mm, which was about 45% of the precipitation in 2006. Our calculations showed a significant difference between peak season sap flow in June, July and August and sap flow over the course of the whole growing season, which showed the need for long-term measurements.
Vers une ontologie pour les communautés de développement de logiciel libre

Differentes approches du developpement logiciel se sont succedees et cohabitent. Le developpement de logiciel libre peut etre vu comme un cas particulier de developpement distribue ayant une structure de projet plus volatile, sans organisation clairement definie, necessitant une participation a long terme et une vision commune des participants. La nature dynamique et libre de ce type de projet, qui repose essentiellement sur l'utilisation du Web en matiere d'echange et de coordination des activites de developpement, pose de nouveaux defis pour le partage de la connaissance. Dans ce contexte, nous proposons d'exploiter les modeles et les techniques du Web semantique pour expliciter les connaissances contenues dans les ressources d'une communaute de developpement de logiciel libre. Dans cet article, nous presentons plus precisement les bases d'une ontologie dediee a ces communautes. Lors de ce travail, notre objectif a ete double. Nous avons d'une part cherche a definir le vocabulaire conceptuel mobilise pour la representation des connaissances dans les communautes de developpement de logiciel libre vues comme des communautes de pratique. D'autre part, nous avons egalement cherche a reutiliser les ontologies du domaine du developpement de logiciel libre proposees dans la litterature en les integrant a notre travail.
In vivo effects of high-intensity ultrasound on prostatic adenocarcinoma Dunning R3327.

High-intensity ultrasound has been used to treat Dunning R3327 prostatic adenocarcinoma implanted s.c. in Fischer Copenhagen rats. Focused ultrasound was generated with a 1-MHz transducer and energy was provided by a 7.5-kW power amplifier. Seventy-four rats were treated using two different sublines of Dunning tumor. Study 1 dealt with 49 rats with the Mat-Ly-Lu subline, treated with acoustic intensities ranging from 300 to 2750 W/cm2. Of the 49 rats in Study 1, 30 had complete tumor necrosis and 19 had no effect; of the 30 who had complete local tumor necrosis, 14 had local relapse, 9 had distance metastases to lung and nodes without local occurrence, and 7 remained free of tumor and were still alive 12 months after treatment. In Study 2, 25 rats with AT2 subline were treated with an intensity of 820 W/cm2. Similarly for Study 2, there was complete local tumor necrosis in 24 of 25 animals, with local regrowth in 7 of 24 and no recurrence of metastasis in the remaining 16 after a follow-up of 3 months. These results suggested that high-intensity focused ultrasound could be useful for the treatment of small localized cancerous tumors such as low-grade prostate carcinoma.
Pilot study of isolated early human follicles cultured in collagen gels for 24 hours.

The human ovarian cortex contains mainly primordial and primary follicles. The ability to mature these follicles in vitro could be of great importance for infertility treatments. Fresh and frozen-thawed ovarian tissue was incubated with collagenase and DNase. Follicles with one layer or an incomplete second layer of granulosa cells were then dissected. The follicles were embedded in collagen gels and cultured with Earle's balanced salt solution, 10% fetal calf serum and 0.5 IU/ml follicle stimulating hormone. Increases in the number of granulosa cell layers and in oocyte size were observed in 40 and 38.7% of the follicles from fresh and frozen-thawed tissue respectively, during a 24 h culture period. All the growing follicles were surrounded by cellular outgrowths. Attempts to culture the follicles longer resulted in deterioration of the follicles and oocyte release. Since our study was purely morphological, further growth parameters, e.g. DNA synthesis, should be examined in the future.
Transformation with katG restores isoniazid‐sensitivity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates resistant to a range of drug concentrations

Isoniazid‐resistant isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis were transformed with a plasmid vector carrying the functional catalase‐peroxidase (katG) gene. Expression of katG restored full drug susceptibility in isolates initially resistant to concentrations ranging from 3.2 to >50μgml−1. Transformation with the corresponding katG gene from Escherichia coli resulted in low‐level expression of catalase and peroxidase activities and conferred partial isoniazid sensitivity.
XETA: Extensible Metadata System - For Extensibility, Accuracy, Suitability and Convenience

This paper presents an eXtensible mETAdata system (XETA system) which makes it possible for the enduser to organize and extend the structure of metadata. We discuss four requirements of the flexible metadata system in semantic web and a methodology to implement the requirements. Using the XETA system, the end-user can flexibly extend metadata, enhance its semantic accuracy and selectively apply the metadata in context. The main purpose of XETA system provides end-users with a way to construct metadata in bottomup, not force them to accept fixed form and fixed meanings for metadata.
Improving network traffic in MapReduce for big data applications

Improving the performance of network traffic in shuffle phase is important to improve the performance of MapReduce. The goal of enhancement of network traffic is achieved by using partition and aggregation. According to traditional method a hash function is used to partition intermediate data among reduce tasks but the traditional function is not efficient to handle network traffic. A novel intermediate data partition scheme is designed to reduce network traffic cost in MapReduce. The aggregator placement problem is considered, where each aggregator can reduce merged traffic from multiple map tasks. A decomposition-based distributed algorithm is proposed to deal with the large-scale optimization problem for big data applications. Also an online algorithm is designed to adjust data partition and aggregation in a dynamic manner. Network traffic cost under both offline and online cases is significantly reduced as demonstrated by the stimulation results by the various proposal considered and used.
Chronic wound repair and healing in older adults: Current status and future research

The incidence of chronic wounds is increased among older adults, and the impact of chronic wounds on quality of life is particularly profound in this population. It is well established that wound healing slows with age. However, the basic biology underlying chronic wounds and the influence of age‐associated changes on wound healing are poorly understood. Most studies have used in vitro approaches and various animal models, but observed changes translate poorly to human healing conditions. The impact of age and accompanying multi‐morbidity on the effectiveness of existing and emerging treatment approaches for chronic wounds is also unknown, and older adults tend to be excluded from randomized clinical trials. Poorly defined outcomes and variables, lack of standardization in data collection, and variations in the definition, measurement, and treatment of wounds also hamper clinical studies. The Association of Specialty Professors, in conjunction with the National Institute on Aging and the Wound Healing Society, held a workshop, summarized in this paper, to explore the current state of knowledge and research challenges, engage investigators across disciplines, and identify key research questions to guide future study of age‐associated changes in chronic wound healing.
Necrotizing Enterocolitis: A Clinical Review on Diagnostic Biomarkers and the Role of the Intestinal Microbiota

AbstractNecrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) remains one of the most frequent gastrointestinal diseases in the neonatal intensive care unit, with a continuing unacceptable high mortality and morbidity rates. Up to 20% to 40% of infants with NEC will need surgical intervention at some point. Although the exact pathophysiology is not yet elucidated, prematurity, use of formula feeding, and an altered intestinal microbiota are supposed to induce an inflammatory response of the immature intestine. The clinical picture of NEC has been well described. However, an early diagnosis and differentiation against sepsis is challenging. Besides, it is difficult to timely identify NEC cases that will deteriorate and need surgical intervention. This may interfere with the most optimal treatment of infants with NEC. In this review, we discuss the pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment of NEC with a focus on the role of microbiota in the development of NEC. An overview of different clinical prediction models and biomarkers is given. Some of these are promising tools for accurate diagnosis of NEC and selection of appropriate therapy.
The Timing of New Technology Adoption: Theoretical Models and Empirical Evidence

This paper surveys the theoretical literature on the timing of new technology adoption. It presents the state of the art as it falls into two major categories, depending on whether the particular model deals with uncertainty regarding the arrival and value of a new technology and/or strategic interaction in the product market. Empirical evidence is reviewed, and recommendations are given for future research.