Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Complete protection from impending stroke following permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion in awake, behaving rats

Using a rodent model of ischemic stroke [permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion (pMCAO)], our laboratory has previously demonstrated that sensory‐evoked cortical activation via mechanical single whisker stimulation treatment delivered under an anesthetized condition within 2 h of ischemic onset confers complete protection from impending infarct. There is a limited time window for this protection; rats that received the identical treatment at 3 h following ischemic onset lost neuronal function and sustained a substantial infarct. Rats in these studies, however, were anesthetized with sodium pentobarbital or isoflurane, whereas most human stroke patients are typically awake. To optimize our animal model, the present study examined, using functional imaging, histological, and behavioral analysis, whether self‐induced sensorimotor stimulation is also protective in unrestrained, behaving rats that actively explore an enriched environment. Rats were revived from anesthesia either immediately or at 3 h after pMCAO, at which point they were allowed to freely explore an enriched environment. Rats that explored immediately after ischemic onset maintained normal cortical function and did not sustain infarct, even when their whiskers were clipped. Rats that were revived at 3 h post‐pMCAO exhibited eliminated cortical function and sustained cortical infarct. Further, the data suggested that the level of individual active exploration could influence the outcome. Thus, early activation of the ischemic cortical area via unrestrained exploration resulted in protection from ischemic infarct, whereas late activation resulted in infarct, irrespective of the level of arousal or whisker‐specific stimulation.
An Efficient Filtering Structure for Lagrange Interpolation

A novel filtering structure with linear complexity is proposed for Lagrange interpolation. The structure is similar to the Farrow structure in principle, but it is more efficient and has the additional feature of being order updatable on-the-fly. The main application for the proposed structure is the implementation of fractional delay filters to mitigate the symbol synchronization errors in digital communications. Some other applications are time-delay estimation, echo cancellation, acoustic modeling, and arbitrary sampling rate conversion
The entrepreneurial growth ceiling: Using people and innovation to mitigate risk and break through the growth ceiling in initial public offerings

Purpose – In this paper the authors aim to introduce a concept that they call the “entrepreneurial growth ceiling” (EGC). They develop arguments that new venture IPOs hit the EGC prior to their IPO, and the ceiling is part of the impetus for going public. The paper argues that proceeds from the IPO will aid firms in breaking through the ceiling if the proceeds are strategically allocated.Design/methodology/approach – The study examines a cohort of firms that went public in the same year. The authors code data from the prospectuses of 366 organizations, including how proceeds were to be spent, and then add performance data post‐IPO.Findings – The results from a longitudinal study of IPOs indicate that firms that allocate proceeds to human resources and innovation (research and development) are more likely to break through the EGC quickly and enhance long‐term stock performance.Practical implications – Entrepreneurial firms will have higher success when investing money into their human resources (people) an.
Mutations Altering the Interplay between GkDnaC Helicase and DNA Reveal an Insight into Helicase Unwinding

DNA helicase is a motor protein that unwinds and separates duplex DNA using energy derived from the hydrolysis of nucleoside triphosphates (NTPs). In different organisms, helicase has a number of different mechanisms for unwinding activity. The studies of the helicase activity in complex with individual and sets of accessory proteins will elucidate the complexity of the regulatory network within the whole replisome machinery. In this study, we use the replicative helicase of Geobacillus kaustophilus, a gram‐positive bacterium, as a model system (GkDnaC). Based on our previous crystal structure of the GkDnaC‐ssDNA complex, we identified several residues involved in ssDNA binding. The locations of these key residues imply that these ssDNA‐interacting sites correlate with helicase translocation. To investigate the nature of unwinding by hexameric GkDnaC helicase (superfamilies IV), we studied how the activity of GkDnaC is modulated by specific mutations and by accessory proteins. Our results imply that a partial loss in the interaction of helicase with ssDNA leads to an enhancement in helicase activity, while their ATPase activities remain unchanged. Based on kinetic evidences from single‐molecule tethered particle motion (smTPM) experiments, the unwinding rates of these GkDnaC mutants were consistently faster than that of wild‐type enzyme. In addition, we characterized the role of accessory proteins of GkDnaC helicase, showing that the interaction with accessory proteins alters both the ATPase and the unwinding velocity of the helicase.
The Roles of Platelet GPIIb/IIIa and αvβ3 Integrins during HeLa Cells Adhesion, Migration, and Invasion to Monolayer Endothelium under Static and Dynamic Shear Flow

During their passage through the circulatory system, tumor cells undergo extensive interactions with various host cells including endothelial cells and platelets. Mechanisms mediating tumor cell adhesion, migration, and metastasis to vessel wall under flow condition are largely unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential roles of GPIIb/IIIa and αvβ3 integrins underlying the HeLa-endothelium interaction in static and dynamic flow conditions. HeLa cell migration and invasion were studied by using Millicell cell culture insert system. The numbers of transmigrated or invaded HeLa cells significantly increased by thrombin-activated platelets and reduced by eptifibatide, a platelet inhibitor. Meanwhile, RGDWE peptides, a specific inhibitor of αvβ3 integrin, also inhibited HeLa cell transmigration. Interestingly, the presence of endothelial cells had significant effect on HeLa cell migration regardless of static or cocultured flow condition. The adhesion capability of HeLa cells to endothelial monolayer was also significantly affected by GPIIb/IIIa and αvβ3 integrins. The arrested HeLa cells increased nearly 5-fold in the presence of thrombin-activated platelets at shear stress condition (1.84 dyn/cm2 exposure for 1 hour) than the control (static). Our findings showed that GPIIb/IIIa and αvβ3 integrins are important mediators in the pathology of cervical cancer and provide a molecular basis for the future therapy, and the efficient antitumor benefit should target multiple receptors on tumor cells and platelets.
Convergent Relaxations of Polynomial Optimization Problems with Noncommuting Variables

We consider optimization problems with polynomial inequality constraints in non-commuting variables. These non-commuting variables are viewed as bounded operators on a Hilbert space whose dimension is not fixed and the associated polynomial inequalities as semidefinite positivity constraints. Such problems arise naturally in quantum theory and quantum information science. To solve them, we introduce a hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations which generates a monotone sequence of lower bounds that converges to the optimal solution. We also introduce a criterion to detect whether the global optimum is reached at a given relaxation step and show how to extract a global optimizer from the solution of the corresponding semidefinite programming problem.
Agar gel immunodiffusion analysis using baculovirus-expressed recombinant bovine leukemia virus envelope glycoprotein (gp51/gp30T-)

Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) envelope glycoprotein (gp51/gp30T-), consisting of BLV gp51 and BLV gp30 that lacked its C-terminal transmembrane domain, was expressed in insect cells under the control of the baculovirus polyhedron promoter. Recombinant BLV gp51/gp30T- secreted from insect cells was determined by immunofluorescence, enzyme-linked immunosorbent and western blot assays using a BLV-specific monoclonal antibody and BLV-positive bovine antibodies. An agar gel immunodiffusion (AGID) test using gp51/gp30T- as the antigen for the detection of BLV antibodies in serum was developed and compared to traditional AGID, which uses wild type BLV antigen derived from fetal lamb kidney cells. AGID with the recombinant BLV gp51/gp30T- was relatively more sensitive than traditional AGID. When the two methods were tested with bovine sera from the field, the recombinant BLV gp51/gp30T- and traditional antigen had a relative sensitivity of 69.8% and 67.4%, respectively, and a relative specificity of 93.3% and 92.3%. These results indicated that the recombinant BLV gp51/gp30T- is an effective alternative antigen for the diagnosis of BLV infection in cattle.
Mojibake – The rehearsal of word fragments in verbal recall

Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the ‘grain size’ of word units (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). In the current study, a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF) English words versus geographical (UK) town names to control for content. We also tested unfamiliar international (INT) non-words and names of international (INT) European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design. Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and semantically constrained words.
In Vivo Tracking of Cell Therapies for Cardiac Diseases with Nuclear Medicine

Even though heart diseases are amongst the main causes of mortality and morbidity in the world, existing treatments are limited in restoring cardiac lesions. Cell transplantations, originally developed for the treatment of hematologic ailments, are presently being explored in preclinical and clinical trials for cardiac diseases. Nonetheless, little is known about the possible efficacy and mechanisms for these therapies and they are the center of continuous investigation. In this scenario, noninvasive imaging techniques lead to greater comprehension of cell therapies. Radiopharmaceutical cell labeling, firstly developed to track leukocytes, has been used successfully to evaluate the migration of cell therapies for myocardial diseases. A substantial rise in the amount of reports employing this methodology has taken place in the previous years. We will review the diverse radiopharmaceuticals, imaging modalities, and results of experimental and clinical studies published until now. Also, we report on current limitations and potential advances of radiopharmaceutical labeling for cell therapies in cardiac diseases.
Click model-based information retrieval metrics

In recent years many models have been proposed that are aimed at predicting clicks of web search users. In addition, some information retrieval evaluation metrics have been built on top of a user model. In this paper we bring these two directions together and propose a common approach to converting any click model into an evaluation metric. We then put the resulting model-based metrics as well as traditional metrics (like DCG or Precision) into a common evaluation framework and compare them along a number of dimensions. One of the dimensions we are particularly interested in is the agreement between offline and online experimental outcomes. It is widely believed, especially in an industrial setting, that online A/B-testing and interleaving experiments are generally better at capturing system quality than offline measurements. We show that offline metrics that are based on click models are more strongly correlated with online experimental outcomes than traditional offline metrics, especially in situations when we have incomplete relevance judgements.
Monitoring the effects of iodine prophylaxis in the adult population of southern Italy with deficient and sufficient iodine intake levels: a cross-sectional, epidemiological study

I prophylaxis is the most effective strategy to eradicate I deficiency disorders, but it has been shown to affect the thyroid disease pattern. In this study, we assessed the frequency of thyroid disorders in an adult population living in two areas of southern Italy after implementing I prophylaxis. To this aim, a cross-sectional, population-based study including 489 subjects from an I-deficient rural and an I-sufficient urban area of southern Italy was conducted. Thyroid ultrasound was performed on all participants, and urine and blood samples were collected from each subject. The levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), thyroglobulin (TgAb) and thyroperoxidase antibodies (TPOAb), urinary I excretion (UIE), and thyroid volume and echogenicity were evaluated. We found that the median UIE was higher in the urban than in the rural area (P=0·004), whereas the prevalence of subjects affected by goitre was higher in the rural compared with the urban area (P=0·003). Positive TgAb rather than TPOAb were more frequent in subjects from the urban area compared with the rural area (P=0·009). The hypoechoic pattern at thyroid ultrasound (HT-US) was similar between the two areas, but TgAb were significantly higher (P=0·01) in HT-US subjects from the urban area. The frequency of elevated TSH did not differ between the two screened populations, and no changes were found for TgAb positivity in subjects with high TSH in the urban compared with the rural area. Our findings support that the small risks of I supplementation are far outweighed by the substantial benefits of correcting I deficiency, although continued monitoring of populations is necessary.
Complete Selection Functions for a Lazy Conditional Narrowing Calculus

In this paper we extend the lazy narrowing calculus lnc of Middeldorp, Okui, and Ida [26] to conditional rewrite systems. The resulting lazy conditional narrowing calculus lcnc is highly non-deterministic. We investigate for which classes of conditional rewrite systems the completeness of lcnc is ensured. In order to improve the efficiency of the calculus, we pay special attention to the removal of non-determinism due to the selection of equations in goals by fixing a selection strategy.
Dynamic importance sampling for queueing networks

Abstract : Importance sampling is a technique that is commonly used to speed up Monte Carlo simulation of rare events. However, little is known regarding the design of efficient importance sampling algorithms in the context of queueing networks. The standard approach, which simulates the system using an a priori fixed change of measure suggested by large deviation analysis, has been shown to fail in even the simplest network setting (e.g., a two-node tandem network). Exploiting connections between importance sampling, differential games, and classical subsolutions of the corresponding Isaacs equation, we show how to design and analyze simple and efficient dynamic importance sampling schemes for general classes of networks. The models used to illustrate the approach include d-node tandem Jackson networks and a two node network with feedback, and the rare events studied are those of large queueing backlogs, including total population overflow and the overflow of individual buffers.
Places: An Image Database for Deep Scene Understanding

The rise of multi-million-item dataset initiatives has enabled data-hungry machine learning algorithms to reach near-human semantic classification at tasks such as object and scene recognition. Here we describe the Places Database, a repository of 10 million scene photographs, labeled with scene semantic categories and attributes, comprising a quasi-exhaustive list of the types of environments encountered in the world. Using state of the art Convolutional Neural Networks, we provide impressive baseline performances at scene classification. With its high-coverage and high-diversity of exemplars, the Places Database offers an ecosystem to guide future progress on currently intractable visual recognition problems.
Long-term photometric behaviour of XZ Dra. Binarity or magnetic cycle of a Blazhko-type RRab star

The extended photometry available for XZ Dra, a Blazhko-type RR Lyrae star, makes it possible to study its long- term behavior. It is shown that its pulsation period exhibits cyclic, but not strictly regular variations with7200 d period. The Blazhko period (76 d) seems to follow the observed period changes of the fundamental mode pulsation with dPB=dP0 = 7:7 10 4 gradient. A binary model cannot explain this order of period change of the Blazhko modulation, nevertheless it can be brought into agreement with the O-C data of the pulsation. The possibility of occurrence of a magnetic cycle is raised.
Mycobacterium chelonae cutaneous infection in a patient with mixed connective tissue disease*

Around 50 mycobacteria species cause human disease. Immunosuppressive states predispose to non-tuberculous mycobaterium infection, such as Mycobacterium chelonae: AFB, non-tuberculous, fast growth of low virulence and uncommon as a human pathogen. It may compromise the skin and soft tissues, lungs, lymph nodes and there is also a disseminated presentation. The diagnosis involves AFB identification and culture on Agar and Lowenstein-Jensen medium base. A 41-year-old female with MCTD (LES predominance) is reported, presenting painless nodules in the right forearm. She denied local trauma. Immunosuppressed with prednisone and cyclophosphamide for 24 months. Lesion biopsy has demonstrated positive bacilloscopy (Ziehl-Neelsen stain) and M.chelonae in culture (Lowenstein-Jensen medium base), therefore clarithromycin treatment has been started (best therapy choice in the literature).
The Nerve Growth Factor Receptor CD271 Is Crucial to Maintain Tumorigenicity and Stem-Like Properties of Melanoma Cells

Background Large-scale genomic analyses of patient cohorts have revealed extensive heterogeneity between individual tumors, contributing to treatment failure and drug resistance. In malignant melanoma, heterogeneity is thought to arise as a consequence of the differentiation of melanoma-initiating cells that are defined by cell-surface markers like CD271 or CD133. Results Here we confirmed that the nerve growth factor receptor (CD271) is a crucial determinant of tumorigenicity, stem-like properties, heterogeneity and plasticity in melanoma cells. Stable shRNA mediated knock-down of CD271 in patient-derived melanoma cells abrogated their tumor-initiating and colony-forming capacity. A genome-wide expression profiling and gene-set enrichment analysis revealed novel connections of CD271 with melanoma-associated genes like CD133 and points to a neural crest stem cell (NCSC) signature lost upon CD271 knock-down. In a meta-analysis we have determined a shared set of 271 differentially regulated genes, linking CD271 to SOX10, a marker that specifies the neural crest. To dissect the connection of CD271 and CD133 we have analyzed 10 patient-derived melanoma-cell strains for cell-surface expression of both markers compared to established cell lines MeWo and A375. We found CD271+ cells in the majority of cell strains analyzed as well as in a set of 16 different patient-derived melanoma metastases. Strikingly, only 2/12 cell strains harbored a CD133+ sub-set that in addition comprised a fraction of cells of a CD271+/CD133+ phenotype. Those cells were found in the label-retaining fraction and in vitro deduced from CD271+ but not CD271 knock-down cells. Conclusions Our present study provides a deeper insight into the regulation of melanoma cell properties and points CD271 out as a regulator of several melanoma-associated genes. Further, our data strongly suggest that CD271 is a crucial determinant of stem-like properties of melanoma cells like colony-formation and tumorigenicity.
Temporally learning floating-gate VLSI synapses

We present a floating-gate synaptic circuit that updates its weight according to the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule. The weight (or floating-gate voltage) is updated only if the time difference between the pre- and post-synaptic spikes falls within a learning window. The update is implemented through tunneling and injection mechanisms which can be tuned for very long time constants up to seconds. The novelty of this circuit is that the tunneling and injection mechanisms are turned on only when the correlation of the pre and postsynaptic activity is significant. The additional benefit of this non-volatile technology is that synaptic weights can be stored locally on chip. We present experimental results that show the learning and normalization effects from the fabricated circuits.
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Excavating Race and the Enduring Racisms in U.S. Curriculum

Drawing from Omi and Winant's (1994) racial formation theory and Holt's (1995) theory of race marking, in this chapter, we explore the context of race and curriculum for African Americans during post-Reconstruction and the post-civil rights era. Our inquiry focused on the racial discourses located in two sources of curricula knowledge: children's literature and U.S. history textbooks. In this analysis, we illustrate how the presence of race aligned with ideological beliefs about race that were prevalent in the wider societal discourse. We argue that the histories of race have maintained a permanent, enduring place in U.S. curriculum. While morphing in content and appearance, formations of race remained entrenched and pervasive, thus reflecting the condition we characterize as the enduring racisms of U.S. curriculum.
Confucian Role Ethics and Relational Autonomy in the Mengzi

Whether role-ethics interpretations of early Confucianism possess the resources to identify and redress gender inequality and oppression is examined here. Argued for is a conception of Confucian autonomy, grounded in Mengzi’s remarks about <italic>zhi</italic> 智 (wisdom), that is a substantive account of autonomy competency: substantive because <italic>renyi</italic> 仁義 guide <italic>junzi</italic> 君子 in determining right and wrong; a competency because it emphasizes a repertoire of skills and capabilities that include <italic>duan</italic> reactions, reflection, extension, and selfrealization through <italic>renyi</italic>. Finally, it is explained how <italic>zhi</italic> autonomy helps the role ethicist address gender oppression.