Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
T cells deficient in inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor are resistant to apoptosis

The type 1 inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor (IP3R1) calcium release channel is present on the endoplasmic reticulum of most cell types. T lymphocytes which have been made deficient in IP3R1 lack detectable IP3-induced intracellular calcium release and exhibit defective signaling via the T-cell receptor (TCR) (T. Jayaraman, E. Ondriasova, K. Ondrias, D. Harnick, and A. R. Marks, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 92:6007-6011, 1995). We now show that IP3R1-deficient T cells are resistant to apoptosis induced by dexamethasone, TCR stimulation, ionizing radiation, and Fas. Resistance to TCR-mediated apoptosis in IP3R1-deficient cells is reversed by pharmacologically raising cytoplasmic calcium levels. TCR-mediated apoptosis can be induced in calcium-free media, indicating that extracellular calcium influx is not required. These findings suggest that intracellular calcium release via the IP3R1 is a critical mediator of apoptosis.
A Guide to Behavioral Economics

A Guide to Behavioral Economics provides an introduction to the field for those who are not economists and for students of the social sciences, business administration and law. It should help readers get more out of the increasing number of publications that emphasize various aspects of behavioral economics, and enable them to better recognize some of the limitations of this important but still relatively new approach.
Applying Deep Belief Networks to the Game of Go a Capstone Experience Manuscript Presented By

Title: Applying Deep Belief Networks in the Game of Go Author: Peter Krafft, Mathematics and Statistics CE Type: Independent Capstone Thesis Approved By: Andrew Barto, Computer Science Dept Approved By: George Konidaris, Computer Science Dept The game of Go poses an incredible challenge to the field of artificial intelligence. Whereas many games are now dominated by computers, most computer Go agents have met only limited success in competition with world-class human players. There is a large and growing body of research in the field of computer Go, but the path forward is still unclear. One avenue that researchers have not explored extensively is exploiting the hierarchical structure that is clearly present in Go. We hope to exploit this structure by using a deep architecture to find transformations that will capture hierarchical interactions between pieces and yield illuminating representations of board positions. Recent breakthroughs in how to train deep architectures have made finding distributed, hierarchical representations tractable. We use these techniques to train one particular type of deep architecture, a deep belief network, to learn the distribution of Go boards that occur in expert gameplay. We also explore how different numbers of hidden nodes and different numbers of layers affect the performance of the model. The deep belief network is constructed with layers of hidden variables that represent features of the data. The ultimate goal of this research is to use the hierarchical features we extract from expert games to train a reinforcement learning agent to play Go. Using these extracted features is more principled than choosing arbitrary features and less time intensive than hand-picking features. Though we do not complete the final step in this research here, we use the similar task of classifying the winner in a final board state as a proxy.
Effective Schools for the Urban Poor

It seems only fair that the reader know what biases, if any, inform the summary remarks I plan to make. Equity will be the focus of my discussion. By equity I mean a simple sense of fairness in the dis tribution of the primary goods and services that characterize our social order. At issue is the efficacy of a minimum level of goods and services to which we are all entitled. Some of us, rightly, have more goods and services than others, and my sense of equity is not disturbed by that fact. Others of us have almost no goods and access to only the most wretched serv ices, and that deeply offends my simple sense of fair ness and violates the standards of equity by which I judge our social order. I measure our progress as a social order by our willingness to advance the equity interests of the least among us. Thus, increased wealth or education for the top of our social order is quite beside the point of my basis for assessing our progress toward greater equity. Progress requires public policy that begins by making the poor less poor and ends by making them not poor at all. This discussion of edu cation will apply just such a standard to public school ing. Equitable public schooling begins by teaching poor children what their parents want them to know and ends by teaching poor children at least as well as it teaches middle-class children. Inequity in American education derives first and foremost from our failure to educate the children of the poor. Education in this context refers to early acquisition of those basic school skills that assure pupils successful access to the next level of schooling. If that seems too modest a standard, note that as of now the schools that teach the children of the poor are dismal failures even by such a modest standard. Thus, to raise a generation of children whose schools meet such a standard would be an advance in equity of the first order. I offer this standard at the outset to note that its attainment is far more a matter of politics than of social science. Social science refers to those formal experiments and inquiries carried out by
Siderocalin/Lcn2/NGAL/24p3 Does Not Drive Apoptosis Through Gentisic Acid Mediated Iron Withdrawal in Hematopoietic Cell Lines

Siderocalin (also lipocalin 2, NGAL or 24p3) binds iron as complexes with specific siderophores, which are low molecular weight, ferric ion-specific chelators. In innate immunity, siderocalin slows the growth of infecting bacteria by sequestering bacterial ferric siderophores. Siderocalin also binds simple catechols, which can serve as siderophores in the damaged urinary tract. Siderocalin has also been proposed to alter cellular iron trafficking, for instance, driving apoptosis through iron efflux via BOCT. An endogenous siderophore composed of gentisic acid (2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid) substituents was proposed to mediate cellular efflux. However, binding studies reported herein contradict the proposal that gentisic acid forms high-affinity ternary complexes with siderocalin and iron, or that gentisic acid can serve as an endogenous siderophore at neutral pH. We also demonstrate that siderocalin does not induce cellular iron efflux or stimulate apoptosis, questioning the role siderocalin plays in modulating iron metabolism.
Boosted multi-class object detection with parallel hardware implementation for real-time applications

Real-time multi-class object detection becomes popular for various applications such as vehicle vision systems, computer vision and image processing. Boosted cascades achieve fast and reliable object detection for one object class, but require parallel usage of multiple cascades for multi-class detection. The multi-class capable cascade splits the root-cascade into sub-cascades iteratively until each sub-cascade contains one class. That requires a huge number of classifiers in the generated hierarchy of interlinked cascades. In this paper, we propose a boosted multi-class object cascade that only splits one class object from the upper-level-cascade when building the sub-cascades. Since only once class object is split so we can reduce the number of classifiers in each stage. From the simulation results, the boosted multi-class object detection can reduce 46% weak classifiers compared to the multi-class capable cascade for the MIT CBCL database. The proposed method achieves high detection rate(95.54%) and low false positive rate(1.94%). We implement our proposed algorithm with a parallel architecture to accelerate the detection operation using TSMC 90nm CMOS technology. The implementation results show that the design achieves an operation frequency of 100MHz of processing images of 30 fps with size 160 × 120.
Partner Attachment and the Parental Alliance

Partner Attachment and the Parental Alliance Ashley Brooke Bell School Family Life, BYU Master of Science Previous research has demonstrated that cooperation and support between parents, called the parental alliance, is an important predictor of parent and child well-being. Consequently, it is important to understand what factors promote the formation of a strong parental alliance. Because of research on the impact of attachment security on individuals' abilities to depend and rely on others and to appropriately manage conflict, partner attachment is a potential predictor of the parental alliance, with insecure attachment negatively weakening the parental alliance. This study analyzed data from 321 couples to examine the relationship between partner attachment and the parental alliance. Using the Actor Partner Interdependence Model, results indicated that attachment was significantly associated with parental alliance scores for both husbands and wives; specifically, higher anxious attachment for wives and for husbands significantly predicted decreased parental cooperation and increased triangulation and conflict. Likewise, avoidant attachment for wives and for husbands was significantly predictive of decreased cooperation and increased triangulation and conflict. These findings point to the utility of marital therapy focusing on increasing attachment as a way to strengthen parental attachment.
Enabling Reasoning on the Web: Introducing a Test-Bed Simulation Framework

The transformation of a document-based medical guideline into a computer-based decision support is a time-consuming and error-prone activity. One way to alleviate this burden is by automating as much as possible the knowledge intensive tasks within the life cycle of medical guidelines. This paper presents a test-bed simulation framework that aims to take advantages of both CommonKADS methodology and semantic Web technologies (OWL, SWRL, and OWL-S) to support automatic reasoning of knowledge-intensive tasks within guidelines. Based on the experiments conducted so far, the major benefit of the test-bed simulation is to enable experiments (simulations of clinical situations) that allow overcoming the main barriers to successfully express medical guidelines in an executable form compatible with electronic healthcare records.
Theranostic Nanoparticles Carrying Doxorubicin Attenuate Targeting Ligand Specific Antibody Responses Following Systemic Delivery

Understanding the effects of immune responses on targeted delivery of nanoparticles is important for clinical translations of new cancer imaging and therapeutic nanoparticles. In this study, we found that repeated administrations of magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) conjugated with mouse or human derived targeting ligands induced high levels of ligand specific antibody responses in normal and tumor bearing mice while injections of unconjugated mouse ligands were weakly immunogenic and induced a very low level of antibody response in mice. Mice that received intravenous injections of targeted and polyethylene glycol (PEG)-coated IONPs further increased the ligand specific antibody production due to differential uptake of PEG-coated nanoparticles by macrophages and dendritic cells. However, the production of ligand specific antibodies was markedly inhibited following systemic delivery of theranostic nanoparticles carrying a chemotherapy drug, doxorubicin. Targeted imaging and histological analysis revealed that lack of the ligand specific antibodies led to an increase in intratumoral delivery of targeted nanoparticles. Results of this study support the potential of further development of targeted theranostic nanoparticles for the treatment of human cancers.
Review on uremic toxins: classification, concentration, and interindividual variability.

BACKGROUND The choice of the correct concentration of potential uremic toxins for in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo experiments remains a major area of concern; errors at this level might result in incorrect decisions regarding therpeutic correction of uremia and related clinical complications. METHODS An encyclopedic list of uremic retention solutes was composed, containing their mean normal concentration (CN), their highest mean/median uremic concentration (CU), their highest concentration ever reported in uremia (CMAX), and their molecular weight. A literature search of 857 publications on uremic toxicity resulted in the selection of data reported in 55 publications on 90 compounds, published between 1968 and 2002. RESULTS For all compounds, CU and/or CMAX exceeded CN. Molecular weight was lower than 500 D for 68 compounds; of the remaining 22 middle molecules, 12 exceeded 12,000 D. CU ranged from 32.0 ng/L (methionine-enkephalin) up to 2.3 g/L (urea). CU in the ng/L range was found especially for the middle molecules (10/22; 45.5%), compared with 2/68 (2.9%) for a molecular weight <500 D (P < 0.002). Twenty-five solutes (27.8%) were protein bound. Most of them had a molecular weight <500 D except for leptin and retinol-binding protein. The ratio CU/CN, an index of the concentration range over which toxicity is exerted, exceeded 15 in the case of 20 compounds. The highest values were registered for several guanidines, protein-bound compounds, and middle molecules, to a large extent compounds with known toxicity. A ratio of CMAX/CU <4, pointing to a Gaussian distribution, was found for the majority of the compounds (74/90; 82%). For some compounds, however, this ratio largely exceeded 4 [e.g., for leptin (6.81) or indole-3-acetic acid (10.37)], pointing to other influencing factors than renal function, such as gender, genetic predisposition, proteolytic breakdown, posttranslation modification, general condition, or nutritional status. CONCLUSION Concentrations of retention solutes in uremia vary over a broad range, from nanograms per liter to grams per liter. Low concentrations are found especially for the middle molecules. A substantial number of molecules are protein bound and/or middle molecules, and many of these exert toxicity and are characterized by a high range of toxic over normal concentration (CU/CN ratio). Hence, uremic retention is a complex problem that concerns many more solutes than the current markers of urea and creatinine alone. This list provides a basis for systematic analytic approaches to map the relative importance of the enlisted families of toxins.
The Role of Psychological and Developmental Science in Efforts to Improve Teacher Quality

Background Theory, methods, and knowledge gained from years of study in psychological science and human development apply to the understanding and improvement of teacher quality and, ultimately, student achievement and social and emotional outcomes. With these applications, educational research has stronger potential to make more effective and systematic contributions to the improvement of teaching in American schools. This potential can be realized by linking the scientific study of psychology and teachers’ development (social, relational, psychological, and cognitive) to teachers’ classroom behaviors (the mechanisms and processes underlying quality) and student achievement of educational and social and emotional objectives (the outputs of quality). New funds of knowledge in developmental and psychological science can serve as a basis for future research on inputs into teacher quality. Purpose The present article advances an interdisciplinary perspective on the factors influencing teacher quality, specifically defined as teachers’ practices and their interactions with students that can be shown to relate to student achievement. The article (1) offers a view of teacher quality focused on teacher–child interactions that serve as explanatory mechanisms in predicting children's achievement; (2) introduces key principles of human adult development that offer insights to link developmental research on teachers to teacher quality and, ultimately, to student achievement and social and emotional outcomes; and (3) discusses two bodies of research from psychological science that illustrate the ways in which psychological principles and an overarching view of teachers as developing people may contribute to current debates about teacher quality. Research Design The article synthesizes research from the fields of education and psychology. Conclusions The article closes with recommendations for basic, developmentally oriented research on teacher quality and student achievement.
Duration of rheumatoid arthritis influences the degree of functional improvement in clinical trials

Background: Functional capacity is an important outcome in rheumatoid arthritis and is generally measured using the Health Assessment Questionnaire disability index (HAQ). Functional limitation incorporates both activity and damage. Because irreversible damage increases over time, the HAQ may be less likely to show improvement in late than in early rheumatoid arthritis. Objective: To determine the relation between sensitivity to change of the HAQ and duration of rheumatoid arthritis in reports of clinical trials. Methods: Data were pooled from clinical trials that measured responses of HAQ scores at three or six months. The effect size of the HAQ was calculated and linear regression used to predict the effect size by duration of rheumatoid arthritis at group level. Treatment effect was adjusted for by including the effect sizes of pain scores and of tender joint counts as additional independent variables in separate models. Subgroup analysis employed contemporary regimens (methotrexate, leflunomide, combination therapies, and TNF inhibitors) only. Results: 36 studies with 64 active treatment arms and 7628 patients (disease duration 2.5 months to 12.2 years) were included. The effect sizes of the HAQ decreased by 0.02 for each additional year of mean disease duration using all trials, and by 0.04/year in the subgroup analysis (p⩽0.01 for both analyses, except for pain adjusted models at three months). Conclusions: In individual trials, less improvement in the HAQ might be expected in late than in early rheumatoid arthritis. Comparison of changes in HAQ among rheumatoid arthritis trials should take into consideration the disease stage of the treated groups.
Linear Types for Aliased Resources (Extended Version)

Type systems that track aliasing can verify state-dependent program properties. For example, such systems can verify that a program does not access a resource after deallocating the resource. The simplest way to track aliasing is to use linear types, which on the surface appear to ban the aliasing of linear resources entirely. Since banning aliasing is considered too draconian for many practical programs, researchers have proposed type systems that allow limited forms of aliasing, without losing total control over state-dependent properties. This paper describes how to encode one such system, the capability calculus, using a type system based on plain linear types with no special support for aliasing. Given well-typed capability calculus source programs, the encodings produce well-typed target programs based on linear types. These encodings demonstrate that, contrary to common expectations, linear type systems can express aliasing of linear resources.
Preemptive Resource Management for Dynamically Arriving Tasks in an Oversubscribed Heterogeneous Computing System

We design resource management heuristics that assign serial tasks to the nodes of a heterogeneous high performance computing (HPC) system. The value of completing these tasks is modeled using monotonically decreasing utility functions that represent the time-varying importance of the task. The value of completing a task is equal to its utility function at the time of its completion. The overall performance of this system is measured using the total utility earned by all tasks during some interval of time. To maximize the performance of such a system where the preemption of tasks is possible, we have designed, analyzed, and compared a set of resource allocation heuristic techniques. We combine two utility-aware heuristics with three different preemption techniques to create six preemption-capable heuristics. We also consider the two utility-aware heuristics without preemption. We use simulation studies to evaluate this set of eight heuristics and compare them with an FCFS heuristic, which is often used in real systems, and random assignments. In general, our set of eight heuristics is able to significantly outperform the comparison heuristics, and the preemption-capable heuristics are able to significantly increase the utility earned compared to the heuristics that do not use preemption. We analyze the performance tradeoffs among the different preemption-capable heuristics under a variety of oversubscribed workload environments.
Application of a Mixture Experimental Design in the Optimization of a Self‐Emulsifying Formulation with a High Drug Load

Response surface methodology (RSM) was applied to optimize the self‐emulsifying drug delivery system (SEDDS) containing 25% (w/w) Drug A, a model drug with a high lipophilicity and low water solubility. The key objective of this study was to identify an optimal SEDDS formulation that: 1) possesses a minimum concentration of the surfactant and a maximum concentration of lipid and 2) generates a fine emulsion and eliminates large size droplets (≥ 1 µm) upon dilution with an aqueous medium. Three ingredient variables [PEG 400, Cremophor EL, and a mixture of glycerol dioleate (GDO), and glycerol monooleate (GMO)] were included in the experimental design, while keeping the other ingredients at a fixed level (25% Drug A, 6% ethanol, 3% propylene glycol, 4% water, and 2% tromethamine) in the SEDDS formulation. Dispersion performance of these formulations upon dilution with a simulated gastrointestinal fluid was measured, and the population of the large droplets was used as the primary response for statistical modeling. The results of this mixture study revealed significant interactions among the three ingredients, and their individual levels in the formulation collectively dictated the dispersion performance. The fitted response surface model predicted an optimal region of the SEDDS formulation compositions that generate fine emulsions and essentially eliminates large droplets upon dilution. The predicted optimal 25% Drug A–SEDDS formulations with the levels of Cremophor EL ranging from 40–44%, GDO/GMO ranging from 10–13%, and PEG 400 ranging from 2.7–9.0% were selected and prepared. The dispersion experiment results confirmed the prediction of this model and identified potential optimal formulations for further development. This work demonstrates that RSM is an efficient approach for optimization of the SEDDS formulation.