Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phenotypic Plasticity and Effects of Selection on Cell Division Symmetry in Escherichia coli

Aging has been demonstrated in unicellular organisms and is presumably due to asymmetric distribution of damaged proteins and other components during cell division. Whether the asymmetry-induced aging is inevitable or an adaptive and adaptable response is debated. Although asymmetric division leads to aging and death of some cells, it increases the effective growth rate of the population as shown by theoretical and empirical studies. Mathematical models predict on the other hand, that if the cells divide symmetrically, cellular aging may be delayed or absent, growth rate will be reduced but growth yield will increase at optimum repair rates. Therefore in nutritionally dilute (oligotrophic) environments, where growth yield may be more critical for survival, symmetric division may get selected. These predictions have not been empirically tested so far. We report here that Escherichia coli grown in oligotrophic environments had greater morphological and functional symmetry in cell division. Both phenotypic plasticity and genetic selection appeared to shape cell division time asymmetry but plasticity was lost on prolonged selection. Lineages selected on high nutrient concentration showed greater frequency of presumably old or dead cells. Further, there was a negative correlation between cell division time asymmetry and growth yield but there was no significant correlation between asymmetry and growth rate. The results suggest that cellular aging driven by asymmetric division may not be hardwired but shows substantial plasticity as well as evolvability in response to the nutritional environment.
Validation of Disability Status, a Claims-based Measure of Functional Status for Cancer Treatment and Outcomes Studies

Background:In prior research, we developed a claims-based prediction model for poor patient disability status (DS), a proxy measure for performance status, commonly used by oncologists to summarize patient functional status and assess ability of a patient to tolerate aggressive treatment. In this study, we implemented and validated the DS measure in 4 cohorts of cancer patients: early and advanced non–small cell lung cancers (NSCLC), stage IV estrogen receptor-negative (ER−) breast cancer, and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). Data and Methods:SEER-Medicare data (1999–2007) for the 4 cohorts of cancer patients. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression tested the association of the DS measure with designated cancer-directed treatments: early NSCLC (surgery), advanced NSCLC (chemotherapy), stage IV ER− breast cancer (chemotherapy), and MDS (erythropoiesis-stimulating agents). Treatment model fit was compared across model iterations. Results:In both unadjusted and adjusted results, predicted poor DS was strongly associated with a lower likelihood of cancer treatment receipt in all 4 cohorts [early NSCLC (N=20,280), advanced NSCLC (N=31,341), stage IV ER− breast cancer (N=1519), and MDS (N=6058)] independent of other patient, contextual, and disease characteristics, as well as the Charlson Comorbidity Index. Inclusion of the DS measure into models already controlling for other variables did not significantly improve model fit across the cohorts. Conclusions:The DS measure is a significant independent predictor of cancer-directed treatment. Small changes in model fit associated with both DS and the Charlson Comorbidity Index suggest that unobserved factors continue to play a role in determining cancer treatments.
Robot-assisted ankle rehabilitation for the treatment of drop foot: A case study

This paper involves the use of an intrinsically-compliant ankle rehabilitation robot for the treatment of drop foot. The robot has a bio-inspired design by employing four Festo fluidic actuators that mimic skeletal muscles to actuate three rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs). A position controller in task space was developed to track the predefined trajectory of the end effector. The position tracking was achieved by the length tracking of each actuator in joint space by inverse kinematics. A stroke patient with drop foot participated in the trial as a case study to evaluate the potential of this robot for clinical applications. The patient gave positive feedback in using the ankle robot for the treatment of drop foot, although some limitations exist. The trajectory tracking showed satisfactory accuracy throughout the whole training with varying ranges of motion, with the root mean square deviation (RMSD) value being 0.0408 rad and the normalized root mean square deviation (NRMSD) value being 8.16%. To summarize, preliminary findings support the potential of the ankle rehabilitation robot for clinical applications. Future work will investigate the effectiveness of the robot for treating drop foot on a large sample of subjects.
A versatile vector for gene and oligonucleotide transfer into cells in culture and in vivo: polyethylenimine.

Several polycations possessing substantial buffering capacity below physiological pH, such as lipopolyamines and polyamidoamine polymers, are efficient transfection agents per se--i.e., without the addition of cell targeting or membrane-disruption agents. This observation led us to test the cationic polymer polyethylenimine (PEI) for its gene-delivery potential. Indeed, every third atom of PEI is a protonable amino nitrogen atom, which makes the polymeric network an effective "proton sponge" at virtually any pH. Luciferase reporter gene transfer with this polycation into a variety of cell lines and primary cells gave results comparable to, or even better than, lipopolyamines. Cytotoxicity was low and seen only at concentrations well above those required for optimal transfection. Delivery of oligonucleotides into embryonic neurons was followed by using a fluorescent probe. Virtually all neurons showed nuclear labeling, with no toxic effects. The optimal PEI cation/anion balance for in vitro transfection is only slightly on the cationic side, which is advantageous for in vivo delivery. Indeed, intracerebral luciferase gene transfer into newborn mice gave results comparable (for a given amount of DNA) to the in vitro transfection of primary rat brain endothelial cells or chicken embryonic neurons. Together, these properties make PEI a promising vector for gene therapy and an outstanding core for the design of more sophisticated devices. Our hypothesis is that its efficiency relies on extensive lysosome buffering that protects DNA from nuclease degradation, and consequent lysosomal swelling and rupture that provide an escape mechanism for the PEI/DNA particles.
Visual perspective and the characteristics of mind wandering

When the mind wanders away from the here-and-now toward imaginary events, it typically does so from one of two visual vantage points—a first-person perspective (i.e., the world is seen as it is in everyday life) or a third-person perspective (i.e., the world is seen from the viewpoint of an outside observer). While extant evidence has detailed consequences that ensue from the utilization of these distinct points of view, less is known about their more basic properties. Here, we investigated the prevalence, demographics and qualities associated with the visual perspective that people spontaneously adopt when the mind wanders. The results from a cross-cultural survey (N = 400) revealed that almost half of the participants (46%) typically utilize a third-person perspective when mind wandering. Further, culture and gender were shown to impact the distribution of first- and third-person imagers. Specifically, a first-person perspective was more common among participants from Western nations and females, while participants from Eastern cultures resonated more strongly with a third-person perspective. Moreover, these factors were also shown to impact qualities (e.g., temporal locus, vividness) of mental imagery. Taken together, the current findings elucidate the prevalence of first- and third-person visual perspectives and detail individual differences that influence the qualia of mind wandering.
An Optimization-Based Approach for Design Project Scheduling

Concurrent engineering has been widely used in managing design projects to speed up the design process by concurrently performing multiple tasks. Since the progress of a design task often depends on the knowledge about other tasks and requires effective communication, tasks and communication activities need to be properly coordinated to avoid delays caused by waiting for information or the need for rework. This paper presents a novel formulation for design project scheduling with explicit modeling of task dependencies and the associated communication activities. General dependencies are modeled as combinations of three basic types representing sequential, concurrent, and independent processes. Communication activities are also modeled as tasks, and their interactions with design tasks are described by sets of intertask constraints. The objective is to achieve timely project completion with limited resources. To improve algorithm convergence and schedule quality, penalties on the violation of constraints coupling design tasks are added to the objective function. A solution methodology that combines Lagrangian relaxation, dynamic programming, and heuristic is developed to schedule design and communication tasks, and a surrogate optimization framework is used to overcome the ldquoinseperabilityrdquo caused by nonadditive penalties. A heuristic procedure is then developed to obtain scheduling policies from optimization results and to dynamically construct schedules. Numerical results show that the approach is effective to handle various task dependencies and the associated communication activities to provide high-quality schedules.
Men Are Hierarchical, Women Are Egalitarian: An Implicit Gender Stereotype

The goal of the present study was to provide empirical evidence for the existence of an implicit hierarchy gender stereotype indicating that men are more readily associated with hierarchies and women are more readily associated with egalitarian structures. To measure the implicit hierarchy gender stereotype, the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald et al., 1998) was used. Two samples of undergraduates (Sample 1: 41 females, 22 males; Sample 2: 35 females, 37 males) completed a newly developed paper-based hierarchy-gender IAT. Results showed that there was an implicit hierarchy gender stereotype: the association between male and hierarchical and between female and egalitarian was stronger than the association between female and hierarchical and between male and egalitarian. Additionally, men had a more pronounced implicit hierarchy gender stereotype than women.
Towards a secure dynamic allocation of files in large scale distributed file systems

In this paper we consider large distributed systems in which objects are shared among several users. Our focus is on peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and, specifically, we present an adaptive algorithm for file fragments allocation on multiple servers belonging to a P2P network, derived from the adaptive data replication (ADR) algorithm by Wolf-son and Jajodia. While the ADR algorithm handles replicas of files, our algorithm handles (replicated) fragments of files. Moreover, while the ADR algorithm does not take into account any security issue, we also make some critical considerations about security of the system and show how a replicated-fragmentation scheme is convenient for sharing information in P2P networks, for achieving both high performance and security. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated in terms of transmission cost of packets, i.e. in terms of network utilization of the system, in contrast of the number of packets exchanged by peers, and the transmission cost is analyzed theoretically.
A single Drosophila melanogaster myosin light chain kinase gene produces multiple isoforms whose activities are differently regulated

Background: Myosin light chain kinase (MLCK) specifically phosphorylates the myosin regulatory light chain in a calcium/calmodulin (Ca2+/CaM)‐dependent manner in animal cells. The roles of MLCK are not fully understood, particularly in nonmuscle cells. Therefore, we cloned and characterized a Drosophila MLCK gene as the first step in a genetic analysis of this process.
Characteristics of Weighted Email Communications

In recent years, network models have been extensively studied. Most of those models are based on the binary status of the existence of a communication link, the intensity of the communication pattern for a given pair of nodes is not taken into consideration. In this paper, we study the statistics of commonly used Email communication and take into account communication frequencies. The resulting weighted Email communication network showed a rather different statistical behavior than the unweighted one. We compare the link and node weight distribution under different assumptions. Finally, weighted clustering coefficient and group growth are introduced and analyzed in the network
Feasibility study of in-situ grown nanocrystalline graphene for humidity sensing

The application of in-situ transfer-free nanocrystalline graphene grown by polymer enhanced catalytic chemical vapor deposition [1] for sensing humidity in an atmospheric environment is investigated by electrical testing. Exposure of the graphene devices to humidity enriched air leads to a relative resistance change of an absolute value of up to 3.5%. Furthermore, post application of a hydrophobic hexamethyldisilazane self-assembled monolayer onto the graphene transistors is attempted leading to a shift of the charge neutrality point towards zero potential. Yet, our devices show more pronounced rayleigh scattering after the self-assembled monolayer application, decreasing the current by a factor of 3.
Mirror reversal of slanted objects: A psycho-optic explanation

No agreed-upon account of mirror reversal is currently available although it has been discussed for more than two thousand years since Plato. Mirror reversal usually refers to recognized left-right reversal of a mirror image. Depending on the nature and layout of a reflected object, however, top-bottom reversal may be recognized instead of left-right reversal; no reversal at all may be recognized; and the presence or absence of reversal may not be decidable. Takano (1998) proposed a psycho-optic theory to explain all these cases of mirror image recognition in a consistent manner. The proposed theory assumes different causes of mirror reversal depending on whether an object's left-right axis is parallel or perpendicular to a mirror's surface. This theory was later criticized in that it provided no explanation when the left-right axis is neither parallel nor perpendicular but at an intermediate angle between zero and 90 degrees with a mirror. This article completes the theory by presenting psycho-optic analyses to show that mirror reversal at an intermediate angle can be explained within the same basic framework of the theory.
Digital GFSK Carrier Synchronization

Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) modulation is widely used in low data-rate personal communication standards like Bluetooth. For the purpose of low power and low cost, GFSK transceivers are usually designed in the analog domain. To improve bit error rate (BER) performance and the integration capability for diverse and complicated applications, the digital GFSK demodulation technology becomes attractive. A digital GFSK transceiver is studied in this paper where a new and simple carrier synchronizer is proposed. The new carrier synchronizer uses a decision-aided data cancellation algorithm to estimate carrier frequency offset. The complete GFSK transmission simulation is performed and almost ideal BER performance is achieved in the additive white Gaussian noise environment
GLUTAMATE RECEPTORS IN THE VENTRAL TEGMENTAL AREA: A POTENTIAL MECHANISM INVOLVED IN LONG TERM POTENTIATION

In the present study, footshock, which produces a powerful aversive emotional response was used in a Pavlovian conditioning experiment as an unconditioned stimulis (UCS), and was paired with the presentation of a light used as a conditioned stimulis (CS). There is an accumulation of evidence that supports the assertion that dopaminergic (DA) neurons within the ventral tegmental area (VTA) are active in processes that contribute to the amygdala-based circuitry involved in regulating emotionally salient responses. To build upon findings implicating VTA DA, excitatory glutamate (Glu), NMDA and AMPA receptors, were examined with respect to their role in Pavlovian conditioned fear responding. Fear potentiated startle (FPS) was used to assess the effects of intra-VTA infused AP5, and intra–VTA infused CNQX on conditioned fear responding in laboratory rats. The administration of the NMDA receptor antagonist AP5 (at 1.0, 2.5, and 5.0ug doses), blocked the ability of a conditioned stimulus (CS) previously paired with footshock to become conditioned to the UCS. Similarly, administration of the AMPA receptor antagonist CNQX (at 1.0, 2.5, 5.0ug doses), inhibited the ability of the CS to become conditioned to the UCS. The results of this study indicate the VTA is an important site for synaptic modifications associated with fear learning, and that activation of excitatory Glutamatergic receptors in the VTA play a necessary part of the processing underlying fear conditioning. Measures of shock reactivity demonstrated that the infusion of AP5 and CNQX into the VTA did not inhibit baseline startle amplitudes. The administration of AP5 and CNQX did not suppress
Financial Market Prediction Based On Online Opinion Ensemble

Financial market prediction is one of the most attractive research areas in financial data mining field because of its available data and potential profits. Financial market prediction has been paid much attention by many researchers and practitioners. Huge numbers of forecasting methods including judgmental methods and statistical methods have been proposed. In previous studies, judgmental methods mainly focus on expert judgments, which are waste of resources in some extent and may lead to lower accuracy, while statistical methods in terms of statistical models can achieve better performance, but when the unpredictable events appear, these models are ineffective and useless sometimes. In this paper, by incorporating online user’s opinions, two novel paradigms are proposed for financial market prediction, which may overcome the aforementioned shortcoming. In the first paradigm, the opinions of several selective online users are extracted, and then their opinions are integrated to forecast financial market. In the second one, a data mining model is constructed by combining user’s opinions and financial time-series data, and then the model is used for financial market prediction. Moreover, these paradigms are validated and compared using real financial market data. The empirical results show that our proposed paradigms are useful and feasible for financial market prediction, and furthermore, the combined model outperforms the traditional judgmental model. These findings imply that the proposed method is a promising alternative for financial market prediction.
Meaning Orientation and Reproducing Orientation: a typology of approaches to studying in higher education?

Interview‐based research has suggested that individual students exhibit either a deep approach or a surface approach to learning in higher education. Questionnaire‐based research has subsumed this notion within a distinction between a meaning orientation and a reproducing orientation to studying, but these are typically conceptualised as separate dimensions along which groups of students might vary. This study demonstrates that responses to questionnaires on studying can be analysed in such a way as to recover the distinction between a meaning orientation and a reproducing orientation in the form of a coherent, robust and reliable classification of the approaches to learning that are exhibited by individual students.
Developmental Toxicity of Levo-Alpha-Acetylmethadol (LAAM) in Tolerant Rats

Mated Crl:CD VAF/Plus female rats, in a range-finding study (n = 5–6 per dose) and a subsequent definitive study (n = 30 per dose) were used to determine the developmental toxicity, including the teratogenic potential of levo-alpha-acetyhnethadol (LAAM) hydrochloride, in tolerant rats. Tolerance was induced by initially administering the drug by gavage (10 ml/kg) at 2 mg/kg/day and increasing the dose every 2 weeks for 12 weeks until the doses of 2, 6, 9, 12, and 15, or 2, 6, and 12 mg/kg/day were achieved in the range-finding or definitive study, respectively. Females were then mated to stock males and treated throughout mating and gestation. Controls received distilled water on a similar regimen. The range-finding experiment was used for initial clinical evaluations and to determine tissue concentrations of LAAM and metabolites. In plasma, liver, and brain collected from dams and fetuses pooled by litter on gestation day 20, LAAM and its two N-demethylated metabolites, norLAAM and dinorLAAM, showed dose-dependent increases in concentration and in tissue to plasma ratios. Tissue to dam plasma ratios were highest in dam liver (17–60), intermediate in fetal liver (3–16), and fetal brain (3–14), and lowest in dam brain (0.8–5.6) and fetal plasma (0.3–2.1). In the definitive study, caesarean section examinations were performed following euthanization on gestation day 20 on all surviving females followed by teratologic examination of the fetuses. Drug-related outcomes, including increased activity, secondary hair loss, scabbing, focal swelling, and material around the nose, were exhibited by all groups receiving LAAM. Maternal toxicity was evident as decreased body weights, with maximum reduction at the 6-mg/kg/day dose, and reduction in feed consumption. There was also evidence of developmental toxicity in the form of postimplantaüon losses at all doses of LAAM. There were no deaths attributable to LAAM. No grossly observable visceral or skeletal anomalies related to LAAM were observed in the fetuses. In conclusion, the no-observable-effect level when administered to tolerant rats was less than 2 mg/kg/day with regard to clinical signs, body weight, body weight gain, and feed consumption, and with regard to developmental toxicity as reflected by postimplantaüon losses. Despite maternal and developmental toxicity, there was no evidence of selective fetal toxicity or teratogenic activity attributable to LAAM.
Goods: Organizing Google's Datasets

Enterprises increasingly rely on structured datasets to run their businesses. These datasets take a variety of forms, such as structured files, databases, spreadsheets, or even services that provide access to the data. The datasets often reside in different storage systems, may vary in their formats, may change every day. In this paper, we present GOODS, a project to rethink how we organize structured datasets at scale, in a setting where teams use diverse and often idiosyncratic ways to produce the datasets and where there is no centralized system for storing and querying them. GOODS extracts metadata ranging from salient information about each dataset (owners, timestamps, schema) to relationships among datasets, such as similarity and provenance. It then exposes this metadata through services that allow engineers to find datasets within the company, to monitor datasets, to annotate them in order to enable others to use their datasets, and to analyze relationships between them. We discuss the technical challenges that we had to overcome in order to crawl and infer the metadata for billions of datasets, to maintain the consistency of our metadata catalog at scale, and to expose the metadata to users. We believe that many of the lessons that we learned are applicable to building large-scale enterprise-level data-management systems in general.