Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Myosin II is not required for Drosophila tracheal branch elongation and cell intercalation

ABSTRACT The Drosophila tracheal system consists of an interconnected network of monolayered epithelial tubes that ensures oxygen transport in the larval and adult body. During tracheal dorsal branch (DB) development, individual DBs elongate as a cluster of cells, led by tip cells at the front and trailing cells in the rear. Branch elongation is accompanied by extensive cell intercalation and cell lengthening of the trailing stalk cells. Although cell intercalation is governed by Myosin II (MyoII)-dependent forces during tissue elongation in the Drosophila embryo that lead to germ-band extension, it remained unclear whether MyoII plays a similar active role during tracheal branch elongation and intercalation. Here, we have used a nanobody-based approach to selectively knock down MyoII in tracheal cells. Our data show that, despite the depletion of MyoII function, tip cell migration and stalk cell intercalation (SCI) proceed at a normal rate. This confirms a model in which DB elongation and SCI in the trachea occur as a consequence of tip cell migration, which produces the necessary forces for the branching process. Summary: Branch elongation during Drosophila tracheal development mechanistically resembles MyoII-independent collective cell migration; tensile forces resulting from tip cell migration are reduced by cell elongation and passive stalk cell intercalation.
The Effect of Leverage and Influential on Structure-Activity Relationships 1 2

22 Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship approaches have established as the main computational 23 molecular modeling method. In spirit of reporting valid and reliable models the aim of our research was to 24 assess how the analysis of leverage with Hat matrix (hi) and of the influential using Cook’s distance (Di) of 25 QSAR models reflects in the model reliability and its characteristics. The datasets included in this research 26 was collected from previously published manuscripts. Seven datasets accomplished the imposed inclusion 27 criteria and were analyzed. Three models were obtained for each dataset (full-model, hi-model and Di-model) 28 and several validation criteria (statistical criteria) were defined to assess and to compare the model. The 29 analysis of the obtained results revealed that in 5 out of 7 sets the correlation coefficient increase when both 30 compounds with hi and respectively Di higher than thresholds were removed. The number of withdrawn 31 compounds varied from 2 to 4 for hi-model and from 1 to 13 for Di-model. The analysis of validation 32 statistics showed that Di-models obtained systematically better results compared to both full-models and hi33 models. Identification of influential compound in data set could significantly improve the model and should 34 be conducted any time when a regression analysis is desired. Cook’s distance approach is recommended to 35 be used to identify influential compounds in dataset whenever the linear regression analysis for QSAR 36 models is applied. 37 38
Model predictive control of an overhead crane using constraint substitution

This paper describes a real-time model predictive control (MPC) scheme for an overhead crane subject to state and input constraints. The constraints are taken into account by means of a transformation technique which transforms the system dynamics with the corresponding constraints into a new unconstrained representation. This method allows to reformulate the underlying optimal control problem (OCP) of the MPC scheme into an unconstrained counterpart. The unconstrained OCP is then solved by means of a fast MPC algorithm that uses a finite number of iterations per MPC step in order to ensure real-time feasibility. Simulation as well as experimental results demonstrate the computational performance of the MPC scheme.
Morphological expressions of antibiotic synergism against Pseudomonas aeruginosa as observed by scanning electron microscopy

Antibiotic-induced changes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa were observed by means of a scanning electron microscope. Seven frequent and five less frequent morphological changes were noted. The frequent changes were: (i) elongation; (ii) chain formation; (iii) nub formation; (iv) spheroplasts; (v) surface holes or pits; (vi) super-elongation; and (vii) increased filamentation. The less frequent changes were: (i) rounded ends; (ii) streptococcal forms; (ii) stalked nubs; (iv) surface bulges; and (v) convoluted surfaces. A morphological equivalent of antibiotic synergism was found in which changes were noted due to synergistic combinations of antibiotics that were not observed when the antibiotics were used alone or when a nonsynergistic combination of antibiotics was used.
A Novel Method for the Efficient Retrieval of Similar Multiparameter Physiologic Time Series Using Wavelet-Based Symbolic Representations

An important challenge in data mining is in identifying "similar" temporal patterns that may illuminate hidden information in a database of time series. We are actively engaged in the development of a temporal database of several thousand ICU patient records that contains time-varying physiologic measurements recorded over each patient's ICU stay. The discovery of multiparameter temporal patterns that are predictive of physiologic instability may aid clinicians in optimizing care for critically-ill patients. In this paper, we introduce a novel temporal similarity metric based on a transformation of time series data into an intuitive symbolic representation. The symbolic transform is based on a wavelet decomposition to characterize time series dynamics at multiple time scales. The symbolic transformation allows us to utilize classical information retrieval algorithms based on a vector-space model. Our algorithm is capable of assessing the similarity between multi-dimensional time series and is computationally efficient. We utilized our algorithm to identify similar physiologic patterns in hemodynamic time series from ICU patients. The results of this study demonstrate that similarities between different patient time series may have meaningful physiologic interpretations in the detection of impending hemodynamic deterioration. Thus, our framework may be of potential use in clinical decision-support systems. As a generalized time series similarity metric, the algorithms that are described have applications in several other domains as well.
Static Analysis for Extracting Permission Checks of a Large Scale Framework: The Challenges and Solutions for Analyzing Android

A common security architecture is based on the protection of certain resources by permission checks (used e.g., in Android and Blackberry). It has some limitations, for instance, when applications are granted more permissions than they actually need, which facilitates all kinds of malicious usage (e.g., through code injection). The analysis of permission-based framework requires a precise mapping between API methods of the framework and the permissions they require. In this paper, we show that naive static analysis fails miserably when applied with off-the-shelf components on the Android framework. We then present an advanced class-hierarchy and field-sensitive set of analyses to extract this mapping. Those static analyses are capable of analyzing the Android framework. They use novel domain specific optimizations dedicated to Android.
High‐Efficiency WOLEDs with High Color‐Rendering Index based on a Chromaticity‐Adjustable Yellow Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence Emitter

A chromaticity-adjustable yellow thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) material, PXZDSO2 as a triplet harvester provides a rational device concept, giving two-color and three-color pure organic white organic light-emitting diodes (WOLEDs) with unprecedented color-rendering index of 95 and external quantum efficiency of 19.2%.
Pre-Diagnostic Circulating Vitamin D and Risk of Melanoma in Men

Purpose Various studies have examined the association between serum vitamin D levels and different cancers; however, this is the first prospective study of this association with melanoma risk. The aim of this study is to investigate the association between serum vitamin D [25(OH)D] levels and melanoma in a cohort of older, middle-aged Finnish male smokers. Methods We conducted a nested case-control study within the Alpha-Tocopherol Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention (ATBC) Study. From the ATBC cohort, 368 subjects were chosen for our study; 92 participants that developed melanoma and 276 matched control subjects. At study baseline, lifestyle questionnaires and blood samples were collected. Serum 25(OH)D was modeled as three sets of categorical variables: clinically-defined categories, season-specific quartiles and season-adjusted residual quartiles. Conditional logistic regression was used to obtain odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) to estimate the association between circulating vitamin D and melanoma risk. Results Overall no association of serum 25(OH)D and melanoma risk was observed. A decreased risk of developing melanoma was observed in the middle categories compared to the lowest category, albeit not significant. Conclusion Results indicate no association between serum 25(OH)D levels and melanoma. Additional studies, including possibly consortium efforts, are needed to investigate the association between serum 25(OH)D levels and risk of melanoma in larger, more diverse study populations.
Goal Striving in Groups with Implementation Intentions : Collective Planning Improves Performance

The present research investigates group performance from a goal-striving perspective. A model of goal striving in groups with implementation intentions (GSG-II) is developed by connecting individual-level theory that planning when, where, and how to act (forming implementation intentions, Gollwitzer, 1999) promotes goal achievement and group-level theory suggesting that groups can strive for goals individually or collectively. The GSG-II model proposes a new type of plan that refers to the group, collective implementation intentions (cII). The model’s main prediction that cII promote group performance found consistent support in six experiments with three common obstacles to keeping goal striving on track in representative group tasks (expected muscle pain in physical persistence, unexpected normative impact on creative idea generation and consumer impulse purchases, goal conflict in mixed-motive decisions) covering all performance quadrants (McGrath, 1984) and permitted processes (Steiner, 1972). Collective if-then planning thus improves group performance. Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed.
On Close and Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: A Survey and Future Challenges

We present an overview of the last ten years of research on visualizations that support close and distant reading of textual data in the digital humanities. We look at various works published within both the visualization and digital humanities communities. We provide a taxonomy of applied methods for close and distant reading, and illustrate approaches that combine both reading techniques to provide a multifaceted view of the data. Furthermore, we list toolkits and potentially beneﬁcial visualization approaches for research in the digital humanities. Finally, we summarize collaboration experiences when developing visualizations for close and distant reading, and give an outlook on future challenges in that research area.
Radiography of Laryngeal Carcinoma

The value of various radiographic methods (except laryngography) in laryngeal carcinoma was assessed in a material of 71 patients. Radiography proved of no value in T1 and T2 tumours if a satisfactory clinical examination could be performed but gave valuable information in recurrences as well as in T3 and T4 cases.
The Privacy Paradox: A Facebook Case Study

The utility of social networks is contingent on information sharing, which constrains privacy. Engaging in online social networks is seen to indicate that the participants either do not care about privacy, do not understand the risks of information sharing, or find privacy controls to be unusable. Given the contextual nature of privacy all three models may exist in the population and in fact in a single person. We introduce the three distinct academic threads leading to each model, i.e. rational economics, risk behavior, and human computer interaction. Further, we conduct a survey based study to elicit the relative strengths of these explanations for information sharing on Facebook (n=384). Our findings indicate that while all three explanations are relevant, their relative strengths are different. The perceived risk of sharing information is the most important determinant of privacy behaviors; to a lesser extent usability of privacy controls is important. Finally, privacy preferences is the least important factor; thus, the explanation that people don’t care is weakest explanation of the privacy paradox (on Facebook). We argue that Facebook should invest in both more usable privacy controls and awareness of those controls. In general better controls and more information increased information sharing and lowered the perceptions of risk, thereby aligning expressed attitudes with observed behaviors and addressing the paradox. We note that privacy risks behaviors are determined by dread risk and familiarity on Facebook, as for risks offline. Thus, Facebook privacy efforts should leverage prior research in risk communication offline. Specifically, risk averse behaviors can be encouraged if risk communication focuses on severe, catastrophic, and rare consequences of information sharing.
Crystallization and preliminary X-ray crystallographic analysis of spruce budworm antifreeze protein.

Antifreeze proteins have the ability to bind to ice with high affinity and inhibit further crystal growth. The insect antifreeze protein from spruce budworm exhibits very high thermal hysteresis activity and is implicated in the protection of overwintering larvae from freezing. This protein has been crystallized in 20-25% polyethylene glycol (Mr 6000), 0.4 M NaCl, 0.1 M Tris-HCl, pH 8.5, by vapor diffusion using the hanging drop method. The resulting crystals are very thin (typically <0.01 mm in the shortest dimension), and only after repeated seeding could crystals be grown large enough for data collection using synchrotron radiation. The crystals belong to the monoclinic space group C2, with cell dimensions a = 82.28 A, b = 62.29 A, c = 63.63 A, and beta = 113.7 degrees. Molecules in the asymmetric unit are related by a twofold axis of symmetry with two molecules present. Native data to a resolution of 2.6 A have been collected with 90.3% completeness and a Rsym of 6.9%.
Multi-lingual Analysis of Future-Related Information on the Web

Future prediction is one of the crucial activities of humans. In this paper, we report the results of exploratory analysis of future-related information on the Web in three different languages: English, Japanese and Polish. We focus on the future-related information which is grounded in time, that is, the information on events whose expected occurrence dates are already known. Our datasets are constructed by crawling search engine indices. We investigate multiple aspects of future-related information in web pages across different languages such as its amount, time span, topics, associated sentiment levels as well as the relation to the future-related content in news articles.
Impairments in Attention in Occasionally Snoring Children: An Event-Related Potential Study

Objective: To determine whether minimal snoring is benign in children. Procedure: 22 rarely snoring children (mean age = 6.9 years, 11 females) and age- and sex-matched controls participated in an auditory oddball task wearing 128-electrode nets. Parents completed the Conners Parent Rating Scales–Revised Long (CPRS–R:L). Results: Snorers scored significantly higher on four CPRS-R:L subscales. Stepwise regression indicated that two ERP variables from a region of the ERP that peaked at 844 msec post-stimulus onset predicted CPRS-R:L Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Index scores. Conclusions: Occasional snorers, according to parental report, do exhibit ADHD-like behaviors. Basic sensory processing is longer than in controls, suggesting that delayed frontal activation requires more effort in snorers.
A Variability Study of Computerized Sagittal Sacral Radiologic Measures

Study Design. A radiographic study was conducted to investigate the accuracy of computer-assisted measurement of sacral morphology in a population with developmental L5–S1 spondylolisthesis. Objective. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the inter- and intraobserver variability of computer measurements of sacral morphology. Summary and Background Data. Recent studies have shown differences in sacral morphology among patients with spondylolisthesis. The sacral table angle (STA) is a fundamental sacral anatomic parameter that is specific and constant to each individual, while the S1 superior and S2 inferior angles are defined as anatomic measures specific to S1 and S2. Sacral kyphosis measured by Ferguson or Cobb method has also been used to evaluate the sagittal shape of the sacrum. Currently, computerized measures are gaining popularity for the study of sagittal balance, but their reliability especially in sacral morphology has never been properly evaluated. Methods. The standing lateral radiographs of 30 adolescents were randomly selected from the radiographic database of our institution: 10 radiographs of asymptomatic individuals, 10 of subjects with low grade L5–S1 spondylolisthesis and 10 with high grade L5–S1 developmental spondylolisthesis. Three surgeons measured sacral morphologic variables on the 30 radiographs at 2 occasions, with a 15 days interval between the 2 sessions, using a computer assisted technique. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were used for statistical analysis. Results. The ICC values measured within observers varied between 0.951 to 0.995, whereas the ICC measured between observers varied between 0.957 to 0.995. There was a slight decrease of the ICC measured in the high grade L5–S1 spondylolisthesis group compared to the normal subjects. However, the difference was not statistically significant. Conclusion. These results confirm the reliability and repeatability of computer-assisted angular measurement of sacral morphology in subjects with L5–S1 spondylolisthesis, even in the presence of lumbosacral junction dysplasia. The use of computerized measurements can be recommended for the evaluation of the sagittal sacral anatomy in future clinical and research studies.
Temporal Integration and Duration Tuning in the Dorsal Zone of Cat Auditory Cortex

The present study examined auditory cortical neurons, the responses of which depended on the duration of noise bursts. We recorded from 150 neurons with response latencies exceeding 30 msec and from 28 neurons with OFF responses to auditory stimuli in the dorsal zone of cat auditory cortex. Of 150 long-latency neurons, 132 displayed some form of duration selectivity. Seventy-eight were classified as selective for long durations. Among the long-duration-selective neurons, 30 responded only to noise burst stimuli with durations longer than a minimal threshold and were classified further as duration threshold neurons. Of 132 duration-selective neurons, 41 responded selectively to noise bursts of short duration; 13 showed maximal responses to noise bursts of a particular duration and could be regarded as duration-tuned neurons. OFF-response neurons included ones that were long-duration-selective, duration-tuned, and nonduration-selective. Duration tuning has been described previously only at the midbrain level in amphibians and bats. The present finding of sensitivity to sound duration in at least one region of cat auditory cortex indicates that this form of neural tuning may be important for hearing in all vertebrates, and for processing of sound at multiple levels in the auditory pathway. The duration tuning in the cat auditory cortex was much broader, and the best duration was distributed over a wider range than in the bat inferior colliculus. We suggest that the duration selectivity of the long-latency neurons results from integration along the time domain of a stimulus during the latent period.
Enhancement of Xen's scheduler for MapReduce workloads

As the trends move towards data outsourcing and cloud computing, the efficiency of distributed data centers increases in importance. Cloud-based services such as Amazon's EC2 rely on virtual machines (VMs) to host MapReduce clusters for large data processing. However, current VM scheduling does not provide adequate support for MapReduce workloads, resulting in degraded overall performance. For example, when multiple MapReduce clusters run on a single physical machine, the existing VMMscheduler does not guarantee fairness across clusters. In this work, we present theMapReduce Group Scheduler (MRG). The MRG scheduler implements three mechanisms to improve the efficiency and fairness of the existing VMM scheduler. First, the characteristics of MapReduce workloads facilitate batching of I/O requests from VMs working on the same job, which reduces the number of context switches and brings other benefits. Second, because most MapReduce workloads incur a significant amount of I/O blocking events and the completion of a job depends on the progress of all nodes, we propose a two-level scheduling policy to achieve proportional fair sharing across both MapReduce clusters and individual VMs. Finally, the proposed MRG scheduler also operates on symmetric multi-processor (SMP) enabled platforms. The key to these improvements is to group the scheduling of VMs belonging to the same MapReduce cluster. We have implemented the proposed scheduler by modifying the existing Xen hypervisor and evaluated the performance on Hadoop, an open source implementation of MapReduce. Our evaluations, using four representative MapReduce benchmarks, show that the proposed scheduler reduces context switch overhead and achieves increased proportional fairness across multiple MapReduce clusters, without penalizing the completion time of MapReduce jobs.
Metacognition in B2C E-Commerce: a Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

To bridge the research gap on the issue of metacognition in the IS research, this study examines consumer’s metacognition in the context of B2C e-commerce. Especially, focusing on the e-commerce solution in terms of Electronic Product Catalogs (EPCs), this study attempts to investigate the effect of the IT artefact on consumer’s metacognition in online shopping. From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, the study combines neurophysiological methodology with psychometric measures to develop a deeper understanding of consumer’s metacognition. The fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is introduced to capture consumer’s neural activities in the region of interest (ROI) related to metacognition across the conditions of e-commerce websites with and without EPCs in a manipulated online shopping scenario. Besides, consumer’s evaluation of the e-commerce websites is further studied.