Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The ASH1 HOMOLOG 2 (ASHH2) Histone H3 Methyltransferase Is Required for Ovule and Anther Development in Arabidopsis

Background SET-domain proteins are histone lysine (K) methyltransferases (HMTase) implicated in defining transcriptionally permissive or repressive chromatin. The Arabidopsis ASH1 HOMOLOG 2 (ASHH2) protein (also called SDG8, EFS and CCR1) has been suggested to methylate H3K4 and/or H3K36 and is similar to Drosophila ASH1, a positive maintainer of gene expression, and yeast Set2, a H3K36 HMTase. Mutation of the ASHH2 gene has pleiotropic developmental effects. Here we focus on the role of ASHH2 in plant reproduction. Methodology/Principal Findings A slightly reduced transmission of the ashh2 allele in reciprocal crosses implied involvement in gametogenesis or gamete function. However, the main requirement of ASHH2 is sporophytic. On the female side, close to 80% of mature ovules lack embryo sac. On the male side, anthers frequently develop without pollen sacs or with specific defects in the tapetum layer, resulting in reduction in the number of functional pollen per anther by up to ∼90%. In consistence with the phenotypic findings, an ASHH2 promoter-reporter gene was expressed at the site of megaspore mother cell formation as well as tapetum layers and pollen. ashh2 mutations also result in homeotic changes in floral organ identity. Transcriptional profiling identified more than 300 up-regulated and 600 down-regulated genes in ashh2 mutant inflorescences, whereof the latter included genes involved in determination of floral organ identity, embryo sac and anther/pollen development. This was confirmed by real-time PCR. In the chromatin of such genes (AP1, AtDMC1 and MYB99) we observed a reduction of H3K36 trimethylation (me3), but not H3K4me3 or H3K36me2. Conclusions/Significance The severe distortion of reproductive organ development in ashh2 mutants, argues that ASHH2 is required for the correct expression of genes essential to reproductive development. The reduction in the ashh2 mutant of H3K36me3 on down-regulated genes relevant to the observed defects, implicates ASHH2 in regulation of gene expression via H3K36 trimethylation in chromatin of Arabidopsis inflorescences.
Fast and Transparent Database Reconfiguration for Scaling and Availability through Dynamic Multiversioning

In this paper, we study replication techniques for scaling and continuous operation for a dynamic content server. Our focus is on supporting transparent and fast reconfiguration of its database tier in case of overload or failures. We show that the data persistence aspects can be decoupled from reconfiguration of the database CPU. A lightweight in-memory middleware tier captures the typically heavy-weight read-only requests to ensure flexible database CPU scaling and fail-over. At the same time, updates are handled by an on-disk database back-end that is in charge of making them persistent. Our measurements show instantaneous, seamless reconfiguration in the case of single node failures within the flexible inmemory tier for a web site running the most common, shopping, workload mix of the industry-standard e-commerce TPC-W benchmark. At the same time, a 9-node in-memory tier improves performance during normal operation over a stand-alone InnoDB on-disk database back-end. Throughput scales by factors of 14.6, 17.6 and 6.5 for the browsing, shopping and ordering mixes of the TPC-W benchmark, respectively.
Training Social Workers and Human Service Professionals to Address the Complex Financial Needs of Clients

ABSRACT In social work and other community-based human services settings, clients often present with complex financial problems. As a need for more formal training is beginning to be addressed, evaluation of existing training is important, and this study evaluates outcomes from the Financial Stability Pathway (FSP) project. Designed to prepare professionals with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills to effectively assess and respond to clients’ financial problems, we evaluated the FSP using a one-group pre-, post-, and follow-up design. Results suggest that with training and ongoing booster sessions including peer support, professionals’ preparedness and confidence increased, which strongly predicted the use of practice behaviors learned during training. Implications for professional education and training are discussed.
Spatial Neural Networks and their Functional Samples: Similarities and Differences

Models of neural networks have proven their utility in the development of learning algorithms in computer science and in the theoretical study of brain dynamics in computational neuroscience. We propose in this paper a spatial neural network model to analyze the important class of functional networks, which are commonly employed in computational studies of clinical brain imaging time series. We developed a simulation framework inspired by multichannel brain surface recordings (more specifically, EEG - electroencephalogram) in order to link the mesoscopic network dynamics (represented by sampled functional networks) and the microscopic network structure (represented by an integrate-and-fire neural network located in a 3D space - hence the term spatial neural network). Func- tional networks are obtained by computing pairwise correlations between time-series of mesoscopic electric potential dynamics, which allows the construction of a graph where each node represents one time-series. The spatial neural network model is central in this study in the sense that it allowed us to characterize sampled functional networks in terms of what features they are able to reproduce from the underlying spatial network. Our modeling approach shows that, in specific conditions of sample size and edge density, it is possible to precisely estimate several network measurements of spatial networks by just observing functional samples. Index Terms—Computer simulation, Modeling, Network the- ory (graphs), Spatial networks.
Towards Logical Hypertext Structure A Graph-Theoretic Perspective

Facing the retrieval problem according to the overwhelming set of documents online the adaptation of text categorization to web units has recently been pushed. The aim is to utilize categories of web sites and pages as an additional retrieval criterion. In this context, the bag-of-words model has been utilized just as HTML tags and link structures. In spite of promising results this adaptation stays in the framework of IR specific models since it neglects the content-based structuring inherent to hypertext units. This paper approaches hypertext modelling from the perspective of graph-theory. It presents an XML-based format for representing websites as hypergraphs. These hypergraphs are used to shed light on the relation of hypertext structure types and their web-based instances. We place emphasis on two characteristics of this relation: In terms of realizational ambiguity we speak of functional equivalents to the manifestation of the same structure type. In terms of polymorphism we speak of a single web unit which manifests different structure types. It is shown that polymorphism is a prevalent characteristic of web-based units. This is done by means of a categorization experiment which analyses a corpus of hypergraphs representing the structure and content of pages of conference websites. On this background we plead for a revision of text representation models by means of hypergraphs which are sensitive to the manifold structuring of web documents.
Creating dictionary for the field of human-robot interaction

The paper is about the sentiment analysis within human expressions mainly in the form of texts. The sentiment analysis focuses on two kinds of sentiment: an opinion and emotion. The purpose is to provide the discovered opinions and emotions to a robot. Consequently, the robot will be able to adapt its behavior to the actual emotional situation. The results of the research can be utilized in work with children, mainly those suffered from a neurodevelopmental disorder such as autism. The paper introduces basic approaches to the emotion discovering. The design of the original approach to emotion classification based on the dictionary is presented and tested on Aesop fables.
Towards a pattern based approach for designing virtual communities for innovations

In the field of Open Innovation, virtual communities set up by companies in order to integrate customers into their innovation process are a new and promising instrument. As there is actually a lack of systematic approaches for designing these communities, in this paper, we propose a pattern based two-step model, which enables non-intuitive design choices for virtual communities for innovations.
A Lookup Service for Delaunay Triangulation Overlays : The DeTella Application

In this paper we describe the DeTella distributed overlay directory service. DeTella is composed of network nodes that reside in a logical address space. Data that is inserted into the network is "owned" by a single node and replicated by "neighboring" nodes. Each data item has a logical address that is used to determine which DeTella node owns it. The logical address space that DeTella uses is combined with the HyperCast [3] overlay multicast software for network transport. By using the robust self-organizing properties of the HyperCast software, DeTella can quickly and efficiently reorganize itself in a changing network environment. We feel that our approach is superior to existing distributed directory architectures. The rest of this paper is organized like this: Section 2 gives an introduction to our work, Section 3 discusses previous work in this area, Section 4 outlines our design strategy, Section 5 describes our implementation using HyperCast, Section 6 presents our analysis and testing, Section 7 gives results of our analysis and testing, Section 8 contains our conclusions, finally Section 9 summarizes possible future work.
Skin-Derived Precursors Generate Myelinating Schwann Cells That Promote Remyelination and Functional Recovery after Contusion Spinal Cord Injury

Transplantation of exogenous cells is one approach to spinal cord repair that could potentially enhance the growth and myelination of endogenous axons. Here, we asked whether skin-derived precursors (SKPs), a neural crest-like precursor that can be isolated and expanded from mammalian skin, could be used to repair the injured rat spinal cord. To ask this question, we isolated and expanded genetically tagged murine SKPs and either transplanted them directly into the contused rat spinal cord or differentiated them into Schwann cells (SCs), and performed similar transplantations with the isolated, expanded SKP-derived SCs. Neuroanatomical analysis of these transplants 12 weeks after transplantation revealed that both cell types survived well within the injured spinal cord, reduced the size of the contusion cavity, myelinated endogenous host axons, and recruited endogenous SCs into the injured cord. However, SKP-derived SCs also provided a bridge across the lesion site, increased the size of the spared tissue rim, myelinated spared axons within the tissue rim, reduced reactive gliosis, and provided an environment that was highly conducive to axonal growth. Importantly, SKP-derived SCs provided enhanced locomotor recovery relative to both SKPs and forebrain subventricular zone neurospheres, and had no impact on mechanical or heat sensitivity thresholds. Thus, SKP-derived SCs provide an accessible, potentially autologous source of cells for transplantation into and treatment of the injured spinal cord.
Design And Experimental Verification Of State Predictive Lqg Controllers For Networked Control Systems

Abstract This paper considers a design problem of controllers for wire-less vehicles in the developed networked control system. The developed system consists of a wire-less vehicle and some computers which configure a computer network. The vehicle is controlled over the computer network. One of the computers is a router which has an active queue management mechanism to keep the queue size constant and to control congestion in the computer network. The dynamics of the vehicle over the computer network can be described as linear systems with an input time-delay. State predictive LQG controllers are designed to achieve the stability and better performances of the vehicle over the computer network. The efficacy of the designed controller is demonstrated in a numerical example and an experiment using the developed networked control system.
Effects of topology in networked systems: Stochastic methods and small worlds

The topology of a networked control system has critical consequences for its performance. We provide first substantial examples on the effects of topology. Then we proceed to develop a rigorous evaluation of topology effects using stochastic methods inspired from statistical physics and Markov chains. This analysis leads us to proofs on faster convergence of distributed algorithms in networked systems for certain topologies and especially small world topologies, which are are given an `efficiency¿ characterization. Finally, these results lead to the development of self-organization of such systems in hierarchies that provably improve performance and response.
Equation-based Multicast Congestion control in Data Center networks

Multicast communications in data center has gotten great attention with its requirement for social networking services and file distribution, such as OS update towards virtual machines. Multicast communications offer advantage of efficient network resource usage. To the best of authors' knowledge, only feasibility and scalability issues have been treated in published papers for multicast communications in data centers. Data center networks generally operate at high utilization, so congestion control is one of the most important technical issues. This is also the case for multicast communications, but there have not been published any papers related to multicast congestion control in data centers. In this paper, we propose a new multicast congestion control, DCMC (Data Center Multicast Congestion control). DCMC is an end-to-end multicast congestion control and adjusts the sending rate to the estimated throughput of the worst congested receiver. The worst congested receiver is selected by equation-based estimation of receiver's throughput. Our simulation results show that DCMC can achieve TCP friendliness, i.e. fairness, with DCTCP with keeping high link utilization.
A Delphi Study of Challenges Perceived by West Virginia University Extension Agents

A Delphi Study of Challenges Perceived by West Virginia University Extension Agents Caleb N. Smith One of the Cooperative Extension Services main objectives is to be a non-formal education provider to the public. In order for agents to fulfill this goal, they need to be competent in many areas, some of which may be out of their area of expertise. The purpose for this study was to identify challenges perceived by West Virginia Extension Agents. A three stage Delphi technique was used to determine what Extension Agents viewed as challenges. The study found agents identified 35 challenges of being an Extension Agent in West Virginia. These challenges were separated into five constructs. The top challenges in the construct, training and support, were disconnect between needs of county and expectations of state office, prioritizing what is important, and meeting programming expectations. The top challenges in the construct funding and resources; were: lack of funding, space for storage, and limited available resources other than funding. The third construct was personal issues, which was the highest rated area and included finding time for all programs, balancing family and work obligations, and overextending on commitments. The fourth area, volunteers and community involvement, impact policies have on volunteers was the most challenging, followed closely by finding leadership in programs, community’s perceptions of an agent’s responsibilities, and recruiting volunteers. The challenges identified related to the last construct of organizational factors included, unclear guidelines and standards, inconsistent or nonexistent administrative policies, and employee pay and promotion.
Can CD44 Be a Mediator of Cell Destruction? The Challenge of Type 1 Diabetes

CD44 is a multi-functional receptor with multiple of isoforms engaged in modulation of cell trafficking and transmission of apoptotic signals. We have previously shown that injection of anti-CD44 antibody into NOD mice induced resistance to type 1 diabetes (T1D). In this communication we describe our efforts to understand the mechanism underlying this effect. We found that CD44-deficient NOD mice develop stronger resistance to T1D than wild-type littermates. This effect is not explained by the involvement of CD44 in cell migration, because CD44-deficient inflammatory cells surprisingly had greater invasive potential than the corresponding wild type cells, probably owing to molecular redundancy. We have previously reported and we show here again that CD44 expression and hyaluronic acid (HA, the principal ligand for CD44) accumulation are detected in pancreatic islets of diabetic NOD mice, but not of non-diabetic DBA/1 mice. Expression of CD44 on insulin-secreting β cells renders them susceptible to the autoimmune attack, and is associated with a diminution in β-cells function (e.g., less insulin production and/or insulin secretion) and possibly also with an enhanced apoptosis rate. The diabetes-supportive effect of CD44 expression on β cells was assessed by the TUNEL assay and further strengthened by functional assays exhibiting increased nitric oxide release, reduced insulin secretion after glucose stimulation and decreased insulin content in β cells. All these parameters could not be detected in CD44-deficient islets. We further suggest that HA-binding to CD44-expressing β cells is implicated in β-cell demise. Altogether, these data agree with the concept that CD44 is a receptor capable of modulating cell fate. This finding is important for other pathologies (e.g., cancer, neurodegenerative diseases) in which CD44 and HA appear to be implicated.
2 D Quantum Mechanical Device Modeling and Simulation : Single and Multi-fin

A two-dimensional quantum mechanical modeling has been performed to simulate a nano-scale FinFET by obtaining the self-consistent solution of coupled Poisson and Schrödinger equations. Calculated current-voltage (IV) curves are carefully compared with experimental data to verify the validity of our theoretical work. The transconductance (Gmmax=380) is optimized through varying the Si-fin thickness (Tfin) from 10nm to 75nm. In order to ascertain the current drivability of FinFET, we investigated the dependence on the number of fins. The electron distributions for single and multiple fins FinFETs are reported with several gate voltage Vg=1.5V, -0.3V, 1.5V. In addition, calculated Id-Vg curve of single fin FinFET is also compared with three and five fins FinFET. From these simulation results, the mechanism of the formation of channel and high current drivability of multiple fins FinFET can be understood.
Improving the spatial reuse of IEEE 802.11 WLAN by adaptive carrier sense threshold of access points based on node positions

The IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) is based on the Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) algorithm for avoiding collisions of frames. In CSMA, spatial reuse can be improved by suitably changing the carrier sense threshold (CST). If the increased CST does not incur collisions and helps concurrent transmissions from multiple devices, this improves the throughput of the wireless LAN. For example, when there are two APs and multiple devices exist near each of them, each AP can transmit a frame simultaneously without causing collisions of frames since each device can receive a frame from its associated AP with a high signal power and the interference from another AP is small. In this paper, we propose a system which improves the throughput in CSMA/CA based wireless LANs by controlling the CST values of APs according to positions of mobile hosts. In the system, the CST values of multiple APs are dynamically configured by a controller which has a camera for obtaining the current positions of mobile hosts. The proposed system improves the throughput in WLAN 58% in comparison with basic DCF in a LAN where two APs are arranged at an interval of 50 m and two devices exist within 10 m from each AP.
An efficient Fourier method for 3-D radon inversion in exact cone-beam CT reconstruction

The radial derivative of the three-dimensional (3-D) radon transform of an object is an important intermediate result in many analytically exact cone-beam reconstruction algorithms. The authors briefly review Grangeat's (1991) approach for calculating radon derivative data from cone-beam projections and then present a new, efficient method for 3-D radon inversion, i.e., reconstruction of the image from the radial derivative of the 3-D radon transform, called direct Fourier inversion (DFI). The method is based directly on the 3-D Fourier slice theorem. From the 3-D radon derivative data, which is assumed to be sampled on a spherical grid, the 3-D Fourier transform of the object is calculated by performing fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) along radial lines in the radon space. Then, an interpolation is performed from the spherical to a Cartesian grid using a 3-D gridding step in the frequency domain. Finally, this 3-D Fourier transform is transformed back to the spatial domain via 3-D inverse FFT. The algorithm is computationally efficient with complexity in the order of N/sup 3/ log N. The authors have done reconstructions of simulated 3-D radon derivative data assuming sampling conditions and image quality requirements similar to those in medical computed tomography (CT).
Gapped sequence alignment using artificial neural networks: application to the MHC class I system

MOTIVATION Many biological processes are guided by receptor interactions with linear ligands of variable length. One such receptor is the MHC class I molecule. The length preferences vary depending on the MHC allele, but are generally limited to peptides of length 8-11 amino acids. On this relatively simple system, we developed a sequence alignment method based on artificial neural networks that allows insertions and deletions in the alignment. RESULTS We show that prediction methods based on alignments that include insertions and deletions have significantly higher performance than methods trained on peptides of single lengths. Also, we illustrate how the location of deletions can aid the interpretation of the modes of binding of the peptide-MHC, as in the case of long peptides bulging out of the MHC groove or protruding at either terminus. Finally, we demonstrate that the method can learn the length profile of different MHC molecules, and quantified the reduction of the experimental effort required to identify potential epitopes using our prediction algorithm. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The NetMHC-4.0 method for the prediction of peptide-MHC class I binding affinity using gapped sequence alignment is publicly available at: http://www.cbs. dtu.dk/services/NetMHC-4.0.
The fundamental limit on binary switching energy for terascale integration (TSI)

The fundamental limit on signal energy transfer during a binary switching transition is E/sub s/(min)=(ln2)kT. Derivation of precisely this result based on two entirely distinct physical models confirms its validity. The first model is an ideal MOSFET operating in a CMOS inverter circuit at the limit of its capacity for binary signal discrimination. The second is an isolated interconnect treated as a noisy communication channel. Both models are relevant to modern terascale integration.