Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Paracrine Effects of IGF-1 Overexpression on the Functional Decline Due to Skeletal Muscle Disuse: Molecular and Functional Evaluation in Hindlimb Unloaded MLC/mIgf-1 Transgenic Mice

Slow-twitch muscles, devoted to postural maintenance, experience atrophy and weakness during muscle disuse due to bed-rest, aging or spaceflight. These conditions impair motion activities and can have survival implications. Human and animal studies demonstrate the anabolic role of IGF-1 on skeletal muscle suggesting its interest as a muscle disuse countermeasure. Thus, we tested the role of IGF-1 overexpression on skeletal muscle alteration due to hindlimb unloading (HU) by using MLC/mIgf-1 transgenic mice expressing IGF-1 under the transcriptional control of MLC promoter, selectively activated in skeletal muscle. HU produced atrophy in soleus muscle, in terms of muscle weight and fiber cross-sectional area (CSA) reduction, and up-regulation of atrophy gene MuRF1. In parallel, the disuse-induced slow-to-fast fiber transition was confirmed by an increase of the fast-type of the Myosin Heavy Chain (MHC), a decrease of PGC-1α expression and an increase of histone deacetylase-5 (HDAC5). Consistently, functional parameters such as the resting chloride conductance (gCl) together with ClC-1 chloride channel expression were increased and the contractile parameters were modified in soleus muscle of HU mice. Surprisingly, IGF-1 overexpression in HU mice was unable to counteract the loss of muscle weight and the decrease of fiber CSA. However, the expression of MuRF1 was recovered, suggesting early effects on muscle atrophy. Although the expression of PGC-1α and MHC were not improved in IGF-1-HU mice, the expression of HDAC5 was recovered. Importantly, the HU-induced increase of gCl was fully contrasted in IGF-1 transgenic mice, as well as the changes in contractile parameters. These results indicate that, even if local expression does not seem to attenuate HU-induced atrophy and slow-to-fast phenotype transition, it exerts early molecular effects on gene expression which can counteract the HU-induced modification of electrical and contractile properties. MuRF1 and HDAC5 can be attractive therapeutic targets for pharmacological countermeasures and then deserve further investigations.
Interim analysis of a prospective randomized non-inferiority trial of cisplatin and fluorouracil induction chemotherapy with or without docetaxel in nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

In this study, we aim to compare the progression-free survival (PFS) rates and side effects of induction chemotherapy based on docetaxel, cisplatin and fluorouracil (TPF) versus cisplatin and fluorouracil (PF) in patients with locoregionally-advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma who received subsequent chemoradiotherapy. We randomly assigned 278 patients with stage III or IV NPC (without distant metastases) to receive either TPF or PF induction chemotherapy, followed by cisplatin-based chemoradiotherapy every 3 weeks and intensity-modulated radiation therapy for 5 days per week. After a minimum of 2 years follow-up, a PFS benefit was observed for TPF compared to PF, though this difference was not statistically significant (84.5% vs. 77.9%, P = 0.380). Due to increased frequencies of grade 3 or 4 neutropenia and diarrhea, significantly more patients in the TPF group required treatment delays and dose modifications. Our findings suggest that PF induction chemotherapy has substantially better tolerance and compliance rates than TPF induction chemotherapy. However, the treatment efficacy of PF is not superior to TPF induction chemotherapy in patients with locoregionally-advanced NPC (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01536223).
Maximizing the power output of partially shaded solar PV array using novel interconnection method

Solar Photo Voltaic Array performance severely effect by the partial shading and fast changing irradiance conditions. The performance depends on shading patterns and position of the solar panels in solar PV array. This paper proposes a novel interconnection method (Magic Square method), which disburse the shade to maximize the power output of partially shaded solar PV Array. The proposed system is tested under different partial shaded conditions for change in irradiation. As the solar panels receive continuous change in irradiation, the P-V characteristics of solar array experience multiple peaks or local peaks. The multiple peaks with conventional Total Cross Tied (TCT) connection are avoided with a novel interconnection method. A novel interconnection method (Magic Square method) gives enhanced output power than the conventional TCT connection. The proposed interconnection method is tested with two groups of irradiations for every chosen shading pattern. The performance of the proposed method for 3×3 solar PV Array is tested using theoretical calculations, MATLAB simulations and experimental results on laboratory built hardware setup. The successful working of magic square method on laboratory setup assures for large number of panels in solar PV array and its usefulness of the system.
Rapid Concentration and Molecular Enrichment Approach for Sensitive Detection of Escherichia coli and Shigella Species in Potable Water Samples

ABSTRACT In this work, we used a rapid, simple, and efficient concentration-and-recovery procedure combined with a DNA enrichment method (dubbed CRENAME [concentration and recovery of microbial particles, extraction of nucleic acids, and molecular enrichment]), that we coupled to an Escherichia coli/Shigella-specific real-time PCR (rtPCR) assay targeting the tuf gene, to sensitively detect E. coli/Shigella in water. This integrated method was compared to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) culture-based Method 1604 on MI agar in terms of analytical specificity, ubiquity, detection limit, and rapidity. None of the 179 non-E. coli/Shigella strains tested was detected by both methods, with the exception of Escherichia fergusonii, which was detected by the CRENAME procedure combined with the E. coli/Shigella-specific rtPCR assay (CRENAME + E. coli rtPCR). DNA from all 90 E. coli/Shigella strains tested was amplified by the CRENAME + E. coli rtPCR, whereas the MI agar method had limited ubiquity and detected only 65 (72.2%) of the 90 strains tested. In less than 5 h, the CRENAME + E. coli rtPCR method detected 1.8 E. coli/Shigella CFU whereas the MI agar method detected 1.2 CFU/100 ml of water in 24 h (95% confidence). Consequently, the CRENAME method provides an easy and efficient approach to detect as little as one Gram-negative E. coli/Shigella cell present in a 100-ml potable water sample. Coupled with an E. coli/Shigella-specific rtPCR assay, the entire molecular procedure is comparable to U.S. EPA Method 1604 on MI agar in terms of analytical specificity and detection limit but provides significant advantages in terms of speed and ubiquity.
What Causes My Test Alarm? Automatic Cause Analysis for Test Alarms in System and Integration Testing

Driven by new software development processes and testing in clouds, system and integration testing nowadays tends to produce enormous number of alarms. Such test alarms lay an almost unbearable burden on software testing engineers who have to manually analyze the causes of these alarms. The causes are critical because they decide which stakeholders are responsible to fix the bugs detected during the testing. In this paper, we present a novel approach that aims to relieve the burden by automating the procedure. Our approach, called Cause Analysis Model, exploits information retrieval techniques to efficiently infer test alarm causes based on test logs. We have developed a prototype and evaluated our tool on two industrial datasets with more than 14,000 test alarms. Experiments on the two datasets show that our tool achieves an accuracy of 58.3% and 65.8%, respectively, which outperforms the baseline algorithms by up to 13.3%. Our algorithm is also extremely efficient, spending about 0.1s per cause analysis. Due to the attractive experimental results, our industrial partner, a leading information and communication technology company in the world, has deployed the tool and it achieves an average accuracy of 72% after two months of running, nearly three times more accurate than a previous strategy based on regular expressions.
Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Brain Perfusion Imaging in Early Dementia

Background/Aims: The presence of frontal or executive deficits in patients even at early stages of dementia is now widely recognized. We investigated the relationship between the scores of the Wisconsin card sorting test (WCST) and brain perfusion in patients with early dementia. Methods: A total of 77 subjects participated in this study. They underwent the WCST and brain single photon emission computed tomography with 99mTc-ethylcisteinate dimer. We analyzed the data using a regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) quantification software program, 3DSRT. Results: The number of categories achieved (CA) scores of the WCST had a weakly positive correlation with regional cerebral blood flow in the bilateral precentral, bilateral callosomarginal, bilateral pericallosal, right thalamus, left central and left parietal segments. The number of perseverative errors of the Nelson type (PEN) scores had a weakly negative correlation with rCBF in the right thalamus. Conclusion: The results in this study suggest that CA scores mainly reflect the function of the precentral segments, especially the left side, and that PEN scores correlate with rCBF in the right thalamus. The results suggest that CA scores and PEN scores should be differentially estimated in the WCST.
Utilizing Applied Projects in Industrial/Organizational Psychology Graduate Training: A Checklist To Help Ensure Successful Experiences.

The scientist-practitioner model indicates graduate education must focus on application in addition to theory. Although a number of approaches may be utilized to gain applied experience for students, this paper focuses on applied projects completed as a requirement of a graduate course. Finding host organizations for class projects presents unique challenges in addition to the challenges present in any on-site student experience. Finding projects that can be completed within a short time frame and that provide appropriate experiences for graduate students is critical. In this article, the author provides a checklist that will help ensure successful applied projects. The checklist includes characteristics of the host organization, project characteristics, student responsibilities and outcomes, red flags or warning of potential problems, sources for locating host organizations, and compensation. Supervisor responsibility is required throughout the applied experience. (Author) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Precision-Oriented Active Selection for Interactive Image Retrieval

Active learning methods have been considered with an increased interest in the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) community. These methods have been developed for classification problems, and do not deal with the particular characteristics of the CBIR. One of these characteristics is the criterion to optimize, for instance the error of generalization for classification, which is not the best adapted to CBIR context. We introduce in this paper an active selection which chooses the image the user should label such as the mean average precision is increased. The method is smartly combined with previous propositions, and leads to a fast and efficient active learning scheme. Experiments on a large database have been carried out in order to compare our approach to several other methods.
Co-morbidities in Finnish patients with rheumatoid arthritis: 15-year follow-up

Objectives: To study the prevalence and importance of co-morbidities in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at the time of the diagnosis and after a 15-year follow-up, focusing on the relationship between co-morbidity and disease activity. Method: The study population comprised 87 patients with early RA (mean age 44 years, 79% female, and 65% rheumatoid factor positive) collected from the Helsinki area between 1986 and 1989. Data for co-morbidities were collected at baseline and at a 15-year examination or at the time of death, and the age-weighted Charlson co-morbidity index (CCIa) at baseline was calculated for each patient. The disease activity score based on 28 joints (DAS28) was assessed with three parameters at baseline and during the first year (DAS28 AUC0–12). The relationship between co-morbidity and activity of RA was studied in groups CCIa 0, CCIa 1–2, and CCIa ≥ 3. Results: Adequate data were available in 80 patients with a mean age of 60 years and a mean disease duration of 15.4 years. At baseline, 20% of patients had at least one co-morbid condition (CC). At endpoint, 60% of the patients had some co-morbidity: 34% had one CC, 19% two, 5% three, and 2% four CCs. The most common end-point CCs were hypertension (30%), cardiovascular diseases (14%), and malignancies (11%). DAS28 AUC0–12 and DAS28 at end-point were higher in groups CCIa1–2 and CCIa ≥ 3 than in CCIa 0. Conclusions: Co-morbidities increased during the 15 years of RA and the patients with high baseline CCIa showed higher disease activity both in early disease and at end-point.
Does Adenotonsillectomy Improve Growth in Children with Obstructive Adenotonsillar Hypertrophy?

Faltering growth may be associated with adenotonsillar hypertrophy, but its pathophysiological mechanism is unclear. This study included 29 pre-pubertal children with obstructive adenotonsillar hypertrophy, and aimed to investigate the probable difference in energy intake and serum insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) and insulin-like growth factor binding protein 3 (IGFBP-3) levels before and 6 months after adenotonsillectomy. Weight and height standard deviation scores, energy intake per kilogram and serum IGF-1 levels were found to be significantly higher 6 months after adenotonsillectomy, indicating that adenotonsillar hypertrophy is associated with poor growth.
Spatial Audio Quality Perception (Part 2): A Linear Regression Model

Previously-obtained data, quantifying the degree of quality degradation resulting from a range of spatial audio processes (SAPs), can be used to build a regression model of perceived spatial audio quality in terms of previously developed spatially and timbrally relevant metrics. A generalizable model thus built, employing just five metrics and two principal components, performs well in its prediction of the quality of a range of program types degraded by a multitude of SAPs commonly encountered in consumer audio reproduction, auditioned at both central and off-center listening positions. Such a model can provide a correlation to listening test data of r = 0.89, with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 11%, making its performance comparable to that of previous audio quality models and making it a suitable core for an artificial-listener-based spatial audio quality evaluation system.
Avatara: OLAP for Web-scale Analytics Products

Multidimensional data generated by members on websites has seen massive growth in recent years. OLAP is a well-suited solution for mining and analyzing this data. Providing insights derived from this analysis has become crucial for these websites to give members greater value. For example, LinkedIn, the largest professional social network, provides its professional members rich analytics features like "Who's Viewed My Profile? " and "Who's Viewed This Job? " The data behind these features form cubes that must be efficiently served at scale, and can be neatly sharded to do so. To serve our growing 160 million member base, we built a scalable and fast OLAP serving system called Avatara to solve this many, small cubes problem. At LinkedIn, Avatara has been powering several analytics features on the site for the past two years.
Improvement of Face Recognition Approach through Fuzzy-Based SVM

In this investigation, automatic face recognition algorithms are discussed. For this purpose, a combination of learning algorithms with supervision are realized; in this way, the classification is first designed by the fuzzy-based support vector machine and then the AdaBoost meta-algorithm is applied to the designed classification to reach more accuracy and overfitting control. In the research proposed here, in order to address the effects of asymmetric classes, the adaptive coefficients are employed. In addition, to reduce the data size, the principal components analysis is also applied to the raw data. It is to note that the proposed approach is carried out in a set of images extracted from Yale University data set and its accuracy of the proposed one is verified.
Population Parameters of Blainville's and Cuvier's Beaked Whales

Abstract : Beaked whales appear to be specifically sensitive to some acoustic sources, which can lead to mass strandings. The lack of knowledge about the population dynamics and reproductive parameters of these animals impedes the assessment of the population effects of stranding mortalities. The goal of this project is to continue a long-term photo-ID study started in the Canary Islands in 2003, in order to obtain a sufficient sample size for demographic modeling. This information will greatly augment the sparse knowledge of beaked whale population biology, facilitating the assessment of possible population effects of human impacts.
A Comparison of Three Integrative Review Methods: Different Methods, Different Findings?.

Comparisons are made of the hypotheses and conclusions appropriate to three different meta-analysis methodologies: vote counts and vote-counting estimation procedures, tests of combined significance, and analyses of effect sizes. Also, the statistical properties of related estimates and the statistical power of the hypothesis tests are discussed. Such comparisons both facilitate choosing among the methods and illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each. Application of the three methodologies is illustrated using data from a synthesis of gender differences in science achievement. Seemingly contradictory conclusions from the three methods can be explained in terms of differences in the hypotheses tested by the methods and in the statistical properties of the methods. Analyses revealed that the magnitudes of gender differences in science achievement varied according to the subject-matter under study. Effect-size analyses were more informative than the other two approaches. Recommendations for use of the three approaches conclude the paper.
40,000 Year record of food plants in the Southern Kimberley Ranges, Western Australia

An important Pleistocene-Holocene sequence was discovered when Carpenter's Gap Site 1 was excavated in Â 1992 and 1993 by Sue O'Connor (O'Connor 1995). The site is located in Windjana Gorge National Park, in the Napier Range, which lies at the southern edge of the Kimberley region. Carpenter's Gap Shelter 1 has an archaeological sequence spanning at least 40,000 years, from the late Pleistocene to the present. A unique feature of this site is the extensive macrobotanical remains preserved: over 2000 seeds and plant parts from one square metre have been recorded. The Bunuba Aboriginal people, traditional owners for this area, consider this rockshelter to be an important cultural landmark. There is supporting evidence, from the petroglyphs and pictographs within this rockshelter, and the rockshelter's continuing role within Bunuba Aboriginal culture, of considerable time depth and continuity to the human occupation and use of this site. This paper describes the macrobotanical materials from the site with some taphonomic considerations. The changing patterns of deposition are considered as potential indicators of both evidence of cultural use from the Pleistocene occupations through to the Holocene, and as general environmental indicators.
Protein plasticity driven by disorder and collapse governs the heterogeneous binding of CytR to DNA

Abstract The amplitude of thermodynamic fluctuations in biological macromolecules determines their conformational behavior, dimensions, nature of phase transitions and effectively their specificity and affinity, thus contributing to fine-tuned molecular recognition. Unique among large-scale conformational changes in proteins are temperature-induced collapse transitions in intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). Here, we show that CytR DNA-binding domain, an IDP that folds on binding DNA, undergoes a coil-to-globule transition with temperature in the absence of DNA while exhibiting energetically decoupled local and global structural rearrangements, and maximal thermodynamic fluctuations at the optimal bacterial growth temperature. The collapse is shown to be a continuous transition through a combination of statistical-mechanical modeling and all-atom implicit solvent simulations. Surprisingly, CytR binds single-site cognate DNA with negative cooperativity, described by Hill coefficients less than one, resulting in a graded binding response. We show that heterogeneity arising from varying binding-competent CytR conformations or orientations at the single-molecular level contributes to negative binding cooperativity at the level of bulk measurements due to the conflicting requirements of collapse transition, large fluctuations and folding-upon-binding. Our work reports strong evidence for functionally driven thermodynamic fluctuations in determining the extent of collapse and disorder with implications in protein search efficiency of target DNA sites and regulation.
A glycolytic metabolon in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is stabilized by F‐actin

In the Saccharomyces cerevisiae glycolytic pathway, 11 enzymes catalyze the stepwise conversion of glucose to two molecules of ethanol plus two CO2 molecules. In the highly crowded cytoplasm, this pathway would be very inefficient if it were dependent on substrate/enzyme diffusion. Therefore, the existence of a multi‐enzymatic glycolytic complex has been suggested. This complex probably uses the cytoskeleton to stabilize the interaction of the various enzymes. Here, the role of filamentous actin (F‐actin) in stabilization of a putative glycolytic metabolon is reported. Experiments were performed in isolated enzyme/actin mixtures, cytoplasmic extracts and permeabilized yeast cells. Polymerization of actin was promoted using phalloidin or inhibited using cytochalasin D or latrunculin. The polymeric filamentous F‐actin, but not the monomeric globular G‐actin, stabilized both the interaction of isolated glycolytic pathway enzyme mixtures and the whole fermentation pathway, leading to higher fermentation activity. The associated complexes were resistant against inhibition as a result of viscosity (promoted by the disaccharide trehalose) or inactivation (using specific enzyme antibodies). In S. cerevisiae, a glycolytic metabolon appear to assemble in association with F‐actin. In this complex, fermentation activity is enhanced and enzymes are partially protected against inhibition by trehalose or by antibodies.
Cardiac-gated local coil MR imaging of the carotid neck bifurcation.

the Signa system. The 5-cm coil was placed directly on the skin of the lateral surface of the subject's neck with the subject supine, his head and neck in a three-sided plastic holder. Data were acquired with a 20FT multisection technique using a 128 x 256 matrix, a 16- cm field of view, two excitations, and 3-mm thick sections with a 1- mm gap. EGG gating was used with the trigger set to 9 msec from the R wave. The EGG signal was transmitted from the patient by cable to a cardiac monitor (78351 A, Hewlett-Packard, Menlo Park, GA), which in turn triggered the pulse sequences. The repetition time (TR) was determined by the R-R interval; the echo-delay time (TE) was 20 msec.