Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can Nominal Expressions Achieve Multiple Goals?: An Empirical Study

While previous work suggests that multiple goals can be addressed by a nominal expression, there is no systematic work describing what goals in addition to identification might be relevant and how speakers can use nominal expressions to achieve them. In this paper, we first hypothesize a number of communicative goals that could be addressed by nominal expressions in task-oriented dialogues. We then describe the intentional influences model for nominal expression generation that attempts to simultaneously address the identification goal and these additional goals with a single nominal expression. Our evaluation results show that the intentional influences model fits the nominal expressions in the COCONUT corpus as well as previous accounts that focus solely on the identification goal.
Antisense Transcription in Gammaretroviruses as a Mechanism of Insertional Activation of Host Genes

ABSTRACT Transcription of retroviruses is initiated at the U3-R region boundary in the integrated provirus and continues unidirectionally to produce genomic and mRNA products of positive polarity. Several studies have recently demonstrated the existence of naturally occurring protein-encoding transcripts of negative polarity in complex retroviruses. We report here on the identification of transcripts of negative polarity in simple murine leukemia virus (MLV). In T-cell and B-cell lymphomas induced by SL3-3 and Akv MLV, antisense transcripts initiated in the U3 region of the proviral 5′ long terminal repeat (LTR) and continued into the cellular proto-oncogenes Jdp2 and Bach2 to create chimeric transcripts consisting of viral and host sequence. The phenomenon was validated in vivo using a knock-in mouse model homozygous for a single LTR at a position known to activate Nras in B-cell lymphomas. A 5′ rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) analysis indicated a broad spectrum of initiation sites within the U3 region of the 5′ LTR. Our data show for the first time transcriptional activity of negative polarity initiating in the U3 region of simple retroviruses and suggest a novel mechanism of insertional activation of host genes. Elucidation of the nature and potential regulatory role of 5′ LTR antisense transcription will be relevant to the design of therapeutic vectors and may contribute to the increasing recognition of pervasive eukaryotic transcription.
Uptake of reactive nitrogen on cirrus cloud particles in the upper troposphere and lowermost stratosphere

NOy (total reactive nitrogen) contained in ice particles was measured on board the NASA DC‐8 aircraft in the Arctic in January and March 2000. During some of the flights, the DC‐8 encountered widespread cirrus clouds. Large quantities of ice particles were observed at 8–12 km and particulate NOy showed large increases. The data indicate that the amount of NOy covering the cirrus ice particles strongly depended on temperature. Similar measurements were made in the upper troposphere over the tropical Pacific Ocean in August–September 1998 and 1999. The data obtained in the Arctic and tropics show very limited uptake of NOy on ice at temperatures above 215 K.
Number : wucse-2009-16 2009 On Unusual Pixel Shapes and Image Motion

We introduce the integral-pixel camera model, where measurements integrate over large and potentially overlapping parts of the visual field. This models a wide variety of novel camera designs, including omnidirectional cameras, compressive sensing cameras, and novel programmable-pixel imaging chips. We explore the relationship of integral-pixel measurements with image motion and find (a) that direct motion estimation using integral-pixels is possible and in some cases quite good, (b) standard compressive-sensing reconstructions are not good for estimating motion, and (c) when we design image reconstruction algorithms that explicitly reason about image motion, they outperform standard compressive-sensing video reconstruction. We show experimental results for a variety of simulated cases, and have preliminary results showing a prototype camera with integral-pixels whose design makes direct motion estimation possible. Type of Report: Other Department of Computer Science & Engineering Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1045 St. Louis, MO 63130 ph: (314) 935-6160 On Unusual Pixel Shapes and Image Motion Nathan Jacobs, Stephen Schuh, Robert Pless Washington University St. Louis, MO, 63130 USA (jacobsn|schuhs|pless)@cse.wustl. edu
Expression of P-Glycoprotein in Human Cerebral Cortex Microvessels

P-Glycoprotein (P-gp) is an ATP-dependent efflux transporter that extrudes non-polar molecules, including cytotoxic substances and drugs, from the cells. It was initially found in cancer cells and then was shown to be a normal component of complex transport systems working at the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Previous studies have demonstrated that, in the brain, P-gp is localized on the luminal plasmalemma of BBB endothelial cells and that it may interact with the caveolar compartment of these cells. The aim of this study was to identify the site of cellular expression of P-gp in human brain in situ and to morphologically determine whether an association may exist between P-gp and caveolin-1, a structural and functional protein of the caveolar frame. The study was carried out on human cerebral cortex by immunoconfocal microscopy with antibodies to both P-gp and caveolin-1. The results show that P-gp marks the microvessels of the cortex and that the transporter is localized in the luminal endothelial compartment, where it co-localizes with caveolin-1. The demonstration of this co-localization of P-gp with caveolin-1 contributes a morphological backing to biochemical studies on P-gp/caveolin-1 relationships and leads us to suggest that interactions between these molecules may occur at the BBB endothelia.
Uterine Lavage or Aspirate: Which View of the Intrauterine Environment?

Fluid within the uterine cavity provides the microenvironment for preimplantation blastocyst development and early implantation. Analysis of uterine fluid sampled by aspiration or lavage provides a view of this microenvironment but the similarity or otherwise of the sample components is not known. This study compared proteins in aspirates versus lavage samples taken sequentially from the same women, using surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization-time of flight-mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF-MS), multiplex cytokine assays, and an activity assay for proprotein convertase 6. Both lavage and aspiration enabled analysis of uterine fluid components, but they provided substantially different protein profiles. Although there were many similarities in overall protein profiles and most specific proteins examined were detected in both fluids, these were neither qualitatively nor quantitatively comparable within each participant. A likely explanation is that lavage samples the entire uterine cavity including washing the endometrial surface (glycocalyx), whereas aspiration sampling is very local.
Reliable Multi-path Routing in Selfish Networks with Hidden Information and Actions

In this paper, we propose a novel game-theoretical solution to the multi-path routing problem in wireless ad hoc networks comprising selfish nodes with hidden information and actions. By incorporating a suitable traffic allocation policy, the proposed mechanism results in Nash equilibria where each node honestly reveals its true cost, and forwarding subgame perfect equilibrium in which each node does provide forwarding service with its declared service reliability. Based on the generalised second price auction, this mechanism effectively alleviates the over-payment of the well-known VCG mechanism. The effectiveness of this mechanism will be shown through simulations.
Multiple antibiotic resistance in Stenotrophomonas maltophilia

A cryptic multidrug resistance (MDR) system in Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, the expression of which is selectable by tetracycline, is described. Tetracycline resistance was the consequence of active efflux of the antibiotic, and it was associated with resistance to quinolones and chloramphenicol, but not to aminoglycosides or beta-lactam antibiotics. MDR is linked to the expression of an outer membrane protein (OMP54) both in a model system and in multidrug-resistant clinical isolates.
Fast algorithm for moving target detection

In this paper, a moving target detection algorithm which combines background estimation and BING (Binarized Normed Gradients) Objectness is proposed in video surveillance. A simple background estimation method is used to detect a set of rough moving foreground in image, objectness detection within the foreground set will estimate another set of candidate object windows, and the target (pedestrians/vehicles) region by the intersection of areas derives from the former two steps. Besides, time cost is reduced by the decrease of estimation regions. Experiments on the outdoor datasets show that the combined method can not only achieve a high detection ratio (DR) but also decrease false alarm ratio (FAR), as well as time cost.
Impact of Workplace Physical Activity Interventions on Physical Activity and Cardiometabolic Health Among Working-Age Women: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background— Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among women in high-income Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Physical activity is protective for cardiovascular disease. The realities of modern life require working-age women to address work-related, family, and social demands. Few working-age women meet current moderate-to-vigorous–intensity physical activity (MVPA) recommendations. Given that working-age women spend a substantial proportion of their waking hours at work, places of employment may be an opportune and a controlled setting to implement programs, improving MVPA levels and enhancing cardiometabolic health. Methods and Results— Eight electronic databases were searched to identify all prospective cohort and experimental studies reporting an MVPA outcome of workplace interventions for working-age women (mean age, 18–65 years) in high-income Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane risk of bias tool; quality of the evidence was assessed using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation approach. A qualitative synthesis was performed for all studies, and meta-analyses were conducted where possible. Twenty-four studies met the inclusion criteria; 20 studies were included in the meta-analyses. Workplace interventions significantly increased minutes per week of metabolic equivalents (4 studies; standardized mean differences, 2.07; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.44 to 2.69), but not minutes per week of MVPA (13 studies; standardized mean differences, 0.38; 95% CI, −0.15 to 0.92) or metabolic equivalents per week (3 studies; standardized mean differences, 0.11; 95% CI, −0.48 to 0.71). Workplace interventions also significantly decreased body mass (7 studies; mean differences, −0.83 kg; 95% CI, −1.64 to −0.02), body mass index (6 studies; mean differences, −0.35 kg/m2; 95% CI, −0.62 to −0.07), low-density lipoprotein (4 studies; mean differences, −0.11 mmol/L; 95% CI, −0.17 to −0.04), and blood glucose (2 studies; mean differences, −0.18 mmol/L; 95% CI, −0.29 to −0.07). These workplace interventions targeting MVPA levels and known beneficial cardiometabolic health sequelae were of lower quality evidence. Conclusions— Workplace interventions variably improve MVPA levels and related cardiometabolic health sequelae of working-age women in high-income Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Our findings underscore the need for ongoing research in this area but also increased dissemination of the existing programs and knowledge.
Multiple Human Identification and Cosegmentation: A Human-Oriented CRF Approach With Poselets

Localizing, identifying, and extracting humans with consistent appearance jointly from a personal photo stream is an important problem and has wide applications. The strong variations in foreground and background and irregularly occurring foreground humans make this realistic problem challenging. Inspired by advancements in object detection, scene understanding, and image cosegmentation, we explore explicit constraints to label and segment human objects rather than other nonhuman objects and “stuff. ” We refer to such a problem as multiple human identification and cosegmentation (MHIC). To identify specific human subjects, we propose an efficient human instance detector by combining an extended color line model with a poselet-based human detector. Moreover, to capture high-level human shape information, a novel soft shape cue is proposed. It is initialized by the human detector, then further enhanced through a generalized geodesic distance transform, and finally refined with a joint bilateral filter. We also propose to capture the rich feature context around each pixel by using an adaptive cross-region data structure, which gives a higher discriminative power than a single pixel-based estimation. The high-level object cues from the detector and the shape are then integrated with the low-level pixel cues and midlevel contour cues into a principled conditional random field (CRF) framework, which can be efficiently solved by using fast graph cut algorithms. We evaluate our method over a newly created NTU-MHIC human dataset, which contains 351 images with manually annotated groundtruth segmentation. Both visual and quantitative results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for the MHIC task.
Prediction of Human Brain Activity Using Likelihood Ratio Based Score Fusion

Human brain has a complex structure with the billions of neurons, so it is a difficult and challenging task to predict the behavior of human brain. Different methods and classifiers are used to measure and classify the brain activities with higher accuracy and reliability. In this paper, instead of using mostly used classifier (support vector machine), prediction of the brain activity is done by estimating the match score densities. This method is based on likelihood ratio test which helps in finding the optimal combination of match scores. The distributions of match scores are modeled for different classes based on density score fusion in which the densities of different classes are estimated from the training data set and match scores are found by fusing the estimated densities with the testing data. The fusion is done with the data extracted from distributed activation patterns using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) against a visual task. MVPA is an intense strategy which helps in better understanding of the human brain. The match score-based technique is used in different biometric systems but never been used for the prediction of brain activity. In order to test the performance of proposed method, prediction accuracy is compared with the support vector machine using two data sets of different modalities, one is electroencephalography (EEG) and the other is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results show that the proposed method predicts the novel data with improved accuracy of 66.1% and 69.3% compared with support vector machine which have 64.15% and 65.7% for fMRI and EEG data sets, respectively.
A web 2.0 user interface for wide-area resource monitoring

Resource monitoring in distributed systems is required to understand the 'health' of the overall system and to help identify particular problems, such as dysfunctional hardware or faulty system or application software. Monitoring systems such as GridRM provide the ability to connect to any number of different types of monitoring agents and provide different views of the system, based on a client's particular preferences. Web 2.0 technologies, and in particular 'mashups', are emerging as a promising technique for rapidly constructing rich user interfaces, that combine and present data in intuitive ways. This paper describes a Web 2.0 user interface that was created to expose resource data harvested by the GridRM resource monitoring system.
An Improved SPIHT Algorithm for Image Compression in Low Bit Rate

Aiming at shortage of the SPIHT algorithm, an improved image compression algorithm is proposed, in order to overcome the shortcomings of decoding image quality and coding time, LS9/7 lifting wavelet transform is adopted. According to the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS), the scanning mode and the method to determine the threshold of algorithm are changed to improve the quality of reconstruction image. On the question of repeating scan of SPIHT algorithm, using maximum list thought, greatly reduce the computation and save operating time. The experimental results have proved that the improved algorithm of image decoding time and the quality of reconstruction images are better than the original algorithm , especially in the case of low bit rate.
A Posture Control Model and Balance Test for the Prediction of Relative Postural Stability

A balance testing methodology has been developed based on a posture control model which defines relative stability by the degree to which a transient postural perturbation causes the center-of-pressure on the feet to approach the limits of the base-of-support. To minimize anticipatory adaptations and to ensure subject safety, the balance test uses a small-amplitude continuous random or pseudo-random perturbation. The data are used to identify an input-output model, which is then used to predict large-amplitude transient response. Sixtyfour normal subjects were tested, as well as five patients with vestibular lesions and five elderly subjects with a history of falling. Tests were performed with eyes open (EO) and blindfolded (BF), and the EO/BF ratio was calculated. The results showed highly significant differences between young (20-40) and elderly (61-79) normals, but no differences between males and females. In using the balance test to identify the balance-impaired individuals, the BF and EO/BF data provided higher success rates than the EO data. Depending on the modeling method used, the balance test was able to identify up to three of five vestibular patients and five of five elderly fallers, at a false positive rate of 25 percent in the normal subjects.
Molecular mechanisms of IL-4 induced transcription: Characterization of coregulatory proteins of STAT6

10 LYHENNELMÄ . 12 INTRODUCTION. 14 Review of the literature . 15 1. Transcriptional regulation of protein coding genes . 15 1.1. Basal transcription machinery.15 1.2. Regulatory elements . 15 1.3. Epigenetic regulation of gene expression.17 1.4. Transcription factors and transcriptional coregulators.18 1.5. Transcription and pre-mRNA processing.21 2. Cytokine signalling . 24 2.1. Hematopoietic cytokines and cytokine receptors.24 2.2. Signalling through the JAK-STAT pathway . 25 2.3. Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription (STAT) family of proteins . 26 3. STAT6-mediated transcriptional activation . 29 3.1. Upstream signalling events leading to STAT6 activation . 29 3.2. Target genes of STAT6 . 31 3.3. STAT6 transactivation domain . 32 3.4. Regulation of STAT6-mediated transcription . 32 3.5. Coregulators of STAT6 . 34 AIMS OF THE STUDY. 39
Tacrolimus Dose Requirements and CYP3A5 Genotype and the Development of Calcineurin Inhibitor-Associated Nephrotoxicity in Renal Allograft Recipients

Objectives: Prolonged calcineurin inhibitor maintenance therapy in kidney allograft recipients is complicated by the development of chronic irreversible drug-induced nephrotoxicity (CNIT). Methods: In 304 de novo renal graft recipients, the association among tacrolimus exposure indices (dose, C0, AUC0-12h), CYP3A5, CYP3A4 and ABCB1 polymorphisms, clinical covariables and de novo arteriolar hyalinization as a histologic sign of CNIT was examined. Results: Tacrolimus C0 and AUC0-12h at 3 and 12 months posttransplantation did not differ between patients with and without CNIT. Patients who developed CNIT more often carried the CYP3A5*1 allele (32.4% versus 15.2%, P = 0.01). Twenty-five percent of recipients with tacrolimus dose requirements exceeding 0.2 mg/kg per day at 3 months posttransplantation developed CNIT, whereas 16.2% of patients with dose requirements between 0.10 and 0.20 mg/kg per day and 4.5% of patients who needed less than 0.10 mg/kg per day developed CNIT (P < 0.0001). These early differences in tacrolimus dose requirements between recipients with and without CNIT persisted during subsequent follow-up. In a Cox proportional hazards analysis, the CYP3A5*1 allele (hazard ratio: 2.38; 95% confidence interval: 1.15-4.92) or tacrolimus dose range (hazard ratio: 2.06; 95% confidence interval: 1.30-3.27) and continued corticosteroid therapy (hazard ratio: 4.75; 95% confidence interval: 1.13-19.98) were independently associated with CNIT. A Kaplan-Meier survival curve demonstrated a significant difference in CNIT-free survival (93.5% versus 81.8% versus 66.9%; log-rank test: P = 0.0006) between patients with, respectively, tacrolimus dose requirements less than 0.1, 0.1 or greater, less than 0.2, and 0.2 mg/kg per day or greater. More patients with CNIT sustained graft loss during follow-up (32.3% versus13.7%, P = 0.004). Conclusions: High early tacrolimus dose requirements, predominantly but not exclusively encountered in CYP3A5*1 expressers, are associated with the development of calcineurin inhibitor-related nephrotoxicity, especially in recipients who continue corticosteroid therapy.
Placebo by Proxy in Neonatal Randomized Controlled Trials: Does It Matter?

Placebo effects emerging from the expectations of relatives, also known as placebo by proxy, have seldom been explored. The aim of this study was to investigate whether in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) there is a clinically relevant difference in long-term outcome between very preterm infants whose parents assume that verum (PAV) had been administered and very preterm infants whose parents assume that placebo (PAP) had been administered. The difference between the PAV and PAP infants with respect to the primary outcome–IQ at 5 years of age–was considered clinically irrelevant if the confidence interval (CI) for the mean difference resided within our pre-specified ±5-point equivalence margins. When adjusted for the effects of verum/placebo, socioeconomic status (SES), head circumference and sepsis, the CI was [−3.04, 5.67] points in favor of the PAV group. Consequently, our study did not show equivalence between the PAV and PAP groups, with respect to the pre-specified margins of equivalence. Therefore, our findings suggest that there is a small, but clinically irrelevant degree to which a preterm infant’s response to therapy is affected by its parents’ expectations, however, additional large-scale studies are needed to confirm this conjecture.