Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acute Glucocorticoid Pretreatment Suppresses Stress‐Induced Hypothalamic‐Pituitary‐Adrenal Axis Hormone Secretion and Expression of Corticotropin‐Releasing Hormone hnRNA but Does Not Affect c‐fos mRNA or Fos Protein Expression in the Paraventricular Nucleus of the Hypothalamus

Corticosterone regulates both basal and stress‐induced hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) axis activity in a negative‐feedback fashion. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms of this negative feedback have yet to be explicitly characterized. By comparing stress‐induced c‐fos and corticotropin‐releasing hormone (CRH) expression in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN), we may be able to determine whether acute glucocorticoid treatment affects the net neural excitatory input to the PVN (represented primarily by c‐fos mRNA expression) or directly affects the ability of cells in the PVN to respond to that input (represented primarily by CRH hnRNA expression). In the following studies, we observed the effect of acute glucocorticoid (RU28362) treatment on subsequent HPA axis reactivity by measuring stress‐induced plasma hormone concentration [corticosterone and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)] and gene expression (c‐fos and CRH) in the PVN. First, we examined the dose–response relationship between systemically administered RU28362 (1–150 µg/kg, i.p) and suppression of the stress‐induced corticosterone response. We then confirmed central nervous system access of the maximally suppressive dose of RU28362 (150 µg/kg) by an ex vivo radioligand binding assay. RU28362 selectively occupied the majority of glucocorticoid receptors in the hippocampus and hypothalamus while having no effect on mineralocorticoid receptors. In separate studies, RU28362 (150 µg/kg) and corticosterone (5 mg/kg) were injected i.p. 1 h before restraint stress. Compared to vehicle‐treated controls, rats treated with RU28362 and corticosterone had substantially blunted stress‐induced corticosterone and ACTH production, respectively. Furthermore, treatment with RU28362 significantly blunted stress‐induced CRH hnRNA expression in the PVN. By contrast, neither RU28362 nor corticosterone treatment had an effect on stress‐induced neuronal activation as measured by c‐fos mRNA and its protein product in the PVN. This dissociation between c‐fos and CRH gene expression suggests that glucocorticoid suppression of HPA activity within this time‐frame is not a result of decreased excitatory neural input to the PVN, but instead depends on some direct effect of RU28362 on cells intrinsic to the HPA axis.
Self-tuning visual tracking based on multiple motion models

To deal with irregular movements in visual tracking, such as abrupt motion in velocity and direction, we propose a self-tuning tracking method based on multiple motion models (SBMM). Multiple motion models are qualitatively defined as high-speed, middle-speed and low-speed motion models and particle filter is utilized to realize the algorithm. In our algorithm, particles are divided into multiple groups to employ different motion models mentioned above. Furthermore, according to the circumstances of the motion in previous frames, we dynamically adjust the number of particles in each group during the entire tracking process to make the tracker more robust. Our method achieves excellent performance in experimental sequences where objects move unstably, abruptly and even in partial occlusion.
Civil Labour, Leisure and Post Work Society

AbstractCivil labour is devoted to the non-remunerative renewal and enlargement of social capital. This paper explores its role in relation to leisure in the context of the growing debate on citizenship rights. The links between social capital and reciprocity are elucidated and related to leisure motive and practice. Leisure is demonstrated to be the a priori of paid employment. Beck’s thesis of the “Brazilianization of the West” is critically discussed to show how the rise of post-work society curtails the responsibility to engage in paid employment and therefore to enjoy leisure. The concept of civil labour is explored as a civic requirement of post work society through Giddens’s work on life politics. The potential for the concept of civil labour to replace paid employment as the new foundation of leisure is critically discussed.
MLLR-like speaker adaptation based on linearization of VTLN with MFCC features

In this paper, an MLLR-like adaptation approach is proposed whereby the transformation of the means is performed deterministically based on linearization of VTLN. Biases and adaptation of the variances are estimated statistically by the EM algorithm. In the discrete frequency domain, we show that under certain approximations, frequency warping with Mel-£lterbank-based MFCCs equals a linear transformation in the cepstral domain. Utilizing the deduced linear relationship, the transformation matrix is generated by formant-like peak alignment. Experimental results using children’s speech show improvements over traditional MLLR and VTLN. The improvements occur even with limited amounts of adaptation data.
Inactivation of the ciaH Gene in Streptococcus mutans Diminishes Mutacin Production and Competence Development, Alters Sucrose-Dependent Biofilm Formation, and Reduces Stress Tolerance

ABSTRACT Many clinical isolates of Streptococcus mutans produce peptide antibiotics called mutacins. Mutacin production may play an important role in the ecology of S. mutans in dental plaque. In this study, inactivation of a histidine kinase gene, ciaH, abolished mutacin production. Surprisingly, the same mutation also diminished competence development, stress tolerance, and sucrose-dependent biofilm formation.
Impact of radio frequency identification technology on manufacturing and logistics: challenges and issues

This paper explores a variety of issues surrounding Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. It includes an overview of research and development, technology and current and future applications. The impending supplier mandates for RFID compliance from mega-retailers such as Wal-Mart, and their implications for manufacturers are discussed. Special consideration is given to the consumer in this study, as ethical concerns abound, such as concerns over the invasion of privacy through RFID. Finally, this paper includes an analysis of the results of an empirical survey on the topic, given to a group of professionals in the manufacturing industry and academics in business disciplines.
ARDB—Antibiotic Resistance Genes Database

The treatment of infections is increasingly compromised by the ability of bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics through mutations or through the acquisition of resistance genes. Antibiotic resistance genes also have the potential to be used for bio-terror purposes through genetically modified organisms. In order to facilitate the identification and characterization of these genes, we have created a manually curated database—the Antibiotic Resistance Genes Database (ARDB)—unifying most of the publicly available information on antibiotic resistance. Each gene and resistance type is annotated with rich information, including resistance profile, mechanism of action, ontology, COG and CDD annotations, as well as external links to sequence and protein databases. Our database also supports sequence similarity searches and implements an initial version of a tool for characterizing common mutations that confer antibiotic resistance. The information we provide can be used as compendium of antibiotic resistance factors as well as to identify the resistance genes of newly sequenced genes, genomes, or metagenomes. Currently, ARDB contains resistance information for 13 293 genes, 377 types, 257 antibiotics, 632 genomes, 933 species and 124 genera. ARDB is available at http://ardb.cbcb. umd.edu/.
Humans exploit the biomechanics of bipedal gait during visually guided walking over complex terrain

How do humans achieve such remarkable energetic efficiency when walking over complex terrain such as a rocky trail? Recent research in biomechanics suggests that the efficiency of human walking over flat, obstacle-free terrain derives from the ability to exploit the physical dynamics of our bodies. In this study, we investigated whether this principle also applies to visually guided walking over complex terrain. We found that when humans can see the immediate foreground as little as two step lengths ahead, they are able to choose footholds that allow them to exploit their biomechanical structure as efficiently as they can with unlimited visual information. We conclude that when humans walk over complex terrain, they use visual information from two step lengths ahead to choose footholds that allow them to approximate the energetic efficiency of walking in flat, obstacle-free environments.
Knowledge in E-business Emarketplace: the next Generation

This paper proposes an agent-based architectural framework for cooperative distributed systems in eBusiness with a special attention to eMarketplace. This business-centric knowledge oriented architecture (BCKOA) describes the framework of an ontology driven eBusiness environment that deals with several business and design issues with special attention to supporting many-to-many relationship between the marketplace participants as well as the integration of marketplaces in an open environment. In this work we envision the eMarketplace as a seething milieu in which economically motivated software agents cooperatively/competitively interact, find and process information and disseminate it to humans and to other agents. This environment, based on coordinated, intelligent rational agent (CIR-Agent) model for market services, business services, and integration services as well as the user interface. To demonstrate and evaluate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the model as a development tool for eMarketplace, a prototype is being developed for eMarketplace with two Mutual Fund virtual business entities.
Transport Activity of Rice Sucrose Transporters OsSUT1 and OsSUT5

Expression in Xenopus oocytes and electrophysiology was used to test for transport activity of the five sucrose transporter (SUT) homologs from rice. Expression of OsSUT1 and OsSUT5 resulted in sucrose-dependent currents that were analyzed by two-electrode voltage clamping. We examined the transport kinetics, substrate specificity and pH dependence of sucrose transport and K0.5 for sucrose. OsSUT1 showed similar features to those of other type II SUTs from monocots examined previously, with a K0.5 value of 7.50 mM at pH 5.6. In contrast, OsSUT5 had a higher substrate affinity (K0.5 = 2.32 mM at pH 5.6), less substrate specificity and less pH dependence compared with all type II SUTs tested to date. Regulation of the rice SUTs, as well as ZmSUT1 from maize and HvSUT1 from barley, by reduced (GSH) and oxidized (GSSG) forms of glutathione was tested. GSSG and GSH were found to have no significant effect on the activity of sucrose transporters when expressed in Xenopus oocytes. In conclusion, differences in transport activity between OsSUT1 and OsSUT5 indicate that type II SUTs have a range of transport activities that are tuned to their function in the plant.
Show Me the Way to Go Home: An Empirical Investigation of Ride Sharing and Alcohol Related Motor Vehicle Homicide

In this work, we investigate how the entry of the driving service Uber influences the rate of alcohol related motor vehicle homicides. While significant debate has surrounded the entry of driving services like Uber and Lyft, limited rigorous empirical work has been devoted to uncovering the social benefits of such services (or the mechanism which drives these benefits). Using a difference in difference approach to exploit a natural experiment, the entry of Uber into markets in California between 2009 and 2013, findings suggest a significant drop in the rate of homicides during that time. Furthermore, results suggest that not all services offered by Uber have the same effect, insofar as the effect for the Uber Black car service is intermittent and manifests only in selective locations. These results underscore the coupling of increased availability with cost savings which are necessary to exploit the public welfare gains offered by the sharing economy. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed within. Language: en
Entendiendo la movilidad humana mediante tecnologías espaciales: el papel de las áreas naturales de tránsito en el Suroeste de la Península Ibérica durante la Prehistoria Reciente

Archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research has demonstrated how mountainous environments influence the socio-cultural dynamics of the communities that live in them and in their neighbouring areas. The development of these communities tends to occur at the margins, often far away from centres of political power. This marginality is also extended to movement in these regions, where mountain ranges regularly constitute mighty obstacles on account of their natural configuration which plays a central role in strategy, commerce and travelling. In the case of western Sierra Morena in Spain, its constitution shaped both the ways of transit through the mountains during Later Prehistory and the historical routes of communication that traverse Andalucia. Using a GIS methodology developed specifically to identify particular characteristics of the landscape relevant to human movement, such as passageways, crossing points, and natural areas of transit, we examine the role that natural accessibility had for the late prehistoric societies of this region. We conclude that the location of their habitats and symbolic places are strongly related to corridors, possibly due to an increasing importance of herding activities.
Multi-Queue Management and Scheduling for Improved QoS in Communication Networks

Quality of Service (QoS) and gigabit networking are the new dimensions that modern VLSI technology is bringing into communications, today. Highly-integrated building block components are the key in bringing this new technology to the users at low cost. Based on OMI-developed HIC/HS gigabit links, we are developing two such components. ATLAS I, a 20 Gbps single-chip ATM switch is being implemented within ACTS. This paper describes the second component, MuqPro. This Multi-Queue Processor chip will handle thousands of cell queues, and will schedule cell departures in hardware, ensuring that sophisticated QoS guarantees are met. An FPGA-based prototype is already under design; we use simulation to evaluate the performance of its scheduling algorithm. ATLAS and MuqPro achieve per-connection QoS guarantees that networks of the past could not provide: minimum throughput, maximum delay, instantaneous access to all available throughput for bursty traffic, and full utilization of the remaining capacity by low-priority traffic. We predict that within a few years, successful new products in the booming networking business will have to support such guarantees.
Catechol-O-Methyltransferase Val158Met Polymorphism on the Relationship between White Matter Hyperintensity and Cognition in Healthy People

Background White matter lesions can be easily observed on T2-weighted MR images, and are termed white matter hyperintensities (WMH). Their presence may be correlated with cognitive impairment; however, the relationship between regional WMH volume and catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val158Met polymorphism in healthy populations remains unclear. Methods We recruited 315 ethnic Chinese adults with a mean age of 54.9±21.8 years (range: 21–89 y) to examine the genetic effect of COMT on regional WMH and the manner in which they interact to affect cognitive function in a healthy adult population. Cognitive tests, structural MRI scans, and genotyping of COMT were conducted for each participant. Results Negative correlations between the Digit Span Forward (DSF) score and frontal WMH volumes (r = −.123, P = .032, uncorrected) were noted. For the genetic effect of COMT, no significant difference in cognitive performance was observed among 3 genotypic groups. However, differences in WMH volumes over the subcortical region (P = .016, uncorrected), whole brain (P = .047, uncorrected), and a trend over the frontal region (P = .050, uncorrected) were observed among 3 COMT genotypic groups. Met homozygotes and Met/Val heterozygotes exhibited larger WMH volumes in these brain regions than the Val homozygotes. Furthermore, a correlation between the DSF and regional WMH volume was observed only in Met homozygotes. The effect size (cohen’s f) revealed a small effect. Conclusions The results indicate that COMT might modulate WMH volumes and the effects of WMH on cognition.
Environmental screening of dark matter haloes in f(R) gravity

In certain theories of modified gravity, solar system constraints on deviations from general relativity (GR) are satisfied by virtue of a so-called screening mechanism, which enables the theory to revert to GR in regions where the matter density is high or the gravitational potential is deep. In the case of chameleon theories, the screening has two contributions – self-screening, which is due to the mass of an object itself, and environmental screening, which is caused by the surrounding matter – which are often entangled, with the second contribution being more crucial for less massive objects. A quantitative understanding of the effect of the environment on the screening can prove critical in observational tests of such theories using systems such as the Local Group and dwarf galaxies, for which the environment may be inferred in various ways. We use the high-resolution liminality simulation of Shi et al. (2015) to test the fidelity of different definitions of environment. We find that, although the different ways to define environment in practice do not agree with one another perfectly, they can provide useful guidance, and cross checks about how well a dark matter halo is screened. In addition, the screening of subhaloes in dark matter haloes is primarily determined by the environment, with the subhalo mass playing a minor role, which means that lower-resolution simulations where subhaloes are not well resolved can still be useful for understanding the modification of gravity inside subhaloes.
Sensing and modeling human networks using the sociometer

Knowledge of how people interact is important in manydisciplines, e.g. organizational behavior, social networkanalysis, information diffusion and knowledge managementapplications. We are developing methods to automaticallyand unobtrusively learn the social network structures thatarise within human groups based on wearable sensors. Atpresent researchers mainly have to rely on questionnaires,surveys or diaries in order to obtain data on physicalinteractions between people. In this paper, we show howsensor measurements from the sociometer can be used tobuild computational models of group interactions. Wepresent results on how we can learn the structure of face-to-face interactions within groups, detect when membersare in face-to-face proximity and also when they are havinga conversation.
A multicast mechanism for mobile networks

This letter proposes a multicast table approach to support GSM/UMTS multicast that minimizes the paging cost. The implementation and execution of the multicast tables are very efficient. The costs for updating these tables can be ignored compared with the costs of standard location update procedures. Furthermore, our mechanism can be implemented within the mobility databases without modifying the standard location update messages. We show that our mechanism always outperforms the existing GSM/UMTS multicast mechanisms.
A first-principles approach to understanding the internet's router-level topology

A detailed understanding of the many facets of the Internet's topological structure is critical for evaluating the performance of networking protocols, for assessing the effectiveness of proposed techniques to protect the network from nefarious intrusions and attacks, or for developing improved designs for resource provisioning. Previous studies of topology have focused on interpreting measurements or on phenomenological descriptions and evaluation of graph-theoretic properties of topology generators. We propose a complementary approach of combining a more subtle use of statistics and graph theory with a first-principles theory of router-level topology that reflects practical constraints and tradeoffs. While there is an inevitable tradeoff between model complexity and fidelity, a challenge is to distill from the seemingly endless list of potentially relevant technological and economic issues the features that are most essential to a solid understanding of the intrinsic fundamentals of network topology. We claim that very simple models that incorporate hard technological constraints on router and link bandwidth and connectivity, together with abstract models of user demand and network performance, can successfully address this challenge and further resolve much of the confusion and controversy that has surrounded topology generation and evaluation.
Feature Distance-Based Framework for Classification of Low-Frequency Semantic Relations

In the relation extraction of semantic relations, it is not uncommon to face settings in which the training data provides very few instances of some relation classes. This is mostly due to the high cost of producing such data and to the class imbalance problem, which may result in some classes presenting small frequencies even with a large annotated corpus. This work thus presents a semi-supervised bootstrapped method to expand this initial training dataset, using pattern matching to extract new candidate instances from the Web. The core of this process uses a multi view feature distance-based framework, which allows quantitative and qualitative analysis of intermediate steps of the process. Experimental results show that this framework provides better results in the relation classification task than the baseline, and the bootstrapped architecture improves the relation classification task as a whole for these low-frequency semantic relations settings.
Linear algebra to compute syzygies and Gröbner bases

In this paper, we introduce a new method to avoid zero reductions in Gröbner basis computation. We call this method LASyz, which stands for Lineal Algebra to compute Syzygies. LASyz uses exhaustively the information of both principal syzygies and non-trivial syzygies to avoid zero reductions. All computation is done using linear algebra techniques. LASyz is easy to understand and implement. The method does not require to compute Gröbner bases of subsequences of generators incrementally and it imposes no restrictions on the reductions allowed. We provide a complete theoretical foundation for the LASyz method and we describe an algorithm to compute Gröbner bases for zero dimensional ideals based on this foundation. A qualitative comparison with similar algorithms is provided and the performance of the algorithm is illustrated with experimental data.