Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CYP1B1 Gene Mutations Causing Primary Congenital Glaucoma in Tunisia

Primary congenital glaucoma (PCG) is responsible for a significant proportion of childhood blindness in Tunisia. Early prevention based on genetic diagnosis is therefore required. This study sought to determine the frequency of CYP1B1 (cytochrome P450, family 1, subfamily B, polypeptide 1) mutations in 18 PCG patients, recruited from Central and Southern of Tunisia.
Impulse Control Disorders Associated With Dopaminergic Medication in Patients With Pituitary Adenomas

Objective:Impulse control disorders (ICDs) such as pathological gambling, compulsive shopping, compulsive eating, and hypersexuality are a matter of growing interest, especially in patients with Parkinson disease who are on dopamine replacement therapy. It was recently reported that ICDs are associated with other disorders also treated with dopaminergic drugs (dopamine agonists) such as restless legs syndrome, multiple system atrophy, progressive supranuclear palsy, and fibromyalgia. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of ICDs in patients with pituitary adenomas who take dopamine agonists (DAs). Methods:Twenty consecutive patients with pituitary adenomas (mostly prolactinomas) taking DAs were assessed. All participated in a structured interview focused on ICDs, which was conducted by a physician. Results:Two (10%) of 20 subjects had a condition diagnosed as ICD. The first patient is a 35-year-old man with giant macroprolactinoma who was alternately treated with different types of DAs (cabergoline, bromocriptine, and quinagolide). He developed compulsive eating and pathological gambling. The second patient is a 53-year-old man with macroprolactinoma who suffered from severe hypersexuality after cabergoline was begun. Conclusions:This study demonstrates the importance of systematic screening for ICDs in patients taking dopaminergic medication regardless of their primary condition.
Analysis on light attenuation through multi-metal-layers for CMOS image sensors on system LSIs

This paper proposes a method for analysis of spectral characteristics on multilayer interconnection. With CMOS technology's downscaling, interconnect layers are multi-stratified since the number of metal levels has increased. However, this multilayer interconnection affects sensitivity of CMOS image sensors. To evaluate the effect on the multilayer interconnect of standard CMOS process technologies, we have developed a method for calculating transferred light intensity through the multilayer interconnect. We show the calculation results in case of standard CMOS 65 nm, 90 nm, 0.18 mum, 0.35 mum, 0.6 mum, and 1.2 mum process technologies.
p21/CDKN1A Mediates Negative Regulation of Transcription by p53*

The tumor suppressor p53 regulates transcription positively and negatively, depending on the target gene. Whereas p53 induces transcription through direct interaction with promoter DNA, the mechanism of p53-mediated transcriptional repression is less well understood. Early reports described the alleviation of p53-mediated repression by inhibitors of apoptosis, suggesting that negative regulation of transcription might occur only in conjunction with programmed cell death. More recently, it has been proposed that certain genes, such as survivin, are repressed by direct association of p53 with their promoters, followed by recruitment of a repressor complex. We show here that p53-mediated negative regulation of transcription could occur independently of apoptosis. In contrast, the amino-terminal transactivation domain of p53 was required for negative regulation of transcription. Similarly, the p53 homologue p73 diminished the expression of survivin and stathmin, depending on its transactivation domain. Mutation of the putative p53 binding site within the survivin promoter did not impair its repression. These observations raised the hypothesis that activation of an effector gene might be required for repression by p53. Strikingly, when the p53-inducible p21/CDKN1A gene was deleted, p53 no longer repressed any one among 11 genes that it down-regulates otherwise. Most of these genes were also repressed by ectopic p21 in the absence of p53. Overexpressed c-Myc reduced the transcription of p21/CDKN1A and impaired p53-mediated repression but did not abolish repression by ectopic p21. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that increased expression of p21/CDKN1A is necessary and sufficient for the negative regulation of gene expression by p53.
School Leaders as Coupling Agents – Mediating Between External Demands and Internal Values

The Swedish education system has undergone an extensive transformation and a new policy context characterised by external control, marketing and managerial accountability is now in place. In previous research, the new context has been presented as something school leaders have to balance against democratic professionalism but eventually give way to. This article intends to make this picture more nuanced by exploring how school leaders make sense of and respond to external demands related to the new policy context. The article takes institutional theory and the concept of coupling – the relationship between the environment of schooling and the participants and practices in local school organisations – as its theoretical starting point. Findings from three compulsory schools show that school leaders make symbolic responses to external demands but also transform these demands to make them fit with norms and values that prevail in their local organisations, thereby preventing neoliberal influences from gaining ascendancy. Substantial changes in practice due to altered understanding were also detected. However, ideas about professional accountability and democratic values still remain the guiding principles and few indications of managerial accountability can be detected.
Rethinking Macroeconomics in the Light of the Financial Crisis

The recent financial crisis showed that mainstream economics was quite unprepared to deal with it. Mainstream macroeconomics failed to envisage even the possibility of a financial crisis like the one that took place in 2008. Even worse, the institutional changes which made the crisis possible were inspired by the neoclassical thought based on the holy trinity of utter competition, rationality and efficiency.In this paper, I start with an example showing how the neoclassical business cycle model does not contribute to the understanding of the recent economic crisis. But the dominance of this approach has deeply damaged the reputation of macroeconomics. So, it is time to question what has gone wrong with it and try to put it right. I argue that, due to the asymmetric behavior of prices and wages, an increase and a fall in aggregate demand require different approaches in macroeconomic theory. It seems much more reasonable to consider separately, on the one hand, the macroeconomics of inflation and, on the other hand, the macroeconomics of recession and depression. This would not be a different situation to the one we have today in physics where to describe the universe physicists employ different theories in different situations. I also argue that macroeconomics has to go back to its roots and recover its original aims and methodology.This discipline was founded by Keynes. So, it seems natural to recover his original ideas as stated in the General Theory, which often differ from the so called Keynesian ones. A central contribution made by Keynes was to focus attention of economics on the economic aggregates. Another main Keynesian contribution is the concept of involuntary unemployment as an equilibrium state. The other key contribution by Keynes has been to identify the crucial role of investment in determining the level of output. Following Keynes´ ideas, Minsky added instability as a normal result of modern financial capitalism and developed his financial fragility theory. His work provides an agenda for policy reforms to attenuate economic fluctuations and avert economic crises. I also survey the contributions made by the different branches of Keynesian thought. In particular, I discuss the New Keynesian approach where unemployment is modeled as a disequilibrium phenomenon due to sticky prices and wages or to coordination failures. Although this approach departs from Keynes´ original definition of involuntary unemployment it allows developing the analysis in a general equilibrium framework, which permits taking into account the interactions across different markets as well as using DSGE models. I argue that sticky prices/wages may be postulated as assumptions in a model in order to represent their minor effect on quantities but economists should remember that this is why the assumption was introduced and not be tempted to argue that price/wage flexibilization may be the panacea to reaching full employment.
Establishing reference samples for detection of somatic mutations and germline variants with NGS technologies

We characterized two reference samples for NGS technologies: a human triple-negative breast cancer cell line and a matched normal cell line. Leveraging several whole-genome sequencing (WGS) platforms, multiple sequencing replicates, and orthogonal mutation detection bioinformatics pipelines, we minimized the potential biases from sequencing technologies, assays, and informatics. Thus, our “truth sets” were defined using evidence from 21 repeats of WGS runs with coverages ranging from 50X to 100X (a total of 140 billion reads). These “truth sets” present many relevant variants/mutations including 193 COSMIC mutations and 9,016 germline variants from the ClinVar database, nonsense mutations in BRCA1/2 and missense mutations in TP53 and FGFR1. Independent validation in three orthogonal experiments demonstrated a successful stress test of the truth set. We expect these reference materials and “truth sets” to facilitate assay development, qualification, validation, and proficiency testing. In addition, our methods can be extended to establish new fully characterized reference samples for the community.
A calibration method for optical see-through head-mounted displays with a depth camera

We propose a fast and accurate calibration method for the optical see-through (OST) head-mounted displays (HMD), taking advantage of a low-cost time-of-flight depth-camera. Recently, affordable OST-HMDs and depth-cameras are widely appearing in the commercial market. In order to correctly reflect the user experience into the calibration process, our method demands a user wearing the HMD to repeatedly point at rendered virtual circles with their fingertips. From the repeated calibration data, we perform two stages of full calibration and simplified calibration, to compute key calibration parameters. The full calibration is required when the depth-camera is first installed to the HMD, and afterwards only the simplified calibration is performed whenever a user wears it again. Our experimental results show that the full and simplified calibration can be achieved with 10 and 5 user's repetitions (theoretically 3 and 2 at minimum), which are significantly less than about 20 of the stereo-SPAAM, one of the most popular existing calibration techniques. We also demonstrate that the 3D position errors of our calibration become much quickly smaller than those of the state-of-the-art method.
Covering racial political issues in Malaysia: The effect of news frames on readers’ thoughts

This paper seeks to investigate the prevalence of four media frames as identified in an earlier study of Malaysian newspapers with regard to a racial-political issue. This study likewise surveys the audience frames to explore the extent to which media frames influence readers’ perception on the issue. A comparative content analysis of news articles on Teoh Beng Hock’s death was conducted on the New Straits Times, Sin Chew Daily, Utusan Malaysia and Malaysia Kini from 17 July 2009 to end of July 2010. Meanwhile, a survey on 400 readers of the four newspapers was carried out. The result showed that all newspapers favoured the policy/action frame in reporting the issue, followed by the conflict, human interest and attribution of responsibility/blame frames. Meanwhile, the audience frames echoed that of the media frames but differed in terms of sequence.
Time-varying effects of fiscal policy in Spain: a Markov-switching approach

ABSTRACT How have the effects of Spanish fiscal policy varied over time? Given this starting point, in this article we analyse the regime dependence of fiscal policy in Spain by estimating a vector autoregressive model within a Markov-switching framework. Our results indicate that Spain’s membership of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is the most likely source of time variation in the fiscal outcomes. Accordingly, increases in the primary deficit-to-GDP ratio do not succeed in stimulating economic activity in the first regime; rather, unexpected upsurges in the primary deficit harm economic activity (non-Keynesian effect) in the second regime, which prevails since the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty.
Detection of Emerging Technologies for Field Effect Transistors: A Citation-Based Analysis

Field Effect Transistors (FET) are used as switching and amplifying devices due to their fast switching and voltage blocking capabilities, and are important as energyefficient devices. However, no academic landscape of FET exists. In this study, we investigated the existence of academic publications in relation to this field by analyzing the citation network of papers published in academic journals. Using a topological-based method, all the papers were categorized into clusters based on their own specific topics. We categorized all the papers into clusters, and found some rapidly developing research domains. To compare the research situation of each country, a matrix was created. Based on the data, 11 countries are classified into three categories that focus on the 'Emerging technology area', 'Intermediate technology area' or 'Mature technology area'. As a result, the share of the Emerging technology area of Japan is lower than that of the Intermediate technology area and the Mature technology area. This is partly because big discoveries by Japanese researchers, for example, conducting polymer, have a huge impact on Japanese research policy and make policy makers focus on Japanese-dominated research fields. This may indicate that policymakers should pay more attention to non-Japan-dominated research fields.
How Wearable Sensors Can Support Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis and Treatment: A Systematic Review

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common and disabling pathology that is characterized by both motor and non-motor symptoms and affects millions of people worldwide. The disease significantly affects quality of life of those affected. Many works in literature discuss the effects of the disease. The most promising trends involve sensor devices, which are low cost, low power, unobtrusive, and accurate in the measurements, for monitoring and managing the pathology. Objectives: This review focuses on wearable devices for PD applications and identifies five main fields: early diagnosis, tremor, body motion analysis, motor fluctuations (ON–OFF phases), and home and long-term monitoring. The concept is to obtain an overview of the pathology at each stage of development, from the beginning of the disease to consider early symptoms, during disease progression with analysis of the most common disorders, and including management of the most complicated situations (i.e., motor fluctuations and long-term remote monitoring). Data sources: The research was conducted within three databases: IEEE Xplore®, Science Direct®, and PubMed Central®, between January 2006 and December 2016. Study eligibility criteria: Since 1,429 articles were found, accurate definition of the exclusion criteria and selection strategy allowed identification of the most relevant papers. Results: Finally, 136 papers were fully evaluated and included in this review, allowing a wide overview of wearable devices for the management of Parkinson's disease.
MPPM: Malware propagation and prevention model in online SNS

With the pervasiveness of online social network service (SNS), many people express their views and share information with others on them, and the information propagation model of online SNS has attracted considerable interest recently. However, the flourish of information propagation model in online SNS still faces many challenges, especially considering more and more malicious software's propagation in SNS. In this paper, we proposed a malware propagation and prevention model based on the propagation probability model, called MPPM, for online SNS. With this model, we can describe the relationships among malware propagation, habits of users and malware detection in online SNS. In specific, based on characteristics of online SNS, we define users' states and the rules of malware propagation with dynamics of infectious disease; then, we introduce the detection factor to affect the propagation of malwares, and present the malwares propagation and prevention in online SNS by dynamic evolution equations; finally, we analyze the factors which influence the malware propagation in online SNS. Detailed analysis and simulation demonstrate that the MPPM model can precisely describe the process of malware's propagation and prevention in online SNS.
Activation of ERK signaling upon alternative protease nexin‐1 internalization mediated by syndecan‐1

Protease nexin‐1 (PN‐1), an inhibitor of serine proteases, contributes to tissue homeostasis and influences the behavior of some tumor cells. The internalization of PN‐1 protease complexes is considered to be mediated by the low‐density lipoprotein receptor related protein 1 (LRP1). In this study, both wild‐type and LRP1−/− mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEF) were shown to internalize PN‐1. Receptor associated protein (RAP) interfered with PN‐1 uptake only in wild‐type MEF cells, indicating that another receptor mediates PN‐1 uptake in the absence of LRP1. In LRP1−/− MEF cells, inhibitor sensitivity and kinetic values (t1/2 at 45 min) of PN‐1 uptake showed a similarity to syndecan‐1‐mediated endocytosis. In these cells, PN‐1 uptake was increased by overexpression of full‐length syndecan‐1 and decreased by RNA interference targeting this proteoglycan. Most important, in contrast to PKA activation known to be triggered by LRP1‐mediated internalization, our study shows that syndecan‐1‐mediated internalization of PN‐1 stimulated the Ras‐ERK signaling pathway. J. Cell. Biochem. 99: 936–951, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Hybrid neural systems for pattern recognition in artificial noses

This work examines the use of Hybrid Intelligent Systems in the pattern recognition system of an artificial nose. The connectionist approaches Multi-Layer Perceptron and Time Delay Neural Networks, and the hybrid approaches Feature-Weighted Detector and Evolving Neural Fuzzy Networks were investigated. A Wavelet Filter is evaluated as a preprocessing method for odor signals. The signals generated by an artificial nose were composed by an array of conducting polymer sensors and exposed to two different odor databases.
Ultrastructure, characteristic features and occurrence of Nosema leptinotarsae Lipa, 1968, a microsporidian pathogen of Leptinotarsa decemlineata (Coleoptera, Chrysomelidae)

This paper presents the ultrastructure and characteristic features of Nosema leptinotarsae infecting L. decemlineata collected in Trabzon (Turkey). Fresh spores are oval, 4.69 ± 0.19 μm in length and 2.43 ± 0.12 μm in width (n = 50). The spore wall is thick and measures 180 to 250 nm and consists of a clear endospore (130 to 170 nm) and an electron-dense, uniform exospore (50 to 80 nm). The polar filament is isofilar and has 15–16 coils. The well-developed polaroplast has a lamellated structure with thin lamellae. The ultrastructural features of Nosema leptinotarsae differ from those of other microsporidia infecting chrysomelids.
The relationship between tuberculin response, BCG vaccine scar and asthma.

Recent studies have proposed that a decline in bacterial infections such as tuberculosis is a factor underlying the rising prevalence and severity of atopic disorder in developed countries. There are conflicting ideas about the inverse relationship between BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin) vaccination and asthma. Stronger response to tuberculin test as an indicator of more potent TH1 response is supposed to influence TH2 modulated allergic reactions. BCG scar considered as an indicator of TH1 - immunoresponse has been proposed to be smaller in asthmatic children in some studies.In a case-control study, 97 asthmatic and 97 control children younger than 5 years of age and BCG vaccinated at birth were tested with 5 units of tuberculin intradermaly. After 48-72 hours, the indurated area was measured in two diameters. Mean while, the scar of BCG in both groups was measured. Severity of asthma in the case group was recorded and categorized into mild, moderate and severe groups. The case group consisted of 63% boys and 37% girls and their tuberculin response was significantly smaller than that of the control (p=0.000), but no data supported the inverse relationship between the tuberculin response and severity of asthma (p=0.113). The scar of BCG was not significantly different in the asthmatic children with variable severity of asthma and control group (p=0.864). Children with definite asthma had a significant weaker response to tuberculin. This might be an indication of less potent TH1-reponse in allergic patients, but it was not associated with severity of asthma. No significant relationship between the size of BCG scar and asthma or its severity was found so perhaps BCG scar is not a sensitive indicator for development of asthma in future.
A pure software ldpc decoder on a multi-core processor platform with reduced inter-processor communication cost

As an error correction code, Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code has been widely used in various communication standards such as WiMAX and DVB-S2. But these continuously-evolving communication standards and the high development cost and low-flexibility of hardwired ASIC solutions have pushed LDPC researchers to turn to more cost-efficient and flexible implementation, and thus the multi-core processor based implementation of LDPC decoder is gaining increasing attention in the last few years. However, the performance of the multi-core processor based implementation is far below the hardwired ASICs, with one of the key reasons that the cost of communication between processors is very high. Three approaches are proposed in this paper to reduce the communication cost, including: optimized algorithm partitioning to reduce communication traffic, utilizing imbalanced communication between tasks to optimize mapping and reduce overall communication distance, and simplified data sending-receiving mechanism to reduce the cost of identifying received data. By using these approaches, the communication time of the proposed implementation of LDPC decoder only accounts for 12.2% of total decoding time, which generally occupies 50% decoding time in the previously reported LDPC decoders on multi-core processors. And our work can achieve better throughput performance under the same hardware condition compared with other state-of-the-art works.