Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reduced Levels of Proteasome Products in a Mouse Striatal Cell Model of Huntington’s Disease

Huntington’s disease is the result of a long polyglutamine tract in the gene encoding huntingtin protein, which in turn causes a large number of cellular changes and ultimately results in neurodegeneration of striatal neurons. Although many theories have been proposed, the precise mechanism by which the polyglutamine expansion causes cellular changes is not certain. Some evidence supports the hypothesis that the long polyglutamine tract inhibits the proteasome, a multiprotein complex involved in protein degradation. However, other studies report normal proteasome function in cells expressing long polyglutamine tracts. The controversy may be due to the methods used to examine proteasome activity in each of the previous studies. In the present study, we measured proteasome function by examining levels of endogenous peptides that are products of proteasome cleavage. Peptide levels were compared among mouse striatal cell lines expressing either 7 glutamines (STHdh Q7/Q7) or 111 glutamines in the huntingtin protein, either heterozygous (STHdh Q7/Q111) or homozygous (STHdh Q111/Q111). Both of the cell lines expressing huntingtin with 111 glutamines showed a large reduction in nearly all of the peptides detected in the cells, relative to levels of these peptides in cells homozygous for 7 glutamines. Treatment of STHdh Q7/Q7 cells with proteasome inhibitors epoxomicin or bortezomib also caused a large reduction in most of these peptides, suggesting that they are products of proteasome-mediated cleavage of cellular proteins. Taken together, these results support the hypothesis that proteasome function is impaired by the expression of huntingtin protein containing long polyglutamine tracts.
Assessing attitudes to English and language use

L'A. examine les attitudes de plus de 300 employes industriels indiens vis a vis de la langue anglaise et de l'utilisation de l'anglais dans quatre domaines differents. L'information est recueillie au moyen d'un questionnaire. Chacun des quatre domaines consideres est examine et compare avec le comportement de plusieurs groupes d'individus ayant le meme niveau d'education et le meme statut professionnel, mais appartenant a differents types d'industries
Good Work Deserves Good Pay: A Quality-Based Surplus Sharing Method for Participatory Sensing

Participatory sensing has become a novel and promising paradigm in environmental data collection. However, the issue of data quality has not been carefully addressed. Low quality data contributions may undermine the effectiveness and prospects of participatory sensing, and thus motivates the need for approaches to guarantee the high quality of the contributed data. In this paper, we integrate quality estimation and monetary incentive, and propose a quality-based surplus sharing method for participatory sensing. Specifically, we design an unsupervised learning approach to quantify the users' data qualities and long-term reputations, and exploit an outlier detection technique to filter out anomalous data items. Furthermore, we model the process of surplus sharing as a cooperative game, and propose a Shapley value-based method to determine each user's payment. We have conducted a participatory sensing experiment, and the experiment results show that our approach achieves good performance in terms of both quality estimation and surplus sharing.
Evidence for left ventricular dysfunction in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome

There is limited information on the development of left ventricular (LV) dysfunction in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) in the absence of lung and cardiac comorbidity. This study aimed to investigate whether OSA patients without heart morbidity develop LV dysfunction, and to assess the effect of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) on LV function. Twenty-nine OSA patients and 12 control subjects were studied using technetium-99m ventriculography to estimate LV ejection fraction (LVEF), LV peak emptying rate (LVPER), time to peak emptying rate (TPER), peak filling rate (LVPFR) and time to peak filling rate (TPFR) before and after 6 months of treatment with CPAP. A significantly lower LVEF was found in OSA patients, compared to control subjects, (53±7 versus 61±6%) along with a reduced LVPER (2.82±0.58 versus 3.82±0.77 end-diastolic volumes·s−1). Furthermore, OSA patients had significantly lower LVPFR (2.67±0.71 versus 3.93±0.58 end-diastolic volumes·s−1) and delayed TPFR (0.19±0.04 versus 0.15±0.03 s) in comparison with the control group. Six-months of CPAP treatment was effective in significantly improving LVEF, LVPER, LVPFR and TPFR. In conclusion, obstructive sleep apnoea patients without any cardiovascular disease seem to develop left ventricular systolic and diastolic dysfunction, which may be reversed, either partially or completely, after 6 months of continuous positive airway pressure treatment.
Chemotherapy in elderly small-cell lung cancer patients: yes we can, but should we do it?

BACKGROUND Twenty percent of all newly diagnosed patients with small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) are >75 years. Elderly patients may show more toxicity due to co-morbidity. We evaluated motives for adherence to treatment guidelines, completion of treatment and toxicity. PATIENTS AND METHODS Population-based data from patients aged ≥75 years and diagnosed with SCLC in 1997-2004 in The Netherlands were used (368 limited disease and 577 extensive disease). Additional data on co-morbidity (Adult Co-morbidity Evaluation 27), World Health Organisation performance status (PS), treatment, motive for no chemotherapy, adaptations and underlying motive and grade 3 or 4 toxicity were gathered from the medical records. RESULTS Forty-eight percent did not receive chemotherapy. The most common motives were refusal by the patient or family, short life expectancy or a combination of high age, co-morbidity and poor PS. Although only relatively fit elderly were selected for chemotherapy, 60%-75% developed serious toxicity, and two-thirds of all patients could not complete the full chemotherapy. CONCLUSIONS We hypothesise that a better selection by proper geriatric assessments is needed to achieve a more favourable balance between benefit and harm.
Inhibitory effects of subcutaneous tumors in nude mice mediated by low-frequency ultrasound and microbubbles

The aim of the present study was to investigate the sonication effects of 21-kHz ultrasound (US) with microbubbles (MBs) on the subcutaneous prostate tumors of nude mice. In total, 15 tumor-bearing nude mice were divided into three groups: The control group, the low-frequency US group and the US+MB group. The MBs used were from US contrast agent SonoVue. The parameters of the US were as follows: 21 kHz, 26 mW/cm2 and a 40% duty cycle (2 sec on, 3 sec off) for 3 min, once every other day for 2 weeks. Color Doppler flow imaging, hematoxylin and eosin (HE) staining, immunoblotting and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were used to evaluate the results. Following 2 weeks of treatment, the blood flow signal disappeared in the US+MB group only, and the tumor size was smaller when compared with the control and US groups. For the immunoblotting, the intensity of cyclooxygenase-2 and vascular endothelial growth factor in the US+MB group was lower compared with the other two groups. Tumor necrosis was present and the nucleus disappeared upon HE staining in the US+MB group. Upon TEM analysis, increased cytoplasmic vacuolation and dilatation of the perinuclear cisternae of the tumor cells were found in the US+MB group. In the control and US groups, the tumors had intact vascular endothelia and vessel lumens. However, lumen occlusion of the vessels was observed in the US+MB group. In conclusion, 21-kHz low-intensity US with MBs may result in vessel occlusion and growth inhibitory effects in the subcutaneous tumors of nude mice.
Humic fractions of forest, pasture and maize crop soils resulting from microbial activity

Humic substances result from the degradation of biopolymers of organic residues in the soil due to microbial activity. The objective of this study was to evaluate the influence of three different ecosystems: forest, pasture and maize crop on the formation of soil humic substances relating to their biological and chemical attributes. Microbial biomass carbon (MBC), microbial respiratory activity, nitrification potential, total organic carbon, soluble carbon, humic and fulvic acid fractions and the rate and degree of humification were determined. Organic carbon and soluble carbon contents decreased in the order: forest > pasture > maize; humic and fulvic acids decreased in the order forest > pasture=maize. The MBC and respiratory activity were not influenced by the ecosystems; however, the nitrification potential was higher in the forest than in other soils. The rate and degree of humification were higher in maize soil indicating greater humification of organic matter in this system. All attributes studied decreased significantly with increasing soil depth, with the exception of the rate and degree of humification. Significant and positive correlations were found between humic and fulvic acids contents with MBC, microbial respiration and nitrification potential, suggesting the microbial influence on the differential formation of humic substances of the different ecosystems.
Crossing the Border: The Sense of Belonging and Identity Work of Chinese Students in Australia

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the sense of belonging and the identity work of a cohort of Chinese students learning and living in an Australian university. In order to achieve this, I begin the process by administering a semi-structured interview to collect the data from selected participants at University X in Melbourne. This enables me to carry out this study and to explore Chinese students' sense of belonging and to gain an insight into the intense identity work required during their stay in Australia. I describe the complex forces involved in their identity negotiation from the perspectives of culture and identity, when located in a host context. This research project will provide specific and useful information for the parties involved in intercultural higher education and should enhance their understanding of Chinese students, not only in Australia, but also worldwide.
Small Cash Rewards for Big Losers: Experimental Insights into the Fight Against the Obesity Epidemic

This paper examines the sustainability of weight loss achieved through cash rewards and, for the first time, the potential of monetary incentives to prevent weight cycling. In a three period randomized controlled trial, about 700 obese persons were assigned to two treatment groups, which were promised different cash rewards contingent on the achievement of an individually assigned target weight, and to a control group. Successful participants were subsequently allocated to two treatment groups offered different monetary incentives for maintaining the previously achieved target weight and to a control group. This is the first experiment of this kind that finds sustainable effects of weight loss rewards on the body weight of the obese even 18 months after the rewards were removed. Additional incentives to maintain an achieved body weight improve the sustainability of weight loss only while are in place.
Moving beyond punitivism: Punishment, state failure and democracy at the margins

Recent commentary on the punitive turn has focused on the repressive nature of criminal justice policy. Yet, on a marginalised council estate (social housing project) in England, residents appropriate the state in ways that do not always align with the law. What is more, where the state fails to provide residents with the protection they need, residents mobilise informal violence that is condemned by the state. An ethnographic analysis of personalised uses of criminal justice questions the state-centric assumptions of order that have informed recent narratives of the punitive turn. It also calls for a reassessment of the relationship between democratic politics and criminal justice by drawing attention to popular demands that are not captured by a focus on punishment alone.
Title: Learning to Recognize Visual Objects with Microstimulation in Inferior Temporal Cortex Authors: It Stimulation during Learning

The malleability of object representations by experience is essential for adaptive behavior. It has been hypothesized that neurons in inferior temporal cortex (IT) in monkeys are pivotal in visual association learning, evidenced by experiments revealing changes in neural selectivity following visual learning, as well as by lesion studies, wherein functional inactivation of IT impairs learning. A critical question remaining to be answered is whether IT neuronal activity is sufficient for learning. To address this question directly, we conducted experiments combining visual classification learning with microstimulation in IT. We assessed the effects of IT microstimulation during learning in cases where the stimulation was exclusively informative, conditionally informative, and informative but not necessary for the classification task. The results show that localized microstimulation in IT can be used to establish visual classification learning and the same stimulation applied during learning can predictably bias judgments on subsequent recognition. The effect of induced activity can neither be explained by direct stimulation-motor association nor by simple detection of cortical stimulation. We also found that the learning effects are specific to IT stimulation, as they are not observed by microstimulation in an adjacent auditory area. Our results add the evidence that the differential activity in IT during visual association 3 learning is sufficient for establishing new associations. The results suggest that experimentally manipulated activity patterns within IT can be effectively combined with ongoing visually induced activity during the formation of new associations.
When Brand Personality Matters: The Moderating Role of Attachment Styles

This research examines the moderating role of consumer's attachment style in the impact of brand personality. Findings support our hypotheses regarding the manner in which brand personality and attachment style differences systematically influence brand outcomes, including brand attachment, purchase likelihood, and brand choice. Results show that anxiously attached individuals are more likely to be differentially influenced by brand personalities. Further, the results indicate that the level of avoidance predicts the types of brand personality that are most relevant to anxious individuals. Specifically, under conditions of high avoidance and high anxiety, individuals exhibit a preference for exciting brands; however, under conditions of low avoidance and high anxiety, individuals tend to prefer sincere brands. The differential preference for sincere (vs. exciting) brand personality emerges in public (vs. private) consumption settings and in settings where interpersonal relationship expectations are high, supporting a signaling role of brand personality in these contexts. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc.
Preclinical Study of Cell Therapy for Osteonecrosis of the Femoral Head with Allogenic Peripheral Blood-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Purpose To explore the value of transplanting peripheral blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells from allogenic rabbits (rPBMSCs) to treat osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH). Materials and Methods rPBMSCs were separated/cultured from peripheral blood after granulocyte colony-stimulating factor mobilization. Afterwards, mobilized rPBMSCs from a second passage labeled with PKH26 were transplanted into rabbit ONFH models, which were established by liquid nitrogen freezing, to observe the effect of rPBMSCs on ONFH repair. Then, the mRNA expressions of BMP-2 and PPAR-γ in the femoral head were assessed by RT-PCR. Results After mobilization, the cultured rPBMSCs expressed mesenchymal markers of CD90, CD44, CD29, and CD105, but failed to express CD45, CD14, and CD34. The colony forming efficiency of mobilized rPBMSCs ranged from 2.8 to 10.8 per million peripheral mononuclear cells. After local transplantation, survival of the engrafted cells reached at least 8 weeks. Therein, BMP-2 was up-regulated, while PPAR-γ mRNA was down-regulated. Additionally, bone density and bone trabeculae tended to increase gradually. Conclusion We confirmed that local transplantation of rPBMSCs benefits ONFH treatment and that the beneficial effects are related to the up-regulation of BMP-2 expression and the down-regulation of PPAR-γ expression.
Potsdam Commentary Corpus 2.0: Annotation for Discourse Research

We present a revised and extended version of the Potsdam Commentary Corpus, a collection of 175 German newspaper commentaries (op-ed pieces) that has been annotated with syntax trees and three layers of discourse-level information: nominal coreference,connectives and their arguments (similar to the PDTB, Prasad et al. 2008), and trees reflecting discourse structure according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann/Thompson 1988). Connectives have been annotated with the help of a semi-automatic tool, Conano (Stede/Heintze 2004), which identifies most connectives and suggests arguments based on their syntactic category. The other layers have been created manually with dedicated annotation tools. The corpus is made available on the one hand as a set of original XML files produced with the annotation tools, based on identical tokenization. On the other hand, it is distributed together with the open-source linguistic database ANNIS3 (Chiarcos et al. 2008; Zeldes et al. 2009), which provides multi-layer search functionality and layer-specific visualization modules. This allows for comfortable qualitative evaluation of the correlations between annotation layers.
Bargaining and Strikes

A recent literature has shown that asymmetric information about a firm's profitability does not by itself explain strikes of substantial length if the firm and workers can bargain very frequently without commitment. In this paper we show that substantial strikes are possible if (a) there is a small (but not insignificant) delay between offers; and (b) a strike-bound firm may experience a decline in profitability after a certain point. A brief discussion of the ability of the theory to explain the data on strikes is included.
Looking back on the current day: interruptibility prediction using daily behavioral features

When a person seeks another person's attention, it is of prime importance to assess how interruptible the other person is. Since smartphones are ubiquitously used as communication media these days, interruptibility prediction on smartphones has started to attract great interest from both academia and industry. Previous studies, in general, attempted to model interruptibility using the behaviors at the current moment and in the immediate past (e.g., 5 minutes before). However, a person's interruptibility at a certain moment is indeed affected by his/her preceding behaviors for several reasons. Motivated by this long-term effect, in this paper we propose a novel methodology of extracting features based on past behaviors from smartphone sensor data. The primary difference from previous studies is that we systematically consider a longer history of up to a day in addition to the current point and the immediate past. To represent behaviors in a day accurately and compactly, our methodology divides a day into multiple timeslots and then, for each timeslot, derives relevant features such as the temporal shapes of the time series of the sensor data. In order to verify the advantage of our methodology, we collected a data set of smartphone usage from 25 participants for four weeks and obtained a license to a large-scale public data set constructed from 907 users over approximately nine months. The experimental results on the two data sets show that looking back to the beginning of the current day improves prediction accuracy by up to 16% and 7%, respectively, compared with the baseline and state-of-the-art methods.
Addressing Practical Software Development Issues in AspectJ with a Pointcut Interface

In this paper, we consider the problems of large-scale systems, team development, andmaintenance in the context of AspectJ[3] programming. To our knowledge, these topics havenot been discussed in any detail in other studies. We propose a new kind of interfacebetween aspects and base code, explain how it is used by aspects, and then discuss theexpected benefits in the context of realistic software development.For the purposes of the workshop, this paper can be viewed as presenting a challengeproblemto demonstrate that proposals for advanced separations of concerns can deal withthese practical development issuesand a response for AspectJ.
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Action effect anticipation: Neurophysiological basis and functional consequences (cid:2)

Voluntary actions are thought to be selected with respect to their intended goal. Converging data sug- gests that medial frontal cortex plays a crucial role in linking actions to their predicted effects. Recent neuroimaging data also suggests that during action selection, the brain pre-activities the representation of the predicted action effect. We review evidence of action effect prediction, both in terms of its neurophysiological basis as well as its functional consequences. By assuming that action preparation includes activation of the predicted sensory consequences of the action, we provide a mechanism to understand sensory attenuation and intentional binding. In this account, sensory attenuation results from more dif- ﬁcult discrimination between the observed action effect and the pre-activation of the predicted effect, as compared to when no (or incorrect) prediction is present. Similarly, a predicted action effect should also reach the threshold of awareness faster (intentional binding), if its perceptual representation is pre-activated. By comparing this potential mechanism to mental imagery and repetition suppression we propose a possible neural basis for the processing of predicted action effects.
HPA: An opportunistic approach to embedded energy efficiency

Reducing energy consumption is a challenge that is faced on a daily basis by teams from the high-performance computing as well as the embedded domains. This issue is mostly approached from an hardware perspective by devising architectures that put energy efficiency as a primary target, often at the cost of processing power. Lately, computing platforms have become more and more heterogeneous, but the exploitation of these additional capabilities is so complex from the application developer's perspective that their optimization is often limited. In this paper we present a transparent, on-the-fly optimization scheme that allows a generic application to automatically and dynamically exploit the available computing units to partition its computational load. We have called our approach Heterogeneous Platform Accelerator (HPA). The idea is to use profiling to select a computing-intensive candidate for acceleration, and then distribute the computations to the different units by off-loading blocks of code to them. This is done automatically at run-time, thus requiring no effort from the developer and adapting to the current input data and load. Using an NVIDIA Jetson TK1 board, we validate our proposal on several benchmarks and on a real-world software package, the Unix text editor ed. The results we achieve substantiate our claim that not only HPA results in faster processing speed, but also in a considerable reduction in energy dissipation.