Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pard3 regulates contact between neural crest cells and the timing of Schwann cell differentiation but is not essential for neural crest migration or myelination

Background: Schwann cells, which arise from the neural crest, are the myelinating glia of the peripheral nervous system. During development neural crest and their Schwann cell derivatives engage in a sequence of events that comprise delamination from the neuroepithelium, directed migration, axon ensheathment, and myelin membrane synthesis. At each step neural crest and Schwann cells are polarized, suggesting important roles for molecules that create cellular asymmetries. In this work we investigated the possibility that one polarity protein, Pard3, contributes to the polarized features of neural crest and Schwann cells that are associated with directed migration and myelination. Results: We analyzed mutant zebrafish embryos deficient for maternal and zygotic pard3 function. Time‐lapse imaging revealed that neural crest delamination was normal but that migrating cells were disorganized with substantial amounts of overlapping membrane. Nevertheless, neural crest cells migrated to appropriate peripheral targets. Schwann cells wrapped motor axons and, although myelin gene expression was delayed, myelination proceeded to completion. Conclusions: Pard3 mediates contact inhibition between neural crest cells and promotes timely myelin gene expression but is not essential for neural crest migration or myelination. Developmental Dynamics 243:1511–1523, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Time Horizon, Costs of Equity Capital, and Generic Investment Strategies of Firms

Recent literature (McNulty, Yeh, Schulze, & Lubatkin, 2002) states that the assumptions behind the capital asset pricing model, in particular the irrelevance of time horizon, do not correspond to the characteristics of firms that prefer long-term investment horizons. I show that family firms display a longer time horizon than most of their nonfamily counterparts, since (1) family firms display a longer CEO tenure, (2) this type of firm strives for long-term independence and succession within the family, and (3) due to the fact that family firms are overrepresented on western European stock markets in cyclical industries in which business cycles inhibit short-term success. As the annual default risk of an investment diminishes with increasing holding period (Hull, 2003), the risk-equivalent cost of equity capital of firms with longer planning horizons (e.g., family firms) can be lower as well. Based on the assumption that economic value to shareholders is created when firms invest in projects with returns above the associated cost of capital (Copeland, Koller, & Murrin, 2000), I argue that long-term-oriented firms can tackle unique investment projects represented by two generic investment strategies—the perseverance and the outpacing strategy. The first one, the perseverance strategy, represents investment strategies in which long-term-oriented firms invest in lower return but equal risk projects than their more short-term-oriented counterparts. The second one, the outpacing strategy, comprises investment projects with higher risk and equal return than the short-term competitors.
The Feeling of Another Person′s Knowing

Abstract We investigated whether predictions about the currently unrecallable knowledge that a person possesses (a) are facilitated by that person′s privileged access to nonobservable information and (b) are influenced by aspects of his or her behavior that can also be observed by another person. A total of 106 target subjects (a) attempted to answer general-information questions (b) predicted which of the unanswered items they would be most likely to recognize, and (c) took a multiple-choice test on the items. The recognition performance of each of these target subjects was also predicted by an observer , who had watched the target′s recall attempts, and by a judge , who had virtually no information about the target. The targets predicted more accurately than the observers, who were in turn more accurate than the judges. The predictions of the targets and the observers were related to three cues in the targets′ behavior: (a) type of recall failure (omission error vs commission error), (b) latency of omission errors, and (c) plausibility of commission errors.
The Effect of Temperature on Shear Bond Strength of Clearfil SE Bond and Adper Single Bond Adhesive Systems to Dentin

Statement of the Problem Monomer viscosity and solvent evaporation can be affected by the adhesive system temperature. Higher temperature can elevate the vapor pressure in solution and penetration of adhesive in smear layer. Bonding mechanism may be influenced by the adhesive temperature. Purpose This study aimed to evaluate the effect of pre-heating on shear bond strength of etch-and-rinse and self-etching adhesives to ground bovine dentin surfaces, at temperatures of 4˚C, 25˚C and 40˚C. Materials and Method In this experimental study, 60 maxillary bovine incisors were randomly divided into 6 groups (n=10). The central part of labial dentin surfaces was exposed with a diamond bur and standardized smear layer was created by using silicon carbide paper (600 grit) under water-coolant while the specimens were mounted in acrylic resin. Two adhesive systems, an etch-and-rinse (Adper single bond) and a self-etch (Clearfil SE Bond) were stored at temperatures of 4˚C, 25˚C and 40˚C for 30 minutes and were then applied on the prepared labial surface according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The composite resin (Z350) was packed in Teflon mold (5 mm in diameter) on this surface and was cured. The shear bond strength (MPa) was evaluated by universal testing machine (Zwick/Roell Z020, Germany) at cross head speed of 1mm/min. The results were statistically analyzed by using ANOVA and Tukey tests (p< 0.05). Results No significant difference was found between the shear bond strength of Clearfil SE Bond adhesive in different temperature and single Bond adhesive system at 25 ˚C and 40 ˚C. However, there were significant differences between 4 ˚C of Adper single bond in comparison with 25˚C and 40˚C (p= 0.0001). Conclusion Pre-heating did not affect the shear bond strength of SE Bond, but could promote the shear bond strength of Adper Single Bond.
Car-to-Car Safety Broadcast with Interference Using Raptor Codes

Car-to-car safety applications that demand real-time and reliable communications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) requires a new paradigm of coding techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel coding approach using a systematic Raptor code for car-to- car post-crash warning broadcast applications. A cross-layer simulator model is developed to evaluate the performance of Raptor codes against repetition codes using also multiple antennas spatial diversity techniques. The end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio are used as performance metrics to demonstrate the latency and reliability problems of repetition codes that are addressed using Raptor codes.
Task Decomposition in Reinforcement Learning

Decomposing a complex task into a set of simpler subtasks is a common technique used by problem solving agents. In reinforcement learning decomposition can be used by having separate modules learn to achieve individual subgoals independently and in parallel. Since each module can ignore parts of the state space that are not relevant to its task, learning time is drastically reduced. However, since a modular decomposition implies the loss of a global perspective of the task, the agent’s performance depends on the strategy used to combine information provided by the different modules in order to select what action to execute. One class of such strategies use the local utilities provided by the individual modules to estimate the global utilities of actions. In previous work we have shown that an agent with pre-defined decomposition using such approximation strategies can achieve fast learning times with little loss in performance. However, since reinforcement learning is intended for domains where the human programmer has little knowledge about the structure of the task, it would be useful if the agent could discover a good task decomposition by itself. The only domain knowledge initially available to the agent is the reward function. The same knowledge used to encode the reward function can be used by the agent to define an initial decomposition of its task. This decomposition can then be refined, as the agent discovers the structure of the world and its task.
A GT-rich Sequence Binding the Transcription Factor Sp1 Is Crucial for High Expression of the Human Type VII Collagen Gene (COL7A1) in Fibroblasts and Keratinocytes*

Type VII collagen is the major component of anchoring fibrils, structural elements that stabilize the attachment of the basement membrane to the underlying dermis. In this study, we have dissected the human type VII collagen gene (COL7A1) promoter to characterize the cis-elements responsible for the expression of the gene in cultured fibroblasts and keratinocytes. Using transient cell transfections with various 5′ end deletion COL7A1 promoter/chloramphenicol acetyltransferase reporter gene plasmid constructs, we determined that the region between nucleotides −524 and −456, relative to the transcription start site, is critical for high promoter activity in both cell types studied. Gel mobility shift assays using several DNA fragments spanning this region identified a GT-rich sequence between residues −512 and −505, necessary for the binding of nuclear proteins to this region of the promoter. Point mutations abolished the binding of nuclear proteins in gel shift assays and drastically diminished the activity of the promoter in transient cell transfections. Supershift assays with antibodies against various transcription factors including Sp1, Sp3, c-Jun/AP-1, and AP-2, and competition experiments with oligonucleotides containing consensus sequences for Sp1 and AP-1 binding identified Sp1 as the transcription factor binding to this region of the COL7A1 promoter. Indeed, recombinant human Sp1 was shown to bind the COL7A1 promoter GT-rich element but not its mutated form in gel mobility shift assays. In addition, co-transfection of pPacSp1, an expression vector for Sp1, together with the COL7A1 promoter/chloramphenicol acetyltransferase construct into Sp1-deficient Drosophila Schneider SL2 cells unequivocally demonstrated that Sp1 is essential for high expression of the COL7A1 gene. These data represent the first in-depth analysis of the human COL7A1 promoter transcriptional control.
Metrical Rhythm Implicitly Orients Attention in Time as Indexed by Improved Target Detection and Left Inferior Parietal Activation

When we direct attentional resources to a certain point in time, expectation and preparedness is heightened and behavior is, as a result, more efficient. This future-oriented attending can be guided either voluntarily, by externally defined cues, or implicitly, by perceived temporal regularities. Inspired by dynamic attending theory, our aim was to study the extent to which metrical structure, with its beats of greater or lesser relative strength, modulates attention implicitly over time and to uncover the neural circuits underlying this process of dynamic attending. We used fMRI to investigate whether auditory meter generated temporal expectancies and, consequently, how it affected processing of auditory and visual targets. Participants listened to a continuous auditory metrical sequence and pressed a button whenever an auditory or visual target was presented. The independent variable was the time of target presentation with respect to the metrical structure of the sequence. Participants' RTs to targets occurring on strong metrical positions were significantly faster than responses to events falling on weak metrical positions. Events falling on strong beats were accompanied by increased activation of the left inferior parietal cortex, a region crucial for orienting attention in time, and, by greater functional connectivity between the left inferior parietal cortex and the visual and auditory cortices, the SMA and the cerebellum. These results support the predictions of the dynamic attending theory that metrical structure with its relative strong and weak beats modulates attentional resources over time and, in turn, affects the functioning of both perceptual and motor preparatory systems.
1 Endogenous Viral Etiology of Prion Diseases

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), or prion diseases, are a group of incurable neurodegenerative disorders, including Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, “mad cow” disease in cattle, and scrapie in sheep. This paper presents structural, genetic, and evolutionary evidence supporting an endogenous TSE virus model that integrates the three major traditional views on the nature of TSE pathogens, the conventional virus view, the prion hypothesis, and the virino concept, into a novel conceptual and evolutionary framework. According to this model, the TSE pathogens are symbiotic endogenous viruses that inadvertently produce transmissible viral particles that lack the viral genome and are composed primarily of the viral prion protein (PrP). Production of defective viral particles that contain a partial genome or lack the viral genome entirely is a relatively common event in the life cycle of many viruses. Similar to the normal viral particles, which contain a genome, these defective viral particles can be transmitted to new host cells. Obviously, in the absence of viral genome, these protein-only viral particles cannot establish a productive infection. However, if these viral particles enter a host cell that carries the parental or a related virus and induce the production of similar protein-only particles, then they would appear as self-replicating, protein-only infectious pathogens if mistakenly taken out from the context of the viral life cycle. This misconception, which is rooted into the current dogma of viruses as viral particles, led to the development of the prion theory. The endogenous TSE virus model is consistent with the TSE data and offers solutions to many enigmatic features associated with TSE, including the function of PrP that, despite more than two decades of TSE research conducted primarily within the framework of the prion hypothesis, is still not known. According to the TSE endogenous virus model, PrP is the protein of an endogenous virus that has co-evolved with their vertebrate hosts by providing a protective function against pathogenic viruses. The evidence for the endogenous TSE virus model and for the antiviral protective function of PrP is strong, and they are fully open to additional experimental testing. The endogenous virus model opens the TSE research field to new interpretations and directions, both in basic research and in associated biomedical and public health fields, and could lead to development of new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. ______________________________________________________________________________________
SMT QoS : Hardware Prototyping of Thread-level Performance Differentiation Mechanisms

Absolute throughput often fails to scale linearly with core count in chip multiprocessors (CMPs) due to contention in shared platform resources, including cache, memory bandwidth and busses. This nonlinear scaling is exacerbated by the addition of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) to CMPs by introducing resource contention at the pipeline resource level, and increasing the number of active threads in the system which further increases contention in shared resources, leading to a loss in performance stability and fairness. This work introduces and evaluates a new form of source-based execution rate control at the processor pipeline level, based on instruction fetch, instruction queue and reservation station partitioning between SMT threads. The efficacy of these controls is demonstrated through experiments with SPEC workloads on a modified test version of an Intel® codename Nehalem microprocessor. This new SMT rate control is presented as a critical building block to restoring the fairness and determinism in performance once inherent in simpler uniprocessors utilizing time-slicing schedulers, and is proposed for inclusion in future microprocessors supporting SMT.
Novel determinants of the neuronal Cl− concentration

It is now a well‐accepted view that cation‐driven Cl− transporters in neurons are involved in determining the intracellular Cl− concentration. In the present review, we propose that additional factors, which are often overlooked, contribute substantially to the Cl− gradient across neuronal membranes. After briefly discussing the data supporting and opposing the role of cation–chloride cotransporters in regulating Cl−, we examine the participation of the following factors in the formation of the transmembrane Cl− gradient: (i) fixed ‘Donnan’ charges inside and outside the cell; (ii) the properties of water (free vs. bound); and (iii) water transport through the cotransporters. We demonstrate a steep relationship between intracellular Cl− and the concentration of fixed negative charges on macromolecules. We show that in the absence of water transport through the K+–Cl− cotransporter, a large osmotic gradient builds at concentrations below or above a set value of ‘Donnan’ charges, and show that at any value of these fixed charges, the reversal potential for Cl− equates that of K+. When the movement of water across the membrane is a source of free energy, it is sufficient to modify the movement of Cl− through the cotransporter. In this scenario, the reversal potential for Cl− does not closely follow that of K+. Furthermore, our simulations demonstrate that small differences in the availability of freely diffusible water between inside and outside the cell greatly affect the Cl− reversal potential, particularly when osmolar transmembrane gradients are minimized, for example by idiogenic osmoles. We also establish that the presence of extracellular charges has little effect on the chloride reversal potential, but greatly affects the effective inhibitory conductance for Cl−. In conclusion, our theoretical analysis of the presence of fixed anionic charges and water bound on macromolecules inside and outside the cell greatly impacts both Cl− gradient and Cl− conductance across neuronal membranes.
Supervised Spectral Latent Variable Models

We present a probabilistic structured prediction method for learning input-output dependencies where correlations between outputs are modeled as low-dimensional manifolds constrained by both geometric, distance preserving output relations, and predictive power of inputs. Technically this reduces to learning a probabilistic, input conditional model, over latent (manifold) and output variables using an alternation scheme. In one round, we optimize the parameters of an input-driven manifold predictor using latent targets given by preimages (conditional expectations) of the current manifold-to-output model. In the next round, we use the distribution given by the manifold predictor in order to maximize the probability of the outputs with an additional, implicit geometry preserving constraint on the manifold. The resulting Supervised Spectral Latent Variable Model (SSLVM) combines the properties of probabilistic geometric manifold learning (accommodates geometric constraints corresponding to any spectral embedding method including PCA, ISOMAP or Laplacian Eigenmaps), with the additional supervisory information to further constrain it for predictive tasks. We demonstrate the superiority of the method over baseline PPCA + regression frameworks and show its potential in difficult real-world computer vision benchmarks designed for the reconstruction of three-dimensional human poses from monocular image sequences. Appearing in Proceedings of the 12 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2009, Clearwater Beach, Florida, USA. Volume 5 of JMLR: W&CP 5. Copyright 2009 by the authors.
The Functional Organization and Capacity Limits of Working Memory

Working memory refers to keeping track of ongoing mental processes and temporary memory. One hypothesis is that this form of memory consists of multiple domain-specific components. Over four decades, experiments testing this hypothesis have yielded insight into cognitive changes from childhood to old age, selective cognitive impairments following brain damage, and on-line cognition in healthy adults. Advances in the understanding of working memory also have arisen from the discovery of associations between individual differences in working-memory capacity and a broad range of cognitive measures. These latter advances have often been interpreted as supporting the alternative hypothesis that working memory consists of a single, limited-capacity domain-general system for control of attention. Here I outline recent developments in the multiple-component perspective that address challenges derived from the attention-based hypothesis and from multivariate studies of individual differences. I argue that the multiple-component perspective and the single-attentional-system perspective are complementary, with each best suited to asking different research questions, and that many areas of contemporary debate regarding the nature of working memory reflect differences that are more apparent than real.
Social problem‐solving skills in boys with conduct and oppositional defiant disorders

The current study compared the social problem-solving skills of a clinic-based sample of 30 boys diagnosed with conduct disorder (CD) and 25 boys diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Past research has indicated that contextual factors influence children's social problem-solving; thus, three hypothetical conflict situations (i.e., child-child, teacher-child, and parent-child) and situations which differed by degree of negative intent of the provocateur (i.e., hostile vs. ambiguous intent) were examined. Problem-solving strategies were aggregated into three broad dimensions: 1) aggressive/antisocial solutions; 2) nonverbal-nonaggressive solutions; and 3) verbal-nonaggressive solutions. Compared to ODD boys, CD boys proposed more aggressive/antisocial solutions in parent-child conflicts when parental intent was ambiguous and in teacher-child conflicts regardless of intent. Compared to ODD boys, CD boys proposed fewer verbal-nonaggressive solutions in child-child conflicts. The implications of these findings for treatment intervention with CD and ODD boys were discussed. Language: en
A Photorealistic Predictive Display

The quality of a teleoperation system is decreased by time delays in the communication channel. Delays as low as a few hundred milliseconds between commanding an action and getting the visual feedback reduce the operator's performance. Predictive displays have proven their suitability to compensate for these delays, but at the expense of image quality when using computer-generated images. A photorealistic predictive display is presented that closes the feedback loop locally at the operator's side of a telepresence system. Photorealism is achieved using delayed camera images for texturing the predicted scene. Consumer graphics hardware is not only used for rendering but also for hardware-accelerated texture extraction. To allow concurrent access to model data, a multibuffer model structure is presented. A model of the teleoperator's environment is automatically acquired and updated by image processing techniques using a stereo camera as the only sensor.