Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tumor-Initiating Cells Are Enriched in CD44hi Population in Murine Salivary Gland Tumor

Tumor-initiating cells (T-ICs) discovered in various tumors have been widely reported. However, T-IC populations in salivary gland tumors have yet to be elucidated. Using the established Pleomorphic Adenoma Gene-1 (Plag1) transgenic mouse model of a salivary gland tumor, we identified CD44high (CD44hi) tumor cells, characterized by high levels of CD44 cell surface expression, as the T-ICs for pleomorphic adenomas. These CD44hi tumor cells incorporated 5-bromo-2-deoxyuridine (BrdU), at a lower rate than their CD44negative (CD44neg) counterparts, and also retained BrdU for a long period of time. Cell surface maker analysis revealed that 25% of the CD44hi tumor cells co-express other cancer stem cell markers such as CD133 and CD117. As few as 500 CD44hi tumor cells were sufficient to initiate pleomorphic adenomas in one third of the wildtype mice, whereas more than 1×104 CD44neg cells were needed for the same purpose. In NIH 3T3 cells, Plag1 was capable of activating the gene transcription of Egr1, a known upregulator for CD44. Furthermore, deletion of sequence 81–96 in the Egr1 promoter region abolished the effect of Plag1 on Egr1 upregulation. Our results establish the existence of T-ICs in murine salivary gland tumors, and suggest a potential molecular mechanism for CD44 upregulation.
Normalised convolution and morphons for non-rigid registration

Automatic segmentation of anatomical structures is often performed using model based non-rigid registration methods. The morphon algorithm is one such method. In this algorithm, two or three dimensional images are registered using a multi resolution deformation scheme. A prototype image is iteratively registered to a target image, using quadrature filter phase difference to estimate local displacement. Any prior knowledge about the target image can be used to guide, or control, the registration. By means of normalised convolution, it is possible to define a, so called, certainty mask for the target image. This mask can be used to define a region of interest that should be focused on in the registration, or, on the other hand, to exclude certain parts of the image from the prototype. These two possibilities are demonstrated in two different applications.
Understanding the motivation and transformation of White culturally responsive professors

The purpose of this study was to examine the motivation for White professors in higher education to become culturally inclusive in their teaching practices and the transformational experiences that created this motivation and shaped their development. The findings revealed personal convictions that centred on moral obligations towards teaching was the primary motivation for the participants, that culturally responsive teaching requires complex consideration in its implementation, and there are a variety of challenges that impact culturally responsive professors. Above all, the participants believed in the moral rightness of their work and felt obligated to teach in a culturally responsive manner.
Network Generalized Hamming Weight

In this work, we extend the notion of generalized Hamming weight for classical linear block codes to linear network codes by introducing the network generalized Hamming weight (NGHW) for a given network with respect to a fixed linear network code. The basic properties of NGHW are studied. We further show that NGHW can be used as a tool to characterize the security performance of a linear network code on a wiretap network. We also introduce the notion of network maximum distance separable code (NMDS code) by extending the notion of Maximum Distance Separable code in classical algebraic coding theory. We prove that NMDS codes play an important role in minimizing the information that an eavesdropper can obtain from the network.
Genotyping of Mycobacterium avium subsp. avium isolates from naturally infected lofts of domestic pigeons in Ahvaz by IS901 RFLP

Background and Objectives: Avian tuberculosis is one of the most important infections affecting most species of birds. Mycobacterium avium can not only infect all species of birds, but also infect some domesticated mammals. The most crucial aspect of control and eradication scheme is identification of infection sources and transmission routs. Molecular techniques such as restriction fragment length polymorphism and pulse field gel electrophoresis have been shown to be much more discriminatory and suitable for use in the epidemiological study. Materials and Methods: Eighty suspected pigeons to avian tuberculosis based on their clinical signs, were subjected to the study. Forty Mycobacterium avium subsp. avium isolates out of a total of 51 identified isolates were subjected to the test. Results: IS901-RFLP using Pvu II was successfully conducted and produced 7 patterns. The majority of isolates (60%) were RFLP type PI.1. This type was the most similar type to standard strain. However, all the patterns obtained in this study were different from the standard strain. Conclusion: The result of this study indicate that these isolates probably are limited to Khuzestan region. We recommend DNA fingerprinting differentiation of non tuberculous Mycobacteria particularly Mycobacterium avium complex isolated from infected birds and human to possibly find source of infections.
Perceived Organizational Justice, Perceived Organizational Support, and Employee Engagement in Rescue 1122 Employees

This research paper is aimed at investi gati ng the relati onship between Perceived Organizational Justi ce (POJ), Perceived Organizati onal Support (POS), and Employee Engagement (EE) in Rescue 1122 employees. It was hypothesized that Perceived Organizati onal Support waslikely to mediate the relati onship between Perceived Organizati onal Justi ce and Employee Engagement in Rescue 1122 employees. A sample of 75 operati onal rescue workers was selectedfrom diff erent rescue 1122 stati ons, with an age range of 20-40 years. Both married and unmarried employees were selected. Organizati onal Justi ce Percepti on Questi onnaire (Niehoff &Moorman, 1993), Survey of Perceived Organizati onal Support (Eisenberger, et al., 1986) and Employee Engagement Scale (Saks, 2006) were used to measure Perceived Organizati onalJusti ce (POJ) Perceived Organizati onal Support (POS), and Employee Engagement, respecti vely. Correlati on analysis, path analysis using AMOS, independent samples t-test, and ANOVAwere carried out to analyze the data. Results revealed that there was a signifi cant relati onshipbetween Organizati onal Justi ce (POJ), Perceived Organizati onal Support (POS), and Employee Engagement. Moreover, Perceived Organizati onal Support parti ally mediated the relati onship between Perceived Organizati onal Justi ce and Employee Engagement in Rescue 1122 employees. Comparisons were also made on the basis of demographic variables. Implicati ons alongwith limitati ons and suggesti ons are being discussed in the light of Western and Indigenous research.
IVEA: toward a personalized visual interface for exploring text collections

In this paper we present IVEA, a personalized visual interface which enables users to explore text collections from different perspectives and levels of detail. This work explores the use of a personal ontology, which encapsulates users' entities of interest, as an anchor for the exploration process. This, in effect, simplifies the comprehension of visual representation of text collections by helping users to focus on aspects that they are particularly concerned with.
Knowledge Convergence : Concepts , Assessment , and a Model Study

In collaborative learning the question has been raised as to how learners in small groups influence one another and converge or diverge with respect to knowledge. This article conceptualizes knowledge convergence and further provides measures for its assessment prior to, during, and subsequent to collaborative learning. In an exemplary study in the field of computer-supported collaborative learning with forty-eight (48) locally distant participants in 16 groups of three, we apply these measures and analyze the extent to which a computersupported collaboration script can affect knowledge convergence. The study provides evidence for the applicability and sensitivity of the proposed knowledge convergence measures. Findings demonstrate that the instructional support increased productive divergence during collaboration and convergent individual outcomes.
Fire and the invasive annual grass Microstegium vimineum in eastern deciduous forests

Fire and the invasive annual grass Microstegium vimineum in eastern deciduous forests" (2012). Abstract Non-native plant invasions have the potential to change natural and prescribed fire regimes by increasing fuel loads, continuity of fuels, and fuel composition, which may alter fire intensity, damage native species, and promote further invasions. In this project we sought to evaluate the interaction between fire and the invasive annual grass Microstegium vimineum in eastern deciduous forests. Our goal was to determine if invasions enhance fire intensity, including fire temperatures, flame heights, and fire duration, and negatively affect tree regeneration, and stimulate further invasions. We also sought to determine how prescribed fires and the timing of fires affect the density and demography of Microstegium and we tested the pre and post-fire management options for controlling the post-fire spread of Microstegium invasions. At Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Indiana, we conducted large-scale prescribed fires to evaluate fire intensity in invaded and uninvaded areas and the response of experimental and naturally regenerating trees. In small-scale plots we manipulated the timing and frequency of fires and applied herbicide treatments to evaluate demographic responses of Microstegium. Our results show that maximum fire temperatures were on average 57% greater in Microstegium-invaded than uninvaded control areas. In addition, fires burned at temperatures over 300 °C for nearly twice as long and flame heights were 98% higher in invaded compared to uninvaded habitats. Microstegium invasion reduced survival of experimental trees by 37% in areas exposed to prescribed fire compared to uninvaded areas and tree survival in invaded, burned plots was 53% lower than invaded, unburned plots. Exposure to prescribed fire increased natural tree regeneration overall but there were 60% and 57% fewer tree seedlings in burned and unburned invaded plots, respectively, compared to control plots with the same treatments. Prescribed fire increased Microstegium biomass by five-fold the following growing season. Experimental spring fires significantly reduced Microstegium seedling numbers by ~75% immediately after the burn, but this did not result in reduced seed production at the end of season or seedling numbers the year following a burn. Burning for two springs in a row similarly reduced seedling numbers during each of the years when the burns were conducted, but this effect did not carry over to reduce Microstegium seedling numbers the following year. Similarly, fall fire reduced seedling numbers by ~50% the following spring, but this reduction also did not result in …
Device parts retrieval from assembly drawings with SVM based active relevance feedback

Content based assembly drawing retrieval is valued highly in many application areas, and it is a common thing to seek assembly drawings from a large collection where a specified device part is contained. Different from object detection techniques, a novel solution is presented in this paper to find the occurrences of target objects. Firstly, all device parts are extracted from assembly drawing images according to their specific characteristics. In later retrieval, these parts are compared with the query image to realize the search task. Furthermore, SVM based relevance feedback is adopted to incrementally improve the retrieval performance, and two strategies are proposed: (1) a novel active selection criterion, which takes into consideration both the informative and the representative measures to obtain more information from the feedback images; (2) incorporation of unlabeled images to alleviate the small sample size problem. The performance of this method is verified by extensive experiments.
A maximum entropy approach to multiple classifiers combination

In this paper,we present amaximumentropy (maxent) approach to the fusion of experts opinions, or classifiers outputs, problem. Themaxent approach is quite versatile and allows us to express in a clear, rigorous,way the a priori knowledge that is available on the problem. For instance, our knowledge about the reliability of the experts and the correlations between these experts can be easily integrated: Each piece of knowledge is expressed in the form of a linear constraint. An iterative scaling algorithm is used in order to compute the maxent solution of the problem. The maximum entropy method seeks the joint probability density of a set of random variables that has maximum entropy while satisfying the constraints. It is therefore the “most honest” characterization of our knowledge given the available facts (constraints). In the case of conflicting constraints, we propose to minimise the “lack of constraints satisfaction” or to relax some constraints and recompute the maximum entropy solution. The maxent fusion rule is illustrated by some simulations.
Finding deep compiler bugs via guided stochastic program mutation

Compiler testing is important and challenging. Equivalence Modulo Inputs (EMI) is a recent promising approach for compiler validation. It is based on mutating the unexecuted statements of an existing program under some inputs to produce new equivalent test programs w.r. t. these inputs. Orion is a simple realization of EMI by only randomly deleting unexecuted statements. Despite its success in finding many bugs in production compilers, Orion’s effectiveness is still limited by its simple, blind mutation strategy. To more effectively realize EMI, this paper introduces a guided, advanced mutation strategy based on Bayesian optimization. Our goal is to generate diverse programs to more thoroughly exercise compilers. We achieve this with two techniques: (1) the support of both code deletions and insertions in the unexecuted regions, leading to a much larger test program space; and (2) the use of an objective function that promotes control-flow-diverse programs for guiding Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) optimization to explore the search space. Our technique helps discover deep bugs that require elaborate mutations. Our realization, Athena, targets C compilers. In 19 months, Athena has found 72 new bugs — many of which are deep and important bugs — in GCC and LLVM. Developers have confirmed all 72 bugs and fixed 68 of them.
The effect of aging on visual orientation and spatial frequency

Although nearly one third of the Canadian population is projected to be over the age of 65 by the year 2030, we know relatively little about how aging affects brain function generally, let alone how aging affects visual perception. The current dissertation was conducted as part of a research programme designed to better characterize how aging affects visual perception. Older persons exhibit a variety of deficits for perception of complex visual forms. The perception of these complex forms-including everyday forms such as faces and objects-is subserved by low-level channels that are selective, or tuned, for the orientation and spatial frequency of luminance-defined contours in the visual scene. The bandwidth of these channels is inversely related to the amount of information that they can pass on to higher visual processes; narrowly-tuned channels are better. Single-cell physiological investigations of primates suggest that visual cortex neurons thought to subserve these channels exhibit broader tuning in senescence. If these channels become broadly-tuned in older aging, this could explain age-related deficits for complex form perception. In Chapters 2 and 3 of the current thesis, I measured the tuning of these channels in otherwise healthy, older humans using psychophysical masking techniques. In Chapters 4 and 5, I measured the average tuning of the neurons thought to underlie these channels in older human adults, physiologically, using electroencephalography (EEG). Despite the aforementioned reports of functional decline in senescent neurons, psychophysical and physiological orientation and spatial frequency tuning did not differ between younger and older adults. One explanation for this discrepancy is that there is a methodological issue in the single-cell primate literature wherein anesthetics interact with senescence to produce seemingly broader neural tuning. Another explanation is that older humans do have otherwise detuned neurons and channels, but are able to tune their neurons and channels by the action of consciousness, attention, or age-related compensatory brain reorganization.
Evaluation of NoSQL graph databases for querying and versioning of engineering data in multi-disciplinary engineering environments

In the context of large engineering projects the effective and efficient exchange and versioning of information from different engineering disciplines is essential. Semantic data integration approaches provide the necessary means to overcome the gap between heterogeneous local engineering tool concepts and common project-level concepts which enable the mapping of engineering data coming from different disciplines. However, evaluations have shown that ontology-based stores do not satisfy versioning and query performance criteria in case of large multi-disciplinary engineering projects. In this paper, we present an architecture solution that uses ontologies to describe engineering models and a NoSQL graph database to version individuals. We evaluate the software architectures according to quality attributes, i.e., performance and scalability, in the context of an industrial scenarios, and compare it with related approaches. Main results suggest that the architecture outperforms ontology stores and match solutions relying on relational databases.
Learning in Information Retrieval : a Probabilistic Differ ential Approach 2 Previous research

Since user’s relevance judgments are a source of evidence fo r information retrieval, learning from this feedback is an appealing idea. Many different learning techniques have successfully been used for relevance feedback. In most models, learning is either performed off line or is based on s imple heuristics. The approach we propose is based on a classical probabilistic model in which learning from feedb ack is simple and incremental. In this paper, we extend this model, presenting a new similarity function that takes into account feedback on the entire database while computing the score between a query and a single document. As a result, w hen a user judges a document it modifies the whole retrieval process.
Targeting Diversity in Photographic Retrieval Task with Commonsense Knowledge

Image search engines have a very limited usefulness since it is still di cult to provide di erent users with what they are searching for. This is because most research e orts to date have only been concentrating on relevancy rather than diversity which is also a quite important factor, given that the search engine knows nothing about the user's context. In this paper, we describe our approach for ImageCLEF 2008 photographic retrieval task. The novelty of our technique is the use of AnalogySpace [3], the reasoning technique over commonsense knowledge for document and query expansion, which aims to increase the diversity of the results. Our proposed technique combines AnalogySpace mapping with other two mappings namely, location and full-text. We then re-rank the resulting images from the mapping by trying to eliminate duplicate and near duplicate results in the top 20. We present our preliminary experiments and the results conducted using the IAPR TC-12 photographic collection with 20,000 natural still photographs. The results show that our integrated method with AnalogySpace yields slightly better performance in terms of cluster recall and the number of relevant photographs retrieved. We nally identify the weakness in our approach and ways on how the system could be optimized and improved.
Test Set Stripping Limiting the Maximum Number of Specified Bits

This paper presents a technique that limits the maximum number of specified bits of any pattern in a given test set. The outlined method uses algorithms similar to ATPG, but exploits the information in the test set to quickly find test patterns with the desired properties. The resulting test sets show a significant reduction in the maximum number of specified bits in the test patterns. Furthermore, for commercial ATPG test sets even the overall number of specified bits is reduced substantially.
β-TrCP Inhibition Reduces Prostate Cancer Cell Growth via Upregulation of the Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor

Background Prostate cancer is a common and heterogeneous disease, where androgen receptor (AR) signaling plays a pivotal role in development and progression. The initial treatment for advanced prostate cancer is suppression of androgen signaling. Later on, essentially all patients develop an androgen independent stage which does not respond to anti hormonal treatment. Thus, alternative strategies targeting novel molecular mechanisms are required. β-TrCP is an E3 ligase that targets various substrates essential for many aspects of tumorigenesis. Methodology/Principal Findings Here we show that β-TrCP depletion suppresses prostate cancer and identify a relevant growth control mechanism. shRNA targeted against β-TrCP reduced prostate cancer cell growth and cooperated with androgen ablation in vitro and in vivo. We found that β-TrCP inhibition leads to upregulation of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) mediating the therapeutic effect. This phenomenon could be ligand independent, as the AhR ligand 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-Dioxin (TCDD) did not alter prostate cancer cell growth. We detected high AhR expression and activation in basal cells and atrophic epithelial cells of human cancer bearing prostates. AhR expression and activation is also significantly higher in tumor cells compared to benign glandular epithelium. Conclusions/Significance Together these observations suggest that AhR activation may be a cancer counteracting mechanism in the prostate. We maintain that combining β-TrCP inhibition with androgen ablation could benefit advanced prostate cancer patients.
Clustering Techniques for Streaming Time Series Data

— Clustering streaming time series also referred to as a multivariate streaming time series clustering has been researcher's target for a long time. Yet so far there are many issues banning them to reach a nearly optimal solution. In this paper we investigate these works pointing to some of the issues focusing on the parameters and give some points to be accounted for future resaerches.
Research of DSP-Based SVPWM Vector Control System of Asynchronous Motor

This paper is aimed to expound and optimize the principle of SVPWM and then realize the optimized SVPWM by using the TMS320LF2407 digital signal processing (DSP) which is specially for the motor control. It has introduced a control system of asynchronous motor based on the digital SVPWM through the hardware and software design, and makes a simulation by using the Matlab of Simulink for asynchronous motor SVPWM control system.