Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reduction in Levels of 24 S-Hydroxycholesterol by Statin Treatment in Patients With Alzheimer Disease

Background: The statin treatment of dyslipidemia is associated with a reduced risk of development of Alzheimer disease (AD). The effect may be mediated by a reduction in cholesterol biosynthesis in the brain, by lowering levels of apolipoprotein E (apo E)–containing lipoproteins, or by pleitropic effects such as reduction in -amyloid production. In the brain, cholesterol from damaged or dying neurons is converted to 24Shydroxycholesterol by cholesterol 24-hydroxylase (CYP46). The oxysterol is subsequently transferred across the blood-brain barrier, transported to the liver by lowdensity lipoproteins (LDLs), and excreted as bile acids. Most of plasma 24S-hydroxycholesterol is derived from brain cholesterol; consequently, plasma levels of the oxysterol reflect brain cholesterol catabolism.
The Generalized Consensus Problem in a Cloud Computing Environment

The new concept, cloud computing uses low-power hosts to achieve high reliability and will ensure the ability to be better. Cloud computing increases the number of user’s applications on the Internet. In this research, the cloud computing environment can provide better reliability and fluency is focused. The consensus problem is fundamental to fault-tolerant distributed systems, but previous studies of the consensus problem are not suitable for a cloud computing environment. To enhance fault tolerance, the consensus problem in a cloud computing environment is revisited in this study. The Generalized Consensus Protocol of Cloud Computing (GCPCC) that we proposed can solve the consensus problem with a minimal number of rounds of message exchange and tolerates a maximal number of faulty components. The GCPCC attempts to solve the consensus problem and makes all correct components in a cloud computing environment achieve stable results without any influence from faulty components.
The Effect of Caffeine and Sleep Quality on Military Pilot Students’ Flight Performance-Related Cognitive Function

ABSTRACT Objective To assess the effect of caffeine and sleep quality on the flight performance-related cognitive function. Background High levels of cognitive performance in pilots is required for flight safety. Methods Students at a military flight school in Thailand were invited to participate in this study. Exclusion criteria was positive screening for caffeine use disorder. We examined three cognitive functions required for flight performance: (1) vigilance (Mackworth Clock Test), (2) situational awareness, including memory (Corsi block-tapping test) and spatial reasoning (mental rotation test), and (3) reaction time (Deary-Liewald task). Neuropsychological tasks were performed before and 30 minutes after drinking a bottle of 220 ml coffee containing 143 mg of caffeine. Sleep quality was measured by the Thai-Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Results Twenty-nine healthy males without caffeine use disorder with a mean age of 25.1 years were enrolled. After low-dose caffeine intake (<3 mg/kg body weight), cognitive performance improved significantly in vigilance, situation awareness, and reaction time. Baseline cognitive performance was not different between high (HSQ) and low sleep quality (LSQ) groups. After drinking coffee, however, participants with HSQ demonstrated improvements in vigilance and reaction time, while the LSQ group had improved vigilance only. Conclusion Low dose caffeine improved vigilance, situational awareness, and reaction time which were cognitive functions required for flight performance. The cognitive-enhancing effect of caffeine was more obvious in student pilots with high-quality sleep.
Saliency Preprocessing Locality-Constrained Linear Coding for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Locality-constrained Linear Coding (LLC) shows superior image classification performance due to its underlying properties of local smooth sparsity and good construction. It encodes the visual features in remote sensing images and realizes the process of modeling human visual perception of an image through a computer. However, it ignores the consideration of saliency preprocessing in the human visual system. Saliency detection preprocessing can effectively enhance a computer’s perception of remote sensing images. To better implement the task of remote sensing image scene classification, this paper proposes a new approach by combining saliency detection preprocessing and LLC. This saliency detection preprocessing approach is realized using spatial pyramid Gaussian kernel density estimation. Experiments show that the proposed method achieved a better performance for remote sensing scene classification tasks.
Tourist See Tourist Do: The Influence of Hollywood Movies and Television on Tourism Motivation and Activity Behavior

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of Hollywood movies and television (movies/TV) on US viewer’s motivation to travel to and participate in activities featured in Hollywood movies/TV productions. A survey was administered in an online format to a convenience sample of 433 respondents via Qualtrics. Factor analysis, correlation, and regression was employed to explore relationships between the variables. Findings identified a profile of Hollywood movies/TV viewers, sources of information used to determine destination choice, and level of involvement among viewers of Hollywood movies/TV productions. Additionally, this study explored the relationships between Hollywood movies/TV productions, tourist motivations, and the propensity to participate in activities featured. Findings indicate that Hollywood movies/TV productions have a positive impact on viewer involvement and that movie/TV related tourism is likely to be affected by movie and TV viewing preference and destination image. The results identify that the predictor “TV viewing behavior” is the strongest predictor of entertainmentmotivated tourism, followed by “destination image” and “movie viewing behavior. ” Findings also indicate that “destination image” is the strongest predictor of movie-related activities and that the image portrayed in a movie does influence the viewer’s inclination to visit and participate in activities featured in a movie.
Effective Citizen Engagement in Community Policing: The Lessons and Experience of Taiwan

Community policing has gradually drawn attention in many countries since the 1990s. This new policing strategy can prevent crime, while also increasing citizen participation and justifying democratic policing. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Taiwan police agencies have adopted community policing. The practice includes the planning of police beats, community fora on safety issues, and service-orientated policing. Since one of the core tenets of community policing is citizen participation and engagement, why do some police agencies differ within the same jurisdiction? To answer this question, this paper builds a simple framework showing how a variety of external and internal factors can affect citizen engagement in community policing. The qualitative data was collected in diverse urban and rural police stations. This study provides a better understanding of how to promote citizen engagement in community policing.
The correlations between the twin kHz quasi-periodic oscillation frequencies of low-mass X-ray binaries

We analyzed the recently published kHz quasi-period oscillaiton (QPO) data in the neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), in order to investigate the different correlations of the twin-peak kHz QPOs in bright Z sources and in the less luminous Atoll sources. We find a power-law relation nu(1)similar to nu(b)(2) between the upper and the lower kHz QPOs with different indices: b similar or equal to 1.5 for the Atoll source 4U 1728-34 and b similar or equal to 1.9 for the Z source Sco X-1. The implications of our results for the theoretical models for kHz QPOs are discussed.
The International Symposium on Advances in Transaction Processing ( ATP ) F a CET a * : Checkpointing for Transactional Composite Web Service Execution based on Petri-Nets

Failures during the execution of Transactional Composite Web Services (TCWSs) can be repaired by forward or backward recovery processes, according to the component WSs transactional properties. In previous works, we presented TCWS fault tolerant execution approaches relying on WSs replacement, on a compensation protocol, and on unrolling processes of Colored Petri-Nets (CPNs) to support forward and backward recovery. We represent a TCWS and its corresponding backward recovery process by CPNs. Even though these recovery processes ensure system consistency, backward recovery means that users do not get the desired answer to their queries and forward recovery could imply long waiting time for users to finally get the desired response. In this paper, we present an alternative fault tolerant approach in which, in case of failures, the unrolling process of the CPN controlling the execution of a TCWS is checkpointed and the execution flow goes on as much as it is possible. In this way, users can have partial responses as soon as they are received and can re-submit the checkpointed CPN to re-start its execution from an advanced point of execution (checkpoint). We present the checkpointing algorithm integrated to our previous work. c © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Improved control of a humanoid arm driven by pneumatic actuators

Favorable characteristics of pneumatic actuators, such as high force-to-weight ratio and safe interaction with humans are very suitable for robotic applications. At the Center for Intelligent Systems at Vanderbilt University, pneumatic actuators are used in our humanoid robot, called Intelligent Soft Arm Control (ISAC) and have been subject in several papers in the past [1–4]. Due to the high nonlinearity of the system combined with the serial kinematics, a fast and robust control is necessary to achieve the desired motion. Regular controllers seem to be overstrained with handling these problems, thus special control techniques are required. In this paper, an approach to improve a conventional PID control by implementing a cascaded model-based controller is presented. To judge the performances of both control types, a testbed was built and experiments were performed. The test results are discussed in this paper.
Synthetic Genomics From a Yeast Perspective

Synthetic Genomics focuses on the construction of rationally designed chromosomes and genomes and offers novel approaches to study biology and to construct synthetic cell factories. Currently, progress in Synthetic Genomics is hindered by the inability to synthesize DNA molecules longer than a few hundred base pairs, while the size of the smallest genome of a self-replicating cell is several hundred thousand base pairs. Methods to assemble small fragments of DNA into large molecules are therefore required. Remarkably powerful at assembling DNA molecules, the unicellular eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been pivotal in the establishment of Synthetic Genomics. Instrumental in the assembly of entire genomes of various organisms in the past decade, the S. cerevisiae genome foundry has a key role to play in future Synthetic Genomics developments.
Feasibility of Specular Reflection Imaging for Extraction of Neck Vessel Pressure Waveforms

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of death worldwide and was responsible for 31% of all deaths in 2015. Changes in fluid pressures within the vessels of the circulatory system reflect the mechanical function of the heart. The jugular venous (JV) pulse waveform is an important clinical sign for assessing cardiac function. However, technology able to aid evaluation and interpretation are currently lacking. The goal of the current study was to develop a remote monitoring tool that aid clinicians in robust measurements of JV pulse waveforms. To address this need, we have developed a novel imaging modality, Specular Reflection Vascular Imaging (SRVI). The technology uses specular reflection for visualization of skin displacements caused by pressure pulsations in blood vessels. SRVI has been tested on 10 healthy volunteers. 10-seconds videos of the neck illuminated with a diffuse light source were captured at 250 fps. SRVI was able to identify and discriminate skin displacements caused by carotid artery and jugular vein pulsations to extract both carotid artery and jugular vein waveforms, making them easier to be visualized and interpreted. The method provided a 6-fold improvement in signal strength over a comparator remote PPG dataset. The current pilot study is a proof-of-concept demonstration of the potential of Specular Reflection Vascular Imaging for extraction of JV pulse waveforms.
The Shaping of AMPA Receptor Surface Distribution by Neuronal Activity

Neurotransmission is critically dependent on the number, position, and composition of receptor proteins on the postsynaptic neuron. Of these, α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid receptors (AMPARs) are responsible for the majority of postsynaptic depolarization at excitatory mammalian synapses following glutamate release. AMPARs are continually trafficked to and from the cell surface, and once at the surface, AMPARs laterally diffuse in and out of synaptic domains. Moreover, the subcellular distribution of AMPARs is shaped by patterns of activity, as classically demonstrated by the synaptic insertion or removal of AMPARs following the induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), respectively. Crucially, there are many subtleties in the regulation of AMPARs, and exactly how local and global synaptic activity drives the trafficking and retention of synaptic AMPARs of different subtypes continues to attract attention. Here we will review how activity can have differential effects on AMPAR distribution and trafficking along with its subunit composition and phosphorylation state, and we highlight some of the controversies and remaining questions. As the AMPAR field is extensive, to say the least, this review will focus primarily on cellular and molecular studies in the hippocampus. We apologise to authors whose work could not be cited directly owing to space limitations.
Why Does Piscirickettsia salmonis Break the Immunological Paradigm in Farmed Salmon? Biological Context to Understand the Relative Control of Piscirickettsiosis

Piscirickettsiosis (SRS) has been the most important infectious disease in Chilean salmon farming since the 1980s. It was one of the first to be described, and to date, it continues to be the main infectious cause of mortality. How can we better understand the epidemiological situation of SRS? The catch-all answer is that the Chilean salmon farming industry must fight year after year against a multifactorial disease, and apparently only the environment in Chile seems to favor the presence and persistence of Piscirickettsia salmonis. This is a fastidious, facultative intracellular bacterium that replicates in the host’s own immune cells and antigen-presenting cells and evades the adaptive cell-mediated immune response, which is why the existing vaccines are not effective in controlling it. Therefore, the Chilean salmon farming industry uses a lot of antibiotics—to control SRS—because otherwise, fish health and welfare would be significantly impaired, and a significantly higher volume of biomass would be lost per year. How can the ever-present risk of negative consequences of antibiotic use in salmon farming be balanced with the productive and economic viability of an animal production industry, as well as with the care of the aquatic environment and public health and with the sustainability of the industry? The answer that is easy, but no less true, is that we must know the enemy and how it interacts with its host. Much knowledge has been generated using this line of inquiry, however it remains insufficient. Considering the state-of-the-art summarized in this review, it can be stated that, from the point of view of fish immunology and vaccinology, we are quite far from reaching an effective and long-term solution for the control of SRS. For this reason, the aim of this critical review is to comprehensively discuss the current knowledge on the interaction between the bacteria and the host to promote the generation of more and better measures for the prevention and control of SRS.
Stochastic Liouville, Langevin, Fokker–Planck, and Master Equation Approaches to Quantum Dissipative Systems

Half century has past since the pioneering works of Anderson and Kubo on the stochastic theory of spectral line shape were published in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 9 (1954) 316 and 935, respectively. In this review, we give an overview and extension of the stochastic Liouville equation focusing on its theoretical background and applications to help further the development of their works. With the aid of path integral formalism, we derive the stochastic Liouville equation for density matrices of a system. We then cast the equation into the hierarchy of equations which can be solved analytically or computationally in a nonperturbative manner including the effect of a colored noise. We elucidate the applications of the stochastic theory from the unified theoretical basis to analyze the dynamics of a system as probed by experiments. We illustrate this as a review of several experimental examples including NMR, dielectric relaxation, Mossbauer spectroscopy, neutron scattering, and linear and nonlinear laser spectroscop.
Evaluation of Buckwheat Genotypes to Different Planting Geometries and Fertility Levels in Northern Transition Zone of Karnataka

Abstract—Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum Moench) is an annual crop belongs to family Poligonaceae. The cultivated buckwheat species are notable for their exceptional nutritive values. It is an important source of carbohydrates, fibre, macro, and microelements such as K, Ca, Mg, Na and Mn, Zn, Se, and Cu. It also contains rutin, flavonoids, riboflavin, pyridoxine and many amino acids which have beneficial effects on human health, including lowering both blood lipid and sugar levels. Rutin, quercetin and some other polyphenols are potent carcinogens against colon and other cancers. Buckwheat has significant nutritive value and plenty of uses. Cultivation of buckwheat in Sothern part of India is very meager. Hence, a study was planned with an objective to know the performance of buckwheat genotypes to different planting geometries and fertility levels. The field experiment was conducted at Main Agriculture Research Station, University of Agriculture Sciences, Dharwad, India, during 2017 Kharif. The experiment was laid-out in split-plot design with three replications having three planting geometries as main plots, two genotypes as sub plots and three fertility levels as sub-sub plot treatments. The soil of the experimental site was vertisol. The standard procedures are followed to record the observations. The planting geometry of 30*10 cm was recorded significantly higher seed yield (893 kg/ha−1), stover yield (1507 kg ha−1), clusters plant−1 (7.4), seeds clusters−1 (7.9) and 1000 seed weight (26.1 g) as compared to 40*10 cm and 20*10 cm planting geometries. Between the genotypes, significantly higher seed yield (943 kg ha−1) and harvest index (45.1) was observed with genotype IC-79147 as compared to PRB-1 genotype (687 kg ha−1 and 34.2, respectively). However, the genotype PRB-1 recorded significantly higher stover yield (1344 kg ha−1) as compared to genotype IC-79147 (1173 kg ha−1). The genotype IC-79147 was recorded significantly higher clusters plant−1 (7.1), seeds clusters−1 (7.9) and 1000 seed weight (24.5 g) as compared PRB-1 (5.4, 5.8 and 22.3 g, respectively). Among the fertility levels tried, the fertility level of 60:30 NP kg ha−1 recorded significantly higher seed yield (845 kg ha) and stover yield (1359 kg ha−1) as compared to 40:20 NP kg ha (808 and 1259 kg ha−1 respectively) and 20:10 NP kg ha (793 and 1144 kg ha−1 respectively). Within the treatment combinations, IC 79147 genotype having 30*10 cm planting geometry with 60:30 NP kg ha−1 recorded significantly higher seed yield (1070 kg ha−1), clusters plant−1 (10.3), seeds clusters−1 (9.9) and 1000 seed weight (27.3 g) compared to other treatment combinations.
Affirmation, Solidarity, and Critique : Moving Beyond Tolerance in Multicultural Education

“We want our students to develop tolerance of others,” says a teacher when asked what multicultural education means to her. “The greatest gift we can give our students is a tolerance for differences,” is how a principal explains it. A school’s mission statement might be more explicit: “Students at the Jefferson School will develop critical habits of the mind, a capacity for creativity and risk-taking, and tolerance for those different from themselves. ” In fact, if we were to listen to pronouncements at school board meetings, or conversations in teachers’ rooms, or if we perused school handbooks, we would probably discover that when mentioned at all, multicultural education is associated more often with the term tolerance than with any other. My purpose in this article is to challenge readers, and indeed the very way that multicultural education is practiced in schools in general, to move beyond tolerance in both conceptualization and implementation. It is my belief that a movement beyond tolerance is absolutely necessary if multicultural education is to become more than a superficial “bandaid” or a “feel-good” additive to our school curricula. I will argue that tolerance is actually a low level of multicultural support, reflecting as it does an acceptance of the status quo with but slight accommodations to difference. I will review and expand upon a model of multicultural education that I have developed elsewhere (See Sonia Nieto, By Sonia Nieto
Analysis on Business Development and Pricing for Electric Vehicle Charging in Indonesia

Electric Vehicles (EVs) has important role in the successful of energy transition and reducing dependency from fossil fuels. Indonesia has started to develop EVs. One of the challenges is charging infrastructure development, includes business model and pricing scheme to achieve business feasibility. This study analyses business model and pricing mechanism for public charging station in Indonesia where a case study is conducted in Jabodetabek area. Monte-Carlo method is used to estimate charging demand based on current travel data and estimated EVs population in 2025. Cash flow method is used to calculate feasible price for public charging with Fixed and ToU price schemes. EVs home charging cost is also calculated to investigate competitiveness of public charging price for each business model. The results show that prices of public charging business model are competitive compared to cost of home charging. The proposed ToU price scheme for public charging is more competitive compared to fixed price scheme, and also effective to minimize grid load escalation of home charging during busy periods. Furthermore, daily cost of EV charging is calculated and compared to fuel cost of ICE vehicles. The result shows that EV charging cost is lower than fuel cost of ICE vehicles.