Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Found in translation: preclinical stroke research predicts human pathophysiology, clinical phenotypes, and therapeutic outcomes.

Stroke presents a major global burden to patients, their relatives, and whole economies.1 Worldwide intense efforts are being undertaken to understand the pathobiology of stroke and to develop novel, effective treatments. This has led to the discovery of a plethora of preclinically promising treatment strategies,2 but intravenous thrombolysis remains the only specific pharmacological treatment with proven efficacy in acute ischemic stroke.3 Apparently, of several hundred controlled clinical trials4 aiming to protect the brain against ischemia (neuroprotection) with compounds previously found effective in animal experiments, not a single one has led to the regulatory approval of a drug for this indication. Many pharmaceutical companies have, therefore, stopped developing treatments for this devastating disease, and nihilism is spreading in the field. A roadblock seems to exist between bench and bedside, preventing the translation of highly effective preclinical neuroprotectants into the clinical realm.5 Despite the prevailing mantra of translational medicine,6 other fields report similar problems when making the preclinical-to-clinical transition. Much has been speculated about the reasons underlying the translational roadblock, and the phrase lost in translation has entered the titles of numerous biomedical publications. In this article, we propose that contrary to current opinion, preclinical stroke research can indeed predict clinical outcomes and phenotypes. Numerous neuroprotectants were reported as lost in translation (Figure 1A), but there is reason to argue that the clinical trials were based on rather weak preclinical evidence, and that many pathophysiological principles and therapies were actually discovered in translation (Figure 1B). We propose that there is little reason for nihilism. We present a concise list of potential improvements that may help to reduce the current attrition rate of bench-to-bedside translation, even in neuroprotection. Stroke may even serve as a model disease because our analysis may apply to other fields where development of …
Understanding and Preventing Teacher Burnout: Teacher Burnout from a Social-Cognitive Perspective: A Theoretical Position Paper

The chapters in this volume by Miller, Smylie, and Woods reflect a sociological approach to understanding the burnout phenomenon. This view implies that the objective situation has changed for the worse for teachers who increasingly experience constraints on the job – for example, intensification of teaching, compliance with administrative regulations, conflicts with parents and supervisors, and unmotivated students. To balance this sociological view, we have decided to compose a psychological position paper that focuses on the responses of the individual teacher to this situation. Thus, we have chosen the opposite extreme to shed some light on the issue. This does not necessarily mean that the blame is put on the teacher when he or she suffers from burnout. Rather, our theory tries to explain why there are individual differences and why not all teachers become victims of a school-system-induced burnout syndrome. There is ample evidence that teachers, in the course of their careers, experience a great deal of stress that may result in depressed mood, exhaustion, poor performance, and attitude and personality changes, which, in turn, may lead to illness and premature retirement. In some societies or school systems, this might occur nowadays more often than in the past (see chapters by Miller, Smylie, and Woods, this volume). The label “burnout” has been suggested for this phenomenon, and clinical observations have been made and empirical research has been conducted for more than two decades (for an overview, see Byrne, this volume).
Isolation and characterization of the TIM10 homologue from the yeast Pichia sorbitophila: a putative component of the mitochondrial protein import system

The Saccharomyces cerevisiae TIM10 gene encodes one of the few essential mitochondrial proteins that are required for the import of nuclear‐encoded precursor proteins from the cytosol and their subsequent sorting into the different mitochondrial compartments. We have isolated and characterized a putative homologue of TIM10 from the halotolerant yeast Pichia sorbitophila. The Pichia TIM10 gene encodes a protein of 90 amino acids with 66% identity to S. cerevisiae Tim10p. It was capable of suppressing the temperature sensitivity of tim10‐1 mutant in S. cerevisiae, suggesting that Pichia TIM10 is both a functional and structural homologue of S. cerevisiae TIM10. The putative Pichia TIM10 gene product contains all the four conserved cysteine residues and the two CX3C motifs typical of the Tim family proteins in the mitochondrial intermembrane space. Using anti‐Tim10p serum, Western blots detected a protein of about 10 kDa, suggesting that the Pichia Tim10p is a mitochondrial protein. The results suggest that mitochondrial import and sorting systems might be also strongly conserved in other fungi. The coding sequence of the P. sorbitophila TIM10 has been deposited in the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database under Accession No. AJ243940. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Beyond Bilinear: Generalized Multimodal Factorized High-Order Pooling for Visual Question Answering

Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging, because it requires a simultaneous understanding of both visual content of images and textual content of questions. To support the VQA task, we need to find good solutions for the following three issues: 1) fine-grained feature representations for both the image and the question; 2) multimodal feature fusion that is able to capture the complex interactions between multimodal features; and 3) automatic answer prediction that is able to consider the complex correlations between multiple diverse answers for the same question. For fine-grained image and question representations, a “coattention” mechanism is developed using a deep neural network (DNN) architecture to jointly learn the attentions for both the image and the question, which can allow us to reduce the irrelevant features effectively and obtain more discriminative features for image and question representations. For multimodal feature fusion, a generalized multimodal factorized high-order pooling approach (MFH) is developed to achieve more effective fusion of multimodal features by exploiting their correlations sufficiently, which can further result in superior VQA performance as compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. For answer prediction, the Kullback–Leibler divergence is used as the loss function to achieve precise characterization of the complex correlations between multiple diverse answers with the same or similar meaning, which can allow us to achieve faster convergence rate and obtain slightly better accuracy on answer prediction. A DNN architecture is designed to integrate all these aforementioned modules into a unified model for achieving superior VQA performance. With an ensemble of our MFH models, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale VQA data sets and win the runner-up in VQA Challenge 2017.
In vivo high spatiotemporal resolution visualization of circulating T lymphocytes in high endothelial venules of lymph nodes

Abstract. Lymph nodes (LN) are major checkpoints for circulating T lymphocytes to recognize foreign antigens collected from peripheral tissue. High endothelial venule (HEV) in LN facilitates the effective transmigration of circulating T lymphocytes from the blood into LN. There have been many efforts to visualize T lymphocytes trafficking across HEV to understand the underlying mechanism. However, due to insufficient spatiotemporal resolution and the lack of an in vivo labeling method, clear visualization of dynamic behaviors of rapidly flowing T lymphocytes in HEV and their transmigration have been difficult. In this work, we adapted a custom-designed video-rate laser scanning confocal microscopy system to track individual flowing T lymphocytes in the HEV in real time in vivo. We demonstrate that the HEVs in LN can be clearly identified in vivo with its distinctive cuboidal morphology of endothelial cells fluorescently labeled by intravenously injected anti-CD31 antibody conjugated with Alexa fluorophore. By visualizing the adaptively transferred T lymphocytes, we successfully analyzed dynamic flowing behaviors of T lymphocytes and their transendothelial migration while interacting with the endothelial cells in HEV.
Paradoxical Potentiation of Neuronal T-Type Ca2+ Current by ATP at Resting Membrane Potential

Despite the marked influence on neuronal physiology of the low-voltage activated T-type Ca2+ currents, little is known about the intracellular pathways and neurotransmitters involved in their regulations. Here, we report that in thalamocortical neurons a phosphorylation mechanism induces an increase both in the current amplitude (1.5 ± 0.27-fold in the ventrobasal nucleus) and its inactivation kinetics. Dialysis of the neuron with an ATP-free solution suppresses the T-current potentiation, whereas it becomes irreversible in the presence of ATPγS. Phosphorylation occurs when the channels are inactivated and is slowly removed when they recover from inactivation and remain in closed states (time constants of the induction and removal of the potentiation: 579 ± 143 msec and 4.9 ± 1.1 sec, respectively, at 25°C). The resulting apparent voltage sensitivity of this regulation follows the voltage dependence of the current steady-state inactivation. Thus, the current is paradoxically inhibited when the preceding hyperpolarization is lengthened, and maximal currents are generated after transient hyperpolarizations with a duration (0.7-1.5 sec) that is defined by the balance between the kinetics of the dephosphorylation and deinactivation. In addition, the phosphorylation will facilitate the generation of T current at resting membrane potential. This potentiation, which is specific to sensory thalamocortical neurons, would markedly influence the electroresponsiveness of these neurons and represent the first evidence of a regulation of native Cav3.1 channels.
Relationship of age to TSH response to TRH in depressed men

The relationship between age and TSH response to TRH was studied in 40 men with unipolar major depressive disorder (range 24–65 years, mean 44.7 years) and 36 healthy male volunteers of similar ages. Both groups were subdivided into younger and older than 40 years of age. “Blunted” TSH response to TRH was observed in 58% of depressed men and in 28% of controls, using a dTSH maximum of ≤ 6 μU/ml as a cut‐off criterion. Older healthy men had a higher blunting rate (40%) than the younger group (19%). In depressed patients, by contrast, the blunting rate was 50% in the older group and 65% in the younger group. Higher mean maximum dTSH, higher basal TSH and lower mean circulating FT4 levels were also noted in older depressed men, suggestive of a subtle thyroid subsensitivity to TSH stimulation and subclinical primary hypothyroidism that may have contributed to the depression. Age is known to be a confounder of TRH test results. There may be a subset of depressed patients over 40 where the confounding effect of age is associated with an exaggerated, rather than decreased TSH response to TRH.
Glochidium metamorphosis in the endangered freshwater mussel Margaritifera auricularia (Spengler, 1793): A histological and scanning electron microscopy study

The metamorphosis of the glochidium of the critically endangered Margaritifera auricularia in the gills of a host is studied here for the first time. Siberian sturgeon, Acipenser baeri, were infected with glochidia and regularly inspected using scanning and optical microscopy. The mature glochidia immediately attach to the epithelium of the sturgeon gill filaments, piercing the secondary lamellae and the connective tissues, blood cells, and vessels within the lamellae. Once the epithelium is pierced, overlapping host lamellae cover the glochidium and form a cyst. Metamorphosis takes place inside the cyst. Sixteen days after infection the glochidium becomes spherical in shape and the larval muscle is reabsorbed. The two adductor muscles of the juvenile are observed 34 days after infection at 16–20°C. Metamorphosis is complete in approximately 51 days at 18–22°C and in 65 days at 16–17°C. Released juveniles have a spherical shell with a thin rim of new shell material and a finely ciliated foot. Juvenile mean measurements are: length = 190 μm, width = 193 μm, and height = 210 μm. J. Morphol. 254:259–265, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Feature Weight Optimization for Discourse-Level SMT

We present an approach to feature weight optimization for document-level decoding. This is an essential task for enabling future development of discourse-level statistical machine translation, as it allows easy integration of discourse features in the decoding process. We extend the framework of sentence-level feature weight optimization to the document-level. We show experimentally that we can get competitive and relatively stable results when using a standard set of features, and that this framework also allows us to optimize documentlevel features, which can be used to model discourse phenomena.
Determinants of Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use in Individual Adoption of Social Network Sites

A large-scale online survey (n=1327) was utilized to investigate determinants of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as well as other effects on the formation of a behavioral intention to use social network sites (SNS). Findings show that need-based motivations such as social deficit, communication need, and community need do positively impact perceived usefulness while hedonic need and contribution need do not. Additionally, perceived ease of use was affected by technologyoriented self-efficacy. Trust and privacy considerations impacted perceived usefulness as well, while external threats to security did not. Finally, age and gender effects on the underlying technology acceptance model constructs were also explored.
Growth pattern of exclusively breastfed infants in the first six months of life: a study of babies delivered at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, Rivers State, Nigeria.

BACKGROUND Some authors demonstrate that exclusively breastfed infants have growth patterns comparable with the NCHS standards while others conclude that exclusively breastfed infants grow slower. These conflicting results informed the need for this study to aid the paediatricians and health workers to justify or condemn the recommendation of exclusive breastfeeding for six months. This was a prospective longitudinal study carried out to determine the growth pattern of exclusively breastfed infants in the first 6 months of life and compare them with the International, National Centre for Health Statistics (NCHS/WHO) reference and the Local, Janes' Elite Standards. METHOD Using weight, length and occipito-frontal circumference as indices, 530 infants were recruited consecutively by convenience sampling over 17 months. Measurements were taken at birth, 2 weeks, 6 weeks, 2 months and subsequently monthly until the end of the 6th month. RESULTS The exclusively breastfed infants doubled their birth weights at 3 months. The mean weight, OFC and length gains were maximal at 2 months, 2 weeks and 2 months respectively The growth of exclusively breastfed infants compared favourably with the NCHS/WHO reference group and also compared favourably with the Janes' 'Elite' reference group. CONCLUSION It is concluded that the growth in weight, length and OFC of exclusively breastfed infants appears adequate for the first 6 months of life.
A Verilog piecewise-linear analog behavior model for mixed-signal validation

Full chip mixed-signal validation requires simulating the entire design through a large number of test vectors, which makes fast, event-based Verilog models of analog circuits essential. We describe an extensible approach to creating these models that maps continuous signals into piecewise linear waveforms by creating analog events which contain a value and slope. By breaking analog circuits into sub-blocks with mostly unidirectional ports, we avoid explicit time integration, thus fitting well into an event-driven digital framework. The result is Verilog analog functional models that are pin-accurate, fast to simulate and capture the key dynamics in analog circuits. A 2.5V-1.8V buck converter and 1GHz PLL models are demonstrated.
E1 of α-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase defends Mycobacterium tuberculosis against glutamate anaplerosis and nitroxidative stress

Significance These studies shed light on the role of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) 2-ketoglutarate (α-KG) dehydrogenase in fulfillment of noncanonical functions: defense against toxic aldehydes during glutamate anaplerosis and participation by two of its three enzymes in a previously undescribed antinitrosative defense. Analysis of the latter pathway revealed a peroxidase activity, which can be inferred to function as a peroxynitrite reductase as well. Heretofore, antioxidant enzyme systems were known to depend on electrons derived from the oxidant itself in dismutation reactions or derived directly or indirectly from NADPH or NADH. Here, electrons derived from the oxidative decarboxylation of central carbon metabolites α-KG and pyruvate to succinyl CoA (SucCoA) and acetyl CoA (AcCoA), respectively, serve as sources of reducing power. Enzymes of central carbon metabolism (CCM) in Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) make an important contribution to the pathogen’s virulence. Evidence is emerging that some of these enzymes are not simply playing the metabolic roles for which they are annotated, but can protect the pathogen via additional functions. Here, we found that deficiency of 2-hydroxy-3-oxoadipate synthase (HOAS), the E1 component of the α-ketoglutarate (α-KG) dehydrogenase complex (KDHC), did not lead to general metabolic perturbation or growth impairment of Mtb, but only to the specific inability to cope with glutamate anaplerosis and nitroxidative stress. In the former role, HOAS acts to prevent accumulation of aldehydes, including growth-inhibitory succinate semialdehyde (SSA). In the latter role, HOAS can participate in an alternative four-component peroxidase system, HOAS/dihydrolipoyl acetyl transferase (DlaT)/alkylhydroperoxide reductase colorless subunit gene (ahpC)-neighboring subunit (AhpD)/AhpC, using α-KG as a previously undescribed source of electrons for reductase action. Thus, instead of a canonical role in CCM, the E1 component of Mtb’s KDHC serves key roles in situational defense that contribute to its requirement for virulence in the host. We also show that pyruvate decarboxylase (AceE), the E1 component of pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDHC), can participate in AceE/DlaT/AhpD/AhpC, using pyruvate as a source of electrons for reductase action. Identification of these systems leads us to suggest that Mtb can recruit components of its CCM for reactive nitrogen defense using central carbon metabolites.
Gene Expression Profiling - A New Approach in the Study of Congenital Heart Disease

Congenital heart defects (CHD) affect approximately 1% of live births. Some of them are associated with a significant morbidity and mortality and congenital heart diseases remain the first cause of death among infants in North America and Europe (Bruneau, 2008). The major causes in CHD are thought to be chromosomal aberrations or mutations in genes regulating cardiac development during embryogenesis (Pierpont et al., 2007). However, from the epidemiological data, it seems that the environment can have a small “teratogenic” effect (Jenkins et al., 2007). For example, some substances (e.g. prenatal exposure to angiotensin converting-enzyme inhibitors, alcohol abuse and Rubella virus) can alter the function of certain genes during embryogenesis (Bruneau, 2008; Cooper et al., 2006). Though, these epidemiological studies have mostly suggested risk rather than pinpointing the underlying disease mechanisms. During heart development complex interactions, among cells originating from different cell lineages, occur. In normal human heart development, a four-chambered heart ensure normal cardiac physiology with a right heart serving to the low-pressure pulmonary system and a left heart to the high pressure body circulation (Srivastava, 2004). A malformed cardiac growth results in abnormal hemodynamic characteristics because of volume or pressure overload leading to an adaptation process of the heart. The completion of the Human Genome Project heralded the beginning of a new medical science era. The available genomic data will markedly improve our ability to diagnose and treat a great number of diseases including heart disease. Examining an individual’s genomic profile or “molecular fingerprint” in a disease context now might help us to understand disease mechanisms and could found a new health care tailored to individual patient that take into account the predicted disease course and response to therapies of that patient. There’s now a real opportunity to replace invasive diagnostic tests with genomic tests that can be carried out with no or little risk or stress to the patients (Bell, 2004; Collins et al., 2003). The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of gene expression profiling technology and the state of genomic research in congenital heart diseases, specifically with regard to the use of microarray approach.
Bag-of-Features Representations for Offline Handwriting Recognition Applied to Arabic Script

Due to the great variabilities in human writing, unconstrained handwriting recognition is still considered an open research topic. Recent trends in computer vision, however, suggest that there is still potential for better recognition by improving feature representations. In this paper we focus on feature learning by estimating and applying a statistical bag-of-features model. These models are successfully used in image categorization and retrieval. The novelty here is the integration with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) that we use for recognition. Our method is evaluated on the IFN/ENIT database consisting of images of handwritten Arabic town and village names.
Dissecting developer policy violating apps: characterization and detection

To ensure quality and trustworthiness of mobile apps, Google Play store imposes various developer policies. Once an app is reported for exhibiting policy-violating behaviors, it is removed from the store to protect users. Currently, Google Play store relies on mobile users’ feedbacks to identify policy violations. Our paper takes the first step towards understanding these policy-violating apps. First, we crawl 302 Android apps, which are reported in the Reddit forum by mobile users for policy violations and are later removed from the Google Play store. Second, we perform empirical analysis, which reveals that many violating behaviors have not been studied well by industry or research communities. We discover that 53% of the reported apps are either copying popular apps or violating copy-rights or trademarks of brands. Moreover, 49% of reported apps are violating ads policies by sending push notifications, adding homescreen icon and changing browser settings. Only 8% show malware-like behaviors, such as downloading malicious files to users’ mobile phones. Based on our empirical analysis results, we extract 175 features for differentiating bad apps from benign apps. Our features cover use of brand names and other keywords, third-party libraries, network activities, meta data, permissions, and suspicious API calls originated from third-party libraries. We then apply 10 machine learning classifiers on the extracted features to detect reported bad apps. Our experiment result shows that the best algorithm can detect them with 86.80% true positive rate and 13.6% false positive rate. On the other hand, the same samples of policy violating apps are detected by VirusTotal with true positive rate of 55.63% and false positive rate of 17.48%.