Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acidic and basic fibroblast growth factor bind with differing affinity to the same heparan sulfate proteoglycan on BALB/c 3T3 cells: Implications for potentiation of growth factor action by heparin

Heparan sulfate proteoglycans on the cell surface act as low affinity binding sites for acidic and basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF) [Moscatelli (1887): J Cell Physiol 131:123–130] and play an important role in the interaction of FGF with the FGF receptor (FGFR). In this study, several aspects of the interaction of FGFs with cell surface heparan sulfate proteoglycans were examined. Reciprocal cross blocking studies demonstrated that acidic FGF (aFGF) and basic FGF (bFGF) bind to identical or closely associated heparan sulfate motifs on BALB/c 3T3 cell surface heparan sulfate proteoglycans. However, the binding affinity of the two growth factros for these heparan sulfate proteoglycans differs considerably, competition binding data indicating that aFGF has a 4.7‐fold lower affinity than bFGF for 3T3 heparan sulfate proteoglycan. Subsequent studies of dissociation kinetics demonstrated that bFGF dissociates form the FGFR at least 10‐fold slower than aFGF, whereas, following removal of cell surface heparan sulfate proteoplycan. Subsequent studies of dissociation kinetic demonstrated that bFGF dissociates from the FGFR at least 10‐fold slwer than aFGF, whereas, following removal of cell surface heparan sulfate proteoglycans by heparinase treatment, the dissociation rate of both FGFs is similar and rapid. These results support the concept that cell surface heparan sulfate proteoglycans stabilize the interactio fo FGF with FGFR, possibly by the formatin of a ternary complex. © Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Functional morphology of the muscular sling at the pectoral girdle in tree sloths: convergent morphological solutions to new functional demands?

Recent phylogenetic analyses imply a diphyly of tree sloths and a convergent evolution of their obligatory suspensory locomotion. In mammals the extrinsic shoulder musculature forms a ‘muscular sling’ to support the trunk in quadrupedal postures. In addition, the extrinsic pectoral muscles are responsible for moving the proximal forelimb elements during locomotion. Due to the inverse orientation of the body in regard to the gravitational force, the muscular sling as configured as in pronograde mammals is unsuited to suspend the weight of the thorax in sloths. We here review the muscular topography of the shoulder in Choloepus didactylus and Bradypus variegatus in the light of presumably convergent evolution to adapt to the altered functional demands of the inverse orientation of the body. In addition, we venture to deduce the effect of the shoulder musculature of C. didactylus during locomotion based on previously published 3D kinematic data. Finally, we assess likely convergences in the muscular topography of both extant sloth lineages to test the hypothesis that convergent evolution is reflected by differing morphological solutions to the same functional demands posed by the suspensory posture. Muscular topography of the shoulder in C. didactylus is altered from the plesiomorphic condition of pronograde mammals, whereas the shoulder in B. variegatus more closely resembles the general pattern. Overall kinematics as well as the muscles suitable for pro‐ and retraction of the forelimb were found to be largely comparable to pronograde mammals in C. didactylus. We conclude that most of the peculiar topography of extrinsic forelimb musculature can be attributed to the inverse orientation of the body. These characteristics are often similar in both genera, but we also identified different morphological solutions that evolved to satisfy the new functional demands and are indicative of convergent evolution. We suggest that the shared phylogenetic heritage canalized the spectrum of possible solutions to new functional demands, and digging adaptations of early xenarthrans posed morphological constraints that resulted in similar suspensory postures. The data of this study, including muscle maps, will be helpful to infer locomotor characteristics of fossil sloths.
Toll‐like receptor variation in the bottlenecked population of the Seychelles warbler: computer simulations see the ‘ghost of selection past’ and quantify the ‘drift debt’

Balancing selection can maintain immunogenetic variation within host populations, but detecting its signal in a postbottlenecked population is challenging due to the potentially overriding effects of drift. Toll‐like receptor genes (TLRs) play a fundamental role in vertebrate immune defence and are predicted to be under balancing selection. We previously characterized variation at TLR loci in the Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis), an endemic passerine that has undergone a historical bottleneck. Five of seven TLR loci were polymorphic, which is in sharp contrast to the low genomewide variation observed. However, standard population genetic statistical methods failed to detect a contemporary signature of selection at any TLR locus. We examined whether the observed TLR polymorphism could be explained by neutral evolution, simulating the population's demography in the software DIYABC. This showed that the posterior distributions of mutation rates had to be unrealistically high to explain the observed genetic variation. We then conducted simulations with an agent‐based model using typical values for the mutation rate, which indicated that weak balancing selection has acted on the three TLR genes. The model was able to detect evidence of past selection elevating TLR polymorphism in the prebottleneck populations, but was unable to discern any effects of balancing selection in the contemporary population. Our results show drift is the overriding evolutionary force that has shaped TLR variation in the contemporary Seychelles warbler population, and the observed TLR polymorphisms might be merely the ‘ghost of selection past’. Forecast models predict immunogenetic variation in this species will continue to be eroded in the absence of contemporary balancing selection. Such ‘drift debt’ occurs when a gene pool has not yet reached its new equilibrium level of polymorphism, and this loss could be an important threat to many recently bottlenecked populations.
Contractions, Removals, and Certifying 3-Connectivity in Linear Time

One of the most noted construction methods of $3$-vertex-connected graphs is due to Tutte and is based on the following fact: Any $3$-vertex-connected graph $G=(V,E)$ on more than $4$ vertices contains a contractible edge, i.e., an edge whose contraction generates a $3$-connected graph. This implies the existence of a sequence of edge contractions from $G$ to the complete graph $K_4$, such that every intermediate graph is $3$-vertex-connected. A theorem of Barnette and Grunbaum gives a similar sequence using removals on edges instead of contractions. We show how to compute both sequences in optimal time, improving the previously best known running times of $O(|V|^2)$ to $O(|E|)$. This result has a number of consequences; an important one is a new linear-time test of $3$-connectivity that is certifying; finding such an algorithm has been a major open problem in the design of certifying algorithms in recent years. The test is conceptually different from well-known linear-time $3$-connectivity tests and uses.
Participatory learning walks: reflective practice for the conductor-music educator

Learning walks can be defined as ongoing, structured classroom visits by senior teachers and other colleagues intended to gather data about teaching and learning through observation and interaction with students. Used in areas such as classroom teaching, learning walks are designed to support professional learning for educators and encourage collegial conversations. A participatory learning walk has the potential to facilitate powerful teacher reflection, inform educational practice and support improved student learning outcomes. This paper presents a modified learning walk that encourages teacher reflection and enhances student learning in ensemble music education. In this article qualitative action research methodology, existing research into reflective practice, the nature of learning walks, and the specific context of music ensemble are each explored. Finally this paper presents the case study of 'Ben' the conductor-music educator and his experience of participating in a learning walk program Above all, this paper seeks to generate professional discussion amongst music educators with regard to their reflective practices.
Supporting Multilingual Document Production: Machine Translation or Multilingual Generation?

In this paper, we look at the current scenario in multilingual documentation generation, identifying the reasons for the introduction of computational tools into the process and the types of tools currently provided in support of the translation tasks. We note that certain requirements of the multilingual documentation task cannot be satisfied by the tools currently available and identify what the problems are. We examine trends now emerging in the document industry, observing a reorganisation of the workflow. Based on these observations, we hypothesize that, as a radically different approach to supporting the multilingual documentation effort, multilingual generation can offer assistance in situations where current translation-based tools are very limited. We believe that, in fact, the type This work is partially supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant J19221, by the British Council grant BC/DAAD ARC Project 293, and the Commission of the European Union Grant LRE-62009. Anthony Hartley is also a member of the Language Centre of the University of Brighton. of support afforded by multilingual generation is one that fits well with the new trends in the document industry and that, ultimately, translationoriented systems and generation-based systems can be employed in complementary ways to provide a suite of tools to support the documentation process.
Interaction in group oral assessment: A case study of higher- and lower-scoring students

This article examines the interactional work in which two groups of secondary ESL students engaged to achieve and sustain participation in group oral assessment, which is designed to assess a student’s interactive communication skills in a school-based assessment context. The in-depth observation of the ways in which participants co-constructed talk-in-interaction led to the discovery of the particular pattern of speech exchange within each group.Within the higher-scoring group, the students engaged constructively and contingently with one another’s ideas, demonstrating a range of speech functions such as suggestions, agreement or disagreement, explanations, and challenges, which resulted in opportunities for substantive conversation and genuine communication to be engineered. Within the lower-scoring group, the resulting interactions appeared more structured, apparently as a result of the pre-set prompts that were originally set for the purpose of facilitating within-group discussion. However, a picture emerges of lower-scoring group members naturally engaging in negotiation of meaning over linguistic impasses, which turned out to serve as the stimulus to collaborative dialogue. There is also evidence of lower-scoring group members assisting each other through co-construction both to find the right linguistic forms and to express meaning. The nature of these interactions suggests that the group oral assessment format, as operationalized in this context, can authentically reflect students’ interactional skills and their moment-by-moment construction of social and linguistic identity. However, the lack of contingent development of topical talk within the lower-scoring group implies that the assessor’s good intentions in providing pre-set prompts may end up restricting students’ performance. The risk of such task/topic-related effects on the quality of student discourse and interaction warrants further research.
Performance comparison of a probabilistic fingerprint-based indoor positioning system over different smartphones

In this paper a performance comparison of a probabilistic Gaussian-Kernel fingerprint-based indoor positioning method over different smartphones, is presented. The work aims at highlighting the positioning accuracy, the robustness and the consistency of the method by testing it over two different smartphone platforms (i.e., Nokia N95 and Samsung Galaxy S II), within a given area. In more detail, three different variants of the probabilistic approach have been tested: Nearest Neighbor (NN), K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN) and K Weighted-Nearest Neighbor (KW-NN). Numerical experiments, carried out in an area of around 80 [m2], have shown that the probabilistic fingerprint provides good position accuracy (less than 1.20 [m] of error) for both devices and also robustness when the signal strength acquisitions are reduced. Finally, the similarity of results provided by the two smartphones leads to assert that the probabilistic approach is also consistent with respect to the device employed in the experiments.
Building Robust Reputation Systems in the E-commerce Environment

In the environment of e-commerce, building a robust Reputation System is a task of not only constructing an effective reputation model in terms of manipulation resistance, but also designing efficient mechanisms to detect customers and vendors whose behavior arouses suspicion. Given context of reputation, we can extract characters or assumptions from the target system. Based on these characters, an advanced reputation model, R-Rep, is proposed to resist manipulative behavior. Clustering algorithm k-means is used to identify suspicious vendors and customers. Results indicate that, R-Rep outperforms two existing models, the reputation model employed by Taobao (the largest e-commerce site in China) and a Bayesian System. By using R-Rep, negative influence imposed by suspects on Reputation Systems is largely restricted over time. Meanwhile, via comparing between statistics of the whole population and suspicious subpopulation, we explore the characteristics of suspicious customers and suspicious vendors intensively, and discover some interesting patterns and phenomena.
REASON: NLP-based Search System for the WWW

This paper presents REASON, an NLP system designed for knowledge-based information search in large digital libraries and the WWW. Unlike conventional information retrieval methods, our approach is based on using the content of natural language texts. We have elaborated a searching strategy consisting of three steps: (1) analysis natural language documents and queries resulting in adequate understanding of their content; (2) loading the extracted information into the knowledge base and in this way forming its semantic representation; (3) query matching proper consisting in matching the content of the query against the content of the input documents with the aim of finding relevant documents. The advanced searching capabilities of REASON are provided by its main constituents: the Language Model, the Knowledge Base, the Dictionary and the Software specially developed for content understanding and content-based information search. We characterize the particularities of the System and describe the basic components of the formal linguistic model, the architecture of the knowledge base, the set-up of the Dictionary, and the main modules of the System - the module of analysis and the logical inference module. REASON is an important contribution to the development of efficient tools for information search.
A New View of Call Graphs for Visualising Code Structures

Software visualisation promises to provide useful techniques for supporting the program comprehension process. One popular view of software structure is the call-graph which displays the relationships between functions in a program. Current software tools visualise these call-graphs as a directed graph. Typical software systems are very large and extremely complex, as a result they generally produce large and complex graphs which often present as much of a comprehension task as they attempt to address. This paper presents a new method for visualising call-graphs which moves away from the conventional node-link depiction. This new visualisation which uses a virtual reality environment shows how some of the conventional problems of call-graph visualisation can be overcome. A New View of Call Graphs for Visualising Code Structures Peter Young and Malcolm Munro Visualisation Research Group The Centre for Software Maintenance Department of Computer Science University of Durham Durham, DH1 3LE, UK E-mail : peter.young@durham.ac. uk
On well-separation of GR(1) specifications

Specifications for reactive synthesis, an automated procedure to obtain a correct-by-construction reactive system, consist of assumptions and guarantees. One way a controller may satisfy the specification is by preventing the environment from satisfying the assumptions, without satisfying the guarantees. Although valid this solution is usually undesired and specifications that allow it are called non-well-separated. In this work we investigate non-well-separation in the context of GR(1), an expressive fragment of LTL that enables efficient synthesis. We distinguish different cases of non-well-separation, and compute strategies showing how the environment can be forced to violate its assumptions. Moreover, we show how to find a core, a minimal set of assumptions that lead to non-well-separation, and further extend our work to support past-time LTL and patterns. We implemented our work and evaluated it on 79 specifications. The evaluation shows that non-well-separation is a common problem in specifications and that our tools can be efficiently applied to identify it and its causes.
Non-Invasive Measurement of Arterial Stiffness Using the Analysis of Oscillometric Waveform during Cuff-Inflation

Background We developed the new method which is measured arterial stiffness simultaneously with blood pressure by oscillometry during cuff inflation, and evaluated usefulness of the index as a marker of cardiovascular disease. Methods The cuff pressure pulse waves during linear cuff inflation were extracted by blood pressure measurement device in 97 outpatients with hypertension. The paired values of the cumulatively added cuff oscillation amplitudes and the corresponding cuff pressures are stored in the device during the measurement. Each of the cumulative addition value was exchanged to the ratio of total addition, and the cuff pressures, P0 and P1, corresponding to the ratios, R0 and R1, respectively, were used for calculation of the Cuff-Oscillometric Stiffness Parameter (CSP) which was defined as ln (P1/P0) / (R1/R0-1). Furthermore, we calculated the Modified Cuff-Oscillometric Stiffness Parameter (MCSP) using CSP, age, height and weight. We also measured Cardio-Ankle Vascular Stiffness Index (CAVI), the carotid Intima-Media Thickness (IMT), blood chemistry, and Framingham Risk Score (FRS) for coronary heart disease. Results CSP was significantly correlated with CAVI(r= 0.608, p <0.0001). There were significant correlated with IMT, FRS. MCSP was closely correlated with CAVI(r= 0.803, p <0.0001). In addition, CSP, MCSP, and CAVI were associated with blood components as markers of diabetes. Conclusions These results suggest that our new method is useful for the screening arteriosclerosis-related disease, and helpful for health care management in home because of easy to use, low cost, and short time measuring.
Advances in the cardiovascular assessment of patients with chronic kidney disease

Cardiovascular mortality is grossly elevated in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), and is associated with a wide variety of structural and functional abnormalities. These issues have driven additional attempts to further characterise these abnormalities to elucidate the pathophysiology involved, assess individual risk and/or target and monitor therapies specifically directed at the cardiovascular (CV) system. This review aims to assess the techniques that are currently available for the study of the CV system. This includes conventional assessments of the whole CV system from heart to peripheral microcirculation (although not deal with VC assessment), as well as the key functional consequences relating to stress induced cardiovascular reserve, perfusion and vasoregulation. In addition this review will introduce a variety of techniques aiming to expand the envelope of conventional measurements.
Dirichlet-vMF Mixture Model

This document is about the multi-document Von-Mises-Fisher mixture model with a Dirichlet prior, referred to as VMFMix. VMFMix is analogous to Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) in that they can capture the co-occurrence patterns acorss multiple documents. The difference is that in VMFMix, the topic-word distribution is defined on a continuous n-dimensional hypersphere. Hence VMFMix is used to derive topic embeddings, i.e., representative vectors, from multiple sets of embedding vectors. An efficient Variational Expectation-Maximization inference algorithm is derived. The performance of VMFMix on two document classification tasks is reported, with some preliminary analysis.
Permanent energetic management a solution in rehabilitation of small hydropower plants

The paper presents an evaluation of the role, importance, and necessity of the rehabilitation for the main courses of small rivers, equipped with Small Hydropower Plants-SHP. The assurance of a proper management, in accordance with the local and specific conditions may provide a high efficiency, and a smaller time to recover the initial investment. The paper structured in six parts aims to highlight the importance of surveillance, designing, modeling, and efficiency of SHP, in the context of the sustainable development of the energy sector. For the local communities, private investors, social communities and local authorities, hydropower plants represent in many cases, the main source of energy. First is analyzed the efficiency of the local energetic infrastructure, in the current economic context. A presentation of the optimal solutions for designing and modeling, followed by the Demand Site Management-DSM is mentioned. The main factors that influence the optimum functioning of the SHP, correlated with the local conditions are introduced as the input-data. A briefly presentation of the numerical model is mentioned, with the main considered parameters. Some of the obtained results for a specific area will highlight the efficiency of the proposed solution, the real benefits of the combined tasks. The paper ends with some conclusions, and references.
Comparing Official and Self-report Records of Offending across Gender and Race/Ethnicity in a Longitudinal Study of Serious Youthful Offenders

Objectives: Researchers have used both self-reports and official records to measure the prevalence and frequency of crime and delinquency. Few studies have compared longitudinally the validity of these two measures across gender and race/ethnicity in order to assess concordance. Methods: Using data from the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of 1,354 serious youthful offenders, we compare official records of arrest and self-reports of arrest over seven years. Results: Findings show moderate agreement between self-reports and official arrests, which is fairly stable over time and quite similar across both gender and race/ethnicity. We do not find any race differences in the prevalence of official arrests, but do observe a gender difference in official arrests that is not accounted for by self-reported arrests. Conclusions: Further work on issues on the validity and reliability of different forms of offending data across demographic groups is needed.