Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Selective amputation of the pharynx identifies a FoxA-dependent regeneration program in planaria

Planarian flatworms regenerate every organ after amputation. Adult pluripotent stem cells drive this ability, but how injury activates and directs stem cells into the appropriate lineages is unclear. Here we describe a single-organ regeneration assay in which ejection of the planarian pharynx is selectively induced by brief exposure of animals to sodium azide. To identify genes required for pharynx regeneration, we performed an RNAi screen of 356 genes upregulated after amputation, using successful feeding as a proxy for regeneration. We found that knockdown of 20 genes caused a wide range of regeneration phenotypes and that RNAi of the forkhead transcription factor FoxA, which is expressed in a subpopulation of stem cells, specifically inhibited regrowth of the pharynx. Selective amputation of the pharynx therefore permits the identification of genes required for organ-specific regeneration and suggests an ancient function for FoxA-dependent transcriptional programs in driving regeneration. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.02238. 001
Force Feedback Augmentation Method for the Minimally Invasive Surgical System

In this paper, a method of force feedback augmentation to improve the force perception is proposed. Reaction force is amplified naturally according to the forceps action. In particular, the principal force components corresponding to the ideal reaction force directions of the current forceps action will be amplified. The other components are displayed without amplification. As a result, only the simple but significant reaction force patterns are emphasized. Complex behavior of the reaction force, which may distract or deteriorate the intended action, is attenuated. In addition, the PI gain scheduling local force feedback controller compensates for the inertial and gravitational force of the master manipulator. Thus the true reaction force at the forceps can be felt more realistic
Joint resource provisioning and admission control in wireless virtualized networks

This paper studies joint resource provisioning and admission control in wireless virtualized networks (WVN), where one base station of an OFDMA-based wireless network is virtualized into two types of slices with resource-based and rate-based reservations. Aiming to maximize the total rate of WVN, first, the resource provisioning optimization problems are formulated by guaranteeing a minimum requirement for each slice. Via constraint relaxation and variable transformations, an iterative algorithm is developed for power and sub-carrier allocation. Due to the channel variations, WVN suffers from non-zero outage probability, i.e., slice requirements cannot always be met. To prevent this issue, we present an admission control algorithm in which slice requirements are dynamically adjusted based on channel state information. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
Automated interpretation of subcellular patterns in fluorescence microscope images for location proteomics

Proteomics, the large scale identification and characterization of many or all proteins expressed in a given cell type, has become a major area of biological research. In addition to information on protein sequence, structure and expression levels, knowledge of a protein's subcellular location is essential to a complete understanding of its functions. Currently, subcellular location patterns are routinely determined by visual inspection of fluorescence microscope images. We review here research aimed at creating systems for automated, systematic determination of location. These employ numerical feature extraction from images, feature reduction to identify the most useful features, and various supervised learning (classification) and unsupervised learning (clustering) methods. These methods have been shown to perform significantly better than human interpretation of the same images. When coupled with technologies for tagging large numbers of proteins and high‐throughput microscope systems, the computational methods reviewed here enable the new subfield of location proteomics. This subfield will make critical contributions in two related areas. First, it will provide structured, high‐resolution information on location to enable Systems Biology efforts to simulate cell behavior from the gene level on up. Second, it will provide tools for Cytomics projects aimed at characterizing the behaviors of all cell types before, during, and after the onset of various diseases. © 2006 International Society for Analytical Cytology
NSP1 of the GRAS Protein Family Is Essential for Rhizobial Nod Factor-Induced Transcription

Rhizobial Nod factors induce in their legume hosts the expression of many genes and set in motion developmental processes leading to root nodule formation. Here we report the identification of the Medicago GRAS-type protein Nodulation signaling pathway 1 (NSP1), which is essential for all known Nod factor–induced changes in gene expression. NSP1 is constitutively expressed, and so it acts as a primary transcriptional regulator mediating all known Nod factor–induced transcriptional responses, and therefore, we named it a Nod factor response factor.
Enriching Perspectives in Exploring Cultural Heritage Documentaries Using Informedia Technologies

Speech recognition, image processing, and language understanding technologies have successfully been applied to broadcast news corpora to automate the extraction of metadata and make use of it in building effective video news retrieval interfaces. This paper discusses how these multimedia technologies can be adapted to enrich perspectives in exploring cultural heritage documentaries. Through automated means, efficient interfaces in viewing and summarizing documentary contents can be built dynamically based on user needs. Such interfaces enable the assemblage of large video documentary libraries from component videodisc, CD, and videotape projects, with alternate views into the material complementing the original sequences authored by the materials’ producers.
Exploiting global connectivity constraints for reconstruction of 3D line segments from images

Given a set of 2D images, we propose a novel approach for the reconstruction of straight 3D line segments that represent the underlying geometry of static 3D objects in the scene. Such an algorithm is especially useful for the automatic 3D reconstruction of man-made environments. The main contribution of our approach is the generation of an improved reconstruction by imposing global topological constraints given by connections between neighbouring lines. Additionally, our approach does not employ explicit line matching between views, thus making it more robust against image noise and partial occlusion. Furthermore, we suggest a technique to merge independent reconstructions, that are generated from different base images, which also helps to remove outliers. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on synthetic and real scenes by comparison with ground truth.
Plant species identification using leaf image retrieval

In this paper, an effective shape-based leaf image retrieval system is presented. A new contour descriptor is defined which reduces the number of points for the shape representation considerably. This shape representation is based on the curvature of the leaf contour and it deals with the scale factor in a novel and compact way. A two-step algorithm for retrieval is used. In a first step, the database is reduced using some geometrical features. Then a similarity measure between the contour representations is used to rank conveniently leaf images on the database. We implemented a prototype system based on these features and performed several experiments to show its effectiveness for plant species identification.
Strategic planning and customer intelligence in academic libraries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to refer to a current discussion on the effectiveness and efficiency of Bielefeld University Library and concentrates on requirements and conditions of implementing customer intelligence in academic libraries. Moreover, a conceptual framework for a library management information system based on a data warehouse that links external and internal data to support strategic planning processes is introduced.Design/methodology/approach – Content‐related and technical aspects of customer intelligence in academic libraries are outlined and analogies are drawn to commercial enterprises to motivate the conceptual reflections. The paper closes with two examples that demonstrate how multifaceted the data pool for customer intelligence can be in librarianship.Findings – The paper sensitizes to the advantages of systematically generating customer knowledge in academic libraries for strategic planning and customer orientation.Practical implications – The suggested approach can serve.
Differences in Acquirer Motivations, Announcement Effects, Target Characteristics, and Financing in Private versus Public Acquisitions: The Case of REITs

This paper first identifies the characteristics of publicly-traded REITs associated with an increased probability of being the target of an announced merger or acquisition. Second, conditional on being a target, we examine whether certain target characteristics influence the probability of a bidder being a private versus a public firm. Third, we examine whether the wealth effects that accrue to the shareholders of target REITs in going private deals and public-to-public transactions vary with the characteristics of the target and acquirer firms. Finally, we investigate the extent to which going private transactions differ from istaying publici acquisitions in terms of the type of financing employed and the motivation of the two investor types. We find that REITs more likely to become acquisition targets are smaller, with no umbrella operating partnership, less liquidity, higher dividend yields and greater institutional ownership than non-targets. We also document that targets of private acquirers have lower leverage, interest coverage ratios, and profitability. Although acquisitions by private buyers are always done with cash, there has been a shift toward the use of cash in public-to-public deals. In addition, the factors related to abnormal returns differ in public-to-public and public-to-private deals.
A Secure Computing Environment

With the advent of various attack vectors on various computing devices, it is vital that we design a secure computing environment which would be resilient to such said attacks. However, there is always a tradeoff between securing a device and incorporating various functionalities into the device to make it more versatile. The more we secure a device, the tougher it becomes to add ad-hoc features to it. Moreover, this tradeoff is very subjective to the needs at hand. It is incumbent on the administrator of the said device to manage the tradeoff between securing the device and providing diverse functionality. In this paper, we describe our approach to securing a computing environment and explain our rationale. This would be of course one of the multiple layers of security with which we would secure the device.
Efficient bump mapping hardware

We present a bump mapping method that requires minimal hardware beyond that necessary for Phong shading. We eliminate the costly per-pixel steps of reconstructing a tangent space and perturbing the interpolated normal vector by a) interpolating vectors that have been transformed into tangent space at polygon vertices and b) storing a precomputed, perturbed normal map as a texture. This represents a considerable savings in hardware or rendering speed compared to a straightforward implementation of bump mapping. CR categories and subject descriptors: I.3. 3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image generation; I.3. 7 [Image Processing]: Enhancement
Contrast-invariant Obstacle Detection System using Color Stereo Vision

In this article, we present a color stereo vision system conceived to detect road obstacles. Color matching algorithm based on dynamic programming is presented. This algorithm is invariant in the contrast. With this property, the gain of cameras is configured in automatic mode without decrease the performance of color matching. As a consequence, 3D edges of obstacle are correctly extracted even in difficult cases (for example, entrance and exit of the tunnel). Experimental results are shown in the last section of the paper.
THE ROLE OF SIMULATION IN DESIGN AND OPERATION OF BODY AND PAINT SHOPS IN VEHICLE ASSEMBLY PLANTS

The paper discusses the use of discrete-event simulation in design and operation of body and paint shops in North American Vehicle Assembly Plants. Two broad classifications are given on the use of simulation in body and paint shops. First classification is based on the stage of development of the system. Four categories are observed in this classification. Namely: conceptual design phase, detailed design phase, launching phase, and fully operational phase. Second classification of the use of simulation in body and paint shops is based on the nature of the problem investigated. Four categories are also observed in this classification which are equipment and layout design issues, issues related to variation management. product-mix sequencing issues, and other operational issues. In this paper. The classification is described in detail and three case studies are provided to demonstrate the use of simulation in selected problem areas.
On the security evaluation of a multibiometric system based on a voting strategy involving likelihood ratio statistic tests

Multimodal biometric systems integrate information from multiple sources to improve the performance of a typical unimodal biometric system. The use of multimodal biometric systems has been encouraged by the threat of spoofing, where an impostor fakes a biometric trait. The reason lies on the assumption that, an impostor must fake all the fused modalities to be accepted. Recent studies showed that, there is a vulnerability of the existing fusion schemes in presence of attacks where only a subset of the fused modalities is spoofed. Among the possible information fusion approaches, recently, a framework for the optimal combination of match scores that is based on the likelihood ratio (LR) test has been presented. It is based on the modeling of the distributions of genuine and impostor match scores as a finite Gaussian mixture models. Since standard LR test demonstrated to be very sensitive to spoofing attacks, in this paper we analyze the robustness of a voting strategy based on likelihood ratio test in the presence of spoofing. The analysis has been carried out on the Biosecure multimodal database, demonstrating the advantages of a voting strategy with respect to the standard LR approach.
Friend recommendation techniques in social network

Online social network has obtained a significant increase in recent years. Making friends is a way of creating social relationships with others in online social network to be in contact with their friends in the real world and to have access to the information they are interested in. Therefore friend recommendation is becoming a very important aspect and attracting extensive attention in visual communities and social network. Various available friend recommendation techniques apply social network configuration, user profile information and/or user interactions for this purpose. In this paper, few friend recommendation techniques with their advantages and disadvantages are discussed along with a proposed method.
Closure in Artificial Cell Signalling Networks - Investigating the Emergence of Cognition in Collectively Autocatalytic Reaction Networks

Cell Signalling Networks (CSNs) are complex biochemical networks responsible for the coordination of cellular activities in response to internal and external stimuli. We hypothesize that CSNs are subsets of collectively autocatalytic reaction networks. The signal processing or cognitive abilities of CSNs would originate from the closure properties of these systems. We investigate how Artificial CSNs, regarded as minimal cognitive systems, could emerge and evolve under this condition where closure may interact with evolution. To assist this research, we employ a multi-level concurrent Artificial Chemistry based on the Molecular Classifier Systems and the Holland broadcast language. A critical issue for the evolvability of such undirected and autonomous evolutionary systems is to identify the conditions that would ensure evolutionary stability. In this paper we present some key features of our system which permitted stable cooperation to occur between the different molecular species through evolution. Following this, we present an experiment in which we evolved a simple closed reaction network to accomplish a pre-specified task. In this experiment we show that the signal-processing ability (signal amplification) directly resulted from the evolved systems closure properties.
Sequential Sales, Learning, and Cascades

When IPO shares are sold sequentially, later potential investors can learn from the purchasing decisions of earlier investors. This can lead rapidly to "cascades" in which subsequent investors optimally ignore their private information and imitate earlier investors. Although rationing in this situation gives rise to a winner's curse, it is irrelevant. The model predicts that: (1) Offerings succeed or fail rapidly. (2) Demand can be so elastic that even risk-neutral issuers underprice to completely avoid failure. (3) Issues with good inside information can price their shares so high that they sometimes fail. (4) An underwriter may want to reduce the communication among investors by spreading the selling effort over a more segmented market. Copyright 1992 by American Finance Association.
Knock-Out of the Potassium Channel TASK-1 Leads to a Prolonged QT Interval and a Disturbed QRS Complex

Background/Aims: The aim of the study was to characterize the whole cell current of the two-pore domain potassium channel TASK-1 (K2P3) in mouse ventricular cardiomyocytes (ITASK-1) and to analyze the cardiac phenotype of the TASK-1-/- mice. Methods and Results: We have quantified the ventricular ITASK-1 current using the blocker A293 and TASK-1-/- mice. Surface electrocardiogram recordings of TASK-1-/- mice showed a prolonged QTc interval and a broadened QRS complex. The differences in electrocardiograms between wild type and TASK-1-/- mice disappeared during sympathetic stimulation of the animals. Quantitative RT-PCR, patch clamp recordings and measurements of hemodynamic performance of TASK-1-/- mice revealed no major compensatory changes in ion channel transcription. Action potential recordings of TASK-1-/- mouse cardiomyocytes indicated that ITASK-1 modulates action potential duration. Our in vivo electrophysiological studies showed that isoflurane, which activates TASK-1, slowed heart rate and atrioventricular conduction of wild-type but not of TASK-1-/- mice. Conclusion: The results of an invasive electrophysiological catheter protocol in combination with the observed QRS time prolongation in the surface electrocardiogram point towards a regulatory role of TASK-1 in the cardiac conduction system.
A Comparison of Chronic and Transient Loneliness on the Variables of Anxiety, Depression and Self-Esteem.

This study sought to determine whether chronic and transient loneliness are meaningful d ist inct ions in loneliness research and to provide data to guide future investigations. To do th is , the study d i f fe re n t ia te d people who reported chronic loneliness from those who reported transient or no experience with loneliness and compared them on the character is t ics of t r a i t anxiety, self-esteem, and depression. The subjects were 218 student volunteers, ages 18 to 25, who were enrolled in undergraduate psychology classes at Louisiana State University. Subjects categorized themselves as chronically lonely, t ran s ien t ly lonely, or never lonely on the Personal History of Loneliness Questionnaire (PHOL). Current loneliness was assessed with the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Subjects were c las s i f ie d on the basis of these two instruments into four groups re f le c t in g loneliness history and presence or absence or current loneliness. Chronically lonely people were found to have higher levels of t r a i t anxiety and were more l i k e l y to be mildly to moderately depressed than t ran s ien t ly lonely individuals. Chronically and trans ient ly lonely individuals did not d i f f e r on self-esteem, although they had lower self-esteem than the nonlonely people. Greatest self-esteem was found among the never lonely. The results of th is study provided additional support for the conclusion that chronic and transient loneliness are two d i f fe re n t types of loneliness and suggested a number of important leads for future research in th is area.
Motor Resonance Mechanisms during Action Imitation in Depression

Objectives Major depressive disorder has been associated with impairments in social cognition. However, studies exploring the processing of social information focused on facial discrimination. The aim of this study was to better characterize the sensorimotor mechanisms underlying motor resonance in depressed patients. Method Twenty-three right-handed patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for unipolar depression were compared to 14 matched healthy controls. In a simple imitation paradigm, the kinematic features of movements in natural condition were compared to those of motions performed after the observation of a moving dot. Reaction time and pointing velocity were considered to evaluate if the motor performance was contaminated by the observed stimulus. Results Patient’s velocity varied in agreement with dot velocity, proving that they were able to extract the correct information from the stimuli and use it to plan their responses. Depressed patients’ actions, as well as healthy controls, were influenced by the dot velocity, suggesting that motor resonance mechanisms are not prevented by depression. In contrast, only patients had anticipatory motor response and started moving before the end of the stimulus motion. Conclusion Our findings suggest that motor resonance mechanisms are not altered by the disease. However, depressed patients exhibit a specific deficit in motor inhibition in the selection of motor responses.
What are the impacts of the child grant policy in Nepal on Dalit women? A qualitative analysis

Abstract Policy makers worldwide have been capitalizing on women’s altruism to address household poverty. Poverty reduction resources mobilized through women have been proven to be more effective and efficient than the resources mobilized through men in terms of addressing household poverty in general and child poverty in particular. However, very few studies have been conducted to understand the contribution of such policies to women’s empowerment (or disempowerment). This article examines the impact of the Child Grant policy in Nepal on Dalit women who receive cash transfers that aim to improve Dalit children’s health outcomes. The experiences of Dalit Women in rural Dhading district, gleaned through qualitative interview and discussion methods, show that the policy has brought about some positive changes in the lives of Dalit women. However, the policy, on its own, has limited potential to destabilizing unequal gender relations within Dalit households. This study also found that policies and programs that support capacity building and political consciousness-raising would complement the Child Grant policy and empower Dalit women in a holistic way.