Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Primary cilium‐dependent mechanosensing is mediated by adenylyl cyclase 6 and cyclic AMP in bone cells

Primary cilia are chemosensing and mechanosensing organelles that regulate remarkably diverse processes in a variety of cells. We previously showed that primary cilia play a role in mediating mechanosensing in bone cells through an unknown mechanism that does not involve extracellular Ca2+‐dependent intracellular Ca2+ release, which has been implicated in all other cells that transduce mechanical signals via the cilium. Here, we identify a molecular mechanism linking primary cilia and bone cell mechanotransduction that involves adenylyl cyclase 6 (AC6) and cAMP. Intracellular cAMP was quantified in MLO‐Y4 cells exposed to dynamic flow, and AC6 and primary cilia were inhibited using RNA interference. When exposed to flow, cells rapidly (<2 min) and transiently decreased cAMP production in a primary cilium‐dependent manner. RT‐PCR revealed differential expression of the membrane‐bound isoforms of adenylyl cyclase, while immunostaining revealed one, AC6, preferentially localized to the cilium. Further studies showed that decreases in cAMP in response to flow were dependent on AC6 and Gd3+‐sensitive channels but not intracellular Ca2+ release and that this response mediated flow‐induced COX‐2 gene expression. The signaling events identified provide important details of a novel early mechanosensing mechanism in bone and advances our understanding of how signal transduction occurs at the primary cilium. —Kwon R. Y. , Temiyasathit, S. , Tummala, P., Quah, C. C. , Jacobs, C. R. Primary cilium‐dependent mechanosensing is mediated by adenylyl cyclase 6 and cyclic AMP in bone cells. FASEB J. 24, 2859–2868 (2010). www.fasebj. org
Working Together Alone in the Online Crowd: The effects of social motivations and individual knowledge backgrounds on the participation and performance of members of online crowdsourcing platforms

markdownabstract__Abstract__ The overarching goal of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the role of members’ social motivations and knowledge backgrounds in driving members’ participatory behaviors and their task performance on crowdsourcing platforms. Based on two studies, a longitudinal field experiment and a longitudinal, multi-method field study, we state that the possibility to interact with other members was an important driver of the development of group-based feelings of respect in this social environment and that on online crowdsourcing platforms feelings of pride and respect, and not identification, affect the level and duration of member activity and positive work of mouth behaviors. Feelings of pride and respect are each affected by different forms of status information, which further confirms the importance of actively managing the communication of social identity information on online crowdsourcing platforms. Together these studies offer compelling evidence that social motivations can and do play a role in affecting member engagement on online crowdsourcing platforms, which is crucially important in understanding why some online (crowdsourcing) platforms have success and others fail. In a third study we investigated the knowledge-performance paradox in crowdsourcing creative problem-solving tasks. By analyzing over 6,000 contributions to 120 creative problem-solving challenges on an online crowdsourcing platform, we showed that the performance of participants of creative problem-solving tasks on online crowdsourcing platforms was best when they possessed knowledge that was related to the challenge context as well as knowledge that was unrelated to the challenge. With these findings we contribute to the ongoing debate on whether the effects of possessing domain-relevant knowledge on an individual’s performance on creative problem-solving are positive or negative, we argue that this effect is in fact contingent on an individual’s level of unrelated knowledge.
Acute Myocardial Infarction After Sildenafil Citrate Ingestion

OBJECTIVE To report a case of acute myocardial infarction (MI) associated with the use of oral sildenafil in a nitrate-free patient. CASE SUMMARY A 45-year-old man was admitted to the hospital with acute left-sided chest pain, nausea, and vomiting that started approximately 30 minutes after taking sildenafil 100 mg before a sexual contact. The patient was diagnosed with an acute anterior MI, and therapy with aspirin, metoprolol, and unfractionated heparin was initiated. Early coronary reperfusion treatment with primary percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty was performed after initial evaluation. Balloon angioplasty followed by coronary stenting was performed successfully in the 80%-occluded left anterior descending artery. The patient was discharged one week after the coronary intervention without complication. DISCUSSION Sildenafil-associated MI is rarely seen in patients without documented coronary artery disease. By inhibiting phosphodiesterase type 5, sildenafil can cause an increase in cyclic guanosine monophosphate levels, which mediates the relaxation of vascular smooth muscle in the corpus cavernosum. Although sildenafil can cause a major decline in systemic arterial pressure in the existence of organic nitrates, physicians should be aware of its adverse cardiovascular effects even in nitrate-free patients. The Naranjo probability scale indicates that sildenafil was the possible cause of the MI. CONCLUSIONS Sildenafil may rarely be associated with MI in patients with no known cardiac history. Physicians should be aware of this rare and serious adverse reaction to sildenafil and counsel patients not to take sildenafil before undergoing a complete physical evaluation and further testing if warranted.
Robust precise eye location under probabilistic framework

Eye feature location is an important step in automatic visual interpretation and human face recognition. In this paper, a novel approach for locating eye centers in face areas under probabilistic framework is devised. After grossly locating a face, we first find the areas which left and right eyes lies in. Then an appearance-based eye detector is used to detect the possible left and right eye separately. According to their probabilities, the candidates are subsampled to merge those in near positions. Finally, the remaining left and right eye candidates are paired; each possible eye pair is normalized and verified. According to their probabilities, the precise eye positions are decided. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively cope with different eye variations and achieve better location performance on diverse test sets than some newly proposed methods. And the influence of precision of eye location on face recognition is also probed. The location of other face organs such as mouth and nose can be incorporated in the framework easily.
Structural decomposition and statistical description of Farsi/Arabic handwritten numeric characters

A statistical method embedded with statistical features is proposed for Farsi/Arabic handwritten zip code recognition in this paper. The numeral is first smoothed and the skeleton is obtained. A set of feature points are then detected and the skeleton is decomposed into primitives. A primitive code includes the information of each primitive and a global code is derived from the primitive codes to describe the topological structure of the skeleton. By using the average and variance of X and Y changes in each primitive, the direction and curvature of the skeleton can be statistically described. Since the global codes have different lengths, we applied PCA algorithm to normalize their lengths. Thanks to statistically description of the skeleton, we can use the nearest neighbor classifier for recognition. According to experimental results, classification rate of 94.44% is obtained for numerals on the test sets gathered from various people with different educational background and different ages. Our database includes 480 samples per digit. We used 280 samples of each digit for training and the rest [200] for test.
Drosophila maternal and embryo mRNAs transcribed from a single transcription unit use alternate combinations of exons.

We have investigated the organization and transcription of several genes in Drosophila melanogaster which are clustered on an 18‐kb cloned DNA fragment (c25) that maps at 99D on the cytogenetic map. Multiple mRNAs, transcribed from genes which lie adjacent to a ribosomal protein (rp49) gene, are present during oogenesis, embryogenesis, or both. At least five mRNAs are transcribed from one of these genes (EH8); three are zygotic transcripts, of which two are blastoderm stage‐specific, whereas two others accumulate during oogenesis and are therefore matenal mRNAs. The complex transcription pattern of this gene indicates that alternate usage of protein‐coding exons results in the production of different mRNAs with different coding capabilities during oogenesis and embryogenesis. The EH8 transcription unit is framed by genes actively expressed in the adult male fly; thus, the blastoderm stage‐specific promoter may be silent although within a region of transcriptionally active chromatin.
Provenance-Aware Storage Systems

A Provenance-Aware Storage System (PASS) is a storage system that automatically collects and maintains provenance or lineage, the complete history or ancestry of an item. We discuss the advantages of treating provenance as meta-data collected and maintained by the storage system, rather than as manual annotations stored in a separately administered database. We describe a PASS implementation, discussing the challenges it presents, performance cost it incurs, and the new functionality it enables. We show that with reasonable overhead, we can provide useful functionality not available in today's file systems or provenance management systems.
Mobile Functions and Secure Information Flow

Programming languages which facilitate mobility of code are becoming widely used since the mobile agents paradigm, also known as the mobile computation paradigm, appears to be well-suited for computation in the highly distributed networks of our day. Mobile agents can move from site to site and can be executed remotely using the local resources of the sites they visit. The fact that these resources may be of different sensitivity levels raises the question of providing secrecy so that high sensitivity data is not leaked to parties which may use it in a potentially harmful way. This problem does not only concern controlling access to local resources but also tracing the flow of information through computation. Several authors point out the benefits of addressing such security concerns in the design phase of a mobile code language as opposed to delegating them entirely to the lower-levels of the system. Recently, the approach of formulating secure flow analyses as type systems has earned attention [8, 2, 3]. We contribute to the field of type-based approaches to security by bringing into attention a computational model which has not yet been studied in this context. We focus on the problem of providing secrecy within the framework of a higher-order mobile code language called Mobile-λ which has its roots in languages such as Concurrent ML [5] and Facile [1]. Mobile-λ supports mobile computation by combining a functional core with constructs for transmitting and receiving values on channels across remote sites. A characteristic feature is that functions and channels are first class values and mobile agents can simply be coded as mobile functions. We discuss an appropriate notion of secrecy for Mobile-λ focusing on information flow aspects rather than access control, and motivate a property which we wish to enforce. Following the type-based approach to security we then propose a type system to enforce
Perceptually based speech enhancement using the weighted β-SA estimator

In this paper, we first propose a new family of Bayesian estimators for speech enhancement where the cost function includes both a power law and a weighting factor. Secondly, we set the parameters of the estimator based on perceptual considerations by taking into account the masking properties of the ear and the perceived loudness of sound. Our results show that the new estimator achieves better overall performance than existing Bayesian estimators both in terms of objective and subjective measures. Specifically, it shows a segmental SNR improvement of up to 0.65 dB while it obtains the best scores in a MUSHRA test for both white and aircraft cockpit noises.
Robust Edge Detection by Independent Component Analysis in Noisy Images

SUMMARY We propose a robust edge detection method based on independent component analysis (ICA). It is known that most of the basis functions extracted from natural images by ICA are sparse and similar to localized and oriented receptive fields, and in the proposed edge detection method, a target image is first transformed by ICA basis functions and then the edges are detected or reconstructed with sparse components only. Furthermore, by applying a shrinkage algorithm to filter out the components of noise in the ICA domain, we can readily obtain the sparse components of the original image, resulting in a kind of robust edge detection even for a noisy image with a very low SN ratio. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by experiments with some natural images.
Intracortical Inputs to Neurons in Layer 4 of Primary Auditory Cortex

MEGAN B. KRATZ: Intracortical Inputs to Neurons in Layer 4 of Primary Auditory Cortex (under direction of Dr. Paul B. Manis) Primary auditory cortex (A1) is organized tonotopically. However, individual neurons in A1 respond to a wider range of sound frequencies than would be predicted by their thalamic inputs, which suggests the existence of cross-frequency intracortical inputs. We use photostimulation in slices of mouse A1 that contain the entire tonotopic map to identify cross-frequency intracortical inputs to Layer 4 (L4) neurons. We find that L4 neurons receive intracortical inputs from L4 and L6 neurons in columns ~300 μm caudal and/or rostral to the cell, in addition to local columnar input. These lateral inputs are most likely tuned to different frequencies than the neuron that receives them. This result suggests that L4 neurons receive inputs that have a harmonic relationship to their best frequencies. These lateral connections may be part of a circuit that allows A1 to detect auditory objects with specific harmonic structure.
First approach of mobile applications study for medical education purposes

Nowadays, there are an increasing number of mobile lines in the world. This new trend has modified the society and the way that we perform the different daily tasks. Most part of the industries has introduced the mobile devices in its performance. But not only that, it has encouraged the development of mobile applications. Even in the health industry, there is a mobile app for almost everything. However, this rapid growth has been produced much disorganized. This is precisely the aim of this research as part of the PhD Programme. This paper presents the research performed under the PhD Programme with a brief overview of the main structure of this research. It describes the main hypothesis considered at the beginning of the investigation plan. Besides, it illustrates the main objectives, the population, the first participants and the variables that we considered in this project.
Superrigidity, Weyl groups, and actions on the Circle

We propose a new approach to superrigidity phenomena and implement it for lattice representations and measurable cocycles with homeomorphisms of the circle as the target group. We are motivated by Ghys' theorem stating that any representation $\ro:\Gamma\to\Homeo_+(S^1)$ of an irreducible lattice $\Gamma$ in a semi-simple real Lie group $G$ of higher rank, either has a finite orbit or, up to a semi-conjugacy, extends to $G$ which acts through an epimorphism $G\to\PSL_{2}(\RR)$. Our approach, based on the study of abstract boundary theory and, specifically, on the notion of a generalized Weyl group, allows: (A) to prove a similar superrigidity result for irreducible lattices in products $G=G_{1}\times. G_{n}$ of $n\ge 2$ general locally compact groups, (B) to give a new (shorter) proof of Ghys' theorem, (C) to establish a commensurator superrigidity for general locally compact groups, (D) to prove first superrigidity theorems for $\tilde{A}_{2}$ groups. This approach generalizes to the setting of measurable circle bundles; in this context we prove cocycle versions of (A), (B) and (D). This is the first part of a broader project of studying superrigidity via generalized Weyl groups.
Evidence for three subtypes of repetitive behavior in autism that differ in familiality and association with other symptoms.

BACKGROUND Restricted repetitive behaviors (RRBs) are a core feature of autism and consist of a variety of behaviors, ranging from motor stereotypies to complex circumscribed interests. The objective of the current study was to examine the structure of RRBs in autism using relevant items from the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised in a sample of 316 individuals with autistic disorder. METHODS/RESULTS Using exploratory factor analysis, three distinct factors were identified: Repetitive Motor Behaviors (RMB), Insistence on Sameness (IS), and Circumscribed Interests (CI). RMB were found to be associated with a variety of subject characteristics such as IQ, age, social/communication impairments, and the presence of regression. IS was associated with social and communication impairments whereas CI appeared to be independent of subject characteristics, suggesting CI may be particularly useful in subsetting samples. Based on sib-pair correlations, IS and CI (but not RMB) appear to be familial. Analysis of the data at the case level suggests that the presence of multiple forms of RRB in an individual is associated with more impairment in the social and communication domains, suggesting a more severe presentation of autistic disorder. CONCLUSIONS There appears to be considerable structure within repetitive behavior in autism. The finding that these behaviors are differentially related to subject characteristics and familiality adds to their validity.
Neutrophil maturation rate determines the effects of dipeptidyl peptidase 1 inhibition on neutrophil serine protease activity

Neutrophil serine proteases (NSPs) are activated by dipeptidyl peptidase 1 (DPP1) during neutrophil maturation. The effects of neutrophil turnover rate on NSP activity following DPP1 inhibition was studied in a rat pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic model.
A variable-density fictitious-domain method for fully resolved simulation of high-density ratio fluid-particle systems

A numerical scheme for fully resolved simulation of fluid-particle systems with freely moving rigid particles is developed. The approach is based on a fictitious domain method wherein the entire fluid-particle domain is assumed to be an incompressible fluid but with variable density. The flow inside the particle domain is constrained to be a rigid body motion using an additional rigidity constraint in a fractional step scheme. The rigidity constraint force is obtained based on the fast computation technique proposed by Sharma and Patankar (2005). The particle is assumed to be made up of material points moving on a fixed background mesh where the fluid flow equations are solved. The basic finite-volume solver is based on a co-located grid incompressible but variable density flow. The incompressibility constraint is imposed by solving a variable-coefficient pressure equation giving rise to a stable scheme for high density ratio fluid-particle systems. Through various verification and validation test cases on fixed and freely moving particles it is shown that the numerical approach is accurate and stable for a wide range of fluid-particle density ratios.
How much time is needed for wideband spectrum sensing?

In this paper, we consider a wideband cognitive radio network (CRN) which can simultaneously sense multiple narrowband channels and thus aggregate the perceived available channels for transmission. We study the problem of designing the optimal spectrum sensing time and power allocation schemes so as to maximize the average achievable throughput of the CRN subject to the constraints of probability of detection and the total transmit power. The optimal sensing time and power allocation strategies are developed under two different total power constraints, namely, instantaneous power constraint and average power constraint. Finally, numerical results show that, under both cases, for a CRN with three 6 MHz channels, if the frame duration is 100 ms and the target probability of detection is 90% for the worst case signal-to-noise ratio of primary users being -12 dB, -15 dB and -20 dB, respectively, the optimal sensing time is around 6 ms and it is almost insensitive to the total transmit power.
GPU based accelerator for RankBoost in web search engines

The general ranking problem has widespread applications including commercial search engines. RankBoost is an efficient ranking algorithm for combining preference in these areas. But it is not widely used because of its long training time. Graphics Processing Units(GPUs) have become powerful parallel processing tools for general purpose computing. In this paper, we use CUDA compatible GPU to accelerate RankBoost training procedure. Based on the parallel architecture of GPU, we propose two mapping schemes: One-Feature-One-Thread (OFOT) and One Feature-Multiple-Thread (OFMT). Different training data-sets lead to different speedups using our mapping schemes. For training data sets from a commercial search engine, the OFOT is better, achieving a 30× speedup; for random data, the OFMT is better achieving a 60× speedup.
The SEE HLA starter kit: enabling the rapid prototyping of HLA-based simulations for space exploration

Modeling & Simulation (M&S) is nowadays considered a pillar of modern engineering. Indeed, the analysis of several systems, processes and physical phenomena is only practicable by developing simulation models and executing them on suitable computing systems. New M&S techniques, methods and tools are emerging that take advantage of distributed simulation environments. One of the most mature and popular standard for distributed simulation is the IEEE 1516-2010 - High Level Architecture (HLA) that, although originally developed for military applications, is increasingly exploited in a great variety of application domains due to its capabilities to enable the interoperability and reusability of distributed simulation components. Today, the development of full-fledged simulation models, based on the IEEE 1516 standard, is still a challenging task because it requires a considerable effort in terms of both time and cost. In this context, the paper presents a software development kit that aims at easing the development of HLA-based simulations in the space exploration domain. The effectiveness of the Kit is proven by its concrete exploitation in the context of the Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE), a project led by NASA and which involves as partners several U.S. and European Institutions.