Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrastructure of spermatogenesis of Taenia taeniaeformis (Batsch, 1786) (Cestoda, Cyclophyllidea, Taeniidae) and comparison of spermatological characters in the family Taeniidae Ludwig, 1886

The ultrastructure of spermatogenesis of Taenia taeniaeformis is described for the first time by means of transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Mature testes contain all stages of spermatogenesis; primary spermatogonia are usually situated at the periphery and mature spermatozoa in the centre of testes. The general process is similar to that described in other cestodes. Six incomplete, synchronic cytokineses occur: four mitotic and two meiotic cell divisions. All these divisions occur simultaneously, resulting in a rosette cluster of four tertiary spermatogonia, then eight quaternary spermatogonia, and subsequently sixteen primary spermatocytes. All of these enter into a growth period and their enlarged nuclei move to the periphery of cells of the rosettes. The first meiotic division forms thirty-two secondary spermatocytes and after the second meiotic division, there are sixty-four spermatids. Spermiogenesis in T. taeniaeformis corresponds to the Ba and Marchand’s Type 3 and begins with the formation of a differentiation zone in the form of a conical projection of cytoplasm delimited by a ring of arching membranes and surrounded by submembranous cortical microtubules. Within this area, there are two centrioles, orthogonally disposed, and vestigial striated rootlets. Only one of the centrioles develops a flagellum that grows externally to the cytoplasmic extension. Posteriorly, a flagellar rotation inferior to 90° occurs and the flagellum becomes parallel to the cytoplasmic extension. Later, the two processes fuse during the so-called proximodistal fusion. The nucleus elongates and moves into the cytoplasmic extension. In the final stage of spermiogenesis, a single crested body appears at the base of the differentiating spermatozoon. Finally, the ring of arching membranes constricts and the young spermatozoon detaches from the residual cytoplasm. Ultrastructural aspects of spermatogenesis are compared with that of other cestodes studied to date, particularly of the family Taeniidae.
Air Pollution Exposure and Markers of Placental Growth and Function: The Generation R Study

Background: Air pollution exposure during pregnancy might affect placental growth and function, perhaps leading to pregnancy complications. Objective: We prospectively evaluated the associations of maternal air pollution exposure with markers of placental growth and function among 7,801 pregnant women in the Netherlands. Methods: We estimated levels of particulate matter ≤ 10 µm in aerodynamic diameter (PM10) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) at the home address for different periods during pregnancy using dispersion modeling techniques. Pro- and anti-angiogenic factors [placental growth factor (PlGF) and soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1 (sFlt-1), respectively] were measured in first- and second-trimester maternal blood and in fetal cord blood samples at delivery. Pulsatility index of the uterine and umbilical arteries was measured by Doppler ultrasound in second and third trimester, and notching was assessed in third trimester. Placenta weight and birth weight were obtained from medical records. Results: Higher PM10 and NO2 exposure levels were associated with lower second-trimester maternal sFlt-1 and PlGF levels. PM10 and NO2 exposures averaged over total pregnancy were associated with higher sFlt-1 and lower PlGF levels in fetal cord blood, consistent with an anti-angiogenic state. PM10 and NO2 exposures were not consistently associated with second- or third-trimester placental resistance indices. NO2 exposure was associated with third-trimester notching (odds ratio 1.33; 95% CI: 0.99, 1.78 per 10-µg/m3 increase in the prior 2 months). PM10 and NO2 exposures were associated with lower placenta weight (–11.8 g; 95% CI: –20.9, –2.7, and –10.7 g; 95% CI: –19.0, –2.4, respectively, per 10-µg/m3 increase in the prior 2 months), but not with placenta to birth weight ratio. Conclusions: Our results suggest that maternal air pollution exposure may influence markers of placental growth and function. Future studies are needed to confirm these findings and explore the maternal and fetal consequences.
Endothelium‐derived relaxing factor alters calcium fluxes in rabbit aorta: a cyclic guanosine monophosphate‐mediated effect.

1. Measurement of tension and 45Ca influx and efflux were used to study the effects of endothelium‐derived relaxing factor (EDRF), sodium nitroprusside and 8‐bromo‐cyclic guanosine monophosphate (GMP) on contractile responses and calcium movements in aortic ring preparations of the rabbit. 2. EDRF activity, induced by stimulating endothelium‐containing rings with acetylcholine, was associated with relaxation of noradrenaline‐constricted rings and with a marked reduction of noradrenaline‐stimulated increase in calcium influx. Sodium nitroprusside and 8‐bromo‐cyclic GMP had a similar effect in de‐endothelialized preparations. 3. EDRF also inhibited noradrenaline‐stimulated calcium efflux. Sodium nitroprusside and 8‐bromo‐cyclic GMP had a similar effect in de‐endothelialized preparations, both in the presence and absence of extracellular calcium. 4. The vascular smooth muscle relaxant effect of EDRF and of nitrovasodilators may be effected by a cyclic GMP‐mediated reduction of cytosolic calcium, through both inhibition of calcium influx and reduction of intracellular calcium release.
CCR7 Deficiency in NOD Mice Leads to Thyroiditis and Primary Hypothyroidism1

CCR7 is involved in the initiation of immune responses and has been recently implicated in the control of tolerance. To analyze the role of CCR7 in autoimmunity, we backcrossed CCR7ko/ko mice (in which ko signifies deficient) onto the autoimmune-prone NOD background. Surprisingly, NODCCR7ko/ko mice never developed diabetes, but showed severe inflammation in multiple tissues including thyroid, lung, stomach, intestine, uterus, and testis. NODCCR7ko/ko mice had a marked enlargement of the thyroid gland (goiter) that was associated with circulating autoantibodies against thyroglobulin, and development of primary hypothyroidism (decreased levels of serum thyroxin, and augmented levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone in the pituitary gland), features found in Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Cells isolated from diseased thyroids and activated splenocytes from NODCCR7ko/ko animals induced goiter in NOD.SCID recipients, demonstrating that autoreactive cells were generated in the absence of CCR7. Moreover, thyroid disease could be accelerated in young NODCCR7ko/ko mice by immunization with thyroglobulin. These results demonstrate the complexity in the generation of multiple autoimmune phenotypes in NOD mice and indicate that CCR7 is a key molecule in their development.
Optimum Control of Oscillation of Wave-Energy Converters

The power output from wave energy converters (WECs) may be increased by controlling the oscillation in order to approach an optimum interaction between the WEC and the incident wave. Optimally controlled WECs, designed to operate at full capacity a rather large fraction of their lifetime, may improve the economic prospects for wave power significantly. Most of the WECs discussed here, utilise just one mode of oscillation. An upper bound is given to the ratio between the converted power from a given wave, and the geometrical volume of the converter. One control strategy for maximising the converted power is based on measuring the incident wave, whereas another strategy utilises measurement of the WEC's own oscillation as input to the controller. In either case the measured quantity has to be predicted some seconds into the future because of noncausal control functions.
The Role of Posture in Sound Localization

Studies of auditory localization revealed that where a subject hears a sound is dependent on both his perceived head position and the auditory cues at his ears. If an error is induced between his true and registered head posture, then errors in his auditory localizations of corresponding size and time course result. The presence of visual information prevents the development of postural errors and, consequently, prevents the development of errors in auditory localization, too. These observations are related to the oculogravic illusion and are interpreted as one aspect of the functioning of a spatial reference system involved in the maintenance of the constancies of auditory and visual detection.
Política de Mantenimiento para un Sistema de Producción con Limitación en la Tasa de Producción y en la Capacidad de Almacenamiento de Inventario.

Este articulo estudia el problema de seleccionar politicas de mantenimiento adecuadas para el caso de un sistema de produccion con tasa de produccion y capacidad de almacenamiento de productos terminados en inventario limitadas. El inventario de productos terminados se disena para salvar fallos inesperados del sistema de produccion, asi como para disminuir el impacto de la variabilidad del tiempo de produccion y de la demanda.
Computation of the Resonant Frequency and Quality Factor of Lossy Substrate Integrated Waveguide Resonators by Method of Moments

This paper presents a technique for the e-cient and accurate determination of resonant frequencies and quality factors of Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) resonators. To consider resonators of a general shape the SIW structure is modelled as a parallel plate waveguide populated with metalized via holes. The fleld into the SIW cavity is found by solving the scattering problem for the set of vias into the parallel plate. Resonances are determined searching for the complex frequencies for which the determinant of the system of equations pertinent to the scattering is zero. To speed up the search, a flrst guess for the resonance frequency is found using an estimate of the minimum singular value of the system of equations. A Muller search in the complex plane is later used to accurately determine both frequencies and quality factors. Results relevant to resonators of various shapes are presented and compared with results obtained with a commercial code.
The most common cystic fibrosis‐associated mutation destabilizes the dimeric state of the nucleotide‐binding domains of CFTR

Non‐technical summary Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease caused by the malfunction of a chloride channel called cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR). The most common disease‐associated mutation is the deletion of the phenylalanine residue at position 508 (ΔF508), which result in channels with poor membrane expression and defective function. Opening of CFTR channels is controlled by ATP binding at two intracellular domains, called nucleotide‐binding domains (NBDs), and subsequent NBD dimerization. Our previous studies revealed that ΔF508‐CFTR channels open very infrequently, raising the possibility that the mutation perturbs NBD dimerization although the mutation is not located near the dimer interface. In this paper, we employed a functional assay to assess the stability of the NBD dimer. Our data suggest that the ΔF508 mutation significantly destabilizes the NBD dimer, supporting the hypothesis that the mutation disrupts the dimer interface. Our results provide structural insights that are potentially useful for drug design.
Energy-efficient Amortized Inference with Cascaded Deep Classifiers

Deep neural networks have been remarkable successful in various AI tasks but often cast high computation and energy cost for energy-constrained applications such as mobile sensing. We address this problem by proposing a novel framework that optimizes the prediction accuracy and energy cost simultaneously, thus enabling effective cost-accuracy trade-off at test time. In our framework, each data instance is pushed into a cascade of deep neural networks with increasing sizes, and a selection module is used to sequentially determine when a sufficiently accurate classifier can be used for this data instance. The cascade of neural networks and the selection module are jointly trained in an end-to-end fashion by the REINFORCE algorithm to optimize a trade-off between the computational cost and the predictive accuracy. Our method is able to simultaneously improve the accuracy and efficiency by learning to assign easy instances to fast yet sufficiently accurate classifiers to save computation and energy cost, while assigning harder instances to deeper and more powerful classifiers to ensure satisfiable accuracy. Moreover, we demonstrate our method's effectiveness with extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet32x32 and original ImageNet dataset.
Incremental learning based on block sparse kernel nonnegative matrix factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a promising method for local feature extraction in face recognition. However, NMF is time-consuming when performing on a large matrix. Another limitation of NMF is that it cannot update the factors incrementally as new training data are available. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a block sparse kernel nonnegative matrix factorization (BSKNMF) based on the block strategy. The block trick not only reduces the computational costs, but also helps to update the factors of NMF incrementally. The kernel strategy and sparse technique are incorporated into NMF, leading to a more powerful method for feature extraction. The ORL and Yale face databases are chosen for evaluation on time efficiency and recognition rate. Compared with NMF and PNMF, the proposed approach gives the best performance.
The Effect of Competition on Recovery Strategies

Manufacturers often face a choice of whether to recover the value in their end‐of‐life products through remanufacturing. In many cases, firms choose not to remanufacture, as they are (rightly) concerned that the remanufactured product will cannibalize sales of the higher‐margin new product. However, such a strategy may backfire for manufacturers operating in industries where their end‐of‐life products (cell phones, tires, computers, automotive parts, etc.) are attractive to third‐party remanufacturers, who may seriously cannibalize sales of the original manufacturer. In this paper, we develop models to support a manufacturer's recovery strategy in the face of a competitive threat on the remanufactured product market. We first analyze the competition between new and remanufactured products produced by a monopolist manufacturer and identify conditions under which the firm would choose not to remanufacture its products. We then characterize the potential profit loss due to external remanufacturing competition and analyze two entry‐deterrent strategies: remanufacturing and preemptive collection. We find that a firm may choose to remanufacture or preemptively collect its used products to deter entry, even when the firm would not have chosen to do so under a pure monopoly environment. Finally, we discuss conditions under which each strategy is more beneficial.
Identifying and Managing Stakeholders in Enterprise Information System Projects

This article focuses on how managers and sponsors of enterprise information system (EIS) projects can identify and manage stakeholders engaged in the project. This article argues that this activity should go beyond the traditional ideas about user participation and management involvement. Also suppliers, customers, government agencies, business partners and the general public can have a clear interest in the ways that the system will be designed and implemented. This article proposes to apply identification, analysis and intervention techniques from organization and management disciplines in the IS field to enhance the changes for the successfulness of enterprise information system implementations. Some of these techniques are combined in a coherent method that may help implementers of complex IS projects to identify and categorize stakeholders and to consider appropriate ways of involvement during the various stages of the project.
Mapping of epitopes on Poa p I and Lol p I allergens with monoclonal antibodies.

Allergen Poa p I isolated from the dialysed aqueous extract of Kentucky blue grass pollen by affinity chromatography with an anti-Lol p I murine monoclonal antibody (MAb) 290A-167 was previously shown to consist of a 35.8-kilodalton (kD) component with a pI of 6.4, designated as Poa p Ia, and a 33-kD component with a pI of 9.1, designated as Poa p Ib. The present study reports on the comparative antigenic analyses of these two components, using MAbs produced separately against Poa p I and Lol p I. Thus, anti-Poa p I MAbs 60 and 61 and anti-Lol p I MAb 290A-167 recognized Poa p Ia and Poa p Ib whereas anti-Poa p I MAbs 62, 63 and 64 and anti-Lol p I MAb 348A-6 recognized only Poa p Ia. The specificities of the MAbs were further resolved by comparing their respective abilities to inhibit the binding of 125I-Poa p I or 125I-Lol p I to the different MAbs prepared in the form of solid phase. These studies revealed that at least 4 distinct epitopes (designated as E1, E2, E3 and E4) were shared by both Poa p I and Lol p I. All 4 epitopes were present on Poa p Ia whereas only E1 and E3 were detected on Poa p Ib. E1 was recognized by MAbs 60 and 61, E2 by MAbs 62, 63 and 64, E3 by MAb 290A-167 and E4 by MAb 348A-6. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Decoupling Learning Rules from Representations

In the artificial intelligence field, learning often corresponds to changing the parameters of a parameterized function. A learning rule is an algorithm or mathematical expression that specifies precisely how the parameters should be changed. When creating an artificial intelligence system, we must make two decisions: what representation should be used (i.e., what parameterized function should be used) and what learning rule should be used to search through the resulting set of representable functions. Using most learning rules, these two decisions are coupled in a subtle (and often unintentional) way. That is, using the same learning rule with two different representations that can represent the same sets of functions can result in two different outcomes. After arguing that this coupling is undesirable, particularly when using artificial neural networks, we present a method for partially decoupling these two decisions for a broad class of learning rules that span unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and supervised learning.
Integration of Just In Time (JIT) Inventory in Outpatient Pharmacy Information Systems

With the implementation of the recent Healthcare Reform Act and the increased scrutiny on the soaring costs of healthcare, medical plans are looking for ways to optimize workflows and reduce costs. Titan Healthcare is a large non-profit integrated healthcare company located in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Texas. They provide health insurance coverage, and a broad range of comprehensive health care services. Titan Healthcare is engrossed to employ the best strategies to close performance gaps and efficiently manage their operations. To help improve their pharmacy operations, they are seeking to design and implement a new Outpatient Pharmacy Information System which will handle both dispensing and inventory functionality. From a pharmacy inventory perspective, expectations for the system are to significantly reduce inventory costs and increase service levels to their members. Titan Healthcare is currently exploring options for designing the right Outpatient Pharmacy Inventory Management System for its operations.
Transhiatal Esophageal Resection for Corrosive Injury

Objectives:To analyze the feasibility and safety of transhiatal approach for resection of corrosively scarred esophagus. Background Summary Data:The unrelenting corrosive strictures of esophagus merit esophageal substitution. Because of the risk of complications in the retained esophagus, such as malignancy, mucocele, gastroesophageal reflux, and bleeding, esophageal resection is deemed necessary. Transthoracic approach for esophageal resection is considered safe. The safety and feasibility of transhiatal resection of the esophagus is not established in corrosive injury of the esophagus. Patients and Methods:Transhiatal approach was used for resection of the scarred esophagus for all patients between January 1986 and December 2001. The intraoperative complications, indications for adding thoracotomy, and postoperative outcome were studied in 51 patients. Follow-up period varied from minimum of 6 months to 15 years. Results:Esophageal resection was achieved in 49 of 51 patients whereas thoracotomy was added in 2 patients. In 1 of the patients tracheal injury occurred whereas in other patient there were dense adhesions between tracheal membrane and esophagus. Gastric tube was used for esophageal substitution in 40 (78.4%) patients whereas colon was transplanted in 11 (21.6%) patients. Colon was used only when stomach was not available. One patient (1.9%) had tracheal membrane injury whereas 4 patients (7.8%) had recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy. One patient each had thoracic duct injury and intrathoracic gastric tube leak. There was no operative mortality. Anastomotic complications like leak were present in 19.6% and stricture in 58.8% patients. All the patients were able to resume their normal duties and swallow normal food within 6 months of the surgery. Conclusion:One-stage transhiatal esophageal resection and reconstruction could be safely used for the extirpation of scarred esophagus. Use of gastric conduit was technically simple, quicker, and offered good functional outcome. Postoperative anastomotic stricture amenable to dilatations was the commonest complication.
An innovative estimation method with own-ship estimator for an allaccelerometer-type inertial navigation system

An innovation estimation scheme is conceived to solve the initial and divergent problems for an all-accelerometer inertial navigation system (INS). The system uses six accelerometers mounted diagonally on each surface of a cube. The method exploits the presence of the gravity effect which gives additional information that helps to determine the sense of the angular velocity. It also provides an upper bound value for the initiation of the platform attitude. A simulation case is investigated, which verifies the effectiveness of using this information-infusing concept in obtaining a convergent INS state estimation, through using the own-ship trajectory estimator to provide the pseudo-measurements for the position and velocity of the vehicle.