Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of Mental Retardation-Associated Dystrophin-Gene Product Dp71 in Excitatory Synapse Organization, Synaptic Plasticity and Behavioral Functions

Background Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is caused by deficient expression of the cytoskeletal protein, dystrophin. One third of DMD patients also have mental retardation (MR), likely due to mutations preventing expression of dystrophin and other brain products of the DMD gene expressed from distinct internal promoters. Loss of Dp71, the major DMD-gene product in brain, is thought to contribute to the severity of MR; however, the specific function of Dp71 is poorly understood. Methodology/Principal Findings Complementary approaches were used to explore the role of Dp71 in neuronal function and identify mechanisms by which Dp71 loss may impair neuronal and cognitive functions. Besides the normal expression of Dp71 in a subpopulation of astrocytes, we found that a pool of Dp71 colocalizes with synaptic proteins in cultured neurons and is expressed in synaptic subcellular fractions in adult brains. We report that Dp71-associated protein complexes interact with specialized modular scaffolds of proteins that cluster glutamate receptors and organize signaling in postsynaptic densities. We then undertook the first functional examination of the brain and cognitive alterations in the Dp71-null mice. We found that these mice display abnormal synapse organization and maturation in vitro, altered synapse density in the adult brain, enhanced glutamatergic transmission and reduced synaptic plasticity in CA1 hippocampus. Dp71-null mice show selective behavioral disturbances characterized by reduced exploratory and novelty-seeking behavior, mild retention deficits in inhibitory avoidance, and impairments in spatial learning and memory. Conclusions/Significance Results suggest that Dp71 expression in neurons play a regulatory role in glutamatergic synapse organization and function, which provides a new mechanism by which inactivation of Dp71 in association with that of other DMD-gene products may lead to increased severity of MR.
STUDENTS' PERCEPTION ON THE USE OF AUTHENTIC MATERIALS IN SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Abstract This study aims to find out the senior high school students’ perception on the use of materials (authentic and non-authentic) in the classroom. To select the representative sample, a sampling method was used. This research observes the perceptions of 10 first-grade students of a Senior High School on the use of authentic and non-authentic materials. They were taught using both materials, authentic and non-authentic. After that, to collect the data, they were asked to fill in the questionnaire (Likert Scale) which showed the students’ perception toward both materials, authentic and non-authentic. Then, the data were analyzed based on two different categories proposed by Peacock (1997) which covered: (1) overall class interest and enthusiasm and (2) self-reported interest & enthusiasm. The result of the study indicated that authentic and non-authentic materials had their own benefit. The students indicated that the authentic materials slightly higher than the non-authentic ones. Keywords: EFL Methodology, english subject, materials (authentic and non-authentic). Abstrak Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menemukan persepsi para siswa terhadap penggunaan materi dalam pelajaran Bahasa Inggris (otentik dan non-otentik). Metode sampel digunakan untuk memilih sampel yang benar-benar mewakili keseluruhan populasi. Penelitian ini berupaya mengobservasi persepsi dari sepuluh siswa/siswi kelas X di sekolah menengah atas terhadap penggunaan materi pelajaran Bahasa Inggris yang berbentuk otentik dan non-otentik. Pada tahap proses pengumpulan data, para siswa/siswi mengisi angket (menggunakan skala Likert) yang menunjukkan persepsi mereka terhadap penggunaan bahan materi pelajaran Bahasa Inggris yang otentik dan non-otentik. Selanjutnya, data yang terkumpul dianalisis berdasarkan dua kategori dari Peacock (1997), yaitu: (1) antusiasme dan minat keseluruhan kelas. (2) antusiasme dan minat diri sendiri. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa masing-masing bentuk materi, baik otentik maupun nonotentik memberikan manfaat bagi siswa. Para siswa memberikan persepsi positif lebih tinggi terhadap penggunaan materi otentik dibandingkan dengan non-otentik. Kata-kata kunci: Metodologi pengajaran bahasa Inggris, materi otentik dan non-otentik
FGF is required for posterior neural patterning but not for neural induction.

Fibroblast growth factor (FGF) has been implicated in a variety of developmental processes including posterior mesoderm and neural patterning. Previous work has led to contradictory roles for FGF in neural induction and anteroposterior neural patterning. Launay et al. (Development 122, 869-880, 1996) suggested a requirement for FGF in anterior neural induction. In contrast, Kroll and Amaya (Development 122, 3173-3183, 1996) and Bang et al. (Development 124, 2075-2085, 1997) proposed that FGF is not required for early neural patterning. Here we use a loss-of-function assay to examine whether FGF is required for neural patterning in three experimental situations: (i) in Xenopus early embryos, (ii) in embryonic explants consisting of presumptive dorsal mesoderm and neurectoderm (Keller explants), and (iii) in explants of dorsal ectoderm and posterior mesoderm in which FGF signaling is specifically blocked in the ectoderm. When cultured until tailbud stages, Keller explants develop neural tissue with normal anteroposterior pattern. Overexpression of the dominant-negative FGF receptor (XFD) in Keller explants inhibited the posterior neural markers En-2, Krox-20, and HoxB9, but not the panneural marker nrp-1 and the anterior neurectodermal markers XAG-1 and Xotx-2. Similar results were seen in whole embryos, but only when XFD RNA was targeted to both the dorsal and lateral regions. In contrast, addition of FGF to Keller explants resulted in a shift of the midbrain-hindbrain boundary marker En-2 to a more anterior position normally fated to become cement gland. We also determined whether FGF is required specifically by the neurectoderm for anteroposterior neural patterning. Recombinants of dorsal ectoderm and posterior mesoderm were made in which FGF was specifically blocked in the ectoderm. Spinal cord and hindbrain markers were inhibited in these recombinants, whereas anterior markers and cement gland development were enhanced. Our results demonstrate that FGF is important for posterior development in both mesoderm and neurectoderm and that neural induction and posteriorization represent separable developmental events.
Chromatic Roots and Minor-Closed Families of Graphs

Given a minor-closed class of graphs $\mathcal{G}$, what is the infimum of the non-trivial roots of the chromatic polynomial of $G \in \mathcal{G}$? When $\mathcal{G}$ is the class of all graphs, the answer is known to be $32/27$. We answer this question exactly for three minor-closed classes of graphs. Furthermore, we conjecture precisely when the value is larger than $32/27$.
Motion Synthesis for Sports Using Unobtrusive Lightweight Body‐Worn and Environment Sensing

The ability to accurately achieve performance capture of athlete motion during competitive play in near real‐time promises to revolutionize not only broadcast sports graphics visualization and commentary, but also potentially performance analysis, sports medicine, fantasy sports and wagering. In this paper, we present a highly portable, non‐intrusive approach for synthesizing human athlete motion in competitive game‐play with lightweight instrumentation of both the athlete and field of play. Our data‐driven puppetry technique relies on a pre‐captured database of short segments of motion capture data to construct a motion graph augmented with interpolated motions and speed variations. An athlete's performed motion is synthesized by finding a related action sequence through the motion graph using a sparse set of measurements from the performance, acquired from both worn inertial and global location sensors. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in a challenging application scenario, with a high‐performance tennis athlete wearing one or more lightweight body‐worn accelerometers and a single overhead camera providing the athlete's global position and orientation data. However, the approach is flexible in both the number and variety of input sensor data used. The technique can also be adopted for searching a motion graph efficiently in linear time in alternative applications.
Vav1 Regulates Phospholipase Cγ Activation and Calcium Responses in Mast Cells

ABSTRACT The hematopoietic cell-specific protein Vav1 is a substrate of tyrosine kinases activated following engagement of many receptors, including FcɛRI. Vav1-deficient mice contain normal numbers of mast cells but respond more weakly than their normal counterparts to a passive systemic anaphylaxis challenge. Vav1-deficient bone marrow-derived mast cells also exhibited reduced degranulation and cytokine production, although tyrosine phosphorylation of FcɛRI, Syk, and LAT (linker for activation of T cells) was normal. In contrast, tyrosine phosphorylation of phospholipase Cγ1 (PLCγ1) and PLCγ2 and calcium mobilization were markedly inhibited. Reconstitution of deficient mast cells with Vav1 restored normal tyrosine phosphorylation of PLCγ1 and PLCγ2 and calcium responses. Thus, Vav1 is essential to FcɛRI-mediated activation of PLCγ and calcium mobilization in mast cells. In addition to its known role as an activator of Rac1 GTPases, these findings demonstrate a novel function for Vav1 as a regulator of PLCγ-activated calcium signals.
An Empirical Study of Highly Impactful Bugs in Mozilla Projects

Bug triaging is the process that consists in screening and prioritising bugs to allow a software organisation to focus its limited resources on bugs with high impact on software quality. In a previous work, we proposed an entropy-based crash triaging approach that can help software organisations identify crash-types that affect a large user base with high frequency. We refer to bugs associated to these crash-types as highly-impactful bugs. The proposed triaging approach can identify highly-impactful bugs only after they have led to crashes in the field for a certain period of time. Therefore, to reduce the impact of highly-impactful bugs on user perceived quality, an early identification of these bugs is necessary. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of highly-impactful bugs in Mozilla Firefox and Fennec for Android, and propose statistical models to help software organisations predict them early on before they impact a large population of users. Results show that our proposed prediction models can achieve a precision up to 64.2% (in Firefox) and a recall up to 98.3% (in Fennec). We also evaluate the benefits of our proposed models and found that, on average, they could help reduce 23.0% of Firefox' crashes and 13.4% of Fennec's crashes, while reducing 28.6% of impacted machine profiles for Firefox and 49.4% for Fennec. Software organisations could use our prediction models to catch highly-impactful bugs early during the triaging process, preventing them from impacting a larger user base.
Controlling Bullwhip Effect of Supply Chain's Milestones (Approach of Dynamic Systems and Control)

The bullwhip effect problem is one of the most important issues in supply chain management. Limited information sharing increases the difficulty of reducing the bullwhip effect and leads to inefficient supply chain management. This paper will offer a literature review of this topic, note the key contributions, discuss current practices for managing the bullwhip effect, and explain why it is necessary for more research to be done in the area, We then present recently documented causes of the Bullwhip effect in production supply chains, and the methodologies used to describe and measure the importance of these causes. We examine the limitations of these methodologies and suggest a combined approach discrete event-continuous simulation modeling approach to further study this phenomenon in complex production supply chains.
Inhibition of pure cultures of methanogens by benzene ring compounds

The inhibition of methane production by Methanosaeta concilii GP6, Methanospirillum hungatei GP1, Methanobacterium espanolae GP9, and Methanobacterium bryantii M.o. H. during short-term (6-h) exposure to eight benzene ring compounds was studied. The concentration that caused 50% inhibition of the methane production rate (IC50) was dependent on the species and the toxicant. Pentachlorophenol was the most toxic of the tested compounds, with an IC50 of less than 8 mg/liter for all species except M. hungatei. Abietic acid was the next most toxic compound for all the species, with an IC50 in the range of 21.4 to 203 mg/liter. Sodium benzoate was generally the least toxic, with an IC50 in the range of 1,225 to 32,400 mg/liter. 3-Chlorobenzoate was substantially more toxic (IC50, 450 to 1,460 mg/liter) than benzoate. The inhibition by benzene, phenol, vanillic acid, and toluene was intermediate to that of pentachlorophenol and benzoate. Long-term incubation (days) studies to determine effect on growth indicated that all eight compounds were usually much more toxic than predicted from the short-term data. In these latter studies, there was generally a good correlation in the observed inhibition as determined from growth and methane production.
Investigating the Information Transfer Efficiency of a 3x3 Watch-back Tactile Display

A watch-back tactile display (WBTD) is expected to be a viable supplement to the user interface limitations of a smartwatch. However, its design requires that many design parameters such as tactor types and stimulus patterns be determined. We conducted a series of experiments to explore the design space of a WBTD consisting of 3×3 tactors. We demonstrated that tactor types and the temporal patterns and locus of a stimulus produce statistically significant effects on the efficiency of a WBTD. The experimental results can act as a practical guideline for the design of an efficient WBTD.
An adaptive stochastic-resonance-based detector and its application in watermark extraction

In this paper, we explore a stochastic resonance (SR) based detector using bistable system (BS) to detect a binary pulse amplitude modulated (PAM) signal embedded in non-Gaussian noise. Through the example of BS based watermark extraction, we show that a reliable performance cannot be obtained if the BS parameters are determined by traditional tuning technique. The key observation is that the BS parameters are not sensitive to the pdf of the noise but to the variance of the noise and the amplitude of the signal. That makes it possible to determine the BS parameters in advance and an adaptive BS can be constructed based on the estimated amplitude of the watermark (signal) and the variance of the DCT coefficients (noise). Experimental results show that the performance obtained from the proposed adaptive stochastic-resonator-based detector is stable and provides superior performance compared to the existing BS based watermark schemes and the Gaussian based maximum likelihood (ML) detector.
The Canis Major Star Forming Region

The shape of the main arc formed by the Canis Major clouds has been suggested to result from a supernova explosion possibly triggering the recent star formation activity. The presence of dozens of OB stars and reflection nebulae forms the CMa OB1/R1 associations. More than a hundred emission line stars are found in this region, including the famous Z CMa, a binary system containing a Herbig Be star and a FUor companion. Several embedded infrared clusters with different ages are associated with the CMa clouds. The main characteristics of the region in terms of cloud structure, stellar content, age of associated young clusters, distance, and X-ray emission are presented in this chapter. Some of the arguments in favor and against the hypothesis of induced star formation are discussed in the last section.
The performance of mobile agent platforms

In the past few years there has been an enthusiastic interest in mobile agent technology and several platforms have been developed. There are some comparisons in the literature about the functionality of some mobile agent systems. However, none of those studies includes a direct comparison between the performance of the platforms. We present the results of an experimental study where we compare the performance of eight Java-based Mobile Agent systems: Aglets, Concordia, Voyager, Odyssey, Jumping Beans, Grasshopper, Swarm and JAMES. The study presents some insights about the performance and the robustness of each platform.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 gp120 and Other Activation Stimuli Are Highly Effective in Triggering Alpha Interferon and CC Chemokine Production in Circulating Plasmacytoid but Not Myeloid Dendritic Cells

ABSTRACT Exposure to aldrithiol-2-inactivated human immunodeficiency virus type 1 or gp120, but not gp41, triggered alpha interferon (IFN-α), CC chemokine ligand 2 (CCL2), CCL3, and CCL4 production in human plasmacytoid dendritic cells (DCs) but not in myeloid DCs (M-DCs) or monocyte-derived DCs from the same donors. The nonresponsiveness of M-DCs for IFN-α/β production was a general feature specific to these cells, as they also failed to produce it in response to inactivated influenza virus, poly(I-C), lipopolysaccharide, Staphylococcus aureus Cowans I, or CD40L. The different capacities of circulating DC subsets to produce immune mediators in response to most stimuli argue for a different role for these cells in the regulation of innate immunity to pathogens.
A 2.4-GHz Low-Power Low-IF Receiver and Direct-Conversion Transmitter in 0.18-$\mu{\hbox {m}}$ CMOS for IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN Applications

In this paper, a low-power low-IF receiver and a direct-conversion transmitter (DCT) suitable for the IEEE standard 802.15. 4 radio system at the 2.4-GHz band are presented in 0.18-mum deep n-well CMOS technology. By using vertical NPN (V-NPN) bipolar junction transistors in the baseband analog circuits of the low-IF receiver, the image rejection performance is improved and the power consumption is reduced. In addition, by applying the V-NPN current mirrored technique in a DCT, the carrier leakage is reduced and the linearity performance is improved. The receiver has 10 dB of noise figure, -15 dBm of third-order input intercept point, and 35 dBc of image rejection. The transmitter has more than -2 dBm of transmit output power, -35 dBc of local oscillator leakage, and -46 dBc of the transmit third harmonic component. The receiver and transmitter dissipate 6 and 9 mA from a 1.8-V supply, respectively
Dopamine, But Not Serotonin, Regulates Reversal Learning in the Marmoset Caudate Nucleus

Studies of visual discrimination reversal learning have revealed striking neurochemical dissociations at the level of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) with serotoninergic, but not dopaminergic, integrity being important for successful reversal learning. These findings have considerable implications for disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder and schizophrenia, in which reversal learning is impaired, and which are primarily treated with drugs targeting the dopaminergic and serotoninergic systems. Dysfunction in such disorders however, is not limited to the OFC and extends subcortically to other structures implicated in reversal learning, such as the medial caudate nucleus. Therefore, because the roles of the serotonin and dopamine within the caudate nucleus are poorly understood, this study compared the effects of selective serotoninergic or selective dopaminergic depletions of the marmoset medial caudate nucleus on serial discrimination reversal learning. All monkeys were able to learn novel stimulus–reward associations but, unlike control monkeys and monkeys with selective serotoninergic medial caudate depletions, dopamine-depleted monkeys were markedly impaired in their ability to reverse this association. This impairment was not perseverative in nature. These findings are the opposite of those seen in the OFC and provide evidence for a neurochemical double dissociation between the OFC and medial caudate in the regulation of reversal learning. Although the specific contributions of these monoamines within the OFC–striatal circuit remain to be elucidated, these findings have profound implications for the development of drugs designed to remediate some of the cognitive processes underlying impaired reversal learning.
Are you TED talk material? comparing prosody in professors and TED speakers

TED talks are the pinnacle of public speaking. They combine compelling content with flawless delivery, and their popularity is attested by the millions of views they attract. In this work, we compare the prosodic voice characteristics of TED speakers and university professors. Our aim is to identify the characteristics that separate TED speakers from other public speakers. Based on a simple set of features derived from pitch and energy, we train a discriminative classifier to predict whether a 5 minute audio sample is from a TED talk or a university lecture. We are able to achieve < 10% equal error rate. We then investigate which features are most discriminative, and discuss conflating factors that might contribute to those features.
The Critical Relationship between the Timing of Stimulus Presentation and Data Acquisition in Blocked Designs with fMRI

This paper concerns the experimental design and statistical models employed by fMRI activation studies which block presentation of linguistic stimuli. In particular, we note that the relationship between the timing of stimulus presentation and data acquisition can have a substantial impact on the ability to detect activations in critical language areas, even when the stimuli are presented in blocks. Using a blocked word rhyming paradigm and repeated investigations on a single subject, activation was observed in Broca's area (left inferior frontal cortex) and Wernicke's area (left posterior temporoparietal cortex) when (i) the timing of data acquisition was distributed throughout the peristimulus time and (ii) an event-related analysis was used to model the phasic nature of the hemodynamic response within each block of repeated word stimuli. In contrast, when the timing of data acquisition relative to stimulus presentation was fixed, activation was detected in Broca's area but not consistently in Wernicke's area. Our results indicate that phasic responses to stimuli occur even in a blocked design and that the sampling and proper modeling of these responses can have profound effects on their detection. Specifically, distributed sampling over peristimulus time is essential in order to detect small activations particularly when they are transient. These findings are likely to generalize to the detection of transient signals in any cognitive paradigm.