Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Convergent evolutionary reduction of atrial septation in lungless salamanders

Nearly two thirds of the approximately 700 species of living salamanders are lungless. These species respire entirely through the skin and buccopharyngeal mucosa. Lung loss dramatically impacts the configuration of the circulatory system but the effects of evolutionary lung loss on cardiac morphology have long been controversial. For example, there is presumably little need for an atrial septum in lungless salamanders due to the absence of pulmonary veins and the presence of a single source of mixed blood flowing into the heart, but whether lungless salamanders possess an atrial septum and whether the sinoatrial aperture is located in the left or right atrium are unresolved; authors have stated opposing claims since the late 1800s. Here, we use micro‐computed tomography (μ‐CT) imaging, gross dissection and histological reconstruction to compare cardiac morphology among lungless plethodontid salamanders (Plethodontidae), salamanders with lungs, and the convergently lungless species Onychodactylus japonicus (Hynobiidae). Plethodontid salamanders have partial atrial septa and incomplete separation of the atrium into left and right halves. Partial septation is also seen in O. japonicus. Hence, lungless salamanders from two lineages convergently evolved similar morphology of the atrial septum. The partial septum in lungless salamanders can make it appear that the sinoatrial aperture is in the left atrium, but this interpretation is incorrect. Outgroup comparisons demonstrate that the aperture is located in a posterodorsal extension of the right atrium into the left side of the heart. Independent evolutionary losses of the atrial septum may have a similar developmental basis. In mammals, the lungs induce formation of the atrial septum by secreting morphogens to neighboring mesenchyme. We hypothesize that the lungs induce atrial septum development in amphibians in a similar fashion to mammals, and that atrial septum reduction in lungless salamanders is a direct result of lunglessness.
Tumor Cell Marker PVRL4 (Nectin 4) Is an Epithelial Cell Receptor for Measles Virus

Vaccine and laboratory adapted strains of measles virus can use CD46 as a receptor to infect many human cell lines. However, wild type isolates of measles virus cannot use CD46, and they infect activated lymphocytes, dendritic cells, and macrophages via the receptor CD150/SLAM. Wild type virus can also infect epithelial cells of the respiratory tract through an unidentified receptor. We demonstrate that wild type measles virus infects primary airway epithelial cells grown in fetal calf serum and many adenocarcinoma cell lines of the lung, breast, and colon. Transfection of non-infectable adenocarcinoma cell lines with an expression vector encoding CD150/SLAM rendered them susceptible to measles virus, indicating that they were virus replication competent, but lacked a receptor for virus attachment and entry. Microarray analysis of susceptible versus non-susceptible cell lines was performed, and comparison of membrane protein gene transcripts produced a list of 11 candidate receptors. Of these, only the human tumor cell marker PVRL4 (Nectin 4) rendered cells amenable to measles virus infections. Flow cytometry confirmed that PVRL4 is highly expressed on the surfaces of susceptible lung, breast, and colon adenocarcinoma cell lines. Measles virus preferentially infected adenocarcinoma cell lines from the apical surface, although basolateral infection was observed with reduced kinetics. Confocal immune fluorescence microscopy and surface biotinylation experiments revealed that PVRL4 was expressed on both the apical and basolateral surfaces of these cell lines. Antibodies and siRNA directed against PVRL4 were able to block measles virus infections in MCF7 and NCI-H358 cancer cells. A virus binding assay indicated that PVRL4 was a bona fide receptor that supported virus attachment to the host cell. Several strains of measles virus were also shown to use PVRL4 as a receptor. Measles virus infection reduced PVRL4 surface expression in MCF7 cells, a property that is characteristic of receptor-associated viral infections.
Mass Balance Re-analysis of Findelengletscher, Switzerland; Benefits of Extensive Snow Accumulation Measurements

A re-analysis is presented here of a 10-year mass balance series at Findelengletscher, a temperate mountain glacier in Switzerland. Calculating glacier-wide mass balance from the set of glaciological point balance observations using conventional approaches, such as the profile or contour method, resulted in significant deviations from the reference value given by the geodetic mass change over a five-year period. This is attributed to the sparsity of observations at high elevations and to the inability of the evaluation schemes to adequately estimate accumulation in unmeasured areas. However, measurements of winter mass balance were available for large parts of the study period from snow probings and density pits. Complementary surveys by helicopter-borne ground-penetrating radar (GPR) were conducted in three consecutive years. The complete set of seasonal observations was assimilated using a distributed mass balance model. This model-based extrapolation revealed a substantial mass loss at Findelengletscher of -0.43m w.e. a^-1 between 2004 and 2014, while the loss was less pronounced for its former tributary, Adlergletscher (-0.30m w.e. a^-1). For both glaciers, the resulting time series were within the uncertainty bounds of the geodetic mass change. We show that the model benefited strongly from the ability to integrate seasonal observations. If no winter mass balance measurements were available and snow cover was represented by a linear precipitation gradient, the geodetic mass balance was not matched. If winter balance measurements by snow probings and snow density pits were taken into account, the model performance was substantially improved but still showed a significant bias relative to the geodetic mass change. Thus the excellent agreement of the model-based extrapolation with the geodetic mass change was owed to an adequate representation of winter accumulation distribution by means of extensive GPR measurements.
MixKMeans: Clustering Question-Answer Archives

Community-driven Question Answering (CQA) systems that crowdsource experiential information in the form of questions and answers and have accumulated valuable reusable knowledge. Clustering of QA datasets from CQA systems provides a means of organizing the content to ease tasks such as manual curation and tagging. In this paper, we present a clustering method that exploits the two-part question-answer structure in QA datasets to improve clustering quality. Our method, MixKMeans , composes question and answer space similarities in a way that the space on which the match is higher is allowed to dominate. This construction is motivated by our observation that semantic similarity between question-answer data (QAs) could get localized in either space. We empirically evaluate our method on a variety of real-world labeled datasets. Our results indicate that our method signiﬁcantly outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods for the task of clustering question-answer archives.
Relationship between Cardiovascular Risk Score and Traditional and Nontraditional Cardiometabolic Parameters in Obese Adolescent Girls

Summary Background: Since the cardiovascular (CV) risk score in the young population, children and adolescents, is underestimated, especially in developing countries such as Montenegro, where a strong interaction exists between the genetically conditioned CV risk and environmental factors, the purpose of this study was to estimate CV risk in apparently healthy adolescent girls. Moreover, we aimed to test some new, emerging CV risk factors and their interaction with the traditional ones, such as obesity. Precisely, we aimed to assess the impact of low bilirubin levels, as a routine biochemical parameter, as an additional risk factor for atherosclerotic disease in the adult phase. Methods: Forty-five obese adolescent girls (mean age 17.8±1.22 years) and forty-five age-and sex-matched normal weight controls, all nonsmokers, were included. Anthropometric and biochemical parameters were measured. Cardiovascular Risk Score (CVRS) was calculated by adding the points for each risk factor (e.g. sex, HDL-c, non-HDLc, blood pressure and fasting glycemia). Results: A significant positive relationship between CVRS and ALT, hsCRP and TG/HDL-c, but an opposite relationship between CVRS and total bilirubin were found (P<0.001). Multiple linear regression analysis showed that higher waist circumference (WC) and LDL-c, but lower HDL-c were independent predictors of lower bilirubin values (adjusted R2=0.603, P<0.001). Conclusions: Obese adolescent girls are at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease late in life. In addition to the traditional risk factors, total bilirubin may have the potential to discriminate between low and higher risk for cardiovascular disturbances in healthy adolescent girls.
Numerical Modelling for Ultra Wideband Radar Breast Cancer Detection and Classification

Microwave Imaging is one of the most promising emerging imaging technologies for breast cancer detection, and exploits the dielectric contrast between normal and malignant breast tissue at microwave frequencies. The development of many UWB Radar imaging approaches requires the use of accurate numerical models for the propagation and scattering of microwave signals within the breast. The Finite-Difierence Time-Domain (FDTD) method is the most commonly used numerical modelling technique used to model the propagation of Electromagnetic (EM) waves in biological tissue. However, it is critical that an FDTD model accurately represents the dielectric properties of the constituent tissues, including tumour tissues, and the highly correlated distribution of these tissues within the breast. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the latest flndings regarding dielectric properties of normal and cancerous breast tissue, and the heterogeneity of normal breast tissue. Furthermore, existing FDTD models of the breast described in the literature are examined.
Evaluating the accuracy of grey system theory against time series in predicting online auction closing price

Online auctions have expanded rapidly over the last decade and have become a fascinating new type of business or commercial transaction in this digital era. Bidding in an online auction is always a very challenging task since we do not know the outcome of the bid until we are outbid or until the auction is closed Knowing the closing price of a given auction would be an advantage since we can use this information to bid and win in a given auction. However, predicting the closing price of an auction is not a straightforward process. This paper reports on the prediction of online auction closing price using two well known theories namely the grey theory and the time series. The prediction accuracy and effectiveness for both models will be evaluated using a simulated auction environment.
Bacteremia Associated With Toothbrushing and Dental Extraction

Background— Antibiotic prophylaxis recommendations for the prevention of infective endocarditis are based in part on studies of bacteremia from dental procedures, but toothbrushing may pose a greater threat. The purpose of this study was to compare the incidence, duration, nature, and magnitude of endocarditis-related bacteremia from single-tooth extraction and toothbrushing and to determine the impact of amoxicillin prophylaxis on single-tooth extraction. Methods and Results— In this double-blind, placebo-controlled study, 290 subjects were randomized to (1) toothbrushing, (2) single-tooth extraction with amoxicillin prophylaxis, or (3) single-tooth extraction with identical placebo. Blood was drawn for bacterial culturing and identification at 6 time points before, during, and after these interventions. The focus of our analysis was on bacterial species reported to cause infective endocarditis. We identified 98 bacterial species, 32 of which are reported to cause endocarditis. Cumulative incidence of endocarditis-related bacteria from all 6 blood draws was 23%, 33%, and 60% for the toothbrushing, extraction-amoxicillin, and extraction-placebo groups, respectively (P<0.0001). Significant differences were identified among the 3 groups at draws 2, 3, 4, and 5 (all P<0.05). Amoxicillin resulted in a significant decrease in positive cultures (P<0.0001). Conclusions— Although amoxicillin has a significant impact on bacteremia resulting from a single-tooth extraction, given the greater frequency for oral hygiene, toothbrushing may be a greater threat for individuals at risk for infective endocarditis.
Measuring a Journey without Goal: Meditation, Spirituality, and Physiology

The secular practice of meditation is associated with a range of physiological and cognitive effects, including lower blood pressure, lower cortisol, cortical thickening, and activation of areas of the brain associated with attention and emotion regulation. However, in the context of spiritual practice, these benefits are secondary gains, as the primary aim is spiritual transformation. Despite obvious difficulties in trying to measure a journey without goal, spiritual aspects involved in the practice of meditation should also be addressed by experimental study. This review starts by considering meditation in the form of the relaxation response (a counterpart to the stress response), before contrasting mindfulness research that emphasizes the role of attention and alertness in meditation. This contrast demonstrates how reference to traditional spiritual texts (in this case Buddhist) can be used to guide research questions involving meditation. Further considerations are detailed, along with the proposal that research should triangulate spiritual textual sources, first person accounts (i.e., neurophenomenology), and physiological/cognitive measures in order to aid our understanding of meditation, not only in the secular context of health benefits, but also in the context of spiritual practice.
Expectation and Surprise Determine Neural Population Responses in the Ventral Visual Stream

Visual cortex is traditionally viewed as a hierarchy of neural feature detectors, with neural population responses being driven by bottom-up stimulus features. Conversely, “predictive coding” models propose that each stage of the visual hierarchy harbors two computationally distinct classes of processing unit: representational units that encode the conditional probability of a stimulus and provide predictions to the next lower level; and error units that encode the mismatch between predictions and bottom-up evidence, and forward prediction error to the next higher level. Predictive coding therefore suggests that neural population responses in category-selective visual regions, like the fusiform face area (FFA), reflect a summation of activity related to prediction (“face expectation”) and prediction error (“face surprise”), rather than a homogenous feature detection response. We tested the rival hypotheses of the feature detection and predictive coding models by collecting functional magnetic resonance imaging data from the FFA while independently varying both stimulus features (faces vs houses) and subjects' perceptual expectations regarding those features (low vs medium vs high face expectation). The effects of stimulus and expectation factors interacted, whereby FFA activity elicited by face and house stimuli was indistinguishable under high face expectation and maximally differentiated under low face expectation. Using computational modeling, we show that these data can be explained by predictive coding but not by feature detection models, even when the latter are augmented with attentional mechanisms. Thus, population responses in the ventral visual stream appear to be determined by feature expectation and surprise rather than by stimulus features per se.
High Performance Monte-Carlo Based Option Pricing on FPGAs

High performance computing is becoming increasingly important in the field of financial computing, as the complexity of financial models continues to increase. Many of these financial models do not have a practical close form solution in which case numerical methods are the only alternative. Monte-Carlo simulation is one of most commonly used numerical methods, in scientific computing in general, with huge computation benefits in solving problems where close form solutions are impossible to derive. As the Monte-Carlo method relies on the average result of thousands of independent stochastic paths, massive parallelism can be adopted to accelerate the computation. Computer clusters with off-the-shelf accelerator hardware are increasingly being proposed as an economic high performance implementation platform for many scientific computing applications. This paper is part of this trend as it presents an implementation of a Monte-Carlo simulation engine for option pricing on an FPGA-based supercomputer, called Maxwell, developed at the University of Edinburgh. The latter consists of a 32 CPU cluster augmented with 64 Virtex-4 Xilinx FPGAs connected in a 2D torus. Our engine can implement various Monte-Carlo simulations on the Maxwell machine with speed-ups in excess of 100x compared to equivalent software implementations. This is illustrated in this paper in the context of an implementation of the GARCH option pricing model. Real hardware implementation shows that our FPGA-based implementation of the GARCH model outperforms an equivalent software implementation running on a workstation cluster with the same number of computing nodes (CPU/FPGA) by a factor of 340.
Facebook for Facing Dementia

Facebook is bridging the generations. A large portion of elderly people logs in Facebook first time in their life after the age of 65 year with an impaired memory. This paper focused on a few ideas that can help in prevention and management of dementia. Facebook is helpful in enhancing social stimulation and interaction. This is one of the key elements of nonpharmacological interventions for dementia. The photos or videos uploaded in Facebook may augment the memories of the persons and the events and thus it can halt the process of forgetting that persons or events. The senior people can interact with comments, likes and share options of Facebook to remain socially connected. Grandparents and parents are left behind alone. They need someone to talk. Moreover, a unique Facebook group for dementia will encourage sharing of information and expression of their views. The group members can motivate one another to perform daily activities on schedule by poking or sending regular message in their Facebook inbox. They will respond after completing each scheduled task to other. The psychiatrist, caregivers and other group members can follow and provide feedback of their activities continuously. It can be a source of data of their behavior also. To provide music therapy Facebook can automatically play especially dedicated song or music for them at a regular interval. Different cognitive enhancing games designed in the Facebook can be useful for them in the early stage. Moreover, the Facebook location system will help us to find out if our dearest person unfortunately gets lost. However, in case of severe cognitive impairment, the seniors may feel difficulties in using Facebook. The Facebook can be a new cost effective arsenal for combating dementia in the initial stages. Future researchers can consider evaluating the impact of Facebook in these domains. Editorial
The harmonic online K-server algorithm is competitive

We show that the Harmonic algorithm for the online K-server problem is ( ~11 x 2K – 2K)competitive against an adaptive online adversary for K 22. From a result of [BBKTW90], we get a deterministic algorithm which is ( ~K x 2K – 2102competitive. These are the best competitive ratios that have been published so far for online algorithms over a general metric space when K >2. 1 Competitive Algorithms There are many applications that might be described as online because it is necessary to make decisions without access to future inputs. Associated with each decision is a cost, and the goal is to minimize the total cost. An operating system’s algorithm for paging memory is a good example of an online algorithm. It must decide which page to swap out before it sees the next memory access. In contrast, an ofline procedure is allowed to know the entire sequence of inputs in advance, before it makes arty decisions. We want online algorithms whose cost compares favorably to the cost of an optimal offline algorithm. *Supported by a fellowship from Lockheed Corp. Permissionto copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the pubhcatlonand its dateappear,and notice N given that copying is by permissionof theAssociationfor computing Machinery.To copyotherwise, or to republish, requiresa fee and/or specificpermission. @ 1991 ACM 089791-397-3/91/0004/0260 $1.50 Sleator and Tarjan ([ ST85]) founded the study of competitive algorithms by introducing the idea that the performance of an online algorithm should be measured by the ratio of the cost it incurs on a sequence of inputs to the minimum offline cost for processing the sequence. Formally, a deterministic online algorithm is C-competitive if there exists a function 1 of the initial configuration so that for every finite input sequence the cost incurred by the algorithm is bounded by 1 plus C’ times the minimum cost of processing the input sequence. C’ is called the competitive ratio of the algorithm. 2 The Harmonic Online KServer Algorithm The online K-server problem was introduced by Martasse, McGeoch and Sleator ([MMS88]). We are given initial locations of K servers in a metric space. Requests for service at points {xt } come in over time. Immediately after the tih request is received, one of the servers must be moved from its current location to St. The choice of which server is moved must be made without reference to Zu for any u > t. Moving a server costs the distance the server moves. Our goal is to find an algorithm whose competitive ratio is as low as possible. The framework of K servers moving about in a metric space is quite general. For example, paging is a special case of the online K-server problem. We interpret a server at point F’ to mean that the page P is in main memory. K is the size of main memory, zt is the page containing the tth memory
ADHD and anger contexts: electronic diary mood reports from mothers and children.

OBJECTIVE Using electronic diaries (eDiaries), this study examined temporal links between child and maternal anger, as well as positive mood and perceived stress, in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) versus comparison peers. METHODS Across 7 days, half-hourly eDiaries were completed independently by mothers and their 8-12-year-old children (51 receiving medication for ADHD and 58 comparison peers). RESULTS Cross-informant analyses revealed systematic patterns of negative maternal moods in relation to child anger in both groups along with evidence of slower recovery in the ADHD group. Analogously, for both groups, children's anger reports increased and good-mood reports decreased in relation to maternal anger, whereas elevated stress in relation to maternal anger was restricted to children with ADHD. CONCLUSIONS The findings indicate that a negative affective climate is more likely to persist in ADHD than in comparison families. They also affirm the utility of child as well as parent eDiary reports and suggest that children may be willing to report low positive mood when reluctant to report negative mood. The promise of incorporating real-time data on mood patterning into tailored treatments for children with ADHD and their families is discussed.