Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increased Susceptibility to Isoproterenol-Induced Cardiac Hypertrophy and Impaired Weight Gain in Mice Lacking the Histidine-Rich Calcium-Binding Protein

ABSTRACT The sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) plays a critical role in excitation-contraction coupling by regulating the cytoplasmic calcium concentration of striated muscle. The histidine-rich calcium-binding protein (HRCBP) is expressed in the junctional SR, the site of calcium release from the SR. HRCBP is expressed exclusively in muscle tissues and binds calcium with low affinity and high capacity. In addition, HRCBP interacts with triadin, a protein associated with the ryanodine receptor and thought to be involved in calcium release. Its calcium binding properties, localization to the SR, and interaction with triadin suggest that HRCBP is involved in calcium handling by the SR. To determine the function of HRCBP in vivo, we inactivated HRC, the gene encoding HRCBP, in mice. HRC knockout mice exhibited impaired weight gain beginning at 11 months of age, which was marked by reduced skeletal muscle and fat mass, and triadin protein expression was upregulated in the heart of HRC knockout mice. In addition, HRC null mice displayed a significantly exaggerated response to the induction of cardiac hypertrophy by isoproterenol compared to their wild-type littermates. The exaggerated response of HRC knockout mice to the induction of cardiac hypertrophy is consistent with a regulatory role for HRCBP in calcium handling in vivo and suggests that mutations in HRC, in combination with other genetic or environmental factors, might contribute to pathological hypertrophy and heart failure.
Spatial patterns of PhDs’ internal migration in France, 1970-2000

This paper provides empirical insights about interregional flows of PhDs in France over the period 1970-2000. We enhance the existing studies by focusing on the patterns and determinants of internal migration, thanks to management of a rich database. First, we highlight the relatively low mobility of PhDs: less than 36% of them supervise their first PhD in a different region than the one in which they defended their own. Focusing on the structural determinants of these interregional flows, we have then tested a gravity model that demonstrates the significant impact of the scientific size of regions and spatial proximity on the PhDs’ mobility.JEL Codes: J61, O390, I23
Inter-DSL coordination support by combining megamodeling and model weaving

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) advocates the use of models at every step of the software development process. Within this context, a team of engineers collectively and collaboratively contribute to a large set of interrelated models. Even if the main focus can be on a single model (e.g. a class diagram model), related elements in other models (e.g. a requirement model) often have to be considered and/or accessed. Moreover, all the involved models do not necessarily conform to the same metamodel and thus may have been built using different independent Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). Such a situation has already been frequently observed in many large-scale industrial deployments of MDE. Manually coordinating all the involved models, i.e. being able to both manage and use the links existing between them, can become a cumbersome and difficult task. As a proposal to solve this inter-DSL coordination issue, we introduce in this paper a generic and extensible inter-model traceability and navigation environment based on the complementary use of megamodeling and model weaving. We illustrate our solution with a concrete working example.
Expansive growth of two glioblastoma stem-like cell lines is mediated by bFGF and not by EGF

Abstract Background. Patient-derived glioblastoma (GBM) stem-like cells (GSCs) represent a valuable model for basic and therapeutic research. GSCs are usually propagated in serum-free Neural Basal medium supplemented with bFGF and EGF. Yet, the exact influence of these growth factors on GSCs is still unclear. Recently it was suggested that GBM stemlike cells with amplified EGFR should be cultured in stem cell medium without EGF, as the presence of EGF induced rapid loss of EGFR amplification. However, patient biopsies are usually taken into culture before their genomic profiles are defined. Thus, an important question remains whether GBM cells without EGFR amplification also can be cultured in stem cell medium without EGF. Meterials and methods. To address this question, we used two heterogeneous glioblastoma GSC lines (NCH421k and NCH644) that lack EGFR amplification. Results. Although both cell lines showed very low EGFR expression under standard growth conditions, bFGF stimulation induced higher expression of EGFR in NCH644. In both cell lines, expression of the stem cell markers nestin and CD133 was higher upon stimulation with bFGF compared to EGF. Importantly, bFGF stimulated the growth of both cell lines, whereas EGF had no effect. We verified that the growth stimulation by bFGF was either mediated by proliferation (NCH421k) or resistance to apoptosis (NCH644). Conclusions. We demonstrate that GSC cultures without EGFR amplification can be maintained and expanded with bFGF, while the addition of EGF has no significant effect and therefore can be omitted.
On-road obstacle detection system for driver assistance

Obstacle detection is an active research area in the field of image processing. On road obstacle detection is an important problem in the area of intelligent transportation systems, driver assistance systems and automated guided vehicles. The proposed algorithm detects all obstacles on road using a single onboard camera which is mounted on a travelled vehicle in real-time for driver assistance. When the obstacle found in front of travelled vehicle using morphological filtering then the driver assistance system gives warning to the driver for avoiding collision. Experimental results are given for real time on road obstacle detection.
Abstracting application-level web security

Application-level web security refers to vulnerabilities inherent in the code of a web-application itself (irrespective of the technologies in which it is implemented or the security of the web-server/back-end database on which it is built). In the last few months application-level vulnerabilities have been exploited with serious consequences: hackers have tricked e-commerce sites into shipping goods for no charge, user-names and passwords have been harvested and condential information (such as addresses and credit-card numbers) has been leaked.In this paper we investigate new tools and techniques which address the problem of application-level web security. We (i) describe a scalable structuring mechanism facilitating the abstraction of security policies from large web-applications developed in heterogenous multi-platform environments; (ii) present a tool which assists programmers develop secure applications which are resilient to a wide range of common attacks; and (iii) report results and experience arising from our implementation of these techniques.
The influence of early feeding practices on healthy diet variety score among pre-school children in four European birth cohorts

Abstract Objective The present study examined whether maternal diet and early infant feeding experiences relating to being breast-fed and complementary feeding influence the range of healthy foods consumed in later childhood. Design Data from four European birth cohorts were studied. Healthy Plate Variety Score (HPVS) was calculated using FFQ. HPVS assesses the variety of healthy foods consumed within and across the five main food groups. The weighted numbers of servings consumed of each food group were summed; the maximum score was 5. Associations between infant feeding experiences, maternal diet and the HPVS were tested using generalized linear models and adjusted for appropriate confounders. Setting The British Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), the French Etude des Déterminants pre et postnatals de la santé et du développement de L’Enfant study (EDEN), the Portuguese Generation XXI Birth Cohort and the Greek EuroPrevall cohort. Subjects Pre-school children and their mothers. Results The mean HPVS for each of the cohorts ranged from 2·3 to 3·8, indicating that the majority of children were not eating a full variety of healthy foods. Never being breast-fed or being breast-fed for a short duration was associated with lower HPVS at 2, 3 and 4 years of age in all cohorts. There was no consistent association between the timing of complementary feeding and HPVS. Mother’s HPVS was strongly positively associated with child’s HPVS but did not greatly attenuate the relationship with breast-feeding duration. Conclusions Results suggest that being breast-fed for a short duration is associated with pre-school children eating a lower variety of healthy foods.
Dopamine D1 and D2 Agonist Effects on Prepulse Inhibition and Locomotion: Comparison of Sprague-Dawley Rats to Swiss-Webster, 129X1/SvJ, C57BL/6J, and DBA/2J Mice

D2 receptors have been studied in relation to therapeutic uses of dopaminergic drugs, and psychomotor stimulant effects [as manifested by decreased prepulse inhibition (PPI) of startle and increased locomotor activity] are hallmark behavioral effects of D2 agonists in rats. Genetic studies with mutant mice might be useful in this line of investigation; however, recent studies suggest that mice differ from rats with respect to D2 agonist effects. Accordingly, we studied a wide range of doses of the D2-like agonist quinelorane (0.0032–5.6 mg/kg) and the D1-like agonist R-6-Br-APB [R(+)-6-bromo-7,8-dihydroxy-3-allyl-1-phenyl-2,3,4,5-tetrahydro-1H-3-benzazepine hydrobromide] (0.032–5.6 mg/kg) in outbred Sprague-Dawley rats, outbred Swiss-Webster mice, and inbred 129X1/SvJ, C57BL/6J, and DBA/2J mice. Whereas the D2 agonist dose-dependently decreased PPI and increased locomotion in rats, neither of these effects was observed in outbred or inbred mice. In contrast, the D1 agonist reduced PPI and increased locomotion in Sprague-Dawley rats and in Swiss-Webster, 129X1/SvJ, and C57BL/6J mice. Neither agonist decreased PPI in DBA/2J mice, although PPI was increased in this strain by a D2 antagonist. Pretreatment with either the D2 antagonist eticlopride (1 mg/kg) or the D1 antagonist SCH39166 [(-)-trans-6,7,7a,8,9,13b-hexahydro-3-chloro-2-hydroxy-N-methyl-5H-benzo[d]naptho-(2,1-b)azepine] (1 mg/kg) prevented the PPI-disruptive effects of quinelorane in rats and R-6-Br-APB in mice, suggesting receptor interactions in both species. In summary, psychomotor stimulant effects of a D2 agonist that were robustly observed in outbred rats were absent in several outbred and inbred strains of mice. These results may have implications for the study of mutant mice to investigate genes involved in psychomotor function in humans.
Extractive summarisation via sentence removal: condensing relevant sentences into a short summary

Many on-line services allow users to describe their opinions about a product or a service through a review. In order to help other users to find out the major opinion about a given topic, without the effort to read several reviews, multi-document summarisation is required. This research proposes an approach for extractive summarisation, supporting different scoring techniques, such as cosine similarity or divergence, as a method for finding representative sentences. The main contribution of this paper is the definition of an algorithm for sentence removal, developed to maximise the score between the summary and the original document. Instead of ranking the sentences and selecting the most important ones, the algorithm iteratively removes unimportant sentences until a desired compression rate is reached. Experimental results show that variations of the sentence removal algorithm provide good performance.
Generalized Perspective Projection

Perspective projection is a well-understood aspect of 3D graphics. It is not something that 3D programmers spend much time thinking about. Most OpenGL applications simply select a field of view, specify near and far clipping plane distances, and call gluPerspective or glFrustum. These functions suffice in the vast majority of cases. But there are a few assumptions implicit in these. gluPerspective assumes that the user is positioned directly in front of the screen, facing perpendicular to it, and looking at the center of it. glFrustum generalizes the position of the view point, but still assumes a perspective rooted at the origin and a screen lying in the XY plane. The configuration of the user and his screen seldom satisfy these criteria, but perspective projection remains believable in spite of this. Leonardo’s The Last Supper uses perspective, but still appears to be a painting of a room full of people regardless of the position from which you view it. Likewise, one can still enjoy a movie even when sitting off to the side of the theater.
Efficient sampling-based bottleneck pathfinding over cost maps

We introduce a simple yet effective sampling-based planner that is tailored for bottleneck pathfinding: Given an implicitly-defined cost map M : Rd Å R, which assigns to every point in space a real value, we wish to find a path connecting two given points, which minimizes the maximal value with respect to M. We demonstrate the capabilities of our algorithm, which we call bottleneck tree (BTT), on several challenging instances of the problem involving multiple agents, where it outperforms the state-of-the-art cost-map planning technique T-RRT∗. In addition to its efficiency, BTT requires the tuning of only a single parameter: the number of samples. On the theoretical side, we study the asymptotic properties of our method and consider the special setting where the computed trajectories must be monotone in all coordinates. This constraint arises in cases where the problem involves the coordination of multiple agents that are restricted to forward motions along predefined paths.
MINIMUM NUMBER OF ISLETS REQUIRED TO MAINTAIN EUGLYCEMIA AND THEIR REDUCED IMMUNOGENICITY AFTER TRANSPLANTATION INTO DIABETIC MICE

In streptozocin (SZ)-induced diabetic mice, 200 islets, but not 50 islets, consistently restore euglycemia within 1 week of transplantation. To determine the minimum number of islets sufficient to maintain euglycemia in a diabetic mouse, we first transplanted 50 and 150 syngeneic islets simultaneously into the right (RK) and left kidney (LK), respectively, and then removed the LK 1 week post-transplantation. The remaining 50 islets maintained euglycemia in 8 of 11 mice with normal intravenous glucose tolerance tests (IVGTT). Protection of 50 islets for at least 7 days was necessary because removal of the 150 islets at 5 or 3 days resulted in a much lower incidence of persistent euglycemia. Similarly, 25 islets were capable of maintaining euglycemia in 2 of 9 mice once hyperglycemia was reversed by split-transplantation of 25 (RK) and 175 (LK) islets. To examine if 50-islet allografts survive longer than 200-islet allografts, we split-transplanted 50 DBA/2 islets in the RK and 150 islets of either B6 (syngeneic), DBA/2 (allogeneic), or C3H/He (third party allogeneic) mouse origin in the LK in 3 groups of diabetic C57BL/6 (B6) mice. The survival of 50 DBA/2 islets in each group after removal of the LK on day 7 was compared to that of 200 DBA/2 islets in control B6 mice. Maximum prolongation of allograft survival was obtained with 50 DBA/2 islets that were split-transplanted with syngeneic B6 islets. These results clearly demonstrate that 50 islets are sufficient to maintain normal glucose tolerance once euglycemia is induced by transplantation of a larger number (i.e., 200) of islets and that 50 islet allografts are much less immunogenic than 200-islet allografts.
Towards Efficient and Truthful Market Mechanisms for Double-Sided Cloud Markets

The increasingly growing supply and demand for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) makes cloud trading possible in an open exchange (OCX) marketplace. The mechanisms based on economic principles show promise in addressing the problem of efficient cloud resource provisioning in such a marketplace, including resources allocation and pricing. Therefore, this article proposes effective and efficient economics-inspired double-sided mechanisms, focussing on attaining the allocative efficiency and truthfulness. Given non-deterministic polynomial time (NP) complexity of the considered problem and the computational tractability requirement for the practical solutions, we design and evaluate the approximation mechanisms for such markets. We propose a combinatorial greedy allocation mechanism to determine the distribution of cloud resources based on the sorted order of allocation candidates. We design the pricing mechanisms that derive the buyer prices based on critical-value, and the seller payments are determined via a mixed surplus-distribution rule that relies on direct and proportional-value payment. The theoretical analysis of the economic properties proves that the proposed mechanisms maintain Budget-Balance (BB), Individual Rationality (IR), Computational Tractability (CT), and achieve Truthfulness (T) for single-minded buyers. The experimental investigation of the approximation quality and the seller strategic manipulation reveal near-optimal allocation performance and near-truthful strategic incentive in our pricing mechanisms.
The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort: A Progress Report

Building knowledge-based systems today usually entails constructing a new knowledge base from scratch. Even if several groups of researchers are working in the same general area, such as medicine or electronic diagnosis, each team must develop its own knowledge base from scratch. The cost of this duplication of effort has been high and will become prohibitive as we build larger and larger systems. Furthermore, lack of methodology for sharing and communicating knowledge poses a signicant road-block in developing large multi-center research projects such as DARPA/Rome Laboratory Planning and Scheduling Initative. To overcome these barrier and advance the state of the art, we must finnd ways of preserving existing knowledge bases, and sharing, reusing, and building on them.
A Dataset for Pull Request Research

Pull requests form a new method for collaborating in distributed software development. To study the pull request distributed development model, we constructed a dataset of almost 900 projects and 350,000 pull requests, including some of the largest users of pull requests on Github. In this paper, we describe how the project selection was done, we analyze the selected features and present a machine learning tool set for the R statistics environment.
Modelling, Simulation and Estimation of Situation Histories

– Air situation histories are represented by sequence set trees . These structures provide the representational power to model a rich variety of situations with only a small number of rules. The model’s generative power makes it a candidate for use in Monte-Carlo testing of planning and surveillance regimes in the air defence domain. Sequence sets are sets of sequences that can be constructed recursively into trees. Sequences are represented by sequence grammar trees and the sequences are themselves associated by set grammar trees. These structures are able to provide a detailed hierarchial model of the temporal evolution of systems of targets, their force structure and intent. Red and blue force components and their interactions are represented. Bayesian probabilities can be associated with the sequence set trees and their component sequence sets, and this facilitates robust algorithms for simulating situations and inferring them from data. A sequence set parser, based on the pivot table method, is presented.
TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY OF SOYBEAN FARMERS IN THE NORTHERN REGION OF GHANA.

This paper assesses the technical efficiency of soybean farmers in the Northern Region of Ghana. The maximum likelihood estimation technique was used for the estimations in a one-step approach through the translog production function. A sample size of 168 soybean farmers was used for the study. Farmers were selected by using systematic random sampling procedure and interviewed with questionnaires. The overall return to scale in production in the region was found to be 0.79. This is a decreasing returns to ADRRI JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SCIENCES ISSN: 2026-5204 ISSN-L: 2026-5204 VOL. 2, No. 11 (2), August, 2016 PUBLISHED BY AFRICA DEVELOPMENT AND RESOURCES RESEARCH INSTITUTE 21 scale and means that a percentage increase in variable inputs leads to a less than percentage (proportionate) increase in the overall output of soybean. The mean technical efficiency in soybean production was 0.61. This implies that an average soybean farmer is able to obtain 61% of the frontier output given the input used under existing technology. Farmer groups and farm size are the significant determinants of inefficiency in the area. Finally, inadequate farm credit, inadequate rainfall and lack of improved planting materials are the most serious constraints hindering soybean production. The paper recommends among others that soybean farmers should be given more technical training on best agronomic practices. Policies geared towards encouraging farmers to apply more fertilizer and other chemicals (herbicide and pesticide) should be formulated and enforced by the government and other actors in agricultural development.
PetroVis & FractVis: Interactive Visual Exploration of High-dimensional Oil and Gas Data

Many processes within the oil and gas domain deal with ‘big data’–large sets of multidimensional data. Effectively analyzing these data sets is crucial to understanding the structure and the be­ haviour of oil and gas fields, and to the optimization of hydrocarbons production. However, experts face many challenges while attempting to analyze these data sets due to their high dimensionality, the inherent uncertainty of the data, and the lack of effective visual analytic interactive tools. In this thesis, we attempt to look for new ways to support domain experts in interpreting high dimensional oil and gas data. For the exploration we designed, implemented and evaluated two new interactive visualization tools: FractVis and PetroVis. Our design efforts involved character­ ization of two oil and gas domain case studies, namely: microseismic monitoring (in the design of FractVis) and petrographic analysis (in the design of PetroVis). For each of the case studies, we outline the necessary tasks, needs, and the challenges faced by the domain experts. By closely collaborating with domain experts we iteratively designed, implemented, and evaluated the two interactive novel visualization systems to simplify the exploration of high dimensional domain data. FractVis is a visualization tool aimed at supporting the visual analysis and exploration of the microseismic monitoring data. It combines, extends, and synchronizes parallel coordinates repre­ sentation with other visualizations and interactions in order to facilitate the visual correlation of the data attributes. FractVis was further expanded by integrating new proxemic interaction and an interactive painting metaphor to simplify navigation and manipulation of the 3D microseismic data. The findings of our preliminary evaluation of FractVis suggest that the tool can provide in­ sight regarding the simplification of the correlation of the microseismic data attributes, as detailed in the thesis. PetroVis is a novel interactive visualization system developed for exploring petrographic data. PetroVis integrates interactive visualization elements with domain-specific statistical features, to