gebhart/patrepeval huggingface dataset:
Experimental design techniques in evolutionary algorithms (2006)

This thesis explores the application of experimental design techniques to the field of evolutionary algorithms. It shows how to use experimental design techniques to analyse a wide range of landscape structures in different representation spaces and compares experimental design techniques with the existing approaches in the literature of landscape analysis. Furthermore, the incorporation of experimental design techniques into evolutionary operators is investigated.
Mechanosensitive Pelvic Nerve Afferent Fibers Innervating the Colon of the Rat are Polymodal in Character (1998)

Su, X. and G. F. Gebhart. Mechanosensitive pelvic nerve afferent fibers innervating the colon of the rat are polymodal in character. J. Neurophysiol. 80: 00–00, 1998. This report describes the chemical and thermal sensitivity of mechanosensitive pelvic nerve afferent fibers innervating the colon of the rat. A total of 51 fibers in the S1 dorsal root, identified by electrical stimulation of the pelvic nerve, were studied. An approximately 7 cm length of descending colon was isolated in situ to permit intracolonic perfusion and distension with Krebs solution. Reproducibility of responses to repetitive colorectal distension (CRD, 40 mmHg, 30 s, every 4 min) was documented. All fibers gave monotonic, incrementing responses to graded CRD (5 to 60 mmHg). Increases ( n = 6) or decreases ( n = 6) in pH of the perfusate failed to produce any change in resting activity or responses to CRD. Infusion of bile salts increased the resting activity of 6/6 fibers in a concentration-dependent manner, but did not affect the magnitude of responses to CRD. After intracolonic instillation of an inflammatory soup (bradykinin 10 −5 M, PGE 2 10 −5 M, serotonin 10 −5 M, histamine 10 −5 M and KCl 10 −3 M), 13/22 fibers exhibited sensitization of responses to CRD. Seventy-three percent of 45 fibers tested responded to intracolonic perfusion of heated Krebs solution. The estimated threshold for response was 45°C and response magnitude increased with the temperature. A smaller proportion (30%) of 37 fibers tested responded to intracolonic perfusion of cold Krebs solution. The estimated threshold for response was 28°C. Of 36 fibers tested, 8 were activated by both heat and cold; typically, fibers activated by heat did not respond to cold. In a sample of 26 fibers tested for response to all three modalities of stimulation, 11 responded to mechanical, chemical and thermal stimuli; the remaining 15 responded to mechanical and either chemical or thermal stimulation. Changes in intracolonic pressure in response to chemical and thermal stimuli were also evaluated. Inflammatory soup and bile salts did not change intracolonic pressure; heat and cold produced a modest decrease and increase in muscle tension, respectively. These results document that mechanosensitive pelvic nerve afferent fibers are also chemosensitive and/or thermosensitive, supporting the notion that visceral mechanoreceptors in general are likely polymodal in character.
High-speed thermal analysis of Zr-Nb alloys (1965)

The Ms temperature of the ω, `diffuse ω', and α phases in Zr-Nb alloys have been studied by recording the thermal arrests obtained on rapid cooling and by electrical resistance measurements. Details of the apparatus which permits heat treatment of specimens in high vacuum, followed by gas quenching, are given together with the temperature of transformation and its dependence on rate of cooling. The transformation temperature is depressed in all alloys with increasing cooling rate, this depression being 100 degC at 3000 degC sec-1 for pure zirconium. Proof of the dependence of ω formation on cooling rate is given. Hypothetical (Ms, Mf) curves based on the experimental results are shown which account for the sequence of phases observed in as-quenched zirconium alloys.
Prospects for the Xenopus Embryo Model in Therapeutics Technologies (2004)

Access to suitable animal models is essential in the field of therapeutics technologies. Recently, lower vertebrates have emerged as attractive low-cost animal models which offer new exciting applications in functional genomics and therapeutics technologies. Amphibian embryos of the genus Xenopus have long served as important models for the study of vertebrate development. Xenopus is evolutionary significantly less distant to humans than fish models, which suggests that experimental findings gained with Xenopus will more accurately predict human biology. Numerous experimental advantages, including external development, large size, identifiable blastomeres, and their ability to withstand extensive surgical intervention and culture in vitro, have favored the use of the Xenopus model in the past. More recently, the introduction of a simple efficient method to disrupt gene functions and the rapid development of genomic resources has further increased the attractiveness of this low-cost, high-throughput model for the analysis of vertebrate gene functions. Using the Xenopus embryo as the primary animal model, our research in the field of therapeutics technologies has focused on the identification and validation of novel drug targets by employing genomic and transcriptomic information in the analysis of the molecular and cellular processes underlying kidney organogenesis and vascular development. Furthermore, our research on signaling pathways controlling cellular differentiation of embryonic tissues provides important insights that may ultimately lead to the development of novel cell-based therapies in regenerative medicine. Finally, we are exploring the possibility of employing the Xenopus embryos in chemical library screens to identify novel chemical modulators of organogenesis.
The Case for Reverse Mortgages in Australia - Applying the USA Experience (2003)

In the USA, reverse mortgages have been promoted as a means of accessing equity locked up in a residence, especially after the owner/s has retired. Although there have been some teething problems, the concept of mortgaging the family home after achieving freehold ownership has many merits. Often an asset-rich household must survive on relatively small regular income, and is unable to access the increasing wealth of the family home. A reverse mortgage overcomes this hurdle. The largest asset for many ageing households is their primary place of residence, the traditional house and suburban land parcel. Recently, the Australian housing market has witnessed substantial growth in the value of its capital city housing, especially on the east coast of Australia. This can be attributed to factors such as owner-occupiers trading up to a better class of dwelling, and the continuing gentrification process for owners choosing not to relocate. At the same time, demographic changes have placed pressure on the regular income of retirees, many of whom have no superannuation fund. For example, life expectancy rates continue to rise and there are an increasing proportion of single person households in society. This has placed additional pressure on financial resources of retirees, especially those with a substantial
Modeling of the glottal flow derivative waveform with application to speaker identification (1999)

An automatic technique for estimating and modeling the glottal flow derivative source waveform from speech, and applying the model parameters to speaker identification, is presented. The estimate of the glottal flow derivative is decomposed into coarse structure, representing the general flow shape, and fine structure, comprising aspiration and other perturbations in the flow, from which model parameters are obtained. The glottal flow derivative is estimated using an inverse filter determined within a time interval of vocal-fold closure that is identified through differences in formant frequency modulation during the open and closed phases of the glottal cycle. This formant motion is predicted by Ananthapadmanabha and Fant (1982) to be a result of time-varying and nonlinear source/vocal tract coupling within a glottal cycle. The glottal flow derivative estimate is modeled using the Liljencrants-Fant (1986) model to capture its coarse structure, while the fine structure of the flow derivative is represented through energy and perturbation measures. The model parameters are used in a Gaussian mixture model speaker identification (SID) system. Both coarse- and fine-structure glottal features are shown to contain significant speaker-dependent information. For a large TIMIT database subset, averaging over male and female SID scores, the coarse-structure parameters achieve about 60% accuracy, the fine-structure parameters give about 40% accuracy, and their combination yields about 70% correct identification. Finally, in preliminary experiments on the counterpart telephone-degraded NTIMIT database, about a 5% error reduction in SID scores is obtained when source features are combined with traditional mel-cepstral measures.
Towards Multi-site Metadata Management for Geographically Distributed Cloud Workflows (2015)

With their globally distributed datacenters, clouds now provide an opportunity to run complex large-scale applications on dynamically provisioned, networked and federated infrastructures. However, there is a lack of tools supporting data intensive applications across geographically distributed sites. For instance, scientific workflows which handle many small files can easily saturate state-of-the-art distributed filesystems based on centralized metadata servers (e.g. HDFS, PVFS). In this paper, we explore several alternative design strategies to efficiently support the execution of existing workflow engines across multi-site clouds, by reducing the cost of metadata operations. These strategies leverage workflow semantics in a 2-level metadata partitioning hierarchy that combines distribution and replication. The system was validated on the Microsoft Azure cloud across 4 EU and US datacenters. The experiments were conducted on 128 nodes using synthetic benchmarks and real-life applications. We observe as much as 28% gain in execution time for a parallel, geo-distributed real-world application (Montage) and up to 50% for a metadata-intensive synthetic benchmark, compared to a baseline centralized configuration.
<i>egc</i> -Encoded Superantigens from <i>Staphylococcus aureus</i> Are Neutralized by Human Sera Much Less Efficiently than Are Classical Staphylococcal Enterotoxins or Toxic Shock Syndrome Toxin (2004)

PCR was employed to determine the presence of all known superantigen genes (sea, seq, and tst) and of the exotoxin-like gene cluster (set) in 40 Staphylococcus aureus isolates from blood cultures and throat swabs; 28 isolates harbored superantigen genes, five on average, and this strictly correlated with their ability to stimulate T-cell proliferation. In contrast, the set gene cluster was detected in every S. aureus strain, suggesting a nonredundant function for these genes which is different from T-cell activation. No more than 10% of normal human serum samples inhibited the T-cell stimulation elicited by egc-encoded enterotoxins (staphylococcal enterotoxins G, I, M, N, and O), whereas between 32 and 86% neutralized the classical superantigens. Similarly, intravenous human immunoglobulin G preparations inhibited egc-encoded superantigens with 10- to 100-fold-reduced potency compared with the classical enterotoxins. Thus, there are surprisingly large gaps in the capacity of human serum samples to neutralize S. aureus superantigens.
High-level ROR1 associates with accelerated disease progression in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (2016)

ROR1 is an oncoembryonic orphan receptor found on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) B cells, but not on normal postpartum tissues. ROR1 is a receptor for Wnt5a that may complex with TCL1, a coactivator of AKT that is able to promote development of CLL. We found the CLL cells of a few patients expressed negligible ROR1 (ROR1<sup>Neg</sup>), but expressed TCL1A at levels comparable to those of samples that expressed ROR1 (ROR1<sup>Pos</sup>). Transcriptome analyses revealed that ROR1<sup>Neg</sup> cases generally could be distinguished from those that were ROR1<sup>Pos</sup> in unsupervised gene-expression clustering analysis. Gene-set enrichment analyses demonstrated that ROR1<sup>Neg</sup> CLL had lower expression and activation of AKT signaling pathways relative to ROR1<sup>Pos</sup> CLL, similar to what was noted for leukemia that respectively developed in TCL1 vs ROR1xTCL1 transgenic mice. In contrast to its effect on ROR1<sup>Pos</sup> CLL, Wnt5a did not enhance the proliferation, chemotaxis, or survival of ROR1<sup>Neg</sup> CLL. We examined the CLL cells from 1568 patients, which we randomly assigned to a training or validation set of 797 or 771 cases, respectively. Using recursive partitioning, we defined a threshold for ROR1 surface expression that could segregate samples of the training set into ROR1-Hi vs ROR1-Lo subgroups that differed significantly in their median treatment-free survival (TFS). Using this threshold, we found that ROR1-Hi cases had a significantly shorter median TFS and overall survival than ROR1-Lo cases in the validation set. These data demonstrate that expression of ROR1 may promote leukemia-cell activation and survival and enhance disease progression in patients with CLL.
Analytical Characteristics of Electrochemical Biosensor Using Pt‐Dispersed Graphene on Boron Doped Diamond Electrode (2011)

Abstract An electrochemical biosensor was developed using Pt‐nanoparticles (Pt‐NPs) dispersed graphene based on a boron‐doped diamond thin film electrode. To compare its performances with those of other biosensors, glucose was used as a target analyte. This biosensor exhibited a wide linear range, a low detection limit and a higher sensitivity compared to other amperometric biosensors using graphene‐based electrodes. In addition, the biosensor promotes a direct electron transfer between the redox enzymes and the electrode surface and detects low concentration analytes. The excellent performance of the biosensor is attributed to the synergistic effect of the Pt‐NPs, graphene sheet and the BDD thin film. Therefore, it can be a promising application for electrochemical detection of analytes.
Sweat protein components tested by SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis followed by immunoblotting. (1990)

Sweat samples were collected in a sauna from 74 healthy volunteers (72 men and 2 women) and concentrated. SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) of the individual samples revealed, in general, five main proteins and four PAS positive components. In pooled sweat, a method of SDS-PAGE followed by immunoblotting with specific antisera or antibodies against 24 human serum components was applied, and three out of the five main proteins showed the same molecular weights and antigenicities corresponding to serum albumin (67,000 Da), Zn-alpha 2-glycoprotein (42,000 Da) and lysozyme (14,000 Da). Moreover, orosomucoid, transferrin, IgG and IgA were demonstrated in the pooled sweat. Although alpha 1-antitrypsin was probably in the pooled sweat, other serum components could not be detected. On the pooled and individual sweat samples, anti-carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) formed three bands at 42,000, 19,000 and 18,000 Da, but the antibody did not react with normal serum. It might be considered from these molecular weights that those sweat components are CEA-related antigens.
The Cortex Regulates the Immune System and the Activities of a T-Cell Specific Immunopotentiator (1988)

Evidence has accumulated to demonstrate important bidirectional communications between the nervous and immune systems. The anatomic pathways of communication include the commitment of different midbrain areas to regulation of immunologic functions. Neuropeptides appear as critical mediators of neuroregulation of function of diverse immunocompetent cells. Biochemicals secreted by immunocompetent cells mediate the effects of the immune system on the nervous system. We provide suggestive evidence that the above summarized effects are under a lateralized control of the neocortex. Furthermore, the neocortex has a lateralized influence on the immunopotentiating effects of sodium diethyl dithiocarbamate (imuthiol), which compound selectively increases T-cell numbers and activities, and acts on cholaminergic pathways. Thus, a major hemispheric asymmetry in the response to a drug is revealed. These results point to an important influence of neocortex on number and function of immunocompetent cells, which role can be modified by pharmacologic agents.
LOS TRABAJOS DE CATALOGACIÓN PARA LA PROTECCIÓN DE LAS PLANTAS EN MURCIA (2015)

LOS TRABAJOS DE CATALOGACIÓN PARA LA PROTECCIÓN DE LAS PLANTAS EN MURCIA
Spacer length impacts the efficacy of targeted docetaxel conjugates in prostate-specific membrane antigen expressing prostate cancer (2013)

Combination of targeted delivery and controlled release is a powerful technique for cancer treatment. In this paper, we describe the design, synthesis, structure validation and biological properties of targeted and non-targeted N-(2-hydroxypropyl)methacrylamide (HPMA) copolymer-docetaxel conjugates. Docetaxel (DTX) was conjugated to HPMA copolymer via a tetrapeptide spacer (-GFLG-). 3-(1,3-dicarboxypropyl)-ureido]pentanedioic acid (DUPA) was used as the targeting moiety to actively deliver DTX for treatment of Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA) expressing prostate cancer. Short and long spacer DUPA monomers were prepared, and four HPMA copolymer--DTX conjugates (non-targeted, two targeted with short spacer of different molecular weight and targeted with long spacer) were prepared via Reversible Addition-Fragmentation Chain Transfer (RAFT) copolymerization. Following confirmation of PSMA expression on C4-2 cell line, the DTX conjugates' in vitro cytotoxicity was tested against C4-2 tumor cells and their anticancer efficacies were assessed in nude mice bearing s.c. human prostate adenocarcinoma C4-2 xenografts. The in vivo results show that the spacer length between targeting moieties and HPMA copolymer backbone can significantly affect the treatment efficacy of DTX conjugates against C4-2 tumor bearing nu/nu mice. Moreover, histological analysis indicated that the DUPA-targeted DTX conjugate with longer spacer had no toxicity in major organs of treated mice.
Is the cross‐over modulus a reliable measure of polymeric polydispersity? (1997)

The answer to the question posed in the title of this paper is, “Sometimes yes and sometimes no; it depends on the specific case.” The use of the reciprocal of the cross-over modulus (actually 100,000/cross-over modulus, where the cross-over modulus has units of Pascal) as a measure of polymeric polydispersity [as determined by the Mw/Mn ratio, e.g., by gel permeation chromatography (GPC)] was first proposed by Zeichner and Patel (Proceedings of the Second World Congress of Chemical Engineering, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1981, p. 333) specifically for polypropylenes made by Ziegler-Natta catalysis and degraded by chain scission. However, their correlation is now being indiscriminately used without ensuring the applicability of the assumptions underlying the work of Zeichner and Patel to the specific case being considered. While Zeichner and Patel's correlation is indeed true in certain specific cases, it is not true in all cases. It would do well to dispel the apparently widespread misconception, especially among industrial rheologists, that the reciprocal of the cross-over modulus can always be used indiscriminately as a measure of polymeric polydispersity, and to emphasize the strict limitations under which this can indeed be done. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Fuzzy logic and Takagi-Sugeno Neural-Fuzzy to Deutsche bank fraud transactions (2013)

This article proposes suitable solution to detect fraud via fuzzy logic followed by Neural-fuzzy Takagi-Sugeno training method. In order for the fraud to be detected through fuzzy logic, there should be some rules stemmed from experience of the experts. These rules are expressed through information that could be registered for a given card. To come up with the fuzzy deduction, membership functions needed to be expressed over the specified input range. This issue is one of the problems of fuzzy logic. To solve this problem, fuzzy logics were established and Mamdani deduction engines were utilized as a result of which suitable responses were presented for fraud detection via Neural-fuzzy method. Despite the fact that the problem inputs were highly linear, Neural-fuzzy training was able to cope with the problem and present a suitable trained system. In other words, Neuralfuzzy training method is employed in order to optimize the fuzzy logic membership functions based on the data. Outcomes of the Neural-fuzzy training were quite satisfactory and highly precise. Thus, utilizing the research findings, Neuralfuzzy training method is proposed for upgrading fraud detection in the banking system of our country.
The formation of nitrogen-containing functional groups on carbon nanotube surfaces: a quantitative XPS and TPD study (2010)

Nitrogen-containing functional groups were generated on the surface of partially oxidized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) via post-treatment in ammonia. The treatment temperature was varied in order to tune the amount and type of nitrogen- and oxygen-containing functional groups, which were studied using high-resolution X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and temperature-programmed desorption (TPD). The surface defects on CNTs due to the incorporation of nitrogen were investigated by Raman spectroscopy. Deconvoluted XP N1s spectra were used for the quantification of different nitrogen-containing functional groups, and TPD studies were performed in inert and ammonia atmosphere to investigate the surface reactions occurring on the oxidized CNT surfaces quantitatively. Nitrile, lactam, imide and amine-type functional groups were formed in the presence of ammonia below 300 degrees C. When the OCNTs were treated in the medium temperature range between 300 degrees C to 500 degrees C, mainly pyridine-type nitrogen groups were generated, whereas pyridinic, pyrrolic and quaternary-type nitrogen groups were the dominating species present on the CNT surface when treated above 500 degrees C. It was found that about 38% of the oxygen functional groups react with ammonia below 500 degrees C.