Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Basic fibroblast growth factor induces differentiation of neural tube and neural crest lineages of cultured ectoderm cells from Xenopus gastrula.

The vertebrate nervous system is initially induced from a section of dorsal ectoderm by signal(s) from the underlying dorsal mesoderm during gastrulation. In an effort to identify the neural inducing factor(s) emanating from the dorsal mesoderm, we have examined the inductive action of various growth factors by applying them to ectoderm cells from Xenopus gastrulae (8- to 12.5-hour age; embryonic stage 9+ to 11 1/2) in a microculture system. Monoclonal antibodies that specifically recognize cellular differentiation antigens from three distinct ectoderm lineages (N1 for CNS neurons from neural tube, Me1 for melanophores from neural crest and E3 for skin epidermal cells from epidermal lineages, respectively) and a mesoderm lineage (Mu1 for muscle cells) were used as markers to monitor the differentiation of cultured ectoderm cells. We found that basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) was capable of specifically and reproducibly inducing gastrula ectoderm cells to produce CNS neurons and melanophores at concentrations as low as 5 pM, a value about 50-fold lower than that required to induce the formation of muscle cells from blastula animal cap cells (6-hour age; stage 8+). The induction of neural lineages by bFGF was correlated with a suppression of epidermal differentiation in a dose-dependent manner. bFGF never induced the formation of muscle cells from gastrula ectoderm cells even at concentrations as high as 5 nM. The response of ectoderm cells to bFGF changed dramatically during gastrulation. Ectoderm cells from early (8- to 9-hour age; stage 9+ to 10) gastrula gave rise to CNS neurons, but yielded few melanophores. As ectoderm cells were prepared from gastrulae of increasing age, their competence to form neurons was gradually lost, whereas the production of melanophores was enhanced and peaked in 11-hour gastrula (stage 10 1/2). The ability to form both neurons and melanophores was substantially reduced in 12.5-hour gastrula (stage 11 1/2). By examining ectoderm cells from the ventral and dorsal sides independently, it was also shown that during gastrulation the change in response to bFGF of the ventral ectoderm preceded that of the dorsal ectoderm. The state of competence of the ectoderm changed primarily due to intrinsic factors rather than by instruction from other parts of the gastrula embryo. This was shown by adding bFGF to cultures of ectoderm cells that were isolated at 9-hour (stage 10) and cultured for increasing periods to allow their autonomous development. The time course of both loss of neuronal competence and gain and loss of melanophore competence closely paralleled that observed in vivo during gastrulation. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
A novel mode of cell detachment from fibrillar fibronectin matrix under shear

Cells within tissues are surrounded by fibrillar extracellular matrix (ECM) that supports cell adhesion via integrin receptors. The strength of cell interactions with fibrillar matrix and the effects of force on these interactions have not been quantified. To this end, we used a spinning disc device to apply radially increasing shear to human HT1080 fibrosarcoma cells attached to a cell-derived fibrillar fibronectin (FN) matrix. The shear required to detach 50% of HT1080 cells was eight times greater on a FN-coated, rigid glass substrate than on fibrillar FN matrix. Covalent crosslinking of the FN matrix increased its stiffness tenfold and produced a modest increase in shear detachment force for these cells. On FN-coated surfaces, cells detach by releasing interactions between α5β1 integrin and FN. By contrast, cell detachment from fibrillar matrix occurred through a novel mechanism of fibril breakage, which left holes in the matrix visible by fluorescence microscopy. These results show that cells require less force to detach from fibrillar matrix than from FN adsorbed on glass and that detachment occurs through breaking fibrils instead of by release of integrin-matrix bonds. Thus, ECM fibril breakage is another molecular feature to consider when understanding cell and tissue homeostasis.
Community Discovery Based on Social Actors' Interests and Social Relationships

The increasing availability of social network data has motivated more computational research in social network analysis. Recently, discovering community from social networks came into the big picture of social network study. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for community discovery based on the contents of social actors' personal interests and their social relationships. Our dataset is a populated ontology created by integrating the publicly available FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) documents. We firstly discover the communities based on the social actors' personal interests. Then we use the social relationship to extend the communities for further discovery. Finally we conduct extensive experimental study to demonstrate that our approach is effective for community discovery.
Gustafson-Kessel-like clustering algorithm based on typicality degrees

Typicality degrees were defined in supervised learning as a tool to build characteristic representatives for data categories. In this paper, an extension of these typicality degrees to unsupervised learning is proposed to perform clustering. The proposed algorithm constitutes a GustafsonKessel variant and makes it possible to identify ellipsoidal clusters with robustness as regards outliers.
The Measure and Regulation of Competition in Telecommunications Markets

The development of the canadian telecommunications web is significantly influenced by the regulatory framework put in place to oversee the evolution of the web toward a competitive system. This paper has two specific objectives: first, to develop a methodological framework, which will allow a proper characterization of the level of competition in the telecommunications industry, more specifically in the residential local access market and second, to recommend some (significant) changes in the CRTC approach to the regulation of the Canadian Telecommunications industry. I argue that the current approach to the regulation of telecommunications in Canada is likely to generate significant harms to consumers and businesses as well as efficiency losses for the Canadian economy. I conclude that there is a urgent need for a telecommunications regulatory reform, with a stronger accent put on three crucial roles of the telecommunications regulator as the trusted generator of information for the consumers, as the manager of the level playing field conditions, and as the promoter of efficient investment programmes. Le developpement du reseau canadien des telecommunications est influence de facon significative par le cadre reglementaire adopte pour regir l'evolution de ce reseau vers la concurrence. Cet article a deux objectifs principaux : d'une part, developper un cadre methodologique adequat pour caracteriser le niveau de concurrence dans l'industrie des telecommunications, plus particulierement du marche des services residentiels locaux, et, d'autre part, de proposer des changements (importants) au cadre reglementaire actuel. Je montre que le cadre reglementaire actuel peut engendrer des problemes importants pour les consommateurs et l'industrie ainsi que des pertes d'efficacite pour l'economie canadienne. Il existe un besoin urgent de reformer le cadre reglementaire actuel, en mettant l'accent sur trois roles essentiels de l'agence de regulation des telecommunications comme fournisseur d'informations aux consommateurs, comme gestionnaire des conditions de concurrence loyale pour toutes les entreprises et comme promoteur de programmes d'investissement efficaces.
A Fast HITON_PC Algorithm

The HITON_PC algorithm which is a state-of-the-art local causal discovery algorithm can deal with a dataset with a very small sample-to-variable ratio efficiently. But it cannot perform inefficiently on a dataset with a very large sample. To address this problem, a fast HITON_PC algorithm is presented which uses a new yet simple search strategy from high order to low order to improve the efficiency of HITON-PC. Experimental results show our fast HITON_PC outperforms the HITON_PC algorithm. Moreover, we also apply the new search strategy to MMPC algorithm. Our method also is superior to MMPC.
Evaluation of Dentaport ZX and Raypex 6 electronic apex locators: An in vivo study

Introduction: Raypex 6 is an electronic apex locator (EAL) that has not yet been tested in vivo. The purpose of this in vivo study was to compare the accuracy of two EALs: the Dentaport ZX and the Raypex 6. Material and Methods: The study involved 36 straight single-rooted teeth. A 10-K file was advanced until the EAL detected the major foramen. The file was fixed in a replaceable pattern of light-cured composite. The apical part of each canal was trimmed to expose the file tip. The distances from the file tips to the major foramen were measured. Results: Wilcoxon’s signed Rank test found no significant differences between the Dentaport ZX and Raypex 6 in terms of their abilities to detect the major foramen (P = .52) The Dentaport ZX was accurate 82.35% of the time to ± 0.5 mm and 97.05% of the time to ± 1 mm, whereas the Raypex 6 was accurate 88.22% of the time to ± 0.5 mm and 100% of the time to ± 1 mm. Conclusions: No statistically significant differences were observed between the performance of the Dentaport ZX and Raypex 6 EALs under the in vivo clinical conditions used in this study. Key words:Dentaport ZX, electronic apex locator, major foramen, Raypex 6, working length.
An Efficient Low Power Viterbi Decoder Design using T-algorithm

This paper presents an efficient Low-Power Viterbi Decoder Design using T-algorithm. It implements the viterbi decoder using T-algorithm for decoding a bit-stream encoded by a corresponding forward error correction convolutional encoding system. A lot of digital communication systems incorporated a viterbi decoder for decoding convolutionally encoded data. The viterbi decoder is able to correct errors in received data caused by channel noise. We proposed an architecture implementing a Viterbi Decoder with Talgorithm deployed with threshold generator unit and purge unit to reduce the number of states which reduce power consumption. We propose modified architecture for the survivor Metric Unit to reduce the memory Access power during the trace back operation. The proposed viterbi decoder is carried out for rate-1/2 with a standard constraint length 7. The Synthesis results will be done using cadence RTL Encounter Tool. For ASIC synthesis, we use TSMC 45nm CMOS Process. The architecture which reduces the complexity and power Consumption by as much as 70% without effecting the decoding speed. General Terms
Semantic Web Service Composition Planning with OWLS-Xplan

We present an OWL-S service composition planner, called OWLS-Xplan, that allows for fast and flexible composition of OWL-S services in the semantic Web. OWLS-Xplan converts OWL-S 1.1 services to equivalent problem and domain descriptions thatare specified inthe planning domain description language PDDL 2.1, and invokes an efficient AI planner Xplan to generate a service composition plan sequence that satisfies a given goal. Xplan extends an action based FastForward-planner with a HTN planning and re-planning component.
Incidence of Bladder Cancer in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Treated With Metformin or Sulfonylureas

OBJECTIVE Previous studies evaluating the effect of metformin on cancer risk have been impacted by time-related biases. To avoid these biases, we examined the incidence of bladder cancer in new users of metformin and sulfonylureas (SUs). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This cohort study included 87,600 patients with type 2 diabetes in The Health Improvement Network database. Use of metformin or an SU was treated as a time-dependent variable. Cox regression–generated hazard ratios (HRs) compared metformin use with SU use, adjusted for age, sex, smoking, obesity, and HbA1c level. RESULTS We identified 196 incident bladder cancers in the metformin cohort and 66 cancers in the SU cohort. Use of metformin was not associated with decreased bladder cancer risk (HR 0.81 [95% CI 0.60–1.09]). This association did not differ by sex (P for interaction = 0.20). We observed no association with duration of metformin relative to SU use (3 to <4 years of use: 0.57 [0.25–1.34]; 4 to <5 years of use: 0.93 [0.30–2.85; ≥5 years of use: 1.18 [0.44–3.19]; P for trend = 0.26). CONCLUSIONS Use of metformin is not associated with a decreased incidence of bladder cancer. Similar methods should be used to study other cancers that have previously been identified as potentially preventable with metformin.
Multi-Level Error Handling for Tree Based Dialogue Course Management

For spoken dialogue systems, errors can occur on different l evels of the system’s architecture. One of the principal cause s for errors during a dialogue session are erroneous recognit i n results which often lead to incorrect semantic interpretat ions. Even if the speech input signal has been correctly recognize d, a natural language understanding component can produce erro rprone sentence meanings due to the limitations of its underl ying model. To cope with this problem, we introduce a multi-level error-detection mechanism based on several features in ord er to find erroneous recognitions, error-prone semantic inter pretations as well as ambiguities, and contradictions. Here, the confidence output of one level directly serves as an additional i nput for the subsequent level. The proposed features and scoring criteria are passed to the dialogue manager which then determin s the subsequent dialogue action.
Outcome of adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia with BFM protocol in a resource-constrained setting

Cure rates for adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in developing countries are significantly lower because of problems unique to these countries. We assessed some of the problems in adult ALL patients (>12 years of age) in a tertiary care hospital of northwest India with modified BFM regimen. The diagnosis of ALL was made according to FAB criteria. The protocol consisted of Phase I & II induction, consolidation, reinduction and maintenance phases. CNS prophylaxis was administered with 24 Gy radiation and intrathecal methotrexate. One hundred and eighteen patients (72.9% males), aged 12 – 68 years (median 23 years) were treated from January 1997 till December 2003. Follow-up of patients was done till December 2005. Complete remission (CR) was achieved in 85.6% patients after induction therapy and 40% patient relapsed. Most patients (23.7%) relapsed during the maintenance phase or after completion of chemotherapy. At least 15% of patients (15/101) after successful induction abandoned the treatment because of financial constraints, prolonged travel time to treatment facility and switching over to alternative medicines. Fatal infectious complications occurred in 19.5% of patients. The 3-year and 5-year event free survival rates were 29.8% and 21.6% respectively. In conclusion, modified BFM regimen resulted in high induction rates but relatively poor 5-year event free survival. Infections related death and post induction abandonment of treatment were the main reasons for poor overall results.
Keratin variants associate with progression of fibrosis during chronic hepatitis C infection

Keratins 8 and 18 (K8/K18) protect the liver from various forms of injury. Studies of liver explants from a large cohort of U.S. patients showed that K8/K18 mutations confer a risk to developing end‐stage liver diseases, though which diseases are preferentially involved is unknown. We tested the hypothesis that K8/K18 variants are associated with chronic hepatitis C (CHC) and that their presence correlates with progression of fibrosis. Genomic DNA was isolated from peripheral blood of a well‐characterized German cohort of 329 patients with CHC infection. Exonic regions were PCR‐amplified and analyzed using denaturing high‐performance liquid chromatography and DNA sequencing. Our findings showed: (1) amino acid altering keratin heterozygous variants in 24 of 329 CHC patients (7.3%) and non‐coding heterozygous variants in 26 patients (7.8%), and (2) 3 new exonic K8 variants (T26R/G55A/A359T); 6 novel non‐coding variants and one K18 coding variant (K18 S230T; 2 patients). The most common variants were K8 R341H (10 patients), K8 G62C (6 patients) and K8 I63V (4 patients). A novel and exclusive association of an intronic KRT8 IVS7+10delC deletion in all 10 patients with K8 R341H was observed. Notably, there was a significant association of exonic, but not of intronic K8 variants with increased fibrosis. In conclusion, previously described and novel K8 variants are present in a German population and collectively associate with progression of fibrosis in CHC infection. The unique 100% segregation of the most common K8 variant, R341H, with an intronic deletion suggests that one of these two genetic changes might lead to the other. (HEPATOLOGY 2006;43:1354–1363.)
Sea ice conditions and melt season duration variability within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago: 1979–2008

Sea ice conditions and melt season duration within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) were investigated from 1979–2008. The CAA is exhibiting statistically significant decreases in average September total sea ice area at −8.7% decade−1. The melt season duration within the CAA is increasing significantly at 7 days decade−1. 2008 represented the longest melt season duration within the CAA over the satellite record at 129 days. Average September multi‐year ice (MYI) area is decreasing at −6.4% decade−1 but has yet to reach statistical significance as a result of increasing MYI dynamic import from the Arctic Ocean. Results also find that the Western Parry Channel (WPC) region of the Northwest Passage (NWP) will continue to be susceptible to MYI as the transition to a summer‐time sea ice free Arctic continues. The processes responsible for the temporary clearing of the WPC region of the NWP in 2007 were also identified.
Fido: Fast Inter-Virtual-Machine Communication for Enterprise Appliances

Enterprise-class server appliances such as network-attached storage systems or network routers can benefit greatly from virtualization technologies. However, current inter-VM communication techniques have significant performance overheads when employed between highly-collaborative appliance components, thereby limiting the use of virtualization in such systems. We present Fido, an inter-VM communication mechanism that leverages the inherent relaxed trust model between the software components in an appliance to achieve high performance. We have also developed common device abstractions - a network device (MMNet) and a block device (MMBlk) on top of Fido. We evaluate MMNet and MMBlk using microbench-marks and find that they outperform existing alternative mechanisms. As a case study, we have implemented a virtualized architecture for a network-attached storage system incorporating Fido, MMNet, and MMBlk. We use both microbenchmarks and TPC-C to evaluate our virtualized storage system architecture. In comparison to a monolithic architecture, the virtualized one exhibits nearly no performance penalty in our benchmarks, thus demonstrating the viability of virtualized enterprise server architectures that use Fido.
Evaluation of Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism for Differentiation of Avian Mycoplasma Species

ABSTRACT Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) was used for typing avian mycoplasma species. Forty-four avian mycoplasma strains were successfully typed into eight distinct groups, with each representing a different species. Homology of AFLP patterns of 35% or less was used as a cutoff value to differentiate avian mycoplasma strains into different species.
Dead Reckoning for Mobile Robots Using Two Optical Mice

In this paper, we present a dead reckoning procedure to support reliable odometry on mobile robot. It is based on a pair of optical mice rigidly connected to the robot body. The main advantages are that: 1) the measurement given by the mice is not subject to slipping, since they are independent from the traction wheels, nor to crawling, since they measure displacements in any direction, 2) this localization system is independent from the kinematics of the robot, 3) it is a low-cost solution. We present the mathematical model of the sensor, its implementation, and some empirical evaluations.
Integrating Local and Global Manifold structures for unsupervised dimensionality reduction

Recently there has been a lot of interest in geometrically motivated approaches dealing with data in high dimensional spaces. We consider the case where data is sampled from a low dimensional manifold which is embedded in high dimensional Euclidean space. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised linear subspace learning algorithm called Local and Global Manifold Preserving Embedding (LGMPE). Different from existing manifold learning based linear subspace learning algorithms which aims at preserving either single kind of local manifold structure or single kind of global manifold structure on the data manifold, LGMPE can preserve different local and global manifold structures simultaneously in the graph embedding framework. Several experiments on real face datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Vasoconstriction and Medial Hypertrophy in Pulmonary Hypertension

To determine whether thickening of the media of pulmonary muscular arteries in cases of pulmonary hypertension is the result of vasoconstriction or of hypertrophy or of both, a method for calculating the amount of arterial muscular tissue per unit of pulmonary tissue was devised. Comparison of the mean medial thickness, expressed as a percentage of the diameters of the arteries, with the amount of arterial muscular tissue per unit of lung, will give an impression as to whether vasoconstriction or hypertrophy prevails in a certain case. This method was applied to sections of pulmonary tissue from 10 normal controls and 17 patients with congenital cardiac disease with pulmonary hypertension. Medial hypertrophy was present in all cases of congenital heart disease studied as compared with controls, and was more pronounced in severe than in moderate pulmonary hypertension. In some cases also vasoconstriction appeared to play an important or even a dominant role in the thickening of the medial layer. In 2 cases of atrial septal defect with large pulmonary flow, hypertrophy was masked by dilatation of the vessels resulting in a relatively thin media.
Tradeoff between Spectrum and Densification for Achieving Target User Throughput

Dense deployment which brings small base stations (BS) closer to mobile devices is considered as a promising solution to the booming traffic demand. Meanwhile, the utilization of new frequency bands and spectrum aggregation techniques provide more options for spectrum choice.Whether to increase BS density or to acquire more spectrum is a key strategic question for mobile operators. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between BS density and spectrum with regard to individual user throughput target. Our work takes into account load-dependent interference model and various traffic demands. Numerical results show that densification is more effective in sparse networks than in already dense networks. In sparse networks, doubling BS density results in almost twofold throughput increase. However, in dense networks where BSs outnumber users, more than 10 times of BS density is needed to double user throughput. Meanwhile, spectrum has a linear relationship with user throughput for a given BS density. The impact of traffic types is also discussed. Even with the same area throughput requirement, different combination of user density and individual traffic amount leads to different needs for BS density and spectrum.