Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evolutionary integration and morphological diversification in complex morphological structures: mandible shape divergence in spiny rats (Rodentia, Echimyidae)

Summary The rodent mandible has become a paradigm for studies on the development and evolution of complex morphological structures. We use a combination of geometric and multivariate morphometric methods in order to assess the correspondence between integration patterns and a priori biological models in the context of evolutionary shape divergence in the mandible of rodents of the family Echimyidae. The correlation of shape distances among operational taxonomic units (individuals, species, genera) in separate morphogenetic components allowed the construction of integration matrices among mandible components for data sets corresponding to varying levels of genetic divergence (intergeneric, interspecific, and intrapopulational). The integration matrices were associated with a priori biological (developmental, genetical, modular) models, and the maximum integration axes (singular warps) were compared with realized axes of maximum interspecific variation (relative warps). The integration pattern and intensity were not stable in data sets with different levels of genetic divergence, and the varying functional demands during the ecological radiation in the family were probably responsible for the differences in observed integration patterns. Developmental and genetic models were significantly associated with the interspecific integration patterns observed, suggesting a role for neutral evolution during the evolutionary divergence of mandible shape. However, directional and stabilizing selection were not discarded as processes responsible for the generation of interspecific integration. The choreography of the morphogenetic components in the mandible is highly flexible and the integrated groups of components can be reorganized depending on functional demands during evolutionary shape changes.
Event-based broadcasting containment control for multi-agent systems under directed topology

ABSTRACT The event-based broadcasting containment control problem for both first-order and second-order multi-agent systems under directed topology is investigated. Based on certain event, each agent decides when to transmit its current states to its neighbours and the agents’ distributed control algorithms are based on these sampled state measurements, which can significantly decrease the number of the controllers’ updates. All the agents are divided into two groups, namely, the leaders and the followers. The formation control is introduced. The leaders exchange their information to converge to a formation. The followers utilise the information from both their leader neighbours and their follower neighbours and are driven to the convex hull of the leaders using the proposed control algorithms. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained theoretical results.
Identification and characterization of a 100-kD ligand for CD6 on human thymic epithelial cells

CD6 is a 130-kD glycoprotein expressed on the surface of thymocytes and peripheral blood T cells that is involved in TCR-mediated T cell activation. In thymus, CD6 mediates interactions between thymocytes and thymic epithelial (TE) cells. In indirect immunofluorescence assays, a recombinant CD6-immunoglobulin fusion protein (CD6-Rg) bound to cultured human TE cells and to thymic fibroblasts. CD6-Rg binding to TF and TE cells was trypsin sensitive, and 54 +/- 4% of binding was divalent cation dependent. By screening the blind panel of 479 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) from the 5th International Workshop on Human Leukocyte Differentiation Antigens for expression on human TE cells and for the ability to block CD6-Rg binding to TE cells, we found one mAb (J4-81) that significantly inhibited the binding of CD6-Rg to TE cells (60 +/- 7% inhibition). A second mAb to the surface antigen identified by mAb J4-81, J3-119, enhanced the binding of CD6-Rg to TE cells by 48 +/- 5%. Using covalent cross-linking and trypsin digestion, we found that mAb J4-81 and CD6-Rg both bound to the same 100-kD glycoprotein (CD6L-100) on the surface of TE cells. These data demonstrate that a 100-kD glycoprotein on TE cells detected by mAb J4- 81 is a ligand for CD6.
Detection of liver fibrosis with magnetic cross‐relaxation

The utility of MRI using magnetization transfer (MT) enhanced pulse sequences to diagnose hepatic cirrhosis in a rat model was investigated. Hepatic T1 was measured with and without MT off‐resonance RF pulses in 17 treated and six control rats. The livers were evaluated histologically, and the hydroxyproline content quantitatively measured. We did not find a statistically significant linear correlation between the MR relaxation times and the degree of tissue injury. However, the MR measurements performed with MT were superior to those without differentiating the treated and control groups. Specifically, the T1 times were 695 ±76 ms for the treated group, versus 748 ± 61 ms in the controls; P= 0.095. The T1sat times were also lower in the treated group, with statistical significance: 367 ± 51 ms versus 421 ± 38 ms, P = 0.016. Finally, the change in the relaxation rates (the inverse of the relaxation times) with and without saturation were 1.31 ± 0.22 s−1 (treated group) versus 1.05 ± 0.12 s−1 (controls), which differed significantly, P= 0.001.
Carrier frequency of mutation 657del5 in the NBS1 gene in a population of polish pediatric patients with sporadic lymphoid malignancies

Nijmegen breakage syndrome (NBS) is a human autosomal recessive disease characterized by genomic instability and enhanced cancer predisposition, in particular to lymphoma and leukemia. Recently, significantly higher frequencies of heterozygous carriers of the Slavic founder NBS1 mutation, 657del5, were found in Russian children with sporadic lymphoid malignancies, and in Polish adults with non‐Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). In addition, the substitution 643C>T (R215W) has also been found in excess among children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). In an attempt to asses the contribution of both mutations to the development of sporadic lymphoid malignancies, we analyzed DNA samples from a large group of Polish pediatric patients. The NBS1 mutation 657del5 on one allele was found in 3 of 270 patients with ALL and 2 of 212 children and adolescents with NHL; no carrier was found among 63 patients with Hodgkin lymphoma (HL). No carriers of the variant R215W were detected in any studied group. The relative frequency of the 657del5 mutation was calculated from a total of 6,984 controls matched by place of patient residence, of whom 42 were found to be carriers (frequency = 0.006). In the analyzed population with malignancies, an increased odds ratio for the occurrence of mutation 657del5 was found in comparison with the control Polish population (OR range 1.48–1.85, 95% confidence interval 1.18–2.65). This finding indicates that the frequency of the mutation carriers was indeed increased in patients with ALL and NHL (p < 0.05). Nonetheless, NBS1 gene heterozygosity is not a major risk factor for lymphoid malignancies in childhood and adolescence. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Are Currency Crises Predictable? A Test

This paper evaluates three models for predicting currency crises that were proposed before 1997. The idea is to answer the question: if we had been using these models in late 1996, how well armed would we have been to predict the Asian crisis? The results are mixed. Two of the models fail to provide useful forecasts. One model provides forecasts that are somewhat informative though still not reliable. Plausible modifications to this model improve its performance, providing some hope that future models may do better. This exercise suggests, though, that while forecasting models may help indicate vulnerability to crisis, the predictive power of even the best of them may be limited.
Neurocognitive Impairments in Deficit and Non-Deficit Schizophrenia and Their Relationships with Symptom Dimensions and Other Clinical Variables

Background Deficit schizophrenia (DS) has been proposed as a pathophysiologically distinct subgroup within schizophrenia. Earlier studies focusing on neurocognitive function of DS patients have yielded inconsistent findings ranging from substantial deficits to no significant difference relative to non-deficit schizophrenia patients (NDS). The present study investigated the severity and characteristic patterns of neurocognitive impairments in DS and NDS patients and their relationships with clinical variables. Methods Attention, ideation fluency, cognitive flexibility and visuospatial memory function were assessed in 40 DS patients, 57 NDS patients, and 52 healthy controls by a comprehensive neuropsychological battery. Results Both schizophrenia subgroups had overall more severe cognitive impairments than controls while DS performed worse on every neuropsychological measure except the Stroop interference than the NDS patients with age and education as the covariates. Profile analysis found significantly different patterns of cognitive profiles between two patients group mainly due to their differences in attention and cognitive flexibility functions. Age, education, illness duration and negative symptoms were found to have the correlations with cognitive impairments in the NDS group, while only age and the negative symptoms were correlated with the cognitive impairments in the DS group. Multiple regression analyses revealed that sustained attention and cognitive flexibility were the core impaired cognitive domains mediating other cognitive functions in DS and NDS patients respectively. Conclusions DS patients exemplified worse in almost all cognitive domains than NDS patients. Sustained attention and cognitive flexibility might be the key impaired cognitive domains for DS and NDS patients respectively. The present study suggested the DS as a specific subgroup of schizophrenia.
When Feedback Doubles the Prelog in AWGN Networks

We demonstrate that the sum-rate capacity of a memoryless Gaussian network at high signal-to-signal ratio (SNR) can be asymptotically doubled when feedback is available. To demonstrate this phenomenon we study two networks: the one-to-two scalar Gaussian broadcast channel (BC) and the twoto-two scalar Gaussian interference channel (IC). For the broadcast channel we show that if the noise sequences experienced by the two receivers are anticorrelated, then, at high SNR, feedback doubles the sum-rate capacity. However, this result no longer holds if the feedback is noisy. For the interference channel we show that if the cross gain is positive and if the noises experienced by the two receivers are anticorrelated and of the same variance, then feedback doubles the high SNR sum-rate capacity.
Repression of CDC28 reduces the expression of the morphology‐related transcription factors, Efg1p, Nrg1p, Rbf1p, Rim101p, Fkh2p and Tec1p and induces cell elongation in Candida albicans

The ability of the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans to transit its cell shape is important for its pathogenicity. To obtain additional evidence that the cell cycle of C. albicans is associated with its morphology, we generated and characterized a conditional mutant of C. albicans CDC28, a cyclin‐dependent kinase. In the constructed strain, the expression of CDC28 was regulated by the MET3 promoter and could be repressed in the presence of methionine and cysteine. Cdc28p‐depleted cells demonstrated highly polarized growth and wider filaments than serum‐induced hyphae. Hyphae‐specific genes, HWP1, RBT4 and ECE1, were activated in the elongated filaments caused by the Cdc28p depletion. Furthermore, the protein expression levels of the transcription factors involved in morphological transition, Efg1p, Nrg1p, Rbf1p, Rim101p, Fkh2p and Tec1p, decreased under conditions that repress CDC28 expression. Taken together, these data indicate that repression of CDC28 affected the protein levels of the morphology‐related transcription factors, the regulation of hyphae‐specific genes and cell shape in C. albicans. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses

Automatically evaluating the quality of dialogue responses for unstructured domains is a challenging problem. Unfortunately, existing automatic evaluation metrics are biased and correlate very poorly with human judgements of response quality (Liu et al., 2016). Yet having an accurate automatic evaluation procedure is crucial for dialogue research, as it allows rapid prototyping and testing of new models with fewer expensive human evaluations. In response to this challenge, we formulate automatic dialogue evaluation as a learning problem.We present an evaluation model (ADEM)that learns to predict human-like scores to input responses, using a new dataset of human response scores. We show that the ADEM model’s predictions correlate significantly, and at a level much higher than word-overlap metrics such as BLEU, with human judgements at both the utterance and system-level. We also show that ADEM can generalize to evaluating dialogue mod-els unseen during training, an important step for automatic dialogue evaluation.
Examining the contemporaneous occurrence of bullying and teen dating violence victimization.

Teen dating violence (TDV) is a preventable public health issue that has been linked to other forms of aggression and violence victimization. It is also a growing concern for school psychologists who may be working to prevent TDV and related behavioral problems, like bullying. The current study examined various forms of bullying victimization (verbal, physical, and relational) and their association with physical and emotional TDV. Self-report data from 17,780 adolescents (33% African American, 54% White) in Grades 9-12 across 58 high schools were analyzed using 3-level models with dichotomous outcomes. Multilevel logistic regressions indicated that adolescents who had experienced bullying (physical, relational, and verbal) were more likely to have also experienced physical and emotional dating violence. Perceived norms about students' and adults' bullying interventions were associated with reduced odds of physical (OR(adults) = . 82, p < . 001) and emotional TDV (OR(adults) = . 82, p < . 001). Findings underscore the need to better understand the relationship between TDV and bullying victimization to design and enhance prevention efforts that address both forms of violence.
Understanding Users' Perceived Difficulty of Multi-Touch Gesture Articulation

We show that users are consistent in their assessments of the articulation difficulty of multi-touch gestures, even under the many degrees of freedom afforded by multi-touch input, such as (1) various number of fingers touching the surface, (2) various number of strokes that structure the gesture shape, and (3) single-handed and bimanual input. To understand more about perceived difficulty, we characterize gesture articulations captured under these conditions with geometric and kinematic descriptors computed on a dataset of 7,200 samples of 30 distinct gesture types collected from 18 participants. We correlate the values of the objective descriptors with users' subjective assessments of articulation difficulty and report path length, production time, and gesture size as the highest correlators (max Pearson's r=.95). We also report new findings about multi-touch gesture input, e.g., gestures produced with more fingers are larger in size and take more time to produce than single-touch gestures; bimanual articulations are not only faster than single-handed input, but they are also longer in path length, present more strokes, and result in gesture shapes that are deformed horizontally by 35% in average. We use our findings to outline a number of 14 guidelines to assist multi-touch gesture set design, recognizer development, and inform gesture-to-function mappings through the prism of the user-perceived difficulty of gesture articulation.
LARGE POPULATION LIMIT AND TIME BEHAVIOUR OF A STOCHASTIC PARTICLE MODEL DESCRIBING AN AGE-STRUCTURED POPULATION

We study a continuous-time discrete population structured by a vector of ages. Individuals reproduce asexually, age and die. The death rate takes interactions into account. Adapting the approach of Fournier and Meleard, we show that in a large population limit, the microscopic process converges to the measure-valued solution of an equation that generalizes the McKendrick-Von Foerster and Gurtin-McCamy PDEs in demography. The large deviations associated with this convergence are studied. The upper-bound is established via exponential tightness, the difficulty being that the marginals of our measure-valued processes are not of bounded masses. The local minoration is proved by linking the trajectories of the action functional's domain to the solutions of perturbations of the PDE obtained in the large population limit. The use of Girsanov theorem then leads us to regularize these perturbations. As an application, we study the logistic age-structured population. In the super-critical case, the deterministic approximation admits a non trivial stationary stable solution, whereas the stochastic microscopic process gets extinct almost surely. We establish estimates of the time during which the microscopic process stays in the neighborhood of the large population equilibrium by generalizing the works of Freidlin and Ventzell to our measure-valued setting.
A simple electronic analog of the squid axon membrane: the NEUROFET.

A simple electronic circuit is proposed as an analog of the excitable membrane. It is based on the Hodgkin-Huxley model and their squid axon voltage clamp data. The simulated potassium and sodium conductances are reproduced satisfactorily and the electronic action potentials are very similar to the experimentally recorded ones. Since this analog contains only a few electronic elements, it is small and inexpensive to build. It could be very useful as a means of simulating a wide variety of membrane conductances and different types of action potentials. Also, the simplicity of the circuit makes it an ideal unit to build complex neuron networks.
H.264/AVC in wireless environments

Video transmission in wireless environments is a challenging task calling for high-compression efficiency as well as a network friendly design. Both have been major goals of the H.264/AVC standardization effort addressing "conversational" (i.e., video telephony) and "nonconversational" (i.e., storage, broadcast, or streaming) applications. The video compression performance of the H.264/AVC video coding layer typically provides a significant improvement. The network-friendly design goal of H.264/AVC is addressed via the network abstraction layer that has been developed to transport the coded video data over any existing and future networks including wireless systems. The main objective of this paper is to provide an overview over the tools which are likely to be used in wireless environments and discusses the most challenging application, wireless conversational services in greater detail. Appropriate justifications for the application of different tools based on experimental results are presented.
Long-Term Channel Block Is Required to Inhibit Cellular Transformation by Human Ether-à-Go-Go–Related Gene (hERG1) Potassium Channels

Both human ether-à-go-go–related gene (hERG1) and the closely related human ether-à-go-go (hEAG1) channel are aberrantly expressed in a large proportion of human cancers. In the present study, we demonstrate that transfection of hERG1 into mouse fibroblasts is sufficient to induce many features characteristic of malignant transformation. An important finding of this work is that this transformation could be reversed by chronic incubation (for 2–3 weeks) with the hERG channel blocker dofetilide (100 nM), whereas more acute applications (for 1–2 days) were ineffective. The hERG1 expression resulted in a profound loss of cell contact inhibition, multiple layers of overgrowing cells, and high saturation densities. Cells also changed from fibroblast-like to a more spindle-shaped morphology, which was associated with a smaller cell size, a dramatic increase in cell polarization, a reduction in the number of actin stress fibers, and less punctate labeling of focal adhesions. Analysis of single-cell migration and scratch-wound closure clearly demonstrated that hERG1-expressing cells migrated more rapidly than vector-transfected control cells. In contrast to previous studies on hEAG1, there were no increases in rates of proliferation, or loss of growth factor dependency; however, hERG1-expressing cells were capable of substrate-independent growth. Allogeneic transplantation of hERG1-expressing cells into nude mice resulted in an increased incidence of tumors. In contrast to hEAG1, the mechanism of cellular transformation is dependent on ion conduction. Trafficking-deficient and conduction-deficient hERG1 mutants also prevented cellular transformation. These results provide evidence that hERG1 expression is sufficient to induce cellular transformation by a mechanism distinct from hEAG1. The most important conclusion of this study is that selective hERG1 channel blockers have therapeutic potential in the treatment of hERG1-expressing cancers.
On some polynomials allegedly related to the abc conjecture

Argument. Although the arithmetic abc conjecture is a great mystery, its algebraic counterpart is a rather easy theorem. It looks like it was rst noticed by W. W. Stothers (cf [21]). Later on it was generalized and rediscovered independently by several people, including R.C. Mason (cf. [12]) and J. Silverman (cf. [19]). This list might be incomplete and I would appreciate any amendments to it.
Probiotics Modulate Intestinal Expression of Nuclear Receptor and Provide Counter-Regulatory Signals to Inflammation-Driven Adipose Tissue Activation

Background Adipocytes from mesenteric white adipose tissue amplify the inflammatory response and participate in inflammation-driven immune dysfunction in Crohn's disease by releasing proinflammatory mediators. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPAR)-α and -γ, pregnane x receptor (PXR), farnesoid x receptor (FXR) and liver x-receptor (LXR) are ligand-activated nuclear receptor that provide counter-regulatory signals to dysregulated immunity and modulates adipose tissue. Aims To investigate the expression and function of nuclear receptors in intestinal and adipose tissues in a rodent model of colitis and mesenteric fat from Crohn's patients and to investigate their modulation by probiotics. Methods Colitis was induced by TNBS administration. Mice were administered vehicle or VSL#3, daily for 10 days. Abdominal fat explants obtained at surgery from five Crohn's disease patients and five patients with colon cancer were cultured with VSL#3 medium. Results Probiotic administration attenuated development of signs and symptoms of colitis, reduced colonic expression of TNFα, IL-6 and IFNγ and reserved colonic downregulation of PPARγ, PXR and FXR caused by TNBS. Mesenteric fat depots isolated from TNBS-treated animals had increased expression of inflammatory mediators along with PPARγ, FXR, leptin and adiponectin. These changes were prevented by VSL#3. Creeping fat and mesenteric adipose tissue from Crohn's patients showed a differential expression of PPARγ and FXR with both tissue expressing high levels of leptin. Exposure of these tissues to VSL#3 medium abrogates leptin release. Conclusions Mesenteric adipose tissue from rodent colitis and Crohn's disease is metabolically active and shows inflammation-driven regulation of PPARγ, FXR and leptin. Probiotics correct the inflammation-driven metabolic dysfunction.