Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Starch biosynthesis in rice endosperm requires the presence of either starch synthase I or IIIa

Starch synthase (SS) I and IIIa are the first and second largest components of total soluble SS activity, respectively, in developing japonica rice (Oryza sativa L.) endosperm. To elucidate the distinct and overlapping functions of these enzymes, double mutants were created by crossing the ss1 null mutant with the ss3a null mutant. In the F2 generation, two opaque seed types were found to have either the ss1ss1/SS3ass3a or the SS1ss1/ss3ass3a genotype. Phenotypic analyses revealed lower SS activity in the endosperm of these lines than in those of the parent mutant lines since these seeds had different copies of SSI and SSIIIa genes in a heterozygous state. The endosperm of the two types of opaque seeds contained the unique starch with modified fine structure, round-shaped starch granules, high amylose content, and specific physicochemical properties. The seed weight was ∼90% of that of the wild type. The amount of granule-bound starch synthase I (GBSSI) and the activity of ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (AGPase) were higher than in the wild type and parent mutant lines. The double-recessive homozygous mutant prepared from both ss1 and ss3a null mutants was considered sterile, while the mutant produced by the leaky ss1 mutant×ss3a null mutant cross was fertile. This present study strongly suggests that at least SSI or SSIIIa is required for starch biosynthesis in rice endosperm.
The petrogenesis of the Apollo 14 high-Al mare basalts

Abstract In this paper, we report analysis of various basaltic lunar samples including 14053 and 14072, KREEP basalt 15386, thirty basalt clasts from Apollo 14 breccia 14321, as well as impact-generated samples (matrix from breccia 14168, olivine vitrophyres 14321,1180 and 14321,1539, and impact melt 14310) using a combination of solution and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The basalt clast samples were previously analyzed by instrumental neutron activation. On plots of incompatible trace elements (ITEs) vs. compatible trace elements, the Apollo 14 high-Al basalts form three approximately subparallel trends that, on the basis of current data, are also separated by age. Plots of ITE ratios (i.e., Nb/Ce vs. Zr/Y) can be used to indicate source composition, and also divide the basalts into three groups: Group A (~4.3 Ga); Group B (~4.1 Ga); and Group C (~3.9 Ga). New data for 14072 suggest the sample does not fit with any of the three groups defined here, and may indicate the presence of a fourth group of high-Al basalts in the proximity of the Apollo 14 site. The Apollo 14 high-Al basalts are compositionally distinct from known Apollo 14 impact melts and impact-generated lithologies. The three groups cannot be related by varying degrees of partial melting of a single, KREEP-contaminated source and, therefore, require three separate source regions. The new data indicate that Group A basalts evolved through closed-system crystal fractionation. However, the new data from basalts forming Groups B and C require open-system evolution that involves combined assimilation and fractional crystallization (AFC). Unlike previous AFC modeling of the Apollo 14 high-Al basalts, an assimilant composed of KREEP is not sufficient to generate the compositional ranges of each basalt group. The modeling of both groups requires a mixture of KREEP and granite as the assimilant, which supports the notion of a genetic relationship between these two lunar components.
Efficacy of Chinese Eye Exercises on Reducing Accommodative Lag in School-Aged Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Purpose To evaluate the efficacy of Chinese eye exercises on reducing accommodative lag in children by a randomized, double-blinded controlled trial. Methods A total of 190 children aged 10 to 14 years with emmetropia to moderate myopia were included. They were randomly allocated to three groups: standard Chinese eye exercises group (trained for eye exercises by doctors of traditional Chinese medicine); sham point eye exercises group (instructed to massage on non-acupoints); and eyes closed group (asked to close their eyes without massage). Primary outcome was change in accommodative lag immediately after intervention. Secondary outcomes included changes in corrected near and distant visual acuity, and visual discomfort score. Results Children in the standard Chinese eye exercises group had significantly greater alleviation of accommodative lag (-0.10D) than those in sham point eye exercises group (-0.03D) and eyes closed group (0.07D) (P = 0.04). The proportion of children with alleviation of accommodative lag was significantly higher in the standard Chinese eye exercises group (54.0%) than in the sham point eye exercises group (32.8%) and the eyes closed group (34.9%) (P = 0.03). No significant differences were found in secondary outcomes. Conclusion Chinese eye exercises as performed daily in primary and middle schools in China have statistically but probably clinically insignificant effect in reducing accommodative lag of school-aged children in the short-term. Considering the higher amounts of near work load of Chinese children, the efficacy of eye exercises may be insufficient in preventing myopia progression in the long-term. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01756287
on Intelligent Manufacturing and Automation , 2013 Bullwhip Effect Study in a Constrained Supply Chain

Well organized supply chains are one of the best ways to compete in today's marketplaces. For make-to-stock production systems the production plans and activities are based on demand forecasting, which is one of the key causes of the bullwhip effect (BE). BE is the inherent increase in demand fluctuation up the supply chain and produces excess inventory and poor customer service. In the paper we simulated a simple three-stage supply chain using seasonal (SM) and deseasonalized (DSM) time series of the market demand data in order to identify, illustrate and discuss the impacts of different level constraints on the BE. The results are presented for different overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and constrained inventory policies. At higher OEE level manufacturers have less variability in production processes; the BE is stronger in DSM than in SM. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of DAAAM International Vienna.
QoS Criteria in IEEE 802 . 16 Collision Resolution Protocol

In this paper, we study the collision resolution protocol of the IEEE 802.16 standard for metropolitan broadband wireless access systems. The standard specifies the use of a random access scheme based on the slotted binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm during the bandwidth request phase. We analyze the distributed choice of the retransmission probabilities used by the BEB protocol. We follow a cooperative team problem approach towards the analysis of the throughput and the delay during the bandwidth reservation process. A Markov chain analysis is used to obtain the optimal retransmission probabilities, the optimal value of the initial backoff window size, Wmin, the throughput and the expected delays experienced by a subscriber station (SS) for placing its bandwidth requests. the results shows that the delay of backlogged messages becomes very large in heavy traffic when our objective is to minimize the expected delay of all transmitted messages. This motivate us to pose a problem of minimizing the a expected delay (or maximizing the throughput) subject to constraints on the expected delay of backlogged messages as a multicriterion problem.
Biomimetic survival hydrodynamics and flow sensing

The fluid mechanics employed by aquatic animals in their escape or attack maneuvers, what we call survival hydrodynamics, are fascinating because the recorded performance in animals is truly impressive. Such performance forces us to pose some basic questions on the underlying flow mechanisms that are not yet in use in engineered vehicles. A closely related issue is the ability of animals to sense the flow velocity and pressure field around them in order to detect and discriminate threats in environments where vision or other sensing is of limited or no use. We review work on animal flow sensing and actuation as a source of inspiration and as a way to formulate a number of basic problems and investigate the flow mechanisms that enable animals to perform these remarkable maneuvers. We also describe some intriguing mechanisms of actuation and sensing.
Mitochondrial DNA studies of Native Americans: Conceptions and misconceptions of the population prehistory of the Americas

A decade ago, the first reviews of the collective mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from Native Americans concluded that the Americas were peopled through multiple migrations from different Asian populations beginning more than 30,000 years ago. 1 These reports confirmed multiple‐wave hypotheses suggested earlier by other sources and rejected the dominant Clovis‐first archeological paradigm. Consequently, it appeared that molecular biology had made a significant contribution to the study of American prehistory. As Cann 2 comments, the Americas held the greatest promise for genetics to help solve some of the mysteries of prehistoric populations. In particular, mtDNA appeared to offer real potential as a means of better understanding ancient population movements. A decade later, none of the early conclusions remain unequivocal. Nevertheless, in its maturity, the study of Native American mtDNA has produced a volume of reports that still illuminate the nature and timing of the first peopling and postcolonization population movements within the New World.
Sparsification Strategies in Latent Semantic Indexing

The text retrieval method using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) with the truncated Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has been intensively studied in recent years. The term-document matrices after SVD are full matrices, although the rank is reduced substantially. To reduce memory consumption, we examine some strategies to spar-sify the truncated SVD matrices. After applying the sparsiﬁcation strategies to three popular document databases, we ﬁnd that some of our strategies not only sparsify the SVD matrices, but may also increase the accuracy of the text retrieval in some cases.
Clinical Outcomes of Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection for Early Esophageal Squamous Cell Neoplasms: A Retrospective Single-Center Study in China

Aims. To retrospectively analyze the clinical outcomes for a large number of endoscopic submucosal dissections (ESDs) in early esophageal squamous cell neoplasms (ESCNs) at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University. Patients and Methods. From January 2010 to February 2014, 296 patients (mean age 61.4 years, range 31–85 years; 202 men) with 307 early ESCNs (79 intramucosal invasive esophageal squamous cell carcinomas (ESCCs) and 228 high-grade intraepithelial neoplasia (HGIN) cases) were included from a total of 519 consecutive patients who were treated by esophageal ESD at our hospital. The primary end points of the study were rates of en bloc resection and complete resection. Secondary end points were complications, residual and recurrence rates, and mortality during follow-up. Results. The en bloc resection rate and complete resection rate were 93.5% and 78.2%, respectively. Complications included strictures (8.4%), perforations (1.0%), and bleedings (0.7%). Twenty-seven (9.1%) patients experienced residual and 18 (6.1%) patients experienced recurrence during a mean follow-up period of 30 months. Thirteen patients died from causes unrelated to ESCC, and no cancer-related death was observed. Conclusions. Our study showed that ESD is a successful and relatively safe treatment for intramucosal invasive ESCC and HGIN, fulfilling the criteria of lymph node negative tumors. This should encourage clinicians to select ESD performed by experienced operators as a potential or even preferred treatment option for lesions amenable to endoscopic treatment.
Association thesaurus construction methods based on link co-occurrence analysis for wikipedia

Wikipedia, a huge scale Web based encyclopedia, attracts great attention as an invaluable corpus for knowledge extraction because it has various impressive characteristics such as a huge number of articles, live updates, a dense link structure, brief anchor texts and URL identification for concepts. We have already proved that we can use Wikipedia to construct a huge scale accurate association thesaurus. The association thesaurus we constructed covers almost 1.3 million concepts and its accuracy is proved in detailed experiments. However, we still need scalable methods to analyze the huge number of Web pages and hyperlinks among articles in the Web based encyclopedia. In this paper, we propose a scalable method for constructing an association thesaurus from Wikipedia based on link co-occurrences. Link co-occurrence analysis is more scalable than link structure analysis because it is a one-pass process. We also propose integration method of tfidf and link co-occurrence analysis. Experimental results show that both our proposed methods are more accurate and scalable than conventional methods. Furthermore, the integration of tfidf achieved higher accuracy than using only link co-occurrences.
NotifEye: using interactive glasses to deal with notifications while walking in public

In this paper we explore the use of interactive eyewear in public. We introduce NotifEye, an application that allows a person to receive social network notifications on interactive glasses while walking on a busy street. The prototype uses a minimalistic user interface (UI) for interactive glasses to help people focus their attention on their surroundings and supports discreet interaction by using a finger rub pad to take action on incoming notifications. We studied pragmatic and hedonic aspects of the prototype during a pedestrian navigation task in a city center. We found that, despite the potential risk of overwhelming people with information, participants were able to keep track of their surroundings as they dealt with incoming notifications. Participants also positively valued the use of a discreet device to provide input for interactive glasses. Finally, participants reflected on their (evolving) perception of interactive glasses, indicating that glasses should become smaller, more comfortable to wear, and somewhat of a fashion accessory.
Money and Capital as Competing Media of Exchange in a News Economy

Conventional theory suggests that fiat money will have value in capital-poor economies. We demonstrate that fiat money may also have value in capital-rich economies, if the price of capital is excessively volatile. Excess asset-price volatility is generated by news; information that has no social value, but is privately useful in forming forecasts over the short-run return to capital. One advantage of fiat money is that its expected return is not linked directly to news concerning the prospects of an underlying asset. When money and capital compete as media of exchange, excess volatility in the short-term returns of liquid asset portfolios is mitigated and welfare is improved. A legal restriction that prohibits the use of capital as a payment instrument renders the expected return to money perfectly stable and, as a consequence, may generate an additional welfare benefit.
Aspherical galaxy clusters: Effects on cluster masses and gas mass fractions

We present an investigation of the effects of asphericity on the estimates of total mass and gas mass fraction in galaxy clusters from X-ray observations. We model the aspherical shape of galaxy clusters by a triaxial model and compare the true total mass and the true total gas mass fraction with the corresponding quantities obtained with the assumption of spherical symmetry. In the triaxial model we allow the extent along the line of sight to vary in order to describe elongated and compressed cluster shapes. Using a sample of 10 ROSAT clusters and a recent CHANDRA observation we find the following results. For prolate or oblate shapes the difference between triaxial and spherical model both in the mass and in the gas mass fraction are negligible (less than 3%). For more aspherical shapes the total mass is underestimated (overestimated) in the centre, if the cluster is compressed (elongated). The gas mass fraction is overestimated for compressed clusters and slightly underestimated for elongated clusters. Comparing X-ray masses with gravitational lensing estimates, we find that elongations along the line of sight can resolve discrepancies of masses determined by the two different methods of up to ∼30%. The combination of Sunyaev- Zel'dovich and X-ray observations is useful to measure the elongation of the cluster along the line of sight. As an application, we estimate the elongation of the cluster CL0016+16 with two different approaches, Sunyaev-Zel'dovich measurements and comparison of weak lensing and X-ray masses, and find reasonable agreement.
The regulation of interconnection in Rwanda.

iii Acknowledgements . iv Dedication . v TABLE OF CONTENTS . vi LIST OF TABLES . x LIST OF FIGURES . x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . xi CHAPTER ONE: THE INTERCONNECTION REGIME IN . 1 RWANDA . 1 1.
The iterative design and study of a large display for shared and sociable spaces

We explore the design opportunities presented by situating large interactive displays outside of the workplace, within shared and sociable spaces such as common areas at universities and conferences, cafes, and hotel foyers. We seek to provide a better understanding of this design space by charting the iterative design of an interactive large display system called Dynamo.Dynamo has been designed to enable the sharing and exchange of a wide variety of digital media. We report on how the interaction metaphors were designed and refined upon in-lab and in-situ studies. We also study how an existing community uses this technology within their own established setting. Qualitative and quantitative analysis shows that the system was used extensively in a variety of ways, including sharing of photos, video clips, and websites, and for facilitating social interaction and collaboration. We conclude with recommendations for designing large display systems for shared and social spaces.
3D Artifacts Similarity Based on the Concurrent Evaluation of Heterogeneous Properties

Archaeological artifacts are often classified in homogeneous groups, according to either intangible properties (e.g., origin, use, age) or physical features (e.g., color, material, geometric shape, size, style). In particular, a single property is usually not enough to characterize artifacts’ peculiar traits, as most of the objects are affected by degradation or only partially preserved. In this article, we propose a shape analysis and comparison pipeline specifically targeted to the similarity assessment of real-world 3D artifacts. The proposed methodology is able to concurrently evaluate heterogeneous properties, such as geometric (e.g., curvature, size, roundness, or mass distribution) and photometric (e.g., texture, color distribution, or reflectance) aspects. The geometric description is based on a statistical technique to select properties that are mutually independent; the photometric information is handled according to a topological perspective and complemented by the analysis of color distribution. The outcome is a mixed description of each 3D artifact, which is used to derive a similarity measure between objects. The potential of our approach is high because any property representable as real- or vector- valued functions can be easily added in our framework. Experimental results carried on an existing collection of textured triangle meshes are exhibited to show the potentiality of the method in retrieval and classification tasks.
Perceptual Properties of Current Speech Recognition Technology

In recent years, a number of feature extraction procedures for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been based on models of human auditory processing, and one often hears arguments in favor of implementing knowledge of human auditory perception and cognition into machines for ASR. This paper takes a reverse route, and argues that the engineering techniques for automatic recognition of speech that are already in widespread use are often consistent with some well-known properties of the human auditory system.
Prediction Models for Assessing Long-Term Outcome in Alzheimer’s Disease

In Alzheimer’s disease (AD), placebo-controlled long-term studies of cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) are not permitted for ethical reasons. Therefore, in these studies, patients’ outcomes on cognitive and functional assessment scales must be compared with mathematical models or historical data from untreated cohorts. PubMed and previously published long-term extensions of clinical trials and naturalistic studies of ChEIs were examined to identify empirical statistical models and other approaches, such as use of data from historical cohorts or extrapolated changes from extension studies, that were used to draw comparisons between ChEI-treated and untreated patients. The models and methods were described. It is essential to be aware of the limitations of comparisons made with these approaches. Prediction models based on ChEI-treated patients can be used in the studies of new treatments when those treatments are added to ChEIs. More sophisticated models that also accommodate patient-specific characteristics should be developed for comparisons in future long-term AD studies.
Scalability and power consumption of static optical core networks

A large amount of traffic in core networks is highly aggregated and core nodes are interconnected by high-capacity links. Thus, most of the traffic demands in the core area can be accommodated by providing more or less static connections between ingress and egress nodes. In this paper, we describe and study three particular realizations of static optical core networks and compare them with the dynamic, packet switched architecture based on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission and conventional electronic packet routers. We introduce an analytical model for estimating the average number of required switch ports for different network topologies in order to assess both scalability and power consumption of the considered network concepts. The results show that the concept of a static optically transparent core network promises high energy efficiency, and scalability to several tens of nodes.
FAM83D promotes cell proliferation and motility by downregulating tumor suppressor gene FBXW7

Abstract Amplification of chromosome 20q is frequently found in various types of human cancers, including breast cancer. The list of candidate oncogenes in 20q has expanded over the past decade. Here, we investigate whether FAM83D (family with sequence similarity 83, member D) on chromosome 20q plays any role in breast cancer development. The expression level of FAM83D is significantly elevated in breast cancer cell lines and primary human breast cancers. High expression levels of FAM83D are significantly associated with poor clinical outcome and distant metastasis in breast cancer patients. We show that ectopic expression of FAM83D in human mammary epithelial cells promotes cell proliferation, migration and invasion along with epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Ablation of FAM83D in breast cancer cells induces apoptosis and consequently inhibits cell proliferation and colony formation. Mechanistic studies reveal that overexpression of FAM83D downregulates FBXW7 expression levels through a physical interaction, which results in elevated protein levels of oncogenic substrates downstream to FBXW7, such as mTOR, whose inhibition by rapamycin can suppress FAM83D-induced cell migration and invasion. The results demonstrate that FAM83D has prognostic value for breast cancer patients and is a novel oncogene in breast cancer development that at least in part acts through mTOR hyper-activation by inhibiting FBXW7.