Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Histone Deacetylase Rpd3 Regulates Olfactory Projection Neuron Dendrite Targeting via the Transcription Factor Prospero

Compared to the mechanisms of axon guidance, relatively little is known about the transcriptional control of dendrite guidance. The Drosophila olfactory system with its stereotyped organization provides an excellent model to study the transcriptional control of dendrite wiring specificity. Each projection neuron (PN) targets its dendrites to a specific glomerulus in the antennal lobe and its axon stereotypically to higher brain centers. Using a forward genetic screen, we identified a mutation in Rpd3 that disrupts PN targeting specificity. Rpd3 encodes a class I histone deacetylase (HDAC) homologous to mammalian HDAC1 and HDAC2. Rpd3−/− PN dendrites that normally target to a dorsolateral glomerulus mistarget to medial glomeruli in the antennal lobe, and axons exhibit a severe overbranching phenotype. These phenotypes can be rescued by postmitotic expression of Rpd3 but not HDAC3, the only other class I HDAC in Drosophila. Furthermore, disruption of the atypical homeodomain transcription factor Prospero (Pros) yields similar phenotypes, which can be rescued by Pros expression in postmitotic neurons. Strikingly, overexpression of Pros can suppress Rpd3−/− phenotypes. Our study suggests a specific function for the general chromatin remodeling factor Rpd3 in regulating dendrite targeting in neurons, largely through the postmitotic action of the Pros transcription factor.
Targeted Therapy of Advanced Gallbladder Cancer and Cholangiocarcinoma with Aggressive Biology: Eliciting Early Response Signals from Phase 1 trials

Purpose Patients with advanced cholangiocarcinoma (CC) and gallbladder carcinoma (GC) have few therapeutic options for relapsed disease. Methods Given the overall poor prognosis in this population and the availability of novel targeted therapies, we systematically analyzed the characteristics and outcomes for GC and CC patients treated on phase I trials with an emphasis on targeted agents and locoregional therapies. Results Of 40 treated patients (GC=6; CC=34; median age, 60 years), 8 (20%) had stable disease (SD) > 6 months, 3 (8%) partial response (PR), on protocols with hepatic arterial drug infusion and anti-angiogenic, anti-HER-2/neu or novel MAPK/ERK kinase (MEK) inhibitors. Median progression-free survival (PFS) on phase I trials was 2.0 months (95% CI 1.7, 2.8) versus 3.0 months (95% CI 2.4, 5.0), 3.0 months (95% CI 2.3, 4.6), and 3.0 months (95% CI 2.4, 3.9) for their first-, second-, and last-line FDA-approved therapy. In univariate analysis, >3 metastatic sites, elevated alanine aminotransferase (ALT) (>56IU/L), serum creatinine (>1.6mg/dL), and CA19-9 (>35U/mL) were associated with a shorter PFS. Mutational analysis revealed mutation in the KRAS oncogene in 2 of 11 patients (18%). The SD >6 months/PR rate of 28% was seen with hepatic arterial infusion of oxaliplatin, and inhibitors of angiogenesis, HER-2/neu or MEK. Conclusions The PFS in phase I trials was similar to that of the first, second, and last-line therapy (P=0.95, 0.98, 0.76, respectively) with FDA-approved agents given in the advanced setting, emphasizing a role for targeted agents in a clinical trials setting as potentially valuable therapeutic options for these patients.
Feedback Directed Prefetching: Improving the Performance and Bandwidth-Efficiency of Hardware Prefetchers

High performance processors employ hardware data prefetching to reduce the negative performance impact of large main memory latencies. While prefetching improves performance substantially on many programs, it can significantly reduce performance on others. Also, prefetching can significantly increase memory bandwidth requirements. This paper proposes a mechanism that incorporates dynamic feedback into the design of the prefetcher to increase the performance improvement provided by prefetching as well as to reduce the negative performance and bandwidth impact of prefetching. Our mechanism estimates prefetcher accuracy, prefetcher timeliness, and prefetcher-caused cache pollution to adjust the aggressiveness of the data prefetcher dynamically. We introduce a new method to track cache pollution caused by the prefetcher at run-time. We also introduce a mechanism that dynamically decides where in the LRU stack to insert the prefetched blocks in the cache based on the cache pollution caused by the prefetcher. Using the proposed dynamic mechanism improves average performance by 6.5% on 17 memory-intensive benchmarks in the SPEC CPU2000 suite compared to the best-performing conventional stream-based data prefetcher configuration, while it consumes 18.7% less memory bandwidth. Compared to a conventional stream-based data prefetcher configuration that consumes similar amount of memory bandwidth, feedback directed prefetching provides 13.6% higher performance. Our results show that feedback-directed prefetching eliminates the large negative performance impact incurred on some benchmarks due to prefetching, and it is applicable to stream-based prefetchers, global-history-buffer based delta correlation prefetchers, and PC-based stride prefetchers
Input Normalization for an English-to-Chinese SMS Translation System

This paper describes an approach to preprocess SMS text for Machine Translation. As SMS text behaves differently from normal written text and to reduce the tremendous effort required to customize or adapt the language model of the traditional translation system to handle SMS text style, normalization is performed to moderate the irregularities in English SMS text using a noisy channel model. A mapping model is used to model the three major problems in SMS text. They are (1) substitution of word using non-standard acronym, (2) insertion of flavour word, and (3) omission of auxiliary verb and subject pronoun. Experiment results show that with normalization before translation, the rejection rate of our English-to-Chinese SMS translation for broadcasting purpose is reduced by 15.5%. We believe that the performance of normalization can be further improved with deeper linguistic processing.
Automatic Detection of Optic Disc in Digital Retinal Images

On the research work leading to automatic detection of optic disc from retinal images is very essential and crucial for expert ophthalmologists to diagnose diseases. Many of techniques can achieve good performance on retinal feature that is clearly visible. Unfortunately, it is a normal situation that the color retinal images in Thailand are poor-quality images. The existing algorithm cannot detected poor-quality images. Therefore, this study is a part of larger efforts to develop a novel method for detection of optic disc in poorquality retinal images. A novel method is presented towards the development for detection of optic disc in poor-quality retinal images. The digital retinal images are detected by using morphological method and Otsu’s algorithm after the key preprocessing steps, i.e., color normalization, contrast enhancement and noise removal. This enables the difference in the proposed method compared to other approaches and the algorithm can achieve good performance even on poor-quality retinal images. The proposed method was evaluated using the local dataset and the publicly available of the STARE project’s dataset. The optic disc was detected correctly in 91.35% using the STARE dataset and 97.61% using the local dataset. This system intends to help expert ophthalmologists in screening process to detect of optic disc faster and more easily.
Automatic Pitch Type Recognition System from Single-View Video Sequences of Baseball Broadcast Videos

This article describes a system that automatically recognizes individual pitch types like screwballs and sliders in baseball broadcast videos. These decisions are currently made by human specialists in baseball, who are watching the broadcast video of the game. No automatic system has yet been developed for identifying individual pitch types from single view camera images. Techniques using multiple fixed cameras promise highly accurate pitch type identification, but the systems tend to be large. Our system is designed to identify the same pitch types using only the same single-view broadcast baseball videos used by the human specialists, and accordingly we used a number of features, such as the ball's location, ball speed and catcher's stance based on the advice of those specialists. The system identifies the pitch type using a classifier trained with the Random Forests ensemble learning algorithm and achieved about 90% recognition accuracy in experiments.
Smoothing Proximal Gradient Method for General Structured Sparse Learning

We study the problem of learning high dimensional regression models regularized by a structured-sparsity-inducing penalty that encodes prior structural information on either input or output sides. We consider two widely adopted types of such penalties as our motivating examples: 1) overlapping group lasso penalty, based on the l1/l2 mixed-norm penalty, and 2) graph-guided fusion penalty. For both types of penalties, due to their non-separability, developing an efficient optimization method has remained a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a general optimization approach, called smoothing proximal gradient method, which can solve the structured sparse regression problems with a smooth convex loss and a wide spectrum of structured-sparsity-inducing penalties. Our approach is based on a general smoothing technique of Nesterov. It achieves a convergence rate faster than the standard first-order method, subgradient method, and is much more scalable than the most widely used interior-point method. Numerical results are reported to demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed method.
Rate-distortion Bounds on Location-based Routing Protocol Overheads in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

— We present an information theoretic analysis of the minimum routing overhead incurred for reliable routing of packets using location-based routing. We formulate the minimum routing overhead problem as a rate-distortion problem and derive a lower bound on the minimum routing overhead incurred. We also characterize the deficit in transport capacity caused by the routing overheads. It is observed that for high mobility and packet arrival rates, the routing overheads may consume the entire capacity of a network.
Geospatial and Temporal Dynamics of Application Usage in Cellular Data Networks

Significant geospatial and temporal correlations, in terms of traffic volume and application access, exist in cellular network usage as shown in recent studies on cellular network measurement. Such geospatial and temporal correlation patterns provide local optimization opportunities to cellular network operators for handling the explosive growth in the traffic volume observed in recent years. To the best of our knowledge, in this paper, we provide the first fine-grained joint characterization of the geospatial and temporal dynamics of application usage in a 3G cellular data network. Our analysis is based on two simultaneously collected traces from the radio access network (containing location records) and the core network (containing traffic records) of a tier-1 cellular network in the United States. To better understand the application usage in our data, we first cluster cell locations based on their application distributions and then study the geospatial and temporal dynamics of application usage across different geographical regions. The results of our measurement study present cellular network operators with fine-grained insights that can be leveraged to tune network parameter settings for better network performance and user experience.
Random network transistors of carbon nanotubes directly grown on glass substrate

We report a transistor of randomly networked single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) grown on glass by using water plasma CVD. The density of the nanotube on pre-patterned region was more than 50/ mum2 which is much larger than the percolation threshold. The nanotube network transistors were fabricated with Al2O3 for the gate oxide and a conducting and transparent ZnO for the back-gate. These nanotube active devices may be fitted to thin film transistor applications for future opto-electronics.
Composition and Decomposition of Japanese Katakana and Kanji Morphemes for Decision Rule Induction from Patent Documents

We propose a new method to construct a word list for rule induction from Japanese patent documents. For word segmentation in Japanese, statistical morphological analyzers have been used in many applications. However, the output of these morphological analyzers presents defects when analyzing unknown words, specifically words that contain Kanji/Katakana morphemes. Some words are overly segmented, and their original meanings are obscured. Furthermore, boundaries between compound nouns are uncertain, which impedes investigation in the initial stages of the application. In our method, we first perform morphological analysis to segment sentences into morphemes. Second, segmented compound words are filtered by character types and Katakana/Kanji morphemes in the compound words are concatenated. Third, the concatenated morphemes are truncated to reduce verbosity. Then, words comprising Katakana/Kanji are retained for use in a word list for rule induction. The experiment results show that our method is effective for extracting decision rules for patent classification.
Regulation of Differentiation by Calcium-Sensing Receptor in Normal and Tumoral Developing Nervous System

During normal development of the nervous system (NS), neural progenitor cells (NPCs) produce specialized populations of neurons and glial cells upon cell fate restriction and terminal differentiation. These sequential processes require the dynamic regulation of thousands of genes. The calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) is temporally and spatially regulated in both neurons and glial cells during development of the NS. In particular, CaSR expression and function have been shown to play a significant role during differentiation of NPCs toward the oligodendrocyte lineage and also in maturation of cerebellar granule cell precursors (GCPs). Moreover, CaSR regulates axonal and dendritic growth in both central and peripheral nervous systems (PNSs), a process necessary for proper construction of mature neuronal networks. On the other hand, several lines of evidence support a role for CaSR in promotion of cell differentiation and inhibition of proliferation in neuroblastoma, a tumor arising from precursor cells of developing PNS. Thus, among the variety of NS functions in which the CaSR participates, this mini-review focuses on its role in differentiation of normal and tumoral cells. Current knowledge of the mechanisms responsible for CaSR regulation and function in these contexts is also discussed, together with the therapeutic opportunities provided by CaSR allosteric modulators.
Orexin Receptor-1 in the Locus Coeruleus Plays an Important Role in Cue-Dependent Fear Memory Consolidation

The noradrenergic (NA) projections arising from the locus ceruleus (LC) to the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis have been implicated in the formation of emotional memory. Since NA neurons in the LC (LC-NA neurons) abundantly express orexin receptor-1 (OX1R) and receive prominent innervation by orexin-producing neurons, we hypothesized that an OX1R-mediated pathway is involved in the physiological fear learning process via regulation of LC-NA neurons. To evaluate this hypothesis, we examined the phenotype of Ox1r−/− mice in the classic cued and contextual fear-conditioning test. We found that Ox1r−/− mice showed impaired freezing responses in both cued and contextual fear-conditioning paradigms. In contrast, Ox2r−/− mice showed normal freezing behavior in the cued fear-conditioning test, while they exhibited shorter freezing time in the contextual fear-conditioning test. Double immunolabeling of Fos and tyrosine hydroxylase showed that double-positive LC-NA neurons after test sessions of both cued and contextual stimuli were significantly fewer in Ox1r−/− mice. AAV-mediated expression of OX1R in LC-NA neurons in Ox1r−/− mice restored the freezing behavior to the auditory cue to a comparable level to that in wild-type mice in the test session. Decreased freezing time during the contextual fear test was not affected by restoring OX1R expression in LC-NA neurons. These observations support the hypothesis that the orexin system modulates the formation and expression of fear memory via OX1R in multiple pathways. Especially, OX1R in LC-NA neurons plays an important role in cue-dependent fear memory formation and/or retrieval.
Professionals' Experiences of the Relations between Personal History and Professional Role

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how workers in a crisis resolution home treatment (CRHT) team experience the relationship between their personal history and professional role. This paper is based on 13 in-depth interviews with health professionals working in CRHT. The interviews were analysed using a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach. Participants expressed that there is a relationship between their personal history and professional role, and three themes are highlighted as particularly important in, namely experiences related to the participants as individuals, work-related experiences and family-related experiences. The participants write meaning into the relationship between their personal history and professional role. By relating and exploring their own life stories in the interviews, they work on forming meaning and identity.
Arginine Methylation of hnRNP A2 Does Not Directly Govern Its Subcellular Localization

The hnRNP A/B paralogs A1, A2/B1 and A3 are key components of the nuclear 40S hnRNP core particles. Despite a high degree of sequence similarity, increasing evidence suggests they perform additional, functionally distinct roles in RNA metabolism. Here we identify and study the functional consequences of differential post-translational modification of hnRNPs A1, A2 and A3. We show that while arginine residues in the RGG box domain of hnRNP A1 and A3 are almost exhaustively, asymmetrically dimethylated, hnRNP A2 is dimethylated at only a single residue (Arg-254) and this modification is conserved across cell types. It has been suggested that arginine methylation regulates the nucleocytoplasmic distribution of hnRNP A/B proteins. However, we show that transfected cells expressing an A2R254A point mutant exhibit no difference in subcellular localization. Similarly, immunostaining and mass spectrometry of endogenous hnRNP A2 in transformed cells reveals a naturally-occurring pool of unmethylated protein but an exclusively nuclear pattern of localization. Our results suggest an alternative role for post-translational arginine methylation of hnRNPs and offer further evidence that the hnRNP A/B paralogs are not functionally redundant.
A belief-based model of trust

In this chapter, we present a socio-cognitive analysis of trust. In this model trust is conceived as a crucial attitude useful for delegating or not a specific task, and it is strongly based on specific beliefs, and on different cognitive ingredients. Characterising the basic elements on which trust is founded is very important not only for a psychological view of this phenomenon but also for better understanding how this attitude works. This model allows to distinguish between internal and external attributions (to the trustee) and for each of these kinds of attribution it allows to distinguish among several sub-components: competence, disposition, unharmfulness and so on. The analysis of the trust concept tries to show the importance of its role in knowledge management and systems in organisations. Trust is strongly supported by the organisation roles and functions, but in order to really understand how organisations work it is necessary to explore such inter-relational notions as delegation and trust.
Leptin Regulates Prothyrotropin-releasing Hormone Biosynthesis

The hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis is down-regulated during starvation, and falling levels of leptin are a critical signal for this adaptation, acting to suppress preprothyrotropin-releasing hormone (prepro-TRH) mRNA expression in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus. This study addresses the mechanism for this regulation, using primary cultures of fetal rat hypothalamic neurons as a model system. Leptin dose-dependently stimulated a 10-fold increase in pro-TRH biosynthesis, with a maximum response at 10 nm. TRH release was quantified using immunoprecipitation, followed by isoelectric focusing gel electrophoresis and specific TRH radioimmunoassay. Leptin stimulated TRH release by 7-fold. Immunocytochemistry revealed that a substantial population of cells expressed TRH or leptin receptors and that 8–13% of those expressing leptin receptors coexpressed TRH. Leptin produced a 5-fold induction of luciferase activity in CV-1 cells transfected with a TRH promoter and the long form of the leptin receptor cDNA. Although the above data are consistent with a direct ability of leptin to promote TRH biosynthesis through actions on TRH neurons, addition of α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone produced a 3.5-fold increase in TRH biosynthesis and release, whereas neuropeptide Y treatment suppressed pro-TRH biosynthesis ∼3-fold. Furthermore, the melanocortin-4 receptor antagonist SHU9119 partially inhibited leptin-stimulated TRH release from the neuronal culture. Consequently, our data suggest that leptin regulates the TRH neurons through both direct and indirect pathways.
The social distribution of depression in Belgium: a comparison of the Belgian Health Interview Survey 2001 and the Panel Study of Belgian Households

Although depression is considered the most common mental disorder, knowledge on its social distribution in the general population in Belgium is still limited. In this paper focus is on risk factors for depression in two representative samples of adults in Belgium, aged 16 or more. In the cross-sectional Health Interview Survey of 2001 (N=9413), the Symptom Checklist 90 depression scale is used to measure depressive experiences in the week prior to the interview. In the longitudinal Panel Study of Belgian Households (N in wave 1=8741), depressive symptoms experienced in the past three months are assessed using the Health & Daily Living Form - Global Depression Scale. Risk factors considered are gender, age, household type, urbanization, educational level, labour market position, home-ownership and income poverty. Logistic regression results show the general risk factor pattern for severe depressive experiences to be quasi similar in both surveys: higher prevalence rates are found for women, singles (with or without children), the lower educated, the unemployed, sick/disabled individuals, renters and income poor. There was no association with urbanization. Concerning age, no association was found in the Health Interview Survey, while elderly adults in the panel were less likely to report depressive symptoms. The quasi similar risk pattern found in both surveys shows that severe depressive complaints, experienced in several different forms, are distributed unequally among social groups in the general adult population in Belgium.