Nitric oxide (NO) is a potent dilator of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) by modulating intracellular cGMP ([cGMP](i)) through the binding and activation of receptor guanylyl cylases (sGC). The kinetic relationship of NO and sGC, as well as the subsequent regulation of [cGMP](i) and its effects on blood vessel vasodilation, is largely unknown. In isolated VSM cells exposed to both pulsed and clampe...

We recently reported that sphingosylphosphorylcholine (SPC) is a novel messenger for Rho-kinase–mediated Ca sensitization of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) contraction. Subcellular localization and kinase activity of Src family protein kinases (SrcPTKs), except for c-Src, is controlled by a reversible S-palmitoylation, an event inhibited by eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). We examined the possible in...

ATP-sensitive potassium (KATP) channels link membrane excitability to metabolic state to regulate a series of biological activities including the vascular tone. However, their ability to influence hypertension is controversial. Here we aim to investigate possible alteration of KATP channel in vascular smooth muscles (VSMs) during hypertension development process. In this study, we used 16-week-...

Thiazolidinediones, insulin-sensitizing agents that lower insulin and lipid levels in insulin-resistant states, block agonist-induced Ca2+ entry into vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cells in vitro and lower blood pressure in animals and humans in vivo. In this study, we investigated the effects of ciglitazone and troglitazone on cell growth and DNA synthesis (as thymidine incorporation), and diffe...

Probabilistic assessment of voltage stability margin (VSM) with existence of correlated wind speeds is investigated. Nataf transformation is adopted to establish wind speed correlation (WSC) model. Based on the saddle-node bifurcation transversality condition equations and Monte Carlo simulation technique, probability distribution of VSM is determined. With correlation coefficients range low to...

CAPTCHAs exploit the gap in the ability between a human and a machine to understand the semantics of specific multimedia content, with vast applications in computer security. In this paper we compare two techniques in automated CAPTCHA solving for text-based CAPTCHA schemes, i.e., classification based on the Vector Space Model (VSM) versus a popular Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine. F...

In this paper, we propose two extensions to the vector space model (VSM) adaptation technique (Chen et al., 2013b) for statistical machine translation (SMT), both of which result in significant improvements. We also systematically compare the VSM techniques to three mixture model adaptation techniques: linear mixture, log-linear mixture (Foster and Kuhn, 2007), and provenance features (Chiang e...

Vector Space Models (VSM) have been widely used in the language assessment field to provide measurements of students’ vocabulary choices and content relevancy. However, training reference vectors (RV) in a VSM requires a time-consuming and costly human scoring process. To address this limitation, we applied unsupervised learning methods to reduce or even eliminate the human scoring step require...

In the Vector Space Model (VSM) of Information Retrieval (IR), the documents and queries are conceived as vectors of weights belonging to the same linear space, and retrieval is based on similarity measures. This view yields paradoxes and problems as regards concepts of fundamental importance to IR (similarity, term independence, preference, linearity). In the present paper, a different view is...

This paper addresses the problem of dynamic frequency control in a diesel-based mini-grid. It is shown that a virtual synchronous machine (VSM) can support dynamic frequency control by adding virtual inertia and damping to the system. However, it is found that the typical formulation of damping power does not work properly when the grid forming gen-set operates in droop mode because of the unkn...