Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LKB1 and AMPK maintain epithelial cell polarity under energetic stress

LKB1 is mutated in both familial and spontaneous tumors, and acts as a master kinase that activates the PAR-1 polarity kinase and the adenosine 5′monophosphate–activated kinase (AMPK). This has led to the hypothesis that LKB1 acts as a tumor suppressor because it is required to maintain cell polarity and growth control through PAR-1 and AMPK, respectively. However, the genetic analysis of LKB1–AMPK signaling in vertebrates has been complicated by the existence of multiple redundant AMPK subunits. We describe the identification of mutations in the single Drosophila melanogaster AMPK catalytic subunit AMPKα. Surprisingly, ampkα mutant epithelial cells lose their polarity and overproliferate under energetic stress. LKB1 is required in vivo for AMPK activation, and lkb1 mutations cause similar energetic stress–dependent phenotypes to ampkα mutations. Furthermore, lkb1 phenotypes are rescued by a phosphomimetic version of AMPKα. Thus, LKB1 signals through AMPK to coordinate epithelial polarity and proliferation with cellular energy status, and this might underlie the tumor suppressor function of LKB1.
Epilepsy surgery in patients with normal or nonfocal MRI scans: Integrative strategies offer long‐term seizure relief

Purpose: Excisional surgery achieves seizure freedom in a large proportion of children with intractable lesional epilepsy, but the outcome for children without a focal lesion on MRI is less clear. We report the outcome of a cohort predominantly of children with nonlesional intractable partial epilepsy undergoing resective surgery.
A bi-axial and wideband vibration energy harvester using magnetoelectric transducer

In vibration energy harvesting, a primary issue in these generators is that most of them can only harvest energy in one single direction of the motions. In this paper, the harvester using magnetoelectric transducer takes advantage of multi-cantilever beams to extract the vibration with multi-directions. The effects of the structure parameters on the electrical-output of the harvester are analyzed to achieve the optimal vibration energy harvesting performances. The experimental results on the performances show that, the harvester has bandwidths of 2.8Hz, 2.5Hz at two directions at the acceleration of 0.6g (with g=9.8ms-2), respectively.
Parental beliefs and family functioning in Chinese families experiencing economic disadvantage in Hong Kong

Abstract The relationships between parental beliefs (i.e., Chinese cultural beliefs about adversity, attribution of children’s success and failure to effort, and expectations of children’s future) and family functioning were examined in 550 Chinese parents experiencing economic disadvantage. Results showed that perceived Chinese cultural beliefs about adversity and parental expectations on children’s future were positively related to family functioning in both fathers’ and mothers’ samples. In addition, paternal expectations of children’s future emerged as the most important predictor of perceived family functioning. The findings underscored the important role of the fathers in Chinese families experiencing economic disadvantage. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
Transcription Factor AP-2γ Is a Developmentally Regulated Marker of Testicular Carcinoma In situ and Germ Cell Tumors

Purpose: Transcription factor activator protein-2γ (TFAP2C, AP-2γ) was reported previously in extraembryonic ectoderm and breast carcinomas but not in the testis. In our recent gene expression study we detected AP-2γ in carcinoma in situ testis (CIS, or intratubular germ cell neoplasia), precursor of testicular germ cell tumors. In this study we aimed to investigate the expression pattern of AP-2γ and to shed light on this factor in germ cell differentiation and the pathogenesis of germ cell neoplasia. Experimental Design: We analyzed expression pattern of AP-2γ at the RNA and protein level in normal human tissues and a panel of tumors and tumor-derived cell lines. In the gonads, we established the ontogeny of expression of AP-2γ in normal and dysgenetic samples. We also investigated the regulation of AP-2γ by steroids and retinoic acid. Results: We detected abundant AP-2γ in testicular CIS and in testicular germ cell tumors of young adults and confirmed differential expression of AP-2γ in somatic tumors. We found that AP-2γ expression was regulated by retinoic acid in an embryonal carcinoma cell line (NT2). The investigation of ontogeny of AP-2γ protein expression in fetal gonads revealed that it was confined to oogonia/gonocytes and was down-regulated with germ cell differentiation. In some prepubertal intersex cases, AP-2γ was detected outside of the normal window of expression, probably marking neoplastic transformation of germ cells. Conclusions: AP-2γ is developmentally regulated and associated with the undifferentiated phenotype in germ cells. This transcription factor may be involved in self-renewal and survival of immature germ cells and tissue-specific stem cells. AP-2γ is a novel marker of testicular CIS and CIS-derived tumors.
Effects of S1P on skeletal muscle repair/regeneration during eccentric contraction

Skeletal muscle regeneration is severely compromised in the case of extended damage. The current challenge is to find factors capable of limiting muscle degeneration and/or potentiating the inherent regenerative program mediated by a specific type of myoblastic cells, the satellite cells. Recent studies from our groups and others have shown that the bioactive lipid, sphingosine 1‐phosphate (S1P), promotes myoblast differentiation and exerts a trophic action on denervated skeletal muscle fibres. In the present study, we examined the effects of S1P on eccentric contraction (EC)‐injured extensor digitorum longus muscle fibres and resident satellite cells. After EC, skeletal muscle showed evidence of structural and biochemical damage along with significant electrophysiological changes, i.e. reduced plasma membrane resistance and resting membrane potential and altered Na+ and Ca2+ current amplitude and kinetics. Treatment with exogenous S1P attenuated the EC‐induced tissue damage, protecting skeletal muscle fibre from apoptosis, preserving satellite cell viability and affecting extracellular matrix remodelling, through the up‐regulation of matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP‐9) expression. S1P also promoted satellite cell renewal and differentiation in the damaged muscle. Notably, EC was associated with the activation of sphingosine kinase 1 (SphK1) and with increased endogenous S1P synthesis, further stressing the relevance of S1P in skeletal muscle protection and repair/regeneration. In line with this, the treatment with a selective SphK1 inhibitor during EC, caused an exacerbation of the muscle damage and attenuated MMP‐9 expression. Together, these findings are in favour for a role of S1P in skeletal muscle healing and offer new clues for the identification of novel therapeutic approaches to counteract skeletal muscle damage and disease.
The transmission of capital and a feel for the game

We examine parental choice in the context of lower secondary schools in urban Finland by means of qualitative content analysis of interviews conducted with upper-class parents (n=33). The analysis concentrates on the social construction of selective school choice within a public education system. The families in question were willing and able to choose their selective classes in schools in which intake is based on aptitude tests. This practice was justified on meritocratic grounds and was therefore not considered a class practice in the parental discourse. We argue that the capacity of upper-class families to transform economic capital into embodied cultural capital becomes an asset in the competition over study positions. The process includes the transfer of trump cards acquired in the field of culture – such as via music or sports, with their acknowledged interconnectedness with social position – to the field of public comprehensive education, despite the fact that social background should not define the allocation of pupils to schools in Finland. The role of the transmission of capital in this process is misrecognised, despite the fact that the result is social exclusion.
Model comparison for functional MRI

We consider a model comparison based on a new model selection criterion. We treat fMRI as a spatio-temporal system identification problem and compare our model fitting method based on spatial regularization methods with the so-called statistical parametric map technique currently popular in the fMRI literature. We illustrate our results with data from the brain obtained during a combined visual and motor experiment.
Chromatic Information and Feature Detection in Fast Visual Analysis

The visual system is able to recognize a scene based on a sketch made of very simple features. This ability is likely crucial for survival, when fast image recognition is necessary, and it is believed that a primal sketch is extracted very early in the visual processing. Such highly simplified representations can be sufficient for accurate object discrimination, but an open question is the role played by color in this process. Rich color information is available in natural scenes, yet artist's sketches are usually monochromatic; and, black-and-white movies provide compelling representations of real world scenes. Also, the contrast sensitivity of color is low at fine spatial scales. We approach the question from the perspective of optimal information processing by a system endowed with limited computational resources. We show that when such limitations are taken into account, the intrinsic statistical properties of natural scenes imply that the most effective strategy is to ignore fine-scale color features and devote most of the bandwidth to gray-scale information. We find confirmation of these information-based predictions from psychophysics measurements of fast-viewing discrimination of natural scenes. We conclude that the lack of colored features in our visual representation, and our overall low sensitivity to high-frequency color components, are a consequence of an adaptation process, optimizing the size and power consumption of our brain for the visual world we live in.
Automated robot speech gesture generation system based on dialog sentence punctuation mark extraction

This paper proposed automated robot speech gesture generation system for service/entertainment robots. This system can automatically generate robot Beat gestures accompanied by speech interaction situation with humans. Beat gestures have no specific semantic meanings to communicate, but it is commonly believed that they are an essential factor of natural communication. We extracted basic gesture patterns by analyzing human speech videos and built a correlation model between gesture pattern and punctuation mark of speech sentence. This model can select a gesture pattern sequence to make a robot gesture expression motion for arbitrary input speech sentence, and synchronize it with vocal wave file from TTS(Text-To-Speech) engine.
Ontology-Based Modeling of Breast Cancer Follow-up Clinical Practice Guideline for Providing Clinical Decision Support

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in Canada. There are identified incentives to the transfer of breast cancer follow-up care to family physicians after primary treatment has been completed by oncologists at the tertiary care centers. This paper presents a semantic web approach to develop a clinical decision support system to support family physicians to provide breast cancer follow-up care. Our approach involved the computerization and execution of a breast cancer follow-up clinical practice guideline. The computerization of the clinical practice guideline led to the development of a breast cancer ontology. We present our breast cancer ontology which models the knowledge inherent within the breast cancer follow-up clinical practice guideline - the breast cancer ontology serves as the knowledge source to determine patient-specific recommendations. In this paper, we discuss the ontology engineering process that highlights the specification of our breast cancer ontology in terms of clinical concepts and the relationships between the concepts expressed as OWL classes and properties, using the protege ontology development tool.
Using a model of the reachable workspace to position mobile manipulators for 3-d trajectories

Humanoid robots are envisioned in general household tasks. To be able to fulfill a given task the robot needs to be equipped with knowledge concerning the manipulation and interaction in the environment and with knowledge about its own capabilities. When performing actions, e.g. opening doors or imitating human reach to grasp movements special 3-d trajectories are followed with the robot's end-effector. These trajectories can not be executed in every part of the robot's arm workspace. Therefore a task planner has to determine if and how additional degrees of freedom such as the robot's upper body or the robot's base can be moved in order to execute the task-specific trajectory. An approach is presented that computes placements for a mobile manipulator online given a task-related 3-d trajectory. A discrete representation of the robot arm's reachable workspace is used. Task-specific trajectories are interpreted as patterns and searched in the reachability model using multi-dimensional correlation. The relevance of the presented approach is demonstrated in simulated positioning tasks.
AR Furniture: Integrating Augmented Reality Technology to Enhance Interior Design using Marker and Markerless tracking

Purchasing products for interior design always has a problem that the purchased products may not satisfy customers because they cannot put them in their own place before buying. The purpose of this research is to study and develop an android application called 'AR Furniture' with the use of Augmented Reality technology for design and decoration that will help customers visualize how furniture pieces will look and fit (to scale) in their homes and also can provide details of products to support customer decision. This application is a prototype to find out factors affecting the design and tracking of AR applications. This paper presents three factors that are important for designing and tracking AR applications. The principle of the application is started with analyzing images from the rear camera of a smartphone or tablet using marker tracking technique for displaying product's details and markerless tracking technique for displaying 3D models, performing feature tracking, and calculating positions to display a 3D model over the real world image. The implementation of the application can be split into 2 parts: Part 1 Creating 3D Models using Autodesk 3Ds Max and Part 2 Developing the application using Unity3D and Kudan Augmented Reality SDK as an engine for image analysis, image processing and 3D model rendering. Then we performed three experiments to test the application, 1) Image analysis with marker tracking 2) Image analysis with markerless tracking and 3) User's satisfaction of using the application. The results show that image analysis with marker tracking works well using markers which their size should not be less than 200 x 200 pixels, the distance between the camera and the marker should not be far more than 60 cm. Image analysis with markerless tracking works well with surfaces having a lot of features and at light levels of 100--300 lux (indoor light levels) with 70% accuracy. The user experience evaluation shows that the weakness (2.86 out of 5 points) of the application is when a user found a problem in the application they would need time to solve it. The user experience evaluation shows that the strength (3.93 out of 5 points) of the application is the application can show 3D Object that meet user satisfaction. And the average overall user's satisfaction come up with 3.93 out of 5 point evaluation score. From the experiments, the application should be modified for better performance such as develop various maker patterns using QR code or barcode, distinguish walls and ceilings so that the application would show 3D objects on them properly, improve light robustness and make 3D models more realistic.
Stimulus Presentation at Specific Neuronal Oscillatory Phases Experimentally Controlled with tACS: Implementation and Applications

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that both the power and phase of oscillatory brain activity can influence the processing and perception of sensory stimuli. Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) can phase-align and amplify endogenous brain oscillations and has often been used to control and thereby study oscillatory power. Causal investigation of oscillatory phase is more difficult, as it requires precise real-time temporal control over both oscillatory phase and sensory stimulation. Here, we present hardware and software solutions allowing temporally precise presentation of sensory stimuli during tACS at desired tACS phases, enabling causal investigations of oscillatory phase. We developed freely available and easy to use software, which can be coupled with standard commercially available hardware to allow flexible and multi-modal stimulus presentation (visual, auditory, magnetic stimuli, etc.) at pre-determined tACS-phases, opening up a range of new research opportunities. We validate that stimulus presentation at tACS phase in our setup is accurate to the sub-millisecond level with high inter-trial consistency. Conventional methods investigating the role of oscillatory phase such as magneto-/electroencephalography can only provide correlational evidence. Using brain stimulation with the described methodology enables investigations of the causal role of oscillatory phase. This setup turns oscillatory phase into an independent variable, allowing innovative, and systematic studies of its functional impact on perception and cognition.
Competition Anxiety, Motivation, and Mental Toughness in Golf

The purpose of this study was to examine whether one's profile of motivation was associated with competition anxiety through mental toughness among 173 competitive golfers (164 men, 9 women). Latent profile analysis identified three distinct motivation profiles (high, moderate, and low motivation). Multicategorical mediation models demonstrated that athletes reporting low or moderate levels of motivation had higher levels of competition anxiety, with these associations partially mediated by lower levels of mental toughness. These findings would permit practitioners to better understand motivation, mental toughness, and competition anxiety symptoms, and their associations.
Sensor, Signal and Image Informatics

Summary Objectives The number of articles published annually in the fields of biomedical signal and image acquisition and processing is increasing. Based on selected examples, this survey aims at comprehensively demonstrating the recent trends and developments. Methods Four articles are selected for biomedical data acquisition covering topics such as dose saving in CT, C-arm X-ray imaging systems for volume imaging, and the replacement of dose-intensive CTbased diagnostic with harmonic ultrasound imaging. Regarding biomedical signal analysis (BSA), the four selected articles discuss the equivalence of different time-frequency approaches for signal analysis, an application to Cochlea implants, where time-frequency analysis is applied for controlling the replacement system, recent trends for fusion of different modalities, and the role of BSA as part of a brain machine interfaces. To cover the broad spectrum of publications in the field of biomedical image processing, six papers are focused. Important topics are content-based image retrieval in medical applications, automatic classification of tongue photographs from traditional Chinese medicine, brain perfusion analysis in single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), model-based visualization of vascular trees, and virtual surgery, where enhanced visualization and haptic feedback techniques are combined with a sphere-filled model of the organ. Results The selected papers emphasize the five fields forming the chain of biomedical data processing: (1) data acquisition, (2) data reconstruction and pre-processing, (3) data handling, (4) data analysis, and (5) data visualization. Fields 1 and 2 form the sensor informatics, while fields 2 to 5 form signal or image informatics with respect to the nature of the data considered. Conclusions Biomedical data acquisition and pre-processing, as well as data handling, analysis and visualization aims at providing reliable tools for decision support that improve the quality of health care. Comprehensive evaluation of the processing methods and their reliable integration in routine applications are future challenges in the field of sensor, signal and image informatics.
If They Like It They Can Take It With Them: A Mixed Methods Examination of Internet-Based Mindfulness Meditation With Incarcerated Youth

The most successful programming offered in juvenile justice facilities does not easily transfer back to communities to give youth the opportunity to practice intervention skills once they return home. This transferability is particularly important to youth leaving state custody given that they disproportionately return to poor communities and disrupted families that both exacerbate behaviors associated with juvenile justice involvement and act as barriers to much needed services and support. With this in mind, a randomized controlled trial was conducted with a sample of 60 youth, ages 16 to 22, sentenced to state custody in a juvenile detention facility in New Jersey to quantitatively assess the ability of freely available Internet-based mindfulness meditation instruction to increase mindfulness. Weekly journals and open-ended post-test questions were used to qualitatively explore treatment experiences. Differences among age and treatment groups on quantitative measures of mindfulness, along with content analysis of journal entries, suggest that the Internet delivery of mindfulness meditation instruction increased mindfulness in older youth. Forty percent of treatment youth, compared to 5% of control youth, provided at least one detailed entry describing their use of "class skills" to help them deal with conflict in the facility. These findings suggest that an Internet delivery of mindfulness meditation is engaging to incarcerated youth, helpful to them in coping with life in a juvenile justice facility, and able to increase mindfulness in older youth who practice it.
An Optimization Approach for Semantic-based XML Schema Matching

We propose a novel solution for semantic-based XML schema matching, taking a mathematical programming approach. This method identifies the globally optimal solution for the problem of matching leaf nodes between two XML schema trees by reducing the tree-to-tree matching problem to simpler problems of path-to-path, node-to-node, and word-to-word matching. We formulate these matching problems as maximum-weighted bipartite graph matching problems with different constraints, which are solved by different mathematical programming techniques, including integer programming and dynamic programming. Solutions to simpler problems provide weights for the next stage until the optimal tree-to-tree matching solution is obtained. The effectiveness of this approach has been verified and demonstrated by computer experiments.