Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beta-Catenin Signaling Plays a Disparate Role in Different Phases of Fracture Repair: Implications for Therapy to Improve Bone Healing

Background Delayed fracture healing causes substantial disability and usually requires additional surgical treatments. Pharmacologic management to improve fracture repair would substantially improve patient outcome. The signaling pathways regulating bone healing are beginning to be unraveled, and they provide clues into pharmacologic management. The β-catenin signaling pathway, which activates T cell factor (TCF)-dependent transcription, has emerged as a key regulator in embryonic skeletogenesis, positively regulating osteoblasts. However, its role in bone repair is unknown. The goal of this study was to explore the role of β-catenin signaling in bone repair. Methods and Findings Western blot analysis showed significant up-regulation of β-catenin during the bone healing process. Using a β-Gal activity assay to observe activation during healing of tibia fractures in a transgenic mouse model expressing a TCF reporter, we found that β-catenin-mediated, TCF-dependent transcription was activated in both bone and cartilage formation during fracture repair. Using reverse transcription-PCR, we observed that several WNT ligands were expressed during fracture repair. Treatment with DKK1 (an antagonist of WNT/β-catenin pathway) inhibited β-catenin signaling and the healing process, suggesting that WNT ligands regulate β-catenin. Healing was significantly repressed in mice conditionally expressing either null or stabilized β-catenin alleles induced by an adenovirus expressing Cre recombinase. Fracture repair was also inhibited in mice expressing osteoblast-specific β-catenin null alleles. In stark contrast, there was dramatically enhanced bone healing in mice expressing an activated form of β-catenin, whose expression was restricted to osteoblasts. Treating mice with lithium activated β-catenin in the healing fracture, but healing was enhanced only when treatment was started subsequent to the fracture. Conclusions These results demonstrate that β-catenin functions differently at different stages of fracture repair. In early stages, precise regulation of β-catenin is required for pluripotent mesenchymal cells to differentiate to either osteoblasts or chondrocytes. Once these undifferentiated cells have become committed to the osteoblast lineage, β-catenin positively regulates osteoblasts. This is a different function for β-catenin than has previously been reported during development. Activation of β-catenin by lithium treatment has potential to improve fracture healing, but only when utilized in later phases of repair, after mesenchymal cells have become committed to the osteoblast lineage.
UNDERSTANDING CONSUMERS ATTITUDE TOWARD ADVERTISING

Literature in advertising and information systems suggests that advertising in both traditional media and the Internet is either easily ignored by the audience or is perceived with little value. However, these studies assumed that the audience was passive and failed to consider the motives of the users. In light of this, the present study measures consumers’ attitudes toward advertisements for different purposes/functions (brand building and directional) and different media (traditional and Internet-based). Literature suggests the following factors that contribute to consumers’ perceptions of ads: entertainment, irritation, informativeness, credibility, and demographic. We believe that interactivity is also a factor that contributes to consumers’ perceptions. By understanding consumers’ attitude towards advertising, designers and marketers can better strategize their advertising designs. A better understanding of interactivity can also help to improve the effectiveness of interactive media such as the Internet. A methodology for studying the factors that contribute to consumers perceptions of ads is proposed and implications for Internet-based advertising and e-commerce is discussed.
Factors challenging and supporting scholarly activity for academic staff in a regional Australian university environment

With expectations of academic staff to achieve high quality teaching and research outputs as performance measures it is timely to explore how staff perceive they are being supported to meet these ends. This article presents findings of a multi-method study that explored influences impacting on the quality and quantity of scholarly activity being undertaken by A- and B-level academic staff within a regional Australian university context. Findings suggest that barriers to achieving scholarly outputs appeared to centre on support from senior academics, intrapersonal and demographic characteristics of staff and academics’ perceptions of their roles as teachers and scholars. Tensions between the multi-faceted components of being an academic were generated by both the university and individual members of staff.
‘O brotha where art thou?’ Examining the ideological discourses of African American male teachers working with African American male students

Since the early 1990s, several researchers have found that African American teachers who are successful with African American students hold deep philosophical commitments to the concept of ‘social justice’. While these scholars have convincingly articulated how ‘social justice’ is a central feature of African American teachers’ success with African American students, little attention has been given to whether African American teachers draw from diverse and/or competing ideological discourses to address the collective goal of achieving ‘social justice’. Employing the theoretical framework of nation language, the findings from this study illustrate how seven African American male teachers who worked with African American male students within a local educational context drew from multiple and sometimes contested conceptions of ‘social justice’. The findings from this study demonstrate that while the teachers held a ‘shared concern’ to radically alter the educational and social conditions of African American males, they each employed different and competing discourses of ‘social justice’. Thus, in the context of this study, the idea of ‘social justice’ was individually rendered, historically contingent and multifaceted.
Multi-class and hierarchical SVMs for emotion recognition

This paper extends binary support vector machines to multiclass classification for recognising emotions from speech. We apply two standard schemes (one-versus-one and one-versusrest) and two schemes that form a hierarchy of classifiers each making a distinct binary decision about class membership, on three publicly-available databases. Using the OpenEAR toolkit to extract more than 6000 features per speech sample, we have been able to outperform the state-of-the-art classification methods on all three databases.
The Empowering Schools Project

In an education system marred by inequity, urban schools in the United States are faced with the challenge of helping students from marginalized groups succeed. While many strategies have been tried, most are built on deficit-based models that blame students and teachers for a lack of achievement and ignore the role of power within the school setting. Building on the body of research on school climate, critical pedagogy, and empowering settings, the present study developed a model of student empowerment using a case study of an ethnically diverse urban high school in the midwestern United States. Participant observation, focus groups, and interviews were utilized to identify classroom and school characteristics related to student empowerment. Students reported equitable teacher–student relationships, integrated student leadership, and shared decision making. Similarly, school staff reported high staff empowerment and sense of community. The Student Empowerment Model is a useful framework for school improvement, adding “power” to the broader literature on school climate and extending the work on empowering settings to schools.
A Method to Detect License Inconsistencies in Large-Scale Open Source Projects

The reuse of free and open source software (FOSS) components is becoming more and more popular. They usually contain one or more software licenses describing the requirements and conditions which should be followed when been reused. Licenses are usually written in the header of source code files as program comments. Removing or modifying the license header by re-distributors will result in the inconsistency of license with its ancestor, and may potentially cause license infringement. But to the best of our knowledge, no research has been devoted to investigate such kind of license infringements nor license inconsistencies. In this paper, we describe and categorize different types of license inconsistencies and propose a feasible method to detect them. Then we apply this method to Debian 7.5 and present the license inconsistencies found in it. With a manual analysis, we summarized various reasons behind these license inconsistencies, some of which imply license infringement and require the attention from the developers. This analysis also exposes the difficulty to discover license infringements, highlighting the usefulness of finding and maintaining source code provenance.
Audio Watermarking Using Wavelet Transform and Genetic Algorithm for Realizing High Tolerance to MP3 Compression

Recently, several digital watermarking techniques have been proposed for hiding data in the frequency domain of audio signals to protect the copyrights. However, little attention has been given to the optimal position in the frequency domain for embedding watermarks. In general, there is a tradeoff between the quality of the watermarked audio and the tolerance of watermarks to signal processing methods, such as compression. In the present study, a watermarking method developed for a visual image by using a wavelet transform was applied to an audio clip. We also improved the performance of both the quality of the watermarked audio and the extraction of watermarks after compression by the MP3 technique. To accomplish this, we created a multipurpose optimization problem for deciding the positions of watermarks in the frequency domain and obtaining a near-optimum solution. The near-optimum solution is obtained by using a genetic algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed method generates watermarked audios of good quality and high tolerance to MP3 compression. In addition, the security was improved by using the characteristic secret key to embed and extract the watermark information.
DERIVED PHOTOSENSITIVE PIGMENTS FROM INVERTEBRATE EYES

The red pigment in the eyes of the squid, blue crab, and horseshoe crab becomes photosensitive when treated with formalin, and bleaches in the light. The resulting change in density is approximately symmetrical around a maximum at 480 mµ in the blue green. This difference absorption spectrum is in rough agreement with the spectral sensitivity of the cephalopod eye and differs only slightly from the difference absorption spectrum of vertebrate visual purple. The formalin-sensitized pigment is not melanoid. Its bleaching in squid retinas releases large quantities of retinene. It is suggested that the light sensitivity of the normal squid photopigment may be independent of its light stability.
IllustStyleMap: visualization of illustrations based on similarity of drawing style of authors

classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. SIGGRAPH 2014, August 10 – 14, 2014, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 2014 Copyright held by the Owner/Author. ACM 978-1-4503-2958-3/14/08 IllustStyleMap: Visualization of Illustrations based on Similarity of Drawing Style of Authors
Phenotypic correction of murine hemophilia A using an iPS cell-based therapy

Hemophilia A is caused by mutations within the Factor VIII (FVIII) gene that lead to depleted protein production and inefficient blood clotting. Several attempts at gene therapy have failed for various reasons—including immune rejection. The recent generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from somatic cells by the ectopic expression of 3 transcription factors, Oct4, Sox2, and Klf4, provides a means of circumventing the immune rejection barrier. To date, iPS cells appear to be indistinguishable from ES cells and thus provide tremendous therapeutic potential. Here we prepared murine iPS cells from tail-tip fibroblasts and differentiated them to both endothelial cells and endothelial progenitor cells by using the embryoid body differentiation method. These iPS cells express major ES cell markers such as Oct4, Nanog, SSEA-1, alkaline phosphatase, and SALL4. Endothelial/endothelial progenitor cells derived from iPS cells expressed cell-specific markers such as CD31, CD34, and Flk1 and secreted FVIII protein. These iPS-derived cells were injected directly into the liver of irradiated hemophilia A mice. At various times after transplantation (7–90 days) hemophilia A mice and their control mice counterparts were challenged by a tail-clip bleeding assay. Nontransplanted hemophilia A mice died within a few hours, whereas transplanted mice survived for more than 3 months. Plasma FVIII levels increased in transplanted hemophilia A mice during this period to 8% to 12% of wild type and corrected the hemophilia A phenotype. Our studies provide additional evidence that iPS cell therapy may be able to treat human monogenetic disorders in the future.
Vowel system universals and typology: prologue to theory

Considering all the work done on vowel system typology and universals in the past half-century (Trubetzkoy 1929, 1939; Hockett Sedlak 1969; Crothers 1978), my title may seem rather arrogant. There are after all theories of vocalic organisation about, or at least models and taxonomies; there are even attempts to explain why certain implicational universals seem to hold (from Jakobson's [laws of solidarity] (1968) to the more sophisticated treatments in Liljencrants & Lindblom 1972; Kim 1973; etc.).
Online Electroencephalogram (EEG) based biometric authentication using visual and audio stimuli

Biometric recognition of individuals has been widely employed in establishing secure and trustworthy systems nowadays. However, due to its increased demand and usability, the associated security risks have been increased, which necessitates finding of more robust biometric traits than existing modalities. Recently, brain signal recorded by Electroencephalogram (EEG) technique has been reported as a potential biometric candidate on account of its high degree of uniqueness, stability and universality. This paper presents an EEG-based biometric authentication system employing brain patterns in response to a number of visual or auditory stimuli by seeing/hearing self, familiar and unfamiliar faces/voices. The system employs power spectral density (PSD) features extracted from alpha, beta and gamma bands of EEG for biometric authentication. The PSD values of multi-band EEG signals from 14 channels form template feature vector for each subject, and are stored in the database during enrollment phase. During online authentication, test feature vector is correlated with the respective template vector and the obtained correlation value is compared with a pre-defined threshold value. Based on the authentication experiments performed on 5 healthy subjects, the proposed system offers an overall accuracy of 79.73% with a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 13.91% and false rejection rate (FRR) of 26.6%.
Automatic structure identification of TSK fuzzy model for stock index forecasting

Among financial time-series analysis tasks, stock index forecasting has been considered as one of the challenging and difficult tasks. Since an accurate stock index prediction enhances stock market returns, it is highly promising research area and has attracted particular attention. In this paper, to predict stock index with complex and nonlinear characteristics, an automatic structure identification (SI) method of TSK fuzzy model is proposed. Typically, SI procedures of fuzzy models consist of relevant input selection, fuzzy rule generation and parameter search space determination. In this study, mutual information is employed to select relevant input variables and fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm is used to generate fuzzy if-then rules. In FCM clustering, the number of clusters should be fixed in advance. This paper uses performance criterion to determine the optimal number of clusters in FCM clustering. After deciding the optimal cluster number, fuzzy if-then rules are extracted and parameter search space boundaries are fixed. Finally, premise and consequent parameters are optimized by cooperative random learning particle swarm optimization proposed by Zhao et al. To confirm the effectiveness, the proposed TSK fuzzy modeling method and comparison methods are applied to Korea Composite Stock Price Index dataset. The experimental results show that the TSK fuzzy models with the proposed SI method outperform comparison methods.
After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home: Re-defining Finnish Childhood Space

Abstract School children's use of their home during the after-school hours has become a controversial question in Finnish society. The article discusses cultural conceptions and uses of home as a specific space for children by comparing two different sets of empirical data: children's accounts of their after-school spaces and media debate on the same topic. Activated public concern in media accounts is analysed as a process of re-defining the properties of ‘proper places’ for children, whereas children's accounts are interpreted as expressions of local cultures. For the children, home is an ideal place for spending after-school time, while the public debate portrays the home as empty and children as lonely and unsafe. Definitions of home in after-school time are considered as part of a broader cultural process of re-defining contemporary Finnish childhood in which control turns out to be a crucial dimension of children's ‘proper places’.
Judgments of Financial Abilities of Severely Mentally Ill Individuals: A Comparison of Self-Report and an Objective Measure

When clinicians are asked to assess the financial capacity of those with severe mental illnesses, they often use a patient self-report. However, agreement between self-reported financial abilities and actual performance has not been established. In this study, concordance between self-reported financial abilities and performance of financial tasks on the Direct Assessment Functional Status (DAFS) scale was examined among 24 persons with severe mental illnesses with a guardian/payee, 25 without a guardian/payee, and 25 nonaffected controls. The groups were generally similar in the proportion of agreement between self-reported and performance-based financial abilities. However, the financially dependent group evidenced a significant discrepancy between self-reported ability to balance a chequebook and their performance on the DAFS relative to comparison groups, indicating that the accuracy of the severely mentally ill participants' self-reported financial abilities can be compromised. Thus, performance-based measures should be employed when assessing financial capacity.
Portfolio Management in a Deregulated Hydropower Based Electricity Market

We present an \asset/liability" model for a hydropower producer operating in a deregulated electricity market. The focus in this modeling eeort is on the coordination of physical generation resources in the form of multiple hydropower reservoirs, with \paper" resources in the form of nancial instruments on electricity. These portfolio management instruments are available in functioning forward and futures markets. Without implicating him, we would like to thank A. Grundt, Norsk Hydro for commenting on an early version of this note.
Cleavages, Institutions and the Number of Parties: A Study of Third Wave Democracies

Abstract This article evaluates how social cleavages and institutions shape the number of parties in the world’s newest democracies. It supplements existing propositions about the interaction of institutions and ethnic heterogeneity with an argument about the geographic concentration/dispersion of relevant groups. And it reflects on the interaction between institutions such as the electoral system, the form of government, and the relative decentralization of governmental authority. A quantitative analysis leveraging returns collected for 255 elections held in 61 “third wave” democracies reveals that the interaction of ethnic cleavages and institutions is more complex than the existing work suggests. The territorial configuration of ethnic cleavages appears to be decisive to the effect of institutions, while the proportionality of the electoral system seems to work in interaction with decentralization. The findings have important implications for both the science and practice of constitutional engineering.
Longitudinal Mixed-Effect Model Analysis of the Association between Global and Tissue-Specific Brain Atrophy and Lesion Accumulation in Patients with Clinically Isolated Syndrome

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The relationship between lesion formation and brain atrophy development in the early phase of multiple sclerosis is unclear. We investigated the association between new lesion accumulation and brain atrophy progression in patients with clinically isolated syndrome over 48 months. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Patients with clinically isolated syndrome (n = 210) were evaluated with 1.5T MR imaging at baseline and at 6, 12, 24, 36, and 48 months as part of a multicenter observational study of early administration of intramuscular interferon β-1a. Mixed-effect model analyses, adjusted for age, sex, and treatment status, investigated the association between accumulation of contrast-enhancing and T2 lesions and brain-volume percent changes in a 48-month period. RESULTS: In patients with clinically isolated syndrome, the average whole-brain volume decreased 2.5%, the mean lateral ventricle volume increased 16.9%, and a mean of 7.7 new/enlarging T2 lesions accumulated over the follow-up period. Patients with clinically isolated syndrome who showed greater percentages of change in whole-brain, white and gray matter, cortical, and lateral ventricle volumes over the follow-up period had more severe lesion outcomes at baseline (all P < .007). There were significant associations between decreased individual brain-volume measures at baseline and greater percentages of change during follow-up (P < .05). We found a significant association between the total cumulative number of new/enlarging T2 lesions and the evolution of whole-brain (P < .001), lateral ventricle (P = .007), gray matter and thalamic (P = .013), subcortical deep gray matter (P = .015), and cortical (P = .036) volumes over the follow-up period. CONCLUSIONS: Lesion accumulation and brain-volume changes occur simultaneously in the early phase of clinically isolated syndrome. More severe lesion and brain-volume outcomes at baseline were associated with greater development of brain atrophy over the follow-up period in patients with clinically isolated syndrome.
On the use of matrix derivatives in integrated design of dynamic feature parameters for speech recognition

In this work, an integrated approach to vector dynamic feature extraction is described in the design of a hidden Markov model (VVD-IHMM) based speech recognizer. The new model contains state-dependent, vector-valued weighting functions responsible for transforming static speech features into the dynamic ones. In this paper, the minimum classification error (MCE) is extended from the earlier formulation of VVD-IHMM that applies to a novel maximum-likelihood based training algorithm. The experimental results on alphabet classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the MCE-trained new model relative to VVD-IHMM using dynamic features that have been subject to optimization during MLE-training.