Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of Novel 14-3-3 Residues That Are Critical for Isoform-specific Interaction with GluN2C to Regulate N-Methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) Receptor Trafficking*

Background: NMDA receptor trafficking to synapses is essential for excitatory neurotransmission. Results: We have identified novel residues within 14-3-3ζ that determine isoform-specific interaction with GluN2C. Conclusion: 14-3-3 is a critical mediator of GluN2C-containing NMDA receptor trafficking. Significance: This is the first study to uncover the isoform-specific role of 14-3-3 in targeting NMDA receptors to the membrane. The 14-3-3 family of proteins is widely distributed in the CNS where they are major regulators of essential neuronal functions. There are seven known mammalian 14-3-3 isoforms (ζ,, τ, ϵ, η, β, and σ), which generally function as adaptor proteins. Previously, we have demonstrated that 14-3-3ϵ isoform dynamically regulates forward trafficking of GluN2C-containing NMDA receptors (NMDARs) in cerebellar granule neurons, that when expressed on the surface, promotes neuronal survival following NMDA-induced excitotoxicity. Here, we report 14-3-3 isoform-specific binding and functional regulation of GluN2C. In particular, we show that GluN2C C-terminal domain (CTD) binds to all 14-3-3 isoforms except 14-3-3σ, and binding is dependent on GluN2C serine 1096 phosphorylation. Co-expression of 14-3-3 (ζ and ϵ) and GluN1/GluN2C promotes the forward delivery of receptors to the cell surface. We further identify novel residues serine 145, tyrosine 178, and cysteine 189 on α-helices 6, 7, and 8, respectively, within ζ-isoform as part of the GluN2C binding motif and independent of the canonical peptide binding groove. Mutation of these conserved residues abolishes GluN2C binding and has no functional effect on GluN2C trafficking. Reciprocal mutation of alanine 145, histidine 180, and isoleucine 191 on 14-3-3σ isoform promotes GluN2C binding and surface expression. Moreover, inhibiting endogenous 14-3-3 using a high-affinity peptide inhibitor, difopein, greatly diminishes GluN2C surface expression. Together, these findings highlight the isoform-specific structural and functional differences within the 14-3-3 family of proteins, which determine GluN2C binding and its essential role in targeting the receptor to the cell surface to facilitate glutamatergic neurotransmission.
Singularities in Graviton-Dilaton System: Their Implications on the PPN Parameters and the Cosmological Constant

Alternatives to Einstein's theory of general relativity can be distinguished by measuring the parametrised post Newtonian parameters. Two such parameters $\beta$ and $\gamma$, equal to one in Einstein theory, can be obtained from static spherically symmetric solutions. For the graviton-dilaton system, as in Brans-Dicke or low energy string theory, we find that if $\gamma \ne 1$ for a charge neutral point star, then there exist naked singularities. Thus, if $\gamma$ is measured to be different from one, then it cannot be explained by these theories, without implying naked singularities. We also couple a cosmological constant $\Lambda$ to the graviton-dilaton system, a la string theory. We find that static spherically symmetric solutions in low energy string theory, which describe the gravitational field of a point star in the real universe atleast upto a distance $r_* \simeq {\cal O} ({\rm pc})$, always lead to curvature singularities. These singularities are stable and much worse than the naked ones. Requiring their absence upto a distance $r_*$ implies a bound $| \Lambda | < 10^{- 102} (\frac{r_*}{{\rm pc}})^{- 2}$ in natural units. If $r_* \simeq 1 {\rm Mpc}$ then $| \Lambda | < 10^{- 114}$, and if $r_*$ extends all the way upto the edge of the universe ($10^{28} {\rm cm}$) then $| \Lambda | < 10^{- 122}$ in natural units.
Betrayal, Distrust, and Rationality: Smart Counter-Collusion Contracts for Verifiable Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become an irreversible trend. Together comes the pressing need for verifiability, to assure the client the correctness of computation outsourced to the cloud. Existing verifiable computation techniques all have a high overhead, thus if being deployed in the clouds, would render cloud computing more expensive than the on-premises counterpart. To achieve verifiability at a reasonable cost, we leverage game theory and propose a smart contract based solution. In a nutshell, a client lets two clouds compute the same task, and uses smart contracts to stimulate tension, betrayal and distrust between the clouds, so that rational clouds will not collude and cheat. In the absence of collusion, verification of correctness can be done easily by crosschecking the results from the two clouds. We provide a formal analysis of the games induced by the contracts, and prove that the contracts will be effective under certain reasonable assumptions. By resorting to game theory and smart contracts, we are able to avoid heavy cryptographic protocols. The client only needs to pay two clouds to compute in the clear, and a small transaction fee to use the smart contracts. We also conducted a feasibility study that involves implementing the contracts in Solidity and running them on the official Ethereum network.
Highly Accurate and Fully Automatic Head Pose Estimation from a Low Quality Consumer-Level RGB-D Sensor

In this paper we describe a novel algorithm for head pose estimation from low-quality RGB-D data acquired using a consumer-level device such as Microsoft Kinect. We focus our attention on the well-known challenges in the processing of depth point-clouds which include spurious data, noise, and missing data caused by occlusion. Our algorithm performs pose estimation by fitting a 3D morphable model which explicitly includes pose parameters. Several important novelties are described. (i) We propose a method for automatic removal of the majority of spurious depth data which uses facial feature detection in the associated RGB image. By back-projecting the corresponding image loci and intersecting them with the 3D point-cloud we construct the facial features plane used to crop the point-cloud. (ii) Both high convergence speed and high fitting accuracy are achieved by formulating the fitting objective function to include both point-to-point and point-to-plane point-cloud matching terms. (iii) The effect of misleading point-cloud matches caused by noisy or missing data is reduced by using the Tukey biweight function as a robust statistic and by employing a re-weighting scheme for different terms in the fitting objective function. (iv) Lastly, the proposed algorithm is evaluated on the standard benchmark Biwi Kinect Head Pose Database on which it is shown to outperform substantially the current state-of-the-art, achieving more than a 20-fold reduction in error estimates of all three Euler angles i.e. yaw, pitch, and roll. A thorough analysis of the results is used both to gain full insight into the behaviour of the described algorithm as well as to highlight important methodological issues which future authors should consider in the evaluation of pose estimation algorithms.
Perturbation of Fuel Homeostasis Caused by Overexpression of the Glucose-6-phosphatase Catalytic Subunit in Liver of Normal Rats*

The terminal step in hepatic gluconeogenesis is catalyzed by glucose-6-phosphatase, an enzyme activity residing in the endoplasmic reticulum and consisting of a catalytic subunit (glucose-6-phosphatase (G6Pase)) and putative accessory transport proteins. We show that Zucker diabetic fatty rats (fa/fa), which are known to exhibit impaired suppression of hepatic glucose output, have 2.4-fold more glucose-6-phosphatase activity in liver than lean controls. To define the potential contribution of increased hepatic G6Pase to development of diabetes, we infused recombinant adenoviruses containing the G6Pase cDNA (AdCMV-G6Pase) or the β-galactosidase gene into normal rats. Animals were studied by one of three protocols as follows: protocol 1, fed ad libitum for 7 days; protocol 2, fed ad libitum for 5 days, fasted overnight, and subjected to an oral glucose tolerance test; protocol 3, fed ad libitum for 4 days, fasted for 48 h, subjected to oral glucose tolerance test, and then allowed to refeed overnight. Hepatic glucose-6-phosphatase enzymatic activity was increased by 1.6–3-fold in microsomes isolated from AdCMV-G6Pase-treated animals in all three protocols, and the resultant metabolic profile was similar in each case. AdCMV-G6Pase-treated animals exhibited several of the abnormalities associated with early stage non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, including glucose intolerance, hyperinsulinemia, decreased hepatic glycogen content, and increased peripheral (muscle) triglyceride stores. These animals also exhibited significant decreases in circulating free fatty acids and triglycerides, changes not normally associated with the disease. Our studies show that overexpression of G6Pase in liver is sufficient to perturb whole animal glucose and lipid homeostasis, possibly contributing to the development of metabolic abnormalities associated with diabetes.
Augmenting computer graphics with haptics for the visualization of vessel networks

Current visualization methods of volume angiograms are limited in their ability to display vessel connectivity and depth information readily available in the data set. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid graphic-haptic display technique that allows visualizing vessel connectivity as well as provides user assistance in tracing vessel branches. Most importantly, our display provides three-dimensional shape cues in both visual and haptic domains that eliminate the need for a rotational display for 3D perception. Issues related to haptic rendering, implementation, and experimental validation of the developed system are reported. This proposed multimodal visualization approach is independent of the devices used and can be applied to current visualization platforms for angiograms due to the small computational load it requires.
Light intensity effect on polymerization shrinkage of a dental composite

The shrinkage force resulting from polymerization of a light-cured composite resin was measured using a load cell and artificial cylindrical cavities. To study the effect of light intensity, we constructed cavities 4 mm in diameter with varying depths of 0.5 to 3.5 mm. The resin was poured into the cavity after spreading a bonding agent and irradiated by two types of light-curing unit. The shrinkage forces were measured as functions of time and the cavity depth for almost same irradiation energies. The intensity effect was also studied by measuring the shrinkage deformation on a semi-cylindrical cavity using a digital image correlation method.
Best practice interprofessional stroke care collaboration and simulation: The student perspective

ABSTRACT Interprofessional practice (IPP) is the accepted standard of care for clients following a stroke. A brief, embedded and evidence-based IPP team simulation was designed to address stroke care knowledge and IPP competencies for students within limited curriculum space. Each team was required to construct a collaborative care plan for their patient during the simulation and submit the care plan for evaluation of best practice stroke care knowledge and implementation with evidence of interprofessional collaboration (IPC). A total of 302 students (274 on-site, 28 by distance technology) representing four professions comprised of 55 teams took part in this experience. Post-simulation, voluntary and anonymous programme evaluations were completed using the standardised interprofessional collaborative competency assessment scale (ICCAS) and open-ended free-text responses to five questions. There was a significant improvement for all pre–post ratings on the ICCAS regardless of profession or previous interprofessional experience. Additionally, the open-ended responses indicated perceived changes to role clarification, communication, and teamwork. The combined interpretation of the programme evaluation results supports interprofessional team simulation as an effective and efficient learning experience for students regardless of previous interprofessional experience, and demonstrated positive changes in stroke best-practice knowledge and IPC competencies.
An Evaluation of Self-Avatar Eye Movement for Virtual Embodiment

We present a novel technique for animating self-avatar eye movements in an immersive virtual environment without the use of eye-tracking hardware, and evaluate our technique via a two-alternative, forced-choice-with-confidence experiment that compares this simulated-eye-tracking condition to a no-eye-tracking condition and a real-eye-tracking condition in which the avatar's eyes were rotated with an eye tracker. Viewing the reflection of a tracked self-avatar is often used in virtual-embodiment scenarios to induce in the participant the illusion that the virtual body of the self-avatar belongs to them, however current tracking methods do not account for the movements of the participants eyes, potentially lessening this body-ownership illusion. The results of our experiment indicate that, although blind to the experimental conditions, participants noticed differences between eye behaviors, and found that the real and simulated conditions represented their behavior better than the no-eye-tracking condition. Additionally, no statistical difference was found when choosing between the real and simulated conditions. These results suggest that adding eye movements to selfavatars produces a subjective increase in self-identification with the avatar due to a more complete representation of the participant's behavior, which may be beneficial for inducing virtual embodiment, and that effective results can be obtained without the need for any specialized eye-tracking hardware.
The Agreeable Entrepreneur

This study looks at the trajectory of dual career entrepreneurs and their motivation for change. It brings out organizations, personal and family related motivations for change. It is found that few entrepreneurs are motivated by money, and the relationship with money is generally instrumental rather than teleological. The study primarily focused on how these dual entrepreneurs viewed themselves on the big five personality traits: extraversion varies, they are low on neuroticism and high on open-mindedness and on conscientiousness. However, contradicting previous research, this study finds that these entrepreneurs see themselves as agreeable rather than disagreeable. Future research directions are presented.
Optimal Sensorimotor Integration in Recurrent Cortical Networks: A Neural Implementation of Kalman Filters

Several behavioral experiments suggest that the nervous system uses an internal model of the dynamics of the body to implement a close approximation to a Kalman filter. This filter can be used to perform a variety of tasks nearly optimally, such as predicting the sensory consequence of motor action, integrating sensory and body posture signals, and computing motor commands. We propose that the neural implementation of this Kalman filter involves recurrent basis function networks with attractor dynamics, a kind of architecture that can be readily mapped onto cortical circuits. In such networks, the tuning curves to variables such as arm velocity are remarkably noninvariant in the sense that the amplitude and width of the tuning curves of a given neuron can vary greatly depending on other variables such as the position of the arm or the reliability of the sensory feedback. This property could explain some puzzling properties of tuning curves in the motor and premotor cortex, and it leads to several new predictions.
Design Pattern Integration Method for Improving Performance of EJB and Its Applications

This paper analyzes the bottleneck of EJB system performance, proposes an idea of optimizing EJB design pattern to improve the performance, and then give a layered and integrated optimization method based on mixed design patterns. Accordingly, the performance of the application was improved and the system has better flexibility and maintainability. Experiments show the improvement of performance at last.
Watershed from Propagated Markers Based on Border Tracking by Graph Matching

This paper introduces the application of graph matching as a suporting technique to the watershed from propagated markers framework. In this work, markers are propagated by attributed relational graph matching, which attributes are collected from the moving borders of the objects of interests. The advantage of this version of the watershed from propagated markers is the production of markers that tends to be locally shaped as the object of interest and closer to its border, which provides a better segmentation result. This approach was compared to the manual segmentation (by standard watershed from markers) and to a method found in literature and the results achieved by the proposed approach were efficient and robust.
Spatial and Temporal Habitat Use of an Asian Elephant in Sumatra

Simple Summary A wild Sumatran elephant radio-monitored near a conservation center from August 2007–May 2008 used medium- and open-canopy land cover more than expected, but closed canopy forests were used more during the day than at night. When in closed canopy forests, elephants spent more time near the forest edge. Effective elephant conservation strategies in Sumatra need to focus on forest restoration of cleared areas and providing a forest matrix that includes various canopy types. Abstract Increasingly, habitat fragmentation caused by agricultural and human development has forced Sumatran elephants into relatively small areas, but there is little information on how elephants use these areas and thus, how habitats can be managed to sustain elephants in the future. Using a Global Positioning System (GPS) collar and a land cover map developed from TM imagery, we identified the habitats used by a wild adult female elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus) in the Seblat Elephant Conservation Center, Bengkulu Province, Sumatra during 2007–2008. The marked elephant (and presumably her 40–60 herd mates) used a home range that contained more than expected medium canopy and open canopy land cover. Further, within the home range, closed canopy forests were used more during the day than at night. When elephants were in closed canopy forests they were most often near the forest edge vs. in the forest interior. Effective elephant conservation strategies in Sumatra need to focus on forest restoration of cleared areas and providing a forest matrix that includes various canopy types.
Increased Primary Production from an Exotic Invader Does Not Subsidize Native Rodents

Invasive plants have tremendous potential to enrich native food webs by subsidizing net primary productivity. Here, we explored how a potential food subsidy, seeds produced by the aggressive invader cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), is utilized by an important guild of native consumers – granivorous small mammals – in the Great Basin Desert, USA. In a series of field experiments we examined 1) how cheatgrass invasion affects the density and biomass of seed rain at the ecosystem-level; 2) how seed resources from cheatgrass numerically affect granivorous small mammals; and 3) how the food preferences of native granivores might mediate the trophic integration of cheatgrass seeds. Relative to native productivity, cheatgrass invasion increased the density and biomass of seed rain by over 2000% (P < 0.01) and 3500% (P < 0.01), respectively. However, granivorous small mammals in native communities showed no positive response in abundance, richness, or diversity to experimental additions of cheatgrass seeds over one year. This lack of response correlated with a distinct preference for seeds from native grasses over seeds from cheatgrass. Our experiments demonstrate that increased primary productivity associated with exotic plant invasions may not necessarily subsidize consumers at higher trophic levels. In this context, cheatgrass invasion could disrupt native food webs by providing less-preferred resources that fail to enrich higher trophic levels.
Image deblurring and denoising with non-local regularization constraint

In this paper, we investigate the use of the non-local means (NLM) denoising approach in the context of image deblurring and restoration. We propose a novel deblurring approach that utilizes a non-local regularization constraint. Our interest in the NLM principle is its potential to suppress noise while effectively preserving edges and texture detail. Our approach leads to an iterative cost function minimization algorithm, similar to common deblurring methods, but incorporating update terms due to the non-local regularization constraint. The dataadaptive noise suppression weights in the regularization term are updated and improved at each iteration, based on the partially denoised and deblurred result. We compare our proposed algorithm to conventional deblurring methods, including deblurring with total variation (TV) regularization. We also compare our algorithm to combinations of the NLM-based filter followed by conventional deblurring methods. Our initial experimental results demonstrate that the use of NLM-based filtering and regularization seems beneficial in the context of image deblurring, reducing the risk of over-smoothing or suppression of texture detail, while suppressing noise. Furthermore, the proposed deblurring algorithm with non-local regularization outperforms other methods, such as deblurring with TV regularization or separate NLM-based denoising followed by deblurring.
Parsing in a Dynamical System: An Attractor-based Account of the Interaction of Lexical and Structural Constraints in Sentence Processing

A dynamical systems approach to parsing is proposed in which syntactic hypotheses are associated with attractors in a metric space. These attractors have many of the properties of traditional syntactic categories, while at the same time encoding context-dependent, lexically specie c distinctions. Hypotheses motivated by the dynamical system theory were tested in four reading time experiments examining the interaction of simple lexica l frequencies, frequencies that are contingent on an environment deened by syntactic categories, and frequencies contingent on verb argument structure. The experiments documented a variety of contingent frequency effects that cut across traditional linguistic grains, each of which was predicted by the dynamical systems model. These effects were simulated in an implementation of the theory, employing a recurrent network trained from a corpus to construct metric representations and an algorithm implementing a gravitational dynamical system to model reading time as time to gravitate to an attractor.