Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cooperative and Stochastic Calcium Releases from Multiple Calcium Puff Sites Generate Calcium Microdomains in Intact HeLa Cells*

Background: Ca2+ microdomains regulate many essential physiological events. Results: IP3-evoked Ca2+ microdomains in histamine-stimulated intact HeLa cells were visualized using a total internal reflection fluorescence microscope. Conclusion: Ca2+ microdomains in intact cells are generated from spatially distributed multiple channel clusters, rather than a single tight cluster. Significance: The results provide a basic understanding of the spatiotemporal signal regulations of Ca2+ microdomain formation in living cells. Ca2+ microdomains or locally restricted Ca2+ increases in the cell have recently been reported to regulate many essential physiological events. Ca2+ increases through the inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP3) receptor (IP3R)/Ca2+ release channels contribute to the formation of a class of such Ca2+ microdomains, which were often observed and referred to as Ca2+ puffs in their isolated states. In this report, we visualized IP3-evoked Ca2+ microdomains in histamine-stimulated intact HeLa cells using a total internal reflection fluorescence microscope, and quantitatively characterized the spatial profile by fitting recorded images to a two-dimensional Gaussian distribution. Ca2+ concentration profiles were marginally spatially anisotropic, with the size increasing linearly even after the amplitude began to decline. We found the event centroid drifted with an apparent diffusion coefficient of 4.20 ± 0.50 μm2/s, which is significantly larger than those estimated for IP3Rs. The sites of maximal Ca2+ increase, rather than initiation or termination sites, were detected repeatedly at the same location. These results indicate that Ca2+ microdomains in intact HeLa cell are generated from spatially distributed multiple IP3R clusters or Ca2+ puff sites, rather than a single IP3R cluster reported in cells loaded with Ca2+ buffers.
The Compound Indexing of Human Self-Similar Behavioural Patterns

Applications of a constitutive framework providing compound complexity analysis and indexing of coarse-grained self-similar time series representing behavioural data are presented. A notion of behavioural entropy and hysteresis is introduced as two different forms of compound measures. These measures provide clinically applicable complexity analysis of behavioural patterns yielding scalar characterisation of time-varying behaviours registered over an extended period of time. The behavioural data are obtained using body attached sensors providing non-invasive readings of heart rate, skin blood perfusion, blood oxygenation, skin temperature, movement and steps frequency. The results using compound measures of behavioural patterns of fifteen healthy individuals are presented. The application of the compound measures is shown to correlate with complexity analysis. The correlation is demonstrated using two healthy subjects compared against a control group. This indicates a possibility to use these measures in place of fractional dimensions to provide a finer characterisation of behavioural patterns observed using sensory data acquired over a long period of time.
“Don’t Bother Your Pretty Little Head”

We examined whether appearance compliments, despite their flattery, undermine cognitive performance. In Study 1, women participants (N = 88 Israeli university students) who wrote about past situations in which they had received appearance compliments (but not competence-related compliments) showed worse math performance than women in a control/no compliment condition—especially if they scored high on trait self-objectification (TSO). In Study 2, men and women participants (nwomen = 73, nmen = 75 Israeli university students) received bogus occupational evaluation feedback, which did or did not include an appearance compliment. Although appearance compliments led to mood improvement among participants with high TSO, they also undermined math performance among both women and men. Because receiving appearance compliments is a common experience for women (whereas men are typically complimented for their competencies), our findings suggest that appearance compliments serve as a mechanism that might subtly perpetuate gender inequality. For the promotion of societal gender equality, it is important that the public is aware that appearance compliments, even if meant well, may create sexist environments. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub. com/page/pwq/suppl/index
A Generalized Query Framework for Geospatial Reasoning

The ability to reason over geospatial entities using publicly available information is greatly enhanced by the abundance of data sources on the Internet. Traditional data sources such as satellite imagery, maps, gazetteers and vector data have long been used in geographic information systems (GIS). However, incorporating non-traditional sources such as phone books and property tax sites brings to light integration issues not previously considered. The ability to answer different types of queries about geospatial entities further complicates the problem. For example, assume we are provided with an image and consider the query “What is the name of this street? ”. There exist many different ways of answering this query depending on the types of data sources and operations available to a system. Three possible plans which answer this query are shown in Figures 1, 2, and 3 . For each plan, we are provided with the latitude and longitude of the center of the image and a point identifying which street we are interested in. The first plan would query a vector data source1 which provides a street name(s). The second plan queries a gazetteer2 which returns a set of named points. These points could be used to query an online phone book data source for a street name(s). Finally, the third plan retrieves an image from an image data source, overlays this image on the map, and extracts the characters corresponding to a street name(s). These plans show there exist components that can: produce and pass new data to subsequent components in the plan, produce an incomplete set of data, or produce no data at all. Therefore, when constructing an execution plan, a system needs to consider not only the operations available to it but also the data produced during execution. There is no guarantee that a valid execution plan will produce a valid query answer. The notions of contingency planning or dynamic plan refinement need to be incorporated into the planning system.
Adams re-trace

In this demonstration we present the traceability recovery tool developed in ADAMS, a fine-grained artefact management system. The tool is based on an information retrieval technique, namely latent semantic indexing, and aims at supporting the software engineer in the identification of traceability links between artefacts of different types. The tool has also been integrated in the Eclipse-based client of ADAMS.
Partial Depletion of Gamma-Actin Suppresses Microtubule Dynamics

Actin and microtubule interactions are important for many cellular events, however these interactions are poorly described. Alterations in γ‐actin are associated with diseases such as hearing loss and cancer. Functional investigations demonstrated that partial depletion of γ‐actin affects cell polarity and induces resistance to microtubule‐targeted agents. To determine whether γ‐actin alterations directly affect microtubule dynamics, microtubule dynamic instability was analyzed in living cells following partial siRNA depletion of γ‐actin. Partial depletion of γ‐actin suppresses interphase microtubule dynamics by 17.5% due to a decrease in microtubule shortening rates and an increase in microtubule attenuation. γ‐Actin partial depletion also increased distance‐based microtubule catastrophe and rescue frequencies. In addition, knockdown of γ‐actin delayed mitotic progression, partially blocking metaphase–anaphase transition and inhibiting cell proliferation. Interestingly, in the presence of paclitaxel, interphase microtubule dynamics were further suppressed by 24.4% in the γ‐actin knockdown cells, which is comparable to 28.8% suppression observed in the control siRNA treated cells. Paclitaxel blocked metaphase–anaphase transition in both the γ‐actin knockdown cells and the control siRNA cells. However, the extent of mitotic arrest was much higher in the control cells (28.4%), compared to the γ‐actin depleted cells (8.5%). Therefore, suppression of microtubule dynamics by partial depletion of γ‐actin is associated with marked delays in metaphase‐anaphase transition and not mitotic arrest. This is the first demonstration that γ‐actin can modulate microtubule dynamics by reducing the microtubule shortening rate, promoting paused/attenuated microtubules, and increasing transition frequencies suggesting a mechanistic link between γ‐actin and microtubules. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Towards a Community Cloud Storage

Community Clouds, usually built upon community networks, operate in a more disperse environment compared to a data center Cloud, with lower capacity and less reliable servers separated by a more heterogeneous and less predictable network interconnection. These differences raise challenges when deploying Cloud applications in a community Cloud. Open Stack Swift is an open source distributed storage system, which provides stand alone highly available and scalable storage from Open Stack Cloud computing components. Swift is initially designed as a backend storage system operating in a data center Cloud environment. In this work, we illustrate the performance and sensitivity of Open Stack Swift in a typical community Cloud setup. The evaluation of Swift is conducted in a simulated environment, using the most essential environment parameters that distinguish a community Cloud environment from a data center Cloud environment.
Am I Really Happy When I Write "Happy" in My Post?

Posts published on the Internet could serve as a valuable source of information regarding emotion. Recommendation systems, stock market forecast and other areas are likely to benefit from the advancement in mood classification. To deal with this task, researchers commonly rely on preassembled lexicons of emotional words. In this paper we discuss the possibility of extracting emotion-specific words from userannotated blog entries. The study is based on analysis of the collection from 14800 Live Journal posts containing the “Current mood” tag, specified by the author. The analysis findings and possible applications are discussed.
Distance Learning in Micronesia: Participants' Experiences in a Virtual Classroom Using Synchronous Technologies

Institutions of higher education that serve Pacific island communities often look for innovative ways to reach constituents who live on islands spread across more than 3 million square miles of ocean. Courses taught in distance learning formats provide islanders with opportunities to further their education without requiring them to leave the islands or take time off from their jobs to obtain bachelor's and other advanced degrees. However, there are several challenges to developing and delivering distance learning courses in this region. The islands are geographically dispersed and culturally and linguistically diverse. Islanders live in traditional societies that blend indigenous cultural norms with the forces of modernization and development. Many island communities are rural, remote, and sparsely populated.
An energy efficient data aggregation based medium access control protocol using centre at nearest source approach for sensor networks in a lattice topology

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) has a great application value and prospect in the fields of military, agriculture, environmental monitoring, medical health, industry, intelligent transportation, building monitoring, space exploration and so on. The operation of WSN is normal under lower traffic loads. But in case of an emergency situation, like fire break out large volumes of data have to be generated and delivered to the sink. Such kind of situations results in severe channel collision and thus decreases the communication throughput in medium access control (MAC) protocols. Hence data aggregation has been put forward as an essential paradigm for eliminating the redundancy. In this paper, we propose DA (Data Aggregation) MAC, a hybrid of TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) MAC approaches which employs center at nearest source technique. Initially the nodes make use of TDMA for its slot assignment. Each node wakes up for its corresponding slot assignment and then goes to sleep mode thus saving energy. But during any emergency situation nodes participating in it change its MAC behavior by allowing contention in TDMA slots. Instead of data transmission by the one hop neighbors of the affected node, data aggregation is implemented for the node with the minimum hop distance for reducing the overhead. This data aggregation technique is called the centre at nearest source approach. The simulation is carried out by means of NS2 (Network Simulator). Analytical and experimental results show that the proposed hybrid MAC protocol outperforms in all its aspects.
Helpful Female Subordinate Cichlids Are More Likely to Reproduce

Background In many cooperatively breeding vertebrates, subordinates assist a dominant pair to raise the dominants' offspring. Previously, it has been suggested that subordinates may help in payment for continued residency on the territory (the ‘pay-to-stay hypothesis’), but payment might also be reciprocated or might allow subordinates access to reproductive opportunities. Methodology/Principal Findings We measured dominant and subordinate female alloparental brood care and reproductive success in four separate experiments and show that unrelated female dominant and subordinate cichlid fish care for each other's broods (alloparental brood care), but that there is no evidence for reciprocal ‘altruism’ (no correlation between alloparental care received and given). Instead, subordinate females appear to pay with alloparental care for own direct reproduction. Conclusions/Significance Our results suggest subordinate females pay with alloparental care to ensure access to the breeding substrate and thereby increase their opportunities to lay their own clutches. Subordinates' eggs are laid, on average, five days after the dominant female has produced her first brood. We suggest that immediate reproductive benefits need to be considered in tests of the pay-to-stay hypothesis.
Statistical Models for Word Segmentation And Unknown Word Resolution

In a Chinesesentence,thereare no word delimiters, like blanks,betweenthe “words”. Therefore,it is important to identify the word boundariesbefore processingChinesetext. Traditional approachestend to usedictionary lookup, morphologicalrules and heuristicsto identify the word boundaries.Suchapproachesmay not be appliedto a large systemdueto the complicated linguistic phenomenainvolved in Chinesemorphologyand syntax. In this paper,the variousavailable featuresin a sentenceareusedto constructa generalized word segmentationmodel;thevariousprobabilisticmodelsfor word segmentationarethenderived basedon the generali zed model. In general,the likelihood measureadoptedin a probabilisticmodel doesnot provide a scoringmechanismthatdirectly indicates therealranksof thevariouscandidatesegmentation patterns.To enhancethe baselinemodels,a robustadaptivelearningalgorithm is proposed to adjust the parameter s of the baselinemodelsso as to increasethe discriminationpower and robustnessof the models. The simulation showsthat cost-efective word segmentationcould be achieved under various contextswith the proposedmodels. It is possibleto achieve accuracy in word recognitionrateof 99.39%andsentencerecognitionrateof 97.65%in the testingcorpusby incorporatingword length information to a context-independent word modelandapplyinga robustadaptivelearning algorithm in the segmentationprocess. Sincenot all lexical itemscouldbefoundin thesystemdictionaryin realapplications,the performanceof mostword segmentati on methodsin the literaturemaydegradedsignificantly whenunknownwordsareencountere d. Suchan “unknown word problem” is alsoexamined in this paper. An error recoverymechanismbasedon the segmentationmodel is proposed.
Improving intelligibility of synthesized speech in noise with emphasized prosody

The performance of current high quality concatenative text-to-speech (TTS) systems is limited under noisy environments. This paper investigates whether or not the intelligibility of synthesized speech in noise can be improved by emphasizing the prosody. Additionally, the paper presents a method that can effectively emphasize the prosody of units in existing TTS databases. The circular linear prediction (CLP) model is combined with the constant-pitch transform (CPT) to perform pitch and duration modifications to concatenative TTS units with little impact to the subjective quality. Test utterances are generated using the method and compared to reference utterances synthesized by a high quality TTS engine. The subjective test results demonstrate a preference for emphasized prosody in the majority of the test cases.
Theoretical analysis of GP-evolved risk evaluation formulas for Spectrum Based Fault Localisation

Spectra-Based Fault Localisation (SBFL) aims to assist de- bugging by applying risk evaluation formulae (sometimes called suspiciousness metrics) to program spectra and ranking statements according to the predicted risk. Designing a risk evaluation formula is often an intuitive process done by human software engineer. This paper presents a Genetic Programming approach for evolving risk assessment formulae. The empirical evaluation using 92 faults from four Unix utilities produces promising results 1 . GP-evolved equations can consistently outperform many of the human-designed formulae, such as Tarantula, Ochiai, Jaccard, Ample, and Wong1/2, up to 5.9 times. More importantly, they can perform equally as well as Op2, which was recently proved to be optimal against If-Then-Else-2 (ITE2) structure, or even outperform it against other program structures.
Demand for Private Health Insurance: Is There a Quality Gap?

Quality of care is qualified as a main determinant of the demand for voluntary private health insurance (PHI) in National Health Systems (NHS). This paper provides new evidence on the influence of the quality gap between public and private health insurance and other demand determinants in the demand for PHI in Catalonia. The demand for PHI is modelled as a demand for health care quality. Unlike previous studies, the database employed allows for the development of a link between the theoretical and the empirical model dealing with unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity issues. Results suggest that a rise in PHI quality enhances an equivalent influence in the demand for PHI as an equal reduction of NHS quality. Income and price elasticity estimates are consistent with the observed feature that PHI appears to be a luxury good and individuals tend to be relatively insensible to tax relief's and monetary co-payments in insurance contracts.
Exploiting social influence to magnify population-level behaviour change in maternal and child health: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial of network targeting algorithms in rural Honduras

Introduction Despite global progress on many measures of child health, rates of neonatal mortality remain high in the developing world. Evidence suggests that substantial improvements can be achieved with simple, low-cost interventions within family and community settings, particularly those designed to change knowledge and behaviour at the community level. Using social network analysis to identify structurally influential community members and then targeting them for intervention shows promise for the implementation of sustainable community-wide behaviour change. Methods and analysis We will use a detailed understanding of social network structure and function to identify novel ways of targeting influential individuals to foster cascades of behavioural change at a population level. Our work will involve experimental and observational analyses. We will map face-to-face social networks of 30 000 people in 176 villages in Western Honduras, and then conduct a randomised controlled trial of a friendship-based network-targeting algorithm with a set of well-established care interventions. We will also test whether the proportion of the population targeted affects the degree to which the intervention spreads throughout the network. We will test scalable methods of network targeting that would not, in the future, require the actual mapping of social networks but would still offer the prospect of rapidly identifying influential targets for public health interventions. Ethics and dissemination The Yale IRB and the Honduran Ministry of Health approved all data collection procedures (Protocol number 1506016012) and all participants will provide informed consent before enrolment. We will publish our findings in peer-reviewed journals as well as engage non-governmental organisations and other actors through venues for exchanging practical methods for behavioural health interventions, such as global health conferences. We will also develop a ‘toolkit’ for practitioners to use in network-based intervention efforts, including public release of our network mapping software. Trial registration number NCT02694679; Pre-results.
Personal stereophonic system using loudspeakers: Feasibility study

Sound focused personal audio system is defined as the system that can make a user enjoy the sound without bothering userpsilas neighbors. To implement this system, it is needed to generate the acoustically bright zones where a user is supposed to be and the dark zones in userpsilas side regions. As a solution method, acoustic contrast control [Kim and Choi, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 111. 1695 (2002)], which maximize the energy ratio between two zones, can be considered and, sound focused personal audio system for a mono sound have been implemented in 2007 as an application example and its results were reliable: 20 dB pressure level difference between the bright and dark zone. We have tried to make the sound focused personal audio system for a stereo sound as a further application: personal stereophonic system. Acoustic contrast control was also applied to implement this system and the control scheme for stereophonic sound using this method was suggested. In this paper, we address the mathematical formulations of stereophonic system using acoustic contrast control, and discussions for its capabilities for implementing the personal stereophonic system from theoretical and experimental results.
Enrichment of semantic knowledge bases - An application to the automatic enrichment of learning tool descriptions

We discuss the first outcomes of a research project targeted to the automatic enrichment of RDF/OWL-coded knowledge bases. More specifically, we discuss the enrichment of learning tool descriptions in a recommendation system for learning resources. We show how, thanks to the implemented enrichment processes, it is possible to improve the precision of recommendations by automatically completing those descriptions. Besides, this approach overcomes the limitations of manual cataloguing and their lack of completeness consequence of relying only on the previous knowledge of cataloguing personnel.