Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Expression of tranferrin receptors in the pineal gland of postnatal and adult rats and its alteration in hypoxia and melatonin treatment

Transferrin receptors (Tfrc) are membrane bound glycoproteins which function to mediate cellular uptake of iron from transferrin. We examined expression of Tfrc in the pineal gland of rats of different ages from 1 day to 12 weeks. The mRNA and protein expression of Tfrc increased up to 6 weeks of age and decreased in 12 week rats. Tfrc immunoreactivity was observed on pinealocytes and macrophages/microglia. By immunoelectron microscopy, the immunoreaction in pinealocytes was observed in the cytosol, on mitochondria and plasma membrane whereas in macrophages/microglia it was localized on the plasma membrane in 1‐day to 2‐week old rats. In older rats, the immunoreaction product in pinealocytes was associated with the plasma membrane and mitochondria only. Iron localization was observed in pinealocytes as well as macrophages/microglia. It is suggested that Tfrc are required for uptake of iron for cell proliferation and maturation in the pineal gland upto 6 weeks of age. The significance of Tfrc expression on mitochondria is speculative. They may be involved in iron transport to the mitochondria or for regulation of the secretory activity of pinealocytes. The TfrcmRNA and protein expression increased significantly in response to hypoxia in 12‐week rats and this coincided with intense iron staining of the pinealocytes and macrophages/microglia. It is concluded that increased expression of Tfrc in response to hypoxia leads to excess cellular uptake of iron which may be damaging to the cells. Melatonin administration in hypoxic rats may prove to be beneficial as it reduced the Tfrc expression. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Struggling for congruency: principles and practices of anti-oppressive social work pedagogy

The author begins by describing and problematizing the term "anti-oppressive theory and practice", the current nomenclature for a social work approach committed to social justice. After reviewing the professional, theoretical, political, and practice contexts of this practice approach she summarizes the essential content areas of anti-oppressive curricula and demonstrates the importance of the research question How do instructors strive for congruency between the content and process of education for anti-oppressive social work practice? A literature review reveals four key themes related to pedagogical congruency: modeling, deconstructing foundational knowledge claims, attending to affective and subjective learning in the exploration of identity and difference, and negotiating power and authority. The author then presents the research process used to investigate the above question, addressing the paradigmatic foundation of the research, describing the collective case study methodology, and justifying the use of the 'ideal type' as an interpretative technique. -- The findings of the research are presented in two stages. In the first, a composite picture of the six case studies, using an ideal type construct, represents the consensus evident within the data. Pedagogical principles and practices are described, and issues such as identity and difference, modeling, the uniqueness of professional education, the classroom power practices of students and instructors, and barriers to anti-oppressive pedagogy are explored. In the second stage, detailed quotes from research participants are used to illustrate the divergence found within the data, especially relating to issues of modeling, the context of anti-oppressive practice, the role of social work educators, and working with identity and difference. -- Analysis of the findings illuminates the enigmatic and evolving nature of anti-oppressive theory and practice. New pedagogical themes that extend our understanding of pedagogical congruency are presented and existing themes are critiqued. Identified directions for future enquiry include the further development of unique pedagogical practices, the exploration of student learning, transference of learning from the classroom to practice, and greater attention to the structural and institutional supports needed to promote anti-oppressive pedagogy.
Rotavirus Architecture at Subnanometer Resolution

ABSTRACT Rotavirus, a nonturreted member of the Reoviridae, is the causative agent of severe infantile diarrhea. The double-stranded RNA genome encodes six structural proteins that make up the triple-layer particle. X-ray crystallography has elucidated the structure of one of these capsid proteins, VP6, and two domains from VP4, the spike protein. Complementing this work, electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM) has provided relatively low-resolution structures for the triple-layer capsid in several biochemical states. However, a complete, high-resolution structural model of rotavirus remains unresolved. Combining new structural analysis techniques with the subnanometer-resolution cryoEM structure of rotavirus, we now provide a more detailed structural model for the major capsid proteins and their interactions within the triple-layer particle. Through a series of intersubunit interactions, the spike protein (VP4) adopts a dimeric appearance above the capsid surface, while forming a trimeric base anchored inside one of the three types of aqueous channels between VP7 and VP6 capsid layers. While the trimeric base suggests the presence of three VP4 molecules in one spike, only hints of the third molecule are observed above the capsid surface. Beyond their interactions with VP4, the interactions between VP6 and VP7 subunits could also be readily identified. In the innermost T=1 layer composed of VP2, visualization of the secondary structure elements allowed us to identify the polypeptide fold for VP2 and examine the complex network of interactions between this layer and the T=13 VP6 layer. This integrated structural approach has resulted in a relatively high-resolution structural model for the complete, infectious structure of rotavirus, as well as revealing the subtle nuances required for maintaining interactions in such a large macromolecular assembly.
Multi-algorithm ASIP synthesis and power estimation for DSP applications

Power consumption is an increasingly important parameter in the design of mixed hardware/software systems. This work applies the high-level synthesis technique to multi-algorithms and explores its use as a means of analyzing power consumption from the high level of design. We apply a multi-algorithm synthesis technique to designing an application specific instruction set processor (ASIP) from a customized ASIC. This technique synthesizes selected time constrained algorithms to define a set of DSP applications, designs the corresponding ASIP core, and extracts the specific instruction set. Although not as effective as a DSP core solution, this technique provides much of the circuit flexibility while maintaining an available trade-off between performance and power dissipation. This technique contains three power estimators to assist algorithm integration with the view to optimizing the embedded system: the first acts during the application of usual high-level synthesis steps. The second one is triggered after the complete synthesis of the target algorithm, and the third estimator is based on the instruction set of the designed ASIP core. This technique has been implemented in our framework called BSS (Breizh Synthesis System).
Intrinsic IL-21 Signaling Is Critical for CD8 T Cell Survival and Memory Formation in Response to Vaccinia Viral Infection

CD4 T cell help plays an important role in promoting CD8 T cell immunity to pathogens. In models of infection with vaccinia virus (VV) and Listeria monocytogenes, CD4 T cell help is critical for the survival of activated CD8 T cells during both the primary and memory recall responses. Still unclear, however, is how CD4 T cell help promotes CD8 T cell survival. In this study, we first showed that CD4 T cell help for the CD8 T cell response to VV infection was mediated by IL-21, a cytokine produced predominantly by activated CD4 T cells, and that direct action of IL-21 on CD8 T cells was critical for the VV-specific CD8 T cell response in vivo. We next demonstrated that this intrinsic IL-21 signaling was essential for the survival of activated CD8 T cells and the generation of long-lived memory cells. We further revealed that IL-21 promoted CD8 T cell survival in a mechanism dependent on activation of the STAT1 and STAT3 pathways and subsequent upregulation of the prosurvival molecules Bcl-2 and Bcl-xL. These results identify a critical role for intrinsic IL-21 signaling in CD8 T cell responses to an acute viral infection in vivo and may help design effective vaccine strategies.
Distinct Activities of Stromal Cells Involved in the Organogenesis of Lymph Nodes and Peyer’s Patches1

It is now well established that the interaction between “inducer” cells of hemopoietic origin and “organizer” cells of mesenchymal lineage is involved in the organogenesis of lymph node (LN) and Peyer’s patch (PP). Organizer cells are defined by the expression of VCAM-1 and ICAM-1 and the production of homeostatic chemokines. However, several studies suggested the presence of a diversity among these cells from different lymphoid tissues. Thus, we attempted to define the difference of organizer cells of LN and PP in terms of gene expression profile. Microarray analyses of organizer cells revealed that these cells isolated from embryonic mesenteric LN expressed higher levels of genes that are related to inflammation, tissue remodeling, and development of mesenchymal lineage compared with those from PP. Several transcription factors related to epithelial-mesenchymal interactions were also up-regulated in organizer cells from LN. These results indicate that organizer cells in LN and PP are indeed distinct and suggest that the organizer cells in LN are at a more activated stage than those in PP.
TravelMiner: On the Benefit of Path-Based Mobility Prediction

Mobility predictions are becoming more valuable in various applications with the rise of mobile devices. Given that existing prediction techniques are composed of two key procedures: 1) profiling past mobility trajectories as sequences of discrete atomic states (e.g., grid locations, semantic locations) and capturing them with an appropriate statistical model, 2) making a prediction on the next state using the statistical model, TravelMiner tackles the former with paths utilized as the atomic states for the first time, where the paths are defined as sub-trajectories with no branches. Comparing to available location-based predictors, TravelMiner makes a fundamental difference in that it is able to predict the sequence of paths rather than locations, which is far more detailed in the perspective of knowing the exact route to follow. TravelMiner enables this benefit by extracting disjoint paths from GPS trajectories via a similarity metric for curves, called Frechet distance and keeping the sequences of such paths in a statistical model, called probabilistic radix tree. Our extensive simulations over the GPS trajectories of 124 users reveal that TravelMiner outperforms other predictors in diverse popular performance metrics including predictability, prediction accuracy and prediction resolution.
Enhancing human action recognition with region proposals

Deep convolutional network models have dominated recent work in human action recognition as well as image classification. However, these methods are often unduly influenced by the image background, learning and exploiting the presence of cues in typical computer vision datasets. For unbiased robotics applications, the degree of variation and novelty in action backgrounds is far greater than in computer vision datasets. To address this challenge, we propose an “action region proposal” method that, informed by optical flow, extracts image regions likely to contain actions for input into the network both during training and testing. In a range of experiments, we demonstrate that manually segmenting the background is not enough; but through active action region proposals during training and testing, state-of-the-art or better performance can be achieved on individual spatial and temporal video components. Finally, we show by focusing attention through action region proposals, we can further improve upon the existing state-of-the-art in spatio-temporally fused action recognition performance.
Congra: Towards Efficient Processing of Concurrent Graph Queries on Shared-Memory Machines

Parallel graph processing has been routinely used to solve problems in a wide range of real life applications today. Efficiently handling many concurrent graph processing queries in a multi-user environment is highly desirable as we enter a world full of edge device oriented services. Existing research, however, primarily focuses on processing a single, large graph dataset and leaves the efficient handling of multiple mid-sized graph queries an interesting yet challenging open problem. In this work, we investigate the management of multiple graph processing queries on shared-memory machines. We carefully analyze the performance of several graph algorithms and find some of them do not scale well with more CPU cores (more threads) while others have diminishing returns as the number of CPU cores grow. Further, we identify the trade-off relationship between the increasing cost of atomic operations and the growing available memory bandwidth with more CPU cores. Motivated by the above observations, we propose Congra, a dynamic graph scheduler that intelligently manages multiple concurrent graph queries for better system throughput and resource efficiency. Congra collects the memory bandwidth consumption and atomic operations characteristics of graph queries via offline profiling and decides which subset of CPU cores for the query to run, as long as the query is not blocked due to heavy resources contention. We implement Congra in C++ on top of the Ligra graph processing framework and test it with judiciously selected graph processing query combinations. Our results show the Congra improves query throughput by 60% compared to existing designs. It exhibits much better quality of service and readily supports a scale-out computing environment.
Stemming Algorithms: A Case Study for Detailed Evaluation

The majority of information retrieval experiments are evaluated by measures such as average precision and average recall. Fundamental decisions about the superiority of one retrieval technique over another are made solely on the basis of these measures. We claim that average performance figures need to be validated with a careful statistical analysis and that there is a great deal of additional information that can be uncovered by looking closely at the results of individual queries. This article is a case study of stemming algorithms which describes a number of novel approaches to evaluation and demonstrates their value. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
A Semi-Supervised Self-Adaptive Classifier over Opinionated Streams

We investigate the problem of polarity learning over a stream of opinionated documents. We deal with two challenges. First, if the opinions are not labeled, then we cannot assume that a human expert will be regularly and frequently available to assess the sentiment of arriving documents for learning and model adaption. Further, the vocabulary of the stream, and thus the feature space used for learning, changesover time: people use an abundancy of words, and sometime seven invent new ones to express their feelings. We propose a semi-supervised opinion stream classification algorithm that uses only an initial training set of labeled documents for polarity learning and gradually adapts to changes in the vocabulary. In particular, our algorithm S*3 Learner starts with the vocabulary of opinionated words that are in the documents of the initial training set, and then expands it with new words, as soon as there is enough evidence for estimating their polarity. We study the performance of S*3 Learneron opinionated streams under the natural order of document arrival and under a modified ordering that allows us to simulate vocabulary evolution.
Reticulocytosis in nonanemic dogs: increasing prevalence and potential etiologies.

BACKGROUND An increasing prevalence of reticulocytosis in the absence of anemia (RAA) in dogs has been suspected in recent years. OBJECTIVES The objectives were to determine whether prevalence of RAA in our canine population has been increasing over the last years, and to identify potential predisposing factors. METHODS The annual prevalence of RAA in adult dogs was determined between 2000 and 2012. Clinical histories and CBC data were analyzed for all dogs, as well as owner response to a questionnaire including information on nutrition and supplements was conducted for dogs with RAA identified between 2011 and 2012. In addition, serum iron concentration (Fe), total iron-binding capacity (TIBC), and percent transferrin saturation (%TS) were determined in 14 dogs with RAA and compared with 8 healthy control dogs. RESULTS Reticulocytosis in the absence of anemia was identified in 1035 dogs, with the prevalence increasing since 2006. Dogs with RAA evaluated after 2006 (n = 853) had significantly lower MCV and were more likely to have microcytosis than those prior to 2006 (n = 182). Increased incidence of osteoarthritis was observed in dogs evaluated after 2006, including the dogs studied between 2011 and 2012 (n = 31), and administration of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, omega-3 fatty acids, and glucosamine was more common in the latter. Significantly lower mean Fe and %TS, and higher TIBC were found in dogs with RAA compared to unaffected dogs. CONCLUSIONS Prevalence of RAA has increased in recent years in our canine population. More ubiquitous use of anti-inflammatory medications and nutraceuticals, associated with increased diagnosis of osteoarthritis should be considered as contributing factors.
Numerical approximations in weighted estimating equations for regression models with missing continuous covariates

1 Summary Missing covariate data is a common problem that complicates the fitting of regression models (e.g., generalized linear models) in many applications. A recently developed technique for handling missing covariate data is the weighted estimating equations (WEE) approach (Robins et al., 1994; Lipsitz et al., 1999). In the WEE approach, the contribution to the estimating equations from a complete-case (i.e., an observation with no missing covariate data) is weighted by the inverse 'probability of being fully observed'. When the missing covariates are continuous, the efficient WEE requires integration over the distribution of the missing data. Lipsitz et al. (1999) proposed a Monte Carlo EM algorithm to obtain the efficient WEE, but, in general, their implementation can be computationally intensive. In this paper, as an alternative to the Monte Carlo EM algorithm, we propose using a simple numerical integration technique, Riemann summation using a midpoint rule, to overcome the computational burden of the efficient WEE. Due to the appealing properties of the WEE, even a relatively crude numerical approximation to the integral produces consistent estimators of the regression parameters. Furthermore, the results of a simulation study indicate that crude integral approximations can yield WEE estimators with relatively high semi-parametric efficiency. When the dimension of the missing covariate vector is large, and Riemann summation becomes computationally demanding, we propose numerical integration with the elements of a low-discrepancy sequence (Niederreiter, 1978) chosen as quadrature points. The proposed methods are illustrated using data from a study of cardiotoxicity among children receiving treatments for cancer.
Investigating the Science Process Skills in Cycle 3 National Science Textbooks in Lebanon

The purpose of this study is to examine the level of inclusion of basic and integrated science process skills in Lebanese national science text books for cycle 3 and to compare the basic and integrated process skills across subjects (physics, chemistry and biology) and within the same subject across the 3 years(grades 7, 8 & 9). This was to investigate the compliance between the content of the textbooks and the new evaluation system set by the Lebanese government. For instance, the study focused on the SPS that have been neglected in some textbooks as well as the maximum percentage of each skill. To that end, the researchers used the analytical descriptive method, and content analysis. The study revealed that the percentage of basic skills in the textbooks analyzed for all grades was higher than that of the integrated skills. The study revealed also that there is emphasis on some skills at the expense of the others and there is no consistency in the total number of skills across skills or subjects. Furthermore the study revealed that within the same subject, some skills disappear from one grade to another. The study ends by recommendations regarding reviewing textbooks regarding the inclusion of science process skills in a way to ensure coherence between the content of the textbooks and the new evaluation system.
The Ventral Premammillary Nucleus Links Fasting-Induced Changes in Leptin Levels and Coordinated Luteinizing Hormone Secretion

Physiological conditions of low leptin levels like those observed during negative energy balance are usually characterized by the suppression of luteinizing hormone (LH) secretion and fertility. Leptin administration restores LH levels and reproductive function. Leptin action on LH secretion is thought to be mediated by the brain. However, the neuronal population that mediates this effect is still undefined. The hypothalamic ventral premammillary nucleus (PMV) neurons express a dense concentration of leptin receptors and project to brain areas related to reproductive control. Therefore, we hypothesized that the PMV is well located to mediate leptin action on LH secretion. To test our hypothesis, we performed bilateral excitotoxic lesions of the PMV in adult female rats. PMV-lesioned animals displayed a clear disruption of the estrous cycle, remaining in anestrus for 15–20 d. After apparent recovery of cyclicity, animals perfused in the afternoon of proestrus showed decreased Fos immunoreactivity in the anteroventral periventricular nucleus and in gonadotropin releasing hormone neurons. PMV-lesioned animals also displayed decreased estrogen and LH secretion on proestrus. Lesions caused no changes in mean food intake and body weight up to 7 weeks after surgery. We further tested the ability of leptin to induce LH secretion in PMV-lesioned fasted animals. We found that complete lesions of the PMV precluded leptin stimulation of LH secretion on fasting. Our findings demonstrate that the PMV is a key site linking changing levels of leptin and coordinated control of reproduction.