Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nucleocytoplasmic Shuttling of the NAD+-dependent Histone Deacetylase SIRT1*

Sir2 (silent information regulator 2) is an NAD+-dependent histone deacetylase that contributes to longevity in yeast. SIRT1, a mammalian Sir2 ortholog, deacetylates histones and various transcription factors, including p53, FOXO proteins, and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ. We found that its subcellular localization varied in different tissues of the adult mouse. Some subsets of neurons predominantly expressed SIRT1 in the cytoplasm, but ependymal cells expressed it in both the nucleus and cytoplasm. On the other hand, spermatocytes expressed SIRT1 only in the nucleus. Cardiomyocytes in the day 12.5 mouse embryo expressed SIRT1 exclusively in the nucleus, but in the adult heart, they expressed it in both the cytoplasm and nucleus. C2C12 myoblast cells expressed SIRT1 in the nucleus, but it localized to the cytoplasm after differentiation. LY294002, an inhibitor of phosphoinositide 3-hydroxykinase, strongly inhibited the nuclear localization of SIRT1 in undifferentiated C2C12 cells. In a heterokaryon assay, SIRT1 shuttled between the nucleus and cytoplasm, and leptomycin B, an inhibitor of CRM1-mediated nuclear exportation, inhibited this shuttling. Two nuclear localization signals and two nuclear export signals were identified by deletion and site-directed mutation analyses. Overexpressed nuclear (but not cytoplasmic or dominant-negative) SIRT1 enhanced the deacetylation of histone H3 in C2C12 cells. Moreover, only the nuclear form suppressed the apoptosis of C2C12 cells induced by antimycin A, an oxidative stressor. These findings indicate that nucleocytoplasmic shuttling is a novel regulatory mechanism of SIRT1, which may participate in differentiation and in inhibition of cell death.
Building Empirical Typologies with QCA

Typologies are omnipresent both in everyday life as well as in the sciences. Epistemologically, there are several systematic ways to build typologies, such as qualitative, theory-based descriptions on one end and quantitative, exploratory statistical means on the other end of the spectrum. Both have their specific advantages and disadvantages, which can be bridged by applying set-theoretic methods, such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The contribution of this paper is substantial and methodological: First, we show how QCA can enhance our understanding of media systems by building a typology that draws on Hallin and Mancini’s framework. The main improvement of QCA is the ability to identify ideal types as well as border cases. In our analysis, we move beyond the widely discussed case of Great Britain and take a closer look at further border cases such as Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Second, QCA has been scarcely applied to build typologies and if so, only in neighboring disciplines. Thus, we aim at familiarizing comparative political communication scholars with this method.
Bidirectional Modifications of Visual Acuity Induced by Monocular Deprivation in Juvenile and Adult Rats

Recent electrophysiological studies of rodent visual cortex suggest that, in addition to deprived-eye depression, monocular deprivation (MD) also shifts ocular dominance by potentiation of open-eye responses. We used computer-based, two-choice discrimination tasks to assess the behavioral significance of these findings in rats. As expected, prolonged MD, from postnatal day 21 until adulthood (>150 d) markedly decreased visual acuity through the deprived eye. However, we also found that the acuity through the nondeprived eye was significantly enhanced compared with normally reared controls. Interestingly, when the deprived eye was opened in adults, there was a gradual but incomplete recovery of acuity in the deprived eye preceded by a loss of the enhanced acuity in the nondeprived eye. These changes were reversed by again reclosing the eye. These findings suggest that the bidirectional changes in visually evoked responses after MD are behaviorally meaningful and that significant plasticity is exhibited well into adulthood.
Circumventing genetic restriction of protection against malaria with multigene DNA immunization: CD8+ cell-, interferon gamma-, and nitric oxide-dependent immunity

Despite efforts to develop vaccines that protect against malaria by inducing CD8+ T cells that kill infected hepatocytes, no subunit vaccine has been shown to circumvent the genetic restriction inherent in this approach, and little is known about the interaction of subunit vaccine-induced immune effectors and infected hepatocytes. We now report that immunization with plasmid DNA encoding the plasmodium yoelii circumsporozoite protein protected one of five strains of mice against malaria (H-2d, 75%); a PyHEP17 DNA vaccine protected three of the five strains (H-2a, 71%; H-2k, 54%; H-2d, 26%); and the combination protected 82% of H-2a, 90% of H-2k, and 88% of H-2d mice. Protection was absolutely dependent on CD8+ T cells, INF-gamma, or nitric oxide. These data introduce a new target of protective preerythrocytic immune responses, PyHEP 17 and its P. falciparum homologue, and provide a realistic perspective on the opportunities and challenges inherent in developing malaria vaccines that target the infected hepatocyte.
Maternal attachment state of mind moderates the impact of postnatal depression on infant attachment.

BACKGROUND Empirical studies have revealed a significant, but modest association between maternal depression and insecure mother-child attachment. Across studies, however, a substantial number of mothers with depression are able to provide a sensitive caretaking environment for their children. This paper aimed to explore whether a mother's own state of mind regarding attachment moderated the association between postpartum depression and insecure mother-child attachment. METHODS Mothers (n = 111), mainly middle-class mothers, and their infants participated in a longitudinal study of postnatal depression, maternal attachment state of mind and child attachment. Depression was assessed using a diagnostic interview (at 4 and 12 months) and symptom checklists (at 4, 12 and 15 months). The Adult Attachment Interview was conducted at 12 months and the Strange Situation procedure at 15 months. RESULTS Mothers diagnosed as depressed were more likely to have an insecure state of mind regarding attachment. Infants of chronically depressed mothers were more likely to be insecurely attached; however, the relationship between maternal depression and child attachment was moderated by maternal attachment state of mind. CONCLUSIONS Results are discussed with reference to resiliency factors for women with postnatal depression and implications for intervention.
ATTITUDE OF STUDENTS ON CONCEPT MAPPING - AN INNOVATIVE TEACHING LEARNING STRATEGY

Background: Multiple researches are going on in the field of promotion of critical thinking skills among nurses and one of the well studied teaching strategies is Concept Mapping (CM). Though Concept mapping is proved to be effective in promotion of critical thinking, it is not widely used. So this study aimed to identify the attitude of student nurses in relation to Concept mapping. Methods: Descriptive survey design was used in this study. Thirty nine pre-final year nursing students participated in this study. 5 point Likert scale was used to assess the attitude of the students. Verbal opinion was also collected in relation to Concept mapping. Results: There were 10 positive and 8 negative statements regarding Concept mapping which the student nurses evaluated. The mean attitude score was 74.5% which showed that the students were in favour of concept mapping. 97% of the students had said that they can easily apply it to the nursing process and 77% of them agreed that it can be used for the entire subjects including non nursing subjects like basic sciences. However, 61% of the students had said the preparation of concept mapping as a time consuming task and they would prefer traditional method of writing care plans. They had expressed that concept mapping made their mind fresh, kindled their thinking and improved their critical thinking. Many of them suggested that if concept mapping was being introduced to them from the first, it would have been the best method to write care plans.
[A new instrument for the evaluation of the medical profession. Use of the OSCE method].

BACKGROUND Objective structured clinical examination has advantages over traditional oral examination of medical student. However, it is not routinely used in Chile. AIM To describe the objective structured clinical examination system and report the results of its first use with Chilean medical students. MATERIAL AND METHODS Thirteen interns ware evaluated at the end of their surgical rotation, using the objective structured clinical examination. Thirteen stations were structured for this examination: one for history taking, two for physical examination, four for problem solving and knowledge, one for radiological interpretation, one for instrumental recognition, one for skills and one for text comprehension. There were a total of 88 questions. RESULTS All students exceeded 60% of requirements. Mean approval score was 73%. The higher score was 80% and the lower 61%. Ten students had a score over 70%. The method was well accepted by teachers and students. CONCLUSIONS This first local experience with the objective structured clinical examination was successful.
Predicting the Size of the Progeny Mapping Population Required to Positionally Clone a Gene

A key frustration during positional gene cloning (map-based cloning) is that the size of the progeny mapping population is difficult to predict, because the meiotic recombination frequency varies along chromosomes. We describe a detailed methodology to improve this prediction using rice (Oryza sativa L.) as a model system. We derived and/or validated, then fine-tuned, equations that estimate the mapping population size by comparing these theoretical estimates to 41 successful positional cloning attempts. We then used each validated equation to test whether neighborhood meiotic recombination frequencies extracted from a reference RFLP map can help researchers predict the mapping population size. We developed a meiotic recombination frequency map (MRFM) for ∼1400 marker intervals in rice and anchored each published allele onto an interval on this map. We show that neighborhood recombination frequencies (R-map, >280-kb segments) extracted from the MRFM, in conjunction with the validated formulas, better predicted the mapping population size than the genome-wide average recombination frequency (R-avg), with improved results whether the recombination frequency was calculated as genes/cM or kb/cM. Our results offer a detailed road map for better predicting mapping population size in diverse eukaryotes, but useful predictions will require robust recombination frequency maps based on sampling more progeny.
Chinese Couplet Generation with Neural Network Structures

Part of the unique cultural heritage of China is the Chinese couplet. Given a sentence (namely an antecedent clause), people reply with another sentence (namely a subsequent clause) equal in length. Moreover, a special phenomenon is that corresponding characters from the same position in the two clauses match each other by following certain constraints on semantic and/or syntactic relatedness. Automatic couplet generation by computer is viewed as a difficult problem and has not been fully explored. In this paper, we formulate the task as a natural language generation problem using neural network structures. Given the issued antecedent clause, the system generates the subsequent clause via sequential language modeling. To satisfy special characteristics of couplets, we incorporate the attention mechanism and polishing schema into the encoding-decoding process. The couplet is generated incrementally and iteratively. A comprehensive evaluation, using perplexity and BLEU measurements as well as human judgments, has demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Multisensory Control of Hippocampal Spatiotemporal Selectivity

A Sense of Place Hippocampal place cells are believed to be mainly governed by visual and self-motion cues. However, the contribution of sensory cues such as smells, sounds, and textures, etc., is difficult to eliminate. In virtual reality, these cues will not provide any information about the animals' position. Ravassard et al. (p. 1342, published online 2 May) developed a virtual-reality system as immersive and close to the real world as possible and compared place cells in rats running in this apparatus and in the real world. Twice as many neurons were active in a real-world situation compared to virtual reality. While place cells in the real world encoded position, place cells in a virtual world encoded distance. Virtual reality reveals how sensory cues differentially influence brain activity involved in sensing place in rats. The hippocampal cognitive map is thought to be driven by distal visual cues and self-motion cues. However, other sensory cues also influence place cells. Hence, we measured rat hippocampal activity in virtual reality (VR), where only distal visual and nonvestibular self-motion cues provided spatial information, and in the real world (RW). In VR, place cells showed robust spatial selectivity; however, only 20% were track active, compared with 45% in the RW. This indicates that distal visual and nonvestibular self-motion cues are sufficient to provide selectivity, but vestibular and other sensory cues present in RW are necessary to fully activate the place-cell population. In addition, bidirectional cells preferentially encoded distance along the track in VR, while encoding absolute position in RW. Taken together, these results suggest the differential contributions of these sensory cues in shaping the hippocampal population code. Theta frequency was reduced, and its speed dependence was abolished in VR, but phase precession was unaffected, constraining mechanisms governing both hippocampal theta oscillations and temporal coding. These results reveal cooperative and competitive interactions between sensory cues for control over hippocampal spatiotemporal selectivity and theta rhythm.
Understanding Differences in Mental Health History and Behavioral Choices in a Community Sample of Individuals with and without Body Modifications

ABSTRACT This study investigated the differences in mental health history and social, health, alcohol and substance, and sexual behaviors of individuals with and without body modification in a community sample. Previous research primarily focused on negative behavioral and psychological correlates of body modification practices in college student, juvenile delinquent, inpatient, and incarcerated populations. This tendency does not take into account changes in the demographics and motivations of individuals who obtain body modifications in the last two decades. The Community Body Modification Checklist was developed based on previous studies; reliability and validity for the measure were established using Cronbach’s alpha and factor analysis. The results indicated that individuals with body modifications were not more likely to engage in risky behaviors or report a history of mental health problems when compared to non-modified persons; however, they were more likely to engage in social and health behaviors. These findings may be best explained by the body modification community becoming diversified by the middle class whose meanings, motivations, and usage of tattoos and piercings are unique.
Integration of acoustic and visual speech for speaker recognition

• an improvement in recognition performance resulting from data fusion for normal input data and for a range of degraded input data conditions. • discriminative models will show better performance than predictive models. This will result from the more stringent data alignment (lip sync) requirements and the lack of classifier input information redundancy in the predictive scheme. Also, predictive modelling is expected to show less robustness to input data variability. • fuzzy ARTMAP models are expected to outperform MLP predictive models with regard to accuracy. This is because the fuzzy ARTMAP map field realises a minimax learning rule that conjointly allows the minimisation of predictive error and the maximisation of predictive generalisation [9]. Standard back–propagation learning does not provide such a mechanism. In addition, tremendous savings in training times are expected with the fuzzy ARTMAP approach. 4 CONCLUSIONS Humans often rely on multiple senses – particularly hearing and vision – for many recognition tasks. We have proposed the joint use of acoustic and visual information for reliable automatic speaker recognition. The initial step towards this goal has combined static facial image information with voice, and the results have shown that performance improvements can be achieved even with a relatively simple integration scheme. We believe that visual speech does convey personal identity information, and that its use in conjunction with acoustic speech results in improved automatic speaker recognition performance in terms of accuracy, robustness, and protection against impersonation. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Sincere thanks are expressed to the Beit Trust for the financial support in form of a Beit Trust Fellowship awarded to the first author. 3 CLASSIFICATION Each known person is allocated an artificial neural network model. Multi–layer perceptrons (MLPs) trained as predictive or discriminative networks (Figure 1) are considered. speech speech Prediction Prediction Visual Acoustic speech Visual Identity error (a) Predictive modelling Visual speech Identity Acoustic speech Categorisation (b) Discriminative modelling Figure 1: Predictive and discriminative classifier modes For speedier and incremental training, fuzzy ARTMAP models are preferred. Each fuzzy ARTMAP model is trained to make a many–to–one mapping from acoustic speech to visual speech for its allotted person (Figure 2). The predictive error across an utterance acts as recognition measure. A fuzzy ARTMAP neural network architecture is composed of a pair of fuzzy Adaptive Resonance Theory modules (modules A and B in Figure 2) [9]. Each module creates recognition categories corresponding to its input data. The two modules are interconnected by …
Superpixel-Based Hand Gesture Recognition With Kinect Depth Camera

This paper presents a new superpixel-based hand gesture recognition system based on a novel superpixel earth mover's distance metric, together with Kinect depth camera. The depth and skeleton information from Kinect are effectively utilized to produce markerless hand extraction. The hand shapes, corresponding textures and depths are represented in the form of superpixels, which effectively retain the overall shapes and color of the gestures to be recognized. Based on this representation, a novel distance metric, superpixel earth mover's distance (SP-EMD), is proposed to measure the dissimilarity between the hand gestures. This measurement is not only robust to distortion and articulation, but also invariant to scaling, translation and rotation with proper preprocessing. The effectiveness of the proposed distance metric and recognition algorithm are illustrated by extensive experiments with our own gesture dataset as well as two other public datasets. Simulation results show that the proposed system is able to achieve high mean accuracy and fast recognition speed. Its superiority is further demonstrated by comparisons with other conventional techniques and two real-life applications.
Effects of contrasting photoperiods and temperatures on performance traits of confinement-reared ewe lambs.

The effects of contrasting photoperiods (16L:8D vs 8L:16D) and ambient temperatures (5 C vs 18 C vs 31 C) on performance traits of ewe lambs have been evaluated. Seventy-two lambs were paired and allotted to one of six treatment groups in a 2 x 3 factorial experiment. The lambs were fed a pelleted diet ad libitum. throughout the 14-wk study (i.e., as lambs progressed from 12 to 26 wk of age). Analysis of performance and carcass data showed that both photoperiod and temperature affected growth rate (P less than .01), feed intake (P less than .01), final weight (P less than .01) and carcass weight (P less than .01). Although feed efficiency tended to be greater for lambs exposed to the 16L:8D photoperiod, this characteristic was not affected significantly. An interaction between photoperiod and temperature was not observed for growth rate, final weight or carcass weight. Final weight and carcass weight for lambs in the six treatment groups were: 52.5 and 27.7 kg for 16L:8D, 5 C; 49.2 and 25.8 kg for 8L:16D, 5 C; 48.1 and 25.3 kg for 16L:8D, 18 C; 45.2 and 23.5 kg for 8L:16D, 18 C; 42.0 and 21.1 kg for 16L:8D, 31 C and 36.0 and 17.4 kg for 8L:16D, 31 C. Carcass merit, including quality and yield, was not affected (P greater than .05) by treatment. Whereas serum prolactin concentrations were elevated in lambs exposed to the 16L:8D photoperiod, an interaction (P less than .01) between photoperiod and temperature was found. Wool growth was similar for lambs exposed to 16L:8D and 8L:16D photoperiods, but was reduced (P less than .05) by exposure to increasing environmental temperatures. These results suggest that environmental temperature and photoperiod independently contribute to the growth and performance of confinement-reared ewe lambs and that each of these variables can be adjusted to optimize the efficiency of lamb production.
Satellite-Based Analysis of Evapotranspiration and Water Balance in the Grassland Ecosystems of Dryland East Asia

The regression tree method is used to upscale evapotranspiration (ET) measurements at eddy-covariance (EC) towers to the grassland ecosystems over the Dryland East Asia (DEA). The regression tree model was driven by satellite and meteorology datasets, and explained 82% and 76% of the variations of ET observations in the calibration and validation datasets, respectively. The annual ET estimates ranged from 222.6 to 269.1 mm yr−1 over the DEA region with an average of 245.8 mm yr−1 from 1982 through 2009. Ecosystem ET showed decreased trends over 61% of the DEA region during this period, especially in most regions of Mongolia and eastern Inner Mongolia due to decreased precipitation. The increased ET occurred primarily in the western and southern DEA region. Over the entire study area, water balance (the difference between precipitation and ecosystem ET) decreased substantially during the summer and growing season. Precipitation reduction was an important cause for the severe water deficits. The drying trend occurring in the grassland ecosystems of the DEA region can exert profound impacts on a variety of terrestrial ecosystem processes and functions.
CMOS amplifier with self-correction offset for SerDes applications

In Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) systems usually there is a mismatch between the devices used in the circuitry handling the two complimentary signals and the analog front-end equalizer (AFE) circuit. This introduces an unknown and relatively steady offset voltage into the differential signals, this offset affects the noise margin of the system. A design of self-correction offset amplifier based on a continuous-time closed loop is proposed for minimizing input voltage offset coming from different sources in the range from - 30 mV to + 30 mV. Simulation results showed offset correction at the amplifier output which allows proper operation in SerDes systems. The amplifier was designed in AMI 0.5 μm CMOS technology, for 6 mW of power consumption and 3.0 V supply.