Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of a nonmammalian Golf subtype: Functional role in olfactory signaling of airborne odorants in Xenopus laevis

Attempts to identify the Gα subtypes in the two compartments of the olfactory system from Xenopus, which are supposed to be specialized for detecting aquatic and volatile odorous compounds, revealed that a Gαo1 subtype is characteristic for the “water nose,” the lateral diverticulum, whereas a novel Gαs subtype predominates in the “air nose,” the medial diverticulum. The newly identified Gαs‐type is more closely related to Gαolf of rat and human than to the known Gαs‐isoform of Xenopus; it is therefore considered the first identified nonmammalian Gαolf subtype. Sequence comparison of Gαolf from amphibia and mammals revealed a particular conservation within the α‐helical domains, which are supposed to control the GDP/GTP‐exchange rate. The selective expression of different Gα subtypes in the two anatomically separated and functionally specialized nasal compartments parallels the expression of distinct classes of olfactory receptors. Moreover, biochemical analysis revealed that stimulation with appropriate odorous compounds elicits the formation of inositol trisphosphate in the lateral diverticulum. In contrast, cyclic adenosine monophosphate signals were induced in the medial diverticulum, and this response appears to be mediated by the novel Gαolf subtype. The data indicate that olfactory sensory neurons in each of the nasal cavities are equipped not only with defined sets of receptor types but also with a distinct molecular machinery for the chemo‐electrical transduction process. J. Comp. Neurol. 439:400–410, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Disruption of Mouse CD46 Causes an Accelerated Spontaneous Acrosome Reaction in Sperm

ABSTRACT Human membrane cofactor protein (MCP, CD46) is a ubiquitously expressed protein known to protect cells from complement attack. Interestingly, when we examined the expression of mouse CD46, which we recently cloned, the message was found only in testis and the protein was found on the inner acrosomal membrane of sperm. In order to elucidate the function of CD46, we produced mice carrying a null mutation in the CD46 gene by using homologous recombination. Despite the absence of CD46, the mice were healthy and both sexes were fertile. However, to our surprise, the fertilizing ability of males appeared to be facilitated by disruption of the CD46 gene, as the average number of pups born from CD46−/− males was significantly greater than that of wild-type males. It was also revealed that the incidence of the spontaneous acrosome reaction doubled in CD46−/− sperm compared to that in wild-type sperm. It was assumed that this increase caused the heightened fertilizing ability found in CD46−/− sperm. These data suggest that CD46 may have some role in regulating sperm acrosome reaction.
Study of interleukin-6 and tumor necrosis factor-alpha levels in maternal serum and amniotic fluid of patients with premature rupture of membranes.

To study the change and clinical significance of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) levels in the maternal serum and amniotic fluid of pregnant women with chorioamnionitis and with premature rupture of membranes. Twenty-six normal-term pregnant women formed the control group, and forty-six pregnant women with premature rupture of membranes were enrolled for the study. Maternal serum and amniotic fluid IL-6 and TNF-alpha levels were measured using a sensitive radioimmunoassay and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA); chorioamnionitis was diagnosed by fetal membrane pathology. The maternal serum IL-6 levels and amniotic fluid IL-6 and TNF-alpha levels were higher than those of the control (P < 0.01). There was a significant relationship between maternal serum IL-6 and maternal serum and amniotic fluid IL-6 and TNF-alpha with the time of the premature rupture of membranes, i.e. the longer the time, the higher the maternal serum and amniotic fluid IL-6 and TNF-alpha. There were 12 patients with chorioamnionitis in premature rupture of membranes and their maternal serum and amniotic fluid IL-6 and TNF-alpha levels were higher than that of non-chorioamnionitis patients (P < 0.01-0.05). IL-6 and TNF-alpha levels in maternal and amniotic fluids are a valuable index in identification of the chorioamnionitis in patients with premature rupture of membranes.
Reports of Esctatic, Paranormal, or Religious Experience in Great Britain and the United States-A Comparison of Trends*

Studies in the United States show that "ecstatic," "paranormal," or "religious experience is much more widespread than contemporary descriptions of reality would lead us to suppose. Despite differences in methodology, trends seem to be emerging and a recent national survey in Great Britain suggests that these findings may not be peculiar to North America. The paper outlines points of convergence and divergence between the British and American work on the occurrance of such experience and its relation to psychological well-being, and explores theoretical perspectives which may illuminate the information gathered in these surveys.
Patient health information materials in waiting rooms of family physicians: do patients care?

Background Patient health information materials (PHIMs), such as leaflets and posters are widely used by family physicians to reinforce or illustrate information, and to remind people of information received previously. This facilitates improved health-related knowledge and self-management by patients. Objective This study assesses the use of PHIMs by patient. It also addresses their perception of the quality and the impact of PHIMs on the interaction with their physician, along with changes in health-related knowledge and self-management. Methods Questionnaire survey among patients of family practices of one town in Belgium, assessing: (1) the extent to which patients read PHIMs in waiting rooms (leaflets and posters) and take them home, (2) the patients’ perception of the impact of PHIMs on interaction with their physician, their change in health-related knowledge and self-management, and (3) the patients judgment of the quality of PHIMs. Results We included 903 questionnaires taken from ten practices. Ninety-four percent of respondents stated they read PHIMs (leaflets), 45% took the leaflets home, and 78% indicated they understood the content of the leaflets. Nineteen percent of respondents reportedly discussed the content of the leaflets with their physician and 26% indicated that leaflets allowed them to ask fewer questions of their physician. Thirty-four percent indicated that leaflets had previously helped them to improve their health-related knowledge and self-management. Forty-two percent reportedly discussed the content of the leaflets with others. Patient characteristics are of significant influence on the perceived impact of PHIMS in physician interaction, health-related knowledge, and self-management. Conclusion This study suggests that patients value health information materials in the waiting rooms of family physicians and that they perceive such materials as being helpful in improving patient–physician interaction, health-related knowledge, and self-management.
The Risk-Return Relationship and Financial Crises

The risk-return trade-off implies that a riskier investment should demand a higher expected return relative to the risk-free return. The approach of Ghysels, Santa-Clara, and Valkanov (2005) consisted of estimating the risk-return trade-off with a mixed frequency - or MIDAS - approach. MIDAS strikes a compromise between on the one hand the need for longer horizons to model expected returns and on the other hand to use high frequency data to model the conditional volatility required to estimate expected returns. Using the approach of Ghysels, Santa-Clara, and Valkanov (2005), after correcting a coding error pointed out to us, we find that the Merton model holds over samples that exclude financial crises, in particular the Great Depression and/or the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the resulting Great Recession. We find that a simple flight to safety indicator separates the traditional risk-return relationship from financial crises which amount to fundamental changes in that relationship. For those months or quarters we characterize as flight to safety we find there is no (i.e. neither negative nor positive) risk-return trade-off.
Automatic Summarization of Meeting Data: A Feasibility Study

The disclosure of audio-visual meeting recordings is a new challenging domain studied by several large scale research projects in Europe and the US. Automatic meeting summarization is one of the functionalities studied. In this paper we report the results of a feasibility study on a subtask, namely the summarization of meeting transcripts. A Maximum Entropy based extractive summarization system using a mix of 15 features improved the performance of a baseline system selecting all utterances longer than 10 words with 20% (F-measure). However, stronger contextual awareness seems to be necessary in order to reduce the precision of the summarizer. The study required the creation of reference extractive summaries, which is documented in the paper.
T cell stimulation via the erythrocyte receptor. Synergism between monoclonal antibodies and phorbol myristate acetate without changes of free cytoplasmic Ca++ levels

We observed that certain E-receptor antibodies (CD2 antibodies) can induce proliferation of resting human T cells in the presence of PMA, while other CD2 antibodies fail to have such an effect. The same CD2 antibodies that were mitogenic in the presence of PMA (9.6, X11, VIT13), but not the nonreactive ones, were also able to induce T cell proliferation via the so-called alternative pathway of T cell activation, i.e., when added pairwise in certain combinations to T cells in the absence of PMA. While the simultaneous addition of two comitogenic CD2 antibodies (9.6 or X11 plus VIT13) or the addition of a single nonmitogenic CD3 antibody (VIT3) led to a clearcut elevation of intracellular Ca++ levels, no such effect could be observed after the addition of one CD2 antibody alone. Even in the presence of PMA, one comitogenic CD2 antibody alone was unable to trigger a significant Ca++ response, although this combination induced a proliferative response. These data indicate that, distinguishable by their influence on free cytoplasmic Ca++, there are two different mechanisms of T cell activation via CD2. While simultaneous triggering with two antibodies leads to cell proliferation preceded by an increase of Ca++ levels, stimulation with one antibody plus PMA results in proliferation without a measurable early Ca++ response. We conclude that T cells treated by certain CD2 antibodies alone already recognize an activation signal probably unrelated to Ca++ homeostasis, a signal that can further be developed by PMA to result in a completely developed proliferative response.
Memory‐related changes in L‐citrulline and agmatine in the rat brain

L‐citrulline, L‐ornithine, and agmatine are the metabolites of L‐arginine by nitric oxide synthase (NOS), arginase, and arginine decarboxylase (ADC), respectively. In contrast to the NOS and arginase pathways, the role of the ADC‐agmatine pathway in learning and memory has only been paid attention lately. Recent evidence suggests a potential involvement of agmatine in learning and memory processing. The present study further addressed this issue by comparing the levels of agmatine, as well as L‐arginine, L‐citrulline, and L‐ornithine, in the hippocampus, parahippocampal region, prefrontal cortex, vestibular nucleus, and cerebellum in rats that were trained in the delayed nonmatch to position task in the T‐maze with their yoked controls. There were significantly increased agmatine levels in the prefrontal, entorhinal, and perirhinal cortices and increased L‐citrulline concentrations in the dentate gyrus (DG) and prefrontal cortex in the T‐maze training group relative to the control one. L‐arginine and L‐ornithine levels were not significantly different between groups in the brain regions examined. These results demonstrate T‐maze training‐induced region‐specific increases in L‐citrulline and agmatine. Significant positive correlations between prefrontal and perirhinal agmatine levels and animals' performance in the T‐maze further suggest the direct involvement of agmatine in learning and memory processing. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Screening Tool for Assessing Everyday Health Information Literacy

This article reports a study about a design process and empirical testing of a practical screening tool aiming at identifying individuals with limited everyday health information literacy (EHIL). First, the relevance of the two related concepts “health literacy” and “health information literacy” are discussed. Secondly, a 10-item tool based on the operationalization of the Medical Library Association’s definition of health information literacy is presented. To pilot the tool, a survey (N=217) was conducted in an Upper Secondary School in Finland in April 2011. The statistical analysis consists of frequency analyses, ftests for means (ANOVA), correlation analyses (Pearson’s r, two-tailed), cross tab-analyses (chi-square) and a factor analysis (extracted and rotated via unweighted least squares and varimax respectively). The results prove that the EHIL screening tool can be used for dividing people into groups according to their level of health information literacy. Results also indicate gender differences: the female students were more motivated to obtain health information than the male students and they to a greater extent preferred to obtain health information from various sources compared to the male students. Three independent factors of EHIL were found: 1) motivation on finding health information, 2) confidence in one’s ability to find, understand, and use health information, and 3) evaluation of health information. This result suggests that these three aspects should be further examined when studying the complex phenomenon of health information literacy and designing measurement tools for practical uses. A shortened 4-item screening tool is presented and proposed for further study and testing as a part of medical interventions, digital library services or modern ICT applications in health education.
Bi-Criteria Scheduling of Scientific Grid Workflows

The drift towards new challenges in Grid computing including scientific workflow management implies the need for new, robust, multicriteria scheduling algorithms that can be applied by the user in an intuitive way. Currently existing bi-criteria scheduling approaches for scientific workflows are usually restricted to certain criterion pairs and require the user to define his preferences either as weights assigned each criterion or as fixed constraints defined for one criterion. The first approach has the drawback that combining multiple criteria into a single objective function is not always intuitive to the end-user, while the second requires a priori knowledge about the result of the first criteria scheduling result. We propose a new bi-criteria scheduling specification method defining for the secondary criterion a sliding constraint as a function of the primary criterion. We model the problem as an extension of the multiple-choice knapsack problem and propose a general bi-criteria scheduling heuristic called dynamic constraint algorithm (DCA) based on dynamic programming. We show through simulation that in most of the experimental cases DCA outperforms two existing algorithms designed for the same problem at the expense of an increased execution time, which is still relatively low for workflows of medium size. Finally, we confirm our simulation results for a real-world hydrological application executed in the Austrian Grid environment.
Passive and dynamic gait measures for biped mechanism: formulation and simulation analysis

SUMMARY Understanding and mimicking human gait is essential for design and control of biped walking robots. The unique characteristics of normal human gait are described as passive dynamic walking, whereas general human gait is neither completely passive nor always dynamic. To study various walking motions, it is important to quantify the different levels of passivity and dynamicity, which have not been addressed in the current literature. In this paper, we introduce the initial formulations of Passive Gait Measure (PGM) and Dynamic Gait Measure (DGM) that quantify passivity and dynamicity, respectively, of a given biped walking motion, and the proposed formulations will be demonstrated for proof-of-concepts using gait simulation and analysis. The PGM is associated with the optimality of natural human walking, where the passivity weight functions are proposed and incorporated in the minimization of physiologically inspired weighted actuator torques. The PGM then measures the relative contribution of the stance ankle actuation. The DGM is associated with the gait stability, and quantifies the effects of inertia in terms of the Zero-Moment Point and the ground projection of center of mass. In addition, the DGM takes into account the stance foot dimension and the relative threshold between static and dynamic walking. As examples, both human-like and robotic walking motions during single support phase are generated for a planar biped system using the passivity weights and proper gait parameters. The calculated PGM values show more passive nature of human-like walking as compared with the robotic walking. The DGM results verify the dynamic nature of normal human walking with anthropomorphic foot dimension. In general, the DGMs for human-like walking are greater than those for robotic walking. The resulting DGMs also demonstrate their dependence on the stance foot dimension as well as the walking motion; for a given walking motion, smaller foot dimension results in increased dynamicity. Future work on experimental validation and demonstration will involve actual walking robots and human subjects. The proposed results will benefit the human gait studies and the development of walking robots.
Implications of multiple antimicrobial-resistant enterococci associated with the poultry environment

Poultry are increasingly being associated with carriage of multiresistant organisms that may cause disease in humans. Among these organisms are the enterococci, now regarded as a common cause of hospital-acquired infections. The use of antimicrobials for growth promotion in poultry production environments may facilitate the dissemination of resistance to Enterococcus spp. that have the potential to be clinically significant. To assess descriptively the degree of multiresistant enterococci in the poultry environment of the Delmarva (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) East Coast region of the USA, litter samples from regional commercial poultry houses and transport container swabs from processing facilities were cultured for Enterococcus spp. Using a microtiter plate adaptation of a conventional biochemical screen, the predominant species identified were E. faecalis (61.2%), E. faecium (18.6%) and E. gallinarum (2.4%). Resistance to the cephalosporin, macrolide and tetracycline classes of antimicrobials was uniform with broader resistance to penicillin and derivatives present in a majority of E. faecium isolates. High-level streptomycin resistance was evident in close to 30% of all isolates with a majority of E. faecalis variants possessing resistance. High-level gentamicin resistance was detected at a low frequency (2.6%) only within the E. faecalis group with resistance to low-level gentamicin levels present in a majority of both the E. faecalis group and subsets of E. faecium. No unexpected vancomycin resistance was detected. Of particular interest was resistance to the streptogramin quinupristin-dalfopristin (Q-D or Synercid), which was present in 70.4% of E. faecium and E. faecium variants.
Size and Position Invariance in the Visual System

The encoding of simple features such as lines and angles leads naturally to size and position invariance when these features are analyzed symbolically in terms of structure and connectedness. No such analysis is possible for a spatial frequency encoding, however, as all a priori indications of pattern unity are lost. An additional transformation of spatial frequency information is therefore demonstrated that automatically derives a size invariant representation of form. The feasibility of the transform scheme in the visual system is outlined with a hypothetical processing sequence. It is found that the organization of cells in the striate cortex shows a marked similarity to an intermediate stage of the proposed sequence.
1 DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION USING NEURAL NETWORKS

A multi-layer neural network with multiple hidden layers was trained as an autoencoder using steepest descent, scaled conjugate gradient and alopex algorithms. These algorithms were used in different combinations with steepest descent and alopex used as pretraining algorithms followed by training using scaled conjugate gradient. All the algorithms were also used to train the autoencoders without any pretraining. Three datasets: USPS digits, MNIST digits, and Olivetti faces were used for training. The results were compared with those of Hinton et al. (Hinton and Salakhutdinov, 2006) for MNIST and Olivetti face dataset. Results indicate that while we were able to prove that pretraining is important for obtaining good results, the pretraining approach used by Hinton et al. obtains lower RMSE than other methods. However, scaled conjugate gradient turned out to be the fastest, computationally. 1. INTRODUCTION Dimensionality reduction is a method of obtaining the information from a high dimensional feature space using fewer intrinsic dimensions. Reducing dimensionality of high dimensional data is good for better classification, regression, presentation and visualization of data. Recently Hinton et al. (Hinton and Salakhutdinov, 2006) used a deep autoencoder for dimensionality reduction of multiple datasets. The autoencoders are multi-layer identity mapping neural networks represented by a function f(x) = x, where x is a multidimensional input vector to the network. They argue that deep autoencoders could be easily trained using a gradient descent method provided the initial weights are near good solutions. They claimed that by pretraining, they were able to obtain a good set of initial weights and the fine tuning which followed the pretraining approach was able to reduce the data dimensionality very efficiently. Their results support their arguments, however, there still remain some areas which require additional studies. Firstly, they reported deep autoencoders showed significant improvement when pretrained over the ones without pretraining (see supporting material of (Hinton and Salakhutdinov, 2006) for details). However, they studied conjugate gradient algorithm with line search for fine tuning and their results cannot be extended to other gradient based methods which do not use line search. Secondly, their pretraining approach is very complicated. It assigns a probability to every possible image via an energy function. We thought it would be pertinent to pretrain a deep autoencoder with a less complicated approach. Thirdly, one of the problems that has been identified with training multi-layer neural networks using gradient based algorithms, is the problem of local minima. Keeping this …
Comment on “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus”

Wolfe-Simon et al. (Research Articles, 3 June 2011, p. 1163; published online 2 December 2010) reported that bacterium GFAJ-1 can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus. However, the presence of contaminating phosphate in the growth medium, as well as the omission of important DNA purification steps, cast doubt on the authors’ conclusion that arsenic can substitute for phosphorus in the nucleic acids of this organism.