Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Post-translational regulation of P2X receptor channels: modulation by phospholipids

P2X receptor channels mediate fast excitatory signaling by ATP and play major roles in sensory transduction, neuro-immune communication and inflammatory response. P2X receptors constitute a gene family of calcium-permeable ATP-gated cation channels therefore the regulation of P2X signaling is critical for both membrane potential and intracellular calcium homeostasis. Phosphoinositides (PIPn) are anionic signaling phospholipids that act as functional regulators of many types of ion channels. Direct PIPn binding was demonstrated for several ligand- or voltage-gated ion channels, however no generic motif emerged to accurately predict lipid-protein binding sites. This review presents what is currently known about the modulation of the different P2X subtypes by phospholipids and about critical determinants underlying their sensitivity to PIPn levels in the plasma membrane. All functional mammalian P2X subtypes tested, with the notable exception of P2X5, have been shown to be positively modulated by PIPn, i.e., homomeric P2X1, P2X2, P2X3, P2X4, and P2X7, as well as heteromeric P2X1/5 and P2X2/3 receptors. Based on various results reported on the aforementioned subtypes including mutagenesis of the prototypical PIPn-sensitive P2X4 and PIPn-insensitive P2X5 receptor subtypes, an increasing amount of functional, biochemical and structural evidence converges on the modulatory role of a short polybasic domain located in the proximal C-terminus of P2X subunits. This linear motif, semi-conserved in the P2X family, seems necessary and sufficient for encoding direct modulation of ATP-gated channels by PIPn. Furthermore, the physiological impact of the regulation of ionotropic purinergic responses by phospholipids on pain pathways was recently revealed in the context of native crosstalks between phospholipase C (PLC)-linked metabotropic receptors and P2X receptor channels in dorsal root ganglion sensory neurons and microglia.
A novel methodology for robust dynamic positioning of marine vessels: Theory and experiments

The paper describes a novel robust adaptive controller for Dynamic Positioning (DP) of marine vessels. The proposed Robust Multiple Model Adaptive Dynamic Positioning (RMMADP) structure consists of a bank of robust controllers designed using the Mixed-μ methodology and an identification unit. The latter is composed by a bank of (steady-state) Kalman filters (KFs) that generate online the output estimation errors (residuals) that are used to generate appropriate monitoring signals. At each sampling time, the monitoring signals are assessed to decide which controller should be selected from the bank of the controllers. The proposed adaptive structure of the RMMADP enables the DP system to operate in different operational conditions and hence, it is a step forward to a so-called all-year marine DP system. Numerical simulations, carried out with a high fidelity nonlinear DP simulator, illustrate the efficacy of the RMMADP techniques proposed. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, the results are experimentally verified by model testing a DP operated ship, the Cybership III, under different sea conditions in a towing tank equipped with a hydraulic wave maker.
In Search of Quality in Finnish Pre‐School Education

This study was conducted during the academic year 2002–2003 in a municipality in Eastern Finland. It focuses on pre‐school education assessing its quality factors from the parents’, teachers’ and children’s points of view. Theoretically, the study focuses on analyses of the purposes of the national core curriculum and pedagogical issues that are related to understanding quality in pre‐school education. According to this study, parents, pre‐school teachers, and children are satisfied with pre‐school education in general. They all emphasize its importance for children’s development in the areas of cognitive and social skills and development. Results clearly show that pre‐school education should be revised to meet the needs of improvement in the area of co‐operation, the expectations of modern society, and the aims of the national curriculum. In addition, pre‐school education is still searching for its own cultural position in the area of Finnish school and daycare systems.
An Integrated Model for Strategic Management in Dynamic Industries: Qualitative Research from Taiwan's Passive-Component Industry

For the past few decades, strategic management theorists and practitioners alike have been absorbed with the pursuit of answers to a single question: Why do some firms perform better than others? Until the late 1980s, the search for answers to this question was centered on research that revolved around two major strategic thinking paradigms: an industrial organizational perspective (IO school), and a resource-based view (RBV school). Essentially, the IO school of thought emphasizes strategy formulation based on policies directed at controlling the market (Porter, 1980, 1991). On the other hand, the RBV school of thought is fundamentally concerned with improving corporate performance through efficiency (Wenerfelt, 1984; Barney, 1991). In short, one school is outwardly focused and one school is inwardly focused.
The Early Search for Tractable Ways of Reasoning about Programs

This article traces the history - up to around 1990 - of research on reasoning about programs. The main focus is on sequential imperative programs but some comments are made on concurrency. The main thesis is that the idea of reasoning about programs has been around since they were first written; the search has been to find tractable methods.
W-Band Micromachined Vertical Interconnection for Three-Dimensional Microwave ICs

A novel vertical interconnection utilizing finite ground coplanar waveguide (FGCPW) and silicon micromachining has been developed for W-band The measured results indicate insertion loss of only 0.6 dB. This transition uses standard processing techniques and is a compact, 520 ¿m width and 520 ¿m length, design. With this vertical interconnect, multiple IC layers may be connected to achieve new levels of high density, low loss integration.
IMPROVISATION OF NEW NOTES DURING SINGING BY MALE SARDINIAN WARBLERS SYLVIA MELANOCEPHALA

ABSTRACT The songs of Sardinian warblers Sylvia melanocephala are extremely complex and variable, and even consecutive songs uttered by the same male usually differ. To provide a better understanding of the nature of the variation recorded, an attempt has been made to determine size and composition of the note repertoire of three selected individuals. The analysis was carried out on samples each consisting of several dozen songs, and the various notes were sorted on the basis of the visual similarity of their spectrographs patterns. Each male turned out to have a very large note repertoire which does not show any overlap with those of other males, with the only exception a particular note found in the songs of all the males. In two birds out of three, however, the graphs of the occurrence of new notes in consecutive songs show no tendency to become asymptotic. This suggests that the assessment of note repertoire size in these birds is not accurate, as they continue inserting new notes in their songs even .
Testing face processing skills in children

We describe a set of face processing tests suitable for use with children aged from 4 to 10 years, which include tests of expression, lipreading and gaze processing as well as identification. The tests can be administered on paper or using a computer, and comparisons between the performance on computer- and paper-based versions suggest that format of administration makes little difference. We present results obtained from small samples of children at four different age groups (Study 1, computer-based tests), and larger samples at three age groups (Study 2, paper-based tests) from preschool to 10 years of age. The tests were found to be developmentally sensitive. There were quite strong correlations between performance on different tests of the same face processing ability (e.g. gaze processing), and generally rather weaker correlations between tests of different abilities.
A Decade after Cairo

The Programme of Action issued by the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development was the first and most wide-ranging international policy document to promote the concepts of reproductive rights and reproductive health. Its major recommendation was that population programmes should provide comprehensive reproductive health services integrated and coordinated with each other and with other health services. It put women at its centre and expressly rejected the use of incentives and targets in family planning services. But the Programme of Action is still far from being implemented because health services are declining or have collapsed; the underlying conditions determining women's health and their control over childbearing are deteriorating; fundamentalisms opposing women's rights are on the rise; and neo-Malthusian thinking is as ingrained as ever in development institutions, donor agencies and government departments. These negative forces on women's health can be attributed to the implementation of neo-liberal economic and health policies over the past two decades. The Programme of Action, together with the accompanying political organising by international women's organisations and population groups, did not challenge neo-liberalism sufficiently, but endorsed it in several respects. It thereby undermined its ground-breaking principles and goals of reproductive health.
A 15-year follow-up study of ventilatory function in adults with asthma.

BACKGROUND Although the prevalence of asthma and morbidity related to asthma are increasing, little is known about the natural history of lung function in adults with this disease. METHODS We used data from a longitudinal epidemiologic study of the general population in a Danish city, the Copenhagen City Heart Study, to analyze changes over time in the forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) in adults with self-reported asthma and adults without asthma. The study was conducted between 1976 and 1994; for each patient, three measurements of lung function were obtained over a 15-year period. The final data set consisted of measurements from 17,506 subjects (8136 men and 9370 women), of whom 1095 had asthma. RESULTS Among subjects who participated in all three evaluations, the unadjusted decline in FEV1 among subjects with asthma was 38 ml per year, as compared with 22 ml per year in those without asthma. The decline in FEV1 normalized for height (FEV1 divided by the square of the height in meters) was greater among the subjects with asthma than among those without the disease (P<0.001). Among both men and women, and among both smokers and nonsmokers, subjects with asthma had greater declines in FEV1 over time than those without asthma (P<0.001). At the age of 60 years, a 175-cm-tall nonsmoking man without asthma had an average FEV1 of 3.05 liters, as compared with 1.99 liters for a man of similar age and height who smoked and had asthma. CONCLUSIONS In a sample of the general population, people who identified themselves as having asthma had substantially greater declines in FEV1 over time than those who did not.
Ballot Position, Choice Fatigue, and Voter Behaviour

In this article, we examine the effect of "choice fatigue" on decision making. We exploit a natural experiment in which voters face the same contest at different ballot positions due to differences in the number of local issues on their ballot. Facing more decisions before a given contest significantly increases the tendency to abstain or rely on decision shortcuts, such as voting for the status quo or the first-listed candidate. We estimate that, without choice fatigue, abstentions would decrease by 8%, and 6% of the propositions in our data set would have passed rather than failed.
Social Media Conceptualization and Taxonomy

‘Social media’ has become a widely used term, and the subject of a growing body of academic research, but with little definitional consensus. The purpose of this article is to answer the question: what are social media? We examined existing scholarly definitions of the term ‘social media’ through a Lasswellian lens, by applying directed content analysis to a sample of 23 academic definitions retrieved from the top 179 cited papers on social media in the Web of Knowledge database. The present study makes two main contributions to the theorization of social media. First, we build on previous academic efforts to suggest an inclusive definition of social media based on Lasswell’s act of communication. Second, using the suggested definition, we categorize social media channels based on three dimensions, that is, user, content format and function. This taxonomy is illustrated by presenting a social media cube that aims to help practitioners, managers, researchers and developers to both classify existing social media platforms, and identify prospective ones.
Change of Word Characteristics in 20th-Century Turkish Literature: A Statistical Analysis

Abstract This article provides a century-wide quantitative analysis of the Turkish literature using 40 novels of 40 authors. We divide the century into four eras or quarter-centuries; allocate 10 novels to each era, and partition each novel into equal-sized blocks. Using cross-validation-based discriminant analysis, with the most frequent words as discriminators, we achieve a classification rate with a relatively high accuracy when the novel blocks are classified according to their eras. We show that, by using statistical stylistic methods, the author gender of Turkish texts can be accurately identified. We also study the gender differences regarding the use of most frequent words. Using weighted least squares regression and a sliding window approach we show that as time passes, words, both in terms of tokens (in text) and types (in vocabulary), have become longer. The findings of this work have implications for the historical linguistic analysis of the Turkish language.
Distributed Placement of Power Generation Resources in Uncertain Environments

To tackle the problem of long-term disasters of river basin by big dams and at the same time to meet the energy demands we propose a novel distributed allocation of power generation units along the river. The presented approach is applicable where a distribution of resources is required subject to challenges posed by uncertainty in the behavior of the environment. The problem of uncertainty is split into two parts. The short-term variations are taken care of using a distance based partitioning approach to determine the power unit co-ordinates and corresponding partitions of the geographic area based on the power demand. The key idea is to minimize the distance between probability distribution of the generated power and the total demand supposed to be catered in a local geographic partition. The long-term uncertainty is handled by assigning sleep/wake periods to the placed run-of-the-river (ROR)s. Numerical simulations on the water flow data of the Mississippi river is performed and it is shown that the proposed formulation is applicable for determining the initial unit placements and also in deciding the sleep/wake periods of the placed units. A comprehensive study of ROR placements upon varying the demand density, locality preference and time is performed. The solution based on the idea of disturb and settle can be computed in an efficient polynomial order complexity and offers exponential savings from the brute-force.
PESAP: A Privacy Enhanced Social Application Platform

Nowadays, social networking sites provide third party application developers with means to access their social graph, by providing a social application platform. Through their users, these developers acquire a significant set of personal information from the social graph. The current protection mechanisms, such as privacy policies and access control mechanisms fall short on protecting the privacy of the users. In this paper we present a framework for a privacy enhanced social application platform, called PESAP, that technically enforces the protection of the personal information of a user, when interacting with social applications. The framework is based on two pillars: anonymization of the social graph and secure information flow inside the browser. PESAP is targeted to be as compatible as possible with the current state-of-the-art design of social application platforms, while technically enforcing the protection of user privacy. We evaluate this compliance, based on a classification of applications in different categories.
Probabilistic Novelty Detection for Acoustic Surveillance Under Real-World Conditions

Novelty detection in the machine learning context refers to identifying unknown/novel data, i.e., data which vary greatly from the ones that the system was trained with. This paper explores this technique as applied to acoustic surveillance of abnormal situations. The ultimate goal of the system is to help an authorized person towards taking the appropriate actions for preventing life/property loss. A wide variety of acoustic parameters is employed towards forming a multidomain feature vector, which captures diverse characteristics of the audio signals. Subsequently the feature coefficients are fed to three probabilistic novelty detection methodologies. Their performance is computed using two measures which take into account misdetections and false alarms. Out dataset was recorded under real-world conditions including three different locations where various types of normal and abnormal sound events were captured. A smart-home environment, an open public space, and an office corridor were used. The results indicate that probabilistic novelty detection can provide an accurate analysis of the audio scene to identify abnormal events.
Exploring the Role of ICT in the transition from a Small Business owner to an Entrepreneur: A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective in a Developing Context

One of the preferred approaches to solving developing country (DC) challenges such as unemployment, poverty and redundant youth is through entrepreneurship and the use of ICT. Yet integrating ICT in business often presents another unnecessary challenge for Small Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) in DCs. In this paper we adopt a qualitative approach using the dynamic capabilities framework (DCF) to explore the role of ICT in transitioning SMME owners into entrepreneurs. The key findings suggest that younger SMME owners are more willing to innovate with ICTs yet lack the resources. The older SMME owners invest in ICT but struggle to make use of it. The research contributes to practice in suggesting how training in ICT to SMME owners, as part of stirring an entrepreneurial culture in DCs, needs to include these generational differences. For theory, the research shows that the DCF can sufficiently be used to understand growth in SMMEs in DCs.
Molecular cloning, characterization, and functional expression of rat oxidosqualene cyclase cDNA.

A cDNA encoding rat oxidosqualene lanosterol-cyclase [lanosterol synthase; (S)-2,3-epoxysqualene mutase (cyclizing, lanosterol-forming), EC 5.4. 99.7] was cloned and sequenced by a combination of PCR amplification, using primers based on internal amino acid sequence of the purified enzyme, and cDNA library screening by oligonucleotide hybridization. An open reading frame of 2199 bp encodes a M(r) 83,321 protein with 733 amino acids. The deduced amino acid sequence of the rat enzyme showed significant homology to the known oxidosqualene cyclases (OSCs) from yeast and plant (39-44% identity) and still retained 17-26% identity to two bacterial squalene cyclases (EC 5.4.99.-). Like other cyclases, the rat enzyme is rich in aromatic amino acids and contains five so-called QW motifs, highly conserved regions with a repetitive beta-strand turn motif. The binding site sequence for the 29-methylidene-2,3-oxidosqualene (29-MOS), a mechanism-based irreversible inhibitor specific for the vertebrate cyclase, is well-conserved in all known OSCs. The hydropathy plot revealed a rather hydrophilic N-terminal region and the absence of a hydrophobic signal peptide. Unexpectedly, this microsomal membrane-associated enzyme showed no clearly delineated transmembrane domain. A full-length cDNA was constructed and subcloned into a pYEUra3 plasmid, selected in Escherichia coli cells, and used to transform the OSC-deficient uracil-auxotrophic SGL9 strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The recombinant rat OSC expressed was efficiently labeled by the mechanism-based inhibitor [3H]29-MOS.
Development of a low-cost, self-contained, combined vision and inertial navigation system

In the field of autonomous vehicle research, maintaining accurate estimates of a vehicle's velocities, position, and orientation is crucial to successful navigation. Normally, this information can be obtained through the use of a GPS system. However, GPS signals are not always available in some of the more exotic or dangerous locations that a vehicle might be dispatched to. This paper proposes a hybrid navigation system for autonomous vehicles that uses inertial sensors and a stereo camera system to accurately determine the velocities, position, and orientation of a vehicle. Such a system would be ideal for vehicles that have to operate in underground, indoor, extraterrestrial, or other GPS-denied environments.
Studying Regions as Spaces for Democracy: A Political Sociological Approach

Why have some European regions institutionalized participatory democracy? To answer this question, this article adopts a sociological approach and method which go beyond current political science narratives about regional democracies. To study how choices over participatory democracy are mediated, we locate an ‘observatory site’—the Regional Government Site—and examine interactions and strategies of actors therein. When applied to the institutionalization of citizens’ juries in Rhônes-Alpes, our approach reveals how, through the resolution of contingencies, regional authorities become producers of participatory democracy. Organizational struggles combined with ideological struggles over visions of democracy transformed the region into a space for politics.
Assessing and improving the quality of undergraduate teaching in China: the Course Experience Questionnaire

Assessing and improving the quality of undergraduate teaching is an important issue in China. Using the Course Experience Questionnaire, this study examined the quality of undergraduate teaching by investigating the relationships between students’ course experience, the learning outcomes demonstrated by the students and the learning environment. Two thousand and forty-three second-year students participated in a questionnaire survey. The results indicated that different aspects of the students’ course experience variously affected learning outcomes, such as overall satisfaction with the course, academic efficacy and the development of generic skills. These results reflected the characteristics of undergraduate teaching in China, and highlighted the need to enhance student autonomy and self-study. In addition, the appropriateness of learning resources and the level of academic freedom in the institutions were found to more powerfully influence students’ course experience than the provision of supportive facilities and services. These findings have implications for improving undergraduate teaching and its quality assurance in China.