Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Evolving Transcriptome of Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Systematic Review

Background Numerous studies were performed to illuminate mechanisms of tumorigenesis and metastases from gene expression profiles of Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC). The objective of this review is to conduct a network-based meta-analysis to identify the underlying biological signatures of the HNSCC transcriptome. Methods and Findings We included 63 HNSCC transcriptomic studies into three specific categories of comparisons: Pre, premalignant lesions v.s. normal; TvN, primary tumors v.s. normal; and Meta, metastatic or invasive v.s. primary tumors. Reported genes extracted from the literature were systematically analyzed. Participation of differential gene activities across three progressive stages deciphered the evolving nature of HNSCC. In total, 1442 genes were verified, i.e. reported at least twice, with ECM1, EMP1, CXCL10 and POSTN shown to be highly reported across all three stages. Knowledge-based networks of the HNSCC transcriptome were constructed, demonstrating integrin signaling and antigen presentation pathways as highly enriched. Notably, functional estimates derived from topological characteristics of integrin signaling networks identified such important genes as ITGA3 and ITGA5, which were supported by findings of invasiveness in vitro [1]. Moreover, we computed genome-wide probabilities of reporting differential gene activities for the Pre, TvN, and Meta stages, respectively. Results highlighted chromosomal regions of 6p21, 19p13 and 19q13, where genomic alterations were shown to be correlated with the nodal status of HNSCC [2]. Conclusions By means of a systems-biology approach via network-based meta-analyses, we provided a deeper insight into the evolving nature of the HNSCC transcriptome. Enriched canonical signaling pathways, hot-spots of transcriptional profiles across the genome, as well as topologically significant genes derived from network analyses were highlighted for each of the three progressive stages, Pre, TvN, and Meta, respectively.
Genetic evidence of enzootic leishmaniasis in a stray canine and Texas mouse from sites in west and central Texas

We detected Leishmania mexicana in skin biopsies taken from a stray canine (Canis familiaris) and Texas mouse (Peromyscus attwateri) at two ecologically disparate sites in west and central Texas using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). A single PCR-positive dog was identified from a sample of 96 stray canines and was collected in a peri-urban area in El Paso County, Texas. The PCR-positive P. attwateri was trapped at a wildlife reserve in Mason County, Texas, from a convenience sample of 20 sylvatic mammals of different species. To our knowledge, this represents the first description of L. mexicana in west Texas and extends the known geographic range of the parasite to an area that includes the arid Chihuahuan Desert. Our finding of L. mexicana in P. attwateri represents a new host record and is the first description of the parasite in a wild peromyscid rodent in the United States.
Transparent Conducting Thin Film Preparation of Carbon Nanotube

Transparent conducting films have a wide range of applications in the fields of flat panel displays, solar cells, and touch panels for their both good conductivity and light transmittance. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) transparent conducting film has become a potential alternative for next-generation transparent conducting film systems owing to high conductivity, light transmittance and flexibility. The multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) conductive liquid was prepared by dispersing MWCNTs in alcohol through ultrasonic and high-speed shearing process with an addition of carbon nanotube alcohol dispersant (TNADIS) as the dispersant. The transparent conducting film was fabricated on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) transparent film by spin-coating process. The film was used as interlayer between the electrode and the separator to improve electrochemical performance of lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries.
Planar shape interpolation with bounded distortion

Planar shape interpolation is widely used in computer graphics applications. Despite a wealth of interpolation methods, there is currently no approach that produces shapes with a bounded amount of distortion with respect to the input. As a result, existing interpolation methods may produce shapes that are significantly different than the input and can suffer from fold-overs and other visual artifacts, making them less useful in many practical scenarios. We introduce a novel shape interpolation scheme designed specifically to produce results with a bounded amount of conformal (angular) distortion. Our method is based on an elegant continuous mathematical formulation and provides several appealing properties such as existence and uniqueness of the solution as well as smoothness in space and time domains. We further present a discretization and an efficient practical algorithm to compute the interpolant and demonstrate its usability and good convergence behavior on a wide variety of input shapes. The method is simple to implement and understand. We compare our method to state-of-the-art interpolation methods and demonstrate its superiority in various cases.
Exploring display techniques for mobile collaborative learning in developing regions

The developing world faces infrastructural challenges in providing Western-style educational computing technologies, but on the other hand observes very high cell phone penetration. However, the use of mobile technology has not been extensively explored in the context of collaborative learning. New projection and display technologies for mobile devices raise the important question of whether to use single or multiple displays in these environments. In this paper, we explore two mobile-based techniques for using co-located collaborative game-play to supplement ESL (English as a Second Language) education in a developing region: (1) Mobile Single Display Groupware: a pico-projector connected to a cell phone, with a handheld controller for each child to interact, and (2) Mobile Multiple Display Groupware: a phone for each child. We explore the types of interaction that occur in both of these conditions and the impact on learning outcomes.
CO excitation of normal star forming galaxies out to $z=1.5$ as regulated by the properties of their interstellar medium

We investigate the CO excitation of normal star forming disk galaxies at z=1.5 using IRAM PdBI observations of the CO[2-1], CO[3-2] and CO[5-4] transitions for 4 galaxies, including VLA observations of CO[1-0] for 3 of them, with the aim of constraining the average state of H2 gas. Exploiting prior knowledge of the velocity range, spatial extent and size of the CO emission we measure reliable line fluxes with S/N>4-7 for individual transitions. While the average CO Spectral Line Energy Distribution (SLED) has a sub-thermal excitation similar to the Milky Way (MW) up to CO[3-2], we show that the average CO[5-4] emission is four times stronger than assuming MW excitation. This demonstrates the presence of an additional component of more excited, denser and possibly warmer molecular gas. The ratio of CO[5-4] to lower-J CO emission is lower than in local (U)LIRGs and high-redshift SMGs, correlating closely with the average intensity of the radiation field and with the star formation surface density, but not with the SF efficiency (SFE). The CO[5-4] luminosity correlates linearly with LIR over 4 orders of magnitudes, with z=1.5 BzK galaxies following the same trend as local spirals and (U)LIRGs and high redshift star bursting SMGs. The CO[5-4] luminosity is thus empirically related to the dense gas, and might be a more convenient way to probe it than standard high--density tracers that are much fainter than CO. We see excitation variations among our sample galaxies, that can be linked to their evolutionary state and clumpiness in optical rest frame images. In one galaxy we see spatially resolved excitation variations, where the more highly excited part of the galaxy corresponds to the location of massive SF clumps. This supports to models that suggest that giant clumps are the main source of the high excitation CO emission in high redshift disk-like galaxies.
Enriched Page Rank for Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an hard challenge especially for language different from english. Porting supervised models, that are state-ofart for english, on different languages is too much expensive. So unsupervised or semi-supervised WSD models are much more applicable to different languages. Graph-based methods, have been recently applied to linguistic knowledge bases, including unsupervised WSD. Although the achievable accuracy is rather high, the quality of the involved resources is de facto a crucial success factor. In this paper an adaptation of the PageRank algorithm proposed for WSD using distributional information is presented. This solution looks to preserve the achievable accuracy for the english language over a foreign language. An experimental analysis for the italian using standard benchmarks will be presented in the paper to support our hypothesis. 1 Background and Motivations Lexical ambiguity is a fundamental aspect of natural language. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) investigates methods to automatically determine the intended sense of a word in a given context according to a predefined set of sense definitions, provided by a semantic lexicon. Intuitively, WSD can be usefully exploited in a variety of NLP and Information Retrieval tasks such as ad hoc retrieval [1, 2] or Question Answering [3]. However controversial results have been often obtained, as for example the study on text classification reported in [4]. The impact of WSD on IR tasks is still an open issue and large scale assessment is needed. For this reason, unsupervised approaches to inductive WSD are appealing. It has been more recently that graph-based methods for knowledge-based WSD have gained much attention in the NLP community ([5–7]). In these methods a graph representation for senses (nodes) and relation (edges) is first built. In [7], a comparative analysis of different graph-based models based on PageRank model [8] over two well known WSD benchmarks is reported. A special emphasis for the resulting computational efficiency is also posed there. In particular, a variant called Personalized PageRank (PPR) is proposed in [7]. This variant tries to trade-off between the amount of the employed lexical information and the overall efficiency. In synthesis, along the ideas of the Topic sensitive PageRank [9], PPR suggests that a proper initialization of the teleporting vector p suitably captures the context information useful to drive the
Multi-Population Ant Colony Algorithm for Virtual Machine Deployment

With the recent rapid development of cloud computing technology, how to reduce the costs of a cloud data center effectively has become an important issue. The study on virtual machine deployment mainly aims at deploying virtual machine resources required by users on a physical server rationally and effectively. This paper proposes a multi-population ant colony algorithm to solve problems of virtual machine deployment. With resource wastage and energy consumption as optimization objectives, this algorithm uses multiple ant colonies for the solution and determines strategies for information exchange among ant colonies according to the information entropy of each population to guarantee the balance of its convergence and diversity. The simulation results show that this algorithm has better performance than the single-population ant colony algorithm and can reduce resource wastage and energy consumption effectively for high-demand virtual machine deployment.
Linear Precoding in Parallel MIMO Broadcast Channels: Separable and Inseparable Scenarios

Parallel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channels are separable from an information theoretic point of view, i.e., the whole capacity region can be achieved with strategies that perform independent encoding and decoding on each carrier subject to a power allocation across carriers. However, recent research has revealed that such a separate transmission can become suboptimal if the transmit strategy is restricted to linear transceivers. The answer to the question whether parallel broadcast channels with linear transceivers are separable or not is a property of the system parameters and the particular channel realization, and judging whether a certain scenario is separable or inseparable is still an open problem for most scenarios. In this paper, we consider some special cases of parallel MIMO broadcast channels and classify them as separable or inseparable, respectively. The insights and the applied proof techniques might be helpful to derive more general classification methods in future research.
Glutamatergic calcium dynamics and deregulation of rat retinal ganglion cells

A rise in intracellular calcium levels ([Ca2+]i) is a key trigger for the lethal effects of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate in various central neurons, but a consensus has not been reached on the pathways that mediate glutamate‐dependent increases of [Ca2+]i in retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Using Ca2+ imaging techniques we demonstrated that, in the absence of external Mg2+, the Ca2+ signal evoked by glutamate was predominantly mediated by NMDA‐type glutamate receptors (NMDA‐Rs) in immunopanned RGCs isolated from neonatal or adult rats. Voltage‐gated Ca2+ channels and AMPA/kainate‐Rs contributed a smaller portion of the Ca2+ response at saturating concentrations of glutamate. Consistent with NMDA‐R involvement, extracellular Mg2+ inhibited RGC glutamate responses, while glycine had a potentiating effect. With Mg2+ present externally, the effect of AMPA/kainate‐R antagonists was enhanced and both NMDA‐ and AMPA/kainate‐R antagonists greatly reduced the glutamate‐induced increases of RGC [Ca2+]i. This finding indicates that the primary contribution of AMPA/kainate‐Rs to RGC glutamatergic Ca2+ dynamics is through the depolarization‐dependent relief of the Mg2+ block of NMDA‐R channels. The effect of glutamate receptor antagonists on glutamatergic Ca2+ signals from RGCs in adult rat retinal wholemounts yielded results similar to those obtained using immunopanned RGCs. Additional experiments on isolated RGCs revealed that during a 1 h glutamate (10–1000 μm) exposure, 18–28% of RGCs exhibited delayed Ca2+ deregulation (DCD) and the RGCs that underwent DCD were positive for the death marker annexin V. RGCs with larger glutamate‐evoked Ca2+ signals were more likely to undergo DCD, and NMDA‐R blockade significantly reduced the occurrence of DCD. Identifying the mechanisms underlying RGC excitotoxicity aids in our understanding of the pathophysiology of retinal ischaemia, and this work establishes a major role for NMDA‐R‐mediated increases in [Ca2+]i in glutamate‐related RGC death.
The characteristics of void distribution in spalled high purity copper cylinder under sweeping detonation

Abstract The effects of different peak compression stresses (2–5 GPa) on the spallation behaviour of high purity copper cylinder during sweeping detonation were examined by Electron Backscatter Diffraction Microscopy, Doppler Pins System and Optical Microscopy techniques. The velocity history of inner surface and the characteristics of void distributions in spalled copper cylinder were investigated. The results indicated that the spall strength of copper in these experiments was less than that revealed in previous reports concerning plate impact loading. The geometry of cylindrical copper and the obliquity of incident shock during sweeping detonation may be the main reasons. Different loading stresses seemed to be responsible for the characteristics of the resultant damage fields, and the maximum damage degree increased with increasing shock stress. Spall planes in different cross-sections of sample loaded with the same shock stress of 3.29 GPa were found, and the distance from the initiation end has little effect on the maximum damage degree (the maximum damage range from 12 to 14%), which means that the spallation behaviour was stable along the direction parallel to the detonation propagation direction under the same shock stress.
The Comparison of Side Effects and Patients ' Tolerance toward Prolonged use of Vaginal and Oral Bromocriptine

Background: Hyperprolactinemia is a disorder which is present in clinical forms of galactorrhea, infertility, menstrual disturbances, hirsutism and premenstrual syndrome. Bromocriptine is a dopamine agonist and is a drug of choice for the treatment of this disease. However, the patient's tolerance of this drug is also important because of prolonged use, which can sometimes last for years. In the present research, the Bromocriptine’s side effects and its acceptance level on the part of patients were studied comparing the two forms of oral and vaginal use. This study was a single–blind clinical trial. The subjects were clients of the gynecologic clinic with complaints of galactorrhea, menstrual disturbance, hirsutism, or infertility. The sample composed of 180 women (two groups of 90 people) and the length of the study was two years. The subjects were divided into two groups; oral and vaginal. Prior to the study the subjects were examined systemically and gynecologically for other systemic and local complications. After health assurance of the other systems of the body, drugs were administered in the two forms. The data was gathered using a questionnaire and was analyzed by SPSS (V.21). This study showed that the side effects of bromocriptine were 100% in oral users and 43.2% in intra-vaginal users. The most frequent complication in the oral use was nausea (38.9%), and vaginal itching (22.3%) in the intra-vaginal use. Vertigo in oral-form was more frequent as compared to the vaginal form (27.8% versus 2.3%). Hypotension, on the other hand, was seen in 11.2% of the cases among oral-users, whereas this figure among the intra-vaginal users was zero. About 51.2% of the oral-users had more than two side effects. In both groups, however, the highest complications were seen within the first ten days of the treatment (66.7% and 37.8%). It should also be noted that the severity of complications in 31.2% of the oral group and %11 of the vaginal group were so high that resulted in discontinuation of the drug. Conclusion: There is a significant difference in severity and kind of complications between oral and vaginal use of bromocriptine and acceptance and duration of drug intake in vaginal form is found to be more compared to the oral form.
Overview of the 2015 ALTA Shared Task: Identifying French Cognates in English Text

This paper presents an overview of the 6th ALTA shared task that ran in 2015. The task was to identify in English texts all the potential cognates from the perspective of the French language. In other words, identify all the words in the English text that would acceptably translate into a similar word in French. We present the motivations for the task, the description of the data and the results of the 4 participating teams. We discuss the results against a baseline and prior work.
Twenty-four-week treatment with extended release methylphenidate improves emotional symptoms in adult ADHD

Abstract Objectives. Treatment investigations with methylphenidate in adults with ADHD focus preferentially on the classical psychopathology: inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. ADHD-associated emotional symptoms, which are frequently present at least in ADHD subpopulations, were studied rarely. The vast majority of the placebo-controlled trials had observation periods between 4 and 8 weeks. To assess the medium- to long-term effects of extended release methylphenidate (MPH-ER) on emotional symptoms and other psychopathology frequently seen in ADHD patients, we conducted a large-scale, multicenter treatment study. Methods. We performed a randomised, 24-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in adults with ADHD. The diagnosis was made on the basis of the DSM-IV criteria, which were confirmed by clinical history and a structured psychopathological interview and the use of rating instruments. 363 patients were randomized to MPH-ER or placebo at a ratio of 2:1. The duration of the titration period was 5 weeks followed by a maintainance phase of 19 weeks. The efficacy measures were the observer rated 10-item Emotional Dysregulation Scale (EDS) derived from the Wender-Reimherr Adult Attention Deficit Disorder Scale (WRAADDS) and a self-report, six-item Emotional Lability Scale (ELS) extracted from the long version of the Conners Adult ADHD Self Report Scale (CAARS:S:L). In addition we used the SCL-90-R for the assessment of ADHD associated and comorbid psychopathology. Results. MPH-ER was statistically superior to placebo in reducing emotional symptoms as assessed by the EDS and the ELS. Obsessive-compulsive symptoms and those of problems with self-concept declined until the end of the observation period. The decline was more pronounced in MPH-ER treated individuals. The effects remained robust during the entire maintenance period until week 24. Symptoms of anxiety, depression, anger and hostility, phobia, paranoid ideations and psychoticism were not improved. Conclusions. MPH-ER appears to be an efficacious treatment for emotional symptoms with ADHD. Also obsessive-compulsive symptoms and problems with self-concept were affected positively.
Monitoring Citrus Soil Moisture and Nutrients Using an IoT Based System

Chongqing mountain citrus orchard is one of the main origins of Chinese citrus. Its planting terrain is complex and soil parent material is diverse. Currently, the citrus fertilization, irrigation and other management processes still have great blindness. They usually use the same pattern and the same formula rather than considering the orchard terrain features, soil differences, species characteristics and the state of tree growth. With the help of the ZigBee technology, artificial intelligence and decision support technology, this paper has developed the research on the application technology of agricultural Internet of Things for real-time monitoring of citrus soil moisture and nutrients as well as the research on the integration of fertilization and irrigation decision support system. Some achievements were obtained including single-point multi-layer citrus soil temperature and humidity detection wireless sensor nodes and citrus precision fertilization and irrigation management decision support system. They were applied in citrus base in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area. The results showed that the system could help the grower to scientifically fertilize or irrigate, improve the precision operation level of citrus production, reduce the labor cost and reduce the pollution caused by chemical fertilizer.