Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved culture methods to expand schwann cells with altered growth behaviour from CMT1A patients

A duplication of the gene for myelin protein PMP22 is by far the most common cause of the hereditary demyelinating neuropathy CMT1A. A role for PMP22 in cell growth in addition to its function as a myelin protein has been suggested because PMP22 is homologous to a gene specifically upregulated during growth arrest. Furthermore, transfected rat Schwann cells overexpressing PMP22 show reduced growth. In addition, abnormal Schwann cell differentiation has been described in nerve biopsies from CMT1A patients. To analyse whether the duplication of the PMP22 gene in CMT1A neuropathy primarily alters Schwann cell differentiation and to exclude nonspecific secondary responses, we improved human Schwann cell culturing. This allowed us long‐term passaging of human Schwann cells with unchanged phenotype, assessed by expression of different Schwann cell markers. Subsequently we established Schwann cell cultures from CMT1A nerve biopsies. We find decreased proliferation of Schwann cells from different CMT1A patients in all passages. We also demonstrate PMP22 mRNA overexpression in cultured CMT1A Schwann cells. We conclude that decreased proliferation in cultured Schwann cells that carry the CMT1A duplication indicates abnormal differentiation of CMT1A Schwann cells. The identification of an abnormal phenotype of CMT1A Schwann cells in culture could possibly lead to an in vitro disease model. GLIA 23:89–98, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Perceptual Frames of Reference and Two-Dimensional Shape Recognition: Further Examination of Internal Axes

Three experiments on the perception of simple four-sided two-dimensional shapes are reported. In the first experiment subjects were given a paper-and-pencil test in which they had to consider each of a set of shapes in turn. They were instructed to draw in what they considered to be the most salient axis of each of the shapes ie a line that they felt most naturally went with the shape. The results showed a significant tendency to draw an axis of symmetry if one was present. However, when presented with instances of a shape that was elongated but possessed no symmetries they failed to consistently draw any particular axis. A further, speeded classification, task revealed that for this shape explicit axis information appeared not to influence performance. In contrast, such information clearly affected performance with a shape that did possess a salient axis of symmetry and elongation. Indeed this axis was shown to be integral with the contour of the shape when a final classification experiment was carried out. The axis of elongation of the other shape acted as a characteristic which was separable from the contour. The results are discussed in relation to accounts of shape perception which assume that a necessary stage in the perception of shape is the derivation of an axis-based structural description.
Rehabilitation exercise monitoring device for knee osteoarthritis patients

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a joint disease that causes disability and joint irritation. Knee OA is known to be one of the most common OA type that happen in patient. The safest treatment to reduce the pain is by having the rehabilitation exercises. Normally, patients of knee OA will undergo prescribed physical activity treatment in the hospital using sophisticated and expensive rehabilitation equipment with monitoring by specialist. Another alternative is to conduct the rehabilitation exercises at home. However, improper exercise movement may cause further injury to the patient when doing it at home. In this project a rehabilitation exercise monitoring device for knee OA is proposed. Two accelerometers are used to obtain the data of body motion from the thigh and shank. Arduino is used to process the signal obtain from the accelerometers for exercise classification and detection of incorrect exercise movement with the use LEDs as indicators. Subject conducted two types of exercise which include the Short Arc Exercise (SAE) and Straight Leg Raise (SLR) to test the detection accuracy of the system. The system was able to detect both SAE and SLR exercises with 100% accuracy. However, the system was only able to detect improper exercises movement for SAE (100%) but with a lower accuracy to detect for SLR exercise, showing the lowest accuracy for subject A when the hip joint external rotation movement was out of the allowable range and when knee is not fully extended. Lastly, the average angle for improper exercises movement was able to determine with some variation angle for each error label. By implementing the rehabilitation monitoring system, specialist are able to monitor (offline) the performance of their patient when conducting the rehabilitation activities at home and the patient will able to get feedback their exercise movement.
An idiographic study into the physiology and selfreported mental workload of learning to drive a car

A driving instructor has to monitor the performance and state (e.g. mental work load) of the pupil who is learning to drive. However, the instructor is also responsible for road safety. Therefore, it might be beneficial when additional monitoring technology would be available to the driving instructor. Fluctuations in skin conductance are indicative of changes in the autonomic nervous system and have been operationalized as changes in stress or mental workload. For the present idiographic study six pupils were followed during their driving training, while measuring their self-reported (and by their driving instructor) workload and their skin conductance levels (with a wrist-worn bio-sensor). The quality of the physiological measurements was acceptable in most cases. Most students showed their highest physiological values 3-7 lessons before their final exam. The driving instructor was good at predicting the self-reported workload of her pupils. Importantly, there was no correlation between physiological fluctuations and fluctuations in self-reported workload. This makes skin conductance measurement unsuitable to replace subjective workload assessments. The physiological data did provide first evidence that a modular driving instruction methodology, with several partial exams, seems to prevent extremely high physiological activity during the final exam.
Distinguishing Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy From Idiopathic Right Ventricular Outflow Tract Tachycardia with T-wave Alternans

Background:The 2 predominant etiologies of right ventricular tachycardia (VT) are arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) and idiopathic VT arising from the right ventricular outflow tract. Discrimination between these 2 entities is critical, as their prognoses and therapeutic options differ. The microvolt T-wave alternans (TWA) is widely used to predict lethal ventricular arrhythmias in various diseases. However, the clinical significance of TWA in patients with VT originating from the right ventricle has been unknown. This study aims to investigate the possible role of TWA to discriminate ARVC from idiopathic right ventricular outflow tract tachycardia (RVOT-VT). Methods:This study enrolled 38 patients (23 male, 43 ± 16 years) with VT originating from the right ventricle. TWA was measured during exercise testing using the modified moving average method. TWA results were compared among patients with ARVC and RVOT-VT. Results:Twenty-five patients (16 male, 42 ± 16 years) met the Task Force criteria for the diagnosis of ARVC, and 13 patients (7 male, 45 ± 14 years) had idiopathic RVOT-VT. Twenty patients with ARVC had positive TWA test, whereas only 1 patient with RVOT-VT had (80% versus 8%, P < 0.001). Conclusions:In patients with VT of right ventricle origin, positive TWA test supports the diagnosis of ARVC.
Development of genome-wide PCR-based markers from insertion, deletion and single nucleotide polymorphisms for closely related Japanese rice cultivars and identification of QTLs for the appearance of cooked rice and polished rice

Appearance of rice grain is an important property, affecting its acceptance by consumers. Moreover, appearance is a complex characteristic involving many components, including glossiness and whiteness. The genetic bases for the glossiness of cooked rice and the whiteness of polished rice (WPR) were determined using 133 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from a cross between two closely related cultivars from Hokkaido, Joiku462, with high glossiness and whiteness, and Yukihikari, an ancestor of Joiku462 with low glossiness and whiteness. Analyses identified 167 genome-wide InDel markers, five cleaved amplified polymorphic sequences (CAPS) and eight derived CAPS markers differentiating the parental lines. The glossiness area (GLA) and glossiness strength (GLS) of cooked rice and WPR were determined for RILs in two locations, Pippu and Sapporo, Hokkaido. Four QTLs were detected. qGLA10 and qGLS9 were detected on chromosomes 10 and 9, respectively, with both being significant at both geographic locations. qWPR1 on chromosome 1 was significant at Pippu, and qWPR4 on chromosome 4 was significant at Sapporo. The Joiku462 alleles at all QTLs increased each trait. The PCR-based markers flanking these four QTLs may be useful for improvement of GLA, GLS and WPR.
Análisis del grado de diversión e intención de persistencia en jóvenes deportistas desde la perspectiva de la teoría de la autodeterminación

El presente estudio, a traves de la perspectiva de la Teoria de la Autodeterminacion, tiene por objetivo establecer las relaciones que existen entre los niveles de autodeterminacion y de satisfacion con las necesidades psicologicas basicas respecto a la diversion y la intencion de persistencia mostrada en la practica de deportes de equipo. Participaron en el estudio 1007 jugadores de futbol, baloncesto, balonmano y voleibol, tanto de genero masculino como femenino y con edades comprendidas entre los 11 y los 16 anos. Los resultados mostraron que las necesidades psicologicas basicas tenian una mayor relacion y capacidad predictiva que el nivel de autodeterminacion, sobre la diversion e intencion de persistencia. Concretamente, la percepcion de relaciones sociales y de competencia se mostraron como los principales predictores de esas dos variables. Como conclusion, se destaca la necesidad de fomentar la satisfacion de las necesidades psicologicas basicas, especialmente las relaciones sociales y competencia, lo que llevaria consigo mayores sensaciones de diversion y una mayor intencion de persistencia en la practica deportiva.
Sevelamer carbonate for the treatment of hyperphosphatemia in patients with kidney failure (CKD III – V)

Importance of the field: Altered mineral metabolism in chronic kidney disease (CKD) is associated with increased morbidity, mortality, hospitalization, cost of care and reduced quality of life. Phosphorus control, one component of CKD metabolic derangements, is potentially related to impaired outcomes and has significant room for improvement. Areas covered in this review: Historical, present and future aspects of treatment of hyperphosphatemia focusing on sevelamer hydrochloride and sevelamer carbonate. What the reader will gain: Comprehensive insight into the background and controversies regarding phosphate binders. Take home message: While calcium-free phosphate binders with a sevelamer backbone may offer therapeutic advantages for CKD patients at risk, more studies comprising significant patient numbers are warranted to answer compelling clinical questions.
Quality-energy aware adaptation for mobile streaming clients

Energy saving is an important requirement for any mobile devices. Meanwhile, streaming is one of the most popular services via mobile devices now. In this paper, we study the dependence of consumed power on adapted video bitrates. A novel adaptation method is then presented to balance the requirements for high video quality and low power consumption.
Word Transduction for Addressing the OOV Problem in Machine Translation for Similar Resource-Scarce Languages

A recently proposed encoding for non-crossing digraphs can be used to implement generic inference over families of these digraphs and to carry out ﬁrst-order factored dependency parsing. It is now shown that the recent proposal can be substantially streamlined without information loss. The improved encoding is less dependent on hierarchical processing and it gives rise to a high-coverage bounded-depth approximation of the space of non-crossing digraphs. This subset is presented elegantly by a ﬁnite-state machine that recognizes an inﬁnite set of encoded graphs. The set includes more than 99.99% of the 0.6 million noncrossing graphs obtained from the UDv2 treebanks through planari-sation. Rather than taking the low probability of the residual as a ﬂat rate, it can be modelled with a joint probability distribution that is factorised into two underlying stochastic processes – the sentence length distribution and the related conditional distribution for deep nesting . This model points out that deep nesting in the streamlined code requires extreme sentence lengths. High depth is categori-cally out in common sentence lengths but emerges slowly at infrequent lengths that prompt further inquiry.
Beyond Prediction: Towards Automatic Intervention in MOOC Student Stop-out

High attrition rates in massive open online courses (MOOCs) have motivated growing interest in the automatic detection of student "stopout". Stopout classifiers can be used to orchestrate an intervention before students quit, and to survey students dynamically about why they ceased participation. In this paper we expand on existing stop-out detection research by (1) exploring important elements of classifier design such as generalizability to new courses; (2) developing a novel framework inspired by control theory for how to use a classifier's outputs to make intelligent decisions; and (3) presenting results from a "dynamic survey intervention" conducted on 2 HarvardX MOOCs, containing over 40,000 students, in early 2015. Our results suggest that surveying students based on an automatic stopout classifier achieves higher response rates compared to traditional post-course surveys, and may boost students' propensity to "come back" into the course.
Molecular Interactions between the Specialist Herbivore Manduca sexta ( Lepidoptera , Sphingidae ) and Its Natural Host Nicotiana attenuata . IV . Insect-Induced Ethylene Reduces Jasmonate-Induced Nicotine Accumulation by Regulating Putrescine N-Methyltransferase Transcripts 1 , 2

Attack by the specialist herbivore, Manduca sexta, on its native host Nicotiana attenuata Torr. ex Wats. produces a dramatic ethylene release, a jasmonate burst, and a suppression of the nicotine accumulation that results from careful simulations of the herbivore’s damage. Methyl-jasmonate (MeJA) treatment induces nicotine biosynthesis. However, this induction can be suppressed by ethylene as pretreatment of plants with 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP), a competitive inhibitor of ethylene receptors, restores the full MeJA-induced nicotine response in herbivore attacked plants (J. Kahl, D.H. Siemens, R.J. Aerts, R. Gäbler, F. Kühnemann, C.A. Preston, I.T. Baldwin [2000] Planta 210: 336–342). To understand whether this herbivoreinduced signal cross-talk occurs at the level of transcript accumulation, we cloned the putrescine methyltransferase genes (NaPMT1 and NaPMT2) of N. attenuata, which are thought to represent the rate limiting step in nicotine biosynthesis, and measured transcript accumulations by northern analysis after various jasmonate, 1-MCP, ethephon, and herbivory treatments. Transcripts of both root putrescine N-methyltransferase (PMT) genes and nicotine accumulation increased dramatically within 10 h of shoot MeJA treatment and immediately after root treatments. Root ethephon treatments suppressed this response, which could be reversed by 1-MCP pretreatment. Moreover, 1-MCP pretreatment dramatically amplified the transcript accumulation resulting from both wounding and M. sexta herbivory. We conclude that attack from this nicotinetolerant specialist insect causes N. attenuata to produce ethylene, which directly suppresses the nitrogen-intensive biosynthesis of nicotine.
Multi-level Feedback Web Links Selection Problem: Learning and Optimization

Selecting the right web links for a website is important because appropriate links not only can provide high attractiveness but can also increase the website's revenue. In this work, we first show that web links have an intrinsic multi-level feedback structure. For example, consider a 2-level feedback web link: the 1st level feedback provides the Click-Through Rate (CTR) and the 2nd level feedback provides the potential revenue, which collectively produce the compound 2-level revenue. We consider the context-free links selection problem of selecting links for a homepage so as to maximize the total compound 2-level revenue while keeping the total 1st level feedback above a preset threshold. We further generalize the problem to links with n (n ≥ 2)-level feedback structure. The key challenge is that the links' multi-level feedback structures are unobservable unless the links are selected on the homepage. To our best knowledge, we are the first to model the links selection problem as a constrained multi-armed bandit problem and design an effective links selection algorithm by learning the links' multi-level structure with provable sub-linear regret and violation bounds. We uncover the multi-level feedback structures of web links in two real-world datasets. We also conduct extensive experiments on the datasets to compare our proposed LExp algorithm with two state-of-the-art context-free bandit algorithms and demonstrate that LExp algorithm is the most effective in links selection while satisfying the constraint.
The four horses of an Iron Age apocalypse: war-horses from the third-century weapon sacrifice at Illerup Aadal (Denmark)

The Illerup Aadal weapon sacrifice mirrors the material world of a Germanic army from c. AD 210. Apart from the personal equipment and the weaponry of more than 400 warriors, it comprises four horses. The present paper gives the first conclusive analysis of the skeletal remains of these animals, involving osteological investigation and strontium isotope analysis. The results shed new light on the character of the sacrificial ceremonies which unfolded in the aftermath of Iron Age battles; on the nature of cavalry and its significance in Iron Age warfare; and on the much debated question as to where the army of Illerup Aadal had originally come from.
Improving Event Causality Recognition with Multiple Background Knowledge Sources Using Multi-Column Convolutional Neural Networks

We propose a method for recognizing such event causalities as "smoke cigarettes" → "die of lung cancer" using background knowledge taken from web texts as well as original sentences from which candidates for the causalities were extracted. We retrieve texts related to our event causality candidates from four billion web pages by three distinct methods, including a why-question answering system, and feed them to our multi-column convolutional neural networks. This allows us to identify the useful background knowledge scattered in web texts and effectively exploit the identified knowledge to recognize event causalities. We empirically show that the combination of our neural network architecture and background knowledge significantly improves average precision, while the previous state-of-the-art method gains just a small benefit from such background knowledge.
Gene therapy for human immunodeficiency virus infection in the humanized SCID mouse model.

BACKGROUND The humanized SCID mouse model is an attractive tool for testing gene therapy to combat human immunodeficiency virus infection in vivo. OBJECTIVES To devise a more specific gene therapy directed against HIV, replacing the formerly used interferon with either soluble CD4 molecule immunoadhesin (sCD4-IgG) and/or anti-gp41 monoclonal antibody (2F5), or HIV-negative transdominants genes (Tat, Rev). METHODS Human monocytoid cell line (U937) was transfected with IFN alpha, beta or gamma genes. 3T3 murine fibroblastic cell line was transfected with sCD4-IgG or 2F5, or both genes, and a human T4 cell line (CEM) was grafted to SCID mice. Negative transdominant genes (Tat, Rev or both) were also transduced in CEM T cell line. Animals were then challenged with HIV-1, Viral load was followed. RESULTS IFN alpha or beta were potent anti-HIV, reducing viral load in vivo and inhibiting reverse transcriptase activity in human-removed cells from animals. sCD4-IgG immunoadhesin and gp41 monoclonal antibody resulted in a dramatic reduction of HIV-1 cellular and plasmatic viral load in humanized SCID mice. The simultaneous introduction of negative Tat and Rev genes resulted in a synergistic inhibition of HIV-1 replication in vivo. CONCLUSIONS Despite the marked reduction of HIV-1 propagation by IFN genes or by negative Tat and Rev transdominants, the gene therapy using soluble CD4 immunoadhesin or anti-gp41 was a more efficient preventive treatment against HIV infection.
A history of tendon operations.

The pendulum of arguments and popular operations swings back and forth, anchored to the problem of tendon healing and adhesions. The following passage, commenting on tendon repairs done by a famous 17th century surgeon, from the Course of Chirurgical Operations by Dionis in 1710, has relevance for history and the future of tendon operations. When M. Bienaise, one of the most famous Chirurgeons of Paris, began the Performance of this Operation about fifty years past, it pass'd for his Invention; of which he reap'd all the Honor and it all the Charms of Novelty; but on Examination it appearing that it had been talk'd about two thousand years before he hit on it, it was consequently discover'd he only reviv'd an Ancient Practice of the Greeks, and that Guido and several others had practised it. 'Tis indeed true, twas grown obsolete, he brought it into use again, and we are oblig'd to him for having try'd it on his Dogs, after that employ'd on Men, and then encouraging us to the performance of an Operation which prevents the laming of a great many wounded patients.
A compact vision system for road vehicle guidance

An intelligent cruise control system for automatic vehicle guidance on German 'autobahnen' is discussed. Recent developments have focused on the vision system, which has reached a new level of performance, compactness and robustness by the use of high performance computers. The system has been integrated in VaMP, the autonomous vehicle of UBM. Extensive test driving on German, French and Danish 'autobahnen' has been performed. Finally, a long-distance ride from Munich (Germany) to Odense (Denmark) is discussed.