Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physiology and Posttranscriptional Regulation of Methanol:Coenzyme M Methyltransferase Isozymes in Methanosarcina acetivorans C2A

ABSTRACT Methanosarcina species possess three operons (mtaCB1, mtaCB2, and mtaCB3) encoding methanol-specific methyltransferase 1 (MT1) isozymes and two genes (mtaA1 and mtaA2) with the potential to encode a methanol-specific methyltransferase 2 (MT2). Previous genetic studies showed that these genes are differentially regulated and encode enzymes with distinct levels of methyltransferase activity. Here, the effects of promoter strength on growth and on the rate of methane production were examined by constructing strains in which the mtaCB promoters were exchanged. When expressed from the strong PmtaC1 or PmtaC2 promoter, each of the MtaC and MtaB proteins supported growth and methane production at wild-type levels. In contrast, all mtaCB operons exhibited poorer growth and lower rates of methane production when PmtaC3 controlled their expression. Thus, previously observed phenotypic differences can be attributed largely to differences in promoter activity. Strains carrying various combinations of mtaC, mtaB, and mtaA expressed from the strong, tetracycline-regulated PmcrB(tetO1) promoter exhibited similar growth characteristics on methanol, showing that all combinations of MtaC, MtaB, and MtaA can form functional MT1/MT2 complexes. However, an in vitro assay of coupled MT1/MT2 activity showed significant variation between the strains. Surprisingly, these variations in activity correlated with differences in protein abundance, despite the fact that all the encoding genes were expressed from the same promoter. Quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR and reporter gene fusion data suggest that the mtaCBA transcripts show different stabilities, which are strongly influenced by the growth substrate.
Are teachers' perceptions about student -teacher relationships predictable from one grade to the next?

The quality of student-teacher relationships plays an important role in a child's educational experiences. Empirically, students who possess positive relationships with their teachers have an increased likelihood of positive school attitudes as well as positive school "outcomes" such as higher grades. Children with conflicted student-teacher relationships are at increased risk for academic problems such as poor grades and repeating a grade. It is therefore important to consider not only what the child brings into the classroom, but also what kind of relationship evolves in order to minimize factors contributing to lower student-teacher quality.The current investigation uses an attachment theory perspective to look at student-teacher quality. It is longitudinal in design, with four goals relating to change in student-teacher relationships from one school grade to the next: (1) to document stability and change in teacher-reported relationship quality, (2) to test whether children who engage in more externalizing behaviors have poorer student-teacher relationships, as reported by the teacher, (3) to see if teachers rated higher in negativity and lower in social connectedness report poorer quality student-teacher relationships, and (4) to see if teachers rated higher in warmth and sensitivity report positive student-teacher relationships.Participants are 24 first and second grade students from urban, low-income homes, attending a public elementary school. The investigation uses previously collected data from the 2004-2005 school year and follow-up data collected during the 2005-2006 school year. Data were collected via parent reports, teacher ratings, and classroom observations of teacher and student behavior.Cluster analysis is used to describe results from Year 2. Three clusters emerged regarding student-teacher relationship quality: positive, average, and high conflict/low closeness relationships. Results are only descriptive in nature and need to be individualized; factors that may have shaped student-teacher relationship quality (e.g., student disruptive behaviors, teacher emphasis on control in the classroom, and "goodness of fit" between student and teacher interactions) in one case are not of equal importance in another one. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the empirical use of teacher-reported STR construct as well as their implications for future research and training.
Assessment of CSF levels of tau protein in mildly demented patients with Alzheimer's disease

Article abstract-CSF levels of tau protein are increased in many patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Studies disagree on whether the increase is found in moderate or severe AD to a greater extent than in mild AD, and in two reports there was an inverse correlation between tau levels and cognitive scores. To readdress this question, we measured CSF tau in a group of mildly impaired patients with AD (Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE] scores >or=to20/30) and compared their tau levels with those in age-comparable normal and neurologic controls. We found that the mean level of CSF tau was significantly increased in the AD group compared with the controls, and 29 of 36 patients with AD had levels that exceeded a cutoff determined in a previous study. CSF tau levels did not correlate with MMSE scores. These findings and those of previous studies show that elevated CSF tau levels are found in most patients with AD, occur early in the course of dementia, and may be useful in supporting the diagnosis of AD. NEUROLOGY 1997;48: 632-635
Collagen scaffolds with in situ‐grown calcium phosphate for osteogenic differentiation of Wharton's jelly and menstrual blood stem cells

The aim of this research was to investigate the osteogenic differentiation potential of non‐invasively obtained human stem cells on collagen nanocomposite scaffolds with in situ‐grown calcium phosphate crystals. The foams had 70% porosity and pore sizes varying in the range 50–200 µm. The elastic modulus and compressive strength of the calcium phosphate containing collagen scaffolds were determined to be 234.5 kPa and 127.1 kPa, respectively, prior to in vitro studies. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) obtained from Wharton's jelly and menstrual blood were seeded on the collagen scaffolds and proliferation and osteogenic differentiation capacities of these cells from two different sources were compared. The cells on the composite scaffold showed the highest alkaline phosphatase activity compared to the controls, cells on tissue culture polystyrene and cells on collagen scaffolds without in situ‐formed calcium phosphate. MSCs isolated from both Wharton's jelly and menstrual blood showed a significant level of osteogenic activity, but those from Wharton's jelly performed better. In this study it was shown that collagen nanocomposite scaffolds seeded with cells obtained non‐invasively from human tissues could represent a potential construct to be used in bone tissue engineering. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
New Principal Coaching as a Safety Net.

This study examines new principal coaching as an induction process and explores the emotional dimensions of educational leadership. Twelve principal coaches and new principals—six of each—participated in this qualitative study that employed emergent coding (Creswell, 2008; Denzin, 2005; Glaser & Strauss, 1998; Spradley, 1979). The major finding: new principal coaching provides a safe place for first and second-year principals to express how they relate to demands from both a personal and professional perspective, including offering a safe place for emotional intensity.
Context Aware Document Embedding

Recently, doc2vec has achieved excellent results in different tasks. In this paper, we present a context aware variant of doc2vec. We introduce a novel weight estimating mechanism that generates weights for each word occurrence according to its contribution in the context, using deep neural networks. Our context aware model can achieve similar results compared to doc2vec initialized byWikipedia trained vectors, while being much more efficient and free from heavy external corpus. Analysis of context aware weights shows they are a kind of enhanced IDF weights that capture sub-topic level keywords in documents. They might result from deep neural networks that learn hidden representations with the least entropy.
Design and development of an autonomous wave-powered boat with a wave devouring propulsion system

This paper describes the design, development, and experiments of an autonomous wave-powered boat with a wave devouring propulsion system (WDPS). The WDPS consists of two fins (hydrofoils) below the bow of the boat. They generate thrust force directly from wave power and reduce roll and pitch motion of the boat in the waves. As described herein, first we performed numerical analysis and a preliminary experiment to design the hull form and the WDPS. Based on the analysis and experimentally obtained results, we designed and developed a prototype autonomous wave-powered boat. We also developed electrically powered systems such as a navigation, control, and wireless communication system for the boat. Moreover, we experimentally tested the performance of the developed boat in a test tank and in a coastal sea area. The experimentally obtained results indicate that the developed wave-powered boat can be a useful tool for ocean observation. Graphical Abstract
Apparent resolution enhancement for animations

Presenting the variety of high resolution images captured by high-quality devices, or generated on the computer, is challenging due to the limited resolution of current display devices. Our recent work addressed this problem by taking into account human perception. By applying a specific motion to a high-resolution image shown on a low-resolution display device, human eye tracking and integration could be exploited to achieve apparent resolution enhancement. To this end, the high-resolution image is decomposed into a sequence of temporally varying low-resolution images that are displayed at high refresh rates. However, this approach is limited to a specific class of simple or constant movements, i. e. "panning". In this work, we generalize this idea to arbitrary motions, as well as to videos with arbitrary motion flow. The resulting image sequences are compared to a range of other down-sampling methods.
Sleep disordered breathing in patients with cluster headache

Objective: To study subjects with active or inactive cluster headache (CH) for occult sleep disordered breathing (SDB). Background: CH frequently occurs during sleep. The authors previously found that symptoms of SDB predicted reported occurrence of CH in the first half of the night, which suggested that CH could be triggered in some cases by unrecognized SDB. Methods: The authors performed polysomnography in 25 adults (22 men) with CH. Subjects were not selected for any sleep-related complaint. In addition to standard measures, studies included monitoring of end-tidal carbon dioxide (n = 22), and esophageal pressure (n = 20). Results: The rate of apneas and hypopneas per hour of sleep was >5 in 20 subjects (80%; 95% CI, 64% to 96%), minimum oxygen saturation was <90% in 10 subjects, maximum negative esophageal pressure ranged from −13 to −65 cm H2O, and maximum end-tidal carbon dioxide was ≥50 mm Hg in eight subjects. The eight subjects with active (versus inactive) CH at the time of study had higher maximum end-tidal carbon dioxide levels (50 ± 3 versus 44 ± 5 mm Hg; p = 0.0007). More severe oxygen desaturation was associated with reports that CH typically occurred in the first half of the nocturnal sleep period (p = 0.008). Conclusions: SDB occurred in the majority of patients with CH. Evaluation of a patient with CH should include consideration that SDB may be present.
Defending behavior in bullying situations

In order to encourage children and adolescents to defend and support their victimized peers, it is important to identify factors that either maximize or minimize the probability that students will engage in such behaviors. This thesis is composed of four studies designed to elucidate how a variety of factors work in conjunction to explain why some children defend their victimized classmates, whereas others remain passive or reinforce the bully. The conceptual framework of this thesis is drawn from several theoretical considerations, including social cognitive learning theory, the expectancy-value framework as well as the literature emphasizing the importance of empathy in motivating behaviors. Also the child-by-environment perspective and the socialecological perspective influenced this research. Accordingly, several intraand interpersonal characteristics (e.g., social cognitions, empathy, and social status) as well as group-level factors (e.g., norms) that may either enhance or reduce the probability that students defend their victimized peers are investigated. In Studies I and II, the focus is on social cognitions, and special attention is paid to take into account the domain-specificity of cognition-behavior processes. Self-efficacy for defending is still an interest of study III, but the role of affective empathy on defending is also investigated. Also social status variables (preference and perceived popularity) are evaluated as possible moderators of links between intrapersonal factors and defending. In Study IV, the focus is expanded further by concentrating on characteristics of children’s proximal environments (i.e., 5 Abstract classroom). Bullying norms and collective perceptions (i.e., connectedness among the students and the teachers’ ability to deal with bullying situations) are examined. Data are drawn from two research projects: the Kaarina Cohort Study (consisting of fourth and eighth graders) and the randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluating the effects of the KiVa antibullying program (consisting of third to fifth graders). The results of the thesis suggest that defending the victims of bullying is influenced by a variety of individual level motivational characteristics, such as social cognitions and affective empathy. Also, both perceived popularity and social preference play a role in defending, and the findings support the conceptualization that behavior results from the interplay between the characteristics of an individual child and their social-relational environment. Classroom context further influences students’ defending behavior. Thus, antibullying efforts targeting peer bystanders should aim to influence intraand interpersonal characteristics of children and adolescents as well as their social environment.
A case for Core-Assisted Bottleneck Acceleration in GPUs: Enabling flexible data compression with assist warps

Modern Graphics Processing Units (CPUs) are well provisioned to support the concurrent execution of thousands of threads. Unfortunately, different bottlenecks during execution and heterogeneous application requirements create imbalances in utilization of resources in the cores. For example, when a CPU is bottle necked by the available off-chip memory bandwidth, its computational resources are often overwhelmingly idle, waiting for data from memory to arrive. This paper introduces the Core-Assisted Bottleneck Acceleration (CABA) framework that employs idle on-chip resources to alleviate different bottlenecks in CPU execution. CABA provides flexible mechanisms to automatically generate "assist warps" that execute on CPU cores to perform specific tasks that can improve CPU performance and efficiency. CABA enables the use of idle computational units and pipelines to alleviate the memory bandwidth bottleneck, e.g., by using assist warps to perform data compression to transfer less data from memory. Conversely, the same framework can be employed to handle cases where the CPU is bottlenecked by the available computational units, in which case the memory pipelines are idle and can be used by CABA to speed up computation, e.g., by performing memoization using assist warps. We provide a comprehensive design and evaluation of CABA to perform effective and flexible data compression in the CPU memory hierarchy to alleviate the memory bandwidth bottleneck. Our extensive evaluations show that CABA, when used to implement data compression, provides an average performance improvement of 41.7% (as high as 2.6X) across a variety of memory-bandwidth-sensitive GPGPU applications.
Cannulating LIMA graft using right transradial approach: Two simple and innovative techniques

Angiography and intervention of a LIMA (left internal mammary artery) graft cannot be performed easily while working through right transradial approach (TRA), because of complexity in anatomical relations of right and left subclavian arteries with arch of aorta. We demonstrate two simple and innovative techniques for the same using right TRA. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Streptolysin O clearance through sequestration into blebs that bud passively from the plasma membrane

Cells survive exposure to bacterial pore-forming toxins, such as streptolysin O (SLO), through mechanisms that remain unclear. Previous studies have suggested that these toxins are cleared by endocytosis. However, the experiments reported here failed to reveal any evidence for endocytosis of SLO, nor did they reveal any signs of damage to endosomal membranes predicted from such endocytosis. Instead, we illustrate that SLO induces a characteristic form of plasma membrane blebbing that allows cells to shed SLO by the process known as ectocytosis. Specifically, ‘deep-etch’ electron microscopy of cells exposed to SLO illustrates that the toxin is rapidly sequestered into domains in the plasmalemma greatly enriched in SLO pores, and these domains bleb outwards and bud from the cell surface into the medium. Such ectocytosis is even observed in cells that have been chemically fixed before exposure to SLO, suggesting that it is caused by a direct physical action of the toxin on the cell membrane, rather than by an active cellular reaction. We conclude, therefore, that ectocytosis is an important means for SLO clearance and hypothesize that this is a primary method by which cells defend themselves generally against pore-forming toxins.
Studying Directory Access Patterns via Reuse Distance Analysis and Evaluating Their Impact on Multi-Level Directory Caches

The trend for multicore CPUs is towards increasing core count. One of the key limiters to scaling will be the on-chip directory cache. Our work investigates moving portions of the directory away from the cores, perhaps to off-chip DRAM, where ample capacity exists. While suchmulti-level directory caches exhibit increased latency, several aspects of directory accesses will shield CPU performance from the slower directory, including low access frequency and latency hiding underneath data accesses to main memory. While multi-level directory caches have been studied previously, no work has of yet comprehensively quantified the directory access patterns themselves, making it difficult to understand multi-level behavior in depth. This paper presents a framework based on multicore reuse distance for studying directory cache access patterns. Using our analysis framework, we show between 69–93% of directory entries are looked up only once or twice during their liftimes in the directory cache, and between 51–71% of dynamic directory accesses are latency tolerant. Using cache simulations, we show a very small L1 directory cache can service 80% of latency critical directory lookups. Although a significant number of directory lookups and eviction notifications must access the slower L2 directory cache, virtually all of these are latency tolerant.
Distraction Osteogenesis May Promote Periodontal Bone Regeneration

Distraction osteogenesis has numerous applications in the treatment of conditions affecting the dentofacial complex, from midface advancement to orthodontic tooth movement produced by transversal distraction of the periodontal ligament. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that periodontium can be consistently distracted toward the tooth crown to promote periodontal bone regeneration. After the surgical production of periodontal defects in maxillary canines of 5 mongrel dogs, periodontal bone distraction was performed. Light microscopy was used for histopathological and morphometric analysis. Periodontal bone regeneration occurred in all animals. Periodontal bone regeneration in the distraction sites (Mean ± SD: 5.45 ± 2.01 mm) differed from that in control sites (0.008 ± 0.67 mm; p < 0.0001). Periodontal bone distraction resulted in periodontal bone regeneration. This finding may establish periodontal bone distraction as a new treatment alternative for periodontal defects.
Primary colonic lymphoma: an analysis of 74 cases with localized large‐cell lymphoma

Background: Surgical resection is considered a crucial treatment in patients with primary colonic lymphoma, but combining surgery with chemotherapy has provided additional therapeutic benefits in some studies. To further explore the optimal therapeutic approach in different clinical scenarios, we reviewed cases with localized large‐cell lymphoma and analyzed the factors related to the outcomes.
Combination Surgical Lifting with Ablative Laser Skin Resurfacing of Facial Skin: A Retrospective Analysis

BACKGROUND Cutaneous aging is manifested by rhytides, dyschromias, and skin laxity. Ablative laser skin resurfacing can effectively improve many signs of skin aging; however, the photoaged patient with facial laxity often requires a surgical lifting procedure in order to obtain optimal results. Concerns with delayed or impaired wound healing has led to reluctance to perform both procedures simultaneously. OBJECTIVE To report the clinical results and side effect profiles after concomitant surgical facial lifting procedures and ablative carbon dioxide or erbium:YAG laser resurfacing in a series of patients. METHODS A retrospective analysis and chart review was performed in 34 consecutive patients who underwent combination CO2 or erbium:YAG laser skin resurfacing and surgical lifting procedures, including S-lift rhytidectomy, blepharoplasty, and brow lift. Side effects and complication rates were tabulated. RESULTS The side effect profile of the combined surgical-laser procedures was similar to that reported after a laser-only procedure. The most common side effect was transient hyperpigmentation which occurred in 20.6% of treated patients. None of the patients experienced delayed reepithelialization, skin necrosis, or prolonged healing times. CONCLUSIONS Concurrent laser skin resurfacing and surgical lifting of facial skin maximizes aesthetic results without increased incidence of adverse effects. Patients benefit from the consolidation of anesthesia and convalescent times as well as enhanced global clinical outcomes.
Towards a Supportive Technological Environment for Digital Art

This paper presents the case for extending programming languages to support digital artists engaged in technologicallv-innovativc work. The anticipated result is an "environment for building environments ", which will need to satisfy certain technological requirements according to the areas in which digital artists most need creative support. A review ofthese areas is undertaken, and a proposal is made to capture the specific areas in which digital artists most need technological support.