Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Arabidopsis G-Protein β Subunit AGB1 Interacts with BES1 to Regulate Brassinosteroid Signaling and Cell Elongation

In Arabidopsis, brassinosteroids (BR) are major growth-promoting hormones, which integrate with the heterotrimeric guanine nucleotide-binding protein (G-protein) signals and cooperatively modulate cell division and elongation. However, the mechanisms of interaction between BR and G-protein are not well understood. Here, we show that the G-protein β subunit AGB1 directly interacts with the BR transcription factor BES1 in vitro and in vivo. An AGB1-null mutant, agb1-2, displays BR hyposensitivity and brassinazole (BRZ, BR biosynthesis inhibitor) hypersensitivity, which suggests that AGB1 positively mediates the BR signaling pathway. Moreover, we demonstrate that AGB1 synergistically regulates expression of BES1 target genes, including the BR biosynthesis genes CPD and DWF4 and the SAUR family genes required for promoting cell elongation. Further, Western blot analysis of BES1 phosphorylation states indicates that the interaction between AGB1 and BES1 alters the phosphorylation status of BES1 and increases the ratio of dephosphorylated to phosphorylated BES1, which leads to accumulation of dephosphorylated BES1 in the nucleus. Finally, AGB1 promotes BES1 binding to BR target genes and stimulates the transcriptional activity of BES1. Taken together, our results demonstrate that AGB1 positively regulates cell elongation by affecting the phosphorylation status and transcriptional activity of BES1.
Sexual minority population density and incidence of lung, colorectal and female breast cancer in California

Objective Risk factors for breast, colorectal, and lung cancer are known to be more common among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals, suggesting they may be more likely to develop these cancers. Our objective was to determine differences in cancer incidence by sexual orientation, using sexual orientation data aggregated at the county level. Methods Data on cancer incidence were obtained from the California Cancer Registry and data on sexual orientation were obtained from the California Health Interview Survey, from which a measure of age-specific LGB population density by county was calculated. Using multivariable Poisson regression models, the association between the age–race-stratified incident rate of breast, lung and colorectal cancer in each county and LGB population density was examined, with race, age group and poverty as covariates. Results Among men, bisexual population density was associated with lower incidence of lung cancer and with higher incidence of colorectal cancer. Among women, lesbian population density was associated with lower incidence of lung and colorectal cancer and with higher incidence of breast cancer; bisexual population density was associated with higher incidence of lung and colorectal cancer and with lower incidence of breast cancer. Conclusions These study findings clearly document links between county-level LGB population density and cancer incidence, illuminating an important public health disparity.
Improving Spatial Adaptivity of Nonlocal Means in Low-Dosed CT Imaging Using Pointwise Fractal Dimension

NLMs is a state-of-art image denoising method; however, it sometimes oversmoothes anatomical features in low-dose CT (LDCT) imaging. In this paper, we propose a simple way to improve the spatial adaptivity (SA) of NLMs using pointwise fractal dimension (PWFD). Unlike existing fractal image dimensions that are computed on the whole images or blocks of images, the new PWFD, named pointwise box-counting dimension (PWBCD), is computed for each image pixel. PWBCD uses a fixed size local window centered at the considered image pixel to fit the different local structures of images. Then based on PWBCD, a new method that uses PWBCD to improve SA of NLMs directly is proposed. That is, PWBCD is combined with the weight of the difference between local comparison windows for NLMs. Smoothing results for test images and real sinograms show that PWBCD-NLMs with well-chosen parameters can preserve anatomical features better while suppressing the noises efficiently. In addition, PWBCD-NLMs also has better performance both in visual quality and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) than NLMs in LDCT imaging.
Knowledge management antecedents and its impact on employee satisfaction: A study on Indian telecommunication industries

Purpose – Managers in many organizations have indicated that in today's highly competitive environment, knowledge management will be the key to organizational success in this millennium. This paper aims to analyze how the organizational culture and organizational learning impacts knowledge management, and ultimately the satisfaction of employees working in the firm.Design/methodology/approach – A survey instrument comprising organisational culture ethos, organisational learning diagnostics, KM orientation and employee satisfaction was developed. Through a postal and personal survey, data were collected from the telecom sector in India. The sample included 80 knowledge workers, project managers, team members, consultants, researchers and designers randomly drawn from Indian telecom companies.Findings – The survey instrument was shown to be both reliable and valid. Statistical analytical tools such as F‐test, t‐test, ANOVA coefficient of correlation and multiple regressions and other descriptive statistics .
Instruction Clustering Analysis for Network Protocol's Abnormal Behavior

Protocol's abnormal behavior analysis is an important task in protocol reverse analysis. Traditional protocol reverse analysis focus on the protocol message format, but protocol behavior especially the abnormal behavior is rare studied. In this paper, protocol behavior is represented by the labeled behavior instruction sequences. Similar behavior instruction sequences mean the similar protocol behavior. Using our developed virtual analysis platform HiddenDisc, we can capture a variety of known or unknown protocols' behavior instruction sequences. All kinds of executed or unexecuted instruction sequences can automatic clustering by our designed instruction clustering algorithm. Thereby we can distinguish and mine the unknown protocols' potential abnormal behavior. The mined potential abnormal behavior instruction sequences are executed, monitored and analyzed on HiddenDisc to determine whether it is an abnormal behavior and the behavior nature. Using the instruction clustering algorithm, we have analyzed 1297 protocol samples, mined 193 potential abnormal instruction sequences, and determined 187 malicious abnormal behaviors by regression testing. Experimental results show that our proposed instruction clustering algorithm has high efficiency and accuracy, can effectively mine unknown protocols' abnormal behaviors, and enhance the initiative defense capability of network security.
Intrinsic microtubule stability in interphase cells

Interphase microtubule arrays are dynamic in intact cells under normal conditions and for this reason they are currently assumed to be composed of polymers that are intrinsically labile, with dynamics that correspond to the behavior of microtubules assembled in vitro from purified tubulin preparations. Here, we propose that this apparent lability is due to the activity of regulatory effectors that modify otherwise stable polymers in the living cell. We demonstrate that there is an intrinsic stability in the microtubule network in a variety of fibroblast and epithelial cells. In the absence of regulatory factors, fibroblast cell interphase microtubules are for the most part resistant to cold temperature exposure, to dilution-induced disassembly and to nocodazole-induced disassembly. In epithelial cells, microtubules are cold-labile, but otherwise similar in behavior to polymers observed in fibroblast cells. Factors that regulate stability of microtubules appear to include Ca2+ and the p34cdc2 protein kinase. Indeed, this kinase induced complete destabilization of microtubules when applied to lysed cells, while a variety of other protein kinases were ineffective. This suggests that p34cdc2, or a kinase of similar specificity, may phosphorylate and inactivate microtubule-associated proteins, thereby conferring lability to otherwise length-wise stabilized microtubules.
Traumatic brain injury rehabilitation : children and adolescents

Traumatic Brain Injury in Children and Adolescents: Introduction Neuropsychological Sequelae Following Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury: Advances During the Past Decade Rehabilitative Medical Management Nursing Management Pharmacologic Intervention in Children and Adolescents with TBI Intervention for Motor Disorders Therapy for Feeding and Swallowing Disorders Following Traumatic Brain Injury Assistive Technologies for Children and Adolescents with Traumatic Brain Injury A Framework for Cognitive Rehabilitation Comprehensive Cognitive Assessment Cognitive Rehabilitation: Organization, Memory, and Language Cognitive Rehabilitation: Executive Functions A Social-Environmental Approach to Communication and Behavior Rehabilitation After Traumatic Brain Injury in Preschoolers From Poster Child to Denial: Growing Past the Injury Families with Childhood Traumatic Brain Injury: New Roads to a Timeless Destination School Reentry After Traumatic Brain Injury Educational Intervention After Traumatic Brain Injury Career Development in School-to-Work Transition: Adolescents with Traumatic Brain Injury Everyday People as Supports: Developing Competence through Collaboration Index
hnRNP A1 binds promiscuously to oligoribonucleotides: utilization of random and homo-oligonucleotides to discriminate sequence from base-specific binding.

To understand the range of possible and probable A1 functions in pre-mRNA biogenesis, it is important that we quantify the relative ability (or inability) of A1 to bind high affinity RNA target sequences and/or structures. Using a fluorescence competition assay we have determined apparent binding affinities for a wide range of 20mer oligos containing putative and possible A1 targets including the high affinity 'winner' sequence identified by selection/amplification [Burd,C.G and Dreyfuss,G. (1994) EMBO J. 13, 1197-1204], AUUUA sequences found in 3'-UTRs of labile mRNAs, 5'- and 3'-splice sites and telomeric sequences. With the exception of a 20mer 'winner' sequence, all other 20mers examined bind A1 with a narrow, approximately 10-fold range of affinities extending from 3.2 x 10(6) to 4.2 x 10(7) M(-1). Studies with homo-oligomers suggest this range reflects nucleotide base rather than sequence specificity and hence, it was possible to predict reasonably accurate affinities for all other 20mers examined except for the 'winner', whose unusually high affinity of 4.0 x 10(8) M(-1) results from a unique higher order structure and sequence. Since there is no known physiological role for the 'winner' 20mer sequence, these data suggest A1 generally binds indiscriminately to all available pre-mRNA sequences. Both the large abundance of A1 in vivo and its binding properties are thus consistent with it playing a structural role in pre-mRNA biogenesis.
Environmental sound extraction and incremental learning approach for real time concepts identification

Audio classification has been becoming very important in the field of multimedia researches dealing with audio processing and pattern recognition. Although major of them are focusing in “how”? Audio classifications should be semantic; the majority of them have neglected the importance of preprocessing step of environmental sound recognition, or using simply very classic sound classifiers. The originality of this paper is to construct a complete three modules process, acting dependently, with well defined functions. New method of acoustic sources separation are offered by our process, as well as, a sophisticated encapsulation of binary classifiers is used to promote environmental sound classification, leading to a real time audio concepts identifier. The main finding is that our system was able to recognize accuracy more than 90% of the introduced audio concepts.
Intuitive and reflective responses in philosophy

Cognitive scientists have revealed systematic errors in human reasoning. There is disagreement about what these errors indicate about human rationality, but one upshot seems clear: human reasoning does not seem to fit traditional views of human rationality. This concern about rationality has made its way through various fields and has recently caught the attention of philosophers. The concern is that if philosophers are prone to systematic errors in reasoning, then the integrity of philosophy would be threatened. In this paper, I present some of the more famous work in cognitive science that has marshaled this concern. Then I present reasons to think that those with training in philosophy will be less prone to certain systematic errors in reasoning. The suggestion is that if philosophers could be shown to be less prone to such errors, then the worries about the integrity of philosophy could be constrained. Then I present evidence that, according to performance on the CRT (Frederick 2005), those who have benefited from training and selection in philosophy are indeed less prone to one kind of systematic error: irrationally arbitrating between intuitive and reflective responses. Nonetheless, philosophers are not entirely immune to this systematic error, and their proclivity for this error is statistically related to their responses to a variety of philosophical questions. So, while the evidence herein puts constraints on the worries about the integrity of philosophy, it by no means eliminates these worries. The conclusion, then, is that the present evidence offers prima facie reasons to ascribe a mitigated privilege to philosophers' ability to rationally arbitrate between intuitive and reflective responses.
Proactive Eavesdropping in Relaying Systems

This letter investigates the performance of a legitimate surveillance system, where a legitimate monitor aims to eavesdrop on a dubious decode-and-forward relaying communication link. In order to maximize the effective eavesdropping rate, two strategies are proposed, where the legitimate monitor adaptively acts as an eavesdropper, a jammer, or a helper. In addition, the corresponding optimal jamming beamformer and jamming power are presented. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed strategies attain better performance compared with intuitive benchmark schemes. Moreover, it is revealed that the position of the legitimate monitor plays an important role on the eavesdropping performance for the two strategies.
The Ionized Gas in Local Starburst Galaxies: Global and Small-Scale Feedback from Star Formation

The small- and intermediate-scale structure and the fraction of the interstellar medium (ISM) ionized by nonradiative processes are investigated in a small sample of four local starburst galaxies, imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The sample comprises three dwarf galaxies, NGC 3077, 4214, and 5253, and one giant spiral, NGC 5236 (M83). The galaxies span a range in metallicity (∼0.2–2 Z⊙), luminosity (MB ∼ -17 to -20), and environment (isolated, interacting), enabling the investigation of nonradiative ionization processes in a variety of galactic conditions. For this purpose, the four galaxies were imaged in the lines of Hβ (4861 Å), [O III] (5007 Å), Hα (6563 Å), and [S II] (6717, 6731 Å). This is a unique set of data, as very few galaxies (and only our four starbursts) have ever been imaged by HST in the relatively faint lines of Hβ and [S II]. The use of HST has allowed us to trace nonphotoionized gas in these galaxies on scales ranging from a few tens of parsecs to a few hundred parsecs and, thus, to provide a full budget for this ionized gas component. Using the "maximum starburst line" of Kewley et al. to discriminate between photoionized and nonphotoionized gas, we find that in all four galaxies non-photoionization processes are responsible for a small fraction of the total Hα emission, at the level of 3%–4%. Because the nonphotoionized gas is associated with low Hα surface brightness, it occupies between one-sixth and one-quarter of the total imaged area. The central starbursts yield enough mechanical energy to produce the nonphotoionized gas in the four galaxies, by means of shocks from massive star winds and supernova explosions. In particular, the starbursts in the three dwarf galaxies must deposit a significant fraction, 70%–100%, of their mechanical energy into the surrounding ISM, in order to account for the observed luminosity of the nonphotoionized gas. The morphology of the nonphotoionized regions is different in the dwarfs and the giant spiral. As already established in previous works, nonphotoionized gas in dwarfs is mainly associated with extended "shells" or filamentary regions, likely areas of supernova-driven expanding gas. In all three dwarfs, star formation has been an ongoing process for the last few times 107 yr to ∼108 yr; time-extended star formation episodes are a requirement to sustain the observed luminosity of the nonphotoionized gas. In the massive spiral, the nonphotoionized gas is concentrated in localized areas surrounded by active star formation, with no evidence of extended structures on the same (or smaller) spatial scales as the "shells" in the dwarfs. The two Hα cavities in NGC 5236 may be evolved regions within the starburst. This confirms the picture that starbursts remain confined events in massive galaxies, likely as a consequence of the deep potential well.
Tumor Necrosis Factor-Accelerates the Calcification of Human Aortic Valve Interstitial Cells Obtained from Patients with Calcific Aortic Valve Stenosis via the BMP 2-Dlx 5 Pathway

Calcific aortic valve stenosis (CAS) is the most frequent heart valve disease in the elderly, accompanied by valve calcification. Tumor necrosis factor(TNF), a pleiotropic cytokine secreted mainly from macrophages, has been detected in human calcified valves. However, the role of TNFin valve calcification remains unclear. To clarify whether TNFaccelerates the calcification of aortic valves, we investigated the effect of TNFon human aortic valve interstitial cells (HAVICs) obtained from patients with CAS (CAS group) and with aortic regurgitation or aortic dissection having a noncalcified aortic valve (control group). HAVICs (2 10) were cultured in a 12-well dish in Dulbecco’s modified Eagle’s medium with 10% fetal bovine serum. The medium containing TNF(30 ng/ml) was replenished every 3 days after the cells reached confluence. TNFsignificantly accelerated the calcification and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity of HAVICs from CAS but not the control group after 12 days of culture. Furthermore, gene expression of calcigenic markers, ALP, bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2), and distal-less homeobox 5 (Dlx5) were significantly increased after 6 days of TNFtreatment in the CAS group but not the control group. Dorsomorphin, an inhibitor of mothers against decapentaplegic homologs (Smads) 1/5/8 phosphorylation, significantly inhibited the enhancement of TNF-induced calcification, ALP activity, Smad phosphorylation, and Dlx5 gene expression of HAVICs from the CAS group. These results suggest that HAVICs from the CAS group have greater sensitivity to TNF, which accelerates the calcification of aortic valves via the BMP2-Dlx5 pathway.
Resource-Efficient FPGA Architecture and Implementation of Hough Transform

Hough transform is widely used for detecting straight lines in an image, but it involves huge computations. For embedded application, field-programmable gate arrays are one of the most used hardware accelerators to achieve real-time implementation of Hough transform. In this paper, we present a resource-efficient architecture and implementation of Hough transform on an FPGA. The incrementing property of Hough transform is described and used to reduce the resource requirement. In order to facilitate parallelism, we divide the image into blocks and apply the incrementing property to pixels within a block and between blocks. Moreover, the locality of Hough transform is analyzed to reduce the memory access. The proposed architecture is implement on an Altera EP2S180F1508C3 device and can operate at a maximum frequency of 200 MHz. It could compute the Hough transform of 512 × 512 test images with 180 orientations in 2.07-3.16 ms without using many FPGA resources (i.e., one could achieve the performance by adopting a low-cost low-end FPGA).
MAC protocol implementation in RF-MIMO WLAN

The paper describes an architectural solution for the IEEE 802.11 MAC (Medium Access Control) layer in an RF-MIMO WLAN transceiver. The complete SDL model of MAC layer is developed and the new MIMAX MAC features are discussed. Implementation details of the MAC processor and MAC-PHY interface are presented too.
Development of a reflective PPG signal sensor

PPG signal which reflects the changes of blood volume in the microvascular bed plays an important role in the cardiovascular disease diagnosis. It possesses high value to acquire the PPG signal accurately. Because the available measurement site of transmission mode PPG sensor is very limited, this paper presents a reflective PPG signal sensor which consists of a photodiode and four light sources surrounding the photodiode. The Monte Carlo simulation was performed to decide the distance between the light source and photodiode. To test the efficacy of the developed sensor, PPG signals were captured from five different measurement sites. The experiment results reveal that the proposed PPG signal sensor could acquire high quality PPG signals.
Cache-efficient algorithms for finite element methods on arbitrary discretizations

In the ﬁeld of numerical simulation the ﬁnite element method is one of the most popular general purpose techniques for computing accurate solutions. Since memory latency is one of the most serious bottlenecks in high-performance computing, I/O-eﬃcient algorithms which minimize this latency have been developed for ﬁnite element methods deﬁned on grid-based discretizations by ordering the data accesses along a space-ﬁlling curve. In this thesis we investigate the design of I/O-eﬃcient algorithms for ﬁnite element methods for arbitrary discretizations in two and three dimensions. In 2D we are successful in extending the 2D algorithm to arbitrary subdivisions at the cost of doubling the traversal length. In 3D an optimal solution was not achieved, but a highly eﬃcient solution which seems to scale well with the input size is still obtained by using heuristic approaches. Experimental evaluation shows that for tetrahedral subdivisions of point sets up to 80 , 000 the cache-miss rate can be reduced to as low as 5 %.
Exonuclease Domain of the Lassa Virus Nucleoprotein Is Critical To Avoid RIG-I Signaling and To Inhibit the Innate Immune Response

ABSTRACT Lassa virus (LASV), which causes a viral hemorrhagic fever, inhibits the innate immune response. The exonuclease (ExoN) domain of its nucleoprotein (NP) is implicated in the suppression of retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) signaling. We show here that a LASV in which ExoN function has been abolished strongly activates innate immunity and that this effect is dependent on RIG-I signaling. These results highlight the key role of NP ExoN function in the immune evasion that occurs during LASV infection.