Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Subepithelial Fibroblasts on Epithelial Differentiation in Human Skin and Oral Mucosa: Heterotypically Recombined Organotypic Culture Model

The stratified squamous epithelia differ regionally in their patterns of morphogenesis and differentiation. Although some reports suggested that the adult epithelial phenotype is an intrinsic property of the epithelium, there is increasing evidence that subepithelial connective tissue can modify the phenotypic expression of the epithelium. The aim of this study was to elucidate whether the differentiation of cutaneous and oral epithelia is influenced by underlying mesenchymal tissues. Three normal skin samples and three normal buccal mucosa samples were used for the experiments. Skin equivalents were constructed in four ways, depending on the combinations of keratinocytes (cutaneous or mucosal keratinocytes) and fibroblasts (dermal or mucosal fibroblasts), and the effects of subepithelial fibroblasts on the differentiation of oral and cutaneous keratinocytes were studied with histological examinations and immunohistochemical analyses with anti-cytokeratin (keratins 10 and 13) antibodies. For each experiment, three paired skin equivalents were constructed by using single parent keratinocyte and fibroblast sources for each group; consequently, nine (3 × 3) organotypic cultures per group were constructed and studied. The oral and cutaneous epithelial cells maintained their intrinsic keratin expression. The keratin expression patterns in oral and cutaneous epithelia of skin equivalents were generally similar to their original patterns but were partly modified exogenously by the topologically different fibroblasts. The mucosal keratinocytes were more differentiated and expressed keratin 10 when cocultured with dermal fibroblasts, and the expression patterns of keratin 13 in cutaneous keratinocytes cocultured with mucosal fibroblasts were different from those in keratinocytes cocultured with cutaneous fibroblasts. The results suggested that the epithelial phenotype and keratin expression could be extrinsically modified by mesenchymal fibroblasts. In epithelial differentiation, however, the intrinsic control by epithelial cells may still be stronger than extrinsic regulation by mesenchymal fibroblasts.
Zoom-Invariant Vision of Figural Shape: The Mathematics of Cores

Believing that figural zoom invariance and the cross-figural boundary linking implied by medial loci are important aspects of object shape, we present the mathematics of and algorithms for the extraction of medial loci directly from image intensities. The medial loci called cores are defined as generalized maxima in scale space of a form of medial information that is invariant to translation, rotation, and, in particular, zoom. These loci are very insensitive to image disturbances, in strong contrast to previously available medial loci, as demonstrated in a companion paper. Core-related geometric properties and image object representations are laid out which, together with the aforementioned insensitivities, allow the core to be used effectively for a variety of image analysis objectives.
Identification of a Cell Death Pathway in Candida albicans during the Response to Pheromone

ABSTRACT Mating in hemiascomycete yeasts involves the secretion of pheromones that induce sexual differentiation in cells of the opposite mating type. Studies in Saccharomyces cerevisiae have revealed that a subpopulation of cells experiences cell death during exposure to pheromone. In this work, we tested whether the phenomenon of pheromone-induced death (PID) also occurs in the opportunistic pathogen Candida albicans. Mating in C. albicans is uniquely regulated by white-opaque phenotypic switching; both cell types respond to pheromone, but only opaque cells undergo the morphological transition and cell conjugation. We show that approximately 20% of opaque cells, but not white cells, of laboratory strain SC5314 experience pheromone-induced death. Furthermore, analysis of mutant strains revealed that PID was significantly reduced in strains lacking Fig1 or Fus1 transmembrane proteins that are induced during the mating process and, we now show, are necessary for efficient mating in C. albicans. The level of PID was also Ca2+ dependent, as chelation of Ca2+ ions increased cell death to almost 50% of the population. However, in contrast to S. cerevisiae PID, pheromone-induced killing of C. albicans cells was largely independent of signaling via the Ca2+-dependent protein phosphatase calcineurin, even when combined with the loss of Cmk1 and Cmk2 proteins. Finally, we demonstrate that levels of PID vary widely between clinical isolates of C. albicans, with some strains experiencing close to 70% cell death. We discuss these findings in light of the role of prodeath and prosurvival pathways operating in yeast cells undergoing the morphological response to pheromone.
Indirect sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for rapid detection of Streptococcus pneumoniae type 3 antigen

An indirect sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for the detection of the polysaccharide antigen of type 3 pneumococcus (SSS-III) is reported. Polystyrene balls with attached anti-SSS-III antibody serve as the solid phase, and antigen is detected using an alkaline phosphatase-labeled antiglobulin conjugate. The reaction is quantitated by spectrophotometry. Concentrations of antigen are estimated by comparison with standard curves prepared with purified SSS-III. For this assay, the practical lower limit of detection of SSS-III is approximately 2 to 3 ng/ml, thus making the test sensitivity about 25 times that reported for counterimmunoelectrophoresis. In preliminary tests with simulated human clinical specimens, none of the body fluids tested (spinal fluid, serum, urine, and sputum) interfered with detection of antigen, nor did they produce false-positive or false-negative results. Streptococcus pneumoniae type 3 whole organisms were readily detected in simulated clinically positive sputum specimens. Cross-reactions were not observed with Haemophilus influenzae type b, group B Streptococcus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Milking the Social Network: A Chinese Indigenous Psychology Perspective on WeChat C2C Commerce

We examine an emerging user self-regulated business model that is nowadays very popular in China – WeChat C2C Commerce, where users sell commercial products to their colleagues, friends, and acquaintances through the Moment feeds in the mobile social networking application. Theories such as trust and swift Guanxi characterizing traditional seller-buyer dyads may not effectively explain the popularity of WeChat C2C commerce. Therefore, we approach this C2C model through the indigenous philosophy of Chinese. In particular, we examine how expressive and instrumental ties embedded in WeChat will substitute for and/or complement to the straightforward impacts of perceived value of products on buyers’ purchase intentions and behaviors. Our findings will not only contribute to IS theories on e-commerce, but also provide provocative insights for entrepreneurs and managers penetrating markets with collectivism culture.
Performance indicators for wireless industrial communication networks

The recent improvements of the wireless networks performance offer a valuable opportunity also in the context of industrial communication systems. However, these systems are often subjected to such tight reliability requirements as well as timing constraints that wireless communications, especially in an interfered scenario, can hardly comply with. A thorough performance assessment is hence needed both at the design stage and during the typical operating life. In such a direction it is important to define some performance indicators that can monitor the main parameters of industrial communication systems employing wireless networks. In this paper a set of performance indicators for polling-based industrial communication is introduced. Then, two case studies of industrial communication systems that make use of two different wireless networks (namely the IEEE 802.11 WLAN and the IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN) are presented and the relevant performance indicators are experimentally measured. The purpose is to show how the performance indicators may provide useful insights in the behavior of the systems as well as how they may be positively influenced by a careful selection of some key parameters.
Noise estimation Algorithms for Speech Enhancement in highly non-stationary Environments

A noise estimation algorithm plays an important role in speech enhancement. Speech enhancement for automatic speaker recognition system, Man–Machine communication, Voice recognition systems, speech coders, Hearing aids, Video conferencing and many applications are related to speech processing. All these systems are real world systems and input available for these systems is only the noisy speech signal, before applying to these systems we have to remove the noise component from noisy speech signal means enhanced speech signal can be applied to these systems. In most speech enhancement algorithms, it is assumed that an estimate of noise spectrum is available. Noise estimate is critical part and it is important for speech enhancement algorithms. If the noise estimate is too low then annoying residual noise will be available and if the noise estimate is too high then speech will get distorted and loss intelligibility. This paper focus on the different approaches of noise estimation. Section I introduction, Section II explains simple approach of Voice activity detector (VAD) for noise estimation, Section III explains different classes of noise estimation algorithms, Section IV explains performance evaluation of noise estimation algorithms, Section V conclusion.
Mound Construction and Site Selection in the Lafourche Subdelta of the Mississippi River Delta, Louisiana, USA

ABSTRACT Sediment coring and trench excavation, radiocarbon dating, LiDAR data, and indigenous material culture are used to evaluate the cultural affiliation of the Grand Caillou earthen mound site and to place this site within its broader geographic context. This prehistoric Native American complex is located within the Lafourche subdelta, an abandoned portion of the Mississippi River Delta that was active from AD 400 to 1400. Interdisciplinary approaches inform the cultural affiliations of prehistoric inhabitants and document how deltaic processes influenced site selection and timing of occupation relative to newly published optically stimulated luminescence ages for Lafourche subdelta evolution. We find that the Grand Caillou site is situated on the natural levee of a major Lafourche distributary, at its junction with a relict crevasse channel. This location provided geographical advantages including access to major and minor waterways and relatively high topography. Mound construction occurred in stages of alternating lithologies, demonstrating geotechnical knowledge. Ceramic analyses assign affiliation to the Barataria phase of the Plaquemine culture (AD 1000 to 1450). Radiocarbon ages for the mound abruptly truncate at 0.6 ka, coincident with abandonment of the Lafourche subdelta. These data demonstrate highly complex, intertwined relationships between humans and river deltas, a timeless phenomenon documented worldwide.
Effects of water velocity on algal carbon isotope ratios: Implications for river food web studies

We used variation in algal d13C between river habitats to study the spatial scale of energy flow through river food webs. We found a strong negative relationship between herbivore d13C (which reflects algal d13C) and water velocity in three productive Northern California rivers but not in unproductive streams. The contrast among habitats suggests that water velocity affects algal d13C most strongly when CO2 availability is low relative to photosynthetic rates. Our results help explain the wide variation in published river biota d13C and show that past studies using carbon isotope analyses may have significantly underestimated the importance of algal‐derived carbon to river food webs. While flow‐related variation in d13C complicates this common application of carbon isotope analysis, we show that it provides a natural tracer of the flux of algal production derived from different habitats within rivers to higher trophic levels. Measurements of consumer d13C showed that most invertebrate and vertebrate consumers relied on local production, except for filter‐feeding insects and steelhead trout, which relied on production derived from multiple sources. Stable carbon isotopes may thus be used to spatially delineate the habitats that support river food webs, providing previously unavailable information for understanding and managing river ecosystems.
Towards Client-side HTML Security Policies

With the proliferation of content rich web applications, content injection has become an increasing problem. Cross site scripting is the most prominent examples of this. Many systems have been designed to mitigate content injection and cross site scripting. Notable examples are BEEP, BLUEPRINT, and Content Security Policy, which can be grouped as HTML security policies. We evaluate these systems, including the first empirical evaluation of Content Security Policy on real applications. We propose that HTML security policies should be the defense of choice in web applications going forward. We argue, however, that current systems are insufficient for the needs of web applications, and research needs to be done to determine the set of properties an HTML security policy system should have. We propose several ideas for research going forward in this area.
Hst-1 (FGF-4) antisense oligonucleotides block murine limb development

The initiation of limb development depends on the site specific proliferation of the mesenchyme by the signals from the apical ectodermal ridge (AER) in embryonic mouse. We have previously reported that the local expression of Hst-1/Fgf-4 transcripts in AER of the mouse limb bud is developmentally regulated, expressed at 11 and 12 days post coitus (p.c.) embryo. In an effort to further understand the role of Hst-1/FGF-4 in mouse limb development, an antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (ODNs) study was performed. We first established a novel organ culture system to study mouse limb development in vitro. This system allows mouse limb bud at 9.5-10-d p.c. embryo, when placed on a sheet of extracellular matrix in a defined medium, to differentiate into a limb at 12.5-d p.c. embryo within 4.5 d. Using this organ culture system, we have shown that exposure of 9.5-10-d p.c. embryonal limb bud explants to antisense ODNs of Hst-1/FGF-4 blocks limb development. In contrast, sense and scrambled ODNs have no inhibitory effect on limb outgrowth, suggesting that Hst-1/FGF-4 may work as a potent inducing factor for mouse limb development.
Improving Safety-Critical Systems by Visual Analysis

The importance analysis provides a means of analyzing the contribution of potential low-level system failures to identify and assess vulnerabilities of safety-critical systems. Common approaches attempt to enhance the system safety by addressing vulnerabilities using an iterative analysis process, while considering relevant constraints, e.g., cost, for optimizing the improvements. Typically, data regarding the analysis process is presented across several views with few interactive associations among them. Consequently, this hampers the identification of meaningful information supporting the decision making process. In this paper, we propose a visualization system that visually supports engineers in identifying proper solutions. The visualization integrates a decision tree with a plot representing the cause-effect relationship between the improvement ideas of vulnerabilities and the resulting risk reduction of system. Associating a component fault tree view with the plot allows to maintain helpful context information. The introduced visualization approach enables system and safety engineers to identify and analyze optimal solutions facilitating the improvement of the overall system safety.
The bio-inspired chaotic robot

Chaos is an interesting phenomenon displayed by non-linear systems that has been used in robotics and found empirically on real robots' behaviour. This paper presents a formal proof that Braitenberg vehicle 2b, a bio-inspired control mechanism for unicycle robots, behaves as a mass in a potential well. This provides a powerful analogy to understand Braitenberg vehicle 2b as a mechanical system and it implies that its behaviour can be chaotic. Implementing a Braitenberg vehicle in robotics entails defining a stimulus function in the environment. Inspired by previous works and using the obtained theoretical results, this paper proposes the free area perceived by a robot as a stimulus to generate collision free continuous chaotic motion on a bounded space. In non-linear systems chaos appears when a parameter is changed in a family of dynamical systems. Similarly, our implementation on a real robot demonstrates that both, chaotic and non chaotic trajectories can be obtained depending on the stimulus function built. The behaviour is explained through the analogy with the mass in the potential well.
Detecting Airports in TM Satellite Images Based on Edge Tracing and SURF

: Most studies on automatic airport recognition from remote sensing images focus on extracting straight lines to identify airport runways, and then determine the airport target. However, straight line not only is an indicator of airport runways, but also indicates presence of highways, railways, and external walls of large-scale plants, marginal lands, mountains, formations, and other structures. Furthermore, these methods work well mainly on a single and large airport instead of small ones. Few of them have studied multiple targets. In this paper, TM satellite imagery is used as source to detect airports. Traditional spatial filter and edge-detection methods tend to fail in airport detection because of noise and false edges. This paper presents a new method that combines edge tracing and SURF to extract airports from images. Firstly, Gaussian filter is applied to suppress noise. Then, gradient magnitudes and gradient directions are calculated. Large local variations of gradients detected by improved non-maximum suppression (NMS) method are removed to obtain a single-pixel edge image. A contour line is extracted from this edge image. Finally, airports are detected through line detection and SURF. Airports in TM images are successfully recognized using the presented method. The airport detection method proposed in this paper is suitable not only for remote-sensing data of TM satellites but also for application on day-painting satellites, such as other remote-sensing satellite data.
High-Performance Bilingual Text Alignment Using Statistical and Dictionary Information

This paper describes an accurate and robust text alignment system for structurally different languages. Among structurally different languages such as Japanese and English, there is a limitation on the amount of word correspondences that can be statistically acquired. The main reason for this is the systems of functional (closed) words are quite different in the two languages. The proposed method makes use of two kinds of word correspondences in aligning bilingual texts. One is a bilingual dictionary of general use. The other is the word correspondences that are statistically acquired in the alignment process. Our method gradually determines sentence pairs (anchors) that correspond to each other by relaxing parameters. The method, by combining two kinds of word correspondences, achieves adequate word correspondences for complete alignment. As a result, texts of various length and of various genres in structurally different languages can be aligned with high precision. Experimental results show our system outperforms conventional methods for various kinds of Japanese–English texts.
Bmp2 antagonizes sonic hedgehog-mediated proliferation of cerebellar granule neurones through Smad5 signalling

During development of the cerebellum, sonic hedgehog (Shh) is directly responsible for the proliferation of granule cell precursors in the external germinal layer. We have looked for signals able to regulate a switch from the Shh-mediated proliferative response to one that directs differentiation of granule neurones. Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are expressed in distinct neuronal populations within the developing cerebellar cortex. Bmp2 and Bmp4 are expressed in the proliferating precursors and subsequently in differentiated granule neurones of the internal granular layer, whereas Bmp7 is expressed by Purkinje neurones. In primary cultures, Bmp2 and Bmp4, but not Bmp7, are able to prevent Shh-induced proliferation, thereby allowing granule neuron differentiation. Furthermore, Bmp2 treatment downregulates components of the Shh pathway in proliferating granule cell precursors. Smad proteins, the only known BMP receptor substrates capable of transducing the signal, are also differentially expressed in the developing cerebellum: Smad1 in the external germinal layer and Smad5 in newly differentiated granule neurones. Among them, only Smad5 is phosphorylated in vivo and in primary cultures treated with Bmp2, and overexpression of Smad5 is sufficient to induce granule cell differentiation in the presence of Shh. We propose a model in which Bmp2-mediated Smad5 signalling suppresses the proliferative response to Shh by downregulation of the pathway, and allows granule cell precursor to enter their differentiation programme.
Performance prediction and procurement in practice: assessing the suitability of commodity cluster components for wavefront codes

The cost of state-of-the-art supercomputing resources makes each individual purchase a length and expensive process. Often each candidate architecture will need to be benchmarked using a variety of tools to assess likely performance. However, benchmarking alone only provides a limited insight into the suitability of each architecture for key codes and will give potentially misleading results when assessing their scalability. In this study the authors present a case study of the application of recently developed performance models of the Chimaera benchmarking code written by the United Kingdom Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), with a view to analysing how the code will perform and scale on a medium sized, commodity-based InfiniBand cluster. The models are validated and demonstrate a greater than 90% accuracy for an existing InfiniBand machine; the models are then used as the basis for predicting code performance on a variety of alternative hardware configurations which include changes in the underlying network, the use of faster processors and the use of a higher core density per processor. The results demonstrate the compute-bound nature of Chimaera and its sensitivity to network latency at increased processor counts. By using these insights the authors are able to discuss potential strategies which may be employed during the procurement of future mid-range clusters for wavefront-rich workloads.
Producción y bienestar social en modelos ganaderos Peri-urbanos en comunidades de Texcoco, Estado de México

Periurban livestock has proved to be important since caters to food cities, transform waste from local restaurants and markets, and provide economic, cultural and social incentives that provides well-being to families and the entire community. The objective was established by indicators to social welfare in periurban communities through Categorical Principal Components Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling to understand why farming families continue to survive even though high production costs and pressure for land use and environmental pollution.