Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heterogeneous Pattern of Selective Pressure for PRRT2 in Human Populations, but No Association with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Inherited and de novo genomic imbalances at chromosome 16p11.2 are associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), but the causative genes remain unknown. Among the genes located in this region, PRRT2 codes for a member of the synaptic SNARE complex that allows the release of synaptic vesicles. PRRT2 is a candidate gene for ASD since homozygote mutations are associated with intellectual disability and heterozygote mutations cause benign infantile seizures, paroxysmal dyskinesia, or hemiplegic migraine. Here, we explored the contribution of PRRT2 mutations in ASD by screening its coding part in a large sample of 1578 individuals including 431 individuals with ASD, 186 controls and 961 individuals from the human genome Diversity Panel. We detected 24 nonsynonymous variants, 1 frameshift (A217PfsX8) and 1 in-frame deletion of 6 bp (p.A361_P362del). The frameshift mutation was observed in a control with no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders. The p.A361_P362del was observed in two individuals with autism from sub-Saharan African origin. Overall, the frequency of PRRT2 deleterious variants was not different between individuals with ASD and controls. Remarkably, PRRT2 displays a highly significant excess of nonsynonymous (pN) vs synonymous (pS) mutations in Asia (pN/pS = 4.85) and Europe (pN/pS = 1.62) compared with Africa (pN/pS = 0.26; Asia vs Africa: P = 0.000087; Europe vs Africa P = 0.00035; Europe vs Asia P = P = 0.084). We also showed that whole genome amplification performed through rolling cycle amplification could artificially introduce the A217PfsX8 mutation indicating that this technology should not be performed prior to PRRT2 mutation screening. In summary, our results do not support a role for PRRT2 coding sequence variants in ASD, but provide an ascertainment of its genetic variability in worldwide populations that should help researchers and clinicians to better investigate the role of PRRT2 in human diseases.
Classical Time Series Models and Financial Series

The standard time series analysis rests on important concepts such as stationarity, autocorrelation, white noise, innovation, and on a central family of models, the autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models. We start by recalling their main properties and how they can be used. As we shall see, these concepts are insufficient for the analysis of financial time series. In particular, we shall introduce the concept of volatility, which is of crucial importance in finance. In this chapter, we also present the main stylized facts (unpredictability of returns, volatility clustering and hence predictability of squared returns, leptokurticity of the marginal distributions, asymmetries, etc.) concerning financial series.
A 15 Kiloparsec X-Ray Disk in the Elliptical Galaxy NGC 1700

We present Chandra observations of the young elliptical galaxy NGC 1700. The X-ray isophotes are highly flattened between semimajor axes of 30'' and 80'', reaching a maximum ellipticity ϵX ≈ 0.65 at 60'' (15 kpc). The surface brightness profile in the spectrally soft flattened region is shallower than that of the starlight, indicating that the emission comes from hot gas rather than stellar sources. The flattening is so extreme that the gas cannot be in hydrostatic equilibrium in any plausible potential. A likely alternative is that the gas has significant rotational support. A simple model, representing isothermal gas distributed about a particular angular momentum, can reproduce the X-ray morphology while staying consistent with stellar kinematics. The specific angular momentum of the gas matches that of the stars in the most isophotally distorted outer part of the galaxy, and its cooling time matches the time since the last major merger. We infer that the gas was acquired in that merger, which involved a preexisting elliptical galaxy with a hot interstellar medium. The hot gas carried the angular momentum of the encounter and has since gradually settled into a rotationally flattened cooling disk.
Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today

The treatment and role of women is one of the most discussed and controversial aspects of Islam. In this volume, three respected scholars of Islam survey the situation of women in Islam, focusing on how Muslim views about and experiences of gender are changing in the Western diaspora. It offers an overview of the teachings of the Qur'an and the Prophet Muhammad on gender, analyzes the ways in which the West has historically viewed Muslim women, and examines how the Muslim world has changed in response to Western critiques. The volume then centers on the Muslim experience in America, examining Muslim American analyses of gender, Muslim attempts to form a new "American" Islam, and the legal issues surrounding equal rights for Muslim females. Such specific issues as dress, marriage, child custody, and asylum are addressed. It also looks at the ways in which American Muslim women have tried to create new paradigms of Islamic womanhood and are reinterpreting the traditions apart from the males who control the mosque institutions.
The Gamma Secretase Inhibitor MRK-003 Attenuates Pancreatic Cancer Growth in Preclinical Models

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a lethal malignancy, with most patients facing an adverse clinical outcome. Aberrant Notch pathway activation has been implicated in the initiation and progression of PDAC, specifically the aggressive phenotype of the disease. We used a panel of human PDAC cell lines as well as patient-derived PDAC xenografts to determine whether pharmacologic targeting of Notch pathway could inhibit PDAC growth and potentiate gemcitabine sensitivity. MRK-003, a potent and selective γ-secretase inhibitor, treatment resulted in the downregulation of nuclear Notch1 intracellular domain, inhibition of anchorage-independent growth, and reduction of tumor-initiating cells capable of extensive self-renewal. Pretreatment of PDAC cells with MRK-003 in cell culture significantly inhibited the subsequent engraftment in immunocompromised mice. MRK-003 monotherapy significantly blocked tumor growth in 5 of 9 (56%) PDAC xenografts. A combination of MRK-003 and gemcitabine showed enhanced antitumor effects compared with gemcitabine in 4 of 9 (44%) PDAC xenografts, reduced tumor cell proliferation, and induced both apoptosis and intratumoral necrosis. Gene expression analysis of untreated tumors indicated that upregulation of NF-κB pathway components was predictive of sensitivity to MRK-003, whereas upregulation in B-cell receptor signaling and nuclear factor erythroid-derived 2-like 2 pathway correlated with response to the combination of MRK-003 with gemcitabine. Our findings strengthen the rationale for small-molecule inhibition of Notch signaling as a therapeutic strategy in PDAC. Mol Cancer Ther; 11(9); 1999–2009. ©2012 AACR.
Long run value stabilization in a real options perspective

The present value of growth opportunities with stable long run value and decreasing investment cost is addressed in a real options perspective. The model is solved in terms of closed form solutions, and a duality between elementary real options of waiting to invest is conjectured to be a fundamental structure of a forthcoming theory of real options. A pure capital budgeting perspective is pursued. Natural lines for future research are accounted for.
Cyber (motion) sickness in active stereoscopic 3D gaming

Mass-market stereoscopic 3D gaming has recently become a reality on both gaming consoles and PCs. At the same time the success of devices such as the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Wii Balance Board, Sony Move and Microsoft Kinect have made active movement of the head, limbs and body a key means of interaction in many games. We hypothesized that players may be more prone to cybersickness symptoms in stereoscopic 3D games based on active movement compared to similar games played with controllers or other devices, which do not require physical movement of the body with the exception of the hands and fingers. Two experimental games were developed to test this hypothesis while keeping other parameters as constant as possible. For the disorientation and oculomotor cybersickness subscales and the overall score of the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, a significant interaction between display mode (S3D versus non-stereoscopic) and motion sickness susceptibility was found. However, contrary to our hypothesis, there was no indication that participants were particularly susceptible to cybersickness in S3D motion controller games.
Slicing objects using system dependence graphs

We present an SDG for object oriented software that is more precise than previous representations and is more efficient to construct than previous approaches. The new SDG distinguishes data members for different objects, provides a way to represent object parameters, represents the effects of polymorphism on parameters and parameter bindings, represents incomplete classes efficiently, and provides a way to represent class libraries. Based on this system dependence graph, we introduce the concept of object slicing and an algorithm to implement this concept. Object slicing enables the user to inspect the statements in the slice, object-by-object, and is helpful for debugging and impact analysis.
The role of climate and food availability on driving decadal abundance patterns of highly migratory pelagic predators in the Bay of Biscay

Within the current context of changing ecosystems, many organisms are experiencing phenological changes in the timing of migration. Here, we assessed whether the abundance patterns of two trans-equatorial migrating pelagic seabirds, the great shearwater and the sooty shearwater (Puffinus gravis and P. griseus, respectively), have changed over recent decades in the Bay of Biscay in relation to the main drivers shaping their migratory journey: climatic factors and food availability. Specifically, we studied the staging dynamic by estimating dates of arrival and departure, staging duration and abundance during a 16-year temporal window (1995-2010) based on monthly at-sea observations performed onboard a commercial ferry. Climatic effects were studied at two temporal scales: oceanic winds and global oscillations indices (North Atlantic Oscillation – NAO) that represent climate variability at short and long time scales, respectively. Based on oceanic winds, we also estimated a hypothetical cost of flying on a monthly basis considering wind speed and the angle between flight and wind direction. Our results showed that both great and sooty shearwaters were influenced by the large scale NAO index but the shape of the relationship was different, while the sooty shearwater was also influenced by food availability. Thus, each species might rely on different cues before and during their migration to adjust to optimal flying conditions and foraging grounds. Both species shape their arrival in the Bay of Biscay with periods of potential minimum flying costs, following their migration from the western to the eastern North Atlantic. We foresee that the quantification of flying costs can integrate different processes at the level of migration and provide a wider understanding of the migratory dynamic of pelagic predators within current changing ecosystems.
Pronunciation Scoring for the Hearing-Impaired

Automatic assessment of articulation and prosody is an important aid for speech theraphy and language education. In this paper, we focus on speech theraphy for hearing-impairment and propose methods for automatic articulation and prosody scoring. The pronunciation problems of the hearing-impaired are briefly discussed. Three methods are developed for automatic pronunciation scoring for the hearingimpaired. In the first method, Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based phoneme recognition and forcedalignment is employed for detecting articulation problems. The second method performs prosody scoring by operating at the syllable level and comparing the pitch and energy contours of a given utterance with a reference utterance. Finally, speech-to-text alignment information is used for duration scoring of a test utterance with a reference utterance. The proposed methods are evaluated on a database collected from native Turkish speakers. The articulation scoring method improves the correct recognition rate of confusable pairs of words by 5.6% yielding a correct recognition rate of 84.8%. The results also show that the prosody and duration scoring algorithms provide useful information to assess the match between the prosodic characteristics of two speakers.
Towards the Automation of the Semantic Annotation Process for Web Services

- The large and growing amount of services available in the current Web has placed the need for developing efficient mechanisms for service discovery, in order to meet either a particular user request or the requirements of software agents. In this regard, a lot of work has been addressed on adding semantics over service descriptions to improve the accuracy of search engines. Nevertheless, the adoption of semantic annotation models, nowadays, has been restricted by service designers and providers, since they require certain specialized knowledge – related to formal knowledge representations–, and given that their actual implementation is very resource intensive. In this paper, we present an approach to overcome this latter issue by automating the semantic annotation process. The approach we propose, builds automatically and incrementally formal representations of knowledge from a corpus of service descriptors, by using text mining techniques and an unsupervised learning approach.
Regulation of Somatodendritic GABAA Receptor Channels in Rat Hippocampal Neurons: Evidence for a Role of the Small GTPase Rac1

The role of the cytoskeleton in the activity of GABAAreceptors was investigated in cultured hippocampal neurons. Receptor currents were measured with the whole-cell patch-clamp technique during repetitive stimulation with 1 μm muscimol. After destruction of the microtubular system with nocodazol, muscimol-induced currents showed a rundown by 78%. A similar rundown was observed when actin fibers were destroyed with latrunculin B or C2 toxin of Clostridium botulinum. Because the small GTPases of the Rho family RhoA, Rac1, and Cdc42 are known to control the organization of actin fibers, we investigated their possible involvement. Inactivation of the GTPases with clostridial toxins, as well as intracellular application of recombinant Rho GTPases, indicated that active Rac1 was necessary for full GABAA receptor activity. Immunocytochemical labeling of the receptors showed that the disappearance of receptor clusters in the somatic membrane as induced by muscimol stimulation was enhanced by Rac1 inactivation. It is suggested that Rac1 participates in the regulation of GABAAreceptor clustering and/or recycling.
Based on HHT Grounding Grip in the Application of On-line Monitoring

In order to more conveniently and accurately monitoring the real-time parameters of grounding grid, this paper based on potentiostatic method of grounding grip of corrosion state and electrical performance monitoring principle. Hilbert-huang transform(HHT) is suitable for nonlinear and non-stationary signal analysis, the analysis of received signals by empirical mode decomposition and Hilbert spectrum. Then make the use of MATLAB to achieve the simulation diagram, and compare the historical record files, so as to realize the grounding grip of on-line monitoring.
A framework of a fast any-angle path finding algorithm on visibility graphs based on A∗ for plumbing design

In this research, we investigate the issue of compact design that involves finding the shortest connecting plumbing path between hydraulic components. An improved version of visibility graph called visibility graph of candidate is proposed followed by a new line-of-sight technique called visible-neighbors which is straightforward to expand to 3D applications. A new data structure associated with the techniques developed are proposed in order to address the inefficiency issue coming with A* algorithm on visibility graphs. The performance of the new technique on visibility graphs is compared to the traditional A* and Theta* algorithms on the aspect of path length, nodes explored as well as computational time.
Detecting and defending against inter-app permission leaks in android apps

Android encourages inter-app interactions and facilitates functionality reusability by providing flexible inter-component communication (ICC) among apps. Components in apps can communicate with other components within single app or cross different apps. However, through this mechanism, components may leak permissions either carelessly or maliciously. Unfortunately, the current app-level permission model in Android cannot prevent such permissions leaks incurred by inter app communication. Simple permission enforcement is not sufficient as it cannot differentiate between normal permission usage and malicious permission usage (i.e., permission leakage). Therefore, users are required to grant permissions to apps during app installation, which may lead to permission mismanaged. In this paper, we propose IntentChecker that aims to detect permission leakage by proposing a light-weight mechanism. IntentChecker defends against the permission leakage attacks by adding authorization extension to the ICC mechanism and automatically generating patches for vulnerable apps. We evaluate IntentChecker with two benchmarks, i.e., Droidbench and ICCbench, and with 4031 real world apps. IntentChecker finds 324 apps that includes at least one permission leakage. We verify the effectiveness of the defense mechanism with 10 apps randomly selected from the vulnerable apps, which demonstrates that it is effective to prevent inter app permission leakage.
An Improved PSO-BP Network Model

An improved network model to adjust weights of BP network based on particle swarm optimization(PSO) was proposed. The fuzzy control was used to assign the different weight to PSO and BP algorithm during different periods. PSO algorithm plays a main role in the previous evolution period, and BP algorithm plays a vital roal in later period. The model can overcome the slow convergence and easily getting into the local extremum of basic BP algorithm, and can also improve the learning ability and generalization ability with a higher precision. The simulation results show that the improved PSOBP network model has higher accuracy and quicker response than the traditional model.
Expropriation and Inventions: Appropriable Rents in the Absence of Property Rights

The authors analyze the problem faced by a financially weak independent inventor when selling a valuable, but easily imitated, invention for which no property rights exist. The inventor can protect his or her intellectual property by negotiating a contingent contract (with a buyer) prior to revealing the invention or, alternatively, the inventor can reveal the invention and then negotiate with the newly informed buyer. Despite the risk of expropriation, the authors find that, in equilibrium, an inventor with little wealth can expect to appropriate a sizable share of the market value of the invention by adopting the latter approach. Copyright 1994 by American Economic Association.
Interest-based prediction routing protocol in socially-aware opportunistic networks

People in life rely more and more on portable mobile devices. Many applications and services through wireless technologies are provided. Most of mobile devices are carried by people. Thus, the mobility of mobile devices is influenced heavily by people's social relationship. Socially-aware Opportunistic Networks are used in intermittently connected networks by use of store-carry-and-forward fashion. It is mainly based on social relationship to design solutions for problem such as routing protocol. In this paper, we study social relationship about interest information among people and use them to predict the contact probability. We present Interest-based Prediction routing protocol (InP) and establish experiments based on real trace data set from SIGCOMM2009. The simulation results show that the efficiency of InP outperforms Epidemic and PROPHET in higher delivery ratio, lower overhead and shorter average latency.
Temporally coherent conservative visibility (extended abstract)

Abstract Efficiently identifying polygons that are visible from a changing synthetic viewpoint is an important problem in computer graphics. Even with hardware support, simple algorithms like depth-buffering cannot achieve interactive frame rates when applied to geometric models with many polygons. However, a visibility algorithm that exploits the occlusion properties of the scene to identify a superset of visible polygons, without touching most invisible polygons, could achieve fast frame rates while viewing such models. In this paper, we present a new approach to the visibility problem. The novel aspects of our algorithm are that it is temporally coherent and conservative ; for all viewpoints the algorithm overestimates the set of visible polygons. As the synthetic viewpoint moves, the algorithm reuses visibility information computed for previous viewpoints. It does so by computing visual events at which visibility changes occur, and efficiently identifying and discarding these events as the viewpoint changes. In essence, the algorithm implicitly constructs and maintains a linearized portion of an aspect graph , a data structure for representing visual events. We demonstrate that the visibility algorithm significantly accelerates rendering of several test models.
Fowarding the choice of bias LEGAL-F: Using Feature Selection to Reduce the Complexity of LEGAL

Preprocessing data is a means for improving the computational eeciency of concept learning systems. The selection of relevant features increasingly becomes a central problem in machine learning. Two diierent approaches were intensively studied these last few years, the lter and the wrapper methods. Both methods wish to give a learner only those attributes that are relevant to the target concept. Lattice based machine learning systems seems to better represent concepts inside the data. Several systems using this framework have been developed recently. Their principal drawback comes from the exponential complexity of the lattice construction. In this paper, we present a method to select relevant features according to the learning algorithm criteria. A rst application is made to bring up a new lattice-based machine learning system, LEGAL-F, which decreases considerably the computational complexity of the previous LEGAL system. A study of the theoretical complexity of LEGAL-F is done, and experimental comparisons are reported rst between LEGAL and LEGAL-F in terms of complexity, and then between LEGAL-F and C4.5 in terms of classiication accuracy.
Electrochemical impedimetric biosensor based on a nanostructured polycarbonate substrate

This study integrates the techniques of nanoelectroforming, hot-embossing, and electrochemical deposition to develop a disposable, low-cost, and high sensitivity nanostructure biosensor. A modified anodic aluminum oxide barrier-layer surface was used as the template for thin nickel film deposition. After etching the anodic aluminum oxide template off, a three-dimensional mold of the concave nanostructure array was created. The fabricated three-dimensional nickel mold was further used for replica molding of a nanostructure polycarbonate substrate by hot-embossing. A thin gold film was then sputtered onto the polycarbonate substrate to form the electrode, followed by deposition of an orderly and uniform gold nanoparticle layer on the three-dimensional gold electrode using electrochemical deposition. Finally, silver nanoparticles were deposited on the uniformly deposited gold nanoparticles to enhance the conductivity of the sensor. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy analysis was then used to detect the concentration of the target element. The sensitivity of the proposed scheme on the detection of the dust mite antigen, Der p2, reached 0.1 pg/mL.