Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Myosin IIA-related Actomyosin Contractility Mediates Oxidative Stress-induced Neuronal Apoptosis

Oxidative stress-induced neuronal apoptosis plays an important role in the progression of central nervous system (CNS) diseases. In our study, when neuronal cells were exposed to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), an exogenous oxidant, cell apoptosis was observed with typical morphological changes including membrane blebbing, neurite retraction and cell contraction. The actomyosin system is considered to be responsible for the morphological changes, but how exactly it regulates oxidative stress-induced neuronal apoptosis and the distinctive functions of different myosin II isoforms remain unclear. We demonstrate that myosin IIA was required for neuronal contraction, while myosin IIB was required for neuronal outgrowth in normal conditions. During H2O2-induced neuronal apoptosis, myosin IIA, rather than IIB, interacted with actin filaments to generate contractile forces that lead to morphological changes. Moreover, myosin IIA knockout using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated protein-9 nuclease (CRISPR/Cas9) reduced H2O2-induced neuronal apoptosis and the associated morphological changes. We further demonstrate that caspase-3/Rho-associated kinase 1 (ROCK1) dependent phosphorylation of myosin light chain (MLC) was required for the formation of the myosin IIA-actin complex. Meanwhile, either inhibition of myosin II ATPase with blebbistatin or knockdown of myosin IIA with siRNA reversely attenuated caspase-3 activation, suggesting a positive feedback loop during oxidative stress-induced apoptosis. Based on our observation, myosin IIA-actin complex contributes to actomyosin contractility and is associated with the positive feedback loop of caspase-3/ROCK1/MLC pathway. This study unravels the biochemical and mechanistic mechanisms during oxidative stress-induced neuronal apoptosis and may be applicable for the development of therapies for CNS diseases.
Acute Stabilization and Three-Month Follow-Up in a Trauma Program

ABSTRACT Forty-six psychiatric patients in a hospital-based Trauma Program were given a set of self-report measures at admission, at discharge, and at three-month follow-up. Average length of stay in the Program was 18.2 days. During treatment in the Trauma Program, there were significant reductions in scores on the Beck Depression Inventory, the Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, the Dissociative Experiences Scale and the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R). These symptom reductions were sustained at three-month follow-up. More rigorous studies with randomization of subjects and a comparison group should be undertaken in the future. The presently available, replicated, but uncontrolled evidence indicates that the Trauma Program is effective in meeting its goals.
Close-up Sophiatown: Transnational Perspectives on Past, Present and Future of an Iconic Suburb

In this article I suggest a different view on Sophiatown's existence, both in terms of it standing as mythical icon and as a suburb. Instead of continuing the look ‘from afar’ (Hannerz 1994), which positions Sophiatown within the category of desirable ‘global icons’, I turn my gaze deeper into Sophiatown, both as a suburb and an icon. I use the lens of transnationalism to zoom into three scenes in Sophiatown in order to examine what has been ignored and overlooked in previous narratives. Where the global icon stays and focuses on the surface, the transnational perspective focuses on the everyday lives within the icon. Through a series of vignettes, looking at women in Sophiatown's history, at coffee making with a Greek immigrant, and tales of home with Senegalese businessmen, through a consideration of Bloke Modisane's post-Sophiatown career, I examine how the time established by focusing on these transnational lives is a time of presence which spans multiple locations. I conclude the article with a final point about the ‘unrepresentability’ of a diverse history in the current ways of narrating history in Sophiatown; and the necessity of extending spaces of representation for other, alternative perspectives.
Speaker change detection and speaker clustering using VQ distortion for broadcast news speech recognition

Addresses the problem of the detection of speaker changes and clustering speakers when no information is available regarding speaker classes or even the total number of classes. We assume that no previous information on speakers is available (no speaker model, no training phase) and that people do not speak simultaneously. The aim is to apply speaker grouping information to speaker adaptation for speech recognition. We use vector quantization (VQ) distortion as the criterion. A speaker model is created from successive utterances as a codebook by a VQ algorithm, and the VQ distortion is calculated between the model and an utterance. A result was obtained by the experiment on speaker detection and speaker clustering. The speaker change detection experiment was compared with results by generalized likelihood ratio and Bayesian information criterion. We show the superiority of our proposed method.
Dual‐mode reflectance and fluorescence near‐video‐rate confocal microscope for architectural, morphological and molecular imaging of tissue

We have developed a near‐video‐rate dual‐mode reflectance and fluorescence confocal microscope for the purpose of imaging ex vivo human specimens and in vivo animal models. The dual‐mode confocal microscope (DCM) has light sources at 488, 664 and 784 nm, a frame rate of 15 frames per second, a maximum field of view of 300 × 250 μm and a resolution limit of 0.31 μm laterally and 1.37 μm axially. The DCM can image tissue architecture and cellular morphology, as well as molecular properties of tissue, using reflective and fluorescent molecular‐specific optical contrast agents.
Fred or farīd, bacon or bayḍun (‘egg’)? Proper Names and Cultural-specific Items in the Arabic Translation of Harry Potter

This paper investigates the transfer of proper names and references to food in the Arabic translation of the first three Harry Potter volumes. The focus of the study is twofold: (1) What is the relation between the different transfer procedures employed in the translation process and the formal, semantic and cultural properties of the source text material? And (2) what is the effect of the applied procedures on the textual and stylistic features of the target text? The major finding that emerges from the investigation is that the main translation strategy is that of simplification. Occasionally, foreignisation is involved as well, but domestication is virtually absent. The findings broadly concur with converging evidence from the translation of other cultural-specific items in the corpus such as references to school and education, kinship and family ties, and the use of dialect and slang, which additionally demonstrate the role of attenuation and normalisation.
Costs of occupational injuries to teenagers, United States

Objectives—This paper estimates the incidence and costs of teenage occupational injuries by severity in the United States. Methods—Existing estimates of occupational injury costs are adapted for the teenage population. Incidence estimates are constructed using data from the US 1993 Annual Survey of Occupational Injury and Illness and the 1993 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries combined with incidence data from the National Health Interview Survey. Results—In 1993, an estimated 371 000 teenagers were injured in the workplace, accounting for 4.2% of all occupational injuries. These injuries cost $5 billion, approximately 3% of the total of injury costs involving teenagers. Conclusions—Teenagers appear to account for a larger share of the total number of occupational injuries relative to their presence in the employed workforce, but a lower share of the costs of such injuries.
Re-evaluating the efficacy of beta-adrenergic agonists and antagonists in long QT-3 syndrome through computational modelling.

AIMS Long QT syndrome (LQTS) is a heterogeneous collection of inherited cardiac ion channelopathies characterized by a prolonged electrocardiogram QT interval and increased risk of sudden cardiac death. Beta-adrenergic blockers are the mainstay of treatment for LQTS. While their efficacy has been demonstrated in LQTS patients harbouring potassium channel mutations, studies of beta-blockers in subtype 3 (LQT3), which is caused by sodium channel mutations, have produced ambiguous results. In this modelling study, we explore the effects of beta-adrenergic drugs on the LQT3 phenotype. METHODS AND RESULTS In order to investigate the effects of beta-adrenergic activity and to identify sources of ambiguity in earlier studies, we developed a computational model incorporating the effects of beta-agonists and beta-blockers into an LQT3 mutant guinea pig ventricular myocyte model. Beta-activation suppressed two arrhythmogenic phenomena, transmural dispersion of repolarization and early after depolarizations, in a dose-dependent manner. However, the ability of beta-activation to prevent cardiac conduction block was pacing-rate-dependent. Low-dose beta-blockade by propranolol reversed the beneficial effects of beta-activation, while high dose (which has off-target sodium channel effects) decreased arrhythmia susceptibility. CONCLUSION These results demonstrate that beta-activation may be protective in LQT3 and help to reconcile seemingly conflicting results from different experimental models. They also highlight the need for well-controlled clinical investigations re-evaluating the use of beta-blockers in LQT3 patients.
A mid-level representation framework for semantic sports video analysis

Sports video has been widely studied due to its tremendous commercial potentials. Despite encouraging results from various specific sports games, it is almost impossible to extend a system for a new sports game because they usually employ different sets of low-level features appropriate for the specific games and closely coupled with the use of game specific rules to detect events or highlights. There is a lack of internal representation and structure to be generic and applicable for many different sports. In this paper, we present a generic mid-level representation framework for semantic sports video analysis. The mid-level representation layer is introduced between the low-level audio-visual processing and high-level semantic analysis. It allows us to separate sports specific knowledge and rules from the low-level and mid-level feature extraction. This makes sports video analysis more efficient, effective, and less ad-hoc for various types of sports. To achieve robustness of the low-level feature analysis, a non-parametric clustering, mean shift procedure, has been successfully applied to both color and motion analysis. The proposed framework has been tested for five field-ball type sports covering duration of about 8 hours. Experiments have shown its robust performance in semantic analysis and event detection. We believe that the proposed mid-level representation framework can be used for event detection, highlight extraction, summarization and personalization of many types of sports video.
Old and New Media: Competition and Political Space

Classically, election analysis, especially studies on voter choice, is focused on demographics and polling. Attention is also paid to news and media exposure – whether candidate coverage, commercials, talk radio and the like may be significant factors behind gaining an image of the candidate, understanding the substance of the campaign, and swaying the voter. Candidate communication strategies and media bias of one form or another remain the object of critical study of ‘media effects. ’ Referenced in such popular books as The Tipping Point, the studies on the changing facial expressions of TV news anchormen as they speak of the candidates are one case in point. These are among the various efforts ultimately to account for fact and knowledge gaps between voter ideas about candidates’ positions and the actual stands.
Asymptotically efficient quantizing

It is shown, under weak assumptions on the density function of a random variable and under weak assumptions on the error criterion, that uniform quantizing yields an output entropy which asymptotically is smaller than that for any other quantizer, independent of the density function or the error criterion. The asymptotic behavior of the rate distortion function is determined for the class of \nu th law loss functions, and the entropy of the uniform quantizer is compared with the rate distortion function for this class of loss functions. The extension of these results to the quantizing of sequences is also given. It is shown that the discrepancy between the entropy of the uniform quantizer and the rate distortion function apparently lies with the inability of the optimal quantizing shapes to cover large dimensional spaces without overlap. A comparison of the entropies of the uniform quantizer and of the minimum-alphabet quantizer is also given.
The LMO2 T-Cell Oncogene Is Activated via Chromosomal Translocations or Retroviral Insertion during Gene Therapy but Has No Mandatory Role in Normal T-Cell Development

ABSTRACT The LMO2 gene encodes a LIM-only protein and is a target of chromosomal translocations in human T-cell leukemia. Recently, two X-SCID patients treated by gene therapy to rescue T-cell lymphopoiesis developed T-cell leukemias with retroviral insertion into the LMO2 gene causing clonal T-cell proliferation. In view of the specificity of LMO2 in T-cell tumorigenesis, we investigated a possible role for Lmo2 in T-lymphopoiesis, using conditional knockout of mouse Lmo2 with loxP-flanked Lmo2 and Cre recombinase alleles driven by the promoters of the lymphoid-specific genes Rag1, CD19, and Lck. While efficient deletion of Lmo2 was observed, even in the earliest detectable lymphoid cell progenitors of the bone marrow, there was no disturbance of lymphopoiesis in either T- or B-cell lineages, and in contrast to Lmo2 transgenic mice, there were normal distributions of CD4− CD8− thymocytes. We conclude that there is no mandatory role for LMO2 in lymphoid development, implying that its specific role in T-cell tumorigenesis results from a reprogramming of gene expression after enforced expression in T-cell precursors.
Influence of different exercise regimes on the proximal hoof circumference in young Thoroughbred horses.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY Most lameness in horses relates to foot problems and may be associated with changes in hoof shape, but there is a lack of information on the influence of normal exercise on hoof shape. OBJECTIVES To investigate the effect of training on proximal hoof circumference in young Thoroughbred racehorses being prepared for racing. METHODS Thirty-seven young Thoroughbred racehorses were included in this study. Front hoof circumference immediately below the coronary band was measured weekly with a measuring tape in all horses present at the stable. Most horses accomplished a minimum of 2 training periods at the stable separated by periods of rest on a paddock. One sample t tests were used to evaluate if the mean change per week differed from zero. To estimate the repeatability coefficient, the left proximal hoof circumference of 25 horses was measured 3 times in a random order on one day. RESULTS Most horses showed a similar pattern of change. The proximal hoof circumference decreased during the training periods (P < 0.0001) and increased when the horse was rested (P < 0.0001). The decrease of the circumference during the first training period was -0.66 mm/week on the left and -0.64 mm/week on the right. During the second training period, this was -0.58 mm/week on the left and -0.57 mm/ week on the right. During the rest period, the circumference increased by 1.03 mm/week on the left and 1.12 mm/week on the right. The repeatability coefficient for the left circumference was 1.8 mm. CONCLUSIONS Horses showed a decrease in circumference during race training that reversed when they were rested. POTENTIAL RELEVANCE Measurement of front hoof circumference is a simple method to assess change in hoof shape. It provides an opportunity to investigate the relationships between specific training, hoof shape and soundness.
Emotional Intelligence and Mismatching Expressive and Verbal Messages: A Contribution to Detection of Deception

Processing facial emotion, especially mismatches between facial and verbal messages, is believed to be important in the detection of deception. For example, emotional leakage may accompany lying. Individuals with superior emotion perception abilities may then be more adept in detecting deception by identifying mismatch between facial and verbal messages. Two personal factors that may predict such abilities are female gender and high emotional intelligence (EI). However, evidence on the role of gender and EI in detection of deception is mixed. A key issue is that the facial processing skills required to detect deception may not be the same as those required to identify facial emotion. To test this possibility, we developed a novel facial processing task, the FDT (Face Decoding Test) that requires detection of inconsistencies between facial and verbal cues to emotion. We hypothesized that gender and ability EI would be related to performance when cues were inconsistent. We also hypothesized that gender effects would be mediated by EI, because women tend to score as more emotionally intelligent on ability tests. Data were collected from 210 participants. Analyses of the FDT suggested that EI was correlated with superior face decoding in all conditions. We also confirmed the expected gender difference, the superiority of high EI individuals, and the mediation hypothesis. Also, EI was more strongly associated with facial decoding performance in women than in men, implying there may be gender differences in strategies for processing affective cues. It is concluded that integration of emotional and cognitive cues may be a core attribute of EI that contributes to the detection of deception.
Using RNAi to knockdown gene function

Copyright: © 2006 Julie Ahringer and contributors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jaa@mole.bio. cam.ac. uk Reverse genetics* Julie Ahringer, ed., The Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1QN, UK
On the reduction of broadcast redundancy in mobile ad hoc networks

Flooding in mobile ad hoc networks has poor scalability as it leads to serious redundancy, contention and collision. We propose an efficient approach to reduce the broadcast redundancy. In our approach, local topology information and the statistical information about the duplicate broadcasts are utilized to avoid unnecessary rebroadcasts. Simulation is conducted to compare the performance of our approach and flooding. The simulation results demonstrate the advantages of our approach. It can greatly reduce the redundant messages, thus saving much network bandwidth and energy. It can also enhance the reliability of broadcasting. It can be used in static or mobile wireless networks to implement scalable broadcast or multicast communications.
Packing protein side-chains by parallel ant colonies

Side-chains are crucial for proteins expressing their biochemical characteristics. Packing protein side-chains is then a necessary task for protein structure prediction, and critical to some descendant and important applications, such as protein design, docking and point mutation analysis. Given all possible candidate rotamers for each residue of protein backbone, packing protein side-chains can be modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem without an accurate energy function. This paper presents a parallel approach, pacoPacker, to pack protein side-chains by ant colony optimization. Each ant colony is used to pack side-chains with the guidance of an energy function. Different colonies use different energy functions. These multiple colonies are running in parallel and cooperate with each other by sharing the pheromone matrix whose role is to tune sampling the rotamer library. In this way, the intelligences embedded in different energy functions can be brought together to find out the best side-chains for the protein backbone. Experimental study has been conducted on two typical benchmarks, and the results show that pacoPacker is competitive to the state-of-art systems.
Continuous versus Discrete Model in Autodiagnosis Systems for Wireless Networks

In the near future, several radio access technologies will coexist in Beyond 3G mobile networks (B3G), and they will be eventually transformed into one seamless global communication infrastructure. Self-managing systems (i.e., those that self-configure, self-protect, self-heal, and self-optimize) are the solution to tackle the high complexity inherent to these networks. In this context, this paper proposes a system for autodiagnosis in the Radio Access Network (RAN) of wireless systems. The malfunction of the RAN may be due not only to a hardware fault but also (and more difficult to identify) to a bad configuration. The proposed system is based on the analysis of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to isolate the cause of the network malfunction. In this paper, two alternative probabilistic systems are compared, which differ on how KPIs are modeled (continuous or discrete variables). Experimental results are examined in order to support the theoretical concepts, based on data from a live network. The drawbacks and benefits of both systems are studied, and some conclusions on the scenarios under which each model should be used are presented.
SPOON: A library for implementing analyses and transformations of Java source code

This paper presents SPOON, a library for the analysis and transformation of Java source code. SPOON enables Java developers to write a large range of domain‐specific analyses and transformations in an easy and concise manner. SPOON analyses and transformations are written in plain Java. With SPOON, developers do not need to dive into parsing, to hack a compiler infrastructure, or to master a new formalism. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.