Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A pilot study of leukocyte expression patterns for drug metabolizing enzyme and transporter transcripts in autoimmune glomerulonephritis

Objective: Leukocyte mRNA expression patterns of drug metabolizing enzyme genes and transporter genes that are relevant for the disposition of cyclophosphamide and mycophenolate were studied. The relationships between expression and patient-level data and pharmacokinetics were evaluated. Methods: The study included patients with glomerulonephritis secondary to lupus nephritis (SLE, n = 36), small vessel vasculitis (SVV, n = 35), healthy controls (HC, n = 10), and disease controls (VC, n = 5; LC, n = 5). Transcript assays targeted metabolizing enzymes (UGT1A7, UGT1A9, UGT2B7, CYP3A4, CYP2C9, CYP2B6) and transporters (ABCB1, ABCC2, ABCG2, SLCO1A2). Genotyping for specific variants was conducted. Group transcript fold-changes were evaluated. Patient level data was evaluated for transcript fold-change and disease, treatment, gender, race, and genotype. Results: Significant differences were noted in expression of UGT1A7, ABCB1, and ABCC2; for UGT1A7, SVV (0.17 ± 0.42; p < 0.05) and SLE (0.03 ± 0.1; p < 0.05) groups had lower expression than HC (0.79 ± 2.02). For ABCB1, SLE had a lower expression (0.33 ± 0.21; p < 0.05) than HCs (1 ± 0.82). For ABCG2, SVV group had a lower expression (0.17 ± 0.14; p < 0.05) than HCs (1 ± 1.82). Differences in expression of ABCC2 approached statistical significance with VC patients (2.02 ± 1.13) exhibiting higher expression than SVV patients (1.06 ± 1.11; p = 0.05). The relationships between transcript expression and patient-level data demonstrated; ABCC2 expression was different by race (1.26 ± 1.82 Caucasian versus 1.37 ± 0.86 non-Caucasian; p = 0.049) and CYP2B6 expression was different by treatment (2.07 ± 2.94 cyclophosphamide versus 0.45 ± 0.5 mycophenolate; p = 0.01). Conclusions: The current study showed differential expression of drug metabolizing enzyme and transporter transcripts and contributes to the literature on transcript expression of drug transporters in leukocytes. The implications of altered local metabolism and transport in leukocytes may be important in autoimmune diseases and transplant patients where treatment is targeted to leukocytes.
Significance of histamine content in fish from the aspect of hygienic quality

radu je prikazan znacaj nalaza histamina u ribi. Pretraženi uzorci lokardi (n=36), pohranjeni na sobnoj temperaturi, treceg su dana bili zdravstveno neispravni radi povecane kolicine histamina (zima 2007.). Cetvrtog je dana i na uzorcima držanim na temperaturi hladnjaka ustanovljena kolicina histamina veca od 100 mg/kg. U uzorcima analiziranim u ljeto iste godine, vec je drugog dana utvrđena povecana kolicina histamina (sobna temperatura), odnosno treceg dana za uzorke pohranjene na temperaturi hladnjaka, te se ti uzorci smatraju zdravstveno neispravnima. Sustavne mjere pohrane ribe na niže temperature mogu sprijeciti histaminsko otrovanje ljudi. Propisane norme, kriticne granice kolicine histamina prema odredbama Pravilnika (NN RH 51/05), kao i mjere sprecavanja histaminskog otrovanja u okvirima veterinarsko-sanitarnog nadzora u Republici Hrvatskoj u skladu su sPravilnikom o higijeni hrane životinjskog podrijetla (NN RH 99/07).
Modeling Emotions in Multi-Agent Systems based on Petri-Net Modeling Technique

Starting from the hypothesis that emotions can be an important factor in the design of (multi-)agent systems we follow two directions within our research: First we focus on theoretical foundations of emotional phenomena; second, we aim to build a conceptual framework for modeling emotion in context of multi-agent systems. In this paper we discuss the use of Petri net formalisms for representing different aspects of emotions in a multi-agent system. Futhermore we propose the adoption of the Socionics modeling approach, initially specified in [2003b], for modeling theories of emotion.
The Role of Labor Market Participation on Marriage Bargaining – Identification through Intergenerational Transfers *

This paper provides insights into the determinants of marriage bargaining by analyzing withincouple negotiation for the share of family resources allocated to each of the spouse’s old-age parents. The focal question is the extent to which spousal labor market participation affects her bargaining power. The study is based on a unique Chinese household level survey data. To account for the potential endogeneity of one’s labor market participation, the analysis exploits the exogenous variations in working-age individuals’ employment status resulting from the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China during the mid to late 1990’s. After controlling for a number of household and individual characteristics (such as elderly needs and living arrangements), the share of transfers towards a spouse’s own parents is found to be positively correlated with her employment status and work hours. The findings support the notion that a spouse’s labor market participation has a non-negligible impact on her bargaining power in the marriage. JEL Classification Codes: J12, J14.
Texture Output : Texture Geometry and Color Regularity Manipulation Input Texture Output : Texture Replacement

A near-regular texture deviates geometrically and photometrically from a regular congruent tiling. Although near-regular textures are ubiquitous in the man-made and natural world, they present computational challenges for state of the art texture analysis and synthesis algorithms. Using regular tiling as our anchor point, and with user-assisted lattice extraction, we can explicitly model the deformation of a near-regular texture with respect to geometry, lighting and color. We treat a deformation field both as a function that acts on a texture and as a texture that is acted upon, and develop a multimodal framework where each deformation field is subject to analysis, synthesis and manipulation. Using this formalization, we are able to construct simple parametric models to faithfully synthesize the appearance of a near-regular texture and purposefully control its regularity.
Organizational Adoption of Cyber Insurance Instruments in IT Security Risk Management– A Modeling Approach

Cyber insurance can be an effective instrument to transfer cyber risk and complement the benefits from technological controls that guard the IS (information and network) assets in organizations. This research attempts to identify the factors that could explain the proclivity of adoption of cyber insurance in managing cyber risk of an organization. Grounded on the context based TOE framework of adoption of innovation, we propose a research model that integrates technology, organizational and environmental factors surrounding the adoption of cyber insurance. We begin with the insights from TOE literature, and contextualize them with the specificities of cyber insurance in order to formulate a set of relevant hypotheses, empirical validation of which could provide valuable insight into organizational adoption (or the observed lack) of cyber insurance. This research attempts to explain the contextual factors that affect successful organizational adoption of cyber insurance and extend the TOE adoption of innovation theory in the area of IT security risk management.
A synchronization and communication model for distributed multimedia objects

As the demand for multimedia information systems increases and network technology provides the capability to handle multimedia data, effective communication and synchronization mechanisms are needed in a distributed environment to realize the successful retrieval, composition and presentation of multimedia objects. In this paper, we propose a specification model for the communication and synchronization of multimedia objects in a distributed environment. This model specifies all the necessary functions for the communication and presentation of multimedia objects. We also implement several synchronization schemes in our model that provide mechanisms to handle synchronization anomalies during the presentation of multimedia objects.
Fuzzy cognitive maps: basic theories and their applications in medical problems

This paper investigates a hybrid methodology that combines fuzzy logic and neural networks, Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM), for modeling and controlling Supervisory Control Systems. A mathematical description of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) will be presented and new construction methods will be extensively examined. Synthesizing different FCM will be presented and explained with examples. The neural network nature of FCM will be briefly discussed. The problem of decision making process and a Decision Tree-FCM model is presented. A successful application of FCM theory in a medical problem (bladder tumor) is provided.
Shared Corpora Working Group Report

We seek to identify a limited amount of representative corpora, suitable for annotation by the computational linguistics annotation community. Our hope is that a wide variety of annotation will be undertaken on the same corpora, which would facilitate: (1) the comparison of annotation schemes; (2) the merging of information represented by various annotation schemes; (3) the emergence of NLP systems that use information in multiple annotation schemes; and (4) the adoption of various types of best practice in corpus annotation. Such best practices would include: (a) clearer demarcation of phenomena being annotated; (b) the use of particular test corpora to determine whether a particular annotation task can feasibly achieve good agreement scores; (c) The use of underlying models for representing annotation content that facilitate merging, comparison, and analysis; and (d) To the extent possible, the use of common annotation categories or a mapping among categories for the same phenomenon used by different annotation groups. This study will focus on the problem of identifying such corpora as well as the suitability of two candidate corpora: the Open portion of the American National Corpus (Ide and Macleod, 2001; Ide and Suderman, 2004) and the "Controversial" portions of the WikipediaXML corpus (Denoyer and Gallinari, 2006).
Nerve Growth Factor-Induced Differentiation Changes the Cellular Organization of Regulated Peptide Release by PC12 Cells

PC12 cells, like endocrine chromaffin cells, undergo neuronal-like differentiation in response to nerve growth factor (NGF). Here we report that this phenotype conversion produces major changes in release of a green fluorescent protein-tagged neuropeptide–hormone. First, the spatial distribution of the releasable pool is altered; peptide release from untreated cells is supported predominantly by membrane-proximal vesicles, whereas a diffuse pool at the ends of processes is used by NGF-treated cells. Second, the time course of release evoked by photolysis of caged Ca2+ is faster after differentiation. High-resolution measurements suggest that a slow step before membrane fusion dominates the kinetics of release in untreated cells. Finally, the effect of actin microfilament depolymerization on total release is altered by NGF treatment. This implies that the mechanism that limits the size of the releasable pool is altered by phenotype conversion. Therefore, the cellular organization of peptide release is plastic and changes in response to NGF. This flexibility may be used to generate cell-specific release properties.
Who adapts better to Brazil: Expatriates from developed or Latin American countries? Revisiting cultural distance

This study aimed to compare transcultural adaptation for expatriates from Latin American countries with those from developed countries, with the intent of evaluating the premise of a negative association between cultural distance and adaptation for the Brazilian context. A final valid sample of 217 cases was reached. Our results suggest that the theory of cultural distance as a predictor of difficulties in transcultural adaptation cannot be generalized for the Brazilian expatriate host environment context. Participants’ responses show that expatriates originating from developed countries adapt in a more satisfactory manner than Latin American expatriates, even though they are more culturally distant.
VOICE QUALITY CLASSIFICATION APPLICATIONS

We describe the voice quality classification system that uses entropy and dynamism criteria as discrimination features. The main idea of this approach is that the input neural net is considered as an informational channel. Channel tuned to the certain type of information transmits it best of all according to the informational criterion. In our case a multilayer perceptron (MLP) emitted posterior probabilities for speech recognition was used as such information channel. Then two features entropy and dynamism were computed using these posterior probabilities. And finally HMM was used as a classifier. Different experiments demonstrated efficient usage possibilities of entropy and dynamism criteria not only in audio classification tasks but also in the voice quality classification applications.
Electrophysiological Correlates of Object Location and Object Identity Processing in Spatial Scenes

The ability to quickly detect changes in our surroundings has been crucial to human adaption and survival. In everyday life we often need to identify whether an object is new and if an object has changed its location. In the current event-related potential (ERP) study we investigated the electrophysiological correlates and the time course in detecting different types of changes of an objecṫs location and identity. In a delayed match-to-sample task participants had to indicate whether two consecutive scenes containing a road, a house, and two objects, were either the same or different. In six randomly intermixed conditions the second scene was identical, one of the objects had changed its identity, one of the objects had changed its location, or the objects had switched locations. The results reveal different time courses for the processing of identity and location changes in spatial scenes. Whereas location changes elicited a posterior N2 effect, indicating early mismatch detection, followed by a P3 effect reflecting post-perceptual processing, identity changes elicited an anterior N3 effect, which was delayed and functionally distinct from the N2 effect found for the location changes. The condition in which two objects switched position elicited a late ERP effect, reflected by a P3 effect similar to that obtained for the location changes. In sum, this study is the first to cohesively show different time courses for the processing of location changes, identity changes, and object switches in spatial scenes, which manifest themselves in different electrophysiological correlates.
Genetic reprogramming of human amniotic cells with episomal vectors: neural rosettes as sentinels in candidate selection for validation assays

The promise of genetic reprogramming has prompted initiatives to develop banks of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from diverse sources. Sentinel assays for pluripotency could maximize available resources for generating iPSCs. Neural rosettes represent a primitive neural tissue that is unique to differentiating PSCs and commonly used to identify derivative neural/stem progenitors. Here, neural rosettes were used as a sentinel assay for pluripotency in selection of candidates to advance to validation assays. Candidate iPSCs were generated from independent populations of amniotic cells with episomal vectors. Phase imaging of living back up cultures showed neural rosettes in 2 of the 5 candidate populations. Rosettes were immunopositive for the Sox1, Sox2, Pax6 and Pax7 transcription factors that govern neural development in the earliest stage of development and for the Isl1/2 and Otx2 transcription factors that are expressed in the dorsal and ventral domains, respectively, of the neural tube in vivo. Dissociation of rosettes produced cultures of differentiation competent neural/stem progenitors that generated immature neurons that were immunopositive for βIII-tubulin and glia that were immunopositive for GFAP. Subsequent validation assays of selected candidates showed induced expression of endogenous pluripotency genes, epigenetic modification of chromatin and formation of teratomas in immunodeficient mice that contained derivatives of the 3 embryonic germ layers. Validated lines were vector-free and maintained a normal karyotype for more than 60 passages. The credibility of rosette assembly as a sentinel assay for PSCs is supported by coordinate loss of nuclear-localized pluripotency factors Oct4 and Nanog in neural rosettes that emerge spontaneously in cultures of self-renewing validated lines. Taken together, these findings demonstrate value in neural rosettes as sentinels for pluripotency and selection of promising candidates for advance to validation assays.
An efficient parts-based near-duplicate and sub-image retrieval system

We introduce a system for near-duplicate detection and sub-image retrieval. Such a system is useful for finding copyright violations and detecting forged images. We define near-duplicate as images altered with common transformations such as changing contrast, saturation, scaling, cropping, framing, etc. Our system builds a parts-based representation of images using <i>distinctive local descriptors</i> which give high quality matches even under severe transformations. To cope with the large number of features extracted from the images, we employ <i>locality-sensitive hashing</i> to index the local descriptors. This allows us to make approximate similarity queries that only examine a small fraction of the database. Although locality-sensitive hashing has excellent theoretical performance properties, a standard implementation would still be unacceptably slow for this application. We show that, by optimizing layout and access to the index data on disk, we can efficiently query indices containing millions of keypoints. Our system achieves near-perfect accuracy (100% precision at 99.85% recall) on the tests presented in Meng <i>et al.</i> [16], and consistently strong results on our own, significantly more challenging experiments. Query times are interactive even for collections of thousands of images.
Prioritized Information Recovery for Wireless Link-Layer Communication

In this paper we develop Prioritized Automatic Code Embedding (PACE) link-layer protocol to achieve preferred data recovery order across connections, while maintaining stable and reliable data flows over wireless networks. We classify link-layer traffic arrivals into different priorities based on the packet delay constraint and the distortion associated with the loss of that packet. The traffic arriving in each priority class is modeled as a poisson process. Consequently, we formulate the link-layer buffer as a multiclass M/G/1 priority queuing system where the decoding process (service process) of the PACE buffer is captured by a nonhomogeneous geometric distribution. This formulation enables the determination of an optimal dynamic decoding schedule for heterogeneous link-layer traffic arrivals. PACE employs a novel rate-adaptive Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) channel code for error recovery. We model the underlying LDPC decoding process and use it to determine an optimal code selection policy for maximal bandwidth utilization. We demonstrate experimentally that PACE reduces the throughput-delay cost by 20%-70% in comparison with the IEEE802.11 ARQ and Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) protocols. Further, the PACE protocol achieves 20%-60% improvement in channel bandwidth utilization and 2-10dB PSNR gain in realtime video quality.
Robust watermarking of compressive sensed measurements under impulsive and Gaussian attacks

This paper considers the watermark embedding problem onto Compressive Sensed measurements of a signal that is sparse in a proper basis. We propose a novel watermark encoding-decoding algorithm that exploits the sparsity of the signal to achieve dense watermarking. The proposed algorithm is robust under additive white Gaussian noise as well as impulsive noise or their mixture. The experimental results show also that the algorithm achieves an embedding capacity superior to those of classical ℓ2 and ℓ1 embedding algorithms.
DisTree: A scheme for DHT

A peer-to-peer (P2P) system has emerged as one of the most successful ways to share resources in distributed environment. Early P2P content distribution networks were relying on a central index of the available resources on the network. Second generation Peer-to-Peer systems employ a Distributed Hash table (DHT) to locate data efficiently in their network. In this paper, we proposed a new scheme of DHT. This scheme is based on formation of a logical tree which supports the key searching using matching key over length. Distree is capable of routing and locating a key in nearly constant message complexity. It also enables to distribute the load of routing request and holding key responsibility which make it suitable for low configuration devices as well.
Memristive synapses are becoming reality

A synapse is essentially a programmable wire used to connect groups of neurons together. The human brain possesses approximately 10 billion neurons, each of which has direct synaptic connections to approximately 10,000 neurons. Neuromorphic computers aimed at mimicking biological computation, and which have numbers of neurons and synapses approaching biological scale, can be modeled with supercomputers or neural hardware accelerators. However, in order for such neural computing devices to achieve a biologically plausible synaptic density, it is imperative to minimize synaptic size. This feat is challenging because the synaptic weight of each synapse must be stored. Since digital synapse implementations require that several bits of data per synapse be memorized, analog synapses may be a superior choice. Analog synapses based on floating-gate transistors store the weight as charge that is trapped between insulating layers. The charge can be manipulated by injecting and tunneling electrons to and from the floating node.1 Such transistors rely on proven technology and allow a relatively high density, rendering them worthwhile synaptic candidates. However, a new class of devices, known as memristive devices, may be the next leap forward in high density synapse fabrication. Memristive devices will allow for fabrication of single device synapses as crossbar arrays on top of complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. As the synapses would be in the memristive layer on top of the CMOS,2 the entire silicon area would be left for neurons. Memristive devices are a class of two-terminal resistive devices with a state.3 The state (and thus resistance) of memristive devices systematically changes as a function of state, voltage, and time, enabling device resistance programming. HewlettPackard’s TiO2-based memristor has garnered the most attention,4 but memristive characteristics have been observed in a variety of materials (e.g. in metal oxides and organic Figure 1. (a) Current-voltage (I/V) curve of an analog memristor with transient simulation from 0 to 0.5s and input voltage as shown in (c). The device becomes more conductive after each pulse. (b) Transient simulated I/V curve from 0.5 to 1s (negative input pulses). The device is programmed as less conductive.
Exchange-rate management in Brazil

This paper examines four hypotheses: (i); in Brazil, as in otherperipheral countries in the post-crisis context, a policy choice appears tohave been made for a flexible exchange rate within a currency band ("dirtyfloat");; (ii); the underlying reasons for this policy appear to have more to dowith pass-through of exchange-rate variations and precautionary demandfor reserves than with the maintenance of a competitive real exchangerate; (iii); in the country's peculiar situation, considerable capital mobility isconjoined with large and liquid financial derivatives markets and a reservesbuild-up policy that carries a high fiscal cost; (iv); until April 2006, reservesaccumulated in much the same way under the floating exchange-ratesystem as they had under the currency band regime; there have beenchanges since then owing to the rapid growth of reserves.