Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Oxidative/nitrosative stress and peroxiredoxin 2 are associated with grade and prognosis of human renal carcinoma

Peroxiredoxins (Prxs) 1–6 were assessed in 138 renal cell carcinomas (RCC) using immunohistochemistry and selected samples by Western blotting analysis. Oxidative/nitrosative damage was evaluated using nitrotyrosine immunoreactivity. The expressions of Prxs were correlated with tumor grade and survival and nitrotyrosine reactivity. Non‐malignant kidney tubular cells showed positivity with variable intensity for all six Prxs. In RCCs, most cases were positive for Prxs 1 and 2, while only 15–20% of tumors showed expression for Prxs 3 and 4. Prx 2 was associated with tumors of a lower grade (p=0.009) and with a lower frequency of distant metastases (p=0.046). Patients with tumors expressing Prx2 had better prognosis (p=0.027). Instead, nitrotyrosine was significantly associated with high grade tumors (p=0.001). Compared with the non‐malignant kidney tubular cells, low Prx expression in the tumor cells can make them more susceptible to oxidative damage. Prx 2 was more abundantly expressed in low grade tumors, suggesting that this protein could play a role in preventing the development of oxidative damage, which in turn can lead to the activation of pathways leading to aggressive tumors.
Modified Differential Scanning Calorimeter for Direct Electrocaloric Measurements

Solid-state refrigeration using the electrocaloric effect (ECE) in ferroelectric materials is a promising alternative to the conventional vapor-compression technology. In spite of growing interest to the investigation of the ECE, direct measurements of the effect are still rare. In this paper, we report on a modification of a differential scanning calorimeter for direct ECE measurements. The importance of proper estimation of the thermal correction factor and use of proper values of the heat capacitance for correct ECE measurements is discussed. The ECE measurements were performed for Ba(Zr<sub>0.2</sub>Ti<sub>0.8</sub>)O<sub>3</sub> and Ba(Zr<sub>0.12</sub>Ti<sub>0.88</sub>)O<sub>3</sub> bulk ceramics. Large electrocaloric temperature changes of 0.54 and 0.34 K are achieved under the application of an electric field of 2 kV/mm for the Ba(Zr<sub>0.12</sub>Ti<sub>0.88</sub>)O<sub>3</sub> and Ba(Zr<sub>0.2</sub>Ti<sub>0.8</sub>)O<sub>3</sub> samples, respectively. The relation between the directly measured ECE values and frequently used indirect estimation based on Maxwell's relations is discussed.
The role of ethnicity and socioeconomic status in Southeast Asian mothers’ parenting sensitivity

ABSTRACT Past research indicates that socioeconomic status (SES) accounts for differences in sensitivity across ethnic groups. However, comparatively little work has been conducted in Asia, with none examining whether ethnicity moderates the relation between SES and sensitivity. We assessed parenting behavior in 293 Singaporean citizen mothers of 6-month olds (153 Chinese, 108 Malay, 32 Indian) via the Maternal Behavioral Q-Sort for video interactions. When entered into the same model, SES (F(1,288) = 17.777, p < . 001), but not ethnicity, predicted maternal sensitivity (F(2,288) = . 542, p = . 582). However, this positive relation between SES and sensitivity was marginally moderated by ethnicity. SES significantly positively predicted sensitivity in Chinese, but not Malay dyads. Within Indian dyads, SES marginally positively predicted sensitivity only when permanent residents were included in analyses. We discuss the importance of culture on perceived SES-associated stress. However, because few university-educated Malays participated, we also consider whether university education, specifically, positively influences sensitivity.
MATHEMATICS AND MONUMENTS CONSERVATION: FREE BOUNDARY MODELS OF MARBLE SULPHATION

A. We introduce some free boundary problems which describe the evolution of calcium carbonate stones under the attack of atmospheric SO2, taking into account both swelling of the external gypsum layer and the influence of humidity. Different behaviors are described according to the relative humidity of the environment, and in all cases reliable explicit quasi steady approximations are introduced under reasonable assumptions on the data. Some numerical simulations are also performed to describe gypsum formation using experimental data, which show a good agreement with the quasi steady solutions. The influence of the cleaning the crust and of the change in concentration of pollution is evaluated and discussed.
Identification of Marginal Effects in a Nonparametric Correlated Random Effects Model

In this article, we consider identification and estimation of average marginal effects in a correlated random effects model without imposing functional form assumptions on the structural likelihood or the mixing distribution. Identification is achieved through imposing that the mixing distribution depends on observed covariates only through an index function. We leave the functional form of the index function unrestricted subject to smoothness conditions. We present identification results for this model and consider estimation of the marginal effects of interest. We illustrate the approach through a brief empirical example, which considers the relationship between insider trading activity and trading volume.
Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI of oral squamous cell carcinoma: a preliminary study of the correlations between quantitative parameters and the clinical stage.

OBJECTIVE To probe the utility of dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) parameters in assessing the clinical characteristics of oral squamous cell carcinoma. METHODS A total of 85 tumours were included. We applied the Tofts and Kermode model for the DCE-MRI data and obtained three dependent parameters: the influx forward volume transfer constant into the extravascular extracellular space (EES) from the plasma (K(trans)), the fractional volume of EES per unit volume of tissue (ve) and the fractional volume of plasma (vp). We evaluated the correlations between these parameters and the clinical stages. RESULTS The T stage showed a negative correlation with the K(trans) (r = -0.2272; p = 0.0365), but it did not show a significant correlation with the other parameters. The N stage showed a negative correlation with K(trans) (r = -0.1948; p = 0.0404), and there were significant differences between N1 and N2+3 (0.119 ± 0.027 vs 0.096 ± 0.023 min(-1); p = 0.0198) and between N0 and N2+3 (0.114 ± 0.29 vs 0.096 ± 0.023 min(-1); p = 0.0288). CONCLUSION A decrease in the K(trans) at the primary site was found in advanced N stage cases, which might indicate that the hypoxic status cause a high possibility of the metastasis. ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE A decrease in the K(trans) at the primary site suggested the high possibility of an advanced N stage.
Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms

A strategy is obviously dominant if, for any deviation, at any information set where both strategies first diverge, the best outcome under the deviation is no better than the worst outcome under the dominant strategy. A mechanism is obviously strategy-proof (OSP) if it has an equilibrium in obviously dominant strategies. This has a behavioral interpretation: A strategy is obviously dominant iff a cognitively limited agent can recognize it as weakly dominant. It also has a classical interpretation: A choice rule is OSP-implementable iff it can be carried out by a social planner under a particular regime of partial commitment.
fMRI Evidence for a Dual Process Account of the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff in Decision-Making

Background The speed and accuracy of decision-making have a well-known trading relationship: hasty decisions are more prone to errors while careful, accurate judgments take more time. Despite the pervasiveness of this speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) in decision-making, its neural basis is still unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we show that emphasizing the speed of a perceptual decision at the expense of its accuracy lowers the amount of evidence-related activity in lateral prefrontal cortex. Moreover, this speed-accuracy difference in lateral prefrontal cortex activity correlates with the speed-accuracy difference in the decision criterion metric of signal detection theory. We also show that the same instructions increase baseline activity in a dorso-medial cortical area involved in the internal generation of actions. Conclusions/Significance These findings suggest that the SAT is neurally implemented by modulating not only the amount of externally-derived sensory evidence used to make a decision, but also the internal urge to make a response. We propose that these processes combine to control the temporal dynamics of the speed-accuracy trade-off in decision-making.
Influence of histological degree of seminiferous tubular degeneration and stage of seminiferous cycle on the proliferation of spermatogonia in aged Syrian hamster (Mesocricetus auratus)

The ageing testis is associated with germ loss in the seminiferous epithelium and a decrease in spermatogonia proliferation. In this work, we study whether the stages of the seminiferous epithelium cycle and/or the degree of histological tubular degeneration resulting from ageing is related with this decrease in spermatogonia proliferation. Eleven hamsters were used, five aged 6 months and six aged 24 months. In both groups, the proliferative activity was studied by BrdU immunostaining. The number of BrdU‐positive and BrdU‐negative cells was measured, providing the overall proliferation index in adult and aged testes. The mean number of BrdU‐positive cells was also determined for each degree of histological degeneration of seminiferous epithelium, and a spermatogonia proliferation index was obtained for each stage of the seminiferous cycle. Ageing caused an overall decrease in the BrdU‐positive cell percentage and a decrease in the number of BrdU‐positive cells in the tubular sections with hypospermatogenesis, the sloughing of germ cells and maturation arrest, these changes being similar in both young and old animals. The spermatogonia proliferation index was only seen to be significantly lower in ageing hamster in stages VII–VIII of the seminiferous epithelium cycle. In conclusion, the overall decrease in proliferation observed in aged seminiferous epithelium is correlated with an increase in the number of degenerated sections of the seminiferous tubules, and this decrease is a phenomenon which occurs in specific stages of the seminiferous cycle.
Caveolin-1 is required for signaling and membrane targeting of EphB1 receptor tyrosine kinase

Eph receptor tyrosine kinases are key players during the development of the embryonic vasculature; however, their role and regulation in adult angiogenesis remain to be defined. Caveolae are flask-shaped invaginations of the cell membrane; their major structural protein, caveolin-1, has been shown to regulate signaling molecules localized in these micro-domains. The interaction of caveolin-1 with several of these proteins is mediated by the binding of its scaffolding domain to a region containing hydrophobic amino acids within these proteins. The presence of such a motif within the EphB1 kinase domain prompted us to investigate the caveolar localization and regulation of EphB1 by caveolin-1. We report that EphB1 receptors are localized in caveolae, and directly interact with caveolin-1 upon ligand stimulation. This interaction, as well as EphB1-mediated activation of extracellular-signal-regulated kinase (ERK), was abrogated by overexpression of a caveolin-1 mutant lacking a functional scaffolding domain. Interaction between Ephs and caveolin-1 is not restricted to the B-subclass of receptors, since we show that EphA2 also interacts with caveolin-1. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the caveolin-binding motif within the kinase domain of EphB1 is primordial for its correct membrane targeting. Taken together, our findings establish caveolin-1 as an important regulator of downstream signaling and membrane targeting of EphB1.
Field dependence–independence from a working memory perspective: A dual-task investigation of the Hidden Figures Test

Field dependence-independence (FDI) is a construct intensively investigated within cognitive style research, but its cognitive underpinnings are not clearly specified. We propose that performance on FDI tasks primarily reflects the operations of the visuospatial and executive components of working memory. We tested this hypothesis in a dual-task experiment with a commonly used measure of FDI, the Hidden Figures Test. The results showed that performance on this test was impaired by concurrent performance of secondary tasks that primarily tap the visuospatial component (spatial tapping) and the executive component (2-back and random number generation), but was almost unaffected by other secondary tasks (simple tapping and articulatory suppression). Moreover, an analysis of secondary task performance ruled out the possibility of strategic trade-offs and revealed an intriguing dissociation for two different sets of “randomness” indices for the random number generation task. These results support the hypothesised mapping between FDI and working memory components and suggest that the dual-task paradigm can provide a useful way to bring underspecified constructs like FDI into closer alignment with theoretical ideas developed within cognitive psychology.
Bidirectional LSTM-HMM Hybrid System for Polyphonic Sound Event Detection

In this study, we propose a new method of polyphonic sound event detection based on a Bidi-rectional Long Short-Term Memory Hidden Markov Model hybrid system (BLSTM-HMM). We extend the hybrid model of neural network and HMM, which achieved stateof-the-art performance in the ﬁeld of speech recognition, to the multi-label classiﬁcation problem. This extension provides an explicit duration model for output labels, unlike the straightforward application of BLSTM-RNN. We compare the performance of our proposed method to conventional methods such as non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and standard BLSTM-RNN, using the DCASE2016 task 2 dataset. Our proposed method outperformed conventional approaches in both monophonic and polyphonic tasks, and ﬁnally achieved an average F1 score of 67.1 % (error rate of 64.5 %) on the event-based evaluation, and an average F1-score of 76.0 % (error rate of 50.0 %) on the segment-based evaluation.
Voluntary and reflex control of the biceps brachii muscle in spastic-athetotic patients

A cross-correlation technique of analysis was used to measure the transmission characteristics of tonic stretch reflex (TSR) pathways in spastic-athetoid subjects sustaining a voluntary contraction in the biceps brachii muscle. A comparison was made with the transmission characteristics of normal subjects measured by the same technique. It was found that gain and phase characteristics of spastic patients did not display the large resonant peaks present in normals. It is proposed that the resonant peaks in the TSR transmission of normal subjects were caused by long loop pathways. The absence of these peaks in the spastic patients supports the hypothesis that short-circuiting of long loop pathways by hyperactive spinal reflexes is part of the mechanism of spasticity.
Scheduling Deteriorating Jobs on a Single Processor

N jobs are to be processed sequentially on a single machine. While waiting for processing, jobs deteriorate, causing the random processing requirement of each job to grow at a job-specific rate. Under such conditions, the actual processing times of the jobs are no longer exchangeable random variables and the expected makespan is no longer invariant under any scheduling strategy that disallows idleness. In this paper, we analyze the effects of different deterioration schemes and derive optimal scheduling policies that minimize the expected makespan, and, for some models, policies that minimize the variance of the makespan. We also allow for random setup and detaching times. Applications to optimal inventory issuing policies are discussed and extensions are considered.
Earthquake Damage Assessment of Buildings Using VHR Optical and SAR Imagery

Rapid damage assessment after natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes) and violent conflicts (e.g., war-related destruction) is crucial for initiating effective emergency response actions. Remote-sensing satellites equipped with very high spatial resolution (VHR) multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging sensors can provide vital information due to their ability to map the affected areas with high geometric precision and in an uncensored manner. In this paper, we present a novel method that detects buildings destroyed in an earthquake using pre-event VHR optical and post-event detected VHR SAR imagery. The method operates at the level of individual buildings and assumes that they have a rectangular footprint and are isolated. First, the 3-D parameters of a building are estimated from the pre-event optical imagery. Second, the building information and the acquisition parameters of the VHR SAR scene are used to predict the expected signature of the building in the post-event SAR scene assuming that it is not affected by the event. Third, the similarity between the predicted image and the actual SAR image is analyzed. If the similarity is high, the building is likely to be still intact, whereas a low similarity indicates that the building is destroyed. A similarity threshold is used to classify the buildings. We demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the method for a subset of the town of Yingxiu, China, which was heavily damaged in the Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008. For the experiment, we use QuickBird and WorldView-1 optical imagery, and TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed SAR data.
An expectation-maximization algorithm for probabilistic reconstructions of full-length isoforms from splice graphs

Reconstructing full-length transcript isoforms from sequence fragments (such as ESTs) is a major interest and challenge for bioinformatic analysis of pre-mRNA alternative splicing. This problem has been formulated as finding traversals across the splice graph, which is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) representation of gene structure and alternative splicing. In this manuscript we introduce a probabilistic formulation of the isoform reconstruction problem, and provide an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for its maximum likelihood solution. Using a series of simulated data and expressed sequences from real human genes, we demonstrate that our EM algorithm can correctly handle various situations of fragmentation and coupling in the input data. Our work establishes a general probabilistic framework for splice graph-based reconstructions of full-length isoforms.
Economic and political restructuring and the sustainability of migrant remittances: the case of Western Samoa.

This study examines the importance of remittances from emigrants to the economies of Pacific island states. The author considers two basic questions: "Are there enough island-born or island-linked people in the labor forces of industrialized countries to generate a given level of remittances to the island states? [and] Will those who are able to sustain the flow be willing to? In this paper I examine the case of remittance flows between New Zealand and Western Samoa. "
Cooperative ℋ∞-estimation for large-scale interconnected linear systems

In this paper, a synthesis method for distributed estimation is presented, which is suitable for dealing with large-scale interconnected linear systems with disturbance. The main feature of the proposed method is that local estimators only estimate a reduced set of state variables and their complexity does not increase with the size of the system. Nevertheless, the local estimators are able to deal with lack of local detectability. Moreover, the estimators guarantee ℋ∞-performance of the estimates with respect to model and measurement disturbances.
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems Design of the TUAT / Karlsruhe Humanoid Hand

The increasing demand for robotic applications in dynamic unstructured environments is motivating the need for dextrous end-efSectors which can cope with the wide variety of tasks and objects encountered in these environments. The human hand is a very complex grasping tool that can handle objects of different sizes and shapes. Many research activities have been carried out to develop artificial robot hands with capabilities similar to the human hand. In this paper the mechanism and design of a new humanoid-type hand (called TUA T/Karlsruhe Humanoid Hand) with human-like manipulation abilities is discussed. The new hand is designed for the humanoid robot ARMAR which has to work autonomously or interactively in cooperation with humans and for an artificial lightweight arm for handicapped persons. The arm is developed as close as possible to the human arm and is driven by spherical ultrasonic motors. The ideal end-effector for such an artificial arm or a humanoid would be able to use the tools and objects that a person uses when working in the same environment. Therefore a new hand is designed for anatomical consistency with the human hand. This includes the number offingers and the placement and motion of the thumb, the proportions of the link lengths and the shape of the palm. It can also perform most part of human grasping types. The TUAT/Karlsruhe Humanoid Hand possesses 20 DOF and is driven by one actuator which can be placed into or around the hand.
Human monocytes are associated with the formation of fibrin

Purified populations of human monocytes (greater than 99% monocytic) contain a subpopulation of cells (8-20%) that will surround themselves with a radial array of needles within 15 s after exposure to plasma. The needles are composed of fibrin as demonstrated by gel electrophoresis of isolated needles and by their reaction with a monoclonal antibody, UC45, that is specific for the alpha chain of fibrin. The addition of UC45 antibody to plasma inhibits the formation of the fibrin needles by monocytes, suggesting that the recognized antigen is important for polymerization. In contrast, UC45 binds weakly to conventional plasma fibrin and does not prevent clotting of plasma although the process is prolonged. Thus, the UC45 antigen is more prominently represented or more accessible on monocyte fibrin. At least 1% of the monocytes were able to form fibers at the earliest time that they could be tested. A greater proportion developed this ability between 2 and 6 h in culture. Macrophages from lung, thymus, and breast milk, when incubated for similar periods of time, do not form fibrin needles. However, phagocytes from tonsils were extremely active in this respect. It is speculated that monocytes may be induced to express fibrin as part of their activities in inflammatory lesions.