Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of the bi-compartmental stem cell niche in delaying cancer

In recent years, by using modern imaging techniques, scientists have found evidence of collaboration between different types of stem cells (SCs), and proposed a bi-compartmental organization of the SC niche. Here we create a class of stochastic models to simulate the dynamics of such a heterogeneous SC niche. We consider two SC groups: the border compartment, S1, is in direct contact with transit-amplifying (TA) cells, and the central compartment, S2, is hierarchically upstream from S1. The S1 SCs differentiate or divide asymmetrically when the tissue needs TA cells. Both groups proliferate when the tissue requires SCs (thus maintaining homeostasis). There is an influx of S2 cells into the border compartment, either by migration, or by proliferation. We examine this model in the context of double-hit mutant generation, which is a rate-limiting step in the development of many cancers. We discover that this type of a cooperative pattern in the stem niche with two compartments leads to a significantly smaller rate of double-hit mutant production compared with a homogeneous, one-compartmental SC niche. Furthermore, the minimum probability of double-hit mutant generation corresponds to purely symmetric division of SCs, consistent with the literature. Finally, the optimal architecture (which minimizes the rate of double-hit mutant production) requires a large proliferation rate of S1 cells along with a small, but non-zero, proliferation rate of S2 cells. This result is remarkably similar to the niche structure described recently by several authors, where one of the two SC compartments was found more actively engaged in tissue homeostasis and turnover, while the other was characterized by higher levels of quiescence (but contributed strongly to injury recovery). Both numerical and analytical results are presented.
Observer and output feedback stabilisation for a class of nonlinear systems

The objective of the work is twofold. First, we investigate the problem of observer design for a class of systems in cascade form. We suppose that an observer exists for each subsystem and then prove that this interconnection is an observer for the overall system. One of both nonlinear functions is assumed to be not Lipschitz (e.g. to satisfy a quadratic constraint on the unmeasured part of the state). This first main result may be viewed as an improvement of Besançon and Hammouri (Besançon, G., and Hammouri, H. (1998), ‘On Observers Design for Interconnected Systems’, Journal of Mathematical Systems, Estimation and Control, 8, 377–380) in which the authors discussed the problem of the synthesis of interconnected observers. The second part is a generalisation of Ammar, Mabrouk, and Vivalda (Ammar, S., Mabrouk, M., and Vivalda, J.-C. (2009), ‘Observer and Global Output Feedback Stabilisation for Some mechanical Systems’, International Journal of Control, 82, 1070–1081) in which the authors study the problem of output feedback stabilisation for a class of Euler–Lagrange systems. The problem of global output feedback stabilisation of the practical system called the two-link manipulator system is solved. The output feedback scheme presented has better performance than the one exhibited in Ammar et al. (2009).
Speech recognition for spontaneously spoken German dialogues

The paper presents a HMM speech recognition system for spontaneously spoken dialogues. It has been developed as part of the German Verbmobil project whose aim is the development of a translation support system for face-to-face conversations. The HTK based decoder deals successfully with some of the hard problems of recognizing fluent speech and reaches quite competitive recognition results.
The Effect of Acknowledgment Traffic on the Capacity of Packet-Switched Radio Channels

1978 815 REFERENCES [ l ] R. de Buda, " Coherent Demodulation of Frequency-Shift Keying with Low Deviation Ratio " , IEEE Trans. Gommun. in 1973 for his work in decision-aided carrier tracking loops. primarily involved in the implementation of the fust commercial time division multiple access (TDMA) system for use in the Canadian domestic satellite network. been involved in the design of transportable terminals for use in satellite and land mobile systems. He is presently Project Leader for the Low Rate Digital Systems project. Abstract-We consider a population of terminals communicating with each other or with a central station over a packet-switched multiple access radio channel. To ensure the integrity of the transmitted data over the multi-access channel, we consider a reliable method using an error detecting block code in conjunction with a positive acknowledgment of each correct message. In this paper, we study the effect on channel capacity of the overhead created by the error-control traffic for both slotted ALOHA [ l ] and carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) [2]. For this we consider several implementation schemes for the two channel configurations: the common-channel configuration (a single channel for both information traffic and error-control traffic); and the split-channel configuration. The packet delay analysis will be treated in a forthcoming companion paper.
On the Lorenz number of multiband materials

There are many exotic scenarios where the Lorenz number of the Wiedemann-Franz law is known to deviate from expected values. However, in conventional semiconductor systems, it is assumed to vary between the values of ∼1.49×10−8WΩK−2 for nondegenerate semiconductors and ∼2.45×10−8WΩK−2 for degenerate semiconductors or metals. Knowledge of the Lorenz number is important in many situations, such as in the design of thermoelectric materials and in the experimental determination of the lattice thermal conductivity. Here, we show that, even in the simple case of two- and three-band semiconductors, it is possible to obtain substantial deviations of a factor of 2 (or in the case of a bipolar system with a Fermi level near the midgap, even orders of magnitude) from expectation. In addition to identifying the sources of deviation in unipolar and bipolar two-band systems, a number of analytical expressions useful for quantifying the size of the effect are derived. As representative case studies, a three-band model of the materials of lead telluride (PbTe) and tin sellenide (SnSe), which are important thermoelectric materials, is also developed and the size of possible Lorenz number variations in these materials explored. Thus, the consequence of multiband effects on the Lorenz number of real systems is demonstrated.
Plasma Immunoglobulins in Depressed and Lithium-treated Patients

The Leicester ECf Trial: Results in Schizophrenia DEAR SIR, We read with interest the recent trial of Brandon et 01 regarding the benefits of ECT on schizophrenic symptomatology (Journal, February 1985, 146, 177-183). Their conclusion that the improvement seen was due mainly to the beneficial effect of ECT on schizophrenic symptoms and not on affective symptoms is based on the premise that the Montgomery-Asberg Schizophrenia Scale (MASS) is exclusively a measure of schizophrenic symptomatology. However, this is not entirely the case, for if the MASS is compared to the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Scale (MADRS) (Montgomery and Asberg, 1979), then three items are seen to be identical, namely 'inability to feel', 'sadness', and 'pessimistic thoughts'. One other item on the MASS can also relate to affective psychopathology, namely 'other delusions' in the possible form of 'hypochondriacal delusions' . Thus, in total one third of the twelve items of the MASS may be related to affective features and not to core schizophrenic psychopathology. We thus believe that before the authors of the paper can conclude that ECT has had a beneficial effect on the core schizophrenic features of their patients they must demonstrate an improvement, not just in the total MASS score, but in the eight items of the MASS that are free from affective bias. ROGER THOMAS GARETH H. JONES University of Wales College ofMedicine, Department of Psychological Medicine, Whitchurch Hospital, Cardiff CF4 7XB
SPATIAL STATISTICS MODELS FOR STOCHASTIC INVERSE PROBLEMS IN HEAT CONDUCTION

A Bayesian statistical inference approach is presented herein for the solution of stochastic inverse problems in heat conduction. Spatial statistics models, in particular Markov random fields (MRF), are used to model the prior distributions of unknown thermal quantities (boundary heat flux or heat source). The posterior distribution of the unknown is derived from Bayes’ formula and explored using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and in particular the Gibbs sampler. Hierarchical Bayesian formulation is used to automatically select the regularization parameter and to estimate the statistics of measurement noise simultaneously with the unknown quantities.
Screening of faba bean (Vicia faba L.) accessions to acidity and aluminium stresses

Background Faba bean is an important starch-based protein crop produced worldwide. Soil acidity and aluminium toxicity are major abiotic stresses affecting its production, so in regions where soil acidity is a problem, there is a gap between the potential and actual productivity of the crop. Hence, we set out to evaluate acidity and aluminium tolerance in a range of faba bean germplasm using solution culture and pot experiments. Methods A set of 30 accessions was collected from regions where acidity and aluminium are or are not problems. The accessions were grown in solution culture and a subset of 10 was grown first in peat and later in perlite potting media. In solution culture, morphological parameters including taproot length, root regrowth and root tolerance index were measured, and in the pot experiments the key measurements were taproot length, plant biomass, chlorophyll concentration and stomatal conductance. Result Responses to acidity and aluminium were apparently independent. Accessions Dosha and NC 58 were tolerant to both stress. Kassa and GLA 1103 were tolerant to acidity showing less than 3% reduction in taproot length. Aurora and Messay were tolerant to aluminium. Babylon was sensitive to both, with up to 40% reduction in taproot length from acidity and no detectable recovery from Al3+ challenge. Discussion The apparent independence of the responses to acidity and aluminium is in agreement with the previous research findings, suggesting that crop accessions separately adapt to H+ and Al3+ toxicity as a result of the difference in the nature of soil parent materials where the accession originated. Differences in rankings between experiments were minor and attributable to heterogeneity of seed materials and the specific responses of accessions to the rooting media. Use of perlite as a potting medium offers an ideal combination of throughput, inertness of support medium, access to leaves for detection of their stress responses, and harvest of clean roots for evaluation of their growth.
Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying semantic ambiguity resolution

The ultimate goal of language comprehension is to obtain meaning. However, this is difficult because many words are semantically ambiguous, mapping onto multiple meanings. Semantic ambiguity resolution has proven a useful tool to investigate language processing in general. However, the majority of research has focused on the initial encounter of an ambiguous word. Less work has investigated the processes occurring after an ambiguous word is encountered, when the initially understood meaning needs to be reinterpreted in light of subsequent inconsistent information. The first part of this thesis investigated the cognitive processes underlying semantic reinterpretation, examining how successful listeners are at this process as well as assessing the time course of suppressing and integrating the contextually inappropriate and appropriate meanings respectively. A semantic relatedness task was employed in which participants listened to ambiguous and unambiguous sentences and decided whether a following visual probe word was related or unrelated to the sentence. The results revealed that listeners are highly effective at reinterpretation but that suppression of the inappropriate meaning is delayed relative to integration of the appropriate meaning. The rest of the thesis examined the neural responses to these sentences by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The fMRI study demonstrated ambiguity-elevated responses in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior temporal cortex. These responses were modulated by the frequency of the ambiguous word’s meanings, such that activation was greater for sentences with a higher likelihood of reinterpretation. The final study developed a TMS paradigm to examine whether LIFG is necessary for this process, demonstrating evidence that this region may be important for sentence processing more generally. Together, this thesis has advanced understanding into the cognitive and neural processes underlying semantic reinterpretation that have various implications for models of ambiguity resolution and language comprehension in general.
Single-Door Cervical Laminoplasty Using Titanium Miniplates Alone

Purpose. To review outcome of 29 patients who underwent single-door cervical laminoplasty for myelopathy using titanium miniplates alone. Methods. Records of 20 men and 9 women aged 35 to 79 (mean, 64.3) years who underwent single-door cervical laminoplasty for myelopathy using titanium miniplates alone were reviewed. A total of 125 laminae were opened; 97 of them were fixed with a titanium miniplate. In 19 patients, a 20-hole titanium miniplate bent to the contour of a lamina was used and fixed into 3 laminae at alternate levels. In the remaining 10 patients, the pre-contoured ARCH Laminoplasty System was used and fixed into all laminae. In most patients, screw fixation was unicortical, and no spacer or bone graft was used. Results. The mean follow-up duration was 4 (range, 2–9) years. At one-year follow-up, the mean Japanese Orthopaedic Association (JOA) score improved from 9.2 to 13.2 (p<0.001). The mean JOA recovery rate was 64%. No patient had neurological deterioration. The mean anteroposterior diameter increased from 14.3 mm to 19.7 mm; the mean increase was 6.1 mm in the plated laminae and 5.3 mm in the unplated laminae (p=0.11). Out of the 125 laminae, there were 2 hinge non-unions in the unplated laminae, and 2 screw pullouts (not associated with plate loosening). No patient had penetration into the vertebral foramen or neuroforamen. Spring-back closure occurred in 5 (18%) of the 28 unplated laminae, with a mean of <3 mm loss of the initial expansion. Two patients developed transient C5 palsy presenting as shoulder abduction weakness. One patient had a delayed dural tear due to a sharp spike at the edge of the opened C6 lamina. Conclusion. Single-door cervical laminoplasty using miniplates alone is a safe technique and achieves a high hinge union rate, good canal expansion, and neurological recovery.
Assisting Translators in Indirect Lexical Transfer

We present the design and evaluation of a translator’s amenuensis that uses comparable corpora to propose and rank nonliteral solutions to the translation of expressions from the general lexicon. Using distributional similarity and bilingual dictionaries, the method outperforms established techniques for extracting translation equivalents from parallel corpora. The interface to the system is available at: http://corpus.leeds. ac.uk/assist/v05/
Algorithm for Protection of Space Division Multiplexing Elastic Optical Networks

In recent years, elastic optical networks have emerged as a solution for dealing with the diversity of the bandwidth demands of network applications. The use of only two multiplexing dimensions has limited the network capacity. To ameliorate this problem, a third dimension has been added in space division multiplexing(SDM). As transmission rates increase so does the need for protection against network failures. Among the protection schemes,those protecting paths are of great interest due to their end-to-end solutions. This paper introduces a novel algorithm based on p-cycle to provide failure-independent path protection in elastic optical networks with SDM.
Differential Chromatin Looping Regulates CD4 Expression in Immature Thymocytes

ABSTRACT Runx1 binds the silencer and represses CD4 transcription in immature thymocytes. In this study, using looping chromatin immunoprecipitation and chromatin conformation capture assays, we demonstrated that interactions between Runx1 and positive elongation factor b (P-TEFb) appose the silencer and enhancer in CD4-negative thymoma cells and double-negative immature thymocytes. This chromatin loop decoys P-TEFb away from the promoter, thus preventing RNA polymerase II from elongating on the CD4 gene. In the absence of Runx1 on the silencer, P-TEFb interacts with the transcription complex, forming a different chromatin loop between the enhancer and the promoter, which leads to the expression of the CD4 gene in CD4-positive hybridoma cells and double-positive thymocytes. Moreover, the knockdown of CycT1 from P-TEFb abolishes both of these chromatin loops. Finally, the selective removal and restoration of Runx1 causes rapid interchanges between these chromatin loops, which reveals the plasticity of this regulatory circuit. Thus, differential looping and decoying of P-TEFb away from the promoter mediate active repression of the CD4 gene during thymocyte development.
Severe Hypoxia: Consequences to Neural Stem Cells and Neurons.

BACKGROUND Multiple neurological diseases result from a pathological hypoxia in the brain, resulting in various motor, sensory or cognitive sequelae. Understanding the response of neural stem cells (NSCs) and differentiated neurons to hypoxia will help better treat such diseases. METHODS We exposed mouse embryonic primary neurons (PN) and neural stem cells to 1% O2 in vitro. RESULTS Both cell types survived and retained their immunocyto-chemical markers, and neurons showed no obvious morphological changes. Microarray analysis showed that the number of genes with significantly altered expression levels was almost five-fold higher in NSCs compared to PN. NSCs displayed a clear block in G1/S phase of the cell cycle and a number of down-regulated cytokine genes. Various growth factors (e.g. neural growth factor, prolactin), involved in survival and proliferation, genes of the Notch pathway, and genes involved in glial differentiation, and cell-matrix adhesion were up-regulated. PN displayed a down-regulation of a number of genes involved in neuron-specific functions, in particular, transmitter-related (e.g. synaptic transmission, neurotransmitter transport and release, learning, adult behavior). CONCLUSIONS We conclude that hypoxia 1-down-regulates genes involved in multiple neuronal functions which can negatively impact learning and memory; 2-induces a cell cycle block in NSCs; 3-can precondition NSC towards a particular differentiation potential while maintaining them fully undifferentiated.
Human Behavior Models for Agents in Simulators and Games: Part I: Enabling Science with PMFserv

This paper focuses on challenges to improving the realism of socially intelligent agents and attempts to reflect the state of the art in human behavior modeling with particular attention to the impact of personality/cultural values and affect as well as biology/stress upon individual coping and group decision making. The first section offers an assessment of the state of the practice and of the need to integrate valid human performance moderator functions (PMFs) from traditionally separated subfields of the behavioral literature. The second section pursues this goal by postulating a unifying architecture and principles for integrating existing PMF theories and models. It also illustrates a PMF testbed called PMFserv created for implementating and studying how PMFs may contribute to such an architecture. To date it interconnects versions of PMFs on physiology and stress; personality, cultural and emotive processes (Cognitive Appraisal-OCC, value systems); perception (Gibsonian affordance); social processes (relations, identity, trust, nested intentionality); and cognition (affect- and stress-augmented decision theory, bounded rationality). The third section summarizes several usage case studies (asymmetric warfare, civil unrest, and political leaders) and concludes with lessons learned. Implementing and interoperating this broad collection of PMFs helps to open the agenda for research on syntheses that can help the field reach a greater level of maturity. The companion paper, Part II, presents a case study in using PMFserv for rapid scenario composability and realistic agent behavior.
Towards an Understanding of the Effects of Augmented Reality Games on Disaster Management

Location-based augmented reality games have entered the mainstream with the nearly overnight success of Niantic's Pokemon Go. Unlike traditional video games, the fact that players of such games carry out actions in the external, physical world to accomplish in-game objectives means that the large-scale adoption of such games motivate people, en masse, to do things and go places they would not have otherwise done in unprecedented ways. The social implications of such mass-mobilisation of individual players are, in general, difficult to anticipate or characterise, even for the short-term. In this work, we focus on disaster relief, and the short- and long-term implications that a proliferation of AR games like Pokemon Go, may have in disaster-prone regions of the world. We take a distributed cognition approach and focus on one natural disaster-prone region of New Zealand, the city of Wellington.
Recommender Systems for Configuration Knowledge Engineering

The knowledge engineering bottleneck is still a major challenge in configurator projects. In this paper we show how recommender systems can support knowledge base development and maintenance processes. We discuss a couple of scenarios for the application of recommender systems in knowledge engineering and report the results of empirical studies which show the importance of user-centered configuration knowledge organization.
A murine Zic3 transcript with a premature termination codon evades nonsense-mediated decay during axis formation

SUMMARY The ZIC transcription factors are key mediators of embryonic development and ZIC3 is the gene most commonly associated with situs defects (heterotaxy) in humans. Half of patient ZIC3 mutations introduce a premature termination codon (PTC). In vivo, PTC-containing transcripts might be targeted for nonsense-mediated decay (NMD). NMD efficiency is known to vary greatly between transcripts, tissues and individuals and it is possible that differences in survival of PTC-containing transcripts partially explain the striking phenotypic variability that characterizes ZIC3-associated congenital defects. For example, the PTC-containing transcripts might encode a C-terminally truncated protein that retains partial function or that dominantly interferes with other ZIC family members. Here we describe the katun (Ka) mouse mutant, which harbours a mutation in the Zic3 gene that results in a PTC. At the time of axis formation there is no discernible decrease in this PTC-containing transcript in vivo, indicating that the mammalian Zic3 transcript is relatively insensitive to NMD, prompting the need to re-examine the molecular function of the truncated proteins predicted from human studies and to determine whether the N-terminal portion of ZIC3 possesses dominant-negative capabilities. A combination of in vitro studies and analysis of the Ka phenotype indicate that it is a null allele of Zic3 and that the N-terminal portion of ZIC3 does not encode a dominant-negative molecule. Heterotaxy in patients with PTC-containing ZIC3 transcripts probably arises due to loss of ZIC3 function alone.