Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of Intercellular Cell Adhesion Molecule 1 (ICAM-1) as a Hypoglycosylation Marker in Congenital Disorders of Glycosylation Cells*

Background: There are no general markers to detect hypoglycosylation and to test gene complementation in CDG cells. Results: ICAM-1 expression is reduced in N-glycosylation-deficient cells and elevated when a normal gene is delivered to these cells. Conclusion: ICAM-1 can be a useful cellular hypoglycosylation biomarker. Significance: ICAM-1 can be used to confirm putative CDG gene defects and to test potential therapeutics for glycosylation-deficient cells. Many human inherited disorders cause protein N-glycosylation defects, but there are few cellular markers to test gene complementation for such defects. Plasma membrane glycoproteins are potential biomarkers because they may be reduced or even absent in plasma membranes of glycosylation-deficient cells. We combined stable isotope labeling by amino acids in cell culture (SILAC) with linear ion trap mass spectrometry (LTQ OrbitrapTM) to identify and quantify membrane proteins from wild-type CHO and glycosylation-deficient CHO (Lec9) cells. We identified 165 underrepresented proteins from 1447 unique quantified proteins, including 18 N-glycosylated plasma membrane proteins. Using various methods, we found that intercellular cell adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1) was reduced in Lec9 cells and in fibroblasts from 31 congenital disorder of glycosylation (CDG) patients compared with normal controls. Mannose supplementation of phosphomannose isomerase-deficient CDG-Ib (MPI-CDG) cells and complementation with PMM2 in PMM2-deficient CDG-Ia (PMM2-CDG) cells partially corrected hypoglycosylation based on increased ICAM-1 presence on the plasma membrane. These data indicate that ICAM-1 could be a useful hypoglycosylation biomarker to assess gene complementation of CDG-I patient cells and to monitor improved glycosylation in response to therapeutic drugs.
Inter-and intra-L 1 differences in L 2 speech perception

In a perception experiment, L1 Mandarin and L1 Japanese novice learners of Korean classified non-tense /s/or tense /s*/initial Korean CV tokens. A mixed effects logistic regression model with acoustic cues as predictor variables was built for each L1 group, and each individual’s regression coefficients were interpreted to be the cue weighting used in identifying Korean /s/ and /s*/. We propose that the weighting of L2 perceptual cues is influenced by the weighting of the same cues in the L1 perception of acousticaly similar contrasts, but that intra-L1 individual variation is great enough that the expected inter-L1 differences may appear less well defined.
Toward a combination rule to deal with partial conflict and specificity in belief functions theory

We present and discuss a mixed conjunctive and disjunctive rule, a generalization of conflict repartition rules, and a combination of these two rules. In the belief functions theory one of the major problem is the conflict repartition enlightened by the famous Zadeh's example. To date, many combination rules have been proposed in order to solve a solution to this problem. Moreover, it can be important to consider the specificity of the responses of the experts. Since few year some unification rules are proposed. We have shown in our previous works the interest of the proportional conflict redistribution rule. We propose here a mixed combination rule following the proportional conflict redistribution rule modified by a discounting procedure. This rule generalizes many combination rules.
Dissociation between intentional and incidental sequence learning in Huntington's disease.

The ability to acquire and act upon serial order information is fundamental to almost all forms of adaptive behaviour. There is growing evidence that such knowledge may be acquired through a number of different means, each perhaps with its own neuronal substrate. One major distinction is between serial order information acquired intentionally and leading to explicit conscious knowledge of the sequence structure, and information acquired incidentally through experience. While this latter form of knowledge influences behaviour, it may do so without the participant being aware of the sequential information, i.e. it is acquired implicitly. Evidence from physiological and lesion studies in animals and imaging studies in humans suggests that these two forms of learning may have dissociable neuronal substrates. Specifically, the striato-thalamo-cortical circuit centred on the caudate nucleus is proposed to be involved in intentional sequence learning and that based on the putamen on incidental learning. The present study tested one part of this proposed dissociation by assessing patients with Huntington's disease on tasks of the two forms of learning. On the test of trial-and-error intentional learning there were marked deficits, which were closely related to disease progression and to measures of executive cognitive dysfunction. This finding was in contrast to the finding from the incidental learning task. Performance of the Huntington's disease group was essentially normal and unrelated to measures of disease progression and cognitive status. The results, although supportive of the proposed dual-system hypothesis, offer only partial confirmation. Further direct study is required using similar tasks in patients with putamenal disorder or lesions within the skeletomotor striato-thalamo-cortical circuit.
Asynchronous peer-to-peer Web services and firewalls

In this paper we test the suitability of Java to implement a scalable Web Service that solves a set of problems related to peer-to-peer interactions between Web Services that are behind firewalls or not generally accessible. In particular we describe how to enable reliable and long running conversations through firewalls between Web Service peers that have no accessible network endpoints. Our solution is to implement in Java a Web services dispatcher (WSD) that is an intermediary service that forwards messages and can facilitate message exchanges by supporting SOAP RPC over HTTP and WS-addressing for asynchronous messaging. We describe how Web service clients that have no network endpoints, such as applets, can become Web Service peers by using an additional message store-and-forward service ("mailbox"). Then we conduct a set of experiments to evaluate performance of Java implementation in realistic Web Service scenarios, involving intercontinental tests between France and the US.
First- and Second-Order Statistics Characterization of Hawkes Processes and Non-Parametric Estimation

We show that the jumps correlation matrix of a multivariate Hawkes process is related to the Hawkes kernel matrix through a system of Wiener-Hopf integral equations. A Wiener-Hopf argument allows one to prove that this system (in which the kernel matrix is the unknown) possesses a unique causal solution and consequently that the first- and second-order properties fully characterize a Hawkes process. The numerical inversion of this system of integral equations allows us to propose a fast and efficient method, which main principles were initially sketched by Bacry and Muzy, to perform a non-parametric estimation of the Hawkes kernel matrix. In this paper, we perform a systematic study of this non-parametric estimation procedure in the general framework of marked Hawkes processes. We precisely describe this procedure step by step. We discuss the estimation error and explain how the values for the main parameters should be chosen. Various numerical examples are given in order to illustrate the broad possibilities of this estimation procedure ranging from monovariate (power-law or non-positive kernels) up to three-variate (circular dependence) processes. A comparison with other non-parametric estimation procedures is made. Applications to high-frequency trading events in financial markets and to earthquakes occurrence dynamics are finally considered.
Democratic Peace and Electoral Accountability¤

One of the few stylized facts in international relations is that democracies, unlike autoc- racies, very rarely fight each other. We examine the sustainability of international peace between democracies and autocracies, where the crucial difference between these two po- litical regimes is whether or not policymakers are subject to periodic elections. We show that the fear of losing office can deter democratic leaders from engaging in military con- flicts. Crucially, this discipline effect can only be at work if incumbent leaders can be re-elected, implying that democracies in which the executives are subject to term limits should be more conflict prone. To assess the validity of our predictions, we construct a large dataset on countries with executive term limits. Our analysis of inter-state conflicts for the 1816-2001 period suggests that electoral incentives are indeed behind the democratic peace phenomenon: while democratic dyads are in general less likely to be involved in conflicts than any other dyads, this result does not hold for democracies in which the executive faces binding term limits; moreover, the dispute patterns of democracies with term limits depend on whether the executive is in the last or penultimate mandate.
Effect of addition of sepiolite on the mechanical properties of glass fiber reinforced polypropylene

Short glass fiber reinforced polypropylene is one of the composites with the widest range of applications in the plastics industry. The partial replacement of the glass fibers by sepiolite, brings forth a hybrid composite with better mechanical properties and, as a result, enhanced compatibility and better interfacial adhesion as a consequence of the surface properties of the sepiolite. The results obtained are also interesting from a practical point of view, as they allow for considerable reductions in the costs of the formulation. Mit Kurzglasfasern verstarktes Polypropylen ist eines der in der Kunststoffindustrie am haufigsten verwendeten Composites. Der teilweise Ersatz der Glasfasern durch Sepiolite fuhrt zu einem hybriden Composite mit besseren mechanischen Eigenschaften infolge besserer Kompatibilitat und eines erhohten Haftvermogens der Grenzflachen, das auf der Oberflachenbeschaffenheit des Sepiolites beruht. Auch aus der Sicht der Praxis sind die erhaltenen Ergebnisse bemerkenswert, da das Verfahren eine Kostensenkung bei der Formulierung gestattet.
Salt sensitivity in humans is linked to enhanced sympathetic responsiveness and to enhanced proximal tubular reabsorption.

If high sodium intake is involved in the pathogenesis of essential hypertension, the effects of changing the sodium intake should be demonstrable in the susceptible part of the normotensive population. Therefore, we have investigated the effects of moderate salt restriction in 52 young normotensive subjects with and without a family history of hypertension; 22 (42%) responded to moderate salt restriction (200 to 50 mmol/day) over 2 weeks, with a significant fall in blood pressure shown by continuous automatic blood pressure recordings. Accordingly, these subjects were classified as salt-sensitive, and the remainder as salt-resistant. Compared to salt-resistant subjects, salt-sensitive subjects showed a 2.5-fold higher incidence of a positive family history of hypertension (p less than 0.01), and a significantly higher blood pressure and lower salivary sodium concentration during the usual high sodium diet. Although there were no differences in Na,K-ATPase activity and in Na-K cotransport of erythrocytes, the pressor response to infused norepinephrine in salt-sensitive subjects was double that of salt-resistant subjects independent of the diet and this was linked to indirect evidence for enhanced proximal tubular sodium reabsorption. On the usual high sodium diet, 40% of the normal population may be salt-sensitive and prone to develop hypertension. Hypersensitivity to catecholamines (genetically determined? ) may be the cause of salt sensitivity. A low sodium concentration in saliva deserves further study as a simple screening test to identify salt-sensitive subjects.
Metabolic Mechanisms Only Partially Explain Resistance to Pyrethroids in Australian Broiler House Populations of Lesser Mealworm (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae)

ABSTRACT The susceptibility of six Australian broiler house populations and an insecticide susceptible population of lesser mealworm, Alphitobius diaperinus (Panzer) (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae), to cyfluthrin, β-cyfluthrin, &ggr;-cyhalothrin, and deltamethrin was investigated. One broiler house population had equivalent susceptibility to the susceptible to &bgr;-cyfluthrin and &ggr;-cyhalothrin, with higher susceptibility to cyfluthrin and deltamethrin. The remaining five populations demonstrated strong resistance to cyfluthrin (19–37-fold), the insecticide used most widely for management of A. diaperinus in Australia. Each cyfluthrin-resistant population demonstrated reduced susceptibility to β-cyfluthrin (resistance ratios were 8–17-fold), deltamethrin (2.5–8-fold), and &ggr;-cyhalothrin (6–12-fold) compared with the laboratory population, but cross-resistance patterns varied considerably between populations. Adding piperonyl butoxide (PBO) had no effect on the susceptibility of the susceptible population to any of the insecticides, but it increased the susceptibility of each of the five cyfluthrin-resistant populations: to cyfluthrin (synergism ratio range, 1.9–5.0-fold), β-cyfluthrin (1.6– 4.1-fold), and &ggr;-cyhalothrin (1.7–2.0-fold). PBO had a more variable effect on susceptibility to deltamethrin, with three of the cyfluthrin-resistant populations being more susceptible to deltamethrin in the presence of PBO, but susceptibility of the remaining two populations was unaffected by adding PBO (synergism ratio range, 0.9–2.5-fold). Overall, the addition of PBO to the four pyrethroids had variable effects on their susceptibility. This variability indicated the presence of other resistance mechanisms in beetle populations apart from metabolic resistance. In addition, the relative importance of metabolic resistance in each beetle population varied widely between pyrethroids. Thus, it cannot be assumed that PBO will reliably synergize pyrethroids against cyfluthrin-resistant lesser mealworm populations when using it to mitigate insecticide resistance.
cusFFT: A High-Performance Sparse Fast Fourier Transform Algorithm on GPUs

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is one of the most important numerical tools widely used in many scientific and engineering applications. The algorithm performs O(nlogn) operations on n input data points in order to calculate only small number of k large coefficients, while the rest of n - k numbers are zero or negligibly small. The algorithm is clearly inefficient, when n points input data lead to only k <;Z n non-zero coefficients in the transformed domain. MIT in 2012 developed a sparse FFT (sFFT) algorithm that provides a solution to this problem. In this paper, we explore the challenges and propose effective solutions to efficiently port sFFT to massively parallel processors, such as GPUs, using CUDA. GPGPUs are being increasingly adopted as popular HPC platforms because of their tremendous computing power and remarkable cost efficiency. However, sFFT algorithm is a complex and computationally challenging memory-bound algorithm that is not straightforward to be implemented on GPUs. In this paper, we present some of the optimization strategies such as index coalescing, loop splitting, asynchronous data layout transformation, linear time selection algorithm that are required to compute sFFT on such massively parallel architectures. Our CUDA-based sFFT, cusFFT, performs over 10x faster than the state-of-the-art cuFFT library on GPUs and over 28x faster than the parallel FFTW on multicore CPUs.
Respiratory Changes During Spinal Anaesthesia for Gynaecological Laparoscopic Surgery

Background: It is currently presumed that spinal anaesthesia can compromise respiratory muscle function during carbon dioxide (CO2) pneumoperitoneum. This observational study was designed to delineate the respiratory effects of CO2 pneumoperitoneum under spinal anaesthesia. Patients & Methods: Forty one patients undergoing elective gynecological laparoscopy were administered spinal anaesthesia with 15 mg heavy bupivacaine and 50 mcg of fentanyl. Heart rare, blood pressure, tidal volume, respiratory rate and end tidal CO2 were serially recorded before, during and after the pneumoperitoneum. Arterial blood gas analysis was done before and 20 min after initiation of pneumoperitoneum. Results: The mean heart rate and blood pressure decreased by less than 20% of the preoperative value. The mean tidal volume decreased from 353 ± 81(Standard Deviation) to 299±95 ml, p = 0.032, over the first 9 min after the pneumoperitoneum with a complete recovery towards the base line, 340 ± 72 ml, within 30 min during the surgery. The maximal inspiratory capacity declined from 1308±324 ml to 1067±296 ml at 20 min and recovered to 1187±267 ml, 5min after decompression. There was no observed change in the respiratory rate. Similarly, increase in the end tidal CO2 from 31.68±4.13 to 37.62±4.21 mmHg, p = 0.000, reached a plateau around 15 min and declined after decompression. Arterial carbon dioxide showed a corresponding increase at 20 min without change in arterial to end tidal CO2 difference. All observed changes were within the physiological limits. Conclusion: In a conscious patient undergoing laparoscopy with pneumoperitoneum, under spinal anaesthesia, the preserved inspiratory diaphragmatic activity maintains ventilation and, the gas exchange within physiological limits. Hence it is a safe alternative to general anaesthesia.
Cognitive Function, Progression of Age‐related Behavioral Changes, Biomarkers, and Survival in Dogs More Than 8 Years Old

Background Canine cognitive dysfunction (CCD) is an age‐dependent neurodegenerative condition dominated by changes in behavioral patterns. Cohort studies investigating cognitive status in dogs are lacking. Objectives To investigate cognitive function, progression of age‐related behavioral changes, survival, and possible biomarkers of CCD in aged dogs. Animals Fifty‐one dogs >8 years old; 21 with no cognitive deficits, 17 with mild cognitive impairments (MCI) and 13 with CCD. Methods Longitudinal study. Recruitment period of 12 months and an observational period of 24 months including a baseline and 3 planned subsequent assessments. Cognitive status was determined using validated questionnaires. Plasma Aβ‐peptides were quantified using commercial ELISA assays and cytokines by a validated immunoassay. Results Signs characterizing dogs with CCD were aimless wandering, staring into space, avoid getting patted, difficulty finding dropped food and anxiety. Thirty‐three percent of dogs with a normal cognitive status progressed to MCI and 22% classified as MCI progressed to CCD during the study period. For 6 dogs diagnosed with CCD, signs of cognitive dysfunction increased with time. A diagnosis of CCD did not affect survival. The level of plasma Aβ42 was significantly increased (P < .05) in the CCD group (92.8 ± 24.0 pg/mL) compared to the MCI (77.0 ± 12.3 pg/mL) and normal group (74.9 ± 10.0 pg/mL), but no significant differences in concentrations of systemic inflammatory markers were detected. Conclusions Canine cognitive dysfunction is a progressive disorder with an individual variability in the rate of cognitive decline and clinical signs. Plasma Aβ42 seems to be an interesting plasma biomarker of CCD.
Aluminium Binding to Serum Constituents: A Role for Transferrin and for Citrate

The binding of aluminium in rat serum was studied. Rats were loaded intraperitoneally with different doses of aluminium(III)chloride 4 times during one week, before being killed by cardiac puncture. One ml of serum was applied to a Sephacryl S-200 SF column and 70 fractions were collected. In the collected fractions, the distribution of aluminium was measured and compared with the concentrations of total protein, transferrin, and citrate. The presence of a high molecular weight aluminium-complex in serum is confirmed. Although a possible role for albumin cannot be excluded, it is most likely that transferrin plays a role as a carrier for biological transport of aluminium in plasma. In addition to transferrin, aluminium was shown to be associated with citrate in serum, resulting in a low-molecular weight complex. It is postulated that citrate acts as a chelator for aluminium, and that the Al/citrate complex in serum may play an important role in intracellular accumulation, and hence the toxicity, of aluminium.
Morpheme level hierarchical pitman-yor class-based language models for LVCSR of morphologically rich languages

Abstract Performing large vocabulary continuous speech recogni-tion (LVCSR) for morphologically rich languages is considereda challenging task. The morphological richness of such lan-guages leads to high out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rates and poorlanguage model (LM) probabilities. In this case, the use ofmorphemes has been shown to increase the lexical coverageand lower the LM perplexity. Another approach used to im-prove the LM probability estimates is to incorporate additionalknowledge sources in the LM estimation process using class-based LMs (CLMs). Recently, the hierarchical Pitman-Yor LMs(HPYLMs) have shown superiority over the modiﬁed Kneser-Ney (MKN) smoothed N-gram LMs in terms of both perplexity(PPL) and word error rate (WER) on word-based LVCSR tasks.In this paper, hierarchical Pitman-Yor class-based LMs (HPY-CLMs) are combined with morpheme level language model-ing. This enables the application of the proposed models ontop of morpheme-based systems. Experiments are conducted onArabic and German LVCSR tasks. Consistent performance im-provements are obtained for all the available corpora comparedto the conventional morpheme-based and class-based LMs.Index Terms: language model, morpheme-based, class-based,hierarchical Pitman-Yor, rich morphology
An efficient cryptographic protocol verifier based on prolog rules

Abstract: We present a new automatic cryptographic protocol verifier based on a simple representation of the protocol by Prolog rules, and on a new efficient algorithm that determines whether a fact can be proved from these rules or not. This verifier proves secrecy properties of the protocols. Thanks to its use of unification, it avoids the problem of the state space explosion. Another advantage is that we do not need to limit the number of runs of the protocol to analyze it. We have proved the correctness of our algorithm, and have implemented it. The experimental results show that many examples of protocols of the literature, including Skeme [24], can be analyzed by our tool with very small resources: the analysis takes from less than 0.1 s for simple protocols to 23 s for the main mode of Skeme. It uses less than 2 Mb of memory in our tests.