Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Spalt family transcription factor Sall3 regulates the development of cone photoreceptors and retinal horizontal interneurons

The mammalian retina is a tractable model system for analyzing transcriptional networks that guide neural development. Spalt family zinc-finger transcription factors play a crucial role in photoreceptor specification in Drosophila, but their role in mammalian retinal development has not been investigated. In this study, we show that that the spalt homolog Sall3 is prominently expressed in developing cone photoreceptors and horizontal interneurons of the mouse retina and in a subset of cone bipolar cells. We find that Sall3 is both necessary and sufficient to activate the expression of multiple cone-specific genes, and that Sall3 protein is selectively bound to the promoter regions of these genes. Notably, Sall3 shows more prominent expression in short wavelength-sensitive cones than in medium wavelength-sensitive cones, and that Sall3 selectively activates expression of the short but not the medium wavelength-sensitive cone opsin gene. We further observe that Sall3 regulates the differentiation of horizontal interneurons, which form direct synaptic contacts with cone photoreceptors. Loss of function of Sall3 eliminates expression of the horizontal cell-specific transcription factor Lhx1, resulting in a radial displacement of horizontal cells that partially phenocopies the loss of function of Lhx1. These findings not only demonstrate that Spalt family transcription factors play a conserved role in regulating photoreceptor development in insects and mammals, but also identify Sall3 as a factor that regulates terminal differentiation of both cone photoreceptors and their postsynaptic partners.
Hemoglobin A1c for Diagnosis of Postpartum Abnormal Glucose Tolerance among Women with Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Diagnostic Meta-Analysis

Objective To evaluate the accuracy of glycosylated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) for the diagnosis of postpartum abnormal glucose tolerance among women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Methods After a systematic review of related studies, the sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), and other measures about the accuracy of HbA1c in the diagnosis of postpartum abnormal glucose tolerance were pooled using random-effects models. The summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve was used to summarize the overall test performance. Results Six studies met our inclusion criteria. The pooled results on SEN, SPE, PLR, NLR, and DOR were 0.36 (95% CI 0.23–0.52), 0.85 (95% CI 0.73–0.92), 2.4 (95% CI 1.6–3.6), 0.75 (95% CI 0.63–0.88) and 3 (95% CI 2–5). The area under the summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve was 0.67 with a Q value of 0.63. Conclusions Measurement of HbA1c alone is not a sensitive test to detect abnormal glucose tolerance in women with prior GDM.
Isolation of a methyl parathion-degrading Pseudomonas sp. that possesses DNA homologous to the opd gene from a Flavobacterium sp

Two mixed bacterial cultures isolated by soil enrichment were capable of utilizing methyl parathion (O,O-dimethyl O-p-nitrophenylphosphorothioate) and parathion (O,O-diethyl O-p-nitrophenylphosphorothioate) as a sole source of carbon. Four isolates from these mixed cultures lost their ability to utilize the pesticides independently in transfers subsequent to the initial isolation. One member of the mixed cultures, a Pseudomonas sp. , however, hydrolyzed the pesticides to p-nitrophenol but required glucose or another carbon source for growth. The crude cell extracts prepared from this bacterium showed an optimum pH range from 7.5 to 9.5 for the enzymatic hydrolysis. Maximum enzymatic activity occurred between 35 and 40 degrees C. The enzyme activity was not inhibited by heavy metals, EDTA, or NaN3. Another isolate from the mixed cultures, a Flavobacterium sp. , used p-nitrophenol for growth and degraded it to nitrite. Nitrite was assimilated into the cells under conditions during which the nitrogen source was excluded from the minimal growth medium. The hybridization data showed that the DNAs from a Pseudomonas sp. and from the mixed culture had homology with the opd (organophosphate degradation) gene from a previously reported parathion-hydrolyzing bacterium, Flavobacterium sp. The use of the opd gene as a probe may accelerate progress toward understanding the complex interactions of soil microorganisms with parathions.
A Novel Multipath-Transmission Supported Software Defined Wireless Network Architecture

The inflexible management and operation of today’s wireless access networks cannot meet the increasingly growing specific requirements, such as high mobility and throughput, service differentiation, and high-level programmability. In this paper, we put forward a novel multipath-transmission supported software-defined wireless network architecture (MP-SDWN), with the aim of achieving seamless handover, throughput enhancement, and flow-level wireless transmission control as well as programmable interfaces. In particular, this research addresses the following issues: 1) for high mobility and throughput, multi-connection virtual access point is proposed to enable multiple transmission paths simultaneously over a set of access points for users and 2) wireless flow transmission rules and programmable interfaces are implemented into mac80211 subsystem to enable service differentiation and flow-level wireless transmission control. Moreover, the efficiency and flexibility of MP-SDWN are demonstrated in the performance evaluations conducted on a 802.11 based-testbed, and the experimental results show that compared to regular WiFi, our proposed MP-SDWN architecture achieves seamless handover and multifold throughput improvement, and supports flow-level wireless transmission control for different applications.
A Theory of Recursive Orthogonal Subspace Projection for Hyperspectral Imaging

Orthogonal subspace projection (OSP) has found many applications in hyperspectral data exploitation. Its effectiveness and usefulness result from implementation of two stage processes, i.e., annihilation of undesired signal sources by an OSP via inverting a matrix in the first stage followed by a matched filter to extract the desired signal source in the second stage. This paper presents a theory of recursive OSP (ROSP) for hyperspectral imaging, which performs OSP recursively without inverting undesired signature matrices. This ROSP opens up many new dimensions in extending OSP. First of all, ROSP allows OSP to implement varying signatures via a recursive equation without reinverting undesired signature matrices. Second, ROSP can be further used to derive an unsupervised ROSP (UROSP) OSP, which allows OSP to find a growing number of unknown signal sources recursively while simultaneously determining a desired number of signal sources. As a result, the commonly used automatic target generation process (ATGP) can be extended to a recursive ATGP, which can be considered as a special case of UROSP. Third, for practical applications, UROSP can be also extended in two differ ent fashions to causal process and progressive process, which give rise to causal UROSP and progressive UROSP, respectively, both of which can be easily realized in hardware implementation. Finally, UROSP provides a feasible stopping rule via a recently developed UROSP-specified virtual dimensionality.
Inherent characteristics of traceability artifacts less is more

This paper describes ongoing work to characterize the inherent ease or “traceability” with which a textual artifact can be traced using an automated technique. Software traceability approaches use varied measures to build models that automatically recover links between pairs of natural language documents. Thus far, most of the approaches use a single-step model, such as logistic regression, to identify new trace links. However, such approaches require a large enough training set of both true and false trace links. Yet, the former are by far in the minority, which reduces the performance of such models. Therefore, this paper formulates the problem of identifying trace links as the problem of finding, for a given logistic regression model, the subsets of links in the training set giving the best accuracy (in terms of G-metric) on a test set. Using hill climbing with random restart for subset selection, we found that, for the ChangeStyle dataset, we can classify links with a precision of up to 40% and a recall of up to 66% using a training set as small as one true candidate link (out of 33) and 41 false links. To get better performance and learn the best possible logistic regression classifier, we must “discard” links in the trace dataset that increase noise to avoid learning with links that are not representative. This preliminary work is promising because it shows that few correct examples may perform better than several poor ones. It also shows which inherent characteristics of the artifacts make them good candidates to learn efficient traceability models automatically, i.e., it reveals their traceability.
Language maintenance in trilingual families – a focus on grandparents

Abstract Trilingual families need language support if they wish to maintain three languages. Most studies on trilingualism have paid little attention to the influence of grandparents as an affective factor. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the impact of the extended family, particularly grandparents, on trilingual families' language maintenance. The content of this study has been informed by an analysis of 70 interviews of trilingual families with children residing in England and Germany. Grounded Theory (GT) was used for the data analysis. It was found that most parents whose native language (NL) repertoire included the community language (CL) ‘dropped’ at least one of their home languages (HLs). This was partly related to the grandparents, who often lived in the same community. They tended to speak the highly regarded CL with their young grandchildren, rather than a minority language. In contrast, parents who did not speak the CL natively often used their HLs with their children in order to provide a means of communication between the children and their grandparents. Usually, they resided in a different country and did not speak the language of the community where their grandchildren lived.
Experimental assessment of random testing for object-oriented software

Progress in testing requires that we evaluate the effectiveness of testing strategies on the basis of hard experimental evidence, not just intuition or a priori arguments. Random testing, the use of randomly generated test data, is an example of a strategy that the literature often deprecates because of such preconceptions. This view is worth revisiting since random testing otherwise offers several attractive properties: simplicity of implementation, speed of execution, absence of human bias. We performed an intensive experimental analysis of the efficiency of random testing on an existing industrial-grade code base. The use of a large-scale cluster of computers, for a total of 1500 hours of CPU time, allowed a fine-grain analysis of the individual effect of the various parameters involved in the random testing strategy, such as the choice of seed for a random number generator. The results provide insights into the effectiveness of random testing and a number of lessons for testing researchers and practitioners.
The Generic book

This work consists of an introduction and 11 articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of various issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena.
Aid agency influence in national education policy-making: a case from Nepal's ‘Education for All’ movement

This article explores the nexus between foreign aid and Nepal's primary education in order to understand how aid agencies affect national educational development. It argues that after 1990, when global education targets provided the basic framework for all donor agency funding to primary education and the subsequent use of a sector-wide approach to achieve them, ‘national’ education policy-making has become relatively unimportant if not meaningless because the documents produced within the parameters of global education targets have become the de facto policies. Moreover, the traditional policy-making function of the Ministry of Education (MOE) has ‘transcended’ to a higher donor – MOE level, relegating the role of the Ministry to ‘managing’ aid and aid agencies. This increased donor–ministry nexus has narrowed the avenues for broader participation by other relevant national stakeholders. Ironically, all this is happening amidst calls for decentralisation of educational planning.
Fast trajectory matching using small binary images

This paper proposes a new trajectory matching method using logic operations on binary images. By using small binary images we are able to effectively utilize the large word size offered in modern CPU architectures, resulting in a very efficient evaluation of similarities between trajectories. The efficiency is caused by the fact that all bits in the same word are processed in parallel. Representing trajectories as small binary images has other advantages, such as a low space requirement and good noise resistance. The proposed method is evaluated on a publicly available dataset, and is compared to the more sophisticated Longest Common Subsequence (LCSS) method. In addition, synthetic experiments show the good efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method, enabling real time trajectory retrieval on databases with millions of trajectories.
Influence of HyCoSy on spontaneous pregnancy: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND The aim of the study was to test whether the use of sonography contrast could enhance the chance of spontaneous clinical pregnancy in women undergoing subfertility investigation. METHODS Couples with at least 1 year of infertility who were scheduled for a consultation including a hysterosalpingo contrast sonography (HyCoSy) were invited to participate in the study. We compared flushing with water-soluble contrast medium (WSCM) versus no flushing. Randomization sequence was computer generated, stratified for age and group allocation was concealed. Primary outcome was clinical pregnancy defined as a sonographically visible fetal sac, detected within 6 months from randomization. Secondary outcomes were spontaneous miscarriage and birth. Exclusion criteria were female age >or=40 years, severe male infertility, previously known severe tubal infertility and suspected anovulation. RESULTS The mean age of the study population (n = 334) was 31.9 years. Duration of infertility was 2.1 years. The clinical pregnancy rate was 29.2% in the HyCoSy group and 26.5% in the non-flushing group, the difference being 2.7% (95% confidence interval -6.9 to 12.3%, P = 0.63). CONCLUSION The clinical impression of an enhanced pregnancy rate after performing HyCoSy could not be confirmed. Tubal investigation with sonography using water-soluble contrast has a function as a diagnostic procedure but not in terms of increasing pregnancy rates in subfertile patients. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER ISRCTN20715945.
Trends in Genome Compression

Technological advancements in high-throughput sequencing have lead to a tremendous increase in the amount of genomic data produced. With the cost being down to 2,000 USD for a single human genome, sequencing dozens of individuals is a task that is feasible even for smaller project or organizations already today. However, generating the sequence is only one issue; another one is storing, managing, and analyzing it. These tasks become more and more challenging due to the sheer size of the data sets and are increasingly considered to be the most severe bottlenecks in larger genome projects. One possible countermeasure is to compress the data; compression reduces costs in terms of requiring less hard disk storage and in terms of requiring less bandwidth if data is shipped to large compute clusters for parallel analysis. Accordingly, sequence compression has recently attracted much interest in the scientific community. In this paper, we explain the different basic techniques for sequence compression, point to distinctions between different compression tasks (e.g., genome versus read compression), and present a comparison of current approaches and tools. To further stimulate progress in genome compression research, we also identify key challenges for future systems.
Decoration of the Truncated Tetrahedron - An Archimedean Polyhedron - To Produce a New Class of Convex Equilateral Polyhedra with Tetrahedral Symmetry

The Goldberg construction of symmetric cages involves pasting a patch cut out of a regular tiling onto the faces of a Platonic host polyhedron, resulting in a cage with the same symmetry as the host. For example, cutting equilateral triangular patches from a 6.6.6 tiling of hexagons and pasting them onto the full triangular faces of an icosahedron produces icosahedral fullerene cages. Here we show that pasting cutouts from a 6.6.6 tiling onto the full hexagonal and triangular faces of an Archimedean host polyhedron, the truncated tetrahedron, produces two series of tetrahedral (Td) fullerene cages. Cages in the first series have 28n2 vertices (n ≥ 1). Cages in the second (leapfrog) series have 3 × 28n2. We can transform all of the cages of the first series and the smallest cage of the second series into geometrically convex equilateral polyhedra. With tetrahedral (Td) symmetry, these new polyhedra constitute a new class of “convex equilateral polyhedra with polyhedral symmetry”. We also show that none of the other Archimedean polyhedra, six with octahedral symmetry and six with icosahedral, can host full-face cutouts from regular tilings to produce cages with the host’s polyhedral symmetry.
Lectures on Twistors 1 Itzhak Bars

In these lectures I will discuss the following topics • Twistors in 4 flat dimensions. – Massless particles, constrained phase space (x µ , p µ) versus twistors. – Physical states in twistor space. • Introduction to 2T-physics and derivation of 1T-physics holographs and twistors. – Global symmetry, quantization and the SO(d,2) singleton. – Twistors for particle dynamics in d dimensions, particles with mass, rela-tivistic, non-relativistic, in curved spaces, with interactions. • Supertwistors and some field theory spectra in d=4,6. – Self-dual tensor supermultiplet and conformal theory in d=6. • Twistor superstrings – d + 2 view of twistor superstring in d = 4. – Worldsheet anomalies and quantization of twistor superstring.
Principles of the impedance technique

A simplified treatment of the electrical impedance of biological tissues is presented, examining the sources of impedance changes and the requirements for recording these changes. The author covers small electrodes, simple models, resistivity of blood, the reactive component in bioimpedance, the use of bioadmittance, the use of the finite-element technique and impedance matching. <<ETX>>
Reported schooling experiences of adolescent Jews attending non-Jewish secondary schools in England

This article explores the reported schooling experiences of 28 adolescents attending non-Jewish English secondary schools who self-identified as Jews. Their reported school peer-interactions suggest Jews attending non-Jewish schools may face several challenges from members of non-Jewish peer groups, including anti-Semitism. Their reported experiences of classroom worlds, on the other hand, suggest that curricula and pedagogical methods could be perceived to exacerbate these challenges. These findings are discussed in relation to two on-going educational debates: the provision of state-funded faith schools, and the debate about the nature and purpose of the curriculum subject Religious Education in non-faith schools.
Fisher Effect, Structural Breaks and Outliers Detection in ECOWAS Countries

This paper empirically investigates the Fisher effect in selected ECOWAS countries by employing annual data from 1961 to 2011. The inflation and interest rates for Burkina Faso, Cȏte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo are used in the study. Firstly, we investigate the order of integration of the 16 time series using the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF), Phillips-Perron (PP) and the Kwiatkowski-Phillips-Schmidt-Shin (KPSS) unit root tests as a confirmatory test. Our empirical results indicate that inference based on the ADF and the Phillips-Perron test displays a considerable degree of robustness to the method of lag selection and the correction for heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation adopted, however, the robustness of the KPSS test to the method of computation of the long-run variance seems to be weak. On allowing for structural breaks, we found more evidence against the unit root hypothesis. Secondly, the Fisher equation is cast in the state space framework and the Kalman filter is applied to estimate the slope parameter. Our state space model results indicate that the strength of the Fisher effect does vary over time. For the ECOWAS countries; in some periods there appears to be a full Fisher effect, while in other periods, the relationship seems to be partial and non-existing at some other periods. The Harvey-Koopman procedure is also employed to detect the time of structural breaks and outliers in the state space model. We recommend that monetary authorities in the ECOWAS countries should aimed at making effective monetary policies and demonstrate strong commitments to monetary targets in order to strengthen the Fisher relation.
A Software Function Testing Method Based on Data Flow Graph

Main task of function testing is to verify software function. Completion of graphic user interface (GUI) software function includes complicated human-machine interactions. Current function testing methods usually consider interface of software and environment, while ignoring software requirement and function completion process. With these testing methods, testing process may be disordered. In this paper, a function testing method based on data flow graph is proposed. Based on software requirement and interface, this method organizes function testing process with transaction processing and data flow. Comparing to the existing function testing methods, this testing method is more effective for GUI software.
Providing Flexible File-Level Data Filtering for Big Data Analytics

The enormous amount of big data datasets impose the needs for effective data filtering technique to accelerate the analytics process. We propose a Versatile Searchable File System, VSFS, which provides a transparent, flexible and near real-time file-level data filtering service by searching files directly through the file system. Therefore, big data analytics applications can transparently utilize this filtering service without application modifications. A versatile index scheme is designed to adapt to the exploratory and ad-hoc nature of the big data analytics activities. Moreover, VSFS uses a RAM-based distributed architecture to perform file indexing. The evaluations driven by three real-world analytics applications demonstrate VSFS’ high scalability and data-filtering capability.