Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Linking Incomplete Reprogramming to the Improved Pluripotency of Murine Embryonal Carcinoma Cell-Derived Pluripotent Stem Cells

Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) has been proved capable of reprogramming various differentiated somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells. Recently, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) have been successfully derived from mouse and human somatic cells by the over-expression of a combination of transcription factors. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the reprogramming mediated by either the SCNT or iPS approach are poorly understood. Increasing evidence indicates that many tumor pathways play roles in the derivation of iPS cells. Embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells have the characteristics of both stem cells and cancer cells and thus they might be the better candidates for elucidating the details of the reprogramming process. Although previous studies indicate that EC cells cannot be reprogrammed into real pluripotent stem cells, the reasons for this remain unclear. Here, nuclei from mouse EC cells (P19) were transplanted into enucleated oocytes and pluripotent stem cells (P19 NTES cells) were subsequently established. Interestingly, P19 NTES cells prolonged the development of tetraploid aggregated embryos compared to EC cells alone. More importantly, we found that the expression recovery of the imprinted H19 gene was dependent on the methylation state in the differential methylation region (DMR). The induction of Nanog expression, however, was independent of the promoter region DNA methylation state in P19 NTES cells. A whole-genome transcriptome analysis further demonstrated that P19 NTES cells were indeed the intermediates between P19 cells and ES cells and many interesting genes were uncovered that may be responsible for the failed reprogramming of P19 cells. To our knowledge, for the first time, we linked incomplete reprogramming to the improved pluripotency of EC cell-derived pluripotent stem cells. The candidate genes we discovered may be useful not only for understanding the mechanisms of reprogramming, but also for deciphering the transition between tumorigenesis and pluripotency.
Marital Satisfaction among Married Couples in which One or Both Members Play a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)

MARITAL SATISFACTION AMONG MARRIED COUPLES IN WHICH ONE OR BOTH MEMBERS PLAY A MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE-PLAYING GAME (MMORPG) Michelle Elton Ahlstrom Department of Recreation Management and Youth Leadership Master of Science The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the gaming behaviors of married individuals and couples who play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game(s) (MMORPGs) including gaming addiction, time spent gaming, satisfaction in gaming participation, gaming interaction (between joint gaming spouses), and socio-demographic variables and the subsequent marital satisfaction levels of both individuals in the couple. Hypotheses were generally supported, excluding the hours spent gaming. 685 couples were separated and analyzed according to whether both individuals in the marriage gamed or just one individual gamed (couple-gaming type). Couples in which only one individual gamed (individual-gamer couples) had significantly lower marital satisfaction than all other groups and couples in which both gamed about the same amount of time (equal-gamers) held the highest marital satisfaction of the groups. Prediction models of marital satisfaction were determined for each couple-gaming type. The strongest predictions present in most of the models for marital satisfaction were the frequency that the couple retired to bed at the same time and the frequency that the couple quarreled specifically about gaming. Much MMORPG research has been presented on youth and adults, however to date there is no research on married gamers. Recent research on the video game habits of emerging adults called for further in depth investigation of the implications of video game use in the family formation stage of life.
Improved combinatorial algorithms for the facility location and k-median problems

We present improved combinatorial approximation algorithms for the uncapacitated facility location and k-median problems. Two central ideas in most of our results are cost scaling and greedy improvement. We present a simple greedy local search algorithm which achieves an approximation ratio of 2.414+/spl epsiv/ in O/spl tilde/(n/sup 2///spl epsiv/) time. This also yields a bicriteria approximation tradeoff of (1+/spl gamma/, 1+2//spl gamma/) for facility cost versus service cost which is better than previously known tradeoffs and close to the best possible. Combining greedy improvement and cost scaling with a recent primal dual algorithm for facility location due to K. Jain and V. Vazirani (1999), we get an approximation ratio of 1.853 in O/spl tilde/(n/sup 3/) time. This is already very close to the approximation guarantee of the best known algorithm which is LP-based. Further combined with the best known LP-based algorithm for facility location, we get a very slight improvement in the approximation factor for facility location, achieving 1.728. We present improved approximation algorithms for capacitated facility location and a variant. We also present a 4-approximation for the k-median problem, using similar ideas, building on the 6-approximation of Jain and Vazirani. The algorithm runs in O/spl tilde/(n/sup 3/) time.
AIDA: Adaptation in der Adoleszenz. Theoretischer Rahmen, Fragestellungen, Design und erste Ergebnisse der Berliner Längsschnittstudie von Klasse 7 bis 9

Ziel der Studie Adaptation in der Adoleszenz (AIDA) ist die differenzierte Beschreibung und auf drei Messzeitpunkte (Klasse 7, 8 und 9) bezogene langsschnittliche Modellierung von Entwicklungsprozessen Jugendlicher im psychosozialen Bereich sowie in weiteren Bereichen nichtkognitiver Zielsetzungen, die der Bildungsauftrag der Schule enthalt. Zur theoretischen Einordnung und Begrundung werden bildungstheoretische, entwicklungs- und personlichkeitspsychologische Ansatze und Konzepte herangezogen. Mase schulleistungsnaher Personlichkeitsmerkmale sowie Indikatoren fur die erfolgreiche Bewaltigung altersspezifischer Entwicklungsaufgaben werden spezifiziert und erfasst. Dabei wird der Einfluss verschiedener Bedingungen, insbesondere der schulischen und auserschulischen sozialen Stutzsysteme im Erleben der Heranwachsenden bestimmt. In diesem Kapitel stellen wir den theoretischen Rahmen, inhaltliche Schwerpunkte, zentrale Fragestellungen, das Untersuchungsdesign sowie erste Ergebnisse zur Modellierung der Konstrukte Ich-Starke und Leistungsorientierung vor. (DIPF/Orig.) The aim of AIDA is to provide a detailed description and longitudinal modelling of the developmental processes of young adolescents, with a particular focus on the psychological and other non-cognitive outcomes that are part of school education. The study samples students at three levels - Grades 7, 8, and 9. The AIDA theoretical framework incorporates theories and concepts from education, developmental psychology, and personality psychology. Constructs measuring personality traits related to school achievement as well as indicators capturing the successful coping of age-specific developmental tasks are specified. Effects of various conditions, especially the adolescents' social resources both within and outside school are investigated. This article reports on the study's theoretical framework, its content focus, key research questions, and study design, as well as its first set of results, those concerning the modelling of "ego-strength" and "achievement orientation. " (DIPF/Orig.)
A Bayesian Model of Transliteration and Its Human Evaluation When Integrated into a Machine Translation System

The contribution of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, we conduct a large-scale real-world evaluation of the effectiveness of integrating an automatic transliteration system with a machine translation system. A human evaluation is usually preferable to an automatic evaluation, and in the case of this evaluation especially so, since the common machine translation evaluation methods are affected by the length of the translations they are evaluating, often being biassed towards translations in terms of their length rather than the information they convey. We evaluate our transliteration system on data collected in field experiments conducted all over Japan. Our results conclusively show that using a transliteration system can improve machine translation quality when translating unknown words. Our second contribution is to propose a novel Bayesian model for unsupervised bilingual character sequence segmentation of corpora for transliteration. The system is based on a Dirichlet process model trained using Bayesian inference through blocked Gibbs sampling implemented using an efficient forward filtering/backward sampling dynamic programming algorithm. The Bayesian approach is able to overcome the overfitting problem inherent in maximum likelihood training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our Bayesian segmentation by using it to build a translation model for a phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) system trained to perform transliteration by monotonic transduction from character sequence to character sequence. The Bayesian segmentation was used to construct a phrase-table and we compared the quality of this phrase-table to one generated in the usual manner by the state-of-the-art GIZA++ word alignment process used in combination with phrase extraction heuristics from the MOSES statistical machine translation system, by using both to perform transliteration generation within an identical framework. In our experiments on English-Japanese data from the NEWS2010 transliteration generation shared task, we used our technique to bilingually co-segment the training corpus. We then derived a phrase-table from the segmentation from the sample at the final iteration of the training procedure, and the resulting phrase-table was used to directly substitute for the phrase-table extracted by using GIZA++/MOSES. The phrase-table resulting from our Bayesian segmentation model was approximately 30% smaller than that produced by the SMT system’s training procedure, and gave an increase in transliteration quality measured in terms of both word accuracy and Fscore. key words: transliteration, human evaluation, machine translation, Dirichlet process model, Bayesian, segmentation
Learning Language Semantics from Ambiguous Supervision

This paper presents a method for learning a semantic parser from ambiguous supervision. Training data consists of natural language sentences annotated with multiple potential meaning representations, only one of which is correct. Such ambiguous supervision models the type of supervision that can be more naturally available to language-learning systems. Given such weak supervision, our approach produces a semantic parser that maps sentences into meaning representations. An existing semantic parsing learning system that can only learn from unambiguous supervision is augmented to handle ambiguous supervision. Experimental results show that the resulting system is able to cope up with ambiguities and learn accurate semantic parsers.
Creating social connections in higher education: Insights from the Campus Canines Program at the University of Pittsburgh

The overall purpose of this study was to capture the relationships made during the Campus Canines Program, an animal-assisted activity program, at the University of Pittsburgh. Meaningful social relationships create greater educational satisfaction. These social relationships are an important piece to creating and sustaining student involvement, and therefore retention, in a college environment. Therefore, the current study is significant because Campus Canines Program may be a program that fosters these important relationships for students. This study used a case study approach that included two mixed-method online instruments. Both surveys are comprised of close-ended quantitative questions and open-ended qualitative questions. During the 2012 Spring Academic Term, a census of the entire population was conducted. This census determined the entire student population to be 270 and volunteer population to be 20. The canine population of 22 was also determined but only for informational purposes. All 270 students were selected for this study and 69 responded to the survey with a 25.5% response rate. All 20 volunteers were selected to participate in this study and 11 responded to the survey with a 55% response rate. Overall, the results suggest that the Campus Canines Program does create a program for student involvement and may support established relationships. The key findings include (1) the dogs may aid in communication with other participants, (2) the program specifically supports established relationships between friends and family, and (3) the Campus Canine Program may provide stress relief. In the first key finding, the dogs act as a social stimulant. This supports the literature that states animals provide a safe environment to promote communication between people. The second key finding shows that the Campus Canines Program specifically supports established relationships between friends and family. These results support the literature which indicates that the human-animal relationship may aid in the development of social networks. Lastly, the third key finding shows that stress relief is a benefit of this program. This does support the literature that states interaction with animals produces physiological benefits.
Homomorphic Signatures over Binary Fields : Secure Network Coding with Small Coefficients

We propose a new signature scheme that can be used to authenticate data and prevent pollution attacks in networks that use network coding. At its core, our system is a homomorphic signature scheme that authenticates vector subspaces of a given ambient space. Our system has several novel properties not found in previous proposals: • It is the first such scheme that authenticates vectors defined over binary fields; previous proposals could only authenticate vectors with large or growing coefficients. • It is the first such scheme based on the problem of finding short vectors in integer lattices, and thus enjoys the worst-case security guarantees common to lattice-based cryptosystems. Security of our scheme (in the random oracle model) is based on a new hard problem on lattices, called k-SIS, that reduces to standard average-case and worst-case lattice problems. Our construction gives an example of a cryptographic primitive — homomorphic signatures over F2 — that can be built using lattice methods, but cannot currently be built using bilinear maps or other traditional algebraic methods based on factoring or discrete-log type problems.
Genomic Evolution of Saccharomyces cerevisiae under Chinese Rice Wine Fermentation

Rice wine fermentation represents a unique environment for the evolution of the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. To understand how the selection pressure shaped the yeast genome and gene regulation, we determined the genome sequence and transcriptome of a S. cerevisiae strain YHJ7 isolated from Chinese rice wine (Huangjiu), a popular traditional alcoholic beverage in China. By comparing the genome of YHJ7 to the lab strain S288c, a Japanese sake strain K7, and a Chinese industrial bioethanol strain YJSH1, we identified many genomic sequence and structural variations in YHJ7, which are mainly located in subtelomeric regions, suggesting that these regions play an important role in genomic evolution between strains. In addition, our comparative transcriptome analysis between YHJ7 and S288c revealed a set of differentially expressed genes, including those involved in glucose transport (e.g., HXT2, HXT7) and oxidoredutase activity (e.g., AAD10, ADH7). Interestingly, many of these genomic and transcriptional variations are directly or indirectly associated with the adaptation of YHJ7 strain to its specific niches. Our molecular evolution analysis suggested that Japanese sake strains (K7/UC5) were derived from Chinese rice wine strains (YHJ7) at least approximately 2,300 years ago, providing the first molecular evidence elucidating the origin of Japanese sake strains. Our results depict interesting insights regarding the evolution of yeast during rice wine fermentation, and provided a valuable resource for genetic engineering to improve industrial wine-making strains.
Brief Measures to Screen for Social Anxiety in Adolescents

Objective: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) in adolescents is considerably underdetected and undertreated despite the availability of efficacious treatments. Our main study objective was to examine brief, valid, and reliable screening measures for adolescent social anxiety, and to then conduct diagnostic interviews to evaluate the measures' ability to identify adolescents with SAD. Methods: We examined 7 brief and valid social anxiety measures and compared their diagnostic accuracy with diagnoses established by a semistructured interview. The sample included 421 Spanish adolescents with and 613 without a clinical diagnosis of SAD. Results: Data revealed that short social anxiety measures are accurate in detecting Spanish-speaking socially anxious adolescents. All questionnaires showed good or excellent discriminating ability, with the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SAS-A) and the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory-Brief (SPAI-B) having the best sensitivity and specificity values, respectively. Excellent areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves were found for most measures, except for the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale for Children and Adolescents and the Mini-Social Phobia Inventory, which had good discriminatory ability. There was little statistical difference in the ability of the brief social anxiety measures to identify cases accurately, although the SPAI-B cutoff score yielded the best balance between sensitivity and specificity and the highest Youden Index. Conclusion: Overall, results suggest that brief measures for social anxiety symptoms can be effective in detecting SAD in Spanish-speaking adolescents. Depending on the purpose of the study, SAS-A may be especially useful for reducing false negatives and the SPAI-B for false positives.
Interactive Visual Steering - Rapid Visual Prototyping of a Common Rail Injection System

Interactive steering with visualization has been a common goal of the visualization research community for twenty years, but it is rarely ever realized in practice. In this paper we describe a successful realization of a tightly coupled steering loop, integrating new simulation technology and interactive visual analysis in a prototyping environment for automotive industry system design. Due to increasing pressure on car manufacturers to meet new emission regulations, to improve efficiency, and to reduce noise, both simulation and visualization are pushed to their limits. Automotive system components, such as the powertrain system or the injection system have an increasing number of parameters, and new design approaches are required. It is no longer possible to optimize such a system solely based on experience or forward optimization. By coupling interactive visualization with the simulation back-end (computational steering), it is now possible to quickly prototype a new system, starting from a non-optimized initial prototype and the corresponding simulation model. The prototyping continues through the refinement of the simulation model, of the simulation parameters and through trial-and-error attempts to an optimized solution. The ability to early see the first results from a multidimensional simulation space - thousands of simulations are run for a multidimensional variety of input parameters - and to quickly go back into the simulation and request more runs in particular parameter regions of interest significantly improves the prototyping process and provides a deeper understanding of the system behavior. The excellent results which we achieved for the common rail injection system strongly suggest that our approach has a great potential of being generalized to other, similar scenarios.
PCR-hybridization after sonication improves diagnosis of implant-related infection

Purpose We wanted to improve the diagnosis of implant-related infection using molecular biological techniques after sonication. Methods We studied 258 retrieved implant components (185 prosthetic implants and 73 osteosynthesis implants) from 126 patients. 47 patients had a clinical diagnosis of infection (108 components) and 79 patients did not (150 components). The fluids from sonication of retrieved implants were tested in culture and were also analyzed using a modified commercial PCR kit for detection of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria (GenoType BC; Hain Lifescience) after extraction of the DNA. Results 38 of 47 patients with a clinical diagnosis of infection were also diagnosed as being infected using culture and/or PCR (35 by culture alone). Also, 24 patients of the 79 cases with no clinical diagnosis of infection were identified microbiologically as being infected (4 by culture, 16 by PCR, and 4 by both culture and PCR). Comparing culture and PCR, positive culture results were obtained in 28 of the 79 patients and positive PCR results were obtained in 35. There were 21 discordant results in patients who were originally clinically diagnosed as being infected and 28 discordant results in patients who had no clinical diagnosis of infection. Interpretation For prosthetic joint infections and relative to culture, molecular detection can increase (by one tenth) the number of patients diagnosed as having an infection. Positive results from patients who have no clinical diagnosis of infection must be interpreted carefully.
UPS: Combatting Urban Vehicle Localization with Cellular-Aware Trajectories

Acquiring accurate location information of vehicles is of great importance. Global Positioning System (GPS) has been widely deployed and used to be the most convenient solution to outdoor localization. As more and more infrastructure such as elevated roads, tunnels and tall buildings is built, however, the ever-increasing complexity of urban environments makes vehicle localization especially in those urban canyons a new challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, called UPS, to tackle urban vehicle localization problem. Inspired by the observation from empirical study that the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) values of cellular signals (e.g., GSM) perceived over a distance have ideal temporal-spatial characteristics for fingerprinting, UPS refines the location accuracy of a moving vehicle by matching its cellular-aware trajectory, which is an association between consecutive geographical positions and the corresponding wide-band GSM RSSI values, with a pre- constructed map. Moreover, UPS leverages large mobility of vehicles to construct large-scale maps. We implement a prototype system to validate the feasibility of the UPS design. We conduct extensive real-world experiments and results show that UPS can work stably in various urban settings and achieve an accuracy of 4.2 meters on average and 5.3 meters with a 90% precision.