Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhanced retinal responses in Huntington's disease patients.

BACKGROUND Huntington's disease (HD) is a fatal progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by chorea, cognitive impairment and psychiatric symptoms. Retinal examination of HD patients as well as in HD animal models have shown evidence of retinal dysfunction. However, a detailed retinal study employing clinically available measurement tools has not been reported to date in HD. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to assess retinal responses measured by electroretinogram (ERG) between HD patients and controls and evaluate any correlation between ERG measurements and stage of disease. METHODS Eighteen patients and 10 controls with inclusion criteria of ages 18-70 years (average age HD subjects: 52.1 yrs and control subjects: 51.9 yrs) were recruited for the study. Subjects with previous history of retinal or ophthalmologic disease were excluded. Retinal function was examined by full-field ERG in both eyes of each subject. Amplitudes and latencies to increasing flash intensities in both light- and dark-adaptation were measured in all subjects. Statistical analyses employed generalized estimating equations, which account for repeated measures per subject. RESULTS We analyzed the b-wave amplitudes of ERG response in all flash intensities and with 30 Hz flicker stimulation. We found statistically significant increased amplitudes in HD patients compared to controls at light-adapted (photopic) 24.2 and 60.9 cd.sec/m2 intensities, dark-adapted (scotopic, red flash) 0.22 cd.sec/m2 intensity, and a trend toward significance at light-adapted 30 Hz flicker. Furthermore, we found a significant increase in light-adapted ERG response from female compared to male HD patients, but no significant difference between gender amongst controls. We also noted a positive association between number of CAG repeats and ERG response at the smallest light adapted intensity (3.1 cd.sec/m2). CONCLUSIONS ERG studies revealed significantly altered retinal responses at multiple flash intensities in subjects with an HD expansion allele compared to controls. Significant differences were observed with either light-adapted tests or the dark-adapted red flash which suggests that the enhanced responses in HD patients is specific to the cone photoreceptor pathway.
A monoclonal antibody detaches embryonic skeletal muscle from extracellular matrices

We have described a monoclonal antibody that rounds and detaches chick skeletal myoblasts and myotubes from extracellular substrata. The antibody also inhibits the attachment of myogenic cells to a gelatin- coated substratum but has no detectable effect on myoblast fusion. The cellular response to antibody treatment varies with differentiation and cell type. Young myoblasts and myotubes are rapidly rounded and detached by the antibody. Older myotubes require longer incubation times or higher antibody titers for rounding and detachment. Chick embryo fibroblasts, cardiac cells, and neurons are not similarly rounded and remain attached. Since the antibody also detaches cells from embryonic muscle tissue explants, the cell-substratum interaction perturbed by the antibody appears relevant to the in vivo interaction of myogenic cells with their extracellular matrices. Binding studies using iodinated antibody revealed 2-4 x 10(5) sites per myoblast with an apparent Kd in the range of 2-5 x 10(-9) molar. Embryo fibroblasts bind antibody as well and display approximately twice the number of binding sites per cell. The fluorescence distribution of antigen on myoblasts and myotubes is somewhat punctate and particularly bright along the edge of the myotube. The distribution on fibroblasts was also punctate and was particularly bright along the cell periphery and portions of stress fibers. For both cell types the binding was distinctly different than that reported for collagen, fibronectin, and other extracellular molecules. The antigen, as isolated by antibody affinity chromatography, inhibits antibody-induced rounding. SDS PAGE reveals two unique polypeptides migrating in the region of approximately 120 and 160 kilodaltons (kd). The most straightforward mechanism for the antibody-induced rounding and detachment is the perturbation of a membrane molecule involved in adhesion. The hypothesized transmembrane link between extracellular macromolecules and the cytoskeleton provides an obvious candidate.
The Multivesicular Body-Localized GTPase ARFA1b/1c Is Important for Callose Deposition and ROR2 Syntaxin-Dependent Preinvasive Basal Defense in Barley[W]

This work identifies a small GTPase required in barley for full penetration resistance against powdery mildew. This GTPase is associated with multivesicular bodies and is important for callose deposition, implying that this cell wall polymer may be transported to the site of attack. Host cell vesicle traffic is essential for the interplay between plants and microbes. ADP-ribosylation factor (ARF) GTPases are required for vesicle budding, and we studied the role of these enzymes to identify important vesicle transport pathways in the plant–powdery mildew interaction. A combination of transient-induced gene silencing and transient expression of inactive forms of ARF GTPases provided evidence that barley (Hordeum vulgare) ARFA1b/1c function is important for preinvasive penetration resistance against powdery mildew, manifested by formation of a cell wall apposition, named a papilla. Mutant studies indicated that the plasma membrane–localized REQUIRED FOR MLO-SPECIFIED RESISTANCE2 (ROR2) syntaxin, also important for penetration resistance, and ARFA1b/1c function in the same vesicle transport pathway. This was substantiated by a requirement of ARFA1b/1c for ROR2 accumulation in the papilla. ARFA1b/1c is localized to multivesicular bodies, providing a functional link between ROR2 and these organelles in penetration resistance. During Blumeria graminis f sp hordei penetration attempts, ARFA1b/1c-positive multivesicular bodies assemble near the penetration site hours prior to the earliest detection of callose in papillae. Moreover, we showed that ARFA1b/1c is required for callose deposition in papillae and that the papilla structure is established independently of ARFA1b/1c. This raises the possibility that callose is loaded into papillae via multivesicular bodies, rather than being synthesized directly into this cell wall apposition.
Laminar: practical fine-grained decentralized information flow control

Decentralized information flow control (DIFC) is a promising model for writing programs with powerful, end-to-end security guarantees. Current DIFC systems that run on commodity hardware can be broadly categorized into two types: language-level and operating system-level DIFC. Language level solutions provide no guarantees against security violations on system resources, like files and sockets. Operating system solutions can mediate accesses to system resources, but are inefficient at monitoring the flow of information through fine-grained program data structures. This paper describes Laminar, the first system to implement decentralized information flow control using a single set of abstractions for OS resources and heap-allocated objects. Programmers express security policies by labeling data with secrecy and integrity labels, and then access the labeled data in lexically scoped security regions. Laminar enforces the security policies specified by the labels at runtime. Laminar is implemented using a modified Java virtual machine and a new Linux security module. This paper shows that security regions ease incremental deployment and limit dynamic security checks, allowing us to retrofit DIFC policies on four application case studies. Replacing the applications' ad-hoc security policies changes less than 10% of the code, and incurs performance overheads from 1% to 56%. Whereas prior DIFC systems only support limited types of multithreaded programs, Laminar supports a more general class of multithreaded DIFC programs that can access heterogeneously labeled data.
Visuospatial executive function in Turner syndrome: functional MRI and neurocognitive findings

Abstract Turner syndrome is a genetic disorder that results from an abnormal or missing X chromosome in females and is typically associated with impairments in visuospatial, but not verbal, information processing. These visuospatial processing impairments may be exacerbated with increased task demands, such as those engaged during working memory (WM). While previous studies have examined spatial WM function in Turner syndrome, none have directly compared the neural correlates of spatial and verbal WM processes across the encoding, maintenance and retrieval phases. We employed both neurocognitive assessments and functional MRI (fMRI) to examine the neural circuitry underlying both verbal and visuospatial WM functions in individuals with Turner syndrome and normal controls. We furthermore examined the vulnerability of task-related fMRI activation to distracters presented during WM maintenance. Fifteen healthy female volunteers and eight individuals with Turner syndrome performed a delayed-response WM task during fMRI scanning. Neurocognitive tests revealed impaired performance across both verbal and spatial domains in Turner syndrome, with greater impairment on tasks with WM demands. Frontoparietal regions in controls showed significantly sustained levels of activation during visuospatial WM. This sustained activation was significantly reduced in the group with Turner syndrome. Domain-specific activation of temporal regions, in contrast, did not differ between the two groups. Sensory distraction during the WM maintenance phase did not differentially alter frontoparietal activation between the two groups. The results reveal impaired frontoparietal circuitry recruitment during visuospatial executive processing in Turner syndrome, suggesting a significant role for the X chromosome in the development of these pathways.
Behaviour Recognition in Smart Homes

Behaviour recognition aims to infer the particular behaviours of the inhabitant in a smart home from a series of sensor readings from around the house. There are many reasons to recognise human behaviours; one being to monitor the elderly or cognitively impaired and detect potentially dangerous behaviours. We view the behaviour recognition problem as the task of mapping the sensory outputs to a sequence of recognised activities. This research focuses on the development of machine learning methods to find an approximation to the mapping between sensor outputs and behaviours. However, learning the mapping raises an important issue, which is that the training data is not necessarily annotated with exemplar behaviours of the inhabitant. This doctoral study takes several steps towards addressing the problem of finding an approximation to this mapping, beginning with separate investigations on current methods proposed in the literature, identifying useful sensory outputs for behaviour recognition, and concluding by proposing two directions: one using supervised learning on annotated sensory stream and one using unsupervised learning on unannotated ones.
Water Availability from Small Dams in Pothwar Plateau of Punjab, Pakistan

To ensure the water availability from small dams in the Pothwar Plateau of Punjab, two dams namely Khasala and Jawa were investigated. Pothwar Plateau has erratic rainfall pattern and depends on rainfall for agriculture production. The construction of small dams in this region provides a lifeline to the farmer’s community. The Government of Punjab has constructed 55 small dams in this region to facilitate the farmers in terms of irrigation services. The selected dams have potential to irrigate the culturable command area but due to poor water managements services and absence of agriculture extension services, farmers produce low agriculture yield and hesitate to cultivate more land. Water availability from these dams is more important than construction of small dams. Some farmers in the study area use dug-wells for irrigation purposes and bear a high cost of production. The several bottlenecks existing in the full utilization of dam’s water are mentioned as: failure of warabandi system, absence of water user associations, broken water channels, blockage of water courses, improper maintenance of water channels and absence of water management services. The Government of Punjab (GOP) and Small Dams Organization (SDO) need more efforts to facilitate the farmers in terms of irrigation services and effective water management practices are desirable to enhance the agriculture production in the Pothwar region.
A Hybridization of Immune Algorithm with Particle Swarm Optimization for Neuro-Fuzzy Classifiers

In order to enhance the immune algorithm (IA) performance and find the optimal solution when dealing with difficult problems, we propose an efficient immune-based particle swarm optimization (IPSO) for neuro-fuzzy classifiers to solve the skin color detection problem. The proposed IPSO combines the immune algorithm (IA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to perform parameter learning. The IA uses the clonal selection principle, such that antibodies between others of high similar degree are affected, and these antibodies, after the process, will have higher quality, accelerating the search and increasing the global search capacity. The PSO algorithm has proved to be very effective for solving global optimization. It is not only a recently invented high-performance optimizer that is easy to understand and implement, but it also requires little computational bookkeeping and generally only a few lines of code. Hence, we employed the advantages of PSO to improve the mutation mechanism of the immune algorithm. Simulations have shown the performance and applicability of the proposed method.
Transfer matrix method for interface optical-phonon modes in multiple-interface heterostructure systems

Interactions of carriers with interface optical phonons dominate over other carrier–phonon scatterings in narrow quantum-well structures. Herein, a transfer matrix method is used to establish a formalism for determining the dispersion relations, electrostatic potentials, and Frohlich interaction Hamiltonians of the interface optical phonons for multiple-interface heterostructure systems within the framework of the macroscopic dielectric continuum model. This method facilitates systematic calculations for complex structures where the conventional method is very difficult to implement. Several specific cases are treated to illustrate the advantages of the general formalism.
Domestic original sin in emerging market economies

This paper explains why domestic debt composition in some emerging economies is risky. To this end, it carries out a systematic analysis of the determinants of the socalled domestic original sin, which refers to the inability of emerging economies to borrow domestically in local currency, at long maturities and fixed interest rates. The paper builds on a large dataset compiled by the authors from national sources. It finds that domestic original sin is particularly severe when inflation is lofty, the debt service-to-GDP ratio high, the slope of the yield curve inverted and the investor base narrow. JEL Classification: F34; F41; G15
Place-dependent People Tracking Place-dependent People Tracking

People detection and tracking are important in many situations where robots and humans work and live together. But unlike targets in traditional tracking problems, people typically move and act under the constraints of their environment. The probabilities and frequencies for when people appear, disappear, walk or stand are not uniform but vary over space making human behavior strongly place-dependent. In this paper we present a model that encodes spatial priors on human behavior and show how the model can be incorporated into a people-tracking system. We learn a non-homogeneous spatial Poisson process that improves data association in a multi-hypothesis target tracker through more informed probability distributions over hypotheses. We further present a place-dependent motion model whose predictions follow the spaceusage patterns that people take and which are described by the learned spatial Poisson process. Large-scale experiments in different indoor and outdoor environments using laser range data, demonstrate how both extensions lead to more accurate tracking behavior in terms of data-association errors and number of track losses. The extended tracker is also slightly more efficient than the baseline approach. The system runs in real-time on a typical desktop computer.
Land Capability Classification using Geographical InformationSystem in Guang Watershed, Highlands of Ethiopia

The main objective of this study was to spatially classify lands of Shinfa watershed in Ethiopia based on their capability for sustainable agricultural use by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) criteria. Land use and land cover was determined from LANDSAT satellite image accessed in 2014 by applying the supervised classification method in ENVI 5.0 software. Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data of 30 m resolution was used to derive slope. “Spatial Analyst Tool Extract by Mask” in GIS environment was used to obtain soil depth and soil texture map of the watershed from Amhara regional digital soil map. Intersect overlay analysis method was applied to obtain the spatial and attribute information of all the input parameters using Geographical Information System (GIS) 10.1 software. The study demonstrates that GIS software provides advantage to analyze multi-layer of data spatially and classify land based on its capability. The study revealed that 1,540 ha (61.6%), 442.25 ha (17.69%) and 518 ha (20.52%) of the watershed was categorized in the range of land classes I to IV, V to VII and VIII, respectively. It was observed that present land use was not as per the capability of the land.
From "Dango" to "Japanese Cakes": Query Reformulation Models and Patterns

Understanding query reformulation patterns is a key step towards next generation web search engines: it can help improving users' web-search experience by predicting their intent, and thus helping them to locate information more effectively. As a step in this direction, we build an accurate model for classifying user query reformulations into broad classes (generalization, specialization, error correction or parallel move), achieving 92\% accuracy. We apply the model to automatically label two large query logs, creating annotated query-flow graphs. We study the resulting reformulation patterns, finding results consistent with previous studies done on smaller manually annotated datasets, and discovering new interesting patterns, including connections between reformulation types and topical categories. Finally, applying our findings to a third query log that is publicly available for research purposes, we demonstrate that our reformulation classifier leads to improved recommendations in a query recommendation system.
Growth of bacteria in 3-d colonies

The dynamics of growth of bacterial populations has been extensively studied for planktonic cells in well-agitated liquid culture, in which all cells have equal access to nutrients. In the real world, bacteria are more likely to live in physically structured habitats as colonies, within which individual cells vary in their access to nutrients. The dynamics of bacterial growth in such conditions is poorly understood, and, unlike that for liquid culture, there is not a standard broadly used mathematical model for bacterial populations growing in colonies in three dimensions (3-d). By extending the classic Monod model of resource-limited population growth to allow for spatial heterogeneity in the bacterial access to nutrients, we develop a 3-d model of colonies, in which bacteria consume diffusing nutrients in their vicinity. By following the changes in density of E. coli in liquid and embedded in glucose-limited soft agar, we evaluate the fit of this model to experimental data. The model accounts for the experimentally observed presence of a sub-exponential, diffusion-limited growth regime in colonies, which is absent in liquid cultures. The model predicts and our experiments confirm that, as a consequence of inter-colony competition for the diffusing nutrients and of cell death, there is a non-monotonic relationship between total number of colonies within the habitat and the total number of individual cells in all of these colonies. This combined theoretical-experimental study reveals that, within 3-d colonies, E. coli cells are loosely packed, and colonies produce about 2.5 times as many cells as the liquid culture from the same amount of nutrients. We verify that this is because cells in liquid culture are larger than in colonies. Our model provides a baseline description of bacterial growth in 3-d, deviations from which can be used to identify phenotypic heterogeneities and inter-cellular interactions that further contribute to the structure of bacterial communities.
MERIT-Infonomics Research Memorandum series Financial Systems, Innovation and Economic Performance

There is growing evidence of international divergence in the performance of new industries. While the United States is at the forefront of the recent revolution in information technologies, European economists and policy makers are concerned that Europe is falling behind with negative implications for long-term economic performance. This paper investigates the role of financial systems as a crucial determinant of apparent differences in national abilities to promote innovative activities in specific sectors. Firstly, a short overview of the relevant finance and innovation literature is provided, and a synthetic view of the finance-innovation link is sketched. It is argued that national financial systems have an impact on the structure of growth through their differing abilities to promote innovation in sector-specific technology regimes. Secondly, I apply a simple econometric model to a data set consisting of 17 OECD countries and 20 manufacturing industries to identify empirical patterns. The evidence suggests that sectors characterized by high technological opportunity and a focus on product innovation perform relatively better in financial systems with large stock markets, competitive banking sectors and good accounting standards. In contrast, the performance of sectors geared towards innovation in processes benefits from a more bank-oriented financial system and concentrated ownership structures. Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a Marie Curie fellowship of the European Commission Programme Improving Human Research Potential and the Socio-economic Knowledge Base under contract No HPMF-CT-2000-00687. I would like to thank Ute Pieper, Keith Smith, and participants at MERIT and UNU/INTECH seminars for comments and discussion. Special thanks to Anthony Arundel for providing the PACE data set. Thorsten H. Block MERIT, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands, Email: t.block@merit.unimaas. nl