Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ligand-Induced Internalization of the p75 Neurotrophin Receptor: A Slow Route to the Signaling Endosome

The nerve growth factor (NGF) family of neurotrophins binds two classes of cell-surface receptors, trk receptor tyrosine kinases and the shared p75 receptor. Rapid internalization and retrograde trafficking of neurotrophin-trk complexes have been demonstrated in a number of systems and are thought to transmit trophic signals from terminals to neuronal cell bodies. In contrast, the internalization and trafficking of neurotrophin-p75 complexes are not well understood. In this study, we used biotinylated NGF and a fluorescent-labeled anti-p75 antibody to follow the kinetics and route of ligand-induced internalization of the p75 receptor in cycling and differentiated PC12 cells. Binding of neurotrophins to p75 induced internalization at a rate approximately three times slower than that of transferrin and NGF-TrkA complexes in the same cells. The ligand-p75 complex was internalized via clathrin-coated pits into early endosomes and eventually accumulated in recycling endosomes in the cell body and vesicles colabeled by the cholera toxin B-subunit in the growth cones. Both internalized ligand and p75 were protected from proteolytic degradation and accumulated in vesicles that did not undergo acidification. Finally, NGF induced endosomal association of p75 and its MAGE interactors, necdin and NRAGE. These data suggest that signaling endosomes containing activated p75 are involved in neurotrophin signaling, and that such endosomes may be temporally and spatially distinct from those containing trk receptors.
Attractor States in Teaching and Learning Processes: A Study of Out-of-School Science Education

In order for out-of-school science activities that take place during school hours but outside the school context to be successful, instructors must have sufficient pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to guarantee high-quality teaching and learning. We argue that PCK is a quality of the instructor-pupil system that is constructed in real-time interaction. When PCK is evident in real-time interaction, we define it as Expressed Pedagogical Content Knowledge (EPCK). The aim of this study is to empirically explore whether EPCK shows a systematic pattern of variation, and if so whether the pattern occurs in recurrent and temporary stable attractor states as predicted in the complex dynamic systems theory. This study concerned nine out-of-school activities in which pupils of upper primary school classes participated. A multivariate coding scheme was used to capture EPCK in real time. A principal component analysis of the time series of all the variables reduced the number of components. A cluster revealed general descriptions of the components across all cases. Cluster analyses of individual cases divided the time series into sequences, revealing High-, Low-, and Non-EPCK states. High-EPCK attractor states emerged at particular moments during activities, rather than being present all the time. Such High-EPCK attractor states were only found in a few cases, namely those where the pupils were prepared for the visit and the instructors were trained.
Security Analysis, Agency Costs, and Firm Characteristics

In this paper we appraise the monitoring activity of security analysis from the manager-shareholder conflict perspective. Using a data set of more than 7000 firm-year observations for manufacturing firms tracked by security analysts over the 1988-1994 period, our evidence supports the view that security analysis acts as a monitoring mechanism in reducing agency costs associated with the separation of ownership and control. However, we also find that security analysts are more effective in reducing managerial non-value maximizing behavior for single-focused than multi-segment (diversified) firms. In addition, the shareholder gains from the monitoring activity of security analysis are found to be larger for focused than for diversified firms.
A parametric model for real-time flickering fire

Fire is a complex natural phenomena involving chemical reactions and turbulent flow of hot gaseous products. Significant computer graphics research is devoted to modelling the turbulent dynamics of fire; however flicker which results from the chemical nature of fire has not been previously modelled. In this paper we present a technique that addresses both modelling of dynamics and chemical aspects of fire. We use a stochastic Lagrangian approach to model the dynamics. We formulate a simplified model of thermochemistry that mimics the behavior of models in combustion studies to capture the chemical aspects. The model is parameterized to enable control of flicker rate, flame height and number of flame brushes in the simulated fire. We exploit the programmability of graphics hardware for real-time rendering. The capabilities of the model are demonstrated via representative animations.
A cluster randomized controlled trial of a client-centred, activities of daily living intervention for people with stroke: one year follow-up of caregivers

Objective: Compare caregiver burden, provision of informal care, participation in everyday occupations and life satisfaction of caregivers to people with stroke, who either had received a client-centred, activities of daily living intervention or usual activities of daily living interventions. Design: A multicentre cluster randomized controlled trial in which 16 rehabilitation units were randomly assigned to deliver a client-centred, activities of daily living intervention or usual activities of daily living interventions. Caregiver outcomes were compared cross-sectionally at 12 months and changes in outcomes between three and 12 months after people with stroke were included in the study. Setting: Inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation. Participants: Caregivers of people with stroke enrolled in the trial. Intervention: A client-centred, activities of daily living intervention aiming to increase agency in daily activities and participation in everyday life for people after stroke. Main measures: Caregiver Burden Scale, Occupational Gaps Questionnaire, LiSat-11. Results: There were no differences in outcomes between caregivers in the client-centred, activities of daily living (n = 88) and the usual activities of daily living (n = 95) group at 12 months. The caregiver burden score was 42.7 vs. 41.8, p = 0.75, mean occupational gaps were 3.5 vs. 4.0, p = 0.52 and satisfaction with life was 53% vs. 50%, p = 0.87. There were no differences in changes between three and 12 months. However, within groups there were significant differences in caregiver burden, factor general strain, for caregivers in the client-centred, activities of daily living group, and in provision of informal care for the usual activities of daily living group. Conclusion: The client-centred intervention did not bring about any difference between caregiver-groups, but within groups some difference was found for caregiver burden and informal care.
Mating system analysis of Açaí-do-Amazonas (Euterpe precatoria Mart.) using molecular markers

Euterpe precatoria (Açaí-do-Amazonas) produces fruits of which the fresh pulp is consumed. It is almost exclusively collected by extractivist farmers, because no selected genotypes are available for the establishment of plantations. For the domestication and breeding of the species, mating system studies are needed for strategy formulation. This study evaluated the mating system of a natural population of E. precatoria. Thirteen progenies were genotyped with 13 microsatellite loci by capillary electrophoresis in an automated DNA sequencer. Estimates of single-locus and multilocus outcrossing rates were 1.0, and paternity correlation was low (rp̂(m) = 0.293). Euterpe precatoria families consist mainly of half-sibs and the reproductive strategy of the species is allogamy.
Attenuation of Endothelium‐Related Relaxation and Enhanced Responsiveness of Vascular Smooth Muscle to Histamine in Spastic Coronary Arterial Segments From Miniature Pigs

Mechanism of coronary spasm was examined regarding endothelium-related relaxation and contraction produced by smooth muscle cells of spastic vessels isolated from Göttingen miniature pigs. In these pigs, coronary artery spasm was documented angiographically in vivo three months after endothelial denudation, and spastic and control segments of the coronary artery were suspended in organ chambers at their optimal length for generating tension. Applications of KC1 (118 mM), acetylcholine(10-9 to 10-4 M), and PGF2α (10-8 to 3 ± 10-5 M) produced similar tension, at the respective doses, in both the spastic and control coronary arteries. During increasing concentrations of histamine (l0-8 to 3 ± 10-4 M; n= 14) and serotonin (10-9 to 10-5 M; n= 13), the maximum tension of the spastic vessel was 136 ± 6 and 97 ± 4%, respectively, of the tension produced by 118 mM KC1. That is significantly larger than seen in the control vessels: 98 ± 4 and 74 ± 4%, respectively. The ED50 to histamine and serotonin was also significantly less in the spastic vessels. After mechanical removal of the endothelium, the tension generated during the cumulative administration of histamine (n = 8) but not serotonin (n = 8) was larger in the spastic than the control vessels, thereby suggesting the presence of augmented responses of the smooth muscle to histamine in the spastic vessels. The increase in maximum tension after mechanical denudation was greater in the control than the spastic vessels in cases of histamine and serotonin. Endothelium-dependent relaxations due to serotonin (n = 5) and A23187 (n = 5) were tested under conditions of precontraction by PGF2α (10-5 M). The maximum relaxation induced by serotonin was 31 ± 4 and 67 ± 8% (p<0.01) in the spastic and the control vessel, respectively. A23187 relaxed completely the spastic vessel, to a similar extent as seen in the control vessels; however, the ED50 of relaxation evoked by A23187 was 2.7 ± 0.6 ± 10-8 and 6.3 ± 1.4 ± 10-9 M (p<0.01) in the spastic and the control vessels, respectively. Thus, both increased responsiveness of smooth muscle to histamine and impairment of endothelium-dependent relaxation to serotonin and to histamine may play an important role in the hypercontraction observed in coronary artery spasm in these miniature pigs.
The Role of Community Characteristics in determining Target Audiences in Arabic Gulf Countries interested in Online Purchasing through Commercial Smartphone Applications

Community’s characteristics are important indicators in the study of disseminating electronic systems on a large scale. A community might be influenced positively to accept electronic systems if their basic requirements to use said electronic systems are commonly available. Therefore, determining communities’ characteristics is the first pillar in identifying a population segment interested in online purchasing, followed by determining their requirements to interact with electronic systems successfully. This study sought to identify common properties within the target audience for commercial smartphone applications in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Many academic studies point to the increasing volume of online trade exchange in GCC, as well as the rise in smartphone users, as compared with the overall population of the GCC. Thus, the success of m-commerce applications depends on two main aspects: identifying the target sector interested in online purchasing in the GCC region and identifying the technical requirements of the users in the target sector, so that m-commerce applications can be created and adopted successfully in the
Policy Networks with Two-Stage Training for Dialogue Systems

In this paper, we propose to use deep policy networks which are trained with an advantage actor-critic method for statistically optimised dialogue systems. First, we show that, on summary state and action spaces, deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) outperforms Gaussian Processes methods. Summary state and action spaces lead to good performance but require pre-engineering effort, RL knowledge, and domain expertise. In order to remove the need to define such summary spaces, we show that deep RL can also be trained efficiently on the original state and action spaces. Dialogue systems based on partially observable Markov decision processes are known to require many dialogues to train, which makes them unappealing for practical deployment. We show that a deep RL method based on an actor-critic architecture can exploit a small amount of data very efficiently. Indeed, with only a few hundred dialogues collected with a handcrafted policy, the actor-critic deep learner is considerably bootstrapped from a combination of supervised and batch RL. In addition, convergence to an optimal policy is significantly sped up compared to other deep RL methods initialized on the data with batch RL. All experiments are performed on a restaurant domain derived from the Dialogue State Tracking Challenge 2 (DSTC2) dataset.
Using mutual information to measure coupling in the cardiorespiratory system.

Mutual information (MI) analysis represents a general method to detect linear and nonlinear statistical dependencies between time series, and it can be considered as an alternative to the well-known correlation analysis. This article shows how the concept of MI can be used to quantify the coupling between two systems, X and Y. We consider systems as coupled if there are two signals, x(t) and y(t), representing successive measurements of the systems, X and Y, respectively, such that x(t) and y(t) are statistically dependent. Roughly speaking, this means that we can learn anything on x from observations of y, and vice versa. MI represents a measure for the strength of statistical dependencies, hence it could also be used as a measure of coupling. We apply our method to the cardiorespiratory system of a newborn. Here, we find significant changes in the strength of coupling with some characteristic time scales. Typical linear and nonlinear dependencies were found to undergo changes with the sleep states of human newborns. Those changes and scales are also reflected by a correlation analysis. However, we argue that there might be simultaneously rather large correlations, and weak dependencies, quantified by the MI. This can occur because correlation is rather different from M1; correlation describes only linear dependencies, where MI takes into account both linear and nonlinear dependencies.
Incremental and Fully Dynamic Subgraph Connectivity For Emergency Planning

During the last 10 years it has become popular to study dynamic graph problems in a emergency planning or sensitivity setting: Instead of considering the general fully dynamic problem, we only have to process a single batch update of size d; after the update we have to answer queries. In this paper, we consider the dynamic subgraph connectivity problem with sensitivity d: We are given a graph of which some vertices are activated and some are deactivated. After that we get a single update in which the states of up to $d$ vertices are changed. Then we get a sequence of connectivity queries in the subgraph of activated vertices. We present the first fully dynamic algorithm for this problem which has an update and query time only slightly worse than the best decremental algorithm. In addition, we present the first incremental algorithm which is tight with respect to the best known conditional lower bound; moreover, the algorithm is simple and we believe it is implementable and efficient in practice.
Do early responders to psychotherapy maintain treatment gains?

This study examined early positive response to psychotherapy in a sample of 147 college student clients seeking therapy at a university counseling center. Early response was determined based on a score representing the difference between client-obtained symptom distress session scores and expected scores derived from a large actuarial study of typical treatment response. In the present study, early positive response to therapy was associated with fewer psychological symptoms at therapy termination and follow-up and maintenance of therapy gains. These results are discussed in relation to placebo effects and common factors and their primary importance in producing meaningful change. Future research directions are recommended that include the use of early response for exploring the contribution of client variables and theoretically derived interventions as they relate to the outcome of psychotherapy.
Polymorphism of M341I in the Type A Human Natriuretic Peptide Receptor Gene in Essential Hypertension in Korea

Objectives: There are 3 subtypes of natriuretic peptide (NP) receptors: type A natriuretic peptide receptor (NPRA), NPRB, and NPRC. The NPRA gene polymorphism, consisting of substition of methionine (ATG) to isoleucine (ATC) at nucleotide 1023 (M341I) of exon 3 was revealed to be associated with increased risk for essential hypertension (EH) in Japanese people. The purpose of this study is to investigate association between EH and the M341I polymorphism in the NPRA gene in Korea. Methods: Eighty patients in whom type B natriuretic peptide (BNP) was measured were enrolled in this study. 66 patients had EH and 14 patients did not. The polymorphism of M341I was evaluated by multiplex genotyping polymerase chain reaction and by sequencing analysis. Results: The overall distribution of alleles was not significantly different between the control and EH groups. However, the C/C homozygous genotype was found only in the EH group. In the EH group, patient carrying the C/C homozygous genotype had the trend of having higher systolic and diastolic BP levels regardless of the previous treatment, even though other laboratory markers including BNP levels had no significant differences according to the genotypes. Conclusion: This would be meaningful for the first identification of the M341I polymorphism in the NPRA gene and for the first suggestion of association of the EH with it in Korea. (Ewha Med J 2012;35(2):95-101)
Novel organization of microtubules in cultured central nervous system neurons: formation of hairpin loops at ends of maturing neurites

Using the high voltage electron microscope, we have examined cultured embryonic neurons in order to understand better the organization of microtubules in developing neurites. We found that, in embryonic chick retina neurons, microtubules were abundant in the ends of neurites and showed an unusual pattern of organization. Most striking was the presence of microtubule loops; after entering the flattened region of a growth cone, microtubules frequently made tight 180 degrees turns. Occasionally these looping microtubules re-entered the neurite and returned in the direction of the cell body. Positive identification of the loop structures as microtubules was made by specific immunocytochemical labeling. Quantitative analysis showed that more than half of the retina neurons that were dissociated on embryonic day 8 and kept in culture for 4 to 6 days (E8C4 and E8C6) contained at least one microtubule that made a 180 degrees turn at flat regions along or at the tips of neurites. The area within the loops typically contained larger membranous organelles, whereas only small vesicles were seen outside the loops. Fine filaments were seen to interconnect the loops at various places, suggesting the possibility that they played a role in maintaining the shape of microtubule loops. Examination of other neurons showed that tight microtubule loops were prominent in chick spinal cord neurons, but they were rarely seen in neurons of the sympathetic ganglia or dorsal root ganglia or in NG108- 15 cloned cells. Developmentally, no loops were observed in E8C1 retina neurons, but retina neurons dissociated from older embryos (12 days) did show loops after 1 day in culture; these data suggest that microtubule loops may be abundant around embryonic day 12 to 13 in the chick retina. The possible significance of this unusual microtubule organization to the control of neurite growth and bidirectional transport is discussed.
Stabilization of All Bell States in a Lossy Coupled-Cavity Array

A scheme is proposed to generate maximally entangled states of two Λ-type atoms trapped in separate overdamped optical cavities using quantum-jump-based feedback. This proposal can stabilize not only the singlet state, but also the other three triplet states by alternating the detuning parameter and relative phase of the classical fields. Meanwhile it is convenient to manipulate atoms, and much more robust against spontaneous emission of atoms. The parameters related to the potential experiment are analyzed comprehensively and it is confirmed that the quantum feedback technology is a significant tool for entanglement production with a high fidelity.
Using a Data Mining Approach to Discover Behavior Correlates of Chronic Disease: A Case Study of Depression

The purposes of this methodological paper are: 1) to describe data mining methods for building a classification model for a chronic disease using a U.S. behavior risk factor data set, and 2) to illustrate application of the methods using a case study of depressive disorder. Methods described include: 1) six steps of data mining to build a disease model using classification techniques, 2) an innovative approach to analyzing high-dimensionality data, and 3) a visualization strategy to communicate with clinicians who are unfamiliar with advanced statistics. Our application of data mining strategies identified childhood experience living with mentally ill and sexual abuse, and limited usual activity as the strongest correlates of depression among hundreds variables. The methods that we applied may be useful to others wishing to build a classification model from complex, large volume datasets for other health conditions.
Relativistic Explanation of the Sagnac Effect in the Rotating Reference Framework

The Harress-Sagnac effect, on which the devices for inertial guidance called optical gyroscopes are based, seems to deny the correctness of one of the two underlying principles of the special theory of relativity, the principle of the invariant, isotropic speed of propagation of light, and of electromagnetic radiation in general. In contrast with this principle, the Harress-Sagnac effect seems to be impossible unless in the rotating reference framework in which the Harress-Sagnac apparatus (interferometer) is at rest the light propagates with an anisotropic velocity. The article provides a relativistically consistent explanation of the effect from the point of view of this rotating reference framework. The explanation is based on the fact that in this rotating reference framework there exists — owing to the relativity of simultaneity — a discontinuity in simultaneity around the perimeter the Harress-Sagnac apparatus (interferometer).