Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activity-dependent endogenous taurine release facilitates excitatory neurotransmission in the neocortical marginal zone of neonatal rats

In the developing cerebral cortex, the marginal zone (MZ), consisting of early-generated neurons such as Cajal-Retzius cells, plays an important role in cell migration and lamination. There is accumulating evidence of widespread excitatory neurotransmission mediated by γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the MZ. Cajal-Retzius cells express not only GABAA receptors but also α2/β subunits of glycine receptors, and exhibit glycine receptor-mediated depolarization due to high [Cl−]i. However, the physiological roles of glycine receptors and their endogenous agonists during neurotransmission in the MZ are yet to be elucidated. To address this question, we performed optical imaging from the MZ using the voltage-sensitive dye JPW1114 on tangential neocortical slices of neonatal rats. A single electrical stimulus evoked an action-potential-dependent optical signal that spread radially over the MZ. The amplitude of the signal was not affected by glutamate receptor blockers, but was suppressed by either GABAA or glycine receptor antagonists. Combined application of both antagonists nearly abolished the signal. Inhibition of Na+, K+-2Cl− cotransporter by 20 µM bumetanide reduced the signal, indicating that this transporter contributes to excitation. Analysis of the interstitial fluid obtained by microdialysis from tangential neocortical slices with high-performance liquid chromatography revealed that GABA and taurine, but not glycine or glutamate, were released in the MZ in response to the electrical stimulation. The ambient release of taurine was reduced by the addition of a voltage-sensitive Na+ channel blocker. Immunohistochemistry and immunoelectron microscopy indicated that taurine was stored both in Cajal-Retzius and non-Cajal-Retzius cells in the MZ, but was not localized in presynaptic structures. Our results suggest that activity-dependent non-synaptic release of endogenous taurine facilitates excitatory neurotransmission through activation of glycine receptors in the MZ.
Preservation of digital evidence: Application in criminal investigation

Any digital device generates information that may become valuable evidence in the event of a cybercrime incident, security incident, or cyber-attack, but often the collection, management and preservation of this information is not done properly. In the legal field, once information has been obtained from the devices, it is very important to maintain it and preserve it from the initial time, through investigation, until the trial or investigation is concluded, and to preserve it for long term use, in order to avoid it to be tainted, damaged, changed or manipulated and so assuring reliability through the whole process. Preservation of digital evidence is an important aspect when deciding its admissibility in a trial in process, or in any future process, reopened by appeal, or as source of historical information. This paper contains a review of the state of the art about digital preservation in institutions dedicated to criminal investigation, analyzing concepts, related projects, tools and legal support in this area. The motivation of this paper is the idea of finding how close we are to having a framework useful to preserve digital evidence, ensuring integrity, hence increasing its admissibility, and supported by long term preservation technique.
Analytical calculation of the Green's function and Drude weight for a correlated fermion-boson system

In classical Drude theory the conductivity is determined by the mass of the propagating particles and the mean free path between two scattering events. For a quantum particle this simple picture of diffusive transport loses relevance if strong correlations dominate the particle motion. We study a situation where the propagation of a fermionic particle is possible only through creation and annihilation of local bosonic excitations. This correlated quantum transport process is outside the Drude picture, since one cannot distinguish between free propagation and intermittent scattering. The characterization of transport is possible using the Drude weight obtained from the f-sum rule, although its interpretation in terms of free mass and mean free path breaks down. For the situation studied we calculate the Green's function and Drude weight using a Green's functions expansion technique, and discuss their physical meaning.
Making usability recommendations useful and usable

This paper evaluates the quality of recommendations for improving a user interface resulting from a usability evaluation. The study compares usability comments written by different authors, but describing similar usability issues. The usability comments were provided by 17 professional teams who independently evaluated the usability of the website for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. The study finds that only 14 of the 84 studied comments (17%) addressing six usability problems contained recommendations that were both useful and usable. Fourteen recommendations were not useful at all. Sixteen recommendations were not usable at all. Quality problems include recommendations that are vague or not actionable, and ones that may not improve the overall usability of the application. The paper suggests characteristics for "useful and usable recommendations," that is, recommendations for solving usability problems that lead to changes that efficiently improve the usability of a product.
Extending AOP with models

Aspect-oriented programming is a promising approach to address separation of concerns. Aspect-oriented programming languages address the problems of scattering and entanglement by providing an abstraction for specifying cross-cutting concerns in a modular manner. The relevant aspects are then composed to derive the desired implementation. However, current aspect-oriented programming languages only allow this composition to be specified in terms of programming language constructs. This is restrictive and can only be used for simple compositions. Many situations in practice need a richer composition context that cannot be expressed using programming language constructs. Models, being at a higher level of abstraction and closer to the problem domain, can be used to capture this information. We propose an approach to extend aspect-oriented programming with a composition mechanism that can make use of the information captured in models. We also outline an implementation of the proposed approach. The proposed approach has been used to seamlessly integrate model-centric and code-centric development.
Thermography for Quality Assessment of Microelectronic Devices

This work presents collaboration between electronics industry and University aimed to develop novel power cycling methodology combined with IR thermography for quality and reliability studies of microelectronic assemblies. For this purpose an array of programmable Thermo Electric Converters (TEC) was designed and constructed [1]. The array provides possibility of introduction of controlled anisothermal temperature field as a function of time. Such field is exploited for stimulation for IR thermography and lifetime acceleration experiments. Furthermore, an advanced method, which takes advantage of short stimulations by photon blast was used to perform Time Domain IR Thermography. Combination of such techniques provided information about the weakest points in the assembly, design and optimisation of the manufacturing processes.
Network analysis reveals structure indicative of syntax in the corpus of undeciphered Indus civilization inscriptions

Archaeological excavations in the sites of the Indus Valley civilization (2500-1900 BCE) in Pakistan and northwestern India have unearthed a large number of artifacts with inscriptions made up of hundreds of distinct signs. To date, there is no generally accepted decipherment of these sign sequences, and there have been suggestions that the signs could be non-linguistic. Here we apply complex network analysis techniques on the data-base of available Indus inscriptions, with the aim of detecting patterns indicative of syntactic structure in this sign system. Our results show the presence of regularities, e.g., in the segmentation trees of the sequences, that suggest the existence of a grammar underlying the construction of the sequences.
Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors Enhance Memory and Synaptic Plasticity via CREB: CBP-Dependent Transcriptional Activation

Histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors increase histone acetylation and enhance both memory and synaptic plasticity. The current model for the action of HDAC inhibitors assumes that they alter gene expression globally and thus affect memory processes in a nonspecific manner. Here, we show that the enhancement of hippocampus-dependent memory and hippocampal synaptic plasticity by HDAC inhibitors is mediated by the transcription factor cAMP response element-binding protein (CREB) and the recruitment of the transcriptional coactivator and histone acetyltransferase CREB-binding protein (CBP) via the CREB-binding domain of CBP. Furthermore, we show that the HDAC inhibitor trichostatin A does not globally alter gene expression but instead increases the expression of specific genes during memory consolidation. Our results suggest that HDAC inhibitors enhance memory processes by the activation of key genes regulated by the CREB:CBP transcriptional complex.
Powerpoint as Educative Media to Optimize Internalization of Hindu Education

This study aimed at: (1) making instructional design with power point as IT-based educative media to optimize internalization of Hindu education; (2) trying out the instructional design with power point as IT-based educative media to optimize internalization of Hindu education; (3) using SWOT analysis for the use of power point as IT-based educative media to optimize internalization of Hindu education; (4) knowing the effect of the use of ITbased educative media upon the learning outcome of Hindu education. Based on the analysis, it was found that: (1) there were three steps that have done to produce the power point as IT-based instructional media, i.e. prototype design, try out, and revision; (2) the produced power point of instructional media in Cycle I could be tried out optimally and there were some revisions conducted to improve the instructional quality; (3) the conducted SWOT analysis could improve the instructional quality when using the power point as the IT-based instructional media; and (4) based on the observation, it was found that the students had positive attitude upon the Hindu instructional by using power point as the IT-based instructional media. In general, there is significant difference of learning outcome of the students in Cycle I and Cycle II.
Overview of TREC 2007

The sixteenth Text REtrieval Conference, TREC 2007, was held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) November 6–9, 2007. The conference was co-sponsored by NIST and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). TREC 2007 had 95 participating groups from 18 countries. Table 2 at the end of the paper lists the participating groups. TREC 2007 is the latest in a series of workshops designed to foster research on technologies for information retrieval. The workshop series has four goals:
Altered CO 2 sensitivity of connexin26 mutant hemichannels in vitro

Connexin26 (Cx26) mutations underlie human pathologies ranging from hearing loss to keratitis ichthyosis deafness (KID) syndrome. Cx26 hemichannels are directly gated by CO2 and contribute to the chemosensory regulation of breathing. The KID syndrome mutation A88V is insensitive to CO2, and has a dominant negative action on the CO2 sensitivity of Cx26WT hemichannels, and reduces respiratory drive in humans. We have now examined the effect of further human mutations of Cx26 on its sensitivity to CO2. Mutated Cx26 subunits, carrying one of A88S, N14K, N14Y, M34T, or V84L, were transiently expressed in HeLa cells. The CO2‐dependence of hemichannel activity, and their ability to exert dominant negative actions on cells stably expressing Cx26WT, was quantified by a dye‐loading assay. The KID syndrome mutation, N14K, abolished the sensitivity of Cx26 to CO2. Both N14Y and N14K exerted a powerful dominant negative action on the CO2 sensitivity of Cx26WT. None of the other mutations (all recessive) had a dominant negative action. A88S shifted the affinity of Cx26 to slightly higher levels without reducing its ability to fully open to CO2. M34T did not change the affinity of Cx26 for CO2 but reduced its ability to open in response to CO2. V84L had no effect on the CO2‐sensitivity of Cx26. Some pathological mutations of Cx26 can therefore alter the CO2 sensitivity of Cx26 hemichannels. The loss of CO2 sensitivity could contribute to pathology and consequent reduced respiratory drive could be an unrecognized comorbidity of these pathologies.
Workload Classification & Software Energy Measurement for Efficient Scheduling on Private Cloud Platforms

At present there are a number of barriers to creating an energy efficient workload scheduler for a Private Cloud based data center. Firstly, the relationship between different workloads and power consumption must be investigated. Secondly, current hardware-based solutions to providing energy usage statistics are unsuitable in warehouse scale data centers where low cost and scalability are desirable properties. In this paper we discuss the effect of different workloads on server power consumption in a Private Cloud platform. We display a noticeable difference in energy consumption when servers are given tasks that dominate various resources (CPU, Memory, Hard Disk and Network). We then use this insight to develop CloudMonitor, a software utility that is capable of >95% accurate power predictions from monitoring resource consumption of workloads, after a "training phase" in which a dynamic power model is developed.
3D segmentation of the liver using free-form deformation based on boosting and deformation gradients

This paper presents a novel automatic 3D hybrid segmentation approach based on free-form deformation. The algorithms incorporate boosting and deformation gradients to achieve reliable liver segmentation of Computed Tomography (CT) scans. A free-form deformable model is deformed under the forces originating from boosting and deformation gradients. The basic idea of the scheme is to combine information from intensity and shape prior knowledge to calculate desired displacements to the liver boundary on vertices of deformable surface. Boosting classifies the 3D image into a binary mask and the edgeflow generates a force field from the mask. The deformable surface deforms iteratively according to the force field. Deformation gradients cast restriction at each deformation step. The deformation converges to a stable status to achieve the final segmentation surface.
Evolution of point masses by planar logarithmic diffusion. Finite-time blow-down

We are interested in a remarkable property of certain nonlinear diffusion equations, that we call blow-down or delayed regularization. The following happens: a solution of one of these equations is shown to exist in some generalized sense and it is also shown to be non-smooth for some time 0 < t < t1, after which it becomes smooth and still nontrivial. We use the logarithmic diffusion equation to examine an example of occurrence of this phenomenon starting from data that contain Dirac deltas, which persist for a finite time. The interpretation of the results in terms of diffusion is also unusual: if the process starts with one or several point masses surrounded by a continuous distribution, the masses decay into the medium over a finite period of time. The study of the phenomenon implies consideration of a new concept of measure solution which seems natural for these diffusion processes.
Fluoxetine Protection in Decompression Sickness in Mice is Enhanced by Blocking TREK-1 Potassium Channel with the “spadin” Antidepressant

In mice, disseminated coagulation, inflammation, and ischemia induce neurological damage that can lead to death. These symptoms result from circulating bubbles generated by a pathogenic decompression. Acute fluoxetine treatment or the presence of the TREK-1 potassium channel increases the survival rate when mice are subjected to an experimental dive/decompression protocol. This is a paradox because fluoxetine is a blocker of TREK-1 channels. First, we studied the effects of an acute dose of fluoxetine (50 mg/kg) in wild-type (WT) and TREK-1 deficient mice (knockout homozygous KO and heterozygous HET). Then, we combined the same fluoxetine treatment with a 5-day treatment protocol with spadin, in order to specifically block TREK-1 activity (KO-like mice). KO and KO-like mice were regarded as antidepressed models. In total, 167 mice (45 WTcont 46 WTflux 30 HETflux and 46 KOflux) constituting the flux-pool and 113 supplementary mice (27 KO-like 24 WTflux2 24 KO-likeflux 21 WTcont2 17 WTno dive) constituting the spad-pool were included in this study. Only 7% of KO-TREK-1 treated with fluoxetine (KOflux) and 4% of mice treated with both spadin and fluoxetine (KO-likeflux) died from decompression sickness (DCS) symptoms. These values are much lower than those of WT control (62%) or KO-like mice (41%). After the decompression protocol, mice showed significant consumption of their circulating platelets and leukocytes. Spadin antidepressed mice were more likely to exhibit DCS. Nevertheless, mice which had both blocked TREK-1 channels and fluoxetine treatment were better protected against DCS. We conclude that the protective effect of such an acute dose of fluoxetine is enhanced when TREK-1 is inhibited. We confirmed that antidepressed models may have worse DCS outcomes, but concomitant fluoxetine treatment not only decreased DCS severity but increased the survival rate.
A Cross-Layer Routing Scheme for Multi-Channel Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper proposes an efficient and adaptive cross-layer routing scheme coined path cost-based Routing (PCBR) scheme for multi-channel, multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). In our scheme, paths are selected based on the path cost determined by the three important metrics: end-to-end delay, available bandwidth, and path packet loss rate. The end-to-end delay and available bandwidth are redefined based on the 802.11s MAC protocol to fit the multi-channel, multi-hop WMNs. Mesh Routers (MRs) process most route discovery work in themselves to reduce the number of retransmissions in flooding the route discovery packets. The route is preferred with less end-to-end delay, more available bandwidth, and less power consumption by adapting the coefficients of the three metrics. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is very suitable for the multi-channel, multi-hop WMNs.
Multimodal Comparable Corpora as Resources for Extracting Parallel Data: Parallel Phrases Extraction

Discovering parallel data in comparable corpora is a promising approach for overcoming the lack of parallel texts in statistical machine translation and other NLP applications. In this paper we propose an alternative to comparable corpora of texts as resources for extracting parallel data: a multimodal comparable corpus of audio and texts. We present a novel method to detect parallel phrases from such corpora based on splitting comparable sentences into fragments, called phrases. The audio is transcribed by an automatic speech recognition system, split into fragments and translated with a baseline statistical machine translation system. We then use information retrieval in a large text corpus in the target language, split also into fragments, and extract parallel phrases. We compared our method with parallel sentences extraction techniques. We evaluate the quality of the extracted data on an English to French translation task and show significant improvements over a state-ofthe-art baseline.
Hierarchical parametric test metrics estimation: A ΣΔ converter BIST case study

In this paper we propose a method for evaluating test measurements for complex circuits that are difficult to simulate. The evaluation aims at estimating test metrics, such as parametric test escape and yield loss, with parts per million (ppm) accuracy. To achieve this, the method combines behavioral modeling, density estimation, and regression. The method is demonstrated for a previously proposed Built-In Self-Test (BIST) technique for ΣΔ Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) explaining in detail the derivation of a behavioral model that captures the main nonidealities in the circuit. The estimated test metrics are further analyzed in order to uncover trends in a large device sample that explain the source of erroneous test decisions.
Adaptive and neutral markers both show continent‐wide population structure of mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae)

Abstract Assessments of population genetic structure and demographic history have traditionally been based on neutral markers while explicitly excluding adaptive markers. In this study, we compared the utility of putatively adaptive and neutral single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for inferring mountain pine beetle population structure across its geographic range. Both adaptive and neutral SNPs, and their combination, allowed range‐wide structure to be distinguished and delimited a population that has recently undergone range expansion across northern British Columbia and Alberta. Using an equal number of both adaptive and neutral SNPs revealed that adaptive SNPs resulted in a stronger correlation between sampled populations and inferred clustering. Our results suggest that adaptive SNPs should not be excluded prior to analysis from neutral SNPs as a combination of both marker sets resulted in better resolution of genetic differentiation between populations than either marker set alone. These results demonstrate the utility of adaptive loci for resolving population genetic structure in a nonmodel organism.
Using the Case-Based Ranking Methodology for Test Case Prioritization

The test case execution order affects the time at which the objectives of testing are met. If the objective is fault detection, an inappropriate execution order might reveal most faults late, thus delaying the bug fixing activity and eventually the delivery of the software. Prioritizing the test cases so as to optimize the achievement of the testing goal has potentially a positive impact on the testing costs, especially when the test execution time is long. Test engineers often possess relevant knowledge about the relative priority of the test cases. However, this knowledge can be hardly expressed in the form of a global ranking or scoring. In this paper, we propose a test case prioritization technique that takes advantage of user knowledge through a machine learning algorithm, case-based ranking (CBR). CBR elicits just relative priority information from the user, in the form of pairwise test case comparisons. User input is integrated with multiple prioritization indexes, in an iterative process that successively refines the test case ordering. Preliminary results on a case study indicate that CBR overcomes previous approaches and, for moderate suite size, gets very close to the optimal solution
Robust Real-time Face Tracking Using Adaptive Color Model

In this paper we present a new robust face tracking method based on the Condensation algorithm [1, 2] that uses a sampling based density representation. A twodimensional color model is used to approximate the face color. We modified the Condensation algorithm to provide color adaptability to the abrupt change of illumination and to the tracking of different colored people. According to the face size and location uncertainty, the searching range is automatically determined and it makes the algorithm extremely robust and efficient. The tracker operates at real-time and actively controls a camera pan-tilt in order to locate a person’s face in the center of the image. Experimental results show the algorithm’s robustness to the agile motion of face and to the dramatic change of illumination in the presence of complex background.