Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adult NG2+ Cells Are Permissive to Neurite Outgrowth and Stabilize Sensory Axons during Macrophage-Induced Axonal Dieback after Spinal Cord Injury

We previously demonstrated that activated ED1+ macrophages induce extensive axonal dieback of dystrophic sensory axons in vivo and in vitro. Interestingly, after spinal cord injury, the regenerating front of axons is typically found in areas rich in ED1+ cells, but devoid of reactive astrocyte processes. These observations suggested that another cell type must be present in these areas to counteract deleterious effects of macrophages. Cells expressing the purportedly inhibitory chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan NG2 proliferate in the lesion and intermingle with macrophages, but their influence on regeneration is highly controversial. Our in vivo analysis of dorsal column crush lesions confirms the close association between NG2+ cells and injured axons. We hypothesized that NG2+ cells were growth promoting and thereby served to increase axonal stability following spinal cord injury. We observed that the interactions between dystrophic adult sensory neurons and primary NG2+ cells derived from the adult spinal cord can indeed stabilize the dystrophic growth cone during macrophage attack. NG2+ cells expressed high levels of laminin and fibronectin, which promote neurite outgrowth on the surface of these cells. Our data also demonstrate that NG2+ cells, but not astrocytes, use matrix metalloproteases to extend across a region of inhibitory proteoglycan, and provide a permissive bridge for adult sensory axons. These data support the hypothesis that NG2+ cells are not inhibitory to regenerating sensory axons and, in fact, they may provide a favorable substrate that can stabilize the regenerating front of dystrophic axons in the inhibitory environment of the glial scar.
Ideophones in Japanese modulate the P2 and late positive complex responses

Sound-symbolism, or the direct link between sound and meaning, is typologically and behaviorally attested across languages. However, neuroimaging research has mostly focused on artificial non-words or individual segments, which do not represent sound-symbolism in natural language. We used EEG to compare Japanese ideophones, which are phonologically distinctive sound-symbolic lexical words, and arbitrary adverbs during a sentence reading task. Ideophones elicit a larger visual P2 response than arbitrary adverbs, as well as a sustained late positive complex. Our results and previous literature suggest that the larger P2 may indicate the integration of sound and sensory information by association in response to the distinctive phonology of ideophones. The late positive complex may reflect the facilitated lexical retrieval of arbitrary words in comparison to ideophones. This account provides new evidence that ideophones exhibit similar cross-modal correspondences to those which have been proposed for non-words and individual sounds.
The Combined Use of Airborne Remote Sensing Techniques within a GIS Environment for the Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Urban Areas: An Operational Application

The knowledge of the topographic features, the building properties, and the road infrastructure settings are relevant operational tasks for managing post-crisis events, restoration activities, and for supporting search and rescue operations. Within such a framework, airborne remote sensing tools have demonstrated to be powerful instruments, whose joint use can provide meaningful analyses to support the risk assessment of urban environments. Based on this rationale, in this study, the operational benefits obtained by combining airborne LiDAR and hyperspectral measurements are shown. Terrain and surface digital models are gathered by using LiDAR data. Information about roads and roof materials are provided through the supervised classification of hyperspectral images. The objective is to combine such products within a geographic information system (GIS) providing value-added maps to be used for the seismic vulnerability assessment of urban environments. Experimental results are gathered for the city of Cosenza, Italy.
Dimeric Structure of the Transmembrane Domain of Glycophorin A in Lipidic and Detergent Environments

Specific interactions between transmembrane α-helices, to a large extent, determine the biological function of integral membrane proteins upon normal development and in pathological states of an organism. Various membrane-like media, partially those mimicking the conditions of multicomponent biological membranes, are used to study the structural and thermodynamic features that define the character of oligomerization of transmembrane helical segments. The choice of the composition of the membrane-mimicking medium is conducted in an effort to obtain a biologically relevant conformation of the protein complex and a sample that would be stable enough to allow to perform a series of long-term experiments with its use. In the present work, heteronuclear NMR spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations were used to demonstrate that the two most widely used media (detergent DPC micelles and lipid DMPC/DHPC bicelles) enable to perform structural studies of the specific interactions between transmembrane α-helices by the example of dimerizing the transmembrane domain of the bitopic protein glycophorin A. However, a number of peculiarities place lipid bicelles closer to natural lipid bilayers in terms of their physical properties.
Eye-Trace: Segmentation of Volumetric Microscopy Images with Eyegaze

We introduce an image annotation approach for the analysis of volumetric electron microscopic imagery of brain tissue. The core task is to identify and link tubular objects (neuronal fibers) in images taken from consecutive ultrathin sections of brain tissue. In our approach an individual 'flies' through the 3D data at a high speed and maintains eye gaze focus on a single neuronal fiber, aided by navigation with a handheld gamepad controller. The continuous foveation on a fiber of interest constitutes an intuitive means to define a trace that is seamlessly recorded with a desktop eyetracker and transformed into precise 3D coordinates of the annotated fiber (skeleton tracing). In a participant experiment we validate the approach by demonstrating a tracing accuracy of about the respective radiuses of the traced fibers with browsing speeds of up to 40 brain sections per second.
LGBTQ Aging: Mental Health at Midlife and Older Adulthood

Abstract Premised upon strength-based models of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer (LGBTQ) aging, this Internet study explored relationships among mental and physical health, financial anxiety, body shame, alienation, loneliness, self-compassion, and self-transcendence in midlife and older adulthood. Findings suggest LGBTQ midlife mental health is predicted by financial anxiety, physical health, self-compassion, alienation, self-transcendence, and body shame (R² =.61), and self-compassion, physical health, financial anxiety, and self-transcendence in older adulthood (R² =.56). Older adults identifying as LGBTQ evidenced less body shame and financial anxiety, and higher self-compassion and mental health. Findings suggest the primacy of self-compassion in LGBTQ developmental gerontology. Counseling implications are discussed.
Radical Innovation in a Small Firm: A Hybrid Electric Vehicle Development Project at Volvo Cars

The potential paradigmatic shift in technology from the internal combustion engine to electric propulsion via hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) has been addressed by most automakers, and has produced very different outcomes. This paper uses the framework of core capabilities to discuss how the small automaker, Volvo Cars, made substantial progress in its HEV development using an approach based on limited resources and a low risk. A comparison with Toyota's successful but very resource-demanding Prius project reveals some factors contributing towards rapid development in a context of limited resources, including focused project objectives, tight collaboration with suppliers of the new technologies, reuse of existing technologies and an unaggressive, bottom-up approach to change the firm's values and norms and other core capability dimensions. This paper provides an empirical illustration of how a small company in a mature industry worked with radical innovation in a development project drawing on the combination of organizational slack, entrepreneurial employees and an extensive use of external (knowledge) suppliers.
Chemical neuroanatomy of the vesicular amine transporters

Acetylcholine, catecholamines, serotonin, and histamine are classical neurotransmitters. These small molecules also play important roles in the endocrine and immune/inflammatory systems. Serotonin secreted from enterochromaffin cells of the gut epithelium regulates gut motility; histamine secreted from basophils and mast cells is a major regulator of vascular permeability and skin inflammatory responses; epinephrine is a classical hormone released from the adrenal medulla. Each of these molecules is released from neural, endocrine, or immune/inflammatory cells only in response to specific physiological stimuli. Regulated secretion is possible because amines are stored in secretory vesicles and released via a stimulus‐dependent exocytotic event. Amine storage—at concentrations orders of magnitude higher than in the cytoplasm—is accomplished in turn by specific secretory vesicle transporters that recognize the amines and move them from the cytosol into the vesicle. Immunohistochemical visualization of specific vesicular amine transporters (VATs) in neuronal, endocrine, and inflammatory cells provides important new information about how amine‐handling cell phenotypes arise during development and how vesicular transport is regulated during homeostatic response events. Comparison of the chemical neuroanatomy of VATs and amine biosynthetic enzymes has also revealed cell groups that express vesicular transporters but not enzymes for monoamine synthesis, and vice versa:their function and regulation is a new topic of investigation in mammalian neurobiology. The chemical neuroanatomy of the vesicular amine transporters is reviewed here. These and similar data emerging from the study of the localization of the recently characterized vesicular inhibitory and excitatory amino acid transporters will contribute to understanding chemically coded synaptic circuitry in the brain, and amine‐handling neuroendocrine and immune/inflammatory cell regulation. —Weihe, E. , Eiden, L. E. Chemical neuroanatomy of the vesicular amine transporters. The FASEB J. 14, 2435–2449 (2000)
Aging‐associated up‐regulation of neuronal 5‐lipoxygenase expression: putative role in neuronal vulnerability

Aging is associated with neurodegenerative processes. 5‐Lipoxygenase (5‐LO), which is also expressed in neurons, is the key enzyme in the synthesis of leukotrienes, inflammatory eicosanoids that are capable of promoting neurodegeneration. We hypothesized that neuronal 5‐LO expression can be up‐regulated in aging and that this may increase the brain's vulnerability to neurodegeneration. We observed differences in the distribution of 5‐LO‐like immunoreactivity in various brain areas of adult young (2‐month‐old) vs. old (24‐month‐old) male rats. Greater 5‐LO‐like immunoreactivity was found in old vs. young rats, in particular in the dendrites of pyramidal neurons in limbic structures, including the hippocampus, and in layer V pyramidal cells of the frontoparietal cortex and their apical dendrites. The aging‐increased expression of neuronal 5‐LO protein appears to be due to increased 5‐LO gene expression. Using a quantitative reverse transcription/polymer‐ase chain reaction assay and 5‐LO‐specific oligonucleotide primers and their mutated internal standards, we observed about a 2.5‐fold greater hippocampal 5‐LO mRNA content in old rats. 5‐LO‐like immunoreactivity was also observed in small, nonpyramidal cells, which were positive for glutamic acid decarboxylase or glial fibrillary acid protein. This type of 5‐LO immunostaining did not increase in the old rats. Hippocampal excitotoxic injury induced by systemic injection of kainate was greater in old rats. Neuroprotection was observed with the 5‐LO inhibitor, caffeic acid. Together, these results suggest that aging increases both neuronal 5‐LO expression and neuronal vulnerability to 5‐LO inhibitor‐sensitive ex‐citotoxicity, and indicate that the 5‐LO system might play a significant role in the pathobiology of aging‐associated neurodegenerative diseases. —Uz, T. , Pesold, C. , Longone, P., Manev, H. Aging‐associated up‐regulation of neuronal 5‐lipoxygenase expression: putative role in neuronal vulnerability. FASEB J. 12, 439–449 (1998)
Parameter sharing and minimum classification error training of mixtures of factor analyzers for speaker identification

This paper investigates the parameter tying strategies of mixtures of factor analyzers (MFA) and discriminative training of MFA for speaker identification. The parameters of factor loading matrices or diagonal matrices are shared in different mixtures of MFA. The minimum classification error (MCE) training is applied to the MFA parameters to enhance the discrimination abilities. The results of text-independent speaker identification experiments show that MFA outperforms the conventional Gaussian mixture models (GMM) with diagonal or full covariance matrices and achieves the best performance when sharing the diagonal matrices, resulting in a relative gain of 26% over the GMM with diagonal covariance matrices. The recognition performance is further improved by the MCE training with an additional 3% error reduction.
Wireless solutions for automation requirements

Wireless technologies are being more and more used in automation, not only because the installation costs are much lower, but also the true self-reconfiguration of a system without any rewiring becomes possible as ever did before. Together with other technologies like service oriented architectures and the use of agent technology, wireless at the physical level play an important role towards flexible and self-reconfiguring systems. To try to have a clearer view about how wireless technologies are suitable or not for automation purposes, we first enumerate the communication requirements of several typical applications. We group the applications into classes and then we present what subsets of wireless technologies do cope with the specific requirements of each class of automation problems. Moreover we present self-powering issues and new opportunities for wireless networks, like location aware systems.
Modeling the non linear behavior of a magnetic fault current limiter

Fault Current Limiters are used in a wide array of applications from small circuit protection at low power levels to large scale high power applications which require superconductors and complex control circuitry. One advantage of passive fault current limiters (FCL) is the automatic behavior that is dependent on the intrinsic properties of the circuit elements rather than on a complex feedback control scheme making this approach attractive for low cost applications and also where reliability is critical. This paper describes the behavioral modeling of a passive Magnetic FCL and its potential application in practical circuits.
Forecasting power output for grid-connected photovoltaic power system without using solar radiation measurement

With the increasing penetration of photovoltaic (PV) power system into the utility network, the issue caused by the fluctuation and intermittence of PV power output draws more attention. In order to predict the hourly power output for a PV system without any complex meteorological instrumentation, a NARX network-based forecasting model is proposed in this paper. Hottel's radiation model is applied to calculate clear-sky radiation incident on any inclined surface at any time. Furthermore, weather forecast data from public websites are taken as the variables that depict the cloud status in future days. By giving enough historical data, the network can be well trained. While forecasting power output, the NARX network can also adjust its weights according to the forecast error. Due to its adaptation to time-varying input, the proposed method can predict PV power output accurately even if the weather changes suddenly. Forecasting results of a roof-top PV power system verify the effectiveness of the proposed model with high precision and high efficiency.
Bagging classifiers based on Kernel density estimators

A lot of research is being conducted on combining classification rules (classifiers) to produce a single one, known as an ensemble, which in general is more accurate than the individual classifiers making up the ensemble. Two popular methods for creating ensembles are Bagging introduced by Breiman, (1996) and, AdaBoosting by Freund and Schapire (1996). These methods rely on resampling techniques to obtain different training sets for each of the classifiers. Previous work has demonstrated that combining techniques are very effective for unstable classifiers, such as decision trees, neural networks and naive Bayes. In this paper we present some results in application of Bagging to classifiers where the class conditional density is estimated using Kernel density estimators.
Combined curvelet and ASF with neural network for denoising sonar images

Curvelet transform is the member of multiscale geometric transforms, which provides an best solution to the problems associated with image denoising with wavelets. The wavelet's performance degrades when circular type space-frequency like curve or arc edges or lines are viewed in the image. Curvelet transform has redundant dictionary that can provide sparse representation of signals that have edges along regular curve. The second generation curvelet transform is simpler to understand and use and also faster and less redundant compared to its previous version. Curvelet transform is depicted in various domains and meant for higher dimensions. This paper focused on an better curvelet based denoising technique to improve sonar images.
Gain time reclaiming in high performance real-time Java systems

The run-time characteristics of Java, such as high frequency of method invocation, dynamic dispatching and dynamic loading, make Java more difficult than other object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, for conducting Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis. To offer a more flexible way to develop object-oriented real-time applications in the realtime Java environment without loss of predictability and performance, we propose a novel gain time reclaiming framework integrated with WCET analysis. This paper demonstrates how to improve the utilisation and performance of the whole system by reclaiming gain time at run-time. Our approach shows that integrating WCET with gain time reclaiming can not only provide a more flexible environment, but it also does not necessarily result in unsafe or unpredictable timing behaviour.
Sexually Dimorphic Serotonergic Dysfunction in a Mouse Model of Huntington's Disease and Depression

Depression is the most common psychiatric disorder in Huntington's disease (HD) patients. In the general population, women are more prone to develop depression and such susceptibility might be related to serotonergic dysregulation. There is yet to be a study of sexual dimorphism in the development and presentation of depression in HD patients. We investigated whether 8-week-old male and female R6/1 transgenic HD mice display depressive-like endophenotypes associated with serotonergic impairments. We also studied the behavioral effects of acute treatment with sertraline. We found that only female HD mice exhibited a decreased preference for saccharin as well as impaired emotionality-related behaviors when assessed on the novelty-suppressed feeding test (NSFT) and the forced-swimming test (FST). The exaggerated immobility time displayed by female HD in the FST was reduced by acute administration of sertraline. We also report an increased response to the 5-HT1A receptor agonist 8-OH-DPAT in inducing hypothermia and a decreased 5-HT2A receptor function in HD animals. While tissue levels of serotonin were reduced in both male and female HD mice, we found that serotonin concentration and hydroxylase-2 (TPH2) mRNA levels were higher in the hippocampus of males compared to female animals. Finally, the antidepressant-like effects of sertraline in the FST were blunted in male HD animals. This study reveals sex-specific depressive-related behaviors during an early stage of HD prior to any cognitive and motor deficits. Our data suggest a crucial role for disrupted serotonin signaling in mediating the sexually dimorphic depression-like phenotype in HD mice.
Improved Load Balanced & Energy Efficient Ad hoc on demand routing Algorithm

- With increasing deployment of unmanned and energy-constrained sensor devices in large-scale mobile ad hoc networks; the aspect of an energy efficient network lifetime have become the key consideration in designing ad hoc routing protocols. Routing protocols are required in network to deliver packets from source to destination. The multipath routing provides the concept of load balancing for efficient data transfer. In this paper, an improved routing algorithm is proposed for Mobile Ad hoc Network; modifying the existing ad hoc on demand distance vector routing (AODV) by calculating the load on different routes based on the parameters like minimum hop count, remaining energy in nodes and node mobility. To effectively use the energy of the network path and sharing the load on multipath, the concept of ‘first come first serve’ is proposed to be implemented.
Fatigue features based on eye tracking for driver inattention system

This paper deals with segmentation methods and fatigue features determination for a camera-based visual systems monitoring driver vigilance. Generally visual monitoring systems have to analyse a set of computed fatigue features and recognize driver inattention or sleepiness. The paper is focused mostly on the segmentation methods used for reliable eyes tracking because of eyes features are certainly the most significant features for determining of a driver fatigue. Fundamentals segmentation methods as a simple colour segmentation and Hough transform are introduced in the paper. After that a more complex Haar-like features approach and symmetries detection approach are shortly introduced. Finally, several of the leading fatigue features are listed and described. All the presented segmentation methods were tested on both laboratory and real images.
The Impact of Coupling on the Fault-Proneness of Aspect-Oriented Programs: An Empirical Study

Coupling in software applications is often used as an indicator of external quality attributes such as fault-proneness. In fact, the correlation of coupling metrics and faults in object oriented programs has been widely studied. However, there is very limited knowledge about which coupling properties in aspect-oriented programming (AOP) are effective indicators of faults in modules. Existing coupling metrics do not take into account the specificities of AOP mechanisms. As a result, these metrics are unlikely to provide optimal predictions of pivotal quality attributes such as fault-proneness. This impacts further by restraining the assessments of AOP empirical studies. To address these issues, this paper presents an empirical study to evaluate the impact of coupling sourced from AOP-specific mechanisms. We utilise a novel set of coupling metrics to predict fault occurrences in aspect-oriented programs. We also compare these new metrics against previously proposed metrics for AOP. More specifically, we analyse faults from several releases of three AspectJ applications and perform statistical analyses to reveal the effectiveness of these metrics when predicting faults. Our study shows that a particular set of fine-grained directed coupling metrics have the potential to help create better fault prediction models for AO programs.