Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bayesian Lasso for Semiparametric Structural Equation Models

Summary There has been great interest in developing nonlinear structural equation models and associated statistical inference procedures, including estimation and model selection methods. In this paper a general semiparametric structural equation model (SSEM) is developed in which the structural equation is composed of nonparametric functions of exogenous latent variables and fixed covariates on a set of latent endogenous variables. A basis representation is used to approximate these nonparametric functions in the structural equation and the Bayesian Lasso method coupled with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is used for simultaneous estimation and model selection. The proposed method is illustrated using a simulation study and data from the Affective Dynamics and Individual Differences (ADID) study. Results demonstrate that our method can accurately estimate the unknown parameters and correctly identify the true underlying model.
Planning, Critical Success Factors, and Management's Information Requirements

Focusing on a manager's goals and critical success factors has been advocated as an approach to defining senior and middle managers' information requirements. In this article a field study is described in which the planning processes in a corporation were used as a mechanism for identifying goals, critical success factors and performance measures and standards, i.e., information requirements for managerial control. A general approach generated from the field study is described and the advantages and disadvantages of the approach are analyzed.
An empirical comparative study of approximate methods for binary graphical models; application to the search of associations among causes of death in French death certificates

Looking for associations among multiple variables is a topical issue in statistics due to the increasing amount of data encountered in biology, medicine and many other domains involving statistical applications. Graphical models have recently gained popularity for this purpose in the statistical literature. Following the ideas of the LASSO procedure designed for the linear regression framework, recent developments dealing with graphical model selection have been based on `1-penalization. In the binary case, however, exact inference is generally very slow or even intractable because of the form of the so-called log-partition function. Various approximate methods have recently been proposed in the literature and the main objective of this paper is to compare them. Through an extensive simulation study, we show that a simple modification of a method relying on a Gaussian approximation achieves good performance and is very fast. We present a real application in which we search for associations among causes of death recorded on French death certificates.
The expression of prion protein by endothelial cells: a source of the plasma form of prion protein?

Summary. The neuronal prion protein (PrPC) is also expressed within peripheral tissues including human blood. The majority of blood PrPC is found within the plasma fraction. We hypothesized that the vascular endothelium could be a source of this PrPC. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction demonstrated that both human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) and human microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC‐1) expressed PrPC mRNA. Flow cytometry confirmed PrPC expression on HMEC‐1s and HUVECs (120 900 ± 15 058 and 58 327 ± 4577 molecules PrPC/cell respectively), with no upregulation following cellular activation. Confocal immunofluorescence microscopy confirmed that HMEC‐1s and HUVECs were positive for PrPC on the plasma membrane. Time‐resolved dissociation‐enhanced fluoroimmunoassay (DELFIA®) analysis of cell culture medium demonstrated a slow constitutive release of soluble PrPC not associated with activation. In contrast to von Willebrand factor antigen, PrPC plasma levels in vivo decrease following desmopressin therapy in patients with von Willebrand disease. Measurement of PrPC plasma levels in patients with varying blood counts demonstrated no association between cell count and PrPC concentration. However, there was a higher level of PrPC in plasma from patients with end‐stage renal failure. In conclusion, endothelial cells of both macrovascular and microvascular origin expressed high levels of PrPC which can be constitutively released into the cell culture medium.
Facile fabrication of large-scale silver nanowire-PEDOT:PSS composite flexible transparent electrodes for flexible touch panels

Large-scale silver nanowire (AgNW)-poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): poly (styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) composite transparent flexible electrodes (FTEs) were fabricated via a Mayer rod coating method, and the optoelectrical properties, surface topography, mechanical stability and touch sensing performance were investigated in detail. The AgNW-PEDOT:PSS composite FTEs show high optoelectrical properties with a sheet resistance of 12 Ω/sq and a transmittance of 96% at 550 nm, and can maintain after 100 times of wiping or 5000 times of bending. The PEDOT:PSS aggregating at the junctions of AgNWs provides highly conductive pathways and enhances the adhesion between AgNWs and substrates. As a proof of concept demonstration, 7 × 7 cm2 transparent touch panel is fabricated using AgNW-PEDOT:PSS composite FTEs as top and bottom electrodes, and can operate on a non-flat surface and perform properly after 2000 times of writing or operating 24 h. The newly designed AgNW-PEDOT:PSS composite FTE is a promising candidate of brittle and expensive ITO for flexible optoelectrical devices.
GaAs wideband low noise amplifier design for breast cancer detection system

Modern wideband systems require low-noise receivers with bandwidth approaching 10 GHz. This paper presents ultra-wideband stable low-noise amplifier MMIC with cascode and source follower buffer configuration using GaAs technology. Source degeneration, gate and shunt peaking inductors are used to explore simultaneous wideband noise optimization and input power matching requirement. The low-noise amplifier circuit operates across a band of 0.3 to 10 GHz with a gain of around 14 dB and the measured noise figure NF below 1.5 dB up to 8 GHz. Measured small-signal results show good stability and very good agreement with simulated values. It is discussed in the paper that with more inductive peaking amplifier operation can be extended to even higher frequency, resulting in an even larger bandwidth.
Vehicle Detection From High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Using Convolutional Capsule Networks

Vehicle detection plays an important role in a variety of traffic-related applications. However, due to the scale and orientation variations and partial occlusions of vehicles, it is still challengeable to accurately detect vehicles from remote sensing images. This letter proposes a convolutional capsule network for detecting vehicles from high-resolution remote sensing images. First, a test image is segmented into superpixels to generate meaningful and nonredundant patches. Then, these patches are input to a convolutional capsule network to label them into vehicles or the background. Finally, nonmaximum suppression is adopted to eliminate repetitive detections. Quantitative evaluations on four test data sets show that average completeness, correctness, quality, and F1-measure of 0.93, 0.97, 0.90, and 0.95, respectively, are obtained. Comparative studies with three existing methods confirm that the proposed method effectively performs in detecting vehicles of various conditions.
Brain metastasis as initial presentation of papillary adenocarcinoma of the lung: case report

The authors describe the case of a 33-year-old patient with history of seizures alone without any previous symptom, being diagnosed with brain metastases from primary papillary adenocarcinoma of the lung. Emphasis is given to the diagnostic investigation for brain metastasis and prognostic evaluation of papillary adenocarcinoma of the lung, and a brief literature review on such diseases is performed.
The EmergingMVC Standard for 3 D Video Services

Multiview video has gained a wide interest recently. The huge amount of data needed to be processed by multiview applications is a heavy burden for both transmission and decoding. The joint video team has recently devoted part of its effort to extend the widely deployed H.264/AVC standard to handle multiview video coding (MVC). The MVC extension of H.264/AVC includes a number of new techniques for improved coding efficiency, reduced decoding complexity, and new functionalities for multiview operations. MVC takes advantage of some of the interfaces and transport mechanisms introduced for the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC, but the system level integration of MVC is conceptually more challenging as the decoder output may contain more than one view and can consist of any combination of the views with any temporal level. The generation of all the output views also requires careful consideration and control of the available decoder resources. In this paper, multiview applications and solutions to support generic multiview as well as 3D services are introduced. The proposed solutions, which have been adopted to the draft MVC specification, cover a wide range of requirements for 3D video related to interface, transport of the MVC bitstreams, and MVC decoder resource management. The features that have been introduced in MVC to support these solutions include marking of reference pictures, supporting for efficient view switching, structuring of the bitstream, signalling of view scalability supplemental enhancement information (SEI) and parallel decoding SEI.
Cervical Myelopathy and Congenital Stenosis From Hypoplasia of the Atlas: Report of Three Cases and Literature Review

Study Design. Case reports of patients with cervical myelopathy to hypoplasia of the atlas. Objectives. To report cases of cervical myelopathy due to congenital hypoplasia of the atlas and to review the literature. Summary of Background Data. Six previously documented cases of congenital hypoplasia of the atlas as a cause of cervical myelopathy are reported in the literature. Methods. Three patient’s clinical record and radiologic imaging studies as well as a thorough literature search are reported. Plain radiographs, computed tomography scans, magnetic resonance images, as well as somatosensory-evoked potential changes are displayed. Results. Cervical myelopathy developed in three patients who were found to have congenital hypoplasia of the atlas. Laminectomy of C1 provided neurologic improvement in all three patients presented. Conclusion. Congenital hypoplasia of the atlas is a rare cause of cervical myelopathy. This report should broaden the radiographic differential diagnosis when seeking an explanation for the signs and symptoms of cervical myelopathy.
Human adenovirus type 5 vectors deleted of early region 1 (E1) undergo limited expression of early replicative E2 proteins and DNA replication in non-permissive cells

Adenovirus (Ad) vectors deleted of the early region 1 (E1) are widely used for transgene delivery in preclinical and clinical gene therapy studies. Although proteins encoded within the E1 region are required for efficient virus replication, previous studies have suggested that certain viral or cellular proteins can functionally compensate for E1, leading to expression of the early region 2 (E2)-encoded replicative proteins and subsequent virus replication. We have generated a series of E1-encoding and E1-deficient Ad vectors containing a FLAG-epitope tag on each of the E2-encoded proteins: DNA-binding protein (DBP), terminal protein (TP) and DNA polymerase (Pol). Using these constructs, we show that for the replication-competent virus, the expression level of each E2-encoded protein declines with increasing distance from the E2 promoter, with E2A-encoded DBP expression being ~800-fold higher than E2B-encoded TP. Pol was expressed at extremely low levels in infected cells, and immunoprecipitation from cell lysates was required prior to its detection by immunoblot. We further show that DBP was expressed 200- to 400-fold less efficiently from an E1-deficient virus compared to a replication-competent virus in A549 and HepG2 cells, which was accompanied by a very small increase in genome copy number. For the E1-deficient virus, late gene expression (a marker of virus replication) was only observed at very high multiplicities of infection. These data show that E1-deleted Ad gives rise to limited expression of the E2-encoded genes and replication in infected cells, but highlight the importance of considering viral dose-dependent effects in gene therapy studies.
Mapping Articles on China in Wikipedia: An Inter-Language Semantic Network Analysis

This article describes an inter-language semantic network analysis examining the differences between articles about China in the Chinese and English versions of Wikipedia. It explores the differences in the content of Wikipedia through (a) correlation analysis of semantic networks and (b) the salience of semantic concepts through their network centralities. The results suggest there is high dissimilarity between the semantic content of the English and Chinese versions of articles on China. While both pages focused on government, population, language, character, diplomatic relations, development of the economy, and science and technology, the Chinesespeaking and English-speaking contributors framed the article on China differently—according to dissimilarities in cultures, values, interests, situations, and emotions of different language groups. This research contributes to the literature and understanding of how culture of different language groups influences the process of crowdsourcing knowledge on online collaboration
The role of UBF in regulating the structure and dynamics of transcriptionally active rDNA chromatin

Somatic cells have ~200 hundred copies of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes (rDNA) per haploid genome of which only a fraction are transcribed by RNA polymerase I (Pol I) at any given time. Thus regulation of rDNA transcription involves controlling both the number of active genes as well as the rate of transcription per gene. How and why a majority of rDNA are silenced is unclear but recent studies indicate that in addition to controlling rRNA synthesis, rDNA silencing plays an essential role in maintaining the genetic stability of rDNA repeats and influences cellular events such as aging and senescence. In this review we discuss the role of the cytoarchitectural transcription factor UBF in determining and maintaining the active (euchromatic) state of rDNA in mammals. In particular we discuss evidence to suggest that UBF dynamically regulates the active rRNA gene pool during differentiation and malignancy.
Decreased Complexity in Alzheimer's Disease: Resting-State fMRI Evidence of Brain Entropy Mapping

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a frequently observed, irreversible brain function disorder among elderly individuals. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) has been introduced as an alternative approach to assessing brain functional abnormalities in AD patients. However, alterations in the brain rs-fMRI signal complexities in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD patients remain unclear. Here, we described the novel application of permutation entropy (PE) to investigate the abnormal complexity of rs-fMRI signals in MCI and AD patients. The rs-fMRI signals of 30 normal controls (NCs), 33 early MCI (EMCI), 32 late MCI (LMCI), and 29 AD patients were obtained from the Alzheimer's disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. After preprocessing, whole-brain entropy maps of the four groups were extracted and subjected to Gaussian smoothing. We performed a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the brain entropy maps of the four groups. The results after adjusting for age and sex differences together revealed that the patients with AD exhibited lower complexity than did the MCI and NC controls. We found five clusters that exhibited significant differences and were distributed primarily in the occipital, frontal, and temporal lobes. The average PE of the five clusters exhibited a decreasing trend from MCI to AD. The AD group exhibited the least complexity. Additionally, the average PE of the five clusters was significantly positively correlated with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores and significantly negatively correlated with Functional Assessment Questionnaire (FAQ) scores and global Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scores in the patient groups. Significant correlations were also found between the PE and regional homogeneity (ReHo) in the patient groups. These results indicated that declines in PE might be related to changes in regional functional homogeneity in AD. These findings suggested that complexity analyses using PE in rs-fMRI signals can provide important information about the fMRI characteristics of cognitive impairments in MCI and AD.
Sensor Reduction for Backing-Up Control of a Vehicle With Triple Trailers

This paper presents a cost-effective design based on sensor reduction for backing-up control of a vehicle with triple trailers. To realize a cost-effective design, we newly derive two linear-matrix-inequality (LMI) conditions for a discrete Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy system. One is an optimal dynamic output feedback design that guarantees desired control performance. The other is an avoidance of jackknife phenomenon for the use of the optimal dynamic output feedback controller. Our results demonstrate that the proposed LMI-based design effectively achieves the backing-up control of the vehicle with triple trailers while avoiding the jackknife phenomenon. More importantly, we demonstrate that the designed optimal control can achieve the backing-up control without, at least, two potentiometers that were employed to measure the relative angles (of a vehicle with triple trailers) in our previous experiments. Since the relative angles directly relate to the jackknife phenomenon, the successful control results without two potentiometers are very interesting and important from the cost-effective design point of view.
The Novel Secreted Factor MIG-18 Acts with MIG-17/ADAMTS to Control Cell Migration in Caenorhabditis elegans

The migration of Caenorhabditis elegans gonadal distal tip cells (DTCs) offers an excellent model to study the migration of epithelial tubes in organogenesis. mig-18 mutants cause meandering or wandering migration of DTCs during gonad formation, which is very similar to that observed in animals with mutations in mig-17, which encodes a secreted metalloprotease of the ADAMTS (a disintegrin and metalloprotease with thrombospondin motifs) family. MIG-18 is a novel secreted protein that is conserved only among nematode species. The mig-17(null) and mig-18 double mutants exhibited phenotypes similar to those in mig-17(null) single mutants. In addition, the mutations in fbl-1/fibulin-1 and let-2/collagen IV that suppress mig-17 mutations also suppressed the mig-18 mutation, suggesting that mig-18 and mig-17 function in a common genetic pathway. The Venus-MIG-18 fusion protein was secreted from muscle cells and localized to the gonadal basement membrane, a tissue distribution reminiscent of that observed for MIG-17. Overexpression of MIG-18 in mig-17 mutants and vice versa partially rescued the relevant DTC migration defects, suggesting that MIG-18 and MIG-17 act cooperatively rather than sequentially. We propose that MIG-18 may be a cofactor of MIG-17/ADAMTS that functions in the regulation of the gonadal basement membrane to achieve proper direction of DTC migration during gonadogenesis.
Tradução e validação da escala de resiliência para crianças e adolescentes de Sandra Prince-Embury

Introducao: A resiliencia e um potencial humano, presente nos individuos em todas as culturas e em todos os tempos, e parte de um processo evolutivo e pode ser promovida desde o nascimento. Os estudos sobre resiliencia procuram compreender como criancas, adolescentes e adultos sao capazes de sobreviver e superar adversidades, apesar de viverem em condicoes de pobreza, violencia familiar, ou em diversas outras situacoes de risco. Na sociedade moderna as mudancas estao cada vez mais rapidas e profundas, exigindo constantes esforcos de adaptacao e, portanto tornando a resiliencia um desafio dessa nova era. O presente trabalho tem relevância para os profissionais de Psicologia, pois pretende traduzir e validar uma escala de resiliencia para criancas e adolescentes, visto que ainda nao existe instrumento validado especificamente para essa populacao. Objetivo: Traduzir, adaptar e validar para a lingua portuguesa e para a populacao brasileira a versao original da escala Resiliency Scales for Children & Adolescents (RSCA) de Sandra Prince-Embury (2007). Metodo: Para a traducao e a adaptacao transcultural da escala foram utilizadas as diretrizes propostas por Hambleton e Patsula (1999). A coleta de dados da pesquisa foi feita em tres escolas situadas em diferentes distritos da cidade de Sao Paulo, duas da rede publica de ensino e uma particular. A amostra foi composta por 1226 criancas e adolescentes de 9 a 18 anos, sendo que 51% pertenciam ao sexo feminino. Resultados: Para verificar os fatores que compoem as subescalas CO, CR e RA, utilizou-se a analise fatorial por componentes principais e rotacao varimax. Admitiu-se cargas fatoriais iguais ou maiores que 0,30 e a aplicabilidade da analise fatorial foi julgada de acordo com o coeficiente KMO e teste de esfericidade de Bartlett. Os escores de Alpha de Cronbach encontrados nas escalas (CO = 0.83, CR = 0.90 e RA = 0.87) na versao brasileira se mostraram satisfatorios em relacao ao que foi relatado por Prince-Embury (2007), indicando boa consistencia interna do instrumento. Apenas em tres fatores (adaptabilidade, conforto e tolerância) os coeficientes alpha encontrados foram consideravelmente mais baixos do que os do original. Varios dos conceitos definidos neste estudo estao teoricamente relacionados entre si, razao pela qual a formacao de alguns fatores mostra que os itens estao ambiguos, e esta ambiguidade conceitual refletiu na analise fatorial. Os fatores que demonstraram esta relacao foram: na escala CO: otimismo e auto-eficacia; na escala CR: confianca e apoio
A System for Detection of Three-Dimensional Precordial Vibrations

Accelerometer-based seismocardiography and sternal acceleration ballistocardiography are promising approaches to the noninvasive detection of precordial vibrations. However, in order to be widely accepted as diagnostic or even prognostic tools, clinical validation and standardization of these methods are necessary. In precordial vibration studies, using all three axes instead of one in cardiac vibration analysis is anticipated to enable more accurate cardiac event detection. Simultaneously acquired electrocardiography, photoplethysmography, and respiration information are considered as promising ways to enhance seismocardiogram analysis. In this article, an easy-to-use system that combines three-dimensional seismocardiography, electrocardiography, photoplethysmography, and respiration measurements is described, and its performance is demonstrated. In the test measurements, the system demonstrated its capability to capture accurate cardiovascular data.