Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insights into Sexual Precocity of Female Oriental River Prawn Macrobrachium nipponense through Transcriptome Analysis

Background The oriental river prawn (Macrobrachium nipponense) is the most prevalent aquaculture species in China. The sexual precocity in this species has received considerable attention in recent years because more and more individuals matured at a small size, which devalues the commercial production. In this study, we developed deep-coverage transcriptomic sequencing data for the ovaries of sexually precocious and normal sexually mature M. nipponense using next-generation RNA sequencing technology and attempted to provide the first insight into the molecular regulatory mechanism of sexual precocity in this species. Results A total of 63,336 unigenes were produced from the ovarian cDNA libraries of sexually precocious and normal sexually mature M. nipponense using Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform. Through BLASTX searches against the NR, STRING, Pfam, Swissprot and KEGG databases, 15,134 unigenes were annotated, accounting for 23.89% of the total unigenes. 5,195 and 3,227 matched unigenes were categorized by GO and COG analysis respectively. 15,908 unigenes were consequently mapped into 332 KEGG pathways, and many reproduction-related pathways and genes were identified. Moreover, 26,008 SSRs were identified from 18,133 unigenes. 80,529 and 80,516 SNPs were yielded from ovarian libraries of sexually precocious and normal sexually mature prawn, respectively, and 29,851 potential SNPs between these two groups were also predicted. After comparing the ovarian libraries of sexually precocious and normal sexually mature prawn, 549 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and 9 key DEGs that may be related to sexual precocity of M. nipponense were identified. 20 DEGs were selected for validation by quantitative real-time PCR (QPCR) and 19 DEGs show consistent expression between QPCR and RNAseq-based differential expression analysis datasets. Conclusion This is the first report on the large-scale RNA sequencing of ovaries of sexually precocious and normal sexually mature M. nipponense. The annotated transcriptome data will provide fundamental support for future research into the reproduction biology of M. nipponense. The large number of candidate SNPs and SSRs detected in this study could be used as genetic markers for population genetics and functional genomics in this species. More importantly, many DEGs, especially nine key DEGs between sexually precocious and normal sexually mature prawns were identified, which will dramatically improve understanding of molecular regulatory mechanism of sexual precocity of this species.
Thermal Modeling of Automotive Lithium Ion Cells using the Finite Elements Method in Modelica

In this paper, a finite element model for the heat transfer inside an automotive lithium ion cell with Modelica is developed. Convective cooling with several coolants is examined. With the help of the cell model, the effectiveness of several coolants are investigated. As coolants air, 25 and 38 % (v/v) aqueous propylene glycol, and a silicone oil are used.
Mechatronic design of a robotic manipulator for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The paper focuses on the mechatronic design of a robotic manipulator that is meant to be mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and to be used in industrial applications, for both aerial inspection by contact and aerial manipulation. The combination of an UAV and the robotic manipulator realizes the aerial manipulator. The robotic manipulator is designed to be versatile so that the aerial manipulator can perform both trajectory tracking in free flight and physical interaction. Moreover, the robotic manipulator can be mounted on commercially available UAVs a modular way without interfering with the existing onboard control architecture. Experimental test are validating the overall mechatronic design.
MELD: parent information and support groups

The Minnesota Early Learning Design (MELD) Program provides education to new parents through long-term information and support groups. The program, ongoing since the early 1970s, has been replicated and recognized extensively. This article provides an overview of the MELD model. Program adaptations have led to the development of programs designed to meet the specialized needs of particular parental populations, including adolescents, hearing impaired parents, and parents of handicapped children. The flexibility of this program enables replication in numerous locales and settings. Ongoing evaluations of the model are presented.
A novel performance model for state-of-the-art processors by modernization of Rent's rule

Faithful a priori estimation of system performance has long been the foundation for early device, circuit, and micro-architectural evaluation. For over two decades, Rent's power-law has been a popular modelling methodology for predicting interconnect characteristics of a system. However, with dimensional scaling, interconnects have become increasingly important, and the existing models do not provide accurate interconnect estimates; at worst, current Rent's-based models heavily under-estimate interconnect delay and power. At the same time, microprocessor designs are also evolving to cope with the rapidly changing technology landscape, which together can drastically influence the overall performance characteristics of the designs. For the first time, this paper argues the validity of Rent's method in the era of rapid technology and microprocessor-design advancements. A new approach to Rent's model is proposed which addresses the inability of the current Rent's approach to accurately capture the standard cell level characteristics and microprocessor characteristics that are inherent to the way we design microprocessors today. The proposed models are validated against a rich database of state-of-the-art commercial microprocessors at 14/16nm, 10nm and 7nm process nodes, and the results illustrate the importance of design-specific technology prediction.
ASSOCIATION ANALYSIS OF SEROTONIN TRANSPORTER PROMOTER GENE POLYMORPHISM WITH ADHD AND RELATED SYMPTOMATOLOGY

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common childhood behavioral disorders. Genetic factors contribute to the underlying liability to develop attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Several investigations have reported associations between ADHD and serotonin transporter promoter polymorphisms, but the results have been inconsistent. The present study did not find significant association between ADHD and serotonin transporter promoter polymorphisms, but did find an effect of serotonin transporter promoter polymorphisms on some ADHD symptomatology. Patients homozygous for the short allele showed more Withdrawn or Somatic complaint scores than subjects with the long allele.
Adaptive Bandwidth Allocation for Realtime Wireless Data Dissemination

The combination of broadcast and on-demand data delivery services is an economic way to build a highly scalable wireless information system with limited bandwidth. The use of data broadcasting should be adaptive so that the system response time can always be minimized. A traditional approach requires the development of a system response time equation in order to find the optimal solution. However, obtaining such an equation is not always possible. We observe that by maintaining a certain level of on-demand request arrival rate, a close approximation to the optimal solution can be obtained. Using this approach, a real-time adaptive data delivery algorithm is developed. Our algorithm does not require the access information of the data items to be known exactly, which is needed normally for this kind of optimization problems. A simple and low overhead bit vector mechanism is able to capture the relative popularities of the data items. With this information, our algorithm can give a performance comparable to the ideal case in which the access information for each data item is known exactly.
Using Critic Reviews to Boost New Item Recommendation

The rapid development of technology promotes the vast expansion of new items in many domains of consumer products. Problem occurs when the new items are continuously added but cannot get reached by the consumers. Many existing recommender systems work well only for well-known items with sufficient ratings but fail to discover new items, and content-based approaches suffer from insufficient item features. In this paper, we show that critic reviews of the items can be used to boost new item recommendation. We propose a scalable framework that incorporates the topics inferred from the critic reviews into the recommendation process by employing topic modeling and non-negative matrix factorization. The results of our experiment show that our proposed method is able to generate high quality new item recommendations which are not supported by many state-of-the-art methods, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in recommending existing items.
Property, Sales, Income Taxes, and Urban Spatial Structure

A hybrid approach combining theoretical and numerical strategies is utilized in determining the effect that government activity has upon urban land values and structure. A theoretical model of the interaction of households and a local government is used to structure the salient relationships. A numerical analysis is subsequently performed on the analytic system to qualitatively evaluate both the implications and the reasonableness of the system. A hybrid investigation lends credence to abstract analyses and supports the use of theoretical constructs in the development of empirical formulations.
Physical association of the cytoplasmic domain of CD2 with the tyrosine kinases p56lck and p59fyn

In T lymphocytes, CD2 forms part of a loosely associated membrane complex which includes the T cell receptor (TcR) for antigen, the CD3 subunits, CD4 or CD8, CD5 and the protein tyrosine kinases p56lck and p59fyn. The interaction of CD2 with tyrosine kinases in this complex provides a possible mechanism for transmembrane signal transduction by CD2. We have investigated whether the interaction of CD2 with the kinases is dependent on other known members of the complex, or whether an independent association can be observed. Using in vitro kinase assays with immune complexes precipitated from cell lysates, we demonstrate that CD2 can associate with p56lck and p59fyn in a rat thymoma line that does not express CD4 or CD8, and in a TcR‐negative Jurkat cell line. In TcR‐positive Jurkat cells that express rat CD2, interaction of CD2 with p56lck and p59fyn Was clearly seen, but it was absent in cells where the cytoplasmic tail of CD2 is truncated, indicating that the interactions are mediated by the cytoplasmic region of CD2. Furthermore, using cells expressing CD2 molecules with partial truncations in the cytoplasmic domain, we show that the association of CD2 with p56lck: is progressively lost as the cytoplasmic domain is shortened, and that the capacity of the mutants to associate with p56lck correlates with their capacity to transduce transmembrane signals.
Video Manga: generating semantically meaningful video summaries

This paper presents methods for automatically creating pictorial video summaries that resemble comic books. The relative importance of video segments is computed from their length and novelty. Image and audio analysis is used to automatically detect and emphasize meaningful events. Based on this importance measure, we choose relevant keyframes. Selected keyframes are sized by importance, and then efficiently packed into a pictorial summary. We present a quantitative measure of how well a summary captures the salient events in a video, and show how it can be used to improve our summaries. The result is a compact and visually pleasing summary that captures semantically important events, and is suitable for printing or Web access. Such a summary can be further enhanced by including text captions derived from OCR or other methods. We describe how the automatically generated summaries are used to simplify access to a large collection of videos.
Group Composition and Communication Styles: An Analysis of Multicultural Teams in Decision-Making Meetings

This study analyzes multicultural teams in decision-making meetings and uses discourse analysis and observational methods to study how member participation in meetings changes when teams are comprised of multicultural members. We use a four-by-four design to document differences in discourse patterns of teams of different composition. Our findings suggest that among high-proficiency English speakers of East Asian origin, there are no significant cultural differences in the discourse patterns when compared to US-born English speakers when speaking English and working in homogeneous groups. However, differences in discourse patterns do emerge when members are combined in mixed groups. Americans tend to increase their participation while East Asians withdraw. The paper examines possible causes of this divergence in communication styles and outlines directions for future research.
Multiclass Latent Locally Linear Support Vector Machines

Kernelized Support Vector Machines (SVM) have gained the status of o-the-shelf classiers, able to deliver state of the art performance on almost any problem. Still, their practical use is constrained by their computational and memory complexity, which grows super-linearly with the number of training samples. In order to retain the low training and testing complexity of linear classiers and the exibility of non linear ones, a growing, promising alternative is represented by methods that learn non-linear classiers through local combinations of linear ones. In this paper we propose a new multi class local classier,
Teaching Native Speakers to Listen to Foreign-accented Speech

This study examined the effects of cross-cultural awareness training and explicit linguistic instruction on attitudes towards and comprehension of foreign-accented speech. One group of social work students received both types of instruction; another received only cross-cultural training, and a third group served as a control (they received no instruction but participated in the pre- and post-tests). Listening comprehension passages read in Vietnamese-accented speech before and after the eight-week instruction period and a sentence transcription task revealed no significant between-group differences. Attitude questionnaires indicated increased empathy for immigrants on the part of both experimental groups. The group that received explicit instruction regarding the characteristics of Vietnamese-accented English showed significantly greater improvement in confidence that they could interact successfully with individuals who speak English as a second language, while the group that received only cross-cultural awareness showed moderate gains. Similarly, the Accent-trained group believed that their ability to understand foreign accents improved as a result of instruction to a significantly greater degree than the other groups.
The Importance of Sisters: Indian Girls Reflect on Their Experience in an Orphanage

The literature on children who have lost their parents and have been raised in an orphanage indicates that they are at a developmental disadvantage compared with children who were raised within their own families. The majority of previous research in this field is taken from the barren institutions of Romania and Russia, solely using quantitative research methods. The goal of this article is to introduce the readers to a different way of gathering data about these children. Taken from a larger doctoral dissertation research project, qualitative methods were used, including ethnographic data, observations, conversations and photographic images, providing data of Indian girl's experiences of daily living in an orphanage. Participants included 19 girls, all living together in one orphanage in Jaipur, India. Data analysis was guided by principles of Grounded Theory, which places priority on the participant's narrative and the meaning of their experiences. The data illuminated the daily joys and struggles of growing up parentless. This article will focus on the methodology of the study as a unique way of accessing the girls’ experience in the home. In addition, it will highlight one main theme from the findings, i.e. the girls’ feeling of well-being stemming from a sense of belonging, particularly to the sisterhood of the home. The sibling relationships in the home provided much needed love, acceptance, and intimacy for the girls. The findings of this research, including the method of data collection, contributes to our understanding of a child's experience in an orphanage and what may help foster a sense of resilience and love.
EFFECTS OF CRITERION SHIFT ON FALSE MEMORY

This study examined the effects of criterion shift on false memory by manipulating payoff types and participants’ expectations about the probability of target words occurring in the recognition test. Participants in Experiment 1 received different sets of instructions that emphasized the negative consequence of either misses or false alarms. Results showed no changes in false recognition when the focus was on false alarm avoidance. In Experiment 2, the experimental groups studied the target words, whereas the control groups did not see any of the target words during the study phase. Both groups were also told that the probability of target words appearing in the recognition test was either one third or two thirds. Changes in the instructions did not affect performance of the experimental group, but had a large effect on performance of the control groups. Overall results of this study support the memory sensitivity view of false memory.
Capture-point based balance and reactive omnidirectional walking controller

This paper proposes a capture-point based reactive omnidirectional controller for bipedal locomotion. The proposed scheme, formulated within Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, exploits concurrently the Center of Mass (CoM) and Capture Point (CP) dynamics. It allows the on-line generation of the CoM reference trajectory and the automatic generation of footstep positions and orientations in response to a given velocity to be tracked, or a disturbance to be rejected by the robot while accounting explicitly for different walking constraints. For instance, in order to cope with disturbance such as a push, the proposed controller not only adjusts the position of the Center of Pressure (CoP) within the support foot, but can also induce at least one step with appropriate length allowing thus to maintain the stability of the robot. Finally, the proposed algorithm is validated through simulations and actual experiments on the humanoid robot iCub.
p22phox Is a Critical Component of the Superoxide-generating NADH/NADPH Oxidase System and Regulates Angiotensin IIinduced Hypertrophy in Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells*

Superoxide anion formation is vital to the microbicidal activity of phagocytes. Recently, however, there is accumulating evidence that it is also involved in cell growth in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs). We have shown that the hypertrophic agent angiotensin II stimulates superoxide production by activating the membrane-bound NADH/NADPH oxidase and that inhibition of this oxidase attenuates vascular hypertrophy. However, the molecular identity of this oxidase in VSMCs is unknown. We have recently cloned the cytochrome b558 α-subunit, p22phox (one of the key electron transfer elements of the NADPH oxidase in phagocytes), from a rat VSMC cDNA library, but its role in VSMC oxidase activity remains unclarified. Here we report that the complete inhibition of p22phox mRNA expression by stable transfection of antisense p22phox cDNA into VSMCs results in a decrease in cytochrome b content, which is accompanied by a significant inhibition of angiotensin II-stimulated NADH/NADPH-dependent superoxide production, subsequent hydrogen peroxide production, and [3H]leucine incorporation. We provide the first evidence that p22phox is a critical component of superoxide-generating vascular NADH/NADPH oxidase and suggest a central role for this oxidase system in vascular hypertrophy.
Personalized Gamification: A Model for Play Data Profiling

This paper proposes model for introducing personalized game-design elements in a gamification system. The model is based on user-centred design, human values theory, and gamification design framework. The proposed model promotes the idea of a baseline game component that is meant to acquire online, real-time data about the cognitive and emotional state of the individual, and based on the collected data to adjust the gamified system to the state of the user. This framework, which we name Play Data Profiling (PDP), describes a model of collecting and processing data before, during and after the actual use of the gamified application in order to optimize the subsequent user experience and outcome. Implications and future work are discussed.
Novel patterning of nano-bioceramics: template-assisted electrohydrodynamic atomization spraying

The ability to create patterns of bioactive nanomaterials particularly on metallic and other types of implant surfaces is a crucial feature in influencing cell response, adhesion and growth. In this report, we uncover and elucidate a novel method that allows the easy deposition of a wide variety of predetermined topographical geometries of nanoparticles of a bioactive material on both metallic and non-metallic surfaces. Using different mesh sizes and geometries of a gold template, hydroxyapatite nanoparticles suspended in ethanol have been electrohydrodynamically sprayed on titanium and glass substrates under carefully designed electric field conditions. Thus, different topographies, e.g. hexagonal, line and square, from hydroxyapatite nanoparticles were created on these substrates. The thickness of the topography can be controlled by varying the spraying time.
Accurate curve fits of IAPWS data for high-pressure, high-temperature single-phase liquid water based on the stiffened gas equation of state

We present a series of optimal (in the sense of least-squares) curve fits for the stiffened gas equation of state for single-phase liquid water. At high pressures and (subcritical) temperatures, the parameters produced by these curve fits are found to have very small relative errors: less than $1\%$ in the pressure model, and less than $2\%$ in the temperature model. At low pressures and temperatures, especially near the liquid-vapor transition line, the error in the curve fits increases rapidly. The smallest pressure value for which curve fits are reported in the present work is 25 MPa, high enough to ensure that the fluid remains a single-phase liquid up to the maximum subcritical temperature of approximately 647K.
Opportunistic resource allocation via stochastic network optimization in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we develop an opportunistic scheduling policy for allocating spectrum in cognitive radio networks. We maximize the throughput utility of secondary users subject to maximum collision constraints with the primary users. Particularly, we consider a cognitive radio network with a subset of the secondary users desire to use the licensed channels of primary system in a stochastic environment. Based on Lyapunov technique, we formulate the above problem as a Lyapunov optimization problem on stability region of virtual and actual queues. Then, we propose an online flow control, scheduling and spectrum allocation algorithm that meets the desired objectives and provides explicit performance guarantees.